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In this article, we integrate Nietzsche’s visions of self-overcoming with a Žižekian toolbox to explore how ‘market-based progress’ is upheld through a fabric of ideological fantasies. Through an analysis of Huel, a nutritionally complete British food brand aligned with progressive and techno-utopian discourses, we reveal a fantasmatic structure centred on pragmatism, the search for unassailable truth and continuance of a prehistoric legacy. These fantasies function as illusory support for acceptance that humanity’s great overcoming is singularly achieved through market logic and ethos. Here, a fetishistic inversion centres on subjects believing that the detached spectatorialism of consumption is closer to the act of the Nietzschean ‘Overhuman’ than it is to its inverse, the ‘last human’. This article provides the parameters for how ideological fantasy insulates the market from its material deadlocks and concludes with a conceptualization of the post-sovereign consumer’s subjectification along the fantastical contours of market-based progress.

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Following Breton’s writings on surreality, we outline how unexpected challenges to consumers’ assumptive worlds have the potential to alter how their escape from reality is experienced. We introduce the concept of ‘surrealist disruption’ to describe ontological discontinuities that disrupt the common-sense frameworks normally used by consumers and that impact upon their ability to suspend their disbeliefs and experience self-loss. To facilitate our theorization, we draw upon interviews with consumers about their changing experiences as viewers of the realist political TV drama House of Cards against a backdrop of disruptive real-world political events. Our analyses reveal that, when faced with a radically altered external environment, escape from reality changes from a restorative, playful experience to an uneasy, earnest one characterized by hysteretic angst, intersubjective sense-making and epistemological community-building. This reconceptualizes escapism as more emotionally multivalenced than previously considered in marketing theory and reveals consumers’ subject position to an aggregative social fabric beyond their control.

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Through a micro-ethnographic engagement with consumers' bingewatching experiences of the web-TV series House of Cards, this videography explores what we consider to be the 'extended frontiers' of escapism. In contrast to passive/active classifications of escapism which risk reducing escapist fare to a textual resource which can be categorised discretely at the point of consumption, we consider 'sustained encounters' with escapist fare as appropriable textures characterised by ongoing and less immediately discernible processes. Drawing upon the concept of hyperdiegesis, we consider potentially 'projective' forms of narrative transportation in binge-watching; heterochronic breaks from normal patterns of time; and post-object behaviours. In doing so, we outline how forms of escapism traditionally considered passive may under certain conditions represent much richer and more complex enterprises than previously imagined.

PurposeAn effective means to promote optimal nutrition for any group of consumers is to expand nutrition professionals' understanding of the cohort's food choice processes. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the situated food choice influences of the videogames subculture; a known consumption enclave for calorie dense low nutrient foods. The investigation is conducted by application of an abbreviated version of Furst et al.'s model of the food choice process as a conceptual framework.Design/methodology/approachThis investigation uses an interpretive research strategy and adopts a qualitative approach to data collection and analysis. In total, 14 purposively sampled semi‐structured, in‐depth interviews were carried out with members of the videogames subculture.FindingsInformants' food choices and preferences during social gameplay were strongly influenced by beliefs related to appropriate food behaviour and ideal characteristics of foods suitable for grazing. All informants described some constraints imposed by the physical surroundings and environmental nature of gameplay such as issues of messiness and inability to eat with utensils while gaming. Social structure played an important role in informants' food choices, and much of this structure was built around the hedonic intersection of food and gameplay. Informants' food choices were also influenced by poor cooking abilities and unwillingness to devote much effort to meal preparation during gameplay.Practical implicationsUsed in conjunction with theories of behavioural change, the insights gathered here should help inform interventions and communications strategies. Both commercial and social marketing domains have a role to play in positively influencing gamers' diets.Originality/valueThe paper offers social marketers insight into the influences that underpin unhealthful food choices within the videogames subculture and how to positively bring about change.