= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
roland comments on Do Fandoms Need Awfulness? - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (151)
Eliezer, I think you missed something big here: to what kind of audience does the work appeal?
Take GEB: if you want to read and understand it you really have to invest some intellectual effort and I suspect the kind of people who end up appreciating it are not the ones who indulge in emotional fandom.
Star Wars on the other hand has a lot more emotional than intellectual appeal and thus it will select another kind of fans, a subset of them are the kind of people who go to conventions and dress up in appropriate clothing.
Make the experiment: go to a group of kids and ask: who wants a laser sword and be a jedi for the next hours? Or would you rather sit down and discuss self-refentiality? Do you want to be Gandalf and use the magic wand or sit down with the Tortoise and Achilles for an intellectual conversation?
Edit to make it clearer: a movie like Star Wars offers a lot more possibilities of emotional appeal: the cool clothing, being a jedi knight, sexy scenes with a hot princess, fighting against evil and saving the universe, etc...
This argument seems strange to me because I've known many, many people who love both stringent intellectual debate and fantasy-dress-up-make-belive. They seem to be correlated rather than anticorrelated, in fact.
How would you dress up to a GEB meeting?
Take my word for it; you do not want to read any of the GEB slash/fic out there.
Yes, but it's compartmentalized to some degree. An intellectual work and a fantasy work may appeal to the same person, but one appeals to the person while wearing an intellectual hat and the other doesn't, and the first kind of appeal is the wrong kind of appeal to result in fanaticism.