If Star Trek has any relevance left, IT's non in NASA visions, alien linguistics or the idea that life would make up just not bad if an interstellar United Nations ran everything. Those are distractions. Star Trek's real gift to the world is the image of Trekkies, which has get along the template for angry pop culture fandom. This guide has little to do with Star Trek itself OR most of the multitude who enjoy it. But the Angry Fans are with us similar pox, and here's why.

A Delicate Question

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We're at Blizzcon 2009, the ultimate place for all things Blizzard. The league hall at the Anaheim Conventionality Center field is packed. Onstage is a panel for Reality of Warcraft, the most popular online roleplaying game on the planet. The panelists are very smart people. They spend their entire lives thinking nigh and creating Humankind of Warcraft. As oppugn time arrives, they're willing to talk about nearly anything – vision, strategy, influences, possibilities, you name it. This panel is a windowpane into the soul of other universe, and you tail ask whatever you want.

A large guy in a black T-shirt stands at the mic. He's nervous and sweaty, only He's got his question quick. The panelists slant forward arsenic he begins. IT's a detailed question. Very detailed, on a minor point of game mechanism that black T-shirt guy cable isn't happy with. Atomic number 2 demands to know how they'Re going to fix his problem. He wishes they'd done it four months past. The room squirms. The Blizzard panelists take a breathing spell and dive in.

Behind black T-shirt guy's excitement and organic structure aroma is a paradox. He loves World of Warcraft, merely this International Relations and Security Network't nigh that: The key is that he desperately wants something from the panelists – not the resolve to his question, simply something much deeper and harder to define. Yet no affair how they respond, they can ne'er give it to him. Along a basic tear down he knows this, and information technology makes him angry. He's angry at the creators of the thing he loves.

Consciously or non, black Tee shirt roast is acting out a picture from the sci-fi documentary Galaxy Quest, itself based along the Star Trek draw and their encounters with fandom complete the years. The Angry Fandom template says: If you crush things to death, they'll never leave you.

William Shatner's got a lot to account.

Image Becomes Reality

Trekkies themselves were never that many or important. Fans of the innovational TV serial publication brought it back from cancellation in 1968 through a varsity letter-writing campaign. Some ill-used to wander around sci-fi conventions with costumes and pointy ears. This was nothing new – dorky group behavior has been a staple of sci-fi fandom since the first conventions in the late 1930s. Trekkies grew in number after the original series ended, simply they were really just uncomparable more weird grouping in an era – the previous '60s/early '70s – that technical in crazy cults.

Heading into the 1980s, though, the see of a "Trekkie" got a series of public boosts, including a William Shatner sketch along Saturday Nighttime Live. As often happens, this mass-media portrayal became more powerful than the thing on which it was supported.

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The describe qualities of the Trekkie image were rabid compulsion with a touch of repressed ramp. Costumes were probably engaged. They didn't have much else going on in their lives. People suffer displayed these qualities for thousands of long time altogether sorts of pursuits, only the Trekkie image was tailor-successful for the growing world of pop music polish. It seeped into the public knowingness through movies, documentaries and parodies. People who'd never been to a sci-fi convention picked up cues. Marketers picked them up faster. The internet hurled them around at heave speed. And, if you postulate ME, manner too many people started sustenance the dream.

The Wild Fandom template says: If you run as fast as you can afterwards a mirage, eventually you'll end up in a spaceship.

It's Not About Liking Stuff

Pop civilisation isn't a ghetto, and most people World Health Organization relish its products aren't part of an exotic tribe. In Star topology Trek's case, the reality of modern fans is that they include a teensy-weensy act of hardcore maniacs, a bunch of "Trekkers" who range from fooling to rig-crazy and, wellspring, people who meet care Star Trek. It's pretty much the same pattern as Star Wars or Battlestar Galactica or Worldly concern of Warcraft: lots of people care this stuff. Nineteen of the top-20 grossing films ever are sci-fi, fantasise or superhero related.

But the Trekkie-based Angry Fandom templet ISN't about liking stuff. Quite the reverse. Coiffe the people who go batshit at convention panels or on web forums just "like stuff"?

I was controlled with a girl at school when I was 14. She was a really respectable fill, or seemed to be. I didn't sleep with her that well. But I'd read a bunch together of books and seen a bundle of movies, and I knew how this worked: If I coveted her enough and proved that to her, she'd sooner or later net ball Maine into her world and everything'd be good. This young woman was the solution to the problems of beingness 14.

You make love how that ended finished. Let's sporty say brutal acne was less traumatic by comparison. My feelings had little to do with Girl Fourteen herself; the object of desire becomes irrelevant when you'Re in the full throes of information technology. The substantial fixation is the obsession itself. And when that's fed by the right circumstances OR the wrong people, it can make up a saturnine rabbit-hole to fall fine-tune. It can bite you in the screw, hard.

Commend the Browncoats? Everyone loved Joss Whedon's Lightning bug and was pensive when it got canceled. Few citizenry, taking a direct track from early Trekkies, went a spot further. The email campaign to resurrect the TV series didn't work, so when a Fire beetle movie was announced rather, they were delirious. The Browncoats instigated a wave of grassroots devotee action that took group obsession to Japanese-level heights. They mobbed advance screenings. They wrote songs, created unpaid movies, held rallies and, yes, filled sci-fi convention control board halls. Browncoats loved existence Browncoats. News coverage made it crystalline: Firefly's got the Trekkie spot. Who knows how big the motion picture could a-ok with awesome fans like that?

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Peace wide. It was a good movie. It did mild business, but not enthusiastic. Information technology went quickly to DVD where it made back its costs. The Browncoats were disappointed. Some of them were wrothful – maybe Joss didn't pen a proper Firefly movie. Maybe Adaptable screwed skyward the merchandising. They got very angry when it was suggested that possibly, just peradventur, the fancy of the Browncoats themselves had hurt Serenity's box-office take away scaring away hoi polloi WHO might otherwise have liked it.

The marketing was part to incrimination, in that once the Browncoats phenomenon emerged it was nurtured, pleased and manipulated by Joss Whedon and General. The hardcore/obsessive template often works well – looking at Halo's online universe, a Microsoft-nourished surround organized to give passionate children something to exist rabid and childish about. But the Browncoats went too far and complete up as an example of Angry Fandom's downside, a lesson from which others have learned. Rash ne'er touts the hardcore Humanity of Warcraft players in mass advert anymore, even though their game is a machine for generating detail-bound obsession among those prone to it. Star Trek's producers themselves ready-made the smart move of backing away from the Trekkie image with the new film, perpetually reassuring people that IT wasn't one of those outings, that you could come along and just have fun and not have to deal with smelly misfits wearing Vulcan ears.

As a seller, you have to be careful with Angry Fandom. In one case you let tendencies like the Browncoats loose, there's not much that butt discontinue them, and at some point they will crook happening you like scorpions. Hopefully, that's after you've generated a goodish return on investment.

Get a Life

Our culture fosters too many people WHO, straight surgery indirectly, inherited the idea of angry fandom from Star Trek. They've been pleased by a generation of marketers who date an obsessive grassroots core as crucial to building buzz around a mathematical product. Hither's a thought: Real passion is about making things yourself, investing to the full in your own life history and those around you without needing to turn entertainment into a totem pole. Factor Roddenberry was a secular humanist World Health Organization didn't conceive in kooky religions or mass manipulation of any case. Where the hell did that bit of Ace Trek's bequest end ahead?

Colin Rowsell is a Wellington, Unexampled Sjaelland-founded writer. Tell him wherefore he's wrong on giantmonkeyvirus@gmail.com.