Another instance of fannish ire turned violent, true. I knew about the rivalling Macbeths and how the New York audience responded due to Richard Nelson's play Two Shakespearean Actors, and because it's one of those instances often cited to justify the Scottish Play superstition.
re: Wil Wheaton getting hate for Wesley, true, and he was a kid at the time. Though maybe I'm looking back with rosy glasses but I remember ST fandom being a bit better about differentiating actor from character, as well as refraining from such claims such as "raped/ruined my childhood". The big battles as I recall were first about whether TNG was ST at all, and then, once it gained traction and audience passion around ca. s3, the grand "Kirk versus Picard" debates. I don't recall people arguing that TNG ruined TOS retrospectively. Poor Wes was often singled out as a first example of "what was wrong with TNG" before TNG really took off in fannish affections, and to this day gets quoted as an example of a male Mary Sue (for Gene Roddenberry), though as Alara Rogers once pointed out, if any character saves the Enterprise singlehandedly in more episodes than any other character, it's Data, not Wesley, even in the early seasons when Wes is still a regular.
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re: Wil Wheaton getting hate for Wesley, true, and he was a kid at the time. Though maybe I'm looking back with rosy glasses but I remember ST fandom being a bit better about differentiating actor from character, as well as refraining from such claims such as "raped/ruined my childhood". The big battles as I recall were first about whether TNG was ST at all, and then, once it gained traction and audience passion around ca. s3, the grand "Kirk versus Picard" debates. I don't recall people arguing that TNG ruined TOS retrospectively. Poor Wes was often singled out as a first example of "what was wrong with TNG" before TNG really took off in fannish affections, and to this day gets quoted as an example of a male Mary Sue (for Gene Roddenberry), though as Alara Rogers once pointed out, if any character saves the Enterprise singlehandedly in more episodes than any other character, it's Data, not Wesley, even in the early seasons when Wes is still a regular.