The Many Faces of Fandom

This was originally to be an audio post, but it got a little long for that and probably wouldn’t fit my preferred three minute limit anymore.

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There’s a thing in fandoms built around long running properties. They start to get “Old Fans”.

Now, these people might be younger than you or I, age really has little to do with it. The important part seems to be that they’ve been on the bandwagon from an early point.

What will happen is that at some point a change of some magnitude will occur. Toys get redesigned, a TV show or comic takes a different approach, or maybe they add a new marshmallow to Lucky Charms. It doesn’t really matter. Often when this happens, some fans will find the new changes distasteful. And while a majority of the people may respond in a reasonable way, there’s always a select few who totally flip out.

The most frequent behavior I observe from this level of reactionary fandom is the inexplicable phenomenon of continuing to expose themselves to the thing they can’t stand seemingly for no reason other than to have an excuse to sit on a newsgroup, or now more likely a message board and air their grievances at any available opportunity.

Recently a troubling realization struck me. It seemed that I had started down the road to being just one of those Old Fans.

I’ve been a fan of Stargate since the beginning (the shows, not so much the movie). I’ve enjoyed the style, the writing, and the characters for over a decade. But then this year, Stargate Universe came along. And it was a complete shift in tone and style. I decided after the first few episodes I really didn’t like how it was being done. But it’s Stargate! I’ve never given up on Stargate before!

But it didn’t stop there. In the past few weeks, I’ve realized that I have been engaging in certain undesirable behaviors. Like looking as hard as I could at every episode to find as much fault as possible. I discovered that as I would read other people’s thoughts about the show every week, I decided that they must be retarded, or otherwise mentally defective to be enjoying this show.

Each week, the progression of my decline into this frightening state of self-destructive fandom became greater, and the extent of my behaviors would increase to match.

I was becoming the fan I hate.

I have always said when confronted with this kind of person that they need to remove themselves from the thing that obviously makes them so crazy. It doesn’t make any sense to sit and inflict it upon yourself, and even worse to then broadcast your hatred on to others.

I have always believed that a state of fandom should be about the enjoyment of a thing. That, if you have no positive feelings at all, you’re not a fan anymore. Everyone will have complaints, but it’s whether you temper that with genuine love and joy that makes this distinction.

I have neither love for nor joy in Stargate Universe. This does not change the fact that I was and still am a fan of Stargate SG-1 and Stargate Atlantis. But I don’t have to enjoy it, or try to enjoy it, and certainly I do not need to force myself to watch Universe just because it is Stargate. And above all else, I need to stop watching it in the hope that it will fail horribly so everyone involved will understand they were wrong to take this direction.

So, will I quit watching Stargate Universe? Maybe, I don’t know. But if I do continue watching it, I believe I need to watch it from a point of view of trying to find something to enjoy in it instead of scrutinizing every episode for faults I can latch on to that will support my belief in how completely wrong the show is.

This isn’t the first time I’ve gone through a stage like this, but it is the first time that it took me so long to realize what I was doing. Hopefully I can learn from this and not fall into the same trap next time.

And just maybe someone else can learn a little bit from this and avoid going down this road to start with.