Your bag is empty.
The first look at next year’s Terminator movie (seen above) was released to Twitter on Wednesday morning, showing the film’s three female leads—Linda Hamilton, Natalia Reyes and Halt and Catch Fire’s Mackenzie Davis—looking so badass that even an unstoppable killing machine would think twice about crossing them. Unfortunately, because all three are women, the image also activated male fandom into overreaction and embarrassing itself.
“I hope whoever signed off on that new #Terminator pic being released has been told by their family not to come home for Christmas,” complained one man. Another griped, “Is that person in the middle a chick? I honestly can’t tell … The worst thing about this picture is the Hillary-cut on Linda … God save us please!” “This is gonna be the WORST Terminator movie ever. That shit is feminism,” wrote a third. This person apparently misunderstands that “feminism” isn’t actually a bad thing, especially for a movie series that started with two movies—the only two that didn’t flop—centering around a kick-ass woman proving that she could and would protect herself and her loved ones despite the odds.
By now, this kind of female-phobic backlash to a genre property that dares to feature women at the center of the story is to be expected. One only needs to look at response to the announcement of Jodie Whittaker becoming the lead of the BBC’s Doctor Who—“You’ve ruined it now,” went one tweet, with another adding, “I’m not watching anymore”—or the recent, surreal backlash to the new She-Ra animated series, to see that this is now the new norm, sadly. As genre spaces become more mainstream and, as a result, more diverse in their appeal and creation—an obvious result of growing from an overwhelmingly male-dominated root—there is an increasingly vocal, ugly “old school” of fandom ready to fight for their right to greedily hide all the toys and not share them with anyone else.
It’s notable that one of the Twitter complaints to the image from the new Terminator—which hits theaters Nov. 2019 and also stars franchise mainstay Arnold Schwarzenegger—was, “Aw naw, it’s Ghostbusters all over again.” The sexist backlash to Paul Feig’s 2016 all-woman reboot of the fan-favorite movie made headlines at the time, due to how extreme the online trolling seemed.
Fandom en masse has started pushing back against the misogyny in its ranks, and attempting to fight against the hatred when it arises.
It’s two years later, and things have only metastasized. Star Wars: The Last Jedi star Kelly Marie Train deleted her Instagram posts earlier this year, reportedly due to harassment she’d received from fans upset about her role in the movie—a movie that the same toxic fan base wants to be remade to more easily fit their desires. Trolls also turned their attention to a Lucasfilm employee based, apparently, on the belief that she was sending them a hidden message in her choice of drinking mug. Paranoid? Most definitely. Surprising? Not at all, sadly.
There are, thankfully, some signs that all is not lost. Fandom en masse has started pushing back against the misogyny in its ranks, with flash mobs and online movements rallying against sexist trolls, and attempting to fight against the hatred when it arises. Historically, the school of thought that such trolls were best left ignored or derided had been prevalent, but such decisions merely left room for them to create an echo chamber and convince themselves that they were correct, with silence from others translating into agreement or complicity. Now, at least, there’s an increasingly vocal contingent of fans willing to support what they love, and others’ right to see themselves reflected in such stories.
With this in mind, the response to the Terminator promo image seems like a fait accompli. It’s putting women at the forefront of a beloved sci-fi franchise—even if they’ve always been there—so, what else could really be expected at this point? If nothing else, the reality of online sexism and hate around genre material just shows that Skynet went at the destruction of the human race completely wrong for all these years; instead of simply trying to slaughter every human, it should have announced that Star Trek was turning Kirk, Spock and McCoy into women for all future movies, and just stepped back to watch the carnage.