Thesis: the rise of fanwank and anti culture correlates directly with diminished understanding of what “romantic”, in a literary sense, actually means.
It doesn’t mean “this is ideal or healthy or even realistic”. It means “this is beautiful, this is tragic, this is grotesque, this stirs emotion”, even if it’s not, as @starryroom puts it, something you would be comfortable seeing play out in front of you at Taco Bell. It’s about grandiosity and mythology and heroism writ large. It’s about playing with the id, as beautiful and terrible as it can be.
Thesis: this kind of conceptual failure is likely an outgrowth of an unusually-permissive mainstream culture, or (even more) of a mainstream culture that presents itself as being permissive even when it isn’t.
Both puritanism and traditional shame-based community morality can be all kinds of awful, but they do make it very easy to understand what it means for something to be a “guilty pleasure,” or even just a “private pleasure” that can’t flourish in the public eye. The puritan code, or the community, may demand things that diverge from the desires of the individual. But if your code is “do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law, unless, you know, it’s abusive or something,” then you end up in very confusing situations where people feel obligated to fight over whether a given thing is or isn’t a moral abomination, because obviously no one could have any other possible issues with your liking it.