Fan. n. An enthusiastic devotee or admirer, as of a sport, entertainment, performer, etc)
On this planet, there are millions of fans who turn into their favorite soaps to closely follow the lives of the characters embodied by many talented actors each and every day. These people may have just begun their journey into daytime, or may have been following the stories for years, decades even!
How one chooses who their individual favorite character or story may be as simple as whoever is in the spotlight the most, or it may be who they find the most physically beautiful. The latter is probably the biggest reason. However, each show has their way of selling to you who they want to be the biggest star and subsequently give them the most airtime, the most interesting storylines and publicize these people through several forms of media.
After deciding whom your favorite soap star is, the next step is learning the most about this character/actor as you can. If you ask around, you can probably even be directed to an official fan club by searching the Internet. The Internet is mostly a very useful tool. If you decide that you would like to follow this actor, you join his/her fan club and wait to hear from people as enthusiastic as you. You wait, you wait and wait. If the actor is pretty new to your favorite story the wait might not be as long. You see, stars that have been around longer have pretty much a tight knit group of their favorite fans that inadvertently discourage newcomers.
Most new fans are so enthusiastic! They dream of the day that perhaps they get to shake the hand of their favorite star and possibly even be photographed with them. These are also the fans that try really hard to show their enthusiasm to the other fans. These fans, especially the ones who have been on the “King's court” and consider themselves to be “close personal” friends of the actor, get responses to emails and posts from the message boards on the web site that tell them to “give it a rest, drop the attitude.”
These poor newcomers' hearts sink, as they feel that these people who are so “close” to their favorite star have just punished them for their enthusiastic following. They shy away, but still they visit the web site that encourages everyone to take part in all of the projects to promote their favorite star, donate money to his/her favorite charity, but don’t, whatever you do, send any gifts to the star! The star has been given so many presents that he/she feels “overwhelmed” and would just rather you give to his/her charity. Again, your heart sinks, as you may not have enough money to make a worthy donation. After all, you saw how much tickets were to the star's last charity event and would have had to forgo a mortgage payment or not buy groceries for a month or two to even dream about planning a trip to this event.
Moving on to reading soap magazines. Ah, the favorite past time of all fans: scouring the Soaps in Depth or Soap Opera Digest for articles, photos or questions about the character or actor. Some even scrapbook every article. You’ve got to have a hobby, and this one costs very little. So scouring the magazine, you see how all of the other stars keep promoting themselves by appearing across the country at various comedy clubs, but it’s been a year, and you never see your favorite star visiting any place close to you. This leaves you asking, why? So you may chose to go back to the web site to see if there is anyone there you could ask.
Still eager to see any photo and event that your star has attended, you click on photos from the charity event that cost an arm and a leg to attend, and you see the handful of fans who were able to attend a lunch with this star and have their photo taken with them. Again, your heart sinks as you begin to feel hopeless that you will never be able to see for yourself how “approachable, nice, down to earth and compassionate” that everyone proclaims this star to be.
Eventually, you decide that this star must not care as much as “they” say and you make the decision to turn the channel to the other network, or hop the fence to one of their co-stars web sites who actually get out and meet their fans! For now, I guess there’s just no room at the inn for new fans. They must have developed the web site just to show others that they could.
Giving credit where it's due, they’re all very lovely web pages: applause!
