No, I’m not talking about SFF fandom’s hate for urban fantasy, though that would be a whole post in itself.
Checking my stats today, I discovered a couple of referrals from a site I did not know, all linking to my recent TV post. So I visited the site and arrived at a forum dedicated to hating Stargate Universe. I’m glad that people there like my post, though I don’t hate Stargate Universe. I’m indifferent to it. I just linked to the SciFiNow interview with some of the Stargate producers, because it was very illustrative of what the huge problem with genre TV and TV drama in general these days is, namely that creators chase after some mystical and elusive demographic of affluent young men who will eagerly buy all the crap advertised during those shows and in the process alienate the viewers and fans they have. Which leads to former fans being so pissed off that they build a whole site dedicated to hating a show. And take it from someone who’s been there – though I never went as far as building a “Show XYZ sucks” site, I just contented myself with bitching to everyone who would listen – you don’t get that level of hate without having been a fan first.
In case you’re wondering why I don’t name the shows I hate, the reason is that if I were to type the title, I would probably launch into a 3000 word rant about how the shows in question suck and betrayed me as a fan and viewer, which I would delete five minutes after writing it. In short, it’s just not worth it.
While on the subject of angry fans, Daniel Abraham a.k.a. MLN Hanover, whose observations about urban fantasy, gender and rape I linked to before, has a new posts in which he responds to a commenter who disagreed with his previous observations on urban fantasy, gender and rape. Some interesting stuff there.
And yet another great link: Here is Carrie Vaughn on how the reality of the internet affected and probably killed off Cyberpunk.
sending...
I’ve had the same experience. You write a whole post, realize how much you hate the post, and then the horrible experience of deleting it entirely.
I made a rather hateful post about CSI on my blog recently, but it ended up being silly instead, and more about character chemistry than why CSI actually sucks. The title was written in that vein, but the post decided it wanted to be more indifferent to the show than bombastically hateful.
I’ve never understood websites dedicated to hating something. Suppose that’s why I’m not a NeoNazi though.
A short post script: I stumbled across your website looking for Strunk/White slash fiction. But um *ahem* not for me, of course. It was for a friend. So glad I found this instead. I can only imagine what I would have found had my quest led me to actual Strunk/White erotica.
*Strunk verbed his noun so hard…*
I guess sometimes those “hate” posts are just necessary venting, but it’s better not to publish them.
And I can even understand the anger of the Stargate Atlantis fans who had their show tweaked and cancelled, even though it was successful, and replaced by Stargate Universe to appeal to a “better” i.e. more lucrative demographic (which then failed to show up, so Stargate Universe got cancelled as well). But to build a whole site dedicated to hating a TV show or anything else for that matter? Who has the time and the energy?
I agree that the CSI shows can be very frustrating. Sometimes they’re good, sometimes they’re awful and the character dynamics are not very consistent.
You and some 4000 other people (probably more by now) came here looking for Strunk and White slash today and found something else. Anyway, glad you like the post and thanks for commenting.
Well I’m much happier with this than I would have been with Strunk/White erotica.