“The Dave Cullen Show” is one of the fandom YouTube channels I watch frequently. The channel…

“is dedicated to Movie Reviews, Film critique, discussion of TV Shows, Pop Culture, and Video Games in my usual caustic and sardonic manner.”

Much of his work involves fandoms, and I largely concur with what he says about them (except for his love for the 1970s TV show, Space: 1999. But I digress.)

This embedded video is a recent one. It embodies much of the reasoning behind why I wrote The Catholicpunk Manifesto. I don’t know what, if any, religious faith Cullen has, but that’s no matter. His thesis is that recent pop culture fandoms (Star Trek, Marvel Cinematic, Star Wars, Disney, etc.) have all sold out to the extremist left-wing agenda and are pandering to satisfy the social justice warrior ‘woke’ crowd. I can only really speak for Star Trek, but I think he’s spot-on. I don’t watch the other current fandom offerings much, I stick to Star Trek and retro fandoms from decades ago. My knowledge of other current fandoms, such as the Star Wars, etc. that I cited, is informed by the opinions of a diverse group of online people whose opinions I respect, and they would agree with Cullen.

One of the intriguing things he proposes in this video is that fans should try and, well, ‘reclaim what we lost’ by creating new works of fiction. Give up patronizing the current pop cultural offerings and just build our own new culture. This is straight-up *punking and I cover a Catholic version of this in the entire Catholicpunk Manifesto.

He offers an interesting plan: start by creating fan fiction. Fan fiction is original creative works that are set in the established works of others. For example, let’s say you really, really, love Star Trek. So you write your own works set in the Star Trek universe. You can’t make any money off of this as it’s someone else’s intellectual property, so you do it for love (true amateur work.) If you have the technical chops for it, create Star Trek fan films. Again, you can’t make money, but Cullen’s point is that in doing all this you connect to a built-in fanbase that will critique your work and your craft will improve. After a fashion, you can utilize your sharpened creative talents and begin making your own original work.

Ultimately, a counterculture of alternative fandoms will arise and grow. Perhaps, if the current culture continues along its trajectory of self-destruction, this ‘alternative’ pop culture will become the dominant. 

Again, as I said in Catholicpunk Manifesto, punkers should provide a way out of the current cultural decline. Or, a way out of the apocalyptic mess the elites are sending us towards.

If you wish to explore written fan fiction, take a look at FanFictionNet and the Archive of Our Own. For filmed works, go to YouTube and just type in the search bar the name of the fandom and ‘fan films’ (i.e. ’Star Trek fan films’) or similar search terms.

PS: ‘Woke’ and ‘woke-ism’ as I understand it, is that sudden ‘awakening’ to the injustices of society and the radical need to eradicate them. Nothing wrong with that, except for the way the wokesters go about it:  unilaterally imposing a radical, extremist left-wing ideology upon society. There is no tolerance for divergent points of view. No mercy or sympathy for those who aren’t woke: they are ‘canceled’ (deprived of a livelihood, de-platformed from social media, and the whole, typical left-wing banishment to a (symbolic) gulag. I have no problem with the concept of social justice, in principle. But the ‘woke’ way is destructive and will lead to a backlash by the extremist right-wing anti-wokesters. 

Are you a creative Catholic? "The Catholicpunk Manifesto" is my new book exhorting Catholics to apply their faith to change the culture for the better!

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