Every now and then I wander into new fandoms, and recently I’ve wandered into two that are, on average, much younger than my usual. The fans seem, on average, to be early twenties at most? Possibly younger? Unclear.
But there are various trends I’ve seen in the way people relate to characters and works that have fascinated me, because I feel like I’m getting a perspective on a fundamental shift in how people interact with fiction.
I’ve been in fandom spaces since the ‘90s, and maybe it was the spaces I was in at the time, but I tended to see people utilizing fiction to interact with new perspectives/worlds/etc. Fiction was a lens to step outside yourself and see larger pictures and new ways of being.
But modern fiction trends seem to be focused much more inward. Fiction is now increasingly seen as an exploration of the self, rather than the other, and that’s led to new trends in how to create and interact with fiction. ‘Relatability’ of characters seems to be a huge one. A reader or viewer must be able to see themselves in the character, fitting that character into their own perspective, outlook, and issues in life. If a character is not relatable in that way, they aren’t considered a good character. A morally complex or even reprehensible character? That’s not a mirror people want held up to themselves, and so morally questionable characters are ‘problematic’.
I think it also reflects in the way that it seems increasingly like there is a prevailing belief that all fiction must teach moral lessons. If a story does not explicitly tell you who is good and who is bad, and show the bad being punished and the good being uplifted, the morality of the writer is questioned. Because again, fiction is no longer an exercise in exploring new perspectives, but is solely a mirror of the self.
I don’t really know where I’m going with this, but it’s been on my mind as I’ve been looking at younger perspectives on fiction and seeing how the way one interacts with characters has shifted. While I certainly don’t think that exploring the self through fictional perspectives is bad, I do wonder about the flattening effect of wanting everything to be ‘relatable’ and to show people the morally right way to live.
Maybe I’m just old, but I find myself hoping that we start shifting away from the notion of fiction-as-a-mirror, and start shifting once again toward fiction-as-a-window.
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