Rant about a review
To start with, this is not a call for folks to go dogpile the reviewer. It's just a rant. Read or not, but please don't go spit bile on the reviewer.
That being said, Sylvia Bond at pinkraygun reviewed In the Hunt.
The review was positive-ish. She didn't like the book, but she liked my essay. But her premise for not liking the book was that it was unauthorized meta, and so it was just a bunch of people who were trying to cash in on SPN's popularity.
None of us (with the exception of the fans who won the contest to be included, and Tanya Huff, who is a big name author) is a "true fan".
Even if she liked my essay, I'm a little uncomfortable with this. Mostly because she didn't list what her yardstick of true fan was. The guy who wrote the SPN novel tie-ins is not, because in her opinion, he sucks. The guy who writes for Television Without Pity also does not, because he also sucks.
It's a little like McCarthyism. What makes a "true american"? What's the criteria? Is it a standard set of rules, or something in her head?
I am not a true fan, because I don't mention that I'm a fan in my bio (I would've thought that would be obvious from my essay) and besides which, I'm trying to be too clever (I tell people that I once liked to dress in corsetry and poke people with sharp metal instruments. That is to say I'm a former scadian) Never mind that in her bio she says that she spends all her money on beer (pot, meet kettle).
I can understand her dislike for the concept of the books. That's reasonable. And I can understand if others don't want to buy the book because they don't care to read professional meta on SPN (Personally, I don't think it's much different than professional meta on Tolkien, or college classes taught on Buffy. If serious academics are discussing Show, I think it raises the level of Show. But she seems to think that it lowers the level of fan meta.).
That being said, she was asked to review the book itself. If she couldn't set aside her dislike for the concept, she shouldn't have agreed to review the book, because she didn't do so objectively.
I probaly shoudn't have left a comment in her blog, but it helped to get it out of my system. And I tried to stay positive with my own words.