"Fandom" vs "RL" friends

[epershand]

One of the interesting things about reading Fandom Secrets daily is that there tend to be a lot of evolving conversations scattered among the secrets. Most of them are shipwars, but there are also other conversations. Via the medium of FS, people are hashing out their feelings on different topics. Just in anonymous, meme-type-image format.

One of the ongoing conversations in the last week or so has been about whether people feel closer to their "Fandom" or "RL" friends. Which is a conversation that I just can't relate to at all. Because, while I remember a time when fandom was something that only happened in my internet life, that time was a very long time ago. While not all of my friends are actively in fandom, or even in transformative fandom in particular, just about all of them are at least fandom adjacent. And while I haven't met all of my flist and droll in person, I've met a relatively large fraction and would love to meet any of those I haven't met.

Fandom is just a very active facet of my day-to-day life. I mean...  damned_colonial and I talked about bandom slash in the lunchroom at work today. I don't even know how I would DRAW lines between "fandom" and "RL" friends. I can draw a line between "fandom" and "non-fandom" friends, sure, but that would be a really unproductive line that would cut through the middle of groups of people I normally spend time with together.

I suspect that this is true of most of the people in my general-purpose cross-journal access circle things given that they are largely friends and friends-of-friends, but I've gotten to be curious. So, a poll:

Poll #5254 Are people in fandom real?

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 20

View Respondents

Do you draw a line between your fandom and RL friends?

View Answers

Yes
4 (20.0%)

No
16 (80.0%)

Where have you met most of your fandom friends?

View Answers

Online
15 (75.0%)

Conventions
2 (10.0%)

The wide world
3 (15.0%)

General age-ish?

View Answers

Primary/secondary school
2 (10.5%)

College or University
4 (21.1%)

Post-school
13 (68.4%)

(The killer question... I don't judge) WHO DO YOU LIKE BETTER?

View Answers

RL
4 (28.6%)

Fandom
10 (71.4%)

Gratuitous ticky boxes

View Answers

Llamas
9 (50.0%)

Daffodils
7 (38.9%)

Canoodling
12 (66.7%)

More ticky boxes please
11 (61.1%)

Please feel free to elaborate in comments.

ETA: Aaahhh I had to edit this like 500 times I am never using the rich text editor again in my life.

Comments

[starlady]

Y'know, I was just thinking about this earlier, and one predominant virtue among my fandom friends is that I don't have to justify my diverse interests to them, more or less ever. And I am not weird among them! Whereas among certain segments of my RL friends/professional acquaintances I do have to justify my various interests, and I am the weird one from the internet, and it can be wearing at times.

[epershand]

Yeah, I tend to be a lot more relaxed around folks involved in fandom to at least some extent--they are equally prone to "over"investment in things and I feel a lot less embarrassed copping to my own fixations.

[general_jinjur]

thinking about it, i have very few non-fandom friends who are not online. i have a few work friends, but i actually only see them at work, it isn't like we hang out. the friends who i see outside of work are all fannish, and mostly (though not all) in fandom socially/culturally. admittedly, i am hardly a social butterfly, so that's not very many people anyway.

i am not sure i can call my non-fandom friends rl-friends, because they are all (a) online, (b) mostly on dw/lj, (c) enthusiasts of some sort -- while not fannish, they have interests they are passionate about, and that's what draws me to fannish people, too.

[epershand]

Yeah, that tends to be my pattern too. I have a few friends who are non-fannish who I hang out with, but they all tend to be at least geeky in some way or another. I can really only think of one or two really close friends who aren't, minimum, giant geeks. So, I guess I have some non-fandom RL friends, and some non-RL fandom friends, but most of my friends are both.

[nextian]

It's a very, very fuzzy line, though.

[epershand]

Thanks to a couple of other comments, I finally figured out that in my life it's not a line but a venn diagram where the overlap in the middle is way bigger than the bits around the edge on either side.

[love]

Thing is... RL is real. At least, that's what I've noticed. I've met people in fandom who later turned out to be great RL friends, even post-fandom. The key is leaving fandom and seeing who stays and who just wanders off and disappears.

[epershand]

Oh, interesting. From your description it sounds like you track a progression -- someone you meet via fandom becomes a fandom friend, and then may over time become a RL friend. Whereas I generally use the term "fandom friend" to describe any friendship with someone who is fannish and who I interact with in a fannish context, which means that the vast majority of my friendships are of both the "RL" and "fandom" variety.

So, f'rinstance, I consider yarngeek and oliviacirce to be "fandom friends" because our friendships started through fandom and we regularly track one another's fandoms, rec each other new fandoms, etc. But they're also the two people I depend on most for sorting through RL issues. It's further complicated by the fact that any given communication I have with my close fannish friends tends to blur back and forth between discussion of RL and fandom without a clear dividing line between the two, and that we often use fandom frames in our discussion of RL issues.

[epershand]

Interestingly enough given the frame, I think I think of you as a RL but not fandom friend because none of our fandoms overlap--I see you being fannish in your space, and you see me being fannish in mine, but when we talk it's always about RL stuff and not fandom :P.

[love]

^_^ I think I will consolidate and just explain my thought process here.

Person who only talks about fandom stuff (and never about real life... and in fact isn't at all interested in my life (or I'm not at all interested in theirs) = fandom friend

Person whose relationship with me started in fandom, but then we branch out into talking about some other things (commiserate about life, work, etc) = remove "fandom", they become a friend

Person who talks with me about stuff we do in real life, discusses non-fandom relationships with me, teaches me about their work, is willing to meet up and hang out whenever I'm in their city or they're in mine = RL friend

The last two categories have a little bit of overlap, admittedly, but the RL thing (actual face-to-face contact, even if only once a few years) is the key factor for me to consider someone RL. So, since we were in college together, you're RL. ^_^

[love]

Addendum: I don't consider fandom participation or activity at all by the time we get to "friend" or "RL friend". Everyone has hobbies/interests, and fandom is just another facet of their lives.

For an example of a fandom friend, there are a few people on LJ whose sole interaction with me is always in the context of fandom. Even if we've met, they only want to talk to me as a fellow fan. Change the subject and talk about life, work, whatever, and they either clam up or bring the subject back to fandom. If you run out of fannish things to say, silence falls and all is awkward.

For an example of a RL friend, one of my friends lives, eats, breathes fandom of all sorts. But we hang out, we talk about life, and even though we share a few fandoms (haha, promiscuous) we don't really talk all that much about fandom stuff. One of us could make a joke referring to fandom and we'd both get it, and we occasionally interact in fannish roles, but we're friends outside of fandom too.

[vito_excalibur]

Yeah, that's the thing. A fandom friend who becomes a real friend becomes a RL friend!

[paperpenguin]

I put RL friends for who I like better just because I have the thing you do--where there's not really a line? I have a lot of friends who I met through fandom whom I know in real life. One of my best friends I met in fandom but we don't talk about it much and have never met. Some of my met-in-person friends are fandomy but that's not how we got to know each other and it's not our main conversation now. And you know! They are all my real life friends!

[oliviacirce]

Your quiz does not have enough options! But I took it so I could check the "canoodling" ticky box.

Anyway, my actual answer to the first question is "sometimes," which is to say I mostly don't draw a line between my fandom friends who are my friends in RL (which is to say almost all of them), but I do draw a line between my real life friends who are not in fandom. I mean, it is kind of unproductive to do so, sure, and the lines (such as they are) get blurry. Almost invariably, though, my "real life" friends who are non-fandom friends are school friends, and that's...a kind of fandom, too.

[yarngeek]

Hmm. I think that most of the people I regularly interact with in RL are a) fannish b) people from work or c) family. Most of the people I talk to OL are fannish.

I'm thinking about it a little more, and I'm classifying people I mostly talk to on the phone or via email (and maybe see once or twice a year, if that) as work friends, even if, technically, most of my interaction with them is virtual or long-distance.

AHA! People get slotted into categories of who I am when I interact with them, rather than the mechanisms I use to interact with! Interesting.

[turlough]

I didn't answer the age question because my friends range from highschoolers to people in their late 50s, though most of them are probably somewhere between their late teens and their late 30s.

I don't really have any non-fannish friends and haven't in many years. The only difference is that these days I know most of them through fanfic fandom on the net while back in the day I knew them through science fiction fandom organisations and cons.