Fandom is no longer niche. 

What started as a madhouse of creativity, chaos, and community has evolved into something far bigger and far stranger. In the early days, it was Sherlock Holmes fans going as far as to stage letter-writing campaigns to bring their detective back from the dead. Today, it’s BookTok fandom movements launching multimedia empires. Creative online fans formed the backbone of this new economy, shaping the digital spaces that raised many of us.

For better or worse, fandom was the small town on the edge of the internet that took us in. It welcomed all our weirdness, our questions, our obsessions, and let us explore the things the real world told us to hide. But fandom doesn’t live on the fringes anymore. The torch has been passed to a new generation of fanatics, and this isn’t just a new look; something fundamental has shifted. 

The problem is “the problematic.”

Fan spaces are now governed by an unwritten code: a hardline rejection of fictional content that deals with sensitive or uncomfortable subjects—age gap relationships, sexual content, violence—the list goes on. More often than not, the label “problematic” is so vague that anything can fall under it, so long as it makes someone uncomfortable.

And while discomfort has always been part of fiction’s purpose—to challenge, to provoke, to unsettle—the new logic suggests that if a story makes you uncomfortable, it must also be morally wrong. Suddenly, the question of right or wrong is at the center of what we read, and it’s transforming fandom into a battleground. The prevailing attitude isn’t just that “problematic” media should be avoided, but that it shouldn’t exist at all.

In turn, young fans have become self-appointed enforcers of moral purity, policing their peers online and demanding the death of any fiction that appears to “glorify” violence, sexuality, or ambiguity. This moral panic mirrors a much larger, more menacing force: the shadow of modern conservative extremism. 

Today’s conservatism has created a culture that recruits children to passionately carry out its mission of moral purity, in which fiction must exist solely to uphold the approved, state-sanctioned version of right and wrong. Fandom, one of the only havens for the strange and controversial, now serves as a tool of authoritarian control, championing the ideals of a fascist America.

This emerging behavior is a terrifying microcosm of the world at large. Yet it’s precisely because of this slouching toward censorship that we must confront the uncomfortable and allow it to exist, not because we personally support the values of the problematic, but because literature is an invitation to reckon with the hardest parts of human nature. Without it, we risk losing the ability to learn, and that, more than any fictional story, is the real danger.

But where did these conservative values come from, and how did the state manage to turn teenage fans on X into foot soldiers for its culture war?

Fiction and Morality: Monkey Read, Monkey Do

Why are we so eager to pass moral judgment on sensitive subjects in fiction? When did reading about violence turn someone into a murderer? Would hearing the story of a serial killer suddenly inspire you to replicate their crimes? 

This anxiety isn’t new, and it’s been circling public discourse for centuries, stretching all the way back to Shakespeare. Early performances of Hamlet (1623) came with pamphlets clarifying that Claudius and Gertrude’s incestuous marriage was not to be imitated. Go back even further, and you’ll find Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1590) pausing the story for a stanza just to assure his readers that a sexual relationship between two women could only be lust—not love—as if the story itself might infect you with the wrong ideas if left unchecked.

Classic literature has always played this strange game: it confronts readers with discomfort, then offers a moral aside, or a winking reminder not to mimic what you’ve just read. And yet, modern literary criticism has long debunked the idea that fiction holds hypnotic powers, that readers will blindly absorb a character’s moral code as their own. But this ancient fear still lingers, just wearing a different mask.

Today, we preface our stories with disclaimers and content warnings, entire rating systems designed to tell the reader exactly what they’re getting into before they even turn the first page. At the same time, we’ve become obsessed with stories of the sick and twisted; cult podcasts, serial killer documentaries, and dark romance novels are all in good fun.  

But this curiosity walks a thin line, because a growing number of people seem convinced that these stories aren’t just entertainment, but recruitment posters for the wicked. If you read about terrible things, or worse, enjoy the experience of reading them, you must be just as monstrous as the people described on the page.

This attitude avoids the real conversation. It’s easier to condemn uncomfortable stories as “problematic” than to reckon with what they’re actually showing us: that human beings are capable of all sorts of terrible or strange thoughts and actions. 

Stories like To Kill a Mockingbird, which force us to look at state-sanctioned, racially motivated violence, or Lolita, which captures the all too common predatory behavior of adult men, make us confront truths in unique ways that only words on a page could accomplish. Instead of facing that discomfort, we reach for the easy fix: erase it, ban it, pretend it was never there.

This is the same slippery path that has always led to censorship. 

Fandom content creator EisSocial, known as E, first found her way into fandom as a teenager through the Percy Jackson series, and has since used her online platform to unpack the complexities of fandom culture. In her own video exploring the tangled relationship between morality and fiction, E draws a clear comparison between fandom policing and the world’s long history of censorship.

It was this connection, she explained, that first signaled to her that modern fandom was veering into dangerous territory.

“The first thing a dictator goes for when seizing power is the arts, because they can influence, motivate, and inspire,” E said. “The silencing and censorship of art in any way, no matter how you look at it, will always lead to something bad. We’re doing the work for them when we censor ourselves, and the young people are leading the charge.”  

History shows where this logic ends. From Nazi book burnings to the quiet purges happening across libraries today, the state has always known how to turn moral panic into a weapon. 

The difference now is that, somehow, they’ve managed to get young online fans to carry out the book burnings for them.

Surveillance and Censorship: Doing the Dirty Work for Them 

As mentioned earlier, fandom was once a chaotic free-for-all of online content where fans could explore any story, character, or idea without much restraint. But somewhere along the line, something shifted. These same online spaces now operate under a new and much stricter social contract. Problematic content shouldn’t just earn criticism, it should be erased.

This new wave of audience-driven censorship isn’t born out of deep critical thinking, but out of the same age-old fear of taboo subjects. And so the purge of the “problematic” begins.

 But this isn’t happening in a vacuum. These values didn’t appear from nowhere, they’ve arrived in step with the real-world return of fascist ideologies, which are creeping back into the mainstream under the promise of moral clarity and safety. Extremism feeds on fear. It offers people the same easy bargain: eliminate the things that scare you, erase what makes you uncomfortable, and the world will finally feel safe.

Into this bargain step the online fan kids—those who aren’t weighed down by adult politics, but who have been raised, like all of us, on stories that draw sharp lines between right and wrong. From fairy tales to classroom lessons, we are taught that good and evil are simple, clean categories. In fandom spaces, this mindset creates complications, especially when it comes to efforts at social advocacy.

E explained how, in the early days, fandoms across fansites like Tumblr pushed for activism and a greater social awareness of the world around them. In contrast, while future generations kept that same drive to organize, their idea of social justice started to twist into something more extreme. Anything that falls outside a black and white view of good and evil is instantly marked for attack under this new brand of activism.

“I feel like kids don’t know how to be activists,” E said. “They understand that pushing for the greater good is objectively great, that being a good person is something you strive for, but on the internet, things get radicalized so hard that they forget what that actually entails. At the end of the day, I do think it’s coming from a place of good.” 

These days, that drive for the greater good has been warped by the anxieties of modern conservatism, the same mindset that would rather see a book burned for being uncomfortable than risk engaging with what it’s actually trying to say. While state-sanctioned extremism erases stories it deems “problematic”—from Navajo code talkers to transgender lives to climate change—young fans follow suit, condemning uncomfortable art and branding creators who explore taboo subjects as “pedophiles” and “freaks.”

What we’re seeing now isn’t just a wave of online bullying, but an ideological shift toward the same old brand of authoritarian extremism. These kids have learned to sell out their peers, to subject them to mass moral judgment, and to wield accusations like weapons, all while seeing these actions as necessary for the sake of societal good. 

And when you strip away the fandom context, this behavior should start to sound familiar—not as harmless arguments, but as the foundation of a much larger tool of authoritarian control.

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The answer to moral panic isn’t obedience, it’s curiosity and discussion.

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How to Fight Fandom’s Fascism 

So what do we do when the walls start closing in? When even the spaces that once welcomed the weird, the uncomfortable, and the unspoken start to mirror the language and logic of fascism? We resist. Not by bending to the pressure to clean up fiction until it’s safe and sterile, but by insisting on the right to confront what is hard to swallow. The answer to moral panic isn’t obedience, it’s curiosity and discussion.

The minute we agree that difficult fiction should be erased to protect us, we’ve already surrendered to the systems that would rather keep us ignorant than make us brave. Literature, art, and fandom are meant to be places where all ideas can be explored without the threat of exile. If we let that go, we’re not protecting each other. We’re helping to build the very machine that will decide what kind of stories are allowed to exist.
And history has shown us exactly what kind of stories that machine will erase first.

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