Perhaps it’s just the circles we move in on the Internet, but this week was unusually antagonistic online. No one was on their best behavior this week, and it just feels like everyone needs to go to their rooms for a time out. Where’s the love, people? Oh, wait, maybe it’s here, in this revelation that the couple on the cover to the Woodstock album are still together, 46 years later. While you’re still recovering from the good vibes of that discovery, here are some things you might have missed on the world wide web over the last seven days. Buckle up.
What Happened: In the wake of a number of pop culture events, fandom spent the week gazing into its own navel. Where It Blew Up: Twitter, media think pieces What Really Happened: It’s been an increasingly vocal period for online fandom lately, in both good and bad ways. For every #GiveElsaAGirlfriend or #GiveCapABoyfriend, there’s a sexist backlash against the new Ghostbusters, it seems. And things really came to a head this week as the dust-up over Captain America’s comic book reveal—which, spoiler alert, revealed that Cap was a Hydra agent all along—lead to both smart think pieces about the character’s value as a patriotic symbol, and, well, death threats sent to those responsible for the comic.
Much of the discussion centered around a think piece called “Fandom is Broken” by movie critic Devin Faraci, which conflated much of the above into the notion of an overly entitled fan culture that could be personified by Misery’s antagonist Annie Wilkes. It’s an essay that misses a lot of nuance—there’s a world of difference between those asking for representation and those complaining that their favorite superhero might be a bad guy in plot twist, for example—and is complicated by passages like “One time I managed to hunt down a kid who threatened to kill me and called him; I won’t deny that his tear-filled voice as he begged me not to call the police and report him gave me some pleasure.” It was also an essay that prompted a lot of responses:
Faraci’s essay prompted a number of response essays, all of which are worth reading: Gavia Baker-Whitelaw argued that fandom isn’t broken, but that it shares a harassment problem with the rest of the Internet, Megan Purdy wrote about the ways in which Faraci and others see a shift in power between fans and creators as something that’s broken, instead of an evolution, and Emma Huxbois wrote about the power (often abused) creators have over fans, and misunderstood privilege. Meanwhile, the Huffington Post’s Claire Fallon pushed back against the idea that fans are entitled, while Blastr’s Dany Roth suggested that fandom was still under construction rather than broken. (Also worth reading: Heidi Macdonald’s piece that looks into the historical roots of fan entitlement and also the Cap Hydra thing.) The Takeaway: Is fandom broken? It depends on how you define it. If your definition of fandom is simply that the audience takes what it’s given and is grateful for it, then yes. That hasn’t been the case for a while, and if that’s your idea of fandom, it’s definitely cracked. But there’s a significant, important difference between speaking up for what you believe in and want to see, and a “broken” relationship, and what’s actually happening is far more the former than the latter.
What Happened: The parent company of the Chicago Tribune announced a name change this week. Unfortunately, their choice of new name left something to be desired. Where It Blew Up: Twitter What Really Happened: It was the end of an era Thursday when Tribune Publishing, owner of the Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times, announced that it would be changing its name later this month. The company, which has been around since 1847, will become tronc—all lower case; it’s short for “tribune online content”—on June 20. Yes, “tronc.”
It’d be easy to say that the jokes wrote themselves, but that would be underselling the response on Twitter:
It’s fair to say that, while tronc did immediately become a far more widely discussed brand upon renaming, that’s not necessarily a good thing. After all, calling your outfit “Tribune Publishing” never lead to the “worst press release in the history of journalism.” (“If all that baloney sounds like the work of a team with no background in journalism, then it accurately represents itself,” the Washington Post wrote about the press release in question.) The Takeaway: Then again, maybe we shouldn’t be too quick to make fun of “tronc”…
What Happened: The political moment the Republican Party has been waiting for arrived this week, as Paul Ryan announced that he would, indeed, be voting for Donald Trump this November. Where It Blew Up: Twitter, media think pieces What Really Happened: Paul Ryan’s relationship with presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has been a difficult one. The Speaker of the House has condemned the violence at Trump’s rallies, accused Trump of “disfiguring” the beliefs of the Republican party and, last month, declared that he was not ready to endorse the candidate for the presidency—all of which made the following tweet that much more sweet for those who enjoy political schadenfreude:
On the one hand, of course Ryan is going to vote for Trump; what is his alternative? On the other, the sight of his seeming reversal was disappointing to a number of conservatives who had hoped that he could stand up as a sane voice in an increasingly insane campaign. Within hours, Paul Ryan’s name was the top trending topic on Twitter, prompting a tweet storm like this:
The Takeaway: Is there some way someone can summarize what happened using an analogy that everyone can understand? Oh, Funny or Die, you have a suggestion?
What Happened: Lin-Manuel Miranda is leaving Hamilton. The Internet is upset. Where It Blew Up: Twitter, blogs, media think pieces What Really Happened: It might have been inevitable, but that didn’t make the news that Lin-Manuel Miranda is leaving the cast of Hamilton any easier for the Internet to bear; the show’s creator announced this week that he’d be leaving the cast after the July 9 performance, unleashing a tidal wave of breathless reports and remembrances about the era’s end. Twitter, too, seemed in shock:
And with any Hamilton movie apparently 20 years away, it’s not like we’re going to see him on the big screen anytime soon, either. The Takeaway: Hey, does this mean we can start a social media movement to decide Miranda’s replacement, like happened with the Daniel Craig leaving James Bond behind? If so, we have our first contestant:
What Happened: So, Rogue One is probably going to have extensive reshoots. Whether or not that’s a big deal depends on how much faith you have in Disney, apparently. Where It Blew Up: Twitter, media think pieces What Really Happened: The news broke, unexpectedly, in a Page Six report: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story was going to get extensive reshoots because Disney execs weren’t happy with what they’d seen so far. Phrases like “in crisis” were used.
As the report started to spread across the Internet, fans didn’t seem to know how to respond. Was this a big deal? Was this the movie being micromanaged? Is everything OK?
The movie blog intelligencia seemed split on what was going on. “Calm down, everything will be fine,” announced one site. The movie “probably isn’t in trouble” hedged another. “The movie isn’t working, but I’ve wanted to ignore that,” said a third. That last impulse—the fervent desire to ignore warning signs that things weren’t going well—triggered a surprising off-shoot response to the whole thing: fans upset that Star Wars movies get leeway that the Warner Bros./DC movies don’t:
But back to Rogue One. More official sources later confirmed the reshoots, and explained they were ordered because of problems with the movie’s tone and a desire to make it more “fun.” The question of whether or not a Star Wars movie needed to be more fun lead to a whole new round of Twitter discourse.
The Takeaway: This speculation about the state of Rogue One will likely continue for a while—at least until another trailer for the film is released and everyone can dissect what (if anything) is different about the way the movie looks from one trailer to the next.
