Cultivating fandoms
There's a certain magical quality to the written word. Where ideas are intangible and mutable when they exist as thoughts, they become anchored in reality when jotted down onto paper. Lines on maps fix geopolitical boundaries while sentences can lay down rules and principles that guide behavior. In the hands of a fantasy author, language altering reality becomes an intriguing plot device, as in Robert Jackson Bennett's Foundryside or P. Djèlí Clark's Ring Shout.
A recent example of this is Charles Stross's latest novel, A Conventional Boy. In it, he plays with the power of roleplaying games mixed with some Lovecraftian horror, with a bit of commentary about the state of the entertainment world thrown in for fun.
The Laundry Files is Stross's long-running fantasy series that mashes up Lovecraftian horror and spy thrillers as it follows the exploits of the members of a secretive division of the UK's Special Operations Executive, nicknamed "The Laundry." Their mission is to protect the public from magical threats, utilizing mathematics to tap into otherworldly powers and the like.
Some spoilers for A Conventional Boy ahead.
In this latest addition to the series (which Stross describes as an interstitial novel set in 2010 between The Apocalypse Codex and The Rhesus Chart) we follow a hapless gamer named Derek Reilly, who ran afoul of Laundry agents when he was scooped up during a raid while he was running a game of Dungeons & Dragons with some friends at the height of the Satanic Panic of the 1980s. The agency suspected that he had been tapping into some sort of occult power through the game, and shipped him off to Camp Sunshine, a sort of prison-turned-deprogramming center for cultists.
Decades later, Derek's has been completely institutionalized, and deemed harmless enough to write a camp newsletter and run a play-by-mail roleplaying game. He's hasn't felt the need to escape until he learns that the camp is about to be completely renovated and with its shipped off to other places and that there'll be a gaming convention in a nearby city. He decides that it's time to enact a long-simmering escape plan so that he can check it out.
After he slips out and heads into town, he discovers more of his people: fellow gamers, including several players who he's been corresponding with over the years through his game, Cult of the Black Pharaoh. He finds that he's got something of a following in the local gaming community, and he sets up an in-person game to run for the first time.
There are some other, screwy things going on at the con, however: a mysterious gaming company, Omphalos Corporation, has swooped in to save the financially-strapped convention, ostensibly to launch its new game, Bones & Nightmares.
As it turns out, the folks at Omphalos have other plans: their game is designed as a blood sacrifice to call an Elder God, with a built-in population of folks to play it. Derek and his new friends are the ideal folks to foil this plan: with the inside knowledge that gaming mechanics are perfectly suited for these sorts of rituals. At the same time this is happening, camp officials realize that Derek has slipped out, and quickly figure out not only where he is, but that there's some weirdness happening under their noses, and dispatch a team to contain it.
All in all, it's a fun read: a nice primer on convention and gaming culture, with some fun characters and a neatly contained story.
There was a line that really grabbed my attention while reading it, as Derek is learning about the convention and the mysterious company sponsoring it:
"They're tech evangelist types. Not real gamers, I mean they've got no heart," Ginger Beard had a definite grognard attitude. "The RPG they're pushing is just one corner of a franchise property along with the MMO, the LARP, the cosplay, and a bunch of tie-in novels. They're very corporate, deep-pocket stuff– there's some serious venture capital bankrolling them. It's like, imagine Games Workshop suddenly turned up twenty years ago with the entire 40K franchise fully developed, all the way to the movies and animated TV series? The free copies for congoers are a loss leader--they're counting on us to spread it by word of mouth. They probably plan to ride a commercial breakout into the mass market, IPO, then cash out.
Is there any better way to describe the approach to entertainment that seems to be everywhere theses days? There's clearly an element of this embedded in the bigger legacy franchises like Star Wars, Star Trek, or the Marvel Cinematic Universe, where you have stories transformed into multimedia entertainment platforms, spread out across all of these different mediums, from games to toys to books to TV shows.
Over the last decade, there's certainly been attempts from corporations to try and launch one of these things from scratch: look at the SyFy Channel's show Defiance, which was a big, ambitious attempt to run a TV show and video game at the same time, or Netflix's Jupiter's Legacy, which felt like the streaming service's attempt to launch its own MCU-style franchise, based on Mark Millar overarching comic book series. It lasted a season before it was canceled. At the same time, media companies like Warner Bros., and Amazon have picked up the rights to classic works like George R.R. Martin's Westeros-set stories, J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series, and J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle-earth legendarium for their own sprawling extended franchises.
As media companies consolidate into bigger entities, they're increasingly focusing on mining their archives for familiar content: if their subscribers and viewers liked HBO's Game of Thrones, why not launch a spinoff (or three?) Or if a new corporation is trying to push its way into the entertainment environment, it's not enough to come up with just one story to headline their offerings: they have to have a whole franchise mapped out that has just enough to be familiar, but different from its competitors.
Stross maps out the route that such a company would likely take: a story that's big enough to exist along all of those big product categories so that their hypothetical consumer base will have enough crap to buy to make it worth the expense and time it takes to launch such a story. It's a cynical way to look at the media world, but there's some truth to it. The eldritch angle is a fun one: there isn't a huge dividing line between true believers in a religion and the superfans of something like Star Wars or D&D, and Omphalos using this framework as a way to mine faith and devotion for a god-summoning ritual is a lot of fun to think about.
But in doing so, Stross showcases why these primordial franchises rarely take the world by storm: the fervent fandom that you see with these legacy franchises are the product of not just good stories, but of a lot of time that's been invested by said fans to really form a bond with these types of stories. Sure, you can hook a lot of people with the right story: I've been a devoted Star Wars fan since I laid eyes on the franchise back in 1997.
In the book, Omphalos is trying to speedrun their product by copying and mashing together a whole bunch of tropes that their marketing department thinks their potential audience fans will like, hoping they can build a community around it before selling off their stake and living off the earnings for the rest of their lives. I have a feeling that if you could cultivate faith in this way, you wouldn't get much juice from Bones & Nightmares, but tapping into something like Dungeons & Dragons – with its decades of history and dedicated players – would be like trying to take a bite out of a transmission line.
It takes time to develop those devoted superfans. I became a Star Wars adherent because I was able to pick up just about every book and tie-in published as a teenager, spent countless hours on message forums, helped run a fan website and built a hall of armor in my basement. It's organic growth that builds with time and contact, and that's something that's hard to replicate right out of the box. Indeed: even new franchises like the MCU and Westeros are built on foundations of dedicated fans that were there long before they were ever adapted.
I don't know if Stross intended that sort of commentary with this particular story, but the book serves as a solid reminder that fandom isn't a body of people that a publisher or corporation can rope in to do their marketing for them. Fandoms are communities of people who stick by a story because they happen to like it and the people who share the same appreciation of it. You can set up a body of work and entice people to come and check it out, but a fandom is something that you have to cultivate like a garden: you have to tend to it and put the effort in to support its growth.
In an age where our favorite stories are increasingly being wielded as tools to support a megacorp's bottom line, that long-term work is more important than ever.