Even if I drew on your face with a pen
This post is not actually about The Last Jedi (2017), which I still haven't seen. I just happened to be reading Film Crit Hulk's "The Beautiful, Ugly, and Possessive Hearts of Star Wars" when I hit a small emotional minefield. An entire section of the essay is devoted to the self-seriousness of toxic fandom, with its complaints about too many jokes and juvenile humor unbecoming the franchise and failure to treat the characters with the respect they deserve:
But it's all very simple: if the movie feels silly, then they feel silly.
And they do not want to feel silly one bit. Make no mistake, a lot of people watch movies and live vicariously through the characters. They go "I'm Luke Skywalker!" or "I'm Spider-man!" and they do this because these movies are really good at making us feel this way. So it's not just about escape, but an empowerment fantasy. They want to hold a lightsaber or web-sling around New York City. They want to feel awesome. They want to feel badass. But they definitely don't want to feel like the butt of a joke. It's exactly why Christopher Nolan endeared a certain kind of superhero fanboy who wanted to dress up their dark affinity for Batman in an intellectual, very serious packaging. While I will certainly go to bat for those films, there is nothing inherently "mature" about this fan approach. As I've argued before, most fan posturing has nothing to do with maturity, but instead the desire to shed their kid-like sensibilities and child-like interests, all by catering to juvenile stories.
There's a reason the Star Wars petitioner personality gets saddled with the "basement dweller" stereotype. It's not a fair one and probably not even accurate (which is scary, imagining them as full-grown adults with jobs and stuff), but it happens because making those comments are absolutely the tonal equivalent of a self-serious tween boy yelling, "MOM, GET OUT OF MY ROOM, I'M SUPER SERIOUS." It is always in the desperation to be taken seriously that we make ourselves the joke. But embracing our kid-like sensibilities, along with all the sadness and range life has to offer, is maturity itself. It's understanding we can be silly and make fun of ourselves just as much as we can be anything else.
By nature I take things seriously. I had to learn to understand a lot of jokes. (I still don't get entire classes of them. I believe that other people find them funny, but they don't produce the same reaction in me. I don't feel bad about it.) Even as late as college, I'd get accused of not having a sense of humor, not knowing how to have fun, not knowing how to lighten up, not knowing how to relax. (Scotty, with technical journal: "I am relaxing!") And I spent a lot of my childhood and my adolescence being made fun of. Big news. I survived to the age where I could have conversations with my peer group and my life got a lot better. But I realized while reading the paragraphs cited above that it is still extremely difficult for me to disentangle learn to have a sense of humor about yourself as part of the process of becoming a healthy adult from be a good sport, what's wrong with you, can't you take a joke? I know they are two different things. One is legitimate life advice; the other is bullying. I even think I managed the first somewhere in my decades of brute-forcing social skills into my brain. [edit: Okay, Tiny Wittgenstein, back off.] But the second is so often passed off under guise of the first that when I encounter the life advice in the wild—not even directed at me! I haven't seen The Last Jedi and I'm not an entitled cishet fanbro!—apparently some unexploded ordnance goes off in my head and I wind up re-reading the section several times to make sure it's not accidentally punching down in its attempts at uplift. There's a lot of mainstream fan culture I have no affinity for, but stop taking that silly thing so seriously is one of the few overlapping hills I will die on.
Anyway, I went to look at some other parts of the internet to get my heart rate back down and saw that![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
handful_ofdust had tagged me WWII AU Newt Geiszler and Hermann Gottlieb, which definitely helped. The link in comments is dead, but I am delighted that I am not the only person who wanted to cast Burn Gorman as Alan Turing after seeing Pacific Rim (2013). I feel validated like five years after the fact. I don't feel bad about that, either.
But it's all very simple: if the movie feels silly, then they feel silly.
And they do not want to feel silly one bit. Make no mistake, a lot of people watch movies and live vicariously through the characters. They go "I'm Luke Skywalker!" or "I'm Spider-man!" and they do this because these movies are really good at making us feel this way. So it's not just about escape, but an empowerment fantasy. They want to hold a lightsaber or web-sling around New York City. They want to feel awesome. They want to feel badass. But they definitely don't want to feel like the butt of a joke. It's exactly why Christopher Nolan endeared a certain kind of superhero fanboy who wanted to dress up their dark affinity for Batman in an intellectual, very serious packaging. While I will certainly go to bat for those films, there is nothing inherently "mature" about this fan approach. As I've argued before, most fan posturing has nothing to do with maturity, but instead the desire to shed their kid-like sensibilities and child-like interests, all by catering to juvenile stories.
There's a reason the Star Wars petitioner personality gets saddled with the "basement dweller" stereotype. It's not a fair one and probably not even accurate (which is scary, imagining them as full-grown adults with jobs and stuff), but it happens because making those comments are absolutely the tonal equivalent of a self-serious tween boy yelling, "MOM, GET OUT OF MY ROOM, I'M SUPER SERIOUS." It is always in the desperation to be taken seriously that we make ourselves the joke. But embracing our kid-like sensibilities, along with all the sadness and range life has to offer, is maturity itself. It's understanding we can be silly and make fun of ourselves just as much as we can be anything else.
By nature I take things seriously. I had to learn to understand a lot of jokes. (I still don't get entire classes of them. I believe that other people find them funny, but they don't produce the same reaction in me. I don't feel bad about it.) Even as late as college, I'd get accused of not having a sense of humor, not knowing how to have fun, not knowing how to lighten up, not knowing how to relax. (Scotty, with technical journal: "I am relaxing!") And I spent a lot of my childhood and my adolescence being made fun of. Big news. I survived to the age where I could have conversations with my peer group and my life got a lot better. But I realized while reading the paragraphs cited above that it is still extremely difficult for me to disentangle learn to have a sense of humor about yourself as part of the process of becoming a healthy adult from be a good sport, what's wrong with you, can't you take a joke? I know they are two different things. One is legitimate life advice; the other is bullying. I even think I managed the first somewhere in my decades of brute-forcing social skills into my brain. [edit: Okay, Tiny Wittgenstein, back off.] But the second is so often passed off under guise of the first that when I encounter the life advice in the wild—not even directed at me! I haven't seen The Last Jedi and I'm not an entitled cishet fanbro!—apparently some unexploded ordnance goes off in my head and I wind up re-reading the section several times to make sure it's not accidentally punching down in its attempts at uplift. There's a lot of mainstream fan culture I have no affinity for, but stop taking that silly thing so seriously is one of the few overlapping hills I will die on.
Anyway, I went to look at some other parts of the internet to get my heart rate back down and saw that
handful_ofdust had tagged me WWII AU Newt Geiszler and Hermann Gottlieb, which definitely helped. The link in comments is dead, but I am delighted that I am not the only person who wanted to cast Burn Gorman as Alan Turing after seeing Pacific Rim (2013). I feel validated like five years after the fact. I don't feel bad about that, either.
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The thing is, from what I’ve read of yours, you are aware of the seriousness than can underly comedy and the absurdity in drama, and have a pretty good idea of which part of the emotional Klein bottle to focus on in any given situation. I don’t know whether that’s the skill Film Crit Hulk is alluding to, but if they can’t get their head around it, well, their loss (I’m also slightly annoyed that someone who calls themselves “Film Crit Hulk” does not write thoughtful, intelligent film criticism *in the actual style of* the Incredible Hulk).
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I am so sorry.
The thing is, from what I’ve read of yours, you are aware of the seriousness than can underly comedy and the absurdity in drama, and have a pretty good idea of which part of the emotional Klein bottle to focus on in any given situation.
Thank you. That's a really nice thing to hear. I don't actually worry that I don't have a sense of humor or that taking things seriously means having no joy in life. (I don't worry that I can't relax, either. Most of the things I do to relax just happen to be solitary rather than social. No amount of peer pressure was ever going to make me find a night out on the town relaxing rather than something that I had to relax from afterward.) It was just that I had a kind of flinch reaction at that point in the article and then had to figure out why, since what the film critic was saying was neither directed at me nor insulting in general.
(I’m also slightly annoyed that someone who calls themselves “Film Crit Hulk” does not write thoughtful, intelligent film criticism *in the actual style of* the Incredible Hulk).
I feel like they might have done so at one point, but now they seem to write thoughtful, intelligent film criticism with more definite articles and fewer exclamation points. I enjoyed their essay about The Last Jedi; it's addressing the jaw-dropping wave of visceral hatred that the film provoked from a percentage of the Star Wars fanbase, in the process of which they examine the deep identification and protectiveness that many fans seem to feel for the original films and how readily and aggressively that protectiveness can turn to possessiveness when they feel someone—like Rian Johnson—is doing Star Wars wrong. There's an entire section about humor because a common possessive fan complaint appears to be that the film doesn't take itself seriously, which makes the fans feel that their investment in Star Wars is being belittled and therefore that they themselves are being mocked for caring about Star Wars and then you get nerd rage. Film Critic Hulk really does not believe that the movie is 152 minutes of "Gotcha, suckers, laughing all the way to the bank" and offers all sorts of evidence on their side, but they also argue that the humorlessness of so many of these complaints is part and parcel of toxic masculinity, where a man must be treated with the utmost deference at all times and being laughed at is the worst, weakest, most shameful thing ever (Film Critic Hulk does not at this juncture cite Margaret Atwood, but fruitfully could have. I thought of Thomas More's characterization of the Devil as "the proud spirit [that] cannot endure to be mocked" and then I wondered if anyone has ever written a story where a demon is exorcized by just embarrassing it sufficiently). Hence talking about the importance of not taking oneself seriously all the time as a basic adult skill, and hence my brain going mildly boom.
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(Also it's a good movie! Really good!)
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I'll keep it in mind whenever I see it! I still have to see The Force Awakens (2015).
(Also it's a good movie! Really good!)
I've liked everything else I've seen by Rian Johnson, which is everything else by Rian Johnson.
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Original Star Trek episode "Day of the Dove" maybe?
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!!!
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Legit!
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(Also I think I would punch someone who mocked Christopher Smart in the face. Nice restraint!)
ETA You can see some of that here, altho even that is cleaned up. https://birthmoviesdeath.com/2016/06/28/star-wars-the-force-alluded-to
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What do you mean by "very bloggy"? Just not tightly written?
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It's basically when they say "I tend to write long, multi-component essays" (whaddaya mean, component) "that frequently go beyond the scope of a movie itself, in order to have larger discussions about storytelling and dramatic function." That's a really long overcomplicated and at the same time weirdly informal way to say "I write long informal multipart essays in which I talk about not just the single movie under review but also storytelling, dramatic structure, blah blah blee."
The #1 reviewer of! all! time! on Goodreads, "karen," writes a lot like that (she is allergic to capital letters for some reason), only she includes more gifs. "Bloggy" is maybe a bad term for it, because there are some academics who wrote blog posts that are more polished than other peoples' journal reviews, but it's that kind of runaway internet thing where a very colloquial personal style gets swapped in for actual criticism and then the person writing it is the subject of a sort of cult of personality, where you're reading more for how they write than what they actually say, let alone whether or not the movie is any good. Which isn't new, it was a big thing with Pauline Kael and the New Yorker. Even James Agee indulged in some of it. Dorothy Parker. But all those writers also had enough critical acumen and professional discipline that even when they were just cracking wise, there was still some wisdom in it.
(Probably a big distinction here is that pro writers had to learn how to edit because you had to be able to fit your thoughts in the available space. Rightly or wrongly, people no longer really need to learn how to do that, so they're free to just let themselves go. But a lot of the time what that ends up with is a lot of stuff that needs to be cut. I don't think anything is necessary in that review until they start talking about the guy who was so pissed off Holdo didn't let Poe in on her plan. If they'd started there, then circled back to include some of their big main essay-ist points, that would at least look more like an essay and less like a braindump. Anne Sexton, who knew a thing or two about letting herself go, said that while W.D. Snodgrass taught her what she could put into a poem, Robert Lowell taught her what to leave out.)
And also, this review is like SIXTEEN THOUSAND WORDS LONG. That amazes me. It's like when I see certain people say they won't read fanfics that are under 100K, because "they don't last long enough." That's because with a lot of those fanfics, people aren't reading, they're skimming. And with a review that bloggy, that goes on that long, the person's not really writing, they're just sort of digressing until they hit an interesting thought. Which is fine! There is nothing wrong with that! But it's not film criticism. It's not even thinking about film. It's not an essay. It's verbal jello.
//rant off
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I think that happened to Robin McKinley. It made her blog unreadable for me. I was very sad.
Which isn't new, it was a big thing with Pauline Kael and the New Yorker. Even James Agee indulged in some of it. Dorothy Parker. But all those writers also had enough critical acumen and professional discipline that even when they were just cracking wise, there was still some wisdom in it.
And none of their reviews went on for sixteen thousand words. I think Agee's record was the time he took three columns to talk about Monsieur Verdoux (1947) and that was extraordinary. Of course, you don't have to pay for printing costs on the internet. [edit: I see you covered that in your additional paragraph!]
I found a decently high level of signal to noise per paragraph in this essay, so I don't think it felt quite as jello-y to me, but I agree with the very colloquial style—it reads almost like it's meant to be heard, not seen on a page.
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Ohhhh Jesus for a while I couldn't even think about Robin McKinley's blog because I was all, "OMG, am I like that? Is that possibly how I come off to people? Weird disconnected emotionally messy babble rambling that makes you want to avert your eyes in pity?" Hah. Yeah, I think that blog is the kind of thing that would be delightful to dip into now and then as someone's published diary, maybe, but somehow unrolling on the screen in perpetuity it's just awful.
(It also occurred to me I could have summed up much of that rant in a reference to Regina Spektor's lyric "you can write but you can't edit." LOL. Another Sexton reference, for me -- she said something like, you have to write write write, then cut cut cut, then write write write, then cut cut cut....and that's two separate processes.)
it reads almost like it's meant to be heard, not seen on a page.
Yeah, it reads to me like what people think dialogue is like, although when you listen to recordings of how people actually talk, you realize how fragmentary and allusive and downright odd actual human speech is. It's very influenced by TV writers like Sorkin and Whedon.
And none of their reviews went on for sixteen thousand words.
CUE REGINA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Y0vtnLNABU
Of course, you don't have to pay for printing costs on the internet.
Yeah, which is of course a blessing (anyone can write anything! anytime! about anything they want! without the gatekeeping of trad pub!) and a terrible curse (anyone can write anything! anytime! about anything they want! without the gatekeeping of trad pub!). It's like when Microsoft Word came out with its spell checker and promptly dissolved the careers of a lot of proofreaders, copyeditors and editors. Haha no. You still need those people, they can't be replaced by a program.
-- And it bugs me that the Hulk film pieces don't seem to be reviewed at all, not even put through a spell checker. I dunno if that's the nature of the Observer or what (the Guardian is notorious for its typos, and I've caught a lot since the NYT went mostly online), but it suggests they're not even doing a cursory pass over the pieces. I don't think trad pub is 100% wonderful. I don't think the rise of the internet is all bad (altho recent evidence seems to suggest the way in which it happened in this timeline is 90% fucked up). I do think the loss of editing is something that affects thinking, and good editing can help change how people write, not just take out sentences for ad space or whatever. That's a real loss and like writing by hand it's going to be hard to get it back. Or like reading a single page in a book, rather than having prose be running down a screen that's one of 20 or 100 or 200 tabs open at the top.
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I backed off of footnotes because I didn't want to become her system of fifteen million footnotes indicated by protracted grawlix! I used to use them a lot in both reviews and general posts. Now something has to be really serious or under an LJ-cut to rate a footnote because I have looked into the abyss and it is four degree symbols in a row.
Yeah, it reads to me like what people think dialogue is like, although when you listen to recordings of how people actually talk, you realize how fragmentary and allusive and downright odd actual human speech is.
I was just trying to edit my comment to wonder if it was the effect of podcasts being such a popular art form: if people are now writing for the eye as if for the ear. (If the answer is yes, it's going to drive me up the wall. Simulated meandering is not something I enjoy even listening to.)
Haha no. You still need those people, they can't be replaced by a program.
You mean "illicit" is not interchangeable with "elicit"?
I don't want to nitpick the critic's spelling because that seems petty; homonyms happen and people re-reading their own work see the words they expect to see. I don't make typos often, but I have had some ridiculous ones get past me into the wild. I do think it's fair to nitpick the market not getting a pair of second eyes on it, which I agree with you it does not look like they did.
and I've caught a lot since the NYT went mostly online
Didn't they purge most of their copyeditors recently?
Or like reading a single page in a book, rather than having prose be running down a screen that's one of 20 or 100 or 200 tabs open at the top.
I learn better from books. It's three-dimensional. I can place passages by where I read them first: how far through the book, which side of the page, how far down the page. I can't do that with scrolls. It's one of the reasons I still prefer to read as much as I can in print and ink. I don't want something to vanish out of my head just because there's no way to fix position on a screen.
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My dim memory is that style of writing -- discursive, personal, rambling, "about" one thing but really with 20 different subjects -- was around long before podcasts, like with the first "bloggy" blogs (like Heartbreak Soup by Emily Gould of Gawker infamy). There are some more focused older blogs, like Sheila O'Malley on books, or Meg....argh, I no longer remember her name, who focused on the NY lit scene. It was made very very famous by Choire Sicha, also of Gawker infamy, but that was just its apex. I think it was built into blogging before then. Which is interesting because the first 'blogs' were basically linkrolls. Some of those very early bloggers, like kottke, sometimes got around to more personal writing, but not in the same very rambling way. Probably around the time Blogspot really took off? That was the first free and very easy to use blogging tool, and it was sort of the AOL CD of online personal writing.
My dad first made his mark in radio news and I grew up listening to newscasts for fun and OH MY GOD, I cannot deal with most amateur podcasters. The vocal fry! The weird emphases! The terrible pacing! IT'S LIKE LISTENING TO REGULAR PEOPLE TALK. WHY ON EARTH WOULD YOU RECORD THAT AND WANT PEOPLE TO PAY TO LISTEN TO YOU. Suddenly the whole world thinks it's Frederick Wiseman. Only, sadly, and not just sadly in this instance, there is only ONE Frederick Wiseman, and it is never more evident that what he does is not "just turn on a recorder" than when you listen to stuff that is actually made by someone....just turning on a recorder. I hate amateur podcasts more than video instructions, which is really something.
I don't want to nitpick the critic's spelling because that seems petty; homonyms happen and people re-reading their own work see the words they expect to see. I don't make typos often, but I have had some ridiculous ones get past me into the wild.
Yeah, I didn't mean spelling, altho I automatically pick up typos because of a pattern recognition thing, so if a piece is full of them it drives me nuts. I was thinking more of the editor who is like "you don't need this introduction," or "you need to get back to your point here," or "this comes out of nowhere, why not back up and write more?" Some of the old stories, like the editor who takes away the first three pages of your article because that's where the real beginning is. Which isn't necessarily true, but is a fun exercise. It's too bad editing gets reduced to typo-picking and squeezing the juice out of everything in the pop culture mind, because to me that's not what editing really is at all. But I think the lack of it is very easily signalled by really terrible recurring typos, missing words, and other things you could call the surface symptoms of the internal disorder.
and I've caught a lot since the NYT went mostly online
Didn't they purge most of their copyeditors recently?
PROBABLY. I would be greatly surprised if any big newspaper or pub house had any copyeditors left, which really fucking annoys me because once I thought it would be how I made my living. (But I also thought that would be writing, editing, teaching....so anyway.) I hear a lot of plaints from friends who are indie editors that now they're contracted by trad pub houses (often paid a flat fee, no salary or benefits of course) and expected to do the work of proofreader/copyeditor/editor for maybe one quarter of the pay of what any of those people would have earned. Gotta love late stage capitalism.
I memorize better from books. It's three-dimensional. I can place passages by where I read them first: how far through the book, which side of the page, how far down the page. I can't do that with scrolls. It's one of the reasons I still prefer to read as much as I can in print and ink. I don't want something to vanish out of my head just because there's no way to fix position on a screen.
HAH, I do the same thing -- I never thought of myself as having an eidetic memory, but I do exactly the same thing with "that passage is on the left-hand side on page 33" and I could visualize it. No, you can't do that with endlessly scrolling grayscale text. I didn't have any choice about buying books, though; our apartment is already full, we went broke multiple times, and the idea of moving (which we HAVE to do) is a nightmare because of the number of books. I seem to be able to remember content pretty well from ebooks, though, I just can't do that visual placing. Which is weird but better than nothing.
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I mean I can feel, in my fingertips, what a typewriter keyboard would feel like under them even now. It would feel like home. It would feel like inspiration. It would feel like dreams and ambition made tangible. It would also probably permanently cripple both my hands in under an hour.
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be careful what your algorithms wish for
> personal opinions and anecdotes, with no real care as to style or syntax
I suspect middlebrow meandering may thriving because it is being rewarded by search engines. It results in a lot of “unique content” that isn’t commercial spam, and if you touch on enough different things at a passable level of quality, you increase the number of things that can trigger people to link back to you.
I’m not suggesting that this calculated, but it seems natural to write more of what gets one attention, especially when attention is monetizable
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Thank you. I appreciate the preemptive deployment of the Flit gun.
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Insofar as he represents the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, I want to make him some cocoa and sit him down in front of a marathon of Technicolor musicals and tell him to stop beating himself up so badly just because human beings communicate poorly and probably always will. Insofar as he represents the part of my brain that seems to have given up so thoroughly on any endeavor in my life having any interest or value to other people that I have my first major fiction collection in thirteen years coming out in a month and I have done almost nothing to promote it beyond mentioning its existence once or twice on this journal, I want him to drop dead.
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Thank you.
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This is very true, and very important! (And I speak as someone who spent their adult life learning carefully not to Insert Joke/Ridiculous Flippant Statement Here, and failing far too often.)
I haven't read the article (I haven't see TLJ yet and hope to reasonably soon) but the "make it cool/dark" is a bit of a 'fanboy' thing (we have had it a lot in DW over the years), but maybe "taking it too seriously" isn't entirely the right way to put it? Don't lose perspective, or self-awareness, or don't bully, perhaps - it's trying to force the thing itself to be what you see it as, which in life or fiction, generally gets very toxic and hurtful quickly, whether it's making stuff properly cool, or tinhat shipping, or deciding this one fandom is the most Evil and going on a moral crusade against it and all its fans. Whatever you call it, it's the eternal pools of toxicity in fandom, and while generalities are always problematic the need to be cool does tend to be on 'fanboy' end of the scale. I don't know what the solution is: possibly don't human being, I don't know. (Maybe that's too cynical? Hopefully.)
But there are too many people who think there's nothing serious or worthwhile in something when it's absurd or comedic or even just fantastical, and you are not one of those. And people who get that are indeed one of the joys of being in fannish spaces/talking to people online. <3
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I have totally not heard this proposition. Who is the guy from the Double Rainbow meme?
Admittedly, Friedrich, going by his expression in portraits, would probably think I was crazy.
I think with Romantic painters you can consider one another crazy and still have great conversations about the sublime.
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That does sound classically Romantic. Stendhal syndrome if you faint and otherwise just a relatively usual reaction to the beauties of nature.
When, a while back on this journal, I saw your description of Cagney as Nick Bottom (you write review something like “not even by synesthesia can he describe his experience”)
I had to go looking because I remembered the performance but not the date of the description and found a comment on
I wondered whether Friedrich’s figures have their backs to us, not only so we can imagine ourselves in their place, but because any expression on their faces would seem ludicrously inadequate to the beauties they are observing.
That makes a lot of sense to me, and I like it.
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Oh fuck yes.
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Yes; that's very much what the essay is about and I agree that it's not unique to any one gender, although I think there are gendered manifestations.
I don't know what the solution is: possibly don't human being, I don't know. (Maybe that's too cynical? Hopefully.)
Don't human being like that.
But there are too many people who think there's nothing serious or worthwhile in something when it's absurd or comedic or even just fantastical, and you are not one of those. And people who get that are indeed one of the joys of being in fannish spaces/talking to people online.
Thank you!
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The quipping about medication made me wince, not only for obvious reasons, but because I have probably been that insensitive myself at times. I hope I have mostly grown/trained myself out of it (but it was not all that long ago that my husband yelled STOP JOKING at me when I thought I was only putting a mildly rueful spin on something, so maybe not).
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These statements are true of a number of things I value.
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While the vast majority of people have simple feelings about the franchise one way or the other, it has suddenly become dominated by unfettered arguments, toxic harshness, boycotts, petitions for films to be struck from the canon, petitions to outright remake films, petitions for firings and even full-on racist and sexist harassment campaigns
Also I gotta admit my very first reaction to that opening is "Were you not here for Ghostbusters 2016," but that is uncharitable.
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I'm willing to entertain the argument that the furor around The Last Jedi is worse. More people seem to be involved and the vitriol level seems to be even higher, which is impressive considering that Leslie Jones was driven off Twitter in 2016. I am not sure that Ghostbusters attracted fan edits and petitions to remake from scratch. The kind of people who complain about wall-to-wall women when the female characters have thirty percent screentime have only been emboldened in the two years since.
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http://screencrush.com/ghostbusters-trailer-most-disliked-movie-trailer-in-history/
It was one of the first times the fanboys successfully fucked up online ratings to the extent 538 wrote about it
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/ghostbusters-is-a-perfect-example-of-how-internet-ratings-are-broken/
It got more vitriol precisely because it was all women, and then didn't make that much money, and the critics also didn't like it. TLJ got glowing reviews and was also a big smash, so that dampened some of the Ghostbusters effect. But for my money that was much, much worse than what TLJ got.
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The trailer vitriol was the first I heard about, as well as the ratings-gaming. I actually think that The Last Jedi being a critical success has attracted more screaming rather than less, because at least the anti-Ghostbusters fanboys could rest secure in the knowledge that the all-female reboot had not been anointed by the critics, therefore their hate must have been justified by objective artistic value and everyone can see the evidence that women don't make art and aren't funny; here there seems to be an active cycle of arguing with the critics who have been paid off or bewitched or suborned by the SJWs, so it just keeps going, God knows what'll happen after the third movie.
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Also, by sheer coincidence this morning I found out (via a statement from him, so it's not secondary reporting) that Ahmed Best, who voiced Jar-Jar Binks in the prequels, nearly committed suicide back then over the backlash, which wasn't all directed at Lucas but also at him, personally. Talk about taking things seriously. I wouldn't say SW fandom is more or less toxic than Ghostbuster fandom in its attitude, but certainly in its size. Which means even more bile.
Then again: as an example of "nothing new under the sun", I offer the Astor Place Riot. Though I doubt "at least they haven't burned the house down and/or killed you" is of comfort to Leslie Jones, or the actress who plays Rose in TLJ, or indeed Ahmed Best.
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I agree that I don't think the overall article is meant in that spirit. It just hit a resonant nerve and then I had to figure out why. I suspect it does not help that the last few years have seen a national skyrocket in the destructive applications of can't you take a joke.
Ahmed Best, who voiced Jar-Jar Binks in the prequels, nearly committed suicide back then over the backlash, which wasn't all directed at Lucas but also at him, personally.
I hadn't heard that and I am sorry. I would have been surprised to hear it at the time, but I am not surprised now, which sucks.
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the Astor Place Riot
I had not heard of that one. I was thinking maybe the opening of Rites of Spring too.
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re: Wil Wheaton getting hate for Wesley, true, and he was a kid at the time. Though maybe I'm looking back with rosy glasses but I remember ST fandom being a bit better about differentiating actor from character, as well as refraining from such claims such as "raped/ruined my childhood". The big battles as I recall were first about whether TNG was ST at all, and then, once it gained traction and audience passion around ca. s3, the grand "Kirk versus Picard" debates. I don't recall people arguing that TNG ruined TOS retrospectively. Poor Wes was often singled out as a first example of "what was wrong with TNG" before TNG really took off in fannish affections, and to this day gets quoted as an example of a male Mary Sue (for Gene Roddenberry), though as Alara Rogers once pointed out, if any character saves the Enterprise singlehandedly in more episodes than any other character, it's Data, not Wesley, even in the early seasons when Wes is still a regular.
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First of all, failing to take people seriously when they ask to be can be really cruel. Mocking or belittling things that mean a whole lot to someone? Not cool.
Second, quite apart from respecting people, just objectively, pretty much anything can be taken seriously in some contexts, deservedly. Watching paint dry, Spongebob Squarepants, snoring goats--anything.
And third, there's absolutely no reason why people should be silly and make fun of themselves for other people. Conversations and social interaction require give and take, and (with some exceptions that probably don't qualify as "conversations" anyway) no party gets to dictate all the terms of the interaction, and we can all benefit from learning what others' expectations are, but NO ONE is required to laugh at themselves or accept some party line on something in order to be an adult.
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I think in this specific context (see reply to
In general I think you're right and that's why I had the reaction I did.
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