If that is the only thing being yelled at the screen, then it does bother a little me. I bet if I yelled out snarky things during Six Feet Deep that the reaction would have been quite different (maybe next time I’ll try, “Co-dependence kills!”, just for science ;-)). I think who was being heckled is intimately entangled with the fan reaction and condoning of that heckling.
(I wonder how much of that is related to the way fandoms have become hyper-sexualized. Dawn is under-aged and it would be creepy for adults to fancy her, so she’s a safe target for heckling. Whereas if I heckled Giles, Spike or Willow, the people who would be most likely to jump to their defense are the people who are invested in them as romantic objects.)
As for the totally unacceptable treatment of the young fan, I feel like my generation of fans and slightly older sometimes feel snottily superior to both characters and fans under 20, mostly out of defensive “well I’m not like that (*cough*anymore*cough*)” than any real problem with those characters. We conveniently forget how annoying Buffy, Zander and Willow were in season 1, because back then we were those kids.
I see it too in the anti-Twilight stuff. “Vampires Don’t Sparkle!” ignores that we were reading Ann Rice and all the old horror fans were saying “Vampires Aren’t Romance Novels!” Even the patronizing “but she’s a terrible role model!” stuff about Twilight bugs me, because A) I was into Phantom of the Opera, and at least Twilight isn’t pedophilic and B) How many people still defend Heinlein? And the “but she’s subtly pitching disturbing messages about gender roles!”, Orson Scott Card was a favorite on the con circuit for years after I read The Homecomming Saga.
Fandom has splintered and changed, and I don’t think we’ve necessarily handled the transition well. Often telling a fan the character they like sucks in public fan forums seems to be about drawing the lines of who is part of the “in” crowd and who isn’t, rather than actually about discussing the works.
Of course, this isn’t the first time fandom has hit one of these points. There was the dismissed books to Star Trek transition, and the Star Trek to general media transition, the goths who loved Neil Gaiman, the addition of Anime, AD&D to Magic The Gathering, and now we have The Big Bang Theory as the highest rated sitcom in the country. The worst thing we could possibly do is circle the wagons and tell all the kids who want to imagine a different world that they have to imagine only the worlds we approve of and live in our nostalgia. The best thing we can do is realize that fandom was never just about genre; it was about an attitude of exploration, of acceptance of people regardless of faults, a place where true outsiders were welcome, not just petulant teenager boys (of any age) who feel so persecuted because they only get to play 3 hours of video games a day and don’t get the access to women’s bodies they feel they deserve.
When I first found fandom, it was a place where the guys who hit on me were shunned by the people who were interested in what I had to say. It was the first place where I learned to accept physical contact because people always asked, only ever offered and gave really good backrubs that weren’t about sexual anything. We were a shaggy crowd of people trying to defy society. The best way to protect our spaces is to keep being ourselves; normal people will leave again. It is not to police people around us, but to focus on what we think is important for ourselves. The whole point is that other people ridicule us for caring so deeply; if we ridicule others for caring we are no longer fans.
Because the truth is that fandom should never be about how few people loved the things we love, or finding other people who love exactly the same things we love; it is about how deeply we love our own fandoms. It is about considering questions other people dismiss as frivolous, and caring deeply about things other people don’t. “Toughen up” is the antithesis of fandom; she should love the heck out of Dawn. I am continually amazed by the hypocrisy of people who will get worked up over whether or not Han Solo shot first calling other people too emotional or thin-skinned.
[/soapbox]
knightofsummer 