Wednesday 6 June 2018

Toxic Love


When I was 11, I fell deeply and irreversibly in love with the Lord of the Rings. It actually changed my life. I adored every last second of it and honestly? Though the fires of passion have faded through the mists of time, I still firmly believe that it's the best studio trilogy ever  and the main reason why I’ve just dropped a significant wad of cash to tour New Zealand this summer. The Lord of the Rings is excellent.

It also made me utterly unbearable. I could just about go five sentences into a conversation before turning it back to Rings. I wore t shirts until they stank and then threw a mard when I was ordered to change into something else. I spent far too much time alone online, rereading the same few websites and the worst, most terribly written fanfiction I could get my hands on. Most importantly though, I couldn’t handle any criticism about the films because I took it as a personal insult against me, the world’s most important person. I remember some catastrophic sense of humour fails which left me crying and my poor, beleaguered family exhausted.

I’d transplanted a personality for a fandom. I used to look back fondly on how much of a nerd I was, but now…?

The Guardian, 05/06/2018
The Guardian. 09/10/2017

BBC, 06/06/2018



Guys, we need to talk about toxic fandoms.

Liking stuff is great. Handmade merchandise is neat. Listening to niche, cool podcasts is fun. Memes are awesome, this one being my favourite:

Stuff like this is why I still have a Tumblr.


As fans become closer to the creators of their beloved objects of desire through Twitter, Instagram and still somehow Facebook, great stuff can come from it too. However, for every cute story about The Rock throwing a high schooler a cinema day, there are about ten more for a celebrity who’s had to just leave to stop the abuse hurled at them. Ed Sheeran quit Twitter. Justin Beiber privatised his Instagram. Adele, Rihanna, Leslie Jones, Daisy Ridley and Emma Stone all had to quit following trollish, abusive comments. And then there are the hordes of Youtubers who receive vitriolic hatred for their opinions on a daily basis. All of this from fans.

I’m not going to say ‘so called fans’, because these are people who like stuff, same as me. Ed Sheeran left following his appearance on Game of Thrones, Justin Beiber closed down his Instagram because people were harassing his girlfriend. Leslie Jones left because of eye wateringly racist abuse when she was cast in Ghostbusters. Game of Thrones fans. Justin Beiber fans. Ghostbusters fans. TV. Music. Films. Is it beginning to sound ridiculous yet? Does it sound insane?

To an entitled fan (of which I very much was one when I was 11) it’s perfectly reasonable. To someone who replaced a personality for a fandom, to see something even slightly out of step of what they envisioned their chosen life to be is a personal, scathing insult. I think Ed Sheeran ruined Game of Thrones! It doesn’t matter that it was a short cameo and mainly for the benefit of a young actress on the show, it destroyed the realism of my dragon story! To Twitter, for I must call him a hateful slur to the online equivalent of his face! Twenty people liked that hateful slur, I shall hurriedly create another, more elaborate hateful slur! Forty people liked it! I’m winning the hateful slur game, hurrah! If I’m lucky, my hateful slur will end up on Celebrity’s Read Mean Tweets, then I shall be the God of the internet for the day!

And oh my God have entitled fans turned Star Wars into a hellscape. The conspiracy theories, the abuse, the endless, endless videos about why The Last Jedi was awful and horrible and the worst thing since the Black Death. And entitled Star Wars fans, who believed they owned a film created for children but it had the audacity, the sheer nerve to cater to audiences beyond aging men and branch out into further, better representation for groups of people who are different from them, chose to lash out at actors, the director, the producer, anyone they could get their hands on. Kelly Marie Tran is gone from Instagram and I’d bet my cat on people being smugly triumphalist over it. They proved they were right to themselves when the stories hit and the other side of the Star Wars divide cried shame, just much too late. The trolls were allowed to fester like an infection, and it feels like they’ve killed any joy left in being a Star Wars superfan.

When I was a Lord of the Rings fan, it was fun. So was being a Harry Potter fan, a Discworld fan, a Game of Thrones fan, a Marvel fan, a jazz fan, a Hamilton fan, an Assassin's Creed fan, a Rick and Morty fan and yes, a Star Wars fan. I was also a Sherlock fan, until it turned rubbish and utterly untethered from any known reality. I tweet at creators so I too can have a shot at a retweet, a like or maybe even a reply and be God of the internet for the day. But should I have leapt on Twitter and called Mark Gatiss a hateful slur because I didn’t like what he’d done with his show? Which, because I’d been a fan, I felt entitled to call my show too. That would have got more attention, I could have got my reply I desperately crave.

When I was 11, I felt like I owned Lord of the Rings. It was mine, and I was unnerved when anyone else I knew said they also liked it, because they couldn’t possibly like it as much as me. They weren’t real fans, not like me (I didn’t read the books until I was 23 by the way, I was a pretty lousy Lord of the Rings superfan). These Star Wars fans probably feel the same way. These comer-ins with their feminist takes and intersectional diversity, they don’t know Star Wars, not properly. They didn’t spend their lives reading subpar novels and going to poorly attended conventions and sticking up for the prequels and becoming so overbearing about this one thing that it consumed their life so the only people they can have a proper conversation with are other people with their exact same experience. The director and cast, they’re not proper fans either, or they would have made the film thrashed out on Reddit two years previously, not whatever it was they threw out to the cinema. They don’t care, not like the real fans. Kelly Marie Tran needed to know exactly how much she didn’t care and how she personally ruined their Star Wars.

Yes, it was fun being a fan.

Until entitled fans ruined it.