This article started as an analysis of online fandom culture in 2024, inspired by the cultural critic Kaitlyn Tiffany’s book Everything I Need I Get From You. In the book, Tiffany explores how the identity of “fan” came to be, with self-identified fans—a predominantly female and queer demographic—being a continually misunderstood and derided population that has nonetheless been shaping our culture from the unacknowledged shadows.
However, as I set to writing, I realized analyzing the concept of “fandom” is difficult because fandom has broadened and infiltrated all aspects of media consumption. Unlike the closed, tight-knit communities on Tumblr or Twitter in the 2010s—which I was not part of, for better or for worse—“fan culture” is now inescapable. In our interconnected online world, to merely demonstrate one’s interest in a particular artist or piece of media is to invite an algorithm to push hours of content. While I’m content to listen to a song by an artist I know nothing about, I often feel as though I have no choice but to be immersed in discourse about their personal lives, their work, their place within our culture at large. It’s not that I don’t want to know this information, it’s that the ones sharing it rarely do so in good faith. I enjoy engaging with content about things I like, yet to do so is often to accidentally find myself in the middle of a culture war.
A girl posts an excited TikTok lip syncing to a song. In the comments, someone body shames her, and I scroll quickly past. Still, the comment lodges in me, a shred of internet shrapnel. A well-meaning young person posts resources to help with one global crisis, and thousands of people dogpile on them to complain that they’re not helping another crisis as well. The critics won’t commit any amount of time to helping solve global inequality, but they’ll devote hours to trolling the people who are trying to do some small part. A female singer’s new album debuts at #1, but the music itself is immediately overshadowed as fans drag her back into a hypothesized love triangle from half a decade ago. To enjoy a piece of media requires a million disclaimers, to identify as a fan of something invites derision, and to come of age online is a battlefield no one has the skills to deal with yet; things simply change too quickly.Â
These problems aren’t a new part of internet culture, but there’s a hyper-ironic and hyper-self aware edge to artistic consumption these days, a constant self-monitoring to avoid the looming, panoptic feeling of judgment from an infinite number of internet strangers.
Fandom is now recognized as the cultural—and consumer—force that it is. Fans with large social media platforms get exclusive invites to movie premieres and listening parties, and everyone from clothing retailers to ticket selling platforms try to present themselves as being “for fans.” With this comes some legitimacy, but certainly no respect: women are regarded as sought-after consumers, but just to exist in female or queer spaces online is to be marked as a target for vitriol.
In a world where one fan’s tweet can be quote tweeted or stitched by an alt-right propaganda account with millions of followers, how can young fans feel safe to experiment with their identities, as fandom’s goal has always been? Too often I see innocent celebrities, and their fans along with them, become scapegoats for broader cultural problems. It’s too easy for people to sit behind a screen and displace all their anger, frustration, and sadness onto others. To see, for example, a famous woman calling out misogyny in their industry and being met with threats of violence and abuse—well, the word “disheartening” is not powerful enough.Â
From my pessimistic “post-fandom” perspective, online spaces have a veil of fear and aggression that I’ve never seen before. Is it simplistic to say all this discourse makes publicly engaging with media less fun?Â
There’s simply more happening in fan spaces and on social media in general. There are more stan accounts, more bots, more ads, more discourse, more platforms. Large fandoms have split into smaller groups within groups. To scroll through social media is to lose dizzying hours to content often intended to be vapid, sensational, or problematic in order to get engagement at all costs.Â
I fear a lot of the articles I’ve written recently conclude with the bitter and unproductive belief that life simply sucks right now, for a multitude of reasons. Given that, perhaps the most accurate conclusion I can draw here is that I personally am upset that fandom as a concept has been hijacked. I personally am exhausted that I can’t go on TikTok to find a video of my favorite singer without wading through a firestorm of irrelevant, mind-numbing, bad faith discourse. The online spaces I spent my younger years on the fringes of weren’t utopias by any means, but they weren’t…like this.Â
At times, I see cultural conversations being pushed in a genuinely progressive direction. When an artist like Chappell Roan says we need to treat famous women better, when fans continue to find value in coming together online, I see the potential to create change for ourselves. I see people refusing to stagnate in the toxic sludge of content that social media companies depend on. But as it stands, our current relationship to celebrity and stan culture is untenable. If we continue allowing our energy to be exploited by those who benefit from these fruitless, circular conversations, the only people who will get burned in the end are young marginalized people for whom these spaces are crucial.