Snowflake Challenge #15: Predictions

[rodo]

snowflake_challenge: Challenge #15:
In your own space, opine on the future of fandom.

So, this is a bit difficult for me, since I haven’t really had my finger anywhere near the pulse of fandom in over a decade, and I’ve happily been doing my own thing at the fringes every since, but I’ll give it a try.

1. Fandom will continue to mostly congregate around franchises and/or remakes. This is partly due to the fact that genuinely original canons seem to get more and more rare these days, but also due to the fact that the built-in sense of community an existing fandom provides helps organise people.

2. East Asian live action canons are going to increase in popularity. This is going to happen in bursts, whenever there’s a new canon coming out that hits the nerve of fandom, as has happened in the last couple of years. Western producers are going to try to cash in on the hype and miserably fail to adapt one of these canons in a western way at least once, because they don’t get why people love the original in the first place.

3. At some point, the social media fandom sphere might collapse or at least diminish because the business model of social media is going to come into conflict with political and legal realities around the globe, such as consumer protection laws, worker protection laws, laws against certain types of hate speech and so on – and managing those types of requirements would require more money than the advertising-based business model brings in (and no, algorithms aren’t going to solve the problem because they’re not good enough to keep pace with humans yet.)

Take all of these with a huge grain of salt because I’m shit at predicting stuff, and also, things might turn out very differently if there’s a war with China.

Comments

[yelp]

Very reasonable predictions, thanks for sharing! I've been especially bummed about the business model of social media recently. It really does seem to stoke the worst and most dramatic of fandom behaviors, and also makes it super visible too.

[silveradept]

These seem like reasonable productions. Franchises and remakes because they're safe and make money, East Asian works because their tropes are really good for a Western audience to play with (and because the attempted Westernization will be much like the Avatar live action movie,) and the entire likelihood that large centralized ad-supported services will implode under the sheer weight of "content" and the inability of computer programs to recognize the Scunthorpe problem, satire, or many of the other things that were fairly easy for humans to understand.

Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith]

>> 1. Fandom will continue to mostly congregate around franchises and/or remakes.<<

Likely so.

>> This is partly due to the fact that genuinely original canons seem to get more and more rare these days,<<

The mainstream examples of original canons are rarer, because people have gotten stuck on saving the cat.

But there are other options. The publishing bottleneck is well and truly broken. Anyone can publish whatever they want on a blog or website. It's not always easy to find, but there is actually a lot more truly unique stuff out there today than there used to be, because people can't block it out anymore. Here's my holiday shopping experience:

Amazon: In addition to the thing you actually asked about, here are 20 books that all sound the same.
Me: Meh.

Kickstarter: Here is a book about an autistic Yeti. Or perhaps you'd prefer a Neanderthal comic book?
Me: Shut up and take my money.

>> but also due to the fact that the built-in sense of community an existing fandom provides helps organise people.<<

That does appeal to some. Certainly it appeals to the people making money off it. But they forget that the human brain is cyclic. Repeating the same stimulus quickly falls into the law of diminishing returns, and then it is novelty that attracts attention.

>>2. East Asian live action canons are going to increase in popularity. This is going to happen in bursts, whenever there’s a new canon coming out that hits the nerve of fandom, as has happened in the last couple of years. Western producers are going to try to cash in on the hype and miserably fail to adapt one of these canons in a western way at least once, because they don’t get why people love the original in the first place.<<

Well, that's because Eastern and Western entertainment is totally different. The heroic dynamics are different, the plot structures are different. Mash them together and you get hash almost every time. Very rarely is it entertaining hash like Star Wars.

>> 3. At some point, the social media fandom sphere might collapse or at least diminish because the business model of social media is going to come into conflict with political and legal realities around the globe, such as consumer protection laws, worker protection laws, laws against certain types of hate speech and so on – and managing those types of requirements would require more money than the advertising-based business model brings in (and no, algorithms aren’t going to solve the problem because they’re not good enough to keep pace with humans yet.) <<

They're also going to run into problems because by this point more people are realizing how toxic social media can get. Which is not a new problem, just the media is a bit different this century. If it's more miserable than fun, people will eventually go do something else.

>> Take all of these with a huge grain of salt because I’m shit at predicting stuff, and also, things might turn out very differently if there’s a war with China.<<

If China wants to throw a war, it better get on the ball, because it doesn't have much time left. They did too much damage to their own demographics, and they're past some important tipping points. Their ambivalent efforts to fix the mess haven't worked because they left it too late. They could do a lot of damage going down, but given what the demographics have done to their economy -- not to mention some other poor life choices -- they're not getting their position back.

I'd worry more about India. I'd worry a lot more if I were in Pakistan. 0_o