Doctor Who Fan types

By Charles Daniels

As the 4 part fan type system, turned 5 part fan system, has been debated
in the "Other Revelation Questions" thread felt I should devise my own
list of fan types for Doctor Who...

1) The Raving Maniac - The fan has seen all the episodes, read all the
rejected scripts, has every last second of existing Doctor Who down to the
smallest Highlanders clip, spends hours every day watching the camera edit
of "Vampires From Space", he has all the target novels organized by
number, all the NAs, and MAs and has read most of them, every morning
they awaken in their Tom Baker underwear, kiss their life sized wall
poster of Roger Delgado and thank lord god all mighty for their total
devotion to Doctor Who and his rewards and blessing most recently
witnessed with the JVR footage

2) That Drunk Guy\Gal - at home they would sit stuffing their faces
with crisps. twiglets, and anything edible as they guzzled cheap beer
and would occassionally click by and find Doctor Who on BBC, ABC, or PBS.
They would laugh at the rubber monsters, smile, and then pass out
drunkenly bloated

3) The "No I'm Normal Really!!!" Fan - this fan tries to seem normal,
and safe, and not like the psychotic freak they are.  They may be
bank managers, insurance agents, or hold any regular office job.
At night they retire to their guilty pleasure of watching Pyraminds
of Mars and reading The Also People.  These fans have houses that
aren't spotted with miscellanous science fiction paraphernalia
and entering their livingrooms you'd think they had no clue who Gerry
Anderson is.  These fans are deadly and dangerous, it's only a few
more years till they dress up in some nightmare outfit from A Clockwork
Orange or Judge Dredd and start wildly attacking co-workers with
model bazookiods after years of playing the straight line.

4) The "Mousy" fan - This is the guy or gal who everyone over looks,
   they wear cheap tacky dark clothing that makes them magically
   disappear into the background, they never add to conversations
   and one quickly forgets they even exist.  No one ever goes to their
   homes but if they did they would find an unsettling display of
   full sized props, models, large wall posters, thousands of dollars
   worth of Dapol Daleks, Svens Models, Action Figures, original Action
   Man Dolls, and books signed by Terrance Dicks, Dave Stone, Douglas
   Adams, David McIntee, and oddly Santa Claus but they don't want to
   talk about that, they never want to explain anything.  This person
   MIGHT freak out like the "normal" fan but it's unlikely and they
   would probably stop their killing rampage and apologised if you
   asked them too.

5) The "Bored" Fans - these fans live in some hideous place like
   Wyoming or Scunthorpe.  There is no hope of meeting other fans,
   everyone look at you bizarrely when you try to read copies of
   Mission Impractical in public or when you are caught watching
   The Robots of Death on tape.  It seems hard to get what you
   do want and even though you've seen perhaps half the stories
   you can't find the others and no one will help you get them.
   Eventually you think of moving somewhere exciting but you
   don't.   PLEASE HELP THESE PEOPLE!!

6) The "Colin baker" fans - you may like any or all of the Doctors
   but you are also a big Colin baker fan.  Other fans mock you and
   suspect you wear tacky coats and kitty pens in private.  No one
   understands you love of The Trial of a Time Lord and almost all
   of Season 22, slowly you try to show that Peri was a good companion
   with the 6th Doctor but no one believes you, everyday you feel
   persecuted by other people and like someone had shoved a camera
   in your face and cued tacky casio FM sting music.

7) The "Slyvester McCoy" Maniacs - Some people like Slyvester McCoy,
   some people are fans, but then there are those who are the Maniacs
   a special breed of fan.  All the Doctors were leading up to him,
   they spend $200 for the question mark umbrella, they have erotically
   bizarre dream of him with live ferrets in his pants, they have pictures
   of him adorning their walls, and closets, and floors, and ceilings,
   long letters somewhere between fan and love letters are sent frequently
   poems in his honor are written, t-shirts with quotes from him printed,
   at the convention breakfasts he is definitely not safe with them
   hovering around waiting for his word to drink the kool-aid or his
   blessing so they may live.

8) The "Tom Baker" Maniacs - These people are uniquely deranged as
   their theories and views of the show are immune to reality.
   Tom Baker was the first Doctor they ever saw, they believed he
   WAS the Doctor, when he regenerated they screamed in terror,
   when they discovered other people had played the Doctor before
   him they were shocked and just resigned themselves to the
   "The Doctor is Tom Baker, and some other people have played
   him as well"  They talk only of his adventures and everything
   Tom baker says is the holy last word on the truth.  These are
   the people who wrote the BBC and complain the Tom Baker Years
   tape just wasn't long enough.  They consider the 4th Doctor
   Prime Computer and new Zealand Telephone commericals canon
   OVER any non-Tom Baker story.  They wear scarves, have the sonic
   screw driver, and firmly believe The Power of Kroll is underrated.

9) The Troughton Supporters - these fans have all the existing Troughton
   stories and loved them, Troughton is there favorite Doctor and other
   fans ask them how this is possible when all of his stuff is gone.
   Troughton Supporters shake their heads and people won't take the
   audios and telesnap reconstructions as evidence as they worship
   and pay daily homage to Graham Strong and David Hollman.

10) The Pertwee Fanatics - They love the gadgets and actions, and
    when people talk shit about Pertwee they get tell them to
    "F**K OFF!" punch them in the face with some venusian akido
    and rush home to watch The Daemons with Roger Delgado.
    Their motto "Bad CSO??  It's nothing."

11) The Hartnell Fans - No one cares about them, so ultimately the
    safest fans, they watch the original stories, have a few audios,
    a few telesnaps, they've read the Plotters and Venusian Lullaby,
    maybe a few more, over all their fandom is harmless except for
    finding themselves urgung to say "My Boy", "Hmm", and they
    can't keep a sentence straight.

12) Davison Fanatics - These are largely non-exisent, no study can
    yet be done, preliminary data suggests they eat celery to avoid
    gases from the Praxis range.

so those are the first 12 identifiable types.
---------------------------------------------------------------------

By Finn Clark.

Further research has discovered further subgroups:

13) The Undergraduate.  Generally a maths student in steel-framed glasses, he
occasionally has a girlfriend and he also watches Star Trek.  Usually called
Nick, Dave or Chris.  Doesn't drink as much as he says he does.  Is rather
quiet at parties.  Will spend hours on end in disturbingly intense discussions
of obscure children's television programmes.

14) The Old-Timer.  Was a founder member of DWAS in the seventies, knew all the
authors before they were famous and occasionally phones up John Scott-Martin
for a chat.  Once almost slept with a companion.  Has spent a truly staggering
amount of money on Doctor Who, not to mention a significant proportion of his
waking life.  Now claims that Doctor Who is a bit shit really and that he's
only still in fandom because of all his friends there, so it's a mystery why he
keeps hanging around the newsgroups...

15) The female fan.  A very rare species, especially if heterosexual.  Didn't
believe the rather disturbing rumours about Doctor Who fans until she found out
for herself.  Going to her first convention was an extremely bizarre
experience.

16) The Virgin.  No, I don't mean someone who's collected every Doctor Who
book.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

By Cliff Bowman

Curiously, a few additional (possibly spurious) fan types have been
identified.

17) The female / otherwise oriented male Petie fanatic. Tends to rip
heads of anyone criticing "Petie" and would dobtless shred Davison's
clothes were he to encounter them. Savagely hypnotised by him, they
seem to follow his work of which Doctor Who is just a subset (so more
Davison underwear fans than Doctor Who fans, really).

18) The combo fan. A strange mixture of the more normal types (2,3,4,5
(except it was one of the Timewyrm books at Microsoft's major site in
Blighty),9,10,11 and 13). May spend hours and hours per wekk (or even
day) trying to create digital representations of a cyberman finger on
his/her home computer with the hope of eventually creating the whole
thing. tends to look hung-over at any time between 7AM and 11PM.

19) The Alternative fan. A drastically enthusiastic fan of Doctor Who
in every media it hasn't been done in yet. Apparently good-natured
from a distance, this fan becomes fervently involved in any project
surrounding his/her favourite (non-existant) episodes. Has a tendecy
to revert to beleifing his/her self to be a sentient form of plant
life.

20) The underpaid fan. Whilst many fans generally presume this to be
their type, the truly underpaid fan works slavishly to increase the
enjoyability of Doctor Who. They may write up scripts for free
distribution, or produce plays of lost/un-produced but approved
material. They may even have original works published by the BBC as
ongoing Who (although the term "original" here may be under some
duress on occasion). May occasionally be attacked by other fans in an
attempt to show that this type earns even less than their wage packets
suggest. Little is known of the mating habits of fan type 20 (except
that so far none have been successfully bred in captivity), and even
less is desired. These two facts, when combined, suggest that the
species may be on the decline. With luck their demise will show other
fans what they were missing all along, albiet a tad too late to change
the situation.

21) The "untrue" fan. Decries any statement, whether good or bad,
about Doctor Who made by any fan of another type. Heatedly debates the
topic if responded to, and proves their point of view with a string of
statements which often verge sufficiently close to the truth to allow
the less hardy fan of another type to waver. May occasionally be found
rifling through books at the store looking for "facts" to denounce.
Generally inhabits the sewer regions of the Internet although may be
seen produly strutting about at fan club meetings.