Ducktales and SPIDER-VERSE On Toxic Fandoms
There’s a great moment in 2002’s ADAPTATION where Donald Kaufman (Nic Cage) explains that, back in high school, he knew the girl he had a crush on found him pathetic, but it didn’t matter to him. “That was her business, not mine. You are what you love, not what loves you. That's what I decided a long time ago”—which is a reworking of St. Augustine’s saying “In order to discover the character of people we have only to observe what they love.”
And that’s absolutely true…to a point. You can definitely tell a lot about a person by what they prioritize, what they are passionate about, what energizes them, what they consume voraciously. But lately there has been a shift from people being a fan of something to that devotion becoming the whole of their identity. To be certain, this was always a part of different fandoms—the purists and the gatekeepers—but it has grown in numbers within these subsets and grown across into different areas of audiences. What may have once been the purview of comic book devotees and STAR WARS fanatics has spread into video games, superhero movies, anime, and even brands and corporations. This melding of identity with what people “love” turns them into a Gollum-esque creature: possessive, bitter, and myopically viewing things through their own specific lens. This has led to the rise of toxic fandom, those who hold so fiercely onto what they enjoy that they don’t allow for detraction, criticism, or even variation of that thing. Sam Sykes once detailed it thusly:
Stages of a Toxic Fandom:
— Sam Sykes (@SamSykesSwears) June 1, 2017
1. I love this
2. I own this
3. I control this
4. I can't control this
5. I hate this
6. I must destroy this
In a 2019 video, Michael The Comic Nerd explored this phenomenon through critiques lobbed from unlikely sources. These were criticisms to this imagined sense of purity and rigid definitions that most didn’t notice in two popular works: an episode of the Ducktales reboot and SPIDER-MAN: INTO THE SPIDER-VERSE. He details how this tunnel vision mixes with the gross entitlement of “fans” to reject anything slightly different—even when they aren’t the target audience. Things have to be exactly as they want, usually because that’s how the character/movie/whatever was when they discovered it. The association of the happiness of that moment is what they are chasing, but clutching so tightly only suffocates the property and robs it of any hope for evolution.
It’s a great video that is well worth your time to watch. If you like it, subscribe to Michael The Comic Nerd’s YouTube channel, follow him on Twitter, and consider supporting him on Patreon. Now…let’s get dangerous.