The Hungry Ghosts of Late Capitalism
Fan culture’s endless search for “content” is leading us into artistic poverty.
by Colin Broadmoor
The “hungry ghost” is a pitiable figure from the syncretic religious traditions of China and Vietnam. Originally a karmic mirror-punishment for materialism during life, today’s hungry ghosts are often just forgotten individuals whose families and descendants have failed to perform the appropriate rites and offerings that would allow their ancestor to return to the cycle of reincarnation.
The form each hungry ghost takes depends on its economic status within a three-tiered system—ghosts of no wealth, some wealth, or great wealth. Among ghosts of no wealth, the most common form has a cavernous stomach and a long, thin neck with a mouth and throat as narrow as the eye of a needle. These unfortunate souls are tormented by unrelenting wracking pangs of hunger that they may never satisfy. The living—lest the roaming hungry ghosts become a nuisance or danger—propitiate and divert the ghosts with spectacles, festivals, and offerings of joss paper money, cars, houses, and luxury goods. And, for the few seconds the flames take to turn paper mansions to ash, the soul’s unending hunger for real material things is temporarily soothed with tokens and smoke.
Welcome to fandom in the 21st century!
To some extent, you can understand everything we see these days in terms of fandom: politics, religion, identity, consumption. During the first decade of the 21st century, the nature of the Internet shifted from a repository of information to a 24/7 entertainment outlet. Today, we get our news from social media sites like Twitter, which is really just crowd-sourced reality TV. We binge-watch these final episodes of the Anthropocene from our beds, couches, phones—so immersed in the spectacle that we fail to notice that almost everything we know about the world has been prepared and served to us digitally. We own nothing, while gorging ourselves on content—on other people’s lives and other people’s struggles—to avoid the tedium, blandness, and futility of our own. Corporations burn hundred-million-dollar joss paper blockbusters so that we placate our hunger for the real with smoke and ash and let the living go about the real business of running the world.
RESPONSE PIECE: If you think fandom is “artistic poverty”, you don’t know fandom.
By Lis Coburn
Blood Knife is an “anti-capitalist, anti-racist, anti-fascist sci-fi / fantasy / horror magazine,” so it makes sense for us to step back for a moment and reflect on the nature of fandom as we know it, as we practice it, as we produce it. Since the second half of the 20th century, the sci-fi, fantasy, and horror fandoms have become emblematic of “fan culture”—and by fan culture, I mean a social network characterized not only by shared consumption of content, but in which the consumer produces additional derivative content in the form of fanfiction, fanart, debates, bad takes, and even meta-analysis like this article.
The first fandom in a truly modern sense were the Janeites, 19th-century aficionados of the work of Jane Austen, but the award for the first “toxic” fandom should probably go to Victorian Sherlock Holmes fans. Arthur Conan Doyle famously grew sick of writing stories about Holmes and initially attempted to end the series by demanding ridiculous sums of money for new installments (the Daniel Craig gambit); when his publishers met his demands, he decided to kill his golden goose by dropping him off a picturesque waterfall.
Fans were furious. They cancelled their subscriptions to The Strand in such numbers that it jeopardized the magazine’s finances, and Doyle found himself inundated with hate mail and entreaties from fans demanding that he resurrect his consulting detective. He did so after ten years of unrelenting pressure and continued writing Holmes stories for another quarter-century until his retirement. Even then, the fandom demanded more Sherlock content, and a young boy named August Derleth wrote to Doyle suggesting he either produce more mysteries or turn the character over to a successor—by which he meant himself.
August Derleth is, in my opinion, the first truly archetypal “fan.” After Doyle declined to take the young boy up on his offer, the undaunted Derleth wrote a series of Holmes pastiches about a detective named “Solar Pons.” The first Solar Pons collection, “In Re: Sherlock Holmes”—The Adventures of Solar Pons, was published in 1945. Derleth ultimately had more stories about Solar Pons published than Doyle did with Holmes.
While there have been many highly derivative or outright plagiarized literary successes throughout history (no points for guessing Chaucer, Shakespeare, or E.L. James), Derleth’s Solar Pons stands in my estimation as the first fanfiction, because it was originally created neither primarily for money by capitalizing on a fad nor to allow an author to retell a story from their own perspective. Instead, Derleth wrote Solar Pons for the same reason we all create fanworks—he wanted more content (in his case, more Sherlock Holmes content, but the dynamic is always the same). Remember: the Harry Potter fanfic boom occurred in the space between the release of Books 4 and 5. Though this effect was amplified by the promotion for the motion picture, it was driven by a fandom too hungry for Boy Wizard Content to wait for J.K. Rowling to finish writing 500 pages about Hagrid’s CGI brother.
Not content with creating the first Sherlock Holmes fanfiction (and arguably the Ur-fanfic), Derleth also wrote weird fiction and engaged with that fandom as both creator and curator. In 1939 he co-founded Arkham House, a publishing house created solely to preserve and disseminate the writings of H.P. Lovecraft. Lovecraft’s publications had been limited to pulp magazines, which were disposable, easily destroyed, and hard to preserve, and so access to particular stories required tracking down old issues.
We own nothing, while gorging ourselves on content—on other people’s lives and other people’s struggles.
Derleth and his partner Donald Wandrei wished to produce an omnibus that collected Lovecraft’s major works in one durable volume. After all the major book publishers rebuffed their pitches, they—in true fan/punk DIY spirit—made it themselves. The first Arkham House Lovecraft edition, The Outsiders and Others (1939), sold poorly but steadily. Derleth, now successful as a weird fiction writer in his own right, effectively subsidized Arkham House in its early years. This was a labor of love: Derleth wanted to preserve and share the works that stoked his own enthusiasm. He wanted to grow the fandom, not an IP. He did not expect the Lovecraft edition to make him rich, or lay the groundwork for a movie franchise.
These early and essential goals of fandom embodied by Derleth—more content, preservation, sharing enjoyment, raising awareness—were supplemented in the 1970s with the invention of “slash fiction.” As far as anyone can tell, slash originated within the Star Trek fandom as “Kirk/Spock” fics. Slash pairings—same-sex characters reimagined as romantic/erotic couples—represent an evolution in fanfic by expanding its limits from “stories that did not happen canonically” to “stories that could not happen within the canon.” This was fanfic at its most subversive: slash allowed fanfic authors to push the “bros being bros” homosocial bonds between male characters into the socially taboo realm of homosexuality. Because these male-male relationships in canon were signifiers of a certain type of masculine ideal, recoding these relationships as sexual undermined homophobic social assumptions about leadership, bravery, and affection. Additionally, as these fics were primarily written for/by women, they act as alternatives to the “male gaze” that characterized official narratives in these franchises (see: Kirk’s dating habits and Federation miniskirts). Of course, these fanfic experiments are not themselves free of homophobia or sexism and tend toward the fetishization of gay sex/relationships, but they do demonstrate an acknowledgement of the potential of fanfiction to take the content in directions it could never go officially.
Half a century on, fanfiction and fan culture are widely recognized routes for consumers to engage with media. In the 1970s, one had to seek out slash fics, fanart, or cosplay—but today you might scroll past a gender-bent Grand Admiral Thrawn on your TL without a second thought. There are digital magazines, communities, and well-publicized conventions devoted to celebrating fandom or “geek culture.” Whereas in the 20th century one needed to seek out ancient Geocities or BBS page to sate an appetite for more SFF content, the 21st-century fan subscribes to endless streams of physical or digital content via add-on channels like Shudder or merchandise services like Loot Crate, which advertises itself as “the #1 pop culture subscription-based service on the planet, bringing the love of pop culture conventions to fans at home.” The content void that fanworks originally worked to fill for free—embracing the late-20th-century internet ethos, “the information must be free”—no longer exists. For a price (usually a monthly subscription fee), media conglomerates offer consumers a near infinite selection of merchandise, TV spin-offs, novelizations, video games.
Toward the end of the first decade of the 21st century, corporations realized fanworks could function as free advertising—inducing, for example, Bioware to run fanfiction contests on the Star Wars: The Old Republic forums in advance of that MMORPG’s release in 2008. Even slash fics—the most subversive aspect of fanfiction—have been co-opted to the point where the television series Sherlock referenced slash fanfiction in 2010, and ultimately sparked a wider discussion of “queerbaiting”—appealing to gay consumers by flavoring same-sex character relationships with plausibly deniable homoerotic signifiers—to give the show a pseudo-illicit edge (see also: the Robert Downey, Jr./Jude Law 2009 Sherlock Holmes and 2011’s Sherlock Holmes: Game of Shadows). And on the lazier end of the queerbaiting spectrum, J.K. Rowling had already declared Dumbledore gay in 2007 without bothering to actually write it in any of her books.
It’s worth remembering that the background context for all this not-quite-representation was the fight for marriage equality in the United States. If we are generous (or naïve) we might see these owners of IPs as using their platforms to support the causes of social justice and diversity, but with a decade of hindsight it’s clear that the intent was to prepare for post-marriage same-sex couples with pooled resources and few/no dependents—a new market segment with theoretically more disposable income than heterosexual couples with more children. The official shows or books could offer ambiguous homosocial/sexual relationships between characters with a nod and a wink, while counting on fans to generate the more explicit possibilities of Johnlock on Archive of Our Own. The IP could therefore capture audiences hungry for homoerotic content without needing to create any themselves. Arthur Conan Doyle may not have been interested in letting teenagers write his characters, but within a century the various Holmes franchises and renaissance of the character’s popularity relied on media outlets emphasizing the slash potential of the Holmes/Watson relationship. In this way, a show could lock in its audience with a promise of diversity that it never needed to deliver on.
We now receive so much derivative content that fanworks are no longer necessary supplements to canon consumption.
We now receive so much derivative content from media conglomerates like Disney that fanworks are no longer necessary supplements to canon consumption. Indeed, they now produce films like The Force Awakens (2015) or TV shows such as The Mandalorian, which exist only for “fanservice” and make little to no sense as stand-alone works. Fans no longer need to rely on each other to produce content because the content stream is endless, right down to the push notifications from the Star Wars app on our phones. Worse still, these corporations have realized that the existence of fan-made slash fiction means they don’t need to actually include diverse relationships in official works—which is why we get nonsensical canon “Reylo” (as the canon pairing between Rey and Kylo Ren has been dubbed) in the Rise of Skywalker, but will never see any hot “Stormpilot” (the non-canon Finn/Poe pairing) action on the big screen.
The two original functions of fanfic— telling supplemental stories that did not happen canonically and telling slash stories that could not happen within the canon—are now meaningless and have been completely subsumed within a corporate media framework. Worse still is our regression on the early fandom value of preservation, as exemplified by fans like August Derleth and the project of getting Lovecraft’s work into an accessible hardcover form. On that front, fandom has failed entirely.
As fans, we are content creators in our own right, but what do we actually own? Movie studios have realized how to turn the cinema experience into two-and-a-half-hour Snapchats. We pay $30 for the privilege of watching Wonder Woman 1984 for a few hours, then talking about it on Twitter for a few days, and we don’t even own a copy at the end. Hard media like DVD and Blu-ray are being replaced with downloads. We see the same thing taking place in video games: there will be no landfill full of Cyberpunk 2077 games, because what we buy now is not the thing itself but rather access to it (healthcare, anyone?).
Where once fandom served the needs of fans (telling new stories, letting people see themselves, offering alternative possibilities for how we understand heroes), today it serves only the needs of media conglomerates by acting as free advertising and by adding value via content and enthusiasm to the IP—a charitable donation of your time and energy to the Walt Disney Company. Nothing is preserved, nothing is owned by the fans, including the works they produce themselves. Fandom is the monumental architecture of the 21st century and fan-creators labor to build colossal Funko Pop pharaohs in the digital desert for the glory of billion dollar IPs. Look upon my cosplay, ye normies, and despair!
Fans have become the hungry ghosts of late capitalism. Our appetite for content—an escape mechanism from the modern world by which we sublimate our own alienation and anxiety through participation in the spectacle—can never be satisfied because we are fed only ephemeral simulacra. We are kept distracted and anesthetized by the contentless content of the modern entertainment franchise. The communities and shared interests that promised connection and perhaps even solidarity are now fully commodified. We produce everything, own nothing, and pay multiple subscription fees for the honor. We feast at a burning banquet of paper delicacies and praise the taste of the ashes.
Another helping, anyone?
Colin Broadmoor is a Contributing Editor at Blood Knife. He is a recovering anthropologist who writes about mass media, technology, and cyberculture.
