I guess this is a case of YMMV. Or maybe they’ve mellowed over the last 20 years.
But the Browncoats I had the misfortune to know about 20 years ago were pretty high on the pathetic scale. In their worldview, the only reason Firefly/Serenity aren’t bigger than Star Wars/Star Trek/Marvel/DC/Titanic/Tolkien combined was the vast Fox-wing conspiracy to suppress St. Whedon.
First Fox deliberately sabotaged the show by showing the episodes out of order. (Why a network would massively hype an upcoming show, then intentionally tank it, is left unexplained. But “Fox execs are boneheads and just made bad decisions” doesn’t play with that crowd).
Then they got a second chance with the Serenity movie, which failed to set the box office on fire. Why? Because Fox intentionally sabotaged the marketing. (Why a studio would spend tens of millions of dollars to make a move and then try to make it flop is also left unexplained).
Seriously, given my tastes, this was a show that probably would have appealed to me, but the hardcore fans managed to turn me off even giving it a shot, despite receiving numerous offers to borrow their DVDs.
Except that - at least in Britain - there’s the strain of Python fan notorious for their humourless ability to just word-for-word parrot the sketches. They’re locally the very epitome of a pathetic fanbase.
There were drunken college-age Python fans in the US who were noted for doing the same–this would have been in the 80s and early 90s. I am not sure if Python is a thing among college student today though.
No, they’re here, too. I went to a showing of Holy Grail hosted by John Cleese and there were a couple bozos shouting the punchlines before the actors got to them. Yes, yes, you’re so smart, you know the movie better than the rest of us Python fans. :rolleyes:
When I visited Tintagel Castle in Cornwall I looked up at the Camelot Castle Hotel which was up on a hill high above and said, of course, “It’s only a model.” Sighs and head shaking from those within earshot. Same trip I could be seen trotting around Doune Castle (site of most Holy Grail filming) banging two coconut halves together. At least I borrowed the coconuts halves from the gift shop, I didn’t bring my own. That would have been pathetic.
It always gives me a quiet chuckle to hear some sports fan, who can list the on-base percentage of the 1927 Yankees starting lineup, and who holds the NFL record for yards-after-catch by a slot receiver, deride Trekkies or GoT fans as trivia-obsessed nerds.
Hey! I left Cleveland as a 14 year-old, and have only been back twice in the nearly forty years since then, but I still have Browns jerseys, hoodies, and hats that I regularly wear. Despite only seeing one game in all that time.
Totally agreed, and was the first “pathetic fandom” I thought of when seeing the thread title. The browncoats turned me off of watching Firefly for around 10 years. When I finally saw it I liked it; I even currently have the DVDs for the show ($3 at goodwill) and Serenity ($0.49 at swapadvd) in my DVD collection.
On the one hand, I kind of wish there were more episodes. On the other hand, I’m glad there aren’t because fuck those annoying browncoats.
That’s just it… the fandom acknowledges that Lovecraft was a racist jackass even by the standards of his own time, while simultaneously acknowledging the rather outsized impact he has truly had on pop culture.
I’ll chime in with agreement. I REFUSED to watch it until… 5 years ago, maybe? I’ll have to see if I can find where I posted about it. Now, I really do think it was definitely a tragedy that it failed so spectacularly. If it had come out now, I think it would have been a runaway success.
I don’t know about that. We used to get under the skin of most Holmesians by pointing out that his extraordinary skills were in large part due to very specialized knowledge of the culture and mores of Victorian Britain, e.g. “No self-respecting barrister would patronize a tobacconist on Fleet Street! So, obviously, Watson, she’s lying!”
To the larger question, as a die-hard fan of Star Trek, Doctor Who and Dark Shadows, long before such devotion was considered virtually mainstream, I find that question coming most often from people who watch professional sports. Nuff Said.
Maybe so, but I don’t think it’s about miserable/non-miserable people.
Generally speaking, there are fans of certain show/game/movie/book/etc… franchises, and that’s all well and good.
Where it tends to go off the rails is when they start integrating this fandom into their everyday lives beyond maybe having something like a clever t-shirt or knick-knack about their hobby. I’m talking about the people whose lives seem to center around the fandom and/or they get WAY too involved- beyond the point of healthiness. They seem to me, anyway, like a kid who is obsessed with something, but without the growing out of it. It’s weird and more than a little bit childish. It’s the guy who watches EVERY game of their chosen team, knows background on all the players, and who gets personally emotionally involved in every game- it’s a BIG DEAL to them when their team loses, or even underperforms, despite having no actual material impact on them personally.
I’m not counting hobbies in there; generally speaking there’s an inherent creativity involved in most hobbies- you’re actually DOING something as you engage in the hobby. Fandoms are just people who like the property, whatever it happens to be. So ham radio people are dorky hobbyists, but not a fandom, while hardcore Phillies fans are a fandom.
So to answer the OP, I’d probably say something like Parrotheads, mostly because in my experience, although they like Buffett’s music, their main goal isn’t to geek out about the changes in the Coral Reefer Band or about how Jimmy sang the second stanza of “Pencil Thin Mustache” different than last time, but similar to five times ago, but rather they’re people in their 40s and later who use it as an excuse to get good and drunk, show their boobs, grill cheeseburgers and generally have a good time out in the parking lot for hours prior to the concert itself.
I think a lot of us get tired of it being brought up so frequently when it doesn’t really have anything to do with the conversation. It’s fine with me if someone brings up Lovecraft’s racism to examine how that influenced some of his work. But very often it’s, “OMG! H.P. Lovecraft is so racist! How can you read that?”
