The little indignities of being young and the big disappointments of not finding the love you want or of not becoming the person you’d hoped—these things are tempered by fandom, which is such an ugly, boring word. Fandom is an interruption; it’s as simple as enjoying something for no reason, and it’s as complicated as growing up. It should be

At its best, fandom is an inside joke that never ends.

it’s hard to celebrate the victories of fangirls the way I’d like to, because those victories are also being celebrated by the sort of people who will use them to make more money off of us.

It is inappropriate now to make fun of girls for screaming or boy bands for existing or anybody for liking anything—this is what we asked for, but it doesn’t feel like enough.

Fans have started using their networked power for good, bad, amoral, indecipherable reasons—the political climate of the last decade has tempted them to play with their power in new ways. As they get better at wielding it, it’s anyone’s guess what they might use it for. “2020 will be the year Twitter stans will be liked by people,” one person wrote

Real scrutiny would reveal everything that the internet has made possible: unimpeded creativity, remarkable feats of will, the unexpected easing of loneliness, the goofy precursors to solidarity, but also devastating atomization and division, overstimulation realized as constant anxiety, emotion mutilated into absurdities, attention rendered an

I’m still inspired by the political power fans seem to have created from thin air and are now prepared to use, and I’m still nervous about the fact that it has been so underexamined.

Maybe fans understand the power of social media better than everyone else does, or maybe it’s exactly the opposite. They certainly don’t consider themselves a malevolent force—and they usually aren’t—but haven’t they employed the same tactics as those online groups who do?

“If K-pop fans are activists, then it becomes more difficult to explain how Gamergate or doxing is related to fandom, but they are actually on a continuum. They’re not unrelated things.”