Oooh, this looked like fun.

[camwyn]

The Unpopular Fandom Opinions Meme:

01. Post this on your journal.
02. Your friends will comment with some of your fandoms or some general topic about fandom.
03. In a new post (or in comments) respond back with one or two of your unpopular opinions for that fandom or topic.

Comments

[deepfishy.livejournal.com]

Some fandoms, which may or may not be vocal enough to distinguish popular fandom opinions from unpopular ones:

Discworld.
Hellblazer. *pines for more Constantine-the-Hufflepuff*
The (probably) teensy-tiny Dog Soldiers fandom.

[camwyn]

Discworld - A set of books that followed up on Magrat becoming Queen of Lancre and assuming the Witch-Queen role while still trying to be the ineffective good-natured little thing that she was would've been more interesting than bringing in Tiffany Aching.

Hellblazer - BRIAN AZZARELLO'S RUN NEVER HAPPENED. (Okay, that's not really what you'd call an unpopular opinion, but it's the strongest one I've got.)

Dog Soldiers - Uh. *scratches head* Dude, I don't even know what the fandom opinions are in the first place, let alone what the popular / unpopular ones are. Except that I flat-out refuse to accept anything presented in the 'it's been in development how long now?' sequel.

[almightyhat.livejournal.com]

Discworld - A set of books that followed up on Magrat becoming Queen of Lancre and assuming the Witch-Queen role while still trying to be the ineffective good-natured little thing that she was would've been more interesting than bringing in Tiffany Aching.

This is incredibly true.

However, just for the sake of not really 'getting' Magrat, it probably wouldn't have made a very good YA series.

[almightyhat.livejournal.com]

... Pardon, of the intended audience not really 'getting' Magrat, there.

[james-the-evil1.livejournal.com]

YES MORE HOGWARTS/HELLBLAZER *whine*
It's been FOREVER since the last chapter!

[viridian.livejournal.com]

Whedonverse. By which I mean: any of the Buffy/Angel/Fray universe and/or Firefly, according to which you actually watched/read/liked/have opinions on.

[camwyn]

Ungh. I know Fray, I know some of the Tales of the Slayers stuff, and I know Firefly. That's it. So, um.

*thinks*

River's still majorly *!&()ed up post-Serenity no matter how therapeutic getting rid of the Big Dark Secret and cutting loose in that orgy of necessary slaughter was. Also, I believe that the Operative went off to commit a few strategically placed assassinations and is going to end up dead on his own sword with a smile on his lips.

[slutbamwalla.livejournal.com]

Doctor Who :)

[camwyn]

Oh, sweet zombie Jesus, my only contact with the Doctor Who fandom has been with the existing players at Milliways and a tiny fistful of my close friends. Um. I know that saying "Eight was suffering from regeneration trauma when he made the claim about being half human" doesn't count as an unpopular opinion, but that's my firm belief.

Possibly it would be unpopular to say "t3h smoochiez has no real place in Doctor Who and I hope Russell T. Davies gets it all out of his system on Torchwood". Also "It's funny but I tend to think that most of the really damn brilliant episodes of the new series had someone other than Mr. Davies at the helm, so there should be more of that, thanks".

[derien.livejournal.com]

regeneration trauma. Hm. I like it. He's not frikkin half-human, I don't want it and I'm not going to buy it.

[terrie01.livejournal.com]

Ghostbusters

[camwyn]

The sequel is actually a live-action version of an extended cartoon episode and belongs in the Real Ghostbusters universe rather than the continuity established by the first movie.

[silly-dan.livejournal.com]

Tolkien?

[camwyn]

Anybody planning on writing anything at all even vaguely romantic about anybody elven should be chained to a table and made to read Laws And Customs of the Eldar, repeatedly, and write a five hundred word essay demonstrating that they understand it and respect the author's intent before they are allowed anywhere NEAR another computer keyboard.

Also, Legolas was probably but not necessarily dark-haired, as I'm almost certain the elves of Mirkwood were not of one of the stocks that produced light hair. Elven hair genetics are a bit different from human.

I could go on at some length about my opinions re: Dwarven gender ratios/gender roles/reproduction, too, but that's not so much 'unpopular' as 'er... you spent how long thinking about this, now?'.

[lwood.livejournal.com]

As I recall, elves are almost all dark-haired, unless of Finarfin's line, which pretty much means they're only golden-haired if from the Golden Wood.

Legolas, being of Mirkwood Greenwood the Great, would be a brunette, I reckon.

-- Lorrie

[camwyn]

That's about what I thought. I remember there being descriptions of him in all of two places in LOTR, and one of them was a little unclear because it mentioned his head being 'dark against the sky'- but it was night, so that could've meant anything, really.

[lwood.livejournal.com]

Yep, including "dark shape against starlit sky", which means a silhouette. On the other wing, a blond Legolas might have been described as having hair that seemed to shine, even in the darkness, and so forth.

BUT!

This just in: in Hobbit, Thranduil is a blond. It's back up in the air. Here's the obligatory Wikipedia reference. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legolas#Hair_colour)

-- Lorrie

[kaikias.livejournal.com]

...Eh. It's a bit more complex than that—we've no evidence that Miriel Serinde was from a light-haired tribe, and she was silver-haired according to the HoME bits where she appears; Celegorm is still considered an ambiguous case; and Legolas and family, if memory serves, were Sindar, which tribe we know cranked out silver hair at least, if not necessarily blond all that often. (Not to mention the red-haired Noldor and such. I doubt that any of the elvish ethnic groupings were meant to be monolithic with respect to hair color.)

[sylveraven.livejournal.com]

Also, Legolas was probably but not necessarily dark-haired,

Don't they actually say something in The Hobbit about the Mirkwood Elves being dark? I mean, I havn't read The Hobbit since middle school, so I might be wrong... but I destinctly remember picturing them all with dark hair.

So, ya know... I'm with you on that one.

[blackswanevent.livejournal.com]

HEROES.

Cause yanno. I haveta.

[camwyn]

Peter Petrelli irritated me. Actually, both the Petrellis did, but Nathan was very obviously meant to be irritating. Peter felt like a case of "hi, I'm the stand-in for the ordinary person watching this, the one who secretly wishes s/he had the guts to say 'I'm special' but never actually worked up the nerve to do it". The character's actually a lot more bearable at Milliways, possibly because there I don't feel like he's being thrown at me with a HI HERE IS YOUR REPRESENTATIVE NOW sign around his neck.

Also, I don't think he's that cute, no matter what people say.

[dhole.livejournal.com]

Sgt. Preston of the Yukon.

(My opinion on the source material is that a little Pierre goes a long way. But I'm not entirely sure if that's popular or unpopular.)

[camwyn]

As far as I can tell from the recordings I have, the winter of the Yukon gold rush appears to have lasted no less than five years before anyone remembered to change the calendar. Either some of the canon episodes have to be set aside, or they have to be rearranged to fall in other years. I'm not counting the flashback episodes, which I understand are clearly marked. I mean main sequence episodes that manage to take up more than a few days' time thanks to narration about 'weeks passed' or what have you.

Also, the episode "The Case That Made Preston A Sergeant" is too riddled with inconsistencies compared to prior canon episodes of higher quality for me to be willing to accept its canonicity. Sorry. "How Preston Got King", yes, I accept that episode; the other one, no. And I"m not just saying that because my fic about him earning his stripes got Jossed.

[firestrike.livejournal.com]

Can we take the "Gods and bleeding martyrs, GET A LIFE!" opinion as implicit in this meme and therefore ignorable?

[camwyn]

Sure!

[parke-matru.livejournal.com]

Reign of Fire
(one of the fandoms where I really think the writers should hire you as your stuff is cooler and more well thought-out than canon)

Harry Potter.

[camwyn]

Alex only existed to keep Reign of Fire from turning into the Big Damn Dysfunctionally Manly Slashfest. Seriously. There were, I think, three women with speaking parts- Alex, Lin or Lynne or whatever her name was who told Quinn that Eddie had gone off to pick the vegetables, and the woman towards the end who got the kids onto prayers when Quinn was falling apart. No, wait, four, Karen Abercromby, my bad- anyway, the movie is basically "GUYS GUYS GUYS LOTS OF GUYS oh and did we mention that it's FEMALES who destroyed the world? Because they did. Yup." I think Alex was thrown in there so that the guys could go 'hey! Isn't that Xenia Onatopp as a blonde?' and so that the women would go 'damn, and here I thought Christian Bale and Gerry Butler were getting it on'.

As regards Harry Potter: Neville Longbottom would be a more interesting main character than Harry, and still fits the prophecy rather nicely. There's more than one way to mark somebody.

[parke-matru.livejournal.com]

Totally fair on both points. And as others have pointed out, Harry is a jock who mostly does as well as he does due to inherent talent or things that people give to him -- his ability to ride a broom, his invisibility cloak, etc. Neville? Interesting, I want to hear more, and he actually has to work for what he does.

[ymfaery]

Hmmm.

HP Lovecraft's Cthulu Mythos.
Sherlock Holmes.

[camwyn]

The Mythos is at its best when we assume that the original authorial intent is a law of the universe: that aside from a very little bit of space and time in which humanity immediately resides, the conventional belief systems and morality of humanity mean absolutely nothing. There are no 'evil' or 'good' Great Old Ones whatever August Derleth might say, and there is nothing holy about the Elder Sign; the Great Old Ones, the Outer Gods, and all the rest have no interest at all in our right or wrong or good or evil. At most, there are designations of 'inimical' and 'not immediately outright hostile'. Also, Y'gonolac was kind of lame as Great Old Ones go, and as much as Clark Ashton Smith and H. P. Lovecraft were friends and correspondents, half the time the entities and planets he added to the Mythos had names that made me think he let an epileptic chicken walk across his typewriter. ("Hziulquoigmnzhah! What a fantastic name!" "How do you pronounce that?" "... Throat-Wobbler Mangrove?")

As re: Holmes: Watson is not nearly the idiot much of fanon makes him out to be (I'm looking at you, Hollywood), and frankly I think the only reason people think he's dumb is because by comparison with Holmes nearly everyone is. DO NOT DIS THE GOOD DOCTOR.

(And as regards the mysterious traveling wound, which fandom has debated over for years: I am willing to accept the hypothesis that Watson had been attempting to either pick something up or remove something from the pack of a cargo animal and was shot with a bullet that went through his leg and came out his shoulder, or vice versa, thus providing two separate locations for what was essentially one war wound.)