SFF and Toxic Fandom

Science ficiton and fantasy fandom used to be something of a safe space for nerds, at least when I started getting involved in the mid-1980s. Yes, there were different subfandoms – primarily literary, Trek, and anime – but there was some overlap, and generally other interests were tolerated. 

That has changed. The toxic polarization that's become prevalent in the media and society in general has seeped into the world of fandom. In "Qanon for nerds": Fandom isn't immune to online radicalization Andrew Liptak looks at how SFF fancom has been polluted by the toxic aspects of modern culture. 

At their core, fans are passionate about the things that they love. There’s a bit of a truism within the Star Wars fan community: we can’t help but hate Star Wars. Long-term fans hated that Lucas went back and messed with the original trilogy in 1997 for the Special Editions. The New Jedi Order killed off Chewbacca and ruined Star Wars completely — and earned author R.A. Salvatore death threats. They hated Jar Jar Binks and the wonky and clumsy politics of The Phantom Menace. Lucas’s animated Clone Wars and pilot film was terrible and full of juvenile, irritating characters.

That mentality certainly extends beyond Star Wars. In their book, Superfandom: How Our Obsessions Are Changing What We Buy and Who We Are, Zoe Fraade-Blanar and Aaron M. Glazer note that there’s been a rise in what they call “Commercial Fandom” as companies and brands such as Polaroid, Old Spice or Coca-Cola have leaned into nostalgia and a sense of shared experience to market their products — something we’ve seen as studios work feverishly to resurrect old movie franchises for new audiences, like Blade Runner, The Terminator, Alien, Ghostbusters, Planet of the Apes, King Kong, Batman, Star Wars, Star Trek, and others. Some of those reboots, remakes, sidequels, and continuations have wildly succeeded: Planet of the Apes, while quietly successful, has earned acclaim for its take on the story concept. The same can be said for the likes of the SCI Fi Channel’s Battlestar Galactica, and Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy. In other cases, like The Phantom Menace, The Terminator or Alien, the results have been more mixed: films that seriously fall short of their originating entries.

Fans took notice, and with the rise of social media, it’s easy for that collective sense of dismay to spread like wildfire. When Sony announced that it was rebooting the Ghostbusters franchise with Paul Feig and an all-female cast, the backlash was fairly immediate from fans who felt that it would replace the franchise that they already loved, but also from fans who had internalized outdated and harmful ideas about gender and representation.

The article focuses mostly on media fandom, but what he discusses applies equally to literary SFF fandom (consider the Sad Puppies and Hugo Awards controversy of a few years ago as just one example). 

BTW, Liptak publishes a weekly newsletter called Transfer Orbit, which I recommend highly. There's both a free and paid version.