Grave Considerations: So, That Happened. . . .

I had a run in, ever so briefly, with the anti-Last Jedi crowd on Twitter, and I kind of felt the desire to talk about it. They apparently have a whole hashtag movement going on, lashing out not only at Star Wars, but the Marvel Cinematic Universe as well, driven further to madness apparently by “Captain Marvel”. I’m fairly certain that this was my first personal encounter with this crowd, where I've actively interacted with them, and not just laughed at them from afar. 

A night or so ago, I got involved in a Twitter spat between one of these anti’s (which is what I’ll call them in lieu of anything more solid, since I don’t really know what they’re against, since it seems to be everything –mr) , and by ‘got involved,’ I mean I made a stupid comment against one of their responses. This was liked by another Twitter user, and when I checked out their timeline, I found out they were one of those fans. I responded to a tweet that they’d retweeted, and suddenly I was pulled in to a whole bunch of pretty disturbing stupid. I know, I know, it was my doing to reply to a tweet, so we can all say I brought this upon myself. But fuck that, you know, because I am who I am and sometimes that means I’m a lot smarter than my temper allows me to be.

I replied to a tweet citing a YouTube video as proof that the MCU, and more specifically, the imminent “Avengers: Endgame” is utterly and assuredly doomed thanks to the blatant feminist agenda of “Captain Marvel”. Yeah, I don’t know what ‘feminist agenda’ either, but, you know, it’s totally there. Within a few tweets, like four of them, I was swept up in a truly dizzying fray of QAnon-tier delusion. I don’t want to talk about that; you can check my Twitter mentions, it’s the same name.

What I do want to talk about is this delusion. This group, made up of people who hate what they think is some hyper-liberalized version of science fiction and comic books, and probably just about every other thing that would fall under the Geek or Nerd Culture fandoms, has a terrible, terrible victim complex. They almost cannot be real people, as they present themselves as absolute lovers of a franchise, to the point that, if the extent to which they’ve made hating a new iteration of said franchise is in any way comparable to their love of a previous iteration of said franchise, they have literally built their personalities around said franchise. Know what I mean? If all the love they had for it was turned to hate for it, they’d be beings of pure hate for the franchise, now, after whatever the ubiquitous They had done to the previously beloved franchise. These are people who have built this version, the online version, of their personas into people who are personally offended, nay, jilted by a pop culture brand. I don’t know if these statements even express what those people are, really; they’re more a wave of emotion, or a general feeling one has, than anything tangible. Like when you feel something like dread, or euphoria, and you can’t explain what you feel other than being dread, or euphoria. They’re like that, except they hate movies that are practically guaranteed to have blockbuster openings and rake in all kinds of money, because they are new installments in generation-spanning narratives that decade after decade, are experienced by new people who love them and gatekeep them. I think you can do a pretty good job of arguing that Star Wars and Marvel Comics are borderline religious affiliations with the ways they have long since permeated and perhaps infected the common cultural consciousness.

The people I encountered are not concerned with things like making sense or experiencing Reality. Somehow, I got blocked by two people right away, which is kinda cool, honestly, but some of the replies to my tweet were the same old, crazy conspiracy style talk. Things about the dreaded yet never actually defined “politics” being “shoved down our throats,” and, since no one is ever apparently capable of expanding on that idea, or identifying what politics they’re referring to, can only be assumed to be anger at the fact that Star Wars has a girl in it now, and Captain Marvel is a girl in the movie and not some generic man from the 60’s or whatever.

But it got me thinking, and it usually does, honestly. I’m someplace along the road of writing up a piece on The Last Jedi, finally, and I can understand why people would not like the movie. In truth, and I’m sure this will come up in some other, less intoxicated article, I’ve struggled with elements of that movie quite a bit myself. I am fine with a girl hero (rumor has it, they are called heroines –mr) and all of that, but The Last Jedi made me ask some real questions about the movie, first and foremost, and eventually about me as a fan of the franchise as well. I’ve long since made my peace with the movie, and it took a lot of viewings but I’ve come to really like it a lot. Or clearly, that’s just evidence of my having been brainwashed by society and it’s PC agenda and also somehow soy products for some reason. And I don’t think that anybody has to like anything, so if you dislike a Star Wars movie, that’s great. You’re no less of a fan; you’re able to be critical of things you consume. But when you dislike something vehemently, like to the degree that a reader can feel heat emanating from your tweets, but are unable to do anything beyond the absolute, bottom of the barrel, entry level offering of evidence, you really do forfeit the right to be taken seriously.

I think at the root of this is a really gross sense of entitlement, that is bolstered by the really pointless rage the Internet allows to fester simply because we can all log in to our virtual suits of armor and hurl words at each other. God knows I have done this too. This is not some attempt to bothsides this subject, because there is not more than one side. People who would be so vitriolic in their frothing at a fictional property in cyberspace are not another side of a conversation are not just another fan voice or point of view. Maybe ironically, but Star Wars teaches us that good and evil are points of view, but certain things that happen do not vacillate between these poles: Palpatine as usurper or maniacal reformer? Maybe. But Anakin kills Younglings, and that is pretty clearly evil. But these maniacal haters are angry to the point of hysteria because they are mad that the movies are not what they feel they are entitled to. It wasn’t what they wanted, so they will throw a totally shameful temper tantrum and act like they’re right about it.

Man, I just don’t know. I don’t know what there is that’s supposed to come of this that will change or mean anything, you know? They aren’t going to remake The Last Jedi, no matter how many destined to fail Kickstarters or whatever are launched. And “Captain Marvel” made a lot of money, so you know that means Disney is fine with it, and stands to engage a whole new demographic of fans to come visit our big tent of a culture, just like “Black Panther” and “Into the Spiderverse” and others have. I think that may be part of the communication breakdown, just why those would be bad things. Why is it bad that little girls have another fictional character to like or be inspired by or be interested in? Why is it bad that Star Wars has a girl in it?

Look, I do not like the way the Star Wars team responded to the hater crowd after The Last Jedi released. I do not like that people who worked on the movie or for the brand got adversarial with disgruntled fans, and maybe some of that response helped to birth this current lunacy. What should the official Star Wars team response have been? I don’t know. I really don’t. But I don’t like what it was. The “Captain Marvel” screeching is just petty, but there’s things in The Last Jedi that really are a lot to handle, and no one is obligated to like anything. But this is well past just people not liking things. These are like people decided to make a central element of their personalities the fact that they hate a thing because non-descript politics were forced on them instead of it being their own personal fanfiction story. I’m trying my absolute best to not seem petty or dismissive myself, and it is so hard, considering what we’re talking about here. I don't like the response these people got from Star Wars affiliates, but they have certainly come to deserve them by this point in time. They should not have been ridiculed in the days or weeks following the release of the movie, but by now, they totally deserve the scorn and denigration that is levied at them, because by this point, they're just acting like infants. It’d be better if we could assure ourselves that the people behind these accounts would eventually mellow out and recognize that they were being totally asinine in the intensity of their venom, but they won’t, because this is 2019, and that whole ‘facts don’t care about your feelings’ crowd has hysterically decided that this present moment is what the future will be until the end of time, and thus they will never find themselves in a place where they do not inhabit this immediate present; attitudes will never change, and of course the dominant attitude is that we are all of us regressing towards some stone age idealism as a species, and that any minute now the new order will arise and prove that a girl who can hold a lightsaber is totally ridiculous and that things like diversity are not actual things that make the world go round.

And I think we’re stuck with this. I don’t think it’s going to go away. In three weeks, the new Avengers movie will make a ton of money and be the number one movie in the world, and this crowd will instead repost pictures of an empty parking lot that it absolutely the parking lot of a movie theater of course, as proof on YouTube that no one has actually seen the new Avengers movies, because that will make them feel like they’re winning some culture war that nobody is fighting except for them. And in the meantime, the new Avengers movie will make a ton of money, and be the number one movie in the world. And then this winter, Episode IX will make a ton of money and be a really big deal and all of that. And we will start all of this over again. I keep coming back to this article and adding things here and there as I remember or process them, but I think that the last real take away from this encounter is that this crowd is not going away, and not because they have some kind of cause or legit position. They are, blatantly apparent from any of the posts that originate from this group, absolute and total professional victims, the kind that has become so loud and popular these last few years that supposedly society was getting back on track thanks to the emergence of stupid people who think they're actually hyper intelligent because they dislike something but can't express why except for in broad strokes of supported complaints, like "too much politics" or "big studios" or whatever they belch out next. Disney did these fans wrong, so they believe, and as they froth at the mouth and project and cry about everything, they think they're actually making righteous arguments or something, I guess. It's honestly real hard to understand them through their complaining, since the complaints are not really grounded in anything real, since a female character is not an indication of the feminist agenda or any social rigging as they like to claim. And their conviction is about as strong as a plastic bag in the wind: again, I replied to one tweet, and like four people replied to me to inform me they were blocking me, which I assume was meant to make me feel bad, but really just shows that they aren't interested in anything real, just crying online. So much for being intelligent, I suppose. But, and I mentioned this earlier, they seem to be the fictional property equivalent to QAnon people, so they don't want and can't handle actual interaction; they just want to find other people who will tell them that their unbelievably thin positions are actually correct and right, because they need that. They simultaneously believe they are speaking for a majority of voices, yet are also constantly persecuted and are a vocal yet rising minority. So, you know, professional victims.

Once again, as so many pieces on this blog have done over the years, this isn’t really going anywhere, or offering anything new, or doing much beyond letting me clear a thing out of my system, as I don’t have ideas or plans or anything. I mean, not too many years ago, I watched a similar but less extreme fire burn through the Transformers fandom, although this anti-Disney thing is really some next level stuff. And because I saw this, as many of us did, with the Transformers fandom and the live action movies and all the totally unnecessary craziness that that spawned, I feel like it really will end up the same way, with a larger fandom that has a section where the cranks get together and screech at everyone else. I am no fan of the live Transformers movies, something writ large across this entire blog, but people are, and that’s fine, and that franchise is nothing less to me than it ever has been. “Maybe we need to learn to dislike things peacefully again” sounds so milquetoast, but it may be the best immediate solution.

No one has to like anything, but if you so dislike something that you craft your online image into a person that exists solely to hate a thing, maybe you should consider shutting the fuck up, because everyone else really is laughing at you. You’re not on some crusade, you’re just making a complete ass out of yourself. Dislike things, sure. Express that dislike, sure. But at this point some of this is just farcical, and I don’t know what that’s supposed to solve at all.