Panic World - The plot to ruin the new Superman movie

Episode Date: July 9, 2025

When did fandom become so zealous? Today we’re looking back at the release of the “Snyder Cut” and the people who still think that Zack Snyder should make all of the DC movies. Open Mike Eagle joins us to talk about where the world of fandom in entertainment is and why we’re so desperate to root ourselves in pop culture that it can become like a religion. Our guest is rapper, comedian, podcaster, and streamer Open Mike Eagle. You can find him pretty much everywhere, or check out his collective works at http://mikeeagle.net/. Want the extended conversation — and a lot of other good stuff, like ad-free episodes, bonus episodes, and access to our Discord? Sign up for just five bucks a month at: https://www.patreon.com/PanicWorld. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

To kick things off, what I would love to start with is kind of a dangerous question, perhaps, which is, who do you think are the craziest fans on the internet? What is the fandom you don't want to go anywhere near? Drake fans. Okay. Why? I don't know if there's a polite way to say delusional, but that's what they are. It's an impractical way to look at the world that they seem to live in.

And they don't, as far as I've seen, especially the, the radical Drake super fan that I'm thinking of. The Drake Ultras, sure. Yeah. They don't, they don't offer much to society as far as I can tell. Okay. I am very personally fascinated and frightened by the Taylor Swift anti-fans. Oh, so people who are just angry at Taylor Swift all the time?

Yes, there's a couple subredits I follow full of people who seem very unwelled that really hate her but are obsessed with talking about her. That's rough. That's rough. When it's the other side of the obsession spectrum where you're obsessed with how much other people like somebody. Exactly. Oh, that's rough. Yeah, antis.

Yeah. These ones are currently very upset because they were convinced that Travis Kelsey relationship was fake. And as time goes on, it's looking less fake and they're kind of freaking out. Also, this is like QAnon almost. Yes, it is Q&O for Taylor Swift. Oh, that's rich. Yeah, yeah. It's good stuff.

And we're going to be talking about an even crazier fan base today. But sort of more broadly, we're going to be talking. about when fandoms online become very cultish and fanatical. I'm Ryan Broderick, joining me. As always, you'll hear him later pop into the episode as our producer, Grant Irving. This is Panic World, a show about how the internet warps our minds, our culture, and eventually reality. And the warping we want to get into today is about how fandom has become zealous and frankly, borderline religious. We're looking back at the release of the Snyder cut, the people who still think that Zach Snyder should take over the Warner Brothers production of DC movies.

It's all very dumb, but it's also pretty fascinating to look back at now, considering, you know, where the world of fandom entertainment is currently. It also, I think, really reveals how desperate we are to find our personalities within pop culture and how alienating that can be when massive corporations control that pop culture. Joining me today is rapper, podcaster, streamer, a preeminent expert in all kinds of stuff. Open mickegle, welcome. Hey, how are you? I'm good. I'm ready. Let's start with this.

What is your relationship to like larger nerd culture? What do you engage in? What do you ignore? I'm pretty rooted in it. My thing is I'm more of a comic book guy. Okay. My fervor doesn't necessarily extend to the to the movies. Obviously, I'm aware of them.

I just don't tend to care as much. Sure. And then zooming in, I've always been much more attracted to the Marvel stuff than the DC stuff in general. So I've seen a fair amount of the DC movies, but I certainly don't. I've never had like a dog in a fight over who should be doing what when it comes to like DC superhero properties. Okay, perfect. That means you're sort of actually more objective here. This is good.

I think so, but we'll see. I've actually been starting to read comics again after a long hiatus because I think I'm, I've interest in the movies. And so now I'm going back and I'm reading like, right now I'm reading a Mortal Hulk, which is... Oh, that's a fantastic run. Unbelievable. He does some stuff with Hulk's in that comic that are outrageous. Yeah, the body horror and all that? Like, you never see it coming. Yeah, it's awesome. But the reason we're talking about specifically the DC movies and Zach Snyder are, uh, there's a few reasons. One, James Gunn is releasing a new Superman movie, trying to relaunch a whole new cinematic universe around DC comic books

and recover from the weirdly divisive era of Zach Snyder's reign over all of these properties. And we're going to get into that in just a moment. The second thing here is that nerd superhero fandoms are kind of dying, maybe. It's really unclear what their role is in culture anymore. Captain America 4 was really bad. I fell asleep during Captain America 4. Thunderbolts was good. I liked it.

But no one else seemed to really care about it. It underperformed at the box office. And this thing that has loomed over pop culture for almost 20 years now, the superhero film, for better or worse, is just fuzzy. Like, I don't understand what these movies even are anymore when I watch them. The third reason we're talking about this is because there is a now kind of vicious anti-culture or vicious, like, pro-the-other-side culture. And this connects to our previous episode about Blake lively and Justin Boldoni. There are these warring tribes of fans online that, you know, are very hard to manage. And this is a, I think in a lot of ways, a flashpoint of that entire idea.

Ugh. So what that means to me is that right now Hollywood is beginning to understand not just like the value of fandoms, but how to manipulate them perhaps and weaponize them. Yuck. Yes. But I want to start with Zach Snyder, and I want to start all the way back in 2004, which is when he releases the remake of the Dawn of the Dead, which I think is an absolute banger. Do you ever see this? I have not seen that. Highly recommend. It honestly is like genuinely very good.

But he also releases a director's cut, which is going to be important for our story later. Also, he always does, is this a pattern of news? He's been doing this. He's been doing this for 20 years. Oh, okay. That's news. That's news. He is also, you know, focusing very much on like, great. grim dark movies that are like very masculine with the exception of this one movie he made about

owls which i've never seen i take you've never have you seen the zach snider owl the first i'm hearing of it the zack snider owl movie legend of the guardians the owls of gaul it's an animated film about owls apparently it's pretty good did not come across my desk yeah what was your understanding of like the zach snider vibe over the last two come two decades so i really Doug Sin City to this day I've never read the book but I appreciated the story

that I saw in the movie and I liked the artistic direction of it a ton like I liked how it felt like I was watching a comic book and so when he did Watchman and it was mostly felt like a one-to-one adaptation of the story which is a DC story that I have read and very much enjoy I was into that

I remember there being a lot of discourse at the time about like what the value of this was since it was such a close adaptation. But I really dug that. Like I like comic books. I like just I like, you know, some comic book stories a lot. So when it comes to the idea of adapting them to movies, I don't think you always have to change everything.

Right. To, to do an adaptation. So so before we leave Watchman world, I will say the, my favorite part of that movie is actually the like the kind of the only original thing he did, which is the opening credits. Oh, the opening credits. Okay. Where, like, you have the montage of, like, 50 years of superheroes set to, like, a Bob Dylan song. I thought that was like, oh, and I also liked the ending.

I think the ending is better. I think the no squid ending is, like, pretty cool. Have you ever seen 300? Oh, I did see the 300. You know what? That was the first movie in my life. I was, like, fighting to stay awake in a movie. And it wasn't, it wasn't anything to do with the quality of the movie.

It was just me hitting that certain part of adulthood where like, oh, I shouldn't go see a movie after 9 o'clock. Like, because it's too dark. And so I remember that movie like in vignettes in between naps, basically. You just kept like waking up to like shirtless men like kicking each other. Yeah. Yeah. And there was a giant guy like a giant sexual man. So 300 is important here because this is, I think, the beginning of when people start to wonder, like, what's this, like, Zach Snyder, like, what's this guy's deal?

And it's also when conservative start being like, I like this guy's deal. But I do think what is interesting is a couple years later, he, Zach Snyder talks about Batman begins. And he says, everyone says that Batman begins, Batman's dark. And I'm like, okay, no, Batman's cool. He gets to go to a Tibetan monastery and be trained by ninjas, okay? I want to do that, but he doesn't like get raped in prison. That could happen in my movie. If you want to talk about dark, that's how that would go.

Was he drunk during this interview? Like, what happened? He was just talking to a journalist. That seems like a weird thing to insert into your answer that nobody implied, you know? He was talking to Entertainment Weekly. What? Come on. It wasn't with Playboy or Hustler?

No, no. This was Zach Snyder in 2008. Iron Man had just hit theaters And he was just like I want to see Batman get raped Yeah he was thinking about rape The whole Iron Man He's just sitting there thinking about rape

That's not good But I think this is like exactly it Which is like he I don't think he thinks politically But he's got this like like teen boy Kind of edginess that attracts Like a certain kind of person And that I think we start to see

Come out into the theaters In 2013 when he directs Man of Steel. Did you ever see Man of Steel with, what is his name? Henry Cavill. I don't think so. So there's a movie called Superman Returns. So that's the one before.

Okay. Now, who did that one? Do you know? That's a great question. I watched as a kid and I was like, this is goofy, but I kind of enjoy it. See, I got weirded out in that movie. Brian Singer. Oh, see, right.

Okay. Because like there's a, like, my main memory of that movie is like, is he stalking her? There's a weird creepiness. Yeah, and like, that just, I don't know, I grew up on the Christopher Reeves movie. So, like, that movie just kind of weirded me out. And I think because of that movie, I just was out on DC movies for like a while. So I never saw Man of Steel.

Yeah, Superman Return has like a, kind of like a surreal horniness to it. Yeah, it's like, weird. Yeah. So if you haven't seen Man of Steel, the important thing is that at the end of Man of Steel, Superman causes a 9-11 style event and then breaks Zod's neck. Oh. That's how Zach Snyder thought Superman should go. So Superman, like, how do you cause it?

Sure. Because I need to unpack that a little bit. No, that's good. Yeah. So he's fighting Zod and the other evil cryptonians. They have like a big battle. But in the middle of the battle, Superman destroys Metropolis. And it's filmed exactly like 9-11 down to like the dust.

No. And like it's a traumatic. I guess they're trying to do like an Avengers Battle of New York kind of idea, but instead they just go real hard with the realism, so it looks just like night 11th. Jesus Christ. Yeah. And critics notices. They called it a gritty, realistic story.

You know, it has an element of Superman to it, but not really. And then he follows that up with Batman v. Superman. I'm sorry, Don of Justice. Now, I think I put that on like TNT one day in the background while I was going about life. So I've seen like a of I've seen some of that. It's fine. It's not it's got it's got Ben Affleck and like I'm from Boston so I have to support everything he does even if it's bad. So like he's fine Bruce Wayne.

But like overall these movies are becoming less popular, less interesting. Meanwhile, Marvel's getting it more popular, more interesting. And then a couple years later in 2017, we get Joss Whedon and Zach Snyder both making versions of the justice league film. Are you familiar with the drama here? Yes, I am. That I am familiar with. You know, Grant's actually been obsessed with this one for a while, and I very generously,

I'm going to allow him to speak and recap for listeners who might not know. After Batman v. Superman and it was like critically smeared, even though it did well, Zach started bringing in different cuts of his Justice League, and it was supposed to be like multiple movies, and they bring in Josh Whitten and people, and they're doing these screenings. like three hours long and people are saying that like this is unwatchable this is the most

joyless thing so like it was going bad uh and then i think an important detail is that genuinely tragically he had a child that committed suicide oh and then so he had a fully that's why he drops out yeah so he had a fully step away and then they gave the reins to a director kind of the exact opposite sort of aesthetic and interest, which, which like, I do think adds to the backlash. Yes, it does. And I didn't, I didn't know that, but that makes, that makes, that makes, that makes, that helps me make a lot more sense of it knowing that.

So, so, like, they feel like this big injustice is being done. But while he stepped away completely understandably, he also apparently had somebody go into D.C. and take the hard drives where the movie he was made. making. He like, he had somebody steal the hard drives out. Yeah. Yeah. So that like he could covertly be making the Snyder cut that like people were like debating whether or not it existed. Did he really have to do that to get the footage to keep making his cut? Is that most likely? Yeah, because the studio probably would have locked it down. But then why would the studio turn around and put it out

if he had to steal the footage to do it? Because he spent five years putting pressure. around the studio using social media. Wow. And so that's the next thing I want to give you a little bit more details about. Over the years, he was on some app that was not Twitter, basically, but was like Twitter where he would just release pictures of the set with no comments to like keep inflaming his fans that this thing might exist. He would like post pictures of people who were cut out of Josh Whedon's movie.

It was literally very much like cue drops where he kept just like being like, at one point before it was released he took a picture of his MacBook with like a Justice League sticker on it and just put that up there so people are immediately like the film the film exists on this laptop but they won't let us get it with a fan base who's already a full inferno

exactly yeah so he really had plausible deniability but did things to keep it going on. It's very Trumpian. It's like very Trump one point. Actually, I'm honestly Trump 2.02.

Like he, Trump spent the entire summer being like, I've never heard of Project 2025. I just happened to be mentioning the exact stuff in it all the time. Isn't that crazy? The whole thing was that it was like, it was supposed to be done. Like there was a secret locked away version that was finished. The big piece of info there for me is, is the bread crumbing. Because literally like,

there's a thing that just happens with people in the world right now. I don't know if it's always been this way, but it seems exaggerated right now. We're like, everybody's looking for, you know, the truth. I think just a lot of people feel powerless, right? And when you feel powerless and you can't make sense of the world, you're looking for people who have the answers to something, you know?

And I think that's, that's, one of the big driving forces of the Q thing, right? It's like, oh, there's somebody named Q who has all this high security clearance and he's going to help me make sense of this world that doesn't make sense to me. So every little thing that Q drops is going to help me understand the world more, right? And it's just such a powerful driver to people. And it just causes them to put so much external valid. on these things that come from this person who they've identified as having this power. And it's like, yeah, if you're, if you're a person who is doing that sort of tactic with this IP that people care really deeply about and they're helping, like, they're helping to make you feel special because your attention and your aggression in speaking about this is like fighting the corporate overlords who are keeping you from the truth. of what this beautiful film experience could be. And I don't know, like that really just thinking about the intention of all of that and the manipulation of all of that. I don't know.

It makes me much more soured, I guess, on him. Exactly. So, like, while they're demanding that, you know, Warner Brothers release, Zach Snyder's complete vision, they're doing like a change. dot org petition you know they're demanding that like they fix it um change dot org and that's supposed to be about like helping people like it yeah no it's about demanding a better superhero film oh god yeah we're all crossed up it's a mess so you have a disappointed agitated fan base and a director feeding into it and a not very sympathetic group of executives right in the crosshairs and we're

going to talk about what happens next right after a word from our sponsor HBO max which I think is what it's called now. It could be Max or HBO Go or one of those. Okay, so Grant did a perfectly acceptable job giving an overview of what fans wanted from their precious version of the movie. And eventually they'll get it, but it'll be too late for sanity to be restored. And to understand how toxic this all gets, let me ask you this first. I would love to kind of get your thoughts on, like, how you think about different, like, online fan bases for comics.

Like, you said that you read them, do you, do you ever sort of, like, lurk in these subredits? Are you in nerdier corners of YouTube or something? Like, what I tend to do with any media that I enjoy is I enjoy it, and then I run to YouTube to hear what people have to say about it. Me too, yeah. And so the twin shock of comics YouTube is that, is that first of all, for as many YouTubers and cottage industries

there are around like superhero movie fandom and analysis and Easter eggs and trailers and all of that, like the field is barren when it comes to comics YouTubers, And then there's just a sea of tiny channels that are just trying it. But there's obviously just not as big of an audience in consuming discourse around the comics, right? Sure. That's the first shock. The second shot is how right-leaning the majority of them are.

And how Gamergate, Comicsgate, a rage bait, anti-woke, how much that sentiment dominates a lot of those channels that do exist. Because of that, like, I largely stay away from the fandoms. They don't, the fandoms don't have much to offer me except annoyance, the vast majority of the time. I'm a big X-Men guy. Like, the X-Men subreddits, the X-Men. They're okay.

The subreddits are all right. The subreddits are cool. The podcasts, the channels that are mostly X-Men focused, mostly, are cool because X-Men kind of has more this inclusivity. It's hard to be like an alt-right X-Men. Yeah. Now, there definitely are some. They exist. They have found them.

But there's this diversity sort of built into it. And it's always, or for the most part, definitely compared to other comics franchises, has more like a safe space kind of vibe to it. which can get annoying on its own, but to me it's way better than the alternative. Now, you mentioned something there that I do want to hit on because I think this is like a missing piece of why the Snyder Cut stuff got so ferocious in this time period. You mentioned Comicsgate. So for our listeners who might not be familiar, comics gate comes from Gamergate. You're familiar with both, yeah? Yeah.

So I knew a reporter years ago who was working on comics gate stuff. And like every time she would publish about it, it was just like violent, insane nonsense. It's really ugly. And what's even crazier is that like it started in 2016 basically around a like female author writing a book about Mockingbird, which is like a Marvel character. And it was it was this blow up over, you know, women being involved. in the comics industry, but I do think it ballooned out. And I think the point that you made about how if you sit down and you're like, Captain America for it didn't work for me, no one's going to watch that.

But if you sit down, you're like, Captain America didn't work because it's woke. Yeah. Like YouTube will promote it and Reddit will promote it. And I think that is the part of this that the Snyder fans figured out, which is that like, it can't just be that these movies are bad. It has to be there's some sort of like cultural, political conspiracy. to make them bad to hurt me, the fan. They haven't added a lot of new fans since like the height of the medium success in like the 90s.

So most of these people are like middle-aged guys who've been reading and buying comics for 30 years. And they feel this very sensitive ownership of the characters. especially if they feel like the changes that are being made are not what they want because they're the ones, they feel like they've been keeping this thing afloat the whole time. And it's this really interesting place where like the sort of manosphere narratives around a lot of media these days, right? How a lot of that intersects with comic fandom and they get really activated because it's really, really easy to take that initial sort of frustration that these fans have and how their characters get changed and how like it seems like their histories don't matter. And it seems like because to them it reflects the feeling that their fandom, that their investment, all of that has not mattered because the companies are chasing a new audience, which they should be.

Right. Right. But it's very easy to infiltrate this frustrated market and say, hey, they're changing it because they don't. like you anymore. Right. It's interesting because, like, I do think the internet has changed the, the incentives, let's say, to talk about these things. Yes.

But I think you're right that it's not really new because, in fact, actually, because the Fantastic Four movies coming out pretty soon. And I was reading through, like, old discussions of, like, the previous movies. And I found a bunch of discourse on, like, old blogs complaining that they had cast Jessica Alba, the most beautiful woman on earth in that moment, as the invisible woman because she was Hispanic. I can't imagine being so racist that I'd be mad to stare at Jessica Alba. I mean, there's a, there's a lot of things in comics, discourse and comics where it's, it's at that line where you're like, wait a minute. Like you're talking about.

What are you talking about? You, you hate gay people that much. where, like, the hint that Iceman may have been homosexual is enough to make you bang your whole head against the wall. Like, what is the problem here? Yeah. If anything, you should be mad at Gene Gray for outing him using telepathy. That's a deep cut for the real reason. She should be getting the flack for that.

Wow. What's interesting about Snyder fans is that they have devolved into this weird conservatism and resentment, and they're known for that, but it's not all just white guys. guys. In the last act, we went over Snyder's role a bit in how, you know, his version came out, but it wouldn't have happened without his fans, or at least quote unquote, his fans, if you believe they exist, supporting him constantly on social media. And I want to focus on one super fan of his, just so you kind of get a sense for how dedicated these people are. Fiona Zang was and possibly is a healthcare administrator from China and a dedicated stand who was involved in the change.org petition in 2017. So Zang, before she saw Joss Whedon's version, was like posting about it all the time. She posts like the lyrics to a Leonard Cohen song that like Snyder uses in a lot of his movies. And on New Year's Eve 2020, Snyder tweets out announcing that his cut is going to be released.

And he writes, this one is for you, Fiona. Let's go 2021. Yeah, it just seems a lot less of an accident. Like, remember I was comparing earlier, like, oh, the people who like lost or the people who like Krakowah, it would be very similar to this if one of those people had been using these sort of tactics to stoke the fires of this fandom and motivate us to put pressure on ABC or pressure on Marvel Comics to give us the thing we want. since this creative genius that we love is telling us that the thing that we want really exists.

Exactly. Have you ever seen the Snyder Cut? I have seen the Snyder Cut. I had a lot of time on my hands in 2020. So I definitely could sit and watch a three-hour movie that everyone's talking about, and it was available to stream from inside my house. I remember digging it, I mean, aside from the length, but I also, can say that I was not really aware

of the depth of all of the discourse around it. So, like, I wasn't looking at it with any sort of, like, political lens at the time. And I was just like, oh, there's the Snyder cut that everybody's talking about. Let me watch the Snyder cut. And I was like, oh, okay, this is cool. And I think around that time, too,

I was becoming more aware of, like, Joss Whedon's sort of effect on superhero movies in general. So I was probably more looking at it through that lens. Okay. Like, I appreciate that there's not a quip every, you know,

38 seconds, probably more than anything, you know? Like you, I was also completely brain damage from COVID lockdown. So it was like, I could stare at this and I enjoyed it. It was fine.

I was kind of happy when it came out because I was online. I was like super online in these spaces of the time. And I was like, oh, like, we'll never have to hear about this again. Hmm. That joke was on me. But to affirm your point that Snyder was stoking the flames, Rolling Stone did some incredible reporting around this. Let me read this to you. So they wrote, according to multiple sources, familiar with the matter.

Zach Snyder confronted an executive at Warner Brothers post-production department and issued a threat, uh, referencing Jeff Johns and John Berg, uh, who are like producers on the Snyder cut. And he said, Jeff and John are dragging their feet on taking their names off my cut. Now I will destroy them on social media. So, like, at least by 2020, spring 2020, this was reported. He was aware that he had this fan base. That he had this button he could push. Exactly.

Yeah. And now, if he was ever asked about it, though, in public, he would say, like, oh, it's all good. It's all, like, love. Don't worry. These fans, this is a community. he would call it like a movement, but he clearly knew that like he could sick these people against you if he was mad.

Which I think is, oh, and then you want to hear one other really funny detail here? Oh, sure. Once again, according to Rolling Stone, about 13% of the accounts that we're talking, that have been talking about the Snyder cut are fake. Of course! Yeah, yeah. Of course.

The bot farms, the bot farms are here. What I think is very hard for people to wrap their heads around, you know, and to kind of bring it back to what we talked about at the top of the show, you know, I read celebrity news, you know, casually. Like, I think it's kind of fun to, like, read through it. And I remember reading through the Blake lively and Justin Baldoni stuff. And I would just see people on Reddit, like, you know, complain about Blake lively. The same way I see people all complain about Taylor Swift. And I think the average person is absorbing a lot of that stuff without realizing it only to discover that it's either fake or, It's totally organized by some PR form or a director who's trying to get his movie made.

And it's really hard to separate that in your daily life because I mean, that's just a lot of work, right? Yeah. If we can't tell who's real and who's fake, then I feel like it's, we're already burnt, you know? Like, it's the value of all of it just takes such a, it just takes such serious damage. if that's the state of things now, where when you, if you click a hashtag to try to see what's going on about something, it can be some percentage of robots versus some percentage of other robots. You know, I don't know. I feel like, I feel like it's actually really sad and damaging and we're not even done unraveling what the effective is going to be on all of our social media interactions. and the idea of how narrative affects these big media franchises and releases, you know? That's a perfect setup because despite, you know, the sense that it was all being manipulated,

there were real fans of Snyder that thought that they were writing some evil that executives had caused. You know, they were writing some kind of wrong. And with the release of the Snyder cut, some thought that it was all just starting. They thought that, okay, the movie has been restored, and now his whole universe is going to be restored. And we're going to get into what that means and sort of the long-term effects of, you know, trying to appease a nerd mob after a word from our sponsors, Rebel Moon, the movie everyone saw for sure. Okay, so spoiler, because this was stoked for so long, and eventually the fans, did get what they wanted, the Snyder cut Colts online is just like never going to go away. It is, it flares up all the time.

But before we get into the long-lasting effects of a toxic fandom, let's explore a bit about what they wanted from the Snyder universe of DC films. So before the cut was released, Snyder made a t-shirt to raise money for charity and suicide prevention. And it ended up raising like $80,000, which is great. but I would love for you to try to explain to our audience what any of this means what I'm about to show you what all the gods all the heavens all the hells are within you this is from Joseph campbell and in what is this it's like a tree of life with is this Nazi uh does look very fast she doesn't yeah like and and and within it there's the symbols for the justice league superhero. Like, I am so confused and scared. Like, there's a baby at the bottom of it. What is happening?

Okay, well, let me break this down for you because I think this is, I think almost every fandom at this point has something like this. But this one is, like, the Snyder cut has taken this to like the extreme degree. So at the top, it says, uh, equitas, acquittis, which is Latin for justice as in, uh, dawn of justice, if you will. God. So, okay, you ask about the baby. How could I not ask about the baby? Yeah, you seem to want to know something about the baby. So that is from a Zach Snyder kind of like comment that he had made that if he got to continue the franchise. He would kill a baby. No.

Much weirder, actually. Batman was going to fuck Lewis Lane and they were going to have a baby. and then I think that would eventually turn Superman evil. The fatherhood? No, because Superman gets cucked by Batman. Oh. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yes.

Oh, yeah. Okay. And so he would team up with Darkside and bring evil alien armies to Earth. Woman turned mad bad. Exactly. And that's why there's a big sword going into the earth with an air around it for the planet apocalypse where these aliens come from. Flash would go back in time and die trying to help. which is why there's an hourglass and a siph on this t-shirt.

He would, like, die trying to, like, kick Batman in the dick really fast, so he couldn't get one up. Couldn't cuck Superman, exactly. Okay. And then the Justice League would assemble to fight Darkside, like, the Knights of the Round Table, which is why there's, like, swords around an Omega symbol on this thing. And then Batman would die to save the world. And that's why there's, like, a W coffin, I guess, for Wayne, which I thought was for Wonder Woman, but fair enough. Wow. Yeah.

So the terrifying thing about this is if I saw somebody. Sorry, one more thing. Hold that thought because this is important. The use of Cortland, there's like a thing on the show that says Cortland. Yeah. So that is a reference to the, the Anne Rand book, The Fountainhead. Stop it. Which is, once again, brings us back to this like weird, fashy right wing thing again.

Yeah. Yeah. What were you saying? I was going to say that the real terrifying thing about this to me is like if I walk past somebody on a street wearing his shirt like I might think oh that's interesting what's that and just have no idea that it's just like a bunch of bullshit like raging crazy person bullshit yeah it's so crazy and like the masculine kind of like right wing nature of this one in particular I think has made it so like irrepressibly insane. You know, I'll say, I'll say this. And, and this is if, if those people are listening to this, which I imagine some will, because that's kind of how this shit works, is that like, get the fuck over it. For real. Like, every, every, like, yo, there are people who spent six, seven years of

their lives watching Lost, right? And there was all of this fucking big shit that was supposed to happen that, that, uh, Carlton Q's and Damon Lindelof said, oh, it'll be, it'll be explained. It'll be, it'll be scientific. It'll be plausible. And they threw that shit out of the window, right? Like, sometimes your franchise does not deliver. Sometimes the thing that you want to see brought to fruition doesn't happen. And you have to move the fuck on. Because it's, it's really, it's a bunch of corporations deciding what lives and what dies. And the truth is, they don't care about any of us. They don't care about any of us. They're only trying to make more fucking money. Okay. There's no plot against you.

You know, like I'm, like, I guess I'm an X-Men guy. So they just, we just had the, the big Crocoen era of X-Men comics. Unbelievable. Yeah, it was great. And Jonathan Hickman, one of the geniuses of comic book writing, sort of set up this universe. And he ended up leaving,

you know, two years into what's supposed to be like this 10-year run. We didn't get shit. We didn't get any. Release the Hickman cut of the crocoe era. I want to see it go full bad. I would hate to see an army of X-Men subreditors making the fact that we didn't get Jonathan Hickman's ending their entire fucking identity. Like that seems like a giant waste of your life.

You know, there's other shit to do. The Snyder cut community continues to exist. The subreddit is very out of control now. What do they talk about now? Well, okay, I'm glad you asked that. I came across I came across a Snyder Cut post today

reacting to an announcement that they're going to do a Superman unlimited variant cover that has like James Gunn on the cover for the new Superman movie and one of the top responses was a Snyder cut fan accusing James Gunn of being a pedophile.

Whoa! Yeah, yeah. I mean, was there any evidence? I mean, it's kind of like Q&ON where like you don't really want to go down that road. Like there's just a lot of it. But like, hold on.

Let me, let me read you some of the top posts of all time on the Snyder Cut sub right. As you're looking for it, can you, can you, I wonder if it's the same person I found who responds to every DC thing by either saying, restore the Snyderverse or calling James Gun a pedophile or if there's at least two of these people. Oh, there's many. Oh, there's many. But the, the major thing you're going to see, you're going to hear them say is let's

see James Guns hard drive. That's what they keep saying. Yeah. So like, if you look at the top post. about like on the Snyder cut subreddit. A lot of them are from fans trying to be like, we can like both directors here, James Gunn and Zach Snyder, and then a lot of people being like, I'm going to kill you.

Wow. That's the result of giving fans what they want. Like fans shouldn't get, fans shouldn't be happy. Like we shouldn't, we shouldn't make these people happy. So let's zoom out and look at how, you know, this has leaked into all kinds of fandoms to some degree, you know,

in a year since. You talked with the Drake fans, actually. That's actually a really good example. Can you say a bit more about, like, how they've reacted to the Kendrick stuff with the Super Bowl? What, it appears that they try to take everything that happens and somehow shape it as a Drake win, even when it's an obvious Drake loss. Yeah. Even things. I was hoping you would say this exact thing.

Great. Yeah. Like, that's like, so I've been making a lot of YouTube videos about all of this stuff. And because of that, I often wake up. And the first thing I see is like how Drake fans are reacting to something. And it's just so far removed from reality and so obviously powered by like, there seems to be some sort of connection for these people where Drake's success is their success. Like it's really that deeply personal for these people where they feel like they're in the trenches for some war that they're not actually in.

There is no war. Like it doesn't exist. very parasycial. Very parasocial. Like parisocial to like wherever the end of that line is. Right. To where like, again, it's like we were saying about the Snyder stuff. It's like where that becomes your identity.

You know, being somebody who appreciates Drake music is one thing. But being somebody who like your identity is a Drake fan, like, that's rough. That's rough. He's background music for shopping. I mean, that's what you guys seem. Bay said and that that you know that sort of set a lot of this off if you go back and i only hear drake in ubers like i don't know what you're talking about and and but i think the the hard part now is that drake himself couldn't completely shake off the you know the underage

girl stuff he couldn't because there's too much like creepy evidence around sure you know allegedly allegedly right like but that's another reason why like Why would you stake your identity on this? Like a guy who he himself can't shake it. What is the driving force of that? I think that is the question. And I'll tell you what my theory is here, which is that I think it is truly just sunken cost fallacy.

It is this, you know, this idea that like, okay, and you see it with Trump supporters. You see it with Zach Snyder fans. You see it with like anyone who kind of goes down this rabbit hole. Like Batman with Lois Lane, they just can't pull out of this. That's why you need Flash to go back and... Exactly. Many times, many times quickly.

Yeah. I feel like there's got to be some sort of line, right? Like, I'm black American, like, that's been my life. So, like, I've seen it around R. Kelly, specifically in Chicago. Yeah. Like, when I was in high school, there was a rumor that R. Kelly was dating a girl from high school, like, when I was in high school. So we've been hearing this stuff for a long time. And I guess with him, it wasn't as much about a sunken cost thing as much as it was about like, when are we as a culture going to decide that what we're hearing is important enough to actually pay attention to?

And I think that's the same thing that happened with Diddy. Like, I think a lot changed with Diddy when you saw a video of him beating the holy hell out of a defenseless woman. Like when you see it, it's like, okay, shit, fuck. Like there's nowhere to compartmentalize away from what I now know to be true. So I guess it's like in each of these situations, what's the line? Like I grew up, I was raised by television in a black American home. So you know who else raised me because of that? Bill Cosby.

Like watching the Cosby show every Thursday when it was new episodes, watching reruns and syndication. I know like there are things in my brain that they're committed to memory. about that show that like, I can't even tell you how deep it runs. But like, when you find out a guy is like sexually assaulted, like 50 people. Right. And of course, it's very different from a Zach Snyder, who to my knowledge has only talked about rape in an interview.

Zach Snyder only often talks about rape. He is not a part of course of any evidence. It's obviously not equivalent. If we sort of move away from like the really serious sort of like J.D. Cosby. like genuine predator stuff. We move into the kind of the world of just like weird ass fandoms that are hanging on for like no reason and they're getting really crazy, right?

And there's a lot of them. Today we talked about Snyder fans because they're like really weird and crazy, but there's a ton. And I do wonder if part of it is just a quality issue. That's the heart of it, isn't it? Like, would we even be having these conversations if the corporations that you talked about weren't reheating like the same intellectual property over and over? Right.

And that's where I get kind of conspiratorial with this, where it's like, is this all just downstream of like living in a world where culture isn't moving forward? There are no new characters, no new stories. And so we just war with each other over the same like reheated garbage. I don't know. I like Superman. But like I would rather live in a world where we don't get a new one every four years. Marvel has gone into a direction of like directors don't matter. It is like collectively made or writers or lighting or.

It feels like a real low place in culture to be where like something having a point of view, even if I dislike that point of view, feels refreshing because it feels like it was not made by market research. I don't like any of the Snyderverse movies. But I do appreciate that it was like a vision made by a guy. Like you can have a take about them. There's something to actually engage with versus like where the Marvel franchise is. You're not going to red pill me on the Snyder cut, Grant. You're not going to do it. I'm a Matt Reeves truther.

I'm going down. Like, I've been waiting five years and I'm like, he must be cooking up something amazing. He's going to plan 10 movies. That's why we're having to wait seven years. Matt Reeves, Batman 2 is going to come out when you're 50 years old. But this is a good point that I want to end on, actually. And this is my last question for you,

which is like, do you feel like this stuff, the sort of like QAnonon for everything culture? Do you feel like that's changing, getting better, getting worse? Like, I mean, it's getting worse, but I think it's getting worse because of the robots. Sure. Okay. Same work. Like, I mean, and, you know, that same thing as in the Kendrick and Drake thing.

Like, there's both sides accused the other of using bots. Both of them probably are, like, I think that shit is just tearing our minds apart. Like, could you imagine being like a 16-year-old boy going through whatever social stuff you might have been going through. at 16, having any sort of passionate feeling about some IP that you have found a connection to. And then you go online and you see a post from a robot that you can't tell as a robot, but is echoing like the worst thing that you believe. Yeah.

You know? Yeah. Like how easy it is to see something like that and have it like ratify. like the worst thing in your head. So there's so much less incentive for you to investigate how you feel about a thing because there's already somebody who agrees with you and you don't even know if they're real or not. Yeah, I promised our producer grant that I wouldn't go into the into the world of politics with this episode because this is supposed to be our fun one. But a lot of the studies.

Oh, shit. And I start bringing up. Thank you. Serial abusers. No, we're free. We're free. I can do this now. So a lot of the studies that I've read about Russian troll farms and Russian bot activity, you know, in the 2010s was interesting because it's not what people I think assumed was happening.

Like I think a lot of people assumed that like Russian bots would be posting like fake news stories to like rile people up. And they did do a bit of that. But a large, a large chunk of what they were doing online is exactly what you're describing, which is that they would go into communities and they would pretend to be a member of that. community and then they would cause fights. They would, you know, pretend to be different minority groups in America and, like, say outrageous things to make people think that that minority group believes that. They would start arguments on Facebook and as, like, part of a Facebook group. It was to create division.

Old CIA tactic, too. And I do, I do feel really sad for young people now who have never know, like going to, like, going to like the creepy comic store that may or may not have smelled bad is like I would argue not as nearly as combative as like going on the internet right now and typing in like the cartoon you're watching like dude I'm following like avatar the last airbander drama right now because they're announcing a new season and like all this old fandom war stuff has just like sprung back up because these people don't go away and they just fight all day and it just bums me out that like young people don't know a world without that stuff it's like the promise of the internet

was about being able to have all these communities to identify with. And I don't know. I think community is such an important thing in our lives that decreasingly we're getting in person. So it's like the promise of it on the internet seems so important. And so the manipulation of it just seems so deeply problematic to me, you know, and that there's, you know, through the lens of capitalism, there's no way that corporations don't seek to use this, weaponize this to take advantage of it. You know, like, so many of the, like, the Disney castings now, like, you know, the, the, the, it's, it's hard not to think that, like, they're not, uh, when, when they do their franchise revivals, their IP revivals, and they put, you know, a black woman in a formerly white animated woman's role.

Like, it's hard not to be cynical about that and think that there's not some idea that they want this sort of outrage discourse because at least then people will be aware that the movie's coming. You know, like it's hard not to think that it's not intentional to some degree. Especially now that we've seen how quickly they'll bend the knee to Trump coming in and be like, woke's over. Right. I mean, and that's it, like I said, it's a cynical take on it because of course I want to see Sure. Uh, diversity. I, like I want little kids to be able to see themselves in places where they haven't

seen people who look like them. I think that's great. But it's like at some point, it's like, obviously, you know what the, the, the, the, the shit storm this is going to create. Right. On Twitter. And I have to think that you want that. Oh, you know.

100%. How do we, how we fix it? What's the, what do we do here? Do we just, I mean, what I'm about to propose we're farther away from. than ever. But if we had a government that was truly humanistic in any sort of way, they would be, they would be regulating some of this stuff. I think this stuff needs government regulation.

I think that we need to be able to trust in some third party to, especially when it comes to how corporations can push these buttons and infuriating. people and scramble people's brains about this stuff and how and how there's such a direct line just between some of it and like actual

real world situations where people can get hurt. Yeah. You know, like it's not it's not such a far off fantasy to see how directly some of like some

of the underpinning emotions around some of these arguments connect so directly to like actual population harm. You know, I think, obviously, first of all, we have to completely fix the government, which I don't know. Step one. Get a government. Step two.

Do good things with that government once we get it. Right. I agree. You know, I think that's the only answer, but, you know, it's just all of it seems to be. such a reflection of how deeply entrenched our government is already with capitalism, which kind of makes it useless. I agree.

I've been trying not to end every episode of our show being like, we got to get rid of the internet. So my suggestion is like smaller fandom spaces. Like if you like a thing, instead of like going and hanging out with like 20,000 strangers, go find like 10 people. Maybe you know them in real life or they know people you know in real life. And like when I grew up, when I was growing up, like, I had interest that my friends had. Like, that's how, like, that's why we were friends.

And like, I think that's, that's okay. You can do that still. You know, it's all right. Yeah, I mean, I can dig that. I guess because like I was saying earlier, the comic book fandoms, like the actual, like, they feel small already. Yeah. And they're already poisoned. That's true.

Yeah. Maybe it's just like, don't read comics. Okay. Well, I think a lot of. A lot of people are trying that already. Just give it up. Just give it up. Thank you so much for coming on this show.

This was delightful. This was a great conversation. If you want to follow you online, where can they do that? Well, if you search my name, I'm on everything. If you want to watch your anti-woke YouTube videos about comic books, where could they do that? I haven't. You know what? That's a secret, you'll have to do.

Sure. Okay. If you want to hear even more about how the world of online fandoms have evolved and how Gen Z is dealing with it, you can listen to a longer version of this episode at patreon.com slash panic world. For $5 a month, you get extra content almost every month. Wow, that's amazing. I love content. Go to patreon.com slash panic world for an extra long version of today's episode.

Panic world is a production of career. written and produced by Grant Irving and hosted by me, Ryan Broderick. Josh Fielstead is our production coordinator and our amazing researcher is Adam Bumas. From Courier is Shane Verkest, who edits our video episodes along with our producer, Kevin Maroney and National Managing Director and Executive Producer Kevin Dreyfus. R.C. DeMezzo is their VP of Brand and Social. Charlotte Robertson is their Deputy Director of Brand and Social. Mary Ann Couga is their director of marketing and Tracy Kaplan is the senior vice president of sales and distribution. If you want to sponsor the show or give us products to sell, she's the one to talk to.

You can email her at Tracy at courier newsroom.com. Lastly, here's my advice for you. Chill out and touch grass while you still can.