Superfans: A Love Story | Are Fandoms Becoming As Toxic As Politics?

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I'm a fan of a lot of things. If you recognize my profile pic, you'll know that I'm a huge fan of Ghost in the Shell franchise (except for the horrible live action) and I just LOVE cyberpunk in general. I love anime and space. I'm a sucker for astronomy and movies set in space whether it is Ender's Game or Interstellar or an anime like Heroic Age or Space Runaway Ideon.

I think I've managed so far to not be this sort of a superfan. The kind of stuff I'm describe is this:

Thompson, who was twenty-six, could recite most of Minaj’s lyrics by heart. Minaj, like Thompson’s mother, is from Trinidad, and Thompson admired her as one of the few female rappers to become mega-famous. “I was a hundred per cent a fan,” she told me recently. But, listening to the new stuff, Thompson worried that Minaj’s musical progression had stalled. From the car, she tweeted to her fourteen thousand followers, “You know how dope it would be if Nicki put out mature content? No silly shit. Just reflecting on past relationships, being a boss, hardships, etc. She’s touching 40 soon, a new direction is needed.” When Thompson got to the show, she put her phone away. By the time she checked it again, two hours later, her tweet had gone viral. “I had, like, hundreds of superfans just trashing me,” Thompson recalled. She was receiving so many direct messages—some telling her to kill herself, some accusing her of not being a “true fan”—that her phone kept crashing. And there was a message from Minaj’s official account. It read, “Eat a dick u hating ass hoe. Got the nerve to have a trini flag on ur page.” The message added, “Just say u jealous I’m rich, famous intelligent, pretty and go! But wait! Leave my balls! Tired of u sucking them.”

The story gets even worse from that where the woman in question loose her internship and years later, her 4 year old babies image being used in horrifying ways.


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