Conventional Wisdom Not All Things….
Posted By Kathleen David on July 2, 2017
OK Fandom, we need to sit down and have a little talk.
Oh no, no, no I am not going to smack you, although that is tempting considering your recent behavior, I really just want to talk to you.
News Flash, not everyone is going to like everything you like especially at the intensity with which you like it.
And that is OK.
I am sure there are fandoms that you wandering into online that leave you scratching your head about what do they see in that.
But they do see something in it that appeals to them like your fandom(s) appeal to you.
Here seems to be the disconnect these days, you can’t make others like/love the things that you like/love. Or as the old saying goes, “You can bring a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.” You have shown it the lovely water now step back and let it make up its own mind about what it wants to do.
The opposite is true too. You may hate something with the passion of a 1000 fiery suns and you are allowed the heartily to dislike something. But to berate others because they like it is really not cricket.
Here’s a suggestion, just walk away from what is causing you such consternation.
Life is too darn short.
I have talked about how a movie does not ruin a book in the past. The book is still there. The movie didn’t magically make the words change in the book to match the film. You can still read your story the way that you liked it.
Recently in several fandoms that I am either a part of or watch from the sidelines have been having some serious meltdowns about things that effect, or may effect, the thing that they love.
One series jumped the characters forward a number of years setting up the next season. They did finish all the previous threads so that we knew about where everyone landed before the time jump. If that had been, as rumored, the last episode of the series, it would have satisfied most fan base. We don’t know except for that little snippet what has happened since we last left our heroes. We do know who has a contract in the next season and who doesn’t so we have an idea of which characters will still be around and they are the most and least popular ones all at the same time. The screaming from fandom has been rather intense. I hope that they give the show the chance to find its footing again and remember that the previous seasons are not wiped off the face of the earth because of the new season. Although I think they are going to kill it with the new time slot.
Another fandom is practically going into convulsions given what happened this season and what is going to happen next year. I think want makes me most upset with a good chunk of the group is the threatening nature of ‘if you don’t do/fix this I am going to …’ that is going on. It’s just a TV show. Sure the fandom is one of the oldest on the planet, but still it is not cancelled but it sure is changing. And the ‘if you don’t’ has been turned up to 10 on this season which I consider one of the best to date. I know a number of my friends don’t agree with me on this and that’s fine. This season worked for me but didn’t for them. I am not going to go try to convince them to see it my way.
There is another fandom that a large number of my friends love that I cannot get into and it hasn’t been from the lack of trying. I just don’t like the premise or the characters. It is not my cuppa but I don’t try to rain on my friends’ parade of love and accolades of their fandom. I read through their comments and move on happy that they have something that brings them so many feelings.
So enjoy your fandoms. Enjoy your entertainment.
Just be kind and allow others to enjoy theirs.
I am grateful for the variety of fandoms out there.
Can we ask which shows you refer to? I’m guessing number two is ‘Doctor Who’, but I don’t have a guess on the other two.
But, isn’t the point of fandom (Fanatic Kingdom…?) to be so passionate about something that it DEMANDS! discussion and debate? The real problem isn’t the discussion so much as the tone behind it! Civility in tone and language, and IDIC should reign… 😉
When I was a lot younger and much more enamored of science fiction/comics culture (think late ’70’s to early ’80’s), we seemed to have this collective feeling that we were somehow more “evolved” than fans of other things. We were so much better than those sports fans, for instance, who would riot after football games, or those silly “Dallas” fans who seemed so upset over who shot JR. We were an insular bunch, and a lot of us learned to hide our interests just to avoid hassles at school. When we stumbled across a fellow fan, it was an event. You’d be so happy to have someone to share the general interest in geek stuff that you’d be willing to overlook stuff they liked that you really weren’t into. It’s not that there weren’t sci-fi/comics feuds and general bad behavior, but for those of us out in the fandom hinterlands and far removed from the world of conventions, all we knew about that stuff was what we read in the Buyers’ Guide. We were so glad to have a fellow traveler that we didn’t get too whacked out if he liked Moorcock and you were a Tolkien fan. You might think Elric was an abomination, but you weren’t going to wish death on your friend for liking it; after all, he was the only guy in your school who even knew who Tolkien was.
And then came the mainstreaming of geek culture through movies like Star Wars, and later the internet driven fandom, and what we find out is that once all of geek fandom can connect with each other, we have just as many awful members in our fandom as they do in pro sports fandom, or music fans, And while admittedly we don’t have sci-fi fans doing the equivalent of throwing claw hammers into a stadium crowd during a soccer game (yet), spending time in the comments section of asci-fi/comics website or a forum will tell you that the claw hammer throwing attitude is there, in abundance. We have the same percentage of loudmouthed, angry, hateful, misogynistic, misanthropic members as do the fans of the Dallas Cowboys, or NASCAR, or what have you. And we’re really disappointed by that, because we think we should be above all that based on our interests (Star trek! Galactic peace and cooperation! IDIC!), but ultimately we aren’t. Because geek culture is so mainstream now, we now have to deal with the same sort of fan that sets a car on fire after his football team loses (or wins). It’s the price we pay now for geek culture being so universal, and there’s no putting that genie back in the bottle.