A Brief Inquiry Into Offline Relationships

A special Tabs fandom war report.

Surprise! Tabs is still on vacation until Monday but The 1975 and Taylor Swift fandoms are at war, and Tabs Senior Fandom War Correspondent Allegra Rosenberg offered to both explain what is happening and, as a fan of The 1975 and Matty Healy herself, to attempt to represent a point of view that is currently being obliterated in the discourse by Taylor’s horrified but unstoppable fan army. —Rusty

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The 1975 are one of my top 3 favorite currently active bands, while I am neutral-to-cool re: Taylor Swift, so you can imagine the month I’ve been having. Jia Tolentino’s New Yorker profile, I think, is a good introduction and a very measured look at the world of The 1975’s singer and Swift’s newest boyfriend Matty Healy, if you’re unfamiliar. (I especially like the way it factors in his identity as a member of a band, a component part of a larger organism, which I believe is essential to understanding him as a person, but that’s another essay…) 

It’s been interesting, as a self-declared Matty fan, to see things from the outside of the fishbowl. Happily sequestered in my fangirl bubble, in an algorithmically targeted world of other 1975 girlies equally rock-solid in their fan identity (this one literally just came up on my FYP), I have never before been subjected to so many non-fans’ opinions of him. Seeing a man I have cooed over from the cheap seats four times in the past few years declared to be the sexist, racist root of all evil by an army of Taylor fans who heard about him 10 minutes ago has been the digital equivalent of dropping through thin ice into freezing water.