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shadowfireflameMy friend recently posted this article on the new “Wonderbook” Playstation is apparently going to release. He’s a big-time video-gamer and was not excited about this interactive book thing, so much so that he asked me, “Why does J.K. Rowling hate all her fans so much? It’s like Star Wars all over again.”
Then he told me how he felt cynical and depressed because it seems like all his favorite interests/fandoms are being overly-commercialized in the hopes of making more of a profit—which he feels is “damaging the brand,” to quote Steven Moffat, but moreover retroactively preventing my friend from enjoying the things he once loved so much. For example, he finds it very difficult, if not impossible, to re-read Harry Potter without feeling a bit weird about the theme park at Universal Studios.
I have less difficulty separating the original story from its accompanying franchise in my head (I love new adaptations of things and really want to visit Orlando Studios and go to the Harry Potter World there), but I do still see his point about real-world cynicism coloring one’s perspective of an otherwise joyful experience. I have this issue with watching actors occasionally: when I have evidence that an actor is a douchebag asshole in real life, unless he’s a truly brilliant actor it can be hard for me to suspend my real-world knowledge long enough to enjoy the production he’s in. And I’m not really sure how to counteract this cynicism other than to find something else to replace it with.
What my friend is talking about with losing the sources of joy in your life isn’t really as unusual or dramatic as he’s making it seem, in my opinion. It’s a well-known phenomenon. In fandom we call it “falling out of the fandom,” though you can replace the word “fandom” with any hobby or interest. But humans seem to need things to love, so often falling out of one fandom coincides with falling into a different fandom—occasionally, though, there is an awkward gap when you’re not really into anything, and that kind of sucks. But something will come along.
For me, there was a period when I was totally batshit crazy for Power Rangers. Then it was Roswell for a bit, then my city’s local hockey team, then everything about the Alamo, then Lord of the Rings and its actors, then Harry Potter for the longest time, then anime, then Kpop, and now I’m really into the Sherlock TV series and Sherlock Holmes things. There’s overlap in all this stuff, I’m still involved in several fandoms, and I still enjoy even the very old things, but looking back, it makes me feel rather wistful and nostalgic rather than excited. I’ll probably never be as obsessed as I used to be with Power Rangers, for example.
There are tons of reasons for falling out of one thing and into another. It can be entirely because of you—you’re older, your tastes have changed. It can be entirely because of the community of other fans—they’re crazy, they’re mean, they’re discouraging, they hinder your enjoyment rather than enhancing it. It can be entirely because of the franchise itself—it’s lost the spark that used to make it lovely to you, its creators or new owners are money-grubbing now, there hasn’t been any new material in a while so it feels stale and old, there has been new material but it sucks, etc. Or it could be any combination of those things or something else. The key in my experience was to experiment and try new things and attempt to find something new, and that’s worked for me.
So other than “embrace it, ignore it, or try to move on,” I…don’t really have an answer for my friend. I’ve noticed this too, and I think it’s not an issue of creators trying to hurt their fans—in fact, I think J.K. Rowling loves her fans and wants to give them more content and has been advised that this is the best way to do so. I think it’s more an issue of businesspeople trying to make a profit on intellectual properties and characters without necessarily understanding them, so in the process it seems like they suck the life and joy out of them.
Many intellectual properties didn’t do this—but doesn’t change the fact that this is what tends to happen when business moguls—particularly American ones—get their hands on something that they don’t really personally love or understand. I suppose it’s not necessarily limited to Americans; anybody being put in charge of something they don’t understand will tend to have this problem. By overly marketing it to the general public, you will tend to alienate original fans whose visions don’t match your own. Particularly if your vision is to make money and theirs is to continue to enjoy the original characters and stories.
But I don’t really see a great solution to this problem of over-marketing and hyper-commercialization. As fans, we want the things we love to be successful and the people who make them to be rewarded, financially and otherwise, so that they can make more wonderful things for us to enjoy. But when the focus shifts from creating new content to thinking of new ways to repackage old content, how are we as fans supposed to prevent things we love from destroying themselves?
Then he told me how he felt cynical and depressed because it seems like all his favorite interests/fandoms are being overly-commercialized in the hopes of making more of a profit—which he feels is “damaging the brand,” to quote Steven Moffat, but moreover retroactively preventing my friend from enjoying the things he once loved so much. For example, he finds it very difficult, if not impossible, to re-read Harry Potter without feeling a bit weird about the theme park at Universal Studios.
I have less difficulty separating the original story from its accompanying franchise in my head (I love new adaptations of things and really want to visit Orlando Studios and go to the Harry Potter World there), but I do still see his point about real-world cynicism coloring one’s perspective of an otherwise joyful experience. I have this issue with watching actors occasionally: when I have evidence that an actor is a douchebag asshole in real life, unless he’s a truly brilliant actor it can be hard for me to suspend my real-world knowledge long enough to enjoy the production he’s in. And I’m not really sure how to counteract this cynicism other than to find something else to replace it with.
What my friend is talking about with losing the sources of joy in your life isn’t really as unusual or dramatic as he’s making it seem, in my opinion. It’s a well-known phenomenon. In fandom we call it “falling out of the fandom,” though you can replace the word “fandom” with any hobby or interest. But humans seem to need things to love, so often falling out of one fandom coincides with falling into a different fandom—occasionally, though, there is an awkward gap when you’re not really into anything, and that kind of sucks. But something will come along.
For me, there was a period when I was totally batshit crazy for Power Rangers. Then it was Roswell for a bit, then my city’s local hockey team, then everything about the Alamo, then Lord of the Rings and its actors, then Harry Potter for the longest time, then anime, then Kpop, and now I’m really into the Sherlock TV series and Sherlock Holmes things. There’s overlap in all this stuff, I’m still involved in several fandoms, and I still enjoy even the very old things, but looking back, it makes me feel rather wistful and nostalgic rather than excited. I’ll probably never be as obsessed as I used to be with Power Rangers, for example.
There are tons of reasons for falling out of one thing and into another. It can be entirely because of you—you’re older, your tastes have changed. It can be entirely because of the community of other fans—they’re crazy, they’re mean, they’re discouraging, they hinder your enjoyment rather than enhancing it. It can be entirely because of the franchise itself—it’s lost the spark that used to make it lovely to you, its creators or new owners are money-grubbing now, there hasn’t been any new material in a while so it feels stale and old, there has been new material but it sucks, etc. Or it could be any combination of those things or something else. The key in my experience was to experiment and try new things and attempt to find something new, and that’s worked for me.
So other than “embrace it, ignore it, or try to move on,” I…don’t really have an answer for my friend. I’ve noticed this too, and I think it’s not an issue of creators trying to hurt their fans—in fact, I think J.K. Rowling loves her fans and wants to give them more content and has been advised that this is the best way to do so. I think it’s more an issue of businesspeople trying to make a profit on intellectual properties and characters without necessarily understanding them, so in the process it seems like they suck the life and joy out of them.
Many intellectual properties didn’t do this—but doesn’t change the fact that this is what tends to happen when business moguls—particularly American ones—get their hands on something that they don’t really personally love or understand. I suppose it’s not necessarily limited to Americans; anybody being put in charge of something they don’t understand will tend to have this problem. By overly marketing it to the general public, you will tend to alienate original fans whose visions don’t match your own. Particularly if your vision is to make money and theirs is to continue to enjoy the original characters and stories.
But I don’t really see a great solution to this problem of over-marketing and hyper-commercialization. As fans, we want the things we love to be successful and the people who make them to be rewarded, financially and otherwise, so that they can make more wonderful things for us to enjoy. But when the focus shifts from creating new content to thinking of new ways to repackage old content, how are we as fans supposed to prevent things we love from destroying themselves?
