Down the road

Author’s note: This is a special Sunday edition of fan/work. I’m back! It has been a wild couple of months, but things are finally getting better, so thank you for letting me take a break from this and being kind. When I started this, I did not think I would have to take a long break so early in this newsletter’s life, but I did have to get a lot of things in order (not to mention rest so I’d have enough energy for this, my 9-5 work, my Master’s thesis, and the rest of my life), so I’m grateful that you have chosen to stay. I’m going to continue experimenting with schedules to see what allows me to be more consistent, and hopefully I can get to a weekly newsletter moving forward. I’ll do my best to keep you updated. Again, thanks for giving me the grace to figure this out.

As I write this, a tropical storm is on its way out of the Philippines. Tropical Storm Kristine has led to flooding in multiple provinces in the country, including where I live (my mom had to take shelter at a fast food restaurant for a few hours until my brother found a friend with a pick-up truck who could take her home), where my mother’s side of the family lives, and even where some of my friends’ families live. There were 22 landslides and the government is making sense of the damage to life and property.

In the past decade, I have experienced and have come to expect typhoons to do this much damage. The damage is sizable for a tropical storm. It feels weird to say it’s unprecedented when it feels like every typhoon or severe tropical storm has felt unprecedented since the early 2000s, but the scale of the damage always surprises me and breaks my heart.  

Typhoons and tropical storms have become more common in the Philippines for nearly two decades, and you might ask—what the **** does this have to do with fandom? 

One of my first examples of digital humanitarian work and fandom colliding was when a supertyphoon hit my country and I saw a post in a Livejournal community for one of my fandoms directing people to donate to the Red Cross to support relief efforts.

For most of this past week, I’ve watched my fellow fans in the BINI fandom (called Blooms; these fans support the eight-member Philippine pop group BINI) get organized and respond to Tropical Storm Kristine by collecting donations, busking online to raise funds, delivering relief goods, and collecting information on individuals and households who need to be rescued from their homes. Their work is happening alongside the efforts of Bloom Philippines, the Philippine fanbase for BINI, the fan clubs of each individual member of BINI, and BINI’s management (they’re run by media and content company ABS-CBN, which does have its own non-profit organization) to collect cash and in-kind donations and direct them to multiple areas, including the Bicol region, one of the provinces that have taken a beating from this typhoon. 

[As of this writing, BINI has pledged 1 million pesos (roughly USD20,000) from their upcoming three-day concert to support ongoing relief efforts.]

One of these groups, Blooms 911, caught my attention when one of their administrators put out regular calls for encoders to help them get information about people or households who needed to be rescued from their homes.

When they started, they only had 30 members, and their numbers even dwindled to single digits at some point. Throughout this week, they’ve grown from a group of around 30 people to around 700-pax strong team, which has allowed them to divide people into smaller groups and give ample attention to five areas/regions in the Philippines. They’ve also been able to shop for groceries thanks to cash donations, pull in fellow Blooms who are healthcare workers to share their knowledge (especially for people at risk of contracting leptospirosis), turn groceries over to Angat Buhay, a local non-profit organization, and support Angat Buhay’s own relief operations. 

I hate that this is something fandoms have had to do over a decade since the first few supertyphoons started hitting the Philippines. 

But I cannot deny that times like these reflect the character and values of fans and fandoms. 

Seeing people from different ages and walks of life working together like this gives me some hope about the future, some hope in a world where people think that polarization, bigotry, hotter temperatures, and rising sea levels are inevitable. 

They don’t have to be. 

Fandoms have a long-standing history of lending their numbers and their ability to draw attention and engage people to important events or causes. 

For the past few years, we’ve seen ARMY raise funds for Black Lives Matter (among a host of causes) and Swifties are doing things like mail campaigns for US presidential candidate Kamala Harris (friendship bracelet included). There’s this piece on how K-Pop fans are borrowing strategies for marketing their idols and applying them to things like community events and digital campaigns for political issues. 

This is one example of how fandom becomes a truly transformative space for people. 

I remember a tweet from a few days ago where a fan said their views were influenced because of the community they formed while listening to One Direction. Unsurprisingly, people were in that user’s comments and quotes—some people were mystified and others were laughing at the idea that being in fandom can open your eyes to the world. There were comments like, “How can you be radicalized by listening to a boy band?” But anecdotes about issues and world events that people found out from One Direction’s members or from their fellow fans started pouring in. And it’s not just One Direction that has had this effect. 

It reminded me of all of the things that I learned because of fans and fandoms. I learned about Prop 8 and Obergefell v. Hodges because I was in fandoms for American TV shows. People hopefully are learning about the Philippines from fans online talking about what’s happening in our country. I get a different view on key social issues from my fellow fans who belong to different communities, backgrounds, or traditions. 

Heck, I know I’ve gotten into different rabbit holes just to write fic. I’ve binged Chef’s Table and read my copy of Larousse Gastronomique just to create a believable Michelin-starred restaurant and menu for a multi-chapter fic that I’m still working on… and I’ve never worked in a kitchen. I’ve seen people learn more about how certain cultures or areas are still inhospitable to people in the LGBTQ+ community, from the lived experiences of individuals who have to do things like get prepaid debit cards just to be able to buy or watch a movie or TV show.

Does it really matter how we get to learn about the world, or is it more important that we do? 

I’m on the latter camp. 

We live in a world with dozens of wicked, tangled, complex problems, for which there are no easy, isolated solutions. We live in a world where people want community but find difficulty building it, a world where people feel jaded about long-established institutions and wary about tradition for tradition’s sake. We live in a world where more and more people are starting to realize how connected we—and the issues around us—truly are. 

If fandom can get us there, if people can learn from their peers and start to get curious, if it can help people become more open-minded and empathetic (I think we’re all well aware that toxic fandom does exist and hurts groups of people), I think we should encourage it and help people develop the skills they need to create these spaces, have conversations without it devolving into toxicity, and build community with each other. 

Maybe fandom can also become a healthier place to be, helping us connect the dots of our life and bringing us into a more harmonious kind of passion. 

For me, fandom becomes truly transformative when we start answering questions like: What can we do for people we do not know, people we may actually never meet? How can our time, our energy, our size be used to address things that matter, to make a positive impact to the world? How can our love and passion for a group of strangers be channeled into something we can do for our own community? 

Maybe if we start asking these questions and making room in our lives to answer them, we can create not just art but also the friendships, the community, or the world we’d like to pass on to future generations.