Where do Fandom and Cults Differentiate Themselves from Each Other?

The almost insane curiosity that science fiction and fantasy fandom direct at their favorite books, movies, television shows, and radio dramas (or comic books, art, etc.) has been compared more than once with cult-like devotion to religious leaders and icons.  In fact, the word "cult" itself has many meanings, and is related to words like "agriculture", "culture", and "cultivate".
We do appear to worship the Star Wars universe in many ways.  Some fans are so devoted to the Star Wars experience that they meet regularly in costume and ... and, well, do things like the Tolkien fans and the Star Trek fans and the Pern fans and the Hunger Games fans.  And it goes on and on.  Millions of people have identified with the science fiction way of life. I'm not suggesting that is a bad thing.  After all, I have helped to organize and run science fiction conventions.  I have sat on panels.  I have blogged about fan groups, fan events, standing in line with thousands of others waiting for movie openings.  I am still planning on seeing "The Avengers: Age of Ultron" on the day it opens in theaters (May 1, "may the Force be with Disney" -- wait, that's a Star Wars thing).
What I am saying, if I am saying anything at all, is that it's all about legacy (or did Tony Stark say that in "Iron Man 2"?).  We are creating a legacy of memorable experiences but we are also creating a legacy of lifestyle.  Science fiction and fantasy fandom is in a way an exercise in the cult experience, although not a bad one.  Not all cults are bad, mind you.  The cult is simply a channel for unorthodox beliefs and behaviors, outside the mainstream.
The outside world are the mundanes.  We are the exciting people, the fans.  But we have not embraced the word "cult" (it has largely only been used by mainstream media when seeking a metaphor to describe the fannish way of life).  We will not join the ranks of the most evil cults in history, to be sure.  But we may eventually be included in the most famous cults in history.
Sir Alec Guinness, who helped launch the Star Wars experience into cinematic history, was about as anti-Star Wars as one can imagine.  He hated the movies that made him a wealthy man.  He hated the legacy of Obi-wan Kenobi, a character he could not really figure out.  One of the most famous Alec Guinness anecdotes in Star Wars fandom is the story of how he met a boy who had seen the movie 100 times, and he asked, "Can you promise not to watch it again?"  The boy burst into tears and his mother hated the actor ever afterwards.
I hope the boy watched the movie 1,000 times more and learned to differentiate the actor from the character.  But I also hope that we have learned to understand and sympathize with Sir Alec, who did not grow up in a world of light sabers and spaceships, who did not adventure with the hobbits or ride dragons.  He was a mundane trapped in the robes of an iconic character and it would be unfair to judge him by the inadvertent cruelty of his words to a child.  At the time no one could have understood exactly what Star Wars was becoming, what it would mean to science fiction fandom the world over.
We credit Star Trek with many breakthroughs in dramatic production, for taking science fiction more seriously than an Irwin Allen production, but it was Star Wars that magnified the fannish experience and propelled it to the front pages of mainstream media.  The World Science Fiction Convention had been organized decades before George Lucas brought his SF memes to the big screen.  Star Trek fans had already held their own conventions.  Planet of the Apes fans were still more iconic with their ape costumes.  But without Star Wars all that might be so buried in fringe culture almost no one would know what fandom is.
When Denny's invited me and other bloggers to write about their Hobbit-inspired menu in 2012, we were only the latest in a series of commercial promotions directed at science fiction fandom.  But the restaurant chain's PR firm did something a little new, a little different this time around.  Whereas Burger King and other restaurants had simply participated in merchandising when "The Lord of the Rings" movies came out (I consulted with one marketing company that helped design some of the merchandise), Denny's invited real life fans to wear their costumes in a series of commercials.
It was a moment of recognition for fandom itself.  The business world paused briefly to acknowledge the growing wealth and popularity of fandom.  It was now acceptable for us to simply be fans in promotional campaigns, rather than mockeries of fandom.  Too often in the past science fiction fans have been parodied by mainstream media, drawn in stereotypes that reduced anyone who lives the lifestyle to the fringes of society, possibly even characterizing us as psychotic misfits.
Fans have now taken control of the medium.  Guys like J.J. Abrams, James Cameron, and even JBuzz Aldrin have worked hard to make science fiction more mainstream, more appealing (and therefore acceptable) to worldwide audiences.  Buzz Aldrin's occasional foray into science fiction media and fandom has done much to legitimize the fan experience by associating it more closely with one of the pioneers of human space exploration.
But we're not yet mainstream.  Despite the huge success of science fiction film franchises and the plethora of science fiction-inspired memes that permeate our marketing, there is still something about the science fiction lifestyle that relegates it to the back woods on the weekends, or the local convention center when "the convention comes to town".  We are a spectacle to be watched and enjoyed, especially the girls in the skin-tight costumes.  In fact, whereas it's deemed unacceptable to grope women on the street or in the office, real-life sexual harassment occurs often at science fiction conventions.  We have not yet brought our mainstream values into the lifestyle, so the lifestyle itself remains outside the mainstream.
Whether human society will ever fully adopt the lifestyle remains to be seen.  Science fiction fans today are nothing like science fiction fans of 70 years ago.  Scientists at the Los Alamos laboratory reportedly had to buy their own copies of science fiction magazines at the store because the stories involving nuclear weapons had been classified as "secret" in the government research library.  To think that being a science fiction fan meant smuggling speculative fiction onto a secret government war research facility at the apparent risk of being charged with a crime is somewhat amusing today, but we have to remember that back then science fiction was still seen as "something in the pulps (magazines)" directed mostly at kids.  Real adults and atomic scientists weren't supposed to be interested in that stuff.
The lifestyle is evolving and may one day become subsumed into mainstream social customs.  Or it may spawn secondary lifestyles that remain on the fringe, perhaps less acceptable to older science fiction fans who, like Sir Alec Guinness, may not "get it" because they simply grew up in a world of light sabers and spaceships.  The comparisons to cults may continue for reasons we cannot begin to fathom, and if anything they may be validated by our own inability to grok everything about fandom that is fandom.  The lifestyle is a living laboratory of social innovation and personal expression, but it remains cult-like for those very reasons. ____________________________________________ SF-Fandom is a moderated, fan-run community devoted to science fiction, fantasy, history, and mythology. SF-Fandom was founded in 2001 and is part of the Xenite.Org network. Free registration is required to post. Please be sure you read our Posting Guidelines.