Toxic Fanbase - Tumblr Posts
Jenna Ortega’s fame: a blessing or a curse?
Jenna Ortega, the bright young star of Hollywood, already has a cult of her own - crazy fandom that can make Selena Gomes and Taylor Swift jealous. And tarnish all her great achievements. How did that happen?
About a year ago Netflix released “Wednesday”, which immediately has become one of the most popular series of the platform and a real cultural phenomenon. Wednesday's dance went viral, prompting the teens all over the world to cosplay the goth girl and of course, Ortega, who played the main role in the beloved series, turned from a promising actress into a superstar.
But could we say that fame is a blessing for her? Along with unprecedented popularity, Ortega has acquired numerous aggressive, obsessive fans, most of whom are teenagers living more online than in real life. The behavior of these fans have already turned into a serious problem. Every new project involving Jenna Ortega is dragged into a scandal by the efforts of her own fans that throw absolutely every accusation in the book at her co-stars.
It all started in January, when Percy Hynes White, who played a part in love triangle with her in “Wednesday”, was accused in anonymous tweets of sexual assault, racism etc. The actor denied all the accusations and no legal proceedings followed. Ortega's fans meanwhile organized the massive campaign against White, justifying it with concerns about their idol’s life, both work related and personal. Ortega and White have repeatedly stated that they became best friends during the filming and although the status of their relationship is now unclear, many fans of Ortega continue to campaign against the actor, inciting to harass him on social media. White’s participation in s2 of “Wednesday” is still uncertain.
Martin Freeman was the next to come under fire from Ortega's fans. Freeman is her co-star in the upcoming "Miller's girl" film, where his character, a teacher, has an illicit relationship with his own student, played by Ortega. The first trailer was released recently and immediately caused to resurface the accusation of racism, child abuse etc Freeman has. In less than a day the viral tweet gained more than 13 million views and Ortega's fans actively participate in spreading accusations and inciting the harassment of the actor. And the movie hasn't been released yet! There is every reason to believe that with the release, the hate snowball will turn into an avalanche and Freeman will become the next victim of the cancel culture.
The most ambiguous situation happened around another co-star of Ortega, Toby Wallace, who played her love interest in the recently released Paramount film "Finestkind''. Although Wallace wasn’t involved in anything controversial, did not actively promote the film together with Ortega and even skipped the red carpet premiere of the film, he was bombarded with hateful comments on his Instagram by Ortega's fans, who wished him dead (smt in portuguese), among other things.
Perhaps the situation began to bother Ortega's PR team, because several big fan pages simultaneously called for an end of harassment of this actor, thereby only fueling the interest of others in the issue.
Thus, almost everyone who plays a love interest of Jenna Ortega in the movies finds themselves under attack from the actress' numerous and very active fans. Their actions create quite an unhealthy atmosphere of scandal around the young star, negatively affecting her reputation in the industry, because everyone of her colleagues risks getting bullied and canceled.
Miss Ortega didn’t comment on any of this and fans may see it as full approval, continuing to harass her co-stars on the Internet. Who is next? The release of a new film featuring Ortega and the Weeknd is to be announced soon, and the prospects for the Weeknd, already suffering harsh criticism for his Idol series involvement, are not very sunny.
In the upcoming film Ortega plays a stalker obsessed with the Weeknd’s character, a very controversial role in itself. Let’s just wait and see if he would be the new target for the Ortega’s stan cult.
2023 has barely felt like it ended, 2024 is only a few months from ending and all we got so far is:
Digital circus fandom becomes the fastest fandom to become toxic beyond compression beacuse of brainrot and gen alpha(worse than the anime community)
Stalking becoming the next hot trend on tiktok
Art Industry being threatened by AI
Tiktok in general
Content Farms
The creator of friday night funkin(who is a grown ass man) liking pics of literal 15 year old characters(ex. Hatsune Miku who is 15-16) and die hards defending his nasty ass
Sexyy Red making lip gloss called Coochie Juice, Bootyhole Brown, Nut, Pussyhole Pink, Yellow Discharge, Gonorrhea, Blue Ballz and Sex on My Period(if you buy these than you're nasty)
Ariana Grande being a homewrecker
Jojo Siwa's awful rebrand
Bigfoot thee stallion vs Nicki Minaj
My hero academia getting the worst ending ever
Bigfoot Thee stallion Twerking at a presidential rally
Ipad Kids
Parents not parenting
Kendrick Lamar makes a diss track(Not Like Us) and all our fave youtubers are now being exposed for liking pre-teens and kindergarteners
Mr Beast's Downfall
Teens showing up to school in Hazbin Hotel and Circus Merch
People begging for another Pandemic and treating it like a holiday and not the fact that your wishing that people get sick beacuse you don't wanna go to school 🧍♂️
Fart Spice(Miss Poopie)
Skibidi Toilet(💀)
And so much more.....
2024 you will not be missed and the trends from this garbage year won't be missed either
If anything, we should be asking *Filthy Frank Voice*
“But-wha…Why do you give a shit?”
Also these are the same guys who say “They’re fiction, their no real, chill my man, it’s not that deep”
Then how the fuck is it delusion then? Especially when it’s an AU and the most of us aren’t trying to claim to be canon?
Also isn’t fanfiction originally the original way people viewed storytelling in the old days or something?
It’s all about controlling other people with these fandoms, it’s the fact they want to control or at the very least suppress what you think, feel, and create…
your ship isn't canon.
And what if I keep living in blissful delusion? What then?
Honestly I feel like my bad experience with fandom steps into a larger problem.
Society has become a d-measuring rat race and we get punished for doing what makes us happy no matter what it is or why That’s been the case for for conceptualizing reimagined RWBY AU and niche writing in the past.
It’s made for “the wrong people” when I should be writing for “the right people”
I don’t mean to sound like a hippy, but society seems to have become so egocentric, all to the benefit to an elite who has hijack the concept of the greater good to work to their benefit.
There's no respect for anyone and their limits and boundaries and tastes from the broad things to nitty gritty details or walks of live regardless if they are moral or not
Everything it pit against each other, majority or minority, niche or mass, objective or subjective, individual or collective.
It's no longer "I'm different than you."
It's now "I'm these things and like these things and dislike these things because I'm a better person than you."
It's not just politics, its pop-culture, hobbies, jobs, everything.
The more I look up CS Lewis and remember GK Chesterton, the more I realize how screwed up everything is.
RWBY Fandom: “*sneer* the changes you made in this AU, its not RWBY anymore! Change it up and make it an original story!”
Me: Fine. *tweaks the designs, change the names, and aesthetics…*
Fandom: “Ah! This story is thinly-veiled fan fiction and its characters, world, and ships are clearly influenced by RWBY’s world, characters, and ships you wanted among other things along with you being butthurt which is pathetic and sad cope!
You should disengage the source material, use something else which you 100% agree with, grow up, and ya know, you need to learn to be more original!"
Me: "Philip Pullman did it with the Chronicles of Narnia in "His Dark Materials Trilogy" and you also got Omniman and Homelander from Invincible and The Boys who are Evil Superman..."
Fandom: "Well they can do that with your stuff, but you can't do that with our stuff."
Me:
My Frustration 2: Electric Boogaloo
This is something of a sequel to my previous post because looking back on it, the way I described 'pop-culture/literally intellectuals' and how they go around spouting "raised stakes and consequences" and especially relating to my distaste of Pyrrha and Arkos being tragic, and Black Sun seemingly thrown out the window or even if it didn't they would be put on the chopping block next sounded to broad and generalized
I want to make it perfectly clear, I'm not saying every person who uses those terms are snobs and are being completely arbitrary
I am aware Monty always intended Pyrrha and Arkos to be tragic, and I get why the story idealistically works(such as Celtic Phoenix is trying to do with Fixing RWBY) and I get why it works for a majority and why its objectively good and what not
But I'm gonna be honest, and pardon me using a Harry Potter gif because I know the whole ordeal about JK but the gif is a mood...
I love the world and characters and certain concepts of RWBY, but I honestly I just really don't like the story that was told with them or directions they went, which once again isn't to say its objectively bad
I’m not saying the direction RWBY went with V3 or Pyrrha and the rest of the cast being tragic in some way or another is objectively bad, it was just not my taste
And I am not saying every normal RWBY fan/RWDE person who liked it is an elitist about it nor are all of them trying to insult me and attack me personally or say my ideas are bad but rather help you guys understand my experience with the toxic strain of the fanbase.
and I am not trying to change canon or its “trajectory” , nor am I doing this to spite Monty, especially when I never knew the guy. This is a difference in handling ideas and concepts.
I’m doing my RWBY AU, which will most likely be revamped into an original story since it takes a whole different directions with the characters and world, but it's mostly because with post V3 and now in retrospect I saw what this world, characters, ships and other ideas could have been all in a story I believe is worth telling. And I was very disappointed and frustrated that it wasn’t along with my own personal exhaustion how epic storytelling has been going in several franchises.
and my original story which might be a magitek space opera, is kinda cross between RWBY, Fairy Tale, Star Wars, Flash Gordon, and The Chronicles of Narnia
The problem with that in the past is I have met individuals who were just snobs using the fact 'raised stakes' and 'consequences' in epics are necessary to just flat out negated any alternative ideas for concepts without even going into detail and from where I am standing it's becoming more legalistic and arbitrary to the point nothing is allowed to go right, at least not on the small scale as well as the large scale
Like for example, my original story recycles concepts of RWBY such as Jaune and Pyrrha, Blake and Sun, Weiss and Netpune, and Ruby and Oscar as new characters but they get well earned happy endings and they reign as kings and queens on their respective planets and the last couple reigning over them all as emperor and empress
in the past on other websites a lot of ideologues just kept harping on 'raise stakes' and 'consequences' like cheerleaders at a prep rally as if those things inherently forbid such things
for example
"Arkos ended tragically worked, ergo all couples and characters in epic stories like Jaune and Pyrrha(the dork knight and the warrior woman isolated by society) especially if they are directly inspired by them must also end that way to raise steaks and consequences, and they only way they can have a happy ending is in a sitcom/romcom. Doesn't matter what the epic story is about, what happens, their roles, or why, or why it makes audiences happy, if they don't end up dead in an epic, it means nothing."
and to borrow a point from another previous post, when it came to my AU and original story, the fandom would set me and others like me up into a conundrum;
RWBY Fandom: “*sneer* the changes you made in this AU, its not RWBY anymore! Change it up and make it an original story!”
Me: Fine. *tweaks the designs, change the names, and aesthetics…*
Fandom: “Ah! This story is thinly-veiled fan fiction and its characters, world, and ships are clearly influenced by RWBY’s world, characters, and ships you wanted among other things along with you being butthurt which is pathetic and sad cope!
You should disengage the source material, use something else which you 100% agree with, grow up, and ya know, you need to learn to be more original!"
Me: "Philip Pullman did it with the Chronicles of Narnia in "His Dark Materials Trilogy" and you also got Omniman and Homelander from Invincible and The Boys who are Evil Superman..."
Fandom: "Well they can do that with stuff you like, but you can't do that with stuff we like."
and to borrow my point from my other post as before, when I tried to explain my personal distaste how it feels like tragic romance is bleeding into other stuff like DC Comics when Dan Didio trashed Bruce and Selena's wedding and ruining Clark and Lois's marriage and the 'hero's shouldn't have happy personal lives' gibberish, one rwby individual condoned it because
"single batman and superman sells well"
right after he said what I wanted was inherently 'pandering' which in my eyes is hypocritical since to do what 'sells well' can be pandering along with the idea I can't stuff my niche interests into stuff they like, but when its the reverse, its totally acceptable
They would go on how "they're just fictional characters, its not that deep" and then we would actively disagree with these things creatively, it all of a sudden was a matter of life and death
the pattern was pretty clear
and combined with my experience a lot of people in the RWBY fanbase began flipping off people who walked out on RWBY V3, insulting them and what they preferred, and telling those people basically "shut up and go watch a sitcom" just gives me this feelings there's a bias, and The RWBY fandom is the tip of the iceberg...
If you like the right things, think the right things, subjectively feel the right things, and subvert the wrong this for the right things, your justified in forcing your opinions onto others, can get away doing and saying whatever you want on the internet anywhere and to anyone without suppression, and simultaneously suppress and censor others within your own communities
“I just think you can tell all kinds of stories with a world like RWBY and it’s characters”
The sad part is you could do wonders with its characters but from what I noticed the fandom never wants to expand on those possibilities.
Strangely many possibilities become stagnant because no one want to try something different.
Examples would be your version of Jacques: instead of the always being evil or a non threat in most fanfic you made him into a good person (something that we barely)…sadly I have met some members from discord that hated the idea that Jacques can be good: it is either him evil or nothing even with the AU tag…
Same with cardin: I don’t like fanfic that use him for literally that one scene in stories. To me personally I hate the bully arc because it just makes the characters like Blake, ruby, yang and especially Pyrrha look bad not doing anything to stop it and on top of that it was there to ignore the mistakes and flaws jaune was doing in school to give a power boost.
How is cardin in the whole entire school (possibly the vale kingdom) was the only racist in the school??? One man cannot be the fuel for racism.
I honestly would have remove it like ice queendom.
He could have been a jerk with a heart of gold protecting his kingdom from evil (vol 3 of him protecting beacon).
Instead he is only used for a copy and paste scene of the bully arc in fanfics…
Ciel (that one atlas partner for penny) had a fanfic story where she was in a time loop trying to save everyone. I never thought you could give her personality due to barely any screen time but some writers actually manage writer her beautifully!!
Sorry for the rant, I guess I am just bothered how barely anyone especially the side characters are not even expanded upon in a lot of fanfics. What is point of imagination if we are restricted from expressing new ideas??
sorry for the long wait to respond
But you are not wrong in any of this, and call me a conspiracy nut, but I feel like this is all connected.
There's a rise of hatred of creativity in fandoms, wether be AUs or original works inspired by them, especially disagreement and disappointment, unless it subverts the 'wrong' things for the 'right' things.
And this works deliciously well for big entertainment, they don't need to worry about competition from little guys or the very least share the spotlight which in turn makes them money.
Creative thinking is actively discouraged because that requires more risk and less money. Big Entertainment doesn't want that, they want good little consumer units.
I guess my real beef with Watts, at least the fandoms praise of him and maybe I'm wrong here, is that while Watts is very intelligent and good at analysis and pointing out flaws, its all ultimately to elevate himself above others save Salem. He's humble enough to know he's just a means to an end for her.
But in regards to everyone else?
He can judge who is worthy and who is not, who is deserving and who is not, and what it is or is not enough because he's so intelligent and measures those qualifications on “real information.”
Which I'm kinda playing on in my reimagined AU.
And even if they do improve, he still tries to make it he's still a leg up on everyone else save Salem.
It's not what he says is necessarily wrong, it’s that he thinks way too highly of his own judgment in making those calls every time when it comes to others save once again, Salem. And often its just for the feeling of being "right and smart"
He'll let someone improve, but not enough where the point his judgement might be wrong. He'd probably undermine and sabotage Cinder if it doesn't jeopardize the mission in order keep her "unworthy"
Because one thing he can't stand is being wrong about something, which the real reason for his anger towards James.
"How dare this person think his judgement is better than my own, because I am so much smarter than him!"
Which isn't to say thats bad storytelling, far from it. It's what makes a good villain.
But my problem is in regards to the fandom who praise him, it's not so much what he said to Cinder, then so much they see themselves in him.
Arrogant, snobbish, and think way too highly of themselves of their own judgement, and don't really care about the meaning what happens in the story, but rather being right, superior, and getting their way or if they do, parade around to put down everyone else.
All because like Arthur, they know so much.
Hey FNDM, the way you treat male abuse victims is repulsive.
"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.
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.
“Zealots cannot be brought to the negotiating table, though they always claim they can be. Zealots do not want peace, but will always claim they’re peaceful. They deal in absolutes, and their intangible objective is the only justification needed in their minds for what they do to other people.”-RetroBlasting
RWBY fans: Ruby would never want to hurt Jaune for killing Penny because she is a sweet pure innocent bean!
Also RWBY fans:
Pop-Culture Gnosticism: Why Fandoms are Toxic
We all know about toxic fandoms, and I've had my share of them with the RWBY Fandom and have heard horror stories from others about other fandoms, all of which bizarrely always preach bout positive things.
My personal example is with the FNDM with its preaching about "hope punk" and "trusting love" and claiming their appeal to the tragedy is driven by "ultimately hopeful" motives even though their tone and behavior seem to show the exact opposite.
Now looking back on it along with my faith as a Christian, Catholic to be exact, I have theory the reason why.
It's a form of secular Gnosticism.
Those who don't know what that is, Gnosticism is an esoteric religion/mystery religion thats rooted in having "The Gnosis"(knowledge) for salvation
The gnostic believed that the material world is evil, a prison created by a trickster god known as "The Demiurge" and our bodies themselves prison as well, for we are supposedly pieces of God, "The Monad", being kept from achieving "oneness" with him and the only way to achieve salvation is to gain "gnosis" or "knowledge"
This led to very hedonistic practices(sleeping around, drugs, self mutilation) or puritanical practices(akin to Christian Fundamentalism or Puritanism) in order to become "pure of corruption" or even trying to bend the material world to ones will to bring the world to "oneness" with "the monad" because Gnosticism basically says "Because you have gnosis, you are a piece of God, therefore you are God and whatever you do is justified if its to help all of humanity achieve oneness with the Monad"
During the Church's infancy, the Church fathers fought furiously against heresies that infiltrated the church, and for good reasons.
Gnostics not only try to deny Christ's redemption of the material by becoming man, they were also doing very terrible things in the name of a nebulous greater good while holding double standards against others, doing harm to others and society in the name of virtue.
Sound familiar?
"It's not bad when we do it because we understand it better than you do. It just looks evil or bad to you because you're ignorant. So we get to be nasty to you, because it's you who has the problem and not us."
let me given a personal example with my experience with the toxic FNDM post-V3 Finale which I can go into detail in another post at later time
A considerable amount of people left when the dark turn and the tragic end of Pyrrha and Arkos happened, and a lot of loyal fans used it as an opportunity to viciously mock them and accuse them wanting everything to be all "sunshine and rainbows" all while boasting the morals and messages of the finale and season and make this the end-all-be-all for characters like Pyrrha and Jaune in epic stories. Because they had "the gnosis" and these supposed to be plebeians, wether they were majority or minority, did not. Even having the nerve to act like they can be offended on Monty's behalf and his family even though they never met or spoken to them.
And they became more puritanical and hostile to Blake and Yang ships that are not Bumbleby and rewrites and AUs, such as the case of Fixing RWBY and RWBY: Remnants, and I'm sure RWBY Evermorrow is on their hit-list too. They see it as an obstruction of achieving "oneness" and a form of "impurity"
Bishop Robert Barron explains this kind of phenomena pretty well. It's an appeal to one's pride because humans love the feeling being the select few who "get it" and "we really know what's going on."
This isn't the perfect theory, there is a gnostic pattern here. I can go into detail later on in another post but I hope this explains somewhat of what might be going on.
*someone makes something thats relatively lighter into something relatively darker, usually by a lot*
"Wow! So interesting! A real test of hope!"
*Someone makes something relatively dark into something relatively lighter, usually still having considerably bad things happen*
"Nah, people don't find it interesting. Sorry."
I know I've said before in a long post before
But I think the hatred of fanatics for reimagined RWBY AU's or tweaked rewrites like FRWBY along with other franchises or original works that recycle certain elements for indie stories is simply this.
They accumulate a niche audience that's big enough, not necessarily bigger than the fanatics it may still be smaller, just big enough who these fanatics and literally snobs see as "wrong people" Which in turn means the possibility that maybe the creators of said works and their audience, despite being what these snobs and loonies deem to be "wrong people, might see something that they don't and may not be wrong.
Keep in mind I say "possible" not "an absolute fact"
The very fact its possible is what drives these pricks insane.
"How dare these self-entitled hacks and their vermin audience not abide to us 'Right People'! Their acting entitled to everything like Watts said to Cinder!
It's totally not us being a bunch of self-righteous and self-absorbed hypocrites! We don't think to highly of our own judgement and standards of 'raised stakes' and 'consequences' at all! We are purely objective and rational and above and beyond subjective and personal feelings and those other icky disgusting things!
In fact, can these wrong people take a moment to appreciate how we 'Right People' are above and beyond all that?"
"What you want is like 90% of shonen anime"
Okay, do you have a specific example from that "90%" that has what I had in mind?
"It's 90% of shonen anime"
Okay then it won't be hard for you to reach into said "90%" and give me a specific example.
"...I don't need to it's 90% of sho-"
Seriously, if you can't give me anything that can scratch my specific itches or at the very least "idk, but maybe this might help" then don't open your mouth.
I know my RWBY AU won't be for everyone, and I know I will get some haters, but I would like someone to have my back when that happens.
But last time that happened to me, nobody had my back.
Even the most composed and seemingly rational people telling me to be 'objective' and not being 'self entitled' and talked about 'toxic fandom' seemed to have no problem with me get dogpiled because I thought the direction for rwby was too dark and not liking arkos being tragic despite Pyrrha's name and allusion 'looked so bad' for me.
And even worse happened when a certain Knight launched a harassment campaign on a DeviantART user for not liking Pyrrha's death to the point the man almost considered suicide which he thankfully didn't thanks to his family talking to him.
How did that not get YouTube levels of attention?
Oh yeah thats right, because the Knight was defending the tragedy of Pyrrha and liked Gurren Laggan and Madoka Magica so 'good taste' justifies horrendous behavior even if it might get blood on your hands.
I might go into detail in another post, but there's been the most composed and seemingly rational individuals of RWBY, and other fandoms who will call out thuggish and mobbish behavior, but stand by passively and accept it when it goes after people who they disagree with and things they don't like.
In the words of RetroBlasting on YouTube
"Hypocrisy; thy name is Modern Fandom"
If you don’t care when the mob goes after people who you disagree with and what they love, maybe you’ll care when they go after you and what you love
And you’ll have no sympathy from anyone when that happens
Watts: *gives Cinder a lecture that reeks of self-aggrandizement and hypocrisy*
FNDM: OMG GET HER ASS DOC! SHES SO SELF ENTITLED!
Yang: *Neglects her sister when she’s breaking down while going Gaga over Neko GF*
FNDM:(makes violent art against people who point it out)
Hot Take: Across the Spider-Verse has done so much damage to fandom discourse especially with that stupid "Canon Event"
Nobody can do an AU or OG work that recycles anything without petty-gatekeepers(not authentic ones!) jumping all over you making it sound like the cosmos will explode if you don't obey their legalistic bullshit.
"You need to curate your tastes if your tired of being disappointed with shows"
Fine *does so*
"Ugh, you're so close minded and immature, why don't you take risks, broaden your horizons, and cultivate your tastes?"
Okay, why don't you do that too?
"Well I prefer the broad and nitty gritty things these ways, which are broad and risky by default so I don't need to do that."