redwoodalchan: Silly Drifloon from "Red Sun" fic (Default)
 It's obvious that whoever wrote those pages is a completely obsessed fan (or most likely fans) who worships the ground they walk on and probably thinks beautiful white chrysanthemums and monkshoods grow from between their toes. Pretty much every other thing that finds its way onto those pages somehow leads back to how totally awesome and special Iron Maiden are, and how they pretty much define CMOA, and how everything they do is amazing and wonderful and perfect--to the point of absurdities like praising a band member for striking a guy with his car because he was running late to a concert as an "Awesome Moment," despite the fact that a moment's logic and reason would tell you that striking someone with a car for any reason is bad, no matter who's doing it!

Look, I make no secret of the fact that I adore Iron Maiden. I think they're a great band and in some respects a very admirable one--but there is a limit to the amount of praise even they are entitled to! I'm just worried about what'll happen if someone tries to mount an honest, reasonable criticism of them or anything they've done on TVTropes. Will Iron Maiden become the next Harry Potter, with people making excuses for EVERYTHING they've ever done wrong, and expecting the worst of anyone who disagrees like they currently do for people who find Snape more sympathetic than Harry and his ilk?

Before anyone asks, yes I've edited those pages. But I haven't been responsible for the more insane bits like the aforementioned car thing.

redwoodalchan: Silly Drifloon from "Red Sun" fic (Default)
 I'm not sure quite how I feel about that. I suppose it was inevitable considering how many of the people on that site use TVTropes.
redwoodalchan: Silly Drifloon from "Red Sun" fic (Default)
 ...if the villain is genuinely the sort of person that the fan in question likes?

It's an honest question. The official definition of DILP that TVTropes uses is:

"When the fandom takes a controversial or downright villainous character and downplays his flaws..."

And there's the thing. If you're a hybristophiliac who genuinely thinks psychopathic bad guys are attractive or desirable or ideal, then you aren't really "downplaying" their flaws because the flaws are part of what makes them your ideal. At the same time, though, you're professing an attraction to a character who was never meant to be seen as attractive, which is sometimes what DILP is taken to mean (particularly if the fan is un-self-aware enough to actually treat the villain as the real hero because he's so evil). So...is that DILP, or is it something else?

Of course, even if it isn't DILP to treat the evil bad guy as your ideal friend/mate/role model/whatever, it's still every bit as creepy and stupid as true DILP, if not worse. 

(I also, for the record, don't think the two are mutually exclusive. I've seen some stories in which fans took morally-dubious characters, downplayed the flaws that they had in canon...only to have them be horrific creeps in some other way, which was treated as perfectly acceptable or even desirable!)

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redwoodalchan: Silly Drifloon from "Red Sun" fic (Default)
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