The Feats of Fandom

Watching the documentary Generation Like left a bad taste in my mouth, and I couldn't quite place why until today. Ceili Lynch and her incessant clicking made me very uneasy. In talking about her love for the Hunger Games she used the word fandom (I like other fandoms and stuff, but not as much as The Hunger Games"). According to the transcript, it's mentioned once and never again. Perhaps this is for the best, because I'm not sure her use of the word was accurate.

A fandom is a group of people who share the same interest. If you like The Hunger Games, you're in The Hunger Games Fandom. If you like Harry Potter, you're in the Harry Potter Fandom. But the idea of fandom goes far beyond proving to everyone else how much you like the thing. A fandom is a community, a place for people to discuss a thing and expand upon it and truly make it their own. Fandoms encourage art and music and stories, cosplay and conventions. They encourage people to be creative about the things they enjoy. Look at the Harry Potter Fandom, actually. They've got a whole genre based on music about the wizarding world. It's called wizard rock. Crazy.

I thought about this today, on 4/20, because it is the ninth anniversary of the release of one of my favorite video games of all time: Mother 3. The game was only ever released in Japan. but it was a sequel, and the second game (Mother 2, or Earthbound as it's known in the States) had a huge cult following. The fandom was upset that they'd never get to see the thrilling conclusion to the trilogy stateside, so they took matters into their own hands and wrote their own localization.

The Mother 3 Fan Translation took two years to complete. It was difficult because the task was twofold: first, they had to actually translate and localize the material. Then, they had to hack that new English script back into the ROM for the game. By late 2008, you could download a patch for that ROM and play it on your computer. Was this legal? No. But it is the only way for English-speaking players to play and understand the game without picking up Japanese.

Why did these people do what they did? They didn't get paid for it, and they're not intending to. They've made it abundantly clear to Nintendo that the patch exists many times, offering their translation to Nintendo free of charge should they ever release a translation stateside, and promising to remove their patch from the internet should that ever happen. They did this because they wanted to share the game with as many people as possible, because they liked it so much that passively enjoying it just was not enough.

I thought about this today, nine years after this game was released. I thought about how online communities based on liking things are about more than just liking those things and clicking on things for so long that your hand starts to hurt. Generation Like is incorrect in that way. The beauty of this generation is that we are in control of what we like. If we see something we don't like about it, we discuss it. At times we can even change it. Sure, we're consumers. We consume a lot. But we don't always do it passively. We are at our best when we do it actively.

Happy 4/20.