What drives a grown person to travel to a courthouse in Virginia to hurl insults at someone she has never met, about behavior she didn’t witness and money she is not owed?
Crouse is referring, of course, to the bizarre public support for Johnny Depp in his defamation lawsuit against Amber Heard. And most of Crouse’s essay is about that trial and the public reaction to it. But this is just the latest example of fans going full-blown toxic with their “love” in recent years, which also includes racist abuse by fans of actor Moses Ingram merely for the fact that she, a Black woman, was cast in the new Disney+ series Obi-Wan Kenobi (just the latest nightmare from Star Wars fans who seem more on the side of the Empire than the Rebellion), and racist and misogynist abuse directed at the cast of the 2016 reboot of Ghostbusters.
Is fandom out of control? And perhaps more pertinently, if it is, how do we fix it?
loaded question: is fandom out of control?
loaded question: is fandom out of control?
loaded question: is fandom out of control?
From an opinion essay in The New York Times by Lindsay Crouse titled “Fandom Is Out of Control”:
Crouse is referring, of course, to the bizarre public support for Johnny Depp in his defamation lawsuit against Amber Heard. And most of Crouse’s essay is about that trial and the public reaction to it. But this is just the latest example of fans going full-blown toxic with their “love” in recent years, which also includes racist abuse by fans of actor Moses Ingram merely for the fact that she, a Black woman, was cast in the new Disney+ series Obi-Wan Kenobi (just the latest nightmare from Star Wars fans who seem more on the side of the Empire than the Rebellion), and racist and misogynist abuse directed at the cast of the 2016 reboot of Ghostbusters.
Is fandom out of control? And perhaps more pertinently, if it is, how do we fix it?
(You can also discuss this at FlickFilosopher.com, if you prefer.)