Tag: generic

How Fandoms Go from Fab to Drab

Fandoms, which are a subculture centered around supporting or following a certain piece of media, are everywhere in Geek culture. Just about every TV show, movie, book series, and more has a fandom, some small, some tremendously big, and many in-between. If something extremely popular is released, usually its fandom explodes for a few months, or even a few years, before mysteriously collapsing and disappearing. If you’ve ever seen this occur, then you have just witnessed a fandom going from fab to drab.

How does this occur? Fandoms have normal lifespans, with the very small ones usually dying out fairly quickly after the piece is released (known as “going dead” in fandom terminology). Medium and large ones that continue in their drab phase can live a long time-I’m talking about decades of survival (Star Wars, Star Trek, Back to the Future). This is all a part of a natural cycle.

However, Fandoms that go from fab to drab have a relatively short and volatile lifespan, which can lead to fall-backs and resurgences, all before their eventual collapse. This usually comes as a result of several factors.

The first is the development is what’s known as toxicity. Every fandom has a few bad eggs. But when there’s enough of them, all attacking people and bullying people over differing ships and opinions, then the fandom gets labelled as “toxic”, both by people outside of the fandom and the few remaining clear-headed people still in the fandom. Fandom is supposed to be about a community coming together, not tearing each other apart. This is an issue that can occur in just about any large fandom, as major groups (particularly shaped around “ships”, or couples that people root for) belittle minor groups, essentially bullying them out of the fandom.

The toxicity does not stop at people in the fandom, either. I remember the days of Superwholock (The combination fandom of Supernatural, Dr. Who, and Sherlock) when the fandom would attack any outsider that questioned them or criticized them, building up their own reputation as toxic. The same thing happened to the Undertale fandom, leading to its demise within only a year of the game being released.

Which leads me to my next point: Hatred towards the fandom. When a fandom is toxic, it not only builds up a bad reputation, but cuts its own supply off of newcomers. When people are discouraged or turned off from joining the fandom, even the largest one will eventually fall. Every fandom needs newcomers to survive; too few or none at all will kill just about any one of them (Superwholock was an interestingly unique case, but in order to explain it in full detail I would need to talk about it separately).

When fandoms are faced with these two issues, they become increasingly volatile, lashing out against others and fully consuming themselves in their toxicity, which only furthers the problem. They solidify their own fate, even if they don’t know it.

Fandoms that once start fab, welcoming all others and becoming a large fandom that bonds over a certain media, can either quickly or slowly turn drab, turning against itself and ruining itself as others watch on. It’s an interesting and prevalent cycle that normally only happens to the biggest and trendiest fandom of the time, providing a serious lesson to others about growing too big too quickly.

The Adventures of the Bland Male Protagonist

I’ve already written a bit about some of my qualms with tropes and stereotypes of female protagonists in the past. However, I haven’t spent any time to talk about perhaps one of the biggest tropes among male protagonists that irks me: the boring hero.

What do I mean by the boring hero? I mean the guy who is in all the action movies and shows that has the same boring and bland personality and backstory, who always becomes the hero and saves the day. He has nothing unique to offer the viewer except that he’s insanely muscular and attractive (but then that becomes a bit unoriginal when that’s how they all look), and is usually just a gritty tough macho guy. He kicks ass and gets the girl, although he doesn’t really provide anything to make the movie or show worth watching.

What makes them stand out to me even more is that usually they are the least interesting thing about the movie. They are the stars of action movies and shows, the ones who keep the story going, and yet everything around them is infinitely more interesting than them. Their personality is like a black hole-they suck the life out of the movie. Literally.

The Boring Hero is seriously one-dimensional; he has no unique background, and he has no character development as the story goes on. Even the female love interest is more interesting, and she has almost the same cookie-cutter personality as the male protagonist. He never gets fleshed out, which drags what might have been an otherwise good movie or TV show down hard.

The Boring Hero doesn’t provide anything of real value to the movie. They seem to stay in place while the story goes around them, despite being the central focus. And they always have that one grand “epiphany” moment, that changes their course and turns them into a hero, with cool music following in the background. But the epiphany is a quick, fleeting moment that almost never appears again. It’s not even a real epiphany, but rather him deciding to act in the typical heroic manner.

The sad part is, this trope even appears in amazing films. Films such as Avatar have been able to hide the fact that the main protagonist is insanely bland and boring through the amazing visuals and characters around them. But that doesn’t change the fact that the main protagonist is so generic that he just becomes another character that the viewer forgets within a week.

Is this trope dying out? No. It’s still strong and present, coming out in films as recent as Solo. Each time the boring hero makes an appearance, there is always something (very, very small) that is supposed to mark them as insanely unique and deep characters, despite them still being bland and generic. A lot of action films and shows want to try and promote themselves as “unique” and “noteworthy”, without putting any effort to actually flesh out their protagonists, particularly the males. It’s a trope that’s gotten old years ago, and definitely needs to kick the bucket.