Fans who need a reality check

Those of you who already know me will probably not be surprised by this entry at all. In fact, you may have been wondering what has taken me so long to post this.

I am steeped in a few very passionate, very dedicated, very opinionated and, sometimes, very insane fandoms currently. The two I am the most active in at this time are the Lost fandom and the Alias fandom. And though these fandoms are related, they are so very different, at least in my experience. This post is going to be about the Lost fandom. I'll probably post a sequel (the "Part II" portion) about Alias on another slow news day.

My biggest beef with the Lost fandom at the moment has to do with the theorists. Now, I think it is great that there are people so dedicated and absorbed by the show that they feel compelled to research the Easter Eggs dropped in the episodes by the evil geniuses at Lost Labs, or to take the characters' names or the cursed numbers and try to connect them in ways that will either explain what is going on on the island or reveal what the over-arching plot of the whole series is. The level of detail and depth of research that some fans have done is really quite extraordinary and can sometimes boggle the mind more than an actual Lost episode does. But the longer the series continues, and the more and more and more theories that I read, the more I wish some of the theorists would just step back and take a reality check.

I am one of those fans who enjoys the show for what it is and for what is shown to me on my television set. I am a "pure canonist" (which is a name that I have just made up for fans like me -- I should copyright it, eh?) -- which means that I am dedicated to what is actually shown on the screen each week. Not what ended up on the editing room floor and not various storylines that were considered but abandoned and not script pages that were cut and not the "Deleted Scenes" that appear on the DVD boxed sets. STRICTLY what is shown on the screen -- that's it. Now, that doesn't mean that theories don't pop up in my head or that I don't discuss any other conjectures about what is going on or what may be going on. Because there is so much ambiguity on Lost, where what you see may not mean what you think it means or there are sometimes things that are hidden in episodes that you are not aware of until later, it is nearly impossible not to make at least some attempts at educated guessing. But I do not waste too much of my time literally picking apart the episodes to the very minutest of details. To me, that takes the fun out of it. Plus, I believe that no matter what theory I might come up with, the writers at Lost have a much better one set in motion already. Read More...




---The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help.'
- Ronald Reagan

Posted byNick at 12:41 PM

Discuss AddThis Social Bookmark Button
 

0 comments:

Post a Comment