The Death of the Fanboy

Written by Joel T. Lewis

Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fanboy is dead. And no one will tremble at his legacy. His culture of posturing, elitism, gatekeeping, and mansplaining will not be remembered fondly.
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The pop culture currency exchange from which the Fanboy drew his power and his expertise is no longer so hard won, so precious as he tried to convince us it was. Expertise in ‘his’ world (and I hesitate to call it his world, because it was never truly his) is mere keystrokes away. Pedia’s both Wookie and Wiki have allowed years of knowledge gained through chapter hunting and issue scouring in dusty comic and secondhand bookshops to be obtained from the comfort of your own couch. And unlike how Ian Malcolm accuses the Ingen corporation of a fatal lack of humility before the powers of nature in Jurassic Park (the irony of making a reference here is not lost on me), the proliferation of popular culture and reference knowledge through standing on the shoulders of those who came before is only positive. Communal narrative, participation, and contribution to popular culture only allows art to grow, and dogmatic idolization of source material and an unwritten stance on the ‘purity’ of the past kills it.

The Fanboy seemed to believe that when the Author was pronounced dead by Roland Barthes in 1967, ownership of the art passed from creator to consumer. This is inherently false. You don’t own art. Your admiration for art is not snatched away by something new that you term ‘inconsistent’ or as a ‘misunderstanding’ of the ‘spirit’ of the art from which new content is inspired. The phrase, ‘Not my -insert fandom-‘ is nonsense. The Ghostbusters were never yours, Thor doesn’t belong to you, Star Wars is bigger than your bigotry, and Doctor Who has never been yours to say who is worthy of the title role. Art progresses, moves on, develops, twists, and is remade; the audience be damned.

There has never been a hierarchy of fandom. Star Wars exists separate from the presumption of expertise the Fanboy claimed to have. It doesn’t matter how many Expanded Universe books you read before the canon changed, it doesn’t matter how many lines from Empire you can quote by heart, and it doesn’t matter that you only watch the Holiday Special ironically. If you believe that somehow this indulgence, this passion you’ve devoted to this fiction makes you the steward of it, you’ve missed the fucking point. You can’t impose your imagination on other people, you can’t justify discouraging and downright bullying others with your presumed expertise about fiction. This was the Fanboy’s modus operandi: Power to the most complete fan. It was elitist, it was cruel, and it strangled the passion of new fans. The Fanboy set the definitions and parameters for legitimacy within fandom and scorned anyone who fell short of those arbitrary levels. This is why he’s dead. This is why we will not miss him.

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Your art is not your own. Your faves are problematic. You do not own what you love. Narrative is not for the powerful, the enfranchised, the white, the male, or the heteronormative alone. It never should have been. To cling to the putrid corpse of the Fanboy and his naiveté, to the elitism that he represented is to be on the wrong side of the history of storytelling. 
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There’s nothing wrong with delighting in a narrative, to devouring its content, to pouring into it your imagination and creativity. There’s also nothing wrong with thinking critically about sequels or reboots, with not liking something for its pacing, it’s acting, or the quality of its effects. But the second you presume to own it, to hold it back from growing beyond you, you taint it. You rip the magic out of it. And that is goddamn criminal.
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So, give us Jane Foster Thor, give us Sense8, Riri Williams the Invincible Iron Man, Ocean’s 8, and Finn and Rose and Jyn and Rey. Kill the Skywalkers and Peter Parker, tear down the Tyrell Corporation, and set fire to the notion that retreading the same territory with the same tired old white men makes for the only compelling storytelling. Yoda said it best in Episode VIII, ‘We are what they grow beyond.’ I don’t presume to know for sure if Rian Johnson intended this to refer to a larger metaphor but I like to think that he’s talking about stories and art as much as apprentices and masters. Art grows beyond us and that shouldn’t scare us into ignorance and cruelty.

I am the Fanboy. I was the Fanboy. And it is time for me, for us, to die.

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