The discussions around Rings of Power. Where do I even start? Let’s face it, it’s not about Rings of Power specifically, it’s just the latest example in a long line of media and games where the fandom has taken on the full mantle of organised religion.
We may have given up what we traditionally think of as organised religion but the mindset of religion is blossoming and it’s way more toxic than any time I spent going to church as a teenager.
Where did this come from?
This thread surfaced on my feed by some arcane Twitter algorithmic process. It’s an interesting thread in how it compares Disney Adult fandom to what a lot of people experience when involved in a religion.
The way some Disney adults interface with Disney Parks is very much like a religion they get married there, celebrate surviving potentially terminal diseases, find meaning with friends through shared experiences and have a sense of being home when they return and literally treat it like making regular pilgrimages to a sort of Mecca. It’s an institution and a place that allows them to find meaning in their lives through iconography, rituals, forms of dress and community relationships.
That is pretty much the definition of a religion.
When it comes to media and games people are adopting a long-standing religious tradition of seminary and bible study.
Study the Bible
The common thread of canon scripture is the economic imperative to fill in the blank space where speculation flourished and replace it with expectation.
I don’t know anything more religious than the tweet below. They are literally debating who controls the scripture they choose to hold dear to their lives.
If you’re of a certain age you’ll remember when most TV or games didn’t generate such religious scripture. TV wasn’t very consistent. Even role-playing games amounted to a dungeon with a supply town a few miles away.
Then the 90’s came along and fandom got its various scriptures.
While we can associate the 90’s with Britney and Madonna, grunge and Nirvana, Friends, reality TV, The X Files, Clueless, VHS tapes and Now That’s What I Call Music mix CDs or whatever else you choose to pluck from the decade we can also associate it with the explosion of canon scripture.
A need to make money and mine the pockets of the fandom created the ‘run Forest run’ effect and we’ve been living with it since. The need to use setting or ongoing narrative or both to sell products seems great at the time, but each word, sentence, paragraph and book starts creating that canon that communities will enshrine in scripture and the result is a People’s Front of Judea moment, but less funny, and a fractured fandom.
The Star Trek Canon
Did you know that the vast majority of what we accept as Star Trek canonical scripture didn’t even exist until the Star Trek shows in the 90’s?
Then The Next Generation came along and every corner of it needed to be encyclopedically documented resulting in such gems as the Enterprise 1701-D blueprints and the seminal Star Trek: The Next Generation Technical Manual. All the detail all the time. A guide for everything.
This all makes sense, a heck of a lot of visual design and thought was put into these shows by key people who went on to define the look of Star Trek for a generation. The trouble is these products have implications.
The Star Wars Canon
Do you know what the irony about Star Wars canon scripture is? It’s a role-playing game’s fault.
Star Wars was based on a solid bedrock of mystery and speculation until the West End Games Star Wars role-playing game was released in 1987 and it began the process of eradicating speculation with the Star Wars Sourcebook and then there was no holding them back.
We had the delights of The Imperial Sourcebook, The Rebel Alliance Sourcebook, Corporate Sector Sourcebook, Death Star Technical Companion and then a guide for every novel released in the extended universe. It was literally a circle jerk of a piranha-like feeding frenzy of endless unnecessary bollocks.
We know where Star Wars ended up.
The White Wolf Canon
What about role-playing games? Well, I give you the World of Darkness, which used bottomless setting detail and endless story to sell books. The whole approach it outlined in the thread below.
The logical conclusion of this is a weight of canon scripture that is too complex to engage with. It makes it both a barrier to being useful and takes on the form of having sufficient complexity that it opens itself up to religious-like faction arguments.
The Rings of Power
Where do I even start? Was there ever going to be a show guaranteed to generate religious dissent and become the new mascot for the industry of vitriol than Rings of Power? Of course not. It’s not a disappointment in that regard.
Tolkien is sort of unique in that the original works have a sort of religious scripture quality that people are really beholden to way more than a lot of other books that may get adapted. Even if you ignore the racism and misogyny, as we’ll come back to that, the trading back and forth of lines of scripture in support of different views is exactly how religious debates happen with people quoting supporting lines from the bible.
Social Media: Radicalise!
All this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I went to church as a teenager and I’ll let you into a secret: it wasn’t mainly about the scripture for most people. It was about a more abstract sense of belonging and purpose and community and friendship.
Oddly, not that different to why people form communities around games and media.
But it’s not like that for everyone as some religions have elements that get radicalised and fandom has been radicalised. It’s always existed, as I remember when actual actors from Deep Space Nine got asked passive-aggressive questions on stage due to it not being Star Trek. Sound familiar?
Then The Last Jedi came along and made fandom much worse than my lived religious experience!
It’s nuts currently. We live in a period my 90’s self could only have dreamed of when it comes to genre media and games and yet as each major project gets closer to release we prepare the defences, secure our social media and, in some small part, we dread the oncoming crusade.
It’s tiring and in some cases frightening just because it reveals a pattern of thought in some of our fellow human beings that is very hard to comprehend. I never experienced this during my time with organised religion, I’ve only got the full-on, fundamental religious experience from fandom in the last five years.
Misogyny and racism to taste
Then we come to the final stage of religious toxicity: when it becomes enshrouded in racism and misogyny and whatever other ‘eny’ and ‘ism’ you want to throw in. The scripture is used to masque these views and argue a position from the benefit of doubt perspective that, with increasing frequency, these people don’t deserve.
They don’t deserve it because it makes no sense. Keeping to a creator’s vision is almost NEVER about changing the WHAT, but about whether the WHY has changed.
Like this thread articles, you’re not betraying an artist unless the themes and intentions are corrupted. Many people miss this. Something isn’t Star Trek because they change a ship design, or something happens a bit in the wrong time period. Star Trek isn’t about ship designs or what the Klingons look like. It isn’t overly about whether characters are female and / or a POC.
The details of the scripture have become the focus rather than the message of the artist.
How religious does that sound?
And, Finally…
I don’t value canon as something valuable in and of itself. You need enough stuff to support the drama and that is it. It usually turns out that is a surprisingly small amount. A New Hope is defined in many ways by what we don’t fully know rather than what we do and it’s a better experience for it.
It’s my view the economic need to sell merchandise and the fact that canonised external story and setting material is devoured by fans has slowly created something toxic when fed into today’s cultural firmament. The merchandise and the internet provided the scripture and then social media finds a way to radicalise it and mix in cultural agendas.
It’s kind of ironic that religious thought, approach and terrorist-like activity have found a new home. I just never fully appreciated it would be embedded in the media and games I enjoy.