★ the saltmaster extraordinaire

*(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:
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This is the full transcript of a thread I made on Twitter earlier this year, about a subject dear to my heart:

THE PREQUEL TRILOGY IN THE 2000s -- A WOMAN-RUN STAR WARS FANDOM

One thing that gets lost when discussing the history of Star Wars is how heavily female-dominated the fandom for the Prequel Trilogy was, particularly in the 2000s. Fan-site after fan-site, fan-shrine after fan-shrine, the userbases of which were overwhelmingly girls and women. People today speak about Rey bringing a generation of women and girls into SW as if that's an absolute first, when a female generation was brought in by Padme and the handmaidens. I was there since 1999, I saw it all, before people got their love and enthusiasm battered out of them by the larger fandom's consistent toxicity and negativity.

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Watch on YouTube

Because I want more people to see this: han_spinel on Twitter created a lovely fan-trailer for "The Phantom Menace", a shot-for-shot visual parallel to "The Force Awakens" official theatrical trailer.

TPM is the film that made a Star Wars fan out of me and it's heartening to see it loved and appreciated, particularly now, in the year of its 20th anniversary.