Fake-admiration criticisms weaponize imagined lost fandom to force justification

Evidence

A subtly perfidious form of hate comment, which is, however, sometimes also used by trolls as an introduction, has the form: “I have always admired you so far, but now I am deeply disappointed in you.” Especially towards artists, the recommendation to rather concentrate on singing/acting/writing novels or similar in the future and to refrain from political or social comments often follows. If one has the opportunity to check this (for example, on fan pages in social networks), one usually finds no indication that the person in question has actually shown any interest in the supposedly so revered idol before. Obviously, the aim here is to trigger remorse about supposedly lost fans and to provoke a justification. In fact, however, such a justification is likely to be of little use – neither to a hater nor to a troll. — Holm Gero Hümmler, Ulrike Schiesser, Fact and Prejudice, 337

Categorization

• SEED: Angle: the ‘disappointed fan’ gambit as a rhetorical tactic — how manufactured reverence is deployed to extract self-justification from public figures.