Being a Fake Fan

What does it mean to be a fake fan?

I've spent a lot of time on the Internet, more specifically on social media, and even more specifically than that, in fandom. I joined my first fandom when I was about 14, and now I'm 19 and I'm probably in about 13 or so fandoms at any given moment. I have a few core fandoms I've been in for years (Teen Wolf, PLL) and some I just recently joined (Marvel, This Is Us), and they're all very different from each other (Marvel and Teen Wolf consist of teenage girls yelling and crying on the Internet, This Is Us is more of a family show, and PLL is almost dead). I've never been called a fake fan, not to my face, or ask box, but I'm sure at least one person has looked at my everchanging Tumblr blog and wondered what the hell it's turned into, because it probably isn't what they followed me for.

My Tumblr blog is the centre of my fandom. I follow things related to my fandoms on all my social medias, but Twitter, Instagram and Facebook are also places where people I know in real life can see the things I'm doing and judge me for them, so those places I generally just follow official accounts and like pictures and occassionally leave comments. So Tumblr is where I focus my fan energies, to allow myself to freak out about anything and everything that I love dearly, because it can be mostly anonymous and no one I know in real life knows about it except for my best friend.

So back to my original question: what does "fake fan" really mean? Does it mean that you don't know what you're talking about when it comes to a certain show/book/movie? There are new people that discover things every day and are still in the process of learning about the thing that they just discovered, and they shouldn't be shamed for that. Is it someone that's a bandwagon hopper, like when a certain sports team starts to do really well and they start to like them because everyone else does? Maybe, but that seems very specific and I'm pretty sure "bandwagon fan" is the term used to describe those types of people. Also, I've done that a lot in my life, because when my local sports teams are doing well, specifically hockey and baseball, everyone in the city and the surrounding area gets really into it, even if they weren't before.

Being a "fake fan", whatever it means, is something that I'm afraid of being (even though it apparently means nothing). To me, it basically feels as though it encompasses someone who shows up halfway through something and acts as if they know what they're talking about when they really have no idea what's even going on. I think that's what it means to me. Right now, I feel like one of those.

Basically, I've been getting more into hockey these days, and I've actually been watching games instead of catching the occasional highlight. However, I know nothing about stats and what makes a good player and when the referees are making bad calls and stuff like that. So when I'm watching, I am commenting on how the players are playing (to myself, because I watch these games by myself out of extreme self-conciousness) and am incredibly self-aware of how ridiculous I sound because I literally don't have a clue what I'm talking about. I like to think I'm a fast learner though, and when I get interested in something, I try and learn as much as I can about it as fast as possible, so I've been teaching myself some of the basics I didn't know before, like different penalties and what the stats mean and other things like that, but I feel like I'd have to watch for a really long time in order to learn what makes a good player, because I didn't play growing up or anything like that, so I have no idea, really.

But does that make me a "fake fan"? I definitely have periodic obsessions that take over my life for about a week, but then they chill out and I either get over them in six months or love them steadily for a long time. Hockey's been around my entire life, as a background thing that I love a lot because it means so many different and important things to me, and right now I appear to be going through a periodic obsession. My week of hardcore loving it is over now, and it's settled into something that will hopefully be around for a while because I'm finding myself really enjoying it.

So I don't think that it makes me a fake fan. I am a fan, albeit a new fan. But I don't think there's anything wrong with that. I think there's a stark and definite difference between someone who qualifies as a "fake fan" and pretends to know what they're talking about when they don't, and someone who's new to something that's trying to teach themselves because they genuinely enjoy it and want to learn things about it. The former is definitely incredibly annoying, and the latter is just someone discovering a new love. So based on the above, I don't think that my love of hockey sparking right now, halfway through the season, makes me a "fake fan", but rather just someone discovering a new love for something they already loved. Hopefully.