Currently, on Urban Dictionary, a stan is defined as an overzealous maniacal fan for any celebrity or athlete, stemming from Eminem’s 2002 hit, Stan. In the video, Stan wants Eminem to make contact with him but Eminem doesn’t reply to his letters and, due to this, Stan thinks he has been ignored. As revenge, Stan ties up his own girlfriend, stows her in his trunk, drives along a rain-soaked highway and drives off a bridge. Eminem gets around to responding and says how thankful he is for the support, only to understand that Stan is obsessed with him and then, finally, to connect the dots and realize that he’s the man who killed his girlfriend.

What many psychological professionals would describe this as is a parasocial relationship. This is not a made up disorder nor an armchair diagnosis, but simply the definition to a relationship many people have with famous figures. Parasocial relationships are one-sided dynamics in which energy, interest and time are extended towards the object of obsession whilst they (commonly a celebrity) remain ignorant of the existence of the other.

But, though critics and think piece writers often frame them as a symptom of young people’s generational rot, behaviours such as this are not new in the slightest. Before the boom of social media, obsessive fans had existed for a long, long time — such as during the Roman reign, where people collected gladiators’ sweat out of admiration; or the Victorian era, when hordes of fans forced author Arthur Conan Doyle to revive his star character, Sherlock Holmes. The Beatles had a superfan plotting to murder John Lennon, Michael Jackson had to prove that he didn’t impregnate a stalker, and Uma Thurman received a card from a fan that had a drawing of an open grave, a headstone and a man standing on the edge of a razor blade.

This is not an exclusively Western phenomenon either. In Korea, this type of idolatry exists heavily within the K-Pop industry. Sasaeng fans are over-obsessive fans of musical idols, to the point that they engage in stalking. According to Yahoo Lifestyle, Korean idols have been filmed, had their phones wiretapped, and even had fans breaking into their homes.

What makes this new era of ‘stalker fans’ different, in my opinion, is the admiration that seems to be growing towards such behaviours. Today, even as a joke, the terminology of ‘stalker fan’ or ‘stan’ has been the latest object of amelioration — where a word’s negative meaning is elevated to a positive one.