whatever you want to call them, these are the people that hold art and culture dearest, and these are the people that it is dangerous to mess with.
get it right, and they will continue to sing your praises.
get it wrong, even just a minor mis-step, and some fanboys find it very hard to be forgiving.
this is certainly the case whether it is music geeks, film geeks, or, as proved recently by the 'Before Watchmen' debacle, comic geeks.
and i think the truth behind these issues is that as fans, we want our heroes and our icons to be infallible.
and when we start dealing with sequels, or prequels, or a follow up of some sort, you are running a risk.
you are increasing the chances of a work held in high esteem becoming tainted, or lessened somehow.
there is also the chance that an original premise could be improved upon, but when people have such an emotional investment in these works you are also gambling with people's memories.
we often have our personal reasons for such deep investment, some that go deeper than others, whether it is an album that saw your through a particularly rough patch in your life or reminds you of fond memories, or perhaps it is a film or a story that just connected with you, or opened your eyes to something you had not experienced before.
these are the types of feelings and emotions that people connect to art.
we could be talking about Greedo shooting first in the Star Wars special editions, the introduction of Jar Jar Binks and midichlorians in The Phantom Menace, we could be talking about the movie adaption of The Da Vinci Code or the long-threatened American remake of Akira, it could be Jay-Z's Blueprint 2 (and 3), it could any modern take on an old idea, whether it is the Wicker Man or Star Trek, and it could be the increasing expectations for Christopher Nolan's final instalment in his Dark Knight trilogy.
and we are most definitely talking about Before Watchmen.
