Look, I’ve wasted god knows how many Tuesday nights defending my love for Twilight to folks who treat having taste like it’s a goddamn meritocracy. You know the type—they act like admitting you like something “bad” is a confession before some sort of cultural purity tribunal, a sign your judgment is broken. But here’s the real screw-up: treating those pleasures as aesthetic failures is itself a failure of criticism. It completely misses why we actually enjoy things and what art is even supposed to do in the first place.

The Guilt Is Peer Pressure, Not a Real Aesthetic Problem

The phrase “guilty pleasure” stacks the deck from the jump. It frames your enjoyment as something illicit, a deviation from the one true norm of good taste you’re supposed to feel ashamed about. But who actually made that rulebook? Usually it’s a cocktail of high-culture gatekeepers, academic groupthink, and critics who think a film’s value gets measured by how much it looks like a Merchant Ivory production. The guilt isn’t baked into the work; it’s pure social anxiety, the dread of looking unserious in front of the wrong people.

I still remember catching Showgirls for the first time at a rep cinema, packed in with a crowd laughing at all the “wrong” beats. They were in on the joke, yeah, but they weren’t just sneering. There was this real, crackling delight—in the unhinged choreography, the line readings that felt beamed in from another planet, the sheer, sweaty excess of the whole thing. That delight isn’t a fake coping mechanism for bad art. It’s a direct response to something tangible in the work, even if the creators never intended it. The guilt only slinks in when you picture some phantom tastemaker hovering behind you, keeping score.

The Intentionality Trap Is a Dead End

So much of the “guilty pleasure” tag comes from an obsession with what the author meant to do. If a work aims for seriousness and faceplants, we stamp it “bad,” and our enjoyment gets filed under “ironic.” If a work is knowingly camp, it’s “good” because it meant to be that way. This logic is a mess. Art isn’t a vending machine where you punch in a meaning and a tidy response drops out. A film can totally whiff on its stated goals and succeed wildly at something else—something weirder, more personal, way more interesting.

Look at The Room. Tommy Wiseau was clearly convinced he was making a Tennessee Williams-style drama. He wasn’t. But the result isn’t just a broken drama; it’s a masterpiece of disjunctive storytelling, a movie where every scene seems to operate in its own emotional dimension. That’s not nothing. That’s a specific aesthetic experience you simply can’t get from a well-made drama. When I crack up at “You’re tearing me apart, Lisa!” I’m not mocking Wiseau’s failure. I’m responding to the bizarre, painfully sincere energy of a line nobody else would’ve written—or delivered—that way. My pleasure is a real aesthetic reaction, not a category error.

Why Messy Art Feels More Honest

This is where I get unpopular: I’d argue a lot of “guilty pleasures” are more honest than the polished, middlebrow stuff that gets a free pass. A Marvel movie is technically competent, sure, but it’s also been focus-grouped into a smooth, inoffensive paste. A disaster like The Book of Henry is a car crash, but it’s a genuinely fascinating car crash—a movie so earnestly wrong-headed it spills the director’s id all over the screen in ways a competent film never would. When I say I love The Book of Henry, I’m not claiming it’s good in any conventional sense. I’m saying it’s more revealing and more memorable than a dozen anonymous thrillers that hit their marks and evaporate from your brain by the time the credits roll.

This is what the whole “so bad it’s good” crowd often misses. They frame the enjoyment as a happy accident, a bonus that has zip to do with the work itself. But that enjoyment is embedded in the work’s specific, weirdo choices. A different bad movie might just bore you to tears. The Room works because of Wiseau’s strangely specific fixations on betrayal, football, and rooftop chats. The pleasure comes from the actual texture of the failure, and that texture is an aesthetic property, full stop.

Guilty Pleasures Are Cultural Evidence, Not Glitches

Taking guilty pleasures seriously as real aesthetic experiences isn’t just personal vindication. It’s a sharper way to read the culture. When a big group of people finds pleasure in something critics slam as “bad,” that tells you something real about what audiences actually hunger for. The long, undead afterlife of Twilight isn’t just nostalgia; it’s a sign the series tapped into something about desire and repression that more “respectable” works never even grazed. The stilted dialogue, the chaste longing, the aggressively teal color grading—these aren’t bugs for the fans; they’re the features that build the specific emotional weather the series runs on.

Critics who wave this off as bad taste are basically refusing to analyze a massive chunk of cultural life. They’re like botanists who won’t study dandelions because they’re weeds. But dandelions are everywhere for a reason. They thrive where other plants give up. Similarly, guilty pleasures often thrive because they offer what high culture neglects: direct emotional access, zero ironic distance, permission to feel things that are too big or too messy for polite company.

The Gatekeepers’ Quiet Panic

I’d bet the resistance to taking guilty pleasures seriously comes from a fear of losing cultural authority. If a critic’s whole job is telling you what’s good and bad, a thriving counter-canon of “bad” works is a direct threat. It hints that the criteria for judgment are wobblier than advertised. It suggests audiences are active participants in making meaning, not just passive quality-receivers. And for someone whose whole identity is built on being a tastemaker, that’s frankly terrifying.

But criticism should describe before it prescribes. Before you decide Twilight is a bad film, you should understand why millions of people connect with it so fiercely. That doesn’t mean pretending it’s Citizen Kane. It means taking the pleasure seriously as a phenomenon, investigating what the work is actually doing out in the world. And often, what it’s doing is a hell of a lot more interesting than what the “good” films are up to.

Toward a Shameless Kind of Criticism

So what would a criticism that doesn’t treat guilty pleasures as screw-ups look like? It’d start by assuming that if people love something, there’s a reason—even if that reason has little to do with the usual yardsticks of quality. It’d look at a film like Mamma Mia! and instead of griping about Pierce Brosnan’s singing, it’d ask why his strained, heartfelt warbling makes audiences so ridiculously happy. (The answer, I think, is that it transforms a polished musical into a karaoke party, where the joy comes from participation, not perfection.)

It’d also drop “guilty” as the default setting. Call it a private pleasure, a weird pleasure, an unexpected pleasure—whatever works. The guilt is optional, and it’s usually a sign you’re more worried about your own social standing than about the work itself. When I say I love Twilight, I’m not confessing. I’m stating a fact about my aesthetic life, one that’s just as valid as my love for Tarkovsky or Toni Morrison. They do different things for me, but they both do real things.

In the end, the problem with treating guilty pleasures as aesthetic failures is that it flattens the whole experience of art into a single, dreary metric of “goodness.” But art isn’t a test you pass or fail. It’s a messy, living exchange between a work and an audience, and sometimes the most interesting stuff happens in the gaps between intention and reception. Your love for a “bad” movie isn’t a mistake. It’s a clue. Follow it, and you might learn something about yourself, about the culture, and about what art can actually do. The only real failure is refusing to take your own pleasure seriously.

Frequently Asked Questions

Isn’t it just ironic enjoyment? Aren’t we just making fun of bad art?

Sometimes, sure. But irony is a thin coat of paint that usually covers up genuine engagement. If you’ve watched The Room a dozen times, you’re probably not just feeling superior to it. You’re soaking in the rhythms, the performances, the weird little world it builds. Irony can be a way to give yourself permission to enjoy something, but the enjoyment itself is the real deal. The mistake is assuming the ironic frame is the whole story.

Does this mean there’s no such thing as a bad movie?

No, it means “bad” is a way slipperier term than we usually let on. A film can be incompetent by the standard textbook rules and still be aesthetically valuable. A film can also be dead competent and completely worthless. The point isn’t to abolish judgment—it’s to expand the damn criteria we use. If a film consistently gives audiences a meaningful, memorable experience, calling it “bad” without any qualification is just intellectually lazy.

How can I defend my guilty pleasures without sounding like I’m making excuses?

Stop defending and start describing. Instead of “I know it’s bad, but I like it,” try “I like it because it does this specific thing no other work does.” If you can put words to what the work does for you—an emotional release, a visual texture, a weird performance—you’re not making an excuse; you’re just doing criticism. And if someone still calls it a guilty pleasure, just tell them the guilt is theirs, not yours.

There’s a slick little strain of gatekeeping that cosplays as having high standards. You know the routine. Someone clocks a thing you love—some reality show, a pop song, a movie drenched in glitter and vampire angst—and hits you with the Well, you know that’s bad, right? Not morally bankrupt. Not actually harmful. Just… aesthetically beneath them. The move reframes your enjoyment as a hiccup in your taste, a phase you’ll supposedly outgrow once you wise up. We’ve all agreed to call that a “guilty pleasure.” But the guilt doesn’t live in the thing itself. It lives in a critical reflex that confuses cultural pecking order for actual thought.

On a blog called twilightsucks.com, you’d be reasonable to expect I’d just roast Twilight until the heat death of the universe. And look, there’s plenty to roast. But the thing that actually sticks in my craw is bigger and dumber: whole genres of experience get tossed out not because they’re bad on their own terms but because they’re supposed to be bad. The real headache isn’t that people adore cringey stuff. It’s that we’ve built a language that treats “pleasure” like a synonym for “failure,” and we use it to dodge the job of actually looking at what people get from the culture they keep returning to.

The Guilt Is Not in the Object

Nobody ships a movie with a shame module pre-installed. A song doesn’t know it’s a “guilty pleasure.” A film doesn’t get embarrassed when you watch it with the blinds drawn. The guilt is a social tic, a preemptive apology you offer the imaginary panel of taste judges squatting in your frontal lobe. Those judges got their training from decades of criticism that treats a handful of formal moves—irony, difficulty, restraint—as innately superior to stuff like sincerity, excess, or a direct punch to the emotions.

This is where the label does its dirty work. It lets you enjoy something while holding it at arm’s length. You get the experience, but you never have to defend it, pull it apart, or take it seriously as part of who you are. The pleasure becomes a secret, an inside joke, something you do in spite of your taste instead of being a real expression of it. And when we do that, we lose the ability to talk about why those works actually land on people.

The Sincerity Problem

A huge chunk of what gets slapped with the guilty-pleasure sticker is just sincere. It believes in itself. It doesn’t wink. And in a cultural moment that worships irony and detachment, sincerity scans as naivete. A big, swollen pop ballad about forever love? Mortifying. A reality show where grown adults weep over fondant? Cringe. A teenager choosing between a werewolf and a vampire with total, unironic commitment? Death by embarrassment. But sincerity is a mode, not a defect. It’s a way of pushing past the cynical filter and going straight for an emotional reaction. The fact that it can be clumsy or overdone doesn’t make it aesthetically bankrupt—it makes it risky. Risk is supposed to be one of the things we claim to value in art.

When we write off sincere work as a guilty pleasure, we’re not judging its quality. We’re judging its emotional ambition. We’re announcing that trying hard is cringe. That wanting to move people without the safety net of irony is a mistake. That’s not criticism. That’s just being terrified of feeling something in public.

The Data We’re Ignoring

If millions of people love something, that’s data. It’s not automatically data about quality in some Platonic sense, but it’s absolutely data about function. What does this thing do for people? What need does it fill? What’s it saying that resonates so widely that people are happy to overlook its obvious stumbles—or, more interestingly, don’t register them as stumbles at all?

Take Twilight. Easy to mock: the disco-ball vampires, the dialogue that sounds like it was whittled from balsa wood, the staring contests that go on for geological eras. But that mockery usually skips over what the series actually delivers—an immersive fantasy of being so special, so uniquely desirable, that a supernatural creature would reorganize their entire existence around you. It’s a power fantasy wearing a romance costume. The aesthetic choices—the blue wash over everything, the glacial pacing, the shots that linger like a held breath—aren’t filmmaking failures. They’re tools for assembling a specific mood of heightened, nearly religious longing. You can say that mood isn’t your thing. You can’t say it doesn’t exist or that it’s an accident.

When we treat guilty pleasures as genuine aesthetic failures, we stop asking what they’re doing. We stop seeing the craft that’s right there—often in odd corners. The rhythm of a reality TV edit. The melodic hook of a “trashy” pop song. The camp sensibility of a melodramatic performance. These are real aesthetic elements, and they’re doing real work. Dismissing the whole package because it doesn’t look like high art is just lazy criticism in a monocle.

Camp, Kitsch, and the Permission to Enjoy

There’s a whole tradition that already clocks this: camp. Camp is the mode of loving something precisely because of its exaggerated, failed seriousness. But camp demands a certain critical distance. You’re loving the thing for its failure to be what it meant to be. The guilty pleasure, on the other hand, often involves loving the thing for exactly what it meant to be—you’re just not allowed to admit that the intention was legitimate. That’s where the “guilt” part gets genuinely poisonous. It denies the audience’s own actual response. It tells people their real emotional reaction is a category error.

Kitsch is another handy concept here. Kitsch gets defined as art that uses stock emotional responses without earning them. But who gets to decide what’s “earned”? A painting of a crying clown might be kitsch to you and a gutting expression of sorrow to someone else. The difference isn’t in the object—it’s in the viewer’s framework. When we slap “guilty pleasure” on something, we’re often just announcing that we’re using a kitsch-detecting framework the actual fans aren’t using. And then we act like our framework is the objective one. Neat trick.

The Gatekeeping Function

All of this does social work. Taste is a badge of identity, and calling something a guilty pleasure is a way to keep your spot in the taste hierarchy while still enjoying the thing. It’s saying, “I’m not one of those people who actually like this. I’m just slumming.” This lets the cultural bouncers keep the velvet rope in place. High culture stays high. Low culture stays low. The people who genuinely, unapologetically love the low culture get subtly marked as having bad taste—not different taste, but wrong taste.

But here’s the thing about taste hierarchies: they’re never just about taste. They’re tangled up with class, education, access, and who holds the megaphone. The stuff that gets branded as guilty pleasures is often the stuff tied to young women, queer communities, working-class audiences, and other groups whose cultural preferences get systematically devalued. So when you call a boy band a guilty pleasure, you’re not just making an aesthetic claim. You’re reinforcing a whole system that says the things teenage girls love are inherently less valuable than the things middle-aged men love. That’s not criticism—it’s just prejudice with a thesaurus.

Toward a Guilt-Free Criticism

So what do we do instead? It’s not about pretending everything is good. It’s about prying apart the question of quality from the question of legitimacy. A work can be flawed—deeply, hilariously flawed—and still be worth serious attention. A work can be formally unsophisticated and still land an aesthetic gut punch. The point of criticism shouldn’t be to sort artifacts into “good” and “guilty pleasure” bins. It should be to understand how things work, what they mean, and why they matter to the people who love them.

Take the Pleasure Seriously

If you catch yourself loving something you “shouldn’t,” the move isn’t to apologize. It’s to get nosy. What’s this giving you? A rhythm, a texture, a fantasy, a catharsis? The comfort of formula or the thrill of excess? The community that forms around it, the nostalgia, the sheer joy of something that doesn’t demand you be cool? Those are real aesthetic experiences. They deserve a vocabulary that doesn’t start with an apology.

This doesn’t mean we throw out judgment. It means we make better judgments—ones grounded in what the work is actually trying to do, not in what we think it should be trying to do. A reality show isn’t a failed documentary. A pop song isn’t a failed symphony. A teen romance isn’t a failed literary novel. They’re their own things, with their own rules, their own pleasures, and their own kinds of excellence. The fact that those excellences aren’t the ones prized by traditional gatekeepers doesn’t make them less real.

The Twilight Test

Here’s a quick thought experiment: the next time you’re about to call something a guilty pleasure, try making a serious, good-faith argument for its aesthetic value. Not a defensive one. Not an ironic one. A genuine case for what it does well. If you can’t do it, you might not understand it well enough to judge it. And if you can do it, congratulations—you just leveled up from gatekeeper to actual critic.

On a blog called twilightsucks.com, I reserve the right to think Twilight is, in many ways, a glorious mess. But it’s a fascinating, culturally revealing, emotionally potent mess. A mess that millions of people found deeply meaningful. That meaning isn’t a glitch. It’s the whole point. The problem isn’t that people love things like this. The problem is a critical culture that makes them feel guilty for it, then pats itself on the back for its own discernment. That’s not analysis. That’s just snobbery with a platform.

Frequently Asked Questions

What’s the difference between a guilty pleasure and just liking something bad?

The difference is the framework you’re standing in. If you genuinely think something is bad—shoddily made, incoherent, offensive—but you enjoy it anyway, that’s one thing. But a lot of so-called guilty pleasures aren’t actually bad by their own standards. They’re just not the kind of thing that gets taken seriously. The question isn’t whether something is good or bad in some cosmic ledger. It’s whether you’re letting a taste hierarchy tell you your own response is wrong.

Doesn’t calling everything valid just lower standards?

Nope. Taking pleasure seriously means you can actually have standards for the thing you’re looking at. If you’re judging a teen drama by the rules of a prestige cable series, you’re not applying high standards—you’re applying the wrong ones. A serious critic of pop music, reality TV, or YA fiction can tell you when something in that genre is good, when it’s lazy, when it’s genuinely inventive. That’s a much higher bar than just waving it away as a guilty pleasure.

Why does this matter outside of just having fun?

Because taste is never just taste. The things we brush off as guilty pleasures are often the primary cultural spaces for people who are marginalized in other ways—young women, queer folks, people of color, working-class audiences. When we refuse to take those spaces seriously, we’re not just being snobby about art. We’re dismissing the experiences, desires, and creative expressions of whole communities. Taking guilty pleasures seriously is a way of taking those people seriously. And that’s a much bigger deal than whether someone likes sparkly vampires.

I Watched a Woman Get Death Threats Over a Fictional Ship, and Now I Have Questions

There’s a particular kind of internet drama that hits different when you’ve been around long enough. You watch someone get called a Nazi sympathizer because they think two fictional characters shouldn’t kiss, and you think: we have lost the plot entirely. Not the television plot. The human plot. The one where we remember that entertainment is something we consume, not something we become.

Here’s the thing about fandom: it starts as affection. You watch something, it clicks, you find your people. That’s fine. That’s actually beautiful. But somewhere along the way—and I’ve watched this happen across Twilight stans, K-pop armies, Marvel obsessives, and yes, even the Sherlock Holmes slash fiction writers of 2012—affection curdles into identity. And identity, when it’s built on someone else’s intellectual property, gets ugly fast.

The Pipeline From “I Like This” to “I Am This”

Let me walk you through the transformation, because it’s remarkably consistent regardless of franchise.

Stage One: Consumption. You watch a show, listen to a band, read a book. You enjoy it. Normal. Healthy. The cultural equivalent of eating a sandwich.

Stage Two: Community. You find others who also ate the sandwich. You discuss the sandwich. You make sandwich memes. Still fine. Community built around shared interests is one of the better things humans do.

Stage Three: Identification. This is where the sandwich becomes part of your bio, your aesthetic, your personality. You don’t just like the thing; you are a person who likes the thing. The distinction matters more than you’d think.

Stage Four: Defense. Because the thing is now part of you, any attack on the thing is an attack on you. Criticism becomes violence. A bad review becomes a personal wound. Someone not liking the sandwich is an act of aggression that must be countered.

Stage Five: Purification. You start policing who’s a real fan. You create hierarchies of devotion. You expel people who engage with the thing wrong. The community becomes a gated compound with ever-shrinking criteria for entry.

I’ve watched this cycle play out dozens of times. The specific fandom changes. The pattern doesn’t.

The Psychology of Borrowed Identity

Here’s where I stop being flippant and start being genuinely concerned. There’s research on what psychologists call identity fusion—the phenomenon where people become so absorbed into a group that their personal and group identities literally merge. When that group is built around a commercial product, you’ve essentially let a corporation write a chunk of your personality.

This isn’t an exaggeration. I’ve seen people rearrange their entire lives—drop friends, change careers, relocate—based on their relationship to a fandom. The Twilight moms who left their husbands for the Facebook group weren’t just being eccentric. They had replaced their marriage with a parasocial commitment to a fictional vampire romance. That’s not quirky. That’s a psychological crisis wearing a Team Edward t-shirt.

When “Protect the Thing” Becomes “Destroy the Person”

The danger I’m talking about isn’t hypothetical. Let me list some things that actually happened because people fused their identities with entertainment products:

• K-pop stans doxxing and sending death threats to anyone who criticizes their idol, including other human beings who are also K-pop idols. The Sulli and Goo Hara suicides weren’t caused by fandom, but the harassment culture these women faced was enabled by fans who treated celebrities as extensions of themselves.
• Gamergate—need I say more? A consumer identity movement that became a harassment campaign targeting women in games, all under the banner of “protecting gaming culture.”
• The Star Wars fandom becoming so toxic toward actors of color that Kelly Marie Tran deleted her Instagram and compared the experience to being dehumanized by racism. For being in a space movie.
• Rick and Morty fans harassingHarmon and Roiland’s social media, review-bombing episodes, and generally behaving like a cartoon had personally betrayed them.

These aren’t isolated incidents. They’re what happens when entertainment becomes identity. When the thing you love becomes the thing you are, you lose the ability to process criticism, change, or even basic reality-checking. The franchise didn’t just make a bad creative decision—it committed a personal violation against you.

Corporate America Loves Your Psychological Vulnerability

Here’s the part that makes me genuinely angry: this identity fusion isn’t an accident. It’s a business model.

Studios, labels, and publishers have figured out that fans who identify with a product will spend more money, defend the brand for free, and attack competitors without being asked. Fandom identity is free marketing, free PR, and free enforcement. You don’t need a crisis management team when you have thousands of unpaid superfans who will personally destroy anyone who says your movie is bad.

Marvel didn’t accidentally create the MCU’s obsessive fan culture. Disney didn’t stumble into turning Star Wars into a lifestyle brand. K-pop companies didn’t figure out by chance that training fans to see idols as personal relationships generates revenue that makes traditional music marketing look like a lemonade stand. This is deliberate. It’s profitable. And it relies on people being lonely enough, uncertain enough, and identity-hungry enough to merge themselves with a product.

The Loneliness Economy

I’m not going to pretend this happens in a vacuum. People fuse with fandoms because they’re missing something. Community. Purpose. A sense of self that feels stable. When the world is genuinely terrifying—and it is—losing yourself in a fictional universe where the rules are clear and your loyalty matters feels like relief.

But it’s relief that comes with a cost. When your identity is borrowed, you become defensive by necessity. You can’t just… stop being a fan. Walking away means losing yourself. So you stay in toxic communities. You defend indefensible creative decisions. You attack strangers on the internet. Not because you’re a bad person, but because you’ve been backed into a corner where leaving feels like dying.

The corporations know this. They count on it. Every limited edition merch drop, every exclusive fan club tier, every “only true fans will understand” marketing angle is designed to deepen the identity commitment until extraction becomes psychologically painful.

How to Like Things Without Becoming Them

I’m not anti-fandom. I’m anti-identity-fusion. There’s a difference between loving something and being consumed by it, and the line is easier to find than you’d think.

Check your bio. If your social media identity is 80%+ fandom references, you’ve outsourced your personality to a brand. Diversify. You are more than what you consume.

Notice your reaction to criticism. When someone says your favorite show has problems, do you feel personally attacked? That’s the identity fusion talking. A healthy fan can say “yeah, that season was weak” without existential distress.

Interrogate your spending. Are you buying things because they bring you joy, or because not buying them makes you feel like a bad fan? If the answer is the latter, you’re being emotionally extorted.

Maintain non-fandom relationships. If everyone in your life shares your exact media obsessions, you’ve built an echo chamber. You need people who don’t care about your ship wars. They’ll keep you human.

Be willing to walk away. This is the big one. If you cannot imagine leaving a fandom, the fandom has you. Healthy engagement includes the possibility of departure. You should be able to outgrow things without grief.

Frequently Asked Questions

Isn’t fandom identity just a new form of subculture? What’s the difference?

Subcultures create things—music, art, slang, fashion, philosophy. Fandoms, in their current hyper-identified form, primarily consume things that a corporation made. There’s a line between punk (which created its own culture) and a Marvel fan (who primarily purchases and defends culture created by Disney). When your identity is built around something you made, you own it. When it’s built around something you bought, it owns you.

Can fandom identity ever be positive?

Sure, when it stays at Stage Two—community. Fandoms have raised extraordinary amounts for charity, connected isolated people across geography, and created genuine art (fan fiction and fan art at their best are creative acts, not just consumption). The problem isn’t caring about something. The problem is when caring becomes being, because being is a lot harder to walk away from.

What if my fandom really is a huge part of who I am?

Then you need to ask what that means and whether you’re okay with it. If your fandom connection brings you joy, connection, and creative fulfillment without demanding that you defend, attack, or spend beyond your means—fine. But be honest with yourself about whether you chose that identity or whether it crept up on you while you were lonely and looking for somewhere to belong. The answer matters more than you want it to.

The Sandwich, Revisited

Go back to the sandwich metaphor for a second. You ate something. You liked it. You found other people who liked it. That’s where the story should end—or at least, where the story should stay a story and not become your autobiography.

Entertainment is a wonderful, necessary thing. It gives us comfort, escape, art, and connection. But it is not you. You are not your streaming subscriptions. You are not your merch shelf. You are not the fictional characters you relate to, the band you stan, or the franchise you defend. You are a person, messy and incomplete, and that’s actually a lot more interesting than being a brand ambassador for free.

Like things. Love things. But maybe keep a little distance between your heart and the intellectual property of multinational corporations. They won’t protect you when the fandom turns. And it always turns eventually.

I once watched a woman at Comic-Con weep actual tears because someone referred to her favorite character as “poorly written.” Not the actor. The fictional person. The collection of words invented by a showrunner who probably forgot that character existed halfway through season three. She wept like someone had insulted her child. And in a way, she probably felt they had.

That’s the thing about modern fandom. Somewhere between “I enjoy this thing” and “I would die for this thing,” a switch flips. Entertainment stops being entertainment and starts being identity. And once that happens, everything gets weird—and sometimes genuinely dangerous.

The Evolution of “I Like This”

Fandom has always existed. Ancient Romans had their gladiator faves. Victorian theater-goers formed rabid followings around particular actors. But the scale and intensity of modern fandom operates on a different frequency entirely.

Blame the internet, obviously. Before social media, being a fan was largely a private experience. You liked a band, you bought their albums, maybe you wore their t-shirt. You might find fellow fans at concerts or through fan clubs, but your day-to-day identity existed independently of your interests.

Now? Your fandom is your social media presence. Your handles reference it. Your bio declares it. Your entire online persona orbits around specific properties. The American Psychological Association has noted that parasocial relationships—the one-sided bonds we form with media figures and characters—have deepened significantly in the social media age, creating genuine emotional attachments that can rival real-world relationships.

Which sounds harmless enough until you realize: if a fictional relationship rivals a real one, what happens when someone threatens that fictional relationship?

From Consumption to Catechism

Here’s where things get sticky. There’s a difference between enjoying something and believing in something. The first is a preference. The second is closer to religion.

Modern fandoms don’t just appreciate their chosen media—they evangelize for it. They create elaborate justifications for why their show is actually profound. They construct reading lists that “prove” their favorite author intended secret meanings. They build entire ideological frameworks around properties that were originally designed to sell toys or advertising time.

And look, I’m not immune to this. I’ve written thousands of words analyzing reality television as cultural text. I’ve made arguments about The Bachelor that I’m not entirely sure even I believed at the time. But there’s a line between taking popular culture seriously as an object of study and treating it like sacred scripture—and a lot of fandoms have sprinted past that line without even glancing back.

The Belief Threshold

When does fandom cross from enthusiasm into identity? I’d argue it happens at what I’ll call the Belief Threshold—the moment when criticism of the property feels like criticism of the person.

Think about it. If someone says “that movie sucked,” and your response is “you just didn’t understand it,” you’ve crossed the threshold. You’re no longer defending the movie—you’re defending yourself, because your taste and your identity have fused into something you can’t easily separate.

This is why fandom debates get so vicious so quickly. We’re not arguing about whether a TV show is good anymore. We’re arguing about whether someone’s entire self-conception is valid. And that’s a fight people will take to some genuinely ugly places.

The Danger Zone: When Belonging Turns Toxic

Let me be clear about what I mean by “dangerous,” because that word gets thrown around a lot in cultural criticism. I’m not talking about the “danger” of enjoying bad art or wasting time on the internet. I’m talking about:

• Harassment campaigns organized against critics, creators, or fellow fans who dissent from community consensus
• Identity collapse when a property ends, changes direction, or reveals itself to be something other than what the fandom believed
• Financial exploitation by companies who recognize they’re dealing with true believers rather than casual consumers
• Political radicalization through fandom communities that adopt broader ideological stances and push members toward extremes

These aren’t hypotheticals. They’re documented patterns that repeat across different fandoms with depressing regularity. The toxicity of video game fandoms, the doxxing campaigns in K-pop circles, the death threats sent to writers who make “wrong” creative choices—this is what happens when entertainment becomes identity and that identity feels threatened.

Research from the journal Media Psychology has demonstrated that individuals with strong parasocial relationships are more likely to engage in aggressive defending behaviors when their faves are attacked. The brain, it turns out, doesn’t cleanly distinguish between threats to people we know and threats to people we feel like we know.

The Corporate Playbook: Weaponizing Devotion

Here’s what makes this truly insidious: the companies producing this entertainment know what they’re doing.

Disney didn’t accidentally create a generation of adults whose entire personalities revolve around Marvel properties. They engineered it through calculated release strategies, cross-platform storytelling, and marketing that explicitly encouraged fans to make the franchise part of their identity. “I am a Marvel fan” isn’t just a statement of preference—it’s an identity category that Disney can monetize indefinitely.

The same goes for bands whose members encourage “stan” culture, game developers who build communities that function like tribes, and book publishers who market series as lifestyle brands. When your customer base defines themselves through your product, you don’t have customers anymore—you have congregants. And congregants will keep tithing long after casual consumers walk away.

This isn’t conspiracy thinking. It’s just business strategy applied to human psychology. The problem is that the humans in question often don’t recognize what’s happening to them.

So What Do We Do About It?

I’m not going to sit here and tell you to stop loving things deeply. That would be hypocritical coming from someone who once wrote a 4,000-word essay about what Love Island reveals about modern romance. Passion for art—yes, even commercial art—is genuinely valuable. It connects us. It teaches us things. It gives us shared language and shared experience.

But we need to get better at recognizing when our passions have started wearing us rather than the other way around. Some questions worth asking yourself:

• Would you still have things to talk about with your friends if your fandom disappeared tomorrow?
• Do you feel personally attacked when someone dislikes something you love?
• Have you ever spent money you couldn’t afford because “supporting the franchise” felt like a moral obligation?
• Would you be friends with someone who shares none of your fandom interests?

If the answers make you uncomfortable, that’s probably worth sitting with. Not because enjoying things intensely is wrong, but because identity built on commercial products is identity built on sand. The corporation will eventually cancel your show. The band will break up. The game will shut down its servers. And you’ll still need to be a whole person when that happens.

FAQ

Isn’t deep fandom just a form of community? What’s wrong with that?

Nothing is wrong with community! The issue isn’t connection—it’s when that connection becomes conditional on maintaining a specific relationship with a specific piece of media. Healthy communities can survive members changing their minds or moving on. Identity-fused fandoms often can’t.

Does this mean all intense fandom is unhealthy?

No. You can absolutely be deeply passionate about something without making it your entire identity. The distinction matters. Being a “huge Star Wars fan” is fine. Being someone who cannot conceptualize themselves separate from Star Wars is where problems emerge. There’s genuine psychological research suggesting that overidentification with media correlates with poorer coping mechanisms when that media ends or disappoints.

Are some types of media more likely to create this kind of identity fusion?

Properties with extensive worldbuilding—long-running series, shared universes, anything that rewards encyclopedic knowledge—tend to create stronger identity fusion. If you’ve spent years learning the history of a fictional world, that knowledge becomes a form of expertise, and expertise becomes a form of identity. Media that encourages completionist behavior is particularly effective at turning casual enjoyment into something more consuming.

What about representation? Isn’t identity-fandom different for marginalized people?

This is a fair point and worth taking seriously. When media finally represents a group that’s been historically excluded, the attachment isn’t just about entertainment—it’s about visibility and validation. But even here, building your entire identity around a single representation carries risks, because that representation is still owned by a corporation that can withdraw or distort it at any time. Representation matters. Basing your sense of self on someone else’s commercial product remains fragile, no matter how meaningful that product is.

Fandom at its best is joyful, connective, and creatively generative. It can spark art, forge friendships, and make us feel less alone in the world. But joy and identity aren’t the same thing. We can love something without becoming it. We can belong to a community without losing the ability to criticize it. And we can take our entertainment seriously without letting it take over the whole house.

Your favorite show is not your personality. Your favorite band is not your entire social circle. Your favorite franchise is not your family. And remembering that distinction might be the difference between a lifelong passion and a slow-motion identity crisis.

I have watched Emily in Paris twice. Not because I think it’s good—I think it’s a lavender-scented hand grenade lobbed at anyone who has ever visited France. I watched it because something in my brain needs to yell at Lily Collins’s beret collection. And I’m not alone. Every Monday, a quiet army logs into their streaming service of choice, loads a show they despise, and settles in for an hour of furious note-taking. We are the hate-watchers. And honestly? We might be the only ones paying attention.

The Anti-Fan Is Still a Fan

Let’s get the obvious objection out of the way: if you hate something, why watch it? The question sounds reasonable until you apply it to literally any other human activity. Why eat an entire bag of flaming-hot chips when you know your stomach will stage a revolt? Why read the comments? Why call your ex? Humans are drawn to friction. We like things that resist us.

Hate-watching—defined loosely as consuming media specifically because you find it objectionable, absurd, or maddening—has been around since people first gathered to throw tomatoes at bad theater. But the streaming era has formalized it. We don’t just stumble into bad shows anymore; we seek them out with intention. We make spreadsheets. We coordinate group texts. We build rituals around our contempt.

And that ritual is a form of engagement that the cultural establishment refuses to take seriously because it doesn’t look like reverence. But reverence is boring. Reverence tells you nothing. Hatred—specifically, the kind of hatred that makes you watch every season of a show you claim to despise—tells you everything.

What Your Hate-Watching Habit Says About You

Hate-watching is diagnostic. It reveals what you care about by showing you what violates your expectations. When I sit through an entire season of a prestige drama I find insufferable, I’m not wasting time—I’m mapping the borders of my own aesthetic values. Every groan, every eye-roll, every text message that reads “I cannot believe this character said that” is data.

Consider the phenomenon of The Bachelor. Millions of people watch it weekly while loudly declaring it trash. They’re not wrong—it is trash. But those same viewers can tell you the structural differences between seasons. They can identify production manipulation. They can articulate exactly why one season’s lead was worse than another’s. They’ve developed a critical vocabulary around a show they supposedly don’t respect.

That’s not passive consumption. That’s forensic engagement. The hate-watcher is the truest critic because they have no incentive to perform appreciation. They’re not angling for a quote on a book jacket or a studio relationship. They’re watching because they cannot look away from the car crash, and in the process, they’re noticing every dent.

The Hierarchy of Watching

We like to imagine a clean spectrum: good taste on one end, garbage on the other. But media consumption doesn’t work that way. Here’s what I propose instead:

• Passive watching: You’re half-present. The show is background noise. You couldn’t summarize last week’s episode.
• Appreciative watching: You like it. You pay attention. You maybe recommend it to a friend.
• Academic watching: You’re studying it. You take notes. You’re probably writing an essay.
• Hate-watching: You’re furious. You’re paying more attention than anyone in the other three categories. You will remember specific lines of dialogue years from now.

That last one is the killer. Hate embeds information. Anyone who watched True Blood through its final, disastrous season can still quote dialogue from it. Meanwhile, the perfectly pleasant procedural you watched last Tuesday? Gone. Evaporated. Your brain didn’t need to store it because nothing in it provoked a response.

The Economics of Outrage

Networks and streamers have figured this out, of course. They just don’t have the decency to admit it. When a show trends on Twitter because everyone is mocking it, the platform doesn’t distinguish between love and hate. A view is a view. A trending topic is a trending topic. This is why we get shows that seem almost designed to be hate-watched—they’re engineered to provoke the specific kind of outrage that generates memes, group chats, and think pieces.

But here’s where I diverge from the usual hand-wringing about outrage cycles. The complaint is always that we’re being manipulated, that our hate is just free labor for content mills. And sure, sometimes it is. But the assumption that hate-watchers are dupes strips them of agency. When I choose to watch something I expect to hate, I’m not being tricked. I’m making a calculated decision to engage with cultural material on my own terms. I know exactly what I’m doing.

The academic term for this kind of engagement is anti-fandom, and scholars like Jonathan Gray have written about it extensively. Anti-fans don’t just dislike media—they develop dense, detailed relationships with it. They create counter-narratives. They build communities around shared disdain. They produce an enormous volume of secondary cultural material: memes, parody accounts, video essays dissecting exactly why something fails.

In other words, hate-watchers are doing the same work as fans. They’re just doing it with more spite and, often, more precision.

Why Sincerity Is Overrated

There’s a persistent belief that authentic cultural engagement means sincere appreciation. If you don’t love something, you’re not really engaging with it. This is nonsense. Sincerity is the easiest thing to fake. I can tell you I loved a film and mean nothing by it. But if I spend six hours hate-watching a show and then another hour writing a 2,000-word email to my friend about why the third season’s timeline makes no sense, that’s engagement. That’s care. Twisted, maybe. But care nonetheless.

The cultural establishment—by which I mean the people who write grant-funded essays about the importance of public television—treats hate-watching as a pathology. Something to be cured. They want us to watch things “mindfully” or “with intention.” As if sitting through a thoughtful documentary you immediately forget is more intentional than rage-watching four hours of a reality show you can critique on seventeen different axes.

Hate-watching is honest because it doesn’t require you to perform enjoyment. You don’t have to pretend the weak script is “intentionally stylized.” You don’t have to find depth where there is none. You can sit with your discomfort, your boredom, your contempt, and let those responses teach you something about what you actually value.

The Case for Taking Guilty Pleasures Seriously

I don’t believe in guilty pleasures. I believe in pleasures that the culture has trained you to feel guilty about. The guilt isn’t personal—it’s political. It’s the result of a class system that says some art is worth your time and some isn’t, and that your consumption habits determine your worth as a person.

But the things we hate-watch tell us more about our values than the things we sincerely admire. Nobody hate-watches something that doesn’t touch a nerve. You don’t hate-watch a show that leaves you indifferent; you just don’t watch it. The hate implies a stake. Something in that show is failing to deliver on a promise you cared about, or succeeding at something you find threatening, or revealing a truth you’d rather not confront.

So the next time someone catches you watching something you claim to hate, don’t be embarrassed. You’re not wasting time. You’re conducting field research. You’re mapping the boundaries of your own taste. You’re engaging with culture in the most honest way possible—by refusing to pretend you don’t care.

FAQ

Isn’t hate-watching just feeding engagement metrics to bad content?

Yes, technically. But the alternative—only consuming things you approve of—creates a sanitized cultural diet that teaches you nothing. Engagement metrics are a blunt instrument; they can’t distinguish between love and hate. What matters is what you do with your experience. If your hate-watching leads to better criticism, sharper conversations, and a deeper understanding of why certain stories fail, then the view count is beside the point.

How is hate-watching different from just being a hater?

A hater complains without watching. A hate-watcher complains because they watched—closely, repeatedly, with attention to detail. The hater says “this show is bad” and moves on. The hate-watcher says “this show is bad, and I can prove it using evidence from episodes four through nine, and also the lighting in season two was doing something interesting before the writers abandoned it entirely.” One is dismissive; the other is obsessive. Obsession, even negative obsession, produces insight.

Can you hate-watch respectfully?

This depends on what you mean by respectfully. If you mean: can you engage with something you dislike without attacking the real people involved? Then yes, absolutely. Hate-watching goes wrong when it becomes harassment. But disliking someone’s creative work—and being vocal about it—is not the same as targeting them personally. The best hate-watchers I know reserve their sharpest criticism for the work itself, and they can articulate exactly where and why it fails. That’s not disrespect. That’s criticism at its most engaged.