Art, Pop, Nerds, and Story

I. Olivia

Shortly after Garage Fiction Podcast 1.0 broke up in October of 2015, due to us “taking a break” when I went to Tokyo… Laura, being the lovely human being she was/is, secretly went off to find me another fiction writing group on Discord. One of these groups is where I met Olivia, a Swiss living with her girlfriend in England.

By April or May 2016, Olivia and I had become fast friends, talking almost daily about story, craft, fiction, books we read, shows we consumed… and by the summer, we had launched Garage Fiction Podcast 2.0.

Over the last seven years, our friendship had waxed and waned… but whenever we did talk, we picked up exactly where we left off without any awkwardness or hesitation.

Today, we met IRL for the first time at The Breakfast Club in Hoxton, near where I was staying. Our conversation flowed just as easily as it had on Discord. We talked story, the craft of writing, fiction, London, her experience getting citizenship, friends, family. And for the purposes of this entry, we talked about Mad Men, Rothfuss, and the Kindle market where she writes.

We both love Mad Men. It is a story with despicable characters you can’t relate to. They are strong and bold with tragic arcs. You pity them, maybe even sympathize with what they’re going through, but you would never want to be them or be their friends.

This is in sharp contrast to LitRPG, a genre Olivia writes on Kindle. In LitRPG, you create an empty shell of a protagonist that gets to expereince adventures, love, levelling up, all the fantasy tropes your heart desires, and the feeling of being cool. The reader then, has a perfect vessel or vehicle in which to experience the story. It’s pure escapism for the mass market. It’s not “art” (in quotation marks). What it is really, is immersive entertainment that just happens to be fiction.

Secondly, while literary fiction, thrillers, and most other stories might end on scary cliffhangers where the characters are placed in peril, forcing you to keep reading to see how they get out of it… in LitRPG, you want to end chapters on a postive note, giving the protagonist a new piece of equipment, a new spell, a new weapon, a new power… something where the reader is not tense and frustrated so much as curious, wondering how “unlocking” this new thing will help them achieve more, do more, be more.

Put another way, it’s a video game without the mashing of buttons and killing of endless monsters, figuring out puzzles, and collecting treasure… that’s DFY (done for you).

Actually, let me rephrase that last part, this is like watching a Twitch streamer play a video game that you insert yourself into. It’s a really weird genre with a hungry market.

II. London Signals

Out of the five or so people I’ve seen reading books on the London metro, most of them are reading literary fiction. Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Dostoevsky. Austen. I was surprised by this. Where are the people reading trashy mass market fiction? YA novels? Murder mysteries or spy novels you’d buy at the airport? The “network television” of books if you will.

So either Londoners are all very smart people reading very smart books, or when they’re in public, they want to signal to everyone they are very smart people reading very smart books. Or both.

What I also found interesting is that there are ads on public transportation for books. This is nothing you’d ever see in Canada or the U.S. Correct me if I’m wrong. And yeah, yeah, I get it. London is a cultural hub. They turn every popular movie into musicals in West End. They have a five floor building that houses all the artistic shit they stole back when they were a colonial globe-spanning empire. They’ve produced Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Keats, Austen, Wilde, Brontes, etc. etc.

But you gotta ask yourself. Is the majority of the population seriously reading very smart books… or is the breakdown just like in Canada/USA where most people don’t read books, but whereas in England, they still respect the intellectual elites to let them dictate what"s “good” or “bad”…. versus in Canada/USA, where the downward spiral of hating anything “intellectual and elite” has made it so that it’s not cool to listen to the “intellectual elite” and/or, we shove them all into one place (NYC and schools) and leave it at that?

III. The Cursed Child (Minor Spoilers Ahead)

OK, imagine if you will… you give a J.K. Rowling superfan a lot of money, enough to create a ton of cool special effects live on stage, high-end theatre production values of light, props, and sound, and some of the best actors West End has to offer.

But… this superfan has to/gets to write the script, probably because he wants to despite having the money to hire good writers. What do you get?

You get a very contrived story, with a forced plot, bad pacing, dialogue that feels wrong… like things a fan would want their favorite characters to say, but not necessarily ring true… and you would want the main characters from the original IP to show up (even if they died in the original IP).

In other words, it is fan fiction.

That’s what Cursed Child is. Except… J.K. Rowling helped write the story. So is Rowling writing fan fiction for something she created? It almost feels that way. Ironically enough, the theme of Harry Potter being mythologized and venerated, and the man himself, at 40, realizing he can’t live up to his hagiography… is in the play. So is J.K. Rowling (the myth and legend), hitting her shortcomings with her own writing (this play and Fantastic Beasts shows what a terrible writer she actually is post-Potter).

There are two main characters in the play. Potter’s son, Albus Severus Potter and Draco Malfoy’s son, Scorpius Malfoy. Scorpius is our empty vessel stand-in. He’s a total nerd, (knowing all the HP lore inside out). When he meets a famous NPC, he gapes, gawks, and expresses glee like a fan at a convention. He somehow ends up being the real hero of the story (like a LitRPG)… and he’s even “shipped” with Albus (but never enough to fully confirm the relationship, which has led to “queerbaiting” accusations from the LGBT community.)

If that doesn’t check off all the elements of fan fiction, I don’t know what does.

I think my question here is why? Why would Rowling allow this? Is it money? Has she gotten lazy as a writer? Is she too rich and isolated to know what’s “good” or “bad”? Furthermore, how has this been running for seven years (minus Pandemic) and has received countless critical and fan praise? Is it purely the brand riding on its own coattails? Or is the fanbase so hungry for new content… any content.. that bad spinoffs, sequels, and prequels are allowed to happen? Or is this a commentary on the culture we live in today… a culture where nerds won, and every IP has an expanded universe (or even multiverse) and this is the level of storytelling we’ll be fed from now on?

Listen, I am a nerd. And when we started winning the culture wars in the 2010s… when the MCU was birthed, when Game of Thrones was adapted, when Star Wars came back, when every conceivable beloved IP was turned into a faithful television adaptaion… I felt vindicated. Look at all this stuff I loved as a child and was made fun of for loving, and now everyone is consuming it. Where are the dumb jocks and bullies now? Look at my nerdom and tremble, for we have won the war, and now we reign with cultural impunity.

But now I’m 40-something and after a decade of this… I am getting exhausted with the lack of ORIGINAL IP. And I feel like a nerd with guilty, bloody hands asking “what have we wrought upon the world?”

Pop culture has won. Artsy intellectual stuff are on the fringes. And I’m tired of it all. Says the old man.

IV. Forbidden Planet

A few months ago, I reluctantly walked into my local comicship, Hourglass in Port Moody, and plopped down $200 for a Warhammer RPG book. That’s not the worst of it. This was the fifth volume in a limited, exclusive set of five Warhammer RPG books. In other words, I have spent $1000 on this entire set.

This is a RPG system I will never play, but at one point three years ago when they announced they’d reprint this infamous adventure module, “The Enemy Within”, which had long been out-of-print… and in foil-embossed glory, I committed to the entire set. I told my LFGS (local friendly game store), I want it all, and because I want to support my LFGS, I’m going to pay you my hard earned dollars instead of Bezo’s trillion dollar machine!

As each module of the five came out, once every six, seven months or so… I grew more and more disgusted with myself and my spend on hundreds of RPG books that I would never play. Why was I collecting all this shit? Why was I spending a significant expense on getting all these “all-time best” adventure modules?

The consumption-to-collection ratio was so underindexed, it wasn’t funny. It’s probably like 3%, maybe 5% if I’m generous? In other words, 97% of my RPG books go unread, unplayed, unran.

So when I was walking around Hourglass that day… having to pick up this fifth $200 book that I didn’t really want, but was obligated to pick up because I ordered it, and my LFGS brought it in for me… I realized something stark and shocking. I realized this was going to be the last time I walked into Hourglass. I had absolutely no more interest in comics, RPGs, miniatures, board games, nerd stuff. Was I finally growing out of all this nerd stuff at 42? It was a strange, melancholic moment.

So today, when between the two parts of Cursed Child, my wife suggested we visit Forbidden Planet, the premier and biggest nerd shop in London…. I kinda dreaded it. I didn’t want to go. In fact, it was like someone who had recently given up on a disgusting habit, had lost all taste for it, but was asked to come back despite the utter lack of interest.

I wandered. I did a cursory look at the new D&D stuff. I briefly considered a collection of 2000AD comics, but given they only had volumes 2-3, but not 1, didn’t care to buy it. I looked at the toys and thought about picking up the new TMNT Leonardo action figure for the new Seth Rogan adaptation… but didn’t.

Thing is, I think a HUGE part of why I bought these things in the past had a lot to do with me identifying as a nerd more than me actually loving the stuff I bought. It helped me confirm, re-confirm, and support my identity as a nerd. It was a childhood me, who couldn’t afford anything, was socially awkward, and found a “home” in nerdom… away from everyone else who was into sports, or whatever… that I bought this stuff. I felt like I was obligated to buy certain things in order to keep my nerd card.

But I’m not sure I identify with it anymore. A large part is because, again, the nerds won and we own the entire cultural multiverse now. But a larger part, I think, is because it has lost the edge, the “secret club feels”, now that it’s popular. A large part of the appeal for me when I was a kid was because it was this weird thing you had to discover on your own in out-of-the-way places and when you found someone else that was also into this stuff, it was an instant bond. It was special and exclusive and niche.

But if everyone else now ALSO loves the MCU, and LoTR, and Star Wars, and Harry Potter, and D&D, and fantasy… it’s not special anymore. It’s just culture now. You can’t escape it. Everyone is aware of it. It’s like when you discovered a cool indie band, but then they got big and you accuse them of “selling out”… but you can’t really make that argument here because the point of these IPs was always to make a shit ton of money.

And also – when you objectively step back from it all, you quickly realize how often these brands exploited your nerd-love for them and told objectively bad stories. Bad pacing, bad dialogue, bad character development, bad everything except the world and characters you’ve grown to love.

V. Four Thousand Weeks

There are probably other factors here. A lot of nerd culture is that of consumption. Collecting, discussing, analyzing, rating/ranking, organizing, arguing, and making fan art of said intellectual properties. And as someone who is in his forties, and has always dreamed of being a creator, and as someone who’s read Four Thousand Weeks three times in the past two years… I am starting to track my consumption-to-creation ratio.

Do I want to spend the second half of my life mostly consuming and not creating… or mostly creating and being super picky about what I consume?

Maybe a lot of the disdain I have for current nerd culture is self-resentment. Maybe it’s exhaustion from the overwhelm (I mean, how many Marvel movies and TV series do we get each year now?). Maybe it’s because I’m getting a lot more picky about what little time I have and if I consume one thing, I am missing out on other things that I might deem “higher quality” even if it’s potentially “intellectual” or “elitist”.

But really, at the end of the day, what’s really driving me is knowing I don’t have much time left. I’m past the midpoint. I want to create more. I think if I don’t, that will be one of the biggest regrets I’ll have later in life.

And listen - I didn’t hate Cursed Child. I don’t regret the £800 we spent on the tickets for a family of five. I had fun. The visual effects were a joy to watch and dissect. The story, despite being contrived and forced, wound up with a very emotionally honest ending that made me tear up. Twice. It was an experience that I will cherish with my family for years to come. And we did it in London! The only city post-2021 that shows it in its original two parts! That sort of exclusivity still gives me glee.

I know there’s a lot to unpack here. And this was a little stream-of-consciousness. But if you’re reading this, thank you for reading.