Episode Report Card Jacob Clifton: A+ | 4 USERS: A YOU GRADE IT Whistle & I Will Hear
By Jacob Clifton | Season 4 | Episode 19 | Aired on 03.31.2013
Diane: "The show has suffered immensely from that, even if it makes organic sense..."
Kalinda: "Sure, but that's not really what they were bitching about."
Diane: "I guess I will fire her, then. I sure hope this isn't the most trivial and least terrible thing you find out about me!"
THAT WAS HARSH
You're right, I'm sorry. Look, maybe my thoughts on this are not your thoughts on this. But I would think by now you'd know how little patience I have for shipping and fan-fiction and that side of the fandom. You know how we talk about Nice Guys and the Friendzone and that the Nice Guy is a piece of crap for putting all his stuff on you, the Dream Girl, and not really caring who you are, or where he stops and you start? That bothers me not solely because of feminism -- well, insofar as it's a product of male privilege to treat women as objects -- but because I think that's a gross way to do anything.
Shipping and fan fiction generally -- not always, not you, although the handful of readers I lose at this point in the conversation were probably on their way out the door anyway -- tend to spring from the same place: You're licking the icing off the cupcake and throwing the rest in the dirt. You're being a Nice Guy when you do things like fast-forward past the "boring" parts of a show that don't feed your ship, or when you conflate the quality of the writing, the show, the acting or the story with whether or not it feeds your ship.
Q: "I'm allowed to enjoy my entertainment any way I see fit!"
A: "Absolutely. And I'm allowed to think it's gross and dumb. That's how that works."
Q: "Do writers hate shippers for doing that?"
A: "It takes an ass to fill every seat, and you've all got the same color of money. But rabid shippers have a thing where they issue death threats and hack perfectly nice, innocent people's Twitter and Facebook accounts and wish AIDS on writers, and I don't think they enjoy that part of it very much."
Crazy people do crazy things, and certainly the overinvested are not all the same kind of crazy. But they are all the same kind of overinvested, and they all lick the icing off. And then over here you've got fan fic, which is a whole other ball of wax. Now, you can't confuse the medium with the message, and plenty of fan fiction is great writing -- I have a weakness for those music videos where you guys montage people together in whatever way, those can be really beautiful -- but at the end of the day, I don't get why you want to play with somebody else's toys. And a lot of it is just rote turning-out-product, like Nanowrimo without the sense of accomplishment. Which is fine. We're not all trying to be Hemingway like certain pretentious recappers we could mention.