Lol, well, I was at work. Well, I was supposed to be at work, in practice I had quietly clocked out and was trying to finish a paper. Which, er, I am still trying to finish.
Yeah, you definitely win on the obscurity and lack-of-discussion front. No arguments there :-).
There is great writing about relatively non-serious stuff, it just needs to hit a certain canonicity, I guess. Any amount of incredible fannish meta to be found on Harry Potter or Friends or Seinfeld, but much less on the current crop. Maybe it just needs more time, and my sense is also that, say Big Bang and How I Met Your Mother and other multicam sitcoms are kind of looked down at now as being just...uninteresting. Meaningless throwbacks who's popularity and longevity is completely random (SO WRONG), in a way even Friends wasn't well before the end of its run. (Community is a bit of critical darling, I think, (at least online) but it has a pandering edge that makes that unsurprising, imo. And a great behind-the-scenes narrative too.)
I really have gone hunting through academic archives, and just turned up very little that's interesting. Academic writing tends to just...summarize, like they're enlightening their audience about a strange phenomenon which needs merely to be catalogued for it's significance to be understood.
I did actually, um, write a couple of essays in defense of Big Bang over on io9, and I got some comments and some arguing (some really, really cranky arguing. Man, that show bugs people. Man, the fact that that show bugs people fascinates me so much,) and it was fun, but there was a flash in the pan quality to it. It doesn't compare to that satisfaction of having an active, critical fandom running along with the show, where you know you can always dip into intelligent, engaged commentary and conversation and there will always be more of it with every episode.
no subject
Yeah, you definitely win on the obscurity and lack-of-discussion front. No arguments there :-).
There is great writing about relatively non-serious stuff, it just needs to hit a certain canonicity, I guess. Any amount of incredible fannish meta to be found on Harry Potter or Friends or Seinfeld, but much less on the current crop. Maybe it just needs more time, and my sense is also that, say Big Bang and How I Met Your Mother and other multicam sitcoms are kind of looked down at now as being just...uninteresting. Meaningless throwbacks who's popularity and longevity is completely random (SO WRONG), in a way even Friends wasn't well before the end of its run. (Community is a bit of critical darling, I think, (at least online) but it has a pandering edge that makes that unsurprising, imo. And a great behind-the-scenes narrative too.)
I really have gone hunting through academic archives, and just turned up very little that's interesting. Academic writing tends to just...summarize, like they're enlightening their audience about a strange phenomenon which needs merely to be catalogued for it's significance to be understood.
I did actually, um, write a couple of essays in defense of Big Bang over on io9, and I got some comments and some arguing (some really, really cranky arguing. Man, that show bugs people. Man, the fact that that show bugs people fascinates me so much,) and it was fun, but there was a flash in the pan quality to it. It doesn't compare to that satisfaction of having an active, critical fandom running along with the show, where you know you can always dip into intelligent, engaged commentary and conversation and there will always be more of it with every episode.