The double-edged sword of posthumous Michael Jackson fandom

Discovering Michael Jackson long after his death, and in the full shadow of the allegations against him, is a double-edged experience – one edge sharper than the other.

I missed out on decades of real-time thrills: new albums, tours, performances, televised moments, the exhilaration of watching him reshape pop music. For me, he and his music arrived pre-framed by the world's treatment of him and his decades of suffering.

When lifelong fans listen to MJ, I imagine they hear not only the music, but the echo of who they were and what they felt at the time. I don't have that. Although I listen to him every day, my listening experience is weighed down with the painful knowledge of what happened to him, with no nostalgia to balance it out.

Lifelong fans, of course, still grieve him, but their grief came after decades of joy, and was shared within a community that understood the loss. Mine arrived at the same time as his story – and I faced it alone. The result was an isolating grief that was new to me, but old news to other fans. Only later did I learn that there are others who arrived at MJ fandom through Leaving Neverland and were compelled, like me, to look closer rather than turn away.

Experiencing everything at once – the exuberant brilliance, the trailblazing, the cruelty, the allegations, the ending to his story – produced an emotional storm, with no time to absorb one aspect before being dragged straight into another. It was difficult to come up for air.

The second edge to late fandom is the perspective it offers beyond the fan community. A common rebuttal to his advocates is that hero-worship clouds their judgment, however encyclopedic their knowledge of the facts that scream his innocence. I looked into the allegations with no emotional investment in my conclusions, yet the deeper I looked, the clearer his innocence became.

There are many fans who know the facts far better than I ever will, and fight tirelessly to disentangle his legacy from the shadow of false accusations. Though I burn with the same sense of outrage and injustice as other fans, I'm a different kind of advocate, whose perspective may reach those who dismiss lifelong fans as biased. And I do believe that in my lifetime it will be commonly understood that he was the victim of false accusations, and was not the weirdo the media painted him to be.