Expectation
It’s the month of October and for most of the internet the month of October is synonymous with the spooky season. Whether or not you celebrate Halloween or are a casual observer of the macabre, it’s difficult to avoid seeing the spooky season being celebrated through popular media. Regardless of how you decide to celebrate the spooky season, whether it’s watching horror movies in a dark cinema, decorating your living room with the appropriately scary ornaments or turning off the lights as you load up your favorite survival horror game, the most important part is experiencing a little bit of fright in your life.
But with an emotion as primal as fear, it’ll come to no surprise that it’ll also be an emotion that is highly subjective. While there are certain fears that are universal to us regardless of where we’re born, some fears are different based on our gender, life experiences and even where we live and the culture that surrounds us.
Horror franchises tend to garner the most staunch supporters. As they tend to elicit very primal emotions that their audiences crave. I’ve seen numerous people build their identities around because of how visceral the emotions and storylines are. The kind of stories that not just resonate with players but form an attachment with them as they control the protagonist through the story especially in video games.
So it comes as no surprise that with such a rabid fanbase that devours every single little bit of content related to these games, when something comes along that doesn’t align with what they perceive to be the core and themes of said franchise. They tend to react intensely, denying the legitimacy of the new entry into their beloved franchise. We’ve seen fandoms with long running franchises — not exclusively just horror franchises — like Star Trek or Final Fantasy where fans denounce new entries into their franchises because the creators tried to do something new that no longer fits into the perceived notion of what an entry into those franchises are.
Case in point, recently there was a new entry in the Silent Hill franchise of games called Silent Hill f. Silent Hill games are survival horror games that focus on the psychological horror that the main protagonist of each game experiences. And the latest game carrying on the tradition of soiling the pants of unsuspecting players, but now set in 60s Japan, has rubbed fans the wrong way. Many are already calling it an embarrassment to have it carry on the name of their beloved franchise.
As an outsider, it might sound incredulous that fans would react in such a negative way. On a piece of paper, we’ve just traded the horrors of a dilapidated and abandoned mid-Western American town for a dilapidated and abandoned Japanese town. But for many in the fandom, they’ve already been building up their expectation for what a new Silent Hill game will be and in their minds, they have a set vision of what it could or should be.
It’s this expectation that plagues a lot of popular media on how they should proceed. Do they evolve and change but risk losing their current audience or do they stay the same but continue to draw the ire of those who have already made up their negative impressions? In a way, I’m quite thankful I’m still early in my writing career that I’ve yet to solidify a fanbase and can continue to experiment with my style and tone of writing.
On the other hand, I do feel that regardless of who or what a piece of media is. It should be able to stand on its own two feet and be judged on its own merits. But to do so, one would have to be willing to consume a more diverse variety of media to have a greater appreciation for the works of many creators, something most people are not willing to do.
