Samuel T. Cogley said:
This was originally going to be a quick response to a post in another thread.
But somewhere along the way I slipped into insanity and decided that my consistently genius insights deserved a shiny, new thread of their own.
So here it goes...
BalthierTheGreat said:
So there will be an influence. I don't think trekkies by themselves can make a flop, but they can tip the scales a bit. What I'd watch for is the second or third week numbers. If they're down from the first weekend, then the mob has spoken.
This post is a good example of many fans' attempts to deny their impending irrelevance in the grand scheme of things.
Many of us here are stumbling through various levels of loss:
1. Denial and Isolation.
2. Anger.
3. Bargaining.
4. Depression.
5. Acceptance.
We have all had a relationship with Star Trek. Some of us have been in this relationship for many years. We've spent lots of money and lots of time on it. And now we are going through a break-up.
Some of us dumped Star Trek when it turned to shit (whenever that time was for you).
Some of us have broken up with Star Trek and then gotten back together with her from time to time over the years.
In any event, it was always us -- the fans -- that decided whether we were dumping our girlfriend, Star Trek.
For the first time in forty years, our girlfriend is about to dump us. The process has already begun.
Sure, she's made some cosmetic changes over the years, and gone through different phases, but she's always been the same old girl, evolving along with us.
But now, she's changing everything.
She let us know that we just weren't cutting it anymore. We weren't supporting her enough. She was supposed to tell us, "It's not you, it's me." But she didn't even have the decency to give us that platitude. Through one of her many mouthpieces, Berman told the fans, "No, it was definitely you."
Her current mouthpiece, Abrams, has told us "I still want to be friends." But we don't believe her. We can't trust her anymore because she has hurt us in the past.
We want to believe her, but it's all so complicated.
Now, she wants to be with someone else (a wider fanbase). We are naturally offended by this.
"What can they do for you that I couldn't? They don't know you like I do. They are going to ask me about you -- because I know you so well -- and I am going to tell them not to date the "new you." And they will listen to me because I'm such an expert on you. I know every little detail about you. So much so that I both love you and hate you at the same time. And that new guy is going to listen to me and he is going to hate you. And then you are going to crash and burn. And then, desperate and alone, you will come crawling back to me. And you will go back to the way that you were and you will be sorry that you ever dared to change and stray. You can't survive without me. And I will lie and say that I love the old you, even though I hate a lot of things about the old you. But the old you is comfortable for me and I am deathly afraid of change."
I think many fans would rather see Star Trek die without them than allow her to move on to someone new.
And even if she successfully moves on to somone new, and she is still willing to keep us around, we don't want to share her with them. We want to keep her all to ourselves, even though we know we aren't doing well enough to support her anymore. We can't keep enough food on the table anymore. She wants a lot of jewelry, and she is never satisfied.
We know, deep down, that she has failed us as well. She was far from perfect. She has let us down many, many times over the years. There were times that we loved her, but many more times that we only liked her, and a few times -- unfortunately -- that she made us so embarrassed that we couldn't even look at her. We didn't even want to admit to our friends that we were dating her. But since she currently has the nerve to dump us, we don't want to bring up those times. At first, before the new movie was confirmed, we bargained with her to stay. But now, we know for sure that she is leaving and we just want her back. Once we get her back, we'll find a way to reconcile all those bad times. We'll figure out the rest later.
Some of us are farther along in the process. We know that the relationship is dead. We know that if we love something, we have to set it free.
So our girl is going to go out on her own for a while. She's going to lose weight. Get in shape. Have a makeover. Get a new haircut. Make some new friends. Get some new hobbies. Find herself. Somehow, along the way, she forgot who she was. And she hasn't been very good company to us since then. She and we have just been going through the motions for years. Someone had to say it out loud. It just hurts because it was her, not us, who did the dumping.
She has promised to come back to us after she finds herself, but again, we don't trust her. What if all those other guys like the new her so much that it turns out she doesn't need us anymore?
What if she is just saying that she still wants to be friends because she is afraid she might fail without us? What if we are just a back-up plan? A crutch? That insults us!
Or -- the ultimate horror -- what if she knows that she doesn't need us anymore and she is just telling us she still wants us, to spare our feelings? She knows she's dumping a loser and she's afraid that we'll slit our wrists if she gives us the finger like she'd really like to.
The bright side of the story is that she's putting so much work into the new her that she's probably going to be really hot and really interesting when she comes back around in a year or so.
But we need to give her some space until then and quit bugging her every second with our endless gripes and nitpicks. "Your new eyelash looks all wrong! It should be three microns to the right! No one will ever love you unless you listen to what I have to say! I am the expert on you. Listen to me! Why aren't you listening to me?!?!?"
If we piss her off too much, she will probably decide to tell us to "fuck off" and go back on her word to still be our friends. She'll say, "Don't you get it? I'm leaving you. You have no bargaining power right now. I don't want or need anything from you right now, except space. Give me space! You are suffocating me!!!"
And the best news of all is that once she gets all dolled up and looking hot, she can be ours again for only $10. (Or for free if the law means nothing to us.) The only condition is that we must be willing to share. And if we share with enough people, she'll be able to be hot and interesting for another few years, until we have to go through this process all over again.
And the ugly truth is that we have
already been sharing her for forty years, with a bunch of bitter, frustrated, stinky, ugly, fat, old people.
At least the new people we will share her with will be fresh and different.
And if she comes back to us in a year and we can't come to terms with the new her...
Well, then we don't take her back. We let her go to live her life. We wish her the best. Can she survive without us? Probably. Only time will tell.
And more importantly. Can we survive without her?
People like to say that Star Trek fans have no girlfriends. Well, it looks to me like, for many Star Trek fans, Star Trek is their girlfriend.
And she just dumped them. And they are embarrassed. And they are afraid to be alone. And they are afraid to admit how much time, enrgy, and money they devoted to their girlfriend, only to have her turn around and dump them.
But when she comes back looking hot as hell, many will take her back.
Or be left bitter and alone...
