0 5
6
these fans of stories that feature dragons, demons, and
time travel.
In 2014, gamers incensed by demands for more diverse
storytelling in videogames declared open season on fem-
inists on the internet. An army of comics, fantasy, and
TV audiences followed suit, in a howl of outrage against
women. Gamergate—and other episodes that were a
direct recruiting ground for what is now called the alt-
right—were campaigns of harassment organized through
shallow channels overflowing with crypto-fascism. The
objective was to ruin careers and destroy lives.
Some fans understand culture only as a function of
war. They believe that they are brave rebels, trying to take
back their beloved fandoms from shambling hordes of
social justice warriors, from the ice-army of snowflakes
coming to bring endless winter to the summerlands of
nerdery. They believe themselves to be the Rebel Alli-
ance, the browncoats, the riders of Rohan, when in fact
they are the Empire and always have been.BEAT FIVE
SUMMER 2016
A fringe far-right rally at the Republican National Con-
vention. I’m here as a reporter, and I hold up my recorder
as the far-right nanocelebrity on the podium segues
seamlessly from a rant about the threat of Islam to a rant
about the new Ghostbusters reboot. “Terrible feminist
flop!” Milo Yiannopoulos yells. The crowd goes wild.
What I had not appreciated, until this point, was that
many of these men felt that they were the ones under
attack. It felt to them that women and brown people
and queer people had taken away so much already.
As Franklin Leonard, founder of the Black List, wrote,
“When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels
like oppression.” Now we were coming for their cher-
ished fantasy worlds too—worlds they had needed
when they were young and lonely, just as much as we
did. Worlds they too had loved.
But there are different kinds of love, aren’t there?
I used to believe that there was something universal
about fandom, that our excitement and love for our
most cherished myths could bring us all together. This
wasn’t the silliest thing I believed in my early twen-
ties, but I had, at the time, swallowed a lot of saccha-
rine nonsense about what love means and the work
it involves. I had not yet encountered in my adult life
or in my fan life the sort of love which is always, and
only, about ownership.
All nerds love their fandoms. For some of us that
means we want to share them and cheer them on as
they grow and develop and change. For others, lov-
ing their fandom means they want to own it, to shut
down the borders and police their favorite stories for
any sign of deviance.Disney executives. Soon, in Vogler’s words, “executives
at other studios were giving the pamphlet to writers,
directors, and producers as guides to universal, com-
mercial story patterns.”
The hero’s journey was and remains the template
for how to create a Hollywood hit. In Campbell’s tell-
ing, this “monomyth” is not just the best story but the
only story, handed down from the classical era. But a
great many of us didn’t see our own lives anywhere in
those patterns. According to the psychotherapist Mau-
reen Murdock, Campbell himself said that women did
not need the hero’s journey—we just needed to accept
that they were “the place that people are trying to get
to.” The writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has spoken
of the dangers of the single story: “The single story cre-
ates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is
not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete.
They make one story become the only story.” Human
society cannot survive on a single story any more than
the human body can thrive on a diet of raw steak sprin-
kled with Adderall.
What brought fanficcers together was the sense, how-
ever softly spoken, of having been disqualified from
those grand social myths on the arbitrary basis of gen-
der, or race, or class. But by the mid-2010s, writing by
women, queer people, and people of color, many of
them emerging young and hungry from the open mouth
of the internet, was beginning to dominate the “official”
science fiction lists: Charlie Jane Anders, Emily St. John
Mandel, Catherynne Valente, Naomi Alderman, Ken
Liu, Carmen Maria Machado, Annalee Newitz, Nnedi
Okorafor, Seanan McGuire, N. K. Jemisin, and more.
Suddenly, most of the best and most feverishly passed-
around publications were being written by and, heaven
forfend, about people who weren’t stiff-necked white
chaps dreaming of war in space. Jemisin’s Broken Earth
books, all three of which won consecutive Hugo Awards,
show what happens when you oppress the most pow-
erful people in society—a vision of the collapse of civ-
ilization richer and more complex than the standard
calamity-by-numbers dystopia. Mandel’s Station Eleven
follows a troupe of actors trying to create beauty after
a global epidemic, giving them as their mantra an old
line from Star Trek: Voyager: “Survival is insufficient.”
Not everyone found these ideas exciting. Not every-
one was thrilled by the new crop of writers stepping in
from the margins. Maybe it would have been all right if
we’d kept our perverse fantasies where they belonged—
in the dank, excitable chatrooms of the internet that
nobody important ever squeezed into. Maybe it would
have been better, or at least safer, if we hadn’t started
to wonder whether we might not live out those fanta-
sies in meatspace. According to certain chin-strokers of
the Twitter-fueled commentariat, that was what really
caused all the trouble: too many gays, too many women,
too many people of color acting like the heroes. It’s just
not realistic to show that sort of thing too often, said