Fan-Baiting: A Feature, Not a Bug

in which I discuss the phenomenon of "fan-baiting" and why it must be done

“Why the obsession with remaking old films? Can’t they just make something new?”

This seems like a simple question, and it seems like it should have a simple answer—that answer being that the activist harpies employed by Hollywood are talentless hacks capable of nothing but cannibalizing the work of better artists. While true, this is not the whole story.

To be perfectly honest, the folks at Hollywood aren’t exactly talentless. They are employed, after all. It’s just that their talents don’t include things like crafting compelling narratives or birthing honest, loveable characters. You know, human stuff. Story stuff. While that type of trite nonsense lies outside of their wheelhouse, you’d be mistaken if you think they serve no purpose, or that they make those big Hollywood bucks for nothing. They do have a talent, and their talent is this: fan-baiting.

What is fan-baiting? In a nutshell, it’s rattling a dog’s cage so you can scream and run away when it nips at your fingers, appealing to the authorities to put it down for attacking you. It’s a provocation, the creation of villains where there aren’t any. Smoke and mirrors. And who are these villains? Well, it’s you and me. People whose crime is loving good stories and objecting to the Orwellian desecration of past art.

[Related: Modern Fiction Has a Narcissism Problem]

Everyone knows you can’t tell a great story without a villain, and it’s important to understand that the people at Hollywood are telling a story, and that story is about something called “modern society” (or, if you want to get political, which they always do, “Our Democracy.”) This is as much an invention as any other thing produced by the current bog of mass entertainment, but it’s critical that you believe in it, because—and this is key—the “creatives” at Hollywood are not beholden to you, the audience; they are beholden to their woke corporate and political overlords. It doesn’t matter whether the public enjoys the content they produce (this is why “get woke, go broke” is somewhat of a misnomer); what does matter is that they can turn you into a villain if you object to their heroic overriding of the hard drive of the “offensive” and “problematic” past. Thus, fan-baiting has become Hollywood’s bread and butter.

The endless gutter-flow of remakes is no accident. It isn’t because they can’t make anything new. Of course they could. It’s because if they were to focus on producing their own fresh content with their own fresh characters and storylines featuring all of the things they want to feature, few would be angry. Instead, and much worse, people would ignore it. They’d simply go back to consuming the oldies-but-goodies (as well as quality work from indies) while Hollywood’s thinly-veiled political sermons rot on the vine. The emperor would have no clothes. Their villains would be shown for what they are: a pile of sheets on the bedroom chair.

Fan-baiting is a feature, not a bug. In order to tell the story they want to tell about society (and the perfectly nice and ordinary folks who inhabit it), they must provoke fans of existing franchises to anger so they can label them as “racist,” “sexist,” or <insertphobehere>. Without this, the house of cards would collapse.

The solution? Stop taking the bait. Stop hate-watching. Stop feeding the rage machine what it needs to survive. The worst you could do is hit the mute button on these desperate, shrieking bog creatures and go about consuming—and producing—quality art on your own. Decouple from the system. Make connections with others who are doing the same. Kick the mud from your boots and leave their empire to its decay while you focus on preserving the past and building a better future atop that foundation. If enough of us do this, eventually, we will see change.