Ohio State film experts analyze fandom culture and its psychological impacts

Kelly Marie Tran faced a barrage of online bullying upon portraying Rose Tico in “Star Wars: The Last Jedi,” demonstrating the harmful effects of fandom. Credit: Jay L. Clendenin | Los Angeles Times (via TNS) [Original caption: Kelly Marie Tran arrives at the 92nd Academy Awards on Sunday, Feb. 9, 2020, at the Dolby Theatre at Hollywood & Highland Center in Hollywood.]

Fandoms, or communities forged by people’s shared emotional investment in a creative property, have inspired positive and negative psychological effects within their members. With mental health becoming an increasingly important issue for the college-age demographic, Ohio State film experts Maghan Molloy Jackson — a lecturer in the Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies — and Alex Thompson — a sixth-year Ph.D. student in English — said several crucial factors have shaped fandoms into what they are today. 

Both Jackson and Thompson said fandoms provide a safe space for countless people to express themselves, especially if they struggle with boredom or loneliness in their daily lives. 

“The first wave of fandom studying in academia was very much focused on the positive things that fandoms do,” Thompson said. “The community that it builds is super helpful for a lot of people.”

Beyond the improvement of interpersonal communication skills, Thompson said another advantage of joining fandoms is the creative opportunities they inherently encourage, such as the creation and distribution of fan art. 

Jackson agreed.

“Fandom is a really emotionally supportive community of people who have come together in mutual recognition around a story,” Jackson said. “And they see themselves, they see each other, through and in that story. And that’s really, really amazing.”

Thompson cites “Blade Runner” (1982) as a prime example of when a passionate fandom led the charge to love a film that would only achieve “cult classic status” years after its initial release. 

“Even though ‘Blade Runner’ wasn’t a hit when it came out, the people who were fans went on to work in the industry and went on to design cities that looked like that, and it became kind of a cultural touchstone for that kind of thing and has remained a cult classic,” Thompson said. “Because it had maintained that cult classic status, Denis Villeneuve could make a giant sequel that’s two and a half hours, and I think pretty darn good. And there’s no reason why — outside of fandom existing — that movie would exist.”

Jackson said fandom culture is highly malleable, seeing as it can be embraced by a wide range of people for an even wider range of reasons. 

“Captain America’s shield was seen at the [Jan.] 6 insurrection, and it was seen at Pride parades,” Jackson said. “The iconicity of that means that you can put a lot of different meanings on top of it and people connect to the emotion behind the symbol, which means if you’re reading the symbol differently, the symbol means something different.” 

Thompson and Jackson said the action of “gatekeeping,” when some fans attempt to exclude others for not being “knowledgeable” enough about a creative property, has undermined fandoms’ fundamental sense of inclusivity. 

Jackson said gatekeeping can be harmful, as seen with recent installments of the “Star Wars” franchise. 

Following her performance as Rose Tico in “Star Wars: The Last Jedi” (2017), actress Kelly Marie Tran “deleted all of the posts from her Instagram page” after she was continually “criticized by ‘Star Wars’ fans for her performance, looks and Asian ethnicity,” according to a June 2018 article from Variety. 

“Think about Kelly Marie Tran and the fact that Kelly Marie Tran had to get off the social internet because fans took it as their charge to gatekeep this property,” Jackson said. “‘Star Wars’ actually has a lot of good moral lessons, but when you start the fascistic, ‘only this is appropriate fandom,’ that’s where you run into trouble.”

Thompson said gatekeeping in the “Star Wars” fandom can be related to the ideas of Cornel Sandvoss, a professor of media and journalism at the University of Huddersfield, who actively researches the impacts fandoms have on society. 

In the past, Thompson said Sandvoss has associated fandom with the term “Heimat,” which has German origins and describes a strong feeling of belonging. 

“Heimat is the sense of home, but like home as kind of a fortress, where you’re safe inside and you are using that home to keep everyone outside,” Thompson said.  

Even if people haven’t seen a specific film or TV series, Thompson and Jackson said the majority opinions of fandoms can color prospective viewers’ opinions of a creative property before they’ve even engaged with it on a personal level. 

“People tend to echo the thing that they hear most often, and that’s how public opinion happens,” Jackson said. “And we have the social internet that makes our opinions that much more transferable, that much more viral.” 

Fandoms’ most negative effects — like parasocial relationships going sour and the patrolling of certain people’s opinions  — stem from different mental health issues related to the internet, Jackson said. 

“It’s a collective trauma that we all have, particularly those of us who grew up with the social internet as a part of our socialization,” Jackson said. “This is a conversation that we need to be having among ourselves: How did this tool develop and cultivate our brains? Because we’re the first people ever to have brains that have networked in the ways that ours do.” 

Cancel culture has also played a role in how people engage with online forums, Jackson said. 

“We all have trauma attached to the precarity of these public figures because they get taken away fast,” Jackson said. “Cancel culture happens quickly, and it happens through the same mechanisms that make fandom a good space.”

There is no doubt the internet’s creation has irrevocably influenced and changed fandom as a general concept, Jackson and Thompson said. 

“The fact that we can see each other interacting in our fandom spaces via Reddit or Tumblr or [X, formerly] Twitter or whatever and are able to comment upon each other’s fandom as a text itself, it starts to get a little like an echo chamber, and that’s the danger of particularly when you think of fandom as like a commitment and emotional connection to a certain story,” Jackson said.

Notably, Thompson said relatively new social media platforms like X or Reddit often prompt either excessive praise or criticism from users, which can create polarizing echo chambers. 

“Social media platforms are designed to amplify interaction so that interaction has to be either strongly positive or strongly negative to inspire that interaction with the post,” Thompson said. “Those are the kinds of things that get amplified.” 

All in all, the differences of opinion that exist within fandoms are what make them so vivid and engaging. Jackson said if more people can recognize and accept this fact, online fandoms can grow into healthier spaces with time.

“We can all sit down in a row and watch the same movie and have incredibly different experiences of it,” Jackson said. “None of them are wrong. All of them are contextual. There has to be some way that we can talk to each other and feel curious, instead of defensive, because I think that we’re a richer understanding for everybody.”