In the process of writing these blog posts, I’ve realized that what I really love about Dungeons & Dragons is the way building a world together brings people together. I’ve played with people who I wouldn’t choose to hang out with and had just as good a game as when playing with my best friends. In order to play, we have to leave behind our personal conflicts about how our world should be, and work out someone else’s conflicts about how their world should be. The collaboration and the radical empathy involved with being someone else facilitates engagement where ego can be left behind. Ideally, Dungeons & Dragons is a liminal experience, and you emerge changed from playing it.
This liminality, in my experience, characterizes all sorts of fannish interactions, and while fandoms are no more perfect than the humans in them, on balance fandoms and fandoming provide a leveling experience where people can mix freely with the shared interest providing a social and cultural lubricant. Many of my fellow students have also remarked on this community-building function of fandom, but in this post, I’d like to discuss some of the specific outcomes of fandom(ing) that build a better world.
Direct action
One way engaging with what we love can improve the world is by direct action. For example, Dungeons & Dragons fans work with charities. Geek & Sundry‘s Dungeons & Dragons web show Critical Role, which I discussed last week, regularly contributes to 826LA:
826LA is a non-profit organization dedicated to supporting students ages 6 to 18 with their creative and expository writing skills, and to helping teachers inspire their students to write.
The cast of the show, voice actors whose home game became a fandom sensation, have run “one-shots” (single session games) for the kids at 826LA, as well as taught them how to build adventures and write characters. They’ve also used their show to raise money for the nonprofit, engaging their own fans with matching donations campaigns that have raised more than $100,000. Dndbeyond.com, a new gaming resource platform developed in response to fannish needs, donated $100 for every natural 1 (an unmodified roll of 1 on a d20 die) that the cast rolled during that campaign.
Wizards of the Coast, the company that owns the rights to Dungeons & Dragons intellectual property also participates in a yearly charity drive for an organization called Extra Life.
Extra Life unites thousands of players around the world to host fundraising and gaming marathons
in support of local Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals.
Wizards directly relates their charitable activities to the experience of gaming, saying, “it’s not uncommon to finish up a campaign with your characters saving the world or rescuing innocents…but fans can have a strong, positive impact in this world, too.” Their drive includes livestreaming gameplay and donating proceeds from special merchandise to the charity. Last year’s Extra Life campaign merch included a new character “race” called the Tortles. Look at these adorable guys!
There are other types of direct action that fandoms can take to improve the world. A fantastic example is the outpouring of fan support for NFL player Colin “Kap” Kaepernick who lost his job for kneeling during the national anthem. Kap knelt in protest against police brutality against black Americans, dramatizing feelings of exclusion, oppression, and unequal treatment. And, as my classmate Matthew Smith put it, “This action took the league by storm and sent the [q]uarterback directly into the spotlight of both political and popular culture.” He likewise observes that the action garnered a ton of support from celebrities and citizens both within the fandom and without. The hashtag #imwithkap, memes, fanart, protest, and vocal support launched Kap into a Nike spokesperson career that has changed the national discourse about police brutality and race. When fandoms unite behind a cause or an idea, they can wield immense power for change.
Resource Creation
Another means by which fandoms change the world is resource creation. As I mentioned above, dndbeyond.com was created by Fandom Games and Wizards in response to fan-player desires for a good character creation engine and an information compendium geared toward ease of use during games. (If you’re interested in learning to play, there’s a great New Player Guide!) And the Wizards-sponsored DMsguild.com allows fans to create and sell their own Dungeons & Dragons adventures, character archetypes, maps, and other materials.
Classmate Conor Stanley’s blog on C-JRPGs, or computerized Japanese role playing games, discusses another resource created in response to fan needs and by fans: wikis. Many fandoms have them. Dungeons & Dragons has a great one at fandom.com. For the JRPGs, however, the wikis of choice are hosted at Fextralife. Conor explains that these crowd-sourced wikipages “provide some of the most in depth game guides on the internet.” Further, Conor and I agree, “the fact that [these wikis] crowdsourced shows just how helpful fandoms can be when they come together.”
Grace Darden’s amazing discussions of street art on her blog, Shared Venues, highlight another one of these crowdsourced resources that wouldn’t exist without fandoms. Street art, by its nature sort of an underground art form, doesn’t “meet” in the same way fans of games can. But they’ve come together to create interactive city maps of where street art can be found. As Grace explains, “this map component is one of the fundamental drivers of graffiti, guerrilla and street art fanatics since it takes them straight to the source of new inspiration.” One example is “Street Art Cities” whose “community is dedicated to creating the perfect platform to discover all murals worldwide.” This crowdsourced mapping is, to my mind, an exceptional example of how fandoms build a better world: not only do the maps help fans find art, but they showcase artists which provides inspiration, and then translates into new art; and since street artists are often at the forefront of political conversations addressing the need for change, this feedback contributes to civic discourse.
Education
A final way that fandom builds better worlds ties back to the idea of community; that is, fandom educates. Learning is a luxury that some people don’t have. It’s also a lifelong pursuit that some people won’t take the time for. However, in the passionate engagement with their fandoms, people learn new things, new skills, new perspectives on the world, every day. For example, as Critical Role‘s involvement with 826LA demonstrates, Dungeons & Dragons teaches writing skills and encourages creativity. Playing the game in the new era of the virtual tabletop educates people in the use of new technologies. Following celebrity players can teach them a new appreciation for art when they post links to fanart. Playing a couple of bards has broadened my musical horizons.
Other examples of educative fandom include the deliberate expansion of diverse characters in games, such as the initiative taken by game designer Michael Chu in Overwatch. Classmate CJ Rakow writes, “‘“Select groups of self proclaimed hardcore gamers are sexist, racist and homophobic with a strange inability to admit that they are.”Game creators such as Chu know that these groups exist, and have been working to combat this culture.” While not all players accept the revelation that some of their favorite characters are gay or genderfluid, CJ explains that they “can personally relate to the ways that representation in the game fosters an inclusive and safe environment” by educating male gamers about the ways women and genderqueer people can feel threatened and marginalized in the world and within gaming spaces.
Fiona’s blog about The Song of Achilles fandom shows another way fandoms educate. The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller is a transformative work; that is, it’s a retelling of The Iliad from the perspective of Patroclus, Achilles’ young friend (and many say lover). As Fiona points out, “In this way, The Song of Achilles (commonly referred to within the fandom by its initialization, TSOA) is, in essence, a work of fanfiction itself.” And now fans of the novel are writing fic about the fanfic! In doing that, they’re immersing themselves in what’s known of the history of the Trojan War, Greek mythology, perhaps even learning Greek. Some of them may have had a love of the classics before they joined the fandom, but others are being exposed to what they might never have looked at before. And because the fanfic and fanart exists in archives and multi-fandom fic challenges, it’s spreading the love of this classic story well beyond its usual boundaries.
Finally, on a personal note: fandom educated me. In particular, Taylor Passio’s exceptional close readings of Spongebob Squarepants helped me see this children’s show in an entirely different light. I’m too old for Spongebob to have been my afterschool buddy. My younger sister is also too old. So my exposure to Spongebob has been limited to clips and memes, and in my mind, it was basically synonymous with Veggie Tales. Before reading Taylor’s analysis of the “alone” episode of Spongebob, I would never have imagined it might be a sophisticated artistic construction, let alone that,
the show is able to cater to many different demographics using parallel messages, but the true recipe to this dual perspective is a subtle balance of slapstick humor and clever writing, in other words absurdism.
Not only do I have a whole new show to binge watch, I’ve learned a thing or two about absurdism, including: “The hallmark of the genre is neither comedy nor nonsense, but rather, the study of human behavior under circumstances (whether realistic or fantastical) that appear to be purposeless and phil[o]sophically absurd. ”
I could spend another 1500 words discussing the way fandom–as an activity, a place, a community, or an emotional construct–can make the world a better place. Every one of my classmates had something valuable to say on the subject, and nearly all of us agree that the experience of sharing a love for something with someone creates bonds between you. But for me, learning all of the different things people get fannish about was enough to make me feel closer to my classmates and appreciate them more as people. So maybe, in the end, the way fandom makes a better world is by making better, more curious, more accessible, more emotionally open persons.
