Anti-fannishness is, of course, this blog’s position on fan culture. Everything I enjoy outside of writing is something I’m willing to discuss with strangers online. But fan communities, I find, tend to breed superfans who set themselves up as the ultimate arbiter of the community. It is because participating in the outward image of the fandom and in its inner dynamics becomes a way to reify the power of the thing worshipped. Another way to reify the power of the thing worshipped is by becoming an evangelist by wearing your identification proudly, giving you an opportunity to preach about what your fandom can do for them. I hear you nodding. You’re right, evangelical Christianity is a toxic fandom.
It’s possible to enjoy any number of things without falling into the pit of spikes and vipers we call fandom. The trick, or what I do, is I chase quality that meets my threshold or allows me to expand my horizons. What I consider quality is always bubbling in a corner. It is constantly being refined. But let me get my head out from between my legs for a second and introduce the subject.
The Best Show with Tom Scharpling seems something like any of the 50 plus degenerates on my mailing list would be familiar with. Jon Wurster, the drummer from Superchunk, joins in. . Funny stuff: if you want to feel good about you hating the Grateful Dead and me sweating through a Stealie and having to concede a couple of points (West Coast psych guys don’t play rnb well at all, meanwhile Can would have made Good Loving sound like a weapon of war), look up the Pigpen tapes. Recently, their list of the 50 worst fans dropped. I figured 49-50 were probably an inside joke (and can’t really imagine someone disliking Vic Berger IV), I am not a The Best Show guy, correct me if I’m wrong. I was entranced and knew, immediately, it would be fun to give commentary on. So here we are: rather than a review or an essay, a listicle. Fun!
Ground rules for engaging:
- All fans will be rated as either being worse than that, about that bad, or not that bad. You can imagine what all of those mean. The tricky thing is this is a list and thus, it’s possible something that’s bad is being “overrated” in how insufferable it is, so the context of where it falls on the list is important. It also means that just because something is being oversold doesn’t mean it’s not deserving.
- Did I listen to the episode? No. However, the point of the exercise is it will allow us a wide breadth of contemporary anthropology, in why man wears what masks he does. What does it mean to be a Bengals fan or have a tattoo inspired by Berserk? Like all anthropologists, I can only speculate forcefully enough I sandblast all nuance. What even is a bad fandom, especially if it’s something I enjoy? Worth discussing. I also know why people make lists: they’re easy to get reactions to.
- If you see something you deeply enjoy on this list, or read something I say, and start getting mad, I recommend standing up for ten seconds, exhaling, and stretching, or maybe going on a walk. Let’s say Tom Waits Fans are on this list and you enjoy Tom Waits, maybe even a lot. Maybe you own a t-shirt or have seen him live. But fandom is really the social context that arises around enjoyment and how it becomes a badge of identity. When you see these fans, imagine the worst case scenario fan getting soooo mad instead of you just having fun reading a column. Trust me, I have my faves on here as well.
- At the end, I’ll post a modified top ten factoring in all my new ratings.
- Groups I think should have been mentioned: Shane Gillis fans, Cum Town fans, Ween fans, JPEGMafiosi, the Charli XCX fandom (I still have to listen to her Wuthering Heights soundtrack but only money could get me to give a fuck about her movie), Aubrey’s Army, and NBA fans (we can be really annoying).
Onto the list.
48. Shark Week Fans– the only week of the year the Discovery Channel matters. I’m perplexed that anyone loves it enough to be a fan. Nature documentaries are pretty forgiving, as long as I see something cool I’m happy. But identifying with Shark Week feels like a 2010s holdover. I could see someone forcing the issue but I’m mostly just confused. Not that bad.
47. Blazing Saddles Fans– I imagine this has something to do with the yahoos who say you couldn’t make Blazing Saddles today. You can’t make Blazing Saddles because Gene Wilder is dead. That’s a nonstarter. Also why would you make a movie twice? Are you fucking stupid?
Notable exception: my partner and their grandfather love Blazing Saddles, but they’re not annoying white boomers who glue a personality together out of the spare parts of smart ass lines from old movies. It probably helps that they’re black. About that bad.
46. Ted Lasso Fans– injecting some American chowderhead into the globe’s beautiful game so he can infect everyone with his Protestant dance battle shit makes me blanche off rip. Somebody close to me also likes this show so it gives me no pleasure to say this. Insufferable positivity that evangelizes an attitude adjustment as a solution is the least football thing on the planet. Football is about ecstaticism and passion, especially the bad emotions. Losing a football match feels like having a bad day at work then getting splashed on the sidewalk by a truck running through a puddle of ooz. It’s why Antonio Conte seems like a man so high strung he turns into a cortisol mystic and his basketball counterpart, Tom Thibadeau, feels like a Confederate general. Online, the Ted Lasso fandom feels spiritually entwined with the astroturfed Wrexham reboot by Ryan Reynolds, who I consider a bad influence on Always Sunny’s Mac. Maybe there’s more to the show than moments soundtracked by The Fray, but I’ll never learn due to the fans. Worse.
45 Crimson Tide Fans- Alabama rejected me from their MFA program, probably because I forgot to submit a coloring book for my writing sample. However, they’re not going to be as good as they were due to NIL rules changing up and Saban being gone. At this point they’re just About that bad.
44. Simpsons Fans– I have my doubts that this is about enjoying what’s probably, pound for pound, the greatest sitcom in American history. I think there are three TV shows whose writing justifies the idea that TV writing could ever be art: The Sopranos, Deadwood, and The Simpsons. What I can guess is one of two things: this is aimed at the people who hang on to the idea the show now is anything like Simpsons prime or those who force the issue and can’t let go of the fact that, one day, The Simpsons wasn’t what it was during the season 3 through 8 prime. This is also the first time I’m feeling like I was hit with a stray. But there’s a certain level of smugness that comes with overidentifying with the critical peak of your medium.
I considered getting a spirit coyote tattoo. Regretfully, about that bad.
43. Norm McDonald Fans– Norm is my favorite comedian, but among the open enjoyers, you will find a subsect of people who view him as an ethos of some pre Austin, Texas comedy guru, some hellfire and brimstone anything goes daredevil. I think this overstates the problematic parts of Norm McDonald by inflating their presence in his comedic ethos to flatter the fact that Norm played with convention like a yo-yo and they’re not even smart enough to unspool it. Norm’s legacy resides more with figures like Tim Heidecker, Adam Friedland, and Nick Mullen, than it does David Lucas and Joe Rogan. Norm’s ability to bend comedic semiotics to his whims that make his lapses into lazy, sometimes hateful material disappointing, and I’d rather remember him for anything else but that. Worse
42. Matcha Fans- I love cilantro but this shit tastes like grass to me. It reminds me of people insisting a bunch of vinegar water mold grew in was great for your gut health. Even if it was, I could just eat some yogurt. Suckers. Who wants to drink tea at a rave, anyway? Worse
41. Wrestling Fans– I can’t hate them. They have a leg up on understanding the degraded showmanship of American politics. Wrestling is also an interesting cross working class cultural shibboleth, uniting rednecks and Twitter left types alike with more dignity than 1,000 Dale Earnhardt memes. Regretfully, instead of knowing the Honky Tonk Man, I instead use Hedo Turkoglu as a reference point and am alone in this world. Not that bad.
40. In-N-Out Burger Enthusiasts– this feels like an anti-California pick. I don’t deal with that many people from LA so I don’t care, but I imagine someone being an enthusiast for Cookout, our local fast food chain and shudder. But I’m deducting points for the obvious regional bias and will instead declare: Not that bad. If Hollywood ever eats me alive I’ll change my vote.
39. Blankies– last round I recklessly slandered Ted Lasso based on vibes, so I’ll probably spare fans of Blank Check for this round, mostly because I sometimes subject myself to movie discussions on Reddit to pull my hair out and I can’t remember if some bullshit from the Ringerverse or the Blankies subreddit that pisses me off so bad. There’s similar issues there, but “Reddit” is a big chunk of noise: no matter how much you like something, you have to remember that the Redditors that like the thing you like are still Redditors. This is how I got into an argument with somebody on the Seriouseats forum and decided I would never post again. About that bad.
38. Trivia Night People– This is me, though it’s more a manifestation of my hyper-competitiveness. The fact I could be hyper competitive about trivia means I’m deeming this About that bad.
37. BBQ Fans– BBQ breeds an obsessiveness that turns pure joy into homework. Like bourbon, the secret is that a lot of it is pretty good, which makes the obsessiveness Worse.
36. Oklahoma City Thunder Fans– In theory, I support small/mid market teams over major markets, but the only reason there is a team in Oklahoma City is a bunch of crybaby billionaire bullshit from Clay Bancett, which meant one of the league’s most iconic teams, the Seattle Supersonics, moved to what amounts to a backwater. Cityzens have done a pretty admirable job supporting the Thunder but the Oklahoma City Thunder juggernaut has a strong hint of what I can only call “nondenominational megachurch” vibes (if Torii MacAdams said this first, my apologies, I’m also ripping off a tweet by Chat Pile). Part of this has to do with Sam Presti’s evil genius GMing, which has seen him pick up undervalued draft picks to allow him near invincible flexibility in trades and team construction for a variety of good basketball playing cornballs. In other words, rather than a sense of historical value that all the storied franchises of the NBA have (say, LA making the ‘star’ part of the basketball world more obvious, or San Antonio’s unique, near Spartan culture as implemented by former Army guy Gregg Popovich), it’s like a credit card company started a basketball team, and then they suddenly became the best team in the league. In addition, Chet Holmgren’s Salierian “crazy ass white boy” act in the face of Victor Wembyanma’s Mozartian Martian game feels like obnoxious meme bullshit, especially considering Vic wasn’t the one who gave the “I’ll have to look into it” statement about an innocent man getting shot two blocks from where he played high school ball. You don’t get to call yourself ‘the Big Oxtail” when you look like a hillbilly Slenderman and can’t even talk about social issues.
Normally, I’m not one to call this out, but everybody gets into sports in their own way: for instance, there isn’t any real reason a kid from Southwest Virginia should root for a team in Detroit. But any great team will have bandwagon fans, and because of all of the above mentioned, it makes the idea of being an OKC bandwagoner all the more distasteful. To cap this rant off, let’s talk about expansion drafts. When the NBA expands, teams are allowed to declare up to 8 players as “protected”. The rest of the players on each team wind up in a draft pool. The two new teams will then pick players from that pool In other words: all those stashed OKC players Sam Presti sits on like a dragon on his gold could wind up on another team, because he can only keep 8. I’ve seen OKC fans refer to this as “punishing” Oklahoma City. Considering one of those teams will likely be placed in Seattle to right a historical wrong: give me a fucking break. Worse.
35. Current Bob Dylan Fans– I’ve often wondered if I should see any of the various legends I’ve been inspired before they die. I don’t care if I see the Stones, but Neil Young and Willie Nelson hold a lot of appeal. Dylan is the difficult one, given discovering Bob Dylan in middle school pretty much sparked my fascination with music (along with Warren Zevon and, sigh, Eric Clapton). But I’ll be honest: with the clips I’ve heard, I feel more comfortable not knowing, especially under the “quality over allegiance” framework I laid out at the beginning. I don’t need to hope Bob Dylan has that same lightning in a bottle because other people have captured it, and I can only read the idea of “current” Bob Dylan fans as wanting to touch the hem of the garment of the guy who wrote “It’s Alright Ma, I’m Only Bleeding”. So much younger then, he’s older than that now. About that bad.
34. Criterion Collectors– I don’t like making a cargo cult out of any product, but I also know if I had unlimited funds I’d have a lot of Criterion Collection DVDs. Of all the annoying subsects of movie fans, these guys are pretty benign. If this were “film twitter”, I’d shoot it up to the top ten. Not that bad
33. Marvel Fans– Meanwhile, on Lubang Island, Marvel fans run through the trees with a knife in their teeth, practicing throwing sharpened sticks at an effigy of Martin Scorsese. Only now, after Endgame no longer have the soft power stranglehold they once did. The fog is closing in, yet they still fight. I mostly pity them now. About that bad
32. Frank Sinatra Fans– Ringadingding, baby. You look like a kitten with some big teeth. How about you bring me a martini and kick it in the head? Worse
31. Harry Potter Fans– We were best friends for close to 13 years and I thought of him as a brother. One day, he told me as an aside he had to buy his partner Hogwarts: Legacy, because even though he knew how awful what JK Rowling was up to was. But, he wanted to see his partner smile. My partner is non-binary. I didn’t say anything, to him or them. I figured it was a momentary lapse into being a shitlib.
Later that year, Operation Al-Aqsa Flood. He ranted and raved to me about how the left had lost their minds and Israel needed to open up a killing field. I told him, more or less, that while I rarely, if ever, find much to celebrate in violence, a military operation with no other options yet is totally different than random killing, and that this was what Israeli society was building up to. It’s not like I ever saw fit to occlude the true character of my politics to him. He knew I left the DSA over a disagreement with how that organization shut down its BDS working group for being critical of the national board prioritizing relationships with the soft Zionism of progressives. He implied I was anti-semitic. Only one of us has ever protested actual anti-semites. But I sat down and listened. Like every time I’ve been “called out” by somebody who had less than stellar reasons for shaming me, reading taught me their shaming was more about whatever they had going on than me, merely trying to exist in the world.
Meanwhile, a year later, 500,000 dead, children like skeletons, hospitals smoking, parents begging for flour: he called it Kamala’s “weak point” (no shit). It didn’t take long before we were no longer on speaking terms. You can see where I’m going with this: open identification today with what amounts to seven bad books about the most boring children in history that white-washes the English class system written by a vociferously hateful woman who hung out with Jeffrey Epstein means I have zero faith in your moral compass. Fuck you and the broom you rode in on. Worse.
30. Steely Dan Fans– I love Steely Dan but I hate the elbow prodding, “did you hear me reference Caves-of-Altamira” performative millennial Steely Dan fandom that also ignores what makes that band so special. Nothing provocative or mind-blowing here, merely requires opening up the lyrics book: it’s insanely smooth music that the sort of Steely Danian character hears in his head as he lives his life. It is the soundtrack of a loser who thinks he has a chance at winning with another line of the fine Colombian and Jose Cuervo. It’s annoying to point out how this band works, but the performative millennial Steely Dan fan has no interest in this. Instead they want to talk about how smooth Michael McDonald is. These next couple are forcing me to dance so my feet don’t get holes in them, by the way. Worse
29. Hunter S. Thompson Fans- the life story of Hunter S. Thompson is not an aspirational tale, no matter how much his fans like to tell you it secretly was. Hunter S. Thompson does not need Parrotheads. I blame Terry Gilliam’s overrated adaptation of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which strips the political content of Thompson’s work out like the copper in a project home to put in a bunch of wacky drug humor. Oscar Zeta Acosta may have had plenty of outsized appetites, but there was an actual fear of police surveillance that prompted the Vegas trip.
In order to be able to make these delineations, you have to enjoy a lot of the subject’s work. But when you meet someone who sees Dr. Gonzo as some sort of boogie-woogie good time guy instead of the beast someone becomes to avoid the pain of being a man, you get the bonedeep sense of exhaustion Hunter carried with him, the sense he always had to be on. Dr. Gonzo was an escape from the horrors of America’s rightward lurch by becoming so outsized you always transcended them, but in time, as Hunter’s addictions grew and the country became more and more bloodsthirsty, it became a convenient way to remove yourself entirely from the human equation. There’s still value in that work, if the fans ever get around to reading it. Worse
28. Muppets Fans– I came into this thinking I was going to give the Muppets fandom the benefit of the doubt, but I realized: there is a certain kind of Muppet fan that bothers me. It’s part of that 80s-90s baby Gen X/elder millennial mindset where the path to enjoying the rapid descent of everything is to get inside your bunker with things that remind you of being a kid, and then to wield this as a piece of armor against The Horrors, as they might put it. It’s sort of like being a “Die Hard is my favorite Christmas Movie” guy. As always, it’s less about the bare enjoyment of the thing than the way it becomes part of your identity, an easy bit of shorthand. If you correctly guess if I’m a Muppets Fan by the end of this paragraph, you can send me proof of your guess and I’ll send you soap with a prize inside. Maybe that’s why I think Muppets fans are about that bad.
27. Kendrick Lamar Fans– If you told me I was going to be executed unless I gave a pretty ironclad presentation on a subject of my choosing, I would ask for a month to write out the paper case for why Kendrick Lamar is the greatest rapper of all time. In this little scenario, though, the caveats fall off to the side, the biggest being nobody listens to music on paper. It’s easy to misconstrue a statement like that, so I’ll just cut to the chase and say that’s more of a historically situated argument about how hip-hop functions currently that takes into account 50 years of hip-hop history than a stamp of quality or, even worse, an opinion masquerading as fact, which gets to the problem with Kendrick Lamar fans.
To give a truncated version of my GOAT case for Kendrick: seven albums, all of which are different, none of which are genuine misfires (if your worst album is either GNX or Section.80, you’re doing pretty good), with two being greatest rap albums of all time contenders (Good Kid Maad City/To Pimp a Butterfly). Kendrick has somehow managed to be one of the few people in the streaming age whose music coming out still feels like an event, the way album drops used to. By the weight of great music dropped, there aren’t many solo rappers who can contend with that, especially those often brought up in this argument like Jay-Z and Nas. Then you factor in there’s at least two or three Kendrick guest verses that have seismic impacts in the genre with “Control” and “Like That”. “Control” might be slightly more impressive: it’s on a 7 minute song with Big Sean (yikes!) and Jay Electronica (whatever), yet Kendrick blows both of them out of the water and crosses into what was more tender territory than expected by directly calling out rappers, which was a huge deal at the time. (Though it was more about acknowledging his peers than slandering them, which Drake never understood).
That gets us to Drake and the final thing, which is that none of the other GOAT candidates cleanly won their feuds except Kendrick, and it was against the biggest commercial rapper in history. Biggie/2Pac’s entire story is a media tragedy fluffed up to kill two young men who should have been friends. People still argue about if “Ether” is better than “Takeover” and vice versa (I know somebody’s cargo shorts are already in a bunch reading this, so let me add it’s “Takeover” because Jay’s message to Nas is “Your best days are behind you and you are not equipped to rap against me anymore” versus “Ether” which is just Nas calling Jay Z gay and ugly for four minutes). There is no realistic way you can argue that Drake beat Kendrick, but people also ignore that Kendrick’s victory over Drake wasn’t necessarily a given. The precepts of rap feuds changed when Drake beat Meek Mill by having his army of teenagers make 5/10 memes about Meek so he could use them as a backdrop, and other than a feud with Pusha T that outed Drake as a father, he had a ton of good will he could have used to tilt public perception his way. Keep in mind, Spotify was advertising “Push Ups”, Drake’s response to “Like That”, in Times Square. And he still lost because he squandered almost all of it. Kendrick’s strategy against Drake couldn’t have been more, ahem, “tailor made” to getting in his opponents head; it forced Drake to get on Kendrick’s terms to try and win, which led to missteps like using the AI 2Pac voice filter (the single worst career decision Drake ever made, by the way). If Drake had called Kendrick a short hotep nobody wants to dance to, we might be in a different world, but Kendrick remained patient, which led to Drake getting desperate, which led to Drake rapping about how he didn’t know Jeffrey Epstein.
I give that context to explain why Kendrick fans suck, because something really odd happened in his career. Kendrick Lamar’s biggest career moment was the Drake feud, and his biggest song is “Not Like Us”. There aren’t many rappers whose biggest song is about why somebody else is everything but a child of God, and because it acted as the cherry on top of Kendrick’s whole legacy case, it meant that newer fans were suddenly emboldened with the knowledge of what this all meant. Perhaps they can’t articulate it the way I did, but they recognized a lot of the facts that made their guy a conceivable GOAT candidate, and proceeded like he had won the office. If I’m not arguing for my life and you say, “Who’s the greatest rapper of all time?” my answer is probably Biggie, but I can’t prove that, because it’s ultimately not the point of any genre. Jimi Hendrix is the greatest guitarist of all time, but that’s a lot different from being the greatest rock band of all time, or writing the best songs (Hendrix is an underrated songwriter, but different argument). To act like it was a settled question means it’s less about the art form and more about winning.
Kendrick, for a variety of reasons, is an easy vector for people who see every mid indie album as a sign of the recurrence of rock’n’roll to be “up” on the popular music form that took rock’s place. Kendrick is a safe pick, in their minds: he’s not outwardly “street” (despite, if you read between the lines, there was obviously a point in time Kendrick was in the streets), he’s got the critical backing of mainstream tastemakers (winningest rapper at the Grammys) and his music communicates to these listeners as ‘smart’, which is as loaded a term as a 10 month old’s diaper. This all just flatters a lot of ugly respectability politics I have no patience for and comes across as condescending not only to the most vibrant American art-form of the last fifty years but to the man they purportedly love. Kendrick’s music is disserviced when it’s used as a convenient avatar of authenticity that these types so need from rap to feel like they can engage with the genre.
“Not Like Us” might have stamped and sealed Kendrick’s case for being the greatest of all time, but it made his fans insufferable in the process. We’ll have to see what effect it has on his music but whatever the case, he will have his army of stans and fans and I’ll just listen in private. Worse
26. Dallas Cowboys Fans- nobody trades more on the memories of what they did in than the 90s like Cowboys fans, except maybe Snoop Dogg. It only gets sorrier with each passing year, as they flail in mediocrity as Jerry Jones pickles his brain in scotch and scrambles it in golf cart accidents. That mediocrity saves them from being worse, but they’re about that bad.
25. David Lynch Fans– Remember what I said about Muppets fans? People do that with David Lynch, too. In my experience, it tends to be Twin Peaks; nobody’s acting like a Hot Topic shopper about Inland Empire. For a show about the failure of nuclear America, people sure like acting like it’s about pie and vibes (there’s a meme you see occasionally that’s like “if Laura Palmer can do [all the stuff Laura Palmer does] then you can get through Monday” which makes me want to scream “SHE WAS BEING RAPED BY HER FATHER!”) The result: Lynch gets turned into a safe, avuncular secular saint, a pull-toy who dispenses fortune cookie wisdom. You can’t have any sharp edges on a statue. I miss him too, but relax. Worse.
24. A24 Fans– I’m going to go easy on these guys because it feels like complaining about hipsters did in the 2010s. A24 has put out movies I love and movies I think are absolute dogwater. Doesn’t change that being a fan of a distributor is like enjoying the truck more than the milk. Not that bad.
23. Golden State Warriors Fans– out of respect for my partner’s grandfather, a grandpa for me too, I’m not going to overstate the case about why Golden State fans can be obnoxious. Anybody who roots for a dynasty is going to be obnoxious on some level, because a lot of sports is about the elation of the impossible happening, and a dynasty’s point is to make sure you’re the one that makes the impossible happen. With that being said, I’m going to make a slightly tangential point: I have a hard time not seeing the rise of Golden State and their move to San Francisco out of Oakland as intertwined with 2010s Silicon Valley culture. The news about Steph Curry having miltech investments didn’t surprise me, whatsoever, and Kevin Durant was only slightly shocking. (Reminder: I wrote a long ass essay about things like this). If I were an NBA player, I would simply not invest in drones, and would instead spend my time doing cool shit. Klay Thompson has 4 rings and Megan Thee Stallion for a girlfriend. There’s another path, is what I’m saying. About that bad.
22. Swifties– There has been a spectre haunting my life since Folklore came out and it’s the insistence I’m supposed to take Taylor Swift seriously, not only as a pop star, but as a canonical poet-songwriter. Everything about Taylor Swift communicates to me as completely middle of the road. Nothing distinguishes her but her svengali ability to convince her fans she’s the shy poetess with an Audrey Hepburn poster when she’s a billionaire who flies a jet the same way you and I go to the bodega. Girl Drake, basically, but I’m supposed to treat her like she’s Joni Mitchell. The only thing she’s better at than Joni is not wearing blackface. Adults have fallen for this high school Mickey Mouse shit. Smart adults. Adults you respect. Worse.
21. George Carlin Fans– Carlin may have been the only American comedian besides Pryor and Lenny Bruce to possibly live up to the “America’s truth telling jester” model. Stand-up and comedy in general, though, is very generational, which is to say: I’ve watched Carlin specials and laughed once or twice, but I have no attachment to them. What is obnoxious is watching people who worship ‘comedy’ like it will save them from rising sea levels speak about Carlin like he was an American Moses. This has only gotten worse as comedy gets worse and becomes an easy way for American reptiles to launder their reputation. The worship of Carlin or any comedian as being “pure” comedy ignores comedy is as much a part of the Culture Industry as a movie studio. Maybe a smaller part. The temptation is there to give people some slack, but the Carlin worship tends to operate in a similar way to Hunter S. Thompson fandom, and well… Worse
20. Erewhon Fans– I’ve tried to avoid letting East Coast regional bias color my evaluations of these fans, but it’s a luxury grocery store in LA. I can only be so forgiving. Worse
19. Rick & Morty Fans- I wasn’t even aware they still exist. At their peak, yeah, it was pretty bad, but after Justin Roiland got sent to Gobleki Tepe to break rocks forever, the shine went completely off Rick and Morty. I think they should be on the list for past transgressions, but top twenty is way too high. Not that bad…right now.
18. Seinfeld Fans– So here we have the most celebrated sitcom, human division, ever made, and its fans. You can probably guess I was already an eccentric kid, and latching onto Seinfeld in middle school didn’t help matters. But, as an adult, I have a problem with the show, and it’s the man it’s named after. While Jerry is the glue that holds the show together, he’s not even on the same planet as a comedic actor as his castmates. Which is odd, because I think Larry David comports himself well on Curb Your Enthusiasm. That doesn’t even get into Jerry almost hiring Pinkertons to beat up pro-Palestinian students. But are the fans just older than me? I don’t feel like I run into toxic or annoying Seinfeld fans. It’s like having beef with the Barney Miller fandom in 2026. Not that bad.
17. Professional Hockey Fans– This feels like something you deal with in the Northeast. Every hockey fan I’ve met seems less annoying than the sort of NBA fan who thinks “Hedo Turkoglu” is a punchline, or all NFL fans. Not that bad.
16. Bruce Springsteen Fans– Northeastern answer. For both political and context reasons, Southerners don’t have a lot of love for the Boss, and I’ll admit, it took me until my mid twenties to even enjoy Nebraska. Also, that guy’s tickets are so outrageous I can’t even imagine a Deadhead situation where people follow him around. I find Bruce himself somewhat annoying (annoying enough I’ll never take out the necessary mortgage to see him live, but love Darkness at the Edge of Town), but no smoke here from the fans. Not that bad.
15. People Enthusiastic about AI– You’ve read 8 billion anti-AI screeds, and you do not need another one. What I find most disgusting about the whole thing is how little people understand the predictive model. You are being cold read by a machine. Worse.
14. Yacht Rock Fans– Of all the morbid symptoms of downwardly mobile millennials, going out of your way to listen to “Sailing” by Christopher Cross to call up the spirits of a time when less money bought more is one of the oddest ones. It’s sad, but it’s also combined with a wink, and I have no patience for the winking. However, I’ve been open about how each entry’s “rankings” are related to their position. To call yacht rock fans worse would mean I’m arguing it’s deserving of a top ten spot, and I simply don’t think that they are. Not that bad.
13. Stanley Kubrick Fans– To get deeper into Stanley Kubrick usually means you have to start coming up with tortured explanations of how every inch of the Overlook hotel is overflowing with the exactitude of his symbolic genius, but it’s pretty easy to avoid, as annoying as it is. Not that bad
12. Microdosers- I’ve met a few microdosers who were remarkably chill about the whole thing and talked about it to me as an option for my agonies. They have had a lot of the same complaints as me about being mentally ill and found something that works. There remains an unfortunate tinge of life optimization, the same sort of brain that hearkens for crash diets and cooking hacks and meal prep TikToks, and that means the community is rife with Silicon Valley energy. That’s before you even get into the obnoxious psychedelic enthusiasts. With all respect to the microdosers I’ve met, about that bad.
11. Yankees Fans– Maybe the most controversial thing I’ll say all day: I don’t really mind Yankees fans that much, provided they’re from New York or the Northeast generally. There are more obnoxious fan communities in the region. I also don’t want to undersell the Best Show’s lived experience, so I’ll recognize that if you’re in that region, Yankees fans might be singularly obnoxious. (I grew up in Atlanta Baseball Team Country, and live in the greater Nationals fan region). If you root for the Yankees outside of that geographic region, though, you are a bandwagon-ass cat, to quote Rasheed Wallace. I feel comfortable labeling them: About that bad.
10. Quentin Tarantino Fans– Quentin Tarantino is in the unique position where I find his ethos obnoxious but find reflexively hating the films he makes and some of the criticisms of those films to be even more obnoxious. For whatever reason, all my compunction goes away when those movies work well for me: describing scenes from Django Unchained will get me to roll my eyes, but watching it will get me hype. With that being said, I’m pretty skeptical of his late style of pop history revisionist film making and his idea he might direct and write plays only makes me think of his single worst movie, The Hateful Eight (which is the closest I’ve ever come to walking out of a movie, just a bunch of circuitous talking and overacting, so shitty I thought Kurt Russell and Jennifer Jason Leigh were bad actors for a long time). I’m going to make a comparison I never thought I’d make, though: Quentin Tarantino fans are like David Foster Wallace fans in the current age. Both are Gen X icons who grapple with the post-modern legacy in different ways to achieve their own ends, whose work includes startling insights into their own personality, who made generation defining pieces of art for better (Pulp Fiction) and worse (Infinite Jest), tend to get overrated by similar types of earnest young men, and now are somewhat outre in the wider movie/literary community for hearkening to the age before them and their own personal peccadilloes (David Foster Wallace being an abusive sex pest, QT being a Zionist). That’s actually why I’m going to be giving these fans some grace today: because they’re so hopelessly out of sync with the trends of today and continuing to bully them doesn’t sit right with me. Not that bad
09. Zappateers (Frank Zappa fans)- I like some Zappa. But think about somebody who thinks Zappa is the GOAT. Somebody who wants you to know they’re a big Zappa head. The fundamental distance from me and Zappa is I know Zappa loves music, but I only feel it when he’s playing his own instrumental compositions. It makes all the humor come across differently. I know I said I found Ween fans annoying, but The Pod is one of my top ten albums of all time, and one of the reasons that Ween winds up working well for me is that even if there’s a humorous element to it, those are actual songs. “Pork Roll Egg and Cheese” might come across as random, but it also manages to make a Taylor ham sound like coming back to home base after huffing Scotchguard for a whole night. And that’s a goofy song, but Dean and Gene commit to its singular atmosphere. Zappa songs always feel like he’s looking for an exit, usually in the form of a guitar solo. Then there’s the sense of humor, where Zappa is nowhere as near as funny as he thinks is. If Zappa, genius of a guitarist as he was, has these flaws, what does it say for the people for whom he’s their guy? For whom, like the Carlin fans, look for a counterculture uncle to flatter all their opinions? It’s still not worthy of the top ten. Keep in mind, we have AI enthusiasts on this list. Not that bad.
08. Beatles Fans– Do you like pizza? I do. Most people do. It’s the most ethnic thing my grandparents eat. If I’m with a group of people, the best plan for food is to just get a pizza, especially if there’s a vegetarian. I’ve had bad pizza, but it’s never been worse than, say, a 5 on a 10 point scale. The best pizza I’ve ever had has been among the best food I’ve ever had. Maybe pizza isn’t my favorite food, but I’m never mad to eat it.
In the bad old days of the 2010s, pizza suddenly got a level of internet cache, like the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles all had Tumblrs. All of a sudden I started liking pizza a lot less. I don’t need upvotes. I need to enjoy a meal. It all seemed a little performative to me, the same way it did with bacon, then that period everybody kept talking about Beer (capitalization mandatory) and that was also obnoxious.
Maybe pizza is your favorite meal. It’s not for me to judge. But I have to ask you: is it really your favorite food, or is it just an easy thing to say in icebreaker exercises?
The Beatles are like pizza. I don’t believe anybody who says they hate it fully, but forcing the option suddenly becomes you pointing to how you like one of the most common and agreeable things on the planet. I tend to think people are more interesting than that and are conditioned to not be interesting because of the idea of society chastising them. The Rolling Stones are pretty much my all time favorite rock band just based off that 1964-1972 run, but it’s all been going downhill ever since (well, since Some Girls, that’s where I quit caring, the Stones were not built for music videos, sorta like Kiss without the makeup). The reason it’s easy to be a Beatles fan is a) they’ve been done for ages, so you never have to see your granddad hype they’re stumbling through “I Want to Hold Your Hand” at the Super Bowl and b) John Lennon’s assassination gives him a sense of martyrdom for the causes he espoused (whether or not he was effective is another argument). It also feels like being the agent of easy, conventional wisdom. If you’re the fan of the best rock band, the best food, the best show, it looks like creating armor for yourself out of uncontroversial opinions, which allows you to advocate for conventional thought at all times, which is rarely correct in full and massaged by market conventions and culture industry standards. Maybe not top ten, but definitely should be on the list. About that bad, but not top ten.
07. Adult Pokemon Fans– I want to give a genuine answer here but every time I see one of those gigantic Eevees at that Kanto park I just want to hug them. Pokemon games are very much a case of “That’s okay, I’ll keep drinking that garbage” for me. I don’t buy every Pokemon game, but I never regret playing one because the rush of cockfighting with elements is too strong. Anything involving speculating and a card game brings out the freaks but even accounting for those (and people who want to fuck Garvedoir) adult Pokemon fans seem pretty sensible, and not just because I am one. LEAVE ME ALONE! Not that bad.
06. Star Wars Fans– At least most Pokemon games are playable. WHO WATCHED THE ACOLYTE? Plenty of people. All of this considering there might be four good movies in the entire franchise. It doesn’t matter which way I turn, I find it annoying. Like it all? The Disney stuff is trash. Think the Disney stuff is trash but like the prequels? Sorry, quit overrating shit you grew up with. Only the original trilogy is good? Get over it, that was damn near 50 years ago. The Animated Clone Wars are peak? I’m not watching that shit. I might even love Andor but the whole hullabaloo around it all (and my early Star Wars guy days) makes me not want to engage, at all. Worse.
05. Kill Tony Fans– There is nothing worse than being self serious about comedy. Kill Tony barely strikes me as comedy as it does a Nu-Austin update of Synanon. Worse.
04. Current Howard Stern Fans– in the top 5? Who even has satellite radio anymore? In an age with Joe Rogan and, well, Kill Tony, today Stern seems rather jejune, an edgier Terry Gross. Is it that that makes it so obnoxious? I know I’m not tuning in. Not that bad.
03. UFC Fans– There’s a lot of overlap between a couple of these. UFC isn’t really my bag and there’s a lot of dumb bullshit surrounding mixed martial arts (including an inarguable rightward slant), but it can also be engaged with as a sport on a normal level. Maybe a lot of the fans don’t! But it is very, very possible. In the end, UFC isn’t even as big of a deal as the NFL, which manages to be about as right-wing culturally and ruin more lives. Not that bad.
02. Elon Musk Fans– Yeah man, what can you even say? This is a ringer. I can say three things for myself: I have never liked Drake, I never liked Nicki Minaj, and I never liked Elon. Don’t be surprised if all three show up at the 2028 Republican Convention. About that bad.
01. Boston Sports Fans– Boston fans are split between a knowledge of two things. One: they are one of the premier sports cities in America and one of its winningest. Two: nothing lasts forever. Because of a period where Boston sports are bad, all Boston fans have an attitude like they’ve been underestimated their entire life, but they’re also historically supposed to be always on top. Not near, on top. Even New York teams don’t have this same arrogant belief in their own just folks simplicity (for instance, the Knicks are a bunch of a fucking basket cases). When they’re not winning rings, they should be. When they are, it’s all according to plan. Umberto Eco talks about this in “Ur-Fascism”, but the Italians could have learned a thing or two from 60s fans who refused to pack out bleachers when Bill Russell was the best player alive. I don’t even care if they’re at the top of the list: Worse.
So, that’s all. Based on my work, here’s a corrected top ten. You’ll notice not a ton changed: I mostly reconfigured the back half. The temptation to put Cum Town fans in at 10 is really strong, but I would be fighting for my life in my group chat if I did.
- Boston Sports Fans
- Elon Musk Fans
- Harry Potter fans
- AI Enthusiasts
- Kill Tony Fans
- Star Wars Fans
- Swifties
- Microdosers
- Kendrick Lamar fans
- Yankee Fans
Now, time to play a ROM hack of Pokemon on my phone while I listen to Untitled Unmastered in a t-shirt that has the Gonzo fist and Animal Sauce stains on it.