AI fans are annoying.

I don't mind American Idol. It doesn't bother me. I do my thing and it does it's thing and we go about not interacting and we're both okay with that.

But, good God. Those American Idol fans.

Every week, my Facebook feed is abuzz with people complaining about how the show is rigged and this season isn't nearly as good and why did they get rid of Paula/Simon and the show is rigged and their favorite person left and the "fan favorite" left and all of this is because the show is rigged. (The general pattern here being that the show is rigged.)

And it gets so much worse when I stumble upon "news" articles about the show with other people's comments on them. I say so much worse because they're usually 20x as angry about it and it looks as though they couldn't pass elementary school grammar. But, I digress.

The thing I need to rant about right now (since I refuse to do so on any message board lest some troll try and declare a flame war against me) is that THE RIGGING OF GAME SHOWS IS ILLEGAL. It has been since the 1950s when a game show was caught rigging the show so the more interesting and better looking contestants won. Because that seemed extremely unfair (to put it lightly) to the public, the people in charge of television decided to make it illegal for anyone to rig a game show. And, yes, by anyone I mean: producers, hosts, contestants, assistants, cameramen, snack boys, whatever.

Being that rigging a game show is illegal, I highly, highly doubt the people in charge of American Idol are stupid enough to try and rig something so big. Because, let's face it, the more people involved in something, the more likely it is that that something is going to get leaked. And then that's a whole lotta trouble for a whole lotta people.

Now. It is NOT illegal for them to manipulate their footage so that it looks like someone is a fan favorite when actual tallies suggest otherwise. That's a ratings-booting technique. And just because someone is your favorite, that doesn't mean that everyone else likes them and will vote for them too.

So, please, can we stop being so ignorant about something so trivial?