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Dark Fandoms: an Introduction and Case Study

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Dark Fandoms: an Introduction and Case Study Deviant Behavior ISSN: 0163-9625 (Print) 1521-0456 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/udbh20 Dark Fandoms: An Introduction and Case Study Ryan Broll To cite this article: Ryan Broll (2020) Dark Fandoms: An Introduction and Case Study, Deviant Behavior, 41:6, 792-804, DOI: 10.1080/01639625.2019.1596453 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/01639625.2019.1596453 Published online: 26 Mar 2019. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 610 View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=udbh20 DEVIANT BEHAVIOR 2020, VOL. 41, NO. 6, 792–804 https://doi.org/10.1080/01639625.2019.1596453 Dark Fandoms: An Introduction and Case Study Ryan Broll University of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario Canada ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY There is a deep and persistent cultural fascination with the macabre – public Received 15 June 2018 executions, true crime books, slasher films, and sites of violence attract large Accepted 2 October 2018 audiences. Although serial and mass murderers increasingly achieve fame, little attention has focused on their fans. Thus, this paper introduces the concept of dark fandoms, or communities of fans of those who have perpetrated heinous acts, and draws attention to Columbiners as one example of a dark fandom. An analysis of more than 700 threaded discussion posts from an online Reddit community reveals that the Columbiner dark fandom discussed their favorite characters from the shooting, proposed fan theories about the incident, and considered the Columbine shooting’s legacy. The implications of these findings for studies of other dark fandoms is discussed. In the early morning hours of April 20, 1999, 17-year-old Dylan Klebold, a senior at Columbine High School, shouted, “Bye,” to his mother who was just waking. Sue Klebold assumed that Dylan was leaving for his bowling class, but he would, in fact, skip all of his morning classes. In the early afternoon, Sue learned that Dylan and his friend Eric Harris had killed 13 students and staff at their school and injured 24 others before taking their own lives in what was at the time the deadliest mass shooting at an American high school1 (Klebold 2016). In the two decades since the shooting at Columbine High School much has been written about the perpetrators, the incident, and the myriad of school safety measures implemented in its aftermath (e.g., Addington 2009; Crepeau-Hobson, Filaccio, and Gottfried 2005;Muschertand Peguero 2010). The current study diverges from past Columbine-related research in that it focuses not on the shooting or related policy developments, but rather on those who celebrate the perpetrators. In her memoir, AMother’s Reckoning, Sue Klebold (2016)describedher surprise at the celebratory fan mail and telephone messages describing her son as a hero that she began receiving after the shooting. Today, these so-called “Columbiners”2 converge in several online communities (Raitanen and Oksanen 2018). Harris and Klebold are not conventional stars. Although we have a complex relationship with celebrities (Holmes and Redmond 2006; Redmond 2006) and are often captivated by the “burnt-out star” and other damaged celebrities who somehow seem more like the rest of us (Dyer 1998; Grieveson 2002;Redmond2006), fame is hegemonically defined as a positive achievement (Schmid 2006). To be sure, some celebrities remain so deviant that they will never be emblazoned on billboards and their fans CONTACT Ryan Broll [email protected] Department of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Guelph, 50 Stone Road East, Guelph, Ontario N1G 2W1, Canada The author wishes to thank Laura Huey for her helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper and participants of the 2018 Faculty Writing Retreat at the University of Guelph for their encouragement and feedback. 1The shooting at Columbine High School remained the deadliest mass shooting at an American high school for nearly 20 years until it was surpassed by the February 14, 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida (McCarthy, 2018). 2Among fans of school shootings, the term “Columbiners” is contested – some perceive it as a generic term to refer to fans of any school shooting, whereas others ascribe it negative connotations and associate it with a “superficial knowledge of school shootings and a fan-like attitude” (Raitanen and Oksanen 2018: 203). While I acknowledge this debate, for parsimony I use the term to refer broadly to fans of the shooting at Columbine High School. © 2019 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC DEVIANT BEHAVIOR 793 are not welcome in the mainstream of American culture (Schmid 2005).Harris,Klebold,and Columbiners fall within this latter category. Nevertheless, death and violence occupy prominent positions in American culture and it should not be surprising that those who propagate evil achieve a measure of celebrity. In 1992, The Silence of the Lambs, centered on the fictional serial killer Hannibal Lecter, garnered five major Academy Awards (Schmid 2006) and tabloid-like news constructions of random violence (Best 1999) and the “faceless predator criminal” (Surette 1994) are ubiquitous. Serial and mass murderers inspire both fear and attraction and have one of the surest paths to celebrity status as the media attempts to give a face to these faceless criminals (Schmid 2006). At the same time, every year thousands of dark tourists flock to the sites of executions, assassinations, and confinement (Brown 2009; Lennon and Foley 2000; Wilson 2008). Previous scholars have identified the existence of fans of mass murderers. Schmid (2005) acknowl- edged fans of non-fictional serial killers and discussed murderabilia – items connected to serial or mass murderers, like locks of their hair, bricks from their homes, or trading cards (see also, Jarvis 2007) – but his analysis largely focused on fans of the fictional serialkillerHannibalLecter. Similarly, others have studied fans of Dexter Morgan, the fictional police-blood-spatter-analyst-by-day-and-serial-killer-by- night (Donnelly 2012; Gregoriou 2012). Fewer scholars have studied fans of non-fictional mass mur- derers, although Columbiners are emphasized among those that have (Paton 2012; Paton and Figeac 2015; Raitanen and Oksanen 2018; Raitanen, Sandberg, and Oksanen 2017). However, these studies portray fans of non-fictional mass murderers as anomalies and are largely disconnected from broader literatures in fan studies, the celebrification (Driessens 2013) of mass and serial murderers, and a broad cultural interest in death and darkness. The current study aims to bridge literatures on fan studies, celebrity, and darkness to better under- stand fan communities devoted to those who have committed heinous acts through the concept of dark fandoms. Then, drawing upon Columbiners as a case study of one dark fandom, I analyze more than 700 threaded discussion posts from an online Reddit community devoted to the shooting at Columbine High School to delineate Columbiners’ expressions of their fandom. The results suggest that Columbiners express their fandom much in the same way as more conventional fans might: by discussing relevant characters, proposing fan theories, and debating the legacy of the shooting and shooters. I conclude by discussing the implications of these findings for other studies of dark fandoms. Dark tourism and the celebrification of murder A cultural fascination with torture, death, and despair has long existed. In Discipline and Punish,Foucault (1995) describes the gruesome public execution by drawing and quartering of Robert-François Damiens for his attempted assassination of King Louis XV of France in 1757. Indeed, public executions drew large crowds throughout the Puritan era and were intended to signal the consequences of non-compliance with social norms (Schmid 2005). A century later, the earliest developments in film drew attention to death: one of the first phonographic recordings was a reading of H. H. Holmes’s confession, while the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots was the subject of one of the first kinetoscopes (Schmid 2005). Contemporary media continue to emphasize crime and violence (Schmid 2005), and every year thousands of dark tourists combine these mediated experiences with in-person visits to sites of violence and suffering (Brown 2009; Farmaki 2013; Lennon and Foley 2000; Wilson 2008; Wilson et al. 2017). Decommissioned prisons and prison museums permit ordinary citizens the opportunity to “share” spaces with the criminal other and, sometimes, (in)famous inmates (Ferguson and Madill 2017)or“celebrity prisoners” (Wilson 2004). In fact, prison museums readily identify notorious criminals who were held there to increase demand (Farmaki 2013; Wilson 2008). Similarly, the locales in which serial killers operate are popular tourist destinations with enterprising groups offering sightseeing tours, photo opportunities, and souvenirs (Gibson 2006). The popularity of dark tourism accentuates the draw of the celebrity criminal and the celebrifica- tion of murder more generally. Although fame continues to be defined largely as a meritorious 794 R. BROLL achievement (Holmes and Redmond 2006; Schmid 2006), its ‘entry fee’ has lowered considerably in recent decades with the rise of reality television and the internet (Redmond 2006). As a result, now “the famous are often the visible, rather than the talented” (Schmid 2006: 297). When the entry point to fame
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