Stephen King’s ‘Misery’ and the Naturalization of Toxic Fandom
I’ve been reading Stephen King for fourteen years now, and only this past week did I finally get around to reading Misery. I snagged a paperback copy at the airport more out of desperation than interest, loathe to board my flight without something to read. I figured I’d have a taut thriller to breeze through on my return trip home — I was not expecting a full blown examination of fan culture.
The gist of Misery is this: popular author Paul Sheldon gets into a car accident that mangles his legs. He is being nursed back to health by Annie Wilkes, his biggest fan. Annie, however, is also keeping him prisoner in her home, where no one knows he is. When she learns that Paul has killed off her favorite character, Misery Chastain, in his latest novel, she demands he write a new book, just for her, reviving Misery. She tortures him throughout, and it becomes quite clear she has no intention of letting him live once he finishes the new novel.
Misery is a book loaded with text and subtext alike about writing and the relationship between creator and audience. It is perhaps King’s most personal novel, although in interviews he always denies the idea that Misery’s main character, author Paul Sheldon, is entirely based on himself. Beyond just the comparison of author to character, the novel talks a lot about writing and addiction, both topics heavily informed by King’s personal life.
King says Misery is a novel about cocaine, and I say yes, but also…
…but also, Misery is a stunningly prophetic novel about the rise and normalization of toxic fandom culture.
This idea first wormed its way inside my head when, around 230 pages in, Annie takes an axe and chops Paul’s left foot clean off. She does it as a punishment for Paul’s snooping, telling him “don’t you blame me. It’s your own fault.”
At this point, it became hard not to read into the situation presented: Paul writes a series of novels about Misery Chastain, and Annie is his self proclaimed number one fan. We can take these titles and expand them, make them broader, for the purposes of metaphor: Paul, as the creator of any content, and Annie, as the fandom of said content.
Because while Annie is a heinous caricature of a fan, purposefully made villainous for the sake of the horror story being told, when viewed as a metaphor for the ways fandom operates in 2019 she no longer seems so exaggerated. In a time where creators and actors are constantly leaving social media amidst hateful messages from supposed fans, where Star Wars movies are criticized for having a female lead, and where the trolling from online Marvel “fans” leads Rotten Tomatoes to change their policy about early reactions, it’s easy to look at Annie Wilkes — a character written in 1987 before social media was even a thought — and view her as downright prophetic for the power that fandom now claims.
Throughout the novel, as Annie tortures and berates Paul, she often kisses his cheek and tells him that she loves him. She makes him burn his new novel, an original story unrelated to the Misery books, telling him she’s doing so for his own good. She then demands he write a new Misery book and stop wasting time on novels set outside of that world. In 1987, an easy read of this scene would be King’s fans discouraging him from stepping outside of the horror genre (indeed, King received a lot of hate mail that year for momentarily leaving horror and publishing The Eyes of the Dragon, a fantasy novel). Today, we can read that scene and correlate it with any number of fandoms:
We can view it as fans rebuking JK Rowling’s turn to adult fiction and their demand she return to Harry Potter. (A demand she has continued to meet.)
We can associate it with the large vocal outroar of online trolls regarding the 2016 reboot of Ghostbusters with an all female cast. (A new Ghostbusters movie, in continuity with the original duology, is coming next year.)
We can look at any damn decision Disney makes with Star Wars, whether it be fans clamoring for a return to male-lead stories, fans decrying the new characterization of Luke Skywalker in The Last Jedi, or fans collectively shunning Solo for offering an unasked-for look at the origin of Han Solo, complete with a new, younger actor in the role. (The box office returns on Solo have forced Disney and Lucasfilm to temporarily abandon their one Star Wars film a year model.)
I’m sure you can think of countless other ways to use this metaphor. Any time a fan fights against change or growth, we’re looking down the barrel of Annie Wilkes’ actions.
Another thing we often see in vocal fandoms these days is criticism based on expectation. What do I mean by this? Let’s look at The Last Jedi and certain criticisms thereof.
Often, fans will say they didn’t like The Last Jedi because it didn’t follow up on The Force Awakens in the way that they expected. Snoke was built up to be a big, mysterious force, and then was killed off without an explanation of his backstory. The criticism herein, then, is “I had a certain expectation that The Last Jedi would reveal things about Snoke, and it didn’t.” It’s judging content not based on what it is, but based on one’s own preconceived notions of what it should be.
Annie Wilkes is certainly guilty of criticism based on expectations. When Paul begins writing Annie her new book, she reads his first chapter and makes him rewrite it. She admits to him that the writing is good, but that the story isn’t right. She tells him it doesn’t play fair with what came before it, and demands he redo it.
The whole reason Paul is writing this new novel in the first place stems from Annie’s inability to handle the death of Misery Chastain, a fictional character created and killed by Paul. Creators constantly receive harassment from fans over character deaths — sometimes, creators receive actual death threats.
Look at the blowback Rian Johnson is still receiving for killing Luke Skywalker. Check out some of the tweets from June 15, 2015, when Game of Thrones temporarily killed Jon Snow. How about when Lexa was killed off of The 100? Just type “angry fan reactions to character deaths” into a Google search and you’ll get pages upon pages of results; at the time of this writing, one of the top results is about a Walking Dead actor receiving death threats.
Let’s move away a bit from the one on one comparisons of Annie Wilkes’ actions and fans’ actions into something a bit broader and, to my mind, more concerning: Annie’s pattern of abuse gaslighted as acts of love. It’s here where the novel feels most prescient to me.
How often in the past few years have we seen properties criticized by fans for adding diversity? Big ticket items like Rey and Finn in The Force Awakens, Rose in The Last Jedi, the all female reboot of Ghostbusters, the addition of Brie Larson to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and the casting of Zazie Beetz in Deadpool 2 all immediately come to mind, and I’m confident that you could come up with a plethora of more examples given time to think or Google it.
Often when these criticisms arise, the fans hide their sexism or racism behind the guise of fan love: “Ghostbusters was my whole childhood, and I love it, and that’s why I hate this new one with women;” “Disney has turned Star Wars into SJW propaganda and I love the franchise too much to see that happen;” “Domino is not a black woman in the comics, stop changing these characters I love for the sake of diversity,” etc.
The constant harassment of creators, writers, and actors by fans who claim to love these universes and characters is an absolute oxymoron. This fan love exists in the same realm as Annie’s fan love — it’s nonexistent, a warped, twisted view on what love really means.
My friend George really loves Star Wars. George is the biggest Star Wars fan I’ve ever met in my life. He loves Rey, Finn, The Last Jedi, etc., and often calls for Disney to hire more women and minority directors and screenwriters to influence the universe behind the scenes. George’s desire for diversity in this fictional world, his want for viewpoints unlike his own, is an example of what love really looks like. George wants to share this galaxy far, far away, and he knows that bringing in fresh voices and diverse faces will only make it more accessible to more people. This is the key, I think, between a fan who genuinely loves their fictional worlds and one who doesn’t.
Recall the outrage over Ghostbusters: Well, this isn’t like my Ghostbusters. Apply that statement to any fandom, really. Behind the racism and sexism of many, there’s also a part of fandom that doesn’t like diversity because it’s a signal that this content is being given to new fans. That what was once just theirs now belongs to others, too.
An easier way to explain: think about that kid you went to middle school with who was really into those counterculture bands until they became popular. All of a sudden, once everyone else liked that band, that kid no longer liked them, claiming they’d “gone mainstream” or “sold out.” There’s a direct line between this mentality and what’s happening with franchises like Star Wars and the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
For decades, Star Wars was represented by Luke Skywalker, a white man. Now, the new franchise faces are Rey and Finn, a woman and a black man. These diverse choices were made purposefully by Disney with a point: to bring in a larger audience, to make Star Wars for everybody. For some fans, it’s the courting of new audiences that is the problem. Think of it like an abusive relationship: you can almost hear these fans calling out and asking, Why aren’t I good enough for you? Why do you need these fans? Why are you changing? (As for the MCU, check out the disconnect between critic and “fan” discussion surrounding Black Panther and Captain Marvel, and feel free to wonder why the only movies fans consider “overrated” in the franchise are the only ones with a black or female lead.)
This mode of thought is inherently selfish and deeply unhealthy. Annie Wilkes displays this same warped, selfish love when she demands Paul write her a new Misery novel just for her. (Fun fact: In On Writing, King reveals Misery was originally titled The Annie Wilkes Edition, which I kind of prefer.) She doesn’t want the world to get to experience Misery’s return, she wants it all for herself. Paul exists not as a human but as a word processor for her story desires — there’s subtext aplenty in the idea that Paul is chained to a bed.
As Annie makes Paul drink dirty mop water, makes him burn his manuscript, chops off his foot and his thumb, she continually claims she’s doing all of these things out of love. And as fans tank Star Wars movies at the box office, comment hateful messages on Captain Marvel online marketing, and harass author George R.R. Martin about his writing pace, they too claim they do so out of love.
For a novel written in 1987, Misery feels eerily ahead of its time. It’s not that King was writing about something that didn’t exist at the time, per se; he was, after all, writing about his own experience with fans. It’s just that the distance between audience and creator has been heavily diminished in the decades since. In Misery, Paul Sheldon ruminates on fan harassment via mail. These days, social media provides direct lines of immediate communication. If I wanted to tweet awful stuff to Stephen King right now, I absolutely could. This direct connection, and the media’s nonstop coverage of it, amplifies all of this negative toxic behavior. Because of this, Annie Wilkes, originally an exaggerated stand in for fandom, now seems an appropriate metaphor for toxic fandom in 2019.
