The Eye Wear of your Fandom

I just recently got some new glasses, and I love them! What does this have to do with you guys? Absolutely nothing! Except it makes a semi-decent segue to my topic for today.

When you are part of a fandom for any franchise, especially one that has lasted for a few dozen years you begin to see people act in ways that you cannot understand in regards to events in the fandom. This can be divided fairly easily into the following three sections, which I have named after three pieces of eye wear.

Rose Tinted Glasses

The first piece of eye wear is one that you have no doubt heard of before, the "Rose Tinted Glasses". Basically this refers to someone remembering something fondly, often from their childhood, or due to who or what is involved, and is often affected by nostalgia, rather than reality.

Imagine you are a child, and it is Saturday morning, you run downstairs in your feety pyjamas and turn on the old analogue TV and watch a cartoon, you love it, you obsess over it, and you remember it for the good things only.

Fast forward about 20 years or so, and you are in a Media store, you find a DVD of that same TV series, and decide to buy it for your nostalgia, you get home and watch it, but it's NOTHING like what you remember from your childhood.

What happens next depends on you as a person, you either accept that things when you were a child just SEEMED better due to your age, and as you grew up, so did your tastes, OR you absolutely refuse to accept reality and convince yourself that the series hasn't changed at all, and is in fact even better than before, maybe the GREATEST SHOW EVER CREATED!!!!

Beer Goggles

The second piece of Fandom Eye Wear is one that you may have heard of as well, the Beer Goggles!

Despite their name, these are not exclusively to do with alcohol, any substance that can alter your perception in some manner, such as alcohol, narcotics, maybe even sugar (SUPER HYPER FUN TIME MODE!!!) can make you remember and react to things in a different way to how you would do normally when "sober".

As an example, Bob Bobberson has come home from a night at the pub, and is flicking through the TV for something to watch, he finds a cool TV show he's never seen before about vampires, and witches and other supernatural creatures. It's gory and cool, and exactly what he likes, he watches it, and then falls asleep.

Six months later, he's hanging out with some friends, and they want a show to watch, when he remembers this show that he watched when drunk, he tells them all about it, and they want to watch it too, so he finds some episodes online, and they watch it...

Turns out it's a show called "The Lair" and it's a soft core porn gay soap opera series, and they laugh at him as a result. Poor Bob.

Shit Stained Spectacles

The final piece of eye wear is one that you will NOT have heard of, because I've named it myself, this one should be fairly self-explanatory. You are looking into a film, or anything, when you hear something about it from an external source, then that stains your opinion on it, whether for the better, or the worse (maybe the shit is actually chocolate?)

Imagine you hear about a new film adaptation of....I dunno, Megaman being announced, you immediately think "oh cool!" then you hear a piece of information attached to the film, for example, it will be directed by Bob Bobberson.

Now depending on Bob's reputation for directing in the past, you will have a pre-existing opinion on what that film would be like, which is hard to get rid of, even if the rest of the cast is great, you'll consider it a terrible film, just because you hate Bob, or you'll love it, despite it being a train wreck, because Bob can do no wrong!

I hope you enjoyed my explanation of the eye wear of your various fandoms, and hope you can see yourself or your friends in at least some of these examples. Let me know if you have any other topics you'd like me to discuss in the future, and I hope to see you read my work again in the future! 

CHEERS!