Really liked this. In addition- isn’t a lot of this just performative “allyship”? If you think misogyny is bad (I certainly do) one thing you could do is, I don’t know, volunteer at a domestic violence center. Or donate to a domestic violence charity. Or something else that actually might make a meaningful change for the cause you claim to care about. Or you could just loudly talk about how you won’t watch anything Joss Whedon made to show your bona fides - and then amp it up by talking about how much you loved his work and what a huge sacrifice it now is to avoid it.... Now you get the social media credit, and it didn’t cost you anything. And I bet in many cases- you’ll still “slip” and watch Firefly on the sly....
ONE: A thing I really appreciate about your writing is that it got me to get over my stupid and largely ignorant animus towards "Girls," which was based almost entirely on my dislike of Lena Dunham as a person and a subconscious belief that a show for and about white millennial women couldn't not be mostly vapid. This is where I return the favor: "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" is really, really, REALLY good. When "The Sopranos" turns 25 in a couple months you're going to read a lot of fawning pieces about how it's the greatest television show ever made. It may very well be in terms of quality. But pretty much every "innovation" credited to the "Sopranos" is something "Buffy" did backwards in high heels, so to speak. This is hard to explain concisely, particularly if you mostly (and imo wrongly) think of Joss Whedon as "The Marvel Quip Guy," but basically, "Buffy" invented a kinda-episodic-kinda-serialized structure for TV drama that basically every single "prestige drama" of the '00s and '10s followed. Mad Men, Breaking Bad, The Good Wife, Justified, The Americans - all shows in that vein.
I will grant you that when the show is bad it's really, really bad, but the best episodes of "Buffy" are up there with any of the all-time greats' (which is insane for a network series with 22-episode seasons and a budget of, like, five dollars). And also David Simon is on record as saying it's the best show ever, yes, even better than "The Wire," which has to count for something!!
TWO: I think the unspoken reason Buffy and Harry Potter fans are so desperate to claw back their beloved fandoms from their creators is that these fandoms are overwhelmingly female, and in general us ladies are waaay less comfortable with "problematic auteurs" than the fellas are. Have any men ever tried to "take back" their fandoms from "problematic" creators in this fashion? Hell, do guys even use the word "problematic" unless they're macking?
It's interesting to compare that Vox piece you quoted about Harry Potter with this one about Rick and Morty:
Weirdly Zen tenor here, for a show whose creators are both serial sexual harassers (and one of whom was ousted for almost certainly beating up his girlfriend)!! I'm being a little reductionist, I know, but it definitely seems like gender is a relevant factor here.
Thanks for returning the favour! My brother has been a long-time huge Buffy fan, so I've always known it's a superb show. Just never felt drawn to sit down and watch all those seasons. Maybe this winter?
I think female fans are often more critical of problematic auteurs than male fans because those auteurs are usually men who do things that harm or piss off women. Rowling may be a woman, but her main crime is attacking transgenderism, which mostly revolves female gender identity (for instance, the title of Matt Walsh's documentary isn't "What Is A Man?"). Then again, things like racism shouldn't be gender specific, yet it still seems like female fans are more likely to criticize or cancel an artist for racism than male fans. It probably has to do with women being incentivized to prize moral virtue (or more cynically, the appearance of it) than men.
Haha, it's tricky to recommend a show that aired for 144 full-hour episodes in 2023... but it's one of my favorites, so I gotta do it. I will say you want to make heavy use of a watch/skip guide for the first two seasons, unless you want to watch Wentworth Miller turn into a fish monster or whatever.
Part of the gender disconnect, I think, is just the core irony of so-called "cancel culture" - it's ostensibly meant to punish artists who don't live up to progressive values, but because the only people who choose what art to consume on that basis are progressives, the only art that can actually get ""cancelled"" on those grounds is media billed towards a progressive audience. (This irony is lost on both progressives who really endorse that sort of approach to media *and* rightists who loudly insist they are being CANCELLED FOR THEIR BELIEFS blah blah blah.)
There probably is an element of moral posture to it - but I also do think that in general, I am more likely to be upset with a male artist who mistreats women than a hypothetical man would be, because stuff like sexual harassment is more of an abstract issue for him. (Not to belittle or ignore female-on-male sexual harassment, but you know what I mean here.)
I agree with all these comments and you spark a really good point, however I think the secret sauce of this online discourse is that when it comes to pop culture fandom a lot of it is dominated by progressives even when progressives arent the core audience. For example the core audience for Doctor Who is British families but its fandom is all progressive Americans. So when James Dreyfuss and Gareth Roberts got canned from doing the radio stuff for some trans comments it’s not something that the vast majority of Doctor Who’s audience would care about but it was done on the whim of the progressive “face” of the fandom. Because if you knew James Dreyfuss for Gimme Gimme Gimme like most Brits do you wouldnt be the kind of guy who cared about problematic or no as that show’s whole premise is gay joke, followed by joke about ugly women, followed by sex joke, followed by gay joke, then repeat
So i think that to an extent cancelling by progressives can cross over and affect other things undemocratically, but the thing you touched on that is so right is that most of this is done democratically by progressives to progressive properties. The arguments against cancel culture arent as intelligent as they could be since the discourse is dominated by the right, but a great argument could be that the more insular these properties get with only employing progressives the worse they get from a writing standpoint
Like for example: The Simpsons at its peak was dominated by progressives and liberals, but its most beloved writer was a conservative libertarian. Now the Simpsons is just progressives but isnt a dominant force. I think even if you dont oppose mono-politics in the writers room on principle I think the argument I would use is that employing a great right wing mind can make the great liberal minds even better and smarter. Now if only great minds still existed!
I think I agree with you on the macro level but take issue with these particular examples. I haven't really paid attention to Doctor Who in the past decade or so (last thing I watched was that recent two-parter, the Bond spoof with Lenny Henry doing a great turn as an evil tech exec - that was quite fun!) but I have a hard time believing they're chasing American *progressives* so much as they are chasing Americans, period - there's way more of us than there are of you, so there's a strong profit motive to chase that potentially larger audience. Not to mention, it looks like the firing happened after RTD was put back in charge of NuWho, and he's pretty stridently pro-LGBT (consider the excellent "Cucumber" and "Banana") and probably looked at Roberts' tweet and said "lol fuck outta here." (And it really was, sorry to say, a really, really bad tweet - the equivalent of tweeting out "what's with these n----rs and their 'ghetto names,' amirite!?" I think that one IT Crowd episode is only slightly offensive, even by modern standards, for reference.) I wouldn't call that "caving."
But yeah, I think a lot of shows are probably worse these days because no one in the writer's room is interested in having characters serve as anything other than mouthpieces for the liberal consensus. (This got really, really obvious in the later seasons of Brooklyn Nine-Nine, in ways that cut against how well-realized the characters were in the early seasons) Simpsons ain't one of them, though: Swartzwelder left the show long after its '90s golden age ended, and the show's current "Oops! All Millennial Progressives" writers' room is making episodes that are genuinely interesting and sometimes even funny in a way the show hasn't been since the Dubya years. I think the politics of the writers is largely orthogonal to what makes media good or bad anyways - I've never seen a non-crank argument for feminists destroying Star Wars, for instance, even if it's obvious the past decade of that franchise has been largely crap.
Really appreciate this comment and dont mind the belatedness. Im glad while we both clearly reach similarish conclusions that you can disagree quite broadly with me otherwise. A lot of diversity of thought I appreciate doesnt even have to be not having the same opinions but just making sure to not share the same thought process. I think thats a big problem nowadays with discourse and creativity is a lot of creators feel like theyre factory-made
And yea I do agree. I think that people are way too hostile now to the idea of political tracts in entertainment or homogenous politics in writer’s rooms that they attack them on that basis. I just feel we should value art that’s interesting regardless of their politics: millennial progressives are capable of great art, to think otherwise would be ignorant: Dali was a fascist, Michael Jackson was a JW, Dostoyevsky was a weird Christian-liberal mix, Tolkien was a reactionary, Carpenter and Paul Verhoven are arguably progressives, Hemingway and Lennon were leftists and they are also all intelligent people who make great entertainment and are pretty political people. If you are a culture warrior youre apparently meant to erase genius and only watch half of these people. It’s madness
And yea I dont think feminism ruining Star Wars is a good argument because Lucas seems like a feminist guy, to an extent. Kathleen Kennedy is blamed a lot and while she does seem a bit wing-brained she is also undeniably a talented producer because she helped Spielberg during his heyday. The problem is if she is the voice behind the production she’s just not a good creative. Good creatives arent merely apolitical or “good politics”, it’s a mixture of practice, raw talent and mental illness. Let’s say she is influencing the stories a lot and is putting feminism in them but is also making them lame: if they replaced her with a talented person who was even more radical than her - like a “kill all men” radical feminist, a TERF, a right wing conspiracy nut or a communist - the art would still be good because her moderately feminist politics are not what makes the stories bad. The stories could be even more political and the politics could be even more radical and as long as the person was talented the stories would be good. Because talented people are often very mentally ill
This article is cathartic to me because it’s a theory I’ve had for a few months tho. Im an aspiring comic book writer and I love lowbrow fandom properties, I think as human beings we need to watch and make a mix of highbrow and lowbrow art to enjoy ourselves and keep ourselves sane. I’ve started to attempt to read and watch more, both to analyze them and to enjoy more healthy varieties of fiction. I still go after what personally appeals to me but hopefully I’ll be a smarter person by the end, if I can read Updike and Woolf in addition to my childhood comfort food of Tolkien and Dahl. A big part of popular media is to give people a way to ground themselves, imo, if you have a new podcast, comic book or TV show episode every week that consistency allows you to go off in other places mentally. When I was a kid and teen I used to watch Doctor Who every week and I think that helped me with my creativity in High School, I would write (terrible) satirical and political poetry and not Science Fiction. Now that these properties are almost universally both terrible and aiming to be prestige I want to try to aim with my work to bring back laughter and entertainment to popular-styled fiction like Spies, Rom Coms, Superheroes, not just in order to make money which is always a factor in wanting to write broad but also to make people happy and then open myself and other writers up to then having more freedom if I can be an incremental change for the better
Now this seems like I ramble but where im going with this is that as a former fandom type as a teen, and as an aspiring writer for things that tend to get fandoms, fandom people terrify me. I also think im familiar with them enough to say that I think fandoms are a detriment to writing as a craft. Fandom celebrities or creatives have sort of become authority figures for writing. Now I dont mean that fandom people are talentless, my girlfriend is a talented artist and writer and she still consumes fanfiction. We both used to create fanfiction, but she agrees with my struggle as a former fan to try to break out of the mindset of writing as a fan. There’s a growth you need to undergo that I think the nature of fandom impedes, because fandoms demand the writing tropes of fanfiction to be used in mainstream fiction and those are incompatible
I’ll quote what I said to her:
“A lot of fandom people criticize tropes from a perspective of writing or reading fanfic. You have different rules for writing fanfics than writing for an author-owned, public domain or with-permission IP. Because with fanfic you can characterize everyone and dont have to worry about pacing or filler because you can publish at your own pace. You also dont have to worry about people being confused having to keep track of characters because familiarity with the source is a given and you also dont have to write for a mainstream audience that will tune out if presented with great risks in storytelling or with characterization that is too dense or with slow pacing or anything else that allows fanfics infinite time theoretically to develop as many characters as possible”
I recently stumbled upon a video from youtube called “Trope Talk - Fridging” by a youtuber called Overly Sarcastic Productions. I havent watched it yet just skimmed the video’s stills which includes its points in the form of cute drawings and then read some dissenting opinions that quoted her but as I havent watched the video I will say that it could be a fine video just mischaracterized but I think im ready in believing this is a video im going to probably hatewatch for my love of bad video essays is enormous. The points I have seen this video bring up are the exact ones I’ve been theorizing are the reasons fandom nerds tend to enjoy bad things, because the videos writing advice is geared towards writing fanfiction
Essentially the video is about a trope called Stuffed in the Fridge, which is where a poorly developed side character (usually a woman) is killed (usually offscreen) to develop the main character (usually a man). As you can see it can get vaguer and vaguer but as with all tv tropes readers the video maker says this is bad writing because it “denies characters their agency” and “everyone is a hero of their own story”. Now this is great advice for a fanfiction, but for a 90 minute movie this is horrible advice. When writing for popular fiction my theory is that you have to balance plot, pacing and character: sometimes you cut a scene explaining a plot hole for better pacing, sometimes you sacrifice pacing to establish more character. Sometimes you need to have poorly developed side characters die because that helps the work kick itself off. Star Wars needed Luke’s aunt and uncle to die to give Luke a call to action, because Luke is the main character and the entire plot is built around him
Fandom types I see get big on socials as either writers or essentially “professional readers” tend to shit on the Hero’s Journey, which Maggie Mae Fish did two videos on how Hero’s Journey is bad seemingly just to defend the sequels, and while Campbell did seem to pull some big reaches and has some problematic opinions I feel the general idea of story structure as he laid it out is an interesting way of gettin people to understand the construction of stories. My theory is Fandom people tend to hate him less because they disagree that stories often unintentionally follow structures or beats or even for his problematic opinions and moreso because giving him credit tears down the utopic ideal that all stories should be real. In comic book fandom the idea of killing a character or making a character do an out of character or wrong action as dictated by the fandom is considered an intense public no-no. Another Youtuber Godzilla Mendoza’s videos on Spider-Man’s Nick Spencer and Zeb Wells run comes to mind, where he suggests some ill part on the writers for killing off Kamala Khan because how dare they kill off a well-liked character for drama? As if she isnt chosen because she’s beloved and if she isnt just going to come back anyway
Creating art should be the *only* acceptable form of fascism, it’s a pass time where you create your own worlds and characters and force them to do whatever you dictate them to do. Meanwhile (and I swear im going somewhere with this) in real life where everyone is losing faith in their institutions and we have fringe idiots becoming elected officials and decrying democratic liberal values, instead of actually trying to use the systems to fight the corruption of mainstream Left parties for crying for change and then closing the door on any policy their progressive voters suggest that could even slightly raise taxes, or Conservative parties getting hijacked by fringe righties who think that the ideal policy to appeal to blue collar workers is to bust their unions *while* crying about pronouns. Instead we have let our governments play in the sandpit and then instead Democratized our art more than any world government. Pop culture is more progressive than ever, more capitalistic than ever, more stale than ever and less free than ever. Whereas the opposite is true for real life, and that’s almost by design it seems: “Look progressives, you got what you wanted!” Major change and appeasement is moreso done in restricting regular people than our institutions. You can rage against the author to get your favorite ship canonized but dont dare think of voting third party, it’s easier to change Azeroth for America (sorry for the schizo rant but I hope I tied those in together well)
Which brings up your quote here:
“That’s the Harry Potter we all created together, without J.K. Rowling.”
To me thats like if Beatlemania said the Beatles are overrated, to steal from a quote from Norm Macdonald A similar act happened with Minecraft, where when Markus Persson became terminally online people started a meme called “Hatsune Miku created Minecraft”, in what I can only describe as the Cold Culture War where two groups of terminally online losers try to one up eachother in patheticness (im no better for having known what any of these things i describe mean). Because only someone similar to Notch in being equally terminally online would bring up some Anime Vocaloid character to argue for still being able to play Minecraft and “own him”. However the creators of that meme then said you cant use it for JK Rowling because “her bigotry is baked into the setting”. Which probably refers to all the stuff that reformed Potter fans try to tie to some sort of bigotry, like that JK Rowling had something against Jews because she made “hooked nosed Goblins” bankers (which I recently read that the idea of Goblins being hooked nosed isnt even from her books). Now that you hate someone you have a spin in your head that theyre rotten to the core in every creative avenue. A similar backpedal of a meme happened when the Bechdel Test lady responded to someone calling out some Asian-led film as failing the test of having two women not talk about men - 49 percent of the population - by saying “if it has all Asians it’s fine that it doesnt pass”. Now even the people who created the worst memes in pop culture cant even commit to their terrible analysis
Im not sure where im going with this but thanks for the article and I’ll probably remember what my greater point is later and put it in a reply lol. Basically im addicted to reading internet gossip, fandoms have a lot of it and I hate when people who soak themselves in fandom become famous
Thanks for the in-depth reply! I recently came across a YA novel and the blurb explicitly marketed it as a "TikTok sensation" with X and Y tropes. It really did seem like MadLibs lit (MadLit?).
"Her bigotry is baked into the setting"? Do they realize that Harry Potter is just a gigantic posh British public school fantasy? If they really were so concerned about bigotry and colonialism and classism like they claim, they would've scoffed off Harry Potter a long time ago.
Those critiques weren’t enough to turn the Internet SJW population against the series, but JKR’s tweets about trans issues were. And almost immediately, everyone was backing up their new anti-Harry Potter position by pointing to how antisemitic and fatphobic the books were! Compare the refrain of “JKR’s goblins are an antisemitic stereotype and buying Hogwarts Legacy hurts your trans *and Jewish* friends!” from when that game came out to the deafening silence before that.
It’s just really funny to me that people are now talking about how the books are *inherently* transphobic, when nobody was even able to discern that fact until they read some tweets the author posted.
It all reveals that the drive to cancel is not about protecting children or some group, but instead about making sure only the morally deserving (by their standards) are bestowed the highest honours of not just money, but more importantly to these crowds, fame (and more specifically, artistic recognition). I've written before about how to many people, especially in this economy of excess and comfort, being an artist is the most glorious achievement. And because so few will ever succeed in that endeavour, the only way they can hold their jealousy and resentment in check is if those who succeed at least obey every tenet of their moral code. Otherwise, the world would be too unfair and their hearts would break.
Yea I think whats kind of disturbing about fandom people is how iconoclastic they are. Like the #DisruptTexts thing, where YA readers try to get Mark Twain replaced by a book that’s basically just The Last Airbender fanfic
And I only recently watched the Harry Potter movies out of curiosity and like yea there’s obviously bits that come off as out of touch and weird, but I feel like there’s this weird aversion to cringe and cliche. There cant be one flaw in a work or else this specific kind of person will stop reading it in favor of infinitely more flawed works. What I found interesting is the Harry Potter movies despite their heavy criticism I found surprisingly felt like real movies. There was set up, pay off, each character had a basic gimmick that factored into the plot. Yet there’s a massive backlash as if Harry Potter is bad storytelling, and CIA-funded MCU is good storytelling. In fact it seems that fandom people are only against the MCU when it tries to have a character with moral greyness, the aforementioned Overly Sarcastic thought it was unrealistic that the Purple Geologist would love his daughter because he’s a bad guy
Idk, it’s a weird thing. Sometimes people have to accept that a lot of escapism is problematic and unrealistic. People want to be superheroes, spies or go to a magic boarding school because theyre kind of selfish goals. No one wants to fly like Superman or use the force because of the altruism, it’s so they can cut thru traffic or get a beer easier
was gonna put this in an edit: tho ofc. there’s two things I disagree with: I think Whedon was moreso disliked beyond hypocrisy (the worst part) for sleeping with fans and crew members. Im sure all of these incidents were technically consensual but he’s a famous guy using his fame and power for sex and I dont think thats something a leader should do. If youre a college teacher and fall in love with a student and date after graduation that’s fine, if youre actively fucking them on your desk that’s not
I also feel like the backlash against male feminists is just another sort of overcorrection of social media lionizing some strangers as great men or women and then treating them as irredeemable monsters when they fail. Fatshaming Lizzo made you a 4chan ince basement dwelling chud, as soon as she was accused of sexual assault people didnt wait for it to be proven in court before they trotted out all the Lizzo is fat jokes that were beneath them five minutes ago. “R. Belly” was my favorite
“Fatshaming Lizzo made you a 4chan ince basement dwelling chud, as soon as she was accused of sexual assault people didnt wait for it to be proven in court before they trotted out all the Lizzo is fat jokes that were beneath them five minutes ago.”
I had no idea Lizzo had been accused of sexual assault, but yeah, this phenomenon is one of my pet peeves in general. We saw it with the “lol Donald Trump is fat” discourse, too: apparently it’s just fine to make fun of him for being fat because he is Teh Evulz, and there’s no need to take into account the people looking on and thinking “well, shit, I’m also fat…I hope I never get on your bad side!”
I belong to one of those Facebook groups that’s just called “[Name of Hobby] Memes” — as the name suggests, it mostly consists of funny pictures, some only tangentially related to the hobby. One day, shortly after Mitch McConnell’s stroke/seizure/whatever that thing was, someone posted a meme that included that picture of him. I remember thinking that the meme itself wasn’t even that bad, but some of the comments got really cruel. A few people posted comments calling that out, but were met with responses like “how do those boots taste?”, “stop white knighting for fascists”, and “he voted for policies that caused people’s deaths, therefore nothing you can say about him is out of bounds.”
In fact, by the time I even saw the post, a mod had closed the comments with a note declaring that the pro-mockery side was 100% in the right and that “Mitch McConnell will be fine, he has better healthcare than any of us, and he doesn’t need you defending him.”
Now, I’m someone who proudly votes D and hates McConnell’s politics…but these people weren’t making fun of anything he actually did or voted for, they’re making fun of him because he had a medical issue that *could happen to anyone*. I believe we used to call that…”ableism”?
It used to be that in polite company, people operated on a principle of “don’t make fun of people’s appearances or bodies or other stuff they can’t control”. But now it seems that we’ve left that behind in favor of “don’t make fun of people for those things, unless they’re a bad enough person.” Then all bets are off and even straightforward instances of ableism are absolutely fine!
And whether Mitch McConnell has good healthcare is beside the point. I don’t object to the posts of cruel mockery because of him in particular, I object to them because I — like all of us — am a human with a body that can have embarrassing problems, and from behind the veil of ignorance, I would want to live in a world where making fun of other people for that just isn’t done.
Ive seen the Trump is fat discourse yea, tho i also saw people like John Green say “dont fatshame Trump because fat people out there who are killing it will get offended” and like it feels like the discorse is a war between hypocritices and people with consistent morality but are just utterly lame about trying to articulate that
The Mitch McConnel thing is stupid because McConnel is one of the few Repubs who took the Jan 6 stuff seriously so hes a good one to have on your side even if you hate his politics but also it never goes both ways. Theres a ton of Blue Collar Repubs who can look at the price of their gas and could say Biden is killing them, but i’ve never seen anyone who isnt an out and out communist argue that its okay to make fun of his falling down the stairs. Hell liberals doxed the guy who said “let’s go brandon” on a phone call to him
Idk theres this weird thing where to progressives even the most moderate members of the other side are iredeemably evil and then people on their side who they claim not to like get constantly asslicked. It literally took supporting Israel, something he’s always done, for progs to actually call out Biden’s rightoid rhetoric beyond fringe leftist weirdos. It’s the same thing with how to online left Palestinians are never anti-semetic and HAMAs are freedom fighters but their parents who “dont get trans stuff” are genocidal
Its a weird situation all round! Oh well I guess i’d rather have progressive hypocrites than centrist ghouls? I say that as someone who probably would vote for centrist ghouls 99 percent of the time lol gotta keep my guys in check
Also, re: the first paragraph: wait, you've never seen "Speed" !?!? BRUH. Top 10 action film all time, ezpz. If it had Keanu in a wet T-shirt a la "Point Break" it'd be better than "Citizen Kane," on god.
Really liked this. In addition- isn’t a lot of this just performative “allyship”? If you think misogyny is bad (I certainly do) one thing you could do is, I don’t know, volunteer at a domestic violence center. Or donate to a domestic violence charity. Or something else that actually might make a meaningful change for the cause you claim to care about. Or you could just loudly talk about how you won’t watch anything Joss Whedon made to show your bona fides - and then amp it up by talking about how much you loved his work and what a huge sacrifice it now is to avoid it.... Now you get the social media credit, and it didn’t cost you anything. And I bet in many cases- you’ll still “slip” and watch Firefly on the sly....
This is a great piece. A couple things.
ONE: A thing I really appreciate about your writing is that it got me to get over my stupid and largely ignorant animus towards "Girls," which was based almost entirely on my dislike of Lena Dunham as a person and a subconscious belief that a show for and about white millennial women couldn't not be mostly vapid. This is where I return the favor: "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" is really, really, REALLY good. When "The Sopranos" turns 25 in a couple months you're going to read a lot of fawning pieces about how it's the greatest television show ever made. It may very well be in terms of quality. But pretty much every "innovation" credited to the "Sopranos" is something "Buffy" did backwards in high heels, so to speak. This is hard to explain concisely, particularly if you mostly (and imo wrongly) think of Joss Whedon as "The Marvel Quip Guy," but basically, "Buffy" invented a kinda-episodic-kinda-serialized structure for TV drama that basically every single "prestige drama" of the '00s and '10s followed. Mad Men, Breaking Bad, The Good Wife, Justified, The Americans - all shows in that vein.
I will grant you that when the show is bad it's really, really bad, but the best episodes of "Buffy" are up there with any of the all-time greats' (which is insane for a network series with 22-episode seasons and a budget of, like, five dollars). And also David Simon is on record as saying it's the best show ever, yes, even better than "The Wire," which has to count for something!!
TWO: I think the unspoken reason Buffy and Harry Potter fans are so desperate to claw back their beloved fandoms from their creators is that these fandoms are overwhelmingly female, and in general us ladies are waaay less comfortable with "problematic auteurs" than the fellas are. Have any men ever tried to "take back" their fandoms from "problematic" creators in this fashion? Hell, do guys even use the word "problematic" unless they're macking?
It's interesting to compare that Vox piece you quoted about Harry Potter with this one about Rick and Morty:
https://www.vox.com/culture/23589595/rick-morty-justin-roiland-dan-harmon-save
Weirdly Zen tenor here, for a show whose creators are both serial sexual harassers (and one of whom was ousted for almost certainly beating up his girlfriend)!! I'm being a little reductionist, I know, but it definitely seems like gender is a relevant factor here.
Thanks for returning the favour! My brother has been a long-time huge Buffy fan, so I've always known it's a superb show. Just never felt drawn to sit down and watch all those seasons. Maybe this winter?
I think female fans are often more critical of problematic auteurs than male fans because those auteurs are usually men who do things that harm or piss off women. Rowling may be a woman, but her main crime is attacking transgenderism, which mostly revolves female gender identity (for instance, the title of Matt Walsh's documentary isn't "What Is A Man?"). Then again, things like racism shouldn't be gender specific, yet it still seems like female fans are more likely to criticize or cancel an artist for racism than male fans. It probably has to do with women being incentivized to prize moral virtue (or more cynically, the appearance of it) than men.
Haha, it's tricky to recommend a show that aired for 144 full-hour episodes in 2023... but it's one of my favorites, so I gotta do it. I will say you want to make heavy use of a watch/skip guide for the first two seasons, unless you want to watch Wentworth Miller turn into a fish monster or whatever.
Part of the gender disconnect, I think, is just the core irony of so-called "cancel culture" - it's ostensibly meant to punish artists who don't live up to progressive values, but because the only people who choose what art to consume on that basis are progressives, the only art that can actually get ""cancelled"" on those grounds is media billed towards a progressive audience. (This irony is lost on both progressives who really endorse that sort of approach to media *and* rightists who loudly insist they are being CANCELLED FOR THEIR BELIEFS blah blah blah.)
There probably is an element of moral posture to it - but I also do think that in general, I am more likely to be upset with a male artist who mistreats women than a hypothetical man would be, because stuff like sexual harassment is more of an abstract issue for him. (Not to belittle or ignore female-on-male sexual harassment, but you know what I mean here.)
I agree with all these comments and you spark a really good point, however I think the secret sauce of this online discourse is that when it comes to pop culture fandom a lot of it is dominated by progressives even when progressives arent the core audience. For example the core audience for Doctor Who is British families but its fandom is all progressive Americans. So when James Dreyfuss and Gareth Roberts got canned from doing the radio stuff for some trans comments it’s not something that the vast majority of Doctor Who’s audience would care about but it was done on the whim of the progressive “face” of the fandom. Because if you knew James Dreyfuss for Gimme Gimme Gimme like most Brits do you wouldnt be the kind of guy who cared about problematic or no as that show’s whole premise is gay joke, followed by joke about ugly women, followed by sex joke, followed by gay joke, then repeat
So i think that to an extent cancelling by progressives can cross over and affect other things undemocratically, but the thing you touched on that is so right is that most of this is done democratically by progressives to progressive properties. The arguments against cancel culture arent as intelligent as they could be since the discourse is dominated by the right, but a great argument could be that the more insular these properties get with only employing progressives the worse they get from a writing standpoint
Like for example: The Simpsons at its peak was dominated by progressives and liberals, but its most beloved writer was a conservative libertarian. Now the Simpsons is just progressives but isnt a dominant force. I think even if you dont oppose mono-politics in the writers room on principle I think the argument I would use is that employing a great right wing mind can make the great liberal minds even better and smarter. Now if only great minds still existed!
Sorry for the belated reply here.
I think I agree with you on the macro level but take issue with these particular examples. I haven't really paid attention to Doctor Who in the past decade or so (last thing I watched was that recent two-parter, the Bond spoof with Lenny Henry doing a great turn as an evil tech exec - that was quite fun!) but I have a hard time believing they're chasing American *progressives* so much as they are chasing Americans, period - there's way more of us than there are of you, so there's a strong profit motive to chase that potentially larger audience. Not to mention, it looks like the firing happened after RTD was put back in charge of NuWho, and he's pretty stridently pro-LGBT (consider the excellent "Cucumber" and "Banana") and probably looked at Roberts' tweet and said "lol fuck outta here." (And it really was, sorry to say, a really, really bad tweet - the equivalent of tweeting out "what's with these n----rs and their 'ghetto names,' amirite!?" I think that one IT Crowd episode is only slightly offensive, even by modern standards, for reference.) I wouldn't call that "caving."
But yeah, I think a lot of shows are probably worse these days because no one in the writer's room is interested in having characters serve as anything other than mouthpieces for the liberal consensus. (This got really, really obvious in the later seasons of Brooklyn Nine-Nine, in ways that cut against how well-realized the characters were in the early seasons) Simpsons ain't one of them, though: Swartzwelder left the show long after its '90s golden age ended, and the show's current "Oops! All Millennial Progressives" writers' room is making episodes that are genuinely interesting and sometimes even funny in a way the show hasn't been since the Dubya years. I think the politics of the writers is largely orthogonal to what makes media good or bad anyways - I've never seen a non-crank argument for feminists destroying Star Wars, for instance, even if it's obvious the past decade of that franchise has been largely crap.
Really appreciate this comment and dont mind the belatedness. Im glad while we both clearly reach similarish conclusions that you can disagree quite broadly with me otherwise. A lot of diversity of thought I appreciate doesnt even have to be not having the same opinions but just making sure to not share the same thought process. I think thats a big problem nowadays with discourse and creativity is a lot of creators feel like theyre factory-made
And yea I do agree. I think that people are way too hostile now to the idea of political tracts in entertainment or homogenous politics in writer’s rooms that they attack them on that basis. I just feel we should value art that’s interesting regardless of their politics: millennial progressives are capable of great art, to think otherwise would be ignorant: Dali was a fascist, Michael Jackson was a JW, Dostoyevsky was a weird Christian-liberal mix, Tolkien was a reactionary, Carpenter and Paul Verhoven are arguably progressives, Hemingway and Lennon were leftists and they are also all intelligent people who make great entertainment and are pretty political people. If you are a culture warrior youre apparently meant to erase genius and only watch half of these people. It’s madness
And yea I dont think feminism ruining Star Wars is a good argument because Lucas seems like a feminist guy, to an extent. Kathleen Kennedy is blamed a lot and while she does seem a bit wing-brained she is also undeniably a talented producer because she helped Spielberg during his heyday. The problem is if she is the voice behind the production she’s just not a good creative. Good creatives arent merely apolitical or “good politics”, it’s a mixture of practice, raw talent and mental illness. Let’s say she is influencing the stories a lot and is putting feminism in them but is also making them lame: if they replaced her with a talented person who was even more radical than her - like a “kill all men” radical feminist, a TERF, a right wing conspiracy nut or a communist - the art would still be good because her moderately feminist politics are not what makes the stories bad. The stories could be even more political and the politics could be even more radical and as long as the person was talented the stories would be good. Because talented people are often very mentally ill
Loving this Substack. I don’t have anything really meaningful to say other than I really appreciate the thinking you are doing here.
Thanks for the generous words!
This article is cathartic to me because it’s a theory I’ve had for a few months tho. Im an aspiring comic book writer and I love lowbrow fandom properties, I think as human beings we need to watch and make a mix of highbrow and lowbrow art to enjoy ourselves and keep ourselves sane. I’ve started to attempt to read and watch more, both to analyze them and to enjoy more healthy varieties of fiction. I still go after what personally appeals to me but hopefully I’ll be a smarter person by the end, if I can read Updike and Woolf in addition to my childhood comfort food of Tolkien and Dahl. A big part of popular media is to give people a way to ground themselves, imo, if you have a new podcast, comic book or TV show episode every week that consistency allows you to go off in other places mentally. When I was a kid and teen I used to watch Doctor Who every week and I think that helped me with my creativity in High School, I would write (terrible) satirical and political poetry and not Science Fiction. Now that these properties are almost universally both terrible and aiming to be prestige I want to try to aim with my work to bring back laughter and entertainment to popular-styled fiction like Spies, Rom Coms, Superheroes, not just in order to make money which is always a factor in wanting to write broad but also to make people happy and then open myself and other writers up to then having more freedom if I can be an incremental change for the better
Now this seems like I ramble but where im going with this is that as a former fandom type as a teen, and as an aspiring writer for things that tend to get fandoms, fandom people terrify me. I also think im familiar with them enough to say that I think fandoms are a detriment to writing as a craft. Fandom celebrities or creatives have sort of become authority figures for writing. Now I dont mean that fandom people are talentless, my girlfriend is a talented artist and writer and she still consumes fanfiction. We both used to create fanfiction, but she agrees with my struggle as a former fan to try to break out of the mindset of writing as a fan. There’s a growth you need to undergo that I think the nature of fandom impedes, because fandoms demand the writing tropes of fanfiction to be used in mainstream fiction and those are incompatible
I’ll quote what I said to her:
“A lot of fandom people criticize tropes from a perspective of writing or reading fanfic. You have different rules for writing fanfics than writing for an author-owned, public domain or with-permission IP. Because with fanfic you can characterize everyone and dont have to worry about pacing or filler because you can publish at your own pace. You also dont have to worry about people being confused having to keep track of characters because familiarity with the source is a given and you also dont have to write for a mainstream audience that will tune out if presented with great risks in storytelling or with characterization that is too dense or with slow pacing or anything else that allows fanfics infinite time theoretically to develop as many characters as possible”
I recently stumbled upon a video from youtube called “Trope Talk - Fridging” by a youtuber called Overly Sarcastic Productions. I havent watched it yet just skimmed the video’s stills which includes its points in the form of cute drawings and then read some dissenting opinions that quoted her but as I havent watched the video I will say that it could be a fine video just mischaracterized but I think im ready in believing this is a video im going to probably hatewatch for my love of bad video essays is enormous. The points I have seen this video bring up are the exact ones I’ve been theorizing are the reasons fandom nerds tend to enjoy bad things, because the videos writing advice is geared towards writing fanfiction
Essentially the video is about a trope called Stuffed in the Fridge, which is where a poorly developed side character (usually a woman) is killed (usually offscreen) to develop the main character (usually a man). As you can see it can get vaguer and vaguer but as with all tv tropes readers the video maker says this is bad writing because it “denies characters their agency” and “everyone is a hero of their own story”. Now this is great advice for a fanfiction, but for a 90 minute movie this is horrible advice. When writing for popular fiction my theory is that you have to balance plot, pacing and character: sometimes you cut a scene explaining a plot hole for better pacing, sometimes you sacrifice pacing to establish more character. Sometimes you need to have poorly developed side characters die because that helps the work kick itself off. Star Wars needed Luke’s aunt and uncle to die to give Luke a call to action, because Luke is the main character and the entire plot is built around him
Fandom types I see get big on socials as either writers or essentially “professional readers” tend to shit on the Hero’s Journey, which Maggie Mae Fish did two videos on how Hero’s Journey is bad seemingly just to defend the sequels, and while Campbell did seem to pull some big reaches and has some problematic opinions I feel the general idea of story structure as he laid it out is an interesting way of gettin people to understand the construction of stories. My theory is Fandom people tend to hate him less because they disagree that stories often unintentionally follow structures or beats or even for his problematic opinions and moreso because giving him credit tears down the utopic ideal that all stories should be real. In comic book fandom the idea of killing a character or making a character do an out of character or wrong action as dictated by the fandom is considered an intense public no-no. Another Youtuber Godzilla Mendoza’s videos on Spider-Man’s Nick Spencer and Zeb Wells run comes to mind, where he suggests some ill part on the writers for killing off Kamala Khan because how dare they kill off a well-liked character for drama? As if she isnt chosen because she’s beloved and if she isnt just going to come back anyway
Creating art should be the *only* acceptable form of fascism, it’s a pass time where you create your own worlds and characters and force them to do whatever you dictate them to do. Meanwhile (and I swear im going somewhere with this) in real life where everyone is losing faith in their institutions and we have fringe idiots becoming elected officials and decrying democratic liberal values, instead of actually trying to use the systems to fight the corruption of mainstream Left parties for crying for change and then closing the door on any policy their progressive voters suggest that could even slightly raise taxes, or Conservative parties getting hijacked by fringe righties who think that the ideal policy to appeal to blue collar workers is to bust their unions *while* crying about pronouns. Instead we have let our governments play in the sandpit and then instead Democratized our art more than any world government. Pop culture is more progressive than ever, more capitalistic than ever, more stale than ever and less free than ever. Whereas the opposite is true for real life, and that’s almost by design it seems: “Look progressives, you got what you wanted!” Major change and appeasement is moreso done in restricting regular people than our institutions. You can rage against the author to get your favorite ship canonized but dont dare think of voting third party, it’s easier to change Azeroth for America (sorry for the schizo rant but I hope I tied those in together well)
Which brings up your quote here:
“That’s the Harry Potter we all created together, without J.K. Rowling.”
To me thats like if Beatlemania said the Beatles are overrated, to steal from a quote from Norm Macdonald A similar act happened with Minecraft, where when Markus Persson became terminally online people started a meme called “Hatsune Miku created Minecraft”, in what I can only describe as the Cold Culture War where two groups of terminally online losers try to one up eachother in patheticness (im no better for having known what any of these things i describe mean). Because only someone similar to Notch in being equally terminally online would bring up some Anime Vocaloid character to argue for still being able to play Minecraft and “own him”. However the creators of that meme then said you cant use it for JK Rowling because “her bigotry is baked into the setting”. Which probably refers to all the stuff that reformed Potter fans try to tie to some sort of bigotry, like that JK Rowling had something against Jews because she made “hooked nosed Goblins” bankers (which I recently read that the idea of Goblins being hooked nosed isnt even from her books). Now that you hate someone you have a spin in your head that theyre rotten to the core in every creative avenue. A similar backpedal of a meme happened when the Bechdel Test lady responded to someone calling out some Asian-led film as failing the test of having two women not talk about men - 49 percent of the population - by saying “if it has all Asians it’s fine that it doesnt pass”. Now even the people who created the worst memes in pop culture cant even commit to their terrible analysis
Im not sure where im going with this but thanks for the article and I’ll probably remember what my greater point is later and put it in a reply lol. Basically im addicted to reading internet gossip, fandoms have a lot of it and I hate when people who soak themselves in fandom become famous
Thanks for the in-depth reply! I recently came across a YA novel and the blurb explicitly marketed it as a "TikTok sensation" with X and Y tropes. It really did seem like MadLibs lit (MadLit?).
"Her bigotry is baked into the setting"? Do they realize that Harry Potter is just a gigantic posh British public school fantasy? If they really were so concerned about bigotry and colonialism and classism like they claim, they would've scoffed off Harry Potter a long time ago.
“they would've scoffed off Harry Potter a long time ago”
Yeah, this seems to be a standard step on the Stations of the Cancellation: the insistence that the work was never any good anyway. (For instance, Jesse Singal recently wrote about Scott Adams/Dilbert and there was a comment thread about the phenomenon: https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/on-scott-adams-free-speech-and-the/comment/13280813)
Prior to December of 2019, when Rowling made her infamous tweet, the prevailing view on the internet was that Harry Potter was good and wholesome and reading it made kids more empathetic. Criticisms of the series on the grounds that it was antisemitic (for instance: https://animatedamerican.tumblr.com/post/125433508357/so-now-jkr-is-anti-semitic-bc-snape-has-a-big-nose/amp, https://www.tumblr.com/littlegoythings/105532044427/12-im-a-huge-harry-potter-fan-myself-and-from?source=share) were generally not taken seriously outside of the Jewish blogosphere. I would guess the same was true of fatphobia-based critiques (e.g. the characterization of Dudley is stereotypical, lazy writing), though I didn’t follow those discussions at the time.
Those critiques weren’t enough to turn the Internet SJW population against the series, but JKR’s tweets about trans issues were. And almost immediately, everyone was backing up their new anti-Harry Potter position by pointing to how antisemitic and fatphobic the books were! Compare the refrain of “JKR’s goblins are an antisemitic stereotype and buying Hogwarts Legacy hurts your trans *and Jewish* friends!” from when that game came out to the deafening silence before that.
It’s just really funny to me that people are now talking about how the books are *inherently* transphobic, when nobody was even able to discern that fact until they read some tweets the author posted.
It all reveals that the drive to cancel is not about protecting children or some group, but instead about making sure only the morally deserving (by their standards) are bestowed the highest honours of not just money, but more importantly to these crowds, fame (and more specifically, artistic recognition). I've written before about how to many people, especially in this economy of excess and comfort, being an artist is the most glorious achievement. And because so few will ever succeed in that endeavour, the only way they can hold their jealousy and resentment in check is if those who succeed at least obey every tenet of their moral code. Otherwise, the world would be too unfair and their hearts would break.
Yea I think whats kind of disturbing about fandom people is how iconoclastic they are. Like the #DisruptTexts thing, where YA readers try to get Mark Twain replaced by a book that’s basically just The Last Airbender fanfic
And I only recently watched the Harry Potter movies out of curiosity and like yea there’s obviously bits that come off as out of touch and weird, but I feel like there’s this weird aversion to cringe and cliche. There cant be one flaw in a work or else this specific kind of person will stop reading it in favor of infinitely more flawed works. What I found interesting is the Harry Potter movies despite their heavy criticism I found surprisingly felt like real movies. There was set up, pay off, each character had a basic gimmick that factored into the plot. Yet there’s a massive backlash as if Harry Potter is bad storytelling, and CIA-funded MCU is good storytelling. In fact it seems that fandom people are only against the MCU when it tries to have a character with moral greyness, the aforementioned Overly Sarcastic thought it was unrealistic that the Purple Geologist would love his daughter because he’s a bad guy
Idk, it’s a weird thing. Sometimes people have to accept that a lot of escapism is problematic and unrealistic. People want to be superheroes, spies or go to a magic boarding school because theyre kind of selfish goals. No one wants to fly like Superman or use the force because of the altruism, it’s so they can cut thru traffic or get a beer easier
Fan-sourced Beatles writing and recording fan-sourced Beatles songs....
Now that's a thought.
Axtually, years ago, I ran across something like that. It was really bad.
was gonna put this in an edit: tho ofc. there’s two things I disagree with: I think Whedon was moreso disliked beyond hypocrisy (the worst part) for sleeping with fans and crew members. Im sure all of these incidents were technically consensual but he’s a famous guy using his fame and power for sex and I dont think thats something a leader should do. If youre a college teacher and fall in love with a student and date after graduation that’s fine, if youre actively fucking them on your desk that’s not
I also feel like the backlash against male feminists is just another sort of overcorrection of social media lionizing some strangers as great men or women and then treating them as irredeemable monsters when they fail. Fatshaming Lizzo made you a 4chan ince basement dwelling chud, as soon as she was accused of sexual assault people didnt wait for it to be proven in court before they trotted out all the Lizzo is fat jokes that were beneath them five minutes ago. “R. Belly” was my favorite
“Fatshaming Lizzo made you a 4chan ince basement dwelling chud, as soon as she was accused of sexual assault people didnt wait for it to be proven in court before they trotted out all the Lizzo is fat jokes that were beneath them five minutes ago.”
I had no idea Lizzo had been accused of sexual assault, but yeah, this phenomenon is one of my pet peeves in general. We saw it with the “lol Donald Trump is fat” discourse, too: apparently it’s just fine to make fun of him for being fat because he is Teh Evulz, and there’s no need to take into account the people looking on and thinking “well, shit, I’m also fat…I hope I never get on your bad side!”
I belong to one of those Facebook groups that’s just called “[Name of Hobby] Memes” — as the name suggests, it mostly consists of funny pictures, some only tangentially related to the hobby. One day, shortly after Mitch McConnell’s stroke/seizure/whatever that thing was, someone posted a meme that included that picture of him. I remember thinking that the meme itself wasn’t even that bad, but some of the comments got really cruel. A few people posted comments calling that out, but were met with responses like “how do those boots taste?”, “stop white knighting for fascists”, and “he voted for policies that caused people’s deaths, therefore nothing you can say about him is out of bounds.”
In fact, by the time I even saw the post, a mod had closed the comments with a note declaring that the pro-mockery side was 100% in the right and that “Mitch McConnell will be fine, he has better healthcare than any of us, and he doesn’t need you defending him.”
Now, I’m someone who proudly votes D and hates McConnell’s politics…but these people weren’t making fun of anything he actually did or voted for, they’re making fun of him because he had a medical issue that *could happen to anyone*. I believe we used to call that…”ableism”?
It used to be that in polite company, people operated on a principle of “don’t make fun of people’s appearances or bodies or other stuff they can’t control”. But now it seems that we’ve left that behind in favor of “don’t make fun of people for those things, unless they’re a bad enough person.” Then all bets are off and even straightforward instances of ableism are absolutely fine!
And whether Mitch McConnell has good healthcare is beside the point. I don’t object to the posts of cruel mockery because of him in particular, I object to them because I — like all of us — am a human with a body that can have embarrassing problems, and from behind the veil of ignorance, I would want to live in a world where making fun of other people for that just isn’t done.
Ive seen the Trump is fat discourse yea, tho i also saw people like John Green say “dont fatshame Trump because fat people out there who are killing it will get offended” and like it feels like the discorse is a war between hypocritices and people with consistent morality but are just utterly lame about trying to articulate that
The Mitch McConnel thing is stupid because McConnel is one of the few Repubs who took the Jan 6 stuff seriously so hes a good one to have on your side even if you hate his politics but also it never goes both ways. Theres a ton of Blue Collar Repubs who can look at the price of their gas and could say Biden is killing them, but i’ve never seen anyone who isnt an out and out communist argue that its okay to make fun of his falling down the stairs. Hell liberals doxed the guy who said “let’s go brandon” on a phone call to him
Idk theres this weird thing where to progressives even the most moderate members of the other side are iredeemably evil and then people on their side who they claim not to like get constantly asslicked. It literally took supporting Israel, something he’s always done, for progs to actually call out Biden’s rightoid rhetoric beyond fringe leftist weirdos. It’s the same thing with how to online left Palestinians are never anti-semetic and HAMAs are freedom fighters but their parents who “dont get trans stuff” are genocidal
Its a weird situation all round! Oh well I guess i’d rather have progressive hypocrites than centrist ghouls? I say that as someone who probably would vote for centrist ghouls 99 percent of the time lol gotta keep my guys in check
Also, re: the first paragraph: wait, you've never seen "Speed" !?!? BRUH. Top 10 action film all time, ezpz. If it had Keanu in a wet T-shirt a la "Point Break" it'd be better than "Citizen Kane," on god.