There’s no denying that fandom has come a long way.

From actually mailing out fan fiction to entire websites dedicated to storing fanfics, it’s quite impressive.

Fan conventions, like Comic Con, are growing and becoming major cultural events.

To top it off, fandom has even conquered academia as “pop culture studies” programs become a reality and peer reviewed papers address My Chemical Romance fanfic.

And as a person who will write hundreds of words on why a specific comic book cover is great or defend ‘Jupiter Ascending’s’ badness, this couldn’t please me more.

Well, there is kind of one issue. Most fan discourses suck.

You’ve probably seen it too, some clickbait headline like “The Sith are actually the good guys.”

(Or some other dumb thesis cooked up by a bunch of friends when it’s late and they’re drunk and bored.)

And yet it gets written and published. Then, people manage to make a few bucks for it. But honestly at this point it’s kind of all expected.

It’s the same basic set up that the Outrage Machine uses: shocking statements to get as many eyeballs as possible.

Yes, I do realize that I’m sounding quite bitter by this point, but I assure you I’m not.

Well, maybe I am a little bit bitter.

But mostly I think I’m disappointed. We have new methods of storytelling. More voices are being heard than ever before, and more stories are more accessible than ever before.

On top of that, we’re constantly connected with the sum total of human knowledge up to this point.

And yet, the most interesting thing to be said about “Lord of the Rings” is “what if Sauron wasn’t that bad of a guy?”

I fully admit that it might be the pretentious liberal arts major in me, but I’m simply tired of a cultural discourse that can at best ask “but what if x was y?”

It’s because these stories frequently have things to say, and all too often get more interesting the more you dig at them intellectually.

That’s what I really want: a deeper collective experience with the stories we all love.