Here’s an idea I would very much like to credit to the person I heard it from, but I can’t find the video on YouTube anymore. Either my search-fu is lacking or the video was removed for some reason. So, sorry about that. The video was specifically about the Harry Potter franchise, so that might help if you want to give it a try. I think the title was something like “JK Rowling Doesn’t Like Women”.

But we are not here to talk about JK Rowling’s many, many problematic deeds and opinions. We are here to talk about fandoms.

Part of the video was about why Harry Potter is such a beloved franchise despite being kind of bad. And yes, you can like it all you want, it doesn’t take away from the fact (and it is a fact) that Rowling’s misogyny, ableism, fatphobia, racism and anti-semitism all take away from whatever she was hoping to achieve with her work. The reason brought forth was that the franchise has such a strong fandom specifically, because it’s shit.

That’s the interesting thing. The video made a very good case on this. If a work of art is actually good and well planned and so forth, there is no room for a fandom to form. A fandom forms when you have the opportunity to add to the existing works. So, you need an interesting core concept (like a wizarding school, not at all original, but still interesting) and such a bad implementation of that core idea that the fans feel the need to fill in the blanks.

Another example of this given in the video was Star Trek, which is kind of the original fandom born way before the Internet, so much of the discussion was in fanzines or by mail. Why was it born? Because the series was cut short. The original series only had three seasons, so their mission still had room for the fandom to add their own stuff. Same with Star Wars. Lucas had been promising prequels and sequels for a long, long time after the original trilogy, so fans could speculate with what happened to the Empire and the Skywalkers.

What other groups are there? I’m not actually sure, because I don’t live in the spaces where these discussions happen, but one that comes to mind is Sherlock, specifically the BBC series starring Cumberbatch and Freeman. Of course, Sherlock Holmes had been around for well over a century at that point, but the BBC series always seemed to hold back something, which enabled shipping between the two leads, among other fan works.

But here’s the problem: Since I’m so far outside of these and other fandoms, I might just be looking for fandoms that specifically confirm this idea, not at fandoms overall. The whole hypothesis might be wrong. Still, that doesn’t mean it would not be interesting. So, there’s an idea for a thesis for someone.