Fan civilization and its discontents
malding, seething, & other events of grand & terrible significance
I’ve been following the Sweet Baby, Inc. controversy purely for entertainment. After this I can no longer in good conscience criticize any of my friends and loved ones for gawking at trashy reality TV or hot mess influencers. This thing is a shit circus.
If you haven’t heard about the alleged sins of Sweet Baby, Inc., you can go ahead and google it if you care to. Probably all you need to know is that some of the keyboard warriors going on the offensive have been calling it Gamergate 2.0. And if you need to look up Gamergate—spare yourself.
I’ve said before that the original Gamergate—whatever we can say about its protagonists, politics, or embarrassing behavior—represented a backlash against a kind of subcultural gentrification. Gamergate was like that scene in The Sandlot where the ragtag bunch of misfits play a game against the kids with bicycles and sharp little league uniforms, except here the misfits got trounced. If it makes us feel better about it, we could imagine the sandlot kids were one and all misogynistic racist basement dwellers with neckbeards, and the well-dressed leaguers were one and all Decent Human Beings, but it would mutatis mutandis preserve the basic dynamic. Only one side was listened to and had its case emphatically made for it by the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian, the Gawker network, NPR, the respectable blogosphere and gaming press, the academy, the Colbert Report, etc., while the other was told to go kick rocks by everyone but unsavory and opportunistic right-wing propagandists.1
This new thing is like…I don’t know. Similes fail me. Maybe it’s like the defeated sandlot kids are sitting in the bleachers of a league game a few weeks later and booing the kids who’d humiliated them. Suddenly some of other spectators join in; maybe they feel that the team is behaving in an unsportsmanlike manner. The little leaguers’ parents stand up, turn around, and shout back: sit down and shut up, you’re the ones who’re out of line…
But who cares. That’s not really what’s so interesting to me about the Sweet Baby, Inc. hullaballoo, or about the hordes of partisans type-chanting GO WOKE GO BROKE and putting THE MESSAGE and THE AGENDA in scare quotes. And why shouldn’t they be reactive? In the global village, everything is content and it’s all happening simultaneously as a towering cynosure screaming and contorting and laughing in our backyards and bedrooms. It’s hard to have any sense of proportion or distance when our personalized hologram of everything is constantly in our faces, tugging at our endocrine system through our eyeballs and ears, giggling and shrieking when we stick our fingers into it.
Feeling alienated by once-familiar cultural spaces and products isn’t as simple a matter as trying the new Burger King fries and deciding not to buy them again. Embittered superfans sense that something fundamental to them has been mucked with by malignant actors, and the notion is continuously reinforced as their algorithmically populated feeds and browsing habits deliver them anti-fan content reassuring them that they’re not imagining that the culture and its keepers have gone mad, and they can Like and Subscribe and Comment for more safety and sanity.
“There is no way to give us an understanding of any society, including our own, except through the stock of stories which constitute its initial dramatic resources,” writes Alasdair MacIntyre. “Mythology…is at the heart of things.”
While there’s a world of difference between the folklore of a premodern society and the twenty-first century’s cultural industrial complex, the latter performs a number of functions analogous to some of those fulfilled by the former. Put me in a room with two or three other people who’ve read way too many X-Men comics, give us a joint to smoke, and get us started by asking about our favorite “era” of the franchise, and you’ll see what I mean: within the hour, we’ll all be transformed into literary and art critics, moral theorists, actors, historians, cryptoscientists, hero cultists, and maybe even economists. When we bring our intelligence and outlook to bear on this stuff, it becomes a prism through which events in the world are refracted into our understanding (and vice versa), even if only on the level of rhyme and metaphor. It’s personal to us.
I was of the opinion (before Jonathan Hickman bailed out) that the Krakoa era was the best thing to happen to X-Men comics in a decade. But it wasn’t without its critics, and oftentimes when longtime fans expressed their misgivings about the new status quo, they weren’t simply saying “I don’t like the turn the franchise has taken,” but “this is all wrong.”2 (And depending on where and when and how they said it, and what they took issue with, they may have risked making themselves personae non grata among other X-fans. Insinuations of various -isms were typical.)
Fandom—a phenomenon peculiar to a society that has professionalized and given over to firms the production of culture and disseminates its artifacts far and wide via some mass-produced or broadcast medium—first manifested in the early twentieth century in response to Arthur Doyle’s detective stories featuring Sherlock Holmes. The Trekkies came along in the 1960s and 1970s. By the early 1990s, the Comic Book Guy on the the The Simpsons indicated that the fanboy had become enough of a recognizable character in society to be stereotyped in a popular comedy, although he was still generally regarded as a slobbish, strange, and altogether unpleasant figure.3 He was still unusual—but not for much longer.
When Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer issued their remarks about the culture industry in 1947, they understood the sweeping apparatus of mass media as a one-way and top-down affair wherein the consumer absorbs with utter passivity and acceptance whatever the publishers, record companies, and film studios hose him down with:
Any need which might escape the central control is repressed by that of individual consciousness. The step from telephone to radio has clearly distinguished the roles. The former liberally permitted the participant to play the role of subject. The latter democratically makes everyone equally into listeners, in order to expose them in authoritarian fashion to the same programs put out by different stations. No mechanism of reply has been developed, and private transmissions are condemned to unfreedom. They confine themselves to the apocryphal sphere of “amateurs,” who, in any case, are organized from above. Any trace of spontaneity in the audience of the official radio is steered and absorbed into a selection of specializations by talent-spotters, performance competitions, and sponsored events of every kind. The talents belong to the operation long before they are put on show; otherwise they would not conform so eagerly.
The consumers are the workers and salaried employees, the farmers and petty bourgeois. Capitalist production hems them in so tightly, in body and soul, that they unresistingly succumb to whatever is proffered to them…They insist unwaveringly on the ideology by which they are enslaved. The pernicious love of the common people for the harm done to them outstrips even the cunning of the authorities. It surpasses the rigor of the Hays Office, just as, in great epochs, it has inspired renewed zeal in greater agencies directed against it, the terror of the tribunals. It calls for Mickey Rooney rather than the tragic Garbo, Donald Duck rather than Betty Boop. The industry bows to the vote it has itself rigged.
Daniel Boorstin (who jumped ahead of Guy Debord in publishing The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America in 1961) makes virtually the same assumption, and specifies the difference between “folk” and “mass” culture in terms of the passivity described by Adorno:
In the United States we have, in a word, witnessed the decline of the “folk” and the rise of the “mass.” The usually illiterate folk, while unself-conscious, was creative in its own special ways. Its characteristic products were the spoken word, the gesture, the song: folklore, folk dance, folk song. The folk expressed itself. Its products are still gathered by scholars, antiquarians, and patriots; it was a voice. But the mass, in our world of mass media and mass circulation, is the target and not the arrow. It is the ear and not the voice. The mass is what others aim to reach—by print, photograph, image, and sound. While the folk created heroes, the mass can only look and listen for them. It is waiting to be shown and to be told. Our society, to which the Soviet notion of “the masses” is so irrelevant, still is governed by our own idea of the mass. The folk had a universe of its own creation, its own world of giants and dwarfs, magicians and witches. The mass lives in the very different fantasy world of pseudoevents.
I boldfaced that one line because it condenses the entire point of these long excerpts: for the most part, consumers of twentieth-century mass culture could listen, but they could not speak—not with anything like the reach, credibility, or efficacy of a radio DJ, news anchor, published novelist, journalist, television actor or writer, rock n’ roll performer, etc. Nor could they make anything for themselves that they couldn’t more easily and cheaply purchase from the culture industry, and get a more impressive product besides.
Since we’ve already heard once from Alasdair MacIntyre, we might as well give him his own block quote:
The means-end relationships embodied for the most part in [modern productive] work…are necessarily external to the goods which those who work seek; such work too has consequently been expelled from the realm of practices with goods internal to themselves. And correspondingly practices have in turn been removed to the margins of social and cultural life. Arts, sciences and games are taken to be work only for a minority of specialists: the rest of us may receive incidental benefits in our leisure time only as spectators or consumers. Where the notion of engagement in a practice was once socially central, the notion of aesthetic consumption now is, at least for the majority.
Even though MacIntyre published After Virtue two decades after Boorstin put out The Image, he believes that the profile of the modern consumer of (rather than an active participant in) culture remains as accurate as it was in 1961. Maybe fan culture was beneath his notice, but by the 1980s it had already begun to change the situation.
1. Prototypes
Music and sport were the big postwar fandoms. The official Elvis Presley fan club, started by a teenaged fan in 1956, had sixty thousand members on its mailing list pretty much as soon as it was launched. During the 1960s, rock n’ roll became a polestar of youth identity; Boorstin must have been shocked and startled to behold the titanic cultural impact and stature of the Beatles a few years after writing The Image. Elsewhere, a football or baseball team could act like an avatar of a region’s spirit, unifying people ordinarily separated by separated by class, race, religion, and politics in the stadium bleachers, or as listeners and viewers of the live radio and television broadcasts of their games.
The institutional histories of sports and rock music alike prevented either from evaporating into ephemera. A baseball team had its famously good seasons and notorious losing streaks, its living and dead heroes, its illustrious leaders, rivalries, and so on. Longtime fans who’d followed their teams for years were too tuned in and too emotionally invested in the players and the game not to feel some vicarious involvement in the practice of professional sporting. In rock n’ roll, fans could demarcate the periods of their own lives in terms of the stages of an artist or band’s career (usually considered in terms of album releases) and speak for years or sometimes decades afterwards of a huge concert (like Woodstock, for instance).
In some respects, the evolution of subcultures revolving around fictional properties consisted in coming to resemble sports and music fandom. Of course, rock n’ roll fans were still largely just buyers of records, and sports fans still spectators.
2. Continuity & Franchises
It is one thing to be an admirer of a novelist like Jane Austen, Ernest Hemingway, or Jack Kerouac; it is other to be enamored of Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, or Middle-Earth.
Similarly: an anthological TV series like The Twilight Zone gives five or six viewers who’ve seen every episode somewhat less grist for conversation than five or six viewers who’ve seen every episode of Star Trek. In general, talking about people comes most naturally to us, and so there’s more to say about Captain Kirk than Shatner’s one-shot character in “Nightmare at 20000 Feet,” and confabbing about what Enterprise crew got up to across three seasons is easier than discussing the plots, ideas, and themes of a five-season TV series with no continuity and a different cast from episode to episode.
The difference grows as the decades pass, and new television and film iterations of each are released. Every individual episode of The Twilight Zone stands alone, while every Star Trek series and movie (barring the JJ Abrams stuff) occurs in a shared narrative universe. As in sports, franchise like Star Trek has continuity, history, legendary ensembles and leaders, fan-favorite heroes and villains of different eras, and so on.
The growth of IP (intellectual property) fandom was fed by the franchise business model, and by the business practice (pioneered by George Lucas) of not only producing sequels to a successful product, but spinning it off into other media and merchandising the hell out of it in the meantime. This is one of the ways in which culture industry product is able to mimic a mythology: entering into additional forms of experience and contexts multiplies the aspects of life on which an IP leaves its imprint, in addition to indefinitely extending the time during which one engages with it.
3. Fandoms Get Organized
The Trekkies were the progenitors of modern IP fandom, using the preestablished infrastructure of the science fiction convention scene to build a national social network that provided ample opportunity for active participation and creative expression. Even if you couldn’t care less about Star Trek, I wholly recommend perusing the Fanlore Wiki’s article on the landmark fanzine Spockanalia. If Adorno and Boorstin had been handed a copy and refused to admit its contents were folk art, they’d have been guilty of intellectual dishonesty.
The early Trekkies were a group that didn’t just sit around watching syndicated reruns of their favorite show: they gathered together at conventions in homemade costumes, they produced art and literature for each other instead of for the market, they formed a dispersed community with an institutional history, leaders, and a developing body of practices and values. And this is exactly why they were said to be “cultlike.”
Alongside the Trekkies we should also mention Lord of the Rings and Star Wars fans, comic book nerds, and anime clubs as exemplary pre-internet IP fandoms. The latter is particularly interesting because it formed out of necessity: if you didn’t belong to a social network that watched anime, then you were probably incapable of watching much of it yourself.
4. New Technologies (Bullet list)
Though the photocopier was invented much earlier, it came into widespread use in the 1970s and 1980s. Making a hundred copies of a fan publication or club flyer no longer required something like the mimeograph used to mass-produce Spockanalia. You just put the original page on the glass and press the button.
The camcorder gave dorky eighties kids who’d watched Raiders of the Lost Ark and Return of the Jedi too many times the means to star in their own Young Indiana Jones “films,” shot in their backyards and starring themselves and their friends. While this is in itself unimpressive, it did put in the hands of middle-class youngsters and adult amateurs the tech to make fanart in the same medium as an original work—a far cry from getting a shot of creative inspiration from a film and having only a typewriter or a drawing pad as its possible conduits.
At some point I’m going to have to write a little something about early video games based on well-known IPs, because—well, I’ll save that for later. The point is that video games opened up an intense new channel for fan engagement and, in theory, a novel way of drawing them towards an IP’s primary iteration. I’m not sure how much longer it would have taken me to sit down and watch the Simpsons if I hadn’t played the arcade game in the corner of Pizza Hut; it’s not inconceivable that I might have missed out on the show’s golden years.
The internet. The elephant in the room. The game changer. The Cambrian explosion of modern IP fandom. There is fandom before and fandom after the internet.
I don’t think it’s necessary to dwell on how the internet changed fan culture, since we’re familiar with all the ways in which the internet changed everything. Just as food for thought, you could try to imagine for yourself how the fanbase of an IP like Rick & Morty would have differed in a world where the only media of communication available to it were chirography, print, the telephone, the fax machine, tapes and disks, and maybe radio and television (if they could get airtime on a local station, pay for advertising on a network, etc.).
While the web and social media are the primary shapers and intensifiers of fan culture, the franchise business model—whose modern iteration makes the Star Wars product line from 1977–2000 look like amateur hour—comes in at a close second. For another negative example, we can look back to Undertale, or to the MOTHER (aka EarthBound) trilogy that inspired it. When an IP becomes inert—when there’s no hope for any official new content—the fandom usually grows less active over time. There are exceptions and extenuating circumstances, but in general a property that hasn’t stirred in ten or fifteen years can be expected to have a quiet and comparatively mild fan culture. The Undertale content on my Twitter feed has decreased by like 4000 percent since 2015–16. There’s millions of fans still out there, but they’ve settled down.
A “living” franchise is another case entirely, as is its fanbase. It might be a crude and disproportionate analogy, but the fanbase of an ongoing franchise is a bit like the early Christians who still believed in the imminence of the second coming, or at least in continuing revelation. They know their “gods” are not finished speaking to them yet.
But to the point: in fandom we see an apparent synthesis between multidirectional and organic folk culture and top-down, one-way mass culture. An entertainment firm releases a product line—films, streaming series, video games, comics, congeries of collectable merch—while the fanbase generates a titanic volume of its own content: message board and social media threads, memes, fan art, fanfic, fan animations, fan mods, let’s play streams, reaction videos, short and longform reviews, and so on and on. They have viewing parties, they cosplay, they go to cons, they gab in Discord channels, they browse and tweak the Fandom wikis, they wear the branded apparel, collect the figurines, hang the posters in their rooms (where their webcams can see them), etc.
On the face of it, an IP’s fanfiction, fan art, and cosplay communities seem like they might prove Adorno and Boorstin wrong: these are not passive consumers of culture, but creative participants in it. In terms of sheer volume, Harry Potter fanfic absolutely dwarfs Rowling’s novels. Nobody really watches the Simpsons anymore (at least not the post-golden age stuff), but scenes and jokes from its classic era continue to circulate through social media as topically relevant memes. The latest episode of a popular TV series is made more entertaining by sitting on the couch with one’s phone and contributing to the witty and histrionic commentary in real time.
But pay attention to one of the words Adorno uses up above:
No mechanism of reply has been developed, and private transmissions are condemned to unfreedom. They confine themselves to the apocryphal sphere of “amateurs,” who, in any case, are organized from above.
What separates fandom from folk culture is that fan content is invalid. An IP has a legal owner. The official content is canon, and fan content is apocrypha.
This is something that we internalize pretty early on, even if we’re not instructed in it. Vinson Ngo’s Powerpuff Girls Doujinshi has been running for twenty years(!!!!). Millions of people have read it.4 It has outlasted all the Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon shows from which it borrowed its characters, including the Powerpuff Girls revival series of 2016. But even a child reading it understands that it doesn’t count. The “real” Powerpuff Girls, Dexter, Mandy, Courage, et al. are the ones that appear on television (and in other official and licensed media and merchandise), and their apocryphal counterparts in the doujinshi must evaporate upon contact with them.
A naïve fan of the doujinshi might want to say that it’s still valid, that it could just be thought of as an alternate universe. This is wishful thinking. As fans of IPs as lousy with alternate realities as DC and Marvel will tell you, multiple worlds and multiple continuities don’t entail multiple canons. Frank Miller could write and draw a third sequel to The Dark Knight Returns, and no matter how good it might be (which would of course be kind of astonishing at this point), no matter how many people read it, and no matter how important some of his prior contributions were to the Batman IP, if the thing isn’t published through DC Comics and stamped with the company logo, then it cannot be canon. It’s fanfiction.
(There’s a possible exception to this, which we could ostentatiously call the Sutter Cane corollary: in the event that unlicensed fan content, developed for the same medium as an IP’s primary iteration and showing comparable technical quality, sees a level of mass engagement on par with or exceeding that of an official release, all bets are off. But this seldom if ever happens. Your apocryphal Harry Potter novel might be declared better than Rowling by a million superfans deeply engaged with the brand, but a hundred million normies who’ve read all the books and seen all the films will never even hear about it, and regard you with incredulity when you tell them about it on the sales floor of Harry Potter New York. Competing with the sheer reach of a media conglomerate is usually like trying to outrun a steam engine.)
Sometimes an IP’s owners can change the canon by fiat. Between the late 1970s and the early 2010s, hundreds (literally hundreds) of Star Wars “Expanded Universe” novels were published. The line basically amounted to official fanfiction, fleshing out the events surrounding the original trilogy, the prequels, the years before and the years between, and extending the story past Return of the Jedi’s closing shot. Maybe only the nerdiest of nerds cared about the Expanded Universe, but it was licensed—and so it was basically canon as far as the superfans were concerned.
When Disney purchased Star Wars from Lucas, the firm issued what amounted to a papal bull declaring that the Expanded Universe was no longer canon. And just like that, something like 380 Star Wars novels ceased to exist. The decision could not be appealed. The Fandom wiki’s contributors (unpaid but happy to help) went about reorganizing its content accordingly.
People who’d been reading the Expanded Universe novels for decades, who included Shadows of the Empire and Knights of the Old Republic among their all-time favorite video games, who’d maybe written their own fanfic based on the books—who were, in short, emotionally and intellectually invested this stuff as Star Wars fans—could protest all they wanted, but it was moot. When The Force Awakens came out, there was nothing left to say. The new release contradicted the timeline of the old Expanded Universe novels, and you couldn’t argue with a brand new blockbuster film seen by like 500 million more people than had read even one of the Expanded Universe novels. The publicity changed the cultural reality. People are free to go back and read the old books as they please, but they do so with the understanding that they no longer matter. They’re as good as fanfiction.
The most fascinating recent case I’ve seen of something like this has to do with a character in the Guilty Gear series.
I will try to keep this short: the Japanese fighting game Guilty Gear XX, released as a sequel in 2002, introduced a new fighter named Bridget. The character’s backstory involved a provincial village with a superstition about identical twins bringing bad luck, but it basically all amounted to a pretense for the big gimmick. Bridget was a boy raised as a girl; he looked, sounded, and behaved as though he were a girl. Male pronouns were used throughout, and Bridget himself says “I’m a guy” in story mode. “Gay for Bridget” became a running joke on video game message boards. Since Guilty Gear XX and its slew of sequels (which would nowadays be released as DLC content and balance patches) had somewhat sparse stories, typical for fighting games, there just wasn’t much to the Bridget narrative, and so the character took on a life of its own in players’ minds across twenty years, hundreds upon hundreds of hours of playtime, a universe of fanart, and an imponderable volume of social media commentary.
In 2022, Bridget finally returned to Guilty Gear as a DLC character in the latest game, Guilty Gear -Strive-, not at all the worse for wear despite the passage of two decades.5 The game’s story (and marketing material) declared the character to be transgender. You can imagine the rapture it caused on Twitter.
I was surprised to see some of the most vocal and resentful backlash coming from a small internet subculture of “femboys” who take “trap” as a compliment rather than a slur.6 Bridget used to be their guy, their fictive hero and model, and I can only guess how often they relished accusing anyone who tried to “claim” Bridget for the transgender community of indulging in fatuous “headcanon,” citing textual evidence from the games themselves. And then the tables were turned and Bridget was officially given over to the other team. The femboys moaned and protested, they pointed out inconsistencies between how the old and the new Guilty Gear material characterized Bridget, they urged people to read between the lines in her “good” and “bad” endings in arcade mode (I have no idea, don’t ask me)—but it didn’t matter. They were the ones promoting headcanon now.
While I don’t feel especially sorry for the Bridget fan[fem]boys, I have to wonder if anyone gloating about their being caught on the wrong side of the authorial “word of god” was in the meantime supportive of the “Harry Potter belongs to the fans, not to JK Rowling” wave. The “Bridget is still a femboy” and the “JK Rowling doesn’t truly own Harry Potter, not when I have the Wizarding World that lives on in my heart” crowds are each of them in their own way as pitiful as the Star Wars Expanded Universe fan who doggedly claims that his pile of brittle, disintegrating paperbacks collects the “true” stories, while the films in the sequel trilogy are pernicious corporate counterfeits. They’re all in denial.
Despite the participatory character and communal involvement of modern fan culture, the products which grow and sustain it are still issued from above. The contradictions between its “folk” and “mass” aspects has produced a sometimes tense dynamic wherein the fans might feel like an IP belongs to them, much in the way Robin Hood or King Arthur lore was common “property” among the medieval and early modern English, but are disabused of that notion whenever that property’s official new iteration comes into conflict with their aesthetics, their politics, their sense of how such-and-such favorite character should be handled by the writers, or their ideas about what it means for a sequel or spin-off to be “faithful to the spirit” of the brand.
Fandoms surrounding inert properties are typically the most “folky” in character. Spockanalia-era Star Trek obviously comes to mind; so does the EarthBound fanbase circa 1996–2002. The classic Doom megawad scene stands out as exceptional because the fans are able to make practically official content for themselves.
The cultures of such fanbases are fairly stable: their “sacred texts” are immutably locked in, they’ve had years to sort themselves out, they’re presided over by oldhead types, and they’re rarely disrupted by sudden floods of newbies. I wonder how many Star Wars fans in 1998 received the announcement of The Phantom Menace with a sense of foreboding underlying their jubilation. A second trilogy couldn’t but change the whole composition of Star Wars, and the longstanding and cozy fan community would be compelled to change with it.7 (I certainly hadn’t guessed.)
I’ve a theory: a lot of the sturm und drang rippling across fandom lately is owed to the shaky position of its “elders.” Historically, any group we might call a community was guided by its senior members, to whom fell the responsibility of regulating its culture and affairs, and setting an example to inductees. In a fan community coalesced around an active IP, these functions are given over to the property’s owners and stewards, who necessarily stand above and apart from the fandom, even though they might listen to it (or the parts of it they like). Most of the time, the products they choose to develop, the people selected to develop them, and their ideas about the audiences they wish to reach (and how to best reach them) all in the long run exert a more powerful influence upon the culture and composition of a fandom than its members, no matter how involved any of them are or how long they’ve been around.
Star Trek: The Next Generation was controversial among a lot of OG Trekkies (at least at first), but they had little choice but to accept it if they didn’t want their conventions to turn into senior citizen support groups with a bizarre dress code. The original series’ cast was getting too far up in their years to be box office draws for much longer, the reruns would eventually get pulled from syndication, and the whole thing would gradually become too archaic and alien (ha) for younger viewers. Trekdom had decades of irreversible diminution to look forward to unless the brand reoutfitted itself and attracted new blood.
The crucial thing here is that the decision to make a sequel series with a new cast, aesthetic, and ethos was made for the Trekkies, not by them. For that matter, the show’s developers probably counted thirty-something guys and gals who wore homemade Klingon costumes to conventions and had written their own episode scripts among the last people they wanted input from.
During an epoch of perpetual technological development and the cultural instability, it’s impossible to remake the same product that spawned a cultic fanbase twenty or thirty years ago and expect the same results. The new material must comport with contemporary sensibilities (or the producers’ conception of them), and some older fans will inevitably be alienated. As a result, long-lived and ongoing IP franchises tend to have volatile fan cultures. Star Trek provides another good example in its post-2017 releases: a hard-to-guess but not insignificant proportion of 1980s–1990s Star Trek devotees did not go for Discovery or Picard (or at least its first two seasons). Fairly or unfairly, “NuTrek” enthusiasts frequently ascribe apostate fans’ dislike of the new shows to bigotry—and those fans are apostates to the extent that they’ve vocally attested to their own lack of faith in the property the fandom exists to celebrate.8
When I trawled Google Images for those horrible thumbnails up top, I couldn’t help getting the impression that a hell of a lot of the critics and anti-fans worked up about Sweet Baby, Inc., and about the “wokening” of popular entertainment in general, are in or approaching middle age. The culture attached to their beloved IPs, the values which those properties espouse, or even the ethos evinced in their production has transformed in ways they find distasteful—and despite having been fans for decades, they have little say and no control over any of it, and they’re shown the door (and directed towards anti-fandom) when they speak up about it.
But it never belonged to them to begin with, and their community was from the beginning a fragmentary one at best. Evidently it has been a hard lesson for some of them to learn.
Adorno and Boorstin are still right: the “mass” aspect of fan culture supersedes its “folk” aspect. An IP fandom, looking towards capital rather than to its own members for its direction, central mythology, and generational renewal, is a metastable consumer interest group with some superficial communal traits—not a community. Not truly.
However: in a society characterized by segmentation, spectacle, and continuous disruption, more organic and integrated sorts of community (built up around engagement in a practice with goods internal to itself, as MacIntyre puts it) are exceedingly difficult to preserve, let alone to foster. For all its dysfunction, drama, and illusions of autonomy, fandom likely remains the most viable approximation to which the secularized majority has access—and can find tolerably comfortable.
Probably this has something to do with why the middle-aged suddenly seem to have such a difficult time parting with their toys and superheroes.
Two good even-handed 2014 pieces on these matters from liberal-approved sources: Vox’s Gamergate and the politicization of absolutely everything, and Slate’s Twitter is broken. I will point you to these because I don’t feel like explaining my own viewpoint here.
Further reading for nerds: a really good writeup about the Krakoa era, its problems, fandom, online brainrot, and how making shit and putting it on the internet isn’t as much fun as it used to be. (Notice too the moments of moral umbrage.)
Question: daytime soap operas were every bit as involved and dramatic as comic book serials, and they had a gigantic audience. Why didn’t soap opera fan culture become a reflection of comic book fan culture?
I’m not one of them. I mean I skimmed some pages back in the day, but come on, everyone was doing it.
The central figures of certain IPs—typically those appearing in comics, animation, video games, or any media that don’t depend on live actors—are, like the heroes of an organic mythology, effectively ageless and static. It’s most always jarring when they are suddenly and fundamentally changed, even when the third rail of contemporary politics isn’t involved. (Remember how well “The Principal and the Pauper” went down?)
Why do I even know about this? The answer is that I still check Twitter from time to time. I followed back a lot of the people who added me when I was busily writing video game thinkpieces over a decade ago, and some of them grew into stuff that is decidedly not my cup of tea. Keeping them on my timeline has been…educational.
Good lord—I’m sure there existed some number of women who’d gotten into collecting My Little Pony toys and watching the TV shows/movies when they were kids in the 1980s and 1990s, and continued doing so after reaching adulthood. The “brony” phenomenon must have pumped blood-bubbles into their brains.
(1) In a way, this mirrors the Gamergate fiasco: a lot of the people in the “ethics in gaming journalism” crowd were reportedly miffed to see themselves described as right-wing trolls after they’d voted for Obama in 2012, supported the gay rights movement, and regularly watched the Colbert Report.
(2) I’ve heard of people getting banned from the Star Trek subreddit for having footprints in the Redletter Media subreddit. Take with a grain of a salt.
"Frank Miller could write and draw a third sequel to The Dark Knight Returns, and no matter how good it might be (which would of course be kind of astonishing at this point), no matter how many people read it, and no matter how important some of his prior contributions were to the Batman IP, if the thing isn’t published through DC Comics and stamped with the company logo, then it cannot be canon. It’s fanfiction."
Holy Terror is canon and I will not hear otherwise.
Wonderful as usual.
Man, makes me miss the old forum wars and trolls of the early zeroes. There was quite the feud between Captain N fan forums. And Captain N isn't even canon to the nintendo games it put in its cartoon and comics.