The Truth about the Mainstream…

I want to talk about something that I think a lot of people feel but struggle to articulate. The mainstream is not a meritocracy. And I don’t mean that in the sense that the best stuff doesn’t always rise to the top — that’s been somewhat true in any era. What I mean is that for a significant and influential segment of the modern audience, quality is not the first filter. Ideological alignment is.
Before a lot of these people will even evaluate your work, they need to know where you stand. Not creatively — politically. Socially. They need to know who you associate with, who endorses you, whether the right people have cosigned your existence. If you pass that test, then the conversation about quality begins. If you don’t, your work is pre-judged before a single page is read, a single frame is watched, or a single second is played. That’s an ideological clearance system dressed up as taste.
You can see this play out in two directions. The first is how quickly a creator goes from respected to irrelevant the moment they’re cancelled. One day they’re brilliant, award-worthy, influential. Then they say the wrong thing or refuse to perform the expected allegiance, and overnight the narrative shifts — suddenly they always sucked, their work was overrated, they were never that good. The work didn’t change. Not a single word of it. The only thing that changed was the ideological standing of the person who made it. And the people who spent years praising that work will retroactively rewrite their own opinions to match the new social consensus.
The second direction is how people outside the approved sphere are treated. If you’re not cosigned by the mainstream gatekeepers, if your audience is perceived as the wrong demographic, if your views don’t align with the accepted positions, you will never be judged fairly. Your work will always be filtered through who you are and who supports you rather than what you actually made.
The mainstream isn’t just a description of what’s popular — it’s a source of validation. Being part of it means being recognized by the institutions, the press, the award bodies, and the industry circles that collectively decide what counts. If you exist outside that sphere, those institutions will actively delegitimize your work. Not by engaging with it critically, but by pretending it doesn’t exist or framing your success as lesser because it didn’t come through the approved channels.
The Rippaverse has done over fifteen million in sales. We’ve built a universe, a fanbase, and distribution infrastructure from scratch. And the mainstream comic press largely pretends we don’t exist — not because the work is bad, but because validating what we’ve done would mean admitting their approval was never the prerequisite they told everyone it was. The prerequisite to being taken seriously in the modern mainstream isn’t quality. It’s compliance. And once you see that, you can’t unsee it.