I’ll never understand how people can try to get attention by riding on the coat tails of their well-known relatives, as though who you know or who you’re related to matters. Someone popped up on Reddit and said “my father was James P. Hogan, ask me stuff!”
Who the hell cares?
This reminds me of Simon Tolkien, the grandson of J. R. R. Tolkien. He spent most of his life as a barrister and then, one day, he decided that he wanted to be an author. He wrote a mystery and tried to shop it around for 7 years under a pseudonym and absolutely nobody was interested. He was crap at it. Then, he decided to admit that he was related to his grandfather and someone took a chance on him and… his book didn’t sell because it was crap.
It doesn’t matter who you’re related to. It matters what you can do on your own.
Simon has said in numerous interviews that he’s tired of “living in his grandfather’s shadow”, which I suppose I can understand, right up to the point that it directly benefitted him, then… he’s completely on board. In fact, if rumors are true, one of the only reasons that Amazon got the rights to Middle Earth is because they had to agree to make a movie out of one of Simon’s books too. Living in the shadow stops looking so bad when you make a buck off of it, right?
Honestly, why in the world can’t these people make their own mark on the world without trying to milk an accident of birth? That’s what I want to know. There are tons of examples of this out there and none of them are at all impressive. Hell, look at the ex-royals, Harry and Meghan. First off, who gives a crap about either of them, they’re idiots, but they’re still trying to make a living off of their former status, all the while whining that they don’t want to be royals.
Then shut the hell up!
Secondly though, why can’t they just make their own way in the world? I mean, Meghan is a crap actress by all accounts and I have no idea what Harry has to offer the planet other than “look who I’m related to!”
This brings us back around to writing and riding around on the coat tails of your ancestors. Maybe nobody ought to care who you’re related to. Maybe you need to make it on your own. You don’t get to be famous for being famous. You don’t get to be well-known for nothing. If you want respect, you have to earn it and that means putting in the work and most people these days, they have no interest in that.
I have no clue what happened with the son of James P. Hogan. I can’t imagine he got that many questions because nobody cares about him. Simon Tolkien is going to go back to being an unknown nobody, especially after the complete disaster that was Rings of Power.
Honestly, can we please just get back to working hard for our success and stop trying to milk our heritage? The only thing that matters is your skill. This is a common story, but it happened to me in the past couple of days so I’m going to tell it. Someone, who claimed to have had a bad childhood, wrote a memoir and uploaded it to Amazon and, no surprise, it didn’t sell. Most memoirs don’t. If you’re not famous, or have had something famous-making happen to you, nobody cares about your life. This guy, though, he was really mad about it. His trauma made him deserving of success. Sorry, it doesn’t work that way. I went and looked at his book and it was immediately obvious why nobody was buying it. He couldn’t write, period. In the Look Inside, he had no concept of spelling, he had, in the first three pages, a sentence that literally went on for half-a-page, etc. It was painfully bad, but he didn’t care about that. He’d suffered and he therefore deserved to be compensated for it.
Sorry. That’s not how it works, yet there are plenty of people who think that way and they’re always going to be disappointed.
Can we all just grow up? That would certainly be nice, right?
