The Culture: Pop Cult Orthdoxy Is Not For Corporations To Decide

Author Brian Niemeier wrote, some years ago now, about corporate fandom and dubbed it "The Pop Cult".

This is the key element he identified then:

"...the PopCult doesn’t offer any answers. It’s pure escapism. The problem is it’s an escape from self-mastery and virtue into the clutches of soulless megacorporations."

Since then what we've seen is that the members of the Pop Cult are not so easily herded. Psuedo-religions are still religions, and as such the Faithful can and do reject the direction of the leadership if they (a) detect that the leaders are going where they ought not go and (b) they sense that there is a critical mass that agrees on (a).

This leads to the question: "Who decides what is Canon?" It was presumed that the Pop Cultist would slavish conform to whatever their idols told them. This turned out to be not true. What Is or Is Not in Canon, once the Creator is gone, is for the Audience to decide: not the Corporation.

Why? This is why.

So a friend did some digging and apparently Alan Merrett, the guy upheld as the source of "female Space Marines used to be canon," is a pathological liar who was disliked by his coworkers and helped Games Workshop make some of it's worst business decisions. pic.twitter.com/xptfrXJsgr

— Marshal Bohemond ⚔️⛨ Space Crusader Vtuber (@HMBohemond) October 12, 2024

Good stewards recognize this fact. That is why they are scrupulous about the property that they sheppard, especially if their compensation is directly tied to its long-term health (and thus value).

We see this being the case (most of the time; there have been mistakes) with the Howard and Burroughs Estates. It was the case for Tolkien until Christopher died and the new stewards did some truly Boomer-style things to what their ((great-?)grandfather created.

One need look only at Lucasfilm, Marvel, and D.C. to see what happens when good stewards are not in place.

"But how can the audience make those decisions?"

Force of numbers. In addition to SpaceMace 39K, Mouse Wars, BattleTech, and many others under incompetent or traitorous management are increasingly cut out of the culture by the audience.

Or do you think that corporate seething at user-driven online publishing isn't just about Mainstream News losing their Narrative monopoly? No, far more important for day-to-day living is that those same platforms allow the audiences of various properties to completely cut out corrupt and incompetent corporate management from the conversation and thus push them out of what is and is not in the canon. No amount of Official Pronouncements means jack shit without buy-in.

Proof? Sorcerers By The Sea outright bribed a cohort of YouTube channels to shill for Corporate Positions because they had considerable audiences, were rather effective and efficient at it, and could be bought with the pocket change usually reserved for tipping the pizza delivery guy.

Why? Well, you get things like this out of them and this is far more effective at determine what Is and Is Not than what they say or do.

I can go on.

The corporate stewards that seethe over this are, at best, Mammon Mobsters mad that the audience will not mindless Consume Product and then get excited for Next Product. You see this most with Stupid British Toy Company and the Devil Mouse.

But the ones that hate it most are the Death Cultists that serve Molech, and as their entire apparantus for taking the openings made by Mammon Mobsters acting as 5th Columnists to turn the corporate operations into recruitment funnels into the Death Cult. As these corporate actors (unlike those in more important segments of the economy) do not have the ability to just use State power to silence these dissidents they have to compete using personal connections with Fellow Travelers in either those platforms or related ones (like Stripe or Patreon) to do it instead, and in the meantime find or build up a compliant group of shills spouting the party line.

They have to do this, because otherise their attempts at being sly about their Death Cult pozzing will keep getting exposed and thereby rendered impotent.

Oh, and that includes their attempts to regain their previous cloak of invisibily via BRIDGE.

This is what corporates and propagandists don't get: the audience gets not only a say, but the final say.

That audience? VETO! VETO! VETO!

And those attempts to pozz non-Anglo media? Already meeting even heavier resistance than the Western pushes ever got. No blackpilling folks. This can be beaten.

Especially once you account for audience use of Print On Demand technology to keep what is considered Orthodox available. We just want our Hunchbacks, and we'll have them the way they must be one way or another.