Audience negotiation - when fans go bad

When exploring any media product, it is essential to consider the complex negotiation that takes place between the producer, the audience, and the product itself. Producers are keen to use specific representations and modes of address in order to ensure that their audiences decode their creation in exactly the right way. In short, they need to make sure that the audience 'gets it'.

But fans don't always 'get it'. This fascinating article by Emily Nussbaum describes how American audiences showed unabashed appreciation for a racist and sexist character in the sitcom All In The Family, despite the liberal creator's intention of creating a character that poked fun at the very real problems of racism in contemporary America. As the show's popularity grew with precisely the kind of audience the show set out to lampoon, many criticised the fact that in attempting to address racism, the show instead presented racism as 'safe and cute', and allowed audiences to identify with an 'antihero' who they felt spoke for them.

Alan Moore's postmodern superhero masterpiece Watchmen blurred
 the line between hero and villain, and inadvertently created an underground
 following for the reprehensible (yet fascinating) anti hero 'Rorschach

In the 1980's, Alan Moore wrote his comic book masterpiece Watchmen, a 12 issue saga that dealt with racism, abuse of power and the idea of beloved superheros actually being flawed and human characters. One of the most memorable characters is Rorschach, a racist and bigoted character who pushed the very boundaries of even an anti-hero. Moores far left, anti-authoritarian ideology is clear throughout; Rorschach is at best meant to be pitied, at worst there to be despised. And yet Rorschach became an anti hero to a certain type of (usually male) comic book fan, fed up with ideals of political correctness. Despite Alan Moore's intention, Rorschach was now the good guy.

Perhaps the published recent example of the 'bad fan' is in relation to Dan Harmon's animated sci-fi comedy show Rick And Morty. Despite being presented as thoroughly unlikeable and flawed, online fans (again, predominantly male and evidencing right-wing ideology) seemed to identify with protagonist Rick's nihilistic and dismissive approach to the universe, and even argued that the creators had not gone far enough. Creator Dan Harmon chimed in with his clear disapproval of members of his own fanbase:

"These knobs, that want to protect the content they think they own—and somehow combine that with their need to be proud of something they have, which is often only their race or gender. It’s offensive to me as someone who was born male and white, and still works way harder than them, that there’s some white male [fan out there] trying to further some creepy agenda by “protecting” my work. I’ve made no bones about the fact that I loathe these people."

Rick and Morty's success and compelling character arcs has
lead to wild disagreements among its many fans.  

This of course raises the question: who actually owns a media product? By using the uses and gratifications model, we can explore how audiences use and take pleasure from a media product, no matter how unlikely this response may be. However, this can lead to audiences taking an aberrant negotiated reading of a media product that may be in direct contrast to the producer's intentions. In these situations, it could just be that the audience has missed the point entirely. And yet all three examples listed here have been significantly popular in their own mediums, perhaps because of their unexpected, even unwanted audience. 

We strongly recommend checking out this AV club article, in particular the comments section, which presents some excellent examples of other TV programmes which have developed 'toxic fandoms.