Fandom, at the very basic level, is one of the dominant modes of engagement online.

Fandom is something that has become really pervasive.

Whatever your interest is, you can probably find a community of people into that same thing.

We're in a culture that, I read you.

You read me.

We're all in it together.

It's a smaller community, much more personalized.

If you want to be in fandom, fandom wants you.

FRANCESCA COPPA: Fandom is saying that I really like a much more active participation with my culture, that I don't just see a movie and walk away from it, but I want to discuss it afterwards.

I want to write stories about it.

I want to draw fan art.

What we had is a kind of aberrational 100 years of mass media culture, where the idea of how to enjoy stories has become really passive and that fan culture and the internet is a return to the previous culture that you saw going through the end of the 19th century, where people told stories to each other because there was no mass media.

Fans are drawn to texts and universes that are really complex, creative worlds where you get a sense that what you saw was only the merest sliver of what was possible.

And so one of the things that fans do is to explore the cultural levels of the universe, adding different kinds of characters, more representative characters, by giving bigger roles to women, by creating different kinds of roles for queer people and racial minorities, for portraying disabled people.

So all of these have been really important locuses for people to come together and to tell stories that express political values, social values, cultural values that are very different from with the mass market can offer.

And so to self-identify as a fan is to say that you're interested in engaging culture in this really broad and rich way.

AMANDA BRENNAN: "Bronies" are male fans of "My Little Pony-- Friendship is Magic."

CHRIS MENNING: Generally between the ages of 16 to 25.

AMANDA BRENNAN: And they fiercely love the show.

CHRIS MENNING: For a man in today's society to tell someone you're a fan of "My Little Pony," a lot of times they might cock their head a little bit and be like, well, what's wrong with you?

One of the most appealing things is how much it directly challenges our heteronormative expectations of what it means to be a man.

AMANDA BRENNAN: The "Bronies" that I've encountered in real life have mostly been completely earnest, more than ready and willing to talk about their favorite episode, their favorite pony.

They want a bro hoof and they want to welcome you to the herd.

CHRIS MENNING: Men traditionally have certain societal expectations.

And really, that comes down to a larger problem with homophobia.

AMANDA BRENNAN: Andrew W. K. is on your side, you're still masculine.

I mean, who doesn't want to imagine a world with magic and happiness and awesome flying ponies?

ALEXA DACRE: We've got this very heavily gender-segregated world we're living in in America.

And I think a lot of women are drawn to Transformers because we can step outside that.

I write almost entirely in the Transformers fandom.

Our canon has one gender.

There is one female character that makes everybody who's not female some sort of gendered other.

And I like exploring the idea of, what does it mean if you are free of those dynamics that we see so often, like heteronormative?

This is a chance to push back against that.

You can play around with that idea of who is the receptive one, and is that really feminized in any way, or is the one who's using the male analog part, is that the male, is that the top, emotionally in the relationship to using the idea of domination and control and reinscribe those tropes.

It really allows for that kind of thing when we're taking, in a sense, gender norms that we're living with.

In fandom, we're a community.

We are no longer inscribed in that, men do this and women do this.

Everybody is, in a sense, gender equal.

DR. WHITNEY PHILLIPS: Holmies is a rose out of the Aurora shooting tragedy.

After it happened on Tumblr, a group of people in their fannish engagement started to post strange Photoshopped stuff that seemed to be in support of James Holmes, who was the shooter.

Within a few hours of that, Buzzfeed posted a listicle about, look at all the stuff that the Holmies are doing.

And then suddenly, it became a story.

Originally, it was about 6 to 10 people.

But the way that it was reported, it sounded like there were tens of thousands of people.

The resulting media attention meant that more people were going to be brought to that space.

And the media attention guaranteed that the Holmie phenomenon would turn into a trollish phenomenon.

One of the great facilitators of community is having an outside, that you can only define a community in terms of borders.

And so with Holmies, they were playing into that trope in an extreme way, where only a handful of people would get it.

I would argue a lot of trollish behavior is actually a kind of fandom.

So where do we draw that line?

How do we cordon off what's fannish and what's not?

It's really important to consider that spectrum, because it's what people do online.

NAOMI NOVIK: Most corporations want to do a kind of branding.

They don't want anybody to think about their product in a way that doesn't fit with their take on their product.

The fan fiction that they're objecting to the most is the fan fiction that is most protected under law because it's the most transformative.

It's a specific part of copyright, which basically says that even though somebody has the right to control their intellectual property, the rest of us have certain rights to respond to that, whether it takes the original work and does something different, changes the meaning of it, changes the form of it, as opposed to simply copying.

Most fanfic writers are not actually interested in going commercial.

They want to share their work for pleasure, with other fans.

And that's the amazing thing that we want to protect.

If you're a fan who's doing this just for love and you get a cease and desist on Warner Brothers letterhead saying, you are going to be sued.

Every violation has a $150,000 fine, you're like, oh my God.

I have to take all my fan fiction off the internet.

I have to erase my website.

I have to vanish completely.

Except, of course, these stories that entertainment corporations tell enter our consciousness.

You can't say, don't have Harry and Hermione get together.

You can't tell people not to have that thought.

That's why fan culture is important, to be able to nurture our creativity and share our stories and our art with other people.

Why wouldn't we value that?

Why wouldn't we let people have this kind of expression?

FRANCESCA COPPA: Fan culture really depends both on free speech and fair use.

And free speech means sometimes taking speech that you don't like.

CHRIS MENNING: It challenges people's expectations of what they consider to be acceptable in society.

ALEXA DACRE: Here is this space where the rules are different.

The world is very different from the world I live in.

And there are set rules and there are set characters, and we relate to each other on a different level.

DR. WHITNEY PHILLIPS: And it's something that someone can switch between-- different fandoms, different communities, different platforms.

NAOMI NOVIK: It lets many more people have a voice, and it lets many people tell stories that would otherwise not get heard.

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