No Fantarding Allowed: Anti-Fanning and American Idol

I’m not a regular American Idol watcher by any means. I watched the third season all the way through, and have pretty much ignored every season before and after that one. This season, I turned on the Top 13 week because I had a night off from my Tuesday night class and, I admit, I started to remember why I liked the show. I thought I’d watch the rest of the season, but then remembered that I have a class on Tuesday nights and a poetry reading on Wednesdays, so I wouldn’t be watching much of the show this season. However, tonight, I skipped my Tuesday night class to sort out my taxes at the last minute and, when I finished my taxes a little earlier than I expected, I tuned in to watch the final 7 battle it out on Songs from the Movies week. The show was interesting, but not as interesting as playing along with the infamous anti-fan site VoteForTheWorst.com.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the site, VoteForTheWorst.com, also known as VFTW, is a website specifically designed for “haters” of American Idol. The site is filled with message boards that allow people to post about their hatred of American Idol, which, somehow, they have an encyclopedic knowledge of. There is a thread for people to make insulting photoshopped pictures of the contestants and judges, entire threads dedicated to the hatred of individual contestants, and then there’s the play-by play thread. The play-by-play thread allows users to comment on the show as it’s airing, thus giving users a chance to insult the action as it happens. At the end of the episode, the site’s managers choose the person they consider to be the worst singer of the night, and encourage all of their users to vote for that person, thus “sabotaging” the show by keeping the less talented singers in the competition. The website’s hatred is not limited to American Idol, as the site has also put shows like Canadian Idol and Dancing With the Stars in its crosshairs, but the main focus is always American Idol.

Like many internet message boards, cruelty is not only common, but encouraged. Most notable is the community’s response to Season 8 contestant Danny Gokey, whose wife died shortly before he tried out for the show. The community has developed two nicknames for Gokey: “Deadwife” and “DWD” (Dead Wife Danny). The attacks on contestants and judges are vicious and board members rarely admit to liking a contestant, a judge, or even a specific performance. Perhaps, this is because it’s forbidden by the message board rules:

No motherfucking fantarding.
No one here cares if you find David Cook attractive. No one cares if you're going to buy 300 of an Idol's new CD. VFTW is a board where we make fun of Idol and its contestants, not where we squeal over what they look like naked. If you want to do that, go here [link] or here [link]. Posting one SHORT comment about how you like someone is not fantarding. Any more than that, and no one wants to read it. Yes, we can ban you for saying you find someone attractive. Don't like it? Get out.

Yet, the website is so active that, during a normal episode of the show, the server often overloads from the flow of activity on the message boards. The play-by-play thread updates on an almost minute-by-minute basis during each episode, as VFTW users want to get in all their negative opinions of a show that they are watching so intently, they can quote it. This raises the question: why create a massive community around a show that you hate, when you could, instead, simply not watch the show?

VoteForTheWorst.com is not the first site of its kind. The site grew out of the site SurvivorSucks.com which, as the name would suggest, was a site originally designed for users to talk trash about Survivor. SurvivorSucks.com has since expanded, with sections for shows such as Lost and The Apprentice. This sort of “anti-fanning,” if you will, is an interesting phenomenon, and it’s made me wonder why these communities form.

Clearly, the members of these communities do not truly hate the shows the claim to hate. There’s no reason to create an Internet water cooler to discuss a show that you despise. There’s no reason to turn a show that you don’t enjoy into appointment television. What these communities are a result of is the increasingly cynical attitude of early 21st century youth culture and the natural desire of the youth to fit in.

The cynic-chic attitude that began to permeate youth culture in the 90’s is best summed up in an old Simpsons episode from that decade, “Homerpalooza”:

Teenager 1: Oh look, here comes that cannonball guy, he's cool.
Teenager 2: Are you being sarcastic, dude?
Teenager 1: I don't even know anymore.1

In modern culture, it’s square to be hip. Showing a lack of enthusiasm for something that’s popular is, at least in certain circles, a way to win “cool points.” It has become fashionable to be the hater of everything and to hold high standards that no form of entertainment can live up to. This is especially true of indie and punk cultures, which formed around musical styles in which a band’s obscurity is seen as a badge of honor. As a fan in these communities, the badge of honor is having an in-depth knowledge of obscure and underground artists. Thus, to indulge in the pleasures of something as popular as American Idol is considered, in these circles, to be distinctly uncool.

Thus, in these circles of the youth culture, the only way to enjoy a guilty pleasure like American Idol or Survivor is to claim to be enjoying it ironically. Entire communities develop for people to continually ridicule these shows so that they might live in denial about the pleasures that they get from watching them. Communities like VoteForTheWorst.com give people excuses to be fans of something popular without admitting that they enjoy something mainstream. This is the ultimate paradox of our modern age: to retain one’s coolness, one must pretend to dislike that which is popular.

Is anyone else confused?


1 Forrester, Brent. "Homerpalooza." The Simpsons. Fox. 19 May 1996.