Episode 111: Canon, What Canon?

 
 
A monkey sits atop a cannon. The fansplaining logo is superimposed over the image.

In Episode 111, “Canon, What Canon?” Flourish and Elizabeth discuss listener questions about the relationship between fans and the source material—including what happens when fans are more interested in fanon than canon. Topics discussed include headcanon orthodoxy, fanworks about fanworks, characterization, “death of the text,” and whether Agent Dana Scully would prefer Herbal Essences or Pantene shampoo (and none of it strawberry-scented, damnit!).

 

Show Notes

[00:00:00] As always, our intro music is “Awel” by stefsax, used under a CC BY 3.0 license.

[00:01:36] You should go to Elizabeth’s workshop if you possibly can!! Information about the festival here.

[00:01:54] As usual, Flourish mispronounced “Bangor” with great certainty, despite having been there many times. Please, no one ever ask Flourish how to pronounce anything. We should all know this by now.

 
 

[00:02:28] Our interview with Emily Nussbaum was in Episode 105.

[00:05:17

 
Flourish sits on a park bench playing “Untitled Goose Game.”
 

[00:06:49] Our last episode was #110, “Ask Fansplaining Anything: Part 5.”

[00:10:17] Get all the information about our shipping survey on the Projects page of our website. Also, an illustration of Flourish looking things up on the computer:

 
 

[00:12:10]

 
 

[00:24:36] Freddie Prinze Jr.’s Star Wars rant.

[00:29:58]

 
 

[00:34:10] Elizabeth is referring to this Tumblr post and its kajillion repsonses.

[00:37:08] Our interstitial music is “Start The Day” by Lee Rosevere, used under a CC BY 3.0 license.

[00:41:55] If you want to feel like nothing has ever changed in fandom, not even a little bit, subject yourself to these alt.tv.x-files.creative comments from 1998.

[00:47:07] Draco in Leather Pants is so universally known that Fanlore simply refers to him as “Fanon Draco.” 😬

[00:58:32] This is what happens to characters when you write an AU fanfic.

[01:09:55] We heard from the person who reads only by trope in Episode 76, “Camp Austen.”


Transcript

[Intro music]

Flourish Klink: Hi, Elizabeth!

Elizabeth Minkel: Hi, Flourish!

FK: And welcome to Fansplaining, the podcast by, for, and about fandom!

ELM: This is Episode #111, one-one-one, entitled “Canon, What Canon?”

FK: [laughs] I mean…what canon?

ELM: Yes, what canon.

FK: Only fanon.

ELM: Ah, that’s the question!

FK: Only fanon!

ELM: That’s not even what you think!

FK: It’s not, I’m just sayin’.

ELM: I am much more Team Fanon. So we have gotten two listener responses, one email, one voicemail, that circle around this idea of certain types of, of fans in certain corners of fandom privileging fan interpretations over canon, and this seems to be a point of tension.

FK: Yeah, and it’s also just sort of an interesting thing to think about and talk about! I mean, it’s kind a perennial issue, right? An interpretation of texts.

ELM: Yes. All right, all right, calm down. First of all though, unrelated, I mean, uh, it’s not, it’s not completely unrelated cause it has to do with fandom, but I wanna say off the bat that I am going to be doing—I’m very excited about this, I’m a little bit nervous—I’m doing a workshop. A, a three-hour-long workshop about fanfiction at the Word Blue Hill Literary Festival, in Blue Hill, Maine. 

FK: Maine!

ELM: Maine. I’ve never been to Maine! It’s near Bangor.

FK: Bangor! Maine is great. 

ELM: How do people in America say Bangor?

FK: Bangor.

ELM: Bangor? So yes, it’s near, it’s near Bar Harbor and Bangor is the closest big city, large Maine city. Yeah, I’m excited. 

FK: That part of Maine in particular is super beautiful. And it’s like the perfect time of year.

ELM: OK. So this is the weekend of October 26, final weekend in October, this is the last episode before that happens, so I just wanted to say it up front. If you live anywhere near there or if you’ll be passing through there, you should consider coming. There’s a bunch of things happening around the town. I know that my workshop is on Saturday and I know that Emily Nussbaum is speaking about her book on Sunday. And we know a lot of people who like the podcast like Emily Nussbaum.

FK: Yay!

ELM: Including us. But my talk is gonna be about fanfiction and it’s meant for people who, like, know everything about it, write it all the time, read it all the time, all the way down to people who know nothing about it. If you’re not, like, in fandom, that kind of limits what you can do in a workshop, you know?

FK: Yeah.

ELM: In terms of talking about how the work relates to the rest of the group or to the source material. And so I decided to construct a workshop where you talk about the craft things that fanfiction helps you work on, not in the like “it helps you become a real writer” or something, but in the like, actual true writing craft things that fanfiction really helps you hone. Which is obviously anytime you write anything you’re improving certain areas, right.

FK: Right, right. And like fanfiction focuses on certain things.

ELM: I think fanfiction gives you a, a unique perspective—an unique opportunity to look at certain things like characterization, which we talked about a lot, or perspective or…I made a whole list. [FK laughs] 

FK: I guess people will just have to go to the workshop to find out more, huh?

ELM: Yeah, like, uh, narrative distance too I think is a huge one, and I always find myself talking about these things when I’m in “The Rec Center,” and then I’m like, “I’m just going on and on about, like, analyzing these fanfics, being like ‘well the narrative distance between blah, blah blah.’” But I actually do think that fanfiction writers are doing really complicated stuff with that that often people don’t even realize. So I think that this is a great opportunity to kind of dig into some of that stuff. So yeah. So we’ll put links in the show notes.

FK: Cool.

ELM: And if you’re anywhere near there you should come.

FK: Awesome. I wish I was near there. Cause Maine’s really beautiful in the fall.

ELM: Why don’t you come with me?

FK: I got stuff to do, Elizabeth!

ELM: I think I could get you somewhere to stay.

FK: I got stuff to do. I can’t come. Sorry.

ELM: Wow, you’re all like “Maine’s really beautiful” and then you’re like “I don’t care.”

FK: [laughing] More like “I have a job”!

ELM: It’s on the weekend, you fool! [FK sputters] All you do on the weekend is watch—you play “Untitled Goose Game,” [FK laughs] and you keysmash about Star Trek… 

FK: Well that’s true.

ELM: You’re not doing anything. In your house. You’re not even going outside in the beautiful fall weather of New York City. You’re just sitting in there playing your goose game!

FK: How do you know that I don’t take my goose game outside? [ELM laughs] My goose game is on the Nintendo Switch, a highly portable video game system!

ELM: Next time you go play the goose game outside I’m gonna need you to take a selfie that shows you both outside and playing the goose game.

FK: Well, I will! I just got the goose game last night, I haven’t really had an opportunity to. [ELM laughs] So, I mean, this is gonna happen.

ELM: OK, I’m really excited about this selfie. We’ll put it in the show notes also. You’re gonna do it out of spite. You’re gonna play it once outside and never again. Just spite.

FK: I’m glad that you totally understand this situation.

ELM: Yes. I don’t care! I’m glad, I’m out of spite forcing you to do it once.

FK: The goose game is entirely about doing things out of spite, so it’s perfect.

ELM: Yes. I’ve gathered that from the many, many fanworks about the goose.

FK: Yeah. The goose is horrible and does horrible things and I love to be a horrible goose, it turns out. Horrible geese forever.

ELM: All right, I’m glad you have a new fandom. There are truly a lot of great fanworks around this goose. I think that it’s, it’s the perfect figure to create fanworks because there’s like no discourse attached. I mean he’s like an anti-capitalist right, so there’s a little discourse, but it’s not like anyone’s mad about it.

FK: I don’t know, I mean is he? I guess I haven’t played very much of it yet, so far he’s just fuckin’ up a gardener’s situation. I guess he’s called the “groundskeeper” so maybe it is, maybe he’s a servant and like, it’s like, “You should not spend your labor for the rich.”

ELM: I think he just doesn’t respect private property.

FK: Ah, yeah, well, that’s certainly true. He does not respect private property. The goose does not.

ELM: [laughing] So he’s like an anarcho-socialist.

FK: The goose is certainly an anarchist. [laughing] That is completely unquestioned. All right. Well, uh, goose aside…

ELM: Yes.

FK: I think that maybe we should listen to our first voicemail on our main topic!

ELM: Yeah. I mean, there’s only one voicemail.

FK: Well, OK, yeah, but it’s like the first of… 

ELM: Our first response.

FK: Our first response. There we go.

ELM: Ah, yeah. So, so we were actually going to include this in our AMA episode and then I was like “No. This is a whole episode.” So thank you, thank you [laughs] to our voicemail-leaver.

FK: Thank you, voicemailer!

ELM: All right. Shall we listen?

FK: Yeah!

Anonymous: Hey, Flourish and Elizabeth! This is anonymous calling to ask you about your thoughts on fandoms where a number of the fans who participate haven’t actually seen, read or otherwise consumed the canon that they’re being fannish about.

So this was brought up to me because I participate in the Worm fandom, which is mainly on the forum sites Sufficient Velocity and Spacebattles, and on those sites there’s thousands of fanfiction and quests about Worm, but a number of the people who participate in that fandom say that they’ve never read Worm or they dropped it after a couple of chapters. And most of those people say they never plan to read Worm because it’s not the type of story they like, they didn’t like the writing, whatever it is. And yet they still participate in the Worm fandom.

This got me thinking about also the Dreaming of Sunshine fandom. So “Dreaming of Sunshine” is a fanfiction of Naruto, it’s a self-insert OC fanfiction with some subtle changes to the characterization and plot that get more drastic as, you know, things snowball. There are a substantial fandom around this with hundreds of fanworks, recursive fanfiction, fanart, et cetera, exchanges, challenges, and tons of discussion on the fanfiction.net forums as well as two different Discords about it. And a number of people in this Dreaming of Sunshine fandom say that they’ve never watched Naruto or read it and a number more say that Dreaming of Sunshine canon has supplanted Naruto canon in their mind. So sometimes they’re reading a different Naruto fanwork and they’re like “Oh, why is this out of character?” But it’s actually just a different interpretation from the Naruto canon and it’s not Dreaming of Sunshine canon-compliant.

And this also brought to mind, actually, the Harry Potter fandom, which as you no doubt know is filled with fanworks that are actually mainly about fanon and not about Harry Potter at all. In my youth, in my younger youth, I used to read a ton of “Wrong Boy Who Lived” fanfiction, which is a trope that is very popular, and it seemed like the things that were coming up in this fanfiction were really different takes and references to other fanfiction and had very little to do with Harry Potter itself or the themes or characterization or mechanics of the actual Harry Potter story.

So I kind of just wanna hear your thoughts about when the fandom that’s happening is not around the actual canon but is around the works of other fans. I find this topic really interesting and I hope you have interesting things to say about it. Thank you for listening!

FK: All right! So. You were the one, when we were listening to this for the AMA episode, you were the one who was like “Hold on! I have way too many thoughts about this, way too many, we’ve gotta include it in our different episode just to talk about this,” so I want you to give the first take.

ELM: [laughs] All right. So, I’m gonna need you to get your stats hat on or just pull up the stats. Do you remember the percentage of people in our shipping survey who said they shipped things they did not know the source material for?

FK: Oh I don’t know, let’s look it up!

ELM: I’m watching you look it up right now and I truly feel like you’re acting. Like you’re on a television show.

FK: And I’m acting as though… 

ELM: Yeah, it’s kind of like, you know, when they go to the tech guy… 

FK: The tech guy looks at the… 

ELM: “Enhance!” And he’s like, type type type type type, and then he does something that’s completely technologically impossible, like, “Oh look, here it is, here’s the numbers on their driver’s license right here.” Or whatever. That’s what you look like right now.

FK: Well, that’s how I feel. All right. So. 9,472 people said that they ship things without consuming the original source material and only 7,041 people said they didn’t ever do that.

ELM: OK and this is amongst shippers, that’s about 16,000. 

FK: Yes, correct. So I mean, it’s over half say that they have done this.

ELM: Right. And the way that’s worded isn’t “always.”

FK: No, it’s just “have you done it.”

ELM: But it’s, it’s pretty clear I think some people were responding to that when we put out the stats and they were like, “Maybe they meant—” I remember one was like “Maybe they meant they’d seen the original Star Wars but not the prequels!” And I was like, “OK, well then they still haven’t seen the prequels!” You know, if they’re writing fanfiction or reading it for, you know, a whole section of a franchise they haven’t seen, then yeah, they don’t know the source material.

FK: Yeah, I mean, we had had differences of opinion about how we would have answered this, because I had said “Well I watched one episode of Merlin but I would still say that I didn’t know the source material for Merlin” and you were like “You can’t say that!”

ELM: Yeah!

FK: But, I think that that’s still like actually within a fairly like, small…even, I would say that even if people have only watched or read one page of a book or like, you know, watched a tiny fraction of something, that still probably relates to what our asker is talking about, right? People who don’t actually like have a deep relationship with the original source of any kind.

ELM: Right, right.

FK: Don’t even really know most of what it is, right. Like… 

ELM: So I, I mentioned this on our Comic-Con panel and I [laughs] someone was livetweeting it and someone in response to them was like “That’s awful! That’s horrible.” I was like “Oh my God.” I actually muted them because I was worried that they were gonna start coming for me and I was like, “I don’t wanna, you weren’t even here and I don’t know what you’re talking about,” but I just loved that immediate response of like, horror. “I can’t believe these people,” right. And it’s like, it just, my assumption is that person was from the kind of corners of fandom where that is sacrilegious. That is the whole point is that you know the thing. 

FK: Yeah.

ELM: That that’s it, you know?

FK: Well, I think that there’s, I think that there’s—there’s sort of multiple things at work within this, right, because something I’ve observed about like—so you are definitely very far away from the end of fandom that’s like “It’s sacrilegious, canon is the only thing,” that’s not at all you, right? But at the same time, sometimes when you talk about your fandom and your feelings about fandom and other fans, I’ve observed you say things like “My depth of feeling for these characters is just so deep.”

ELM: Sure.

FK: “You have no idea how much I care about these characters as compared to other people not caring about them as much, even if they say they’re fans, like, so deep,” right?

ELM: Hey, go back, go back. I don’t say “you’re not as deep as me bro,” but I do say—I have said things like—

FK: Oh, I didn’t mean that you were being, like, an asshole to other people because they weren’t like this, you know what I mean?

ELM: I just wanna clarify! I remember the first time we talked about this too, and the way I framed it as like, sometimes I will, you know, if I will reveal an emotional connection to the characters, and I’ll observe the other people talking about them, and maybe they’re also feeling very shy… 

FK: Right.

ELM: And maybe we’re all protecting ourself by not wanting to be like “I would literally die for this fictional character!” Cause that’s really embarrassing, right? Even when you think you’re around other fans.

FK: Right.

ELM: But the fact is sometimes I’ll express some of these feelings and people will be like, “Oh. OK.”

FK: Right right right!

ELM: “You do you, calm down.”

FK: For you it’s about, like, emotional vulnerability—not even about, not about knowledge necessarily but emotional vulnerability. And you’re not judging other people for not being like that, but it is a difference that you express that you’ve found, and I think that this is something that—so I think that people, I think that there are not, I don’t want to put this on you, but I think there are other people who would feel that way—who would feel like “Oh God, this person is coming in here and dinking around in my fandom and they don’t have knowledge and they obviously can’t have emotional connection to these characters cause they don’t even know who the characters are!” You know?

ELM: Wait wait, you definitely just skipped a logical step. Because me, feeling like “I love this character, I feel super connected to them,” isn’t, I mean, it’s partly because of the canon, but it’s mostly because of the fanon.

FK: Right, that’s true.

ELM: And not the fanon of like, Draco wears leather pants and smokes a cigarette. [FK laughs] I mean, I mean like, if you have thousands of people making a bunch of you know, a bunch of arguments via fiction, about who Draco is—I don’t feel that much affection for Draco. I mean, I like writing and reading Draco, but I’m not like “OH! My Draco!”

FK: Yes yes. What about who Thomas Hamilton is? [laughs]

ELM: No, that’s just me shouting at Gav and Natasha.

FK: Oh my God.

ELM: And them shouting back at me. So. That’s just us shouting. 

FK: All right all right. But I do know what you’re talking about.

ELM: Yeah. I’m trying to think of a character that I feel—it’s, it’s rare that I think, I mean, that was a shame because there just weren’t a ton of people who, obviously people like him well enough. But it’s a relatively small fandom, so you’re not gonna get thousands of Thomas Hamilton stories.

FK: Even if he was like the central figure that everyone cared about, you still wouldn’t get… 

ELM: There aren’t even thousands of Flint stories, you know? I mean, there’s a couple thousand. But there aren’t, you know, the hundreds of thousands of Draco stories, so you know. But you know, maybe reading thousands of stories about Remus and Sirius, I actually care deeply about both of them and the arguments that get made. Because that’s a much better example too, in the sense of like, she only really gives you little bits.

FK: Right.

ELM: So people really, and I, I don’t think that they—they’re not, you know. Not to go after Clint Coulson or something. But they’re not one of those like, “This is a wholly constructed ship,” or you know what I mean. I know everyone always says that about their elevated background guys ships, but like, she gives you some pretty fundamental starting points.

FK: And they’re fairly formative for Harry and like, very important in—[laughs] as background guys go.

ELM: Yeah! [laughs]

FK: You know, and things about their youth, like, inform—

ELM: Big dramatic tragic backstory, yes. They are the underpinning of like, what happened basically.

FK: Right.

ELM: So. Like, I, just not to justify… 

FK: OK, so, the only reason I went down this road is just to say that I think that there are people who…I don’t think that it’s totally fair to pin it completely on, like, people who are, you know, whatever. “You must know everything about canon” people. I think that there’s like, there’s a lot of different ways people might say “Oh, but you don’t really know about this character,” you know. That’s the only thing that I wanted to get in there. 

Because I have seen these reactions from people who are more like you or me, for that matter, although I’m further on the canon train, but like, I’ve seen these reactions from people who are like, “I can’t believe there are all these people in this fandom who don’t even care about the original thing,” like, “my feelings are rooted in, like, both the original thing and the interpretation. And if you take away the interpretation it’s just any two guys,” you know.

ELM: Right right yeah. And also the kind of like, especially for long-running stuff where a big portion of the fandom just starts to be like, “Everything about this is garbage!” And then you get the people who still have mixed feelings and they’re like, “You can stop watching this! If you hate this so much, you can, you can go,” right. So that kind of conflict. And the people who are like “No, it’s still my fandom and we’re all still here!” Right? But it seems to be causing them physical pain as they continue on watching this show or whatever, and it’s just kind of like, that kind of paradox and you know, like, what’s still tethering people there, right. And I think some of that’s related to in terms of like, what it means to continue to be quote-unquote “in the fandom” of something.

FK: Yeah! So OK, so hold on though because there’s the other element—so there’s, there’s that element of this, but then there’s also this element of fanfics of fanfics. That this is in. Which I think is really fascinating cause that’s a topic that people get real, like, I have noticed people getting really upset about this in different ways in fandom, and for many different reasons.

So like for instance I’ve seen reactions, when like one fanfic gets really popular, people being like, “Can’t believe people are writing fanfics about this fanfic. It wasn’t even that good!” And like, you know, that sort of a response to it. I don’t know, it’s just a really interesting question to me. Maybe this is the tall poppy syndrome thing again.

ELM: Yeah.

FK: But I guess I see that a lot within fandom. And I don’t know, like, is it—I don’t know.

ELM: Right, I feel like this is one of the main undercurrents. I don’t know if we’ve talked about this so much on the podcast, which is interesting, but this kind of idea of the paradoxical space that some people in the fanfiction world sit in where they say, you know, “Fuck canon,” whatever, but also secretly kind of still venerate like the original author. And so when people write, even when people aren’t writing a fanfiction of a fanfiction, people write a really popular fic and you get this kind of “What, does she think she’s as good as JKR?” [FK laughs] “That bitch!” That kind of vibe. And like, I think people are a little more circumspect about it than they might have been 10 or 15 years ago.

FK: Oh my God, they’re much more circumspect. I mean, at least in the circles that I’m in.

ELM: Yeah.

FK: I’m sure there are other people who are not, in fact, let me rephrase. I know for a fact that there’s other people who are not that circumspect who probably are not listening to this podcast, but maybe some of them are, you know.

ELM: Yeah, I think amongst some circles it’s not seen as very fashionable to be like, “That uppity bitch who thinks she’s as good as J. K. Rowling” or whatever, which I think was pretty par for the course sort of reaction when I was entering fandom, and I think it was a lot about—

FK: Oh, extraordinarily common.

ELM: I’m glad you agree. [laughs] And not just with fanfiction too, with any kind of BNF who was a loud voice talking about their interpretations of characters.

FK: Yeah. 

ELM: Or plot or whatever. Kind of like “How dare you suggest any kind of authority here.”

FK: Yeah.

ELM: So there’s definitely that level of it and obviously it’s rooted in misogyny, often, and internalized misogyny since often AFAB people across the board doing this and talking about this. But also, like, I think it’s also that kind of, I do see that sort of undercurrent of not wanting to be like, “Oh, maybe I am one of those people who cares about,” you know. [FK hoots] “The ship models in the fleet,” or whatever, to mock the thing I always mock you for, you know? I think there’s a little bit of tension because I think a lot of fanfiction people take it as a point of pride that they’re like “I don’t need any of that canon stuff!”

FK: Yeah, totally!

ELM: And then, but actually deep down they’re like “But…” 

FK: Right, which I totally, I mean, it’s kind of interesting to me because I think that you’re very right.

ELM: Very right.

FK: And I think that that is something that has sort of developed, really, over the past 15 years, because I think that 15 years ago the, the like… Let me rephrase. I think that there’s lots of different fanfic subcultures that are sort of in different places with this, right.

ELM: Sure.

FK: But in my experience, the people that I’ve talked to, the interactions I’ve had, it seems like in the past 10, 15 years is the, has been a bunch of people coming in who are approaching stuff primarily through fanfic as their first lens, right. As opposed to, “I got really into,” whatever, in the early days of the internet you would get online and you’d be like “Well, I really like Star Trek so I’m going to go find a Star Trek website, and then through that I will find fanfic.” “I really like Babylon 5,” “I really like Buffy,” whatever, right.

So you would come in and initially you would be exposed to these other people who also liked Buffy or Babylon 5 or Star Trek or whatever, and some of those people would be deeply canon-focused and others would be fanon-focused and others would be into fanfiction and sort of in between, and then eventually you’d sort of find your people and go do your thing. But now, I think a lot of people come in and they’re like, “Oh, here’s the AO3!” Or “Oh, here’s Tumblr culture!”

ELM: Right.

FK: Or “Here’s Wattpad!” Or whatever. And then they go and they see other fandoms through that lens. So I think there’s a bigger distance between people who are more canon-focused and are more focused on a particular storyworld broadly… “Broadly” is the wrong word. Specifically! [laughs] As opposed to people who are approaching everything through a fanfic lens. And so I don’t know. I don’t think that that’s a bad thing but it is an interesting shift, I think.

ELM: Absolutely, yeah. I, I think that’s absolutely right. Also, not just a fanfic lens but you just said it, like, Tumblr in particular the way Tumblr is structured it really really privileges kind of being an omnivorous relatively casual fan and saying like “Oh, you’re in the fandom if you just reblog gifsets of this,” right. That’s kind of an attitude that they take, even Tumblr itself takes, right.

FK: And because of the access, as a relatively casual fan, to find fanworks and to be in those things!

ELM: Right!

FK: Which you previously would only find if you were really really really dedicated to finding them!

ELM: Right, and it also centers you, the fan, as opposed to “You are a fan of Buffy and you’re on a Buffy board,” right. And if you look at someone’s bio and it’s like, 17 different shows that they list in their list of fandoms alongside like that they’re an INTJ and a Hufflepuff or whatever. No offense to all the INTJ Hufflepuffs, but you know…there’s more INTJ Ravenclaws, I think, actually is correct. But. That’s true.

And also as you were talking another thought struck me too, when I think about this most, I think about—there’s a reason I named JKR. I think also there is some different level when it’s a single author, particularly a female author, and I’m thinking of JKR and Stephenie Meyer.

FK: Yeah.

ELM: In particular. Right? And I think about, like, you know, “How dare she”—she being the fanfiction writer—“think that she can match her!” Those two women, you know, in particular, right? As opposed to, it gets kinda weird and a little stupider when you’re like, “How dare they think they can match the Marvel corporation, owned by the Disney corporation!” [FK laughs] You know? And obviously then you sort of get this, there’s some sort of weird corporate, especially Disney brainwashing going on in the way people sometimes talk about ownership of characters and of story and, and what you’re allowed to do with them. But I also think that you have, don’t have as much of a leg to stand on when you’re, like, getting outraged on Disney’s behalf as opposed to getting outraged on Stephenie Meyer’s behalf.

FK: There’s also more of a like, so I was seeing recently, there was recently this—whatever, Freddie Prinze Jr. went on some rant about like, people in Star Wars fandom who don’t understand that Star Wars is for kids, or something like this? I don’t know. I didn’t actually watch the rant. I just had someone, like, send it.

ELM: I like how you bring up Freddie Prinze Jr. so often. I really love it. I don’t think of him outside of you. It’s really good.

FK: I had not thought—someone else posted this as like a Star Wars thing.

ELM: Tell me more.

FK: Whatever, he was a, he voiced a Star Wars animated character. But the point is he was saying, he was talking about his opinions, and then the responses, my friends were talking about how there were particular people who had been in charge of particular bits of Star Wars canon who they feel like understand Star Wars best. Particular authors. “Oh yes, the director of this animated series really gets Star Wars. And Freddie Prinze Jr. really gets Star Wars. And so we want them to do more Star Wars things.” And you see this all the time throughout, right, people privileging different folks’ takes on that world.

ELM: Sure.

FK: And I think that that’s very different than a single authored work, like, you know, there’s not a—who gets Twilight? Stephenie Meyer is Twilight, right. J. K. Rowling is Harry Potter, which is a strength and a weakness.

ELM: Even something as big and machine-like as the MCU, which is the biggest and the most machine-like of all of these, to be clear, like, people spend a lot of time talking about what Joss Whedon got wrong and what—I don’t think they even say the Russo brothers, sometimes they give them credit, I don’t think they actually had anything to do with it. The 19 other people who wrote that script, right.

FK: Right.

ELM: They definitely, especially with the Joss Whedon stuff. And I think a lot of it is factually fuzzy, people are looking for humans to pin it on.

FK: Oh yeah.

ELM: Because it’s really hard to say how many dozens and dozens of people are involved.

FK: This is a hugely collaborative work!

ELM: Yes. I mean that’s always my biggest critique and it’s not like I know, you know, like, who was responsible, all I know is that you can see a thousand hands on this and it didn’t necessarily turn it into a better piece of writing, you know.

FK: Right.

ELM: But if you don’t know, or don’t want to grasp the way that actually works, it’s easier to try to find the person to kind of blame it or give it praise. I’ve seen this working both directions.

FK: Right, but the one thing that does mean though is that you—if you have multiple different takes on it, then it’s hard to be like “But do you think that you’re Joss Whedon?!” I mean you can say that, but then you’re like, “No, I don’t think I’m Joss Whedon, I think I’m,” insert some other writer who wrote Marvel, you know what I mean, and then you get…so, so, yeah. But I think that one of the interesting things is when you start to get that fanfic of a fanfic thing, right, then there is a person that you’re pinning it on, right. Like, if you’re writing a fanfic of a fanfic, then you’re like “Well, I’m writing a fanfic of this thing that Elizabeth Minkel wrote.” You know? “I’m writing a version of Elizabeth Minkel’s take on these characters!” You know? It really gets you back to that sort of, here is one person that you sort of have to choose: do you venerate them or do you think that they’re shitty? And because it’s internet discourse, you pick one of the two! You know.

ELM: You know it’s not a binary like that!

FK: [laughs] Sometimes it feels—I’ve been on Twitter too much lately. Ooh.

ELM: Yeah, I mean, I’d be curious to actually look at this in depth because I’ve never actually, I’ve obviously read a ton of remixes, but I’ve never been involved in any sort of, I mean, I don’t think it’s that common that there’s a significant enough fanfiction that spurs hundreds of others, you know. I know one in Supernatural that we could talk about, I now know about this one, but it’s not like every fandom has a fanfiction that leads to hundreds of others, right? But like, I would be curious to know if people…because I’ve seen so much, frankly I think of as hypocrisy around this in terms of like, “I would be very uncomfortable if someone wrote a fanfiction of my fanfiction.” It’s like, “Oh, that’s interesting.” Even if they didn’t tell you about it? Like, even if it had nothing to do with you, just like you think your work has nothing to do with the source material? You know, like… 

FK: It’s also funny cause remixes were such a, like a fad in fanfic world for awhile, you know?

ELM: I mean I think there’s still remixes happening.

FK: Oh no, I’m not saying that they’re gone, I’m just saying that there was a period of time where I felt like literally every fanfic I read was a remix of some other fanfic and I was like “OK.”

ELM: Right. And I, I don’t know, I think generally the public party line on remixes is always “Thank you so much.” And sometimes I wonder when I read one that’s fine and the remix is extraordinary, if that person was like “Damn it!” Like… [laughing] “Oh my God, you did this,” or maybe they’re just happy to see, take it as a compliment, but like, if someone took something I wrote and then made something that was significantly better, and that I loved more, because I’m also a fan of these characters, I don’t know how that would feel.

FK: I like to, I’m gonna, I’m gonna stand by the party line that I would be thrilled. That’s what I want to believe about myself. I don’t know that it’s true, but I’m gonna believe it until I am put in that position.

ELM: Yeah.

FK: No, but I think that, I think that there is something interesting, so the asker brought in at the end the idea of like, you know, whatever, the “Wrong Chosen One” fics, and I’m not sure that I—I don’t know that I totally get down with the idea of those as fanfics of fanfics, but what it did make me think about is A/B/O fic. Which, you know—

ELM: Sure, as you often do.

FK: As I often do. Freddie Prinze Jr. and A/B/O fic, you know.

ELM: Sure.

FK: I’m just gonna let you think about that right now.

ELM: I mean I can’t think about him in isolation, there needs to be at least one other person in this universe. Is it you?

FK: No. It is, uh, the girl from She’s All That. Who gets the makeover. So A/B/O, it’s not quite the same thing but it is sort of a, a, like a community-defined set of rules or set of ideas. Which I think is kind of like, in some ways fanfic is like that, right? Like the community sort of defines a space in which everyone writes stories.

ELM: Yes. 

FK: You’re like, not convinced of this at all.

ELM: Well but that’s just like—I mean it’s also like fandom’s version of like what working in a coffee shop is like is the same thing, you know? But you wouldn’t say that on the surface because coffee shops exist and, I don’t know, John Watson’s self-lubricating anus doesn’t actually exist, right? I don’t know, you can make him an alpha if you want.

FK: You went there! Oh man! This is a family podcast, Elizabeth!

ELM: It’s really, it really never has been! [both laughing] But. You know. Like, not to say you can’t have both those things in the same story FYI, I don’t wanna be limiting. It’s not a binary.

FK: No. You can have your A/B/O coffee shop AU.

ELM: Never read it but I’m sure it exists.

FK: Ha! It definitely exists!

ELM: Uh, I don’t know. I mean, yeah, you’re right, it probably does. I love it when, now that I’m in an AU-oriented fandom I love it when it seems like just any old AU premise, like, by itself it would have been an AU premise, and they’re like “…and it’s A/B/O.” And you’re like, “OK!” And it’s like a, you know, it’s like an underpinning. Which actually I like better than when that’s the main… 

FK: Or it’s a D/s AU. It’s a D/s AU and also… 

ELM: You know I like that. So. Yeah, as opposed to where it’s the main, especially A/B/O where it’s the main thing in the story, then it just winds up describing, like,  suppressants and… 

FK: Knotting.

ELM: …heat cycles constantly and you’re like “All right. This is not my bag.” [FK laughs] Supporting everyone for whom that is their bag! But anyway, the point is, we collectively like, come up with structures and tropes and stuff like that. But I don’t necessarily think that has much to do with the idea of, it’s not disconnected, but I don’t necessarily think that is the same thing as, you know, being interested in something that you don’t actually care about the source material for.

FK: I don’t know that it’s the same, I just thought that it was interesting to think about sort of as a, continuum maybe? I don’t know.

ELM: Yeah, I think we both push back on the idea that like, The Wrong Boy Who Lived or my personal favorite of that is Raising Harry, that’s a trope I really love.

FK: Yes.

ELM: As you can imagine why. You know. I, I, I just think of those as canon-divergent AUs, you know. And I don’t necessarily think, I mean, because then you start to get into well, where are you gonna draw the lines of what’s fanon and what’s canon? Like, everything in Harry Potter fanfiction—it’s such a vast ecosystem, it’d be very very hard to write something, you would basically have to not really read any fanfiction if you wanted to just write something that was this pure relationship with the canon only and didn’t have anything to do with this massive collective conversation. In a way that I wouldn’t say is true with other fandoms because it’s just not that large and it hasn’t been going on as long as that, right, like, the scale of it.

FK: Right, and even if you do do that, then often you’re bringing in other stuff from outside, right? One of the things that I find is most interesting is when you read a fanfic and you’re like, “Whoa! This is coming from some other place.”

ELM: Yeah.

FK: And you’re like “Oh! It’s coming from,” like, whatever your weird context is, you know.

ELM: Do you remember when, in the early 2000s and maybe the late ’90s too, people would say things in the notes like “See if you can catch the Buffy reference”?

FK: Yes.

ELM: What happened to that?

FK: Do you actually wanna know?

ELM: Why, was there an actual thing? 

FK: Cause that, this was part of the Cassandra Claire plagiarism scandal!

ELM: I remember that being a part of it.

FK: Yeah!

ELM: But this was not unique to her. People did this all of the time.

FK: It wasn’t, but I think that as that became more—like, in my experience… 

ELM: And they’d always do it with like a winky face, right?

FK: Yeah!

ELM: Like, “See if you can catch the, like, the exchange I grabbed from The West Wing,” you know?

FK: Right! But I think that as that—

ELM: Easter egg.

FK: —became bigger and bigger and bigger scandal, and people found out about it, it like, truly poisoned that thing.

ELM: That’s interesting.

FK: I mean that has always been my assumption. Maybe I’m wrong, now that you say it, maybe I’m just associating it.

ELM: Yeah, I mean, I don’t wanna overstate how far that might have spread.

FK: Yeah.

ELM: I have to wonder too if it’s related also to, you know there’s that famous post on Tumblr where someone’s like, “Why do I see this person saying, like, ‘I don’t own these characters’ on the story, LOL of course you don’t,” and then it’s like thousands of people being like “You young fool!! Let me hit you with my cane while I tell you about the way it was!” And you’re like, “All right guys, come on.” And then people are like nicely explaining the way it used to be. And I wonder, when you kind of, when the norms were being really explicit about, you know, with a disclaimer and some were even kind of cheesy like—

FK: Yeah!

ELM: “I don’t own Buffy, Angel and Xander, I just take them for a spin!” or whatever and you’re like, “Please just say that you don’t have a legal right to these.”

FK: “The only thing I own is my coffee mug and my pen!”

ELM: [laughing] You’re making—you’re making—

FK: “My notebook is debatable, my mom bought it for me for chemistry class,” you know.

ELM: Oh my God. You’re making me feel cringey about not, not only about like the year 2000 but about being 16 in the year 2000. You’re making me have a lot of secondhand nostalgic embarrassment.

FK: Oh, I’m glad because I have a lot of secondhand nostalgic embarrassment for that period of my life. And guess what, youths? Your time is coming! You will feel this way too! You’ll be like “Oh God I feel so cringey about 2019…!”

ELM: No, they’re not gonna feel that way cause first of all, cringe culture is already embedded in youth culture currently. Second of all, they’re all going and fighting climate change. They’re not gonna feel embarrassed about this.

FK: I was doing plenty of political things!

ELM: That’s true. I was very earnestly protesting the Iraq war. [laughs]

FK: Yes. I do feel a little cringey because I had, like, a Nader pin and then I felt real bad about that afterwards.

ELM: Yeah, you should! I’m judging past you.

FK: [laughs] Past me made the mistake—

ELM: Lucky you couldn’t vote in that election, so you didn’t throw away any votes.

FK: And I learned, and I learned—and I’m pretty sure no one voted for Nader because of me. [Both laugh] Can you imagine?

ELM: “Look at that fresh-faced young person! I hadn’t thought about him before, but the youth seem to like him.”

FK: Yeah. Yep. Totally. Uh, yeah. Well, and I learned my lesson and now I don’t need to vote for Bernie, so. [laughs]

ELM: Good, that’s a lesson learned at a young age.

FK: Lesson learned! Thank you, Ralph Nader. OK.

ELM: Thank you for seat belts. We can thank him for that.

FK: All right, we should—

ELM: And consumer protections.

FK: You know what, you know what we actually have to do though, because you brought up fanon in the context of this. We should take a break and talk about the next question, because it like, seeps into the stuff that we’re talking about now.

ELM: All right, I think that’s a good idea.

FK: OK so we’re gonna take a break, we’re gonna get ourselves together, stop thinking about Ralph Nader—

ELM: Action items.

FK: We’re gonna read our next question, which is gonna smoooothly, like, connect up to all this.

ELM: Talk about cringe culture, don’t do that again.

FK: Smooooooothly.

ELM: No!! [both laugh]

FK: All right. Let’s take a break.

[Interstitial music]

FK: OK. We’re back!

ELM: Yes. We are back.

FK: And we have a question slash comment from SJ that is relevant.

ELM: OK, you’re gonna read it.

FK: OK. “Hey Elizabeth and Flourish, I’m curious if you have any thoughts on a trend I’ve seen recently pushing back against fanon and the rise of the ‘fuck canon’ philosophy. Recently I’ve seen popular posts on my dash expressing a concern that, A., fanon often isn’t that good in the first place and takes the air out of fanfic being written about a more diverse collection of premises, and B., that the death of the author is rapidly heading toward, quote, ‘death of the text,’ and is a pit stop on the way towards some kind of Tumblr-gone-wild horrorscape of fan entitlement and wish fulfillment, where fans view all canon as something we have to suffer through to unlock access to new fan content and fan community, and where a totally dismissive attitude towards canon is the prevailing mindset in fandom.

“The first concern was raised by a fan creator I like and respect. She gave the example of the ‘Crowley loves astronomy’ fanon in Good Omens being overdone to the point where even an allusion to it is a turnoff to her on GO fic. And honestly, I think that’s fair. I can see how some hyper-popular fanons do reach a saturation point where they stop being fun. 

“The second struck me as more a bad faith, quote, ‘kids these days are snowflakes’ argument against a fully legitimate mode of engagement with a given story. What’s more, I love fanon! Even when it’s cheesy and overdone! So it feels oddly counterintuitive, or maybe even curmudgeonly, to me to hear fan creators saying that fanon in general as a fan practice makes their fan experience worse because it limits creativity in fan writing. 

“Have you seen a similar backlash against transformative approaches to fandom that take a more permissive attitude towards creating brand-new fanon or dismissing canon entirely? Are fans in actuality straying further from canon than they have in the past? And if so, do you think it makes sense to attribute that shift to fan entitlement? And isn’t fan entitlement not so much about writing whatever the hell you want in your fanfic, but more about fans trying to insist creators change canon to suit their whims? Even if a given fandom took a quote ‘death of the text’ approach and started just spitballing with characters and settings only loosely linked to canon, would that be a bad thing? Or really even that different from what certain fandoms are like now?

“Thanks so much! I love the show and really enjoy hearing your thoughts on all things fan. SJ!”

ELM: What a great letter!

FK: What a great letter!

ELM: Our voicemail was also great, I realize I didn’t say that.

FK: No, I mean, obviously it was because we were like—

ELM: What a great voicemail!

FK: “Let’s, instead of having, we have a whole episode’s worth of talking about these things!”

ELM: Great pair.

FK: Yeah!

ELM: What a great pair. I sound like one of my customers at the race track.

FK: Oh God.

ELM: Sorry. It is what it is.

FK: Aw, it is what it is. OK. All right. So what did this spur in you, Elizabeth?

ELM: Oh, so much. I think that, it is my sense, that fanon headcanons are more than they might have been a decade ago or two decades ago, purely because of the modes of expression and the platforms on which they are shared. So the kind of Tumblr “I’m gonna write three paragraphs laying out my headcanons” can spread with 100,000 notes that literally could not happen on LiveJournal, LiveJournal was not structured that way, and it could not have happened in a mailing list because mailing lists didn’t have the potential to reach millions of eyes. Right? Or, um, and Twitter as well. And there are other platforms.

But these big big open platforms with like, massive, massive scale, I do think that there is a potential for—and I get a little tired, I’ve gotten tired all throughout my time on Tumblr of the sort of, it’s not quite a fic. It’s more just like a series of, you know, where it’s just like five paragraphs, “Maybe he thought this, and then this would happen, then this would happen. And then he always felt this way.” And it’s kind of like a fic, and I totally respect people who enjoy that, but for some reason to me I’m always like “No! Write it or don’t say it out loud!” You know, it would just, my own hangups, you know?

FK: Yeah.

ELM: But I do think that there is something about the platforms themselves that has defined the modes of engagement and the scale of engagement around this stuff and obviously that has a sort of circular effect within, if it annoys you and you’re gonna see more and you’re gonna talk about it, then it becomes a discourse point also in a way that it may not have previously.

FK: Yeah, I mean, that’s interesting, because I don’t disagree with anything you said but I was just looking at these old X-Files mailing list conversations—I shared them with you on Twitter for other reasons.

ELM: Yeah, thank you. Thank you.

FK: But one of the things that was interesting is, I always bring up as my example of headcanon like, Scully having strawberry shampoo, and people are arguing about this and they’re mad, you know? At the time it was enough of a big deal to create like a kerfuffle that has made it to Fanlore today. Even though this was literally like on Usenet. You know? So it’s not like having headcanons—I mean obviously that’s a very minor one, it’s about the way a character smells. But you know, even, there were larger ones at the time in that fandom. And I’m sure that it’s the case in every other fandom as well. So I agree with you that the scale is different, but it’s clear that it was annoying people and that people were finding it—I mean, this was a, this thread was an argument about critiquing fanfic. And yelling at people for like, “You just lazily threw these headcanons into your fanfic and it turns me off because, you know, have you ever smelled strawberry shampoo? It sucks! Scully would not wash her hair with something that stinks like that,” you know what I mean?

ELM: Right, right.

FK: And you’re like “OK!” And it sounds an awful lot, just an awful lot, like this argument, but on a smaller scale because the internet was smaller.

ELM: Yeah, I just wanna say sidenote: strawberry is my favorite flavor and my favorite fruit and one of my favorite foods, I’m literally drinking a strawberry Polarade seltzer as we speak.

FK: Whoa!

ELM: And strawberry shampoo: never good.

FK: No, it’s never good! It’s true! This is accurate critique!

ELM: In my youth, in my adolescence I tried to make it work. I remember at one point I used children’s strawberry shampoo because I loved strawberry so much? No. And she’s an adult woman. She would not do that. I’ve never seen this show. I have very strong feelings. She uses nice shampoo.

FK: Yeah, I mean, I always figured given the time period Herbal Essences was probably the answer.

ELM: You think that, you think that she’s a bargain basement kind of lady? I have never seen this show.

FK: I think that she is probably the kind of person who, I would describe it as… 

ELM: No Flourish, Herbal Essences: way too strong a scent. Is she that kind of lady?

FK: I think that for that time period she would be.

ELM: You don’t think she would be a straightforward Pantene girl?

FK: I would accept that. I would accept that. But I think that there’s a range of possibilities, right? And I even think that, I think that there is like—I’m not going to get into this.

ELM: You have such a serious face right now.

FK: I have a lot of, I have some serious Scully feeling here.

ELM: I have also never, reminder, I’ve never seen this show, would Agent Mulder be a Pert Plus Two-in-One?

FK: I think probably but I think that there are a variety of different attitudes towards this. And I think there are some subtle characterization things.

ELM: Hang on, hang on. Would he use Dr. Bronner’s? 

FK: No.

ELM: That’s a shame.

FK: He’s like a—

ELM: Would any character you’ve ever imprinted on use Dr. Bronner’s?

FK: Um… 

ELM: What about your Game of Thrones people?

FK: Oh well, I mean, they’re using like lye soap if they wash. [laughs]

ELM: This is in your modern coffee shop A/B/O AU!

FK: In a modern coffee shop A/B/O AU, yes, some of them would definitely use Dr. Bronner’s. 

ELM: All right, great.

FK: Actually this, so this is actually—I’m sorry, I’m gonna indulge myself, you might have to cut this out [ELM groans] and if you do I want you to leave, like, a note in here saying “I cut out X minutes of Flourish talking about Scully…”

ELM: No no no, don’t do this. Don’t do it unless you’re actually making a broader point. No examples. No examples.

FK: I’m just, I’m only thinking about this, there’s no point, you brought me down this path. You asked me!

ELM: No. All right. Back to the question at hand.

FK: What I would say about this is, I think that there is some argument to be made that there are a variety of characterizations that you can have for different characters and one of the things if there’s widely accepted headcanons, then maybe that cuts out—it’s true, maybe that does mean, if you can’t deal with a character who’s characterized—

ELM: Hang on. What kind of shampoo someone uses is not, or like, “Crowley loves astronomy,” those are not, that’s not like, that is playing fast and loose with the word “characterization.”

FK: Well but if it’s a, if it’s like a symbol for the way the characterization exists.

ELM: Yeah, I think very often people talk about these little, little like, relatively mundane preference things as characterization points like… 

FK: No, but I’m not talking about that actually being a characterization—

ELM: Yeah, but that happens all the time and it is very frustrating.

FK: But occasionally it’s a stalking, it’s a stalking horse for it. So sometimes you can say “Do I think that Scully uses strawberry shampoo, if I do, then maybe I believe that she’s got this, like, soft side.”

ELM: Fun and girlish.

FK: Right. “She’s really very girly and outside is like, this hard shell, but if you break through, then she’s just,” right? 

ELM: Sure.

FK: As opposed to Scully, you know, whatever, washing her hair with Pantene and she’s actually just this very basic straightforward lady who’s gettin’ shit done, you know what I mean?

ELM: All right all right, you have to acknowledge though that some people do not go past the strawberry shampoo.

FK: Oh, completely, completely, completely! I’m just saying that I think that that’s one of the challenges here is that we’re talking about sort of two things.

ELM: I think that’s one of the things that gets people angry! You know? When it feels like some sort of checklist, the fandom has agreed that here’s the shampoo he uses, here’s the kind of outfit he would wear, and anything else is out of character, you know. And doesn’t do anything beyond, “Well, if Draco truly wears leather pants, does he just wear them? What does this mean in context?” Right, you know? Obviously that’s a bad example because Draco in leather pants was, like, an archetype, right, of a whole bitchy persona that he had, right. You know. Like, like…queeny sort of.

FK: But at least the archetype all sort of hangs together in a certain way, right.

ELM: Right, but if you, you just wouldn’t pop him into those pants and not do the rest of that. So that’s a bad example. Right? But I think when people feel like they’re just, people are just marking up a thing and then, especially when people will come back and say “Well you didn’t have Scully using strawberry shampoo, so…” 

You know? And you’re like, “Why are you like this?!” You know? But it definitely happens and I think it has happened all along. I’m still gonna argue that it may be—maybe not more prevalent now but easier to see. Because it’s not in some mailing list like the thing that you were showing me.

FK: Yeah, and it also may be true, I don’t know if this is the case or not, but it might be true that people sort of collectively come to fewer possibilities, right? When I think about the X-Files stuff, obviously there’s some of these things that are basic, but also there’s broader, like, people would say “Oh, this is a Profiler!Mulder thing,” and it’s like “OK yes, OK, you’re going to be privileging the fact that he did X and Y and Z in his previous career at the Bureau and for you that’s really important to who he is and how you’re interpreting him versus another kind of characterization,” but maybe if it were today there would just be one sort of broadly accepted, you know, idea of what was important to Mulder. I don’t know. Is that, or was it worse actually in the past.

ELM: It’s, it’s hard because I feel like I haven’t been in a very very active and large large fandom since Sherlock, right. So in the last five years I don’t have first-hand, like, “I’m a fan observing this at all times” experiences, I’ve just seen bits and pieces, right? And so I am still in a lot of Harry Potter—that’s not necessarily true because I did spend time back in Harry Potter fandom like a few years ago, but Harry Potter is a really weird example because it’s so big and it’s so long-running that now I feel like you’re kind of at a point where you sort of—sometimes I look at lists of stories and it’s like we’re playin’ some sort of, I don’t know, bingo! [FK laughs] 

And I don’t mean that dismissively, and it sounds so dismissive, but it’ll just be like, “X identity on Y character and Z identity on Q character,” I’m using too many letters here, that’s confusing. You know what I mean?

FK: Yeah.

ELM: “I’m gonna do this interpretation for this guy and this is the scenario, we’re gonna toss them all in, go for it.” There’s nothing wrong with any of that, but I now feel like it’s moved so far from the source material—but in a sense does that even matter, of course it’s going to, because there are obviously infinite things to say about those books but then at a certain point, in this fandom in particular, I feel like it’s cycled on so far away from there and there’s so much dissatisfaction with the author, you know, that you’re kind of just using a collective shorthanded group of characters to sort of explore the themes that you wanna explore in the world, right?

FK: Yeah, and there’s also been so many different interpretations through the history of it, you know, because it took so long to sort of play out that I feel like you also have like lots of competing interpretations of those characters as opposed to… 

ELM: I mean we’re talking characters who got nine lines of book time originally, right? So it’s like, OK. I know that character’s name, you can say—like, Ernie Macmillan? Go for it. Like, he can be anything you want him to be. Like, I really don’t, you know? And so, and then, then is the baseline the fact that you’re all there together or is the baseline the fact that you all know the basic rules of the wizarding world, whatever. There are a lot of different things going on. That is not a great example though of what fandom is like because that’s such a weird large ecosystem, you know?

FK: Yeah! I think that there, maybe, maybe to re-center this a little bit on the question, I think that the idea of quote “the death of the text” is interesting in the context of what you’re just talking about too, because it does sort of bring up the question of what are we doing here. Right? Like, what is our goal?

ELM: What are we doing here?

FK: What are we doing here, right? And I think that one of the biggest differences between you and me is that you are usually extremely responsive to other fans’ interpretations and the fanon space, and I’m interested in that too but I’m always coming back to the text. But that doesn’t mean that one of those things is right. You know? Like, both of these… 

ELM: No, it means I’m right. Generally. [FK laughs] If we do different things, usually that’s the way it kinda works out, so.

FK: I’m just saying that, you know, I don’t… 

ELM: I’m responsive in the sense that I make a judgment of whether I think it’s a good, you know, a good headcanon or not. And that’s not to say that I’m ever going to tell anyone publicly that I think they have a bad headcanon or a bad interpretation. Like, I genuinely am not interested in that, I’m mocking them privately.

FK: But you also like, don’t…I don’t know because I’ve never read any of your fanfic… 

ELM: What’s that, Flourish?

FK: But I get the impression… 

ELM: The one thing that haunts you?

FK: It haunts me constantly forever. But I get the impression that you tend to be, when you talk about things you tend to be responding to other people’s headcanons and other things fans are doing and so on, it’s not “I was haunted by this particular thing the author did and I need to speak back to the original author,” it’s more like “I need to continue this conversation with other people in fandom.” And I don’t know if that’s true, because as I said, I’ve never read your fanfic. But it’s how you speak about it.

ELM: Well, it’s not necessarily—I think it’s both those things happening at the same time cause it’s kind of like, I read all fan reactions as some kind of critical response to a text. And we’ve had to clarify in the past but I’ll clarify again, when I say “critical response” I don’t mean—

FK: Right.

ELM: —“criticizing,” I mean critical response in the sense of like literary criticism, like, which, which, sorry, that just was being, redundantly restating it. Basically like literary criticism isn’t just “You did this wrong, this wrong, this is bad for this reason,” it is analysis, right, it’s just saying “What are we doing here, how does this work, how does this break down.” I think every single human response, but particularly fans because you’ve taken the extra step of like, being in the fandom.

FK: Right.

ELM: And having some sort of stakes here and wanting to say something about it, whether it’s just in person or between other fans or putting your ideas down and putting them out in the world, right. So I will often read fans’ interpretations and they will have literally nothing to do with the source material, and that sometimes annoys me. And it’s like, you’re doin’ your own thing, that’s fine, but maybe you’re rewriting the characterization—in my view—

FK: Right.

ELM: In a way that makes you feel like they’re better than they, they’re better people than they actually are in canon. That annoys me a lot! You know? Like, the woobification of characters when, you know, in a very unearned way, and saying “Oh, my soft little precious angel” to a character that is not like that at all, I don’t love it! You know? But, but it’s not like I’m thinking of them, it’s not like that’s separate from me critiquing the text myself. You know? 

So like, saying “Well, a bunch of fans are interpreting this character this way.” And I hold that up against the way that character is written originally and if I were to write that character better, usually my critique of the original—except in Black Sails—is “this could be deeper,” you know what I mean?

FK: Yeah.

ELM: So I think like if this was a wholly fleshed-out character, what would they be and when I hold fan interpretations of that fleshed-out version against the version that I am creating, or the different versions that I think feel real, and I feel like there’s a big clash, then yeah that’s gonna annoy me. That’s not to say that I’m gonna get in their mentions and be like, “You’re a dumb fool,” you know? I would never do that. But I’m allowed to internally think “That’s a bad reading,” you know.

FK: Yeah, yeah yeah yeah.

ELM: And I say this with a, with an acknowledgment that I love when readings are different. There are, I could give you a rec list of 10 different stories that I like in the X-Men fandom that read Charles Xavier differently, and I think they’re all interesting and good readings. But I can also enumerate what I think is a bad reading and that’s stuff I see every day and that’s stuff I just live with. I think “Oh, I don’t actually like this person’s, I think this person has really missed the mark here, I’m not gonna engage with their work.”

FK: Right, yeah. OK. And I guess it’s not totally fair of me to say, like, to say that you engage with other people and their interpretations and I engage with the original text because obviously I wrote an enormous, totally fanon-responsive Reylo fic, so like, that’s not actually really about canon. I mean it is about canon, but it’s also about, so.

ELM: You’re just so thirsty for that fandom approval. [both laugh]

FK: All right, OK.

ELM: That’s a good angry look. No. I think you should respond to what I just said though. I know you’re correcting a little bit, but.

FK: No no no no, I’m just thinking about it. Cause I think it’s, I think that your point is well-taken that there’s also this like…I guess all I’m thinking about is sort of the source of one’s responses, right? You’re saying “Well, I look at what fans, what other people are interpreting, and then I say do I like it or not.” You know. “Do I connect with it or not, do I think it’s a good reading or not,” you know, like, and I guess usually when I think about canony things I think first about the—I mean when I think about fandomy things I think about, I read the canon and I’m like “I have an idea about this canon!” You know. And then I wanna put it out there! And sometimes that also connects up with a conversation that other fans are having, in fact often it does because usually, like, a large group of people will identify some of the same concerns [laughs] you know.

ELM: Sure! I mean obviously I do that.

FK: Yeah.

ELM: I am critical about literally everything I engage with.

FK: You certainly are, right.

ELM: Yes, thank you.

FK: I don’t know. There is a point at which I think that it’s possible to sort of really just be interacting with things that are further away, even if you have been into and read the canon, not like our first question, but you were into the canon and then you started reading fanfic, and now you’ve read so much fanfic that you’re just thinking about fanfic and other people’s interpretations of it. I don’t know. I mean I guess… 

ELM: But is that bad? I mean, that’s what I did—

FK: Not necessarily bad!

ELM: —in the Harry Potter fandom, and possibly you as well, and I think that my experience was significantly better!

FK: Sure, and for me the most obvious example is in Harry Potter fandom where like I was into Snape and then things happened in canon and I was like “Oh no, but not that Snape!” And then I was like, “But actually, the Snape I was into I think was better than what happened in canon, so I’m just gonna go and,” you know.

ELM: Right, absolutely.

FK: Right? Which I think is a common feeling that a lot of people have.

ELM: I think that’s what the letter-writer, you know, the part about the death of the text and the reference to young snowflakes or whatever, you know.

FK: Right.

ELM: And I don’t, all right. I don’t wanna put too fine a point on it. But I do think that there is, there are some trends in some corners of fandom to do this, to sort of say—maybe this isn’t really fair cause I don’t wanna pin this on people who just want everything to be, like, happy and fluffy and hugs and like, we’re all, we’re all family, et cetera et cetera. And those are great themes and I love those themes, right?

FK: Right.

ELM: And I don’t think that all, all fiction should be pain or whatever. Right? And when I say this too I think there is, in other moments and even in some corners now, there is a tendency to make everything awful in your fanfic, through your fan interpretations.

FK: Get ’em.

ELM: Right, exactly. So I don’t wanna say one thing or the other but I think there is some truth in the idea that for some people, there is such a wholesale literally like—did you see that thing we put in “The Rec Center” a few weeks ago that was like, what an AU is like, and it was from Star Trek: The Next Generation, it was Riker being kind of teleported while horizontal through the wall?

FK: Oh yes, yes.

ELM: [laughing] Through a portal?

FK: That is a classic, that is a classic—in fact I just watched that episode that that happens in the other day. 

ELM: But it’s like this character’s in an AU and he’s like “What?” And he’s just shot through the wall. And sometimes I feel that way a little bit where people are just kinda wholesale lifting their characters into a happy fluffland AU, or maybe like a dark pain AU, you know. You would never frame it that way but it feels so much like this desire to sort of, I mean, it’s not like a binary between like “I’m gonna bring them all to the brink of death” or “I’m gonna wrap them all in bubble wrap and have them snuggle with no plot,” or whatever.  You know what I mean? 

That’s not a fair characterization at all of what fandom is doing. But I do think that, I understand why people get frustrated with this kind of wholesale lifting. It’s why I get frustrated with a lot of AUs where it feels like, “If you just wanted to cast the actors in your original story…” Is that what’s going on here, or do you really think that you’re, you’re engaging with even fanon ideas about what these characters are?

FK: Right. At the same time, like, you know, OK! If you just wanna be casting the actors in your original story and you’re doing that, I guess have fun, you know!

ELM: Fine. Do it. All of this is to say, I’m not saying “Don’t do it,” I’m just saying you’re, you’re allowed to observe it happening. And I think that the headcanon, there was one post I remember that got a lot of traction on Tumblr a few years ago that I appreciated. I can’t remember what fandom it was, they were like, “There’s a tendency to write this character in this fandom as having a lot of tattoos. I don’t like that, I’m gonna write fic where this character doesn’t have tattoos!” And then people were like, “This is a great example of how you should respond to headcanons you don’t like. Just be like, “I will produce more fanworks and I am not going to embrace this,” you know, as opposed to just writing like, callout posts for some inane headcanon.

FK: Yeah, for the headcanon.

ELM: And, and people were like “This is a win/win! You get more fic about the thing that you wanna see, and we all get more fic period,” you know? And I think that’s a great take, and I have no idea what fanfic it was, I don’t know how I’ll find this again, but that being said I think the easier way out and the human instinct is not to go and write whole new fictional works, instead to just complain.

FK: Particularly because I think that this, this also, getting back to your point about the way that things have changed in how we talk, I do think this relates to people using social media as a broadcast medium as opposed to having conversations on mailing lists, right? So when you write about your headcanon on a mailing list, you have to acknowledge that you’re sending email to other human beings who have or don’t have your opinion, who are going to read it and personally respond to it directly. Whereas I feel like when you write, when people write headcanon posts on Twitter or Tumblr, it’s often like “Here are the facts.”

ELM: Yes.

FK: “Here are the facts about this character.” And then you read this and you’re like, this happens to me all the time with like, I mean obviously for me it’s Snape posts. And I’m like, “No! Those are not the facts! I, I reject your reality and substitute my own!” And I get pissed off, but then I stop and I think and I go, “This person isn’t talking to me.”

ELM: Yeah.

FK: “This person can hold these opinions and that doesn’t bother me, you know, they’re obviously allowed to, it’s not like it’s a bad reading that Snape is a horrible bully with no redeeming features, that’s actually pretty much what’s in canon so like, why am I mad about this? Oh, I’m mad about this because it feels like they’re yelling at me personally.” But they’re not. You know? They’re just shouting into what seems to them to be a void.

ELM: Right right right. So this makes me think about—oh God, I don’t wanna get too far into it, this can get kinda overblown and wanky fast. But it makes me think about only wanting to see political opinions you agree with or whatever, you know.

FK: Right.

ELM: Because my instinct is like yours too. And I’ll see, I remember there was someone who was reblogging stuff that I liked picture-wise the other day and I looked at their blog a little bit cause I’ve made the mistake before of not doing that, based on a few posts, and I read a few of their text posts just talking about their responses to characters, and I just fucking hated them! And I was like “Great, I’m not gonna follow you.” Right? And so part of me is like “Yeah, it’s fandom, just curate your experience, I don’t wanna read a bunch of people I disagree with,” and to be honest they were much more generous to the characters than I think they deserve. It wasn’t like I was like “You’re being mean to my fave,” because like, these people are monsters. They’re not monsters. They’re complex human beings. But like, they’re assholes, right. And I don’t wanna read the “How dare anyone say anything about my pure son of goodness and light” or whatever, I don’t want that interpretation on my dash. 

That being said, and like you’re saying too: you don’t want certain reads of Snape on your dash, you just won’t engage with them. Does that lead then to kind of siloing of interpretations, and I don’t—these are very innocuous like, our interpretations of various like cis white men, right? You know. And what happens when it’s possibly more complex than—

FK: Yeah.

ELM: —if a character is sweet or not or whatever. I shouldn’t be diminishing the “Snape is gross” or whatever. The accusations are like—

FK: No no it’s a quite, it’s a quite—

ELM: —that he is a serial abuser, essentially. So I don’t want to diminish that at all because that’s very serious.

FK: I think the other thing is like, it’s, you know, to me it really is, I mean, and again I hate this because it can come off as a tone argument in certain situations, but I don’t mean that because people are allowed to say whatever they wanna say in whatever format, but it is something to say like: I am interested in engaging in discussion with people about these issues. What I’m not interested in is having someone show up randomly and yell at me about something, not even intending to yell at me, just yelling, you know. And then going away and not, like, you know. And if I respond to that post, then the response to me is “Well, I wasn’t talking to you.”

ELM: Right.

FK: “And why are you interacting with me about this, I didn’t want to have a discussion, I was just telling you my opinion. I was just saying my opinion.” And that’s fair too, right? Like, they didn’t ask for that, right? So you know, then that makes you silo yourself in a certain way.

And by comparison, I think that that was a benefit of certain ways that people organized in the past. There were plenty of non-beneficial things about that, right, but you did sometimes have genuine differences of opinion with other people about a character that you were all on a mailing list about, and sometimes that turned into terrible arguments that turned into flame wars that caused huge problems, but sometimes you actually genuinely had to, like, talk about your differences of opinion and like, you know, and have them. And discuss them in a way where you were recognizing that someone might read your words and disagree with you and come back to you and talk about it as opposed to that feeling like an automatic attack.

ELM: Right.

FK: I don’t know how to solve this. It seems like that’s a very platform-based issue.

ELM: You always want to find solutions to things and I just don’t know why. I mean I still, I’ve always felt like fanfiction was able to do more on this front. Because you kind of have to—maybe my problem with headcanons generally, and again, if you love them, please continue doing them. They’re just not for me, you know. Headcanon posts. But my, when fic, you have to do a lot more. It’s inherently a lot more effort to make those arguments, right?

And that’s not to say that meta doesn’t do a good job of textual analysis, but frankly some meta does not, you know. And some fic does not, isn’t particularly good at textual analysis, and a lot of fic isn’t trying to do that either. Meta often is trying to do that and very often fails, I think cause people have different, people have different lenses and also people have different levels of skill in terms of arguing for their interpretation. So. 

All right. We need to wrap up. But I want to bring this all the way back in our final minutes to the idea that a good portion of people are engaging in fandom practices without having seen the source material.

FK: Yeah.

ELM: And then I feel like, what, so you’re over here talking about my, both of our interests and maybe retooling your interpretations of this as we go of, you know, holding up fan stuff against the canon, et cetera, et cetera. Forget about all that. What about these 9,000 people who are shipping things without knowing the source material? 

FK: Well, I mean… 

ELM: What’s the baseline then?

FK: I think it comes back to genre stuff, right? Doesn’t it? 

ELM: No.

FK: Like generic conventions about different kinds of…?

ELM: No. OK, maybe, I think for some people. But I think, I think more often it has to come from the sort of collective wisdom of the crowd, which isn’t always so wise, and you know, I can see how that would just compound some of these issues in the sense of like—if certain fanon interpretations and certain fics read characters certain ways, are really big, and that’s the way that all the people who don’t actually know the source material are going to read them, and so then that—that’s just kind of fuel on the fire because they’ll say “Well, I always thought,” and that’s like, “That wasn’t even in the original thing!” You know? “That was from this fic!” That kind of thing. And so like, on an individual level it does not matter. You know? If you enjoy fanworks for a thing? 

FK: Yeah.

ELM: Genuinely I think does not matter whether you know the canon or not. In a collective level, when people are trying to discuss the characters? I think it does matter and I think that people will wind up clashing over stuff without actually knowing, you know. You don’t have to go and present your list of “I have read all these things, so here’s my interpretation,” or “I have read zero of these things and this is why I feel this way.” No one has to actually say that and so you can completely be talking at cross purposes.

FK: Yeah!

ELM: Or not realizing that you have—you know, and obviously that’s in addition to, you know, people having different backgrounds and different interpretations of things to start, you know. But this is, this is more extreme, and it’s really hard to, it’s hard for me to think of an analogy in the broader culture, but it’s a really really interesting thing about fandom, particularly right now I think far more than—exactly as you were saying, you would, you would come into the X-Files boards because you liked the X-Files, not because you heard there was some great fanfiction there.

FK: I think that you could probably draw some, some similarities to things happening in politics where people have sort of tribal identities about things that they don’t necessarily… “Tribal identities” is like a really bad way to put it.

ELM: It’s a very problematic way. But—

FK: It’s a term that people consistently use and I really want to not use it. But. But. When people have identities about things and they don’t necessarily have any knowledge—I mean, I don’t necessarily have much knowledge of lots of issues but just sort of receive ideas about them.

ELM: Hold on, hold on. That is the way it literally has always been.

FK: I know, but you were just saying, you were saying “is there anything that’s comparable to this,” and I kinda wonder if there isn’t some comparison there.

ELM: I mean I, but now I’m more thinking about the shift. It’s not like we say in politics 20 years ago people were like super informed, right?

FK: Right, whereas it was actually probably even worse! [laughs]

ELM: Yeah! Genuinely. I mean if you were to poll an average person 100 years ago, they’d probably say “Yep, I, I always vote Republican.” And you’re like “Why?” and they’re like “I don’t know.” You’re like “OK great.” Or whatever party it was, you know.

FK: Totally.

ELM: Or I don’t know. “I saw a poster of him and he looked fine.”

FK: Yeah.

ELM: You know? Like, people have always had these kind of not-fact-based reasons for political leaning or for voting for one candidate or another. But I do think we have genuinely seen a shift in transformative fandom over the last 20 years.

FK: Yeah, I would buy that.

ELM: I mean we’ve talked about, we had that letter-writer last year talk about how they read by trope and they never know the source material and that was, maybe that was the wrong way to do it, and we said not exactly, no one’s wrong here, but maybe you’re in the minority, but I think it’s a growing minority of people. And I see all the crossover…it’s been very interesting in the last year or so to see an extraordinary explosion of public interest in tropes, to the point where I’ll have to click on them in the profiles and be like “Are you a fandom person or are you just, you like bedsharing romances, or both.” Do you have this? Where people will be like “I love fake dating!” And I’ll be like “Fake dating fics? Fake dating fics?” And I’ll click and they’ll be like “No, this Hallmark movie about fake dating!” And I’ll be like “Aww, it’s different!” You know? Obviously it’s the same but I don’t wanna watch a fake dating Hallmark movie. I’m not just there for the fake dating, I want it within the context of fanfiction, you know?

FK: Right. Well, the thing that haunts me, has been haunting me since last night I watched this was Michael Chabon wrote a Star Trek short that is so fanfic tied-in that now I can only assume that he has read a bunch of fanfic and it’s horrifying me, and/or did he just pick this up from like, the wisdom of broad things, seeing other people talk about it, I don’t know, I can’t figure it out and I’m dying. So this is related.

ELM: Why do you think that he would have had to read fanfic?

FK: I don’t, like, that’s the problem! When I was watching I was like “I’m reacting to this trapped-in-an-elevator story about Number One and Spock,” like… 

ELM: Flourish, I’m gonna break it to you because you haven’t seen much television.

FK: I know it’s a thing!

ELM: “Trapped in an elevator” is one of the standard tropes of all comedy.

FK: I know it’s a thing.

ELM: Every sitcom has had a trapped-in-the-elevator episode.

FK: I know.

ELM: I just want you to know that it’s actually a part of the culture because you haven’t seen any television shows.

FK: [laughs] I know it is it’s just—ugh, anyway.

ELM: OK, well now this is gonna get me down another rabbit hole.

FK: It’s just, OK, in this case I’m reacting to it because of the particular trope within fandomy things and it’s like, there’s a bunch of stuff that’s connecting. All I’m saying is, yes. There’s tropes. They’re a thing. We need to end this episode Elizabeth, we’re going too far.

ELM: [laughing] “All I’m saying is there’s tropes! It’s a thing!”

FK: [laughs] There’s tropes. It’s a thing. OK. Elizabeth, we’re done. We have officially gotten to a point where we’re done.

ELM: All right.

FK: Stick a fork in us.

ELM: I’m gonna go remix this.

FK: [laughing] OK.

ELM: It’ll be 100 times better.

FK: Times better!

ELM: And you’re gonna be like “Oh thank you!”

FK: “Thank you!” 

ELM: “I love it!”

FK: Aww, I love it! [laughing] All right all right all right. Before we go, a couple of notes. If you are a Patreon patron at the $5-a-month level or higher, some of you have received your Fansplaining pins!

ELM: Yeah!

FK: We’ve been sending them out. They’re sort of rolling, you know, it’ll take a little longer for international folks to get ’em, if you just pledged $5 obviously it might take a bit, but the first batch of them has gone out and I know some people have them in their hot little hands so hooray!

ELM: Why are you saying everyone’s hands are little?

FK: And hot.

ELM: That’s, that’s a headcanon! That’s completely unsubstantiated.

FK: All right. We also just released for $3-a-month and above Patrons a new special episode about Black Sails and there’s probably gonna be a second one cause I want another one.

ELM: [chanting] Black Sails, Black Sails, Black Sails! Now you’re gonna watch it again and you’re gonna be like “Oh, I missed so much.” Right?

FK: I literally started watching it again.

ELM: And you already said “Oh, I missed so much, you were right.”

FK: I said “I missed so much, you were right.” So. Looking forward to… 

ELM: How satisfying! So yes. If you have been thinking of becoming a Patron, obviously I’d recommend the $5-a-month level or more because material objects are always superior to other things, right? Things!

FK: And your name in the credits!

ELM: It’s a really cute pin, I now have, I have some in my possession. I’m not a pin-wearer but this is our pin so I’m gonna wear it like it’s a flag pin, you know, the nation of Fansplaining.

FK: At all times in the nation, great.

ELM: But, so, if you, if you have $5 a month to spare, if you’ve been thinking about becoming a Patron, then you’ll get that and you’ll get the special episode. And if you don’t have $5 a month, no worries, if you have $1 a month even we’ll take it. Every little bit helps and everyone who pledges gets some kind of reward.

FK: And, if you don’t have or want to give us any money, there’s other ways you can support us! By telling people about Fansplaining, by reviewing us, giving us some stars on iTunes. We like stars!

ELM: We only like, we like five stars, Flourish. You always say “we like stars.” But like, five stars.

FK: Um, we’re not pressuring people. Uh.

ELM: I’m not pressuring anyone, I’m telling you my headcanon, which is that we deserve five stars.

FK: Great, OK. So that actually does help us, you know, get the word out a lot. Also, obviously sending us your thoughts, your comments, your questions, we don’t answer everything but it’s incredibly helpful to hear what people are thinking about and obviously we do answer a bunch of questions, so.

ELM: We do try to answer everyone at least privately.

FK: Yeah, we do, we make the effort.

ELM: Don’t say like “We’ll just ignore it.”

FK: No no, I just don’t want, I mean, it’s not a—

ELM: We do have a little bit of a, we have a little backlog of people that we do need to respond to so if you… 

FK: I just don’t want people to feel abandoned.

ELM: Yeah, if you’ve had a message that hasn’t been responded to and it’s been more than a couple of months you should always feel free to, if Google’s giving you that nudge alert, you know.

FK: Yeah we’re not trying to ignore you we’re just bad at emails.

ELM: You’re totally free to follow up and even if you have further thoughts you could send them along and we’ll respond in some capacity.

FK: Yeah. And it makes our day.

ELM: It does!

FK: And what else, what else is there to talk about?

ELM: You didn’t say the number that they can call us at.

FK: Oh yeah! You can also call in to leave us voicemails at 1-401-526-FANS!

ELM: [laughs] That’s it, that’s correct.

FK: OK.

ELM: And I think that’s it. Yeah, you said that we are on all the social media platforms at fansplaining, and yeah, as a reminder we will include stuff about the Word Blue Hill Literary Festival if anyone is up for coming to that in the show notes, and we’ll also include a picture of Flourish playing Untitled Goose Game outside. [FK laughs] So go to fansplaining.com to check out that great content.

FK: All right. I will talk to you later, Elizabeth.

ELM: OK bye Flourish!

FK: Bye!

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ELM & FK: Fansplaining is brought to you by all of our Patrons, but especially Alaine Sepulveda, Amanda, Amelia Harvey, Anne Jamison, Bluella, Boxish, Bradlea Raga-Barone, Bryan Shields, Carl with a C, Carrie Clarady, Chelsee Bergen, Christine Hoxmeier, Christopher Dwyer, CJ Hoke, Clare Muston, Cynthia, Desiree Longoria, Diana Williams, Dr. Mary C. Crowell, Earlgreytea68, Fabrisse, Felar, Froggy, Georgie Carroll, Goodwin, Gwen O’Brien, Heart of the Sunrise, Heidi Tandy, Helena, Jackie C., Javier Grillo-Marxuach, Jay Bushman, Jennifer Brady, Jennifer Doherty, Jennifer Lackey, Jennifer McKernan, Josh Stenger, Jules Chatelain, Julianna, JungleJelly, Katherine Lynn, Kathleen Parham, Kitty McGarry, Kristen P., Lizzy Johnstone, Lori Morimoto, Lucas Medeiros, Maria Temming, Maria Mercer, Mark Williams, Matt Hills, Meghan McCusker, Menlo Steve, Meredith Rose, Michael Andersen, Molly Kernan, Naomi Jacobs, Nozlee, Poppy Carpenter, Rachel Bernatowicz, Sam Markham, Sara, Secret Fandom Stories, Sekrit, Simini, Stephanie Burt, StHoltzmann, Tara Stuart, Veritasera, Willa, and in honor of One Direction, and BTS, and Francis Crawford of Lymond and Sevigny, and Captain James McGraw Flint Hamilton.

Our intro music is “Awel,” by stefsax. Our interstitial music is by Lee Rosevere. Both are used under a Creative Commons “BY” license. Check the show notes for more details. The opinions expressed in this podcast are not our clients’, or our employers’, or anyone’s except our own.

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