5 Anti-Fandom

So far we have discussed how fan-audiences engage with participant culture seeking benefits “(mostly) limited to being part of and contributing to a community, sharing a passion or realising creative ambitions — often leading to increased social currency (and higher status, greater reputation — after all, status-seeking is one of the cornerstones of the social media age)”.^[1] However, we must not think that this increased sense of community (or social currency) is premised exclusively on positive feelings. “Fan culture is often motivated by a complex balance between fascination and frustration, affirmation and transformation.”^[2] While much of the focus on media and audience studies has been on ‘positive’ fandom, there is of course a wide variety of modes of engagement with texts. Some go so far as to suggest that “many of us care as deeply (if not more so) about those texts that we dislike as we do about those that we like.”^[3] Thus, to ignore the affective power of dislike means missing out on a large component of what motivates fans’ passions. We ought to highlight the transformation that occurs through frustration, and thus we turn our attention to the phenomenon of anti-fans. We should first define anti-fans, then elaborate on the context for why anti-fans are seemingly more prevalent compared to the past, then we have to clarify what makes anti-fans distinct from (regular) fans (or ask the question if anti-fandom is becoming more regular/typical of fandom in general).

Originally, the term ‘anti fan‘ was coined to refer to “those who hate or dislike a given text, personality, or genre”^[4] We must be careful, though, to place fix fans and anti-fans into a fixed binary; while fandom and antifandom “could be positioned on opposite ends of a spectrum, they perhaps more accurately exist on a Möbius strip^[5], with many fan and antifan behaviors and performances resembling, if not replicating, each other.”^[6]

Thus, while it might seem as if fans’ passionate liking and loving of texts is diametrically opposed to ant-fans’ disliking and loathing of texts, this is too myopic a view. “Fandom is not a simple, life‐long and unproblematic relationship, but one where posi­tives and negatives, fandom and antifandom are often present all at once.”^[7] The möbius strip analogy suggests that fans and antifans can exist within the same community and even within the same person’s identity at different times. Fans and antifans (and fannish and antifan readings of texts) can significantly overlap:

What is the opposite of fandom? Disinterest. Dislike. Disgust. Hate. Anti-fandom. It is visible in many of the same spaces where you see fandoms: in the long lines at Comic-Con. at sporting events, in numerous online forums like Twitter, YouTube, Tumblr, and Reddit … and in our politics. This is where fans and fandoms debate and discipline. This is where we love to hate.^[8]

It is difficult to assert that there is more anti-fandom now than ever before, but it is easy to assume that there is. The reason is our participatory condition:

While initially YouTube could be called a platform of cultural citizenship expressed via vernacular creativity and evaluated positively, today’s social media platforms carry increasingly worrying amounts of excited anger and hatred as well as forms of humour that are meant to exclude rather than to encourage reflection on what might make the world a better place for most of us.^[9]

Perhaps contemporary online culture seems increasingly antagonistic. “It is clear that the emotions, and especially the anger that social media allow their users to express, cannot be reduced to meaning-making, even if making sense of the world is part of it.”^[10] Today’s participatory audiences must affectively labour more than to merely make sense of media and piece together identities from the cultural representations surrounding them. They must also work to navigate the emotive content and the opposing viewpoints online that cleave communities and sometimes seem to preclude understanding. Anger is a big part of the media spheres in which we all participate! We love stuff, but we also love to hate certain things too (and let others know). Put simply, “antifandom is performed to be viewed but also, more importantly, shared.”^[11]

“Nowadays, via social media particularly, fans can poach material and render visible their re-appropriations more easily, which suggests that fans are also potentially more easily confronted with other interpretations of the original text.”^[12] With social media, fans’ objects of fandom are more visible than before^[13], and so too is our engagement with those objects. And because we exist in a “commenting culture” grounded in affective investment^[14], people don’t only lurk on social media, but also contribute to them, often responding in kind to others’ inflammatory content. It seems as though it is not only easier than ever to participate in media as an active audience member, but to do so as an anti-fan (and to also gain a larger audience for one’s own communication). So, the productivity of fans online means not only more (or more visible) interpretations, but this means a greater range not only in terms of the quantity of fan comments but the qualitative valence of these comments too (fans aren’t only confronted by greater diversity of commentary and thus greater amount of critique, but also more inflamed critique). Just as fans have a greater number of mainstream spaces to express passion, so to do antifans.  We see affective investment so easily around “bad objects” and we see “affective solidarity” also as communities of interest organize around these investments, defending perceived good objects and railing against the bad. Anti-fans’ passion runs as deep as that exhibited by fans. Wherever there are fans expressing their passion, so too will you find anti-fans.

Perhaps that graphic is a good cue to mention that even though Gray originally linked hate and dislike together as equally powerful affective orientations to (media) texts as love and admiration, he subsequently introduced greater finesse into his argument as he de-emphasized the ‘anti-‘ nature of fandom and accentuated the ‘dislike’ function.

“‘Anti-‘ is unequivocal in being opposed, in being ‘not.’ ‘Dis-‘ may at first seem to be enshrouded by the same haunting air of negativity and negation … but ‘dis-‘ is a versatile prefix” and can connote noble work such as disinfect, disentangle, disarm, disrupt, disorient, displace, and discover.”^[15] As part of this, he also clarified that hatewatching something (or hatelistening – see the Nickelback meme, below) is not actual hate, but a variety of dislike.

“Hate is regularly involved colloquially to mean dislike, as when people utter, ‘Omigod, I hate that show. It’s the absolute worst.'”^[16] But real hate goes far deeper than colloquial hate – it typically will “involve the presence of pain, anger, and a desire for elimination.”^[17] Rather than true hate that feeds off of violence, ‘hatewatching’ is a form of “engaged dislike” [that] gives voice to a potential wealth of other grievances that are about texts, representational systems, and ethics.”^[18]

One of the issues with hate-based dislike is that people are often the target of antifannish hostility: “Human texts are liable to suffer from the circulation of vitriolic antifan discourse in a way that inanimate texts such as films or kilts do not.”^[19] When people’s bodies and personalities are attacked, it’s difficult to see anti-fan behavior in a positive light. This is a “darker dimension”^[20] of antifandom that goes beyond ‘dislike.’ “After all, when disgust and hate are expressed about a person or group of people outside of media contexts (especially when this disgust or hate is based on a priori prejudices), it is usually known by other terms. “Sexism”, “racism”, “homophobia”, and “hate speech” are a few that come to mind.”^[21] “Typically, racist and sexist hate speech such as this has been linked to trolling”  but trolling doesn’t do justice to the shifting nature of antifandom online where “racism, misogyny, and homophobia are becoming more prevalent among antifans.”^[22] Thus, while earlier material we examined about participatory culture may have been typified by the expression, “I share therefore I am,” now, perhaps, a new expression may be equally typical:

When one gets their hate on, “sharing isn’t caring.” The hater is one distinct form of antifandom, but as clarified already, there are a wide variety of types of ‘hate.’ Trolling can be seen as one such form, where the hate is “a form of amusement that one might have at someone else’s expense.”^[23] Indeed, “anything related to having fun at the distress of others. … trolling is often purposefully harmful or intended to upset media creators or other fans rather than elicit a sincere response. Yet, to troll, one needs to possess a certain amount of knowledge to make fun of that person.”^[24] There is some debate as to whether or not trolling is innocuous or whether it is a harbinger of something more than mere disconnection and misidentification. Trolls clearly derive pleasure from engaging in digital dislike. “Today some people embrace being a hater, dishing out the hate, participating in ‘hateration,’ and/or drinking the ‘hater‐ade.’”^[25] Hating a series or a song is different from hating a character in a series or an actor who plays a role or a singer who sings in a certain style. While antifans clearly can participate in fan communities, it is questionable whether the same can be said of trolls who may not even be fans but just people partaking of participatory culture in order to pester others.^[26] According to Scott, fans can be classified as trolls when “they have become too aggressive in their affective claims to textual ownership, manifested in actively attempting to sway or collectively criticize particular representational choices.”^[27] 

But far from condemning certain producer choices (casting is a big one), and moving on from attacking celebrities, antifans increasingly target ordinary people, fellow members of participatory cultures, leading Jane to assert that “antifan discourse online has become far more hyperbolic, threatening …, We can see, therefore, that antifan activity on the Internet is transforming into a very different beast.”^[28] But as Jones argues, “this activity still remains antifandom, albeit antifandom fueled by political, cultural, and/or religious intolerances rather than dislike for a text.”^[29] So, while trolls provoke fandom, antifans work to police the discursive borders of fandoms. One of the ways that this happens is through ‘fan-tagonism.’

Fans can troll other fans (often, fans of some other franchise, artist, etc). But fans can troll within a fandom too. The former phenomenon is widely represented in audience research and can be referred to as “competitive anti-fandom”^[30] whereas the latter, “strong differences within the pre-existing community of a fandom is a topic that has thus far gained little academic attention”^[31] Of course, fandom has always been subject to factions from within, or ‘fan-tagonism.’^[32] Skirmishes within fandoms, rather than between them (i.e. people who think early Elvis is better than late Elvis rather than Elvis fans vs. Beatles fans (who was the biggest influence on pop-rock charts) have also been referred to as “antifandom within fandom.”^[33] Typically, we see fans arguing with fellow fans (often about production choices), but sometimes we see fans directly challenging the producers of a text (encountering them at Comic-Con, appealing to them via social media…). No matter what, “fantagonism explicitly invokes an activist struggle to intervene in industry worlds”^[34]

Cardi B thanks her haters (emphasizing how anti-fans can be commodified by those in “power”)

“Anti-fandom is a multifaceted thing.^[35] One of the things that distinguishes antifandom from its presumed opposite is the idea that antifans do not necessarily have to have direct contact with the texts that they despise. We presume that fans who are passionate about something in a positive way have experience with that thing; but this is not always the case with antifans. Contrarily, audiences’ dislike of things might be based on their exposure to ‘paratexts’^[36], such that even without direct exposure to texts anti-fans “can create a picture, or an understanding, of a text without ever interacting with the text in full.”^[37] This detachment from objects of ridicule (what Gray terms ‘audiencehood from afar‘^[38]) is not required. Some fans passionately follow and dissect the media content they condemn! Anti-fans “who hate a program (without necessarily viewing it) must be differentiated from disgruntled fan factions who hate episodes, eras, or producers because they perceive a violation of the larger text they still love.”^[39]

The idea that disappointed antifans were in fact fans at an earlier point suggests not just that the affective target changes, but so too does the intensity. “While fans can become disappointed in their object of fandom, turning into antifans, they are also very forgiving, criticizing but not terminally rejecting the former object of their fandom. Former fans can thus return to their initial fan status.^[40] In addition to the new focus on the spectrum of dislike, distaste, and hate^[41], this more variegated view of affect as affective fluctuation rather than just affective fascination is one of the reasons a study of antifandom is located within the third wave of fan studies. Clearly, since the pleasure that some (anti)fans get is not from expressing positive feelings of love or like but negative feelings like hate and dislike, we cannot place ‘antifandom’ within the first wave of fan studies (recuperating the notion that ‘fandom is beautiful’). Instead, anti-fandom is sometimes ugly. Of course, its ugliness can serve as connective tissue too. Antifandom “might be considered as a coping mechanism in which solidarity can be found in an imagined community of fellow haters.'”^[42] Click makes a similar point when she points out how “the hated object, then, is crucial to the formation of the collective, and the expulsion or incorporation of the hated other is needed to maintain collective identity.”^[43]

Typically, anti-fandom is based in dislike that “is a result of moral or ethical issues the antifan has with the text or fan object, rather than dislike due to aesthetic, industrial, or factual reasons.”^[44] This focus distinguishes it from snark-based fandom. 

Snark, more than just a portmanteau combining ‘snide’ and ‘remark’, is a type of engagement (or cultural participation) that implies an “ironic, critical fandom in which readers and viewers bemoan the flaws of the books and films, while enjoying and keenly devouring (if sometimes furtively) the texts”^[45] Thus, snark as a mode of (anti)fandom is not simply consuming and commenting on junk food for the brain. The point of snark is to participate in a culture of (passionate) criticism.

When one enjoys junk food, one doesn’t engage in a critical analysis of it. You know it’s bad for you and take pleasure in it, but engaging in a detailed analysis of its dietary shortcomings isn’t part of the pleasure. … [In a snark-fuelled participatory culture] the criticisms aren’t incidental to the pleasure taken in the texts; they appear, in large part, to constitute that pleasure.^[46] 

The point of snark is not just to celebrate one’s guilty pleasure. Even though some media content may be totally puerile, like all texts that generate antifandom, they can “tell us about audiences’ hopes and expectations for the media writ large, and hence [can] be a key site for understanding why, how, and when the media matters to us and why, how, and when it doesn’t.”^[47] And even though some texts “may indeed be ‘totally brainless’, in their critical grapplings with the texts, the brains of these critical fans are emphatically still engaged.”^[48]

This chapter has focused upon negative affect mobilized by antifans, but it has not suggested that negative affect has only negative effects. Snarky commentary, far from focusing only enmity upon someone or something, is productive communication insofar as it frequently sketches the moral boundaries of one’s community, establishing the “good objects” and the “bad objects” and the permissible discourse that takes shape around them. In fact, for many participatory fans, expressing oneself through one’s antifandom is seemingly a necessary part of contemporary fandom. And certain topics, like politics for instance, are ripe with antifandom:

I suggest that, much as fandom has become a recognized state of being in our daily lives, encompassing much more than the love of a text, band, or celebrity, so too does antifandom permeate our politics, interactions, and affective engagements, and recognizing it as such informs the ways in which the “darker underbelly” of antifandom can be engaged with, examined, and pushed back against.^[49] 

That affective engagement with politics — what some call “political fandom” — is what we shift our attention to in the next chapter.