The Ranch

Enjoying art is a weird experience. There’s a lot of reasons for this, but the one that sticks out to me is that it seems like creatives are too good at setting the bounds of discussion around art, even in “subversive” contexts. Well… framing this as a “reason” might confuse consequence with cause. It’s that—as trite as it may sound—the cause is capitalism and all of the systems of domination that it is entangled with. Far from being an impotent or abstract critique, capitalism is critical to contend with in considering art and culture; it subtends creative expression, which–amid a whole host of things–makes art less interesting.  

From what I can tell, the thing that makes capitalism “unique” or “different” when looking at the past few thousand years of statecraft and jurisprudence is that it’s been really successful at reaching the goals of those two things. This may seem odd, as much of capitalism’s mythopoeia and hagiology is rooted in a disdain for the state and bureaucracy. That’s the thing, though—the fact that capitalism allows those ideas to be proliferated can distract from the concrete actuality of private-public collusion, alongside the wide-reaching tendrils of The Market™. Its dominance allows it to take on and respond to alternative lifeways through parasitism and/or destruction. It only recedes when the balance of forces… forces it to do so.

Storytelling mediums (and cultural production more broadly) are useful examples of this, where even oppositional and exciting work, representing—following Raymond Williams’s analysis in Marxism and Literature—the residual and the emergent, can actually bolster the dominant culture. The core takeaway from this is that even resistance against domination, particularly through producing cultural artefacts, has the potential (and the likelihood) to have an impact that is politically opposite of its intentions. A useful framing device for this is the Four Horsemen of Bullshit Graph, a (metaphorical) radar chart that I just made up. 

A radar chart template comparing the labeled with Joss Whedon, Aaron Sorkin, Dave Filoni, and Chris Avellone. Given the difficulty, arbitrariness, and misleading nature of empirical information in conversations around art, the graph is blank. It is simply here so that readers can visualize what a radar chart or graph is. 

It has four points represented by a veritable Mount Rushmore (implied coloniality and erasure intended) of dominance’s entrenchment and recapture in culture: Joss Whedon (snarky and desirable ensembles), Aaron Sorkin (competent bureaucracies), Dave Filoni (mythopoeia and fealty to nostalgia, history, and (private) property), and Chris Avellone (the moralistic anti-Whedon, who loves the gray areas). The supermajority of creative production—across mediums—can be mapped using these poles.

Keep Williams’s ideas (dominant, residual, and emergent) in mind for the rest of this; they’ll be critical throughout the piece. With these, he talks about how in societies, dominant features are emblematic of the current era—i.e., the things that most embody/represent/signify capitalism and all of the systems that it is connected to. These would be all of the features of domination that are accentuated by the present hegemony. It is the vast majority of the things that are “common sense.”

Residual features were formed in a “previous” historical era (and potentially dominant during that period, if not dominating), and are still active in the present. However, in the current era, it is seen as “marginal” and “not fully incorporated/assimilated” into present functions. These are often things labeled archaic or primitive, such as Black and non-Black Indigenous peoples & practices/worldviews/lifeways. They are decidedly non-capitalist (insofar as self conceptions and intentions go; outcomes are a different story), in both “positive” (e.g. communal economics, no private property) and “negative” (e.g. child marriage) ways.

Emergent values are the new (while being born of residual and dominant) values, norms, conditions, practices, and (kinds of) relationships being formed, that are hard/impossible to consistently predict the “when” and “where” of their occurrences, if not the “if.” Emergence is anti-capitalist (again, at least in intent), coming from the recomposition of working class/dominated bloc power.

The relationship between the three is this: the dominant features of the conjuncture (or the current moment in a political-historical sense) are always engaged in a struggle to make the residual features “merely” residual. It essentially tries to sweep those things under the rug, often “allowing” them to exist, so long as they don’t get out of line and/or continue to big up capital. The dominant also struggles to incorporate, suppress or even puppeteer the emergent, often borrowing its “negative” or “subversive” aesthetics sans content. If necessary, the dominant may use tactics it deploys for emergent properties against residual properties, and vice versa. The fact that capitalism as a dominant system is capable of this is what makes the creative outlook so limited, even when people “do” revolutionary stuff. If something like Andor can make Disney a bunch of money, that’s an indication of this.

★★★

To start exploring the poles of the four horsemen, it’s good to understand Whedon’s role, as his pole is the baseline. Lotsa popular pieces orient around this one; dialogue first characterization, “memorable” (i.e. marketable) lines and ensembles, alongside an emphasis on snark and banter. Think of the first MCU Avengers movie from 2012 and you’ll have a very clear picture of what I mean. This sensibility is not bad-in-itself; there’s nothing “wrong” with particular stylistic choices in any totalizing sense. It’s that, in Whedonesque hands, this acts to manage the economy of emotions in a certain way, using coolness and relatability to either normalize or standardize characters into an “ideal” hierarchical power structure. It may even be utopia–but a kind that lives up to its namesake–with slaves. So… as always… it’s a question of who’s let into the club and who gets blocked by the bouncer. 

Given this code-red and pervasive risk, it’s critical to understand the importance of challenging dominant structures. Part of that is taking the idea that the dominant is harmful seriously. That requires rooting collective perspectives in the truth that harm doesn’t always have to be obvious or have clear causality. Whedonesque media’s assimilationist orientation may not seem problematic if one uses a multicultural perspective. However, the context in which “multiple cultures” are interacting is what gives those interactions their character. The “melting pot” form is not inherently liberatory. Many cultures or peoples being pressurized together without obvious-to-an-apathetic-outsider abjection doesn’t mean that it went away or that it wasn’t spooled into something that could situationally become more covert. 

But back to movies: if Avengers is an odd example because it’s not necessarily “multicultural” in the sense of (racial) diversity, the 2002 space western Firefly serves well here. There’s a Black woman in the ensemble there (wow)! That’s not enough to satisfy me, though. Nor, to “improve” it, would I want Whedon to necessarily try to write something that makes identity particularly relevant in that “love/desire for explicit and ‘accurate’ representation” way. it would likely not go over well, to say the least.

This feels particularly prudent for Firefly as there is a heavy (and vague, in that special way only exoticizing eyes could manage) pan-Asian (particularly Chinese) aesthetic-cultural influence beyond the obvious Western stuff, and that’s pretty weird… given that, you know… there’s no prominent Chinese folks in the show. That’s Orientalism for you, though.

That’s part of the issue; inclusion and multicultural/melting pot conversations get turned into the need for other cultures to be legible so that they can be more easily bought and sold (i.e., that’s the outcome, at any rate). This isn’t great, as those cultures are then able to, in their acquiescent offshoots, fold more neatly into dominance (given their perceived residuality and the relationship to power that implies), furthering the marginalization of anything that can’t be well-situated within the dominant cultural space.

That leaves audiences with limited choices as far as media depictions go. They can: 1) allow themselves to be fulfilled by being seen in media made by (or that otherwise bolsters) dominant forces like Hollywood, just waiting for the “opportunity” to be embarrassed/disappointed, 2) throw other people who share the same identities under the bus, or 3) be shown modes of struggling for a good life that won’t work or are otherwise missing critical context.

The issues with this are made clear in things like the research on representation in media. Regardless of my questions about the framing of many of these studies (i.e., to be a bit uncouth, how much representation is needed before it magically turns into material change), it is very clear that media is looking “more” like the world that it showcases or otherwise takes inspiration from. That may sound like a good improvement, and something to celebrate, until uh… one looks at the conditions of the folks who are being represented. From a failing economy to (looming) trans genocide to femicide to the continued abjection of Black folks, having the IRL Weyland-Yutanis of the world put more marginalized faces on my screen is a cold “comfort.” That’s Spectacle for you, though!

Even if the conversation stays rooted in media and the space around it, the story told is still like poetry. I think of Ryan Coogler’s movies, which are IP powerhouses. I particularly remember the fervor around 2018’s Black Panther movie. Lightning somehow struck twice with 2025’s Sinners. Again, I have to ask: what material changes does this usher in, and—if there are any—how does that help the most discarded people in Black communities? For me, (petty-)bourgeois people becoming more comfortable or someone being “allowed” to enter that economic arena is not only an invalid response to my question, it is a distraction from addressing the issues that cause the misery folks pretend it’s responding to.

To be frank: from what I can tell, even focusing on narrow terms within dominant economic paradigms, Black folks are still struggling, with even the bourgeois(-aligned) folks admitting that “the best Black economy ever” isn’t enough. That’s not even to mention the continual loss of such “gains.”

The Whedon-style fixation on “our faces” in “their places” feeds into–if one believes that the results indicate the purpose–that emotional economic management mentioned earlier. It’s one of the main ways that marginalized folks are placated at present, particularly as the Powers That Be are broadly uninterested in providing material respite. From representation as a kind of more diffused stylistic choice, to more specific things like “quips,” there is a way in which (for the people that find those modes effective, endearing, or otherwise appealing) the stakes of falling for this are made unclear. The world can be ending, on screen and beyond it, but being able to be Black (and/or a woman, and/or any other identities, etc) onscreen and sardonic in the face of it all is a battle-tested shield in the 3rd millennium.

Alongside this is the “feast or famine” market orientation of many a cultural product, where it either has to sell gangbusters or is deemed a failure. The organic/“common sense” strategies that float to the top revolve around how to obtain space on that tip of the pyramid. The folks vying for that spot aren’t often able/willing to ask questions about why there’s a pyramid in the first place. This creates a monetary—and therefore productive—incentive to not be experimental, low-fidelity, or to find other creative models in any substantially collective or widespread sense; the money goes to things that make money, and investor/patron led processes means that the decisions flow in the same direction as the dollars; from the top down. This double management of the emotional and the (socio)political economy is part of how dominance stays in place.

Pernicious is the word I’d use to describe the double management; it is able to work in the background, a kind of “common sense” that insists on itself. Especially in the case of folks like Coogler fans, I want to try and be understanding, rather than reject-via-dismissal. If the terms of order and the rules of the game are to be represented or be made abject, it tracks that many folks would grasp for representations, and be drawn to things that (seem to) pass initial sniff tests. 

My issue with this is that it’s just a veiled means to get to the same ends as the negative depictions or lack of depictions, since someone working at Coogler’s scale can never break out of the machine that feeds his projects, unless he literally does just that. Calling from inside the house, even if it were to accurately assess that the house is haunted, is not the same as removing the restless spirits. If one doesn’t heed their own warning, where does that leave their audience?

This doesn’t even get into the complications around fandom/stan culture. When/as media is unable to change material conditions, it becomes a battleground where people expel their anxieties. Rather than fighting for the changes that would make one’s life better (and possibly feed into “more representative” media), folks get bogged down in trying to turn a reactionary space into a progressive or radical one just because they like the reactionary stuff. 

It’s a losing battle, as the game is rigged. Since we are years and years into the dominance of fandom thanks to the internet, it becomes an even sharper (double-edged) sword; the center of many communities are rooted in bourgeois media, stuck within those confines. Every stretch, subversion, and tweak echoes against the muscular caverns of that configuration’s material reality.

What follows is a move to protect the status quo, to “avenge” the Avengers in this or that communal spat. The very ways in which negative or otherwise harmful forces are combatted mirrors those heroes. Rather than seeing the need for change, folks fervently fight to defend a broken present that continues to fissure.

Thinking like this does not lend itself to the kinds of self-activity that would address root causes. Collectives shouldn’t be built to entrench reactionary ideas and uncritically accept liberalism. They should reject seeing people as grab bags of legible features and entertaining habits to combine into a Spectacle. This feels especially true when thinking through identifying with products. 

What is learned from much media at present is a combination of the opposite of Glissant’s Right to Opacity and a remixed take on Great Man Theory, meritocratic ideas (rather than classical ideas of some being innately special, though there is always overlap). Sometimes, though, as in the case of something like Spider-Man 2’s train scene, it is indicated that the people are what give the great men power, but that still leaves the power in the hands of those men, just with extra steps.

To bring it back home, Whedon’s style allows the audience to be fulfilled by being seen, foreclosing analysis on “what” they’re being seen “in.” To reference Avengers again, how personable the heroes are—combined with the world-in-the-balance-stakes of the conflict—doesn’t organically leave room to ask questions.

Even if this Whedon-mode were to be pointed in a more interesting direction, like one that tried to use ensembles and characterization to explore contexts of challenging social structures in radical ways, it’d likely still fall flat. One part of this is the ways in which non-radical (especially reactionary or progressive) efforts seem radical (which just means “different” in some breathlessly nebulous sense) because they do something most liberal works aren’t willing to do–for good or ill. I think of how the 2018 show Pose centers queer Black and nonBlack Latine folks in precarious positions. 

The reason that it doesn’t escape Whedon is because it doesn’t actually challenge the social and economic structures in real life that allow the experiences of marginalization being presented to persist. I’m not necessarily asking for–in the case of something like Pose–the show to even be different; that’s not quite my interest. It’s moreso to say that even when the media does something that feels interesting and subversive (which I may disagree with, but… I try to hold space for given how indoctrinated my folks are in the current system–me included!), unless that emotional difference is paired with material action, shit is going to stay how it is. What comes in return is heightened (and often specious) “awareness” and “care” for invisibilized issues or people(s) that doesn’t make the real corollaries of folks represented in a show like Pose any better off.

★★★

If Whedon is the human face, then Sorkin represents the ideal ways that humans interact with dominant social systems. It’s the homo economicus concept: (overall, in the end) competent and rational actors who are rooted in self-interest, narrowly defined as protecting private property, social standing within social hierarchies, and market positionality. Specifically, it leans into the power of the system, as even raging against or critiquing it is often—within this frame—articulating a different facet of it.

It shows up most clearly with The West Wing, a 1999 show that gets the libs going. It’s all about the exploits of people in the eponymous section of the White House, the top brass of the US government’s executive branch. Even though homo economicus is meant to be rational, this show is extremely idealistic (which I’d argue is the point of rationality as conceived under Eurocentrism, but that’s a massive aside for another time). It takes the tack of “the best ideas win,” which doesn’t bear fruit as a theory if you look at… any point of American history ever. This is also a kind of emotional management, though it may work better for different people than those who desire screen representation (even if there’s overlap). This is for the people who just wish there were the right people manning the death machine that is the government.

It’s a combination of 1) seeing the problems in the world through a blinkered perspective, the ways in which that narrow view 2) encourages one size fits all answers, and 3) how the two come together to create a situation that treats political problems as design issues. It’s how people who think they could be engineers (and some who were) try to deal with the thorny chaos of human sociality, to ensure their spreadsheets ring true. It is, in a phrase, “seeing like a state.”

This ends up setting us annoying and rowdy radicals up for shitty depictions. This applies to many a liberal media, and especially ones that stretch far towards the poles we’re talking about here (I’m looking at characters like Killmonger ¬_¬). Anyone who doesn’t believe in the power of the system to–in some ideal environment that these super smart people have created–fix the problems (that it is often a handmaiden to if it didn’t cause them itself), is seen as someone who isn’t worth the time of day. 

For the folks who are critical and seen as rational, their “critiques” are things like arguing about whether or not America is the greatest country. That one is particularly funny. I have this “legendary” monologue from the first episode of 2012’s The Newsroom (another Sorkin jawn) in mind. It starts off like “[America sucks because of its] literacy rates, life expectancy, and infant mortality [but] lead[s] the world in […] military spending and the number of people who believe in angels.” Which is fair. I am always suspicious of the fixation on metrics and how that often relates to funky ideas about “residual” type beliefs like angels, given the technocratic thing I mentioned earlier, but whatever. Worse ones could be highlighted. 

Then they bungle it and prove that I’m never wrong by saying “the country used to be great, when it fought for moral reasons, valued intelligence, and fostered groundbreaking innovation.” The USA fanfic shit just kills me so bad. Like… way to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory!

Sorkinism feeds itself off of the fear of chaos, the idea that the economic man is the only thing standing between the (sometimes-)shitty-but-better-than-everything-before present and the past of cruelty and other such things that white(-aligned) people seem to be very scared of while historically being some of the main perpetrators. Don’t ask about the future, though; history has ended.

To say explicitly what I’ve been hinting at: I don’t have much understanding in my heart for seeing through a Sorkinistic lens. This “realistic” (if you fancy yourself a temporarily embarrassed bureaucrat) perspective feeds into how actual people actually engage in their lives. I have a hard time separating it from the (free speech absolutist, tolerating intolerance) perspectives that have made many spaces unsafe for the most marginalized as people position themselves to benefit from the fallout of intolerance.

That’s what I was getting at when I mentioned the ways Sorkinism is indicative of thought process and approaches. It’s not just that everyone who works on The Hill fancies themself as a Sorkin character. It’s not even that viewers who couldn’t be further from that experience are drawn to the personalization of the byzantine bureaucracy that bellows bullshit brocards. It’s that when those things come together, they create a perfect shitstorm that turns discourse into how to best run the empire, rather than taking hammers to the whole thing.

This “common sense” idea of rationality ends up creating a situation where the empirical or otherwise observable minutiae between people as different as Ben Shapiro and Barack Obama (or, to ground it in media, West Wing’s usual proceedings and that Newsroom monologue) can distract from the fact that they both genuinely think this blood-soaked stain on Turtle Island deserves to live. That agreement means that–if we ourselves are not neoliberal/fascist/technocrats–whatever conversations that follow need to be very different! Otherwise, what’s the point of even talking?

I may be straying a bit from my scaffolding of media at this point, but it’s apt, as this pole of Bullshit is so rooted in the particular profile of a liberal hagiology around “American values.” It is for this reason that I do not have a bunch to say about aesthetics… “[Procedure] will make me God” is the aesthetics! 

This pole is critical to articulate because it really does build in interesting directions that converge and diverge from Whedon; there is that sardonic dialogue and interest in multiple characters, but Sorkin is definitely the overlong “literary” to Whedon’s brevitic “commercial.” The wide reaching nature of this tendency towards the status quo shows how damn near all of the actual ways people engage with politics are infec(l)ted with the same presuppositions. Things like presupposing the necessity of politics.

A big question I raise after coming away from these two poles, especially the Sorkin one, is this: does power need to be—following Cedric Robinson’s definition in Terms of Order—“routinized and institutionalized”?

★★★

That question comes in handy when thinking about Filoni, The Guy for Star Wars. If Whedon is (in the main) the heart and Sorkin the “common sense,” or practical knowledge, then Filoni is the soul. The love for canon, narrowly conceived as an untouchable deity that is owed fealty, along with downstream technical and craft faults (why does so much of Star Wars feel like playing with action figures, in the worst possible way?) create a perfect storm of badness.

Though don’t let me do too much on Filoni, as many of the things that follow probably apply to Lucas as well. Oh well; sins of the father and all that. This guy’s big issue is that one can tell that he’s a big fan of Star Wars, with an encyclopedic knowledge. Neither of those things are bad-in-themselves, though I will say that they bring one into the danger zone. Regardless, one should like the things they’re working on, and having a robust understanding can be useful. The issue is that the former statement does not indicate the latter meaning. Filoni is like if a bad fanfic writer got the keys to the castle.

The clearest example of this in Filoni’s work is Ashoka Tano. Beyond the… gross stuff, she has popped up a lot more than (I feel that) she should, leading to an entrenchment of the accidental commentary Star Wars does where so much of the story engine is fueled by the exploits of this-or-that Skywalker (and their retinue). I mean, she literally had the codename Fulcrum early on in the show Star Wars Rebels. It doesn’t get much more self-indulgent than that.

Filoni’s moves smack of this across the franchise; one can feel the sense that he was picked as the Torchbearer for Star Wars post-Lucas. This more high-level role means his particular touch is harder to track, compared to the previous two poles, outside of the general vibe of being the “conservative” side of the IP, if things like Rian Johnson’s The Last Jedi (2017) represents the “liberal” side (which is a big hint for us as critics that the differences are enough to cause fight over, but not so much as to be meaningful for anyone who’s not (emotionally, spiritually, and psychologically—let alone monetarily) invested in the IP).

This indicates to me that—to say it in a slightly different way than what we started with—the “soul” of the kinds of cultural production I’m thinking through are rooted in a sense of fealty to pre-established myth(opoeia). This can take the liberal form of “challenging” while not unsettling, in the vein of Episode Eight, or is the “conservative,” remixing “classic” Star Wars, like the Mandalorian.

These differences aren’t so different, at least when thinking about political outcomes or messaging. “Improving” the status quo or going “back” to some nostalgic status quo both center frozen moments in time, relying on the fuzzy feelings that it provides to cast their ideas from. It’s something that allows one to trace the bounds of the (ideological) cage without realizing that there’s a whole world beyond it.

The thing about this mode is that… it works very well. Feeding into an IP machine is a great way to employ oneself in the mercenary-fiefdom-viceroy situation that is the arts and entertainment industries. The power of this approach, where it deploys heroism as the main way people object to or inject themselves into the world, can work well to build community and stuff (as fans need characters to project agency onto that they don’t feel), but that’s part of the issue. When this is combined with continuity, a perfect storm is created, where the most valuable part of a story is the plot, or those things that can be surmised from passive readings and summarized on wikis, leaving room for self insertion and wish fulfillment. 

This obsession with saviors may be even clearer with another Disney IP in Marvel. The Avengers were mentioned before, but that whole MCU shtick could easily be read with a class understanding from a glance, where there is movie after movie of people who have outsized power self-style as a vanguard of Great Men to stop threats to the status quo, along the “liberal” and “conservative” registers that were mentioned earlier.

An interesting development has happened in the Marvel side of things, though; there’s been this whole multiverse thing. Given the current conversation, I read that as, in part, a way to work through the contradictions a fealty to canon engenders. If Plot (which is the concretization of canon) is God (or will “make me God”), then characters and worlds (and even story structure) become handmaidens to that, which—at least in the hands of this franchise—leads to a lot of faults from both ends. It makes it difficult to do things that are more character driven, like rooting stories deeply in this or that set of experiences (alongside how that might impact a “plot”). It also makes it harder to continue down a plot-first path, as there is a way in which the more Canon accumulates, there becomes a kind of linear (and maybe even exponential) increase in convolution, even after feasibly holding all those threads together for an extended period becomes more remote.

So, resets and alternate timelines are an exit hatch for this. Or, at least they seem to be. Part of the reality is affirmed by the general emotional divestment from Marvel; things are just not as galvanizing after Endgame (though maybe Doomsday is turning that around?). This strategy actually acts as more of a release valve, as the narrative buildup can be exhaled by tweaking the spatiotemporal; maybe we fight a villain’s past version, maybe we gather heroes from across time and space.

This kind of temporal fungibility is interesting because it tries to use the master’s house to destroy the master’s tools, if that makes any sense. There’s a way in which the prison cell of the story is revolting against characters who have no interest or capacity to understand the reality of their cage.

Operating primarily on a plot level doesn’t do all that much to change things though, if that orientation is where the issue is rooted. This leads to—if we return to Star Wars—a situation where even rebellion, a core concern for the series, reaching a high water mark in Andor, becomes just another piece of the myth. It almost feels like it gets there, taking inspiration from Sorkinism to trace various experiences of both engaging with the Empire and Rebellion, with a bit (or a lot relative to much of Star Wars) of that working to put people at the core. It approaches something interesting, until one remembers that they’re watching Star Wars.

Even if we ignore the way media is made (which I argue is wrong-headed), there is a way that this story feeds into narratives that are themselves meant to act as a kind of rigid mythopoetic. If it all feeds into republics that will get destroyed again (a risk that comes with building anything “anew”), what’s the point? If the point is what one makes of it, or, to say it differently, to find purpose in the act of finding purpose, it’s no good. The imaginary gets stuck between Empires and Republics, which… if Rome and the US are anything to go by… that’s not all that comforting of a distinction as a prole-or-lower class person.

This relationship to created myths is limiting, to say the least. Raising plot up as the Most Important Thing, while not having anything Important to Say, is a recipe for un-inspiration. It can be focused on, just like other stories might lean into character or setting, but it can’t be uncritical (assuming the thing is meant to have artistic merit—rather than just being a piece of art—which is obviously not always the goal)!

The Filoni pole is problematic because, more directly than the others, it instrumentalizes culture for the sake of the economy. This is a direct relationship; an entry into the world of fandom and stan culture. After all, much of the money in Star Wars has always been the merchandise. It’s really about selling tangible products alongside how to think about them.

I don’t like this for reasons that might be obvious; anything made that feeds into bourgeois sentiments should be treated as getting in the way of class abolition. This makes Star Wars important. It may not be as important as life and death in an immediate sense, but anything that shapes how people think shapes how they relate to the world should be given attention, outside of fandom fealty. Not being able to be critical is a surefire way to end up in situations that make one pick between a republic and an empire, rather than imagining more.

★★★

The final horseman is Avellone. He is what lives in the shadows cast by Whedon. Where Whedon’s more rooted in whimsy (though wanderlust, a supremely American feeling, may be more accurate), Avellone is the “edgy” and “dark” response. Think of how “optimism” and “pessimism” are used in conversation, and that gets at the “difference.” It’s the frontiers above versus the vaults below.

Avellone is a video game designer and writer, working mostly in RPGs. Some highlights are 1999’s Planetscape, 2004’s Star Wars KOTOR II, and 2010’s Fallout: NV. Given this RPG focus, a lot of these works explore “morality,” or the distinctions (or lack thereof) between “good” and “evil.”

Across these examples, the idea of “ambiguous” morality, or—complicating these poles of good and evil—is at the fore. One recurring idea is that there aren’t necessarily good guys or bad guys; even in KOTOR, there’s an approach to the Force that seems more skeptical of its binaries than the movies Lucas made.

This may sound reasonable if you’re someone who finds any affinity with the idea of moral relativism; life often doesn’t have people who would be labeled as “good” or “bad”; they exist in various shades of gray, as they say. It’s interesting for me to think through this as someone who is broadly anti-moral, opting for my own takes on egoism and ethico-onto-epistem-ologies “in the place of” morals. A big part of this is an issue that I find across all takes on morals that see them as necessary or useful: the rational person of that homo economicus idea from earlier. To go back to the Avellone style, this manifests itself across these games as an orientation around deconstructing altruism, or doing “good” things without a “reward” in mind. Dialogue or quest endings will often indicate pyrrhic outcomes. The frequency by which this happens across the mentioned games imparts two messages:

Trying to intervene in various social dynamics and situations has unforeseen consequences. Oftentimes, those consequences are undesirable, especially vis a vis (self-)conceptions of agency and power. That is to say, the fact that control can be lost is a big part of the affective message; losing control may be one of the worst parts of failure. 

The learned fear of this possibility is an explanation as to why those social dynamics cannot change and is necessarily a reason to abstain from social change.

This messaging really bothers me. Part of it is that this is where the “grit” and “edge” (or “maturity,” if you’re one of those people that think happy things are “childish” and sadness is indicative of adulthood) come in. The rest is how that allows for a different articulation of shared ideas with the dominant culture, rather than a genuine exit hatch for it. Assuming people don’t have the agency to meaningfully change things (outside of the specific bounds of rational individualism) is “reasonable,” and that’s a big part of the issue.

The danger of this kind of “pessimism” is that the (true) unfixability (and fascism) of the ready-made machinery of society is seen as a justification for becoming… a don’t-tread-on-me type. It’s the “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” approach, which I categorically reject.

Another part of this is that it treats morality in economic terms, where there’s only “so much good” to “good around,” and there’s just not enough for there to be anything other than the (relatively) dark grays of the broken worlds his stories inhabit.

It’s not a useless perspective in a certain sense, but a lot is ignored for this particular brand of “pessimism,” especially as the “zero-sum” “nature” of the economy being analogized (as capitalism haunts these stories with various levels of obviousness) is constructed and constantly reinforced. This limits imaginaries to individual action, where the choices are to accept the impossibility of agency, the impossibility of collectivity, and/or the impossibility of revolutionary and radical change.

This often manifests in the “edge” mentioned earlier. This ends up creating a feeling, especially in a world like the one of Fallout, that everything is hostile, which the game constantly affirms. 

As an aside: it’s quite funny how often that pops up as a theme in settler stories, given that they are often the ones to construct those types of conditions for the rest of us. Anyway.

That powerlessness comes across in a decontextual way through playing these games, where you can’t really improve the world through your individual action, but you aren’t allowed to even try to do it in a different way.

One of the worst parts of this is that it leaves no room for more joyful feelings as it relates to social questions, even if they were to be bracketed by an awareness of their ephemerality. This brands sincerity as a kind of naiveté, where many non-atonal ethics are approached with suspicion and disdain at best. When those connections do exist, and are explored at all, they are often through a kind of grief or punishment that is feeding off of someone else’s misery, like the F: NV scene where that one guy “won the lottery.” The problems of the world become “justifications” for misanthropy, which routes folks back into not being able to address the world as it is. 

To underline the point: this is an imagination killer. It critiques, in ways that are at times quite interesting, especially in the relative context of entries in long-standing IPs, but it falls flat. In my view, if one critiques with no conception of what ought to be, even if that answer is “this should all burn,” it becomes difficult to probe the depths of the thing being critiqued. This is just as problematic as efforts that are more “optimistic,” in the vein of Whedon. Hardship can always be overcome so long as liberalism is upheld. Here it says that liberalism is too strong to be defeated by radically different ways of relating, so only something worse would be able to pull it off.

There is a way in which this approach is quite good at diverting certain kinds of radical activity. Part of it is often onlookers falling for the “I like it so it’s radical” trap. There is something to be said about the early steps we mentioned, referring to the lack of faith in many of the approaches to responding to social problems. If you have various factions vying for power, and they are all, for example, trying to establish authoritarian control over a territory, their ideological differences are likely notable, but they don’t address the fundamental contradictions of authority.

This perspective seems to kind of fall into that pessimism, though, getting stuck there like its quicksand, when it could be a grounding space to return to in thinking about the importance of finding other ways to relate. Yes, the authoritarian nature of most obviously-available options cannot lead to substantive change, regardless of what they promise. That is a different issue than the possibility of substantive change, though. That possibility space is what I’m interested in. 

To be clear: Whedonesque stories and Avellone-core approaches are not worlds apart; they are more accurately considered when seen as the bounds of a limited frame. It can’t be stressed enough; different sides of the same thing are not equivalent to being different things. Acknowledging the cage is “better” than getting ensnared into it by being disarmed with the treats of the other poles. However, it doesn’t point to how to escape the cage. Maybe that’s a tall order for a popular piece of media like a video game. Fair enough. But leaving the sentence incomplete is a better response than ending it by closing off possibility.

★★★

Given that these poles create a chart, many different pieces of art can be mapped using them. Metal Gear Solid, Persona 3, and The Last of Us are ones that I’ll zoom into, as I’ve been considering them a lot recently. I’ve found that they–alongside many an art–will focus on social relationships without being very interested in structure (beyond surface-tracing). They then end up waffling between Whedon’s light and Avellone’s shadow, when they don’t deploy a funky combination. 

Metal Gear Solid is like a dimension-hopper in this sense, at once in both via superpositioning. Persona 3 is similar but is more segmented, with the masquerade literally having shadow monsters to fight, alongside more fun ensemble stuff during the day. The Last of Us really leans into a kind of Whedonesque sincerity by way of Avellone’s skepticism, couched in grand Filonian-style myths about “human nature,” including a pessimistic Sorkinism. 

I should be fair to Metal Gear, though; it is, like Sorkin, interested in bureaucracy, and, like Filoni, interested in myth, specifically, the myths of how elite power works—that confusion of cause and consequence that comes with things like finding out about Epstein’s exploits. Another aside: that is to say, if Metal Gear were slightly different, like if it were more inspired by Hitchcock or Lynch thematically (rather than just aesthetically), it would be based more directly in that kind of elite activity. The logic is there in the games.

Funnily enough, I’ve heard lots of folks say that the series is anti-war. This probably makes sense, if you’re not as strict as I am with that formulation. Showing soldiers being sad is not enough for me. Nor is talking about the horrors of war, especially if it is just a “deeper” exploration of the (admittedly reductive) “sad soldier.” Elsewhere, I’ve talked about the utility of imperialism as a frame. In that schema, MGS would be “non”-imperial (or “non”-war to use the current conversation’s parlance).

This is an important thing to point out as it showcases the ways in which recapture (the net) is not all that different from entrenchment (the cage). The fact that Snake is an exceptional individual (i.e. a Great Man) at worst, and the tip of a vanguardist spear at best (be it FOX, FOXHOUND, MSF, Diamond Dogs, or any other groups characters are a part of).

Persona 3 (I played Reload) is more clearly bifurcated, with the duality between slice of life aspects related to going to school, socializing, and working, and the nighttime activity of fighting evil stuff. It’s very Buffy. With the ensemble focus alongside the constellation of social links, which include folks outside of your fighting Party, it slots nicely into that Whedon pocket. The narrative and thematic reasons that explain the masquerade aspect are very gray in that angsty Avellone sense. It literalizes the light-shadow dynamic that is going on with the Whedon and Avellone poles. Memento Mori, the reminder that death is looming, acts as the coagulating force that pulls the game more squarely in a Avellone-esque orbit overall, as a kind of “having the cake and eating it too” moment.

For the Last of Us, to articulate earlier ideas a different way, it tries to find the Whedon (meaningful relationships and “humanity”) within the Avellone (rough-and-tumble “human nature” of death and competition), while inverting Sorkin’s gaze (an eye towards the social institutions that exist in the post-apocalyptic context), explaining it through a naturalized “canon” about what it means to be human and in human societies a la Filoni. This ends up leading to the net, as any utility that could be found in this criticality is forfeited by taking the most myopic conclusions possible, where—like many an apocalypse media—the answer is a libertarian anti-relational ethic.

These properties are interesting to look at since they are often well-regarded within their communities, and they show the ways in which the cage (in the case of Persona 3) and the net (in the case of TLOU or Metal Gear) work together. I’m not sure if this point can be stressed enough: the variety presented here, and the fact that there’s much more variety out there—that gets stuck between the net and the cage—indicates how pernicious dominance is at present. It can look a lot of different ways, and it can use that to pretend that it’s doing more than what it is, which is reinforcing itself constantly. This gets into a wider issue with non-radical perspectives; without a deep and biting critique (especially insofar as that shapes action), the cage and the net are often able to grab shit up.

★★★

I want it to be abundantly clear that I’m not all that interested in critiquing aesthetics, emotions, and desire as concepts; I’m not all that sure that it’s possible to do that in ways that are fruitful. Seeing them as wedded to the economic process is critical, though, to see how they can, at best, get hijacked to serve the interests of power. That’s why I find that the cage and net framing is useful. It is very easy to, for example, see a work that tries to escape the cage of war, in the vein of Metal Gear, as reaching some sort of exit velocity from domination’s gravitational pull. 

However, given that it doesn’t really know what to do about the cage, it kind of just flops around in the open space until the net reels it back in. Specifically, I’m thinking about the morbid obsession with military hardware that can be seen throughout the series, and how that isn’t robustly explored or acknowledged as a space where recapture can happen. To say it more plainly: a right wing weapons fan can see themselves in that in a way that “completely” “misses” the messaging. That could be boiled down to literacy or attention (or the lack thereof), but I’m not sure that it’s reasonable to be so willing to make excuses for the ways in which certain stories garner reactionary fanbases. To be clear, this is a difficult thing to navigate, given the ubiquity of weapons, alongside how much energy in various societies have been put into creating weapons for a… long long time, especially under/in modernity. Difficulty isn’t impossibility, though, and I’m not very interested in using gentle gloves with powerful creatives and IPs; accosting them for their audiences is like the least mean thing I could do. 

On another note, it should also be said, if it’s not clear, that I’m very critical of many of the examples and these influences because I enjoy or have enjoyed (aspects of) the aesthetic layers of these various sensibilities. Rather than letting that be a motivation for me to defend acts of entrenchment or recapture, I see it as a reason to be even more critical. If I imagine these things to be circuits or outlets in various affective and libidinal economic flows, routing feelings and wantings into dominant channels, it means that I have to keep my wits about me. It’s easier for me to shit on stuff I don’t care about, think about, or like. That doesn’t mean that dominant systems have no modalities by which they can appeal to me, though. I never want to assume that I’m immune to propaganda or too smart for it, since there’s no functional pathway for that to be true.

It’s also worth saying that I don’t see this as a particularly contemporary problem; this is not a screed against “modern art” in itself. I am working through and trying to grapple with the fact that the dominant system is able to puppeteer various energies, if not embody them itself. There is something gravely problematic and unnerving about seeing groups like the Black Panthers—which I and many of my folks greatly admire—be something that can be represented in a movie like 2021’s Judas and the Black Messiah. I think of similar tensions around 2024’s Fanon, or even 1992’s Malcom X. This goes deeper than desires for and questions about “accuracy.” Deeper even than questions about the possibility of accuracy. It’s to say, even if it were accurate and resolutely radical, what does it mean that it can be shown in any capacity? How does that impact what it means to be radical? I don’t have a full picture, but a start is thinking about the four horsemen and their modes of retrenchment and recapture, where they can and do all act at once to, whether they intend to or not, keep dominant systems intact.

This also means that focusing on this-or-that sensibility is wrongheaded. To say it another way, I’m not complaining about “diverse ensembles” or “the lived experience of being a bureaucrat.” In general and in a specific piece of media, it is way too easy to forget that not only do those things not equate to liberation because they feel good, but it is because they feel good that they don’t lead to liberation, in this instance. It, in the best of cases, gives people a tool or two to think about the dominant system differently, in a way that often doesn’t translate to different behaviors. Ergo, it doesn’t really matter what’s in someone’s head if they aren’t able to do anything about it.

To underline the point, though: there is room for exploring those aesthetic sensibilities, either critically or otherwise. That shouldn’t be confused with changing conditions. The terms of engagement need to move away from “fandom is activism” logics. Arguing about movies or games is just that… one can enjoy that without adding the veneer of liberation to it so as to alleviate the personal discomfort in the contradictions fandom generates.

Responding to the four horsemen and entrenchment/recapture does imply certain aesthetic sensibilities, at least in a descriptive way. A big one, especially as it relates to speculative stories (as these questions are often more legible there), is problematizing “plot” and “canon.” Rather than starting from a place of assuming it to be critical to represent them in a unified, arithmetically cogent and interoperable way (like multiple characters having compatible if not the same understandings of events in the storyworld), partiality and partisanship should be embraced. This doesn’t mean that every story has to have an “unreliable” narrator in the accentuated sense of something like Ulysses or Dhalgren (though I do have a personal disposition towards those). It’s to say that the very idea of “reliability” should be, at the very least, brought into question. Having a perspective, even as an omnipotent narrator, is colored by that person’s/being’s standpoint/positionality. Practically, this call encourages character and narration statements to be separable if not separated from “facts.” This is meant to intervene in the tendency in real life and in fiction to trust authority because they are such, at the direct expense of analyzing the information presented and thinking through what the truth might be, even in (and especially in) situations where facts might be hard to come by.

Alongside this, though, there should be actual activity in the actual world. I’m ambivalent on whether or not each piece of art needs to “encourage” this, as “encouragement” looks different from person to person. What I will say is that entrenchment and recapture are themselves a kind of encouragement, and that encouragement doesn’t have to be intentional for it to happen. Unless you know better, constantly imbibing media that extolls the immortal nature of the status quo will probably encourage similar perspectives within you.

If storytelling is going to continue—and it seems that it will—I call for taking its various forms more seriously. Part of this is what’s been focused on for this piece; being honest about the ways that media informs and hijacks what the audience wants and feels. Given the power of dominant culture, many an aesthetic choice is, at best, at risk of being recuperated. Often, it is just entrenching dominant ideas directly, or otherwise taking non-dominant and anti-dominant ideas and defanging them as part of the placation–that’s the recapture.

However, even probing deeply into these flows of feeling and wanting aren’t enough. There too needs to be an interest in how these pieces of cultural production are made, as objects that exist in the world. That material and monetary context is critical for embarking on a robust critique or analysis of any piece, industry, or medium of cultural production. That isn’t to necessarily say “this was made by a bad company so that makes it bad,” or “this was created with ulterior motives so that makes it bad,” even if those statements can be and often are true. Combining explorations of feeling and wanting with more straightforward economic concerns is to acknowledge their inseparability.

More critically, it’s to acknowledge the shapes that those entanglements take. It’s to say that even in conversations about aesthetic or artistic choices, it is worth asking questions about who benefits from this or that depiction in economic terms.

To use an easy example, a movie like 2025’s Warfare “needing” the go ahead from the US military to get access to its hardware shapes the way in which that hardware is depicted, which may make clear why even a “negative” or “critical” depiction can be a mode of recapture. If a house gets blown up, or a specific person in the military is shitty, many of these pieces can’t help but to do the two step move of 1) making whatever badness that exists in the space be rooted in the dispositions of specific individuals and 2) treating that sense of morality as a useful tool for examining those issues, which loops back to questions and solutions that are vaguely trying to find morally upstanding people to occupy powerful positions.

I care so much about this stuff because of two things:

fandom is culture for many people, and

stories are, in a relative sense, one of the easiest ways to navigate social contradictions.

For folks who want to change things, this is critical. It’s not to turn these things into blueprints; it’s to say that, in some sense, stories often are. I’m very uninterested in creating spaces for “escape,” where people who already ignore social issues are able to further that ignorance. I don’t think being challenged by culture should be avoided; it feels critical to changing it and the context in which it exists.

This radar graph idea helps me with this because it acts as a reminder to what it means to live in a society; escape or change isn’t solely a question of individual capacities, drives, or interests. The things I and many others care about can exist well within a liberal enclosure—and that should be seen as a big issue. From Whedonesque Identity, to Sorkinist Bureaucracy, Filonian Myth(opeia), and Avellonean Morality, this graph is a space where the “true” meaning of this or that social dynamic is explored. The fact that there is a noticeable difference between something like Fallout New Vegas and West Wing as it relates to the role of government doesn’t mean that the bounds of what is possible should be found within neoliberalism, fascism, feudalism, and other forms of societal management.

I’m also a partisan; I want most of the things we do (yes, we) to feed into non-dominant and anti-dominant culture building. If folks aren’t actively working towards liberation, their efforts should at least not impede those efforts. What this means concretely will differ across contexts, but a big part of it is creatives and fans both deepening their understandings of how the world/society/community functions, alongside resisting the(ir) defensive posture around problematic elements in various texts, especially as it relates to the reality of the shadows cast by dominant culture. Again: one should not defend a piece of media because it makes them feel good. 

The implied object of much of the things I’m discussing is rooted in my outsider/insider-looking-in criticality of fandom. I see fandom as responding to the contradictions between cultural production as an artistic process versus as a product-making process by picking the product side. I’m more on the artistic side as it relates to my tastes and how I think culture ought to be related to, while trying my bestest to understand the ways in which that product-based thinking shapes how people self-conceptualize, inspired by Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle. This is all to say: if fandom spaces and fandom modes of engagement—where identifying with media is part and parcel of enjoying it—are deprioritized, cultural production can start to avoid the ways in which it often reifies dominant culture at the direct expense of relational and radical lifeways.

I also don’t want to pretend that seeing it as art is infallible. The contestation around the concept of art is proof of this; from its Eurocentrism to its classism. Basically, it goes back to asking questions of dominance. Anti-and-non-dominant perspectives for how cultural production ought to be related to—especially in refusing easy victories like turning ideological enemies into caricatures—is critical.

I’m going to risk a bit of rigidity here. All of this discussion is downstream from an overarching goal of trying to escape the gravitational pull of the poles of each Bullshit horseman. Again; this is not a claim that is preoccupied with the “discrete” and “emblematic” aesthetics of each pole—the results of those things are the issues being attacked, especially as they relate to the wider narrative assemblages they fit within, as discrete texts and as being in conversation with other texts.

The alternative(s) I’m interested in, rooted in my partisan commitments, revolve around embracing the tensions that arise from navigating legibility, accessibility, craft, and “artistic merit.” In a general sense, this looks like leaning into entanglement, obligations, and accountabilities, rather than the ideas of rights, duties, and heroism/sacrifice. The ideas to be leaned into are retooling relational ethics, informed by a current context that can acknowledge faults with “past” forms of (clearly) situated knowledge, while not falling prey to the blinkered nature of humanistic knowledge that claims universality. So, rather than having a story like Naruto route all of its philosophical questions through a kind of splaying across all of the horsemen poles, it could (if you were to allow me to fanfic a bit) be both deeply interested in how to deal with the world as someone who lives in a glorified military base, who is roped into fighting for that military, is a living weapon for that military, and only sees an out by becoming a leader within that hierarchy, while constantly pointing to all of the failures of that mode of social organization. In other words, if Naruto stays who he is, the world should more accurately showcase the social dynamics that such a constitution would imply, engender, and be in a dialectic with. My ideal version of that would be that villagers would have some sense of protagonism and would try to overthrow things, with Naruto and company having to be held accountable for being defenders of the status quo. If that doesn’t necessarily fit the vision, the world itself could explore those things with intentionality; imagine an extreme version of the ending to the land of waves arc, and that’s roughly what I’m getting at.

This is meant to address the relationship between depiction and endorsement. While one does not necessarily lead into the other… if the storytellers don’t understand the context that leads to a depiction (i.e. why are or what makes certain things particularly harmful), it can become a big issue. While people “missing the point” regarding something like Warhammer 40,000’s satire are easy to blame, it doesn’t help that its storyworld is often uninterested in those most deeply harmed from living in a universe that is mythical in its suffering, and nearly comical in its perspectives. If it might not make for “as fun” of a story to explore the life of someone working on a Manufactory World—a planet-sized factory—I suspect that that’s a part of the issue. If the experiences of people–who are themselves or are acting in the capacities of historical (and current) patriarchs, capitalists, mercantilists, abusers and colonizers–are consistently understood to be more interesting than their victims, then the whole enterprise of storytelling needs to be razed so that something new can grow from the ashes.