I'm in the actual hockey fandom and the fake hockey fandom scares me a little bit.
I'm so glad my fave player doesn't have socials, because that fandom went boundaries? What are boundaries?
I’m gonna have to disagree with you here, chief, at least in regard to framing this as a problem unique to *that* fandom. The unfortunate truth is that it’s pretty much all fandoms these days. And it’s getting worse as fandoms get bigger. I personally believe that social media is the primary accelerant of horrific fandom behavior, and has overall inflicted much more harm on humanity as a whole than benefit, in ways that go above and beyond fandom. However, monetization of fandom is actively killing it.
To be clear, there have always been unhinged fans who behaved abominably. There have always been clout-chasers who want to stir shit for no good reason. But they didn’t used to directly benefit from interaction via monetized social media profiles. And even though it’s only a small percentage of modern fans with enough following to effectively do that, it feeds an environment of increasingly extreme behavior to get and keep clicks.
Add in that media corporations realized they could use fandoms as a steady source of revenue and free advertising, and actors for whom social media following is becoming a resumé item that casting directors care about, and we have a toxic parasitic death spiral in which only the corporations really win.
Because the stickiest part of this mess is that people tend to feel like they are owed a return on their investment. People in fandom know that they directly contribute to the livelihoods of the people making the entertainment they consume. It’s not necessarily right, but it is logically foreseeable that openly courting a fandom is going to result in some level of return expected. Ass gas or grass no one rides for free, you know? Again I am not saying this is a morally laudable position, just that it’s a very simple point a -> point b line to draw.
And then add that tangled web to the very modern sensibility that anything other than forthright radical honesty is a lie. And that all manner of despicable behavior is permissible in the ever-expanding hunt for “representation.” And the moral purity Olympics of virtue signaling via bad faith interpretation of every single damn thing anyone does or says.
And this drives out the more normal and old-school fans who just wanted to share gifs and meta and fanworks without it being such a fucking trial all the time, leaving the nuts the loudest voices in fandom.
Modern fandom is self-cannibalizing across the board, it’s just that *that* fandom is A: huge, B: new, and C: breathtakingly hypocritical given the point of the story they are fans of. So it does make for an absolute case study.
Ultimately yeah your fav player is smart not to have any (public) social medias. Even though it probably wouldn’t be quite as bad for them since athletes are rarely famous on the level that actors and singers are.
