There was a story that went around this week about movie studios' woes with "superfans."
A "superfan" is somebody who has attached their whole personality to hating an intellectual property they loved in their youth.
Full Essay: https://www.the-reframe.com/killing-our-way-to-paradise/
Killing Our Way To Paradise
"One really violent day" in our morally underdeveloped nation. Supremacist superfans, Star Wars, and the popular insistence within a violent empire of owning heroism as exclusive property.
These hate nerds subject the creators of popular children's movies to threats and other harassment in targeted online brigades, with special vitriol saved for actors who commit the unforgivable crime of depicting a hero while being not white and/or not male and/or not straight.
The story informs us that studios, faced with persistent targeted harassment, have taken many steps to address the matter, some of which involve capitulating and focus-grouping the superfans to see what they want and giving it to them, which is how you get The Rise of Skywalker.
Superfans will tell you they engage in such antisocial behavior because their love of the work is such that they cannot abide any impurities to its perfect formula. My observation is that they seek purity for a different reason.
I think superfans seek purity in their chosen children's entertainments because they have stored their beliefs, unexamined, deep in the dank basements of their minds and souls, and down there in the dark, those beliefs have gone to rot.
In their minds, heroes are people just like them, that is to say people who are white and straight and male, and these people are heroes because they kill all the people not like them, which creates a paradise in the world of the movie, at least until it's time for more movies.
In the mind of superfans, it's not just that white straight males are the only appropriate heroes.
It's that white straight males own heroism itself as their exclusive inherited property.
I suspect the superfan problem with heroes who are not white and not male isn't actually that there are no white male heroes for them to enjoy, because there's always going to be a straight white dude in the mix; he's the peanut in the mixed nut assortment of popular fiction.
I suspect the problem for the superfans is that the white male heroes in these modern movies do something the superfan cannot, which is demonstrate a belief not white not male not straight people are heroes, too.
This inclusion makes characters who are not straight and white and male a part of *us,* which means that they are not a part of the people who need to be killed and killed until they are gone, at which point paradise happens.
And, because these white straight male heroes honor the humanity of people who are not male or white or straight, these supremacist superfans find themselves unable to identify anymore—not only with the characters they despise, but even with *the white straight male heroes.*
eep in the basements of their minds and souls, they now identify themselves with the villains, who despite their obvious villainy still believe that power is best effected and protected by killing until none remain to kill, and still believe that power belongs only to the pure.
So superfans need their children's-movies-for-adults to be pure again in a way that allows them to identify as heroes again. That's what I think.
Star Wars superfans are probably the worst of the bunch. Nobody hates Star Wars like a Star Wars superfan.
There was a really cool and interesting installment in the Star Wars series a few years ago, and it ended with the conclusion that heroism had nothing to do with bloodlines and was accessible to all.
It featured a female protagonist and a Black hero and a female Asian hero. It also had a hero in the classic white dude mold who failed to listen to leadership and created a big problem by thinking he knew best and going it alone.
It featured another classic hero—a returning one, the protagonist of previous films—who had rejected star wars altogether, and no longer wanted to wield his weapon, and no longer trusted the old narratives he'd been given.
Eventually he saves the day by sacrificing his life without killing anybody (spoilers on a 7-year-old movie). This was exactly in keeping with his training from the original films, by the way; you could even say that it was the ultimate fulfillment of the character's moral arc.
No matter: the superfans lost their few remaining marbles and have never gotten them back. And now studios are asking them for advice, in a futile attempt to avoid being harassed forever by these few, these angry few, this band of boogers.
The superfans will be rewarded for antisocial behavior by being allowed to set boundaries of permission when it comes to how much not-white not-male not-straight should appear on screen.
To not really change the subject, Nazism is back.
In increasingly open and alarming ways, Nazism is the animating spirit of one of our two national parties, the one that calls itself "conservative," the Republican Party. They have a coinflip chance of taking the presidency.
Somehow Palpatine returned.
Nobody who wrote the movie bothered to say *how* Palpatine returned. I think it came from doing what the studios are doing: listening to superfans, trying not to upset them by suggesting that heroism—their exclusive property—is under attack, a fake threat justifying retaliation.
Maybe the way Palpatine returned was that he was never gone.
It occurs to me we've always had supremacist superfans in this country. There are statues and societies and flags and everything. They insist that they and only they are heroes—that heroism is their property.
To not really change the subject again, we killed an innocent man named Marcellus Williams in Missouri last week.
Somehow lynching returned.
Everyone's confused as to how. Maybe the way it returned is it was never gone.
Full Essay: https://www.the-reframe.com/killing-our-way-to-paradise/
Killing Our Way To Paradise
"One really violent day" in our morally underdeveloped nation. Supremacist superfans, Star Wars, and the popular insistence within a violent empire of owning heroism as exclusive property.
@JuliusGoat
#Missouri governor Mike Parson pardoned the McCloskeys (those very fine people in the title photo who pointed guns at peaceful Black Lives Matter protesters) but refused to grant clemency or even commutation to #MarcellusWilliams.
The logic of lynching, indeed.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/missouri-governor-pardons-mccloskeys/
Missouri governor pardons couple who waved guns at Black Lives Matter protesters
The couple pleaded guilty to misdemeanor gun charges in June, although Mark McCloskey announced in May that he would be running for U.S. Senate.
A.R. Moxon, Verified Duck 🦆
Now @christinkallama@hcommons