Wow. All right. I feel like the only black guy in a sitcom coming out of the door, like, hi. How many of you know who Octavia E. Butler is? Those of you who don’t, I’m going to each, give me an answer, I’m going to each buy you a book. Right? So, I’m a fan. I’m not a fan, but I’m a fan. I’m a fan of the show. I’m a fan of the show. I’m not a fan, but I’m a fan. My fandom allowed me, broke this lexicon abuse in the projects of Brooklyn, to even imagine I could go to undergrad and graduate school, and Magna and Summa can allow them both. Right? It’s why I never succumbed to my dyslexia, how I taught my grandfather how to read. It’s literally why I am in front of you today. People look at fandom as being this thing that’s out there, but it’s a thing that’s kind of in here. Right? We are all fans of something. How many of you are fans of something right now, that you can go three other people and go, hell yeah, you know. There’s something about that is so absolutely stunning and stellar and beautiful about it. But for me, it’s really about what can we do with what we have and how can we remake the world with the things that we are experiencing. Right? So basically, I love this stuff so much that I’m an evangelist for it. I’m like a reverend in the Church of Fandom. Right? No, it sounds funny, but the parallels between religion and fandom are so many. We have things that are canon and not, congregations, denominations, what was once a fringe culture is now centralized, we have sky buddies. Right? And so we’re all friends of something and we pull fans, somebody’s like, that was a joke, grenade, it’s like, oh. Right? And so we’re all fans of something because there’s something about it like religion, there’s a pull and a lure there. It’s like a mythic understanding of another type of parallel world. Right? Now we experience. I know for me, when I get in my fan thing, sometimes everything else turns off. So I have a friend who rents a studio apartment for his stereo and records. I have another friend, you give this dude a box of Skittles, he’ll give you an entire oral history of Western wrestling. And my ex knows more about fashion than Tim Gunn. Right? Every pleat, every stitch, every swatch. She knows it all. The thing is that we need these types of things to become elevated in our world, to elevate ourselves outside of our mundane. Right? We are fans because it brings us joy. We meet other people, we find belonging. And when you marry Joy in belonging, you get a kind of love. And fan love is a special kind of love. It’s the type of love that has you calling out of work for a Friday because you want to go to a midnight show of a movie you’ve already seen, but it’s better in community. It’s driving 100 miles to a fabric store to buy the exact state of orange for your Goku cosplay. She’s like, fuck yeah. It’s saving money so you can buy a replica of Andorreal, which is Lord of the Rings sword. See? I love this shit. It’s legitimately getting a second or a third job so you can save enough money to go to San Diego Comic-Con and ball out. I have no idea how this thing works. Top button. Oh. All right. So, San Diego Comic-Con, how many of you know about SDCC? Right. It is the biggest pop culture event in the world. But it’s only one lane. Fiscal year 2018, that’s how much money you brought into San Diego area. $147.1 million in less than a week. And 135,000 people showed up. That is all of Gainesville, Florida. Or all of Orange, California. Or 89.4% of Syracuse, New York. Right? And it’s great because at SDCC, another lane is movies. Out of the top 20 highest grossing movies of all time, all but one fantasy sci-fi horror superheroes, Titanic. Fast and fierce is on there, but in the middle of disregard for physics, we are going to call that a fantasy film. Right? And so, you know, we have people who are doing these things, right? Because the consumer power of fandom is undeniable. But there’s untapped power. So how do we move from collective consumption to collective world-building across difference? Something I believe that fandom is uniquely suited for. For me, it’s a simple formula. I times W plus F equals R. Imagination times will plus focus equals a result. Imagination. If you can invest in a teenage boy in Longjohns, swinging through New York on scientifically impossible webbing, you can look at somebody and invest in their humanity and their right to have everything they need. Well, you have to have the will to do it because the ideas do no good to sit in your fucking head. They have to come out, but the will to do it is kind of scary because being the harbinger of change is a scary thing. So you have to refine your vision in your head over and over and over until it becomes irresistible to you that you have to live in that world and you have to have the will to do so. A will is like a dino gathering energy. Once you reach 100%, you have to let it fly. And that’s what the focus is. Pick something that you dig. Increase representation in writer rooms, whatever it is, pick it in focus and give all your will to it. And the results are going to suck because you’re by yourself. Big change happens with big amounts of people. And that’s what fandom is. A whole bunch of people digging each other, digging on the same thing. Right? Oops, backwards. Right? So that’s the result. But you’ve got a lot of people doing these things. What people are doing, get all ready. We have Harry Potter Alliance. We have 501st Legion. We have FlamCon, Indigenous Comic Con. All those things bringing things to the table, but we can do a whole lot more with it. So if we have affection for fandoms, let’s have affection for each other. I call them momentary possibility zones. Things that happen in fandoms all the time. It’s you starting a literacy initiative on the library for comic books to help disproportionately impacted students. It’s Flash, F-L-A-S-H. Fit like a superhero to help diabetic families get back into shape. It’s about a kid at Comic Con in a wheelchair dressed as Captain America wanting to take a picture with every Captain America that are there. One guy finds the kid and gathers 25 around him to take the photo. So he didn’t have to go all the way around. These moments, because we have all this talk about microaggressions, but never about microalliances. We never talk about the good things that happen. Right? And I want to end with Unstar Trek, because of course that was my gateway fandom. So fandom is pedagogical. Ethically, morally, socially. Right? How many of you can do the Vulcan salute? I hate all of you, because I cannot do it at all. But this is also Hebrew greeting for the Konahim, who do the breathing. Right? So imagine greetings from now on. What’s up? Hey, what’s up? Black-Made head nod. Right? Or if you go to somebody and you go, you’re in peace a long life, and they hit you with the live long and prosper, you’d be like, bong, that’s a momentary possibility zone, right there. Take what you love as a fan, investigate it, map it onto your mundane world, see where they converge, see where your values are in alignment. To do this work, you have to engage in the cartography of the fantastic. Right? This thing right here. Difftor hesmusma, which means live long and prosper in Vulcan. Thank you.