The term “stan” or “stanning” comes from the Eminem song “Stan,” which tells the story of a mentally unstable superfan who is frustrated that Eminem isn’t responding to his crazed letters. The term has evolved over the years to be associated with the internet, specifically pocks of fan communities on X. When I was a teenager, I was a part of RuPaul’s Drag Race stan Twitter, and all of the drama and conflama that came with that (you had to be there the night Alaska was crowned the winner of All Stars 2). While the origin of the term obviously has negative connotations, many superfans use stanning as a means to an end of finding a community.
There’s nothing wrong with being a fan of a celebrity at any age. Your grandma might still have fond feelings for Elvis. Your dad might be listening to the same Beatles albums that he was listening to when he was a teenager. But the general public doesn’t pathologize those kinds of aloof, nostalgic attachments to celebrities; it’s way more unusual not to be a fan of any musician, actor, or athlete than to be a casual fan. But obsessing over a celebrity that is either age-inappropriate to stan (see Club Chalamet) or being obsessed with a celebrity to the point that it takes over your life and they are all you think about is certainly looked down upon. A lot of unhealthy stanning falls under the category of parasocial relationships, where one person develops a sense of connection and intimacy with someone else, despite the person they’re invested in not knowing that they exist.
It’s no wonder that stans use the internet as their venue of choice for their obsessions. They can find like-minded people who are also obsessed with finding every single clip in existence of their favorite K-POP band and analyzing it until they can’t anymore. If you want to post about Kieran Culkin every hour on the hour on Twitter, nobody is going to stop you. But in real life there are social repercussions to being too into a celebrity (imagine if your coworker couldn’t stop talking about Sabrina Carpenter during the monthly company meeting), so entering a social space like the internet, where obsession is not only acceptable but encouraged, is extremely tempting, especially for extremely lonely people.
Think of the SuperWhoLockian (Fans of Supernatural, Doctor Who, and Sherlock, respectively) community on Tumblr in the early-mid 2010s. Sure, the teens who engaged in this fandom liked the shows they were watching, but the appeal of the community that came with watching these shows was irresistible to a group of chronically online teenage nerds.
The promise of community permeated throughout Tumblr during that time. I was in middle school in 2012, and kids were actually saying, “I like your shoelaces.” “Thanks, I stole them from the president,” as a means to an end of making friends in real life. Tumblr-speak might’ve been cringeworthy, but it was not ineffective in bringing lonely people together. But as with all things that seem too good to be true, there’s always a catch, and this is certainly the case when it comes to stanning.
I’m in the unique situation of not experiencing the darkest parts of stanning until I was 20 years old. Most of us imagine the craziest stans as teenagers… but I was halfway through college when I first let my own stanning get out-of-control with the all too underrated actor Paul Dano. It was 2020, and I was going through it. My roommate Sarah and I had watched Swiss Army Man, the movie he made with Daniel Radcliffe, and loved it, so we wanted to check out some of his other work. Over the course of the fall semester, my roommates and I watched every film in Paul Dano’s filmography. We would have constant movie nights (because there was nothing else to do) where we screened Paul Dano double features, watching incredible movies like Little Miss Sunshine and absolute stinkers like Too Young To Be a Dad.
What started as a jokey way to pass the time devolved into a full-blown obsession. I watched every Paul Dano interview ever uploaded on YouTube. I knew exactly which neighborhood in Brooklyn he lived in (according to his Wikipedia page), despite not living in Brooklyn nor knowing the neighborhoods. I watched movies he recommended; I read a bad play that his wife wrote. I felt extremely attached to this man in a totally platonic way. I felt like I knew him and imagined situations where I’d run into him and become his friend. I felt totally insane and out of control, but I was addicted to thinking about this guy. I had a textbook parasocial relationship with Paul Dano.
I could recognize this obsession as extremely weird and unhealthy, but like with all one-sided attachments, I couldn’t just shake it off as if it never existed. The only thing that healed it was time, and filling my life with things that are far more fulfilling than watching a bunch of bad movies just for the 5 minutes a character actor is onscreen.
Most of us realize when we’re young that we reach a point of diminishing returns when obsessing over a celebrity. It’s one thing to have a group of friends you go to Taylor Swift concerts with, or a Tumblr account where you only post gifs of a young Marlon Brando. But once you reach the point where you’re googling people that Lola Young went to high school with on the off chance that they tagged her in an Instagram photo in 2015, you’ve totally lost the plot.
It’s hard to admit that your dad, who told you “One Direction doesn’t know who you are and never will,” was 100% right. But it’s something you must accept at one point or another. It’s crucial to build your life around yourself and not your idea of someone else. Aging out of stan culture is not as inevitable as you might think it is: you need to make an active choice to move on. Aging out of stan culture allows you to focus on your skills and talents instead of becoming an expert on a subject that does nothing to serve you in the long run. It’s okay to betray your 16-year-old self by no longer worshipping at the altar of Harry Styles.
When a fan told actress and singer Dove Cameron that their goal in life was for her to notice them, she said this in response:
If you’re not going to listen to me, at least listen to someone who knows what it’s like to be an object of parasocial obsession. They know better than anyone how fruitless stanning really is.
