When did everyone wake up and decide to stop liking things casually, and instead choosing to associate happiness with a celebrity or a team?
It’s okay to be upset when your favorite sports team loses (Bills fans, I feel for you) or your favorite singer cancels an album release or concert. That’s normal and understandable.
But, letting people who don’t even know you exist dictate your emotional state is insane. If this is you, you might consider choosing to see a psychologist instead of buying tickets to an event.
What is this culture of having your life literally shaken and disrupted by people you will probably never meet? Not only is it an unhealthy attachment, it’s dangerous.
Social media always connects people with others across the world, including with our favorite celebrities. While this is a blessing, especially when social media connects families who don’t normally see each other often, it is also a curse.
When people who don’t know how to like things normally are able to get in touch with their favorite celebrities, it allows them to form unhealthy attachments to and obsessions with them.
Perhaps the greatest examples are K-pop stans, (don’t crucify me) Swifties, and Lana del Rey stans.
Liking K-pop, or Korean popular music, is no longer something people can say is a special interest or quirk, but it has morphed into this incredibly toxic bubble in pop culture. K-pop stans are almost always just that, stans. It is really one of those things where there is pressure to either disregard its existence or live a life dedicated to its every update and announcement.
To be fair, K-pop does receive a lot of hate, sometimes for no reason at all, and it’s normal for that to upset fan bases, but in response, K-pop stans take it even beyond the next level. In defense of their favorite singers, stans will often dox, or to leak someones address/personal information, critics or sometimes even threaten death.
This is not normal, obviously.
Of course, not all fans, or even stans, are like this, but even one is too many. This culture of worship perpetrated by stans is incredibly toxic and generally harmful to the K-pop performers and to celebrities in general.
Fan bases with similar characteristics (this is not a directed attack) include the Swifties, or Taylor Swift’s superfans.
Taylor Swift is incredibly talented, a fashion icon, a lyrical genius, and the argument that she revolutionized pop music should be considered. “Folklore,” “Midnights,” and “Lover” are some of my top albums EVER. She is an amazingly gifted woman. Most of her hate, if not all, is undeserved and untrue
Her superfans, however, are some of the most objectively annoying, aggressive, and pretentious people to walk the planet. Swifties are probably the only reason I am not a Swiftie.
Please, for the love of Taylor Swift, I genuinely pray that Swifties can learn to like her in a NORMAL way.
If you love her and her amazing and versatile music, that’s great. That’s actually awesome! But, this cult mentality has got to go. Every attack on Swift is not an attack on women as a whole and let’s stop pretending that she speaks for all women and all feminists.
Celebrities just get hate sometimes and not everyone can be liked by everyone ever. That’s a huge part of being in the public eye. It doesn’t make it right, but it happens.
I think another fan base in which this same obsession is brewing is with Lana del Rey stans.
I love Lana del Rey and she has been in my top artists on my Apple Music Replay for almost five years in a row, but her stans are nasty and aggressive.
The social media obsession with her is relatively recent, and, even though she was never really “underground,” she is certainly being rediscovered, which is great, except for when older fans fight with younger fans and it becomes a battle of who likes her more and who actually deserves tickets to her concerts.
Reminder for all superfans (not just Swifties): the artist you love or are obsessed with is not and should not be your personality.
Fan bases are supposed to be a community of people who are connected by mutual appreciation for a singer, player, actor/actress, or other celebrity, not where people can bond over extreme and inappropriate fixations.
Let’s leave stan-ing in 2023.