| Summary: | In this article, the author focuses on the subversive and oppositional side of fans by examining, via three years of online ethnography, a digital network formed on YouTube around the phenomenon of school shootings. Taking into account the self-produced content and digital exchanges of a sample of 81 fans and 142 videos, thematic analysis of media participation shows that school shootings are a means for individuation. School shooters are admired for the ordeals they endured and the ways in which they managed to overcome these hardships. Fans’ participation in such networks allows questioning the limits of moral principles, assigned social roles, the meaning of life mirroring death. In these regards, the fan figure is an innovative form of self-realization related to the promotion of subversive and anomic prescribed values. Simply, the reverse side of this figure highlights the paradoxes and limitations of contemporary injunctions to individuation. While these fans emancipate themselves through a phenomenon of violence, beyond good and evil, according to modern day manners where one must rely on a personal moral compass, fans believe they have the power to shape their lives modeled to their ideals. They project a self-referential definition of themselves self where no price is too high to pay to gain complete control over their lives.
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