"Imagine a place:" Power and intimacy in fandoms on Discord

Abstract

With over 300 million users, the voice, video, and text chat application Discord has been steadily emerging as a dominant site of fan communities and practices. As the platform continues to grow and to court audiences beyond the site's gaming origins, fans have flocked to the site. To critically consider how fandom has developed on Discord, we analyze how power structures and intimacies between and across fandoms are constructed across three levels on the platform. At the smallest scale, rules, roles, and fan practices within individual Discord servers afford the explicit hierarchization of fans and the regulation of fan discourses. Next, Discord's subscription services encourage economic and cultural competition across and between servers of the same fan text. Finally, fan practices and discourses stretch across the entire Discord platform, connecting seemingly disparate fandoms through a variety of fan activities. By examining how fan practices and the platform's affordances constitute power structures and intimacies across these three levels, we provide a primer on the affordances and critical sites of inquiry on the ever-expanding Discord platform.