The Cost of Fandom

Everybody’s a fan. Whether you pine for new Metal Gear Solid games or wait with baited breath for each week’s episode of Lost, cyber-stalk Jonathan Ross’ Twitter account or fervently attend cosplay events as your favourite Gundam robot-mech thingy, it’s part of human nature to hold an almost obsessive level of fascination and devotion to a certain franchise, medium or person.

That’s why reboots and remakes, and prequels and sequels, are such dangerous territory. Old classics in new hands or a belated attempt to explain how The Force, scientifically, works, the harbingers of a fanbase find their Midi-chlorians boiling at the very notion of messing with the originals.

These past weeks, J.J. Abram’s Star Trek opened to movie theatres with overwhelmingly positive reviews, yet scornful lists of how the formula was tampered with flooded the internet, penned by forum usernames “Tribble Trouble” or “Kobayashi Maroonie”. Both Sherlock Holmes and The Road received trailers of their upcoming movies, but seen as too “Hollywood” or “mainstream” to the literature devotees.

The most egregious case of fanbase shattering originality in the video game world came from Bethesda’s recent marvel, Fallout 3. Ten years since the vault dweller last scoured the wasteland for Stimpaks, bottle caps and juicy bags of Rad Away, rabid fanatics of Interplay’s isometric RPG crawled from the woodworks to voice their disgust at the very notion of “those Oblivion guys” taking on a franchise as esteemed as Fallout.

A trip to post-apocalyptic message board “No Mutants Allowed” is less enjoyable than suffering a Mentats withdrawal during a Deathclaw fight. Attempting to defend Mutants’ honour, one user’s signature reads “these are people who have had their hopes and dreams completely and utterly crushed, ground into a horrible paste, and then used to ice the crap cake that is Fallout 3”. In a particularly exhilarating thread about Fallout’s deluge of facial hair, a consistently snarky vault escapee remarks “after all, it’s easier to make 47 beards than create deep and involving dialog options”.

With fans like these, who needs critics?

I don’t propose that these alarmingly frequent reboots and sequels should be given free rein to destroy our childhood memories or favourite pop culture mementos. There is a massive amount of responsibility given to these privileged rebooters so severe fan distress (or nerd rage, if you will) is obviously justified if Sherlock Holmes sprouted wings or Indiana Jones met crystal-skulled aliens who burn out Cate Blanchett’s eyes by downloading the facts of life to her tiny, tiny human brain.

But how much is creativity stifled when directors and designers are at the mercy of vocal fans who feel they have shared ownership of the franchise in question? Blizzard felt the backlash first hand as devout enthusiasts bemoaned Diablo III’s lavish colour palette and questioned every change to Starcraft’s minutia in its sequel.

Fans are an essential part of a product’s success, even those who run wiki (and wookie) pedias, create their own leather-bound lore bibles and conduct frame by frame analysis on a shark’s tale, but it’s easy to tip from rabid obsessive into scrutinising curmudgeon. By holding excessive baggage so close to their chest, to mix clichés, these so-called fans often deny themselves amazing experiences, either through stubborn avoidance or complete denial.

“The audience we’re making this movie for is people who love movies, not people who love Star Trek movies, if we made this movie for them alone; we would be limiting our audience like crazy” says Trek’s Abrams. Let it go, embrace the joy of fresh and innovative perspectives and allow a new generation of fans to join your esoteric club.