Posts Tagged ‘celebrities’

The Quiet Game: My First Review

Posted: July 18, 2013 in Living and Life, Review, Scary Stuff, short story, Writing
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Between finishing the last post and getting out of the shower, I realized that there wasn’t enough time to watch a movie before bed (another time, perhaps). Which is why I decided to write this post, featuring my first review of The Quiet Game: Five Tales To Chill Your Bones. (If you’re interested in reading but don’t have the link, click here). It comes from one of my beta readers, and it was posted on her Facebook status. And by the way, this happens to be my mother.

Yes, I know your family is supposed to love everything you write, even if you have your character choking a baby (please don’t ever write anything as sick as that). But my mom’s a little different. For starters, my mother was the one who got me into Anne Rice and Stephen King. Yes, she did. Originally a fan of the two authors, she’s the one who lent me Interview with the Vampire and told me to read Stephen King when I’d read several Anne Rice books. She’s also lent me other books and turned me onto other writers like Dean Koontz and Dan Brown. She also introduced me to Buffy the Vampire Slayer and The X-Files, shows which had a profound influence on me and my writing.

So even though she’s family and even though my mother doesn’t get the same sort of thrills I do from horror movies (I feel delightfully terrified while she’s just terrified), she’s definitely helped in molding me into the writer I am. Which was why I was very delighted when I called her and she told me she was about one short story into the book. And later when I logged onto Facebook, I was greeted with my first review. What did Rabbi Wendy Warren Ungar have to say? Why this:

“Reading Rami’s new book of short stories that was just published, (shameless promotion here), and I’ve discovered that my son is yet another author I can’t read at night!”

If you haven’t noticed, the subtitle on this blog is “Scared yet? My job here is done.” Well folks, my job here is done. Because I’ve always dreamed of giving someone a fright with my writing, and hearing that my mother can’t read my work at night gives me a small sense of accomplishment. I like knowing that I can deliver the goods when I say my stories are scary, and I like knowing I’m getting the sort of reactions I’d hoped for.

So Mom, thanks for reviewing and shamelessly promoting and all that. It means a lot to me and I hope to make even better stories as time goes on.

I also hope to post more reviews for The Quiet Game as they come. I know some friends have said they’ll write a review when they’re done, so I’m sure those reviews will show up in the next couple of weeks. Until then I hope you enjoy reading The Quiet Game as much as I enjoyed writing it, putting it together, and sending it out to you.

Good night everybody!

The Quiet Game Launch Party

Posted: July 17, 2013 in Living and Life, Progress Report, short story, Writing
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Welcome! Come one and all to the launch party for The Quiet Game: Five Tales To Chill Your Bones. Seeing as I can’t actually afford a launch party, this post has just become Ohio’s most happening place right now. We have so much for you, but first, why not have a drink?

Expensive champagne all the way from Google. And have some hors d’oeuvres:

And before we get to the entertainment portion of the party, I’d just like to thank everyone for coming. Your support has meant the world to me, and without it I seriously doubt any of us would be reading The Quiet Game over the next couple of weeks. A special shout-out goes to my family, a spectacular “BOO!” to my beta-readers and their excellent feedback, and a cauldron full of weird goop for all those who contributed in some way to the creation of The Quiet Game: Five Tales To Chill Your Bones.

Now I know you want to scroll down and download or order a copy of the book. I know, I know. But before you do, there’s some wonderful entertainment here for you. First, we have a special performance by Macklemore and Ryan Lewis. They’ll be telling us why I should shop at the thrift store more often.


Thank you, Mr. Lewis and Mr. Macklemore. I can’t tell which one is which, truth be told. Now, before we bring out our next guest performers out, I’d just like to say a few words on how The Quiet Game came to be. During the Fall 2012 semester at Ohio State, I started toying with the idea of writing a collection of short stories. I had several ideas for short stories on my tack board, and the critiquing of Reborn City was taking longer than I thought it would. So after the semester ended, I shrugged and said “Why not?” That later lead to five really creepy short stories being written over the course of a month, with one of them being rewritten several times over. Then there was some artwork to create, a book trailer, a copyright to get, but in the end it led to The Quiet Game: Five Tales To Chill Your Bones.

And you know what? It was worth it!

Our next performance is from the group who asks, “Is there a more logical way this movie could’ve ended?” Please welcome the folks from HISHEdotcom and their new video, “How Man of Steel Should Have Ended.”


Boy, was that something else! Now I know you all want to get back to your day jobs, so I won’t keep you much longer. I just would like to say thank you, and I hope you will indulge me by watching the book trailer for The Quiet Game one more time.

Now without further ado, here is The Quiet Game: Five Tale To Chill Your Bones! First we have the Amazon page! Very cool, right? And for a limited time, you can save twenty-seven cents when you buy from Amazon now! That means instead of paying $5.50, you pay $5.23 (you’re on your own for shipping and handling).

And right after it, we have the link for that wonderful e-book sharing website. Yes, it’s the Smashwords link! A lovely page, in a lovely shade of blue.

Well, thank you all for coming and I hope you enjoy reading The Quiet Game. I hope you’ll also tell your friends and family about it and maybe write a review or two about it (every review helps). I would just like to close this party by having Mr. Macklemore and Mr. Lewis come back on stage. Which one are you guys again? Oh, what does it matter? Party hard!

Review: Dan Brown’s Inferno

Posted: July 4, 2013 in Review
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It’s good, but it’s not great. How sad.

Dante’s Inferno has always intrigued me on some level. It’s a very imaginative work, and one could make a case that the many layers of Hell portrayed in The Divine Comedy could be used for today’s society. That’s part of the reason why I was so excited to learn that Dan Brown had released a new Robert Langdon book based around Inferno, the first book of The Divine Comedy. The other reason was that I had loved Angels & Demons and The Da Vinci Code, and The Lost Symbol had cheered up a really uneasy sick day. I wanted to see what Robert Langdon was up to this time around!

Unfortunately, this volume makes it seem that Dan Brown is trying to hard to make a good story for Langdon to run around and save the world in. In what feels like a horrible and barely-believable cliché, Langdon wakes up in Florence, Italy with amnesia and can’t remember what happened to him. Almost immediately he’s into all sorts of trouble as he learns he’s been wrapped up in a confrontation between the World Health Organization and a shadowy operation meant to protect the interests of a dead geneticist who’s concocted something very terrible for the world and is paying for his plan to be carried out from beyond the grave.

At certain points throughout the novel, there are revelations and twists that are meant to be like what happened with the Mandarin in Iron Man 3 but instead leave you thinking it out for five minutes trying to understand what happened before going back through the nearly five-hundred page book and concluding that Brown didn’t even give any hints of these twists where most authors would have done so. And finally when you get to the conclusion things seem to be wrapped up a little too neatly with another twist that makes you say, “That’s nice, but it’s almost too nice. I could almost be okay with it.”

When you’re almost okay with a villainous geneticist’s plot, you know there’s a problem.

On the bright side, the first half of the novel has all the usual thrills of a Robert Langdon novel, and you do feel like you’re learning about a variety of subjects while you’re reading. There are plenty of exotic locales described in breathtaking detail that you wish you could go to yourself to see, and the character of Sienna Brooks as Langdon’s female companion this novel seems like a real person for most of the book, a poor girl trying to deal with her own genius and the pitfalls that have occurred because of it.

(Whatever happens to the women Langdon sees in the novels? We never find out what happened to the yoga instructor/physicist, though there’s hints of an untimely death or a break-up, we’re never sure of what happens to the descendant of Jesus who started to like Langdon, and the Masonic Grandmaster’s sister wasn’t even romantic, so I’m assuming there’s no break-up?)

All in all, I’m giving Dan Brown’s Inferno a 3.4 out of 5. Hopefully he can do better with the next book should there be (and judging by how popular the Robert Langdon books are, I think there will be a sequel. Whether or not there should be one and whether or not it’s any good).

The Benefits I’ve Gotten Through Blogging

Posted: July 1, 2013 in Living and Life
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I’ve been blogging here on WordPress for nearly two years (the second anniversary of Rami Ungar the Writer is actually a month and a day away, believe it or not). A lot has happened in that time. I started college, a job, and a new life. I began the publishing process for Reborn City, wrote The Quiet Game: Five Tales To Chill Your Bones, which will be coming out in 16 days, I published several short stories and one or two articles, became a writer for Self-Published Authors Helping Other Authors, met my roommate for the apartment I’m getting in August, read all the Hannibal Lecter books, got into The Daily Show, and a few other things.

And witness to most of this is my blog. I’ve been able to record my musings, review movies, TV shows, and books, update people on my writing, and add links to the places my short stories are published. I’ve made some great friends through the blogosphere, a couple of whom have helped me with my writing my being kind enough to offer feedback on my work (by the way, both of those friends are Canadian, so I’ll give them a shout-out by wishing them a happy Canada Day!). I’ve met people who have offered me wonderful advice, given me their own thoughts, and even sometimes argued with me on this or that topic. I even had nearly two-thousand Anne Rice fans reading my review of The Wolf Gift, and I’m happy to say the majority of them reacted positively to it.

You know, my life has been enriched a lot by blogging. Sure at times I was lucky just to get a single person to read the posts I was writing. But these days I’m proud to say I have a little bit of a following going on, and I’m glad that you all keep reading my posts. Sure I lose a few followers every now and then, but most of them keep coming back (God only knows why) and it touches me deeply that you want to read what I’m writing. Thank you so much.

new TCG cover

I’m about to start on a new but related adventure: publishing and selling copies of a published collection of short stories. I have trepidation, excitement, doubts, and confidence all going through my system. But whatever happens, I have a feeling that my blog, and the people who read it, are going to be behind it every step of the way.

Oh, and speaking of publishing, remember Daisy, the short story I published on Amazon and Smashwords, not only as a promotion for The Quiet Game but also to see if anyone would read it? Well, it looks like 150 people have downloaded and read it, and I even got one review that gave it an “average” grade. Have no idea if that’s an indication of how The Quiet Game will do (I’m personally hoping it’ll do much better), but it’s still got me excited. Perhaps in the future I’ll have 150 downloads on the first day!

Have you downloaded a copy yet?

Have you downloaded a copy yet?

Off to go jog now. Once again, thanks for reading my work. I really appreciate it.

Review: World War Z (film)

Posted: June 29, 2013 in Review, Scary Stuff
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Some of you may remember my review of the novel a while back (if you haven’t read it, click here), which got a very favorable review for being a history of the political, military, economic, social, educational, religious, ethical, and moral ramifications of a zombie war as told through a series of vignettes from witnesses of the war (try saying that three time fast).

After reading the book, set ten years after the end of the war, my whole family–or just me and my mother, plus my sister who hasn’t read the book–wondered how the movie would differ from the book. Obviously there would be a lot of differences, seeing as the movie shows the zombie war as it begins. When we got to the theatre yesterday, had our coupon denied, sat through a hundred corporate ads, had the projector break down, and finally started the movie, we hoped that even with so many liberties, the movie would be good.

We weren’t disappointed. Although plenty of liberties were taken and plenty of stuff was left out–the zombies were fast-moving rather than slow shufflers, there was no mention of the new religious empire of Russia or the South Africa plan, changes in what happens to North Korea, and a huge difference in what happens to Israel–the movie was a decent zombie thriller. Brad Pitt was awesome as Gerry Lane, a retired UN worker who’s called back into service when the plague breaks out. He is surrounded by a great cast and zombies who are so lifelike–or maybe un-lifelike is better–that whether they are CGI or actors in make-up, they look so real.

The movie zigzags around the world, from Philedelphia to the Atlantic Ocean to Korea to Israel (whoop-whoop!) to Wales and finally to Nova Scotia, but there are plenty of thrills and tense situations in-between that have you on the edge of your seat. And finally there’s the scene in the vault in Wales, where the final twist in the movie is revealed. At the end, you’ll be enjoying yourself despite all the liberties taken.

My family and I left the theater discussing the movie and its many differences from the book, but how we enjoyed it all the same. I’m going to give the film a 4.4 out of 5, for being the first decent zombie film I’ve seen in a while.

Oh, and apparently Paramount is moving ahead with plans for a sequel, despite the fact that the original was plagued with numerous problems and production costs skyrocketed. Not surprising, considering horror has had a history of doing sequels long after the sequels should stop, and this was well before the sequel mania we are in began. I’m not sure if I’ll see the sequel, but considering that it took six years for the movie to actually make it to the screen, I tink enough time will pass for me to actually enjoy the sequel.

Review: “Under the Dome” Pilot Episode

Posted: June 25, 2013 in Review
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Adaptations are either average, amazing, or really, really bad. Sometimes it’s easy to know which one is which, sometimes it’s not. But when you have Under the Dome, based on the thousand-page novel by Stephen King, it’s difficult to tell what this adaptation will be like. Especially when you consider that there are some big differences to the novel that His Scary Highness himself okayed.

For those of you unfamiliar with the novel, Under the Dome takes place in Chester’s Mill, a small Maine town that is cut off from the world by a giant invisible dome. The novel itself focuses less on where the dome came from and how they get out of it (though that does get its treatment), but on the social ramifications of being cut off from the rest of the world. The TV series, which may have more than one season depending on how well the show does in the ratings, will chronicle how the town does over a period of months (rather than days like in the book). Clashes will occur, people will die, and perhaps we may get a second season.

However at this point it’s too early to tell. There’s the usual weirdness and odd elements that typically define a King story. Two teens have seizures where they see “stars falling in lines” and there’s a cow that’s split in two early on. There’s also hints of something very wrong happening in Chester’s Mill well before the dome fell (I won’t give anything away if you haven’t read the book, but trust me when I say it’s important). And of course, there’s the usual elements of a small town in a King story: the local diner, the townsfolk knowing everybody and everything, and town politics that are bound to get nasty.

The King himself okayed certain changes to the story. What on Earth could that mean for the show?

As for character development though, not much. Dale “Barbie” Barbara (Bates Motel‘s Mike Vogel), our main character, is as mysterious to us as he is to the fellow townspeople. Big Jim Rennie (played by Breaking Bad‘s Dean Norris) isn’t yet the villain he’s supposedly playing (or will that develop later?), while his son Junior (played by Alexander Koch) is disturbed, but a different kind from the one in the novel. Still, very disturbing.

I’m not going to go into all the differences between book and TV show, but I do hope that this story can improve over time and become something I look forward to in the summers should it have a second season. For now, I’m giving it a rating of 3.4 out of 5 for at the very least giving a good attempt at bringing a Stephen King novel to the small screen. Let’s hope they can make it a great attempt as time goes on.

The Passion and the Drive and the Dream To Write A Novel

Posted: June 25, 2013 in Reflections, Writing
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I heard somewhere that around 90% of Americans want to write a novel. I wasn’t sure if that was accurate, so I did a little research. Estimates vary depending on what study you read. One article said 200 million Americans, which is about 64% of the country’s population. Another estimate said about 80% of Americans have a novel in them, which would be around 252 million Americans.

Why don’t they? Here are the common answers as I’ve heard them:

(In the voice of a woman I met at synagogue) “I want to write, but I don’t have the skills.”

(In the gruff voice of a 30-something classmate of mine from a couple semesters ago) “Yeah, I have a novel in my head. Got all the characters, the scenes, and the punctuation marks. Just have to find the time.”

(From someone I met in high school) “I would write, but nobody would read my work.”

(The promise from two friends who said it like they were going to win the lottery someday) “Oh yeah, I’ll write a novel. It’ll be great.”

Rich tomes, all from these daredevils we call writers.

There’s some things I’d like to address here. For starters, writers aren’t born with their abilities. We start out fumbling with pen, typewriters, or computers when we’re young, trying to tell a story. Over time our skills develop, rough like stone but then polished. It may take years to do, but we do it. So what if you don’t have the skills? Neither did Shakespeare till he actually tried and learned his craft. You should try it out.

Second, the time to write won’t just magically come upon you like fairies floating in the air or like a dollar on the sidewalk. Nope, we writers carve out the time. I carve out the time between my part-time job, cooking, chores and errands, eating, jogging, and sleeping to write. It’s an exhaustive process, but writers do it anyway. So don’t wait for the time to find you, but instead find the time yourself. It may seem impossible, but I know you can find the time, even if it’s in-between the moments you finish running errands and the moments you go to pick up the kids. Nothing good on TV between those times anyway, right?

Third, don’t assume that people won’t read your work. Sure, it seems like a majority of people stop reading after high school or college. And there are plenty of people who do. After all, there’s plenty of TV-watching, movie-watching, calling, texting, Skyping, chatting, listening to music, and other such activities to do in your spare time rather than read a book. But a lot of the great movie franchises come from people who read books and write them as well. Jennifer Roth, whose novel Divergent is being made into a movie, probably worried that nobody would want to read her work. And at 24, she’s already a bestseller (so jealous, by the way). And she’s probably not the only one: Suzanne Collins, JK Rowling, Anne Rice, Stephanie Meyer, Bram Stoker, Mary Shelley, Mark Twain, Stephen King, Dean Koontz, Ernest Hemingway, Edgar Rice Burroughs. Say what you want on their work, but these people are famous, their books have been adapted into various formats at least once, and some weren’t famous until after their deaths. Yet they still wrote, because they were willing to face the fears that nobody would want to read their work and put it out there anyway.

And with self-publishing, you can even get directly to the readers without having to please the gatekeepers in New York (I’ve got a post about those guys later). So don’t despair that nobody will read your work. There’s always somebody for every writer. I’m sure there’s someone out there for you. Maybe your parents, your partner, your friends, or somebody in Kabul you’ve never even met or heard of just browsing online. They could become your biggest fan.

This is the magic the writer conjures and creates. If we put our wills to it, we can all do it as well.

And finally, writing a novel is nothing to laugh about or say “I’ll do it” with such a casual air. It’s difficult. It’s writing one word–usually four letters, sometimes less, oftentimes much more–after another after another. And the average novel is a minimum of 40,000 words, woven into a (usually) complex story with characters who are developed and grow over time, a plot that we invest ourselves in, wanting to know what happens next, and a magic that is fiction, for though it may be lies on paper (or screen), it seems so real to us. Having the energy to keep writing those words and weave them into the story in our minds is no mean feat. Kudos go to those who attempt it, but special congratulations to those who can stick with it, and applause to those who do it time and time again, story after story. Who says you can’t be one of those people?

So maybe a lot of the American population say they want to write a novel. But only several of us actually have the dream to withstand our fears that no one will read our work, the passion to develop our skills and carve out the writing time, and the drive to keep going when boredom, distractions, life, or various other things come at us and want us to stop from completing that next four-to-eight letter word. We are the writers.

And if you have any of these qualities, I’m sure you can be one of the writers as well. You just have to give it a try.

Review: Man of Steel

Posted: June 15, 2013 in Review
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I’m going to say this now: I’m about as much of a Superman fan as I am a Trekkie. He has a superpower for every situation, and the worse his problems seem to get is when Lois looks at another man or gets kidnapped. It’s a difficult task to bring Superman to the big screen, and an even bigger challenge to make him seem more relatable.

Sadly, this latest run at the silver screen didn’t pan out for me. The filmmakers take too long to get to the conflict, instead explaining how Superman becomes who he is through an in-depth look at Krypton and sometimes jarring flashbacks. When we do get to the conflict, we see Superman (thankfully with a defined set of powers) played by Henry Cavill, only he seems kind of wooden and with little to say, meeting up with the most expressive (and angry) character of all, Zod (played by Michael Shannon). Although the native Kryptonians have trouble adjusting to Earth, they prepare to beet the living snot out of Cavill, only for Cavill to fight back in fight scenes that I zoned out of most the time. There is one scene near the end where we get a real sense of conflict where good ol’ Clark has to make a tough choice, but that’s about the only time I get that sense that Supe’s as troubled as he’s supposed to be.

There’s also Amy Adams’s Lois Lane. Spunky, definitely not a damsel in distress. Will abandon her common sense if it means getting a photo of alien technology and is the only one who is able to make the connections between Clark Kent and Superman well before he puts on the suit and cape. I’m not sure why though, apparently he wasn’t as good about covering his tracks as he should’ve been. She’s basically important to the story, but her performance isn’t exactly spectacular enough for an Oscar.

Lawrence Fishburne is underused as Perry White (or perhaps that’s his character in Hannibal as a reporter), and Christopher Meloni plays Elliot Stabler in the Air Force with his usual tough guy act that never fails to kill. Other than that, not much in terms of acting to really make me feel like I’m in the middle of something fantastic.

Also, the swept-back hair look is out for superheroes. They would’ve done better with messy hair, something that rockstars might wear. And don’t stick around after the credits for a look at the inevitable sequel, because there’s not even a hint of what’s to come (though I bet it involves Lex Luthor, Kryptonite, and possibly an arms race).

Though the night wasn’t entirely wasted. That opening sequence gave me an idea on how to modify a certain story of mine and make it better. Who knows what that might lead to.

All told, Man of Steel gets a 3 out of 5. If this film was the beginning of a rival franchise to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, then I seriously doubt that such a franchise will ever rival the Avengers, no matter how much money is made.

Review: The Great Gatsby (2013 film)

Posted: May 13, 2013 in Review
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I find some parts of the original novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald very confusing, just by the fact that Fitzgerald used a different sort of language than most of the authors I read do. Maybe that’s why I find watching adaptations of these sorts of stories so edifying. Because I can actually understand what’s happening.

The latest outing of The Great Gatsby in Hollywood, this time helmed by visionary director Baz Luhrmann and starring the still-youthful Leonardo DiCaprio (what’s that guy’s secret anyway?), is an interesting take on the old story. Luhrmann takes out a lot of character development and does a lot of telling rather than showing Gatsby’s history in order to make room for stunning 3D effects and his usual eye-candy filming. Most of the character development is devoted to developing the warm relationship between DiCaprio’s Gatsby and Tobey Macguire’s Nick Carraway, making them seem like the best of friends. There’s also a bit of time spent on the complicated relationship between Gatsby and Carey Mulligan’s depressed-and-indecisive-but-still-trying-to-seem-sunny Daisy Buchanan, but not as much as that between Gatsby and Nick.

We also don’t see much of what precipitates the final events of the novel and skip over the entire funeral, which might upset quite a few purists. And the relationship between Nick and Jordan? Dashed out completely in favor of showing Nick therapy-writing Gatsby story at a sanitarium, where’s he’s been placed due to alcoholism and all the issues he’s feeling as a result of what happened to him in America.

But credit to Luhrmann, the party scenes are so enticing, especially in 3D, that you want to step right into the party and have a drink, or at least rewind the movie to watch those scenes again. And the arguments during the final half of the movie are realistic and emotional, so much so you feel like you could be seeing an actual fight between real people. And finally, Jay-Z’s rocking soundtrack is so much fun to listen to that you find yourself grooving in your seat. There should be an Oscar just for that.

Overall, I have very mixed feelings about this film. But I enjoyed it anyway and I felt it was a very decent adaptation. So for The Great Gatsby I give a grade of 3.7 out of 5. Not the best film I’ll see this summer, but definitely a well-spent two and a half hours.

The Rabid Fans

Posted: May 12, 2013 in Living and Life, Novel, Reflections, Writing
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At the end of the 2012 presidential election, riots broke out at a Mississippi university where racial slurs were shouted by the mob, and over the ensuing months the White House was inundated with petitions asking for individual states to secede from the Union. All these and a few other interesting little acts of rebellion and political anger were the result of President Barack Obama nabbing a second term and, in the eyes of these people, sitting comfortably in a position to create a dictatorship.

I thought these people were being overdramatic and possibly a little unpatriotic. I mean, why not wait till the next election, like the Democrats were forced to do from 2000 to 2008? Why threaten leaving the Union? And until this past weekend, I thought nothing could match this overreaction.

I was wrong.

Author Charlaine Harris is receiving hate mail and death threats for wanting to end her vampire series and to end it a certain way. Seriously?

This past weekend, I read several articles, online and off, about how Charlaine Harris, author of the Sookie Stackhouse books, was receiving negative reviews, angry letters, and even a few death threats. Why, you ask? Because a small but extremely passionate legion of her fans are upset that the latest book, Dead Ever After, also happens to be the last Sookie Stackhouse book. Some were angry that Ms. Harris was ending the series. A few were threatening to do horrible things to themselves or to Ms. Harris if the ending doesn’t put their favorite couples together (and when a leaked copy of the novel appeared in Germany, some fans did what they threatened).

This isn’t the first time an author has received this sort of treatment from fans. Stephanie Meyer received some very angry letters when she said she didn’t want to write any more vampire stories, and even Sir Arthur Conan Doyle got his share of haters attacking him when he threw Sherlock Holmes over a cliff, seemingly killing him. For the latter, this led to Holmes’s resurrection, which can show how powerful fans can be, and in the age of the Internet, a few people can create a tidal wave of faceless anger and indignation.

But can I remind everyone of something? THESE ARE FICTIONAL STORIES! There’s no actual Sookie Stackhouse or Bella Swann, Sherlock Holmes doesn’t actually mysteries in London, there are no vampires or Hogwarts, Klingons are the creation of talented make-up artists working with patient actors in seats, and the fact that adults get so worked up by a show about talking animated ponies seems a little creepy! None of it is real, but the fact that so many people treat these things like life or death just seems to disturb me.

The new target: celebrities and artists. It’s ridiculous.

So why do people go all Annie Wilkes when their favorite author decides to do something that a few fans disagree with? Or to go a little broader, why do some fans threaten to boycott or do horrible things to a celebrity when that celebrity does one little thing that doesn’t fit with the image these fans create of certain idols? And yes, fans create the images of their idols, because it is only in their minds that Tom Cruise is truly a dashing, charismatic, very eccentric man, or that the super model is the cool, serious seductress of your dreams. Magazines and TV and movies may help perpetuate these images, but the fans are the ones who create these images in the first place.

But to return to my original point, I don’t know why certain fans act so crazy when an idol does something that doesn’t fit their image, be it a pure actress that cannot be anything other than the sweet girl from the country, or the author that wants to end a book series after so many years, or the bad-boy musician who keeps his marriage and family secret because “that does not fit his image”. I always look at what these people do as gifts: they give us a wonderful story or a performance or a song and we appreciate it because of all the work that went into creating such a beautiful present.

“Mr. Spock, please set fanatics to minimal. Their interference could jeopardize the smooth running of our operations and the lives of many civilians.”

Even more so, plenty of artists treat their work like their babies, children they create and give birth to inside themselves. What happens when someone else tells them how they should raise their own children, what those children should learn and who they should love? It’s a little freaky, to say the least.

But it seems that some fans don’t see things the same way. They love their idols while the idols do what the fans want, but as soon as the idol does the opposite, the fans become hostile, believing they are owed something. The truth is, the rabid fans are the ones who owe something to the artist, and that’s an apology. You don’t own the work, you didn’t create it, and you sure as heck can’t tell the creators of such work what they should do with it. And if you are willing to go to such lengths such as try to ruin an artist’s career like hurting yourself or go on a hate campaign, then I seriously worry about your mental state.

So people, the next time you want to do horrible things to an artist for doing something not remotely criminal but you still find yourself feeling really upset about it, take a step back and ask: Is this really worth going to war over?

I highly doubt it.

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