I Can’t Take Geek Culture Anymore
It’s an amazing time to be a geek.
There’s unprecedented production for new Star Wars franchises, the Marvel Cinematic Universe has dominated the box office for the past decade and continues to do so on streaming platforms, and the vast, relentless volume of user-generated content shows no signs of slowing down. Video game production is nearing that of the movies. Movie actors are appearing in streaming shows. The universe is expanding at an incredible, fantastic, exponential rate. It truly is the golden age.
But that’s also the problem. I just can’t take it any more.
I either can’t keep up, or when I do binge my way through a mini-series, I have very little idea what’s happening, because I have no frame of reference for the wealth of obscure references that I’m convinced are pandering to a group of about a hundred people on the internet. We live in a world of easter eggs, teasers, post-credits reveals, premier access, spoilers, reaction videos, frame-by-frame analysis, expanded universes and trailer by troll. I loved Avengers: Endgame and all that led up to it, but the multiverse of sidebar storylines, spin-off series, and explorations of characters that I just don’t care about is burning me out. To say I watched Loki is generous. I know my eyes saw each episode, but my comprehension of the plot was close to zero. I love this stuff, but as with all good breakups, it’s not you, it’s me.
Every month, three work friends and I have lunch together as part of an informal graphic novel club. It’s one of my favorite things about my job, and I always look forward to spending time with Phil, Brian and Stef. Phil is a deep, deep well of knowledge on comic books, and makes his own incredible 3D printed collectables. Brian spans video games and comic books with ease, and is amazing at reading between the lines around inter-related plots. Stef’s a toy collector and is currently working her way through some of the comic book classics like Crisis on Infinite Earths and Batmanga. It’s wonderful to see her discover those stories, and for us all to live them over again through her eyes. I usually hold down the video game side of the house, and am historically the one crying ‘let’s not talk about this yet, I didn’t watch it this week already’.
A recent lunch saw us chatting about Loki. Phil went deep on the inter-related references back to previous threads that had happened in the books. Brian pieced it all together and was making sense of it in relation to Wandavision and The Falcon and The Winter Soldier. Stef didn’t really understand it but was detached enough to just sit back and enjoy it for what it was. I went off on a cynical rant about how none of it made sense, that you need a formal qualification to be able to enjoy this, and how I felt increasingly excluded from a club that was getting smaller and smaller with every new episode. Brian rightfully flagged that I was exhibiting signs of burnout. My cynicism around one of the things I’m most passionate about is nothing to be proud of. I’ve thought a lot about that lunch since, about what I want to do about it, and I’m attempting to now turn that cynicism into something productive and positive. I’m grateful to Phil, Brian and Stef not only for their friendship, but for calling me out on the need to step back.
Of course, all of this happened in the monthly comic books long before it happened in the streaming shows and movies. For thirty five years I was a religious comic book shopper. I’m that guy with a massive collection of long boxes in the man cave. But something happened over the past ten years where the stories became so complex, so dense, so interwoven and impenetrable, that I had no choice but to abandon my life-long passion. I felt increasingly excluded from the club. No-one likes to feel as if they’re aging out of something.
I’d reach the end of an X-Men book and have no idea what the hell I had just read. I turned to the trade paperbacks to help distill and collate the individual threads, but with limited success and similarly low comprehension. Again with Green Lantern, one of my all-time favorites, the recent Grant Morrison arc was impenetrable from the first issue. The art was poor, the story was unreadable, and everything I cared about was gone. Serious readers will tell me “you don’t understand what he’s trying to do”. To which I’d answer “I know all too well what he’s trying to do, and I don’t like it - this is just art school garbage”. This has been rampant throughout the Marvel universe in particular - the Spider-verse is literally a web of stories that I couldn’t keep up with. The Avengers is so splintered and fragmented that you need to be reading ten different titles simultaneously (which might just be the whole cynical commercial point of course). X-Men requires you have your own clairvoyant powers of understanding to be able to follow what’s happening across the dozens of different titles.
A few years ago, while recovering from serious illness, I’d read many of the longer Batman arcs such as No Man’s Land, Knightfall and Court of Owls. I’d voraciously consumed recent arcs such as Blackest Night, Age of Ultron and the entire Walking Dead series. I loved them all, No Man’s Land in particular. The stories are complicated, but focused. The characters go deep, not broad. There’s a strong thread that unites all the different titles around a common theme, and the narrative feels as if it has direction and purpose. At what point did comic books stop doing this?
And then of course there’s the annual events. The ‘it all ends here’ blockbuster tie-ins across the entire publishing franchises that seduce readers into an overarching arc that promises to upend everything you thought you knew about the worlds these characters inhabit. First it was the Crisis arcs, then years-long sagas across dozens of different titles. At DC there was Countdown, then 52, then The New 52 and on and on from there. At Marvel there was Civil War, House of M, Secret Wars and many more. With alarming and increasing regularity, titles were being rebooted and reshuffled, with variant characters perpetually being introduced in less than transparent efforts to keep with the times. It all started to feel cynical and desperate. Variant covers were the least of my problems.
It’s the same sport with Star Wars. I was absolutely the Star Wars kid at school, and am a lifelong collector of the action figures. I’d weathered the lean years in the nineties, and heck, even enjoyed the recent trilogy. I thought The Mandalorian was fantastic, especially the end of Season Two. But there’s cracks appearing in my fandom. While I’d eventually gotten over myself after leaving the theater in a ‘how dare they just remake everything and serve it up as something new’ rage after The Force Awakens, Darth Maul’s appearance at the end of Solo was just something I couldn’t take. He was dead, right? Didn’t Obi-Wan slice him in half?
The friend I’d gone with calmly explained to me that if I’d have been watching Clone Wars and Rebels, then I would have understood what was happening. I’d always dismissed his point of view around the Expanded Universe. He was really into the hundreds of Timothy Zahn books, which I’d always thought were ‘cute, but of course they’re not the real thing’. My dismissal of him is of course, now the norm for how the franchise is evolving, and my inability to adapt is now my frustration. Why do I need to have watched the animated series in order to understand the movie? Why do I need to have consumed all the other aspects of the franchise, across several different formats and platforms in order to simply enjoy what was supposed to be a shocking reveal? If I left Episode 7 in a fit of infantile entitlement, then after Solo I was starting to feel like walking away for good.
Of course, all of this is reflective of modern media fragmentation. With such phenomenal choice available to us wherever and whenever we are, anything and everything we want is no more than a couple of taps away. We are spoiled beyond words. But with that huge breadth of choice comes consequence, and that consequence is our time and attention. Just because I haven’t invested hundreds of hours into watching the animated Star Wars franchises, it precludes my understanding of the things I do have time to invest in. Just because I haven’t read an arc of the books from decades ago, I’m unable to decipher a post-credits scene that teases a movie coming out in five years’ time. I get that turning to the internet is all part of the fun, and Phil reminded me that modern geek culture thrives on the collective figuring out of what it all means. I get it, I just don’t feel part of it. It makes me feel… old. And for this to happen with something I so strongly associate with my childhood, and perhaps even my identity, it’s hard.
So, enough moaning, what am I going to do about it?
To start, I’m going to stop trying so god damn hard, and just enjoy what I can enjoy. I loved The Last of Us 2 and Death Stranding earlier this year, and I can’t wait for the new Dune movie. I’m looking forward to playing House of Ashes coming out in October, and catching up on The Batman Who Laughs at the beach this summer. I feel indifferent to the need to watch Black Widow, The Bad Batch or any of the upcoming MCU movies, and I’ve stopped going to the comic book store. I get 2000AD delivered weekly, and that’s just fine. I’m getting more comfortable with walking away when it’s all too much, but I’m a work in progress. I need to be more like Stef. Just enjoying what I can, working through things at my own pace, and not being afraid to just appreciate it all for what it is. The overwhelming scale of content is a wonderful problem to have, and while the work is sometimes hard, I’m getting more comfortable with being OK with that.
It’s an amazing time to be a geek.
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