Reading the Room: The Magicians, BTS, and the Emotional Responsibility of Creating Popular Culture
| Meta | |
|---|---|
| Title: | Reading the Room: The Magicians, BTS, and the Emotional Responsibility of Creating Popular Culture |
| Creator: | Heidi Samuelson |
| Date(s): | April 22, 2019 |
| Medium: | online essay |
| Fandom: | The Magicians, BTS |
| Topic: | The role of entertainment and the responsability of creators to their audiences |
| External Links: | On Medium.com |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
Reading the Room: The Magicians, BTS, and the Emotional Responsibility of Creating Popular Culture is a 4000-word meta essay published on Medium.com by Heidi Samuelson on April 22, 2019.
It is one of the many pieces of meta written in reaction to the shocking death of Quentin Coldwater in The Magicians' season 4 finale in the days after it aired on April 17, 2019.
The author interrogates the choices of The Magicians' creators in a wider context and contrasts them with other artists' creative choices in managing the expectations of audiences, art vs realism vs escapism, and the goals of pop culture in general.
Topics
- The goals of mass entertainment creators vs artists
- The responsibilities of creators to their audiences
- The role of escapism in pop culture
- The aesthetics of misery in Western art
- The use of death in mass entertainment as a shortcut to "art"
- The failings of The Magicians' Season 4 finale vs the comforting yet realistic message of BTS's music
Excerpts
Popular culture specifically depends on wide audience consumption and approval, which is why bad series finales, insulting character arcs, and stale or unbelievable plot lines are curious. When a show, or a movie franchise, or even a commercially successful band creates something that has its audience angry, scratching their heads, or vocally removing their support, it makes you wonder how things could have gone so wrong.
In the second to last episode of season four, Quentin, the central character of the show, gives a speech about how he loved the escapism he got as a kid from reading a fantasy book series (which he found out was based on a real place and was actually horrible). In his soliloquy he says, “Maybe I was better off believing it was fiction. The idea of Fillory is what saved my life. This promise that people like me — people like me can somehow find an escape. There’s gotta be some power in that. Shouldn’t loving the idea of Fillory be enough?”It’s curious, then, that in the very next episode the writers decided to kill off Quentin in a sacrificial act to save his friends and to save magic.
To me, the creators sound a bit self-important and concerned with their own ability to create a surprising story arc to impress their friends than caring at all about their audience and how people use fiction, particularly fantasy/sci-fi, to escape and cope with how shitty reality is — a point that they make within their own show. Trying to turn standard hero arcs on their head may be an intellectual exercise that’s interesting for a creative writing class. It’s less interesting when you are writing a television show that more than half a million people watch every week.
We don’t all get success or joy or to be a hero or to travel to new worlds. We don’t get to have the romantic relationships we want. We don’t get magic. And so we watch fantasy shows and read fantasy novels because maybe in some small way they save us in those moments of escape they provide us.
Creative expression can and should be personal, especially if you want your audience to relate to it more than just superficially. Of course that creative expression may be a manifestation of personal pain, but when you make things for large audiences I think you have a responsibility to keep those audiences in mind.
BTS always mentions their fans in their interviews, in acceptance speeches, on social media, and it never sounds like obligatory lip service. They know they’re successful because people like their music, like them, and they clearly also want to sell a lot of albums and make money. But they show a level of care for their fans that’s maybe only rivaled by Misha Collins.They clearly say that if you can feel better about yourself and the world by listening to us, and we can ease your pain just a little by sharing our struggles, then that’s what we want to do.
Death isn’t edgy. Look at the hellscape we live in. The way profit-driven business interests influence political decisions has been blasted out into the open via a corrupt regime, and no one really cares, either because that’s the way it’s always been done or because we simply don’t punish organized crime or the wealthy, and we’re probably all going to die in cataclysmic environmental disasters in the next 50 years anyway.So let us have some escapism.