Yesterday, WarnerMedia Studios CEO Ann Sarnoff spoke with Variety in a lengthy interview and suggested that Zack Snyder’s era has ended with his version of Justice League completing his trilogy. Hopefully, fans can respectfully accept that WarnerMedia is focusing on new projects and won’t be returning to the Snyderverse anytime soon.
I say this because there is vocal group of toxic fans that have embedded themselves into The Snyder Cut movement and even getting on the radar of Snyder himself. This made waves last week in the blogging community with a charity Zoom event where Zack Snyder had to distance himself from the Alt-Right leaning Geeks+Gamers YouTube channel. The Zoom happened to include three people linked to G+G along with a couple other YouTubers in the Zoom that are equally questionable.
After Snyder’s statement, the G+G channel seemed to be outraged that he would distance himself on their live-stream reaction and this led to one of their cohorts, Ethan Van Sciver, essentially wig-out over it and you can see his comment during the stream below as ComicArtistPro Secrets.
Ethan is actually mentioned by name in the “thank you” section of the credits for Zack Snyder’s Justice League, so he’s not unknown to the filmmaker or The Snyder Cut group. He went even further on his own stream with a horrifying rant about calling upon people to kill Chinese people (this coming soon after the shooting in Atlanta that targeted Asian women) with a machine gun on his own YouTube channel with other people linked to G+G in the chat and one other person agreeing with the violent call-to-arms.
It certainly begs the question why didn’t anyone vet these people as most of them have public personas/channels that could have been looked over by other people if Zack was too busy. Snyder had previously dismissed the “toxic fan” question recently citing the money they had raised for suicide prevention. These are the same people he eventually denounced last week as G+G and Ethan thought raising donations gave them cover to keep being horribly toxic because Snyder had embraced them for the charity stuff.
Well, Sarnoff in the interview with Variety took the opportunity to denounce toxicity in the fandom.
SARNOFF: “We’re not tolerating any of that. That behavior is reprehensible no matter what franchise you’re talking about or what business you’re talking about. It’s completely unacceptable. I’m very disappointed in the fans that have chosen to go to that negative place with regard to DC, with regard to some of our executives. It’s just disappointing because we want this to be a safe place to be. We want DC to be a fandom that feels safe and inclusive. We want people to be able to speak up for the things they love, but we don’t want it to be a culture of cancelling things that any small faction isn’t happy with. We are not about that. We are about positivity and celebration.”
There are already butt-hurt people from yesterday’s news about moving on from the Snyderverse trying to coax fans into boycotting the HBO Max release of Godzilla vs. Kong later this month to send a message to WarnerMedia, which is only going to hurt the people involved with that film including Legendary, who has nothing to do with the current wave of DC Comics projects. It feels like this is only going to get worse now that there won’t be months of speculation about when WarnerMedia announces the next DC project from Snyder.
Boycotts have been a huge thing in both DC and Star Wars fandom from a small minority of people thinking depriving views on streaming services or box office money will lead studios to reconsider certain choices they’ve made as massive corporations.
While most of my own interactions with DC fans has been mostly positive including from those that are keen for the Snyderverse to make a return and have been championing The Snyder Cut. The ones that do stand-out are the people who gang-up and upload targeted harassment from mostly anonymous Twitter accounts. When that toxicity it’s brought-up there are plenty of people quick to dismiss any of that and jump directly into whataboutism instead of sticking to the topic-at-hand.
SOURCE: VARIETY
THE RONIN 