XPost: alt.gossip.celebrities, alt.politics.democrats.d, sac.general   
   XPost: alt.rush-limbaugh   
   From: bankrupt@disney.com   
      
   Fuck diversity.  Some things should never be changed.   
      
   By Alissa Wilkinson   
      
    @alissamarie   
    alissa@vox.com   
      
   None of the Ghostbusters movies are particularly good, though   
   you might argue the original was great, in the way that cult   
   comedy classics from the 1980s often take on a life of their own   
   with people who grew up wearing out their VHS copies or   
   rewatching them on TV whenever they aired. But without the   
   nostalgia factor in play, each successive Ghostbusters film or   
   property, at best, feels like a funny idea for a sketch   
   stretched out to feature-length, then buoyed by its performers’   
   name recognition and irresistible comic performances and,   
   eventually, nostalgia.   
      
   That’s one reason why the mid-decade announcement of a new   
   “gender-swapped” version of Ghostbusters — which, like the 1984   
   original, would star four Saturday Night Live performers (three   
   former cast members and one multi-repeat host), but this time   
   they’d be women — was met with skepticism. Was there really   
   enough life in Ghostbusters to sustain a whole new reboot?   
      
   That skepticism, a familiar response to most announcements of   
   reboots and remakes, was justifiable; one clear trend of the   
   2010s was the never-ending resurrection of pop culture   
   properties we thought were long over, mostly with no good reason   
   beyond “nostalgia sells.” But more generalized skepticism over   
   the idea of an all-woman Ghostbusters was quickly eclipsed by a   
   bizarrely overblown backlash, months before the film even came   
   out.   
      
   In the end, the movie was merely fine. But in retrospect, the   
   Great Ghostbusters Apocalypse of spring 2016 was a harbinger of   
   things to come, and a window into the ways the internet can fan   
   the flames and provide a platform for the toxic corners of pop   
   culture fandoms to act on their worst impulses.   
      
   The attacks on Ghostbusters and subsequent movies set a template   
   for a different, degraded kind of criticism   
   In some ways, the Ghostbusters backlash was a sequel to   
   Gamergate, which began with the bizarre and misogynistic   
   harassment of a number of women in the gaming world, grew into a   
   full-blown online troll onslaught, and eventually became a   
   blueprint for recruiting mostly young men to the burgeoning alt-   
   right. The Ghostbusters backlash was also perpetuated largely by   
   a violently vocal minority and took some of the same shape as   
   Gamergate, particularly in the ways it targeted women and people   
   of color.   
      
   The casting of the film’s four stars — Kristen Wiig, Melissa   
   McCarthy, Kate McKinnon, and Leslie Jones — was declared to be a   
   “SJW” capitulation to “political correctness,” and Jones, the   
   only woman of color in the cast, became the target of a   
   particularly hateful online assault led by self-styled   
   provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos (who was eventually banned from   
   Twitter as a result). Yiannopoulos’s campaign against Jones   
   ultimately reached the point where it became part of the 2016   
   election cycle and a flashpoint in the alt-right’s culture war.   
      
   And that was part of the point; as one Twitter user who spent   
   months relentlessly attacking the Ghostbusters filmmakers and   
   cast proclaimed, “Ghostbusters 2016 is a declaration of a   
   culture war.”   
      
   RELATED   
      
   How the all-female Ghostbusters reboot became a lightning rod of   
   controversy   
   The vicious threats and blatantly racist attacks were clearly   
   the product of the worst parts of Ghostbusters’ so-called   
   “fandom.” The same tactics would be repeated in later assaults   
   on other movies deemed too “political” by the alt-right, which   
   was a not-so-coded way of saying movies that featured women and   
   people of color in lead roles in franchise films they considered   
   to belong to the “true” fans, rather than the films’ creators:   
   Black Panther, Captain Marvel, Star Wars: The Last Jedi, and   
   more. In most cases, the attacks usually happened before anyone   
   had seen the films, prompting review aggregation websites like   
   Rotten Tomatoes to update their policies around audience scores   
   to prevent trolls from artificially deflating scores before a   
   movie’s release date.   
      
   The harm also extended beyond attacks on specific people   
   associated with the movies, by making it nearly impossible to   
   have a conversation about Ghostbusters — or Captain Marvel or   
   The Last Jedi or any other similarly targeted property — that   
   was actually about the movies. Instead of talking about the   
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)