I certainly sympathize with the desire to hew out an alternative to the witches’ brew of leaden, self-serious pretentiousness, after-school-special stabs at socio-psychological commentary, and hard-R, creepily sexualized grim’n’gritty violence that passes for “maturity” in a fair amount of genre entertainment today. The problem is that when, in a search for such an alternative, people fetishize (in a confrontationally funfunfun way) a sort of carefree, willfully silly return to some simpler, more innocent age –a borrowed nostalgia for the unremembered Silver Age, to paraphrase LCD Soundsystem–they find themselves making arguments that are untenable from a factual perspective as well as an aesthetic one. For example, they conjure up straw-man adherents to a grimmer, grittier version of a character with no such history; or they insist that an artifact from a particular character’s earlier era would drive that character’s current fans and shepherds into a rage despite that artifact’s actual presence in a film helmed by the current shepherd to great acclaim by the current fans; or (to quit beating around the bush) they imply that the original Battlestar Galactica is superior to the current one. This last bit is not only a point of view that is all but definitionally unserious, it also ignores the fact that niche BSG fandom has basically taken an opposite trajectory to most comparable fandoms in that its purist factions defend the silly version against the Very Serious version. It’s Earlier, Funnier Stuffitis in a slightly less virulent form, is what my diagnosis would be.
A rival strain of genre-based argument is aimed not at genre works that are deemed insufficiently fun, but at non-genre works whose supposed deficiency stems from two faults: 1) their view (as detected by their detractors) that their status as non-genre works alone makes them superior–a view that, even if it were present in the text (which is, to put it mildly, debatable), would still be a remarkably minor facet of the work itself; 2) their detractor’s detection of a kinship to a mode of storytelling the definition of which he has stretched to encompass virtually any mode of storytelling he doesn’t care for–that definition therefore failing to define much of anything anymore.
Insofar as both these views of genre either fail or refuse to acknowledge the many different ways one can skin a cat, they have more in common than their proponents would (I’d imagine) care to admit.