Are Obsessive Fans Ruining the Internet?

Be sure to also read Part One, Has Slash Made the World Better for Gay Men.

Journalist Marcy Wakeman* writes frequently about entertainment. But she received a surprised in 2007 when she published an interview with an actor who once played a prominent gay role. Shortly thereafter, an angry reader contacted her editor to “expose” her as an obsessive fangirl who was using her ties to the publication to get close to the actor in order to stalk him.

“It was really disturbing to me,” says Wakeman, who was shown the email by her editor. “It was so weird and creepy and personal. It was pathological, so full of venom, clearly designed to get me fired.”

Wakeman asked around, and quickly discovered three other journalists whose employers had been similarly contacted after they’ve done one-on-one interviews with the actor or his co-stars. Since the accusations were so similar – that the journalists were all crazy, stalker-ish fangirls – it seems likely that the same person had written all the letters.

Marcy’s editor just laughed it off, but one of the three other journalists lost her job, and another was so embarrassed that she quit.

“There was this crazy, unbalanced person out there who, whoever someone had contact with the objects of their fixation, tried to get them fired,” Wakeman says. “It really shook me up.”

Let’s be very clear about something: crazy, obsessive fans of celebrities are absolutely nothing new: in 1981, John Hinckley Jr. tried to assassinate President Ronald Reagan to impress Jodie Foster (and another man, Edward Richardson, reportedly came close to killing her!).

Let’s also be very clear about the vast majority of TV and celebrity “fandoms,” the communities that gather together to honor specific celebrities or TV shows: most of the people involved are decent folks who act in a socially appropriate manner.

“Recently, we had our annual charity auction that raised $17,610 for charity,” says Mary D. Brooks, the Australian-based webmaster who runs more than 20 websites devoted to subjects as diverse as Xena: Warrior Princess and  Spartacus actor Andy Whitfield. “That’s the good in fandom. I firmly believe there are far more good fans than there are sour apples.”

Last week, we even published an article on how some gay-related fandoms are helping to make the world much more accepting of same-sex relationships.

But when it comes to obsessive fans, the internet has also changed things in a fundamental way.

“Oh, goodness, the fanaticism!” says Brooks, who has been involved in TV fandoms since the mid-1990s. “That [fanaticism] has been around forever, but it is getting much worse now.”

It used to be the occasional nutcase, she says. “But that has changed dramatically. It has escalated over the years to the point of it being a very serious problem.”

For Brooks, it’s all about the anonymity of the internet.

“If you’re in my living room, you wouldn’t say, ‘I think you’re an absolute moron,’” she says. “You’d get smacked in the mouth! There’s anonymity on the internet, hiding behind handles. It’s a real problem. But you can’t fix that, because it’s the nature of the internet.”

“I will no longer cover [a certain show],” says the editor of one entertainment website. “Whenever I do, the crazies descend. It doesn’t matter what I say, if it’s even the slightest bit negative, they go berserk. It’s just not worth it.”

With the rise of the “slash” phenomenon, which involves the celebration of real or perceived same-sex romance in pop culture, some of the internet’s most passionate fandoms now involve gay-themed projects like Torchwood and Queer as Folk.

Torchwood creator Russell T Davies has been on the receiving end of a lot of that passion, both positive and negative. When a bisexual character, Ianto Jones, died in a recent Torchwood mini-series, some fans cried foul – and Davies cried foul at their crying foul.

“Please don’t get on your high horse about Ianto Jones, for f*ck’s sake, who is fictional,” he told AfterElton.com last year, attributing the brouhaha over Jones’ death to “nine hysterical woman.”

Image source

But what’s wrong with having strong opinions about a television show? After all, if you can’t get passionate about your favorite show or TV actor on the internet, surrounded by other like-minded fans, where can you get passionate?

Still, sometimes perfectly appropriate passion segues into abuse for anyone who doesn’t share exactly that same degree of passion. And when that anger gravitates from the fan forums to more critical, mainstream websites, even non-fans or casual viewers can find themselves caught in the crossfire.