I’m not gonna sit here and pretend DC/DCEU fans are a flawless example of a perfect fandom. We’re not. We can be far too passionate and argumentative. We’re too dramatic. We’re stubborn. We have a tendency to put creators and actors on pedestals. We’ve got pettiness down to a goddamn art form.
But that’s hardly unique among fandoms, especially comics fandoms. It’s par for the course when a bunch of very different people get together to enjoy a shared interest. How that makes us uniformly a bunch of slavering alt-right white male supremacists who would actually attempt to organize an effort to tank the online vegetable freshness rating of a movie from a “rival” company is not something I can wrap my head around.
Putting aside the fact that - while yes I’m certain there are tons of straight, white, male DC/EU fans; it’s comics, after all - the majority of the most active and passionate fans I’ve encountered have been female, queer, POC, and heavily liberal, when we actually decide to come together, pool our resources, and put some goddamn energy into something, it’s something positive and celebratory.
Like the Farooqi brothers of Comic Book Debate, who organized a Black Panther Challenge fundraiser to take an entire school of Bronx children to see Black Panther and met their goal within 10 days.
Or the ForSnyderCut website, a gorgeous site that - in addition to hosting an extensive timeline of the bedeviled Justice League production and gathering evidence to the existence of a more than salvagable director’s cut - collects detailed analysis of the DCEU films, articles celebrating their merits, artwork, and personal writings of fans who’ve been positively affected by them.
Literal labors of love. This is what DCEU fans do with their time and energy. They don’t set out to sabotage the work or passions of others. Hell, most of us are looking forward to Black Panther. And those that aren’t are just going to not see it. Like what regular people who don’t want to see a movie would do.
Because we are regular, normal, generally decent people like everyone else. We just have very strong opinions about Superman.
