The Personal Vendettas of Online Fandom
Recently, I published the third in a series a videos going through various things that occurred to me while watching the entirety of the Simpsons over the course of about 18 months. Part of the reason I decided to do this was because various things people have said about the show over the years such as “the characters changed” and “the writing sucks now” are for one thing, hopelessly vague, and for another thing, these opinions seem to have just become so entrenched that they’re unquestionable. I’ve noticed this trend in other fandoms as well. A certain ‘canon’ develops with regard to broadly held opinions, and I’ve been suspecting that people aren’t actually forming their own opinions and that they’re getting them from the internet. I wanted to see if that was the case here because when it comes to the Simpsons, the idea people are getting their opinions from everyone else was incredibly likely because really, how many people have actually watched ALL of it?
In watching all of it, I found quite a lot of things people tend to say about modern Simpsons don’t really hold up. I also found that there is quite blatant evidence of it trying to incorporate audience feedback and address problems. For example, the phenomenon of ‘Flanderization’, a term invented by fans online to describe the slow changes made to Ned Flanders over the years, in actual fact, got addressed in 2009 and hasn’t been a problem since. Apparently no has noticed this for 15 years because I still see people citing it as a problem with modern Simpsons to this day.
Thing is though: apparently I’m being too charitable. Apparently I’m saying “its self-aware therefore its good”, when what I’m actually saying is “the show is obviously working to fix problems. This is what you wanted, right? Isn’t that the POINT of criticism? To make things better? What else did you actually want them to DO?”
Some of the reactions I’ve had to this video (which I did expect) demonstrate a problem with online fandoms that’s become all-consuming, and that problem is: personal vendettas. About half the critical comments on this video are insisting that I’m being too nice and apologetic about the show and, by proxy, the writers’ various failures. One person tried to justify the vitriol it gets with the fact the writers are rich…okay yes I know that, but what’s that got to do with the quality of the product?
I had some similar reactions to this video about Doctor Who, where I first and foremost tried and understand why certain creative decisions that people have their issues with were made in the first place. I was particularly charitable towards an episode called ‘Space Babies’, arguing it was probably designed for the kids around the world who’ve just discovered the show, which is highly likely with Doctor Who’s recent move to DisneyPlus.
If you wrote a film or show featuring Russell T Davies as a showrunner of Doctor Who and that fictitious version of Russell T Davies is actively TRYING to make the show bad, you have to ask: WHY is he doing that? What is his motivation to create bad art? Cause if you can’t answer that question: you’ve written a bad antagonist. That’s the difference between badly written bad guys in fiction and well written ones. A well written bad guy BELIEVES that what they’re doing is right. A badly written one just wants to stomp on a basket of puppies for no reason. People aren’t like that. Russell T Davies is not like that. Kathleen Kennedy is not like that. They’re obviously trying to make something that works for someone. What do we LEARN by saying PERSON IS JUST BAD AT WRITING/PRODUCING/DIRECTING? This way of thinking doesn’t explain WHY decisions get made or WHAT the person that made them was trying to achieve with them, and if you’re not asking “what were they trying to do here and why?” then how does anything get resolved? Feedback in the creative industry doesn’t just go “person sucks”. When someone in the industry writes something, people around them question it, they re-write it and work around it to resolve problems. They don’t just say “you are a bad writer” because if someone is just BAD, then they can’t change. They get replaced by someone else who is also “BAD” and no progress gets made at all.
Doctor Who fans spent years with a vendetta against then-current Doctor Who showrunner Chris Chibnall, who was a ‘bad writer’, as opposed to previous Doctor Who showrunner Russell T Davies, who was a ‘good writer’. Then Russell T Davies returned to the showrunner role and has put out some bad episodes, so he is now a ‘bad writer’. But he was a ‘good writer’ — how has he gone from one to other? What do we learn about the transitional process of good to bad by boiling it down to the simple goodness or badness of PEOPLE as opposed to the goodness or badness of the art itself?
This has gotten even more surreal in the case of the Simpsons. People blame it’s current state on this often nameless bogeyman ‘the new writers’ — not even a specific person, just some writers who are new. Who are we actually talking about here?
TV writing in America is a communal process and a lot of the people in the writers room on modern bad Simpsons are often the same people who were there when the show was well received. You look at the credits: you see the same names over and over again: Mike Reiss, Matt Selman, Al Jean. Al Jean was showrunner on the strongest season from when the show was considered ‘good’. Then he became showrunner again in season 13 and ran it till 32 and these are generally considered ‘bad’.
How can Al Jean be ‘good’ and then ‘bad’?
The answer is: I don’t care.
I don’t want this to be the main question I try and answer because it disregards the art itself if it’s tied into a person’s worth as artist. Its a complete waste of time. There is an actual PURPOSE for Roland Barthes’ seminal essay ‘The Death of the Author’. Its not just an excuse to continue engaging with works by people who’ve done terrible things. Its a lens by which we understand art on a mechanical level.
All of this reminds me of 2016 when I tried watching YouTube reviews trying to get a decent indicator of whether Ghostbusters 2016 was worth going to see and I’d have to turn off the video when the person I was watching would start talking about an entirely imaginary childhood experienced by Paul Feig that explains why he’s grown up to hate men or something. That’s not media criticism because it teaches me NOTHING about the actual film itself. Y’know: the thing you’re meant to be talking about. If you wrote an essay for a film theory class about an imagined childhood of a guy you’ve never met, guess what? You’d fail. There’s no point trying to critique the merits of people you’ve never met and far too many people in far too many fan communities get caught up in it.
The art is what matters: does it work? If not, why not? Why did they do it this way?
