The Elemental Aspects Of Fandom & Religion

Dec 3

Religion and storytelling have always enjoyed an intimate relationship, and we don’t have to look far to find elements of the miraculous, the supernatural, the divine or the heroic in our modern movies. From Star Wars’ elemental aspects of The Force, a supernatural energy which binds the galaxy together and exists between all living beings (including rocks, which the Jedi are often fond of lifting), to the magical narratives of Harry Potter’s Hogwarts, where the very coexistence between the real world of non-magical, non-believer muggles and the increasingly segregated and marginalized world of wizardry compete for dominance.

Jolyon Thomas’ work motivates a line of research which inverts this search for the religious in our modern stories and focuses on the elements of their accompanying fandom which themselves exhibit and create devotional culture. His work is interested in the ways in which fan culture turns into devotional culture, what those processes look like, and where the common ground of behaviors is.

To do this, we need to look at the elements of fandom which are ritualistic in nature. Modern fan culture, which we could often characterize as fanatic culture in the extreme, is predicated on a wide variety of highly stylized, repeatable, consistent behaviors, which augment one’s experience of being a fan, but also connect one’s individual experience to a broader engaged community of those who feel the same, very similar to an experience of faith. Modern fans attend mass gatherings such as comic cons or the premieres of movies, often waiting in line for hours before being allowed entry. We wear clothes which signal allegiance and alignment with our chosen favorite stories, broadcasting to others our preferred avenue and flavor of faith. We gesture towards each other in specific, ritualized ways as in the Vulcan greeting of Star Trek’s Mr. Spock. We fill our homes with objects and avatars from these stories, which are frequently shrine-like in nature, where we can bask in their collective (and collectible) glow as we re-watch the movies again and again.

Modern fans, as in religious culture, quote lore as in scripture, memorizing lines from movies as Christians might do from The Bible, and vividly recalling moments of climax or simply dropping them in as knowing retorts in conversation. Most materially, we devote large spans of time, and large amounts of money to our fandom, as in our faith. We travel to relevant places depicted in the movies, and we even build theme parks devoted to immersive mass gatherings where we can situate ourselves in simulated replicas of the fictitious worlds, drawing ourselves even closer to the stories we love. Thomas draws upon a specific example of this blurred line in the case of Washinomiya shrine in Japan’s Saitama prefecture, popularized in the early 2000s by the anime television series Lucky Star. The fictional Takanomiya shrine is based on the real-world version in Washinomiya, but as its fandom grew, devotees would begin to visit the real shrine en mass, revitalizing the local economy, participating in local festivals, and blending the fictional world of the show with the real-world traditions of the shrine. These deep, intimate connections between faith and place are not restricted to religious faith, but are consequences of faith itself, even if that faith comes from our secular love of the movies.

As such, fandom, as in religion, is a source of purpose in life, enabling and empowering connection to community, and is life giving in itself. Importantly, and with particular connection to Christianity, fandom is often predicated upon anticipation. We wait for the next movie trailer to drop, or the next episode to be released, and scrutinize it with frame-by-frame granularity. We wait in line for entry into the darkened caves of the theater to watch the next installment. And we wait outside the theme parks, rides, and conventions to experience heightened communal proximity with those who think and feel the same. And of course, such behavior is also frequently inter-generational. The baton is passed between father and son, ‘like my father before me’ as Luke Skywalker would have us believe. And finally, fandom is also strongly a creative outlet and actively encourages individual artistic expression. Fans write their own stories, make their own videos, paint their own pictures, and revel in the drawing of their favorite characters. In the spirit of this, I’ve created my own depictions of the Shinto kami Kitsune, created with MidJourney, an artificial intelligence and machine learning creative tool currently gaining momentum and incredibly popular within modern fan culture. I hope you enjoy them as much as I did making them.