Why I hate what I hate.

Ooh, let this post slip a bit. To my dedicated readers, of which I have none, my apologies.

Anyway, as I said last Friday, I've decided to dedicate each Friday's post to expounding at length upon my most and least favourite things, alternating weekly. Last week was one of my favourite films, The Crow, tomorrow will be something I hate with an intense passion.

So I thought, before my first 'Shit I Hate' post, I'd explain what kinds of things I hate. This isn't simply a matter of whether I like something or not- while there's a lot of things I don't particularly like (beer, rap music, BDSM) I don't hate them.

So firstly to dispel one common argument: I don't hate stuff just because it's popular. I like Mario, Hayao Miyazaki, the original Star Wars trilogy, Half-Life, Evangelion, Iron Maiden, Zelda, Metallica, Spider-Man, Muse and Doctor Who. These things are all GOOD as well as popular (although I have to wonder sometimes about Spider-Man and Metallica these days) so I don't see the need to go hating on them just to score cheap points.

Secondly, I don't hate stuff just because it's controversial, is laced with Unfortunate Implications or is backed by people I personally disagree with as long as it remains a work of quality. Orson Scott Card is a nasty, bigoted homophobe but Ender's Game is still a brilliant landmark of science fiction. The less said about Mel Gibson these days the better, but I still think Apocalypto and Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome are awesome films. If you can't react to art seperately from the artist, then you have a perception problem.

Finally, strange as it may seem, I don't even hate stuff just because it outright sucks. Sturgeon's Law dictates that 90% of EVERYTHING is crap. It doesn't particularly bother me. Sure, it's irritating when even something I've been looking forward to turns out to be disappointing, but merely sucking isn't enough to incur my wrath. I could probably name hundreds of movies, books, bands and games that suck but which I have no particular feelings about.

No, what it takes for me to hate something is any combination of the above. Things that are massively popular despite being completely unworthy of such recognition. Unextrordinary things that are popular solely because of their notorioty or because of the controversies attached to them. Things that are crap but try to get away with it by generating controversy, appealing to our baser instincts, or deliberately causing moral offense. Or worst of all, a combination of all 3- something which is not only completely crap, but morally offensive yet manages to be unreasonably popular. And it is exactly one such a property that I will be ripping to shreds tomorrow. Oh, I'm probably late to the party and maybe you'll think I'm just jumping on a bandwagon, but this needs to be said. Or at least I think so. And this is my blog. So... you know how it goes.

By the way, I just read Hideyuki Kikuchi's first Wicked City novel today. Not a bad story I guess (I'd seen the classic 1987 movie many years ago) but ultimately the story was actually pretty dumb and full of obvious holes, the sheer amount of blatantly explicit sex was just plain embarassing (it was regularly bordering on porn) and the adaptation by Seven Seas was pretty terrible with obvious translation mistakes and new art which simply wasn't very good. It wasn't nearly as good as Kikuchi's Vampire Hunter D, although at least it was something different- I gave up on the VHD novels because they were getting depressingly repetative. Still, I'll be picking up the second volume when I can- I want to see where the story goes from here, since the first volume only covered the same events as the movie.