A Year in Forums: People Don’t Know Anything About Stuff They Like

I spent some time in a lot of new pop media forums this year. This is what I observed

I have this pet peeve that shows up the most in my more text-based book forums, and science fiction book readers are the worst offenders. Someone will come into a science fiction reading forum and make a recommendation request for something, say, featuring big space battles for a new reader to the genre. Then someone will drop Neuromancer by William Gibson which doesn’t meet either of the those criteria. But even if the follow-up posters get the whole space-battle part correct, they will absolutely drop the ball on the “new to the genre” thing.

We, collectively, as speculative fiction readers, completely forget that it is a learned reading subskill. There’s familiarity with tropes and recognizing genre expectations. For sci-fi, you’ll need to be able to follow fictionalized accounts of advanced science and technology to some degree. Fantasy typically requires the ability to learn the rules for a whole new universe in a very short amount of time. So throwing someone into the deep-end on a particularly “difficult” text is not going to set up an enjoyable reading experience. Someone might do okay, but if you have the option to give them something else first, that bodes better long term.

There’s a huge spectrum between Nora Roberts and Stanislaw Lem, and large parts of the of the sci-fi reading community struggle with that. They sort of hole up in their little corner and forget there are other books.

In one of my reading groups, the discussion also comes with surprising frequency of why so often science fiction and fantasy are lumped together in either book stores, forums, or conceptually. I don’t understand how you can read even a little bit of either genre and not get why that collapsing of classification might occur sometimes. I’ve done whole extensive presentations on how fantasy and sci-fi evolved independent of one another, and yet the places where it crosses over are really obvious if you’re just paying attention. Clarke set down his third law in 1968. This is not new, exciting analysis of the speculative cluster.
Speculative fiction is not the only one who does this, and this isn’t the only indicator. But way too often, I’m sitting here in one of my groups thinking “are you actually paying attention? To anything? At all? About this genre you proclaim to love?”

And I’ve gotten into comic book collecting, recently. I’ve always been a comic book media fan, but collecting, specifically, is expensive. I’ve always sort of dropped in, dropped out, read stories in trade form as I could get them. Venom is my one area that I know extremely well, though. While I’ve regularly bounced off the Venomverse storylines and there’s a few Carnage storylines I’ve skipped, I’ve read the entire main 616 canon. More importantly, I’m re-reading it right now chronologically (starting from the solo work) to refresh myself on some of the main storylines and actually be able to appreciate the flow of character development from year to year.

I’ve also dipped into and out of X-Men and Spider-Man (obviously as a Venom reader), but those can be a lot more difficult to follow.
That all being said, I know what I don’t know. I’m aware of the vast swaths of information that I’m not intimately familiar with. And I learned, at eleven years old, when the X-Men movie didn’t match the X-Men animated show that hey, comic book adaptations don’t follow the source material. They have to make major changes, and those changes happen for various and sundry reasons. Sometimes justified, sometimes not.

But we’ve been adapting comics into other mediums since at least the 40’s. Some adaptations are going to be better than others, but we’ve been doing it so long, there’s some stuff you can kind of expect.
Apparently, half the people in the comic book forums I’ve been in recently just…don’t know any of this information.

It starts with comic purists shitting on people who’ve only ever seen non-comic media so they maybe don’t understand a lore element, but that’s not nearly as prevalent now when as when I was a kid. To the credit of the community, people are slightly less gatekeepy, but it doesn’t mean they’re still not kind of assholes about some non-comic media.
What’s really getting to me, surprisingly, is non-comics readers making very bold statements about the source material without any textual support.
He’s a breakdown of an interaction I had recently:

OP—“Bold statement about the nature of a character’s narrative role wherein they only reference Movie and Animated Show.”
ME—“In the comics, the character only has that narrative role for a very small portion of their run. They’ve been this other narrative role for much much longer, and it highly benefited their growth as a character. They stagnated and were wasted in that other role. Also, Video Game is a better example of what you’re talking about.”
ANOTHER COMMENTER—“The OP is probably only familiar with Movie, that’s why they held this opinion.”
ME—“Yeah. I guessed as much. That doesn’t stop them from being WRONG on the INTERNET, so I have no problem taking ninety seconds out of my day to provide cited sources in a neutral manner with the hope they actually read the material.”

And I know it seems super gatekeepy on the surface to feel this way, but it’s because I want the communities, as a whole, to be better. When someone asks a question, I want them to get an answer from someone who knows what they’re talking about. I want there to be room to actually have more complex discussions where everyone is working from at least complementary information.
Basically I want people to be smarter and more well-informed and actually pay attention to what they’re consuming and be passionate about understanding it. Because that remains the root of so many problems.