#it's target demographic skews decently young after all

[welcometogrouchland]

Decided to spontaneously watch three seasons of Craig of the Creek in like. A couple days and the first thing I'll say is it's a very good show. The second thing I'll say is that Craig Williams could defeat the Collector in 2 minutes of screentime if he were there

[freedom-of-fanfic]

you seem to have some level of interest in voltron and the current fandom, while also having a seemingly good understanding of fandom history more broadly, so a question from someone with limited fandom exposure and only from tumblr, where it feels impossible to understand the grand scheme: what is the voltron fandom like, compared to other/past fandoms? are we large? more minor-dominated? is anti culture abnormally prominent? is there more or less meta? any thoughts on where we fit appreciated.

These questions are very interesting to me. Answers are from my personal experience only/reading I’ve done, though, and mostly anecdotal.

disclaimer/caveat that tumblr - web 2.0 in general - really changed how fandom looks in general to a degree that’s hard to explain. It raised its visibility to the rest of the world. it raised fandom’s internal visibility by giving lurkers the ability to run blogs without speaking up (just resharing the works of others) and by eliminating personal control over how far blog content spreads. I think it made fandom bigger than it used to be. and I think it was in just the right time and just the right place to sweep a lot of young people up into fandom just as internet access was becoming faster, more widespread, and more unsupervised/common for even young participants.

is voltron fandom large?

it’s hard to gauge the size of fandoms, particularly when there’s no central community with members to count or some such. It’s certainly active. klance is consistently among the most frequently used ship tags on tumblr and sheith frequently places as well (the two most popular ships in the fandom). In only 18 months, VLD fandom has produced 33,000 fics on AO3 alone - never mind other fanfic sites like wattpad and ff.net. Not counting multi-canon brands (Marvelverse, DCU, etc), VLD places 16th on a list of all fandoms by number of fanworks (on AO3). that’s … way active. ridiculously active.

compared with other fandoms, I’d say that its volume of activity to (likely) number of participants is high. For a cartoon that doesn’t air on network television, it also seems decently large (but this is merely speculation). However, it’s quite dwarfed by the megafandoms generated by live action movies (Star Wars, MCU, etc), which are usually spurred on by constant canon additions like cartoons and comics and books.

but for fun, and in a not remotely scientific way, let’s take a stab at the size of VLD tumblr fandom with some numbers-producing tumblr-based vld fan content.

the vld discourse survey, advertised on tumblr, has almost 1900 responses now. 554 of the responses are from people who count themselves as antis (about 30% of the fandom.) almost exactly double that number (~1100 people) signed the anti-run petition demanding character ages from March 2017, which was also advertised on tumblr.

let’s extrapolate, then, that if antis are representative of the response rate of all of vld tumblr fandom (I would guess pro shippers were less likely to respond, if there was a difference: in my experience antis are eager to get counted and shippers are not), half of the vld tumblr fandom took the discourse survey. that makes ~3,800 people who are actively participating in vld fandom via tumblr. (other active vld fan gathering sites are on 4chan, twitter, amino apps, and discord channels, with overlap between sites.)

is voltron fandom more minor-dominated? 

questions like these always get me wondering so I ran some actual numbers on this:

assuming this survey is accurate to fandom demographics - which it isn’t, because self-selecting surveys never are*, but it may have a rough correspondence - about 42% of the vld fandom is composed of people 17 and younger, whereas about 58% are 18 or older.

about half the fandom - 49.6% - are of an age to potentially be in US high school (14-18 years old), and about 40% of fandom is potentially the ‘normal’ ages for undergrad college (18-22 years old). 25% are of post-grad age or older (22+).

I’d guess this fandom has a high number of young members compared to fandoms for live action movies or comic books. But compared to other cartoons, I would speculate that VLD fandom has a higher percentage of older fans due to the show being a reboot of an older series, designed to appeal to anime fans (skews older than american animation fans), draws on the (LoK)Avatar audience due to being the same studio & part of the same creative team (older teens/young adult audience), and not airing on network television (smaller young audience). 

*if anyone is underrepresented it’s probably older fans, who are more wary of fandom survey results being misused and have less presence on tumblr compared to younger fans.

is anti culture abnormally prominent? 

yes. yes it is.

once again consulting the vld discourse survey (it has a pretty large response pool, okay?), 1 out of 3 vld fans consider themselves anti-shippers. (again: as a self-selecting survey these numbers may not be accurate, and I would guess antis are overrepresented, but still.)

I speculate this is because anti-shipping principles were peculiarly suited to ‘support’ klance and attack competing ship sheith. as 4/5ths of antis say klance is their primary ship, and sheith was the original target of anti-shipping (the rest came afterwards in response to claims of hypocrisy), this seems to be a likely motive for young klance fans who felt uncomfortable with sheith or jealous of perceived sheith support to slip headfirst into anti-shipping as a whole.*

(and vld anti-shipping is made up mostly of the youngest fandom members. the majority of 13-17 year old fandom participants are anti-shippers; the majority of 18+ fandom participants are pro-shipping. 64% of all anti-shippers are 13-17 years old and 32% are college-aged. the average age of neutrals falls between anti- and pro- shippers; pro-shippers are about 40% college-aged, 30% high schoolers, and 30% 23+.)

I also think the prominence of anti-shipping in vld fandom spurred the growth and popularity of anti culture in other young fandoms. it’s now somewhat normal for fandoms to have an anti-fandom ready to fight them from inception.

to be clear: vld fandom didn’t start anti-shipping, just made it more well-known as a phenomenon due to how widespread it is. and anti-shipping - which is mostly American, like English-speaking vld fandom - has its roots in more widespread cultural issues like the authoritarian movement in America/the West, Christian Dominionism, poor education,radical feminist ideology, mra/gg/4chan/alt-right argument techniques, and the extreme partisanship that web 2.0 promotes and exacerbates.

*anti-shippers will say this is reducing the important stuff they protest to a ship war. but no matter what antis believe they stand for now, it’s hard to deny that a lot of pro-klance antis got their start because of liking klance and hating sheith - you know. ship war material! - and looking for a way to justify their feelings. (you’re allowed to hate sheith and like klance without being an anti, by the way.)

does voltron fandom have more or less meta (comparatively)?

vld fandom is surprisingly alive with meta. this fandom loves to take canon apart down to its bones, making theories about future events, ship manifestos, character analyses, and more - and fandom spreads it around, too. meta can get hundreds - thousands - of notes. it’s quite beautiful.

this may be the silver lining of the prominence of anti-shipping. anti-shipping - shame culture, really - makes fandom hesitant to take creative risks because the chance of being harassed and shamed for doing something wrong feels high. people write less fic with risky premises, draw less fanart that isn’t fluff/neutral-toned, etc, because everything you do you also have to defend.

but man, it really makes the meta scene amazing. being forced to constantly prove that xyz has a canon basis, or isn’t problematic, or that a character did or didn’t do something, or explain why you like or don’t like x - or, if you haven’t had to actually argue, having to constantly think about it - has really whetted vld’s fandom’s appetite for meta - dissecting canon to find and share hints of weird story theories or future romantic interaction. 

and because meta directly references the text for its content, I think it’s the most accepted kind of fanwork in vld fandom. after all, you got it from canon. if you’re going to debate on anything, it’s as likely to be the canon itself as the meta.

hope you enjoyed this vld fandom snapshot. :)