Abba’s most devoted fans have helped them remain in the public consciousness. Sometimes, under difficult circumstances.
English player Bukayo Saka is comforted by teammates after missing a penalty in the England v Italy final of the 2020 European football championship.
REUTERS/Carl Recine
As Team GB prepares to send its youngest Summer Olympian ever to the Tokyo 2021 Games, fans need to remember what being a young athlete in the public eye takes
BTS performs at the 2021 Billboard Music Awards in Los Angeles.
Billboard Music Awards 2021 via Getty Images
The return of actors like Karate Kid Ralph Macchio and Bill & Ted’s Alex Winter sees them older and wiser. Fewer role revivals remind us of character growth related to womanhood.
Don’t forget fans. Here, Phuong Nguyen (left) as Captain America with Derrick Petry as Deadpool, at Comic-Con International in July 2018, in San Diego.
(AP Photo/Richard Vogel)
Some comic fans have found a bright spot in virtual conventions in an otherwise bleak pandemic year. The sense of community matters more than a simplistic analysis about metrics or interactivity.
Monsta X fans have been derided as boy-band dupes, but their protests against the treatment of superstar Wonho shows them rejecting the capitalist system that’s quick to cut people loose.
Fans take photos of adult film actress Ange Venus at the Adult Video News Adult Entertainment Expo in Las Vegas.
Reuters/Steve Marcus
There’s a strand of radical feminist thought that claims porn causes misogyny. So four researchers decided to test this idea – and descended on a porn expo to study the beliefs of the male attendees.
BTS at the 2018 Billboard Music Awards. Fans of the band recently mounted a vigorous social media campaign after a controversial Channel Nine segment on BTS aired.
WENN/AAP
K-pop fans are a global network of varied ages and nationalities, who have an active, creative and symbiotic relationship with their idols.
Reaction videos are just one of many ways that Game of Thrones fans have explored their love for the show online.
Leon Andrew Razon/Screenshot from Youtube
Eric Forcier, Swinburne University of Technology and Lisa M. Given, Swinburne University of Technology
Fan culture is thriving in Westeros. Although HBO’s Game of Thrones has ended, fans will ensure that the show lives on (and changes) across multimedia platforms, long into the future.
Lleyton Hewitt in 2004. No one who has ever watched Lleyton play one of his epic matches comes out a hater.
DEAN LEWINS/AAP
While often lumped with other European populist parties, Beppe Grillo’s M5S is a movement of activist fans mobilized by the messages of his “celebrity brand”.
My Little Pony fan, Michael Anderson, a Brony, at the Dragon Con science fiction and fantasy convention in Atlanta, Georgia, USA, in 2014.
EPA/ERIK S. LESSER
Interim Director, UWA Public Policy Institute; Associate Professor & Programme Co-ordinator (Masters of Public Policy), The University of Western Australia