Just Your Typical Fanboy

Anonymous asked: In regards of "pissing off" and "driving off" the fans, don't you think there are some fandoms for which it's the same? For example Runaways fans - when Arena/Undercover were going I've seen much more of them getting mad and simply giving up on the books and announce they won't touch any comics that treats them as canon (some of them are only now coming back to buying Marvel at all, thanks to A-Force and Battleworld Runaways), that I have seen getting mad and yet coming back for more.

majingojira:
hellyeahteensuperheroes:
brevoortformspring:
I think a pretty clear barometer is that, if a fan feels compelled to loudly announce how they’re leaving, they’re not buying any Marvel books or merchandise any more and instead giving all their money to DC and you’ll be sorry—they’re full of it.
The readers who leave just leave. No outburst, no drama, just a departure. The ones who are still incredibly emotionally invested put on the performance (and then most often continue to follow some or all of the books anyway.)
I have a request to the fans: Reblog this if you stopped buying or refused to buy Arena/Undercover because of how they treated characters from Runaways or Avengers Academy or others that you liked. Tag it “True Fans Don’t Buy Mad”.
What’s funny is, at least by the numbers us fans have available, both what the anon asks and Brevoot describes actually happened. People just dropped the book and never picked it up. There was a loud complaint at the start and at Nico’s death.
But beyond that, no one made a peep. This goes double for Undercover.
Also, his descriptor is overly generalized to what happened in this specific instance. I saw very few who foreswore Marvel during the height of anger. Just that book, and just that writer.
That and there’s a key grammatical difference between “Follow” and “Buy” especially in this day and age. I’m not 100% certain, but I think this specific wording basically allows him to weasel out of the sheer failure of that meta-series (if you disagree with that analysis just ask why Cullen Bloodstone and the other Arena Originals are nowhere to be seen in any of the advertizements of Secret Wars even though characters directly related to them are front and center). Undercover was cut short by 4 issues if you recall. But I think Brevoot has simply developed a defense mechanism to tune out such things, for good and ill.
That anyone actually buys mad anymore is baffling to me. Why would a person spend money on something that upsets them? Maybe this was true before the internet rose to widespread piracy/sharing of information, but today? Hell, are there comic shops that don’t let customers read books in the shop? How does this happen?
But in the end, I am a Runaways fan and refused to buy Arena/Undercover because:
1) I trade wait and analyze what I buy before I put money down.
2) I work at a library so waiting and reading things for free is a long engrained habit.
3) Arena/Undercover failed to live up to my standards for reading worth buying.
Both series almost made me drop comics altogether as a new reader who got started reading Runaways trades. I literally couldn’t make a big show of it since I wasn’t very active on any social media at the time.