There’s a big difference between merely saying This movie sucks! and taking it out on the people who made it. When Star Trek: The Motion Picture came out, Trekkers were not screaming for Robert Wise’s head. Even the late Harlan Ellison wrote a polite, but negative review in Starlog. And this is the guy who often took potshots at Gene Roddenberry the way Stephen King hates on Kubrick.
Social media is the big factor here. It’s possible rotten fans may have always been with us. I imagine there were letters even Cinefanstatique magazine declined to print back in the day. There was that one SW blogger fellow who’s been blocked by Dave Prowse and John Williams on twitter for their behavior. Seriously, what issues could anyone possibly have with them?
There are ridiculous trolls, of course. That’s not what I’m talking about here. There are legitimate criticisms being levied against TLJ that are being attributed to trolls in order to hand-wave them away.
Think about what you’re saying. “[T]hat one SW blogger fellow” isn’t representative of half the fanbase. The people who harassed Tran aren’t representative of half the fanbase. It’s become very easy to paint anyone dissatisfied with TLJ using that broad brush, though.
There are Lucasfilm employees on Twitter right now trolling Star Wars fans and comparing the situation to GamerGate. Just absurd. If Twitter had existed back when Lucas released the SEs and he posted his famous quote about the movies being his and not the fans’ (paraphrasing), what do you think the result would be? If the creators are going to participate in social media and actively berate their critics, the social media mob is going to descend upon them.
TFA receives an overwhelmingly positive response from fans and everything is cool.
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Are you new to the internet?
This forum doesn’t encompass the entirety of the conversation, nor is it even a microcosm representative of the entirety of Star Wars fandom. It’s a subset of a subset. The discussion here may have become contentious, but in the rest of the world, by and large, the response to TFA was overwhelmingly positive.