Foot-in-Mouth Disease on the Web!

Most of my favorite sites these days are the ones on which I get to post my thoughts, such as this blog, my multiply and facebook page, and my diecast forum. I no longer care much for any of the other sites I used to visit, whether it's the movie sites or the comics sites, and rarely even click on them anymore.

The lone exception, however, would have to be aintitcoolnews.com, a site I follow as much now as I did when my regular haunts were entertainment news sites and comic book sites.

I haunt their site on a semi-regular basis because I like their stories, a lot of their reviews, and even their message boards (dubbed 'talkbacks') because unlike the other stuff I used to read the comments there are actually laugh-out-loud funny, whether deliberately or otherwise.

But I think my affinity for this site stems from the fact that it kind of represents a bunch of fanboys made good. I mean, these are guys who get passes to movies and all kinds of sneak preview goodness based simply on the fact that they are fans who were industrious enough to put up their own website and proclaim their love for pop culture. These were not some basement-dwelling trolls content to infest other people's websites with their snarky, infantile comments; these guys made devotion to pop culture their life. I don't even know what Harry Knowles, the site's founder, even does for a living apart from this site, assuming he even has to.

I was, as a result, somewhat disappointed to recently learn that Knowles, who has practically attained the status of pop-sub-culture icon, is not nearly as well-versed in the pop-culture he professes to adore as he himself thought he was, and made this ignorance embarrassingly public on AICN itself a few days ago.

He created a post on AICN saying, to paraphrase him, that the marketing materials of the upcoming X-Men Origins: Wolverine had put him into a "berserker rage" a phrase often used to describe Wolverine's fits of murderous rage during which he vivisects his enemies with his adamantium claws. A click on the article showed that Knowles was having conniptions about the fact that one of the featured mutants in the movie, Emma Frost, who is in fact based on a character appearing in the X-Men comic books, was depicted as having the mutant ability to turn into, as Knowles put it, a "Disco Ball." What followed then was a string of profanity directed by and large at the studio which produced the film, Twentieth Century Fox, and an admonition to at least consult wikipedia on the characters they were bringing to the screen, because Emma Frost (a.k.a. The White Queen) isn't some "Disco Ball" girl, she's a (censored) TELEPATH!

And it was in this moment that Harry Knowles, supposed pop-culture demi-god, turned putting his foot into his mouth into a goddamned art form.

See, the thing about Emma Frost is that in 2001, when Grant Morrison, a writer some people revere as the next Alan Moore, was writing one of the X-Men's monthly comic books, he introduced the concept of a "secondary mutation" or, in layman's terms, either a second unusual feature or a second superpower for some of the title's characters. Emma Frost received one such "secondary mutation," and her added power was that she could turn her skin into diamond. So counting from '01, Emma Frost has basically had this power, in addition to her telepathy, for almost nine years.

And Harry Knowles didn't have the first clue that she did, and even accused people who DID know that fact of being ignoramuses. Of course, a lot of fanboys who HAVE read the X-Men in the last ten years or so had a field day with Knowles.

Now, I was actually sad to see this happen to Knowles, because of all the people whose reviews I read on AICN, it is him with whom I have the most in common in terms of taste in movies. About 85% of the time we've seen eye-to-eye on several blockbusters and even some of the smaller films he reviews. With the notable exception of his unhealthy preoccupation with the Russian girl in the last two Spider-Man movies, we like and dislike mostly the same things about the movies he reviews. An endorsement from Harry Knowles can sometimes (though not always) get my fanny into the seat to watch a movie. There are a number of other writers on the site whom I would have loved to see make fools of themselves in so blatant a fashion, but apparently they all do their homework better than Knowles.

I'm not even disappointed that Knowles didn't know about Emma Frost's additional power. I'm disappointed that he didn't take his own advice and learn more about the character via Wikipedia or a good old-fashioned trade paperback before shooting his keyboard off about what sodomizers Twentieth Century Fox are. I'm the last person in the world I'd consider a Fox defender; what they've done to at least three Marvel properties, including the X-Men, is virtually unforgivable, but it just so happened in this instance that they were right on the money. It also makes sense from a cinematic perspective to use Emma's "diamond skin" power because frankly it's a lot more unique that telepathy, which has already been thoroughly done in three prior X-Men films.

That's really the thing about fanboys at the end of the day, even the prominent ones like Knowles, is that they can be so intoxicated with their own self-importance in terms of pop-culture that they consider themselves above even doing a simple fact check before shooting off their mouths, which also explains the ENDLESS stream of message board posts proclaiming "this movie is going to suck" based not even on movie trailers or teasers anymore but on mere ANNOUNCEMENTS as to cast or crew. I had thought Harry Knowles above that sort of garbage, and felt extremely disappointed, even though he's never exactly been a role model of mine. I also don't think he helped himself one bit when, in editing the piece, he acknowledged his mistake and then added with visible bitterness that Frost's diamond power was stupid anyway and that "technically" Fox was not responsible for her having that power. Well, Harry, I'm sorry to tell you this but as far as the comic book character goes, Fox had NOTHING to do with Emma gaining diamond-skin powers. "Technically" doesn't even enter the picture anymore because Fox's non-involvement in Grant Morrison's creative decision is ABSOLUTE.

Knowles should consider himself lucky he never tried to become a lawyer, as that kind of unfounded, shoot-from-the-hip proclamation is the sort of thing that could cost him a case. Maybe I could be a fanboy demi-god someday...