By “purity culture”, I mean this recent idea that if you like [insert character that is villainous or has [insert bad belief] here] that you are secretly a horrible person, agree with their actions, or have the same beliefs as them.
Fandoms are religions and liking a villain is akin to worshipping the devil.
I’m only kinda joking. I do think that some people aren’t fans so much as disciples.
I have been in the fandom space for many years, since I was a young teenager, and in my experience I have only ever see this discourse happen on twitter (it happens on Tumblr too but to a much lesser extent). I wonder if it has to do with COVID, more people came online and I know there has been an uptick in media literacy issues which adds to the problem.
I see people, specifically fandom “veterans”, talk about how a lot of “normal” fans got involved in fandom spaces during COVID and it led to clashes as people do not seem to understand the etiquette. I do not like using the word “normal,” but its the only term I can think of to describe people who watch TV/movies/read books and then move on (those that don’t read fanfic, make/like fanart, peruse forums and whatnot).
I think this depends on where/what platforms said fandoms are on. If you’re on somewhere with a lot of performative liberals, “antiship” largely ““won”” those spaces and, combined with aforementioned performatism (ie lots of virtue-signalling), naturally leads to a lot of reactionary tendencies.
edit: I should probably define stuff better. “ship” means character relationship pairings, many are “canon” as in appears in the source media, but many ships are not canon, or have altered scenarios, such as age or race or what have you. “proship” basically means, “don’t like, don’t read” - just leave it alone. “antiship” is its antithesis, and takes on a keyboard “social justice” warrior mantle, and demonizes ““problematic”” ships, frequently “antishippers” go around and harass fandom creators who create content they find distasteful/evil – the most common scenario is claiming x or y thing in a fandom with fictional characters constitutes abuse, and then assuming it means the person who created depiction of said thing “supports” or does said thing IRL.
The “performative liberal” aspect - typically consists of over-emphasis of identity politics and oppression olympics, often to where their id intersections that have privilege are downplayed (whiteness, masc, cis, etc) and their underprivileged ids are forefront.
Additionally, I’ve noticed that fandom spaces filled with the above tend to treat Fandom as like, the Hegelian center of the world from which ideas and ideals spring forward and materialize into the real world, where the power of fiction and ideas are what shape the world we live in, rather than fiction largely being reflective of the authors inherent biases and conditional on their own relationships to structures IRL.
Combined factors above, you get people who think policing content - content type, access, availability - is their greatest duty, particularly as it signals to others about how righteous they are.
It’s gotten to a point where doxxing and wishing/threatening abuse on people is extremely commonplace and well-documented. It shouldn’t be a big deal but it is.
I don’t know about anyone else but for me I just go with my experiences with this type of thing. Like for example if someone has a Tyler Durden or Joaquin Phoenix Joker pfp, I feel pretty confident assuming they hold some kind of Alt-right beliefs. Of course, I wouldn’t jump straight into attacking someone over something like that alone, that sounds a bit silly to me.
What do you mean?
I mean this recent idea that if you like [insert character that is villainous or has [insert bad belief] here] that you are secretly a horrible person, agree with their actions, or have the same beliefs as them.
Not sure I’ve seen that before myself
I have never seen this.
But I have seen people use horrible characters to represent themselves because they unironically agree with those horrible characters, which is probably what fuels the responses you’re talking about.
I’ve seen the theory that purity culture was brought about by the decline of the US economy. As it becomes harder and harder for artists to sustain themselves off their work, they begin to find reasons to shame other artists and reduce competition. They’re petty bougie in a bougie culture after all, and they’re in direct competition with eachother. In non-English fandoms, purity culture is mocked as a western phenomenon. It’s a big reason why I think art should be decoupled from profit entirely, sooner than factory jobs at least.
Whoever told you this has no idea what they’re talking about.
The bulk of criticism artists face for their work doesn’t come from other artists; if anything it’s the other way around. Artists are the ones consistently trying to avoid attacking other artists’ works, which is actually a problem because they end up giving wormy defenses of things that don’t need nor deserve to be defended. When artists finally do end up pushing back on other artists’ it invariably ends up being done in a pathetic way where they have to weave in empty praises of the artist and their work even if they don’t deserve it or believe their own words to avoid looking like they’re “attacking” them. They’ll do this even if the artist has been dead for god knows how long.
Artists, more than anyone else, seem to be allergic to giving good criticism because they’re trying to avoid controversy themselves. I’ve found it to be extremely frustrating how cowardly and reserved they often are in their critiques whenever those critiques arise, in fact. There’s always some excuse for why X isn’t as bad as people are saying, or Y probably isn’t a bad person, etc. The only time an exception seems to be made is when the creator is sufficiently controversial that they can be openly and viciously attacked because they’re no longer popular. J. K. Rowling is a perfect example of this: almost nobody was willing to critique how terrible the Harry Potter series is until she outed herself as a transphobic Nazi and lost half of her fandom overnight in the process. Even still you’ll find some artists defending HP anyway not because they agree with Rowling but because it’s still a popular setting and they’re scared of alienating people who enjoy it.
Meanwhile quite literally the biggest example of art critique in the modern day is the conservative crusade against art trying to erase progressive storytelling, which is most definitely not coming from artists critiquing other artists but from political agitators trying to influence public opinion and foster censorship.
I’m not talking about successful artists like Rowling. I’m talking about the artists seeking commissions and hopeful entrepreneurs in fandom spaces OP was talking about where the phenomenon OP mentioned is rampant and perpetuated by said artists. I’ve constantly seen it myself and I was relaying an explanation I heard from a Marxist. Fandomers in LATAM, Vietnam, China, all can vouch for this phenomenon and it actually caused some controversy and conflict when Americans went to Xiaohongshu.
That’s bizarre because I’ve never seen or experienced this myself. Maybe it depends on the platform in use?
Probably. It’s a Tumblr and Twitter phenomenon with some of it leaking to YouTube. But where it is it’s absolutely fierce.
Ahhh, that explains it then. I never got into either of those.
