How to Successfully Dislike a Fandom

Your guide to not sounding like a dick

A few months ago, a friend of mine posted something on Facebook that was aimed at fellow Harry Potter fans. Everyone from casual to ritual Potterheads who are friends with this guy showed up and left their two cents. Some fans loved and agreed with the piece, others not so much, with many in between. People united in their love for something came together to tenderly discuss and debate its rich and abundant minutia. But then a non-fan jumped into our space just to state that she believes the entirety of the Harry Potter universe to be garbage. Like 90% of people who don’t like something, this girl blamed the (fifteen billion dollar…) thing itself. “I don’t like X, so therefore X is garbage” is a particularly egotist view of art. Naturally, she didn’t offer any reasons.

There are a disproportionate number of white bros who hate Mad Max: Fury Road. This alone makes it revolutionary. Think about it: someone made a movie centered around car chases and white dudes were not the target audience.

None of them (that I have seen) have posted remotely thoughtful, lengthy, critical discussions about why. Surely, a film that has been crowned with rich criticism, that was objectively pioneering at the very least on a number of technical levels for which it has won an embarrassment of awards, will have plenty of wiggle room in there for thoughtful discussion. If you hate something, you’re not sure why, and you are unfamiliar with criticism as its own art form, I recommend studying it to hone and clarify your discomfort, and then constructing an argument as to why you believe those critics are wrong. But all I have seen is hate in varying levels of typographic emphasis such as expressing your hate in ALL CAPS so that we know you are serious. I DON’T LIKE X, SO THEREFORE X IS GARBAGE.

And today on Facebook, several of your (mostly white) friends are posting their not-fully-formed opinions that Beyonce’s masterpiece Lemonade, is something that they just don’t get. They are proudly declaring they aren’t interested in it and don’t notice everyone around them cringing. They probably only heard about the hype in the first place because it’s something that plenty of their white friends do get and are actively discussing. And embarrassingly — it’s not that hard; This is the most white-culture-accessible work Beyoncé has ever done (even as it embraces some art that blacks invented, and whites came to love and adopt as their own). It has everything white art academia likes: Spoken word poetry! Historically suggestive costumes! Bjork-like musical experimentation! Objectively, you can’t take your eyes off it. It casts a cinematic spell and brings us into a dreamlike world of its own. But, you know, I don’t like X, so therefore X is garbage. Some of these people haven’t listened to anything Bey’s done since Destiny’s Child. So without having bothered to check if Bey has grown exponentially as an artist since then, they are automatically mad by the headlines declaring Lemonade to be serious, profound, expertly crafted art.

In the real world, we’d feel silly giving our opinions on a book we haven’t read, right? But on social media, it happens all the time. And the thing is, it’s painfully transparent.

I don’t like X, so therefore X is garbage is how children reason, and it’s problematic on a number of levels, the most obvious one being: who jumps into a party just to say they don’t want to be there? It’s incredibly rude. Internet Culture is an exponentially expanding building with new rooms, corridors, and basements being built every hour, and where very few doors are locked. Just because you wander into an open door doesn’t mean you’ve been invited. It doesn’t mean your presence won’t be silently (or not) mocked if you enter for nefarious purposes. Taken to the extreme, this is known as trolling. But there also seems to be the hapless version: people who just never knew when to walk past an open door that contains something that is by their own disinterest for other people. Or for that matter, people who never learned how to walk in, sit down, and start listening to something in silence precisely because they don’t understand it. Choosing to walk in and immediately starting to shout because you don’t like the subject of the room — especially when you walked past warning signs declaring today’s chosen subject to get there — is rude, ignorant, and makes you look like an asshole. It’s like showing up to a D&D group that meets weekly at Barnes & Noble just to call the attendees bad names and then deigning to feel misunderstood when they take you for a grunting jock type who doesn’t appreciate nerdy things.

Rudeness aside, here’s the thing: It makes you sound dumb when you say something sucks instead of telling us why you think it sucks. I realize it must be difficult to say to yourself: I don’t like X, yet other people do, so I must actively THINK about why I dislike the thing or I must let it go and mind my damned business. Yet this is what grown adults do.

There are plenty of things I deeply dislike that incidentally qualify as easy targets because as many people hate them as there are numbers who appear to like them: Fifty Shades of Grey is one of them. Too easy, since there is abundant scathing criticism out there explaining why. Here’s something a bit harder: I don’t like comic books even though I often love the franchises that arise from them. I will go see the latest Marvel film on opening night but couldn’t tell you a damn thing about how close they are to the comics. A few people have given me a comic book they particularly liked, and I suffered through finishing it. I didn’t like the dialogue. I didn’t like the busyness of it visually. But my suspicion is that I just don’t get it, and that’s on me, not on the world of comic books. I haven’t tried reading enough of them to be capable of discussing why, so I shut the fuck up.

There’s only one way to critique a fandom: interestingly, knowingly, and seriously. There is a reason why literary criticism, film criticism, or art criticism are established styles that never sound like a bro whining on the internet that he didn’t personally like something. Apparently the quick and dirty way to announce you don’t get the appeal of a thing is to dismiss it as the problem. Trouble is, you’re going up against people who have thought about, analyzed, and actively loved the thing, and the the process of actively loving something automatically makes them experts. They will always make you sound like a fool. Tread cautiously, or have the sense to walk past that open door and find your own room.