Creative intent and fandoms

The internet has allowed for anyone to express their opinion on anything through a veiled screen of anonymity without any fear of repercussions that they normally would filter their thoughts through in any regular situation involving human interaction. This has widely been regarded as a bad move. While many corners of the internet are full of wholesome communities spreading positivity and good vibes, the vast majority of journalistic social media seems to be a growing cesspool of toxic hate speech spurred by people who are hellbent on bringing down anyone trying to express a creative vision.

Let’s get one thing clear: It’s much, much easier to sit on the sidelines and critique something than it is to actually make the thing. Anyone, literally anyone, can look at a piece of art and express their own opinion on it. And that’s completely fine. You’re allowed to have your own opinion on it. You just cannot attack the creator for creating something that you personally disagree with it. Art by definition is self-expression, and the creator of that piece probably didn’t make it for you.

I wrote about Sekiro earlier this year, and how the difficulty of the game was a part of the game director’s creative vision for the game. It caused a big controversy when it came out about being inaccessible to a large majority of players because the creative vision of the game is by nature excluding a large population of the playerbase who are interested in it. And lots of people hated on the studio’s creator for “locking off” this exclusive content behind such tediously difficult sections. But you don’t get to hate on the creator. All you get to do is disagree and all you get to do is be disappointed that it’s not what you wanted. That’s perfectly fine. The creator didn’t make this for you, he had a vision for the type of player who should play this game and he made it for them. End of story.

Let’s take another example. The Sonic movie trailer got a lot of flack on the internet for anthropomorphizing the cute hedgehog to an uncanny valley extreme. The visual style of the character got so much hate that the creator vowed to re-do the 3D model in order to appease the fanbase. This is the perfect example of when backlash against a vision can be so strong and so vicious that the creator simply succumbs to the noise. The Cats trailer is currently get a similar treatment, and it’s really unfortunate, because clearly the visionaries behind it had an intent. They had a story to tell in a very specific style and setting, and just because it’s not coming across properly in a trailer, most fans are jumping on the hate bandwagon well before giving it a shot (I personally find the kitschy nature sort of appealing and would actually like to watch this film).

Sure, the final season of Game of Thrones wasn’t great. I personally wasn’t a fan. But I didn’t channel my disappointment into rage and hatred to sign some petition to get them to re-shoot it. That’s just absurd. What gets you to automatically discount the hard work of thousands of creative people just because you didn’t like the ending? The entitlement of the fandom is honestly a little puzzling at times. It’s fine if you didn’t like it. Just move on and hope that you’ll like the next one. It’s almost as if the fans don’t stop to re-assess their own relationship with the franchise and instead just love to board hate trains when they see a large outcry happening.

Twenty years ago, there wasn’t this massive public forum available for people to just share their opinion on anything. A movie or game director would have a vision, create the thing, put it out there, and the world would react to it. There weren’t any massive social media outlets blasting out memes or a hundred journalism sites putting out clickbait articles on whether or not it’s worth spending money on. People made the choice themselves, and if they didn’t like it, they simply said they didn’t like it. They didn’t take to Twitter and @mention the director for letting down the fans of the entire franchise.

I’ll repeat this one more time for emphasis: You’re allowed to have an opinion. You’re allowed to say whether you enjoyed it and you’re allowed to be disappointed if you didn’t enjoy it. But you do not get to be mad at the creator and hate on them for “ruining” your favorite thing. It’s on you for developing such a strong attachment to a fictional franchise and investing so much of your self-worth into it that a wrong decision made by someone on the creative team gets you so riled up that you decide to smack talk them behind their back. I’d be impressed if the people complaining that The Last Jedi wasn’t a good Star Wars film could even pen down a coherent plot or theme for a ten second play.

The point is this: creating stuff is hard. Really, really hard. It takes a lot of sustained energy and effort to take a vision of an idea from your head and actually put it out there into the world. Just the act of bringing this artifact into existence through sheer willpower and determination is marvelous enough. At this point, the creator should be satisfied with themselves and just move on. How the public perceives it and reacts to it is a different story entirely. The internet has allowed anyone and everyone to freely share their opinion on anything. I bet the people writing sarcastic passive-aggressive YouTube comments on the Sonic trailer would be flustered to even say hello if they were in the presence of the film’s director. It’s so, so easy to just sit back and react to the flood of content coming in through the internet every day. It’s a hundred times more difficult to keep making original, unique stuff in this crowded digital space.

So yeah, fandoms are good in moderation but they absolutely suck when taken to the toxic extreme. This is a big issue in certain industries more than others (like gaming, entertainment, and tech) where the consumer’s opinion and taste matters quite a bit. So the next time you want to put out a hot take on something you didn’t like, make sure you’re only objectively talking about the thing you didn’t like. Don’t bring the creator into it. They had a vision. It didn’t resonate with you. And that’s fine. Or here’s a better idea: don’t put the hot take out at all. The world really doesn’t need another person sharing why the original Lion King is and will always be better than the CGI remaster. We get it. Just sit back and let creators create.