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xandromedovnaOkay, unpopular opinion time: I think Family Shatters is better than Zero, and I actually kinda like it. It’s still not the best spin-off miniseries, but I get what they were going for. I think to understand and appreciate Family Shatters, you have to be familiar with and enjoy fluff as a genre. In one sense, I think it knows what their audience wants, but because we don’t really care about the characters beforehand and crucially we don’t create the fluff ourselves, it falls short of its intentions. But I think Family Shatters points out an important tension between what fans want a show to do and what they want to do to a show.
Some have interpreted Family Shatters as season 19, but it’s framed more as a spin-off miniseries in the vein of Grifball. It has a similar canonicity to the PSAs and in some ways feels like Zero’s reinterpretation of the tradition. FS is a parody of 90s sitcoms and puts the characters of Zero in situations where wacky hijinks can ensue, such as trips to the beach or killer wasps. But like the problems with categorizing Zero itself, the question of how to take FS makes it hard to embrace on its own terms. But reading FS as s19 or as a miniseries misunderstands its point, which is to show us who these characters are outside the necessities of plot.
It's important to keep in mind that RvB is itself a fantext in relation to Halo, and therefore it often uses genres and tropes common in fandom. As such, it makes sense that they would embrace fluff. With a name derived from both ‘fluffy’ and ‘fluff piece’, fluff is a genre of fic that has happy endings, little conflict, often little plot, and an intent to uplift the audience (“Fluff”). As the name suggests, fluff pieces are rarely taken seriously as anything other than fan service, a way to gain and keep an engaged audience (Guarriello 1.7). However, fluff does important critical work in relation to the fandom, and is itself engaged in the same power and story dynamics as other fics, such as racism (Guarriello 4.10). (Perhaps not surprisingly but disappointingly, there seems to be very little critical attention given to fluff, and I really hope I don’t have to be that bitch who writes a whole thing about it; if anyone has recs for journal articles or books about fluff, let me know!)
In my experience, fluff is much more common in fandoms for dramas and tragedies, where the characters live in a crapsack world and have very little downtime or room for joy. As fix-its for the storyworld, fluff allows the characters breathing room from the plot, shifts attention to slice-of-life pleasures, takes relationships seriously as sources of comfort, and centres joy. Fluff can often provide comfort to balance out things that happen in canon, and it can also make space for character development and fleshing out of the storyworld with less urgency. While often dismissed as frivolous, that frivolity is part of the point: fluff as a genre argues that these moments of joy, connection, and comfort are just as important as the angst and pain of the canon plot.
Personally, I find the characters a lot more interesting in Family Shatters than in Zero. Perhaps this is because we know so little of them in canon, although that is also what limits FS from being more compelling. Unfortunately, if you don’t come to care about the characters in Zero, which few of us did, there’s little reason to invest in these characters more without the plot to ground you. That said, one interesting effect here is that because we’re expected to know the characters from Zero, FS doesn’t have to waste time explaining the relationships and can simply show us the shenanigans. This is the strength of most fics, which would be considerably longer if they also had to rehash canon in detail for a novice audience.
On the other hand, what differentiates FS from other fluff fics is that the author of the fluff is also the author of the canon itself. Part of the joy of writing fluff is as a commentary on canon, by speaking back to the story and saying ‘these characters deserve to be happy in ways you refuse to grant them’. It’s not just that the characters deserve nice things, it’s that the fan’s contribution to the storyworld is providing that space. If that space is already provided by the same people writing the original story, it leaves little room to reimagine the story, and also raises the question of why this isn’t part of the main story in the first place.
The other complicating factor is that FS is based mostly around high-concept and referential stories, with many of the episodes shifting RvB into different genres. The episodes are self-contained and vary wildly between 90s sitcom, film noir, zombie film, bodyswap, and other genres. That variability can make reception of the show uneven if there’s not enough connective tissue to justify investment in the characters or the story; for example, Community also relies heavily on referential and high-concept stories, but they are grounded in a larger story world with compelling characters who are given depth through these stories. I think this actually works in FS’s favour, as we know so little about these characters that anything they contribute to our knowledge of them is adding depth. Perhaps this is why I’m more invested in them here than in Zero, well that and the fact that at least the stories are new instead of s1-17 reheated.
To be clear, I’m not necessarily claiming FS is good, just that I enjoyed it more than Zero, and I think it’s partially because it understands the importance of fluff as a genre and as a counterpoint to the main plot, even if its execution is plagued by similar issues. I liked the treatment of dad jokes in 1x2 and indestructible wasps of 1x9, and I think this series has potential, although it’s certainly a hard sell even within the fandom. And yet, I definitely hated the characters less after watching it, so maybe it did what it set out to do.
Works Cited
“Fluff.” Fanlore, Organization for Transformative Works, accessed 2 Apr. 2023.
Guarriello, Nicholas-Brie. “Affective Racial Politics in How to Get Away with Murder Fan Fiction.” Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 29, 2019.
