Fringe internet cultures escalate to murder-fandom to stay distinct from mainstream

Evidence

As 4chan’s casual misogyny and racism seeped further into mainstream discourse, fringe internet cultures pushed toward new extremes to set themselves apart. One disturbing avenue was the growing fandom surrounding Columbine shooters Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. In adjacent online spaces, mass murderers—from Adam Lanza (Sandy Hook) to Randy Stair (Weis Markets)—were idolized like K-pop stars, complete with dedicated stan armies producing fan art and fiction. As Katherine Dee observed, these killers were “depicted in an anime, ‘chibi’ style, decorated with hearts and glitter, or ‘slash’ pics that imagine shooters in homosexual pairings with one another.” — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 812

Categorization

• XREF: Directly instantiates the book’s central mechanism: subcultural differentiation compressing into ever-more-extreme spectacles as omnivore monoculture flattens the field — core to the reader’s four-period trace. — connects to: Hacker culture is the root of internet culture’s anti-mainstream stance. — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 78; The Internet emboldens fringe believers by confirming isolated views — Michael Barkun, A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic…, 148; the MOC “The Viral Refinery: How Preexisting Fringe Fears Get Smelted Into Mainstream Reality”
• DEEPTHINKING: The killer-fandom phenomenon is the darkest instantiation of the ‘death of the sellout’ logic — the micro-dialectic of differentiation pushed past all ethical bounds, worth sitting with.