Separate 'Fandoms' of the Same Franchise?

Anyone know of any notable separations of fandoms, subcommunities, of a franchise and how they rose up?

For example: Resident Evil.
The creation of the Resident Evil game series had a fandom.
The Resident Evil film series also has a fandom, but it arose nearly separately, without too much overlap.

Transformers is another example as well. Michael Bay's films are polarizing to say the least.


I've heard of splits as well.
 
For a time at least there was quite a bit of acrimony between Original Series Star Trek fans and Next Generation fans. They arose somewhat independently thanks to the time gap between them.
 
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Dark Souls is kinda weird in the sense there's a real PVP scene that's still around today and then you have the Cult of Vaati (Praise Be His Name) who like to go to forums and write 10k lore analysis on this one random item description.

90% of 40k's fanbase has never played the tabletop and never will, likely getting into the franchise either via the video games or the books.

It wouldn't surprise me if the overlap between comic readers and movie goers are basically non-existent when it comes to Marvel's comic and movie universe.
 
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Star Wars is my go-to example of this. There's the very large and mainstream Star Wars fandom of people who watch and enjoy the movies, and then the smaller niche fandom of people who read the EU books and other supplemental materials. The two groups are surprisingly distinct.
 
It wouldn't surprise me if the overlap between comic readers and movie goers are basically non-existent when it comes to Marvel's comic and movie universe.

Not only that, but also the divide between the Disney MCU and the Fox X-Men stuff. Especially since the latter has been going on since the late 90s.

Also for long-running or wide-ranging franchises, there's always the fandoms that grow around specific entries unto themselves. The obvious example is Final Fantasy, especially since apart from certain themes and references, each game (and other media) is mostly separate, other than a few direct sequels. So one could be a fan of multiple Final Fantasies, but not all of them, and I don't know how that applies to the formulation of being a "fan of Final Fantasy" as a whole.

Other than that, there's Touhou. There are plenty of different fandoms each involving different aspects of the original, whether it's the music, the gameplay, the characters, or the stories. It is entirely possible to be a deep hardcore lore expert in Touhou without having played a single game in the franchise.
 
Worm is a very interesting case. There isn't much overlap between the "Canon Worm" and the "Fanfic Worm" fandoms. If I had to guess, (and I'm definitely going into my subjective opinion here), I'd say it was what happens when you combine a very long, clunky canon story with a fanfic-friendly setup that increases the incentive for writers to just look at other fanfics. This is turn means that fans of the canon story (not unreasonably) scoff at it as it diverges, which it definitely has.

That the fandom overall is still ultra-niche and ultra-concentrated in a few places (like SB/V) makes it all the more interesting.
 
Worm is a very interesting case. There isn't much overlap between the "Canon Worm" and the "Fanfic Worm" fandoms. If I had to guess, (and I'm definitely going into my subjective opinion here), I'd say it was what happens when you combine a very long, clunky canon story with a fanfic-friendly setup that increases the incentive for writers to just look at other fanfics. This is turn means that fans of the canon story (not unreasonably) scoff at it as it diverges, which it definitely has.

That the fandom overall is still ultra-niche and ultra-concentrated in a few places (like SB/V) makes it all the more interesting.

I feel like there's also not quite splits, but very conflicting ways in which the fandom treats the story though with a lot of grey areas between. Two big ones are:

People drawn to Worm for the powers and fights vs people who are primarily drawn to the character arcs, personalities and relationships. The former are mostly centred around SB/SV, while the latter is also on SB/SV, but is also a little scattered between the Subreddit and a small Tumblr community as well.

People who interpret Worm to be grey vs gray morally, and see the superhero conflict in universe to be arbitrary vs people who take the world seriously as a dark but gritty superhero universe and accept a good vs evil viewpoint on the setting. (also the former group is right and the latter is wrong lol)

Again, there's plenty of grey area and mixing between the two poles, but the takeaway here is that Worm does not really have one core appeal to it, but it's a hodgepodge of different things that draw people to it, leading to people with wildly different viewpoints crashing into eachother.
 
Although there is certainly strong overlap (especially nowadays, after Ubisoft's... handling of the franchise), there is still a dichotomy between the Might & Magic fandom and the Heroes of Might & Magic fandom (it was far worse in 1999, of course, when a strongly opinionated element of the second killed an attempt to bring in more aspects from Might & Magic). The how is simple - Might & Magic was the original series (so had a long-lasting established fanbase) and Heroes was much more popular (so had a lot of people who weren't even aware that Heroes was a spin-off series).
 
Fullmetal Alchemist is the most obvious one to me, thanks to having two wildly different anime adaptations; one based on the manga, and one that's not. Nowadays the divide doesn't seem that bitter, but I'm told when Brotherhood was airing there was some serious shit going down between the fandoms.
 
There's also fandoms that just develop in different areas. Transformer tumblr fandom and, say, their fandom on tfw2005 (the biggest board) is highly different even while liking the exact same comics and shows due to demographic differences.

You'll run into places fairly unfriendly to women or at least more male centric and thus separate fan hubs run by women on a number of things
 
Madoka: "So tell me what you thought of Rebellion?"

But like to be slightly less glib... it depends on exactly what you are looking for. Do you mean in the context of two separate fanbases engaging in the same material in radically different ways? You have things like the Harry Potter franchise, which I'm sure has a sharp division between people that have solely watched the movies, people that have solely read the books, and both. Leila makes a good point about Star Wars. I'd toss Game of Thrones in there too. Honestly most large fandoms have this to some extent, because you splinter into movie continuities, TV continuities, comic continuities, and so on. Often times these groups are going to either exist completely independently and ignore the others, or outright clash, with intermixing, as it were, relatively rare. A kind of interesting example is early Sailor Moon fandom, which was splintered between people who saw the subs, back when that was much more difficult, and people that relied on the dub and dub knowledge, either because it's what they had, or what they preferred. That's died down because subs became much easier to get and you have a dub with reasonable fidelity now anyway, but that was an interesting thing back in the day. And even now you have a minor split between people that read the manga and people that watched and preferred the anime. (This is less of a split and more a preference, though, given how prolific the SM anime is.)

Now if we start talking about schisms and in-groups that emerge within fandoms, ooooh boy. Shipping does it a lot especially with big fandoms (Harry Potter with Hermione/Harry v. Hermione/Ron, I recall some DIgimon shipping drama with Kari and T.K., etc.). Heck, I'd say that if you get to a reasonable size, shipping schisms are basically inevitable with some really rare exceptions. There's also the schisms over sequels or spinoffs (Madoka is a good example of this, Star Trek is too as previously noted, I've seen some interesting arguments among Digimon fans about the topic, Dangan Ronpa, etc.) that can get unduly heated. There's debates and schisms over character's morality (Harry Potter, again, provides a good example with Snape, Dangan Ronpa provides a good example with Kokichi), the morality of sudden plot threads or elements and if they're justifiable, and in some games the very existence (let alone execution) of certain plot twists or game elements (again, Dangan Ronpa).

Like, you could really approach this question in a variety of ways. The way where you have isolated communities due to different source materials, separated communities due to receiving the material differently, or splinters and schisms among a formerly united fanbase that cause it to become permanently, or severely, divided. I think it shows how versatile media is there days, as well as how amorphous and flexible the idea of "fandoms" really is, that you can get a wide diversity of kind of answers to these sorts questions, alongside various examples that all excellently support their kind of answer.
 
I used to get tons of shit because I grew up with 80s TMNT and had no iinterest in the original comics or TMNT 2003. I talk to less people now but it feels like it died down after 2012 came out and was best of both worlds.

Batman TAS fans never gave The Batman a chance. Same for X-Men TAS and Evolution.
 
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How about, like, old HP fic archives which divided by ships, canon predictions, and slash friendliness (and endless drama between sites helped along by some epic trolls) :p
 
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There seems to be a major difference between this site's Exalted fandom and the RPGnet/WW/OP fandom(s), or at least there seemed to be back when I was keeping track of Exalted.

The Anglophone fandom of WoD seems to be somewhat different from the Slavophone one, though there is an overlap among the more reasonably linguistically capable people, e.g. local LARPs tended to be mechanically closer to the game of Killer with lots of RP, while the Atlantic supposedly used a ruleset where conflicts are resolved through stopping the action and starting a game of rock-paper-scissors, and touching an enemy other than in the form of a handshake was frowned upon. At least that's what things looked like back when I was paying much attention to the discussions of WoD LARPs.
 
For Trek, TOS/TNG is the eldest divide but hardly the only one. Each show has some amount of the fanbase dedicated to it, and on a slightly larger scale there's a few different 'eras' that fans separate into: TOS/TOS Movies, TNG/TNG Movies/DS9/VOY/ENT, and JJTrek/DIS/etc. (the currently produced stuff). You could also make an argument for sorting ENT with the current stuff, or splitting the TNG era up along a line somewhere near the airing of the movie First Contact.

And then there's the side materials and beta canon, which is its own kettle of fish.

Really, overall, Trek fans are like Scots.
 
It wouldn't surprise me if the overlap between comic readers and movie goers are basically non-existent when it comes to Marvel's comic and movie universe.
Most of the time they have basically nothing to do with eachother, so that is deffo the case.

A while back @Cetashwayo saw Black Panther and was like ¨I liked Shuri, what should I read¨ and I had to explain how she is not a spunky teenage genius in the comics but instead a calm, collected woman who returned from a near-death coma after serving as Black Panther in an invasion of Wakanda, to become a spiritual leader, because while in a coma she went on a spiritual soujorn into the collective Wakandan ancestral undermind. The two characters have nearly nothing to do with each other.

This is not necessarily a problem per se, but when your exposure to the character is the movie, and you show up like ¨ayy lmao I wanna read some comics, what do you have for me¨ and they hand you this dense, deeply poetic comic authored by Ta-Nehisi Coates that is just wildly different, people are going to get confused and turned off.

This is my way of saying that Marvel is really really bad at selling comics, capeshit in the direct market is a crazy late capitalist hellworld and you better bring your literary shovel and pickaxe if you want to dig into the strata of superhero universes to find stuff like what you enjoyed in the movies. If you are into the comics, you probably will like the movies, but liking the movies means jack shit because they are accessible normie things distilled from the weirdness and nonsense of decades of convolution and continuity of storytelling.
 
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For Trek, TOS/TNG is the eldest divide but hardly the only one. Each show has some amount of the fanbase dedicated to it, and on a slightly larger scale there's a few different 'eras' that fans separate into: TOS/TOS Movies, TNG/TNG Movies/DS9/VOY/ENT, and JJTrek/DIS/etc. (the currently produced stuff). You could also make an argument for sorting ENT with the current stuff, or splitting the TNG era up along a line somewhere near the airing of the movie First Contact.

And then there's the side materials and beta canon, which is its own kettle of fish.

Really, overall, Trek fans are like Scots.
Trek fans sure are a contentious people. :V
 


Basically, you can divide the Jojo's Bizarre Adventure fandom between the people who got into it before the 2012 anime - whether by the manga, the video games, the OVA, or the memes - and people who got into it because of the 2012 anime.
 
For Trek, TOS/TNG is the eldest divide but hardly the only one. Each show has some amount of the fanbase dedicated to it, and on a slightly larger scale there's a few different 'eras' that fans separate into: TOS/TOS Movies, TNG/TNG Movies/DS9/VOY/ENT, and JJTrek/DIS/etc. (the currently produced stuff). You could also make an argument for sorting ENT with the current stuff, or splitting the TNG era up along a line somewhere near the airing of the movie First Contact.

And then there's the side materials and beta canon, which is its own kettle of fish.

Really, overall, Trek fans are like Scots.
Interesting-I have always grouped ENT along with TNG/DS9/VOY(both show and movies for TNG) because ENT came out in the same timeframe-1987 to 2005 of continuous trek(or near continuous given there was a brief break between the end of voyager and beginning of ENT).

While the era is different-it recycles a lot of voyager storylines, had voyager and TNG cast members direct and the writers/producers were the same people mostly. It's Berman era trek just set in the 22nd century instead of the 24th. It has the same "feel", atmosphere, structure, etc...
 


Basically, you can divide the Jojo's Bizarre Adventure fandom between the people who got into it before the 2012 anime - whether by the manga, the video games, the OVA, or the memes - and people who got into it because of the 2012 anime.
Yeah, Jojo's Bizarre Adventure is probably one of the most clear-cut examples of a split fandom you can find.

To elaborate, Jojo's Bizarre Adventure is a manga series that started in 1987 and is currently ongoing to this day. The series is divided into individual parts, each of them being a largely self-contained narrative with different protagonists and settings that are loosely connected with the others. At the moment, Parts 1-4 of Jojo have received full anime adaptations, and Part 5 is scheduled to release later this year.

The divide in the Jojo fandom is primarily between anime viewers and manga readers. Those who're willing to read the manga have access to all of the series' content that has been produced so far, including monthly releases of the still on-going Part 8. However, those fans who are only interested in the anime only have access to half of said content, meaning that there's about 23 years of Jojo that they aren't able to consume until the later parts are adapted as well. Fortunately, Jojo's Bizarre Adventure has been receiving new anime adaptations in about two year intervals since 2012. Part 4 having come out in 2016 and Part 5 coming in 2018. However, this still means that the anime won't have caught up to the current point in the manga for about a decade though, not to mention that the series will have moved forward even further by then.

This has created a situation where manga readers can't discuss almost half of the series they've enjoyed with anime-only viewers without spoiling them, and where anime-exclusives have to limit their interaction with the wider community or else risk the same thing occurring. This isn't helped by the fact that the age of the series has many older fans toss out spoilers more casually than they would a more recent work. For context, the part the most recent anime adapted concluded it's run in 1995. New content for anime-exclusives is more than a decade old for manga readers.

This has resulted in a community that urges new members to read the manga to the extent that it has become a meme in and of itself. The fandom can get obnoxious about it sometimes, but fortunately the majority more-or-less respect the decision that anime-exclusives have made, and welcome them as new blood.
 
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