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By David Futrelle
The movie review-aggregate site Rotten Tomatoes has made some changes to its website that will prevent angry trolls from talking shit about movies none of them have seen, removing the ability of anyone but professional critics to review movies that aren’t out yet and shutting a feature that allowed users to report whether or not they want to see a movie that’s about to come out.
It was clearly a response to an organized downvoting campaign against Marvel and Disney’s upcoming Captain Marvel movie, which has angered the internet’s angriest men because it features a woman — Brie Larson — in the titular role. Trolls had apparently managed to push the film’s “want to see” rating down to 27% before the feature was disabled.
As Collider points out, this is hardly the first time angry dudes have tried to tank a movie at the box office with mass downvotes.
Over the last couple of years, it’s become commonplace for “fans” who have yet to see a movie to enact a negging campaign designed to bring down the film’s audience scores prior to release. The Ghostbusters “fans” did this by downvoting the trailer for Paul Feige’s female-led reboot [and] Marvel Studios “fans” intentionally tried to tank the Rotten Tomatoes score of Black Panther … .
Naturally, the trolls are pissed, and many have taken to Twitter to denounce Rotten Tomatoes for allegedly taking away the First Amendment rights of ordinary, hard-working Americans by preventing them from crapping on a movie they haven’t seen on one privately-owned website:
Indeed, the critics charge, the Rotten Tomatoites are apparently destroying democracy itself.
But what else would one expect from the gang of beta cuck feminazi fascist assholes who run Rotten Tomatoes?
According to this self-described Jordan Peterson fan, the “fucking fascist dictators” at Rotten Tomatoes have taken away his right to tell the world that he wants to see a different movie, although he has in fact told the world this in the very tweet in question:
The powers that be at Rotten Tomatoes are apparently a rather unique breed of Nazis in that they are also liberals:
They are also, apparently, fascists who hate white men. (Which would be sort of a new twist for fascism, I have to say.)
This fellow, with a Covington Kid avatar and zero followers, is also very much concerned about the rights of white men:
As is this fellow with nine followers:
And this lovely fellow with five followers and an Elon Musk avatar:
Evidently Rotten Tomatoes is not only racist against whites but also racist against everyone who isn’t white:
The brave free speech defenders made sure that their own personal free speech was filled with all the right angry internet dude buzzwords:
Other commenters leaned heavily on the slurs:
Some even made up their own slur just for the occasion, combining the name of the actress playing Captain Marvel (Brie Larson) with the old favorite “retard.”
Some of the criticism got weirdly specific. For example, these critics are angry that the people running Rotten Tomatoes are evidently too enthusiastic about performing oral sex:
As a result of Rotten Tomatoes’ actions, at least two white MALE asses will not be attending the movie.
This white man, thinking ahead, apparently plans to boycott a completely different Marvel movie coming out later this year:
Meanwhile, the same people who insisted they didn’t organize the mass-downvoting of Captain Marvel have evidently decided to organize a mass-upvoting of the movie Alita: Battle Angel — I guess to prove that angry manbabies don’t hate all superhero movies centered around women, at least not if the women in question have weird huge cgi-ed anime eyes.
So far these newly minted Alita superfans have pushed the Rotten Tomatoes audience score rating for that film up to 94% — a considerable improvement from the 59% score from critics.
So sad that these thoughtful critics and their assorted sockpuppets have been denied their sacred right to voice their opinions about a movie none of them have ever seen, at least on one particular site out of the gazillions of sites on the internet that would like its audience rating scores to actually reflect the views of the audience and not of angry mobs of woman-with-normal-eyes-hating trolls. I can only hope that free speech somehow manages to survive this assault.
I hate fucking hater haters. Hate is only hate if I’m allowed to hate the hatred of hate. I hate it when haters hate to allow my hate to perme… uhhh… hate the hate. Fuck you fucking fuckers! We hates you!
Good gravy. These losers are still using ‘NPC’ as an insult?
And they say only the right can ‘meme.’
Didn’t these same chucklefucks also screw with the ratings for Wonder Woman and A Wrinkle in Time? Both female-led, of course, and the latter full of WOC to boot.
@Surplus
And Antman and the wasp because one of the main characters was a woman. I once saw a rant from a guy who wrote like a 3 page paper because the movie poster of Antman and the wasp had the wasp in front of the Antman. Never mind she’s a woman and shorter then he was so that’s how photographing works for that.
Wow. Get a load of this guy who’s heroically seen a bunch of blockbuster movies. What a sacrifice! He deserves a medal for this amazing feat. And this is how Disney/Marvel repays him!? They have a single female centered movie after several years of fans clamoring for one? Bastards!
Pour one out for this brave and put upon soul
I like Alita for what its worth 🙂
Hey, those two white MALE asses have identical tweets, except for an errant space that makes the lines break differently. Copy-pasting identical screeds? Why, they almost sound like… NPCs? (dun-dun-DUNNNNNNN!)
More specifically, Russian bots.
Meanwhile, there seems to be a kerfuffle brewing connected to the Covington privileged-little-gits harassing Nathan Phillips. The latter has been accused of being a fake vet by some d00d whose YouTube account has apparently been yanked. There’s a lot of right-wing hand-wringing and tears about this, natch, but I’m having trouble finding a balanced (or left, for that matter) article about this — the first few Google hits are all obvious right wing propaganda: a right-wing tabloid, a Gamergate site, Fox News, and (speaking of Russian bots) RT were the first four. Those were followed by blogs and Reddit results, all likely right-wing based on the host (when Reddit) or the blurb. Nothing center or center-left.
Is it a nothingburger, hence the lack of coverage outside the right-o-sphere?
OK, how do I load a 100%-up-to-date copy of a page around here? I keep being stymied when trying to catch up by being served copies that I know are stale, usually because the “Recent Comments” section is missing a comment that I know exists because I’ve seen and read (if not wrote) the comment in question. Shift + reload does NOT seem to get me a fresher copy in such cases. It’s slower, as if it is reloading everything from the server and bypassing caching as it should, but at the same time I still get a stale version of the page proving that it is NOT actually bypassing caching.
How do I force a load that is 100% fresh and up to date down to the last byte, embed of any kind, etc.? Using current Firefox x86_64.
Nobody tell these fanbrats about Darna–a superheroine (of color at that!) who’s been headlining feature films in the Philippines since 1951.
Don’t worry fellas ,you’ll still be able to post negative reviews without actually seeing the movie once it comes out so you plans to destroy the one female lead marvel movie out of over a dozen isn’t completely halted.
Of course it is. Why would you imagine othwrwise?
I heard that Alita was going to “destroy SJWs” or something. I’m not really seeing it. I mean, all of the scenes with CGI warrior cyborgs each had, like, one token female cyborg who wasn’t Alita, and the main characters who weren’t villains were white or white-coded*, so maybe that’s what they were talking about, but otherwise it wasn’t particularly anti-feminist.
*I’m not sure if Alita herself is supposed to be white or east asian or what within the context of the film. Or even if it matters much, since her eyes are really big and her skin is artificial.
And she is originally from Mars .
Long time lurker, 1st time poster. When will these man baby snowflakes realize that not everything is about them? And when will they go their own way?
Screaming fascists screaming about what fascists RT are for not letting them scream and be fascist all over their site.
The mind boggles.
Even by MRA\Alt right standards them pretending to not understand the semantic difference between “I don’t want to be interviewed only by white men” and “I don’t want any white men to see this film” is staggeringly stupid. It is the best example of bad faith I have seen in awhile.
Surplus – The Guardian had an interview on Philips in January. There had indeed been some miscommunication – he “only” served in the military during Vietnam. (Big deal, I know.) Apparently, his social circle never cared about the distinction, which is why he didn’t make it clear.
@Surplus
I kind of suspect that the 5-minute edit window is interacting weirdly with the recent comments list. Also, being on a page with a url that ends with /#comment-xxxxxx seems to also cause issues with loading recent comments. Try waiting for the 5 minutes for the recent comments list to update and try being on a page not linked to a specific comment for best results.
@Snowberry
I don’t know anythign about the source material, but the movie Alita itself has a fairly feminist message. Alita rejects the expectation of her adoptive father to be basically a peace-loving nurse (a very normative role for a women) and instead chooses to follow her instinct and become some sort of freedom fighter/bloodsport athlete (a very abnormal one). She’s also shown not to be the only female cyborg to be part of their elite commando as its leader is also a woman. I think Alita makes a good case to represent some ideals of the cyberfeminism school of thought.
What is “facisim”?
@Surplus Try CTRL+F5. It’s supposed to ignore the local caching. If it doesn’t help then the admin of this blog needs to check server side caching rules whether they prevent posts and comments to update in real time and serves cached versions.
I often read (here, mainly) this call to the 1st Amendment revokation, but i never dug a bit to see what this amendment says. So i look a bit on wiki.
Well, first, i do not really understand why it is called first amendment ? On wiki, there is something called a bill of rights in which the freedom of speech is just a few words in the third article (not the first). Does this mean the third article is in fact the first amendment to the article 1 and 2 ?
Second, the third article speaks about the Congress being not allowed to pass laws prohibiting the freedom of speech (among other liberties). Does that mean that the Rotten Tomatoes site is part of the Congress and can edict laws ?
Sorry, i am not good at legislation (even with my own country laws, alas), i probably miss the point somewhere.
The act of eating your SIM card (“faci-“, of or pertaining to the face; “SIM”, subscriber identity module). It can leave you feeling sickafantic.
@ occasional reader
The background to the constitution is complex and convoluted; although interesting if you like that sort of thing.
To over simplify; Congress finally managed to produce a Constitution that everyone could, just about, agree on.
The Constitution itself allows a mechanism where it can be amended.
Amendments are subject to a certain proportion of the individual states and commonwealths etc agreeing to them.
Now there were certain issues some of the anti federalists wanted to be made explicit, to protect state rights.
Not everyone wanted those; but they agreed that if enough states did, then they could use the amendment process to add them to the constitution. So as soon as the constitution was ratified, it was already subject to ten amendments. They were pretty much modelled on the English Bill of Rights, so the name sort of stuck.
The amendments are numbered; and the one guaranteeing freedom of speech is contained in the first one.
Note, it only refers to congress making laws, originally it didn’t apply to individual states.
As to whether the rights only apply to the government, or whether they also bind non government bodies, that is an issue in constitutional law.
Generally, the rights only have ‘vertical’ effect. That means it’s only government infringement that is protected against. But there’s also a concept called ‘horizontal’ effect. That’s where non government actors can be caught within the constitution. The idea being, that if the government allows the rights to be infringed indirectly, then it’s failing in its duty to protect them.
But it’s difficult to see how that would apply to a private company that didn’t have a monopoly.
So yeah, when they bang on about the First Amendment; they are completely missing the point.