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Narrative
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Fans of cult shows, films, books, whatever outside the mainstream tend to themselves be a bit outside the mainstream. For want of a better term, let's call them "Geeks".
Now, if you have been reading this Wiki, you know that in TV-land, geeks may be socially inept, but they've all got hearts of pure gold and are basically good people who we all think well of and feel sorry for.
This is not the case in real life. In real life, quite a few of these people don't have a lot of friends and can't get laid because they just aren't very nice people. Let's call them "Jackasses".
After an exhaustive (or, at least, exhausting) survey of fandoms, a pattern seems to emerge about the relative proportions of good-hearted kind geeks to jackasses, and this is Red Shoe's Law of Fan Jackassery:
The jackassery of a fandom is a unimodal function of the fandom's obscurity.
For non-geeks, this means that the proportion of jackasses to normal people sharply increases with the obscurity of the fandom until it reaches a peak, then sharply drops off again.
This observation can be explained thus: for fandoms not-too-far from the mainstream, the fanbase is larger, and therefore its native level of jackassery becomes more representative of the level of jackassery in the population at large. Jackassery is discouraged because the community is large enough to drown out the voices of individual jackasses. As you move away from the mainstream, fandom becomes more geeky, composed of people who are, at best, less normal, and often, less sane.
However, beyond a certain level of obscurity, the size of the fandom drops to a point where it can no longer support an elevated level of jackassery: if the whole fan community consists of six guys in their moms' basements, they just stop hanging out with the guy who's a giant dick. Thus, for example, fans of Vr5 are a really nice bunch of people. Both of them.
Peak jackassery occurs when these forces are their furthest out-of-balance, when obscurity is sufficient that acting like a normal human being is no longer expected of the fans, but the fan community remains too large and diverse to make a unified stand agains the jackasses.
Coincidentally, this peak occurs at exactly the obscurity level of Doctor Who in the USA; in the UK it would be considerably towards the left-hand side of the plot. One Piece in the US and UK, as well, for that matter.
And Fallout .
The drop ends right at the Earth Bound level.
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