This project argues for a reconceptualization of fandom within Rhetoric and Composition Studies and Writing Studies by positioning fan communities as sites of literacy development sustained through networks of participation, care, and communal investment. Building on scholarship in Fan Studies, Rhetoric and Composition, and Literacy Studies, I examine how fan communities cultivate literacy practices through collaboration, mentorship, feedback, and shared knowledge-making. Drawing on Henry Jenkins’s concept of the “acafan,” I begin with a personal narrative that situates my perspective as a scholar-participant, foregrounding the relationship between lived experience and scholarly inquiry that has long characterized Fandom Studies. From this position, I conduct a critical review of English Studies scholarship on fandom from the 1960s to today. This review reveals that while scholars have increasingly recognized fandom as a site of literacy learning, identity formation, and rhetorical participation, less attention has been devoted to understanding how literacy knowledge is circulated and sustained within fan communities. I address this gap through a historical and theoretical analysis of fandom practices, examining fan communities through the lenses of literacy sponsorship and discourse community theory. Building on Deborah Brandt’s discussion of literacy sponsors, I apply Kara Poe Alexander’s concept of reciprocal literacy sponsorship to fandom communities. Reciprocal literacy sponsorship refers to literacy development sustained through ongoing cycles of mentorship, feedback, participation, and knowledge sharing in which community members simultaneously occupy the roles of sponsor and sponsored participant. Through an examination of fandom from proto-fandom communities of the nineteenth century to contemporary digital spaces, I demonstrate how literacy development emerges through mentorship, feedback, collaboration, archiving, and communal knowledge-sharing. In these spaces, literacy sponsorship is distributed across networks of participants who collectively sustain the conditions necessary for learning. Ultimately, this project contributes to conversations about literacy development, discourse communities, and writing beyond the classroom by arguing that fandom reveals a form of literacy sponsorship that complicates traditional institutional models. Reciprocal literacy sponsorship provides a framework for understanding how literacy knowledge circulates within participatory digital communities and offers Rhetoric and Composition and Writing Studies new ways of understanding writing, learning, and community formation in contemporary networked environments.