How studios are changing the way they approach toxic fandom

The words “toxic fandom” have become a bit of a buzzword of late. It conjures up memories of Star Wars: The Last Jedi  cast member Kelly Marie Tran being driven off Twitter by racist comments, or angry fans flooding the Rotten Tomatoes page for Captain Marvel with hateful reviews before they’d seen frame one, or trolls attacking the female-led 2016 Ghostbusters movie. More recently, there was an issue with fans of Zack Snyder’s Justice League attacking executives online they felt were standing in the way of the movie getting released. That one got so bad that WarnerMedia Studios CEO Ann Sarnoff sounded off about it in an interview with Variety. “I’m very disappointed in the fans that have chosen to go to that negative place with regard to DC, with regard to some of our executives.”

Of course, the great majority of fans don’t behave like toxic trash. Indeed, fans of the Snyder Cut also raised $500,000 for suicide prevention in honor of the director’s late daughter Autumn. But the gross obnoxious ones tend to stand out on account of how gross and obnoxious they are. It’s been going on for a long time, but studios opt to ignore it, which is why Sarnoff’s comments made waves. It’s not often you hear of studios actually backing up their employees who are getting attacked.

Studios are supporting their employees more when they’re attacked online

But it’s happening more and more now, as studios realize they can’t just stay silent on this issue without looking irresponsible. “If you ignore them, you are silently condoning what they do,” said Sean O’Connell, author of Release the Snyder Cut: The Crazy True Story Behind the Fight That Saved Zack Snyder’s Justice League. “I understand the need to have a zero-tolerance policy,”

O’Connell was talking to The Hollywood Reporter, which has an interesting deep dive on the phenomenon. THR also cites the case of Krystina Arielle, who faced racist attacks after she became host of The High Republic Show, a Star Wars show hosted on the official StarWars.com website. In light of the attacks, the official Star Wars Twitter account explicitly threw its support behind Arielle, and got her trending earlier this year:

This felt significant to Moya Bailey, an assistant professor at Northeastern University and the author of the forthcoming book Misogynoir Transformed: Black Women’s Digital Resistance. “A lot of people had been on their own, managing the backlash of long and deep-seated racist stereotypes alone, and so having [the entertainment] industry understand that it makes a difference when they come forward and support you, it’s a huge turning point,” she said.

THR also talked to André Carrington, an associate professor of English at the University of California, Riverside and the author of Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science Fiction. He agrees that the employer being in their employees’ corner when these attacks happen is important. “It’s necessary to have that tone set in order to make it manageable to ignore those trolls and to put defamatory and hostile attitudes at the margins.”

You’ll probably notice that a lot of the incidents we mentioned above involve women, people of color, or both bearing the brunt of online vitriol. Carrington’s work traces that back to a time in the 1950s when zines and other communities around sci-fi and fantasy properties were presumed to be white spaces. What’s changed now, he thinks, is that fans of color are more visible, whether on social media or at conventions. “It really matters when Black members of a mostly white fan community can speak back to people’s beliefs or attitudes toward them.”

Jamie Broadnax, who runs the website Black Girl Nerds, has firsthand experience with that. She got the idea to start the site in 2012, when she googled the term “Black Girl Nerds” and got images of white women wearing black-framed glasses. “That’s what Google thought Black girl nerds were,” she said.

Now, her site is a destination, and despite some toxicity online, she thinks are mostly going in the right direction. “I look at it as, ‘This is going to be the future. This is the lay of the land,'” she said. “You have to deal with it no matter what. Let’s celebrate it. Let’s not be vitriolic with the way things are going, because this is the future.”

Carrington is on the same track, noting that he’s more excited than ever for the future of Star Wars. “I’m a much bigger fan of more recent Star Wars stuff than the original trilogy or the prequels. In part that’s because there is more of it and there are so many more points of entry, but also, I can see so many more people who have interests like mine – actors from different backgrounds, cosplayers who have been so creative over the years — getting to play on big stages like Krystina Arielle does.”

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