There used to be a fantastic book store in the Cobble Hill section of Brooklyn, NY, called BookCourt. It was beloved by locals, and touring authors to NYC often made a stop for signing events and book talks. It was a bright, beautiful space tinged with old New York charm: creaky floors, book staff recommendations, and walls of shelves. It was in operation for over 30 years, until one day the family who owned and ran the store announced their closing. It was a shock to the neighborhood and the greater literary community.

Minutes after the announcement, New York Times bestselling author and Brooklyn resident Emma Straub announced that she and her husband would be opening a bookstore in Brooklyn, not far from the site of BookCourt. Having worked at BookCourt at one time, she felt a connection to the store and the gap it would be leaving for the community–a gap she filled by opening Books Are Magic.

Watching this all happen with my own eyes from working inside the book industry, I was charmed. Opening a bookstore (or any small brick and mortar business) is no easy feat; it takes massive amounts of capital and long hours of hard work. One thing authors say a lot is that they set out to write the books they themselves want to read, and opening a bookstore feels similar to that idea: write the kinds of books you’d imagine stocking at your own store. Straub used her literary success to usher in a similar business that would give back to the community that inspired her in the first place.

This is a solid use case of insider influence. Insiders in creative industries can often find opportunities to create something new using the insider knowledge, passion, and affection for the industry that shaped them–and pass all of it on to new folks. Whether it be giving back to communities, uplifting other creators, or designing products and spaces that serve fans, insiders are uniquely positioned to be culture ambassadors. Here are a few examples that I find really exciting.

Insiders who build for other creators

Ever since watching the mid-90s sitcom Third Rock From the Sun with my family religiously, and later falling in love with the movie 10 Things I Hate About You, one of my Hollywood crushes was Joseph Gordon-Levitt. I loosely followed his career, and in 2005 I noticed he, along with his brother, started a website for creativity: HitRecord. What started as a site where they could post their own videos and such would soon open up to other creators who could collaborate on art for art’s sake. It’s no secret that making a hit Hollywood movie or TV show is a tough thing to accomplish, but Gordon-Levitt stayed focused on the art. Later, HitRecord developed a production arm for films and TV shows and a learning arm of the company as well, where folks could learn skills from other creators–even Joseph himself. But as a creative outlet, folks are posting their own art, writings, videos and remixes with other creators at all hours of the day.

Former Gilmore Girls actor John Cabrera founded Remarkist with a similar vision, but for collaborative fandom. In a world where fandom is fragmented between social media, message boards, individual blogs and websites like Discord and Reddit, fans sometimes have trouble finding one another–or finding the communities that feel real, niche, and connective to them personally. Remarkist builds the kinds of tools fans need to celebrate their fandoms, find other enthusiasts, build their own works with others, and more–all in one place. In 2021, Cabrera hosted a watch party of the very show he was on, and over several months fans joined to watch and discuss Gilmore Girls while he built Folkic, a community app for watch parties and events across fandoms. Fans can now host their own events, display their own art and writing, and more is coming as the app prepares for a launch after its beta period.

Insiders who open the door

There are tons of Hollywood elites that lend their money and influence to back new projects, create their own production companies, and more. But some actually use their platform to physically open doors to new creatives through festivals, initiatives, and even book imprints at major publishers.

The timing is never more relevant than now to talk about the Tribeca Festival. Founded in 2002 by Robert De Niro along with Jane Rosenthal and Craig Hatkoff, the film festival’s initial aim was to help revitalize lower Manhattan in the wake of the 2001 terrorist attacks. The festival was to bring joy, community, culture–and an economic boost–to a part of the city that had been physically decimated and spiritually depressed as a result of the terrible destruction and tragedy. With independent films and panels, thousands of people came to the inaugural event. Many more attended the next year, and programming expanded to include comedy, music, family activities, sports and outdoor screenings on the Hudson River.

In a new Netflix documentary, TRIBECA 25, De Niro says, “To me, New York is the most cinematic city in the world.” The festival not only celebrates film in general, but helped reshape the economy at the site of disaster. The actor who is synonymous with New York for many roles, including Taxi Driver and The Godfather Part II, lent his particular passion for both the art and the city to a project that delivers every year.

Decades earlier in 1978, actor Robert Redford founded the Sundance Film Festival. Using the salaries he had acquired from starring in such movies as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, he bought a ski area in Utah, and named it Sundance after the iconic character. Redford felt connected to the area, having built a home there, and he was influenced by the 1972 movie he starred in, Jeremiah Johnson, about the American West. He created the festival, then called the Utah/US Film Festival, to highlight American-made films, and increase interest in making films on location in Utah. In 1981, Redford created the Sundance Institute, a nonprofit that discovers and supports independent artists. In 1991, the US Film Festival officially changed names to the Sundance Film Festival, and is the largest independent film festival in the country. Redford used his influence to bring together the location he thought had film potential with independent creators who could thrive in the industry.

Opening the door also means recognizing who isn’t in the room and should be. Ryan Murphy, the powerful writer, director and producer of monumental TV shows like Glee, American Horror Story, American Crime Story, and many more, used his experience and his success to help diversify voices in directing. Murphy created the HALF Initiative, aimed at a more inclusive environment behind the camera. Murphy describes his early days in the industry working on shows like Popular: Hollywood was run by straight, white men over the age of 50, and he wasn’t one of them as an openly gay creator. He wanted to tell stories about women and the LGBTQ+ community, underserved demographics both in the marketplace and on creative teams.

Instead of joining the ranks of the Hollywood elite and gatekeeping success when he made it, he opened those proverbial gates to directors that would previously not have been given a chance. The HALF Initiative also has a mentorship program in which every director on one of Murphy’s projects mentors emerging directors. Under the initiative, at least 50% of directorial positions on his projects are filled by women and other underrepresented groups. The result is incredible storytelling that feels grounded. His TV show Pose, about the mid-80s underground ballroom culture in NYC, features many trans actors. But his writer’s room also included trans writer Janet Mock who directed as well, making her the first trans woman of color to direct a TV show episode.

Stand-up comedian, writer, and actress Phoebe Robinson, well-known for her podcast and HBO show 2 Dope Queens, is one creator that launched a book imprint to help uplift other marginalized voices. Tiny Reparations Books, an imprint housed under Penguin Random House’s Plume imprint, launched in 2020. A New York Times bestselling author herself with Plume, having written and published three books, Robinson is uniquely qualified to open that door to creators who might otherwise be lost in the shuffle of the publishing machine. In just over 5 years, the imprint has brought unique voices to the mainstream, producing honest, evocative fiction and nonfiction including the national bestseller Marsha: The Joy and Defiance of Marsha P. Johnson by black trans activist Tourmaline.

Insiders who serve their community

Filmmaker and comic book lover Kevin Smith is well known for his movies Clerks, Mallrats, Chasing Amy, Dogma and more. His View Askewniverse movies feature the characters Jay (Jay Mewes) and Silent Bob (Kevin Smith) in some way. Smith began buying comics at a Red Bank, NJ, store called Comicology in the mid-1990s, around the time he made the movie Clerks. When the owners announced they’d be closing the store and moving abroad, he purchased it and its stock using the proceeds he had made from Clerks. He reinvented the store, decorating it with props from his works, and called it Jay and Silent Bob’s Secret Stash. Since taking over the original location, Smith moved the store a couple of times, each new iteration growing larger with more artwork, props and memorabilia from Smith’s View Askewniverse films on display.

For a fan of Jay and Silent Bob, the store is a real-life extension of the characters: they are heavily influenced by comic books (just like Smith), so visiting The Stash feels like stepping into the fictional world of the View Askewniverse. This is a classic example of a creator returning to his roots: comic books influenced his art, and so Kevin Smith used revenue from that art to keep the store that inspired him alive, both a destination for fans and a center of discovery for a new generation.

If you’re in Nashville and you’re a literary lover, you have to visit Parnassus Books. Not only is this space beautiful and charming–as are many independent bookstores–but what you may not know is that it is owned by an acclaimed, bestselling novelist and writer: Ann Patchett. As Patchett writes in her memoir, when the city’s local independent bookstore was bought by a chain, it was moved into a mall and began to sell more gifts and merchandise than actual books. The city had one other bookstore, a Borders, but the chain closed all stores in the early 2010s.

Patchett fondly remembered the bookstore she visited as a child: a space with a small footprint that carried books, no gifts. It only stocked what it could, hand-selected volumes from staff, but the joy of discovery was ever present. She wanted a store like that to exist in Nashville, but never actually wanted to work in one. Thankfully, she had friends who wanted to take on the hard work of starting and running a business–all they needed was backing. Patchett could finance a dream project: opening the kind of bookstore she desperately wanted to visit again. In 2011, Parnassus was born, and today the profitable store hosts scores of author events and serves the community every day.

Which brings me back to Books Are Magic in Brooklyn, in my own city, and Emma Straub. Straub’s latest novel, American Fantasy, is a story about a fandom cruise. Based loosely on the New Kids on the Block cruises that the band has put on over the years, and Straub’s own rabid fandom of the still-performing boy band, it’s a novel about insiders as much as it is about fans who form parasocial relationships to their idols. One character straddles the line between fan and producer, balancing her knowledge of the real men behind the personas with serving fans exactly what they want. As I read, I couldn’t help but think of Straub’s simultaneous positions as a bookstore owner and author. As a huge fan of New Kids on the Block, she managed to indulge in her own fangirlish obsession while telling a fully rounded story about the fandom machine that surrounds a boy band like it. Insiders can build spaces for fans using their influence, but they are uniquely qualified to bridge the gap between fans and creators precisely because they are fans themselves first.

Want more? Our Discord is where you’ll find everything you need to know about the Remarkist ecosystem including Folkic, our community app and Masslore, our fandom knowledge database! And be sure to hit that subscribe button so you never miss a thing at Rmrk*st Mag!

Happy September everyone! The summer seems to have flown by, but as Taylor Swift once said, “August slipped away…” And, if we’re getting technical, there are still a couple more official weeks of summer. But while we aren’t quite breaking out the autumnal beverages and fall decor yet, we’re looking forward to the season that belongs to one of our favorite shows, Gilmore Girls. September brings the first of the Gilmore-inspired small town festivals and conventions, some of them featuring the actors who played our favorite residents of Stars Hollow, a tradition that grows every year and well into November. But the fall is also a fantastic time for many fandoms–like football, holidays, and spooky season to name a few–and we’re excited to see what’s coming out over the last few months of the year.

Before we get into our theme for September, let’s take a look at what you might have missed in August! We built content around the idea of Devotion in fandom. One thing is for sure: it can get expensive to be a devoted fan, and we explored what it means, financially, to participate as much as you can within a particular fandom. But what if you’re not living your fandom out loud in public. We looked at the nuances of private devotion to the content you love. And finally, we explored five different ways devotion in fandom is tested, from bad endings to off-putting adaptations.

This September, we are turning our attention to Ambassadors. In fandom, there are insiders: cast, crew, writers, creators–all of the people who create the things we love are integral to fandom. And all of them are fans of something themselves. Insiders in fandom act as stewards to fan communities, and we are going to take a look at some of the ways they do that. We’ll look at fan club organizers that can bridge the gap between creators and fans. We’ll explore how artists themselves act as ambassadors to new storyworlds and bring fandoms with them. And in celebration of Remarkist and our Folkic app, we’ll look at some projects built by folks inside the entertainment industry that serve fans and fandoms directly.

We hope to see you here as we drop new pieces, and as always please let us know your thoughts in the comments. Check the table of contents below; we’d love for this space to spark fannish conversations about every topic we cover–and beyond! There are lots of fun things coming this fall, so make sure you are following John Cabrera and Remarkist on Instagram for any announcements. You can also find more information at our website and on our Discord, where we post regular updates about the Remarkist ecosystem as a whole. And if you haven’t signed up yet for our Folkic app waitlist, now is the best time!

1. Insider Influence: Creators Building Spaces for the Communities That Made Them

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2. Writing Oneself Into the Narrative

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3. Fan Club Ambassadors

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Want more? Our Discord is where you’ll find everything you need to know about the Remarkist ecosystem including Folkic, our community app and Masslore, our fandom knowledge database! And be sure to hit that subscribe button so you never miss a thing at Rmrk*st Mag!

What is one thing all fandoms have in common? Devotion to the art, creators, and the worlds of that franchise. Fans will often make excuses for the content they love out of pure passion. They’ll defend characters they love for doing something questionable, the occasional production mishap, small continuity errors or episodes that weren’t as engaging as others. Sometimes these aberrations become part of the lore of the fandom, the ability to love something even because of its flaws, rather than in spite of them.

But what pushes fans to the edge where their devotion is tested? What are the things that can actually break a fandom, or cause fans to cut ties with the content they once devoted themselves to? I’ve been thinking about all of my fandoms recently and what has stuck with me over time versus the franchises I broke from, and considering the reasons I–and others–have for making those decisions to bow out. Here are five scenarios in which fans’ devotion is tested.

When the ending is…bad

I never watched Game of Thrones, but boy did I hear about it when it ended. From everyone. Still. For the fandom, it felt to me that something sacred had been breached: a book series so beloved for so long, an epic and successful adaptation of those books (not always guaranteed; see below), and it all came crashing down with an ending the fans hated for all the right reasons. The one emotion I have felt from fans who talk about it is disrespect from the creators. With the original books by George R.R. Martin unfinished, by season 5 the writers had started writing new storylines without much of his involvement, and the ending of the series simply didn’t pass muster. Luckily for GoT fans, Martin turned his attention to the spinoff series, House of the Dragon–as well as the final books.

Another popular example is the ending of the sitcom hit, How I Met Your Mother. The series is built around Ted telling his kids the story of how he met their mother, as the audience is told the story over nine seasons. The final episode was where the fandom would finally learn the identity of the titular “mother.” Though I would argue, personally, that it was a cool choice to have a completely new character we never met be the mother. This tactic gave me flashbacks to the ending of The Wonder Years, a similar show told in flashbacks. In the series finale, Kevin explains that he and Winnie didn’t end up together as adults. It made sense for the series, which was about first experiences and young love, that the central love story be formative to the characters’ development but not the only love they would experience. On The Wonder Years, it absolutely worked.

But on How I Met Your Mother, it angered fans that the mother of Ted’s children is someone we meet in the ninth season, and only learn she’s for sure the one in the last episode before she passes away. Now Ted and Robin, now divorced from Barney, are in the process of getting back together. And what about the former serial womanizer Barney who seemed to have changed his ways by marrying Robin? Do these friends know any other people?! While the entire series is a great exploration of friendship and romance in your late 20s/early 30s, the finale of the show seems to negate previous character development and events of the last season for what seems like a cheap reason.

When a character changes, or dies

I’m not talking about when a character dies for the plot or to really serve a story. I personally love those character deaths. I also love when a character evolves because of what is happening in their storyline, whether it’s falling deep into depression or facing the world happier and lighter because they are going through positive changes. We should celebrate character development, and process the deaths of beloved characters as we would in real life.

But character deaths that don’t serve a story seem to be created for shock value or just plain cruelty, and that pisses fans off. Fandoms know when an emotional reaction isn’t earned. Some examples: Tara on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Derek on Grey’s Anatomy. You get the idea.

I recently saw an Instagram video about how the titular character in Dawson’s Creek, Dawson himself, evolved to be an insufferable character. But the creator praised James van der Beek, the actor, for playing the character as if he despised him. The protagonist in the show doesn’t get the girl, and all the side characters become the heroes. The fandom reacted in their own way to a contrived story and character development that didn’t really make sense.

Inconsistent storytelling

I’ve been bingeing older episodes of the podcast Pod Meets World hosted by Danielle Fishel, Rider Strong, and Will Friedle from Boy Meets World. While listening, I’m also doing a rewatch of the series and deeply enjoying their recaps. I watched the show as it aired, but never really again–and their recaps remind me of why. The thing that the show almost never gets right is consistency, and it’s frustrating. Did Cory and Topanga start their relationship at 12 years old in the episode “Cory’s Alternative Friends” or were they in kindergarten? Or was it the sandbox? Or the playground? The story changes constantly. Also: is Eric a cool older brother? Or really dumb and outlandish? The character, as Friedle himself asserts over and over in many podcast episodes, frustratingly changes course throughout the series. And what’s Shawn’s deal? How did he and Cory become friends and why did they keep adding and subtracting siblings to his character? Rider himself hasn’t been able to follow the path of his character’s trauma, emotions, wants, and needs.

A tonal whiplash

I can speak for all Gilmore Girls fans when I say this: when we saw the first trailer for Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life on Netflix, we all freaked out. The tone was perfect: our favorite small town setting, a snowy town square, our favorite girls drinking their favorite coffee and making quips, exasperated Luke, and Emily Gilmore being herself. The tone felt like our show. But when it premiered, it fell a bit flat for a lot of the fandom. Was it because the episodes were like movies? Was it the colors? Was the writing not full of fast-talking as it was before? A fandom relies on the structure and tone of the story they love; switching it up is unsettling in most cases.

In another example, the epic show Lost started out as a thriller: a plane crash on an island, the back of the plane and its passengers missing, death and destruction in the aftermath of the crash, and survivors who are left behind with nobody to contact. As the first season progressed, survival in community was the main tension, while the island itself, full of its own secrets, monsters, and mysterious past, became the main character. What followed was several seasons of scientific mysteries and supernatural phenomena. But at the end, the series closed on a metaphysical/spiritual note that baffled fans completely and made their seasons-long practices of easter egg hunting, discussing, and theorizing feel cheapened.

A weird adaptation

One of my favorite books is Every Summer After by Carley Fortune. And I’m not alone: fans went crazy over this author’s debut novel in 2022. Since then, she’s become a household name in the book world with multiple instant number one New York Times bestsellers. So when the news of the television adaptation of the book, titled Every Year After, surfaced, fans reacted accordingly. It was one of the most anticipated shows of the summer of 2026. I was absolutely thrilled and counting down the days.

But the series came out and it…flopped. Fans were confused. Including myself. It’s hard to say why this adaptation didn’t make me feel the way the book did, because I can’t point to a single actor’s performance or anything being “wrong.” I just know it didn’t work, and fans agree. Some folks found it jarring that the actors played a huge span of ages for their characters, as the story takes place over the course of many summers as Percy, Sam and Charlie grow up together. Others hated the side character storylines that felt shoehorned in. In general, scenes felt unfinished and choppy, as if badly edited for story. It was a disappointing way to experience one of my favorite novels.

These tests of fandom are just that: tests. Whether a fan–or the entire fandom–can endure the fallout is case by case. For me, I can’t say that my interest in shows like How I Met Your Mother, Lost, or Gilmore Girls was catastrophically affected by the endings or tonal shifts, but they are things I think about and wince at. Though I’m not sure anything could make me not love a book by Carley Fortune.

What are the tests of your devoted fandom that you have experienced? I’d love to know in the comments!

Want more? Our Discord is where you’ll find everything you need to know about the Remarkist ecosystem including Folkic, our community app and Masslore, our fandom knowledge database! And be sure to hit that subscribe button so you never miss a thing at Rmrk*st Mag!

There’s a funny scene in an episode of Gilmore Girls where Mia, the owner of the Independence Inn, visits Stars Hollow. She mentions to Lorelai in Luke’s Diner that Luke used to wear his Star Trek shirt all the time as a kid, much to Lorelai and Rory’s shocked delight. Immediately Luke is embarrassed, brushes it off, insisting that it’s untrue. For the viewer–and the titular Gilmore girls–this reveal for Luke is very out of character. Our beloved grumpy diner owner, never seen without a backwards cap and flannel is….a Trekkie?

When Lorelai calls him out as such, he scoffs. “I was not a Trekkie,” he insists. But it’s too late: Lorelai, Rory, and Mia are off to the races, teasing Luke about the trappings of what it meant to be a “Trekkie” in the early 2000s. That is, a bit of a geek, and definitely not the image Luke projects. Up until now, he could be a fan in silence, and avoid all the identity assumptions that being labeled a “Trekkie” would incur. But being outed as part of this fandom changes his image–at least in the moment.

We think of fandom as loud. The word “fandom” conjures all sorts of images: conventions, cosplay, and yes–scores of Trekkies. Fandom and identity expression are intrinsically linked. But the loudest fans are not necessarily the most devoted, or at the very least they don’t account for everyone in the fandom who is. Fandoms seem monolithic, but individuals within them know there are many nuances. But silent fandom, having affection for something that the fan doesn’t advertise or demonstrate, can be the purest love. Without public performance, or the pressure of such, fandom is stripped to the very essence of why we love something: because it speaks to us on an individual level.

Is fandom, by definition, a group activity?

When we think of fandom, we think about it in terms of a collective experience. A fandom is not an individual, it is a group of individuals, either connected or not. You can be part of a fandom but not know anyone personally in it, but participate with the community anyway. Every time you go to a concert, or attend a movie, you are participating in fandom, with others, even if you’re alone.

Henry Jenkins, scholar of media and known as the founder of fan studies, asserts in his 1992 book, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture that fandom is a group process. Fans interpret content together through shared conversations and create content for collective distribution like zines (today it might be a Reddit thread or a podcast). To be a fan is to inherently join a community, a collection of folks who build meaning together.

But if you love something, do you actually need to commune with others to consider yourself a fan? Jenkins, at least during the writing of his first book, might argue yes, because he makes a distinction between simply liking something and being a fan. The former might be private, and the latter requires others.

Fandom and identity often go hand in hand. Even as children, what we like is part of who we think we are. I remember being obsessed with Rainbow Brite, a cartoon character who wore a colorful dress and rode a horse with a rainbow mane. She also had blonde hair, which I desperately wanted at 5 years old. Somehow, this magical girl who brought color everywhere became part of my identity. I definitely couldn’t form any real conversation about her with other fans; to me she was just my friend. I played with the doll I had of her while I slept on sheets with rainbows on them.

As adults, I would argue that we participate in fandom, at least financially, without having to make it much of a group activity. We buy merch, rewatch things we love, maybe buy all the books from a favorite author without ever thinking about whether or not others love them too.

The tyranny of consensus

I personally think Jenkins is right about fandom transforming our relationships to the things we like through community and communication. He wrote about how the consensus of meaning is a collective, ongoing process that a fandom takes on naturally. In community, close readings and discussions can change the way we view a piece of content, simply because others have opinions that we are exposed to.

Participating in social fandom means that there will be a consensus to consider, one we might not want to. How we describe content is important to fandoms. There is canon, the official works of a franchise, and then there is “fanon,” the agreed-upon canon amongst fans that maybe explain plot holes or assert some kind of meaning. There is also beta canon, referring to licensed material like book series or podcasts associated with a franchise. Beta canon can stand until it is overwritten or contradicted by a piece of media in the official canon, and of course this is a great source of debate for a fandom. The Star Wars and Star Trek franchises have tons of associated, licensed novels that exist as beta canon. In 2025, the scripted podcast miniseries, Star Trek: Khan launched, written by Star Trek novelists and TV series screenwriters. It even features actors George Takei (reprising Sulu from the original series) and Tim Russ (reprising Tuvok from Star Trek Voyager). But it was still considered beta canon until writer Kirsten Beyer confirmed in an interview that the events of Khan would be considered–and not contradicted or overwritten–in all future Star Trek storytelling.

What happens when a community gets new information and makes a collective decision about a franchise that affects the fandom? Fans might feel pressured to perform consensus to fit in, or have their own views heard. To reference one of my previous posts on unpopular opinions, I was a self-proclaimed Gilmore Girls superfan for over a decade before I met more than a few others who even watched it. To me, canon began and ended with the text of the show.

But in 2016 I learned that there were fan-teams for Rory’s various boyfriends: Team Logan, Team Jess, Team Dean, and it made zero sense to me. What did the boyfriends have to do with anything? It’s Rory’s story, and they are great side characters who come in and out of her life. But getting out of my fan bubble of one and becoming part of the larger fandom by talking to others, I had to accept that this was “fanon” and part of the business of talking about my favorite show. It’s a kind of tyranny of consensus: any conversation I get into about the show with other fans will eventually land on the Team question because it’s so ubiquitous in the larger fandom. At least now I know and can either have an answer ready or dip out.

A private fan doesn’t have to virtue signal to the group. Unpopular opinions without an audience are just…opinions. Fans who celebrate in isolation don’t have to prove their level of fandom, as often happens in groups. Fans posture in a group setting, proving their worthiness as a “good fan” through various measures of legitimacy that the fandom has decided on. The revelation that I’d never thought about Rory Gilmore’s boyfriend Teams made me feel like a bit of a “bad fan.” There was a whole discourse I was missing simply because for me it never existed. But before I attended any Gilmore Girls events or discussions, I was the world’s biggest fan, at least in my own mind. I’d seen it more than twenty times, could recite every episode and identify most of the pop culture references. I liked being able to have my fandom without performing it. But actually participating in the community of the fandom is an entirely different experience, with its own traditions and rituals.

Separating art from artist

Relationships are hard. Even parasocial ones. Maybe especially those ones. When an artist or creator does something that doesn’t sit well with us, sometimes we have a hard time unwinding the art from the creator, especially in big fandoms with lots of voices and conflicting opinions.

I recently saw the biopic Michael, a film about Michael Jackson’s early years as an artist through his superstardom into the late 1980s. I’ve also seen–twice–the Broadway musical MJ, a depiction of Jackson’s career told in flashbacks during the rehearsals for his Dangerous album world tour in 1992. Neither the film nor the musical address some of the more serious allegations towards Jackson, but do show an empathetic view of his growing addiction to painkillers following a terrible accident on the set of a commercial for Pepsi.

I always struggle to talk about my fandom for Jackson, but ever since I was a kid I’ve loved the music. One of my earliest memories was my mom playing “ABC” by the Jackson 5, on the 45 record in her collection. I viscerally remember the Motown logo on the label. My brother and I, along with friends of ours, did a skit and danced to the song for our school talent show, choreographed by our mothers. And as I got older, I listened to Michael Jackson on my own (and who didn’t love “Will You Be There” off of the Free Willy soundtrack? Shoutout to the elder millennials). In my freshman dorm suite, one of my roommates bought a vinyl copy of Bad and hung the cover sleeve on the wall in our kitchen as decoration. For two semesters I made my morning coffee with Michael looking over my shoulder.

On the one hand, both the stage show and the movie offer incredible portraits of sheer talent. I absolutely loved the musical; it was full of amazing dancing from Michael’s choreography, and the music is infectious and nostalgic. The spectacle of it made me sad that I didn’t see the Dangerous tour (probably because I was a preteen at the time). I found the biopic enjoyable too, and caught my young niece looking up the songs on her phone after we left the movie theater. The music is just so good, even Gen Alpha is into it.

Between Michael’s natural stage presence and his ability to draw on many dance inspirations from Fred Astaire to Fosse, to his commitment to transforming music as the culture knew it with the help of Quincy Jones, this is an individual it’s simply hard not to root for in the context of these pieces about his life and work. And I can’t imagine there is anyone who doesn’t feel the need to get up and dance when they hear the first beats of “Billie Jean,” or feel completely moved by the “Thriller” music video. It’s hard not to love the art and the artist by association.

But in light of the allegations, I am conflicted. Because even in looking up reviews of the movie, I saw lots of commentary on what was missing, and what might be addressed in the sequel in the coming years. Surely people have boycotted the movie and refused to see the show, and I understand why. But saying I loved both, and also love the artist’s work, is a tricky admission, depending on the setting. Instead of talking about the art, the conversations around the artist take center stage, and maybe they should. And on the flip side, inside the fandom, fans heavily contest the allegations and stand firm by his innocence. It’s hard to be a fan and hold contradictions inside a community, especially when you disagree.

Quiet fandom helps dispel some of that noise. You don’t have to publicly make a statement that you don’t agree with the artist, and still love the content. But more than that, without the noise of a fandom community, you can decide what you really think about both art and artist. Holding a contradiction is sometimes easier to do quietly. Fandom as a community tends to devolve into groupthink; this is an area where an individual can make their own decision without social risk.

The truest fan

There’s another scene in Gilmore Girls where Luke makes another geeky admission. Lorelai references The Twilight Zone, talking about her morning, and Luke responds that she could use The Outer Limits as a reference, because it’s a similar show from a similar era, but nobody ever references it. As Lorelai would say, “nerd alert!” What I love about Luke’s fandom for sci-fi is that it’s so unexpected and yet so pure. The Star Trek tee, the casual reference to The Outer Limits–both of these add up to a glimpse into a character that we never get to see fleshed out.

But we don’t see Luke at Comic-Con because he isn’t performing his fandom for others. And maybe that’s a sign of true fandom: not letting anyone else’s interpretation get in the way of your own passion for something. (Though it could be fun fanfic to follow Luke to a sci-fi convention.)

Maybe devotion to a franchise or musician or storyworld can be defined as the quality of attention, versus how loud and performative your attention is. And one can certainly be devoted to the highest degree in a group or alone. But whether you wear your Star Trek tee under your outfit in secret or proudly at a convention, what you love is part of you.

Want more? Our Discord is where you’ll find everything you need to know about the Remarkist ecosystem including Folkic, our community app and Masslore, our fandom knowledge database! And be sure to hit that subscribe button so you never miss a thing at Rmrk*st Mag!

I’m a huge fan of live entertainment. I prefer concerts and live theater to most other things. Every time I catch a Broadway or off-Broadway show, about halfway through the first act I’m already thinking about a repeat experience. When can I come back and see this again? How much will it cost? Is the ticket price doable? Are there any discounts?

This week, I saw the international sensation Titaníque for the 5th time. It played an historic off-Broadway run in NYC from 2022 through 2025, which played over 1200 performances, winning multiple awards and inspiring international transfers all over the world. And in March 2026, a limited run opened on Broadway. I saw the off-Broadway production twice, and the Broadway production three times. You could say I’m a superfan of this spoofy musical about the Titanic (the boat), Titanic (the movie) and exactly what Celine Dion would think of it all had she been there (on both the boat and in the film). Sounds zany? Yes. Is it box office gold? Also yes.

Every time I bought tickets, I paid a different price. Off-Broadway tickets were under $100, but I bought tickets when the show became a bit buzzy, so I paid quite a bit more than I might have a few months earlier. Beying late to the game can cost you. A few months later, I told a friend about it and she agreed she needed to see it, and we paid a slight premium again.

When the production opened on Broadway, the theater ran a promotion to celebrate the box office opening: the first 97 people on line would only pay $19.97 per ticket, to honor the year that Titanic was released in movie theaters (a winter I remember all too well; I saw it more than once, of course). I arrived hours early at the St. James Theatre and was amongst one of the first 40 or so people in line. I thought I was a superfan, until I got to talking to the women behind me. They had attended the off-Broadway production over 100 times! I couldn’t fathom how much they’d spent on tickets–let alone traveling to NYC every time as they both lived out of town.

Since then, I have won a lottery rush ticket (around $45) and bought tickets during a promo sale for around $65. All in all, I’m not breaking the bank on any of these tickets. But, I could have spent all of that collective ticket money on only one performance if I wasn’t gaming the system as a superfan. Or, I could have taken those small amounts and put it towards tickets to other shows I haven’t seen over and over. But superfandom is its own kind of devotion, and when practiced can get expensive. And yet, we gladly pay for it. Are we overpaying for these experiences, or are they a necessary investment in our fandoms?

It was rare, I was there

When I was younger, if you missed a concert that came through your city, or a live show, you missed it for good. Forever. I’ll consistently be mad at myself for not attending an NSYNC or Britney Spears concert circa 2000. But these days, since the dawn of YouTube and social media, if there’s a concert tour happening, chances are someone has posted footage somewhere. Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour was absolutely marked by a new wave of millions of fans who watched the shows entirely online through social media streams from fans who were there. This was a great thing: if you couldn’t go because the tickets were too expensive (they were), unavailable, or the cities were too far from you, every fan could at least watch the show.

We have much more access to live entertainment and happenings than we ever did before. Live events are often recorded, and we can watch streams from our devices; we can be anywhere and access an experience virtually. While this ubiquity democratizes experiences, it somehow doesn’t make up for the real thing. And the real experience of a thing feels like it’s becoming more and more scarce–and therefore, more special.

The live theater industry has long pushed back against pro-shot films: live capture of a theater production, like a Broadway show. Notable pro-shots in recent years include Hamilton, Waitress, Merrily We Roll Along, and the most recent, Hadestown. The pro-shot of the musical Six opens this month, and it remains to be seen how well it will do in movie theaters. But if we can rely on the data for the previously mentioned films, demand might be high. The filmed pro-shot from the West End production of Hadestown was a box office hit, and not only extended it’s limited U.S. release, it has surpassed Hamilton’s theatrical release revenue (though Hamilton streamed on Disney+ for several years first). And: it hasn’t even hit the movie theaters in Europe yet.

The Broadway and live theater industry has always claimed exclusivity as their biggest asset: you have to be in the theater to experience it, making it a premium experience to have. But the untapped market of folks who don’t live near New York City or even a regional theater is huge; those fans enjoy cast albums and snippets of both promotional and bootleg videos (affectionately called slime tutorials by fans in the know) of those productions. Theater producers have worried that pro-shots would cannibalize their IRL audiences, and ticket sales would dip.

But a fascinating thing happened instead: when Hamilton was released on Disney+, it helped build a more global audience for the live productions on Broadway and on tour. Ticket sales for the “real thing” soared. Not only that, a person who sees a pro-shot might develop a fandom that expands to merch sales, experiences like fandom cruises and conventions, and more content-adjacent activities in addition to saving up to go see it in person. In short, pro-shots are likely to help create superfans who might have had a passing interest otherwise; now they’re more willing to invest in the content and spend a lot to experience more of it.

You can find anything you want on the internet; it’s almost too easy to find some kind of footage of an experience you might be interested in. Heck, I even watch rider POV rollercoaster videos on YouTube from theme parks of coasters all over the world that I’ll never ride! But because we can find a rendering of an experience so easily, it makes the in-person experience that much more valuable, and rare.

Proof of humanity

In our current culture, the combination of social media, algorithms, and AI have increased the value of a human-verified experience. And we put a premium price on that. So whether it’s paying upwards of $20 for a cinema ticket to watch a film with strangers even though it will be on a streamer in a few months, showing up at a theater more than twice to see a show, buying concert tickets to hear our favorite artists play, or attending conventions to commune with other fans and meet casts and creators, the live experience of fandom is an economic hurdle. But it’s the only way to have an experience with our fandom that cannot be faked. In a world where “pics or it didn’t happen” no longer applies because you can render any kind of photo you want with a few words in a prompt, fans have to go a bit further for an authentic experience.

The convention circuit has long been a subculture of fandom, where fans gather at themed cons where they can meet their favorite creators and celebrities, get autographs, and take pictures with their heroes (literal and figurative). From big cons like San Diego Comic-Con to smaller festivals like the Gilmore Girls-themed Small Town Convention in CT, fans pay a premium to travel to cities where they can meet their faves. Some plan visiting cons as a vacation like any other: they gather their friends or families and make a whole weekend out of it. Others might choose to attend a smaller festival closer to their hometown.

The economics are staggering. If you grab a friend to attend a convention and it’s out of town, for the two of you the cost of gas/flights/train tickets can already cost several hundred dollars. Add in a hotel for 2-3 nights and it can cost you upwards of $500 at minimum. And that’s before you’ve bought convention tickets which can cost anywhere from $50 to $100 just to attend, before any meet and greet add-ons which range from $20 to $30 to over $100 for a celebrity, depending on who they are.

I have spent about $1,500 to $2,000 on a single fandom weekend in a small town, and more if I have to fly. I could spend a week in a European city, like Paris, for only a little more than that (provided I shop for the best deals). But I’ve happily spent a similar amount on a long weekend in Las Vegas to see the Backstreet Boys at the Sphere and New Kids on the Block at Dolby Live. I could see both bands in my home city (I have, several times), or watch videos of those exact concerts on social media, but the lived experience of being inside the incredible venues offered in Las Vegas–along with attending themed pop-up shops and activations around those shows, and meeting other fans–could not be matched without getting on a plane. In fact, seeing social media posts about those shows moved me to make a plan to go. It wasn’t enough to watch through a screen; I had to see it, and feel it, for myself.

Fans could watch their favorite show on a streamer, and chat with friends online. But nothing really compares to the experience of participating in fandom together, in real space and time. Ephemerality is fleeting, and that’s the exact reason we crave it. But we also crave an imperfect, uniquely human experience to make sure we know it’s real.

The R&B/pop singer JoJo spoke on the pressure for live music to be perfect in a recent Instagram reel. JoJo became famous for her singles “Leave (Get Out)” and “Too Little Too Late” in the early 2000s, and since then has consistently pursued singing and acting. Her voice is truly awe-inspiring (and I’ve seen her sing live), even landing her on a Broadway stage in Moulin Rouge! The Musical. In her reel, JoJo laments that even live musicians now often use technology to fake perfection on stage at concerts. While many fans know backing tracks and lip synching have long been a staple of live performance, one of the best things about hearing someone perform live is their inherent humanness. But because more and more musicians use tech to their advantage, fans have come to expect perfection. In the video JoJo says, “A missed note, a human moment, a run that doesn’t quite land, all those things start to feel and sound like a failure when it used to just feel live.”

Have you ever been at a concert where the musician forgets the words to their own song? Or coughs in the middle of a verse? These moments are deeply human, and reason enough to buy a ticket for any show, because you never know what might happen. I love live musicals because of the humanity involved: sometimes someone drops a prop or flubs a line, or an understudy goes on at the last minute which could introduce you to an entirely new artist.

Recently at a performance of Schmigadoon! on Broadway, actress Ana Gasteyer took a bit of a fall during a scene and recovered pretty quickly. But during the curtain call, the entire cast made a big show of falling down, one by one, after they took their bows.

@makeupbydupreeWas not prepared for this ending of @SCHMIGADOON!… teehee #schmigadoon #schmigadoonbroadway #anagasteyer #pratfall #broadway

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Even though these actors perform eight shows a week, and they’re all one of a kind, that show was uniquely special. And if you were one of those lucky audience members, you got a special treat of human comeradery when things go wrong on stage.

Real fan? Or getting scammed?

It is not news to any superfan that concert tickets are at an all-time premium price. When Taylor Swift was promoting her reputation album with the Reputation Stadium Tour in 2017, I was absolutely floored by her methods to make sure tickets got into the hands of real fans. Through Ticketmaster’s then-new Verified Fan system, fans had to sign in and complete certain challenges that would get them a better place in line when it came time to buy tickets.

While the system garnered controversy, I can say firsthand that it worked incredibly well (and with the benefit of hindsight, looking at how impossible it was for fans to afford Eras Tour tickets, it seems almost charming). Fans would sign into their Ticketmaster account and stream her music videos, or order merch to boost their account and place in line. I ended up with tickets to the show, for a very reasonable price (just over $100) in incredible lower bowl seats at Met Life Stadium in East Rutherford, NJ. While I had to “work” for my place in line by doing anything a superfan would already do, like stream her videos, my ticket-buying process was incredibly smooth.

It was not the same for Eras. While I had secured tickets for Swift’s canceled Lover Fest shows that should have happened in 2020, I was told that holding those tickets granted me a better chance to receive a code to buy tickets for Eras. I did receive a code to buy, unlike all of my friends. But when it came time to buy, I was let into the site just to see all the tickets gone before I could snag any. And the prices were outrageous. Within minutes, the fandom erupted: the site shut down for hours, and when it was back up, all venues sold out during the presale in seconds. The same day, tickets popped up on resell sites for outrageous amounts of money. This felt like a betrayal: my superfandom got me easy tickets to two previous tours; what was going on?

A few months later, Ticketmaster contacted me with an offer: I could pick a price point, and they would sell me tickets at that price if available. In the weirdest way I’ve ever done business with the site, I was granted tickets. They were more expensive than I ever imagined I would pay. Friends of mine were left with the resale market, spending upwards of $600 per ticket, so I considered myself lucky. Still, I knew the whole thing felt like a scam, preying on people who just really love the music.

The ordeal was absolute chaos and resulted in many lawsuits, as well as a lot of discourse over how fans secure tickets to any live shows. Thousands of Swifties spent tons of money on marked-up tickets to see the Eras Tour, precisely because they knew it was a one in a lifetime experience. But unfortunately, the ordeal set a new standard: ticketing systems regularly use dynamic pricing, allow scalping, increase fees and allow tickets to be sold at astronomical markup to take advantage of fans who really want to be in the room. Just this week, StubHub reported $2.6 million in lobbying expenses in California, where a bill was introduced that would curb resale pricing at 10% over face value. StubHub is fighting the bill, and customers might have to continue to pay the price–literally. And maybe they will, because the live experience is precious to a superfan.

When devotion pays off

Superfandom doesn’t always have to be super expensive. When it comes to my Broadway habit of seeing a show a minimum of twice, sometimes three to five times, my superfandom actually makes me a more thrifty spender. Because I was a superfan, I noticed that Titaníque would be selling those first tickets at under $20 apiece. I’m following the show and its creators on Instagram, and I pay attention to industry news and announcements, which gave me a leg up on promo news. All I had to do was show up and hope for the best. It paid off: my friends and I sat in the center mezzanine for the show’s first preview. And not only did we get to experience this new run with so many other superfans, but we also got an audience gift. It was an unforgettable night: the crowd was raucous, the set had been updated for the Broadway stage, the cast was electric–and we were the first to see it.

Your fandom might also work to help more fans secure access. A resale ticketing platform I love is Theatr, an app developed by fans where folks can offload their tickets to shows or pick up last-minute deals from resellers. Theater tickets are always final sale, and that’s a risk for a buyer, so the app is a game-changer for superfans. The app does not allow sellers to list tickets for higher than face value, so if someone in your party gets sick or you get pulled into a late work meeting, you can sell your ticket pretty fast to a waiting fan who wants your seat at the price you paid. And because of that competitive spirit, superfans have alerts set for shows and price points, look at the app often, and are always ready.

Theater superfans also utilize rush tickets (day-of ticket sales for a very low price) and lotteries. Superfandom is key here: you cannot be a casual fan if you want to find the best deal. You have to be uniquely engaged. Superfans know exactly what shows have in-person or digital rush, are overtly familiar with the policies, pricing, and probability of getting a ticket depending on the show. The first show to ever offer in-person rush was the 1996 smash hit Rent, a show about poor twenty-somethings struggling to pay, well, rent. It made sense that this show would offer a very low ticket price to the clientele who connected with the material the most–provided they showed up, got there early, and waited. It’s not uncommon for fans to appear outside box offices at 6 a.m. to guarantee their ticket.

In 2015, Lin-Manuel Miranda, star and creator of Hamilton, introduced Ham4Ham, a $10 ticket lottery for the first row of every show (as in, a “Hamilton” for a Hamilton ticket). When demand was overwhelming in person at the box office, he began enlisting cast and friends to give quick free shows on the steps of the Richard Rodgers Theater. If you showed up for the lottery, you probably wouldn’t win. But you would get a free comedic, musical, or touching performance from the Hamilton cast or friends of the show. Later, the franchise would build an app for digital lottery entries for all of the Hamilton productions all over the world, and the app includes games and other activities that boost your chances of winning. You have to be a superfan to get a deal. But superfans were also instrumental in the phenomenon of the Ham4Ham live shows. Just by being dedicated enough and wanting that cheap ticket. This one might be my favorite:

I believe we should invest in the experiences we want to have, because they are precious and unmatched. And whether you spend a lot or a tiny bit to have those experiences is up to the individual. But as long as there are live experiences to be had, the economics of superfandom will always play a part.

Want more? Our Discord is where you’ll find everything you need to know about the Remarkist ecosystem including Folkic, our community app and Masslore, our fandom knowledge database! And be sure to hit that subscribe button so you never miss a thing at Rmrk*st Mag!

Happy August, everyone! It’s hard to believe we’re in the home stretch of the season. We hope you’ve been enjoying blockbuster movies, beach reading, and highly anticipated album drops as you narrow down any contenders for Song of the Summer.

We’re excited to bring you this month’s theme. But before we get there, let’s take a look at what you might have missed in July. Our theme was Curation, for the fans that love to categorize, make lists, and build canon.

In the age of streaming, we examined how fans collect physical media when digital copies of our favorite shows, movies, books and music prove to be convenient but fleeting. Speaking of collections, we dove into how building music playlists around our favorite content can expand fictional worlds and extend their reach beyond the screen. And, we looked at how recommendation lists–both editorial and fan-generated–build communities, especially around specific fannish groups.

Raise your hand if you’re going to see your favorite band this August, or finalizing plans to go to a convention this fall. Because if you are, our August theme is for you. We will be publishing content around the idea of Devotion: how we practice dedication to a thing we love in all different ways. Devoted fans patronize the vast plethora of content available to us, and keep those franchises and stories alive through dedicated passion.

We’ll look at the economics involved in being a superfan, whether or not you can be a quiet devotee of something, and how our allegiances can be tested by both artists and the art itself when things change for us or the content. We can’t wait to share our thoughts with you!

As always, take a look at our table of contents, and check back for updated links and surprises! And, very importantly: make sure to follow John Cabrera on Instagram for special announcements. You can always find more information at our website and on our Discord, where we post regular updates about the Remarkist ecosystem as a whole, as well as on Instagram. And if you haven’t signed up yet for our Folkic app waitlist, now is the best time–because we have lots in store coming this fall!

1. The Price of Passion: The Financial Realities of the Fandom Economy

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2. Can Fandom Ever Be Private? The Case for Silent Love of Content

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3. Testing Devotion: 5 Ways To Break A Fandom’s Loyalty

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Want more? Our Discord is where you’ll find everything you need to know about the Remarkist ecosystem including Folkic, our community app and Masslore, our fandom knowledge database! And be sure to hit that subscribe button so you never miss a thing at Rmrk*st Mag!

In the summer of 2009, I drove across the country for an internship at a record label. This was before streaming, before Spotify put every song at my fingertips. I had an iPod loaded with my CDs, and admittedly more than a few-cough-downloads. Don’t judge. I asked friends to burn me mix CDs for the drive to the City of Angels. Each one was a window into their world: some punk rock, some pop, some heavy on singer-songwriters. That impulse, handing someone a curated piece of your taste, is the same one driving playlist culture today. Only the format has changed.

Canon Expansion

Director James Gunn’s collaboration with Spotify for his Superman film in the summer of 2025 is a clear example of official canon expansion. In addition to the movie soundtrack, Gunn built out 11 playlists for characters, such as Clark Kent, Lois Lane, Lex Luthor, and Hawkgirl. He thought about them as people, and what they would be listening to. Clark Kent’s playlist is filled with feel-good anthems like Jimmy Eat World’s “The Middle,” while Eve’s is filled with all the girl energy from the likes of Sabrina Carpenter and Taylor Swift. Which character has the best taste in music? That’s for you to decide. But in case you were wondering which one is closest to James Gunn’s personal taste–he thinks it’s Lois Lane. While this was all done as marketing for the film, it’s an act of world-building past the runtime of the movie. It adds to the world that didn’t exist before.

While Gunn’s playlists are considered official because they were studio sanctioned, this doesn’t mean fans can’t get in on the action. There is a fan-made playlist “clark kent, superman” that takes the same approach–gather the songs that they think Clark Kent is listening to. While the official playlist clocks in at 38 minutes (this feels reminiscent of the limited nature of a burned CD), this fan decided to make a five-hour-plus playlist for your listening pleasure. That’s a whole lot of time to get inside of Superman’s head.

This same approach can be applied to any fandom. Over here at Rmrk*st, we were inspired to figure out what our favorite Stars Hollow townies would be listening to. Lane Kim might be the music aficionado of Gilmore Girls, but what exactly would Emily Gilmore be listening to on a Friday night? Logan Huntzberger out on a night on the town with the Life & Death Brigade? Sookie St James dancing in the kitchen? We explored 14 characters and each one is quite different.

You can find the same patterns around shows like The O.C. where fans are building out playlists for characters like Seth Cohen and Summer Roberts too.

As fans, we have the power to extend this format to beloved characters and shows that the studio never touched, filling the gap that was left by the source material.

Reorganizing What Already Exists

Unlike the Superman and Gilmore Girls playlists, you can also reshuffle what is already there to bring about new context. That is exactly what Taylor Swift did for her past three album releases. She curated her back catalog into new emotional groupings. Ahead of the 2022 Midnights release, she partnered with Apple Music and made three playlists, based on categories she personally uses for her songs. Fountain Pen songs are diaristic, written like poetry, Quill Pen songs are folkier, old-fashioned tracks, and Glitter Gel Pen songs are the fun ones that don’t take themselves too seriously. When Taylor announced The Tortured Poets Department, fans speculated it was about the five stages of grief. In response, Taylor dropped five official playlists that sorted her existing catalog into the five stages of heartbreak. Most recently, before the release of her 12th studio album, The Life of a Showgirl, Taylor gave her fans the playlist “And, baby, that’s show business.” It served as an easter egg as it was compiled from the songs she previously recorded with producers Max Martin and Shellback. It makes us wonder what she has up her sleeve for her elusive 13th studio album. For those still looking for new ways into the massive Swift catalog, she also curated her songs into Summer and Winter playlists. Across all of these, the content doesn’t change. It is simply a reason to be heard again.

The fan-side version of this same impulse shows up in how listeners handle Swift’s re-recording project. With the Taylor’s Version releases, fans now have two recordings of the same song, the original and the re-recorded master. When Taylor Swift got the rights to all of her masters, at the Remarkist Spotify account we decided to make the “Utterly Unofficial Red” playlist. We blended the original Red album with Red Taylor’s Version, and added some other tracks that were released separately in that era. No new songs or world, just a different lens on the material.

Cataloging for Completion

Instead of interpretation, this primarily is about documentation. The soundtracks released by studios are still a curated collection of songs, not an exhaustive list. For example, Bridgerton’s official Spotify playlist compiles the orchestral pop covers for easy listening. NBC’s This Is Us took a more inventive approach with a “Best Of” playlist, and during the show’s run (2016-2022) they had a playlist generator where fans entered their birthdate to get a custom Spotify playlist of songs released that day, tying the show’s themes of memory and time directly into a personalized listening experience. None of these are complete–they are only official highlights. That gap is where the fan is most likely to step in.

Fans can use tools like Tunefind to track every song in every scene and build that into one long-running playlist, capturing the music an official release wouldn’t bother including. Gilmore Girls is an excellent example of a show that has so many pop culture references. At Rmrk*st, we tracked every band mentioned by Lane Kim and her bandmates. This would make one epic playlist, just saying. We also created “Hep Alien: The Complete Set List.” The fictional band might just be that–fictional–and have no actual recordings, but they covered many songs throughout the run of the show. We can’t listen to the real “Hollaback Girl” and not hear Gil singing it.

Another fan playlist reconstructs Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour. Throughout the two-year run of the tour, the actual setlist went through changes, but this playlist imagines a version where not one song was ever cut to make room for The Tortured Poets Department. In addition, every surprise song that was available on streaming is also included. The result? Over 15 hours to relive The Eras Tour.

You can find this same completionist instinct across a wide variety of fandoms, ranging from The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel’s documented end-credits songs, to music from The Bronze on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, to Fallout fans rebuilding in-game radio stations like Galaxy News Radio.

Aesthetics and Vibes

Sometimes the playlist doesn’t care about canon or being complete, but instead it’s all about the vibes. The atmosphere is what makes a show comfortable to revisit. The same rewatchability that draws someone in to watch an episode draws them into a playlist built on the show’s mood. All you need is the right guitar sounds or drum beat to get the feeling back.

Cozy Small-Town/Fall brings us to this Gilmore Girls Fall playlist that has us reaching for the flannel, blankets and pumpkin spice coffee.

80s Retro/Sci-Fi has us all about this Stranger Things playlist. In preparation for Stranger Things 4, Netflix got in on the vibes playlist by creating The Upside Down Playlist and having actor Caleb McLaughlin (Lucas) create a Throwback Thursday playlist of all the 80s songs that helped him get into character.

Period dramas call for the Don Draper Mentality, where you’ll find music from the 60s to pair with your Mad Men rewatch. This playlist definitely calls for an old fashioned to sip on.

Moody Teen & Coming-of-Age… we found the perfect playlist that combines the vibes of all our favorite teen dramas, and we are currently pretending we are in a 2000s TV show. It’s a composite of Gilmore Girls, One Tree Hill, The O.C., and Smallville. The vibe doesn’t need a single source to be effective. It can construct a whole imagined show out of several real ones, which is its own kind of world-building. Type in anything, and we do mean anything. We found one titled: “2000s surfer mermaid malibu barbie”–now that is specific!

That drive to Los Angeles is long behind me, but the instinct behind those mix CDs never really left. Whether it’s a studio building out a universe, someone reshuffling existing material, cataloging every scene’s soundtrack, or chasing a very specific vibe, the goal is the same one my friends had in 2009: here’s a world, now listen your way into it. Got a favorite show, character, or vibe you want turned into a playlist? Drop it in the comments. No request is too specific. We might just build it next.

Want more? Our Discord is where you’ll find everything you need to know about the Remarkist ecosystem including Folkic, our community app and Masslore, our fandom knowledge database! And be sure to hit that subscribe button so you never miss a thing at Rmrk*st Mag!

There’s a classic ride in Walt Disney World: Spaceship Earth, in EPCOT. Visitors take a slow-moving buggy through the humongous golf ball-looking iconic structure in the park, and on the journey they learn about the origins and evolution of written communication. Judi Dench narrates as you ride, sharing how the ancient Phoenicians developed common alphabet for trade, a written language that not only led to economic boom but the flourish of art, philosophy, mathematics, science, and culture across the Mediterranean. But then Rome falls, and the Library of Alexandria burns, taking all of the knowledge of human civilization with it. It’s a dramatic scene, made visceral by a specific campfire odor that guests get to experience (and often cannot forget).

Every time I ride, I feel a specific sadness for all of that loss, because what precedes this scene is community: animatronics of philosophers convening in an open air amphitheater to share and discuss what they think and know. After the fire scene, the Dark Ages set in, and we see scenes of monks in monasteries in absolute solitude, painstakingly copying texts by hand, and preserving what’s left of the written word. After the fall of Rome, the civilized world will have to find its way back to the kind of community and connection it once had—at least until Gutenberg invents the printing press.

Today, new knowledge, art, and entertainment is always available and coming fast and furious. Even since I was a kid, new TV shows, movies, and books were available all the time, and we could go to any library or video or music store to browse and chat with others about new content.

Now, when it comes time to decide on something to watch or listen to, our streaming platforms deliver exactly what they think we might click on according to our algorithmic history. They have a knack for presenting the exact thing we want to watch up top without discovery. We don’t have to browse or even ask friends what to watch; social media is an algorithmic recommendation feed. We might be lulled into a sense of community if we think the things we are seeing are what everyone sees, especially if we interact with other fans around content. But is this really building community?

Before the inundation of recs coming at us from our phones, browsing used to be discovery-based: you could walk into a music, video or bookstore and wander for hours, looking for something to pique your interest. I still love to do this in the library or a bookstore. But when I need a book to take on vacation, I need an action plan. I want to take something that matches the vibe I’m feeling, is the appropriate length, and available in the format I feel is most convenient. For that, I’m either searching “best books to take on vacation” online, or looking to my networks–whether it be friends or folks I follow on Instagram–for ideas.

Recommendation lists come in two forms: editorialized and decided for us, or fan/community-led. Recommendation culture is a fandom’s way of building canon, either with or without institutional authority. You might be getting your recommendation from a highly reputable news source with an editorial board, or a fan community on Discord. Who is doing the recommending, and how does this help communities form around different canons?

Fans love lists

We’ve all been there. We see the article: “Best ‘Insert-Your-Fave-Show-Here’ Episodes: Ranked!” and immediately we click on it. We might get halfway through the list when we realize we are agreeing and disagreeing along the way. We have thoughts. So we get to the bottom and either comment on how right or wrong the ranking is, or share with friends with a “can you believe this?!” note on our social media posts and in text chats.

Fans get excited about lists. And when we see a “best of” list, or a “complete list of…”, it’s an invitation for us to contribute our own opinions. In minutes, we are in community with other fans who agree or disagree, or start to debate the validity of the list. What starts as an archive becomes a conversation–and maybe even leads to new, different archives.

The popular book reviews and social media site Goodreads has been a powerhouse for readers who love lists since the late 2000s. Users can create their own “want to read” bookshelves, and share them with others. Since the dawn of time, we ask our immediate friends and family for recommendations for everything from movies to watch to best restaurants to try in a new city. Taking the book recommendation list digital was a game changer for fans. From these lists, fans can join groups organized around genres and interests and find community that way.

Goodreads also created Listopia, a crowd-sourced, interactive manner of building themed book lists around genre. Instead of a list curated by editors, Listopia puts the archival power directly in the hands of fans. They can vote on and curate themed lists that consistently change based on who is voting. Listopia is a completely fan-driven, dynamic archive that communities of fans can build around.

Trust over taste

Recommendations are, of course, reflective of taste. The taste of a publication’s editors will determine what recommendations go on any list or in any review. And individual fans will build their recommendations around their own tastes. But taste isn’t the sole reason why others go to them: it’s trust.

Vouching for a piece of content is often a high stakes endeavor in any community. Recently, a friend recommended a book to me that she really loved and had a personal connection to; when I read it and didn’t feel particularly moved, I felt bad. I didn’t want to mention I’d finished it because I knew she would ask my thoughts. When we trust the recommender, and don’t like what they choose, it can be unsettling. This is different from healthy debate about a work; disagreeing and agreeing on certain aspects of any content with a fan community is partly why some folks join fandoms in the first place. But recommendations come with weight that reflects all parties’ identities.

In the fanfiction community, recommendations are taken extremely seriously. Since the very first appearances of fanfic in the early days of the Internet, recommendations, or “recs” have been part of the culture. Historically, LiveJournal and Tumblr blogs were destinations for rec communities. A 2000s-era rec community called Crack Van existed on LiveJournal. Since it was multi-fandom, moderators would recruit folks from different fandoms to compile primers on those fandoms as their resident experts. Each month different volunteers would “drive the van,” offering readers overviews and rec lists to help new fans discover content. Sadly, Crack Van no longer exists.

The Rec Center is a modern, flourishing rec newsletter compiled by co-creators and fandom journalists Elizabeth Minkel and Gavia Baker-Whitelaw. What Minkel and Baker-Whitelaw bring to fans is trust. Minkel is the co-editor of Fansplaining, a media outlet devoted to all things fandom culture. Baker-Whitelaw is the co-host of a weekly pop culture podcast, Overinvested. Both bring a wealth of professional experience as well as their own fandom that allows their audience to trust their recs.

Rec culture in fanfiction is so important to the communities because they are built on trust. Trust that fans won’t just use forums to promote their own work. Trust that they’ve read what they are promoting and tagged all the appropriate warnings and descriptors. Fanfic communities are helpful to those seeking new fandoms to get into, and recs and rec lists keep these spaces safe for new fans.

Shared canon and community

All communities eventually share a language. It can be actual language and shorthand, along with traditions and norms. In any given fandom, you’ll find at least one common understanding, whether it’s every Gilmore Girls fan understanding the meaning of “Oy with the poodles, already!” or Marvel fans knowing to stay in the theater beyond the credits for an additional scene.

In the Gilmore Girls fandom, there’s much debate over canon: some fans refuse to acknowledge the seventh season as the creators, Amy Sherman-Palladino and Dan Palladino, had left the show and had nothing to do with its writing. Then there are those who don’t count the Netflix revival because they didn’t feel it fit the series well. Any fan’s position on both is subjective, but many die-hard fans likely are aware that there is public contention with both.

This Reddit thread asks whether Season 7 or A Year in the Life is more “headcanon,” and users debate in the comments. Canon is subjective to the community’s individuals and how they want to categorize the work. But these discussions in and of themselves help build community over shared understandings of canon. As evidenced by a single Reddit thread, the comments are diverse, but everyone is in the conversation.

Similarly, fandoms create rec list canon. If you’re into horror films there’s likely a basic list of movies that many fans agree are must-watches. Same for classic films, comedy TV shows, or a type of music. “Best of” lists might be largely undisputed, even if the individual content pieces can be debated separately amongst fans. Fans of science fiction and fantasy as genres might put Star Wars on every must-watch list, while fans of the franchise itself might argue the merits of every film, or whether they even belong to the science fiction over fantasy genre or vice versa.

When community fractures

Sometimes, recs act as a wall between fans who consider themselves “real fans” versus fans who maybe aren’t as well-versed in the content. There’s a popular meme that comments on the “name 5 songs” genre of fan-policing, and it goes like this: Someone says they like a band, or wears merch associated with it, and a bigger fan immediately says, “oh you like that band? Name 5 songs of theirs.” It’s dismissive and usually used to assert dominance over what they deem a “lesser” fan. This is where community building breaks before it starts: rather than view this opportunity as invitation to offer a rec list of the best songs a new fan might want to know, the “bigger” fan puts up a wall instead.

With any kind of community, exclusion is a risk factor. When we go to concerts, are we looking around at those who can sing every word with the band? Or are we appreciating that all levels of fans can attend and enjoy the music? How often have you assumed that knowing the catalog might make someone a “better” fan than someone who just is there for the vibes?

Gatekeeping, and “real fan” litmus tests like knowing every data point of every episode, or knowing all the creators’ names, or obscure lore associated with a franchise can fracture a community. There is also elitism amongst fans, like those who read the book before the movie. Fandoms also can have a way of pushing “correct” theories and ships, and call out those who might not have the specific narrow interpretation that most fans in the space agree upon.

And there’s hierarchy: fans who got into something through a casual gateway versus fans who have been around for years. We saw a lot of discourse when Taylor Swift started dating Travis Kelce, sparking a new wave of female football “fans” who were showing up to catch a glimpse of Taylor. And it was evident during the Heated Rivalry fandom craze that folks were showing up to hockey games for the first time, and shipping the actors from the series in real life to a detrimental degree.

Ownership is real when it comes to fandom, because fandom is tied to our identities. I’ve been listening to and seeing musician Jason Mraz live since his very first album was released, and even at that, I was “late” to the fandom of local coffee shop goers who saw him play an open mic night every week in San Diego, CA in the early 2000s. But as a longtime fan, I watched audiences grow over the years, and when he recorded the song “I’m Yours,” a delightful song he had only played live, it catapulted his popularity. Now I had trouble getting tickets to shows! And it’s similar when a team starts winning and picks up “bandwagon” fans.

Gatekeeping might be used as a way to build walls instead of trust. But trust is vital: new fans need recommended content from established fans to fully join a fandom community. When trust is withheld or weaponized, community breaks down too.

Looking beyond fandom

Rec culture has bigger implications beyond what communities experience in their fandoms today. It serves as a bridge to future societies that form around any given fandom, culture, or idea. This month, journalist Rose Horowitch published a provocative essay in The Atlantic titled “The End of Reading is Here”. In the piece, she opens by delighting this EPCOT enthusiast in describing the Library of Alexandria, once the most significant collection of intelligence—just as the Spaceship Earth ride taught me as a kid. The works of Aristotle and Homer were among its holdings, and it was the site of humanity’s greatest intellectual achievements to date. But, the Library was tragically lost to fire, and historians have spent centuries trying to piece together what happened. Even though that fire smell sticks with me, it turns out that Disney Imagineers might have simplified history a bit in their attraction.

In an interview with NPR about the article, Horowitch posits that perhaps it wasn’t just a fire that destroyed the Library, but years of neglect from the community. She argues that the Dark Ages didn’t start after the Library burned as we all have come to understand it; the Dark Ages had already started because the community had lost interest in the collection of knowledge they had, leaving it vulnerable to disappearance.

This is a rather dramatic rejection of archival knowledge with far-reaching consequences that we can feel the repercussions of today. The Library of Alexandria was the center of community, art, and knowledge in its day. And today, we might see ourselves in our own version of Dark Ages, scrolling our algorithms instead of building communities around sharing recs. While the Library was a center of discovery akin to GenX and millennial individuals strolling around their local Blockbuster, the Dark Age that followed the loss led to fracturing communities. I think about this all the time when I let my Netflix app tell me what I should watch instead of talking to others about the last interesting thing they binged.

Consistent honing, upkeep, and sharing lists are how they survive. Even if they change as fans contribute, like on Goodreads’ Listopia, constant care and input from the community keeps those lists alive. Much like a library maintains an evolving record of knowledge for future generations to reference, recommendation lists generated within fandoms–and the communities that form around them–help those fandoms evolve and thrive.

Want more? Our Discord is where you’ll find everything you need to know about the Remarkist ecosystem including Folkic, our community app and Masslore, our fandom knowledge database! And be sure to hit that subscribe button so you never miss a thing at Rmrk*st Mag!

I was devastated when I saw the news: Gilmore Girls would be leaving Netflix on June 30, 2026. I immediately felt a gut punch. Since Netflix began streaming the show in 2014, its fan base has fundamentally changed. Netflix not only brought a broader audience to a beloved franchise, but it gave it a new lease on life, becoming so popular that Netflix released a four part miniseries sequel, Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life. More than that, the streaming of Gilmore Girls on Netflix led to tons of other media, like think pieces and podcasts about the show, and small-town events all over the U.S., which reshaped its relevance in pop culture. For a show that never received many awards or significant attention during its run, its existence on Netflix changed its legacy. And, because it was readily available, here at Remarkist we built our very first franchise-long watch party around it with fans tuning in together every night from different timezones to watch all seven seasons and the miniseries.

What is personally fascinating to me is that I felt the loss even though I own all seven seasons on DVD–and I have since before streaming platforms were even invented, much less ubiquitous. My DVD box sets are in fantastic condition despite being well-used; each disc was watched by me at least 20 times over the course of a decade (and before my DVD player stopped working). I have the hard copy of the original media in my possession, so why was I feeling such a loss when it disappeared from my emotional-support streamer?

We have never had so much access to entertainment in history. We don’t have to go to the video store on a Friday night to rent a single movie (or hope they have the one we want in stock), we don’t have to be home during “Must See TV” to catch an episode that airs in real time, and we can find a TV series from 30 years ago on a streaming platform and watch it right away. And if we are still at a loss as to what to do with our free time, we have nearly unlimited access to social media entertainment, e-books and audiobooks, and music–all from portable devices we can take anywhere at any time. But we still feel precious about the things we love. When One Tree Hill was booted from Netflix in 2017, fans threatened to boycott the platform, and even started a petition.

As I watched Gilmore Girls on Netflix over the last decade, my eyes would always pan over to my DVD collection, displayed in my living room. If streaming the series allowed me to enjoy it easily at any time, the physical media offered proof it was mine. Like any work of art you might hang on your wall, displaying my DVD set is more reverent than practical. And in a world where we’ve moved from physical media to digital, hard copies have taken on new meaning: they are at once artifacts and symbols of what we can control and curate as fans.

Physical media: a testament to our devotion

One thing I hear folks talking about a lot is the loss of monoculture in the digital age. It used to be that we had a limited amount of channels, movie releases, and radio stations deciding what we consumed on a daily basis. And, since there wasn’t much to choose from, it seemed we were all fans of many of the same things. Now, entertainment and fandom is a choose-your-own-adventure where no two people have the exact same content menu. Our social media algorithms are all tuned to our specific interests, our streaming accounts analyzing what we consume, for how long, and our ratings. It seems like we have more control than ever: we can choose what we want to consume at any time from anywhere, because there’s so much.

But the reality is that even though the content platforms have changed how we consume and how much there is, they’re still in charge of what we watch and listen to. Gilmore Girls is one of Netflix’s most-streamed shows, and yet it left the platform and showed up on Prime and Hulu. Consumers cannot choose which platforms buy the rights to which properties, so we are still beholden to them. But when you buy a DVD, you own it forever.

Taylor Swift famously brought her VHS copy of the original Toy Story to the red carpet premiere of Toy Story 5, for which she wrote an original song. She had cast members Tom Hanks, Joan Cusack, and Tim Allen sign the relic from 1995. This signaled Swift’s attachment to the franchise since her childhood (she would have been 5 years old when the movie released in 1995), and the physical proof spoke to me as a fan who might approach her in the same way with my original copy of Fearless. She can stream the movie whenever she wants, like anyone with a Disney+ subscription, but she kept that tape and its oversized plastic box for thirty years as a testament to her devotion.

Edits vs the original

Digital media is certainly convenient. One thing I think is really amazing is that independent musicians can write and produce songs and put them up on Spotify or YouTube immediately, and build a following without a record label having to acquire, produce, and distribute their work. The same goes for self-published books and other content creation. But because digital media is easy to distribute, it’s also subject to editing. A TV show can edit out a scene that upset people, musicians can change a word that they didn’t realize was offensive in a track, and all with little effort. But there are moments when this feels confusing for a fan.

In December of 2025, I started to see chatter online that Taylor Swift had changed the words to two tracks on her reputation album, which happens to be my favorite. The 2017 release was a pivotal one for her career, and I pored over every track like an archaeologist excavating the depths of human emotion. So when I checked my streaming service, I heard the change and felt that something had been taken from me. My memory of the lyric, the way it worked for the storytelling, my attachment to it–I felt kind of violated that it had been altered. Once an artist puts something out, sharing it with an audience is an act of co-ownership; a song whose lyrics meant something to them can be owned in an entirely different way by its listener, and in that sense the art becomes the audience’s possession. (Taylor Swift communicated this outright in her song, “The Manuscript.”) I quickly found my reputation CD, relieved that I would always have a copy of the original. The digital version would never be “safe.” I also scoured the internet to see if I could buy a copy of the vinyl, and could not find it anywhere. At that moment I realized the importance of physical media, and hated myself for not making sure to build a vinyl collection for this specific artist. Through the convenience of “owning” digital media, I had forgotten how important it might be for me to collect the actual objects of my affection.

The lost ritual of collecting media

Remember when the iPod came out in 2001? It was advertised as a device that allowed you to carry “1000 songs in your pocket.” That was an astronomical number for a tiny device. We needed to carry a few stacks of CDs to get close, and who needs more than 10 or 15 CDs worth of music on a commute or flight? The point was, technology granted us the privilege of having an excess of content for a fraction of the space previously needed to house it. Illegal music downloading platforms also flourished during that time. There’s an episode of Gilmore Girls where Rory is writing an article for the Yale Daily News about music piracy, and interviews a student about downloading music. In front of her, he downloads an artist’s catalog in a matter of seconds–not because he likes the music but because he simply can obtain it. In an age where anything and everything is available digitally, we might collect what we don’t even need or want.

Having too much to choose from also leads to a paralysis of choice. Who hasn’t sat down in front of their 5 or 6 streaming platforms, or 100+ cable channels, just to claim “there’s nothing on.” When we have to make space for media collecting, we have to make careful decisions. But digitally, we are less constrained. And things do get pretty cluttered.

Across the board, we do a lot of shopping online. But we used to participate in a ritual of acquiring new media, and going to the store to pick up a copy was part of the thrill. As a teen, I loved going to The Wall, a regional music store chain where you could buy CDs and cassettes, maybe some vinyl too. Their famous store policy was that they’d replace any CD or cassette that was damaged, so long as you put their sticker on the case. They played music in the store, and one time I loved what I was hearing so much that I got up the courage to ask the person at the register what it was. The album was Crystal Waters’ Storyteller, and I bought it on the spot. I still have it, because it’s a classic, but also because it is a symbol of my young independence, a marker of my first foray into establishing my own taste. Finding new music or new content was an activity in and of itself; discovery came to those who ventured to find what spoke to them.

And once you returned home with physical media, you still had to work for it: I think most folks in my generation can viscerally remember the insane difficulty associated with opening a CD wrapper and then tearing off the tape that kept it shut. It was part of the experience. Cracking open a fresh CD and looking at liner notes was a thrill I am still chasing in 2026. And it might be why Taylor Swift sells CDs with gifts inside like a journal, photos, stickers, and jewelry. It’s a throwback to that time when it was exciting to hold the new art in your hands. Content takes up room in our heads, but owning physical media meant it also took up physical real estate, and we constantly had to evaluate if it was worth that price.

Physical media, or emotional receipts?

When I was a kid, we were always threatened by the tyranny of the Disney Vault. It was a brilliant marketing endeavor: Disney would decide to release classic animated films on VHS–and later DVD and Blu-ray too–but only for a limited time. They claimed that if you didn’t “bring home the magic” now, you’d never see it again, because the film would go into the Disney Vault–along with your ability to watch it at any time. (You can watch this great mini-doc about the history of the Disney Vault, and the invention of renting or buying home video, on YouTube.) Disney was precious about their content, and rightly so, but in the streaming era it seems hilarious that any content would be locked away for a limited time. But they tapped into a fan’s sense of scarcity that only owning the media outright would remedy. My “Platinum Edition” of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs “2-Disc DVD Experience” still sits on my shelf, unopened. I remember buying it out of a sense of obligation as a Disney fan, because I felt it was part of my identity to own this foundational, original Disney classic in its anniversary edition. I collected it; I didn’t consume it.

Curating my DVD collection over the years was both a functional endeavor (stuff I wanted to own so I could watch over and over again) and an expression of who I am. I was a kid of the 90s when your coolness could be determined by the size of your VHS collection in your parents’ basement or TV room. And if you were old enough to drive, the giant book of CDs you kept in your car spoke to the exact kind of person you were.

Recently I saw former Boy Meets World actress Danielle Fishel post a video of her husband’s DVD and Blu-ray collection on Instagram, and it took me back to those days when we really valued what our collection said about us as soon as others encountered it. Today, even if I’m reading a book in public, its identity can be concealed if I’m reading electronically. We no longer have to display what we love by the sheer fact of loving it; we can choose what to disclose.

Looking at the many movies on my DVD shelf, I see a snapshot of who I believe I am, the content organized by era of my life: The Gilmore Girls shelf, the Dawson’s Creek shelf, the classic teen movies of the late 90s/early aughts shelf, the concert doc shelf. This is a collection of my tastes, a curation of my personality all in one place.

From the proverbial basement shelf of DVDs, or even a personal book library, we learn about other people in our communities. We can glean from their collections what they’re interested in, or at least what they want us to think. When I saw a giant shelf of DVDs, I immediately thought of the family as wealthy or privileged, especially if they were situated next to a giant screen TV. But I could also make an educated guess about their family vibe by assessing the content itself, how it was organized, and whether it was neatly kept. In short, our collections tell others about who we are.

I’ve recently seen stories dedicated to the bland set decoration of modern TV shows and movies. Every living room looks like a staged real estate listing, a model home. In the 90s and 2000s, we heralded movies with Nancy Meyers kitchens, beautiful spaces that showcased warm, homey vibes. Even spaces that looked like a dreamy coastal home out of a catalog had a lived-in feel, like the floor-to-ceiling bookshelf in Something’s Gotta Give. You’ve Got Mail’s Kathleen, played by Meg Ryan, lives in a beautiful Upper West Side brownstone, but the decor is decidedly personal: books on shelves and on surfaces, haphazard stacks of mail, and mismatched furniture.

Creators have recently noticed that this kind of personality signaling through set design no longer exists, and it got me thinking: is it because we all want to live in a minimalist space, or is it because we no longer collect things in our homes like we used to, specifically, hard-copy media? And if there’s no media to peruse, what could we possibly know about the characters? The things we curate in our personal spaces tell a story about who we are, but nobody but you is looking at your algorithm on your Netflix homepage.

Choosing what to keep

Thinking back to those home libraries featuring tons of DVDs, VHS tapes and CDs, and recognizing the excess and materialism of the late 20th century, we might have been collecting just for the sake of having the most. We could probably all admit that not every piece of media we owned meant that much to us (or at least not as much as Taylor’s Toy Story VHS did). And I believe that streaming took us far in the other direction: owning nothing, renting everything. But artists have started to release special edition vinyls. Beloved authors are releasing special edition hardcovers of their already-bestselling books. When everything is available all the time to rent, focus has come back to physical media, but only in the most curated sense. Now, we pick and choose what we decide to own with a lot more care, precisely because everything is so available digitally.

Physical media provides proof: proof of taste, devotion, and worthiness of real estate in our homes. While we can consume everything, everywhere, and all at once, the long-loved DVD boxed set will never be sacrificed to your next binge-watch, or pushed out of your algorithm. It will always be yours.

Want more? Our Discord is where you’ll find everything you need to know about the Remarkist ecosystem including Folkic, our community app and Masslore, our fandom knowledge database! And be sure to hit that subscribe button so you never miss a thing at Rmrk*st Mag!

Hello Rmrk*st readers! We hope you’re excited that the summer is upon us, bringing with it the World Cup, Love Island US and UK, blockbuster movies, and outdoor concert season. It’s a great time to be a fan!

As we settle into July and look forward to what’s in store, let’s take a look back at what you might have missed in June. Our theme was Imagination, and we wanted to take a look at how creative impulses inform our imaginations when we produce or consume content. Even if you don’t think of yourself as a creative person per se (which, we heavily disagree with), your imagination works overtime when you enjoy any content. Whether it’s reading a book and imagining the story with your mind’s eye, or filling in blanks when you don’t have all the information from the narrative, our imaginations help to create a story.

We examined how the Mandela Effect impacts our perceptions of what is real, and how our brains sometimes create a mental mirage. In a deep dive on bootleg fandom merch, we examined what moves fans to make the kind of paraphernalia they actually want to wear, own, and display when it comes to their specific fandom communities. And, we took a look at why we love thrillers and mysteries so much–and how our imaginations do a lot of the mental work.

If you’re anything like me, you’ll be dedicating at least a few days of your summer to decluttering. In my case, that means taking a hard look at my bookshelves and media collections. My home library is important to me, and displays who I think I am as a fan, but sometimes the realities of having enough space take over. So, we hone our collections, purging some items and finding permanent homes for the content we really love. This July, that archival spirit is how we’ll be approaching pieces here. Our theme is Curation.

If you’re someone who loves to collect things, especially related to your fandom, you’ll appreciate what we’ve got in store. Collectors decide on what their compilations will include, and all collectors are different. They might curate according to completion (like needing to keep, forever, all the original box sets of Gilmore Girls DVDs in the wake of it leaving Netflix as of this month, the end of an era). Or they might curate according to season, or medium, like all the Harry Potter books versus the DVDs of the films. Whatever your collector style, the way you bring your own fandom into it is through personal curation. So this month, we’ll get into what it means to collect physical media in the digital age, dig into recommendation lists and how they help us build community with other fans, and examine how assembling music playlists is a curator’s dream.

So take a look at our table of contents below! And be prepared for some surprises. Make sure to follow John Cabrera on Instagram for special announcements, and follow us on Instagram too. And finally, find more information at our website and on our Discord, where we post regular updates about the Remarkist ecosystem as a whole!

1. Curating Identity: Why Physical Media Matters in the Age of Endless Streaming

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2. How Fan Communities Build Trust Through Recommendation Lists

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3. A Personal Soundtrack: How Curating Playlists Extend Fictional Worlds

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I spent a weekend completely binging a show on Apple TV that it seemed everyone was talking about: Widow’s Bay starring Matthew Rhys. Unlike his terrifying character in The Beast in Me, Rhys plays the almost deliberately aloof mayor of a small island town who, like the mayor of Amity in Jaws, is choosing to ignore some particularly troublesome mysterious truths about his home and the people that inhabit it.

I watched Widow’s Bay the way I watch most thrillers: with one hand over my face and the other on my remote, compulsively skipping the credits to get to the next episode. I simply could not stop watching, even opting to stop an episode halfway through to go to sleep and picking it right up with my coffee the next morning. It is about a New England town on a secluded island that has a truly mysterious and checkered past. From the first settlers reporting of evil happenings, to modern local fishermen fearing a certain point in the ocean, and a community still reeling from a killing spree of young girls, there’s a lot to be nervous about. It’s described as comedy-horror, and I agree that it is: the townies are delightfully quirky and deliver deadpan lines, briefly providing relief from the stress of the tension. The comedy helped me enjoy the series on one level, but the jokes also provided what I would call a Twin Peaksification to the dialog, contributing to the overall uneasiness I felt.

I am not a horror movie fan. I don’t do well with being scared, and I certainly don’t like blood and gore. Slasher films? I’m out. Zombies and monsters? Nope. As a self-proclaimed Highly Sensitive Person (HSP), certain images on screen stick with me and disturb my waking and sleeping moments for years. So, I avoid certain content for my own peace of mind.

But as a kid I realized the appeal of action thrillers, like Speed or The Fugitive. And psychological thrillers became intoxicating to me. I started to crave that not-knowing feeling about what might happen to the characters I grew attached to, and watching them wrestle with their own perceptions was a fun exercise that got me thinking about my own life and decision-making. I recognized this as an appreciation for suspense over horror. Shows like Lost and other narratives that dealt with more of a puzzle or mysterious happenings versus a serial killer on the loose were interesting to me.

It comes down to how my own imagination fills in details: what could be happening versus what we might find out is happening. And this imagination is cultivated on both a personal and collective level. Considering the runaway success of the movie Backrooms, collective imagination provides the scaffold around which thrillers can be built, and the audience becomes a collaborator in the storytelling. A slasher film might tell you exactly what to be afraid of, but good suspense–like hearing that eerie signature John Williams score in Jaws–has the viewer creating all kinds of things to be afraid of in their own mind.

Why the Imagination Scares Better Than the Screen

I viscerally remember the scariest book I ever read as a kid. I was a fan of the Sweet Valley Kids and Sweet Valley Twins book series by Francine Pascal, and all of the Sweet Valley franchises had a thriller series attached to the main one. Sweet Valley Twins had the Super Chiller special editions: these were longer books that had stylistically different covers, and something about them tempted me.

The one I read was The Curse of the Ruby Necklace, a thriller where Jessica finds a ruby necklace while filming a movie about a girl’s mysterious death at an old mansion. After finding it, Jessica experiences nightmares and supernatural activity. When her twin sister Elizabeth procures the necklace from her, she starts having the same nightmares and does some investigating, eventually discovering that the necklace belonged to the dead girl. It freaked me out considerably. I was about 11 or 12, and I still remember what I imagined in my mind’s eye as I read it. If they made a movie of this book, it would never live up to my experience of the read.

As an adult, the scariest book I ever read was Simone St. James’ The Broken Girls. A journalist is on the scene at an abandoned girls’ boarding school investigating the murder of her sister, when she uncovers a connection to the school’s past and a story of a lingering ghost that haunts it. The narrative jumps in time from the 1950s to 2014, and in the back and forth the reader learns about the students and what might have happened there. But the storytelling is gothic in nature, and St. James managed to scare the bejeezus out of me with supernatural elements, such as music turning on at random moments, and other ghostly activities. She did it again with her novel The Sun Down Motel, about a woman working as a night clerk who vanishes from a motel in the early 1980s and her niece who investigates the disappearance decades later. St. James has a knack for atmospheric storytelling that would keep me away from roadside motels for the rest of my life.

One of my favorite bits from the show Friends is when Joey keeps his copy of The Shining by Stephen King in the freezer. Why? So it can’t haunt him. It’s hilarious because it feels so relatable: a book is just a book, but sometimes the imagery it evokes in our own minds is so real that we can’t have it in the same room as us.

When we read, we conjure images and settings from the written page, and I believe we think up the scariest versions of those things that our minds will allow because we are effectively in a safe space. Research suggests that we might willingly dabble with suspense, horror, and thriller genres because it’s a way to experience fear about certain things in a “protected frame” or controlled environment. We feel physically safe (in a theater or in front of a screen, or on our couch reading a book), detached (knowing that the horrors on screen are fake, or characters in a book are made up), and confident in the controlled environment (a haunted house monster won’t outrun us).

Novels and other fictional spaces that we visit are collaborative between us and the authors and creators. We fill the blanks they leave with our personal fears, making the imagined threat more specific and potent than anything a creator could invent. When the story unfolds without showing us much–which happens naturally while we read since we can only go on the author’s descriptions, and more practically when we watch suspense that leaves a lot to the imagination through suggestion–our brains do the heavy lifting of manufacturing the scariest thing possible.

Backrooms took this concept and ran with it–all the way to box office millions. What started as a photo on a 4chan message board grew into a phenomenon of storytelling. When a user asked for “disquieting images,” someone posted a creepypasta of an abandoned office space. The image was an example of kenopsia, the idea that something ordinary could feel off in a particular context, like an empty, abandoned mall. The photo projects a liminal space, a transitionary place caught in between what may have happened in it and what happens next. A collective fandom grew around the phenomenon of “backrooms,” and YouTuber Kane Parsons built a series, called The Backrooms, around it. From there, YouTuber Kane Parsons built a celebrated series around the concept, which eventually inspired a full theatrical film drawing on the “found footage” genre of horror. The audience’s imagination does the rest.

Suspense Through Sustained Uncertainty

What I loved about Lost when it aired in the 2000s was the very fact that I had absolutely no idea what was going on. When I hear criticisms today about the show, the prevailing one is that certain plot points didn’t make sense, or never answered certain questions. But for me and other fans, that was the appeal. Every season introduced more questions than answers, and that left a lot of room for fans to discuss and theorize in between episodes and seasons. That was the most fun part, more than actually watching it. It’s what I remember most from the experience.

As I sat down to watch Widow’s Bay (and I promise no spoilers here!), I was confronted with some expected accoutrements of suspense: an isolated town, folks murmuring about mysterious happenings, kooky townies with weird stories. But episode to episode, I truly had no idea what “big bad” I was looking for; I just had a bunch of random puzzle pieces. The series bills itself as comedy horror, and while there are horror elements, the absurdity of these events and character one-liners are comical. Perhaps that’s what made it all the more creepy: the genuine moments for laughter almost felt misplaced.

The effect is a viewer not knowing how to hold information, which is in itself unsettling. It’s also so unclear what’s going on: is the island haunted? Was there a serial killer? Are these ancient mysteries or is there something still happening now? When a story proposes many options, the viewer has to hold all of these possibilities at the same time, which sustains uncertainty and their need to use their imaginations to fill in obvious blanks. Episode to episode, it feels like you’re writing along with the creators because your brain keeps asking new questions and providing possible answers.

Widow’s Bay also heavily references other horror and suspense movies, like Stephen King’s It and Carrie, etc. as well as Jaws, The Fog, and more. These visual references help the viewer fill in the blanks as well by using the familiarity; cognitively we pull up memories of those stories and write the ending to this one. For example, we know what happened to Carrie, so maybe for a moment we expect this story to go the same way because we see familiar imagery that relates to that classic story.

In perhaps a mimicry of what it feels like to watch the entire series, one episode features a drug trip with periods of blackout that skip time. Imagining what happens in the interim is all the viewer has to go on. And in a way, the entire series is about learning to live with everyday horrors and uncertainties, and doing your best to move forward.

Community of Imaginations Fuel Suspense Narratives

Suspense stories that withhold information don’t just scare and perplex individual viewers, but it generates community as people gather to compare and contrast what they imagined or think is actually happening.

This is where audiences really get to work. At the end of every episode of Lost, fans would talk to each other in person and online and wonder their fan theories aloud; there was no need for this to end when there were no more episodes. Upon the ending of Widow’s Bay (again, no spoilers!), I thought about the questions the series posed. There is a second season coming, but even if there wasn’t one, I think I’d still be having as much fun as I am now discussing the possibilities with friends who have watched. Suspense and thrillers work because of collective imagination.

The Backrooms, both the online urban legend and the film Backrooms, are the ultimate proof of this in action. The original 4chan question asked for a photo and relatively nothing else, and the anonymously posted office photo prompted fans to fill in more blanks collectively. A user responded that you could “noclip” (a video game term for cheat code to bypass limits of the game) and the storytelling went viral from there. Soon various subreddits and creators expanded on the idea, even creating a split in the fandom between “true” backrooms and new levels. The phenomenon was so popular and widespread, even Severance creator Dan Erikson said he was inspired by the Backrooms for his series. This is reminiscent of the Goncharov phenomenon, where fans created a myth around a fake film.

The power of unanswered questions

As humans, we crave endings that tie up loose ends. I always hear complaints from fans when an ending is abrupt, or ambiguous (cue Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life’s “final four words”). Unanswered questions leave audiences desperate for more information. The sustained ambiguity throughout the content up until the end has held their rapt attention precisely because they feel they’re getting close to a conclusion. Uncertainty is unsettling.

But our imaginations come in to help us make sense of the world. It’s why we turn to stories in the first place. We are brought up on narratives that have beginnings, middles, and endings. “Once upon a times” are followed by “happily ever afters” because we like to make meaning out of life’s events. Clean endings, regardless of whether they’re happy or not, are hard to come by in the real world.

When we engage with suspense stories, our imaginations get a good workout. We exercise problem solving, look for clues, consider wild possibilities, and build community. As children, we engage in imaginative play all the time, preparing us for future activities as adults. But as adults, we don’t use that muscle in everyday life as much as we probably could. So the next time you’re sucked into a thriller, think about how your brain is activated, and how this might help you in your very real endeavors. You just might imagine something unexpected.

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The moment it came up on my Instagram feed, I laughed out loud and immediately pushed the share button. I could not believe what I was looking at. I was with my cousin at a concert, chatting before the show started and checking up on Game 4 of the NBA Finals. We are New Yorkers, so of course we were concerned about whether the New York Knicks would win this game.

Even if you’re not from either of the teams’ hometowns, it was hard to escape the news that Taylor Swift showed up at the game with her best friends Alana and Este Haim of the band Haim. Basketball fans might have questioned their right to be on what is known as “celebrity row” courtside at the game, sitting next to longtime Knicks fans like Ben Stiller, Mariska Hargitay, Timothée Chalamet, and the king of them all, Spike Lee. But Taylor, Alana and Este didn’t show up in branded team merch to cosplay as fans for the night. They came in homemade shirts that only a craft girlie would know were fresh off the at-home press: blue tees with orange lettering with the following names: STEVIE KNICKS, KNICKELBACK, KNICKOLE KIDMAN. They brought a STEVIE KNICKS tee for Mariska, too. The joke was immediately understood, and coverage of them took over social media and traditional media alike.

After the NBA Finals Knicks win a few nights later, the streets of New York were flooded with people (I was one of them). In the days prior, I saw Knicks tees being sold on the sidewalk: homemade graffiti tees, tie dye, screen prints of players’ faces front and back. “FINALS 2026!” plastered all over. These are fun tee shirts, better than anything I’ve seen in a store or the official NBA website. And as I walked around Manhattan after the win, I saw people selling them on the street to commemorate the moment, and even more fans wearing unofficial merch they clearly either bought off the street or made themselves.

Bootleg merch has long been a part of fandom. While it’s fair that rights holders want to protect their images and don’t want to see individual creators copy their branding and sell it for less, when it comes to wearing one’s fandom, the experience is a bit more complicated. Fans usually know their fandoms better than the creatives who produce the content, and so their interpretations are what catch on and influence what they buy to wear and display. When brands get more creative with merch, and play into inside jokes of the fandom or produce niche items, fans are more likely to embrace them. We look at bootleg culture as something akin to stealing, but what if bootleggers and fandom-inspired merch creators are tapping into something more authentic about fandom itself?

How fandom finds us

Fandom is a journey. It is personal to each individual and usually starts with something small: a song you heard on the radio that made you pay attention, your dad renting the movie he loved as a kid to introduce you to it, a library book discovered at school that made you feel seen. We enter fandoms for personal reasons, because some piece of content spoke to us on some level.

We feel inclined to own a piece of that fandom. A t-shirt, a keychain, a mug. As a kid, my family went to Disney World every couple of years. Every time we went, I bought a keychain with my saved-up pennies. I had all kinds of keychains from Walt Disney World: character-themed ones, plastic logos from each of the Disney Parks, special keychains that were from the gift shops of different rides I loved. I even had one that was a little coin purse shaped like a backpack with Mickey ears all over it. I loved the keychains because they were individual to me; they represented each trip--and now their inherent kitsch is vintage.

Merchandise has to speak to a fan for them to purchase it. It’s not really enough to buy something featuring a logo from our favorite show. I have a t-shirt bought from the Warner Brothers official store brandishing the Luke’s Diner logo from Gilmore Girls. On the side of the logo, it says “Gilmore Girls” on it. I remember thinking, “well that kinda ruins it.” I want a shirt that looks like it came off the set, as if Luke’s Diner itself sold it to me. I don’t want something plastered with the franchise name on it. Why is that?

As fans, we tend to want to walk around in our favorite fictional worlds as a local, like an insider. Official merch is overly brand-safe: logos and slogans are approved by a team unrelated to the content. Fans have no way of knowing if the team who conceived of the merch are fans too, but fans know when something reads as inauthentic. Fan-made merch often passes the authenticity test with other fans: the more niche, the better.

And while maybe it isn’t easy to spot a true fan next to someone who simply donned a corporate-approved shirt, it’s definitely easy to identify a fan through niche merch. So it’s ironic that merch made by fans could be classified as inauthentic, counterfeit, bootleg. I would argue that the person wearing something original is the person who really “gets” the fandom more than anything else. But homemade merch can also create a sense of inclusion for a new fan, someone who is not trying to act like they’ve been there the whole time but wants to get in on the fun too.

Taylor Swift and the Haim sisters aren’t known as lifelong Knicks fans like the other celebrities they were seated with. Instead of putting on Knicks merch that a stylist handed them, they opted for a more authentic approach. They didn’t pretend to be diehard fans in jerseys with player names on the back, but showed up in garb that included them amongst fans in a different way. As a fellow (proud) Knicks bandwagoner for the most exciting sports moment in my city’s recent history, I felt directly spoken to, and included in the celebration even though many sports fandoms would say I haven’t earned it. The shirt they made gave many a perfect way in. And both Knicks fans and bandwagoners like me showed up to watch parties for Game 5 in copycat merch, even coming up with new ways to emulate the idea. Actress Cynthia Nixon posted a picture on her own Instagram, sporting a Cynthia Knickson shirt.

“Inspired by” vs “infringing on”

Printing a logo on a tee or mug without legal clearance or a licensing agreement is a real bootleg. And typically, isn’t legally allowed. Fan creators on Etsy and Redbubble often get in trouble for doing this, and it makes sense from a franchise’s perspective. But fans tend to crave more creative interpretations of their fandoms anyway.

Fandoms thrive on collective inclusion. One way they do this is through inside jokes, memes, and knowledge of the latest happenings inside the fandom. I have frequented brands like Cornelia Street Shirts and Girl Tribe for Taylor Swift-inspired merch, and last fall we interviewed Dragonfly Merch Co. about their fandom-inspired merch business for Gilmore Girls. A quick search online will yield many results for fandom-inspired merch companies. The site for The Subtle Nerd shop presents a real reason for why fans love these kinds of companies. In their About section, they write, “Tired of walking through endless shops, looking for just the right item? Enter The Subtle Nerd, where you’ll find a curated section of shirts, hoodies, hats, and accessories for the nerd at heart, geek on the street, and gamer in his or her element.”

The Subtle Nerd is getting at something fans are always looking to express: a nuance, an insider perspective, something that makes them highly visible to other fans but maybe not others outside the fandom. A logo is an advertisement, but an inside joke is a social cue. Wearing a branded shirt with movie poster artwork certainly can identify you as a fan or just aware of a film’s existence, but a quote from that film or niche fandom inside joke on that tee signals real belonging to a group. You could sport a Titanic movie poster tee, or a “There was room for Jack on that door” tee, and the latter might give you a bit more street credibility as a fan.

Another factor when it comes to authentic merch is speed. Sometimes things happen within a fandom and independent creators have the agility to whip up a merchandising opportunity in response faster than an official brand can. When a brand catches up, often it feels forced, and that they’re late because the moment has passed. For years, ever since the exact episode aired, I wanted a black tee that said “babette ate oatmeal” from a classic Gilmore Girls episode. In the storyline, Kirk is starting a new business to capitalize on the speed at which people want fandom merch: he creates shirts right after something has happened for members of the town to buy. The only unfortunate thing for him is that, nothing that exciting happens in Stars Hollow; it’s all very mundane. But therein lies the joke. I saw creators making the shirt all over the internet in various fonts and styles. But I wanted the exact shirt that the character Kirk tries to sell: no logos, just Kirk’s creation. Recently, I saw an official version on the Warner Brothers website, which feels extremely late and inauthentic to the moment.

The fan-made merch economy

Simply put, personal economics are a barrier to merch-buying. The concert ticket is expensive enough, and a concert tee might start at $50 for something generic, a logo or name on an itchy tee. Especially when fans are newer, or younger, disposable income that they can spend on souvenirs is tough to come by. Even when fans are eager to spend on merch, consider access: the Eras Tour made the news for incredibly long lines and selling out of some of the hottest merch items, even several days before a concert in any given city on the tour. Facebook groups had fans helping each other out, buying on site and mailing to out of state fans, and resell sites were lit up with popular merch items that were impossible to find otherwise.

Bootlegs, fan-made merch, and companies that make fandom inspired merch democratize access by offering something for everyone. When fans can’t get the merch they want from an official source, they turn to other platforms: Etsy, Amazon, Redbubble, or their own craft store. And, while they love a hot item that is going viral amongst fans, they also create their own phenomena.

One of the biggest fan-made merch stories in recent years is the making of friendship bracelets during the Eras Tour. Making this kind of merch was a totally fan-led operation that Taylor Swift herself never capitalized on; she even joked on “The Graham Norton Show” that she should have invested in beads, had she known what would happen.

Fans seized on a line from her song “You’re On Your Own, Kid” that says, “Make the friendship bracelets/take the moment and taste it” which dovetails beautifully with the experience of going to a once-in-a-lifetime concert with friends and family. So fans made bracelets, all kinds of them. And because they were handmade, they were personal. And what did we all learn as kids that you do with a friendship bracelet? You trade them, which fans did at shows and all around stadiums. The tradition even spread to many other fandoms, and fans have been trading bracelets at other shows and conventions outside of the Swift fandom.

Making friendship bracelets isn’t a new tradition; Taylor Swift mentioned it in a song because it’s something people have done for decades. But making the bracelet itself into Taylor Swift-inspired fan-created merch that is recognizable across every demographic of the fandom and beyond was a revelation. Most importantly? They were cheap. Sure, you could buy friendship bracelets someone else made online, or you can purchase a fancy bead kit to make them. But most fans could purchase a kit for a few bucks, turn making bracelets into an activity shared with friends, and the bracelets themselves became their own memory of the tour and the consumption of it–even if you only watched the movie release in theaters or consumed videos from the concerts at home.

The psychology of the souvenir

I knew as a kid why I wanted those Disney World keychains. It was a souvenir, one I could afford on limited allowance. Apparel and larger items were so expensive, and my parents were very strict about buying stuff for my brother and me while we vacationed. They always prioritized the experience of going over the cost of buying “junk” I probably wouldn’t care about much longer after we returned home. The keychains were more personal, because I bought them myself. They were economically available because they didn’t cost that much, and they were small and didn’t take up a ton of room in my luggage. But they meant a lot to me: they were my souvenirs of the experience, not meaningless pieces of plastic. I used to spend the week at Disney World hunting for the perfect encapsulation of my trip. You can walk into any gift shop and see hundreds of keychains all over the resorts and parks. So picking just one was a vacation-long challenge. And I did it every time.

There is a key difference between the souvenir of the experience vs. a souvenir of the brand. A bootleg tee sold on the street outside of a concert belongs to the fan community, not the corporation–so it represents the fan and the experience (like, say, the thrill of buying a tee on your way out of the venue from a guy selling them out of a box). My best friend and I bought tees from a guy in the parking lot after a New Kids on the Block concert with opener Jesse McCartney while giggling about buying “crappy” shirts with the last bit of cash we had. I still have it, and I’ve never worn it; the hilarious memory of the purchase is stronger than even my memory of the concert. I was with my friend, we were laughing, we’d just had a fantastic time scream-singing “Hangin’ Tough” with the boys and thousands of other fans. And the bootleg tee is proof of it.

A souvenir that represents an experience rather than a brand is inherently more significant to a fan. You could buy merch at a concert, or a few weeks later online. But there’s something special about procuring a merch item during the event itself–or making something niche to wear to it. In 2011 psychology researchers coined the term the IKEA Effect, meaning that we place more value on items that we partially make ourselves. So making a tee shirt, costume, or bracelet for a fandom event might be more valuable to us as a souvenir from the experience than anything we might buy.

You’ve likely heard the phrase “you are what you own.” The phrase comes from consumer psychologist Dr. Russell Belk, whose 1988 theory of the Extended Self states that our identity is extended to the things we collect. Souvenirs fall into this category; even if we don’t use them, we tend to hold onto objects whose value is symbolic to us. Souvenirs help tell a story about who we are, both to ourselves and others.

Supporting other fans

Fandom is a collective activity, and inside of it, we build community. This support extends to how and why we purchase merch. When I’ve been shopping for fandom items to wear to events, I have always found the most interesting products from individuals and companies that are fans themselves. They always carry the most unique and niche goods, because they care about the content like I do. I treasure my “I Am An Autumn” sweatshirt from Dragonfly Merch Co., which I wore to the Smells Like Snow and Coffee Festival in Akron, OH last fall. I ordered it ahead of time, but I made sure to stop by their booth at the festival. I definitely didn’t need another Gilmore-inspired tee, but it just feels so great to support other fans by buying their items and so, I walked away with one more.

What do bootlegs reveal about fan culture?

Bootleg merch speaks to a fandom prioritizing their interests over straight branding. Fans value accuracy, speed and community-understood signifiers. They would much rather show others that they get the inside joke or niche understanding of the fandom over sporting its official logos. This understanding shows others that they are legitimate; their fandom is real and they have earned the right to be included in the group.

Bootlegs also expose holes in the market for engaged fans. The Click Clack Show, which describes itself as “a women’s sports podcast about more than the game” pointed out in an Instagram post that Taylor Swift and Haim’s homemade Knicks shirts weren’t just clever and fun, but actually revealed a lot about how men’s sports organizations like the NFL, MLB, and NBA don’t make merch that caters to what women actually want to wear. They are forced to wear shapeless unisex tees and jerseys, or the dreaded pink merch that all teams seem to make (what’s the point of wearing team merch if it’s not in the team color?). The caption reads, “Women don’t just want shrunk-down men’s jerseys; we want style, culture, and humor mixed into our fandom.” Women want to be included, and if they can’t buy official merch, they will make their own.

But even if brands catch up and provide niche-specific items that fans really want, fans will always create their own fandom-inspired merch. And as long as they don’t infringe on copyright, these items will always feel more personal and exist as one-of-a-kind pieces that feel like wearable fan art. Merch will always be a part of fan expression, and how original it is will always be up to the fan.

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If you were a kid in the 90s like me, you might remember a movie starring Sinbad about a genie granting wishes called Shazaam. I remember when the music-finding app Shazam came out, I recalled the movie title. And while I’d never watched it, I remembered ads for it, maybe a still photo from promotions. I had the distinct memory of it being on TV, not in theaters. And I just never got around to watching it. But, we had a genie-forward culture in the 90s thanks to Disney’s Aladdin, so I was probably a little tired of the genre.

If you also remember this movie, you also have likely experienced the shock and awe of an entire generation when we recently learned that… this movie never existed. It is a figment of our collective millennial imagination. This is a Mandela Effect: when a group remembers something incorrectly but are sure of it based on the community experience. Shazaam is so strongly “remembered” that Sinbad even poked fun at it in this episode of Pablo Torre Finds Out. Perhaps we’re confusing it with the (very real) movie Kazaam, starring Shaquille O’Neal in the genie role. Or the superhero movie Shazam! based on a comic book series. Or maybe because Sinbad was everywhere back then, hosting Sinbad the Sailor movies on TNT where he wore baggy “genie” pants (thanks to MC Hammer and also Aladdin, the 90s was all about baggy genie pants). Or maybe it’s because he played a genie called Sinboo on Nickelodeon’s All That.

Regardless of the reason, the movie never existed and yet, it’s so strong in our collective memory that even writing this, I have to keep double checking to make sure of the facts. I remember it so, so clearly. And knowing it doesn’t exist makes me feel particularly unsettled about everything I think I remember. But the Mandela Effect also speaks to the power of fandom and collective consumption. An incorrect collective memory reveals how fans engage with stories: through emotions and cultural osmosis rather than a careful close reading of the text. While some fans are really into details, groups of fans might rely more on the collective experience of a story rather than the story itself. A Mandela Effect might tell us what fans want to remember or draw meaning from rather than what is actually presented. Fandom cultures are born through community adventure.

Cognition and collective memory

Where does the term “Mandela Effect” come from? In 2009, a researcher named Fiona Broome discovered that she–along with many others–had vividly “remembered” South African president Nelson Mandela dying in prison in the 1980s. I myself can admit this: I “remember” his “death” too. But actually, Mandela was very much alive at the time and died much later in 2013. Broome coined the phenomenon, and looked into the ways a group of people might remember an event so incorrectly.

An article from VeryWellMind plainly explains some of the cognitive reasons a Mandela Effect occurs. Neuroscience states that the brain produces a schema, and false memories can occur when the brain places similar things together. VeryWellMind uses this example: lots of people mistakenly believe Alexander Hamilton was an American president when he never won an election (and could not be, as an immigrant). But because he was an influential founding father and his face is on the ten dollar bill, our brains might associate him with other U.S. presidents.

Our brains fill in blanks when there are holes in a story; this is called confabulation. And information we receive after an event can actually influence our memory of it; we know this if we watch a lot of true crime documentaries where eyewitness testimony is unreliable (*raises hand*). Priming is a brain function by which our memory is influenced with a preceding word or idea before we experience it. So in an investigation, a witness might be led with a very small tweak to a question like “Did you see a bicycle?” vs. “When did you see the bicycle?”

Social media also exacerbates this: one major fandom event covered by many different angles can influence your memory of the same event. I personally feel this when I remember attending the Eras Tour: I watched so many videos and snapshots from Taylor Swift’s massive show in different cities that the memories I have are conflated with my own experience of being in the stadium I was in. That feeling is shared, making it more powerful. And, it’s tied to emotion: elation, happiness, excitement. Emotion tied to memory is extremely strong. It’s why hearing a song you loved with an ex can make you sad, or a scent you loved in high school can bring back a flood of memories.

And if you’re a fan of reality bending narratives this might appeal to you: quantum physics suggests there could be alternate realities and dimensions where things are happening and we “remember” them in this one. If you’re a skeptic, it seems unlikely. But hey, we can’t rule anything out!

Fandom and memory distortion

I’ve already mentioned this, but social media–and all kinds of experiences of fandom–contribute to memory distortion. When we engage with source material and stories, it’s often both intensely and indirectly. We watch our favorite shows, sometimes over and over, but we spend more time talking about them with friends, other fans, or consuming content about them online or in other places.

Fandom content is derivative, and repeated exposure with anything can overwrite memories we have of the original. We experience fandom through memes, fanfiction, parody and discussions–all which have the capability of shaping our memories. And since fandom is a collective experience, we create echo chambers of community that can scale a misremembered piece of content into a widely held belief.

Examples in Fandom

The Shazaam Mandela Effect is just my favorite one, but there are many well-known Mandela Effects in fandom. One big one is from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the Disney animated film from 1937. A pop culture phrase we feel we know is “Mirror mirror, on the wall: who is the fairest of them all?” The evil queen is jealous of Snow White’s beauty, and the man in the mirror tells her so. But the quote is actually, “Magic mirror on the wall, who is the fairest one of all?”

A quick search on Reddit provided me some fun answers for why we might remember it this way, and Disney perhaps is a bit at fault. The Disney Channel Original Movie Descendants, a franchise about the children of all the heroes, heroines and villains of Disney classics, is known for a song called “Rotten to the Core” in which the lyric is: “Mirror, mirror on the wall/Who’s the baddest of them all?”. This movie premiered in 2015, and the misremembered quote predates it for sure. But the lyrics may be indicative of how strong this Mandela Effect is in our collective culture.

Another explanation suggested that maybe we remember it alongside other fairytale lines, like “Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair” and that repetition fits with our cognitive understanding of fairytale language, or, schema (as mentioned earlier). But keep in mind: because these fairytales come from Brothers Grimm, original versions said “mirror mirror.” The original German text indeed says,

„Spieglein, Spieglein an der Wand:

wer iſt die ſchoͤnſte Frau in dem ganzen Land?“

So, perhaps it’s not a misremembrance at all, just a conflation with the extremely commodified Disney version that exists in mainstream culture. And that makes it a Mandela Effect, because the fandom is piecing different memories together collectively.

Another great Mandela Effect is from Star Wars. The biggest twist of the original trilogy is the reveal that (spoiler alert!) Darth Vader is Luke Skywalker’s father (though, in Pitch Perfect, Beca is unimpressed with the “twist” and thinks we all should have seen it coming). The line, “Luke, I am your father” was known to me as a touchstone of pop culture long before I ever saw the movies or knew what it was from. But actually, the line is different. Darth Vader actually says, “No, I am your father.”

A third great example, for my fellow millennials, is the Berenstain Bears children’s book series. Didn’t everyone remember it as “Berenstein”? I was absolutely obsessed with these books as a child; every time we went to the library we came home with at least four or five editions from the series. And I probably couldn’t read that well when my mom started reading them to us, so if I heard “Berenstein,” that’s how I remembered it. But I also remember putting together those letters on the cover with the sound of the name, learning that “stein” sounds like “steen” or “stine” depending on the word. So in my twenties, when someone posted the news online that in actuality, it was “Berenstain,” my jaw dropped. I stared at those covers for hours as a child and remembered them incorrectly.

Emotions and fandom

Why does the Mandela Effect make us so uneasy? For one thing, fandom is intertwined with identity. Our deeply personal connections to our fandoms and content we love help us define who we are. So, when we realize that we remembered something wrong or incorrectly, especially about something we love so much, it can shake that foundation of identity. It’s all the more unsettling when there’s a contingent of sticklers in the fandom who are more particular about details and point out that we’re wrong about deeply held memories. That’s when fandoms can fracture, when the individuals involved aren’t aware that there are all types of fans–some that are more analytical, some that are more imaginative. If you’ve ever proclaimed that you’re a fan of a band but can’t name five songs they put out at the request of another devotee, you know the feeling that comes with being labeled a “bad” fan. The reality is, there is no one way to be a fan.

Another way to look at the effect of the Mandela Effect, though, is that fans can be united in their incorrect memories. I have felt a particular kinship to strangers in my general age range on a nostalgic level who remember Shazaam as much as I did. There’s no feeling quite like being wrong as a community; it’s a unifying mistake on the part of an entire generation, and we can laugh about it together.

Fandom is an interpretive space

The Mandela Effect exposes the gap between canon and “fanon,” the canon that fans decide exist, regardless of what the creators intended. In a way, it is collaborative fan fiction: fans are writing the story they wish happened versus the one that did, even if subconsciously.

I’m not really a big sports fan, but I am a New Yorker. And recently, the New York Knicks have gotten themselves into a historic run for the NBA title. The last time they won was before I was born. I have never been to a Knicks game, and only watched a handful on TV over the years. But as the Knicks draw closer to a championship win, I find myself wrapped up in the frenzy taking over the city. It almost feels like I’ve been watching with everyone all season, even though I absolutely have not. But I am swept up in the feelings of comradery, joy, and excitement of the moment. I find myself telling others the story of what it means to be a New Yorker, that this is what it’s all about, watching and cheering with strangers on a shut down street or on the subway. I, along with millions of others, have assigned a story to the events of what is actually happening, which, to be honest, are just basketball games. The players are doing their jobs; New Yorkers and Knicks fans are writing an emotional narrative about what’s happening, and participating in collective memory-making together.

We do the same thing with all of our fandoms; we extract meaning from a text that might not actually be there. We create mythologies because they help us believe in something bigger than ourselves. If we remember the line as “Luke, I am your father” vs. “No, I am your father” the meaning changes slightly. Maybe fans want Darth Vader to have said his name, Luke, in a fatherly way instead of with a detached sense of villainous energy to get him to do what he wants.

Being part of a fandom itself implies that we are active participants, engaging with stories in a way that makes us feel seen, not only for ourselves but in community with others. Remembering something wrong together tells us so much more about how fandom functions in society as a communal ecosystem than it does about our abilities as humans to get things right all the time. The Mandela Effect shows us how we rely on one another in community, and how much each of us can affect a collective vibe.

So, what are some Mandela Effects in fandom that you were shocked by? Tell me in the comments!

Want more? Our Discord is where you’ll find everything you need to know about the Remarkist ecosystem including Folkic, our community app and Masslore, our fandom knowledge database! And be sure to hit that subscribe button so you never miss a thing at Rmrk*st Mag!

School’s out for summer! It’s June, and that means soon we’ll be heading on summer vacations, spending more time outside, and getting opportunities to tap into creative endeavors. When we were young, we longed for summer to get away from routines and spend the next few months following our whims if we could. Summer blockbuster movie-going on hot afternoons, playing make-believe with friends, discovering new places on trips that inspired us to build new stories. Into adulthood, even if we don’t get a specific summer vacation per se, we still feel that pull towards a bit more freedom to explore when the season changes.

Before we get into what June has in store here at rmrk*st Magazine, let’s take a look back at what you missed in May.

Our theme was Curiosity, and we explored the analytical spirit that can come with being a fan. We did a deep dive on plot holes and what they really mean for fans who love the stories that occasionally gloss over some details that we notice. We took a look at what happens when we obsessively rewatch old favorite series’ and movies that we’ve seen multiple times before, and how this practice deepens our appreciation of the stories we love. We published a defense of unpopular opinions. And we examined the role of pop culture in academia from the 1980s to today.

In June, we are looking forward to that summer vacation spirit: our theme is Imagination! We are excited to think about some of the ways imagination fuels creativity and informs fandoms. Our topics include the Mandela effect in fandom (like when an entire fandom remembers a line in a movie incorrectly), and the appeal of bootleg merch. We’ll examine why horror and suspense thrill us when our imagination of what we aren’t seeing scares us more than what we do see on screen.

So come on the journey with us! We look forward to examining the role of fantasy when it comes to creative pursuits.

Our Table of Contents is below. Follow us on Instagram, and also make sure to give John Cabrera a follow to make sure you don’t miss special announcements and reflections. Find more information about the Remarkist ecosystem at our website and on our Discord, where we post regular updates!

1. Fandom and the Mandela Effect: Finding Joy in Remembering It Wrong

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2. Bootleg Merch: Why Fans Make Better Stuff Than Brands

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3. How Suspense Thrillers Hijack Your Imagination-And Why You Love It

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I think most of us grow up feeling like schoolwork is the opposite of a fun, leisure time activity. Even if we enjoy school. I always loved reading as a kid, and school never felt boring, but there was a huge difference between reading Sweet Valley Kids and The Babysitter’s Club under my covers with a flashlight past my bedtime vs. reading Fahrenheit 451 and To Kill a Mockingbird for school. Obviously, the former assigned titles are important novels I appreciate much more as an adult, but reading them for school? Not a fan. For many, leisure reading and assigned texts feel like they exist on separate planes.

In college, I had an English professor who spoke with a classic 90s-era west coast valley girl accent, like Cher Horowitz in Clueless, but at 2x speed. In that accent, she pontificated about Faulkner and other modern academic canon literature in a way that made me feel utterly unintelligent by comparison. She was the smartest person I’d encountered in my collegiate journey, and she casually dropped complicated words I didn’t know the meaning of into her discourse.

One day she let it slip that she was planning a new class for the next semester: a feminist literature course focused on…Buffy the Vampire Slayer. As in, the TV show. This was around the year 2000, so Buffy was a huge part of pop culture. When a few of my classmates scoffed–yes, they actually audibly scoffed–she looked them dead in the eyes with pity and said, “You’re English majors. You’ll never be able to watch anything in peace ever again.” Reader, this former undergraduate English major confirms that she was correct.

Years later, I can’t watch anything without analyzing the text. A close treading of popular culture artifacts is what I would consider a wild and exciting Friday night. And I know I’m not alone. There is a growing trend of fandom-based academic courses in higher education that I wish was the norm when I was getting my degree. Pop culture courses offer new entry points into critical thinking, cultural theory, and interdisciplinary studies, whether it’s the study of fandom itself, or bringing unexpected texts–like a hit TV show about a vampire slayer–into a literature class. Pop culture has become both a legitimate and valuable academic pursuit, and this raises questions about how we measure the quality of a work in order to study it from an academic perspective.

The old literary canon and introduction of culture studies

Up until the 1980s, English and American Literature departments across colleges and universities studied a particular canon. In a 2015 interview with Literary Hub, Jane Gallop, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee stated, “The canon as it was…in the 70s was really gone by the 90s; it is a completely different canon…there’s also a lot more reading of various kinds of non-high-literary texts. It moved in every direction…We started reading women. We started reading men of color. We started reading people from outside of Europe. We started reading things that nobody thought of as literature.” The rise of Literary Theory changed the way academics studied texts, and the definition of what constituted as academically worthy transformed.

During the 1960s and 1970s, as literature studies were changing in response to modern cultural shifts, institutions in academia began to develop Cultural Studies as a discipline. The field officially can be traced back to British literature scholars Raymond Williams and Richard Hoggart, who recognized the importance of studying everyday life. According to this piece on the British Academy blog, “Each of these thinkers knew there was a minor tradition of studying culture ‘from below’; that is, the cultural practices and rituals of everyday life associated with ordinary people, or with groups and populations who did not belong to the powerful social classes or to the political elites.” In other words, they asserted that studying, for example, a modern ladies’ fashion magazine had the same academic weight as studying the established classics.

When a third founder of the discipline, Jamaican-British literature scholar Stuart Hall, became the director of the Center for Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham in the UK, he continued the work of Williams and Hoggart. The “Birmingham School” as it came to be known signaled an academic paradigm shift: the interdisciplinary study of culture began to gain legitimacy, though definitely not overnight. Communications Professor at Goldsmiths, University of London Angela McRobbie writes,

“When I graduated from my first degree in English Literature and Sociology in 1974, few literature departments would have considered a thesis on the subject of girls’ magazines as legitimate. And in sociology the topic of young women and their leisure activities could only be filed, absurdly, under the idea of ‘deviance’. But in Birmingham, it made complete sense as a subject for investigation.”

Today, it is widely accepted that film, TV, and music can be studied as scholarly texts, but there will always be a disconnect between what is considered “high” and “low” art worthy of inspection on a higher education level. However, as McRobbie concludes, “perhaps this constant questioning of the grounds of validity continues to tell us a story about the place and value of culture in society.”

While in graduate school, I wandered into a specialized library for media studies one day. I browsed the shelves, which were mostly filled with bound dissertations from former students. One caught my eye: it was a psychological study of the effect of daytime soap-opera viewing. My mom had watched soap operas when I was growing up, and I came to love them too. I always thought of soaps as lacking in deep storytelling but they were fun, like candy. Junk food for the brain. How exciting to find something so deeply pop cultural inside a prestigious university library.

I checked it out for extracurricular (read: fun) reading, as it wasn’t related to any of my coursework. The conclusion of the paper was that women who watched soap operas weren’t just consuming what we might collectively regard as mindless TV. While the storylines were fantastical, they were able to project their own real life anxieties onto the characters, psychologically finding catharsis in their busy lives as mothers and homemakers. The study made me realize that consuming pop culture is never a “guilty pleasure” or devoid of meaning; it was right there in this dissertation that pop culture could heal your brain in a real way, especially if the text in question spoke directly to your particular demographic. And that is worth studying.

Fandom across academic disciplines

I love this particular 90s sitcom trope: the setting is high school, and instead of a stuffy academic (think: Mr. Feeny on Boy Meets World), the new teacher rides a motorcycle to school and sits on the desk (think: Mr. Turner), asking students to throw out their textbooks and read a comic book as homework. Yes, this is a real Boy Meets World storyline from an episode that results in a debate between educators: should students read what the old canon of academia expects them to (that they find utterly boring) or is it a teacher’s responsibility to engage young minds with literature that they find more accessible? This “cool teacher” trope of encouraging alternative reading and finding knowledge outside of classroom redundancy is so popular that it occurred at least once on every TV show I watched as a teen.

Pop culture is a mirror of society, but often course reading is not, or it doesn’t seem like it could be. Especially if students don’t see themselves in a text, and struggle to find a thread of relatability. One argument for fandom in academia via fannish content is that it meets students where they are in their everyday lives. When the content is engaging, accessible, and feels familiar to their lived experience, it lowers the barrier to critical thinking.

In a scene in the movie 10 Things I Hate About You, feminist Kat (Julia Stiles) argues in her English class that reading Hemingway feels incomplete at best and a celebration of misogyny at worst. She argues that they could be opening the syllabus to read Sylvia Plath, Charlotte Bronte, Simone de Beauvoir—figures that speak to her experience as a woman instead of always reading texts by white men. It’s a poignant (and hilarious) scene because the students all hail from different backgrounds, but it speaks to the lack of intersectionality in the course reading. In another scene, Kat is seen reading The Bell Jar for fun and Heath Ledger’s Patrick famously gets her attention in a bookstore by asking her about Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique.

The irony here is that 10 Things I Hate About You, an iconic popular movie from 1999, is a modern retelling of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew. Shakespeare’s works are studied in high schools and universities all over the world and exist in the upper echelon of canonical literature. But at the time he lived, William Shakespeare’s plays were considered pop culture, and he didn’t even publish them. He was considered an entertainer, and theater was generally thought of as low brow, for the masses. Shakespeare met audiences where they were: his work reflected their own lives back at them, much like a modern limited series drama that drops on one of our streaming platforms is a mirror to our lived experience. At some point, the works of Shakespeare transcended into the literary canon of Western literature, probably because his well established tropes provide timeless insight into the human condition. But in his own time, he was just providing entertainment.

Case studies: pop culture in the classroom

There is an almost endless list of college courses that have introduced fandom and pop culture into their curriculum. And fandom itself has been carved into its own discipline, like this DePaul University minor program, Fandom Cult Media and Subculture, out of their College of Communications. As fandom evolves, it deserves expanded courses of study across both the humanities and sciences. Star Trek has long been studied across both literature and science over several disciplines, like media studies, STEM fields, and even language.

At New York University in 2022, The Clive Davis Institute introduced a course on Taylor Swift, the first of its kind. Taught by Rolling Stone’s , it focused on themes in Swift’s work as well as her evolution as an artist and the greater topic of pop singer/songwriters. From there, other universities, including Harvard, offered courses across disciplines from cultural studies like close reading Swift’s lyrics as novels and examining queer subtexts, to sociology and media studies, examining branding and the effects of her fandom on communities.

As evidenced by my own collegiate experience, Buffy the Vampire Slayer is one of the most popular fandom topics at universities. In 2012, Slate set out to find the fandoms that were most studied in academia and found that more than double the papers, essays and books could be attributed to the study of Buffy (or, Buffyology) than any other franchise at the time. Even today, fans come back to Buffy as a rich text that can be studied in terms of gender conversations, feminist studies, masculinity, family dynamics, sociology, ethics and spirituality, media studies, and more. I have to wonder what that Slate study would glean today! But other franchises in their results in 2012 included Alien, This Simpsons, The Wire, and The Matrix.

Colleges have also embraced Beyoncé. In 2010, Rutgers offered a course entitled “Politicizing Beyoncé” examining race, gender, and politics through the lens of her career. Other universities followed suit. In 2025, a new course was introduced at Yale: “Beyoncé Makes History: Black Radical Tradition, Culture, Theory & Politics Through Music” taught by African American Studies professor Daphne Brooks, covering the artist’s career as a study on Black history and social movements. Even the University of Copenhagen offered “Beyoncé, Gender and Race,” with Professor Erik Steinskog who expressed that their goal was to introduce Black feminist thought, a topic that isn’t well known in Scandinavia.

As a student, I took a class for my English degree called “Writing New York” at New York University. Most of us don’t remember every syllabus, or every book we read in school. But I remember so much of that course many years later. We studied the iconic poetry of Walt Whitman alongside the lyrics of Glen Campbell’s “Rhinestone Cowboy.” There was a whole unit on the punk scene of CBGB, the legendary bar that sat on the ground floor of a building just blocks away from our classroom, and examined lyrics written by The Ramones and Patti Smith.

We read the beat poets: Ginsberg and Kerouac, who famously hung out at the bars all around our campus like White Horse Tavern (where Dylan Thomas allegedly consumed 18 shots of whiskey just before his death) and the West End by Columbia University where I spent many hours as a graduate student. We dug pretty deep into Pete Seeger and his activism through folk music, and of course, Bob Dylan. What I realized in that class was that pop culture is literature; it is history. The musicians and poets we studied were tied directly to massive social movements and significant historical events.

Anything can be elevated to an academic pursuit

Ask any college student or take a look at a course catalog, and you’ll find that there is a natural tension between classical canon and cultural relevance that shifts over time. What would Shakespeare’s peers have been reading if they were attending college the way we know it at the time of his popularity? And had they known that the entertainer that they loved would be regarded as one of the most important voices in literature for hundreds of years, would that have changed their experience of his work as pop culture?

One thing I loved to do at school was go to the research library and pull copies of Cosmopolitan and Ladies’ Home Journal from the 1920s through the 1950s. Those old magazines could tell me what readers of the past cared about: the ads for vacuum cleaners were just as relevant to me as the interviews with famous actors of the day. It made me wonder if those pages served as an actual mirror to their societies, or portrayed an idealized one? It made me think about how a scholar from the next generation might pull issues of Seventeen Magazine from the 1990s to try to learn about what my generation cared about as teens, considering both what exists on those pages and what is glaringly absent. The very act of looking back and examining the meaning and context of a piece of literature, popular or not, makes it an academic pursuit.

Fans who analyze their fandoms in real time are indeed elevating the content to something worthy of study. It’s not necessarily the content that matters, but the critical framework and structure through which it is examined. I am a firm believer in that there are no guilty pleasures: only content that you enjoy for no other reason than you enjoy it. And nobody should ever feel guilty for consuming content that they love. But if I can apply an academic framework to a discussion of Bravo’s Summer House scandal and drama-filled reunion, you bet I am going to!

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I remember the first time I heard the question asked: “Team Dean, Team Jess, or Team Logan?” in reference to Gilmore Girls. I was listening to a podcast, and the hosts were asking a guest the question, “What Team are you on?”

I was really struck by this. Were there “teams” of fans who preferred a specific romantic match for Rory? (I realize now that this is a ridiculous question. It was 2017. Go with me here.) In all my years of watching and rewatching the show, I never once–not once!–considered any of these partners significant to the story of Rory’s development beyond what any relationship in one’s life does to further their evolution as a person. In fact, the main reason I had always loved the show was the mother/daughter/granddaughter relationships, and how the writers always centered these dynamics. It seemed so clear to me that the central thesis of the series was about generational bonds. All boyfriends were simply steps on Rory’s journey, nothing more.

When I attended a virtual watch party of the series in 2021 and subsequently attended an in-person fan festival later that year, I realized my opinion on what the show was about was not actually that popular. Fans had formed actual teams around Rory’s boyfriends, had an opinion of which was her best, and discussed them at length. Meanwhile, I was wondering why they were even worth discussing at all.

My unpopular opinion was (and is!) that the show isn’t about romance or partnering up in the slightest, and the three boyfriends serve Rory as one of two main characters of the show whose story we are meant to care about (the other being her mother Lorelai). Her boyfriends’ character arcs aren’t important, but rather they exist to show us how her personal growth ebbs and flows over the course of her young adulthood. Therefore, picking a “team” seems strange to me, at best.

We’ve all been here. We’ve all said the one thing that other fans don’t generally agree with. On social media like TikTok and Reddit, unpopular opinions and hot takes abound. There are countless “unpopular opinions” threads on the Gilmore Girls subreddit. The “unpopular opinions” hashtag on TikTok is extremely, well, popular. Disagreement on social media fuels engagement, making posts go viral, which is why we see more and more of it.

But what exactly is the function of an unpopular opinion? Contrarian statements and hot takes in fandom spaces definitely spark drama, but that’s not all they do. When used in the most productive way, they lead to incredible conversations and deepen our engagement with the stories and franchises we love.

What exactly is an unpopular opinion?

Think about your favorite franchises, books, and movies. What characters, storylines or relationships are beloved within those franchises? Which ones hit you a bit differently? And how does it make you feel?

Fandoms are in-groups. They are distinctive social spaces with their own social norms; writer and fan expert goes so far to call fandom “an altered state.” Whether you participate in them virtually, in person, or both, in any specific community we all want to feel heard and respected. We all know what it feels like to drop a comment we really believe in and get no response. Or worse, a pile-on of negative “no, you’re wrong” arguments and downvotes. Does it make us feel like less a part of the group? Often it does. Or, it feels antithetical to the social contract of being inside a fandom.

Social media has trained us to look for likes and echo chambers; it’s nice when we feel everyone agrees with us. So the unpopular opinion might be a surprise, and it can sting a bit. When your opinion clashes with the majority, it can feel like a rejection of you, not just your take. Fans often tie their identity deeply to the media they love, so rejection of an opinion can feel personal.

This is also why fans might form solidarity around teams (as in: Team Dean, Team Jess, Team Logan). It’s less of a risk to state an opposing opinion if you know you stand with a faction of fans who agree. We are conditioned to align ourselves with others out of psychological safety.

In the 1950s, a social psychology experiment, the Asch Conformity Experiment, proved that in a social situation, you might second-guess a correct answer when inside of a group that disagrees. The 2022 television show Jury Duty proved this experiment to comedic effect; Ronald Gladden knows that his jury duty stint feels unusual, but he goes along with all of it anyway, not realizing that he is part of a giant fictional hoax. In the context of fandom, you might soften or retract genuine opinions under perceived peer pressure so as to not disturb your social standing in the fandom group too much.

In modern society, having a hot take, especially via the internet, can gain you a following. While in the past we had shock jocks on the radio who provoked public sentiment for entertainment value, today we have influencers and commenters who want you to disagree with them for likes and shares. Engagement in the comment section can help that creator make a living.

But is it really fan discourse if the point is the performance of disagreement? And does that then make the opinion itself…popular? There is a difference between contrarianism for clout and genuine disagreement. The latter is what helps us build relationships and media literacy.

Genuine dissent can drive meaningful fan discourse

Fandom is definitely fun when everyone celebrates a franchise together. But inside of a fandom, things get really interesting when fans have genuine debates.

Recently when The Devil Wears Prada 2 hit theaters, there were tons of mixed to negative reviews from major outlets. While every critic seemed thrilled to see the stars of the iconic original back on film together, lots of opinions played down the actual story. Even some of my friends weren’t really into it and had complaints about Miranda being too soft, or Andie not seeming authentic as a journalist. I didn’t agree: the setting of a very different media world than the one we collectively experienced in 2006 would absolutely produce a softer Miranda. New media (websites, blogs, social media, etc.) changed traditional magazine and periodicals culture–and the creative titans that ran them–forever. So one hot take review caught my eye: A PureWow piece entitled “Sorry, You’re Wrong About ‘The Devil Wears Prada 2’ – That’s All” reflected all of my own unpopular opinions. This excerpt in particular:

This was my “hot take” too, and led to some really interesting conversations with friends about many topics: the state of media (a profession I became part of in the 2000s), aging, professional growth, the way technology changes culture and jobs, and legacy.

A person can make a lot of noise when they hate on content just to hate. Especially when it’s popular. In modern times it’s even rewarded via social media algorithms. And, let’s be honest: we’ve all vocally hated on something without much critical thought; friends in my orbit who unequivocally hate Taylor Swift without engaging with her music in a deep way come to mind. And yes, I do it too: I can think of a time where I said I thought Grey’s Anatomy was a bad show to friends and they all took offense (I watched the first season and never went back). Hot takes without thoughtful critique is common, even within fan communities that turn toxic with infighting. But when both parties come to the conversation in good faith, rather than hating just to criticize, the outcome is a deeper discussion about personal values, experiences, and worldviews. We might even learn something.

, an expert on socializing and author of The Art of Gathering, wrote a piece recently in defense of “skunk guesting.” Drawing on the phrase “the skunk at the garden party,” Parker attempts to name the phenomenon when a guest doesn’t just stay quiet and polite when invited to a gathering, but instead uses their invitation to say something provocative in a room full of people who are the prime audience. She writes, “It’s the choice to use your temporary belonging — your seat at the table, your proximity, your invitation — not just to enjoy the room, but to shape it. To widen the geography of conversation. To interrupt, when necessary, in service of a larger value.” A hot take in a room full of invested parties carries weight; it’s the perfect place to confront a topic that might ruffle some feathers.

If a given fandom is the gathering, the person with the unpopular opinion is, well, the skunk in Parker’s metaphor. And to her argument, that unpopular opinion has the ability to shape the room in a way it might not have been if something went unsaid. And chances are, the person who chooses to voice a hot take is not the only fan who possesses it; they simply might be the bravest to speak it. And being forthcoming can inspire others to join in, resulting in a much more dynamic room.

Furthermore, fan discourse that emanates from one person’s unpopular opinion informs more dialog because the argument itself begs a rewatch. If I hear a hot take I don’t agree with, I might go back to rewatch from that lens and see if I can see the unpopular opinion holder’s point of view. Even if my opinion doesn’t change, if nothing else I at least attempted to see someone else’s point of view (and we can all argue that’s generally a good thing). We are all entitled to change our opinions, too, so discussion after a rewatch is a great way to reexamine our thoughts on any piece of content.

Unpopular opinions challenge stan culture

Mainstream narratives serve a purpose: they get folks interested, help content gain fans, etc. But sometimes blind love goes too far.

In the year 2000, I was in college and “Stan,” by Eminem was an enormous hit. Eminem became famous while I was in high school, and I was extremely aware of his influence. The song was about a fan whose love of an artist turns dark; Eminem named the fan Stan in the song, but we can take it as a portmanteau of the words “stalker” and “fan.” Before “Stan,” we didn’t have a word for a kind of fan like this, and to hear young people use it now in conversation when they love a creator (as in, saying “I stan this musician!”) for some of us, it’s a bit triggering. The concept is hardly new; I’d been a teen when superstar Selena was murdered by the founder of her own fan club. But this new word for it has transformed in the past twenty+ years of fandom culture.

Obsessive and parasocial superfan relationships to actors, musicians, and other famous people have existed as long as I can remember. Social media has amplified the phenomenon, giving fans unprecedented access to the celebrities they admire. But what about superfans of a series or character?

In fandom spaces, ship wars, character assassination, and cancel culture all exist when it comes to fiction. Ship wars, for the unfamiliar, are intense disagreements within fandoms over which characters should be romantically entwined. Fanfiction spaces like AO3 are havens for fans to build their own fiction around the characters they love, but heated debates over which they choose to romantically pair together can erupt all over platforms like Reddit, Twitter/X, and Tumblr. In many fandoms, shippers choose sides and stay pretty loyal, and encounter what one fanfic writer of “Reylo” fanfic (the shipping of the Star Wars franchise characters Rey and Kylo Ren—it’s ok if you didn’t know it; I had to look that one up) called “shipping prejudice” from other fans.

When it comes to cancel culture in a fan community, those who have differing opinions face aggressive call-outs from others who don’t agree with their takes. While disagreements can foster conversation, there’s a fine line between healthy debate and toxic policing of fandoms by others within it. It’s not uncommon for fans who go against the grain inside fandom spaces to face some drama, bullying, or worse. Again, this is tied to identity and belonging: our fandoms are part of who we are, and when others present opinions that don’t align with the ones we believe inside a fandom, it can feel threatening. And the entire reason stan culture and fandom toxicity exists is because of an intense emotional connection to the stories and creators we love.

Unpopular opinions enrich the fan experience

Healthy debate stemming from unpopular opinions are great for fandoms. And maybe the platforms we are used to using just aren’t great for thoughtful fan discourse. Social media favors outrage, and takedowns are swift. So finding a space where all opinions are welcome is key. To reiterate Priya Parker’s thesis, a gathering where one feels free to be the skunk might be the most valuable room.

To take it back to Gilmore Girls, the podcast I was listening to when I first heard about the existence of the boyfriend “teams” was Gilmore Guys, hosted by Kevin T. Porter and Demi Adejuyigbe.

The two guys came to the show from a totally different perspective than I had, so listening to their podcast as it dropped week to week was an exhilarating, frustrating, often screaming-out-loud-to-nobody-about-how-wrong-they-were endeavor. By the end, I had heard all of their hot takes, disagreed with many, and was fascinated by their read on a show I thought I knew well. I walked away from every episode enlightened, realizing my perspective was limited.

The best fandoms aren’t echo chambers. They are fertile ground for conversations that need thoughtful unpopular opinions and hot takes to stay alive. I’ve made some of my best friendships by debating their hot takes. When we embrace diversity of thought, challenge ourselves to find out-of-left-field opinions on the media we love, we stay open to the possibility that an unpopular opinion could lead to deeper engagement with our fandoms, and friendships with others within them.

Want more? Our Discord is where you’ll find everything you need to know about the Remarkist ecosystem including Folkic, our community app! Don’t forget to follow us on Instagram, tumblr, and Spotify for more insights on fandom—and hit that subscribe button so you never miss a thing at rmrk*st Mag!

If you’re like me, you have a bunch of streaming platforms with a watchlist a mile long on each. But every time you sit down to enjoy a movie or series, you fire up something you’ve seen not only once, but several times before. And returning to an old fave doesn’t even begin to put a dent in your watchlist.

Here’s the thing about putting on a show for the 15th (or 50th) time: it’s not just a comfort watch, although that may be your initial reason for clicking over to a show you’ve seen before. I spent the better part of my twenties and thirties putting my Gilmore Girls DVDs on in the background while I did everything else: work, reading, putting away laundry, cleaning…even sleeping. At a certain point, I could recite every episode without looking at the screen. The background noise was like music, and we don’t ever judge ourselves for listening to our favorite bands and songs over and over; that’s what music is for!

We live in a culture where there’s always new content, everywhere. Constantly. There are endless queues on our streamers, and believe it or not, cable and network TV still exists and there’s great stuff there too. And social media content, video podcasts, and general internet entertainment can account for hours of viewing time a day. Yet we return to the same stories. Why?

Sometimes I think I’m being lazy, or participating in the equivalent of not trying a new food or getting out of my comfort zone to do something different. But I have come to realize that obsessive rewatching is not a failure of adventurousness or a symptom of comfort-seeking avoidance. Instead, I have come to think of it as one of the most sophisticated forms of engagement with fiction. Am I attempting to forge a valid excuse for firing up Happy Endings, an excellent sitcom from the 2010s, for the 30th time instead of trying out something completely different, like House of the Dragon? Yes. But I also have come to realize that obsessive rewatching is a practice that develops critical thinking, deepens curiosity, and reveals truths about storytelling that a single viewing can never produce.

The limits of the first watch

When you hear a song for the first time, are you tuned to the lyrics or the melody? Is it indeed one or the other? I have always been a melody first, lyrics later gal (unless it’s Taylor Swift). Others might experience the opposite. The point is, it takes a few listens of a song to consume it completely. It’s the same for watching movies and TV shows. The first watch is limited in a variety of ways.

On a first watch, the brain is being hit with a lot. We might just focus on plot, or the overall vibe. The first time I watched The West Wing, I was overwhelmed with the vibe of the show, which I really loved: the fast pacing, the signature Aaron Sorkin walk and talks, the hilarious one-liners from CJ, Josh, Toby and Donna. But a lot of the time, I couldn’t follow the actual plot. It was too much information, and the scripts were dense. On a third rewatch, I finally understood some of the more complicated, nuanced, political dealings that happened on the show. And it was so rewarding to finally absorb it all on subsequent rewatches. But who can focus on the plot when this walk and talk is so great?

On the first watch, we might not have a lot of processing capacity beyond the basic plot-driven facts: the who, what, where, when, or why. And since the story is new, we might miss foreshadowing, or the nuances in the storytelling that sets up the ending. Maybe we miss pieces of the thematic architecture, understanding only at the end that the show was a play within a play, or told in memories, or…told in reverse. Maybe dialog has more meaning than you pick up on during the first time around.

A first watch is an orientation; it can be really exciting on its own. But if you love to dive deeper, it’s a preview to the main event: a second or third viewing. Rewatching once you know the ending can be really rewarding; the scene that looks like one thing in episode one and becomes something completely different when you return to it knowing episode ten. Or, watching a movie like The Sixth Sense knowing the ending becomes a completely different experience than watching it for the first time.

Some works are designed for return, built with layers that reward the attentive rewatcher specifically. A rewatch is where you notice Easter eggs you might not have before, or realize that the last episode featured a pretty good callback to the first. When I finished reading Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin, I immediately turned back to the first page and reread the first 2-3 chapters. I immediately saw snippets I’d forgotten, seemingly insignificant mentions I now knew, knowing the ending of the book, held a ton of weight.

Freeing our attention

On a first watch the brain is fully occupied tracking plot, leaving almost no capacity for anything else. It’s like going on a rollercoaster for the first time: you’re not sure of the ups, downs, twists and turns so you’re taking in what you can and getting surprised along the way. A rewatch eliminates that cognitive burden entirely and the eye is suddenly free to notice everything it missed the first time.

Our brains are also free to engage in anticipation. To further the rollercoaster metaphor, now we can look forward to the best drops, or, the most powerful moments of a series or movie. Whenever I’m watching a movie I love, I am gearing myself up for those rollercoaster-equivalent moments. In May 2026, theaters will show the iconic movie Legally Blonde in honor of its 25th anniversary. I know I’ll be waiting in anticipatory glee to hear “What, like it’s hard?” for the hundredth time–but this time on the big screen again and with other fans.

Humans are also hard-wired to recognize patterns. Neuroscience confirms that the brain is so good at recognizing patterns, that we actually crave it. We like to find structure in unfamiliar territory. So when we are familiar with the content, repeated exposure allows us to see more and more each time because cognitively, our brains have built better maps of what we are watching. This is why fans of shows they’ve watched repeatedly might finally catch something out of place or mistake: a boom mic, a background character doing something strange that they’ve never noticed before, or a continuity error like a misplaced plate or strand of hair scene to scene.

Freeing up attention also can change our emotional reactions. I’m the kind of person that watched Stranger Things with one eye on the screen and my hand over my face just because I was so tense not knowing when a jumpscare was coming. I could barely process the plot because I was nervous. But on the third rewatch, I knew exactly when (spoiler alert!) Barb would disappear. I could watch the scene with two eyes open and just be sad to see her go. Knowing what is coming does not eliminate emotion but transforms it. Dread replaces surprise, dramatic irony replaces shock, a richer and more complex emotional engagement replaces the simpler one of the first watch.

A known narrative as a safe container for genuine emotion; we can feel things fully inside that container. Fans often have comfort shows they return to like Gilmore Girls, Parks & Recreation, The Office or Friends because the characters make them feel safe…like actual friends.

What we’re really doing during a rewatch

I grew up an amateur dancer, and one thing we were trained to do was to get to a point with practice and repetition that the steps felt like second nature. Knowing a routine cold, so well you’d forget you were doing it, allows you to focus on the performance. It’s the same skill set when we know material well: we can focus on other things when we’re not preoccupied with getting from point A to B.

What I really love about a rewatch is the opportunity to develop a skill for what the literature community would call a “close reading.” Close reading is when you don’t just read the text (or watch the content), but you reread, over and over, to analyze it from different angles. Rewatching helps us develop a skill for close reading. As a former English major this is something I get really excited about: attention to structure, sensitivity to pattern and repetition, and awareness of the gap between surface and depth is all on the table in a close reading.

A fan of Gilmore Girls might say that Logan is Rory’s “Christopher,” meaning that when Rory gets into a relationship with a person from the world of the Gilmores (read: upper class, wealthy, lots of society rules), that relationship mimics that of her mother Lorelai’s relationship with her father. Engaging in this world is trepidatious; Lorelai ran from this world (and Christopher) when got pregnant with Rory. Their relationship didn’t survive because it was tied to the upper crust existence where social rules are adhered to. Rory is raised in a very different world, the one of small town Stars Hollow, where a Luke type (read: Jess) could be her romantic destiny.

Picking apart these characters and what they represent, where they fit into the Gilmore women’s lives, and how their existence is related to patterns of identity and individualism in the show is all part of close reading a narrative. In other words, close reading allows us to build critical thinking skills.

Obsessive rewatching of a show we already love helps us watch new things too. When honed, this skill transfers to how we watch new content. A keen eye might notice a continuity pattern error quickly, or catch an Easter egg drop because they’re tuned to noticing details. Taylor Swift fans are so used to her hidden messaging in plain sight that she can’t even appear in a photo going out to dinner without fans taking detailed notice of everything she wears that might be representative of a new project. of Taylor Swift Style breaks down every clothing, jewelry, and accessory item that might tell a bigger story about what the artist is up to. She is keenly aware of how Taylor tells a story, so she—and her followers—are primed to look for specific details. A person who rewatches obsessively begins to watch new things differently. They’re more attentive, more analytical, and more curious up front. They stop taking things for granted and instead are prepared to look for clues or foreshadowing.

Obsessive rewatching generates rather than satisfies curiosity. Returning to the text produces new questions rather than answering old ones. And furthermore, the rewatch acts as a gateway to adjacent curiosity: the show that sent you to the book it was based on, the film that sent you to the director’s entire filmography, the series that sent you to the historical period it was set in or led to more research. Or in the case of Gilmore Girls, the obscure cultural references that led you to learn more about them. For author Matt Browning, curiosity led to writing Gilmore Girls Pop Culture Reference Guide, a book deciphering the many references in the show.

Why we rewatch

These days there is just a lot going on. Our attention spans are at an all time low, constantly being hijacked by news, entertainment content, notifications, etc. The ability to be everywhere and see everything all at once from a small device you can fit in your hand is convenient, sure. But at the same time, it’s more than overwhelming. We binge a new show over a weekend and promptly forget about it two weeks later. We’re always looking for the next thing, and that’s not difficult, because the next thing is popping up on our feeds within seconds.

The choice to return to something known in a culture engineered for distraction is meaningful. In an oversaturated world, rewatching a favorite show or movie is a deliberate act of resistance against the attention economy’s demand for constant novelty. It’s also a conscious choice to slow down and revel in one fandom.

Rewatching also helps us build community. As we feel further disconnected, fandom around a franchise we have loved for many years on end gives us access to rewatch parties, in-person festivals, and conversations.

Rewatch podcasts, anniversary screenings, and even long-awaited sequels that have us rewatching the original content en masse (hello, The Devil Wears Prada!) make us feel more connected than ever. While a solo rewatch can be fantastic, participating in it with other fans exposes us to other opinions, perspectives, and collective intelligence of a group of attentive viewers. Rewatch podcasts, often hosted by superfans or creators of the content themselves, helps us take a look back and reframe content we loved in the past. We confront our opinions with a more evolved lens, which can be rewarding in and of itself.

So next time you feel bad about rewatching an old show when your queue is a mile long, don’t! Find other fans, search around for a rewatch podcast, or simply slow down and enjoy what you love.

Want more? Our Discord is where you’ll find everything you need to know about the Remarkist ecosystem including Folkic, our community app! Don’t forget to follow us on Instagram, tumblr, and Spotify for more insights on fandom—and hit that subscribe button so you never miss a thing at rmrk*st Mag!

When I was a preteen, I was obsessed with Boy Meets World from the moment the pilot aired. We had recorded one of the episodes on our trusty family VCR, probably because we had plans on the night it aired. Back then, if you were going to be away from your television when a show was on, you were going to miss it. (The VCR really changed our lives.) I remember when I got my hands on the tape and pressed play. This wasn’t an episode like the first three that had already aired. Season 1, Episode 4 was what would become one of the series’ most iconic: “Cory’s Alternative Friends.” If you’re a fan, you know the one. Cory, a curly haired boy, overhears a couple of girls talking about a classmate’s hair, calling him “a total Brillo head.” Cory assumes they’re talking about him and gets self-conscious, so attempts to straighten his hair with his friend Shawn’s help. Shawn gets the straightening product from his “sister” Stacey, and things go horribly wrong.

Cory’s hair looks ridiculous. And so, because this is middle school, he has to sit with at the “Weirdo Table,” consisting of a group of misfits. In the meantime, he is assigned to work on a project with Topanga, a hippie child who comes on strong and is a bit strange (though I would argue she’s stylish, environmentally conscious, and emotionally intelligent which is pretty cool). The episode culminates with Cory joining the “Weirdo” kids and Topanga, who have all been kind to him while he’s been publicly shunned for his hair, in a meaningful protest to attempt to save the school librarian’s job. At the end, Topanga kisses Cory at the lockers (and 12 yr old me lost her MIND).

Over three decades later, this episode is still a fan favorite. The show went on to have 7 seasons, and its major storylines included Shawn’s family life and Cory and Topanga’s romance. I bring that up because while this episode is iconic, it sets up facts about the characters that are never addressed again: namely, Shawn having a sister, Topanga’s parents’ hippie-ish names, and Topanga and Cory having zero relationship as of the 6th grade. The subsequent seasons go on to focus on these characters and these specific relationships, but these establishing facts are forgotten or overlooked for the duration of the series. It’s a point of fan contention that Cory and Topanga’s origin story changes again and again as the writers insist on their destiny as life partners, having met as babies on the playground.

On their podcast, Pod Meets World, actors Danielle Fishel and Rider Strong, who played these characters, often joke about how ridiculous it is that these plot holes abound. But for this fan, it’s refreshing to hear them talk about it. While plot holes are narrative failures that exist for all sorts of reasons, they are nevertheless invitations for discussion. For Fishel and Strong, they use these plot holes to speak to the realities of showbusiness, what the writer’s room dynamics might have been throughout the seasons, and their own understanding of their characters as the show progressed as they wondered about season renewals every year. All of these topics are insightful for fans to learn about. For regular fans with no personal connection to the production of content, plot holes offer an opportunity for us to question our relationships with fiction. What are we willing to overlook for the sake of story? And what really matters?

What is a plot hole, really?

Inconsistencies plague fiction all the time. Observant fans pick up on continuity mistakes and anachronist errors (or even just production errors) often. Many shows start with a pitch bible that leads the series through at least early seasons. A show bible contains lengthy character outlines and story arcs, defines the rules and facts of the story world, and sketches a progression of how the series will evolve. Writers refer to these documents when breaking new stories or pitching scripts.

Sometimes overall plot is stronger than details, and characters are rewritten either in their history or relationship to others. These plot holes feel almost intentional to serve a greater purpose, as it seems to have happened on Boy Meets World. Or on a soap opera or telenovella, continuity is sacrificed for drama all the time. It’s more compelling to have someone come back from the dead or reappear as a long lost sibling than the more realistic version, or one that adheres closely to past events in the narrative.

And when a series goes on for longer than the original writers intended, plot holes might be inevitable. The X-Files ran for so long that a lot of things didn’t make sense after a while, and not just because it was a sci-fi series where you’d expect unexplained phenomena.

Plot holes might even be subjective: what reads as a plot hole to one viewer might read as intentional ambiguity to another. Did the creators forget something? Or are we meant to clock it and wonder?

Why do plot holes bother us?

As humans, we are wired to try and make sense of everything we see. It’s one of our most native traits: before human civilization even existed, we created language and a means of documenting our observations about our surroundings. Plot holes mess with this innate need.

That nagging feeling that something is off can preoccupy your brain, losing you as an invested participant in the story. Plot holes can be frustrating, confusing, and even take a person out of the narrative experience.

Plot holes can affect our investment too. We might love a movie in spite of its plot holes, maybe even because of them. But an ill-placed plot hole in a series we’ve been enjoying for a while, especially if we’ve been previously impressed with its attention to detail, can really make fans angry. A series like Lost had a lot of dedicated fans in the beginning, fans who were so excited by the fact that it seemed the writers thought of everything, only to lose them when things started to make less sense and come out of left field. There is always a relationship between creator and consumer, and when that trust is broken, it’s hard to come back from.

It’s also possible that plot holes bother us as fans when we really love something, and don’t necessarily want to admit it is flawed. We all form deep connections to the stories we love, and as the saying goes, love is blind. Have you ever loved a movie so much when a friend says, “meh, I thought it was weird when….” and points out an inconsistency? Or when you’re watching something with someone else and their response to something on screen is “yeah, right, that would never happen…” you feel deflated? Plot holes might reveal that we either missed something big because we were too enthralled by the content, or that we are gullible and buy into something without reason. In short, a plot hole might reveal something about ourselves we aren’t too excited to confront.

Some fans are so bothered that they take plot holes into their own hands. They write fanfiction, or complete the story in a way they feel it should be completed, in an effort to correct a mistake, or what they perceive as one.

Why plot holes are great conversation starters

If you’re like me, your idea of a good time is discussing content and really digging into a close reading. But sometimes, a piece of fiction is just really wrapped up, and doesn’t ask, or compel me to ask, any meaningful questions. This actually frustrates me, as someone who loves to pick something apart in all the best ways, for great conversation. A plot hole is a perfect way to get a good conversation started. Shared irritation? That’s just another way to bond with other fans.

Let’s take Boy Meets World and the soulmates issue that drives the last half of the entire series and even inspired a Girl Meets World spinoff. Raising the stakes for Cory and Topanga’s love story might have meant sealing their destiny from the playground. But audiences might disagree. Is it more powerful for them to have met as toddlers knowing they would be together forever immediately (as much as one can know that sort of thing at 5 years old)? Or is it richer storytelling to reference the episode where we meet Topanga and get to know her as Cory does, and follow a linear love story from there? As a fan, I would argue the latter is a way more compelling love story: meeting a person from a totally different social group at 12, befriending them, and finding connection in the process provides endless story opportunities. But others might disagree, and prefer the destiny storyline. Whichever speaks to you as a fan might reveal something about your own thoughts on true love.

Inconsistencies can offer perpetual conversation. In Gilmore Girls, fans are constantly bringing up that the character, Kirk, played by Sean Gunn, shows up a couple of times in the earliest episodes before becoming a regular character on the show.

In one episode, he’s an unnamed swan delivery man. He goes by Mick in another episode, as a DSL installation technician. His name and origin story changes, as in later seasons we are told that other characters have known him his whole life, while earlier versions of the character feel like a stranger to the townies. But we could see Kirk as the DSL installation guy or delivering swans because his series-long bit is that he has many different jobs. There are many explanations given by the creators as to why this unfolded the way it did, but fans are still talking about it.

Entire communities form around plot hole discussion; a quick search on Reddit will show you many conversations devoted to the same writerly mistake. These plot holes sometimes unite and sometimes divide fandoms, but the fact is that they do offer some form of community conversation.

Plot hole? Or literary device?

Like I said, the human brain is wired to pick up on inconsistencies. So when we clock a plot hole, that might be the author or creator’s intent: to grab our attention. A deliberate gap might come back later.

As fans, it’s sometimes important to recognize the difference between an accidental plot hole and a point of mystery. One of my favorite story devices is when an event is glossed over in a narrative, barely noticeable, but the story comes back to it later. Whether seen in flashbacks, revisiting a scene from another perspective from another character’s point of view, etc. Anything that takes the viewer or reader back to fill the plot hole is so satisfying to me; coming back to a moment to explain it further or reveal what was really going on, or what someone saw, often offers a twist that instantly feels exciting. Intentional plot holes can be a lot of fun, especially when you like to be surprised or having your suspicions that something was off confirmed.

There’s also the plot hole that doesn’t resolve: an ending that doesn’t make sense or is open to too much interpretation. While this can be frustrating for fans, it might be the author’s intention to keep them guessing. A plot hole can set up sequels, more storytelling, leave them dissatisfied, or provide opportunities for retconning, which can really get people talking. It’s been decades and to this day fans are still discussing the ending of The Sopranos. Of course, one could argue if an ambiguous ending is a plot hole at all.

Embracing flawed stories

As for Boy Meets World, I can honestly say I was annoyed by the insistence on retconning the facts about characters I’d come to deeply love. But I kept watching all through my teens, until the very last episode aired. When I think of the series, I think of 12 yr old me, rewinding my VHS recording of “Cory’s Alternative Friends” over and over, guarding the cassette so nobody in my family would mistakenly tape over it, and now, I occasionally watch it on Disney Plus as an adult. I’m totally invested in hearing from the actors from the show on their podcast every week. The series meant everything to me because of that episode, and I can accept that future episodes pretty much assume my favorite episode never even happened. At the end of the day, the plot holes were no match for my devotion.

Sometimes we love something so much that plot holes cease to matter. A dedicated fan will notice inconsistencies, but accept them as part of the charm of the content. A gap in narrative is the gap where fans live: we thrive in the space between what the story gave us and what we needed it to give to us. Devotion to the content we love is deep and unconditional, and tracking flaws is evidence of how fully we receive stories.

Noticing a plot hole is the story’s way of telling you that you were attuned to it, that you cared enough to notice. A discussion about inconsistencies is in essence a discussion about our attention and where we focus it. While we watch a lot of content these days with one eye on our phones and our heads in many different places, noticing a plot hole might be a win in and of itself. It signals that we focused our attention on a fictional world for a bit of time, and isn’t that the point?

I want to hear about some of the plot holes that you love, that bug you, that fans discuss a lot or not enough. Share yours in the comments!

Want more? Our Discord is where you’ll find everything you need to know about the Remarkist ecosystem including Folkic, our community app! Don’t forget to follow us on Instagram, tumblr, and Spotify for more insights on fandom—and hit that subscribe button so you never miss a thing at rmrk*st Mag!

It’s May, a month full of both beginnings and endings. May always makes me think of season finales and a looming hiatus. Before streaming culture, network television seasons were broken up into two halves. The fall lineups would start in September with new shows and returning favorites, and break just before the holidays. After the new year, the spring would offer mid-season replacement shows and premieres. A season of TV would end, culminating in series cliffhangers and finales. We would have the whole summer to speculate on how our favorite shows would come back in the fall. Three long months to think about future character arcs and plot lines, or speculate about cliffhangers and the mysteries we were left with to wonder about. And that fascination is what kept us sustained.

That feeling has now been democratized to every season; with streaming we are always waiting for one thing while enjoying another and looking forward to something else. And while that’s in a lot of ways more exciting, May still feels like a time to wrap things up as we prepare for the summer and future seasons. With that in mind, we think you’ll love our content topic for this month.

Before we tell you what our May theme is, let’s take a look back at what you may have missed during April. Our content theme was Fanfare, where we took a deeper look at how we build excitement around the stories we love.

Anticipation is an art form when done well, and we took a look at how the waiting period for a movie or TV show to be available is often one of the best parts of fandom. One big movie release that we couldn’t wait for this year? Project Hail Mary, based on the book of the same name by Andy Weir. This led us to ask the question: is the book always better than the movie? The answer is complicated.

Looking at the Gilmore Girls fandom, we tracked the rise of fan festivals, as folks who have found fandom online grow tired of only using social media to connect with other fans. We also considered what happens to a lonely fan that cannot find a fandom community, and how they might find positives and negatives in the solitude.

In May, we’re channeling that vibe of speculation when it comes to season finales that this time of year has been known for in the past. Our topic is…Curiosity! If you participate in fandom by asking questions, analyzing plot details, and looking for clues, this month is for you. We’ll look at how multiple rewatches of TV shows and movies inspire new understandings of content. We’ll investigate why plot holes really stick in our brains and affect how we watch. With fandom making appearances on college campuses, we’ll look at the academic approach to fandom content. And we’ll dig deep on why unpopular opinions can be so fun to have, share, and discuss.

So bring your notebooks and pencils, and get ready to examine storyworld content closely. Sometimes to love something is to investigate it from multiple angles!

Take note of our Table of Contents below. Make sure to follow us on Instagram, and also John Cabrera for special announcements and reflections. You can always find more information on our Discord where we post regular updates about the Remarkist ecosystem. We have some big things coming up, and you won’t want to miss it!

1. What Plot Holes Reveal About How Deeply We Love Fiction

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2. The Rewatch Effect: How Returning to Stories Again and Again Make us More Curious

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3. Unpopular Opinions in Fandom: Why Dissenting Voices Make Fan Communities Better

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4. Fandom vs. The Canon: Why Pop Culture Belongs in School

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In the spring of 2019, I stumbled upon a series on Netflix that hooked me from the first episode and captivated me for a fairly short, intense binge. The show was The Society, a teen drama about a group of high schoolers who go on a field trip, and upon returning everyone in their town has completely vanished. Scared and abandoned, the teens come together to form a new society, and natural leaders and villains emerge while they pool resources and make rules for how they’ll continue living in a new reality. The show pulled me in immediately, forced me to confront questions about what I might do in that situation, gave me quite a few jump scares, and ultimately ended on an incredible cliffhanger. I couldn’t wait for a second season.

I asked friends about it. “Surely, you’ve watched The Society?” Nobody I knew had. More than that, there wasn’t any conversation in my social media feeds or online in any obvious ways. I had had an intense experience, but nobody to share it with. It was genuinely weird, and lonely.

The show was renewed for a second season, but the global pandemic got in the way and it was never filmed. Until recently, I didn’t even know that it was respected or even remembered by others; the recent consensus amongst those who did watch it is that it was a masterful show that ended too soon. So at least now, I can rest easy knowing I wasn’t totally alone in my fandom, and it’s validating to learn it had critical acclaim and enthusiasts despite getting canceled.

When we experience great content, we feel a natural inclination to share it with others. One of my favorite things is when I watch something by myself that blows my mind, then ask a friend if they’ve seen it, and feel that moment of connection when they respond, “YES! I LOVED it! We MUST discuss!” Fans have an inherent urge to debrief and/or celebrate something they’ve discovered. So what do we do when we experience love for something alone? What happens to a fan without a fandom?

Why community around fandom works

Validation is important to the human condition. We want to feel understood, and known, by others. In the very center of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs is Love and Belonging, and community around fandom provides a sense of belonging that can also lead to deep friendships and love. We all know how good it feels to be part of something, whether it’s enjoying music with other fans at a concert, going to a book signing and author chat, or attending a fandom convention. It is validating to know that what we choose to engage with is important not only to us, but to others.

There’s also pride in loving something that others love too. When you become a fan of something, and see others are fans too, it feels like a marker of having good taste. When we recommend a book, movie, music group to a friend who in turn loves it, we can feel pride in either knowing what’s “good” or knowing our friend well enough to make a recommendation, or both. For those who love celebrating content, showing others a great time in that celebration is essential.

When community fails to emerge

Do you remember the last time you made a recommendation and it was rejected? Maybe you said to a friend, “I loved this movie–did you see it?” and that friend says “Yeah, I saw it, I didn’t love it” and you feel crushed? A disagreement over liking something can feel like disconnection. While fans within a fandom might debate facets of story or character, the one thing those fans absolutely have in common is the agreement that the content is worth engaging with. Within that fandom, lots of different personalities will emerge, but everyone is essentially on the same page.

It’s worth breaking down why some might not follow your fandom, and examine why that feels like a kind of rejection:

A Genuinely Uninterested person might hear your passion, note it, and say “nope, I don’t think I’d like it” and move on without any drama. While the rejection is not at all personal, this can be deeply frustrating. We are all guilty of this; a friend of mine is often telling me I’ve really missed out not watching Game of Thrones, but I simply am not interested.

A Perpetual Promiser heeded your recommendation and is always meaning to get to it. They heard you, they noted your passion, but something is always getting in the way of them following through. While it’s not usually personal, this rejection feels hollow: you might be so eager to hear what they think of the content, because you’re anticipating a celebratory discussion with them. And if they seem too busy, it doesn’t feel dissimilar to a friend blowing you off.

The Partial Convert has taken your recommendation, watched a couple of episodes, and simply stopped engaging. It’s agonizing because you know deep down they don’t share the same enthusiasm, because if they did they would have completed it. Furthermore, you understand that they didn’t feel the same compulsion to love it as you did.

An Active Resister makes you feel like you’re overselling the content you ride or die for, and that can feel uncomfortable. It also defeats the purpose of the recommendation in the first place. Maybe they would have loved the content on their own if you weren’t pushing it so hard all the time. This paradox is often evident in pop culture; I remember in my college days seeing absolutely everyone on the subway reading The Da Vinci Code. If everyone was reading it, I decided it couldn’t possibly be good, and actively resisted it for years. When I finally did read the book, I had a great time, but I remember flat out resisting it so much. When content has to “live up to the hype,” it might fail with a would-be fan regardless of the predication that they might like it otherwise.

You might have recommended content to The Wrong Audience, which is again a form of rejection in and of itself. Not considering your pitch wouldn’t have worked regardless of how passionate it is feels like a failure of understanding who the content is for, and challenges those relationships. I often find this with content that has a strong point of view on a sociological or political issue; recommending content that makes an overt argument can be polarizing, and isn’t for everyone.

Finally, a Delayed Convert shows up late to a fandom, or the content you recommended. Fandoms tend to treat a Delayed Convert in different ways; they either embrace them outright or impose a hierarchy of who got there first, determining “real fans” from “bandwagoners” the way a band’s fandom might treat others when the band breaks out from indie to commercial popularity. In an interpersonal relationship, you might not have the same passion you did three years ago for a movie you watched then, so the delay impacts how you can celebrate it with a new fan.

The unexpected joy of solo evangelism

We talk a lot about fandom communities and how they can be inclusive or exclusive, healthy or toxic. When fan communities primarily meet online, it can feel like finding one’s tribe for a while. But without a real world element there is a limit to those interactions. Consistently experiencing fandom through a screen can feel lonely, unless you can find meetups and fan fests, or some way to actually meet one another. In the same way, solo fandom can be isolating. But there are some ways it can be fulfilling.

There is something to be said for keeping something for oneself and not sharing it with others, whether that’s because they’re uninterested or you simply want to keep it private. There is one TV show that I am always hesitant to recommend, and it’s because I love it intensely in a way that feels too personal. I once recommended it to a very close friend, and she gave it a lukewarm review. It crushed me; I realized I couldn’t handle any criticism of the show at all, because a part of me needed it to stay as perfect in my mind as it did during my first viewing. I devoured it when it first released in April of 2020, in a time that was extremely isolating and scary, and the show was a lifeline of joy for me.

In an admittedly vulnerable move, I will divulge here that the show is Mindy Kaling’s Netflix series, Never Have I Ever. I have watched the first season, which I deem a perfect season of television, probably more than 30 times, even just to listen to in the background of my waking (or sleeping) hours. I can’t even fathom watching it in the same room as others, much less recommending it to friends whose opinions I care about. (Please go watch it if you haven’t; just don’t tell me your thoughts unless they’re extremely positive!)

When you love something alone but publicly, it can be taxing. You might find yourself in a constant state of defense. But you can choose not to let criticism get in the way of building your own relationship with something you love.

On their podcast, Las Culturistas, hosts Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang always ask their guests one essential question: “What was the culture that made you say that culture was for you?” It’s a revealing question that asks guests to remember their earliest brushes with content that spoke to them. Our early, private fandoms often inform how we interact with content in general.

We were all young once, consuming content by ourselves, often alone, until something resonated with us. The things that captured our attention when we were young are foundational texts that shape our perceptions. These formative experiences set the stage for our future fandoms and participation in fandom communities.

But a private fandom in adulthood helps shape who we are as well. Without the noise of criticism or even blind excitement, we can deeply get to know what we love. When a piece of content is entirely yours, it can be separated from any sense of communal history with an established fandom, or influence from others.

Being alone in your fandom also means you never have to defend it. Any Taylor Swift fan has been through something like this: when the artist says or does something that nonfans don’t understand, or appears “overexposed” in pop culture, there’s a lot of vocal criticism in the ether. Fans of hers not only feel compelled to explain, but they are often asked to defend their fandom in those moments, which is both exhausting and feels unfair. After all, being a fan doesn’t mean standing for everything a piece of art says or everything an artist believes. But if you love something privately, you never have to answer for it.

When you finally find a community

Community exists for everything, somewhere. Chances are you’ll eventually find a Discord server, a Substack article, a social media account, a podcast, or a watch party group at some point. There is a particular joy in finding another fan of something you love and who also felt alone in loving. Recognizing a fan of an obscure show or band builds an immediate bond; you both carried the same private enthusiasm and built strong relationships to the content on your own.

What are some books, movies, or TV shows that you love and are struggling to find other fans like you? Put them in the comments! Not only do we want to know what we might be missing out on, but let’s help you crowdsource some fandom communities!

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