With Hollywood going woke, you would be forgiven for thinking they are simply accommodating what their audience wants. After all, their purpose is to give the audience what they want so judging by their most recent content you would think that they are becoming woke.
However, after Comicsgate, The Little Mermaid controversy and the Snow White debacle, it seems as if the fans are not reacting well to the reinterpretation of their beloved characters and stories. Possibly because Hollywood is making the heroes they grew up with into people they no longer recognise.
You wouldn’t hear about this from the mainstream media, highlighting the fans who have welcomed these changes to canon, with fluff pieces about how the fandom is celebrating the ‘diversity’ and inclusiveness’ in the franchises.
What you don’t hear about is the growing community of fans that are beginning to express their displeasure at these things. They are leading campaigns to boycott the latest versions of the movies. And it seems that their efforts are working. Disney was forced to do reshoots of Snow White when their original dwarf cast was leaked online. They have been responsible for the low ratings of these ‘modern versions’ of the stories they loved. Disney’s Snow White has a rating of 20 per cent. The latest The Little Mermaid had 57 per cent. Warner Bros was forced to cancel Batgirl due to the outcry from the comic book community.
This community is known as the Fandom Menace. Some lefties did try in vain to link this group to the ‘far right’, but really it’s a community of fans that for various reasons are not happy with the direction that their characters are going in. There are right wingers in this community who are not happy with the progressive direction of pop culture, but there is also a growing community of normal fans who just don’t like the amount of changes to the story and transformation of their heroes.
There are two dynamics that make up this community. The first is that there appears to be almost reverence of the characters and stories. This is something that has happened throughout human history. A reverence for the mythos, or a recurring theme or story which teaches morals and values. Stories provide meaning and purpose but, more importantly, they create an identity that people strive towards. The superheroes that we see now are not that different from the immortals in the old legends. Perhaps that is why Marvel has included some of those characters to their worlds, including Thor and Zeus. Good stories about humans doing impossible heroic acts, like fighting dragons, inspire people to do good everyday while teaching important moral lessons about selflessness and courage. More importantly it also provides a narrative that people can use to make sense of the world today and apply that understanding. If they can see the battle between good and evil plainly, then it will help them to understand the ongoing war between good and evil in the real world. Perhaps this is why movies like Maverick did well, because it focused on a simple good vs evil story without the moral relativism we have seen in recent movies like Black Panther.
The second dynamic is that people want to be entertained. People want a form of escapism: to go into another world where they can watch adventures taking place. As Ben Shapiro put it when announcing The Daily Wire’s endeavour to counter Hollywood, people want to get away from the worries of the world for an hour or so. This is what entertainment does.
What entertainment media offers is an example of what JRR Tolkien called ‘sub-creation’ or ‘fantasia’ (where we get the word fantasy from). Using elements of the physical world we live in, we can create our own worlds. For Tolkien this was seen as an act of worship: to use the creative talents given to us by God and to realise the complexities of the world that God has given us from the complexities of the world we create for our own. This is something that is now missing from our modern pop culture. But now, the fans are realising it and they are demanding that the industry remembers the foundations of the institutions that created those icons we know and love.
