(Not to be confused with ‘purity wankers’, those are an altogether different kind of headache-inducing persons).
I know I promised No Discourse on this blog, but I have to say the following, because it’s been the bane of my existence within fandoms, for the past 20+ years. It’s also not something widely discussed in fannish spaces, probably because it still is the dominant mindset, particularly in geeky / nerdy fandoms. This post is also partly a reaction to the level-headedness of one person, in the sea of rage-filled, perpetual gnashing of teeth that is any comments section related to the putative Lord of the Rings prequel TV series produced by Amazon:
I’ve been asking myself for years
what exactly is it about geeky
fanbases that make responses like the above ridiculously thin on the ground. My theory is that such fandoms have a higher than average ratio
of what I’ve come to term ‘purists’, a group of fans also dubbed ‘elitists’ by others who’ve noted their patterns of behavior. And here’s the interesting
thing – from silly Japanese shounen anime all the way to sprawling
Western fantasy epics, they manifest in remarkably similar ways, to the
point where I’ve come to recognize the patterns instantly, over the past
twenty years:
refusal to accept almost any deviation from the Source Canon in
later adaptations + intensely hostile and genuinely angry reactions not
just toward the official content creators, but also toward fellow fans who
have the temerity to enjoy the new material (dislike of canon changes in and of itself isn’t enough to make one a purist, every person has their own personal likes and dislikes);
hold the entitled attitude that content creators are beholden to them and thus should only create the kind of content that the purist contingent finds the most enjoyable / that resonates most with their childhood nostalgia. If a content creator steps out of line (meaning create something different, while still following his or her own personal vision), then it’s perfectly acceptable to shout at them, mock them, drag their name through the mud and go on and on and on about how they ‘betrayed’ their fans (see the whole ‘The People Vs George Lucas’ debacle. How someone can create something with that title and not get laughed out of the room as gigantically entitled, but instead get hailed as a Passionate FanTM, is proof of how popular the purist viewpoint is in geeky fandoms).
general disdain toward transformative fannish endeavors (fan-fiction in general, fan-art and cosplay when they involve whatever new canon content is rejected.
Linked example used because it’s one of the many derapages of Tolkien
fandom specifically, on top of providing good snippets of the particular
brand of hostility and sneery contempt that I’ve come to associate with
fandom purists);
a seemingly obsessive fixation on constantly tearing down / railing at whatever one hates, rather than a focus on what one loves,
sometimes even decades after the fact (this has the effect of turning
entire fandoms into negativity binge-fests, or, to be far less polite
about it, toxic fucking cesspits that become the very opposite of a place where someone can decompress and enjoy their preferred content in peace);
to accompany above, sometimes the nonsense gets to the point
where creating an atmosphere actively hostile toward the fans of the New
Thing is precisely the intended effect (for example, fan-forum
after fan-forum for all sorts of nerdy canons, that involved a certain
subset of people constantly dogpiling, insulting and harassing the New
Thing’s fans, with the tacit approval of the non-interventionist mods.
The result has always been an exodus of generally non-purist fans,
whereas the purists were left to openly crow and gloat about it. The
assortment of insults over the years varied, but ‘idiot’ or ‘cretin with no taste’ were the most consistent);
a worldview that consistently turns the inherent subjectivity ofpersonal taste into objective opinion + the view that purist-accepted opinions are inherently superior to all others.(take a shot every time you see a canon with a divided fanbase get termed ‘objectively horrible / awful’ by the usual suspects. You’ll die of liver failure).
And I could keep going. Some of the above might sound remarkably similar to the so-called Tumblr ‘Antis’ and that’s not surprising, given the cross-polination that happens in fandom. The fundamental difference is that antis are largely transformative fans who judge content on the basis of its moral value, whereas purists / elitists tend to be curative fans with a very rigid opinion of what counts as ‘canon’, who view themselves as stewards of said canon against any notable alterations / any alterations that they personally dislike.
To be clear, someone disliking The Hobbit films or the character of Tauriel isn’t anywhere near enough to make them a purist. Someone disliking the Star Wars Prequel Trilogy or the Sequel Trilogy or the Yu-Gi-Oh spin-offs or various Gundam series or anything with a big enough Hatedom isn’t enough to make them a purist. What is enough is consistently filling the comments sections of anything positive toward any of the above and more with thousand of posts on how ‘terrible’ they are, what a ‘shill’ the author is, how little taste he has. What is enough is the aforementioned fixation with building fandom up on a base of perpetual hate, instead of love for one’s preferred content. What is enough is going out of one’s way to make fandom miserable for others.
If asked to point out the root cause of all
the above, I’d say it’s an unfortunate combination of the strong emotional investment more typical of nerdy fandoms (and we have historical
examples of this, see the shit Sir Arthur Conan Doyle got from his
fanbase, enough that it forced him to reverse course on an authorial
decision) + the divide between curative and transformative sides of
fandom + a fundamental disinclination of particular fans to give
even half a shit if fandom is as good a place to others as it is to
them.
The last part is bolded because it’s the key, I suspect. You can have 1
and 2 and (generally) not end up with someone who is a purist. 3 is
also needed, because constant expressions of negativity and hostility
require that one answer in the negative to the question 'don’t you care that fans of the New Thing are walking into a fandom that is consistently hostile to them?’
Purists, at a fundamental level, have zero respect for the fans of the
New Thing / New Canon and thus don’t believe that their own
actions should be tempered, for the sake of fandom being enjoyable for all.
This becomes very clear when you see that people who reject constant purist-style negativity justify it precisely out of care for their fellow fans and what sort of fannish environment they’re creating.
Examples:
And:
And:
@freedom-of-fanfic I know this doesn’t directly concern Tumblr Antis, but outside of Tumblr (and even in some parts of Tumblr, before the antis became particularly strident) purists have been a consistent reason for people leaving fandoms entirely and some of their attitudes and actions have served as bluepirints for later fandom derapages (antis).
a good post that illustrates beautifully how the purist escapades of anti-shippers aren’t so different from the escapades of fandom wankers purists of the past. the need to control the behavior of others is very similar, and the thought processes to justify it are also very similar.
another example of this kind of purist attitude from fandoms past would be people who organized to tell off creators whose fanworks featured self-inserts or ‘Mary Sues’. ‘It’s not canon’ and ‘they’re poorly written’ were the central complaints, and there was endless ‘make sure your OC isn’t a mary sue!’ meta content in fandom circles. It wasn’t until the late 2000′s/early 2010′s that this attitude was broken down to its misogynistic roots and rendered Uncool. ‘let women* write what they want, god. No need to tear each other down.’ ‘fandom is for fun.’ And we found other shit to tear each other down for, of course, but it was still a good step towards self-awareness.
(*’women’ being ‘transformative fandom members’, which was known to be overwhelmingly afab and/or women already, though increased gender spectrum awareness came later.)
Today, I think anti-shippers would largely agree that it’s absolutely ridiculous to tell someone off for making up a girl character who shits rainbows and writing fic about her just because she’s not canon or the creator makes everyone act out of character around their OC. otoh, they wouldn’t hesitate for a millisecond to tell the creator to check herself if she had her OC date a male character that’s too old for her, too evil, or is gay/bi/pan/headcanoned as such/antis overwhelmingly ship him with another canon guy. (Mary Sue lives, but only if she’s socially aware and not stepping on the toes of fandom wankers.)
Personally speaking, I think there are a couple of differences between canon purists and anti-shippers in terms of damage and behavior. In brief:
web 2.0 makes it hard for antis to get away from content they hate and hard for creators to get away from antis hating on them in a way that was not the case when canon was the purity standard (as opposed to morality/sj.) ‘curative fandom’ and ‘transformative fandom’ ended up on very different sites over the years; now we’re all together on viral sharing socmed. lmao. this raises vitriol levels to fever pitch.
we’re in public now. viral sharing sites means people who aren’t in fandom can see fandom content even if they don’t have the context to understand it. fanworks take on a pretty different connotation outside the shared dialogue of fandom spaces. at the same time we’re much less anonymous than we used to be. if you do something in fandom that society at large finds too distasteful, you could face some serious consequences.
in an online culture ready to shame anyone for anything and very sympathetic to authoritarian behavior, anti-shippers have positioned themselves as the Final Bastion Against Moral Depravity in fandom spaces. this has much better press than positioning oneself as the final bastion against People Who Dare to Create LotR Content Without Memorizing The Silmarillion. Canon purists were only ever going to be able to push their opinion as giant nerds; if someone tells them to fuck off, nobody will blink an eye. it’s just a creative choice. But there’s a very different social implication to telling a person who opposes writing fictional rape content to fuck off. (that’s what antis depend on.)
there’s also a different emotional toll between being told you’re stupid for not knowing canon well enough as opposed to being told you’re a real life pedophile/rapist/abuser/apologist/etc and being smeared as one for creating fictional immoral content or saying that creating fictional immoral content, especially in a fandom microcosm, is not the same as actually condoning these things irl.
long story short antis are in the right place at the right time to be much more hurtful and dangerous than canon purists ever were, imho.
but I do have a lot of hope that some - maybe many - individual antis will change their attitudes and quit being antis, even if it’s just from time passing. after all, I was once a Mary Sue Anti, complete with writing reviews to tell their writers to shape up and learn how to canon, and look at me now. anything’s possible.
(I apologize if I ever told you your 10th Member of the Fellowship was a bad idea. it was great, you were great, and you deserve to write whatever makes you happy.)
