Fandom, Jenkins told me, is “born out of a mix of fascination and frustration. If you weren’t drawn to it on some level, you wouldn’t be a fan. But, if it fully satisfies you, you wouldn’t need to rewrite it, remake it, re-perform it.” Nowhere is Jenkins’s constructive view of fandom more evident than at Comic-Con International, in San Diego. Comic-Con started as the Golden State Comic Book Convention, in 1970, attracting some three hundred people. It’s now a four-day bonanza attended by a hundred and thirty-five thousand fans of all stripes, many of whom show up in elaborate cosplay. When I arrived at this year’s edition, in July, I started seeing Spider-Men five blocks from the convention center. Near the entrance, a group of Christian protesters—the oldest fandom, really—was yelling, “The Syfy channel cannot save your soul!” I turned around and saw a guy dressed as Lumière, from “Beauty and the Beast,” shrugging at me with candlestick hands.

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Shopping Cartoon by Emily Flake

Inside the exhibition hall, a sea of Dumbledores, Stormtroopers, and Sailor Moons lined up for merchandise and photo ops. As Comic-Con has ballooned, Hollywood franchises have swept in to market their latest tentpole projects, unveiling trailers at starry panel discussions and wrapping fans in a mutual embrace. (By one estimate, pop-culture conventions in the U.S. are now a ninety-million-dollar industry.) The center of the hall was dominated by build-outs for “Star Wars,” Marvel, and “Doctor Who.” You had to walk a good distance to get to the old-school comic-book bazaar, which was like a rent-stabilized neighborhood in a gentrified city. A seller named Levi, who was dressed as Robin and had attended Comic-Con for fourteen years, said, “It has sold out, but not in a bad way. There’s more money, but there’s also a lot more fandom now.”

I met Daenerys Targaryen in line for Mega Construx, a rival of Lego that had built a life-size Iron Throne. Her real name was Arin, and she was twenty-three. “I’m trying to get on the Iron Throne, since I didn’t get to do that on the TV show,” she told me. She had been coming to Comic-Con since her freshman year of high school, when she dressed as Princess Bubblegum, from the cartoon series “Adventure Time.” She said that she had been dismayed by Daenerys’s downfall, because she saw the character as a model of female empowerment. “I refuse to believe anything that happened in the last season,” she said, as the line inched forward. “I mean, I know it happened, but I have my own canon: she and Jon Snow are happy, everything worked out, she has two dragons—somehow the third one came back and he’s not a zombie.”

Arin grew up in San Diego and works in digital marketing in Hollywood, where she handles promotion for comic-to-film franchises. She spends a lot of time reading online fan forums. “I know how to get into their world,” she said. “There’s a fine line to tread on how much you listen to fans, because fans aren’t always right, either. But there are certain things where you should listen to them, because they’re smarter than maybe the super-high-up execs are going to think.”

She got to the front of the line and handed her phone to her mother. When she sat on the Iron Throne, she adjusted her snow-white ringlets and shot the camera a look of regal serenity. Later, she posted her royal portrait on Instagram, with the caption “justice for khaleesi.”

“Fan” is short for “fanatic,” which comes from the Latin fanaticus, meaning “of or belonging to the temple, a temple servant, a devotee.” The vestal virgins, who maintained the sacred fire of Vesta, the goddess of hearth and home, were the Beyhive of their day. But “fanatic” came to be associated with orgiastic rites and misplaced devotion, even demonic possession, and this may explain why fan behavior is often described using religious terms, such as “worship” and “idol.” (One Trekker at Comic-Con told me that the show “replaced religion for a lot of people.”)

“Lisztomania,” coined in 1844, described the mass frenzy that occurred at Franz Liszt’s concerts, where audience members fought over the composer’s gloves or broken piano strings. Charles Dickens’s readers in New York were so anxious for the final installment of “The Old Curiosity Shop,” in 1841, that they stormed the wharf where it was arriving by ship and cried out, “Is Nell dead?” In 1893, Arthur Conan Doyle, sick of writing Sherlock Holmes stories, flung the detective off a cliff in “The Final Problem,” which ran in the magazine The Strand. (“Killed Holmes,” Conan Doyle wrote in his diary.) After readers cancelled their Strand subscriptions by the thousands and formed “Let’s Keep Holmes Alive” clubs, Conan Doyle was forced to resurrect him. Sherlock fandom persists today, thanks to the BBC series starring Benedict Cumberbatch, whose admirers, sometimes known as the Cumberbitches, have swarmed location shoots in London and filled the Internet with Sherlock-Watson slash fiction.

Newspaper writers started using the word “fan” around 1900, in accounts of baseball enthusiasts. The rise of professional sports leagues had produced a new class of spectators who didn’t necessarily play the game but pledged allegiance to a team. The word was also used, more pejoratively, about “matinée girls,” young women who attended theatre not for the plots but to gawk at favorite actors. As the movie industry blossomed, in the nineteen-tens and twenties, so did fan magazines, such as Photoplay. After the matinée idol Rudolph Valentino died, in 1926, some hundred thousand fans mobbed the streets of New York during his funeral, smashing windows and clamoring to get a last glimpse of his face.

Science-fiction fans, who have always been at the forefront of fandom, started meeting at conventions in the nineteen-thirties. The World Science Fiction Convention, which began in 1939, in conjunction with the World’s Fair, still exists, as WorldCon. (The 2019 edition was just held, in Dublin.) “Star Trek” fandom, in the late sixties, was a breakthrough. When NBC threatened to cancel the show, fans organized a letter-writing campaign and kept it on the air. The show ended after its third season, but it had aired enough episodes to qualify for syndication, allowing the viewership to expand throughout the seventies. The first major “Star Trek” convention was held in 1972, when some three thousand Trekkers gathered at the Statler Hilton hotel, in New York, under a banner that read “Star Trek Lives!”

Rock and roll dragged Lisztomania into the twentieth century, as Elvis Presley fans swooned and screamed—a phenomenon immortalized in the title of his 1959 compilation album, “50,000,000 Elvis Fans Can’t Be Wrong.” Beatlemania further crystallized the image of the screaming female fan. An underappreciated aspect of the band’s appearance on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” in 1964, is that it spotlighted not just the Beatles but the hysterical audience. The “screaming teen” stereotype has often inspired hand-wringing or contempt, a way of policing adolescent-female libido. The fan scholar Mark Duffett has suggested that “fan screaming may be a form of ‘affective citizenship,’ ” a communal defiance of ladylike behavior.

Like television, the Internet broadened and intensified fandom. When Jenkins published “Textual Poachers,” digital fandom was “mostly guys at M.I.T. and military bases typing ‘Star Trek’ into computers while at work,” he said. Nineties shows such as “The X-Files” and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” spawned passionate fan communities that used the Web to gather, complain, or hunt for romantic subtext. (“Shippers” are fans who, often disregarding narrative logic, advocate for certain characters to couple up.) But stronger fandoms meant a stronger sense of ownership, which could put writers and producers on the defensive. The ABC show “Lost,” which ran from 2004 to 2010, inspired elaborate theorizing about its mysteries, and fans revolted when the finale didn’t deliver answers. One of the showrunners, Damon Lindelof, later lamented the conflicting demands of viewers: “There were things that they wanted, but they also wanted to be surprised.” Millions of dollars ride on the contradiction.