euclase:

One of my fellow fanartists sent this message, and I wasn’t sure if she wanted me to publish her name, but she asked a really good question:

I was talking to a friend of mine whom I haven’t seen for some time and she’s missed the part where I became a so-called fan artist. She’s an artist herself and she was like “I don’t get fanart. Why do people do it? What is the reason?” And I couldn’t find one except that I love these shows and I love portraits. I feel like that wasn’t an explanation at all, though. What would you say? Why fanart? Why not anything else? I felt so awkward. I didn’t expect I would have to explain myself to another artist…

This happens to me a lot.

Most of the time, I just call myself a pop artist. Artists who don’t understand fanart know what pop art is. They know Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe. They know “the artist who painted Ben-Day dots.”

I almost never explain fanart as fanart to people unless they are genuinely receptive. In my experience, when someone says, “I don’t get fanart,” they usually do get fanart, but they don’t like it, and they expect you to defend it. “I don’t get fanart” is code for “Why are you wasting your time drawing this?”

I don’t waste time explaining myself to those people.

But for times when I think someone is genuinely receptive, or for times when I’m tired of the stigma of “fanart” and “fangirl,” and I’m fed up with feeling ashamed to call myself a fanartist, and I don’t think neatly fitting myself under the male-established pop art umbrella is satisfactory enough, and I’d rather be a loud motherfucker who pisses everyone off, which is always, I might say something like this:

The fanart I make is similar to pop art, but instead of commenting on pop culture as a whole, I share my art with a tightly knit and passionate community of mostly women and people in the queer community who are also fans of that story. And together, our community as a whole disestablishes male-dominated media by reclaiming mainstream stories for the minority. Fanart is a form of underground or outsider art, and it’s one powerful way that we take from a story and its characters the things that we relate to the most or enjoy the most as women and members of the queer community and transform them into our own stories and derivative works of art in order to reclaim the mythology that has been taken from us by a straight, white, patriarchal media.

I think the key word in all of that is “community.” Fanart is something you do because you want to be part of a community.

So pick your battles. ❤