Fanboy Insecurity Run Rampant

Never underestimate the irrational fanboy need to be "right." It makes sense, honestly. Most of your hard-core fanboys (certainly myself) grew up feeling outside of anything and everything that would be considered "mainstream."

Yet, in recent years, we have this situation where fanboys have become a driving force in pop culture. With Hollywood falling over itself to make big-budget hay out of almost every cartoon series or comic book I grew up with, my generation of nerdy-types are feeling like the belle of the ball. Everybody wants in our pants...to grab our wallet.

The fan reaction to this sort of attention is always the same, and we've seen it over and over, and over again. A sense of entitlement, a sense of ownership. It's good, honestly, in small doses, breeding a deep affinity for these characters and properties. However, I can't think of a single case where this fan-property relationship hasn't turned dark.

Yeah, it's the UK poster, what of it?

The latest place where I see this is over on Rotten Tomatoes, in regards to the critical response to The Avengers (or, I guess the official title is Marvel's The Avengers - there you see Disney ownership in action). At the time I write this blog, on May 1st, 3 days before opening on May 4th, the "tomatometer" rating for the film is 94%. An excellent score, by any rational estimation.

Right now, there are five "rotten" reviews, with 82 "fresh." Now, I look at that and think, "well some people just don't enjoy this kind of entertainment." Part of my growing up as a fanboy made me 100% certain of two things. One is that I like what I like, and I shouldn't ever be embarrassed by that. Secondly, that not everyone is going to like what I do, and...so what?

I love the hell out of The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai, Across the Eighth Dimension, and, when that movie came out, virtually no one else did. Trust me, I've rarely felt as alone as I did sitting through that movie - twice - in a 500+ seat Cinerama theater with 3 other people.

But I loved that I was alone. I loved that Buckaroo and the Hong Kong Cavaliers were something for me and just a few others. No internet to connect with those folks. The movie was, and is, quirky, weird, and not for everyone. That's part of why it's awesome.

Now obviously, The Avengers (screw you, Marvel's) is supposed to be a much more populist entertainment. Yet, I still wonder, what the hell happened to the sense of the individual in fandom? Why do we see fans getting in such a twist over the film "losing" it's 100% Tomatometer rating?

Worse yet, we see fandom as a offshoot of our current political discourse. Comments on every, single "rotten" review call for that critic to be "removed" (i.e. censored) from Rotten Tomatoes. Or, long, involved, overly fannish diatribes as to why the review is wrong.

I was particularly annoyed by the responses to Stephanie Zacharek's only barely negative response to the film in at Movieline. Where fans, including "Marvel Fan" (*sigh*) take umbrage with Ms. Zacharek's comparison of the film to the nostalgia-fests The Artist and Midnight in Paris (which, to be fair, it's pretty clear she likes more). Why in God's name would a fan be offended at that? Any mainstream superhero movie is, by it's nature nostalgic! If you're offended by that, then you better be offended by the entire way both Marvel and DC Comics have handled their publishing for the past twenty to thirty years!

Critics are not supposed to make you, or the people who made the film, feel better. They're supposed to honestly tell you how they felt about watching the movie in question. Stop acting like their job is to reinforce your personal self-worth by telling you how right you are.

The silliest damn thing about all of this is that the "94% Fresh" rating is never going to stand. Never. Once the mainstream press reviews start coming hot and heavy on Thursday, that percentage is going to drop like a rock. I don't think it's going to fall into "Rotten" territory (below 50%), but I suspect, ultimately, at a guess, somewhere in the 80% range. Respectable, even great, and the film is gonna make a bazillion dollars. With that pretty much assured, I don't see why people fixate on what Cole Smithey thinks. I mean, he's a pretentious twat, but what difference does that make to me?

I also get somewhat bothered about how this impacts my personal interactions. I am more of a fan of Christopher Nolan's Batman films than I am of the "Marvel Movie Universe," even if I enjoy both of them tremendously. I think Nolan makes insanely commercial art, and Marvel makes extremely artful commerce. I wouldn't miss either, but I'll always prefer the former. Upon seeing the latest trailer for Nolan's The Dark Knight Rises, I shared it, and my excitement about it, on Facebook.

I was particularly hit by comments that I made being labeled divisive. What I wrote was, "I'm gonna be 100% honest with you folks...Every, single time I see something from this, I stop caring about Avengers." That's truth. I didn't say "Avengers sucks." Perhaps I could've elaborated, explained more, I'll admit, but after being really excited to see The Avengers on Thursday, all it took was less than three minutes of The Dark Knight Rises to make me absolutely more excited to see that.

You may disagree. That's perfectly OK by me. I like what I like, and not everyone is going to like what I do.

A BLACK Peter Parker!?!?!

Sometimes, the fanboy culture is really embarrassing.

So, a young, up-and-coming actor with a popular TV show has floated that he would really like to audition to play Peter Parker/Spider-Man in the coming Sony Pictures "reboot" of the franchise...

(Let's not even touch that Sam Raimi's Spider-Man and Spider-Man 2 were fantastic, and the series would need no "reboot" if Sony would just let him handle the character correctly...another rant, that.)

Not an uncommon turn of events, most TV actors know that a big-screen franchise can be a quick ticket to the A-list. Totally understandable that a young actor would see this as an opportunity...

Except, see...the actor in question is Donald Glover of TV's Community.



As you can see, Donald Glover is black.

This is where my embarrassment begins. In a turn of events that, in a world where something as bone-headed and simple as the color of a character's boots can inspire a wave of outrage that outpaces that of the average American in 1939 when Hitler invaded Poland, ought to surprise no one, the online "fan community" has jumped on this. There's plenty of places to find commentary on this.

Now let's be clear about one thing off the top. Sony Pictures didn't float Glover as an option, nor director Marc [(500) Days of Summer] Webb. Glover responded to a fan posting on his twitter page that he liked the idea. That's it. There's nothing more to this story than that. Top that off with the financial reality of the situation, as Drew McWeeny explains pretty clearly in the blog I linked to above, and the odds of Donald Glover as Spider-Man are pretty extremely small.

Of course, when did reality ever get in the way of Fanboy outrage?

Let's start with something that's not unique to fanboys, this "I read it on the internet" disease. I got a lot of shit from people because I refused to take a report on the TMZ website as proof that Michael Jackson was dead. I wanted to hear it from someone other than an internet gossip rag. The internet is like a hair trap on a drain. All that crud that you don't really want to deal with gets caught there, and some idiot will deem it important just because it didn't go down the drain. Except these days, NOTHING gets down the drain. You're wallowing in innuendo and opinion on the internet, and the sooner you just realize that, the better.

So, yeah...first off, CHILL THE HELL OUT, FANBOYS!!!!

Second...

And this is where I really get embarrassed...

Some of you out there need to understand that society is progressing. You need to understand that there are many, many different kinds of people in the United States, Black, White, Latino, Gay, Straight, Overweight, etc...and when you're dealing with a character that's is, was, and always has been designed to be an everyman, that gives you a lot of leeway to play around with details. Up to and including race.

One of the sheer genius things about Spider-Man, on a design level, is the costume. Specifically, the mask.


It's a wonderful extrapolation of Stan Lee's "everyman" idea. The costume, the mask, it hides all. Spider-Man could be you, me, or the grocer down the street. By removing any defining characteristics of the person under that mask, Lee and artist Steve Ditko tapped into a basic psychological hook that almost always snares a comic book fan.

Spider-Man could be YOU.

That was even a marketing line Lee used for the book. I even remember a story, forgive me, I can't find any panels on-line, where Peter rescued a racist, and then explained that he could be any color under that mask. He might be one of THEM.

Making Peter Parker a teenage kid, just like the the vast majority of his readers, was not a whim. It was a calculated choice. It was also a choice being made in 1963, and it's simply the financial reality of that time that Lee and Ditko could not have made Peter Parker anything but a Caucasian kid. That is no judgment on them on creators, it should not be, but on the reality of the publishing world/market they were creating in.

I hope, I pray, that wouldn't be the case now. There's really no story reason why Peter Parker, a teenager in Queens, NY, couldn't be black, white, latino, asian, etc. It's New York, fer God's sake. I'd challenge anyone to tell me why he couldn't be.

The only, and I mean ONLY, response is that Peter is traditionally white. Believe me, there is no concept more powerful to a comic book fanboy than tradition. They're more mired in "the way it's always been done" than my grandparents were.

I understand that. I have to admit, I'd have to adjust to the idea of a black Spider-Man, I have 40+ years of comic books that showed me otherwise. I certainly wouldn't have been open-minded enough to come up with the idea of color-blind casting. That's me being honest (and kudos to those who are that open-minded), but I also can see, inherently, that they're no reason he MUST be white.

There's also a far cry from that and this:

PETER PARKER IS F**KING WHITE! Have people lost their minds? Peter Parker is as white with brownish red hair as what Wally West is to The Flash. This is racist!!! Leave it to Floppywood and the whole Obama log sucking crew. In the comics Peter is white and white only. It's defying the nature of the comics.

Why don't we make Jonn Jonzz the Man of Steel for that matter. How about the the blue guardians of OA as Batman. The race factor will destory man untimately on planet Earth.

Thanks for that little meltdown, "Cory."

And I wonder if that's the legacy of the fanboy community.

Look, part of my love of superheros and pulp fiction characters is the values they taught me, and frankly, one of those core values is the equality of all. Superman, Spider-Man or Batman would NEVER judge a person by the color of their skin, but by their actions. Likewise, an actor should be judged by their performance, not by the color of their skin. Sometimes I wonder how the lessons that I found so pure, and clear, within these stories can be so bastardized, so ignored.

These heroes, like all good folk tales, were supposed to encourage us to be better. To look forward, to take their examples and use them to make ourselves, and to make our world a better place. To see people, with whom I'm supposed to share this connection, act in such a vicious and disgusting way is hurtful to me.

So, why not let Glover audition? I know, in my heart of hearts, that their are plenty of fanboys who will judge him not by his color, but by his ability to moth off, and deliver clever quips, during battles with the super villains.

Which is something Raimi, bless him, never really got right.