From an opinion essay in The New York Times by Lindsay Crouse titled “Fandom Is Out of Control”:
What drives a grown person to travel to a courthouse in Virginia to hurl insults at someone she has never met, about behavior she didn’t witness and money she is not owed?
Crouse is referring, of course, to the bizarre public support for Johnny Depp in his defamation lawsuit against Amber Heard. And most of Crouse’s essay is about that trial and the public reaction to it. But this is just the latest example of fans going full-blown toxic with their “love” in recent years, which also includes racist abuse by fans of actor Moses Ingram merely for the fact that she, a Black woman, was cast in the new Disney+ series Obi-Wan Kenobi (just the latest nightmare from Star Wars fans who seem more on the side of the Empire than the Rebellion), and racist and misogynist abuse directed at the cast of the 2016 reboot of Ghostbusters.
Is fandom out of control? And perhaps more pertinently, if it is, how do we fix it?
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I’ve been a fan in my day (my day being the 90s) but we pretty much stuck to writing fics and talking about it (and everything else) on discussion boards.
There’s something I heard, I think it was a story on a podcast, that’s always stuck with me. It was about fan brigades of Korean boy bands who would log into a group like it was their job and await marching orders for the day: today let’s all swarm this online poll, or make these phone calls, or participate in this sales promotion linked to our idol to show support, or buy and mail in hundreds of this symbolic item to some company in protest of some decision. One person was in charge of the group and would always find something for everyone to do and direct these coordinated activities. Every single day.
That kind of behavior is something the world doesn’t need.
That behavior can be channeled for good as well as for ill, though. Kpop fans, encouraged by the bands and singers they idolize, have been mobilizing to do good works for decades — including, recently, when they famously derailed a Trump rally and supported the Black Lives Matter protests by drowning out racist voices on social media.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/22/asia/k-pop-fandom-activism-intl-hnk/index.html
I’m not sure this is a specific issue with fandom as much as with the general culture. Everything is louder, everything is amplified. It’s vastly easier today for good people as well as awful people to find like-minded thinkers and egg each other on to collective action. Sometimes that means Kpop fans mobilizing for charity and social justice; but sometimes that also means racists, misogynists, and people sucked into toxic cults of personality using the same social media megaphone to further their own goals.
Tribalism can be terrifying. And too often that’s what fandom becomes: tribalism.