Why is toxic fandom destroying everything?
- Thread starter Sgt. Sacrament
- Start date
Rage baiting gets attention, views, clicks, follows…. And money.
Being offended is now a high art and allows you to feel superior to others.
I don’t comment on a product unless I have something positive to say…. Or if I need to reiterate that I wasn’t the Intended target of the product.
But I recognize that, Because of the way algorithms (and human nature) work, we are all “wound up” by rage baiting…. And it occurs on both sides of the political spectrum.
One could argue that the term “toxic fandom” is, Itself , a rage bait pejorative applied to anyone who doesn’t like the latest product (and, don’t forget, all Hollywood output is a product…. Designed to sell views, subscriptions, merch etc).
It distills down to this :
Buy this product
No, that product sucks
You are (fill in blank)
Oh yea? Well you are (fill in blank)
Repeat ad nauseam
Being offended is now a high art and allows you to feel superior to others.
I don’t comment on a product unless I have something positive to say…. Or if I need to reiterate that I wasn’t the Intended target of the product.
But I recognize that, Because of the way algorithms (and human nature) work, we are all “wound up” by rage baiting…. And it occurs on both sides of the political spectrum.
One could argue that the term “toxic fandom” is, Itself , a rage bait pejorative applied to anyone who doesn’t like the latest product (and, don’t forget, all Hollywood output is a product…. Designed to sell views, subscriptions, merch etc).
It distills down to this :
Buy this product
No, that product sucks
You are (fill in blank)
Oh yea? Well you are (fill in blank)
Repeat ad nauseam
Forget toxic. What about apathetic fandom? I just finished reading a 16-page thread about BBC Merlin, from 2009. The discussion included the first 2 seasons and I've been unable to find any other threads that discuss Seasons 3-5 of this show. Did people all just stop watching it?
I did. Wasn't interesting enough. Then life shifted and I never got back to it.
That's kind of the thing now is that being invested, really invested, is not something I give as much time too because my real life is way, way, way too demanding.
Genre fandom does have a disappointingly short attention span sometimes. The TrekBBS thread for the first season of Superman & Lois, for example, is 88 pages long. The thread for the most recent season, the show's third, tops out at a mere 30 pages -- despite the fact that, by most accounts, the third season was every bit as good as the first, if not better.
There's a lot of content out there these days, so people have a lot of options and a lot of new things to explore. I guess for some folks, the shiny new object is always going to be more interesting than the familiar old one. Personally, I'm more of a loyalist, and gratefully stay with the things I love for as long as they're there to enjoy.
I really enjoyed S&L, but I just ended up losing track of it after one of the mid season breaks. Those tend to get me, because I won't realize they've come back, and if I'm not signed up for the streaming service they're on, then I only have a few weeks to get caught up while the episodes are on the website/app, and a lot of the time they're already gone by the time I go to watch them.
I think it's pretty normal for shows to bleed off viewers as the go on. Some shows might get a boost here or there, but even then tend to start dropping back off pretty quickly.
I think it's pretty normal for shows to bleed off viewers as the go on. Some shows might get a boost here or there, but even then tend to start dropping back off pretty quickly.
I was a huge fan of Merlin for most of it's run, but I ended up losing track of it after a while. I think it was basically similar to what happened with S&L where it didn't realize it had come back on for the last season or somewhere later, and by time I found it was too late to get caught up. I think did eventually watch the rest of on Netlfix.
That's why shows get canceled eventually...
In the case of Merlin though I was looking as I couldn't remember and it seems here in the US at least that it started on NBC but then ended up on Syfy after the first or second season. It's really unclear when it comes to the final seasons but I remember it being on BBC America at some point but I'm not sure if that was exclusively so. So there's that and then for the third season it came on after WWE wrestling when that was a thing on Syfy. So I don't think any of those did any favors to keeping up an active discourse for the show.
In the case of Merlin though I was looking as I couldn't remember and it seems here in the US at least that it started on NBC but then ended up on Syfy after the first or second season. It's really unclear when it comes to the final seasons but I remember it being on BBC America at some point but I'm not sure if that was exclusively so. So there's that and then for the third season it came on after WWE wrestling when that was a thing on Syfy. So I don't think any of those did any favors to keeping up an active discourse for the show.
There are some genre shows I've been 10-20 years late in finding. I got into Merlin in November 2022 due to running across a screenshot of Eoin Macken (Gwaine) and being shocked because of how closely he resembles a character in the prose adaptation I've been doing of a computer game called King's Heir: Rise to the Throne. I'd been browsing Pinterest, looking for pictures of people, clothing, objects, etc. for inspiration, and suddenly up came this picture of someone who could have played the part of the main character in that game, if it were ever to be filmed using live people.
So of course I was curious, and the comments stated the character's name and the name of the series. Season 1 was available on Amazon in Canada, and so I ended up giving myself the 5-series set plus an all-regions DVD player for Christmas, to see the rest of it.
I've now seen most of the series at least twice, I've seen loads of clips on YT, and took a deep dive into the fanfiction. I'm now working on my own Merlin fanfiction. It's nice that at least there are still people around to discuss it on AO3 (Archive Of Our Own). The fanfiction ranges from not-great to fantastic, humor to far better than the show gave us, and I've really been enjoying it.
And yes, I wasn't pleased with the ending. Holy crap, they basically went Hamlet on the characters. So I appreciate the fanfic that people write to fix that.
I don't have Netflix, but have found that the series is still being shown on Tubi. It's more convenient for me at the moment to just watch on that site, when I want to check something for my stories.
It's so annoying when a show is hard to find. That's why it took me years to finally watch the entire Highlander series. I never got to see the first season until the whole thing turned up on the Space Channel (what Canada had before it became the vastly inferior CTV Sci-fi).
When I mentioned getting into the show on my gaming forum, half a dozen people immediately told me, "You're gonna hate the ending." They're right. I hate the ending. But that's what fanfiction is for - fix the ending and take the characters in other directions. One of my projects is a rather ambitious crossover between Merlin and Highlander. At some point Downton Abbey is going to turn up as well. It may sound like an odd mixture, but it gives me a good reason to do loads of historical research, and I'm having a blast.
It's a combination of many, many factors, not all of them endemic to fandoms themselves.
The emergence and empowerment of marginalized communities (a good thing overall) sometimes makes them impatient to see everything change "right now" to suit their needs and desires. As these groups began to enter fan spaces, those tendencies brought them into conflict with the existing fans, especially when the newcomers started demanding fundamental changes that would rewrite everything.
Age is also a factor. We're undergoing a major cultural shift between generations with wildly different world outlooks and values. Gen Zs and Gen Alphas have grown up fully in the "new" world, Millenials straddled the divide, and Gen Xers/older are very much products of the old one. Those disparate mindsets are not conducive to mutual understanding.
Lastly, the influence of bad actors must be considered. Whether it's the venal money interest of rage-baiting grifters on YouTube, or the socio-political maneuvering of foreign state-sponsored and or other idological actors, western civilization is being driven to further and further extremes. Their influence reaches all the way into fan spaces.
The emergence and empowerment of marginalized communities (a good thing overall) sometimes makes them impatient to see everything change "right now" to suit their needs and desires. As these groups began to enter fan spaces, those tendencies brought them into conflict with the existing fans, especially when the newcomers started demanding fundamental changes that would rewrite everything.
Age is also a factor. We're undergoing a major cultural shift between generations with wildly different world outlooks and values. Gen Zs and Gen Alphas have grown up fully in the "new" world, Millenials straddled the divide, and Gen Xers/older are very much products of the old one. Those disparate mindsets are not conducive to mutual understanding.
Lastly, the influence of bad actors must be considered. Whether it's the venal money interest of rage-baiting grifters on YouTube, or the socio-political maneuvering of foreign state-sponsored and or other idological actors, western civilization is being driven to further and further extremes. Their influence reaches all the way into fan spaces.
And yet when the Sequels did it, it was seen as "Poor Writing". Nice double standards there.
Star Wars already did that to itself with ROTJ and the Prequels. It caused its own stagnation.
Or rather, because they had nothing to work with.
They're fine as SW character Archetypes. Finn and Poe are the ones who don't fit.
Learn how to apply "double standard" properly; familial relationships in George Lucas' SW were intended; although the PT was produced after the OT, the 6 films tell the Skywalker story from beginning to end. The worthless ST--only existing once the franchise was sold to Disney--had no natural connection to a family story which ended with ROTJ, thus Kennedy/JJ, et al. needed to tell their own story, but that was quite impossible, because they lacked any creative ability to do just that. So what happens? They robbed the Skywalker grave to justify the existence of their pointless new characters. The one character who had the foundation to be an interesting "overcoming the struggle" plot was consistently, deliberately marginalized in the screenplays as much as the actor who portrayed him was in the Chinese market, thanks to Disney/LFL.
There were no empty shell characters in ROTJ, since the same main characters were still involved, and one of the most important to the saga was formally introduced in that film. Try again.
Either the Disney/LFL group are creative, or they are not. It was their job to create a new SW series instead of grave-robbing the Lucas work. They failed to do so, and the poor, misguided results are undeniable.
Last edited:
No they weren't, Lucas didn't plan for Vader to be the dad from day one.
Stupidly cutting off what could have been a thriving Universe.
Lucas left them nothing to work with.
IE, thanks to Lucas they couldn't make new things and had to use what little to nothing there was left.
Finn was never meant to be more than a plot device to get Rey into the plot. You may as well complain that C-3P0 wasn't a lead in the OT.
ROTJ crippled future storytelling possibilities, and the PT further crippled things.
You need to have something to work with to be creative, they didn't.[/quote][/QUOTE]
Every story ever told has "An Agenda", it ridiculous the complain about that.
It really did. It's funny to me to watch ROTJ and then try to read or watch a story set afterwards. Anything else feels just tacked on. Doesn't matter if its the Ewok adventures, books, or the ST, they don't fit in.
ROTJ is a "happily ever after" and there's no changing that. It's meant as a fairy tale end and does so quite well, though I think Lucas should have gone with his sequels instead of the lesser prequels.
Really, the best time to do Sequels was in the late 80s or early 90s. 10 years is reasonable that the Rebels would still be fighting the remains of the Empire.
Wrong. Some of the early SW drafts played with the hidden parental relationship, so that did not come out of nowhere.
You are not the creator, so Lucas creating SW to tell the Skywalker story is how it was meant to be and is correct. There's no "cutting off" anything other than that found in the minds of addicted fan(atic)s who do not know when all things--including said addiction--should come to a natural conclusion. Star Wars the film series as created by Lucas had a natural conclusion. It is the only reason SW existed, and everything else is simply ancillary merchandising.
Here in the real world, Lucas had no obligation to leave anything for the new owners of a property. As noted earlier, Kennedy/JJ, et al. needed to tell their own story, but that was quite impossible, because they lacked any creative ability to do just that, and decided the foundation of their "new vision" was robbing the Skywalker grave to justify the existence of their pointless new characters.
There's a universe of things that can be said of your comment about the Finn character, but that's a topic for another thread.
Utter nonsense. ROTJ was the creator's conclusion to his story. If others cannot write their own stories (independent of rip-offs and grave robbing), then they have no one to blame other than themselves and their gross incompetence, which is still on full display with Disney SW.
They needed talent and vision. They did not and do not have that, hence the Disney era of Star Wars.
Last edited:
Fake, he didn't decide that till ESB.
Lucas sold out his artistic integrity in 1999, so this whole "He's the Creator" thing is bunk.
Yes, because Lucas left nothing to work with. Stuff from the Prequels could have worked, but Lucas botched that up for them too.
Then it's because he salted the Earth and then sold out later, making it pointless.
They need a Universe with room left to tell more stories, they didn't get that.
BS, and historically false. Next...
If that's the case, then anyone attacking him proves to be even a bigger addict than assumed if they're still chasing a Star Wars high from low-grade Disney spin-offs from a creator's work you consider the result of "selling out" artistic integrity.
Once again, if others cannot write their own stories (independent of rip-offs and grave robbing), then they have no one to blame other than themselves and their gross incompetence, which is still on full display with Disney SW. True creativity is not born of expecting a creator who finished his own story to "leave" a body for the creatively bankrupt SW grave-robbers to clone and feed on.
Not all force users have to be Sith or Jedi, if you want to go that direction. And the Star Wars Galaxy is huge. So they only needed good writers.
Because he didn't make the final decision until Empire..., doesn't mean he hadn't been toying with the idea well ahead of the original movie coming out.
Similar threads
