This is a good read and this feels like the best place to put it
Lady Gaga, 'Venom' and When Fandom Is Weaponized
Lady Gaga, 'Venom' and When Fandom Is Weaponized
Official JOKER Thread (SPOILERS)
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richaveli83
Veteran
This is a good read and this feels like the best place to put it
Lady Gaga, 'Venom' and When Fandom Is Weaponized
Movie is going to be great
TheGodling
Los Ingobernables de Sala de Cine
This really is the best place since that nonsense started with The Dark Knight.This is a good read and this feels like the best place to put it
Lady Gaga, 'Venom' and When Fandom Is Weaponized
This really is the best place since that nonsense started with The Dark Knight.
And no one has tried to make it better as a whole.
Edit: I'd put that toxic fandom at the foot of the prequels more than the Dark Knight homie. When Lucas is getting death threats and people seriously using the phrase "raped my childhood" then that feels like the beginning of a terrible tree. And I'm sure someone older than me would cite something before '99
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TheGodling
Los Ingobernables de Sala de Cine
I was talking more about fandom becoming about tearing down "competitors". The whole downvote The Godfather movement on IMDb is still some of the most embarrassing "fan" shyt I have ever seen.
Oh. Well the article is about a lot more than that. It's just about fandom being weaponized in general. Whether it's down voting, coming for critics necks who disagree with you, or even, as the article points out, bloggers and critics/writers antagonizing fans for liking things they don't
The whole environment about being a fan right now is ass cheeks and, much like American politics, isn't getting better any time soon until people pull their heads out of their asses
I think The Phantom Menace is as good a place as any to start tracking it. By the time that movie came out, the Internet was in enough homes and Internet culture as we see it now started to really form. Like you said, it's where the tree sprouted. It's well documented how toxic Star Wars fans were at time. It's why the reaction to the new movies doesn't surprise me. They've always been like this.
In that they’ve been entitled brats who only want their toys played with a specific way or else?
That has always been the difference in how I viewed Star Wars and Star Trek fans...sure there was the same amount of outsized sense of ownership with the franchises within the fanbase but the biggest dikks among Trek fans anger and criticism usually was coming from them thinking anything that came after The Original Series was not following the Roddenberry rulebook as closely as they were supposed to; Star Wars fans act like they know better than even Lucas.
Star Wars fans are also more likely to be sexist, semi-racist abusive douchebags than Trek fans are.
Yup. It's a particular kind of toxicity that, while it appears in other fanbases, really came to the forefront in Star Wars fandom during the early days of the internet.
The only subculture I can think of that's been as consistently toxic is video game fandom, but that's a whole 'nother can of worms.
Bringing it back to comics, we all know the Marvel and DC rivalry has always been a thing. However, before the movies popped off, it had whittled down to being just a fun little thing where fans took harmless jabs or debated who could win in a fight. Fun shyt. The writers and artists who work on the characters jump back and forth between the two companies so often that there aren't really any differences between the two anymore, so most fans just read and watched the stuff that interested them. Then movies started popping off and slowly it turned into this deep, angry fan territory shyt. The fact that one company is currently the crown jewel of the movie industry and the other is almost despised and constantly mocked only exacerbates the issue. There's so much hyperbole and shyt flinging going on that it's next to impossible to discuss things without it being seen as an attack.
The Venom article you posted, while not involving DC, is a perfect example of territorial fan culture. The two movies aren't really competing with each other. They serve different audiences and the success of one has zip to do with the success of the other. In terms of box office, both movies are doing fine from what I can tell. Yet Lady Gaga fans somehow saw this random superhero movie as a threat and launched a whole campaign against it. That's fukking weird, bro, and it happens all the time now.
That said, I do like that article also points out how often bloggers and such feed back into the negativity. The article cites DC fans, but I can name examples of other instances where internet talking heads goaded a few angry fanboys or blew something up to be bigger than it initially was. Happens a lot in video games: someone will post a negative review of some hot new game (usually a Nintendo title, oddly enough) and then say some shyt like "Oh the fanboys aren't going to like this one.
" We talk all the time about needing to accept that others may not like what we like, but we say very little about the opposite - the fact that sometimes people will like things you dislike and you need to be okay with that. I'll just quote the article here because the writer said it perfectly: "There is often an antagonizing of these fans, to the point where their inside jokes and responses are radicalized and used as weapons against them by those who can't accept that there are fans who loved something they didn't. Fandoms have weaponized themselves in some cases, but the very concept of fandom has become something of a slur by those who regard their position outside of it as a higher, more honest perspective."I think that's because Star Trek has always been about inclusion to an extent. You look at the cast for the original series and it really was something special in how diverse it was for the time. Star Wars, by contrast, has always been a specifically white male power fantasy unless you dig into some of the extended universe stuff.
Another part of fandom that doesn't get looked at enough in situations like this and that is pretty germaine to what happened with Venom vs A Star Is Born is the fandom of female pop stars.Yup. It's a particular kind of toxicity that, while it appears in other fanbases, really came to the forefront in Star Wars fandom during the early days of the internet.
The only subculture I can think of that's been as consistently toxic is video game fandom, but that's a whole 'nother can of worms.
Bringing it back to comics, we all know the Marvel and DC rivalry has always been a thing. However, before the movies popped off, it had whittled down to being just a fun little thing where fans took harmless jabs or debated who could win in a fight. Fun shyt. The writers and artists who work on the characters jump back and forth between the two companies so often that there aren't really any differences between the two anymore, so most fans just read and watched the stuff that interested them. Then movies started popping off and slowly it turned into this deep, angry fan territory shyt. The fact that one company is currently the crown jewel of the movie industry and the other is almost despised and constantly mocked only exacerbates the issue. There's so much hyperbole and shyt flinging going on that it's next to impossible to discuss things without it being seen as an attack.
The Venom article you posted, while not involving DC, is a perfect example of territorial fan culture. The two movies aren't really competing with each other. They serve different audiences and the success of one has zip to do with the success of the other. In terms of box office, both movies are doing fine from what I can tell. Yet Lady Gaga fans somehow saw this random superhero movie as a threat and launched a whole campaign against it. That's fukking weird, bro, and it happens all the time now.
That said, I do like that article also points out how often bloggers and such feed back into the negativity. The article cites DC fans, but I can name examples of other instances where internet talking heads goaded a few angry fanboys or blew something up to be bigger than it initially was. Happens a lot in video games: someone will post a negative review of some hot new game (usually a Nintendo title, oddly enough) and then say some shyt like "Oh the fanboys aren't going to like this one.
I think that's because Star Trek has always been about inclusion to an extent. You look at the cast for the original series and it really was something special in how diverse it was for the time. Star Wars, by contrast, has always been a specifically white male power fantasy unless you dig into some of the extended universe stuff.
From the Lady Gaga to Beyonce to Taylor Swift to Rihanna to Nikki Minaj etc. these fandoms are aggressive, abusive reactionary little cabals that are vicious as hell to anyone they perceive as being a threat or a critic to their object of affection.
Exactly.
I've been on the internet for a long time, breh. I've argued with the most steadfast Nintendo fans and haters, gone to war with Marvel and DC fanboys, and been called more than a few names by anime kids. But even I don't have the heart to go at the Bey Hive or the Barbs.
What's crazy about popstar fandom is not only does it not get called out as frequently as others, but the stars themselves will weaponize their fans against people. Nikki sics her crazy ass fanbase on critics all the time and she barely gets called out for it. It's weird to see these toxic fandoms be allowed to flourish freely while we're trying to stomp others out.
Saysumthinfunnymike
VOTE!!!
I tried to save the Aquaman thread, it was getting ridiculous, most of these ppl watch all these movies so they ain't fooling nobody. This idea of "I can't trust DC..." is overblown too.
DC gave us Superman The Movie and Batman '89 and The Dark Knight trilogy, among others. Their history is way more positive than negative. Man of Steel was mixed. Wonder Woman was overwhelmingly positive reactions.
The others can be argued whether they had mixed or downright bad reactions but who cares. The Joker movie has nothing to do with previous DC movies, it has a completely different team working on it, different actors, different director..
If Joker is good or bad it has nothing to do with anything previously from DC.
DC gave us Superman The Movie and Batman '89 and The Dark Knight trilogy, among others. Their history is way more positive than negative. Man of Steel was mixed. Wonder Woman was overwhelmingly positive reactions.
The others can be argued whether they had mixed or downright bad reactions but who cares. The Joker movie has nothing to do with previous DC movies, it has a completely different team working on it, different actors, different director..
If Joker is good or bad it has nothing to do with anything previously from DC.
People need to remember that studios don't make movies; writers, directors, and actors do.
shyt, if DC or Marvel putting out bad product was enough to make people lose faith in them, we wouldn't even have these movies cause everyone would have abandoned them yers ago over all the shytty comics they've done.