The Internet Pessimism Dysfunction

There are two surefire ways to get attacked on the Internet. The first one is to be a woman. Whereas a man can tweet "I had a bagel for breakfast" and everyone will just ignore it, when a woman does the same thing several men will take it as an invitation to make crude sexual comments, and perhaps send her a picture of their personal region. And God forbid if a woman should express an opinion, like "The bagel I had for breakfast was delicious." In addition to the crude sexual comments, her statement will attract the attention of self-important guys who will proceed to mansplain to her that bagels aren't nutritious, and they're not really delicious, she only thinks they are because of her small female brain, and if she wanted to be really smart like them she'd eat whatever they eat for breakfast.

The other way to get attacked on the Internet is to express optimism about something the Internet has already decided will be bad before anyone's even seen it, like the latest DC cinematic universe movie. What the Internet really likes to do is decide in advance that something will be bad, list all the reasons why it'll be bad, and then after it comes out pronounce it to be bad for those reasons even if the finished movie, TV show, or video game doesn't reflect them. Why is the Internet like this? Like many things, it's someone else's fault. Specifically, this guy's:

No, not former NBA player John Salley, but the guy he's holding very uncomfortably by the crotch: everybody's pal George Lucas. Now, George Lucas is an objectively good human being. He donates generously to charity. He says he wants to be remembered, not as a great filmmaker, but as a good father. But he's responsible for a lot of this Internet meanness, because he spent the back end of the 1990s making a experimental little indie movie. You know the one I mean:

In 1999 everyone was hyped for The Phantom Menace. Heck, I spent all of 1999 under a cloud of ever-worsening depression and even I was excited. We all knew it would be the greatest movie of all time. Darth Maul would be the scariest villain ever, there was something called a "pod race" that was sure to be the most amazing and exciting sequence ever seen on film, and we'd get to see young Anakin Skywalker before he became Darth Vader! That Jar-Jar character looked he might be mildly annoying, but he couldn't be any worse than the Ewoks, right? The Internet was in its infancy then, but nobody on message boards and newsgroups even considered the possibility that Episode I would be bad. That seemed farfetched and crazy, like, I don't know, Donald Trump becoming President!

And then the movie was released. And it was . . . not good. although it took most of us a while to realize it. But by the end of 1999 we had to confront the hard truth that the movie we'd spent years hyping ourselves up for and extolling the virtues of was just not that great. George Lucas was the High Priest of Geekdom, and he'd made us look like gushing idiots in front of everybody.

I really believe that the failure of Star Wars: Episode I was a formative event in the culture of the Internet. Sure, every fanbase has always had a lunatic fringe that proactively hated things before they came out; in the early '80s a group of angry Star Trek fans took out an ad in Daily Variety threatening to boycott Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan to protest the death of Mr. Spock. But those folks were always just that--a lunatic fringe. These days, they seem to be the dominant voice in many fandoms. Anyone who dares to express optimism for something these people have proactively decided to hate: the Justice League movie, Star Trek: Discovery, risks being shouted down. 

If you could time travel back to May of 1999, I think you'd see find these same folks enthusiastically camped out in line for The Phantom Menace giddily clutching their plastic lightsabers. I think that the failure of that first Star Wars prequel (and its two siblings) to live up to peoples' hopes and dreams turned some of them into irredeemable cynics. Now it's almost impossible to make a new Superman or Star Trek without attracting an army of proactive Internet haters because these people care about those properties a lot more than they care to admit. They want to like them, but they got burned by The Phantom Menace. And so they proactively hate on them, imagining this makes them look like wise Internet sages who are immune to slick Hollywood marketing.

Sometimes I wonder if some corners of the Internet might be a little kinder if The Phantom Menace had been the magnum opus we all thought it would be during those first few months of 1999. Maybe not. But we'll never know.