Fandom going into 2025: What to Watch
I don't have a crystal ball... just Scorpio intuition.
I hate to say it, but my 2025 has not gotten off to the greatest start. I was sick at the start of the year with one of the viruses going around (not COVID, so a small win). It took me a while to feel better and to also feel up for writing something somewhat intelligible. And then there’s the fact that I live in DC and January has been far from okay to say the least. So with the negativity aside, the thing that has managed to lift my spirits is thinking about fandom. It’s important to talk about what we can look forward to this year, and if you’re like me and you’re reading this newsletter for the very reasons I write it, then we have a lot of pop culture items to discuss.
Full disclosure: these predictions could be way off base or way too obvious. It’s all in good fun.
DC Comics’ upcoming live-action film Superman will mark the beginning of DC getting greater fanfare than Marvel.
I am biased when it comes to DC Comics over Marvel as far as characters go (think Teen Titans and Young Justice). However, Marvel has outperformed in live-action content since the 2010s, thus, maintaining a sizable fandom through its narrative output. With James Gunn having been at the helm of DC Studios since 2022, we’ve seen commercially successful outputs including The Suicide Squad (2021), and tv shows Peacemaker and Creature Commandos. Up next on his slate is the summer theatrical release of Superman (2025). The trailer came out a month ago and now sits as a top five most viewed superhero movie trailer. In comparison, the Marvel movies coming out this year, Captain America: Brave New World and Thunderbolts, have not been promising. Both have undergone reshoots, with Captain America rumored to have extensive reshoots and Thunderbolts doing reshoots to add in more Bucky Barnes. Reshoots are not inherently bad, and Marvel has done reshoots before, but ever since the end of Phase 3, there’s been back-and-forth amongst fans on whether Phase 4 and beyond will be promising (you can read some of the debate on Quora).
Therefore, Superman is going to be the major summer blockbuster film. And being that DC Studios is a subsidiary of Warner Bros Discovery, I’m inclined to believe this could be the biggest marketing campaign for a DC movie to date.
Should I write more about the online fan conversation regarding the Superman trailer? Watch below so we can scream.
All BTS members coming back from military service will launch the group into global recognition unlike before.
I’m an ARMY, and obviously I’m too ready for BTS to comeback in every sense of the word. I became a fan in 2017, which is considered the first big wave of the group gaining international fans. Throughout the years, BTS has become a recognizable name, but in my experience, they haven’t stuck as a household name in the way that we talk about western artists. BTS is an IYKYK entity. What do I mean by this? I recently read this amazing piece from ayan artan’s rent free. that succinctly puts it together: BTS doesn’t get the recognition they deserve as artists.
My thoughts have always centered on this question: Is it truly just a language barrier? I’ve had interactions where I hear something along the lines of “they’re talented, I just need to understand the lyrics to connect with music.” My response is usually a simple “I get that” when really, I don’t. I’m not the type to confront this head-on, and a part of me suspects this is a subconscious habit of my white privilege. BTS have done so much for me and my mental health, yet I can’t facilitate a mere calling in on how one can open their perspective with a <.05 second translation search? That’s why I also suspect (or really, fear) BTS will have more all-English songs, or likely have English versions of songs to get western radio play. K-pop fans often have discussion threads about whether or not they feel comfortable supporting English K-pop songs (which can launch into a whole discussion on if English songs by K-pop groups are still K-pop, but I’ll digress for now). I’d like to believe there could be another “Life Goes On” — the first primarily Korean song to top the Billboard 100 chart.
However, despite the xenophobia BTS has experienced, my prediction is that whether BTS makes their comeback with a lead English or primarily Korean single, the excitement will be immense from fans. Additionally, BTS’s comeback is going to infiltrate outsider conversation because unlike western boy bands, BTS IS coming back from their two-year hiatus due to their mandatory military service (read my first PR case study paper on how their hiatus announcement’s mistranslation caused panic in 2022).
As far as the world tour will go, don’t talk to me about ticketing; I don’t want to think about that right now. In professional terms, I will be in desperate need of good luck.
Want a guide on BTS? Maybe I’ll work on a little something at some point. But for now, I have a mostly complete discography playlist on Spotify that I’m reworking into chronological order, including solos.
It’s going to get worse before it gets better on X (Twitter)… and for fans, this means struggling to find a safe space.
During my time at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, my class had a guest speaker who was working for Twitter before Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter was completed. This speaker did express worry and less than a month after that class they were laid off from Twitter along with the amassed 80% of Twitter’s total workforce. Since 2022, things for Twitter, now rebranded as the unremarkable “X”, has undergone a massive shift of algorithmic content that is riddled with misinformation. I can’t think of anything good that has happened to Twitter since the acquisition, but what I do know as a longtime Twitter user is that Stan Twitter will hold on for as long as it can until things somehow become… even more disastrous, if that’s possible?
Up until Election Day, part of me hoped that Elon Musk and all things X would phase out. But after the absolutely heinous display he made at the inauguration (obviously on top of everything reprimandable about his presence that’s known), that hope is gone.
Other Stan Twitter users might feel the same as me: what makes letting go difficult is that it’s an online space that has served the growth of many musical artists and where fandoms have convened through the ups and downs of shows getting cancelled, bands breaking up, independent artists finding overwhelming positive support, bringing out the pitchforks to cancel a celebrity, talking fan theories, going into fan wars headfirst, and forming friendships that span oceans all in the name of what they love. Now that society has had social media for well over a decade, we have so much to reminisce. As I collected my thoughts on the matter, I found a 2023 decennial social media study on how social media has enabled positive reminiscing practices from users.
Though my guess is people really do want to get off of X, they just miss Twitter. To me, that explains the race to replace Twitter, though I have yet to see other apps stick. When Threads landed on the scene, I made this post on LinkedIn as a question to the audience: Will Threads be accepted by fandoms? At this point in time, Threads is a bit of a wash. I see rumor mill articles when I get to that part of my Instagram scroll that reminds me every so often that there’s content to view on Threads. I’ve not seen anyone talk about this (and please, do correct me if someone has talked about this), but as far as finding a replacement for Stan Twitter, I don’t foresee a switch to Threads because it’s a Meta app that connects to your personal Instagram and Facebook accounts. Twitter is (was?) for that Jungkook screenshot from one of his many Weverse Lives as your pfps. It’s for the fanart and fanfic and finding the right cat photo that matches with a Yoongi picture. With that reasoning, I do see the potential of Blue Sky becoming an alternative to Twitter for fans. This article on Swifties moving to Blue Sky is the best I could find that articulates what my thoughts are exactly: when a fan’s favorite celebrity, band, team, etc moves away from X and creates a profile elsewhere, they will follow. However, the article shares that there are Swifties that still remain on X because of the ‘Taylor Nation’ account dedicated to Swift’s whereabouts and fandom news . From my experience as a BTS ARMY, I know fans remain because of the emotional attachment to user BTS_twt that has tweets from as early as pre-debut in 2013.
So where will fans go as X becomes a more dangerous platform? My prediction is that it’ll vary by fandom needs and wants from the performer that they follow. There won’t be an exact replacement to Stan Twitter… unless Tumblr makes a comeback, in which case, I’d be more than interested in being a PR mind behind that nostalgia ride.
The PR interest in fandom means better tailoring campaigns to cut through the (political) noise on social media.
Not to be one of those people who constantly brings up their thesis, but this prediction is based on ideas from my research, as well as casual observations via LinkedIn. Before really getting into the weeds of my social media observations, I wanted to see if anything new came up when Googling “fandom in public relations” and lo and behold the AI overview gave me familiar answers that I could see were generated with some help from my thesis [when viewing it was the 4th one down on the links, it’s 3rd in the screenshot below].
My thesis centered on discussing how PR practitioners can better appeal to fans through collaborative strategies that can enable authentic connections with fans. “Authenticity” has been a big PR buzz word, and to be frank, it has gotten to the point for me where the idea of authenticity as a strategy feels… less than authentic? Something I want to further study is how can we determine what authenticity feels like as an audience. I found a chapter in Public Relations, Branding and Authenticity: Brand Communications in the Digital Age by Sian Rees that offers insight from how to understand authenticity from the corporate perspective by adhering to the brand trust model: individuality, consistency and continuity. This means that while companies have the formula to understand how to approach authenticity, my question is how it translates on social media. I don’t want the social media numbers, I want a large sample of qualitative answers to determine when fans feel celebrity and brand authenticity.
I’m interested in this because the amount of noise on social media is overwhelming. How can PR elevate messages to cut through the noise? My prediction is that authentic fan engagement practices will be taken seriously, and that many US-based celebrities and brands will be faced with the choice of how they are going to do so with the current administration warring on DEI. Companies that maintain DEI practices are ones that will maintain positive fan engagement if the fandom in itself champions DEI values. In those instances, PR campaigns will cut through the noise by having campaigns that are curated to fans’ wants. A recent example I’ve seen of this is Tumblr’s campaign that occurred during the 24-hour TikTok shutdown declaring its distance from the politics and “masculine energy” of other social networks. Though it’s unclear if the app has gained more users, the campaign has been considered a success from a creative standpoint. Now I’d like to see more companies take a firm stance before we get into the thick of 2025.
Fandom content creators will be on the rise and combat the AI takeover in creative departments.
I hear about AI often in one of two ways. I either hear about how it’s meant to make our jobs as communicators easier, that it can help do the minute tasks like formatting and grammar checks. And the other way, the way in which I think about AI, is how AI can be leveraged for content creation. It sounds simple enough, but then there are rightfully a lot of questions about how AI is able to create from a prompt. What original sources does AI incorporate when creating an image or text? In what ways can AI inspire you before you cross trademark lines? AI can, has, and will change transformative fandom activity. Though there are darker implications in how AI impacts parasocial interaction, my prediction will focus more so on AI’s intersection with fanart, fanfiction and overall fan-generated content.
The fear with AI is robots taking over. For me, that fear extends to creative endeavors. Mark Twain said there is no such thing as a creative idea, him and probably everyone has said this at some point, especially if you’re a lover of the arts. The very essence of fan-generated content is being inspired from the source material and remixing it to their liking. AI can be prompted to generate content to one’s liking, but that eliminates and disregards the efforts from fan creators. A study on how AI translators can impact K-pop fan translators highlights that fans relying on fan translators are not interested in AI translators as AI often misses the nuances of translating Korean into multiple languages. There have been instances of fan artists expressing concern of AI being fed their work, thus, claiming AI is stealing their artistic style. AI can write fanfiction, though it stands to be seen if AI can write fanfiction well. As a semi-active fanfic writer and daily fanfic-reader, I say that using AI to write fanfiction defeats the purpose of wanting to put your own spin on characters you love. The writer of this article experimented with four AI generators to see what kind of fanfic it would write within the Harry Potter universe, and let’s just say the results were to the liking of J.K. Rowling.
Henry Jenkins, the pioneer of fan studies, does caution the discourse on fandom and AI as being one wherein we have to consider the line between when AI is a helpful tool in fan content creation versus whether it is stealing from fan creators. I agree that AI as a prompt generator listing a variety of ideas is helpful, but I’m inclined to be weary of how AI can plagiarize from source material, even if accidental. Moreover, I predict fans will continually combat the use of AI for creative purposes as it defeats the purpose of fan creators being as they are: originators in their own right.
Do you have predictions of fandom in 2025 based on your personal fan observations? Let me know in the comments! I’d love to learn more from other fandom corners of the internet. And maybe, just maybe, as this newsletter hopefully sees growth I’d love to host guest spots.