Returning to "Becoming-a-fan' stories: Theorising Transformational Objects and the emergence/extension of fandom

Fan studies have had much to say about fan cultures and communities, but rather less to say about how people become fans in the first place. Indeed, in his textbook Understanding Fandom, Mark Duffett goes so far as to describe this issue as an 'elephant in the room'. Anthony Elliott has sought to reread Bollas rather than merely applying his work; first in relation to postmodern media culture, and then in relation to mobile, digital media. Despite scholarly accounts of fan conversion, becoming-a-fan can also involve the intertextual extension of fan affect from one 'old' or displaced fan object to another 'new' text. The importance of access points means that the process of becoming-a-fan can be a very slow, gradual one in some instances. In such cases, culturally shifting meanings of self and text eventually intersect, with an audience-text 'interdiscourse' being found and produced.