Fellowship of the Fans

Star Wars - Headland's Bad Fanfic Habits (7/18/2024)

As I keep track of what is going down with The Acolyte, I find myself noticing habits of Headland's that were definitely picked up from her fanfic days, which were never addressed, but in a recent interview where she attempts to justify the eighth episode, the finale, only to make things much, much worse for her, she revealed she paid homage to Fight Club  by making the last scene of the show the last scene of Fight Club, which made it click that she's not just copy and pasting from Star Wars, but other series. Sure, she calls it a homage, but that's not really what it is, not if fans can't recognize if for what it is.

Now, a bit of timeline here.

1999 - Headland graduated from high school and headed into college.
1999-2005 - Prequel trilogy came out.
2001-2003 - Lord of the Rings trilogy came out.

These dates are important because Headland did, in fact, make the claim that the prequel trilogy was, in fact, a part of her adolescence and college years, yet this in itself has, for me, actually cast major doubts regarding her being an actual Star Wars fan because the first prequel movie actually came out the year she graduated high school, during the spring right around the time she would have been ramping up for graduating high school, meaning her fandom experience actually started at the college level.

I also brought up the time frame of the original Lord of the Rings trilogy because this particular trilogy came out around the same time, and this was the actual series that the female audience gravitated towards more. This isn't to say the female audience didn't gravitate towards Star Wars, but that they were likelier to gravitate towards Lord of the Rings.

There's also an interview somewhere where Headland talks about the guy sitting in the back of the room with a hood and how that hood over his head made him seem so mysterious in her eyes and that she found this hot, yet what she described is the more anti-social male nerd which in a way makes sense as the Prequel and Lord of the Rings trilogy was the first wave of destigmatization for nerds, while the second wave came from the MCU with the woke movement restigmatizing being a nerd.

In fandom, starting around 2010, I started noticing a push from what I call the anti-critique crowd where they attempted to shut down any and all attempts to think critically regarding the fanfiction we were reading, utilizing at times a narrative that this was to protect the children completely ignoring the idea that the proper way to protect children was to understand that a child shouldn't even be on a writing platform unless they're ready to handle criticism of their writing in the first place while ignoring the fact writing stories isn't for everyone.

In reality, though, what they were attempting to do was to protect themselves from having their own work pointed out as being bad writing and the easiest way was to guilt trip readers into not saying anything, that readers had a moral obligation to say ask permission to say anything negative, not understanding that the comments and review sections of stories is there for readers to voice their thoughts regarding what they read.

I say thoughts rather than opinions for the simple fact this is a group that can't differentiate between subjective facts and objective opinion, labeling everything as "just opinion" even if someone is able to back up what they say with facts, including some of the observed truths regarding bad writing habits. Those writing in Hollywood now are often from this group, individuals who don't want to believe their writing is bad, and/or a group that wants to place the nasty nerds back in their place.

And when I say nasty nerds, that is their words towards the nerd community, but they forget that those who gravitate naturally towards nerd culture are, in fact individuals who are discriminated against because they don't fit societal norms, but this does include the straight white male nerd, so is it any surprise that male nerds aren't having it? I should say nerds in general though, because what is seen as a group of males actually isn't. I myself, for example, am a female nerd of similar mindset.