we need to do something about stan accounts

somewhere along the way, "real person" and "fictional character" got switched up

i got SO MAD at a stan account the other day, and — if you follow me on twitter — it probably wasn’t the one you think! 

phantom of the opera completed its broadway run at the end of april, and i was pissed that former phantom and admitted and convicted child rapist james barbour was invited to closing, so i made a tweet about it. i got this innocuous reply: 

why did this make me MAD??? no sane reason. but it was the division of title — “trust me, us phans hate him as much as you do.” i am a phan! if there ever was a phan, i am her! i have seen no other production four times, not even newsies; i didn’t listen to any other musical in the car every day on my way to kindergarten; i didn’t sit at any other table at my broadway-themed bat mitzvah! what reason would this person have to believe i am not ALSO a phan? is it because my twitter account is dedicated to me and my own life and not to phantom of the opera? why is that what would make me a card-carrying phan? is there a card i should be carrying so people know i’m a weird little freak in the same way they are? 

i come from the fandom world, which is why i was unduly pissed about being grouped with the normies. i grew up there, i was raised there (i often say i was partially parented by a group of queer star trek fans in their 20s who were in my tumblr circle when i was 13 pretending to be 15 so they would respect me more), i made many, many friends there, i will likely die there. i am sure if stan twitter existed in the capacity it does now when i was at a more vulnerable age, i would have become just as insane, just as boundary-averse, as stans today. 

fandom is what we do when we can’t possess the thing we love. we can’t turn a pop star into our friend or shove a TV couple inside our own romantic history, but we can find community with people who feel similarly affected by art, beauty, or love. at its best, internet fandom creates lifelong, real-world relationships that start with shared love of a mass produced person, place, or thing and grow into something permanent and sacred. at its worst, internet fandom encourages the strangest kind of tribalism and unchecked, antisocial cruelty. i’ve experienced it in very silly and low-stakes capacities (except for the time johnny depp stans told me i needed to be held accountable for doing libel, that was scary, we know those folks love lawyers), but i’ve witnessed it at its worst. 

also — tell me if i’m wrong, but i didn’t encounter stan accounts nearly as much before elon musk took over twitter. i write about pop culture for a living, and i was used to talking about movies, TV, music, and theatre in a kind of bubble of adult writers and critics. twitter has changed so that now if i tweet about a TV show, my For You tab becomes infected with stan tweets and stan accounts, many of which are run by children. when i see their tweets — often shallow and underbaked and not particularly well articulated — my big adult brain is tricked into engaging with outrage or incredulity about ~media literacy~. accounts with profile pictures that feature adult faves also trick my brain into thinking i am engaging with a peer. that’s the twitter special: how can we get as many people as possible angry at a child? how can critics co-exist in a space that, for some people, only exists to host the good-feelings associated with shipping two characters, or loving an actor or a musician? 

sometimes the vitriol comes from that angle, from outsiders stepping into the fandom space and not understanding the local language. but just as often, if not more, the vitriol comes from the fandom to the outsider. if you don’t believe me, tweet a mild criticism of taylor swift. i dare you.

people who have found belonging in fandom are amazing at attacking on behalf of their own happiness. the person, place, or thing they support gives them happiness and joy — how could someone threaten that happiness and joy with criticism? i tweeted that jason sudeikis and hannah waddingham have no chemistry on ted lasso without using their names and a stan account took me to task for “telling people they’re wrong,” as if that’s enforceable or a rational way to engage with other people’s thoughts and feelings about a television show (it’s also, simply, not what i said). i was also told repeatedly that i “didn’t have to watch the show if i didn’t like it,” as if criticism cannot go hand in hand with love and appreciation. as if i am not the world’s biggest fan of gilmore girls, a show i also hate!

a conclusion i’ve recently come to is: stan accounts love to engage with fictional characters like they are real people and real people like they are fictional characters. 

my “ted and rebecca have no chemistry” tweet went low-stakes crazy in the fandom space and elicited a lot of responses like, “and who do YOU think you are?” like my thought was both 1. poisonous enough to their perception of those characters that it would ruin their fun and 2. so irrelevant it wasn’t even worth engaging. i tend towards the second thing! most tweets aren’t worth engaging! but stans converged anyway, quote tweeting and dog piling to validate themselves and the community they’ve built around how incredibly wrong everyone else is about the TV show we all watch. 

there’s this presumption on twitter that everyone in your virtual circle cares just as much as you do about whatever insane thing you’ve latched onto. i did not tweet about ted lasso because i care about another ship as much as ted and rebecca stans care about ted and rebecca; i tweeted about it because it is a show i watch and i am allowed to have feelings about it. and as stan and non-stan twitter circles become more intertwined, i’m seeing more and more cruelty levied at folks who really did nothing to deserve it — WAY stronger stuff than nice-guy ted lasso fans are capable of (this is not me asking for it, by the way).

because that’s the more-insidious version of this: the side where stan accounts talk to and about real people like they are fictional characters. this extends to their faves, in the sense that there are still people who believe harry styles and louis tomlinson are secretly married, that benedict cumberbatch has a fake baby with a wife that abuses him, and that taylor swift is a lesbian and her relationships with men have been faked for positive PR. these statements have never been corroborated by the people in question. in several cases, the artists themselves have had to come out and beg their fans to stop the madness!

objectifying the biggest stars in the world to the point where you project lives that are not theirs onto them is not love; it is possessiveness turned cruelty. it is cruel to use conspiracy theories (that’s what they are!!!) to terrorize widows (i’ve seen writer Ashley Reese subjected to vile comments about her recently-deceased husband for some of the least-incendiary commentary i’ve ever read), grieving parents (like Maya Thompson, a mother who lost her child to cancer who received the following quote tweet after gently asking twitter to stop speculating about the sexualities of people we don’t know), and other vulnerable people who have accidentally wandered into the fandom space with innocuous criticism.

if you’re gonna be Like That online, at least be honest about what is going on. defending taylor swift against allegations of heterosexuality (lol) isn’t defending her honor; it’s defending your own. 

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if you want a more positive spin on fandom, PLEASE read Kaitlyn Tiffany’s Everything I Need I get From You: How Fangirls Created the Internet as We Know It. it is a wonderful read and it made me cry many times.

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