This post was written by Lauren James, author of Last Seen Online.
I grew up in fandom. BBC Merlin, Doctor Who and Teen Wolf are some which I’m willing to admit to – but I was never picky. I was always more interested in the fans themselves than the fandom’s chosen media property of interest. I loved digging into the dramas going on within a fan community.
If I caught a whiff of a Big Name Fan with thousands of followers whose Tumblr ask box was full of gossipy messages, I was there. I read every write-up I could find about people getting caught for ‘internet crimes’ like faking an emergency for crowdfunding money or using photoshop to create fanart ‘pencil sketches’. I would click dozens of links to the original fraudulent blogger’s account, following a rabbit hole of posts where they defended their crimes, devouring the comment threads debating the drama.
The stakes of fandom dramas are low-to-non-existent – someone might have to delete their account, maybe? or change usernames? – but there is little real-life impact from fan drama. But when lies or secrets are revealed in fandoms, it can be so explosive that whole communities rupture down the middle, never to recover. Things get intense very quickly.
From personal experience, I was using fandom to fill a void for the things I was lacking in real life. For close, intimate friendships; for queer kindred spirits; for a community that made me feel safe, accepted and understood. When you’re relying so deeply on a small group of people for those things, it’s no wonder that a controversy can get so heated.
When your favourite fan writer is revealed to be plagiarising paragraphs of their fics from novels, it doesn’t just leave you without fic to read. It destroys the foundations of your support mechanisms. The people you trusted most, who you confided in – maybe telling them things you would never share in real life – are no longer trustworthy.
That can feel like a life-or-death crisis point.
So, I wrote a novel where fandom drama is life-or-death, literally. What if your favourite fan blogger is involved in a crime? What if the lead actor on your favourite TV show is killed?
I thought that it would be the perfect way to investigate a murder – in this case, a fan girl who obsessively documents the movements of her favourite actor on the day he is arrested for murder.
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Last Seen Online is told through her blog posts, as she investigates the personal lives of the male actors on a fictional TV show in an attempt to prove that they are secretly queer and dating. She goes viral when she goes to their address, and one of the men ends up dead. But who murdered him, and why? The commenters on her blog are hugely invested in finding out.
I wanted to explore how the internet can be used as a tool for investigating real-world crimes. Can a fandom collectively use their detail-oriented focus and intense knowledge of their subjects to solve a crime?
In real life, groups of vigilante detectives on the internet have managed to solve real life murder cases. For example, a female skeleton found in an Ohio river in 1975 was IDed as a missing girl by a Reddit user who worked to update police databases with missing records. An unidentified man who died in a car crash in Australia in 1995 was identified by a Reddit thread, who found his family based on his Grateful Dead t-shirt. Several podcasts investigating old cases have led to new arrests and convictions, such as Your Own Backyard and Serial.
That is a seriously impressive and admirable level of detective work, but it’s a rare occasion when social media frenzies help to solve crimes. Mostly, the internet just turns traumatic disasters into viral clickbait.
The internet also tends to see conspiracies which aren’t there. Were Harry and Louis from One Direction secretly dating? Or is Taylor Swift gay? When you consume a huge quantity of content created by a celebrity, you form a strong parasocial bond with them. Fans feel like they know their role models on a personal level. They have spent huge amounts of time, energy and resources on studying their heroes – from going to all their shows and watching all their ‘behind the scenes’ content, to more extreme activities like tracking their jet movements or hotel stays. They will analyse their social media posts and pictures taken inside their homes, looking for clues to their inner lives.
These are also, conveniently, very useful skills to have if you are trying to find a murderer, which made Last Seen Onlinea delightful novel to write. I tried to write a book for internet-savvy, internet-cautious readers, who know that you can’t accept what you’re told at face value if you want to survive online. It is filled with references to the fandom dramas I lived through from 2005-2015.
Born in 1992, I was one of the earliest generations to really grow up with the internet. For me, fandom spaces were a lifeline when my touch-starved teenage self desperately needed connection and community. I know how easy it can be to slip too far into an obsessive space where you’re investing an unhealthy amount of time in a fan space – I only survived the pandemic lockdowns by engaging in the torture and pleasure of the Supernatural fandom.
It can be a safe space to seek out comfort in times of crisis. But let me end with a message to my younger self: No, Taylor Swift is not gay. But you are.
Get your copy of Last Seen Online by Lauren James here.