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Friday, October 04, 2024
'Fans are going to retaliate:' Studios are creating superfan focus groups, and can we just not?
The Mary Sue: It is another day online which means another frustrating move by studios and outlets. According to Variety, Hollywood is battling “toxic” fandoms. Actually, you’re battling about 6 YouTubers you let continually drive a narrative who you refuse to call out. The response to the toxicity is frustrating.
7 comments:
Carly Tamborello
said...
I agree with this article that calling focus groups of self-proclaimed fans is probably not the best way to go. I do think there are some times that responding to fan input can be valuable, particularly with adaptations––for instance, when people were so upset with the creepy, uncanny-valley-esque original design for Sonic the Hedgehog in the 2020 Sonic the Hedgehog movie, it was fan responses that drove the creators to change the character’s design, which made the movie much more successful and fans across the board happier. However, it’s true that fan environments can easily become toxic spaces when they are overrun with people who only care about making themselves heard (and often have the worst takes). So I totally agree that randomly picking a few vocal fans and dropping them in the room with the actual storytellers, and then potentially catering to their every demand, is a supremely bad idea for the creative process. This is the wrong way to cultivate trust and serve the story.
The idea of a “toxic superfan” is relatively new—before internet forums, swatting and doxxing, there wasn’t much you could do to harm celebrities and actors from the comfort of your home. Today, however, it’s become extremely dangerous. This issue is especially prevalent on reality shows, where the people onscreen have received little to no media training and are often painted as villains to help boost ratings. On RuPaul's Drag Race, nearly every season has a queen who gets the “villain” edit. Through creative use of sound effects and carefully edited interview segments, the production team is able to craft a personality that the audience loves to hate. This in itself is problematic, but the reality is far worse. These queens (like the Vixen, Mistress Isabelle Brooks, Dayabetty, Kandy Muse, etc.) receive thousands of death threats and hate comments daily. As performers, it impacts their ability to book jobs and make a living doing what they love.
I don't think this idea of a toxic super fan or fandom is new, what is new is the idea that we are calling them out on their behavior and treatment of those furthering the story lines and acknowledging that that behavior is toxic and that other members of that fandom don't have to live with it. There is possibly nothing worse for a beloved franchise of movies (my own being Star Wars) than a group of super fans getting to decide what stays in the plot, especially when the stereotypical super fan is an older white man who is known for berating and abusing women and people of color in the franchise to the point that they completely step away from the project, as we've seen with the sequel trilogy (the story line aside), and the newest TV shows. Like the author says the fans don't know what is best for a franchise, they just know what they want to see. They aren't the writers or producers and if it was up to them they would repeat the same story over and over again with just slightly different characters. I'm all for a screen of regular, every day fans to understand if plot lines are landing or if something is working, but determining the next phase from a small group will only lead to more disaster.
Giving fans too big of a voice in the creation of media serves nothing other than pandering to the same groups whose attention you’ve already got. The goal of creation is to reach people and if you’re too focused on what the established fan base of a project is going to like you may be missing out on new audiences. There is also a distinct lack of risks associated with massive fan circles. I fear there is already far too much media that exists solely to capture the same audiences they’ve captured before (every single time Beetlejuice gets a new adaptation.) If feels lately that everything made is to sate an already existing fan base.
Ok, this article may make some good points, but the tone absolutely was not necessary. The idea of fan 'approval' to popular media is a complicated issue with a lot of griping and valid disagreement on both sides. This article was just an attach on fandom and the idea of fan involvement that read like the author had a personal dispute with a 'superfan' and not an actual criticism of what is wrong in modern fandoms. Coming as someone who is very active in what is called 'fandom', for a lot of different franchises, I think that people often form very strong opinions on fans without actually examining what they are saying. Yes, the toxic youtube commentators who call themselves superfans are a huge issue, especially in fandoms like marvel and star wars, and they definitely should not speak for entire fandoms. However, I am hugely in favor of listening to fan voices, to a limited degree, when it comes to media. There is a pattern, specifically in certain franchises, of creators straying into what they think will make them the most money, and losing a lot of the aspects of story that drew fans in the first place. There is also a long history of fan voices doing very good things for the progression of certain franchises. I think that book series are a great example of this. The author Cassandra Clare of the Shadowhunters universe started off in the fan sphere on Tumblr, before turning her original works into a wildly successful book series, that was adapted into a (terrible) movie and a TV show. Cassandra Clare has made a multitude of decisions about her fandom that were sparked, at least in part, by fan reactions, and the Shadowhunters fandom is better for it. After the underwhelming response to the movie made out of the Mortal Instruments books, Freeform picked up the series and made a TV show that is, in my opinion, incredible, and also was very successful up until its cancellation in 2018, despite a massive fan movement to keep it alive. The most popular romantic pairing in the series, Alec and Magnus, were given a spin off book series, inspired by fan urgings, that has also seen a lot of success. I could go on with case studies of how listening to fans has been good for franchises, or how not listening has turned out poorly. But the point I'm trying to make is that, while having focus groups of very vocal, potentially toxic, fans, may not be the best move, writing fans off in this manner is an incredibly damaging way to think about creation. Fans are an important valuable part of media and they should be at the very least considered when important decisions are made. Studios work very hard to cultivatу an audience who loves they work, and while ultimately the creators do know best, sometimes putting an ear to the ground of what fans are saying can be very beneficial to their work.
At first, I didn’t understand what the article was getting at, but it started making sense to me quickly. I totally agree with the article, it doesn’t sound like a good idea to have a select number of fans as a focus group for a show. In my opinion, the entire audience can easily be the focus group – there are communities everywhere online that can tell studios what the audience did and didn’t like. By choosing a select number of superfans, it’s not going to end well. Part of what makes a show good is that there are things people don’t like about it; that is to say, people can love a show but not like certain parts of the show. It’s written by professionals who (scarily) know more about what the audience would enjoy than the audience does themselves. By doing this, they’re opening their studio up to all sorts of problems and probably more dislike from the community than they would’ve gotten if they had produced normally.
7 comments:
I agree with this article that calling focus groups of self-proclaimed fans is probably not the best way to go. I do think there are some times that responding to fan input can be valuable, particularly with adaptations––for instance, when people were so upset with the creepy, uncanny-valley-esque original design for Sonic the Hedgehog in the 2020 Sonic the Hedgehog movie, it was fan responses that drove the creators to change the character’s design, which made the movie much more successful and fans across the board happier. However, it’s true that fan environments can easily become toxic spaces when they are overrun with people who only care about making themselves heard (and often have the worst takes). So I totally agree that randomly picking a few vocal fans and dropping them in the room with the actual storytellers, and then potentially catering to their every demand, is a supremely bad idea for the creative process. This is the wrong way to cultivate trust and serve the story.
The idea of a “toxic superfan” is relatively new—before internet forums, swatting and doxxing, there wasn’t much you could do to harm celebrities and actors from the comfort of your home. Today, however, it’s become extremely dangerous. This issue is especially prevalent on reality shows, where the people onscreen have received little to no media training and are often painted as villains to help boost ratings. On RuPaul's Drag Race, nearly every season has a queen who gets the “villain” edit. Through creative use of sound effects and carefully edited interview segments, the production team is able to craft a personality that the audience loves to hate. This in itself is problematic, but the reality is far worse. These queens (like the Vixen, Mistress Isabelle Brooks, Dayabetty, Kandy Muse, etc.) receive thousands of death threats and hate comments daily. As performers, it impacts their ability to book jobs and make a living doing what they love.
I don't think this idea of a toxic super fan or fandom is new, what is new is the idea that we are calling them out on their behavior and treatment of those furthering the story lines and acknowledging that that behavior is toxic and that other members of that fandom don't have to live with it. There is possibly nothing worse for a beloved franchise of movies (my own being Star Wars) than a group of super fans getting to decide what stays in the plot, especially when the stereotypical super fan is an older white man who is known for berating and abusing women and people of color in the franchise to the point that they completely step away from the project, as we've seen with the sequel trilogy (the story line aside), and the newest TV shows. Like the author says the fans don't know what is best for a franchise, they just know what they want to see. They aren't the writers or producers and if it was up to them they would repeat the same story over and over again with just slightly different characters. I'm all for a screen of regular, every day fans to understand if plot lines are landing or if something is working, but determining the next phase from a small group will only lead to more disaster.
^Kiana Carbone
Giving fans too big of a voice in the creation of media serves nothing other than pandering to the same groups whose attention you’ve already got. The goal of creation is to reach people and if you’re too focused on what the established fan base of a project is going to like you may be missing out on new audiences. There is also a distinct lack of risks associated with massive fan circles. I fear there is already far too much media that exists solely to capture the same audiences they’ve captured before (every single time Beetlejuice gets a new adaptation.) If feels lately that everything made is to sate an already existing fan base.
Ok, this article may make some good points, but the tone absolutely was not necessary. The idea of fan 'approval' to popular media is a complicated issue with a lot of griping and valid disagreement on both sides. This article was just an attach on fandom and the idea of fan involvement that read like the author had a personal dispute with a 'superfan' and not an actual criticism of what is wrong in modern fandoms. Coming as someone who is very active in what is called 'fandom', for a lot of different franchises, I think that people often form very strong opinions on fans without actually examining what they are saying. Yes, the toxic youtube commentators who call themselves superfans are a huge issue, especially in fandoms like marvel and star wars, and they definitely should not speak for entire fandoms. However, I am hugely in favor of listening to fan voices, to a limited degree, when it comes to media. There is a pattern, specifically in certain franchises, of creators straying into what they think will make them the most money, and losing a lot of the aspects of story that drew fans in the first place. There is also a long history of fan voices doing very good things for the progression of certain franchises. I think that book series are a great example of this. The author Cassandra Clare of the Shadowhunters universe started off in the fan sphere on Tumblr, before turning her original works into a wildly successful book series, that was adapted into a (terrible) movie and a TV show. Cassandra Clare has made a multitude of decisions about her fandom that were sparked, at least in part, by fan reactions, and the Shadowhunters fandom is better for it. After the underwhelming response to the movie made out of the Mortal Instruments books, Freeform picked up the series and made a TV show that is, in my opinion, incredible, and also was very successful up until its cancellation in 2018, despite a massive fan movement to keep it alive. The most popular romantic pairing in the series, Alec and Magnus, were given a spin off book series, inspired by fan urgings, that has also seen a lot of success. I could go on with case studies of how listening to fans has been good for franchises, or how not listening has turned out poorly. But the point I'm trying to make is that, while having focus groups of very vocal, potentially toxic, fans, may not be the best move, writing fans off in this manner is an incredibly damaging way to think about creation. Fans are an important valuable part of media and they should be at the very least considered when important decisions are made. Studios work very hard to cultivatу an audience who loves they work, and while ultimately the creators do know best, sometimes putting an ear to the ground of what fans are saying can be very beneficial to their work.
At first, I didn’t understand what the article was getting at, but it started making sense to me quickly. I totally agree with the article, it doesn’t sound like a good idea to have a select number of fans as a focus group for a show. In my opinion, the entire audience can easily be the focus group – there are communities everywhere online that can tell studios what the audience did and didn’t like. By choosing a select number of superfans, it’s not going to end well. Part of what makes a show good is that there are things people don’t like about it; that is to say, people can love a show but not like certain parts of the show. It’s written by professionals who (scarily) know more about what the audience would enjoy than the audience does themselves. By doing this, they’re opening their studio up to all sorts of problems and probably more dislike from the community than they would’ve gotten if they had produced normally.
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