Kulturkampf

[Megamandrn001]

Yeah, it's always a thing in fandoms where the new is despised and eventually a lot of it becomes beloved even if only a niche of it loves it. Star Trek: The Next Generation was absolutely hated, now it's praised as maybe the pinnacle of Star Trek. (With the other option, DS9, also being incredibly and massively criticized at the time.)

It's an easy criticism without having to say anything specific for a "fan" to haughtily declare "they didn't get it." Sometimes it slowly becomes clear that they did get it, the immediate difference that everyone could see was because of how much they did. DS9 got Star Trek and the difference was how this led them to say "what if the ship didn't warp away every week?" Similarly dear to my heart, the Zack Snyder Trilogy has been relentlessly attacked as "not getting [everything]" when I think it's some of the most truly comic book like movies ever done in the genre, it wasn't until Zack Snyder's Justice League where you could see just how much he did get it and everything we were seeing was the setup. A lot of times it feels like these "fans" are the ones who didn't get the original material, something that's quite easy to see on Twitter and elsewhere these days where people who completely missed the point of some straightforward media are always lecturing everyone else about their lack of media literacy. The number of times I've seen someone declaring something like the TRUE Batman or whatever which would require eliminating 90 years of the work related to him or something is truly countless (My favorite is, of course, stuff like MovieBob declaring that the best and true essence of Batman is the goofy kitchy Batman of the 1960's TV series and Batman and Robin film, since that's what he grew up with, while the "dark brooding" violent Batman is a betrayal of the character even though the original 1930's comics have him straight up killing dudes in noir detective stories.)

I despised Mega Man Legends when it first came out, because I was all "Oh, Capcom has this unrelated 3D series it wants to push but can't sell it on its own, so it just steals the Mega Man name and staples it on, cowards". Then the video store I rented games from gave me a copy of it instead of Mega Man 8 and I decided to actually play it and said "Oh, this game actually rules, I'm an idiot, never mind".