This piece will talk about stan culture and how it is ruining film discourse. So for those of you unfamiliar, a stan or fan account on social media is a person who devotes themselves entirely to another person or a franchise and spends hours a day constantly tweeting out about them or using fan cams, repetitive streams of pictures or video clips, to prove their devotion.
I have read some pieces about these people saying they are lonely and look to these parasocial relationships with stars as a means of finding community. However, where that becomes challenging is with the dogmatic way in which they act, these people act like they are in a cult, if the object of their eye does something bad they will still defend them blindly and attack any naysayers, which is fairly typical cult like behaviour.
What is even more troubling that they though you could say they do it to have a purpose and have a community, they also devote themselves to people they don’t know. They act like these celebrities are their friends, their family, their lovers and this is unhealthy as it reeks of obsession. A para-social bond between a viewer and an actor or a listener and a singer is normal and often its encouraged, though here it can be seen to be going too far and going into that realm of viewing the singer or actor as a part of them not as a separate person, they view an attack on one as a personal attack on them.
Moreover these people also carry out the silencing activities of a cult, and will come after anyone who speaks ill of their obsession sometimes threatening them with violence or false accusations in order to try and get them to be quiet and to distract from the criticism. This makes honest and valued criticism harder and harder to find as these groups and to an extent both extremes of the political divide cling so hard to their tribalism that they feel that anyone outside of them needs harassing. How are you supposed to say such an actor is stiff and wooden if a few hundred odd balls with too much time on their hands will spam you for days with death threats.
I believe that people need to carry on despite the stans and keep saying what they want to say, but more so I think something needs to be done about the stans from a societal viewpoint this isn’t healthy for them and they are only making cyberbullying online worse as well. In a sense it is a form of extremism not in the bombs and kidnappings sort of way but in a sense of extreme cliques of people where group think rules the roost and that outsiders need to be punished, it highlights the dangers of the internet and how increasingly it is becoming apparent that it needs to be policed better and with a much firmer hand.
If you enjoyed this piece, then please head over to my Patreon to support me, I offer personalized shoutouts, customised film recommendations to suit your personality and tastes, the ability for you to pick what I review next and full access to my Patreon exclusive game reviews. Check it out!
Another Millennial Reviewer 