A Swarm With No Stinger

On Janine Nabers and Donald Glover's new show and what it gets wrong about stan culture

The Internet’s been buzzing this past weekend with the release of Janine Nabers and Donald Glover’s new limited series Swarm. A satirical take on Beyoncé’s most hardcore fans AKA “The Beyhive”, Swarm boasts a stacked entourage of guest stars like Billie Eilish, Paris Jackson, Rory Culkin, Beyoncé’s own protégé Chloe Bailey and even Malia Obama in the writers room. The show promised to be a biting look at celebrity worship and internet stan culture but while it was expertly directed and featured a strong lead performance from Dominique Fishback, something felt missing by the time the credits rolled around the final episode.

In Swarm, our protagonist, Dre, is a self proclaimed Ni’jah stan, the fictional popstar that very (and I do mean very) closely resembles Beyoncé. After the death of her sister, Dre goes on a murder spree, killing anyone who has said anything critical about her favorite artist, whether in person or just online. 

There’s a lot of fun to be had while watching Swarm, especially for the real life Beyoncé fans at home. Notable moments in Beyoncé’s life are recreated to a T. Her second pregnancy, Solange and Jay Z’s elevator fight, the time someone allegedly bit her at a party and more. Some of the best moments in the show is hearing Dre or other characters say something out loud and realizing how cringey fandom culture can look when taken off the internet. A fan screams over a balcony in an Instagram video and proclaims “The Queen is having twins!!” in earnest and you realize just how crazy stans can get.

I don’t mean to absolve myself of fandom while writing this, I am very much a child of the internet. I’ve been interacting with all sorts of online fandoms since I had access to a computer. I’ve seen it all, forums, LiveJournal, DeviantArt, Tumblr, Twitter and more. I've been up close and personal with fandom culture since the mid 2000s and seen how it’s evolved overtime. That’s what was missing from Swarm for me. The aspect of community. When I was trawling through Avatar: the Last Airbender forums at 10 years old, I just wanted to see people like me who discussed the same obsessions I had. 

The feeling of belonging to something bigger than yourself is a big part of stan culture and the omission from Swarm’s narrative is glaring. In the first episode, Dre’s sister Marissa tells her “those are not your friends, those are some crazy ass fans who don’t give a fuck about you” when she catches Dre still tweeting from a Twitter account dedicated to Ni’jah. It’s a shame the show doesn’t take this concept further. 

The mob mentality that encompasses stans is what leads many to go online to harass and bully those who don’t like their celebrity drug of choice. Something started by one stan can multiply to a fever pitch quickly if enough like minded individuals get on board.

Take for example this moment from 2019, where Beyoncé and Jay Z are sitting courtside at a basketball game and quick videos from that event show what looks to be Beyoncé getting irritated at the woman, Nicole Curran, sitting next to her. What could have stayed a relatively innocent internet meme, quickly spawned into hundreds upon hundreds of Beyoncé fans descending into Curran’s Instagram comments, sending her death threats and harassment all in the name of protecting their queen’s honor. Curran ended up deactivating her Instagram accounts after the misunderstanding. Events like this happen often on the internet, with much worse consequences than a deactivated Instagram and some hurt feelings.

We’ve seen the way Johnny Depp stans have used manipulative misinformation tactics to discredit his ex-wife Amber Heard during their defamation trial. Tactics so widespread and effective that you couldn’t scroll anywhere on social media or watch the news without seeing edited Tiktok clips from the courtroom all of last April. 

While of course Swarm is an exaggeration of the real world, not seeing how the other members of Dre’s community validated her obsessive behavior seemed like a true miss. 

Swarm struggles to even justify its stan culture angle. Dre’s trauma from the loss of her sister and the rejection from her foster family leads her down this murderous path but her being a Ni’jah fan just feels more circumstantial than anything else. There’s also no real attempts to delve into Dre’s psyche and explore why exactly she’s such a fan of Ni’jah. Not going specifically into why black women identify so much with Beyoncé in the first place felt like another missed opportunity. 

When Eminem inadvertently invented the term with his song “Stan” in 2000, he told a story about a fan obsessively sending letters to his favorite rapper with no response. The barrier to fans and celebrities has broken down in the past 15 years with the rise of social media, the concept of “stanning” isn’t a one way relationship anymore. Interacting with your favorite celebrity is just one click away. These interactions can help strengthen the parasocial relationship one has with a public figure. These people can feel like our friends. And in turn, many celebrities have weaponized their large fanbases online to further their own agendas.

Swarm doesn’t capture any of the nuance and back and forth that goes into fan and celebrity relationships.

The show works best when it sticks to giving thrills and horror, it’s when it attempts any sort of social commentary that it falls flat. 

I do respect Swarm for purposely keeping Dre’s backstory from the audience though, as if to warn that anyone can become a Dre, an obsessive stan.

The definition of swarm: to move somewhere in large numbers

In the end Swarm doesn’t even live up to its own title.