Nerd media and politics

There’s this weird thing happening with evaluating older SF/F media from a current social justice perspective where a genre or a property retroactively becomes progressive because it touched on, say, inequality or gender identity or sexual orientation. Then when an established author, in the current environment, makes something a lot more tame than his earlier work would imply or somebody takes the genre in a more centrist direction people become confused or even feel betrayed.

It’s also becomes a culture war territory where basically two sides call each other interlopers and not real fans.

The whole discourse surrounding cyberpunk because of Cyberpunk 2077 is a good example. But there are lots more, like with Star Trek or superhero comics.

One surface reason comes from fans compartmentalizing how they engage with those works and with what aspects from them. But the deeper reason, I think, is because of the people who want to find “liberatory potentialities” in nerd media of yore ignore that a lot of the progressive elements they latched on actually come from a transgressive impulse.

A lot of SF/F media was made in a much more conservative environment and featuring same sex relationships or characters breaking gender norms or heroes fighting authority figures was a good way to be a bit naughty. But they rarely came from a genuine engagement with the real life struggles reflected in those stories.

I don’t think it’s a very healthy response to pretend they were coming from a genuine and considered place. For one it’s polarizing in a really unproductive way. Reactionary fans of those works aren’t hypocrites, they don’t lack reading comprehension, they just glean over the progressive elements and focus on what conforms to their views.

It’s also saying that there’s no more work to be done, which is a pretty conservative attitude and it easily backfires by allowing reactionary fans to say they don’t hate, I donno, strong female characters, they just like well written ones like in the old works.

A lot of these properties are also owned by big media monoliths by now and it’s weird to participate in whitewashing their legacies instead of championing and engaging with current, independent works in the genre that don’t have the same baggage.

In the grand scheme of things this is pretty meaningless, but I do feel the way some people flatten their entertainment consumption with their politics by claiming that the kind of entertainment they consume was always reflective of their current politics, points to… something.

There are many ways to address the discomfort of liking a problematic genre or a property with reactionary fans, but imposing a totalizing interpretation is a very unserious one. And I’m not even sure it’s an effective one.