| Current mood: | Look, Sir! Truthiness! |
Nuts or...there but for the grace of God?
I've been taking a nasty journalistic look at the pathology of obsession in relation to talifandoms, and in the course of turning up a few academics and researchers into this kind of behaviour, I was directed to this fascinating piece. Read carefully, and feel the deja vu:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/08/03/DDG0RE1DDI1.DTL
It all went to rat-shit when someone called one faction "delusional":
Anelli, 25, who works as a journalist when she isn't overseeing the Leaky Cauldron, says that most abuse came from a small faction of vociferous fans. "They've lost the ability to divorce themselves between what J.K. Rowling is doing and what they'd like to see happen, and they've taken their disappointment and projected it onto her," she says. "I can totally understand how you could be upset if your preference didn't happen, but I can't understand or tolerate that people who claim to be her fans can be so mean to her."
But it got me thinking.
Remember the study into the psychology of terrorism that I blogged about? The one that found suicide bombers weren't the frothing loonies we expected? It wouldn't leave my brain. And having gone down the conventional track that folks who threaten to kill authors for whacking a favourite character or getting into really unpleasant fights over the length of an SSD (or clone numbers...) must all share the same abnormal psychology, I wondered if I might be looking the wrong way. In psychology, a fruit-loop isn't always quite the fruit-loop the symptoms suggest. Things can look the same on the surface, but spring from many different roots.
This is a quick primer into terror psychology:
http://www.ssrc.org/sept11/essays/mccauley.htm
The name Talifan might be more apt than I ever thought, and ![[info]](http://stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif)
rc_ghost's splendid phrase internet madrasas equally revealing.
Two key elements leap out at me: the insular nature of the deviant group, their previous normality until exposed to some idea or personal influence, and the "downward spiral" effect of them vying with each other to be more extreme - best described by former members of the Baader Meinhof gang in frank TV interviews.
This is clearly a universal phenomenon, but right now I'm not sure if I'm looking at one syndrome or a mix of aberrant behaviours manifesting similar symptoms. The internet element is a significant one in this, I feel. I get a whiff of Aspergers, OCD, religious orthodoxy, plain old normal human susceptibility, and a dozen other things.
And, yes, some of them - maybe most - might just be normal humans,and thus easily led and prone to conform.
Just like the clones*, in fact. How ironic.
But I need to unravel this.
I'll keep you abreast of what other dingbattery I unearth (every tie-in writer has a stack, I know) but at the moment I'm on the hunt for any academic who's done research into the psychology of obsession and anti-social behaviour among fans, be that in the context rock stars, actors or just grunt hacks like me.
Fascinating. Utterly fascinating. My gut reaction is that they all need garotting, but my rational self finds it all...fascinating.
(*Except the clones have sex lives. Chicks dig armour. )
