With all this talk about how fan culture can bring people together and create something new, something that no one anticipated forming, there is also the critical aspect of fandom that cannot be ignored. Star Wars: The Last Jedi (TLJ) was released in December to worldwide fanfare, but when the reviews came out and people who had long been anticipating its release wrote about it, they mercilessly tore it apart. The consensus across many platforms and according to the worldwide box office profits, is that TLJ was a success. The film garnered attention almost everywhere, and its marketing could not be missed. Despite this, as mentioned before, online reviewers, often long-time fans of the series, declared that this film was horrible, that it was nothing like it should have been.
In this case, we had the nasty side of fandoms and people’s critiques; people have review-bombed TLJ’s IMDb score so that it’s rating is abnormally low, it doesn’t come close to matching the critics’ rating. So, in this case, we have fans who had specific expectations of what the film would be colliding with the reality of the director and, ultimately, Disney’s vision for the series. Some of the critiques have been valid while others rip apart the film for simply not being what the fans predicted.
Looking at it all, it is difficult to say if such a backlash could have been avoided with a fandom as old and massive as Star War‘s. With the previous film, The Force Awakens (TFA), there was similar backlash, although not nearly as much review-bombing. If this will happen with the next and final film of the sequel trilogy is yet to be seen, but the fan activity is still going as strong as ever so it is likely that history will repeat itself.
I see where you’re coming from and agree that fandom is usually either helpful or hurtful to something. For instance, I know many people that are big fans of the artist Drake. While I don’t care what artist they like or not, numerous of the people I know act as if he can do nothing wrong (this certainty isn’t limited to Drake, but he was just the first that popped into my head). Even when his album “Views” was given pretty low ratings, all of my peers claimed it was “fire” and album of the year. I’ll even admit, I do the same sometimes when my favorite artists release an album. I definitely can recognize my initial bias, loving anything and everything that my favorite artists drop at first, but I have tried to stop my fandom from obscuring my sense of quality by not talking about new releases for a couple weeks, when my instinctual appraisal endorphins have worn off. I feel as if fandom would be much more insightful if people had to wait two weeks before talking about something that releases. People would actually have proper formed opinions and hopefully, the hate review spam on IMBD would falter.
I think there is a tendency in fan culture to form opinions based on works as a whole rather than as individual pieces of art, which leads to a lot of internal comparison. While this is necessary for series such as Star Wars, I think fan culture would benefit from taking each work as its own creation before comparing it to expectations and previous works. But, isn’t that the true essence of fan culture, the literacy of this subculture?