Reflections on fandom & (wor)shipping real life people

I’ve seen some anti-Colifer posts going around and they have brought up something I’ve been thinking about for some time, but never had the chance to post about. Now seems like a good time to talk about fandom behavior and the process behind celebrity worship. I’m going to be talking about Colin/Jen, because that’s the context I’m in right now but what I’m going to say applies to any other fandom where (wor)shipping the actors that play a fictional couple occurs.

There is almost a sort of cult of personality going on in fans of celebrities that, in many ways, dehumanizes them completely. In an attempt to feel closer to the people they admire, fans tend to transfer their own values and morals onto the actors they love. They have this perfect image of the actors and put them on a pedestal and think they’re capable of doing no wrong.

I’ve always tried avoiding that. It’s the reason why I’ve never really done the whole celebrity thing – there are actors and actresses whose work I admire and really enjoy, but I’m fully aware that I have absolutely no idea who they are as human beings and in 99% of the situations that prevents me from getting too attached to celebrities. They’re human beings with flaws, just like us. We have no idea who they are. The only thing we have access to and what we consume is an image of who they are. Now that image may be perfectly accurate and correspond exactly to who they are or… that image we have of them may be absolutely wrong and be completely misleading (and since we tend to project our own beliefs onto them, in most cases that image is far from being correct). Case in point: we don’t know who Colin is unless we actually know him personally. Same for Jen or for any other actor or actress in this world. And knowing them personally doesn’t include watching them at filming, seeing them at games, spending some minutes with them at conventions, taking pics, etc. More under the cut (I’ll warn you this is probably the Mount Everest of unpopular opinions so proceed at your own risk).