I can think of so many examples of this. Charles Manson, Bonnie and Clyde, the unabomber, the columbine shooters, Elliot Rodgers, etc. all of these people were violent and did horrible things, yet despite this… well actually no, it’s almost like BECAUSE of this, they all have their own little fanclub of admirers… it’s weird.
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Bad people exist. Bad person does something other bad person likes- boom- Bad person Fandom.
A google search found this as a top hit: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/wicked-deeds/201409/why-serial-killers-become-celebrity-monsters-in-the-media
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I’m gonna take a more general approach then some other commenters have taken so far with disparaging everyone involved in these fandoms.
All the people you listed as examples have done some terrible things that not many people would ever dream of doing. There’s a kind of morbid curiosity that a lot of people feel around individuals like that. A need to know why they did the things they did.
Hearing those stories and listening to them speak satisfies that craving of knowledge and some people become obsessive with it. Others see parts of themselves in these people and put them on a pedestal in order to work through and/or avoid those conversations about themselves.
Not really an ELI5 but it’s the best way I can put it from my criminology/psychology/sociology classes rn
TL;DR, people agree with them on some things and since “they’re the only people that are saying it” they end up “agreeing on all things.”
People became unironic fans of 2019’s “Joker the character” because they saw a lot of themselves and their frustrations in Arthur Fleck/Joker and his struggles against a society that is “rigged against him.” A lot of the fan rhetoric around Ted Kaczynski/Unabomber that I hear is based on his “reject the technological dystopia and return to a life off the grid,” is very similar to that of Joker fans because they too are frustrated “with what technology has done to humanity.” A lot of memes I see are “news head line of technological advancement making humanity worse” and there’s a translucent Unabomber mug shot over it to say “this is what Ted was warning us about.” How much is ironic meme humor and how much is genuine agreement? Hard to really say but that’s what one sees from the Unabomber fandom. The Columbine shooters “were outcasts and weirdos, fancying themselves as edge lords,” and a lot of teens feel that way and say “I know kids just like Dylan and Eric.”
Let’s take a President, for example. This is supposed to be someone that a whole country can look up to. Most of the time, the President does good things and people prosper. But twice in a lifetime, along comes a racist, bigoted, misogynist, rapist of women and little girls and all of a sudden, those types of people have someone to look up to.
The more awful that President is in public, the more those awful people see it is apparently publicly acceptable now to also be openly, publicly awful people. So they do. And they all band together, doing whatever their awful role model shows them they can do or outright tells them to do.