D&D 5E Toxicity in the Fandom

[Zardnaar]

who is kate bush?

Artist who did Running Up That Hill.

 

[Mind of tempest]

Artist who did Running Up That Hill.

ah

 

[Mezuka]

It is like all those people discovered "Running Up That Hill" off when it was viral on Tik Tok in 2020 decrying people who discovered it through Stranger Things as Johnny Come Latelys. We get it, you are cool . But it isn't the sort of stead diet of doxxing and death threats that I see going on in truly toxic fandoms.

I discovered Running Up That Hill when it came out in 1985, 37 years ago.

Which proves the old Jedi saying: 'There is always an older fish'

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

who is kate bush?

I Wanna Be Kate: The Kate Bush Primer

If you're a long-time fan of Kate Bush, very little has surprised you more than the sudden popular resurgence of Kate. Driven by the use of her song, Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God), the only two things that might be more surprising than Kate rocketing up the charts again is finding out...

www.enworld.org

 

[Ruin Explorer]

But the more I read, the uglier it got. Growing up in the 80's and early 90's, I always felt that, even if we disagreed, people in the D&D fandom, being nerds and geeks, and poorly understood by the "norms", were kind of in this together.

I really don't think that was actually true.

I think it was an impression you got because you only dealt with real people back then, not "internet people". But you could already see the same issues you're describing in the letters pages in Dragon magazine, for example. One of my first experiences of AD&D was someone insisting I'd bought the "wrong" edition (2E) and shouting at me about it.

The bigotry re: people are different is a bit novel, I will admit. It's not entirely new - if you look again at a lot of early '90s and before stuff there's often some outright misogyny, racial stereotyping (or even outright racism on occasions), thinking gay or trans people are inherently funny/laughable as a concept (not always like, Cyberpunk 2020 never did, for example). What's a problem now is that we have this "culture war" rhetoric which is basically being pushed for political reasons to try and stir up division and hate, which brings a lot of people out of the woodwork.

 

[Umbran]

It baffles me why people can't just talk about themselves without trying to appeal to the masses to try to justify their opinions.

Broadly? Humans are tribal creatures, and social standing matters. Being seen as agreeing with the tribe as a whole has social weight. Even better if you are leading the group in that assessment - "The group agrees with me" is psychologically powerful to people. I think the technical term for it is Agrumentum ad Populum.

 

[wicked cool]

if you dont complain then there is no change.

Until recently i had no idea how toxic the TSR office was. This new book preview has opened my eyes on why it failed

Going to disagree strongly with the hits on facebook etc. i dont want to live in blissful ignorance. Pre facebook/internet you had to rely on some weekly/monthly magazine to get any kind of news. Dragon had an add for upcoming products and some of the video gaming magazines had articles on D&D

i would agree its getting worse but a lot of this is justified
-everything costs more. I want to go to a movie or concert to enjoy myself/have fun and see a good product. I dont want to go to say a Motley Crue concert and watch the lead singer read of a teleprompter because his mind is mush. i paid a lot of money for that
- buy a video game (pick one in the last few years) and it literally crashes all the time as its filled with errors.
-a trilogy of movies where the plot is a mess as a giant studio gave way 2 much freedom and the oversight was awful
-at 1 point we were buying D&D miniatures and the quality went way down and the price went up. There was 1 set where the miniatures get a mysterious dust on them and many for a while were shipped broke as the plastic was 2 shallow
-i see organized D&D rules where certain D&D races are banned as they are broken. same goes with MTG. instead of a fix its just banned
-Sports stars sign 5-6 year mega deals and then want to leave their teams after 1-2 as its 2 hard. Not that i have but fans shell out a lot o f money for merchandise and they expect maximum effort
-i go to see some comedian that is offensive and i have to worry that someone has a weapon and now maybe im in danger. This didnt happen in the 80s /90s
- want my new marvel movies to be better or as good as the best of the old ones


i seek out the reviews. I want to know why Siskel and Ebert didnt like a movie (old reference). I was mad at GOT when there was 1 episode where i couldnt see what was going on because the screen was 2 dark. That crap didnt happen with my grandparents old black and white shows
People are dedicated to their lore. I dont want some new designer in 5-10 years to come along and say wouldnt it be cool if halflings had wings or gelatinous cubes could talk and fly and maybe lloth was just misunderstood etc.

I think this community in its reviews etc is very solid. I know based off of here and elsewhere what are the best 5E materials and which ones are not so good. in my ignorance where are all theses toxic d&d groups? critical role fans were toxic towards their own product but that seems to have died down. i dont see any bashing of them on their own fan page. I have never seen such dedication from tatoos to cosplay etc. The mercer effect is just pure jealousy

 

[FrozenNorth]

Well, here's the thing.

First, .01% is generous.

Second, the major deleterious effect of social media is that it allows horrid people to easily find each other. And then it amplifies those voices, creating the effect that those people think that their voices are more common that they are. Third, it rewards people for being even more horrid than they would otherwise be. Finally, it normalizes the voicing of those horrid opinions, causing others who might otherwise not be so horrid to become more horrid.

I am less sanguine than you are.

Fifth, it tends to make less horrid people more horrid, unfortunately.

 

[FrozenNorth]

As I get older, I find a lot of the things I grew up and enjoyed are getting a reboot - into something I find myself recoiling from. Words like "improved" and "retcon" abound and there's folks both standing up to defend the original and "what it stood for" and the new who "want the property to get with the times". I don't find it usually works, and after a few years it settles back down a bit to become an acceptable compromise after the revolution has died down.

The reverse is also true. As I grow older and have kids, I share some of the stuff I liked with them. Quite often I find myself inwardly groaning as I realize “yes, Buttercup was essentially a prop in The Princess Bride”, “GI Joe, despite the occasional good episode, really was hamfisted and terrible” and “the new Sheera really was better in all points over the old one”.

 

[Celebrim]

I don't know what the most overused word in the current culture is, but if it isn't "toxicity" then toxicity is certainly in the top five. I don't agree that things are getting "more toxic" nor am I convinced that toxic isn't just a word for "things I don't like" or "people I disagree with". It's a wonderful word for well-poisoning, and quite often I see things in the culture that look like claiming "toxicity" as a way to gain publicity for something or to adjust the narrative or the debate in what you think would favor you. Often it's used a distraction from what would otherwise be uncomfortable topics or uncomfortable criticism. You can always just claim the criticism is "toxic" as a way of dismissing it. You can redirect the complaint by painting the complainer as toxic or whatever other insult would be helpful for addressing the person and not the complaint.

And I think it's really become a symptom of a toxic creator community that increasingly arrogant and detached from the majority of consumers. The fundamental ideal here is that it's not that I have a bad product, it's that I have bad customers. The fundamental ideal here is that customers aren't patrons of the content, they are servants to it. The customers ought to take what their masters give them, rather than the producers seeing themselves as servants that give the customers what they want.

And if the serfs rebel against that attitude, you can always cherry pick a few idiots and pretend that they are representative of the majority.

Consider an intellectual property like the MCU up until roughly End Game. Here you have content providers treating intellectual property with great dignity. They recognized that not everything in the IP was great and indeed a lot of it is considered stupid even by the fans, but they took core ideas from the Marvel comics and they brought them to the screen with dignity and respect for arguably the first time in Marvel's history. And people loved it and it made a lot of money because people pay for the things that they love.

But when a content creator is not as successful as the content creators for the MCU were, well they need excuses. It can't be because they did a bad job, because the egos on these people are larger than the Dallas-Fort Worth metro area. Are the fans who hated the last few seasons of Game of Thrones, toxic or do they have legitimate complaints about the drop in quality of story telling and dialogue? And is it not "toxic" to claim that the complaints about the final few seasons of Game of Thrones are toxic? I mean sure, there is always some distraught idiot making bad points or making good points badly, but is there no such thing as a legitimate complaint?

Is all of Star Trek equally intellectual and well written? Not even the fans of TOS would claim all of TOS is equally good. It's not unreasonable to make complaints about the treatment of the Star Trek IP over the years, or to suggest that films like Galaxy Quest or TV shows like Orville often through parody and homage create more respectful and enjoyable versions of Star Trek than the official Star Trek branded shows. They do so because it's clear that while the creators don't take themselves fully seriously and are willing to pick fun at the short comings of the shows that are well known to fans, but they also clearly love what they are parodying.

And this suggests for me something that I think is increasingly a rule of content creation: Thou shalt not be put in charge of content that thou dost not love. Because it's so so obvious when something is made as a labor of love how much more respectful it is and how much more likely it is to be successful, then when something is made by someone who considers the original intellectual property to be ridiculous, it's fans to be ridiculous for liking it, and it's creator to be talentless for having originally made it.

Consider failing IP's like 'Wheel of Time' which seems to be heading to an early doom because most people I talk to did exactly what I did which was watch the 1st episode, shrug and find no reason to watch more of it. I'm not at huge Wheel of Time fan. I never made it past the 6th book. It's obvious that there are huge problems with the text. But as the writers flail about in the realization that they are failing in the marketplace there are increasingly excuses coming out about why they are failing, and it all seems to have to do with how stupid they thought the books were in the first place, how stupid the customers are for wanting the shows to have the major events and plot points of the books, and so forth. Or consider the failed Cowboy Bebop IP. Now again, I'm not a huge fan of Cowboy Bebop, but I thought it really telling that when it failed the people responsible for managing the brand blamed the fans and not their own lackluster content, to the extent of screaming at the fans for being stupid because they were going to miss out on all the cool ideas that they had for future seasons. Meanwhile, things like Expanse quitely rack up love amongst communities of the same sort of people who are supposedly impossible to please, or Top Gun: Maverick features a female leader loved by the same fans who supposedly can't except strong females, and so on and so forth. Which make me think that all of those excuses that the customers can't be pleased and are really ugly Neanderthals that shouldn't be pleased are themselves toxic.

In short, whenever I hear about "toxicity" I just shrug and assume someone has too much ego to imagine that someone else who created a well beloved product maybe has more talent than they have and ought to be respected for the quality portions of their creation.