ABSTRACT
Despite media and academic presentations of celebrities predominantly as loved and admired idols, doted on by their fans, famous people are not always the subject of admiration and love. In some extreme cases, audience members are not lovers but 'haters'. Contemporary fan studies are often described in terms of the acknowledgement of fandom as 'a common and ordinary aspect of everyday life in the industrialized world' and important for fans' identity construction, which results in investigating fandom as part of our everyday lives. One difficulty in researching anti-fans is finding them as they do not typically set up clubs or organize conventions. Reactions are selected for analysis when they contain negative expressions toward celebrities, resulting in 2,893 anti-fans' reactions. The chapter aims to contribute to the body of fan literature by focusing on the under-researched phenomenon of anti-fans by means of an analysis of online reactions to celebrity gossip.
