Fanwork-Only Fans

I personally don't like Genshin Impact very much but I LOVE watching the voice actors play Among Us... does that count?

Nope for Genshin Impact and yes for Among Us.

I don't know where else to put this, but I really only care about the DC Extended Universe because of movies that only exist in my head. Of the real movies, I've so far only watched the first three all the way through, just once each. While I do study the wikis, it's mainly to see how my head movies could fit in the DCEU and what could be subject to Revision (if not a full-fledged Retcon).

With some exceptions, most notably a Superman movie, those head movies tend to feature members of the Batman family, most notably Tim Drake as the incumbent Robin (played by an actor who only exists in my head). The centerpiece of my series has Tim appear alongside Cassandra Cain (played by TWICE's Tzuyu), retconning the Birds of Prey (2020) Cassandra as a different character with the same name. I actually got myself stumbling down the K-pop rabbit hole this way!

I also recently became interested in M*A*S*H for similar reasons despite having yet to watch a single episode. I started to imagine a reboot film with my Robin actor now playing Radar, the former Trope Namer for Hyper-Competent Sidekick, as a Casting Gag. Finding out that MASH is set during the Korean War only accelerated my interest because I don't know of many other major Western works that would allow room for exploration of relations between Americans and Koreans.

If licensed adaptations count as fan works, then I guess I could consider myself a Batman fanwork-only fan. Batman: The Animated Series was my gateway. I have read (or at least watched fan video readings of) some of whatever comics I could find on the internet, but there are way too many comics to catch up with that would prevent me from being much of a comic fan. This extends to superheroes, in general, for similar reasons.

I don't think there's a "trope" for adaptation-only fans, and headcanon-only fans is probably too rare to trope (if not covered under Fanwork-Only Fans).

Edited by AnotherOnlinePersona on May 10th 2024 at 7:25:25 AM

I'm pretty much at this point with most superheroes. I haven't watched a superhero movie all the way through in...I dunno how long, I'm not sure I've ever read a comic book of the genre cover to cover and I haven't really been terribly interested in such cartoons since I was a kid. But at the same time I can instantly recognize one and what their deal is, most jokes about them click with me, when somebody takes some panels out of a comic book and posts it online I'm usually engaged for the little self-contained situation.

I also never really played Night in the Woods despite my interest in it. I watched a friend of mine play it once but it was already started and I probably didn't see half of it but I was able to reconstruct it pretty quickly. I feel like videogames are especially prone to this.

Honestly I feel like this kind of thing happens a lot outside of wikis/fanfiction in ways people don't even realize. There's a lot of media people just sort of get the gist of only by passively consuming it, and it's reflected by other media. Like think about how instantly recognizable and common references or deconstructions of 007 movies are, but at the same time I don't really know many people terribly interested in the old movies or books.