written by @Ceilidhann, originally published on Bibliodaze May 31, 2016. Reprinted with permission from the author.
I don’t read the Captain America comics. Indeed, I’ve pretty much fallen off the Marvel wagon this past year or so due to general fatigue with the oversaturation of superheroes in pop culture. It doesn’t really do much for me these days, and the recent news that Captain America in the comics would be revealed as a stealth Hydra agent exemplified my exhaustion with the genre and a particularly insidious strain of storytelling. Others have spoken more passionately and eloquently about the nastiness of this trend and the way real and incredibly painful history is used to create cheap shock value, so I’ll direct you to those pieces.
My particular focus today is with a piece Devin Faraci wrote on the issue of fan entitlement on Birth Movies Death, which you can find here. For the record, I’ve never been a Faraci fan. I’ve found many of his arguments sloppy and the ways in which he attacks people who disagree with him to be sad at best and creepy at worst. This article, which posits a generally agreeable hypothesis regarding the toxicity that has begun to pervade that vaguely defined space known as “geek culture”, draws a staggeringly inaccurate and willfully blind false equivalence to the fan opposition to Hydra Captain America and the orchestrated misogynistic hate campaign currently faced by the new Ghostbusters film, of which I’ve previously written about here.