Phasmal said:
Maybe geek culture shouldn't be a fuckin' hornets nest. But it kind of is.
Quoted since it summed up the point so well and so early.
Honest question to everyone: What is "geek culture"?
If we strip away the fact that part of it was an attempt to market traditionally 'uncool' stuff together in a more specialized demographic. I'll ignore the conspiracy theory level assumptions, but the fact that, as an easy example, Loot Crate assumes Doctor Who and Star Trek, Warcraft and Space Invaders, Batman and Game of Thrones all cater to the exact same people is kind of an arbitrary oddity, isn't it?
"Geek Culture" is already a nebulous concept as far as I can tell, but since it's generally making more money than "Mainstream Culture" these days, we have to continue to acknowledge it exists. Either that, or Mainstream and Geek culture have become one and the same and the term is absolutely meaningless now, outside of specific contextual ideas to the larger idea of niche-titles within the broader culture. So, Assassins Creed and Battlefront is "Mainstream" gaming, Undertale and Deception is "Geek" gaming, I, guess? Batman v Superman and Deadpool are "Mainstream" superhero movie, while Super and Tiger Mask are "Nerd" superhero movies? See how forced and nonsensical this all gets when we try and pretend that things we've all liked for years have somehow become the defacto entertainment of the world?
Star Wars is as mainstream as movies as a concept even get, yet a Star Wars Geek is someone who's probably dipped their toe into the Expanded Universe stories, can tell you the difference between the vinyl caped Jawa and a cloth caped equivalent, or will explain how much better the original script was for Return of the Jedi before Lucas decided to make it his safe little nest-egg. How can Star Wars be both Mainstream
and Nerd Culture simultaneously? It's because with the general erosion between the niche and the mainstream, Geek Culture has simply become the way in which Mainstream Culture is discussed, dissected and appraised outside of the Mainstram lens.
In short, Mainstream Culture looks at Deadpool and says "Hah! That was funny and snarky. I like it!" Geek Culture looks at Deadpool and says "Hah! That was a surprisingly accurate depiction of the comic character I like and made fun of the flaws of previous, related films. I like it!"
Ultimately, the difference between Geek Culture and everything else are the fans themselves. Some fans are enterprising - they create fan works, theorize missing story bits, so on and so forth - but the majority of people just... talk. They talk about the things they like. About the things they don't like. They argue what they see as obvious positive qualities being called negatives. They defend that which exists as a product like it's a part of themselves - or at least a part or something they enjoy enough, they feel it's worth defending. In short, they know what they like, and if they aren't vocal about it, they aren't engaging in the ephemera of "geek culture" as it exists on the internet in the first place.
That might be the problem with this particular little niche. It just means that - much like a product review - only people really happy, or really angry are going to bother reviewing it at all. If all you see if the best of the best and the worst of the worst, of course most people assume any given "culture" is the worst thing since Satanazis.
That doesn't mean some of them AREN'T utter assholes. It just means that only the type to bother arguing about it could well be an asshole, since... otherwise, what is there to say? There's also the obvious connection between "Geek" and what's most politely described as high-functioning autism*, which... well, there's no way to sugar coat that. A lot of people who bother arguing about and studying movies and comics and cartoons aimed at children tend to have a certain mindset behind their obsessive fascination, and "being mature about it" just isn't always part of the package.
(*Professionally diagnosed Aspergers Syndrome here, for what it's worth.)
This is why no matter how hard you try to shame and argue that nerds "just need to grow up", it's not that simple, nor will it ever be. The larger and more expansive that culture becomes the more people are willing to engage who
don't have those social issues and complexes, sure, but to assume you'll ever be rid of it completely is ignoring the "GEEK" part of "Geek Culture"... but, I digress.
But let's take a second to observe this pattern of Geek Culture "attacking" a reboot, shall we?
* Mainstream title becomes a Fan Favorite due to Geeks still loving it decades later
* Fan Favorite gets Reboot tailored to Mainsteam audience, not Geeks who actually still cared in the first place
* Geeks get upset that something important to them is being handled by Mainstram idiots who don't care about it
Anyone who thinks this pattern is new is a fool. When it was announced that Michael Keaton was going to play Batman, fans wrote in to Warner Bros. en masse, complaining that a goofball known for movies like Nightshift, Mr. Mom and Burton's own Beetlejuice had no business being Batman. This got executives nervous enough that they rushed out the initial teaser so quickly
there isn't even any music. It's a mess of a trailer... but, it was still good enough that the letters stopped. And Burton's Batman more or less kickstarted the trend of caped crusader movies that now dominate the world box-office year after year.
Now, do you remember how
angry the internet was over Afleck being chosen to play Batman in the latest run of DC movies? You really think "Twitter Bitching" and "Letter Campaign" are that different in the context of the 25 years between them? Same nonsense, different decade. The only difference is we're so interconnected through social media and 24 hour digital outlets craving "newsworthy" pieces that people stating the obvious - That the Paul Feig Ghostbusters trailer looks like tedious, unfunny crap, and the movie probably isn't going to be any better - is now somehow "newsworthy".
In short, a director is huffing that The Internet called his trailer garbage. But no,
we're the badguys. Because, y'know, we "attacked" him. By huffing that the trailer looked like garbage. Did I miss something, or is this just a perfect example of a total lack of self awareness?
TheLaughingMagician said:
Recently, pundits started a campaign to downvote the new movie's trailer [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3ugHP-yZXw] into oblivion. At time of writing, its sitting at 200,000 "likes" and over 700,000 "dislikes.
See he's not wrong about the assholes thing though. Get a fucking life.
Yeah... I'm not convinced it's a "campaign" dedicated to fucking with the movie's ratings. I've certainly never seen one organized, and having seen literal single posts on image boards that were ignored in their own threads held up as "proof" of similar, I'm not buying it unless someone has a link.
Even if it was, well, that's shitty. Same thing happened to the latest Call of Duty trailer in protest of the Modern Warfare remake being saved as a "Bonus" of the $80+ collector's editions. Are CoD fans the most massive assholes on the planet because they don't want to buy a new outer-space shooter to get a remastered version of the game they already know they like?
The gender of the cast in a Ghostbusters remake is simply not that interesting. Are they taking a trip to China to fight all manner of funky Asian ghost types, or fighting voodoo zombies in N'orleans? Are there multiple Ghostbusting agencies locked in competition with one another and their rivalry causes a much bigger problem they have to work together to solve? Is one of the Ghostbusters trying to work on new technology to "trap" ghosts in physical form because their lover was killed? Is the world around them uncertain if Ghostbusting is ethical, since the undead should still have basic human rights? I'm literally making this crap up as I go, and literally
any of these ideas would have been more interesting than "the Ghostbusters have ovaries instead of testicles".
(I'd love to see a third film with Egon as a helpful ghost working as a double agent between the living world and the ghost world -something to that tune, anyway. You better believe that Geeks would rage about THAT, too, but at least it'd be
interesting.)
Granted, I've never seen a shitty remake trailer get bombed that hard before. But I also can't remember a remake with a fanbase quite like Ghostbusters. I used to know a guy who built multiple Proton Packs to go to charity events dressed as a Ghostbuster, an odd organization of which there are multiple chapters in the US. (You want to talk Gerd Culture!) The universe is also fairly small for a franchise of this sort, meaning that the fanbase is somewhat more uniform; there's no meta-discussion of which Starfleet Captain you like better or who's the Best Snake, the Ghostbusters are just
The Goddamn Ghost Busters.
That's also ignoring the fact that, unlike comic heroes or popular novels, Ghostbusters was an original screenplay written by a small group of very talented guys that squeezed lighting in a bottle. And even
they made a shitty sequel! If you didn't think fans would be upset regardless of how the movie turned out, you haven't been paying attention.
Pluvia said:
Theater? I mean how come it's always geek culture that has a problem with writers writing something or even worse; women and minorities.
I mean I don't remember massive movements created at JK Rowling to rewrite Harry Potter. I don't remember people kicking up a massive fuss in sport because a player happens to be a minority...
Just this week, I read an article suggesting that Wonder Woman - a character sculpted by Greek Gods in their own image - should be black. Not because there was one specific actress they could think of that would perfectly embody the role, but solely because "representation is important", suggesting that the face of a fictional character is completely flexible... so long as it's in the correct direction. I understand the implications and reasoning behind it, but I always thought that line of thinking was nonsensical, at best.
And yet that wasn't as pointless as another I read about how Lupita Nyong'o should play Cleopatra... despite Cleopatra having been a Macedonian born in Egypt. The fact that she willingly learned Egyptian language was what set her apart from her otherwise Greek family.
But hey! Ancient Nubians and Egyptians were, like, exactly the same. That assumption's not racist in a completely different direction, right? Identity Politics on both sides is bloody stupid. Some people are legit racist about it, I don't doubt that, but I'm willing to bet that most people are just annoyed at what they see as race-swapping to prove a point or cause an artificial controversy, rather than because the actor is actually more suited for the role or because a certain culture or nationality would inherently influence the character in an interesting way.
Personally I didn't have a problem with Josh Trank casting a black actor as Johnny Storm; I had a problem with him casting a black actor and
not casting a black actress for Sue. Making her adopted only further complicates what's already a mish-mash of characterization and universe history. (Then again, F4NTASTIC is such a mess we're better off just thinking of it as "Chronicle 2".)
I guess that was true of Jessica Alba being cast alongside Chris Evans a decade ago, but honestly, the fact that the movie didn't feel the need to write in an excuse meant it was as color-blind to the the fact that Alba was of Mexican descent as I was.
