I can't believe I actually have to say this, but no, I do not want to "hang out" with or otherwise befriend any of the medieval queens except in the sense that I would be very interested in seeing the minutiae of their daily lives up close and personal.

Critical distance, however, is something that comes up quite a lot in musicology and other media-oriented fields and I would strongly encourage anyone who is interested in this topic to investigate those discourses before dismissing other scholars' work.

There's a long tradition of musicologists disavowing any pleasure in the musical works we study, because being a fan of an artist was and is seen as disqualifying. This despite the fact that many of us experience aesthetic pleasure in the works we teach and research.

Of course, there's a difference between enjoyment of a musical work and authorization of or endorsement of the artist, especially if they are particularly problematic or harmful in some way.

This is a problem that students often confront with great difficulty, by the way. "Is it okay for me to like [artist] even though they did or said something terrible?" is a question that comes up a lot both in the media and in the classroom.

Monarchs, royals, and politicians are not usually artists in this sense. But there are worlds of cultural production that swirl around them, particularly on social media, so I don't think that raising the discourse of fan culture as comparable is out of place here.

Can you plausibly be a fan of someone you know to have been hugely problematic, perhaps even harmful or criminal? Many people are. I think it's interesting that we expect "more" from scholars.

I also think it's a gross oversimplification to conflate casual expressions of interest in a historical figure on Twitter or other social media with genuinely being that figure's fan or, to use a massively problematic term, "stan."