: Re: How do I indicate a superfan review vs a social-criticism essay? I occasionally write short essays about classic films, and have been thinking about converting them into video essay for YouTube.

@LarsenBagley300

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I would recommend watching SFDebris' various "Opinionated Guides to Star Trek" (which to date have entries for all 6 live action series, the Animated Series, and the Films). He is of course a Superfan who describes the origin of the site as having a college assignment to make a website but no content for the website, and to his mind "bitching about Voyager seemed natural". Definately a Superfan and will gush about certain characters.

To offset this, he actually shows the a serious amount of critical work. He is/was a high school English teacher and his appreciation for stories and the elements that contributed to them. This tends to show up in his non-star trek stuff, but he it's there too (for a famous episode "Damok" of TNG, which deals with a language that is based entirely on cultural references, he releases a companion video to discuss how it's entirely possible for this to occur in the real world, and how several languages are gibberish unless you get the references (namely Chinese characters). For his Star Wars review, he discussed the history of George Lucas' development of the series and the various plans and how they evolved into the very well known stories we have today, because he felt that he had nothing new to contribute by reviewing the films. It's more of a biography of George Lucas than a critique of his film. In his review of "The Day After" he opens with a history of the development of the Atomic Bomb and the Cold War, as well as a discussion of the Cold War Politics that influenced the film as well as the nature of Nuclear Warfare Strategy amounted to two guys holding guns to the others head, threatening that not only were we going to shoot back if you shot first, but also that we're just crazy enough to shoot FIRST! He did this because the review aired nearly 30 years after the film was made, and the general audience may have not even been born during the cold war at all, let alone remember how scary it was.).

One notable feature is that (in the Star Treks series at least) SFDebris rates individual episodes by comparing their quality to that of others in the series, but not in the Franchise ("All Scores are Relative to their Series"). This is done on a Bell Curve so that there would be an equal number of scored 1 (the worst) and an equal number of Scored 10 (the best) but their would be more Scores of 5 than either of those. Each series also has exactly one Score of Zero, which is reserved for an episode that is so bad, it damages the Franchise by association (Though the movies do not have zeroes, as there are so few) and the most recent series is (Star Trek: Discovery) has no scores at all, because the series is ongoing and could get better or worse over time and this could effect scores). And will discuss why he feels the episode deserves the score (which can range from long winded explanations to "It's good, but there are better offerings in this series".

In all, it's a nice blend of the two and you can tell when he's gushing as a Superfan (especially in DS9, which is probably one of his favorite Trek Series) and when he's being analytical and explaining nuances in his story. He's also very funny about to boot in both forms (for example, in his Godzilla review, he explains the story of the inspiration was the Castle Bravo Nuclear Test Incident and the Contamination of the Japanese fishing boat Daigo Fukuryu Maru as the result of someone not being there to tell the Mathmatician in charge to "carry the one", resulting in the never good situation of saying "Whoopsie" in relation to a Nuclear Bomb. Which is a very silly way to talk about what essentially went wrong.).

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