Breaking Madden // Uncanny Valleys // Tilde.club // Normcore // Fandom

I don’t really know what SB Nation is but I have been reading it a lot lately. I remember when it launched it seemed like some sort of dreamland where you could write your own sports blog and work hard and with a little luck become the next Bill Simmons.

I have been reading it a lot primarily because of the work of one Jon Bois. I first discovered Jon via his Tim Tebow CFL Chronicles, an ambitious 6-part fanfic opus. I liked it so much I tweeted about it, and then pinned that tweet to my profile page so if anyone arrived at @nsbarr the first thing they’d see was my enthusiasm for it.

Recently I’ve tuned in to Jon’s ongoing project Breaking Madden, now on its second season. “Edge of Tom-orrow,” the episode I just watched seems like as good an introduction as any other. Explaining it would be kind of hard so maybe you should just go check it out.

If this post does nothing but turn you on to Jon’s work, great! I’m glad. But for the rest of the post I want to unpackage why I have such a visceral, positive response to it. Like, sure: it’s good stuff, but why do I get so jazzed about it? Maybe I’ll discover something about my own sensibilities.

Mixed Media

Here’s a grossly oversimplified picture. First we wrote in HTML and it was terrible but also a fun sandbox to play in. Then we got Wordpress and WYSIWYG and it became easy to embed familiar media (videos, pictures, tunes) into our words but hard to do much else. Then Tumblr came along and asked us to pick one kind of media we wanted to share: words or photos or vids or tunes or whatever.

I miss mixed media and it’s not totally a nostalgia trip. In some ways the modular Tumblrfication of things is a step backwards in expression.

Anyway this is just a long way of saying that a Breaking Madden experience includes great writing, entertaining GIFs, cinematic storytelling and a great soundtrack. The arrangement of all these media types into one work feels nostalgic and also novel (cf. tilde.club).

Uncanny Valleys

The uncanny valley is that uncomfortable place where something looks like a human or talks like a human or moves like a human but is not quite human and basically creeps us out.

The most obvious connection to Breaking Madden is the game, Madden ‘15, which looks holy-shit realistic, until suddenly a player is spinning on his head for no reason or his limbs are bending at impossible angles (cf. glitch art and the Great American Realization that Football is Terrible For Your Health).

An almost-human stuck in the uncanny valley will do his damnedest to get out of there. The result is an overdose of normality, or normcore (cf. Clark Kent, Coneheads).

I’m not calling Jon an almost-human, but I think his style could occasionally be called normcore. And so in Breaking Madden there’s a sort of rich interplay between robot and human and cyborg and weird and normal and too-normal.

Being a Fan

I am a fan of Jon’s work and maybe I held up this fandom to an unflattering magnification but whatever. Other people are fans of his work too and engage with him on Twitter. In turn those people are rewarded with cameos in Breaking Madden, usually as freakish-looking custom characters.

All this is great and probably the Future of Social Engagement, but more exciting to me is just all the positive vibes in my Twitter feed. I wonder if Jon/the SBNation people are particularly good at creating fandoms because they themselves are fans of sports teams.

Anyway I think there is something powerful about fandom. About writing fanfic or saying Hey I’m a fan! or just cheering someone on really hard. Maybe it’s some kind of antivirus to all the hating and trolling that goes on. But maybe not! Who knows.