It is good to be a fan. Fans like things. Fans celebrate the things they like with other fans. Fans are passionate. That passion can be catching and uplifting...but at other times, it can get excessive and weird.
Case in point: the third season of HBO's Game of Thrones prequel show House of the Dragon is set to begin filming this month. The show has drafted a new director into the fold for this season: Nina Lopez-Corrado, who's worked on shows like The Night Agent and Perry Mason, not to mention on the upcoming second season of The Last of Us. That's a solid resume, and I'm sure she'll do good work on House of the Dragon.
Recently, Nina Lopez-Corrado's sister Ava posted a video on Instagram showing herself, Nina, and Nina's young daughter searching for a tasty slice of pizza in London; much of the filming for House of the Dragon is done in England, which I imagine is why the family is there. It's pretty cute:
Pretty innocuous, right? Well, a lot of the comments had nothing to do with the video and everything to do with how much disgruntled fans aren't enjoying the TV show that Nina Lopez-Corrado is joining. For instance:
- "I don't expect anything good from season 3, the second one was already pretty bad. It looks like a fanfic made on AO3"
- "The book that George Martin wrote is still better than this series that is getting worse and worse. Look at Twitter and see that all the fans are hating this idea of Alicent and Rhaenyra together. You live in a bubble where everyone loves Alicent and Rhaenyra but in reality everyone hates them. That meeting with Rhaenyra and Alicent in season 2 was ridiculous and we hated it."
- "Making Alicent betray Aegon is a bizarre destruction of the character and no one will be able to make me think otherwise."
- "The way they are compromise to keep humilliating alicent"
And look, as a fan of House of the Dragon and the book it's based on, I'm someone who has been pretty critical of the show, but what critiques have nothing to do with a director and her family eating pizza, so why would I spam a video about that with my complaints? They're happy living here. And at the risk of meeting the inappropriate whiners on their level, Nina Lopez-Corrado is brand new to the director lineup this year; she's never worked on the show before, so why are these people spamming her video acting like she's responsible for every reason they're unhappy?
Mind you, even if Lopez-Corrado had made every call you didn't like since the start of the show, it would still be extremely weird and bad to tell her so on a video about her and her family getting pizza. It's just one more thing that doesn't make sense about this. But asking for logic from a toxic fan is like asking for good Chicago-style pizza in the U.K.; it's hard to come by.
I doubt we'll ever get rid of the toxic fan problem, but hopefully we all enjoy the third season of House of the Dragon when it comes out on HBO and Max sometime next year.
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