You hear all these “you’re not a real fan unless” and it lists a hundred things, but I met a dude today who saw my Deadpool pin and asked what my favorite story arc was, and I explained that while I loved Deadpool, I was new to Marvel (I only really got into it a year and a half ago) and hadn’t been able to find a lot of the comics. Instead of making a face or a derogatory comment, he just offered to send me all the stuff he had. That is a true fan.
I told the guy at the comic shop when I went in for Black Widow that I’d seen a few Harley Quinn panels on Tumblr and thought it looked badass but didn’t know where to start because my entire involvement in DC fandom was watching the Batman cartoon as a kid. This guy sitting at one of the tables playing Yu-Gi-Oh, wearing a comic shirt and carrying a definitely-hardcore-fan amount of swag, spins around and goes “dude! You’ve never read DC? Check out the back issues wall. They’ve got all kinds of Harley Quinn.” He then proceeded to explain how “New 52″ was a spinoff, and had some split opinions in the fandom, but either continuity is good as long as you pick one and stay with it so you don’t get mixed on what’s going on.
True fans love to see other people loving the stuff they love.
YES THIS. I’m one of those terrible people who’s like “Why yes I do own a Marvel Encyclopedia that I read front to back when I’m sad” and the X-Men are, like, my first love, and I have a mental laundry list of all the ways I can share LITERALLY ANYTHING ABOUT THE X-MEN with my friends. You like the animated series? Yeah bro, I’m here for that. Movies? Honey, sweetie, darling, tell me all your opinions ever, my body is ready. You watched X-Men: Evolution as a kid? Dude, I still watch it when I’m sick or upset. Comics? Yeah baby, talk nerdy to me about time-travel plot lines and clones. I heard someone tell a girl a couple years younger than me that she wasn’t a ‘real fan’ of something (the Avengers, I think?) because she’d only seen the movies and I was like “*hisses* THAT IS MINE NOW I WILL TAKE OVER.”
au where the government incarcerate bucky in a high security secret facility and the avengers just conspire and break him out and when a government official comes to stark tower and is like ‘hey give barnes back’ tony is just like ‘he’s not here’ and the dude is all ‘he is sat right there’ and tony just goes ‘nah thats my cousin sergei’ and the government can’t do anything bc technically bucky barnes has been dead for 70 years and every year the facility gets a christmas card from the tower signed steve, tony, clint, natasha, bruce, thor and ‘cousin sergei’ and the card is just a picture of bucky with reindeer antlers on
