#and it's a shame it became so horrific and was splashed all over the media like it was

[septembersghost]

This is random but did you also avoid the Depp/Heard trial? Not because you didn’t care, but just because it was too overwhelming and unpleasant to engage with.

i did avoid diving too far into that sphere intentionally, though of course i still saw news about it through cultural osmosis and the high profile nature of the case, and some of the things online being so downright evil that others couldn't help but comment on them (understandably). i actually still have an article from the atlantic last year saved in my drafts about this (this piece), and i think it's an important, illuminating read, and i've actually been thinking about it a lot again over the past couple of weeks. :/ (the article author kaitlyn tiffany also wrote in 2020 about fandom conspiracy theories is also such an important piece imho, though a disquieting read.)

"

The case is complicated, and the testimony is rife with sordid, disturbing details. In short, Depp has taken Heard to court for defamation over a 2018 essay she published in The Washington Post that identified her as a victim of domestic abuse and sexual violence. Heard also made abuse allegations when she filed for divorce from Depp in early 2016, and was granted a restraining order against him.

Rebecca felt betrayed by Depp when Heard came forward with her story, and has since renounced her fandom. But she’s been positively horrified by the behavior of Depp’s other fans, who have spent the past several years trying to discredit Heard as a “gold digger” and a “monster.” (I agreed to identify Rebecca by only her first name because she was concerned about harassment from this community.)

 ...For Millennials in particular, she told me, fans’ sense of their own morality is deeply entwined with fandom. “We hang so much of our own identity on these things that we love,” she said. “So if those things are threatened, you either have to admit that you’re sort of a bad person for liking those things or you have to convince yourself that everyone else is wrong.”

Hilde Van den Bulck, a professor of communication at Drexel University, has studied the version of fandom that inverts its practices and creates a community of denigration. Where fandom tends to derive from a positive emotion (I love this actor; I love that character), anti-fandom draws from just the opposite, and nurtures negative feelings toward a famous person or character. Fans and anti-fans both express themselves through online sleuthing: They hang on the object of their fascination’s every word, and analyze every detail of that person’s wardrobe and hairstyling and self-presentation. “Anti-fans know as much about their object of anti-fandom as fans do about their object of fandom,” Van den Bulck said. Their relationship with the celebrity they despise is “often very deep, very emotional.”"

idk i have a lot of things i could write about and delve into with this given more current events, but this exemplifies a lot of where fandom's problems with women intersect with confused ideas about social justice and morality intersect with emotions about things we love intersect with the very incorrect idea that enjoying a work of art or an artist is equivalent to endorsement of everything they do, and it's so complex. absolutely we should hold people accountable, absolutely people should be called out for harmful actions and behavior (be that abuse, racism, misogyny, homophobia, -isms and hurt or disregard for others of any kind), and it should not be tolerated. at the same time, i do worry that overcorrection in tying things we enjoy to morality is leading to us punishing each other for the bad actions of individuals far out of our control, and that doesn't solve the problem or help uplift anyone.

sorry, this got super off-topic! but i understand why you tried to avoid it, because it was overwhelming and unpleasant and triggery, and revealed some ugly and shameful things about the way fans - even predominantly female ones - will behave and harass others online and how we need to curtail that going forward as best as we can.