Two indie creators who are wise to Hollywood’s contempt for its own audience have determined what must be done–or rather, what must not be done.
First up, best selling author and comic book writer Jon Del Arroz exhorts dissenting consumers to starve the Pop Cult beast.
We know the story’s going to be trash. It’s going to be pop commercial consumerism with member berries and not much creativity at all because of the backlash of the last film. And so we’re going to get an endless cycle of youtube critics positing that the movie will be terrible, people clicking on it, people going at seeing the movie a zillion times to confirm it’s terrible, posting about it, youtube critics bashing it, people tuning into yotube critics bashing it, and then the actors crying about misogyny and racism and creating free promotion to make this another billion dollars again.
It’s so tired. And it’s entirely on you, the person who reads the blogs, watches youtube to NOT CLICK THESE THINGS. Do not talk about the movie. Don’t watch commentary on it. Starve it of mentions.
This is what they do to independent alternatives. The media refuses to talk about it. You will never see any one of these sites ever mention Flying Sparks or Justified because they don’t want people knowing it exists. And the only way to deal with that in information warfare is to do it back to them.
Every time you click on a youtube review or preview of this movie, you are feeding the machine. You are keeping it going.
Make content supporting indies. Click on the content that’s supporting indies.
Jon’s most telling observation is that only our side produces attack reviews of our opponents’ content. Vice, The Mary Sue, and The Verge don’t write hit pieces on Galaxy’s Edge or Justified. They know that the way to neutralize dissenting creators is to deny them a platform.
Not responding in kind is just tactically illiterate at this point.
Author Rawle Nyanzi expands on JDA’s call to action with a simple yet bold concept:
Therefore there is only one solution: Cease this madness at once. I call it Brand Zero.
For all the complaints about the major brands, even critics see them as real and legitimate, as opposed to “amateur” brands. There is a sense that these big media brands are the only ones that matter, even when they drop the ball on purpose. We are conditioned to think of big brands as above us just because the owners have a big bank account and could afford nice graphic designers.
Thus, we must take radical action to break this conditioning. From this day forward, I will not mention any major media franchise on this blog, and I will erase such talk if I see it in the comments. Also, I will not like, share, or reply to any social media post that discusses a major media franchise.
This does not only apply to woke brands. All major brands, including anime, will not be mentioned here. No big brand requires my help in getting the word out, so I won’t do it for them.
If it is mentioned on any mainstream geek site (Bleeding Cool, IGN, Comic Book Resources, Anime News Network, etc.), it is a major brand. Those sites get a lot of traffic from interested parties, so they don’t need you to talk up whatever they’re talking up. Meanwhile, great content languishes in obscurity because everyone would rather complain to a company that deliberately antagonizes them, thinking they’ll change with the 17,863,485,736th email.
I applaud Jon and Rawle on their resolutions. You won’t see me giving page inches to converged IPs, either.
Merely mentioning a Disney/Marvel property, even to negatively contrast it with a superior indie work, just gives the Devil Mouse brand social proof as the one to beat.
Refusing to feed the beast doesn’t suffice by itself, though. We also need positive messaging that promotes superior alternatives.
Freeing Gen Y fanboys from the nostalgia trap has also proven more of a challenge than even I anticipated. Studying methods professionals use to combat addiction and deprogram cultists may be in order.
In the meantime, I’ll leave you with some more sage advice from Rawle:
“Brian Niemeier’s Combat Frame XSeed is a great non-mainstream mecha series … Buy these, and you’ll help shift things in the right direction.”
