I think by far the worst fandom I was ever in was my first fandom that I actually participated in - which was the Beatles (and by extension classic rock). So this was in 2010-2011, and then it branched out to classic rock in 2012 before I left (Technically Star Trek 2009 was the first but I wasn’t active). What a flaming trash fire that was. It was just. So embarrassing? The average age of people in the fandom at that time were 13-16 years old. So there were a lot of young girls and then a smattering of older people - men, usually, who grew up with the Beatles/Classic Rock.
So of course there were scandals. Older men preying on these little girls. I remember one in particular, it was actually a woman in her 20’s - and she was BIG in the fandom. 10k followers at least. And she had been soliciting nudes out of these little girls for YEARS until it all came to a head and she was ran off the site.
And the racism. Yoko Ono. The “witch who ruined the Beatles.” Fan girls couldn’t be bothered to come up with actual reasons to hate this woman so of course it always turned to racism. It always ended with slurs.
And there was a huge problem - moreso in the classic rock fandom as a whole - with underaged groupies. Led Zeppelin in particular had a lot of dealings with underaged groupies, some as young as 14. And these fan girls not only condoned it but they encouraged it. They had wished it was them a lot of the time.
There was also a big issue with people harassing the band members’ families on social media. This happened a lot with The Who in particular. These girls would harass the band members’ children and wives for pictures and it was just so bizarre and appalling, honestly.
Looking back now I can’t believe how toxic just… everything about it was.
I was really into classic rock at those ages and reading this I can’t believe how lucky I was that I wasn’t on Tumblr until some years later wtf
Yeah it was so.. gross? I made my tumblr in Oct. 2011 and the community back then - not just for classic rock people but for EVERYTHING was just? Awful? (*shudders* superwholock)
Fandom history is extremely interesting to me like from the dawn of fanzines with Star Trek and Star Wars to the internet era and LJ and Fanfiction.net and just.
Fandom for the most of it’s presence in the last ~50 years I feel like was mostly older teenagers and adults, 15+ year olds. Or at least, from what I’ve seen of the Old Days of Fandom. And then Tumblr came along and I feel like it opened the doors for a much younger (physically and mentally) audience, which went over about as well as you’d expect.
I feel like I didn’t really start seeing 12, 13, 14 year olds participate in fandom until tumblr (myself included - I was 14 in 2011 - I was almost definitely too young for fandom). And so in the late 2000s and early 2010s there was this shift of audience age and it didn’t go over well, especially because younger teenagers are just straight up awful sometimes. There’s this age gap between the early 2000s fandom and the early 2010s fandom and I feel like a lot of the older fandom members got pushed away (don’t get me started on the tumblr witch hunts, the callout culture, death threats). And now all that’s left are a few Fandom Elders™️ from the LJ / FF.n age and a bunch of 20 year olds who have grown out of fandom because they forced it to be tailored for their younger selves.