TWITTER queen Lady Gaga affectionately calls her brood of fans “Little Monsters”; they in return swear fidelity to their “Mother Monster.” Rihanna, currently the most popular woman on Facebook, with more than 45,000,000 “likes,” enlists her troops to serve the “Rihanna Navy.” Katy Perry, who this year matched Michael Jackson’s record of having five No. 1 songs from the same album, has her litter of “Katy Kats.” Then there’s the rapper Nicki Minaj, who labels her female fans “Barbs” (after the Mattel doll) and her gay male fans “Ken Barbs.”

Bradley Stern, of MuuMuse.com, says, “You can still be in on the joke” and be a fan.

The umbrella term for these new subsets of super fans, who devotedly discuss their idols’ merits across the Internet, is “stans,” a nickname cribbed from the Eminem song “Stan” that appeared on the rapper’s “Marshall Mathers LP” from 2002. In the song, the M.C. tells a fictional tale of a fan named Stan who becomes so maniacally obsessed with Mr. Mathers that he murders his girlfriend and kills himself by the track’s end. Now the term has been playfully appropriated to describe a new breed of celebrity zealot for the digital era: an impassioned believer who may spend days crowing about how flawless a favorite artist looked at a party for an energy drink, or refuse to admit that a lyric was flubbed on “The View.” Ask stans why the artists they champion failed to make a dent on the iTunes chart this week and risk an online threat.

“Stans are a built-in support system,” said Tamar Anitai, the managing editor of MTV’s Web site. “They are very much aware of how the public sees this person, and they are here to protect him or her.”

Colloquially, the term can be used as both a noun (“OMG, I am the biggest Rihanna stan”) or as a verb (“Mexico is stanning so hard for Britney Spears right now”). There are also a slew of popular Twitter hash tags (“Is it sad I’ve been thinking about Beyoncé almost all day at work? #stanproblems”) and even a Web site, Stan Wars, devoted to the subject matter. The site includes a dictionary, F.A.Q.s and even a “stanipedia” to clear up (and perpetuate) misinformation and various feuds swarming around stan-prone artists, who are often, but not exclusively, Top-40 female recording artists, like Jennifer Lopez and Madonna.

“To affiliate yourself with a mainstream artist today is just like the unwavering loyalty that sports teams have, like the Giants or the Celtics,” said David Russell, an artist manager at IE: Music who works with acts like Robbie Williams and Ladyhawke. “The same way that you follow a team despite the players that come and go, fans come on board early for pop stars and remind people of the success he or she had — whether it was 20 minutes ago or 20 years ago.”

This can make competition among stans particularly ugly, but it can also serve as a lifeboat, keeping a troubled performer’s career afloat. The singer Ciara, a former A-list recording artist who fell into a series of problems with her former label, Jive, that resulted in her most-recent album being shelved, might have been forgotten were it not for die-hards going to bat for her day after day on Web sites like That Grape Juice or Popjustice. “Her stans compare her to Beyoncé or Rihanna, despite the fact that her album shipped something like less than 30,000 units in North America,” Mr. Russell said. “They will continue to drum up anticipation for whatever keeps her relevant, even if it’s just a fashion association,” like the singer’s friendship with Riccardo Tisci of Givenchy. “Her stans will defend her to the death,” Mr. Russell added. “It’s a little scary.”

But many stans claim their mission is infused with self-deprecating dark humor. “How serious you take it depends on how mentally stable you are,” said Tré, 25, the creator of Stan Wars and a graphic designer who lives in Washington, who uses one name, like many of the stars he covers. Tré calls his site “a comprehensive guide to worshiping people you don’t know, who live a lifestyle you can’t afford, supported by an industry you don’t understand.”

Bradley Stern, 22, a self-described “total and complete stan boy,” is the creator of the Web site MuuMuse, a mix of music reviews, insider industry information and fan contests.

When Britney Spears, an artist he follows rabidly, wore a hat that resembled a cartoon panda on her head at a recent stop on her Femme Fatale tour in Charlotte, N.C., last month, Mr. Stern sounded the trumpet to usher in a new era of “Panda Hatney” and “Kawaiiney,” a mix of the Japanese word for cute with the singer’s own name.

He calls Christina Aguilera, whom Mr. Stern says he has loved since high school, throughout a career marked by soaring highs (she recently scored a No. 1 single for her brief cameo in the Maroon 5 song “Moves Like Jagger”) and plummeting lows (“Burlesque”), the Great Legendtina of Former Floppiness, who sits on a “throne made out of unsold ‘Bionic’ albums.”

“It’s sort of pathetic to be a fan of anything these days because nothing is really sacred,” Mr. Stern said. “We will always see behind the curtain. You can still be in on the joke and be a psychotically obsessed fan.”

This sense of irreverence suits an Internet generation searching for a happy medium between teeny-bop fanaticism and TMZ transparency. In an essay about Charlie Sheen published in Newsweek and on The Daily Beast, the author Bret Easton Ellis describes this evolving sense of self-awareness toward celebrity culture as “post-Empire” thinking, which strives to destroy old-guard illusions about the “prefab way,” as Mr. Ellis put it.

In a phone interview, Mr. Ellis said: “We’re in a transitional phase that is a confused combination of transparency and earnestness. A stan continues to obsess over celebrity, despite being aware that the whole notion of celebrity has never seemed more fleeting or purposeless. The crazy thing is that these stans have not only accepted this, but that they’ve embraced it as part of the game. This is so unlike fandom before. The stan is going to become part of the fabric of celebrity and — I hate using this word — their brand.”

Indeed, Mr. Stern was recently made a media partner in GUMBO Pop, an artists’ performance series, and has done posts for the MTV Buzzworthy blog. He added that he receives a barrage of artist’s exclusives, cross-promotional giveaways, and oft-anonymous industry gossip from industry executives as well as from fellow stans.

Meanwhile, Jordan Miller, the Web master of an enormously popular Britney Spears fan site, BreatheHeavy, has turned being a super fan into being something of a Spears scholar, appearing as a commentator on the singer for E! News Daily and MTV. BreatheHeavy, which he started in high school, served as “one big résumé” for his current job at a marketing firm based in Las Vegas, he said, and he is working on a broader celebrity site that will focus on other artists besides Ms. Spears.

Nonetheless, Mr. Miller, 23, is uneasy about what people might think of him. “A stan will follow a celebrity blindly — it’s a little creepy,” he said. “I like to look at myself as a fan who knows Britney’s best interests, maybe even better than she does. But now that I think about it, it’s weird because I’ve never met her, even though I’ve been following her every day.”

Originally posted by iLays

Just in case yawl didn't see it tha first time

Originally posted by Legendtina

@ the Ciara shade.

Originally posted by Ryan

Originally posted by Ryan

Originally posted by Cap10Planet

This is obviously Talisa and her minions.