Fandom Capitalism: Some Errant Thoughts

27 Oct 2024 - Otto Vogel

I just read Alan Moore’s recent article from the Guardian¹ and I have some thoughts.

A number of my fond childhood memories are from a small science-fiction/general “nerd culture” convention in my hometown. These were modest, weekend affairs, heavily relying on volunteers, a robust local “nerd” community, and being able to get B to C list celebrities to come to give signatures and the occasional panel. Year upon year, the convention grew, and pretty damn fast at that. Chatting with vendors in the lunch line, some people had the sense of a bubble. The growth in “fandom” felt inorganic, unsustainable. People would get tired of Marvel, tired of the endless TV shows, they’d spend their time and disposable income elsewhere. Then covid happened, and I lost contact with the community. I couldn’t get into the online meet-ups people had. By the time the lockdown was fully lifted and the convention started again, I was leaving. I went one last time to say my goodbyes, and that was it. I don’t know how much things have recovered — maybe if I write a follow-up to this, I’ll get in touch with the vendors I know — but the dynamics of fandom stick with me, and some ideas also stick around.

“Revisionist Masculinization”

Moore mentions that comic fandom used to be “proffered solely to the working classes,” but “soaring retail prices had precluded any audience save the more affluent”. So there’s a class element that I definitely saw the aftershocks of in the convention of my hometown. The convention was a major pit for my often meagre disposable income. But I cannot shake the feeling that there’s some gender dynamics we shouldn’t miss.

As an area of human activity gets more and more valued, more and more prevalent, and more and more tied into systems of male identity formation, there is often what I will call for now “revisionist masculinization”.² Women are written out of the story; their contributions ignored, downplayed or sometimes ascribed to male contemporaries. Things like computer science, video games, sci-fi and fandom are rendered into spaces that were “always male”. Moore notes the “largely misogynist crusades such as Gamergate or Comicsgate” as one noxious element of contemporary fandom culture. It’s pretty obvious that these backlashes have at least two goals;

• Push women and minorities out of producing these forms of media.
• Push women and minorities out of the fandoms surrounding these forms of media.

I think there’s a more subtle, third goal:

• Rewrite the history of this form of media to exclude the role that women and minorities played in creating and shaping it.

“Creative Fandom” versus “Consumptive Fandom”

There were really [n] types of vendors present at the conventions of my youth; there were

1. Resellers, who would buy official merchandise of various popular media franchises, or retro video games, or old comics, etc. and resell that with some level of markup on the convention floor. There was a real heavy link between these people and the large-scale media empires that were so important for the convention. Selling a Supernatural or Dr. Who figurine only makes sense when people are there who are fans of Supernatural or Dr. Who. The more fans there are, the larger the potential customer base.
2. Artists, who would sell things they made. Sometimes this would be things like renditions of Pokémon sprites, art of Nintendo characters, or things like that, but sometimes it was their own books, comic books, or their own art or jewelry. These people were much less invested in the large-scale media empires, and often worked in legal grey areas surrounding intellectual property.
3. Advertisers, who didn’t really sell anything but instead were more interested in advertising their local business, fan club or speed running community. Again these folks tended to be much less invested in the media empires, and sometimes just seemed to be there to chat with the convention attendees.

I want to draw out the line between Resellers and Artists here, because I think they point to two modes of fandom. This gets into the reasons why fandom has exploded “from the perspective of Capital.”

Basically, fandom fulfills the same role that sequels used to; they extend and repeat the value that a single media object has. A sequel to an Iron Man film can expect to capture the same sort of audience that the first film got; if you expand that out into a full cinematic universe where the audience is expected to see everything, you can really rake in the cash. Expansive universes, invested fandoms and large systems of related products means a lot of money. This is where consumptive fandom comes in. If the way you express fondness for a media franchise is via purchasing official merchandise (usually with horrific markup), attending fan conventions with high entry fees, and engaging in endless pseudo-technical discussions about “canon” — then the media company has a lot of very profitable repeat customers. Fandom captures, retains an audience. This avenue of fandom is what Resellers profit from.

By contrast, there is another form of fandom, that I’ll call creative fandom. Here, the focus is on DIY, peer-to-peer creation, and a sort of levelling out of the dynamic between creator and fan. This is the realm of fanfic, fan art, ROM hacks, modding, fan games and other artsy, crafty type things. From personal experience — a shoddy dataset, to be clear — I think that this avenue of fandom is often dominated by women and queer people. Fanfic and handcrafts are socially coded as “women’s activities” and the prevalence of queers in shit like modding, ROM hacks and speed running is immense. This is the avenue of fandom Artists profit from. This leads to what I hope is a reasonable hypothesis:

Hypothesis (a): As media companies make efforts to shift fandom from creative to consumptive fandom, they encourage revisionist masculinization.

There are a couple lines of argumentation I think we might take here:

1. Fanfic is a very “girl-coded” area of fandom, and I think really at the root of a lot of modern fandom culture; just consider the fandom structure of Harry Potter. Harry Potter’s fame came in large part from the large culture of fanfic around the series. As the series grew, the amount of official merchandise also grew. There are now official robes, official wands, a small library’s worth of spin-off books, official candy, official lamps and official posters. Where I live now, there are Harry Potter sections in so many bookstores, advertisements for that bizarre “Cursed Child” play, and you can get Harry Potter merchandise at a few other places in town that you wouldn’t expect. It is still an incredibly lucrative franchise. While fanfic may still be important for parts of the fandom, I don’t think it’s what drives the fandom’s growth or continued relevance.
2. We continue to live in a sexist society. “Man” is perceived as being the more “basic” category, so marketing tends to cater more towards men unless it explicitly tries to market towards women. Men also probably have more disposable income due to wage gaps and other systems of responsibilities that women get tied up in. As men get more prioritized in the fandom, there is a tendency to try to cast the fandom as a “male” space, where women are excluded. Attempts to expand the fandom after it has been masculinized — through the introduction of minority, female or LGBTQ characters, for example — results in raciest or misogynist or queerphobic backlash which aims to rewrite the history of the fandom to exclude minorities, women or queers. Narratives that the media had some sort of pre-existing narrative or thematic purity that is being corrupted by “political” interests are deployed, obscuring the way that the media was always already political. It also drives an online system of discourse, with people arguing in the comment sections on news sites or on Facebook or on Twitter. This acts as organic advertising, that the companies really like to see.

There are different attitudes to the fandom that each form of fandom encourage. I suspect that consumptive fandom encourages the sort of entitled attitude that Moore mentions in his article;

This boost in fandom’s age and status possibly explains its current sense of privilege, its tendency to carp and cavil rather than contribute or create. I speak only of comics fandom here, but have gained the impression that this reflexive belligerence – most usually from middle-aged white male conservatives – is now a part of many fan communities.

Within capitalism, when you spend money on something “as a consumer”, you expect to purchase that thing, and through that purchase you expect to gain control of that thing, to get some rights. This system of legal entitlement is deeply embedded in our understandings of how the world works, to the point that the current shift to a rentier economy is profoundly disquieting. On the one hand, I think this is helpful; things like right-to-repair, reselling, and the ability to modify the objects we are inevitably surrounded by is something good, and under the current system our understandings of why we can do these things is tied into ideas of property. On the other hand, I think that this plays into the development of a sense of entitlement in the franchise itself among some people. They see themselves as the rightful consumers of the franchise and these consumer goods; if the franchise isn’t catering specifically to them then something must be going wrong, they must be being treated wrong somehow. Maybe here is the place where a discussion of parasociality is worth getting into. Or maybe a discussion of how some media franchises have gotten worse over time due to corporate decision making prioritizing profits and control over the fandom instead of a healthy fan culture. But I think I’ve spoken too much without doing proper research already.

I guess this brings us back to Moore’s essay. Where he points to the public performance of reactionaries like Donald Trump and Boris Johnson, I instead would point to the dynamics of entitlement. Trump supporters feel themselves entitled to a particular form of the world, an imagined historical place where there were they were allowed to be casually racist, where the government seemed to be serving them in specific, where they felt in control of the things in the world around them. If your identity is tied into a community you feel like you should control, then any sort of changes to that community feel like a personalized threat.

Immediate Postscript

I got a bit of time after posting this to check through some articles and found one that seem useful, Busse’s Fan Labor and Feminism, which touches on both the labour/class question and the gender question. Even if it doesn’t provide exactly what you might be looking for, check the citations, I bet there’s something there.

1. If the link is dead, the article was titled: “‘Fandom has toxified the world’: Watchmen author Alan Moore on superheroes, Comicsgate and Trump” by Alan Moore, published on Oct. 26th, 2024. ↩

2. I am sure some clever feminist has already written about this somewhere, but I want to get something out on this blog so I’ll coin a term here with full intent to use someone else’s term later. ↩