Tuesday, July 19, 2016

Arrow

It's likely not surprising that Arrow's writers are getting increasingly political -- Oliver Queen is now the mayor of Star City and it's a Presidential election year, after all.

But what does Arrow writer Ben Sokolowski hate as much as Republican Presidential nominee Donald Trump?

Apparently Arrow viewers who aren't on board for the Oliver Queen/Felicity Smoak romance.

Leaving Presidential politics aside (I know, good luck with that), Sokolowski's since-deleted tweet (you can still see plenty of him apologizing for it in his mentions) isn't the first time the recently that Arrow's writers have taken aim at viewers who don't toe the #Olicity line.

In a tweet that's still live, Jake Coburn claimed that "you can't love Arrow and not love Olicity. It's literally not possible." When (ironically) Sokolowski said that he knew plenty of people who would disagreCoburn retorted that those people are "bozos."

At the time of Coburn's comments, being enthusiastically pro-Olicity was likely just de rigeur at The CW; the relationship steadily became a bigger and bigger part of Arrow's dynamic throughout the third and fourth seasons, until the two had an ugly breakup, when it returned to TV's familiar status quo of "will they or won't they?"

Over the course of the last six months or so, though, it's become a hugely divisive element of the series, with pro- and anti-Olicity fans both going way too far in service of their fandom. Actors, writers, and producers have been harassed, threatened, and bullied on social media with the only significant difference between the two seemingly being which people they choose to harass. That the Arrow fandom is monoloithically pro-Olicity is no longer a safe assumption -- as Sokolowski is learning from dozens of comments that range from the genuinely offended to the politically offended to the opportunistic trolls.

Showrunner Marc Guggenheim, meanwhile, may not have chimed in on the matter of Olicity, but he's apparently not a huge fan of Donald Trump's either, tweeting a joke that Happy Days actor Scott Baio's appearance at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland "killed Garry Marshall."