“#IHateThisShow!”: Anti-Fandom in the Digital Age

Simone Becque

One aspect of an anti-fandom I want to consider – what is the intersection between mass culture and anti-fandom? It seems that cult television shows are adored in a way that broadly popular shows are instead mocked. I want to argue that at a time when television audiences are generally fracturing - leading to smaller niche audiences with fewer mass culture hits - anti- fandom unites larger groups of people around a shared hatred. In other words, what are the implicit links between fandom and cult that are problematized by thinking about anti-fandom and mass audiences? Many media forms that are very popular seem to provoke an equal and opposite reaction of hatred. The Twilight books have spawned several popular anti-fan responses, such as, “Alex Reads Twilight” (http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7CCC01B887254707&feature=plcp). “Vote for the Worst” an anti-fan site for , also comes to mind as a space of shared hatred. Originally started in 2004, to “support voting for the entertaining contestants who the producers would hate to see win on American Idol” (http://www.votefortheworst.com/page/1/about-us/), the site has since expanded to include other talent shows like Dancing With the Stars and The X-Factor. This attempt organizes dislike around a certain show and turns hate watching into a shared force to subvert the show’s intention, recognizing the worst instead of the best. Meanwhile fandom for cult shows seems to be based on shared love, community and a “we’re all in this together” mentality. This isn’t a strict rule, and there are plenty of exceptions, but the popular shows sprout factions of anti-fans based on popularity alone. Or as small shows become more popular, like Modern Family, the backlash of fans to anti-fans begins to start. Then there are reality television shows, like Bravo’s The Real Housewives series that provide a fertile ground for hate watching. Some of these shows, like Here Comes Honey Boo-Boo seem to come with a hate watching audience already built in. The problem of course, is that in order for shows to become popular, there must be a large group of people eager to watch; American Idol can’t generate an anti-fan following, if it isn’t popular in the first place. So perhaps one way to think about anti-fandom is as a natural component of popularity. Anti-fandom could then be thought of as a response to the old “mass culture is inherently bad because a lot of people like it,” while small cult shows are thought of as good “high culture” precisely because so few people like them. One blogger, Eric Voss, upon noticing that $#*! My Dad Says, routinely beat 30 Rock in the television ratings, set out to prove that 30 Rock is indeed better than former based on the number of jokes per minute (http://splitsider.com/2010/11/proving-scientifically-tha-30-rock-is-better-than-my-dad-says/). The central question of this exercise seemed to be, why is the “inferior” product more popular? Even in an era of “quality television” the attitude persists that the most popular shows are not as good as the less popular shows beloved by fans. This then positions cult hits that do become popular do so in spite of mass audiences that prefer “inferior” shows, and positions the cult fandom audiences as arbitrators of taste. In this way, anti-fandom is a form of textual resistance; pushing against the ideology of the text, or the popularity of the text. What is it about certain texts that seems to provoke such a stronger reactions than others? One final piece of the puzzle might be the nature of online spaces and the privileging of snark. Online recaps of television shows, some message boards, and blog post comments reward snark. This use of snark as a carefully crafted authorial position should not be taken lightly, it is a vital element of the Internet culture. Snark is considered cool, in a way that unabashedly loving a text is not, because it illustrates a certain critical distance, and pushes against the text. Snarky recaps are more apt to “go viral” or to be re-posted and shared by users. Perhaps, going forward, as television audiences continue to splinter, what binds us together will not be shared admiration, but mutual hatred of what is popular.