Fandoms tend to contain countless groups of fans who join together because of their specific view of their subject. Within the Tom Hiddleston fandom, there are two main groups: ‘Hiddlestoners’ and ‘Screaming Fangirls’. Whereas a Hiddlestoner may appreciate Tom’s looks and watch all of the films or television shows he has starred in, a ‘screaming fangirl’ is most likely to turn up at film premieres and public events, screaming their adoration for him. A Hiddlestoner can be a screaming fangirl, there’s nothing stopping them; but screaming at someone because you ‘love’ them, is not an acceptable reaction in the eyes of the media. The problem is that these fangirls give the Hiddlestoners a bad name. An example of this is when a couple experienced a swarm of screaming fangirls, outside the Donmar Warehouse, after a performance of Coriolanus that Hiddleston starred in. They described the crowd as ‘thick, [...] the smiles unblinking, and it really did feel like we were one Hiddleston-nipple away from somebody getting trampled to death.’1 This has a negative impact on Hiddlestoners that aren’t as extreme,as the internet merges the stereotypes into one. McRobbie suggested that media like this causes women to look critically at themselves, when they should be free to be a fan of whoever/whatever they like. Unfortunately it also leads to fans questioning whether or not they want the world to know that they are a fan of Tom Hiddleston for fear of being stereotyped in such a negative way.
1 N/A, 2014, The dark side of fandom, 2/01/14, Observation Deck, [Online], [Last accessed 30th April 2014], Available from: http://observationdeck.io9.com/the-dark-side-of-fandom-1514042157
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