#fan behavior study

So I’m starting a series that breaks down the recurring patterns we see in fan spaces — the behaviors, rituals, and phenomena that make fandom feel like its own ecosystem. Some of these are fascinating, some are unhinged, and some are so specific to One Direction and its extended orbit that they might as well be a graduate thesis waiting to happen.

This isn’t a callout series, or a “fans bad” lecture. It’s more like an informal field guide for the weird little cultural microclimates we’ve built online: why they form, how they spread, what needs they fill, and why they keep repeating across different groups and eras.

Below is a list of planned topics along with rough release estimates. I’ll keep updating this post as new installments take shape. This will live under my pinned post, labeled “Fan Behaviors Study.”

Just a quick reminder: this is, at its core, a Larry blog. I’m doing my absolute best to approach each topic from a wider, non-Larrie lens, but if an installment draws on Larry-related examples or focuses on them directly, I’ll include a disclaimer at the top so you know what you’re walking into.

Nov. 17 • Virtue Signaling Economies (How Morality Became a Currency in Online Fandom Spaces)

Nov. 18 • The Receipts Arms Race (Why Fandom Became a Courtroom, a Library, and a Battlefield All at Once)

Nov. 24 • Fandom as Micro-Political States (Why Stan Wars Feel Like International Relations With Worse Diplomacy)

Dec. 1 • Access Fantasies (Imagined Proximity, Collapsed Boundaries, and the Illusion of Being Known)

Why Opposing Factions Resort to Harassment, Insults, and Personal Attacks

This post is part of my Fan Behavior series, which you can read more about here > x

Before beginning, it's important to acknowledge that this post draws partly from my experiences as a Larrie. Like many people within that section of the fandom, I have received anonymous messages, personal attacks, and harassment from those who oppose that interpretation. However, this post is not intended to argue that one side is uniquely guilty or uniquely victimized. Similar behaviors occur across countless fandom spaces and ideological divides. The goal here is not to assign blame, but to understand why hostility becomes such a persistent and patterned feature of fandom culture.

There is a tendency to view fandom conflict as irrational or trivial. From the outside, arguments between opposing groups of fans can appear absurdly disproportionate to their object: celebrities, ships, and interpretive disagreements. Yet fans who ostensibly gather around a shared appreciation for the same artist frequently engage in behavior that resembles political or religious conflict more than casual entertainment discourse. Insults become routine. Harassment campaigns emerge. Anonymous messages escalate into threats. Individuals monitor one another’s accounts, archive years of activity, and develop detailed dossiers designed to undermine the credibility and status of their opponents. The intensity of these behaviors raises a central question: how can disagreements about celebrities, relationships, or interpretations provoke such extreme responses?

A sociological answer starts from the premise that fandom is rarely just about the object of fandom itself.

Human beings are fundamentally social creatures who derive meaning, identity, and belonging through group membership. Religious institutions, political movements, local communities, and cultural organizations have long provided individuals with frameworks for understanding themselves and their place in the world. Increasingly, online communities occupy that space as well. Fandoms do not simply consist of people who enjoy the same music or media; they function as “imagined communities,” in Benedict Anderson’s sense, with their own norms, values, languages, hierarchies, and boundaries.

Social identity theory argues that people derive self‑esteem from the groups to which they belong, engaging in in‑group favoritism and out‑group derogation to protect that identity. When individuals invest significant time and emotional energy into a particular interpretation (such as believing or rejecting a ship), that belief becomes intertwined with their self‑concept. The group’s status and legitimacy become tied to their personal sense of worth. Criticism of the group, or of its core beliefs, is therefore experienced as criticism of the self.

This helps explain why disagreements within fandom are rarely felt as simple differences of opinion. They become challenges to identity. Opposing viewpoints are not merely alternate interpretations, but perceived threats to the validity of one’s community and, by extension, one’s own moral and epistemic authority.

Over time, opposing factions—such as Larries and antis—develop distinct subcultural formations. Each group constructs shared repertoires of language, inside jokes, interpretive frameworks, and origin stories. These cultures are maintained through what sociologists call boundary work: practices that mark who is a “real” member, who is suspect, and who is an enemy. The existence of an opposing faction becomes central to the group’s self‑definition; members understand who they are partly through contrast with who they are not.

Within this environment, conflict is not an accidental by‑product; it becomes socially functional. Shared opposition strengthens internal cohesion. Having a clearly defined “other” helps produce what Émile Durkheim would describe as collective effervescence—a sense of shared emotional intensity that reaffirms group belonging during moments of ritualized conflict.

Fandom hostility also often takes on a moral dimension, which helps explain why harassment can feel righteous rather than cruel. Opposing fans are framed not just as factually wrong, but as morally defective: delusional, dangerous, homophobic, predatory, or manipulative. Once a disagreement is moralized in this way, aggressive behaviors are reinterpreted as necessary forms of “social control.” Harassment becomes protecting vulnerable members. Public humiliation becomes “calling out” harmful behavior. Monitoring opponents becomes vigilant research. In sociological terms, this is a process of norm enforcement and moral entrepreneurship, where certain members position themselves as guardians of the fandom’s moral order.

As a result, hostility becomes normalized and routinized. Actions that would be unacceptable in other settings are absorbed into the group’s moral universe as legitimate tools for defending the in‑group and disciplining the out‑group. The fact that these behaviors are often performed in front of an audience further reinforces them; likes, retweets/reblogs, and supportive replies act as social rewards for escalating the conflict.

Digital platforms amplify these dynamics. Earlier fandoms were limited by geography and media constraints; disagreements could remain localized. Contemporary platforms collapse distance and put rival groups into constant proximity. Algorithms are designed to privilege engagement, and conflict is highly engaging. Content that mocks, quote‑tweets, or reblogs opponents is rewarded with visibility, which in turn incentivizes more of the same behavior.

In this context, what begins as intermittent conflict can slide into obsession. Many fans spend more time monitoring and responding to the “other side” than they spend engaging with the actual media or artist that drew them into the fandom. The conflict becomes a central source of interaction, identity work, and emotional stimulation. Entire networks form around resisting, debunking, or ridiculing the opposing faction. Over time, the original interpretive disagreement becomes secondary; maintaining the antagonistic relationship becomes the main social activity.

The structure of platforms also makes practices like stalking and archiving more accessible and socially acceptable. Persistent user profiles, searchable histories, and screenshot culture allow fans to systematically document opponents’ behaviors. This facilitates what can be described as surveillance and doxxing practices within fandom: collecting, curating, and circulating personal information as a weapon in intra‑fandom struggles.

Another key sociological process is the transformation of individuals into symbols. As conflict intensifies, specific users become emblematic of entire positions: “that Larrie,” “that anti,” “that blogger.” Once people are seen primarily as representatives of an ideology, empathy erodes. They are no longer perceived as complex individuals with nuanced motivations, but as avatars of everything the group opposes.

This is a form of dehumanization, even if it operates in subtle ways. It becomes easier to justify cruelty toward a symbol than toward a person. Personal attacks, harassment, and even offline stalking are rationalized as attacks on what that person stands for, rather than on the person themselves. In this sense, fandom conflict mirrors broader patterns observed in political polarization, culture wars, and other identity‑based conflicts, where out‑group members are reduced to caricatures and treated as legitimate targets of hostility.

The trajectory often looks similar across different fandoms and issues. What begins as interpretive disagreement becomes identity conflict. Identity conflict fosters group polarization, where members adopt more extreme positions to align with their in‑group and distance themselves from the out‑group. Polarization then produces a normalized culture of hostility, in which increasingly aggressive tactics are not only tolerated but celebrated.

Recognizing these dynamics does not excuse harassment, stalking, personal attacks, or abuse. It instead frames them as patterned outcomes of social environments that strongly reward tribalism and oppositional identity formation. The more central a fandom becomes to an individual’s sense of self, the more existentially threatening alternative viewpoints appear. The more threatening those viewpoints appear, the easier it becomes to justify escalating hostility in the name of protection, authenticity, or truth.

Fandom hostility ultimately tells us more about human social behavior than about the celebrities at the center of the conflict. The insults, harassment, and personal attacks are not primarily products of music, television, or shipping culture; they are products of belonging. They emerge from the deeply human desire to protect the communities that provide identity, meaning, and connection.

The tragedy is that the same psychological and sociological mechanisms that allow fandoms to foster friendship, solidarity, and mutual support can also produce exclusion, cruelty, and violence when group identity becomes anchored in opposition to an enemy. In this sense, the conflict between Larries and antis—or any opposing fandom factions—is not an exception to human behavior but a specific expression of broader social processes. Fandom simply provides a particularly visible stage on which struggles over identity, legitimacy, and certainty are performed under the guise of arguing about celebrities.

How Numbers Became Morality, Validation, and a Stand-In for Truth

This post is part of my Fan Behavior series, which you can read more about here > x

There’s a particular kind of worship that thrives in modern fandom spaces, and it has nothing to do with the celebrity’s personality, artistry, or even the music itself. It revolves around numbers—streams, sales, chart positions, playlisting, radio play, tour grosses. Metrics have become talismans, citations, shields, trophies, and sometimes entire belief systems. It’s strange how quickly a song’s success can stop being about the song, and start being about what its numbers allegedly prove: the worthiness of the artist, the righteousness of the fanbase, the legitimacy of the fandom’s worldview. Somehow, data became a moral compass.

Metrics offer something that art rarely does: clarity. Art is subjective, but numbers feel objective, absolute, immune to interpretation. You can argue about whether a track is good, but you can’t argue with a Spotify counter ticking upward. And in online culture where everything is scrutinized, debated, and fought over, the promise of something indisputable is intoxicating. It makes sense that fans cling to metrics like gospel. They feel like truth that can’t be twisted.

But fandom rarely uses metrics as neutral facts. Instead, numbers become righteousness. A chart position becomes proof that the fandom “showed up.” High streams become evidence that the artist is loved more, supported more, deserves more. Low numbers become a crisis, sometimes even a personal failing. Fans internalize metrics as if they’re grading the fandom’s loyalty. The conversation shifts from enjoying music to performing devotion, and every dip is treated as an accusation.

It doesn’t help that digital platforms encourage this behavior. TikTok, Spotify, YouTube, and Billboard updates turn everything into a live scoreboard. Music becomes a sport, fandoms become teams, and release weeks feel like tournaments. Fans report daily numbers the way analysts report stocks. It's a constant cycle of monitoring, strategizing, worrying, celebrating, and catastrophizing. The analytics aren’t just for labels anymore; they’re for everyone with a stan account and three spreadsheets.

This is where chart manipulation discourse creeps in. When metrics become morality, any number that contradicts the fandom’s self-image becomes suspicious. If another artist debuts high, accusations of payola or botting appear within minutes. If your artist does well, it’s because their success is pure, organic, authentic—a moral victory, not just a commercial one. Fans treat charts like battlegrounds where justice prevails. Numbers stop reflecting market behavior and instead take on ethical weight.

Of course, none of this happens in a vacuum. Metric worship is deeply tied to the broader internet culture of validation. Numbers measure attention—likes, followers, views, engagement—and attention has become currency. If numbers define personal worth online, it follows naturally that numbers would define celebrity worth, too. Fandoms aren’t just arguing about what’s good; they’re arguing about what deserves to exist, succeed, and be remembered. Numbers become the arbiter of value when discourse is too messy to settle anything.

In this environment, listening to a song isn’t just listening. It’s participating in an economy of loyalty. Fans loop tracks overnight, run streaming parties, build guides filled with rules about skipping ads or avoiding mute buttons. They turn music consumption into labor, not because they’re obsessive, but because the system rewards obsession. The more intensely the fandom works, the more they can claim their numbers are “earned.” Validation becomes communal.

But the most interesting part—maybe the most revealing—is how numbers become self-identity. When a fandom says “we got them to #1,” it isn’t just celebration. It’s self-definition. Chart wins become proof of collective power, competence, and unity. Low numbers become an existential threat: what does it mean if the metrics don’t match the fandom’s image of itself? It destabilizes the mythology the group built.

As someone who has absolutely sat through endless release week chaos, it’s impossible not to see the emotional undercurrent. Metric worship lets fans cling to something concrete in a space defined by projection and uncertainty. It gives them control in a world where they have none. It lets them feel like they matter to the artist, that their work changes something real in that person’s career. It transforms a one-sided relationship into a dynamic where participation feels essential, almost sacred.

Yet the irony is hard to ignore. In a culture obsessed with numbers, the actual art can get lost. People debate chart points more than production choices, playlisting more than lyrics, radio spins more than emotional resonance. The music becomes secondary to the scoreboard. And fans can start defining their worthiness not by how they feel, but by how well they perform.

Metric worship isn’t really shallow, it’s systemic, emotional, and deeply tied to the architecture of online fandom. But it's also a reminder that the loudest numbers aren’t always the truest ones. Charts don’t measure sincerity, streams don’t measure connection, and sales don’t measure meaning. They only measure movement.

The real movement will never show up on a spreadsheet.

Purity, Protection, and the Impossible Standard Placed on Idols

This post is part of my Fan Behavior series, which you can read more about here > x

There’s a particular contradiction that sits at the heart of modern fandom culture, and once you notice it, it becomes impossible to unsee. Fans insist their favorite artists are autonomous adults with agency, nuance, and depth—right up until those artists do something uncomfortable, imperfect, or unexpected. In those moments, the narrative shifts. Suddenly the idol must be protected, explained, excused, or morally managed by the fandom itself. What emerges is a form of parasocial moral absolutism which is the demand for total moral perfection paired with a simultaneous infantilization of the person being stanned.

This phenomenon isn’t rooted in cruelty or bad faith. It grows out of care. Fans want to believe that the people they love and support are good and not just talented, not just successful, but ethically sound in a way that reflects the fandom’s own values. Over time, that desire hardens into purity politics. The idol becomes a symbolic extension of the fan’s moral identity. If the idol is good, then loving them feels safe, righteous, and validating. If the idol falters, the discomfort is akin to destabilization.

From a cultural studies perspective, this is a predictable outcome of parasocial intimacy colliding with online moral culture. Social media trains people to think in absolutes: right or wrong, unproblematic or cancelled, safe or dangerous. Nuance doesn’t circulate well. Accountability collapses into punishment. Context becomes suspicion. In fandom, this logic is intensified by emotional attachment. Fans don’t want to grapple with the reality that someone they admire can hold contradictions, blind spots, or flawed opinions. So instead, the fandom steps in as a kind of moral guardian.

Moral guardianship takes many forms. Sometimes it looks like aggressive defense: reframing harmful behavior as misunderstanding, bad phrasing, or manipulation by others. Sometimes it looks like preemptive control: fans monitoring what the idol says, wears, likes, or associates with, and intervening whenever something threatens the fandom’s moral image. And sometimes it looks like erasure—rewriting history to pretend certain moments never happened, or insisting criticism is malicious rather than warranted.

What makes parasocial moral absolutism especially strange is how quickly autonomy disappears when it’s inconvenient. Idols are framed as fully grown adults when it comes to talent, labor, and success, but as fragile children when it comes to accountability. Responsibility is displaced onto managers, labels, friends, the media, antis, or even “bad timing.” Anything but the person themselves. The fandom constructs a protective bubble where the idol exists in a permanent state of innocence, unable to do harm because harm would threaten the emotional safety of the fans.

This is where the phrase “he/she/they can’t do anything wrong” stops being a joke and starts functioning as a belief system. It’s not just denial really, it’s self-preservation. Acknowledging that an idol has acted harmfully forces fans to confront uncomfortable questions about why they support them, how much they’re willing to overlook, and whether admiration requires moral alignment. Absolutism avoids those questions by flattening reality. The idol is either perfect or persecuted; there is no middle ground where harm and humanity coexist.

At the same time, this system punishes idols who do attempt nuance. When an artist acknowledges mistakes, evolves publicly, or speaks with complexity rather than certainty, fandoms often react with discomfort or hostility. Growth threatens purity. Apologies invite scrutiny. Ambiguity feels unsafe. The fandom’s desire for moral clarity clashes with the reality of human development, and the idol is pressured back into a simplified role: either spotless or silent.

The irony is that parasocial moral absolutism ultimately strips idols of the very humanity fans claim to love. By demanding perfection, fandom denies the possibility of learning, contradiction, or growth. By infantilizing, it removes agency. And by positioning itself as moral arbiter, fandom assumes a power it was never meant to have. The relationship stops being one of admiration and becomes one of surveillance.

As a fan, it’s easy to understand how this happens. Caring deeply about someone in a public position can feel protective, even parental. In an online culture where harm is constant and accountability is often performative, guarding your favorite can feel like doing the right thing. But protection becomes control faster than anyone expects. And control, even when well-intentioned, is still a form of erasure.

Parasocial moral absolutism isn’t about holding people accountable—it’s about managing discomfort. It’s about preserving the emotional safety of fandom by refusing to allow complexity to exist. And while it may feel stabilizing in the short term, it ultimately creates a brittle system, one that shatters the moment reality pushes back.

No one can survive being both morally perfect and eternally innocent. And no fandom can stay healthy while pretending otherwise.

How Morality Became a Currency in Online Fandom Spaces

This post is part of my Fan Behavior series, which you can read more about here > x

One of the most fascinating (and honestly, bizarrely predictable) cultural shifts in digital fandom is the rise of something called virtue signaling economies — systems where morality isn’t just a personal value, but a form of currency exchanged within the community. It’s not simply “people expressing beliefs.” It’s morality transformed into performance, and performance transformed into social capital.

Fandom has always been a space of heightened emotion, identity, and belonging. But in the era of hyper-connected social platforms — where every post is public and every silence is scrutinized — morality becomes something you have to show in order for it to count. The question is no longer what you believe, but what you publicly declare, how visibly you declare it, and how often you do it. In this economy, private values have no market value. Only public performance circulates.

From a cultural studies standpoint, this makes perfect sense. Online fan communities function like small societies with their own norms, hierarchies, and reward systems. And like any society, they develop their own forms of cultural capital — things that grant status, credibility, and safety. In fandom, particularly in progressive-leaning online spaces, visible moral alignment becomes one of the strongest forms of cultural capital. Posting infographics, reblogging activism threads, adding moral commentary to discourse posts — these aren’t just expressions of care; they’re signals of membership and belonging. They show you’re “one of us,” that you understand the community’s values, that you’re aligned with its ethics.

But the flip side is that silence becomes suspect. Fans begin to treat the absence of a statement as the presence of a stance — a negative one. The lack of a post becomes a political position, the lack of a reblog becomes a betrayal, and the lack of visible outrage becomes a sign you’re complicit. Morality shifts from something internal to something that must be demonstrated on command, like a performance review where the whole fandom is your manager.

This is where celebrities get pulled into the system — often unwillingly, and often unfairly. Once fans normalize public moral performance among themselves, they project that expectation upward. The celebrity becomes responsible not only for their art, but for maintaining constant moral visibility. There’s this implicit expectation that they should comment on every crisis, every injustice, every political moment, and do so in the exact tone and language the fandom deems “correct.”

And if they don’t? The economy interprets it as a debt.

You can see this dynamic clearly in the recent events around Louis Tomlinson. When a global crisis erupts, there’s a portion of the fandom waiting for him to post — not because he hasn’t historically taken action, but because action without visibility does not circulate within this moral economy. Louis is one of the few celebrities who meaningfully supports causes behind the scenes, quietly, without spectacle. But quiet support is nearly invisible to a fandom attuned to public virtue. When the currency is optics, not outcomes, his silence reads as apathy — even when his actions say the opposite.

This is the tragedy of virtue signaling economies: they devalue actual impact in favor of visible performance. A celebrity could donate privately, amplify things offline, support people on the ground, or take meaningful political stances behind the scenes, but if they don’t post a graphic or a statement that aligns with fandom expectations, they’re still read as morally lacking. Visibility becomes the only proof of caring.

Fans often care deeply about global events and want to see that the people they admire care too. There’s also a parasocial element, where fans expect the celebrity’s stance to reflect and validate their own. But the pressure this creates is enormous. It turns public figures into moral vending machines. Insert crisis, expect statement. Insert discourse, expect alignment.

And because the moral marketplace is always in motion, fandoms begin evaluating each other through it as well. People who want nuance are seen as downplaying injustice. People who say “we don’t know what they’re doing privately” are labeled dismissive. People who hesitate before reposting the latest infographic feel compelled to do so anyway, because not posting feels riskier than posting something half-sure or half-true. The moral economy rewards speed and visibility, not accuracy or sincerity.

From a cultural lens, this is the inevitable result of three intersecting forces:

(1) the collapse of traditional information trust (2) the rise of online performativity (3) the emotional intimacy of fandom spaces.

When you combine deep attachment, low trust, and high visibility, you get a system where people feel responsible for proving their values constantly and publicly.

But as a fan living inside this, I think the question we rarely ask is, what does it mean when morality becomes a performance instead of a practice?

The problem with virtue signaling economies isn’t that fans want celebrities to care. It’s that the economy makes it difficult to recognize care unless it’s visible, aesthetic, and algorithm-friendly. It pushes us to evaluate sincerity based on optics. It encourages people to perform outrage or grief even when they’re overwhelmed or uncertain. And it treats quiet, steady, meaningful action — the kind that actually helps — like it’s worth nothing because it can’t be reblogged.

The goal of analyzing this isn’t to shame fans for caring; care is powerful and important. It’s to understand the mechanics behind why fandom reacts the way it does, why the pressure feels so suffocating, and why silence is interpreted so aggressively when the currency being exchanged is visibility instead of impact.

Because until we understand the economy, we can’t step outside of it or even notice when we’ve been participating in it without meaning to.

Why Stan Wars Feel Like International Relations With Worse Diplomacy

This post is part of my Fan Behavior series, which you can read more about here > x

Something that bothers me in online culture is the way fandoms have evolved into miniature political states. Not metaphorically. Not symbolically. Functionally. Every major fandom now operates with its own parties, propaganda machines, ideological purity tests, alliances, informants, propaganda campaigns, and charismatic leaders who never asked to be leaders. What used to be “people who like the same thing” has, through years of online migration and social fragmentation, become something more like a network of competing micro-nations, each with its own foreign policy and internal dramas that rival actual governments.

To understand this, you have to look at how digital communities have filled the void left by traditional social structures. As institutions became less trusted and people became increasingly isolated, fandoms did what humans always do in the absence of stable governance: they built their own. Fans created rules, expectations, cultural norms, and enforcement systems—if not consciously, then through sheer repetition and social pressure. What emerged wasn’t a simple community but a political landscape, complete with factions that resemble political parties. And just like political parties, these factions spend an alarming amount of energy fighting each other for control of the narrative, legitimacy, and proximity to perceived truth.

Nothing illustrates this better than the infamous “stan wars.” These aren’t petty disagreements; they're extended conflicts with histories, turning points, casualties, and diplomatic crises. Stan wars escalate because, within a fandom-as-state model, every disagreement becomes a threat to collective identity. If another faction challenges your interpretation of an artist, your reading of an event, or your understanding of the “truth,” it’s not just a difference of opinion—it’s an attack on the credibility and stability of your entire micro-nation. People react accordingly: defensively, aggressively, and sometimes irrationally, because that’s exactly how groups behave when they believe they’re protecting something bigger than themselves.

And then there’s propaganda. Fandom propaganda isn’t formal—no one is issuing press releases from a marble building—but it’s very real. It looks like aesthetic edits packed with selective quotes. It looks like interpretive threads positioned as fact. It looks like rumor cycles engineered to discredit rival factions, framed as “just sharing what I heard.” Because these communities rely on narrative cohesion to survive, controlling the story becomes a form of power. The faction that controls the dominant narrative, even briefly, gets to act as the governing body of fandom truth. The power isn’t official, but it’s palpable.

When there’s no central authority to regulate these stories, a leadership vacuum forms. This is how micro-celebs—people who started off as regular fans—become charismatic leaders whose opinions suddenly hold disproportionate weight. They’re not elected, they’re not appointed, and they don’t need credentials beyond confidence and a good posting style. Their followers treat them like spokespeople. Their detractors treat them like tyrants. Their presence stabilizes their faction’s worldview, until it destabilizes it. Smaller fandoms orbit them. Larger fandoms fear them. And the cycle repeats, because political ecosystems always produce power figures when official leadership doesn’t exist.

Within this structure, ideological purity tests emerge almost automatically. If your micro-state revolves around particular values—protecting the celebrity, advocating for truth, promoting a ship, defending personal interpretations—then staying in good standing means adhering to the group’s ideology. Any deviation becomes a sign that you're disloyal or a liability. Fans who question their faction’s norms risk being accused of “switching sides” or “giving ammo to antis.” And just like in traditional politics, purges follow. People are exiled, unfollowed, soft-blocked, dragged, or quietly iced out because they presented a nuance that jeopardized the faction’s stability. The irony is that these ideological tests rarely come from malicious intent; they come from fear of losing cohesion.

But the most revealing aspect of fandom as political states is the way alliances form and dissolve. Factions collaborate against common enemies and then quietly return to ignoring or disliking each other once the threat passes. Two groups who can’t stand each other will suddenly link arms the moment a larger opposition emerges. It’s realpolitik in digital form: temporary unity for strategic gain. And just like international alliances, they can fall apart dramatically over the smallest issue, leaving months of infighting in their wake.

When you step back and look at all of this—from the stan wars, to the propaganda, to the charismatic micro-leaders, to the shifting alliances and ideological purges—you start to see fandom not as chaos but as structure. It’s an accidental form of governance created by people who were never trying to create anything political at all. But politics isn’t something you choose; it’s something that emerges anytime humans group together, form identities, and perceive threats.

As a fan, witnessing this feels strangely familiar. I’ve laughed at the absurdity, suffered through the diplomatic crises, watched micro-celeb collapses like political scandals, and lived enough stan-war history to feel like I should have my own foreign policy handbook by now. But it also feels inevitable. When you gather thousands of passionate people around an object of shared love, you’re going to get politics—just smaller, faster, more dramatic, and somehow even pettier.

Fandoms aren’t just communities anymore. They’re micro-states, complete with borders, governments, wars, alliances, propaganda, scandals, and revolutions. And the more we recognize this, the easier it becomes to understand why everything feels so intense, so dramatic, and so strangely familiar. After all, we’ve been living through politics our whole lives. Fandom just gives us a version we can actually watch unfold in real time.

Imagined Proximity, Collapsed Boundaries, and the Illusion of Being Known

This post is part of my Fan Behavior series, which you can read more about here > x

Before getting into this topic, I want to be explicit about one thing. This post will use Larry Stylinson as an example at points, because it is one of the most visible and long-running cases of this phenomenon. I am a Larrie, and I do deeply believe in Larry. This post is not an argument against that belief, nor is it intended to make anyone question the legitimacy of the ship. What follows is an explanation of why this dynamic exists in fandom culture, not a reflection of my personal convictions or an attempt to debunk anything.

This post is part of my Fan Behavior series, which you can read more about here > x

Intimacy has always been compelling, but in fandom spaces it has increasingly become something that is not just felt, but consumed. Relationships—whether real, rumored, implied, or entirely fictional—are treated as products in their own right. They are packaged, analyzed, circulated, and monetized. The bond between two people becomes content. Their closeness becomes currency. And the emotional investment of fans becomes a market that can be measured, activated, and, in many cases, deliberately cultivated.

From a cultural studies perspective, this isn’t accidental. Modern fandom exists at the intersection of emotional attachment and capitalist logic. Intimacy draws attention, attention drives engagement, and engagement produces profit. Shipping doesn’t just happen organically; it becomes an economy. Fans produce edits, theories, fic, art, and discourse. Platforms reward visibility. Media outlets pick up narratives that generate clicks. Labels, studios, and management teams quickly learn that perceived closeness—especially when it carries romantic or queer subtext—keeps people watching.

This is where the commodification begins. Chemistry becomes something to be performed, replayed, and scrutinized. A glance, a laugh, a lingering touch is no longer just a moment between two people; it becomes evidence, marketing material, or narrative fuel. Fans are encouraged, implicitly or explicitly, to read meaning into interactions because meaning sustains interest. Even tension—awkwardness, distance, unresolved conflict—can be profitable. It creates speculation. It keeps the story alive.

Queerness, in particular, has often been folded into this system in complicated ways. Performative queerness allows industries to gesture toward inclusivity without committing to risk. Ambiguity is safer than confirmation. Suggestion is more marketable than truth. Fans are left to do the interpretive labor, filling in gaps, defending narratives, and sustaining emotional investment while institutions maintain plausible deniability. Intimacy is offered just enough to be consumed, never enough to be resolved.

What makes this dynamic especially powerful is that it doesn’t feel transactional from the fan side. It feels emotional, personal, even sacred. Relationships—especially those believed to be real—become deeply meaningful to people because they reflect longing, recognition, and representation. Fans aren’t wrong for caring. But when intimacy becomes a product, the line between genuine connection and constructed narrative blurs. Fans begin to feel entitled to access, clarity, or confirmation, because they’ve been taught—by years of content, framing, and suggestion—that this closeness exists for public consumption.

Friendships, too, are pulled into this economy. A bond that might otherwise be private becomes something fans track, measure, and mourn when it changes. Distance is read as betrayal and growth is framed as loss. People evolving naturally over time is treated as a disruption to the product fans were sold. Intimacy, once commodified, is no longer allowed to be fluid or human. It must remain legible and emotionally available.

In the case of ships like Larry, this commodification collides with genuine belief, long-term pattern recognition, and emotional investment built over years. That collision is why discourse around it becomes so charged. When intimacy has been both deeply felt and repeatedly leveraged as content, disentangling belief from consumption becomes nearly impossible. Fans are left navigating a landscape where real feelings, real people, industry incentives, and audience interpretation are all tightly braided together.

The industry benefits from this ambiguity far more than fans do. Emotional labor is outsourced. Interpretation is crowdsourced. Risk is minimized. Meanwhile, fans are left to carry the weight of meaning, defense, and explanation—often turning on each other when the narrative feels threatened or unclear.

The commodification of intimacy doesn’t mean relationships aren’t real. It doesn’t mean belief is foolish or misplaced. It means that intimacy, once filtered through fame and profit, is rarely allowed to exist without being shaped, sold, or strategically obscured. Understanding that doesn’t invalidate connection—it contextualizes it.

It’s also important to clarify what this does not automatically imply. The commodification of intimacy doesn’t require labels or management to be consciously “baiting” fans in a calculated, malicious way. More often, it operates as a maintenance strategy—keeping audiences attentive, emotionally invested, and continuously talking. Intimacy, ambiguity, and unresolved narratives are tools of momentum, not necessarily deception.

At the same time, this exists in deep tension with the reality of closeting, particularly where queer relationships may be involved. The industry has a long history of suppressing, redirecting, or carefully managing anything that could disrupt marketability or invite risk. In that context, the contradiction becomes stark: intimacy is allowed to circulate just enough to sustain interest, while clarity or confirmation is treated as dangerous. Fans may be discouraged, mocked, or silenced for believing something is real, even as the conditions that fuel that belief are never fully dismantled.

Whether management chooses to clamp down—policing fan narratives, shutting down discussion, reframing intimacy as coincidence—or chooses to let the dynamic continue evolving, the outcome often serves the same purpose. The lack of resolution keeps fans engaged. It keeps them watching, listening, analyzing, attending shows, buying records, and staying emotionally close. Proximity, even imagined proximity, is powerful. Wanting to remain near the artists—emotionally, culturally, or physically—is what sustains long-term investment.

This isn’t about accusing labels of intentional manipulation so much as recognizing how profit incentives shape what is permitted and what is denied. Ambiguity is useful. Silence is useful. Distance and closeness can both be strategically valuable depending on the moment. The industry doesn’t need to invent intimacy to benefit from it; it only needs to manage how visible, discussable, or nameable that intimacy is allowed to be.

In the end, the system rewards attention more than truth. As long as fans are still talking, still hoping, still emotionally tethered, the machinery keeps turning. And that persistence—rooted in care, belief, and the desire for connection—is where profit is ultimately generated, regardless of what is acknowledged out loud.