On Fandom and Gods

I read “What Polytheists Can Learn from Fandom” today. First off, the piece had some good takeaways:

• An emphasis on building coalitions through a lattice of local, semi-local, national, and international events and loose affiliations of people is important for the future of polytheism.
• We can do things that respect the diversity of religions and traditions within polytheism while creating some cohesion.

The message in that post is very welcome. These are the things that I hope will push conversations forward and lead to harmony and unity within our communities, and I recommend reading the post.

However, I am very cautious about framing coalition-building as we can learn from Fandom. We could learn from any decentralized network that is still able to get things done and be there for its community members, and there are a few compelling reasons why Fandom is not a good choice. Fandom is a very particular subculture, and there are many people for whom that model is not a good fit even though Fandom itself is fine.

• Fandom has strong ties to consumerism and materialism.
  • If you have read what I said about the basics of ritual (and shrine minimalism), I encourage people to purchase goods from our own artisans, but also to avoid purchasing too much. Everything in moderation. You have to take care of everything physical you give to the Gods.
    • This is not a message I see in Fandom.
  • Our movement needs to care about the environment, exploitation, and materials.
    • Example: I have mixed feelings about Instagram culture and the emphasis on commodity items and material goods when people share what they’re doing. I vastly prefer it when I see things that focus on the Gods and not the materials used to venerate them.
    • Example: I mentioned on Twitter a while back that I’d like to see prayer bead makers move away from crystals because those are mined in unethical ways, and wood, bone, and stone beads work just as well. There are woods and plants related to specific Gods, too.
• There have been many conversations on Twitter about people treating the Gods as if they are a fandom when they’re literally an integral part/cause of the universe.
  • If we want to encourage solid, stable devotional practices, we have to choose models that encourage a healthy mindset: Religion is not a hobby.
  • I think it’s awesome that people are making blogs &c. devoted to adoring specific Gods. This bullet point is not about that practice at all. As long as it’s not being used as a replacement for cultus itself, it’s great!
  • There is some crossover between the mythology/mythlit fandoms and polytheists. This can lead to good synergies, waaaay out there hot takes, and/or interpersonal conflict — I’ve seen all three. Cultivating a sense of mindfulness in such situations matters.
• Treating the Gods like Fandom can intimidate newbies who may feel like they don’t belong because they are not devotees. Many just want to honor the existence of Gods and learn how to do basic worship, not become theologians, mystics, devotees, esoterica initiates, or diviners.

With that said, I’m going to outline why I think the way I do.

TL;DR: I used to be a geek/nerd, but don’t identify as that anymore because Comic-Con shocked my system and I just could not even. In fact, Comic-Con is probably the #2 reason I became a minimalist. (The #1 reason was something that happened in grad school that I won’t go into.) Welcome to my baggage room.

As a child, I grew up in a household that consumed B-movies, Star Trek, Star Wars, and other things that would be considered “geekery” today. I got heavily into Battlestar Galactica when the remake came out because it was intellectually stimulating, and I loved how it commented on contemporary issues through the lens of science fiction. In 2005, when I started at Smith College, though, the Smith Science Fiction and Fantasy Society was intimidating. I wasn’t sure if I qualified as a geek, so I didn’t start attending meetings or events until the spring semester (2006) because I knew some SSFFSians and they assured me that I belonged. I got into LARP and gaming that spring.

Keith mentions ConBust, so I’ll just throw this out there: I was involved in the planning my sophomore and senior years, but not my junior year — my junior year, I was studying abroad in the UK during the spring. I participated in and ran LARP and tabletop role-playing games, mostly 2nd ed. World of Darkness. A group of us would gather in the SSFFS library to watch old episodes of Doctor Who, and I set aside feelings of not belonging, at least for a while. While studying abroad, I went to a small Doctor Who con because it was the UK and why not, and I realized that I didn’t belong there because as interesting as I found the show, I had not dived into it with the enthusiasm of the people who were there.

The year I stopped identifying as a geek was 2013. I was 26. It was the year I went to New York City Comic-Con, which a coworker told me about. It was … overwhelming. Merch covered every surface where it was possible to vend things, a busy orgy of consumerism, and the overcrowded, long-waiting-line-and-no-guarantees-of-getting-in panels were more like icing on the cake that just told people to buy things.

I went back home from that and looked at the things I’d acquired over the years — vaguely geeky shirts from Threadless and ThinkGeek, some plastic franchise merch from things I was into, and the like. It was a weird feeling in my chest, a sense of pollution and a desire to just purge it all. I reflected again on the feelings of disquiet I had had around geeks in college, how I had never felt like I had fit in. I realized that the actual issue was commercialism, consumerism, and materialism — the desire to acquire, the push for physical items as status indicators, and the like.

That year, I donated most of it. On Twitter, I started to notice the number of times I saw people share their object collections, how they contextualized the photographs, the way that much of it seemed like a performance. I realized that I didn’t read for escapism, but because I love seeing the worlds that creators make and the decisions each creator works through to give life, breath, and voice to the characters in their stories — an extension of how much I love talking with other people and learning more about them, how they got where they are, and how they think. My values were very different from most of the other geeks and nerds I knew. Why was something (Fandom, or a fandom) that gives so many people joy and a sense of belonging making me feel like I was suffocating? What if I wasn’t actually a geek or nerd at all?

It’s impossible to separate my plunge into minimalism from the materialism shock of ComicCon.

On Google+, because I was afraid of the reaction and nobody used Google+, I shared my thoughts about why I would no longer use the terms geek or nerd. Most of the time since, I have successfully avoided the term. It’s really difficult to find other adjective words sometimes, though, for geeky and nerdy, and I thus slip sometimes. (I am a bookworm, though.)

For a few years after, I gamed, at least until I started to feel a push to do my own creative projects again, like new greenery in a meadow after winter. (I had still been doing creative things, but most were gaming-related. I’m one of the people behind the massive DIY Purified port for the Chronicles of Darkness, as an example. Purified are so weird because they’re basically a supernatural type based on Western Esotericism and the elixir of life, and that’s probably why I liked them so much.) My move back towards my a priori creative work was about the time I dialed in my religious practice and started doing regular offerings after my lightless grad school years and the first few years of work, when doing it regularly was a struggle. Minimalism-wise, I was purging things I had had since high school. They went to Goodwill or were sold via used item stores (online or physical). I felt like I could breathe again, finally.

I still go to ConBust, but the guests are (mostly) the same from year to year, there’s an alum contingent, and it’s a great way to catch up with people I know. My mom occasionally buys me geeky shirts, and I wear those, but I no longer seek out franchise shirts on my own. I’d rather support small creators I like on Patreon in exchange for intellectual work than physical goods. Many of them are SFF lit mags and podcasts. I love Strange Horizons and Alice Isn’t Dead and so many other things.

And, of course, ultimately — the flow of my life was heading towards more religious activity and study. I followed that — it’s why this blog has polytheism, minimalism, and everything in between in the tagline.

Now, while I buy books, I try to limit myself to things that I know I will use. With items of any kind, I always ask myself if I’m interested in them for status signaling or because they actually have an important role to play in my physical, emotional, intellectual, and/or spiritual life. When I slip, I know it — the acquisition becomes a source of stress and not of happiness or fulfillment, and I feel it starkly in my gut even if I can put on a smile and hide any visible signs of my inner conflict.

All of that is very long, but it’s important context. Thank you for reading.

❤️