(Not to be confused with ‘purity wankers’, those are an altogether different kind of headache-inducing persons).
I know I promised No Discourse on this blog, but I have to say the following, because it’s been the bane of my existence within fandoms, for the past 20+ years. It’s also not something widely discussed in fannish spaces, probably because it still is the dominant mindset, particularly in geeky / nerdy fandoms. This post is also partly a reaction to the level-headedness of one person, in the sea of rage-filled, perpetual gnashing of teeth that is any comments section related to the putative Lord of the Rings prequel TV series produced by Amazon:
I’ve been asking myself for years what exactly is it about geeky
fanbases that make responses like the above ridiculously thin on the ground. My theory is that such fandoms have a higher than average ratio
of what I’ve come to term ‘purists’, a group of fans also dubbed ‘elitists’ by others who’ve noted their patterns of behavior. And here’s the interesting
thing – from silly Japanese shounen anime all the way to sprawling
Western fantasy epics, they manifest in remarkably similar ways, to the
point where I’ve come to recognize the patterns instantly, over the past
twenty years:
refusal to accept almost any deviation from the Source Canon in
later adaptations + intensely hostile and genuinely angry reactions not
just toward the official content creators, but also toward fellow fans who
have the temerity to enjoy the new material (dislike of canon changes in and of itself isn’t enough to make one a purist, every person has their own personal likes and dislikes);
hold the entitled attitude that content creators are beholden to them and thus should only create the kind of content that the purist contingent finds the most enjoyable / that resonates most with their childhood nostalgia. If a content creator steps out of line (meaning create something different, while still following his or her own personal vision), then it’s perfectly acceptable to shout at them, mock them, drag their name through the mud and go on and on and on about how they ‘betrayed’ their fans (see the whole ‘The People Vs George Lucas’ debacle. How someone can create something with that title and not get laughed out of the room as gigantically entitled, but instead get hailed as a Passionate FanTM, is proof of how popular the purist viewpoint is in geeky fandoms).
general disdain toward transformative fannish endeavors (fan-fiction in general, fan-art and cosplay when they involve whatever new canon content is rejected.
Linked example used because it’s one of the many derapages of Tolkien
fandom specifically, on top of providing good snippets of the particular
brand of hostility and sneery contempt that I’ve come to associate with
fandom purists);
a seemingly obsessive fixation on constantly tearing down / railing at whatever one hates, rather than a focus on what one loves,
sometimes even decades after the fact (this has the effect of turning
entire fandoms into negativity binge-fests, or, to be far less polite
about it, toxic fucking cesspits that become the very opposite of a place where someone can decompress and enjoy their preferred content in peace);
to accompany above, sometimes the nonsense gets to the point
where creating an atmosphere actively hostile toward the fans of the New
Thing is precisely the intended effect (for example, fan-forum
after fan-forum for all sorts of nerdy canons, that involved a certain
subset of people constantly dogpiling, insulting and harassing the New
Thing’s fans, with the tacit approval of the non-interventionist mods.
The result has always been an exodus of generally non-purist fans,
whereas the purists were left to openly crow and gloat about it. The
assortment of insults over the years varied, but ‘idiot’ or ‘cretin with no taste’ were the most consistent);
a worldview that consistently turns the inherent subjectivity ofpersonal taste into objective opinion + the view that purist-accepted opinions are inherently superior to all others.(take a shot every time you see a canon with a divided fanbase get termed ‘objectively horrible / awful’ by the usual suspects. You’ll die of liver failure).
And I could keep going. Some of the above might sound remarkably similar to the so-called Tumblr ‘Antis’ and that’s not surprising, given the cross-polination that happens in fandom. The fundamental difference is that antis are largely transformative fans who judge content on the basis of its moral value, whereas purists / elitists tend to be curative fans with a very rigid opinion of what counts as ‘canon’, who view themselves as stewards of said canon against any notable alterations / any alterations that they personally dislike.
To be clear, someone disliking The Hobbit films or the character of Tauriel isn’t anywhere near enough to make them a purist. Someone disliking the Star Wars Prequel Trilogy or the Sequel Trilogy or the Yu-Gi-Oh spin-offs or various Gundam series or anything with a big enough Hatedom isn’t enough to make them a purist. What is enough is consistently filling the comments sections of anything positive toward any of the above and more with thousand of posts on how ‘terrible’ they are, what a ‘shill’ the author is, how little taste he has. What is enough is the aforementioned fixation with building fandom up on a base of perpetual hate, instead of love for one’s preferred content. What is enough is going out of one’s way to make fandom miserable for others.
If asked to point out the root cause of all
the above, I’d say it’s an unfortunate combination of the strong emotional investment more typical of nerdy fandoms (and we have historical
examples of this, see the shit Sir Arthur Conan Doyle got from his fanbase, enough that it forced him to reverse course on an authorial
decision) + the divide between curative and transformative sides of
fandom + a fundamental disinclination of particular fans to give
even half a shit if fandom is as good a place to others as it is to
them.
The last part is bolded because it’s the key, I suspect. You can have 1
and 2 and (generally) not end up with someone who is a purist. 3 is
also needed, because constant expressions of negativity and hostility
require that one answer in the negative to the question ‘don’t you care that fans of the New Thing are walking into a fandom that is consistently hostile to them?’ Purists, at a fundamental level, have zero respect for the fans of the
New Thing / New Canon and thus don’t believe that their own
actions should be tempered, for the sake of fandom being enjoyable for all.
This becomes very clear when you see that people who reject constant purist-style negativity justify it precisely out of care for their fellow fans and what sort of fannish environment they’re creating.
Examples:
And:
And:
@freedom-of-fanfic I know this doesn’t directly concern Tumblr Antis, but outside of Tumblr (and even in some parts of Tumblr, before the antis became particularly strident) purists have been a consistent reason for people leaving fandoms entirely and some of their attitudes and actions have served as bluepirints for later fandom derapages (antis).
Time's Vengeance 