Modern celebrity fandom encourages fans to look for the narrative they want to see. Little clues are everywhere, and new source material is never-ending. If fandom has become more conspiratorial—and I think it has—that must be due, in part, to the way that social media has created immediate incentives for amateur sleuthing.
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 ... See more