my own canon: she and Jon Snow are
happy, everything worked out, she has
two dragons—somehow the third one
came back and he’s not a zombie.”
Arin grew up in San Diego and works
in digital marketing in Hollywood,
where she handles promotion for comic-
to-film franchises. She spends a lot of
time reading online fan forums. “I know
how to get into their world,” she said.
“There’s a fine line to tread on how
much you listen to fans, because fans
aren’t always right, either. But there are
certain things where you should listen
to them, because they’re smarter than
maybe the super-high-up execs are
going to think.”
She got to the front of the line and
handed her phone to her mother. When
she sat on the Iron Throne, she adjusted
her snow-white ringlets and shot the
camera a look of regal serenity. Later, she
posted her royal portrait on Instagram,
with the caption “justice for khaleesi.”
“
F
an” is short for “fanatic,” which
comes from the Latin fanaticus,
meaning “of or belonging to the tem-
ple, a temple servant, a devotee.” The
vestal virgins, who maintained the sa-
cred fire of Vesta, the goddess of hearth
and home, were the Beyhive of their day.
But “fanatic” came to be associated with
orgiastic rites and misplaced devotion,
even demonic possession, and this may
explain why fan behavior is often de-
scribed using religious terms, such as
“worship” and “idol.” (One Trekker at
Comic-Con told me that the show “re-
placed religion for a lot of people.”)
“Lisztomania,” coined in 1844, de-
scribed the mass frenzy that occurred
at Franz Liszt’s concerts, where audi-
ence members fought over the com-
poser’s gloves or broken piano strings.
Charles Dickens’s readers in New York
were so anxious for the final install-
ment of “The Old Curiosity Shop,” in
1841, that they stormed the wharf where
it was arriving by ship and cried out,
“Is Nell dead?” In 1893, Arthur Conan
Doyle, sick of writing Sherlock Holmes
stories, flung the detective off a cliff in
“The Final Problem,” which ran in the
magazine The Strand. (“Killed Holmes,”
Conan Doyle wrote in his diary.) After
readers cancelled their Strand subscrip-
tions by the thousands and formed “Let’s
Keep Holmes Alive” clubs, Conan Doyle
was forced to resurrect him. Sherlock
fandom persists today, thanks to the
BBC series starring Benedict Cumber-
batch, whose admirers, sometimes
known as the Cumberbitches, have
swarmed location shoots in London
and filled the Internet with Sherlock-
Watson slash fiction.
Newspaper writers started using the
word “fan” around 1900, in accounts of
baseball enthusiasts. The rise of pro-
fessional sports leagues had produced
a new class of spectators who didn’t
necessarily play the game but pledged
allegiance to a team. The word was also
used, more pejoratively, about “matinée
girls,” young women who attended the-
atre not for the plots but to gawk at fa-
vorite actors. As the movie industry
blossomed, in the nineteen-tens and
twenties, so did fan magazines, such as
Photoplay. After the matinée idol Ru-
dolph Valentino died, in 1926, some
hundred thousand fans mobbed the
streets of New York during his funeral,
smashing windows and clamoring to
get a last glimpse of his face.
Science-fiction fans, who have al-
ways been at the forefront of fandom,
started meeting at conventions in the
nineteen-thirties. The World Science
Fiction Convention, which began in
1939, in conjunction with the World’s
Fair, still exists, as WorldCon. (The 2019
edition was just held, in Dublin.) “Star
Trek” fandom, in the late sixties, was a
breakthrough. When NBC threatened
to cancel the show, fans organized a let-
ter-writing campaign and kept it on
the air. The show ended after its third
season, but it had aired enough episodes
to qualify for syndication, allowing the
viewership to expand throughout the
seventies. The first major “Star Trek”
convention was held in 1972, when some
three thousand Trekkers gathered at the
“ Your son has an unctuous, grasping, power-hungry quality
we find unattractive in a five-year-old.”
