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Member
Posts: 46
| WSJ Online published an article that I think may be of interest to many other members of this board; it examines the relationship between an author and her fandom, in this case Charlaine Harris and her decision to end her Sookie Stackhouse series:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324482504578453062428...
Quite frankly, I'm ashamed of how some of her fans have treated her; reading the story made me very angry. | |
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Uber User
Posts: 263
Location: Gunnison, Colorado | Strange how people can become so fixated on a single author or series, no matter how good. Even stranger to be an author whose fans make you rich, and then threaten to kill you... | |
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Elite Veteran
Posts: 1008
Location: UK | Thanks so much for this article,Scott.So weird.I got in on the ground floor with the Sookie books,right back in 2002,2003? I found the first three books extremely interesting.To me,an outsider Brit, Charlaine Harris was clearly,if subtly, criticising the whole good old boy, bigoted southern state mentality of small southern towns, with the claustrophobic intolerance of the different.. Vampires were a nice less controversial way of highlighting the intolerance towards gays,though indeed she did have a gay murdered in the second book.Sookie's invidious position as a seeming retarded person also denounced the casual,careless attitude to outsiders.(Check out her interesting ''Grave'' series,where this time it is the nasty petty intolerance and humiliation of so called ''trailer trash'' who are so badly treated in these stifling bigoted small towns).
Sadly,as the Sookie books took off,they were no longer critiques,just standard romances.Poor Bill,the decent vampire from Civil War times was too staid as a hero,and fans started wanting a more glamorous,sexy hero,and for me things went downhill from there.But the TV series really got the fans hot!.I struggled through one series and couldn't bear to watch any more,as the plot lost all resemblance to the books.I will read the last book in tribute to the original ideas,but I know I am among a minority,though quite substantial one, who wanted the series to end several books ago,and think Harris is sensible to end.it all. | |
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Uber User
Posts: 236
Location: Grootfontein, Namibia | Mhmm, Stephen King wrote about an insame fan in Misery. | |
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New User
Posts: 3
| Glad I wasn't the only person who had Misery flashbacks when reading this. I've enjoyed a lot of the Stackhouse books, but they were really going downhill in quality, and I respect Charlaine Harris for pulling the plug rather than continue to churn out books that were terrible but popular -- despite her editor's apparent desire to keep publishing them "forever." It's a shame that so many fans went off the edge like this. | |
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New User
Posts: 1
| I had a friend suggest to me that authors, not unlike celebrities or athletes, need to realize that if they don't want to be scrutinized, criticized, or bullied, they need to consider another line of work. "People are jerks and that's just the way it is."
Whereas I think my friend is an idiot, a comment that has him not speaking to me at the moment, I do have to wonder if this particular moment in the Internet age is more dangerous for creative types simply because of the amount of access that the fans have to the authors. Twitter, Tumblr, and Facebook give fans more agency, and (despite the fact that it cannot be helped) maybe this isn't such a good thing. | |
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