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I hate being sick. Woke up on Saturday with a scratchy throat and a small fever. By Sunday morning I was in full hack/cough/sneeze mode that hasn't let up since. Which has nothing to do with my fandom thoughts but I'm whiny when I'm sick and if I have to miserable, dammit you all have to hear about it.
Right, so fandom thoughts for a Monday morning. It's sort of amazing to me how hypersensitized hanging out in fandom can make people to one aspect of a show/movie/book (especially 'ships or characters that provoke strong reactions), often completely out of proportion to the actual amount of time devoted to the thing in canon. Not that I don't think obsessively focusing on or picking apart the details isn't a good thing. Hell, it's part of what makes fandom so fun and how we bond.
But just from hanging out among various fannish communities (and this has happened in every fandom I've ever been around), you'd think that vastly more amounts of screen (or page) time is devoted to whatever the thing is than ever really is. It's like the constant hyperfocus and discussion tunes us in so strongly to whatever that even the smallest mention gains far more weight and, I dunno, presence than everything else. An objectively short scene ends up feeling like, and being discussed as though, it's taken up half of the story when really the overwhelming majority of the time was spent on the search for whoozits or fighting demons or aliens or completely unrelated relationships or characters. And when it's a character or ship that irritates you, and you've just spent several hours arguing about it with people who obsessively love it as much as you dislike it (or vice versa) it really does feel like that one or two scenes is the end all, be all of what makes or breaks the story.
It worries me how easily that kind of investment (positive or negative) in any one aspect or character can just...shut everything else out. When I go back and rewatch or reread something after the intense furor and focus has died down I'm always surprised at how little of the Big Fannish Focus ever shows up, and how many other interesting or potentially enjoyable things I completely missed on first watch. I'm not sure how you solve that, or if it's even a good idea to. What would fandom be without the thrill of devoting hours to decoding what a single look means? Or doing a happy dance of joy around your living room and rushing to express OMGCAPSGLEE with fifty other people over the tiniest bit of backstory that supports a theory or fic idea? I just kinda wish that it was possible sometimes to at least step back and recognize that how we talk about a story really, really, really does affect how we see it. And even though we wish Character X would die in a fire, or that references to this or that 'ship were banished forever and ever to the dimension of puppets, and we know that their fans will be utterly obnoxious for the next three weeks over that five minutes, it honestly was just five minutes and not the five hours it felt like.
This is Eunice on cough medicine. Carry on.
Right, so fandom thoughts for a Monday morning. It's sort of amazing to me how hypersensitized hanging out in fandom can make people to one aspect of a show/movie/book (especially 'ships or characters that provoke strong reactions), often completely out of proportion to the actual amount of time devoted to the thing in canon. Not that I don't think obsessively focusing on or picking apart the details isn't a good thing. Hell, it's part of what makes fandom so fun and how we bond.
But just from hanging out among various fannish communities (and this has happened in every fandom I've ever been around), you'd think that vastly more amounts of screen (or page) time is devoted to whatever the thing is than ever really is. It's like the constant hyperfocus and discussion tunes us in so strongly to whatever that even the smallest mention gains far more weight and, I dunno, presence than everything else. An objectively short scene ends up feeling like, and being discussed as though, it's taken up half of the story when really the overwhelming majority of the time was spent on the search for whoozits or fighting demons or aliens or completely unrelated relationships or characters. And when it's a character or ship that irritates you, and you've just spent several hours arguing about it with people who obsessively love it as much as you dislike it (or vice versa) it really does feel like that one or two scenes is the end all, be all of what makes or breaks the story.
It worries me how easily that kind of investment (positive or negative) in any one aspect or character can just...shut everything else out. When I go back and rewatch or reread something after the intense furor and focus has died down I'm always surprised at how little of the Big Fannish Focus ever shows up, and how many other interesting or potentially enjoyable things I completely missed on first watch. I'm not sure how you solve that, or if it's even a good idea to. What would fandom be without the thrill of devoting hours to decoding what a single look means? Or doing a happy dance of joy around your living room and rushing to express OMGCAPSGLEE with fifty other people over the tiniest bit of backstory that supports a theory or fic idea? I just kinda wish that it was possible sometimes to at least step back and recognize that how we talk about a story really, really, really does affect how we see it. And even though we wish Character X would die in a fire, or that references to this or that 'ship were banished forever and ever to the dimension of puppets, and we know that their fans will be utterly obnoxious for the next three weeks over that five minutes, it honestly was just five minutes and not the five hours it felt like.
This is Eunice on cough medicine. Carry on.