Toxic Fandoms: Avoidance and Awareness

I’ve had some high-minded stuff about game philosophy on the blog recently. Here’s a bit more of a rant to offset it. Enjoy…

When I was a big comic book reader, I always identified with the character qualities of my favorite characters. The visual trappings weren’t the point, nor public identification with them. Nor defending the character or IP at all costs. Why own a t-shirt proclaiming you like the Avengers (or whoever) when, particularly as you age, you should be internalizing their heroic qualities into how you approach the world?

For me, it was Spider-Man. Particularly as I aged, though, it wasn’t about showing myself as the biggest Spider-Man fan. It was about embodying the characteristics that drew me to the character of Peter Parker in the first place (and later, Miles Morales, Gwen Stacy, Ben Reilly, and many others who’ve had the mantle).

Superheroes are allegories, or at least they can be in certain ways. Superman, for instance, is symbolic of certain virtues; he’s not just a fictional person doing various deeds.

Devotion to virtues is not what is often rewarded, though. Rather, memorization of lore minutia, public displays of obsession, and so on…this is what gets engagement online. That 30-minute video dissection of how a movie fails to capture the essence of a character is rage-bait for our own sense of superiority. Where are the calls to action to manifest that essence ourselves?

I am sadly not immune to idle consumerism, though, either of media or physical goods. I’ll give you an example, though hopefully it serves to further my point a bit.

I have a Spider-Man costume. It’s quite nice, actually. I didn’t commit to wearing it, though, until I was satisfied with how I’d improved my physique; not to look like Spider-Man (though it didn’t hurt that I have the same rough build) but to embody a better version of myself that was striving for something better. The costume was just the excuse, the aspirational qualities of the character mattering more than the character itself.

The first time I wore it publicly, I was in the best shape of my life. It was a triumph in ways that transcended the aesthetic specifics.

On an old, now-defunct pop culture discussion board, I had the revelation at one point (this was in the mid-2000s!) that many people would defend their favorite comic book character to the point of utter delusion, often in hypothetical contests of who would beat whom in a fight.

My preferred discussion partners were those without this obsessive predilection, and they were frankly the minority in this particular corner of the internet. Part of loving a character, to me, was (and is) acknowledging their flaws, their limitations. It’s this that defines them as much as their strengths, or gives context to their strength, literal and figurative.

Switch hobbies and the same could be said for many board game fandoms (this is a gaming website after all, not a comic book one). Why admit a game’s faults? Or a designer’s? Why permit a negative take about your favorite game or designers when you can rebut with something more positive, content in the knowledge that the site’s incentivization structure (thumbs, upvotes, etc.) will vindicate you? Why consider why it might be anathema to someone else’s purpose for gaming, when you have a tribe willing to validate your love for it instead?

Few of us are exempt from this critique, including myself and many people I enjoy speaking with and playing games with. This isn’t judgment. It’s a reminder.

The reminder is that we too often get lost in tribal pettiness over low-stakes, subjective endeavors. Marvel sucks. DC sucks. Disney ruined Star Wars. Ameritrash games vs. Eurogames! Solo gaming vs. social gaming. How dare someone say bad things about my favorite sub-genre of anime. Or board games. D&D 5th edition is the best. It’s the worst. Here’s why {X} edition was the best.

And so on, until we’re dead and have been replaced in the discourse queue by those younger than us, with new animosities and biases to justify among the groupthink.

And the direct attacks are the easiest to ignore. It’s the passive-aggressive responses, those technically exempt from forum moderation or public backlash, but which subtly insinuate that one opinion is Right and another is Wrong…these are often the worst offenders.

I am sometimes amused that, in discussions even among people who enjoy the same types of games I do, words that are not entirely glowing about the group’s sacred cows (games, designers, etc.) receive responses that, while they aren’t direct attacks, clearly signal that I’m just not “getting it.” There’s something in the collective unconscious in the group that is uncomfortable with someone – even one of their own – not sharing their love, or not sharing the same degree of love, that they feel is correct toward a particular game, person, publisher, style of game, or IP.

Examples abound, but it could be something as innocuous as:

• A: “I didn’t really enjoy {GAME}. {Other Game} did it better for me.”
• B: “{GAME} really requires that you have the right group for it. Once you do, though, it’s amazing!”
• A: “I’ve played with a handful of groups that normally enjoy these types of games. Didn’t land with any of them.”
• B: “It’s really about having the right mentality though. You just have to enjoy the ride.”
  
• B’s responses will get more love, of course, if this is in a public area, and the subtle implication is that you don’t have the right group for it, or don’t have the right mentality, but that it’s your fault, not the game’s.

There are other ways to phrase their love that wouldn’t harbor this implication; they know what they’re doing. But a discussion like the one above also comes with plausible deniability of that accusation, and so it goes unchallenged.

I’ve seen this from people who will turn around and decry the plague of toxic positivity in some communities, so they aren’t opposed to dissenting opinions in theory. But they still clearly feel challenged when it’s about something they personally love.

Far worse examples exist, mind you, including those advocating free speech…except when it’s on a topic they don’t like. Then shut it down. These sorts of “rights for me, but not for thee” double standards exist too often in our discourse, and none of us has to look far to see it, but this also threatens to become more political than I intend this article to be.

For the worst of these online warriors, their punishment is being locked in this pointless dance. I used to joke that socks and trolls were their own worst punishment, for not making more of their lives.

So why bring this up? As a reminder. A reminder not to get pulled in.

There’s more of it now. Lots more. It all wants your attention. Every platform, every cause, every creator. But it also wants more than that.

We’ve all seen toxic fandom at this point. I’m not discussing anything new. But reminders of what too often surrounds us aren’t bad either. We need to ground ourselves to maintain perspective.

Because we see it. We see the endless string of Youtube videos that will convince us that all of our favorite media is actually shit. We see the toxicity that created Snyderverse obsessives, and the bizarre link between it and misogyny and extreme right-wing politics. We see smug mega-fans whose online social circles revolve around venerating something or someone they have no personal connection to.

We see creatives and creators taking the most brutal lumps from those who will never once in their lives step into that arena themselves and raise their passion nakedly to the crowd.

Various friends and coworkers have taken, at times, to sending me links to Spider-Man merchandise, which I invariably turn down. It’s become clear that they either think they just haven’t found the right piece of consumerist swag to entice me, or that they think it’s a matter of willpower and merely time before I give in and buy something. This misses the point. And yet, it’s become so hammered into our collective consciousness that it’s unlikely to stop being the default mode of enthusiast engagement any time soon.

I see oblique links between consumerism and toxicity. My coworkers’ entreaties are entirely benign, of course, and are even well-intentioned. There’s no animosity there.

But it’s the core mentality that gives rise to other forces. Everything becomes transactional, and creators depend so much on consumer engagement that eventually they start creating content simply to generate engagement, not out of creative passion. This, in turn, creates a sense of privilege in consumers who recognize their power. Rinse, repeat, rage.

Content for content’s sake. It’s a manifestation of this problem, both its creation and its consumption.

The solution is cultivating enough perspective to recognize its effect on you, gradual detachment from the worst of it, and mindful re-entry with a sense of purpose to one’s consumption. It’s not consuming itself I abhor; it’s unexamined, mindless consumption, and mindless creation.

What does the algorithm want? Creating for this purpose is mindless creation. Because it wants fear, anger, vitriol, and melodramatic takes that lose all sense of nuance and community. It wants to rail against the most recent run of Amazing Spider-Man instead of reminding us what Spider-Man stands for. It wants to do the same for everything you hold dear, not just geeky IPs that should be more joyous than contentious.

It wants more than your attention and your time. It wants your emotional investment, an actual piece of you.

Don’t let it have that.