Episode 123: Reread, Rewatch, Replay
In Episode 123, “Reread, Rewatch, Replay,” Elizabeth and Flourish think about that most ubiquitous of comfort activities—returning to old favorite books, shows, films, games, and fics. Topics covered include the specific pleasures of re-experiencing narratives, how repeat consumption is an inherent part of fan culture, the different things people seek out when rereading fic, and how moments of collective trauma influence art and culture.
Show Notes
[00:00:00] As always, our intro music is “Awel” by stefsax, used under a CC BY 3.0 license. Our cover image is by Chris Marquardt, used under a CC BY-SA 2.0 license.
[00:05:45]
[00:06:22] The Iditapod; some absolutely stinking adorable dog pics.
[00:11:27] Flourish is wrong. It’s nine flags over Nacogdoches, not ten.
[00:13:31] Our last episode was #122, “Wash Your Hands and Read Some Fic.”
[00:15:58] Slight Awakenings corrections: it’s set in 1969, and it’s based on Oliver Sacks’s 1973 memoir of the same name. Watch the trailer to get the glorious “1990 movie trailer” vibes.
[00:20:49]
[00:24:51] Unbelievable is based on “An Unbelievable Story of Rape,” by Ken Armstrong and T. Christian Miller, a collaboration between the Marshall Project and ProPublica. It was then covered in a This American Life episode called “Anatomy of Doubt.”
[00:29:42] Our interstitial music here and at the end of the episode is “Delayed Reaction” by Lee Rosevere, used under a CC-BY 3.0 license.
[00:30:56] Our most recent special episode, #15, is “Tropefest: Trapped Together.”
[00:44:04] The n+1 essay is “Missing Time,” by Marissa Brostoff.
[00:51:81]
[00:52:57] Rec Center #121 is where they covered Fic Journal of the Plague Year and Lock Down Fest.
[01:02:15] Flourish is talking about the UnaCast “Social Distancing Scoreboard.”
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 #123, “Reread, Rewatch, Replay.”
FK: Guess what it’s about!
ELM: Everything new.
FK: [laughs] Oh man. Yeah. Nothing, nothing that feels new is comfortable for me at the moment.
ELM: Nope!
FK: So we’re not talking about that.
ELM: Nope. So, so. Things are not great here.
FK: No.
ELM: Because time is moving in a nonsense way, I think it’s helpful once again to say when we’re recording this, so this is Saturday, March 28th.
FK: We are both living in New York City.
ELM: In the city of New York. And so this will be coming out in a few days, presuming things will be worse then, and if you listen to this a few days after that, even worse.
FK: Yeah. So. However, we should say up front that we’re both fine as of March 28th, so, you know, don’t worry.
ELM: I wrote this in the newsletter yesterday, and then I was like, “Wow, if something happens, I’m gonna, it’s gonna look,” you know.
FK: We’ve also both been self-isolating for like, over two weeks now. So.
ELM: Yeah. Almost three weeks in fact. So that’s pretty cool.
FK: Right.
ELM: Goin’ to the grocery store yesterday took me three hours. And I know all over the country it’s taking people a long time, but it’s really different when it’s apparently everywhere here!
FK: Yeah.
ELM: So that was something.
FK: Yeah, I’ve only avoided that by going to the grocery store at only five o’clock in the morning.
ELM: I went at 9:30 in the morning on a weekday.
FK: Yeah, no, I know, but everybody’s staying home.
ELM: I thought that would be a prime time because a lot of people would be watching their kids or working.
FK: Yeah, but still.
ELM: I thought with my flexible schedule I could go, and I was wrong.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Though, I will say it was very sweet, so like these firefighters came in and they didn’t realize there was a huge line, and so they like went to go just pay for their things, and everyone was like “Hey!” And then they were like “OH! So, so sorry!” And then they went to the back of the line. And the people in front were like, “No no no. No. You, it’s fine.”
FK: [laughing] You’re firefighters, you should go to the front!
ELM: Clearly! Like, they’re like “You’ve got things to do, we can wait here.” But they stayed at the back of the line! And the line, I was on that line for more than an hour.
FK: Wow.
ELM: And I was just like, I mean like, I hope there were no fires. Obviously it was like, their moment off. You know, their, they must get some time off. So. But I was just like, that’s very nice. It was a really nice, I mean, they didn’t have to.
FK: It was nice that everyone, yeah, it was nice that everyone offered to let them cut and also that they went to the back.
ELM: Everyone was nice. A nice group. So. Yeah.
FK: All right, well, I’m sure that there will be [laughs] I’m sure that we’ll have more to say about the COVID-19 experience as this episode goes on, because it can’t be removed from our heads for more than three minutes at a time, but…
ELM: But.
FK: But. First, before we get into the enormous amount of rewatching, rereading, and replaying that is going on in our and many other people’s lives right now, I think we have a couple of comments from the last episode.
ELM: Yes, we have two letters that are in response to the last episode that we thought made a nice segue into this topic around rereading. Which I, I suggested because I mentioned it in the last episode, I said that rereading is actually a big part of the fanfiction world, and it gets talked about, but not really like—people say like “Oh, I love rereading,” or they’re like “Oh I love it when commenters say that they reread it” or whatever, but the kind of act of rereading doesn’t really get analyzed in a way that—
FK: Yeah.
ELM: —I think it deserves. Cause it’s actually really really interesting within the context of the broader fannish practices of rewatching or re-consuming the media that you like. Which is a very fannish thing, that’s like, you know, classic fan is watching the thing over and over again, or reading it over and over again. You know?
FK: Yeah, absolutely. And the different, and I feel like there’s a lot of nuance in the ways that people do this. They do it for different reasons and in different ways. And I think that yeah, there’s not a lot of attention paid to that.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: OK. So we should read these letters. Um, I will read the first one?
ELM: OK, do it.
FK: OK. First one is from Eleanor.
“Hi Flourish and Elizabeth,
“I listened to your last episode, and it made me think about two things. One, with talking about wanting to read or write the same thing with lower stakes, it made me think of a conversation I had a few days ago in a Discord, where some people were brainstorming quarantine fic ideas, but I found myself unable to join in until we changed the reason to quarantine to glitter (maybe magic glitter, maybe regular glitter, maybe regular glitter everyone assumes is magical because it’s so hard to get rid of). Suddenly a lot of the storylines we were talking about—even the stuff about obsessive cleaning—seemed a lot more palatable, while still allowing for some aspects of our new reality to sink in.”
ELM: Man, I wish it was glitter.
FK: Right?
ELM: That would be kind of fun. I love glitter.
FK: Yeah, like, no one would die but everything would be glittery.
ELM: Yeah, fine. That seems much better.
FK: We might have some chafing issues.
ELM: I don’t care. All right, continue.
FK: Back to Eleanor. “Two, it made me realize that while I wasn’t consuming any sort of fictional narrative because I didn’t really have the time or wherewithal, I was spending a lot of time following the Iditarod as a low-stakes sports narrative. It was the right combination of competent people taking on a difficult task with a lot of training and calm demeanor (one of the mushers, Jessie Royer, had her sled catch fire, and she still came in a very respectable third place).”
How does your sled catch fire? Isn’t it cold? I don’t know. We’ll find out.
ELM: What’s, what’s that, Dr. Flourish, scientist? [both laughing] “Can there be fires where it’s cold?”
FK: Can there be fires in cold places? [laughing]
ELM: “Doesn’t the snow put it out?”
FK: Back to, [laughing] back to, back to Eleanor. “Comma, low stakes reporting that emphasises friendship and mushers working together (at one point the Iditapod had a segment that was pretty much a couple of guys—” The Iditapod. Oh my God. I’m sorry. I love this letter. [ELM laughs]
“—at one point the Iditapod had a segment that was pretty much a couple of guys standing around trying to figure out if they were looking at an aurora or just some clouds), social distancing (the first place winner this year was 30 miles ahead of the person in second), and great pictures of dogs and dog hijinks (another musher had a delay early on partially because his dogs went on a two mile bison chase).”
ELM: Oh my God the Iditarod is really good.
FK: [laughing] Why am I not following the Iditarod?
ELM: Yeah, yeah, you should have been.
FK: OK. “Again, it wasn’t fictional, but the narrative around the sport was the right combination of low stakes, cute stories, and general competency that it got me through the last 12 days. Even though the end of the race was affected by the coronavirus, the logistics of the race meant that it could continue on (and generally people did whatever they could to make that happen safely). And because it wasn’t fictional, I didn’t have the same sort of West Wing problem you all were talking about, where the fantasy of competence is too painful compared to our trash fire reality.
“Anyway, hope both of you are doing well and finding enough to occupy your time. Thanks for making the podcast—I’m going to be going back and listening to some older episodes. Eleanor.”
ELM: Thanks, Eleanor!
FK: I really want to, I want, why wasn’t I paying attention to the Iditarod?
ELM: Yeah.
FK: Why didn’t this occur to me?
ELM: Did you have to—
FK: I mean I know of Blair Braverman, I followed her some? But I didn’t like, decide that this was a thing to focus on and I wish I had.
ELM: Did you, we did it in fifth grade. Did you ever have an Iditarod follow-along in school?
FK: No. That’s not a thing in Northern California.
ELM: I don’t know, you’re closer to Alaska than we are.
FK: It’s not a thing.
ELM: So—
FK: You’re from a snowy place. I’m not from a snowy place. It’s different.
ELM: Yeah, it’s true. I did feel very connected to all those professional dog sledders.
FK: Cause it’s snowing.
ELM: We each got our own, we each got our own—I think they picked it randomly and we each got our own person and I believe we wrote them letters? And we like followed their—
FK: That’s very sweet.
ELM: —we followed their, you know, you have to root for your person. And you, like, followed their story. And this was like in the ’90s so I guess we probably didn’t have that much, you know, it’s not like they could like Tweet about what they were doing or, I don’t know. I don’t know if they can do that now.
FK: Right, you were probably looking at like…
ELM: I have no idea. Memories of this are so vague. I just remember feeling so invested. Mine had a bunch of problems and I was so invested in her, like, her safety and her story basically. So. But yeah, there’s a lot of things can go wrong out there, and it is a narrative that you can follow in real time.
FK: It’s true, it’s true.
ELM: Sorry you missed out on that!
FK: Yeah, I really did!
ELM: Then and now.
FK: Yeah. Yeah. I really missed, I’m a miss-outer right now.
ELM: Yeah yeah, it’s true. Thank you very much Eleanor. Do you want me to read the other letter?
FK: Yeah, go for it!
ELM: OK. So. “Hi Flourish and Elizabeth, I missed participating in your flash survey, but really appreciated your breakdown of it. I’ve been having a wild time myself during this semi-quarantine social distancing.
“At the end of February, I essentially lost my job as a teacher as schools closed down in my country. It left me with a lot of free time and a lot of confusion on how to fill it. I ended up joining a Discord server for Baby’s First OTP, and it did wonders for both human contact in general and fandom as an escape. I would highly recommend joining up a fandom Discord for anyone who is struggling and needs contact, it’s made me so happy even while things have been absolutely crazy.
“I’ve also written tens of thousands of words for said pairing, and it’s alleviated so much of the time I’ve had just not knowing what to do. I totally get not being able to write at all, things are so scary right now, but I posted four new stories on the AO3 since this started and I’m in the middle of writing three more. I hadn’t posted since 2015 prior to this.”
FK: Oh!
ELM: “The funny thing is, I did notice a bit of a pattern while you were discussing what people are looking for in fandom works right now. Everything I’ve written has been both Super Dark and also Happy At The End. I’ve used two of the Big Four archive warnings, so it’s been pretty heavy. I haven’t been writing specifically about COVID or quarantines or pandemics, but I have been writing about depression and PTSD and death, all wrapped up with a fluffy exterior or coda. I think, like you guys mentioned, I’m definitely processing something about the current events even though the specifics look completely different.
“I do think it’s important that the pairing I’m writing is for literally the first thing I ever shipped, back when I was 11. That comfort is huge. I could probably tag my life hurt/comfort right now. Thanks for reading, Oki.”
FK: Oh man. “I could tag my life hurt/comfort right now!”
ELM: Yeah, yeah.
FK: Oh, that’s, that’s, that’s too deep, Oki! Too deep, too real. Too real.
ELM: I don’t know where Oki is, because they said “in my country.” I hope everything is OK there.
FK: Yes, me too.
ELM: I know they’re not American because no one here can say something’s universally true of, in our country.
FK: Yeah, yeah, exactly.
ELM: So…
FK: We can’t say that because, I was reading some article that described, I don’t know. Someone described the United States as like a janky collection of lone cowboy-feeling places and I was like “Yeah. Who we are.”
ELM: That’s literally historically true.
FK: Yeah, a janky collection of places that all think they’re the only place, and they all wanted to be their own thing. Now they’re stuck together.
ELM: I don’t think anyone who has ever studied American history is, the answer to that statement is “Duh.”
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Like, obvs.
FK: And there’s reasons why, for instance, Texas is particularly weird about this, because you know, the six flags, or actually ten in some places, of the many different nations that is has been part of or been.
ELM: Cool. Good luck to Texas.
FK: A whole thing. We’re gonna be, you know, cowboys.
ELM: I’m very happy to live in the state of New York, despite all the things that are going on right now.
FK: Me too, actually. It’s funny, like, I—I feel very comforted living here, despite everything else, like, I feel like…
ELM: To be fair, I am wildly biased because my father has worked for the government of the state of New York for his entire career, and my parents are both from New York, I am from New York, and my mother’s side is distantly related to the Cuomos.
FK: Right, but I’m not biased.
ELM: The Cuomo family. I’m talking about me right now, not you.
FK: Right, but I’m just sayin’, we’re both comforted being here, I’m from, like, outside of San Francisco, like, inland, like an hour’s drive away, you know. And uh, OK. It’s more than an hour. But if you were really gonna scream through it and there was no traffic it could be an hour.
ELM: Wow, thanks for those specific details.
FK: Anyway, uh, I’m inland from San Francisco, but you know, roughly from that area, and so I feel like I am in a position to say that I am glad I’m in New York and I would rather be in New York than there right now.
ELM: Really?
FK: Yeah!
ELM: Interesting.
FK: Because things are bad here, but I also have a lot of confidence that like, people care about it? [ELM laughs] I do, genuinely. You know? I have a lot of confidence that, whatever, I don’t think New York is gonna be allowed to, like…
ELM: What are you saying about your home area?
FK: Are you kidding? No one gives a shit about Sacramento! People who live in California don’t give a shit about Sacramento, you know? So I have a lot of confidence that it’s going to be fine because people care about New York City, like, not…
ELM: People do care about New York City.
FK: You know? Like, they really do.
ELM: OK, wait, hold on. I led us astray.
FK: You did. It’s OK.
ELM: Oki.
FK: Oki. [laughs] Sorry, Oki, we just had to go down a little thing there. A little experience thing.
ELM: Yeah. This is interesting and it is, it’s interesting to see like, kind of a case study of a lot of the themes that we were talking about last time.
FK: Yeah!
ELM: The idea of catharsis…it’s interesting to think about catharsis as, I mean, I guess you were already setting this up, because this was your question in the mini-survey, but there’s—so often when I think about catharsis I think about the content of the story, but you were framing it as something that happens to the reader. Which is the way we always would frame escapism, because if it’s like a, you know, you don’t think of…I don’t know, like Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter or whatever, these are very basic examples, as like…
FK: Right.
ELM: “They’re not escaping! They’re in their world.” You know, you’re escaping to their world. So it’s interesting to think about that, and both of these letters, in particular the second one, really kind of dig into that theme where it’s like, it centers the person doing the writing or the reading, you know?
FK: Absolutely, and I think that that maybe actually is a really good transition into the sort of rereading bit, because as I was seeing some of these responses, and as we talked about the survey and so on, I’ve continued to think about this. And I’ve realized that a lot of my rereading is because I know that those are stories that will push particular emotional buttons for me.
ELM: Mm-hmm, yeah.
FK: So like, it’s like, I know that, I finished reading the book I couldn’t shut up about—rereading the book I couldn’t shut up about, Doomsday Book, since we last recorded, and like every other time, I was weeping like a baby at the end. You know? Like, and I knew why I, I knew exactly how it was gonna do it and I knew what was gonna happen and I understood that it was pushing these particular buttons that might not work for you, right, because everyone has different things that it pushes their buttons for, but I wasn’t even mad at the emotional manipulation.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: Because that’s what I was signing up for.
ELM: Right, right, right.
FK: I had a similar set of feelings when I finally, I finished, I read the whole Wheel of Time series. And at the end there were points at which I was like, “I know exactly why I’m crying right now, it’s not even terribly great writing to me, at this point, it doesn’t matter though, because it’s obviously great writing in one way, which is that it made me cry! In ways that I could have totally predicted, you know? That’s fine.
ELM: But you, that wasn’t a memory—cause I’m thinking more about now, like, there are certain things where just thinking about them will give, like, re-consuming them will give me anticipatory—I will anticipatorily tear up, right? Cause I’m like...
FK: Oh yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.
ELM: Like, I—have I ever talked about Awakenings before? Have we discussed this film?
FK: No, tell me about Awakenings.
ELM: Awakenings was one of, I believe it was made around the same time in Robin Williams’ career as Dead Poets Society, you know, before he turned into…obviously he did lots of comedic stuff his whole career, but some of his more serious stuff happened around a particular decade period.
FK: Right.
ELM: And it’s based on a book by Oliver Sacks, and I believe it was a relatively early—it must have been a very early book for Oliver Sacks because it was, you know, it was in the ’80s. It was based on his experience, and so when Oliver Sacks was young…the famous neurologist who was famous for really weird, exploring really weird…
FK: The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat.
ELM: Right, like, very very strange unexplained neurological things was what he did a lot of work on. Earlier in his career he, it was in the ’50s and he was sent to go work as the doctor at an institution, and it had a lot of patients who were essentially…not comatose, but they basically lived in sort of suspended isolation that a lot of them had gotten sick with encephalitis in the ’20s, and they had been living in this home for decades, just basically trapped. And he, he got a response out of them by giving them—and this is famous now—by giving them the Parkinson’s drug, L-dopa. Right?
And the other main character in the movie is played by Robert DeNiro, and his character got sick when he was a boy in the ’20s. So he’s, you know, in his 50s or 60s by this point and he spent most of his whole life there. And it’s, he’s the one that Robin Williams’ character makes the breakthrough with. And he basically brings him back to life. And they’ve all been trapped in suspended animation for most of their entire adult lives. It’s basically children—
FK: Right.
ELM: I mean, can I spoil it? This is a famous movie.
FK: Sure, spoil it, it’s OK. I’ve never, I’ve never seen it, but you can definitely spoil it. It also is a thing that apparently really happened, so…
ELM: Right. And it happened decades ago, so I think the statute of limitations is up. So it’s an incredibly, so much about the movie is, is like, hard to begin with, right, because of the topic, and it’s incredibly moving the way they show these people basically coming back to life and the people who have been visiting them for decades, either a spouse or a parent. And many of the parents, like, Robert DeNiro’s parent is, like, she’s an old woman now, right? And this happened when her son was a boy, you know.
And so they’re all, it’s incredible, and it’s incredibly moving, and that makes you very moved, and so a lot of the movie is them, you know, basically waking up. It’s called Awakenings. And going at like, trying to go out into the world and just see what has happened, and it’s like basically they’ve been asleep for all these years. And then it slowly starts to reverse. And like, then, you know what’s gonna happen—just thinking about it makes me wanna cry! And it was only temporary.
FK: Right.
ELM: And so they slowly just shut down again.
FK: Right. And end up being locked in again.
ELM: And it’s so, so sad. It like, makes you, every time—I’ve seen it multiple times over the years and every time it’s made me cry for like an hour. It’s like, so devastating. And so like, just thinking about it and talking about it right now, but I would—I would totally watch that movie again.
FK: Yeah. Yeah!
ELM: And the fact that, just thinking about it makes me cry, and knowing that when I would watch it it would make me cry for an hour.
FK: Right.
ELM: It’s just so weird. It’s such a weird human instinct I feel like.
FK: Right. Right, well, but it’s also like, about the particular way it’s gonna make you feel, too. In my experience. Right? So for me, sometimes I want something that’s gonna make me cry in this way, and sometimes I want something that’s going to do this instead.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: You know what I mean?
ELM: Yeah.
FK: And I feel like this is also actually the instinct that leads us sometimes to poke at Twitter too often. Because that’s not rereading, but sometimes we know we’re gonna get mad, you know what I mean?
ELM: Yeah.
FK: Twitter or Facebook or whatever, right? We go and we’re like, “I know, even though I don’t know exactly what it is, I know that whatever, this particular person is going to post a political opinion that’s going to enrage me, and I’m still going to look, because I wanna be mad, somehow, some part of me wants to be mad right now.” You know?
ELM: Right, right, totally.
FK: I feel like there’s a real—it’s not even emotional regulation, it’s like emotional, like…selection. And sometimes it’s unconscious and sometimes it’s conscious.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: And with rereading, I feel like it’s more conscious than usual. Or replaying or rewatching, yeah.
ELM: Yeah, I mean, I think the social media thing is a little bit different because, you know, it’s like yeah, you know, “Oh, I wanna be mad, I want this to reinforce,” like, “I know what I’m getting into,” but there’s a lot of question marks there. Because you don’t actually know what the people on your feed are gonna put up.
FK: Yeah, not exactly.
ELM: I had this bad habit in the weeks and even months after the 2016 presidential election of clicking into the replies on tweets. [FK laughs] And then like blocking people who were awful or whatever just for spite, spite blocking.
FK: Dead dove, do not eat, Elizabeth! Dead dove! Do not eat!
ELM: And I remember tweeting about it, it was around New Year’s of 2017 and I was like “My New Year’s resolution is to stop doing this.” And I did, until the last few weeks. And I started looking at people’s replies. And I don’t know why…
FK: I’ve noticed that.
ELM: Why I’m doing this. How have you noticed?
FK: Because you’ve been irritable in the way you used to be [laughing] about people’s responses to things! There was a period of time where you were like, less irritable about people having bad opinions, and now you’re back—
ELM: That’s not true! I think I just, I just…no no, I think I just wasn’t sharing with you, because this whole time I was pretty irritable about people’s opinions. [FK laughs] So…
FK: OK, well maybe, maybe it just spurs you to be more share-y. But you have been more share-y about that.
ELM: Yeah, just, there’s a lot of—there’s a lot of bad behavior on—
FK: There’s a lot of bad opinions.
ELM: —on Twitter right now. Like, people going in the mentions of someone who said that a friend has died and saying “stop the sensationalism,” or…
FK: Yeah, I saw that one.
ELM: Not that one, this is happening every time anyone tweets something like this!
FK: No, I mean I saw that category.
ELM: That thing.
FK: Not that specific one.
ELM: Or, people, like, armchair, like, medical examiners or whatever, being like, “What are the co-morbidities?” And it’s just like, “Just shut the fuck up.” Honestly. That’s my attitude. And especially with someone’s tweet where it’s someone close to them who’s died, not like, reporting on—not like a news story or reporting on a death.
FK: Yeah, just like, someone I know.
ELM: Like, seriously. Shut your typing fingers forever, if this is your response to someone dying. “What were their co-morbidities? That’s not gonna happen to me!” Like, you are a bad person. Putting a message out there. These people are never gonna hear it, but I’m mad! I’m mad about you. You should be mad too!
FK: I’m mad too!
ELM: Yeah, be mad. Be mad.
FK: Sure, I’m mad!
ELM: Mad.
FK: So, so, there’s like a little bit of—so to bring it back: there’s a little bit of predictability to this. I’ll look at replies knowing I’m gonna get replies like this. That is not the same thing as rereading.
FK: No no no, it’s not, I’m just saying they’re related. But I do think that rereading and rewatching is interesting for the predictability piece, and I think it’s interesting because I don’t really have things that I reread that are going to make me angry. I think that’s interesting.
ELM: I…
FK: Like, I’ve certainly, I’ve read books that have made me angry…
ELM: In what way?
FK: Like, cause I got mad at the way they treated the character or…
ELM: Oh, OK.
FK: Because I thought that it was like, I was frustrated, it made me like, there were a couple…
ELM: Poorly written? Like, you think is a flawed, it’s a flawed text.
FK: Yeah, flawed, or like a flawed text in a way that makes me mad. Like The Witches of Eastwick still makes me angry.
ELM: Why would you read that, why would you reread that?
FK: Well, maybe because I want to feel angry? You know? But I don’t, so I don’t reread it.
ELM: No, that’s different. That’s like anger as a…if you think something is not, if like, OK. You can reread or rewatch something that’s, like, really flawed, but there’s things about it you like.
FK: Right.
ELM: But if the overwhelming feeling is that this is flawed in a way that is not redeemable for me, then no, why would you reread that?
FK: But also like, I don’t know, books that make you feel angry because of the injustice that is done to a character, right? Like, there’s, um—actually this is something that the Wheel of Time series does really well, is that it makes you, like, often in the process of reading that book, for me, there’s all—lots of flaws in that series, but it really makes you feel angry that characters are being, like, unjustly…you know, they’re being told that they don’t know what they’re talking about or whatever. This is like a repeated thing. And like, you feel sort of angry for the characters, and like, frustrated in a way that’s…and I don’t know that I’ve ever, like, chosen to reread a book because that was in there. But it is an emotion that books can create, and I wonder if there’s different things that we choose…do people choose to reread books because they want to feel like that? Cause it’s sort of a relieving feeling, you know what I mean? That is a kind of catharsis too.
ELM: Yeah, or knowing that, if you already know the outcome then knowing that the, that like—and justice is served, right?
FK: Right, well that’s true, yeah.
ELM: There can be something very satisfying about that—
FK: That’s true.
ELM: —and knowing that there’s…OK well big content warning for the next couple of minutes for sexual assault and rape, but did you watch Unbelievable?
FK: No.
ELM: I think I mentioned it after I watched it? I put it in the—
FK: I feel like you did.
ELM: —in “The Rec Center” as one of my media pics from last year. But Unbelievable is based, is a Netflix series, incredibly good, honestly I can’t, everyone’s experience is different but I have seen from lots and lots of women who have been the victims of sexual assault: there’s something about this…and not in a Law & Order: SVU way. But there’s something about Unbelievable because it’s a true story, and…
All right. Anyway. For context, I’m not explaining this well. Rewind. Unbelievable is an eight-part miniseries that’s based on a, it was a partnership between I believe Pro Publica and This American Life, I might have gotten that wrong on the text side, about—
FK: Oh, it’s that series about the women—OK. I know what, OK. Keep talking, sorry. This is exciting because I just realized what it was, I haven’t seen it but I read the thing. Anyway, go on!
ELM: Right! So, basically the way that they framed it on This American Life, cause I listened to the original recording on it, was, this is the story of two investigations, both about rape, one where everything goes wrong and one where everything goes right.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And, I mean, “Unbelievable” is the perfect title. Because some of it is, like, you’re like, “the way that people act in the, in the side of it where everything goes wrong is fucking unbelievable. This is ridiculous, that you’re doing that to this—” The police handle it so poorly, they, you know, they don’t care, they retraumatize the victim over and over again, they don’t believe her, right? The title works on so many levels.
And then on the one where it works right, there are a bunch of coincidences where you’re like, “This is unbelievable, this is unbelievably good luck.” But also, they are the most dedicated, you can see the turns everywhere along the way where a person who cared slightly less would just say, “Mm, well, we don’t have all the evidence, so…” and they’re like “No no no. No.”
And because it’s a true story and because a lot of people had listened to or read the original recording, you know what’s gonna happen, right? But it still manages to be incredibly suspenseful, and also there’s something incredibly powerful about watching these women who are victims of rape and who were not being believed by certain people in law enforcement, and knowing that this, the rapist would be caught. And knowing—
FK: Right.
ELM: —that there were people who cared enough to eventually believe them. And so it kind of worked on this weird timescale, because even as it was happening, and you were like, and you know, the first episode you just like, you feel—like, your body is like, just so tense with rage that this is happening with her! But at the same time in your head you can hold the fact that like, she is going to see justice.
FK: Right.
ELM: And like, it’s not going to happen now, and it’s so terrible that this happened, but there is something very very powerful about holding those two things in your head at the same time.
FK: Right.
ELM: That, I think, in a much more basic way—no offense to Law & Order: SVU, but—
FK: No, but yeah!
ELM: You get that in a much more basic way of like, “This is formulaic and these people kind of in a rote way, because it’s a great great formulaic show, care, and the structures of the show mean that they’re most likely—”
FK: Yeah.
ELM: “—justice will be served.”
FK: Yeah, although later on that sort of gets undermined because by the time you get to like Season 10 it’s like…
ELM: Really batshit.
FK: “Here are 50,000 twists!”
ELM: Don’t worry about it.
FK: And so the show starts being about one thing and then by the end it’s about something totally different.
ELM: Did you get to the child kidnapping—
FK: Yes.
ELM: —New Orleans—
FK: Yes, I did.
ELM: —escaped lab animals! [laughing]
FK: Yes, there was a lot. I have to report to you that it only gets more so. I think I’m in Season 10 right now because some of my stress-watching is Law & Order: SVU right now, and it only gets more so. I just, the one that I watched most recently was Kathy Griffin starring as the leader of a group called “LesBe Strong.”
ELM: Stop.
FK: And there is like a guy targeting lesbians in the area, but Kathy Griffin also has a B-plot where she has to admit to her lesbian friends that she is bisexual.
ELM: No! [laughs]
FK: And she hits on both Benson and Stabler, and I hated it so much but I also loved it. I have very mixed feelings about this episode.
ELM: That sounds great, I’m sorry, that sounds really good!
FK: It’s great and also terrible?
ELM: LesBe Strong.
FK: And I really, really loved, yeah. So like she spent the entire time hitting on Benson, and then like the sort of zinger at the end is that she like, lavishly hits on Stabler while Benson is sitting there like “Yep!” [laughs]
ELM: Sure, sure! Yeah!
FK: So there you go. And LesBe Strong. Yeah.
ELM: OK, wait, pause. I wanna take a quick break because we’re at about the halfway point—
FK: OK.
ELM: —and then I wanna talk about rereading, I wanna talk about rereading fanfiction actually, first. First and foremost. Can we do that?
FK: Yeah, we can!
ELM: OK, great.
[Interstitial music]
FK: All right, we’re back!
ELM: We haven’t gone anywhere. In weeks.
FK: In weeks! OK. We’re back, and before we get on with the second half of the episode, we want to send a message to our listeners about how we make this podcast. Which is through the generosity of listeners and readers like yourselves.
ELM: [laughs] Yes.
FK: So. We are completely patron-supported, we don’t break even, you guys have heard this a million times but it’s really, it’s really important to note that you guys are the only reason that we’re able to make this show, and if you support us on Patreon, Patreon.com/fansplaining, there’s lots of exciting rewards you can get, including our most recent special episode, which is entitled “Tropefest: Trapped Together.”
ELM: Yeah! Tropefest!
FK: So we’re planning on doing a series of Tropefest episodes, special episodes, for Patreon patrons only. Which are going to go into a bunch of different tropes. The first one, you know, Canadian shack, elevator, stuck in your apartment in quarantine, maybe because there’s I don’t know glitter outside…
ELM: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Glitter quarantine. Classic, classic trope.
FK: Glitter quarantine, classic glitter quarantine. There’s a bunch more we’re going to get into, I’m not sure we’ve decided what the next one will be yet, but yeah! That’s a $3-a-month Patron reward. So not very much money, but.
ELM: And we should say for the $5 Patrons, we are very grateful for anyone becoming one right now, but because of the state of the postal service we’re gonna pause sending pins.
FK: You will get your pin.
ELM: It’s just not a great time in New York City to go send something in the mail, and so…and I will say too, I don’t wanna be shamey, but yesterday I was reading a Tumblr post talking about all of the wacky comfort things people bought recently…I don’t wanna be shamey, but I would say people should maybe limit the things they’re ordering, because people need to order basic life necessities right now.
FK: I, I think that…yeah, I think nobody should beat themselves up about this, but it is something people should think about, so.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: Anyway, we’re not going to contribute to it by sending pins, but we will get everybody’s pins to them eventually.
ELM: Right. But, but, another thing I will say—I said it last time and I’ll say it again—we are incredibly grateful for Patron support because, you know, it’s a very financially unstable time too, an economically unstable time, I mean, not every listener is in the United States, but I’m thinking about the United States right now. And I am fully aware that a lot of people have lost their sources of income. And so as always, like, obviously, even if this was a normal time I wouldn’t ask people who have no money to pledge. But if you do have a steady stream of income, and you do have a couple of dollars to spare and you’ve been thinking about becoming a Patron, we’d really appreciate it, especially because we’re gonna have some Patrons who are not gonna be able to continue in the coming months because…
FK: And which we fully understand!
ELM: Absolutely. And obviously you should be paying your bills before you should be paying us, I don’t have to tell you that. And so if you do have a steady stream of income, if you’re a salaried employee, if you have the kind of job that is not in danger, it is a little, it’s a little scary right now. I think the initial shock hit a lot of people I know who work in IRL jobs, like performing artists or people who work in restaurants and bars. Obviously. But, you know, seeing Buzzfeed staff take a pay cut last week because they’re anticipating the downturn that the media’s going to take in a recession, as it always does, because people can’t afford to buy ads, really really made me worry about the long-term—long-term, medium-to-long-term. So. If you have $3 a month you should give it to us. [laughs]
FK: Yeah.
ELM: That’s my takeaway! [laughing] That’s my takeaway.
FK: If you don’t, you can also be incredibly incredibly helpful by just promoting the podcast. Tell people about it, we like to think that we’re, you know, good people to listen to while you’re self-isolating. Writing in, sending us questions, thoughts, um…
ELM: Yep, yep.
FK: Rating us on iTunes, you know.
ELM: Well, subscribing on iTunes.
FK: Subscribing on iTunes.
ELM: Ratings and reviews, while we appreciate them, apparently don’t do much for the rankings these days.
FK: Well, they make me feel good.
ELM: Yeah!
FK: So I’m gonna say, you know what? Do it. Because it’ll make me feel good.
ELM: Make Flourish feel good, all right.
FK: As always, you can call in 1-401-526-FANS, that’s 1-401-526-F-A-N-S, and that will take you to a voicemail box, you can leave us a voice message, which would be great. You can send us email, fansplaining at gmail dot com, or leave a message on our Tumblr, our Twitter, our Facebook, if you had to you could do Instagram I guess…wherever makes you feel good! Our website also has a form. Yeah! So let us know how you’re feelin’, how you’re doin’, your responses to our episodes in particular.
ELM: OK! Business over?
FK: Business over. Let’s talk about rereading fanfiction.
ELM: I think that rewatching, rereading, replaying, re-experiencing, which is the wankiest way I could possibly say it, um… [laughs] Which is up there with “ideation,” no offense to anyone in the design community, these are terrible terms that I don’t wanna say ever again.
Re-experiencing is like, fundamental to being a fan. Right? And like, you know, you don’t get to know every stat just by watching it once, right? You may need to watch that many, many times.
FK: Yep.
ELM: And like, it’s funny too, I don’t know if you felt this way, but for me, you know, when writing a fic, sometimes I’ll rewatch the movie or the show and I’ll be like, “It’s research!” You know, like…
FK: Sometimes it genuinely is sort of research, you know!
ELM: Sort of.
FK: No, well, there’s rewatching things for emotional reasons and then there’s also times when I, like, rewatch something because I’m like, “I want to understand like, all of the little details in this room,” you know what I mean, or like—
ELM: Or to get the feel of it again.
FK: —I want to know—right.
ELM: How does this character, how does this character feel, and like, it’s not necessarily an emotional thing but what is the substance, the essence, the inner-and-outerness—
FK: Yeah, totally.
ELM: —of this, of this character, right? And I’m, it’s really hard to get that if you only watch it once. Then you’re just kinda spinning off into your own, into your land there, really.
FK: Completely, completely. Or you know, like, because I am this type of fan, there’s like the emotional bits and there’s also the like—where, where exactly did this ship go in this battle? You know what I mean? Which I know is not your thing, but that is a reason that people rewatch.
ELM: Absolutely! Absolutely.
FK: You know?
ELM: Yeah, totally.
FK: Right, and the sort of cataloging and also the understanding, like, the details of this, whatever. There was some stupid fast cutting, but I want to understand what actually happened in this fight, right.
ELM: Right.
FK: Things like that.
ELM: Right.
FK: But, but I think that rereading fanfic is different than that.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: For a variety of reasons.
ELM: Agree.
FK: And you know, it’s funny, as we were talking about—and you can tell me if you feel this way too—as we were talking about having like cathartic experiences or like emotional experiences, I should say, more broadly, when we reread things, I was thinking about how one of the things about fanfic is that it—I feel like sometimes it gives me the opportunity to re-experience the original story but just different enough that I get a little bit more of that emotional punch.
ELM: The original—like, the source material, the original story?
FK: Yeah, maybe not the original story per se, but the source material. Right, like, I get a frisson when I see these two characters interacting—
ELM: Yeah.
FK: —but I’ve rewatched it so many times I don’t get that, the same frisson any more. But then I read fanfic, and now I get the frisson again.
ELM: Yeah!
FK: You know?
ELM: Absolutely. I think that that’s—I mean, it’s, that’s a part of reading fic for the first time too. A fic for the first time.
FK: Oh yeah yeah yeah.
ELM: Yeah, totally. Totally.
FK: But then rereading fic is like, I feel like it’s like, “Well, I’m gonna reread this and maybe I’m gonna recapture that frisson again.” That’s one of the reasons.
ELM: Right, right. So for me, with rereading fanfiction, it falls into two categories: one is one-shots, where I just find them pleasurable for whatever reason. I can think of a couple one-shots off the top of my head that I’ve reread probably ten times in the last couple of years. And I would reread one of them right now, and I just feel like, I want just half an hour where I can just be like “This is great. This is great.” You know? And they aren’t necessarily even fluffy, but like, sometimes funny or, yeah. They’re rarely, like, super-depressing. You know. But they may be like, “Eh, this is like—this is…” And they’re the way that you feel when you, if you ever studied short stories…
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Have you ever studied short stories?
FK: Yeah!
ELM: [laughs] So—in a writing class or an English class?
FK: In a writing class, not an English class.
ELM: Yeah yeah yeah.
FK: I mean, not since I was—yeah. In a writing class.
ELM: It’s slightly different, right? I’ve done it in both.
FK: Yeah yeah yeah.
ELM: And in a writing class, it’s often fairly technical in terms of like, how did you make this perfect little thing?
FK: Right.
ELM: This, this is the pieces put together perfectly, and how did they do that. And you’re trying to deconstruct it, and it’s something that’s very hard to do with a novel because novels are many other things.
FK: They’re big.
ELM: Right. Yeah. And it’s like really hard to—
FK: [laughing] They’re big!
ELM: It’s a lot of working pieces! Whereas a short story you truly can take apart. It is like a kind of a, um, an engineering sort of task, you know. And less an interpretation of art sort of task. And sometimes I feel that I’m subconsciously doing that when I’m rereading a really good one-shot, because I’m like “This hits the beats exactly where I want them,” and it’s not like, I vaguely remember what the beats are—because I haven’t committed the words to memory—so it’s like, piece. Piece. Piece. Piece. You know, you’re watching the…
FK: They’re all chunking together, yeah.
ELM: Like a Rubik’s cube or whatever.
FK: Yeah, similar to the pleasure that you get when, like, you read a book or watch something where it’s like they set it all up and then they knock the dominoes down and you’re like “Yes yes yes!”
ELM: Exactly, right!
FK: Some, like a really good mystery novel where you’re like, “All of them were put in place and there it is!” [ELM laughing] You know?
ELM: Right. So that’s the way I feel about one-shots. But for longfic, I do really like reading, rereading longfic that I know is well-written. But ideally it will, some time will have passed since I’ve reread it, so it can be somewhat fresh to me.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: You know? And so then I can just get engaged with it again. And that’s a little more amorphous to me, because it’s like, what am I getting out of this? It’s just like, I really want to experience this good writing again, and like, honestly, except in the massive, massive fandoms, there is a finite amount of really well-written longfic.
FK: [laughing] Yes.
ELM: There’s a finite number of stories! You know? Like…
FK: There are, yeah, totally.
ELM: And so if I know a writer’s really good…there’s a couple of longfics in my current fandom that I’ve read once, and I have been saving to reread for a second time. Because I wanted that time to pass so they can feel truly fresh.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Which is kinda funny to think about, though, that we can ration it out that way.
FK: No, but it’s completely true. I had one of the greatest, one of the greatest little periods of my fandom, like, fic enjoyment was, there was a period when all of this old X-Files fic was suddenly posted to the Archive Of Our Own, and I went back and reread all of my old longfic favorites. And some of them didn’t hold up and that part sucked—
ELM: Ohh.
FK: —because it was like, “Aww, I read this when I was 11 and it seemed good but it’s actually bad!” [ELM laughing] You know? But there were some of them where I was like “Aww, yes. And it’s been, like, many years, and this is so satisfying.” And it combines the enjoyment of like, reading even a novel that you’ve put aside for a long time and now are remembering how good it is, with the enjoyment of like, “Oh, and these characters that I’ve followed and I’ve loved so much and they’re completely part of me,” you know what I mean, and reliving all the frisson of seeing them together. Really, like, maybe one of the peak like, reread experiences that I think you can have, right? Cause it combines all of those, all of those wonderful bits.
ELM: It’s funny thinking about it. There’s limited, because sometimes I’ve tried to do that with some old Harry Potter fic, and I found I couldn’t really get into stuff that kind of got Jossed, which was weird?
FK: Oh, yeah.
ELM: Even if it was like a really engaging—or like Harry/Draco stuff that was written while the books were still coming out? Because it felt like…
FK: Yeah yeah yeah.
ELM: I don’t know why, which is funny to me, because it’s like, even if it’s like a really well-written story, because I do not care about the canon that much, but I guess I care about it a little bit, you know?
FK: That’s funny because I never, I don’t have that problem at all. Not at all.
ELM: Well maybe that’s because fanon Snape is so much more nuanced and interesting than canon Snape. [laughs]
FK: I’m sure that’s the case for Harry Potter, but I was talking about for X-Files, but I think the reason that I can do that for X-Files—
ELM: That was written when most of it, that’s very apples and oranges, you know? Cause that was when the show had been going on for awhile. There’s a difference between, like, ostensibly X-Files could just keep going, whereas Harry Potter, let’s face it, is seven books. That’s it, you know?
FK: Yeah yeah yeah. Yeah yeah yeah.
ELM: That story is, is closed. It should be closed.
FK: Right, it is closed, and it is quite possible, like, if the writers had made different choices—better choices—that… [laughs] Perhaps some of the ways that things went later on, like, some of the bad, my opinion bad canon choices that they made, they didn’t have to make those. They could’ve made different ones.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: You know what I mean? Whereas with Harry Potter, yeah, it sort of drives to a particular thing.
ELM: Yeah, that’s how I feel about Torchwood, which is, to talk about a television fandom that I was in, I, I can happily read stuff that is AU from a certain point.
FK: Right.
ELM: Even, even if it—
FK: Because it’s just as though there were more episodes in the middle there.
ELM: Yeah, just, and better ones than the ones they wrote. No offense to everyone who made the fourth season, but that was very very bad.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: You shouldn’t have done that. You should have skipped it. Save your time and money.
FK: Oh, man.
ELM: It was very bad!
FK: Those are some opinions, we got some red-hot opinions right here.
ELM: Fresh from like—
FK: They’re actually pretty cold opinions at this point.
ELM: Fresh from the whatever year that was, 2013? I can’t even remember when that came out. I just remember being quite disappointed.
FK: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, it is funny thinking about this too and about sort of different things—there was a thread on Twitter that was going around where people were talking about how different things will be after this current pandemic, because it’s gonna be impossible for anything that was being shot like two months ago—after the pandemic you’re not gonna be able to just be like, “And this happens to be right now!” Like, no, it was clearly before this stuff happened, right?
It was interesting, so I was actually thinking about how that impacts different things that we enjoy reading that are older? Or, or watching or playing. Like, like The X-Files, because The X-Files has this very, like…the government conspiracy stuff, all that does not hold up right now, you know what I mean? It doesn’t hold up in the age of Trump, it doesn’t really hold up in the age of Obama either, but you know what I mean? It’s just like an entirely different, um, mindset.
ELM: You read that really good essay in n+1 about X-Files fandom and—
FK: I did, I did!
ELM: —conspiracy theories and stuff, right?
FK: I did, it was amazing.
ELM: We should put that in the show notes, yeah, it’s really really good.
FK: But I was thinking about that, because for me it does not, um, for me it’s almost like, watching the new X-Files stuff I didn’t wanna see that. But I still could get into rereading or rewatching. It feels like slipping into a different mindset, but not like in a distressing way. And I kind of wonder what that’s gonna be like after this all is over, whether that will be—will this experience that we’re all currently going through have that much of an impact on art? I guess it will, right, art and culture and everything. And what will it feel like to be watching things that came out, like, in 2019? I don’t know. It’s interesting. We can check in in a couple years and see.
ELM: Well, like, that’s a very, um—that’s a very short, I think these are valid questions to ask but it’s a very short view of history.
FK: Oh, of course.
ELM: You know?
FK: But I’m asking about my view of how I’m living it, not about history broadly!
ELM: I know!
FK: This is gonna be different like 50 years from now!
ELM: But it’s also like, I often get the sense when people are asking questions like that that they don’t actually consume a lot of culture that was made in the olden times, you know?
FK: Yeah yeah yeah, totally.
ELM: You don’t pick up a novel from 1854 and go like, “This is so,” you know, like, “Wow!” You know, I don’t know. Like…
FK: Well, it’s also, you pick up a novel from the ’70s that’s very of its time and it’s a different experience, too, you know what I mean?
ELM: Absolutely. And so it’s like, maybe the tension there is feeling like you’re watching things becoming history. But that’s not actually how it works, you know.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: I, I, I don’t know. I think it’s hard to say in the sense of like, I was 16 when 9/11 happened, and if I had been 26 I might have had a better perspective on the way art looked immediately before.
FK: Right.
ELM: Obviously immediately after everything’s completely batshit and we all have to sing “I’m proud to be an American cause at least I know I’m free” in my public school assembly, which I think probably should’ve been unconstitutional, whatever—not that one. We sang that song that goes [singing] “God is watching…us.” I know, I know none of these things are gonna seem weird to like, people who live in huge swaths of the United States where this continues to happen.
FK: No, that seems weird, that seems weird to me.
ELM: I mean, it was, we were about to invade Iraq and some patriotic American in the music department decided we needed to sing about how much we loved George Bush.
FK: I think that, I think that I’ve told, I think I’ve said this on the podcast before but my big cultural memory about this was that there was a gal who was in my grade who was a really great artist—
ELM: A gal, a gal, huh?
FK: A gal. A person.
ELM: Is it because I said “George Bush” and you immediately needed to be folksy?
FK: I immediately, I immediately had to be folksy. [both laugh]
ELM: Flourish clearin’ brush.
FK: She made bank, because she painted these very schmoopy pictures of girls in hijabs with like, the American flag behind them, holding candles. And like, she sold these for like—I mean, I don’t know how many she did. She did at least one and sold it for like a significant amount of money. And I was like, man, that’s smart.
ELM: [laughing] Yeah, yeah.
FK: That was smart of you.
ELM: I love that that’s your enduring memory of this.
FK: Well I just—because I just remember at the moment looking at the painting and feeling like, you know, sort of touched by it, and also knowing that it was very hollow and weird, and schmoopy, and like, then seeing that she had made money on it and feeling jealous, because I could not paint well enough to sell.
ELM: What an emotional journey you went on.
FK: What an emotional journey it was.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: I was really quite Slytherin even at that time. Even as we were about to invade Iraq.
ELM: And I would say, I think the art of the last 20 years has shown us that, while there has been some good art processing that time directly—and I say this as someone who has background in studying literature and trying to look at history through literature that was being written contemporarily or like, or in the decades that followed—basically reading literature looking for history within it.
FK: Right.
ELM: Which is something that you have to have a lot of time, like, time has to have passed.
FK: Right.
ELM: I think you can make a good, a good argument that while there has been some good art that’s directly engaged with the stuff that happened in the early 2000s in this country, so much of it is something that you’d need a much broader lens to see the shape of art over the last 20 years and how it’s much more subtly infused throughout, as opposed to like, “This is the great 9/11 novel.” Which, obviously there have been some good novels written explicitly about this, right? But like, that’s quite rare.
FK: Well, and also often those novels end up getting written much later, you know what I mean?
ELM: Yes, right, right.
FK: Because then you have enough perspective on it.
ELM: And so I think it’s a little weird of people—I understand the instinct to be like “How are we gonna process this moment? What is it gonna look like? Six months ago, six months from now!” It’s just like, I have to wonder if the pace of culture—in particular, the production of television—has suggested to people’s minds that it needs to have an instantaneous reaction, when in fact culture works at a much slower pace.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And it’s much more holistic, and you can see the scars of long stretches of history in long stretches of literature, television, you know. I’m doing research about New York in the ’70s right now and that’s a broad swath of things and it’s all bubbling up around feelings and events and it’s not…it’s not the news. It’s art. You know what I mean? Like…
FK: Right…yeah, but I think it’s also, I mean, one of the things that I think drives this—and one of the reasons why I think so many people are rewatching or rereading or replaying—
ELM: Oh yeah, get us back to rewatching!
FK: We haven’t even talked about games almost at all, even though that’s a big part of this too! But one of the reasons that I think we get driven back to this is that in the moment that these things are happening, right, like—right after 9/11 I don’t think that my friend was being calculating when she made the schmoopy hijab picture, right? I think that she genuinely like, felt that, you know what I mean?
ELM: Yeah.
FK: Because it didn’t, what else were you going to draw? What else were you going to—there was no way to make anything other than something that was—
ELM: Uh, Flourish, you could draw a bald eagle and a single tear.
FK: Right? You know what I mean, like—
ELM: Standing on an SUV with the, with the flag magnet? With the ribbon magnet?
FK: This is detailed. This is really detailed.
ELM: OK. The ribbon magnet but—did you have this in your town? Because our favorite, so there’s the yellow one, “support your troops.”
FK: Yeah. Obviously there was the yellow one.
ELM: And there was the American one, American flag one, to support America.
FK: Yep, American flag one.
ELM: But then there was my town’s favorite, probably yours too, the double ribbon: half flag, half yellow.
FK: [laughs] Yes, well, there were so many of them—
ELM: On your big fucking SUV. Every SUV.
FK: Yeah. Yeah. OK, but my point being though, right, in the moment, it’s hard to make any other kind of art than something that feels like it engages with that moment.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: If you’re making art, often, right? And the only other thing that maybe makes sense is to do what, you know, what Oki was talking about, which is sort of—I feel like it’s almost the fic-writing version of rereading something you love, you know what I mean? Like, going back to something that feels comforting, going back to something that you know what the outcome is going to be, in, I mean, one of the things within gaming that’s happening right now is people are replaying old games that they’ve played before or they’re playing a new game where you know kind of what it’s going to be like. Like, Animal Crossing is the game of the moment because it’s very gentle and there’s been ten million Animal Crossing games, so it’s gonna be a little bit new but mostly you’re still like, indebted to Tom Nook doing settler colonialism that just feels very gentle. And we’re all cool with that, you know?
ELM: Why, this Tom Nook sounds like a bastard.
FK: He’s actually a really cute raccoon and I love him.
ELM: Yeah, I’ve heard all about him since our last episode. I don’t know.
FK: He’s very cute.
ELM: Landlords.
FK: Real cute.
ELM: Landlords are pretty bad news. Is he—
FK: He’s a landlord, but he’s such a cute landlord, and you don’t have to pay him back.
ELM: Oh, that’s nice.
FK: Like, there’s no time frame on your debt and you never actually have to pay it.
ELM: Oh, OK.
FK: So anyway. Yeah. So like, there’s like this—so that’s the other option, right, it sort of feels like? It sort of feels like there’s not, I mean, it’s really hard. I would find it, I mean, maybe some people can do this but I think it’s really really difficult to try and make art that’s not sort of either comfort-zone or like, directly focused on the thing that you’re doing right now. And so maybe that is like a natural part of the progression of crises like this, is what else can we do? Maybe this is just not a moment in which we’re going to make…
ELM: Well, I mean, I, I think that I mean, I don’t think those are the only two choices. Like, as we discussed last time, and what I am hoping to do—though frankly right now, in the next few weeks while New York is like this, I don’t, I don’t conceivably see…maybe I’ll be able to mentally disengage, but it is…
FK: Yeah.
ELM: There is something very specific about being in New York right now that I think only people in like, Italy and Spain and particular parts of China can really understand. There’s an interesting, OK. So, so taking a step back. There’s an interesting fic challenge that I included in “The Rec Center” yesterday. Did you happen to see it? The Fic Journal of a Plague Year?
FK: No, I didn’t see that. Tell me about it.
ELM: Well, actually, let me read you the description, because I think it’s really interesting. So, in the previous “Rec Center”—and we talked about this in the last episode—there’s an open fic challenge that’ll be over by the time this comes out, but there’s been a lot of submissions, called the Lock Down Fest. Right?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And that’s people, I think, writing either the “trapped together” trope or writing about, directly about this pandemic. Right? And I think both of us, me more strongly than you, would like—I support everyone who wants to do that, I am not interested in that right now. Like, no thank you. Right?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: But this one we included yesterday was quite different. So it’s called “Fic Journal of a Plague Year,” and it’s organized by earlybloomingparenthesis—parentheses, rather—and, here, can I read you the description?
FK: Yeah, go for it!
ELM: “So, as people all over the world deal with the coronavirus and its fallout, fic writing can be a place to process those feelings and provide a document of how fic and fic communities are helping us through this very weird time. All fics in this open collection should be, one, written during the period of the coronavirus situation, and two, include commentary in the endnote explaining how the fic and/or writing process were affected by the global crisis. The fics don’t necessarily have to be about illness, isolation, or the effects of the pandemic; instead the feelings, thoughts, and experiences the writers going through during this situation should have influenced the fic in some way.”
FK: That’s really interesting, I love that idea!
ELM: Also, this is a really good note at the end, and I wish more people would do stuff like this: “The collection is open and unmoderated. All fandoms, ratings, kinks, etc. welcome. Materials that deal with racism and xenophobia are allowed, as these are very real consequences of the pandemic, but spreading racist and xenophobic ideas via the commentary is not. Please be kind to each other.” Which I think is a really good clarification, because those are huge parts of this right now and—
FK: Yeah yeah yeah, yeah that’s really good.
ELM: —and so to, to make it really, a really clear signal that this isn’t an opportunity to be racist, but you can talk about racism, especially if it’s affecting you directly. And so this is a really interesting challenge. It’s just opened, you know, as of this exact moment there are 12 works in here. And it is really interesting. It’s, it’s, it’s an interesting way to process it. And so, I mean, I’m not saying you were saying that those two ways—directly dealing with the subject or retreating back into the rewatch experience or the comfort, repeat experience—are the only two, but this is a third way, and I think a very clear way. And I honestly don’t think that everyone’s going to be in the right headspace to do this, you know?
FK: Yeah, yeah.
ELM: But maybe you don’t even need to actively be thinking about that headspace. You could just spew it out, you know. “Why do I have these feelings and here’s the story that comes out with them.”
FK: Right.
ELM: But that’s interesting, because that is very different than—I think the common thing that, to bring it back to rewatching and rereading, it’s the difference between the predictability and leaning into the unpredictability. And I think it’s really really, it’s a very weird…I think that there’s been a lot of good commentary about this, I wish I could think of some off the top of my head that we could include in the show notes, but, but this is a very unique crisis in the sense of like, with a natural disaster generally it happens.
FK: Right.
ELM: And so it’s about processing. Whereas for most people in this country right now, anyway, it hasn’t happened really? And…
FK: Yeah.
ELM: There’s a question about whether it’s gonna happen.
FK: Right. And even here it still feels like that, even though we’re in the place where it has most happened and is most happening, I feel like. You know?
ELM: It does not, it feels like it’s actively happening right now. [laughs]
FK: It feels like it’s actually happening, but it’s also like the weird thing—I was trying to describe this to somebody. I was saying, you know, on the one hand, like, there is a makeshift morgue like outside, in a place that I usually walk by all the time. And it’s just a few steps from, you know, I mean it’s like a few blocks, like maybe 10 blocks from my house I guess. But on the other hand, I am sitting in my house and my house is exactly the same, and I’m not sick, and neither is my partner, and I go out and walk the dog around the block and so like those things feel very…weird but also, you know? It’s like this weird double experience, is what I’m saying, you know?
ELM: Yeah but, I mean, I don’t know. I think because I’ve lived here a lot longer than you, not to be like “you’re not a real New Yorker” cause that’s false.
FK: No, it’s OK. I mean, I’m not. [laughs]
ELM: My favorite reference for this is having lived through Hurricane Sandy, which was an extremely traumatic period in the city’s history. And frankly, more people are gonna die in this, lots more—more people have already, I don’t remember the—so many of the deaths in Hurricane Sandy were very isolated, there was you know, specific communities that were particularly hard-hit.
FK: Right.
ELM: And I had a lot more personal experience than a lot of my friends because of where I live and where I was working.
FK: Right.
ELM: A lot of my friends worked from home, lived in high elevations in Brooklyn, and just had kind of an extended snow day, and they were like “this is kinda scary,” and my experience was living very close to places that flooded and having to walk to Manhattan in a total blackout.
FK: Right.
ELM: Back and forth. Which was quite scary.
FK: Yeah, yeah.
ELM: And having friends whose homes were destroyed and helping them clean them up. And then other people’s experiences were more extreme, obviously, and had people be sick or die or have their houses destroyed, or—
FK: Yeah.
ELM: —their apartments really damaged, or people who lived in lower Manhattan, if you lived where you do right now, if you’d lived in New York, you wouldn’t have had power for a week.
FK: Right.
ELM: I had a friend who had to walk up and down, you know, 20 flights of stairs in a high-rise in the Lower East Side. You know, carrying water, you now?
FK: So yeah, I moved here not too too long after, like within a couple years, and my building—the building I moved into when I first moved to New York—it had flooded. And so like all of my neighbors, the first thing when I met them, they were like, “All right, do you have a water tank? Because you’re on the 10th floor and like, we didn’t have water, and get a water tank.” And you know, we got a water tank. I mean, obviously I didn’t experience it at all, cause I was in Boston at the time, but it was striking how, um, immediately everybody was like, “Here are the things that you need, because if we go without power, then we’re all gonna be…”
ELM: Because this already happened.
FK: “…trapped in this building. It happened recently.”
ELM: Right, right. So I say this as a frame of reference, because like, obviously it was different for the people I know whose home was destroyed. But through most of it, you know, it was this simultaneous surreality and reality.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: I still had my house, I still had Orlando, and like, we huddled together during the actual storm, but like, other than that Orlando was like “I don’t know what’s going on,” you know? Like…
FK: Right, so this is what it felt like then too.
ELM: No, it was different. It was different because this is…I think it was, I mean, it was vastly different in the sense of like, obviously I’m using this as a frame of reference. But like, you know, not to go too much into it, this is obviously off-topic but I think it’s relevant, I think people have been very curious about how it feels to be here right now, so I think we should talk about it a little bit.
FK: Yeah, very.
ELM: But like, you know…so depressing to think about. One thing that’s very striking to me is, I keep thinking about—sorry, this is gonna make me cry! I don’t know. I keep thinking about the morning after Hurricane Sandy and you know, I lived by myself then and I live by myself now, and…it was very scary the night of the storm, and you know, I listened to the radio until the power went out, you know, and going…being able, when I remember the next morning it was all over, and I went out to the street, and every single person on my block was out on the street, and I took a really long walk to see what had happened and it was the same on every street. And now no one can do that.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: You know? So it’s like…it’s a very very, very weird time to live here.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And it’s, it’s gonna be different literally everywhere else, because I mean, I’ve lived in other places in this country, lived in other cities. And nothing is like this. There’s nowhere this large and this dense, where your daily life means you’ve, you brush up against potentially thousands of people, at least hundreds, you know?
FK: Yeah, yeah.
ELM: I think it’s impossible for, from what I gather you know, no one who’s not Italian can understand what would be there right now, and how different that is from the things that make Italy, you know, that kind of thing. Or the, it’s gonna be different everywhere, because it’s gonna affect what daily life is like. And I think it’s really hard, I feel very disconnected from the rest of this country right now, and it’s not just this disease and how it’s everywhere, but, but it just makes me think about how completely different things are here than they are elsewhere always, you know what I mean? And that’s very weird and very isolating. And…
FK: Yeah, um…
ELM: It’s just very, you know, if I was in the suburbs right now, obviously things would be different. But not as different, you know?
FK: Yeah yeah, I agree. You know, it’s funny, because that’s part of why I feel more comforted being here even though I know that being in a situation—there’s that map that purports to say how good everyone is at social distancing, did you see this map? And it’s like based on where your cell phone was. And it was like “Oh, Montana’s doing a bad job of social distancing!”
But the reality is that in Montana you drive three miles to get to your phone booth [sic; mailbox] and you see a moose on the way. And no humans. And here, if I stay literally within the same footprint of my apartment building, I have the opportunity to infect or be infected by 90 people, you know? [both laugh] So actually, I’m not sure that I’m doing a better job of social distancing than someone in Montana.
ELM: Oh my God, don’t make me think about the doorknobs.
FK: But—I know, I know. There’s like a little thing of Lysol wipes that we’re supposed to wipe with whenever we go out.
ELM: Oh, that’s nice. I just…
FK: Yeah, but wait for us to run out. You know, thank you super for finding some Lysol wipes, but…
ELM: I am just very good at holding my hands very firmly at my sides as I am outside at all times, so.
FK: But, but my point being that for me even though it does mean that New York is more of a hot spot and going to be more of a hot spot, I feel comforted by having those people around, you know what I mean? Like, I feel like it’s hard…I feel like even though we aren’t allowed to talk with each other or interact with each other very much, at least there are other people nearby. And I think I would find it very isolating and scary to be alone in, like, a suburb somewhere, even if it did reduce my chances of getting the virus, because I would—you know, I would be like, who’s here, what’s gonna happen if I get sick.
ELM: Yeah, but I wanna, I wanna see those people! There, like, we’re all stuck!
FK: This is the difference, this is the difference between you and me, for me it’s enough to know they’re there. [laughs]
ELM: No, I wanna see them! Like, I go out of my house every single day! In normal circumstances. And see all the people! You should do it too! [laughing]
FK: I do do it too! [laughing] No, actually I just let Pepys pee on a pee pad and I like, take them out once a week. No, of course not. My God. I go out, I go out on a minimum of four walks a day, Elizabeth.
ELM: I don’t know. It’s, um, it’s just really—this is alarming. I’m just processing all my feelings right now. I’m just letting it all out. So this is why I’m trying to write something that’s about here. Cause that’s my way of processing this, right? And, and, who knows? Maybe I’ll submit it to this thing, and then people will be able to figure out what my pseud is, because you’re gonna narrow it down immediately. But!
FK: That’ll, that’ll be great. I hope that you do that.
ELM: I mean that’s fine.
FK: And I hope that by us talking a little bit about what’s going on in New York, like, just as we wrap up, I hope that that helps people sort of understand how it feels here? Because like you were saying a lot of people have been asking me, or are curious, or whatever. And, um, I don’t know. I hope that everybody who’s been rereading things for like, comfort purposes, or for catharsis purposes or whatever, gets the comfort or catharsis they need. And I don’t know. We’re gonna get through this, Elizabeth! We can be together even though we can’t physically be together.
ELM: To be fair, this isn’t a massive change for us, because we mostly just Skype with each other.
FK: That’s true.
ELM: Even though we live in the same city.
FK: Yeah, but we have to Skype to make the podcast, so we do, a lot.
ELM: Yeah. So I have a lot of practice at Skype. It’s really coming in useful in all my socialization.
FK: Yeah, right?
ELM: Yeah.
FK: OK.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: Elizabeth, I don’t know that we have anything else to say for this episode. I think that we might be done.
ELM: Well, just as a reminder, your thoughts, your feelings…
FK: Wash your hands.
ELM: No, I was gonna say send them to fansplaining at gmail dot com.
FK: And then wash your hands. Before and after you do that.
ELM: If anyone still needs the advice to wash their hands, I don’t know what’s going on. Like…
FK: I am gonna keep saying it though, just in case.
ELM: If anything I am seeing people go over the line and they’re like, “I’m gonna, I’m gonna spray my package with bleach as I leave it outside my house for seven days,” and it’s like, just don’t talk to other humans who are not in your household face-to-face. Like, that’s where it is. It’s mouths at mouths. Just wash your hands.
FK: I support people in whatever their way of coping is.
ELM: No, I support you, I just think listen to experts. They just say to wash your hands a lot, wipe things down…
FK: We’ll be fine.
ELM: But do not, do not, do not wash your vegetables with soap and water.
FK: No, that’s, that’s, that’s pathological. It’s pathological.
ELM: You, you, I mean I’ve read multiple things from microbiologists in the last few days who are like, “People who are putting things that are not just water on their vegetables are going to get severe gastrointestinal distress.” So, you don’t want that!
FK: Don’t do that!
ELM: You don’t want to be sick right now!
FK: No one wants it. That’s our tip, that’s our top tip: don’t wash your vegetables with anything but water.
ELM: Don’t give the health care professionals of our country an extra stress right now, just use hot water and scrub them thoroughly, like you normally would, always wash your vegetables please.
FK: OK. Elizabeth? I’ll talk to you later.
ELM: OK goodbye!
[Outro music, thank-yous and credits]