What is it about the internet that seems to breed what I have dubbed “The Comic Book Guy Mentality”? That is, any time you read a message board devoted to a specific fandom, whether it be Star Trek, The Simpsons (from where the syndrome takes its name), Buffy the Vampire Slayer, or… uh… comic books, you run across large groupings of fans that seem to post only to say “Worst. Episode. EVER.” or that its creator(s) are the soulless minion(s) of Satan Himself.
I first noticed this phenomenon in 2001 when I first started posting to messageboards and thought it was just the crowd I hung out with. I eventually lost interest in that fandom – pro wrestling – and moved on to other boards that were more general interest, like this one but I’ve lurked at other boards where the theme is more focused on one aspect of entertainment or the other and still see it happening though.
My most recent encounter with the experience is at a Star Trek message board. I’ve been a fan of the franchise for about a decade now and am well aware that opinions on its six series and ten movies varies wildly, even amongst its most devoted fans but I naïvely thought that its fans were only just apathetic to the shows or ideas they didn’t like, not actively hostile.
Holy Mother of God, I couldn’t have been more wrong. Not only are there fans that say only the original Star Trek is the only one worth watching, they will vociferously attack anyone that dares to post otherwise. And then you have the pretentious Deep Space Nine fans who look down their noses on all the rest, and the The Next Generation fans that think Star Trek is too cheesey and dated and Deep Space Nine “departs” too much from what Gene’s vision was and then you have the Voyager fans and the Enterprise fans and the fans that like two shows but not the other four, and all the other permutations thereof, all pretty much shitting on everyone that doesn’t hold their opinion.
It seems fans like me, who watch a show and post about it because they like it, are exceedingly rare… at least in environments that focus on one show or genre and I’m at loss to explain why. I fully understand that liking a show does not exempt it from criticizement (which I do myself, in the weekly Enterprise threads here on the SDMB) but the level that some ostensible fans take it is baffling.
Does anyone else have similar experiences? Or ideas as to why this is so common?
People are very passionate about their shows/hobbies.
Fans have a lot more time on their hands and easier access to information and forums to disucss their shows/hobbies.
The 'net is annonymous. People will say all sorts of things and take all sorts of strange often cantankerous positions just because they can.
From personal experience I recall an Irish football website that had one particularly difficult poster. He constantly picked on people and degraed them because they didn’t know Johnny Giles’ birthday or Roy Keane’s blood type. We all had a meeting at a pub in Dublin and this sort of creepy little man appeared. We had found our troll and my goodness was he pathetic. Interestingly though, I met a lot of good people from that site and that has maintained my faith in message boards ever since.
If you think the Comic Book Guy mentality is bad on wrestling boards, imagine how it is on boards about comic books!
I’m with Lochdale; it’s largely a combination of passion and anonimity. After all, it’s called the Internerd for a reason. Plus, it is kind of liberating to be talking to people who won’t shun you because you know how to spell Themiscyra or that we’re located in Sector 2814. Some people take this too far and we get the nerdrage.
Yeah, that I have met some one of the people here has taken a lot of the ginger out of my “anonymous” posts. It’s a whole lot easier to be a horse’s ass to somebody you’ll never meet. However, I think the difference is that the people of whom Aesiron speaks are like that all the time! They may hold back some IRL but they share many traits with Lochdale’s pathetic and creepy troll and can blossom into their full creepiness online, unfettered by the knowledge that most people they slap around online could beat them up in real life–and want to.
It’s common not only on the Internet, but on TV commentary programs. Issues are always discussed as one choice or another, and there’s rarely a nuanced discussion with the idea that some points by the other side are valid, but others are not. The more you push your own side and demonize the others, the higher the ratings, especially since it’s better theater to have to people shouting at each other than calmly discussing the issues.
It’s also a lot easier to describe something as “It was great!” or “It sucked!” It’s harder to say, “Well, I liked this and that, but not the other things, so ultimately the show is good but flawed.” In addition, that sort of binary judgment lends itself to more entertaining discussions.
I think it’s that many of them confuse bashing with useful criticism and they think it makes them seem intelligent. I see this on internet movie database in the user comments. Most of the posts are scathing no matter what the movie is. I really wonder if any of these people like movies at all. I like movies, and I can usually find something redeeming even if it’s just that a movie is ideal for MST3King. Sometimes I want to scream “yeah! well let’s see you make a better movie if all you can do is bash every one you see.” Consider that Roger Ebert co-wrote Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.
I found this capsule summary of the Star Trek camps fascinating—seriously! Learning how the tribes within a specific realm of pop fandom align themselves is endlessly interesting to me, even if I’m not a fan in that particular “realm.”
As to the OP, your observation is dead on. It’s one of the most tiresome aspects of too many fan boards. The funny thing is, the opposite is almost true on certain hard rock boards I’ve visited. (Yeah, I’m an unrepentant metalhead.) The snobbier among us may speculate that it has to do with intellect level, but you come away from some of these headbanging havens feeling like you’ve eaten too much sugar—every lamebrained move a beloved band makes is a stroke of genius, every album a masterpiece. Critical appraisal is generally greeted as it is by Bush officials: a sign of disloyalty if not blatant treason.
I noticed that as my children plummeted headlong into adolescence, they and their friends developed the incredibly annoying habit of picking apart everything.
“Look at that blue sky.”
“Actually it’s more of an azure”
“I’m going downtown, do you want anything?”
“Since downtown is actually at a higher elevation, aren’t you going ‘uptown’?”
You get the drift. Of course, as live, breathing humans, the missus and I get to smack those smirks right off their faces until they learn the proper time and place to be a wise-ass.
It’s kind of a geeking out that happens in stages. First of all, the obsessive one thinks he’s the only one who feels passionately about this genre/show/movie. He finds there’s others out there who share his devotion. He’s no longer alone!
But wait, it turns out they’re WRONG about something! What’s more, they have the nerve to think they’re RIGHT! THEY’RE POSERS! They’re not truly dedicated to the cause as am I. They don’t have the singular vision that I have after all, and I NEED TO EDUCATE THEM! And because I never bothered to learn social grace, I’m going to spew forth all sorts of bile and venom at them because I’M RIGHT!
This, to me, is very funny. I don’t care if people like Star Trek or not. It’s the dogmatic adherence to a point of view regarding whether the original star trek is better than next gen. Wow. I mean I could understand it if people were fighting over whether the Jefferson’s had a better theme song than Good Times, but… Oh wait, I digress.
I totally agree with your description of the comic book guy syndrom. It reminds me of arguing in high school about who rocked harder: motley crue or metallica. I always wonder who these people are and how do they get so riled up over TV shows or rock bands or the like.
You can’t discount the huge number of kids on the internet. Of course I have no data, but since that’s never stopped me before, I’ll guess the proportion of under-18 people on the internet is several orders of magnitude higher than in the real population. And kids can be, well, jerks.
When we were young we’d get on a neighbors dad’s cb radio and heckle the truckers. (I guess we were the original trolls)
We thought it was hysterical at the time, but looking back, we were assholes.
So you have anonymous adults on a messageboard with anonymous 14 year olds discussing anything and there’s potential assholedom. We had the same problem on a parrot owners website, for God’s sake.
Even as someone who watched every episode of Voyager’s first four seasons and most of its fifth, I was shocked to find out that there are *Voyager *only fans. I mean, even as a diehard Trekkie, I can’t imagine that level of devotion to the show. I’m constantly surprised by people that say they just got into Star Trek because of Enterprise too. More believable but still surprising in its own way.
That garbage scow against an ISD? No contest. Put it up against a real ship, say a D’deridex or a Valdore, and then we’ll have a geek fight to end all geek fights though.
Yeah, there are plenty of those kinds of fans at the different boards I visit and they annoy me too but their fanboyism is much easier to diagnose and explain than the Comic Book Guy fans. In some ways, they’re much more annoying – on the whole, these fans seem to have even less a grasp of the language and they’re also the slash writers ::shudder:: – but not quite as prevalent or as high in numbers. If I had to give numbers, I’d estimate it at 60 / 30 / 10 with 60 being the Jay Shermans, 30 being the uber fanboy/fangirls, and 10 being the normal enthusiast like me.
That might be part of it, true, but at the site that prompted this thread, I would guess most of the people I have interaction with are my age – 23 – and older. I know the bulk of the Original Series Trekkies that stick their fingers in their ears while screaming that theirs is the only real Trek are older than me. The three that annoy me the most with their dogmatic rabidness are all at least in their mid-thirties, if not forties and beyond.
It’s awe-inspiring, and not in the conventional sense of the term either.
Consider who these people are. I don’t like to perpetuate stereotypes, but you know that many of these people do not have a lot of social prestige in real life. So when they get in a situation where they can for once make a claim to a little superiority they tend to go overboard.
The same holds true for game developer websites. Every single thing they do is a work of art, no matter how badly it screws the game up. I recently reviewed a game and gave it a higher score than many other reviewers. My review was “fair and unbiased.” Those other reviewers’ all had agendas, were paid to give the game a negative score, didn’t bother to play the game, hated that genre, etc. You name it, and they had a reason why those reviewers were wrong and I was right. It was just plain stupid.
Game developers: you want your fans to love you? Doesn’t matter how good or bad your game is; just respond to the fans on your messageboard, be polite and appreciative, and make it seem as if you’re listening to suggestions. You’ll have people defending you if you stuck an empty box on the shelf and claimed to be selling interactive air.
SNAP!!!
::: Moderator cracks whip for attention ::::
Lochdale, you comments are completely out of line for this forum
You want to call someone stupid or say that they suck, go to the Forum called “BBQ Pit.” This forum is a discussion about arts and entertainment, and there is no such thing as right or wrong when it comes to taste in arts and entertainment.
You want to say that a band sucks, that’s fine, you can insult the art or the music or the entertainers all you want. But you cannot insult another poster, not here.
You may consider this an Official Warning from a Moderator. Stop it. This is the second (or, arguably, the third) time that I’ve warned you not to insult other posters in Cafe Society. This is repeated mis-behavior, in the same forum, and that’s a habit that won’t last long… one way or the other.
