The Dark Side of Being a Fan

Emma Watson is best known as the actress who played Hermione Granger, one of the main characters in the Harry Potter film franchise, based on J.K. Rowling's iconic book series, released in the late 1990s and which helped revive young audiences' interest in reading. She has played other film roles, but it's clear that it was primarily because of the Harry Potter films that she became known worldwide. Emma has also gained notoriety for her political activism. But this activism is typical of "celebrity" politics, with plenty of politically correct and biased rhetoric and little hands-on action. Despite having built a less than impressive career in terms of acting, both in the arts and in politics, Emma has millions of followers on Instagram and other social media platforms, on this particular one, around fifty million—that is, she has more Instagram followers than Argentina has. Many of this young lady's millions of social media followers are her "fans," and as you might imagine, they are people who harbor a sense of fanaticism toward her, treating her as if she were a special, flawless human being and exaggerating her personal and professional achievements.

Whenever I think of social activism, I think of those people, usually women, who dedicate their lives to fostering and caring for stray animals, almost always dogs and cats. I think of the sheer number of followers these people tend to have: far fewer than "Hermione," the activist of words... I think of the difficult lives these kind-hearted people lead to maintain their altruistic projects with some of the most reviled creatures in a typical urban environment, and how much more celebrated these celebrities are, even or especially when they do nothing truly special (or quite the opposite). And there's no way to conclude that their fans contribute more to feeding the ego of this type of celebrity, who also engages in abstract activism, and that they could do something more objectively altruistic, at least by following animal rights accounts, given that the more followers a social media account has, the more money it can earn from sponsors... They could help much more noble causes than stroking the ego of narcissists (sorry, but that's my impression of Emma and others like her). This is one of the darkest sides of being a fan: the typical injustice of deifying figures who, frankly speaking, are far less relevant in a practical sense, even if their faces are known worldwide. If they themselves could actually do good, helping NGOs and individuals genuinely engaged in altruistic projects, using their own image to drive support, but also contributing generously. But no... They prefer to act like parrots of supposed social activism full of ulterior motives, such as, for example, supporting refugees, which, in reality, have as their most important objective to push the globalist agenda of slowly destroying the cultural and ethnic identities of nations through mass immigration.