Up@dawn 2.0

Friday, September 13, 2019

Superfans

Superfans: A Love Story
From “Star Wars” to “Game of Thrones,” fans have more power than ever to push back. But is fandom becoming as toxic as politics? 
...“Fan” is short for “fanatic,” which comes from the Latin fanaticus, meaning “of or belonging to the temple, a temple servant, a devotee.” The vestal virgins, who maintained the sacred 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 described using religious terms, such as “worship” and “idol.” (One Trekker at Comic-Con told me that the show “replaced religion for a lot of people.”)
“Lisztomania,” coined in 1844, described the mass frenzy that occurred at Franz Liszt’s concerts, where audience members fought over the composer’s gloves or broken piano strings. Charles Dickens’s readers in New York were so anxious for the final installment 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 subscriptions 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 Cumberbatch, 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 professional 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 theatre not for the plots but to gawk at favorite actors. As the movie industry blossomed, in the nineteen-tens and twenties, so did fan magazines, such as Photoplay. After the matinée idol Rudolph 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 always 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 letter-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 Statler Hilton hotel, in New York, under a banner that read “Star Trek Lives!”
Rock and roll dragged Lisztomania into the twentieth century, as Elvis Presley fans swooned and screamed—a phenomenon immortalized in the title of his 1959 compilation album, “50,000,000 Elvis Fans Can’t Be Wrong.” Beatlemania further crystallized the image of the screaming female fan. An underappreciated aspect of the band’s appearance on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” in 1964, is that it spotlighted not just the Beatles but the hysterical audience. The “screaming teen” stereotype has often inspired hand-wringing or contempt, a way of policing adolescent-female libido. The fan scholar Mark Duffett has suggested that “fan screaming may be a form of ‘affective citizenship,’ ” a communal defiance of ladylike behavior...
Is Superfandom a good thing? An escapist fantasy? An excuse for toxic incivility? All of the above?

1 comment:

  1. The toxicity in politics comes from tribalism and an "us vs them" type of mentality that doesn't include a path for harmony or coexistence. It seems the communal nature and freedom of self that comes with being apart of fan groups is what drives people to them. They then cherish that community they have cultivated so much that they will protect it at all costs, even if it means going on the offensive. Social media just amplifies it.

    I also thought the following quote was very said: "People need three things: They need to be heard, they need to be seen, and they need to be valued."

    Section 13

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