Wednesday, June 09, 2004
My fandom is bad for your mental health.
Rebecca has to be the last person I would have ever expected to see as the subject of fandom_wankery, but sure enough, the fallout from her dastardly essay, James Potter Is Ever So Evil. And Dead, Too (But We Knew That), has been immortalised in the hallowed archives of wank.
In her honour, I have made an icon:
since James is Teh Evil and Snape is Teh Perfekt, and that is what her theory was all about. *nods sagely* As far as I am concerned the icon is free for the taking, for the LiveJournallers. I say, spread the Hitler!James luuuurve.
But seriously. There are some times when I wonder why I am no longer a very active fandom member. I mean, weren't the Old Days wonderful, when I posted like a fiend on the Ye Old HP4GU list, and debated in the Snapefans Y!G, and generally had a grand old time being involved in this fandom? Sometimes, I think about those good times...
...and then something like this EXPLODES in the faces of fandomers everywhere, and I think, "Oh, right, that's why I don't bother anymore."
I know there are a great deal of debates that are executed with respect and equanimity; I'm not making generalisations about every single person in the fandom. There are a large number of people who treat everyone with dignity. However, there are still too many folks around here who think it's acceptable to tear a person apart based on their interpretations of books.
Now, I love my literature just as much as the next person, and I hold firm to my beliefs about the elements and themes that I glean from my personal readings of texts. I'm all about literary debates: I do it on a regular basis when I'm in school. But good grief, people: can't we agree to disagree sometimes, instead of rant on our journals that someone has the 'audacity' to post a disagreeable theory, and then encourage a festival of comments, some of which border on (or actually are) personal attacks? And then, when someone points out that a number of those comments might be inappropriate, still have the nerve to defend such behaviour?
My fandom delights in controversy. My fandom enjoys proving everyone else wrong, which is difficult to do when it's comprised of so very many members with so very many viewpoints. My fandom is a place where theories and fic are somehow rendered indistinguishable from their authors.
You know, it occurs to me that my fandom is, in the words of the Sugar Quillers, on CRAX.
Yet we love it anyway. Oh, the things we'll do for a good book!
| 11:04 PM |
Who am I? I'm a twenty-two-
