Episode 142: Copyright Brainworms

 
 
Jay Gatsby is annoyed

In Episode 142, “Copyright Brainworms,” Elizabeth and Flourish try to get at the diseased intersection of creativity and the law in the U.S.: our broken copyright system. Spurred by conversation around The Great Gatsby coming out of copyright, topics covered include transformative collaboration on TikTok, the Ratatouille musical, fannish feelings amongst pro creators, and what strange impulse leads people to describe God as the “copyright owner” of the universe.

 

Show Notes

[00:00:00] As always, our intro music is “Awel” by stefsax, used under a CC BY 3.0 license.

[00:01:23] Our 100th episode was “The More You Know.”

[00:03:19]

 
 

[00:04:31]

 
Eeh.

Eeh.

Ugh.

Ugh.

 

[00:09:10] 

[00:10:57]

[00:13:09] There’s way too many TikToks contributing to the grocery store musical number to list them all here, but Buzzfeed has a good roundup.

[00:16:37] The Verge covered the Ratatouille musical and most of the TikToks that contributed to it. But the greatest Rataouille musical TikTok of all is… 

[00:22:12] Our interstitial music here and elsewhere is “Early Morning Song (Finch Duet)” by Lee Rosevere, used under a CC BY 3.0 license.

[00:37:45] The Morning Edition interview with Michael Farris Smith, who wrote Nick.

[00:51:42]

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 #142, “Copyright Brainworms.”

FK: [laughs] Oh, so many people have them. And we have seen so much of it lately.

ELM: Yes. You know, yes. Before we get started I gotta say this—

FK: Hmm.

ELM: You ready?

FK: Hmmm.

ELM: So, I don’t know if you remember, when we did our 100th episode, which was what? More than a year ago now?

FK: Yeah! Wow. Yeah. Yeah, I guess it was.

ELM: Yeah, right? Do the math. Maybe a year and a half ago or so. Anyway, the subject was things that we had learned since we had started, over the course of 100 episodes. And you were like, “I learned this thing that I had always believed, I was totally wrong about, and I’ve now—I think that, you know, all these fans are valid that I thought were invalid before.”

FK: “Valid” is such a strong word. But go on. You’re, you’re basically right, fine. Go on.

ELM: And then I said that I didn’t really learn any—I didn’t, I wasn’t wrong about anything. I just learned some new facts. And that was the end, right.

FK: Yeah, I remember. [laughing] I found that, I found that a little bit annoying at the time. Are you gonna tell me that you have a different take on this now, Elizabeth Minkel?

ELM: Still no. But I want to say that I’ve come to have a greater appreciation, because I remember very early on we were talking about copyright. Like, within the first dozen, two dozen episodes. I guess it was also the first year. And I remember we had Sarah Jeong on, talking about copyright stuff, and the Axanar lawsuit was going on and all that, and I remember saying to you, like—this copyright stuff, it’s fine, but I don’t think it’s that interesting, and I wonder if you just think it’s interesting because you got like a Cease & Desist order from Warner Brothers or whatever, you know.

FK: Yeah, I remember this. I remember this. I remember this conversation.

ELM: Right? And now in 2021, I almost said 2020 but let’s move on from that year, I think that copyright is one of the most integral parts of understanding modern fan culture.

FK: Yes!! Yes. So in other words: you did have a big thing that you learned.

ELM: Yeah!

FK: And you did have some influence from this and it is not one way and I feel much better about everything now.

ELM: Well, yeah! I guess—well, the setup was “what were you wrong about.” And like, if one could say that early on in this podcast I said that copyright was not interesting, then I was wrong. [FK laughing] I don’t know why I said it that way, but I was wrong if that’s what I believed, past me. It’s so interesting! 

And also, so I would say that like—I think it’s no coincidence that this podcast has been going on from 2015 to now 2021, and I think that we’ve seen this kind of astronomical and like, rapid shift in knowledge, not just amongst fans but amongst general audiences. Not necessarily knowledge, but out-loud statements about copyright?

FK: Yeah, maybe not “knowledge” but “awareness” of copyright. 

ELM: Yeah.

FK: And I think that that, I think that that kind of marches together with the fact that—people say “the internet,” but I really mean all of the developments to do with the internet, and mobile telephones and everything else, having made creation of stuff so much more…I mean, people always have created things, right. People have always written, they’ve always done stuff. 

But now you create things and you can share them online and find someone else who thinks it’s really funny, you know what I mean, or really cool, or really whatever, and I think this goes hand-in-hand with fanfiction becoming more publicly acceptable to write. Fan art being publicly acceptable and normal to do. All of this stuff—now it’s like, normalized that you’re creating things that are often derivative works, right? And so suddenly, if that’s normal and so many more people are doing it and engaged with it, then that becomes something people have opinions about, something people think about. Copyright is actually relevant to their lives.

ELM: Sure. But we should reiterate—actual knowledge… 

FK: Doesn’t mean they know much about it. [laughs]

ELM: No, no. Not very much. But yeah, as you’re saying, meme culture, right? And pop culture texts being turned into very widely-shared memes. And when that happens, often you see very few people talking about copyright, right? Because I think that people generally assume that if you take a screenshot from a television show and stick—

FK: Meme it.

ELM: —some text on it and say “Tell Donald I—” what’s the, how does it go? “Tell Donald it was me”?

FK: “Tell Donald it was me?”

ELM: You know what I’m talking about?

FK: I don’t know that I know what you’re talking about, Elizabeth.

ELM: Game of Thrones—

FK: I actually might not know this.

ELM: Some older lady in Game of Thrones?

FK: Oh! Yes! Yeah yeah yeah. Yes, I do know what you’re talking about! Yes. “Tell Donald it was me.” Yeah.

ELM: And so post-Georgia election I saw people photoshopping Stacey Abrams’ head into that meme, and uh… 

FK: There was a lot of discourse about that. 

ELM: Yes, there was! And then around the election I saw people doing that also with Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s head, and I, I just don’t enjoy these memes very much, I’m just gonna say it.

FK: All right. Anyway, anyway, aside from memes though, people are now more, like, empowered to actually share things that are not memes as well as things that are memes, right?

ELM: Right. So getting at people’s understanding of copyright though, you start to think about how people encounter it, right? You understand there’s more visibility than ever about who owns which characters, which franchises. Right?

FK: Right.

ELM: We’ve talked before about the public outcry when Spider-Man rights were potentially changing hands from…it wasn’t even rights, it was like what studio was gonna make the movies, right? Between Sony and Disney.

FK: Yeah.

ELM: And it was like, these are like, completely constructed narratives about who you think is good and bad. 

FK: Right.

ELM: And obviously some of it was related to like, “Oh, well, I liked the Disney-produced versions of,” you know, whatever. But people—

FK: Right.

ELM: It’s also like, different individuals and different teams making these, right? And it’s not people overlaid their opinions about corporate, like, their fantasy opinions about corporations onto this, right?

FK: Right, right, right. People, this is back to my big grudge for the past year, right? People have learned the words “IP” and they’ve learned, you know, a variety of words, and they don’t necessarily know how to use them, but they’re gonna come up with opinions about this stuff.

ELM: Right. And I think it goes into hyper-drive when you get into fandom itself, and you start to see people using the term “IP” instead of “fandom,” which isn’t always the worst thing in the world. Or using the term “franchise.” Because sometimes, back in the day, people would say, “You know, the thing about Harry Potter fandom,” or whatever, and they meant “Harry Potter,” the text, or the franchise—

FK: Franchise, yeah.

ELM: —the people making it, and they would say “fandom” because they didn’t have another word to talk about the collective world of Harry Potter, when they really were trying to talk about the text itself and the things that were owned by J. K. Rowling and/or Warner Brothers. And so sometimes I think it’s not the worst development, but like, often I feel like it gets wielded in a way that’s like… 

FK: Right.

ELM: “IP” is not synonymous with “storyworld,” especially when we’re all in like, transformative work land. You know? 

FK: Yeah, yeah yeah. I hear ya. So that’s like, the state of right now. But there was something specific that led you to want to do this episode, and this was you. Right? This, this is your copyright episode, my friend.

ELM: Oh my God. First of all, it’s both of ours now, but there were several instigating things within the last month or so that made me wanna talk about copyright. So first of all, Flourish.

FK: Yes.

ELM: Have you heard about the sort of Chinese-owned platform TikTok?

FK: Do tell! [both laugh] Yes, I have heard of the sort of Chinese-owned platform called TikTok. It is, there’s been a lot of controversies about it, it is a thing of the youths, it’s sort of like Vine, but younger people.

ELM: I think of it now as very family thing. It, in the—

FK: It’s become more of a family thing.

ELM: In the era of lockdown, I’ve been very charmed by whole families doing TikToks together.

FK: Yeah, that’s true. So it’s sort of—so Vine was like, if you have never heard of it—not you, I mean like you-the-listener. If you remember Vine, Vine was like 6-second videos, and so it was like, here’s gonna be your little trick with cutting or slapstick or whatever and then you’re done. And that was really cool and led to a bunch of comedy. 

TikToks can be up to a minute long, so they’re not as constrained, but they’re still very short videos, and it’s still somewhat Vine-like in that sense. In that there’s a lot of “We’re gonna steal all the stuff from early film to do, like, funny cuts and, you know, slapstick-y things and so on.”

ELM: Also often shot—

FK: But there’s lots of other stuff, too.

ELM: Often shot vertically.

FK: Mm-hmm.

ELM: I think that’s one of the notable things about both of them, whereas I feel like YouTube, people still do shoot in landscape mode.

FK: Yep.

ELM: Is that the right one?

FK: Yep, that’s the right one. Landscape. Hamburger, not hot dog.

ELM: I’m a vegetarian, so that’s completely inappropriate.

FK: [sighs] Soy burger, not…soy dog.

ELM: No thank you. [laughing] Anyway! So, Vine to me was like, obviously really culturally important and like, pretty revolutionary content in there. But to me, it was like, first and foremost about form, and it was about those six seconds and what you could do with them, and that was the challenge of it. Whereas TikTok I feel like there’s a lot of different things going on. We’ve seen some really, truly incredible one-minute-long, very heavily produced self-insert fic.

FK: Oh, yeah! Yeah, that stuff is amazing.

ELM: It’s really—it brings me so much joy, cause it’s just like, this is the same exact stuff… 

FK: The color grading is so good, and the writing is so bad!

ELM: It’s literally the same thing as like, what people our age were posting on fanfiction.net in 2001, except it’s like, a beautifully produced visual version of yourself at Hogwarts saying you’re in love with Harry and Voldemort’s gonna kill you or whatever. So. Anyway. I love the youths and I’m not being facetious.

FK: No, this was—this was a true delight to watch.

ELM: I’ve seen a few of them but we should share at least one of them in the show notes with a big thumbs up. But the reason I brought all this up was because of the, I wanna talk about copyright because of TikTok, and some of the forms on TikTok that I’ve been observing over the last year, and what happens when those forms intersect with IP in a very deliberate, knowing way. 

Not, not in the—the Harry Potter self-insert was clearly, that’s in the grand tradition of self-insert fic, right? That person’s not thinking that Warner Brothers is gonna call them, be like “Do you wanna do your own…”

FK: No.

ELM: Right? They know what they’re doing. That’s the story they wanna tell, right. So can I give you a little bit of backstory about what really caught my eye?

FK: Yes. Give it to me. Tell me the backstory.

ELM: So TikTok explainer. You know about duets. 

FK: Right. You have a video and then you can record like a side-by-side of yourself reacting to the video, so there’s been a lot of them…like, some of them are debunking, like there’s a conspiracy theory video and someone will debunk the conspiracy theory video, like. There was one about the forest fires…do you remember this?

ELM: The hot firefighter!

FK: The hot firefighter.

ELM: [laughing] He’s quite hot! 

FK: Yeah, we remember the hot firefighter. We sure remember him.

ELM: I watched that one like 20 times because that was just so, like, he was just like “Nope.” Like, she was like—

FK: Yeah, it was great, right?

ELM: “The fires stop at the U.S. border!” And he was like, “You’re looking at a U.S. government map. Look at a map of Canada to see the Canadian fires.”

FK: Yeah, totally.

ELM: I’m glad that that was the first one we saw. But yeah.

FK: So you can do those kind of duets, but then you can also obviously use that to do anything that would be two people side-by-side.

ELM: Like a huge one is like, cooking reactions. People cooking something on one side and then people critiquing it or commenting on it on the other side. And so…but then there’s a lot of duets in the way we would traditionally think of duets, creating music, especially singing together. So someone might sing one part and then someone will record another track and they’re side-by-side, and then a third person can add on to those first two, and they’ll be put in a grid, and then you start to see these grids build and build and you’re always recording your track on top of everyone else’s, right?

And so these are really enjoyable, and a lot of the time, like the one that’s been going around the last week or so is the sea shanty one? You saw this, right? Which is really—I watched that one like 100,000 times, really.

FK: Yeah, sea shanties are right, right up your alley.

ELM: That’s a really—oh yeah. That was great. It was about whaling! 

FK: Yeah!

ELM: But so a few months back I saw one that went viral that was very compelling and interesting to watch. The initial post was, it was like—I think it was lightly mocking or maybe celebrating modern musical styles. Not like Hamilton. But you’ve seen a modern musical where they’re like—

FK: Sure!

ELM: [hums a few bars] You know? Like—

FK: Yeah, yeah!

ELM: Did you get my impersonation? Did that make sense to you?

FK: I got—it made perfect sense to me. I’ve seen a musical within the past 10 years. A new one.

ELM: Yes, yes. Me too. Yeah! That was my Rodgers and Hart impersonation, so… [laughing] [hums a few more bars] Anyway. The guy did a, it was like a one-sided, it was “we’re breaking up in a grocery store.” And he recorded one half of a couple breaking up in a grocery store, and it was like [sings] “We’re in a grocery store!” And it was like, the whole thing was—it was really ridiculous. And then a woman duetted the other half of the couple, and like, you know—

FK: So she was writing her half, like—so he only provided his half. And then she made up the other half.

ELM: Yeah. And one of the, it was absolutely spot-on in terms of modern musicals. It was like, you know the—it had meta-commentary where they were kind of speaking towards the end, and talking over each other slightly—

FK: Oh, yeah.

ELM: —show the disconnect, you know? like… 

FK: I can, I can hear it right now. [both laugh]

ELM: It was very recognizable to anyone who’s ever seen a musical in the last 10 years. And so that was really funny, all of itself, and that could’ve been it. But then another person said “I’m your child watching you break up in the grocery store.” And they recorded another harmony line on top that was like “No! No!” You know, like, just—and it was meant to be a commentary, but also you know, musically on top of it.

FK: Yeah!

ELM: And then people kept adding to it, and they were like, the grocery store clerk, and someone was like, something on the shelf—I can’t remember what—watching you break up in the grocery store. And then someone was the squeaky wheel on the cart, and they were just like “Eeeeee! EEE! Eee!” [both laughing] And just, it got impossible to listen to by the end, cause it was just like people wailing. But like, the joke was there, right?

And so I watched this whole thing, like, building and building and marveled at it. And I was like, “This is a really incredible,” it’s not a transformative work in the way that we think of them, but it is that same sort of building and iterating and taking a common knowledge and passing it, you know, “we’re gonna keep building on it cause we all share this common set of practices.”

FK: “We’ve all been in a grocery store and heard a modern musical.” [both laugh]

ELM: I don’t think that having been in a grocery store was necessary. I think you could have done this without the—like, obviously I mean we all have been in the grocery store, probably, but… 

FK: Well, you needed to know what would be in the grocery store. I’m envisioning a specific grocery store, you know, as I think about this, right?

ELM: It’s a larger one.

FK: What is in that grocery store?

ELM: My grocery stores generally don’t have carts. People mostly use baskets.

FK: It’s suburban. This is clearly a suburban one.

ELM: But it might be in L. A. So. You know.

FK: It could be in L. A.

ELM: Just bigger, you know what I mean?

FK: Yeah…L. A., in… Anyway. Go on. [ELM laughing] Go on. Let’s move on. Let’s not get too delayed by this. Because this, the grocery store musical has nothing to do with fandom other, I mean, it feels fandoms, the way things are building on it, but it’s not a fandom.

ELM: So this is what really struck me, and I had like, slightly—I really liked it a lot, but I had a slight twinge, tinge, of bitterness, where I was just like, “People in fandom build on each other’s work in extremely creative ways all that time and everyone thinks that’s weird! And now everyone’s like, ‘these people are geniuses!’” Right? Because there’s no source material involved! Imagine if it had been a Star Wars grocery store and everyone would have been like—actually, if it had been that, people would have been like “Wow, creative!” Right? But imagine if it was some weird ship or whatever, you know? People would just be like, “I don’t know what, that’s some fandom stuff or whatever.” You know? 

And I know that’s been changing and there’s a lot of crossover, out of fandom into a kind of mainstream meme popularity sort of, but like—there was a little twinge of like, the form is new, but the like, the practices are not that new.

FK: Yeah. This is not groundbreaking.

ELM: But it’s being hailed as, like, revolutionary. So that really struck me. And then, not long after, the Ratatouille musical stuff started. And this apparently—I learned from WNYC listening to a story about the Ratatouille musical—was the same person as the grocery store person! He’s obviously very talented.

FK: Whoa! Clearly.

ELM: So someone recorded a very funny “imagine if Ratatouille was a musical.” They did a little song and it sounded like a rat, and it was funny, and then people just started riffing on it. They were like “Here are all the songs you could do.” So that was interesting, and that’s a fun thing, and I like that Ratatouille has apparently taken the place of Shrek in the like, collective animated—

FK: Right.

ELM: —vague shitposting meme culture, right? I mean, nothing will replace Shrek.

FK: Nothing will ever replace Shrek.

ELM: Which is now in the National Cinema—what’s it called? The, like, vault or whatever? There’s a national like… 

FK: Oh yeah, yeah, it’s been added.

ELM: Shrek, Shrek was put it in it this past year, because it’s one of the most important… 

FK: Deserved.

ELM: …works of all time. [laughs] But the Ratatouille musical, they started courting the attention of Disney and Pixar, who, Disney owns Pixar. And that’s when I started to think, “OK, this is a little bit different.” Right? This isn’t really a fanwork, to me, in the same way, cause to me, you know, when I think about fanworks I don’t think about people creating them with a hope that the creator, the owner of the IP, will look at it. And obviously that happens all the time.

FK: Huh.

ELM: Tons and tons of people think about fanworks that way. 

FK: That’s interesting, yeah. Because like—you know, whenever you, when you look at like, a lot of fan artists are professional artists in their—you know, in their day jobs. And people will draw things that are fanart that also are intended to get them a job. Concept artists—just the same way that people will write, you know, spec scripts or whatever if they’re a TV writer, right, concept artists will draw things. And I don’t think that means that they’re not fans of the thing or that it’s not fanart. But it has like a dual purpose, right?

ELM: Yeah, but I think that that dual purpose changes things for me, definitely.

FK: Sure.

ELM: And I didn’t know in the beginning of seeing Ratatouille musical stuff that that was the intent. And once I knew it was the intent, I was like “Oh, I should have known.” And this isn’t a judgment and this isn’t saying it’s a less valid fanwork or whatever. But it definitely changed it for me, because the intent was now to say “Pixar, do you wanna make this a real musical? This would be amazing. Look at all this talent here, and why not? All these Broadway actors are really suffering because Broadway is shut, and we’re really talented, and…” Absolutely, I don’t begrudge them anything at all. 

But it really struck me as, I had all these feelings about why people couldn’t see fandom’s creativities in the same way they loved things about the grocery store musical or whatever, and then here was an example with an accessible pop culture text attached to it, and then the immediate thing was not just to value the creativity but was to turn it into something that was officially sanctioned and ostensibly monetized.

FK: Right.

ELM: I think it’s the former—it’s the “officially sanctioned” thing that is what I get tripped up at. It’s not the monetization element. And I think that, to me, fanworks do not get officially sanctioned. And I know you’re gonna have different feelings about this because you also are an official sanctioned in your job. And I’m not saying they’re less of a fanwork because they are officially sanctioned.

FK: Right.

ELM: But this was just—these are some complicated feelings that I had, right? About like… 

FK: Right, right. And one thing is true: I think that there is something there to be said about, like, you know—there is a frustration at the idea of like, it needs to be blessed before people will see it as worthy. Right? I find that frustrating, the idea that something needs to be blessed before people see it as worthy.

ELM: Or, “We’re all toiling away but maybe one of us is gonna get noticed,” you know, like, “senpai is going to notice us.” Or the idea of “What IP would you love to write” being a question that I see going around Twitter constantly, and it’s interesting to me because it’s kind of like…I know so many people who are professional writers, many of whom “write IP,” as they say, which is writing tie-in novels or works—

FK: Right, tie-in novels or whatever.

ELM: So absolutely I know these are career goals, but so many people are framing them in a very fannish way, and they’re saying “Well, I’d love to write a Star Wars novel,” right? And it’s like, it’s simultaneously a professional desire. “That’d be a huge, a great assignment. That’d be so great to get paid to write a Star Wars novel!” But also you can tell that there’s a fannish element too. “I’d love to write a story about this, this and this.”

FK: Right.

ELM: But only in the—“I want it in this context,” right. These are people I follow who do not engage with fanworks in that way. They’re not saying “I have a lot of ideas, so I’m gonna write this fic and post it on AO3.” They’re saying “I would love to write these ideas for Lucasfilm and for the publishers of the books” or whatever.

FK: Well, there’s something about—there’s also something about wanting power in that, too, right? To some degree, when you say like “I wish I could write the Star Wars novel,” it’s like, “I wish I could direct how this franchise was going to go.” Right? “I wish I was the one who got to make those choices.”

ELM: I don’t think saying that “I wanna write a Star Wars novel” is saying you get to make choices about the franchise. I think everyone knows, especially these writers know, that they are not going to be making franchise choices.

FK: No no, not writers, not for like professional writers particularly. But I think, but I do think that there is—

ELM: Oh, that’s what I’m talking about. I’m not talking about fans who are like “I wish I was in charge of Lucasfilm!”

FK: Oh, OK.

ELM: I’m talking about writers. You know? Who say like—

FK: Sure.

ELM: “I would like to write this IP and I would like to tell this story.”

FK: Wait wait wait. I think you’re opening up another can of worms here. Because they’re—there’s so much I wanna talk about about this!

ELM: Whether people have the freedom of imagination—the copyright of the imagination kind of thing, right?

FK: Right. Because it’s one thing about like, if people are making things and whether people will like, want to read them or listen to them or recognize them as cool if they’re unsanctioned, and it’s another thing about what’s limiting people’s imagination about what they can make. And I think that we should take a break and have the second half of this episode about that.

ELM: OK, let’s do that.

FK: All right. I’ll see you on the flip side.

[Interstitial music]

FK: All right, we’re back and before we get on to talking about people’s limited imaginations…that sounds so mean. I love it.

ELM: Wow.

FK: I don’t love it. I don’t know how I feel about it.

ELM: I feel fine about it.

FK: Anyway. Before we get on to, to the limiting of people’s imaginations, we should talk a little bit about Patreon.

ELM: OK, I have some thoughts about how we can mix this up.

FK: How?

ELM: What if we both talk about it together, instead of just taking turns?

FK: OK…we have to then, like, alternate sentences. So… 

ELM: No, words!

FK: This podcast is funded… 

ELM: By!

FK: Patreon! [ELM laughs] Dot com! You have to keep going if we’re gonna do this!

ELM: Slash!

FK: This podcast is funded—

ELM: Slash fansplaining!

FK: By patreon.com/fansplaining! This is not going to work, Elizabeth. patreon.com/fansplaining is how… I really liked that you were trying to get that Ratatouille musical, grocery store musical feel in here, but we don’t know, we can’t do that.

ELM: [sings] I’m in a grocery store!

FK: I’m shilling… 

ELM: Go on, sing it! [sings] Patreon!

FK: [sings] For Patreon! [speaking] All right, all right. Let’s rein it in. patreon.com/fansplaining is how we make money which enables us to keep this podcast on the air.

ELM: Oh, we’re really doing this? OK. So Patreon, there’s all these levels, right? Right?

FK: Yeah there’s these amazing levels! There are levels like you can listen to all of our special episodes, of which there are so so so many about topics like tropes and TV shows that we’ve watched and tons of other cool stuff like that, and… 

ELM: Yes, that’s true, that’s true! And at $5 a month you get all of that plus you get a very cute enamel pin sent in the mail through the USPS, which seems to be doing better now than it was a few weeks ago.

FK: Thank goodness! And for $10 a month, you can get a tiny zine, which is cute and small and friendly and there’s like a couple more left from our last run, and once that is gone then you’ll have to wait for our next run, which will be in a little bit.

ELM: So that’s Patreon—

FK: And this last run was about Giles, which you might love.

ELM: It was about Rupert Giles, yes. So that’s patreon.com/fansplaining, you can pledge as little as a dollar a month, as much as you want, but if you don’t have any cash to spare right now, you can also share the podcast.

FK: Absolutely. You can… 

ELM: I’m really starting to see… 

FK: Subscribe to us on your favorite podcatcher.

ELM: I’m starting to see why we don’t do it this way.

FK: Yeah, me too. But we’re in it now, so let’s keep going. You can subscribe on your favorite podcatcher, leave us a review, you know, leave us some stars or hearts or whatever your podcatcher lets you do.

ELM: [laughs] Stars or hearts. And you can also get in touch with us. It’s fansplaining at gmail dot com, or fansplaining.com, there is a submission form. If you would like to hear back from us, you need to give us contact information there. One problem we consistently see is that people do not leave any information there.

FK: Or you can call us at 1-401-526-FANS. That’s 1-401-526-F-A-N-S. And leave us a voicemail! Which we would love to receive, and we will play it on air and respond to it.

ELM: And finally you can follow and contact upon any of the social media platforms we are on, so that is Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram and Facebook.

FK: We made it through that. It was difficult.

ELM: Never doing that again.

FK: Now we’re on the other side. Never doing that again. OK. So what we were gonna talk about, though, was about how people…so you were, you were just talking about how you would see authors saying like, “I want to write a Star Wars novel,” but they only mean it if it’s gonna be like a sanctioned novel.

ELM: Oh, yes. So all right. I’m not purporting to know what’s in the heads and the hearts and minds of these authors that I follow and I follow a lot of authors who are in this realm, and aspiring, you know, aspiring professional authors who would like to be, you know.

FK: Right, right.

ELM: So folks who have gotten published in this way and people who haven’t. And there’s a very common meme that I see surface once every couple weeks that’s like, “What’s your dream IP? What would you love to write for?” And they also mean, like, what comics franchise—I see this with comics people that I follow. “What comic would you love to take over?” I mean, that goes to creative decisions that you’re talking about it. Or “write a run of,” you know.

FK: Sure, sure, sure. Right.

ELM: And especially with something like that, with comics too, because you’ve seen some high-profile, somewhat traditionally literary people being pulled in, like Ta-Nehisi Coates or whatever being pulled into Black Panther or whatever.

FK: Right.

ELM: So it seems like that is, you know, open to people being able to put their official—being able to play with these characters but in a very, the most official space.

FK: Yeah yeah, heck, I mean, Michael Chabon getting to play with Star Trek, right?

ELM: Yeah, exactly!

FK: So, OK. But there’s the other thing though which is—that’s different to me than, recently…wait. This requires a little bit of backstory. Because this, this part of what I wanna talk about is about—I mean, you brought it up to me as well, we were both like, losing our minds about this. About The Great Gatsby.

ELM: Were you already losing—

FK: Coming out of copyright.

ELM: —losing your mind before I brought this up?

FK: I was. I was not perhaps as laser-focused on the bad actors in this space as you were.

ELM: Shaking my head.

FK: But I never am. You shake your head, you wiggle your finger at people. So, OK. [ELM laughing] One of the things that has been…there’s been a variety of things that have happened to do with The Great Gatsby coming out of copyright. But one of the things that has been most startling to me is seeing all these people—I mean, there just keep being more and more and more, being like “Well, now that it’s free of copyright, I’m gonna write this thing!”

ELM: Yeah.

FK: And it’s like, “OK!” And it’s not, right, it’s not authors saying “I’m gonna write this and now it will be publishable and now that’s like, a, you know, that’s been a career goal of mine, is to be able to do this.” It’s not that. It’s just people being like, “Now I can write that idea!” 

ELM: Yeah. And I know a lot of these are for the jokes, they’re for the lulz, you know, “I’m gonna write this thing where Jay Gatsby does whatever!” But so many of them are like—is this a joke? They’re like “I’m gonna write a modern version where something something!” And it’s like, “OK?” Like, you’re gonna write a modern AU?

FK: And they’re literally describing a modern AU.

ELM: “It’s a modern AU of The Great Gatsby that you want. OK.” You know? It’s like, I don’t know what you want. You thought of the idea that this thing set 100 years ago could be set now? You’ve—you’ve definitely seen that in movies! You don’t have to know modern AUs to know this is a thing. 

And so I don’t—I don’t really understand the joke here. And yet these things are going, these statements are going viral, and it’s like, “Really? All of you think this is a worthy thing to share?” I don’t know. It’s just…I have seen every single one of these, I read, and I go “You already could write that.”

FK: Mm-hmm.

ELM: I don’t understand the joke of, “Well, now I can do it in the,” like, “I can do it legally.” Like… 

FK: Right.

ELM: OK? I don’t know. It’s just, something about it, it’s—

FK: But you also could’ve, you also arguably could’ve done it legally before. Many of these things you actually could arguably have done legally before. It’s not—you know, not 100%, but like, we’ve talked about The Wind Done Gone 10,000 times on this podcast.

ELM: Well obviously it depends on the estate. I know the C. S. Lewis estate is very litigious, right? I know multiple examples where people tried to write Narnia follow-on works that were transformative but were not allowed to proceed.

FK: Right, and there’s a variety of different takes from estates and whatever, but—but you still, like, there are some that are still clearly OK. Like The Wind Done Gone was a case of a litigious estate that got smacked down.

ELM: Right. So yes, one could, and one—

FK: I’m making the shruggie face.

ELM: Right. The question is, like, it’s how some—somehow the work leaving the copyright and entering the public domain, like, frees people’s minds to even imagine up a little joke concept about it, and I just, I don’t—I cannot wrap my head around that mindset.

FK: I mean, I do get it, I think that there is something great about it coming out of copyright and people being able to—

ELM: Great?

FK: —make money out of their stuff about it.

ELM: Would you say it’s great?

FK: Yeah, I do—oh my God. I didn’t mean it like that. [ELM laughs] Ugh. It was, that was so unintentional.

ELM: I like how it took you like 30 seconds to get my joke here. 

FK: It really did. I was just, I was just, I was just… 

ELM: You were like “Yes! Yes it is great.”

FK: Just forging along. I do think it’s great! No, I was like… 

ELM: Fine. It’s good.

FK: “Are you gonna really argue with me that it’s not—do you, do you,” you know? [ELM laughing] Obviously there’s a material difference if something is in copyright vs. out of copyright, and I think personally that copyright terms should be much shorter than they are, you know?

ELM: Sure.

FK: So there is, there is a difference between that, but you’re right, I think there’s this thing about like, being able to like—like not being able to even think about things that are in copyright. Which actually if anything proves the point that copyright terms should be shorter. If people are having this, like, wild level of “Oh no! We can’t mess with that.”

ELM: Right.

FK: I just—and how much of that is a pose, also, I don’t know. 

ELM: Right.

FK: Like how much of it is a pose of “I’m so creative,” like, “until something is legal,” but also… 

ELM: I, so I have a lot of different thoughts about this. One is, sometimes I talk to people, friends who are not in fandom and we get to talking about fanfiction, and the impulse to like, do it. Just the intellectual impulse. Not necessarily the like, the impulse to do the labor, but the thoughts, right? Like, the “Oh,” you know.

FK: Right.

ELM: Why do you think about the story this way, or whatever. And I, I’ve encountered so many people who just have a lot of questions, cause it’s not something that they ever think about. They don’t watch a movie or read a book and like, wonder about someone’s backstory in a way. Or they do, but they want an answer from the movie. That’s something I feel like I encounter a lot.

FK: Do they never, are these also people who don’t read Greek mythology and then come up with their own versions of it, right, a very like—high school thing to do? But also an adult thing to do, obviously.

ELM: Flourish, I’ve never done that.

FK: But you know the kind of thing I’m talking about.

ELM: No. I’ve never encountered that.

FK: You never went through a Greek mythology phase?

ELM: No. No.

FK: Wrote versions of Greek myths or anything?

ELM: I love that you presented that like some sort of universal thing.

FK: This is a totally normal thing that a lot of people have done in the past!!!

ELM: Yeah, OK… 

FK: It’s all through Western art!!!!

ELM: Who did you self-insert yourself with?

FK: Not like that, like writing Pygmalion or whatever.

ELM: I wanna know.

FK: Didn’t self-insert myself with anyone in this context I don’t think.

ELM: Dammit, come on.

FK: I wish I had a better answer for you, because it would be really funny if I did, but I don’t think…if anything, I wanted to be Athena.

ELM: No.

FK: In like the Iliad or whatever, right. I thought that was awesome.

ELM: I’ve got your number, it definitely would have been you and Hades.

FK: Oh my God. [laughing]

ELM: You are a self-insert Persephone if I ever met one, I’m sorry, no offense. 

FK: No!

ELM: The original Beauty and the Beast.

FK: I don’t think that ever crossed my mind, but you’re, you’re not wrong. But I don’t think, that was like, I didn’t go there. Anyway. [ELM laughing] 

But I do wonder about this, right, because it’s not like it’s that—obviously I don’t think that, separate from what is quote “normal” to do when you’re a kid or whatever, I don’t personally think that James Joyce’s Ulysses is Odyssey fanfic, because I have specific definitions of fanfic and stuff, see all of our previous episodes for why. But, I do think they’re very related.

ELM: Sure.

FK: And I think that this isn’t, you know, the impulse is not universal obviously, but I’m shocked when I hear that people who are otherwise creative writers or whatever, never experience inspiration in that way, you know?

ELM: OK, but I—you are the person who studies fans, I have encountered so many fans and so many fan cultures where the response to “We didn’t get this information in the movie” is “I need the author to tell me the answer.”

FK: Yeah, that’s true, but usually those people are not like, writers themselves. I don't know, maybe they are.

ELM: That’s a huge portion of fan culture. I’m not saying they are writers, but that’s a huge portion of fan culture.

FK: Yeah, it’s true.

ELM: I remember, this was very revelatory to me. Seven years ago now I went to—right when I was getting involved in studying and writing about fans, I went to a Fan Studies Network conference. I may have mentioned this on the podcast before.

FK: Oh, yeah.

ELM: And it was right after they had Jossed the Extended Universe, in Star Wars.

FK: Oh yeah. People were having brain aneurysms about it.

ELM: So someone was presenting on it, and it was a male academic, and he was a little bit older, and he was playing some fan reactions, and it was like YouTube videos, and these guys were like, “Well, what are we gonna know about Leia’s,” I don’t know, it was Leia’s mother or something like, “How—if that’s, if this information isn’t canon anymore, then how are we gonna know about her,” I don’t know if it was her mother. I don’t know anything about Star Wars.

I just sat there dumbfounded, because I had been in fanfiction fandom for like, 15+ years at that point, being like “You need someone…” I had never encountered that attitude before in fandom. Because obviously the answer is “make it up,” you know?

FK: No, but it is a real thing, it is a real thing.

ELM: You know what I mean? But this is huge! And now, like, looking back seven years later after studying fans, I’m like “Oh it’s a huge portion of fandom.”

FK: Yep, it is.

ELM: And that’s not a judgment. Not to say that that’s, like, a lesser fan or whatever, someone who doesn’t come up with their own answers, someone who really values the answers of the official word, right? But it’s a very popular lens through which people view the story. And I think that extends well beyond fandom. So you see people getting really excited about extra information from the creators, right? Or saying “What happens to blank after the movie ends?”

FK: Sure, but then the thing that I think is weird about this is the idea, like—this is the part where I think it’s copyright brainworms—is the idea that like, because this arbitrary thing ticked over… 

ELM: Yeah.

FK: Right? Like, at midnight, from 2020 to 2021, this thing—which was by the way a copyright law instituted by man and the Walt Disney Corporation—

ELM: A man from the Walt Disney Corporation. [laughs]

FK: In the United States only, by the way!

ELM: Yes.

FK: You know? Only in the United States! All of a sudden, now, the floodgates are open and this is no longer something that is, there is no more canon. Now we can think about this. And I don’t think that that’s really strictly what people were—I don’t think anybody is being that strict about it.

ELM: Yeah.

FK: But I do think that that’s like a vibe I’ve been getting from a lot of people.

ELM: Yeah, I’m glad you also got that vibe.

FK: It’s not a great vibe.

ELM: It’s a very confusing vibe to me! And it’s like, I understand there’s a bit of a meme element to it, like, “Oh, what’s my wacky Great Gatsby idea?” It’s interesting. So I was listening to, so I tweeted about this—people may have seen me—and I think some people misinterpreted what I was saying. 

But I was listening to “Morning Edition” a few days ago on NPR, and the host, who I generally like, was like, “The Great Gatsby comes out of copyright and,” in this kind of bombastic—I mean maybe he was excited to not be talking about like Trump or whatever. And then he said, “The Great Gatsby comes out of copyright, and The Great Gatsby is about Jay Gatsby, this enigmatic millionaire who throws the parties. But the narrator, Nick—he’s an enigma. What’s his story? Like, this guy I’m interviewing thought about that!” Right? 

And the guy wrote a book called Nick that is like, a Nick Carraway backstory, and he was a very soft-spoken gentle man, and he told the story of like, how he came to the idea was he read The Great Gatsby and he had a very fic-like impulse: he thought about Nick Carraway and wanted to know what his deal was.

FK: Yeah, sure.

ELM: And he wrote a Nick Carraway novel. And then he tried to sell it and he was told, because he didn’t know this, that The Great Gatsby was in copyright and he would have to wait till it came out of copyright in 2021. Right? So I love that there was no like… 

FK: And he waited!

ELM: Mm-hmm! There was no, like, “Oh, now that The Great Gatsby’s out of copyright I’m gonna cash in and write a Nick Carraway backstory novel,” in a cheesy franchise-milkin’-it sort of way that we kinda think about this stuff with Hollywood. It was truly like her—

FK: Which, trust me, is completely happening with Hollywood.

ELM: “Hey, Nick, what’s he up to? Gritty Nick!” Oh! Should I write a gritty prequel called Nick? Nicholas?

FK: Yeah. Do it. Nicholas. That’s it.

ELM: Sorry, your husband’s name is Nick. This is probably very confusing to you.

FK: Just mintin’ money over here.

ELM: But, you know, this guy—actually when he was talking about it it was very relatable because it was very, it was obviously 100% fic-like. It was like, “I was compelled and I asked this what-if and I wanted to know more about this character and I thought maybe he’s like this, maybe he’s like this,” you know?

FK: Right.

ELM: And then the host was over here like, “What! I’ve never heard of anyone doing anything like this before!” And that was the most annoying part cause it was like “Oh, come on, buddy, no.”

FK: That’s not even about fanfic, right? I mean, gosh, have you not been into a bookstore and seen like, Madeline Miller’s books recently? You know what I mean, like… 

ELM: I don’t think that he’s reading Madeline Miller’s books. But yeah, there’s a very very long history… 

FK: Fair enough, but you know what I’m saying.

ELM: There’s a very long history of this stuff.

FK: And popular books, of like—you know?

ELM: And especially with RPF. Especially with things about real people. So, so much of our popular culture is about imagining, I mean, look at the debacle over The Crown recently and the actual crown having to say, “Put a warning on it that’s fictional,” or whatever.

You know, so the interviewer was deeply annoying in this. But I didn’t blame this guy at all, because I wrote fanfiction before I knew it was a communal act, and I’m really really glad that I learned about it and that that came to frame the way I viewed and wrote further fic. He had a very similar impulse, but he didn’t, I don’t know, Google “Nick Carraway backstory” or whatever, and he might’ve found all the Gatsby…would it be JayNick? Carra—Carragat? No. Carraby?

FK: Gatsway.

ELM: Gatsway!

FK: I think Gatsway.

ELM: Gatsway. That’s it. We have a winner. You know. He didn’t find all those fics. I mean I don’t think he’s writing that ship. 

FK: Well, and to be clear, he wasn’t like slagging fanfic or anything, right? As far as we can tell this guy didn’t know that fanfic existed.

ELM: No one said a single word about fanfic.

FK: [laughing] If he didn’t know about copyright, well… 

ELM: He’d never heard of that! And then the host—but OK, this is actually relevant to what we were just talking about too. Then the host, one of the weirdest parts of the interview was the host was like, “Do you, when you like walk down the street, like, do you just look at people and like think up backstories for them?” And I was just like… You know what, this is a weird question to ask a—I, I don’t think it’s that weird that a person who wrote a whole novel… 

FK: A writer!

ELM: …would be able to think of a backstory for a character. But it was something that, something about—I mean, whatever. These are just goofy interview questions or whatever. But the way that he was approaching it, the interviewer was like, “I, I would never dream of thinking about what this character on the screen or on the page was ever,” you know, “what was going on in their life or their backstory or whatever,” right? That was the vibe, and it was like—

FK: Right.

ELM: And, and that is what I’m saying connects to what I’ve encountered from other people, which you’re saying seems weird to you, but like—I don’t think it’s that weird that people would say, like, “I just took him at his word! He was there on the page and I read his thing and I thought about—”

FK: Yeah, yeah yeah.

ELM: And that’s not to say, you know, the interviewer didn’t think deep thoughts when he read The Great Gatsby, but like, you might not think like—oh, where’s Nick from? What is—well, I mean, he tells you a little bit. But what’s, what’s, what happened, what did he do in college or whatever. I don’t know. I don’t know what—

FK: Why is he, why is he such a just like, passive observer of so much stuff? Like, doesn’t he have any like—you know.

ELM: Yeah! If I were to write fic about The Great Gatsby, I mean, I think that he would be a good character, because he’s a very very close narrator, and there could be really interesting things to say—like what if you took a step back? What if he wasn’t the POV character and what if you could actually look at him, you know? And then that’s the act of like, whatever. I mean I’m not actually going to write Great Gatsby fanfiction, nor am I ever going to read it. But.

FK: Right, right right. But the other thing about this, right, though—all of this is about these sort of normal writing impulses that I feel are shared by people, but like, the response that you had to this interview was not the same as the response that a lot of people in the fanfic community had to it. So many people in the fanfic community, even responding to your own tweets about this, were like, “Yeah! Man! Fuck that guy for like, writing fanfic and then selling it! Men always write fanfic and sell it and women never do!”

ELM: Yeah.

FK: Look, I’ll be honest: I have had, at points in my life, I’ve felt upset about this, right? I’ve been like, fucking—I’ve been mad at individual male authors for writing something that I said, “That’s like fanfic but you only get published doing it because you’re a dude.” I have to say, I think I was wrong to be pissed off in that way at individual male authors. Who were not themselves being assholes about fanfic.

ELM: So many people admitting they’re wrong tonight!

FK: So many people admitting they’re wrong tonight. No! Look: I still think that women are more likely to find fanfic communities and then sort of, you know, just be doing fanfic and then like, maybe want to but be unable to or, you know, not feel empowered to, or write things in the context of fanfic which are then devalued by wider society. Right? There’s two things going on: one is maybe you get, start writing fanfic and then you devalue your own writing and you don’t think that you could sell it, and then another thing is you’re writing stuff that’s fanfic and that’s what you want to write, and then you would love to make money off of it but society doesn’t value that kind of writing or whatever it is, and you aren’t gonna get paid for it. And more importantly you aren’t going to, like, be revered for it or recognized for that work, even to separate this out from pay.

So like, yeah: I do think all that is still true, and I think that men are much more likely to like, write something and then be like “And I could totally sell this!” And then go do it. And then be lauded for it, right? And—and I think that even within writing that exists—like, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, you know, maybe gets a bunch of attention and some Jane Austen fanfic that has been, you know, published on Amazon Marketplace [sic] does not. But that’s not really totally fair, because Bridget Jones’s Diary also got tons of attention and like, a movie made out of it, and so did Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, and they’re basically the same thing, you know?

ELM: [laughing] Basically the same thing.

FK: They’re both alternate universe… 

ELM: Yeah, I remember, there’s a lot of zombies in Bridget Jones. And I think that’s one of the better parts of Bridget Jones to be honest.

FK: They’re both alternate universe Jane Austen things! [laughing] But you know what I’m saying, right? So it’s not—it’s not that there’s not sexism here.

ELM: Yeah.

FK: It’s just that it’s way more complicated than like, “Here is this male author and I’m so fucking sick of seeing male authors do this,” cause like, it’s not just male authors that do this.

ELM: Right, right.

FK: It’s kinda unfair.

ELM: Yeah, and it’s like—well, what do you want? You know? If I, if I wanted to write a Nick Carraway novel—if I wanted to write a Nick Carraway story—frankly I would probably want to do fic. I wouldn’t want to write a novel about this dude, right? Like… 

FK: Yeah!

ELM: And then you obviously can make the argument, “Well, I want it to be Nick/Jay, and no one will publish that, because publishing world is homophobic.” And it’s like, all right.

FK: They totally would publish—I’m sorry, I do think that they would publish that. They would definitely publish this.

ELM: I know! I’m saying this is what fandom pulls out every time. And it’s like, “Hey, maybe, maybe publishing isn’t just, like, what you read in ninth grade, also! It’s not just The Great Gatsby, there are in fact queer books written by queer people with queer characters out there, and they’re not all tragic, and et cetera et cetera, and some of them are and it’s fine,” and this is just me, restating some of my grudges from [laughs] the grudge thing we did recently. 

But like, you know, when I think about the fact that I’m in a fandom now where there are a bazillion iterations and at all sorts of different levels—not, “levels” is like a weird way to say it. But things that Fox paid 200 million dollars to make are at a different level than the comics, right? The things, the [laughs] movies.

FK: Right, yeah yeah yeah.

ELM: You know what I mean? There’s a different level of financial investment and different sets of stakes and different potential audiences and expectations or whatever. And obviously within the comics there are different runs and some of them, I mean, over 50+ years, like—oh my God. It’s almost 60 years now, because time passes. But like, you know… 

FK: Time passes!

ELM: There are some that are meant to be flagships and some that are a little more off-the-rails or whatever, and like, you know.

FK: Right.

ELM: Big resets or however they want to do it. And so I think about it, and I’m like, I really love the characters that I’m writing right now—is there a world in which there is a form of the official version of the X-Men in any of those iterations, because there are many, in which I would want to write them? And it’s like, well, whatever, sure, if they called me up I could figure it out, but I have literally no desire to do that, because that’s not the relationship I have to these characters. I have a fanfiction relationship to them, you know? And that’s not because I think that Marvel’s gonna call me to write, you know, a whatever AU, you know? 

FK: Right, right. But there’s also like—there’s freedoms both of like, what you put in it and also the form you can write and all of these kinds of freedoms that you have that you would not have if you were trying to write for any form of commercial…you know. 

ELM: But that being said, I think they’re—you know, comics fans or whatever, and they think about stories in terms of the comics. So they think of ideas, then…I mean, it’s kind of self-perpetuating, and it’s a little bit of what you’re getting at just now, which is, if you find fanfiction and you start reading it and you start thinking about stories in the way you think about the fic that you like, and then you’re writing within that context. Whereas if you’re mostly watching TV and you’re writing spec scripts, you’re within that context. Or if you are mostly reading comics you might think—you know, someone sitting down and saying “Oh, I wanna write a story about Wolverine” is different than me reading a bunch of fic about Wolverine and saying “I wanna write a Wolverine story.” Because that person who reads comics is probably gonna inherently frame it around the way those stories are told, not just in terms of medium, which is obviously quite different, but even in terms of just the kind of things that those stories value or the kind of ways they are structured or whatever, you know what I mean?

FK: Well, and maybe—and maybe that brings us back to the copyright brainworms, right?

ELM: Well let’s come back to that!

FK: Maybe there genuinely are some people for whom, like, if you’re not in this context, if you are not in this…if you really are in this, like, you know, writing for pay context, then maybe it becomes hard for you to imagine doing any kind of writing that is not for pay. Right? Maybe, maybe it’s—maybe that cuts off for you. I know that’s not true, because I know so many people who write both things that are for pay and things that are not, but like… 

ELM: How many people have you encountered in your life, because I have encountered many—maybe because I worked as a professional journalist for quite some time—I have encountered hundreds of people who said to me, “I just don’t understand how you can write for free.”

FK: Yeah.

ELM: “A, how do you have the time,” 

FK: Yep, yeah, totally, me too.

ELM: And I’ll be like, “I didn’t watch the show you just told me that you spent all weekend watching, I in fact worked on my fic instead of watching TV, and I’m not judging you for just sitting there—”

FK: Cause it gives me joy, yeah.

ELM: Right! But it’s the way that, it’s really really impossible for me to kind of sit there—it’s hard for me to sit there and watch these conversations go, especially on Twitter where they say like, “Never ever write for free.” “Never do any of this for free.” “You’re devaluing yourself every time you write for free.” And it’s like, why does—first of all, do people ever say this about art, that you shouldn’t draw for fun and practice? Visual art, I mean. Right? Do they say that about visual art? Because I don’t encounter that. Not that you shouldn’t give your art away for free, but people acknowledge that when you’re doing visual art you have to practice a lot, right.

FK: You need to practice, yeah yeah yeah.

ELM: Or like—

FK: People, I mean, I do think that when people say “never write for free” they probably mostly mean—well, maybe I don’t know what they mean. Yeah. I think that when people say this with regard to art, it’s always like, “Never take a, never do something on—” you know, “never allow someone to tell you to draw without getting paid” or whatever.

ELM: Right, which obviously, people should not be doing labor in that way, like—you know, for someone who should be paying you. But like, I have played the cello since I was nine, and I can tell you: I was not paid for every single moment that I’ve played my cello. In fact I was paid for very few moments of playing it. Right? And like, I—I don’t know why writing always winds up in this separate sphere where I’ve definitely encountered people who I know, who are professional writers in some capacity—whether they’re journalists or whatever—who just say, like, “Oh, I would never, that’s my job,”

FK: Right.

ELM: “And I’m not gonna put words down on a page that I am not going to be paid for.” And I get it, and then I also don’t get it. Especially if you’re a journalist, writing an article and writing fic—one of them is painful and the other one is fun. You can decide which one’s which.

FK: Right, right, but I mean maybe—yeah, maybe if you do approach things like that then you don’t even let yourself think in those ways about anything that you can’t get paid for. And so maybe then, maybe then something coming into the public domain really does unlock that for you.

ELM: Yeah. I think—OK. But I think that we’re focusing a little bit too much on writers, because I think that some of these comments are coming from just plain old people.

FK: Well. Oh my God I have so much to say about that. [laughs]

ELM: No! I mean, let’s talk about this a little bit as we kinda head towards wrapping up. Because this is the brainworms part. This is the, you know, copyright has like, locked people into these mental silos where they can’t think beyond—you’re makin’ this face, please, please go ahead!

FK: This is the thing that comes from—OK. So… 

ELM: Yes…?

FK: We’re saying this the day after the attempted coup. And on that day, before people broke into the Capitol of the United States of America, there were a bunch of like, prayer meetings and things outside, right?

ELM: Oh yeah.

FK: People, you know, who were going to these protests and things? And in one of them, this video portrays a preacher saying, you know, “God is the copyright owner of the universe.” And like, then his backup choir sings, [singing] “Copyright owner! Copyright—” It’s like a chant, right? Which, by the way, is like—totally, I don’t think that anybody should be, like—that form of preaching and that sort of chant and so on, I don’t want to make fun of that, because like, it’s a thing. Some people find it super meaningful. You do you, as far as however you wanna do your prayer meeting.

ELM: Such a good priest-in-training.

FK: No, genuinely! I genuinely feel this way. I have been to many very beautiful nondenominational services where there was prayer like this, and although I may make fun of it sometimes, it is also a totally legitimate thing. But, what I don’t think is legitimate is calling God the copyright owner of the universe. This is deep brainworms! It is both showing that you don’t know shit about copyright, and you also possibly don’t know much about God! Like…I don’t get it!! Because it’s just like—what does this mean? Does it mean that like, well, God created the Earth, and then you know, He’s allowed to enjoy the fruits of these labors for, you know, up to 75 years after God’s death—is God dead? Do we count from when Jesus was crucified or do we count from when Nietzche—?

ELM: Hold on, I think it’s 90, isn’t it 90 years now?

FK: It’s actually 90, it’s actually 90. You just broke into my bit because I got the term of copyright wrong!

ELM: I thought you would know this, you know, with your interest in God and all, so… 

FK: It isn’t, I don’t know what it is. I don’t know exactly what the copyright term currently is. I should know this but I don’t. Anyway, point being, this is all—it’s bonkers, and I truly, like, if copyright has, has reached like, prayer in that way, and in such a weird way, I don’t even know what to say! 

ELM: It’s extremely weird, I’m sorry. It’s very weird. It’s also like—I don’t understand the message here. What are we saying? Like, because… 

FK: We’re saying that we’re not allowed to do anything with God’s creation that He doesn’t want.

ELM: Yeah, OK.

FK: That’s the implication I take. Which I mean, like: fine, you know what I mean? From a theological perspective, I guess, fine, but it’s so weird to bring copyright into it. It’s just weird!

ELM: I mean… 

FK: I think I’ve said “weird” 5,000 times.

ELM: The, the, you know, fans are already obsessed with talking about “canon,” and that is a word that comes from the Catholic church.

FK: Yeah, yeah. But I guess my point is though that like… 

ELM: And the “Word of God,” that expression used in fandom?

FK: The Word of God, yeah, yeah. The Powers That Be, right?

ELM: No, “The Powers That Be” sounds goofy, like… You know, like… 

FK: It is goofy.

ELM: Or folksy. Like, “Oh, that’s the Powers That Be!” Whatever. I’m of a background that is both Catholic and superstitious, as those two things go hand-in-hand very often. And so the Powers That Be—well, it doesn’t feel Italian to me. That feels, in my mind that’s very Irish.

FK: Yeah.

ELM: I don’t know, but I can see it, I can see it on a—

FK: Whatever it is—it could possibly, I believe that it could be Irish. You know. I believe that.

ELM: I could see it on a little needlepointed pillow, like, “Oh, the Powers That Be.” So there’s probably some other expression that I’m not aware of amongst my people. But it sounds a little goofy to me, whereas “The Word of God” sounds very threatening.

FK: Yeah… 

ELM: And sounds quite Old Testament. From on high.

FK: Yeah, yeah, and I do think that—I don’t know, I just, it’s interesting how connected these things are and how weird people get about…I just, I think it’s, I mean, look: I do believe in there being some form of copyright law, because I think that people should be able to make money from creative works that they made. But it’s just so bizarre how deeply this has gotten, you know, entrenched in our culture in ways that I find just wild. I, I can’t—you know, and it’s—

ELM: I mean, OK—

FK: It’s kind of idolatrous.

ELM: Yeah, yeah, like—my thoughts right now are very unflattering and it’s towards society as a whole, but like, there’s an authoritarian element to it as well. And this kind of desire to like, say, like, that it’s official, this creator—and the fact that so ofte it’s a corporation, and the kind of… 

FK: Yeah.

ELM: You know, there’s—I mean, we’re talking about this in a wholly American context right now, right? And like…it’s tied up with the way that American culture thinks about corporations, right?

FK: Sure, but I also find people—it’s not like it’s only Americans who talk about copyright law in this way.

ELM: That’s our cool hegemony.

FK: American copyright law, but because—

ELM: Hegemony.

FK: Yeah, because of American hegemony! I’m not, I don’t claim to have any insight into what it’s like to be a person outside of the U.S. looking at American copyright law, but I can tell you that it’s not just Americans who talk about it in these ways.

ELM: Oh no, but I do think that the—it’s our fault. Accept it.

FK: Oh it is our fault. Completely. Oh, absolutely! Are you kidding?

ELM: I’m not trying to exclude the rest of the world from this narrative, but I’m just saying: let’s talk about what’s at the heart of it here, right? And this kind of idea of corporation-knows-best, corporation owns these characters—we’ve been going, circling around all these ideas for the last couple of weeks about the truth of characters and the truth of the story, right? And this sort of idea of like, who owns the truth? And, I mean, I think that—like, these [sings] copyright owner [speaking] prayers, like, really—how did they come to illustrate this really extreme example of what we’re even talking about here, you know? This kind of idea of a liturgical interpretation of what the truth of the world is, you know what I mean? Like… 

FK: Yeah, yeah.

ELM: I don’t know. I don’t know. It’s just really hard for me—I mean, I say this as someone who actually really celebrates fanfiction and fanworks as a pushback against corporations. And I don’t think it’s some great subversive act that’s always like, some big fuck-you. But like, when you start talking about it in these terms, it is a bit of a perpetual fuck-you in the sense of like, you can’t tell me what these characters are doing! I’m gonna do whatever I want with them! Even if I’m not contradicting what you’re saying, I’m still doing whatever I want with them, I’m still thinking about them, you don’t own my thoughts about these characters, and you don’t own my interpretation, and I don’t need you— “you” are the copyright, [sings] copyright owner, [speaking] here.

FK: Right, right. Yeah.

ELM: I don’t need you to say so to continue to have thoughts and to put those thoughts down on paper and share those thoughts with other people.

FK: Right. Right, and to go back to what we were talking about at the beginning of the episode, the first half of the episode—I do think that there is something really nice about keeping that for yourself and not having it be, quote, “tainted by commerce,” right? I mean, I think this is where that reaction comes in, because obviously I think it’s totally OK for people to want to use this stuff—you know, people can be really into something and use it as a way to get ahead in their career, and I think that’s totally fine, but I do think that you lose something when you, you know, when you make it into something that is part of your career or commercialized. 

And obviously, like, it’s super privileged to be able to have a hobby and not worry about that stuff—obviously it is, right, you know, obviously there’s some people who have to really—many people who don’t have time to do any of it, or if they do have to make it a stepping stone to something that’s going to pay. I get that, and I think that we should never forget that. But that also doesn’t mean it’s not true that it would be nice if we had universal basic income and everybody could just have fun with some things, you know what I mean?

ELM: No, but yeah, but I’m also thinking about this from the other angle and it’s like, you know, they were never going to—thinking back to the beginning of this conversation, they were never gonna make money off the grocery store musical, right?

FK: Right, yeah.

ELM: And it’s when you start approaching—and I don’t think the people who originally did the, started doing the Ratatouille videos were thinking “Maybe we’ll catch Pixar’s eye and then we’re gonna do a Broadway benefit—”

FK: No, I don’t think so.

ELM: “—where we can raise all this money,” or whatever, right? Again: I think that’s incredible, that they raised a ton of money, this was a couple days ago when they did the actual performance and everything, and like—that’s great.

FK: Yeah. I missed it! I was really sad that I missed the performance.

ELM: And I, I truly miss Broadway, and I wish I could pay more than I pay for other things in my daily life to go see some Broadway shows right now. But, you know, that being said—I think this is one of the big friction points you see with this, you know, the non-monetized side of fandom, the idea that the money is where the rightsholders are. The money is where the copyright holders are. So if you start to think about it from that direction, and it’s not just “I’m interested in this and I’m interested in the ideas,” but you’re also thinking about—and I’m not saying that the people who made the Ratatouille musical were thinking about the fact that—

FK: Right.

ELM: —Pixar was the owner and maybe they could cash in. Not at all, right. But obviously this is happening within fanart, you know. And this kind of idea that like, coming at it from that angle and doing it because of who the copyright owner is, and what you could potentially get out of it, and not like, in spite of?

FK: Right.

ELM: Right? I think is one thing that is really hard for a lot of people from the non-monetized side of fandom to kinda reconcile with. Because that just feels, I don’t know. I don’t know! I don’t wanna make it sound like holier-than-thou, like, “Oh, you must do this pure, like,” you know, whatever. I’m writing, I’m also writing fanfiction about these, you know, comic book characters owned by a giant, now owned by the Walt Disney Corporation, you know? Like… 

FK: [laughs] Yeah, totally. Well, I think in wrapping up, I don’t think that we’re trying—neither of us came into this episode, “copyright brainworms” sounds like it’s such a super-judgy thing to say, and I think that we are judgy about some of this stuff… 

ELM: Yeah.

FK: But more to the point, I think that we all sort of have—whatever point you’re coming at it from, everything is sort of impacted by the copyright system. And isn’t that really more of the point than anything else, right? Is just—wow, look at how much impact this has on our ideas and on what we choose to do and like, the fact that—for you it’s like pushing back against it is the thing that’s fun, and for other people they’re like “I wanna, I don’t feel like it’s good unless I can own the copyright to it and I can make money off of it” or whatever.

ELM: Right.

FK: So I don’t know. I guess it’s just, I guess it’s an opportunity to think about this as sort of the air we breathe, and like, you know? [laughs] I mean, maybe we could make it less polluted or something? I don’t know. This is a bad metaphor.

ELM: How do we make it less polluted?

FK: By fixing copyright law.

ELM: Yeah, it feels completely futile, right? And it’s like, it’s worse than it was a few decades ago, and like, the things that we’ve seen in the last 10 years have been extremely bad, like—there have been, the developments have been bad, you know? And I think that that’s part of it too, just feels like…it’s marching in a direction that we can’t come back from, and some of the people making these legal decisions are making relatively myopic ones.

FK: Yeah…I don’t know.

ELM: Like you say—no? You feel hopeful that we can reform our copyright system with the cool people in Congress who know so much about copyright?

FK: [laughs] Yeah, I don’t know about that. But I do feel good about stuff like the work the Organization for Transformative Works has been doing to preserve fair use exceptions and things like that.

ELM: Yeah, yeah, all right.

FK: So it’s not like a completely bleak—it’s not a completely bleak situation, and we’re, I think now more than ever before, in the past 10 years, people have been well-positioned to have non-profits fight for your rights. You know? So there’s that. I wanna end on that happy note.

ELM: Yeah, but what about the giant corporations who are gonna…

FK: Shh! Shh! Shh!

ELM: Like—

FK: Happy note.

ELM: Mark Zuckerberg.

FK: Happy note! Happy note, Elizabeth. I can’t take, I can’t take more depression today.

ELM: I’m sorry.

FK: You ready to end on a happy note?

ELM: [sings] Copyright owner!

FK: [laughs] I’m gonna talk to you fucking later, Elizabeth.

ELM: Bye Flourish. [sings] Copyright owner!

[Outro music, thank yous and credits]

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