Now

In his youth, The Fan experienced joy. This was his first mistake.

Now, The Fan anticipates the arrival of the newest incarnation of The IP. The new incarnation is a Bold New Direction for The IP and features the exact things that made The Fan happy, once or twice, before his balls dropped. 

The Fan will [watch/play/read/experience] the Bold New Direction and will hate it. He says it is because of the Bold New Direction, when in reality, it is because he’s behind on his mortgage.

Online, The Fan will [post/comment/upvote/downvote] similar opinions about the travesty that is the Bold New Direction. Dozens of similar people and hundreds of bots will agree, including the more powerful Influencer, whose videos and posts The Fan will consult daily. The Fan will think he is part of The Movement to retake The IP. 

The Bold New Direction will either succeed because the audience gives a shit, or fail, because the audience doesn’t give a shit. Either way, The Fan will act as if The Bold New Direction failed, because The Fan has found community, and he hasn’t had that since he was on his middle school baseball team, the DiFronetto Grocers, which The Fan misses like a keyboard misses the T key. 

Eventually, the Bold New Direction will [run its course/die due to corporate cowardice/be destroyed by the death of key talent/get swallowed in a merger between a telephone company and a conglomerate no one has heard of but everyone works for]. After this, the telephone company candy manufacturer beer distributor coffee chain bank will announce The Return to Form of The IP. The Return to Form will be exactly like The IP was when The Fan experienced joy, either by bringing back the aging Creator (may [he/she/they] be worshipped and their signature sold for $500 online), or by bringing in the Creator’s [literal/metaphorical] progeny or by bringing in a Fan. Not the same The Fan who played on the DiFronetto Grocers and is part of The Movement primarily full of bots, but a different Fan, one loyal to the Telephone Candy Beer Coffee Bank and, more importantly and more reasonably, money. 

Either the Return to Form is successful because it’s actually a Bold New Direction, or it’s a failure because it’s a Bold New Direction, or it’s a success because it’s a Return to Form, or it’s a failure because it’s a Return to Form. In every scenario, The Fan is unhappy, because he is tracking his life by releases of The IP, rather than by any number of reasonable and healthy metrics, such as by age or number of divorces. The Fan would like gardening, for example, but that would require a removal from The Movement, which shrinks daily as more members of The Movement discover their own equivalents to gardening.  

The Fan will only experience joy again when he is no longer The Fan.  

Unfortunately, his condition is terminal. 

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David Marino is a graduate of the Clarion Writer’s Workshop, holds a Master’s Degree in Writing from Sarah Lawrence College, and is a member of SFWA. His work has been published in Lightspeed, Escape Pod and PseudoPod, among others. You can follow him on Instagram @davidmarinowrites. He lives in New York City.