Loose Ends | Addressing Some Responses To My Fandom Editorials
NOTE: Since Twitter isn’t called Twitter anymore apparently, I get to plug my… X… for circumstance’s sake! Why? Because I said so!
Welcome to a director’s commentary/ FAQ of sorts. Here, I will go over one of my old editorials and address some of the more common or pressing responses to the points I made, as well as going over some things I missed the first time around. Who knows, maybe this will become a recurring series like my old “Bits and Pieces” roundups.
So a while back I wrote an editorial called “Campfire Stories”, and more recently I wrote one called “Invisible Ecosystems”. These were intended to deconstruct the widely pervasive idea of “toxic fandoms”, instead proposing that only toxic individuals and small cliques within fandoms exist.
So here I’ll go over each subsection of “Invisible Ecosystems” and proceed to clarify some things, as well as add things I forgot to talk about initially.
But First, a Vocabulary Lesson!
So you may have noticed that I’ve gotten into a bit of a habit of beginning editorials with small glossary sections, where I clearly lay out and define terms that will be important later. Honestly, I don’t know why I didn’t do this sooner.
I’ll get more into the backstory of this stylistic choice in my next editorial, but for now I just wanted to address it because I think this is its best application so far.
I was unsure whether or not I wanted to go with the “Fallacy of Composition” or the “Hasty Generalization Fallacy” as the main outline for my “toxic fandoms don’t exist” argument (yes, these are two different things, although very similar). I decided on the former because people online get really weird about the word “generalization”. As soon as they get accused of it, they start defending their right to do it.
Speaking of which, I can’t believe that while writing “Invisible Ecosystems”, I forgot to include this garbage fire from my old nemesis, TheGamer. After devoting a good half of my Hogwarts Legacy editorial to them, and having this in the back corner of my mind while writing “Invisible Ecosystems”, you’d think I would have remembered that.
Anyway, yes, not even I am immune to the urge to choose my words carefully for fear of setting people off unnecessarily. It’s not a matter of political correctness, it’s a matter of choosing my battles.
Anatomy of a Fandom
I felt that this part was important to put first (after the glossary). If you don’t understand this, you won’t understand anything else. This is the foundation around which the rest of the editorial is built; I consider every subsequent section to more or less be an application of this concept.
I think we’ve all heard that only about one percent of Internet users contribute visibly to the Internet (ex. comments, tweets, videos), and the rest are known as “lurkers”. It’s not unreasonable to think that the same goes for fandoms as well.
In fact, I think we know it does. Otherwise, those fan artists or voice actors that get harassment from small groups of angry fans would receive up to a billion hate messages, since each person also has the capacity to make bot accounts, another factor in vocal minorities seeming bigger than they are.
Most people would take my statement about the possibility of bots as “denial” or “coping”, but in fact people on websites like 4chan speak very openly about their ability to seem like a much larger force than they are, and are even proud of it. So by addressing incidents of targeted harassment as if they represent a whole fandom, the trolls get exactly what they want.
Troubleshooting
So this is kinda funny because up until this point in the writing process I was on the fence about whether or not I would mention specific people and conversations by name, but in the end I decided that it was the only way to get my points across clearly.
After all, being vague about this point would be kind of hypoctitical on my end. How can I complain about people saying “this fandom is toxic” instead of “(insert name here) is toxic” while refusing to name names myself?
So when I said this:
To prove that a fandom is “toxic”, that by necessity requires the accuser to prove with concrete evidence that the ideas and behavior that constitute this toxicity are supported and practiced by a majority of the fandom.
I was aware that some people would take this as “debate bro” logic, where you take somebody’s point of view and apply it in an extreme way that technically is a logical conclusion but is also just a cheap tactic on your part. And I was sent a couple of responses that said something along those lines.
I would just like to make it clear that I am not sorry, that this was a perfectly valid point, and that I will stand by it for the foreseeable future.
Taking The Bait
As I had said, this was originally supposed to be a whole separate editorial, but I acknowledged that somebody had already made my points for me, and better than I ever could.
Anyway, I think I was pretty clear here. This whole part was about creators and companies in the entertainment space weaponizing the idea of “toxic fandoms” to silence critics. If you’ve been on the Internet literally at all in the past seven years, the fact that this is a thing shouldn’t be news to you. We all remember Ghostbusters 2016 (despite our best efforts), we know how this goes.
I don’t know what’s worse: when this mentality bleeds into members of the community itself and stops them from asking more from content creators and companies because they feel undeserving, or when people outside the community reaffirm these feelings.
Since 2020, Hungrybox has taken over as one of the main figures of the Smash community, having come a long way from when a lot of people hated him. And while his coverage of fandom drama has good intentions, it falls into many of those same framing tropes I’ve discussed before.
Okay, moving on.
F#%* The Police
Let’s get the elephant out of the room:
I mean, if you can separate the average Muslim from 9/11, you can separate the average gamer from GamerGate. It’s not that hard.
Once again, I am not sorry, this was a perfectly valid point, and I will stand by it for the foreseeable future.
But this is a whole separate beast. As soon as I wrote that I just sat there for a couple of minutes thinking “I can’t believe I said that”.
Anyway, now is the time to address the most common complaint my first two editorials on fandom received: that, despite me repeatedly saying otherwise, I was treating vocal minorities as if they are incapable of making an impact or causing any harm. I was accused of being apathetic and uncaring of those who were the target of harassment mobs, or worse. I was accused of saying that nobody who wasn’t responsible for those incidents should care.
These people simply weren’t paying attention. I don’t think that people shouldn’t stop or call out “bad behavior” when they see it, but I disagree that high-profile incidents like the “Smash Bros allegations” are the result of people turning a blind eye to the misdeeds of others and letting them happen.
Furthermore, framing the act of taking action against bad actors in your community as your job as a member of that community (and one that should result in the tarnishing of everybody’s reputation if anything slips through the cracks), rather than something that is just the right thing to do can cause genuine harm because of the carrot-and-stick system it sets up.
And I mean, even when you ARE “one of the good ones” in a fandom, people will forget all about you when it’s convenient.
So here’s an… example? Thought experiment? I dunno.
Within this article, there are two sides discussed: a group of Pokémon players harassing a streamer, and several, several more Pokémon players calling them out.
Which one of these sides is “gaming culture”? Choose wisely. Because most people would laser-focus on the former group and center them in yet another discussion about how horrible and sexist gamers are, and ignore the innocent and even outraged majority.
But if sexism was such a problem, they would have received no backlash from anybody except the streamer they targeted.
See, what I didn’t want to do was comb through the Internet, scrape up a dozen screenshots, and say stuff like “Look! Here’s an example of a (insert franchise here) fan talking about race/ sexuality/ gender stuff and the post wasn’t dislike-bombed! Here’s an example of a racist/ sexist/ homophobic (insert franchise here) fan getting dislike bombed or otherwise called out! That proves the fandom isn’t as bigoted as you think it is!”
Why? Because that’s corny as hell, that’s why.
And anecdotes can’t beat other anecdotes, a lesson I’ve learned the hard way.
It’s not uncommon for such anecdotes to be part of YouTube videos with titles like “My Experience Being a Professional Smash Bros. Player as a Woman”, and regardless of the video’s actual contents it will be spread around as proof of a uniformly toxic community (this is not necessarily the video maker’s fault.
I get that this next point might make me seem nitpicky at best and like a tone-policing asshole at worst, but I need to say it.
If you are the target of harassment by one or a bunch of people, speaking out about it is the right thing to do.
But here’s a major problem with framing stories in such a way that pits your identity against a community as if the two are in hostile opposition: by doing so, you suggest that if you are an x in the y community, this WILL happen to you. You suggest that this is the experience of every x in the y community, and you ironically erase the experiences of others. It also frames harassment as something that specifically targets people in group x, but something that matters more if it happens to group x.
Yes, framing does matter.
And how is a problem supposed to be fixed if the innocent majority is too cynical to fix the problem , because they’ve been conditioned to see it as all-encompassing and insurmountable? And you’re also scaring people in the group you’re advocating for away from the community. A lack of new blood entering a community is not going to solve any problem you’re complaining about.
But for the millionth time I do believe that if you see something happening in your fandom space, you should at the very least say something. Otherwise nobody will report on these incidents except for people like Technicals. And he’s already made enough people miserable with his Drama Alert bullshit, thank you very much.
Seriously, Technicals is a drama-hungry crank and I cannot believe anybody takes this guy seriously. He’s the biggest bad-faith actor “in” the Smash community, and he has done nothing but spread misinformation and push tropes like the “lying victim” well beyond the realm of “I mean, it does happen sometimes”.
He’s a master at talking out of both sides of his mouth, wanting to help the Smash community while also insulting it at every turn. The fact that he has openly associated with LeafyIsHere and Keemstar, two of the all-time worst influences on Internet culture, should be enough to turn people away from him, but nobody wants to call that out because that’s apparently “guilt by association” even though he’s literally just like them. I’m glad that cockroach doesn’t attend Super Smash Con because there’s a fifty percent chance I would [REDACTED].
NOTE: Do not threaten people over the Internet. Bad idea.
The Abyss Stares Back
It’s at about this point that it REALLY starts to sink in how many content creators I mention by name in this editorial, and I start to feel grateful that I’m not famous yet.
For the record, I hate r/gamingcirclejerk for more reasons than how I was treated by some of the people there. I take issue with what they have become, or at least what they revealed themselves to be.
Some people accused me of “muddying the waters” by bringing up all the cringe things Vaush has said and done. But I already illustrated why his video was incorrect (it followed many of the tropes I had previously outlined), and his controversies aren’t exactly secret. He’s not wrong about the Smash community because he once compared watching CP to purchasing a computer, but I just want to let people know who we’re dealing with here.
One last thing to address is the… tone of the final stretch of “Invisible Ecosystems”. I certainly got a little extreme in my hypotheticals, but at that point I was just tired, is all. Not physically, but mentally.
I was sick of unserious thinkers; I was annoyed with people who seemed unwilling to think through the implications of their ideas. What do they gain from stating or implying that a person or group is dangerous or immoral, and proposing no effective solutions? Do they think that pointing out what they perceive as a problem will make it go away? If you truly believe that a problem is serious, and that actual lives are in danger, and that nobody except you and your in-group is willing to do anything about it, then why not take extreme measures to solve it?
At least me being a nobody minimizes the chances of getting hounded by an army of brain-dead reactionary nematodes sent by Vaush, Technicals, or somebody else. On the other hand, I can’t wait until I’m important enough for something like that to happen to me.
Conclusion
I don’t know when’s the next time I’ll discuss this topic here on this blog, or if I ever will again. I’ve just about said everything I wanted to by now, and every new bit of fandom “drama” that comes up fits cleanly into one of the above scenarios/ applications.
At this point, I don’t think you can misunderstand what I’ve said. You just either agree with me or you don’t. The Internet’s inclination towards negativity and outrage means that my opinion that toxic fandoms don’t exist will likely always be in the minority, and that I’ll be debunking the same handful of rebuttals for the rest of my life.
Maybe one day I’ll be popular enough to have some kind of influence, and change the conversation surrounding fandoms and Internet drama. If more people saw things my way, our problems wouldn’t seem so insurmountable. Until then, I’ll just be here, separating truth from hysteria in my own unique way, hoping somebody will listen.
Thanks so much for reading. Until next time, stay on the hook!
