Fandoms that aren't terrible? Or fandoms that are less toxic than others?

This has been an interesting past couple of days seeing some incredibly stupid actions of some "hard core fans" of certain TV shows. The news that has gotten the most attention was on October 7, McDonald's was bringing back their long lost Szechaun dipping sauce in select locations for that day only. This was meant to appeal to Rick and Morty fans which in the show's season premiere, one of the recurring jokes is Rick's nostalgic obsession with that sauce despite it being a simple tie in to the film Mulan. Countless Rick and Morty fans lined up at McDonald's stores only to find out that they were all out and Rick and Morty fans created sudo-riots over a freaking dipping sauce.

Then there's this news about home owners who currently live in Walter White's house of Breaking Bad fame putting up a fence to stop Breaking Bad fans from throwing pizza onto their roof and even stealing property to bring home as souvenirs. BB fans thought they were being funny with the pizza just to reference one of the show's scenes, but its an act of vandalism and even Vince Gilligan disapproved big time.

So to try create a positive counter against these tasteless actions by these fans, are there any fandoms out there where the fans generally act decent? I should clarify that when some fan does something stupid, I'm not saying all of that franchise's fans are like that. Its just that the more toxic fans of a certain movie, tv show, games, comics or sports that tend to make poor decisions and gives that fanbase a bad reputation I've thought about some fandoms that either are class acts and here are two that are either good or are not a bad as some of the worst fans.

• Nebraska Cornhusker Football Fans: Listen, sports fans have a long track record of reckless behavior. The die hards have committed riots no matter how their team performs and will get into drunken fights in the stands. Nebraska fans seem to be one of the few exceptions where its a sport fandom that acts decently. Many UN fans load the stadium for games no matter how well the team performs. While the most obnoxious sports fans will call out or insult fans of the opponent, Nebraska fans have been good sports just wishing the opponent a good game. Of course I'm sure Nebraska has its bad eggs, but their fandom is widely considered as some of the nicest in college football. I'd recommend reading this article about their fans, even if its +10 years old.
• Kirby fans: Out of the many different video game fandoms out there, we rarely hear anything bad about Kirby fans. Normally the fans are the target audience who happen to be kids or people who grew up with Kirby and are generally happy with the franchise. They seem to be pleased with the IP going back and forth between traditional platforming and numerous spinoffs. Instead of fans having fierce arguments over their vision for the franchise, Kirby fans seem contempt with how Nintendo has treated the IP. Also Kirby fan art isn't often mocked for sexualizing its characters or forcing romance, like Sonic and Kingdom Hearts. (I don't doubt that horrible Kirby frank exists though)

I dunno, fans of anything that's basically doing fine and isn't very big? It's just people united by liking something. I'm a fan of Kirby, but there's no community or anything that I'm a part of. The best fandoms I've been a part of, as in, I've been on their site regularly or whatever, has always been small. If you've got a couple of hundred or even thousand people following a basically decent person's blog or twitch or whatever and have a mod or two to ban the jerks, those communities are gonna be pretty nice to be in. Even then, you can get one absolute moron or two that ruin the fun for everyone else if they're allowed to stay and worsen the conversation.

Shoutout to Jeff Green's twitch account.

I think all communities that are big enough to matter, have their loci of ugliness. It can be CoD or StarDew Valley, but everywhere people connect will have something that scurry if you turn over enough rocks.

As a kid we stumbled on some old people playing jeu de boule and they were totally fine with us playing along them for a bit.

Jazz fans probably also don't have a solid channel to the mainstream to showcase bad behavior.

Sesame Street? Learning about issues like race and autism in a healthy supportive environment with a fan base that is heavily age 5 or younger, which is the oldest you can be without being completely intolerable about the things that you like.

Earthbound fans seem to be pretty cool. All of my experiances with Starmen Dot Net were nice and FanGamer is a really cool company.

People probably disagree but baring trials of etc the destiny fandom doesn't shit on people as much as the game

Complaining about fandoms is and always will be pretty stupid. Fans aren't controlled by some hive mind.

If you go to the community level, many fandoms are really great. The GB FGC has been living proof of this for sometime, but there's many, many more out there.

Damning a fandom is kind of like damning a country. It's often just too big a population slice to say anything meaningful about.

The Quake 3 Arena: DeFrag commuinity was, for the most part, extremly excellent, lots of fantastic folks and some seriously talented video editors.

Also some Streamers have excellent communities and are very superb to each other.

I also like this community a lot.

I feel that on avarage a lot of communities are actually not so bad, the only not-really-good communities I can think off when it comes to gaming are related to MOBAs.

There are definitely fan bases of some things that are more toxic than others. If you can only call out a group if 100% of it is toxic, then you are taking away the ability to call out a lot of groups.

Even if the Rick and Morty McDonald's thing only involved a small percentage of its fan base, that's a pretty poor showing from that percentage.

Us. Giant Bomb Fans. We rule. Go us.

I think it's a universal law that any fandom that get sufficiently large also gets increasingly toxic.

Rick and Morty is HUUGE right now. #1 comedy on television means its bigger than stuff like Big Bang Theory, which should be impossible. Correspondingly the toxicity levels have shot through the roof. Its not an isolated phenomenon.

@qrowdyy:

Yeah, that's true, but seriously, why the hell does that happen?

I always believe that fandoms where what you made of them.

The DC fans on twitter are doing great rn. Suggesting that a video of Ben Affleck groping a reporter is being pushed by Marvel agents to tank Justice League. Totally blind of the Harvey Weinstein situation and Affleck hypocritically writing a letter condemning his actions.

I'm a Rick and Morty fan and I can barely tolerate the fan base. To not be a fan and see that must be the biggest turn off in the world.

McElroy Brother fans and Giant Bomb fans have been the nicest, coolest fans I've ever seen and interacted with.

I've usually had good experiences with the Sid Meier's Civilization communities I've participated in. Everybody just wants to enjoy a good strategy game. I've found a lot of PC strategy games seem to attract chiller crowds. Except XCOM. People get real touchy about XCOM.

I love the Giant Bomb fan base, I really do, it's the best fan base on the internet, but even we've had our more toxic phases. I think back to the era when Patrick was a member of the team, for example, and I'm glad things are different now.

Of my hobbies, Gunpla (Gundam plastic models) is probably the nicest community. Welcoming to newcomers and not a lot of drama or toxicity. You just build and paint shit.

@htr10: Probably has something to do with how existing fans can't set the tone of a community with the amount of new people coming in.

Also, have you checked your post number? Congrats, i guess :)

@sloppydetective: Relative to DC both the Mcelroys and Giant Bomb have smaller communities. I mean how GB fans are actively involved in the forums/comments? A couple thousand? Maybe a little more?

Regardless, my take on the DC and Rick and Morty situation is pretty simple. Be a fan, not a fanboy.

Edit: Clarification

I feel like the Pen and Paper RPG player base has gotten a lot less toxic in the last few years. That might just be because of the influx of 5th edition newcomers (riding off of stuff like Critical Role and The Adventure Zone) and the shitty edition purists and rules lawyer types still lurk in dark corners. However, at the very least, I feel like the outward facing elements of that community are mostly positive nowadays, whereas I remember a bit more jerkiness back in the 3.5 era.

Star Trek fans? Well i don't know about the reboot fans i guess, but i remember trekkies and trekkers being pretty positive when i was a kid.

@andythemez said:

How many times could that have possibly happened.

Discovery and the JJ Abrams films have shown me (regardless of their actual quality) that just ain't true

There are folks who turn the snobbery ALL THE WAY UP when you discuss these things in any kind of positive way, and these folks are not rare either. Though, that might just be internet effect™ at work

Anyway, to contribute to the thread, I've never had any serious issues with Warhammer fans. They rag on GW pretty hard but seem pretty decent towards each other

Book fans are usually all right until movies or shows are made out of the works. Once upon a time, Tolkien was a joy to talk about in an academic setting. The only book really ruined for me by overenthusiastic fans is Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I liked it well enough until the four hundredth time I heard someone talk about the meaning of life, the universe, and everything.

I still love Rick and Morty, but the way the fanbase is getting obnoxious is making me quite sad. I do feel it's fucking stupid to look up to Rick as a role model, considering how much of a dick and how nearly entirely fucked up and emotionally damaged he is. Sure, he's a compelling character, but almost as much as with Walt from Breaking Bad I've leaned towards Rick beinh nearly a complete douche with faint touches of sympathizing moments.

REM fans are the best, I suppose.

I've worked at a couple of small/medium scale anime and comic conventions and as a result have encountered a lot of fandoms. Out of all of them, the purest in my experience are the people who are really big into Adventure Time. They've never been rude, they're usually just happy to talk to people about their fandom. Of course you'll get the one or two over zealous ones, but I've never seen an Adventure Time fan look down their nose at someone who doesn't like or know about Adventure Time.

@troll93: I used to know some good people who were mostly miniature painters and didn't actually play much. It almost made want to get into painting miniatures too, if it wasn't for my crap vision and the cost.

I don't know about the specific divisions of the McElroy fanbase, but the Adventure Zone fanbase has gotten to some ridiculous levels of entitlement and fervor.

I don't think a fan base can stay good when it starts growing past a certain size. That said, I can't imagine the Prairie Home Companion fanbase getting up to much shitty behaviour. It's not something that can really illicit a lot of emotional response.

People who center their identity around fandom of entertainment drive me nuts. Gaming definitely has toxic communities in spades, but I've encountered them elsewhere. I'm an MMA fan (despite every ounce of marketing/promotion around it) and hoo boy do I stay away from those forums. Same thing with Death Grips; love the music, fans are terrible. People who are that deep in a fandom are in sore need of some hobbies, in my opinion.

I hate the word 'fandom'. I really fucking hate it.

That's all I have to contribute to this conversation.

Every fandom has its assholes, and the larger the fandom becomes the more assholes. For some reason, assholes are a lot more vocal than us decent folk that just like the thing in question. I am a fan of Tool, Rick and Morty, Lord of the Rings and a few other things that Dan Ryckert calls "fucking terrible". If I was one of the toxic asshole fans, I would send him a hateful PM every time he mentions how those things suck. I would make posts on forums saying how fucking stupid he is. I don't, and I don't think he is. Well, there are more and more basic concepts of things he just can't seem to grasp, but he is a cool duder all the same.
My point is, the larger the fanbase, the larger the amount of bad people. And bad people just can't shut up. I probably have been one of those bad people at one time or another. Now I am older and hopefully wiser, so I just try and tune out their noise. It still hurts just a little bit when people call me a fucking idiot for liking Tool, a band that helped me through a very bad time in my life. A bad person for liking Rick and Morty, a show that me and my girlfriend can laugh and have fun watching. A stupid child for liking Lord of the Rings, the series that made me love literature and is now one of the reasons why I have a job I love. At this point I am more tired of people calling fans of anything terrible people. It's also sad that some people can't look past those bad fans, and dismiss the thing in question before even seeing if they like it.

So I'd say you won't find any large fandom that isn't at least part terrible, you just have to look past those people and find the fans that are more like you. Decent fun folk who just happens to like something.

@sparky_buzzsaw I started painting Warhammer 40K miniatures earlier this year, finally feeling I could take the initial cost of a lot of paint and brushes and such. I am never going to play, so I don't adhere to any rules, so I am just having fun assembling and painting badass Space Marines. I also have wonky eyes, and really shaky hands, and it hasn't hindered me that much yet.
If you are interested in trying out painting miniatures, do what I did. Buy one of the Paint Sets that have three easy to assemble minis, one brush and the basic paints you need to make them. Then download the Citadel Paint app to get the basics down. It's a lot of fun!

@troll93: Oh yeah, I failed to mention those videos! Duncan is a lot of help, and almost a must I'd say. I am painting a Dark Angels Gauntlet Tactical Squad, and his video on how to paint Dark Angels was almost on repeat for the first two soldiers. I too take a lot of time painting each one, and I have kinda fallen off now. Too much else to occupy my time. But I did put the finishing touches on this guy while watching/listening to the GBeast Playdate yesterday. Now I just have to learn to take photos of my miniatures so that they look as good as they do in real life... That photo is seriously bad.
Anyway, yes. Watch the videos, use the app. And if you have a Games Workshop store nearby, use them! They seem to be there to help, and the one closest to me (about an hour away, so I am seldom there) has very helpful people.

I'm a dog and I was starting to write something and then I noticed this duder covered everything I was trying to say better than I ever could.

Basically I believe that within all fandoms you'll find some fanatics and if you focus on those fanatics and judge the rest of the fandom accordingly then nobody wins.

Historical wargamers

I'm biased, but Phish fans are the best. Everyone just wants each other to have a great time and are willing to bend over backwards to make sure everyone does. Everyone is really open minded about music and you can have a conversation about almost any kind of music with anyone in the crowd. Plus they have the best weed. Also, nobody talks while the band is on stage. No body is constantly holding their phone up. Nobody is invading other peoples space. All generalizations for sure, but based on my personal experiences.

I don't think I've ever seen a fan base that didn't have it's fair share of assholes. PC community, console community, DC fans, Marvel fans. So on and so forth

The bigger they are the more chance you have you have some bad dudes in it, there's nothing you can do about it.

Board gaming fandom seems alright, at least Boardgamegeek does. Honestly it has more to do with the individual communities than the fandoms per se. Like Giant Bomb is pretty chill, some other websites, not so much.

No such as a fandom that doesn't have its share fair of terrible fans. I suppose Avatar: The Last Airbender fanboys seem to be better behaved, at least when compared to most fandoms I've run across. Not that it's really saying much mind you.

@misterwizz:

https://www.facebook.com/MNightFans/posts/493450070669147

Any fandom that would issue death threats to anyone would definitely be towards the more toxic end of the spectrum.

the idea of a kirby fandom is so fucking weird to me

@takyondg said:

I like MMA, and I've dipped my toes into serious MMA fandom over the past few years, usually when there's a big fight involving people I'm interested in, but I've never quite made the leap yet. And part of the reason why is that few things make me as ashamed to be a human being than to see the opinions of other humans on MMA comments sections. Turns out, an American company that is totally dominant over a mostly international sport (sup, Brazil), a sport that is both insanely technical - which some fans think means boring (sup, Tyron) - and occasionally spectacularly violent, whole dollops of testosterone, steroids, dangerous weight cuts, and people who are just pieces of shit (sup, Bisping), and a growing women's division, one of the champions of which happens to be a Brazilian lesbian (sup, Lioness) is a GREAT formula for a totally toxic fanbase.

Can we create a Hall of Fame somewhere to enshrine shows, sports, and other cultural phenomena that are as renowned for their awful fanbases as they are for their actual quality or importance to the greater culture? Obviously, the most obvious current enshrinee would be Rick and Morty, but off the top of my head there's also Homestuck, My Little Pony, and the bands Tool and (arguably) Radiohead.