One encouraging sign heading into 2022 is that the counterculture has for the most part rejected the Conservative obsession with ascribing economic causes to social phenomena. Sad to say, this undead meme has seen a resurgence since Mister Metokur’s New Year’s Eve stream, so let’s drive another stake in its heart.
A major hurdle to understanding our new era that most people struggle to surmount is the shift from an economic frame to a moral frame. Everyone currently living in the West was raised under a Left vs Right paradigm with roots in the eighteenth century.
Especially in its American expression, the once-dominant dichotomy held that Liberals wanted collectivism and socialism while Conservatives championed individualism and the free market. This model’s obsolescence becomes strikingly clear when you consider that democrats now cheer on corporate cartels joining forces to crush working class people, while republicans wield government power to make people consume a particular drug.
In reality, an exclusively economic model of human behavior never adequately explained the world. It was never meant to. The Left, for example, clearly used various economic planks only as convenient sticks to bludgeon their enemies. Their real strategy was waging psychological war on the moral level while keeping their opponents distracted with vain debates about the tax code. It worked. The Death Cult now control all cultural institutions.
That’s the real reason why many creators, including yours truly, have long counseled against paying money or attention to the big brands the Death Cult has hollowed out into skinsuits. The Cult doesn’t have a profit motive. Instead, it wears skinsuits of your beloved childhood IPs to demoralize you. It wants you destroyed, and demoralizing you is an important step in that process.
Enlightened self-interest would seem to be sufficient cause for not swallowing the soul poison the Death Cult peddles. If that’s not enough, always remember that filling the Cult’s coffers or boosting their signal amounts to aiding and abetting their unholy crusade against you. Cooperating with an evil Cult is immoral.
The error is compounded by the fact that the Death Cult wins by controlling public morality. Only a superior moral vision can defeat a moral vision. Cooperating with the enemy forfeits your moral claim while reinforcing theirs. It’s preemptive surrender.
The above moral calculus often draws the following two objections:
- Boycotts don’t work. Years of failed attempts have proven that dissident movements are too weak to move the needle on consumer entertainment preferences.
- Following from objection 1, commenting on skinsuit IPs is the only way to get engagement. Content creators have no choice but to discuss Big Brand X if they want to stay relevant.
Both objections are easily dismantled by pointing out that they conform to the obsolete paradigm the Death Cult has conditioned its opponents to stay within. They both ignore the far more strategically significant moral level and confine themselves to impotent economic debate. That’s exactly where the Death Cult wants us.
Aside from being strategically unsound, both objections are factually untrue. Building a platform on rants against skinsuit brands starts a countdown to irrelevance. Like professional lobbyists, outrage marketers must secretly hope their cause never succeeds.
We’ve seen these dynamics play out online in the past few days. A rapidly emerging phenomenon within our skinsuit institutions is former Pop Cult high priests who’ve aged out of the crusade’s vanguard being sent out to smash heretical icons. Here’s walking anachronism Kevin Smith describing how to skin a franchise in the shopworn jargon of a tired 90s hipster. Because he’s still stuck in the Clinton years, he gives the game away by explaining that fan outrage equates to free marketing for the skinsuits.
Author David V. Stewart has pointed out how nerd rage turned Captain Marvel from a middle market B flick into a billion-dollar hit. Here he once again warns viewers to ignore the skinsuits:
Another fellow author, Rawle Nyanzi, developed the concept of #BrandZero. The idea is to withhold money and attention from skinsuit brands as totally as possible. Not one penny. Not one click.
This comment on David’s video, which Rawle called attention to, supplements the rationale for BrandZero explicated by Smith.
Now, that’s an unsourced comment from an online anon. It should be taken with a grain of salt, but the call to action holds true, even if the stated premise is false. Marvel may not care whether people buy their comics, and most indicators suggest that they don’t. The point isn’t to hit Death Cult institutions in the wallet. That’s a reversion to the obsolete economic paradigm.
The point is to counter their inverted morality with moral integrity of your own.
Shifting paradigms can be a challenge. Happily, I’ve drawn up a road map to help you exit the dead-end lane where the Death Cult wants you.
Allow me to roll another #BrandZero snowball.
My two favorite comics on Arktoons are CLASSIC BIBLE TALES and FATHER GABRIEL’S JOURNEY—but that’s only because everything else on Arktoons is edgy, dissident trash. The only Biblical comic book that tactfully combines good art and testosterone is an old graphic novel called HEROES OF THE BIBLE. It’s what JDA’s DEUS VULT wishes it could be, because it recounts stories from actual Christian canon and doesn’t bait its readers with naked cat people. Buy a physical copy for your kids if you can find it.
I found David Stewart’s video was. He himself sees and correctly diagnoses the problem but in the very same video justifies being a part of that problem.
No, David. You don’t need to make a video on Amazon LotR. Money isn’t that important.
My two favorite comics on Arktoons are CLASSIC BIBLE TALES and FATHER GABRIEL’S JOURNEY—but that’s only because everything else on Arktoons is edgy, dissident trash.
I believe that there is a place for “edgy” when it comes to non-Death Cult storytelling. A variety of approaches should be promoted; let everyone do the type of story they’re interested in. Some are good at Biblical retellings while others are good at spacefaring action. There’s more than one way to tell a story with sound morals.
There’s a difference between dark subject matter and edge. Dark subject matter is something like the animals’ fates in George Orwell’s ANIMAL FARM; the entirety of Lemony Snicket’s A SERIES OF UNFORTUNATE EVENTS; the fate of the pilot in Gary Paulsen’s HATCHET; or the mutation and mutilation subplot of Season 2 of the 2003 Clone Wars series. All of the horrible things that players encounter in Fallout: New Vegas are also revealed in way that doesn’t make them edgy.
And as someone who comes from an entire generation that was wrecked by edgy entertainment, I will happily consume Pure Flix–style, feel-good Bible fiction instead of anything edgy.
What would you say is the different between “dark subject matter” and ”edgy stuff”? Is “edgy” when you show gore and sex just for the sake of it, rather than having some larger thematic purpose?
I would define edgy as a package deal among violence, sex, and “trying too hard.” It’s the difference between a parishoner friend who tells you, “I killed that man because he threatened my family. I forgave him for what he did to me, personally, but I could not allow him to defile my daughter,” and a gun nut who throws his arm around you and tells you, “You see this 10mm Glock 20 with these aftermarket combat sights and extended magazines? Clichétheists think that Christians are supposed to be pushovers who forgive their enemies as they rape our women—but I’m a MANLY Christian! That’s why I conceal my giant muscles under this jacket with the angel of death and why I load my Glock with hardcast ammunition. Because I’m a manly Christian like Charles Martel!
“As the spiritual head of my household, I sit back with a beer at night and make my wife do all of the housework—and as soon as the Pope calls for another crusade, there’ll be no more room in Hell for all of the saracens I’ll splatter!”
Jim is Gen Y to a fault, and that remains his weakness. He might understand religion is important for a society, but he doesn’t understand religion itself. That explains why he doesn’t get how someone could operate from a framework outside of materialism. That’s the 20th century attitude that keeps Gen Y from being an effective force for change.
Everything you could want in an entertainment product can be gotten from sources outside of Hollywood aside from objectively inferior CG, generic acting and actors, and tired scripting full of expected modern clichés. The only thing they have left to offer are pale imitations of the past or postmodernist slop with no value, much like OldPub does.
It’s been over half a decade since the skinsuit space turd came out after trailers trumpeted it up by milking your nostalgia instead of relying on storytelling techniques or craft. You were scammed, and yet you still watch their vapid, empty streaming shows. At what point do we move on? This pathetic behavior is well past its sell-by date.
The thing is, it hasn’t really ever been about profit. The series I’m working on centered around the early Worldcon crowd will show that in spades. They’ve tricked us into thinking it was about money while actually making it about religion. Some of us have figured it out, but it looks like anyone older than a Zoomer is going to have trouble shaking that illusion off.
We have our own Boomer-like blindsides, after all.
In the last five years the “It’s a private company, they should be able do whatever they want free of government intervention” argument has only been used by two groups of people:
-Democrats who are glad that said companies are enforcing their ideology.
-Griftercons who want to “lose with principle” so that they can request donations for the next election season.
Rudolph,
Yeah I’m so fed up with attitude
It has allowed the neurodiverse to completely jettison natural rights as they ban hammer the give and take of social conversation because it overstimulates them.
Yet no one bothers to challenge them and the death cultists as to why they qualified to discern good and bad social conversations?
xavier
Don’t forget Libertarians, who want Big Government to not interfere with a private company’s freedom to be amoral providers of hedonistic pleasures.
I meant to reply to Rudolph Harrier, whoops.
Much like forgiveness, not giving subhuman cretins time or attention is as much for you as it is to do something to them.
One thing I appreciate about the BrandZero concept is the way even trying to practice it seems to develop some detachment. We do have a problem with nostalgia. The franchises of our childhood are a narcotic. We can very easily look to them for solace when we should look to God. We have to walk away from them, which means we have to stop caring about them. Even talking about why the new version of something is worthless is a mistake, because that means we’re still attached to that franchise, when we shouldn’t be.
For the married men within the sound of my voice, it’s time we put away our toys and devoted our selves to what matters – our churches and our families. Go read to your kids. Go take your wife by the hand and take a walk together. Lead your family in prayer and devotion.
Yeah, I see IP as products, not a substitute God. If the product fails, I discard it. No need to devote time and energy to something when it becomes something you don’t like.
There is reason to believe the Cult is losing the Attention Wars as well. Disney+ released 2 shows based on Marvel and Lucas Film properties and both have been met with indifference. Pretty much everything Hollywood produced this year (outside of No Way Home) met the same fate. Disney’s push for it’s own brand of Star Wars (the High Republic) has also failed on the interest scale. While it’s too early to tell if the spell is broken, it’s not looking good for the Cult.
I can tell you that insiders have looked at the Nielsen Bookscan numbers for the skinsuit space battle books, and have learned that all of them not written by Timothy Zahn (or are re-releases of the old material) have been total belly flops. The comics have also been an utter disaster.
This isn’t going to stop them from running the IP into the ground, because the IP is dead and conquered. The ONLY solution is to leave it for dead and move on. The younger generations already don’t care and it will be dead in their lifetime. The faster those of my generation finally learn to let go, the quicker it will be to change things for the better.
Of course it won’t stop them, but if their brand of X IP isn’t getting people talking about it (even if it’s only to rant about how awful it is) then the exercise becomes mute. Attention (good and bad) is the measure of their dominance. If we are actually ignoring them, that represents a loss of power. So they can continue to run our favorite IP’s into the ground with diminishing returns.