I recently saw someone online tell an egregious lie about my friend, who met her now-spouse in a somewhat sensational way at an orgy and subsequently had a child with him. This person falsely claimed the friend had gotten pregnant at the orgy (the pregnancy came later, and was planned) and was raising the child alone (they live together and are engaged).
An interesting thing about this confabulation is that it was probably de novo. My friend is quite public about her family’s origin story and has blogged about it. That she is a single mother, or that she became pregnant at the orgy, are not common falsehoods in circulation. I was, in real time, watching someone make things up to get mad at. And I thought, “Wait, this is bashing.”
Bashing sounds like a relatively generic verb for hating on something, but in Harry Potter fandom in the 00s, it was a specific, neutral term for portraying a character as irredeemably bad. Writers would be upfront in the summary or the intro that their story contained “Ron bashing”, which meant that they’d turn up all the bad qualities Ron had in canon, make him do so much extra bad stuff for good measure, and then bring him to justice within the story. At times I found this pleasurable, and at other times I was too irritated with both Ron and the author to continue.
I did not go out of my way to read bashing fics, so I would often go straight from reading a fic where Dumbledore was an evil manipulator who had orchestrated every bad thing that had befallen Harry to a fic where he was a chill guy. There was nothing incoherent about this – it was all play.
(At this point it seems useful to make clear that Harry Potter is the largest fanfiction community ever, with well over a million works, and widespread phenomena therein are not microtrends.)
In retrospect, bashing prefigured a lot of behavior I see online. It doesn’t explain the behavior, since it’s just another instance of the same category. But it’s a “purer” example that isn’t confounded by real life stakes. That people do this with fictional characters means they enjoy harassment for confabulated harm for its own sake. It’s not just that people trip into lying about their enemies because they are so angry about real life harm caused by those enemies. Some of them would also do this for fun, for its own sake.