Cyberbullying works!
Yes, that's right: cyberbullying gets results.
I keep seeing people who avoid the internet or alter their actions to accomodate trolls on the internet.
George Lucas recently went into retirement, making a comment about "why make more movies when everybody hates them anyways?" Well, George, fuck those people. They aren't buying your movies, but there are plenty of people who are. When the Star Wars movies were going to come out on BluRay, a bunch of 4chan-esque trolls spammed amazon for months ahead of time with fake 1-star reviews lambasting them for not including the original cuts. Hundredes of them. (As an aside, amazon is terrible for letting people review stuff before it's out. Seriously, people.) When the movies came out, they sold great anyways and the rating is fairly high in spite of all the fake reviews which were designed to lower the rating. After over a decade of whining about how The Phantom Menace ruined everyone's childhood, the 3-d re-release did pretty well and I heard many stories of people watching it with an audience of all ages who enjoyed it unironically.
Here's the thing: the complainers will always be loud, but content people tend to stay quiet. If you're a creator, you mostly hear from the complainers. Creative types can be sensitive, since they're expressing their inner selves. With the new generation of internet trolls, it makes for an ugly situation.
Apparently trolls have been a factor in Jim Shooter not having posted in his outstanding blog in over two months. People being obnoxious and insulting in the comments seems to bug him. Isn't it nice how a minority can ruin something for everyone?
The internet makes being a creator a whole new ballgame because you can communicate with fans directly and instantly, and those who normally wouldn't say anything will be vocal, due to the ease of communication. Chris Claremont was on an internet board while writing various X-Men comics this last decade and he seems to have taken way too much of it to heart. The comicbookresources boards were just apparently unmoderated troll fests where 4chan-esque trolls would whine endlessly about how terrible he was. He seems to have read these boards and taken the contents to heart. The rule was that only one review thread could be posted per comic, so one of the worst trolls would take great pleasure in posting a lame, uninformative, and insulting review to every issue of X-Men Forever. The problem? Chris listened to these people and let them influence his work, for the worse.
Chris was influenced by the internet in varied ways. One poster on a board I used to read, Phil something, (Chris, like John Byrne, was offput by people who didn't use their real names) was a big Bishop fan and was politely critical of Chris's work. He used to jokingly hit people with steel chairs on the boards. He met Chris at a convention and brought that up to introduce himself to Chris. In an issue of Uncanny X-Men Chris wrote, Storm and Nightcrawler found themselves at an anti-mutant rally, where a guy named Phil threw a steel chair at them. Ha! Another poster on those boards whose name I forget had been reading since the 60's and kind of had a crush on Professor X, reading whatever book he was in, so Chris used her as the inspiration for a character named Book who was in Excalibur (vol. 3), along with Professor X. Of course he also found out he was fired from Excalibur, I think it was, from a comic book gossip site rather than from Marvel. What fun. The stress from this and influences at Marvel appeared to be negatively affecting his health for a while, and he was hospitalized and had to take a break from writing for a few months. Ick. One particularly obnoxious poster went on about how Chris was trying to make Dazzler a lesbian for months until he got banned (I think), because Chris had Dazzler dye her hair pink.
(I think this was a gay guy with a female persona. I've had so many negative experiences with people like that that it's become a subconscious red flag for me. I know it's irrational, but still, there's that feeling of "Uh-oh! A gay guy pretending to be a woman! Probably another psycho asshole!" Weird, but that's how it's worked out, somehow. This isn't to say that all the gay men masquerading as women have been volatile and abusive, of course, just an unusual amount.)
But anyways, ahem, it's getting sad when the internet jackasses can shut down people's art, just by being loud and obnoxious. Being thick-skinned is more important than ever. How many great works will we never see because the creators were browbeat into submission by internet trolls? It's a disgusting thought. The internet is already a threat to creative endeavors, due to piracy, but this is far more repulsive, to me. And what shitty people these are. What joy do they get from wrecking professional artists' self-esteem and confidence, not to mention their art? Talk about repulsive.
I keep seeing people who avoid the internet or alter their actions to accomodate trolls on the internet.
George Lucas recently went into retirement, making a comment about "why make more movies when everybody hates them anyways?" Well, George, fuck those people. They aren't buying your movies, but there are plenty of people who are. When the Star Wars movies were going to come out on BluRay, a bunch of 4chan-esque trolls spammed amazon for months ahead of time with fake 1-star reviews lambasting them for not including the original cuts. Hundredes of them. (As an aside, amazon is terrible for letting people review stuff before it's out. Seriously, people.) When the movies came out, they sold great anyways and the rating is fairly high in spite of all the fake reviews which were designed to lower the rating. After over a decade of whining about how The Phantom Menace ruined everyone's childhood, the 3-d re-release did pretty well and I heard many stories of people watching it with an audience of all ages who enjoyed it unironically.
Here's the thing: the complainers will always be loud, but content people tend to stay quiet. If you're a creator, you mostly hear from the complainers. Creative types can be sensitive, since they're expressing their inner selves. With the new generation of internet trolls, it makes for an ugly situation.
Apparently trolls have been a factor in Jim Shooter not having posted in his outstanding blog in over two months. People being obnoxious and insulting in the comments seems to bug him. Isn't it nice how a minority can ruin something for everyone?
The internet makes being a creator a whole new ballgame because you can communicate with fans directly and instantly, and those who normally wouldn't say anything will be vocal, due to the ease of communication. Chris Claremont was on an internet board while writing various X-Men comics this last decade and he seems to have taken way too much of it to heart. The comicbookresources boards were just apparently unmoderated troll fests where 4chan-esque trolls would whine endlessly about how terrible he was. He seems to have read these boards and taken the contents to heart. The rule was that only one review thread could be posted per comic, so one of the worst trolls would take great pleasure in posting a lame, uninformative, and insulting review to every issue of X-Men Forever. The problem? Chris listened to these people and let them influence his work, for the worse.
Chris was influenced by the internet in varied ways. One poster on a board I used to read, Phil something, (Chris, like John Byrne, was offput by people who didn't use their real names) was a big Bishop fan and was politely critical of Chris's work. He used to jokingly hit people with steel chairs on the boards. He met Chris at a convention and brought that up to introduce himself to Chris. In an issue of Uncanny X-Men Chris wrote, Storm and Nightcrawler found themselves at an anti-mutant rally, where a guy named Phil threw a steel chair at them. Ha! Another poster on those boards whose name I forget had been reading since the 60's and kind of had a crush on Professor X, reading whatever book he was in, so Chris used her as the inspiration for a character named Book who was in Excalibur (vol. 3), along with Professor X. Of course he also found out he was fired from Excalibur, I think it was, from a comic book gossip site rather than from Marvel. What fun. The stress from this and influences at Marvel appeared to be negatively affecting his health for a while, and he was hospitalized and had to take a break from writing for a few months. Ick. One particularly obnoxious poster went on about how Chris was trying to make Dazzler a lesbian for months until he got banned (I think), because Chris had Dazzler dye her hair pink.
(I think this was a gay guy with a female persona. I've had so many negative experiences with people like that that it's become a subconscious red flag for me. I know it's irrational, but still, there's that feeling of "Uh-oh! A gay guy pretending to be a woman! Probably another psycho asshole!" Weird, but that's how it's worked out, somehow. This isn't to say that all the gay men masquerading as women have been volatile and abusive, of course, just an unusual amount.)
But anyways, ahem, it's getting sad when the internet jackasses can shut down people's art, just by being loud and obnoxious. Being thick-skinned is more important than ever. How many great works will we never see because the creators were browbeat into submission by internet trolls? It's a disgusting thought. The internet is already a threat to creative endeavors, due to piracy, but this is far more repulsive, to me. And what shitty people these are. What joy do they get from wrecking professional artists' self-esteem and confidence, not to mention their art? Talk about repulsive.