lazypadawan (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
lazypadawan) wrote2010-04-09 03:45 pm
lazypadawan) wrote2010-04-09 03:45 pm
Entry tags:
Fanboy Thugs
Ever since I started writing fan fiction and getting fanzines in the early 1990s, I've always been befuddled by the attitudes of a small number of SW fans. There have always been people who resent Lucas for some reason and think that if only the GFFA was in their hands, it would be so much better. There have been know-it-all fanboys since civilization began. Sometime over the past 20 years they got together like some hellish Reese's peanut butter cup and it seems like with every passing year, they get louder, more obnoxious, and uglier.
As a result George Lucas is the Emmanuel Goldstein for unfocused and irrational nerd rage. The people who hate him loathe him beyond reason or logic, which is why I call it Lucas Derangement Syndrome. Really, what on Earth justifies it? But the internet echo chamber and the media have fanned it for so long, it has inspired a cottage industry for small-timers trying to get attention (and perhaps a shot at the big time). This is why we have basher-themed documentaries and epic-length scathing "reviews" on YouTube. They get a tremendous amount of press from the mainstream media and even got some approving nods from people in Hollywood. Because of that, you just know there's more coming which will keep feeding the hate.
Let's be honest. This is no longer about a love or passion for SW. It hasn't been for years. The kinds of people who are gleefully pumping their fists in the air over the YouTube bashfests don't really care about our favorite saga. The only thing they care about is being right. You see, they're just like the villain in "The Incredibles," the obnoxious fanboy who wanted to be a superhero but didn't have any powers and was only a nuisance. It turns out he's the supervillain later on in the movie. He creates all of these gizmos to give the illusion of power and then tries to destroy the superheroes he could never be. At one point he tells Mr. Incredible that "I've outgrown you." But we know he didn't outgrow anything; he's held on to this immature anger all of this time. These doofuses feel like Lucas personally betrayed them. Yet not every fan felt the same way they did. Moreover, the prequels were all very successful at the box office, they sold lots of action figures, and brought in many new fans. I think that upset them even further.
So, they're trying to win here by re-writing the narrative with the help of a compliant media always eager for controversy and an appetite to tear down a public figure. In the internet echo chamber, it's easy to find a lot of other loud voices egging each other on. They're trying to make sure the only thing that remains from that era 1997-2005 is their sound and fury.
Which is why they are viciously attacking any nail that can't be hammered down. Technology has made a society that's already rude, crude, and narcissistic even more so and nothing's a quicker getaway car than an anonymous internet comment. A couple of months ago, somebody hacked into the e-mail account of another SW fan site to send me (via SWPAS) hate mail. Yes, somebody went through the trouble of hacking just to do that.
But what's truly alarming is what happened this week on the Star Wars Examiner's page. The author posted rebuttals to the YouTube TPM basher. Not a single commenter who disagreed with the author bothered to actually argue his points. Instead they lobbed ad hominem attacks, outraged that someone out there actually LIKED TPM. They called the author "gay," wished for someone to beat up the author's son, and hoped the author's son would someday stab the author in the job. Absolutely sickening.
Yeah, that's what it come down to. I'm sorry, but anyone who writes something like this, or hacks into e-mail accounts just to get at me is NOT a good person and no one I would ever want to associate with. I was thisclose to cancelling my trip to Celebration V and you know, there's still four months where I could very well choose to do that, money be damned. This isn't passionate love for a childhood tale, this is thuggery.
I'm thisclose to printing up all of those comments from Star Wars Examiner and send them to Lucasfilm. These are the kinds of "fans" they have been desperate to keep? Thugs who throw around gay slurs and tell someone his son deserves to be beat up or that he deserves to be murdered by his son? Why?
Update: I've since found out that the author got comments concerning molestation and sodomy of his son.
As a result George Lucas is the Emmanuel Goldstein for unfocused and irrational nerd rage. The people who hate him loathe him beyond reason or logic, which is why I call it Lucas Derangement Syndrome. Really, what on Earth justifies it? But the internet echo chamber and the media have fanned it for so long, it has inspired a cottage industry for small-timers trying to get attention (and perhaps a shot at the big time). This is why we have basher-themed documentaries and epic-length scathing "reviews" on YouTube. They get a tremendous amount of press from the mainstream media and even got some approving nods from people in Hollywood. Because of that, you just know there's more coming which will keep feeding the hate.
Let's be honest. This is no longer about a love or passion for SW. It hasn't been for years. The kinds of people who are gleefully pumping their fists in the air over the YouTube bashfests don't really care about our favorite saga. The only thing they care about is being right. You see, they're just like the villain in "The Incredibles," the obnoxious fanboy who wanted to be a superhero but didn't have any powers and was only a nuisance. It turns out he's the supervillain later on in the movie. He creates all of these gizmos to give the illusion of power and then tries to destroy the superheroes he could never be. At one point he tells Mr. Incredible that "I've outgrown you." But we know he didn't outgrow anything; he's held on to this immature anger all of this time. These doofuses feel like Lucas personally betrayed them. Yet not every fan felt the same way they did. Moreover, the prequels were all very successful at the box office, they sold lots of action figures, and brought in many new fans. I think that upset them even further.
So, they're trying to win here by re-writing the narrative with the help of a compliant media always eager for controversy and an appetite to tear down a public figure. In the internet echo chamber, it's easy to find a lot of other loud voices egging each other on. They're trying to make sure the only thing that remains from that era 1997-2005 is their sound and fury.
Which is why they are viciously attacking any nail that can't be hammered down. Technology has made a society that's already rude, crude, and narcissistic even more so and nothing's a quicker getaway car than an anonymous internet comment. A couple of months ago, somebody hacked into the e-mail account of another SW fan site to send me (via SWPAS) hate mail. Yes, somebody went through the trouble of hacking just to do that.
But what's truly alarming is what happened this week on the Star Wars Examiner's page. The author posted rebuttals to the YouTube TPM basher. Not a single commenter who disagreed with the author bothered to actually argue his points. Instead they lobbed ad hominem attacks, outraged that someone out there actually LIKED TPM. They called the author "gay," wished for someone to beat up the author's son, and hoped the author's son would someday stab the author in the job. Absolutely sickening.
Yeah, that's what it come down to. I'm sorry, but anyone who writes something like this, or hacks into e-mail accounts just to get at me is NOT a good person and no one I would ever want to associate with. I was thisclose to cancelling my trip to Celebration V and you know, there's still four months where I could very well choose to do that, money be damned. This isn't passionate love for a childhood tale, this is thuggery.
I'm thisclose to printing up all of those comments from Star Wars Examiner and send them to Lucasfilm. These are the kinds of "fans" they have been desperate to keep? Thugs who throw around gay slurs and tell someone his son deserves to be beat up or that he deserves to be murdered by his son? Why?
Update: I've since found out that the author got comments concerning molestation and sodomy of his son.
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I had no idea that had happened, thanks for writing about it. I will read those articles and leave a positive comment to the author, he needs support and those fanboys need to know that just because they shout a lot it doesn't mean theirs is the only voice.
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It's saddening to think that the same fandom that produces really kind-hearted and philanthropic people like the 501st (with all the charity stuff they do now and again) could produce people who lob ad homenim attacks and threaten a man's son because they don't agree with him. Disgusting.
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There is a fine line between not liking something because it's nothing up to your expectations and how you think it should be and not liking something for solid reasons due to moral beliefs or something of that nature. I mean i hate that the whole Satine storyline and everything to do with that character. It seems so OOC for Obi-Wan and really doesn't make sense based on what we know about him. Yet i'm not going to start making fan documentaries and bashing Dave & George for it. It's their world and i just live in. I can just reject their reality and substitute it with my own. To my reality Satine never happened and that's it.
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....that being, of course, that we *do* in fact obviously need to take our most beloved fandom back from these thugs and fanboy bashers and general outright lunatics, and we need to do it *now*....no more letting them even labour under the sad and pathetic delusion that they could *ever* dare to even try to speak for the rest of us, or to have *any* kind of overwhelming voice in the fandom - they've been thinking that far, *far* too long already and so it's past high time indeed that they were bloody well called down for it, and that it was made *damn* clear and certain that, no, in point of fact they really *don't* speak for the rest of us and they'd best shut up before assuming they do. Enough pandering to them, enough kowtowing to the negative, ad-nauseam bashing, self-destructive and generally poisonous hateful likes of them....we've suffered it far too long already, and now it's obviously reaching the very lowest and most reprehensible of nadirs, and so it has to stop....*now*, enough, no more-!
And, yeah, I daresay then that if forwarding some of this info on to Lucasfilm to basically point-blank ask 'em, is *this* the kind of behavior they want to keep countenancing, are *these* the so-called "fans" they're working so hard to court and keep when they're only poisoning the fandom and its reputation as a whole....it really badly tarnishes the fandom, then, no other way around it, and darn it - we deserve *so* much better than that, SW and Papa George and this world in general, we *all* of us deserve so much better than to be subject to the likes of this-!....and so-o, then, yeah, I'm guessing as it maybe would be mighty timely indeed to point out as much to Lucasfilm, one way or 'tother make it known to them....because by obviously and so blatantly courting this negative element, they're only encouraging this kind of divisiveness, poisonous discourse and outright thuggery - hell, they're obviously not denying or distancing themselves from it, at any rate, but it's past time they should be *made* to.
They *have* to be made to see it, then, and to understand that they are seriously running the risk of alienating the rest of the devoted, passionate, positive, actually, genuinely loyal and *true* SW fandom they actually *do* have....like *us*, in other words-! The more they incssantly cater to the negative, the more they're gonna lose....we have to make 'em see that now, no more of this, I can't help but feel. *le sigh*
Ohhhhhh, honestly, where are those "I love the SW prequels" T-shirts on Etsy.com or some such, "I love Clone Wars" or some such....because I know for a fact as I'd be well into buying something like that, and wearing it with fierce and passionate pride, that's what-! :D
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Before I got internet I was on my own as SW fan, and it was all right. Of course I'm much happier now when I have the access to the good fannish things, but looks like there has to be a bad side to everything.
If someone doesn't like something about the movies, or anything in SW fandom, it's their right, but they don't have to be so loud and vehement about it, on my opinion.
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Bashers almost took the joy out of me :( For years I couldn't understand (and still don't) why I'm not allowed to enjoy PT or Saga as a whole. I was hoping those hateful people would find themselves a new hobby, but there always has to be someone who likes to beat a dead horse...