The strange story of how internet superfans reclaimed the insult 'trash'

The birth of modern fandom is generally attributed to Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes series. In 1893, he killed his titular detective and created fan uproar; more than a hundred years later, the Benedict Cumberbatch-led Sherlock has spawned its own intense fandom.

But the history of fan communities starts a little earlier than Sherlock Holmes. Many of William Shakespeare’s plays are, in modern-day parlance, fanfictions of classical myths and legends. Musicians like Johannes Sebastian Bach and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart were the subject of adoring fan communities. There was the phenomenon of Lisztomania, which centered on the 19th century virtuosic pianist Franz Liszt. An episode of a fandom podcast called Fansplaining discusses literary fandom, including “commonplace books” for which philosopher John Locke advocated and which have been around since the 1400s. These books basically functioned as proto-Tumblrs—collage collections of quotes, poems, and other “highbrow” content.

But once women began creating commonplace books, men commercialized and separately “feminized” the practice by rebranding these scrapbooks as “sentiment albums,” wherein women were supposed to cultivate their wifely virtues. Instead, they were often used as multimedia fan repositories for popular male figures, particularly English poet Lord Byron. (Also noted in the podcast: The Brontë sisters, besides being novelists, also wrote Real Person Fiction of contemporaries like Duke Wellington.)

Early fandom was mostly literary-based, and as McCulloch explains, “Novels were a lowbrow, female thing.” One of the biggest early novelists, Ann Radcliffe, wrote what are known as “horrid” novels; she and fellow female novelists, writing for a female audience, were shunted into a separate categorization from the men who read history and non-fiction.

These splits—between male/female, highbrow/lowbrow, serious/amateur—continue to this day. You’re a man creating work? You can have fans of all genders and sexes. You’re a woman creating work? Your work and legacy will be downplayed. You’re a male fan? You’re legit. You’re a female fan? You’ll be policed both by your peers and by trolls.  When it comes to expressing fandom, people often use the loaded, gendered word “hysteria.” And as Alexis Chaney pointed out in Vox, young women of color are essentially written out of most fandom narratives.

On Tumblr, fandoms explode open with new interpretations of characters, relationships, and creator intentions.

From the publishing world to the music industry, women and other marginalized groups still struggle to be seen as owners or arbiters of their own tastes. Last fall, former Rookie editor Jessica Hopper tweeted: “Suggestion: replace the word “fan girl” with “expert” and see what happens.” It’s been retweeted 753 times to date.

If you think all of this unnecessarily elevates the importance of fandom, consider Lollie’s two examples of the most powerful patriarchal fan communities: professional sports and organized religion. If you dispute the latter, consider the Pope. As for the former, Lollie proffers this verbal side-eye: “I’ve seen y’all at football games… y’all are trash.”

If there’s any place where marginalized fandom communities can flourish, it’s on the internet: Digital spaces like Tumblr allow those fans to not just connect with each other, but to parse source fandom material for new, perhaps unintentional, meanings. It’s a stark contrast to the way fandom used to function.

Lollie’s parents, both avid Star Trek fans, would know. Her mom, Teresa Lollie, was introduced to the original series by her brother in the ‘60s, but it wasn’t until the show started airing as reruns that she came back to it. Teresa and her husband Gerard would buy cash-only tickets at midnight showings and meet fans there, in the workplace, or at random out in public. For their generation of fans, fandom was something that worked in linear movement: You met, commiserated, and connected with fans over the thing you all loved.

Eventually, fandom evolved to be something far amorphous and subversive. The early internet is where fandom jargon all started, the place where fans first started to use an exclamation point to denote different iterations of the same character, e.g. Alison!Sarah, for Orphan Black fans. (McCulloch attributes this to the technical aspect of early fandom: After all, it took a certain amount of capital and know-how to access Usenet or even have a computer.)

Nowadays, Tumblr continues to shape the way that fans connect and communicate with each other; the rise of “portmanteau” ship names within fandom communities corresponds to when Tumblr became the fandom gathering space of choice in 2006 (though portmanteau names were already in use, particularly for celebrity pairings/IRL “ships” like Bennifer, TomKat, and Brangelina). Previous platforms like Livejournal had supported “/” characters, e.g. Draco/Harry. Tumblr’s inability to read “/” characters in their tags forced fans to come up with different ways of referring to those pairings—hence, “Drarry.”

Portmanteaus aren’t just cute monikers—they can bring a whole new level of cultural significance to the original artwork. Many popular fandom properties have canonical straight, cis, white, male heroes—much of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, for example, or the Harry Potter franchises. On Tumblr, those fandoms explode open with new interpretations of characters, relationships, and creator intentions, with fans creating “slash”—homoerotic fanfiction—about same-sex or -gender pairings like Finn/Poe from Star Wars: The Force Awakens or Harry and Louis (Larry) from One Direction.

Fans apply this corrective casting/rewriting of mainstream narratives to not just sexuality, but also race (in the form of POC-centric race-bending and diverse fan casts for literary properties), and trans identity. It makes total sense that fans of Hamilton, itself revisionary, would recast Thomas Jefferson as a Heelys-wearing asshole and Alexander Hamilton as a pugnacious bisexual workaholic. Some mainstream creators, like Captain America’s Russo brothers, humor these fandom interpretations. Lin-Manuel Miranda takes the next step of sharing and engaging with fan works directly.)

Other fandom-specific phrases come out of different and varied cultural contexts. The fanfiction terms “beta” (to proofread another fanfiction writer’s draft) and “drabble” (generally, a short piece of writing) come from the publishing world and, as McCulloch discovered, Monty Python, respectively. Fandom has co-opted and popularized everything from BROT3 to “it me.” It’s no wonder that Tumblr is the most-plundered social network for Buzzfeed stories, or that Tumblr’s fandoms have become a cultural force so huge that they merit its own formal cultural rankings.

And yet, there’s still a disconnect between how fandom is perceived from the outside and how fans themselves in the thick of it feel—thus, the confusion over “fandom trash.” This disconnect feels like a relic from fandoms past, says McColloch. The fanzines of the 90s and the message boards of the early aughts were “fandom as this really undercover thing that you didn’t necessarily tell your friends and family about,” she says. Warner Bros. was sending cease and desist letters to people who were writing Harry Potter slash. That doesn’t happen nowadays. And yet there’s still lingering embarrassment over being a fan.

For many, these internet pockets of insular fandom are still the only places offering up true diversity regarding race, sexuality, gender, and just about every other kind of marginalized representation. The passion generated in those spaces provides a way to fully explore and test identity, desire, and human connection in ways that still aren’t possible or safe to do in the public-facing world. And, well, there’s nothing trash about that.

Lilian Min is a culture writer, photographer, and fangirl. Follow her on Twitter @llnmn.