This story was originally published in the sixth, music-themed print volume of Sunstroke Magazine, titled “Super Crush”

Everyone knows who the stans are. If you’ve been online anytime in the past decade, you’ll recognize them. They’re the online creatures telling you to stream Loona, breaking down the meaning of every noun in Taylor Swift’s lyrics, elaborating scarily complicated theories about Louis Tomlinson’s fake baby, and flooding Pop Crave’s replies with fancams and nearly undecipherable linguistic exchanges. They’re the online equivalent of feral animals you see on a hike and are too scared to approach.

They’re passionate, young, and everywhere. Seriously, for every piece of media that’s out there, there’s some form of online fandom, formed by stans, surrounding it. It’s a painfully modern social phenomenon that we’re all aware of but don’t discuss nearly enough. 

I grew up in these spaces, and so did an uncountable number of young people. They still do. So why don’t we talk more about the space they occupy in modern culture? What does it mean for a significant portion of the global youth to grow up in this impenetrable online social pandemonium? How do these parentless, pseudo societies work from the inside?

I joined Twitter when I was nine years old — a dangerously impressionable age — and I entered online fandoms almost immediately. For the best part of my early teenage years, my online antics mattered to me even more than my day-to-day interactions in real life. I retired from my seven-year stan Twitter residency a while back, but its effects still impact me. 

A handful of these effects aren’t positive; they account for the most cringe-worthy records of my digital footprint. But on a more holistic level, spending those formative years in those communities helped me understand myself and the world around me better than anything I had learned in school up to that point. I dove into the unpoliced world of online fandoms, gaining a new way of understanding culture and society.

I’ve said it in passing conversation, but the more I mention how growing up in online fan spaces shaped me as a person, the more accurate it feels. From my career choices to my interests, to my interpersonal relationships, I’m able to find traces of my passionate pre-teen self in my adult life. In fan communities, having an identity meant something; they gave me space to develop as an individual.

Online, you’re not the person your parents have raised, or your friends have understood you are; you are whoever you decide to be. This created an avenue for my young self to create a “persona” that, truthfully, felt more aligned with who I knew myself as than who the outside world thought I was.

It came with an endless supply of unquestioned validation, reassurance, community and purpose. It’s no mystery why young people — in the prime years of discovering themselves — often turn to these communities.

I made some of the most meaningful friendships I had growing up through these communities. Most were simply “mutuals,” or people who followed you back, but some went beyond that. A sense of belonging is what lingered. It wasn’t just being a part of a group, but being someone that had a connection to others.

On a small scale, these communities are a teenage utopia made stronger by love for shared interests. But zoom out, and you’ll see a different picture. In the stan world, there’s a clear hierarchy of authority that sometimes distracts from the fantasy of fandom, slipping into reality instead. If you have the follower count to be relevant, you’re on a higher playing field. 

The phenomenon of update accounts — often run by devoted members of specific fandoms, and serve to post every relevant piece of information regarding a show, group or celebrity — is an apolitical entity in a space where conflict rules. They serve as the community’s keepers and historians; their accounts are our primary vessels of information, and the teenagers behind them are the blueprint for social media analytics and audience engagement.

However, apart from the emotional fulfillment fans might get from serving as members of a fandom, there’s little in it for them. It’s unpaid labor, a one-sided love relationship where countless hours are devoted to a celebrity — who is treated much like a God. It is fanaticism turned into community, and delusion turned into hope. It’s meant to be that way. 

The selflessness that drives social media standom is inherent. A stan, no matter how personable within their community, is a vessel for a subject’s exposure.

When discerning viral content produced by stans, it’s not the creator’s name that gets mentioned, but their idol’s. It’s never Na’ama; it’s the Taylor Swift update account admin who went to jail for refusing to join the Israel Defense Force, and came back to update their followers once they were released. It’s rarely Dorothy; it’s the Ariana Grande fan that tweeted from a smart fridge when her mom took her phone away.

Unlike viral content generators, online fandoms are unpaid, unrecognized street teams for artists or celebrities, being a part of them can be frustrating. After investing unmeasurable effort into something intangible and far removed from their real lives, fans feel as if their bias, or the person they stan, owe them a stake in their choices — from choosing singles for an album to having a say in their personal life. These fans believe that their constant devotion is enough to give them permission to demand anything from their bias, escalating into a parasocial relationship.

Evidently, stan culture has many flaws which shouldn’t be downplayed. Parasocial relationships, bullying and harassment, muddling young people’s sense of identity at a critical age, unemployable digital footprints, and many other chronically-online issues run rampant within fandoms.

But for the fans themselves, common enthusiasm isn’t a plausible cause for worry; it is the cure to the rest of their conflicts. When you’re young and passionate, everything feels big and scary, but having a dedicated space where you can separate from your personal life and engage in innocuous conversation can relieve some of the anxieties of adolescence.

Be critical of stan culture, but don’t forget what it might mean for those on the other side of the screen. After all — against the wishes of every teenage fad truther — it’s just a phase; an influential and complicatedly modern one, but still a phase that gets outgrown eventually. 

As the guinea pig generation of former stans join the workforce, their legacy of teenage passion becomes marketable skills, and complex insight to how people can gather around a common interest and make crazy things happen.