There was a time when fandom was a place where you we made friendships built on shared obsession, and experimentation. The borders were porous: artists, writers, cosplayers, and commentators coexisted in a wild but functional feedback loop of creation and critique. Nobody expected moral purity because fandom itself was an act of trespass; fans were engaging with works that didn’t belong to them, and changing stories that weren’t meant to be changed, and creating our own meaning of the works we consumed.
Over the last decade, and especially over the past 5 years, that sense of reckless participation has kinda gone away. Modern fandom operates under surveillance in every way- social, moral, and algorithmic. Platforms that once rewarded experimentation now amplify outrage and conformity, because any attention is good attention. Younger audiences who were once drawn to these communities for discovery now enter into them already trained to be a cop, and treat discomfort as a signal of danger rather than an invitation to think. What was once a place of communal weirdness has become a site of moral instruction.
This transformation obviously didn’t happen overnight, of course. It’s the cumulative result of three intertwined cultural changes: the rise of online purity culture, the psychological effects of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, and a flattening of discourse around the Me Too movement that blurred the line between accountability and censorship. On top of this, is a renewed hostility toward piracy and independent circulation, which reinforces the same moral binary, the idea that there are “good” and “bad” ways to engage with art. Together, this stuff has twisted fandom from a form of participation, to a system of compliance.
What Purity Culture Did to Fandom
Purity culture didn’t just pop out of nowhere, of course; it's been coming from a drift toward moral absolutism online, where language of harm, trauma, and accountability became detached from their real-world contexts and repurposed as tools for interpersonal regulation. Inside fandom spaces, this produced a strange inversion where communities that were once defined by creative trespass began to reward self-censorship and moral signaling. To be a “good fan” became less about insight or passion and more about correctness; and about consuming and producing art in ways that could withstand scrutiny from others.
In practice, purity culture functions through collective anxiety. It thrives on the fear of implication, where the idea that merely liking or depicting something “problematic” is indistinguishable from endorsing it. Fans are encouraged to preface creative works with elaborate disclaimers, to separate their authorial selves from their subjects, and to anticipate moral interrogation before it arrives. The language of safety replaces the language of interpretation, and uncomfortable stories are reframed as potential threats rather than opportunities to think about power, violence, or desire. The old phrase “don’t like, don’t read” gives way to “don’t make, don’t draw, don’t think that way.”
This change is sustained by the architecture of the modern internet. Social platforms reward outrage, and fandom discourse has adapted to fit those incentives. A single screenshot or decontextualized quote can circulate as evidence of wrongdoing, and the algorithm blows that moral panic into entertainment. Within that environment, any kind of nuance becomes a liability (cause why tell the truth when you can get more clicks for ragebaiting!). The safest position is moral clarity, even when the subject is fiction. So the community all become cops, and fans scrutinize one another for ideological impurity, and corporations exploit that vigilance to present themselves as ethically superior.
The irony is that purity culture disguises itself as progressive reform. Its advocates often adopt justice language, yet their methods reproduce the same binaries as older conservative moral views. It demands innocence instead of literacy, avoidance instead of engagement. It denies the premise that individuals can encounter disturbing material without being corrupted by it. And it treats art as a moral test rather than a field of exploration.
For older fans who came of age in spaces where experimentation was expected, this change over time feels like a betrayal to them. For younger fans, it’s often the only model they’ve ever known. The result is a cultural ecosystem where the fear of being “wrong” outweighs the thrill of discovery, and where fiction is expected to behave better than the world that produced it. Am I not allowed to have a favourite character who is a pervert, or is hot for the sake of being hot? You have to allow people to enjoy things, no matter how uncomfortable you are with it.
The Pandemic as a Pressure Cooker
When the world was under lockdowns, the internet became the only way we could be social. Fandom, which had always existed in the hybrid space between escapism and connection, suddenly became one of the few arenas where people could still feel part of a crowd. Conventions were cancelled, and physical community was replaced by an algorithmic one. What might have been a temporary refuge quickly became a permanent reality, where fandom became life, and life became public.
The lockdowns tightened of all of social and emotional boundaries. People threw their emotions into online spaces that were never designed to handle that much stuff. And what happens when all that builds up? A feeling of hypervigilance, everywhere. Isolation made people more dependent on online validation, while constant visibility made that validation feel precarious. Algorithms prioritized engagement, and outrage was the most efficient form of it. Within that dynamic, moral policing offered both catharsis and structure; a way to feel righteous when everything else felt uncontrollable.
Fandom’s shift toward moral absolutism absolutely hypercharged during those times. When the world outside was dangerous and uncertain, there was comfort in drawing hard lines within fiction. To condemn a character, a trope, or a ship felt like you were protecting what what yours, or felt like it was. It created a sense of safety in a time defined by danger, but it also turned creative spaces into psychological battlegrounds. Works that once functioned as complex, interesting explorations were now treated as ideological minefields. The internet’s long-standing friction between private desire and public performance finally snapped, and there was no longer a distinction between what one enjoyed and who one was.
At the same time, the influx of new, younger users, so many of them kids and teens, deprived of peer spaces and offline rites of passage, started to change fandom demographics. With few age-appropriate communities left online, younger teens began inhabiting spaces once dominated by adults, bringing with them a natural adolescent rigidity about right and wrong. Without clear boundaries or media literacy education, feeling discomfort became synonymous with danger. Adult creators, wary of being accused of anything, started to feel uncomfortable, and started toning down their works in response. The ecosystem flattened, and the result was a feedback loop where moral simplicity became the default mode of engagement.
The pandemic didn’t create purity culture, but it did intensify its mechanisms. It turned what had been scattered impulses into collective expectation; and made everyone chronically visible, chronically online, and chronically afraid of saying or liking the wrong thing. In doing so, it solidified a model of fandom that prioritizes moral performance over art.
The Death of Nuance
But I should go back even further than that to find out why it ended up like this. The MeToo movement began as a reckoning with power, it was a necessary confrontation with systemic abuse and the silence that allowed it to persist. It revealed how institutions, from Hollywood studios to gaming studios, protected predators and punished victims. But as its language traveled beyond the context of workplaces and into fandom spaces, it lost its specificity. What had been a framework for accountability became, in diluted form, a universal template for judgment. Online, the concept of harm kept going until it no longer required a victim; it could be inferred from implication, depiction, and even the imagined consequences of fiction.
Within fandom, this produced a subtle but corrosive misapplication of #MeToo’s moral urgency. Instead of asking how the structures of power operate in art or in the industry, many communities began asking which fans or artists were “unproblematic.” A fandom’s social order increasingly resembled a tribunal, with participants policing not actual misconduct but just thought crimes; stuff like erotic or violent works became suspect, and artists were pressured to provide moral justifications for their creations. The confusion between representation and endorsement, became foundational to people.
This misreading of activism intersected perfectly with the emotional volatility of post-pandemic online life. The act of calling someone out offered the illusion of political participation, even when the target was another marginalized creator. It became this kind of performance of virtue, which was rewarded by engagement metrics. The original goal of exposing real-world predators was replaced by the symbolic policing of fictional morality. The end result is this current culture that claims to be progressive but behaves punitively, using the language of justice to enforce conformity.
Corporations have learned to exploit this shit, like you’ve got platforms and publishers positioning themselves as arbiters of ethical consumption. Content warnings have multiplied, not as tools of awareness but as signals of moral hygiene. When controversies erupted, companies issued statements about “values” while continuing to exploit labour and underpay artists. The audience’s attention was successfully redirected, and outrage toward individuals has replaced the scrutiny of institutions. The same users who condemned a fan for drawing an “inappropriate” ship would turn around and celebrate the sanitized adaptations produced by the very corporations, which ends up further suppressing artistic risk.
This flattening of moral reasoning has consequences beyond fandom. It also erodes the public’s capacity to think critically about art. If every uncomfortable depiction is conflated with endorsement, then the art we create loses its ability to disturb, provoke, or interrogate. And if that mindset dominates, the people who most need art as a space for contradiction will find themselves trapped in a culture that demands purity rather than understanding.
The sad part is not that people care about ethics, but that their care has been algorithmically weaponized against them. Genuine compassion has been replaced with reputational fear, and the collective instinct to protect others has been rerouted into protecting appearances. And in that confusion, fandom has lost its intellectual depth, replacing the need to ask questions with constant vigilance.
Piracy, Access, and the Corporate Capture of Culture
Purity culture isn’t limited to morality; it also extends to how people are taught to access art. Lately, a new kind of moralism has attached itself to consumption that divides the audience into ethical and unethical viewers based not on what they watch, but how they watch it. Piracy, once seen as the inevitable and often necessary infrastructure of fandom, has been changed into a moral failure. It’s not just illegal; it’s “**wrong**.” That framing, frequently repeated across social media and reinforced by corporate marketing, has wiped away one of the most crucial principles that built modern fan culture; that art is a public good before it is a product.
Anime, games, and film fandoms all owe their existence to piracy. Fansubbing communities in the 80s, 90s and early 2000s preserved and distributed series that were never officially licensed outside Japan. Like, you had bootleg DVDs, torrent trackers, and streaming mirrors filled the gaps left by distributors who didn’t believe international audiences existed. For a generation of fans, piracy was how you learned about all of this shit. It provided access, context, and belonging long before these companies acknowledged their interest, and yet as those same companies built fortunes on the audiences piracy created, they began criminalizing the behavior that sustained them. Crunchyroll, once a piracy site itself, now pursues takedowns against mirrors that function exactly as it once did. The transformation from subcultural hub to corporate gatekeeper is almost laughable.
The moral condemnation of piracy functions in the same psychological register as purity culture, where it trains users to internalize corporate ethics, and feel shame for seeking access outside sanctioned channels. It teaches people to view scarcity as natural rather than manufactured. Younger audiences who never experienced the pre-streaming internet, often genuinely fear piracy, not because of legal risk, but because they’ve been told it’s an ethical breach. That fear is learned, and it copies the same obedience expected in moral policing; Stay in your lane, consume what’s provided, and trust the platforms are doing it for your best interest.
And of course there’s some bad actors out there, but piracy was never just about stealing content; it was about maintaining. When corporate platforms merge, delist titles, or shutter archives, entire libraries vanish. Crunchyroll’s absorption of Funimation wiped years of community commentary, reviews, and translations. Piracy, for all its imperfections, remains the only reliable system of preservation left. Every time a platform removes a show or locks it behind regional licensing, it reaffirms to me why piracy even exists in the first place. The moral panic around it shows that access is power, and controlling access is how corporations maintain it.
The rhetoric of “supporting creators” has become the moral shield for this control. Look, I get it if it’s an indie film or game, but that’s not what I’m on about. Fans are told that streaming subscriptions or digital purchases help animators, writers, and developers, when in reality most of that revenue never reaches them. The same companies enforcing “ethical consumption” practices rely on exploitative labor conditions and overworked contractors. The insistence that piracy harms artists is about conditioning audiences to see corporate mediation as virtue. It rewrites the act of sharing, archiving, and preserving as theft; another form of moral impurity to be purged.
When you connect this back to the broader ecosystem of fandom, you can see that whether it’s the policing of desire or the policing of access, the underlying logic is identical; someone else decides what is safe, what is right, and what is allowed. What began as communities defined by curiosity have been domesticated into compliant consumers.
What’s Lost
What’s being lost isn’t just a set of behaviors, or even a nostalgic version of the internet, but an entire epistemology of engagement. Being a fan of something once functioned as a site of informal education, where people learned to read subtext, argue, interpret, and understand. They developed literacy in discomfort, learning that art could disturb without corrupting you, a character’s cruelty wasn’t an endorsement of it, and that fantasy and morality occupied different planes. That literacy has completely eroded. Now, to engage with something transgressive requires a public defense of said thing. Fictional violence or eroticism must be justified in advance, often with a political statement attached. The possibility of engaging in contradiction and not being black or white in your thoughts, is treated as moral weakness.
Discomfort is part of the process. People wrote essays, and pieces about why a piece of media affected them. They knew that fiction could evoke identification and revulsion simultaneously, and that a story could expose parts of yourself you didn’t yet understand. That’s what made fandom generative, that shit allowed people to test ideas they couldn’t explore elsewhere. When moral perfection becomes a prerequisite for participation, that experimental quality just disappears. What replaces it is this weird, squeaky clean thing, where everything has to be affirming, safe, or righteous; anything else is suspect.
Another effect of this stuff is cultural homogenization. Fan spaces that once had completely different interpretations of the same thing now produce near-identical takes. Artists self-censor not because they believe their work is harmful, but because they anticipate the blowback, and algorithms reward conformity by punishing deviation. There’s a reason why “stick to your niche” is a saying by creators online, because trying to do something new will make the algorithm completely remove you from it. The landscape becomes one of repetition and fear. The cycle of discovery that once brought new voices into the open is gone, and what remains is an anemic performance of inclusivity that tolerates only the most palatable forms of difference.
Subculture depends on friction, and it thrives on tension between the sanctioned and the forbidden. Fucking hell, you need the freaks and sickos and the degenerates. Remove that shit and you’ve got a sterile hellscape. The early internet, for all its woes, allowed for that friction to exist. You could find yourself in spaces that startled or unsettled you, and that encounter was formative. It taught discernment, and built resilience. When every uncomfortable thought is preemptively policed, that growth is stunted. What you get is a younger generation that is scared to tell the stories and art they create. The internet becomes an mirror to institutional life, where it is governed by moral codes, and risk management.
To lose discomfort is to lose art’s capacity to teach; to lose subculture is to lose imagination. And to lose the right to be wrong is to lose the mechanism through which people learn empathy, context, and complexity. What’s left is a performance, where you have art that mimics the language of justice while abandoning its intellectual core.
Disobedience as Care
If fandom survived as community, its renewal will depend on disobedience. Not the reactionary shit that mistakes being cruel for courage, but the refusal to accept shame as a condition of participation. Reclaiming fandom doesn’t mean abandoning your ethics; it means disentangling them from obedience. It means recognizing that boundaries protect people, not ideologies, and that censorship even when cloaked in compassion, always serves the powerful.
To rebuild this culture, fans and artists will have to relearn older skills that the internet has nearly erased. It requires remembering that not every uncomfortable image is an endorsement of harm, that moral worth is not measured by aesthetic preference, and that fiction is one of the few remaining places where dangerous ideas can be examined without destroying anyone. The goal is not to normalize cruelty but to treat art as a field of inquiry rather than an arena for punishment.
Part of that reclamation involves restoring access. Piracy, archiving, and independent hosting are not crimes against art; they are acts of preservation against a system that treats culture as disposable inventory. Fans who digitize old anime tapes, maintain fanfiction mirrors, or create emulation frontends are not undermining creators are defending history from corporate amnesia. To consume outside official channels is, in many cases, the only way to ensure that the work survives at all. Moral panic about “stealing” obscures the deeper theft; when conglomerates erase decades of creative labor, comment archives, and cultural memory, they are stealing the record of how people learned to love this stuff in the first place.
Reclaiming fandom also requires resisting the psychological infrastructure of purity culture. You have to. That means rejecting the impulse to interpret everything through the lens of safety. It also means accepting that not every depiction needs to align with our moral code, and that our curiosity will sometimes lead us into discomfort, and that discomfort is okay. True literacy comes from confront that, not hiding yourself away. The alternative is people too frightened to engage with ambiguity.
None of this is easy, I know. It demands unlearning habits that the contemporary internet reinforces at every level. Algorithms reward outrage, corporations monetize that fear, and social capital accrues to those who enforce that conformity. To create spaces of freedom within that system is an absolute must. It might mean smaller communities, longer conversations, or art that circulates beyond the reach of mainstream platforms; but those are precisely the conditions under which subcultures thrive. The history of fandom, from zines to torrent networks, prove that creative ecosystems thrive when they operate outside moral and corporate supervision.
Disobedience in this sense, is a form of care; it is the defense of art’s ability to make us think and feel, and it protects the right to grow through friction rather than flee from it. It insists that moral purity is not the same as goodness, and that empathy without courage is just compliance. To reclaim that is to reject the idea that culture should be clean, and to remember instead as contradictory, unruly, and most of all, human.
