When does being just a "fan" of someone turn into something more like a cult following?
On the playground in elementary school, kids would tell this "scary story" over and over and over again in hushed voices by the kickball line-
that one kid thought Spongebob Squarepants was real and walked into the ocean to find his pineapple and drowned.
I scoured the Internet for proof if this actually happened or if something similar happened, but the internet's a strange, multivariate place, and the jury's still out. Some people say it's true and totally happened in 2002. Other's call it an urban myth.
Whether or not anyone drowned trying to find Spongebob, at the core of this incident is the belief that someone else's fiction can become someone else's truth. That something so removed from our reality can hold so much sway over our actions.
On an ABC News special "Out of the Woods"(which aired about a week ago), they covered an incident in which two twelve year old girls led their friend into the woods and stabbed her with intent to murder, trying to please the fictitious, elusive internet meme/video game character "Slender man". This actually did happen and the girl miraculously survived the stabbing. The two girls cited that they had to kill their friend in order to find Slender man's house in the woods. Through online chat rooms and websites, they started "serving" this faceless internet being, and fulfilling his requests. What the ABC News team gleamed from this incident was that "us parents" needed to monitor our children's internet usage more vigilantly. What sites are our kids going on? What kinds of evil are they witnessing? What is the internet making them do?
In this extreme incidence of fandom, these young girls resemble members of a 20th century cult, more than members of a neighborhood fan group. A cult whose leader could get his followers to kill, or kill themselves for him. Dozens of cults in the 20th century succeeded in creating such an environment in which it's members were pushed towards such extremes.
You can't ignore that both of these incidents involve people who are young. They're kids. They are "young, impressionable youth", who supposedly can't tell the real from the fake. (Don't let your kids play violent video games because you kids will become killers). Maybe. I'd like to think that they're something going on with fan culture itself in the 21st century that is making environments or niches for these kinds of manipulations to occur.
I know the "Fan" scene could be going in a different direction - but it reminded me so much of these two incidents.
The scene builds an image of a person from an aggregate of trivial facts. Who this person actually is, is less important than who these girls think "he" is. And this creation of a false identity, which is hyper real to the "fangirls", seems dangerous and powerful. When they can't get it right, and they can't remember what his favorite smell is, the construction of this person is halted, and the person real to them threatens to become foreign and fake - out of their reach. It's a world teetering moment.
the 20/20 story
I could link you to a forum of people arguing for almost a decade if the Spongebob thing happened or not - but I don't think you want to go there.
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