#only the focal point of the scene in a masterfully animated show written for a target audience of six year olds! grhdfhdvsj

[bestworstcase]

You've mentioned that hatedoms tend to be very similar to each other, if not outright identical across fandoms. What is it that causes them to be like this and so similar to each other?

well. to explain this i think it’s first helpful to lay out why hatedom… exists, because i think that is generally not understood in normative fandom space; what i see happening in a lot of conversations about hatedom is that there is a widespread presupposition that hatedom is kind of a side effect of bullies and bigots lashing out at fans for liking something they don’t, and… that’s a misconception because hatedom is a fandom subculture.

“but farran,” you might be thinking, “hatedom is full of bigoted bullies”—and yes, it is. that is true of fandom across the board and, frankly, the harassment is often mutual. it’s just that trolling hatedom or just being combative and nasty toward people in hatedom is broadly socially acceptable in a lot of fandom spaces and the perception that hatedom is demographically homogenous (white, cishet, male) allows fandom’s bad actors to spin aggression as self-defense by rhetorically invoking identity politics. 

which is not to say that hatedom isn’t ever reactionary or that hatedom doesn’t have a massive bigotry problem—it is and it does—but rather that those things are not unique to this one subculture. it is a Fandom Problem. 

so, with that said, what makes hatedom happen?

it isn’t about not liking something. it isn’t even really about hating a thing. people in hatedoms are… fans, actually. 

specifically they are fans who have reached the natural terminus of fandom’s “fuck canon/yay fanon” culture. this is actually the main reason i tend to get somewhat acidic with the anons i get sometimes kvetching about hatedom rewrites and the like, because… hello? 

inside every happy fan besotted with fanon is an embittered screed just one favorite-headcanon-shattering narrative turn away from getting out. it is the same. mindset. bifurcated solely by whether the preferred fanon resembles the real story enough to believe the fanon is real. 

this is why hatedom is disproportionately populated by shippers of torpedoed ships and hardcore believers of popular fan theories that flopped. (and once you notice this, perusing fandom tags and blogs becomes a fun exercise in forecasting the hatedom.)

anyway the point of all this being that hatedom arises when there is an irreconcilable break away from popular fanon in the actual text. when ships get sunk, popular fan theories get jossed, or the narrative status quo is changed, it’s really common for fans who were deeply invested in that ship or theory or paradigm  to pivot to hatedom because the emotional attachment they have to the story and characters doesn’t go away, it just hits an immovable obstacle and ricochets off in a new direction. 

again, fans do exactly the same thing at a lesser intensity. fix-it fic. headcanons of omission, ie, “i know x happened in canon but i don’t like it so i am choosing to pretend it didn’t, actually.” the entire sentiment that fandom itself is about stripping a story for spare parts to write bespoke au fic tailored exactly to suit the fan’s preferences. 

what distinguishes hatedom—& this is getting to the answer of your actual question—is that in hatedom the “fuck canon/yay fanon” principle is applied in the context of that irreparable breach opening between canon and fanon. in normative fandom spaces, the popular fanon kind of gets superimposed with the text in a manner that allows them to blend together, hiding any small discrepancies. that isn’t possible in hatedom because the discrepancies are always so large.

inevitably what that leads to is this feedback loop where the hatedom develops its preferred fanon through a combination of fanworks, meta-posting about why the fanon would have been better or should have been what happened instead, and cherry-picking whatever bits and pieces from canon people in the hatedom happen to like.

(which is how all fanon develops, yes.)

over time, it’s the meta-posting about the preferred fanon that causes hatedom to dissolve into the vindictive nitpicky circus. no matter where you go in fandom, there is always a huge social incentive to keep coming up with new things to talk about. obviously. in normative fandom spaces a lot of that is generated by excitement and joy and just a desire to spend more time with the story and share what you think and kick fun or interesting ideas around. but in hatedom, the passion binding these fans together is estranged from canon almost completely and the group identity is predicated on this really intense disappointment that the preferred fanon got left in the dust. 

so hatedom is fundamentally driven by a powerful social incentive to keep coming up with new reasons why the preferred fanon is better. that pushes the fanfic away from au and into spitefic territory, leaches nuance out of the discussions, encourages nitpicking and angry screeds. eventually it hits a certain critical mass and tailspins rapidly into bullshit because (and this is the key) people in hatedom are fans. 

as in, most of them like the stories they’re ripping apart. they largely do not actually have any deep problem with the story because they are fans having extreme reactions to disappointment. so they talk shit and nitpick and make melodramas out of molehills and sometimes fling bizarre identity politics around to either legitimize nonsense Story Bad arguments or score imaginary points in altercations with normative fandom. 

if that all sounds familiar, yeah. lmao

i will close with an anecdote to illustrate the broader point. 

once upon a time i made a snarky little post about an extremely stupid ironwood take i scrolled past while blogwalking. somehow or another that ended up in front of one of the BNFs of rwby’s hatedom; he misinterpreted my point (because it was a vague snarky paragraph) and wrote a fairly harsh response based on that misinterpretation. there were several followers of mine in the notes kind of signaling an expectation that i was about to receive a barrage of harassment over this. 

i responded by:

clarifying that i didn’t mean the (genuinely awful!) thing he thought i was saying

indicating that i understood how/why he’d read the post that way and no hard feelings

elaborating in detail on what i did mean and why i thought that

and what happened?

the dude apologized for jumping to conclusions and being so caustic off the bat, then explained his own opinion and the thought process behind it. and that was that. the number of hostile angry anons i received was zero. the number of inane bad faith reblogs i got on other posts afterwards was zero.

now this is a basic, basic deescalating tactic but it’s also really illustrative of what i’m talking about when i say that hatedom isn’t motivated by a desire to bully fans  out of fandom because if it hadn’t been for the handful of people in the notes going basically, “oh no! it’s him! brace yourself!” i wouldn’t have known the guy was a hatedom BNF at all. his initial response to me was indistinguishable from the tantrums the dadpin people or that one penny truther throw in my inbox every now and then and frankly he was a lot more reasonable and mature about our differences of opinion than them once the misunderstanding was cleared up. 

like…

i’m not conflict averse at all. anyone who’s been following me for any significant length of time knows that, lmao. but i do try to lead with reasonable and presume good faith until proven otherwise and the thing is? that shuts down hatedom aggro fucking instantly. because people in hatedom are just… fans, really. fans who are usually pretty stoked to be treated like fellow fans instead of the enemy and will usually make an effort to rise to the occasion. 

and once you grok that hatedom becomes really quite simple to understand; the homogenous pan-fandom slurry of inane bullshit happens because fundamentally most people in hatedom like the story but rode the “fuck canon/yay fanon” train all the way to its very toxic and unpleasant last stop and now they’re kind of… stuck there trying to shout the cognitive dissonance away. most of them would be 1000% happier if they hopped the fence back to fandom and went “here’s my wish fulfillment power fantasy au fic that i’m writing for a target audience of Me” buuut there are a lot of social and emotional headwinds against that. 

so instead they make up wildly entertaining bullshit reasons a story is bad like “the animation is ugly” and “it’s bad writing not to explain how [completely mundane everyday thing that children can understand, like haircuts or the concept of money] works” and “how could the disney princess show have monarchy in it?!/how could the fairytale show have fairytales in it?!” and so forth. it just gets sillier and sillier forever.