Do Fandoms Need Awfulness?

When an author of a work of fiction has run out of elements that everyone will like, he or she still has the option to put in high-variance elements that some people will love and some people will hate. Could it be that the objects of fandom are just those that went for these high-variance choices?

I find the Animal Farm example funny because it's always seemed to me to be a monumentally dumb and unnecessary work.

More on-topic, I can't speak for others but I really don't think I'm a rabid Tolkien fan because of some cultlike cognitive dissonance over his glaring flaws. I freely acknowledge that his writing is not great literature in any meaningful sense of that phrase. (But this does sound like a really good explanation for Objectivists (okay, and Wagner and Joyce too), so who knows.)

Actually, on reconsideration I think that what Bond calls "monumental badness" is closely related to "lack of accessibility". Joyce/Wagner/Tolkien/various cult movies and TV shows all have the quality of rewarding intense study and background knowledge, and frequently are off-putting to the casual reader/viewer because they assume that knowledge. This can be as simple as having watched all the previous episodes in a series, or as challenging as knowing the slang of 1904 Dublin. Therefore these works generate the feeling of belonging to an exclusive in-group of initiates (with internal hierarchies and everything), and feeling superior to outsiders who "just don't get it" (a.k.a. hipsterism). Whereas a work that is well-crafted, and thus makes everything clear on the first reading, will not generate this fanaticism.

It seems to me that the basic insight is true and worth noting: people don't become hyper fans of things they expect everyone likes. That wouldn't send much of a signal of your group loyalty and your good taste, after all. Extreme fandom says "I know most folks wouldn't like this but I really really like it, and I think they are just wrong wrong wrong."

Oh, GEB has lots of critics.

It's hard to think of any creative work that becomes sufficiently widely known without attracting some harsh criticism; not even The Well-Tempered Clavier. I think Bond has his cause and effect backwards: passionate fans are annoying and create passionate haters, and the haters trot out whatever aspect of awfulness exists to be found. Apple fanboyism is perhaps the most transparent example of this phenomenon.

My guess is that Bond's thesis overestimates how much mileage fandom gets from defending the relevant works against outside criticism - maybe his theory represents an outsider's view?

The only true fandom I've spent a lot of time inside was not at all dedicated to defending its object of focus. The segment of Harry Potter fandom I knew consisted of people (>90% women) writing slash about Harry Potter characters. In meetups people would usually spend more time discussing derivative works (and obsessing over 'pairings') than the original work. To the extent that the original work was discussed it was often to poke fun of its glaring flaws. Most people I knew did not think the Harry Potter books were actually great books. Some thought they were pretty good, some thought they were downright awful - that wasn't the point. The quality of the books wasn't the reason why they were in the fandom.

The only time this fandom would be visible to outsiders was when we did things like dress up as Harry Potter characters and go to a new Harry Potter movie. I'm sure people who saw that thought, "My, these people sure must like the Harry Potter films". In a way, of course, we did - but not in the way the typical cinema-goer liked them. The main object was to mine the new material for suggestions of sexual tension between the male characters.

Maybe this is atypical, I'd be curious to know the inner workings of fandoms that are not sex-based.

Could it be that it's not the flaws that cause the fandom directly, but the tradeoff between emotional volume and flawlessness? Star Wars, for instance, leans really hard on all the emotional buttons it can press. After some point this button-pressing leads authors with a finite reserve of skill, attention, and time, to sacrifice other considerations (realistic characterization, narrative coherence) in order to produce a stronger reaction. On the other hand, works whose creator has taken the time to make them complete and eliminate flaws don't necessarily make the kind of sacrifices necessary to jump out and grab you immediately.

Are there any ready examples that establish the (flaws -> fandom) link in preference to the (emotional volume -> flaws AND fandom) link?

UPDATE:

I think Twelve Virtues is a great example of my hypothesis; some of its turns of phrase have been criticized as unclear or ambiguous, on this site. I suspect the ambiguity comes from the fact that EY was trying to write something with high emotional relevance.

What's going on with your comments in this thread? These are clearly too low-effort, snarky and passive-aggressive for LW. Take this as a mod warning. 

This may actually be a feature, not a bug. If something is flawless, there is little danger that someone will turn away from it because of its flaws and miss out on a net gain. If something is worthwhile in spite of its flaws, however, some people will notice the flaws first and will turn away from it and miss out on the value they might otherwise have claimed. The fandom instinct is to tell these people, "no, once you look past the misogyny and the unbelievable characters and the plot woven from overcomplicated schemes and implausible coincidences, it's actually a great piece of literature."

We all seek to aid one another in our searches for delicious fruits, but the lush colorful fruit will look tasty to anyone, they don't need specific advice about it. Rather, spend your time talking about the warty hairy fruit with the thick rind that nevertheless contains a sweet nectar within.

Were this true it would also seem to fit with Robin's theories on art as signalling. If you pick something bad to defend then the signal is stronger.

If you want to signal loyalty, for example, it's not that good picking Shakespeare. Obviously everyone likes Shakespeare. If you pick an obscure anime cartoon then you can really signal your unreasonable devotion in the face of public pressure.

In a complete about turn though, a situation with empirical data might be sports fans. And I'm fairly certain that as performances get worse, generally speaking, the number of fans (at least that attend games) drops. This would seem to imply the opposite.

Bond is being caustic so people will pay attention to him. It's his schtick. He reviews Ender's Game and calls it 'pornography'.

His claim is backwards. People instinctively share their favorite stories for signaling reasons. Read Comeuppance if you don't believe me. The urge is probably strong enough that they'll drive across several states to get to a convention to find a receptive group of people with whom they can signal their approval. Indiana Jones fans don't have conventions because they aren't atypical -- most people like Indiana Jones movies.

He is sort of right, though. Anything that's good enough to attract a rabid fan base but still alienate the general public in spite of its virtues is pretty obviously going to have some even bigger faults.

Proust's following is small, rabid, and (being composed mostly of literary critics) is very far out of touch with reality. Why don't we call them a fandom?

Are Gilbert and Sullivan bad in any dramatic way? They have serious fandom. How about Bach himself?
The Grateful Dead? I'm simply skeptical of the Shakespeare being seriously bad claim too. He had bad plays and no-one cares about them.

What about Chess? Poker? Why does D&D count but they don't?

Anyway, I think that the largest effect at work here is that if anything attracts great enthusiasm it will attack aggressive attack. Everything has its flaws. So what?
Tolkein's fandom is MUCH greater than that of C.S. Lewis or countless other fantasy authors who has MUCH more awful about their work. Snobs and the asethetically competent criticize Crichton and Dan Brown plenty but they don't have fandoms Wagner wasn't special. All Opera is comically awful as well as great. That's why we have terms like "soap opera" and "space opera". Actually, maybe the Marriage of Figaro is just great, but it's unique.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Lolita have the most passionate individual fans of any literature I know of, but they don't congregate to express their admiration. The phenomenon of organized fandom needs large bodies of work to gather around, and the larger the body of work the greater the opportunities for awfulness.

If this effect is real, I'd expect it to function as color politics. Both sides need to have enough to build their case, that is the work in question must have both good and bad sides. The sides must fail to understand each other, that is, the badness and goodness of the work needs to be sufficiently obscure or hard to figure out or requiring vast background. And there should also be emotional attachment, beyond in-group, to the selected positions for both sides.

For a rationalist community, this dynamic doesn't seem to apply, as the rationalists would need to be a color-side, blindly defending their position without understanding their opponents. A rationalist community would need a different kind of dynamic (but not at all necessarily novel).

Sherlock Holmes has quite a lively fandom, and I haven't heard of any horrendously bad features.

The fact that something has flaws gives you a reason to think about it. A memeplex with no flaws would not stick in your head as long. I'll give some examples.

I can imagine writing Dr Who fanfic, because I know in my head what a good Dr Who story ought to look like, and very few of the actual Dr Who stories measure up. I can't imagine writing Lord of the Rings fanfic, because to me the book is perfect as it is.

Even though I'm not a Christian, I have read a lot of books on Christianity. For a while, I kept expecting, or hoping, to find a book that explained how the various different aspects of Christianity fit together to make a logical, internally coherent system. Then I started reading books about the early history of Christianity in order to try and understand how such a poorly designed set of beliefs came about. I have also read many books by liberal Christians because there are aspects of Christianity that I really like, and it would be nice to discover or work out a memeplex that takes these aspects and divorces them from the aspects that I don't like. I sometimes call myself a Taoist, but I don't have anywhere near the same desire to read books on Taoism because I feel I already get it, and I already know how to divorce the "bad" aspects from the "good" aspects.

I will make a prediction. In the coming century, Christianity will gain far more converts from Islam than Islam does from Christianity, because Christianity is the more interesting religion. It's memes have evolved over a longer time and in more demanding environments.

In romantic fiction, at least one character must have some character flaw. Elizabeth Bennet can see that Mr Bingley is a nice person, but it is the rude and arrogant Mr Darcy that she ends up falling for. In real ife, two people who spend a lot of time jocularly arguing or teasing one another often end up as a couple. People with no character flaws are just boring!

In Dungeons and Dragons, some people (myself included) prefer the earlier editions to the later editions. Later editions have rules that are more comprehensive, complete and elegant. But a game with rules that are sparse, incomplete and wonky is a game that implicitly invites you to tinker about with it, and change the rules in whatever way you want. It's a game with more possibilities!

So my conclusion is that flawed memeplexes can thrive because they engage the intellect and imagination of people with certain personalities. Perhaps this eventually leads people to have positive emotional reactions to the flaws in the things they love, so that you go all gooey inside when you think of your girlfriend's bossiness, or the saving throw tables in early D&D. People can be very good at explaining how features of the things they love, that might appear to the casual observer nto be flaws, are actually desirable features.

To move on to a slightly different subject, I was discussing this idea of "fannishness" with my wife (who cannot imagine that anyone can think Star Wars a bad movie) and we decided that in order to have Fans a work of fiction needs to be set in an imaginary world, have a number of important recurring characters, and take place over a number of episodes.

Another thought that struck me: I just got a book out of the library called "A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder". The author's thesis is that "moderately disorganized people, systems and institutions frequently turn out to be more efficient, more resilient, more creative and in general more effective than highly organized ones". I haven't read the book, but it strikes me that there may be some relation between the supposedly greater effectiveness of moderately disorganised systems, and the supposedly greater appeal of moderately flawed works of art.

Probability Theory: The Logic of Science has elements of monumental badness, and intense fans.

There are a fair number of Revolutionary War reenactments - it's a pretty spirited community, from what I've heard. They also seem to evade some of the corniness criticism Renaissance Fairs seem to garner. Chess and go may not count as "fandom", but they are reasonably popular.

I don't think it's the /badness/ that is required to have a fandom, but a constant stream of discussion. Without badness, it's harder to sustain the discussion. If everyone agreed pirates would beat ninjas or that longswords were better than katana, eventually conversation dries up. Badness spurs arguments that allow adherents to share their beliefs and signal their devotion.

In the same vein as newerspeak's reference to Proust, how about Joyce fans and their annual bloomsday celebrations?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloomsday

Changing genres, I believe all of these references* have both fans and "conventions", and anyone would be hard-pressed to call any of them "bad" or flawed:

Architecture: Frank Lloyd Wright

Jazz: Davis, Coltrane, Peterson, Brubeck

Toys: Lego, Barbie, and Play Mobil

Military aircraft: P51 Mustang

Racing: Volvo Ocean Racing, F1, World Rally, MotoGP

Cars: 1955 Gullwing, 1965 Shelby Cobra, Enzo Ferrari

Birding: The Great Horned Owl

• and many many more.

I suspect that it doesn't take much to get the ball rolling on a knock-down drag-out fight between fans and opponents of any Work X: all you need is for enough people to have heard of Work X, and then you wait for polarization. As long as the work is popular enough that most people have heard of it, everyone will take a side and defend it to an extreme degree in a shrill voice. Works that are just good tend to acquire fans more slowly - Shakespeare, George Orwell, and Bach, while widely known, could not really be described as "sweeping the globe" at this time - and so they rarely have the critical mass of people who are newly excited about them and want to talk about them with their friends in casual settings.

A good example of polarization is the Twilight series by Stephenie Meyer (a vampire romance quartet mostly aimed at teenage girls) - no one seems to be neutral. Everyone either adores it and can't say anything about it that isn't incoherent squealing over how much they want to romance this or that character, or heaps it with such derision that you'd think it had killed their cat. Some people have opinions on it without even having read the first book, let alone the whole series. (My full defense of Twilight against the common criticisms may be found here for interested parties; warning, spoilers for all four books.) Each side fuels the other - there's apparently a belief latent in these people that the more extreme one's expression of love or hate of Twilight, the more successful one will be in converting the heathens/rallying support/setting every copy in the world on fire/getting Stephenie Meyer to come to one's house in person and give one an advance copy of completed-only-with-one's-encouragement Midnight Sun/whatever.

I wouldn't say it's the goodness or the badness of the work, but the purpose of the work. Any work that changes the criteria for what "winning at life" is, or in any other way indicts the status quo, is going to turn off anyone who likes the current game, and it's going to attract anyone who would benefit under the new game. Being a fan is signaling one's unfitness at the current game. (The average fan of Star Wars has a good reason to dream of a place far away - his life sucks.)

Anything that is either descriptive or reaffirming the current game is probably fine - Animal Farm, Raiders of the Lost Ark. Anything prescriptive is a threat to the people with the highest status currently - the people whose winnings are maximal under the current game.

As the work becomes more wildly prescriptive, it will attract fewer people, and the people who are attracted are the most unfit at the current game. As the prescription loses credibility as the concensus builds against it, the devotion of the fanbase must increase to a) combat the pervasive bad reputation that new potential converts encounter and b) keep the fanbase itself motivated in the face of derision and mockery on all sides.

About Jack Vance:

"That's serious fandom. Aimed at work that - like Animal Farm or the Well-Tempered Clavier - is merely excellent, without an aspect of monumental badness to defend."

The history of the Vance Integral Edition is full of flamewars and intensely stupid quarrels, not to mention some off-the-wall exegesis of Vance's work that would make Charles Kinbote blush. I think the most ridiculous aspects of Vance fandom are not well known because it is a much smaller cult, compared to other fandoms. (And yet the VIE project was reasonably successful.)

"If Jack Vance had been so clever as to keep all the poetic phrasing and alien societies, but now and then have his characters make crazy political speeches - if he had deliberately introduced an aspect of monumental badness - would he now be worshiped, instead of just loved?"

Well, there are some obnoxious political speeches in Vance's work, only not in his best regarded or better known works. See for example the regrettable "The Gray Prince".

Fandom is social - a big part of it is interacting with other fans. So here's an alternative hypothesis: works that especially appeal to a narrow subset of the population are more likely to develop a fanatic fandom (with things like conventions), because they allow fans to get together with other people like them, form a fanatic community, and radicalize as a group. With broadly popular works, fans won't be all that similar to each other so they'll be less likely to come together to form a fanatic community. Trekkies and Randians seem consistent this hypothesis.

Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy? They have Towel Day, and as far as I know, unless you reject it whole as nonsense, it has no glaring flaws.

Just from reading the quoted segment of Bond's argument, I think there's something missing from it.

'Bad' is too vague. It's not (usually) like people watch a film (or read a book or whatever) and think "man, i found that truly horrible. It was so bad I'm going to start obsessing over it and attending conventions".

Rather, there are specific properties of the work that attract them. These properties (or other ones that go hand in hand with them) also happen to mean the work has bad qualities.

It can't simply be any properties to do with 'badness', because fandom only accretes around certain bad things, not every bad thing.

The question is, what are those properties?

At a quick guess, I'd say one is that the work allows the person to deeply immerse themselves in an appealing imaginative vision (e.g. a fantasy realm), and perhaps to construct an identity around that (e.g. dressing up as a character), perhaps in conjunction with others in a social group (such as in discussion groups and at conventions).

(Responding "does it?" to a comment is not always inappropriate, but it does lean on the reasoning for your skepticism being obvious. If you just want to express disagreement, you can use the disagreement votes or the disagreement reacts)

Those sure are a lot of naked assertions with zero supporting argument. Strange, I don't feel any particular urge to defend Bonds' monumentally bad writing.

Fandom is a subculture that grows up around people who are passionate about a work when the rest of the world isn't.

If the work is part of the dominant culture, nobody has to build a fandom around it. The Well-Tempered Clavier is assigned to every piano student -- nobody has to organize clubs to listen to Bach in secret.

To have a fandom, a work doesn't have to be bad. It can just be overlooked, forgotten, or left behind by the mainstream. Gilbert and Sullivan operas are pretty good, but they have a fandom made up of old-fashioned Anglophiles and intellectual showoffs. (I'm one of them, naturlich.)

It helps if there's something totalizing about the work itself -- if the author insists that it should change how you see everything about the world, then those who like it will make fandom part of their identity. (See: Wagner, Rand, Kerouac.)

Cultural products that create fandom usually have younger target audiences. Those products tend to be of uneven quality. This seems to explain the correlation noticed by Bond. Products for the young of undeniable quality can be used to test the hypothesis. They do create fandoms: -The catcher in the rye -Jimi Hendrix Older products of uneven quality do not produce fandom... (But since they have been forgotten, I won't give examples!) If older great work didn't create fandom, it's simply that they came before fandom.

Warren Buffett seems to fit all the criteria of the counterexample Eliezer asked for. And if you doubt the fanaticism of his fandom, just look over some videos of his annual shareholders' meeting/convention.

Eliezer, I think you missed something big here: to what kind of audience does the work appeal?

Take GEB: if you want to read and understand it you really have to invest some intellectual effort and I suspect the kind of people who end up appreciating it are not the ones who indulge in emotional fandom.

Star Wars on the other hand has a lot more emotional than intellectual appeal and thus it will select another kind of fans, a subset of them are the kind of people who go to conventions and dress up in appropriate clothing.

Make the experiment: go to a group of kids and ask: who wants a laser sword and be a jedi for the next hours? Or would you rather sit down and discuss self-refentiality? Do you want to be Gandalf and use the magic wand or sit down with the Tortoise and Achilles for an intellectual conversation?

Edit to make it clearer: a movie like Star Wars offers a lot more possibilities of emotional appeal: the cool clothing, being a jedi knight, sexy scenes with a hot princess, fighting against evil and saving the universe, etc...

These works with huge fan bases (Star Wars, Star Trek, Harry Potter) have tons of improbable stuff, things clearly added for no reason other than drama, things that are designed to turn your logical brain off. Awful stuff... But they maintain self-consistency. A fan is typically someone who is familiar with the universe's rules, accepts them, and uses them to make predictions about the characters. The author may throw in a surprise or two, but that eventually gets added to the rules. The rules provide the fan with a psychological reward every time they are proven right about the outcome.

Knowing and accepting the rules of a fantasy universe is not unlike knowing and accepting the rules of a religion. The more immersed you are in them, and the more they differ from real life, the more fanatical you become about them. It is as if we are wired to form internally consistent sets of rules for universes, even if (perhaps especially if) they are not real.

This is, I think, why a scientist can be religious. They see neither the physical universe nor their religion's universe as particularly connected to everyday reality. But both have internally consistent rules, and thus provide a psychological reward when you make predictions based on them. Just as a Trekkie does not expect to be beamed out of trouble, or die as the penalty for wearing a red shirt, the nobel-winning scientist is not expecting God to intervene in the laboratory.

I am not sure whether awfulness is important... Distance from reality probably is though, since it helps distinguish the two "magesteria" from each other.

I would like to propose the idea that the fans don't necessarily have to have anything to do with what the original work that started the group going. The original work could just bring together a group of people, that group of people then creates there own reasons for being together and reinterprets the original work to suit there needs. Maybe the strongest fan bases are formed around works that have a "badness" about them, because they are easier to reinterpret to suit the needs of the fans.

I have a theory that the harder people try to convince me of something, the more it means they're really trying to convince themselves. (Example: creationism)

This seems related...

More seriously, I've seen at least one study in which it was noted that the more stringent religious sects have better retention rates, i.e., the more an ideology demands from its adherents, the more committed they are. This sounds like it could be another manifestation of the same effect.

It strikes me that the correlation between "is bad" and "has fanatical fans" is partially due to a common cause - a piece of fiction has to conform to certain popular prejudices entertained by tens of millions of idiots in order to have a really big fan base, and a really big fan base is highly conducive to having a hard core of fanatics - the more people that are interested in something, the more hardcore fanatics you'll get.

I can imagine meeting another Vance aficionado in person: we just nod politely, in silent agreement, or talk in cryptic sentences like vorlons.

H. R. Giger is an excellent painter and sculptor, anyone can see that, but for most people his sculptures are just too... alien. I discoved that I really like Giger and Vance, but I can see that others would have to acquire the taste.

GEB has always struck me as more clever than intelligent.

Also somewhat related: the Onion A/V Club has an ongoing Gateways to Geekery series, which gives newcomers introductions to various genres that are the subject of fandom (though not necessarily at the con level), explaining why they can be inaccessible and how best to approach them. There are 18 entries so far; it might be interesting to look for commonalities.

The mechanism makes perfect sense, though that doesn't mean the theory is right. If you have a very good, relatively unobjectionable movie/book/etc, most people will like it, some people will dislike it, but it's unlikely there'll be much conflict. By contrast, if you've got some movie that's got some good parts, and some really awful parts, then you have the potential for some people to really like it, and then actually have to defend it against the bad parts. Since they don't want to part with liking it, they develop all kinds of defense mechanisms, they talk amongst themselves, maybe you get some social evaporative cooling, and they start liking it more and more, because they spend so much time thinking about it and defending it. Not to mention they actually have to look to find people who like it as much as they do. If pretty much everyone liked it pretty much the same amount (or within a proper upper bound), this need never arises, and fandom does not form. But if it's there, and the group needs to defend itself from the Philistines who don't understand, pretty soon people are getting married dressed up as Han and Leia. Of course, some movies/books/etc. fall below critical mass and never develop a fandom despite having similar characteristics.

The main problem with that theory is that I'm not sure it's causal, and it may fit too well. That is, when you look at the actual development of such groups, they may not actually be defined by opposition (I don't personally know). Though the "needing to seek out other people who also ignored or even liked the bad parts" may still be a driving force.

Of greater concern, it's probably possible to find something seriously wrong with damn near anything. If you've got a bunch of people speaking Klingon, it's also much more entertaining to find some reason to call them idiots. I, for one, would be significantly less pissed off by some of the moronic parts of, say, Harry Potter, if it weren't one of the most successful series ever written. So it's quite possible that we understand the badness because the fandom exists and people want to make fun of it, and pretty much anything that evolved a fandom would present us with similar fodder.

Maybe there are Shakespeare conventions, they're just not an object of public ridicule, because Shakespeare is better than Star Trek.

I'm a poet and hang out with a lot of literature lovers, but I think I still know more people who get excited about Star Wars and Star Trek than Shakespeare. So I'm not sure I accept that Shakespeare lovers are a dime a dozen and Star * lovers aren't.

Apple.

But badness, especially badness of an obvious, monumental variety, inspires devotion. The quality of the work, in the face of such glaring shortcomings, becomes a matter of faith -- and faith is a much stronger bond than mere appreciation.

IMO this, among other things, can explain why religions still exist.

"And so the fan groups of Tolkien, Star Trek, Spider-man, Japanese kiddie-cartoons etc. develop an almost cult-like character." I like some of all of these examples, and I agree there are horrible, asinine elements to all of them. They all have ludicrous philosophical positions, arbitrary physics, inane plots and villains with motivations that manage to be incoherent and predictable at the same time. Although I've seen every episode of every series of Star Trek before Enterprise, I have to say I spend most of my time watching it making fun of the gaffs and absurdities. I don't know that I'm typical, but Star Trek wouldn't be the same if it wasn't so plainly atrocious. The absurdity is, for many people, an appealing aspect of it.

Jack Vance is one of the few 'science' fiction authors I can find no significant flaws with (other than that the term 'science' is rather misapplied to his genre), and although he has many dedicated fans you are right that there are no Demon Princes Conventions where everyone dresses up with giant earlobes and exchanges mining company stock.

I think it's also probably true that widely popular fiction is so bad at least partially because people have demands on fiction that is only tangentially related (if at all) to plot coherence, believability and skilled writing. Some of Stephan King's most popular books are ones that he considers to be poorly written.

I have noticed some criticisms. Try this, for example:

http://richardkulisz.blogspot.com/2008/09/eliezer-yudkowskys-friendly-ai-project.html

The Beatles.

True fanaticism requires a reservoir of unconsciousness into which contradictions and faults can be swept aside.

Without flaws which fans feel guilty about overlooking or ignoring, fanaticism is unlikely to arise. Nor is it likely to arise among people with well-developed emotional balance who won't or can't harbor monumental blind spots and unconsciousness sinks.

People who defend something vehemently are often compensating within themselves for a negative reaction which they cannot acknowledge. If the matter isn't truly important in a life-or-death sense, and people are getting vehement, it's probably a defensive reaction. Best defense is a good offense and all that.

There are a couple of different aspects to fandom, and it's worth splitting them apart. I'm a HUGE fan of GEB and the Well Tempered Clavier, and have been for over 25 years. Neither of these are the basis of any social group I'm part of (though GEB fandom is rife in a some, it's not the core of any).

The aspects of fandom you're looking at - the clique or socially-separate group, would seem to come not from bad elements of the work, but from a desire to form tribes and share hardship, normally by repelling out-group attack (or perceived attack). Note that an attack on the group does not require an attack on the work, though less-generally-liked reasons for group membership probably make it easier to find attackers.

I'd recommend you avoid changes in your book to cater to such tribal instincts, unless you're using it as an example of how people trick themselves.

Simpsons?

Your PS for the newly imported post is out of date- the colored text doesn't seem to have come with it.

Renaissance time paintings? The Taj Mahal?

Or are these works of art gone too much into the past and thats why they are not criticised?