Video Essays

Pop quiz, hot shots. What do #ReleaseTheSnyderCut, Retake Mass Effect 3, and petitions to remake The Last Jedi all have in common? Apart from driving traffic on change.org, they're all the subject of my new video!



Let's talk about how the demands of modern fandom are antithetical to the creation of art!

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Anything with Annie Wilkes gets a watch from me.

2012 was a different time.

I had a phase as a preteen, what we might call Draculaism, where I felt I was too old for animated kids movies. I still liked movies like Toy Story and The Incredibles, but thought things like Finding Nemo or Cars were for babies. Part of it might have been that I went to local sitter with a bunch of kids and wanted to be liked by the cool older kids, part of it was that Cars especially really tested my patience, but I didn't see any Pixar movie in theaters after The Incredibles until Toy Story 3. Meaning I missed out on Ratatouille, WALL-E, and Up.

So yeah, what a loser is accurate.

Good video, I basically agree with the overall point. 

That said, I must say I have a slightly different take on "fan entitlement" than a lot of people insomuch as I basically view it as the manifestation of a lot of people who feel voiceless taking some rather, extreme, measures in order to be heard.  The people starting dumb change.org petitions and spreading hashtags like that are not the kind of people who get to write for entertainment sites or have highly viewed Youtube channels so they do stuff like that both to affirm that there are others like them and to express their disapointment in a way where they'll be heard.  You will note that when the real media largely agrees with the fan outrages on social media (like with Game of Thrones or Sonic the Hedgehog and The Rise of Skywalker) these things eventually blow over and people move on.  It's when the entertainment media is largely in oposition to these fan outrages (like The Last Jedi and the career of Zack Snyder) that they turn into these ugly things that never end.  As people see the entertainment media try to essentially have the last word on something like The Last Jedi, they push back harder and harder to make it known that not everyone agrees.  So, when established tastemakers in the media and on film twitter get angry about these kind of things I do bristle a little at sort of elitism at play coming from people who have the privilege of not needing to start futile petitions in order to get their opinions out there.  

Nice points. I share a similar feeling about the elitism and anger you mention. A lot of the writing on fan entitlement has an underlying tone of "Why can't these losers get over this trivial shit?" that's even more manifest on twitter. I have a lot of issues with that kind of framing and I was very conscious about, for lack of a better phrase, not being mean in the video.

This is a good topic to delve into.

PG Cooper hates Joker but loves Rise of Skywalker. Oh, Lord.

Speaking as the forum member with the shortest attention span...lol, no it isn't.

Rise of Skywalker is louder, I'll give it that.

It certainly was in regards to Rey's parentage, but making this argument involves a lot of speculation about Abrams's intent and that's not really something I wanted to do. Plus, there's enough Youtube videos on Rise of Skywalker, figured I didn't need to throw my hat in that ring too.

Could you maybe make a video about how we'll never find the lost footage from The Magnificent Ambersons, that would be great.

Isn't the rumor that they threw the Magnificent Ambersons footage into the ocean?