THENEWYORKER, SEPTEMBER 16, 2019 27
titious fan named Stan (short for “stalker
fan”), who becomes so furious that Em-
inem hasn’t responded to his letters that
he drives himself off a bridge with his
pregnant girlfriend in the trunk. Unlike
regular fans, stans see themselves as cru-
saders, pledging loyalty and rushing to
their idol’s defense against dissenters.
Thompson was on the receiving end of
a maneuver known as the clapback, in
which a star actually responds to a lowly
hater. Like Queen Victoria’s cavalry, the
stans follow suit and attack.
“When it comes to stans and how
they operate on social media, it’s crazy
to witness,” Thompson told me. “These
people really think that they’re doing
some due diligence by the celebrity.”
More than a year later, she continues
to receive messages from angry Barbz.
She ended friendships with people who
she says didn’t defend her online, and
she no longer listens to Minaj’s music.
“I felt very weird when this whole thing
happened,” she said, “because I was such
a huge fan of hers.”
A
glance around the pop-culture
landscape gives the impression that
fans have gone mad. In May, viewers
of HBO’s “Game of Thrones” revolted
against the show’s final two episodes,
in which the dragon queen, Daenerys
Targaryen, took a turn toward the geno-
cidal. Some critics accused the show-
runners, both of whom were men, of
propagating the idea that women in
power are inevitably crazy. Others com-
plained that the personality change was
too implausible, or that the whole sea-
son was rushed, or that it simply sucked.
More than 1.7 million people signed a
petition on Change.org to “remake
Game of Thrones Season 8 with com-
petent writers.” At a press conference,
HBO’s programming president, Casey
Bloys, turned down the request, though
he acknowledged the fans’ “enthusiasm
and passion.”
The outcry bore similarities to the
fan uprising against “Star Wars: The
Last Jedi,” released in 2017. Much of the
backlash had to do with Luke Sky-
walker not acting quite like Luke Sky-
walker, now that he had rematerialized
as a sour middle-aged hermit. Like
Daenerys, he wasn’t the hero that fans
had long held him to be. Some fans
were also mad that Rey, the orphaned
heroine, was revealed not to be secretly
of noble lineage, undercutting two years
of carefully worked-out fan theories.
Detractors swarmed Rotten Tomatoes,
posting bad reviews, and petitioned Dis-
ney to strike the film from the “official
canon.” (Again, no dice.)
Some of the crankiness had a Trump-
ian cast. Many of the new “Star Wars”
characters were women and people of
color, and the Asian-American cast
member Kelly Marie Tran was harassed
online so violently that she quit social
media. The episode echoed previous
fan wars such as Gamergate, in which
male video-game fanatics targeted fem-
inist gamers, and the troll campaign
against the all-female “Ghostbusters”
remake and its black star, Leslie Jones.
Most people are fans of something,
whether it’s the Red Sox, “Hamilton,”
or Agatha Christie. But the nature of
fandom seems to have morphed in the
past decade. In the old days of sci-fi
conventions and Bobby Sherman fan
clubs, fandom was a subculture reserved
for the very young or the very ob-
sessed—or, in the case of the Grateful
Dead, the very stoned. As fantasy and
comic-book franchises have taken over
the entertainment industry, nerd cul-
ture has become mainstream. Now that
couch potatoes have social media, they
have risen up and become active, opin-
ionated participants. As a result, movie
studios and TV showrunners have to
cater to subsets of diehard devotees,
who expect to have a say in how their
favorite properties are handled.
The ramifications can be loud and,
occasionally, expensive. This spring, Par-
amount released the trailer for “Sonic
the Hedgehog,” a movie based on the
vintage Sega character, featuring live ac-
tion and C.G.I. Fans were so disturbed
by the title character’s creepy human
teeth that Paramount postponed the re-
lease date three months to give him a
dental makeover, at great cost. (One per-
son wrote on Twitter, “I’ve thought about
Sonic the Hedgehog’s creepy lipless
mouth and his horrible human teeth
more times today than I want to in my
entire life.”) “That’s the power of fan-
dom,” a producer who worked on the
2014 reboot of “Teenage Mutant Ninja
Turtles” told me. That film weathered
its own fan blowback, when Michael
Bay, another producer on the movie, im-plied, in an interview, that the turtles
were aliens (every fan knows they were
mutated by toxic ooze) and then had to
walk back his comments. For the sequel,
the producers incorporated everything
the fans said they wanted—among other
things, making the villain Krang, a talking
brain—but the movie earned less money
than the first one. The producer I spoke
to said, “The question we always ask
ourselves in the room is: Is the fan base
so strong and such an important part of
the box office that we have to change
something to keep them happy?”
Other fan movements are more sin-
ister. Right after “Avengers: Endgame”
was released, in April, Taiwanese media
reported that a man in Hong Kong was
beaten bloody by a crowd of movie-
goers after he stood outside a cinema
shouting out spoilers. Four months ear-
lier, fans of the pop star Ariana Grande—
the Arianators—relentlessly targeted
her ex-boyfriend, the “Saturday Night
Live” cast member Pete Davidson, after
her breakup anthem “thank u, next” hit
No. 1. Davidson, who had spoken pub-
licly about being bipolar and having
suicidal thoughts, responded in an open
letter: “No matter how hard the inter-
net or anyone tries to make me kill my-
self. I won’t.” Grande tried to call off
the hounds, writing online, “i feel like
i need to remind my fans to please be
gentler with others.”
One of the most belligerent—and
embattled—fan phalanxes belongs to
Michael Jackson. In July, three fan groups
announced a joint lawsuit against James
Safechuck and Wade Robson, the two
men who detailed horrifying child-mo-
lestation allegations against Jackson in
the documentary “Leaving Neverland.”
The suit was filed in France, where tar-
nishing the image of the deceased is a
crime. Each fan group demanded a
nominal payment of one euro, and their
lawyer, Emmanuel Ludot, called the al-
legations a “genuine lynching.” Frivo-
lous as it seems, the suit gets at the heart
of modern fandom: an attack against a
celebrity or a beloved character is an
attack against the fans, and it is their
duty to retaliate.
Fan dustups are often proxy wars for
larger social conflicts, like changing de-
mographics or post-#MeToo feminism.
The language of fandom, in turn, has in-
vaded politics; supporters might “fangirl”