Fanfics, Not-Stalgia, Or Brandfics?

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.

So how do I describe brandfics? First, let’s clarify what a brand and “intellectual property” (IP) are when it comes to this discussion. Jake & Leon or Captain Yuletide are my intellectual properties. I created them and most of the characters (because of course I don’t own the characters who are part of parody strips like DC’s heroes or Godzilla). A “brand” is this case is explained thusly by the American Marketing Association:

What is a Brand?

A brand is any distinctive feature like a name, term, design, or symbol that identifies goods or services.

What is Personal Branding?

Personal branding is the act of promoting yourself as a brand by crafting a distinct identity, reputation, and online presence to showcase your skills, expertise, and personality. This type of branding is normally used by professionals, influencers, and entrepreneurs to enhance their careers, attract opportunities, and build a strong online presence.

What is Corporate Branding?

Corporate branding is the process of establishing and managing a corporation or organization’s identity. It involves crafting the company’s mission, values, and culture, which align with its public image. Corporate branding aims to create a consistent and positive company perception among its stakeholders, including customers, employees, investors, and the public.

What is Brand Identity?

Brand identity refers to the visual and symbolic elements that represent a brand. These elements include a brand’s name, logo, color scheme, typography, and design elements. These elements work together to create a recognizable image for the brand, which consumers can identify and connect with.

That last one is what matters most for this discussion. So for our purposes a “brand” would also be the capital n “Name” I use on the site, the big name characters and other associated IP that is part of, say, Marvel’s brand or DC’s. A “brandfic” therefore represents using a brand as the basis of your story but not much else. For example My Adventures With Superman uses the names from Superman’s roster but that’s it. Their personalities, goals, and even races and genders were changed because they made a story about the brand name Superman, not the characters they were based on. So you had black Jimmy Olsen and Perry White, Korean Lois Lane, and Ron Troupe was a girl. They also made Deathstroke the Terminator into a pretty boy and completely changed Livewire’s story, among other changes made to the Superman corner of the DC Universe. Multiversal continuity, those core aspects of the character that separate Superman from Marvel’s Hyperion or Sentry, are missing because they just wanted the names, like with Echo on Disney+.

This is hardly a new phenomenon. The problem with so many adaptations going at least as far back as the 1940 serials is that most of them weren’t in alignment with the comics. Adventures Of Captain Marvel is one of my favorite serials, but the puff of smoke versus a magic lightning bolt was probably a limitation of special effects at the time, while the powers of Captain Marvel were tied to the McGuffin of the serial. One cliffhanger had Captain Marvel knocked out, which isn’t quite in line with his powers. It’s still close enough to the original that I do think they were trying to make an honest adaptation. Meanwhile the first Batman serial changed Bruce and Dick into secret government agents fighting World War II spies out of concerns of showing vigilantes to kids around this time.

Compare that to Captain America up there. No shield and now he’s shooting dudes. That makes sense to us now, and Steve wasn’t afraid to pick up a firearm in the MCU for good reason, but only during wartime when he had to shoot his way out of a Nazi stronghold. Waking up in the present day in his second movie had him using less guns and more fists. Except the Captain America of Earth-600001 isn’t Steve Rogers. He’s district attorney Grant Gardner, and he fought mad scientists and criminals instead of the Axis powers. He also did it without superhuman strength and durability. He just worked out a lot and wore a similar costume. They wanted the name and maybe the costume but changed everything else, and this was the first ever Marvel adaptation, while Superman and Captain Marvel were getting more faithful adaptations.

Nowadays Marvel Studios has an edict to not know the comics before taking on a project. It’s how you get the major change to Echo in her powers and even her tribe of ancestry was changed. Characters can have new personalities, powers, and costumes (if they have one at all..go as far back as the first Punisher movie, for example–he didn’t even draw a skull on his shirt), and this has been a problem with adaptations for decades. Marvel Studios was created to fix that but that changed with the new owners. You can even look at the live-action Super Mario Brothers, which bore no resemblance to the video games outside of a third act costume change for Mario and Luigi, and that the Brooklyn and alternate universe ideas from the DIC cartoons were in effect.

The big brand Name equals cheap marketing. People know the Name so it’s instant recognition…and then you get the end product like Zack Snyder’s DC universe and it’s not the same. Or they take the parts people didn’t like, such as using Supergirl: Woman Of Tomorrow as your Supergirl guide rather than the decades of pre-New 52 stories that people did like. At least with the Shazam movies being made during the New 52 it was emulating the comics of the time. That’s what separates a brandfic from not-stalgia. Not-stalgia could be a form of brandfic because they’re just using a name. Nostalgia is something gone that you remember fondly until Hollywood breaks it. A normal brandfic could be an existing property that still has new stuff made or had it made soon enough that we never had a time for it to be proper nostalgia. The Star Trek series from JJ Abrams or Alex Kurtzman would be examples. They were relaunches but we got new Trek as late as Enterprise. They stopped being just nostalgia when Star Trek: The Next Generation had enough seasons to give us Deep Space Nine and Voyager, plus original stories in the larger universe in comics, games, and novels.

Star Wars has also devolved into brandfic. Rogue One and the spinoff Andor changed the entire tone of what the franchise was known for, while the treatment of the classic characters in the sequels to push the new characters by Kathleen Kennedy and Dave Filoni into their place. They want the Star Wars brand but not the characters. The Acolyte and later seasons of The Clone Wars tried to turn the Jedi into a corrupt system, while the former also opted to push the Sith as misunderstood and added things to the lore that didn’t make sense. There were already witches in the form of the Nightsisters, but now we have a new batch who calls the Force “the Thread” and was using the name so Leslie Headland could work out her daddy issues. Meanwhile Cowboy Bebop and The Rings Of Power are so far removed from the source material that they seem like completely new IP…but they need that brand Name to get out into the world. Their creators have better ideas than the people who made a brand so popular they have something to adapt steal names from to push their original stories.

The idea is that the brand loyalists, the ones who will read or watch anything with Superman or Star Trek on it, will stick around and that they’re the majority. A fanfic is made by fans of the characters, even if they put their own spin on things. You can find more loyal slashfic than some of the brandfic that just wants to use the Name. They’re too impatient to create their own thing because they want the praise. So they use an existing name because that’s already popular and slap it onto their stuff. They’re not even fans of the brand but they’ll use the brand and the names that come with it. That’s why I call it “brandfic”. It’s the brand they want to make stories around, not the characters, background personalities and lore, or the other core concepts of the character that forms multiversal continuity.

In short (too late) brandfic is fiction centered around the most service level aspects of the brand. Captain America fights for justice and good old fashioned American values, and that’s totally what Grant Gardner is doing. He just doesn’t have the powers or shield and isn’t named Steve Rogers. The story involves Starfleet but they don’t have the same values and any idiot can join Starfleet. We like the idea of the Force, but what if it was this? Sure, the Doctor is popular, but what if we made him a woman and totally changed his/her history? The Joker isn’t someone who fell into chemicals that altered his skin and mind, he’s some angry dude in make-up that wants to watch the world burn. The brand is popular but what made it popular isn’t to their tastes and the everything for meeeeeeeeee crowd hates that. So they make stories using the brand and cut out all of that lame stuff in favor of what plays to their elitist snobbery. It lacks everything that made the brand popular with the audience (who isn’t them) be drawn toward it, but it’s not the characters and worldbuilding they want. They just want the brand. As adult Grogu put it, that is why they fail.