Imteresting how every time there’s a pop culture thing that has a particularly large following among young women, the Internet commentariat suddenly becomes Very Concerned about how it is Bougie And Bad

And the language used to express this concern and scorn is markedly different from how they criticize phenomena that are popular with men.
Compare the mockery that Serious Cultural Critics have for Marvel movies with how they deride Hamilton. It’s two vocabularies of contempt.

While these Serious Critics love to shit on Marvel fans, they make an effort to cloak it in criticism of Disney and Hollywood (however half-assed)

No such effort is made when they ‘slam’ Hamilton, Harry Potter, or anything perceived to have a largely female fanbase

It’s jarring, but the pattern has become clear: ‘masculine’ pop phenomena are criticized as symptoms of larger cultural or corporate trends, while ‘feminine’ ones are lambasted as being outlets for women’s frivolity

Like, I don’t have patience for ‘theory’ or English-major criticisms of cultural phenomena. I actually think that a lot of serious gender-related cultural analyses are misguided or even laughable.
But this is so fucking blatant. It’s not even subtext.

Marvel fans are dismissed as ‘brainwashed,’ which is itself dehumanizing, elitist, and gross.
But Harry Potter and Hamilton fans are considered *inherently* frivolous, annoying, and performative.

Back when it was a thing, Game of Thrones was treated with respect despite arguably surpassing HP’s omnipresence at its height and its massive corporate backing. Yet one got approvingly referenced by the commentariat and the other was dismissed with ‘read another book.’

Of course, now those same people are pretending they never liked GOT in the first place. The ‘masculine’ phenomenon gets quietly retired, the ‘feminine’ one remains a punchline.

Hell, this even happens within reactions to franchises. Compare how Cool Online Progressives reacted to Black Panther vs Captain Marvel. Put aside any considerations of what you might think of the quality of either film, but consider the online reaction:

BP was lauded as a cultural phenomenon even before release, and even grotesque racists like the Chapo crowd acknowledged it. The hundreds of millions of dollars Disney put into marketing the film were ignored.

CM, before the trailer even dropped, was mocked by those same crowds for being everything wrong with ‘slay queen’ feminism (a mythical phenomenon that has never been spotted in the wild). Little girls excited for the film were laughed at. The marketing campaign was nitpicked.

And again, this has nothing to do with the quality of either movie. I’m talking about how the Cool Online Kids reacted to them *before anyone had seen either movie*.

Of course, now that Scorcese gave film nerds the go-ahead to be elitist cunts to Marvel fans, it’s acceptable in certain circles to call people stupid for liking Black Panther. But this isn’t spoken in mixed company, because it’s polite to pretend to care about black people.

But even then, that crowd’s scorn for BP circles back, half-assedly, to hand-wringing over Disney and Hollywood. CM, though, was A Dumb Girl Thing from day one.

Honestly, even when criticism for a popular phenomenon is NOT framed in such gendered terms, you can guarantee that anything perceived as A Girl Thing is going to get a big backlash.

And even feminist critics aren’t immune to this! Female characters are always held up to higher standards than male ones in such criticism, and works that feature them in prominent positions are more likely to be scrutinized for failings and inconsistenciesz

Let’s drop a fucking bomb in this thread: if Rey had been a man, each and every fucking one of you who’s been ragging on ROS for months would have either liked the film or at least been ‘meh’ about it. Y’all would have moved on by now if she weren’t marketed to little girls.

This isn’t an early-2010s-Tumblr-style attempt at reducing all criticism of the film to ‘you’re just a sexist.’ This is an observation of how character tropes and story beats are perceived WILDLY differently based on the character’s gender.