Chambers <ben### [at] pacificwebguycom> wrote:
> http://xkcd.com/566/

  Btw, I find the attitude people have towards the sequels rather interesting.

  Most people seem to think that most other people think the sequels suck.
However, when you think about how they affected popular culture, especially
the first sequel, that doesn't really seem to be so. It's a bit like the
thought of "most people think the sequels suck" is a legend which most
people believe but isn't really true.

  While the sequels definitely didn't affect popular culture so extensively
as the first movie, especially the first sequel did have some impact. While
making allusions to certain scenes of the first movie became an overused
cliche in less than a year from its release, allusions to scenes from the
second movie (especially the brawl scene) are not uncommon either.

  I think that what happened is that when the first movie came out, people
started a lot of fanon about the universe of the movie. When the second
movie came out, fans got disappointed because it was *different* from fanon.
Basically "they changed it (ie. the movie's universe), now it sucks" (even
though they didn't change anything; AFAIK the movie trilogy universe was
pretty much laid out from the very beginning).

  Over time people got over this disappointment and actually started to
accept the second movie as acceptable canon, and a rather good movie.
However, for some reason people want to ignore this fact. They still want
to think that most people hate the second movie, while that's not really
true. What was true at first is not true anymore, but people don't want to
believe it.

  Of course the same phenomenon happened with the third movie as well:
Again people started tons of fanon over the second movie, and when the
third movie drastically differed from this fanon, people got disappointed.
"They changed it, now it sucks" once again (even though nothing was really
changed).

  Rather ironically, I think it was the third movie which helped many people
overcome the disappointment of the second movie being "different from fanon".
When people got over silly ideas like "the matrix inside the matrix", they
started to see the second movie in a different light, and it was not all
that bad after all.

  Yet the myth of "most people hate the sequels" persists in popular culture.
Some people believe this myth so firmly, that I think they hate the movies
simply because they believe most other people hate the movies.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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