[Wrote this a while back. Deleted names and links; the post's point isn't ultimately about the specific writer in question.]
A fella whose best writing I continue to greatly value reviews a gamebook:
I'll admit that I was quite prepared to dislike [this book]. Being a big fan of Westerns, I tend to be more than a little snobby about the way the genre is so often misused and caricatured, especially in crossovers with other genres. And while a post-apocalyptic setting is a very good fit for Western themes and esthetics, I was nevertheless apprehensive. I've seen too many poorly executed Western-influenced creations not to assume the worst.
(My emphasis.)
I see and SAY this kind of bullshit all the time, and it deserves to be called out. This is childish nonsense and he should be embarrassed by it.
Snobbery about Westerns has nothing whatsoever to do with Westerns. It happens because you are (or in this case, because the writer is) a snob.
This stance is willfully ignorant because he cares about the 'correct' way of doing a genre, and anyone with a basic understanding of how literary genre works knows that this brand of ignorance springs from private anxieties rather than the text-system itself, but he's smart enough and educated enough to know that -- to know better;
It's self-regarding, because he spends breath preemptively defending what is a totally personal, idiosyncratic, indeed possessive feeling about 'Westerns,' which is a matter of ego rather than critical analysis;
Reactionary because he's railed time and time again about 'revisionist' understanding of 'classic' texts -- his particular hobbyhorse is interpretive deviation from the letter and spirit of the original Dungeons & Dragons rules and, weirdly, Gary Gygax's private intentions -- and because, in this particular case, he's also an unabashed cultural reactionary, expressing next to nothing but contempt for 'new-fangled' cultural texts. (re: Westerns, he is particularly bothered by Firefly -- you can probably guess why.) Preserving the past for the future is not the same thing as fetishizing pastness.
Throw in some acute status-consciousness -- he was a young nerd apparently raised, if his religious callouts and bits of churchly Latin are any indication, in a hierarchical cultural environment -- and you've got some pretty conventional snobbery in a man old enough to know better.
Millions of people enjoy Westerns without feeling the need to apply private criteria to determine whether they're WESTERN ENOUGH. These people have a healthy relationship to the pleasure of viewing/reading these stories, even if they persist in ignorance about the history and source texts of the genre. Ignorance isn't much of a sin. Willful ignorance is.
I'm a snob about plenty of things, and I HATE IT. It is a failing to be addressed -- to grow out of.
One of the many differences between him and me is that I don't try to pass off my snobbery as an inevitable result of really really caring about things. It's pure ego, I know just enough to know it (arguably nothing more!), and I wish to be able to overcome that adolescent insecurity. If you go into a reading/viewing experience expecting -- i.e. WANTING -- to hate it, in order that your prejudices will be confirmed, you and you alone have fucked yourself up.
This writer isn't an idiot -- quite the contrary, he's a damned fine writer when he surpasses himself. But snobbery is a problem, maybe one of his biggest problems as a critic, and it saddens me (and pisses me off) to see it. His fans and regular readers don't mind, of course -- and that's an even bigger problem, which presumably no one needs me to explain.
