Fanboy Outrage: 4 Historical Cases of Panic and ConfusionRecently, the internet exploded into a bazillion pieces and glued itself back together with insanity and irrationality. In case you haven’t heard, Nick Spenser and Jesus Saiz’s "Steve Rogers: Captain America" issue 1 just came out. I’m going to throw out a customary spoiler warning because it’s the polite thing to do for something that is less than a week old, regardless of what media it is part of. But if you’re reading this article, you’ve almost certainly already heard what happened in this comic. Or at least, part of what happened. So with the spoiler warning out of the way, Steve Rogers was revealed to be an agent of Hydra. This, coupled with allegations from editor Tom Brevoort and writer Nick Spenser that this is not a clone or mind control, threw fans (and even, as I’ve posited, people who don’t actually care about Captain America and just want to make their voices heard when a pebble makes ripples across the pond) into a mad frenzy.
Now I’m not here to comment on the validity of this as a narrative choice, or to comment on the insanity of people who will send death threats over something so trivial that it will 100 percent be reversed and forgotten within the next calendar year. Instead, I want to take this opportunity to look at some of the moments in history where fans also lost their minds over things happening in stories across different media. They might not have all given rise to the same level of insanity among the masses, but they each lured out some kind of response among folks paying attention. Or even, as I’ve alluded, people who weren’t really paying attention, but thought they had to make their opinions heard. 
One is from the animated television show Family Guy. The particular incident I want to talk about came from the episodes Stewie Kills Lois and Lois Kills Stewie, which both aired in 2007. By the time these episodes aired, Family Guy had already been around for 8 years and had even almost faced cancellation. So I imagine show runner and creator Seth MacFarlane felt like he needed to do something to shake things up and get people talking. So this two-parter has the evil baby of the Griffin household, Stewie, succeed in what he had been planning for some time: he kills his mother, Lois, and frames his father, Peter. This was huge. Things would NEVER be the same. Worlds would live, worlds would die! Right? Well, no. But when I was a freshman in college, listening to people who had their minds blown by the first part of this 2 part episode, you would think they had just gone through a black hole and lived to tell the tale. Anyway, we find out in the second part of this story that this is entire scenario was all a hologram created by Stewie just to see if his plan would work. Spoiler, it would not. While this whole incident might have gotten people excited for Family Guy and almost certainly even boosted ratings for a little while, it was a lot like the boy who cried wolf. In 2013, the series once again kills off a main character. This time, the family pet, the talking dog Brian. But this time, the fanfare was significantly reduced. The only buzz I did hear this time around was people scoffing at the attempt of this has-been show to be relevant. People were saying that of course Brian would come back. The show tried this before, and Lois is still with us. Why should we fall for this a second time? (Now, if MacFarlane really wanted to mess with heads, he would have kept Brian dead.) In any case, the whole Stewie kills his mom thing later being followed up by the death and return of the dog reminds me a lot of some of the big twists you often see in superhero comics. Something huge that will fundamentally change the core of the character or series is really just a temporary change in the status quo. In comics, it might last a year. These things may elicit excitement from somebody who is new to the genre or the series, but if you keep doing this sort of thing, it will only elicit boredom and threats to leave and never come back. 
Speaking of superheroes, this next example is something that happened in a superhero movie just a few short years ago. 2013 saw film director Zach Snyder bring us Man of Steel, the first Superman movie since 2006. This was preceded by a lot of trepedatious excitement. After all, the previous Superman film wasn’t great. And people were very unsure of Zach Snyder’s style. Some people rushed to his defense, saying, sure, he had brought us some clunkers, but he also brought us some decent movies. So when the movie finally arrived, it brought with it a huge divide among audiences. Not only was it a very dour and joyless movie, which many people cited as being very antithetical to Superman, but in the climax, Superman breaks General Zod’s neck. This was a delicate situation. You had people saying Superman doesn’t murder, period, end of discussion. When in fact, Superman has murdered a couple of times. There was the time at the end of John Byrne’s run on the Superman comics when he straight up executed some Kryptonians from an alternate reality. And there was the time when Superman killed Doomsday in battle, and nobody batted an eye (well, actually, people batted many eyes, but because Superman died, and not because of how he handled Doomsday). You had people saying that it didn’t matter that this was literally the only way to defeat the bad guy. Superman didn’t have kryptonite or a Phantom Zone projector, or a convenient Arkham Asylum like Batman. It was kill or watch other people be killed. It really didn’t matter that on a scale of 1 to 10 of completely inexcusable offensive film making that Zach Snyder could offer, Superman breaking General Zod’s neck was about a 3, compared to what would later happen in Batman vs Superman Dawn of Justice. Those 5 seconds of Superman screaming in anguish as he snaps the General’s neck continue to this day to engender debates and arguments from fans about whether Superman should kill, whether the killing was necessary in this movie, or how the movie should have ended. As far as reactions to things happening in entertainment, this is the slow burning one. To paraphrase Doctor Tyrell, this one didn’t burn as bright as the Captain America Hydra thing, but it surely is burning for a really long time, and will probably continue to burn as long as Zach Snyder is helming Superman in film. 
Up next is one of the least extreme from my list. And it is about the television sitcom How I Met Your Mother, and specifically, its infuriating protagonist Ted Mosby. For those unfamiliar with this series, it had an unusual hook. While most shows will leave themselves open on how they’re going to end, including which romantic partner the main protagonist will ride off into the sunset with, How I Met Your Mother was unique in that, allegedly, show creators Carter Bays and Craig Thomas knew how they wanted the show to end from the beginning. The series was seemingly all building toward Ted finally meeting the mother of the children, and the woman of his dreams, since he spent what felt like millions of hours talking about how every other woman he had dated was wrong for him in one way or another. So this woman who was going to get with Ted and birth 2 other probably equally annoying Mosbys into the world was gonna have to be something if she was going to win over the fans, right? So the show spent the last season showing us the mother interacting with the other cast members, and then in the final episode we burn through several years until finally, she just as quickly as she was introduced. Meanwhile, Barney and Robyn, who got married in the finale in a wedding that had been teased for years, break up just as unceremoniously as Ted’s bride was killed, and it turns out that old Ted who has been telling this 9 year story to his children is basically just asking them if it’s okay if he goes after Robyn, who he dated and professed his love to a few times throughout the series. I can only imagine that Bays and Thomas were actively trying to gut punch everyone who had ever watched the show. You had the people who were actually interested in seeing how Ted’s wife was going to measure up to the years of buildup, disappointed in that they barely got to see her even interact with Ted that much. Then you had the people who had been shipping Barney and Robyn and were right to expect that they would get a happy ending, since the series had been showing us glimpses of their future wedding since the beginning of Season 5. This was a show that I had given up on after Season 7 ended, as I felt like we were being jerked around aimlessly even then. But other, braver souls soldiered on. But even they couldn’t stomach the finale and how it wronged them. While this one isn’t really being talked about anymore, it’s still alarming how far this show fell. It went from being talked about as being one of the smartest, most intricately and tightly written shows ever to being just a big huge mess that left nobody happy when all was said and done. (This one could also fit pretty easily into a list of finales that fans hated, but that’s neither here nor there.) 
The last item on our list is probably the most similar to the recent insanity-monsoon that ignited this article. In the early to mid-1990s at DC Comics, the Green Lantern comic series wasn’t doing great in numbers. So higher-ups decided to shake things up with a one two punch. Hal Jordan, the Green Lantern of the previous almost 40 years, goes crazy when his city is destroyed and his bosses who run the Green Lantern Corps won’t do anything about it. So he commits genocide against all of the other Green Lanterns, takes their power, and becomes an evil supervillain named Parallax. Now, hard as it is to imagine that people actually liked the cardboard cutout known as Hal Jordan, this infuriated people. And to add insult to injury, Kyle Rayner, a mouthier younger more creative guy replaced Hal as the last Green Lantern. If people hated their favorite Lantern becoming a genocidal maniac, then they REALLY hated this smart alleck filling his shoes. People sent threats to writer Ron Marz who was helming the adventures of the new Green Lantern (sadly, as much as we like to think we’re a more advanced civilization than the barbaric 1990s, we really aren’t). Eventually, I guess those psychopaths won out in the end, when, about a decade later, Hal Jordan was revealed to have been possessed by an alien parasite that was responsible for the evil he did. This put Jordan back on center stage of the Green Lantern comics, and thusly pushed Kyle Rayner right out of the way. This, much like what I suspect will happen with the Captain America Agent of Hydra thing and the Lois Griffin is dead thing, was just a temporary thing. Sure, it lasted much longer than many of the other “twists” that happen these days in the entertainment we love. But still, in the grand scheme of how long the Green Lantern comics have been going on, it was but a fleeting moment. I guess what we can take from all of this is that people need to calm down. Like, now. It’s okay to love something, but it is not okay to harass someone who hasn’t worked on a character for 5 years with your hate of said character they once worked on. Or, as I mentioned, it aint okay to send death threats. Like, ever. And even if you’re angry about something that happened in a story you read (or, with the Captain America thing, a story you probably didn’t read), the worst thing that will happen is that you stop reading, the series gets bad sales, and the story is undone/reversed/forgotten, and you go right back to reading and passive-aggressively not enjoying it. But as I said, society hasn’t changed much since the dark 1990s. I guess it’d be too audacious of me to expect this article to change hearts and minds now. But you never know. Confess! Which one of these made you freak out a little like a total upset fanboy? Or maybe we missed the one that triggered you? Let us know in the comments! 
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