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.
This is just a form of gaslighting they use to try and make it out that the problem is you and not them ruining the industries we all care about. It's very much the same meta with games where they try and gaslight people and try to make it out they're just 'growing out of video games' when any one of us who actually likes video games knows you can still pick up a lot of the older games out there and enjoy them like you were five again because that's how good they were. Or given how bad things are now, you could pick up an average game you weren't that keen on back in the day and it's still better than the absolute shite being churned out now.
There was a great video I watched by a guy who did a really detailed break down of shooters and why he thinks they're bad and he brought up this issue of gaslighting fucks as well. The same people doing this are the ones wrecking the industry, alternatively they're normies who don't even have hobbies worth talking about anyway so them passing judgement on nerds is hilarious when you think about it.