Blorboundaries
Earlier this year, in my Final Fantasy XIV video, which I still think is really good and you should go check it out and comment and like it and tell me I’m a good good internet boy, I deployed the term blorbo. Coined first in 2021 on Tumblr (best source I could find), it was used to refer to a habit for how Tumblr behaviour often involves a kind of public conversation (dare I say discourse) that often involves such shredding of available context that things look incoherent, without the faintest anchoring detail. Blorbo is a word that didn’t seem to exist until December last year but it so perfectly encapsulates a concept that has been omnipresent since two fans were able to bicker over their opinions of a god, and having it available presents an enormously useful way to discuss a fandom behaviour agnostic of a particular fandom.
When I described a blorbo in the video I referred to them as ‘a term for how fandom terminology looks like from the outside.’ And while yeah, you can low-key use blorbo as a way to make fun of people’s particularly weird fandom discourse, it can serve as a useful example for the consideration of how fandoms necessarily compartmentalise, how the nature of these spaces is to develop language and concepts that are specialised for operation within that fandom space.
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