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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 8705412" data-attributes="member: 4937">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.</blockquote>

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