What fandoms owe their fans

I was already thinking of writing this post or something like it, when — buried inside an otherwise anodyne Variety post about toxic fan culture — came the startling admission that studios have begun enlisting “superfan” focus groups to tell them, ahead of time, what hardcore fans will “retaliate” against in future projects, so that those projects can be changed preemptively.

This premise has been given a solid airing in the weeks since the article dropped, in social media, on podcasts, and so forth; but I’ll re-note a couple of key points here, for the record:

1. We don’t know which studios are doing this, or how prevalent it is, so this all might be a buncha nothing;
2. Under any circumstances, if it is happening, this is creatively moronic.

It’s also (of course) worth noting that the “retaliation” described lands disproportionately on creatives who are women, who are people of colour, who are queer, or who are all three. We must therefore hold the premise that these superfans’ concerns are around “canon that must be respected” with great gingerness, because by engaging with this at all we are conferring the framework of good faith on an argument which is usually built on bad faith. I’ve discussed this before.

I’ll also say that, on some level, this is all kind of ridiculous: we are describing enormous entertainment brands owned by even larger multinational conglomerates. Looking for the zheuszh of creative spark within those enterprises is, at best, chancy.

And yet, there is a paradox at the core of this particular industry (Hollywood), which is: in order to continue generating the product that these conglomerates theoretically want to sell you, they have to continue to employ creatives and storytellers to make it, all of whom have values and viewpoints and ambitions of their own, and are very much not shoes.

Of course, even as currently as right now, many studios are probably trying their ass off to eliminate the risk of dealing with actual human storytellers at all, by conferring creative roles on large language models and other artificially-intelligent monstrosities. Those of us in the creative community are living on tenterhooks, and the vague (vain?) hope that those efforts at A.I.-ification will fail, and that the mass audience will smell a computer-generated rat when the studios create one.

But we don’t, as of now, have any real proof on that. The biggest delusion within the creative community, I think, is around the nature of the “mass market,” i.e. the 99.5% of people who go to movies or watch TV and thereby make this an actual saleable industry. In short: we think our audience likes our art form as an art form, and I assure you, they absolutely do not.

When The Last Jedi came out and the mainstream trades wanted to change the narrative on Disney’s $4 billion purchase of the Star Wars brand, the easiest way to do so was to craft a story about how the new film was “controversial,” by elevating the gripes of a small minority of the fan base into something on equal standing with that selfsame mass market. My sense of that pocket of pissed-off people hasn’t changed since 2017, i.e. that we are discussing a small, but exceedingly vocal, group of Reddit and YouTube trolls, many of whom now literally make money off their continued muckraking. The idea of any of those CHUDs being let into the tent to inform policy on future creative projects is lunatic in the extreme. But you, reader, already knew that.

Let’s return to the question, then: what do fandoms owe their fans? I am here using “fandoms” to describe those massive entertainment brands, of which people are fans; stuff like the MCU, or Star Wars, or Tolkien’s Middle-Earth.

What consideration do the people that own those brands owe to the people who are fans of those brands?

I spoiled it in this post’s hint, but here it is again: absolutely nothing.

Snow White and the Seven (Bald, Imprisoned) Dwarves

I was thinking about Alien³ when I started writing this. Specifically, I was thinking about the now legendarily “controversial” opening of that film, in which all of the survivors of the prior film (save one) are killed in a spacefaring disaster before the credits have finished rolling.

I recall that there were a few different efforts to get a sequel to Aliens written, at least one of which (the William Gibson version) had the surviving characters of the second film land on a space station and continue to fight the xenomorphs as a group.

At some point, however, the nascent version of the Alien³ we have now got started, when Vincent Ward decided he wanted Ripley (Snow White) to land on a planet of monks (seven of them) and do battle with the alien (the Devil), one on one. This pitch changed a lot in the making, obviously, but something always remained true, which is that the opening of the film required dwindling Ripley’s travelling squad back down to one.

Does this opening inherently negate the stakes of Alien³‘s predecessor, in which Ripley worked her ass of to make sure Newt (and Bishop and Hicks, less so) were safe in that space capsule at the end? I guess. Do I care? Not really. This is where we get into what I called The Force Awakens Conundrum: as soon as a sequel is called upon to exist, you kind of need to accept that the story has to keep going. And that when stories keep going, prior stakes have to fade into the tail lights. Otherwise, there’s no new hill for the story to climb.

Sequelae tackle this inherent narrative problem in different ways. If you’re the Star Wars Sequel Trilogy, you decide that even though the star war was definitively won in Return of the Jedi, later on Something Else Happened, and similar table stakes came to exist in the galaxy in order to (re-)test our heroes. If you’re the old “Legends” canon of the Star Wars Expanded Universe, on the other hand, you tackled the problem by blunting the “victory” in Return of the Jedi, making it just a major win in an otherwise ongoing campaign for domination of the galaxy. You conjure up also-ran threats, similar to but not equal to the Emperor, in order to have our heroes defeat them over and over and over again ad infinitum, so that everything always kinda “feels like Star Wars.”

I’ll underline the “similar to but not equal to” thing, re: the bad guys in the Expanded Universe. In re-visiting some of that old Legends canon recently — which I only did because that selfsame legion of CHUDs has lately been using old “canon” to beat new fans over the head for whatever it is the CHUDs find distasteful about Disney-era Star Wars — the most significant thing I noticed was how few of those old books and comics are stories, and how many of them are just telling us more things that happened.

As I’ve described before, no one changes in the Star Wars Expanded Universe. Or at least, the main characters don’t change: Han, Luke, Leia and Lando remain basically frozen in amber at the end of Return of the Jedi, their moral dimensions and decision matrices fixed for the years and decades to come.

The other characters — anyone created net-new for those stories, like Corran Horn, or Jaina and Jacen Solo — can change, if a writer takes a notion to change them. But I can’t help but suspect that the reason so many of the “hardcore fans” of Star Wars who deeply embrace the old E.U. do it because it serves them up endless reiterations of an unalloyed idea of who their favourite characters are, without ever pressing them through the transformational dimensions of what could be called an actual story. Stories change their characters; that’s why they’re stories. When that doesn’t happen, the characters become flattened, removed of nuance; they become icons and archetypes, not people.

People, after all, have a worrying tendency to let you down sometimes. Icons never do — which isn’t particularly fair to the icons, frozen as they are, but is a lot more digestible for their fans. Icons, not characters, always perfectly conform to the fans’ expectations of them. Luke is always a great Jedi. Boba Fett is always a helmeted badass. Baby Yoda always does cute cartwheels and, like Maggie Simpson, never learns to speak — because if he spoke, he might say something. And so forth.

To return to Alien³: I don’t know if that movie’s opening narrative decision plays fair with the audience or not. Yes, I’m sure there are a million stories that could be told where Ripley, Hicks, Newt and Bishop get back to Earth (or somewhere else) and have another adventure; where no one is summarily killed offscreen to set up a new “Ripley alone” adventure, and stakes and tension are manufactured in some other way that I can’t think of.

But the reason I raise the example is: people who love Aliens feel betrayed by the opening of Alien³, in a way that feels very pressing right now. There’s the pervasive feeling that the latter film broke some sort of unspoken “contract” with its franchise’s fans.

Whatever it is, this “contract” seems to be what is extending further and further into these fandoms by the day; a growing sense that the entertainment should conform to the fans’ expectations of it, and never dither or deviate in any upsetting or provocative way.

What I’m saying is, if you boil the “contract with fans” down far enough, what you really end on is an agreement not to tell stories at all. To freeze everything and everyone in amber, and have the expectations met every time by forever carbon-copying what came before, only without the stakes, the tension, or the catharsis. Brand exploitation as theme park.

Creatively, it’s death. At the very least, it’s not storytelling.

On bibles and story plans

Something else that I think is going on here is a real yearning, among some (but not all) thinking styles, to believe that the story they are experiencing exists within a tightly controlled, and therefore parseable/knowable, set of rules. It almost feels like a security-blanket thing, this need.

On one level, it’s absolutely fair: storytellers must create rules for the story universes in which they are telling their tales, and (for the most part) play fair with those rules. Well-defined rules in stories create the aforementioned stakes and tension, along with a sense of fair play. They drive engagement.

On another level, this thinking is where you get the (now decades and decades old) persistent delusion among the Star Wars fan base that on some hot summer day in, like, 1972, George Lucas sat down on a rock somewhere and wrote out the entire Star Wars saga, word for word.

Lucas himself, of course, is partly to blame for this myth. During the production of both the Original and Prequel trilogies, he alluded to an elaborate, 9-film story plan that informed all of his choices. Sometimes, this story plan took the form of a mammoth screenplay for the original Star Wars that had to be calved into thirds because it was too gargantuan to make all at once, essentially giving you the Original Trilogy.

Which is why, once again, I am begging literally anyone who thinks they know better on this to read the original screenplay for Star Wars, which was illustrated as a graphic novel about a dozen years ago.

Yes: there are ideas in that original, woolly form that absolutely go on to be recognizeable beats and relationships in the Original, and even Prequel, trilogy.

No: it is not, on any manifest level whatsoever, an outline of the story that we know of as Star Wars. Not even the first film; let alone the five that followed.

Instead, it’s a hodgepodge of ideas and poorly-expressed archetypal themes, as Lucas does what writers always do and tries to find his way into his own story, his own tone, his own set of narrative principles. If you follow the writing of Star Wars from draft one to draft two to draft three (the one they shot) to draft four (the one Marcia Lucas edited), you see that hodgepodge being carved down into a sharper, more precise idea of itself, until it’s… Star Wars.

That’s art.

I think the reality is that all of this falls into the general human problem of having difficulty with complex concepts. We are far more likely (and able) to grab simple ones; contexts that are heavy with nuance are just harder to hold. That’s fine; we’re apes, after all.

Most people who don’t create stories themselves (and even a lot of people who do) probably don’t really intuit how all this works; that there’s a difference between a beat-for-beat, block-for-block blueprint of how you’re going to tell a tale, and having a firm sense of the overall tentpoles of the thing and the direction in which it’s heading. Writers fall anywhere on the spectrum between these approaches (and several others besides), but here’s something I can tell you for 100% god damn sure about George Lucas’ approach to the Star Wars saga: he’s one of the latter. He had the big picture in his head, a sense of the thing, plus or minus a few key details (such as whether Han or Leia would turn out to be Luke’s sibling). He needed a lot of help from a lot of people to turn that vision into something we could all see; and he weighed a metric shit-ton of decisions against that original vision again and again and again, discarding the things that didn’t work and leaning into the things that did.

That’s art.

But even if the creator of a story has an entire legendarium developed before he commits a single word of his novel (which is spiritually, though not factually, how we might think of J.R.R. Tolkien, for example), there’s another complexity here that befuddles much of a story’s audience: that even when the author has fully finished creating the story, it’s still only half done, because it must then be transmitted to whoever is hearing the story.

The person who hears (or watches, or reads) the story is the half-author of the tale, which is where “there was a plan, this is right, this is wrong” goes fully out the window. Every person encounters every piece of art through the lens of their own understandings and experiences; they identify parts of themselves and parts of others and parts of pieces of other stories and a trillion other things in an endless sequence of ripples and identifications, cascading down from their minds to their hearts to their souls to their toes, and it goes on and on and on forever. It’s magic. Not science; alchemy.

Part of the appeal, I think, of believing meta-narratives like “George Lucas had a plan all along” is believing that there is a right and a wrong, a set of correct solutions for the premises of a tale. But there never is. There is only the amalgam of all the choices of all the people who made the art; and then, your composite reaction to it, as the receiver of that transmission. There isn’t, and can never be, a right or wrong, because that composite is always subjective. And I think that drives some people crazy.

Perhaps those are the people who are always trying to “gotcha” their favourite television programs, theory-cornering their way through every trivial detail (as always, I blame LOST), trying to turn the straw into gold before the art does that for itself. But art is not a puzzle for you to solve. And with apologies to the canon wonks, knowing the “established rules” does not, therefore, give you any kind of an edge or authority in how that art works.

What fans owe their fandoms

(Good news: it’s “absolutely nothing” here, too. But I digress.)

Are we at a weird tipping point here? As mentioned above, I’m sure all of the major studios would like nothing more than for “brand exploitation as theme park” to become the marching order, the McDonaldsification of all of these fandoms, the same Big Mac, every time you order. It’s infinitely more controllable; infinitely more scaleable; and it requires paying less and less workers, which conglomerates love.

Back to my vague (vain?) hope as a creative: that, for storytelling at least, the Big Mac model just ain’t gonna work, because with stories, people actually will get tired of eating the same shit all the time. But — as I said — we don’t yet really have any proof… unless the (impacted-by-a-dozen-other-major-things) current crisis in the theatrical exhibition industry counts.

I suspect — I hope — that the efforts at endless regurgitation eventually just kill the money-printing machine; that audiences continue to say “meh, who cares” about the umpteenth focus-tested Star Wars television series in a row, and someone in the C-suite will need to figure out how to hire storytellers again.

But that's what those of us who claim to care about these stories need to keep making clear in advance: we want real ones, good ones, ones with stakes and meaning. Burn the "contract with fans" to start the campfire around which you tell it, if it's worth telling.

A couple of link drops before the real link drop, both of which heavily impacted the writing of this piece:

Here’s Matt Zoller Seitz on Megalopolis, a film whose reaction deserves a whole other essay; but suffice to say, art, motherfuckers!

And here’s Charlie Jane Anders on toxic superfans, in which a radical solution is proposed: stop injecting troll-enraging inclusivity into decades-old story worlds, and… come up with something new, for crying out loud!!

The rest of the link drop

• “Memory is sex and nostalgia is pornography. You can do incredible things with memory, grow and love and learn from your mistakes, find reasons to live, but with nostalgia all you can really do is get a little closer to the grave and buy something about it.” This hit. (Kaleb Horton)
• There’s so much you don’t know about the c-section. This was occasionally gruesome but, I thought, exceedingly interesting. (Culture Study)
• Compassion Fatigue and being loving while angry arrived at the exact right time. (Open Heart Project)
• This week on the YouTube channel, Osha Aniseya! Finally! Plus some easy-to-follow rules for what will get you blocked. (YouTube)
• Also on YouTube, Rey’s Theme… in space (Sorry for the SpaceX element, I do try to avoid all things Musk in my posts on account of his being an alt-right fascist empowering the worst people on the planet. But this is too sweet.)