I started thinking about this over on the Star Wars board, but it’s something that’s creeped up with Game of Thrones, the DCEU, sitcoms like How I Met Your Mother, cartoons, and comics (as many of you know). Since the movies and TV shows are the more visible and more hyped up products, I figured it fits better here.

Basically, there’s been this argument, especially for big franchises, that when audiences speculate or get hyped for another entry in an initially successful/almost always successful long-form story, they may at times become too enamored with their own speculation or ideas and therefore “watch the product wrong” in some way.

I’m talking the disappointment and complaints people had at Game of Thrones’s ending seeing to turn Dany too evil too quickly, HIMYM’s prescripted ending wasting the last two seasons, The Last Jedi’s take on Luke and answers to The Force Awakens’s mysteries, Rise of Skywalker’s handling of The Last Jedi’s left over story threads, Batman V Superman’s handling of of the title characters and conflict, Iron Man 3’s handling of the Mandarin, etc.

When is a complaint a problem with the fan, and not a problem with the product? When is a complaint a problem with the product and not with the fans?

I feel like we could all probably agree that it varies depending on the product, but I’m more interested in the specifics and nuances you guys see to it-

-Does a criticism have to be rooted in an idea’s execution, where issues and distaste with a concept are disqualified by some right of the creator that the audience can’t complain about?

-How important is long form storytelling to these complaints: could a story *require* some particular type of answer or block off a particular answer by the way it has already been developed?

-How important are previous standards from the long-form storytelling’s previous entry?

-Are there any works of art that “disqualify” the defense of the stories (I.e, does the general success good mysteries have with playing with audience expectations mean that some subversive storytelling techniques need more than subversion to succeed?)

I mean, I’m a guy who generally holds that all the mentioned examples have more execution and conceptual problems than they have fans who are too picky, but on at least one I know there’s immense argument.