★ the saltmaster extraordinaire

*(Not to be confused with ‘purity wankers / purity police / fandom police/ antis’, those are an altogether different kind of headache-inducing individuals, whose approach to fictional content specifically centers Morality / faux-Morality. A detailed breakdown of them can be found here).

Fandom purists / elitists are specifically people who not only refuse to accept any sort of changes between canon adaptations or in sequels of the original canon, but who also distinguish themselves by actively mocking and harassing the people who do enjoy the changes, spewing vitriol in any sort of open space they can find (again, in an attempt to get at fans who love the things they hate) and effectively turning fandom into a toxic, negativity-filled morass for anyone other than themselves. They're very often the loudest and most influential voices within geeky / nerdy fannish spaces, with Star Wars being the perfect example of an elitist-dominated fandom.

This post was also written partly a reaction to the remarkable level-headedness of one person, in the sea of rage-filled, perpetual gnashing of teeth that was any comments section related to the putative Lord of the Rings prequel TV series produced by Amazon, before we started getting more details:


I’ve been asking myself for years what exactly is it about geeky fanbases that makes level-headed, reasonable responses like the above ridiculously thin on the ground. My theory is that such fandoms have a higher than average ratio of the aforementioned 'fandom purists / elitists.' And here’s the interesting thing – from silly Japanese shounen anime all the way to sprawling Western fantasy epics, they manifest in remarkably similar ways, to the point where I’ve come to recognize the patterns instantly, over the past twenty years:
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As someone who's been involved with fandoms for twenty years now, since the pre-LJ era, one of the most baffling and actively enraging developments in recent times has been the sharp rise of content-policing from within fandom itself, rather than something caused by the intervention of an outside entity (as was the case with the fundamentalist Christian group whose caterwauling kicked off Strikethrough). I've read and written reams of social analysis when it comes to the whole 'anti' phenomenon, caused by their actions that very much took the shape of actively coordinated campaigns against some of the content that I enjoy in fandom (chiefly non-con fic and incest ships). 

Kickstarted by my bitter disappointment in running into an old friend on here and seeing them turned into another 'how dare you engage in rape/incest/abuse apologism!' zealot, here are a series of comments I left on Reddit, a while ago, explaining the social roots behind the whole anti phenomenon when someone brought up the thing in r/HobbyDrama, explaining exactly how, in ten short years, fandom went from YKINMK to.... this complete shitshow we've got on our hands now. 

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