Photo: https://film.wp.pl/
Fandom – why are there so many fantasy fans in Poland?
The fifty-seven thousand people who attended this year’s Pyrkon Festival of Fantasy Fans in Poznan prove that the phenomenon of fandom is present and growing in Poland. Who are the young people who dress up as characters from books and games?
I’m standing in line at a chip shop, and in front of me, a girl in an elf costume with a bow slung over her shoulder picks up her order. Behind me, a Hollow Knight in a black cloak with a cardboard sword strapped to his back takes off his paper-mache mask and engages in conversation with a boy in full Warhammer armour. I am passed by girls in colourful wigs and a man in a wheelchair converted into a cannon. This may sound like the account of a fancy dress ball, but this time it’s probably the biggest fancy dress ball in Poland – the annual Pyrkon Fantasy Festival, for which I’ve come to Poznan along with 57,000 other people from Poland and around the world.
Fifty-seven thousand! That’s more than the population of Belchatow. What are all these people doing here? And why are they dressed in such strange costumes?
Fantasy, fandom, fanfic
Pyrkon takes its name from the Poznan ‘pyra’ (tater) and the Polish word ‘konwent’, or fan convention. The event, which in its early years was held in a few school halls, is now the largest fantasy festival in our part of Europe.
To understand why the equivalent of the population of a county town would gather in one place on a June weekend to dress up as fictional characters, you first need to understand what fandom is in general. In the simplest terms, it is a community of fans who gather around a particular piece of popular culture, be it a literary genre, a computer game or a band. They can be divided by anything – age, language, culture or location – but they are united by passion.
Fandom is creative by nature. It produces all sorts of art (fanart) and literature (fanfic) inspired by the medium around which the community gathers; the costumes you see at Pyrkon are the result of many hours of independent work. Some fanfics are longer than some novels. What may be a waste of time for some is a passion for others, to which they devote every spare moment.
History of fandom
Modern fandom is primarily associated with the virtual world, but its history goes back much further than the rise of the Internet. The first modern fandom is considered to be the Sherlock Holmes fans of the time when the books were published; after Arthur Conan Doyle ‘killed’ the main character in one of his stories, readers publicly mourned him as if he were a real person and put pressure on the writer to reverse his decision. This community also produced the first fan fiction between 1897 and 1902. Another early fandom or railway enthusiasts, known as railfans or mikole (from Polish miłośnicy kolei), emerged with the spread of this means of communication in the mid-19th century and began to organise themselves into a community in the early 20th century. The first hobby magazine for railway enthusiasts, the American Railroad Magazine, was published from 1906 until the late 1970s.
At the end of the second decade of the twentieth century, a science fiction fandom developed around Amazing Stories magazine, the first publication devoted exclusively to science fiction. Enthusiasts of the genre’s stories formed literary and discussion clubs, and the first conventions were held in the 1930s. Fanzines, or simply zines – from the English magazine – also appeared, as amateur fan magazines that published fan fiction, fan art and reviews written by fans.
The real explosion in the popularity of fandom, however, came with the proliferation of television productions such as ‘Star Trek’. It is the fandom of this series that has gone down in history as one of the largest and most active. Even though 58 years have passed since the premiere of the first episode, the community has survived for decades and still exists today. Duplicated on Xerox and mailed fanzines gave way to mailing lists, then blogs and discussion forums, then social media. Today, nearly 119,000 Star Trek fanzines have been published over the past 12 years on ArchiveOfOurOwn, the largest archive of fan literature.
Fandom in Poland
While in the West fan communities were developing around pulp magazines, we had slightly different problems, which is why the phenomenon of fandom did not penetrate Poland until the 1970s. In 1976 Eurocon – a convention held in a different European city each year – was held in Poznan, and the National Fantasy Fan Club was founded in Warsaw. It was here that many renowned science fiction and fantasy authors, including Jacek Piekara, Rafał Ziemkiewicz and Jarosław Grzędowicz, began their creative adventures. In 1985, the first edition of Polcon took place – the oldest fantasy convention in Poland, which is still organised today.
Polish fandom is thus inextricably linked to the literary milieu concentrated in fantasy and science fiction clubs, and it is these trends that have shaped it over the years. That is why the biggest Polish convention, Pyrkon, is a festival of fantasy. However, with the fall of the Iron Curtain and then the spread of the internet, fan communities began to form around other types of work, such as reality shows and music bands.
In the popular imagination, fandom is still associated with teenagers who like Japanese comics a little too much and are rarely taken seriously. The Organisation for Transformative Works (OTW), a non-profit organisation run and maintained entirely by fans, not only houses the largest archive of fan literature, but also provides legal advice in conflicts between fans and copyright holders, and publishes the academic journal Transformative Works and Cultures, dedicated to fan culture and creativity. But even if fandom is condemned to an eternal existence as a vaguely defined subculture, its foundations – passion and community – remain the same. And those two things are worth taking seriously.
Joanna Talarczyk
Source: DlaPoloni.pl
Pyrkon festival web site:
Pyrkon Fantastyczne Miejsce Spotkań
