Adaptation, fanfic, and creative appetites 🎨

🎵 The song for this post is The Cleaner, by Orgone. 🎵

I saw Fat Ham at SF Playhouse about a week ago. I won't talk too much about it, other than that I really enjoyed it, and if you're in SF, consider seeing it.

SF Playhouse describes Fat Ham as

Critically acclaimed playwright James Ijames reinvents Shakespeare’s masterpiece with his outrageously funny Pulitzer winner Fat Ham. Juicy is a queer, Southern college kid, already grappling with some serious questions of identity, when the ghost of his father shows up in their backyard, demanding that Juicy avenge his murder.

Which got me thinking about my (former) Shakespeare rant, which got me thinking about fanfic, which got me thinking about cultural hunger.

The Shakespeare rant, or, how 2017 Pablo would have reacted

I wrote about this as a sidebar to another article:

Stealing a line from an ancient Brendan Kiley article, "The greatest playwright in history has become your enabler and your crutch." I love Shakespeare, he's great, but: he's overproduced, and my beef is that all the most imaginative and outlandish adaptations are spent on Shakespeare; I wish they'd demonstrate this kind of fun attitude for everything.

Not for nothing, it often works: one of my favorite shows in high school was playing Malvolio in a Disco-and-funk 70's version of Twelfth Night. But every time I hear someone say "we're doing Hamlet... in space!!!" or "we're flipping the genders!" or somesuch, I wish they did that for, idk, True West or The Melancholy Play or create a Frankenplay where half the show is The Misanthrope and the other half is 4:48 Psychosis. I want Top Gun adapted for the stage, set in medieval times. Instead of gunfight sequences, I want horses and jousting tricks. I want bardcore Highway to the Danger Zone. I want the beach volleyball scene to be a bunch of bearded medieval men wrestling or something.

idk, something! Instead we play way too many things straight with no juice, and save all the creative seasoning for Doth Iambic Pentameter Man.

Generally, I still believe this. I'm tired of Shakespeare! I can enjoy Fat Ham and things like it. But, beyond Shakespeare... why does everything have to reimagine one of the same 60 stories? Why can't we create new stories, or base characters, or worlds? Hadestown, one of the hottest shows on Broadway, is a re-telling of Orpheus and Euridice. Last summer I saw & Juliet, a takeoff of Romeo & Juliet. One of the biggest indie games in the last few years, Hades: we're back on the Greeks.

Fixed points, innovation tokens

I no longer rant about it as much. There's real value of using Shakespeare, even in basic stagings, and I think it's best illustrated by fanfic.

Why is there so much Harry Potter fanfic? Because if you want to tell, or read, a story, it's frankly way easier to use a world that's been vetted. We love things cooked "from scratch," but who the hell wants to grind their own flour? Worldbuilding from scratch is very hard. As a writer, you can tell a story a lot more efficiently if you use a world that's already baked; as a reader, you don't have to allocate new space to learning a brand new world, its rules, and cast of characters. Both sides can just skip to what this author is bringing to the table.

In tech we have this idea of "innovation tokens." I frequently argue for challenging their orthodoxy (1, 2), but it's a sincerely amazing idea: imagine your creative juices are scarce, like a pile of tokens, and any creative decision you make "spends" a token. Do you want to spend your tokens on fancy, strange technical details (like using a weird programming language) or could you bear to use something established, and leave those tokens on actual business problems? Usually, it's the latter.¹ Similarly, for authors and readers, using a pre-baked story or world means you can focus your energy and investment on what's new.

Appetite, taking chances, blame

So, we're clear, adaptations and spinoffs are always cool? Of course not. Here's a fun fact: until Wicked in December², the top 10 grossing movies in 2024 were all sequels. What happened to us?

It reminded me of this incredible essay by Helen Rosner, looking at what the then-fresh President Trump's preference for well-done steak smothered in ketchup. I really can't condense it, it's spectacular writing, you should read the whole thing, but I'll block out some quotes because nobody ever clicks external links (emphasis and links in the original):

Trump’s insistence on well-done meat has been extensively documented; it’s now as much a part of the man’s mythology as his sine-wave hair and preferred female silhouette. "It would rock on the plate, it was so well done" is how Trump’s butler described his employer’s preferred preparation to the New York Times.

[...] You’re free to eat your steak however you like, but I’m free to see your choice and understand that it reveals something fundamental about you.

Here’s a truth about being a human in the world: At their core, all our experiences are transactions, and all transactions come down to two axes of belief: How much do I believe that our interaction will harm me, and how much do I believe that it will better me? When it comes to new experiences, two new variables enters the model: trust and risk. Are you trying to harm me? Are you trying to better me? What do I have to lose? What do I have to gain?

All our choices, quotidian and life-altering alike, from picking socks to having a child, boil down to this calculus of trust and risk. [...] You can’t read a book before you read it. You can’t taste the steak before you raise your fork to your mouth. The trust is that the risk won’t turn out to be a risk at all, that you’ll like what you experience, that your life will be better for having experienced it. The sales pitch of art is this: Trust me, there will be a reward.

[...] Adults who won’t eat pink-hearted steaks might lean on any number of reasons for their position, but almost always it comes down to an aversion to risk, which is at its core an unwillingness to trust the validity and goodwill of any experiences beyond the limited sphere of one’s own. It is — and we’re talking about steak here, so don’t get huffy — a confession of a certain timidity, a defensiveness, an insecurity. It’s not just a fear of change, it’s also a bone-deep fear that the way you’ve always done something — the way that, without outside intervention, you might continue always do it — will turn out not to have been the best way for you after all. The risk of that private humiliation can easily outweigh any benefit that could come from your new, better way. It means that when presented with a risk, you make the choice not to trust.

Hollywood (and I'd argue most mass-market storytelling culture, a la plays and video games) are cooking their steaks more well-done than ever. It makes me sad because, well, it tastes like shit. Also: it makes me feel lonely because I feel like not enough people notice or care.

If you look at "why" in the Hollywood case, there's a lot of supply-side side blame: you have executives who shelve completed movies that tested very well, or de-list their streaming catalog, entirely for tax reasons, damn the culture. You have most media and entertainment properties run by unimaginative corporate ghouls who hate the things that make us human.. A writer on Twitter once mentioned after a Q&A at a Univision all-hands meeting that The Onion was owned and run by someone who couldn't name a single Onion headline. Adam Conover also has a video suggesting the reliance on IP and adaptations (instead of original movies that create lasting "movie stars") is a labor play, in part to remove the leverage that actors have.

I agree with all this. And I love blaming the rich and tasteless (the first almost always implies the second). But it's always worth remembering, capital is serving the interests of consumers. Anytime someone pulls up that 80% of CO2 emissions come from just 56 companies as a way to suggest their personal efforts aren't meaningful, I want to grab them by the shoulders and scream. It's still because of you (and I)!!

As an example: suppose one of those companies was Tyson meats: this wouldn't surprise me, since it's very well-studied that greenhouse emissions for factory farming of animal products are way, way higher than for plants and agriculture. If Tyson stopped doing all the emission-ey things that would put them on a carbon producer list, what would happen, actually? They'd stop producing meat at the prices they do, and people would be pissed! Americans eat a lot of animal products. Tyson is producing all those emissions because the public, like you and I, make individual choices every day to incentivize the companies to provide their services, at those prices. If even half of America only ate animal products 1 day a week instead of 7, Tyson would have to scale down operations, and thus, their emissions.

So to the original point: yes, our media landscape sucks and is all adapatations and sequels because of all those supply-side reasons. And let's pressure (and shame, and ridicule) those soulless inhuman profit shells at the top into pretending they care about culture or the customer for a change. But let's also own our demand side responsibility of this. Consume indie art, in whatever media. Support original work. Follow a new artist on whatever platform that medium loves. Try reading fiction with original worldbuilding. Be patient when shit sucks. Let's cook and eat some rare steak again.

Other links:

• The Crap Art movement, from way back in 2001, which I'd only heard of a few weeks ago, and chuckled to see it was by Tom7, who makes some of my favorite videos ever, and has a charming blog.

• "I want shorter games with worse graphics made by people who are paid more to work less and i'm not kidding." This is slightly different than adaptations/IP, but similarly talks about expressing consumer demand for a different product, recognizing that the current trends are toxic as shit (in this case: video games are a meat grinder, where even after delivering giant hits everyone loves and that make a ton of money, teams get laid off and the executives get comically large bonuses for doing it).

1. ^ I know I link out to my other pieces, but I feel compelled to say: in the context of tech companies, I still have major beef with this narrative as described. It makes a wonderful story in your head, but the reality is, most shops will use established tech and still run into unique technical hurdles they'll need lots of creativity to get out of, and now they're stuck with an inappropriate stack and a workforce who prioritizes not thinking problems through.

2. ^ Reminder: Wicked is also on a stack of Prior Work pancakes. It's an adaptation of a Broadway musical, which itself was adapted from a novel, who's whole schtick was "here's a new story in the world from Wizard of Oz. So again, we love to recycle 😛