dizzojay | Snowflake Challenge 2025

Challenge #5

Talk about what has improved in your life thanks to fandom. Post your answer to today’s challenge in your own space and leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

This is any easy one – the friends I’ve made.

At my journal I’ve often waxed lyrical about my fandom friends.

It’s not like I was lonely or friendless before I found fandom; I wasn’t. I had – and still have – many lovely friends who aren’t involved with fandom at all. But there’s just something extra magical about fandom friends.

Fandom isn’t just a group of people who happen to like the same TV show. We’re a family; a community. We’re a community of like-minded people who all love the same thing and who can openly share our likes and loves with each other.

And like any community, we interact, we have fun, we take care of the vulnerable members of our community, we support each other’s dreams and cheerlead each other’s challenges.

Bu for me, fandom isn’t just an abstract thing; it’s a place. It’s a place with no borders, where us fans, regardless of or race or age or sexuality or whatever other characteristics we may have can belong, to be welcomed into a community that is accepting and fun; a community that GETS us.

Somehow, friendships made through fandom are easy; easier than friendships forged in real life. Real life friendships have to form and evolve. When you start out, you’re just two disparate strangers working for the same business or living in the same street. Friendships made through fandom, on the other hand, begin with both parties knowing something about each other – what we love and what we have in common. And although those friendships may start out as something as simple and superficial as a shared love of the same TV show, they quickly grow into something far more meaningful.

Many of my fandom friendships have outgrown the computer screen and crossed over into real life, and those friendships have given me more joy than I could ever put into a simple post like this. The fandom friends who I haven’t had the opportunity to meet in real life, the ones that live in my laptop, are still loved and nurtured as much as ‘real life’ friends.

Members of fandom are often those of us that society thinks of as ‘weird’ or a bit quirky. A lot of us probably suffered through school and have never been regarded as 'cool' or in with the ‘in’ crowd; but in fandom, ‘weirdness’ is embraced, individuality is celebrated, imagination is admired. Fandom is where we can be ourselves, and fandom friends are the ones who help me to be all that I can be, and more.