Ok, I have to preface this by saying I'm a long-time wikipedia user and have always found like 99% of their categories horribly useless, and I never browse wikis that way. I'll go to google and use its superior text search over a wiki's own bad one before I'll resort to large category browsing in almost every case. (So maybe somebody on the other end of the spectrum does find these categories useful?)
To me, given the Fanlore focus on fandom to the exclusion of canon minutia, categories like 'film' make no sense. That's how the source product is organized outside of a fandom context. Fandoms are usually thematically organized (HP books, HP movies, HP cosplay, HP conventions, etc.). Even canon source texts that aren't based on anything and that haven't spawned major offshoots in other mediums often have a tie-in novel or two floating around. It's a rare fandom that's both large and absolutely, positively single-medium. Some fandoms are easy to guess the "primary" medium for; some are more evenly split. Tiny fandoms can be single-medium, but if they're tiny enough, I usually find they're more like fanfic of books of micro-genre X rather than an actual fandom for book Y. The organizing principle is more likely to be Yuletide or Raymond Chandler or m/m romance than "books".
As a category on Fanlore, 'theater' seems like it should cover... I don't know... articles about people standing in line to get tickets or stage door waiting practices, not plays and musicals themselves. Takarazuka is a form of theater with a relatively unified fandom where the format and the fandom elements seem more directly linked. "Theater" as a whole does not seem like that to me.
And movies? Books? True, some people prefer one to the other, but there isn't really any such thing as "movie fandom" or "book fandom" in a general sense. Anime and manga fandom are different because they actually have groups of people who organize or conceptualize their fandom activities around the idea of being an anime/manga/whatever fan. In Japan, lots of people are fans of BL or otaku culture or are part of the doujinshi scene or something, but I haven't seen people talking about being "anime fans" or "manga fans" the way they do outside of Japan. In the US, anime fandom strikes me as being more like Japanophilia fandom than people who like a particular shape of cartoon eye fandom. The common thematic and stylistic features of anime are significant in that people are likely to like multiple series and in that they make anime more obvious and distinctive as a category, but I don't think they're the reason why there's a distinct anime fandom any more than "spaceships are cool" explains why SF fandom is its own thing. Lots of people like to watch tv. Media fandom isn't "tv" fandom. Blah blah blah.
Anyway, I'm not going to actively campaign to get rid of these categories if they're helping people find things, but they don't make sense to me.
![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
Re: radical!
To me, given the Fanlore focus on fandom to the exclusion of canon minutia, categories like 'film' make no sense. That's how the source product is organized outside of a fandom context. Fandoms are usually thematically organized (HP books, HP movies, HP cosplay, HP conventions, etc.). Even canon source texts that aren't based on anything and that haven't spawned major offshoots in other mediums often have a tie-in novel or two floating around. It's a rare fandom that's both large and absolutely, positively single-medium. Some fandoms are easy to guess the "primary" medium for; some are more evenly split. Tiny fandoms can be single-medium, but if they're tiny enough, I usually find they're more like fanfic of books of micro-genre X rather than an actual fandom for book Y. The organizing principle is more likely to be Yuletide or Raymond Chandler or m/m romance than "books".
As a category on Fanlore, 'theater' seems like it should cover... I don't know... articles about people standing in line to get tickets or stage door waiting practices, not plays and musicals themselves. Takarazuka is a form of theater with a relatively unified fandom where the format and the fandom elements seem more directly linked. "Theater" as a whole does not seem like that to me.
And movies? Books? True, some people prefer one to the other, but there isn't really any such thing as "movie fandom" or "book fandom" in a general sense. Anime and manga fandom are different because they actually have groups of people who organize or conceptualize their fandom activities around the idea of being an anime/manga/whatever fan. In Japan, lots of people are fans of BL or otaku culture or are part of the doujinshi scene or something, but I haven't seen people talking about being "anime fans" or "manga fans" the way they do outside of Japan. In the US, anime fandom strikes me as being more like Japanophilia fandom than people who like a particular shape of cartoon eye fandom. The common thematic and stylistic features of anime are significant in that people are likely to like multiple series and in that they make anime more obvious and distinctive as a category, but I don't think they're the reason why there's a distinct anime fandom any more than "spaceships are cool" explains why SF fandom is its own thing. Lots of people like to watch tv. Media fandom isn't "tv" fandom. Blah blah blah.
Anyway, I'm not going to actively campaign to get rid of these categories if they're helping people find things, but they don't make sense to me.