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"Feral Fandom"
Jan. 20th, 2010 12:36 amThe always awesome ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
cleolinda has a great post today.
Apparently a girl decided she was a fan of a certain musician. She bought the guy's address off the interenet (wtf?) and then asked her mom to drive her over there. She then hid in the his bushes, snuck up to the house and took pictures through the window and eventually surprised him. He was polite at first (I suspect because he wasn't really sure what was going on) and later tweeted that this was not okay with him.
THIS KIND OF THING IS NOT OKAY - EVER!!!!!!
*slaps mother* You are supposed to be the adult here - what the hell were you thinking?
In addition to general "what is WRONG with people nowadays?", cleo coins a phrase I'm rather fond of - a "feral fandom"
Back in my day *cough cough get off of my lawn* people got involved in fandoms that already existed, or people were fans of something became fans of something else, so there was an element of "this is not how we do things" received wisdom - perhaps because the groups were small and less-interconnected in the days before the InterTubes.
But nowadays, with instant communication and thus instant hysteria, fandoms can sprout up overnight like weeds with no existing assumption of social structure. It's like a bunch of abandoned dogs who form a pack on their own but that don't act and socialize like "normal" dogs. And unless a bigger or louder dog decided to risk taking them on, there won't be any boundries. The sorts of personalities who tend to all-out-fangirl aren't exactly the most grounded, so this isn't likely to happen. Thus you get a large group of people with instant communication and no sense of social structure or appropriate behavior.
I know there are a lot of other aspects that can lead into this - the papparazzi culture, the sense of entitlement people seem to have about artists, the marketing of the Cult of Celebrity, celebrities having handlers tell them what to say all the time, etc. But Cleo and her commenters say that all better than I can
But I think the phrase "feral fandom" is awesome, and I plan to make it part of my vocabulary.
cleolinda has a great post today.Apparently a girl decided she was a fan of a certain musician. She bought the guy's address off the interenet (wtf?) and then asked her mom to drive her over there. She then hid in the his bushes, snuck up to the house and took pictures through the window and eventually surprised him. He was polite at first (I suspect because he wasn't really sure what was going on) and later tweeted that this was not okay with him.
THIS KIND OF THING IS NOT OKAY - EVER!!!!!!
*slaps mother* You are supposed to be the adult here - what the hell were you thinking?
In addition to general "what is WRONG with people nowadays?", cleo coins a phrase I'm rather fond of - a "feral fandom"
Back in my day *cough cough get off of my lawn* people got involved in fandoms that already existed, or people were fans of something became fans of something else, so there was an element of "this is not how we do things" received wisdom - perhaps because the groups were small and less-interconnected in the days before the InterTubes.
But nowadays, with instant communication and thus instant hysteria, fandoms can sprout up overnight like weeds with no existing assumption of social structure. It's like a bunch of abandoned dogs who form a pack on their own but that don't act and socialize like "normal" dogs. And unless a bigger or louder dog decided to risk taking them on, there won't be any boundries. The sorts of personalities who tend to all-out-fangirl aren't exactly the most grounded, so this isn't likely to happen. Thus you get a large group of people with instant communication and no sense of social structure or appropriate behavior.
I know there are a lot of other aspects that can lead into this - the papparazzi culture, the sense of entitlement people seem to have about artists, the marketing of the Cult of Celebrity, celebrities having handlers tell them what to say all the time, etc. But Cleo and her commenters say that all better than I can
But I think the phrase "feral fandom" is awesome, and I plan to make it part of my vocabulary.
