Me and My Fandom Obsessions

[unspeakablehorror]

While I do talk about many other topics, when I talk about fandom, I tend to focus.  A lot.  Right now I'm extremely focused on Star Wars, but my previous fandom which I'm still very fond of even if I don't talk about it as much is Legend of Zelda, and especially the character Ghirahim from that videogame series.  So while I very much read books, watch tv and movies, and play games not in those categories, I just don't talk about them as much or am as familiar with minor details in those stories.  

This very much doesn't mean that I think Star Wars or Legend of Zelda are the apex of media.  I do think there is a lot of analysis that can be done on these stories, but they're very, hmmm, commercialized stories, with all the traits that come with that.  Additionally, they're aimed first and foremost at children, a demographic I have not been part of for a long time.  Due to this fact, I generally evaluate them on a different metric than I do stories more appropriate for my age.  They also generally perpetuate a very simplistic, conventional sense of values that often clash with my own sense of ethics.  Nevertheless, knowing about other literature and stories allows me to pick out things from these works I wouldn't have otherwise been able to notice.  Sometimes, they do employ interesting literary techniques or references, or have something valuable to say.

Of course, I certainly do comment on other media, especially books that I've read, and I may even think about these stories a lot, I just generally don't write as many of my thoughts down as meta or make fanworks based on them.  At the same time I will say that I think the quality of much of the media I've been exposed to outside of my fandom obsessions is, well, often a lot better, not only from a literary perspective, but even just from an entertainment perspective.

So uh, yeah.  That's my observation.  I guess with my particular fandom obsessions, I engage more closely because I want to generate things that pair what I enjoy in those fandoms with other things I enjoy, rather than the things in those fandoms that I very much do not enjoy.  And sometimes I feel like I won't have as many problems if I gripe about them?  There's no media or media creator that I think is remotely perfect (though they are very definately not all equal in that imperfection, either), but I feel like negative criticism for some media or media creators is more hazardous.  Though that's definitely not to downplay the problems one can have critiquing stories like Star Wars or Legend of Zelda, either.  I feel like both of those fandoms are quite large and have plenty of staunchly overzealous defenders, it's just there's also plenty of people who are willing to apply negative criticism of them from all sorts of different angles.  Fandoms where most of the people involved are only willing to sing endless praises for it are kind of a downer for me.