Fandom is Broken

Devin Faraci, who I know some of you hate because of his DCU reviews, wrote a pretty fascinating piece on fandom.

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Last week the AV Club ran an excellent piece about the nature of modern fan entitlement, and I think it's fairly even-handed. The piece covers both the reaction to an all-female Ghostbusters reboot but also the hashtag that trended trying to get Elsa a girlfriend in Frozen 2. The author of that piece, Jesse Hasenger, draws a line between the two fan campaigns, rightly saying that whether driven by hate (Ghostbusters) or a desire for inclusion (Frozen 2) both campaigns show the entitlement of modern fan culture. It's all about demanding what you want out of the story, believing that the story should be tailored to your individual needs, not the expression of the creators. These fans are treating stories like ordering at a restaurant - hold the pickles, please, and can I substitute kale for the lettuce? But that isn't how art works, and that shouldn't be how art lovers react to art. They shouldn't be bringing a bucket of paint to the museum to take out some of the blue from those Picassos, you know?

The AV Club's piece ran a day too early, it turns out. The same day the piece hit the internet exploded in another fan outrage, this time coming as a result of Steve Rogers: Captain America #1, a new Marvel comic that revealed - dun dun dunnnn! - that Captain America had actually been a Hydra double agent his whole life. It was a shocking reveal at the end of the comic, and nobody yet knows what the narrative payoff to it will be. But that didn't stop people from really just freaking the frick out and flooding the Twitter feed of writer Nick Spencer with so much hate that he simply had to log off. They began going after writer Ed Brubaker, who hadn't written a Cap comic in five years. They started calling people anti-Semites (because, they reasoned, Cap was created by two Jewish kids to fight Nazis and now Marvel had made him a Nazi. None of that really holds up, especially the idea that Hydra are Nazis. They are not and never were in the Marvel comics universe, and even the movies went through a lot of effort to show that Hydra was aiming to fight the Nazis as well) and then the death threats came in.

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Sending death threats to Brubaker is sort of hilarious in the People are Dumb sort of way. Let's threaten the old writer of the book over developments by the new writer! But let's get past the "Death Threats are Obviously Wrong" part.

Fans have a ridiculous sense of ownership of these properties. And any change to to, well, anything, is going to infuriate at least one vocal constituency. But the failure to change, or challenge the audience, is a faulure of art. That leads to boring stasis. We need art that takes risks and yes, that means ruffling fandom's feathers. That's what dramatic tension is. From the original AV Club piece to which Faraci refers:

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Fans so hardcore they become irrational are hardly a new phenomenon, but they have more access to each other than ever. This is partially because of the internet, but it may also have to do with the galvanizing effects of major pop-cultural events like, say, adaptations of the Harry Potter books back in the early ’00s. Adaptations of bestselling books had been delighting and (perhaps more often) disappointing audiences for decades, but suddenly, an instant-classic book series was being adapted near-concurrently with its original run. Concerns about fidelity were paramount and, indeed, the first Harry Potter film is a model of forest-for-the-trees fan love, including as much material from the book as possible. Even now, with general consensus that the series improved with a less-faithful Alfonso Cuarón take on Prisoner Of Azkaban, fans hunger for more unadapted corners of their favorite books. Whenever the idea of remaking or rebooting Harry Potter is broached, someone inevitably mentions that it would be great to do as a TV series, to really dig into the minutiae of the books’ world. Even after eight faithful movies, fans can still feel underserved.

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Our job as the audience is not to passively consume, but it is not the artist's job to give us precisely what we want (which would ultimately be unsatisfying anyway, as it would be empty and unchallenging). There is a role for criticism, and people should think about the art they enjoy, and have opinions and vigorous debate...

But for the love of God, let them finish telling their story first. Captain America is on issue 1. If the stunning reveal is in the first act, that means it doesn't mean what you think it means. That's not just comic book illusion of change, that's basic storytelling. Ghostbusters hasn't even come out yet. Hell, Frozen 2 hasn't even been MADE. We shouldn't have hardened opinions about these unfinished works. Let storytellers tell their stories first. Stop interrupting to add your two cents, then complaining about the disjointed narrative.

Stop being such entitled whiny fans, and also have an ounce of damned patience. Wait, until you come to a damned conclusion. Fandom, I swear, is better when there is challenge and its not just rote nostalgia.