On Fandoms
It’s been almost 150 years since Friedrich Nietzsche declared, “God is dead…and we have killed him,” and looking back over the past 150 years, you can see the incalculable misery resulting from our collective homicide. While many of the late 19th century intellectuals believed the move away from the widespread belief in religion would engender more enlightened attitudes in mankind, they did not live to see the full horror of what would actually happen in the 20th century. We now live in the 21st century, and in the West, God remains dead. And contrary to the beliefs of many of those in the 19th century, this has not resulted in a more rational and realistic time to live in. Rather, it leaves us adrift in a sea of infinite possibilities, as James Anthony Froude wrote about the Crises of Faith in 1881: “All round us, the intellectual lightships had broken from their moorings…to find the lights all drifting, the compasses all awry, and nothing left to steer by except the stars.” And the few stars left are dying out fast.
I’m not a religious person, but I admire those who are, because I appreciate the many benefits of organized religion, which is often denigrated today. Personally, I believe the upsides outweigh the downsides. Being a part of a long tradition gives you a sense of purpose, identity, and shared history. Meeting others with the same beliefs, and striving towards the same goals, must be hugely comforting when adrift on the seas, knowing you’re not alone out there in the infinite vastness. I think it’s a deeply valuable thing for a person to have.
As I said, I don’t have that, strictly speaking. And yet I feel more with each passing year that everyone does have a religion of some kind, maybe not in the traditional sense, but a belief system and a set of values that gives them comfort and orients them in the world. You can see this in the extreme forms of political polarization today – what are political parties anymore but cults you swear allegiance to, in order to avoid thinking for yourself? This is the downside of organized religion – it encourages conformity, and a willingness to absolve yourself of your actions by ceding them to a higher authority. But at least organized religions can blame the mystery of God – this is much more acceptable to me than worshipping man, which must always be fallible.
My religion is art. Art in the broad sense – literature, theater, music, any creative expression of humanity is my religion. Because as a creative myself, it works like a religion for me. Going to the theater is going to church – a shared community experience with deep emotional resonance. And my writing gives me purpose and meaning. When I write, it’s not a conscious process, but more how I imagine the process of prayer is. I sit down alone and wait and listen for the story to be told to me. And it comes to me if I focus on it, probably as the answer from God comes in a prayer. And from that inexplicable, ineffable process, a real thing of beauty is made – a novel or a poem or a story of some kind. And this thing created from nothing can go on to move others, which is truly amazing. I can’t tell you how many times I have cried over the fictional creation of someone’s imagination. What is this but a miracle? This power to make people feel, to create characters who seem as real as living people, and sometimes more so. In our rational, skeptical age, I don’t think we appreciate how magical this process is, and we are always eager to rationalize it away. But it’s completely inexplicable to me, which is why I never get bored with it. I never know what will pop into my head next, and spontaneity is always exciting.
Which brings me to fandoms, another aspect of my personal religious conviction. Fandoms are worshippers of the creative arts, whether films or television or comic books. They are a congregation with the zealot’s commitment to their chosen religion. Fandoms gets a lot of flack, usually from those outside of them, for being a toxic environment full of incels and manbabies whining about their childhood being destroyed and picking things apart in great detail. I’m sure it’s the same flack religious people get from militant atheists, who deliberately avoid their adherents but constantly complain about them. This perception of fandoms could not be further from my experience in them, and it’s over a decade now that I’ve been active in them, doing both fanfiction and cosplay. I’ve always loved geeky stuff, but it wasn’t as socially acceptable to be a fan for a long time, so when our time in the limelight finally came, I was as excited as anybody. Little did I know how it would end.
It seems like there was a period, in the early teens, right around when The Avengers came out, where there was nothing cooler in the world than to be a nerd. They were selling Batman sweaters in high street stores, there were Star Wars nights at baseball games, and The Big Bang Theory was bringing general geek knowledge to the masses. Finally the nerds were the cool ones, but we should never have wanted to be so. Because inevitably when something becomes “cool,” everyone wants to be in on it – it welcomes poseurs and bandwagon jumpers of the worst kind, people who know nothing about the stories and characters we’ve loved for decades, but who merely want to be seen embracing the popular thing in the cultural moment.
I think we all made the mistake of thinking because superhero films were popular, that Hollywood would start respecting these fans who had made them so. But Hollywood has been and always will be run by people who were very successful, which tend not to be the geeky types. Geeky types tend to spend an obsessive amount of time poring over the thing they love, whether it makes them money or not, while successful people tend to obsess over things that make them profit and fuel their ambition. The producers, directors, and writers of Hollywood are largely not obsessive nerds, because they’re successful. And rather than try and respect the fans, they dismissed them as losers who, now that they had their beloved property, they didn’t need anymore.
And you’ve seen the result – the patent hatred of fans and fandom thrown out of Hollywood in recent years. The “toxic fandom” of Star Wars, of Lord of the Rings, of Marvel, for not swallowing the trash products Hollywood vomits out. The professional critics going into gaming, saying it’s sexist, and trying to change it into something that suits them, who don’t even play video games, and who cry foul when they receive pushback. These people began to “deconstruct” the fandoms, to pull the properties apart, to mock them and denigrate them, to point out how problematic these things were, and to demand they change to suit them, the people who never had any interest in them until they became popular.
The charge of “gatekeeping,” is thrown at fandoms a lot, but that’s one of those words that means different things to different people. While I agree that nobody should be excluded from fandoms on the basis of stupid, superficial things (I have no patience with those who say Star Wars isn’t for girls, for instance, although I’ve never met anyone who has actually said that!), actual gatekeeping is important to fandoms because you don’t want people coming into your space, accusing it of being toxic and terrible, and trying to fundamentally change it while not even appreciating the thing in the first place. Imagine an atheist going into a church and expecting people to respect his ideas on their religion, while not even sharing the tenants of that religion or knowing the first thing about it, and you’ll get some idea of what it’s like.
You saw this in the recent Rings of Power marketing, people who claimed that “people of color” could now like Lord of the Rings since they threw a few token racial minorities into it, as if “people of color” couldn’t like Lord of the Rings before. One of the great fallacies of our age is that an individual cannot appreciate a creative work unless this individual is exactly replicated in it, which of course misses the entire point of creativity, which is to go beyond the individual. Those of us who grew up in fandoms know that things like gender or skin color never mattered before non-fans went into those spaces and started making it a problem. Fandom is about bringing people together over a shared love of something, but when you start attacking that love, when you start claiming that it’s racist and sexist and evil, and when you start lying about it, people are naturally going to lash out. And then the very people who attacked the thing you love can claim they’re the victims of toxic fandoms. There have always been provocations against organized religions, but the provocateurs don’t whine when the Christians get mad about an artist putting the crucifix in a jar of urine. The provocateurs know exactly what they’re doing – they’re setting out to stir controversy, and they have every right to do so in a free society. But it’s deeply annoying when those people in Hollywood who do essentially the same thing play victim about it.
The things I wrote about organized religion are the same things you get from a shared fandom. There is a long tradition that gives you a sense of purpose, identity, and shared history. Meeting others with the same beliefs, and living in the same world, is such a relief when you find it. This is why fans are apt to get so upset about things that outsiders might see as minor – changes in character or the rewriting of canon, for instance. I’ll do more on this later with my specific fandoms, but if you don’t see why making Luke Skywalker, the hero of Star Wars, into a broken, embittered old man who rejects all his former teachings might warrant a backlash, then I can’t help you. Just imagine changing the story of Jesus so that he becomes a broken, embittered old man who rejects all his former teachings, and you can imagine the outrage.
As with most things, fandoms are neither wholly good nor wholly bad, and they can suffer the same downsides as organized religion. There can be conformity and righteous indignation and horrible individuals who use the fandom to cloak their own pathologies. I’m certainly not going to defend abuse or violence for any reason. But you have to understand that fandoms are as important and serious to people in them as a religion. I don’t approve of anyone who uses their religion to commit abuse or violence either, but I certainly understand the strength of feeling in those cases. Understanding is not condoning, and it is always the responsibility of everyone to allow for freedom of speech and expression overall. But in return, there should be some acknowledgement that these characters and stories that mean a tremendous amount to people should be treated with respect. Or if they’re not, at least don’t complain when there’s a backlash. I don’t believe in censoring any kind of creativity, but if you’re going to break canon and character, know why you’re doing it, and be able to defend it, rather than just denigrating the things that came before, and then lashing out and blaming others when you get pushback.
I don’t blame anyone for finding that sense of religious awe in a shared story – to me, it’s one of the most human things in the world. And one would think that companies interested in making money would be interested in appealing to the fans of these stories to see why they continue to be popular, rather than insulting the fans and then wondering why nobody wants to see their products anymore. I’m sure Hollywood will find a new source of income soon enough, and I, for one, can’t wait for us geeks to be left alone to love the things we love again, to be ignored and overlooked and blissfully free of the bullies coming into our sandbox and kicking over our toys, and then crying when we leave the playground.
