EXTREME fanboy/girlism, and your opinions.

[Chogg Van Helsing]

So, not been on in a while, but thought I'd return!

So to open with, I'm a fan of an artist called Lindsey Stirling, she's like a hip-hop violinist, pretty awesome and such, look her up on youtube if ya want.

Now, I'm a fan, was invited to some fan pages on facebook, and I have to say, I'm incredibly freaked out by some people on these 'fan pages'.

For one, some are creepily obsessed with her as a person, not the music, just every little thing she does. While I understand that there will be fans like that everywhere, I've never seen as many as on these pages, or from the people I've met when I went to see her live. It almost made me embarrassed to be associated with them. They also obsessed over other fans sometimes which was just weirder.

Lindsey Stirling herself is great, and really interacts and appreciates her fan base, as it is they who got her famous, but does that really warrant the obsession? I mean, seriously?

So my question to you all is; is this just normal? Am I the strange one for thinking this? Or am I right in thinking this is too weird, 'cause it's proper obsession by people who, frankly, I wouldn't want to be obsessed over were I her.

 

[Legion]

Well it's pretty common for musicians it seems. Especially young male or female artists and bands aimed at teenage girls. If you went onto the twitter page of a famous singer such as Justin Bieber (as an example) and said you didn't like one of his songs then you would seriously get death threats from teenage girls.

Hell, even the girlfriends (or just rumoured girlfriends) of pop stars get them, just for having the audacity of being with them. It's kind of scary.

 

[Thaluikhain]

I don't mind people who are obsessed with the minutiae so much, it's when they will not accept criticism of what they are fans of.

There were some seriously racist elements in LotR, for example, Tolkien once said he envisaged orcs to have "those features of Asians most reprehensible to Caucasians" or somesuch, but some people just refuse to accept that.

 

[Angie7F]

I used to read posts on the J-POP girl group AKB487s Google + pages and cringe at the comments from the fans.
I think sometime people forget that celebrities are just celebrities and really become too personal.

 

[Entitled]

There were some seriously racist elements in LotR, for example, Tolkien once said he envisaged orcs to have "those features of Asians most reprehensible to Caucasians" or somesuch, but some people just refuse to accept that.

People refuse to accept that, because that's not what Tolkien said. First of all, he was first asked to give a visual frame point for orcs, and he described them as "degraded and repulsive versions of the (to Europeans) least lovely Mongol-types."

Which both gives a nod to the cultural subjectivity of beauty, "(to europeans)", and heavily implies that he didn't consider asians themselves degraded or repulsive, but explicitly described orcs as a degraded and repulsive version of certain asian features.

Besides, he was basically inventing the idea of alternate universe fantasies and fictional races on the spot. He had no way of knowing that on the long term, we will have Star Trek, and shows like that, which directly treat fantasy species as moralizing parallels to our Earth racism, and that in the future his own fantasy demon-goblin-thingies will be assumed to generally represent a race as long as they have one similarity with them.

He also self-admittedly based orkish speech on a repulsive degeerated germanic pronouncation, that sounded ugly as possible to his ear, and never would have assumed that this will be interpreted as orks representing germans, any more than their slanted eyes meaning that they "represent asians".

 

[Ruley]

I think people pushed into the public eye are always going to have the over obsessive fans. Its the victim of todays modern celebrity. People want to know things about them that no one else knows as if to feel closer to them and thus themselves being elevated closer to a celebrity status. Or merely being acknowledged by said celebrity for the same effect.

I think things can get out of hand and too far. In general, such an obsessive mindset on learning everyone about someone whose life isn't involved with yours in any way can be considered wasteful (exceptions of course). And on top of that, the unfortunate fact of this that some can be unstable. Just look at the death of John Lennon.