i think you’d like this, the message read. Attached was a screenshot of a sketch of Adam Lanza, the 20-year-old who took the lives of 26 people at Sandy Hook Elementary School, in 2012. Twenty of those people were children.

The timestamp was 3:00 a.m.

When I didn’t respond, the user, whose account name was just a string of letters and numbers, clarified that it wasn’t their art. They weren’t much of an artist. Maybe I had seen the picture before, they speculated. They weren’t trying to steal it. They had seen it on Tumblr earlier that day and it reminded them of me.

They kept messaging me, a stream of consciousness:

do you think adam would read your blog
adam was on tumblr
have you seen it
you should write more about him tbh

A link to a Reddit thread titled “Adam Lanza’s Tumblr?”
A video edit of Adam Lanza playing Dance Dance Revolution.

lol i can imagine you being into DDR
was DDR big when you were younger
you’re adam’s age

A YouTube link to a song, “PISTOL IN MY POCKET.”

you kind of fell off

i used to read your stuff

now you just tweet

tweet

tweet

tweet …

nobody responds to you

And then, finally:

do you like andrew blaze?

Around 7:00 a.m. that day, I accepted their message request, and asked, “Why do you think I’d like that picture?”

The user deleted their account three days later. They never responded to my question.

Earlier that year, I had reported on Adam Lanza’s YouTube channel a series of despairing monologues against a black background about his feelings of isolation and disgust with culture. Notably, Lanza’s ire wasn’t directed at “degeneracy,” or “the modern world,” now familiar refrains from angst-ridden young men on social media, but rather culture itself.

Lanza positioned himself against those he called “culturists,” a term he used to describe people who uncritically accept culture as a construct. He eventually turned against values altogether, calling himself a “eulavist,” riffing off of the fringe philosophy “efilism,” an outgrowth of antinatalism that argues that it would be better if life—any life—did not exist.

My interest in reporting on these videos was simple: There was more to the story than we had gotten from mainstream reporters, none of whom had—in the decade since Sandy Hook—explored Lanza’s digital footprint. It seemed obvious to me that his YouTube videos might offer clues about the motivation behind one of the most heinous crimes ever committed in American history. The investigation culminated in a podcast, and finally, an essay about what I saw as a pervasive nihilism among all Americans, not just perpetrators of mass casualty events.

I receive dozens of “crazy” messages a week about my writing and from all sorts of people. Many of them are from people who feel seen by my work, in more and less troubling ways. Many of them are also deliberate attempts to provoke me. They want to scare me, either for laughs, or as punishment. How dare I intrude? How dare I observe them? Whether I’m actually doing so or not, my reputation is that I watch people.

Not too long ago, a 20-something fan of a popular far-right internet personality saw me in a space on X and requested to speak.

“You just lurk around!” he screamed, his voice cracking, like a toddler shouting, “I hate you!”

Many of the senders are angry teenagers or young adults, upset with me because they think I am trying to empathize with them when they’ve deliberately put walls up to keep people like me out. Normies. They believe I’m claiming to speak for them, or that I have “special” insight. And whether they’re a part of a subculture I’ve written about or not, their message to me is that I don’t get it and I never will.

These messages, as pointed or alarming as they can sometimes be, rarely upset me. This is the nature of the type of writing I do. In some ways, to be an internet culture reporter is an invitation for these types of “shit tests.”

But for some reason, the person who messaged me about Lanza—the sketch—sticks with me. I wonder, though, if the stranger saw my attempt at sober journalism as fan art and not proper reporting. If my amateurish style—if my own lack of carefulness—made it seem less like an attempt at a serious investigation, and more like I was cryptically telegraphing that I was one of them. I wonder if I did something wrong.

Whenever I think about it, I stop being about to think about anything else. It gives me the kind of anxiety that only seems possible in the face of physical danger—but not because I thought the sender was dangerous. It makes me anxious because I think I made a mistake. I wonder if I minimized something horrible in my reporting, and it keeps me up at night. I wonder if there is a good reason not to explore the minds of monsters like Adam Lanza. What keeps me up at night is the fear that I didn’t make it clear—enough, or even worse, at all—how much my heart breaks for the victims and their families. That my compassion was with them and only them. If I owed them something more.

I want to apologize, but I don’t know to whom, where, or how.

This video of Randy Stair for instance, reads like a tribute video to a dear friend who has passed away. The creator has ripped one of Stair’s YouTube videos—Stair had a prolific YouTube presence—where he is reading an old diary entry. The video is set to “Cry,” by Cigarettes After Sex, a song that’s typically used on TikTok to denote bittersweet nostalgia.

“Middle school sucks!” Stair declares in his theater kid inflection.

The top comment, from a user named REB (itself a reference to Columbine shooter Eric Harris’ online handle), reads: “i miss her sm i really wish she just would have gotten help because if she did, she’d still be here doing amazing stuff rip Andrew i hope my sweet girl is in a better place.”

Though plausible, it’s unlikely that the REB who commented on TikTok was a friend of Stair’s or that the video creator knew him personally. The commenter doesn’t miss him so much as yearn for him, in the way we yearn for boy band heartthrobs or even fictional characters. It’s reminiscent of how Stair himself might have yearned for the world of Danny Phantom, the animated universe that inspired him but which he could never truly be a part of.

This intense yearning is common in fandom culture, often taking on an almost occult quality. Fans may try to channel fictional characters or real people in a mystical sense. Some practice “reality shifting,” performing meditation and visualization practices to “move timelines.” Others subscribe to “multiverse theory,” imagining that on another timeline, in another universe, they are united with their fixation.

You may have also noticed that REB refers to Stair as “she,” a reference to limited, but compelling, information that Stair was struggling with his identity as a transgender woman. In this writing of the story, people suggest that Stair may not have murdered his coworkers if he had transitioned. These types of posts and comments are typical of what’s known as the true crime community (TCC), also referred to as the true crime fandom—or, in an attempt to poke fun at themselves, the true cringe community.

Other posts are less mawkish and more irreverent: that surrealist internet humor we often ascribe to Zoomers but that is really more endemic to fandom, or perhaps just the internet itself. On my Tumblr dashboard earlier this week, I came across a post which compared various school shooters to animals from the toy collection Littlest Pet Shop (LPS). This type of playful art isn’t out of the ordinary in this fandom, or any other one. You may see fan art where school shooters are depicted in an anime, “chibi” style, decorated with hearts and glitter, or “slash” pics that imagine shooters in homosexual pairings with one another.

On Spotify and YouTube, you’ll find hundreds of playlists with titles like: “the shooting at my school,” “ACADEMY MANIACS!” “a.l.,” “zero hour,” and “columbine high 1999 x3.”

They’re meant to convey different things.

Some of them are “soundtracks” to text-based role plays, a sort of collaborative storytelling popular in fandom spaces. Others are designed to put you in the same headspace as a particular shooter, not during the shooting, but rather, what the playlist creator believes their emotional world might have been like. The songs tend to be a mix of the creator’s personal taste and the taste of whichever murderer they’re fixated on. You might find a mix of KMFDM (famously a favorite band of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold), Brenda Lee, Chappell Roan, and whatever song is trending on TikTok that month. Foster the People’s so-called school shooter anthem, “Pumped Up Kicks” almost always makes an appearance.

To put their behavior in the context of fandom, compare what I’ve described to the One Direction transformational works, a fandom term which means derivative content that significantly alters or reinterprets the original material, described by internet culture reporter Kaitlyn Tiffany, in her book Everything I Need I Get From You: How Fangirls Created the Internet as We Know It:

It sometimes takes the form of playful disrespect, and you can’t always understand it by taking it at face value. Its practice takes many forms, some of which could reasonably be described as mutilation, and from the outside, it might not even look like love at all.

The One Direction fandom, as I experienced it on Tumblr in the early 2010s, was playfully vicious and much grosser than you might expect. The images I remember best were surrealist—sometimes creepy or disgusting.

Primarily composed of preteens, teenagers, and adults in their early 20s, TCC fans treat school shooters and serial killers not as criminals but as characters from their favorite movies or novels. They aren’t just characters—they are characters these kids have a strong parasocial relationship with, whom they empathize with, whom they adore, whom they “miss” as though they are people they personally know.

TCC and the more mainstream true crime fandom do crossover because both are products of the 24-hour news cycle. They are the logical outcome in a world consumed by the ever-encroaching mediatization of everything. In both fandoms, crime is to be consumed, dissected, transformed, and remixed. But it’s only TCC that features the stickers, the glitter, the hearts, the stray references to K-pop, anime, Taylor Swift, and cartoons.

It is clear from the very beginning that TCC is a space for big, teenage feelings, and ultimately, teenage catharsis and looks like other more intimate, more adolescent, fandoms.

The labels and tags change; the community migrates away from platforms and back to them; they retreat to Discord servers and group chats, away from prying eyes like mine. There are periods of time when they are moderated out of existence. Unsurprisingly, they evade easy categorization, which means it’s sometimes tough to determine if they are breaking terms of service by glorifying murderers.

But are they? Sometimes yes, sometimes no.

Fans in TCC have fraught relationships with their fan objects, often simultaneously repulsed by and adoring them. The first time I saw the acronyms DNI, or “do not interact,” and DNC, or “do not condone,” was in TCC. These acronyms often serve as guideposts: They don’t endorse violence, even if they play with it in their posts. They DNC murder. If you are pro-violence: DNI.

There is a tension: a deep, unrelenting love for these figures while many members recognize that what they did was wrong. The greatest tension lies in the fact that, like the Star Wars fan who doesn’t acknowledge the prequels, many members of TCC seem to discard the endings of these shooters’ stories altogether.

Like most online communities that operate on the fringes of acceptability, TCC doesn’t like being seen. Certainly not by journalists and academics, who either pathologize their behavior or bring their spaces to the attention of “trolls, feds, and posers,” as one former TCC member described it. Or to the platforms themselves, who may be ban-happy. And since a significant part of the community are minors, they’re keen to keep their involvement hidden from their parents. Archival efforts are inconsistent, primarily undertaken by a handful of academics and reporters.

And so the full story of TCC may only be able to be told through an oral history.

People who chirped away on AOL chat rooms in the wake of Columbine; members of the famous Shocked Beyond Belief forum, of which Adam Lanza was a member; private subreddits; the first wave of #hybristophiles on Tumblr; members-only Discord servers and Telegram channels.

Their collective memory is the only place this history is housed.

As Judith Fathallah, in her book Killer Fandom: Fan Studies and the Celebrity Serial Killer, a comprehensive exploration of the part of this fandom specifically interested in serial killers, points out, “Fandom of serial killers is older than the term ‘serial killer,’ and has actually been one of the most publicly visible forms of fandom historically, from Victorian hawkers selling bottled dirt from murder-sites as souvenirs to media moralizing over the contemporary sexualization of Richard ‘The Night Stalker’ Ramirez or Ted Bundy.”

There’s well-documented and well-known historical precedent for this type of behavior. For as long as there’s been the concept of “crime,” there have been people who consume that crime as entertainment, and as a result, there have been fans.

Even the more fannish expressions, the expressions that feel inextricably linked with both the rise of celebrity and the proliferation of television, aren’t particularly novel. Incels, who themselves sometimes have a fannish, half-ambivalent relationship with the 5-foot-9-inch college student who killed six people and injured 14 in a mass shooting in Isla Vista, California, Elliot Rodger, “ironically” referring to him as Saint Elliot, love to point out:

Women are so shallow, they’ll show interest in a murderer like Ted Bundy before a man under 6’0”.

However, this type of fan engagement seems different from that of the women who wanted to, and in some cases did, knowingly sleep with serial killers like Ted Bundy. Members of TCC aren’t united by their letter-writing efforts to prisoners any more than K-pop fans are united by their attempts to contact Korean pop idols. It happens, and it can happen in big, explosive ways, but it doesn’t define the community.

To them, these murderers are, as Ryan Broll describes in his 2018 paper, “Dark Fandoms: An Introduction and Case Study,” characters.

According to Fathallah, turning murderers into “characters,” as though in a work of fiction,is something that the media, to some extent, has already done. TCC just takes it a step further.

The members of TCC are a mixed bag of people who identify with them, people who want to be with them, who think they could have saved them or been saved by them, and people who feel some combination of both.

It’s too late, though. The space for school shootings already exists in our collective imaginations.

The school shooter, just like the serial killer before it and increasingly the groomer or pedophile today, is an archetype. These archetypes serve as symbolic vessels for societal fears and anxieties.

“Goths don’t exist anymore,” I often see older millennials lament on social media. But they do: TCC members are contemporary Goths in a world defined by hypermedia consumption, the revolving door of “current things,” and a forever “culture war,” which has defined Gen Z’s and Gen Alpha’s childhood and young adulthood as much as the “war on terror” defined mine.

The school shooter being an archetype doesn’t mean that its role in our lives is straightforward. It’s an archetype we have a deeply ambivalent relationship with.

On the one hand, TCC is a community that’s steeped in “edgelording,” or deliberately engaging in shocking or controversial behavior online to elicit strong reactions from others or to appear edgy and nonconformist. They reject socially sanctioned ideas of what it means to be cool, embracing what mainstream culture has maligned instead.

Some corners of the community borrow and adapt memes from the more explicitly white supremacist fringes of the online right. In self-described “toxic” TCC Discord servers, 12- and 13-year-old kids post racial slurs with reckless abandon. They share stories about how they talked about wanting to “gas the Jews” and “TND” (“total N-word death”) at school and then snicker about the reactions from their classmates and teachers.

They embrace mental illness, but not in the carefully constructed, DEI-tinged language you see in Instagram advertisements for direct-to-consumer ketamine, with their calls for “self-care,” and “treating” oneself, or the “special snowflake” register that’s so often the butt of conservative jokes. Their mental illness makes them evil; bad; rotten to the core.

They’re racist and have borderline personality disorder and deserve nothing.

On the other hand, every now and then, someone will pop up and demand other server members respect their neopronouns, or their “headmates,” an entirely online word for one’s alternate personalities, as depicted in dissociative identity disorder. In a recent, and quite bizarre incident I witnessed, someone demanded that all Zionists be booted from a server otherwise devoted to role-playing young men famous for killing 6-year-olds.

This jarring juxtaposition of extreme offensiveness and demands for arbitrary notions of respect speaks to their immaturity. They are a product of their time and, viewed through the lens of teenage rebellion, the absurdity of their language makes sense. They are resisting the dominant culture while still deeply intertwined with it.

They are kids.

This immaturity is underscored by the communities that TCC intersects with, like #edtwt (eating disorder Twitter), #shtwt (self-harm Twitter), #obstwt (obsessive love Twitter), and #988twt (suicide Twitter). It’s at once sincere and insincere. Fathallah describes the culture as “semi-ironic,” and “deliberately evasive.” She goes on to say, “Irony seems present, yet it’s difficult to pin down and define. The emblematic phrase of this tone might be the statement ‘Ha ha just kidding ... unless?’”

In a talk for the Association of Internet Researchers, Dorothy Vickery proposed that memes around school shootings might also be a way for young people to cope with the violence our culture expects students to be waiting for. Like the rape survivor who tries to process her attack through consensually violent sexual encounters, the fascination with school shooters may also represent an attempt to understand and process the incomprehensible nature of such tragedies.

As if they are saying, “I’m not scared. I accept that life is like this. I have control, now.”

She sent me a long voice note, almost 20 minutes in length, where she described how and why she got into TCC.

“My school made me this way, man,” she confesses at one point in her message.

Her classmates bullied her for, in her words, “being a tranny,” and called her a “school shooter.” She felt like her classmates were daring her to be violent, to embody the stereotype. She tells me she did not lash out, nor did she want to lash out in that way. She almost hoped somebody would shoot up her high school (a feeling shared by many of her online friends in TCC), though, because it would vindicate her.

It would show that not only did her classmates “deserve it” because of their cruelty, but that she wasn’t the monster.

“I wouldn’t have cared [about the people who died].”

This constant comparison, this incessant declaration that she was a school shooter, paradoxically attracted her to TCC.

“Dylan Klebold is literally me,” she says, her voice lighting up, “I love talking about Columbine, I love talking about Columbine because they were so sincere. It was this sincere thing!”

She can barely contain herself.

“Cal Gabriel’s monologue in Zero Day,” she’s effusive now, referring to a movie loosely based on Columbine popular among TCC members, “That’s me!”

Mass casualty events speak to the emotional reality of being a teenager. When we’re teenagers, our feelings are so big and the reality of our lives are often so small in comparison. The violence of a school shooting gives teen angst the gravitas it feels like it deserves: It offers catharsis. And when a school shooting is “just” a story, a piece of modern folklore, why not use it?

In other words, the extreme nature of these events mirrors the intensity of adolescent emotions, providing a framework for understanding and expressing overwhelming feelings that may seem disproportionate to everyday experiences.

It is also a fantasy that is shaped by our media environment.

I myself am a high school dropout. I give all sorts of reasons about why I left high school: I wanted to do online school instead, some convoluted story about how actually it helped me get into a better college than I would have had I graduated conventionally, the occasional meek admission that I wasn’t really “getting anything out of it.”

But the truth is, I was weird.

I was weird, and I was unlikable. When I think back to the person I was then, I wouldn’t have liked me either. The weight of my unlikability finally started to suffocate me. I had to leave, I couldn’t be confronted with it anymore. My sister once remarked on the way high school colors my view even today: “Heaven for you is probably going back to high school, but everyone likes you.”

On my last day of junior year, a kid threw a slushy at me out of a moving car. I decided then and there that I could never, ever, go back. And I didn’t.

I understand the reality distortion downstream of that kind of teen angst, the kind of teen angst that makes you gravitate toward darkness, whether it’s playacting satanism or being a Goth or becoming a member of TCC. But I also understand that when you’re weird, weird like that, it’s very often your own fault. And eventually, you become addicted to being disliked.

I think back to L.I. saying her classmates made her like that—made her like what, though? The status of “victim” when you’re bullied in school is complicated. Kids are vicious, but then we’re fooling ourselves if we believe that all bullying is wholly undeserved, some random tragedy of the cosmos. What is too painful for many of us to face is that bullying is a social corrective, and the bullies who take it too far are themselves punished.

This disparity in social aptitude—because that’s what it is, ultimately—is often revealed in the comments section of TCC video edits. There are people who know why Randy Stair doesn’t deserve our sympathy, even if his sadness was real, and there are people who don’t.

Several times I cried while watching the more sentimental TikToks. I cried when I watched that video of Randy Stair reading aloud from his old journal. I cried when I read the creator’s other captions, each one reaching out to a friend who exists nowhere but their own mind.

I imagined some faceless adolescent, teen angst personified, thinking they’ve found someone who truly understands them, only for that person to be stuck in the computer, or worse, their own imagination. The impossibility of trying to pull someone from the ether, the harried cry of, “Why can’t I bring you into the physical world?”

It’s not just the content, though, it’s the form.

The form manipulates you into forgetting what you’re watching. You forget that these are school shooters. For a brief moment, they are just teenagers, teenagers you see yourself in. The ethereal instrumentals; the sullen teenage monologues, both ripped from real-life shooters and movies, like Zero Day; the way cinematic scenes are created with filters and cuts.

The fan art of TCC can evoke a sadness so true-feeling and so heavy it makes you feel sick. Almost as sick as you feel when you come back and realize what you’ve been crying about. That you’re not feeling something for these people in particular, that it’s a trick of storytelling techniques, of form, of media, of setting dialogue to evocative music—and you need to be alert. The feed will try, but you cannot allow it to hypnotize you.

Even the more absurd content, like the anime drawings, have this quality to them. They give the impression of lost innocence even more than they do the evil that is inconsistently and incoherently acknowledged in TCC. It was not lost on me that the only gory or overtly violent images I saw were of self-harm. Rarely did people post crime scenes, unless they were trying to be deliberately provocative.

L.I. at some point suggested that the members of TCC “liked” violence, even if they didn’t know that they did on a conscious level. But TCC isn’t saturated with violence for its own sake, or naked sadism. It exists, but at the chaotic, nihilistic fringes.

Our media environment enables a great deal of cognitive dissonance, the same kind of cognitive dissonance you see in more traditional forms of true crime. A true crime story might be sad, but it’s sad in the way a sad movie is—you are still, ultimately, consuming entertainment. This is in its own way true of TCC: Though the content is a symbol for pain, that pain is one-dimensional. It calls for the viewer to focus inward.

Members of TCC are often distanced from the reality of murder, from what should be natural responses to them. How could they feel the real weight of these events when everything is introduced to them as “fiction”? This is a quality that seems to be intrinsic to most internet-native media, a theme I’ve seen repeated as I’ve conducted qualitative interviews with people about their internet usage habits.

Every now and then, I’ll see the fog clear as people talk to me about their media consumption, and they’ll be struck with revulsion: How did I become this way?

They fall down the rabbit hole, and only realize they were falling once they’ve hit the ground.

“You got lost in cyberspace,” I’ll tell them, “You forgot that you had a body, and so you didn’t feel things the normal way we’re supposed to feel them.”

Fathallah writes of Lionel Trilling’s 1972 lectures on sincerity and authenticity, “specifically, the location of the authentic in a form of insanity that defies all social restriction in favor of total self-realization [...] conflating ‘authenticity’ with some received idea of the id drive.”

To me, this is a much more compelling explanation than the idea that people will create communities wherever they can. There’s a quote allegedly posted by Adam Lanza that circulates in these spheres, something he apparently left on a YouTube video about pro-anorexia: “It is the human desire to belong to something in a world where there is nothing for most people to belong to.”

That is how the most charitable views—including, at one point, my own—framed TCC.

That’s part of it I’m sure. We’re all “bowling alone,” as it were.

People will find identity and community when and where they can, and this is one that offers not only the opportunity for rebellion, but coolness. But even more than looking for belonging, or social and cultural capital, they are looking for catharsis.

TCC is what that looks like in a mediated world. It is why TikTokers post videos of themselves crying in their cars. It’s not because they’re narcissists, or they want fame and fame alone. They can only understand and experience their emotions, and by extension, themselves through media depictions. It is not enough to cry: You must cry with yourself, through the screen. It must be a TikTok, or a tweet, or a micro-blog.

The attraction to fame is similar. Fame gives your life meaning. It’s not about being “great” for greatness’s sake alone. Fame says that your time on this earth was worth something.

You are not just noise, you are a signal.

L.I. shares a poem with me, one she tells me is her favorite, and implores me to include it in this article. “It’s incredible,” she says, “It’s emblematic of everything in a way that goes beyond explanation.”

It’s from the movie Zero Day:

I am my own bullet.
I live my life perfectly.
A parabolic arch of meaning,
purpose.

This is what it practically, actually looks like for everything to be a fandom. Everything is fandom because everything, and therefore, everyone is media. And the only way to truly live in a world first consumed by media, and next, consumed by capitalism, is fandom.

“Cut them some slack, whatever you do,” that’s how L.I. ended her message to me, “They’re teenagers, and they don’t know what they’re doing. It’s the people who are twenty-plus, who should be over their teen angst, that you have to worry about. What’s wrong with them? How are they still doing something this retarded?”

Though her message was somewhat flippant, L.I. underscores that there are real dangers.

Fathallah describes members of TCC as “relatively powerless,” in the framework of fandom. What she’s referring to is the inability of TCC members to directly influence the subject of their fascination—their fandom. Unlike TV fans who can petition showrunners to change a storyline, there is no equivalent for TCC. She writes, “Witness the Fifty Shades of Grey machine. The day when some form of slash fic reworked for traditional publication secures its film deal may well be on the horizon (by the time this book is published, it may have happened). Serial killer fanfiction, by and large, is not publishable in any traditional sense, and not recuperable by the convergence culture industry except as fodder for clickbait articles.”

In other words, TCC’s user-generated content can only be exchanged within the community. Because of the nature of their work, there’s no pathway for this content to be “legitimized” through traditional media channels.

But there’s a darker possibility: that the few people in TCC who do go on to become criminals themselves are the “media producers.” Their actions, not merely their consumption, transform the “text” of mass casualty events.

And so violence escapes containment from fan fiction by the few consumers who become, in effect, authors.