5. Ianto Jones' Death And Its Backlash
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWEm49c4TRI I'd like to preface this entry by pointing out that the "Save Ianto Jones" campaign raised nearly £16,000 for Children In Need, which is another sign of how fandom can achieve great things. But beyond that, their disproportionate reaction to the death of Torchwood character Ianto Jones didn't help the fandom's image. In 2009, at the climax of Torchwood: Children Of Earth's fourth episode, Ianto Jones (one of the three main characters) was killed off. Most fans accepted it as a dramatic part of the narrative, some (like me for instance) couldn't give a monkey's right nut if he lived or died, and some took it hard. So hard that they decided to stand up for what they believed in and campaign for Ianto's resurrection, basically killing any chance they had of being considered well-adjusted in the process. The most well known reaction to Ianto's death is that there is a shrine in Cardiff Bay to the character. A shrine for a fictional character that still exists, is added to and maintained by fans four years after the character was killed off, and has now become something of a tourist attraction. But, as one of my friends pointed out to me, as disproportionate as that response is, it's relatively harmless. But away from the more or less harmless public mourning of a fictional character, there was an active campaign to resurrect the character and a vicious internet backlash to the episode where the character died.
Websites like
this one were started shortly after the episode aired, urging viewers to inundate the BBC with letters of complaint and to send bags of coffee to the Director General, since one of Ianto's traits in Torchwood's early episodes was how good the coffee he made was. I personally see this as these fans having way too much investment in the programme since they were willing to spend time and money pestering the BBC about reviving a fictional character. But again, this was relatively harmless and probably cut the BBC's coffee expenditure down a fair bit. But it wasn't all harmless lunacy otherwise it barely would have qualified for this list. The episode's writer James Moran received a torrent of abuse over the internet which he discussed
here, including accusations of homophobia because Ianto was gay, and requests for him to pass on abusive comments to other people who worked on the episode in question. As well as the abuse to James Moran and other people involved with the programme, a schism later developed in the "Save Ianto" movement and some members split off with the intent of ceasing the more fun elements of the campaign and militarising (for lack of a better word) the attempts to bring back Ianto. Luckily, this attempt at a more hardline approach never came to fruition and that side of the campaign died out while the other more reasonable side eventually stopped actively campaigning for Ianto's resurrection and now hold annual events to raise money for charity. We geeks have enough image problems to fight as it is without people like this who can't accept change and act both irrationally and hatefully, making it harder for the rest of us to improve the image of both geekdom and sci-fi fans in general.