Fan Channel Myopia

Let's talk fan myopia, specifically the provincialism that is commonly on display for those purporting themselves to be "all (X)".

This January 2018 video from Spacedock's channel is very typical. The Templin Institute channel is just as bad. Despite both channels being aware that science fiction anime exist, you rarely--if ever--hear anything out of these channels about it. Despite being "any sci-fi" and "investigating alternative worlds", they don't stray into written SF of any kind; even coverage of Dune focuses on the '80s film and the SciFi miniseries with some nods to the books and that's one of the later classics of the genre.

It is dishonest and incompetent to be so myopic when you hold forth as being about anything in a given genre. You gimp yourself, damage your credibility, and make yourself out to be a poser poaching on territory you have no claim to belong to when you do this. Ignoring two entire media--novels and comics--as well as half the planet makes you out to be the normie Fake Gamer who only thinks of D&D and WOW when talking of tabletop and MMORPGs.

And no, ignorance is no excuse. You can look through Amazon for all of this stuff easily; it's right there, easy to find. Discoverability is not the issue; lack of bothering to do basic-bitch due diligence is the problem, due to a lack of curiosity. Templin, Spacedock, and others like them have fallen down on the job and do their audience a grave disservice by ignoring easily 80% or more of the entire corpus of material within the space they claim as their mandate of coverage. World Class Bullshitters does a better job, and they don't even claim to do so; they've actually had an indie SF author--Yakov Merkin--on their show, albeit by way of using a Patreon perk.

There is no excuse for this anymore. There hasn't been for many years, and it's not going to change any time soon.

Which leads to another issue, but that's for another post.