SmoaknArrow

If TV shows, like Arrow, didn't want fan theories, season 1 wouldn't have hinged on "What is the Undertaking?" Season 4 wouldn't have used the "Who's in the grave?" hook for an entire season, and Season 5 wouldn't be "Who is under the Prometheus hood?" If your viewers aren't curious and spinning guesses over the question hooks you've littered through your plots, they're not interested or engaged, and that's a stone's throw from apathy.

Funny story. My extremely offline friend emailed me the day after that TV Guide/WM interview awhile back to tell *me* about it and she absolutely stopped watching live as a result. My last offline friend put Arrow on her DVR this week. There might be one other friend still watching, but she's in Canada. I'll have to check in on her to see. But spoilers like that do sometimes leak through to offline fans, especially when they're mainstreaming news sites like TV Guide, and they do apparently impact some offline viewers. I was really surprised.

I've lurked here a long time for the great conversation and, after something brought up yesterday, I'm delurking. Hope nobody minds if I jump into this conversation. It's going to be kind of lengthy, so I apologize in advance. I would never speak for anybody else, let alone EmilyBettFan, but I've found myself with that same sentiment in my mind. I do not believe that Arrow writes for the comic book fans and doesn't want non-comic book fans. Guggenheim's answer on this recently just reinforced something I've believed and said for years. But there is a disconnect this season. It's something I've tried to communicate on Twitter to the show execs, but that 140 character limit makes that difficult, and it's even more so when others filter it through a predetermined meaning opposite to what you're actually trying to say. Plus I'm sure the show runners have me muted by now. LOL! The vibe of "they're not writing for me" (aka a non-comic fan) started surfacing during this hiatus. I'll focus specifically on the promotion and talking points. For the entire hiatus, every talking point raised by the show seemed designed to appeal to the comic book fan. Is that the "right" impression? Not necessarily. Several of their points are things I had criticism about (like downplaying Oliver's fighting skills and shoving him to the background) and asked that they fix, but when combined with the show's other talking points in their narrative, it starts to lean in that "for comic-book fans" direction impression-wise. These talking points include: Flashpoint, stunts, gritty/grounded/back to basics, focus on Oliver Queen (the show is "Arrow" not {fill in the blank other aspect here}), new mask (x 5 I believe? I think we'll be up to at least 5 new masks this season, not counting villains), metahuman to join the team, Team Arrow 2.0, Oliver "goes it alone," and action, action, action! I'm all for grounded and gritty, stunts, getting Oliver back to a competent fighter, etc., however, many online fans know that these are the same talking points many comic book fans used to attack the show as reasons why Felicity / Olicity / OTA must die. So when the show began to echo those points (and started cramming in half a dozen new masks, a meta human, etc), and it felt like you couldn't drag the word "Felicity" or "Olicity" out of them... combined with Olicity is ambiguous, we're writing away from their romance, and Olicity won't necessarily reunite this year, I can see where the feeling developed that the show cares more about the comic book crowd than non. The talking points lined up. Add in some unfortunate comments by show-connected people on social media that smacked of shipper shaming, mocking Felicity / Olicity fans, etc., and that match was lit. Even now the promotion is focused on suits, masks, and the comic book elements. They keep emphasizing New Team Arrow 2.0 when I wanted more OTA. They kept emphasizing how Oliver was "alone" and ignoring/dismissing that Felicity was actually still on the team. We were about to hit the premiere and we still hadn't heard anything about Felicity or her story. Yes, they commented on it in social media, but there was really nothing promotion-wise to convey any of that to the average, off-line viewer. There still isn't. Felicity's story has apparently started and I haven't seen a single interview with Emily Bett Rickards talking about her own character. She's vanished. But male actors are brought out to comment on her story and how it impacts them? Setting Olicity aside, there is a sense that Felicity Smoak has been de-powered by the show (which is a form of being fridged). She is the only character on this show that the writers have framed in "nevers." To be clear, I am not saying Felicity needs a mask or a suit to be a hero or that she is not currently a hero. I think we all know she is. My point is this: Arrow is an action show, yet Felicity is the one character who cannot get self defense training even after being paralyzed last year, is consistently reduced in skills so those abilities can be handed off to those who are in masks (usually men), kept behind a keyboard, removed from stunts, action sequences, missions, and fieldwork. The excuse that she's a hacker/computer geek, however, never applies to the men who are supposed to be her tech equivalents, and the hairsplitting reasoning for that rings extremely hollow. More important, these reductions are all things many in the comic book segment of the viewership said they wanted. So to some, it feels like the comic book fans are being listened to as Felicity Smoak is reduced from Genius to hacker to "funny girl," and the show continues to drum on the talking point this year re taking Felicity back to her S1 and 2 roots. She feels like she's being boxed in and limited while everybody else is allowed to evolve around her, and that's not okay with me. Then the EP of the show says they're going to "articulate" anti-Felicity fans via the storyline? Are you kidding me? My objection is not that the story was going to give Ragman the POV of Bomber Bad! Of course he is. Of course he'd feel that way. Of course I was expecting him to react that way and for there to be conflict. My frustration yesterday was that the EP/Writers took something that so many viewers have waited so long for -- a story for Felicity Smoak about Felicity Smoak -- waited until mere hours before the episode aired to even mention it, and then made her story about the fans who hate her. {{{bangs head on desk}}} In 0.1 second they took what should have been an exciting reason to rally online, tweet live, and even do a trend and just smothered it. There was absolutely zero reason to even bring that up in discussion of her story. None. And it triggered an understandable anger from Felicity fans. Felicity should not feel like she's being written as viewed through the restrictive lens of people who simply want her gone. Why does it always feel like who she is, what she's allowed to be/do/become is controlled by those that dislike her and will always dislike her instead of her numerous fans? No other character on this show has those kind of "never" restrictions. Not one. Anyway, back to the promotion/talking points. I worked hard all hiatus to build the mindset of Keep an Open Mind. Take It Week To Week. Olicity isn't the only reason I watch, but with all the talking points about time travel, meta humans, masks, and New Team Arrow 2.0 for season 5, Oliver & Felicity were the one thing left I had to be excited about and then BAM! That was done too. I mean, when your offline friends are emailing you about the TV Guide/Wendy article saying, "Well that couldn't be more explicit. They're done. What else is good on Wednesday nights?" you have a serious problem. The show hammered home the ambiguous/might not happen Oliver/Felicity are over for months. Did it not occur to the show runners that a lot of viewers might actually, ya know, believe them? Whenever I try to talk about this promotional disconnect, a lot of people say: Stop reading interviews and stop paying attention to the promotion and just watch the show. But that's my point:I can't get to the TV Screen through their talking points and misleading promotion. While I don't think that the average viewer reads all the articles and interviews, I do think viewers are exposed to the average promotion (commercials) and some of the mainstream media articles, like the TV Guide/Wendy one. My problems is not (at that time) that the talking points/promotion didn't reflect what was on the screen. My problem is that -- after 5-6 months of hiatus narrative -- they were making it impossible for me to want to put my butt in front of that TV Screen to even watch. They were giving me no reason to believe that Season 5 was going to be anything more than what they were promoting: Flashpoint, masks, meta humans, time travel, crossovers. I was begging them to give me one thing -- just one thing -- to be excited about, to tune in & live tweet for, or even trend about. They couldn't do it. They still don't seem able to do it. Now, every week, I try to talk myself into watching. Sometimes I get really close to doing it. Then the show saying something completely dumb (points to yesterday's Felicity Smoak article comments) and shoves me right back out again, putting Arrow on Netflix and waiting til it's done and I know what they've done before I commit to 23 episodes. The problem here is not that I don't want to watch. I do! The problem is the EPs and writers keep shooting themselves in the foot. They literally talk me out of watching every week and that's me avoiding 95% of the articles and interviews and have been for weeks. What little gets through just confirms the hiatus message that This Is Not For You. When that's the message so many people are absorbing, how do you get people motivated to be a social media force online? To put in that time and hard work when there's no reason to be excited? How do you justify asking them to do that? How long do you blindly promote when, at every turn, the promotion seems to say to you: This show is not for you, we don't care about what you value enough to talk about it or promote it, and you're not going to get it? I have almost 17K followers now on Twitter and I have no idea how to answer those questions when people come to me and ask. Arrow show runners seem to have indicated they interpret anger as passion. So at this point... What option do you leave people to express their dissatisfaction other than silence? Note from your loving mod: This post is quite thoughtful and articulate and overall @SmoaknArrow speaks to her own reactions to the show and not to those of other fans. So I'm not going to go through and edit the places where she mentions fans and/or how MG and Co may or may not be trying to appeal to various fandoms. That being said, that line of discussion is still not ok in these forums, so please continue to self moderate on that front. Point the second: while the Spoiler Discussion thread had a pretty wide ambit, this really is more of a Bitterness thread discussion, so I'm going to move it there.