Revoke my nerd credentials if you must, for I have never read more than a book and a half from the “Harry Potter” series. I was the type of youthful shut-in, when “Harry Potter” was on its meteoric rise, that was less excited about exploring the unknowable world of wizardry than I was the adult ennui as depicted in Steve Martin novellas. Escapism was never really my bag. It mostly reminded me how ill-equipped I was to deal with a grand adventure, much less my own personal life. Truly, I don’t mean to besmirch the legacy of “Harry Potter” here — J.K. Rowling seems more than capable of doing that on her own, and I did think that what I had read worked. It’s just that as a kid who regularly tried to talk to his peers about what I assumed was the impressive emotional gravity of “Shopgirl”, or sat in the storage room below his staircase reading, my interest in “Harry Potter” started to wane once all the magic stuff started creeping in. Action and excitement? Not in my literature, man.
I have, however, read the ungainly-titled “MuggleNet.com’s What Will Happen in Harry Potter 7” three times. I received it as a gag gift in 2013, a whole six years after the actual “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” had already been published. I don’t think my friend who bought it for me ever expected me to actually read it, and truthfully I probably only picked it up to smugly snicker at its odd continued existence. The book, which inexplicably remains in print to this day, contains predictions from six “Harry Potter” superfans associated with prominent fansite MuggleNet.com, and reads as if one of their overlong message board posts accidentally got sent to a publishing house. There’s a gamut of speculation, from reasonable theories about characters, to predictions about tone (“We can safely assume that ‘Deathly Hallows’ is not going to be a cheerful book”), and even more brow-furrowing insights such as what its $35 price tag could suggest about its length. None of this should be interesting to someone like me, and yet something about it drew me in.
The book is at its most compelling when it’s pulled in two directions: a confident pride in its status (Rowling’s awareness of the site is referenced no less than three times within the first two pages), and — more often — a dorky enthusiasm to share every last stray thought related to “Harry Potter” that has seemingly ever occurred to the writers. A section pontificating on Severus Snape’s intentions notes that his name is an anagram for “persues Evans,” before immediately undercutting this observation to note that “you have to misspell the word ‘pursues’ to make it work.” There’s a whole page cataloguing the frequency in which socks are mentioned across the six books that builds to no discernible thesis. Not a single solid answer is given, but how could it? All involved seem to know they’ll only be able to experience this rampant and climatic theorizing once, the nostalgia for this period so strong that in 2015 the site created an ouroboros of analysis by running monthly features reflecting on the accuracy of these very predictions. Its title is a misnomer, “MuggleNet.com and the Bittersweet Highs of Media Obsession” perhaps a more accurate one. What anyone imagines they’ll do afterward is the one fan theory that goes unexplored.
It was my introduction to a sub-sub-genre of media, these passion projects that are built upon enthusiasts honoring their own fandom. Without fully understanding why or even caring about which community I was exploring, I dug deeper, discovering the even more prevalent medium of fan documentaries. While the specifics vary from project to project, they all broadly say the same thing: This media property we love has so much to offer. Everyone in the fan community is so passionate. Other people just don’t get it. From the description of The Arrested Development Documentary Project, which purports to feature interviews with 200 fans from across the country: “The overall goal of the documentary is to provide awareness of this brilliant, witty, and original comedy.” And note the air of importance in Amazon’s logline for Ringers: Lord of the Fans emphasizing that this documentary, finally, “is the first and only one to respectfully honor the good-natured depth and breadth of Lord of the Rings fandom.” The assumed appetite for non-probing works such as these has led to there being no less than two fan documentaries focusing on the online EarthBound community: One, Mother to Earth, is built around interviews with people who possess or once possessed a prototype of its unreleased NES progenitor. The other, EarthBound USA, distinguishes itself by being “about how EB fans have fought to popularize the Mother series in North America” — or it would, anyway, if it wasn’t about to roll into its sixth year of production. Supposedly inspirational biopics and life-affirming Oscar winners fell further and further down my viewing queue. There was a dark magic at play with these fan works, even if I couldn’t quite understand why.
There could be something to be said for these documentaries on their own merits if the analyses of each property were particularly engaging. Unfortunately they rarely rise above the level of an electronic press kit for works that were already beloved in their time, already impactful within their genre, already picked apart to death by message boards across the globe at all hours. Dear Mr. Watterson: An Exploration of Calvin & Hobbes is arguably the most prominent of this genre: it not only achieved a limited theatrical release and press tour, but made enough of a splash to serve as the basis for the Bill Hader & Duffy Boudreau-penned parody “Searching for Mr. Larson: A Love Letter from the Far Side” in Documentary Now!’s third season. The film itself is nicely produced, easy to watch, and imbued with a warm autumnal aesthetic — one could argue that it’s the high watermark for its genre, as far as presentation goes. But while the film’s logline claims to showcase “how the collected works of Watterson still speak to readers everywhere,” by providing such little insight the documentary can’t help but be a tribute to obsession itself, and not in a particularly meaningful way. There’s an interesting debate in the film — one too often drowned out by the director’s shallow autobiography — about Watterson’s battle to prevent his work from being merchandized. It was a battle he ultimately won, and by allowing his work to stand on its own and speak for itself, it has done wonders to solidify the legacy of Calvin and Hobbes by never deluding the comic’s voice. What Watterson couldn’t have predicted was that fans would take it upon themselves to speak for him and wind up having so little to say. Dear Mr. Watterson’s weirdest quality is that its director upended his entire life to say nothing much at all. It’s the kind of movie that makes shallowness, obsession, and desperation seem enticing — a noble alternative to experiencing anything deeply. As of this writing I’ve watched it twice.
I don’t want to suggest that a documentary about fandom is an inherently bankrupt artistic or intellectual endeavor. Documentaries like 1997’s Trekkies, or especially 2017’s Tokyo Idols work in part by coming from filmmakers with no attachment to the fan cultures they are presenting. They stand as far more objective and interesting works that build a thesis beyond “We think this thing is cool, and ergo we are cool for liking it.” And yet Dear Mr. Watterson and its ilk, for all their flaws, at times do tap into something uniquely special about the genre — something I had been longing for in literature since my youth.
Fan documentaries live and die by their own filmmaking competency — and surprisingly — it’s when they are too slick and well-produced that they stumble the most. It’s the ramshackle, desperate, self-propagandizing moments devoid of recognizable celebrities that I keep coming back for, and makes this sub-genre rise above its low aspirations to turn into something transcendent. While its commercial prospects are incredibly limited, perhaps the documentary that most sustains this magic is 2013’s The Smash Brothers. Boasting a runtime of four hours and eighteen minutes (which, for comparison, makes it 83 minutes longer than Hoop Dreams, and 40 minutes shorter than BBC’s six-part Planet Earth II docuseries), the documentary presents the story of a group of dudes competing to be the best at a game so antiquated that the hardware to run it has become scarce. While the documentary aims for the practiced functionality of an extra long Behind the Music or 30 for 30 episode, it’s hounded by increasingly obvious budget issues — $5,000 of its $12,000 budget had to be put on the director’s credit cards — and an assumed reverence for a community that could charitably be described as “largely inconsequential” at best and “the site for multiple grooming and sexual assault allegations” at worst. The result is a deeply heartfelt, sloppy production, and the odd tonal blend is felt every step of the way.
Much of it is illustrative of what not to do in a documentary. The narration sounds distractingly like someone doing an impression of a generic documentary voice, and then even more distractingly is inexplicably absent for much of the final hour. An overseas trip to Tokyo to compete against Japanese “Super Smash Bros. Melee” players is backed by a Korean song. A mysterious, unremarked upon figure is prominently framed laying in bed and reading a book during the majority of interview footage with “Smash” player “Lucky”. No amount of tense background music is able to raise the endearingly small stakes to the level of earth-shattering consequence the production seems to suggest. In over four hours the Bechdel test is never passed, unless you count gameplay footage of Samus punching Sheik.
The fact that exactly one person interviewed seems to know how to speak on camera shouldn’t be exceptional enough to praise, but it is. Documentaries about obscure subcultures gain their power based on their subjects’ ability to elevate their stories into myth, and few are more adept at this than Christopher “Wife” Fabiszak. He’s the keeper of all knowledge of the community and precise in his verbal lacerations, a scalpel housed in a Funko Pop. Seemingly able to muster a hot take on any topic presented, he’s clearly relishing his moment in the sun and lends the proceedings a weight and clarity that camcorder footage of CRT screens could not capture. What else he has going on in his life is unclear, and if what we’re witnessing here is what his life has been building to, he fills the role so successfully that you don’t even for a moment consider that it’s all been in vain.
While the documentary sells itself on the rise of a handful of elite players, the secondary meta-narrative that slowly arises is far more compelling and the real, hidden appeal of this sub-sub-genre. There’s a perpetual low-level buzz of loneliness that blasts into an airhorn any time the subject of high school, women, or social interaction arises. One player, “Wes,” is described as “a fucking badass” by “Chillindude”, the type of truly average young male that Hollywood has never come close to casting as an everyman. Yet, when we meet “Wes,” he appears to be merely caffeinated. “PC Chris” is designated to be “cool as shit” but mostly just seems like one of three people in the documentary you can imagine Starbucks hiring. At what is supposed to be the climatic moment where the community proves their obsession is something worthy of respect (at least on a competitive level), one interviewee underlines its importance by stating that “The ‘Halo’ kids were watching and the girls were watching,” and it’s hard not to be transported back to whenever you felt the most unnecessarily vulnerable.
“Punk” is not a word you’d use to describe any of the documentary’s players, yet the film’s shaggy presentation gives everything an outsider, DIY charm nevertheless. Very little in the documentary subverts the stereotypes you’d assume its subjects possess — these are people, after all, who have built much of their identity around their skills at an increasingly dated commercial product designed for children, and frequently project their frustrations into the gameworld. What it does instead is find the humanity within that stereotype that is so easy to overlook. No matter what the particulars are, there’s always a heartbreaking beauty in watching people clinging to the edge of some meaning before they fall into an offscreen abyss. Sure, it could be easy to roll your eyes at the competitive scene’s early champion “Ken” earnestly saying “I had the eye of the tiger,” but at the end of the day sincerity beats irony, and the enthusiasm of everyone involved makes for a text that’s more compelling than it is worthy of mockery. It’s hard not to watch this brand of anti-escapism and flashback to the summer I spent playing board games with the same five people, or the odd little rivalries formed between departments at the grocery store I worked at in high school, or the incompetent Little League team I played on that bumbled its way into tournament victory — communities and conflicts that felt so meaningful at the time, but whose stakes could only really be felt unless you were there. To an outsider, these fan projects never successfully sell a niche property or even much of an aspiration to enter the circumscribed social worlds they present. Instead, they offer a roundabout portrait of the self, what it looks like to love something so much that you’ll do anything to make the little corner of the world you’ve found yourself in matter. That something like The Smash Brothers succeeds for four hours and eighteen minutes is maybe its most impressive move of all.
And I think that’s what I kind of love about these fan projects, particularly the clumsy ones, even when I have little interest in their source material. Something that’s striving for mainstream respectability like Dear Mr. Watterson misses the point of what these projects can achieve — it’s the sloppy quality, over-enthusiasm, and end product that seems to be held together by tape that provides an honest aesthetic of what a niche obsession feels like. It’s manic and uncool and has no regard for your time or interest, and those are the elements of obsession that no scripted film ever quite captures. “Harry Potter” and Super Smash Bros. may be about action, adventure, and triumph, but their respective fan projects are mired in marginalia, passionately brought into existence to please no one but the people who created them. This, more than anything that happens in their source material, is something I understand all too well. I don’t want to pretend that these communities are something to be uncritically celebrated, or ignore the dangers of how specific fans elevating their love for a product to a personal art can create its own insular, toxic power structures. But there’s a uniquely un-slick humanity in a fandom lionizing itself, I think, in a time where earnestness is so often derided. Just as the only people who can change the world are those foolish enough to believe they can, so too do these fans put in the effort to fight against an indifferent public in order to crystallize their pet obsession into something more. Hyper-specific though their topics may be, it’s the kind of hero’s journey I can relate to.
