For whatever it's worth, with the Keller thing, I think you did a good job of explaining at the time that you were just trying to figure out what you didn't like about it, and I did understand that! I got that it was mainly an exploratory thing for you. And ... I mean ... wanting to examine and dissect canons and figure out why we react emotionally in the way that we do to certain parts of them is a really useful thing for a writer to do! It's actually one of the reasons why I find myself reading a lot of reaction/analysis meta from fandoms I'm not in, because I find that absolutely fascinating, but it's much easier for me to engage with the interesting/analytical aspects when I'm not also reacting on a gut emotional level that makes it hard to take the criticism on board because I already have such deeply ingrained and very emotional opinions on it.
Watching other people's fandoms self-destruct can be really fun to rubberneck on, I cannot lie. >_> But there often reaches a point when it's just not fun anymore -- I definitely hit that with The Magicians, where I was having a lot of fun watching people alternately squee and scream in frustration about their show, and then it trainwrecked so hard that everyone was really sad and I felt too bad for them to go on enjoying the reactions.
I think cases of dealing with canon get difficult because for a lot of us, being critical of canon, or parts of canon, is crucial to how we fan.
Yes, that too! I think we've also talked about this before, that for some people (and sometimes the same people for some canons but not others), the negativity and/or dissection of canon is a crucial part of the fanning process. I mean, even the distinction between loving dissection and negative dissection is often in the eye of the beholder! I really love squeeful analysis of my shows, but there are plenty of times when reading other people's analysis goes into a place that's too negative for me -- but I can recognize that they're having fun, and they still like the show, it's just that they either have a harsher discussion style than I prefer, or they hated some of the things I really liked.
But it can be incredibly cathartic when you hated something to go online and find out that other people hated it too. Especially that betrayed kind of hate when a canon does you wrong. Finding like-minded people to vent to, or just reading their hate posts, feels so good ...
... at least for awhile. I find that for me, at least, that kind of nega-fanning loses its charm very quickly, and it starts to feel like it's keeping me in the same unhappy/betrayed headspace without being able to move on. YMMV.
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Watching other people's fandoms self-destruct can be really fun to rubberneck on, I cannot lie. >_> But there often reaches a point when it's just not fun anymore -- I definitely hit that with The Magicians, where I was having a lot of fun watching people alternately squee and scream in frustration about their show, and then it trainwrecked so hard that everyone was really sad and I felt too bad for them to go on enjoying the reactions.
I think cases of dealing with canon get difficult because for a lot of us, being critical of canon, or parts of canon, is crucial to how we fan.
Yes, that too! I think we've also talked about this before, that for some people (and sometimes the same people for some canons but not others), the negativity and/or dissection of canon is a crucial part of the fanning process. I mean, even the distinction between loving dissection and negative dissection is often in the eye of the beholder! I really love squeeful analysis of my shows, but there are plenty of times when reading other people's analysis goes into a place that's too negative for me -- but I can recognize that they're having fun, and they still like the show, it's just that they either have a harsher discussion style than I prefer, or they hated some of the things I really liked.
But it can be incredibly cathartic when you hated something to go online and find out that other people hated it too. Especially that betrayed kind of hate when a canon does you wrong. Finding like-minded people to vent to, or just reading their hate posts, feels so good ...
... at least for awhile. I find that for me, at least, that kind of nega-fanning loses its charm very quickly, and it starts to feel like it's keeping me in the same unhappy/betrayed headspace without being able to move on. YMMV.