I've grown to expect a certain standard with fandom-bashing.
This weekend's Sydney Morning Herald features an article devoted to bashing online fans, charmingly titled 'World wide wackos'.
Now, when mainstream media decides to write about fandom, sometimes you get serious articles, and sometimes you get sensationalist articles. This article, however, isn't even a good sensationalist article. It's so full of loaded language and cheap shots, it may as well be a Usenet troll. And like a troll, it's not worth getting angry about.
But this part made me drop my jaw in disbelief:
While movies and TV shows such as Star Wars and Star Trek have produced more than their fair share of fan-inspired tosh, The X-Files appears to have become a peculiar magnet for obsessives everywhere.
But all is not well in the strange world of X-Files fandom, where a schism has emerged between those who passionately support a romance between the lead characters Mulder and Scully and those who equally oppose it. The former are known as Relationshippers (or 'shippers) and the latter NOROMOS, short for No Romancers.
OMG WHAT FRIGGING CENTURY ARE YOU LIVING IN?
Is your best example a show that is thirteen years old and four years dead? Do you imagine that MSR is still a hotly debated topic? When Mulder and Scully, for crying out loud, have had a *kid* together on the show?
Do you really believe shippers vs noromos deserves to be called a fandom schism? Do you realise that Mulder/Scully is the *least* controversial of the X-Files universe pairings? And any sensationalist article that fails to even mention slash, if only to rip into it, suggests such crappy research that you don't even know it exists.
Do you realise that the term shippers has long since spread throughout the multiverse of fandoms as a term of common usage? So that when you spell it with an apostrophe, you look as dated as someone writing 'phone or 'burger?
Seriously. If you're going to be criticising fandom, there are much juicier targets. In this day and age, snickering at MSR is just as quaint and ridiculous as, say, ranting against Beatles music.
Now, when mainstream media decides to write about fandom, sometimes you get serious articles, and sometimes you get sensationalist articles. This article, however, isn't even a good sensationalist article. It's so full of loaded language and cheap shots, it may as well be a Usenet troll. And like a troll, it's not worth getting angry about.
But this part made me drop my jaw in disbelief:
While movies and TV shows such as Star Wars and Star Trek have produced more than their fair share of fan-inspired tosh, The X-Files appears to have become a peculiar magnet for obsessives everywhere.
But all is not well in the strange world of X-Files fandom, where a schism has emerged between those who passionately support a romance between the lead characters Mulder and Scully and those who equally oppose it. The former are known as Relationshippers (or 'shippers) and the latter NOROMOS, short for No Romancers.
OMG WHAT FRIGGING CENTURY ARE YOU LIVING IN?
Is your best example a show that is thirteen years old and four years dead? Do you imagine that MSR is still a hotly debated topic? When Mulder and Scully, for crying out loud, have had a *kid* together on the show?
Do you really believe shippers vs noromos deserves to be called a fandom schism? Do you realise that Mulder/Scully is the *least* controversial of the X-Files universe pairings? And any sensationalist article that fails to even mention slash, if only to rip into it, suggests such crappy research that you don't even know it exists.
Do you realise that the term shippers has long since spread throughout the multiverse of fandoms as a term of common usage? So that when you spell it with an apostrophe, you look as dated as someone writing 'phone or 'burger?
Seriously. If you're going to be criticising fandom, there are much juicier targets. In this day and age, snickering at MSR is just as quaint and ridiculous as, say, ranting against Beatles music.