I was talking about this with a friend but a really interesting cultural shift over the last ohhhhhh ten years maybe is that many people in fandoms view themselves as stakeholders and not audience members. Because of that, they think that the fandom should be running things, or at least have an acknowledged say in how something is run. And every reminder that they are not in control, no matter how small, bothers them.
This has always existed to an extent but it used to be very siloed and only noticeably prevalent in certain fandoms and everyone else in fandom spaces generally agreed that it wasn’t healthy to act like that. Now it’s seemingly every fandom with an online presence and it’s all happening much more publicly than ye olde Trekkie forum.
I do think that the increase in access to creatives through social media, extended promotional cycles where you do a thousand interviews and all of them get clipped for instagram and tiktok, and an increase in entertainment and fandom aggregate social media accounts which keep people updated on all of those clips and every second of the creative process has had a big hand in creating this sense of ownership that audience members feel. It makes us feel like we’re on the team because we think we know so much. But we are not and we don’t.
