The new stuff

So I'm not into Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Since I was twelve, I haven't watched anything turtles except Turtles Forever. I'm not the demographic for the new movie. I'm not watching it and I barely care.

I am a comics fan who occasionally has to deal with the drooling masses descending on my hobby when something irrelevant happens and listening to Hollywood types talking about what huge fans they are before putting stories and characters I love under the knife so they're palatable for those very same drooling masses. Therefore, I am super-invested in calling out drooling morons who are suddenly deeply outraged when creators and organizers do something creative with a franchise that said morons haven't spent a dime on in decades.

Y'see--

These turtles look like human/turtle hybrids. They look like teenagers. They do not look like one another. There are no real Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles whose memories are defiled by these upgrades.

That's all I have to say about turtles here.

--it's mind blowing for some people to realize that Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, Conan, etc. are all franchises that are owned by organizations that really want to make money off of them. Their pure, creative vision is only useful to them for as long as they can also appeal to a broad audience. If you're lucky, they'll drown in nostalgia and shrink into a set of navel-gazing, and quotes so well tread they're divorced of all meaning. Otherwise, you get NuTrek.

Now, I don't talk a lot about the new Star Trek films. I saw the first one and it was okay, but it's not for me. If the second one had created and followed it's own vision, I might have given it a second chance. I could talk a lot about creators stupid enough to park their soapbox derby cart alongside an F-14 and rev the engine, but I won't.

It's not for me. I can't get mad. I'm not the gatekeeper of Star Trek and I can't declare one thing Trek and another thing not. When the new series does something phenomenally stupid and it comes across my dashboard, I get a good laugh at it. Sometimes, if it seems too stupid for words I'll look it up ("super blood").

There are other good things out there for me to get invested in. Things I can actively support. The Chik-Fil-A Day thing shows that supporting something is always more effective than boycotting it. Sure, call out things you like for their problematic elements, that's how you get change.

Because when you do walk away, you're not the audience anymore. It's not yours and you can probably shut up about how it's not made for you anymore.