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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.
that is not sarcasm.
this right wing stupidity might indeed kill real free speech.
and they will have precisely themselves to blame for it.
Oh, but pay attention, angry white men. It’s way worse than you think it is. What about all the libtard SJWs that haven’t even set up a website that publishes film criticism, never mind removing a previous feature? Aren’t they all robbing you of your First Amendment rights by being too lazy to provide you with a platform? And there are millions of them! It’s a conspiracy!
In all seriousness, congratulations to them. I’m not a comics fan so was blissfully unaware of Captain Marvel until the online chatter after Infinity War. So I didn’t really know enough about the character to get excited. But these entitled numpties have just guaranteed I will be going to see it at the cinema (just as their forebears guaranteed my attendance to see Ghostbusters). Thank you angry white men!
I think it was @Valentin who first pointed this out, but navigating to the main page, and then clicking through from there to the article you want tends to load the latest version.
It does tend to break the edit timer, though.
@Alan Robertshaw already gave an excellent summary of the Bill of Rights, but if you wish to learn more about the USA’s system of government, Laws and Sausages is an ongoing webcomic that is quite accessible.
I wonder if all these freeze peachers are equally offended that Trump is heavily restricting journalism at his summit with Kim Jong Un?
@occasional reader
Alan Robertshaw covered the nitty gritty of it well. I’d only add that the US Bill of Rights is what we call the first 10 Amendments to the Constitution; the Articles are the original Constitution, so the numbering is different: Article 1 outlines the powers and duties of the Congress, Article 2 does the same for the Office of the President, Article 3 for the Judicial system, etc. After that, we get to the Amendments, so the First Amendment is, indeed, Amendment 1.
Also, as has been pointed out, the First Amendment dictates that the government can’t punish you for saying whatever you want to say (with some very specific limitations established by the Supreme Court), but it doesn’t require that other people allow you to use their platforms and publications to distribute your speech.
Which is something that white-wingers…I mean right-wingers don’t seem capable of understanding, at least when it involves conservative voices.
Who would they want to play Captain Marvel? Steven Seagal? Arnold Schwarzenegger? Jason Statham? Do these fuckers want every part in every movie to be played by white men?
At any rate, I’m going to see Captain Marvel with my wife. I’m sure we’ll both enjoy it.
Does anyone know why these folks are so excited about Alita? It seems puzzling. Admittedly, I haven’t seen it yet.
“Freeze Peach” is the right for me to say whatever I wish, including the freedom for me to say “you can’t speak”.
“Censorship” is when anyone whom I say can’t speak is nonetheless allowed to speak.
They’d probably argue, in all seriousness, that Trump’s silencing of the (((MSM))) allows
conservativealternative voices to finally be heard, and so net-net it’s a good thing.Haters gonna hate the upcoming marvel movie is promising. I’ll be watching it with my family. We are solid MCU fans.
I can’t wait to rub their faces in it when Captain Marvel comes out to rave reviews. The manboys hated Fury Road, and Ghostbusters, and Star Wars… and then those movies kicked all sorts of ass!
Or As XKCD puts it
@lady c destroyer of incels
Welcome! And the answer is never.
@Fabe: It’s a great cartoon but for me the real stinger is in the alt-text:
Yeah… it’s not exactly the ringing endorsement the FREEZE PEACH fetishists like to think it is, is it?
@Catalpa:
That shouldn’t even be physically possible. The server never even sees the #fragment part of a URL, under normal circumstances, and the client only uses it to scroll to a specific part of a page.
That’s long enough for an appreciable likelihood for more comments to have been posted in the interim. Not a viable option then when one is trying to get fully caught up. Also what am I supposed to do for those five minutes, sit there in front of my computer twiddling my thumbs and getting nothing done?
I will try the control-F5 to see if it works any better than shift-F5.
The entitlement is nothing short of breathtaking. It’s really telling that these guys can’t fathom that if they personally don’t want a Captain Marvel movie, or don’t personally want a feminist like Brie Larson in the role, then as the perceived end consumers, they should have some form of not just veto power, but publicly visible veto power, something to serve as warning to others that might be thinking of doing something perceived as “SJW.” They have just no capacity to understand that other demographics might be just as large as them and interested in seeing the film, or that the film might have broad enough appeal to satisfy all audiences.
They learned nothing from Mad Max: Fury Road.
It’s odd that these guys are so infatuated with Alita: Battle Angel though. Not being into anime and manga, I know nothing about that work, but reviews said it was alright, but that Alita’s oversized eyes pushed her into uncanny valley territory. The Daily Beast pointed out a trend of Captain Marvel haters praising Alita and a whole bunch of conservative “documentaries” like Dinesh D’ouchebag’s Death Of A Nation. Does Alita’s design or plot satisfy their fanservice needs or something? Do they perceive it as “feminist free” because no Brie Larson? I wonder what the story is there.
I’m just trying to make up some quip about throwing rotten tomatoes at the performer on stage, versus throwing frozen peaches at them.
@Fabe:
As is common with xkcd, the alt-text for that image is worth noting itself:
And yeah, most of the big ‘Free Speech!!!11!!’ types are really just actively engaging in the Heckler’s Veto.
And I see Cat Mara made my comment while I was composing it.
@Surplus:
You’re thinking entirely on the server side; the client could be sending different requests to the server based on the presence or absence of the /#comment-xxxxxx portion of the URL. This is probably especially true because Javascript links so often use ‘#’ as a placeholder for the actual ‘link’ while instead running some Javascript, which means the browser doesn’t necessarily want to do a re-load in case that’s happening.
@Katamount:
There was an article I saw recently (which is on my other computer so I can’t link to it right now) which tied together the level of entitlement seen with Captain Marvel with the recent Kickstarter someone had to digitally remove the rat from the final scene of The Departed in terms of (a loud portion of) the audience insisting that they know the story better than the people writing it.
@Katamount
Speaking as a long-time fan of Battle Angel Alita, I’m also puzzled by the whinebro’s embrace of the movie; neither the movie nor the source material are particularly sympathetic to their worldview. One of the consistent themes in the original run of the manga was about Alita breaking free of the roles that others tried to put her in.
Ironically, in the second run — Last Order — a copy of Alita decides to become male (and renames himself Sechs), and you know the whinebors would absolutely lose their shit over that….
@Surplus
Once again, the correct response when people offer you help and tips is not to yell at them about how inconvenient those solutions are to you.
Well, it’s nothing new that they, for some reason, embrace anime that either contradict their worldview, or even outright denounce it as evil.
A really bad example we could see here a while ago was using an edited pitcure form Kiniro Mosaic for some right-wing twitter shit I think, I don’t remember anymore, except that it was ironic to use KM there. That show’s basically about a japanese and a british girl who are enamoured with each other cultures (and each other, too).
This is ridiculously common amongst them, and I have no idea why.
OT: please enjoy these droll webcomics