Drifting from an old old favorite...

[gategrrl]

Wow, this happened so gradually I hardly noticed it. I wouldn't say I'm a big fan, but I was following the comic strip For Better or For Worse online for a long time, since I don't get the newspaper. I used to look it up first thing after my computer booted up. And now, I've suddenly realized, I've only clicked on Lynn Johnston's site maybe once in the past three weeks, only after I read a comment about what's happening in some forum or other.

I guess I've basically dropped it because of lack of interest. I strongly disliked the retconning and character manipulation and where Johnston was taking her characters - especially out of the parameters she herself set for them years ago. She eschewed creative directions and embraced cliche. She limited her own characters' sense of adventure and brought them back into a claustophobic family world. Although always middle class, her characters hadn't ever been so mediocre.

Why am I bringing this up? If you take a look at my previous post, it does relate to the author's perogative to dictate the character's reality. There is a flip-side to that. If the author/creator has full authority over the development (or lack thereof) of his/her characters, when those same characters and storylines take a nose-dive for some of the audience, well, that creator is going to lose audience for their imagination. At the moment, Johnston's imagination and mine aren't running concurrently. I'm not enjoying being inside her mind. (I'm going from Stephen King's assertion that writing and storytelling is telepathy; it is exposing your mind and imagination for a shared experience. see his book "On Writing") 

Do I think Johnston gives a hoot that I no longer read her strip? Of course not. But I do. It's saddening when an old favorite isn't, anymore. It's like losing an old friend, simply because you've both changed enough that there's little in common.

Comments

[moonshayde.livejournal.com]

Star Wars Episodes 1-3. Nuff said.

[karendreamer.livejournal.com]

I just read an article on her this weekend. After around 40 years of marriage her dentist husband fell in love with someone else and they are in the process of divorcing. She has decided to ease into retirement. She is using the tactic of interspersing old strips into new to free up her time to work on ideas for wrapping everything up. She is also going to focus more on the older generation and the younger generation instead of Elly and John. Kinda makes sense since she can't quite focus on the marriage of two middle-aged people right now.

[gategrrl.livejournal.com]

I knew about the impending divorce and her plans for switching the strip over to a "frozen in time" format - that in itself doesn't bother me; it's the choices she's made for her characters, and the weasley way she's manipulated a Romance into the storyline, when the one that was there was just fine and a little more adventerous than the one that ended up being there.

That was a long sentence, wasn't it?

[gategrrl.livejournal.com]

Hey, you gonna be awake for the next half hour or so?

[aizjanika.livejournal.com]

This is how I feel about Supernatural right now. They've taken my favorite characters and are retconning them and just completely changing them. I'm not angry with the writers/producers/whoever for doing this. It's their show. But...I don't have to like it.

For every rabid fan who still likes it and every new fan I see attracted to the show, I'm seeing more and more people on my flist drifting away from the show--not from anger, but from boredom. The show has changed, the characters have changed, and everything about it that made it unique and different and appealing has been stripped away. Even the actors can't save it for me.

I used to be an Anita Blake fan

[justalurkr.livejournal.com]

As in Laurell K. Hamilton's "Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter," in which the heroine famously said "I don't date monsters, I kill them." Well, now the heroine still doesn't (what I'd call) date monsters, she screws them. As many as she can get, as fast as they can come as of the last volume I read in the series.

I got into Anita Blake as an antidote to the summer hiatus on Buffy TVS, and got hooked on the world before Burnt Offerings, the last book I enjoyed more than not. Not only did the author take a sharp turn to the pornographic after that, but she started hitting the bestseller list with such regularity, it put me off reading bestsellers and wondering about the general reading public.

I miss the old, nearly human Anita. Even if the new Slut of St. Louis weren't propelling the author to the top of the NYT booklist, it would still be the author's perogative on where to take character development.

We don't have to ramble down the same garden path, though. I haven't dropped FBOFW yet, but I'm getting there. I hadn't thought about it in terms of returning an extraordinary family to the ordinary mean, but I think you called it.