Fans?

As you may have noticed, at the top of the page it says that the site is updated every Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. I did not update the page any of those days this week, and no one said a thing. I like to think that this is because my readers are intelligent, caring, and uber-sexy. In fact, I did not update my site for those three days to prove a point. Basically, my readers rule (and maybe that I do not have many readers). Yeah, so no one bitched, maybe secretly I wanted someone to bitch, but that is really not the point.

I have been a casual fan of http://www.outpostnine.com for a while now. The best part of the site was the author's stories about being an American teaching English in Japan. Many of the stories are quite funny. The author recently decided to move this portion of his site onto the Festering Ass, for whatever reason, maybe to make more money, get more exposure, whatever, the decision was his. In anticipation of his new readership, the author will be posting his archive (a couple years worth), and then begin posting new stuff.

His site was moved to http://GaijinSmash.com. He posted an announcement on Outpost Nine that he was moving to a new location, and threw up his first archived story. What resulted was sheer chaos. His first entry appears here, but what really caught my eye were the venomous comments from his "fans."

These are people who have enjoyed his site for a couple of years, for free mind you, and they have the gall to bitch about him trying to do something different, expand his site, maybe make a career out of this. Outpost Nine has a couple of Google ads and a store, where you can by shirts and such, but I doubt he was making a mint off of this stuff.

I guess my real question is: Where does this sense of entitlement come from his fans? When my favorite author writes a book that I do not like, I do not get my undies in a bunch and send off angry letters to him and the publisher. If my favorite band makes an album that I do not like, I do not disown them and avow to never listen to any of their albums again. I just do not understand why his faithful readership would give him the tenth degree for changing things. After all, he is only posting his archives, there will be new stuff in a couple of months.

I have been thinking about this since Thursday (I was actually going to post it on Thursday, but then I came up with that brilliant intro), and I still cannot wrap my little brain around this. If you have the time, check out the comments on this link about the first post, and if you can explain it me, please do.