Part 1: Taking Stock in 2024
I don’t want to live on this planet anymore. --Professor Hubert J. Farnsworth
I once remarked to a friend of mine that starting in the 2000s and 2010s, each woke release was a net loss to the Right Wing. One by one, every franchise was systematically carved up on the altar of progressive politics, and Hollywood made bank on the outrage machine which followed. Each humiliation ritual set a blaze to the internet, but over time, those fires dimmed to cinders and then ash. What cannot go on forever must eventually come to an end.
I told him then in 2023 and now in 2024, each woke/bad release of Hollywood has inverted into a net positive to the Right Wing. I don’t mean that common refrain “go woke go broke”. I admit I once believed in that slogan (oh, to be young in 2016 again), but what I’m referring to is the death of legitimacy.
That comes with financial losses, yes. And in maybe in five to ten to fifteen years, we’ll see some form of industry collapse. However, the more important matter is that the crown of entertainment has been left lying in the gutter, waiting for the next person to pick it up. I don’t want Hollywood to make good movies anymore. Each middling to decent picture like Mission Impossible or Top Gun breathes more life into the corpse of modern media and prolongs the period we will have to endure until a successor finally arrives.
I’m not saying I’m a saint by any means, and I don’t blame the occasional movie goer. I myself will probably go to see Dune 2 because I’m interested to see how they will inevitably fumble the ball. But what I am saying is that I would happily sacrifice every movie for the next decade if it budged our dead culture toward something a little better.
Thankfully, Hollywood has been doing a lot of that work for me on that front. 2023’s WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes erupted over disagreements of streaming residuals and usage of AI. I don’t know the specifics of these issues, and I frankly don’t care. What matters is that they delayed numerous movies including an untitled Star Wars movie (yuck).
What’s better, those movies that saw a release in 2023 generally did not do well. Marvel, once a flagship franchise, flopped with a disastrous launch with The Marvels, a movie set to cost them hundreds of millions of dollars. On the other side of the superhero aisle, Aquaman 2 has fared better, but is still teetering on breaking even. And let’s not even discuss Indiana Jones 5.
It isn’t that Hollywood didn’t have its successes in 2023, but it is undeniable diminishing returns of attention are catching up with them. You could argue that this is merely the shift from movie theaters to streaming services, except even these platforms are struggling. Companies are competing for the attention of split audiences and are being forced to continually inflate subscription prices. The fact of the matter is, households can’t afford ten different streaming services, not when the grocery bill is climbing too.
We’re in a unique position where Americans are being offered worse and worse quality of entertainment for increasingly expensive prices. And this is all coming at a time when most people are tightening their belts. This double whammy has sent increasing numbers of people to the far corners of the internet, seeking alternatives to mainstream culture.
This splintering is both a boon and a curse to the would-be reactionary artist. Never in living memory have there been so many people opting out of traditional venues and seeking better forms of entertainment. And yet, there are still no replacing institutions to promote good works to the masses. The indie is left to fend for himself, shaking a tin can on the social web.
If that wasn’t bad enough, modern tools have allowed tens of thousands of grifters to set up shop, competing for that ever scarce attention from the moth-like masses. Augmented with new AI technology, the market is not only gluten but morbidly obese, crushing aspiring artists underneath its rolls of fat.
Audiences have to sift through a sea of trash for just one gem, and they have to do so out of pure curiosity. They won’t be able to talk about indie projects with their friends and family the way they can with mainstream movies. There’s no wide fanbase to generate a discussion online. They can only consume the media and move on. And thus, most indies are relegated to ten reviews on Amazon—if they’re lucky.
I don’t have the solution for this problem. There are many good people working on it, from promoting individual strategies to forming fiction contests to building review sites. These are admirable and necessary efforts, but I don’t think there can be a fix-all solution until another big player metastasizes. Until there’s a platform to sort the wheat from the chaff (and has the mass acceptance of a large audience), it is going to remain a free-for-all for the foreseeable future.
Before any art can be made, the reactionary artist needs to embrace the realities of the current landscape. It is unlikely you will break even with your work. It is more unlikely that you will make a sizable revenue stream. And it is highly unlikely that you will make a living with your efforts. The era of big name authors/artists is over. If there ever truly was one, it is now firmly in the past.
The reactionary artist must labor without expectation of pay or reward or attention. Those few must also work harder than ever before, lest they be drowned out in the morass of AI simulacra. The reactionary must do this for years, often devoting what precious free time they have to tedious but necessary practice. And once they finally do make some impact, they must not lose heart when they can’t repeat past successes on demand.
It is hard to say whether these brave, preserving few will have any long-term impact themselves. What can be said, however, is that they were the ones who stood up when all odds were against them. They were the pioneers of the wild west, the astronauts landing on new frontiers, the deep-sea divers of the Mariana Trench. The future belongs to those who show for it, and they will certainly be the ones who lay the cultural foundation for others to follow.
The aim of this article is not to lament the rotten state of Hollywood, but rather I want to explore what made their media so powerful. What can reactionaries learn to bolster their present efforts? What tools and tricks are available to us that we may make the most of what we have? Most importantly, how may we avoid the decay of previous works and grasp at something eternal? My friends, take the plunge with me into a dead culture of decades past, so that we may excavate something real, and find a road to a better tomorrow.
Part 2: Back to the Year 3000
There is one other franchise that I failed to mention for 2023. Futurama, a highly acclaimed adult animated sitcom, made its very surprising return. The award-winning show had been picked up and cancelled multiple times over the course of its runtime, but when Comedy Central pulled the plug back in 2013, it appeared to be the end. And yet, lo-and-behold, in 2022 Hulu ordered two new seasons for their streaming service.
After nearly a decade long hiatus, the new season premiered on July 24th to… crickets. Perhaps this is just anecdotal, but I remember talking to friends who had enjoyed Futurama, and many didn’t realize a new season was coming out. And when I told them, they shrugged their shoulders, and the conversation continued on.
Online didn’t fare much better either. I saw a trailer for the new season maybe once or twice, but discussion was dead. There was no excitement about this beloved show returning. There was no hype or controversy that I still see occasionally from a new Star Wars series. There was nothing. I blinked my eyes, and the new season was quickly forgotten in the eternal churn of “the current thing”.
What’s most perplexing about this case is that the property didn’t appear sabotaged as you see in so many reboots. The trailer wasn’t filled with cringe diversity or woke talking points. Unlike so many others, this franchise seemed to be a true blast from the past, picking back up exactly where it left off.
I am sure all the problems I listed earlier contributed to this underwhelming revival, but in my experience, audiences are still very much desperate for whatever last drops of entertainment they can wring from the crusted towel that is Hollywood. The consumers should’ve still been frenzying. The tweets should’ve still been tweeting. And yet… silence.
Let’s put a pin in this and come back to it later. We’re going to dial the clock back to March 28th of 1999 when the first episode of Futurama premiered on television. Conceived by the (in)famous Matt Groening, the show would follow the adventures of a slacker pizza delivery boy as he was frozen in time to the year 3000.
There are two jokes in Space Pilot 3000 that oddly set the cadence for what the rest of the series would look like. In the first, Fry realizes he is in the future.
My G**! It’s the future! My parents, my co-workers, my girlfriend. I’ll never see any of them again!
I admit this got a dark laugh out of me when I first saw it, but let us examine this joke in the context of 2023. Dark humor in 1999 is exactly what many young men wish unironically today. If there was an opportunity to teleport yourself one thousand years into the future, just how many young men would take it?
The world is increasingly full of people who share the same sentiments as Phillip J. Fry, stuck in dead-end lives with no hope for the future. In fact, rock bottom has fallen a lot further. There are exponentially more men who find themselves in far worse situations than Fry was. What sane man wouldn’t sign up for space adventure even if it meant—especially if it meant—leaving everything behind?
But amazingly, Futurama doesn’t leave this joke as a dark one-off. Futurama proves Fry wrong. Throughout the rest of the series runtime, there are a number of episodes that show the hole Fry left behind in 1999. Episodes like Luck of the Fryrish, Jurassic Bark, and Game of Tones, explore the relationships he had with his friends and family. Even if it didn’t seem to him that he was valued or important, the loss of this loser pizza delivery boy was a tragedy that affected them for the rest of their lives.
In this example, we see the magic of Hollywood unfold. Despite the subversiveness, despite the cynicism, despite the downright perversion, the writers are just enough connected to reality that they hit upon something real. It might only be a glimmer, but those glimmers of humanity (and all the great gags) made Futurama work.
The first task of a reactionary author is to create real people in his work. I don’t mean necessarily real as in sympathetic or relatable or justified (though those are invaluable tools for any artist); I mean real as in connecting to the human experience. Fry’s celebration of being isekaid strikes at the heart of any man who desperately wants a second chance at life.
The beating heart of any narrative is found in the passions of men confronting the reality of the world and God. The story is then a thousand little moments scattered across a stretch of time, all building to a wholistic portrait. You shouldn’t be able to look at any one passage of the story and say “this alone is the point”. The whole text is the point. The story, taken in full, is the painting at hand. No one looks at the Mona Lisa and says the point of the portrait was in the nose. And while there is a lot to be said about her smile, that expression could not exist without a face.
The thrust of Futurama was the wish-fulfillment of an abject loser, but it is in everything that follows that gives the aim of the storytellers. Part of that aim was exploring the humanity of a young man who thought he was unwanted and unneeded. But he was proven wrong. His life did have meaning. He just couldn’t see it at the time. And in those special moments, Futurama soared to the heights of genius.
Let’s turn to the other key joke in the pilot. Once Fry stumbles into the future, he is assigned to be a delivery boy, as that is the job he is best suited for. He spends the rest of the episode running from re-living his life as he did in 1999. Hoping to find another path in this bizarre world, he wanders all over New New York. His escapades take him to his long-lost descendent, Professor Farnsworth, who offers him a new job:
As a delivery boy.
And at that exact moment, the dismal cynicism from the creator of Simpsons raises its ugly head once more. What does Fry do in this new world, a horizon of endless possibilities, his second—no—last chance? He celebrates and reverts to his old ways immediately. Perhaps with better writers, this would be a poignant commentary. But examining this from a meta perspective, these are the authors saying Fry not only can’t—but shouldn’t change.
I don’t buy that Fry could ever be happier in the year 3000 than he was in 1999. He’s exchanged the real world for larp land, where he gets to live space adventures with his space friends. But even in larp land, he remains as pathetic as he ever was in the real world. Fry’s problem in 1999 was that he didn’t feel needed, and that would be even more true in the year 3000.
I mentioned in my earlier Adventure Time essay that Finn is never allowed to grow up, and neither is Fry from Futurama. Contrasted with Homer Simpson, I found Fry’s immaturity endearing for much of the series. Because Fry was young, it was almost expected that he would be immature. Homer was middle age, and it was clear he had no intention or capacity to fix his failings. Fry still had time in front of him to figure out what he wanted.
And yet besides his unrequited love for Leela, he never will. Fry may become more accustomed to the year 3000, but he will always remain a stupid kid working a dumber delivery job. I wrote a twitter thread on Futurama expressing a similar sentiment, and there were few noteworthy criticisms. A big gripe was that how this was merely the nature of sitcoms. The characters have to be unchanging because that’s the draw of the show. I disagree with that sentiment as characters do change as sitcoms continue. They become worse.
There’s this interesting process called flanderization in long running serials. It is where characters gradually grow into caricatures of themselves over the course of the series. Formerly complex humans are whittled away to one-note exaggerations for the audience’s amusement. Many people blame this degradation on low-quality writers taking the helm of established franchises, but I don’t think that’s the whole story.
When characters cannot resolve their flaws or conflicts in stories, the only choice the writer has left is to exaggerate these problems in order to create further entertainment. And often, they will tack on more flaws until the cast become absolute degenerates. In Futurama, this is all played off as gags, and it can make for deceptively good dark humor for a while. I admit, Fry’s time travel plot line about being his own grandpa was hilarious. But when do we stop and question where this train is heading? What is this all culminating towards?
Another criticism launched at my twitter thread was that if Fry ever overcame his problems, that would mean the end of Futurama. I don’t entirely buy that argument. It would change many aspects of the show, but I think the writers behind Futurama were smart enough to still leverage that. However, let’s say for argument’s sake that it would mean the definite end. Subjected to season after season, we saw what happened with the Simpsons and Family Guy and American Dad (for whatever value they might’ve had) and dozens of other shows. We saw what happened to Marvel and DC. We’ve seen hundreds of reboots and not one of them better than the original. It’s obvious that the answer is not to stretch things out until something breaks.
Futurama was cancelled by Fox on season 4 with the finale The Devil’s Hands are Idle Playthings. In this episode, Fry finally wins the affections of Leela with his music after making a deal with the devil. A dramatic series of faustian bargains occur, ending with Fry sacrificing his talent to save the woman he loves. This episode ended with a heartwarming close to the series and a wrap-up of an excellent arc.
Take note reactionary authors. The adage that the “journey is more important than the destination” is a half-truth. It is the destination that gives context to what the journey is for. Yes, the journey is often more enjoyable than the ending, but it is the conclusion that defines the story.
Futurama was renewed, and that happy romance turned into another three seasons of “will they, won’t they”. That lasted until the season 7 finale when they finally committed. And now, after ten years, the show has been renewed again.
I don’t doubt you can blame some of this on corporate forces. Keep making what prints money until the money runs out. But is it just a coincidence that this cynical approach to the storytelling fits so well with the Left’s values?
So many storylines seem purpose built as a bait and switch, ready to undo all the progress that gets made in order to reset to a continually degrading status quo. Why isn’t new ground being explored? Why aren’t new possibilities being explored? Why can’t the Left just move on? If it was just all about making money, why can’t Hollywood create original blockbusters like they did in the 80s and 90s?
But anyone with eyes to see knows the answer to that question. It is the Left’s values that control corporate culture, not the other way around. It is the storylines that are in charge, not the dollar. The only real difference between the heartwarming Futurama and the hideous Simpsons is a happenstance of which show got the more funding.
Part 3: Searching Infinity for Better Entertainment
If you dig beneath the woke tripe, the perverse degeneracy, and the banal laziness, I wager the issue at hand with modern media is problem resolution. We all know the culture has stalled for a while now, and the Left can only double-down on what brought us here to begin with. Their stories reflect this as well. Never ending, always expanding, ever consuming, the multiverse that is so popular in modern media is but a manifestation of a status quo, endlessly at threat and yet aggravatingly immoveable. With each embarrassing blockbuster, I’m praying for the day Azathoth finally wakes, and it all winks out of existence.
In the meantime, we must sift through the cultural wreckage and lash ourselves to whatever driftwood we can find. What do we do, not just with Futurama, but all the fallen IPs around us?
There’s a thought experiment I like to play with modern franchises. I take any one movie or series and ask myself: how would this be done from a Christian perspective? For those farther afield in faith, I guess the question would be: what would make this story life-giving?
For me, this test immediately separates the parts of Futurama (and any other franchise) into what is worth salvaging and what that can be thrown in the trash. I know there are many people skeptical of Catholic/Christian storytelling. After all, we’re supposed to be the prudes who can’t have any fun.
However, with some cursory inspection, you immediately see that those elements which are best in Futurama survive this test. Apart from the superficial execution, Jurassic Bark’s tragic story remains largely intact. Luck of the Fryrish’s core theme doesn’t need to be altered. Godfellas could use a little more work, but a comedy where a robot horribly fails at playing God has great potential.
What would the show lose? Coming from a stricter approach, it would lose the profanity, obviously, but how many of the gags really require screaming out God’s name as the basis for the joke? The nudity would be covered up. But does Futurama’s inherent potential require showing people nearly naked? The vulgarity would be tightened down moderately, but do we really need to have Fry sleep with his own grandmother? Is that so crucial to the plot?
Tell you what, let me sketch out my idealized version of Futurama, and you can compare it to the show we have. I’ll limit mine to five seasons instead of whatever number we’ll eventually end up with. We’ll have with the same cast and setups for the story premise.
Our Fry suddenly finds himself transported to the year 3000. Just like in the original, he celebrates that he has ditched his old boring life behind. However, as events follow, he finds himself back right where he started as a delivery boy. Instead of stupidly celebrating returning to his job, Fry bemoans that even in the future, he’s a loser. He faces the same problems as he would in any other timeframe.
What follows is a comedy of errors, as Fry must navigate a decadent, shallow future. He constantly fumbles, much in part to his friend Bender, who drags him along morally dubious adventures. Fry is immature. He’s egotistic. He’s stupid. But through all this, he slowly adjusts to the new world he finds himself thrust in.
He finds that he’s attracted to Leela, but as her subordinate, he cannot win her respect. In the 2nd season finale, our Fry has become much more knowledgeable and capable. He leaves Planet Express to find a profession of his own. It could really be anything, but since in the original show he wanted to be a spaceship captain, we’ll use that premise.
Interspaced throughout these episodes, we have much the same flashbacks to Fry’s past as we do in the original show. We understand more of Fry’s regrets, and he reconciles with his mistakes and bitterness. As he pursues his career as a space captain under new management, he’s still somewhat immature, overconfident, and making rash decisions. However, because of his drive, he also pulls off seemingly impossible stunts.
A rivalry erupts between Fry and Leela as she thinks he’s trying to upstage her, and he’s desperately trying to win her heart. This culminates in a final match between them that goes horribly wrong. For the sake of the hypothetical, let’s say they both enter a famous space race with their respective spaceships. Leela’s ship gets severely damaged, and she’s put in danger. Fry, more concerned with her than winning the race, risks everything to save her. But for forfeiting the race and risking his own spaceship, his employer sees it as the last straw and fires him.
Fry is back on the streets with nothing. He’s not going back to his job as a delivery boy, that much is certain. However, Leela, earning tremendous respect for him, offers to be co-captains with him, switching off every day. The 4th and 5th seasons would be dedicated to them chafing under each’s leadership style and way of thinking until a romance develops. My Futurama finale would end with Fry taking over the company from Professor Farnsworth and marrying Leela.
I’ll leave it to you whether you think that overarching plot line is better than what we’re stuck with. I think it is. I think there’s a Futurama out there that is far better than the one we got. And I wish one of us had the chance to write it.
Part 4: New Tropes for a Dying World
Futurama is a show from the 90s stuck in its ways two decades later. I think that’s what killed the newest season more than anything else. Despite everything, I would’ve been up for more adventures with the Planet Express crew if the story wasn’t squalid when you frame it up in the modern day.
Philip J. Fry is no longer a lovable goofball. He’s an epidemic upon a generation of directionless young men. Leela is no longer an adventurous captain. She’s the personification of self-destructing girl bosses everywhere. Bender is no longer a charming rogue. He’s the drugged out junkie on the side of the street.
All the antics of the Planet Express crew, no matter how cynical or perverse, were framed as if everything would be all right somehow. Well 2024 is just starting, and everyone can see that things are certainly not going to be “all right”. These tropes are not only tired, they are dead. They are rot that reactionary artists need to cast aside.
If there’s one final lesson Futurama can teach reactionary artists, it is that the old tropes of the world are well and truly gone. Men can no longer embody Philip Fry or Homer Simpson, not if they want to survive the coming genetic bottleneck. Women can no longer pretend to be Leela, the feminist girlboss, not when they are next on the chopping block for equality. And the antics of Bender become something far more sinister when you realize that his real life equivalents get away with their crimes. The so-called moral arc of the universe bends over especially for people like him.
The new scene that is coming has framed itself against the mainstream, but I’m not sure anyone has an articulated vision of what that means yet. For myself, that question is: what does it mean to be Catholic in a decaying world? For others, it will be what parts of their culture they can preserve. For others still, what ideas can we bring forward to improve the world? I’ll go a step further. What does it mean to be a good person when every authority is corrupt? We need heroic men and feminine women surely, but how can that manifest in our broken social spheres?
A new set of tropes (or storytelling archetypes) are being born in the reactionary sphere. These new, or more accurately ancient, modes of thinking are still in their infancy, and will take some time to establish themselves. This is the work reactionary artists are doing right now. They are paving the way for new tropes to manifest in the real world. It is through stories that we understand our place in the world, and I think we still have good stories to tell, despite everything happening around us.
In the coming years, the dissidents will do what they can while the mainstream will suffer what they must. I enjoyed Futurama for what that is worth. I think we all have our guilty pleasures. But what is clear is that Futurama and other such works have no place in the future. They cannot. They are too poisonous, and they kill all life in the cradle. And so I say cast it aside! Cast all entertainment aside if it stands in our way! We have better stories to tell, and I raise a glass to what we will accomplish in 2024.
Love this essay. I've never really watched Futurama, but I definitely see the "animated sitcom problem" elsewhere. The one that hits close to home for me was SpongeBob, especially since he actually did have a character development (in the first movie where became the manager of Krusty Krab II) but they decided to throw that away because that's verboten in a western cartoon. And I'm actually with you that it's not so much about "the money". If the writers really wanted to continue the show while taking into account these developments, they could have.
Full House had the main cast growing up through the years, Uncle Jesse getting married and having his own kids, etc. There's no reason why we can't have that with (for example) the Simpsons.
The remark about there needing to be an ending to every journey, and that the context of the ending is important for writers to bear in mind (myself included there as a fantasy writer), lest we lose track that we write ultimately not for ourselves but for others. Excellent article.