ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the tensions within fandom and tease out their impact on the world of media industries. Fantagonism captures tensions within fandom, the fans struggle to shape the production of the text and meaning from it, and the ability of producers to respond to and incorporate these struggles into serial reproduction over time, disciplining any petulance or rabidity. The industrial dynamics of media franchising feed fantagonism, reproducing popular culture in an iterative manner that, gradually or radically, aims media texts at a multiplicity of new markets, audiences, tastes, and forms of fan engagement. The Suicide Squad case, then, represents not just activist fan attempts to intervene in powerful cultural institutions like film criticism, but also a more complex and ambivalent line of tension over privilege in fandom and domination over cultural value and meaning. Measuring industry response to and management of the kind of antagonism is tricky.
