Tuesday 12 June 2018

Star Wars' Toxic Fandom - Lies, Crusades and Misinformation


Well, that didn't take long. A few days ago I offered a plea for sanity and attempted to analyze the problem within the Star Wars fanbase. You can find that here if you wish, in all its detail, but the cliff notes version is simple - 

Advancements in technology, online echo-chambers and a mishandled effort to quash trolling has led to a small but extremely vocal number of misogynists. These have been getting bolder over the years, and Star Wars is the fandom which has suffered the most from them. While this sort of thing has happened many times in the past, Kelly Marie Tran (the actress playing Rose Tico) was driven off of Instagram by verbal abuse from such individuals. This has finally drawn a major spotlight to the situation and a determination to fix it. However, I am worried that both an inability to discern between those who vocally dislike Disney's ongoing decisions and actual sons of bitches who harass people online will backfire. Many are using Tran's treatment as an act of online martyrdom as a sign to effectively start a crusade to wipe out the problematic elements of the fandom, and this sort of thing only ever ends badly.

I did plan to wait a week to see how this all panned out, listening, watching and keeping an eye on things to test the waters. This didn't even take that long to see how badly things were going to be, and I actually gave this an extra 24 hours just to see if things would be fixed. Sadly, they were not.

You see, someone decided to claim the supposed glory of verbally insulting someone until they are driven offline, and openly boasted about it on social media. It was from a small group, the "Down with Disney's Treatment of Fanboys and Franchises" page on social media. The total number of its members have yet even to reach triple digits, and even a glance is enough to see that these are obviously a mob of self-deluded fanatics, nothing more. In fact, while it would not be surprising to learn that their members participated in it, it's highly doubtful that they were the ones who truly had an impact. Unfortunately, their habit of trying to latch onto other groups voicing their displeasure in far saner manners has led to something nasty. Here's the Down with Disney's comment via social media. Read it if you desire, but please pay attention to the tags at the bottom -



It's the #GiveUsLegends part which is of note here, as it suddenly became the source of attention for the wrong kind of people. Give Us Legends itself was a protest group, largely focusing on a continued effort to have the Expanded Universe continued in one form or another. They were not asking for the current timeline to end, the films to be re-written to focus on the new setting, and opposed harassment of the creative figures behind it. While they would speak out against what they saw as stupid decisions, said words were often on the decisions and mentality over the qualities of the people who made them. This movement eventually spun off into a new organistion, the Twin Suns Foundation - A non-profit group which pushed its message through constructive means, book donations and promoting reading among children.

I'll freely admit that, outside of covering their initial effort to garner support and offering money to the Twin Suns' opening fundraiser, I had little knowledge of them. For all I knew they might have changed since that time, hence some research was needed. All it took was a few minutes to realise that these were not the sort of people who would ever agree with such an action, let alone align themselves with those who would participate in online bullying. This was hardly hard-hitting dirt digging required, and it was the sort of thing any person with a decent head on their shoulders could have pulled off. Unfortunately, we live in an era where journalistic integrity is at an all-time low, and any fool can potentially gain a large audience without professional oversight or a requirement to properly fact-check their information.

Enter makingstarwars.net.

The website opted to produce an article with this lovely opening line to it, and it allowed things to go progressively downhill from there:



Without commenting on the fact that this came from a completely different group from Give Us Legends, or offering the most basic of facts, the article opened up with tabloid hyperbole. Writing off Give Us Legends as a "hate group and Star Wars fandom terrorist organisation" it began writing them off as the worst kind of fans. Without even bothering to offer the group's correct name nor some history on them, it began lumping the actions of one lunatic over a single hashtag. The story was rushed without bothering to contact the Twin Suns Foundation for comment, nor did it even pause to confirm the names of those involved.

If you want a readable version of the article itself, here's an advert free text-only version. In effect, it spends a great deal of time discussing how heinous Give Us Legends is, attempting to depict anyone involved as monsters. Then the majority of the article is spent encouraging people to start actively policing the fandom, requiring those reading to drive out the "haters" and verbally put those who might align with this group to the sword. It specifically cites that there is no community manager, and thus they must patrol the fans themselves. All of a sudden, my fears of some fool starting a crusade have become very evident.

Much of this could be attributed to a well-meaning but tone-deaf fan trying to do the right thing. It's typically best to attribute such actions to incompetence rather than malice when possible, even when they are trying to seemingly do the right thing. At least until they start actively ignoring things and refusing to update the article with new information. Not long after this was published the President of the Twin Suns Foundation, Brian Borg, approached them with the following tweet:



This was promptly followed by a press release confirming that the Twin Suns Foundation does not support the actions of such individuals, nor does it associate themselves with them. This was openly forwarded to makingstarwars.net and the owner of the website, Jason Ward. There, done, problem resolved. The person in question is not asking for its removal, nor even for the words to be altered, just with an update and their own words to be included so they might defend themselves. Something most courses on journalism tend to teach as a basic requirement when covering the news about anyone. The odd thing is that, after submitting this, Borg was promptly blocked from the Making Star Wars Twitter page:




The article then went without mention of this, nor updates of any kind. All it would have taken was a five-minute edit and a link to the top of the article, confirming this as new information. It would have even granted the writers to re-post this and gain a fresh wave of clicks. Instead, the decision was made to try and shut out this new information, and have a large audience of 180,000 make their decisions based on faulty news.

As such, a cursory look at Twitter brought up a multitude of rants, insults and actions decrying what had been brought up, and comparing those who wish the EU to continue with the alt-right, MRAs and the usual bunch:













Each and every one typically spouted the same exact thing - That this was a hate mob and little else, responsible for everything wrong with the fandom, attacking people and (as ever) were the only ones who hated Aftermath thanks to homophobia. What is concerning is that so much of this spun off of this single article, and as a result, a great deal of this outrage was built on misconceptions that members desiring the return of the EU actively tried to correct, such as this example here. Most had to be told that the movement wasn't seeking to erase the Disney universe, they just wanted the one they had been following for years to be brought back and continued in some form. Yes, the article was so bare bones that it didn't even get that point across.

Matters only became worse when other websites began jumping onto this, with TheForce, Resonate and Screen Rant all parroting this information. Quite literally in the case of TheForce, and while Screen Rant at least bothered to cite Borg's response, these are the top three results for "Give Us Legends". Each building their stories largely on lies and presenting a minor group of fewer than fifty members no one knew nor cared about before last week, and which was universally decried by everyone who saw them.

Yet, what was staggering was makingstarwars.net's response when they were openly called out on this. Rather than correcting the information, Jason Ward attempted to refer to the group as a Give Us Legends group, as if it were a subsidiary. All while completely ignoring the words of Borg, or even his own followers when they called him out on this error.



While I am not nearly enough of a conspiracy theorist to refer to this as a "false flag operation" as others have, this only further highlights just how poisonous the entire fandom has become. You have the trolls, morons and racists who should be decried, the larger fandom who pushes back against them, and those who attempt to manipulate the situation for their own ends like this to trigger a purge of anyone vaguely resembling their target. The end result is simply people relentlessly screaming at one another, and trying to claim the fandom as "theirs" while ridding those they don't feel deserve to be part of it. Rather than actually fixing the problem, efforts such as this will just keep making the community ever more toxic and more disdainful to outsiders. Even those who try to write articles like this, just in the attempt to give some much-needed sanity to the situation, have become a lightning rod for such conflicts.

Personally, I'm about ready to just sit back and hope the worst of the worst end up wiping one another out. There's no good ending to this situation, not if events continue on this path, and not if there is no compromise or to sit down and talk with those who are actually reasonable. Yet, if you wish to take away anything from this article, let it be this - Listen to both sides, but treat every source as unreliable. Do your own research and come to your own conclusion, and don't allow yourself to be caught up in a web of misinformation. Oh, and don't put your faith in fandom crusades. People just end up hurt, and things only become worse as a result of them.

5 comments:

  1. This is why I'm so reluctant to associate with a lot of groups that can be linked to anything on social media, or who have no standards on who can join. I've seen so many of these blow up thanks to idiots who were not involved in the original creation of these groups, or who try to assume control of the groups or who have no thought about what consequences their actions could cause.

    Something that complicates this is that I can't see any side that's really in the right, aside from the unfortunate actors who get caught in the middle of the two extremes yelling at one another and all they want to do is leave. I can get mad at the extremists for the terrible shit they do, however I can also get mad at people like Rian Johnson who make this stuff and hope this reaction would happen.

    Look, if you want to have your fanbase wipe itself out then fine, do what you want to do, but at least have the common decency to try and shield your actors from it or give them an idea of the hell they could go through. We might not have known how hateful a minority of fans are when Jake Lloyd first showed up onscreen, but nowadays I feel part of making a film should be to prepare the actors for the reception. I wonder how many people remember the fallout that happened after the new Ghostbusters movie came out, in which another actress ended up being pissed off at a group of pissed off fans which only ended up in a downward spiral until she left as well.

    Finally I'd like to bring up the futility of trying to make a movie that's so divisive in the first place. A website linked in the previous article claimed that this movie would remove the 'weeds' infested in the fandom so that the series can move forwards, but you know what? Those people aren't going anywhere. When you get invested in something you become spiteful when you think that something becomes awful and you'll hang around anyway. It's why I certainly didn't leave 40k when Mont'ka came out and made the whole setting smell like shit.

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    1. Yeah, no arguments there at all. I've seen all too many groups or fandoms become hives of scum and villainy for turning a blind eye to these sorts of people. What's irksome here is that the guy this article used as a starting point wasn't even a member of the group the article cited, but a completely different one. As such, between the fact the writer linked them over the use of a hashtag, blocked any attempts to correct him, and went on this tirade, i'm tempted to think it was a convenient excuse to make pot-shots at a faction he didn't like. Between the two, i'm honestly thinking that the only positive outcome is the hope that this turns nuclear and the fandom destroys itself, leaving the less extremist elements to take over.

      Also, good point, I had completely forgotten about the hatred thrown toward Leslie Jones, but that's another perfect example of how bad this has gotten. It's as if tribalism and fanaticism has become desirable somehow, to the point where people are looking to start fights. Well, that or the internet has become populated by Walter Sobchak clones.

      Trust me, that's not the worst of it. More than a few of the fans have begun using the statements of "toxic" "gatekeeping" "homophobe" and "misogynist" as a way of shunning people they dislike. Say you didn't like how a minority figure was written in the film and - even if your points are that it hurt the social group due to how mishandled the writing was - you will just be written off as a bigot. I mean, hell, just to cite two personal examples - I saw a group of pro-Disney fans screaming down someone who disliked the films, but claiming that they were "real fans" and demanding that the guy prove his credentials. They relentlessly yelled about how they were so much better fans than him due to cosplaying, meeting the actors and participating in larger events, and then ironically accused him of gate-keeping because he voiced that he didn't like The Last Jedi.

      Equally, some maniac ended up confronted me at one point, and was adamantly convinced that it was wrong to say anything bad about a film ever beyond the first six months of its release. That and those who insisted on doing it should simply leave the fandom because they couldn't speak about how positive it all was. When I cited that I did like things about Star Wars - such as the EU - he began to try and react by blocking it off, accusing me of gatekeeping if I brought it up unless it was relevant. "Relevant" in his mind apparently was only three specific scenarios, most of which revolved around Disney re-using ideas.

      Creating a divisive movie is - in of itself - not a bad idea if it can create discussion. Whiplash is a film which, while I didn't enjoy it, I could respect for the themes it dealt with and how well most were executed. Adding something like this in as a major installment in a larger series though, that was never going to ever end well.

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    2. I think 'divisive' might not be that good of a word for me to use since it doesn't adequately cover the split that the film caused. I get the idea of wanting to start a discussion, but according to Rian Johnson he wanted half of the audience to think it was fantastic while the other half would think it was a massive pile of shit. The problem is that there's a point where you cause a divide with your fanbase so great that even legitimate criticism is going to get swallowed up and you'll have learned nothing about what you did wrong or how you can improve.

      To use a different example, what Ward did to the Necrons in 5th ed was divisive, but at the same time there's a lot I've defended there that offers very unique storytelling and gameplay opportunities. It's very clear that what he did was always going to split fans since it was so radically different. At the same time however he wasn't trying to get half of the fans to outright hate the new Necrons. He could have done a lot better (despite my defence of his book I would have preferred him to explore more ideas that linked to what the original armies were, one Necron world led by a Destroyer Lord would have been for this as a quick example).

      Of course there's also a fair bit in Ward's book that I'll defend as not being objectively bad, unlike the Last Jedi where I can point out a whole list of issues that are objectively awful, and that's before we get to stuff that I personally thought was just bad.

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  2. The thing is, the media hasn't given us any hard evidence that Kellie Marie Trans was harassed. They're using this story to deflect attention from the fact that Solo bombed. We don't know for certain that it's a true story because journalistic integrity is depressingly rare these days. Maybe she was harassed, maybe she wasn't, but 1) almost everyone who uses the internet gets nasty comments hurled at them and 2) the media hasn't actually shown us any proof beyond her leaving instagram. It's entirely possible that Kellie Marie Trans motivation for doing so was that she just likes her privacy. When Daisy Ridley stopped using social media, she later revealed she simply didn't want to "grow up" on the internet.

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    1. Even if that's the case, I would not be surprised if she was driven from social media over harassment. The character was badly recieved, even by more than a few people who liked the film. The problem is that, as mentioned above, I've all too often seen such hatred bleed over onto the character itself. Combined with the growing hostility within the fandom, i'm going to be honest here and say that i'm more likely to believe that harassment was the reason more than anything else.

      If she says otherwise at some point, then i'll listen to that, but until then i'm going to judge this one via experience. Plus, it has to be said, the higher up to the totem pole you go in terms of publicity the more attention you get, and the more contempt is spewed your way. I'm a small time writer for a blog and a video games column, and even I have lost count of the number of death threats, insults and Taken style "I will find you, and I will kill you" messages which have been sent my way. In light of that, I don't even want to think of just what sort of thing she would be getting.

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