I think it really has to do with the vantage point and experience from which they are entering into the conversation. For me, for example, my immediate reaction is exactly that of, "I didn't like the character, but that is no justification for this kind of harassment." I haven't personally experienced this kind of harassment, I don't know anyone personally who has, and I'm not into any nerd spaces to comment on what I've experienced there, so all I'm left with is my experience with the character and my condemnation of what she's going through. I wager that that is where many people are coming from. The good thing is that they too are rightfully coming out against what is being done to her.
Why are people so mean? I know the internet's anonymity emboldens these individuals, but what do they get from being mean in the first place?
You and me both. It's the one franchise that honestly cannot be debated in a civil or polite manner. Mind blowing how antagonistic some can get if someone likes a movie they didn't or hates one they did. Like, there are 11 movies & 2 TV shows so far, obviously people will have varying opinions. Why get so nasty about it.
Unless you are going to report everyone and let the mods decide to ban and not ban no one needs you to provide this service. Seriously. None of those posts whether you agree or not are off topic. Anyway, people that go on social media and harass actors over stupid fantasy movies are sad individuals. Get the fuck over yourself. It's a movie.
And yet the result of that combined context is yet another TLJ pile-on. I guess it's just disappointing and/or ironic given this thread's focus on Star Wars fans being unable to control themselves.
People who don't like something are generally more vocal about it than those that aren't, right? A person with a positive experience with a company will tell a few people, while someone with a bad experience will tell everyone and their mom... More specifically though this thread is about Kelly Marie Tran being harassed. I don't think those expressing their distaste are having to control some urge to harass KMT.
Fuck anyone that harrasses a person because their beloved kids movie didn't fulfill their lofty ideals. Fucking nerd scum.
I didn't say they were ban worthy. I said they were rude and insensitive, which they are. I'm not providing a service, I'm engaging in the discussion, even if you don't like my form of engagement just as much as I dislike the approach of many here. Nobody should feel like they have to provide the context of their thoughts on a movie before saying harassment is bad. Harassment is bad is a thing people should feel confident in saying as a complete sentence. Nobody cares what you thought of a movie. I have not shared my own thoughts on the movie, because they have nothing to do with Kelly Marie Tran's experiences online and pretending that people care what I think about TLJ instead of talking about what happened to KMT would be pretty insensitive to the harassment, some very racist and sexist in nature, that she has experienced for months now. Couldn't you just say "there is no justification for this kind of harassment"? What knowledge do we gain from knowing you didn't like the character? Because I can promise you that in the thousand posts already made in this thread, the possibility that someone can dislike a character and not harass the performer is very, very well covered ground. It is firmly established. It would be like saying, "You know the sky was really blue when I looked outside just now, but there is no justification for this kind of harassment." While this might be an accurate part of your reality, it doesn't really advance the topic in any way. (Obviously there is some difference between bringing up the sky and talking about the movie, but I was going for something inarguably true that similarly does not alter the second half of the statement as it is also inarguably true.)
I think if the Internet and social media existed back when Voyager came out like it does today, she would have been harassed given that the show wasn't well liked she was the first female captain that a Star Trek show was based around.
But by that way of thinking about it, why would anyone comment at all in the scenario you describe? The fact that there is no justification for that kind of harassment is also very, very well covered ground. It's firmly established.
I think the big difference in the fan bases is Trek fans can accept when they don't like certain things without spazzing out about it. Trek has been all over the map right from the inception, the first movie was a very different tone from the TV, TNG initially was something the fan base was arguably split on, DS9 is very different. The fan base understands how to take a deep breath and relax when something isn't perfect or even good. Star Wars fans though, I think there is firstly a certain arrogance to begin with that Star Wars is some kind of holy, sacred thing that they put on some ridiculous pedestal. And then when things don't go how they want, it's full melt down mode. Star Wars fans have problems accepting things when they're not done exactly how they think they should and yes IMO that is very specific to that fandom. Again also see Marvel ... no one cares if a Thor movie or an Iron Man is not the greatest thing since sliced bread. The kid from Iron Man 3 probably didn't get any death threats even though that movie is lame.
When you start talking about posting on a board is a social contract to talk about the topic at hand you're trying to control the tone of the thread. We don't need flowery language, that's what you're doing. Its a discussion about how a person in a movie was harassed by a portion of that franchises. The literal topic at hand is going to make people comment on that character but last time I checked every comment is basically, "who gives a fuck about whether you dont like the movie or the character, you cant treat people like that". It's entirely a valid comment. You're not a mod, you dont get to decide what is a valid thought to share and what isn't. So really, not trying to hear you on this point. There is more than one way to have a discussion. You dont get to define it.
All this fanboyism and gatekeeping and harassment, for such a mediocre film franchise at that. Star Wars is and always has been garbage in its film form, and somehow the fans who uphold it are even worse.
There's obviously a racist/misogynistic undercurrent to a lot of the criticism of the new Star Wars movies. It's been an "excitable" fanbase for a while but it seems to have a nasty edge now because a woman is in charge and the movies are being led by women and feature them prominently. Nobody chasin after Peter Jackson despite the Hobbit being real bad.
I guess I had hoped the conversation could evolve past the basics at some point. Like I think it's worth talking about how the rising cost of productions across all entertainment mediums has increasingly eroded the barriers between creators and fans in a way that's incredibly dangerous. Movies and TV shows are expensive and jobs are easily ended based on bad fan response so there is an increasing push toward fan engagement. Fans are told they matter more than anything, that their vision is the most valid, and catered to by marketing in a way that sets up expectations that can never actually be met by the source material. Almost inevitably, there is disappointment when it turns out your vision was not actually the priority. (General you, obviously.) You see it a lot especially with shipping culture and in serialized programming where it feels like networks could end the story at any moment, so they pander to people they have no intention of satisfying in order to increase the hysteria. The hysteria is deliberate, and the consequences are massive. This isn't to say that people aren't responsible for their own awful behavior. Obviously they are. But there is a degree to which some people have come to understand their importance as fans that can never align with reality and for some the response is incredibly aggressive. It's always the actors who are at the front lines of that response, and very often it's the women and people of color who take the brunt of the backlash. Social media is a pandora's box that marketing departments cannot close again.
Honestly, complaining that people are commenting on the broader phenomenon at work here (shitty fans transferring their frustration with a character onto an actor) is kind of thread whining, and the attempts to police people into only repeating the sentiment "harassment is terrible" is starting to be a very tiresome thread derail. If people are showing empathy for KMT and holding her blameless, and posting respectfully, they should be able to contextualize their thoughts around the situation any way they like. Also, the "well covered ground" argument makes no sense because "harassment is bad" is also well-covered ground. In fact, fan reaction to the content is a very interesting thread of discussion because women of color who are being targeted for daring to show up in geek franchises is a large and troublesome topic; see: Leslie Jones' harassment after Ghostbusters (2016). Being able to talk about the work being done by these performers, the context the work is happening in, and the patterns of behavior that drive harassers is a lot more on-topic than you're making it out to be, and saying "nobody cares what you thought of a movie" is a pretty jerky thing to say in general. In the old place, they even banned threads where the only possible avenue of discussion was lamenting how terrible a situation was, and I appreciated that. Trying to force the opposite situation -- i.e. ONLY talking about how terrible a situation was -- is not conducive to a good discussion that explores what's going on.
Any harrasment like this is abhorent. Lumping a group of people together and blaming them as a collective is equally abhorent.
I wonder if Evangeline Lilly got much hate since some of the more disliked aspects of the Hobbit movies involved Tauriel.
Let's say I made a piece of artwork and hung it up in an exhibit, and people come to look at it and come away with their own opinions about it. I also have a Twitter account where I post miscellaneous stuff about my life. A few people who REALLY didn't like the artwork decide to inundate my Twitter with extremely hateful comments. The negativity gets to a point where I decide to ignore/put the comments out of sight. Other people find out about this and feel bad that the negativity got me down, and I overhear them remarking to their friends, "You know, I thought their art was trash too, but I wouldn't leave comments like that. It's totally not cool". Like, how is this an acceptable form of support? Great, thanks for that weird, backwards expression of sympathy that sounds like a semi springboard for you to share your negative opinion. That makes me feel loads better. Again, the sentiment behind these comments is GOOD – that an opinion of someone's work is absolutely no reason to harass the actual person. But your actual opinion of the work in question is irrelevant to the fact that harassment = shitty, so why bring it up except to restate your opinion needlessly or to try to distance yourself from the harassers who share the same opinion as you? Back to Kelly and the social media problem as a whole. I wonder if actors are completely unfiltered when it comes to Twitter and whatnot, or if they've got people to look over stuff for them. I guess the healthiest thing is to just avoid it entirely, but that's such a bummer.
I dont think it would be possible for me to love and respect Rian Johnson more than I do for the incredibly positive attitude he keeps through all of this horse shit. He is an inspiration.
At this point I hope Rian's trilogy is all minority women just to piss off the horrible incel Star Wars fandom
Maybe it is time for the Star Wars fanbase to do some soul searching. When one fanbase's behavior is getting notably worse than other comparable ones (Marvel, Thrones, Trek, Tolkien, Potter, etc.) I think maybe some reflection needs to be had.
As a fan of SWs, Im on a forum calling those responsible abhorent....If I met someone responsible, Id also call them out. Im not going tolabel the entire fanbase as some are doing, but as you say I would encourage others to take the same stance. I personally have nothing I need to quietly reflect on.
Or fandoms can acknowledge and tackle the shitty toxicity and the power it has within the community rather than worrying about "NOT ALL STAR WARS FANS!"
People get real flexible with the definition of critique. A critique does not fit into a twitter post or comment.
But this is why people do it, for online "cred". "Look, I just tangled with the director of TLJ and won." If he gets retweeted or replied to by the "popular" Youtubers, he's an instant celebrity, however momentary. EDIT: Of course, how they really feel about things is what fuels it, but they know there might be a payoff of being recognized for it online.
And then went on to say that it would never occur to me to attack an actor for it. Where was I hedging toward empathy toward her attackers? Seemed quite the stretch to me to arrive where you did. It might apply to some in the thread, but not me. I have nothing but disdain for those that put such toxicity out there.
Geek culture is trash. If you can't immediately move on (or you get angry about any of this shit), you're the problem.
Fuck me, this thread. "Yeah, this seems like a good place to dump my TLJ hot take that literally zero humans give any kind of fuck about." "Gosh, not ALL Star Wars fans, guys. Both sides are the same!" If you thought this was a good time to make it about yourself, you were wrong. And you're an asshole.
So to be totally clear, I was not trying to single out or criticize individual people so much as an impulse and pattern of behavior that is exemplified here. Others have used the example of the Black Panther thread as other instances where it has happened, though I was not witness to those myself. I know I myself have done this before, as I admitted in my first post about it. I understand the impulse to use a personal anecdote for context. We've all done it when a friend tells us something bad that's happening to them and we relate it to a similar bad thing that happened to us -- and then immediately hope they don't think we were being self-involved -- and how we overcame that. It's a very common, almost instinctive response. But I do wonder if it is an entirely healthy response in terms of how we relate to others and their suffering. That's my point. Not that one individual or sixty or however many are in the wrong, but why we feel we can't just say bad behavior is bad without providing a clear context of where our own thoughts and feelings would fit along that spectrum with regards to a piece of media, especially when the things we're talking about are something as serious as serial harassment juxtaposed with something as inconsequential as how we felt about a movie that came out months ago. Because I'm willing to bet some of those people who contributed to the overwhelming negativity that drove her off of Instagram didn't think they were engaging in harassment. They didn't think they were being overly mean. They were just offering an opinion. But not every opinion is required at every moment. It's just not. We can all agree that she doesn't deserve to be treated this way. We can all have opinions about the movie. We can keep those things separate. We can experience empathy for her entirely apart from a fictional universe that is rather inconsequential in the overall scheme of things. Because I do think there is something a little conceited in offering that personal, anecdotal context, and that isn't intended as a specific indictment of any one individual. Human beings are social but we are also very self-centered (as in focused on the self) by nature and learn to grow past that as we engage and empathize with others. So although contextualizing bad things happening to others alongside how we feel and think is a common instinct in how humans process and engage, might it not be better to learn to empathize with the person entirely separate from the product? We should strive toward expressing empathy without being self-involved, right? Sorry if it came across as tiresome tone policing. I have a bad habit of trying to respond to as many of the people quoting me as possible, and unfortunately that leads to a lot of posts about the same thing, I guess. I'm also not as good at brevity as this. Clearly.
Sorry, I just don't think this is true that it is something that would only happen with Star Wars and not other franchises with large fanbases. i think you have to weigh in on the context and time. Social media and the Internet has embolden toxic fans to not only spew their crap, but also to do it within an echo chamber which just intensifies the toxicity of it when it is unleashed. This is not something that is exclusive because of one IP; this is something that is a subset of any fandom that simply takes things too far. Star Trek and Marvel don't somehow have better fans. They're all going to have toxic fans and it's only dependent on something for them to unleash their hate. The Internet and social media has intensified the positive acts of fandom and how fans can interact with each other and the content creators, but at the same time it has also intensified the negative aspects as well and it isn't simply because one fan base is worse than another.
Star Wars fans are, generally speaking, pretty nutty and have an unhealthy investment in the franchise, but this harassment is on another level. No doubt a miserable tiny minority of fans.
lol oh brother, I'd then put ALL Of my hair back and not have layered bangs with curly-whirlies around my engineering grease-face. xD Model or not, it's a dorky do that would definitely be high maintenance.
So now the conversation has reached that inevitable point where, yeah, it's bad that Tran has been viciously and cruelly harassed and everything, but calling out the toxicity of Star Wars fandom is actually equally bad, ok??? That's what's abhorrent here, alright?? It's important that we talk about the essential issue here - not ALL Star Wars fans!!!1! Yeah, of course it's not all Star Wars fans. Just like it's not all Trek fans, Marvel fans, video game players, Magic: The Gathering players. I've met extremely cool folks in all of these worlds. Some of them are my among my best friends to this day. But many, many, many people I've met and had the unfortunate pleasure of dealing with in these worlds have been absolutely garbage humans. Tons of racism, clannishness, misogyny, spiteful entitlement, and huge heaps of immaturity and refusing to grow up, the latter of which is actually held up as a badge of pride. If you've been lucky enough to not deal with these folks, that's awesome. I've dealt with them so many times. They run off women from tabletop groups, alienate people with their hateful childishness, and make everyone involved look bad. It's not all Star Wars fans, but there's no doubt that there is a healthy and vocal and thriving thread that runs through these fan groups, and they've been thoroughly empowered and emboldened by MRA bullshit and alt-right campaigns. If you're not part of that, that's good. That's great. I'm not part of that, and I like Star Wars, Star Trek, games, etc. But I have enough critical thinking skills to look around me and identify patterns when I see them. When I hear people say "Gamers are shit", it would be ridiculous for me to be offended. A) I know they're not talking about me, and B) I know exactly who they are talking about, and their comments are completely justified. Man, I would encourage some people to just take a step back and self-reflect for two minutes. Look around you and see the patterns in online behavior, in how fan groups treat creators (and each other), in the type of rhetoric that is used to comment on (excuse me, "critique") actors and writers who are PoC and/or women. It doesn't mean that you, specifically, are a bad person, if you didn't like The Last Jedi. But can you see how the fan engagement with the film and its creators has a huge and a very public thread of hatefulness, bitterness, and violent immaturity? Is it that difficult to understand what people mean when they say, "Jesus, Star Wars fans are fucking shit"? Think about where that's coming from. Give up some of your personal baggage about Star Wars and have some empathy with people who are the targets of this bullshit. Recognize how comments like "I think her character was a huge heap of trash and fucking ruined Star Wars, but don't harass the lady!" may have good intentions but ultimately feed into the language of harassment that's been deployed here. So, you didn't like The Last Jedi. Okay. But you have a responsibility about how you talk about things, about how you talk to people, about how you engage in a conversation. You have a choice about how you make your critiques. You have the opportunity to find and learn an actual critical vocabulary. You have the chance to understand that vitriolic YouTubers laying on thick hyperbole for clicks are not the end all, be all of thinking and talking about movies. You can make a conscious effort to be thoughtful and not yet another asshole on the internet, impotently screaming about shit.
I think people are just sick of this “I hated the film/her character” quantified crap. Which is fair enough, because this is not the time and place for it. If you feel you need to quantify your dislike of TLJ, don’t post in this thread.
The zealousness of some Star Wars fans in feeling like the franchise is "theirs" and how they have to express that in the loudest and angriest way possible goes back to the prequels. It became in many ways acceptable for all manner of hyperbole in saying how Lucas raped their childhood and Jar Jar is worse than Hitler, the discourse of SW became about taking it back from Lucas and everyone was on board.
