1. Introduction
[1.1] At the Textual Echoes Symposium hosted by Umeå University in Sweden in 2010, Berit Äström (2010a) presented a paper on male pregnancy stories about the television series Supernatural (WB/CW, 2005–). I found Åström's paper so intriguing that I watched five seasons of Supernatural in a span of two weeks and schooled myself on other existing research (Tosenberger 2008; Åström 2010b). Supernatural had arrived in my life at an opportune moment. Soon we were in a glorious honeymoon phase, during which I binge-watched the show on DVD and created a fan identity on Gmail, LiveJournal, Delicious, Twitter, and Tumblr. I became part of several fan communities, read and wrote fan fiction, and participated in group watching parties.
[1.2] Through changes in showrunner and new narrative threads I wasn't interested in, I desperately tried to keep my relationship with Supernatural alive. I felt like an outcast in my fan communities, though I had initially joined in order to combat feeling like an outcast in my real life. Active fans often find their passion for a particular object waxing and waning, and it is not uncommon to move to a different fandom. Likewise, fans often leave one community within a particular fandom for another, or they determine to end their relationship with the canon at a specific point that allows them to continue participating in fan activities. Among the Supernatural fans I knew, some opted not to participate in reading or writing fic set after the departure of series creator Eric Kripke as showrunner. I just wanted my life back after three years of a relationship that had run its course. As I came to discover, my breakup with Supernatural and its fandom was an emotionally and technologically complex process. My personal example serves as a springboard for examining a largely unexplored aspect of fan culture: becoming an ex-fan.
[1.3] From the earliest ethnographies, such as those of Bacon-Smith (1992) and Jenkins (1992) for Star Trek (1966–69) fans, the field of fan studies has celebrated fandom as a safe space, a way for misfits to find community together and for secret passions to be brought into the open. This "fandom is beautiful" phase was a "purposeful political intervention that sided with the tactics of fan audiences in their evasion of dominant ideologies, and that set out to rigorously defend fan communities against their ridicule in the mass media and by non-fans" (Gray, Harrington, and Sandvoss 2007, 2).
[1.4] As the discipline has evolved, scholarship has broadened to emphasize the practices and experiences of a range of fans. There have been additional attempts to define fans more inclusively in terms of race, gender, and social class. Most scholarship, however, continues to presume that participation in fandom is a largely positive experience. Lynn Zubernis's (2017) edited collection features stories from fans and actors of Supernatural describing the impact that the series and its fandom has had on them, including leading to sobriety, suicide awareness, and crowd-funded charity. In keeping with the theme of the book, a portion of the proceeds benefits Random Acts, a charitable organization begun by Supernatural actor Misha Collins to which fans regularly donate and volunteer.
[1.5] Other scholarship has sought to avoid the utopian approach by examining social and cultural hierarchies within fan communities. For Gray, Harrington, and Sandvoss (2007), the significance of this move within the discipline was in findings that "highlighted the replication of social and cultural hierarchies within fan cultures- and subcultures, as the choice of fan objects and practices of fan consumption are structured through our habitus as a reflection and further manifestation of our social, cultural, and economic capital" (6). Practices like shaming and bullying have also been brought into the light (Zubernis and Larsen 2012, 116–42). Fan activists have even launched dedicated social media accounts to police bullying from outside and inside fan communities (such as @AntiFanbullying on Twitter, which was deleted in 2015). The dark side of fan cultures is becoming a more discussed and studied aspect of fandom, though usually described as aberrant and the worst of fan practices (note 1). However, these moves only reiterate the desire and sometimes expectation that fans feel to police, revamp, and reshape fandom into a beautiful and positive space.
[1.6] In order to break up with Supernatural, I simply quit watching the series and deleted it from my DVR. Breaking up with the Supernatural fandom was far more complicated. I had to undertake a thoughtful approach to dismantling my fan identity. Becoming an ex-fan raises questions about the ethics and meaningfulness of shutting down a fan page or pulling fic. Did I want my Supernatural fan identity to continue to exist, with the possibility that my fics would continue to circulate and be read? A complete rupture from a digital identity soon proved to be impossible, so I opted to leave my LiveJournal page up as a kind of fond memory for what had been.
2. "Tumblr is a line too far!": Platform migration woes
[2.1] During my three active years as a Supernatural fan, my fan communities were in a period of platform transition. Actor Misha Collins joined Twitter in 2009, inspiring many, myself included, to join. LiveJournal was a major hub of fan activity, but soon friends migrated to Dreamwidth and then Tumblr. I was frustrated at losing a community I had just found, and I was unexcited about creating new social media accounts when I had only recently created so many. I recall shouting in frustration one day, "Tumblr is a line too far!" As a LiveJournal holdout, I remained most active on a site that was rapidly losing activity. Many groups and users deleted profiles, posts, and pages, so a returning visitor might be faced with an image of LiveJournal's goat, Frank, a digital parallel to an animal eating valuable paperwork (figure 1). Frank's appearance on deleted pages, as well as pages that had not been updated in years, created a digital ghost town, contrasting with one that was once bursting with activity but that now lay dormant and decayed. In the ethnography of players of the online game Uru: Ages Beyond Myst (Cyan Worlds, 2003), Celia Pearce and Artemesia describe the sense of "shock and catharsis" the players experienced when the platform that hosted their game was shut down (2009, 86). Rebecca Williams similarly notes how the dormancy of a fan object or community may "necessitate a period of identity transformation for the fan" (2015, 29). As a solitary fan clinging to dying communities, I felt increasingly isolated and outcast—feelings that participation in fan communities is (according to most research in our field) supposed to combat.
Figure 1. When LiveJournal users attempt to navigate to a page that no longer exists, they are greeted by the image of Frank, here crying over a broken link.
[2.2] In the cases of two of the Supernatural communities on LiveJournal, group moderators decided to lock communities so that new posts could not be created, but they did not delete existing material. This strategy is useful for researchers, as it means that the activities of the community's past remain available. For some fans, however, this may serve as an emotional reminder of experiences they may wish to forget. Although a particular member within the group may have moved on to creating new fan works or have ceased fan production altogether, their impact and previous work are still accessible, thus creating a schism between identities. This can be remedied through the creation of a new user account, although savvy web geeks can determine the connection between the two.
[2.3] The 2014 leak of various celebrity photos retrieved from Apple's cloud storage (known as the Fappening) was a scaled-up version of something many internet users fear: the exposure of their private selves online (Massanari 2015). Deleting fan works, blog posts, or even an entire account is an imperfect way of negating the past. Even if the entire story or website on which it appeared is gone, it is likely that other websites still point to it, the title and author are included on a list somewhere, and the Wayback Machine can still find it. Copies may still exist off-line too. One real-person fic writer in the Supernatural community was hired by an entertainment blog (note 2). Faced with having to interview the very people she once wrote erotic real-person fic about, she deleted her fan accounts. When someone asked about one of her fics in a story-finder community, other fans were respectful of her wishes not to have the story circulating. But many of us, myself included, had already saved versions in our personal archives off-line.
[2.4] As Matthew Fuller (2005) explains, our digital activities leave flecks of identity that ensure a record of our presence remains on servers. This is true for fan works even after they have been deleted by their creators; it is also true for the act of reading those same fan works. Despite our best efforts, we are never fully private online, and everything leaves some trace of activity. For Viktor Mayer-Schonberg (2009), these realities are something all internet users must acclimate themselves to while continuing to advocate for mandated expiration dates for digital information. Until this solution is adopted, fans like the fic writer turned entertainment blogger may find our best efforts to fully divorce ourselves from our fan activities unsuccessful.
3. Antifans, nonfans, and ex-fans
[3.1] Although fan studies tends to look at the activities of flourishing communities and the experiences of engaged fans, there is also value in considering the role of ex-fan. Being an ex-fan is different from being an antifan, which connotes a level of hatred and knowledge so passionate that it bespeaks a deeper love. Chancery Stone's (2007) top definition on the Urban Dictionary describes an antifan as one "who purports to be a fan but who is actually engaged in dissing down, covertly or overtly, the object of a fandom, often for hidden agendas of their own." Similarly, Jonathan Gray argues that many antifans are "performing a love for something else" when they critique a particular text or its fan community (quoted in Jenkins 2010). Kristina Busse makes the related claim that by focusing on extreme affect, fan studies scholars can observe the relative similarity between loving and hating fan objects (2018, 218). Gray (2003) also advocates studying nonfans who may watch a media text without producing their own works surrounding it or joining online communities. But being passionately hateful or casually interested is a different experience from passionately loving something and then walking away from it.
[3.2] Being an ex-fan indicates that there was once passion for the source text. Changes to a television series cast or producer or a cancellation may strengthen or lessen fan relationships with the object and prompt fans to shift to a new fandom. While this may be a more common experience, I am not the only person who walked away from all fan-related social media accounts and fan practices. Perhaps the expression about first loves being the greatest rings true. I didn't want to transfer the fervor I once had for Supernatural onto a new object. I did not hate Supernatural or its fans. As Kristina Busse notes, the real ending to a fan experience may not be the series' conclusion but the moment a fan stops caring (2018, 218). At that moment, I became an ex-fan, a relationship marked with nostalgia for what was but apathy about what is to come.
4. Conclusion
[4.1] Breaking up with a fandom is a prolonged process, charged with emotion and complicated by the digital technologies used by fan communities. In seeking to preserve fan practices as part of our cultural legacy, we ensure that no one can fully divorce their fan identity. Nonetheless, it is possible to become an ex-fan, which involves a simultaneous sensation of nostalgia for the passion that once existed and apathy toward the future. Breaking up with a fandom is an underexplored area within fan studies. As we continue to pursue new understandings of the future of fandom, it seems fitting to expand our understanding of its conclusion as well.
5. Acknowledgment
[5.1] A version of this paper was presented at the Fan Studies Network Conference, Norwich, UK, June 27–28, 2015.