Metarecipient parents’ #Bluey tweets as a distributed fandom affinity space

This article explores children's and adults’ online fandom and engagement with the children's animated television programme Bluey. This Australian cartoon has proven extremely popular worldwide with its primary recipients, that is children, and has also received significant attention and positive evaluation from parents, who – we suggest – offer a metarecipient perspective on the series as they tweet about it, both voicing their own opinions and serving as their children's mouthpiece. Proposing the notion of a distributed fandom affinity space, we explore parents’ discourse on Twitter around the commonly adopted hashtag #Bluey and discern several fundamental categories of posts that provide insight into child and metarecipient parent fandom in the #Bluey affinity space. The tweets revolve around the concepts of parenting, family life, education and language that arise from watching Bluey, which both parents and children evaluate in positive terms. Overall, the distributed fandom affinity space realised through the #Bluey hashtag highlights the capacity for user engagement in popular culture offered by Twitter outside dedicated fandom accounts.