[If you’ve ever been in a fandom space — yes, even stan
Twitter — the last thing a Black woman gets away with is even the
hint of violence or anger.]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

DONALD GLOVER’S SWARM IS ANOTHER PIECE OF FANDOM MEDIA THAT
DEHUMANIZES BLACK WOMEN  
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STITCH
March 23, 2023
Teen Vogue
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_ If you’ve ever been in a fandom space — yes, even stan Twitter
— the last thing a Black woman gets away with is even the hint of
violence or anger. _

, QUANTRELL D. COLBERT/COURTESY OF PRIME VIDEO

 

_In this op-ed, pop culture and fandom writer Stitch explores Donald
Glover's_ Swarm _and how it portrays fandom and centers Black women.
Spoilers ahead._

What would you do for the love of fandom?

As more eyes turn to analyzing fandom and creating content around the
experience of being a fan, more media are focusing on extreme forms of
fandom. Gone is the idea of fandom as pure utopia, where people come
together to talk about and bond over their interests. Instead, movies,
TV, and articles are taking a closer look at the ways fans have become
more and more devoted to their fannish objects in ways that risk
harming themselves _and_ other people. 

The premise for _Swarm_ — a horror/thriller
series(-within-a-series) on Amazon Prime created by Janine Nabers and
Donald Glover — is all about the extremes a deep love of fandom can
lead vulnerable people to when coupled with severe trauma. The
series’ main character Dre (Dominique Fishback) is an awkward young
Black woman whose love of the fictional pop star Ni’Jah (who Glover
and Nabers admit is inspired by Beyoncé) provides her with emotional
strength in times of trauma… and gives her confidence that allows
her to commit great acts of violence. While the show has its high
points in the way that Dre’s instant, _violent_ reactions make
her a “female rage” icon
[[link removed]] on
par with Mia Goth's _Pearl_, its weak points are clear in how the
show portrays fandom, and in the misogynoir that permeates Dre’s
characterization.

Let’s start with the fandom stuff.

All but one of the show’s seven episodes — the one set up to look
like an episode of  _48 Hours_ — opens with white text against a
black background that reads: “This is not a work of fiction. Any
similarity to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events, is
intentional.” In an interview with _The Hollywood Reporter_
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Donald Glover calls the series a “post-truth TV show” that’s
based on “true events.” What are those true events? I can’t
actually imagine them. The intentionality is obvious, but the
combinations of unrelated Actual Persons + Events to paint stan
fandoms as exceedingly awful — in ways no other fandom could ever be
— is… alarming. Especially because some of the inspirations for
what Dre does across the series _aren’t_ true/actual events done
by actual people, they’re rumors
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that didn’t actually happen
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Or they didn’t happen the way the show lays the events out. In
episode three where Dre bites her idol Ni’Jah? That’s something
that happened… allegedly between Sanaa Lathan and Beyoncé
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as a result of stan Twitter fandom gone wild. Attributing that
behavior to fans on a show with that kind of “everything here is
true/has happened” tag before every episode makes it sound as if
it’s something a fan _has_ done. It misrepresents the behaviors
and environments in these spaces and gives these fandoms — spaces
that can be incredibly toxic in parts — a worse reputation than they
have for things they haven’t even done.

I write about and research the ways that fandom behavior —
especially in spaces populated by marginalized fans — can become
incredibly toxic and harmful to fans, journalists/critics, and the
creators or celebrities responsible for fandom. However, the only
major deaths I can think of in (relatively) recent history
are Yandere.freak allegedly shooting her friend while drunk
[[link removed]], Christina
Grimmie’s 2016 murder by a man suspected of being an obsessed fan
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double murder-suicide that occurred within Andy Blake’s fandom cult
[[link removed]]. In idol fandoms,
there are things like NGT48’s Mano Yamaguchi being assaulted by
intruders in her home
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Yunho being poisoned by an anti-fan back in 2006
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This is not to diminish the horror of extreme fandom behaviors, but to
point out that when fans act out to anything barely approaching
Bataillean extremes of fandom… it’s newsworthy. When Barbz go
after a pop culture columnist
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Corden has to apologize to the fans of the biggest boy band in the
world
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mentioning that he’s received death threats from said fans
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those things are news. A murder because of fandom? Multiple murders?
Those would be _everywhere_.

Heightened reality is part of television, of course, but it’s also
important to look at which narratives are dramatized like this — and
who the eventual portrayal hurts or helps in the long term.

Why focus on a Black woman as the source of fannish violence when we
have documented proof of what male sports fans and nerds get up to
when they’re angry enough? The fact is that while fandoms are
increasingly terrible, singling out stan Twitter (and only one version
of it at that) to build your “aren’t fandoms scary” show around
feels… short-sighted. This is not to say that I think any “female
focused” fandom is above critique or reproach. I’m
the _last_ person to have that thought, and I’ve got articles like
this one on weaponized white womanhood in fandom
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prove it.

However, as I watched _Swarm_, what stood out to me was the way that
the initial press framing the series as “fan(dom) gone wild” a)
might have missed the point of this show about a traumatized Black
woman giving into rage, trauma, and desperation and b) ignores the
ways that fandom _as a whole_ inspires people to some level of
extreme behavior in order to center what they love the most.

Black women in fandom have always been underrepresented, if not
outright erased. Even though there's nothing about us that is less
fannish than anyone else, our contributions to and existence within
the fandom spaces we've always been in have been erased and ignored.
The only times when Black women are acknowledged as being part of
fandoms are in situations where the fandom in question is incredibly
toxic or our identities are used against other people to validate a
stance. In the fandoms for Black women celebrities like Beyoncé,
Nicki Minaj, and the fictional Ni’Jah, Black women make up the
majority of the fanbases. And unfortunately… stan Twitter has a
reputation
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toxicity and digital violence.  Fellow fans, people viewed
as anti-fans
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journalists, critics, and even celebrities themselves — including
the fandom object — can all come under fire from stans upset at the
way that their celebrity of choice is being perceived. But the
aggression rarely if ever makes if off of these mean Twitter streets;
although doxxing and dogpiling are increasingly common, for the most
part it hasn’t escalated to the point of any of the violence that we
see onscreen in _Swarm_.

Even though _Swarm_ is an incredibly well shot, beautifully acted
television show, its decision to center the narrative on a frenzied
Black woman fan feels both unrealistic and unfair. It feels as though
the character is being assigned this history and behavior set that
doesn't mesh with what Black women's fandom, even stan fandom, looks
like. It doesn't help that despite the Black women working on the show
at every angle, Donald Glover's misogynoir
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through. 

In a recent _Vulture_ interview
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Glover said that he told Fishback not to find the humanity in her
character and to, “Think of it more like an animal and less like a
person.” If that’s how you’re thinking of your Black female
character and how you urge her performer to act, that explains the
shape of the series. In the same piece, co-creator Janine Nabers
compares Dre to Scarlett Johansson’s alien character in _Under the
Skin_. For both, Dre’s humanity isn’t the point, and they don’t
see it as present. They _want_ the watching audience to do the work
of humanizing Dre, not the actors. The only problem? That’s not how
fandom reacts to Black female characters. That’s not how a lot of
people react to Black women _period_.

As I watch and rewatch the show, I keep thinking about the “whys”
behind it. Why fandom? Why Black women? Why Dre? Why the endless
Beyoncé references? I know that part of the goal is to show Black
women as something they've never been shown as before in pop culture
— as gratuitous, gory, violent killers. Some of Nabers’s
commentary about the show makes it clear that she thinks that Dre is
supposed to be empowering in some way, describing Dre (“the
character I wanted to write for a long time”) to _Vulture_
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“so profoundly settled in her ideology, gives zero f*cks, and is
going to get the job done.” 

In this same _Vulture_ interview, Nabers insists that despite
Dre’s actions, “this is a love letter to Black women.” I don’t
understand how. _Swarm_ doesn’t validate Dre’s rage or
effectively delve into her trauma to make her scary but sympathetic.
It doesn’t give Black women an “unhinged” character that’s
validated or justified by the narrative the way unhinged white
characters often are. On top of that, it turns a tight, biased lens on
a fictionalized version of Beyoncé’s fanbase, one that
we _know_ is heavily populated by Black women and other marginalized
Black people.

A lot of the pushback against criticism of _Swarm_ centers around
the fact that the show has Black women behind and in front of the
camera
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Nabers even says it herself in the _Vulture_ interview when
journalist Sam Sanders brings up how an immediate response
to _Swarm_ will be “Donald Glover hates Black women.” In
response, Nabers says “it’s silly to say that” because Glover
hired her, he hired and cast other Black women, and this is a show
about Black women. Except… that doesn’t mean the misogynoir has
left the building. Misogynists work with women all the time. Donald
Glover, who has a pretty public
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very weird
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Black women, works with Black women. That doesn’t mean that he
likes, understands, or respects them, and hiring a few isn’t
actually enough to undo or distract from the way Dre is portrayed in
this show _or_ how Glover has talked about her.

Ultimately, _Swarm_ is a lot like what I think HBO’s _The Idol_
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be like: an external POV about something the creators don’t really
have direct interest in or understanding of. There are incredible
moments across this show that had me on the edge of my seat, true, but
there’s something about the show’s portrayal of Dre that is
unsettling beyond her brutality. Co-creator Nabers keeps bringing up
how underrepresented Black women are in the serial killer game
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idea that they’ve “fallen through the cracks” is present in that
episode with the true crime bent). 

However, there’s a huge difference there. For one thing: there’s
no accounting for misogynoir across this work. People
left _You_ thirsting after Penn Badgley’s character to the point
where he had to tell them to chill out.
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life white male serial killers become thirst objects for the darker
parts of true crime fandom. Black women — real and otherwise —
aren’t assigned even a tenth of the humanity and desirability that
these white men are… even before the serial killer thing comes into
play. 

I went into _Swarm_ expecting something like Satoshi Kon’s film
adaptation of _Perfect Blue_ or Rin Usami’s _Idol, Burning_…
work that understands the extremes fans go to and humanizes them in
the process of exploring how fandom shapes their actions. Despite the
promise of the first two episodes, I ended my time with the series
thinking “Wow, these folks really don’t _get_ fandom, huh.”
And that’s mostly because of the way they claim Dre’s violence,
fueled by fandom, is glossed over _because_ of her Black womanhood.
If you’ve ever been in a fandom space — yes, even stan Twitter —
the last thing a Black woman gets away with is even the _hint_ of
violence or anger.

Black women aren’t allowed the “luxury” of violence. We’re not
allowed the empathy offered to people who actually harm others, so why
would we be allowed to hurt people over _fandom_ of all things?
While I got a kick out of Dre being able to do something I couldn’t
— I can’t even curse about people trying to get me fired over my
work on fandom without being accused of abuse — it rang hollow
because I know how Dre would be treated not just in her fandom, but in
her life. 

A world that doesn’t take care of Black women when
they’re _good_ sure as hell wouldn’t miss the chance to punish
one for committing serial murders across the country. The fantasy
falls flat.

* swarm
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* prime tv
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* fandom
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* Black Women
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