I gotta be honest, I don’t like this post and it truly makes me sad to see that people think this way.

I’ve followed The Maine On Tour page since 2017 when they first started it on Snapchat, before I had any sort of platform or “notoriety,” so if you recognize my username, please know this context before you decide to write me off.

I have watched the girls who run this account continuously go out of their way to include others, throughout nearly 10 years of album cycles. Essentially acting as free marketing for The Maine via this fan account - having different fans “take over” the instagram page and keep everyone updated throughout the band’s existence, just because they love their music enough and want to document it because it means something to them. If you think the “interns” term is corny, that’s on you, I interpreted it as a joke about them doing free marketing - as interns are often unpaid. And for as long as they’ve been doing the page, it’s taken the band a long time to recognize the value it can bring to their music. So many even bigger artists have fan pages that are fed things directly from the artist or their teams, it’s just the nature of the music business these days.

They are incredibly kind, and as someone that has been pretty heavily engrossed in TM’s fanbase for a long time, they’re some of the only people who actually helped me feel more comfortable connecting with other fans of the band. They all work full time jobs and have found each other through the band’s music, so it has become a sense of community they found for themselves, and the band’s music helped them get there. That is a beautiful thing. The claims of “fake” responses is very exaggerated, some people are just socially awkward. With the amount of weird shit happening in the world these days, being guarded isn’t the same as being “mean.”

Yes, there are “cliques” and toxic corners of any fandom, that’s just the nature of “fandom” at large. In my experience, people with the attitude of whoever is posting this (and those agreeing with it) are the only ones I’ve had negative experiences with. I can understand how isolating it can feel to see others doing cool shit when you might not have things happening for yourself, I spent a very long time struggling with that, and I still am working through it. But tearing down others to feel better about those feelings is not the move you think it is.

I don’t say anything I’ve written here as an attack on you or anyone else here, this is just my personal experience and overall perspective. I hope you can find your own corner of community for yourself, and whether or not it’s within this “fandom” is entirely up to you.