Can't agree with you. And just because those Heaven's Gate whackjobs had a ST fetish, the correlation between them and the average SF fan, let alone ST fan, does not imply causation.
As for the kidnapping threats, did they go through with them? I think not. On the other hand, contrast that to football fans tearing up the streets because their hometown team won! What happens when they lose? Yikes.
There's a hell of a lot more incidents and documentation of such incidents on the part of so-called "normal people," than the SF "freaks."
Yeah anything that is considered to be a Social outcast is blamed while the far more serious organisations that promote objects and persons that can kill people rest easy.
We see people who have been shot and blown to bits on the news each day but when news breaks that a kid shot somebody the first question isn't "where did he get the gun?" it's "what was the last movie he watched or thing he did before the shooting, did he watch the Matrix?".
A case here in Tokyo back at the start of the Summer had a guy driving over people on a pedestrian street, he then proceeded to get out and start stabbing anyone at random.
The first thing the media blamed was "Otakus" because they found some drawings he did of animation characters and his personal writings about himself. They put less emphasis on the fact that he posted on internet message boards that he was planning to kill people and when he was going to do it. They also thought the fact that he was acting like a maniac over his stolen coat at work a few days earlier was less important than him been an anime fan, or the fact that his neighbours knew how he used to beat his own mother. But of course, lets look at the real problem with this guy that the meida portays...he watched and drew some animation character so that makes him a crazy anime fan that made him kill others. No blame to the people at his work, the people who read his warning messages on the net or his neighbours who never reported him to the police for beating his mother.
They even tried to ban knife weapon sales in the area where the stabbing and killings took place. Why? Because it's an area popular with people who like animation, however he never bought the knives there and a few weeks later there was another stabbing incident in a different area, this time by a person who used only kitchen knives. This guy had problems long ago, but nobody did shit about it. Even after it happened people kept their ignorance to the real causes and that's why it happened and will happen again.
Comparing Trek fans to cultists is the kind of extreme bullshit that is laid on fans of any type of popular Sci-fi, animation media etc. The people who usually do it are out of touch with society and what the real sources of the problems in todays world are.
Again, seriously, has there ever been a rampage after a SF convention? -- RR
-- RR
