I love being a fan. I hate fandom.
They're two distinct entities. Being a fan just means appreciating and getting a lot of enjoyment out of something, be it a team or an artist or a celebrity. That's great. We should all be fans of the things we love.
Fandom is something else entirely. Fandom is doing all of those things above, but irrationally. It's talking about that thing so often that it becomes half of your personality. It's acting disgusted with someone when they say anything remotely negative or indifferent about that thing. It's insisting that thing is infallible and that everything it does is genius even if no figure in pop culture not named Dolly Parton can claim that title. Fandom sucks.
It breeds perhaps the two things that get under my skin the most. The first, as I already mentioned, is confirmation bias. It's forming opinions on things before you do them, and then experiencing that thing through the lens of your already formed opinion so you never actually think critically about it or reevaluate how you feel about it. It's visiting Las Vegas because you know you're gonna love Las Vegas, and landing at the airport, getting out of your plane, looking at runway and going, "Wow...Las Vegas is absolutely stunning."
Or, in the context of fandom, it's when a raging Harry Styles fan listens to Harry's House for the first time and halfway through their listen declares it "pop album of the decade" even if they would have hated the album had it been recorded by Shawn Mendes.
The other thing that gets under my skin is people liking something or embellishing their liking of something just because it gives them a sense of identity or community. Identity and community are important. I get that. But as I also said above, you can like Taylor Swift without needing to make that 97% of your personality. And even if liking Taylor Swift is 97% of your personality, you don't have to do so in a way that ensures that you know that I know that liking Taylor Swift is 97% if your personality.
Fandom just feels so insincere to me.
Perhaps this is a me problem. Perhaps I'm just wired in a way where I fall in love with things but don't get fanatical about them, and perhaps I should understand that and just let people be happy finding obsessive joy in whatever they like.
But I'm allowed to be annoyed. Fandom sucks.
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