Media is More Fun When You Don’t Waste Time Hating It

It’s a very weird time to be a Venom fan with the current All-New Venom run. I’m genuinely enjoying it, curious to see where it goes, and think there’s some very clever use of language. Two of my favorite symbiotes, Toxin and Sleeper, got some panel time, and there’s clearly something happening there with SCAR. We have Flash as Anti-Venom being put in a position where he has to be in direct conflict with Venom. Dylan’s in a relatively stable and generally loving, non-abusive home for the first time ever, giving him a chance to be a little asshole teenager. I like MJ as a character, and I’m stoked on having a female 616 primary host. I’m not without notes, but I’m having an excellent time. I look forward to getting my new issue every month.
I’m meeting a lot of people in online spaces who hate it. Let they are just relentlessly almost hyperbolically negative.
There’s one contingent that doesn’t like that Eddie’s not the host. I personally don’t really care about that, I guess. The overarching Venom narrative hasn’t been about a specific bond in something like twenty years. And as much as I love Eddie, I adore the Venom symbiote. The Costa run is my favorite run specifically because he opens up the alien’s personality more. So I’m totally okay with explorations of Venom without Eddie. Something interesting always comes from it.
Another group is disillusioned Spider-Man fans who don’t like the current iteration of Mary Jane and would enact grievous bodily harm on Paul Rabin if he were a real person. For me, I haven’t read the mainline Spider-Man books since before Civil War, so I’m really only caught up in a sort of abstract way with events since One More Day. The “Paul” story and how that all came to be actually sounds genuinely interesting, and I’m currently reading volume 6 to catch up with the story. And while I, like everyone else, am not overly fond of how the transition from Civil War to One More Day and its aftermath has been handled, I’m not really personally affronted by it because I have some intellectual and emotional distance.
And I have to be very clear that I’m not saying my opinion is right or and others are wrong. Opinions are subjective. That’s the point. Rather I’m just trying to frame-up some context for my specific view on the narrative and why I feel the way I do.
As the years progress, I’m in this kind of crosswind a lot. Part of it is how loud blanket negativity is compared to nuanced critique. The other part is a feeling like I’m just not interacting with certain media the same was as other people in a fashion that I can’t pinpoint.
I can’t be the only who experiences this, but I find myself very very aware of it lately. Part of it is being more involved in comics. Like this is a very easily angered group of people, so you’re going to see a lot of bitching. Another place I noticed this, though, was when I was involved in BookTok. Just saw a lot of people spending a lot of time on books they despised and only occasionally in a constructive review capacity. A little bit of “this is why I gave this book two stars,” but a lot more “top ten books I hate” with very little additional useful critique. And quite a bit of “I hated the last five books I read.”
I feel like there’s two layers of things happening here. The first is just lack of familiarity with the medium. This is what I saw on BookTok and continue to see in some of the my other genre reading groups and forums. People new to books or a specific genre as an adult, and they just don’t know what they like, yet. So they end up stumbling into books they were never going to like, and think “oh, I just don’t like sci-fi” when, no, they just need different sci-fi. I think if you’re in that situation you’re teachable. You just need more experience in the medium.
The part that makes me feel like I’m living sort of just next to reality, though, is that it is extremely rare that I actively hate a piece of media. It takes a very specific set of circumstances for me to go from “I don’t care for this” to “fuck everything about this.”
It starts with the fact that I generally know what I like, so I’m not often getting into situations where I don’t know what to expect. The second element is that I can generally find something enjoyable about whatever it is I’m consuming even if it doesn’t meet some other arbitrary standard set by the community.
The Bendis run of Moon Knight, for example, is something I recognize as being very not Moon Knight in terms of character and pre-established lore. It is not something I would ever recommend to a new reader of the character. I still enjoyed it immensely for what it was. It was entertaining. There’re a couple of comic writers I feel that way about.
As an adult, if there’s something I don’t like, I stop consuming it. It never gets to the point that I hate something because the instant there’s any kind of negative response I just…stop…Or if I do happen to finish it for whatever reason, I just never really think about it again.
And I think that connects into my entire ethos. Namely, actively hating something takes energy, and I don’t have that to spare. I don’t have the time to sit in a subreddit complaining about a story beat in narrative I have no control over.
It just makes fandom more fun when you just ignore the stuff you don’t like and focus on the stuff you do. It genuinely makes things so much better.