 From left, Melissa McCarthy, Kate McKinnon, Kristen Wiig and Leslie Jones in “Ghostbusters.” (Hopper Stone/Sony Pictures Entertainment) The past week has seen the publication of two provocative essays about fandom and fan culture, each arguing in a different way that the relationships between consumers and the art that they love has been thrown out of wack. “When opinions start focusing so intently on the very idea of a new ‘Ghostbusters’ or Elsa's sexuality or Harry Potter scenes that don't appear in the books, fan culture becomes dangerously anti-art, promoting a form of conservative stasis rather than active engagement. It's not always easy to put our trust into filmmakers, or novelists, or TV showrunners,” wrote Jesse Hassenger in the AV Club. “But isn't it more exciting when art, or even just pop culture, doesn't settle for asking you how you feel?” And in Birth Movies Death, Devin Faraci predicted grimly that “I see things getting worse — creators walling themselves off from fans while corporate masters happily throw vision and storytelling under the bus to appease the people who can get hashtags trending,” noting that “I recently read Glen Weldon’s excellent ‘The Caped Crusade: Batman and the Rise of Nerd Culture’ and the arc of fandom it sketches out is a profoundly disheartening one, with Batfans morphing from monkish annotators of the character’s fictional history into crusaders harrassing anyone on the internet who sees Batman differently than they do.” I’m sitting with these pieces for a while before I write a full-length response, because I’m trying to integrate a whole bunch of thoughts about the potential tensions between artistic freedom and advocacy for diversity, the fragmentation of television and the rise of the niche show, and the clash between U.S. and international audiences’ preferences. But one thing these pieces raise is the question of what does a healthy fan culture, and a healthy attachment to a work of culture, actually look like? I don’t have the definitive answer to these questions. And certainly, enthusiasm for culture has been used as a way to demonize women and young people, among other groups. So I’d be curious to know what you all think productive engagement with culture and artists looks like. If something’s gone wrong, that implies that something was once right. And if we’re going to find our way back, we need to know where we started. | 
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