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Your Politics Has No Place In a Fandom

(Lucasfilm via AP)

Earlier today, I wrote how the new Ghostbusters trailer for its coming reboot in 2020 ignited a deluge of tweets from angry social justice warriors who feel that the 2016 reboot, which featured an all-female cast, was getting shortchanged and the toxic “fanboys” were getting rewarded for their toxicity.

(READ: The New Ghostbusters Trailer Is Out, and It’s Already Causing SJW Meltdowns)

The thing is, you could literally replace “Ghostbusters” with many other franchises that SJWs have attempted to, or have succeeded at, co-opting. If it’s popular, then one of the social justice groups will show up demanding its pound of flesh.

When they do show up, they’re not showing up as moralizing outsiders who only wish for a moral society. People like that are ridiculous, but at least they’re honest about who they are and what they want. Anti-video game lawyer Jack Thompson was a snake, but he never pretended to be a fan of video games.

Social justice warriors do pretend they’re a part of these fandoms, though.

I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen tweets and articles written by social justice warriors who proclaim to be a fan of this or that franchise, be it in gaming, movies, or television. They proclaim they and the rest of the fandom wish for more “inclusivity” or “representation” in their respective fandom, and before you know it, the creators of the said medium are giving it to them.

Very rarely does this actually please the SJW “fans,” or if it does, it doesn’t for long. One misstep and you’re back on the chopping block.

Take the recent dustup with the new Star Wars show “The Mandalorian,” which has become a crowd favorite thanks to its return to meat and potatoes, early George Lucas style of space western storytelling and presentation. Everything about the show is great, but the feminists weren’t so pleased.

According to them, the show didn’t have enough women with speaking roles in it. They took to social media and the blogosphere to curse the name of Mandalorian creator, John Favreau.

(READ: Dear Disney, Ignore the SJWs, Star Wars Is Good Again)

If they would have waited a few more weeks, they would have had their strong woman archetype, but regardless of this, you could see the unforgiving nature of the social justice warrior and popular media. The rule is that it must always conform to their specifications or you must face the consequences.

Some businesses are only too happy to cave and bow since many in Hollywood are just as radical as the radicals in the mob, but many cave thinking this is what the “fans” want.

This usually causes blowback from a group of people who were ignored and sidelined during the entire creation conquest; the actual fans of the franchise. This group doesn’t have the platform that the SJWs and actors who agree with them do, but they’re much larger in number.

They too take to social media and let it be known that what was done to what they loved was a crime and that they won’t be watching it or supporting it. The SJWs — who were waiting for this to happen — immediately respond with the appropriate accusations. They peg these angry fans as “white fanboys” who create a “toxic fandom” filled with hatred and sexism/homophobia/transphobia/racism or a mixture of one or more of them.

This narrative is picked up by the media, who then paint the real fans of the franchise as a group everyone should ignore.

Meanwhile, the franchise becomes a mess of political messaging, unfunny jokes, ridiculous plotlines, and characters nobody believes or even likes.

Take Rey, the new lead character of the Star Wars franchise. She is what you would call a “Mary Sue.” Whatever she does, she’s immediately the best at. She can beat seasoned Jedi in a fight, including Luke Skywalker. She can fly the Millennium Falcon better than Han Solo. In her first major fight, she handily beats a practiced Sith lord because “girl power.”

When nobody globbed onto Rey as the hero of the next generation, the fans were painted as sexist. Producer J.J. Abrams said in interviews that the reason people didn’t like the new Star Wars was that we were “threatened by women.”

“I can see why people might get freaked out by it, but the people who are getting freaked out are the people who are accustomed to that privilege, and this is not oppression, this is about fairness,” said Abrams.

“Star Wars is a big galaxy, and you can sort of find almost anything you want to in Star Wars. If you are someone who feels threatened by women and needs to lash out against them, you can probably find an enemy in Star Wars,” he continued.

This is a stupid thing to say. Not only is it completely inaccurate, it’s asinine to dump on fans who have brought forward legitimate reasons as to why they don’t like the direction you’re taking a franchise. Fans also didn’t like Lucas’s prequels at the time of their release, and the leads in those films were men by and large.

But Abrams touched on something that I found very interesting. He noted that it was people who were accustomed to “privilege” that were “freaked out” by the new direction Star Wars was taking. He then spoke about “fairness” as if he was taking it out of the hands of those who loved it and putting it into the hands of people whose turn it is to love it.

If that’s the case, then these people weren’t really fans, to begin with. They were a group of people who wanted a franchise or brand to belong to them.

This is ludicrous thinking. The fans of the film are fans because the franchise, product, or what have you is the way that it was. If it didn’t appeal to certain people because it didn’t have enough women, LGBT representation, or whatever it is SJWs get mad about, then they weren’t fans. In fact, it sounds like they were opposed to the franchise, and would remain so until changes were made that fit their politics better.

You can see that in The Mandalorian was initially treated.

If you want to fundamentally change something, then you’re not a fan of that thing. You should go find something that is more your speed and style and leave the people who love the thing for what it is alone. If they don’t want your all-female reboot, it’s not because of the all-female cast, it’s because you made it about the politics of feminism. You ditched story, character development, and more in order to shoehorn in concepts and messages no one came there to see.

If you think a hostile takeover of a franchise is necessary to reinforce your politics, then don’t count yourself among the fans who love something the way it is. You’re the outsider trying to introduce toxicity into the environment in order to scratch an itch no one else has.

You’re the toxic non-fan, and you need to back the hell off.

 

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