Fandom has gotten exciting! But also . . . overly involved and weird and scary.
I was a teenager once, so there’s a type of fandom I intuitively understand. That’s your run-of-the-mill idolizing. When you love a teen actor so much, you put up their posters on your bedroom walls. When you’re so obsessed with a K-pop band that you start shipping their members. When you’ll spend dumb amounts of money on T-shirts, keychains, “mystery boxes,” and other ephemera. I think we’ve all experienced this kind of fandom; it’s cute, innocent, and invariably leads to boxes of useless objects stacked in your parents’ attic.
But fandom has taken many a turn since, I’d say, the 2010s, with our incessant online presence. First off, it doesn’t seem to be the domain of adolescents and teenagers anymore. Teenagers graduate from being fans who daydream of their idols as romantic abstractions into militant guards that keep their idols in check. There’s the phenomenon of queerbaiting, in which fans seem to insist on the purity of celebrities who play queer characters. If they’re playing gay, they better come out as gay. Celebrities are sometimes forced to come out publicly, oftentimes when they’re too young and ill-prepared for the public scrutiny.
The leading example of the toxic and aging nature of fandom is in the world of political devotion. Growing up, I don’t remember political fandom A) existing and B) having so much merch! Politics was BORING. You didn’t walk around with red-brimmed hats to announce your affiliation. Sure, there were lawn signs, but those were also . . . boring. The signs had the same three colors and two basic font selections. They were both visible and imminently forgettable. As a kid, it seemed that politics was like going to the DMV: You engaged with it because you had to, and only begrudgingly.
But today, adults will poster up! They will wear statement tees loudly announcing that we should “Ban the Fascists and Save the Books” or “Let’s Go, Brandon!” There are T-shirts for every minor position you might have.
I remember wearing these shirts in college; adults would pass me by, roll their eyes, and think, “She’s still figuring it out.” I aged out of that kind of apparel-based expression, but now, everyone seems to be jumping back into it—and not in a fun way.
This kind of fandom is fanning out to every medium. Now movies need to be box office hits so they make a statement. Take, for example, the Sound of Freedom controversy. It became a surprise sleeper hit of the summer, doing better than even the Mission: Impossible and Indiana Jones sequels! But its success had little to do with the promise of a rip-roaring ride at the cinema.
Sound of Freedom star Jim Caviezel didn’t hang off buildings the way Tom Cruise did. No, this release was politically motivated and strategically engineered not to the masses, the way most movies are, but to a political base. On the surface, it’s a film that’s based on a true story about rescuing victims of child trafficking. While the film purported not to have any political affiliation, it was immediately embraced by QAnon, and interviews with Caviezel—an ardent QAnon fan—did little to disabuse audiences of that connection.
The distributors crowdfunded $5 million for the marketing budget, and at the end of every showing, Caviezel appeared on-screen to promote the distributor’s pay-it-forward program, in which tickets are prepaid for others to see the film. It’s unclear whether any of those people actually saw the film. But that doesn’t really matter, because the numbers declared it a huge hit. The fans had more to brag about, and what used to be “going to the movies for fun” became “buying tickets to movies to stick it to the other side.”
We saw more of that with the song-of-the-summer battle. Jason Aldean’s “Try That in a Small Town” was introduced to wild indifference, but when Country Music Television pulled the video for its possibly offensive messaging—imagery that seems to celebrate the site of a lynching and denigrates a Black Lives Matter protest—Donald Trump took to Truth Social, his social media platform, and made the song a MAGA sensation. Again, fandom here isn’t about enjoying a tune; it’s about a political declaration.
And yet, there are glimmers of hope. Over the summer, I saw people of every race, religion, class, and disposition wear utterly ridiculous pink outfits because we were all joyfully watching Barbie. There was a little effort on the right to get a backlash going, but it clearly didn't amount to much, because the movie still made a gajillion dollars.
Politically motivated fandom can make waves, but at the end of the day, genuinely loving something might just win out.