Fan rankings make no sense

How does Annie Wilkes know that she's his 'number one fan'?

Annie doesn't strike to me as someone that has the required resources to accomplish a project of that magnitude. How is it decided, what actually judges whether someone is number one or number two fan?

What metric is used?

How are these things measured?

I don't understand when someone says they are 'the biggest fan' or 'number one fan', as to HOW they came to that conclusion. Are they just talking out of their buttocks, lying, exaggerating or just saying nonsense that has nothing to do with reality?

Think about all the things you'd have to do to ESTABLISH what 'fan number' you really are! You'd have to spend years, maybe even decades interviewing people, putting them into categories, testing them in various ways, then test your tests to know they are reliable, and so on.

Not only that, but you'd have to know who the fans are, not to mention you would need to know ALL of them - not just 'most of them'.

How would you even do this, even with the help of a government, agencies like FBI/CIA/etc. and billions of dollars of funding?

We're talking about a psychotic fat hag that lives alone with her weird pets - how does she complete a project of this magnitude?

Whenever someone says they're the biggest fan or number one fan of someone, I start wondering why they are so confident to the truth of that EXTREMELY unlikely statement, and how they came to that conclusion, why they don't doubt their own methods of acquiring the information that lead to said conclusion and so on.. are they all crazy?

Is this movie, among pretty much every other movie, TV show and story simply saying that every single fan of anyone is just an insane individual, whose words, statements, claims and thoughts can't be trusted whatsoever?

Why would anyone say they're the number one or 'biggest' fan, without considering how many other fans there are, all of which are ready to say this same, stupid thing as well? Why can't anyone EVER say 'I am your number 7 fan' or 'I am your 44th-biggest fan'?

Why is it always 'number one' or 'biggest'?

It's pretty unnerving to realize that even in this very movie, TWO separate people make this claim! They can't BOTH be 'number one' fan, or 'the biggest' fan, now can they? Now, we can conclude that the waitress CAN become the number one fan, because the previous holder of this peculiar title actually perished, but would she still have made this claim even if Annie hadn't died?

Of course I have no idea how these things are even measured, there's probably no electronic device that can measure your 'fandom radiance' to determine who has more of it than someone else, so this kind of rankings seem quite arbitrary, and thus, become meaningless. So why even point to them?

Any time anyone says anything like this, I wish someone would ask them to explain that and inquire about the measuring methods and such. 'I am your number one fan' - 'really? How did you measure it and who lost to you and how? Was there a big competition that you won? Who is number five?'

I realize this probably comes from the usual thoughtless apefeel lust crap that dominates people's behaviour, especially women's, and has absolutely no other basis in reality than 'big feeling' that some ignorant idiot estimates must be bigger than anyone else's, but this is hardly convincing evidence, so such statements absolutely should be curbed before accuracy can be reached in a more subjective way.

I can only pity the celebrities that have to do 'fan events', where everyone probably proclaims they are 'the biggest' or 'number one' fans... sigh.

They can all be big fans, but they can't all be number one.

This kind of thoughtless fan rankings make absolutely no sense.