The Incessant Fan Bitching on Ain’t It Cool News

I’ve been hanging out on AICN for a few days since the first display of the Zack Snyder Aquaman picture. AICN has been hostility central as fans are complaining about how he looks nothing like Aquaman (apparently having forgotten when I wrote the character when he looks more or less exactly like that.)

And as fans continue to declare loudly that everything Hollywood produces is garbage, it made me wonder the following:

What the hëll are they doing here?

I mean, I think that–for instance–everything that Fox News says deserves advance contempt, based on their indisputable track record of lying. So you’ll never find me on the Fox News website spouting hatred, because since I deplore them, I simply don’t bother with them.

Yet here are all these people who have nothing but contempt for what Hollywood produces, hanging out on a website that is essentially nothing but one big promotional device for those very films that they despise. They come there to bìŧçh and piss and moan about everything. It’s like Red Sox fans frequenting the Yankees website. Any reasonable individual would look upon these actions and wonder why in hëll they are wasting their time at a site that is going to bring them nothing but anger and frustration.

This attitude would prompt said reasonable individual to think that the lot of they are actually full of crap. That no matter how much they say they despise everything that Hollywood turns out, the fact is that actually they support every film that they bìŧçh about. That they turn up there, not to express genuine contempt for Hollywood, but simply to posture (mostly from anonymity) and prance about with their oh-so-cool disdain for motion pictures and television while secretly supporting the films that they so despise.

The fact is, I believe, that they all think they’re too cool to be fans. That to express genuine excitement and support would remove the edge they aspire to as a self-designated truth sayer in a world gone mad.

Except they all know they’re not. Bìŧçh and piss and moan all they want; they’ll still be there opening day. As will I, most likely.

But at least I won’t be a hypocrite about it.

PAD

44 comments on “The Incessant Fan Bitching on Ain’t It Cool News

  1. “[T]he edge they aspire to as a self-designated truth sayer in a world gone mad.”

    That’s it, 100%. And by yelling at them by calling them hypocrites, they get that edge. It’s the same reason people show up here and yell at you about politics, even though they profess nothing but contempt for you. They need to be an outsider, because The Saviour never comes from the status quo.

    Me, I avoid AICN and all other “Fan” sites like, well, I avoid most air-quote “Fans”. And I feel kind of sad that as a creator, your job might oblige you to be there anyway.

    1. Given the four-year turnover rate for comics readers, it’s arguable that most people reading Aquaman right now haven’t read any run on Aquaman prior to The New 52 version, so yeah, that makes sense.

      And yeah, there is a good analogy with the people generally find themselves opposed to Peter’s political beliefs, who used to come here during the heydey of this site’s traffic and complain when Peter would make a politically-oriented post: As if they were somehow obligated to read and comment on it, when it is pretty easy to just skip over a given post when discerning from the title the political nature of the topic.

      1. Believe me, whenever I say something political even now, the polititrolls still show up to piss and moan. They comment on nothing else I say; just politics.

        PAD

      2. I wasn’t going to wade through that garbage, but, just for the hëll of it, I did a quick word search. Found this.

        Mike the moneyspyder eBob • 3 days ago
        Not the classic,but the Peter David 90’s badass version!

        So, at least a few remembered, and at least a few comments are bucking the AICN Talkback’s trend of being nothing but almost vile garbage these days.

    1. Nobody needs to publicly humiliate Rob Liefeld – he’s done it superlatively well, himself, for years.

  2. And if no one said anything, the movie would never even get made or released as it would be a sign that no one cares about Aquaman.

    Here’s an important thing to remember, in most cases, if people didn’t care about a thing, they wouldn’t bother to complain about it.

    What’s worse in the fame/entertainment game (which is all comics/books/movies/etc is)?

    A) To have people complaining and bìŧçhìņg about a character/story arc/item/event?

    Or

    B) For no one to give a dámņ about it and say nothing at all?

    1. Except, this is the internet, so I tend to agree with others when they say that most of those bìŧçhìņg and whining probably aren’t even fans of the character.

      Many of them just love to bìŧçhwhìņëmøáņ, and the internet is their infinite echo chamber.

  3. There’s actually a term for this. It’s called “hate-watching” (or “hate-reading”, etc.). I once asked a liberal political blogger Roy Edroso why he never seemed to write about anything besides how awful he thought right-wingers were, as I found that sort of anger-in-print pretty limiting and draining (his SO agreed with me). But hey, he parlayed that into a Village Voice column, and to be fair he did write a lot of Oscar stuff recently… For the most part, I believe hate-blogging (or hate-commenting) is exhausting to read and often counter-productive to write.

    1. Yeah, I have a bunch of FB who are RWNJ and I try not to comment on their political posts unless I find it amazingly ridiculous. But none of them seem to have the same problem when I post something. As for hate watching, there are too many good shows to waste on things you don’t like (Which is why I stopped watching Enterprise). The one exception is this year’s Glee, since it’s the final season, I figure I’d make it to the end even though it’s become even more illogical this season.

  4. It’s a question I’ve asked myself — and posed on various forums I’ve been to — many, many times. What kind of twit goes around to sites devoted to stuff that he or she apparently hates, just to complain about it? Why don’t they devote their time to celebrating stuff that they actually DO like? As you might expect, no one ever elects to supply an answer.
    Ultimately, I don’t think that the folks at AICN actually hate Hollywood or what it produces; they just like to complain. Their playing the dozens, as it were, seeing who can come up with the cleverest or most over the top slam on whatever it is they’re talking about. It’s an odd, particularly adolescent proclivity, endeavoring to look cool by verbally one-upping each other. It’s all about the pwning.

  5. Shìŧ we aren’t ALL like that. Some of us actually like the stuff we see and enjoy following the films through production and into release.

    I guess I just felt compelled to defend those of us that spend a lot of free time discussing this stuff online but aren’t whiny entitled dìçkbágš who piss & moan about it.

  6. It’s been in fashion to deride anything coming out of establishment media for a while now. Oooh, we’re independent, we’re sarcastic, we’re soooooo in. And we have the right to moan and complain because “nothing new ever comes out of Hollywood…”
    Somehow we ended up with a subscription to Entertainment Weekly. 98% of the articles in there seem to be written from a superior, we’re smarter and more clever than everyone ever point of view. The internet makes a lot of people, including some I used to be friends with on Facebook, think they’re smarter and better than everyone. And heaven forbid you have a differing opinion.

  7. The atmosphere at AICN has been toxic for the last year. The kickstarter project for Harry Knowles TV show apparently pìššëd a bunch of them off (whether that’s for any good reason I’m just not interested enough to say) and some are there just to needle him.

    Combined with the loss of the best writers on the site, Harry’s own sloppy and sporadic writing, and the fact that the breaking news they were known for can be found at many other sites, it’s been a steady decline in interest. And I suspect, as is often the case, the bad chases out the good. The negative commentators have just made it too much of a hassle to engage anyone there.

    So to all the other reasons given, I’ll add the following reason the negative “fans” are there–to destroy the site. Feeling betrayed or envious or mad that the place “they” discovered is now popular beyond their tinyt subset, or whatever, they are determined to take down the website. From that perspective, their actions make perfect sense.

    1. The truth of the matter is that most of the people who post there are simply there to watch the place circle the drain, and are trying to build up their own self importance by believing they’re the ones flushing it. It was indeed once a good site, a groundbreaking site in fact, but Knowles’ shenanigans over the year, his firing of and the general draining away of quality writers and the turn of the site from a scoop-getting maverick that Hollywood feared to a site devoted to Hollywood schmoozing for presents and gifts has driven away a huge section of the people who used to post positively there. The bad has indeed driven out the good, but it wasn’t the talkbackers that began that process, Knowles himself did. The unfortunate result is that what used to be an entertaining and informative place to talk with like-minded people has now become a mire of hateful idiots all seeking to outdo each other with the most hideous insults they can let fly. The responsibility for the sites decline rests with Knowles; his recent abominable behaviour with the kickstarter seems to have sealed the deal as far as chasing away the last of the quality commentators on the site. It’s a sad state of affairs there now, for sure.

      1. “The bad has indeed driven out the good, but it wasn’t the talkbackers that began that process, Knowles himself did.”

        See, to me at least, that runs close to the blaming the victim mentality and to excuse the idiots. Say what you want to about Harry Knowles or the quality of the site, but the appropriate response is to just not go there anymore.

        When the quality of the coverage began to suffer and the frequency of weekly or biweekly columns stated to become monthly or bimonthly, I simple went elsewhere more often than I had prior. I was never a big talkbacker to begin with, but I certainly wasn’t going to start living in the talkback section with the express goal in life to be as miserable and šhìŧŧÿ as possible.

        I was a regular on several boards on IMDB back from around 2004 to maybe 2010. Sure, you hit some major dumbases along the way no matter where you went there, and there were already some boards you learned to avoid, but on the whole it wasn’t too bad until it started shifting a bit more towards the downslide sometime around 2008. Then it seemed like most the people on most of the boards, especially genre boards, were there to see who could be the biggest ášš. My response? I left. Ended up not missing it all that mush either. There was no point in sticking around for the petty šhìŧ and the nastiness on some genre boards.

        I think John Byrne can be a A#1 ášš. For a while, some years back, I at least read threads in the John Byrne forum for some of the comedy value. I don’t think I ever actually bothered posting. After a while I didn’t even bother with reading the forum. Why bother with something that (very often) negative?

        It takes a special kind of stupid to be the kind of talkbacker that lives in the AICN talkback section these days, and, yeah, I’d say they began the process some time back from what I saw. I was seeing more and more of the asshat variety of talkbacker showing up some time after 2004 with their only purose for being there apparently being to be an ášš. You may be right that Harry didn’t ultimate help with his actions causing the site to lose fans who might have stayed there to talk about positive things, but the šhìŧhëádš were well on their way to making the talkbacks miserable a decade ago.

  8. I guess “Not all of us are like that” doesn’t fit with the company line being sold in the blog post.

    1. Unfortunately, this also is in line with PAD’s post: I also visit AICN, but I didn’t comment on the Aquaman post at all, which is why only the negative posts are there to be read.

      I try not to comment until the facts are in, but will also own up to times when a “creative decision” will send up red flags for me, and I will comment (typically at length, so nobody reads my comments). The majority of these cases are when a studio decides to market an existing property to a wider, more kid-friendly PG-13 rating when the property has been established as a hard R-rating (Expendables, Die Hard, Terminator are recent examples, as well as “reboots” of Total Recall, RoboCop (same is true for the 3rd film)). The reason I get passionately angry is not because of hating the movies, but that the change in rating necessitates a change in tone and therefore compromises the characters for the sake of a rating to drive up box office gross. While it is certainly true that movies ultimately are created to earn money for their investors, time and again it has been shown that what succeeds at this best is simply making a good movie and not making changes simply to cater to certain age ranges. I vehemently oppose this trend, as I still vividly remember going to see R-rated movies with my father and how we bonded over that. Studios think an R-rating is the kiss of death for a film’s BO gross, which actually forces R-rated movies to be more extreme to ensure they don’t get cut down to PG-13, which is just as much a sad sign of the times.

      But I digress. . .

      I suppose what I’m trying to say with my example is that AICN is an appropriate forum for voicing opinions both positive and negative, but fully agree that it has been taken over by trolls and those that just want to moan for the sake of hearing themselves speak. But I wouldn’t say everyone there is that way, just the most vocal ones.

      Just my $0.02

  9. I’m going to somewhat repeat Bill’s point, but expand it a bit as well.

    It’s not about the Aquaman picture, it’s just what the talkback section of AICN has devolved into over the last few years. It wasn’t even just over the least year or due to the kickstarter or the departure of guys like “The Infamous Billy The Kidd” from the writing staff.

    Writers for sites like Film Threat started writing attack pieces in AICN and Harry some ten years back, and I started noticing a growing core of people in the talkback section who seemed to be there exclusively to attack whatever was being discussed, attack the site, and attack Harry. There also seemed to be a growing bit of the “we built you up, we’ll tear you down” aspect of it as well.

    But, in part due to what Bill mentions above, the last few years have gotten bad. It’s gotten to the point that, if I look at something on AICN, I don’t even bother with the talkback section. I never look at it at all these days unless someone points something in it out to me.

    Negative comments about Auqaman? Go look at the talkbacks in a new DVD releases column. By the time I stopped bothering with them some years back, they were mostly people insulting Harry, making fun of the reviews, or making racist jokes about his wife. From what I understand about them these days, that’s almost exclusively what the comments are, and on most other columns as well.

    I used to say that some of the IMDB forums could be the absolute lowest of the low with regards to examples of fandom on the internet, but the AICN talkbacks took that spot some years ago.

    “This attitude would prompt said reasonable individual to think that the lot of they are actually full of crap.”

    They are. I can’t say that I truly know any of them, but the comments on display there before and from whenever someone brings up something that went even more off the rails there tends to make me think that they’re simply the kids that got picked on, and now, thanks to their new pack, they can feel the fake power of the internet giving them the “courage” to be nasty little šhìŧš to others all day long.

    I mean, I can understand poking something with a stick from time to time. We all do it. I just played poke the SJW with a stick the other day, but I wasn’t nasty about it and limited my comments. But AICN has become home to the absolute worst on the web when it comes to fandom. It’s become the place where the petty, the nasty, and the downright vicious go to, I don’t know, make themselves feel bigger by ripping everything else down.

    Aquaman? It’s not about Aquaman with that pack of áššwìpëš, they’re like that about everything.

    1. Some of them have actually built up personas that have achieved a (very) limited amount of notoriety (if that word can be applied to so tiny a pond). The guy who sends every post with “FACT!”. The guy who steers every conversation to race. The guy who attacks everyone who brings up race. The guy who hates JJ Abrams so much that other posters bring up the new Trek just to get him wound up. And so on.

      There isn;t much niche for someone making good points and it just angers the trolls, interrupts their performance. Not sure what, if anything, they can do. Any attempt to tame the rabble will set off a shitstorm and I don’t think Harry has the discipline to really lay the hammer down and not just ban anyone who doesn’t kiss his ášš (not that all the Harry critics have a point; the attacks on him are frequently ugly above and beyond any “offense” he may have made).

      The “fame” of being an internet douche seems like a pretty insignificant life achievement to most of us but there are a LOT of people who work hard to earn it.

      1. “The guy who hates JJ Abrams so much that other posters bring up the new Trek just to get him wound up. And so on.” Yep, I remember him–worse yet was when he declared that he would continue to hate on JJ and the Trek films until _everyone_ in the Talkbacks agreed with him.

        He’s just one instance of the insanity of the place. Sadly, it’s spread to other sites as well, where it’s just some douchenozzle doing some faux hard man posturing just to prop themselves up and look down on everyone. The only film sites I really look at anymore are Den of Geek and First Showing–the comment sections there are actually areas of sanity compared the AICN and Badass Digest.

      2. “The guy who hates JJ Abrams so much that other posters bring up the new Trek just to get him wound up.”

        I saw one of those threads one time. I had no idea what the hëll was going on. It wasn’t even about Abrams, and then, totally out of the blue, it’s a stream of Abrams hate rage.

  10. The saddest thing about “The guy who hates JJ Abrams so much that other posters bring up the new Trek just to get him wound up” is that he takes himself completely seriously and considers himself an intellectual and a writer. He now posts pretentious, rambling articles on a couple of other websites, reviewing movies and tv shows by throwing out as many big words and lengthy, over-descriptive paragraphs as he can come up with.

    And he still clogs up nearly every comment section with his JJ rants, trollish behavior toward anyone who doesn’t agree or buy into his pseudo-intellectual posturing, or being butt hurt when he isn’t including in podcasts on topics of which he is an “expert”.

    He is the main reason I stopped reading the AICN talkbacks, but he is impossible to get away from. Every new and interesting site that the original and entertaining Talkbackers create, he is right there worming his way into posting content and commenting. He is the perfect example of Bill Mulligan and Marc McKenzie’s description of the “fame” of being an internet douche and a faux hard man posturing just to prop himself up and look down on everyone.

    1. “He now posts pretentious, rambling articles on a couple of other websites, reviewing movies and tv shows by throwing out as many big words and lengthy, over-descriptive paragraphs as he can come up with.”

      Hey now, he’s just on one site now baby.

      thesupernaughts.com

      1. I went and looked at that.

        Now i’m going to take a shower and fumigate my computer.

  11. To be fair, I don’t like this movie version either.

    Why?

    Not blonde enough to match up with your’s. GIMME SOME COLOR! He’s drab!

    1. That’s the problem I have with Man Of Steel and the pictures from the new movie so far: that the costumes are too colourless. I understand that Snyder doesn’t want to use a vivid four-colour comic style palette, but he could put a bit more colour in them. If I wanted to see Superman in shades of grey, I could just pull out my DVDs of the early seasons of the George Reeves Superman show.

  12. A few of the top-voted comments on that particular post:

    “I’ll say one thing as far as the look of the character is concerned. If I was to believe that somehow, somewhere out there, there was a being that ruled over and controlled all the oceans and aquatic life on earth. This is what I imagine he would look like.”

    “If he loses an arm and replaces it with a spear hook, Zack Snyder can take money directly from my checking account.”

    “Probably as cool as an Aquaman costume can look.”

    “looks awesome! But his Trident has 5 prongs.”

    “Looks Badass”

    “See? Even DC realizes Aquaman as originally designed is lame. I like this.”

    “Not the classic, but the Peter David 90’s badass version!”

    “I’m a natural skeptic, but I like where Snyder’s going with all of this. The character designs are more interesting to me than Marvel.”

    Given, there’s a good few comments being negative about the costume, but there’s just as many loving it. And for the most part, the people who’re being negative about it aren’t being blindly negative. They’re critiquing the decision of the film-makers to go with a certain look for a character they hold dearly. If you disagree with them, fair enough, but don’t tar them all with the same ‘blind hater’ brush. And as for them, if you can’t handle a few dumb-áššëš, you’re in the wrong line of work.

    Also, using your blog to bìŧçh about people bìŧçhìņg on a blog? You’re part of the problem.

    1. Just as many loving it? That is a VERY distorted count on your part. The VAST majority is negative.

      And I think using my blog to comment on other’s behavior is hardly part of the problem.

      PAD

      1. Calling it ‘a problem’ was a little hyperbolic of me, I admit. And I apologise for being flippant. But people have every right to bìŧçh about something they take issue with, just as you have every right to bìŧçh about them bìŧçhìņg. As long as it’s a constructive critique, then what’s the harm.

        Regarding AICN, the majority of the negative comments on that post (as most posts on there nowadays) are regarding Harry Knowles’ questionable ethics and fabrication of stories involving himself and celebrities. If you discount those comments, I think you’ll find the pro/con movie-version Aquaman look quite balanced.

        But even if they weren’t, everyone has the right to give their opinion on it, negative or no. And I don’t remember reading one post (although I’m sure there’s one or two) saying they’d boycott the movie because of it. If they disagree with your point of view, so be it.

        Look, I agree with you in saying there’s a lot of ‘hating for the sake of hating’ people on the internet. But your example was a bad one. Not one person on that particular talkback cited that “everything Hollywood produces is garbage”.

        I think you took issue with (and might have had your feelings hurt by) people finding the movie Aquaman look a poor choice, probably due to it being close to the look you personally helped create. Fair enough, but don’t pass your chagrin off as something else. Defend your opinion, don’t tar everyone with the same brush and say because they don’t agree with you, they’re simply haters of everything.

  13. Why would Red Sox fans frequent the Yankees site, and why would ostensible “fans” bìŧçh about the Aquaman image? Because they are trolls — their goal is to cause *others* anger and frustration, not to engage in reasoned conversation and constructive debate.

    You’ve been around online long enough to remember the phrase, Peter: “Sit on your hands.” Don’t feed the trolls. They don’t want to be educated, and you cannot win against them.

    (We are all trolls on our own now and then, too. It’s good to recognize that.)

  14. It’s the exact same on SHH and IMDB Fantastic Four forums. It’s packed with the same members bìŧçhìņg and moaning and declaring how bad it will be, how it should be boycotted and how in-accurate everything is while ignoring the fact it’s not based on 616 but UFF all the while adoring changes Marvel makes to their movies.and making it so that people interested in the movie can’t talk about it.

    I’m with Peter in that if I don’t like something I simply don’t bother with it. How sad and pathetic must there lives be that they devote months of their lives to hating on a movie that isn’t out yet and which they say they won’t even see.

    1. “I’m with Peter in that if I don’t like something I simply don’t bother with it.”

      And yet here you both are, spending time bothering about something you don’t like. They’re devoting time to hate on a movie, you’re devoting time to hate on them hating on a movie. It’s all pretty pointless.

      1. Given that it was my favorite 2099 title and now my son’s favorite Spider-Man in both comic and Wii game form? Kinda had to respond.

  15. I don’t understand complaining that a movie, TV series, comic, etc. that hasn’t come out yet is going to stink, especially if the comic hasn’t been written or drawn and the cameras haven’t started rolling on the movie/TV show.

    I can understand a “they cast Smith? Jones would have been better” mentality, but not a “Smith is going to ruin this character/franchise; this movie will be the worst ever” mentality. At least in the former example, our hypothetical commenter isn’t declaring the movie a failure, sight unseen; just that he believes Jones would have been the better choice.

    But enough with comments about complaints. I want to talk instead about the second issue of PAD’s Phantom mini series, which I got this week. I would have posted these comments in the thread about The Phantom, but comments seem to have been disabled in that thread.

    I don’t know if my comic shop had some sort of a delay in getting the issue or if it just came out, but it was good.

    The “Kamandi wannabe” (as I described the character in my comments about issue #1) who attacks the Phantom at the end of the first issue turns out to be a character from early days of the Phantom comic strip. I won’t mention him by name to avoid spoilers for those familiar with the early days of the strip. I’m not familiar with the early days (and had never even heard of this character before) and found it interesting that, according to the text at the end, Lee Falk originally considered having the “Kamandi wannabe” as ______.

    Scenes I liked:

    Phantom: “He talks to animals? Isn’t that a bit much?”

    Diana: “Says the man who talks to his dog and horse.”

    Phantom: “Fair point.”

    And later:

    Phantom: “…and was he at all a… I don’t know how to say it… a jungle man type?”

    Diana: “What’s that type like, Kit? …In case you hadn’t noticed, you’re a jungle man type, too. Which hints should I have looked for?”

    Phantom: “Well, an elephant would have been a good start.”

    I’m looking forward to issue #3. PAD, when is it expected to ship?

    Also, the Phantom’s new friend’s home looks a bit like Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater. Are we going to learn that Wright designed this guy’s home or is the artist a Wright fan who snuck in an “Easter egg.”

    You said back in the thread about the Phantom that this is the “Phantom Vs. Tarzan story” (without Tarzan actually being in it) you’ve been planning for years. Have you always had this character in mind or did it suddenly dawn on you that you could use so-an-so as you tried to figure out who’d be the Tarzan stand-in? Again, I’d never even heard of this character before picking up this issue.

    So, to reiterate, The Phantom #2 is good; people who complain about things they haven’t seen, listened to, read, etc., yet don’t make sense.

    Rick.

  16. On the imdb boards for The Shield, there is a user with a vendetta against the show and actually admits to creating sock accounts to lower the ratings of the series as a whole and individual episodes.

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