Just from reading the quoted segment of Bond’s argument, I think there’s something missing from it.
‘Bad’ is too vague. It’s not (usually) like people watch a film (or read a book or whatever) and think “man, i found that truly horrible. It was so bad I’m going to start obsessing over it and attending conventions”.
Rather, there are specific properties of the work that attract them. These properties (or other ones that go hand in hand with them) also happen to mean the work has bad qualities.
It can’t simply be any properties to do with ‘badness’, because fandom only accretes around certain bad things, not every bad thing.
The question is, what are those properties?
At a quick guess, I’d say one is that the work allows the person to deeply immerse themselves in an appealing imaginative vision (e.g. a fantasy realm), and perhaps to construct an identity around that (e.g. dressing up as a character), perhaps in conjunction with others in a social group (such as in discussion groups and at conventions).
Just from reading the quoted segment of Bond’s argument, I think there’s something missing from it.
‘Bad’ is too vague. It’s not (usually) like people watch a film (or read a book or whatever) and think “man, i found that truly horrible. It was so bad I’m going to start obsessing over it and attending conventions”.
Rather, there are specific properties of the work that attract them. These properties (or other ones that go hand in hand with them) also happen to mean the work has bad qualities.
It can’t simply be any properties to do with ‘badness’, because fandom only accretes around certain bad things, not every bad thing.
The question is, what are those properties?
At a quick guess, I’d say one is that the work allows the person to deeply immerse themselves in an appealing imaginative vision (e.g. a fantasy realm), and perhaps to construct an identity around that (e.g. dressing up as a character), perhaps in conjunction with others in a social group (such as in discussion groups and at conventions).
BTW, in my first sentence above I mean there’s something missing from Bond’s argument (not that the quotation omits something)