Terminator: Genisys (pronounced jen-i-size, I promise) came out in 2015. I don’t know a single person who liked it. In the lead up to this year’s Terminator: Dark Fate the message was subtle, but not. “We hear you,” the filmmakers seemed to say. “We didn’t like Genisys either. We’re ignoring it. Your voices are important to us.” That may or may not have been the case. Not too many people went to see Terminator: Dark Fate. (I did! I liked it! Well, it was OK. B minus.) The voices of the fandom were regarded as very important.
Is this the right attitude for creators to take? Should the whims of fandom be a consideration in creating art? How should the artist regard their audience? When you’ve got gangs demanding the Snyder Cut, or a Star Wars movie starring only white men, or Marvel movies that perfectly recreate comics from 50 years ago, how can creators know which voices to listen to? Are all fan demands created equal? Can a writer be trusted to take criticism from the faceless masses?
To answer this question, we should turn to the “Buffy” comics.
There’s a war brewing
The way most media outlets would frame it, there’s a war brewing between those who create media and those who enjoy it. But that simultaneously is too simple and too complex. There isn’t one singular conflict- there are tons of them! And these problems aren’t new, they’ve been around for hundreds of years. The recent “Buffy” series takes on this dynamic head-on.
Let’s use the one most obvious example of something that changed from then to now: Willow’s sexuality. I don’t know at what point in the writing process of the show they decided Willow would be gay, but in the narrative itself, it happened while Willow was in college. In the new series, Willow knows she is gay and is out as a high schooler.
Now, I don’t have statistical evidence but, at least in my interactions with the Buffy fandom, this is exactly the kind of change people were hoping to see. Elements of Willow’s journey have aged, some poorly. Having Willow as a confident, empowered young lesbian is exactly the kind of power fantasy some fans longed to see. The writer of the “Buffy” comics, Jordie Bellaire is a long-time fan. There’s no way that part of her was not aware as to what kind of thing other fans wanted to see in the comic.
So what’s the argument against considering fan-response in creative choices? Unfortunately, they’re the kind of arguments often made in bad faith, but for the sake of argument lets look at them on their merits. One has to do with the notion of “pandering” to a certain group of people. This gets tricky, but it is entirely a question of authorial intent. Is making Willow a confident lesbian “pandering” to queer fans? Would putting her in the closet be “pandering” to homophobes? There are stories to be told with both versions of the character and indeed, we’ve seen what each version looks like.
Accusations of “pandering” are often used as a dog-whistle, a way to reject a creative choice because of its perceived appeal to a particular identity. And most of the time, it’s used to punch down. Every time the Disney company allows a creative choice that barely clears the lowest possible standard for acceptance and inclusion, you see accusations of “pandering.” It’s not a word that gets thrown around when the overwhelming male-ness of the Avengers movies is taken to task. No one says, “The Avengers is just pandering to male fans.” Because that sort of thing is accepted as normal.
The other criticism is a matter of integrity. Changing an aspect of a character might go against the integrity of that character. Changing an aspect of the story might go against the integrity of its themes. This is a very interesting- but highly subjective- consideration. In the original pitch for Buffy, Joss Whedon often talked about subverting the expectation that the “the little blonde girl who goes into a dark alley and gets killed in every horror movie” is helpless. His words. Buffy’s blondeness and smallness was Whedon in conversation with what he saw as a horror movie cliché.
Continued belowSo if you changed one of those aspects, would you be going against the integrity of the character? What if Buffy was 6′ 4” and super erm, buff? What if she were fat? What if she was a brunette? What if she was black? Those changes would go against to original inspiration of her character, but would it violate her core integrity? It’s not so simple, especially because Buffy is such a three-dimensional character. There’s a lot that makes her, her. Change one thing and she’d be different sure, but as long as she’s brave and powerful, as long as she longs for a normal life even as she makes choices that guarantee she’ll never have one, she’ll still basically be Buffy.
When the fans are the writers
In Jordie Bellaire and artist Dan Mora’s series, Buffy still looks basically like Sarah Michelle Gellar. They didn’t fundamentally change her in that way. Are they preserving the integrity of the character? Are they pandering to the purists? These questions might be interesting to consider, but they’re ultimately meaningless.
No story is written in a vacuum, and it’s ludicrous to ask a writer to ignore forces in the world around them. As politics in the real world change, we should hope to see politics of a story change. A story where the Watchers round up vampires, separate them from their companions, and put them into detention centers would read very differently today than it would ten years ago. I hope and expect that any story with that sort of imagery take real world events into account, and write a story that plays to our shared understanding of what those images represent.
There’s never going to be a rule that says “always please your audience” or “fans are always wrong.” There’s no categorical imperative to be found here. But creators are going to be influenced by the world they inhabit. In comics, creators are often going to be fans- or critics- of the characters they are writing about. The “Buffy” comics, as with many licensed comics, are created by fans with their own perception of what should change and what should remain the same. They will doubtlessly be expected to make a lot of tough calls and well, we will have to take each of them as they come. There’s always going to be another apocalypse, and like Buffy, we’ll just have to deal with them one at a time.
