Episode 119: Ask Fansplaining Anything: Part 6
In Episode 119, “Ask Fansplaining Anything: Part 6,” Flourish and Elizabeth tackle a new stack of listener questions and comments. Topics covered include actors’ shipping preferences, #OwnVoices in profic and in fanfic, what counts as “canon,” why we get stuck in fandoms we no longer like, and Flourish’s true feelings about fictional demons.
Show Notes
[00:00:00] As always, our intro music is “Awel” by stefsax, used under a CC BY 3.0 license.
[00:03:20] Read the summary of our Star Wars special episode, then pledge to our Patreon!
[00:06:07]
[00:08:00] We had an extensive conversation about Michael Sheen and Good Omens fandom in Episode 104, “The Fourth Wall Redux.”
[00:11:30] Read Betts’s post about lesson plans! We also discussed some relevant issues in Episode 102, “OOC.”
[00:29:25] Our interstitial music is “reNovation” by airtone, used under a CC BY 3.0 license.
[00:31:18]
[00:33:17] Elizabeth talked about fandom being like a relationship in a piece called “Fangirl.” (No relation to the Rainbow Rowell novel.) The other piece she mentions, reflecting on Sherlock fandom much later on, is “january 2nd.”
[00:42:11] We’re referring to a letter about a toxic Discord which we responded to in Episode 115, “Power Plays.”
[00:44:08] This letter is regarding a conversation from Episode 19, “Cataloging Fandom.”
[00:52:00] Oki is referring to our discussion of Harry Potter and J. K. Rowling in Episode 116.
[00:53:56] We interviewed Emily Nussbaum in Episode 105. The essay about Woody Allen films is in her most recent book, I Like To Watch.
[00:55:11] This whole demons thing is in reference to an exchange in Episode 115, “Power Plays.”
[01:00:55]
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 #119, “Ask Fansplaining Anything: Part Six.”
FK: [laughs] So, as with our previous five Ask Fansplaining episodes…
ELM: So many!
FK: There are so many! This episode is comprised of questions from listeners and readers like you that have been sent in, so should we just jump in to them?
ELM: No! I wanna know how did people send in these questions, Flourish?
FK: Excellent question, Elizabeth! [ELM laughs] They sent them in through e-mail to fansplaining at gmail dot com, through our Tumblr ask box, fansplaining on Tumblr, or in one case in a voicemail: 1-401-526-FANS. We won’t pick up if you call that number, it’ll just send you to a voice mail box and you can record whatever you wanna say.
ELM: Are you sure that’s your complete answer?
FK: What am I missing?
ELM: I’m sorry to tell you, you get a 75%. Three out of four.
FK: Well, there’s the website also.
ELM: Mm-hmm.
FK: That is one way people sent things in. There’s a form on our website.
ELM: And one of these letters came in through that form. As we always say, if you don’t leave your contact information there and you are asking a question that requires an answer rather than this set of thoughts in this letter, which is more of a read-on-the-air thing, don’t use that form! Because we cannot reach you.
FK: Correct. OK. Now shall we get into the questions?
ELM: All right fine, now we can.
FK: All right. So the first question is from an anon. And it is: “What is your position on actors shipping non-canon ships that include their own characters, and/or emphasizing them more than ships that their characters are currently in?” Danger Will Robinson! Danger Will Robinson!
ELM: [sighs] OK. I… [FK laughs] I don’t have a consistent hard-line stance on this. I think the context matters.
FK: I agree with that, but I do think it’s a risky business for any actor to get in if they’re like, going for one ship over another—as opposed to sort of, you know, performatively multi-shipping.
ELM: Interesting.
FK: Which some people do.
ELM: Some people do do that.
FK: To, you know, to varying success.
ELM: I mean this takes us—there’s a few things going on. Is it good for the actor? Is it good for the fan? Is it good for the discourse?
FK: Is it like sugar: something that seems like it’s good, and then maybe actually is killing you?
ELM: What are you, the New York Times? Come on!
FK: Basically! [both laugh]
ELM: So…immediately, obviously, the first thing that comes to my mind is Star Wars. You Reylo. Maybe you have some feelings about this. I don’t think we can really do the whole conversation justice, but I will say that for anyone who is not a three-dollar-and-up Patron and didn’t hear our Star Wars episode—or maybe you are a patron and you love Star Wars and you heeded our warning about our extreme negativity and you decided to treat yourself and not hear that!—we do talk about Oscar Isaac a bit, and how we had a lot of ambivalence about…
Basically for the four people on earth who haven’t witnessed this in the last few months, during the Rise of Skywalker press tour…I could not remember for the life of me that movie’s name for one second. [FK laughs] It’s a blessing. He basically, the whole time as long as he’s played Poe Dameron he’s been pretty shippy, and pretty, pretty flirty and pretty vocally supportive of the idea of Finnpoe. But it was on this press tour that it turned into a sort of point of political frustration and anger, a little bit, saying, you know, “I lobbied Disney,” or Lucasfilm or whoever, “for them to make this happen, and they didn’t, and I guess, I guess they’re cowards.” Essentially. I’m not, I’m not quoting directly, but that was generally the vibe of many interviews he gave about this subject. And we were both a little frustrated by that kind of turn of events.
FK: Yeah, not to say that we don’t think that it would be nice to have a gay lead in a Star Wars film! I think that we think that would be great! But…
ELM: I mean I think we both think that Finnpoe would be great, though I think we’re both in agreement that…
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Giving them zero screen time together in the previous film, they would’ve had to do…
FK: A lot.
ELM: Probably more work than a Star Wars film is capable of doing around romance in a single installment.
FK: Yeah, exactly, exactly. I had complex feelings about that. Among other things, like, it is—whether it was a good choice or bad, it’s actually not his job to, to make the decision about whether his character gets together with somebody? So…that was also a little weird, because like, actors can have a lot of feelings but they are not writers, usually. I mean, obviously some actors do both. But not in this case. Yeah, so…I have some complex feelings about that.
But I would say that it’s not just this, right? Like, that’s the current issue, or a recent issue, but there’s been lots of instances where actors have expressed their love for a particular ship and I think that when they do that, often it’s totally out of like, their pure selves. They actually do like this thing or the idea of this thing or whatever, or they think it’s funny, or—and I’m all for all that—but they often don’t understand the context, like you were saying, that they’re stepping in. So I think that, you know, it’s fine for them to have those feelings and they should, but it’s just a real minefield and often stepping into that minefield is bad.
ELM: Yeah. It’s interesting too about the different ways you can do it and the way that can come off to fans. Cause I’ve been interrogating this for myself, because I mentioned this on the podcast before, but I truly do enjoy the fact that James McAvoy seems to ship my ship as much as, as I do, right, and he’s one half of it. Not the—he plays one half of it. I’m not an RPF shipper. [FK laughs]
And it’s never done in a—well, maybe it is in a little bit of a teasing way. But it never feels meanspirited or looking down on anyone who likes the idea of it. It really seems like he likes it too. But it also never feels teasing in the sense of…it’s just his opinion. I never feel like it has anything to do with the actual…
FK: He seems clear that it’s not gonna happen?
ELM: It never seems, that never even comes into it! He’s just like “Yeah, Cherik! Ha, love it.” And you’re like “Great, me too!” Right? And never like “Shut up,” you know, “I don’t wanna hear your opinion.” I’m like, “Glad you love it.” You know? Like… Yes. It is a great ship. Agree. And I don’t understand why that’s so uncomplicated and it seemed like maybe I would have felt differently if I had been in the fandom when those movies were still coming out? But I know these movies are never…
FK: But…
ELM: They’re going to make them as romantic as possible without ever doing that.
FK: But I also do wonder though, right? I mean, it’s not like…it’s not like there’s a clear rival ship, I don’t think. You know?
ELM: What…
FK: Is there?
ELM: What about…no. [laughs]
FK: In those movies?
ELM: In the movies there’s some really, really…
FK: Yeah.
ELM: …genuinely half-assed attempts at heterosexual romances. And you’re like…
FK: Right.
ELM: And then they wind up cutting out I would say 80 to 90% of the footage of those, and you’re like, “Clearly you don’t care either.” So. It’s fine.
FK: Right, so I think that that’s one of the things, right?
ELM: Yeah, totally.
FK: In a situation where…I mean that’s, maybe it will never go canon, but it’s not like there’s another thing that people are loving that it sort of seems like it’s against.
ELM: Right.
FK: So.
ELM: It’s really hard, because we’ve talked about this a bunch with Michael Sheen and Good Omens also, and him not only shipping it but engaging in fan practices and the kind of fandom that we’re in, and our…we also had a lot of ambivalence about that. But that was more…my frustration with it was kind of because people were placing so much validation on his opinions. And that’s not the vibe I”m getting from the Oscar Isaac stuff. I don’t see people saying “Well, Oscar Isaac believes in it so Finnpoe is real.” It’s more of a kind of self-righteous…
FK: Yeah.
ELM: “Oscar Isaac and I are both fighting for gay rights via shipping.” Which as we know is also a fraught, somewhat fraught position to have around shipping, as we discussed about a hundred thousand times here. So, I don’t know. It’s really nuanced and obviously it’s within the eye of the beholder, but I think there are ways to see whether things cause harm or are, are relatively neutral when you look at the way that small, medium, large groups of fans are taking in that information and what they’re doing with it. And I think it’s hard.
FK: I agree.
ELM: Great.
FK: All right, well, should we get on to the next question? Did we answer that?
ELM: Uh, I mean we just said it’s complicated, like, in 17 different ways? But yes. We answered it.
FK: [laughs] That’s the best answer I have, right?
ELM: Fine.
FK: OK. What’s the next question?
ELM: It’s another anon. Probably a different anon. Maybe…part of the anon extended universe? Oh, I said that and then I realized what the question was. OK hold on. “What do you do when a piece of expanded media is extremely disappointing (in my particular case, a Doctor Who book)? Do you consider those canon?”
FK: Well there’s a personal answer, and then there’s a broader answer. Right?
ELM: There’s no broader answer because this really varies, but go ahead, tell me your personal answer.
FK: Yeah, well, the broader answer is like, actually I think that like—what constitutes canon in every fandom, like, by most people’s consensus…first of all not everyone agrees, but then it also sort of is different depending on what fandom you’re in, right? In some fandoms there’s like a sense that certain novels are canon, as well as a TV show and a movie, and other ones are like, “well, this part’s canon but not that,” you know? So that’s tough, because that means there’s like different community expectations for what quote “counts” as canon.
ELM: Right.
FK: Separate from your own personal ones.
ELM: Yes.
FK: But my personal take on this, as a person who has read many many many a piece of expanded media, basically, is like: I read it, it sucks, I usually feel like I have to read it to the end—which perhaps is perverse but I do it anyway—and then if I really hate it it goes in the dustbin of my mind and I never think about it again, because it was bad.
ELM: What do you physically do, or is this on Kindle?
FK: Uh, if it’s a physical Star Trek novel I keep it just because…
ELM: You like to own things.
FK: I like to own things. But. [both laugh] No, I, I think that I usually keep it, but I think that…
ELM: You’ll never…
FK: If I were not, if I were not being completist about something, then I, like, I have chucked bad X-Files novels and bad Star Wars novels and stuff before. By “chucked” I mean “put in a Little Free Library.”
ELM: Yeah. [laughs] Throw it in the garbage!
FK: Well, maybe! There’s actually a couple of Star Trek novels that almost come all the way around. They go through Little Free Library, over to “maybe in the garbage so no one else has to read this…”
ELM: Oh, no.
FK: And then all the way back to “but I love it because it’s so terrible.”
ELM: Oh my gosh. Yeah, I definitely think it depends on…it’s both internal and external. Right? Like, I…it actually reminds me, even within transformative fandom…so there was a post that I reblogged from the Fansplaining account written by our previous guest, Betts, who was talking about…you know, she came on, if you haven’t heard the last episode go listen to it, especially if you are a fanfiction writer or a fiction writer of any kind. And someone left her an ask about characterization for fic. It’s a really great post, I think it’s a really good example of what her posts are like, so definitely check it out on fansplaining’s Tumblr.
The one thing I really liked was as a part of her advice, which included like kind of transcribing dialogue so you can get speech patterns and stuff—
FK: Yeah.
ELM: —to make them sound authentic, also writing down, observing them basically and writing down, like, what the characters do, what their motivations are. What they want and how they go about achieving it. How they react when other things happen. And then the best part was where she said, “If it’s well-acted and well-written, that will all be consistent.” [both laugh] “And like, make sense as a whole. And if it’s not, then…” Especially if it’s a longer-running TV series where you might have many different writers…
FK: Have many different, many points of actors…
ELM: Many levels of acting…
FK: Yeah…over the course of a lifetime even, you know!
ELM: Right. And then she said you have to basically pick and choose what you want to believe, what is the most compelling to you amongst that? And she doesn’t go too deep into it, but the kind of implication there is like, if you actually try to make that all fit together, you’re gonna drive yourself up a tree, basically. You know?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And it makes me think of our “Out of Character” episode and this kind of, the knots that people twist themselves in trying to make things kind of fit. And that’s a canon thing too, you’re like “This is who this person is and they did this and this and this? And…it’s all canon?” And you’re like, “I don’t think you actually…” like, “Now you’re just describing some sort of…” it’s the actual word “canon” I think that’s a problem here because when you think about it in the Biblical sense, I mean, even then, those—I mean, depends on your religious background and whether you think that everything there hangs together real tight or not, but… [FK laughs] I’m gonna tell you: it kinda doesn’t! Because it was written over hundreds of years by a lot of different people! It’s not like it’s one singly authored wholly consistent…I mean there’s, there’s solid themes that are throughout. I’m not saying Jesus is like, a huge capitalist and then he’s like, “eat the rich,” right. [FK laughs] You know. But you know what I mean, it’s not…
FK: Yeah, I do, I do.
ELM: It is more, it’s more holistic than I think the term “canon” often…
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Suggests.
FK: I think, I do think that sometimes it can be a fun exercise to try and sort of fix or explain some of that stuff? But there’s also times when it gets to be just like, contortions.
ELM: I’m gonna—
FK: And then you’re like “no.”
ELM: No, no Flourish. It’s not fun to me. I hate that. I hate it when other people do it. I will click out of a fic if I see someone trying to explain some terrible writing choice. It gives them more credit than they deserve and I hate it! “They” being the writer who wrote the bad thing originally.
FK: We are different people. All right! I think that answers that question. [laughs]
ELM: Hate it.
FK: Shall we move on to the next?
ELM: Yes.
FK: OK. This is another anonymous question. “Hi Fansplaining—love the pod! I got into a new fandom a few months ago and ran into a wall quickly when I was told as a cishet woman I shouldn’t be writing about LGBTQ+ people—in other words, only people from these communities should write about such people. This seems like such a loaded topic that I didn’t know how to respond! What are your thoughts? Does my identity inherently make my works—explicit slash fics—offensive? Do I never write again? Many thanks!”
Oooh! “Do I never write again?”!
ELM: Mmm. OK. This old chestnut…
FK: Yeah!
ELM: This has been an ancient and I was gonna say “venerated” but it’s not venerated discourse point in slash fandom. I don’t know if we’ve ever directly talked about it on the podcast somehow in 119 episodes.
FK: Yeah, I’m not sure that we have…although as you say, it is an ancient discourse point.
ELM: So, the first thing I’m immediately thinking of is how it’s also a discourse point in male/male professional romance.
FK: Mm-hmm.
ELM: And it’s grown astronomically, I would say, as a discourse point over the last few years, just because male/male romance in the sort of…because of the platforms, because of Kindle self-publishing, and everything that that’s spawned in terms of leading to a huge proliferation of all romance, but there’s been a huge boom in male/male romance and a lot of people from slash fandom have…
FK: Right.
ELM: Crossed over, or they’ll simultaneously still write fic and they’ll write those as well.
FK: Right.
ELM: I know lots of people on my, lots of people I read on my feed…I don’t know, well, you’re not in quote-unquote “slash fandom,” problematic as that term is.
FK: No no no, lots of people, lots of people that I read do the same.
ELM: Yeah?
FK: I don’t… [laughs] Just because I am not in the hard core of slash fandom does not mean that I have not observed this. In fact…
ELM: Just because your head isn’t turned by the first dark-haired guy and light-haired guy you see on screen? [both laugh]
FK: Doesn’t mean that I haven’t occasionally been beguiled by said dark-haired guy and light-haired guy.
ELM: So, OK. This is, this has spawned a lot of conversation, and you know, one thing—even before a lot of that was happening you definitely saw this where you’d have like a cis gay man come into slash fandom—which continues to be mostly women and AFAB people, people who were assigned female at birth of all sexualities and genders, to be clear—I mean I just said not, not cis men. But you know, the other ones. [FK laughs] And obviously there’s cis men in fandom too, I’m not trying to erase them, but I have noticed this many many times over the years: a guy coming in and saying “You’re all completely wrong, that is not how gay men have sex, and you’re all,” you know, the fetishizing discourse, et cetera, et cetera. But particularly the “you’re getting the sex part wrong.”
And then like literally four days later a different cis gay man will come in and give completely contradictory information [FK laughs] and you know, I can say, of my…not to blow up any of thier spots, but even in casual conversations with friends of all genders and sexualities, people who have overlapping gender and sexuality identity categories have different sexual practices and preferences!
FK: Yeah!
ELM: That’s undeniable! There is a kind of weird groupthink narrative that develops in slash fandom about how it happens, right, and it’s often problematic and can somewhat hew to heteronormative…et cetera, et cetera, right?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: But that being said, there are a lot of different ways that people write this and there’s, there is no one authority about the way…
FK: Yeah.
ELM: …that things work. That doesn’t actually answer the question of whether you can write it at all, right, but I think that that’s implicit in those conversations. “You haven’t experienced this, so you can’t write it.”
FK: Yeah, I agree. I also think that there’s something that’s very important here which is—the “you haven’t experienced something so you can’t write it” conversation to me I think has become a lot larger recently, and I think it has to do with some of those crossovers with professional publishing.
ELM: Mm-hmm.
FK: And, I think that it has to do with trends in professional publishing like people talking about #OwnVoices right? And in professional publishing the idea of #OwnVoices being, right, like, have people from marginalized groups tell the stories of those groups, right, don’t have a white person write about, for instance, in a topical issue, perhaps being a Mexican migrant!
ELM: But Flourish, her husband was an undocumented immigrant! You saw this, right? You—did you see?
FK: I didn’t, I didn’t see that part.
ELM: No no, let’s give a little context. This was the latest thing that’s going around, and taking a step back and starting from the beginning, but the American Dirt debacle…apparently, I knew this fact already, so…so basically very quick story: this has been set up by—God, I believe it’s Flatiron, this publisher, part of Macmillan?—as the book of the year, seven-figure advance, Oprah’s Book Club, A-list actors endorsing it, and the author is a white woman who has one Puerto Rican grandparent and she wrote about her ambivalence and…maybe not discomfort, but… She wrote about trying to kind of position herself as like, identifying as white, in an article in the New York Times a few years ago, right? Where she said like, “Well, I actually am part Latina, but,” et cetera et cetera.
FK: Which is a pretty bit, I mean, when you’ve sort of staked that in the ground…that’s a pretty big statement to have made about your identity…
ELM: That’s a huge conversation and I know a lot of Latinx friends who aren’t sure, you know, who struggle with this themselves. You know.
FK: Absolutely.
ELM: Even if they’re 100% from Latin American countries, et cetera, but they still aren’t sure where they fall racially, et cetera, et cetera. But so she wrote this book about a Mexican woman who is fleeing from—I believe it’s a drug lord flirts with her, and then she… It’s a very dramatic set-up of why she becomes, she has to flee and become an undocumented person with her daughter and all this stuff. And it’s a thriller. And they spent all this money on it, and it came out, and it’s just been a debacle, I would say.
FK: Yeah. And I mean, I think that there’s a—one of the challenges with this particular debacle is that there’s a lot of criticism that the book is not very good in that it’s like, not a good portrayal of being an undocumented migrant, and, like—immigrant. And you know, I mean, that it’s poorly written, and that it’s full of cliché, and like, all of those things are true.
ELM: Like “I’m ducking bullets as, I’m very fiery,” and all this stuff, and you’re like “whoa.”
FK: Based on—I mean I guess I haven’t read the whole book.
ELM: I’ve seen excerpts.
FK: The excerpts have not been great.
ELM: No. [laughs]
FK: So, OK. So I think that those are all valid critiques of the book as a book—
ELM: And side note, leading back to this, the thing that’s been going around today is that apparently when they sent out the marketing to reviewers, they talked about how her husband was an undocumented immigrant. But he was an undocumented immigrant from Ireland. Which is a group that’s a, that’s actually quite large and does have some of the struggles of being an undocumented person in America!
FK: Yeah.
ELM: But they are also—
FK: It’s a different struggle!
ELM: It’s a different thing than people, than, you know.
FK: Wow.
ELM: Mexicans or anyone from Latin America trying to cross the southern border!
FK: Yes, very.
ELM: And that’s very misleading, so congrats to that publisher.
FK: Macmillan for that, yeah.
ELM: And, final point, the thing that really just sent it over the edge and turned it from “problematic” into “cartoon villain” was someone found the photos of her party that the publisher threw for her during [laughs] during BEA last year, where all of the centerpieces were decorated in barbed wire.
FK: Yeah. Oof.
ELM: And there was like a, you know, tweets beneath it being like “Oh, how cute! No detail,” you know, “No detail spared! That’s so thoughtful.” And “thoughtful” is not the correct word.
FK: Not the word for it!
ELM: No.
FK: OK. But, but, but. But, but, but. OK. So obviously all this stuff is bad, right?
ELM: [laughs] Yes.
FK: But to me it seems like even if it were, like, the best book and it had been brought out in a really tasteful way and like, I mean, she had really—even though she is not from these groups she had really somehow gotten to the core of the experience and had done her research and had…right, and it was great. And everyone agreed it was a really beautiful portrayal, and…I mean, this would never happen because people have different experiences. But even if the world agreed it was a great book, there would still be a problem with this, because the issue is that she is getting this seven-figure advance and having her book be pushed on everybody and is therefore…
ELM: Literally taking all the resources. Like genuinely—
FK: Right, exactly.
ELM: —they, and this is an indictment of the publishing industry: even if she was from this background and telling her own story, it’s not a great model that you literally put all of your resources in one book.
FK: One book.
ELM: Which is what the publishers are doing right now.
FK: And so, and so like: to me, that is the heart. I mean obviously anybody can write a bad book, right?
ELM: Sure.
FK: She could also have been, I mean, she could have written the same—I mean, probably not a book that’s bad in all the same ways, but like, she could’ve written a terrible book that like, was trashy and exploitative and she could have been herself, you know, from Mexico! Like, people write lots of trashy exploitative things about their own backgrounds all the time, right? And those things suck too.
The issue though is, is about this structural publishing industry thing. And to me, one of the things with fanfic is, you are not taking anything away from someone else by writing your fanfic.
ELM: Right.
FK: You’re not taking money away from them. You’re not taking the ability to have your books on like, an endcap in a Barnes & Noble away from someone. You know? There’s no way that you are replacing someone else’s voice. Now, I mean, I guess—are there, maybe if you’re incredibly popular in the fandom and you’re writing characters who are nothing like you, maybe you want to like promote work of people that you like. I mean, I’m not saying that it’s like an exact, like, there’s absolutely no difference in anybody in fandom. But it’s a really different situation than like, professional publishing, seven figure advance. So…I just have a really hard time directly equating those two things. You know?
ELM: Right. It’s interesting, too, because fanfiction inherently asks you to step outside of yourself, even if you are writing about a character that shares a lot of the same background points with you.
FK: Yeah!
ELM: Because, you know, when I write original fiction, I can write a thinly-veiled version of myself. But, I mean—oh, I guess I could transform any fictional character in fanfiction to be a thinly-veiled version of myself, and there are all those funny call-out posts where you’re like, “Just put, project all your issues onto your favorite character!” or whatever. But it’s never gonna be like that. You’re always being asked to kind of step outside. And I think that, for all of its problems, you might argue—maybe that’s somewhat by the nature of the kinds of stories that fanfiction broadly privileges, when you think about 10,000-word conversations [laughs] where people just work it out, right? Or very, very small and intimate moments and the kind of…
FK: Yeah.
ELM: That sort of thing. You might argue that, as opposed to most other genres of professionally published fiction, it really privileges that sort of empathy. And I know that “empathy” can be a very fraught term when it comes to this topic.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: But I also think that fanfiction asks you to really really remove yourself and to try to bridge that gap between you and this character who may have a wildly different background from you.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And so this sort of idea of “you can only write what you know” seems somewhat antithetical to what actually happens in fanfiction. And it’s also sort of like, when we’ve had guests of color on to talk about how fanfiction communities on a whole tend to overlook characters of color…
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Generally, the ethos—and I am clearly not gonna say that all people of color in fandom feel this way, because I definitely would never say that—but generally the attitude has often been like “I would like more people to just write about characters of color,” right? And that’s basic, you know, that’s essentially asking white people to be willing to step outside of themselves and empathize and try to view the world through those different lenses. And obviously a lot of sensitivity is required, and maybe that’s the sort of thing where you say “Hey, I wanna write this but I’m a little hesitant, and I don’t wanna,” you know, “I don’t wanna make this feel inauthentic, would anyone from this background be interested in…” Just as we might have a Britpicker…just as we should have Britpickers, everyone, why are you not doing this any more? We really could use it!
It doesn’t hurt to ask if you’re wondering about that. “Anyone who has experience with this, would you be willing to read this over?” And I think a lot of people would rather do that so they don’t have to read stuff and be on edge the whole time that you’re gonna get it wrong or, say, like, “Yeah, I want more stuff about people from this background to be in the world, and I’d love to help you out.” You know? Not demanding people’s time from them, but…
FK: Yeah, and if you’re really anxious about this, like, there are a lot of gay men in the world and I bet you could get one of them to…gaypick…your fanfic if you wanted them to.
ELM: “Gaypick,” Flourish.
FK: Gaypick. Gaypick.
ELM: Yeah, it’s complicated. But…
FK: Don’t stop writing.
ELM: If you are really worried, yeah. Don’t stop writing. If you are really worried, I mean obviously, the whole thing with any of this is that people are allowed to critique you and say “no,” and you’re also allowed to keep writing.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: That’s, I mean, you can…
FK: That’s what it is.
ELM: You can be, I mean, I don’t want you to do this, but you can actively be trying to cause harm with your writing, and no one can stop you.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Don’t do that. But you’re not! So, like…
FK: Yeah.
ELM: You know?
FK: Yeah. Absolutely.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: OK. Should we listen to our next, I mean, it’s a voicemail! It’s not a letter.
ELM: Yeah, I think we should listen to it!
FK: All right, let’s do it.
Voicemail: Hi there, my name is Molly and I just listened to your most recent episode and I just wanted to say thank you for it. Thank you so much. Sincerely. I got really excited. Just being inspired to go off and work on a fic. Specifically I now have an ending for a fic that I've been writing for ten years that I’ve been putting off finishing because I didn’t have a point that I was going to end it at. But from your latest episode I now have the inspiration to finish that damn fic already. Thanks again. Bye!
FK: Ahh!
ELM: Too—too bad this isn’t YouTube, because then you could see our reaction.
FK: Oh! There’s some hands on faces, there’s some big smiles.
ELM: It’s so charming!
FK: It’s really delightful.
ELM: Well, we’ll have to make sure that Betts hears that, and we have heard some similar sentiments from a lot of people since that episode, which is great. [laughs]
FK: Yeah! And I go “oh!” every time one of them happens. I said I was gonna write fic at the end of that and I haven’t done it, so.
ELM: Flourish! You should be ashamed of yourself!
FK: I refuse to be ashamed of myself.
ELM: Shame. I actually wrote a ton of fic immediately after we recorded that, but to be fair, I had already written a whole bunch earlier that day because I was in the zone finishing my story. So I didn’t need Betts for that at all. I just did it by myself.
FK: Great. Well…
ELM: [laughs] No no—
FK: Thank you, Molly! [laughs]
ELM: I truly, I truly find, I truly enjoyed that conversation a great deal but I am so thrilled that we’re getting responses like Molly’s response because it’s true, it’s truly great.
FK: Yes. OK. On that warm and fuzzy note, do you think we should take a break?
ELM: Yeah, I think we should.
FK: All right.
[Interstitial music]
FK: OK. We’re back and before we launch into the second half of our letters, wanted to bring you a little reminder about the way this podcast gets made.
ELM: So, we use Audacity and we both… [laughing]
FK: No, not that kind of how this podcast gets made! The part where we have no sources of funding except for our listeners and readers like you. We have a Patreon, which is patreon.com/fansplaining, and we don’t break even, but we are incredibly grateful for the support that we get from our listeners slash readers.
And first, thank you to everyone who has pledged. Second, if you haven’t pledged, consider pledging! You can pledge as little as a dollar a month, and…
ELM: [laughing] The two genders!
FK: [laughs] Great. You can pledge as little as a dollar a month, and every pledge level gets a rewards. So a dollar a month gets you one of our special episodes, $3 a month gets you all the special episodes we’ve done—we’ve done I think 13 or 14 so far? 13.
ELM: 13.
FK: $5 a month gets you a shiny enamel pin. $10 a month an occasional tiny zine. It’s great. You should support us that way.
ELM: $400 a month gets you your very own Weasley sweater.
FK: Yeah, that I would knit, laboriously.
ELM: Really surprised that no one has—you could do it like Flourish does for their dog. Actually, would you do a dog Weasley sweater for…for like $200 a month?
FK: For more than the human size?
ELM: No, you set the price points incredibly high.
FK: OK. Yes, I would do a dog Weasley sweater for less than that. So maybe I should put that in there.
ELM: OK. If you have a dog and you love Harry Potter and you have a lot of money, let’s talk.
FK: Yeah. OK. Great. All right.
ELM: You’ll have to share a picture of Pepys in his Weasley sweater.
FK: Oh, I am always ready to share a picture of Pepys, my dog, in his lil’ sweater.
ELM: I’m aware. I’m aware.
FK: All right, great. Shall we get on with reading more of our asks?
ELM: Yeah!
FK: All right. I’ll take the first one. “Hey guys! Hope you’re both doing great. I just wanted to say, first of all, how much I’ve been enjoying the podcast!” Aww, thank you. “As I’m very private about my fandom activity in daily life, it’s almost a relief to tune into a conversation where so much of the culture I grew up with and participate in is openly discussed.
“Anyway, I’ve relatively recently become active in a new fandom after about eight years stuck in…BBC Sherlock. And I wanted to talk about that weird feeling of being ‘stuck’ in a fandom, because I’m wondering if this is common? Not just with Sherlock but with any fandom.
“Because I think I only really loved the show between the years of 2011 and 2014, but between 2014 and 2018 I was just there because I couldn’t find an anchor in another fandom. I couldn’t find anything I liked as much, even though increasingly I wasn’t sure what I liked about Sherlock. I shipped Johnlock, but didn’t like much of the fic or the way they were characterised. I hardly ever rewatched the show. I didn’t like the writers, nor many of the decisions they made. I agreed with most of their critics. I didn’t really like Sherlock fan culture either. And yet this show occupied my thoughts for eight years. Even when I’d actively searched for something else to take my interest, nothing did.
“And then I abruptly fell out of love with it in January 2019, when I found a new fandom out of nowhere. And then swiftly moved on from that one to another, which is where I’m active now. So I’m looking back at BBC Sherlock wondering how I managed to hang around in that fandom for so long, with so little love for it.
“I read an article Elizabeth wrote about being in Sherlock fandom, actually, where she described finding a new fandom like a new relationship, and it rang true for me. So, to riff off that metaphor…being in Sherlock fandom (for me) was like being in a marriage gone stale, loving and living with someone you don’t really like anymore.
“So…I’m wondering if this is a thing? Do other fans have these weirdly reluctant relationships with old fandoms? Best, Anon.”
ELM: Man. Anon. I’m here for you.
FK: I mean we know that you have this relationship with old fandoms sometimes.
ELM: Mmm, yes and no. Well, I was thinking about this after I read it and I was like, “Oh, man.” The whole—the whole way through I was just like “Oh, man, oh, no.” [laughing] The part about how they didn’t like any of the things and listed them one after another I was like “This is so relatable right now.” [FK laughs]
But for me with Sherlock in particular, I came to—sorry, Sherlock friends, because I still have a lot of you in my life—I came to like kind of hate everything about it to the point where, like, I felt like I got a divorce from it. Like, it wasn’t like I was trapped in a marriage, I was like “I don’t wanna see you ever again, gonna get a restraining order,” which is me blacklisting all the terms on Tumblr. Not a literal restraining order, even though there were literally bad things that happened in this fandom also.
But I, I did start to think about—I wrote this post, someone reblogged it recently, which was random—that I wrote in 2016, in the beginning of 2016, when the Christmas special aired and it had been two years since the debacle that was Season Three in January of 2014. And there’s definitely some—it was interesting to reread, and I, I think anon maybe should read it and see. It’s a different situation because I wasn’t like, just sticking around and being like “Why am I still here?” I was like, watching something, watching a new episode of something that I had really actively pulled away from and wondering if it would still catch me and if I would still be, you know what I mean? Like…
FK: Yeah, totally.
ELM: So it was like having coffee with your ex basically, right?
FK: This is how I felt about the new X-Files episodes. Like years later. I was like…oh.
ELM: But that’s a little bit different I think because that’s like kind of a…almost a reboot or a revival, where this was like, it was just the next episode.
FK: Yeah, no, it was different, I’m not saying it was exactly the same thing, but the “coffee with an ex” thing really rang true to me.
ELM: But, but like, sticking around…I don’t know, I don’t think I’ve ever had this experience where I like couldn’t even remember what I liked about the thing nor did I like any of the fanworks. Like, I’ve never, I was in Harry Potter fandom for a long time despite having a lot of ambivalence about the actual books, but I really loved the fanworks, and when it felt like a lot of people in my ship around 2009 or so were really drifting away to new things…I kinda just left.
And it wasn’t that something new caught me, and I was also just doin’ other…I don’t know. We’ve talked about this before, but sometimes I think people create these narratives, not—not anon! But they create these narratives in their heads about, that it’s wholly about the fandom and the show, or the thing, that are the reason they are in a fandom or not, when actually like—when I think about some of my fallow periods where I wasn’t really in a fandom, it was kind of that like, life stuff was getting in the way. And…
FK: Yeah.
ELM: I wasn’t into something in spite of that. It was like, “OK, nothing’s catching me and also I am super distracted living in a long-term hostel in Scotland, I really can’t right now.” You know?
FK: Yeah, totally.
ELM: I don’t even know what I would have done if I had been, like, actively in a new fandom at that time because I didn’t have regular access to the internet.
FK: Yeah, yeah, I think so too. And I think that sometimes when I have had that more regular access, or, and like—the time and the space, it has led me to get, like, to continue…not exactly the same way as anon is saying, but it’s led me to continue in things that I wasn’t enjoying as much just because it was there and I had the time and it was like, the thing I was used to doing and thinking about.
It does sound different than what anon is, because in those cases it wasn’t like…I mean it was preoccupying me, but it was almost sort of the snake eating its own tail of like, “Well, what I do is I check all of this stuff and the fan discourse and the fanfic, and I don’t really like it but because I’ve checked it, now I’m thinking about it. And then I need to check on it again because I’ve been thinking about it, and I have a reaction to it,” you know what I mean? Like, it just sort of becomes this loop. I’m not sure that’s what anon is talking about, but for me that’s like, you know, that’s the problem of like, if I have the free time to do that then like…fandom can expand to fill that free time. Even if I don’t really want to [laughs] you know, be in the fandom. Whereas if I don’t have much time, then the fandom I take part in is gonna be stuff that I really wanna be part of. Or I won’t be able to be in fandom, because I’m too busy.
ELM: I feel like what you’re describing is what a lot of people both in the media and, like, just even like, random people I’m friends with who have nothing to do with media commentary. Weird, I know, but I actually know lots of people who are not in the media…
FK: Shocking!
ELM: …talk about social media. But that’s like that but then even one level less because there’s like nothing there. It’s just like, “Oh, and then I check my this, check my that…”
FK: “I check Twitter, and then someone is angry, and then I think about it, and then I go away, and then I have to check to see if someone responded, and…” Yeah.
ELM: I’ll think about it, I’ll be like “That sounds terrible!” And then I’ll think, “Oh, you know, have I, do I do that—just because there’s a fandom thing involved? If I don’t really, I’m not really feelin’ it that much any more?” But I don’t have these patterns the way that you do, and actually I really feel—[laughs] I feel like in my, in my elderly years of fandom anyway, not of life—I’ve gotten much better at identifying patterns and trying not to replicate them in terms of like, I think I mentioned this a little while back but I started a pseud for, like, a Tumblr for my pseud, my like, new pseud, and followed a bunch of people. And then didn’t, really had negative feelings about my dash for like a day. And then I was like, “Doesn’t need to be this way!” And then I like, immediately unfollowed [laughs] like half the people! And I was like, “Nothing’s compelling me to be a part of these conversations that are, to witness these conversations I don’t enjoy!” So, which I wouldn’t have been able to do even five years ago. And I think that it’s just taken, taken several things souring me on the whole fandom and the thing to—to be able to recognize those patterns of myself and, and it sounds like anon has…it’s not irrelevant to anon’s situation, because you’re kind of trapped in this patterning. If you can recognize “why am I here?” You know?
FK: Yeah. And I think there’s also a sort of, the variety of ways, I don’t know anything about anon’s circumstances, but for me like—moving to a place where there were more other fans that I could interact with in person and like also—
ELM: Anon literally said that fandom was a solitary IRL experience for them!
FK: No, I know they said that, I know they said that. So but I don’t know why. Right? Is it because they prefer that it is, is it because they prefer to be very private about it? You know?
ELM: Maybe, Flourish, maybe leave them alone! If your advice is to go meet other fans, you can fuck right off. GET OUT FLOURISH. [laughs]
FK: Elizabeth! Could you let me finish my statement?
ELM: OK!
FK: Because I was saying, and then also, so like that’s one other method that’s not an online thing, but—
ELM: I like how you just got real mad. [laughing]
FK: I did, because the other piece I was gonna say then, was and also like, you know, when I was in high school often it was like I couldn’t necessarily just watch all of the stuff I wanted to watch, you know what I mean, like, I had to be places. Other people were telling me what I needed to do.
ELM: You had to be places, like in class at your high school?
FK: Or like my mom would be like “We’re gonna go do this thing and I need you to come with me,” or “I need you to do this chore,” whatever else. I couldn’t necessarily control my time in the same way as you can as an adult. And so like, realizing as an adult sometimes that like: even though I made those patterns of like, “Oh well, I’m just gonna go online cause I can do that really quick, I don’t need to watch a whole episode of something but I can like, interact,” and now it’s like: No! I can actually, I can make choices and if I want to just enjoy the canon and not go online, I can do that, and no one can stop me, you know?
Like, so I guess having the—you know, sometimes like the situation that we’re in, the ability that we have to sort of get out, sometimes online can be an escape from whatever that situation is, and if you, if you can like recognize that, that’s another way of sort of breaking out of those spaces. Do you see what, does that make sense?
ELM: It does…
FK: Online self-soothing is like, a thing that for me at least developed as like a coping mechanism with high school. And then, like, there’s lots of other ways I can exist now too.
ELM: Right, but I think that’s easy for you to say because you like different modes of engagement—
FK: Oh yeah, that’s true.
ELM: —and I think a lot of fans don’t.
FK: Yeah yeah yeah.
ELM: So if fandom for you is about, you know, really liking the show and engaging with fanworks and other fans’ like, media critique around it…
FK: Right.
ELM: And it’s nothing to do with just consuming the canon over and over again, or, not “just,” I don’t wanna be diminishing, cause, but doing that or meeting up with fans IRL…
FK: If you don’t wanna like, go have like a bath in the canon, and you also don’t want to meet people IRL, then maybe you’re kinda limited to certain things that are the things that are causing this problem.
ELM: Yeah. I mean, just like, it makes me think back to our letter-writer a few episodes ago who was in a Discord that was toxic and it’s like, well, if this is the only space that you’re in, this is how you engage in fandom, then you are kinda fucked.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Right? Whereas like, if you get a lot of pleasure out of fanworks by themselves and you don’t need that community piece…
FK: Right.
ELM: You know? Then, then you have a little more space. But then if you’re like anon here and you don’t like the way people are writing the fic, you’re kinda stuck, you know?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Because you can’t single-handedly, especially in a big fandom like that, if most of the characterization feels off to you, just saying like “Go write your own,” that’s not gonna…that’s not gonna last long, you know? That’s gonna be pretty limiting. So.
FK: Totally. All right. Well, I’m sorry, anon.
ELM: Well, no, I’m happy for anon that they’ve found not one but two other—they’ve broken up now, they’ve had their rebound relationship.
FK: Mm-hmm.
ELM: And now they’re in a new one even, so it sounds like they’re kind of playin’ the field, a little. You know, two fandoms in one year? Wild to me. [FK laughs] Can’t imagine. Y’know, I’m happy for anon. I’m sorry about those eight years, or those four years rather. I’m sorry it was Sherlock. Truly. Cause I know what it’s like to not enjoy being in Sherlock fandom.
FK: Aww.
ELM: Sherlock friends, I support you all.
FK: All right. I think we should get on to the next question.
ELM: OK, I’m gonna read it. Bubba-H said to Fansplaining: “Hi, smiley face.” It’s an emoticon. Not an emoji. Just, so everyone can get the full sense. “I’ve been listening to your back catalogue and I had a thought on Episode 19: it seems weird/hypocritical to me that people are so pearl-clutching about teenagers being exposed to sexual 18+ content, but have no problem with teens consuming content featuring hyper-violence. My sister is actually taking action with this disparity: she’ll let her teens watch Sense8 (orgies and all) but not Game of Thrones due to its violence.”
FK: Yeah, that sure, that sure is a thing! More in some places than others, definitely in the United States.
ELM: So, we revisited the transcript to Episode 19, because we didn’t remember what we said. I, I’m not sure—I think this comment is true, I’m not sure this is what we were talking about.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: I think that this has been a perpetual—as long as I’ve literally been alive, people have talked about this in the US.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And outside of it, when people talk about American culture and they’re like, “Why are you like this?!” You know?
FK: I don’t know!
ELM: Go to a movie rated PG-13 and you see a guy get shot in the head, but you know, like, you can’t see—
FK: Like, any pubic hair and it’s an X. [laughs]
ELM: Or like a man’s flaccid penis is like…you’re like “OK, sure,” right? And then you go to Germany and everyone’s like “Have you considered being naked here?” And you’re like “Oh—OK—I guess? Not really but…thanks guys!” So. Yeah. So… [laughs] So, I think all of this is true, but in Episode 19 we were talking about a post that we had been tagged in where someone said that they were in their early 20s—I think they were 23—and they were in a fandom where most of the people, in their perception I believe, were between the ages of 14 and 17. I think it was an RPF, possibly a boy band fandom.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Which, I mean, I’m not saying that, you know—those do tend to skew younger than other types of source material, so…
FK: Sure, yeah.
ELM: Not saying that it was incorrect that everyone in this space was a teen. But I think that was their perception. And they were saying that simultaneously they were worried that they were too old for it, or they were gonna be too old for it soon, and also they felt some anxiety and discomfort about being in this fandom space with teenagers. You know, people who are under some sort of arbitrary age. Which, to clarify, is also an age—depending on what we’re talking about—that varies…
FK: Culturally.
ELM: Culturally, even state-by-state, I’m not—I mean…
FK: Legally and culturally it varies, like, what people…
ELM: I’m not just talking about the age of consent, but in terms of like, what, I mean, it’s not even about, like—needing to be 18+ to post on something isn’t about whether you can actually consent to IRL sex. It’s not disconnected.
FK: Right.
ELM: But it’s also like people set these kind of arbitrary lines of “above this is adult content and below this is not-adult content,” right? So that does vary, actually, quite a bit between the ages of…definitely 16 and 18.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Around the world. Sometimes even lower than 16 for the age of consent, depending on where you are.
FK: Right.
ELM: So we talked about how it was complicated. This was 100 episodes ago, and it was interesting to read, knowing all the purity culture stuff that would go down—
FK: Seriously.
ELM: —in the years that followed.
FK: Yeah. I mean, I stand by everything that we said, but like…so much stuff has gone down since then.
ELM: But I mean like it’s not like it wasn’t happening then, either. But it’s just like, continued. It’s like, just intensified.
FK: Yes.
ELM: But you know, these kind of ideas of like, I’m not saying—when it comes to fanworks I would never say you should force anyone who feels too young to see something, to see something. Absolutely not! But we also talked about, we talked about this a lot with purity culture, this funny flip from when we were teens and you would lie and say you were older. [FK laughs] Right?
FK: Yep.
ELM: Because, and, and, possibly even—it was funny talking to Betts about when she accidentally read some explicit fic when she was 11 and she was like “Oh goodness no!” and backspaced out. And I feel like that’s a pretty normal reaction! Like, not for you, cause you were like “Give it to me,” but like, I think that when you’re 11 or 12, if you encounter that you’re like “Ah, no, I don’t know, no, no thank you,” right?
FK: Absolutely, yeah.
ELM: Some kids are like “What’s that?” but I think a lot of kids are like, “Ah! No.” Right? And I think that’s—
FK: Absolutely.
ELM: —that’s pretty normal. If you’re a few years older, and you actually can put words to sex acts, and…not saying you’re doing them, but if you can understand them conceptually and you’ve like, read the book your mom gave you or whatever, like… [laughs] I’m assuming your mom also gave you a book.
FK: Yeah, pretty much, yeah. Basically.
ELM: That’s not to say that she didn’t want to talk about it, but there was also…
FK: A book, there was a book.
ELM: A book, yeah. [both laughing] So, you know.
FK: There was a lot pubic hair in the book.
ELM: Oh, did you get a book from like the ’70s?
FK: Oh, yeah.
ELM: Those were the best books. You’ve seen the famous stuff about where they compared the original Joy of Sex to the reissue in like 2008, maybe?
FK: [laughing] The degree of hairiness!
ELM: Of the original one, yeah. Those people were lovin’, lovin’ the natural look.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: It was really, really nice. Anyway…you know, I think that it’s, it’s really—there is an opt-in element to it.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: But, I don’t know. It’s also interesting to think about—this question really made me think about, like, I was like “Well, that’s not what we were talking about at all,” and I started to think about “What are we talking about when we talk about this?” And it’s rare that people within this conversation of purity culture and saying you shouldn’t be exposing minors to this content, it’s very rare that they’re talking about explicit sex acts, unless it is about rape.
FK: Right.
ELM: Or it is about, you know, underage or whatever. But the objections there are not even the depictions of sex. It is the depictions of abuses of power and power imbalances. And that’s what the fixation is, and that—that’s underpinning…
FK: Occasionally there’s an idea that if you are interested in reading this depiction of sex, then you are a pedophile.
ELM: Right.
FK: Right? But…
ELM: Oh, absolutely, but that always feels like a kind of a deflective sort of strawman. Saying like “Oh, you find this titillating, sicko!” Or like, “You wanna rape someone because you are…”
FK: Yeah yeah yeah, exactly. And the implication is that it’s all about the…
ELM: The actual depiction. That’s correct, right. But that’s, that’s slightly a little bit afield too. I think when people talk about trying to protect people, it is often about protecting them from what they perceive as depictions of abusive relationships, abuses of power, power imbalances. You get people saying two adults, a 35 year old and a 30 year old, and it’s an inherent power imbalance because one of them has lived on the earth for longer than the other one. Which is bonkers to me, right? You know, like, obviously boss–employee, teacher–student, like, these are relationships that, while complicated IRL, do have an inherent power imbalance at the start of it. Right? You know?
FK: Right.
ELM: Yes. But…
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Just because, you know, it’s a very…I’ve seen some really compelling arguments about how it kind of folds into a radical feminist framing, too, about you know, even the, the very idea of men and women is inherently a power imbalance, right? And it kind of boils down to this sort of essentialism that underpins radical feminism.
FK: Right.
ELM: And it’s like, “OK!”
FK: Right.
ELM: [laughs] You know? Like: Yes. But if that’s your framework and that’s where it stops and that’s where it turns into kind of a dogmatic hard line…
FK: Yeah.
ELM: …framework, then, then I, I think that’s where you get into these, I think that those connections are right ones to make in terms of ideology and everything that stems, then, from radical feminism, whether it moves on to TERFism or SWERFism or whatever. You know what I mean?
FK: I do. I do know what you mean.
ELM: I feel like I’m just like a Tumblr post come to life right now.
FK: You kind of are, and I think that we should move on to the next question.
ELM: [laughing] Anyway, purity culture is fraught and I don’t wanna talk about it right now any more.
FK: Great.
ELM: That was enough, that was enough.
FK: There we go.
ELM: Thank you Bubba-H.
FK: It was enough. The next question is actually not a question, it’s a palate cleanser. Are you ready?
ELM: Oh, OK! OK.
FK: “Hi Flourish and Elizabeth, I just wanted to say a quick thank you for ACKNOWLEDGING that HP,” Harry Potter, “is a massive cultural phenomenon that means a huge amount to a big percentage of a whole generation because the amount of Takes trying to pretend it isn’t that important was KILLING ME when the J. K. stuff exploded. There were seriously people saying shit like ‘Oh I never liked it’ and ‘read another book’ which makes me so ANGRY. I can’t go back in time to my childhood and choose to read a different series with giant midnight releases of BOOKS sorry! That’s impossible for many reasons!! Sincerely, Oki.”
ELM: OK, a little critique on your reading: Oki capitalized the word “BOOKS” in all caps, but they didn’t capitalize “sorry,” and you read those with an equal amount of inflection.
FK: I felt like the exclamation point was doing something there, but I accept your critique, because it’s true.
ELM: Yeah if I were to have you rerecord it I would say “BOOKS sorry.”
FK: Well, I also should have said “ACKNOWLEDGING” because that was also in all caps, but I had not yet fully committed to the bit, so.
ELM: [laughs] So, if you, you can imagine and we’re gonna preserve the punctuation, the capitalization in the transcript. This is a very impassioned and delightful letter from Oki, and obviously we meant it before and we mean it again: we stand by all these sentiments, I too found that, that line of rhetoric quite tiring.
FK: [laughs] Extremely.
ELM: It also, it reminds me a lot of like, you know, when like a man gets MeToo’d—maybe I shouldn’t use that language because I’ve seen the right critique that that makes it sound more passive.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Like the person didn’t do a bunch of terrible acts or whatever. So…
FK: Yeah, yeah yeah.
ELM: When a man’s abuses of power and assaults are exposed in the context of the Me Too movement…
FK: There we go.
ELM: This sort of response of like “I didn’t like him anyway” or “he always seemed creepy” or whatever, it’s just like, OK? You know? That’s not relevant.
FK: Great. Good for you.
ELM: Oh God. The response of like “I don’t find him attractive anyway” is always like, which is the flip side of that, is “Oh, he couldn’t,” you know, “He couldn’t have actually done anything non-consensually, he’s so hot,” which is something I have seen about a certain person recently, I won’t say any more! You might know what I’m talking about.
FK: Mm-hmm. I do!
ELM: Anyway, it’s a very tedious response and also I think doesn’t really do anything to address a similar sort of thing here, of like, the really hard question of people who are admirers of this person and they may be able to put the person aside, but can they put their work aside?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Right? You know? And like, especially the same sort of thing of like, I think we’ve talked about this a little bit and talked about kind of reconciling what to do with, you know…Emily Nussbaum had that really interesting essay…
FK: It was a great essay, yeah.
ELM: …in her book, I think it was called “Confessions of a Human Shield,” in which she tries to grapple with her Woody Allen fandom, essentially.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: You know, so that one’s a really complicated one, cause then you start to also look at their work and you say, “What about the themes that are related in their work?” and stuff like that. And I think it’s, it’s tricky with J. K. Rowling because people, a lot of people have been pretty critical about the content of her work already but I feel like this was a kind of a watershed where people who hadn’t done a lot of critical thinking about Harry Potter and just kinda loved it were like, “Oh, but, but she’s like this?” You know? And I think that’s really really hard. And I think to kind of try to undercut that by saying “Well, you should just read this random book series and forget about this important part of your entire life…”
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Was…not helpful.
FK: Not great.
ELM: So Oki, we’re here for you.
FK: We’re here for you.
ELM: We will continue to acknowledge that HP is a massive cultural phenomenon that means a huge amount to a big percentage of a whole generation.
FK: All right. I think we’ve got one more letter.
ELM: And I’m gonna read it, and it is for you, Flourish. [FK laughs] I hope you’re ready for this.
FK: I’m braced.
ELM: “Hi, Flourish and Elizabeth,” but mostly Flourish.
FK: [laughs] That was not in the letter.
ELM: That was my parenthetical. “I know this was just a small tangential journey at the end of Episode 115, but I’d love to hear y’all talk a bit more about fiction demons in a world of demons versus religiously described demons in like, an RPF fic. It might just be a bit of my own religiosity, but it feels different to me too, although I also get pretty squicked out by RPF in general for similar reasons, where it seems like you two don’t. Anyway, love the show, thanks for putting it out.”
OK, wait wait. For the record, for the record, I’m not squicked by RPF but I do not, it does not appeal to me in any way. So don’t lump me with Flourish, a true RPF stan.
FK: OK, great. So. OK. I have been thinking a lot about what I meant at the end, cause it was like this little tangential journey, and I was like “I don’t even know what I’m saying!” And here’s what I think I meant: so for me, when people are dealing with religion broadly—and demons usually, they don’t always, but often tie in to like, you know, religious imagery and so on. There’s sort of two ways that you can take it, and one is the like, totally fictionalized like silly, almost? Right? Where it’s like, I don’t know. The world of Buffy, and like, the demons and all of this stuff like, and there’s Hell? But like…is it…whatever. You know? It’s like, this is like a…
ELM: But the whole thing is such a, it’s like such a metacommentary. It’s like very knowing, the entire time, right?
FK: Exactly. Very knowing and very, right? And then there’s on the other side, like, and just to completely stick only with like very popular TV shows of the ’90s that I love, right, there’s this other side where there’s some like X-Files episodes where it’s genuinely like, there’s, there’s a couple of episodes where it’s genuinely about like Scully as a Catholic and like, they’re investigating some kind of a faith miracle or something like that, right? And like, it’s not actually…I mean it’s The X-Files so it’s a little silly, but it’s not that silly, and it’s genuinely trying to ask questions about, like, faith, the way that humans, like, real people practice their faith and think about faith and like, have their faith tested, right?
And so to me, those two things are both fine. But there’s sometimes stuff that’s in the middle where it’s like, I don’t know. Sort of trying to do both and failing at either? That gets to me to feel like, almost insulting. You know?
ELM: Yeah.
FK: Like, like—it’s sort of taking a thing which is, you know, actually meaningful to people, and just being like “And then…!” You know? Not, not winking and knowing and like, “Yes, ha ha,” you know, “we’re gonna take all this stuff,” not the like Supernatural bit where they’re like “Well, logically we do eventually have to get to God so…here’s God, guys!” You know? Not like that, but just in a sort of like… “Ooooh. Here is some spice, some,” you know, like, “cultural spice of this religious stuff!” You know, and you’re like “Eeh, really?”
ELM: This is interesting because this was not my perception of your actual in-the-moment reaction in Episode 115.
FK: No, I don’t think it was. I think in the actual moment I had like a weird reaction and I was like, “Why do I, why am I reacting like this? What am I thinking of?”
ELM: But I think you may be trying to intellectualize it more than what actually happened. I don’t think that what you’re saying is, I don’t think you’re like lying right now. [FK laughs] I’m sure that you also…
FK: But I might have also had a moment of like, “eeh.”
ELM: Right, and maybe a little bit of that is sort of an intellectual protectionism, because you might have this, I feel like you had this deep-down instinctive reaction of like, truly, a moment of belief, essentially, right?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And not actually wanting to see that thing that maybe you believe in somewhat to be depicted in that way. And, and that ties into it being taken lightly, but I think that there was a little bit more of a sort of…
FK: Yeah, well, I think that the reason I find it insulting is that if it’s…if it’s being depicted and it doesn’t feel true or right or real, in a certain way, if it doesn’t feel like they’re getting at any kind of a truth with it, but it also seems like they’re taking it seriously, I go “ugh! Get it out of here!”
ELM: Wait wait, you must have loved 1990s drama on CBS Touched by an Angel.
FK: I have never watched a single episode of Touched by an Angel.
ELM: [singing] “When you walk…”
FK: Yes, I’ve heard the theme song.
ELM: “Down the road…”
FK: But I’ve never watched a single episode.
ELM: “Heavy burden…” All right.
FK: I mean, I don’t know how I would react to it.
ELM: It’s incredible. It is made, I don’t know, it must be made by, I was gonna say it’s made by Christians—it’s made for Christians. In AMERICA.
FK: Yeah, I don’t know. Sometimes I like inspirational romance, so it’s possible that I would weirdly like this.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: I don’t know.
ELM: “God loves you with all his heart!”
FK: Yeah I mean—I don’t know how I would react to this. In fact, I’ve wondered about this. Because I have thought sometimes, “This seems like a terrible show but also like something I might like, but then think was terrible.” But I don’t know.
ELM: Yeah, as an areligious child in the ’90s, I watched a lot of—I mean I just think that in the ’90s TV, I really enjoyed the line of Witcher commentary about how The Witcher was a return to ’90s TV because it’s like, not good and people are enjoying it, you know?
FK: [laughs] I still haven’t seen it. I’m saving it, I’m carefully saving it up for a precious moment, cause I think that I’m going to either totally hate it or totally love it and I’m hoping it’s the second thing.
ELM: I’m sorry. I haven’t seen it, so I’m just repeating what I’ve heard. Maybe it’s…
FK: No I’ve heard that too.
ELM: Great.
FK: I’ve heard that if you liked Xena you will probably love this.
ELM: Yeah, Young Hercules.
FK: So I’m in. Yeah!
ELM: Right. So, Touched by an Angel was like higher-budget. It was the same as like Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman, right?
FK: Oh yeah. I remember Dr. Quinn.
ELM: But it was still like ’90s…not procedural, but you know what I mean? So.
FK: Totally.
ELM: Maybe we should watch an episode together. I don’t know, I don’t even know where. Maybe on YouTube?
FK: I have no desire to do that.
ELM: C’mon!
FK: I’d prefer the mystery.
ELM: The Angel of Death…I think his name was Andrew? Michael?
FK: I don’t know.
ELM: One of those two names. And he was blond. And he was very sympathetic.
FK: OK.
ELM: Cause he was, you know, telling people it was their time.
FK: I have no desire to watch this. I would prefer to keep it a mystery. Sometimes I wonder, but I can just wonder.
ELM: Well, when we initially talked about this demon question I also suggested that we should watch The Devil’s Advocate starring Keanu Reeves and Al Pacino, and I truly do want to make you watch it, cause it’s incredible.
FK: Well, liquor me up and we can, we can try it.
ELM: You like lawyers?
FK: Sure.
ELM: You like the ’90s?
FK: [laughs] Sure.
ELM: Do you like Keanu Reeves doing a strong Southern accent?
FK: No. [ELM laughs] But I would like to see it, in order to fully understand how much I don’t like it.
ELM: Do you like Al Pacino?
FK: Obviously.
ELM: One of the greatest Italian-Americans?
FK: Clearly.
ELM: Playing the Devil?
FK: I think that he’d make a great Devil. OK. I’m sold. We’ll watch this together some time.
ELM: I can’t wait, I can’t wait.
FK: All right.
ELM: Talk about demons.
FK: That was the end of our letterbox!
ELM: Yeah, it was. Those were some great questions. Interesting discourse points. Some lighthearted moments. I think we went on a journey.
FK: If you have questions that have been brought up by this episode or any episode or just out of your own fandom experience, please send them in to us for our Part Seven letterbox at fansplaining at gmail dot com. Or, fansplaining on Tumblr. Or, our website: fansplaining.com. Or, give us a call at 1-401-526-FANS. And say hi!
ELM: That’s right! And one final reminder, patreon.com/fansplaining.
FK: Yeah!
ELM: Get in there! Listen to us talk about Star Wars in a negative fashion!
FK: All right. I think this has been a great episode Elizabeth, and I will talk to you later.
ELM: OK bye Flourish!
FK: Bye.
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