I reviewed Michael Bond’s Fans: A Journey into the Psychology of Belonging for the TLS:

“Fannish devotion,” Michael Bond writes, “is a gregarious impulse.” As the subtitle of his book suggests, he is interested in fandom as a shared experience that gives people’s lives meaning and purpose. In the course of the book, he joins fans at online meetings and conventions and talks to collectors, cosplayers, fanzine writers and “aca-fans” (researchers who are fans of what they study) to try and understand what forms of belonging fandom takes.

Fans begins by framing fandom within the social identity theory pioneered by the psychologist Henri Tajfel. Tajfel’s experiments, conducted in the late 1960s, showed that people require minimal prompting to categorize themselves with others and to favour members of their own group over anyone else. Group identities are an inevitable fact of social life, one of the key ways we position ourselves in the world. Fandoms, Bond argues, suggest that in-groupishness does not have to lead to intolerance towards those outside the group. They offer “the pleasures of tribalism with less of the harm”.

After this opening chapter, the social theory takes something of a back seat and the book settles into a diverting tour around the more eccentric shores of fandom. “Fans,” Bond writes, “exist in places you would never think of looking.” He talks to one academic psychologist who is a “Brony”, one of the thousands of British and American men who gather in online communities to celebrate the characters in the toy line and media franchise, My Little Pony. These men are drawn to its themes of friendship and compassion, and enjoy upending expectations about the kinds of things men should be interested in. This same psychologist is also a “furry”, one of the large subgroup of cosplayers who like dressing up as anthropomorphic animal characters such as Bambi, Sonic the Hedgehog and the Lion King. He sometimes lectures dressed in his fursuit, and reports that student feedback is “largely positive”.

Fan cultures are bottom-up, relying on little or no input from the objects of their devotion. Their members are not just consumers of a product but advocates and campaigners for it. They can form formidable lobby groups, for instance, to challenge the cancellation of a favourite TV series (as NBC planned to do with Star Trek in 1967, until they received 115,893 letters in protest). They can also be highly effective political activists. When anti-government protestors in Thailand demonstrated in the streets in 2020, many of them dressed as characters from Hogwarts to symbolize their fight against injustice. Fans of the South Korean boy band BTS have used their online savvy to block anti-protest surveillance apps, derail racist social media campaigns and raise money for Black Lives Matter.

Fan fiction, almost none of which is shared beyond fan communities, deploys astonishing reserves of energy and creativity. The online fan-fiction repository, Archive of Our Own, has around five million registered users and more than nine and a half million works (a number that rose sharply during the Covid lockdowns), including over 10,000 versions of The Hobbit. A common ploy of fan-fiction authors is to move the action to the present: in one rewrite of War and Peace, for instance, Pierre takes to Reddit after his duel with Dolokhov to air his grievances. Another technique is “shipping”: inventing relationships between (usually same-sex) characters. The most common such couplings are Kirk/Spock, Holmes/Watson, Starsky/Hutch, and Harry Styles and Louis Tomlinson of One Direction. There is also a niche sub-genre detailing the love affair between Donald Trump and Shrek (“Trump suddenly felt strong arms surrounding him, steadying him and saving him”).

Bond argues that these fan subcultures are richly meaningful and, for the most part, healthy. As he points out, diehard sports fans are rarely assumed to be overly-fixated or fanatical, in the way that sci-fi fans or cosplayers often are. Pathological obsession among fans gets disproportionate media attention, but is rare. Many fans do experience an illusion of intimacy with the object of their devotion. But psychological research suggests that people who form such “parasocial relationships” with imaginary characters or unavailable stars are often empathetic, and just as good at forming relationships in real life.

Parasocial relationships can offer the temporarily isolated a sense of belonging, a chance to dip their toes in the waters of sociability and “to darn the holes in their social fabric”. A woman whose husband had recently died of cancer, for instance, developed a crush on the singer Josh Groban that made her see how she might be able to love again. Cosplaying can also be a way of experimenting fruitfully with other identities. Several hundred furries had their personalities tested while they were “in fursona” (in their furry persona). They scored significantly higher than in their everyday personalities on factors such as agreeableness, emotional stability and openness to new experiences.

Sometimes Bond’s eagerness to see fans’ behaviour as normal can take him into uncomfortable areas. In a section on the thousands of fans of the High School killers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, who call themselves “Columbiners”, he argues that their motives are “surprisingly benign” and that “they mean no disrespect to the victims”. Most Columbiners, he says, identify not with Harris and Kebold’s crimes but with their sense of themselves as outsiders, but he does concede, in what should surely have been more than an aside, that “a tiny minority of their members aspire to be mass murderers”. He skates over this difficult territory with a bland formulation: “In serial-killer and school-shooter fandoms, there is little to celebrate, but there is a great deal to contemplate.”

This book would have been stronger with a tighter and more contemporary focus, perhaps on how fandom is changing in an online age. Its scope is wide, covering everything from Janeites (Jane Austen fans) to Japanese anime enthusiasts. One chapter centres on therians: people who believe that they are an animal trapped inside a human body. Bond says that therians are “on a quest for identity, meaning and a sense of belonging just like Janeites, Trekkies and Potterheads”. But are they “fans” of the bears, wolves or big cats with whom they identify? It seems a stretch.

The tone of Fans feels a little undecided, caught between sympathy and satire. Bond seems to be very good at talking to fans, winning their trust and drawing them out. But he also wants to find humour in their unconventionality, such as when he pokes gentle fun at the online meeting of the Richard III Society where “most were not yet up to speed with the finer points of video conferencing – the mute button seemed particularly challenging”. A former New Scientist editor and writer who has written other books on human behaviour, he is skilled at summarizing and synthesizing psychological theories. But this book seems poised somewhat uneasily between a serious scholarly study and a more personal journey around cultures of fandom.

In truth, there is a substantial body of scholarship in cultural studies and sociology produced since the 1990s already pointing out what Bond discovers: that fandom is a creative, dynamic and communal process. He skirts fairly lightly over this scholarship, preferring to talk to fan scholars over Zoom rather than delve too deeply into their works. The book succeeds best when it simply reports from the mostly unironic, beguilingly weird world of extreme fandom. Here it becomes a celebration of human idiosyncrasy and our talent for building shared meaning and solidarity out of the strangest material.