High School Fans

Reflect on a time when you challenged a belief or idea. What prompted you to act? Would you make the same decision again?

When I was in middle school and some of my first year of high school I was a fan of a television series who’s target audience was not me or most of the fans in general, the target audience was young girls but I would say that roughly ninety percent of the actual audience was men between the ages of 15-30 and years old, this caused a very large amount of controversy in the community since many people were very worried about these statistics since the popular misconception about these adult fans of a children’s show is that they were pretending to be fans in order to get close to young kids and lull them into trusting them. This was a concern because many people thought of these older men as pedophiles but all these people never truly tried to dig any deeper that the surface to understand that

After many years of being a fan myself I decided it was time to speak up and stand for what I held close. I took it upon myself to inform people of the situation at hand and write on forum pages about why these people enjoy the show and I felt that since I was a fan myself that I could properly convey the message. The message I was trying to tell people is that we shouldn’t be judged simply for enjoying something harmlessly and I would often tell the story of why I specifically enjoyed it and that was simple the fact that it was a Technicolor escape from what was my bitter reality in middle school, which I have repressed most of. In middle school I did not have many friends that I could actually consider close or even trustworthy along with that I was constantly harassed and intimidated by my peers for being overweight and alone so seeing this program on the television about bright colors and the “magic of friendship” I was able to allow myself to feel something other than self hatred and actually feel like I was a part of something.