Fandom Woes: The Reductionist Game And Well Poisoning

Fandom Woes: The Reductionist game and well poisoning

“You cannot go on seeing through' things for ever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it... If you see through everything, then everything is transparent.”-CS Lewis

One thing I get really annoyed about toxic fandoms is one thing they love to do is to reduce everything what you like and what makes you happy to basic components and then make it sound stupid(reductio ad absurdum) and make you feel like a stupid and crazy person for liking it.

"Oh, you don't like the Dork Knight and the kind amazonian isolated by society ending tragically? Nor these ships ending tragically? You just want everything to be all sunshine and rainbows and want nothing bad to happen ever. Just go write a sitcom or something."

Or if you don't meet their standards or use the fact it's "this and not that" or its niche to also make it look inherently bad.

"The fact it's an AU, or a fanfic, or its and original story inspired by this, or the fact it's so out of the way and has an audience smaller than ours just shows how bad it is. But whatever makes you happy I guess."

Both of these things what CS Lewis called "Nothing Buttery" or what some would call "Reductionism"

Let's say you explain why you love kissing your girlfriend/boyfriend and you go into things that are not rational

"You just like touching lips with your significant other. All that stuff is all style and no substance."

Which often their standard of "substance" or any other necessary quality they measure by a nebulous standard if not an unfair one and make unfair and unnecessary comparisons.

All it hopes you feel guilty and conform your thoughts and subjective feelings to theirs, or if you don't, they can justify in their minds and to those none the wiser throwing what you love to the dogs when the opportunity hits.

I say this because that's what happened to me in my past experience with fandoms.

And often it has an element of hypocrisy because they like niche things but they will go on how they have every reason in the universe to like something while you just like something different because "it just makes you feel good" and you go into detail and they say "thats not substantial"

You see the psychological scam going on here?

Speaking as a Catholic, it also seems rooted in the modern idea if something cannot be 100% rationalized, its irrational and needs to be suppressed, silenced, or even outright destroyed. But that's another discussion for another day.

"Disengage the fandom and curate your interaction!" - It's not that simple.

One thing I've told about my woes about fandom is "disengage from the fandom" and not to "hyperbolize" or not "open floodgates", and be "rational" and just accept not being "serious storytelling" or else it comes of as "fragility" or I guess would be "breaking from fragility"and being "defensive" and "not touching grass"

And I know this comes from a good place and I know these people mean well...

The problem is that advice doesn't work when it comes to certain fandoms who use these labels and also hyperbolize and "floodgate", the escalation of interaction, and the "consequences" of that. At least in my past experience

The problem is when you try to "disengage with the fandom" requires you to drop social media entirely. And when it comes to pop culture and creativity and start with projects, most of that stuff now requires social media and the internet.

If you "disengage" your often just left with people you know at work who might have no idea what you're talking about and can't help you in any way.

Michael of RetroBlasting of YouTube his Unplugged Video about " 'Ignoring it' and doing nothing"

It isn't the analogue world anymore, you don't just leave a comic book shop full of jackasses and go to another one and continue your business. And toxic fandoms know this too.

In fact this video explains this kind of stuff best

And what toxic fandoms do, is they set you up into a conundrum.

In the game of The Toxic Fandom, if whatever your doing that takes elements of what you liked of safe franchise, especially out of disagreement and disappointment gets big enough, they invade your space and harass you and often resort to their own brand hyperbolizing and "floodgating" first and assume the worst reasons of what makes you happy and what you want.

If you stay composed and rational and use milder words like "disheartened" and "bummed out", accept your ideas being labeled as "not seriously storytelling", and "disengage" from where if your you put stuff out and find another platform.

They see you as a wimp and keep pushing you back because "oh he's just disheartened guys, he'll get over it, so we can keep pushing him around. What's he gonna do? Be Mildly annoyed? LOL!"

and use the fact stayed "this label" instead of changing to "that label" to screw you over because "we need to make room for real storytelling, thats the consequences sorry!" for whatever reason

And if you do anything aggressive or assertive back;

which might involve hyperbolizing and flooding gates, or at the very least get more aggressive with your tone

If you defend yourself from labels and explain why you wanted what you wanted and why it makes you happy, which is not necessarily being 'defensive'

If you do anything that isn't passive...

You "Broke" from "fragility" your being "defensive", your "not being the bigger person" and "not accepting reality"

and you need to "touch grass"

So the fandoms won't let you win

So in this context, you keep being passive and keep on "disengaging" and keep accepting these labels, the fandom will become more bold and invasive and even actively sabotage you by slandering you such as LilithFairen, KnightOfBalance, or Canonseeker does with AUs and ReWrites of RWBY and they might even falsely report too.

So instead of things getting hypothetically better in the long run, the damage gets exponentially worse

Now of course the argument can be made "well there's always gonna be haters no matter what." Of course there will be, so you might as well fight back to stop the unnecessary bleeding.

Now of course there's cases where it is the case where the person is overreacting and need to step back, but the problem is in my experience there's outsiders who don't bother to take the time time and figure out what's going on before making their judgement call because they think they can just assess the situation by just looking at it and make an assumption because they know so much.

Because the think they’re doing this

when in reality their doing this is getting in the way

Another example I can think off is the success of Kamen America which is an active disagreement with what was done with the idea of Captain Marvel, combined with other elements of course so its not a blatant rip off.

Once it got big enough, Captain Marvel fanatics began shrieking its nothing but a "Porn Captain Marvel Rip-Off" and try to reputation assassinate it, which ComicsGate tried to jump in because the "leader" has a personal beef with the creators

And these are the same people who cheer on evil superman clones like Omni-Man and Homelander or cheer on "His Dark Materials Trilogy" which was made by an author who had a big beef with The Chronicles of Narnia and CS Lewis

Because supervision/inversion is awesome when it subverts/inverts things they don't like I guess

So once again, the fans like myself had to step in and say something and fight back so those out of the loop knew what was actually going on.

Once Fandoms become invasive and are policing social media and creativity to a certain magnitude and try to throw what makes us happy to the dogs when the opportunity hits, being passive and rational might not be an option.

Sometimes it is. But sometimes it's not.

Godzilla X Kong New Empire: Scar King

Me, an Intellectual:

Lanky Kong

Grown up married Alice and P

U know what? Give me things to draw

just a thought, Alice and P grown up and married and being all lovey dovey and their daughter is just all like "Ew."

it was kinda rushed ngl, but I really wanted to draw that dkjvbndbjkdn

Listening to CS Lewis’s Ransom Trilogy, the Eldila and Oyéresu are basically Invisible Space Maiar and Valar and the Old Solar language is CS Lewis’s version of Elvish