I am willing to suspend my pitchfork because I like all the characters and I love the world.

There's lots of things I don't like, but I don't really care. I can't watch every TV show, every film, every play,

You could possibly watch every opera, but not every staging of every opera.

You could read every comic. Potentially - I mean, I used to work in a comic shop. Many were... sophomoric, and I didn't really understand what people saw in them and wanted to buy them, but sure enough people did.

The market is an amazing thing - in a way. Things people like will find an audience, and that audience will like them enough to send a studio that cancels them thousands and thousands of packets of peanuts (in the case of Jericho).

Or, you know, death threats.

This is the weird thing about fandom.

But hey, I can understand anger about things being cancelled more than I can understand anger at things existing.

I did not enjoy Jodie Whittaker Dr Who. Truth be told I didn't enjoy Capaldi era either. I was a film and TV critic for a while about thirty years ago - and Opera critic! - so I understand the concept of criticism and can expand on why I think a thing doesn't work - in my opinion - but if millions of people want to watch it, there is no law forcing me to.

This isn't Clockwork Orange.

And yet as a society we have become more critical, faster to release our floating lanterns of bile into the night sky.

Both sides are guilty of this of course. We separate criticism into valid and invalid criticism. Jack Reacher is a man mountain, not a man molehill.

I liked Prey. Thirty years ago they would have cast Sandra Bullock in that role.

I guess because I have always watched Hong Kong action movies I have no issue with strong female action heroes. Netflix has shows where nobody looks like me, that I love simply because its an entirely different set of cultural story tics up there on the screen. Isn't it fun, not knowing what will happen next?

Actual criticism? Its what happens after you have seen a thing. The reason critics like to head to film festivals is to see a thing first, before their palate is polluted by expectation. That way they can judge a film on its own merits, rather than the trailer and what Dom thinks.

I'm not a huge fan of sport. But I get why people like it. You get the fun of watching peak fitness humans pushing themselves to the limit without knowing what is going to happen. I don't really get that with Rings of Power - rather the opposite in fact. I didn't really get that in Squid Game either (although the middle parts had considerably higher stakes).

But I don't have to watch it if I don't want to.

Somehow we live in an age when people think that character developments are unearned, but do not feel the same way about their own criticism.

Should one persons opinion cancel art? Should we judge it on the intent of the creator? Should we judge it by comparison to a creator's oeuvre? By comparison to other works in the genre? Should we reappraise it in twenty years or fifty years or a hundred years?

It has been twenty years since the original Lord of the Rings trilogy debuted. Fan reaction in certain circles to Glorfindel's place being taken by Arwen forced Jackson and Walsh and Boyens to rewrite and recut Two Towers to reduce Arwen's role. Twenty years on the echoes are still reverberating - a GENERATION has passed, and people still have an issue with badass lady elves.

My side? We also think that one person's opinion matters. We fetishise it. We rewrite our own opinions to match the opinions of that one person, in an attempt to mask our own suppressed xenophobia. My side has already begun to call out Rings of Power for cultural appropriation, and the only POC elf is the only character to experience racism.

Jury is out on which side we al fall, right? Even I'm conflicted, right? Because of my extreme hatred of Jeff Bezos? Maybe this is the one thing that finally unites us all and binds us in the darkness?