Fandom Is Broken
Controversies and entitlement shine a light on a deeply troubling side of fandom.
i've been composing my thoughts on extreme fandom in my phone's notebook for the past week. inspired by Evan Dorkin's Eltingville Club, Alan Moore's thoughts on the matter (and his writing style), and a near-lifetime of observations that started in the mail columns of magazines and evolved into comment threads and video reviews involving comics, movies, music, games, and all "geek" pursuits.
phone rant begins now; ...
the big companies are becoming far too preoccupied with catering almost exclusively to the misaligned territoriality of over-demanding consumers. the frequently vicious, unendurably spiteful, moribund obsessives polluting any discourse with meaninglessly aggressive, wearingly cacophonous wailings. perversely entitled caustic scolds that are less concerned with creators' intent then they are weighing in with their hastily constructed caloric-gut driven point of view, policing imaginative growth till it relents to their limited experiences. the first to demand that the imagined integrity of corporate entities be forever upheld and last to acknowledge or consider the very real tragedies and injustices ever permeating a world of flesh and steel that's omnipresent to even the most casual observer. their cultural tastes sub-refined, emotional understandings malformed, and intellectual nutrition in ruins from a debilitating dependence on mass market franchises and nakedly commercial properties (that more often than not meant to capture the unsophisticated, unchallenging, undemanding, not-yet-completely-burgeoned sensibilities of children) for their root sensory experiences. and when their naively sociopathic demands are not met, they counter with unnecessarily profane declarations of their limp outrage, toweringly interchangeable in their escalating grotesqueire, which are little else but mentally inert examples of a categorically bitter, revealingly jealous, skewered entitlement attempting to convince itself that its a thorough deconstruction of a "flawed" work, when the defects (more often than not) lie in the consequence-averse opinions of an inferiority-riddled non-entity's crudity-bloated pontifications.
phone rants ends.
as someone who has a deep respect, interest, and investment in much of those mediums, i find it disheartening and worrisome that the default mode for genre-enthusiasts has been of the "angry nerd" variety. i have absolutely been guilty of this behavior in the past (sometimes the present.... DC Rebirth for the fuck of shit), but that was never my go-to response when presented with something that didn't match my expectations. i had and continue to have plenty of comics, movies, music, books, TV shows, etc that intrigue, arouse, inspire, inform, and upend my perceptions of what is possible within these mediums, and i've tried to avert my attentions from the contrarians, the fundamentalists, and the would-be provocateurs who have a pathological attraction to the prospect of destroying everyone else's good time with sloppy displays of empty subversion or hollow scholarly frustrations. but they just don't seem to show any signs of diminishing, so here we are.
