oh no, it's the fandom police...

[edenfalling]

I will never stop finding it fascinating how many people involved in fandom think hate-reviewing is a good idea. It's like they get a mad-on toward one particular character and feel a need to tell anyone who likes (or simply doesn't hate) that character that they are Doing Fandom Wrong.

My latest example, which I received today in regard to Uchiha Sasuke from Naruto:

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:Boring. they should execute the traitorous bastard. In my eyes, he's worse than Itachi ever was!

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This also shows up sometimes in the form of the Staunch Defender, who falls in love with a particular interpretation of a character and goes around telling anyone who dislikes that character (or simply likes them in a different way) that they are -- you guessed it -- Doing Fandom Wrong. I think the defenders tend to be a little more frothing and verbose than the haters, but it's all shades of the same impulse: you must like what I like in exactly the way I like it, or else.

Which is both hilarious and sad, and I am sure happens in all fandoms, but Naruto is the one where I run into it personally.

Comments

[askerian]

uuuurgh. yeah, the naruto fandom is horribly full of THIS CHARACTER IS EVIL AD I MUST TELL YOU THAT. it's like either they think you didn't notice they're TERRIBLE or they want you to know they're JUDGING YOU for daring not to bash the TERRIBLE ONE the way they deserve it. more often the second one, which is very sad. :/

[edenfalling]

I always wonder why they think I would CARE about the judgment of a rude stranger on the internet, let alone change my mind. They must live in a very strange world...

[branchandroot]

That phenomenon will never not weird me out. I mean... multiple interpretations means it's a good literary source! *waves hands*

[edenfalling]

Yeah! Layers are a GOOD thing. But apparently this does not compute for a lot of people. :(

[akatsuki210.livejournal.com]

For whatever reason, Sasuke seems to be a really polarizing character--people either love him or hate him.

What particularly annoys me is when people review a fic that was written while a series was still in progress (such that you had to extrapolate/speculate some things), just to tell you that you got something "wrong." Especially if the summary/author's note for the fic says something like, "This is my theory about..." or "This is based on an idea someone had regarding..."

[edenfalling]

I like Sasuke, generally speaking. He carries interesting baggage and has no idea how to deal with it, he makes a lot of plot stuff happen, and I like the way he has both superiority and inferiority complexes and this tends to screw up his interpersonal relationships. I also think he has a positive genius for making the worst possible choice in any given situation, and he can get deeply annoying and deeply ridiculous (often at the same time), but hey, 'interesting character' and 'person I'd like to hang out with in real life' do not necessarily need to overlap much.

I think a lot of people in fandom miss that distinction. *wry*

And yeah, people who criticize a story based on information that didn't exist when that story was written are just infuriating. Seriously, why do they DO THAT?

[justicevoles.livejournal.com]

Ahhh, Naruto fandom, the only place I've ever been where people have pairing wars about the same pairing...

[edenfalling]

Oh god, don't remind me. *headdesk*

[rosaxx50.livejournal.com]

Naruto, whatever one thinks of the series, seems to incite either passionate hate, or love, or both for the characters and ships involved. Especially Sasuke.

(I don't understand these people either. Fanfiction is generally not written as an excuse to debate a character???? Or a ship.)

[edenfalling]

I have been in/am in both Harry Potter and Homestuck fandoms, which are notorious for wank and general WTF, but while I have seen some truly batshit behavior in both places (and we will not even get into religion wank in the Chronicles of Narnia fandom, because we would be here for weeks), my personal encounters with internet crazy have mostly been in Naruto fandom. Passion often goes to some very strange places.

(Yeah, like, I freely admit that I sometimes write a fic to see if I can convince myself of a ship or to lay out a meta theory to my own satisfaction, but they're still stories rather than invitations to an argument. I'm not going to rewrite them if someone accuses me of being Wrong on the internet.)

[rosaxx50.livejournal.com]

Oh, definitely. I might have a skewed perspective, but Naruto fandom is my benchmark for fandom craziness. It was my very first fandom, and after all these years, I'm yet to find one with more vitrol.

I think, in part, it's because Kishimoto has terrible gender dynamics and good ones in ways that fandom isn't used to, heh. The other part is probably just how long he strung along the ship tease and character motivation tease. (I was in SasuSaku fandom for most of it, which is, obviously, right in the middle of things.)