Fandom Kvetch 3

[dreamer_easy]

Ladies and gentlefong, fresh from this morning's fandomsecrets, Exhibit A:



Now we're all heartbroken over Donna's unbearable fate. I'm in optimistic denial ("It must be a cliffhanger!"). Plenty of ficcers are busy rewriting it - quite right too. So it's not at all hard to sympathise with the OP's unhappiness.

So where does this cross the line into overentitlement? By reversing the polarity of the neutron flow. srsly. Stories flow from the writers to the characters and then to the audience - not the other way around. How dare RTD give Donna a sad ending? Because he's the writer, one of the showrunners, and the characters' creator. Entitlement does not flow from Donna to Russell; it flows from Russell to Donna. But Donna's just the piggy in the middle; the real issue is that entitlement doesn't flow from fandom to Russell, it flows from Russell to fandom. No matter how much expertise, ownership, love, or authority we claim, we don't call the shots. We just don't.

The above secret is far from the worst example of fannish overentitlement I've seen, and the OP isn't a fuckwit, just some upset kid blowing off steam. But it does nicely encapsulate the phenomenon. If the attitude it expresses was rare, it'd be easy to just smile and shrug. But it isn't.

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[kateorman.livejournal.com]

Bwa!