Fandom is a subculture that grows up around people who are passionate about a work when the rest of the world isn’t.
If the work is part of the dominant culture, nobody has to build a fandom around it. The Well-Tempered Clavier is assigned to every piano student—nobody has to organize clubs to listen to Bach in secret.
To have a fandom, a work doesn’t have to be bad. It can just be overlooked, forgotten, or left behind by the mainstream. Gilbert and Sullivan operas are pretty good, but they have a fandom made up of old-fashioned Anglophiles and intellectual showoffs. (I’m one of them, naturlich.)
It helps if there’s something totalizing about the work itself—if the author insists that it should change how you see everything about the world, then those who like it will make fandom part of their identity. (See: Wagner, Rand, Kerouac.)
Fandom is a subculture that grows up around people who are passionate about a work when the rest of the world isn’t.
If the work is part of the dominant culture, nobody has to build a fandom around it. The Well-Tempered Clavier is assigned to every piano student—nobody has to organize clubs to listen to Bach in secret.
To have a fandom, a work doesn’t have to be bad. It can just be overlooked, forgotten, or left behind by the mainstream. Gilbert and Sullivan operas are pretty good, but they have a fandom made up of old-fashioned Anglophiles and intellectual showoffs. (I’m one of them, naturlich.)
It helps if there’s something totalizing about the work itself—if the author insists that it should change how you see everything about the world, then those who like it will make fandom part of their identity. (See: Wagner, Rand, Kerouac.)