Fifty Shades of Grey came out on Valentine’s Day weekend, and it’s no secret that it was pretty much a huge gong show. Sex toy distributors set up tables in movie theatre lobbies, parents brought their children, fights broke out, and stuff that is not meant to happen in movie theatres…happened.
Some fandoms are insane. There’s just no way around that.
With the advent of the Internet, fans are able to find each other, discuss their favourite moments and theories, and bond over a shared interest. Unfortunately, this also leads to a mass hysteria that causes some really weird moments in fandoms.
The original fan craziness dates back to 2008, when Twilight started gaining steam. It found a lot of fans in preteen and teen girls, but also weirdly attracted a lot of middle-aged women (AKA “Twimoms”). There’s a lot of Twilight weirdness out there. A 7-year-old girl asked Robert Pattinson, who played Edward, to bite her – apparently not realizing that vampires are not real. He’s also had fans chase him and try to kiss him.
In Illinois, a teenage girl was arrested for drunk driving and driving without a tire on one of her wheels. Why the disregard for safety? She was upset because her boyfriend didn’t take her to the new Twilight movie like he had promised. On the Twimom front, a 56-year-old woman converted her spare bedroom to a Twilight shrine, complete with cardboard cutouts, pillows, and posters. And a 49-year-old got a full back Twilight tattoo for $3,000. She’s also planning to cover her torso.
I’ve been a Supernatural fan since it began a decade ago, which makes me feel old. However, I stay away from the fandom for one simple reason: they are crazy intense. The wives of the leads have both gotten hate and threats from hardcore fans.
At the beginning of the series, the creators had to be very careful incorporating new characters, because people would freak out if attention was taken away from the leads. There’s a large subset of the fandom that is pro-Wincest, which is shipping (short for relationshipping, which refers to hoping that two characters will get together. In this case, that would refer to Sam and Dean Winchester) the two leads together. They are brothers.
True story: my cousin, for some reason, decided to read a Supernatural fanfiction out of curiosity. It featured both incest and bestiality, and this is something people love to read. I really only tell people I love and trust that I like Supernatural because I don’t want to be painted with that uncomfortable brush.
Also kind of creepy: One Direction fans. There’s one who threatened to kill herself if one member didn’t follow her on Twitter and one who threatened to kill a band member’s dog. Then there’s the woman who recreated all of member Harry Styles’ tattoos. Another fan got unnecessary braces to be like Niall Horan. Also, in pursuit of researching this column, I have seen way too many semi-pornographic One Direction fan drawings. You’re welcome.
Then there’s all the Twitter feuds that go on whenever fandoms feel like they or their idol are wronged. Lady Gaga and Perez Hilton had a feud recently. What about? Who cares; their issues got buried when Lady Gaga’s fans started attacking Perez on Twitter, telling him to get AIDS and even threatening to kill his new baby. And it’s not like threatening children is unusual in fandoms – video game fans freaked out when Toronto dad Mike Hoye changed Link’s pronouns to female ones in the video game Wind Waker so that his toddler daughter could play as a female and sent him messages threatening her.
I would love to participate in the fandoms of the movies and TV shows I love. I would. But in general, you need to have a level of passion and a touch of insanity that I, thankfully, do not possess.
