The Power of Fangirls

Fan culture can cause amazing movements within the pop culture industry. If it were not for their dedication and involvement with spreading their personal favorite shows, characters, and other fandoms many media would not become as well known and widely mainstream as they are today.

Henry Jenkins explains in his book Spreadable Media “Spreadable Media examines the nature of audience engagement, the environment of participation, the way appraisal creates value, and the transnational flows at the heart of these phenomena. It delineates the elements that make content more spreadable and highlights emerging media business models built for a world of participatory circulation.”

Free! or ‘swimming anime’ started out as a one minute commercial during Anime Mirai, a film festival in Japan that showcases recently graduated students and new workers in different anime studios. The participants are to create a short film to showcase their animation and artistic skills.

One particular animation by a worker at Kyoto Animation and Animation Do resonated with all the little Yaoi fangirls of Tumblr. Fans wanted to see more from this animation so much that they started a petition on Tumblr to have this short film become a full animated series. Once the petition proved to be growing in success fans started to create character profiles for the characters of the short film, giving them names, personalities, even defining some relationships between the characters. The following for these textual poachers became so large that the writers of what was soon to be known as Free! took some of these character profiles and implemented them into the animation.

Henry Jenkins explains the success of media, like Free!, on its spreadability. Spreadability is defined as the ways content can travel through social media. Spreadability does not just apply to t.v. shows and fandoms, it can be utilized for understanding how people spread their ideas and the implications these activities have for business, politics and everyday life.

This means the control of which media takes off is within the hands of the fans rather than the marketing team. If a fandom can gain enough proactive fans that spread their fandom across social media then it is more likely to gain a larger following, thus becoming more main stream. Without media spreading to other potential fans it cannot grow in popularity.

Just remember "If it doesn't spread, it's dead".