Finding the Grey in Fandoms

I've backed off from fandoms over the years because the vociferous love or hatred, the intense dislike or like of any particular fandom's niches... both turn me off massively. And that can be a challenge, especially given my own interests and line of work. I'm currently working on an Alan Wake series. and I've got a lot of other stuff going on in the background, like literary analysis and novels and writing and all of the usual story brain artistic stuff that piles up.

Occasionally those stories start out deeply referencing other media. And I'm okay with that. But I always have to transform whatever I'm doing, either into some sort of personal creative project or into an educational situation.

A lot of that's because of habit.

As a kid, I learned to walk that cautious line of wholesome and good media, always concerned whether something espoused the correct virtues. And that's not a bad thing, inherently. As parents, we certainly think about the media our kids are consuming and whether, for example, it's cathartic or a problem to drive home from work every day listening to "Break Stuff" by Limp Bizkit, as I did for most of my 20s.

And then when we reach the point in our lives when we have to ask: Am I making this decision for you? Or am I expressing my opinion and then letting you make your own decision?

Well, that's its own ball of parenting wax.

When I'm thinking about fandoms, thinking about media that matters to me, I sometimes find it helpful to take a little side step. I'm going to use an example here. And I've been working around this and hesitating, because it's one of the biggest fandoms out there: Let's think Star Wars.

Star Wars was special to me as a kid, in part because I had to fight for it. There were times when literally watching a Star Wars movie or referencing a Star Wars concept would get me a twenty-minute lecture on demons and the evils of the Force. And there were times when my parents would suggest that we go see a Star Wars movie. I'm not sure quite why. I assume because they knew I liked them. But that kind of whiplash back and forth of hyperanalyze this thing, and maybe you shouldn't even look at it because of that aspect, and go ahead and enjoy it in a different context. That was always challenging to me.

I found myself not exactly sneaking, but quietly consuming Star Wars media, video games especially. I could play so much Jedi Knight. I only had to deal with discussing the violent aspect of the video game I was playing. And because Video Games, the conversation never really went much deeper than is it violent or not. And a lot of the side aspects of, say, reading a Star Wars comic book that had scantily clad ladies in it, or reading a Star Wars themed novel, or trying to get the movies to play on the TV on VHS, those didn't come up because I found another path. The challenge of pushing towards a piece of media that I liked but had to be cautious around, I think always made me a little bit cautious about diving in head first and absolutely adoring something.

We talked already about making idols of other authors or other forms of media. When you make an idol of another form of media or another author, you inevitably end up disappointed. I know I disappoint people every day. And my favorite authors or filmmakers or video game designers, surely they do the same. So how do we find that path of aspiring to something without either putting it up on such a pedestal that we're disappointed by it and reject it when something goes wrong, or we put it up on a pedestal and we defend it vociferously to the point that we turn other people off to it. That we degrade Star Trek or one era of Star Wars versus the other.

I have favorite films from each era and I have films that I deeply dislike from each era. And if we're saying the phrase "my Star Wars"... for me, my Star Wars is mostly the 90s video games with a little sprinkling of the books and comics.

And this isn't about Star Wars, completely.

I have to put a lot of my politics and religion thoughts into fiction and explore them that way. Like fandoms, conversations about politics and religion can very quickly become saturated yes/no elements, right/wrong elements, black/white elements. And it's ironic, but for someone like me who sees things in black and white so much, I'm a big advocate of looking for the gray areas, if only because the stark white and stark black are overwhelming.

And I've always personally felt more comfortable in the shadows.

But that leaves the painful gap.

If you are there in the shadows... if you are neither Sith nor Jedi... if you think the Sith are trying to kill us all and you simultaneously think the Jedi are a crumbling order of overwrought monks, what are you left to build in the center without just getting called a wishy-washy centrist? And perhaps more importantly, how do you affect change? Whether it's change in your personal life or change in your spirit or change in your community or change in your world, when you're naturally drawn to unification and healing and finding a mutually beneficial solution?

When the communities you're functioning in or the media you're functioning on insist on you picking a side or insist that now is not the time, how do you effect the incremental work of daily progress?

I brought this up yesterday, "incrementallity."

The Narrative Alchemy of turning challenges into stories or turning frustrations into magic items.

When you're attempting those acts of narrative alchemy, what are you doing? Are you doing it for yourself because you personally need to make that change? Or are you doing it for someone else in your family or someone in your community or for a higher cause?

It's easy to see that this is silly when we're arguing about Star Wars. It's a little harder to do when you're confronting corruption and politics or internal violence within a faith community. When you're dealing with matters that seem perfectly good or perfectly evil, and good is failing at fixing the evil because of a thousand possible reasons.

As Dark Helmet told us, "Evil will always triumph, because good is dumb." Evil is dumb too, but likes to fold its problems into itself and push the violence outward. Good struggles with that. Good can too easily become inaction. Or action which is good in its motives, but does the world of a more facile evil.

I find myself constantly trying to find that path of Kyle Katarn, the shadow person who works in the darkness and uses the tools of the darkness in order to advance the cause of the light.

Figuring out where that light is and how to approach it without burning out your retinas and figuring out where the darkness is and how to bring some illumination to it without causing it to shrink back in upon itself and tighten and congeal into something dangerous.

You may have noticed the running theme of walking that supposedly straight and definitely narrow path. That is because you can depend, perhaps, on the brilliant energy of rage or love or hope to drive you into a project, but you're going to need to figure out how to sustain your drive, both internally and as a member of a community. Because if one is constantly raging against the darkness or hurtling towards the light, that drunken zigzagging can be perilous in its own way.