Greetings from the Fandom Club! Founded last semester, we are one of the youngest clubs at John Cabot University, but the community has fully embraced our spirit and joined in the nerdiness!
Fandom is all about passion. We are all enthusiastic about something: a book series, a TV show, a film franchise, music…. Everyone is part of a fanbase; they just have different degrees of showing it. What we do at Fandom is bring together people who share many interests but don’t know it. So many friendships have been formed at our meetings, and this is why JCU's student life is an amazing complement to academics. Participating in clubs gives students many opportunities to meet people outside of their major field of study, people that they might never meet in class. The Fandom Club particularly unites people who are passionate about the same things.
Fandoms really do bring people together. Here’s a funny story: I actually knew Claudia, Fandom’s vice president, before coming to JCU, from talking about the same books on Twitter. Then we met on the first day of Orientation and couldn’t believe we would be studying together for the next three years. At one point we decided we should make our fandom talks an institutional thing and include the entire community, so we got together a group of close-knit friends with interests that spanned across more than 20 fandoms, and created the club.
Our multi-fandom events have gathered more than 80 people each, and that felt like a big success for us, especially as it was our very first semester as a club. In the fall we dedicated an entire month to Harry Potter, showing all the films before having a huge Hogwarts party with a Sorting ceremony and themed food. We also brought our club members to an exclusive first screening of the new Thor: Ragnarok movie, which we got to see two weeks before the film premiered in the US. We brought students to Romics, Rome’s ComicCon where we did a cosplay contest and participated in many activities organized by the fair.
Besides regularly bringing our members to the movies, we also have discussions about the media texts that we consume. We analyze the discourse and the entire process that goes behind the creation of a media text: the making, the marketing, the audience reception. For this, we employ the theories that we learn in class every day, especially in Communications, Literature, and Marketing courses.
Collaborations between different clubs are also super fun and effective. We get to work with cool people who have different interests and find that we are not that different after all. We’ve collaborated with the Fashion Club, the Queer Alliance, the Film, Media, and Communications Society, and the Literature Club, and we look forward to collaborating with more!
This semester we are also planning to shoot some fan-made content that is entirely created by us: borrowing the literary universe from existing stories, we are creating and producing original narratives; writing the script, casting, planning a schedule, and finally filming.
Being a club's board member and a student leader is an extremely educational experience. You have tasks and responsibilities that go beyond academics, and you really learn how to work in a team, manage time, network, and multitask. Organizing big events takes foresight, time, effort, and a lot of precision. Being the president of Fandom Club has definitely sharpened all my soft skills: it is a challenge, especially if you always want to give your best to the community, but it’s been incredibly rewarding, and I've collaborated with an amazing team. (Shoutout to my board and all the members of Fandom for making all of this possible!)
Follow our social media for updates about our upcoming events. Are you an artist? Submit your artwork by tagging us and using the hashtag #FanArtFriday to be reposted!
Federica Bocco
Communication major, Humanistic Studies minor
JCU class of 2018
Hometown: Naples, Italy
