Every so often (less so these days) I will involve myself in a 'debate' online about something. I use those '' marks because my experience of these events strays a long way from what I would term actual debate, becoming instead a running series of arguments in the 'My Dad is bigger than your Dad' sort of vein. Recently there have been a couple of articles circulating social media arguing about the 'death of fandom' and the toxicity that the internet seems to have brought to discussion of pretty much any subject, and as long and well-thought out as those were, I have been thinking for a while that the problem is actually a much simpler one, once we strip back the problematic language used, the threats of death and sexual violence and the sense of entitlement often found throughout many devoted fandoms. The problem is that as we have become a digital society, debate has morphed from a discussion and exchange of ideas which promotes thinking and reasoning and even progression, into a simple binary scale. You are either for something or against it. You either love a thing or you hate it.
This lack of nuance has tended to encourage people to adopt entrenched positions, for fear (I assume) of being ostracised from whatever group it is that they identify with. The current controversy swirling around the new Ghostbusters movie is a perfect (if depressing) example of this. The discussion (such as it is) which surrounds it seems willing only to admit one of two positions as being acceptable - either you must think that it's an awful, hideous terrible thing that will be the death of our collective childhoods, or you must be in love with it, blinded by corporate loyalty/third wave feminism/a lack of sophistication in your taste in movies and humour etc. Should you dare (as I did) to point out that criticism of an entire movie that you haven't actually seen yet is fairly redundant and not a little silly, you are a lefty SJW fascist, trying to trample down the voices of those people who just want to have an opinion. It doesn't matter how carefully you phrase it, it doesn't matter if you say that you like the trailer but they didn't and that's fine because it's all a matter of taste. It doesn't even matter if you didn't actually mention the troubling undercurrent of sexism and misogyny which seems to lurk, shark like beneath pretty much every vocal anti-ghostbusters opinion that there is out there at the moment, (I certainly didn't) you will still be told that you're simply trying to be a White Knight, pandering to the feminists in hope of sleeping with them (this is some of the milder stuff that was flung my way in this one conversation).
Now, I'm happy with the idea of people disagreeing with me - heck, I write reviews for a hobby and fiction as part of my living so I would be seriously boned if I was to roll up in a ball and cry every time somebody took exception to what I write. I'm even happy to alter my own position if someone advances arguments that cause me to reconsider my own view of the facts. But herein lies one of the root causes of the problem we are experiencing in fandoms of late - the confusion between subjectivity, which is definitionally the way that all art is viewed, be it movie, TV show, comic, etc, and objectivity which is concerned with facts. A picture or piece of music cannot be objectively BAD. You cannot say, with empirical certainty, that a movie is without redeeming features. And that's because art is a subjective experience - you will take your own reaction to the art presented to you, based on your own tastes, experience and personality. But if you view the world through a binary lens, assuming that only your interpretation is the correct one and others are inherently incorrect - well, that's where fascism becomes a valid word to be throwing around.
Art is a peculiar craft to have for sure - as an artist, one bares one's soul to the world, pouring one's energies into creating a thing moulded in line with one's own tastes and vision and then hoping that there will be more people out there who appreciate and agree with that taste than don't. And the truth is, there rarely will be. Sure, a lucky few will create something that is more or less universal in its appeal, and they will become rich and successful, though generally only for a time (anyone heard from Stephanie Meyer or E L James lately?). At risk of sounding snobbish (which is far from my intention) art which appeals to the masses tends to be art which doesn't maintain its shine for a great length of time. Barely anyone bought the last Dan Brown book as far as I could tell, yet for a couple of years there you couldn't move in any train carriage or coffee shop for people with their noses stuck in a copy of the Da Vinci Code. That sort of mass appeal tends to be fleeting, whether because there is only so much vanilla that people will tolerate or because there are simply only so many ways of doing the same thing before it becomes boring. But Van Gogh was a man whose art was never really appreciated until long after his death and now s considered amongst the greatest ever produced by human hands. Movies which critics adore fail miserably by commercial standards, while movies that critics despise succeed beyond all reasonable measure (see Transformers: Age of Extinction, which represented the point at which even critics previously forgiving of the franchise lost all patience, yet which went on to dominate global box offices, taking in over $1 billion worldwide and cementing itself as one of the most commercially successful movies of all time.)
And I think a lot of this is due to the binary nature of how we are now told to judge things. Batman v Superman can't be 'just ok', it either has to be the best thing ever committed to celluloid or the death of modern comic book cinema. It isn't just art either - go look at any 'discussion' of any subject online and the measured and reasonable responses will be far outweighed by the extremes on either side of whatever it is. Jeremy Corbyn can't be a reasonably decent man with some good ideas - he must either be the perfect saviour of humanity or the antichrist. Johnny Depp can't be a man accused of domestic violence - he must either be a hideous, woman beating monster or the saint who couldn't possibly ever have laid a hand to a woman. It's ironic that in an age where superheroes are more a part of the common pop culture consciousness than they ever have been before, it's the comic books, and their associated movies, that are displaying more nuance in the way that they address important issues than the real world which they used to form a hyper exaggerated, over simplified picture of. It's almost like the profusion of comic book-based TV shows and movies has caused us to seek out perfect superheroes and evil super villains in the real world, while those movies and shows themselves often try to aim for more nuance and distinction, in an attempt to ape a real world that is rapidly disappearing from view.
Myself, I'm an eternal fence-sitter. I will always try and look at the balance. Not because I am a special snowflake or because I want to feel different from the rest of the world, but because I am, quite simply, terrified of missing out on opposing views and ideas that might challenge and inform me. I might not agree with them, but they still give me an opportunity to look at the things that I love in a new light, and what's not to love about getting to see a new angle on the object of your affections?
Fandom isn't broken. It just forgot that opinions and facts are two very different things. Love a thing or hate it - that isn't something I would ever deny anyone. But be open to the possibility that sometimes, a thing may just be ok.
