Let’s Be Friends Based On Mutual Hatred

I stole that line from Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim and the Infinite Sadness, but it’s a line well worth the theft.

I’ve been telling people for years that having mutual interests with your friends is nice, but there’s something unbelievably satisfying about having mutual hatreds. Think about it: You talk about your favorite movie with your friend, you quote all of your favorite lines, you remember the first time you saw it, and then that conversation is more or less done. But when you HATE the same film, the conversation can go on forever. There are an infinite number of decisions that would have made the movie better. You can spend years searching for the exact analogy that captures just how terrible that film is and how it wronged you.

I find myself thinking a lot about a subreddit called r/freefolk, which dedicated itself to joyously mocking the final season of Game of Thrones. As a once-beloved show self-destructed in front of millions of fans, keeping up with r/freefolk was more entertainment than the end of a show I’d been invested in for nearly a decade. I can’t be clear enough how thorough they were in demolishing the choices in that last season. They flayed it. They spared no quarter. Below is the least spoiler-y post I could find, but one that summarizes the feelings perfectly.

This, to me, was the perfect evidence of what I had been saying for years: Hatred bringing people together for great fun. And of course, by hatred I here mean trivial hatreds/frustrations. I’ve lived in America long enough to know how dangerous hatred towards groups or ideologies can be. But for piling on to an offending piece of fiction, why not?

Cue ominous music. Last year, I found r/thelastofus2. The Last of Us is a massively popular, award-winning game (reviewed here). Its sequel is also a massively popular, award-winning game, but one that ended up becoming incredibly divisive for fans of the first. r/thelastofus2 is… similar to r/freefolk. It’s similar in purpose, anyway. The users feel let down by a franchise they cared about, and wanted a place to voice that frustration and riff on decisions they didn’t like.

The cultures of the two communities, though, are wildly different.

r/freefolk, for example, went on to support their numbers to raise money for charitable causes important to the actors and celebrating those actors even though they were let down by the final product. Big example here: https://www.reddit.com/r/freefolk/comments/but28k/freefolks_you_made_it/

r/thelastofus2 recently blew up over a user sending fake death threats to himself and accusing a Youtube channel called GirlfriendReviews of inciting their fans to violence. There’s a lot going on with that, better summarized here than I could do by myself: https://www.newsweek.com/girlfriend-reviews-last-us-2-reddit-controversy-death-threats-1613848  Even putting aside the strange Reddit user who felt the need to lie for attention, the community is full of people who loudly deny that they take issue with the inclusion of LGBTQ+ and feminist themes and characters in the game, while also dismissively referring to those elements as “trans whatever,” or making fun of the body types of the women in the game. Bad faith criticisms run rampant. It’s popular over there. Hatred tastes good, after all.

This is not a scientific analysis of the communities. Some might say I’m cherry picking, choosing only the biggest headlines for each community, and not doing a qualitative analysis on useful/positive criticism vs. negative/toxic criticism. But as a vibe check, I feel like the evidence stands: there are good ways to hate on fiction, and ways that open the door to the deceit, prejudice, and unpleasantness. Or, to put it another way:

Please hate responsibly.