The "funniest" thing are the progressively nonsensical attempts at disguising outrage as something that is not racism. I mean, there are definitely race and gender flips I'm not a big fan of, but...
The "funniest" thing are the progressively nonsensical attempts at disguising outrage as something that is not racism. I mean, there are definitely race and gender flips I'm not a big fan of, but that is not the kind of thing that would make me feel the world is out of its orbit.
What do bother me a bit are other kinds of "flips", like for example the guy that plays Superman in Superman & Lois is not a ripped Adonis and I kinda think he should be :P. It feels like Tobey Maguire playing He-Man lol
That's how I feel about the people showing up to school board meetings to complain about critical race theory. If I had kids in school I'd want to go just to watch my neighbors out themselves as...
That's how I feel about the people showing up to school board meetings to complain about critical race theory. If I had kids in school I'd want to go just to watch my neighbors out themselves as racists.
As soon as they started kicking up fuss about franchises they don't even pretend to have any attachment to, I feel like it must have become obvious to the general public what they really have a...
As soon as they started kicking up fuss about franchises they don't even pretend to have any attachment to, I feel like it must have become obvious to the general public what they really have a problem with.
It was plausible that these adult nerds were really invested in the Ghostbusters, but The Little Mermaid? Nobody would believe that. So now the pretense that it was about the quality of sequels/remakes is out, and it's openly about opposing the very concept of changing certain characteristics of a character in recasting. Namely race, gender, sexuality. As you said, the hawks for accuracy don't seem to care very much about other things that are often changed. There was no online shitstorm when 5ft 7 Tom Cruise was cast as the canonically 6ft 5 Jack Reacher.
So I totally agree with your point, and I think the whining about casting and adaptations is out of control and ridiculous, but I actually do remember seeing people complain about Cruise being...
So I totally agree with your point, and I think the whining about casting and adaptations is out of control and ridiculous, but I actually do remember seeing people complain about Cruise being cast as Reacher. It wasn't nearly as nasty and the race/gender stuff for sure, and I'm absolutely certain there wasn't as much of it, but it was there. I don't think it changes your argument any, but I know a lot of fans were really happy with the casting in the new series because the actor is BEEG.
I think some of this is the sort of culture of gatekeeping/possessiveness about characters and IP that fandom communities have always have (which is already problematic on its own) combined with a lot of racism and misogyny in geek communities which was always there, but I think has been getting louder because there has actually been pushback against it in the last decade+. Nerds have always pitched fits about adaptations of nerd shit, but it has combined with a really nasty regressive subculture that isn't just unconsciously racist/misogynist, but consciously so, into something really foul. It's reached a point where I am deeply uncomfortable identifying myself as a "fan" of any number of things that I really enjoy. And maybe that's a good thing. The idea of your identity being a person who likes a particular book or movie or comic book company is really kind of dehumanizing when you think about it. I mean, by all means get nerdy about shit, love things, enjoy things, devour stories and all of that. But making being a "star wars fan" or a "Tolkien geek" your whole identity isn't great and is probably going to lead to some pretty shitty behavior. That's not a recipe for a complete, well rounded person, and I've been guilty of it at times in my life for sure.
Indeed there was pushback about Jack Reacher, in fact that's the only way I would ever have known about that example, because I've never had any interest in that franchise. But as you say, it...
Indeed there was pushback about Jack Reacher, in fact that's the only way I would ever have known about that example, because I've never had any interest in that franchise. But as you say, it wasn't nasty. It didn't trend on twitter, it wasn't top billing on the reactionary podcast circuit, it was criticism but not a shitstorm.
I think the comparison between that and something like the Little Mermaid illustrates very clearly the difference between backlash from just the source material purists, and backlash from source material purists PLUS a bunch of people with much darker motives. Both groups are toxic, yes, but I think you'll agree that it's a very different game when the racists get involved.
For that reason I have some hope that it's obvious enough for the general public to see, and they can write off those involved as bad actors without further consideration. This reduces their ability to mainstream their talking points.
Curious which. I've always found Superman boring, so never delved into the whole lore thing with him, but being obviously humanoid in origin would seem to mean that on Earth he should look...
I mean, there are definitely race and gender flips I'm not a big fan of
Curious which.
the guy that plays Superman in Superman & Lois is not a ripped Adonis and I kinda think he should be
I've always found Superman boring, so never delved into the whole lore thing with him, but being obviously humanoid in origin would seem to mean that on Earth he should look incredibly frail as there is no weightlifting/resistance that would build musculature for him.
I'm not a big fan of creators changing the race and/or gender of a character without integrating this new perspective into the narrative. A recent example was the TV show The Sandman. The...
Curious which.
I'm not a big fan of creators changing the race and/or gender of a character without integrating this new perspective into the narrative. A recent example was the TV show The Sandman. The impression I get is that they flipped every gender and race they could, and also were top-notch in terms of LGBT representation. That is fantastic. Unfortunately, with the exception of a few scenes, they failed to integrate the unique perspective these characters brought, so it feels like black actors playing white characters, and LGBT characters reproducing heteronormative traits. My issue, I must clarify, is not political, but rather that this is not conducive to good storytelling. Either go all the way and have the courage to make these characters shine, or keep everything as is and deal with the criticism. That is my opinion. Or maybe not, representation is always good somehow, no? IDK.
I've always found Superman boring, so never delved into the whole lore thing with him, but being obviously humanoid in origin would seem to mean that on Earth he should look incredibly frail as there is no weightlifting/resistance that would build musculature for him.
Yeah, that makes sense. But super-heroes largely do not make sense. John Byrne's 1986 Superman established the modern archetype of the character, both in story and imagery. He didn't invent everything from scratch, but he did introduce things that we now consider inseparable from Superman and consolidated the mythology in a very cohesive way. In John Byrne's era, the enormous power of the heroes was visually expressed in their oversized anatomy, and it really was anatomy, these guys were learning about every muscle of the human body just to make it pop. Those were the glory days of monsters like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Dolph Lundgren, and Sylvester Stallone. Good times.
I cringe seeing people complain about diversity inclusion in movies, but I also cringe seeing people mock/complain about people complaining about diversity inclusion in movies. Same for a lot of...
I cringe seeing people complain about diversity inclusion in movies, but I also cringe seeing people mock/complain about people complaining about diversity inclusion in movies. Same for a lot of other "outrage culture" issues
If a movie has a "diverse" cast and sucks, people will say it sucks. This happened with the Ghostbusters remake. Outrage culture focuses on fringe cases and exaggerates things, like "you're not allowed to criticize this person because they're homosexual/trans/woman/POC". In reality, most people (even far-left) have no problem criticizing gays/transgenders/woman/POC when they do things which actually deserve criticism.
I used to be the kind of person that would get mad at castings like the sea snake in House of the Dragon. I'm happy to have moved past that rage some time ago. I think this is definitely a very...
I used to be the kind of person that would get mad at castings like the sea snake in House of the Dragon.
I'm happy to have moved past that rage some time ago.
I think this is definitely a very oniony onion article.
I wouldn't judge someone who merely wishes to protect the internal consistency of the fictional worlds they cherish. What is wrong in my view is to use the criticism of media products as an excuse...
I wouldn't judge someone who merely wishes to protect the internal consistency of the fictional worlds they cherish. What is wrong in my view is to use the criticism of media products as an excuse for blatant racism. There's a difference between preference and outrage.
I've reached a point where I think I would judge someone for the former. I've started to think that too many people that would self-identify as "geeks" or "nerds" or whatever have formed our...
I've reached a point where I think I would judge someone for the former. I've started to think that too many people that would self-identify as "geeks" or "nerds" or whatever have formed our entire identities around liking one or two things, and the absolute overreaction when someone wants to expand those stories, or change them, or retell them is a problem that I don't think we've grappled with much because we're still working on just not hating black people and women in geek circles, and we're not even doing a great job at that.
But stories aren't a static thing, they change by their nature. Even the meaning of a book changes in the act of reading and interpreting it (something else that nerds tend to have a hard time accepting, hence "word of god" and "canon" being very important in most fandoms). And stories are told and retold and changed and adapted and combined in so many ways, and those things are important to storytelling. So I get being a Tolkien fan and thinking the Hobbit was a pretty bad miss, but I kinda feel like I'm over the whole "I must protect the stories that I love" thing. It leads to gatekeeping and bad behavior and pitching gargantuan fits because "that actress has the wrong hair color" or "she's not pretty enough to play that character" or "ariel can't be black". It's literary prescriptivism, and I think we need to move past it just like linguists are moving past prescriptivism in language. If we want "fan" or "geek" or "nerd" communities to be nice places then we need to be more open not just to different types of people, but to different types of stories even when they involve the things we love.
And the thing is, this process doesn't harm the stories we already love. Like, I love The Hobbit. I have really formative memories of my mother reading it to me at bedtime. It has always held a really important place in my love of stories. And Peter Jackson making some pretty awful Hobbit movies doesn't affect that in the least. The Hobbit still exists exactly as it always has, both in print form and in my memory.
And that doesn't mean that adaptations or new stories told using old characters are somehow immune from criticism, even criticism that references the traditions that those stories are drawing from. I can look at the Hobbit movies and I can say that they didn't really work as their own thing very well, and that they fail as adaptations to capture the core of what makes The Hobbit a good story. But the important thing is that I'm looking at the work as a new story that is trying to capture something from a previous story, not someone coming in and doing violence to something that I hold dear. Because the thing I love is still there, you know?
I actually think that, for all their failings, Marvel comics fans have done a pretty good job of this. This might just be because I'm an outsider to that fandom looking in, and I don't see the nastiness. But from where I'm sitting, it seems like the MCU is looked at as its own thing for the most part, and comics fans seem to be pretty good at looking at the movies on their own merits, and examining how they do certain stories and characters both similarly and where they depart without getting overly upset about the departures. I have a feeling this comes from the way that comic often play with different versions of characters and retell a lot of the same stories in different ways and with different people.
Anyway, sorry about the rant, it's just something that I've been thinking about a lot, especially over the last few years as I've seen a couple of fan communities that I used to be pretty active in implode into absolutely wastelands of awful negativity over most ridiculous shit.
Do not feel sorry. But I hope you're able to make a distinction between those who merely express a preference among their peers, and those that seek to broadly publicize their views with the...
Do not feel sorry. But I hope you're able to make a distinction between those who merely express a preference among their peers, and those that seek to broadly publicize their views with the evident purpose of inducing moral outrage and reinforcing patterns of societal oppression.
Without distinctions, it is hard to know the difference between antagonists and potential allies.
Yeah I definitely hear you, and I don't think that people shouldn't be able to say, "I wish this was more like the thing that I love". I do think there's a danger that those folks will be easily...
Yeah I definitely hear you, and I don't think that people shouldn't be able to say, "I wish this was more like the thing that I love". I do think there's a danger that those folks will be easily swept up by or caught up in the rhetoric and manipulation by the folks who have an agenda, or even just in a mob of folks who are kinda mad about something not being to their liking and want to make sure people hear about it. And sometimes when that happens, a few people get really caught up in it and do stupid things like sending death threats to artists and doxing critics who disagree with the hivemind. I think the structure of the internet and the ways that it amplifies strong feelings makes all of this stuff way worse.
If in 1970 you didn't like a Star Wars then you might rant about it to your friends, maybe you would write a letter to the editor or write a review for a fanzine, but it just wasn't likely to get to the kind of insane, fevered mob mentality that things got to in 2017. And yeah, a few fringe people in that mob were motivated by conscious racism or misogyny, but a lot more folks just didn't like it because it didn't make them feel like Star Wars was supposed to. And that reaction was almost as toxic as anything I have seen in online fandom. Note: I'm not saying that there aren't valid criticisms of TLJ; there are. I do think that if Disney had been more confident in it and had a competent follow-up, then it might have come out looking better in hindsight, but it never really had the chance to do that because the third movie tried as hard as possible to negate everything that the 2nd was trying to set up.
Another example is Gamergate. I know people who got caught up in that stuff because they just uncritically loved videogames and saw people criticizing the thing that they had created their whole identity out of; so when people started telling them, "these feminists are the enemy, and SJWs are corrupt and want to take all of the things you love away from you" then instead of thinking critically about it or just acknowledging that there might be different viewpoints or that games won't be worse if women in them are more than dehumanized damsels or sex objects they got swept up into that whole right wing radicalization funnel.
I just think that "geek" (or fandom or whatever you want to call it) culture needs to really carefully examine our relationships with the things that we love, and the way we think about stories and culture and criticism, especially online.
I'm really sorry if it feels like I'm ranting at you, because I'm not. I just used to love being part of those types of communities because it felt like finding people that you could be excited about things that you loved with. But more and more they feel like places where it's about drawing lines and gatekeeping. It feels like so many fandoms are as much defined by what they hate than the stories that they love. And that negativity and susceptibility to manipulation and mob mentality has just really taken so much of the fun out of those communities for me.
The "funniest" thing are the progressively nonsensical attempts at disguising outrage as something that is not racism. I mean, there are definitely race and gender flips I'm not a big fan of, but that is not the kind of thing that would make me feel the world is out of its orbit.
What do bother me a bit are other kinds of "flips", like for example the guy that plays Superman in Superman & Lois is not a ripped Adonis and I kinda think he should be :P. It feels like Tobey Maguire playing He-Man lol
That's how I feel about the people showing up to school board meetings to complain about critical race theory. If I had kids in school I'd want to go just to watch my neighbors out themselves as racists.
As soon as they started kicking up fuss about franchises they don't even pretend to have any attachment to, I feel like it must have become obvious to the general public what they really have a problem with.
It was plausible that these adult nerds were really invested in the Ghostbusters, but The Little Mermaid? Nobody would believe that. So now the pretense that it was about the quality of sequels/remakes is out, and it's openly about opposing the very concept of changing certain characteristics of a character in recasting. Namely race, gender, sexuality. As you said, the hawks for accuracy don't seem to care very much about other things that are often changed. There was no online shitstorm when 5ft 7 Tom Cruise was cast as the canonically 6ft 5 Jack Reacher.
So I totally agree with your point, and I think the whining about casting and adaptations is out of control and ridiculous, but I actually do remember seeing people complain about Cruise being cast as Reacher. It wasn't nearly as nasty and the race/gender stuff for sure, and I'm absolutely certain there wasn't as much of it, but it was there. I don't think it changes your argument any, but I know a lot of fans were really happy with the casting in the new series because the actor is BEEG.
I think some of this is the sort of culture of gatekeeping/possessiveness about characters and IP that fandom communities have always have (which is already problematic on its own) combined with a lot of racism and misogyny in geek communities which was always there, but I think has been getting louder because there has actually been pushback against it in the last decade+. Nerds have always pitched fits about adaptations of nerd shit, but it has combined with a really nasty regressive subculture that isn't just unconsciously racist/misogynist, but consciously so, into something really foul. It's reached a point where I am deeply uncomfortable identifying myself as a "fan" of any number of things that I really enjoy. And maybe that's a good thing. The idea of your identity being a person who likes a particular book or movie or comic book company is really kind of dehumanizing when you think about it. I mean, by all means get nerdy about shit, love things, enjoy things, devour stories and all of that. But making being a "star wars fan" or a "Tolkien geek" your whole identity isn't great and is probably going to lead to some pretty shitty behavior. That's not a recipe for a complete, well rounded person, and I've been guilty of it at times in my life for sure.
Indeed there was pushback about Jack Reacher, in fact that's the only way I would ever have known about that example, because I've never had any interest in that franchise. But as you say, it wasn't nasty. It didn't trend on twitter, it wasn't top billing on the reactionary podcast circuit, it was criticism but not a shitstorm.
I think the comparison between that and something like the Little Mermaid illustrates very clearly the difference between backlash from just the source material purists, and backlash from source material purists PLUS a bunch of people with much darker motives. Both groups are toxic, yes, but I think you'll agree that it's a very different game when the racists get involved.
For that reason I have some hope that it's obvious enough for the general public to see, and they can write off those involved as bad actors without further consideration. This reduces their ability to mainstream their talking points.
Curious which.
I've always found Superman boring, so never delved into the whole lore thing with him, but being obviously humanoid in origin would seem to mean that on Earth he should look incredibly frail as there is no weightlifting/resistance that would build musculature for him.
I'm not a big fan of creators changing the race and/or gender of a character without integrating this new perspective into the narrative. A recent example was the TV show The Sandman. The impression I get is that they flipped every gender and race they could, and also were top-notch in terms of LGBT representation. That is fantastic. Unfortunately, with the exception of a few scenes, they failed to integrate the unique perspective these characters brought, so it feels like black actors playing white characters, and LGBT characters reproducing heteronormative traits. My issue, I must clarify, is not political, but rather that this is not conducive to good storytelling. Either go all the way and have the courage to make these characters shine, or keep everything as is and deal with the criticism. That is my opinion. Or maybe not, representation is always good somehow, no? IDK.
Yeah, that makes sense. But super-heroes largely do not make sense. John Byrne's 1986 Superman established the modern archetype of the character, both in story and imagery. He didn't invent everything from scratch, but he did introduce things that we now consider inseparable from Superman and consolidated the mythology in a very cohesive way. In John Byrne's era, the enormous power of the heroes was visually expressed in their oversized anatomy, and it really was anatomy, these guys were learning about every muscle of the human body just to make it pop. Those were the glory days of monsters like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Dolph Lundgren, and Sylvester Stallone. Good times.
I cringe seeing people complain about diversity inclusion in movies, but I also cringe seeing people mock/complain about people complaining about diversity inclusion in movies. Same for a lot of other "outrage culture" issues
If a movie has a "diverse" cast and sucks, people will say it sucks. This happened with the Ghostbusters remake. Outrage culture focuses on fringe cases and exaggerates things, like "you're not allowed to criticize this person because they're homosexual/trans/woman/POC". In reality, most people (even far-left) have no problem criticizing gays/transgenders/woman/POC when they do things which actually deserve criticism.
I believe the satire in the article targets those that are outraged by what they perceive as too much diversity.
I used to be the kind of person that would get mad at castings like the sea snake in House of the Dragon.
I'm happy to have moved past that rage some time ago.
I think this is definitely a very oniony onion article.
I wouldn't judge someone who merely wishes to protect the internal consistency of the fictional worlds they cherish. What is wrong in my view is to use the criticism of media products as an excuse for blatant racism. There's a difference between preference and outrage.
I've reached a point where I think I would judge someone for the former. I've started to think that too many people that would self-identify as "geeks" or "nerds" or whatever have formed our entire identities around liking one or two things, and the absolute overreaction when someone wants to expand those stories, or change them, or retell them is a problem that I don't think we've grappled with much because we're still working on just not hating black people and women in geek circles, and we're not even doing a great job at that.
But stories aren't a static thing, they change by their nature. Even the meaning of a book changes in the act of reading and interpreting it (something else that nerds tend to have a hard time accepting, hence "word of god" and "canon" being very important in most fandoms). And stories are told and retold and changed and adapted and combined in so many ways, and those things are important to storytelling. So I get being a Tolkien fan and thinking the Hobbit was a pretty bad miss, but I kinda feel like I'm over the whole "I must protect the stories that I love" thing. It leads to gatekeeping and bad behavior and pitching gargantuan fits because "that actress has the wrong hair color" or "she's not pretty enough to play that character" or "ariel can't be black". It's literary prescriptivism, and I think we need to move past it just like linguists are moving past prescriptivism in language. If we want "fan" or "geek" or "nerd" communities to be nice places then we need to be more open not just to different types of people, but to different types of stories even when they involve the things we love.
And the thing is, this process doesn't harm the stories we already love. Like, I love The Hobbit. I have really formative memories of my mother reading it to me at bedtime. It has always held a really important place in my love of stories. And Peter Jackson making some pretty awful Hobbit movies doesn't affect that in the least. The Hobbit still exists exactly as it always has, both in print form and in my memory.
And that doesn't mean that adaptations or new stories told using old characters are somehow immune from criticism, even criticism that references the traditions that those stories are drawing from. I can look at the Hobbit movies and I can say that they didn't really work as their own thing very well, and that they fail as adaptations to capture the core of what makes The Hobbit a good story. But the important thing is that I'm looking at the work as a new story that is trying to capture something from a previous story, not someone coming in and doing violence to something that I hold dear. Because the thing I love is still there, you know?
I actually think that, for all their failings, Marvel comics fans have done a pretty good job of this. This might just be because I'm an outsider to that fandom looking in, and I don't see the nastiness. But from where I'm sitting, it seems like the MCU is looked at as its own thing for the most part, and comics fans seem to be pretty good at looking at the movies on their own merits, and examining how they do certain stories and characters both similarly and where they depart without getting overly upset about the departures. I have a feeling this comes from the way that comic often play with different versions of characters and retell a lot of the same stories in different ways and with different people.
Anyway, sorry about the rant, it's just something that I've been thinking about a lot, especially over the last few years as I've seen a couple of fan communities that I used to be pretty active in implode into absolutely wastelands of awful negativity over most ridiculous shit.
Do not feel sorry. But I hope you're able to make a distinction between those who merely express a preference among their peers, and those that seek to broadly publicize their views with the evident purpose of inducing moral outrage and reinforcing patterns of societal oppression.
Without distinctions, it is hard to know the difference between antagonists and potential allies.
Yeah I definitely hear you, and I don't think that people shouldn't be able to say, "I wish this was more like the thing that I love". I do think there's a danger that those folks will be easily swept up by or caught up in the rhetoric and manipulation by the folks who have an agenda, or even just in a mob of folks who are kinda mad about something not being to their liking and want to make sure people hear about it. And sometimes when that happens, a few people get really caught up in it and do stupid things like sending death threats to artists and doxing critics who disagree with the hivemind. I think the structure of the internet and the ways that it amplifies strong feelings makes all of this stuff way worse.
If in 1970 you didn't like a Star Wars then you might rant about it to your friends, maybe you would write a letter to the editor or write a review for a fanzine, but it just wasn't likely to get to the kind of insane, fevered mob mentality that things got to in 2017. And yeah, a few fringe people in that mob were motivated by conscious racism or misogyny, but a lot more folks just didn't like it because it didn't make them feel like Star Wars was supposed to. And that reaction was almost as toxic as anything I have seen in online fandom. Note: I'm not saying that there aren't valid criticisms of TLJ; there are. I do think that if Disney had been more confident in it and had a competent follow-up, then it might have come out looking better in hindsight, but it never really had the chance to do that because the third movie tried as hard as possible to negate everything that the 2nd was trying to set up.
Another example is Gamergate. I know people who got caught up in that stuff because they just uncritically loved videogames and saw people criticizing the thing that they had created their whole identity out of; so when people started telling them, "these feminists are the enemy, and SJWs are corrupt and want to take all of the things you love away from you" then instead of thinking critically about it or just acknowledging that there might be different viewpoints or that games won't be worse if women in them are more than dehumanized damsels or sex objects they got swept up into that whole right wing radicalization funnel.
I just think that "geek" (or fandom or whatever you want to call it) culture needs to really carefully examine our relationships with the things that we love, and the way we think about stories and culture and criticism, especially online.
I'm really sorry if it feels like I'm ranting at you, because I'm not. I just used to love being part of those types of communities because it felt like finding people that you could be excited about things that you loved with. But more and more they feel like places where it's about drawing lines and gatekeeping. It feels like so many fandoms are as much defined by what they hate than the stories that they love. And that negativity and susceptibility to manipulation and mob mentality has just really taken so much of the fun out of those communities for me.
That's okay. I'm glad you could express something that is clearly very important to you. These things are complicated. I understand.
Of course, it all depends the context, but I was definitely more of the later than the former. I just wanted to be mad about something.
Thankfully the article has a good ending.