Episode 122: Wash Your Hands and Read Some Fic
In very self-isolated Episode 122, “Wash Your Hands and Read Some Fic,” Elizabeth and Flourish share the results of a mini-survey about people’s fiction habits in times of crisis—the personal, the global, and during the COVID-19 pandemic. Are people more interested in fluff or angst? Do they seek escapism or catharsis? Is this a good time—or the worst time—to watch Contagion? They also read a message from the co-chair of the AO3 Technical Support and Feedback Committee on some of the reasons the Archive doesn’t have a mobile app.
Show Notes
[00:00:00] As always, our intro music is “Awel” by stefsax, used under a CC BY 3.0 license.
[00:02:21] Last week’s episode, featuring EarlGreyTea68, was “The Money Question 2: The Appening.”
[00:11:15] Our interstitial music here and throughout the episode is “A History of Bad Behaviour” by Lee Rosevere, used under a CC BY 3.0 license.
[00:14:30] Allegra’s article, paid for by listeners and readers like you, is “The Ever-Mutating Life of Tumblr Dot Com.”
[00:18:00] We’re talking about Episode 35, “No Escape.” Also, Toasty’s stats about how the 2016 election affected fanfic. Find the complete results of the survey here, including the questions we asked. We’ll have an extremely cool visualization of the results soon, we promise!
[00:19:49] The article in the Times is “For Me, Rewatching ‘Contagion’ Was Fun, Until It Wasn’t,” by Wesley Morris. He also did an interview with On the Media: “Rewatching ‘Contagion’ During the Pandemic.” The On The Media interview that spurred him to watch it was with Laurie Garrett, “Black Swans.”
[00:23:47] We learned about the tattle phone in the “No Fair!” episode of This American Life and our lives will never be the same.
[00:29:09] “Anarchy in the U.K.” (You’ll have to be logged in to the AO3 to read it.)
[00:34:44] The episode of This American Life from immediately after 9/11 is “Before and After.”
[00:46:01] This question was asked in Episode 110, “Ask Fansplaining Anything: Part 5.” It’s about ¾ of the way down the page, if you’re looking for it in the transcript.
[00:53:39] If you missed them, here were some of our clarifications on the survey.
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 #122, “Wash Your Hands and Read Some Fic.”
FK: Comin’ at you from self-isolation.
ELM: Yeah. Well, we don’t know! I mean, we are recording in self-isolation. When you’re listening to it, we could be in a whole different world. It’s really—
FK: Yeah, right?
ELM: —weird to think about, actually. I don’t wanna think about it.
FK: Yeah, but who knows? Life’s comin’ atcha fast right now.
ELM: This has been a very interesting few weeks, I’ll say that. I’ll start.
FK: Yeah, it has! I don’t know what to say about that beyond that it’s, there’s a pandemic going on and that’s a lot of stuff!
ELM: Interesting! Very interesting! Um…cool.
FK: But we’re, but we’re still gonna come at you with some fandom-related content, because when is a better time to obsess about something than when you are trapped inside trying to avoid your loved ones?
ELM: Oh ho ho, but: is there a better time? Because perhaps the stress of the pandemic prevents you from engaging with fandom!
FK: In order to answer these actually not-age-old questions… [ELM laughs] We ran a survey. About people’s, like, responses to crisis and how that impacts how they interact with fiction. We got 1,263 responses. We’re gonna talk about that, and we’re gonna talk about, you know, sort of people’s fannish behaviors during times of crisis more generally as well as this specific crisis.
ELM: Right. And that’s, I’m so pleased with the response, by the way, because we had the survey up for like, less than 48 hours, I wanna say. So…
FK: Yeah! It was a real—
ELM: Thank you to everyone who filled it out! You know? It was a little guy, it was a mini-survey, but I appreciate people popping in there and giving us their feedback. So we’ll dig into that.
FK: Yeah, it was a great response for such a short amount of time.
ELM: All right. First though. We have to follow up from last week.
FK: Yes! Because last week, if you guys…it’s not last week, it’s last two weeks ago. Last fortnight.
ELM: Last century, which is what it feels like.
FK: It feels like. [laughs]
ELM: The different reality we lived in.
FK: In any case, we did an episode about—do you remember, [laughs] last century, about how everyone was worried about AO3 apps that like, you know, reproduced fic from the Archive Of Our Own.
ELM: Didn’t reproduce—
FK: We were worried about this once, now it seems like small potatoes.
ELM: Didn’t reproduce, didn’t reproduce, Flourish. Don’t spread misinformation.
FK: Right. They didn’t actually reproduce it. Well, some of them might’ve. But anyway.
ELM: Yeah. Some of them might’ve, but the one that everyone was mad at did not.
FK: Did not actually.
ELM: It just reskinned, gave a different portal, a way of seeing the content that continued to be hosted on the servers of the Archive Of Our Own.
FK: Right. While we were doing that, we had an episode about it, it was with EarlGreyTea, which was incredible, we loved it, uh, you should listen to it. And one of the things we talked about was that we weren’t actually sure of the real reasons why the Archive did not have a mobile app. We had some theories and we had some knowledge of it but not like a, you know, authoritative, you know? Understanding of this?
ELM: Right, and EarlGreyTea68 is on the legal committee of the Organization for Transformative Works, but actually clarified several times in her very lawyerly way: she was not speaking on behalf of them.
FK: Right.
ELM: So we haven’t had that official word of someone—
FK: Right.
ELM: —coming from that side of it, especially the tech side of the AO3.
FK: Right. But hey! Wonderfully enough, one of the co-chairs for the AO3 Technical Support and Feedback Committee, CJ, wrote in! And told us some things about this! So, we can read what he had to say, and then we’ll all know what’s going on!
ELM: Let’s, ah, let’s clarify too: when CJ wrote and asked if we’d be interested in this, he said “Do you want a drabble or a double drabble?” Presumably defining it precisely as a drabble of 100 words, meaning 100 to 200 words. And this is in fact a quadruple drabble.
FK: Yeah he was like “my quadrabble.”
ELM: And it is exactly 400 words long, so that’s the kind of fandom commitment I really appreciate.
FK: All right, shall I read it?
ELM: Yes.
FK: All right, this is from CJ.
“There are four ways that a site can get you get the tall, dark, strong, delicious…coffee from your coffee shop AU on your mobile phone.
“The simplest way is, of course, open the coffee shop door and the barista directly serves you. The barista controls the menu and the prices, and even the color of the chair cushions. This is a website with a mobile interface.
“Some coffee shops are swank and have their own drive-thru. They can get you your delicious delicious caffeinated goodness in all the varieties the coffee shop has without you getting out of your car. But the store has to carve a hole in the wall, get an extra employee to stand by the window all the time, maybe some extra machines, a whole lot of infrastructure—and keep the baristas from fighting over the last of the oat milk for their favorite customer. The window has to be at a certain height and size, with certain features, for local code compliance. This is a mobile app with an API in the App Stores. A long term solution, but very complicated.
“Sometimes an enterprising individual will set up a cart outside the coffee shop. A customer places an order, the entrepreneur runs in to buy the coffee from our hero barista, comes back out and sells it to the customer. They might mark up the price a little bit, they might customize the menu a little to make certain items easier to order, they might even slap a different logo on the cup. But it’s the coffee from the coffee shop, and cash going in the register, and the barista could the street cart to get lost. This is an interface overlay app, like Fluff, Archive Track Reader, or Fanfic Pocket Access Library were.
“Then there’s that one competing coffee shop that set up shop across the street in the dead of night. Only, rather than selling their own coffee, they sneak in the back door of our hero’s coffee shop at three a.m. and liberate a random selection of grounds. Not ethical, not nice, and not really a good selection of drinks, either. And they definitely slap their own logo on the mug, something about a Sign made out of Wood or the like.
“And now that I’ve thoroughly abused the metaphor, I’m going to go get a nice hot cup of tea.”
ELM: This is delightful. This is like a fanwork, basically, in itself.
FK: It is a fanwork in itself and it does explain basically that, you know, the Archive is not prepared to carve a hole in the wall.
ELM: Right.
FK: You know?
ELM: Get an extra, extra barista to stand in the window at all times.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Extra coffee making machines…but yeah, the local code compliance, for sure. I mean, when framed this way, I don’t think in reality you actually have a lot of times where someone will go into Starbucks for you and get the coffee and then come out and you pay them for…I mean I guess you can pay like a, there are like, people who will go pick up your order for you.
FK: So I have seen this actually, um…
ELM: Really?
FK: Well, not Starbucks. I don’t know if it’s Starbucks. But you know in the part where you go into the tunnel to New Jersey and it’s always backed up?
ELM: Yeah.
FK: There are people who will come up to the window of your car, and like, take an order from you, and run to like, there’s a bunch of street vendors, and they run to the street vendors and they get the stuff from the street vendor and then as you wait your car moves forward, and then they run over and they do it for tips.
ELM: That’s incredible. Wait, this is the Lincoln Tunnel?
FK: Yeah! When it gets real backed up.
ELM: Man, I’m only on a bus whenever I go through the Lincoln Tunnel. No one ever comes and asks for my coffee order.
FK: Now you know.
ELM: It’s fascinating! I mean the moral of the story is, take the train.
FK: Yes, it really is. [laughs] But!
ELM: I thought, initially when you said that I thought you meant the one tunnel between New York City and New Jersey for the train, and I was like “How do they?”
FK: No no no! [laughing] In a car!
ELM: “Are you gonna tell me they call someone in New Jersey and place the order and in Secaucus you get out and they’re like, ‘Here’s your coffee’?” And that’s not where the story wound up. So. Your story makes way more sense than my story.
FK: Thank you. I’m glad that you agree that the story makes sense, because it does.
ELM: We need another tunnel under the Hudson River, that’s my takeaway!
FK: All right. OK.
ELM: It’s a really, it’s a great metaphor, it’s interesting, yeah. I mean I also, one thing that we didn’t really get into, because EGT is not on the technical side of the AO3, but I think that it’s underscored here, and I know from talking to people who work on the technical side, is—when I say “volunteers,” there are a handful of people doing most of the technical work. Right? You know? And like, the kind of maintenance that you would need to run things, something beyond a very straightforward website, I think people really really…you see posts on Tumblr where people are like, “I work in the technology industry and I’m gonna tell you why the things that you’re saying would be easy or not.” But you see a lot of people who do not work in the technology industry and they’re like “I don’t know why they don’t just do that! I’ll just donate them some more money and they could do it,” and it’s like, it’s not that simple.
FK: And the local ordinances are actually a big deal, right, because the way that the web is built, you can have a website that’s like, with old crappy code, literally you have not kept up with anything about HTML or CSS, and it’ll still run and you can still see it. Whereas on the app store, your app breaks if you don’t keep it up. I have a bunch of things that I made that are completely not accessible anymore.
ELM: Right.
FK: Whatever, we did a project, we made an app, a year later no one wants to pay to update the app, so you can’t get it! It’s not possible. The end. Goodbye. [laughs] You know?
ELM: Right, right. And anyone who has ever worked on apps for a sustained product, which I have as a person who works in the media, so you know, you have to keep publishing it.
FK: Yeah!
ELM: Obviously this’ll be old hat for anyone who works in technology, but like, a huge portion of this stuff is, is like, device testing and browser testing and stuff like that.
FK: Oh yeah, absolutely.
ELM: And so it was interesting to see stuff that I had worked on, obviously we were always, always updating everything as we continue to make the magazine, as I worked on this over years and years, but like, to see devices being deprecated and certain versions no longer, you know? And like, saying “Oh, we’ll no longer support this very old version,” which may not be old to a user, because, you know, they’ve had it for seven years or whatever, but it’s very old in software terms, you know?
FK: Yeah, totally.
ELM: I had a, I had the eleven-inch Mac, which I really really loved, for six years.
FK: I loved that Mac.
ELM: And I was working with a developer at my last job to build an interactive and I was like, “Well, I’m looking at the test right now and I can’t,” you know, “it actually, a lot of it’s getting cut off and it looks kinda wonky,” and then he said “What computer are you on?” and I told him and he was like, “Well, they’re not making those any more and that’s such a tiny percentage of the market that I’m sorry.” And I was like “Oh. No!” And that’s how I found out.
FK: But it’s real, right?
ELM: But it’s real and it’s just like, oh, if it’s only, you know, less than a 1% of computer users, then there’s a certain, you know, point where you have to cut your losses. Cause you’re not gonna be able to make something that’s flashy and interactive for every single device that a person might own. You might have people who are older or who have less money who are on very old devices, very clunky stripped-down sort of displays, and you know that’s really, that’s hard!
FK: Yeah, absolutely. And this is why, yeah. This is why you might opt for, even though it’s not as good for people who, you know, want a really flashy mobile interface or a really streamlined mobile interface for that matter, why you might opt for something that’s instead just HTML that is mobile-optimized. OK! You know, it works.
All right. Thank you very much, CJ, for writing and telling us about that. It was super helpful. I think that we should take a little quick break and then we should talk about the main point of the episode, our survey.
ELM: All right! I’m gonna go wash my hands.
FK: Great, me too.
[Interstitial music]
ELM: Flourish.
FK: Yes?
ELM: What’s your handwashing song?
FK: I sing the ABCs.
ELM: Aww, that’s pure!
FK: I know! There’s all these songs that it could be, but I started, I learned it with the ABCs and now I sing the ABCs and it is what it is. What’s yours?
ELM: [laughs] You ready for this? So my choir conductor, who I love deeply, sent a very in-character email that was like four paragraphs long and began by saying that “Happy Birthday” was banality wrapped in music.
FK: [laughs] That was a take.
ELM: And I knew immediately he was going to be telling us to wash our hands to some other song, and then he suggested we do the main chorus from the fourth movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Which you could do by going “dah dah dah dah, dah,” or, if you’ve ever sung it but you don’t actually remember it, you could do it with sort of fake German words. Like I do!
FK: [laughs] Why don’t you show us?
ELM: “Deiner sau der binden wieder—” No— [FK laughs riotously] No, some of the words and sounds are correct, because I’ve sung it multiple times, but like, they are not in the right order, so I hope that all Germans appreciated what I just did. Also I like, sang the bass part for some reason. [sings]
FK: I may, I may start doing this because—
ELM: “Binden wieder, auf—”
FK: That’s, that’s definitely better than the ABCs. I’ll really start doing this.
ELM: I, I can only imagine what that just, that whole thing just sounded like to a German speaker. They’re probably just gonna cry.
FK: We’re sorry, German speakers.
ELM: We’re just gonna be like— [laughing]
FK: I know that we have German speakers in our audience, so we apologize to you personally. Um, OK.
ELM: Yeah, just imagine what the words actually are, it’s, just imagine them completely out of order. Like “Lord God of something something something.” [laughs]
FK: OK! All right. Well, obviously we’re back.
ELM: [laughs] Yep! Anyway, it’s brought me joy every time I washed my hands. Which is I think what Beethoven would have wanted! So.
FK: Great.
ELM: Do it.
FK: All right, so this survey: it’s really mini.
ELM: Before we get into it though, let’s, let’s do our quick business. Cause we started doing business in the beginning or the middle right now. So let’s do it now.
FK: Oh, that’s a good idea. OK! So our business. As you guys probably know, Fansplaining is supported by listeners and readers like you, so the way that you can help us keep making this podcast—as we have done for 122 fortnights at this point—is to donate to our Patreon! Patreon.com/fansplaining. You can also just, you know, tell people about the podcast, you can write in—
ELM: Wait wait wait—
FK: But, if you give us money…
ELM: Yeah! [laughs]
FK: Yeah, don’t worry! I was gettin’ there! I was gettin’ there! I was saying you can, you can give us money, you can tell people about it, you know, you can write in and give us feedback and that helps too, but if you give us money, then you get things in return.
ELM: So first of all, if you give us money right now you’ll be paying for something that happened already, and something we wanna have happen in the future, cause most recently our Patreon earnings were used to pay Allegra Rosenberg—I don’t think we actually had a chance to mention the article—
FK: I’m not sure we did!
ELM: —that we published because it just happened in between, we recorded the last episode very early and we’re recording this one very late. So Allegra Rosenberg, a delight, a wonderful writer, wrote us a few weeks ago a very long interesting piece about Tumblr in the year 2020, which has had a lot of resonance on Tumblr of people talking about how it really captures their experience of what it’s like to be on the platform right now. And so it was thrilling to publish it and we’ll include it in the show notes if you haven’t had a chance to read it yet.
But yeah, we were able to pay her, you know, I wish we could pay her more! I wish we could pay all the writers more. But frankly we were able to pay her more than some outlets I know that [FK laughs] stick a lot of ads on their things! Or charge, charge membership fees. That’s something that’s important to us, even though we don’t actually pull in a massive amount of money from Patreon, we like to use some of that money to pay it back.
So if you have been thinking about pledging, it’s really great. It’s kind of a communal thing, because it helps us just put more writing from different voices out in the world, basically.
FK: Right, and there’s also stuff we’re going to do, like we’re about to start on a series of special episodes. And special episodes are available to people who pledge, I believe it’s $3? A month or more?
ELM: Yes. It is. Why did you say that like it was a question you had?
FK: Well, just cause I was, you know. I was self-doubting. But anyway, we’re about to embark on a series of special episodes about tropes in fic. So if that sounds like your jam, and it should, because tropes are great and we’re great, uh… [laughs]
ELM: Wow!
FK: Then you should probably consider pledging!
ELM: You should. I, I’m not sure how the next few weeks to few months are gonna play out, but I suggested this as a sort of series we could do as special episodes, something that we could draw on our, our isolation… [laughs] We’ll be isolation, right, we like can’t go to the movies and see new things.
FK: Right.
ELM: You still haven’t seen Portrait of a Lady on Fire.
FK: And I don’t know when I will, now!
ELM: And I’ve seen it twice, and I guess I could record a one-person episode about it…it’s a real shame cause I think…
FK: I know, I regret—
ELM: Our listeners, yeah. You should’ve—
FK: I really regret it!
ELM: You should’ve been here for that. You could’ve seen it with me either time!
FK: I couldn’t have cause I was in Norway, right?
ELM: Yeah, you were in Norway.
FK: Anyway.
ELM: But we were thinking, we’re not sure how many of these there are gonna be, but if we are really trapped in our homes for months on end, there might be several! [laughs] Oh.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: So, uh, that’s, again, patreon.com/fansplaining. But, as Flourish was saying before I mocked them…totally cool if you don’t have cash and actually, you know, while I think a lot of people do have cash to spare, I am very cognizant especially as someone who is an independent contractor that there are a lot of people who are going to be very worried about their financial situation right now and the uncertainty of it.
FK: Seriously.
ELM: So absolutely I always stress that, like, if you can’t afford to pledge do not feel guilty in any way.
FK: But yeah, but, but recommend us to your friends for quarantine listening! Right? We’re great quarantine listening.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: We’re gonna make you feel like you have some friends over talking with you about fandom.
ELM: Yes.
FK: Even though you can’t have friends over, because you’re in isolation.
ELM: So true, so true.
FK: OK. All right all right all right. OK. I think that that’s good, and I think that we should now actually talk about the survey.
ELM: OK, so, the background on this is in the fall of 2016, we suffered.
FK: Yes.
ELM: A terrible loss. On November 8th, 2016, the Year of our Lord. And we recorded an episode called “No Escape,” where we talked about how we felt like we were losing our grip on our sanity. [FK laughs] And we saw people saying that they were reading a lot of fic, for comfort, and we didn’t know how to access that part of ourselves that would let us do that.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: I, I couldn’t think about anything else. And I couldn’t stop.
FK: It took us, it took both of us awhile to get back to a place where we could have any fannish engagement. It was even tough to make the podcast, because we were both so distracted by real life.
ELM: Right. So, it was interesting though, because then after that Destination Toast, our friend, who hopefully we’re gonna have on soon to talk about some other stats, crunched some numbers and showed that actually fanwork production—people posting fanworks on the AO3—increased significantly like, year-on-year, I think. Comparing to previous time periods.
November’s a weird time, because of NaNoWriMo, but also because of Thanksgiving, it’s simultaneously a productive and unproductive time I think. But I believe that’s what they were comparing it to and they found that it’d gone up. And contrary to popular perception, at least on my feeds, it wasn’t all fluff! In fact, they found that there was more angst than fluff being produced.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Which was interesting, because people—I am definitely one who sometimes gets slightly resentful of having to read a very fluffy story during a time of personal sadness, and I get frustrated when people suggest that’s the only thing that people wanna do. Which people in my life definitely say things like that, they’re like, “People want fluff because they wanna escape from the sadness of their life!” And it’s like, “That doesn’t work for me in that way, and the suggestion that you don’t have any struggles if that’s not how you engage with fluffy or angsty fic,” you know…
FK: Right.
ELM: Is, is frustrating to me. So that’s some context.
FK: But then, the coronavirus crisis has come around, and some of the same conversations were happening, but also lots of different conversations, like, there were people you know, outside the fic space, in the broader sort of, you know, people talking about culture who were saying that, you know, there was a New York Times article about people watching the movie Contagion, right? Like…
ELM: Actually, side note, I just heard it last night and we should include it in the show notes. Speaking of Contagion, so a few weeks ago there was a really good On The Media interview with an expert, she’s a former scientist and a journalist, talking about—basically predicted everything that happened over the last three weeks, essentially. And it was upsetting then and it’s upsetting to think about in retrospect!
But she mentioned that she had been one of the consultants on the movie Contagion, and so I guess a bunch of people listened to that and then decided to watch it, and so on this past week’s On The Media, Wesley Morris, the critic from the Times, said he watched it after listening to that interview and then had a long conversation with Brooke Gladstone, the host of On The Media, about the experience of watching it. And it was really interesting and I highly recommend it. Cause he’s a very thoughtful critic, and so it was very interesting to hear him.
He compared it to, um, he called it like the disease version of The West Wing, essentially this sort of, um, not these—
FK: The fantasy that people are going to be competent?
ELM: Competency porn, basically, yeah. And like, it was very very interesting to think about. So it’s not to say that people aren’t watching Contagion or reading Emily St. John Mandel’s, uh—“sinjin,” I don’t know if she actually says it?—Station Eleven.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: People are definitely engaging with that.
FK: Well, so we, but that’s a thread that we’ve been seeing, and then there’s another thread where some people were saying that they were like, so distracted and they couldn’t focus on fiction and then other people saying like, you know, just anecdotally, that they were like totally burying their heads in fiction right now. And so we’re interested in all of these conversations, and then it felt like there was—I mean for me, this felt different than the elections. It’s felt much more like I’m like, “Oh yes. It is time for me to go and reread all of my favorite old fics from my favorite old pairings.” You know? Which is a comfort thing.
ELM: Right.
FK: And that’s a different kind of comfort than fluff necessarily. It’s like a comfort of like, “I know what’s gonna happen.”
ELM: Yeah yeah yeah. Totally.
FK: So anyway, as a result of all this, we were talking about it and we were like, “We should do an episode about this,” but instead of just speculating, or talking about our feelings… [laughs]
ELM: Yeah or talking about what we just saw—
FK: Right.
ELM: —on our feeds.
FK: Yeah. Because our feeds, whatever. “We should actually do a survey and see what people self-report about this stuff.” So we did!
ELM: All right. Walk me through some of these 1,263 results.
FK: All right. So our first question was, “In times of crisis, whether personal or shared, do you consume or create fiction as a coping strategy?” A little bit over half of people said “yes,” and then like another 35%-ish said “usually yes, but there are exceptions.”
ELM: Only 10% said “no” or “usually no.”
FK: Yeah.
ELM: So vast, vast majority, 90% of the respondents—
FK: Absolutely.
ELM: —said “yes.”
FK: OK. So that was the first thing, which I wasn’t that surprised at because it seems to me like, you know. I mean. All right. So then the next question was, “Right now, during the COVID-19 crisis, are you consuming/creating fiction as a coping strategy?” Most people said that they were doing that, but not everybody. So—
ELM: Yeah, let’s dig into this a little bit.
FK: So 9% of people said they’d like to be doing that, but it’s not working.
ELM: I was very interested in that number. It’s about 60%, almost two-thirds, said yes, they were using it as a coping strategy. But the majority of those people said they were doing it as much as they normally do. It wasn’t like it was a special extra amount of digging into fiction.
FK: Right. And then an additional 20% said that they were doing it but it wasn’t a coping strategy. They were consuming and creating fiction, but it wasn’t anything to do with this. Right?
ELM: Right, right.
FK: So then, right. So then about 9% of people said they wanted to be doing this but it wasn’t working for whatever reason.
ELM: That’s interesting because I saw a lot of people saying that on my feed, and I think there’s a bit of a self-selection there, because I think that Twitter in the past week has been very bad, and I think it’s been a place where people who feel anxious to see other people being anxious, and…
FK: Get more anxious!
ELM: They release their anxiety into the world.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Also about things that are not related to this, it’s really like, when we were discussing it the other day, I said that this, everyone needs the tattle phone, my favorite thing in the world. [FK laughs] Which is this thing which we learned about on This American Life where these kids at the nursery school would call into a phone that was connected to nothing to tattle on each other.
FK: Right. Which is great.
ELM: It was revolutionary.
FK: We all need it.
ELM: Oh, it’s so good. It’s so delight—what a, I’m gonna listen to that segment again just for some joy, because they with permission from all the parents actually set up a recorder.
FK: Yeah!!
ELM: And they recorded their calls. [both laughing] These kids! But like, I do, there was an element of Twitter, it feels like everyone’s massive tattle phone. Except everyone can see it! And that just feels, this sort of anxiety spiral, basically.
FK: Yeah I’ve genuinely found myself often typing something into Twitter and then being like “Nope! Actually, not only does the world not need to hear that, no one needs to hear that. Delete delete delete,” you know what I mean?
ELM: I’ve done this too! I have truly.
FK: All right, all right.
ELM: I’ve thought long and hard before tweeting anything related to this virus.
FK: Genuinely. I actively treated things that were not related to it cause I was like, “It’s time for something completely different!” OK.
ELM: Fine!
FK: So then there were about 10% of people who said that they were not consuming or creating fiction right now, but only 4% of them said that they were doing it less than usual because of the crisis.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: So that was interesting.
ELM: That’s interesting. Yeah. Very interesting.
FK: Also interestingly, about a third—a little more than a third of people said that they were finding it harder than normal to focus on creating or consuming fiction, because of COVID-19, because of “the rona,” as one of our friends has started calling it.
ELM: It’s not one of our friends. Everyone’s calling it that.
FK: Are they really? I’ve managed to avoid it.
ELM: You are not in the zeitgeist.
FK: I’ve only been infected—
ELM: Everyone has been calling it “the rona,” where have you been, Flourish?
FK: Trying not to hear about the rona in order to manage my anxiety!
ELM: By the time you transcribe it you’re gonna feel so embarrassed that you didn’t know that everyone called it “the rona.”
FK: I don’t know that I will be embarrassed, cause I think it shows that I am being smart and staying off of Twitter.
ELM: [laughing] Oh.
FK: I’m self-isolating. If I’m not on Twitter, I don’t know what the fuck everyone’s doing!
ELM: Yeah, that’s very true.
FK: Anyway, OK.
ELM: All right.
FK: But then the next question was “Are you finding it harder to focus on creating or consuming fiction now, during the COVID-19 crisis, than during other times of crisis?” And only about 20% of people said “yes” to that. So like, there’s like 15% of people who just always find it hard to focus during a time of crisis.
ELM: Right.
FK: And then 20% who are like, yeah, it’s especially bad right now. All right. So that’s all interesting, and I don’t think that that’s like massively surprising, I mean, I don’t know that I would’ve guessed the exact numbers, but I’m not, nothing in there is making me go like, “What?”
But then, we asked “Right now, do you find yourself creating or consuming more happy or light stories than usual?” OK.
ELM: Yeah, OK.
FK: And 40% of people said “it’s really mixed, I’m into all kinds of stories right now.” 23% said that they’re more into happy stories than usual, and 23% said that they always lean towards happy stories, so nothing’s changed. [laughs]
ELM: Right. So it’s about half of people are diggin’ happy stories only right now, right?
FK: Right. And then about 12% of people said either that they always prefer darker stories or they’re gravitating towards darker stories right now.
ELM: Yeah, I was particularly interested in that. It was 7% of people who said they’re gravitating towards darker stories than usual. That, that’s one of the, one of the things that I am most interested in. And I think it connects to some of our later questions, so we don’t need to dig into it too much right now.
FK: All right. So then the next question was, right now, do you find yourself rereading, rewatching, whatever, stories more frequently than usual. 43% of people said “no, not really.” 22% said “yes, because I don’t have the bandwidth to find new ones.” And 34% said “yes, because I know how they’ll turn out.” Which I thought was interesting, cause I’m definitely in that 34%. I’m like, I really just wanna read stories that I know for a fact how they’re gonna turn out, so that means either stories that I know really well or stories that like, have signposted to me so obviously what the ending is gonna be. [laughing]
ELM: Yeah. I find that the subject of rereading within fandom doesn’t get as much attention as I think it should. Because…
FK: I reread fic all the goddamn time.
ELM: I reread fic as well. I mean, I think there are a lot of factors there. I don’t know, it’s so much easier to read, like, fic, than…I don’t know, it’s not like I’ve never reread a novel, but like, if you were like “Oh, read this great long fic one more time,” I’d be like “OK!”
FK: Right.
ELM: But if you were like “Reread this novel you love one more time,” I’d be like “Do I wanna do that even though I loved it?” You know? So.
FK: I feel like a lot of the novels I reread tend to be things that I read and loved as a child and that are, and it’s the same thing, it’s like, comfort reading, right?
ELM: Yeah, yeah.
FK: Whereas like novels that I read and loved as an adult, like, I may have loved them, but did they make me feel warm and fuzzy enough? I don’t know. [laughs]
ELM: I mean I’m not necessarily reading for warm and fuzziness. It’s just also like…
FK: Yeah, warm and fuzzy isn’t really what I mean. I mean…it could be cathartic.
ELM: That’s totally fine if that’s what you’re doing.
FK: No, there’s novels that are really dark that I reread, y’know.
ELM: There’s something about the idea of reading a novel for the first time and really feeling like you’re wholly consumed by it—
FK: Mm-hmm.
ELM: —that I rarely get with fic in the same way. I think because fic kind of sits more in this communal pool?
FK: Mm-hmm?
ELM: So I’ll think of stories from authors I love as part of all of the stories they wrote.
FK: Right.
ELM: Or as a part of a bunch of fics that I like in that fandom that do the same thing, or as a part of the fandom on a whole.
FK: Right.
ELM: And when I think about exceptions to that, I think about, we’ve discussed—I think we’ve discussed on the podcast, you know, the fic “Anarchy in the U.K.”
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Which is a Cherik fic, which I think about all the time! But I also think doesn’t have very much to do—
FK: [laughing] Yeah.
ELM: —with the canon or the rest of the, you know, stories or whatever.
FK: Yeah, totally.
ELM: And I think that’s interesting, the fact that that one stays with me so much, because I think it’s much more like an original novel in that it sinks you into a specific world that doesn’t actually feel very connected to the rest of the fandom. At least for me personally.
FK: No no no, I would agree too. I mean, not that I’m as well-read in the fandom as you are, but like, having read a fair bit—
ELM: Yeah.
FK: —I think that’s true.
ELM: It’s just, I would read that right now. Maybe I should just go read it!
FK: Maybe you should just go read it.
ELM: Sometimes it just, whenever anything happens to the royal family, I think about it. Which is terrible, it’s totally just like…
FK: That’s fine.
ELM: It’s like a, I don’t wanna use a, I was gonna say like a worm crawled into my brain or whatever but that’s an upsetting thing to think about right now. Or in general.
FK: But you put it on the podcast anyway.
ELM: Yep.
FK: Great, great. OK. So, this one I was interested in. So “Right now, do you find yourself more interested in stories about pandemics and societal breakdowns than usual.”
ELM: Because the mainstream media would suggest that we are!
FK: Right. And also, like, interestingly, 32% of people said they were never interested in stories like that. 22% said that normally they liked those stories but right now they hit too close to home.
ELM: Right, so that’s more than half of people do not want to engage in fiction about this in any way.
FK: Right. And then like 28% said they didn’t have any feelings either way. Only 5% said they were more drawn to stories like that than usual. And then the group I’m in, 11% says “stories like that always interest me, including now.”
ELM: Yeah.
FK: If you’re in that group, by the way, and you have not read Connie Willis’s Doomsday Book yet, you should go out and read that. Right now.
ELM: Don’t go out. Don’t go out!
FK: Don’t go out. You should get get it on your library loan, you know, mobile device. Right now.
ELM: [laughing] Yeah.
FK: It’s a great book about plague. It is cathartic.
ELM: Cool.
FK: It is not escapist. It is cathartic. So. You know. Read about the Black Death! It’ll be great.
ELM: Speaking of that distinction…
FK: OK right yes! Those were our next questions. So. “In tough times, do you tend to think of the stories you create or consume as escapism?” Right? 60% of people said yes. 32% said “it depends.” Which means that only 7% were like “nope.”
ELM: Yeah.
FK: Right? I thought that was interesting.
ELM: Why?
FK: I don’t know, I expected people to say that they thought about those stories as escapism, but I didn’t think it would be that many, you know?
ELM: It’s a very fandomy group that took this.
FK: I guess, I guess it was a very fandomy group and fandomy people, I think, would say that. But I was still a little surprised. OK. But then, “In tough times, do you tend to think of the stories you create or consume as cathartic?” 48% said “yes.” 36% said “it depends,” 15% said “no.” And I was sort of surprised by that, too, because I feel like to me, catharsis and escapism are…not totally opposed, but to me they feel a little opposed!
ELM: I mean, we would have to pull the actual data to see how those overlapped.
FK: Yeah, and it might be interesting to do that. In fact I think that we might have some, we might have some of that by the time this comes out.
ELM: We don’t wanna promise that before it’s confirmed, but we may have a familiar face.
FK: Doin’ some data analysis.
ELM: Yeah. Well, maybe you don’t know their face. A familiar name.
FK: There we go.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: But yeah, I would be interested in that because to me, like, yeah, talking about this distinction, to me a story like Doomsday Book is cathartic, it is the Black Death, not everyone dies but a lot of people die. Right? And like, at the end…
ELM: In a super gross way.
FK: Right. And at the end, like, I am, you know, weeping and completely wrung out, and it’s a whole thing, right?
ELM: Yeah.
FK: Versus like an escapist story which to me would be like, rereading Lord of the Rings for the bajillionth time, which you know, not that there’s not catharsis within it, but to me I’m like, that’s like “Oh, I’m gonna immerse myself in this other world where like, you know, at the end everything is fine and the world is returned to,” I don’t know.
ELM: OK, so for you “escapism” involves aa happy ending.
FK: Yeah, pretty much, for me.
ELM: Whereas “cathartic” might be like a—
FK: Right.
ELM: —resolution, and there’s been a lot of pain along the way.
FK: Right. And, and by the way, also like, I think that I could read Lord of the Rings and see it as cathartic, because I think that if I were in certain mindsets I would be like, “Oh, the elves passing away,” and like, be focused on those aspects. Do you see what I mean? Like so it might be about—
ELM: Spoiler, spoiler.
FK: —what aspects you’re focused on.
ELM: Wow.
FK: There are no spoilers for The Lord of the Rings at this point in time. [ELM laughs] That is my final statement.
ELM: Don’t tell me what happens to Tom Bombadil.
FK: No one knows, so that’s fine! [ELM laughs] [singing] Hey dol merry dol…
ELM: That could be your handwashing song. You’d be there for awhile if you did some of those songs.
FK: Oh, I’m so delighted. That’s gonna be my handwashing song. But you see what I mean, right? One of them is like a happy resolution and the other one is like a, you know. Not-happy resolution [laughing] maybe. Or like partially happy, but bittersweet. Like, you know.
ELM: Right.
FK: The emotion that I get out of it being like, weeping.
ELM: It’s interesting. It’s hard for me to answer these questions in a broad way. And I know this is an issue for some people in general because we tried to include as much “it depends” as possible. You know, it depends on what the crisis is, right?
FK: Completely.
ELM: You know, it’s interesting, I think—have we talked about this on the podcast?—it’s definitely something that I’ve talked about before, but like, I think we may have? I, I’m just gonna say it anyway. This is gonna be a grim, a grim turn of things, but so like, my best friend from college was killed in a car accident about a year after I graduated, which I think I’ve mentioned on the podcast. And I remember the day afterwards, and it still was in like a total shock and like, very very weird, and anyone who’s had this kind of experience knows how weird it is. I listened to the This American Life from immediately after 9/11. And the This American Life from immediately after 9/11 was about, one of the segments was about the sinking of the General Slocum.
FK: Oh, yeah!
ELM: Which was the worst loss of life in New York City prior to 9/11, which was when more than 1,000 mostly-German immigrants were on a pleasure cruise in the East River and it caught fire and sunk and they all died.
FK: Yeah, and it was, it was like mostly women and children, it was like families, because it was a church outing. This was in my neighborhood, and it basically meant that all of the German people who lived in the neighborhood left. Because…
ELM: Yeah, it was like the end of the German community—
FK: Everyone lost their family.
ELM: —in New York City, basically. This was in the 1890s, I wanna say.
FK: Yeah, no one could bear to stay because everyone knew—everyone had lost someone in their family. At least one. Some of them had lost their entire family.
ELM: And so it was very interesting to have a very, very personal tragedy that I was trying to process and listening to something that was being made while people were trying to process a tragedy that was simultaneously very personal and also massive, being 9/11. And their instinct had been to contextualize it by thinking about a tragedy that had, it inherently shaped the city in which they…actually they weren’t living in New York in the time and neither was I. Maybe in ways that most New Yorkers don’t have any knowledge of, right?
FK: Yeah, I had never heard of it before I moved—
ELM: But it was in the fabric of the city.
FK: Yeah. I had never heard of it before I moved to this neighborhood and then I was like “What’s this?”
ELM: I mean that’s very much New York’s way, to constantly be paving and building over its own history. That’s one of the things I find interesting about it as a place. But it was really really interesting. But when I think about that, it’s like, those levels of it…all of those things were very, very different, and the only thing they had in common was like sadness and shock and death. [laughing] You know? The circumstances for all those were very different, my relationship with them was different, and I found it…I guess I actually found it escapist. Right? And that’s kind of, maybe that’s a little perverse. Hearing about the tragedy of people that lived more than a century ago.
FK: No, that makes sense, because it’s not your tragedy.
ELM: Right!
FK: It’s a different tragedy!
ELM: It is, it’s just very weird to—it’s weird to think about those levels and like, what escapist means. And I, I see people asserting that escapism is, is like, it must be a romcom or it must be super-fluffy. It must be curtain fic or domestic or whatever. And I really, I don’t, I don’t relate to that at all. And I get a little, I mean, I say I get frustrated when people assert that that’s the only way to do it, because I’m not the only person on Earth who does it this way, you know?
FK: No, absolutely. But that also makes sense because it’s like, it’s not the same thing as catharsis either, because like the reason that I—you know, would like reread Doomsday Book is that at the end when I’m crying I’m like, crying about what’s happening in the story and I’m crying about what’s happening in my life. Right?
ELM: Yeah.
FK: I’m crying about both those things. But like, you could totally read a story like that and not have that cathartic release at the end of it, and instead be like, engaging on a different emotional level with what happened. You know?
ELM: Totally, right. Yeah.
FK: And that could be escapism.
ELM: Especially if you’re in the middle of a crisis, I think it’s very hard to find catharsis. Like, that is very much a—that’s something that you need a little bit of distance for. I mean, you could find the story cathartic.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: But it’s very hard to process in real time. If we’re talking about this from a reading, a writing perspective, as opposed to a reading perspective…
FK: Right, right right.
ELM: I think it’s really really hard. We’ll talk about that distinction in a little bit, the writing vs. reading.
FK: We should, we should keep going, because I think that…
ELM: Yeah, let’s do it. Let’s do it.
FK: We need to get through, it was a mini-survey and yet there’s a lot of meat in it.
ELM: Yeah. No. I’m a vegetarian.
FK: There’s a lot of…potatoes in it.
ELM: Starchy!
FK: OK. So, the next question was “In tough times, what kinds of experiences do you want to get out of creating or consuming stories?” And you know, it’s like, pick as many as you want. They could contradict each other. And there’s too many of these to go through all of them individually, but I wanted to note a couple of things, which is that the most common response—78% of people said this—was “I want to totally forget about myself as a person and lose myself in the story.”
And then, you know, very close there were, there were sort of three clustered at the top. With 76%, people said “I want to see people overcoming adversity.” And then also 76% of people said “I want to feel immersed in a world that’s nothing like my own reality.”
ELM: Mm-hmm.
FK: And I thought that was interesting, because we had also asked “I want to see people,” you know, “Do you want to see people suffering or failing to overcome adversity?” And only 19% of people said that. That was the one that had the least number of people responding.
ELM: Unpopular.
FK: But with regard to sort of immersion in a world, we also asked people specifically so like, one was like, everyone—or not everyone. But 76.9% of people said they wanted to feel immersed in a world that wasn’t like their own reality. Only 51% said “I want to feel immersed in a world with relatively small conflicts, not big ones.” And then only 31% of people said “I want to feel immersed in a world with huge, high-stakes conflicts.” Which was interesting. I was like—cause I sort of expected, I don’t know what I expected. I thought that maybe more people would say that they were into small conflicts? You know? Like, the schmoop plateau sort of concept.
ELM: Yeah. I mean, the problem with some of these options is I think some people don’t actually know how to analyze the kinds of things that they want.
FK: Right, fair enough.
ELM: You know, like, that’s tricky, and you start to divide like—what are high stakes, what are low stakes? You know? Like, I can articulate that—
FK: Is a break-up high stakes? A break-up could be high stakes, but it also could be low stakes, compared to what?
ELM: Right, right.
FK: Like in my own life, a break-up of a relationship would be super high stakes. But as compared to like, the death of the universe…
ELM: Yeah.
FK: Very little!
ELM: Right.
FK: All right, OK.
ELM: It’s interesting, but I, one thing I did find interesting about these results—can you read the first, I wanna say, version of my…
FK: Yeah. So the very very first one was “I want to see a version of my current situation reflected back at me,” and only 24% of people said that.
ELM: What was the one beneath that?
FK: “I want to see a much more heightened or extreme version of my current situation reflected back at me.” And again, 23% of people.
ELM: Right. So those, those are some of the least popular ones. People, I think that aligns with the, also people saying like, “Normally I like stories like that, but right now they hit too close to home.” I think that, this is not a massive sample size, it’s 1000+ people, but it is interesting, the suggestion that people really wanna see this…I understand wanting to see Contagion in the way of it being competency porn, right?
FK: Right. But that’s also to do with the fact that it’s reassuring, right? It’s competency porn!
ELM: But that, see, but like, for me, that brings me back to like, what we were just talking about! Like, I was thinking about this too, like: do I wanna watch Contagion right now? I don’t think I could watch The West Wing right now for multiple reasons.
FK: Yeah, no.
ELM: But one of them being the fantasy of a competent government and people who just want—
FK: Right?
ELM: —to do the right thing, and I actually, so, in the end of 2016, so I saw Hamilton. Which I hadn’t listened to beforehand, I resisted aggressively. And I’m glad I didn’t.
FK: I remember this stage of your life.
ELM: Aggressive resistance. But I’m glad they did, because then I got to experience it fresh. But I saw it in the last week of Obama’s presidency. Obviously the Founding Fathers were very fraught and it’s a complicated topic and I’m not gonna sit there and say they were the greatest people in the history of the earth, and the institutions they created are not deeply flawed, but like, they are institutions! And I’m a big believer in reforming institutions. [laughs] Incremental change! And it was very hard to watch Hamilton at that moment, and I went home and tried to watch the John Adams miniseries, which is something I love. And I couldn’t watch that either.
FK: Wow.
ELM: Cause I was just thinking, like, “They all set this up, and you just set it on fire.”
FK: Yeah.
ELM: You know? And there was nothing escapist about it and there was nothing comforting, and there wasn’t, it wasn’t anything, any variation on, you know, 18th century competency porn of seeing a bunch of people who really cared and gave a fuck about what a government should be. Just made me upset and empty and sad. You know?
So it’s like, I don’t know. I feel slightly validated by the fact that so few people in this survey said that they wanted to see the version of what’s going on right now, but like, in a way that resolves. Because maybe a lot of people are just saying “Oh, I just don’t want to engage with that,” but maybe there are people who are like me, who are like, “That makes me feel worse! Because,” [laughs] “we’re being run by, by people who are incompetent grifters!” You know? Like…
FK: Right.
ELM: Sorry. [laughs]
FK: No no no, absolutely! I totally, I totally feel you.
ELM: You know what I mean?
FK: And that’s why I prefer stories in which everyone dies to stories that are… [ELM laughing] to stories that are resolved well. It’s OK. At this point in the survey, we asked people if they read fanfic. And if you read fanfic, then you moved on to some fanfic-specific questions. So…
ELM: So…
FK: Almost everybody did, so great.
ELM: Surprise, surprise. 94.4% of our readers…after we had had it out for like 10 minutes and like 100 people took it it was literally like one person said they did not read fanfic. It was like, good. Great!
FK: So all right. So the first question of this was, “During times of crisis, do you find yourself reading or writing fic about the crisis at hand, or analogous things, like a post-apocalyptic scenario during a pandemic or an oppressive political regime after an election.” 60% of people said “no,” 33% said “sometimes,” 7% said “yes.” So. I guess I wasn’t totally surprised about that, after sort of all the other results, but it was interesting. I think that, that that was more to set up, though, for the next question.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: And the next question was, “During times of crisis, do you find yourself interested in fics that are significantly lower-stakes than the original source, eg ‘I’d read a Walking Dead high school AU, but not a straight-up canon Walking Dead fic.’” And only 33% of people said “no.” 33% said “yes,” and basically 33%—I mean a third—said “sometimes.” So I thought that was really interesting.
ELM: Right.
FK: I guess it doesn’t surprise me, again, you know?
ELM: Yeah, I think that the answers on the first one are interesting to me because—so part of the reason we started thinking about this was someone was like, “Yes of course the fanfiction people have started writing about coronavirus.” [FK laughs] And I was just thinking like, OK. I’m sure a couple people are gonna write that. But they, to just be like “Oh, look, the fanfiction people are writing about it,” I, I think kind of misunderstands the way that fandom engages with really topical stuff.
FK: And, and in fact, right, we asked people “Have you read any fic specifically about coronavirus.”
ELM: Right.
FK: Not wrote, because the question of whether people wrote it or not is, I don’t find that very interesting. People write lots of stuff.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: But have they read it? And only 1.5% of people had read any. And out of that—1.4 actually. Out of that, twelve of those people, 1%, said “yes, and I don’t regret it,” and five—that’s 0.4% of our total sample—said “yes, and I regret it.” [laughing] So, you know, there you go.
ELM: Right.
FK: But on that one, a lot of people said they didn’t have any interest. Like, 33% of people said they didn’t have any interest in that kind of story.
ELM: We gave them slightly more granular choices on this one, so I thought it was interesting, and the most interesting thing for me was “no, and I really don’t like fic that engages directly with real world events that way,” which was almost 30% of people said that.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Like, I would never, you know. We had 20, 20% saying “I would read something that engages with that, after some time passes,” but it’s clear if they would engage with it, they don’t really want to read it right now.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: But we had an ask in a recent AMA episode, within the last six months, talking about real world events in fic, and I think we both had a lot of ambivalence about that.
FK: Yeah, and you know it was interesting because we also got someone commenting after we put out the survey who said, um, “I’ve definitely felt a sudden urge to read fics dealing with this topic (or fics loosely inspired by it), yet I also feel guilty that this would be me trivializing a real crisis and would be viewed as inappropriate by some.”
ELM: Yeah, I think that’s fair! I think it really depends on the subject as well.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Because disease and actual real diseases where people are dying…you know, I have a lot of trouble with, I’ve read, I was just tweeting about my, I’ve talked about this on the podcast. My high school, my big high school project where I did it on the literature of disease and plague.
FK: Right.
ELM: And it mostly focused on art that people were making in the late ’90s about the AIDS crisis. AIDS is one of those topics, I’ve read a lot of art about AIDS, like, you know, I’ve read and seen, consumed a lot of art, people who lived through it and watched their friends die from it, when you have fanfiction characters, you know, living through the AIDS crisis…
FK: Yeah.
ELM: In the ’80s? That’s a big no for me. I would nope out of that.
FK: Right, but when, but when it happens in The Hours, that might be OK.
ELM: Those were original characters!
FK: Well they are original characters, but they also are sort of AU versions of the Mrs. Dalloway characters.
ELM: Yeah. And that’s, that’s interesting.
FK: Yeah. I just had to throw that in there because I don’t know that we’ve ever talked about that. [laughs]
ELM: Yeah, and it’s interesting and I, I mean, I haven’t read The Hours since high school. Um…
FK: Maybe we should reread it for a special episode sometime.
ELM: I actually don’t know if I still have my copy. Looking over my shelf. I wonder where it went!
FK: Maybe you should borrow it from Libby, the library app.
ELM: Maybe. I don’t really want to read The Hours right now.
FK: You don’t have to reread The Hours right now. [laughing] Anyway.
ELM: I’d rather read Mrs. Dalloway right now.
FK: Mm, well.
ELM: You’re right, I don’t know. I think it’s also about, it depends on what fandom I’m in.
FK: Yeah, totally.
ELM: You know? And I say this as someone who is writing fic in a fandom where the source material directly engages with the freakin’ Holocaust! You know? Like, shows it! On, and the famous opening shots, right?
FK: Yeah, totally.
ELM: Oh, I’m OK with that? You know? We draw these lines, like, I don’t know. It’s really, it’s really complicated.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And obviously if I ever felt like anyone was trivializing that in a fic, I would immediately nope out. If I felt like it was offensive, I might say something. But if I felt like it was just not being treated as seriously as it should, I just wouldn’t read it.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: But for the most part it’s, it’s treated very seriously. As you can imagine.
FK: Yeah!
ELM: So…but it still is, even writing about it, is that inherently trivializing it? If it’s not something that you had experience with?
FK: Yeah. I mean, but then there’s also the question of like, you know, what part of coronavirus are you writing, you know what I mean? What part are you writing about, like, what do you mean by “having experience of it” or not having experience of it, right? Like—obviously it’s not the same thing to be like, in self-isolation and like, not have it or know anyone who has it and basically not be affected by it except like, seeing panic, you know? As opposed to like, being in a hospital or being, you know, a worker, being a doctor or a nurse or someone who’s trying to care for it, right? Obviously there’s like, that, you know, rings of effect.
We’ve talked about this a lot in other episodes also, and I think it’s a complicated question. I am really hesitant to say, like, “Don’t write that.” And I certainly think that I’m in the category of, I might be interested in reading it? Depending on the fandom? I don’t know. I’m not sure I’m ready for it yet, though.
ELM: I think that… [sighs] I kind of need that level of distance. I would…
FK: Yeah.
ELM: In general. Like, even 10 years from now…
FK: I don’t think I could write it, you know what I mean? Like…I definitely don’t think I could write it.
ELM: No, maybe like, I’m writing a contemporary fic right now and trying to decide exactly when in history to put it, and I’m like, actually, you know, I think it’s better if, if, if you don’t…if it’s not too directly on-the-nose.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Right? So like, if I were to wanna engage with this in any way, I don’t think it would be like, “the coronavirus of 2020!” You know? You say, like, “there was an epidemic and everyone had to self-quarantine,” and then, then, then what? You know? Like, but do we need the like, the blow-by-blow, the tick tock, they’re all sitting around watching Trump giving a press conference—
FK: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
ELM: —on this Friday afternoon or whatever? I don’t, I don’t know if those details actually bring very much to a work of fiction in general, let alone fanfiction, whereas, you know, I’m thinking a lot about the stuff that I read for my plague research project. And reading The Plague, by Camus…right? It’s not, it’s meant to be any, you know. It’s meant to be anything, right. It’s any time a disease comes to a place. Right? And how they treat outsiders and how they treat people who they were already treating slightly poorly, and they start treating much more poorly, right? And not needing the specifics of the exact time or place to understand there’s a universality to it.
FK: Right.
ELM: And I think that sometimes when we talk about fanfiction, these couple fics are engaging with this immediate current event—
FK: Right.
ELM: —it, it kind of obscures the fact that most fiction isn’t that precise, and it’s more trying to get at broader feelings and themes. And maybe fictionalizing some of the specifics.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: In order to not make it feel like a direct one-to-one, cause there’s some power, there’s power in that space, basically.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Do you agree?
FK: I agree. Also, that was the, that was the last question in the survey. [ELM laughs] So, I do wanna mention though that there were some people who—most of our surveys there’s like comment areas, and we did not leave one this time. But people gave us their comments anyway! And…
ELM: Read, read me the long comment that we got. Someone sent us a really long, thoughtful comment on our website.
FK: Yeah, there was a really long thoughtful one. So OK, this one was from an anonymous person.
“I love the podcast and have been a long time listener.” Thank you!
“I recently took your survey on fan practices in times of crisis. I know that you framed the survey around COVID-19 (which really hasn’t affected me as a relatively healthy young person in rural America, though I feel deep empathy for those who have died and had their lives disrupted so totally) but it made me think about times when I was in a personal crisis, like after the 2016 presidential election, when I fell into a well of true crime.
“While I am well aware of the problems with true crime (as a young white woman, I know I am part of the problem) I think that at that time I was fine with the dark themes inherent in the crimes I was learning about because I wanted stories that could be solved, with a bad guy going away in the end. (I am also well aware of the problems saying that, as it’s never just a simple as putting the bad man behind bars, but rather there are issues of policing, incarceration, systematic corruption and society-wide inequality that are more complex, which go unaddressed and unsolved in these simple narratives that take up 45-minute true crime podcasts).
“And in a more recent personal crisis over a romantic relationship that was souring, I turned to fanfic. I was reading all different kinds of stories, not always fluffy, some very dark, but always complete. I found that I didn’t have the capacity to read something that wasn’t done. I needed to know there was an ending even if it wasn’t a happy one. I’m sure it has a similar root as my desire to see the ‘bad guys’ in prison at the end of the true-crime podcast. In a time of instability, I go looking for escape in things that are simpler, not in their themes, but in their certainty.”
I feel you, nonny.
ELM: Yeah that’s great.
FK: Yeah, totally, they put how I feel into words. Great.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: Love it. We also had a bunch of people who said that they have trouble writing but they don’t have trouble reading right now. There were some people who said that they like giving comfort to other people through storytelling, so they’re trying to find time to write because they want to do what they can to make other people feel good, which I thought was cool.
ELM: Yeah, we had a bunch of people talking about how, I mean, and as I said in the clarifications on this, like, we initially thought about using words like “engaging with fictional worlds” instead of “reading/writing,” which is broader than reading and writing, you know.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: That might be like cosplay or whatever. And I was just like, just don’t get too bogged down in it. Just think about engaging in fictional worlds. But I understand that it might be different…
FK: Yeah. Well, it is different, you know, whether you write or read. For sure. It’s just, you know, this is a mini-survey! Similarly, like, we didn’t ask people where in the world they were, even though that would be really interesting to know, because it opens a huge can of worms, right? Like, because obviously like, especially if you’re answering questions that were specifically about the current crisis—which not all the questions were—but, huge difference depending on what country you live in or, like, what your socioeconomic status is! Or all this stuff.
ELM: Absolutely, and even, even for people who are in countries that are affected, it’s, you know, it is upsetting and interesting to think about how much things change from day to day. So when I think about people in China who have been quarantined for, you know, six weeks or whatever…
FK: Yeah.
ELM: It’s very weird. It’s just weird to think about. It’s weird to think about these time scales. I have a friend in Seattle and we’ve been texting and she’s been talking about, she’s like “I think we’re a week ahead of you,” and I’m like, God. It’s just so weird to think that like you can see the things happening in advance…
FK: Yeah, completely.
ELM: And you’re just like, waiting for it to happen.
FK: One of my friends has actually been tested and has it in Seattle and it’s bizarre. Like, watching what’s going on with them! Cause it’s like…OK…
ELM: They’re doing OK?
FK: Yeah, they’re, they’re all right. They have a pregnant wife and a small child, and that’s complicated.
ELM: Cool.
FK: But.
ELM: Great.
FK: But it seems like everything’s all right so far, so, you know.
ELM: That’s good.
FK: Fingers crossed. But, you know, it’s weird, it’s like, interesting and scary to hear about how they’re dealing with it and like…you know, it seems like it’s a mild case but what’s the deal, you know?
ELM: Right, right. But just, it’s the kind of idea of the waiting of it, or the thinking of like, if you’re in a different part of the world, particularly if you’re in China or Italy, that you might be in this specific spot, you know? And so it’s like, yeah, this is obviously, couldn’t capture any of that.
FK: But there’s also so much. There’s so much, right? Like, I know people here who like, they’re separated from—I know at least three people who are separated from their parents who are currently dying and cannot visit them. And one of whom’s parent died and there will be no funeral because of this. You know? So like it’s not…
ELM: Yeah.
FK: It’s like, how can you account for that too, right? There’s so much. And I would love to be able to account for that, but you know, the map is not the territory and we had to make choices about what kinds of questions were gonna be in this survey, so.
ELM: Right, right. So. And also, like, yeah, most of the survey is not meant to be about this particular crisis at this moment.
FK: Right, it’s more about sort of broad…
ELM: Even if there’s interesting ways to engage with that. So. But yeah, no, I just wanted to go back to writing for a second, because I think it is interesting. Tying it back to our last episode, and talking about productive hobbies, I don’t know how you felt the last week, but I felt like I couldn’t do any work and very guilty over that fact.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Reminded me a lot of the week after the election, actually, which wound up screwing me over because as a contractor, freelancer, at that point I wound up just very behind on work for multiple clients, and I just like, kinda ruined the month of December for me in terms of having to make up for those two weeks where I was just staring blindly at my screen.
FK: I remember that, I remember the entire process of that.
ELM: Yes.
FK: And also how pissy you were by the end of the month of December, where you were like…
ELM: Real mad, not happy!
FK: Like, ruined everything.
ELM: So, um, having that recent experience and not wanting to repeat that…but I think that it’s, it’s a little depressing the guilt that some people have been, I’ve been seeing about not being able to write something like fic, which really is meant to be voluntary, and I know people wanna feel like they can contribute and put things into the, their various fandom communities, to help, but it is also OK to just kind of sit with things. I mean like, for me, I have been writing a lot this past week, that’s one thing I’ve been able to do because I felt like it’s very methodical, and I’ll be like “I need to focus on this right now,” this, this slightly different world, you know? And that’s, maybe even a little easier for me than reading. Where I don’t have to focus this hard, actually.
FK: Totally.
ELM: You know? So it’s easier for me to get distracted when I’m reading, whereas when I’m writing, I’m like, if I’m actually writing I’m actually paying attention to the words that I’m making you all say right now. You know? And that’s been, that’s been weird for me, because that’s not usually my instinct, but it’s been really really helpful to just kind of force myself to do it.
FK: Yeah, totally.
ELM: So…but I just don’t think anyone should feel any guilt, especially over fanworks. Because it is a totally voluntary thing, and…
FK: Right.
ELM: Totally possible we’re gonna have weeks if not months of, of very minimal social contacts! So that…
FK: Right! So on that note, I think that we should possibly round out this episode by reminding people of what they probably should be doing, according to our understanding as of this moment. Which is…
ELM: Oh! Social distancing!
FK: And washing your hands…
ELM: OK, no. Let’s talk about social distancing for one second. I’m sure that all of my feelings about social distancing will change even more within the next three days when this episode comes out. Stop going places!
FK: Yeah!
ELM: Like, just stop!! I’m mad! I’m mad. Apparently a lot of the restaurants in New York were busy last night!
FK: It shouldn’t be, that was dumb! Why would you do that?
ELM: What the fuck, what the fuck, why are you doing this?
FK: Don’t do it!
ELM: I had a boring night in my house! And I’m mad at everyone who went out!
FK: Yeah! I did too!
ELM: You’re, you’re endangering the health and potentially lives of everyone who—I know, the, the hard thing is, here’s what is hard: people who live in large cities in particular, and New York I can definitely say, I’m sure people in Seattle have this as well. I do have concern for the local businesses in my neighborhood.
FK: Absolutely.
ELM: And especially in New York, at a time where the last few years we’ve seen the end of the 9/11 leases and—
FK: Oh my God yeah.
ELM: —we’ve seen a massive amount of things closing because these commercial leases are expiring and they’re jacking up the rents.
FK: Some of them are doing take-out.
ELM: That’s true.
FK: A lot of places are doing, I mean, which, the question is it a great idea—
ELM: You’re still, I mean the thing is…
FK: You’re still going out but it’s different than like, being in a bar and breathing on people.
ELM: Right, absolutely. The thing is, even with take-out, though, I feel bad for everyone having worked in the service industry, I feel bad for everyone who has to work there right now, and I just feel like anything you get from a restaurant means people there have to be there at work cooking it instead of self-isolating themselves.
FK: But they also maybe need the money.
ELM: Right. So then, you’re like, I don’t know what to do, right? I don’t want people to…
FK: And I don’t know what to do, but I do know that the answer is not to go stand in a busy bar or restaurant.
ELM: OK, all right, so we know what to do about that: don’t go to a bar.
FK: Don’t do that.
ELM: Don’t go to a restaurant.
FK: Stay in. Stay away from other people. Like, you can go out for a walk, but like, stay away from people when you do. Like, don’t stand right next to someone at the crosswalk and breathe in their face like someone tried to do with me.
ELM: Hopefully, hopefully by the time this comes out, this will be widely spread, but the last few days people have been like, “I don’t know what to do, I can’t even leave the house!”
FK: You can leave the house, it’s fine.
ELM: People who do not have mobility issues. And I was just like, “You are allowed to step outside your house!”
FK: Just don’t go cough on people!
ELM: Don’t make out with your neighbors, yeah!
FK: Three feet between you, leave space for the Holy Spirit. [both laugh] Sorry, I had to.
ELM: Don’t make out with the Holy Spirit…you’re not even Catholic! [laughing]
FK: Anyway.
ELM: Yeah. All right, absolutely, and like, you know, people are, you can still go to grocery stores if you need to buy supplies! I think that people panicking and rushing and hoarding and having like 17,000 people being in the same grocery store at once: not helping. So…
FK: No, I mean, I think that it’s probably good if you like, encounter a grocery store that’s not full of people, to get more supplies than you normally would, and then don’t go back for a long time! Because that way you’re staying in your house, which is good. Yeah. We have a lot of opinions about this.
ELM: They’re not opinions, they’re just us repeating the advice of experts.
FK: Well that’s true too. Also, cover your nose and mouth with a tissue. Wash your hands when you get into places. Don’t touch things. Touching things is how you get the rona. [ELM laughs] Or transmit it to someone else, which is really what you should be concerned about, because obviously not everyone is in a high-risk group, but lots of people are, and…
ELM: Unless you are in a high-risk group, and then you should be concerned about it for yourself.
FK: Well obviously yes. But think about other people!
ELM: Yes.
FK: OK, most people who listen to this podcast I think probably have been on Twitter and are part of the same anxiety spiral as we are, so they probably know these things. But it’s worth saying again.
ELM: [laughing] Oh, you never know. I, you know, I know from our feedback we get on our newsletter, there’s plenty of people who are not on Twitter or Tumblr who subscribe to the newsletter and they’re like “I don’t see these things!” I mean, you know.
FK: Well and also don’t think of it, just because it’s not in your area yet doesn’t mean it’s not in your area, because as we know, there’s not very much testing, it’s hard to tell, you can be transmitting the virus for two weeks before you even know it, right, before you even know you’re sick.
ELM: But if you live here with us, in the greatest city in the world, to quote Hamilton, a show I saw: it’s here. It’s really really here.
FK: Right, so…
ELM: It’s like, it’s like everywhere. You know how many cases we’re gonna have by the time this comes out?
FK: A lot. We’re gonna have a lot. We already have a lot. We’re gonna have more.
ELM: It’s so large here. And so dirty. And so close. Sorry! Just makin’ me anxious!
FK: I’m gonna go wash my hands now a lot. [ELM laughing] I’m gonna go, I’m gonna hang up the phone right now, I’m gonna say goodbye to you.
ELM: No no no no no, we didn’t tell people how to contact us, we gotta…
FK: OK, if you’re practicing social distancing but you wanna talk to somebody, somebody can be us. You can call us at 1-401-526-F-A-N-S, that’s 1-401-526-FANS. And I’m not even gonna tell you any of the other ways to contact us because you probably need to talk to a human who is not your significant other—
ELM: No no no no no no, no no no no no no no.
FK: Eh, I think it’s healthy to talk to a human that’s not your cat!
ELM: If you wanna talk to a human, make a Skype date with one of your friends. Because we are not the tattle phone and I do not want people to call us and give us very very long messages. If you have a comment that relates to these topics, definitely call us and leave us a voice mail. We love them. But you are otherwise encouraged to schedule Skype dates with your friends, pour yourselves glasses of wine…
FK: But if you don’t wanna talk on the phone, if you don’t wanna use your voice, you can always send us an email: fansplaining at gmail dot com. You can send us a Tumblr message, our ask box is open and anon is on, we’re fansplaining there. You can send us a Twitter message. Whatever. The world’s your oyster.
ELM: From within your house.
FK: From within your house. Your house is an oyster and you are the pearl in it.
ELM: But if you can take a walk, take a walk. Because otherwise you’re gonna lose your mind.
FK: Oysters open up. In the sea.
ELM: OK.
FK: This is a bad metaphor. I think that, I think this is the end of this metaphor.
ELM: I’m not, I’m not sure where you’re going with this, but…
FK: I don’t know where I am either, but I like thinking about the oysters.
ELM: You’re slowly opening your hand in a clam shape.
FK: Like an oyster! [laughing] All right. What, is there anything else? Should we talk about anything else?
ELM: No, I think that’s it. I’m gonna leave my house right now and I’m gonna keep a respectful distance with my neighbors, who I would not like to infect or be infected by!
FK: Great, sounds sensible.
ELM: OK, excited to talk to you again in two weeks when everything has completely changed.
FK: All right, talk to you then.
ELM: K bye!
FK: Bye!
[Outro music, thank-yous and credits]