The Energon Pub

[Geminii]

Transformer and GIJoe fans on the average do seem more normalized than others and a bit more grounded in reality. Oh there are a number of ass-clowns but on the whole that's true for about every fandom regardless of what it is.

I'd hazard that older fans of anything, on average, tend to be a bit more grounded just from having a couple of decades on the teen fandoms.

Look at fandoms for pre-80s media, and in particular fandoms for media which never got subsequent revivals in later decades. Fandoms for things like Blakes 7 and The Prisoner tend to have a lot of people closer to retirement age than college age, and while they still may hold conventions and write fanfic, they don't tend to have the levels of teen/tween drama seen in things like the Twilight fandom.

Then there are fandoms where revivals or strong differences across generations of the product lead to stratification and cliqueiness amongst the fans. We ourselves experienced it soon after Beast Wars hit the screens. Look at things like the My Little Pony fandom, or (for a more extreme example) the Lord of the Rings fandom when the movies came out. We still have a little of it, but we're more integrated now that the extreme GeeWunners took themselves off in a huff.

Look at fans of even older products and media, including early 20th-C and even the preceding centuries, and you'll tend to find older fans who are less 'weird', for want of a better word. Even if they do have an entire library for renditions of Bach, or a workroom which is wall-to-wall miniature trains or wooden soldiers.