Fandom Echo Chambers

I am out of town next weekend, so while I will try to get a Saturday Note written in time, I don’t know for sure if it will come out. 

I thought I’d have a new review of National Treasure on the movie review blog, except it turns out that I already made a review years ago! So I’ll add some new observations.

Randomly had the thought earlier this week: I should go to DragonCon. Doubt that’ll happen this year, though.

Fandom Echo Chambers

I haven’t seen Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey yet. I hope to get to it soon. I’m not psychic so I can’t say how it will do, but I suspect quite good, and I’ve suspected that ever since I saw that pre-orders for IMAX tickets were sold out shortly after pre-orders were open. It was clear that a lot of people wanted to see it! This is apparently a shock to some people, as there are contingents of people (notably on Twitter) who predicted that, given negative discourse about everything from casting to costume design, that no one would want to see the movie. I recall seeing a comment on someone’s mostly-unrelated post questioning if it was worth discussing, as obviously it’s not going to do well given all the online conversations, right?

Well, its opening weekend was fantastic, and it is projected to make a lot of money.

What gives?

This whole thing reflects something you see in fandom circles (and also politics/society in general, but we won’t go into that now) in which people look at their personal interactions and observations within their chosen communities and extrapolate that everyone else in the fandom feels that way, too. You can’t do that! You can’t assume that your particular corner of Twitter, or Tumblr, or Reddit, or YouTube, or whatever place online that you frequent, or whatever place in real life even, is necessarily a representation of the whole of the audience or population.

Like, if you were on the Internet, especially the film-y side of it, in the 2000s or early 2010s, everyone seemed to hate movies like the Star Wars Prequel Trilogy or Michael Bay’s Transformers. Yet those movies made tons of money, and clearly had very dedicated fanbases attached to them. The Prequel Trilogy fans even sort of erupted out into the public scene with the release of the Sequel Trilogy, but that’s a whole ‘nother thing we shan’t get into here. It wasn’t until The Last Knight that the Transformers movies stopped being reliable money makers.

In my own experience, a lot of it on Tumblr, there are fandoms that I think I have a read on, but they aren’t necessarily good barometers on where the fandoms are as a whole. My corner tends to be fairly critical of the books that Riordan has put out in the last few years. There are quite a few people who take it as assumed that the last Heroes of Olympus book (if not all of them) was disappointing to the fandom. And yet I remember a few years ago having YouTube recommend to me a then-brand new video with a title like, “How Riordan Writes the Perfect Children’s Books”. And while I tend to find myself pretty critical of the TV adaptation, there’s a lot of fans out there who think it’s fantastic and supportive of how it’s been handled. Just because I don’t like it, and I know a ton of people who agree with me, doesn’t mean everyone else also agrees with me on the subject.

Or, to go with a series that I’m much less invested in, Rings of Power. My crowd on Tumblr tended to be badly disposed towards the series, even before it came out, which I thought went to extremely ridiculous levels–and I said as much. One person even claimed to me, more than once, that it wasn’t a good sign that the series hasn’t done any outreach to the fans, clearly because they knew the fans wouldn’t like it… but I replied, both times, with a link to an article on a prominent fansite (TheOneRing.net) describing a set visit by some fans, who apparently had good things to say.

And then, at some point between the first two seasons, a claim went around that the series had been canceled, and patting themselves on the back. The source? Well, one Tumblr blog said he had a friend in the industry, and noticed something on the IMDB page which was often indicative of a series being canceled. It was so ridiculous, and obviously fake, as you can probably tell from the fact that the season three trailer was shown at San Diego Comic-Con this week. But these people had convinced themselves that, well, we all know it’s a failure of a TV show, everyone I talk to in my bubble agrees with me, obviously it must really be a failure that anyone would cancel right away.

So this Odyssey situation doesn’t really surprise me. It was a highly-marketed, hyped movie from a well-known and liked director, on a very well-known subject–yeah, of course it doing well in the box office is a likely outcome. And of course, people who don’t look outside their bubble on the Internet don’t realize that hey! Other opinions on a movie exist! 

That’s just how it is sometimes.

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