On the Origin of the Fanboys

You know what a fanboy is. In a very basic sense, it's this guy, who dressed like Boba Fett for his own wedding. Everything you need to know is right there.

Insane fandom is one of the hallmarks of 20th century culture, and the 21st looks like it's gonna be more of the same. Huge social networks, intense arguments over canon, fictional languages, detailed homemade and official-issue costumes and memorabilia, pilgrimages to symbolic locations, long lines for performances and releases, speculative fan-generated fiction, annual gatherings and group interrogation of the creators--obsession.

You can trace the sci-fi brand of fanboy at least all the way back to WorldCon--that's the annual World Science Fiction Convention, the birthplace of the respected Hugo literary award and ancestor to the holiest of all nerd proms, ComicCon. WorldCon started in 1939 and, aside from a brief hiatus while everyone went to stomp on Hitler's face, it has been chugging along ever since.

But there were fanboys even earlier, in the late 19th century. Over what? H.G. Wells? No, Sherlock. No, no, seriously, I mean Sherlock Holmes. The curator of the Sherlock Holmes museum at 221B Baker Street in London tells me that unfathomable numbers of people (both children and adults) have been writing letters to Holmes as though he were truly a real person ever since the first stories were published in 1887. It's easy to see why: he was a superhuman character with incredible powers, the first superhero, really. But it seems like he was also the first character to inspire fanboy behavior, too. People joined clubs like the Baker Street Irregulars, smoked pipes, argued over canon, and speculated very seriously about what may have happened to Holmes between certain stories and what his mysterious personal history might have been. I would argue especially that the intense speculation over his unwritten romantic life (concerning Irene Adler and the significance of women named "Violet") was the precursor to modern fanfic, slashfic and "shipping".

But it all seems to have come out of the blue in the last half of the 19th century. I don't quite understand why people suddenly started acting this way. It seems too easy and too flippant to note the cultural timing of it all, draw a line after the Darwin bomb, point to the void beyond and say, "Ok, there be fanboys, because the more skeptical people drifting away from the church needed some other myth to latch onto with equal, but secular, fervor." But it might not be too far off the mark, especially since this first big fanboy target was essentially the patron saint of empirical observation and cold hard reason. Miracles, but through science.

I wonder if there are any earlier precedents, though. I remember seeing a footnote in a textbook once, which suggested that there was some equivalent fanaticism surrounding Don Quixote in the 17th century, though nothing near the scale of fandom we're accustomed to in our time--a few incidents of people dressing up like Quixote and Sancho Panza and sorta riding around town looking for crimes to thwart, I kid you not. But I have never found another reliable reference to this anywhere, so I have to chalk it up as apocryphal for now, no matter how much I want it to be true. And I cannot tell you how much I wish and hope that, someday, someone will unearth an ancient tablet describing a group of hardcore Homer nerds (I picture some of them dressed in homemade Polyphemus and Scylla costumes, because that would be awesome) who waited in line for months to hear a recitation of The Odyssey or something.

I'm only half joking when I say that this should be a serious area of academic inquiry. Obsessive fanboy-itis such a bizarre and powerful part of modern psychology, and I want to know where it comes from.