The five stages of fandom
STAGE THREE: SO YOU ARE HUMAN, AFTER ALL
This is when the cognitive dissonance kicks in. They start to relax, and that careful mask of politeness begins to slip. Sometimes they don’t feel like “being nice”. They might be irritable some days, and you might find out things about them that you wish you didn’t know – things that interfere with that oh-so-rosy mythos that you’ve established for them. In short, sometimes they’re a bit of a dick, just like everybody else.
STAGE FOUR: WHO THE FUCK DO YOU THINK YOU ARE?
This is where it ends, at least in most cases. You start to think, “This person thinks they’re better than me,” when the reality is … you’re right. You think they’re better than you, and they think they’re better than you. Slowly it dawns on you that really they’ve just got a bit more natural aptitude and a lot more practice, and certainly a lot more dedication to their craft.
They’ve got so used to your fascination with their work that they don’t know how to talk about anything else. If you talk about yourself, their eyes glaze over because they genuinely have no interest in your life. That shouldn’t, logically, come as much of a surprise. It might very well turn out that other than your mutual agreement on the subject of their own brilliance, you have absolutely nothing else in common.
STAGE FIVE: JUST SOME GUY
On the other hand, much as you might have started out thinking that your hero is all kinds of wonderful, maybe they’re starting to see you that way, too. You can converse without awkwardness, because your relationship is no longer based on the job they do, but on the other shared interests and values you hold in common.
Just like the colleagues you hang out with after work, you don’t talk about one thing all the time, but share balanced conversations about the other interesting things in your life. They’re just another friend – “just some guy” (or girl!) – and you’ll even forget from time to time whatever it was that drew them into your life.
Either that, or you’ve just lost interest in them. It doesn’t require any particular malice for someone with whom you have absolutely nothing in common to not be very interested in you – like the many colleagues you don’t socialise with after work. Maybe in your insistence that they should treat you like a normal human being, maybe that’s exactly how they are treating you. They’re just doing you the courtesy of not pretending any more. They’re a bit of a dick sometimes that doesn’t care very much about you: that’s the truth of it, and they’re exhausted from pretending to like the other people fawning all over them.
In most cases, you’ll never have spoken at all to the subject of your admiration, but you’ve just found out enough about them to know that you’d never be friends in real life, but that’s OK. You can go on being you, and they can go on being them. The sole thing that drew your attention in the first place – them being good at a job – hasn’t changed. You’ll probably buy the next thing they do, and continue to show a detached interest in their output.
It’s just that, however you’ve got here, the spell is broken. You know they’re just another person with a particular skill. I can sing ‘How Much Is That Doggie In The Window’ backwards: I’m sure somebody somewhere thinks that makes me the most awesome person alive.
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