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This is how I see it as well. It actually reminds me of the movie American Ultra, back in 2015. When it flopped at the box office, the writer (Max Landis) was vocal in grumbling on social media that "people say they want to see an original movie, but this shows people won't actually bother to see an original movie". Except... I saw that movie, as it turns out. It sucked badly. Landis simply didn't want to admit that (in fairness, I wouldn't either), so he chose to place the blame on those pesky audiences.
This strikes me as much the same thing, except conveniently for Eichner his flop of a movie happens to be about gay romance. So he doesn't just get to blame the audience for his movie sucking - he gets to blame the bigoted audience. But as you say, people loved Brokeback Mountain. Turns out that you can't just make a piece of media that panders to the norms of $currentYear, you also have to actually make it good or only the hardcore adherents of ideology are going to be interested in it.
It's an all-purpose, all-weather, can offroad as well as on, excuse. Same with the Rings of Power showrunners: "the reason people criticise our amazing show is not because we can't write to save our lives, it's because they're fascists".
Well, hand me my brown shirt and let me goose-step around the kitchen, so!
Yeah, same with the Wheel of Time show. And really a lot of things now that I think about it: Star Trek, Star Wars, Ghostbusters, basically anything where fans criticized a new iteration of a much-loved franchise. It's always "well those people are bigots" whenever the criticism occurs.
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