RichardLess wrote: ↑December 11th, 2019, 6:27 am I am so damn tired of hearing how toxic *this* fan base is. I guarentee this fandom isn't any more or less toxic than any other noun that brings out the tribalism in humans.
Buy your daughter or whoever was teased about being a GB16 fan some new toys and new shirt. Tell her about all the charity work Ghostbusters local groups do. Tell her about all the Ghostbusters fans who denounced the garbage tweets & racism. Tell her how exciting it is or can be to be a fan and meeting other fans who share the same love that you do.
It's a false narrative that promotes the hate and ignores everything else.
"I know people were being mean to you personally online but it's okay because many
Ghostbusters fans do charity work!"
The fan community is good and bad simultaneously. The bad does not negate the good, the good does not negate the bad. I've been a fan of
Ghostbusters my whole life, and I have been a fan of many other things just as passionately, and I have genuinely never seen a fanbase hit a low a tenth as low as we hit in 2016.
Ghostbusters fandom
has an unusual degree of toxicity and I again think the only way forward is to own that and try and behave in ways that acknowledge and refute it at the same time. It would be better for that person's daughter to actually go out and see groups of people who celebrate the franchise in all of its forms together rather than being told her experience is irrelevant. Saying it's a small contingent is both dismissive and wrong -- many people have merely realized that 2016 hate is unpopular, and simply side-snipe at it every chance they get, even when it's not being brought up. For one obvious example, the existence of this movie is not necessarily an invitation to talk about 2016, but the YouTube comments are inevitably overrun with people saying awful shit about it, to a degree that is more than basic tribalism. (Paul Feig, meanwhile, is graciously Tweeting that he's excited about the movie.)
I'll never forget the guy, whose entire online identity was
Ghostbusters, including the full costume in all his pics and whatnot, Tweeting multiple "dead wife" jokes at Patton Oswalt because Oswalt said he liked the film. This guy acknowledged before doing it that it was abhorrent and soulless to do so, but reasoned that it was his moral obligation to fling this sort of abuse at a guy who committed the crime of liking the movie. This is a guy I know was embraced in these communities beforehand. There's no question he was "one of us." And he's just one example of hundreds I've seen since that movie was announced.
Those fans don't negate the good ones, and the good ones don't negate those fans. Both of them exist, and if we're good fans -- and my experiences on this board have been very, positive, even the disagreements! -- then as I said before, it's our obligation to own up that the bad fans exist too.