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So how do we know that these are actual fans? I.e. How do we know that these people aren't online activists just claiming to be fans? Dare I say that there might be people making money of the fact that shilling the movie to actual fans, that Disney have their own 50 Cent army sitting in /r/IndianaJones?
I remember back in the day that there was this whole thing about how "fans gatekeeping fandoms is a bad thing!" as a part of the culture war. But gatekeeping served a purpose in my view and it is shame that good fans bought into the reasoning of not gatekeeping anymore do their own detriment.
Certainly we've seen Amazon shutting down reviews for Rings of Power with the excuse that "bad people are reviewbombing the show because they're racist and sexist and homophobic", and they own iMDB so they were able to put their thumb on the scale there. Rotten Tomatoes did a different rating based on if you clicked on the "verified audience/critics" versus "all audience/critics" for The Little Mermaid, where one was favourable and the other was unfavourable.
So if the big corporations have shown that they are both willing and able to filter reviews, and commercial outlets go along with them (because if your film critic gives them a negative review they'll pull advertising, so you better give a good review), I suppose there isn't any reason to think they wouldn't set up astroturf sites.
Absolutly and also if you look at the positive review texts they are sometimes just copy paste with "bot like" username. Sometimes even getting simple things wrong about the movie. But the thing about reddit is that you can look at the users history and see that they are behaving suspiciosly either being straight up activists and not actually discussing having good faith discussion or defend the billion dollar companies go from little mermaid to strange worlds to elements defeding the trash and never showing up in activist circles. Back in the day a powermod punished me with a short term ban because I called out an obvious paid shill on a subreddit, like that was going to convince me that it wasn't astroturf.
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Yeah I do have suspicions many of these spaces are being astroturfed, the fanbase for these IPs are big and passionate enough to usually allow a bad entry to succeed, only slightly less. As for gatekeeping, we've long since accepted that it needs to return. We threw open the gates for those who wish to subvert the IP and mold it into what they like it to be because they never liked what it is about it that made the whole thing popular in the first place. Then they kicked us out and now gatekeep us. "Make your own Star Wars" "Cishet white male tears are so sweet"... you know how it goes. I think this also applies to the recent Assassin's Creed games, that have just divided the fanbase altogether. In trying to chase the ghost of Witcher 3 and Geralt of Rivia, they've chucked out what made AC Brotherhood and Ezio Auditore so beloved to the brand and I daresay even gaming in general.
Well yeah gaming has had its kerfuffles ever since back in 2014 when Gamegate happened. But somehow the air over culture war battlefields are different now, I can't really put my finger on what has changed. The Hogwarts Legacy boycott was DOA and majority of the regular people just ignored bought and played the game. Something has changed, and I don't know what.
I mean, has there ever been a gaming boycott that has worked? I'm not even sure the limited "no pre-orders" campaigns have ever worked.
It is not the boycott in itself that is the difference in outcome, But no big fights online of people defending the game and the defenders called everything bad under the sun. It was limited fights online but nothing high profile. Like we got more than a week over the removed CoD skins.
I suspect it's because most of the calls for boycott had very little to do with the writing, technical and mechanical aspects of the game but JKR. Nevertheless, I'd still remind folks that the game was lowkey woke. Congratulations! You too can be a Black transgender pure blood wizard Nazi!
Well the thing for me which I'm open about it that there is that it feels different. Almost like the dominios started to fall after Elon bought Twitter and the latest domino to fall is all the DEI directors booted from the media companies. I remember at the beginning of the Bud Light boycott that the likes of Tim Pool thought at it was going to go over, but it is still going. But on the woke side of the things fizzle out really fast it seems. Like where they able to disrupt boycotts on the non-woke side earlier? It looks like something has changed.
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