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[meta] » fandom purists* / elitists and what makes them tick
*(Not to be confused with ‘purity wankers / purity police / fandom police/ antis’, those are an altogether different kind of headache-inducing individuals, whose approach to fictional content specifically centers Morality / faux-Morality. A detailed breakdown of them can be found here).
Fandom purists / elitists are specifically people who not only refuse to accept any sort of changes between canon adaptations or in sequels of the original canon, but who also distinguish themselves by actively mocking and harassing the people who do enjoy the changes, spewing vitriol in any sort of open space they can find (again, in an attempt to get at fans who love the things they hate) and effectively turning fandom into a toxic, negativity-filled morass for anyone other than themselves. They're very often the loudest and most influential voices within geeky / nerdy fannish spaces, with Star Wars being the perfect example of an elitist-dominated fandom.
This post was also written partly a reaction to the remarkable level-headedness of one person, in the sea of rage-filled, perpetual gnashing of teeth that was any comments section related to the putative Lord of the Rings prequel TV series produced by Amazon, before we started getting more details:
I’ve been asking myself for years what exactly is it about geeky fanbases that makes level-headed, reasonable responses like the above ridiculously thin on the ground. My theory is that such fandoms have a higher than average ratio of the aforementioned 'fandom purists / elitists.' And here’s the interesting thing – from silly Japanese shounen anime all the way to sprawling Western fantasy epics, they manifest in remarkably similar ways, to the point where I’ve come to recognize the patterns instantly, over the past twenty years:
To be very clear, someone disliking The Hobbit films or the character of Tauriel isn’t anywhere near enough to make them a purist. Someone disliking the Star Wars Prequel Trilogy or the Sequel Trilogy or the Yu-Gi-Oh spin-offs or various Gundam series or anything with a big enough Hatedom isn’t enough to make them a purist. What is enough is consistently filling the comments sections of anything positive toward any of the above and more with thousand of posts on how ‘terrible’ they are, what a ‘shill’ the author is, how little taste he has. What is enough is the aforementioned fixation with building fandom up on a base of perpetual hate, instead of love for one’s preferred content. What is enough is going out of one’s way to make fandom miserable for others.
If asked to point out the root cause of all the above, I’d say it’s an unfortunate combination of the strong emotional investment more typical of nerdy fandoms (and we have historical examples of this, see the shit Sir Arthur Conan Doyle got from his fanbase, enough that it forced him to reverse course on an authorial decision) + the divide between curative and transformative sides of fandom + a fundamental disinclination of particular fans to give even half a shit if fandom is as good a place to others as it is to them.
The last part is bolded because it’s the key, I suspect. You can have 1 and 2 and (generally) not end up with someone who is a purist. 3 is also needed, because constant expressions of negativity and hostility require that one answer in the negative to the question "don’t you care that fans of the New Thing are walking into a fandom that is consistently hostile to them?" Purists, at a fundamental level, have zero respect for the fans of the New Thing / New Canon and thus don’t believe that their own actions should be tempered, for the sake of fandom being enjoyable for all.
This becomes very clear when you see that people who reject constant purist-style negativity justify it precisely out of care for their fellow fans and what sort of fannish environment they’re creating.
Examples:
The last post really hits the nail on the head. "Make our complaints without insulting the tastes of others" is the crux of the whole thing here. My problem with fandom purists / elitists has never been that they dislike what I like. It's that they're actively and consistently cruel toward the fans of what they hate and deem to not be worthy of 'canon' status. They actively and consistently create a fannish atmosphere that is so unpleasant that many fellow fans are driven away from what should have been spaces where they could freely engage with the content they love.
Fandom purists / elitists are specifically people who not only refuse to accept any sort of changes between canon adaptations or in sequels of the original canon, but who also distinguish themselves by actively mocking and harassing the people who do enjoy the changes, spewing vitriol in any sort of open space they can find (again, in an attempt to get at fans who love the things they hate) and effectively turning fandom into a toxic, negativity-filled morass for anyone other than themselves. They're very often the loudest and most influential voices within geeky / nerdy fannish spaces, with Star Wars being the perfect example of an elitist-dominated fandom.
This post was also written partly a reaction to the remarkable level-headedness of one person, in the sea of rage-filled, perpetual gnashing of teeth that was any comments section related to the putative Lord of the Rings prequel TV series produced by Amazon, before we started getting more details:
I’ve been asking myself for years what exactly is it about geeky fanbases that makes level-headed, reasonable responses like the above ridiculously thin on the ground. My theory is that such fandoms have a higher than average ratio of the aforementioned 'fandom purists / elitists.' And here’s the interesting thing – from silly Japanese shounen anime all the way to sprawling Western fantasy epics, they manifest in remarkably similar ways, to the point where I’ve come to recognize the patterns instantly, over the past twenty years:
- refusal to accept almost any deviation from the Source Canon in later adaptations + intensely hostile and genuinely angry reactions not just toward the official content creators, but also toward fellow fans who have the temerity to enjoy the new material (dislike of canon changes in and of itself isn’t enough to make one a purist, every person has their own personal likes and dislikes);
- hold the attitude that content creators are beholden to them and thus should only create the kind of content that the purist contingent finds the most enjoyable / that resonates most with their childhood nostalgia. If a content creator steps out of line (meaning create something different, while still following his or her own personal vision) then it’s perfectly acceptable to shout at them, mock them, drag their name through the mud and go on and on and on about how they "betrayed" their fans (see the whole ‘The People Vs George Lucas’ debacle. How someone can create something with that title and not get laughed out of the room as gigantically entitled, but instead get hailed as a Passionate FanTM, is proof of how unfortunately popular the purist viewpoint is in geeky fandoms).
- general disdain toward transformative fannish endeavors (fan-fiction in general, fan-art and cosplay when they involve whatever new canon content is rejected. Linked example involves mockery toward a woman who dared cosplay as Tauriel from The Hobbit films, instead of going with a 'book-only' female character. Example used because it proves very good snippets of the particular brand of open hostility and sneery contempt that I’ve come to associate with fandom purists);
- a seemingly obsessive fixation on constantly tearing down / railing at whatever one hates, rather than a focus on what one loves, sometimes even decades after the fact (this has the effect of turning entire fandoms into negativity binge-fests, or, to be far less polite about it, miserable, stinking, toxic cesspits that become the very opposite of a place where someone can decompress and enjoy their preferred content in peace);
- to accompany above, sometimes the nonsense gets to the point where creating an atmosphere actively hostile toward the fans of the New Thing is precisely the intended effect (for example, fan-forum after fan-forum for all sorts of nerdy canons, that involved a certain subset of people constantly dogpiling, insulting and harassing the New Thing’s fans, with the tacit approval of the non-interventionist mods. The result has always been an exodus of generally non-purist fans, whereas the purists were left to openly crow and gloat about it. The assortment of insults over the years varied, but "idiot" or "cretin with no taste" were the most consistent);
- a worldview that consistently turns the inherent subjectivity of personal taste into objective opinion + the view that purist-accepted opinions are inherently superior to all others (take a shot every time you see a canon with a divided fanbase get termed "objectively horrible / awful" by the usual suspects. You’ll die of liver failure).
To be very clear, someone disliking The Hobbit films or the character of Tauriel isn’t anywhere near enough to make them a purist. Someone disliking the Star Wars Prequel Trilogy or the Sequel Trilogy or the Yu-Gi-Oh spin-offs or various Gundam series or anything with a big enough Hatedom isn’t enough to make them a purist. What is enough is consistently filling the comments sections of anything positive toward any of the above and more with thousand of posts on how ‘terrible’ they are, what a ‘shill’ the author is, how little taste he has. What is enough is the aforementioned fixation with building fandom up on a base of perpetual hate, instead of love for one’s preferred content. What is enough is going out of one’s way to make fandom miserable for others.
If asked to point out the root cause of all the above, I’d say it’s an unfortunate combination of the strong emotional investment more typical of nerdy fandoms (and we have historical examples of this, see the shit Sir Arthur Conan Doyle got from his fanbase, enough that it forced him to reverse course on an authorial decision) + the divide between curative and transformative sides of fandom + a fundamental disinclination of particular fans to give even half a shit if fandom is as good a place to others as it is to them.
The last part is bolded because it’s the key, I suspect. You can have 1 and 2 and (generally) not end up with someone who is a purist. 3 is also needed, because constant expressions of negativity and hostility require that one answer in the negative to the question "don’t you care that fans of the New Thing are walking into a fandom that is consistently hostile to them?" Purists, at a fundamental level, have zero respect for the fans of the New Thing / New Canon and thus don’t believe that their own actions should be tempered, for the sake of fandom being enjoyable for all.
This becomes very clear when you see that people who reject constant purist-style negativity justify it precisely out of care for their fellow fans and what sort of fannish environment they’re creating.
Examples:
The last post really hits the nail on the head. "Make our complaints without insulting the tastes of others" is the crux of the whole thing here. My problem with fandom purists / elitists has never been that they dislike what I like. It's that they're actively and consistently cruel toward the fans of what they hate and deem to not be worthy of 'canon' status. They actively and consistently create a fannish atmosphere that is so unpleasant that many fellow fans are driven away from what should have been spaces where they could freely engage with the content they love.
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^ this. One hundred per cent this. I see this a lot in everything, from online games like Overwatch and Fallout 76 to the formerly mentioned Star Wars and also musical genres. I think this is why I avoid going into these spaces anymore. I find especially damaging in online games when people not only have capacity to shout you down but police your enjoyment of the game with action and abusive chat/voice comms. Message boards are always like, oh, you just need to report it, but companies never do anything about it because they know that the loudest audience, those most concerned with policing the product are the most rabidly enthusiastic about giving them money and not questioning their decisions.
A lot of places treat anything creative you want to do as a fan as dissent, and thus something to be punished.
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You're definitely right about reports often going nowhere, but there is some progress, however slow. Just this morning, purely by coincidence, I read an article about an in-game chat-monitoring AI being tried out. In about six weeks, it's apparently banned over 20.000 Counter-Strike GO players for toxic messages / behavior in chat and resulted in an overall reduction of 8% in individual players sending toxic messages. For such a short time-frame, those are good numbers and the system is still working on a trial basis. It wasn't specified what "toxic" meant, but knowing the online FPS community, probably a whole heaping of blatant homophobia, racism, etc. Now it remains to be seen how widely adopted this AI is and what's its false-positive rate.
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I'm so sorry that you've had a horrible time with games. If you're interested in either GW2 or ESO or FFXIV (which I'm looking to get back into, after several years away) and want to play with someone else, I'm more than up for it. I should, however, warn you that I'll barely play anything until at least January, because I went and signed up for two writing challenges + NaNo and that will eat up most of my free time for the very near future. XD
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Even though this topic makes me sad I do think there's something incredibly cool about the term bad-faith actor. I think a lot of things regarding OW are going down the pan so in a week it might a moot point!
I've played a bit of FFXIV but I definitely do like ESO, I just never go on, so that sounds wonderful! In January, that would be super, super fantastic!
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Great post!
Is it okay if I link to it over at Pillowfort?
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And of course, feel free to link / quote! I love it when my meta posts spread beyond the initial reach of my circle here on DW.
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Well, fandom oldies never thought we'd leave IRC and Yahoo Groups and crawl out from under our safe and sturdy rock to face the non-fannish world, but here we are. Who knows, fandom's more... unpleasant members could grow up one day.
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Said "adaptations" being (1) The Hobbit movies, which are a gawdawful mess thanks to 5 different studios meddling (!) and the (2) Shadow of War/Shadow of Mordor computer games. The latter are generally acknowledged as having good gameplay, but take Tolkien's Middle-Earth lore and drop acid while snorting lines of coke off the books. The usual reaction I see in the fairly purist book subreddit I hang out in is "Have fun with the gameplay, but please don't mistake it for Tolkien's version of Middle Earth". Book fans have ambivalent and varying reactions to the LoTR movies--everybody agrees they're pretty to watch, though, and the best adaptation to date, relatively speaking.
They split up the movie and book fandoms into two different subreddits before I joined up, so I suspect there were some nasty flamewars going on before that. (Actually, the movie sub doesn't care if you discuss the books, but the book sub will not discuss movie-only lore and characters.) The mods of both subs are aggressively pro-civility, fortunately. That helps, and should be de rigeur.
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Tolkien fandom isn't solely to blame for it, but it did play a role in giving me an allergy to the whole "not a real fan" notion. I've always wondered what the types most likely to bandy about this accusation would think of someone who loves the most obscure lore minutiae of their fandom... while also being into the red-headed step-child equivalent, for various reasons. They'd presumably sneer just as easily at such a person as they would at a new fan only involved with the hated part of canon, based on everything I've seen so far.
I've had little involvement with either sub, but it's almost guaranteed that nasty clashes between people were the motivation for the split. Rules about being civil toward fellow fans and not saying they're 'lesser' for their tastes are the only effective solution against this nonsense, agreed. This is probably why unmoderated / unmoderate-able spaces end up quickly devolving into cesspits, with the purist contingent having the loudest and most aggressive voice.
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I remember when GX had started airing recently in Canada, I was buying manga at the local geek-whatever store and the owner was loudly complaining about how he didn't like the "new Yugioh" to someone buying cards. This guy was childhood friends with my step-father so I didn't really get why he cared so much, he was way outside the demographic and never talked about Yugioh, to begin with? Yet he jumped on the GX Hate Train just because... it was different? I get some people can just dislike things and that's okay! It was just wild. Power Rangers fandom, one side being anti-ish and the other side just being loud toy collectors that refuse to admit the thing they like is for young children so how dare newer seasons to be more kid-friendly. Not a great time lmfao.
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I regret not taking and saving screenshots, but I was there for the absolutely enormous harassment campaign that happened on the Janime forums, in 2008 (back then the largest YGO English-language community on the Internet). That's actually what I referred to in the post, when I talked about campaigns meant to drive away fans, while non-interventionist mods sat and twiddled their thumbs. This is precisely what happened on Janime, with many of my friends bombarded with so much hate for daring to like and defend GX (I remember a torrent of insults related to their supposed lack of intelligence) that they fled the forum and their harassers cheered. I left as well, at about this time and the forums died just several years later, specifically due to an incompetent admin.
This entire experience + the Star Wars fandom as a whole are at the root of my abiding hatred of fandom-purists and the notion that they can be as horrible ans toxic as they want, just because their precious selves hate a part of canon.
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