Episode 117: Fans and the Man
In Episode 117, “Fans and the Man,” Elizabeth and Flourish talk about whether fandom really has “gone corporate” in the last decade—and if so, what parts of fandom, and in what ways? Topics covered include whether fans have “sold out,” been exploited, or both; whether it’s a good thing for fandom to be intertwined with corporations; and whether “curatorial” and “transformative” are even still useful terms to define fan cultures as we enter the ’20s.
Show Notes
[00:00:00] As always, our intro music is “Awel” by stefsax, used under a CC BY 3.0 license.
[00:03:03] To listen to our Star Wars special episode, pledge $3-a-month or more to our Patreon!
[00:04:55] Our end-of-year episode is #116, “The Year in Fandom 2019.”
[00:06:31] We’re talking about “The Decade Fandom Went Corporate” by Katharine Trendacosta.
[00:16:26] The X-Files fan memorialized as a character is Leyla Harrison.
[00:17:12] Do you remember this trivia game? It’s worth over $100 now, apparently.
[00:28:02] We’ve covered the Axanar situation in detail in two episodes: #25 “Lawsuit at Axanar” and #40 “Axanar [Lawsuit Intensifies].”
[00:31:00] All the articles and data from our Shipping Survey can be found on the Projects page of Fansplaining.com.
[00:32:35] The main Fanlore article about George R. R. Martin’s stance on fanworks is literally called “Someone Is Angry On The Internet.”
[00:33:41] Diana Gabaldon’s stance on fanworks was laid out in a blog post called “Fan-Fiction and Moral Conundrums.” It’s been deleted, so we bring you the Fanlore page about it instead.
[00:38:09] Our episode about monetizing fandom was #86, “The Money Question.”
[00:55:15] Flourish is describing the Penny Arcade Greater Internet Fuckwad theory:
[00:59:44] The “Jack Harkness Rule” is in fact called the “Harkness Test”:
[01:05:07] Betts’ writing advice is the best. Seriously, go read her posts!
[01:06:34] Rageprufrock breaks down how to do historical research.
[01:07:25] That Harry Styles episode was #58, “Flourish Goes To A Concert, Or, Elizabeth Agrees To Talk About Harry Styles For Half An Hour.”
[01:09:18] Our Captain Marvel special episode was excellent, and just a reminder (again): to listen to it, pledge $3-a-month or more to our Patreon!
[01:14:00] Our outro music is “Gone” by Lee Rosevere from Music for Podcasts 2, used under a CC BY 3.0 license.
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 117, “Fans and the Man.” [FK giggles] Yeah, you can laugh at your own title cause it’s good!
FK: I made it up and I’m delighted by it.
ELM: So when we say “the man” we mean like, The Man.
FK: Yeah, like, the corporate man.
ELM: The man.
FK: We talk about this a lot, but in this particular case we’re bringing it up because there’s been sort of a, a lot of conversation about this past decade in fandom and the way that fandom has become corporatized in some respects.
ELM: Sold out, man!
FK: Sold out.
ELM: Well, or, uh, exploited.
FK: I mean…that’s, that’s two sides of the same coin, my friend.
ELM: Is it?
FK: I think it kinda is!
ELM: I mean, one might argue that the, the strong trend in the first half of the 2010 decade—so clunky and we never came up with a way to talk about that. The oughts? No, they’re not the oughts. Sorry. The teens?
FK: Hee hee hee, the teens!
ELM: No one ever said that, though, and now it’s over.
FK: And when we talk about “the teens” we mean the actual teens.
ELM: Yes.
FK: Like, the humans who are teens.
ELM: Yeah, we do talk about the teens. But you know, in the first—probably from around 2012, maybe, to ’16, it was very trendy for people to have fanart contests. I don’t know if those years are exactly the years I mean, but definitely happening in 2013, ’14 and ’15.
FK: Yeah, there was a period of like “We’re gonna crowdsource this!”
ELM: Yeah. And like, “If you, if you design the cutest poster, like, you—your poster will get chosen.” And I would not describe that as selling out, I would describe that as pure exploitation.
FK: Yeah, I mean, I think that there’s—I think there’s both things that are happening.
ELM: All right. Go back. Why are we doing this episode now, why are we starting 2020 off with such a perennial depressing topic?
FK: Because it has been coming up in a lot of places, not all of which have been very substantive, but different takes on the way that fandom is interacting with the corporate world really—I mean this is, this is what I feel like I’ve been seeing again and again and again in people’s, like, end-of-the-decade coverage. Also just in conversations about fandom right now. I’m sure that the current Star Wars situation is not helping with regard to that. But it just seems like it’s…
ELM: Situation? There’s a situation, Flourish?
FK: I would call it a situation. It’s a situation. Trust me, it’s a situation for anybody who, who, yeah…it’s a situation.
ELM: Side note, while we’re here, why don’t we just say it at the top of the episode? If you didn’t see it on social media, we have recorded a special episode about the Star Wars situation.
FK: [laughs] We really have. We really, really have.
ELM: So, that is for, our special episodes are the $3-a-month Patreon level.
FK: Mm-hmm.
ELM: And so if you have cash to spare, if you are very eager to hear us be very negative about Star Wars, and not just about The Return of Skywalker [sic], but also we both let out some feelings. I talk about Doctor Who for like five minutes.
FK: It was a lot!
ELM: It was, it was connected!
FK: It was connected. It was a lot, but it was a connected lot.
ELM: Just saying, I, I’m saying don’t listen to it if you really loved The Rise of Skywalker.
FK: Or do, and hear what we had to say about it, and get mad.
ELM: OK.
FK: But don’t get mad at us.
ELM: Sure.
FK: Have your feelings.
ELM: We’re just warning you in advance. But if you were frustrated, maybe you’ll find it an enjoyable listen! So it’s patreon.com/fansplaining.
FK: Sellin’ it. Sellin’ it.
ELM: Just, just reminding people! Because we usually do it at the end, and sometimes people are like “Oh, I listened to the credits for once!” And I’m like, are people just turning off when we say “Let’s do end business”? So as a reminder, that’s the, that’s the business side of the end business.
FK: Right.
ELM: Patreon.
FK: So back to the point…
ELM: Sellin’ it! [laughing]
FK: There’s been a lot of sort of…[laughing] Discussion of…you know. Thanks. Thank you. There’s been a lot of discussion of like, fandom quote “going corporate” or “selling out” or “being exploited” and the idea that like, this has happened in the last decade, and a lot of the conversation about that I don’t think that either of us has found very well-formulated? Like, there’s a lot of…it results in a lot of, like, talking about trends that are not necessarily, I don’t know. That just aren’t very substantive.
ELM: Right.
FK: But there have been some pieces that have been substantive and we wanted to talk about those and, and think about them, because, I mean, you know, among other things we didn’t actually do, like—we did a short sort of review of the decade in our last episode, but we didn’t really, you know, have a chance to, to dig in, and also at that point people hadn’t written their responses so we couldn’t, you know, bounce off of them.
ELM: Yeah. So, OK. We should talk about the, the piece that we initially were looking at, which I think was one of the, one of the most substantive pieces.
FK: Definitely.
ELM: OK. So this was in io9, which, you know, I think is, is—I would describe as a mainstream space, but I’m not sure. I was thinking actually as I was editing our Star Wars conversation, you were talking about how executives in Hollywood read Variety but they don’t read The Mary Sue. Which is, that’s, like—Mary Sue and io9 are in different spaces.
FK: Yeah they are.
ELM: And I’m wondering if executives are familiar, would they read io9.
FK: Only if it came up—they would understand it as a publication that meant something to fans if it came up in a list of things that there had been writing about a franchise they worked on of. But they’re not exactly, it’s not like people are going to go on io9 on a regular basis just to read it.
ELM: That’s interesting. So…
FK: I mean, #NotAllExecutives. [laughs] There are some executives who read io9.
ELM: Oh, what an important hashtag. [laughing]
FK: Yeah, #NotAllExecutives. But you know what I’m saying. It’s not the standard, it’s not an industry standard thing that people read even if they’re in that franchise space. So this substantive article, we really wanted to sort of talk about and respond to in the light of it sort of talking about a bunch of stuff we’ve seen bopping about everywhere, but in a more substantive way.
ELM: OK. So I think if you’re listening to this episode it might be a good idea to pause and read this if you didn’t. It’s by Katharine Trendacosta, and it was published in mid-December and it’s called “The Decade Fandom Went Corporate.”
FK: December 19th, if you really need the, the date for some reason.
ELM: If you really need the date.
FK: I don’t know why you would [laughing] but maybe. Help you identify it.
ELM: Just, just a few days after my birthday.
FK: Mm-hmm.
ELM: Just wanted to put that out there. It has a really cute illustration actually.
FK: It’s a very good illustration.
ELM: Just lookin’ at it. Congrats to Angelica Alzona, the illustrator. [both laugh] All right. So, when I initially read it, I was like—you know, and I want to say at the top: I don’t want to say like “Oh, we want to pin an entire episode of critique to one article.” I don’t, I don’t think that would be fair to anyone. And also, I don’t know, I kinda think of this in the sort of like, the Ann Powers...I don’t…I immediately thought about when Lana Del Rey went off at Ann Powers for saying, you know, for doing her job as a music critic, and this kind of idea of: Ann Powers took her seriously! Very seriously. Seriously enough to critique. She thinks you’re part of the canon.
And this is kinda how I feel about this piece, because on first reading, I was like, “This is good! There were a few like ‘what’ moments, and there was one moment where I was like ‘what?!’” And if the piece had been less good overall, it would have been the kind of thing that I’d screenshot and be like “Bro, what?” on Twitter like I do all the time with coverage of fandom.
FK: [laughs] You do that.
ELM: But—oh, I do—but overall, I thought it was a really interesting and substantive piece and I was really grateful for it, and I wanna take it seriously. So upon close reading I’m feeling like there are more and more holes here, and I don’t wanna say that I wanna devote a whole episode to tearing it apart or something, but I just wanted to say up front that I think that because it is a substantive piece that means that it is deserving of a substantive analysis. And I think those holes are actually some of the places, I think they’re reflecting some of the, the holes in the broader discussion and understanding.
FK: Absolutely. This is 100%, this is why I wanted to talk about it too, because when I read it, the first time I was like, “Oh, there’s, there’s a bunch of good stuff,” I sort of had the flip view, I was like “Oh, there’s a bunch of little good stuff in here but the overall trend of what the conversation is is some of the frustrating things that I see,” particularly with my job, right? Because like—I mean, the title of this is “the year that,” you know, “the decade that fandom went corporate,” and like, I’m kinda the poster child for that in a certain way, right?
So you can naturally imagine that there’s a few things that I’ve got, like, questions about, you know? I’m like “I don’t know about that!” Not so much—you know, really really more in the sort of whole concept of like, what fandom is and how it should be expected to interact with, you know, a corporation.
ELM: Right.
FK: I don’t know. So. So let’s, let’s, let’s talk about it. [laughs]
ELM: All right, where do you wanna start.
FK: Gosh. I don’t know. Well, one of the things that I think is interesting in this piece is that it really cites…it sort of has a slightly confused timeline about different things happening, although in general I sort of agree, which is to say that I think that in the—actually, you know what, in the beginning of the piece it says, quote, “Fans and fandom spent the 2000s fighting for legitimacy and proving their combined worth, and corporations spend the 2010s learning how to co-opt fandom to silence critics, manipulate press, and make even more money.” And I pretty much agree with that, although within the piece there’s sort of a confused timeline about when each of these things happened? And I wanted to talk about that because I think that it’s relevant to the broader conversation. When did corporations start getting into the fan space, and how?
ELM: Right. Yeah, I mean, I think within that too, there is a little bit of a muddling of what the 2000s were like for transformative fandom in particular. This piece, this piece spends a good amount of time talking about transformative vs. curatorial fandom. I know we’ve talked about them a lot, but just very quickly, because I’ve been thinking about them a lot recently…I don’t know, do you think anyone who listens to Fansplaining doesn’t know how we would broadly define those two buckets? Probably not at this point, right? Transformative fandom: people who create fanworks. Curatorial fandom: people who log the specs of ships on wikis.
FK: [laughs] There we go.
ELM: That’s the most reductive thing I could possibly do.
FK: It was reductive, but just think of it as an aide-memoire if you forgot, and if you never knew, go look it up and, and get a more nuanced take, I guess.
ELM: Right. You know, I, I think that the transformative fandom spent the 2000s not fighting for legitimacy but literally trying to be left alone. Like, literally running away, right? From…I mean…maybe you could frame that as a fight for legitimacy, but it was never a fight for, like, a sanctioned legitimacy…
FK: The fight was, the fight was to be allowed to be…yeah. The fight was to be allowed to be left alone, right.
ELM: Right.
FK: The fight was to say, “We just want to have our spaces, that we’re allowed to have, that don’t necessarily mean you sponsoring us, but that mean that we’re allowed to be here.” That’s it.
ELM: Right. And allowed means like, “I want a place to post my shit on the internet where other people can look at it and communicate with me.”
FK: And not be sued.
ELM: Right. And it’s interesting when we talk about this, beyond this article, because there’s a lot of narratives. And there’s a lot of confusion. I see it on Tumblr every day. And people will post these timelines of what happened in the history of this, these corners of fandom, and some of it’s good and some of it’s bad. And so, which is like, a statement that means nothing. But you know, the fact of the matter is that fandom wasn’t necessarily mainstreamed in the sense of being sanctioned by corporations, but fandom was exposed to the mainstream in the late ’90s if not the mid ’90s, so. Paramount was suing Star Trek sites I think as early as ’95 or ’96. I don’t know when you had your…
FK: Oh, and before, and before that, before that there were Star Wars things, you know, there were dustups around Star Wars slash fanfic.
ELM: Oh, I’m just talking about, I’m talking about digital…
FK: Oh, yeah yeah yeah, for sure.
ELM: Digital spaces only. People didn’t have, you know, and it was really—it went directly in line with scale and how many people had access to the internet and…
FK: Totally, agreed.
ELM: These suits, the man! Learning about the internet! [laughs] You know?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And so then you, you had by the early 2000s you started a series of, you know, basically exoduses of people saying “I just wanna post my things and I don’t want people taking it down in the middle of the night.” And so that was what the entire decade of the 2000s was for a lot of transformative fandom, was just being kicked off one platform after another.
FK: Well there was that and there was also the times when transformative fandom bumped up against sort of corporate, you know, whatever that means. Corporate, you know, copyright holders or whatever. There were also times when transformative fandom pushed back and was like, “No, we don’t want part of this.” So for instance, one of the early cases with FictionAlley we made a compromise, which was that Warner Brothers would allow us to go on and not fuck with us, basically, and we wouldn’t host NC-17 fanfic, and they would also like, let us basically use sale links, right? So like, that happened in like 2003. So it’s sort of weird then too to like, locate this “getting paid” part in the 2010s.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: When in 20—because I mean, and let’s be clear, one of the conversations that happened within that, there were lots of conversations at the time. There were suggestions that slash shouldn’t be allowed, not necessarily from Warner Brothers, but just sort of, you know, in the air, different people saying “Oh, well, what if—if you do that then you can play nice with them and then,” you know. So this conversation was happening also as early as 2003, and people were drawing different lines about what they—you know, like, archives were drawing lines and individuals were drawing lines about how much they wanted to actually be interacting with the corporate side and what they were willing to, you know, compromise.
So it’s also complicated on that side too, right? There’s these exoduses that are happening, and then there’s also this initial negotiation of: should we get paid? How should we get paid? What’s OK to accept to get paid? Should we refuse to get paid, right, which is—which is the Archive of Our Own, that came out later, after this negotiation had happened, right?
ELM: Right.
FK: So, the answer is like: yeah, reductively the 2000s were about getting legitimacy in the sense of, you know, fanworks being recognized as fair use and not having lawyers come after you. But it was also this much sort of crunchier conversation. You know?
ELM: Right. I don’t know, staying in a similar time period, I mean, the relationship between non-transformative fans and corporations, how would you characterize that in your view? In the—on the web specifically, from 1995 through 2010, roughly.
FK: I mean, I think that honestly, the relationship was largely—because measurement wasn’t a big thing until about 2010, the relationship existed but it was much smaller scale, more one-to-one, it was not mainstreamed in the same way, and it became mainstreamed as it became possible to track things starting in about 2008, which I thought it was funny that that article pinned it to Iron Man. I would pin it to Twitter, you know?
ELM: Yeah.
FK: I would pin it to things that you could look into, to the ascendancy of social media. That’s really to me what has caused the monetization or the, you know, I mean, you can call it exploitation or you can call it selling out or whatever else. But to me what we’re seeing is not so much corporations interacting with fans in the old-school way any more or less than they ever did. Right?
ELM: OK but what—even before that, remove the internet aspect of it…
FK: Yeah.
ELM: People who buy things, that’s been around for decades!
FK: Oh yeah! And people would make stuff and—I mean in fact I just, I mean, I just picked up this amazing book which is literally a book published for Star Trek fans that tells you where you can get every article of Star Trek memorabilia and tells you what catalogs to write in to. It’s like a list of addresses. It’s amazing.
ELM: That’s really good.
FK: I had to buy it. I was like, “Yes, thank you, I need this piece of fandom history.” But yeah, I mean, and—but also like, it’s not as though there weren’t people on message boards, you know what I mean, like, in the ’90s, of course! People who were in the X-Files fandom went to set.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: You know? People did all these kinds of interactions. I mean they named an X-Files character in like the late ’90s was named after a fanfic writer! So there was this kind of—who died of cancer, I mean, this was why they named it after her.
ELM: [laughing] All right, it wasn’t like a revenge act.
FK: [laughing] No it wasn’t a revenge act or anything else, it was like a tribute, right.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: So that’s what I mean when I say that there is still the same level of interaction with like, hard-core fandom, as there ever was. Because that was going on then! And it’s going on now. It’s just that now it’s larded on top of that is this interaction with social media.
ELM: Right, but I feel like some of this is scale. So when I think about what was available in the year 2000 in terms of when you go to Hot Topic…
FK: Yeah.
ELM: You know, I think we discussed this before, but like, I, with my money from working at The Gap, purchased all sorts of really mediocre Harry Potter memorabilia. Direct from Warner Brothers.
FK: Oh yeah. Some of that memorabilia was incredibly mediocre.
ELM: Incredibly! Except my Hot Topic Hogwarts track jacket: not mediocre in any way whatsoever.
FK: Yep.
ELM: Do not insult it. But like, a lot of—you know, and like, board games, I have like a Harry Potter kind of themed Clue…
FK: I had a bunch of figurines.
ELM: Yeah, right? So, all this stuff…
FK: But sort of weird figurines. Like ones based on the books, because the movie was like, not out yet or they hadn’t sorted it out, so they were like…
ELM: I had some of those weird figurines, yeah!
FK: Yeah, they were weird figurines!
ELM: So when I think about all of that, I think, that all exists and we were buying it. And I think most people I knew who liked Harry Potter were at least, if they were able to purchase at least something were buying it. You know? And Every Flavour Beans were at every Borders by the checkout, and Chocolate Frogs and stuff… [laughs]
FK: They certainly were.
ELM: You made that mistake a few times and then you didn’t want to have the gross ones, and so they started doing ones that had no gross ones in them. Right? So like this…
FK: And they reframed them as a game and now they don’t have the—
ELM: I didn’t know!
FK: Now they don’t have the license for Every Flavour Beans anymore, I think? So they sell them now as like, it’s like, it’s like framed up as like to play a game with your friends, yeah.
ELM: Wait, Jelly Belly does not have them?
FK: I don’t think so, because I noticed recently that no longer are they selling Bertie Bott’s, they’re selling like, “Surprise Beans.”
ELM: [laughs] Oh man.
FK: I mean maybe they still have the license and they just aren’t selling them because Harry Potter’s, you know.
ELM: Can I just say, I can’t tell—do I not think about Jelly Belly jellybeans any more because I am not 15? Or is it because their moment of ascendancy was around the year 2000?
FK: I can’t answer that because I lived near the Jelly Belly factory, it’s in California, so.
ELM: [laughing] Good.
FK: So I have no way of assessing it because I…
ELM: “I, as an individual from Jelly Belly, California.”
FK: Can I just say also that the Jelly Belly beans, before they get their hard outer coating, if you ever go to the factory, they’re amazing.
ELM: I like the outer coating a lot, it’s one of my favorite parts.
FK: I like the outer coating too, but they’re really great before they get the outer coating, when they’re fresh.
ELM: I could have a jelly bean right now. This is making me really want a good one.
FK: What’s your favorite flavor?
ELM: Of jelly bean?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Of Jelly Belly or any jelly bean?
FK: Jelly Belly.
ELM: Oh, OK. So specific. Wait, this is actually connected to fandom! There was a flavor that was hard to get unless you went to… [laughs] This is so specific. Unless you went to a candy store that had, like, the wall of Jelly Bellies where you could…did you have these?
FK: Yes.
ELM: Oh, you lived near the factory, right. So it wasn’t one that you would get in a variety pack or a bag, you’d have to go to the store where they sold them by individual flavors and you’d choose your own. It was called Strawberry Jam and it was maybe the greatest candy that’s ever been invented.
FK: Right, you love strawberries.
ELM: I love strawberries. And I remember I went and purchased a bag before I saw…I think the first three Harry Potter films.
FK: Wow.
ELM: So I directly, I remember going with my friend Annie to see Philosopher’s—what’s it called. What do we call it? Not Philosopher’s Stone.
FK: Sorcerer’s Stone.
ELM: [laughs] Sorcerer’s Stone. And I was so excited and I was so nervous it was gonna be bad, and I had my little bag of jelly beans, and I ate it, and I watched it, and I was like, “I can’t tell if this is good. I don’t know.” And then afterwards Annie turned to me and she was like, “That was bad.” And I was like, “OK…”
FK: Oh noooo.
ELM: [laughs] I mean, she wasn’t wrong! I think she didn’t have enough of that fannish magic to be like “There were still some things I loved!” You know? Which I would have done. But like, but that was the immediate response to that movie. And I had my jelly beans and we just…and got our, our moms to pick us up. Yeah. Special time in history.
FK: Let’s get back to what we were talking about. By the way, not that you asked, but my two favorites are pear and buttered popcorn, and I mix them, and everyone else thinks it’s gross.
ELM: You are a monster.
FK: Thank you.
ELM: Buttered popcorn.
FK: I love it.
ELM: A literal monster. Actually, you are a good person to have like in the apocalypse, because…
FK: I will eat the gross things.
ELM: No one wants that!
FK: [laughing] I’ll eat it!
ELM: In the apocalypse, when you’re at the Jelly Belly factory.
FK: Just, just…
ELM: They’re like all out of the other flavors and you’re like, “I’m fine.” [laughing]
FK: Just call me the vacuum cleaner. All right.
ELM: Oh, do you think I’ve just come up with a really good YA novel concept?
FK: Stuck in the Jelly Belly factory at the apocalypse?
ELM: Yeah. It’s like, Willy Wonka meets…
FK: It is not a good idea. All right. Pull it together. Let’s bring it back. Bring it back. Center. [breathing slowly]
ELM: OK. So. Me bringing up all this shitty merch…I said merch…just makes me feel like, you know, while I agree that, you know, the article cites things like Her Universe as things that are…I thought that was a little bit of a weird kind of stretch, because it sort of asserts that that was sort of a co-opting of transformative fandom, and I, I feel like that sort of thing more reflects a person with more fannish sensibilities or a person who’s in fandom, but doing something that people have always done. Like, people have always made shirts related to Star Wars. Right? But like, now you can get a really cute dress or really cute top that’s not just a, a boring old t-shirt, right, that comes in like one large man size. Or one large size of any gender, but you know the kind of t-shirt I’m talking about, right?
FK: [laughing] Right, exactly. Honestly this was the biggest problem that I had with this article, is that while I certainly certainly understand the desire to not have, you know, the corporation or the official people or whoever in your business, I think it’s sort of weird to suggest that the world would be better if there was no…if no one catered, like, when no one catered to these things at all. And then it’s also weird to suggest that no one was trying to cater to them in the early 2000s. Do you see what I’m saying?
It’s like—people, like, corporations have gotten better at catering to these impulses over the past 20 years. And more people have had access to it and it’s been normalized, certainly. I mean, even in—just in the past 10 years is I would say when it’s really been normalized. And I don’t see what has been foreclosed on by that. Do you see what I’m saying? Like…
ELM: Yeah.
FK: I really don’t. I understand not wanting to take part in it, but I don’t understand what that prevents you from doing that was available before.
ELM: Right. It makes me wonder if people have anxiety—and I’m not pinning this article, because I think this article is expressing a lot of what, like I said, what we’re seeing in broader conversations—I sometimes think about whether a lot of this boils down to an anxiety about the monetization of things that we love in a space that previously you possibly couldn’t have seen that as clearly.
I mean, I think a lot about sports. And I think about, you know, when I was at a time in my life when I was truly in sports fandom, and like, purchasing a t-shirt from the official Buffalo Bills store…
FK: You and your Bills…
ELM: Was a thing…you know I wasn’t like “Oh, I need to go find the Bills crafter who will make me the…”
FK: Right.
ELM: “...the organic thing because my love of the Bills is so pure and untouched by money,” because the idea, I mean—and you can—there are a lot of interesting and fraught arguments to be made about money and sports, particularly around the college athlete space.
FK: Extraordinarily!
ELM: And I think that the, the people arguing that college athletes should not be paid, I think—not to be reductive, but I think it’s kind of a racist argument, you know?
FK: Yes.
ELM: I said that in a John Mulaney tone. “But that seems quite racist to me!” [both laugh] But the, the NFL has never existed in some pure “love of the gridiron,” you know, always you’re like “Of course, that’s my team!” And, and if I wanna go to the game and pay for a ticket and, yeah! I can connect with fellow fans in the parking lot while we tailgate, and I’m sure there are ways that that’s gotten more corporatized over the last 30 years, right? I’m certain.
FK: Oh, it has. Yeah. I’m sure.
ELM: But there isn’t something…I don’t have a hard time holding in my head the idea of watching the game with my dad and his brothers and my grandfather and feeling that sort of organic love of something we all love together. That is, that is not—the idea that the Bills are making lots of money and that…
OK, even: not to continue talking about sports so much, but there are economics of this. I don’t know if this is true of all NFL teams but when we were in Buffalo, where my dad’s from and where my grandfather lived until he died, they had a rule where if not enough seats of the game were sold, they would not show the game on local television.
FK: Whoa.
ELM: It was like a blackout rule. And I’m not sure if that was true for all franchises or all teams, but…
FK: I don’t know.
ELM: It definitely was a thing in the ’90s in Buffalo because they wanted people to go to the games, you know.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: So I remember that being a part of it. So even your organic enjoyment of something on your free, on CBS or whatever, was directly impacted by the economic, the direct monetary…
FK: Yeah, for real.
ELM: But I never, ever thought of that as something bad and corporate. And so that’s why, I mean, you’re nodding so maybe you wanna get in here before I go into…
FK: No, I—I completely…
ELM: …a monologue about my childhood and the frosty fields of… [laughing]
FK: No, completely, completely. Oh my God. You’re just goin’. You’re goin’, you’re gonna keep going.
ELM: It was a brisk November day in upstate New York.
FK: [laughing] Oh my God. No. Exactly. I mean I, I do think that there’s some anxiety about this because it wasn’t something that had those elements to it, but the thing is it did have those elements to it, right? It’s not as though these things were not always owned corporately and I mean the other thing about this is that… “Owned corporately.” That’s not what I meant. Owned by corporations, that’s what I meant. [ELM laughs] Very different.
But I think the thing is, the other thing is like, this article in particular and I’ve seen it elsewhere too, there’s this idea that because corporations do not celebrate all forms of transformative fandom via like, talking about it, right? That they want to crush transformative fandom. Or that they want the only things out there—actively are seeking to prevent people from saying certain things and do that. Now—
ELM: Like, wait hold on. You’re saying, let me clarify: you’re saying that the things that they don’t actively sanction, there’s a sense that if they’re not actively sanctioning it…
FK: They’re censuring it, yes.
ELM: Or that they want to. Like, if they can’t make a buck off it, if they can’t put their thumb up on it…
FK: Then they, then they actively want to end it.
ELM: Then they’re gonna come for it.
FK: And I think that that is a…an attitude that some…I don’t think that’s an attitude that no one in the entertainment industry holds. I think that there are some people in the entertainment industry who would say, “Here are the ways that you should enjoy our project, and here are some ways that you shouldn’t enjoy it.” I’m not saying that it doesn’t exist.
ELM: Oh, you think that hypothetically perhaps the 95 theses that…maybe that’s a bad metaphor because that was meant to be in opposition to the structures but…when Paramount and CBS put out the Axanar thing where they were like…
FK: Yeah, yeah.
ELM: “They can’t have pointy ears if you wanna make a fan film!”
FK: Well that one’s, that one’s complicated too because that one is motivated not—I mean, that’s motivated from the idea of like, they’re trying to defend their copyright and trademark. Maybe ill-conceivedly, but they’re trying to defend their copyright and trademark.
ELM: I don’t think those things are disconnected.
FK: I think what I’m trying to say is, there’s this idea within this article, right, you know, “We’re lucky that the last 10 years hasn’t seen fan-to-fan fandom crushed under the heel of corporate fandom,” right. That’s a pretty strong statement.
ELM: Yeah, yeah.
FK: And it’s, and it’s, and I’m not saying that corporate fandom doesn’t ever overstep. I think that, you know, with stuff like the Axanar thing and like, with trying to defend copyright and trademark, there’s absolutely boundaries that corporate fandom—er, that corporations are trying to hold, right?
ELM: Mm-hmm.
FK: As we’ve seen, lawyers will argue conservative stances on fair use and we need groups like the Archive Of Our Own to fight back against that, because this is a negotiable issue, right? That’s how copyright law in the United States works, right. So I’m not saying that there isn’t, like, a line here that’s being defended and pushed, but I think that it’s weird to suggest that like…I feel like that statement suggests that, yeah, if corporations do not praise something they’re criticizing it. And I just don’t think that that’s the case.
I think that, I think that at this point, the majority of people on the corporate side don’t see fanfiction necessarily as a threat. They might see it as a, like, you know, “Well, we don’t want anything to do with it, because as long as it’s not gonna fuck with our copyright and our trademarks and we can’t make money off it, so, pfft, get over there!” You know what I mean, like, “Do your thing, we aren’t gonna even look at you.” Right? And I think—I feel like that’s a very different than, genuinely what was happening in the ’90s, which was Cease and Desist letters—I mean it’s different than the Axanar decision, right?
ELM: Sure, yeah yeah yeah.
FK: It’s benign neglect, and I just—I mean—I don’t know, isn’t that what a lot of people want in transformative fandom? Is benign neglect? [laughing]
ELM: Well…I mean, I have to wonder if…some of the unspoken sort of undercurrents, maybe some of the problem actually is that kind of false binary between transformative and affirmational fandom. Because…
FK: Yeah.
ELM: One thing that we discussed a lot on this podcast over the last…five years we can say now because it’s 2020, we started in 2015, just gonna say it, I’m sayin’ it!
FK: Wow, wow, wow.
ELM: I know. Well, five years sounds so much more dramatic than four, doesn’t it?
FK: It does.
ELM: It’s half a decade.
FK: It’s half a decade!
ELM: Over the past five years, you know—we’ve, we’ve talked about this and I still would like to write something substantive about it and that’s on my 2020 resolution list—to take a specific example, the idea of affirmational shipping culture.
FK: Right.
ELM: Right? Which I’ve talked about a little bit, but to, to reiterate it a bit in the context of this, the sort of idea that when we say “shipping,” I mean we did this whole huge survey on it, for some people that means fan-to-fan conversations, and for some people that means “I want my ship to be validated.”
FK: Right.
ELM: “And that’s how I’m going to get value out of this fannish experience, it’s not by you and me ship the same thing, wow, we love it! But…”
FK: Yeah.
ELM: “…by someone saying ‘you got it, you’re right.” And so when, when you have what is quote-unquote “transformative” fandom supposedly, it’s not like everyone is walking around being like “fuck the corporations, I’m doin’ what I want, I don’t need any validation, I don’t care, I don’t care what Michael Sheen says, I don’t care what whatever—” you know what I mean? Obviously that’s not true, even people who I thought who were dyed-in-the-wool, I’m-transformative-fandom-first, I’m-about-fans-first, the second Michael Sheen opens his mouth, you know…
FK: Yeah! Absolutely! And it goes the other way too, you know.
ELM: Yeah, yeah!
FK: Because the Axanar stuff is actually like—they’re not talking about transformational, I mean, they’re talking about transformational fandom, in that they’re talking about the fan films, but if you look at those fan films, what are they concerned with? Right? They’re concerned with like, the most like, I mean, one of the fan films that they were like negotiating with is, you know, Star Trek Continues, which is basically the most dedicated to making things that look like they could be old Star Trek, right?
ELM: Right, right.
FK: That’s super affirmational even though it’s new stories. It’s incredibly affirmational in the way that it’s going about making it. So you can’t even say that it’s necessarily only, quote—I mean what is that, is it affirmational or transformational? I don’t know, it’s sort of both.
ELM: Well I mean that gets into the kind of—it’s interesting when you see famous authors who hate fanfiction, I feel like there’s always two camps, to name a few. But the George R. R. Martin comments on it, and he’s even recently—I know this because I sometimes do Google alerts on “fanfiction” for the newsletter. Apparently recently he said once again that he doesn’t like fanfiction, and everyone had to write a stupid little article about it, and it was like…good, you put some more shitty content into the world, folks.
But if you look at his original writings about this on his LiveJournal, they’re really, he’s got this kind of old-school, what I think of as an old-school sort of SFF author, and I don’t wanna diminish SFF, but I do think there’s a lot of derivative, somewhat derivative or…you know, those are genres that do have…I mean every genre has derivative works in it, right. But I find there is some anxiety within those spaces.
FK: No, there’s, there’s some anxiety because there’s historically been a bunch of basically potboilers, you know what I mean? Like…
ELM: Yes, exactly, “potboilers” is exactly the right word.
FK: Which is fine, by the way, I like them, but so…
ELM: Yes. But so he has the most affirmational approach to what he view fanfiction as, where he’s like, “It’s gonna be plagiarism! They’re gonna rip me off.” You know, it’s like people writing rip-off Dickens, right. Whereas—maybe this is funny because I’m giving gendered examples, but if you look at what’s-her-name, Outlander.
FK: Diana Gabaldon.
ELM: Diana Gabaldon’s original posts on, on fanfiction, and her incredibly problematic takes where she used terms like “white slavery” and “seducing her husband,” you know, hers are very much a very…what I think of as actually more related to fanfiction and what people should fear, which is the idea of like, “I have an idea of my characters and you’re gonna come and you’re gonna have them do other stuff that I don’t think is emotionally true, and maybe you’re gonna make them gay or whatever and that stresses me out!” This is like, hearkening back to an argument from like two decades ago, right. I feel like people would know that they can’t say that even if they feel that these days.
FK: Right.
ELM: At least I hope. But you know what I mean?
FK: Yeah yeah yeah.
ELM: That was always like—that was what people were always arguing.
FK: Yeah, that’s—I don’t know that Diana Gabaldon specifically…
ELM: No no, Diana Gabaldon never said anything like that. Well, she wouldn’t, because she’s—this is het, it’s a het ship, right. But like…
FK: Well, no, I mean…
ELM: You know.
FK: I think particularly because there is this gay guy who has, like, a lot of chemistry with Jaime and maybe gets together with him sort of in some ways and then like…you know.
ELM: To clarify she never said anything about…
FK: Just to be clear, yeah.
ELM: Yeah. I mean I, I, that was always—and often I mean, when people brought that up I always thought it was a bit of a straw man, this kind of like “J. K. Rowling would be mad if you make her characters gay.” Which I mean now, in light of all that, maybe. [laughs]
FK: Yeah, but also like a little bit of a straw man assumption.
ELM: Yeah, right? And this kind of using the presumption of the author to say. So that’s a sort of like, those two approaches are the kind of, the ways that authors say that they don’t like…and you know, those are actually really different, because one’s the transformative side of the like: “You’re going to twist this so much against the wishes of the corporation,” like what I might be doing with the X-Men, is that what Disney wants?
They probably don’t care. I mean, they don’t care, right? You know? But as opposed to me writing something that’s so convincing that they’re going to think that I’m ripping off some sort of, you know. That the comics people are, you know what I mean? That kind of thing, right? You know, those are really, those are two different things happening at the same time.
But the fact that people don’t articulate this often, and maybe don’t know to articulate this, means we kind of wind up arguing…it’s all kind of jumbled together and so then you can kind of wind up in statements like this where you’re kind of assuming what corporations are thinking and what fans are thinking, when in fact fans are thinking a lot of different things. Like, it’s not just how people view fanfiction, but fans are thinking about their fannish activity in really different ways and their relation to the corporation and the source material in really different ways.
FK: Absolutely, and transformative fans are thinking in different ways too, right, and again this—one thing that I think I do appreciate is that…I appreciate the idea within this, you know, within this article, that maybe, you know, the line isn’t between curatorial and transformative fandom. It says, “any more,” and I’m not sure it ever was. But then it—“the last 10 years have merged both into exercises in consumptive fandom.” And I think, but I don’t know. But you’re missing all the different positions people hold within there, do you see what I’m saying? It’s as though…
ELM: I don’t know, I would be curious to know if there was ever…we’re talking, I’m the one over here like “Fuck canon, who needs it?!” And I’m the one who bought the Harry Potter track jacket from Hot Topic, sanctioned by, you know, licensed by Warner Brothers, right?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: So like, that’s all three things at once, and I sit here and say like, “I’m not a consumerist fan in any way,” but that’s completely false! But it feels like that, right?
FK: I’m literally looking at your—I mean, it’s Harry Potter fanart and it’s not consumerist because they did not…on the one hand is that not consumerist, because they didn’t, Warner Brothers didn’t make it? On your wall, the Harry Potter fanart? But on the other hand you did buy it from somebody and it is about sort of collecting stuff around you, you know? I don’t know.
ELM: For context, I have four little framed prints of the four Hogwarts houses.
FK: They’re very cute.
ELM: On the brick wall of my kitchen. Thank you. Flourish put them up.
FK: It’s super cute. It’s extremely Elizabeth style and place.
ELM: Yeah, it’s too bad I feel very ambivalent about Harry Potter. But it still looks cute!
FK: They’re cute! You don’t necessarily, you wouldn’t necessarily know.
ELM: Yeah, they’re real stealthy. You look at them and you’re like “Oh there’s pictures of plants and herbs and hot drinks,” you know, it’s very kitcheny.
FK: Yeah, it’s very kitcheny, they’re great!
ELM: Great, great. Yeah, no money went to Warner Brothers. But like, I mean that’s the other thing too, there’s a little bit of a hint of this in the article and I feel like my position on this, that kind of thing, have really transformed thanks to you and your Mr. Moneybags attitudes over here over the last…
FK: Ha-ha-ha.
ELM: Yeah, thank you. Over the last five years. I think that the, the most cogent conversation we had about this was the monetizing fandom one where we talked about this kind of separating out what explicitly non-monetized fanfiction spaces were. Because before that, you know, in the years before that I was really arguing sort of, “Why shouldn’t fanfiction writers get paid? Fan artists get paid!” Right?
And now I’m sort of, I know that people have a lot of anxiety about this. But for the fan artist space, I just, I sort of feel like there’s a hint of this in the article too, a little bit of “Oh, well now everyone has to monetize their hobbies” or whatever. They don’t! You know?
FK: Right!
ELM: They—they don’t! And like, OK, I think that fanfiction is in a tricky space because I think that the fact that that, that channel hasn’t really been opened to people in the same way. There’s no comparable “Oh, I’ll do commissions for you, I’ll draw a body for $20, I’ll draw color, two characters for $50,” whatever. That doesn’t exist. And unfortunately for fanfiction writers who might want something like that, they’re gonna have to go to more sanctioned spaces. They’re gonna have to work in a space like Wattpad where there is a potential pathway to getting paid for their work. And do I think that’s unfair? “Unfair” maybe isn’t the right word. But I understand why people who take that stance might be frustrated.
That being said, anyone who suggests that you have to sell your fanart, or that you have to sell your crafts, or that you have to sell your fanworks in any way—it, you don’t! You, you really don’t. Right? And you can and…
FK: I think that’s my problem with this, is that it’s like, assuming that by the—this argument is like, basically, “By the existence of these other possibilities, it is squeezing out space for people who don’t wanna monetize or don’t wanna do fanart or whatever.” And so the argument that you could use here is you could say, “Well, because these options exist, people will take them. And then they won’t have the benefits and the delight and the, you know, and the expansive possibilities of a non-corporatized, non-monetized fandom space, right?
Because I do think that, that people who potentially—if you enter into these spaces and you see a path to a job or whatever, then you, maybe you take that, when otherwise you would have just pursued it for fun. But what’s the alternative? Is the alternative to be like, “So therefore we should ban this”? That seems weird and regressive to me too, right? Like, in its own way.
ELM: I don’t understand, the idea that someone would come into fandom and that they would see a very strong corporate-sanctioned path and the non-corporate-sanctioned path would be closed to them is strange to me.
FK: Yeah. I mean, you could say that if you’re like a teenager and you see this as like, a way…you don’t, maybe you don’t fully see the non-corporate path or something. OK. I mean, I guess. But…
ELM: That did not happen to me as a teenager! Because, like, as you know, I read Harry Potter because of a fucking Coca-Cola commercial… [FK: laughs] Because there was a tie-in commercial which had like a bunch of kids in it, not the Harry Potter characters, on the Hogwarts Express, going like, “Magic of Coca-Cola! Doo-doo-doo!” And then I was like “Well that looks magical” so then I read it.
But like, my immediate response to that was not “Where’s all the sanctioned shit?” I was not like “Where’s the Warner Brothers portal?” I was like “Oh, I think like, Harry and Draco, that really seems like a thing!” And then all you had to do was go Google: Harry, Draco. You know? Three clicks and you’re there, right? And then you’re like “Oh, all these people are doing it” and then you know about it and then you’re in, right?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: So this kind of idea that you need to have your, like, that that needs to be signposted to you is very strange to me, because people have been finding these other spaces naturally for a very very long time, and like yeah, fuckin’ sucks for everyone I see there where they’re like “I didn’t know this existed and I’m so excited to learn about it now,” yeah, I wish you had learned about it sooner if it really brings you joy and you didn’t know there was another path beyond just seeing what the corporation was handing you, you know.
And that sounds reductive, because I think that there’s a lot of joy to be had in the things that corporations can present to fans. Like, it’s very, it can get a little patronizing, people are like “Oh, you just want they give you.” But you just like love the movies! And you love to see behind the scenes? OK!
FK: Sometimes the things they give you are good!
ELM: Yeah! It plays into this idea of fan as this quote-unquote “slavish devotee,” right? Maybe you just loved the movie and you wanna see what Robert Downey Jr. has to say about it, you know? And you don’t want to deconstruct Iron Man, you just like it. That’s totally fine! That’s also part of fandom.
FK: I think that there’s also a bit of a desire—and I see this in a lot of people, sometimes myself too—there’s a desire to combine a sense of like, purity…
ELM: Yeah.
FK: I guess? In a different way, right? Like, the idea of…
ELM: This goes back to the thing I was thinking about the Bills, though, which I don’t even know if I finished that statement, but the money—
FK: Yeah!
ELM: Makes it impure. Right?
FK: Right, mm-hmm. Right!
ELM: Go ahead, continue your thought. [laughs]
FK: Exactly! So like, I mean, people who, who see…well, it’s embarrassing to be into something that’s like a corporate thing. Not that people are explicitly saying this. They’re thinking it sometimes, right? “I don’t wanna be, I’m not a person who would be into like a corporate thing. Corporate things suck,” right. “Those are just, they’re just out to get your money, and like, they’re not good and they’re not community-minded and they’re not any of this stuff. But it’s OK if it has all of these other, better aspects to it, and that’s what transformative fandom is, so fuck those affirmational fans and fuck all,” you know what I mean, like, “fuck, fuck also any corporate nature of this. Fuck all that. Because I’m a good fan. I am a,” you know, “I’m not an idiot who’s,” whatever, “watching the boob tube.”
ELM: Yes.
FK: “I’m doing something better.”
ELM: I think that is widespread and I think we both do this, even if we try not to.
FK: Totally! I’m sure I do! [ELM: laughs] So that’s not…but that’s also, but like you said that’s not a great look for a variety of reasons, and one of them is like—I mean, one of them really is, you know, one of them is “don’t yuck my yum,” right? There are lots of—
ELM: I hate that expression so much! Why did you have to say that out loud?! [FK: laughs] It’s gonna be in the transcript! It is the worst expression in the entire world! There are multiple ways to say that!
FK: I didn’t know you hated it so much. Don’t harsh my squee?
ELM: Yeah, I mean, I don’t like that one either.
FK: I don’t like that one which is why I used a different one.
ELM: “Yuck my yum” is such a gross phrase!
FK: All right, well, whatever that, you know, insert your favorite version of that phrase here. But you know, I mean, I think that it’s weird to suggest that like, somebody is…I mean I do think that, like, it can be possible to simultaneously say that like, being community-oriented is great, and like, working for a community that is you know, sharing stuff and not like, being, you know, not being consumerist and all this, like—sure, I agree that all those things are good. But like, you can, you can be doing that in a lot of spaces and in a lot of ways and like, also like some standard fandom stuff.
ELM: Having a fulfilling life. Yeah. I think about this sometimes. You know, I have this like, when I do the affirmational–transformational divide—and I’ve done this in a few talks—I’ve talked about how like, affirmational capital often comes from knowledge, right? I mean, I say this like I came up with this. But I just explain this, you know. So like, you get your fannish capital because you’re like, “I know all these facts,” right? And people that know the most facts are the best fans.
FK: Right.
ELM: Or the people who document the most facts, and that’s, you know, et cetera. And then I say things like “Well, transformational fandom you get your fannish capital from being, having emotional investment,” because I don’t want to present some sort of situation where only the people who create fanfiction or fanart are considered “good fans,” because that’s shitty and that, that problem exists within transformative fandom, where people literally post things like “I know I’m not really a good fan cause I never write any fanfiction.” Absolutely not!
So what do you bring to this? You bring your enthusiasm, you bring your love of these characters, you bring maybe a comment or maybe not. Maybe a kudos. I mean not even that. You just bring, you bring this kind of emotional level into it, and a happiness around the thing.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: But I remember I got called out by someone after one of these where he was like, “I think that it’s ridiculous that you’re saying that people in other parts of fandom that aren’t transformative aren’t measuring things by emotion.” You know. We kinda argued a little bit, it was like a fun argument or whatever, he wasn’t really mad at me. But I think about it and I’m like, it is kind of a patronizing statement. Maybe not in affirmational fandom, where I really do think in a lot of these spaces it is about kind of a…it can be a bit of a dick-waving sort of, “I know the thing, and PLOT HOLE PLOT HOLE THIS IS A PLOT HOLE,” that kind of culture, you know?
But if you look at people just—think about the videos where people play their reactions to watching a trailer, right? And that to me is the most, that’s not transformative in any way. That is pure reifying…it’s affirmational, right? Because you’re like “What! My, I love this!!” Right?
FK: Yeah!
ELM: But that’s not—you know, and I could sit here and be like “That’s not particularly deep,” but it’s like pure emotion, right? And people find joy in it and they’re like “Those are also my emotions,” right?
FK: Yeah, I think that what I’m—I think that what I’m coming down to is that perhaps in this new, perhaps in this new decade, some of these categories that we’ve relied upon as, you know, just as things that we say off-hand, as terms of art, terms of art? No. Terms of discussion. I think we’re seeing the cracks in them. And I think that those cracks were always there, right. The map is never the territory, and what you decide to map is obviously gonna order your thought. And I think that here we’re seeing some of the ways that using “affirmational” and “transformational,” that thinking about, you know, the idea of like “consumptive fans” versus “creative fans” or something like that, I think that—which are different by the way, those two categories of things—I think that those things maybe don’t serve us super well, or maybe they serve us only in certain contexts.
And I think that to me that’s what I’m really seeing coming out of this conversation about the decade, is I’m seeing a lot of people using those categories in ways that I’m not sure really tell us much useful to move into the next period of time. Or, or give us tools that are as helpful as I would like them to be.
ELM: So, let’s think about the different groups here and what they want. People who I think of as quote-unquote “in transformative” fandom—which is me more than you but both of us, right? Because I think you are, you’ve always said that you kind of engage differently with different things, right?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: There are places where you…
FK: There are things that I’m pretty affirmational about.
ELM: Yeah. And you’re not doing any of the fandomy in the way—I just did a little gesture, when I think of like…
FK: Or I’m doing a little bit of it but it’s not like I’m, you know, yeah. Like, whatever, Star Trek, right. I’ve written some fanfic about Star Trek, but it’s like, little tiny bits and mostly I’m just…
ELM: Right.
FK: Collecting every Star Trek novel.
ELM: So I think that one of the biggest challenges for transformative fans, to use that bucket that we just declared was pointlessly reductive, is overcoming…I feel like, all right. Thinking back to the start of this conversation, the sort of long—“intergenerational” sounds stupid, but like, this sort of residual anxiety from 1995 to maybe towards the end of the 2000s decade, of this idea of transformative fans being kind of persecuted…
I mean we’ve talked about this, side note, we’ve talked about this as one of the reasons why transformative fandom is so bad at accepting critique about themselves, right? It’s this sort of “But women can’t be…”
FK: Yeah, martyr complex.
ELM: “…problematic, you know? We’re not Marvel,” you know, that kind of thing. I think that kind of attitude is embedded in these spaces and even though there’s lots of people trying to break that down, I think that is kind of a foundational ethos.
FK: Yeah, because it was founded in this very oppositional space and oppositional time, right?
ELM: Yeah, but I mean, not to draw too blunt a metaphor or a, a comparison, but I mean, it’s similar to feminism in the sense of like, it’s exactly what you see whenever there’s any sort of intersectional feminist conversation. You see “But women…oppressed…women are oppressed!” And it’s like…
FK: Yeah yeah yeah.
ELM: “OK now, but you didn’t actually, maybe some of you didn’t think about, you know, maybe some of you white cis women didn’t think about X group or Y group when you were doing all this 50 years ago,” or whatever, “and just because that was foundational for this movement now doesn’t mean that you don’t need to do the work of fixing that,” right.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Et cetera. So I think that that legacy, just like we were saying, we’ve been saying all throughout this episode, is deeply tied up in this sort of idea, this sort of idea that corporations are coming for people, and they’re not. Like…
FK: Yeah.
ELM: In this case? Like you said, the entertainment industry is not coming for fanfiction. It’s not. You know? And if you think that a ton of people being really interested in the corporate thing blots out your interest in the non-corporate-sanctioned thing? Then I think that’s something that you personally need to work on! And I think a lot of people personally need to work on. Like, whatever Disney does with the X-Men franchise going forward does not diminish my personal enjoyment of writing X-Men fanfiction.
FK: Right.
ELM: And, as you know from your love of Star Wars being completely destroyed by other humans—that’s a really hard thing to do! It’s hard to say that like, you know, say they take the whole thing in a really different direction. Am I gonna be like “Oh, my fanfiction doesn’t matter any more!” No, like, it matters to me! Right? But that’s something that I’m able to say, having been in fandom for two decades and feeling supremely confident about my internal interests in things.
FK: Right.
ELM: Solely about me internally, right? You know what I mean?
FK: Right, right. One thing I want to add to what you just said is it’s also, it’s not as though we—just because people are not coming after fanfic now doesn’t mean they never will, which is why it’s really good to have organizations like the Organization for Transformative Works and the EFF, for that matter, right, existing to support this. But, but, it doesn’t have to be that we’re in crisis right now for those to be important. In fact, one of the reasons they’re important is that we’re not in crisis at the moment.
ELM: Well, people might argue that because there is no stable place outside of the Archive to actually do anything else fannish…people, I think, do feel very adrift right now. I mean I see an extraordinary amount of anxiety on my feed, in particular from people I knew from Tumblr who came to Twitter who left Tumblr—these are the same people I was talking about last, I mean, I shouldn’t pinpoint it all on these people on my feed. But you know, I was talking in our last episode about people who didn’t really like Tumblr.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And then the ban happened and then they’d already been drifting away and then they were like “I’m done, Tumblr,” but who don’t seem to enjoy Twitter either. I see lots and lots of people, maybe not even on my feed but maybe retweeted onto my feed, saying “This place fuckin’ sucks in a different way,” and…
I’ve actually—very ahistorically—seen people suggesting that like, purity culture and anti culture was directly the result of people having to migrate to Twitter, which I think erases…
FK: That’s hilarious.
ELM: …the past six years of Tumblr?
FK: Right. Well, OK. But but but, I’m not trying to say that the Archive Of Our Own makes it, you know, I’m not saying that the platforms that we gather on are stable. What I’m saying is just that the legal status of, you know, the legal status of fanworks is not necessarily that much more stable than it ever was, but it’s just not—I mean, it’s not under immediate, like, attack, you know.
ELM: Yeah, yeah.
FK: Like, I don’t—I really don’t see it as being under immediate attack. That doesn’t mean it couldn’t change and that doesn’t mean we don’t need these organizations: it’s why we need these organizations. I wasn’t trying to refer to like, necessarily, the stability of what platforms you’re on or anything like that.
ELM: Well, but I just think that it doesn’t matter—that, sure, but like, if you feel like your space to hang out is…if you feel like your rec center is, I just thought of my own newsletter. But you’re hanging out at the rec center, the Y or whatever, you know like in your town, and you feel like it’s constantly in danger of being shut, or like you don’t even…like the room that you found to gather is like really not ideal…
FK: Yeah, but again, this is not new either. I mean I know you know that it’s not new. Right? Like, this was the same thing that happened around the end of LiveJournal, and people went and founded Dreamwidth, and it didn’t end up becoming as much of a thing as—I mean lots of people still are on Dreamwidth, but it didn’t end up becoming as much of a thing as Tumblr did, which is probably fine for the sake of the people who run Dreamwidth, but…
ELM: You can see how people have these compounded anxieties…
FK: Oh yeah.
ELM: Because they feel like “Oh, fandom is so corporate now but there’s no space for me in that,” even though that’s completely false because two seconds later they reblog a whole bunch of gifs directly from the movie, and it’s like “Well actually you aren’t as oppositional to this film as you think you are, because if you truly were oppositional then would you engage with the actual,” you know, “the actual people making it in any way whatsoever, or ever say that you liked something an actor said about their read on the character.”
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Right? Like, people contain multitudes and don’t acknowledge them. You know? But you can see how all of that going down at the same time as Tumblr feeling like a hostile space, Twitter being a total shitshow at all time—like it always has been FYI folks, this, it’s just it’s gotten worse and worse but…
FK: It’s not new and it’s not just, it’s not just fandom!
ELM: It’s a bad platform, yes, it’s not just fandom.
FK: The moment anybody gets on Twitter they turn into like…you know, the angry, do you remember that old webcomic where it was like, dude anonymous on the internet turns into, like, a terrible mouthbreathing version of himself? That’s what happens to all of us when we get on Twitter.
ELM: I—like—is that, I hope you can find this webcomic because otherwise it just sounds like you’re just describing…
FK: [laughing] It was, I’ll try and find it. It was a very famous, like, you know, apply anonymity to…
ELM: “You know that comic where a man goes on the internet and he’s a jerk?” is what you sounded like.
FK: I wouldn’t have mentioned it except it was a very, a very vivid…
ELM: Good, find it for me. You can’t describe it in any other way but yes, find it for me. OK, so: but setting fans aside, I wanna talk, I wanna—in the final note, what does this mean for the corporate side, the man? We talked about the fan, how about the man? Like, I feel like you have poisoned me for life, but I don’t think that corporations having access to fans is a bad thing. I think that there are millions upon millions of people, even people who would—may not pass your fan test, because they don’t do the things you do…
FK: Yeah.
ELM: But they go see every MCU film opening weekend, and that’s that, and they consider themselves in the MCU fandom. And when the trailer drops, and they say “Tweet at us so we can get, you can get the next trailer immediately,” they’re like, “Yes! I love this!” Right? Those people: there are millions of people like that.
FK: Yeah!
ELM: And if they wanna say they’re in the fandom and if Marvel or whoever wants to talk directly to them, and say “What do you guys wanna hear more about?” Like, “What are you interested in?” Like, you know, “We wanna have this conversation with you.” The idea that threatens my fan experience is paranoid and narcissistic honestly. Like, go do those things! Like, that doesn’t bother me. I don’t walk around San Diego Comic-Con going like, “These people aren’t talking directly to me! I’m mad!” I go like, “This is funny.” You know? Like, “These people are lovin’ it, and I’m just happy to be here.” Right? But I see so many people being like, “Mm.” You know?
FK: Yeah, and honestly I don’t see that—personally I don’t see the problem either with opt-in, fair interactions.
ELM: Yes!
FK: You know what I mean? I would be fine with any, you know what I mean, like—what Wattpad’s doing, go with God! You know?
ELM: Right! Wattpad isn’t—
FK: Fanart contests with fair outcomes, right?
ELM: They’re not knocking on my door, Wattpad’s not like “The only way you can do fanfiction is this way, on our path!”
FK: Yeah!
ELM: You know I don’t, well, I have a Wattpad account so I can use the app. But I don’t use Wattpad! Because it doesn’t click with me. And it doesn’t threaten my experience in any way. The world is vast!
FK: And similarly right—right. And so like one of the clients that I have, we have a situation where basically if you tag your fanart with our hashtag, then we may repost it. And sometimes we see fanart that hasn’t been tagged that hashtag and we ask the person who made it if we can repost it. And if they say no, we don’t do it. You know what I mean? Who does that hurt? I don’t think that hurts anybody, you know?
ELM: Well, what would you say to the argument that by boosting that—some of that fanart, you create a sort of situation where that looks like the good stuff, and the people who don’t get that…
FK: It’s definitely not the case because we boost a bunch of things that are children.
ELM: Aww.
FK: I mean, no one—
ELM: That’s so pure!
FK: We don’t only boost things that we think are particularly pretty.
ELM: Yeah, all right, but I’m—I’m trying to bring in the argument, I’m kind of arguing the other side right now.
FK: Yeah yeah yeah.
ELM: But, the idea that if there’s a corporate sanctioning involved, who gets that pathway? OK: here’s the actual argument with that stuff, which I don’t think is terrible, all right? Here’s a Tumblr that I like a lot, I think I brought it up as an example, but Doctor Who I think has a really great Tumblr, they reblog fanart of all sorts, all skill levels, really beautiful interesting stuff.
Doctor Who has never ever ever in my experience reblogged shippy or particularly weird fanart. I don’t know, I haven’t been in the Doctor Who fandom broadly, cause I was in the Torchwood fandom, since Tumblr—since I joined Tumblr. I was in the LiveJournal era. So I don’t know, but I’m certain that there’s some weird shit.
FK: Yep.
ELM: Right? They’re not going to sanction that.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: They’re not going to sanction like, I don’t know if this exists, but like, Jack Harkness is a satyr and Martha is a, you know, a goddess and the Doctor is, I don’t know, a tree, and they’re all fucking each other, right?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Write that fanfiction right there. [FK: laughs] Jack would. He would fuck a tree.
FK: Jack—Jack—
ELM: A consenting tree.
FK: #JackWould.
ELM: You know the—you know the Jack Harkness Rule has been making, it’s appearing on my dash again, and I’ve been saddened that it has been missing and thrilled to see it. You know this, right?
FK: I do, I do, I do.
ELM: Yeah, we should find it and post it. It’s basically like, it’s, it’s “Are they of the legal age of consent amongst their species?” [FK: laughs] Or like the age of consent, not legal. “And can they say yes explicitly? Then it’s fine.” Yes.
But you know, they’re not gonna put that up. And so then you’re like, “OK.” So the pure transformative side would be like “I don’t want them to put it up! That’s mine, that’s for fandom, that’s my sexy satyr-tree-goddess art,” or whatever. Right?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: But I could see the…somewhere, back towards the vanilla end of the spectrum, where it’s a gay…
FK: Right, a ship. “Why won’t you post the gay ship.”
ELM: A non-canonical gay ship, right. And you know, they could say “Well we don’t post any ships.” Right? But then what if they do, what if they post a canonical ship, which—not Doctor Who, but other accounts tend to do.
FK: Right right right, no no no, absolutely.
ELM: And so then you can see how it bleeds into the ecosystem, and even if you don’t wanna care then it sort of seems like they’re validating some things and not others, right?
FK: I mean, they’re validating canonical ships.
ELM: They literally are.
FK: If you’re validating—but they’re already validating canonical ships because they’re in canon, you know what I mean?
ELM: OK what about, what about, what about, what about… [laughs] When people draw racebent fanart, you know? Like, I don’t see, I don’t see a lot of racebent fanart getting boosted, and that’s different, because that’s—that’s not, especially something like Harry Potter, where you could argue that…or a book series where you could argue that the characters could look however you want.
FK: I mean, that’s a, that’s a question, because…so one thing that you could say is you could say, “Well,” if I were—no. This is not actually, I have not made this decision on any, with, for any client…
ELM: No corporate stance here?
FK: I have no corporate stance here. But if you were presented with this one thing that you could say is “Well, we only post fanart that is clearly based on the images in our visual media.” Right? That is showing the actors, clearly from those things, so maybe you don’t post racebent fanart. Or maybe you do and you—I don’t know, I don’t know what I would…
ELM: This really falls apart when half the images on my dash look like the same anime characters, right.
FK: No, it’s hard, it’s really hard to say, does this count or does it not, right? Because it’s a judgment about how good is your likeness.
ELM: Yeah yeah yeah.
FK: But I think that what you’re really saying here is that, this is the argument that like, “Well, are you, are you, the canon—you as a canon thing are having to make, you’re having stances, you’re saying things.” But again, you do that already in what you present in canon.
So yeah, OK, maybe it is a question about whether you post racebent fanart or not, and I can imagine good and bad responses that involve posting it or not posting it, right? Because if you post racebent fanart, then potentially another argument could be “Yeah, they’re just trying to get credit for these characters, who actually are played by white actors.”
ELM: Yeah yeah yeah.
FK: Or who are not actually, you know what I mean? So there are a lot of—this is a negotiable space. I mean it’s a, it’s a, [laughing] it’s a difficult space that you have a lot of sort of back-and-forth within, and I don’t think that there’s ever going to be a “this is perfectly OK all the time.” But there’s never a “this is perfectly OK all the time,” do you know what I mean?
ELM: Right, right.
FK: I don’t think there’s any simple solution to this, and I think we’re also really running late and we’ve gotten really really really really off topic, but I’m loving this conversation.
ELM: This isn’t off-topic at all! We’re talking about fans and mans!
FK: [hoots] Fans and mans!
ELM: Like this is literally we’re talking about—
FK: Oh my God oh my God you just said “fans and mans.”
ELM: I know I said it! I thought about it before I said it. [FK: laughing] I don’t say things without thinking about them a split second in advance, do you?
FK: I’m dying, I’m dying, I’m dying.
ELM: Don’t die.
FK: Fans and mans!
ELM: This is not off-topic at all! This is literally the topic!
FK: Yeah, it is literally the topic.
ELM: Yeah. Yeah, we are running out of time though because I feel like if we didn’t cut ourselves off…
FK: We could go forever.
ELM: This is a topic that we could do an entire, the podcast could only be on this topic. It’s not going to be.
FK: No, we’ll come up with other topics. We promise.
ELM: Should we tell them what our next topic is, cause it’s so different actually?
FK: Yeah, sure.
ELM: So yeah, part of the reason we wanted to talk about corporate things is cause in the next episode we were gonna do an explicitly non-corporate one, because, OK: so are you, were you familiar with Betts?
FK: Yeah!
ELM: Bettydays is her AO3 handle.
FK: A little bit, but please, you know…I think that you brought her into my life. I mean, a long time ago.
ELM: OK. She’s going to be our next guest. We don’t usually talk about guests in advance, but this is definitely happening so we feel fine to say it. So she’s a fanfiction writer. We’re not actually in any of the same fandoms, but she is also a writing instructor and teaches composition and creative writing. And she writes these posts about, like, writing pedagogy, like—OK. So like, here’s what I’m going to say: Tumblr, full of really really really genuinely truly horrendous, heinous, awful, every other synonym I can think of, bad writing advice, right?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And then there’s also the straw man bad writing advice, where they’re like, “Everyone says show don’t tell, but here’s why that’s colonialist!” You know? And it’s like: Everyone doesn’t…what…no! That’s not good advice to start with, right. You can say why, like, “Here’s why that advice would be,” but instead it’s like…
FK: Right, there are—yeah.
ELM: You know what I mean? So anyway, amongst the sea of utter garbage, Betts has been posting for the last several years these posts that I just absolutely adore, because people ask for her writing advice or she, she gives writing advice, and because she’s a fanfiction writer in addition to being a writer of original fiction, she takes both forms so seriously and her examples are very much about…you know, I think a lot of people in fanfiction, for all the talk about how “I’m just here to have fun, I don’t wanna be critiqued,” I think plenty of people would love to improve their writing.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And because that’s not part of the conversation of how do you improve it, cause you don’t wanna be like “You could have fixed that story by doing this, you bad writer,” you know what I mean?
FK: Yeah, it just turns into these howling into the void—it’s funny because a while back I said something like “I don’t see this as being a central theme,” and you were like “No, it is, because I see all these howling into the void Tumblr posts of writing advice for like, a,” for an audience of people, but never getting down to specifics, of actual examples of people’s own writing.
ELM: Yeah. So she’ll give examples and you know, it’s very much like “Yeah, you can do whatever you want, but here’s how you make it clearer for the reader, or here’s how you can be more,” I almost said “impactful” but people hate that word. You know. “Here’s how you can give more impact,” right.
And I find it really great and actually on a similar note, I want to include it in the show notes, rageprufrock, who’s one of my—I think many people’s…
FK: Yes! [laughs]
ELM: In their top five or whatever cause she’s hit every fandom and she gave us all one to five glorious fics. But she posted a thread on New Year’s Day which was in a similar vein of like, “Here’s how I do historical research or stories, or do research,” and it was really good, and she wasn’t calling out anyone in particular but she was like, “Some of you I don’t think do enough research. And here’s how it can impact your characterization,” right?
FK: Right.
ELM: She’s like, “Some of you, love ya, do way too much, and here’s how it can kind of trip your story, and here’s how to find a happy medium and here’s some, like, resources.” And it was great and it was like, I really love these posts, and so I’m really excited that Betts is gonna come on so we can really talk about the craft of writing. And particularly fanfiction, because I—I think that people don’t get to talk about that enough and I think that she has really interesting and really helpful advice to give.
FK: Well I’m looking forward to it. This is a little bit like, it’s not the same as when…because I’m actually interested in this topic as opposed to when you permitted me to talk about Harry Styles for an episode.
ELM: I’m interested in this topic! I love talking about writing pedagogy and craft!
FK: I know you are! That’s what I’m saying.
ELM: I love talking about craft, yeah!
FK: That’s what I’m saying—
ELM: You’re saying it’s my version? No, Flourish.
FK: I was saying it was your version, but then I was like “No, I’m actually interested in it too.” So. [laughs]
ELM: You definitely are and you have anxiety about this and you definitely wanna talk about craft things.
FK: Great.
ELM: I know it.
FK: OK.
ELM: I know you.
FK: We’re looking forward to it.
ELM: This is my gift to you.
FK: Oh. That was an amazing reframing. [ELM: laughing] That was such an amazing reframing. OK. So we already talked about Patreon, patreon.com/fansplaining, you can…
ELM: Whoa, whoa, we didn’t talk about it in depth! We didn’t talk about the other tiers! Again, I feel like I’m channeling John Mulaney!
FK: I was getting there! I was getting there!
ELM: All right.
FK: I was going to say: you can in addition to pledging $3 a month in order to get our new special episode about Star Wars—as well as the others—you can also pledge more than that. You can get such wonderful prizes? Rewards? As an incredibly cute Fansplaining pin…
ELM: Incredibly cute.
FK: …your name in the credits, you can listen to these episodes a day early. So…
ELM: The back catalog of special episodes now is building up. I believe this will be our 14th?
FK: Yeah, there’s a lot of special episodes.
ELM: And one of them I actually wanted to highlight, if you didn’t get the chance to listen to it, if you weren’t a patron, there’s been some mixed talk on my feed in the last few days about how Disney is single-handedly responsible for all of our wars—which I think has been a little bit of a reach—but I do think any time you wanna talk about Disney, and we talked about Marvel’s relationship with the Department of Defense and how the themes in those stories can sort of shape cultural narratives. So we, we had Gavia Baker-Whitelaw, my newsletter partner, on when Captain Marvel came out to talk about those connections. And just because it’s been a topic of conversation in the last week for obvious reasons, maybe worth listening to if you’re thinking about becoming a patron.
FK: Absolutely.
ELM: Cause it’s a perennial topic.
FK: Oh God. All right. So there’s that. You can also support us by rating, reviewing us on iTunes or your podcatcher, wherever you are listening to this. We think we deserve all the stars. You can make your own judgment, but all the stars. It really helps other people find us. Reviews with words, super super helpful.
You can also use your words to write in! You can call in at 1-401-526-FANS, and send us questions—
ELM: Why did you say “write in” and then immediately pivoted to “call”?
FK: Well, because I was going to say “write” first but then I was like “No, what we really want is for people to call.”
ELM: We want both. We want people to write us at fansplaining at gmail, or if they want to use their voices they can call us.
FK: Right. Well, I like having voicemails because I think it breaks up the monotony of the two of us.
ELM: Yeah, I love having someone else talk who’s not you.
FK: I love having someone else talk who’s not you.
ELM: [laughs] I like how the slight hesitation, and then the “FUCK YOU” came back. I’m kidding.
FK: [laughing] I also am kidding. Mostly.
ELM: Yeah, great, we, yeah, me too. I have to listen to your voice way more than you have to listen to mine.
FK: You really, well…
ELM: No.
FK: I have—yeah.
ELM: How often, when you transcribe, how often do you have to replay a segment. Cause when you audio edit you have to replay segments multiple times.
FK: You probably listen to more words in total, but I’m not, I mean—like, I listen to them on like less than half speed. So it’s like a [slowly] really slow version of Elizabeth.
ELM: That’s gonna be fun when you listen to this part.
FK: All right, I think that that’s it. What else do we have to talk about?
ELM: Fansplaining on Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, Instagram. All of those places.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And you can follow us, interact with us there, I don’t know. I’m, you know, you’ll get updates there.
FK: Good, great.
ELM: I’m not doing a very good job being the man here.
FK: All right, well, I think that people know what those platforms are for.
ELM: You can engage with our brand. You’ll get a close, special, intimate relationship with our brand. Relatable.
FK: Elizabeth, I’m going to talk to you later.
ELM: Relatable.
FK: I’m gonna talk to you later.
ELM: OK bye.
FK: [laughing] Bye!
[Outro music]
FK & ELM: Fansplaining is brought to you by all of our patrons, and especially Alaine Sepulveda, Amanda, Amy Yourd, 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, cordsycords, 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, Meghan McCusker, 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, 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.