Still boggling after all these years.

[connielane]

Joss Whedon - Created Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which lasted for seven seasons. Seventh season was not well received by the fans, but it didn't exactly kill affection for the show as a whole. Four years later: Whedon starts writing Buffy stories again. No one (that I can find) says anything to the effect that Whedon should just let it go and not mess with the fans' precious Buffyverse more than he already has.

Spielberg and Lucas - Made Raiders of the Lost Ark, an extremely popular film that spawned two very popular (though widely acknowledged as inferior) sequels. Nineteen years later: Speilberg and Lucas make another Indy film. Fans don't complain about this, except that they want it to be a worthy addition to the franchise. No one says "Ugh, not ANOTHER Indy story!"

Fans had their complaints about the Star Wars prequels, as everyone knows, but I never heard anyone complaining that there were going to BE prequels.

Did Tolkien fans complain when The Silmarillion came out because they didn't want new stories from Middle Earth?

Then WHY do so-called Harry Potter fans complain when there's apparently new canon to be enjoyed very shortly? I mean ... I think we all know why that is. But it's just amusing to me that the whiners don't seem to realize how ridiculous they sound complaining that there's going to be another story to enjoy.

Of course, I could be totally wrong about complaints in those other fandoms, not being as involved in them as I have been in HP, but it strikes me as a bizarre fannish anomaly nonetheless.

Comments

[peachespig.livejournal.com]

Already tried to write this, got eaten, take two.

While I do think other fandoms have their complainers, I agree that nothing can quite match Harry Potter. It all comes down to the richness and the vibrancy of the world and the characters that JKR created.

Unlike for example LotR, the HP world is enough like ours that we can imagine ourselves being in it, and the school and the Houses and the sorting all seem to inspire people even more to emotionally identify with her universe. And then the characters are so varied and memorable, and some people pick just one or two that really resonates for them and get emotionally wrapped up in them. And you end up with people not just liking the books, but very personally emotionally involved in some individual character or relationship.

When you think about it, isn't it amazing that Snapefen and Harmonians and Loonies and so on are even inspired by the same books? The things about Snape that one person becomes attached to are so far apart from the Harmonian view of Hermione, say, that it's almost unrecognizable that people are talking about the same series.

And at the end of the day, people realize that the fragments of the books they have latched onto emotionally are not the same things that are important to the author. She doesn't value what they value and so she isn't likely to respect what their wishes would be. So they know that anything further she produces is unlikely to bring them any pleasure. And so they complain.

So that's my thesis: people get mad at JKR not because she's a lousy writer, but because she's a good writer. She was good enough to suck them in and make them care about a character even though they probably don't like her, her personality or worldview or final storyline. And she sucked some people in with Snape and others with Remus and others with Hermione and others with Luna and others with Draco. When you think about it, it's pretty amazing.