Fan Interaction with Ordinary/Micro- Celebrities

As I began to display with the previous set of posts, there are many opportunities for YouTube fans to meet with those at the center of their fandom. This is something to be expected with ordinary celebrities and is probably one of the main hallmarks of what an ordinary celebrity is. An ordinary celebrity is not as distant to the everyday person as a mainstream or regular celebrity is. 

With this final section of my blog, I will share moments where the fan is able to interact with the YouTuber in a way that works partly due to the YouTuber’s status as a microcelebrity; and thus concludes my blog.

Pictures of fans meeting and posing with Gus Sorola (top picture) and Burnie Burns (bottom picture) of Roosterteeth at RTX 2013

Picture of fans dressed as RWBY characters posing with Monty Oum (male with blonde hair) the head animator and creater of RWBY at RTX 2013.

Photo of Roosterteeth fans meeting at “Frank’s” (a restaurant recommended by Roosterteeth employees) at RTX 2014

Picture of fan proposing at RTX 2014. Both dressed as characters from Roosterteeth series RWBY.

Picture of fan dressed as a Roosterteeth affiliated character at RTX 2014. (Cosplaying, or dressing up as characters, is a big part of the Roosterteeth fandom)

Conventions

One thing that all of the YouTubers that I am looking at have in common is that each of them have conventions that their fans can go to and interact with each other. The Roosterteeth fans have RTX which is a convention held by Roosterteeth and takes place in Austin, TX. Whereas the Smosh and Fine bros fans have VidCon, which is an online-video specific conference held in Southern California. These conventions also serve as a place for fans to meet their idols, which will lead me into my final point. Following these posts will be a series of photos of fans at such conventions.

Fan Blogs

Fan blogs are another way that fans of YouTubers express their relation to fandoms. There are a multitude of them, some dedicated to different parts of said fandom.

This blog: “smoshsmoshsmosh” is dedicated to all things smosh related.

On the other hand this blog “roosterteethboys” is dedicated solely to the male members of Roosterteeth and this one “tehraion” is dedicated only to the RWBY animated series from Roosterteeth.

Smosh fans expressing their gratitude to the members of Smosh and SmoshGames on twitter

#smoshappreciationweek2015

Just last week was an event called “Smosh Appreciation Week” where the fans of Smosh flocked to their social media with the hashtag of “smoshappreciationweek” or “smoshappreciationweek2015″. As you would expect, in these posts fans showed their appreciation for the YouTube group.

Online/Offline Activity

With this next section of the blog, I intend to showcase other activities of the fans that do not include fan creation. 

What I found while looking into fan creations was almostcompletely what I expected. There was an abundance of fan-art and of fan-fiction. There was actually an entire tumblr blog dedicated to Roosterteeth fan fiction entitled “fuckyeahrtfanfic.tumblr.com”. Similar to what was discussed in class, there is a lot of textual poaching and queer reading occurring within these fandoms (most notably the Smosh and Roosterteeth fandoms). Although in context, it seems like the more appropriate terms would be “visual” poaching or queer “viewing” as most, if not all of the content provided by the YouTubers is visual. Similar to the Spock and Kirk fan fiction, one of the fan-fictions I provided in the blog somewhat followed the hurt/comfort theme (Ruby comforted Weiss after a nightmare). The one from the Smosh fandom featured a convenient situation while the other one from the Roosterteeth fandom featured one person being hurt but instead of “comfort” there was a fight that brought the two subjects together.

Something that I found more interesting was that there was not a lot, if any, conventional fan art related to the Fine brothers. Most of what was found was user created gifs that were made by taking away only specific points from their videos. I think this can be considered a type of textual poaching as fans literally only take away parts from the video that they liked and choose those moments to share with others. They are also used as a way for fans to promote their viewpoints on certain subjects as shown with the third set of gifs.

“Geoff and Burnie get in a fight over something stupid, and it’s all downhill form there “

Roosterteeth Fan Fiction (Geoff Ramsey and Burnie Burns)

“Ian and Anthony played a game of Spin the Bottle in a summer party. They are now in a closet. It's Anthony's chance to show himself to Ian, through a little fun. Ian goes along with the 'plan'; what do you possibly plan on doing in there?“

Link to IanxAnthony Fan Fiction (Smosh)

Roosterteeth Fan Art (Rwby Animated Series)