In case you haven’t been keeping up, Marvel’s brand new show is basically “Let’s Stuff Our Feet In Our Mouth Over and Over Till We Choke On Them.” No, not Iron Fist, though that’s certainly an apt description of the PR shambles surrounding IF. I’m talking, yet again, about the other PR shambles, surrounding Marvel’s godawful Nazi-Captain-America Secret Empire story line. The company recently released a statement urging readers to follow the Secret Empire plot line to its conclusion before making any judgments.

There’s so much wrong with their statement that it’s actually mind-boggling.

First off, let me just reiterate how horrific the plot line itself is. Here’s a good recap from Polygon, but if you don’t feel like clicking the link - Captain America, the brainchild of two Jewish men who wanted to call the US out on its relative indifference to Hitler and fascism, has now somehow been a secret HYDRA agent for his entire comics existence. That alone is stunningly anti-Semitic (and at this point I’m going to link once again to Jessica Plummer’s essay on that subject), but author Nick Spencer didn’t stop there. Magneto, a f***ing Holocaust survivor, in case anybody somehow forgot, is a HYDRA yes-man. Jewish-Romani Wanda Maximoff has also been dragged into this unholy mess, for some reason joining HYDRA Cap’s new team of Toxic Avengers. Oh, and apparently HYDRA Cap can lift Thor’s hammer, because that’s totally how Thor’s hammer works.

So all of that is bad. Really bad. But clearly once this company starts messing up, it can’t stop to save its life. One of the most galling lines in Marvel’s statement is that Steve Rogers’s “heart and soul -- his core values, not his muscle or his shield -- are what save the day against Hydra.” For one thing, to the best of my knowledge, Steve Rogers is the only character in this godforsaken plot line that has the admittedly flimsy excuse of being brainwashed/retconned by HYDRA; as far as I’ve been able to tell, Nick Spencer hasn’t trotted out similar excuses for either Magneto or Wanda. For another thing… sure, Marvel’s statement sounds pretty on paper, but holy hell, that is not how they’ve been marketing the story up until this point. If that was really what they wanted readers to take away from Secret Empire, a logical place to start promotions-wise would be with the concept that, wow, HYDRA is being a putrid fascist staph infection and our heroes have to fight that, tooth and nail.

Right?

Yeah, it really would. So golly, I wonder why Marvel plans to slap the HYDRA aesthetic onto their apps, their digital comics platform, a smattering of non-Marvel comics news sites, some physical comic book stores, and even the employees thereof.

Let’s be clear about one thing: no matter how much Nick Spencer protests that HYDRA isn’t a Nazi organization in his comics run, Marvel as an overall multiplatform franchise has already ensured that HYDRA can be nothing but a Nazi organization. As I’ve written before, by engaging in a massive transmedia marketing effort that includes not just the fan-empowering aspect of licensing (T-shirts and other merch, a point to which I’ll return later), but also a vastly popular movie series whose viewership has easily outpaced the number of people buying comics, Marvel basically made sure that its brand identity is tied to one single unified storyworld. Hence, they can’t really get away on a narrative level with such massive character inconsistencies as in Secret Empire, because people expect consistent characters across transmedia platforms, and HYDRA Cap isn’t consistent with MCU Cap in the least. Neither is HYDRA itself, for that matter -- the comics organization doesn’t have the same simple cause-effect relationship with Nazism that the MCU organizational does, as Jessica Plummer points out elsewhere in her piece, but that doesn’t matter a jot in a world post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, when what people see is overwhelmingly HYDRA = Nazi. Congratulations, Marvel, you played yourself.

On top of that, this is the world of the Internet we’re talking about. 59% of people these days don’t read articles, just headlines. A 2015 study showed that humans’ attention span is now literally worse than a goldfish’s. Sure, the aca-fans and just-plain-fans are going to read either the comics or angry articles/blog posts/tweetstorms about the comics, but come on, Marvel, when you:

(1) release a comic about regular-white-collar-guy “Hank Johnson, Agent of HYDRA,”

(2) don’t just erase Wanda and Pietro’s Jewish and Romani heritage in the MCU but also make them volunteer for HYDRA’s experiments holy cannoli what is wrong with you,

(3) cap this off by letting the set dresser for Captain America: Civil War put a cross on the wall of Wanda’s bedroom in the Avengers tower...

...then you are giving those fans no faith that you’ll actually carry off this whole Steve-is-such-a-cinnamon-roll-that-he-shakes-off-HYDRA’s-brainwashing plot line you say you’re going to do. You just look like one big anti-Semitic HYDRA apologist.

And honestly, for most people in this day and age -- the regular people who don’t obsess over this stuff like yours truly -- what they see in eight seconds or fewer is all they’re going to care about. And what people are going to see with Secret Empire is that infamous “Hail HYDRA” comics panel. They’re going to see the HYDRA symbol on the shirts of whichever comics store employees actually go along with the awful marketing gimmick. They don’t have time to wait for an entire story line to play out over however many weeks -- especially because, as Colin Spacetwinks breaks down in this long, yet incredibly detailed, essay, these days comics aren’t just competing with themselves for a share of their audience’s paycheck, but also with Twitter and webcomics and manga and Netflix. People could devote a generous chunk of their time to this story line, or they could take one look at the Internet furor, say “huh, there’s a Nazi,” and then go do literally anything else.

(Lest you, dear reader or Marvel employee, become tempted to dismiss all this because comics are fiction, let me just point you to the large body of research establishing fiction’s power to influence people’s beliefs and emotions. Start here, or here, or here. Also here.)

Marvel isn’t even the only franchise that has a terrible tendency to market fascism, either, though it’s the most visible at the moment because of its continual public drunkstumbling. The Hunger Games had that Capitol Couture campaign with L’Oreal, circa the first movie. Star Wars is arguably even worse on this front. I love Star Wars, don’t get me wrong, and the movies alone definitely don’t glorify the Empire -- but dear god, its merchandise gives me the willies. So much Darth Vader, so many stormtroopers, so much Kylo Ren. The Empire was aesthetically based on the Third Reich, for starters. Darth Vader is a little more complex than that, definitely, because the original trilogy gave him something of a redemption arc. I’d argue, though, that dying was a crucial part of that redemption for Vader, because up till he saved Luke from Palpatine, he had still been complicit in or a primary agent of a lot of bad stuff. So I won’t lie, I’m a little uncomfortable with seeing the guy’s mask on mugs and T-shirts and Halloween costumes -- especially after that scene in Rogue One that a lot of people really seem to love. That’s the most terrifying scene in that whole movie, to me. It’s the most directly, actively violent Vader has been in the entire saga. It reminded me so much of Kylo and his uncontrollable anger, the needless murder and destruction he causes wherever he goes (and in some ways I’d say Kylo is worse than Vader; I’m thinking mainly of the First Order’s uniquely stomach-churning method of stormtrooper “recruitment”).

And yet we see Darth Vader and the stormtroopers and Kylo Ren everywhere on merchandise. In fact, Lucasfilm was banking on Kylo Ren being a “breakout character” after The Force Awakens, so they slapped his mask on a ton of merch. These characters who are agents of not just violence but oppression are being marketed to the general public, to kids.

Admittedly, licensing and merch can be a double-edged sword. Kelli Stanley, as I mentioned in my previous hot take on Marvel and transmedia, has talked about how licensing characters and their super-insignias, putting them on all manner of merchandise “inspire[s] individual identification and storylines of their own.” Make no mistake, I’m glad in one respect for this aspect of transmedia branding, because screw you, Nick Spencer, I’m still going to wear my five Captain America shirts on a regular basis because no terrible HYDRA storyline can take my beloved anti-fascist hero away from me. But then, on the other hand, encouraging “individual identification” with characters like Kylo Ren is… just really awful. I can’t think of another way to put it. It’s literally encouraging people to consume and identify with the image of a fascist murderer, which can also have the effect of downplaying the atrocity of such a character’s actions -- because how bad can he really be if he’s on a cereal box?

In a larger, more general sense, this is my argument for a more thematically aware, more ethical form of entertainment marketing. The field needs more English and film and cultural studies and history majors* -- people who have studied feminist and queer and postcolonial theory, who understand that stories don’t occur in a historical or cultural vacuum, who are actually equipped to analyze and understand the movies and TV shows they’re marketing. Maybe then the marketing for these texts won’t go completely against their central themes -- which doesn’t fix every single issue with Marvel (because as Colin Spacetwinks says, there are so many), but it would be a start. Honestly, though, for now I’d just be happy if franchises stopped glorifying cruel, oppressive regimes, through their stories and their marketing alike**. Especially in these times, entertainment marketers for giant franchises like Marvel and Star Wars absolutely have an ethical responsibility to understand how people consume stories and market their own stories so as not to send incredibly dangerous messages. We get enough authoritarianism in the real world. We don’t need subliminal or obvious glorifications thereof in pop culture, too.

*Coincidentally, I’d love to have a career in entertainment marketing, so you know… if you’re looking for somebody, hit a girl up.

**And to head off anybody who might try to say this argument is anti-free speech, may I (1) redirect you to this wonderful XKCD comic on the subject, and (2) remind you that I’m talking about private businesses here. The free market.