#its a lot more bittersweet with the context of 20020. but still

[wander-wren]

you are so right! i like your point about it being perfect and imperfect—i feel like it does achieve its goals very very well, at the expense of other things that would be at odds with those goals. we can’t ask one story to be all things.

now, we definitely can discuss and critique why it had those goals in the first place and how it gets to that point, what biases and ideas of the author that reveals, all of that. we can discuss whether those goals, themes, everything were good ones, whether they were worth picking over other things. that’s more subjective, i think.

it’s also pretty obvious that the story is about america and football as opposed to, say, the ongoing existential crisis of a devout muslim in 17776 iraq because america and football is the author’s area of interest/expertise. and now we’re running up on an age-old issue in literary spaces, diversity and lived experience and what authors are allowed and obligated to write. so essentially at a certain point you’re not just asking for the story to be different, but for a different person to have made it entirely.

which is not me arguing to protect the poor, poor disenfranchised white men who aren’t allowed to write anymore. far from it. i just think it gets a bit silly at that point? yeah, it would be great for [insert minority group of your choice] to have written a story in a similar world about [insert themes and plot]. but that’s not the story we got. we got 17776. and jon bois doesn’t own the concept of immortal people on a far-future earth, or sentient spaceships, or multimedia narratives. historically, we’ve gotten some pretty cool shit out of humans going “hey, i like this thing you did. i’m gonna make my own version.”

and, hey, i love a good dystopian narrative as much as the next person. there are some pretty gut-wrenching thought experiments in this story’s tag that i would be interested to see expanded upon. but you’re right—i’ve never read a story like this. a happy post-apocalypse, who’d have thought? a sort of love letter to ordinary people and ordinary things and the way stories can be made out of disparate, arbitrary parts. i wouldn’t change it either.

i’ve been trying to look for critique of 17776 but it’s actually quite hard to find. not because i dislike it (i don’t think you could look at my blog and come away thinking i dislike Football Satellite Story) but because i just like to see critiques of things i like sometimes. opens up the old brain.

plus there are certainly things that i could critique in the story, i just haven’t quite figured out how to articulate them. most of them feel like quite low-hanging fruit, anyway—the whole narrative is predicated on time essentially pausing in the 2020s, plus apparently all bad things have been eradicated (war, hunger, money, i don’t know if it’s explicitly stated but i assume bigotry etc). american government still exists as it does today, at least in name—there is a president and governors. quite a lot to unpack there.

i read 17776 as a utopian story. it’s not a perfect world, but as jon bois says several times, the imperfections are necessary, deliberate, chosen. therefore….don’t they make it perfect? up for debate. it’s certainly the only utopia i’ve encountered that i respect, for the simple fact that it never turns out to be a lie or boring.

that said, there is SO much of the world of 17776 that we don’t see. we don’t see disabled folks, and we especially don’t explore what that looks like with the nanos. we don’t see people from the places that were underwater, that juice tells us survived and “continue their cultural practices elsewhere.” we don’t see anyone wrestle with the premise, that is—no more children. no making new families. no change. a flooded world. an infinite sun. the unfairness of everyone who didn’t make it to the end of the world. and of course you can say, to the last bit, that it’s been 15,000 years, people have already done all of that wrestling. you’re telling me it doesn’t still hit them?

that’s not even touching on the fact that we don’t see the rest of the world. we don’t know what happened to it, what the politics are, what land has even survived. jon bois is very insistent on glossing over all of the difficult questions.

and i’ve written before about how i admire that, for the guts alone if nothing else. why don’t people die? who knows! what about this bad thing? it’s gone. what about this problem with the world? it’s fine.

so 17776 is flawed, mostly in that it is deeply american and apparently uninterested in engaging with the less comfortable parts of its premise. for the first, i want to know what else anyone expected from a story titled “17776: What Football Will Look Like In The Future.” for the second, i maintain that changing that would require that jon bois had simply written a different story.

17776 is ultimately a positive narrative to me. i almost said hopeful, but it’s not that. there’s no hope after the end of the world, there’s no need for hope. it’s just content, despite the occasional dips. this is the part i struggle to articulate, because i so clearly understand where jon bois needed to go, and it is obvious that he was steamrolling over any pesky bits that would detract or distract or slow him down in getting there (again: guts). i respect it.

would telling those grittier narratives, turning this utopia into a dystopia, be worthwhile? certainly, to some. would it wreck the existing themes/message? very probably. would that make a better story? do the themes deserve to be wrecked because the way they were presented is flawed?

up to you.