An unwelcomed intruder is taking over your mind, body, heart, walls, and wallet. Honestly, you feel so attacked right now. Your parents simply don’t understand—this is actually the love of your life. Your signs and personality types align perfectly, you want the same number of children (since you changed from wanting one to three), and you both are absolutely obsessed with Beyoncé (which is incredibly rare, since she is obviously such a lowkey artist and celebrity).
But wait. There is an unwelcomed intruder of an entirely different sort, and she’s on your Instagram feed standing next to your fiancée! Okay, ladies, now let’s get in formation. We are finding every social media account this woman has, we are finding her address, we are finding her workplace, and we are finding her social security and a copy of her birth certificate. It is time to leave disgusting and threatening comments under every single post she has on every social medium because she would dare to even contemplate being next to the man you share with a couple million other girls in a mutual understanding that none will likely ever actually have or even meet him. This is the natural course of action. It’s just showing that you care.
This is seemingly the modern fan, and I’m here to give a radical awakening, starting with a trip back in time, before even the advent of the now archaic Myspace. Your only connections to your faves were rare concert tickets that you saved up to buy for months in advance, magazines they were featured in, television programs that showed their faces (no Youtube videos for you!), and, if you were incredibly lucky, maybe you ran into them in the streets (back then, fans weren’t so crazy so as to necessitate a celebrity’s constant supervision when going out).
We are a privileged generation in so many ways, this is just one small privilege among many. Our celebrities give us constant live updates on Snapchat, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. They go above and beyond to give us a better glimpse into their lives, deal with constant stalking, and enter danger whenever they go out by mobs of people trying to take a literal piece of them home as a souvenir. This generation of fans is horrifically ungrateful, and needs a set of ground rules.
Rule number one: remember that what they do is a job. All those programs you watch, all the music you buy, fan meetings, etc. They are part of their making a living. Having a dedicated fanbase is necessary to the end of making money—and no, that does not make celebrities inherently manipulative or wrong for catering to the fans.
Rule number two: they owe you nothing but their sincere gratitude, their continued hard work, and the fulfillment of engagements. They are not obligated to let you into even a sliver of their personal lives, relationships among that. When they choose to do so and fans react like little demon spawns, that does nothing but decrease the respect they have for their fans, and their willingness to put themselves out there in the digital world.
Rule number three, and a summary of all three: it is perfectly okay to be crazy about a celebrity and or anything else. Just check yourself, because there is a difference between the colloquial “being crazy” and the literal “being crazy,” and that is a line you should never cross.
