The Hypocrisy of Fanboys

If there's one thing that really pisses me off about the internet, it is the ubiquitous presence of the ultimate scum of the universe - the modern fanboy. 

And while I'll mainly be talking about movie adaptations, I think a lot of this idea I have can spread across other platforms. 

For the uninformed, a fanboy is someone obsessed with some form of media, usually a video game or comic. And I only say obsession because that is the only word in English to describe their behavior. It's much worse than that unfortunately. I'll have to make up a new word. They are obsedeadarded. This is a clever amalgam of obsessed + deadly + retarded. Obsessed because they need whatever gets them wet, deadly because they would literally kill for the thing, and retarded because it's usually over something trivial like a video game or a comic. 

If that is not reason enough to hate fanboys, there is more. There is the Hypocrisy of Fanboys to be had. 

So fanboys are obsedeadarded over comics and/or videogames. To the average person, media is something that is to be consumed in one way or another - video games are to be played, comics read, movies viewed. They are to be enjoyed, with the possibility of having some longer lasting impression. It may even be considered art. Plenty of comics have risen to the level of high art in our post-modern world. The evidence for this is the explosion of comic book and video game movie adaptations. Ten or fifteen years ago, any regular guy who claimed to read comics would be immediately ostracized and possibly stoned. But then X-Men came out, it became cool to be into it. Good. 

Now enter fanboys. Where as a normal person can read a comic or watch a movie or play a game and say, "You know what, maybe this is more than just a game. Maybe it has some kind of significance", a fanboy will say, "This is the end-all-be-all of comics. This is the Alpha and Omega. This is my new God." 

Fanboys put things on pedestals. Batman is no longer just a comic but something to be deified. And any deviation from the source material, the thing that made it so powerful to them, is the anti-christ. It must be burned, purified, or in some way destroyed. 

Just look at the IMDb boards for Frank Miller's The Spirit adaptation. 

So fanboys deify whatever it is they love and consider it high art and they worship everything about it. And here's the hypocrisy: they are just consumers on crack. And art is not something that we aggressively consume. Well it is, but not in the purest sense of it and that's how fanboys see what ever it is they obsess over. Sure you can buy a print copy of the Mona Lisa for $10 but the original, which ostensibly looks the same, is priceless. And that's what fanboys do. They obsess over the Mona Lisa and buy a print copy and hang it on their wall. If you really think about it, it kind of loses it's meaning. 

The thing that they consider art and important is really just something that they buy, consume, and repeat. It's still all about feeding the masses. All those thousands of Will Eisner fans are bashing The Spirit remake for deviating from the source material but those same people will be lining the theaters opening day to see it. 

The main differences between a normal person and a fanboy is the license to hate something before they actually consume it and the speed and quantity of consumption. They can judge a movie from a trailer because they have devoted their lives to the source material. And while they say how much of an abomination it is before and after they see it, they still see it. It's the addiction. 

The fanboy also feels that movie adaptations, because it is crossing into new territory, should be very strict to keeping with the source material. What it really comes down to, in their minds, is consumer respect. They feel that because they have devoted and invested themselves so deeply into the comic or video game, the adaptations should respect them. But they don't and they don't have to. This is what really upsets the fanboy. They average consumer isn't looking for respect though, they are just looking for something to fill the consumer appetite. So they won't get bent out of shape because Denny Colt's suit isn't blue. They don't care. 

And this brings me back to my original point - fanboys are just consumers on crack. They need to be fed. But most of the time they aren't satisfied because of this feeling of disrespect. The art that they saw in the source material is gone because movie studios don't really need to satisfy a consumer's respect, only their appetite. They are in it for the money, not to make people happy.

So in a nutshell, being a fanboy means living an empty existence from never being satisfied by the thing that you have devoted your life to and having to sit through movies that you knew from the beginning you weren't going to like.