TheX-filesIWantT... Tagged Articles at Cinematical

If you're a faithful Beat reader, you may remember that one of the very first installments dealt with the nasty, critical side of fandom. You know the types – the ones who spend so much time hating that nothing could satisfy them. (Seth Rogen summed it up in a pithy quote that, somehow, I only just caught: "They could find out Jesus Christ was making a movie with Frank Miller and they'd say, 'That's a terrible combination!'") But now, I'd like to address the other side of the coin – and yes, one side of it is defaced to help me decide these things – and that's the uncritical element of fandom. It's a side I didn't really grasp until I started writing here, where anything vaguely critical can be followed by screams of "You're such a hater!! You want it to fail!"

When I was at ComicCon, I tried to keep up with the news of the outside world. One of the "quietest" geek stories (and something I would have talked about much earlier, had con and editorial demands not sidetracked me) was the release of The X-Files: I Want to Believe. The bad reviews were pouring in right and left, even garnering heavy discussion on sites where the interests of geekdom are generally disdained. And no matter where you went, the comment fields were populated with X-Philes, and for every one who was verbose and rational, there were ten saying "F--- the haters! They want it to fail!"