Episode 132: Purity Culture 2020
In Episode 132, Elizabeth and Flourish receive a letter asking them to revisit the topic of purity culture, which they last discussed in 2018. They talk about the way the term “anti” has changed in the past 15 years, connections between fiction and real life, and the specific way the fannish migration to Twitter has amplified these dynamics. They also hear from EarlGreyTea68 in a belated anniversary episode segment, and they answer a listener letter about migratory fandom.
Show Notes
[00:00:00] As always, our intro music is “Awel” by stefsax, used under a CC BY 3.0 license.
[00:00:53] We last covered this topic in Episode 84, “Purity Culture.”
[00:01:27] We celebrated our fifth anniversary in Episode 131.
[00:05:43] Our interview with EGT was actually also a follow-up to the Discourse Trilogy—Episode 121, “The Money Question 2: The Appening.”
[00:08:00] Our interstitial music here and elsewhere is “Don’t Trust the Cloud” by Lee Rosevere, used under a CC BY 3.0 license.
[00:09:02] The frog in question is Michigan J. Frog, from Warner Bros.’ Merrie Melodies.
[00:21:29]
[00:27:08] “Lucifer” is actually Latin and got associated with the Devil via various translation hijinks, which Flourish can elaborate on AT LENGTH if you ask nicely.
[00:37:18] LOL Reading the Romance is not from the 1990s it’s from 1984!!
[00:45:41] The YouTube pedophilia problem was covered extensively back in 2019, for example here in the Times.
[00:52:25] Betts’ voicemail is around the 20-minute mark of Episode 131.
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 #132, “Purity Culture 2020.”
FK: The most evergreen of topics. I sound a little deflated saying that, but that’s because I feel a little deflated thinking about purity culture.
ELM: Don’t be deflated, we haven’t even started yet!
FK: Well, that’s true. There’s a long—[laughs] there’s a long, there’s a long deflation road to go. OK. So we, about two years ago, had an episode called “Purity Culture.” It was part of our Discourse Trilogy. And we haven’t talked about it since then. We haven’t talked about antis, I mean, you know, we’ve talked about these things, but we haven’t like, dedicated an episode to it, you know?
ELM: Right, yes. So we got an email from a listener asking us to do an episode about it and it seemed like, ah—you know, it had been long enough that it was worth revisiting.
FK: I think so. But before we do that we have some business that we need to finish up from last time. So, if you think back to last time, it was our anniversary episode, and you know, we invited people from the past year to come and share their thoughts about how fandom has changed in the preceding year.
ELM: Yeah, I’m gonna stop you right there. So here’s what happened. I messaged Flourish and I was like, “Can you make a list of all our guests for the past year?” And Flourish did. And then, ah, so they would write to all of them to solicit their thoughts about these questions: how fandom had changed globally or personally. And I saw the list and I was like “That seems right! Why would I ever doubt it?”
FK: Yeah, it was wrong. I had left off EarlGreyTea68. So…yeah, that one’s on me. That was not because we don’t love EarlGreyTea, in fact I feel really bad because I really wish that we had been able to, you know, include her answers in the previous answers, but we couldn’t because I screwed up, so, you know. Flagellation. Insert flagellation here.
ELM: I didn’t hear an apology.
FK: OH COME ON. [both laugh] Anyway, the good news is, EGT was super sweet about it and offered to share her thoughts for this episode. So we have a recording from her!
ELM: OK, should we listen to it?
FK: Let’s do it.
EarlGreyTea68: Hello Fansplaining! This is EarlGreyTea68. Happy birthday! As for what has changed for me the past year in fandom, it’s really hard for me to remember what life was like before the pandemic. And that was really the biggest change that I remember, looking back over this year, is that I had a really hard time putting any words on paper in March and April. And that’s actually fairly unusual for me, and it was an indication of how much I think the pandemic changed the way that I was approaching fiction. Fiction had always been an escape, but suddenly all of the things I was working on seemed like they were quaint historical pieces, because they weren’t taking into account the current state of advanced panic that I felt that we were all living in and are still living in. So that stands out to me as the biggest change, the way in which—I’ve started writing again, but I feel like my relationship to my writing has shifted slightly in these pandemic times, that the cracks showed in its ability to be my safe place, I guess.
I think other things that stand out to me in terms of fandom is I feel like this was really the year when—I mean, I guess that’s part of a larger trend that I see where fandom just stopped being the separate space to me. I couldn’t separate it out from the pandemic, I couldn’t separate it out from the Black Lives Matter movement and systemic racism, which should never have been separated out. But it was, it was important to me to recognize that, which I think I did this year in a way that I hadn’t in previous years, coming to terms—if you can call it that—with J.K. Rowling’s transphobia…there was just a lot of challenges to fandom being what it had been for the first 40 years of my life this year. And probably those challenges should’ve happened earlier in my life, but they happened this year, and I think that on the whole I’m gonna come out to a good place.
And I feel like this is rambling and has just been kind of like, me doing therapy with you. But I’m writing again, and I actually have a lot of works in progress going on all at once, some of which are quaint historical pieces and some of which are dealing actually with quarantine. And I feel like it’s sort of, I am able to process things through fandom and through writing and I think a lot of us have realized that we can try to make this space work for us in this way as we process a lot of really unsatisfactory things about the way that we’ve set up fandom as a microcosm of society and society in general.
OK! That’s it for me! Happy birthday!
ELM: So I will say, you know, I guess I don’t know about like, everyone’s writing habits and so when people are saying that they can’t write right now, you know—especially fic, cause that’s the only thing I really care about writing…I care about writing words for my job [FK laughs] or whatever. But you know, in my spare time. It’s so reassuring—I hate this, that I’m like “Oh I love that you had trouble with this!” But like, it is very reassuring to hear that, that EGT was struggling with this as well, because if you remember when we talked to her, she has one of the most regular, regimented, “I take an hour,” whatever, “per day at this exact time to write fic because it brings me happiness,” you know, of almost anyone I know. I know very few people, including people who only write fiction for money and don’t write fanfiction, you know. They always say that’s how you’re supposed to do it, but it’s rare that I actually encounter people who really do that methodical work. So like, I’m very sorry for EGT that she was having trouble as well, but it’s also like, it’s kinda like, “Oh, even—”
FK: Even EGT.
ELM: “Felt that way, then I’m not so bad here.”
FK: Yeah, yeah. I agree. I completely agree with that. I felt like this was a very relatable response altogether too. I think that, you know, also with—just with the real world colliding with fandom, I think that that’s very relatable. I think that for a lot of people, like, it sort of…I don’t know. There are phases when fandom feels like it’s a respite and there’s times when it feels like it’s, when the veil that that could be true is torn away. Right? And I think that that’s something that a lot of people feel at different times and, you know, I don’t know. I just felt like the whole response I was like “Yep, yep, yep.”
ELM: Incisive commentary.
FK: “Yep.” I’m sorry! I don’t know what else to say! [laughing]
ELM: Yep.
FK: When someone says things that are great, like, why gild the lily, right?
ELM: Yeah, that’s—that’s really true. Done.
FK: All right. Well, the lily will not be gilded.
ELM: Just leave it.
FK: OK. Should we take a quick break before we get on to the meat of this episode?
ELM: I’m a vegetarian, so I resent that you used that phrase.
FK: Shall we take…I mean, there’s like, you can talk about the flesh of a fruit.
ELM: No.
FK: Or the meat of a nut?
ELM: Stop it! Your meat-centric worldview! [FK laughing] I can’t believe you ever claimed to be a vegan. You’re the worst!
FK: Claimed to be? I didn’t know that there was a claim involved! If you don’t eat animal products, you’re a vegan!
ELM: Like, veganize your mind, all right?
FK: Oh my God. OK, well, I will probably not try to veganize my mind, but I’ll talk to you in a second!
ELM: C’mon man! Veganize it!
FK: Oh my God.
[Interstitial music]
FK: All right, we’re back and as you might guess, we need to talk to you about Patreon before we go further.
ELM: Do not say it that way. It’s like it’s an intervention.
FK: [laughs] All right, so I will try not to say it that way. We as a podcast, you probably know, are funded by listeners like you through patreon.com/fansplaining, and there’s a lot of different levels that you can donate to us to help keep us on the air, and I’m pretty excited about the $3-a-month level right now, because…why am I excited, Elizabeth!
ELM: Good prompt.
FK: Yeah, I’m prompting you! Come on! We’re not smooth, but I’m trying to be smooth.
ELM: I am literally sitting here in silence and you’re just like, just—just tapdancing across the stage here. Like, “ya-da-ta-dah dah dahhhh!” And I’m like, “What? What are we doing here?” It’s incredible.
FK: Yeah, just like that frog with the top hat and tails? That’s me.
ELM: Isn’t it like a Warner Brothers frog?
FK: Is it a Warner Brothers frog? I don’t know. I just had a vision of the frog.
ELM: I think it has to do with the Warner Brothers Studio.
FK: Ah, OK.
ELM: FYI. Let me teach you something about Hollywood.
FK: [comedy voice] Hollywood!
ELM: [laughs] Anyway. $3 a month, you get access to all our special episodes, and we’ve had close to like 20 special episodes at this point. You know, there’s one on Buffy, there’s one on that terrible Star Wars movie we all paid $20 to see—in a theater, most of us. Those topics! But also starting from March we were doing a series of special episodes called Tropefest, and we did “Enemies to Lovers,” we did one on Omegaverse, we did “Trapped Together,” and we did…one other I can’t remember...Canon-Divergent!
FK: There we go!
ELM: Canon-Divergent AU, my actual favorite! So that’s great, I just am blocking it out. And so we set that aside for a few months but now we are going to resume it and our next one is one of my other favorite tropes that Flourish is ambivalent about, Found Family.
FK: Yeah, and I’m really excited to talk about it because, so, I finally watched The Expanse and everybody who loves it was right and I loved it, and for the first time I’m having like, found family feelings about something, and I’m really interested.
ELM: The first time ever?
FK: Yeah, I mean, intellectually I understand the found family thing but I’ve never really been a big found family person! This is pretty much the first time I’ve, I’ve felt like found family was central to, you know, my personal fandom.
ELM: The whole episode is gonna be like that. I’m gonna be like “Ever?!” and you’re gonna be like “Yeah!”
FK: It just wasn’t a big thing for me! I don’t know! [laughs]
ELM: So anyway, you get that, all—the whole back catalog and the new one that’s coming out soon for $3 a month. But, if you have more cash to spare, $5 a month gets you a really cute enamel pin sent through the good ol’ post office that we need to save.
FK: Save them!
ELM: Yeah, I don’t know how. I feel very powerless about this post office situation.
FK: Yeah, me too.
ELM: And $10, speaking of the post office, we will send you a tiny zine. And that one, this one’s on me. I apologize for the delay. I know how to apologize! [FK laughs] But we were doing a series of collaborations with Maia Kobabe, who’s, you know, probably our favorite artist, as a podcast, I would say.
FK: Yeah! Definitely, collectively!
ELM: That’s not overselling it. And so we had not completed the third and final installment of our like, my first fandom stories. And so we’ve been talking to Maia and we’re gonna get that going! And so we should be able to send that out within the next few weeks. So if you have money, give it to us and we’ll give you a tiny zine!
FK: [laughs] It’s true.
ELM: And a pin!
FK: And if you don’t, that’s OK too, you can still support us by spreading the word about the podcast, by reviewing us on iTunes, by subscribing on your favorite podcatcher, whatever that is—that really helps. Or, by sending in letters to fansplaining at gmail dot com, to any of our social media accounts—those are @fansplaining everywhere—sending us a voicemail, 1-401-526-FANS. And in fact, this episode was prompted by such a letter! So you know, you have an impact by doing that.
And with that, I think we should read the letter and get on to our main topic.
ELM: All right, do you wanna read it or shall I?
FK: Ah, I can read it!
ELM: OK!
FK: All right. This is from KimBoo York. “I have a friend who’s fandom adjacent, to whom I was trying to explain the whole recent surge in antis, their quote ‘crusade’ against quote ‘problematic’ content—sorry, I just must use scare quotes whenever I discuss antis—their demands for AO3 to censor work, their harassment and death threats of their quote ‘enemies,’ and their side-by-side talking points shared (lifted from?) TERFs and conservative Christians, and their complete unwillingness to start their own archives or spaces and instead demand that others conform to their standards.
“While I wouldn’t want you to put a bullseye on the podcast by getting in too deep on this topic, could you consider doing perhaps a timeline or recap? There are some articles out there, and a book from 2015, but nothing on the vicious flavor of antis we’ve got today.
“Thanks for considering! KimBoo York.” All right!
ELM: All right. Antis. Purity culture. 2020.
FK: To be clear, antis not like “extremely small ants,” or like “your most beloved female relative,” or “respected older woman.”
ELM: No one describes the insect ants as “anties.”
FK: A little antie! With its little feelers!
ELM: Absolutely not.
FK: No one can see me making feeler gestures right now. On my head.
ELM: I’m blessed that I’m the one who gets to see that, thank you. Thank you. That’s very you.
FK: Little antennae.
ELM: [laughing] So. I think it’s probably worth, even if people listened to the original “Purity Culture” episode, kind of grounding this with a little bit of background. I don’t think that necessarily we would be able to construct a step-by-step timeline, these are kind of waves of conversation.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And trends that have sort of ebbed and flowed over the last…
FK: 15 years?
ELM: I was gonna say 25, but yeah.
FK: Probably more.
ELM: I mean, like, awhile, basically. So. I have to imagine the reference to the academic book from five years ago is referencing—most often in fan studies, when I encounter anti—this is changing in the last couple of years, but older stuff, stuff from five years ago and earlier, it’s usually about anti-fans, which is slightly different and I think it’s actually what you wrote your…
FK: Yeah, I wrote my master’s thesis.
ELM: Right. Twilight something?
FK: So, yeah, in 2010 I wrote my master’s thesis about Twilight anti-fans, and basically the way that those sorts of communities shaped up at that time, it was like you would get sort of an internet community of people who really disliked a thing that was popular in fandom, and then they would essentially make fun of it. Right? And it would be like a community of people who were sort of gathered around, just making fun of the thing. And sometimes there would be some stuff in it like, with the Twilight anti-fans there would be people who felt like it was anti-feminist and so they didn’t like it for that reason, or…
ELM: They felt like Twilight was anti-feminist.
FK: Yeah, yeah.
ELM: Not, like making fun of it. Yeah.
FK: Yeah. So they would make fun of it and then they would say “Well, the reason I don’t like it is because it’s anti-feminist.” But it wasn’t like a—you know, the making fun of it, I mean, it was mean, but it was light-hearted, right? It was like, “Here’s some mean gifs. Here’s some mean memes,” right, about Edward Cullen looking like, I don’t know, he’s covered in flour all the time. Because he sort of does, right.
ELM: Yeah, that’s fair.
FK: So, you know, and this was—there were other communities like this. It was people who really disliked the thing so much that they kind of came back around to liking it and behaving as though they were fans of the thing. Cause like, when you’re spending all your time on a community making fun of Twilight, like, I’m sorry, that’s still a big part of your life, right?
But that’s not the same thing as antis today.
ELM: Right. I mean, and it’s interesting because that kind of culture—I mean, there are parallels, there are connections between how we would use the term “anti,” which, I mean, like—pause for one second. Pausing myself here. The term “anti” in 2020 is, is so disparate.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Amorphous?
FK: Amorphous is a good word for that.
ELM: To the point where it’s almost meaningless, you know. People use it in a way to self-describe their own beliefs, people use it as a bludgeon to, they ascribe other people’s behaviors and beliefs…
FK: Yeah, yeah. And sometimes, like, for—yeah, exactly as a bludgeon. So sometimes it’s like an insult that you can use to be like, “Well, I know you’re bringing up this uncomfortable thing, why are you just hating on it? You’re just an anti!” You know. But it’s a real conversation that needs to be had.
ELM: It’s really funny to think about this as a timeline, because actually even to envision this conversation you’re kind of jumping around in time. So like, the culture when I—if I were to say “anti” and to use the immediate definition that comes into my head that’s not it being used in every which way to suit different people’s needs or whatever, I would describe it as people who ostensibly are in broader fandom spaces, but it’s not specifically about one fandom.
The strongest argument that quote-unquote “antis” make is that there is a direct line between fiction and reality. That problematic behaviors in fiction, whether they’re abusive dynamics, whether they’re things like rape, pedophilia, any depiction of them is inherently romanticizing them and that they are offering a blueprint for people to commit these acts in real life. And to normalize these behaviors and potentially not be able to spot them because they’ve romanticized them.
FK: Right.
ELM: But it also often winds up being anti-shipping. And that is either against specific ships, usually ships that are emblematic of what they see as you know “inherently abusive” or “pedophilic” or “incestual” or like pedophilia and like incest—which we can get to in a bit, because that’s where I think a lot of this just goes completely off the rails.
And so it might initially start as being anti-a-specific-ship, but there is a significant contingent of people who are anti-shipping in general. And they’ll talk about “shippers.” “Shippers like this.” This kind of shorthanding of this idea that if you ship anything then you inherently are for underage, you know, you’re really into underage ships, like a huge age gap, et cetera, that kind of thing.
FK: Yeah, and I think that the missing link between these two things—I think back to like, I don’t know, on Tumblr in the early 2010s, like, where you would have…I just remember vividly in multiple fandoms the problem where people who were, who didn’t like a particular character would get into that character’s tag, right, and start—
ELM: Yes.
FK: So you would have people who’d be like, whatever, “I dislike,” I don’t know. Who’s a character of this sort? I mean, at the time when I was in Sleepy Hollow, people who didn’t like Abbie or Katrina, two of the female characters. So people would get into the tag and they’d be “Oh, I’m anti this character, and here’s all the reasons why they suck.” And everyone else would be like “Just let us live our life!!” You know?
ELM: Right, right. Which is where the phrase “don’t tag your hate” came from, which was like—the tags exist ostensibly so people who like the thing you’re putting in the tags can find each other. Which, you know, obviously that wasn’t an agreed-upon norm! Like, you know, from a metadata perspective…
FK: Yes!
ELM: From a basic tagging perspective…
FK: That is not an agreed-upon norm!
ELM: If I’m writing about a character I hate, of course I’ll tag them, you know? Because who cares! Like, do I care if I’m ruining the good time of the people who think this monster is actually all right? No! I’m factually telling you that my post is about this person.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And there’s no sentiment—
FK: Yes.
ELM: Involved in a basic tag of someone’s name or a ship name.
FK: Right, right.
ELM: But obviously that’s not actually how it shakes out in practice, you know.
FK: Yeah, and that’s obviously super—it gets super complicated. In this particular case it gets super complicated, like, if the character is a Black woman and people are putting their hate for her in that tag, and like…just incredibly messy and incredibly difficult to deal with. And so I think that’s sort of the missing link. And then I think from there this sort of all coalesced around, as you were saying, ships and characters who people see as inherently abusive or inherently bad. Power dynamics being a big part of that.
ELM: Right.
FK: And then those things all sort of combining to form—sort of a worldview. In which, in which fiction sort of deeply influences reality and in which power dynamics in every relationship need to be extremely minutely examined to make sure that it’s OK. And then I think that something that I’ve been seeing happen more recently, I think that a lot of this has come off of Tumblr and moved on to Twitter, and thence sort of into the larger discourse outside of fandom.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: Yeah, just in the past like, year or so!
ELM: Yeah, there was a—there was a tweet yesterday, at the time of this recording it’ll have been a few days ago—that I sent to you, which I thought was fascinating. The, the person who had screenshotted the original tweet is a journalist, probably about our age, and the original tweet was something along the lines of like, “Can we please stop, really, can we just kill the trope of the person raises someone from childhood and then they fall in love with them.” And when this journalist took a screenshot of this tweet, it had 75,000 likes. And she wrote in her caption, “What are 75,000 of you reading?!” Right? And just like…
FK: I don’t know!
ELM: I don’t know!
FK: I literally sat here trying to think of any book in which that was depicted as a good thing.
ELM: Right! So this is part of it, and as we discussed it it really got to some of the things that are going on with purity culture, because you know, the first thing I thought of was—sadly, because I’m basic—I thought of the Sweeney Todd film. I thought of Alan Rickman and Amanda Seyfried. Because that is like a subplot there, right?
FK: But he’s the evil one!
ELM: But it’s like, he’s the bad guy, right? It’s so obvious! I mean, they cast Alan Rickman. He’s the bad guy! He’s real creepy. She’s interested in a man who’s closer to her age. Right?
FK: Yes, correct.
ELM: You know, that little, that delicate, spindly boy. You know him.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: You remember. You saw that movie, right?
FK: I did see that movie! [both laughing]
ELM: You know the spindly boy, right?
FK: I know the spindly boy!
ELM: But like, I, you know, I thought of that—if I try to think of any other examples it’s always, it’s like the bad guy! It’s like the creepy, like, guys, it’s deliberately meant to be creepy. “My ward, I love you, my ward,” and you’re like, ugh!
FK: They’re all—the one example I can think of is, uh, there’s an Anne McCaffrey book that does it. But Anne McCaffrey also writes lots of books about dragon rape! No one thinks that Anne McCaffrey has good sexual politics, and if you do, I’m sorry, she does not!
ELM: Right.
FK: Also—yeah! No! Like, literally that’s the only one I can think of! [laughs]
ELM: So there’s the kind of idea of like, is this a trope that you’re seeing á la Sweeney Todd, the mere existence of it is upsetting to the 75k people that faved this? I mean, I don’t know what percentage of them actually can think of real examples.
FK: But this is exactly what I think the problem is, right?
ELM: Right, right.
FK: Cause stuff gets on Twitter and on Twitter what does really well is stuff that everyone can agree with: “That shit’s creepy. I don’t want it!” You know? And so then it’s this very strident statement, and you get to retweet it or like it, and it seems to tally fine, and then you think about it a little bit and it sort of falls apart and you’re like “Oh.”
ELM: “Oh, what is that trope? I don’t…I hadn’t encountered it.”
FK: “What book did I read?”
ELM: “Maybe it’s not littered with this trope!”
FK: Yeah!
ELM: Maybe it is and we just can’t think of too many more examples, right.
FK: There’s probably, there’s probably like some Regency romance from like 1960 that has it in there. So I’m sure that I’ve read like one other book that has it. But like…
ELM: Wards.
FK: No! [laughs] It’s not a thing!
ELM: Um, but you know, like, so there’s this idea of like, when you actually see that outright depicted, you know, there’s a question of—oh, with this Sweeney Todd example or whatever—there’s an argument that’s made often within purity culture spaces, within anti spaces… Again, using these terms with reservations about the kind of squishy nature of them at this point… It’s the mere depiction of it that is, that is problematic. It is not, you know, whether the bad guy’s doing this and it’s meant to be seen as bad, right, it’s the fact that it exists at all.
FK: Right.
ELM: Because potentially someone could read it, quote-unquote read it the wrong way.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Take the wrong lessons from it, “Oh, there’s a rape scene and it’s meant to be bad, as rape is, but maybe someone will be titillated by it, and maybe someone gets off on that, and then they’re gonna be inspired to go commit sexual assault, or to think it’s fine if it happens to them”? Like, I’m not sure what the next step is there, but it’s the kind of idea of reading it the wrong way.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Taking the wrong thing away from it.
FK: Definitely. This is also related to the deep concern a lot of people have with like, people finding villains sexy. Right? Like, or writing about a villain. Yeah, I mean, you know, this is something that people find really, really stressful, a lot of people who sort of are in the anti space. And I mean, I don’t think it’s uncomplicated when people find a villain sexy! But it stresses folks out a lot. I don’t know what to say about it. This seems like a pretty common thing people have done [laughs] over the course of hundreds of years, is find villains sexy. So.
ELM: Like, like the Devil.
FK: Like the Devil.
ELM: Yeah, back before they made him a joke, the Devil was pretty tempting! [FK laughs] As you may remember, my freshman year of college I took a class called “Evil.”
FK: And did it involve a segment about the sexy Devil?
ELM: We started…I mean, he wasn’t that sexy. But we started the class with the, like, 2000 years of how perceptions of the Devil changed, right. There was a turning point, right, where he was seen as a joke.
FK: Right.
ELM: Right?
FK: Yeah, absolutely. Little, little, you know, red horns and a pointy tail.
ELM: Yeah! He used to be so serious and so scary.
FK: Yeah! Lucifer Morningstar.
ELM: Yeah! What a sexy name, I’m sorry.
FK: It is a sexy name!
ELM: It’s so sexy!
FK: It’s a sexy name! Like…
ELM: Is that his name, if we directly translated it back into—what is it in Aramaic?
FK: Lucifer, Lightbringer. It’s his name.
ELM: Lightbringer? Shit.
FK: “Lucifer,” it means lightbringer.
ELM: That’s so sexy! Lucifer is the Aramaic?
FK: No, Lucifer is not Aramaic. I don’t—OK first of all, it wouldn’t be in Aramaic, it would be in Hebrew.
ELM: What kind of future priest are you? In Hebrew?!
FK: Nothing in the Bible is in Aramaic!
ELM: Oh, where did I get this from?
FK: It’s in Greek or Hebrew!
ELM: Is the New Testament not?
FK: No. Jesus spoke Aramaic but the written language of the Bible is—so there is one word, there are like two words in Aramaic in the New Testament. Because, like, Jesus says things and they’re in Aramaic occasionally.
ELM: OK, but the whole thing was written in Hebrew.
FK: The New Testament was in Greek. Old Testament in Hebrew.
ELM: Shit. They never talk about this in church.
FK: I once broke up with a church because the pastor didn’t know Greek. Cause it’s easy Greek.
ELM: You’re terrible.
FK: It wasn’t that he didn’t know it. It was that he didn’t want to admit that he didn’t know it and wasn’t willing to have a conversation about anything to do with it.
ELM: All right, it’s a little more complicated.
FK: Yeah, I mean, I was just going for the—you know, the funny thing. The funny thing. Not the exact accurate thing, but the funny thing. We’re on a podcast!
ELM: You, uh, you took us down a little rabbit hole here about how villains are sexy.
FK: I did.
ELM: I feel like there are so many things going on here. So OK. There’s this lens, there’s this worldview, and it is one where most dynamics between humans are measured on this, this abuse of power scale, right? And this kind of idea of what are these levels of power. And it’s interesting to think about, because I love thinking about power dynamics, right, and obviously they exist, you know? And like, it’s undeniable that there are power dynamics between all sorts of pairs of humans, whether they’re romantically involved or not.
FK: And that those power dynamics can be bad! In a post-Me Too world, how many of us have not, like, it’s incredibly obvious that like, there can be bad power dynamics! No one disagrees with this.
ELM: I think it was pretty obvious before Me Too happened, but...that’s fine.
FK: [laughs] I agree, I was just thinking about how like…
ELM: You just learned about this in the last three years, so.
FK: It never occurred to me before in my life. [ELM laughs] This is why I need antis to tell me that I was wrong about… [laughing] Anyway.
ELM: Yeah, I, I think that sometimes what tends to happen—there’s two ends of the spectrum here. One side of it is this extremely decontextualized, like, “this thing on the surface is bad.” And I actually think this, like, this tweet was a fairly good example of it, because it feels like a bit of a straw man. It’s like, “Is that trope really everywhere in the world?”
Or this kind of decontextualized idea of, you know, inherently, like, if two people are this far apart in age, that is inherently bad, right? When actually, you know, like, if you wanna talk about like, large age gaps, and the problematic nature of them, it’s really—I think that, I’m not a massive fan of this, speaking in like sweeping generalities, and that’s not to say that “Oh, actually I think that like, that specific 16-year-old getting with that 35-year-old is real true love” or whatever. That’s not excusing it at all. But it’s also saying that the decontextualization of it and the kind of extreme fear that you see manifested where you see people saying “Oh, these people are two years apart in age and that’s an inherent abuse of power.”
FK: Right.
ELM: And it’s like what—what two years are these? Like, you know? I don’t even like—even underage people, if they’re 16 and 18, like, there are loopholes in the laws to except that, right?
FK: There sure are!
ELM: That’s one element of it. The other side of the spectrum, and I think it’s interesting that these two things exist simultaneously, is when these arguments are actually a cover for a personal dislike.
FK: Right.
ELM: Of a ship. And that’s where you get into the space of—obviously when people find explicitly age-gapped or, you know, teacher-student, or another—
FK: Right, sure!
ELM: That kind of abusive, if the actual ship in the—I mean, I’m talkin’ to you, Snape/Hermione shipper…
FK: That’s fine!
ELM: You know, yeah!
FK: Yeah! There are very few people who would disagree that that is [laughs] it’s a problematic ship. Sure is!
ELM: Absolutely! Well within your right to say “I don’t wanna read that, cause I don’t wanna read about,” you know.
FK: Absolutely, absolutely! And there’s many good reasons why you might not want to. Sure!
ELM: Right, right. But you also get these kind of arguments of—and this I think is very specific to, to fandom-related anti purity culture. I think this would look very strange to people outside of fandom spaces. But the, like, “They are best friends, so they’re like brothers, so this ship is basically incest.”
FK: Right. Because, in real life…they’re best friends so they’re not allowed to bang? Question mark?
ELM: Right. So whenever I see stuff like this, and I see stuff like this a lot, unfortunately, over the last few years, I don’t—I honestly don’t know how to take it and I actually think that there is some variation within it. I know we’re talking about spectrums all over the place here, we’re in a spectrum of a spectrum, but like, I think there are some people who actually do believe that, and I think—but I also think there’s an equal number of people who are using any excuse they can grasp at to justify why the ship they dislike is bad.
FK: Yeah. I think that’s—that’s very clearly the case. I think that it’s probably confusing also if you are a young person coming into these spaces and reading this discourse and not necessarily able to distinguish those things, right? I don’t know that this is the case, but when I think back to my younger years in fandom, and the arguments that people made about things, and I think about the way that I took that in, I don’t know. It just seems to me like if you have a bunch of people talking about these power dynamics—which are obviously real, and this is back to my, I mean, obviously these have always been real, but if you’re seeing in the media every day cases of people abusing other people and you know, pedophilia within the Catholic church and all this stuff, right, and it feels very scary and there’s a lot of predators out there who are trying to, you know, who are taking advantage of people, right? Epstein and whoever else.
And then you see people talking about this online, about this in media? I can just imagine how it could be very easy to feel like “Yeah, they are like brothers and that is gross,” you know? “That is the slippery slope that we’ve fallen down. We’ve fallen down this slippery slope and that’s why things are so shitty right now!” You know?
ELM: Yeah. There have been a number of kind of… I almost said “Come to Jesus” but that’s not the right term at all. But confessional blog posts, like Tumblr post and Twitter threads that I have read in the last couple of years, of people who did come to this rhetoric when they were relatively young. It’s been interesting. I’ve seen many many times over the past few years people who were raised in fundamentalist religious upbringings, particular fundamentalist evangelical Christianity, hitting early puberty, finding that Christianity is not doing it for them, and falling into these beliefs with the same sort of patterns of fundamentalism and the same sort of black-and-white thinking that allows you to frame the world this way, you know.
And the, our letter-writer, you know, references—which you see a lot of discourse referencing around these topics, you know, conservative Christian beliefs as well as radical feminist beliefs. I think that they actually say “TERFs,” but it is the broader radical feminism, the, you know, decades-old worldview that you know, all men are predators.
FK: Yeah. All heterosexual sex is by its own very nature rape. Right? Like, that is a classic radfem belief. And I think that there’s—obviously, there’s like, some things that that philosophy is pointing to, you know? And then there’s also that bald statement, and I’m not sure those two things are, anyway.
ELM: Right! So when you think about, like, you know, even for people who didn’t come from this sort of fundamentalist background where they were looking for this very sort of, kind of clear cause-and-effect sort of logic through which to see the world, you know, I don’t know, it’s very confusing to come into adolescence and things can get really jumbled. And these are very convincing coherent arguments and obviously as an individual human in real life I strongly disapprove of rape! [FK laughs] I know! It’s a bold stance! It’s bold!
But drawing the line back to fiction, muddling it…and kind of obscuring really substantive critiques, I think, about the way that, you know…one thing that I really always hesitate in these conversations, and I kind of get a little frustrated with the kind of strident—equally strident, on the other side—“fiction is not reality” argument. It’s like, actually, I don’t think fiction is disconnected from reality, because I think fiction is written by humans who live in the world and fiction reflects people’s, you know, the values of societies, and the cultures of societies, right?
FK: Absolutely, absolutely.
ELM: And so, like, this, this, this fallacy that, you know, that anything we write down is literally nothing to do with any—that’s absurd! Because it’s read by humans and it’ll stay with them! Right? I think that the argument I would make is that fiction isn’t, is not meant to be a blueprint for living your life, right? You know? And this has been a theme throughout the history of fiction. For hundreds of years people have criticized fiction, saying “Oh, it’s not moral enough. You’re not showing people how to live a good life, how to live a moral upright Christian life,” or whatever the context was at the time, right?
You see this cropping up over and over again if you study the history of the novel, you know. And even before that, you know, you see—I’m gonna go in a full English lecture mode here, but you know, these swings of morality and then debauchery and like, the 17th century English playwriting, you know, about what the purpose of fiction is for. You know, not just novels. Right?
So it’s like, I think that the idea that fiction should show you how to live your life is inherently a flawed one. But the fact that fiction reflects life?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Certainly.
FK: You know, everything that you’re saying right now really reminds me of a classic of Cultural Studies, Reading the Romance. It’s a very old book now, it’s like from the early ’90s, I wanna say, maybe the late ’80s even. But it was a study of romance novel readers and it’s a really interesting study because at the time, right, romance novels were largely dismissed—I mean, they still are dismissed by a lot of people. But they were like dismissed as completely anti-feminist and also like, trashy and all this stuff.
And what this person found was that people were reading these novels and most of the readership of them were people who were living in fairly patriarchal systems, you know, who were like, a wife or a mother who the only free time that they had for themselves—it was like a common thing. Like, “My doctor told me I needed to take time for myself and I needed to pick up a hobby, so I picked up reading as a hobby.” Like, literally, which is incredibly sad to me to think about that, but this was like a recurring theme. And that within the novels, like, the actual content of them was largely about operating within a constraining system, right? A lot of times you have a historical or even a contemporary romance novel and it’s like, the world is constrained, you’re going to be in this like, romantic situation, but it’s showing you people who are like, trying to negotiate a relationship and solve problems in their relationship. And they solve the problems in their relationship.
And so the people who were reading these novels talked about how, to them, the fact that the characters had even the sketchiest, like, careers and so on? Still meant something to them! And the fact that the characters were like, working out these problems was actually quite relevant to them. You know? And it like, inspired them in certain ways. Because those were the levels on which their lives were operating.
And I guess I can’t help but think about that when I think about fanfic and I think about the way people read things today, and I think about, well, what are the themes that are coming out within that? And I don’t think that they’re always literal. So I think that’s the other side of this coin, right, is there’s also this question of is—what are people working out through fiction? What are the things in their own lives that they’re trying to write about and think about?
And I guess that also kind of applies to antis too, you know? Like: what are the things in people’s lives that are making them relate to fiction in that way, right? Why are people so concerned about the—on the one hand, why are people writing things that other folks find problematic, what are they working out in their own lives to be writing this out or why is that fantasy compelling to them, and then on the other side, like, why are you so obsessed with it, right? What’s going on in your own life that makes you feel like you have to analyze everything through these lenses of power dynamics, when the reality is, like, I don’t know. I don’t know about you, I don’t go through my life thinking in terms of power dynamics with everybody I encounter, right? In daily life that’s, that’s not my like…
ELM: Everything is a power dynamic, Flourish!
FK: Well, it is, but I don’t like—you know, I don’t think about it when I go get my coffee in the morning, you know what I mean? I just get the coffee!
ELM: All right, creepy. Imagine if you did!
FK: Oh my God, what would that be like? What would I do?
ELM: I mean, you know, when I took anthropology in college we learned about—as my professor would say in his voice—“transactions.” [FK: laughs] That’s how he spoke. He had elbow patches.
FK: Ooh!
ELM: And a mustache.
FK: Elbow patches!
ELM: Yeah, mm-hmm!
FK: I’m into it.
ELM: He also, he also said—he was an expert in the religious anthropology of South Asia, in particular Gujarat, and I remember very distinctly the way he said “Gandhi,” which was [in his voice] “Gandhiji.” [FK laughs] I’ve been working on my impersonation of him for like literally 15 years at this point. [In his voice] “Transactions.”
But, sure! Like, that’s anthropology, like, that’s humans interacting with each other and you make transactions, there’s obviously power there.
FK: Sure.
ELM: I have the $4 and that person is standing there about to give me the coffee and there’s some dynamic going on, I don’t know what, you know?
FK: I mean of course there is, but I don’t know—
ELM: No. I know. It’s not like I’m—who’s abusing who here?
FK: Yeah, while we’re sitting here, you’re older than me, I think that I’m the one being abused here!
ELM: I mean obviously you’re the submissive in this relationship, so… [FK laughing] We’ve already established this so many times it’s not funny. But. Yeah, I think that—I think it’s really hard to talk about this without infantilizing people who are framing things this way, and I think it’s something I really wanna avoid doing.
FK: Yeah, it’s true.
ELM: I hate this idea of like, you know, that argument of, of readers of certain kinds of fiction—whether it’s certain themes in fanfiction or otherwise—are, you know, scared of reality and trying to put up barriers. But I also think it’s hard…obviously you wanna protect yourself when it comes to interpersonal relationships, and I’m certain there are people who are arguing these things who have suffered abuse.
FK: Yes.
ELM: In fact I know, because people will often say that. And we all have different ways of processing that, and we all have different—like, different kind of levers, pushing us down, right? You know, like, it’s not like everyone universally is given the same set of challenges and some of us are better at handling it than others. That’s absurd. Right?
But I do think that the argument of—while I think there are flaws in the “don’t like, don’t read” argument, I really think when it comes to stuff like this, it would save people a lot of heartache. Because you’re not gonna be able to stop people from writing things you don’t like. And when I say that “don’t like, don’t read” has its flaws, you know, I do think that in particular when people are writing explicitly bigoted content, that sucks, you know? And like—I think this conversation is super fraught at all times, because I feel like I’m constantly being like “Go ahead, write about rape! But you can’t be racist,” which is like, I don’t know! The whole—it’s all fiction and it all exists in the world and it’s all being written by humans and read by humans. And I sometimes wonder if I’m drawing arbitrary lines that don’t deserve to be drawn.
FK: Well, I think that there’s also like—there’s also a difference between like, someone writing about racism and someone writing, being a bigot, right? Like…
ELM: Right, but following this through, there are definitely people who are writing rape scenes because they find it sexy.
FK: Sure, absolutely.
ELM: And I know we can make the big roundabout argument about rape fantasies and reclamation of female power or whatever, but I think there’s people in the world who get off on it.
FK: Absolutely.
ELM: There’s people in the world who get off on pedophilia. They’re pedophiles! Right, you know? Straight up. And I don’t really know how to handle this one in terms of saying that like—I don’t want people to write explicitly racist works, but I also don’t know if I can stop them. Right? And you know, like…you could make the same argument and say, like, people are gonna write super pro-rape stories and I don’t know if you can stop them. You can just yell at them about it.
But it’s rarely down to individual stories and authors that way, when it comes to purity culture. It’s the ethos. It’s the lens. It’s the kind of sweeping straw-man arguments. It’s the assumptions that—the assumptions of intent and I, I really strongly push back against the kind of idea that, you know, the only people who can write about rape are people who have been victims and they’re working through their trauma. I don’t agree with that.
FK: Yeah, there’s a variety of reasons why that’s clearly wrong, among other things being that like—if you feel like you live with the threat of rape, then that itself is something that you might want to address in your life.
ELM: Absolutely!
FK: And also—even if you—that’s just like the first of many arguments about this, right.
ELM: And the forcing people to disclose…
FK: Yeah.
ELM: “Oh, I can write about this because actually here’s something that happened to me and I’m allowed to depict it,” right, that sucks. And no one should be forced to disclose that. So like I have a really hard time with that. And that’s often, that’s one of the most common arguments you see when people are trying to defend the “all content goes in these spaces,” you know, is “Well, if I’m doing it for this good reason then it’s OK.” And it’s like, once again, you have no idea if people are gonna take any of this stuff.
But then like, I could write a perfectly innocent story about children, completely nonsexual, just kids, and a pedophile could read it and find it sexy because I described their kid-like features.
FK: Yeah, this is something people have found out about YouTube, right? You have completely innocent videos of your kids, and people creep on them. And like, that is obviously gross and disgusting and a, you know, an invasion. It’s also like, the situation of like, having things in the world. You can’t, when an image or something like that goes out into the world, you can’t control its reception.
ELM: Right. I think it’s the lack of control that’s at the heart of this. And I think that one of the reasons we’re framing this around “how has this evolved over the last fe years,” it does feel like the world has dramatically spiraled out of control since the last time we talked about this topic. And I feel like these arguments have only gotten more virulent and these cycles of conversation have only gotten stronger and louder and kind of in a whirlwind, and I think it’s in reaction to just things being completely bonkers and people feeling like they have nothing to hold on to. And it’s like, “What can I control?”
FK: I think that’s true and I think that also, as a lot of these conversations moved on to Twitter, and they came up against people who are, like, active politically, I think that also created more of that—more of that foment, right. I’ve been surprised to find that in leftist spaces that I’m a part of…first of all, there’s obviously a lot of abusive people in leftist spaces. I don’t think this is a surprise to anybody who has done any leftist organizing of any sort.
ELM: Leftist white man…
FK: Right, I mean, this is not a shock right?
ELM: Hacky sack convention, I don’t know. [both laugh]
FK: But I’ve been surprised to see some of this rhetoric basically popping up word-for-word, and it’s usually like, I mean—if you ask people they’ll talk about radical feminism, but when you dig a little deeper, it’s clearly coming from the same well, right? It’s clearly coming from the same fandom Tumblr space, and I don’t know, I just think that it’s—I think you’re right about it being about control and about fear and about, like, broader purity too, right? The idea that like, if you could just define all the right things, you know. If we could just define all of the right things then you could have correct belief and correct action, and then you would not need to be anxious about anything, because you would know that you had correct belief and correct action.
And unfortunately that’s not really how morality works in our world. You know? Like, there’s no—I can’t, I can say like really broad principles, you know, “Do unto others,” whatever, I can quote Jesus up and down, but it’s really hard to know that like, any individual action you’re taking is the right one. There’s a huge butterfly effect of all the different things that could result from that action, and you can’t control them.
ELM: Right. It is interesting to me how it loops back around, I just thought of Mike Pence which is terrible—I should never think of him.
FK: Sorry!
ELM: But you know, like—
FK: “Mother.”
ELM: Sometimes some of the commentary I see from young people on the left… “Young people on the left.” I’m gonna be like, “Signin’ up for the antifa bus!” You know, like… [laughing] I mean people our age and younger, I don’t mean to sound like that. People who are not conservative. Sometimes in trying to get a handle on these conversations, to assert some sort of control, it winds up sounding like Mike Pence being like, “Ah, I could never be alone in a room with a woman.” Because both—you know, we all actually, Mike Pence and the person who thinks that all interpersonal actions are abuse are on the same page, you know?
FK: They really basically are.
ELM: We’re all just like, waiting to sin or to be the victims of sin. You know? And it’s like…I think that everyone’s individual experience is different. But I think if you read widely enough, you read enough different sorts of POVs, you read different experiences from people of different backgrounds, you can form a really like—I feel cheesy, but you can form kind of a broad tapestry of ways to live in the world, right? Like, especially if you are reading widely and you’re understanding how different perspectives are seeing these situations, right? And like, I don’t think fiction needs to give you a blueprint, but I think the broader body of written fictional works actually can help you build those tools, because you’re understanding different perspectives. And you’re not just looking to one individual work to guide you.
And I think that’s, you know, drawing those connections to fundamentalist Christianity, that’s one of the biggest weaknesses there, right? I say this to you, future priest! But like, you know you can’t live your entire life just being guided by a single text. And no text should have that responsibility.
FK: Yeah, I mean, we live in a world with other people, and they’re—the classic thing to say, that a lot of people would say…not fundamentalist Christians…is that obviously the Bible is one of the things we read, and the world is another, because that’s also something that God made, right? Hey!
ELM: You just made it so Christian and I wasn’t asking for that!
FK: You like invited it! You brought me, I was not gonna go there but you brought it there.
ELM: Not like that!
FK: But even if you don’t completely want to wander down that particular religious path, I think you could also say that there’s a certain amount of like—interacting with other people in an open way that is helpful too, and I sometimes wonder how much…how can I put this? There’s been a lot of times in my own life where I felt like I wasn’t able to actually, like, interact with other people and hear their perspectives and not feel threatened by them. Perspectives that were different from my own. Because often it was because, like, when I was younger, because I was somehow in the power of other people, right, or because I felt like—yeah, that they wielded some sort of power over me and that I couldn’t actually have that interaction and understand what they were thinking without having it immediately impact my own life.
And I think that that’s one of the things too is that like, when you yourself feel like you’re under siege, it can be really hard to hear any other perspectives than your own. And unfortunately I don’t know how that can get fixed, because I think there are larger structural reasons that people feel under siege, you know, or they feel they’re in the power of other people in ways that make it hard, you know? That part I don’t know how to fix.
ELM: Yeah. I think to tie this back to fandom, because [laughs] it’s starting to be like about the nature of living in the world, I think that we’re in a bad place that I don’t actually see a way out of in the sense of that, the idea of it being a lens through which to view all media and all fandom activity. It’s sort of the flip side of what Betts was talking about in her voicemail in the last episode, you know. Maybe not “flip side,” but kind of sits adjacent to? This sort of idea that people are watching media with a fannish lens, but “fannish” means something different, right?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: This is like watching it with an anti fannish lens, right, and looking for the ways that fictional works can cause harm. And I don’t really see a way out of that, and I think that there are people who are opportunistic and are using these arguments to mask their…whether it’s an anger with a ship or a character they don’t like or a person in the fandom they don’t like, or you often see—if you dig in a little bit on anti discourse—people angry at the AO3 because they aren’t allowed to put up a Ko-Fi [said “coffee”], Ko-Fi [said “koh-fye”], or a Patreon. I’ve seen this over and over again as I’ve dug in a little bit to “Oh, you support that site that…”
FK: Right.
ELM: “That is all pedophilia,” and then I’ll go like three posts down, and it’ll be like “Fuck that site for not letting me monetize my fanfiction!” It’s like, “You’re—that site that you said was evil?! I don’t know!” And so like, I think that when it’s a worldview it can get weaponized and it can get used by people who are just using it as a cover, and I think it’s really hard to break down and undo. Because it’s just a strong set of beliefs and way of looking at the world.
So I think that’s hard, and I think when we talked about this two years ago, when I observed a lot of this emerging five years ago, I wondered what would happen, you know, a couple of years in the future—especially because a lot of people by their own admission were relatively young, they were 17, 18, 19, they were entering college, which is a really fraught time, you know?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: I can say from personal experience, and I’m glad that I had limited connection to the internet at that time, because…I mean, I had the internet, but it wasn’t like this, you know? It wasn’t, it was 2002, you know, it wasn’t…you know what I mean.
FK: I do.
ELM: You know how old I am!
FK: I know how old you are! It’s, it’s nearly as old—it’s—it’s close to as old as I am, it’s older than I am,.
ELM: Older than you! I’m in charge of you, cause I’m two years older than you, so. Do as I say. Um… [both laugh] But you know, I had wondered, what’s it gonna be like for people when they get a few years older? I personally found a lot of strongly-held beliefs I had in college kind of hit differently when I entered the working world and you start to have to make compromises to just pay the bills that you may not be asked to do prior to that. [laughs] I’m a terrible centrist! But.
But like, looking at that a few years later? Like, I don’t know. It’s just like a new crop of people just showed up and they were even more upset and now I don’t know what to do with this! So I feel like I should just stop prognosticating or even speculating about what it’s gonna be like a couple years from now. Like, I don’t know if we could’ve predicted the effects of Tumblr’s tiddy ban—we didn’t even talk about the tiddy ban.
FK: With Ds. Double Ds.
ELM: Double Ds. You know. But so much of this went to Twitter because people—even far prior to that—were leaving Tumblr, you know. And what is the social media landscape gonna look like in a couple of years? I think it’s impossible to say.
FK: Yeah, I agree.
ELM: Anyway!
FK: Well…
ELM: Got nothin’.
FK: Neither do I. I think that that is the best that I’ve got about purity culture.
ELM: This was a complicated discussion.
FK: It was. It was! It was. OK. I hope that that answered your question, dear writer-inner, as best as we could.
ELM: KimBoo York! We know their name.
FK: I just like using the term “writer-inner.”
ELM: I don’t like it and I want you to stop.
FK: [laughs] I will respect your boundaries and stop. Anyway, thank you for writing in. It was a good reminder that we needed to revisit this topic, and it’s too bad that the topic continues to need to be revisited.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: OK, but before we sign off, there’s one more—I’m not gonna say it—one more person who has written in…
ELM: Yeah! What a cool, straightforward way to use language that exists in the world.
FK: [laughing] …who we wanted to address! Can I, can I read this to you?
ELM: You get to do all the letters?! It’s true, this one is to me.
FK: It’s to you! I need to do it.
ELM: So hook me up.
FK: All right. Here’s the message. It’s from anonymous. “Elizabeth, I didn’t appreciate you being so dismissive of the Old Guard fandom. It’s been a comic since 2017 and it isn’t just a movie. I know that the fandom will be fleeting as everything is these days. If it only lasts six weeks, then at least I’ll have something to look forward to every day for six weeks. Congrats on your five years! Your podcast is also something that keeps me going in the darkest timeline. Looking forward to the next episode.”
ELM: Well, anon—first of all I will say, I really like it when you get mad at me you write the letter “E,” only. [FK laughs] Do you know this about yourself? You’ll be like “E, I’m genuinely angry with you right now.”
FK: I also use “E” when I make notes on the show notes and that’s not when I’m angry with you.
ELM: Yeah, no, but I think it’s funny that always when you’re angry or like, edging towards angry, you’re like “E, I’m pretty frustrated by what you’re saying.” And I’m like “Oh no. Flourish is mad.”
FK: It’s because saying “Elizabeth” sounds like I’m calling you on the carpet, like, “Elizabeth Minkel, get in here!” and I don’t wanna do that!
ELM: Yeah, but “E” is just as aggressive as my full name! So that’s fine.
FK: All right, all right, all right. [laughing]
ELM: Um, though I don’t know if the letter-writer meant it in the same way that you do the “E, I’m mad at you.” But I apologize to the letter-writer! I didn’t mean to dismiss the fandom as it is, and it’s funny because as you, as you read the letter, you’re like “Actually, I think we kind of agree though.” Me saying it’s a movie is the same way of me saying that The Witcher is a television show, which obviously it’s not, it’s a series of novels and [laughs] obviously it’s a video game, right.
FK: Several video games that ate too many hours of my life! [laughs]
ELM: But the Western AO3-oriented fandom that I’ve observed kind of flashing in the pan the first few months of this year—and there are still tons of people engaging in the Witcher fandom, transformative works, who even came on in that, at that time—were definitely people who came in through the television show. That was a point of reference, right?
FK: Absolutely. Absolutely. And I mean like honestly like—the novels, yeah. Yeah.
ELM: Right. So, so for The Old Guard, me saying it’s a movie is more to say that like, I’m certain that there’s a portion of people who are really into The Old Guard right now who are going to go back to the comic books, and I think there’s probably another portion who were already into it and were thrilled to see the movie, and that it really resonated with a lot of people. But I still think there’s a good healthy portion of the people who were really into it who are engaging with it primarily through the film, and I said—the reason I said “it’s a movie” is because unlike a television show, there is often a limited shelf life to the fandoms of movies…
FK: Yeah, most of the fandoms for movies…with the notable exception of Inception.
ELM: Well, now that there’s Inception 2: Tenet…
FK: Just won’t die.
ELM: That we will never see, apparently, so that’s fine. But when I say that I think that we, we kind of—I feel like this comment winds up agreeing with me a bit is like, I don’t know. I think the kind of fleeting nature of a lot of this these days, and the speed at which a lot of people are moving on, at least on my feeds…I don’t know. That kind of sucks? Whatever! People can do whatever they want. They can love seven or eight fandoms in a year, or seven or eight fandoms at once, but like, if a bunch of new writers suddenly rolled up in my fandom and produced a bunch of stuff and then six weeks later they left, I would feel kind of sad, you know? I’d be like “Well, you shouldn’t have come at all!” I don’t know, maybe you feel differently. Maybe you don’t know what it’s like, because you’re in this big normie fandom, Star Trek.
FK: [laughs] I don’t know what that’s like. I also don’t know that I would feel that way. But I also don’t know how I would feel. So.
ELM: Yeah. I think it’s hard to say. So like, I don’t fault anyone for kind of sweeping through stuff, and I, I do think that the evolution we’ve seen over the last, like, decade of just how multi-fandom people can be and how they view so much media through this fannish lens and this like, “Oh, this really caught me and I’m gonna reblog gifsets and I’m gonna write a couple fics, and then this next thing catches me and I’m gonna do the same thing.” I find it really really interesting, and I find the way these patterns have now started perpetuating themselves, right? Like, I don’t think that you saw this kind of behavior 15 years ago at this scale.
FK: Yeah, not at this scale for sure.
ELM: So I think it’s really interesting for this kind of broad creativity, but I think that if you’re in an individual fandom and you wanna stick around for a little longer, and most people move on, I think that sucks. So. I hope for the letter-writer that more people stick around in this fandom for longer, because I mean, I haven’t watched this movie yet but it looks good! [FK laughs] And I like the art that I’m seeing! So…and I think it’s awesome. I think it’s great to see, I don’t know. It’s great to see kind of new stuff coming into my sphere, you know?
FK: Absolutely.
ELM: Not just sort of recycled stuff.
FK: Totally.
ELM: So yeah. So. But I do apologize, I didn’t mean to be dismissive or to kind of downplay the, the depth or the enthusiasm of that particular fandom.
FK: All right! Co-signed, I guess. Although I don’t know that I need to co-sign that.
ELM: It wasn’t addressed to you?
FK: It was not addressed to me.
ELM: And you didn’t say the original thing, so get out of my space! I am doing this right now. [FK laughing]
FK: Well said! How’s that instead?
ELM: You could say “Thank you for the kind words at the end of the message.” That’s to both of us.
FK: That is true. Thank you very much for those kind words. It means a lot—it really really means a lot to hear that from people.
ELM: Seriously.
FK: All right, well, I think that just about wraps it up for today.
ELM: All right, so, if you wanna nicely discuss purity culture with us—not yell at us—once again, fansplaining at gmail dot com or on most social media platforms or 1-401-526-FANS. Please be respectful. And we’ll keep talking about this!
FK: Cool! OK, well, talk to you later.
ELM: OK bye!
[Outro music, thank-yous and credits]