Hulu’s Riveting New Documentary Is a Cautionary Tale for Both Musicians and Their Fans

Erin Lee Carr’s documentary Fanatical: The Catfishing of Tegan and Sara is a gripping internet detective story, recounting and, by its end, proposing a plausible solution to a mystery that has haunted the indie-pop star Tegan Quin for 16 years. But it’s also a story about how the internet has changed fandom, initially for the better but increasingly for the worse. Tegan and her identical twin sister Sara began making music in the mid-1990s, when they were both high school students. But they rose to fame in tandem with the explosion of online fandom, as the specialized culture of Usenet groups was replaced by the entry-level access of web forums and the instant intimacy of LiveJournal and MySpace. To the Quins, who had grown up in the punk scene of their native Calgary, the technological shift played into punk’s ethos of accessibility, allowing artists and fans to connect on an equal footing in a way that had previously been limited to merch-table exchanges and brief encounters. But that intimacy also gave rise to a new form of obsession, whose toxic byproducts are very much still with us. (Just ask Chappell Roan.)

To Tegan and Sara’s fans, many of them young queer women who found solace in their music and community in their audience, it didn’t seem surprising when Tegan appeared to reach out to them on Facebook—thrilling, sure, but not implausible the way it would be if Beyoncé suddenly slid into your DMs. And when this person began to share personal photos and demos of what were unmistakably unreleased Tegan and Sara songs, whatever questions there might have been melted away. Over a period of years, beginning in 2008, the impostor, whom the movie refers to as “fake Tegan,” or simply “Fegan,” engaged in a string of relationships with at least half a dozen fans, growing increasingly personal and, in at least one case, sexual. Fegan knew things that it seemed, at least to people who didn’t know the Quins personally, only the real Tegan would know, like the twins’ current relationship statuses and the fact that their mother was fighting cancer. But she also seemed strangely eager to share unasked-for details, in one case sending a fan a link to a file server that contained photos of the band’s passports, and made excuses whenever the request for physical proof of her existence arose. This Tegan was never in town long enough to meet up, and the guest list was always full.

By the time suspicious fans began to approach the real Tegan’s management, this had been going on for years, traced back at least in part to a phishing attack on Tegan’s tattoo artist. The catfisher seemed to lack the will or the skill to go after the Quins’ finances, but the violation was profound, and it paralleled a steep rise in the duo’s public profile. Their music was growing more popular and more personal, increasing fans’ sense of emotional connection even as they found themselves becoming more distant faces in a much larger crowd. The fans still had each other, of course. But Tegan wasn’t spending hours after shows signing autographs and chatting them up, and opportunities to get close to the Quins were both more regulated and more monetized through VIP ticketing. Both sisters’ romantic partners felt the strain of a scrutiny they had not had the time to adjust to, and an especially virulent subset of admirers rooted for the end of their relationships, or anything that might turn their attention away from the stage.

Tegan’s story is deeply upsetting, and it leads to a confrontation so eerie and unnerving that I had to pause and regain my composure. But the most tragic part of Fanatical is what the impostor’s betrayal did to Tegan and Sara’s followers. Day in and day out, sharing real-life details and emotions in exchange for Fegan’s manufactured ones, these fans formed what they thought was a meaningful connection with someone they’d idolized from afar, whose music had been the gateway to communities, both online and in person, where they felt welcomed and loved. “It’s kind of lonely,” says Jamie, a self-identified “superfan” whose fandom stretches back decades, “so you look for your people.”

And then, their lifeline was severed, that connection polluted. Some of Fegan’s victims say they couldn’t listen to Tegan and Sara for years after they’d been duped, and the friendships they’d formed through mutual love of their music suffered or sputtered out altogether. JT, a bartender who was raised in group homes, says that when she connected with the queer music scene, “it felt like I finally found my people, and my space on this earth.” And although JT was shy when she first met Tegan through a mutual acquaintance, they struck up enough of a friendship that it didn’t seem odd when Tegan started to reach out over email, with JT not knowing that the real Tegan had abandoned that email address in an attempt to shut Fegan down. Their correspondence eventually became intensely sexual, but when JT pushed to meet in person, or even for tickets to a concert, Fegan rebuffed her, a response that was both disorienting and devastating. The hurt was compounded after JT found out she’d been tricked, and aggravated when the real Tegan opted to keep her distance as well, not knowing how to apologize to someone she hadn’t seen in years for something she hadn’t done. For JT, the whole scene felt poisoned, the safe spaces no longer safe.

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Fanatical is structured as a whodunit, but the question we’re left with is a why. It’s about one person’s twisted deception, and the manipulative and vindictive lengths to which they go to maintain it. But it’s also about the rush of instant validation that fame provides, and the way modern fans feel as if they not only share in that but have the right to control it. Connecting with her audience brought Tegan joy, along with the other rewards of success. But now she wonders whether, by greeting concertgoers in line and shooting birthday videos for them, she “opened the door” to what came later. No less a megastar than Taylor Swift forged her fan base in the mines of MySpace, and as recently as a few years back, she seemed to be as online as any die-hard fan, liking posts and popping up in people’s mentions. But like much of the social internet, that sense that you might be able to connect with any star, no matter how huge, if you just hung around the right spaces, seems to be dying off. The loneliness, however, is still going strong.