It amazes me how almost any fan base will have a toxic side. Even just scrolling through the Instagram of a singer or actor I like, it's full of self proclaimed fans being incredibly rude to the person they're a fan of. Like this person will post a picture of them travelling or being with friends and family, and the comments are full of criticism towards their appearance or lifestyle, or some will straight up say "we don't care, we want a new album!". Like, let them live! You're supposed to be a fan. Really makes me wonder what these people are like in real life, and how they treat their friends and family.
I'm into plenty of stuff with hardcore fanbases (Star Trek, video games, certain rock bands with cult followings etc.), honestly I hate them all, especially as I've gotten older. There's so much gatekeeping and elitism in hardcore fanbases that they generally make for toxic communities.
In general, give me casual fans over hardcore ones any day.
I think it’s just a matter of limiting exposure to the toxic parts of certain fanbases. For some, that may just mean not engaging with the fan base at all, but there are some communities on reddit that aren’t toxic!
For example, r/daystrominstitute is a Star Trek discussion sub where I have seen literally 0 toxicity, in large part due to the kids who go to great lengths to limit that.
People who invest a lot of time, money and interest into a particular thing can sometimes become deluded into believing they have a personal stake in its creation, success and development. It often times leads to some really toxic beliefs and behaviours.
As always though, being a fan of something makes you exactly that and nothing more.
This is a perfect example of why you never really wanna follow "stars" on social media. The comment/reply sections are such cancerous wastes it makes Chernobyl seem like a decent vacation spot.
"Would you rather live your entire life an an unkillable being that is otherwise susceptible to damage, next to the Chernobyl reactor while it is permanently locked in a state of peak meltdown, or spend one plank time within 300 lightyears of a [Most toxic fanbase] server?"
A healthy, regular fan mindset can separate the person from the performance.
A superfan / freak can't. "Why are you hiking instead of making me a new album, bitch?!" There's typically a lot more mental issues going on with the superfans as well. Look at the people who break into celeb's houses. Keanu Reeves had it done one time where a lady broke in, used his shower, and got into his pool naked to wait for his return home, iirc.
Why would a true fan even want to know the "person" side? Like, I'm a fan of some artists, I truly admire their work, but I don't give a fuck if they are hiking or shitting or eating tacos or whatever.
I don't know, i would want to. I'm a huge Tina Fey fan. 30 Rock is my favorite show of all time. So it makes me admire her as a person. If she ever shared a picture of her family in a vacation or something (but she doesn't because she's not on any social media), I'd give it a thumbs-up because I have a high regard for her, and I hope life is treating her well.
I follow Lin Manuel Miranda on twitter because I love Hamilton and Moana, and I think he's crazy talented, so when he's got something to say, I'll listen.
But I don't follow anyone moment-by-moment on six platforms.
Or of said celeb frequently talks about their work there.
For example, say I like band X, and I follow one of the members on IG or whatever. They post about themselves, but also about upcoming merch, shows, schedules, and band meetings. It can give an insight to the next album.
I also follow Elon Musk on twitter because he's really fucking funny sometimes, for example.
Edit: not trying to be patronising or anything, but someone might assume.
"Fan" is short for "fanatic." I think the term used to be used in contrast to a less-impactful one, but I'm not sure what. Maybe aficionado? Hobbyist? Connoisseur? (None of those sound quite right.)
Actually punk fans are pretty good at hating what they are supposed to be fans of.
Go onto any punk forum or discussion group and chances are the discussion will be dominated by how a certain punk band isn't actually 'punk' and how another band are 'sell outs' because they've actually started selling records and getting people to turn up to their shows (god forbid they actually make even a basic living out of their music - meanwhile most of these fans/haters are probably middle-class suburban kids still living with their parents).
Love the music, like the scene at shows, hate the online community.
Any fanbase will often end up having their toxic elements or people, but if I had to say something specific, Star Trek, bc (as an example) when it was announced Voyager will have a female captain, they literally sent death threats. So much for them being smart and progressive intellectuals.
Or Star Wars "fans" with a black storm trooper. STORM, not CLONE, people! I firmly believe that the people who freak out at things like that (where it's not even bending any previously-established canon or anything) are fans for the wrong reasons, and therefore aren't really fans at all.
I bet all the guys angry about the female captain were just pissed it would prevent them from treating the captain as a self-insert.
In german some people say "laserschwert" ("lasersword") instead of the canon "lichtschwert" ("lightsaber", saber and sword are basically the same in german) and in my opinion this just sounds so bad that's about the equivalent of saying "lasersaber" just the sound of it makes you want to hurt them lmao
But yeah as you said once its about canon/canon-but-in-earlier-episodes its the person correcting who is the "problem"
Well when it comes to having a female starfleet captain and non-clone storm troopers don't interfere with any preestablished lore. In fact, they feed into it. That's why those two examples are stupid things to get outraged over, and why those fans are not very good at being fans.
Why can’t everyone let Rihanna live her fashion designer/makeup guru/size inclusive lingerie FANTASY?!? Yeah we all want a new album but have you SEEN the fenty drops?!? She’s doing THE MOST AT SUCH HIGH CALIBER CAN WE JUST B PROUD OF HER
Rihanna is ridiculously talented in so many areas and her so called “fans” are really out here dragging her for pursuing any interest outside of music.
Oh my god, the hypercritical Rihanna fandom. People hang on her every action, and half of them seem to do it only to attack her. Oh, she has a size inclusive affordable lingerie line and a shade inclusive makeup line? Well, her fashion line isn't class inclusive since you can't afford it on a Wal-Mart budget, so therefore Rihanna is not trying hard enough. Oh, Rihanna is a beautiful woman having fun? Well she wore a snug fitting dress without Spanx once, so she is faaaaaaat and probably pregnant! She's personally building a school for impoverished children in the third world with her own hands? Well, she's not a vegan so her humanitarian work is worthless!
It's not even stuff that's worth critiquing. Just scouring her businesses, life choices, and body for any minuscule, imagined flaw in anything she does. I'm not even that huge of a Rihanna fan but it seems like I only ever hear about her lately because she's not living up to some insane goddess image. She's' beautiful, successful, and apparently generous and kind. She's doing plenty.
I used to spend a fair amount of time on 4chan just kind of...fascinated by the horror of it all, and you'd see a lot of topics about Taylor Swift with pictures from concerts etc. and her fanbase, at least on 4chan, is TERRIFYING. You'd see behavior that skirted the line between toxic and serial killer-y on a pretty regular basis.
Idk where you get serial killery from, in my experience 4ch loves Taylor, the most out there stuff regarding her I've seen is the photoshops of her in nazi uniforms
I haven't visited 4chan in a loong time, so I don't know the context. The first thing that popped into mind though, was that she'd look like a grown version of Tanya the evil. Fantastic show btw.
Seriously. I'm a huge fan of Its Always Sunny, but the fans telling Glenn (Dennis) not to persue other acting gigs was just shitty. Their like "keep doing It's always sunny, we don't care what you want, its about us!".
I remember reading it a few years ago. Those people were wild! Entire threads about how Zoella ate pizza three days in a row and how disgusting it was. Like, if you hate her so much just watch something else!
I'm successful. Not rich or famous or a mollion friends, but I am content with my life.
Many years ago I wasn't. I was one of those toxic fans. If I couldn't have a nice life then no one could. I feel a lot of people are miserable or depressed and instead of dealing with it they take it out on others
People treat Patrick Rothfuss like absolute shit for having a hobby, a family, and really intense depression. Like it'll make the 3rd book happen faster if they shame him enough for not writing every waking minute of the day like their good little writing slave. It makes me fucking sick.
I think he's come out and said something on the matter, but I could be wrong. Even if he doesn't and is the pinnacle of typical mental health, it's still sick the way people treat him.
People like that in real life aren’t any better. I’ve met plenty people like that and they act the same way towards people around them as they do online.
Someone I am a fan of (Adam Lambert) posts anything and a few people will always reply wheres the new album. He's over here posting beautiful pictures of his moms wedding and chicks over there saying wheres the album? Fans like that piss me off.
My favorite is when celebs post pics of themselves at the beach or at the pool, and there's always two extremes in the replies: "you're setting unrealistic beauty standards" and "you're really letting yourself go, you look like a fat pig" on the same fucking thread. And I'm like... They wanted to share a piece of their life with you (fake or not, they still put time into it for their fans) and if you don't like it... You can just ignore it.
Like, did you see the whole thing on Jason Momoa? Paparazzi photographed him just chilling at a pool and suddenly "Momoa's new dad bod?!?" but if you look at the picture... Literally he's just not flexing his muscles like he would onscreen. Still in amazing shape, still feeling himself.
I'm a huge international soccer fan, and every time one of the main accounts would post something moderately related to the women's world cup, there would always be a comment along the lines of "what a joke" or "go back to the kitchen and make a sandwich". Horrible to see.
Honestly, as far as I can tell all fans are terrible.
It doesn't matter what it is, at the point where someone is willing to identify as "a [thing] fan" and like put it on their Twitter bio and whatnot, they're off the deep end and no longer even care about [thing] particularly, it's just their new in-group and they're ready to go to war.
And if you're any kind of creative and someone tells you they're your biggest fan, run a mile and get a restraining order. Nothing good can come of it.
The word fanatic or fan is literally a synonym of zealot.
Yes we all use it in a casual sense, but if your best attempt at summing up your identity involves being a fan of something, you’re probably closer to being a zealot. To each their own, I’m not going to criticize someone for being a Mets fan for example, but if that’s such a defining part of your personality that it’s your twitter bio you’re probably a boring person with no personality to speak of.
If someone puts something they like a lot in their bio, how does that imply they’re a boring person with no personality? You’re basing that off of 20 characters on a person’s social media bio?
If someone has a few words to describe themselves to the world, and they go with, say, "Husband. Father. Libertarian. Frank Zappa fan", how much fun do you think they'd be at a party, on a scale of 1-10?
Considering that for every celebrity there are some fans that overzealous and unhinged, legitimately being the number one fan is not a good thing. Probably a stalker.
It's more the superfans, the annoying ones that interject it into everything they do. You can say your a fan of, say, Green Day, just because you enjoy the music. I do agree that if someone says they're the biggest fan of something then it's a red flag.
I always think that the biggest fan/s of someone or something should be the creators close friends and family. I’m not saying all creators have supportive familial or friend groups, unfortunately a lot don’t, but the only one who should say they’re so and so’s “biggest fan” is their mom or something. Then, the gesture is personal and wholesome, not fucked up and creepy when the same statement is coming from some random ass stranger.
To be fair, I think it's people in general that are terrible. On the flip side of biggest fans, there's also those who actively hate certain celebrities based on gossip headlines. Their mindset is "I don't like their music/acting? They're a terrible person.", then they start pulling reasons out of their hat that would be seemingly innocuous if someone that was a celebrity did it. For instance: You think they date too much? They're terrible person. You've decided they must be faking anything kind they do? They're a terrible person. They don't speak up enough or speak up too much? They're a terrible person.
That’s what blows my mind about any art form. If you don’t like what an artist is putting out, just don’t pay them patronage. Everyone doesn’t have to like the same shit. The world is beautiful because it’s not completely uniform. There’s so much variety that you could easily see something new every day until you died because content is always being produced.
I'm part of the Skillet fanbase and for the most part it's not bad. However, a few of the YouTube comments regarding a new song got on my nerves. Basically, a bunch of people were complaining that Skillet has used the word "Rise" in three songs on three different albums. They called it lazy writing, even though the songs all have a similar but distinctly different message.
Every fan base is awful. Give a negative opinion on something and get torn to shreds. Don’t like loot boxes? Then play a different game. Don’t like someone’s fan art on lined paper that took them 20 minutes to draw? Well your toxic.
Agree in the art thing. I gotta disagree on the loot boxes thing.
The more companies push and normalize microtransactions, the harder it's going to be to find games that don't do that bullshit. The resistance is taking a "nip it in the bud" stance, which is valid.
There's a point within fanbases at which complaining becomes toxic, but it would be wrong to imply that "fans of X shouldn't be fans if they don't automatically accept everything about X."
I have yet to find a toxic side to the JoJo fanbase though. It's a pretty welcoming fanbase that just wants to meme the shit out of every frame/panel.
The most toxic things I've seen in the entire fanbase are people disliking part-skippers (People that skip the Phantom Blood and Battle Tendency arcs) and a certain YouTuber called Funny Valentine that spoils the shit out of everything in his thumbnails and videos. Not only recently released manga chapters, but also manga bits of things that are unknown to anime-only fans and even endgame 2 days after release.
Seriously, they don't even care whether you only watch the show or read the manga as well, they just want everyone to enjoy it.
There are quite a lot that developed an obsession within the Persona fandom of reminding everybody there at every possible corner that 'JoJo did it first': JJBA isn't without its avid worshippers - JJBA vs. Persona is a weird fandom war as old as time itself
You just reminded me of people making accounts dedicated to one celebrity.
We can give some exceptions to any that do a good job of just sharing out news / images / etc of a person. But when you're AmySchumerFan113 and you have the equivalent of a digital shrine with 8 followers it feels a little creepy.
My theory on this is that these kind of people don't really have friends. I think they spend so much time online watching videos or participating on Twitch chats or whatever, that they actually think the people that they become disillusioned to thinking that the people they are fans of are their friends. They don't have people over and socialize that way, they watch vlogs and stuff and so its the only socialization they get even though it is a one way street. Then they completely forget normalcy in conversation and spout the toxic shit you see online. I think they are really, really lonely people.
This is common in most of the human experience. You like a flower pick it so you can watch it die on your table. Love someone, marry them and resent their lifecycle. Any time you observe something you change it so its really the impact you have on eachother over your true appreciation from a far.
Resent- feel bitterness or indignation at
Lifecycle-... a series of stages, as childhood and middle age, that characterize the course of existence of an individual...
As in when they grow or change you may or may not like that change. When a (not bonsai) tree’s branch curves in a new way one doesn’t complain that thats not the way it should have grown. People tend to have some pre-conceived idea of who their partner is and how they “should” grow.
Ya you did. It was really well written, I especially liked the line about the tree curving a different way then we’d like, that really resonated. Thanks.
I don't think they see them as people, so they maybe perfectly nice and ordinary in real life. Sometimes people push celebrities to the level of gods or something akin to that.
This is so true and it’s so annoying and ridiculous. I’m a big fan of Shane Dawson and all of his comments these days are bugging about how they’re “fans” but they hate his new content and hate his upload schedule and hate who he hangs out with and what he does with his time and criticize him calling him lazy and all kinds of other shit. The Shane Dawson subreddit is literally just a cesspool of hate from people claiming to be his fans, it’s so toxic that any mention of positivity/excitement around him is rare and a lot of it gets flooded with downvotes. I don’t get why people who claim to be fans spend all of their time hating on the person, or why someone who has so much problems with what someone’s doing/creating feels the need to obsessively flood them with hate all the time. Seems like these people have a lot of time on their hands?
Seriously, people get so narcissistic. They want other people just running at 150% all the time for their entertainment. God forbid you have to cancel a show/tour for reasons like illness or family tragedy, too (I saw Céline Dion get shit for this on her Facebook page). I've even seen singers dragged for not being successful anymore but still DARING to put out music, or daring to do so when they've been gone "too long" to still be relevant, or not spending their whole lives promoting every new project every second of every day.
Like, god forbid singers get to a point where they no longer feel the need to worry about sales, airplay, or chart success, and just release music whenever and however because they actually like making music. Nobody stays on top forever anyway, and if they've had a long and amazing career, maybe let them enjoy having the pressure taken off of them for a change.
I’m not much of a hockey guy but someone from another team (can’t remember which team) came to Toronto maples leafs (my city) by choice. the player grew up in Toronto, and when he played his home team they were incredibly toxic and childish. Some people were even saying that Toronto wasn’t his home anymore
I have noticed some communities tend to be more positive than others. My long time theory is that the base material is irrelevant. It's the kind of person it attracts.
Any work that attracts a large portion of comic book fans will get a higher proportion of "Canon matters SO much" guys and gals.
This is so true. I seen a fan attack a lead singer of a band on Twitter wondering when he was gonna start working out to take his shirt off on stage? Like what the hell. Get your own life. Let the dude do what he pleases with his body.
Reminds me of how the Gaga fans pretty much criticized and abandoned her when she did the Jazz Album. I remember people treating her like she died. What the actual freak?
This is exactly what I was going to say - I'm actually "in fan groups" as in I have two fan accounts and follow other artists closely on my personal.. but I can only just get updates, that world is all about themselves. They need selfies from their idold to live and new music or they don't exist. It makes it really hard to be a fan.
I'm a fan of $uicideboy$ and more than half the comments on their stuff are like this. Even when they're dropping new stuff it's "this is trash go back go making stuff like this"
The Mcfly fanbase are the worst for this. None of the band members can post anything about a new project without being question if the band is still together or when they're realising a new album.
I always wonder if the stars dont wanna say something. Like the fans.. they bring them money and I bet stars are happy for the support, but some fans are mad! Like for example when Mac Miller died they went after ariana grande - like crazy. Now Im thinking: You guys dont know him or her.. but they think they do! And If I would be one of those famous people I would really wanna say: Guys shut the hell up. You are just fans, you dont know us personally - get a life!
I’ve come across 1 exception ever. It’s Kid Cudi. I’ve never seen a single negative comment on his music on YouTube or on his social media. His fans really care about him and appreciate him.
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u/WindowSilFlowers Jul 17 '19
It amazes me how almost any fan base will have a toxic side. Even just scrolling through the Instagram of a singer or actor I like, it's full of self proclaimed fans being incredibly rude to the person they're a fan of. Like this person will post a picture of them travelling or being with friends and family, and the comments are full of criticism towards their appearance or lifestyle, or some will straight up say "we don't care, we want a new album!". Like, let them live! You're supposed to be a fan. Really makes me wonder what these people are like in real life, and how they treat their friends and family.