Alan Moore on Fandom: A Few Thoughts

Alan Moore recently published a piece in the Guardian titled "Fandom Has Toxified the World."

The content of the actual piece is rather less categorical in its criticism of fandom than that, and so the title an example of the characteristically cynical media practice of catching the eye with something more shocking or provocative than the material it offers really warrants. After all, Moore declares that he "believe[s] that fandom is a wonderful and vital organ of contemporary culture" (emphasis added) and indeed that in the absence of fandom a culture--such as, I suppose, that of comics--"ultimately stagnates, atrophies and dies." However, he is "also sure that fandom is sometimes a grotesque blight" (emphasis added), which "poisons the society surrounding it with its mean-spirited obsessions and ridiculous, unearned sense of entitlement," with, as the title of the item indicates (it is representative of Moore's position to that extent, at least), this is one of those "sometimes."

In saying that Moore discusses his experience of fandom--which is not insignificant, but also limited, comparing the fan world he knew when he was young, at a time when the comic book was much more marginal to cultural life than it is now, with what, after aloofness from it for the decades during which he became a superstar in the field, fandom in its contemporary form. This is the occasion of the negative commentary, none of which will surprise anyone at all exposed to, for example, the Comicsgate episode.

While Moore's piece stuck to familiar ground here--arguably because it did so--it did get me thinking again about how so many treat fandom as an easy target. Consider, after all, the title of the piece: "Fandom has Toxified the World." Reading up on these matters I have had the opposite suspicion--that, to the extent that we find fandom "toxic," the toxicity of the world has simply been reflected in fandom, and that focusing on fandom is easier and safer than criticizing bigger and broader cultural developments, in part because fans are such an easy target for kulturkampfers from all sides. After all, fan-ness is equated with nerdiness by the conventional, and we live in a culture where gleeful nerd-bashing is not just given a pass, but a significant cultural industry in its own right (certainly to go by such successes as The Big Bang Theory and its spin-offs). At the same time Big Media has a significant financial stake in beating up on some elements of the fan community--Big Media, after all, intent on having things both ways, desirous of exploiting fan affection for the franchises they own, but at the same time desirous of the freest possible hand in exploiting the materials of its franchises as it chases consumers' ever-shrinking disposable income. Meanwhile those who embrace identity politics are prone to equate fandom with what they would see as its worst elements. (Looking at the dialogue about Joker 2 online I am struck by how many have rushed to see the film as giving fans what they think is a well-deserved middle finger, with the politics of identity and its enmities factoring heavily into this as they use words like "entitlement" to beat down any social criticism they see as irrelevant to their own concerns.) At the same time the identity politics-bashing right, if pleased to see the umbrage at certain aspects of pop culture turn the relevant part of the public off of "wokeness," has little sympathy for them. The right is the purview of the swaggering jock, not the nerd, and anyway sees grown men who like comics and such as refusing to put away "childish things" and get jobs and devote themselves to raising the country's fertility rate, 'cause reasons.

Indeed, all that being the case makes it seem even less likely that fandom is "toxifying" the world, than the opposite, that the world is toxifying fandom. After all, to go by the extreme disrespect with which pretty much everyone treats fandom, fans are nowhere near so powerful as they would have to be in order to have such an impact on the culture, while they are by no means immune to the world's toxicity, such that it manifests here--all as some, for whatever reason more attentive to the signs of poisoning here than elsewhere, readily confuse cause with effect.