Fan Theories Are Ruining Entertainment
Maybe the secret to better entertainment is less engagement with it
Spoilers for The White Lotus Season 2 follow.
Today even the most casual fans have the ability to engage with media on a level previously unimaginable. Your favorite director is only a tweet away, subreddits dedicated to your favorite 90’s TV show abound, and when you finish that podcast episode about the latest comic-book movie there are five more waiting in your feed. We have never been more connected to the things we love and the people who love them. I think that’s a problem.
Audiences have been trained over several decades to expect twists and turns and surprise reveals. Fans were shocked in 1980 when The Empire Strikes Back revealed that the evil Darth Vader was Luke’s father. Then, they had to wait three years to find out what came next, or for confirmation of whether Vader was telling the truth, without the internet providing a channel for rumors. Contrast this with the release of The Force Awakens in 2015, in which we find a young orphan, Rey, marooned on a desert planet: fans spent the next two years absorbed in YouTube videos and blog posts speculating on her origins, despite the movie giving no hints that her parents are anyone in particular.
Studios have discovered that by planting seeds of mystery and intrigue that feed fan-theories, they can keep an audience talking long after a movie or television show’s release, building organic excitement for future installments. In the 35 years between the release of Empire and Force Awakens audiences were taught to expect that all of the major characters in the Star Wars galaxy are (or at least could be) connected and related to each other in one way or another. That lead to a problem, however, when Lucasfilm came across a filmmaker who wanted to play with those expectations in favor of what he thought was a more interesting story. By revealing that Rey’s parents weren’t actually anybody in particular, Rian Johnson disrupted generations-old assumptions fueled by access to decades of fan-fiction from which to draw theories.
Audiences have been so thoroughly trained to expect “a twist,” that they look for them in places they don’t exist. Conversely, some stories that were never intended to have a twist are given one purely to spark interest and ignite conversation. Season one of The White Lotus is not really about solving a mystery, but the show starts with a mysterious dead body because dead bodies are interesting and creator Mike White thought the mystery would keep audiences returning. Season two played off of this structure, adding multiple dead bodies and then jumping back in time by a week, keeping audiences talking each week about who might die.
Weekly The White Lotus season two episode breakdowns dedicated entire segments to the “death-watch,” ranking characters by likelihood of ending up dead at the end of the season. I, also, indulged in this theorizing and predicting. Throughout the season, Mia and Lucia, the local sex workers presented as foils to the snobby ultra-rich hotel guests, seemed likely candidates to get caught up in some misfortune. So did Albie, the too-nice-guy son of a scumbag Hollywood producer who at one point seemed to be heading towards a conflict with the local criminal underworld. Some even theorized that Daphne, the bubbly young mom who refused to see herself as a victim in the face of her husband’s infidelity, would snap and kill someone or multiple someones.
In the end, none of these came to be, as creator Mike White chose a more unexpected path: killing off series star Jennifer Coolidge as Tanya McQuoid-Hunt, who almost everyone assumed to be safe due to her status as star and the only recurring character from season one. It was a masterful finale to a phenomenal season of television, but my immediate reaction was, to be honest, a little disappointed. I could see that what I had just watched was expertly-crafted television. But in the face of all of my fan theories, it felt anti-climactic. At that moment I realized that we’ve gone wrong in how we consume and talk about media.
We were wrong to engage with The White Lotus as a mystery show. (White has even stated that he doesn’t see the show as a mystery, and even viewed most of Tanya’s plot line throughout the season as a clear send-off to her.) Instead, it should be seen as a complex study of human behavior and relationships, wealth, and power. It should be revered for its satire, its true-to-life dialogue and character interactions, sharp commentary on our culture, deep character development, and its subtlety in all of those things. I recognized and appreciated all of this as the show was going on, but was still unable to resist the temptation to overlook it in favor of predicting who would die.
By absorbing myself in theories and predictions about the outcome, I created a set of expectations for the show that could never be matched. The result was that I watched the finale of a groundbreaking and highly-acclaimed season of television and was unable to appreciate it for what it was.
Maybe it’s White’s and HBO’s fault for starting both seasons with a mysterious death, inviting viewers to dig deeper into the mystery. Or, maybe we as viewers should be willing to hold our own theories lightly or engage in a different way altogether, letting creators play with our expectations and take us on a journey that is richer and deeper than one we could have imagined ourselves.
Fan-theory culture as it has developed in recent years has resulted in a dysfunctional feedback loop between audiences and creators leading to one of three outcomes: 1) studios bend stories to meet fans expectations, resulting in worse art, 2) fans are disappointed when reality doesn’t live up to their expectations, or 3) fans’ expectations are met, and it’s not satisfying because they already “called” everything. None of those options is the outcome that anyone involved wants. The result is frustration from all sides and a decaying relationship between audiences and creators; something that most of the major franchises are dealing with currently.
Understanding audience expectations is a key to great storytelling. When a storyteller knows what an audience is thinking at any given point, they can either lean into those assumptions or intentionally subvert them to make a point. We, as audiences, should in turn be willing to have our expectations subverted. Let us take a step back and put artists in the driver’s seat of the stories we love. It’s the only way for us to be fully surprised and awed by art again.
All of this will be hard to do when Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania kicks off Phase Five of the MCU next month. I’m sure there will be plenty of theorizing and predicting to be found about the future of the MCU even here. In a lot of ways it can be difficult to talk about ongoing stories without discussing what may come next. But with all of my predictions I hope to practice an eagerness to be proven wrong and hold my expectations lightly. I am also going to try to make an intentional effort to consume less fan theory media before and during the release of major films and shows that I am engaging with. This way, I hope to find more contentment and less disappointment with things that are just meant to be enjoyed.