Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-1255374-20160227224555/@comment-995426-20160328225859

Zakor1138:

I've given your comment more thought.

I've been a fan of TMNT for more than a quarter century. I've been in various fandoms over my life. And one long hard lesson I've learnt is that, even in the best of times, fandoms are a d&eacute;tente&mdash;many different opinions in diametrically opposed disagreement that have somehow chosen to peacefully coexist. Fandoms can often be beset by these divisions, which may never fully go away.

If you wanted a community of fans united in common broad interest, this could be your place. But if you wanted a community of fans united in common likes, you were likely going to find some of it here, but you were never going to be able to expect that from everyone, even among the otherwise civil and well-behaved. The best you could hope for is a tight circle of similarly-minded friends, but even then there can be no long-term guarantee you'll always like the same things. Debate and disallusionment are both inevitable in fandoms, at least for some of their fans.

I once stumbled over a humorous image on one of the various tropes wikis, which brilliantly highlights and lampoons this kind of discord that tends to arise within fandoms:



It's sometimes called "fan dumb," but the truth is that fans can have very complicated, personal reasons for having the likes and opinions they do. As long as fans can still find a way to disagree calmly and civilly, people can find a way to live with this.

I've been in fandoms with much more bitter divisions, where one side vs. another side boiled over as a holy war. The Star Fox fandom periodically erupted into one of those over the subject of Krystal. Fans could become nasty, and entire online communities could implode from fans being unwilling to coexist peacefully in the same place. One should be thankful that Turtlepedia isn't anywhere near that level of chaos. Polite debate and respectful disagreement in the face of negative opinions are really some of the better results to hope for in a fan community.