First off, I really appreciate the participation in here, it's made for a great conversation and one with a lot of valid thoughts on both sides, and a lot of exploration of tough issues.
Before I get to the responses, let me pose a question: if Rewind and Chromedome were portrayed as "family", would that change your opinion on their closeness, would their emotional intimacy be more permissible to you?
It seems to me like our society values the family as something that can only be attained through genetics, that emotional intimacy is normal in that dynamic but cannot be recreated in any other dynamic short of a sexual relationship that leads to marriage - thus, since Cybertronians don't engage in sexual relationships, there is no room in the tales of their lives for that level of emotional intimacy. I would argue that is an emotionally stunted perspective, that physical intimacy is hardly the only path to emotional intimacy.
Emotional intimacy and emotional honesty are paths away from being stunted, recently therapists treating severe PTSD patients have found growth by using the drug Ecstasy, the patient creating a temporary emotionally-intimate bond with the therapist in a safe environment helps them express the pain that has been weighing them down. Granted, that is an extreme therapy for an extreme case, but its lesson can be taken down several notches to comment on our conversation here as well.
I'm really sorry about the long-ass response below, I didn't expect such a fantastic conversation to come of this, both sides of the argument are very inspiring and I can't help myself. For every post I respond to, I want to respond to 3 more, so it's hard to not have EVEN MORE than what's here.
andersonh1 wrote:Maybe the problem here is twofold: mixing the media and equating the violence level with the exploration of emotional depth.
I think it's fair to say that the afternoon/Saturday morning cartoon version of Transformers has always been friendlier to kids than series which aired on cable, and certainly more than theatrical releases. You've got to include the 86 movie with the Bay movies. I should sort each category out rather than trying to use them all as one continuous succession of media.
And when it comes to violence, the whole premise of Transformers is "two factions at war". You can handle that by treating it as action adventure, or go to the opposite end of the spectrum and grace the page with buckets of internal fluid, dismemberment and torture. But the point is, physical conflict is at the heart of the franchise. Kids buy the toys so they can fight, and the fiction reflects that. Transformers is not a series built around love or romance or deep personal feelings. Yes, those emotions are relevant to the characters, obviously. But they don't have to be there for the Transformers concept to work for the target demographic, whereas conflict does. True, the fiction is far more shallow without emotional depth, but does the 8 year old who wants to see Prime and Megatron fight really care about that? We do, but they don't.
Conflict is a core requirement of the brand. Emotional exploration is not. I think each has to be discussed on its own, not lumped together by the idea that if one is acceptable, so is the other.
I don't want anybody to get the wrong idea, I'm not suggesting we just dump bald-faced romance into the brand. I'm talking about fleshing out the humanity of the characters, being in war doesn't mean having no emotions, and to sanitize the pain, loss, interpersonal bonding, and all the other emotions that come with war is to serve its audience poorly. There can be room to tell personal stories in the ideas you present.
Kids want to see Prime and Megatron fight, but it gets boring after a while if they ONLY fight, if those characters don't do something more, and perhaps that's in how they respond to war and violence in their own ways. Fun adventures are not unwelcome, but they're a relatively shallow expression, there should be more engaging tales. When I was a kid, the boys on the schoolyard were engaged by Robotech every day, and that was a very emotional story in that way, and it also dealt with romance too - and today it endures in the imaginations of its fans. Without emotion, what is conflict? How can one truly win the battle if it means nothing to them? To me, those seem like ideas that kids can get a lot out of without having it forced at their eyeballs, smarter character writing can be very engaging to a younger audience if it's presented in a way they can conceive.
The idea that conflict can be discussed on its own without emotional impact seems quite unhealthy to me, it sends a very wrong message that violence and hate and conflict are easy things, simple things to get and out of, that don't really hurt anybody.
I agree that some topics aren't age-appropriate, but why violence and war and hate aren't on society's list of taboo topics while emotional intimacy is on that list, that seems unhealthy. It should be on your mind, with my niece when she was those ages it was on my sister's and my minds even when it didn't seem like it. But at the same time, it's really easy to just "go with the flow" that society puts out there where mature images of violence are the norm for kids entertainment at 8 years old while people's feelings are still taboo.
I don't know. If you look at the stages of life, conflict comes a lot earlier than you might think, whereas relationships are largely parent/child and friends. Deeper expressions of friendship or romantic love appear later with maturity, and even then it takes years to learn and grow with understanding.
You're making me think.
Does conflict come earlier, or is it kids reflecting what they see? Some children find nurturing to be a pretty big deal way before conflict - 3 year olds who want to care for a doll as if it was their loved one. I think our society has taught us that conflict is an easy thing for kids because it is easy to understand and sell, and it sets them up for a lifetime of fighting wars - but our world is changing, we are seeing the signs of violence every day destroying children, and war is becoming less an appetizing option for diplomatic differences - especially ground war. The only reason there's a school lunch program in our country is because in the '50s the military was seeing the next generation of recruits too malnourished to be draft-worthy, but today we have a much better understanding and expression of nutritional and physical health; why can't we do the same for emotional health as well? Because it's not how it was? That's what change is.
Deeper understandings of emotional value can help greatly with young people in other ways, not only could it stem the tide of bullying and loneliness and isolation that come in our modern life by expressing better understandings of friendship and empathy, but also giving a more rounded idea of those things as a precursor to romantic feelings might very well keep kids from promiscuity and teen pregnancy and making choices. These 15 year old girls think every boyfriend is the love of their life because they have no emotional understanding of what's really going on in teenage relationships and what true bonding is. So if we lay the foundations by showing how non-sexual relationships such as Rewind & Chromedome's have healthy and unhealthy messages within, those kids could have better tools to use when they do eventually get into romantic situations. It can't be worse than trying to ignore it as long as possible, especially when the parents who do everything right with their kids still have to leave their kids open to all the other kids out there who have ineffective parents.
It's a tough thing to think about, but I believe it's worth us talking about to grow ideas.
Dom wrote:One thing to keep in mind is how rooted to the reptile brain the violence or intimacy is, or how much it is pitched to our reptile brains.
There are studies showing that the more pitched to the reptile brain soemthing is, the more likely it is to affect (and often offend) people. (This applies to drama, comedy, whatever.)
If the violence is relatively sanitized, (having few consequences as you mentioned in the comics thread), it is less likely to raise people's ire. To use the famous example, the nekkid blade is not going to trigger most people's reptile brains. But, the nekkid woman is going to get an involuntary reaction from most people. We seem to be biologically (or strongly socially) programmed to react to large stretches of bare flesh, even if there is nothing inherently lewd about the particular part being shown. (I have noticed that a "bare back" dress or shirt can be more likely to get my attention than cleavage in many cases.)
That's wildly different from what we're talking about. That's carnal urge, it's not even an emotional state really. You automatically equate any sort of emotional intimacy with sex, but there's no flesh to get aroused over with Rewind and Chromedome, we're talking about hardcore emotions, not hardcore violence OR hardcore sex.
That is a bit unfair. A kid watching MMPR is not necessarily a violent philistine, nor are they likely to grow up in to such a person. The violence in MMPR was cartoony, and I would imagine it still is. Generally, it was about killing mean and scary monsters, and sometimes dealing with inner demons (such as it was depicted on MMPR with HS students dealing with little kid fears). But, you get the idea.
MMPR came out on my 18th birthday, my sister was in childhood development classes and she would take me to some of her work related to that, preschool stuff. I don't know if the kids were predisposed towards violence or if MMPR brought out the violence in them, but they were excited by the violence in a massive way. The number of childhood injuries skyrocketed across the nation shortly after MMPR came out, many from recreating violence they saw on the show. The shows weren't GOOD in any way, they were just real actors and costumes as opposed to cartoons. The costumes and sets and props were colorful and easy to identify, and there was essentially minimal story to follow. It was porn for children, swapping sex for violence.
A lot of the kids that stuck with it seemed like they were attracted to violence, and weren't making discriminating choices since the product at the time was pretty much the same thing year after year... and in many ways still is 21 years later. It got so bad that Haim Saban had to make sizable donations to childrens' hospitals and even build a whole new WING of the Los Angeles Childrens Hospital to save face.
Most of the sci-fi I read is on the softer-side. (Like I said, Trek is "relatively hard".)
Jesus, if Trek is "relatively hard sci-fi" I shudder to think what you're describing. "It was the future, there were a lot of colors and noises"???
Yeah. That moment is up there with the entirety of BotCon '04 in terms of "moments I wish I was there for". (It is especially funny given that TF and manga fandoms have some overlap and that there are significant numbers of gay/bi members of that fandom, to say nothing of fans with gay/bi friends.)
I feel like the show and toy producers are relatively isolated from the tone of the fandom, and it comes out in ugly ways like that, people who are homophobic or at least just have ugly outdated ideas about gay people work on a toy brand in an office without really looking at or connecting with their audience enough to understand why stuff like that is unintentionally harmful.
I am not sure that the movies or Prime are wholly representative of the brand though. (Hasbro has approved some pretty heavy content, especially in recent years.)
Hasbro seems to be pushing forward with another movie in the franchise. I think the Transformers brand has now made Hasbro as much money in 6 years off that movie series as the toys have in 30.
Roberts has his hand on the pulse of the vocal parts of the fandom. And, so much of what he writes seems designed to "reward" them, that I cannot shake the impression of "gay space robot shipping" when reading MTMTE. The content is unavoidably influenced by the intent of the writer, which is why I consider the writer when reading the content.
Every single thing you said here is coming from you though, not the content creators. You have extrapolated from one fact - Roberts has his hand on the pulse of the fandom - outwards to all these other ideas.
And again, the 'shippers don't need Rewind and Chromedome, they will seek out and infer their relationships, or make them out of whole cloth, from ANYTHING. Look at all the fans with weird ideas of TF Prime Knockout and various other characters (it had been Breakdown for a while but he's out of the picture now). I'm sure some of them see gay space robot sex every time they see Prowl and Starscream within 2 panels of each other in RID. You cannot change them, that's their world in their heads.
If the motivation is to reward the worst groups of fans, I am not in favour of it.
But you're the only one assuming that's what is intended. Nowhere is that stated or even hinted at except in the mind of the fearful of the why.
Not necessarily. Much of that was addressed during G1. (Again, I am not ignoring later iterations of the fanchise. But, it is easier to argue about stunting by going back to first principles.)
Mirage has always been portrayed as conflicted, to the point where Prime and the other Autobots were openly suprised that Mirage gave up a ride home to Cybertron in order to stop the Decepticons. Similarly, in the UK, Divebomb stayed with the Predacons out of a sense of professional obligation, despite not enjoying the job.
Blastoff's and Cosmos' file cards both make isolation a defining element of their characterization. Omega Supreme's emotional deadness (resulting from being betrayed by the Constructicons) was the focus of an episode of the cartoon.
Huffer is one of many characters depicted as "just wanting to go home".
Ratchet and other Autobots were shown worrying over severely damaged comrades. Wheeljack was shown as being tempted to work with Decepticons in order to get needed supplies in the UK. Grimlock's quest to bring back damaged Autobots plays in to this. Even Budiansky, towards the end of his "not giving a fuck" phase (not long before handing the book off to Tokar) showed two Autobots weighing the morals of using black-market components to repair damaged friends.
Those are all rare and wafer-thin examples of emotional depth from "loyalty, faith, friendship, loneliness, longing, and caring".
Plenty of death is strongly implied, including the death's of humans in episodes like "Megatron's Master Plan".
You're taking small examples and extrapolating to cover a lot of places where it simply isn't there at all.
"Resolute" was basically a direct to video/disk release. It was comparable to most action movies.
It aired on Cartoon Network.
My germophobia is a thing. (It grows at least partially out of a need to regularly wash my hands for blood tests and such.) "Glory hole" was me using a deliberately depraved way to describe it. Honestly, kids sticking their fingers up their noses before trying the toys also pretty well horrified me.
You said penises dude, you are retconning.
Anyway, don't let your germophobia rule you, even germs serve their purpose, and if not for exposure to them our bodies wouldn't have immune systems that could handle things like that.
O6 wrote:That's G's point--Optimus Prime and Elita One are "in love," for the simple fact that Elita One is a female and Optimus Prime is a dude, and no on questions it. Chromedome and Rewind actually show that they apparently legitimately care about each other, and just because they're (ostensibly) two dudes, guys like you throw a fit about it.
Yeah, pretty much. And the strangest part is that Dom isn't trying to make homophobic arguments, he's making arguments about pandering to 'shippers - those fans who get off on the idea of fictional characters in sexual relationships.
Dom wrote:In the case of Rewind and Chromedome, my problem is with (what I am reasonably confident was) Robert's motive for pairing them up. Even if it was not Roberts' plan, I have to ask why Roberts would include a plot-point that would be obviously likely to feed in to that kind of thinking by fans? (Seriously, does official content need to be rewarding that sort of fan?) "Gay space robots" just sounds like something that would be found in a parody of fanfic, and now it is in official comics from a company that I have largely respected over the years.
Perhaps to engage in personal storytelling? Seems likely. It's expanding on the ideas that these robots are people, that they do have emotional intimacy, that they have downtime and use it to talk about heroics of their idols, or to work on bettering themselves, or to get drunk to forget their troubles, or to socialize, or to be close with those who matter most to them. Rewind and Chromedome found solace in sharing a life with each other after they were willing to commit suicide for their own personal reasons, that's not an immature pandering thing to say, that's serious shit right there. They aren't pounding each other in the tailpipe, they aren't in it for lust, they are close because that's a story of what happens in that society, they are people with emotional damages and have found someone to help them with those damages - you talk about seeing this brand as emotionally stunted, well to me it seems like that's a way forward, a way beyond the same old thing. But because it involves interpersonal emotional intimacy, you classify it as writing "gay space robots" to pander to 'shippers. They're asexual robots, there's no homo OR heterosexuality generally.
Dom
-compulsively meta.
Truer words never spoken.
Gomess wrote: that sort of fan
Phrases like this genuinely concern me. And if you think about it, "that sort of fan" hasn't been anywhere near as pandered to as, say, the G1 nostalgics, or the lazy sci-fi fans who want spaceships and time travel. Gay space robots all the way.
Damn, good stuff all around.
And let's really ask ourselves, if some fanboy or fangirl gets gushy at home seeing Prowl and Starscream in a panel together, how does that HURT the rest of us? If the content can stand on its own, that's all that should matter.
As for why I value kids' fiction above adult fiction, it's because I believe stories generally *mean* more to kids, and as such the way they connect with their fiction as an audience is singularly profound, and more worthy of discourse. It's based purely on personal experience, but kids seem more capable of openmindedness and change- in the truest sense- than most adults. I'm glad that there are people out there who care about creating fiction for adults, don't get me wrong, but I work exclusively with writers and publishers who pitch at younger audiences, and I'm proud of it. Children Are the Future and all that.
...That wasn't as smooth as I'd have liked, but it's 3am here. Point is, kids' fiction is important, TF is primarily for kids, and kids need to see emotionally close space robots too. Get that stuff out of the comics and put it in the mainline (yeah right). Of course you didn't give OptimusXElita any thought as a kid; we're bombarded with heteronormativity every day. If Elita had been a previously established male TF, like Ironhide, I'd bet that episode would've had (more of?) an emotional effect on you.
Came off pretty well, makes a lot of sense and seems very genuine. If that's your 3am rough, you should be talking to parents and students on your work hours.
BWp wrote:This is the entire point. Prime/Elita adds nothing to the story, it's two characters paired up with each other purely to exist as a couple and nothing more. THAT is the definition of shipping as fans perform it. Rewind/Chromedome on the other hand ties into the major themes and concepts of the story it's featured in (people latching onto others in times of need, companionship easing the feeling of being 'lost') and actually goes through the trouble of showing *why* these two characters are together in the first place, and what each gains from the relationship. On top of that, it has an arc to it, a story that reaches a denouement and (in the latest issue) a conclusion. I don't like a lot of things in MTMTE, but the Rewind/Chromedome relationship is something I thought WAS very well-handled in it, and if you would quit panicking because you're afraid that someone out there who doesn't know an Autobot from a Go-Bot is going to look down on you for reading comics with gay robots in them, I think you could also see that it was one thing Roberts did pretty well.
Right on the money! Tailgate hungers for interpersonal contact, he feels isolated from being a bot out of time and feels kinship to Cyclonus, are we seeing "gay space robots pandering to masturbating fans" there too or just people with longing? I think it's the latter. The brand can break out of its emotionally stunted mindset by exploring these ideas rather than either avoiding them or exploiting them.
The rest of your post is another situation where all I can add is "thumbs up" which seems inadequate.
O6 wrote:Prowl is so right, I can't even do anything to add to it.
Shit, between all this stuff and also everything he did in Shadowplay, Chromedome would definitely make it to "main character" status in my book.
In fact, I recently reread the first issue of MTMTE (for kicks, I guess) and was astounded by just how little filler there is and how much Roberts is setting things up for later. Rewind and Chromedome are introduced right away as being completely inseperable--Rewind insists that if Chromedome is going, so is he. That 'right there' hints that they've got something going on--if Roberts was pandering to shippers, he would have made them (very cliche-ly) "fall in love" on the Lost Light and then show Rewind robofisting Chromedome in his quarters. (And you know what? I've STILL seen worse stuff for this franchise pop up.)
In fact, most of the people who I've seen who've come out (pun intended) in support of Rewind and Chromedome aren't "those kind of fans," and are actually praising the fact that it's being done well and for story reasons and not just for the sake of two gay robots hooking up. I mean, if he wanted to do that, and make it that kind of huge overt Thing, wouldn't he (and IDW) come out with a big showy thing about how they're being "so progressive" by having major gay characters in a relationship in their book?
Bingo all across the board. MTMTE has a lot of foundation there, and characters who just "are" rather than making some big Jack & Rose Titanic play.
Dom wrote:Yeah, but "that sort of fan" is arguably more poisonous.
Back in the 90s, there was a television show called "Friends" (about a group of idiot 20 somethings). One of the jokes about the fans of that show (and it was *really* popular*) was that "Friends" the show was for the people who did not have many actual friends.
This is arguably a similar dynamic. "That sort of fan" is not the fan that should be getting encouraged with content that panders and rewards them.
That doesn't describe how "that sort of fan" is poisonous at all. If they have no friends, how can the propagate ideas to others anyway? They lack interpersonal connections, that's why they cling to a show like Friends. This argument is cart before the horse stuff, the show was very popular across the board, why do you have to believe the writers wrote it that way to pander to a specific group when it was successful with many different types? Keep in mind, Friends was a sitcom soap opera from the very beginning, it existed as it was supposed to.
In any case, we're a LOOOOOONG way from that, hence the "MTMTE is more like M*A*S*H" thing - Chromedome & Rewind could be Hawkeye & Trapper John far easier than they could Frank Burns & Hot Lips.
I stand by my previous comments about children's literature destroying any enthusiasm for reading. There were children's books that I could not stand as a kid. And, my appreciation for that writing style has not increased over time. The simplistic writing style and content make it hard to find much to chew over.
Studies show that you're way out of the norm there. Perhaps you were exposed to the wrong childrens lit, but overall studies show that kids who read that stuff are smarter and become lifelong readers of all sorts of literature.
By this logic, kids also need lessons in politics and civics. (One might argue that these lessons are even more important.)
I am not talking about history classes, (though history is vital). I am talking about the fact that kids (to say nothing of adults) need to have an understanding of how power structures work. This includes multiple branches of goverment, but it also includes basic concepts like the application of power and such. (And, in cases like that, fictional examples could work with kids as they would be less likely to cause political controversy as a real life situation would.)
Similarly, there are questions of bio ethics or other topics.
Yup. The Wizard of Oz, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, any number of fairy tales, they deal with a lot of these ideas on levels kids can understand and on levels they don't know are educating them on those topics. The only prerequisite should be a proper foundation that the kids can understand.
Of course, this is getting in to intellectual development more than emotional development. But, while you work in kid's literature. I work in adult ed. I see plenty of people who are very articulate about their feelings.....and not much else. They might be able to regurgitate facts, but they do not understand much in the way of basic principles and they certainly cannot dispute if something is a principle or not.
In other words, if you are going to say that "gay space robots" is meeting a vital need, I could argue that there are even more vital needs not being met.
Apples and oranges. If a body isn't getting enough vitamin A, does that mean you should also starve it of protein until it meets the vitamin A demands? And I highly doubt you see plenty of people who are correctly articulate about true feelings, most people in our society are pretty ignorant of where their feelings come from.
Gomess wrote:BWprowl wrote:Roberts couldn’t ‘pander’ to Chromedome/Rewind shippers with what he wrote, because there were no Chromedome/Rewind shippers until he started putting out this story where Chromedome and Rewind were close! How could Roberts ‘pander’ to fans of a particular relationship when that particular relationship didn’t even exist until he wrote it?
It's not the specific relationship which bothers Dom. The group to which he believes Roberts is pandering is... fans who want to see TFs of the same gender expressing their feelings for one another? And then, like, I dunno, draw rude pictures on Tumblr?
I'm really not accusing Dom of homophobia. But I can really see no other difference between Chromewind (Redome?) and... Blackbolt? Silverachnia? than gender. At best, BW's resident "OTP" was an awkward, clichéd attempt to give depth to its strongest female character. At worst, it was the late 90s equivalent of exactly what Dom's imagining.
(And please no one tell me there were no obsessive shippers (or whoever it is Dom hates, I'm STILL not clear on that!) at the time of BW)
I think that's what Dom is trying to avoid. To the max. The odd thing is that those emotionally-stunted people are creating an atmosphere of emotional stunting in others through gut reaction. Just as one should not write slash fiction into a comic just to appease 'shipping fans, one should also not avoid all talk of any intimacy to avoid said 'shipping fans. Don't let others on any side of an argument control your own expression or ideas, listen to advice but ultimately do whatever you can to tell the story you think should be told, that's how I see it.
TM wrote:Wow if this is what's going in the IDW TF G-1 comics,Then i'm glad I stopped buying everything after December 2011 came to a end.
That's a very good impression of an emotionally stunted response. (... what's that, you weren't making an impression? Oh.)
From my understanding Transformers robots don't need sex nor companionship because their a warrior race that get the emotions/desires/purpose in life they need from fighting,upgrading & killing.
Don't need companionship, really? That ultimately is the statement that is at the crux of this "emotionally stunted franchise" thing, that these robots don't need friends. But they do have friends, they do have loyalties and companions and people they call "brother". They had them from the beginning. These ideas merely extrapolate based on those original ideas, they say "where do those feelings they had in G1 come from, what happens when the emotional toll becomes too much, what happens when the war ends, what do we do with the hatred and isolation and all that other stuff that we pushed aside for 4 million years to fight for what we believed in?"
If the Transformers is merely a story of isolated robots fighting, upgrading, and killing, that is a very sad and empty place to be. Their war is a tale of tragedy with no winners and no value in winning or losing. They are a species doomed to spread misery and pain across the cosmos as they continue fighting, upgrading, and killing without feeling.
The comics books industry is on it's last leg. In order to sell those comics now,they have to delve to new lows
RID and MTMTE are selling quite briskly.
O6 wrote:I decided to ask him.
https://twitter.com/jroberts332/status/ ... 1361417216
If you hate Twitter:
Onslaught Six via Twitter wrote:@jroberts332 Hey James. A friend of mine dropped MTMTE because he considered Chromdome&Rewind "pandering to shippers." I disagree. Thoughts?
James Roberts via Twitter wrote:.@OnslaughtSix Most fiction features couples, why not MTMTE? (There's a much longer response, but that can wait 'til I leave the title.)
(Given the 140 character restraint, I think I worded my original question well enough.)
So basically, I get two things out of this: Roberts wanted to explore a pair of characters who were in a relationship (regardless of gender and/or gender roles) and he still has plans as to why this is important (hence "that can wait until I leave the title.")
Fucking awesome!
Also "Every good story has to end sometime, or else it stays around long enough to become bad.
" is wise stuff.
Gomess wrote:Tigermegatron wrote:Wow if this is what's going in the IDW TF G-1 comics,Then i'm glad I stopped buying everything after December 2011 came to a end.
As the first person to agree with Dom in this thread, care to elaborate?
Second person, Anderson expressed his opinion that emotionally intimate relationship material isn't appropriate for this franchise.
Gomess wrote:Because cooties
Tigs has made me wonder if maybe the majority of adult TF fans don't see it as a WaRrIoR rAcE kind of franchise, and as such, maybe there really isn't that much of a demand for romantic plots.
It's unfortunate, since the average person on the street probably wouldn't assume an adult TF fan would have a mind for Relationships, and here we are proving them right.
Cooties, ew!
I'd like to address that we're not even talking about "romantic" plots, just emotionally intimate ones. The romance angle involves sexuality, which the Transformers entities largely do not have in any capacity whatsoever, and yet it's easy for the complex emotional intimacy angle to be painted as just "gay space robots banging each other", especially by outsiders. If we let the argument be framed as just "robots having romance and sex", the fight for emotional maturity instantly loses ground before it's even begun.
Dom wrote:I personally know fans who are unable to discuss fiction (let alone non-fiction) past a certain level. They do not seem to engage in any deep thoughts on interactions. They want comics in general to be stuck in the 80s or earlier. They have vivarious attachments to the characters, but less apparently to real people/things. I really do not want to be seeing more stuff pitched to them, if only because I ain't interested in reading it.
You speak of this as a negative, as if it needs to grow beyond being stuck in the '80s, and yet you also fear that a modern interpretation with more emotional depth is being pitched to them as well. By that logic, there is pretty much no avenue you could take which wouldn't fit into their wheelhouse. Or I could just have kept reading and BWP would have covered this for me.
The situation with Blackarachnia and Silverbolt (or Optimus and Elita) is different for being so generic. My reaction in both cases was more or less "okay, this is the obligatory and not terribly interesting pairing up". The Rewind/Chromedome thing seemed like Roberts going out of his way, which just made it worse in my eyes.
<-- this guy knows what I'm feeling right now. So shallow relationships between robots is fine, but deep ones are verboten? How is he going out of his way? It didn't even come up until deep into the first year as a plot point, it simply "was" the same way that monoform believers and empurata and other things came up throughout the narrative. It's obligatory because some robots had roboboobs and small waists? That sells female characters short in general, whether you realize it or not.
My biggest over-all complaint about "More Than Meets The Eye" is that it seems to be aimless and vapid.
VAPID I can't get on board with, it seemed vapid in the first handful of issues, but has slowly grown to be about people and what drives them, the opposite of vapid - it is challenging on those lines in the biggest way I can imagine. Aimless? Sure. Vapid? No.
Again, it is a question of there being other things to be done with TF as a whole and human type relationships just does not seem right in this particular book. Again, I read "Earth 2", which features a gay character, (albeit one whose boyfriend got killed in his origin). I also read a fair amount of Bendis, who is known for his "kitchen table" discussion scenes.
That's a poor excuse. There's no time for emotional conversation because there's other things to be done? It's been 30 years for us, 4 million for them, at what point does a healthy dose of conversation about emotional health and intimacy for these characters come in? What's the chore list that takes precedence over that so we can saw through it to get to tales that make characters into more rounded, compelling creatures on the page? Why should we have to eat all our rolls before we can eat our broccoli? (I originally said "carrots" but realized some people might see that metaphor as too phallic.
)
There is a significant amount of evidence for this type of thing.
Roberts and Barber both deviate from the "all war all the time" template, but keep a certain amont of brand-cliche otherwise prominent. Roberts is using all manner of obscure characters in wacky scenarios. Barber is setting his book on Cybertron.
But, the guys who deviated by pitching high and not adhering to at least some TF cliches (particularly the more shallow and easy to identify stuff) got in hot water with fans. Guys like McCarthy and Costa are solid writers, but they pitched over fans heads and were called out for it.
Sounds like that's a problem with the audience, sounds like this franchise is
emotionally stunted.
But, as I said, it just comes across as forced/pandering in this case. The impression that I have, (and Roberts' long form comments may prove me wrong) is that Rewind and Chromedome got paired off to make an obligatory statement to the shippers and give the more stunted members of the fandom some kind of vicarious connection.
Seems to me like it's forced because you're forcing the meta to overwhelm the content rather than judging the content on its own merits. There's a reason I didn't buy into AHM or Ongoing or pre-AHM where I have with these current lines, and it's not because I want to see robots bedding each other. I felt for Tailgate when he wanted to emulate Rewind and Chromedome's spark-chamber-fluid-sharing moment but Cyclonus rebuffed him violently, and I felt EVEN MORE for when Cyclonus a moment later helped him pick up the broken vial. That was some moving stuff right there, that was inspired and inspiring. It makes me less happy as your friend and as a fellow fan to know that the meta angle has ruined that fiction for you, that your fear of emotionally stunted fans ruining the franchise has stunted your emotions and ruined that part of the franchise for you.
And, politics and warfare are important topics to understand.
But emotions aren't?
anderson wrote:Do I want to see Chromedome and Rewind (or pick any combination you like) as a couple, exploring their feelings and having domestic issues? No, definitely not. Would some different take on long-term relationships, possibly exploring just what that would mean to a race like Transformers, be appropriate? Possibly. But I just can't picture Chromedome and Rewind taking a walk, or going on a date, or discussing the budget, or meeting the family, or any other typical couple activities. None of that makes any sense to me. Having Rewind call Chromedome "Domey" honestly made me cringe a bit. Cute little nicknames are another thing I just can't picture two Transformers doing.
Is that honestly how you see Chromedome and Rewind, going on dates and flirting and having household bickering? That's not how it seems presented to me at all. Their origin isn't some junior high prom, it's an interpersonal connection while waiting in line to commit suicide, that's heavy shit AND THEY'RE NOT EVEN SUPER EMO ABOUT IT! I tell you what, you find me meeting a soulmate at a suicide booth and we don't commit suicide, I can guarantee you I'll be an emo little bitch for a while.
Also, as to the nicknames thing: Cliff, Jackie, Prime, Bee, Megs, Screamer, etc.. Familiarity breeds nicknames, it's how it is whether it's an emotionally intimate relationship or just a casual one. I haven't seen a lot of pet name stuff in the comics though.
Gomess wrote:In terms of emotional depth, My Little Pony seems to have evolved tremendously since the 80s. TF? Not so much. But if one Hasbro brand can change to keep up with reality, so can another.
Oh shit, that's a good point. Where would we rather see TF going? Do we want it to be stuck the way GI Joe is? I sure don't, GI Joe seems quite trapped and stunted, a lot of criticism of that fandom has been hurled by our gang here even as we ourselves partake in that franchise. Shit, the GI Joe live action movies couldn't even put sex in
gratuitously without painful stumbling, Flint had to stare into a warped surface at the thong-wearing ass of his fellow soldier like a boy peeking at nudie mags for the first time, it was embarrassing!
O6 wrote:I think part of it is that Roberts is, in some ways, pitching to a different kind of TF audience--the audience who has seen it all happen before. I can already think of a handful of things that MTMTE has done that no other TF story period has done before, and that's part of the reason I keep watching it. Roberts may be "aimlessly wandering," and sometimes even I wonder what the actual point is going to come to (if ever?), but the reason I keep coming back every month is that things are happening and they're always things that I haven't seen happen in TF before.
YES! Exactly, there are new ideas here, and why shouldn't interpersonal dynamics and emotional discourse be among them since we've seen shootin' and killin' and explorin' and transformin' stories until we're blue in the face? They seem totally valid to me, and to not explore them because the undertone of emotional intimacy is seen as a precursor to sexual relationships seems like it's stunting the potential available.
Dom wrote:Honestly, the progress of those fans is on them. My complaint is that they are using fiction (TF or otherwise) to get vicarious connection because they are too lazy or inept to go out and meet their own damned people. And, hey, that is on them. But, I am not interested in the comics they form that connection with.
But you are, Dom! You are because there are 'shippers and emotionally damaged people overly attached to EVERYTHING, and the internet brings them together to create their own subculture and communities. There's no way to stop it, you can make the most chaste, most disconnected story you want and if there are 2 characters in the book there will still be a fan who gets gushy over it. It's impossible to stop human nature in that regard. If a technical manual were well-read as entertainment I guarantee you the cog would be having an affair with the worm gear in some reader's mind.
Part of it is that I think that TF is better suited to handling other ideas. But, part of it is I would rather not see comics panding to the above mentioned fans because I would prefer to be reading better comics.
Doing the things it's easiest at gets boring and repetitive though, getting better at telling other stories should be a goal too. Especially now that it's broken through the pop culture barrier into the greater world, it shouldn't be defined as what it can't or won't do well, it shouldn't be scorned and seen as only attracting one kind of stunted person. We're better than that as a group, all of us, the minute we started taking part in this conversation we took it past what this franchise was best at into better territory, because we're THINKING about it!
I do not want to be reading comics that are pandering to emotional stunties. (I can see how you misunderstood what I said though.)
All comic books do that, it's inherent in the medium, it attracts emotional stunties, sometimes it even helps them through those tough times into being better people. Look at Legion of Super-Heroes and Spider-Man in the '60s, I know you scorn all that stuff but those stories I know a lot of people my parents' age who got a lot out of those stories because they were inspired by the simple tales and the real messages of the characters within them.
anderson wrote:I'd have to see an example to judge. But without all of the domestic issues, and physical attraction issues, we're left with stories that could be told just as effectively through friendship. Chromedome and Rewind would work just as well as two old and dear friends as they did the way Roberts wrote them. In fact, remove a few lines of dialogue, and that's what you'd have.
Remove sex and that's what a good marriage is too though. It's emotional honesty and intimacy, a lot of "dear friends" are really old friends who don't spend much time together, there's more than that. Chrome and Rewind have an example of that sexless domestic cliche when one of them, I think Chromedome, talks about the other one's longstanding sleeping troubles - and this is something that mere rackmates could have also said in a military story, yet it is deeper not because of romance, but because of the emotional connection between the two. Chromedome is not Rewind's original "number one", which could mean his "number one friend" if you want to interpret it that way, so Chromedome knows that Rewind is out there looking for his original number one and Chromedome supports Rewind in that endeavor - that's kind of amazing depth without a single romantic gesture or physical moment.
One of my favorite scenes in the latest issue of RID was Skybyte's exchange with Jazz, where Skybyte is unwilling to leave Jazz to fight on his own. He expresses loyalty to him and friendship, and there should be more of that. If these characters are willing to fight and die for each other, let's have a reason why. Let the characters express how they feel. Make the relationships meaningful. That type of emotional exchange I'm all for, and it's something I would enjoy seeing a lot more of.
Damn RID spoilers I've not gotten to yet! Sorry I can't add more. Anyway, that's a friendship that's a few months old, imagine if that relationship kept them in close quarters for 4 million years how it could be even more emotionally intimate. I'm not talking about romance on any level (and holy cods, Skybyte + Jazz would be the weirdest 'shipped combination I could think of), just being in tune as 2 people who are basically all the family each other has known for so long.
Chromedome was willing not just to die for Rewind, but more importantly perhaps, willing to KILL him to keep things from getting worse for him - when you can imagine a world where you love someone enough to end their suffering for them, you've crossed over into serious shit territory! Those aren't Fisher Price emotions you're playing with, that's a serious war/life/death story right there.
Maybe that's what you're talking about, I don't know. We might not be all that far apart. I just don't want to see something like Chromedome sitting at home, wondering just when Rewind is going to make it back from the front lines! That's the type of "war romance" the franchise needs to avoid!
Yes, that is cheap cliche, you are super right. That's not emotional growth, that's trading a war story cliche for a domestic story cliche and they're both quite stunted. Chromedome sitting at home of course is unlikely since he's a fighter MORE than Rewind. But absolutely, that's the type of unwelcome filler that lazy writers might use which would damage the standing of any growth gained.
Dom wrote:Okay, then why should TF be stuck with "robots in disguise?
It's not, we have Monoformists or whatever they're called now. And the fleshy humans like Kicker and Rad and Spike and Hunter. And Action Masters. (The quintessons weren't fun enough to count here.)
Shock wrote:I still think this is more of a case of Dom holding a grudge against a fandom that no longer exists. Case in point would be the comment about most fans not being able to mention Nightracer without somehow connecting it to Raksha. As of right now, that statement is, I think, provably wrong. The thing to bear in mind here is that the fandom is not the same as it was ~15-20 years ago in the old days of the ATT/Allspark boards. Well, Allspark is still around but it's generally considered the Mos Eisley Spaceport of fansites. I would say that the bulk of the fans on the internet now are ones that have started interacting with the fandom within the last 5-10years and most of us have no freakin clue what a Raksha is nor do we care. So saying nightracer to someone like myself means nothing other than to referrence a Botcon toy or two.
So yeah, back in the bad ol' days maybe this would have been "pandering to the fandom" but again, that iteration of the fandom no longer exists.
I think Dom is wrong about the pandering to the 'shippers, but I don't doubt for a second that there are still 'shippers in our midsts. Most fans don't want to have anything to do with Kiss Players, certainly avoiding going down that path is a noble ideal, but if it meant sacrificing all of Alternators? I don't think so. And that
WAS pandering on the part of the creators, MTMTE certainly doesn't seem like that to me.
BWp wrote:I will go on record as saying that I believe I hate David Willis more than Dom does. I actually continue to read Shortpacked to this day, just to find fodder to let me hate him more.
Is that the internet equivalent of a hatefuck?
Dom wrote:But, I was wondering how much weight you would assign to emotional depth.
Ok, that's fair. How do we quantify this though? Is MTMTE 10% emotional depth content to 40% adventure and 50% dicking around the wikis? Is the G1 cartoon 95% adventures, 4% war, and 1% feelings of being pals? Is TF Prime 70% senseless violence, 9.5% making speeches, and 15% antics, and 0.5% dishonest emotional content mainly involving Bulkhead's 3-way relationship with Miko & Handjob, i mean, Wheeljack, and Arcee & Jack Jack? I can't say for sure how much I'd sacrifice the main adventure content for emotional depth, right now I can only say "more" but I don't think more than a quarter and only then if it's really well-written.
I generally dislike feelings in fiction. Maybe it is because I am pretty well in touch with my own feelings, (misanthropic as they tend to be). But, I tend to think that fiction has better uses. And, in a more objective sense, I have seen the damage that a focus on feelings has done to education in this country.
So how in your mind do we get this franchise less stunted as an expression? Or do we, in your mind? How does TF grow without this emotional content, from your perspective?
At this point, there are college students, even graduates, who can talk all day about how they feel but not much about what they think. Assignments that ask them to objectively consider subject matter (in any number of disciplines) are answered with multiple "I" statements, often at the encouragement of instructors (the same people who should be discouraging that kind of behavior).
It is all about emotion dammit. It is all about what the reader feels, not what the writer has actually written.
Those don't sound like real feelings, those sound like self-absorbed reactions, the twitter-esque equivalent of feelings. Not what drives them, but what spews out of their face-holes (mouth and eyes and ears) in the moment.
Now, we have a comic that specifically is rewarding that kind of thinking. And, it is rewarding and validating that thinking in a fandom that has trouble parsing back-writes from original content (along with possibly fact and fiction). Now, the "ghey space robots" crowd" has been all around validated.
First off, I think most of the fans who said "TF is gay because they're all dudes" are sexually-repressed because they want more female contact in their lives and, in the most puerile fashion sexualize everything around them because that's
all that matters to them, they want to be perceived as having a strong case of the "notgays" so they can have a better chance to get their dicks wet, as if just getting laid will solve all their problems.
Secondly, the odds of any fan who flipped out about "gay space robots" is almost certainly NEVER going to have a relationship as intimate as the one 2 fictional robots had/have in MTMTE, and that's sad. If they were more secure in who they are, they wouldn't have to worry about being into TF or any "gay, not gay, ok!" entertainment, and that wouldn't bleed into other portions of their lives which would hamper their ability to connect with those who should matter most to them.
And, yes, this does make me angry. I have no desire to read comics that play in to and reward a poisonous trend in this country.
Feelings bitch! Get with the times! Everybody's got 'em! Every time Optimus Prime transforms and goes into battle, he's thinking about sticking his robot dick in Roller afterwards as his reward for killing 'cons! ... Seriously Dom? Is that what you think is going on with this franchise right now? That's not how it seems to me, not at all. Transformers is not coming off as a romance novel to me, it's not out there trying to fulfill lonely, unsatisfied, sexually-frustrated fans just because it's aiming for a deeper emotional content.
O6 wrote:Are we even told directly that Chromedome and Rewind are physically attracted to each other? Is that even an emotion TFs are capable of having?
They don't copulate, they don't sexually reproduce, why would that be in play?
Yes! This is the whole thing that confuses me to hell about Anderson's point. It's like he can't fathom two characters being in a relationship without--for lack of better terms--one being the man and one being the woman. What he said...wouldn't happen, and I don't think any realistic TF writer would actually portray characters that way. It'd be fucking stupid.
I don't think he's saying that's ALL he can fathom, just that he can see where we are now easily leading to that, and that's a fair concern. You talk about "any realistic TF writer" but it's really easy to get shitty writers who insinuate themselves like a cancer into a brand too.
Why are you against new people who enjoy things differently than you entering the fandom?
That's what it comes down to, you keep...you keep drawing this weird fucking invisible line between "us" and "them" when the reality is we all came to Transformers for entirely different reasons, and we all stayed here because the franchise delivered different things to all of us. [...] To me, there is no "wrong kind of fan," or "that kind of fan." People are allowed to enjoy things the way they want to, and you shouldn't be throwing stones from afar because you're hardly innocent yourself.
Ouch, that's pretty cutting. But it does say on the top of all these pages, "
Welcoming all views from the Transformers community" so your point does hit where we live, proverbially speaking, I can't say you're wrong there at all.
In fact, Marissa Fairbourne from TF Season 3 never ended up as anybody's love interest, did she? (She's Flint's daughter, which may imply he married Lady Jaye, but I'm not sure her mother is ever mentioned. A casualty of the Cobra war?)
Well, she was... oh god, I can't believe how badly I'm going to undermine this without wanting to... but she was Optimus Prime's girlfriend in Kiss Players.
I feel dirty for knowing that, and also for the damage it does to the greater point.
All three Powerpuff Girls remained independent for the show's run. (I'm stretching, here, but you get the point.)
Velma never fucked anybody! Jinkies!
TM wrote:I don't think this is the problem. Due to the star Trek fans being leaps & bounds more nuts,crazy,social outcast & beyond more malicious than any evil TF fan is capable of doing on-line.
Wow, thanks. 3 generations of my family right down the shitter with that comment. I'm sure Shockwave appreciates your comment as well.
TM wrote:After a while of thinking about it,I will concede you are right on most of your points.
I was more or less referring to the Malicious star trek fans in the early 1990's who use to send people those viruses because they use to get bent out of shape when people would steal media images from their sites & use that stuff elsewhere. That was almost 20 years ago & other than that I don't see any Star trek fans acting this way anymore in this day & age.
I don't visit nor post on any star trek message boards nor forums,So I don't know how they act over their.
From my own personal experiences I can confirm that TF fans are a mean.mentally i'll,hermits,degenerates & malicious bunch. The main reason I like being here on TFViews is because everyone is polite & tries to get along,also Jedi is perhaps the most professional,plite & respectful TF moderated forum owner,I've ever seen.
Due to the TF franchise being toy driven & not media driven like star trek is. the TF fans collect more toys than the star trek fans. so by default the TF fans have not grown up while the Star trek fans are more mature due to them not playing with toys. the star trek media is also aimed at adults while the TF cartoons are aimed at kids,So by default Star Trek bring in more mature media fans while TF bring in less mature media fans.
I appreciate that you were a stand up guy and changed your statement on that Trek thing, I really do. I would say Trekkies come in all types, as do Babylon 5 fans and Farscape fans and any sci-fi fans. I saw people doing destructive things at each other online in the late '90s in those franchises, but also some of the nicest - I still have the handmade Ranger belt buckle a fellow fan I barely knew mailed me from halfway around the world, didn't even charge me shipping. It's the same thing with TF fans, you will find that there is a great range of types and the more positivity and openness you give out with them, the more you will get back. Ignore the negativity and focus on the positive aspects of the community, don't pre-judge, and I think you'll find a lot more good folks than you expect.
Gomess wrote:Does Star Trek have emotional depth? I haven't seen much of it, but I guess it is mostly about the characters' relationships in an enclosed space.
Are Star Trek fans really 'worse' in general? Sure it isn't just the fact that Star Trek is a bigger franchise, so it happens to cover a wider breadth of people, including more jerks...? 'Cos I don't know many Star Trek fans, but those I do know are good people.
Anyway, does Star Trek confronts its audience with things that make them uncomfortable? Probably some iterations of it do. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying TF should be a boundary-breaking franchise, but its comics should be one of the few areas where it can tell slightly more challenging stories. It doesn't seem to be. Or at least isn't given the chance to, because whenever it does the fans just click "dislike".
Trek comes and goes with emotional depth, I'd say the original material and its films do have it, and TNG has it, and DS9 is almost overrun with it, Voyager and Enterprise are soapy and shallow in the way they presented it, and the '09 movie was the most shallow thing I'd seen in years. The novels are (were? I stopped reading a while back) generally deeper emotionally, sometimes swinging way too far. The whole idea of slash fiction comes from Trek as well though: "Kirk / Spock" gay fan fic porn, "Spock / McCoy", etc., commonplace in early '70s fan lit.
O6 wrote:(I can't fucking believe where this thread has gone.)
I can't believe you linked a Shortpacked comic, and one so melodramatically sappy
and unfunny no less, in this site.
Gomess wrote:I guess any franchise which could come up with Shattered Glass must have some deepseated emotional problems.
Erk, Star Trek did it first. Also over-exploited it first too. "Mirror Mirror" was the episode, a "mirror universe" being the premise, hence "shattered glass" in reference to that mirror. Goddamnit, now I'm involved with 2 fandoms that are several decades old with this crap in them!
Actually, I wonder what the actual creative forces behind the TF IP think about emotional depth? Like, as people. Maybe it doesn't even enter as a factor, because they're still doing business for 80s boys.
They have to approve it, they'd be fools not to. I would think it gives them pride to know it has this kind of range that they're guiding, but it's a tertiary thing on their plates after designing and marketing toys, and helming awful movies and TV shows. Some of them are just in it for the paycheck though.
Dom wrote:Fun Publications does not seem to invest much intellectual capital in to developing their IP. They do not even necessarily follow up on existing story threads. (Granted, nothing is really lost in this case, given the caliber of their work. But, it does show how little thinking goes in to the content that they market and charge money for.)
They do it for fun, so I think they do invest a lot of intellectual capital in their IP, they also take pride in it even as they do stumble their way through. They are not out to make cash, there are much better and easier and less annoying ways to make a buck. So for all the scorn they catch, they are still fans and they still care, whether or not we agree with how they do things.
Ironically, from what I have seen, most of the people who are reading (and liking) the Fun Publications stuff are the guys who came in during the "Beast Years". The comics and text stories are largely *written* by 80s boys. But, I know at least one 80s boy's boy who snorts derisively at Fun Publications output, and calls it fanfic. (This puts me in the odd position of defending Fun Publications on the basis of them being official. But, that is a topic for another thread.)
Well, I agree that BW brought in the Fun Pub faithful, I remember my buddies and I were on a toy safari and talking about Botcon (pretty sure it was the 3rd or 4th one), Jeremy wanted to go and I think he did, and my pals from that era are the ones who bought in the most to the Fun Pub stuff. But I also feel that Fun Pub is fanfic, licensed fanfic yes, but nothing more canon than that.
The best writing from Fun Publications reaches the level of competent hackery and incorporates genre elements reasonably well. (And, even that level of writing is *rare*.) There are obligatory happy/sad/scary moments, but nothing that an 8 year old would not see right through.
It's fans writing for fans, what are you really expecting here? You are so mean to them because you take it as canon since it's licensed and pretty fucking expensive, but ultimately it's just fanfic. I enjoyed The Stunti-Con Job enough to buy the comic and the hat at '11, but I made no allusions that it was meant to be brilliant work, it's just fun comics for fans.
(to use JT's wording from elsewhere) "puzzle toys with personalities".
Good stuff, but not mine.
O6 wrote:EDIT: Actually, I want to address part of why I continue to read MTMTE: It makes me happy. I read it, and I laugh, and I enjoy reading it...and I don't really read into it more than that. This is generally how I go about things. (Occasionally, it backfires. I saw the Thor film in theaters with some friends and had a great time, so I defended the film to people for a long time afterward. Rewatching it on my own last year at home proved to be a noticably different experience.)
This is why I say "just because I like something doesn't automatically make it good". My SW buddy Raph and I had fun at GI Joe Retaliation, but I make no bones about that movie being a 6/10 on its best day.
Dom wrote:Roberts is writing about the robots and how the robots get along, and he gets a pass for many of the same things that the other writers got passes for (such as redefining characters or having a story that does not apparently go anywhere) because he is writing about robots doing stuff. The guys who write about other stuff, and maybe use robots, do not get the pass because a large number of vocal fans do not get the other stuff.
And he's writing about the foundational beliefs of the Cybertronian society re the Knights of Cybertron, the Circle, Primus and so forth, how that leads into religious beliefs that we already knew and others such as the Monoformistic beliefs, and how that ties into the Crystal City and the Metrotitans being the steeds of the Knights; then there's also the interpolitical beliefs of both sides of the war, as well as outside factions such as Cyclonus; there's Cybertronian morality in every issue, including "good guys" who are anything but, such as Whirl, and how others are able to stomach fighting alongside them; and on and on like that. To say that it's only about bots talking in space is missing a lot of content, even for a flawed book that has all but abandoned its actual driving framing mechanism there's a lot more than just sitting around talking nonsense and having the occasional laser fight.
Shockwave wrote:Another example is the Trek fandom. Star Trek fans have a reputation for not having the best grip on reality. Being a Star Trek fan for several decades now I can understand the concept of wanting to distance oneself from the public perception of a particular fandom. The best way to do this is by yourself though isolation. I don't interact with the Trek fandom at all. I don't go to message boards, web sites or anything. I basically watch the dvds and movies and that's it. Sometimes I'll buy toys if I like them. But by and large the best way I've been able to not be seen as the stereotypical "Trekkie" is to be the example and to just enjoy my fandom on my own terms.
Wow, it's just shit on Trek week over here, ain't it? That said, yeah, that's how I am now too. I haven't been to StarTrek.com in years. I haven't been to a message board for Trek in over a decade. I talk with my Star Wars and TF friends who also like Trek and that's about as far as I take it. I buy here and there and I keep thinking I'll read another novel, and that's it. I still love Trek, I still carry its values with me on a daily basis, I still look at my movie Enterprise every night before bed and occasionally imagine going through mundane life on a starship to help me fall asleep, but I don't really interact with its fandom because it's very... aggressive.
