Are fandoms religion substitutes?

[If my soul was made of stone]

Some of the more egregiously idiotic people on Tumblr and/or the bird app would submit that religion is a fandom substitute.

In the brief time that I spent on Tumblr in the latter half of 2014 I saw this argument far too many times, and even as someone just barely moving away from her hardcore New Atheist background at that time it was pretty offensive to see the adolescent fixations of people my age on 90s animation compared to millennia of tradition and ritual, in the same way that a handful of years earlier the adolescents-and-classical-Mediterranean-mythology subgenre of YA fiction struck me as a bit disrespectful towards faiths that were once similarly central to much of human society and experience. It's the sort of argument that one could imagine a bizarro-world Rose Twitter version of John Dule making, with the tea and nail polish emojis at the end of it.

[If my soul was made of stone]

Maybe, but it's a pale imitation at best so long as they don't subject thousands of children to abuse or behead those who disagree with them.

The average Tumblr or Twitter discourse over fandom topics might surprise you, then.

[If my soul was made of stone]

It's not the same appeal as following religious texts, which theoretically address anxieties over the meaning of life and promote virtues.

This is also the purpose of many secular works of fiction, no? It makes sense that folk might develop similar attachments to those works and model parts of themselves on it (writing smut about it is another matter, though). People have an intrinsic urge to identify with aspects of the world at large greater than themselves, and it's from that impulse that we have totems, gods in human forms, and groups centered around interests like these, especially given the contemporary culture of intimately identifying with fictional characters.

I'm not trying to equate fandom and religion by any means, but there are clearly common aspects of the human psyche that are involved in both.

[If my soul was made of stone]

This is also the purpose of many secular works of fiction, no? It makes sense that folk might develop similar attachments to those works and model parts of themselves on it (writing smut about it is another matter, though). People have an intrinsic urge to identify with aspects of the world at large greater than themselves, and it's from that impulse that we have totems, gods in human forms, and groups centered around interests like these, especially given the contemporary culture of intimately identifying with fictional characters.

Maybe for some people, but as a pretty intense fan fic and fan art maker myself, not really. It's catharsis and wish fulfillment.

Faith is also a source of "catharsis and wish fulfillment" for many people, myself included, but I don't want to stretch this comparison beyond its usefulness.

[If my soul was made of stone]

Faith is also a source of "catharsis and wish fulfillment" for many people, myself included, but I don't want to stretch this comparison beyond its usefulness.

It sounds like this is such a broad comparison that anything could be considered a religion substitute.

That's a central problem of the comparison as originally posited in this thread, yes. I still think there's modest merit in it, but only in the very broad sense that I was describing.

[If my soul was made of stone]

In some cases, yes, but things like “wellness culture” are better examples.

There's a strange and uniquely postmodern-capitalist quasi-spirituality to Gwyneth Paltrow selling people "jade eggs" to use for vaginal weightlifting, certainly, and the way that it mystifies the feminine reproductive system as a whole. It's an odd synthesis of primordial taboo, neoliberal feminism, and simple ostentatious celebrity greed, that pairs well with other westernized and commodified takes on yoga and such in the mind of the culturally alienated middle-aged suburbanite.