Friday, March 8, 2019

We won't even get into the intellectual property theft angle and the original Captain Marvel

It's late and this hits a lot of threads, so I'm just going to hit the high points.

Lots of fans feel a sense of ownership over the characters and franchises they follow.








The intersection between fandom and the alt-right has grown increasingly, if you'll pardon the word, fanatical. Perhaps the ugliest corner is dominated by the men's rights movement.

From the Hollywood Reporter:
Such messages are, of course, not actually reviews of Captain Marvel the movie — that there’s no way any of these people have actually seen a film that hasn’t been released yet is a clue, perhaps — but instead the very fact that Marvel is finally releasing a movie with a woman at the forefront, and that the actor playing the role has been outspoken about real-world issues surrounding sexism, racism and ableism. In other words, it’s more of the same kind of attempts to derail progressive Marvel movies that saw faked accounts of assault by African-Americans at Black Panther screenings last year.

That shouldn’t come as much of a surprise, considering the kind of sexist and racist trolling that surrounded 2017’s Star Wars: The Last Jedi, and particularly Kelly Marie Tran’s character Rose Tico; genre properties, especially tentpole projects and those released by massive studios like Disney or Warner Bros., have had to contend with increasingly vocal swathes of bigotry online in recent years as power structures inside the movies shift away from white male heroes.

Perhaps the best commentator on the alt-right wing of fandom and andd one of the best on the business of pop culture is Bob Chipman. Here, he points out that Disney does have a hidden agenda and it has nothing to do with social justice, and everything to do with lax enforcement of anti-trust laws.





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