I have been slowly recounting my personal experiences in science fiction and fantasy fandom.
When we left off I was attending a planning meeting for Conversion 22.
I can sum up the next couple of years thusly.
Enough people quit the convention planning committee that by the end my wife was the president, and I was head of programming. We came to "lend a hand" and we ended up running big parts of the show. We brought in Jeremy Bulloch who portrayed Boba Fett in Star Wars, which was great. Sure, a good portion of his speaking fee came out of my pocket, but it was totally worth it, spending time with him and his wife before the convention.
Overall, however, things did not go exactly as planned and we took a lot of flack. We also got a lot of complaints from certain quarters that we had too much Star Wars content at the event.
What was not made clear to me at the beginning, was that the local premiere Science fiction and Fantasy convention was supposed to be geared towards authors, aspiring authors, and (space permitting) artists who might be interested in doing the cover art for said authors. A fine event, but one that is clearly not Star Wars friendly. One author made it very clear that Star Wars was crap and fans who dress up are overweight, arrested adolescents. Clearly not my crowd.
So I decided to turn my energies back to the local Star Wars fanclub that my wife and I helped start. After a year or so, I noticed an unusual trend. Core members were meeting without me and people stopped coming to lightsaber class. I was eventually informed that my cracking wise about the prequels pissed people off, and my raving about DragonCon pissed people off. My wife and I (among others) were removed from the council and Dragoncon was declared to be NOT Star Wars, and its discussion, verboten.
So in short, I pissed off the SF&F fans for liking Star Wars too much, and I pissed of the Star Wars fans for not liking Star Wars enough.
What did I do then? Watch this space.
Previously on Slashboing: