why is it always media that tries to be open and inclusive like steven universe, overwatch, dream daddy, that have the worst fanbases that run around telling eachother to kill themselves over inaccurate fanart and headcanon disputes
They’re not any worse than other fanbases that are steeped in bigoted, reactionary dickheads. It’s just that people make a bigger deal out of more diverse fandoms behaving badly because marginalized people are held to different standards.
Also you’re more likely to encounter bad SU, Dream Daddy and Overwatch fans on tumblr. Bad fans of more reactionary franchises are more common on reddit or the chans. And if they are here they’re not people that the OP would be following anyway.
i feel like not any worse is not a very satisfying answer though because it’s still kinda like why are communities that are supposed to be about openness and inclusiveness still comparable in violence to stuff like rick and morty
Im not a sociologist but my guess would be that anything that promotes group identification (i.e. “we play overwatch and overwatch players are like this”) also encourages people to create community norms and boundaries. This can be a good thing (like keeping Nazis or sexual harassers out), a bad thing, or a bit of both.
you’re probably right but it’s still kind of disheartening because i feel like we should be doing better
I still think the #1 easiest thing that would make fandoms way way better would be for everyone to stop inferring RL political beliefs from fandom affiliation. I understand why people do it but it leads to an atmosphere where youre either paranoid of large swathes of people based on nothing more than their consumer habits or youre paranoid that YOUR consumer habits might be alienating your friends or other members of a marginalized group you are in.
Not to mention it creates a culture where people care more about making their fandom look good than addressing bigotry and other problems in a mature and transparent fashion.
I don’t even watch cartoons or play video games but I can throw in my two cents here: I think fandom is intensely competitive but not very honest about being competitive. I agree fans of “diverse” media aren’t any more badly behaved than fans of, say, the Big Bang Theory, but they aren’t any better behaved either. It’s just a constant of human behavior.
Maybe fandom would benefit from acknowledging that negativity and competition are inherent to fandom as a social activity.
Fantasy football is an example of a male-dominated social competitive activity. I really think fandom on places like Tumblr is kind of a female-dominated mirror of that same competitive urge. Instead of teams, we root for ships, instead of players we root for characters. There’s lots of other ways to compete such as “who has the best analysis” and so on. Sometimes there’s money involved too, but even playing for social capital and attention is enough to really motivate people.
Making fandom a better and less nasty place would mean acknowledging that different people access it for different reasons. Some people don’t want to compete at anything, they just want a stress-free passive enjoyment. Other people have a strong drive to compete, to show they’re right, to get into conflicts. Most people are somewhere in the middle or go through different stages. But a lot of the most competitive people aren’t honest about their drive to compete. Maybe if there was more space to fight and get it out but in a way that doesn’t hurt everyone’s feelings. Livejournal fandom (while horrible in many respects) was great for that because you had lots of fan-organized writing competitions, charity competitions, even sports-bracket-type things for ships (I don’t know what to call them because I don’t even sport).
I think we’re always going to want to kick each other’s asses and get in arguments and fight stuff out. But that’s OK if everyone understands the rules and the stakes and accepts them. But when you have a massively unequal playing field, and one person thinks they’re playing a fun game but it’s dead serious to someone else, you can’t establish those kinds of friendly tournaments.
Attempts to make things better that start with “why can’t we all just get along” are going to fail because a lot of people don’t want to get along. That’s not what they’re in fandom for. They’re in it to win it. And because most of us are women or woman-aligned, we have an internalized sense of shame about competition that we really shouldn’t have.
I agree with this and my experience with fandom can be that it is very competitive in a way that mirrors sports. The Once Upon a Time Fandom was certainly like that. People would watch the episodes as if they were sports matches and cheer on their favorite characters and ships.
But I think there’s a difference between “not getting along” with a fandom and what I’m talking about, which is essentially no-platforming everyone in a fandom because one thinks that being in that fandom alone is the equivalent to having political views that should be no-platformed. One is complaining about the behavior of people within a fandom while the other is saying that nobody can be friends with or sometimes even show basic kindness toward people in that fandom because being in it is the equivalent of supporting RL oppression and violence. That makes enjoying fandom difficult, especially for people who like villains and/or have a lot of friends who do since a lot of villains do things that would be pretty messed up IRL.
I don’t think sports fandoms are like that (at least not in the US, I know from having friends internationally that, yeah, people do interpret the political ideologies of people based on what team they support and the results of that haven’t been great to put it mildly).
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