The plot to ruin the new Superman movie

When did fandom become so zealous? Today we’re looking back at the release of the “Snyder Cut” and the people who still think that Zack Snyder should make all of the DC movies. Open Mike Eagle joins us to talk about where the world of fandom in entertainment is and why we’re so desperate to root ourselves in pop culture that it can become like a religion. Our guest is rapper, comedian, podcaster, and streamer Open Mike Eagle. You can find him pretty much everywhere, or check out his collective works at http://mikeeagle.net/. Want the extended conversation — and a lot of other good stuff, like ad-free episodes, bonus episodes, and access to our Discord? Sign up for just five bucks a month at: https://www.patreon.com/PanicWorld. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

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• 0:26Ryan Broderick?

  To kick things off, what I would love to start with is a kind of a dangerous question perhaps, which is, who do you think are the craziest fans on the internet? Who, what is the fandom you don't want to go anywhere near?

• 0:37Speaker 02

  Drake fans.

• 0:39Ryan Broderick?

  Okay, why?

• 0:41Speaker 02

  I don't know if there's a polite way to say delusional, but that's, that's what they are. It's, it's an impractical way to look at the world that they seem to live in and, and

• 0:52Speaker 02

  they don't, as far as I've seen, especially the radical Drake superfan that I'm thinking of.

• 0:58Ryan Broderick?

  The Drake ultras, sure.

• 0:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, they don't, they don't offer much to society as far as I can tell.

• 1:21Ryan Broderick?

  Okay, I, I am very personally fascinated and frightened by the Taylor Swift anti-fans.

• 1:29Speaker 02

  Oh, so people who are just angry at Taylor Swift all the time?

• 1:32Ryan Broderick?

  Yes, there's a couple of subreddits I follow full of people who seem very unwell, that really hate her, but are obsessed with talking about her.

• 1:41Speaker 02

  Ah, that's rough, that's rough. When, when it's the other side of the obsession spectrum where you're obsessed with how much other people like somebody.

• 1:49Ryan Broderick?

  Exactly.

• 1:50Speaker 02

  Oh, that's rough.

• 1:51Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, antis, yeah. These ones are currently very upset because they were convinced the Travis Kelsey relationship was fake. And as time goes on, it's looking less fake and they're kind of freaking out.

• 2:00Speaker 02

  Oh, so this is like QAnon almost?

• 2:02Ryan Broderick?

  Yes, it is QAnon for Taylor Swift.

• 2:03Speaker 02

  Oh, that's rich.

• 2:05Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, it's good stuff. And we're going to be talking about an even crazier fanbase. Today, but sort of more broadly, we're going to be talking about when fandoms online become very cultish and fanatical. I'm Ryan Broderick. Joining me as always, you'll hear him later pop into the episode is our producer, Grant Irving. This is Panic World, a show about how the internet warps our minds, our culture, and eventually, reality. And the warping we want to get into today is about how fandom has become zealous and frankly, borderline religious. We're looking back at the release of the Snyder Cut, the people who still think that Zack Snyder should take over the Warner Brothers production of DC movies. It's all very dumb, but it's also pretty fascinating to look back at now, considering,

• 2:47Ryan Broderick?

  you know, where the world of fandom entertainment is currently. It also, I think, really reveals how desperate we are to find our personalities within pop culture and how alienating that can be when massive corporations control that pop culture. Joining me today is rapper, podcaster, streamer, a preeminent expert in all kinds of stuff. Open mic eagle, welcome.

• 3:12Speaker 02

  Hey, I'm good. I'm ready.

• 3:16Ryan Broderick?

  Let's start with this. What is your relationship to like larger nerd culture? What do you engage in? What do you ignore?

• 3:23Speaker 02

  I'm pretty rooted in it. My thing is I'm more of a comic book guy.

• 3:29Ryan Broderick?

  Okay.

• 3:30Speaker 02

  My fervor doesn't necessarily extend to the to the movies. Obviously, I'm aware of them. I just don't tend to care as much.

• 3:40Ryan Broderick?

  Sure.

• 3:40Speaker 02

  And then zooming in, I've always been much more attracted to the Marvel stuff than the DC stuff.

• 3:48Ryan Broderick?

  Okay.

• 3:49Speaker 02

  In general. So I've seen a fair amount of the DC movies, but I certainly don't. I've never had like a dog in a fight over who should be doing what when it comes to like DC superhero properties.

• 4:00Ryan Broderick?

  Okay, perfect. That means you're you're sort of actually more objective here. This is good.

• 4:04Speaker 02

  I think so, but we'll see.

• 4:06Ryan Broderick?

  I've actually been starting to read comics again after a long hiatus because I think I'm, I've lost interest in the movies and so now I'm going back and I'm reading like, right now I'm reading Immortal Hulk, which is-

• 4:14Speaker 02

  Oh, that's a, that's a fantastic run.

• 4:17Ryan Broderick?

  Unbelievable. He does some stuff with Hulks in that comic that are outrageous.

• 4:21Speaker 02

  The body horror and all that, like you never see it coming.

• 4:25Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, it's awesome. But the reason we're talking about specifically the DC movies and Zack Snyder are, there's a few reasons. One, James Gunn is releasing a new Superman movie, trying to relaunch a whole new cinematic universe around DC comic books and recover from the weirdly divisive era of Zack Snyder's reign over all of these properties. And we're going to get into that in just a moment. The second thing here is that nerd superhero fandoms are kind of dying, maybe. Like it's really unclear what, what their role is in culture anymore. Captain America 4 was really bad. I fell asleep during Captain America 4. Thunderbolts was good. I liked it, but no one else seemed to really care about it. It underperformed at the box office.

• 5:08Ryan Broderick?

  And this thing that has loomed over pop culture for almost 20 years now, the superhero film, for better or worse,

• 5:17Ryan Broderick?

  is just fuzzy. Like I don't, I don't understand what these movies even are anymore when I watch them.

• 5:25Ryan Broderick?

  The third reason we're talking about this is because there is a now kind of vicious anti-culture or vicious, like pro the other side culture. And this connects to our previous episode about Blake Lively and just Justin Baldoni. There are these warring tribes of fans online that, you know, are very hard to manage. And this is a, I think in a lot of ways, a flashpoint of that entire idea.

• 5:50Speaker 02

  Ugh.

• 5:51Ryan Broderick?

  So what, what that means to me is that right now Hollywood is beginning to understand not just like the value of fandoms, but how to manipulate them perhaps and weaponize them.

• 6:00Speaker 02

  Yuck.

• 6:01Ryan Broderick?

  Yes. But I want to start with Zack Snyder and I want to start all the way back in 2004, which is when he releases the remake of The Dawn of the Dead, which I think is an absolute banger. Do you ever, did you ever see this?

• 6:12Speaker 02

  I have not seen it.

• 6:13Ryan Broderick?

  Highly recommend. And it honestly is like genuinely very good. But he also releases a director's cut, which is going to be important for our story later.

• 6:22Speaker 02

  Also, he always does. Is this a pattern?

• 6:23Ryan Broderick?

  He's been doing this. He's been doing this for 20 years.

• 6:26Speaker 02

  Oh, okay. That's news. That's news.

• 6:29Ryan Broderick?

  He is also, you know, focusing very much on like grim dark movies that are like very masculine with the exception of this one movie he made about owls, which I've never seen. I take you've never, have you seen this?

• 6:40Speaker 02

  The first I'm hearing of it, the Zack Snyder owl movie.

• 6:43Ryan Broderick?

  Legend of the Guardians, The Owls of Gawool. It's an animated film about owls. Apparently it's pretty good.

• 6:50Speaker 02

  Did not come across my desk.

• 6:52Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. What was your understanding of like the Zack Snyder vibe over the last two decades?

• 6:58Speaker 02

  So I really dug Sin City. To this day, I've never read the, um, the book, but I appreciated the story that I saw in the movie. And I liked the artistic direction of it a ton. Like I liked how it felt like I was watching a comic book. And so when he did Watchmen and it was mostly felt like a one to one adaptation of the story, which is a DC story that I have read and very much enjoy. I was into that. Um, I remember there being a lot of discourse at the time about like, what the value of this was, since it was such a close adaptation.

• 7:36Speaker 02

  But I really dug that. Like, I like comic books. I like just, I like, you know, some comic book stories a lot. So when it comes to the idea of adapting them to movies, I don't think you always have to change everything.

• 7:49Ryan Broderick?

  Right.

• 7:49Speaker 02

  To, to, to do an adaptation. So.

• 7:52Ryan Broderick?

  So before we leave Watchmen world, I will say the, my favorite part of that movie is actually the, like the kind of the only original thing he did, which is the opening credits.

• 7:59Speaker 02

  Oh, the opening credits. Okay.

• 8:01Ryan Broderick?

  Where like you have the montage of like 50 years of superheroes set to like a Bob Dylan song. I thought that was like, oh, and I also like the ending. I think the ending is better. Um, I think the, the, the no squid ending is like pretty cool. Have you ever seen 300?

• 8:15Speaker 02

  Oh, I did see the 300. You know what? That was the first movie in my life. I was like fighting to stay awake in a movie. And it wasn't, it wasn't anything to do with the quality of the movie. It was just me hitting that certain part of adulthood where like, oh, I shouldn't go see a movie after nine o'clock. Like, cuz, cuz it's too dark. And so I remember, I remember that movie like in vignettes in between naps.

• 8:49Ryan Broderick?

  You just kept like waking up to like shirtless men like kicking each other. Yeah.

• 8:53Speaker 02

  Yeah. And there was a giant guy like a giant, a giant sexual man.

• 8:59Ryan Broderick?

  So 300 is important here because this is, I think, the beginning of when people start to wonder like, what's this like Zack Snyder? Like, what's this guy's deal? And it's also when conservatives start being like, I like this guy's deal. But I do think what is interesting is a couple of years later, he Zack Snyder talks about Batman McGinn's and he says, everyone says that Batman McGinn's Batman's dark. And I'm like, okay, no, Batman's cool. He gets to go to a Tibetan monastery and be trained by ninjas. Okay? I want to do that, but he doesn't like get raped in prison. That could happen in my movie. If you want to talk about dark, that's how that would go.

• 9:35Speaker 02

  Was he drunk during this interview? Like, what was happening?

• 9:38Ryan Broderick?

  He was just talking to a journalist.

• 9:41Speaker 02

  That seems like a weird thing to insert into your answer that nobody implied, you know?

• 9:47Ryan Broderick?

  He was talking to Entertainment Weekly.

• 9:49Speaker 02

  What? Come on. It wasn't with Playboy or Hustler?

• 9:52Ryan Broderick?

  Like, no, no, this was Zack Snyder in 2008. Uh, Iron Man had just hit theaters.

• 9:58Speaker 02

  Oh, man.

• 9:59Ryan Broderick?

  And he was just like, I want to see Batman get raped.

• 10:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, he was thinking about rape, the whole Iron Man. He's just sitting there thinking about rape. That's. That's not good.

• 10:08Ryan Broderick?

  I think, but I think this is like exactly it, which is that like he, I don't think he thinks politically, but he's got this like, like, like teen boy kind of edginess that attracts like a certain kind of person. And that I think we start to see come out into the, into the theaters in 2013 when he directs Man of Steel. Did you ever see Man of Steel with, uh, um, what is his name? Um, Henry Cavill?

• 10:31Speaker 02

  I don't think so. So there's a movie called Superman Returns.

• 10:36Ryan Broderick?

  So that's the one before.

• 10:38Speaker 02

  Okay. Now who did that one? Do you know?

• 10:40Ryan Broderick?

  That's a great question. I, I watched it as a kid and I was like, this is goofy, but I kind of enjoy it.

• 10:44Speaker 02

  See, I got weirded out in that movie.

• 10:47Ryan Broderick?

  Bryan Singer.

• 10:48Speaker 02

  Oh, see, right. Okay. Cause like there's a, there's a, like my main memory of that movie is like, is he stalking her?

• 10:57Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, there's a weird creepiness.

• 10:59Speaker 02

  Yeah. And like I, I, that just, I don't know. I grew up on the Christopher Reeve movies. So like that movie just kind of weirded me out. And I think because of that movie, I just was out on DC movies for like a while. So I never saw Man of Steel.

• 11:13Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. Superman Returns has like a, kind of like a, like a surreal horniness to it.

• 11:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 11:19Ryan Broderick?

  It's like hard to shake. Yeah. So if you haven't seen Man of Steel, the important thing is that at the end of Man of Steel, Superman causes a nine 11 style event and then breaks Zod's neck. That's the, that's, that's how Zack Snyder thought Superman should go.

• 11:34Speaker 02

  So Superman, like, how'd he cause it? If you, if you, sure. Cause I, I need, I need to unpack that a little.

• 11:40Ryan Broderick?

  No, that's good. Yeah. So he's fighting Zod and the other evil Kryptonians. They have like a big battle, but in the middle of the battle, Superman destroys Metropolis and it's filmed exactly like nine 11 down to like the dust.

• 11:52Speaker 02

  No.

• 11:53Ryan Broderick?

  And like, it's a traumatic, it's, I guess they're trying to do like an Avengers Battle of New York kind of idea, but instead they just go real hard with the realism. So it looks just like nine 11.

• 12:04Speaker 02

  Jesus Christ.

• 12:06Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. Uh, and critics noticed this. They called it a gritty, realistic story. You know, it, it, it has an element of Superman to it, but not really. And then he follows that up with Batman V Superman. I'm sorry, Dawn of Justice.

• 12:19Speaker 02

  Now I think I put that on like TNT one day in the background while I was going about life. So I've seen like a, of, I've seen some of that.

• 12:28Ryan Broderick?

  It's fine. It's not, it's got, it's not Ben Affleck and like, I'm from Boston, so I have to support everything he does, even if it's bad. So like, he's a, he's fine, Bruce Wayne, but like, overall, these movies are becoming less popular, less interesting. Meanwhile, Marvel's getting it more popular, more interesting. And then a couple of years later in 2017, we get Joss Whedon and Zack Snyder, both making versions of the, of the Justice League film. Are you familiar with the drama here?

• 12:55Speaker 02

  Yes, I am. That I am familiar with.

• 12:57Ryan Broderick?

  You know, Grant's actually been obsessed with this one for a while, and I very generously, I'm gonna allow him to speak and recap for listeners who might not know.

• 13:06Speaker 03

  After Batman versus Superman, and it was like critically smeared, even though it did well, Zack started bringing in different cuts of his Justice League. And it was supposed to be like, multiple movies, and they bring in Joss Whedon and people, and they're just doing these screenings. They were like, three hours long, and people are saying that like, this is unwatchable. This is the most joyless thing. So like, it was going bad. And then I think an important detail is that genuinely tragically, he had a child that committed suicide.

• 13:40Ryan Broderick?

  Oh.

• 13:41Speaker 03

  And then, so he had a fully-

• 13:42Ryan Broderick?

  That's why he drops out, yeah.

• 13:44Speaker 03

  So he had a fully step away. And then they gave the reins to a director who had the exact opposite sort of aesthetic and interest, which, which like, I do think adds to, to the backlash.

• 13:57Speaker 02

  Yes, it does. And I didn't, I didn't know that, but that makes, that make, that helps me make a lot more sense of it, knowing that.

• 14:05Speaker 03

  So, so like, they feel like this big injustice is being done. But while he stepped away, completely understandably, he also apparently had somebody go into DC and take the hard drives, where the movie he was making. He like, he had somebody steal the hard drives.

• 14:22Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 14:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, so that like, he could covertly be making the Snyder Cut, that like, people were like, debating whether or not it existed.

• 14:35Speaker 02

  Did he really have to do that to get the footage to keep making his cut? Is that?

• 14:38Ryan Broderick?

  Most likely, yeah, because the studio probably would have locked it down.

• 14:41Speaker 02

  But then why would the studio turn around and put it out if he had to steal the footage to do it?

• 14:45Ryan Broderick?

  Because he spent five years putting pressure on the studio using social media.

• 14:50Speaker 03

  And so, so that's the next thing I want to give you a little bit more details about. Over the years, he was on some app that like was not Twitter, basically, but was like Twitter where he would just release pictures of the, of the set with no comments to like keep inflaming his fans that this thing might exist. He would like post pictures of people who were cut out of Josh Whedon's movie. It was literally very much like Q drops where he kept just like being like, uh, at one point before it was released, um, he took a picture of his MacBook with like a Justice League sticker on it and just put that up there. So people are immediately like,

• 15:32Speaker 03

  the film, the film exists on this laptop, but they won't let us get it.

• 15:36Speaker 02

  Yes. With, with the fan base who's already a full inferno.

• 15:40Speaker 03

  Exactly. Yeah. So he really

• 15:44Speaker 03

  had plausible deniability, but did things to keep it going on.

• 15:49Ryan Broderick?

  It's very Trumpian. It's like very Trump one point. Actually, I'm honestly Trump 2.02 like he, Trump spent the entire summer being like, I've never heard of Project 2025. I just happen to be mentioning the exact stuff in it all the time. Isn't that crazy?

• 16:04Speaker 03

  The whole thing was that it was like, it was supposed to be done. Like there was a secret locked away version that was finished.

• 16:08Speaker 02

  The big piece of info there for me is, is the, the breadcrumbing. Cause literally like

• 16:19Speaker 02

  there's a thing that just happens with people in the world right now. I don't know if it's always been this way, but it seems exaggerated right now where like, Everybody's looking for, you know, the truth. I think just a lot of people feel powerless, right? And when you feel powerless and you can't make sense of the world, you're looking for people who have the answers to something, you know? And I think that's, that's one of the big driving forces of the Q thing, right? It's like, oh, there's somebody named Q who has all this high security clearance and he's gonna help me make sense of this world that

• 16:59Speaker 02

  doesn't make sense to me. So every little thing that Q drops is gonna help me understand the world more, right? And it's just such a powerful driver to people and it just causes them to put so much external validation on these things that come from this person who they've identified as having this power. And it's like, yeah, if you're, if you're a person who is doing that sort of tactic with this IP that people care really deeply about and they're helping, like, they're helping making you, they're helping to make you feel special because your attention and your aggression in speaking about this is

• 17:43Speaker 02

  like fighting the corporate overlords who are keeping you from the truth of what this beautiful film experience could be. And I don't know, like, that, that really, just thinking about the intention of all of that and the manipulation of all of that, I don't know, it, it makes me much more soured, I guess, on, on him.

• 18:09Ryan Broderick?

  Exactly. So like, while they're demanding that, you know, Warner Brothers release Zack Snyder's complete vision, they're doing like a change.org petition, you know, they're demanding that, like, they fix it.

• 18:21Speaker 02

  Change.org, isn't that supposed to be about, like, helping people?

• 18:26Ryan Broderick?

  I know, it's about demanding a better superhero film.

• 18:28Speaker 02

  Oh, God.

• 18:30Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 18:32Speaker 02

  It's a mess.

• 18:33Ryan Broderick?

  So you have a disappointed, agitated fanbase and a director feeding into it and a not very sympathetic group of executives, right in the crosshairs. And we're gonna talk about what happens next, right after a word from our sponsor, HBO Max, which I think is what it's called now. Like, it could be Max, or HBO Go, or one of those.

• 19:30Speaker 04

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• 20:00Ryan Broderick?

  Okay, so granted, a perfectly acceptable job, giving an overview of what fans wanted from their precious version of the movie. And eventually, they'll get it, but it'll be too late for sanity to be restored. And to understand how toxic this all gets, let me ask you this first. I would love to kind of get your thoughts on like, how you think about different, like, online fanbases for comics? Like, you said that you read them, do you, do you ever sort of like lurk in these subreddits? Are you, are you in nerdier corners of YouTube or something?

• 20:37Speaker 02

  Like, what I tend to do with any media that I enjoy, is I enjoy it, and then I run to YouTube to hear what people have to say about it.

• 20:45Ryan Broderick?

  Me too, yeah.

• 20:46Speaker 02

  And, uh, so, the twin shock of comics YouTube is that...

• 20:53Speaker 02

  Is that first of all, for, for as many YouTubers and cottage industries there are around like superhero movie fandom and analysis and Easter eggs and trailers and all of that. Like the, the field is barren when it comes to comics YouTubers. And then there's just a sea of tiny channels that are just trying it. But there's obviously just not as big of an audience in consuming discourse around the comics, right? Sure. That's the first shock. The second shock is how right-leaning the majority of them are.

• 21:38Speaker 02

  And how gamergate, comics gate, rage bait, anti-woke, how, how much that sentiment dominates a lot of those channels that do exist. Because of that, like, I largely stay away from the fandoms. They don't, the fandoms don't have much to offer me except annoyance. The vast majority of the time. I'm a big X-Men guy. Like the X-Men subreddits, the X-Men. They're okay. The subreddits are all right.

• 22:14Speaker 02

  The subreddits are cool. The, the podcasts, the, the channels that are mostly X-Men focused, mostly are cool because X-Men kind of has more of this inclusivity. It's hard to be like an alt-right X-Men fan. Yeah, now there definitely are some. I have found them, but there's this diversity sort of built into it. And it's always, or for the most part, definitely compared to other comics franchises, has more like a safe space kind of vibe to it. Which can get annoying on its own, but it's to me is way better than the the alternative.

• 22:50Ryan Broderick?

  Now, you mentioned something there that I do want to hit on because I think this is like a missing piece of why the Snyder Cut stuff got so ferocious in this time period. You mentioned Comics Gate. So for our listeners who might not be familiar, Comics Gate comes from Gamergate. You're familiar with both. Yeah. So I knew a reporter years ago who was working on Comics Gate stuff and like every time she would publish about it, it was just like violent, insane nonsense.

• 23:18Speaker 02

  It's really ugly.

• 23:19Ryan Broderick?

  And what's even crazier is that like it started in 2016, basically around a like female author writing a book about Mockingbird, which is like a Marvel character. And it was it was this blow up over, you know, women being involved in the comics industry, but I do think it ballooned out. And I think the point that you made about how if you sit down and you're like Captain America 4 didn't work for me. No one's gonna watch that. But if you sit down, you're like Captain America didn't work because it's woke.

• 23:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 23:52Ryan Broderick?

  Like YouTube will promote it and Reddit will promote it. And I think that is the part of this that the Snyder fans figured out, which is that like it can't just be that these movies are bad. It has to be there's some sort of like cultural, political conspiracy to make them bad to hurt me.

• 24:09Speaker 02

  Right.

• 24:10Ryan Broderick?

  The fan.

• 24:11Speaker 02

  They haven't added a lot of new fans since like the height of the the medium success in like the 90s. So most of these people are like middle aged guys who've been reading and buying comics for 30 years. And they feel this very sensitive ownership of the characters, especially if they feel like the changes that are being made are not what they want because they're the ones they feel like they've been keeping this thing afloat the whole time. And it's this really interesting place where like the the sort of manosphere narratives.

• 24:58Speaker 02

  Around a lot of media these days, right? How a lot of that intersects with comic fandom and they get really activated because it's really easy to take that initial sort of frustration that these fans have and how their characters get changed and how like it seems like their histories don't matter and it seems like because to them it reflects the feeling that their fandom, that their investment, all of that has not mattered because the companies are chasing a new audience, which they should be, right?

• 25:29Ryan Broderick?

  Right.

• 25:30Speaker 02

  But it's very easy to infiltrate this frustrated market and say, hey, they're changing it because they don't like you anymore.

• 25:38Ryan Broderick?

  Right. It's interesting because like I do think the internet has changed the incentives, let's say, to talk about these things.

• 25:47Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 25:47Ryan Broderick?

  But I think you're right that it's not really new because in fact, actually, because the Fantastic Four movie is coming out pretty soon and I was reading through like old discussions of like the previous movies and I found a bunch of discourse on like old blogs complaining that they had cast Jessica Alba, the most beautiful woman on earth in that moment, as the invisible woman because she was Hispanic.

• 26:15Ryan Broderick?

  I can't imagine being so racist that I'd be mad to stare at Jessica Alba.

• 26:18Speaker 02

  I mean, there's, there's, there's, there's a lot of things in comics, discourse in comics, where it's, it's at that line where you're like, wait a minute, like you're.

• 26:29Ryan Broderick?

  What are you talking about? What are you talking?

• 26:31Speaker 02

  You, you hate gay people that much? Well, yeah. The hint that Iceman may have been homosexual is enough to make you bang your whole head against the wall. Like, what is the problem here?

• 26:44Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, if anything, you should be mad at Jean Grey for outing him using telepathy. That's a deep cut for the real reader. She should be getting the flak for that.

• 26:52Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 26:53Ryan Broderick?

  What's interesting about Snyder fans is that they have devolved into this weird conservatism and resentment, and they're known for that, but it's not all just white guys. In the last act, we went over Snyder's role a bit and how, you know, his version came out, but it wouldn't have happened without his fans, or at least quote unquote, his fans, if you believe they exist, supporting him constantly on social media. And I want to focus on one super fan of his, just so you kind of get a sense for how dedicated these people are. Fiona Zhang was and possibly is a healthcare administrator from China and a dedicated stan who was involved in the change.org petition in 2017.

• 27:34Ryan Broderick?

  So Zhang, before she saw Joss Whedon's version, was like posting about it all the time. She posts like the lyrics to a Leonard Cohen song that like Snyder uses in a lot of his movies. And on New Year's Eve, 2020, Snyder tweets out announcing that his cut is going to be released. And he writes, "This one is for you, Fiona. Let's go 2021."

• 27:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, it just seems a lot less of an accident. Like remember I was comparing earlier, like, oh, the people who like Lost or the people who like Krakoa, it would be very similar to this if one of those people had been using these sort of tactics to stoke the fires of this fandom and motivate us to put pressure on ABC or pressure on Marvel Comics to give us the thing we want, since this, this creative genius that we love is telling us that the thing that we want really exists.

• 28:30Ryan Broderick?

  Exactly. Have you ever seen the Snyder Cut?

• 28:33Speaker 02

  I have seen the Snyder Cut. I had, I had a lot of time on my hands in 2020, so I definitely could sit and watch a three hour movie that everyone's talking about and it was available to stream from inside my house. I remember. I remember digging it. I mean, aside from the length, but I also can say that I was not really aware of the depth of all of the discourse around it. So like, I wasn't looking at it with any sort of like, political lens at the time. And I was just like, oh, there's the Snyder Cut that everybody's talking about. Let me watch the Snyder Cut. And I was like, oh, okay, this is

• 29:16Speaker 02

  cool. And I think around that time, too, I was becoming more aware of like, Joss Whedon's sort of effect on superhero movies in general. So I was probably more looking at it through that lens. Like, like, I appreciate that there's not a quip every, you know, 38 seconds, probably more than anything, you know?

• 29:41Ryan Broderick?

  Like you, I was also completely brain damaged from COVID lockdown. So it was like, I could stare at this and I enjoyed it. It was fine. I was kind of happy when it came out because I was online, I was like, super online in these spaces at the time. And I was like, oh, like, we'll never have to hear about this again. That joke was on me. But to affirm your point that Snyder was stoking the flames, Rolling Stone did some incredible reporting around this. Let me read this to you. So they wrote, according to multiple sources familiar with the matter, Zack Snyder confronted an executive at Warner Brothers post-production department and issued a threat referencing Jeff Johns and John Berg, who are like producers on the Snyder Cut. And

• 30:21Ryan Broderick?

  he said, Jeff and John are dragging their feet on taking their names off my cut. Now I will destroy them on social media. So like, at least by 2020, spring 2020, this was, this was reported, he was aware that he had this fanbase.

• 30:38Speaker 02

  That he had this button you could push and

• 30:40Ryan Broderick?

  Exactly.

• 30:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 30:41Ryan Broderick?

  And now, if he was ever asked about it, though, in public, he would say like, oh, it's all good. It's all like, love. Don't worry. These, this is a community. This is, he would call it like a movement. But he clearly knew that like, he could sic these people against you if he was mad. Which I think is, oh, and then you want, you want to hear one other really funny detail here?

• 31:02Speaker 02

  Oh, sure.

• 31:04Ryan Broderick?

  Uh, once again, according to Rolling Stone, uh, about 13% of the accounts that we're talking, that have been talking about the Snyder Cut are fake.

• 31:12Speaker 02

  Of course.

• 31:13Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 31:15Speaker 02

  Of course. The bot farms, the bot farms are, are here.

• 31:19Ryan Broderick?

  What I think is very hard for people to wrap their heads around, you know, and, and, and to kind of bring it back to what we talked about at the top of the show, you know, I, I read celebrity news, you know, casually, like, I think it's kind of fun to like read through it. And I remember reading through the, the Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni stuff. And I would just see people on Reddit, like, you know, complain about Blake Lively, the same way I see people complain about Taylor Swift. And I think the average person is absorbing a lot of that stuff without realizing it, only to discover that it's either fake, or it's totally organized by some PR forum, or a director who's trying to get his movie made. And it's really hard to separate that in your daily life, because you, I mean, that's just a lot of work, right?

• 32:01Speaker 02

  Yeah. If we can't tell who's real and who's fake, then I feel like it's, we're already burnt, you know, like it's,

• 32:10Speaker 02

  the, the value of all of it just takes such a, um, it just takes such serious damage. If that's the state of things now, where when you, if you click a hashtag to try to see what's going on about something, it can be some percentage of robots versus some percentage of other robots. You know, I don't know. I, I feel like, I feel like it's actually really sad and damaging, and we're not even done unraveling what the effect of it's going to be on all of our social media interactions and

• 32:46Speaker 02

  the idea of

• 32:49Speaker 02

  How narrative affects this, these big media franchises and releases, you know?

• 32:55Ryan Broderick?

  That, that's a perfect setup, uh, because despite, you know, the sense that it was all being manipulated, there were real fans of Snyder that thought that they were writing some evil that executives had, had caused. Some, you know, they were writing some kind of wrong. And with the release of the Snyder Cut, some thought that it was all just starting. They, they thought that, okay, the movie has been restored and now his whole universe is going to be restored. And we're going to get into what that means and sort of the long-term effects of, you know, trying to appease a nerd mob after a word from our sponsors, Rebel Moon.

• 33:34Ryan Broderick?

  Uh, the movie everyone saw for sure.

• 33:41Speaker 00

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• 34:38Ryan Broderick?

  Um, okay, so spoiler, because this was stoked for so long and eventually the fans did get what they wanted.

• 34:47Ryan Broderick?

  The Snyder Cut Colts Online is just like never gonna go away. Uh, it is, it flares up all the time. But before we get into the long lasting effects of a toxic fandom, let's explore a bit about what they wanted from the Snyder Universe of DC Films. So before the cut was released, Snyder made a T-shirt to raise money for charity and suicide prevention, and it ended up raising like $80,000, which is great. But I would love for you to try to explain to our audience what any of this means, what I'm about to show you.

• 35:18Speaker 02

  What? All the gods, all the heavens, all the hells are within you? This is from Joseph Campbell. And then, what is this? It's like a tree of life with, is this Nazi?

• 35:33Ryan Broderick?

  It does look very fashy, doesn't it?

• 35:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, like, and, and within it, there's the symbols for the Justice League superhero. Like, I am so confused and scared. Like, there's a baby at the bottom of it? What is happening?

• 35:49Ryan Broderick?

  Okay, well, let me break this down for you, because I think this is, I think almost every fandom at this point has something like this, but this one is, the Snyder Cut has taken this to like the extreme degree. So at the top, it says, uh, equitas, acquitus, which is Latin for justice, as in dawn of justice, if you will.

• 36:09Speaker 02

  Oh, my God.

• 36:10Ryan Broderick?

  They, uh, so, okay, you asked about the baby.

• 36:14Speaker 02

  How could I not ask about the baby?

• 36:16Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, you seem to want to know something about the baby. So, uh, that is, uh, from a, uh, a Zack Snyder kind of like comment that he had made that if he got to continue the franchise.

• 36:28Speaker 02

  He would kill the baby.

• 36:29Ryan Broderick?

  No, much, much weirder, actually. Batman was going to fuck Lois Lane, and they were gonna have a baby, and then I think that would eventually turn Superman evil.

• 36:40Speaker 02

  The fatherhood?

• 36:42Ryan Broderick?

  Cause you know, he got, no, cause Superman gets cucked by Batman.

• 36:45Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 36:46Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yes.

• 36:48Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. Okay.

• 36:49Ryan Broderick?

  And so he would team up with Darkseid and bring evil alien armies to Earth.

• 36:55Speaker 02

  Woman turned man bad.

• 36:57Ryan Broderick?

  Exactly. And that's why there's a big sword going into the earth with an A around it for the planet Apocalypse, where these aliens come from. Um, Flash would go back in time and die trying to help, which is why there's an hourglass and a scythe on his T-shirt.

• 37:09Speaker 02

  He would like die trying to like kick Batman in the dick really fast, so he couldn't.

• 37:13Ryan Broderick?

  Exactly.

• 37:14Speaker 02

  Get one up?

• 37:15Ryan Broderick?

  Couldn't cuck Superman. Exactly.

• 37:16Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 37:17Ryan Broderick?

  Um, and then the Justice League would assemble to fight Darkseid, like the Knights of the Round Table, which is why there's like swords around an Omega symbol on this thing. And then Batman would die to save the world, and that's why there's like a W coffin, I guess, for Wayne, which I thought was for Wonder Woman, but fair enough.

• 37:34Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 37:35Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 37:36Speaker 02

  Uh, so the terrifying thing about this is if I saw somebody wearing-

• 37:41Ryan Broderick?

  Oh, wait, sorry. One more thing. Hold that thought, because this is important. The use of Cortland, then there's like a thing on the show that says Cortland. Yeah, so that is a reference to the, uh, the Anne Rand book, The Fountainhead.

• 37:54Speaker 02

  Stop it.

• 37:56Ryan Broderick?

  Which is, once again, brings us back to this like weird, fashy, right-wing thing again. Yeah. Yeah. What were you saying?

• 38:04Speaker 02

  I was gonna say that the real terrifying thing about this to me is like, if I walk past somebody on the street wearing this shirt, like, I might think, oh, that's interesting. What's that? And just have no idea that it's just like a bunch of bullshit, like raging, crazy person bullshit.

• 38:27Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, it's so crazy. And like, the masculine kind of like right-wing nature of this one in particular, I think, has made it so like irrepressibly insane.

• 38:37Speaker 02

  You know, I'll say, I'll say this, and, and, and this is if, if those people are listening to this, which I imagine some will, because that's kind of how this shit works, is that like- Get the fuck over it for real. Like every, every like yo, there are people who spent six, seven years of their lives watching Lost, right? And there was all of this fucking big shit that was supposed to happen that, that Carlton Cues and Damon Lindelof said, oh, it'll be, it'll be explained. It'll be, it'll be scientific. It'll be plausible. And they threw that shit out of the window, right? Like sometimes your franchise does not deliver. Sometimes the thing that you want to see brought to fruition doesn't happen and you have to move the fuck on.

• 39:22Speaker 02

  Cause it's, it's really, it's a bunch of corporations deciding what lives and what dies. And the truth is they don't care about any of us. They don't care about any of us. They're only trying to make more fucking money. Okay? There's no plot against you. You know, like I'm, I'm like, I guess that I'm an X-Men guy. So they just, we just had the, the big Krakowan era of X-Men comics.

• 39:46Ryan Broderick?

  Unbelievable.

• 39:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was great. And Jonathan Hickman, one of the geniuses of comic book writing, sort of set up this universe and he ended up leaving, you know, two years into what's supposed to be like this 10 year run. We didn't get shit. Get any.

• 40:01Ryan Broderick?

  Release the Hickman cut of the Krakow era. I want to see it go full bad.

• 40:04Speaker 02

  I would hate to see an army of X-Men subredditors making the fact that we didn't get Jonathan Hickman's ending their entire fucking identity. Like that seems like a giant waste of your life, you know? There's other shit to do.

• 40:22Ryan Broderick?

  The Snyder Cut community continues to exist. The subreddit is very out of control now.

• 40:27Speaker 02

  What do they talk about now?

• 40:29Ryan Broderick?

  Well, okay, I'm glad you asked that. Um, I came across, I came across a Snyder Cut post today reacting to an announcement that they're going to do a Superman unlimited variant cover that has like James Gunn on the cover for the new Superman movie.

• 40:45Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 40:45Ryan Broderick?

  And one of the top responses was a Snyder Cut fan accusing James Gunn of being a pedophile.

• 40:51Speaker 02

  Whoa.

• 40:53Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 40:53Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, was there any evidence?

• 40:56Ryan Broderick?

  I mean, it's, it's kind of like Q and on where like you don't really want to go down that road. Like there's just a lot of it, but like, hold on, let me, let me, let me read you some of the top posts of all time on the Snyder Cut subreddit.

• 41:07Speaker 03

  As you're looking for it, can, can you? I wonder if it's the same person I found who responds to every DC thing by either saying, "Restore the Snyderverse," or calling James Gunn a pedophile, or if there's at least two of these people.

• 41:20Ryan Broderick?

  Oh, there's many.

• 41:21Speaker 03

  That's what they do in their life.

• 41:22Ryan Broderick?

  But the, the, the major thing you're gonna see, you're gonna hear them say is, "Let's see James Gunn's hard drive." That's what they keep saying.

• 41:29Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, so like if you look at the top posts about, like on the Snyder Cut subreddit, a lot of them are from fans trying to be like, "We can like both directors here, James Gunn and Zack Snyder." And then a lot of people being like, "I'm gonna kill you."

• 41:42Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 41:44Ryan Broderick?

  That's the result of giving fans what they want. Like, fans shouldn't get, shouldn't, fans shouldn't be happy. Like, we shouldn't, we shouldn't make these people happy. So let's zoom out and look at how, you know, this has leaked into all kinds of fandoms to some degree, you know, in the years since. We talked about the Drake fans, actually. That's actually a really good example. Um, can you say a bit more about like how they've reacted to the Kendrick stuff with the Super Bowl?

• 42:09Speaker 02

  Well, it appears that they try to

• 42:13Speaker 02

  take everything that happens and somehow shape it as a Drake win, even when it's an obvious Drake loss.

• 42:20Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 42:20Speaker 02

  Even, even things-

• 42:21Ryan Broderick?

  I was hoping you would say this exact thing. Great.

• 42:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, like, that's like, so, I've been making a lot of YouTube videos about all of this stuff, and because of that, I often wake up and the first thing I see is like, how Drake fans are reacting to something. And it's just so far removed from reality and so obviously powered by like, there seems to be some sort of connection for these people where Drake's success is their success. Like, it's, it's really that deeply personal for these people where they feel like they're in the trenches for some war that they're not actually in. There is no war. Like, it, it doesn't exist.

• 43:00Ryan Broderick?

  Very parasocial.

• 43:01Speaker 02

  Very extr- like parasocial to like, wherever the end of that line is.

• 43:06Ryan Broderick?

  Right.

• 43:07Speaker 02

  To where like, again, it's, it's like we were saying, um, about the Snyder stuff. It's like where that becomes your identity. You know, being somebody who appreciates Drake music is one thing.

• 43:19Speaker 02

  But being somebody who like, your identity is a Drake fan, like, that's rough. That's rough.

• 43:26Ryan Broderick?

  He's background music for shopping.

• 43:28Speaker 02

  I mean, that's, that's what Yassine Bay said and, and that, that, you know, that sort of set a lot of this off.

• 43:34Ryan Broderick?

  I only hear Drake in Ubers. Like, I don't know what you're talking about.

• 43:38Speaker 02

  And, and, but the, I think the, the hard part now is that Drake himself couldn't completely shake off the, you know, the underage girl stuff. He couldn't because there's too much like creepy evidence around.

• 43:54Ryan Broderick?

  Sure.

• 43:55Speaker 02

  You know?

• 43:55Ryan Broderick?

  Allegedly.

• 43:56Speaker 02

  Allegedly, right? Like, but that's another reason why, like, why would you stake your identity on this? Like, a guy who, him, he himself can't shake it. What is the driving force of that?

• 44:08Ryan Broderick?

  I think that is the question and, and I'll, I'll tell you what my theory is here, which is that I think it is truly just sunken cost fallacy. It is this, you know, this idea that like, okay. And you see it with Trump supporters. You see it with Zack Snyder fans. You see it with like, anyone who kind of goes down this rabbit hole. Like Batman with Lois Lane. They just can't pull out of this.

• 44:27Speaker 02

  That's why you need Flash to go back and.

• 44:29Ryan Broderick?

  Exactly.

• 44:30Speaker 02

  Many times, many times quickly. I feel like there's got to be some sort of line, right? Like, I'm black, American. Like, that's been my life. So like, I've seen it around R. Kelly. Specifically in Chicago.

• 44:45Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 44:46Speaker 02

  Like, when I was in high school, there was a rumor that R. Kelly was dating a girl from our high school. Like, when I was in high school. Like, so we've been hearing this stuff for a long time. And I guess with him, it wasn't as much about a sunken cost thing as much as it was about like, when are we as a culture going to decide that what we're hearing is important enough to actually pay attention to? And I think that's the same thing that happened with Diddy. Like, I think a lot changed with Diddy when you saw a video of him beating the holy hell out of, out of a defenseless woman.

• 45:23Speaker 02

  Like, when you see it, it's like, okay, shit, fuck. Like, there's no, there's nowhere to compartmentalize away from what I now know to be true. So I guess it's like, in, in each of these situations, what's the line? Like, I grew up, I was raised by television in a black American home. So you know who else raised me because of that? Bill Cosby. Like, watching The Cosby Show every Thursday when it was new episodes, watching reruns and syndication. I know, like, there are things in my brain that they're, they're committed to memory about that show that, like, I can't even tell you how deep it runs. But like, when you find out a guy is, like, sexually assaulted, like, 50 people.

• 46:07Ryan Broderick?

  Right.

• 46:08Speaker 02

  And of course, it's very different from a Zack Snyder, who to my knowledge, has only talked about rape.

• 46:15Ryan Broderick?

  Zack Snyder only often talks about rape. He is not a pedophile.

• 46:20Speaker 02

  It's obviously not equivalent.

• 46:22Ryan Broderick?

  If, if we sort of move away from, like, the really serious, sort of like, Diddy, Cosby, like, genuine predator stuff, we move into the kind of the, the world of just, like, weird-ass phantoms that are hanging on for, like, no reason, and they're getting really crazy, right? And there's a lot of them. Today, we talked about Snyder fans because they're, like, really weird and crazy, but there's a ton. And I do wonder if part of it is just a quality issue. That's the heart of it, isn't it? Like, would we even be having these conversations if the corporations that you talked about weren't reheating, like, the same intellectual property over and over again? Like, and, and that's where I get kind of conspiratorial with this, where it's like, is this all just downstream of, like,

• 47:00Ryan Broderick?

  living in a world where, where culture isn't moving forward? There are no new characters, no new stories, and so we just war with each other over the same, like, reheated garbage? I don't know. I, I like Superman, but like, I, I, I, I would rather live in a world where we don't get a new one every four years.

• 47:15Speaker 03

  Marvel has gone into a direction of, like, directors don't matter. It is, like, collectively made.

• 47:21Ryan Broderick?

  Or writers, or, or lighting, or.

• 47:24Speaker 03

  It feels like a real low place in culture to be, where, like, something having a point of view, even if I dislike that point of view, feels refreshing because it feels like it was not made by market research. I don't like any of the Snyderverse movies. But I do appreciate that it was like a vision made by a guy. Like you can have a take about them. There's something to actually engage with versus like worth a Marvel franchise this.

• 47:49Ryan Broderick?

  You're not gonna red pill me on the Snyder Cut, Grant. You're not gonna do it.

• 47:52Speaker 03

  I I'm I'm a Matt Reeves truther. I'm going down like I've been waiting five years. I'm like, he must be cooking up something amazing. It's he's he's gonna plan 10 movies. That's why he's we're having to wait seven years.

• 48:03Ryan Broderick?

  Matt Reeves, Batman 2 is gonna come out when you're 50 years old.

• 48:08Ryan Broderick?

  But this is a good point that I want to end on, actually. And this is this is my last question for you, which is like, do you feel like this this stuff, the the the sort of like QAnon for everything culture? Do you feel like that's changing, getting better, getting worse? Like?

• 48:25Speaker 02

  I mean, it's getting worse, but I think it's getting worse because of the robots.

• 48:28Ryan Broderick?

  Sure. Okay.

• 48:29Speaker 02

  Like I I mean, and and you know, that same thing as in the Kendrick and Drake thing like there's there's both sides accuse the other of using bots. Both of them probably are like, I think that shit is just tearing our minds apart. Like, could you imagine being like a 16 year old boy going through whatever social stuff you might have been going through at 16? Having any sort of passionate feeling about some IP that you have found a connection to? And then you go online and you see a post from a robot that you can't tell is a robot, but is echoing like the worst thing

• 49:14Speaker 02

  that you believe?

• 49:16Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 49:17Speaker 02

  You know?

• 49:17Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 49:17Speaker 02

  Like how easy it is to see something like that and have it like ratified like the worst thing in your head. So you there's there's so much less incentive for you to investigate how you feel about a thing, because there's already somebody who agrees with you and you don't even know if they're real or not.

• 49:36Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, I promised our producer Grant that I wouldn't go into the into the world of politics with this episode because this is supposed to be our fun one. But a lot of the studies.

• 49:45Speaker 02

  Oh shit, and I start bringing up.

• 49:47Ryan Broderick?

  Thank you.

• 49:48Speaker 02

  Serial abusers.

• 49:49Ryan Broderick?

  We're free. We're free. I can do this now. So a lot of the studies that I read about Russian troll farms and Russian bot activity, you know, in in the 2010s. Was interesting because it's not what people I think assumed was happening. Like, I think a lot of people assumed that like Russian bots would be posting like fake news stories to like rile people up. And they did do a bit of that. But a large, a large chunk of what they were doing online is exactly what you're describing, which is that they would go into communities and they would pretend to be a member of that community and then they would cause fights. They would, you know, pretend to be different minority groups in America and like say outrageous things to make people think that that minority group believes that.

• 50:33Ryan Broderick?

  They would start arguments on Facebook and and as like part of a Facebook group. They it was to create division. Old CIA tactic too. And I do, I do feel really sad for young people now who have never know, like going to like the creepy comic book store that may or may not have smelled bad is like, I would argue not as nearly as combative as like going on the internet right now and typing in like the cartoon you're watching. Like, dude, I'm following like Avatar, the last Airbender drama right now because they're announcing a new season. And like all this old fandom war stuff has just like sprung back up because these people don't go away and they just fight all day. And it just bums me out that like young people don't know a world without that stuff.

• 51:18Speaker 02

  It's like the promise of the internet was about being able to have all these communities to identify with. And and I don't know, I think community is such an important thing in our lives that.

• 51:31Speaker 02

  Decreasingly, we're getting in person. So it's like the promise of it on the internet seems so important. And so the manipulation of it just seems so deeply problematic to me, you know? And, and, and that there's, you know, in through the lens of capitalism, there's no way that corporations don't seek to use this, weaponize this to take advantage of it, you know? Like, so, so many of the, like, the Disney castings now, like, you know, the, the, the,

• 52:08Speaker 02

  it, it's, it, it's hard not to think that, like, they're not, uh, when, when they do their franchise revivals, their IP revivals, and they put, you know, a, a, a, a black woman in a, in a formerly white animated woman's role. Right. It's hard not to be cynical about that and think that there's, that there's not some idea that they want this sort of outrage discourse, because at least then people will be aware that the, the movie's coming, you know? Like, it's, it's hard not to think that it's not intentional to some degree. Especially now that we've seen how quickly they'll bend the knee to Trump coming in and be like, woke's over. Right. I mean, and, and that's, like I said, it's a cynical take on it, because I, of course, I want to see Sure.

• 52:53Speaker 02

  Uh, diversity. I, I, I want little kids to be able to see themselves in places where they haven't seen people who look like them. I think that's great, but it's like, at some point, it's like, obviously, you know what the, the, the shitstorm this is going to create. Right. On Twitter, and I have to think that you want that. Oh, 100%. How do we, how do we fix it? What's, what's the, what do we do here? Do we just? I mean, what I'm about to propose, we're farther away from than, than ever. But if we had, if we had a government that was truly...

• 53:26Speaker 02

  Humanistic in any sort of way. They would be, they would be, they'd be regulating some of this stuff. I think this stuff needs government regulation. I think that we need to be able to trust in some third party to, like especially when it comes to how corporations can push these buttons and infuriate people and scramble people's brains about this stuff and how, um, and how there's such a direct line just between some of it and like actual real world, uh, situations where people can get hurt.

• 54:06Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 54:06Speaker 02

  You know, like it's, it's, it's not, um, it's not such a far off fantasy to see how directly,

• 54:16Speaker 02

  some of, like some of the underpinning, uh, emotions around some of these arguments connect so directly to like actual population harm. You know, um, I think, obviously, first of all, we have to completely fix the government, which I don't know.

• 54:35Ryan Broderick?

  Step one, get a government. Step two, do good things with that government once we get it. I agree.

• 54:42Speaker 02

  You know, I, I think that's the only answer, but you know, it's just all, all of it seems to be such a reflection of how deeply entrenched our government is already with capitalism, which kind of makes it useless.

• 54:55Ryan Broderick?

  I agree. I, I've been trying not to end every episode of our show being like, we gotta get rid of the internet. So I'm, my, my, my suggestion is like smaller fandom spaces. Like if you like a thing, instead of like going and hanging out with like 20,000 strangers, go find like 10 people, maybe you know them in real life or they know people you know in real life. And like, when I grew up, when I was growing up, like I, I had interests that my friends had. Like that's how, like, that's why we were friends. And like, I think that's, that's okay. You can, you can do that still, you know, it's all right.

• 55:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I can dig that. I guess because, like I was saying earlier, the comic book fandoms,

• 55:35Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 55:36Speaker 02

  like the actual, like, they feel small already.

• 55:38Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 55:38Speaker 02

  And they're already poisoned.

• 55:40Ryan Broderick?

  That's true. Yeah. Maybe it's just like, don't read comics.

• 55:44Speaker 02

  Okay, well, I think a lot of people are trying that already.

• 55:47Ryan Broderick?

  Just give it up. Just give it up. Thank you so much for coming on the show. This was delightful. This was a, this was a great, great conversation. If you want to follow you online, where can they do that?

• 56:00Speaker 02

  Well, if you search my name, I'm on everything.

• 56:03Ryan Broderick?

  If you want to watch your anti-woke YouTube videos about comic books, where can they do that?

• 56:08Speaker 02

  I haven't, you know what? That's a secret, Sean. You'll have to dig.

• 56:12Ryan Broderick?

  Okay.

• 56:15Ryan Broderick?

  If you want to hear even more about how the world of online fandoms have evolved and how Gen Z is dealing with it, you can listen to a longer version of this episode at patreon.com/panicworld. For $5 a month, you get extra content almost every month. Wow, that's amazing. I love content. Go to patreon.com/panicworld for an extra long version of today's episode.

• 56:42Ryan Broderick?

  Panic World is a production of Courier. It is written and produced by Grant Irving and hosted by me, Ryan Broderick. Josh Fielstedt is our production coordinator and our amazing researcher is Adam Bumis. From Courier is Shane Verkest, who edits our video episodes, along with our producer, Devin Maroney, and National Managing Director and Executive Producer, Kevin Dreyfus. RC DeMezzo is their VP of Brand and Social. Charlotte Robinson is their Deputy Director of Brand and Social. Mary Ann Couga is their Director of Marketing, and Tracy Kaplan is the Senior Vice President of Sales and Distribution. If you want to sponsor the show or give us products to sell, she's the one to talk to. You can email her at [email protected]. Lastly, here's my advice for you.

• 57:26Ryan Broderick?

  Chill out and touch grass.

• 57:28Speaker 05

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• 57:58Ryan Broderick?

  While you still can.