It’s important to understand that, when it comes to liking or disliking a fictional space movie, morality has no bearing on a person’s opinion. Whether or not you like a space adventure movie says nothing about you as a human being, because it’s just a movie.
I remember after TLJ came out, and for the next couple years, there was a massive wave of articles by journalists that tried to either trivialize or vilify criticizers of the film. “It’s just Russian bots.” “It’s just a small group of racist trolls online.” “They’re not real fans, anyway. They’re just manbabies who don’t understand the true meaning of Star Wars.” I heard all of these repeatedly from journalists, with similar sentiments even being repeated by Lucasfilm employees. Of course, antagonizing your own customers is never a good idea, no matter how little you care about them. But the whole thing was so bizarre, I still can’t fully wrap my head around it.
That was because it was true (the part about Russian bots, trolls spammers - the racists, sexists and homophobes - we even had numbers of them on here). There is a massive disconnect between criticising and outing these fuckwits - and ‘antagonizing your own customers’, as you claim.
This is true, but it’s at least worth mentioning that there’s a vocal minority of trigger-happy ST fans who’ll happily lump valid criticism in with bad faith actors.
Definitely. I’m kind of guilty of that myself, if only as a defense mechanism when interacting with people online. I see dislike of the sequels as a red flag about certain attitudes that needs to be disproven by the disliking party. If they start ranting about Gina Carano’s firing, a “Lucasfilm civil war,” or even how there will be a “retcon of the sequels through the World Between Worlds,” then I feel the urge to disengage.
That’s a flaw on my part.