Types Of Fandom As Observed By Me: an expanded Twitter thread

So we've all heard of Transformative vs Curatorial Fandom, right?
Transformative fandom makes fanworks. Curatorial "curates" canon.
Well.
I posit that instead of fans existing on a spectrum like this


Fans actually exist on a grid like this!


Allow me to explain.

Plot Fandom here is people who like lore and worldbuilding in the fiction they engage fannishly with. I'm using "plot" instead of "setting" here because of the focus on transforming or preserving canon storylines, but if you think "setting" applies better, I am not the sole arbiter of fandom meta and you can use whatever word you want. Or make your own chart thing if that's what you prefer.

Transformative plot fans love to read and write canon-divergence AUs, like "what if X happened in canon instead of Y", fusion AUs with another plot-heavy media, or  and are usually less interested in shipping or romance-first content. 

Curatorial plot fans maintain fandom wikis, collect stuff, and discuss particulars of worldbuilding and lore from the canon they're into.

Media that attracts Plot Fans include: webserials like Worm and fantasy/sf battle shonen like My Hero Academia or Jujutsu Kaisen.

Character Fandom here is people who like character-driven stories, or are more interested in the character dynamics of a plot-heavy story.

Transformative character fans like shipping and/or genfic with an emphasis on Friendships and Character Interactions and are more fond of mundane Coffeeshop/College AUs, missing scene fics, and Fluff.

Curatorial character fans love character studies, character meta, memorizing and analyzing canon info about characters, and collecting character merch. In the sports anime fandoms I frequent, I've seen curatorial character fans collect screencaps or manga panels of their favorite characters or something else in the source material they like into long Twitter threads.

Media that attracts character fans include any franchise with lots of likeable characters, like sports anime, gacha games, or, again, My Hero Academia.

 

I use Hero Academia as an example here because the idea for this was prompted by the fact that I'm in a lot of different fandom spaces where people like or care about MHA to some extent, but I can't recommend, for example, A Heart Swelled to Bursting to the same people I'd recommend Subject: A Comprehensive Report to, because those are fics for different kinds of fans. (A Heart Swelled to Bursting is an incredible Bakugou character study and meditation on trauma, Subject is a canon-divergence AU in which Midoriya becomes a quirk analyst for Nighteye's agency with mixed-media worldbuilding elements like excerpts from fictional books on quirk genetics, phone call transcripts, and emails between characters. They're both great fics check them out.)

... It's my meta post and I get to choose the fic-rec tangent!

"But what if I like characters and plots!" you may exclaim. In that case, I have wonderful news for you: there is a midpoint on the graph.
 
I personally would put myself somewhere here:


I participate in both transformative (making fanart and fic) and curatorial (adding to fanlore pages and Memorizing Things For Fun) fan activities pretty much equally, but I don't really care about worldbuilding. I'm not super invested in most ships but I love canon and noncanon potential friendships, and have an extra soft spot for gen crossover fics thanks to reading Friendship!!! is magic by Afrai at an impressionable point in my life.

Obviously this isn't the one true guide to how all fans engage in fandom ever, but I think it helps elucidate some of the disconnects I've seen between fans of the same property, or fans of different things that appear similar on the surface.