BW Media Spotlight

Because of course it looks like the Atari symbol. Branding is important you know.

Since I’ve started this site I’ve found myself coming up with new terms that explain what I see going on in the storytelling world. The latest was “SEECA“, an acronym of “Snobs, Egotists, Elitists, Corporatists, and Activists”–the five biggest problems with modern entertainment across the board. Others have included “Eventitis“, an overreliance on huge event stories over smaller stories that let us get to know the characters better, or “multiversal continuity”, those core aspect of character, design, and backstory that says “this is (X). “Mockstalgia”is a mocking of older material often passed off as parody, while “Not-stalgia” is something claiming to be nostalgic but isn’t.

That last one could be seen as a subset of a new term that came to mind while listening to my favorite wake-up podcast, Morning Nonsense. Literature Devil‘s topic yesterday was on how fanfic has ruined modern storytelling. To be more precise, fanfic is a good way to learn the ropes and improve your craft. There’s a few of mine in the Prose archive. I started from fanfic, then moved to derivatives (I should show you my 6th grade comics sometime), and then finally towards original ideas inspired by the stuff I was into enough to make fanfic of. Sure, I cringe at some of my old fanfic. The one or two Voltron comics I still have are kind of cringe, while the “War Of The Fools” parody of the George Pal War Of The Worlds movie, because I really liked his take on the invader ships, was the same dumb joke every time. I also named one of them “Joe”. Kid me was an idiot.

(Then again, a group sprite comic project I was part of outside my planned solo series had me creating a vegan zombie.)

The problem is when you approach an official project like a fanfic. You make the same mistakes but rather than doing it for fun or practice you’re making official canon and lore, so if you screw it up just to “leave your mark” you screw over previous writers or later writers have to fix your mistakes, the only time the retcon is a good thing and sadly not how they retcon things anymore. The best example I could use is the Marvel Cinematic Universe and its various streaming offshoots. They’re more interested in “wouldn’t it be cool if…” rather than “would it make sense to the story as has been presented all this time”. It’s because they really don’t care about even previous movie canon, nevermind accuracy to those silly little comics that sit low on the media pecking order above the “superior” movies, made by the “real” storytellers in live-action Hollywood.

So is that not-stalgia? No, those are “adaptations” of something currently around. Nostalgia is something that is no longer making new stories but you still fondly remember it. Not-stalgia would be something like the Underdog movie while mockstalgia is more the CHIPS or Baywatch movies. You can’t call it “hatefics” as some people in the Morning Nonsense chat suggested because that would require them to care about the comics enough to hate them. The showrunner of Echo didn’t care, she just wanted to tell the story she wanted to tell regardless of how well it matched the character. She-Hulk: Attorney At Law could be hatefic but the hate was less for the comic than the comic lovers.

Suddenly I had an epiphany that still stuck with me after I fully woke up. The best way to describe these particular bad adaptations goes into what they really want from the material: a popular brand they can trick people into going to in order to see their “superior” ideas. Ladies, gentlemen, and the rest of you, I give you….Brandfic. It’s like a fanfic or a hatefic or a dontcarefic, but lazier and more ego-centric.

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