The other day I was driving home and listening to sports radio and I guess they had been talking about a trade a team didn't make and the fans were angry. One of the hosts said that the angry fans reminded him of nerds who get angry and become toxic because their fan theories didn't come true. I couldn't have rolled my eyes any harder.
Just brought back memories of all the moronic critics when The Last Jedi came out. It wasn't enough to simply say they enjoyed the movie, they had to crap on everyone who didn't and Disney being Disney went along with it. I remember hearing the "you're just mad because your fan theories did come true" or "You just wanted to see a heroic Luke" I remember asking someone who said those exact things why it was a bad thing to want to see a heroic Luke. They didn't respond.
This also popped up in Game of Thrones with Arya killing the Night King and people getting called sexist for saying that it should've been Jon.
I guess in hindsight this exposed all the media shills for what they were. Anyone who was actually interested in the IP would know that fan theories have been around in nerdom since the beginning. Anyone who actually cared about the IPs would know this, but this is what happens when a site/channel that was made to cater to fans is bought out by a corporation and gets re-staffed with a bunch of hacks. Sci-Fi Channel and the Star Wars websites I would frequent in the 90s and early 00s come to mind.
Well, he's not entirely wrong. Shippers go absolutely ballistic when the ships they theorized and argued about online for years and wrote endless fanfics for don't pan out. One only needs to look at the abuse Adam Driver got to see what I mean, not only for his character not hooking up with Rey, but for him not hooking up with Daisy Ridley in real life, despite the fact that he was married and had a child underway at the time. But since they're always a combination of autistic, female, lefty, alphabet, and self-proclaimed alphabet ally, they're just conveniently ignored.
Let's also ignore the fact that there were no "fan theories" concerning the Star Wars heroes' fates; there was an entire expanded universe that said all there was to say about them that people generally really liked. Then Disney omitted all that and replaced it with a shoddy film trilogy that turned Luke, Leia, Han, and everyone else into losers whose accomplishments amounted to jack-all. Of course people are going to get mad when you take away something good and substitute it with something godawful.
One point of fairness I'll give to this is that it's the only important thing Arya actually does in the entirety of the series. Her story is otherwise completely isolated from everyone else's and never has an effect on the larger world until that point. However, that doesn't justify her killing the Night King; it just goes to show how the showrunners never had a clue what the point behind her character was, and possibly by extension, neither does Martin.
I liked Arya. I think it would’ve been cool to have Jon and Ayra fight the Night King together. I do believe that part of the downfall of Game of Thrones was the girl power push at the end. You don’t have a collision course between Jon and the Night King only to subvert expectations. Also I give Martin most of the blame.
I never understood why those shippers never received the same hatred that we did for not liking Last Jedi. I got downvoted on Star Wars Reddit (haven’t been there in years now) for saying the EU did much better job with Han/Luke/Leia.