Narrative Warfare: When Your Demonic Cultists Wear Business Suits

Brian Niemeier isn't the only one to point out that created identity is a thing, or that fandom is a cult.

There is an irony here. That irony is that the Devil Mouse is very much like the Evil Empire of its laser sword franchise: the not-sorcerers running the military, by and large, did not get on with the sorcerers calling the shots because they didn't comprehend how the sorcery worked- they only saw the results, and so long as the results outweighed the bother they tolerated the sorcerers.

Corporate and the Death Cult work the same way within a corporate environment, and the Devil Mouse's cockup of said laser sword franchise shapes up as exactly this thing from start to finish at fast-forward speed. Both factions see the Pop Cult as nothing more than an exploitable front org meant to sucker rubes for them to farm without pity; it's just that Corporate isn't willing to exhaust them in an "eat the seed corn" manner.

Corporate wants to milk them like cows for revenue; the tells are a lack of moderate risk-taking to keep IPs fresh enough to be truly evergreen in favor of too-safe products and merchandise overloads. The Death Cult wants to funnel Pop Cultists into their ranks, which requires breaking the Pop Cultist's faith in their idols (hence deliberate defiling of the idols) and then swooping in while vulnerable to indoctrinate them; it's a grooming scheme, and not much different from how flesh peddlers groom their victims before reaping and raping them into the network to be used and consumed- and killed.

What this comes down to is two competing demon cults. Corporate worships Mammon. The Death Cult worships Molech. And like fictional Chaos Gods, they cooperate until it's cuts into their core objectives. That's when the knives come out, at which point either the enterprise shifts entire into one cult's control or it all comes undone when the enterprise proves too unstable to go on.

Corporate decided to pull steel in the Devil Mouse. Soon we'll see if the laser sword franchise can stabilize or if it's too late and it collapses. Even if it endures, it's going to be in a greatly diminished state, and it would take a heroic effort to fix what the Death Cult deliberate set out to destroy to induce despair. That still doesn't prevent a future attempt to do it again, or to destroy it through actual mismanagement (rather than the deliberate demolition we've seen). The Pop Cult, as a whole, still hasn't figured out that this is the actual state of things; their devotion to their idol won't allow for it.

Which is why, painful as it may seem, the best thing to do is to walk away and build anew.