Unsettling Futures - Issue #3: Fandom is too big to fail, and that's a problem
“Abraxas says here: ‘Around the Godde there forms a Shelle of prayers and Ceremonies and Buildings and Priestes and Authority, until at Last the Godde Dies. Ande this maye notte be noticed.”
― Terry Pratchett, Small Gods
What is fandom, anyway?
The simplest definition is that it's a community dedicated to appreciating a piece of pop culture.
So if you really, really like Lionel trains, or the Beatles, or The Sorrows of Young Werther, you're a fan. But fandom comes into being when you share your enthusiasm with another person who likes the same thing. Fandom is a group activity.
That's… kind of the problem.
Can you say you're a fan of a franchise if you're hypercritical of every film/season/book/toy launch that's come out for years? Decades? There are folks out there who identify as Star Trek or Star Wars fans, and they will tell you exactly where their beloved franchise went off the rails – often more than a decade ago. "Everything since TNG has been a mistake!" or "Everything since the prequels has been garbage!" they will rail, and you wonder, is this person still a fan? By what definition?
The equation should be "stop liking the text, leave the fandom," as in "Man, 2 Werther 2 Sorrowful wasn't nearly as good as The Sorrows of Young Werther. I didn't like the way he moped at all! I guess I'll go do something else with my life!"
But nope!
Turns out when the formula is "community + shared interest," the community part becomes more important.
Like, a lot more important.
No surprise, really. People need community. We're desperate for it. Modern life has left us badly atomized; start counting up the professional roles that used to be filled by friends and family members sometime if you want to be really depressed. (Capitalism: both the cause of and solution to your desperate loneliness and isolation!)
So people stick around in fandoms. They call themselves Star Wars fans and keep posting in forums and buying toys and making memes even if they haven't liked a movie since Return of the Jedi. (And some of them are pretty salty about the Ewoks, come to think of it.) They get angry and possessive about "their" show. They send death threats to creators and actors over shipping. They start campaigns to remake or reshoot entire movies, and I'm realizing as I type this that this sentence could refer to any one of at least three recent incidents.
Fandoms also become insular, and develop their own subcultures, their own deuterocanonical texts, which diverge rapidly from the commonly accepted interpretation of a text by an ordinary, small-f fan.
A few years back, a lot of people I followed on Twitter started self-identifying as "House Slytherin" in their Twitter handles, which is weird, because if you're only a casual follower of Harry Potter (i.e. someone who has read all the books and seen all the main films, some of them repeatedly) that's sort of like saying "I'm obsessed with the racial purity of fictional wizards!" But to them it meant something entirely different (thank god) because fandom had been obsessing over the subject of the Sorting Hat. Tens of thousands of people have spent years developing an exegesis of Hogwarts Houses that is so vast and complex and all-consuming, future scholars will devote their careers to studying its nuances.
The flipside to putting a lot more philosophical weight than is strictly necessary on books about fraternity-initiation-via-magic-hat is when fandom veers wildly from its original source material.
Is it fandom to write real-person fics about the actors who star in your favourite show? How about real person erotic fics featuring mpreg? Okay, what about if you add in some weird, badly-wrong wolf biology and then it cross-polinates with the Sherlock and Hannibal fandoms and busts out into original published fiction, and the next thing you know there's a New York Times article explaining copyright law as it pertains to wolf-people sex novels? Is that fandom? What are you a fan of, exactly, even going back to the point where you start writing real person fics?
This is where fandom becomes a church, and the text, the god that was once the centre of worship, may die, and this may not be noticed. Terry knew what he was talking about.
Believe it or not, fandom didn't used to be like this, and the change, as with almost all things, came with the internet. And I know this, because I am old, and I remember it happening.
I was a fan of The X-Files when I was a wee baby (teenaged) nerd, and we got to see, in real time, the development of an internet fandom. We were there when shipping was coined! Or, not there there. We didn't have an internet connection at my house. (Yes, in the early- to mid-1990s, it was still more common than not to have no internet.) But word filtered out to us somehow, and reached our main fandom activity, which was watching the show with our friends who lived in the same geographical vicinity, and talking about it afterwards.
I'm not going to say that old fandom was morally better. Fandom, and genre fandom in particular, has existed since around the 1920s or 1930s. The problems – toxicity, bigotry, bullying, possessiveness, entitlement – were always there in embryo. But the issues are magnified when we connect everyone.
The internet adds two things to fandom – mass, in the form of thousands, maybe millions of members, and velocity, as it reduces the time to share any opinion, fanfic, fan art, or hot take to near zero. Remember what mass times velocity equals?
Fandom now has a terrifying momentum, one entirely out of proportion to the things that inspire it.
Modern fandom can jumpstart careers for talented fan artists, it can forge friendships, it can fund medical treatment for people halfway around the world, and it can deploy SWAT teams to the homes of innocent people over "ethics in videogame journalism."
I know people who argue that this kind of behaviour isn't representative of "real fans," which is, to put it as gently as possible, a bullshit argument. Every fandom develops a malignant wing once it gets big enough. Fandom is glee and joy and anticipation, and it's also an asshole screaming at a McDonalds cashier about Szechuan sauce because of a cartoon. You don't get the one without the other, and you don't really get to take part in fandom without at least somewhat running up against the dipshit brigade.
I mentioned earlier that there were at least three movies I could think of that inspired major online/fan campaigns for remakes/major changes.
Two of those (The Snyder Cut and the Campaign to Fix Sonic the Hedgehog's Creepy Teeth) actually succeeded. That's… an alarming ratio. Fan campaigns used to fail about 99% of the time, and by "used to" I mean anything farther back than 10 years ago.
And fandom doesn't just get things it actively wants, it's so big that it gets served up things it despises.
You didn't like the end of Game of Thrones? Congrats, you're getting endless spinoffs. You thought WandaVision had a finale that landed like an undercooked pancake? Congrats, Marvel TV shows and movies FOREVER. The Abrams/Johnson/Abrams Star Wars Trilogy was poorly-planned (and wound up pandering to the worst fans in multiple ways)? Congrats, new trilogies! And TV shows! And video games! And comics! And Funko Pops! SO MANY FUCKING FUNKO POPS!
Because fandom starts by being about liking something. You like when Luke and Leia swung across the chasm. You liked when Harry got his letter from Hogwarts. You liked when those two FBI agents bickered over whether it was aliens or just swamp gas.
But a mature fandom, one that has gained critical mass, no longer requires you to like anything. It doesn't even matter if you hate it. For a significant minority of fans, quality is a secondary concern – new content (I hate that word, but it's appropriate here) is just grist for the mill – new data to be repurposed into fanfic, cosplay, gifs, con panel discussions, YouTube channels, Twitter jokes, hatewatches, and on and on and on. The content is processed into fandom. The fans do free labour on behalf of the franchise. The fandom grows; the franchise profits.
When J.K. Rowling went full transphobe, one of the most common reactions among people speaking out about it was to say that they couldn't walk away from Harry Potter fandom completely because it was too big a part of their lives.
That didn't surprise me, but it did make me uneasy.
I get liking stuff by problematic creators. I largely became a science fiction fan because of Robert A. Heinlein and Orson Scott Card; we can't throw stones in the city built entirely out of glass houses. But when specific fandoms become an inescapable cultural black hole, I can't believe that's healthy. It's not healthy for the people in the fandoms, whose communities – actual, supportive communities, friends of long standing – are tied to the whims of bigoted creators and/or giant amoral corporate entities.
It's also not healthy for future fans, small-f fans as well as hardcore "Our wedding was MST3K themed" fans. They're supposed to grow up and discover things they'll like, and most of what I see in the media landscape is sequels and reboots of stuff their parents and grandparents liked, with the rough edges sanded down by generations of corporate directives.
I walked away from The X-Files before it wrapped up. Just stopped watching around season six or seven. I knew they weren't going to wrap up the myth arc; you could see it wasn't going to work. I still like the show and will watch a favourite episode on streaming now and then, but I've never gone back to see the finale.
Lots of people do this every day; they don't like Werther 3: Weimar Drift and they move on and find something else to fill their time. Lots of people leave fandoms too, sometimes with an ostentatious flounce, sometimes quietly and by degrees.
I think that the net effect of small fandoms is positive; I think the net effect of mass fandom is negative. I don't know what – if anything – can be done about it. It's an emergent property, you can't kill fandom without shutting off the internet. And more important, you can't tell people to leave something that's a source of community, that's cruel.
But if I knew any young fans, I'd warn them to keep to the shallows. There's sharks in the deep end, and if you go out there, you eventually get eaten, or you become one of them.
It will be interesting to see what happens when one of the big fandoms dies – too big to fail does not guarantee immortality. Eventually, one of the big mass media fandoms – Star Wars, Harry Potter, Dr. Who, MCU – will go down like a lightning-struck tree. The franchise will die first, when a movie or three tanks, a theme park goes under. And then we'll see what happens in its wake to all that fannish energy.
Maybe it'll turn toxic, driving away all the casuals, turning inwards and cruel.
I prefer to think that it will turn outwards, in positive directions. A dead franchise, a dead fandom, should be a nurse log in a forest, offering nutrients and fertilizing new growth. Newer, better fictions, with room to grow now that they can find the light.
Anyway, fandom is weird. Here's a song about The X-Files.