I Just Watched Love Island USA For The First Time… And I’m Scared
Written by Sharon Hamza
with additions by Daphne Bryant
Every time a new season of Love Island is announced, I sigh and prepare for six to eight weeks of defending Black women like my life depends on it.
Love Island USA wrapped its seventh season a few weeks ago, crowning couple Amaya Espinal and Bryan Arenales as its winners. After the overwhelming success of season six in 2024, season seven saw a significantly large increase in national and international viewership. I have watched Love Island UK seasons ten and eleven, but I never really tuned into the USA version (partly to show love for my country wheyyyy fish and chips). Prior to watching season seven, I thought I’d had enough experience in the online Twitter (aka, X) battlefields.
Oh girl, was I wrong.
Reality television thrives off of its audience and the discourse they create online, but the show itself and the fans at home still coexist as two distinguishable spaces. Love Island is no exception to this, and social media has become an integral feature of how the show progresses through fan voting. However, the newest American installment saw the online space become much more negative.
People having opinions online about a show is certainly not a mind-boggling phenomenon, but forming fan spaces centered on contestants before the show even airs is very... interesting to say the least! After the first two episodes of the show, there were already factions created amongst the Love Island fans: those in the“ Huda camp” and those in the“ Olandria camp.” This is a classic example of stan culture wherein people develop parasocial connections to public figures they particularly like. We saw this go further with the“ Nicolandria” craze, as netizens shipped contestants Nic and Olandria together even though their primary interactions for a while were make-out sessions within challenges. Fans also grew increasingly fond of Amaya (dubbed“ Amaya Papaya”), creating videos defending her rocky start to the show. All of these behaviors are arguably common practices of the average Love Island fan.
However, this season, we saw instances where the toxicity of stan culture permeated through positive discourse, souring the watching experience for many fans. As a franchise, Love Island has come under intense pressure for not sufficiently protecting and defending cast members from online hate and abuse, which has resulted in the untimely deaths of contestants Caroline Flack, Sophie Gardon and Mike Thalassitis. This season, the Love Island team made efforts to release anti-bullying statements and ward off unnecessary hate towards the cast and crew.
Still, a lot of Love Island“ fans” create spaces founded on hate. A particularly disturbing occurrence was an image created by those claiming to be fans of Huda, depicting her and Olandria’s faces over the tragic murder of George Floyd. That alone shook me deeply, a callous and overt intention not only to spread hate towards Olandria, but also Black women and people as a community.
Black women often become the target of online abuse within reality TV discourse. Contestant Catherine from Love Island UK season ten faced an onslaught of racial abuse when she returned from Casa Amor with Elom, instead of sticking with her Villa connection, Scott. Despite playing the game how it was intended to be played, she was harassed for her decision.
Black women weren’t the only ones targeted in Season 7: islander Cierra Ortega was kicked off for saying a slur directed towards the Asian community (and don’t even get me started on Yulissa Escobar). The fact of the matter is, racism is interwoven in the DNA of this show, and the casting directors, producers and social media team are doing a horrible job at combatting it. I mean, how many times are we going to let racist men mooch off of black women in the pursuit of clout? Justice for Justine, Zeta, and Jana please (IYKYK).
On another note, within a franchise such as Love Island, where the online perspective is a key feature of the show, there are times where the fans begin steering the narrative. In some cases, this provides a satisfying experience for the viewer as seeing their voices heard makes them feel included in the narrative being displayed before them. We saw this in the widespread reaction to Nic and Olandria (finally) becoming a couple, much to the delight of the Nicolandria fans. Nonetheless, this becomes an issue when the fans fail to recognise that the people they are watching on TV are just that: people.
The excitement of reality TV often makes viewers forget that beneath all the over-exaggerated production and carefully curated scenes, there are real individuals, not the figureheads of a new online fandom. This new season saw the creation of different names for these different fans, fragmenting the collective and assembling oppositions.
For me, it was a fascinating sociological event, as is most reality television. But this season packed a heavier punch, knocking my nerd-tinted glasses to the ground, forcing me to wake up and realise that Love Island isn’t an experiment. It’s a cast of real people, whether their objective was to find love or to just go on a free holiday.
Love Island is truly an immersive experience, but it's up to the viewer to decide how deep they go. Sometimes it’s for the best, but it’s often for the worst.
