Or are you like me and (for the most part) don’t?
I have one community which is on Discord I take part in on occasion. It’s nice with the occasional fandom event, like my upcoming rarepair week. Yet I don’t have a lot of places where I can talk about my preferences for my fandoms outside of the comments on my fics.
For most fandoms I don’t really chat with others. I’ll have fun looking at works and putting stuff out there but don’t have the urge to converse further.
For everything else (yes 90% of it is Pokémon) is ComicFury, the occasional spots on Discord, and once upon a time, Reddit (hello kbin). Before covid there was a lot convention stuff but thanks to being sensitive to the vaccine among other things… that has fallen off more than I like. But what else can I do?
Not to say I haven’t looked into other sites like Dreamwidth and stuff, but goodness if the UI doesn’t grab me immediately it takes a stupid long time for me to really get into a location- regardless if its digital or offline.
Alas if you do not also take part in a current huge community. Not like I share a lot of commonly held fandom beliefs, so I guess I should cut my losses? Just sort of wish there were more people putting out the kind of works I really want.
I very rarely share the popular headcanons too. But I just have fun hearing and helping others figure out how to tell their stories. As long as they aren’t possessive/cultist about their headcanons I can have fun even if I think their ideas are OOC. It helps that at large one of my favourite things is fixing plotholes (which Pokémon has in all forms) and its just so fun to hear how people decide to fix things.
There is something special when dealing with fandoms as big as Pokémon. A lot of niché ideas have a chance to have their own subfandoms. My biggest fancomic project is full of stuff the fandom at large does not care about and have seen 90% of the subfandom declare they hate BUT here I am in a couple of Discords! (though I largely only talk in one because it’s smaller and I get overwhelmed when there are too many people chatting at once despite it being in separate channels lol hhhh). When I was on the subreddit, I too often had a take considered a little too spicy at times. Oh well!
However, when a fandom is small enough usually people tend to be so thankful for content that they will check out genre/ideas they wouldn’t usually if there was a bigger buffet. But often enough the small fandoms I get into are so small that I’m still the only fanfic writer for that fandom. The only conversations I’ve had about Dino Run have basically all been people who read my fics fandomblind lol.
So yeah, 100% me too on wishing there was more of the kinds of works I want to read.