Moving thread from IMHO to Cafe Society.
I just want to say what a huge fan I am of the moderators around this place. Reading their posts really gives meaning to my life.
Daniel
The Society for Creative Anachronism and other medieval recreation societies. Maybe my sample size is skewed, but I’ve met three SCA members and all of them managed to combine a photographic registry of battle armor and daily modes of dress with absolutely no social skills whatsoever. Like I don’t care about the Middle Ages at all and that should have shown on my face, but these people still backed me into a corner and made me listen to their imitations of ribald medieval bards and tell me about the daily routine of a monk. I DON’T CARE. Incidentally, all three of these people were thirtysomething males who had never been in a serious relationship. Take that as you will.
Fan fiction in general, and slash fiction in particular. Um, what’s the point? For me, the best part of writing fiction is making up the characters, getting to figure out all their backstory and little quirks and speech patterns for yourself. Why would someone cheat themselves out of that? And why do they have to make 100 million livejournal communities based around this crap? And slash, what the hell? Is it supposed to be hot or ironic or what? I just really don’t get the point in stealing other people’s good characters for your bad fiction, sexual or otherwise, and then getting so obsessed that you spend all day pairing up characters in your lame LJ communities. Then again most of these people probably couldn’t create interesting original characters anyway.
I must admit to being another person who doesn’t quite get Whedonmania. I’ve seen a few episodes of Firefly and Buffy, and while they’re OKAY shows, they’re not anything to have a fit over.
:dubious:
Do you really think it matters?
::d&r::
I’m going to draw a distinction between vampire fan base in general and say Anne Rice fanbase in particular. It’s diminished in recent years (as her “Dickensean” “proletariat” writing has begun to suck so much even some diehards had to admit it) but they are rabid. I used to post to a book message board on AOL (years and years ago) and, being perfectly polite, made a comment to the effect of “I like The Witching Hour until the end- I thought the final few chapters were too unrealistic to be scary”, and was literally flamed on the board and in my mailbox by people wondering how I could dare criticize such a brilliant and earthchanging writer. I’ve had similar experiences since then, and when I went to a book signing of hers way back aways it was to find lines of people who the SCA and Trekkies would fight to the last phaser and dagger to drive out.
Also a small sample size, but one of the couples I knew who were SCA members were in arrears in their rent and their phone bill and had a new baby, but somehow found the money for daddy to buy a new helmet (stainless steel with dyed horse tail in back, several hundred dollars), and couldn’t agree more on the lack of social skills thing with the ones I’ve known. What drove me nuttiest about them is that 1 in 20 of them may actually know or care anything about the real Middle Ages (one of the least romantic periods imaginable).
I lived for awhile in an SCA household. Dear God, what a mistake that was. Individually, at least one of them was very cool–he made his living as a jeweller selling stuff to other SCAdians, and his work was very beautiful. As a group, they were unbearable.
But in my brief forays in SCA geekery, I met a couple really nifty folk. It’s just the folks on balance were intolerable for me.
Daniel
Ooh! Ooh! I got another one!
Oklahoma City fans of the Dallas Cowboys. Insufferable, moronic, extremely vocal, delusional, non bathing, cheap cologne wearing, beef rib* eating, Dr. Pepper drinking, sport truck driving, DINK yuppies, all of them.
*as oppossed to pork ribs, of course
I don’t enjoy Buffy or Firefly at all. You tell that to a rabid fan and they look at you like you’re eating paste or something. The only buffy I can watch is Kristy Swanson, thank you very much. Okay so I can’t even watch that.
I’d like to add LARPers or Live Action Role Players. I used to work with one and he kept trying to recruit me (which is funny, I don’t even really enjoy Role Playing video games and really have no idea how Dungeon and Dragons work - what made him think I’d like that is beyond me).
It felt like I was being recruited by a cult. He gave me the heebie geebies.
Dang, and I used to run LARPs, too! Sounds like I’ve touched on every annoying fanbase here except furries and jocks. And I’d just as soon not touch those.
Daniel
You could touch both at the same time by beating up a team mascot.
Sneak attack! Sneak attack!
Daniel
Two:
Silly Goths - That specific subset of goths that seem to have actually taken over goth culture - people who are defined by a sort of silly/cartoon approach to the goth lifestyle rather than a morose or morbid approach. They’re really into The Nightmare Before Christmas, music like KMFDM and the Insane Clown Posse, My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult, comics and branded clothing from cutesy-scary things like “Kreepee Lenore”, Johnny the Homicidal Maniac, all that “Emily” shit, the entire existence of the mall clothing store Hot Topic, and judging from that store’s website’s current front page, they’re almost entirely to blame for the existence and upcoming marketing blitz of Corpse Bride.
I’m not sure what it is about these goths, but the whole thing just pisses me off. I love classic goths - give me a pretentious clove-smoking, Baudelaire-reading, Bauhaus-listening death-obsessed weirdo ANY day, but if I as much as pass a “Silly Goth” on the street, I just want to bash their brains in.
and
Indiscriminate Sci-Fi Nerds - There’s a difference between being an aficionado and being a taste-impaired dork - Indiscriminate Sci-Fi Nerds are the ones buying the shitass fanfic that passes for franchise novels for brands like Star Wars, Star Trek, Buffy, etc. They also buy lazy Dark Horse fanservice comics like “Buffy Vs. Predator” and “Batman vs. Aliens” and buy DVD boxed sets of things like Farcscape and Babylon 5 - the creatively bankrupt, made-for-TV, Lifetime Original Movies of the sci-fi genre. These people allow heaps of this garbage to still be made daily because they’re right there to buy it all up, and they love to perpetuate the stereotypes of “sci-fi nerd” while they’re at it.
Heh, precisely what I was talking about in my first post in this thread!
Daniel
Yeah, I know how you feel, LHoD. I like Star Trek, the Red Sox (haven’t been mentioned yet, but, I’m sure they will), Joss Whedon’s work, and Firefly/Serenity in paticular.
And yes, I’m a Firefly Evangelist. And I do think it was prematurely cancelled due to poor handling on the network’s part. But everyone I’ve turned on to the show has liked it. Guess I just know my friends’ tastes better than some people.
But yeah. Sports fans. Elijah Wood’s never gonna be cast in a movie about a violent gang centered around exchanging MST3K tapes.
The rabid fans of my three particular fandoms – Buffy, Trek, and Firefly – are the ones that get to me the most. I can’t seem to read anything about any of them anymore without wanting to gouge my eyes out or cut off the fingers of the person on the other end.
Besides them: Monty Python fans.
Note: in a quarter century of membership in the SCA, I’ve encountered a very broad spectrum of personalities – and unfortunately we do have people who combine generally poor social skills with a delusional self-image. Sorry 'bout that. Fortunately, most of us are just plain folks who like to mess about with our pseudomedievalish hobby on the weekend. As with any hobby, some people take it too seriously.
I was talking with my girlfriend (on the way to see Serenity, actually) about different levels of fandom, and what makes a fan truly geeky. It seems to me that geekiness is proportional to the narrowness of the basis for one’s fandom – that is, you may generally like science fiction, like myself, because it lets you play around with fascinating ideas, or you may focus all your energy on just one particular bit of popular fiction, until you’re dressing like a character from a 40-year-old tv show and ignoring the entire rest of the genre.
Preach it, guys. Anything enjoyable can be ruined by taking to extremes. IIRC in the ancient pre-Web age it was called FIJAGDH vs. FIAWOL (“fandom is just a god damm hobby” vs. “fandom is a way of life”). And I am in the FIJAGDH camp firmly.
BTW, glad to know I’m not a neo-Python. OTOH from your descriptions I must have been fortunate and met the only mentally balanced SCA people in the planet 
Fair enough–and like I said, there are some great people that I met in the SCA.
I don’t buy the criticism that they don’t know anything about the real (and really fucking awful) middle ages; that criticism would be fair if they had the word “medieval” in their name, or didn’t have the word “anachronism” in their name, but as it is, feh. Go bother the Civil War Reenactors.
And I gotta say, the SCA folks never annoyed me but that I’d gone on their territory. They weren’t ever evangelistic annoyances. Unlike the vampire player who once cornered me in a bar to tell me about his incredibly powerful vampire who could blah blah blah zzzzzzz.
Daniel
Seconded, thirded, fourthed, and fifth. All by me.