Weathering the storm: Grief and fan identity following the loss of a fan object.

Abstract

In our increasingly media-saturated world, it has become more important than ever to study not only people’s relationship to active media objects, but what happens to such relationships once the object ceases to be active. This research aims to foreground fans’ experience of grief following the loss of the object of their fandom, and how this grief is in dialogue with their identity as a fan. Specifically, it takes the experiences of overseas fans of the Japanese idol group Arashi, who went on an indefinite hiatus at the start of 2021, as a case study. Working under an interdisciplinary theoretical framework bridging psychology, media, and fan studies, this research finds that fans’ grief initiates a threefold transformation with regard to their identity: it (a) reconfigures their relationship to the fan object, (b) reshapes their view of fan communities, and (c) prompts a reassessment of their identity as a fan. Findings highlight how fans take deliberate actions to cope with grief across all dimensions of their fan identity, challenging the view of fans’ grief as passive and superficial by illustrating the concrete and complex ways in which fans’ grief transcends mere emotional distress to become an impetus for identity work and transformation. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)