Episode 116: The Year In Fandom 2019
In Episode 116, Elizabeth and Flourish revive their end-of-year tradition and revisit big fandom trends in 2019. What changed, what got better, and what got worse? (According to Flourish, everything got worse.) Topics covered include the premature death knell for Tumblr, myths about the “monoculture,” truths and falsehoods about “fantitlement,” the messy rise of 8,000 streaming services, and, of course, “J. K. Rowling and the Infinite Pool of Bad Opinions.” And finally, since this decade is FINALLY over, they talk about what’s changed for fans over the past ten years. Spoiler alert: everything.
Show Notes
[00:00:00] As always, our intro music is “Awel” by stefsax, used under a CC BY 3.0 license.
[00:01:00] Previous Year In Fandom episodes: 2018. 2017. 2016. 2015.
[00:02:25] We devoted Episode 84 to the topic of purity culture.
[00:03:06] Elizabeth’s referring to this thread about the term “anti."
[00:09:36] The article in question is “BTS Is Back: Music’s Billion-Dollar Boy Band Takes the Next Step” by Seth Abramovitch.
[00:14:03] One glorious Tumblr thread that fully explains how a billion dollars went up in smoke.
[00:19:13] Tumblr’s 2019 year in review.
[00:20:53] Our interstitial music is “Awkward Silences (version a)” by Lee Rosevere, used under a CC BY 3.0 license.
[00:21:44] One piece about Tumblr that Elizabeth liked was “How Tumblr Helped Queer Mainstream Pop,” by Emma Madden.
[00:27:00] You can watch our full SDCC panel with closed captioning on YouTube:
[00:27:33] Kyle Chayka’s piece is “Can monoculture survive the algorithm?”
[00:29:56] Elizabeth’s referring to this tweet thread about how the “monoculture” never really was.
[00:35:14] The relevant Game of Thrones petition. The relevant Voltron petition.
[00:36:50] The original thread, in all its gloriously bad understanding of IP law, has been deleted and revised many times. Here’s what’s left of it. Here’s the original post, reposted.
[00:49:30]
[00:57:26]
[00:59:30] We’re singing “Immortal, Invisible, God Only Wise,” if you’re wondering.
[01:02:35] Ghost Writer’s reboot is indeed on Apple TV. The trailer:
The original Ghost Writer’s intro:
[01:13:09] Elizabeth’s blog post for The New Yorker is “The Endless Harry Potter.”
[01:18:11] Puppy tax!
[01:26:25] Elizabeth was listening to “Dinopocalypse Redux” on Radiolab.
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 #116, “The Year in Fandom 2019.”
FK: We made it!
ELM: We…made it. I was a little worried about you in the last couple of weeks. There was so much despair.
FK: Oh, it’s not been a very easy couple of weeks for me. OK OK. So every year, we do the same thing. And what we do is, first we talk about the trends that we observed last year, 2018, and whether they continued in 2019. Then we talk about things that are goin’ on 2019, and then we talk about our personal years in fandom.
ELM: Should we talk about the wild card we’re gonna add, or should we just surprise people?
FK: Uh, let’s, let’s have it be a surprise… [ELM laughing] It can’t be a surprise. We’re also gonna talk about the decade in fandom.
ELM: Briefly, briefly, because everybody has been doing decade coverage. I think it’s worth having a mention. Also because, you know, there’s been some, I’ve been looking at the coverage coming in over the last few weeks, there has been some good and some bad coverage when it comes to, like, the year in culture. Or the decade in culture.
FK: Right.
ELM: Some stuff I think really shows people’s biases and blind spots.
FK: So we’re gonna be good, right?
ELM: I mean we are going…I mean like, in the sense of like, if you’re talking about the decade in culture and you don’t have any conception of any way that fandom was a part of that, then you did it wrong.
FK: That’s true, OK.
ELM: And we are inherently going to say fandom was a part of culture. But no, we are actually talking about fan culture over the last 10 years.
FK: Yes. OK, so shall I tell, shall I just list off what we talked about in this episode last year as, like, the major things in 2018?
ELM: Well let’s take them one at a time. We’ll just talk about them briefly.
FK: OK. So the first thing we talked about was purity culture.
ELM: Mm.
FK: Was a thing in 2018, and continued in 2019, shockingly enough. I think it was also a holdover from 2017, this is like a long term trend.
ELM: Yes. Cool. So, I think people who listen know what purity culture is, at this point. There was a major purity culture flashpoint around Thanksgiving of this year, particularly on Twitter, in which some people found some old fic from a now-pro author that had some quote-unquote “problematic themes.”
FK: Yeah, I mean, I also feel like to some extent, like, purity culture as a term is beginning to lose its meaning for me it’s like a completely, like…
ELM: Hey, you took the words right out of my mouth! So like I think we both, I mean, fell silent during that because I was just…first of all it was Thanksgiving so I had things to do and so did you. But like, it sort of felt like it became a, a kind of an opportunity for everyone to air all feelings they had about this topic, even loosely related, to the point where people were having like 50 conversations. I actually saw a really good thread about the term “anti” the other day, which I’m wondering if I can dig up and put in the show notes, that kind of put me…it articulated something that I’ve been feeling for awhile which is basically like, “I can’t engage with this term any more because I don’t know what you mean by it.”
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And I don’t know if you mean this kind of, when we talk about purity culture, we talked about it last year, it was a very specific…it’s not specific but it’s very…it’s a somewhat narrow definition. Not saying everyone who wants to critique fandom is an anti, right? But some people are using it that way, and when people are talking about misogyny in fandom or racism in fandom and other people will say “You’re an anti!” And then that really, frankly, to me, can really damage the conversation around, you know, people trying to actually censor or say that very…like people were saying that these two adults with different ages are in an age gap. And I think of that as purity culture. And that is nothing to do with whether fandom should be critiqued for being racist! But every time that people conflate those things, it makes it harder to have that conversation about how ridiculous it is that people are getting harassed for writing a 35-year-old and a 40-year-old or whatever absurd thing that happens.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Because the terms have gotten so jumbled, you know what I mean? So it’s like, [sighs] that’s how I felt. That’s how I felt, Flourish.
FK: All right, so much for purity culture.
ELM: All right, oh wow, we’re just gonna move on immediately! Anyway, I…
FK: We are!
ELM: Well I will say very quickly, in all seriousness, I think the fact that I saw so much of this on Twitter was, I mean, we’re gonna talk about this right now you know in our review session and also in our big themes for this year too, was an interesting reflection of a kind of…not necessarily a post-Tumblr landscape, but it was a real intersection because a lot of the pro-pub authors who were maybe in fandom 10 years ago are primarily on Twitter right now, you know?
FK: Yeah, agreed.
ELM: And so to see those kind of things happening in the same space as opposed to being somewhat segmented was interested.
FK: Yeah, particularly. We’ll get into more of it, but particularly as some fandoms have more migrated to Twitter. Not all fandoms.
ELM: Right.
FK: But like there are some that have, have wholesale moved…OK. We’ll talk about that later. The next topic that we talked about last time is capitalism. [ELM laughs] Which is a huge topic. But I mean it was, we meant it both in terms of fans getting paid for their fanworks more frequently, and also the influence of money and corporations becoming incredibly obvious in 2018 and in a way that, they were always involved, but like, very transparently. You know?
ELM: Right. Do we, how do you think, Mx. Capitalist, how do you feel… [laughs]
FK: Well I mean you know, it’s hard for me to say this because my job involves being so aware of a lot of these machinations and for me, it’s true that that became more clear, because like, the Disney-FOX merger was just a huge deal, and it has radically shaped a lot of things that are happening in…
ELM: Hang on, that…
FK: Fannish…
ELM: That happened this year. Oh, wait, you’re saying that’s something that—
FK: Yeah! Yeah yeah yeah.
ELM: Yeah, I think if we’re not talking about paying for fanworks or anything like that, I think the biggest story for me and fandom along those lines, two of them—we won’t go too much into the first one—was the public Endgame vs. Avatar box office war. I don’t, I…
FK: Yep.
ELM: We will not talk about that. But I have to say it.
FK: Yeah, I…I regret to say that that is impossible for me to talk about [laughs] but…
ELM: But…
FK: You can imagine some thoughts I might have.
ELM: Yes. Yes.
FK: [laughing] Go imagine them.
ELM: Basically, Avatar was the highest, had the highest global box office for about a decade and Endgame was poised to overtake it and people got really invested in which team they were on in a, in a way that I thought was absurd since both things are owned by Disney. Anyway.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Anyway.
FK: Yep.
ELM: The other one, also…
FK: Do you stan green or blue Zoë Saldana more?
ELM: And the other one which is actually related, cause of course it is cause everything is now owned by Disney, is the custody battle over young Spider-Man. Which was a similar thing where Sony and Marvel and…Marvel is owned by Disney…had kind of, were sharing, sharing custody over Spider-Man, essentially, and then they had a little fight. And then Sony was like, “I’m taking my son!” And everyone was like, “Sony’s a bad dad though, Disney’s the good dad!” And it’s like, mmm. OK. It was so strange.
FK: Well it was, it was interesting though because I had to, you know, that did come up a lot in my work where I had to tell people like, “No, actually in today’s brave new world, people may not understand all the pieces of corporations owning things, but they certainly understand the concept of this IP battle.” Which historically people have not understood. And I do think this is a real change that has happened in the past, like, in the past decade. Which we’ll get to later.
ELM: But I think it’s happened in an extreme way in the past couple of years.
FK: Agree.
ELM: So do you find that people in Hollywood are surprised to hear this?
FK: Yes. Because for so many years…
ELM: No one knew.
FK: It was not something…no one knew and no one cared and it’s like, it’s surprising to people to discover that actually now these things are, even though people don’t necessarily know all the details or understand the true situation, they still have some concept of like, what’s happening. And before there was no concept. No one cared.
ELM: Yeah, I mean, I would say the little bit of knowledge that the general fan public has right now is bad. I would say it is a prime example.
FK: Drink. Deep. Or. Taste. Not. The. Pierian Spring. That ends capitalism. We’ve gotta end capitalism. We’re gonna run out of time! [laughing]
ELM: I just wanna say, I think that fan—fandom, capital-F Fandom, broad huge swath of millions of people this year, on this topic has performed a peak Dunning-Kruger.
FK: Yes. I would agree.
ELM: Which is the social science research that says that the less you know, the more confident you are that you know it. It’s been really grim to watch.
FK: Yes. I am, I am attempting to come to terms with this. Uh, it is, it is very true. OK.
The next thing that we said last time was K-pop. It’s a thing, actually! More accurately we said that this was the year where transcultural fandom broadly, because of K-pop, became like a real topic and a real—2018 was—a real topic and a real big big big chunk of the discussion. And I think that that was true and it certainly hasn’t become less so. It’s become more so.
ELM: Yeah, I think what we’ve seen in the last year, especially I’ve seen it over the last like quarter of this year, the true Western American mainstreaming of K-pop has meant…I don’t know. More opportunities than last year? It’s become so unavoidable for the Western media, the Western culture media, entertainment journalism, that it’s just presented opportunities for American journalists and British journalists—you know, Western Anglophone journalists—to show their asses in extreme ways because they can’t ignore it any more. And so there was a famous one in a couple weeks ago, maybe months ago now, where there was an older male American journalist who wrote in the Hollywood Reporter profile he was doing of BTS that he googled them on the plane to Seoul. And it was like, “Sir. Could you…could you…not put that in your fuckin’ article?! I’m sorry.”
FK: The thing that, the thing about it is that it combines all of the like, bad ways that people cover boy bands with all the bad ways that people cover anything that’s not Western culture. [laughs] Great.
ELM: And the reverse side of that too, or not the reverse cause it’s not a binary, there’s been this, there’s been a string of female K-pop solo act stars’ suicides recently, and…
FK: Yeah.
ELM: That has led to a similar sort of like, all of the bad ways people talk about female celebrity and female musicians…
FK: Yep, yeah.
ELM: Combined with “Well, this oppressive culture,” blah blah blah. You know? And it’s like, there are so many people who are either Korean or, and who write about this thoughtfully, or are you know, deeply familiar with the structures of K-pop and, and Korean celebrity, and now international celebrity and all this, who are writing about this thoughtfully, but still, still people with huge platforms in the West and the English-speaking West.
That being said, I think one thing that we’ve really seen is a huge rise of stan culture interaction with this media in a way that I don’t think is great either.
FK: No! No. In fact, I get it—I say one of my themes for 2019 is: everything sucks!
ELM: You’re so, you’re the cynical one now. It’s really, really refreshing.
FK: I’m really cynical this year.
ELM: But you know, I observe particularly K-pop stan culture interactions with articles that have anything to do with K-pop and I’ve had journalist friends who’ve written largely positive reviews…actually just, our friend Aja Romano was just on an internet culture panel that I went to see IRL in New York City and they were saying, they wrote an article about…I think it was about BTS…and mentioned a different, earlier, important band as an influence twice, and like, got harassed. Like, “How dare you say that they, they were not…”
FK: “Don’t you know that BTS sprang fully formed out of the head of some producer?!”
ELM: [laughing] Right? And so it’s like…and so it’s like, if your coverage doesn’t align exactly with what a large mass of people in a stan culture kind of cycle want, that can go really really poorly. I mean, if you look at the replies on a piece that’s overwhelmingly positive you’ll see. Like: “This piece! This piece!” And that’s, that’s validating for a journalist but I think it doesn’t help, it doesn’t really help the media ecosystem around this topic. Because it turns into such a binary of like, “Did you, did you please this very large group that’s gonna harass you if you didn’t say everything exactly the way they want you to say it.”
FK: Yeah, and it’s not actually, it doesn’t actually make me feel that great about fandom…
ELM: This is not unique to K-pop!
FK: And sort of…
ELM: Sorry, can I just clarify: this is not unique to K-pop at all.
FK: No, not at all! No no no. In fact I was thinking about it in terms of like the, the Avatar–Endgame war and all this stuff, right. So I mean…the, definitely not unique to K-pop. And, and I guess what I would say is that it makes me feel like… [sighs] Man. Maybe, maybe letting…maybe letting fans get together in extremely large groups is bad! [laughs]
ELM: Good, that’s a great takeaway.
FK: Maybe it’s bad!
ELM: Maybe.
FK: What if everything is bad? OK. What if everything is bad?
ELM: You’re going to say this to every topic, aren’t you?
FK: I, I probably am. But hey, this is one that’s actually sort of more positive than it was last year, which is: Tumblr!
ELM: Tumblr dot com. Yes.
FK: Tumblr dot com. I was wrong. Tumblr continues to do, to tumbl.
ELM: Well, you…
FK: It keeps tumblin’.
ELM: You were wrong because you haven’t been a really active hellsite user in quite some time!
FK: It’s true. It’s true. I was like, “I don’t use this hellsite any more, no one I know uses it any more, it’s gonna fall apart and die,” and it totally did not.
ELM: So as someone who’s…
FK: Not even remotely.
ELM: …been actively using it for the last 12 months, here’s my observations. Are you ready?
FK: Yeah, I’m ready.
ELM: OK first of all, if you haven’t been keeping up on the news, Tumblr was purchased towards the end of the summer, I wanna say, by Matt Mullenweg and the people at Automattic, who make WordPress. Unclear what they’re going to do with it. Purchased it for three million dollars after it was sold to Yahoo for one billion dollars. And so that has spawned a new, exciting component of Tumblr humor about just how many bajillions of dollars we have all lost.
FK: We have run into the ground! [laughing]
ELM: And people would say, you know, like, I just saw—I saw this incredible post the other day that involved in the reblog threads someone saying “canon” in reference to Catholicism and then the next reblog was something like “Did you notice they used the word ‘canon’?” Because they didn’t know that, they thought that was just a fandom word. And then the, and then you can imagine the like, “Oh my God I wanna, like, burn my eyes out” or whatever, “that I had to witness this,” and then like the final reblog I saw was like, “Another great hit from the people who lost Verizon one billion dollars.” [all laughing] And it’s like, and that’s a really exquisite addition to every like, chain of idiocy that you see on Tumblr. It’s like, this is why we did it.
And like, you know, that’s always been a part of Tumblr, not, maybe not always, but for most of the last decade that’s been a part of Tumblr’s humor, is this kind of idea of like, “We’re trapped in this stupid place with these stupid people and we love it here and we hate it and we love it,” you know what I mean?
FK: It really has, yeah.
ELM: And so just give us, like, a real extra monetary dollar number to, to that.
FK: Yeah. So the other, the other thing about this that I think is interesting is I’ve been working more closely with looking at, like, the Tumblr firehose, and trying to think about why people devalue Tumblr as a fandom space in the corporate area. So to give you some context, like, people in like, corporate social media tracking value Twitter way way way highly, and Tumblr not at all.
ELM: Right.
FK: Usually, right. Because—and the answer is simple as to why: it’s because Twitter is measurable. It’s very easy to get the Twitter firehose and it works. The Tumblr firehose is also a thing. It’s not very good in a lot of ways but it exists. But I had this brain wave, and I realized why a lot of people don’t, don’t engage with Tumblr very much: it’s because when people tag things on Tumblr, they don’t usually use the main…I mean sometimes you use the main tag for your fandom, but you usually just are using a character or something, right, or you write our own.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: So even, but actually most people who run these like sort of corporate social media scraping, they only use the title and the official hashtags. So, it blew my mind, I was working on a project and I saw…
ELM: But that already misses so much on Twitter as well, it’s not like everyone is going #StarWars when they talk about it, you know?
FK: Oh, it misses a huge amount on Twitter. Exactly, no, it misses a huge amount on Twitter, but less than it does on Tumblr.
ELM: Sure, yeah yeah.
FK: And it totally—when I realized this I was like “Oh my God you guys oh no.” Maybe not oh no, because I don’t know that Tumblr wants people, like, let me rephrase. I think that Tumblr, the corporation or the…
ELM: Tumblr dot com certainly does.
FK: They really want people to care. But people on Tumblr may not be so thrilled at my social scraping ability to get their posts.
ELM: I mean, yes and no.
FK: But some of them might be, I don’t know, it’s mixed.
ELM: I think it’s hard. I think if you were able to show, you know, it’s not like fans exist in a purely oppositional space and if you were to notice that those two white men in Pacific Rim were very popular and that led to them getting more screen time in the next Pacific—I don’t know, I didn’t see either Pacific Rim, I don’t know if they die or whatever. But you know what I mean? [FK laughs] Think of some example like that. If you were able to show that, like, this is actually like, disproportionately huge on Tumblr, and that led to when they started to think about how they wanted to shape the rest of the franchise, you know, that kind of thing…I don’t think that fans would be mad about that, you know?
FK: And that, and that Tumblr is huge, right? Actually like the volume of conversation on Tumblr for a lot of fandoms is much higher than anywhere else. And people genuinely actually do not see that. So it’s interesting and I’m curious to…
ELM: I will say from the, um, from the media perspective, which is kind of adjacent to this, I will say that Tumblr has ceased to generate any traffic for media these days. And five years ago it did. And I know that most people who, you know, most publications have given up on having any presence there or trying to promote their content there. And I do find that really interesting, cause these aren’t disconnected, right?
FK: Right.
ELM: But Tumblr is a much more closed ecosystem than Twitter.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Twitter frankly doesn’t drive that much traffic for media anymore either, but all journalists are on Twitter so it’s really hard to suggest that that should be devalued. But like, Tumblr, you may notice if you’re a user of Tumblr, not you but the listener, people copy-paste entire articles onto Tumblr.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Right? Which you cannot realistically do on Twitter, and you have to click out and on to the publication and see this K-pop article. As opposed to on Tumblr, they’re literally wholesale plagiarizing onto it daily. And no one says anything. Right? Which I think is a problem, because it, it doesn’t create a sort of…it creates a very, um, cloistered sort of narrow, you know, in-app experience.
That being said, like, for the entertainment industry, even if it is limited to Tumblr, the sentiment is still building. And that may translate to…
FK: Yeah, that doesn’t matter. That doesn’t matter to the entertainment industry. I mean, because what they care about is did you buy a ticket.
ELM: Right, exactly.
FK: Did you sign up for Amazon Prime, did you sign up for Netflix. You know?
ELM: But I, I do think the segmenting off is a problem for the broader culture. If you were to look at all of these things kind of holistically together.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And I think that’s a genuine bad part of Tumblr culture honestly, is that people do this. So. It’s a shame.
FK: Yeah, yeah, it’s true. It’s also, I mean, probably the bigger deal from the entertainment side is that like, Tumblr is…I mean obviously all of fandom is not oppositional, but so much of the things that Tumblr cares about and are into are things that are not, like, they’re, they’re too far out of the comfort zone of a lot of corporations, basically.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: Which isn’t a bad thing, I mean, obviously I like that. You know? Like, I like those things. But, but, it is a challenge in terms of like, trying to convince people that they should care about this, you know.
ELM: I mean, do I believe that in 2019 when I think about the top ships? From, you know, from the great analysis that our friend Amanda Brennan, Tumblr librarian, has been doing? Like, the top ships for the year were like Aziraphale and Crowley, Crowley…and the guys from IT, which I saw referred to so many times on the reporting on this as canonical, and like…I think some people didn’t see IT 2 but that’s fine. [FK laughs] Maybe, maybe people are making it seem canonical by their fervor, you know. Or like, last year one of the big ships was what’s-his-name from Venom and Venom, you know. And that’s one where you’d be like “Well, that’s weird,” you know, like, “Hollywood’s not gonna,” but like, that—that, it’s not like that movie thinks it’s weird, you know? And like it’s probably good to know that it’s not too weird for actually tons of people, right, you know? That gives them a signal that they keep going down that path.
FK: Yeah. I mean, you’re preaching to the choir here—
ELM: I’m just sayin’, it’s not that, it’s not that confusing, right. And it’s not that weird. I see weird shit every day on Tumblr, and I rarely see that reflected in the big stats of Tumblr. It’s, that’s the long tail stuff. And that’s fine, that’s what it’s there for, you know?
FK: It’s true.
ELM: You can find the seven other people who like your specific fetish or whatever, you know? Doesn’t have to be a fetish. Just could be an aesthetic you like. You know?
FK: I do know.
ELM: You know?
FK: I do know. I will go find my other, like, Cronenberg aesthetic fans.
ELM: Yeah, fetish. Cronenberg fetish fans.
FK: I mean…it is, I mean, with Cronenberg the aesthetic and the fetish are pretty much the same thing so that’s fair enough. [ELM laughs] I think it’s probably about time that we should take a break before we can get into properly this year’s—we sort of talked about this year with Tumblr just a little bit now.
ELM: [laughs] Great, let’s talk about it slightly more, cause spoiler: that’s our first topic for 2019.
FK: All right, all right, let’s take a break.
[Interstitial music]
FK: We’re ba-ack.
ELM: [laughs] Thank you. Dot tumblr dot com.
FK: Yeah I mean I was just trying to be weird, we were talkin’ weird.
ELM: So here’s what I would say, continuing, we don’t have to talk about it that much more cause we actually kinda got into a lot of it. [FK laughs] I have been very disappointed over the last year with the discussion outside Tumblr of Tumblr. I think that there have been a few pieces this year that I appreciated that acknowledged Tumblr’s cultural importance over the last decade and continued importance, but many more that dismissed it.
I saw a lot of people, and you know, I’m not going to deny anyone’s right to leave Tumblr in protest, and I don’t want to diminish anyone whose safety was directly affected or anyone who’s a sex worker or anyone who works in that realm who was actually being explicitly targeted by the porn ban last year. I do have a lot of people in my sphere and my, like, spheres of spheres, mutual friend spheres, on Twitter who frankly were not active Tumblr users for the past few years who constantly complained that they didn’t like Tumblr and [FK laughs] this year have gone full moral high horse “I knew I was wrong, Tumblr is dead, I don’t like Twitter either, and I…” and it’s like, OK, but you, you didn’t find a community that you enjoyed there! You didn’t like the experience there, and you…and so it’s a little, it’s a little frustrating to me to kinda come back after the fact and be like “Well,” you know, “I left for moral reasons alone.”
I think that you can have all of these things together, but I do think there was a little bit of posturing, at least in the spheres I’m in, and that was a little bit frustrating to see because lots and lots of people still have their communities on Tumblr, and they haven’t gone anywhere, you know?
FK: Yeah, yeah.
ELM: The traffic dropped by about a third, but it’s still millions of people engaging.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: My dash doesn’t look that much different than it did a year ago.
FK: At the same time there were—I mean like the notable group that in my experience and the experience of a few other people I know, like, Reylos picked up en masse and went to Twitter.
ELM: I think Reylos were already on Twitter last year.
FK: They already were. They were, a lot of them were already—I mean there was a lot of people on Tumblr but it sort of ended? But I don’t know that it was because of the, I mean, I think that it sort of hastened the move, right? Because Reylos are also already really connected often with YA publishing, because…disproportionately, there’s like a Reylo-YA publishing crossover thing, I don’t know why.
ELM: Reylo was still in the top ten if not the top five ships on Tumblr this past year, so I think you may be less on Tumblr.
FK: Well it’s funny, I was saying this to someone—I was saying this to someone who used to be a lot on Tumblr and who is a Reylo and who moved, so it’s not just my perception. In fact I said, cause that’s what I said to her. I was like “I think people are still on Tumblr, Reylo’s still in the top,” you know?
ELM: Yeah.
FK: Like you just said to me what I said to her and she was like “Well, I don’t know, but seems to me like everyone left.” So I think it’s a complicated, there’s people there, there’s people who left, it’s no—there’s no like, I don’t think that it’s a clear like, everyone picked up and left or a clear everyone stayed right here all the time.
ELM: Here’s a suggestion I have for Reylos: what I observe, and you’re actually maybe an ex-Reylo now, but like, what I’ve observed on Twitter of Reylo culture is very much stan culture. And it’s, it’s not, I mean I know there are people in the Reylo fandom who are sharing fanworks about Reylo. But mostly when I see Reylos on Twitter, they are performing stan culture acts much as you would around Harry Styles. Just to pin it all on you. Or K-pop or, you know, Rihanna or whatever, right.
FK: Yeah yeah yeah. Yeah.
ELM: Whereas Tumblr I think, because of the nature of the actual UX and the mechanics of the platform, Tumblr’s never going to be a very good platform for that kind of stan culture, that rapid cycling of engagement that’s about counting numbers and responding quickly. And I also have to wonder, we’ve observed over the last five years the kind of waxing and waning of different kinds of Star Wars fan activity, in terms of like, at certain moments in the franchise this is what people really wanna make a lot of transformative works.
FK: Yeah yeah yeah, versus doing…
ELM: So I wonder if there’s something about the immediate year after the aggressively Reylo film that was The Last Jedi for fanwork culture. I’d be curious to know if there was a lot more fanwork production, I’d imagine there was in 2018 than there was in 2019. So.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: You know?
FK: Well, we will, we can look into these things…
ELM: That’s quantifiable.
FK: I think that that’s, I think that’s insightful, although I…
ELM: That’s me: insights dot tumblr dot com. I’m sure someone probably has that. [all laugh] Someone definitely has that URL, so.
FK: Should we talk about our next—it’s probably Tumblr that has that URL. [ELM laughs] Should we talk about our next topic?
ELM: Yeah, we talked about Tumblr enough. I think it’s gonna come up again, but sure. Hook me up.
FK: All right, then, the next topic is the fannish monoculture.
ELM: All right, this is all me. Let me explain.
FK: It’s all you! It’s all you! Start tellin’ me about it!
ELM: OK, so: I’m working on a piece about this very topic, so that’s part of why I put it in, but I’m writing this piece in a kind of year-end way, because I have observed this throughout the year. But here is what I’ve observed: we did this SDCC panel about endings partly because major franchises are ending this year, right? Ending—the franchises aren’t ending, but major iterations, arcs within the franchises.
FK: The Skywalker Saga is coming to an end.
ELM: Yeah, I didn’t wanna use that, that ™ term that you just used. But you know. The Star Wars movies with Chewbacca in them. That’s not true, he was in Solo actually. They’re gonna, they’re gonna do an all-Chewbacca arc, aren’t they, next.
FK: I am, I for one am here to go to Kashyyyk.
ELM: Is that where Chewbacca’s from?
FK: I’m into it. Yeah. There’s multiple Y’s involved. It’s great.
ELM: Yeah, that was the only thing I liked. [FK makes a Wookiee noise] The only thing I liked about Solo was the multiple Chewbaccas. [FK Wookiee noises] OK. So, Game of Thrones, the… [FK Wookiee noises] I’m just gonna keep talking. Game of Thrones ending, Endgame, Avengers: Endgame ending, now Star Wars, I feel like there’s other examples. A lot of big cheesy goodbye kind of vibes here.
And throughout all of it you got a lot of cultural coverage that talked a lot about quote-unquote “the monoculture,” some of it good and some of it quite bad. Like there was just a really well-done piece by Kyle Chayka—
FK: Game of Thrones, the world of people saying “this is the last time everyone will watch a television show together. Game of Thrones is the last time.”
ELM: Exactly.
FK: Which is, I mean, there’s so many ways in which that’s…
ELM: Right.
FK: Funny.
ELM: Right. So I would highly recommend a piece that just came out by Kyle Chayka who’s a really good longform journalist talking about this. One of the best pieces I’ve seen on the subject. And I still think that the concept is flawed. He was talking about the way that algorithmic social curation sort of flattens it into this monoculture, but I just think that we’ve seen a real conflation in the last year, sort of, I think, if we were to look at what’s happened over the last five years, the course of this podcast, in terms of like sort of shift from fandom meaning specific things to sort of equating interest around quote-unquote “nerdy” properties with fandom, to now suggesting that the audiences of these very mass-culture but loosely nerdy properties are fandom?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Right? This is the arc that we’ve observed and it’s not the same thing that it was two years ago. This kind of idea that the Game of Thrones fandom is the Game of Thrones viewership. And like Game of Thrones is the easiest one. Game of Thrones has such distinct sub-fandoms, right?
FK: Yeah!
ELM: You know?
FK: And there are multiple of them and they are clearly their own things!
ELM: Right!
FK: Not that they never talk to each other but like, there’s clearly a bunch of different people who are interested in different ways.
ELM: Different ways of engaging, different backgrounds of the people, different methods of discussing it and sharing content about it, and the sort of suggestion, I mean: yes, they are all united by the show Game of Thrones, which was on Sunday nights on HBO, right? And so there is something to be said for an appointment TV or a, like, this big tentpole movie comes out and everyone goes to see it within a week or two. But.
FK: Yeah. Well, also like: the reality is that while big tentpole movies are bigger than ever, appointment TV that quote “everybody sees,” is smaller than ever.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: Even Game of Thrones, you know?
ELM: Well, I think that’s part of it though. I think that’s why people have this extra anxiety because “there’s nothing else that we’re all going to care about together,” but then Succession on HBO got 27 million viewers, you know what I mean? So it’s…
FK: But people already don’t all…yeah, but people also already don’t all care about it, you know what I mean? Not the way they all cared about the—you’re going to laugh at me because I always bring this up but…
ELM: M*A*S*H, M*A*S*H.
FK: The ending of M*A*S*H, right? I know that’s silly but like, but even like, The X-Files, like a regular episode of The X-Files, you know what I mean, or whatever. Any property like that.
ELM: But that’s still flattening, I don’t have it on hand but when I was tweeting about this piece that I thought was good and I was saying “But I still am not sure about this as a theory,” you know, someone responded to me with some great thoughts and was talking about how it was never, it was never true. And he was linking to like some writing in a book about this like myth of the monoculture on TV in the ’90s, and how that excludes black audiences and excluded it then and excluded it in, you know what I mean?
FK: Yeah yeah yeah.
ELM: This idea that we all sit around a watercooler—I mean we were like fetal or nonexistent. But the idea that people sit around a watercooler and watch something is absurd when you actually think about the numbers of these things and the actual population of the country and, you know?
FK: Right, exactly. Even when it was at the highest number of TV ever it was still not everybody who watched this.
ELM: No, right? You know?
FK: Exactly, right, right—it’s simultaneously that it was never true and also that it used to be way more true than it is for Game of Thrones so why are we all freaking out about Game of Thrones being, I don’t know.
ELM: Right, right, exactly.
FK: It’s wrong on both ends! [laughing]
ELM: And I think the most interesting thing about Game of Thrones is 20 years ago you couldn’t measure something like this. You couldn’t say, what was a monoculture show? I don’t know, Seinfeld. Everyone might have discussed it around the watercooler, but there’s so much more opportunity for various, like, multivarious fandom expressions beyond just audience. That’s the other thing too, it’s like the idea that every Game of Thrones quote-unquote “fan” is in the Game of Thrones fandom or whatever, to use that term, beyond like just watching it and enjoying it and discussing it the next day at work, you know? Like…that’s a, they might be a casual fan, we might use that term, but like there’s more space for people who wanna go and sort of find each other now than there ever was.
But if you think about like the Seinfeld finale or whatever, you know, it’s not like there were like 15,000 Seinfeld recap podcasts! [FK laughs] For the last, you know, for the last season of it, you know what I mean? Like…and now there is, and people can have different approaches and say, like, “Oh, we’re this kind of fan” or “we’re this kind of fan,” or “this is all, we care about this ship,” or “we have this background” or whatever. You know what I mean?
FK: I do know what you mean and I think it’s also complex because, like, the very behaviors that people take part in are different. I mean, there’s just, there’s so many questions around measurement and around like also people’s behaviors and talking about media. There’s just, I don’t know. It’s, yeah.
ELM: Yes…?
FK: Yeah. Yeah! Yeah. Yeah…I’m excited to read your piece, Elizabeth.
ELM: Yeah, I mean, it’s, this is mostly, it was—it’s partly inspired too by some of the discussion around quote-unquote “Star Wars fans,” and I just really kinda hit a wall with frustration here about this sort of idea that there is a Star Wars fan and he is a specific person doing specific things with specific opinions. Or the fans versus critics bullshit that…
FK: yeah.
ELM: …all fans feel a certain way and, and there are critics on the other side who are, you know what I mean? It’s like, these are, it’s just a reification of all the bad like, the idea of what a fanboy was 15 years ago but now it’s like a giant corporate stamp on it. And it’s just like, that’s shitty! And the media is, like, first, like, singlehanded—not singlehandedly. The media is quite responsible for this kind of perpetuation of these ideas.
FK: Well it’s that and there’s also, you know, again when I talk about measurement I’m thinking about the ways that, again, the ways that people measure quote “fan sentiment.” Right? Back to what we were saying about Tumblr, if what you are looking at is genuinely the title of your property and the hashtags, there’s certain parts of fan culture that are more likely to use that.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: Than others. You know? Like…and, also, by the way, people who are very casually like “Hey, I saw this,” you know, whatever, “I watched Lord of the Rings last night, it was fun,” and like, don’t care about anything else in it, those people are gonna use that whereas someone who is like, going deep into like, obscure characters or whatever, they’re never gonna get caught in that pull.
ELM: Right.
FK: So I think that that’s what, that’s why I bring up measurement also because I think that there’s like, multiple layers on what people are, are struggling to quantify this and then coming up with not always great results.
ELM: Wow, really seems like you should fix this, Flourish.
FK: Gee! What do you think I’ve been tryin’ to do for the past 10 years, Elizabeth?!
ELM: Are you telling me that the entertainment industry doesn’t know the term “Hydra trash party”?!
FK: [laughs] Yes. I am telling you that the entertainment industry simultaneously like, I keep telling people, like, simultaneously they know way more and way less than you can ever imagine, and it’s a weird weird weird combination.
ELM: That’s great. All right. I’m interested to see, I’ll be interested to revisit this next year, after, you know, because we’ve started to see—and we’re gonna talk about this a little bit when we talk about platforms, streaming platforms in a few minutes—but you started to see shows going back to weekly releases, after dumping, you know, and so I’m interested to see how that pendulum swinging back in terms of television culture at least—though it may be completely drowned out by the sheer, sheer upsettingly large amount of content that’s going to be coming out in the next year. [laughs]
FK: Yes. Welcome, yeah. Yeah.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: The wave.
ELM: All right, we don’t have to talk about that yet.
FK: OK OK. All right. Fantitlement is our next topic.
ELM: OK.
FK: Fantitlement.
ELM: OK.
FK: Is this the point at which…no. I can’t do it yet.
ELM: You go off on your rant about how Star Wars is dead to you?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: No, save it. Save it for the end.
FK: Fantitlement, Elizabeth. It was a whole thing this year! I felt like it was, I mean, it’s not like this is a new topic. None of these are ever new topics.
ELM: Yeah. Here’s, here’s one take I had. You wanna hear some, my greatest takes?
FK: [laughing] I wanna hear your takes.
ELM: After the Game of Thrones, in the final weeks of the Game of Thrones season eight, there were some petitions asking them to rewrite, redo it. Cause people thought it was bad. And you know, it was interesting because I, I caught wind of one of the big ones that turned out to be a big one, not early on but like, before it really became a headline in literally every shitty cultural outlet on the internet. And it had a few tens of thousands of signatures. And I was thinking, “Oh, that’s so funny, it’s like the same number as the Voltron petitions we were looking at the end of last year,” where they were literally saying, they were like… And some of the Voltron petitions I looked at, they were like, you know, into conspiracy theories about how things were written and distributed. Like, like the people were being…
FK: Extremely.
ELM: …locked in basements and that’s why the content wasn’t what you wanted it to be. You know? Like, and I was just thinking about how the reaction from my feed was pretty dumb to the Game of Thrones ones, because people were like, “Gentlemen, just write some fanfiction! You’re all so entitled, you’re so used to getting your exact way.” [FK laughing] I’m just sitting here being like, “The Voltron fans, who are probably mostly young people, like, young queer people, young women, young AFAB people, you know, et cetera, like…they also write some fanfic, you know? It’s not like, like it’s, it’s like, “Oh, when white men don’t get their way they protest, and when everyone else doesn’t get their way they just go write fanfiction.”
FK: [laughing] Slink off and write fanfic, yeah!
ELM: That’s, that’s completely blinkered to what’s actually going on right now in the culture. And it doesn’t…
FK: Yeah…at the same time there was that hilarious dude who was like, “If, if,” I don’t remember what fandom it was in, do you remember this thing that went viral where the guy was like, “Hello, like, I wonder what would happen if we just took the, tried to take the story from the corporation…”
ELM: It was Star Wars! It was Star Wars!
FK: It was Star Wars!
ELM: It was like a week ago! Yeah, and they were like…
FK: It was so funny.
ELM: “Can we try to take over, like, we’re gonna unionize and sieze the…” [laughing]
FK: That’s the other, that’s the other side of it, because on the other hand sometimes they really do need to just learn what the fuck fanfiction is! [laughing] That, I mean, I’m not disagreeing with anything that you said and yet…
ELM: Yep!
FK: And yet both things are true! Because everything is shitty.
ELM: Yeah, and I mean, that’s funny thinking back to the conversation like 15 minutes ago about fans learning about what IP is. It’s like, well, apparently some have not quite grasped it. Right? You know? Like…
FK: Or, or are a little learning is a dangerous thing.
ELM: Just the tiniest bit of learning. And it’s funny to me too, I’ve had a lot of thoughts this year and I, I think this will be a continuing theme for me, about the idea of like one of the pleasures of fanfiction. And it’s not like this is new to me, but I really felt like I had a shoring-up, one of the pleasures being the like, literal corporate like, wresting it out from a giant corporation, right? You know? And like, I think that’s partly because I’m in a second year of a fandom that is a giant, like, superhero, you know. So it’s not the same thing as Black Sails, which feels…it’s still made by a large network, but it just feels a little…
FK: Yeah…
ELM: A little artier, you know? [laughs]
FK: Yeah, like, the people who made it actually like, are more touchable. [ELM laughs] And yeah.
ELM: You don’t think I could go touch Simon Kinberg? [laughs] Just give him a little, little shoulder pat!
FK: Lil’ pat!
ELM: Yeah. So, I don’t know. Maybe, maybe that’s part of, part of why I’m feeling it or maybe it’s just me reacting to the sort of increasing discussion of the corporate part of corporate media in the broader culture. But I, I do find that funny, that people still seem to have so much trouble with this topic.
FK: Well, it’s also tough because it’s like, it’s, it’s tough because again, like, every, on every side, people behave in, in such terrible ways [laughing] right? Like, on the one hand it’s like, people don’t want to be critiqued or don’t want to admit that like, they made something that people didn’t like. Everyone, no one wants to like, make something and then have people not like it. Right? And people get very defensive. And yet on the other hand, like, you know, yeah, the tone—and it all becomes a, it all becomes an issue of tone, and response, and that’s the worst.
ELM: Are you talking about the creator side. You’re talking about the corporate media side.
FK: Yeah, I’m saying like, that part of the reason that this is so bad is that like, whatever, the Game of Thrones cinematographer is like, “I shot that episode and it was dark because that was my vision!” Everyone’s like, “Well I don’t know, I couldn’t fuckin’ see anything,” right? And so that’s like a very, that’s like a very, I mean…personally I thought the episode was fine, but I also think it’s a valid critique to be like “I couldn’t see a fuckin’ thing what’s wrong with you,” if you couldn’t.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: You know? So like, OK, but then, but then, then that gets lumped in with someone not being able to take a valid critique like that, or to be able to talk about it, with like, also things about character and small bits and like…just everything, and then like, instead of critiquing it’s like “Well, you owed us something better.” And like, did he owe you something better? Is that something you can say about a critique? I don’t think you can, but you’re going to. And like, I don’t know. And like, the idea of like, a contract between the storyteller and the people hearing the story, and…I don’t know. It’s so squishy and everyone has shown their butt.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: A lot.
ELM: Yeah. I think that really articulates how I feel. It’s absurd to me too…
FK: Squishy butts.
ELM: As the critic, like, I don’t feel like I’m owed anything. And in fact it brings me some pleasure to be able to write down exactly why someone failed. I don’t want to say that, like…no. I’m not, I’m not, I’m not like, uh, what do you call it.
FK: I don’t know what you call it, but I can’t wait to find out!
ELM: I, I’m not into hatchet jobs or anything, and I’m not like one of the…you know, there are actual critics who, and I haven’t like…
FK: Right, seek out stuff to ruin.
ELM: I haven’t done a lot of professional criticism in the last few years, because I’ve been mostly writing, like, about fan stuff. But when, when I was doing criticism, and I would read a book, and it didn’t work, one of the pleasures of doing criticism is figuring out exactly what wasn’t working.
FK: Right.
ELM: And on the flip side, exactly what was working. And you can’t sit there like a baby…no, that’s mean to babies. Sit there like an adult fan and be like, “I thought it would be the way I thought it would be, and it wasn’t, and so you betrayed me.” Right? Like, in fact, isn’t it more satisfying to say “I’m disappointed that this wasn’t better, and I’m gonna show my skill as a viewer or a reader, and show why I think it didn’t work.” You know? Why it didn’t feel like it came together, why it didn’t bring me any pleasure, why I think it’s not very well-written. Like, an actual critique instead of acting like, I don’t know. You know? Like…
FK: But I think that part of the problem is too, even when people do engage in that kind of actual critique, then it’s very easy for that to get co-opted by people who, whose, who read that and go “Yeah! What they said, that sounds smart and I hated it!” You know? [laughs] Like, it’s just, it’s hard because like there’s so many different people…
ELM: But that’s normal. The dumbest people can read a very thoughtful review of a movie they just had a gut instinct they thought was garbage, and the review could be the most deep thing and it says it’s a bad movie…and they’re gonna go, “I told you!” And it’s like, “You didn’t, you didn’t think of any of this! You just didn’t like it and you couldn’t articulate why.” And that’s fine, I’m not saying the average viewer needs to sit around here with like, being an expert critic or whatever. It’s just…
FK: I mean we’re saying that a little bit.
ELM: No! I, you don’t, it doesn’t have to be complicated and deep, but like, it’s, it’s more about how you position yourself in relation to the text. It’s not necessarily about your skill or your talent at deconstructing the text. It’s more about what you think the text should be doing. And…
FK: Right.
ELM: I know it’s hard when you are a fan of it. Like, I have been in fandom for quite some time.
FK: I was gonna say and yet it’s, yeah.
ELM: But actually I’m coming from critical media fandom and I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of people feel this way in critical media fandom where you can be like “I’m disappointed as a fan but, you know, I feel like this is a way for me to express my interest in this topic, by,” you know what I mean? Like, “by showing all the ways it didn’t work for me and the ways that I would, I would’ve,” you know. “And then I’m gonna go write some fanfiction to say here’s how I would make it better.”
FK: Yeah…at the same time I do, I do have some sympathy for the feeling of just like, “Oh no.” You know? Like…
ELM: Sure!
FK: “Oh no, that thing happened and it was not for me.” You know? So it’s just, I don’t know. People can be behaving badly and I can also have sympathy for their feelings.
ELM: What are those words that you just said? Cause I don’t hear people saying the words “it was not for me.”
FK: Yeah. I mean, like…
ELM: That’s the healthy attitude.
FK: That’s the healthy, that’s the healthy attitude, but I think that it like—that’s the healthy way of expressing the same feeling that like, leads to a lot of this showing your butt. OK. I think we should move on to the next topic.
ELM: All right.
FK: Because I’ve, I don’t feel like there’s any, like, I mean, it’s just like “Look at it. Look at that bad situation over there, let’s poke it a little.” So let’s, let’s move on to the next one, which is, which we covered it a little bit already. Which is this sort of idea of fans versus audiences versus consumers.
ELM: Yeah. So I put this one on the list around streaming, television streaming platforms in particular. This year was a complete shitshow on this front. [FK laughs] I’m not, I, I don’t know if…I don’t wanna malign any potential clients of yours, but I will say that certain streaming platforms clearly have literally no idea what they’re doing. They’re just throwing money at the wall. [FK laughs] Throwing money into a black hole and setting it on fire as it goes down. And, good, good luck to them.
FK: Tell us, tell us how you really feel!
ELM: I just don’t, I don’t understand what the point of this is! Like, I—I don’t understand why throwing money at making garbage without thinking about who your potential customer is, and the idea that, obviously the different streaming platforms—you can see this even just as an observer, I mean, I shouldn’t say “obviously” because this is literally something that I’m like studying in a professional capacity [laughs] so it’s not like, maybe it’s just not patently obvious by just glancing at them. But it’s like, they clearly have different strategies. Right? And you can see it in their content creation, you can see it in their audience engagement.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: But I don’t see any long-term strategic thinking, and maybe there is some going on internally, but they are giving no indication that they have any. And it’s interesting to me because, I don’t wanna go too much into the decade stuff yet, but I think that one thing that we’ve seen over the last decade is a few large movie franchises showing they have…maybe somewhat making it up as they go along, but giving the appearance of having a medium- to long-term franchise strategy.
FK: Right. There was some idea, even if it was, they were not building the plane in the air.
ELM: Right.
FK: Right. They might, they might be fixing the plane in the air… [ELM laughing] One engine might go out…but they weren’t building it in the air.
ELM: Right. But, exactly. That’s a very good, very good metaphor. Right, but like, this is like, I don’t even think some of these people know, they’re like “Are we making a plane or are we making a…the Hindenburg? Like, what are we, craft…”
FK: [laughing] Are we making the Hindenburg.
ELM: I couldn’t remember, I couldn’t remember, I almost said “creature.” What kind of vehicle the Hindenburg was. Is it a blimp? No.
FK: It’s a zeppelin.
ELM: Zeppelin! Yes. OK. Thank you. Creature!
FK: Yeah, so I mean, I think that, I think that what I would say with this is that to me it’s sort of a both sides…when I say “both sides” thing, what I mean is I see this like question about fans versus audiences versus customers, versus consumers, as a…it’s a problem from the audience side, as well as from the…
ELM: Yeah.
FK: Corporate side. Because, just to slightly divert the conversation, on the audience side I think that it is incredibly, I mean, this is when we see things like box office fights. Right? This is when we see things like total album sales or total listens or something like this in stan culture becoming this, like, “Well, look at all of these people who consumed this.” Right?
ELM: You think people are doing that are on streamers? Cause I don’t think they are at all, because they don’t have any numbers!
FK: No no no no, not necessarily around streamers. I’m just saying, I’m not saying this in particular about streaming, I’m saying that I think that…but I do think that actually, to some degree, there is an idea of like, “Well, everybody, if everybody watched this, then like…” I don’t know, it’s…I guess the thing that I would say is: whether or not there’s numbers, I think that there’s this idea that if everybody sees, within, within fan culture broadly, often, there’s an idea that if everybody saw something, or if there was a lot of sales or if it seems like it’s a cultural cachet, then that’s winning, which we’ve talked about many times. And that doesn’t actually divide out like, all of the different reasons people see things. [laughs]
ELM: Yeah.
FK: Or like, what their feelings are, or any of those pieces. Right? It’s this total flattening into just like, “Here’s a number.”
ELM: Right.
FK: And I think that that also afflicts streamers and it also afflicts, yeah, I mean it’s always afflicted movie studios because the only thing movie studios have ever cared about is butts in seats. I hate to tell everyone but that is, I mean…in this way fans have become more aligned with movie studios! Now you too only care about butts in seats! [laughing]
ELM: You’ve probably said “butt” like, seven times in the, in this episode.
FK: Butt.
ELM: You really…
FK: Butt butt butt butt butt butt.
ELM: It’s your word of the year.
FK: [laughing] I don’t know why. I don’t actually normally say “butt,” but.
ELM: You’d think you’d say asses in seats, like, it’s a very, very…
FK: I usually say “ass,” but no, cause it’s like a stock phrase.
ELM: I think “asses in seats” sounds more sexy.
FK: But it’s not the stock phrase.
ELM: “Put your ass in the seat.” Yeah, all right.
FK: It’s not the stock phrase.
ELM: But you said “showing your butts” multiple times, which is not a stock phrase.
FK: I said “showing your butts.” I don’t know why. I’m just envisioning, there’s a gif with a dancing butt that I’m thinking of, I don’t know.
ELM: All right, continue with your…
FK: [laughing] Now I’m lost. No, I’m just thinking about butts.
ELM: No, you were talking, you were saying something intelligent and I derailed you.
FK: No! It’s, I’m not, there’s no intelligent—now I’m thinking about specifically Captain America’s butt. A butt that only cares about box office returns.
ELM: I immediately thought of Oscar Isaac actually the second we started talking about this, yeah.
FK: [laughing] The two genders.
ELM: [laughing] Well it felt very—I mean I saw it gratify, so much, clearly I was not the only person who noticed this but when I saw Oscar Isaac in Hamlet where he famously just wore the underwear and his butt was so present. And so then, but then he…
FK: You literally will never let go of this, this experience.
ELM: But then he, he made the news recently because he said that the chair in the Millennium Falcon was too narrow for his butt! And now that’s become a, a wide point of commentary about…I mean, it’s, it’s a really, it’s a work of art. I, I just can’t understand it enough. It’s what I, I’ve paid the big bucks to see it, so.
FK: Elizabeth…I’ve been holding something in for this entire episode.
ELM: You wanna talk about Star Wars now?
FK: No, something else. Another disappointment in my life.
ELM: Oh, are we on our last topic?
FK: We’re on our last topic.
ELM: So, can I say up front, I was semi-joking about this yesterday when this all went down but it, part of me is like “Are we just putting this in the Year in Review because it literally happened yesterday?” Literally we are recording this the day after all this went down. That being said, I think it was a pretty big moment in the broader fan culture, you look so sad right now, please talk about it.
FK: J. K. Rowling suuuuuuuucks. She sucks. She sucks so bad.
ELM: OK, so, if somehow you missed this last week, J. K. Rowling has had some problematic politics and over the years some of them have been just things she put out on her platform.
FK: Yep.
ELM: She’s also had some, she’s had some mixed politics, like, she, she was actually a target during the Scottish independence referendum because she was a loud supporter of the Remain movement, and that was a nuanced political question and if you were Scottish and you wanted independence you can be mad at her, but I think that one is more of an internal conflict, right. But she’s, she’s had some issues with, in British politics with Labour and her feelings about the party.
That being said, it was known before yesterday by a lot of people…
FK: It was known…
ELM: …that she was, had some transphobic leanings. She followed a bunch of explicitly transphobic accounts, and to give a little context I do wanna say this to you, because I think Americans are really—not just Americans, non-British people, really really seem to be missing a lot of the…not all but many are missing the context of this. Britain has, the British establishment—particularly white women in positions of medium-to-high power in Britain, including a lot of journalists and editors—has a, like, Britain has a serious transphobia problem in a way that I, I think most British people would agree is not the same here.
FK: The specific…
ELM: Yeah.
FK: Instead of a quite specific…
ELM: As opposed to like there…
FK: Conversation…
ELM: Here it turns into a straw man, and like, conservatives are transphobic, right. Republicans are transphobic. You’re like, “Not surprised.” And sometimes you get people, like, I don’t know. I don’t wanna just, ad hominem Jonathan Chait or something. But you know, a centrist actually kinda maybe secretly sorta conservative…
FK: Yeah yeah yeah.
ELM: Middle-aged white man or whatever who’s like, “You should forget about trans people, because they’re gonna lose us the election!” And you’re like, “That sorta sounds transphobic to me sir!” That kinda thing, you know.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: But this is like, women in particular, like, cis white women being explicitly transphobic, saying things that I don’t wanna repeat because they’re so explicitly transphobic.
FK: It’s not just, it’s not, it’s not just like “I am worried that if I am explicit about my identity then someone will say something,” it’s like “No, they’re actually out there proactively.” [laughs] Right? That’s the impression that I get anyway. It’s like, “I’m proactively gonna argue about this.”
ELM: Yeah, and I mean, you also see too in a way that I don’t think is reflected here to the same degree—though I am certain it exists—there’s a lot of inter-queer community conflict around this, cis white lesbians saying you know, “L without the T,” and then obviously you have lots of lesbians who are saying “L belongs with the T,” et cetera, like, you know. But it…
FK: Yeah yeah yeah.
ELM: I think it was two years ago, maybe it was last year actually? The London Pride parade was led, London Pride was led by a trans-exclusionary lesbian group that explicitly marched, led the parade with signs that were, that were…
FK: Yeah yeah yeah.
ELM: Explicitly transphobic! And that is the…
FK: Which, yeah.
ELM: So that’s the climate in which feminism exists in Britain right now, is…
FK: Yeah.
ELM: It is so much more part of the conversation there, in a really toxic way. And so if you said to me two years ago, because I’m, you know, involved in British journalism and some feminist leanings for years now, if you were like, I probably said it. I was like, “I bet J. K. Rowling is a TERF.” You know? Like, this is not surprising to me.
FK: Abso—well, it’s, I mean, honestly it’s also not surprising to a lot of trans people who have been following her because she’s been like, sort of cueing it in various ways. But…
ELM: Oh, well, before she cued it.
FK: Ah, OK. Fair, fair.
ELM: I would have [laughs] stereotyped her demographically and said “that would not be shocking.” That’s just to give some context.
FK: Right, right.
ELM: That being said, as I tweeted yesterday, a lot of people already knew this and tons of people did not! And so the kind of response of like, “Everyone knew this!” or, “It was obvious!” or whatever, is so toxic to people who just learned about it yesterday and are devastated! And so I was really really frustrated with that response, you know? Like…
FK: There was also, yeah! There’s also a big difference between like, followed some people and liked some stuff, and straight-up said it.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: You know what I mean? Like, to me…not, it’s not like, like, I knew about this. Of course I knew about this. But having her actually straight-up say it, particularly when like, I mean, for me like, long before I identified as genderqueer like, [laughs] I look back and I go “Wow! I was really into Tonks for reasons! Gee, like, I wonder why that character was so particularly interesting to me?” You know?
ELM: Yeeeeeah.
FK: And like, identifying that way—which is obviously like…anyway, so it’s just, it’s weird and hard when someone who, whose character specifically like meant a lot to you in the context of that is like “Nope! Bye.”
ELM: Yeah…
FK: OK! Great!
ELM: It’s interesting, that angle of it is very interesting to me because I’ve gone over such a journey with Harry Potter fandom in the last…
FK: That also is true! [laughs]
ELM: …18 years.
FK: Ohhhh.
ELM: Oh my God.
FK: Eighteen!
ELM: It’s really incredible to think about actually, so that’s fine.
FK: I know, right?
ELM: And I was discussing this last night with someone, another genderqueer friend who had the same feeling about Tonks, and I was just like, you know what, I definitely…it was very easy to read her that way in the fifth book, and then J. K. Rowling…
FK: Yup. Just…pooped on it.
ELM: Immediately in the sixth book! And so I, I feel like I’ve had 15 years to not read Tonks that way, because she so aggressively was like “Well, actually, she, she was, Harry thinks she’s in love with this one man but she’s actually in love with this other man,” and you’re like, [sighs] “Those two men who were obviously boning separately?!” You know, like, it’s like…and so I’ve had a lot of time.
And this is one of the reasons why I have trouble with the Harry Potter fandom now, even though, as listeners will know, I was, I was back in it and kind of like, you know. Legitimately in it, like, it was like my main fandom a couple of years ago. That the fandom keeps, at least the transformative fandom, keeps spiraling, spiraling away from the books.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: So now it’s completely its own thing and it’s explicitly progressive and you know, writing these characters in extremely diverse ways across the, across the board and just exploring different identities, kind of using them. And I know people who see, still manage to see subtext and say “Well, the reason I’m writing Neville this way is cause of blank.” And I’ll be like, “That’s cool, you do you, I don’t see any of the subtext any more in these books. Because I’ve had, I’m so cynical about them.” And…
FK: Yeah.
ELM: I might have seen it when I was, and felt it, when I was 18, but I cannot recapture that time in my life.
FK: Yeah yeah yeah.
ELM: So then I don’t, I don’t…it’s hard for me to engage with it at this point, and I, this is not, I’m not disparaging anyone in the Harry Potter fic community or transformative fandom who’s doing this cause I really…
FK: Yeah.
ELM: I respect the people who are trying a lot of new things, but you know what I mean?
FK: Yeah, yeah, I know exactly what you mean. So I actually, it was kinda a couple, a few people checked in with me yesterday, which I thought was very sweet and I, I was so grateful that there were people who like, proactively thought “Gee, like, Flourish is probably having a hard time today!” like, “I should check in!” But it was funny because although it was different and it was like, for me like, I was like “Agh,” you know, but just like you said—it’s not like there haven’t been many years of J. K. Rowling showing us who she is.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: And it’s not like there haven’t been many years of like, and it’s not like, like you said: I read Tonks that way so strongly and then in book six it was like “Oh! Nope nope nope nope.” You know? And I was like “Ugh, not that way, come on!” You know? Like…so, so again it’s, you know, so actually it was not like, I mean, I didn’t spend yesterday weeping. I think that some people did.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: You know. I didn’t because of having like, this slow-motion train wreck happening over the course of many years. [laughs] You know?
ELM: Yeah, yeah yeah.
FK: So, so yeah. I mean, but at the same time, like, that’s not to say that it wasn’t also an inflection point. Right? And a moment of like…
ELM: Absolutely.
FK: “Yup!” [laughs]
ELM: I think that if we broaden it a little bit, so it’s not just about this, so…you know, like, in the, in that same tweet where I was like “Some people have known about this for a long time and some people,” not to like read my own tweets or whatever, but like, I was like…
FK: You’re doin’ it, go for it. Embrace it.
ELM: Basically I did these two tweets where I was just like, “Several things are simultaneously true.”
FK: Right.
ELM: “One is, you may have already known about this; one is maybe you didn’t. And please don’t talk about it at the expense of the other.” Right? You know, saying like “You dummies! Like, of course we knew!” Right? Then another one of those was, I saw lots of people—cause I’ve got so many takes, like a variety of takes tweeted onto my feed. A lot of people were like, “Forget about her! Forever! And only read,” you know, and there’s a difference between saying like…
FK: ARGH.
ELM: “Let’s boost queer and trans authors, let’s boost trans fantasy authors…”
FK: Right. There were some people who were like “Today we’ve got some really depressing news about J. K. Rowling’s real opinions about things, so here’s a list of fun trans fantasy that you could go read that might make you feel better.” Like, great! Love that framing, you know?
ELM: Right. So that was one way to frame that. But I also saw many instances of like, “She’s dead to all of us, so then we should do that.” And I was just like, you know…
FK: And also “Replace it with this thing that I’m a fan of.” I’m like, “Great. Thank you for telling me what I should replace J. K. Rowling with.” Like, no! Get the fuck out!
ELM: The one I always see is people like making comments about Rick Riordan and the Percy Jackson books and stuff. And I’m sure they are great. But that was the other thing, that was the flipside of that is: that doesn’t erase, like, you can’t, it’s fuckin’ Harry Potter! And for millions of people, you can’t just erase like, you can’t…your name, you literally changed your name to a Harry Potter word. I don’t know if everyone knows this. [FK laughs] But I think we should say that. Like, are you gonna change your name to Percy Jackson?! No!
FK: No. It means a lot of things that are not Harry Potter related to me, and in fact occasionally I forget that it came from Harry Potter.
ELM: Never forget, Flourish.
FK: But that’s 100% where it came from.
ELM: You chose it! You chose it.
FK: I did choose it.
ELM: It’s not like, my name means “God’s oath” in Hebrew. I looked it up when I was like 12 or whatever. I didn’t pick that.
FK: No.
ELM: But I do care about God’s oath.
FK: [laughs] You got so serious just now! [ELM laughing] Well I mean the good news is that if, I was just having this conversation with someone, all the other people in the world named Flourish are Nigerian, and that is because it is considered in Nigeria to be like a Biblical name.
ELM: Really?
FK: Yeah! But it’s, I mean, it’s in the Bible a bunch. And trust me, I know, because every time it’s mentioned someone in church like, everyone turns and stares at me whenever it’s in a psalm or something.
ELM: I do think about you when I say the word “flourish”…
FK: Which continues to happen every time…
ELM: Yeah, yeah.
FK: Yeah. [sings the tune to “Immortal, Invisible, God Only Wise”] And everyone has to look at me.
ELM: Oh, were you singing that, I know that one!
FK: Yeah!
ELM: Yeah. [hums the hymn]
FK: There’s a line in there about flourishing and literally every, all, the entire choir just goes bwomp. [both laugh] So anyway.
ELM: Yeah, so, I just, I think that…I don’t know what to tell people. I mean, this is what I’ve been saying for the last five years. We, we saw this with, you know, the “Magic in North America” stuff, and all of her, you know, insensitive-to-legitimately-poorly-handled and straight-up racist shit over the last fight years, and not just last five years, but like, obviously the, the books are not great on the front. But she’s, it’s the new information that I think really digs the hole. Cause there’s like, you can take the books with a grain of salt, and I know for some people they can’t. Right? Like, I know East and South Asian people who can’t.
FK: Right.
ELM: Cause they’re like, “You gave her what name?!”
FK: Yeah. [laughs]
ELM: No. “Like, the one mention of me and you did that? Absolutely not. I can’t fully enjoy these books and I never will.” And I totally respect that. That’s, that’s fine, right? You know? But like, I do think it’s, it’s been in the last few years when she has, that’s one of the big fandom stories of the last decade. J. K. Rowling just…[sighs] diggin’ that hole. Jumpin’ in.
FK: OK. So maybe we should actually use this to transition to the last decade. This has been, like, a last decade story.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: So what are the other broad last decade stories?
ELM: Oh my God, all of the stories.
FK: There’s so many stories, right?
ELM: Yeah!
FK: So one thing is that this last decade is the last, this is the first decade that we have had with easily-measurable online metrics for conversation. Which I think people are not gonna say is a big fandom story but it is.
ELM: Tell me more!
FK: So, right, Twitter firehose, I mean, historically people would do things like crawl forums or whatever, in order to get some data about what people were saying. But that’s really hard and you have to, like, do it separately for each forum, and no one was really doing it. And now, in the past decade, because of things like the Twitter firehose and the Tumblr firehose and Facebook’s API historically although not now, people created companies that let you do social listening. And that radically changed the entertainment industry’s relationship to fandom.
ELM: OK, well…
FK: And that’s the past decade!
ELM: But if you look at what that actually means in practice, would you draw a direct line between that and the full franchisification, rebootification, regurgitationification…
FK: I think that they’re not unrelated, because I do think that creating something…like, giving people an idea that you can measure quote “fandom” with a number…
ELM: Yeah.
FK: I think that that has only supported the franchisification rebootification regurgitation trend.
ELM: Hang on. That doesn’t explain them, like, trawling through like, every property from the ’90s to try to, you know like, I got really mad when I saw the trailer for the Ghost Writer reboot, which looks like garbage. It looks, I’m so mad about this Flourish! So mad! Ghost Writer…
FK: I liked Ghost Writer too!
ELM: [sings] Ghost Writer! Word! Ghost Writer, incredible scrappy little show, I don’t know if you watched it, you might have been slightly too young.
FK: No no no, I watched it and I even had the official pen.
ELM: I had the official pen, stop it! You had the official pen?
FK: Boom! Yeah!
ELM: Did you get it in the pledge drive!
FK: Yeah!
ELM: Yeah!
FK: I begged my parents for it!
ELM: I begged—you’re stealing my story! I did this!
FK: We both did this. It’s a better story now.
ELM: Holy shit yeah, that’s really good. I loved Ghost Writer. We would order, this is absurd, I’m Italian-American, I shouldn’t admit to this. We would order Domino’s pizza on Sunday nights, cheese pizza…
FK: I kinda like Domino’s.
ELM: You’re not Italian. And…
FK: It’s gross…
ELM: It’s fine…
FK: It’s fine…
ELM: It’s fine. It’s not, it’s like, pizza and Domino’s are like different food than pizza-pizza.
FK: It is different food than actual pizza, it’s fine.
ELM: I’d be happy to have either of those right now.
FK: All right, go on.
ELM: And we’d have our Dominos and it’d be pizza night and then I’d watch Ghost Writer, which was an incredible like, it was a very New York in the early ’90s show. Aggressively diverse, I would say.
FK: It was, it was—in the way that only the early ’90s could be. Yes.
ELM: So diverse. Ghost Writer was a, had been an enslaved person, I believe you learned, eventually, right? Who escaped?
FK: I think eventually yeah.
ELM: On the Underground Railroad, so like…
FK: I think so, yeah.
ELM: And was a ghost. That was writing. He’s a ghost. And he writes to us!
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Anyway, I watched a trailer for the reboot. It’s just a bunch of kids in a fancy-lookin’ like middle-class house with some like Harry Potter-esque music in the background! Woo, ghost writes, a ghost writes! Garbage.
FK: I haven’t seen this trailer but I’m enjoying your reactions to it? And I don’t think I’m gonna go see it now, because I’m just gonna understand your reaction.
ELM: It’s not a ghostly experience. I think it’s, I think it’s, I don’t know it’s probably on Apple TV or something that you’re not gonna watch. So. [both laugh]
FK: Well, yeah. I mean, so, so I mean that franchisification of everything, I think that there’s like a—there’s a variety of forces that have caused that and I’m not, like, an expert on them, so I hesitate to say it, but I do think that people see franchise pieces as, you know, the revival of an existing project, as efficient because you already have that IP, you own it.
ELM: Right.
FK: As opposed to having to pay for it. And I think that people also see them as safer bets than new IP.
ELM: OK, but how…
FK: Now I’m not sure that all of those things are true, but, but, I mean I’m not sure that’s actually the case, but I think that that’s one of the reasons why we see this.
ELM: OK. Predicting the next decade, we have seen some significant flops in the last five years with this method. If this continues for another five years, will they start to change their methods?
FK: I don’t know. I think that there’s larger questions about the way that the movie industry exists and like, how films work. I can’t even begin to predict. It’s just not in my wheelhouse.
ELM: All right.
FK: I truly can’t. Because I also don’t, I mean, there’s lots of questions about the way that films play internationally, and all—and there’s just so many factors, and there are other people who actually know things about this. But, I will say that I don’t think that we’re going to see people going back on their idea of engaging with fandoms.
ELM: No.
FK: I think that there’s a lot of interest in engaging with fandoms and I think that’s going to continue.
ELM: Right, so, let’s…
FK: Regardless of…
ELM: Let’s take that as our next step: is that a good or a bad thing for fan cultures? Fan culture, fan cultures. I think it depends on who you are. I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently: when we have our personal fan hats on, it doesn’t feel like a good thing because of the kind of fandom that we participate in, but I think that from a broader perspective I think there are…
You know one thing I’ve been observing over the last year, it’s been interesting, I know you probably don’t just observe it you probably actually on the other side of implementing it. The “tweet at us and we will tweet you when the trailer drops” trend.
FK: Mm-hmm.
ELM: I’m, I’m sure you are directly engaged with this kind of thing.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: So on Twitter, if you’re not on Twitter, they’ll do maybe a teaser trailer or something, or they’ll just do a teaser tweet, and they’ll say “Fans, tweet back at us and then we’ll tweet you directly.”
FK: Yeah.
ELM: “When we have a trailer for you.” And it’s basically a, it’s very interesting to me as someone who looks at platforms, because it’s just kind of clearly people using the tool at their disposal.
FK: Yup.
ELM: In the only way, you know, cause you don’t have to…
FK: Sort of like a mailing list, except Twitter.
ELM: Yeah, and there’s also been some interesting reporting recently about the music industry using texting in this way. You know. And trying to kind of own that direct relationship and saying, like, “Just let us know and we’ll text you for the…you’ll be the first to know,” right. And you get some fannish capital if you’re the first to see it.
FK: Yeah. Well, and honestly, I actually don’t think—because I think that, you know, you said that from our personal perspectives we think this is a bad thing. I don’t think it is, because from my personal perspective it actually doesn’t…
ELM: I don’t think it’s bad.
FK: …interact with me.
ELM: Yeah no, I don’t think it’s bad, but I think it’s like—well, I do think it’s bad. I, all right. I don’t care. Like, me as a fan, when I’m like, this is not gonna bother me.
FK: I would say, for a lot of this stuff for me it’s like “OK!”
ELM: Yeah.
FK: If I’m coming from my fannish perspective, like, honestly, I love getting into things late.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: And I love, you know, I mean you know this about me. And I love being like, out of step with everything and then like finding a few people and like, I mean, no, I’m not into that. In fact…
ELM: Right.
FK: I mean, not to—so, in fact I would say for me this decade has been the decade of like, my like, getting less enthused about like, of-the-moment experiences. Mostly. Broadly.
ELM: This is you maturing, Flourish, and coming to appreciate that depth is more important than immediacy.
FK: I don’t know about that.
ELM: I think it is!
FK: I’m not sure that’s true.
ELM: I think that you’ve, you’ve, you’ve grown in that way as long as I’ve known you, which has been half of this decade.
FK: May-be. But regardless…
ELM: I think it’s just getting, just getting old. You’re so old now.
FK: Regardless…
ELM: The ripe old age of 32…
FK: Regardless! I think that it is good, I think that it is good in the sense that…well, let me rephrase. I think that it can be good. I think that it’s highly complex, though, right, interacting with fandom in any way and having…and I don’t know that, I don’t know. I don’t know that it’s, I don’t know that everyone’s very well-set-up to do it, right.
ELM: I don’t know, I think the reason I might say it’s not great from my personal fandom perspective is I feel like I am waiting for the other shoe to drop. In the sense of, right now I’m still in the safe fan-only place. In my own personal fandom activity. It’s not, you know, “safe” maybe is over, whatever. It’s, it’s, an untouched by, you know, I can, my fanfiction world can still be just fans talking to fans. And I’m fully aware the irony of saying this when I literally write articles in large mainstream publications about fanfiction. But like, you know, it makes me worry that, sure, it’s cool and you can opt into it on Twitter, but I don’t want them coming in and saying…
FK: You want to be able to continuously opt out.
ELM: Yeah, I don’t want them to, I don’t want them to look at it at all. I don’t want them to, “I see you really like stories about this trope, of Cherik,” you know, like, you know, I don’t want any corporation anywhere near that. You know?
FK: Yeah, I do know what you mean. I mean I think the—yeah, I do know what you mean. But I, but again, I think that there are, there are categories of things in which I think that it’s good to have interaction and where it’s fine. So I don’t know. It’s just… It’s a mixed bag, is what I would say.
ELM: Yeah. It’s just, I don’t like the, I think that this has been hanging over transformative fandom’s head for this entire decade, too, this kind of like, “Oh, we’re lookin’ at you. We’re seein’ a little you. We’re comin’ over,” right? And like, I think that there, if we were gonna move this conversation to transformative fandom, obviously this has been a very interesting decade, cause you simultaneously had the very stable space of AO3, right? Like, for any of AO3’s problems, like, it was, it was built to be this like, rock solid, like…
FK: Right.
ELM: This bedrock of transformative fandom, this is the place you can put your stories and I think its, its growth has—it’s truly growing at a much faster rate than it was 10 years ago.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And I think that’s awesome, and so you kinda have that as an underpinning, but everything else on top of that has been so turbulent, right? You know, whether it’s…
FK: Yeah yeah yeah.
ELM: Whether it’s Kindle Worlds and Wattpad’s monetization efforts from the actual fanfiction side or Tumblr as this kind of, this place where everyone is trapped and constantly getting resold, and you’re wondering if they’re going to be shut down and like…that’s been most of Tumblr for this decade, cause it’s been sold multiple times, right?
FK: Yeah, so many times, it’s true. This is not a new story. Yeah, I guess—I think that maybe, maybe my view on this is a little bit shaded by the fact that I do see so much stuff on the corporate side. I just have a hard time getting worked up about people, like, big corporations quote “seeing” fanfiction, because they have no clue. This is in the category of like, truly there are so many people who just have no idea about any of it. Like, when they stumble in, it’s because they don’t know what’s happening. Often.
ELM: OK on the entertainment industry side, but literally everyone else has seen it, to a much greater degree now than, than 10 years ago…
FK: It’s true, that’s true, that’s absolutely true. No no no, I’m not saying it’s not true…
ELM: You get just as mad if not more mad than I do if someone writes a dumb article in a major publication about fanfiction.
FK: Well, that’s true but that’s mostly because I feel like people who write dumb articles in major publications are like, I feel like they have a responsibility. [laughing] I don’t know. I mean I just, I guess I feel like...yeah, you’re right. That’s not very, that’s not very consistent of me. You’re right.
ELM: Did you feel, did you think in 2010 that nine years later you would co-design a survey that was literally fueled by spite when some man on Twitter said shipping only was for non-canonical pairings?
FK: I did not. But I had a lot of spite. [both laugh] I, I have, I have, you know, I’ve said many confessions of sin since then, so I feel like I’m past it, it’s all water under the bridge now. But there was a lot of spite involved with that. Yeah. That’s true.
ELM: Yeah. I just think, I mean, it’s hard for me to think about 2010 and now and be like…because, I think personally for both of us, too, I mean you were…you were in grad school a decade ago and…
FK: Yeah.
ELM: I was…I was in the Torchwood fandom. Really enjoying team dynamics. You know. And just working and, and you know, honestly wondering like, I don’t wanna bring this, we’re gonna go into actual personal stuff now, but just like even thinking about my own trajectory, I think yours is a little less surprising. Like, I…even in 2010 if you had said “within five years your main beat is going to be fan culture, this thing that you…”
FK: I’d have been like “Yes, that thing that I went to grad school for!” [laughs]
ELM: Right, whereas I would have been like “No! I don’t feel comfortable talking about that publicly and also, like…” I’ve said this before, but I don’t know if you’ve ever read them, but I wrote a couple of pieces when I was blogging for The New Yorker at that time, 10 years ago, where I…if you read them and you know I was in fandom, and I just…there’s one where I said something like, you know, “I’ll say it, I’m a Harry Potter fan.” And then I said something like, “Don’t worry, I won’t mention that again.” You know? [FK howls] Cause people were such dicks about it, you know?
And it was just like, I was trying to explain what it was like to be in fandom, you know, to look at the end of the Harry Potter…I think it was the last movie and I was talking about this shift from something that we felt was organic to something that we felt was super corporate. At least I felt that way and I think a lot of fans did too. And it was totally a fandom article, but I really didn’t want to emphasize the fact that I was in Harry Potter fandom. I was trying to, to put that level of distance there. Right? You know? And like…
FK: All right. Wait wait wait. I’m gonna stop you because I think that we should take a break and then talk about our personal stuff. We really should.
ELM: Yeah but I can’t talk about the whole fuckin’ decade. Let’s just talk about this past year.
FK: OK fine. We’re gonna take a break and then personal.
ELM: All right. All right.
[Interstitial music]
FK: All right. We’re back. Is it finally time for me to go on my rant?
ELM: Have you just been sitting there the whole time waiting to complain?
FK: Yes! I cannot believe that in the space of a year, I have gone from writing hundreds of thousands of words of Star Wars fanfic, to literally, this morning… [ELM laughs] Sorry, there’s a loud, there’s a loud siren here. But it’s like, it’s like, it’s the siren of my heart, if you can hear it in the background, I’m not gonna stop because the siren is like saying what I think.
ELM: Oh my God.
FK: It is! I, I went from writing hundreds of thousands of words of fanfic to literally this morning saying “maybe I’ll wait to see Rise of Skywalker on a plane.” I don’t have tickets. I’m so not into it.
ELM: Oh my God. [laughing]
FK: And I feel bad because I know lots of people who work at Lucasfilm and I wanna support them and I’m like, “Yay!” And they’re all good and like, hooray good job, I guess, but also no! It’s dead. I’m angry. I’m really cynical this year.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: Everything sucks.
ELM: You really are.
FK: I was just saying I’m like so burnt out.
ELM: You really are. It’s been really something to see the last few weeks. So like, you just think everyone’s take is, is exhausting.
FK: Literally every take is exhausting. Even the good—the takes I agree with still make me feel miserable and exhaust me. The takes I disagree with make me feel miserable and exhaust me. The takes that I have no feeling about, I’m just like “Ugh. You mentioned the thing. Fuck off!” I hate all of it and all of you. I don’t hate all of you, but I feel like that sometimes.
ELM: I feel like, I don’t know where we would find this but I feel like I’m sure, like, two years ago we had some kind of exchange where you were like “Well, you’re much more influenced by other people’s opinions when it comes to fandom than I am.”
FK: Probably.
ELM: You almost definitely have said this at least 17 or 18 times.
FK: [wails] Yeah but I hate it so much. You were right. It sucks. All of it sucks. I’ve been ground down now.
ELM: I’m really, I’m excited to welcome you to the land of caring about other people’s opinions.
FK: [moans] But, but, but…all of them are bad.
ELM: Yes! No, this is how I’ve, this is how I felt in January of 2014 during Sherlock season three.
FK: Yeah, well, I’m there.
ELM: Just the word “Sherlock” sent me, I, when I wrote that piece about my experience I said “I went to church multiple times in one week.” Like I genuinely went to church to have a calm space.
FK: I’m not that far down.
ELM: Where I wouldn’t look at my phone…I mean it was January in London, it’s a depressing time anyway, it’s pretty in those churches, you just wanna have a moment where you’re like, “I don’t wanna think about this.” Like, you know?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: At least it’s Christmas now. You can be festive.
FK: I’m really excited that I have a good reason to like, not engage with any of this.
ELM: Yeah, you can just say…no, I mean, I think that’s probably pretty healthy to have a legit reason to not look at any of this.
FK: Well and here’s the other thing: I actually do think, as you were talking earlier, you were saying that like, the idea of writing fanfic to wrest things back from their corporate overlords or whatever.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: And genuinely, like, I—I think that if I can reach, if I can find that spirit again, then maybe I can enjoy things again. I’m just not there yet. But I hope that I’ll be able to find that spirit again and be like, “I’m gonna watch this thing and it’s gonna be nonsense and I’m gonna love it,” you know. Like, or, “I’m not gonna love it, but I’m gonna write a thing that I do love, or I’m gonna read a thing that I do love,” right. I just need to find that spirit again. Somehow.
ELM: You might not. TBH.
FK: I know, but I would like to. And, and I…I think that if I could, it would be good for me and everyone around me.
ELM: Yes!
FK: Cause they wouldn’t have to deal with me being such a grouch.
ELM: Yeah, you know, Pepys and I were talking earlier…
FK: Yeah, Pepys is really sick of this.
ELM: Yeah, and he was like “Honestly. Honestly.”
FK: Yeah.
ELM: He put his little paw over his other little paw and he was like, “Let me tell you.” That would be so cute!
FK: He sits like that all the time.
ELM: I know but imagine him saying, “Let me tell you.”
FK: I know. “Let me tell you.”
ELM: “You would not believe what they were saying today.”
FK: You have to know that like, he has like a George Takei kind of a voice. Because he’s got this funny low little dog voice. So you just have to imagine him, like George Takei coming out of this dog. If someone was gonna play Pepys, it would be George Takei.
ELM: I’m glad you work in Hollywood so you can pitch that. Get it before George Takei wants to retire. He’s probably gonna retire soon.
FK: He’s like a hundred years old.
ELM: I know.
FK: He’s not doing anything else. He’s done.
ELM: You don’t think he’s…
FK: He’s writing comic books now, that’s it.
ELM: One last project: being Pepys the dog. [both laugh]
FK: “Oh, I’m not going to go out on the musical that I wrote about my experience in an internment camp. Instead I will go perform as Pepys the dog.” [laughing] Elizabeth, what was your fannish year like?
ELM: [laughing] Oh my goodness. Oh but you, hold on, go back. You found joy in Star Trek!
FK: I find a lot of joy in Star Trek.
ELM: Great.
FK: That’s true.
ELM: Solved.
FK: Yeah. It’s not that everything is terrible. Some things are good, like Star Trek. Star Trek is actually good, and the Star Trek fandom is good, and I have been deeply enjoying Star Trek fans.
ELM: Yeah and I think you’ve been happy with the content to some degree and the approach of the franchise…
FK: I’ve been happy with the content that’s come out…I’ve been happy about all of that. The things I’ve not been happy about, there’s so much Star Trek out there that it’s easy to be like “Well, yeah, that thing was nonsensepants,” you know?
ELM: Yeah!
FK: I’ve got a lot of perspective, Star Trek has been my happy place.
ELM: It’s interesting that you can’t capture that for Star Wars because now there’s like these different levels of content coming, you know? Like, there’s a TV show and all this stuff, right?
FK: The problem is that they, all the stuff that I felt nostalgic about is like, gone from the Extended [sic] Universe, you know.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: And like, the stuff that is replacing it, the things that I liked are all…I don’t know. It just doesn’t, it’s not the same. Star Trek: it’s my happy place.
ELM: All right, great.
FK: What was your year like?
ELM: Aww, what a year!
FK: What a year!
ELM: Um, my personal year in fandom, I think this was a great year! Just great!
FK: You, you posted fanfic!
ELM: I posted two fics.
FK: Wow.
ELM: I know. How many did you post?
FK: When it rains it pours!
ELM: Did you post two? You probably did actually.
FK: Um…I did.
ELM: Did you post more than two?
FK: I don’t think so.
ELM: Great! We both did two.
FK: Yeah!
ELM: One of them’s still posting. I said that like I’m not the one posting it. One of them is just coming out of me and going onto the internets somehow magically.
FK: [laughing] That is how it feels sometimes.
ELM: That’s not how it feels right now because I have to write the ending. [FK laughs] But it’s been very…
FK: And then I can read it!
ELM: Yeah, you haven’t read the long guy yet. You could start! I mean, you wanna read it all in like one hour, even though it’s like…
FK: I do.
ELM: It’s gonna be like 70,000 words long.
FK: That’s my plan. I’m gonna sit down and read it, all of it.
ELM: Cool, I’m excited for when you skim it, thank you.
FK: Hey!
ELM: My lovingly chosen words. Carefully betaed. Yeah. Shout-out to my beta! One of the, I mean, she’s, it was kinda her fault. She sort of pressured me. So. To put it up there.
FK: That’s good! You needed it.
ELM: No, it was great! She was like, “Just do it!” So anyway, all of that aside, I don’t wanna…I feel bad. I got an ask which I’ll, I’ll have answered by this point, which was like “what’s the link to your fanfiction?” and I’m not sharing my pseud. Just as you don’t share your pseud here!
FK: I don’t. You can go find it.
ELM: Yeah, I think that, um…
FK: Or like, DM me!
ELM: I, I think that if you are in the fandom that I’m in and you’re curious, I’m happy to share it with you but it’s not…and I feel like most people I know who have a public fandom analyzing persona…
FK: Yeah you’re just not gonna say it on this podcast, you’ll say it on a DM somewhere.
ELM: You have this, other people I know have this, where it’s like “You can find it probably, if you know or are interested in,” like, I can, I found yours without you telling me.
FK: Yeah it’s not hard.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: This is very easy.
ELM: But it’s like, I don’t wanna read a Reylo regency, or, sorry.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Sorry, Georgette Heyer pastiche.
FK: Thank you.
ELM: Yes. I wanted to be very specific.
FK: I’m not gonna make you.
ELM: It’s just not, not my interest.
FK: You don’t have to!
ELM: I could if you really want me to.
FK: No, I don’t actually.
ELM: Is it because you know I’m a very critical person?
FK: Uh, it’s mostly because I actually thought through all the things I would want to do to revise it, but I haven’t done any of them, so it’s because like, I already have my own critiques of it and I don’t need yours too. [laughing]
ELM: Right, but I think those are connected because I think if you knew I was a more cookie-loving fanfic reader you’d be like “Sure.”
FK: Yeah no definitely, but it’s also like, not…if you did that I’m sure they would be good critiques, it’s just that probably I would be like “Yes, I know. I know. I know! I know all about this. I have thought about my own writing! I don’t think about other people’s writing like this, but I think about my writing like this.”
ELM: Yeah, you try to be a good baker, but you are an indiscriminate cookie eater! I’m gonna continue this metaphor forever.
FK: Forever.
ELM: I think it’s a really good one!
FK: It is, it is.
ELM: Anyway, yeah, it’s been a very interesting year also because you know, like, I talked about this a little when it happened, but like, you know, actively in the fandom of a property that put out a, like…saying it’s a bad movie doesn’t feel quite right. It was just a, what, what even, what was that?! Like, what…
FK: Yeah.
ELM: What went wrong? You know?
FK: I do know.
ELM: Like…
FK: Yeah.
ELM: It was just weird how it fit. It was like a weird failure. Not a, not like…like, frankly I, I strongly disliked Endgame.
FK: Uh-huh.
ELM: And I maybe, I know there were mixed feelings about that. But I…
FK: But you knew how it got that way.
ELM: Yeah! It was, it felt, it just, yes. I know exactly why it was like that. And I hated every minute of it. There was literally nothing redeeming about it for me, and I know that’s not my fandom, but like, just gonna say it. But this was more like, “What?” And then you know we were intoxicated, so like. I mean you weren’t. You had…
FK: I loved it.
ELM: You had one sip, but I, I had many many many sips, so.
FK: Well, I had one sip but I still enjoyed it deeply because it was so bananapants and also then the sky pissed on me? I don’t know. It was great.
ELM: [laughing] So to have that and to kind of, to kind of see some cultural commentary around it that really annoyed me, people being like “Well, of course there are no fans for this.” And I was just like, “What the—are you—like, first of all…”
FK: Are you serious?!
ELM: A medium-to-large fandom, even when the beginning of this part of the franchise came out a decade ago, right? It’s not a small…
FK: Yeah.
ELM: It’s not a juggernaut, like Captain America or something, but you know, there’s…
FK: A lot of people care a lot about that.
ELM: There’s as many fics as there are about Yuri!!! On Ice or something. Right? It’s around that range, right? Significant! That being, and also, like, it’s still pretty active! You know? There are thousands of people reading and writing in that right now and so this kind of idea of like…it brings me back to the monoculture again and it kind of annoyed me. It was just like, you know, this idea that people can’t imagine that, I mean, there is, there’s fan cultures around all sorts of things. And if it’s not visible to you, then it doesn’t exist. That was very frustrating to me. So.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Anyway, I am excited to be posting fic. It’s been…
FK: I’m excited that you are too!
ELM: It’s been a…thanks! Yeah, so I feel like I’m the pure one and you’re the cynical one.
FK: For once it, this has been a year of flip-flops.
ELM: You mean I was always pure…
FK: Switchin’ it up.
ELM: …in my heart, but now you’re just openly cynical.
FK: [laughs] Is that the note on which we wanna end this episode?
ELM: It’s the note that you wanna end this decade on. You just said it grammatically properly and I just rearranged it. But. That’s like…
FK: For once!
ELM: Look!
FK: We are flip-flopped in another way!
ELM: I mean is that the note you wanna end this decade on?
FK: I think that unfortunately it is the note that I’m gonna have to end this decade on, but the good news is that I, my love for Star Trek is still pure. And I look forward to being deeply disappointed in some way by Picard, so that I can be cynical about everything. That’s it! That’s the tweet.
ELM: I’m very sorry. I’m gonna, I’m gonna, I have an idea for another fic, so I’m just gonna keep writing fic. Fanfiction is great. I feel better about fanfiction than ever.
FK: That’s true. I, I feel good about fanfic also.
ELM: [laughing] OK great I’m glad we agree!
FK: All right. So, wrap-up stuff. As always, we are entirely supported by listeners like you. And readers like you, if you’re reading this. So the best way to help us continue to make Fansplaining for the next decade…
ELM: Wow.
FK: That maybe is getting a little bit too far ahead of ourselves. For at least the next year…
ELM: You think that podcasts will exist in 2029?
FK: Can you imagine?
ELM: You think the Earth will exist in 2029?
FK: Probably not. Come to us, asteroids. OK.
ELM: No…you know what Flourish, I just listened to that RadioLab about the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs and it actually gave me genuine existential—like, I found it to be a traumatic listening experience. What actually…
FK: Great, so I’m never gonna listen to that.
ELM: What actually happened to the dinosaurs, they died within 15 minutes.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: They burned, they, their blood boiled to death. They were just eating a leaf, and then…
FK: Why are you telling me this?!
ELM: I’m sorry!
FK: I didn’t ask!
ELM: I just heard it a few days ago!
FK: We’re gonna talk about something else!
ELM: And I was just like, just imagine…
FK: We’re gonna talk about—no! We’re in the middle of our pitch for people to give us Patreon money, Elizabeth, and now they’re thinking about dinosaurs with their blood boiling!
ELM: Just eating leaves and then all of a sudden just…oh. I’m snapping. Like that. [audible snap]
FK: All right, so…if you wanna hear about more dinosaurs getting their blood boiled in the coming year, then you should donate to our Patreon.
ELM: Don’t donate to RadioLab, donate to us.
FK: Patreon.com/fansplaining. [laughing] We have lots of, of wonderful gifts for our Patrons, including things like an enamel pin, which by the way: all of them have been sent out now to anyone who gave us their address, so there’s, if, if you were one of the last people to give us an address it might still be on its way to you, but everyone else should have them or have not given us an address. And therefore it’s your own fault because I’ve been bugging you for literally months now. So. You know. Reach out to me if you are owed a pin and don’t have one for some reason. That’s the Patreon.
ELM: You had such, it was like a tired high school teacher.
FK: I’ve written a lot of emails asking people to give me their addresses so that I can send them an incredibly adorable pin. And I’m a little tired. And I’m really grateful to the people who did send me the address finally.
ELM: No, I mean, you have to say that some people haven’t send their address and they’re OK with not getting your pin. It is what it is, you know? Like…
FK: And that’s what I’m assuming.
ELM: I appreciate their continued financial support and if they check their messages eventually…or maybe they don’t want any more materials in their lives, so I respect that.
FK: And maybe they’ll eventually, yeah, I respect all of that. OK. So. You can also support us by rating us on iTunes or wherever you listen to this podcast. We think that we deserve all the stars, but you can make your own decision about that.
ELM: Nope, we do.
FK: Um, and then also you know, writing a review, that’s very very very helpful and helps us, you know, float to the top of whatever podcatcher exists.
ELM: Speaking of writing, you can write to us.
FK: You can!
ELM: Fansplaining at gmail dot com. You can also write to us at fansplaining.com, our website, though as we like to reiterate if you don’t leave contact information we have no way to reply to you.
FK: Yep.
ELM: So please don’t leave a question that requires an answer and no contact information there, but there’s a little form if you have a quick question. Or, you can call us at our phone number, 1-401-526-FANS. This is the year I learned the phone number by heart, aren’t you proud of me?
FK: Yeah! I am! I learned it too!
ELM: Yeah, well, I’m more proud of me because I was having trouble with it in the beginning and there was some sort of weird block, cause I actually have a very good memory. But you can call us in all of those places, you can remain anonymous, clarify that you wanna be anonymous, we are excited to preserve anonymity or pseudonymity. As we already said earlier. I’d like to preserve my own pseudonymity.
Or, you can message us or just follow us for more conversation on Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. All at fansplaining. We’ll keep using those until those platforms are shut down before the asteroid comes and hits us. I think that’ll happen before the asteroid comes.
FK: I think that that’s all we have to say right now.
ELM: Uh…
FK: I think I’m going to go meditate on the shortness of human life.
ELM: I, all right. No no no. Positive ending. I had a really great year in fandom, personally, I wanna put that positive vibe out into the world to try to balance out your extreme negativity. It’s been really great.
FK: I think that’s a good idea.
ELM: And I appreciate that you have been proud of me and I’m glad you got over your weird passive-aggressive anxiety about asking to read my fanfiction and thank you…
FK: Elizabeth, that’s not positivity, that was passive-aggressive about being passive-aggressive! [both laugh]
ELM: Thank you Rainbow Rowell for acting literally like a marriage counselor and saying “I think that Elizabeth is just saying you need to ask. You know, to use your words.”
FK: Elizabeth.
ELM: Maybe I should write a fanfic…
FK: This is not positivity.
ELM: About the three of us…
FK: Whatever you’re doing right now, this is not.
ELM: Where Rainbow is our marriage, a marriage counselor AU, and Rainbow’s like “Flourish, I think Elizabeth is saying…”
FK: I think that you should do it and I think that that is it. Goodbye, Elizabeth. [laughing]
ELM: Goodbye Flourish, I’ll see you on the last day of 2019!
FK: See ya then.
[Outro music]
FK & ELM: Fansplaining is brought to you by all of our patrons, and especially Alaine Sepulveda, Amanda, Amelia Harvey, Anne Jamison, Bluella, Boxish, Bradlea Raga-Barone, Bryan Shields, Carl with a C, Carrie Clarady, Chelsee Bergen, Christopher Dwyer, CJ Hoke, Clare Muston, Cynthia, Desiree Longoria, Diana Williams, Dr. Mary C. Crowell, Earlgreytea68, Elasmo, 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, Karen, Katherine Lynn, Kitty McGarry, Kristen P., Lizzy Johnstone, Lori Morimoto, Lucy in Bookland, Lucas Medeiros, Mareinna, Maria Temming, Maria Mercer, Mark Williams, Matt Hills, Menlo Steve, Meredith Rose, Michael Andersen, Molly Kernan, Naomi Jacobs, Nary Rising, Nozlee, Paracelsus Caspari, Poppy Carpenter, Rachel Bernatowicz, Sam Markham, Sara, Secret Fandom Stories, Sekrit, Simini, Stephanie Burt, StHoltzmann, Tara Stuart, Veritasera, Willa, and in honor of fandom data analysis, and 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. 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.