Damon Lindelof
Still catching up on the LOST news … a couple of weeks ago, Damon Lindelof wrote in The Daily Beast:
The most awesome part about being one of the primary storytellers of a popular television show is hearing how much its most loyal fans hate it.
Oh. Wait. It’s actually not awesome. It hurts like hell.
I know—boo hoo for me. That’s the price of doing business, isn’t it? If I’m asking you to invest your time and attention in a story I’m telling, it’s your right to tell me that you hate that story.
You just don’t get to call yourself a “fan.”
At least that is what I had always believed.
He changed his mind after watching the film Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 1, which he hated, despite being a Harry Potter fan. When he left the theater, his brain was churning:
As I staggered out into the parking lot, my brain was deftly trying to resolve a deep and complicated paradox: If I loved the book, and the movie was an incredibly loyal adaptation of that book…
How could I possibly hate the movie? And even more distressing…
Based on the careful emotional logic I’d been using to insulate myself from the slings and arrows of “Why didn’t you people answer any goddamn questions?” and “A golden light in the middle of the island? SERIOUSLY?!?”, if I hated the movie…
Did that mean I was no longer a fan?
He turned it over in his mind, in the parking lot, and came to a conclusion:
I still love Harry Potter. Deeply and profoundly… I’m still a fan. A huge fan. Huge.
And so I sincerely and genuinely apologize to all those whom I have stripped of their Lost fandom just for complaining about the stuff you didn’t like. It doesn’t make you any less a fan. In fact…
It just makes you honest.
I respect that. And I’m genuinely sorry for ever feeling otherwise.
Source: The Daily Beast
