Essay On Fanboys

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Michael Stainbrook
Star Wars in American Culture
5-1-14
Term Paper
Fanboys
What is it that characterizes people who love a series of film, fiction, video game, video game console or any other works of the like to be deemed the all-encompassing term of “fanboy?” Fanboys are most known on the internet for passionately supporting their particular fandom and therefore consequently denying all forms of logical argument to support their claims, or better yet, known simply as “trolls.” So whenever you jump on reddit.com and see a particular post about how PS4 is better than the Xbox One, you can see that there is clearly going to be a large fan-boy war over which of the two consoles is better. But why is it that we as fan-boys seem to take anything that criticizes our particular series of interest as a deep and personal wound? Why do we feel the need to argue with someone else because they do not feel the same way that we do about our certain object of idolism? And how does all of this pertain to Star Wars in American Culture? In this paper I will discuss how about what constitutes a fan-boy, some of the psychology behind fan-boys and how all of this pertains to Star Wars.
Thorin Klosowski from lifehacker.com defines a fan-boy as “a fanboy (or fangirl) is someone who defends their favorite phone/politician/city/OS/game/console/genre/etc. while attacking everything else” (Klosowski). Thorin goes on to say that the fanboy puts their complete blind trust in whichever side that they have chosen and then stubbornly sticks to that side. He also goes on to say how this is not only obnoxious to everyone around us, but it also means that we tend to attack ourselves to a certain series or brand and possibly lose all critical thinking choices wh...

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... it for the fear of negative emotions related to loss if our investment of money or time wasn’t “worth it.” The Choice Supportive Bias theory explains how we create false realizations about our purchases, consequently tricking our brain into viewing our purchases as the best on the market. Star Wars is a multibillion dollar franchise that has had a major impact on our different aspects of culture in today’s society. One of those aspects is fanboys. With such an overwhelming amount of Star Wars fans it is undeniable that Star Wars has had a huge impact on the way we identify ourselves with other like-minded individuals who make up memberships of our fanboy community. Finally, Star Wars is only one example of how fanboy culture has been influenced by a popular film. And for all of us who tend to identify with Star Wars fan culture, J.J. Abrams better not screw it up!

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