Beyond Snow White: Fandom Must Stop Falling for the Hate

After years of internet scrutiny, memes, and vitriolic podcasts, it’s official: Disney’s Snow White remake debuted as a box office disappointment. With studio estimates pegging the film’s opening at around $43 million in the U.S., the new musical comes in south of Tim Burton’s remake of a similarly antiquated Disney property, Dumbo, which opened soft at $45 million in 2019, and above last year’s Mufasa which premiered to $35 million in December. Given Snow White’s reported $270 million price tag, let’s just say the princess has her work cut out to turn a profit.

The confirmation of a Disney remake taking a bite of a rotten apple is certainly newsworthy, if perhaps expected since many of Disney’s remakes of pre-1989 animated films have struggled unless featuring a substantive angle to their reimagining (think Angelina Jolie as a heroic Maleficent or Emma Stone as punk rock Cruella de Vil). And generally, as based on audience polling on CinemaScore and our own critical analysis, this take has left folks wanting. Yet just a quick perusal of any social media app—TikTok, Facebook, X—adds a weird if wholly unsurprising wrinkle to the story: Loads of men, many of them middle-aged, and plenty more apparently without children, are taking a noxious, almost demonic glee in the box office failure of a princess movie primarily aimed at little girls.

It’s a low-key boorish sight, and one totally commonplace in our modern internet landscape. Once a refuge for groups of likeminded people who shared an interest or passion for media and beloved fictional stories, online pop culture enthusiast communities, or “fandoms,” have been commandeered of late by purveyors of culture war animosity and relentless outrage. That same landscape where folks once gathered to share nostalgia for Star Wars, or comic books, or even Disney princess movies, has become a scarred and desolate battleground where everything is cannon fodder. Hence as soon as Latina actress Rachel Zegler was cast as Snow White in June 2021, this social media carnival of bigotry and hate seemed inevitable. After all, for about a decade now we have seen this song and dance, and every time it’s come to town it has taken a hefty toll on everyone within the blast radius, including fandoms that ostensibly insist they love these stories and iconographies.

So Disney’s Snow White is probably a flop and the world will move on. It should. But fandom: Please stop falling for this stuff. For more than 10 years, cranks, online provocateurs, opportunists, and, yes, bigots, have infiltrated and influenced how your culture acts and is perceived by the outside world. From Gamergate to four-hour long video essays dissecting Star Wars movies from half a decade earlier, fandom is increasingly being defined by a bunch of misanthropic, bitter, and yeah, mostly whiny white guys who want to obsess over how many Jedi Academy course credits Daisy Ridley logged in The Last Jedi, or the skin color of a young woman playing a princess in a fantasy remake of something they probably haven’t watched in a quarter-century.

It wasn’t always this way. And this toxic rightward drift has been deliberately manipulated. Let’s please stop playing into it.

Incentivized Hate

In a 2019 New York Times feature, Tristan Harris, a former design ethicist at Google, which is the parent company of YouTube, commented the following on the social video-sharing site’s ability (if by apparent accident) to incentivize radicalization: “There’s a spectrum on YouTube between the calm section—the Walter Cronkite, Carl Sagan part—and Crazytown, where the extreme stuff is. If I’m YouTube and I want you to watch more, I’m always going to steer you toward Crazytown.”

Harris’ comments were not anecdotal, nor are they out of touch with the world six years later. According to a 2023 Pew Research study, 95 percent of teenagers use YouTube as a primary app, with that percentage dipping all of one point when you count young people up to the age of 24. That is more than any other online service. Also more than any other online service, YouTube has economically incentivized the need to provoke and engage—or some might say enrage—viewers to extend minutes on a user’s channel. Beginning in 2017, YouTube has allowed video creators to run ads and generate revenue on their video content, as opposed to previously only allowing vetted content creators this resource.

While this was done to theoretically share revenue with successful content creators, rewarding them for their work, it also had the effect of incentivizing those who relied on inflammatory and indoctrinating language to have a leg up by keeping viewers engaged with content that often perpetuated a hero and villain narrative, with the viewers and creators always implicitly being cast as the outside-thinker underdogs standing up against “them” (with the “them” being ill-defined, but often non-white ethnicities, minorities, and women).

It is perhaps not coincidence that investigative news site Bellingcat found that among 75 fascist activists examined on alt-right chat rooms and white supremacist Discord servers, most cited watching a YouTube video as the moment of their “red-pilling” (a term which itself blurs a popular fandom text like The Matrix with the alt-right narrative of being the “rebels” fighting against the empire/machines). Meanwhile Vox-Pol, a European research group, found that among 30,000 then-Twitter accounts associated with the far-right, YouTube videos were the most commonly shared links.

While not all or even most YouTube video content about Star Wars, Marvel, or Snow White—or for that matter content on TikTok and X—is alt-right, the way these algorithms work is by funneling users into a loop of steady, similar content. This in turn incentivizes creators who wish to build their subscriber base to jump on bandwagons, which increasingly have tilted toward hyperbolic and often aggrieved culture war sensationalism. 

In other words, there’s a reason if you search for any of the titles mentioned above in a YouTube search bar, you’ll likely be inundated with video essays about how Kathleen Kennedy, Brie Larson, or now Rachel Zegler has “ruined” something the viewer is implicitly supposed to view as belonging exclusively to victimized and put-upon white men.

This goes back to well before the current decade or recent political winds. In 2016, alt-right podcasters and self-described men’s right activists like Stefan Molyneux lamented movies like The Force Awakens as being “anti-family” and pushing feminist agendas. Molyneux is not a traditional online pop culture commentator or movie critic, but used a popular movie to generate YouTube engagement for a political ideology that then takes a foothold within fandom communities.

Consider how a few years later a self-described moderator of the “Down With Disney’s Treatment of Franchises and its Fanboys” movement took credit in the press for deploying bots to review-bomb The Last Jedi on Rotten Tomatoes. The goal was to intentionally influence the perception of not only that movie but of Star Wars fandom as well. At the time, the moderator claimed the fictional character of Luke Skywalker was “a victim of the anti-mansplaining movement” and that men should be “reinstated as rulers of society.”

That ugliness was also nothing new. Several years earlier in 2014, video game developers and simple players of their products saw a reckoning within that industry after 4chan users became irate due to a disgruntled ex-boyfriend sharing erroneous and misleading information about the love life of his ex, an independent video game developer named Zoe Quinn. 

According to self-described Gamergate proponents, this was about demanding better ethics in video game journalism since Quinn entered into a relationship with a games journalist. Mind you, said journalist only ever wrote half a sentence about Quinn’s game and that was before the pair entered into a consenting relationship. However, among the 4chan users who precipitated the campaign of death threats and harassment against Quinn and other women developers in the ensuing months, their original stated goal was “just make her life irrepairably [sic] horrible.”

Stop Falling for It

This is a narrative we have seen for 11 years now. Time and again, it is about finding a scapegoat, usually a woman, and tearing them down for social media engagement. The terms and jargon used to decry the suffering of “red-pilled” men might change. In 2014, they were angry about “social justice warriors;” in 2019 it was a fight against “wokeism” in Star Wars and Marvel; and in 2025 it is about Disney princess “DEI hires.” The goal is always the same though: create a wedge in fan communities that historically tend to be whiter and more male-heavy, and encourage political radicalization by claiming victimhood.

Ironically, many of these properties that fans claim to love have had more complex and frankly liberal, if not occasionally radically left, ideologies. What is the X-Men if not a naked metaphor for supporting, protecting, and celebrating marginalized minority groups? Ryan Reynolds’ hero even cracked in Deadpool 2 that “[we’re] a dated metaphor for racism in the ‘60s!” The Matrix and its red pills were always a fairly overt metaphor for disengaging with the conservative hegemony of the status quo and remaking your body to match the person you are in your mind’s eye—an allegory conceived of by two trans women directors. And even the retroactively adored Star Wars prequels features the on-the-nose anti-fascist line, “So this is how democracy dies. With thunderous applause.”

What’s changed is that when Len Wein and Dave Cockrum created Storm in 1970s Marvel Comics, there was no online fandom being purposefully divided and provoked along racist fault lines, and heteronormative audiences likely didn’t pick up on the trans subtext in The Matrix, even after the directors very publicly transitioned. There was no YouTube algorithm to be gamed; no TikTok audience to be exploited; no ad revenues to be garnered by finding another witch to burn, be it Zoe Quinn, Daisy Ridley, Brie Larson, Iman Vellani, Halle Bailey, Amandla Stenberg, or now Rachel Zegler.

Yes, at only age 21 Zegler said in a way that proved too candid for self-described “Disney Adults” that the original Snow White was “extremely dated when it comes to the ideas of women being in roles of power and what a woman is fit for in the world.” A more PR-seasoned figure with extensive media-training might have found a delicate way to state the same truth. Yet true it remains that few parents want to take their daughters to a movie in 2025 where the heroine spends the whole film cleaning for seven guys and dreaming of a stranger to come marry her on the spot. However you view that summary of a 1937 film, though, these three-year-old comments were never the heretical sacrilege our internet John Hathornes make them out to be.

But that’s almost mooted now. The movie’s media life cycle is winding down, and as it turned out the film wasn’t very good. Meanwhile Zegler and her considerable talent are off to West End where she can no longer “hurt your childhood”—especially if she stays away from a certain type of fandom’s media going forward, which is evermore perceived in the public these days as being a tedious echo chamber of man-children whining about any performer who is neither white or male. Indeed, if you do take enjoyment in anything associated with “fandom,” as likely any writer or reader on this site is wont to do, then you must reckon with the things you love as growing tainted, their legacies increasingly perverted and redefined.

Because rest assured, the bad-faith actors will find another target soon. There must always be another. Which is a formidable deterrent for any talented filmmaker or actor of color who might otherwise want to play in these sandboxes. So if you love superheroes, Star Wars, Star Trek, Game of Thrones, or just O.G. Disney fairytales, do yourself a favor. Don’t fall for it. Don’t watch four-hour YouTube essays about how a movie ruined your youth. Go outside, and if need be, put away the childish things when their latest movie or TV show makes you mad. It might be the only way to preserve them for the next generation.

The post Beyond Snow White: Fandom Must Stop Falling for the Hate appeared first on Den of Geek.