#get the six idiots in OFMD S2!

[parttimesarah]

[three--rings]

You know what the OFMD fandom experience reminds me of?

My Hannibal fandom experience.

A show I really, deeply love, but reading other fans meta takes on it made me want to fucking throw things.

Hannibal fandom was the reason I joined tumblr in 2013, and I left six months later in a fit of rage when tumblr decided the show was homophobic for having a queer woman (not lesbian, unspecifically queer) sleep with a man once in order to get pregnant. Also when they pretended to kill a female character and people were ranting about the show's misogyny and I was like you idiots she's gonna be alive next week and then she was, cause that happens like 20 times in that show.

I spent the rest of the show's run on twitter, following only cast and crew accounts and like 2 RL friends and only using twitter to liveblog the show.

The way it shook out was all the inane discourse topics of Hannibal fandom were forgotten after the show was finished mostly because people didn't need to make up things to be angry about for a week between episodes and could just focus on fic and stuff. And the angry people moved on to some other show, probably.

And that's what ofmd fandom feels like for me. Do you know how tired I am reading about who is really to blame for Izzy's toe being cut off: him or the man who did it? How tired I am of arguments about morality that totally ignore that the characters under discussion are pirates who have killed like, a lot of people? The arguments with clear ax grinding agendas?

I'm dreading the discussions that are coming and to some extent already happening. I feel like we need a trigger warning for arguing about who is Evil Actually In This Situation. #toegate?

But I'm far too invested in tumblr to ragequit again. And fuck twitter. It's not better there, even if I don't follow anyone.

But yeah, morally complicated shows have shitty meta discussion. And that's too bad because that's what I ENJOY. I desperately wanted people to analyze Hannibal with because god there was so much to talk about, but then people would just pull out some shit like "that queer female character is homophobic because she's too pretty." Yes this is a take I read.

Hannibal is also the fandom where I learned about the curse of S2 in fandom, where fandom declares a new show PERFECTION based on S1 and then S2 comes along and doesn't live up the the perfection they've built up in their mind and then they get mad and tear it apart for everything they can possibly twist into a flaw.

If anything I have a little hope that that won't exactly happen with ofmd because of how toxic the fandom has already been in variously attacking most main characters for their Low Moral Fiber or whatever. Just gotta hope no one's unproblematic faves get complicated, though, or the hell to pay will be epic.