Everyone is looking for someone to save them – a God, a partner, a friend, and sometimes, a celebrity. Jenson’s “Fandom As Pathology” takes a look at the socioeconomic contexts through which people engulf themselves into fandom and parasociality. The stereotype of the fangirl and alternatively, the fanboy does not lie unfounded. People that are rejected by the groups that are propped up in their society often find themselves in some kind of online fan community, most commonly teenage girls, LGBTQ+ youth, children of low income families, and those that are otherwise socially disadvantaged. The systems to which they preside aside have failed them in one way or another, and demonizing them (especially those that are still children) is potentially dangerously regressive.
When I was 13-14 and in the most vulnerable stage of my life, I was heavily involved in a fan community on Twitter. At that point in my life, I was grappling with personal strife that I really hadn’t fully processed until now. I was in a tense and arguably abusive familial circumstance, I spent much of my free time home alone while my mom worked to get food on the table, and on top of that, I was in the throes of puberty with the social agitation caused by the first Trump administration reverberating through my middle school alongside it.
The other people in that fan community with me were just like me. They were my age, had a similar worldview, and shared a lot of my interests. In my mind, they were just as much my friends as my friends from school. We would text each other about our crushes and people that annoyed us, and a couple I’ve stayed in touch with for eight years now (one of which I met in person for the first time a couple months ago).
The thing that separates me from the stigmatized fringe of fans that Jenson explores is that this phase of my life did not last long. Once I entered high school and started making friends that shared my interests, hobbies, and beliefs in my real life, I didn’t need the fan community to fill that gap anymore. I still participate in fan culture to this day, but not in the all-consuming concentrated way that I did when I was 13. I go to concerts far more than even the average music fan (partially due to not having to pay for them most of the time), I buy merch on occasion, and I am always looking for new things to love. But at the end of the day, it’s certainly not my place to look down upon those that continue to live as a fan in a concentrated or “low brow” fashion. The exception, however, lies in taking it to a personal level.
I lost a friend to fandom, and I wish I hadn’t. We were immensely close friends throughout high school, and she was one of the handful of people I made a concerted effort to keep in touch with after moving across the country. While I expected for a lot of my hometown friendships to fade away to varying degrees, I’m still left saddened by what appeared to be a sudden shift to apathy from this friend, noticeably after I made some critiques of the fandom she had attached her identity to. Eventually, investing so much time and emotional weight into a fandom makes critiques of the product become a personal attack, and that friendship was collateral damage to that reality. I am not to deny someone the source of their joy, but as the great poet MJ Lenderman once said, “it falls apart, we’ve all got work to do.”