Your tumblr is very fascinating and I am learning quite a lot, especially about the "dead fandoms." Is there any fandom that in your opinion should STAY dead? I realize this may open up a big old can of worms but I'm really curious.
I liked the first Matrix movie a whole lot, but…God, can you imagine what it would be like if the communities and discussions that surrounded the Matrix movies survived into the social media age?
Rick & Morty fan communities give us a little “sneak peek” into what that would have been like. Don’t get me wrong, Rick & Morty is a really good and well made show, but, like the Matrix, any kind of property steeped in philosophy that congratulates the audience for being intelligent enough to “get it” tend to attract a certain personality type that pride themselves on being above the sheeple, who are addicted to something very dangerous: the neurotransmitter rush of thinking you’re smarter and better than someone else. There is nothing new about this to fandom at all: Robert A. Heinlein, one of my personal favorite writers, was this to the 50s-80s.
Not all Matrix fans were like this, probably not even most, but it cannot be denied it had an attraction to this personality type. The Matrix flattered their egos and sensibilities. They tended to be male, enjoyed collecting swords, had names like 7xVegetaDarksabrex7 on video game message boards, loved the movie Idiocracy (which is a funny movie, don’t get me wrong), considered themselves libertarian, and base a huge chunk of their personality on being atheists. I have never quite seen eye to eye with this mentality. To quote a friend, who is an atheist: “atheism is like fire safety: it makes sense to me, but I see no need to join a club about it.”
It’s also a fundamental misunderstanding of what, exactly, rationalism is. Rationalism isn’t the absence of emotions, but having an understanding and awareness of all of yours. Rationality is keeping all of your feelings in balance. Putting emotions aside isn’t what makes you think clearly, because we understand the world through our emotions and experiences. If you went through a bitter divorce, for example, it’s possible to see the entire world in light of that: you can find statistics that show that true love and romance are impossible and that the opposite sex can’t be trusted. Rationality and statistics and Nate Silver can’t save you there; it digs you a deeper hole because you are out of whack, so the stats you see are the ones you want to see.
In fact, this ties into a bigger question many people ask: is it possible that a community that surrounds a piece of fiction can eliminate your love of it? A lot of people go back and forth on this, and I think the answer is yes, it can. Why? Because only 20% of fiction is there on the page, or on the screen. Everything we like is something we like in a social context or how it lives in our heads, and if the fandom has an unpleasant streak, that makes a difference in the other 80% of how we enjoy it: talking about the latest episode with friends, writing fanfic, meeting people at cons, dressing up, playing the tabletop game. To quote Cory Doctorow: “content isn’t king, conversation is king. Content is only something to talk about.”
