“…Much attention when it comes to popular culture, fandom, and its role in political engagement on social media has been focused on right-wing aligned phenomena such as #GamerGate, which has focused on games as a political arena that were debated by fans and those trying to gain the political approval of fans and has contributed to the rise of the alt-right (Bezio, 2018), or QAnon, which has been suggested to illustrate how "political party allegiance can operate as a fandom" (Reinhard et al, 2021(Reinhard et al, , p. 1153. Generally, popular culture increasingly works on all levels of political discourse-from teenage fans to seasoned politiciansboth as a vehicle to discuss politics on social media (Wurst, 2021) and as the "battleground" of "the new culture wars" which constitute a "post-millennial spin on the extreme partisan polarities of the 1980s and '90s" (Proctor & Kies, 2018, p. 127). QAnon, #GamerGate, and many other such instances have commonly been described as consequences of and contributors to the new populist movements (Bezio, 2018).…”