Is your fandom
Serious Business? Be careful, because you may fall into the underbelly of every fan community: Fan Dumb. These are the fans that claim to be the
watchdogs of their fandom, but in reality they are more like dogs in the manger.
Because fandom's diversity comes from differences of opinion and tolerance of
Dis Continuity, this may be hard to pinpoint, but there are some telltale signs. Several types are...
- The Purist: A nostalgia-laden fan who can't shut up about how much better things were in the Good Old Days (which by a crazy coincidence appear to be some time before you became involved in the fandom). They lack any ability to enjoy new spins on things without constant comparison to How It Used To Be. Despises mixing fandoms, yet is invariably attracted to obscure and mostly inaccessible shows. Hates it when his fandom has any presence on the internet.
- A false variety of the above may troll by attempting to get Gannon Banned with stupid minutiae.
- Another variety is the person who tries so hard to prove that he's not a screeching eleven-year-old girl that he pushes himself too far in the opposite direction. This one has particularly nasty things to say about adaptations.
- The Culture Alien: A fan who is completely objective (i.e., complains equally) about what he watches, without regard to the tropes, directions or demographics appropriate to the particular genre. This fan usually has an extreme lack of Willing Suspension Of Disbelief, and doesn't so much dislike a convention as refuse to accept it at all. Often criticized as overly disliking something which is obviously not geared to him.
- The Strawstuffer: A fan whose disappointment with a show's overall appeal ignores the chain of decay, middle management and all those who contribute to decision-making, and just aims at an easily-named target regardless of their involvement in deciding a story's content; for instance, an actor. Usually antagonistic.
- The Tinfoiler: A fan who believes that changes and new directions he dislikes occur not because of Executive Meddling, conflicting Creative Differences, or even simple apathy, but because writers explicitly hate the Tinfoiler's fandom and enjoy spiting him. The telltale sign here is word choice, as the fan will reference abstract concepts or teams as if they were a single being. Usually defensive. Enjoys hyperbole-laden verbs like "rape", "butcher" and "Macekre".
- The Chicken Little: The paranoia-besot fan, convinced that the whole world is out to destroy his or her object of fandom, and that the slightest slip-up will give outside forces the chance to rip it to shreds. However wildly successful the production, expectations are as low as possible. Ambition is to be mistrusted. If we don't rock the boat, maybe no one will notice us. Maybe we can squeak on by under the radar, forever. Alternatively, maybe if we scream enough we'll be able to scare off the cancellation demons before they even get close.
- The Freedom Fighter: This fan seems to believe that people challenging his opinions on the show in question is a direct assault on his personal liberties, and that someone (or several people) telling him that he's wrong about something on an internet forum is the same thing as the Soviet Secret Police kicking down his door and dragging him off to a gulag without trial. As such, you will often hear this fan use terms such as "freedom of speech," "oppression," and "dissent" entirely seriously, as if he is the last free voice in the wilderness railing against some oppressive fascist regime using thought-control to brainwash the masses into liking a particular program. Constant references to the U.S Constitution and/or Bill of Rights, the Spanish Inquisition, and most especially the Nazis tend to be made, whether they're applicable to the situation or not — and they usually aren't. Essentially, this kind of fan believes that other people exercising their rights to freedom of speech in disagreeing with them is a directly assault on his/her rights to freedom of speech, and that the other people should be silenced because of this. The inherent hypocrisy here is often lost on them.
- The Martyr: Related to the above, but instead of politically charged anger, any criticism or contradiction of the Martyr's point of view will instead result in a self-pitying litany of complaints about how people are always shouting him down because of his views. Is prone to making very grand gestures in which he publicly announces to all that he is leaving the forum because he's sick of everyone ganging up against him, regardless of whether this is the case or not. Despite his grand exit, he can usually be found posting there again in a very short period of time.
- The Toxic Genius: The fan who tends to believe that the fact that people are disagreeing with him is not because they have different opinions about the show, but because he's just so much smarter than they are that he is able to see all of the flaws that they cannot. This is regardless of whether the people he's arguing with acknowledge those flaws, acknowledge them as flaws, or whether those flaws even exist. Oddly enough, his "vaunted" intelligence rarely extends to seeing any positive attributes that the show possesses.
- The Toxic Visionary: Arguably the purest distillation of fan stupidity, the Toxic Visionary resembles the Toxic Genius in that he uses his perceived intelligence as a weapon, but the difference is that the Visionary believes he's smarter than the creator. The operative phrase here is "I could've written it better" said without irony. Telltale signs include picking over the work for Subtext that doesn't exist and overestimating the significance of the fandom to the human race as a whole. Thankfully, they usually keep to themselves, though they do occasionally associate with Tinfoilers, Misplaced Champions, and Freedom Fighters.
- The Mad Bride: This fan doesn't love the fandom so much as one specific character, probably the Draco In Leather Pants. This character then becomes the most important thing about the fandom. If the character gets hurt, it's "bashing" from a member of the creative team who dislikes them, and if they're shown up by another character it's because said other character is a Mary Sue. They become progressively more and more devoted the less their image of the character resembles the actual character, reaching singularity at about the point they decide they're actually married to the character on the Astral Plane, and no one else understands them like they do. (We wish we were making this up.)
- The Mad Matchmaker: Similar to the above, but this fan is obsessed with a particular Shipping pairing, to the point where anyone who disagrees about the obvious deep love between the characters — or anyone who doesn't agree with their shipping enough — clearly hates the show. Occasionally, in some kind of odd meta-I Want My Beloved To Be Happy state of affairs, they may be using this shipping pairing to sublimate feelings that on some level they're aware they shouldn't be having about a fictional character who can't reciprocate.
- The Mad Player: The male version of the Mad Bride who focuses less on Eternal Love and more on sex. He'd rather fantasize about hot fictional or animated women than get a real girlfriend, and some of the loopier ones believe they really are an item with said women.
Interestingly, there are some that go to the opposite extreme. They are eternally optimistic about their favorite franchise/medium, and will ignore all flaws, attacking those who point them out. Despite being totally opposed to the personalities above, they will adopt the
exact same tactics, and can be found in very similar categories. The key here is not just that they like something that nobody else likes, but that they pigeonhole anybody with any kind of complaint about their chosen idol into one of the above categories; if you don't like the work, then there's something wrong with
you. Although the positive variant are more or less the same as their 'hater' brothers and sisters, some particular "positive" fan-dumb variants include:
- The Misplaced Champion: "Fandom — love it or leave it!" This fan gets a bit too confrontational when it comes to criticism of the object of their fandom. Regardless of how mild or gentle the criticism. Regardless of how valid or reasonable the criticism. Regardless, in some cases, of how even the Word Of God may even agree with the criticism. As such, even saying that you really liked last night's episode but thought that this particular scene was a little bit lame will have him swooping down to berate you for your lack of loyalty and demanding to know why you don't just go and watch something else if you hate the show so much.
- Bizarro Chicken Little: In the same fashion as the Chicken Little above, this fan sees doom in every raindrop; however, whereas the former thinks that even the slightest misstep on part of the production team will result in cancellation, this Chicken Little seems to operate on the assumption that even the smallest voice of criticism will reach the ears of the Powers That Be, who will immediately cancel the show in the belief that nobody likes it anymore. Ergo, all voices of criticism must be silenced without prejudice in order to keep the show on the air.
- The Willfully Blind: This fan refuses to see any faults in the object of his love at all, even if they're staring him right in the face. Tends to go beyond merely liking something to a irrational state of mind where, because he likes something, that means that it cannot possibly have any faults at all. Is fond of the Quality By Popular Vote line of argument, often insistently referring to ratings or sales figures to support this assertion. If they encounter evidence of a flaw that even they cannot ignore, they are then prone to rationalize it away with the excuse that "it's still better than everything else."
- The Highbrow Elitist: This fan attributes criticism of his or her fandom to a lack of sophistication and berates people who don't like what they like as just not getting it. "Well clearly, this show isn't meant for you." Common in some Literature- or Film-based fandoms, as well as Anime and anything and everything with the word "indie" in it. Expect the Highbrow Elitist to overlap with the Purist and the Toxic Genius (see above).
One of the surest signs that you are dealing with Fan Dumb, optimistic or not, is when the phrase "
True Fans
" (or some variation thereof) is thrown around. In the end though, in each of the mentioned cases, the
Viewers really are Morons.
Despite the diversity, the product of all these types is a fan who brings nothing
constructive to discussion. While a jaded fan
keeps fandom in its proper perspective, Fan Dumb remains on its
insistent, neverending quest to talk about how bad something is.
Taking these fans too seriously is usually a mistake. Although they tend to be louder than the rest of the fanbase combined, they are usually a decided minority in almost every fandom. If you're a producer, then
pandering to them is usually a good way to make your show crash and burn. And to add insult to injury, they usually won't be very grateful that you were thinking about them, but will instead start whining about how you made the show crash and burn.
See also
Single Issue Wonk. A specific example is
Die For Our Ship. And do visit
this JournalFen community, dedicated to collecting the most spectacular cases of Fan Dumb. This is the number one cause of
Artist Disillusionment and, curiously,
Fan Disillusionment.
