Fisk and Fix-It Fanfic

One of the things I found most interesting within this week’s readings was in Fisk’s Popular Discrimination. In it, he talks about the fact that consumers of popular media writing their own plot lines for their favorite shows or films in their heads. Fisk talks about the fact that plot lines have become so conventional and superficial that people are kind of able to guess or have an idea of where they want things to go, and then get upset when it doesn’t go the way they expect. 

“The conventionality of plot lines, too, enables readers to write ahead, to predict what will happen and then to find pleasure (or sometimes frustration) in comparing their own projected ‘scripts’ with those actually broadcast. They frequently feel that their ‘scripts’ are superior to the script-writers’, that they ‘know’ the characters better and are thus better able to say how they should behave or react.”

This makes me think of what my friend calls “Fix it Fanfics”. Fan fiction, set in a world of a popular series, that changes the outcome of certain plot lines that, in their eyes, have gone awry. An example, and I know I keep coming back to the MCU a lot, was the death of Tony Stark in Avengers: End Game. This was both a shock and an incredibly emotional piece of cinema that had both myself and my friend crying in our seats. And, like me, she immediately just shook her head and said something along the lines of: “Yeah, I loved that movie, but that last thing did not happen. He didn’t die, there was no funeral, and Tony is alive and well.” Of course, Tony is her absolute favorite character in Marvel, so her reaction was expected, but it was still interesting to watch as she wrote a huge part of the plot of that film out of existence in her mind. 

There is also my personal example regarding the finale of the fourth season of Stranger Things. Spoilers if you haven’t seen it, but Eddie Munson, a new and highly beloved character gets killed off and the writing on it, at least in my opinion, was just terrible. It had very little shock value, added nothing to the plot, and killed off a character that had become an instant fan favorite from his first appearance in episode one of the season. Now, it is possibly incredibly biased, but right off the bat I could think of about ten different ways they could have done that to either allow him to live in the end or to handle his death better. As it is, I feel like the writing surrounding that characters death was really poor and didn’t make much sense. Unlike Tony’s death that actually served a purpose, Eddie’s death was literally, at least in my opinion, just killed off as an excuse to not kill off one of the main cast of the show. 

Definitely interesting readings this week, but this one was the most interesting and relatable to me.