The more I think about fandom, atleast from a traditional media perspective the less it makes sense, people enjoy writing stories about the characters, creating art work and even dressing up as the characters all un paid.

To take an extreme example of fandom as a case study:

Theres an anime called The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya that got really popular all over the world partly because of its subject matter (teenaged girl is God but has no idea she is, wishes that out of the ordinary stuff happens but also believes they cant so she is surrounded by time travelers and aliens who want to keep her from destroying the world).

But one of the main reasons it go so popular was because of the dance it featured at the end of the show:




This has spawned all sorts of fan videos of people copying the dance:





The studio that also produced this show made another show called lucky star, its a slice of life show who's lead character is an obsessive anime fan who dress's up as some of the characters from The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya.

What also makes the show similar is the fact that they use an opening dance:



That also spawned fan video dances.

But whats truely, astonishingly amazing is that fans started to animate cross overs of the two shows having the characters from The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya do the lucky star dance.

And I'm not talking about bad animation I'm talking about animation so good that it could be genuine footage from the show:



Dont get me wrong, I understand that talking about you're favourite show is fun but what I dont understand is what motivates a person to produce such high quality work un paid.

Anyone got any insights?