Sentiment Albums Hold the Seeds of Modern Fandom

06.12.2023 - 23:13 / atlasobscura.com / On Tiktok

To be a fan is to be a perpetual collector, and that doesn’t just mean autographs or action figures. Acquisition is an important part of many fans’ lives, from the material, such as concert merch or rare comic cover variants, to the intangible—facts, memories, interpretations, arguments, ideas. They save images, curated and annotated lists of fanfiction, data about fictional universes for wikis, clips from their favorite shows for vids. They deconstruct their obsessions, and build something new from all the little pieces. Sometimes they do this alone, but often, they do it together—the shared act of creation often defines a fandom.

Modern fandom online is a vast and varied place, and some of its practices are shaped by the platforms where fan communities gather. On TikTok, fans might make videos they hope will reach millions of eyes, while closed spaces such as Discord might only reach a dozen intensely interested people. Tumblr is still home to a great deal of fan activity despite the turmoil of the past few years. There, people spin up blogs for specific obsessions—the stuff they love, or love to hate, or simply spend way too much time thinking about.

I joined Tumblr more than a decade ago, and when I fell for a new show (BBC’s Sherlock—sorry, I know), I began to participate in fandom there. That meant reblogging gifs and fanart, and writing and responding to others’ analysis—what fans call “meta”—which others would then post to their own blogs. The accumulated grid of various kinds of content was a visual representation of the obsessive churn of my brain—I was building a record of my fascination, piece by piece.

Then I think back further, a decade and a half before, to one of the friends with whom I shared a love of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. She kept a large three-ring binder full of images related to the show that she’d clipped from magazines; I decided to copy her, selecting cut-outs from Seventeen and TV Guide and Fangoria to carefully paste into a binder of my own. It was a proto-Tumblr, full of my analog reblogs. I’d flip through the binder from time to time, admiring the accumulation of another record of fascination.

What I was doing in the binder and on Tumblr, what millions today do across the internet in all these various forms, is a practice with deep roots. The desire to collect, compile, and share the things you love stretches back centuries. If there is a seed of modern, connected fandom, it might be in what was once called a “sentiment album.”

For centuries, the creation of a “commonplace book” was a core practice for many in Europe who could read or write. These were places to record information you might not have physical access to again—more a note-taking app than a journal—as well