Monster Fangirl

Hurray! The heroes have captured the murderer and locked him away, and the day is saved.

So why is he getting all this fan mail?

The Monster Fangirl (and this is almost Always Female, though the genders may be flipped) might have the belief that Love Redeems, or she's In Love with Your Carnage (in the worst case), or believes that he's really innocent. If she's aware of his evil nature, it's essentially a form of All Girls Want Bad Boys.

Their fate is usually to be casually discarded, to wind up another victim, or to go to jail for the crimes they commit to aid the Monster, often screaming declarations of love all the way. As a villain is not always redeemed, the woman's deluded attraction to the dangerous psychopath may also be a romantic manifestation of Too Dumb to Live. This will often be a reason to justify the trashiness of Trashy True Crime.

Depressingly, this occurs even in Real Life. In medicine, this is sometimes called hybristophilia, a paraphilia in which one is sexually aroused by the fact that somebody has committed a heinous crime.

Compare Draco in Leather Pants, and to a lesser extent, Rooting for the Empire for when the fandom does it. See also Psycho Supporter, Nightmare Fetishist, and Horrible Judge of Character. For a fangirl of a literal monster in a relationship with one, see Interspecies Romance, Beast and Beauty, or You Sexy Beast.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Death Note:
  • Light Yagami founds over half his schemes on these people. Misa Amane had some potential as a less-polished monster in her own right, as a less brilliant and histrionic psychopath instead of a genius narcissistic one, but decided to slave her entire being to his will on first meeting, and never wavered, and without that his plan to defeat L would never have begun to exist. His final big scheme also relies heavily on Disposable Woman Kiyomi Takada, a college girlfriend turned news anchor whose response to the revelation that he is Kira is not visceral horror but infatuation.
  • The rest of the Kira fans who keep him in names and faces to kill (yay fact-checking!) and cheer and all, and also his eventual right arm Teru Mikami, are a bigenderal hydra of this phenomenon stretching across the world. Even after the Villain with Good Publicity is exposed and declawed and killed, he still has a huge cult. This series is founded upon existential despair.
• Lummy from Fairy Tail is completely head-over-heels with Mad Bomber Jackal, a reflection of how fans became so enamored with him despite how he's nothing more than an irredeemable killer; on another note, she also changed Beast Man Tempester into a dark-skinned blonde Bishōnen to suit her tastes. Deconstructed when her swooning gets on Jackal's last nerve, driving him to blow her to smithereens.
• Jo Jos Bizarre Adventure Stardust Crusaders: Dio has a lot of these. And they're not all girls, either. He has several scenes in his mansion where there are women who willingly walk up to Dio, knowing fully what he needs them for. Hol Horse even finds two blood-drained women laying on the floor later, deeming them "Dio's leftovers." Even later than that, Vanilla Ice declares to Dio that he would do anything for him, even die. Considering there are so many minor villains in the part who cater to Dio and call him "beautiful" and "elegant" and make comments admiring his perfect body.

Comic Books

• Batman:
  • Harley Quinn is the girlfriend of the Joker, an infamous homicidal clown who terrorizes Gotham City. Harley was originally the Joker's psychiatrist at Arkham Asylum until she suffered a major case of Critical Psychoanalysis Failure, being manipulated by the clown into falling in love with him. Harley is insanely devoted to the Joker, despite him being a violent psychopath who is terribly abusive to her.
  • After Harley ditched the Joker for good, the clown prince of crime got himself a new right-hand woman with Alexis Kaye a.k.a. Punchline. A college student who got held hostage by the Joker during an attack on a TV Station, Alexis's infatuation with him eventually grew into an unhealthy obsession as she developed her own Joker-inspired attire and began to randomly poison people around Gotham in order to catch the Joker's attention. The Monster Clown saw potential in her and taught her a modified version of Joker Venom that Alexis tested on the homeless. Punchline finally proved herself to the Joker after she murdered the dean of her college. Additionally, she believes herself to be Harley's Superior Successor and apparently the Joker actually likes her and treats her better compared to his former henchgirl.
• Judge Dredd: The lead-up to the "Necropolis" arc had a rather tragic justified example. After a woman barely survives an encounter with Judge Death, a psychopathic Omnicidal Maniac from another dimension, it creates a psychic link between the two. She basically becomes a smitten fangirl of Death and dreams about becoming his bride. She then helps his allies Phobia and Nausea to cross the dimensional span into Mega City One by sacrificing her husband, for which Death rewards her by ripping out her heart.
• In the first part of the Maximum Carnage storyline, Carnage was in the middle of his latest rampage within the maximum-security facility he had been sent to when to his disbelief, he gained a cheering section. Of course, the fan, in this case, was fellow inmate Shriek, who was almost as sociopathic as he was, but they would become partners as a result.
• Issue 3 of the mini-series Star Wars Vader Dark Visions features a mentally unstable nurse on board a Star Destroyer who falls in love with Darth Vader. Her delusional mind even conjures up fantasies about them straight out of a cheesy romance novel and somehow convinces herself that his every act of murder and violence against a crewman is somehow showing his love for her. It ends exactly how you expect, really, but sneaking into his quarters while he has his armor off is a new kind of stupid.
• In one of his limited series, Venom gains a crowd of child admirers on Halloween (one wearing a Spider-Man costume, ironically) after saving one from a mugger — the fact that he brutally killed the mugger is lost on them. He might have even given one an autograph if the police weren't coming.

Fan Works

• Sabrina in Pokémon Reset Bloodlines is revealed to have been this as a child. At one point, she wrote a school essay about a person she admired. Her chosen subject was Twenty Gyarados Bill, a notorious criminal whose titular Gyarados devastated the coast of Johto and the reason why the six active Pokémon limit was established. While she doesn't deny he's a mass murderer, she tries to highlight his more positive traits, describing him as "a shining example of self-improvement through hard work and determination".
• Male examples: in The Simpsons fanfiction The Yellow Mile, a grown-up Maggie, who is on death row after killing one of the gangsters who murdered her parents, briefly contemplates the number of marriage proposals she's been getting.

Films — Live-Action

• In the opening of Men in Black 3, Boris the Animal escapes from his Lunar Prison when his prison mail girlfriend brings him a cake containing his lethal symbiont. The kill-crazy alien monster thanks her for her aid to him, but lets her be sucked out into space without remorse and goes back to trying to destroy Earth.
• Once Upon a Time in Hollywood shows Charles Manson's fanatical followers, many of whom are female and believe they are in love with him, and all of whom are willing to kill for him. Manson sends four of them—"Tex", "Sadie", "Katie", and "Flowerchild"—to murder everyone in Tate's house, but the plan goes Off the Rails when Dalton hears their noisy muffler and orders them off his street.
• The Petrified Forest: A very rare male example in the person of Grandpa Maple, an old coot who hangs out at his family's gas station in the Arizona desert. He loves to tell the story of how Billy the Kid once took a shot at him, and he is only too thrilled when notorious gangster Duke Mantee arrives and takes them all hostage.
  "It certainly does feel great to have a real killer around here again."
• Downplayed at the end of The Pink Panther (1963) when Clouseau is framed as being the jewel thief The Phantom. He's hauled away to jail but there are legions of screaming fangirls outside.
• In Serial Killing 4 Dummys, Sasha is a Goth girl obsessed with Serial Killers. When Casey expresses (mostly in jest) his ambition to become a serial killer, Sasha encourages him to pursue the ambition for real, and volunteers to be his first victim.
• The eponymous Villain Protagonists of Tragedy Girls are a variation on this trope, a pair of teenage True Crime enthusiasts whose fascination with serial killers and spree killers goes well beyond morbid curiosity into a desire to emulate the psychopaths they obsess over. The film opens with them developing a serious Broken Pedestal concerning their town's actual serial killer, Lowell, who they criticize for his sloppy technique as they kidnap him and plan to make him the scapegoat for their crimes.

Literature

• The Executioner's Song: Gary Gilmore gets arrested for murder and suddenly becomes famous. Shortly after his arrest for murder, Gary writes his girlfriend Nicole and tells her about a sex letter he got from a strange woman. He continues to get fan letters from women as his case becomes a huge national news story.
• The Final Girl Support Group has Chrissy Mercer, aka "Crazy Chrissy". Having been the Final Girl survivor of a killing spree, she went on to sell killing spree memorabilia and run a "murderabilia" museum out of her house in Montana and philosophizes about the relationship between final girls and slasher killers while connecting the slasher phenomenon to ancient Greek Dionysian cults. Her boyfriend Keith may or may not be a Serial Killer. That said, it turns out that she was ultimately no threat, and in fact tried to warn Lynette that Stephanie was the real villain.
• The Harry Potter series has Bellatrix Lestrange, tenaciously devoted fangirl to Voldemort, who (according to J. K. Rowling) is obsessed with Voldemort despite his complete inability to feel love, compassion, or even pity for another being.
• I Became the Villain the Hero Is Obsessed With: Super Villain Egostic has an ever-growing fan club, due to a combination of forcefully broadcasting his attacks, killing supervillains instead of putting them in Card Board Prison, and not actually killing any innocents. On multiple occasions, when Egostic sets up a Hostage Situation, he finds fangirls of his amongst the hostages. Once, a group of them ask for his autograph. On another occasion, the fangirl feigns fear of him, before he asks her when his first attack was and she lists the date, exposing her, all the while his live-stream is filled with messages from women saying they wish they were in her place right now.
• Mr. Monk Gets Even: Stella Chaze, a local woman who had become Dale the Whale's girlfriend during incarceration, plays a part in the story. She creates a massive traffic accident to help him escape, injuring dozens of people and ultimately blows up her house in an attempt to kill Stottlemeyer and Monk (or keep them from getting any information regarding where her boyfriend is) when they come to question her.
• Sissi from Nightfall (Series) has become obsessed with Prince Vladimir, the Big Bad who has destroyed the world and is breeding the surviving humans for vampire food. She's drawing pictures of him and is writing stories about him. She ends up at the Resistance because she's gone on a probably deadly journey to meet him.
• The Parker Pyne Investigates story "Have You Got Everything You Want?" has a milquetoast man arrange the theft of his wife's jewelry as he's being blackmailed over his having an affair years earlier. In actual fact, he didn't even have an affair; a frightened young woman fleeing a jealous husband spent the night in his hotel room, which is enough to cause a scandal, but he's firmly advised never to reveal that, as he's only interesting to his wife if she thinks her love redeemed a criminal.

Live-Action TV

• Baltar's cult in Battlestar Galactica (2003) sheltered Baltar after his trial from the many, many people who wanted him dead.
• In Bones, Serial Killer Howard Epps got married to one of these while in prison. Then he escaped and killed her.
• Several episodes of Criminal Minds:
  • In "Riding the Lightning", the Serial Killer has a horde of fangirls who call themselves "The Brides of Jacob" and deliberately dress up as his victims.
  • In "The Angel Maker", the titular Serial Killer had a number of these. The UnSub is one, while Prentiss and Rossi meet another who tries to follow in her footsteps.
  • In "Devil's Backbone", Psycho Psychologist Antonia Slade has either several Monster Fanboys including the UnSub or just the UnSub using several aliases.
• Gender-inverted in Criminal Minds: Suspect Behavior with Veronica Day's Monster Fanboys.
• In Flashpoint, "Jamie Dee" takes a hostage to steal a police car. It turns out that the "hostage" is one of his fangirls. However, he's not what he seems.
• CSI: The "fiancée" of Nate Haskell in the episode "Targets of Obsession". He has a whole club of Monster Fangirls. This reaches new highs of psychosis in "Father of the Bride", in which fangirl Tina Vincent cackles maniacally at her own capture, and spends her interrogation alternately smiling at taunting the cops with how much better Haskell is than them.
• Dexter:
  • Dexter himself gets a fangirl in Lila, who sees him as a misunderstood creature and her soulmate when she finds out that he is actually a prolific Serial Killer. She turns out to be dangerously insane herself, and he eventually kills her after she tries to kill his girlfriend and her children.
  • The killer in Season 6 gets legions of online fans, plus a pair of fans who actually aid him in a kill.
• In the Frasier episode "The Life of the Party", Frasier, after another disastrous blind date, laments:
  Frasier: Murderers on Death Row can find women to marry them! I can't find one who'll sit through coffee with me!
  Niles: It's easy for those men to attract women, they have all that time to work out in the yard.
• Hightown: Frankie gets a new girlfriend/drug mule in Season 3 named Rachel, a straitlaced woman who is clearly smitten with them, despite definitely knowing that he's a ruthless drug lord. However, as he's also a very handsome and charming man it's easy to see why. Frankie clearly is just using her. She's naive and lonely enough to be seduced easily by him into this.
• Law & Order: Criminal Intent:
  • Kevin Reddick from the episode "Seizure", a death row inmate known as the Motel Ripper, attracted these, including a research scientist he manipulated into committing a copycat killing. Her boss Dr. Buckman set things in motion to exculpate Reddick because his PET scan showed Reddick did not have a lesion in his brain, which would have discredited Buckman's theory about rage killers. The research scientist, on the other hand, did have the lesion.
  • Another episode centers around a recently-paroled killer, who is shown to have his share of "groupies" (which Eames naturally makes a snarky comment about). He's not responsible for the episode's main crime, however.
• Law & Order: Special Victims Unit:
  • The episode "Svengali" features a homicidal artist who has almost a dozen followers who commit murders, as he encourages them to be creative and to impress him. In the end, he gets sent to a supermax prison where he will have no contact with anyone on the outside.
  • William Lewis escapes from prison with the help of a pair of these, one of whom is a doctor, thus showing that this is not strictly a low-IQ trait.
• One of the criminals in Lie to Me (a rapist who blinded his victims) has a Monster Fanboy who is so devoted that he married one of the victims so he could be "close" to what had been done to her.
• Red John from The Mentalist seems able to recruit fanatical followers of both sexes.
• In the Millennium (1996) episode "Lamentation", Lucy Butler comes off as this to Ephraim Fabricant, a notorious Serial Killer she's exchanged vows with over the Internet. To put it mildly, she turns out to be the more dangerous of the two.
• Tiger King: Season 2 mentions that in spite of Joe's incarceration for animal abuse and murder for hire, many gay men across the world have declared their love for him and/or written him letters. Joe describes one in particular as his new boyfriend. The director mentioned that he also received photos of women in bikinis as fan mail, despite the fact that he's gay.
• In Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, the Reverend who held Kimmy hostage for 15 years has a fiancee despite being in prison. Kimmy finds this out when he calls her asking for a divorce (since apparently he legally married her while she was a hostage) and a whole episode revolves around her and Titus trying to convince the woman not to marry him. Turns out the woman is marrying him because of her horrifically low self-esteem; in her words, she's okay with marrying a prisoner because he'll never spend enough time with her to find out how terrible she is.

Music

• In The Beatles' "Maxwell's Silver Hammer", the titular character murders several people with a hammer, but he still has fans.
  Rose and Valerie, screaming from the gallery
  Say he must go free
  (Maxwell must go free!)
• Madame Macabre's "Killer Love" is from the perspective of a woman who's in obsessive love with a Slasher Movie villain.
  I don't care what people say,
  they don't matter anyway.
  Sparks like this you can't deny.
  If you left I think I'd die!
  I hear them shoutin',
  "Run away, run away!
  Ooh, that boy's a sin!"
  But I just can't help it,
  this killer love,
  killer love's gonna do me in.
• Frank Zappa: "The Illinois Enema Bandit" is about a real-life criminal who gave his female victims enemas. When sent to court "one girl shouts: "Let the bandit be" and another one shouts: "Let the fiend go free."

Stand-Up Comedy

• Bill Hicks' song "Chicks Dig Jerks" addresses this, name-dropping Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun, Charles Manson and Squeaky Fromme, and the fact that women actually tried to get dates with serial killer Ted Bundy after he was caught.
• Chris Rock: "You get more respect comin' outta jail than school..."

Theatre

• In Assassins, Squeaky Fromme speaks of the apocalyptic preachings of mass murderer Charles Manson, remembering how they met and declaring herself his lover and slave. She believes that by assassinating Gerald Ford the authorities will be forced to release Manson from prison, at least temporarily, to testify at her trial.

Video Games

• Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony has the Big Bad, Tsumugi Shirogane. This person is a huge fan of Danganronpa (yes, the series. The Hope's Peak saga is fictional in the V3 universe, and has quite the fanbase), to the point where they try to re-create the original Killing Game, complete with Monokuma overseeing everything.
• Hellen Gravely from Luigi's Mansion 3 towards King Boo. Despite being a ghost herself, she constantly fangirls over the way more monstrous king, and her room in the hotel is covered in his face.
• While Satan from Puyo Puyo can hardly be considered a monster, he's still loved dearly by Rulue. Often she'll find herself gushing about his many qualities she sees as attractive. He doesn't feel the same way about her.
• Played With in Ratchet & Clank: Up Your Arsenal. Courtney Gears constantly flirts with Dr. Nefarious, and willingly participates in his vendetta against organic life forms. However, she's much more psychopathic and sadistic; while Nefarious does have his noble moments like saving Qwark and giving Lawrence paid paternity leave, Gears takes advantage of her fame as an Idol Singer to kidnap and torture her fandom for fun and pleasure, and is willing to destroy ~80% of the universe's population out of xenophobia.

Web Comics

• Tsukiko to Xykon in The Order of the Stick. She regards him as a hottie and devotes herself to him, thinking someday he'll grow to love her. Unfortunately, he doesn't care about her feelings. When she dies, he hardly has a reaction to it.

Web Video

• CollegeHumor's "If Google Was A Guy" had Google getting angry at one of these.
  Fangirl: Boston bomber.
  Google: *nodding, grabs folder* It's a real tragedy.
  Fangirl: Cute one.
  Google: *throws folder* OH FUCKING SHIT!

Western Animation

• Inque in Batman Beyond had a male version. He helped her escape and tried to become like her. She pays him back for his help by giving him a halfway-working solution. He becomes something like her, all right.^{what happened?} When Inque gives him half of what made her that way he becomes oddly shaped with enormous hands, too big of ears, and a huge Mad Eye. He can't talk, can barely move, and needs a caretaker to watch over him. Just like Inque.
• Dilbert: After being convicted for the death of a busload of Nobel Prize winners (an accident that actually been caused by the Pointy-Haired Boss), Dilbert quickly discovers that life in maximum security is surprisingly enjoyable — he's got a large, furnished cell to himself, including an internet connection, and gets a ton of fanmail from women who finds his murderous reputation a turn-on.
  Dilbert: You know, I'm actually innocent.
  Guard: Yeah, but I wouldn't let that slide if I were you. [winks]
• Kid Cosmic: Fantos the Amassor is a male example. He's a Psychopathic Manchild enamored with Erodius the Planet Killer and the destruction it causes, going so far as to collect various memorabilia of it— including various Stones of Power, which are the remnants of the planets it has destroyed.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: The Reveal at the end of School Raze, and the first confirmation that Cozy Glow is not what she seems, is the revelation that she's been secretly sending letters to Tirek in Tartarus, and conspiring for her own plans.
• The Simpsons: In "Pranksta Rap", Bart fakes his own kidnapping to avoid being punished after sneaking out to a rap concert, and ends up accidentally implicating Milhouse's dad Kirk Van Houten due to hiding in his apartment, and some very unexpected competence from Chief Wiggum. It ends up benefitting everyone involved; Bart gets off scot-free, Wiggum is promoted, and Kirk loves prison, as he gets three meals a day, and conjugal visits from "Springfield's craziest chicks".
  Lindsay Neagle: You've kidnapped my heart!
• Villainous has Demencia, a Loony Fan of Black Hat who keeps breaking into his lair and trying to help with his product demonstrations.

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