The Era of the Fan-Oriented Storytelling is Upon Us
“It’s a new age, and a new world in terms of the relationship between the folks making shows and the community watching them,” Westworld showrunners Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan wrote in a post published last month. This was part of a buzz-worthy Reddit campaign that teased fans with spoilers ahead of the show’s premier.
The way fans have affected mass-marketed media has reached new heights with creatives and audiences regularly interacting with one another. Shows, like NBC’s Timeless, have been brought back from the brink of destruction because of how its cancellation upset fans, and Sherlock’s stars are publicly duking it out over how audience expectations are affecting the show’s production. Over in the music world, fan-dominated narratives around Korean boy band BTS has propelled the act within a span of a year to be performing at some of the biggest award shows. Between the instantaneous ability of social media to make the masses heard by corporations and industry insiders recognizing the need to hear voices outside of boardrooms, it feels as if modern storytelling has become bigger than its creators. Instead, it’s become a public entity, resulting in fans and storytellers shaping many narratives altogether.
Since fandoms have existed, audiences have interacted with storytellers to further narratives they wanted to hear be told. Early efforts include Sir Arthur Conan Doyle famously bringing back Sherlock Holmes from the dead and the original Star Trek series being extended to continue exploring the final frontier of sci-fi. In the age of accessibility, where kickstarters and social media campaigns raise attention to what fans want to see, these sort of actions have now become embedded in our storytelling culture. Where poor ratings once spelled the eternal demise of TV shows, the likes of Veronica Mars, Sense8 and Firefly, have since been given new life through movies. Chuck, Community, and Arrested Development all saw extended life spans because fans determined it to be so. Where storyteller’s once had a sense of determining canon, Harry Potter fans have essentially revoked the validity of the J.K Rowling-blessed Cursed Child play and regularly debate the canon-ness of her post Deathly Hallows-reveals, while Prison Break literally brought a character back from having her head chopped off because fans decided they didn’t like that plot.
At the end of the day, creatives and the investors behind their projects call the majority of the shots but as there are many options of content audiences are interacting with, businesses and creators take note of what the people want. We’ve ultimately reached a point where one-sided storytelling is no longer an option. The age of audiences’ tastes being chosen for them has ended, and even though storytellers may create worlds, fans are the ones keeping them alive.
