are fandoms ruining your mental health?

listening to you talk about how guys have rooms dedicated to sports teams is so funny, theres literally a house on my street and on the front door window is an Everton decal

The whole “do women have hobbies?” 💀 yes, but any time we do publicly we get mocked for it. Or…in their eyes our hobbies don’t qualify as “real” hobbies

I was just telling my friend the other night that as someone who has never been in a fandom or into stan culture i feel like I’m missing out. Obviously not to the unhealthy extent but the fun silly community extent. There’s something about my brain that doesn’t allow for that to happen. Even things that I’m a fan of, I never go beyond just enjoying that thing and moving on. For example, I’ll hear a song I really enjoy and at most I’ll add it to my playlist (often I don’t even do that), but I will never actively seek out the music video or more music from that artist or look up the artist or anything. It does make for a blissfully ignorant life in many ways but I do have some FOMO about getting to be part of a community and all that.

I remember my first experience in a toxic fandom, Dan and Phil fans during 2013-2018 we so obsessed about them and wanted to know everything about their sex lives, it was genuinely crazy - I'm glad I never engaged with it, I was more of an observer lol

i loved this video so much

It’s on fucking sight Mary watch your back

I find more often than not men don't have hobbies

THE FOUSEY TUBE CLIP IS SO OUT OF POCKET OMG. WHAT HE ASKED YOU TO MARRY HIM

I use to be in the dreamsmp fandom....I was 12....that is all I need to say.
The qsmp fandom is the one I am in now and honestly everyone is just amazing there

The movie "Almost Famous" in a way also talks about how the girlies are the reason for the bands success, and how that was diminished to those same women being groupies

when I was like 13-14 yo I had folders on my computer where I chronologically organised Beatles photos by years, months, and sometimes by days...

if history repeats itself, as it often does, then i can't wait for the day that men are gatekeeping young girls from liking 1 direction LMFAOOO

“Men are totally allowed to be extreme fanboys.” Are we forgetting how gay men are literally clowned on nonstop for liking anything? And they’re considered walking stereotypes in any fandom? I mean I feel like that is glaringly obvious.

I became a BTS fan when I was 29 and every day I am thankful for that fact. I am able to engage with fandom but also know when I’ve had enough. I can also know that while J-Hope is my bias, I do not know him nor will I ever, but I can still appreciate his art. He’s a phenomenal dancer, performer, rapper, and singer. But I didn’t beat myself up when I couldn’t buy his new album because I had more important bills to pay.

this is a little bit different but i was a certified horse girl as a kid. i took lessons, had my own horse, dressed in the typical “horse girl” way etc. it was a space where i was very comfortable. i collected these little horse figurines and i was obsessed with them. i had a whole instagram dedicated to pictures of them and collecting them. i did this from probably 9-13. the amount of bullying i endured because of this hobby was horrific. grown adults would make fun of me for it. and now at age 20 as a swiftie i STILL get made fun of for what i enjoy. they constantly complain that “women don’t have hobbies” but then belittle the things we enjoy and say “that doesn’t count”. i’m so tired of it lmao

The oversexualiztion of celebrities is what gets me. Morals go out the window for hardcore fans because they barely see their favs as real human beings. I’m in the [redacted] fandom and the way people talk about the lead singer frustrates me to no end. This man is real and has two teenage kids who are presumably on the internet in some capacity. Imagining them finding what people say about their dad makes me nauseous. It’s okay to love things and people, but it’s not okay to dehumanize them in such a way

ik fousey was popular but the thought of him having actual fans that aren’t just npc’s is hard to grasp lmao

A great example of weaponizing your fan base is Gabbie Hanna. Homegirl used her audience to harass people, dox them, try to get someone fired based off a false child SA allegation, actively mess with someone’s sobriety, etc. it’s a wild trip, look it up

I didn’t ever have an account, but I used to check Twitter a lot for updates on my favorite singer, and it definitely ruined my mental health. Every single “fan account” seemed to just tally up chart success and that apparently determined how good the song/album was to them. And these “fan accounts” were also borderline cyberbullying my favorite singer because she wasn’t using social media, wasn’t promoting her new music that much, and wasn’t really making public appearances because of her mental health. I ended up ruining an entire album for myself because I constantly wanted to know where the songs were charting/how many streams songs were getting/any teasers for upcoming music/etc. It was definitely a dark time for myself and I’m glad to be out of there haha

I forgot normies had fandoms literally what in the green grass are those😭

Ocd is a real thing it can be harmful to you and people around you mainly beacus its not your phones fault its what your doing on your phone beacus not only are you obbseased your obbseased with something thats not real

I remember when i was getting into kpop i wanted to be seen as kpop stan and there was this "rule" set by kpop stans that you have to stan atleast 3 kpop groups to call yourself a kpop stan lol

Melanie Martinezs fandoms are awful. What the fans call themselves 'Crybabies' THEY ARE SO MEAN.

My grandma uses patchouly oil and she calls it the hippy smell 💀💀💀

I would say I am a normal, healthy fan. Like I'm not following these people all around the world to every single concert they do. For example, I only seen Beyoncé one time in my entire lifetime and I decided to go see her again two months later in September, but as far as being a type of saying that is like out of control crazy with it, I honestly don't think that I am. I've just always loved her always listen to her music and I'm a fan of a lot of other people, but she's the only one who I had to see twice.

elijah

As a kpop fan, I can say that half of us are complete delulus

I like how "cult" is in the word "culture".

[Heavy cw for mentions of sa through fiction and csa]Fandom ruined me so hard i had to unlearn a lot of gross r//pey stuff fandom had taught me and normalizrd as a concept since holy fuck fandoms. I dont think ill get my teenhood back when i describe my formative years as "rando online constantly sa's my charcater" and "Another rando had really in detual erp thay would include inc//st and p//fophila when i was like around 12 going on 13. Yipeeee

"I felt gay" 💀💀💀💀💀💀💀

Sports fans are the most braindead group od individuals on this earth. Its WAY worse than Fandom

i'm scared of fandoms… and even with the ones i got sortve involved with i never got too far into it because i am just that bad at interacting with people

Idk if you already have one but if you haven’t please start a podcast omggg

im happy my fangirl days were spent on fictional characters.

Imo kpop is probably one of the worst fanbases to get involved with, because its almost like the companies WANT you to be obsessive over them (for example, making it in the contract for them not being allowed to date) and also the strict beauty standards.
I was like 12-13 when i first got into it and i realized "these girls are twice my age and skinnier than i am" so obviously i thought there was something wrong with me

I was in the undertale fandom as a 13-15 year old and as soon as I got out I swore off of fandoms lol
if I get into anything I'm going to enjoy it myself or with close friends

I keep having flash backs to my tumblr era oppressions and wondered how my parents didn’t know i was mentally ill

when i was a teen WHOO BOY. thank god we didnt have tiktok and twitter was still not big for fandom so all my past crimes are lost to time and have no attachment to my face/name. although ive never been a fan of real people that much, ive always been into books/games so at least i harassed imaginary characters in my head not a real person online

When you mentioned seeing exploitative tabloids as a kid it reminded me of how I feel like one way those have evolved in our generation is via the Snapchat discover page, like I be seeing all sorts of click-bait exploitative content on there and it fs echos 2000s tabloids 😔 Anywho, wonderful video keep up the good work!!!

the clip of u on the radio was a hard watch and I did have to mute it but love this vid

I strongly agree with your commentary about men and sports... Because of an IRL experience my sister and I experienced. We were waiting in line for 5SOS in Minneapolis close to the US bank Stadium (Vikings stadium) and a bunch of grown men constantly asked us why were were waiting in line. Said "who?" and made fun of us for waiting in line... As if they literally didn't have their face painted for one of the worst football teams in the US.

I think a toxic thing about fandoms which you kinda touched is how some people think that others aren't as big of fans of them if they don't literally "tour" with their favorite artist... I grew up with this girl and she ended up starting to become a fangirl of a country artist and when I started liking the same artists as her, she told her friends that I was not a fan of them.. Why? Because I didn't go to 3+ concerts each tour...

And don't even get me started on how Tiktok has ruined many concerts but especially with Harry Styles or how random tiktokers jump on the bandwagon just to go to the free concert. Super annoying.

I had an interesting experience regarding interacting with fandoms from an outsider standpoint. Just a couple of days ago I wanted to buy a present for my friend, and since I know she is a fan of a particular member of a K-pop group I wanted to see if I could buy her a present relating to the member she liked. Looking around the internet and doing a little research on my own (I know little about K-pop in general, my friend mentioned her idol on occasions but my knowledge stops there) I eventually did find fan-made merch that I thought she would like. Though with how much I've heard about the general negativity revolving around obsessive K-pop fandoms, I was worried that I would be rejected to purchase their item as a complete outsider and even worse could do something that they would consider "offensive" and potentially experience the wrath of fangirls first-handedly. Turns out, all of that worrying was for nothing because the seller whom I asked if I could purchase their merchandise was probably one of the nicest people I've met on the internet, she had so much patience in explaining to me what the exact process was (it's fan-made merch, so the buying process is generally a little complicated) and reassured me that me being almost completely oblivious about K-pop did not affect anything at all, in fact she was happy to learn that I wanted to purchase their item as a clueless outsider as a gift for a friend and was very welcoming overall. It was a surprisingly positive and heart-warming interaction, not something I come by a lot in the storm that is social media nowadays lol. I think it shows that although some fandoms are notoriously known for their toxicity and I know there are extreme cases, I believe that most fans are nowhere near what some media portrays them to be, so take that for all its worth but that experience has definitely changed my bias towards fandoms being abrasive and toxic in general.

Interesting watching this video AFTER “toxic gossip train” dropped