General agreement that Marvel's diverse comics are mostly tokenism - the titles get publicity but little support.

KC: What do you do, as a business, when you've (rightly or wrongly) identified your most important customers as the most toxic fans? Publishers and creators are afraid to say no to them.

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KC: Fan culture depends on emotional investment. So does brand-based marketing. There's a toxic synergy when companies market to fans. Toxicity begins with over-investment and the inability to separate yourself from the product.

@ghost_bird you think it is wrong to invest emotionally in something constructed? Does this include art, music, literature? At what point does something go from being enjoyment (mutual or solo) and become fandom?

@CitySquirrel A better question would be "how does a fandom become toxic?", I think.

@ghost_bird this was going to be my follow-up

@CitySquirrel When being a fan is more important than liking the thing you're a fan of, perhaps. Or when you start responding to criticism of the thing you like as a personal attack.

@ghost_bird I think it is when fans start to feel ownership over the object of their fandom. Instead of experiencing the source they start curating it. Note that I don't count "gamers" as fandom... Though something similar is probably going on.

@CitySquirrel I think entitlement is the other part of it, along with the identity thing, yes. It's very visible in gamer culture, where it's part of the marketing - this piece on "consumer kings" is good, if you've not read it: https://www.magicalwasteland.com/notes/2014/8/22/the-king-and-his-objects

@CitySquirrel As for whether gamer culture is a fandom... it certainly behaves like one, albeit on a large scale, and I think it's worth making the connection with other fandoms so no one thinks it's unique. (Although, equally, there are a lot of fandoms within the "gamer" identity - PC or Nintendo, FPS or MOBA, fighting games or platform games...)

@ghost_bird sorry, I meant that gamer culture is worse and suffering from... Something. The reason I don't think it is the same mechanism is that gamers seem to have rallied around ideas that have nothing to do with their fetishes directly. Whereas "fans" object to their "property" being misused, the gamer issues seem tied into issues of masculinity/ gender identity and racial identity. Then again, the same could be said if some fans, I guess. And vice versa.

@CitySquirrel I can see your point - although the same anxieties about race/masculinity are in comics fandom too... and written SF, to a lesser extent. (And Dr Who, now I think of it, and Star Trek according to the panel earlier today.) Perhaps it's a more general thing expressing itself in (white male) fandom?

@ghost_bird yeah, for sure. Though my thoughts on fandom are informed by how so many people were angry at the ending of the Harry Potter books arguing that it was selfish of Rawling to show the characters in the future. That is a feeling of ownership over material that is completely undeserved.

KC: Nerd culture is exclusionary by nature - the myth of nerd identity begins with straight white boys who were bullied at school.
HG: Nerd culture as a "fictive ethnicity" for white men, imitating the collective identities of marginalised groups. Nerd bullying as the privileged imitating the self-defense of marginalised groups.
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(Discussion of feminised fan spaces - tumblr antishippers is the example - where toxicity is still based on over-investment but takes a different form. Weaponisation of progressive readings/critiques as a source of power, in a way that echoes infighting in progressive politics.)
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