Episode 144: Writing Women
In Episode 144, “Writing Women,” Elizabeth and Flourish celebrate Femslash February by talking to breathedout, a longtime f/f fic and meta writer. They discuss her route into fandom through queer female erotica, fandom’s longstanding biases towards male bodies, what types of characters get to be “default” vs “political,” and the role desire can play in reading and writing.
Show Notes
[00:00:00] As always, our intro music is “Awel” by stefsax, used under a CC BY 3.0 license.
[00:01:34] breathedout on the AO3!
[00:06:53] We’re discussing Episode 133, “Slash: The Discourse.”
[00:10:20] So far our “Tropefest” special episodes include “Trapped Together,” “Canon-Divergent AU,” “Enemies to Lovers,” “Omegaverse,” and “Found Family.” You can listen to these and the next one we’re going to release, “Hurt/Comfort,” by pledging to our Patreon!
[00:13:00] Our interstitial music is “Vaping in L.A.’” from Music for Podcasts 4 by Lee Rosevere, used under a CC BY 3.0 license.
[00:16:00] breathedout’s meta on the Bad Sex Awards.
[00:28:07] breathedout’s meta about masculinity not being a blank-slate default, “On the personal as normal; on the normal as political.”
[00:48:01] We answered that question about people coming to fandom later in life in Episode 143, “Ask Fansplaining Anything: Part 9.”
[01:05:56] Browse the Femslash February back issues of “The Rec Center”!
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 #144, “Writing Women.”
FK: Which is conveniently happening during Femslash February.
ELM: OK. So, you know, we thought for awhile about what to title this episode, because ostensibly it is about fanworks, fanfiction in particular, with romantic and/or sexual configurations of ladies.
FK: Mm-hmm.
ELM: Which some people call “femslash,” some people call “f/f,” some people call “saffic.”
FK: Uh-huh. Some people use the broad term “wlw,” which I say as “wooloo.”
ELM: I am—I am not going to join you in your…
FK: In the “land of wooloo?”
ELM: In the wooloo—the land of wlw is great, the term pronounced that way is the opposite of great.
FK: The “wooloo train”?
ELM: No, I don’t like this “wooloo train.” So there are a lot of different terms, and so we wanted to keep it somewhat broad, we are talking about people writing about women with our guest, breathedout, who is a longtime f/f writer, I guess. I was just gonna default to “femslash” immediately! I don’t know, it’s just my old, my old terminology. Just, you know.
She is an f/f writer, I first encountered her in the Sherlock fandom. She wrote a lot of meta back in the day—only a few years ago—about writing about women, writing about queer women, connection between queer women and the queer female characters they write, some really interesting stuff. We’ll put it in the show notes for sure. But I thought that she would be a really interesting person to talk to for ostensibly our first femslash episode—which is bad, since we’ve been doing this podcast since 2015—but to be fair, we didn’t do our first dudeslash episode until like two months ago, so.
FK: It’s not like we’ve been out here just like, talking about dudes only this whole time.
ELM: Right. I mean, we’ve probably talked about a lot of dudes, to be honest.
FK: Well, sure. But fandom in general talks about a lot of dudes, and I think it’s worth mentioning that like—especially cause I know that there are some people who are listening to this podcast who are not super into fandom, and who are like, listening to this podcast because it’s their window into fandom, I think it’s worth noting that a lot of fanfic is written about het, and a lot of fanfic is written about men lovin’ men, and it’s a much smaller community of people who are writing women loving women in the fanfic world, and there’s this long history of simultaneously like very very, um, intense and like, passionate f/f, femslash groups—like the Xenites, basically it’s like impossible to be a Xena, I mean, I’m sure there’s someone, but almost no one’s a Xena fan without being into Xena and Gabrielle, right? And they’re doin’ their whole thing, right? But then also this real sense of—what is going on, why is everybody writing about gay men all the time and not about ladies. [laughs]
ELM: Well, I think it’s notable, I think this gets at some of, some of the historical stuff, that you used the word community of people. Because there’s a few different ways to go about this. I think there are some people in the broader fanfiction-writing world who, I think a lot of people would use the word “community” in different ways, right. But I do think when it comes to this, there’s a few different things. There is like, a dedicated core group of people who would consider themselves “femslash fandom,” in the same way that somewhat derogatorily you might say “migratory slash fandom,” people moving from m/m ship to m/m ship, and like, kind of viewing media looking for those two dudes to get together, right.
FK: Right.
ELM: That’s a long-standing term and trend. Femslash fandom are people who wanna read and write about queer female stories, and so can seem, you know, there are definite like, waves and migrations and movements, right? And you see the big femslash fandom rise up. Like I know, like Supergirl is one of the biggest right now, right?
That being said, I think that you see a lot of femslash conversations within massive fandoms, like big juggernaut fandoms, where it seems like there would be enough space for all sorts of configurations, and yet you know, if you crunch the numbers in Marvel or Harry Potter or any of these really big spaces, it’s still like, extremely disproportionate about how much time a relationship without a man involved, basically… [both laugh] The amount of time that fans devote to that, in terms of producing or reading those stories, right?
FK: Yeah, yeah.
ELM: So like, for me personally, capital-F Femslash fandom that I’ve seen, I see it like pass by me, but I’ve never been in those spaces. Whereas I have been in some of these juggernaut spaces and seen these conversations. And not just about femslash! I mean, we did call this “writing women.” You see it around just female characters in general, and you may have a different perspective coming from a lot of het ships where obviously a lady is—it’s het cause there’s a lady there. [FK laughs]
But in male/male fandom, historically, you know, I’ve read so many stories that do not pass the Bechdel test, and many of which go out of their way to exclude women when there are women in the source material, you know? They actively remove any female characters or agency from that.
FK: Right.
ELM: So…
FK: Yeah, yeah. This is not a thing that is debated in het fandom. It’s not a thing. But! [laughs] I have heard this often from people within slash spaces. But I think it’s also worth noting, you know, another piece that I think is worth bringing into this is there’s—you talked about “femslash fandom” in the way of like, migratory slash fandom, and this historical way that people talk about it. I think it’s also worth noting that there’s a fair number of people who have written stories featuring f/f pairings, or wooloo people…
ELM: Never again. Never again.
FK: [laughing] Anyway…
ELM: “Wooloo people”! [laughs]
FK: Wooloo people! Yeah! I’m doing this specifically to make you squirm and I’m glad it’s working.
ELM: I don’t think “squirm” is the right term, it’s more just like…
FK: You’re a lil squirmy right now!
ELM: It’s just weariness! My body is literally not moving, there’s no squirming, it’s just like—no. Come on.
FK: Anyway, I think there’s a lot of people who have written like one or two stories in these spaces, but don’t feel like they’re part of the space in the same way. I think that both of us have written f/f stories—even stories where that was, like, the main pairing—but not necessarily being part of femslash space. And I’m not, I do think that that’s actually a broader thing that happens across all kinds of ships, all ships and all types of ships, much more than people often like to talk about it within fandom. Cause obviously it’s easy to see big groups of people doing things in a group, right.
ELM: Right.
FK: But, you know I think—I think that’s worth noting. Because I think it’s a complicating factor in the way that fandom interacts with this stuff.
ELM: Yeah, definitely. I mean, I think that some of those themes came up when we had our slash discourse episode, too.
FK: Oh yeah.
ELM: This kind of idea, you know, of like—you saying like, you know, you’ve read plenty of, and written—I don’t know if you’ve written male/male stuff before?
FK: I’ve written a little bit, yeah.
ELM: But like obviously read plenty of it but never would consider yourself quote-unquote “in slash fandom,” right? And I absolutely understand that distinction.
FK: Right, totally.
ELM: Yeah, I don’t know. It’s interesting. I’m excited to talk to breathedout about this, because obviously we touched on a lot of this with the slash conversation too, like—there’s just like some, there’s very complicated gender dynamics going on within a lot of fanfiction or fanworks fandom, you know? The gender of fans and the gender and sex of the characters that they engage with, right?
And you know, there’s a not-insubstantial contingent of male/male slash fandom which is predominantly, by all accounts, by every single measure that we’ve ever gotten, women and non-binary—often AFAB people, right? You know what I mean? That specific, like, you know—not as a “women and women lite” commentary, but you know.
FK: Right. [both laugh]
ELM: But, you know, people having the argument—which I’m sure you’ve heard a million times—talking about how male/male can create a distance, right, from your own body or your own experiences. And actually if you are not cis, too, even giving you the space to not, you know, “I don’t want anything to do with this body,” right? And kind of a projection or a way to just like, disembody yourself personally, right?
And so that’s why I think this can get really complicated, too, because there—there’s like a line of discourse I’ve seen from f/f folks saying like, “Why do you,” you know, “Why do you hate yourself and hate your body,” right?
FK: Right.
ELM: It’s like, you know…and does…right? And this is, I’ve seen it in the past. I don’t mean to create some sort of straw lady. You know what I mean?
FK: Yeah, I do definitely know what you mean and I think it’s really complicated and there’s a bunch of different needs in tension, if you know what I’m saying here, like, in the way that people use fanfic and think about it. I don’t know. I guess I’m just really excited to see what somebody from sort of the inside of like, writing primarily f/f fic feels about this. Right? Cause like, that’s, that’s a perspective that neither you nor I have, and I think it’s gonna be really really really valuable to—just to have that other viewpoint in here.
ELM: Yeah! Absolutely. So we’ll call breathedout, but first we have two items of business. Items of business?
FK: Items of business.
ELM: Orders of business? Items?
FK: Items.
ELM: Items? OK. Number one, you may notice that this episode is a week later than normally scheduled in our bi-month—bi-week—bi—twice a month—
FK: Twice a month schedule.
ELM: —schedule. [FK laughs] Twice-a-month schedule. We’ve had some pandemic logistics that have been very fraught, I would say. [both laugh]
FK: Yayyyyy, it’s a pandemic!
ELM: Um, it’s great, I think we’re both grateful that we, you know, have homes, but sometimes those homes make it difficult for us to record for various reasons. So we thank everyone for their patience and the next episode is gonna have a similar additional week delay, just because we can’t actually get the space to record.
FK: Yep.
ELM: So we really thank everyone for their patience on that. But in the interim, we have also recorded a special episode for patrons, because it had been months since we had the last one.
FK: Yeah!
ELM: I mean, there was like, an election and like…
FK: There was a lot of stuff that happened.
ELM: …an insurrection…
FK: That were reasons that like…
ELM: …Christmas, and like…
FK: Yeah, things happened. [ELM laughs] But I’m really excited about this one in particular because we are, it’s a Tropefest episode, in that series, and we are talking about hurt/comfort, which you know, going into it I was like “Oh yeah, it’s a classic!” And coming out of it I was like, “I have so many thoughts!! Even more than I thought I had!!” So I think that this is a, I mean, I think this is an unmissable special episode, personally.
ELM: Wow. Wow.
FK: I am ready to oversell it to people.
ELM: [laughs] So, that is for our patrons who pledge at the $3-a-month level or up on Patreon. Patreon.com/fansplaining.
FK: Yeah. And that’s how, as you guys know, that’s how we make the podcast. There’s lots of different levels that you can pledge at, it is, you know, you can pledge more or less than $3 a month. We also do things like tiny zines. We have really cute enamel pins. Lots of really good stuff that you can get by pledging to our Patreon. And we’re so grateful to everybody who pledges.
We also know that not everyone can pledge or wants to pledge or whatever, we’re in a pandemic, there’s lots going on, also maybe just Patreon’s not your thing! And there’s ways that you can support us that are not Patreon. For instance, by spreading the word about the podcast, by following us, subscribing to the podcast on your favorite podcatcher. By writing in, sending in your comments, questions, thoughts to fansplaining on Twitter, on Tumblr, on Facebook, on Instagram, by emailing fansplaining at gmail dot com, by writing in our little, you know, send-in-a-question form on our website. Keep in mind that if you don’t give us an email address, you might not get an answer if you write in there. And by calling 1-401-536-FANS, which is our voicemail box. And if you do that, then we might play your question on the air!
ELM: OK, so just—just to wrap things up, we are going to be putting out the hurt/comfort episode next week, the week after this episode comes out, so that’ll be the final week of February, and if you are a new patron, you’ll have access to 21 other special episodes to listen to between now and then, so you know, content!
FK: Yeah! And, and now is a really great time to follow us on social, because we are probably going to be putting out, like, a mini-survey, which I will not go into in detail.
ELM: Wow, wow, no spoilers.
FK: No spoilers! No spoilers, but sometime between, you know, now and the next few weeks, we’re gonna be doing like a little mini-survey, so tune in for that.
ELM: All right, now I think it’s time to call breathedout.
FK: Let’s do it.
[Interstitial music]
FK: All right, it’s time to welcome breathedout to the podcast! Welcome!
breathedout: Yay! Thank you.
ELM: I feel like it’s, it’s exciting to see the face of someone that you’ve read for a long time. Like…it’s even weirder in person. Do you ever get this? Like, at cons? You both must have experienced this.
BO: Well, greywash doesn’t go to cons, but I’ve been to one, and it was odd. It was almost like, overwhelmingly that way to me.
ELM: It’s just—people’s heights.
BO: All these people!
FK: Yeah.
BO: All these people have bodies and faces!
ELM: It’s just like, “What?!”
FK: Yeah!
BO: It’s just like, too much. [all laugh]
FK: Yeah, it is.
ELM: OK. So I don’t know your height, but I can see your face. [all laugh] So, I feel like I encountered you—we both used to be in Sherlock fandom back in the day. I don’t know if you have any association with Sherlock these days.
BO: I’m pretty much, like, not in fandom at the moment.
ELM: OK, that’s fair. But can you give us a little fannish backstory? Like, your fandom history and situate yourself, kind of with femslash or f/f or—I don’t actually know what you want to call it.
BO: Yeah, sure.
ELM: Let us know.
BO: Yeah, I usually say f/f, partially due to my lack of knowledge of fandom terms when I came into fandom. So my intro was kind of, in my late 20s I wasn’t in—first of all—fandom as a teenager, or my early 20s, I didn’t even really know that it was a thing. And when I was in my late 20s, I was active in the like, literature blogging community, and I was also common-law married to a man, and I’m more or less a lesbian, and that was like, creating a lot of problems, like, sex was a big part of my life and like, something that I was struggling to like, make sense of and make work in my life. Because I, like, my monogamous relationship didn’t match up with my sexual preference. In my late 20s, that started to become really an issue.
But in the books that I was reading that spoke really eloquently as things of all other aspects of life, basically, there’s a real—or at least was 10 years ago—there’s a real prudishness or taboo about treating sex as just an important part of life in the same way that you would treat, like, other aspects of human existence. And I think that’s really like, underlined by stuff like the Bad Sex Awards, where people just take clips—they take bits of sex scenes out of context and read them aloud and ridicule them without any, you know, context of what the author’s intention was, et cetera.
So anyway, so I wasn’t finding—what I really wanted was like, explicit fiction that had explicit sex in it and took the sex seriously as part of like, the story that was being told. And ideally about women, because that was what I wasn’t getting in my life at the time. And so I wrote this blog entry on my old lit blog and like, voicing this frustration, and a couple of people—we had a big comments conversation about it, but a couple of people also privately emailed me and they were like, “So…if you want sex writing…” [all laugh] “You might wanna check out fanfiction.”
So I did, and in a lot of ways it was like, this big revelation, because—exactly. You know, it was, it was sort of two-thirds exactly what I was looking for, you know. Like, there was a lot of sexually explicit fiction that was really queer that took the sex seriously as a really integral part of the story that was being told, and it was so cool and transformative and like—and actually how I got, how Sherlock became my fandom is that it was just sort of an easy entry point because I was already familiar with the Sherlock Holmes Doyle novels.
So I kind of like, came into fandom through this back route, and I didn’t know anything about like, a lot of the culture, the fannish culture that I now know about. So I kind of stumbled in [laughs] this very like, sort of awkward like, bumbling into a party at a late hour way. Gate-crashing into fandom. And I was like, “You know, this is so cool,” and it didn’t occur to me—it obviously, I picked up on the fact that a large percentage of what was out there was m/m and a large percentage of the characters that people were writing about were men.
But I was just kind of like, it’s very cool that there’s this focus on queer relationships and it just, it seems very normal to me within this context to be writing about women in the same way, to like, take media sources and make transformative works about women in sexual relationships in the same way that a lot of people were doing that about male relationships. And I wrote and write about men as well.
But even like, my first thing that I wrote, my first like—I guess it’s kind of a novella—in Sherlock fandom, it’s sort of a mishmash of BBC Sherlock and the Doyle, the ACD stories, in that it’s like, time-shifted to be just after the First World War, which is an area of interest for me. It’s like the Holmes/Watson story, but then there’s this B-plot line about these two Victorian lesbians, and they write steamy letters to each other. So there sort of were stealth lesbians—they were, I didn’t mean for them to be stealth, I just thought, “You know, this is great. Now there’s more queer relationships in this story. What’s not to love.”
So as time went on, [laughs] I kind of became more familiar with fandom. It turned out that there were all these kind of long-standing, just long-standing discourse about [laughs] this and that.
FK: What was it—what was it like to come into that? Like, what was the first thing that you—like, when you were coming in to that space, what was the first thing that you realized about this discourse? Like, what was the, you know…
BO: Well, first of all, I remember very very early in my discovery of fandom having this conversation—and I, God, I don’t even remember how all of this really panned out. But I think it was the very early days of Anti-Diogenes, which is a groupchat that my now partner—fandom partner but also life partner—greywash started as a writing support group, like a fanfic writing support group. And folks were talking about slash, and I was like, “What is this slash you speak of?” [all laugh]
And so people—this whole sort of like, conversation started up about like, how to define that term to somebody who had never heard it before. And like, I remember this long chat conversation that greywash and I had following on from that larger with-more-people-involved conversation, where I was like, “So, you know, what about people who are queer in canon? Like, are they still slash?” You know? Like all these—
FK: Yeah, the standard question that one has when you don’t know!
BO: Yeah, the standard questions! You know, what, like—does it have to be that it’s a transformative thing, or like, do you call two women in a relationship slash, that whole thing. And that’s kind of why I, when I was like, really active on Tumblr and writing a lot of thoughts about writing about queer women in fandom, I feel more comfortable using f/f because I still don’t really—[laughs] I don’t really instinctually understand what “slash” and “femslash” mean in a way that like, I feel much more on solid ground saying that I like to write f/f than that I like to write femslash.
ELM: Sure.
BO: And then, you know, like—as I was writing more stories about women havin’ sex, and simultaneously as a sidebar getting divorced and actually having sex with a lot of women, I started to just like see differences and I guess readerly expectations—like, for the same level of kind of like, messiness, explicitness, or like, what I would consider the same level of messiness, like, character messiness and explicitness. People seemed to sort of take that in stride when it was two men, but have very strong reactions, like, kind of—revulsion is too strong perhaps, or maybe not, but kind of drawing-back. Not what people were expecting. And in some cases, obviously not what people wanted. [laughs]
FK: So what people were expecting or wanted was like, something that was sweeter? Or like, more calm? Or more…smooth? Or…
BO: Yeah, yeah, or like, like I think there’s certain sex acts that are like, viewed by—I don’t know. So I’m thinking specifically of, in my second novel-length story, I wrote this fisting scene and I just like, on my long stories, like, for people who haven’t read my stuff: there’s a lot of sex in them, usually, in my long stuff, and I don’t tag every sex act, because I don’t feel like you know—someone searching on AO3 for, you know, like, “cumming on your face,” really wants to read like, 200,000 words about processing trauma of the First World War. That’s not what they’re looking for. [all laugh] I mean, it would make the tags even longer than they already are and they’re already very long.
I got people that were just very like, “Oh my God, I didn’t wanna read that,” or like, just you know—having like, really strong reactions, which is fair. And fine. Even though, like, that particular scene—it’s not, I mean, I went on to write what I would consider much more, like, dark or disturbing sex between women. That whole story is very kind of fandom…I would say fandom-friendly or typical in that it, you know, it’s a love story between these two women and they like, become closer over time, there’s kind of a semi-slow-burn and then there’s a negotiation of early relationship stuff and, you know, so that’s very familiar ground. But I think that was for some reason out of, out of the common way.
Definitely, like, when the—this didn’t happen in my first story because I think the fact that the women in it were Victorians meant that their language was very restrained, even though they were writing about cunnilingus. [laughs] It was like…
FK: But they used the word “cunnilingus” instead of other kinds of words, because they’re Victorians. [all laugh]
BO: But in stories where there are multiple pairings and there’s a lot of sex, just, amongst all gender configurations, there’s just, there’s strong reactions to the, really to the sex that involves women, not necessarily that only involves women, but the sex that involves women, that I just have not experienced on scenes involving men. Comments that are disgusted or like, “That’s gross, get those women out of here,” and I was like, “This is so weird,” because I’m still this fandom-naïve newbie. [laughs] I’m like, “Why is it different?!” So that was kind of my somewhat-rocky fandom coming-of-age trajectory.
ELM: This is like, I have so many like—there’s so many directions we can take this in right now that I’m just, I’m very torn about which direction. Flourish, I don’t know if you have a strong feeling.
FK: I mean, I’m just really interested in this—cause I think that, from the outside, I really observe people who write f/f—whether they call it “femslash” or whether they, you know, don’t, but who primarily write f/f—there is this sort of sense of gulf, right, or like, distinction from the rest of the fanfic community, and a real sense of—maybe not like, being besieged, but sometimes it feels like being besieged. And it’s really interesting hearing about this experience of yours, because it’s like, sort of speaking to that only without any of the history. [all laugh] If you’re a long-term femslash person, there’s always like, there’s like 20 years of—
BO: Right.
FK: —you know, bad blood of various kinds that is going on in here. But, so it’s really interesting to hear that just coming in you were immediately seeing this distinction. And I wonder—as you talked to more people who are interested in f/f writing, what did they have to say about that, and what did you find as you kept on going in terms of like, siting yourself within the broader world of fandom? Is that a direction that you’re OK with going, Elizabeth?
ELM: Oh, yeah! I mean, and a quick follow-on to that too is like—I’m curious about, as you left a place like Sherlock with a huge juggernaut male/male pairing at the heart of it and frankly a two-background-dudes ship as the [laughs] as the second-most, that was kind of stitched out of very little, you know, because they famously shared no screen time until what, the final season or whatever?
I’m curious about, once you were out of that space with those like, kind of big slash fandom, classic slash fandom expectations, and maybe into writing other fandoms that didn’t have that kind of looming thing, how that kind of shaped too. So maybe that’s not a—is it a totally additional question? I just wanna pile on the questions for you right now.
BO: Well, I think those two questions [laughs] I think those two questions are not totally separate questions, because… [laughs]
ELM: OK, good. [laughs]
BO: Because, like, what I personally went on to write has become like, more and more and more niche as time goes on. Like, I have many fewer readers, and like, the people who are reading my stuff by and large, like, I think by this point kind of know what they’re getting into. Like, they’re there because they want to read a story by me. [all laugh]
ELM: Yeah.
BO: And also, like, the fandom—like, I have gravitated more toward fandoms that have more to work with as far as like, developed and complex and like, messy female characters. The thing that I’m writing right now is a Killing Eve story and I’ve written a couple other things in that fandom. So like, I feel like—exactly, as you’re saying, Elizabeth, like: the people that show up there are certainly showing up with different expectations than the folks who—well, Sherlock is so huge that there were all sorts of people, which is—I was gonna say it was one thing that was cool about it. It was also one thing that was terrible about it. [all laugh]
FK: Right.
ELM: “Cool” is very generous, but OK.
FK: Whereas in Killing Eve, you’re pretty much—even just watching Killing Eve there’s certain shared things that you’re like…
BO: Right. Although less so than I would have expected. But that is certainly more true than it was for Sherlock. I mean, there’s certainly more people that want to read about women fucking than there were in Sherlock fandom. [laughs] So like, that’s a leg up. So to speak. [laughs, FK groans]
ELM: Good. Good. [laughs]
BO: But I think as I have talked to more people and like, made more fandom friends and had more like, at this point, long and obviously meaningful fandom relationships, there’s a lot of baggage about being female, and this thing about like, the expectation of softness or the expectation of…people perceive a lot of political and/or personal pitfalls about writing women that they don’t perceive about writing men.
And actually, as I went back and looked at my old Tumblr femslash essays—cause I was like, “What did I used to think when I was more engaged in actually, before we bought this house and just are now spending our time fixing it up?” What really struck me about them, I bring up this point in one of those essays, but it is much more on my mind now, is that like, writing about men—maleness is also a thing. It’s a constructed thing. [FK laughs]
So like, when you’re writing about men, you’re not just writing about the default human, like, I think that people feel—and this is very true of race as well, and that’s actually sort of why I think that it’s more obvious to me when I’m thinking about gender, because, you know, in the intervening five years or whatever I like, I’m white, and I’ve sort of like, come to realize that whiteness is also a constructed thing. It’s not the default, it’s not a non-entity.
ELM: The lack of a race, yeah.
BO: Yeah, it’s—white people can’t help but act from like, that privileged place in white supremacist culture in the same way that men can’t help but act from their privileged place in cisheteropatriarchy. And I’m not saying, when I say “they can’t help but act,” of course we can build consciousness around those things and change our behavior, but all men are at some point—and often frequently!—acting from like, their privileged place in the patriarchal structure, right.
So like, to me as a white person, whiteness is hard to perceive. It’s like, very easy for it to be invisible. And it’s very easy for me to feel like I’m not writing whiteness, because to me, from my privileged position, it does seem like an invisible thing. And I think that for a lot of men that’s true too. I think that there’s a lot of behaviors that I, as a woman, can be like, “Welp, there’s his maleness coming out,” that like the man in question doesn’t perceive.
But I feel like what’s interesting to me about this thing where like, we tend to perceive writing, you know, white cis men as just like, the default human, where we can write them apolitically, and not engage with any of these structures, is that it’s really interesting to be like, a lot of times when we write white men, we don’t write them acting oppressively. Like, we don’t write those male, that male shit that like, you know, like—they don’t interrupt the female characters in the book all the time. [laughter] They don’t take up 70% of whatever meetings they’re in. They don’t, you know, like, all that stuff. And like, that’s understandable, because people want their characters to be likeable. Like, they don’t want them to be oppressive assholes! [all laugh]
ELM: I mean, some of us.
BO: Right. Some of us. [ELM laughing]
FK: Stop looking at me, Elizabeth Minkel! Stop looking at me!
ELM: No, you can look at me! I mean, I just project all of my surliness onto a bunch of dudes and then we go from there, so…
BO: No, absolutely. I mean, I write many unlikeable characters. But I understand why people wouldn’t want to write unlikeable characters. But it’s interesting to me that we feel that we can write people in an oppressive position and not have them engage with that and not engage with that ourselves, but we feel like we can’t write people in a less-privileged position on whatever axis of oppression we’re talking about, and have them not deal with that, you know?
FK: That’s interesting. So this is the idea that people write slash, male/male slash, because they like to envision, like, a world in which everyone’s sort of equal and not dealing with any of this.
BO: Right, right.
FK: It’s like, OK, great, but like—that’s, that’s a little fucked up, you know? [laughs]
BO: Yeah! And I mean, I can certainly understand wanting a break from thinking and talking about systems of oppression all the time. But it’s just interesting that like, we feel that we can disengage the oppressor from that system, but we don’t feel like we can disengage the oppressed from that structure.
Although, the exception being that—I feel like there’s a lot of fiction now, fanfic, a lot of fanfic but also other kinds of fiction. Like, I’m thinking of She-Ra, for example, where there’s a ton of queer characters that just never, homophobia, transphobia, like, are not things that they encounter. Like, that just doesn’t exist in their world and they just happily go about their lives being queer and that’s just not part of the story. And like, like, I think it’s good that those stories exist. That’s not the kind of story that I personally particularly am drawn to writing or reading, but I think it’s good, like, it’s a good option for people to have. It’s an example of like, writing people who in real life—if we’re going for high realism—you can never fully disengage from the fact that those systems exist in the world as a queer person. But if they were in the real world, they would be in the less-privileged position, and yet they’re in the story not having to deal with that.
So all of that to say, [laughs] I feel like there’s a perception that when it comes to gender, writing about men is default or unmarked and that writing about women is political and marked, and that as such, there’s all these pitfalls that one has to avoid or else engage with in some way. You know, like, there’s this long history of narratives about like, lesbians who die, so we never want a dead lesbian. And like, there’s this long history of narratives about lesbians who like, go insane at the end of the story, or like, go back to being with a man at the end of the story, so like, we don’t want any stories like that. Or there’s, you know, like—you guys know all the tropes. [laughs]
So I think like, that leads to kind of a uniform type of thing that’s still allowed to exist in the f/f or femslash world, if people are very anxious about like, “Well, I don’t want to do this and I don’t want to do that and I don’t want to,” like, I don’t know, step on toes or—I mean, these are serious concerns, like, they don’t want to retraumatize people who have already lived their lives with a lot of trauma. But it sort of leaves a, like, a set of emotional and dynamic options that’s pretty limited.
FK: Yeah, you know, it’s interesting cause I don’t—I mean, maybe, Elizabeth, you being fully a slasher, you know, have a different perspective on this. But while I hear a lot of people talking about bury your gays about, you know, men in non-fanfic contexts, I don’t hear a lot about people saying like, “Oh, you can never—” I mean obviously there’s some people who only want to read happy stories or whatever, but I don’t remember people being specifically political and using that to yell at people for writing a tragic story. Maybe they do do that. Do they do that?
ELM: Well, OK: so I’ll say as a representative from Planet Slash, one thing I think is that people do not appreciate, like, major character death fic.
BO: Yeah.
ELM: In general, so.
FK: In any fandom, right.
ELM: I think that’s a universal across fandom. So that’s like, less of an issue. I think the bury your gays stuff with queer female characters—that’s predominantly a pro media critique, right, because I think it’s rare in any kind of fic that people are super pro, like, killing half of the ship or whatever.
BO: Yeah. That’s true.
ELM: You know, but also, breathedout, for context, Flourish and I just recorded a special episode for patrons about hurt/comfort, and it was really interesting to think back over our several decades fo reading hurt/comfort and some of the trends that we used to see, and you know, the term “whump”? And this kind of piling-on. And like, as someone who’s historically read male/male slash, like, you know—it’s definitely, you see those arguments of, well, you know, it’s OK to just like torture him, you know? Whereas like—would you, would people be so free and loose with torturing a female character? Flourish, you’re gonna be like…
FK: Well, they did in Xena. I know they did in Xena, because I read some of that in Xena. [laughs] But I don’t think anymore. I don’t think that’s as big of a trend anymore at all. I don’t know, maybe.
ELM: Yeah, I don’t know. I guess my other question that related to this, too, is like, what I think is ironic about the arguments that you are describing that people have is like—this sort of, like, “dudes are default, and if you bring in,” you know, “not-white dudes, you have to bring in systems of oppression,” but like, so much of fanfiction is like, surfacey kind of rom-commy setups and it’s like, well, why not just have this be two ladies, you know, like—doing the meet-cute or like, the funny fake dating? Like, you’re not dealing with any serious—like, why, [laughs] white men have complicated lives as well! Like, just because they have privilege in some realms, they are fully embodied humans—
BO: Right.
ELM: —and their lives are not rom-coms, right? You know? So like—and yet, for the sake of this fic, we decided they were just doin’ the rom-com, you know? So like…that’s something that’s always struck me as very funny, because it’s like, there’s no version of this that’s seriously engaging with their lives and the different facets of their identity.
BO: Right.
ELM: You’re just having them do the fun thing, you know what I mean?
BO: Yeah.
ELM: So like, why can’t—why can’t we see those bodies in those scenarios? “We” being a collective fandom group, not, individuals obviously can write femslash romcoms. But you know what I mean?
BO: Yeah, for sure, definitely. I mean, and I think like, there’s fic that, like, obviously fanfic is a huge and diverse body of work, and like, I think there certainly are fics that really grapple with that kind of stuff, that kind of like—whether it be oppression or just like, um, whatever. Different states of being, mental health issues, what have you. Yeah! Exactly. So much of it is just sort of fun and not delving deeply into that kind of thing. So.
ELM: Right, but it so often seems—I know you’ve written about this, and it’s something that I definitely wanted to get to, but you see fandoms where there are like, protagonist female characters front and center, and people write the romcom, you know, fake-dating story about the two background dudes. And you’re like—cause they had a few lines of banter? Like, that’s, you know what I mean?
BO: I know. Ugh. [all laugh]
ELM: I don’t know if you wanna go into that!
BO: Um…
ELM: But like, I mean, to me, I will just say to me it’s struck like a parallel to—definitely when we have conversations of fans of color talking about just this kind of, the swiveling of the gaze, always, towards—G-A-Z-E—but towards, like, hey, the background dudes—!
FK: Also the swiveling of the gays—the swiveling of the gaze and the swiveling to the gays.
ELM: I mean, right? You know? And it’s just like, “Oh, oh, there’s a black male—oh no! Those two guys! Over there! Those two white guys!” Right? And it’s something that I just feel like we’ve been talking about this on the podcast for like five years, and I’ve just witnessed it happen so many times, and I feel like, “OK!” I don’t know. At this point it’s like, I’m just gonna, I don’t know what to do with this, you know?
BO: Yeah. I really had this with The Old Guard, which I—as I said, I’m not very like, heavily engaged with fandom right now, and I feel like I kind of forgot some things about it. They kinda backgrounded in my brain. But greywash and I watched The Old Guard with some friends of ours, and I was like “Wow, is there gonna be all the,” like, I mean—the Charlize Theron, first of all, it’s Charlize Theron. [all laugh] And secondly, there’s two characters, two female characters in that movie that are just like, very ripe for writing like, all the—all the fanfic about either of them with her.
And so I was like, rubbing my hands together like, hopping over to AO3, and all of the stories—the vast majority of the stories are about her male teammates. Who are, in fairness, who are canonically involved with one another. But still! I was like, kinda broke my heart a little bit. I was like, “Oh, right. Fandom. Oh, fandom.”
ELM: Yeah! I mean, I had that feeling, I had this with you know, like, I’m a bit of a hypocrite here because my Black Sails ship was, you know, is Flint and the Hamiltons. Well, there’s a lady involved in that! So. You know. But the disparity between the male/male fic and the stuff around any of the three queer female characters is shocking to me. You know? Like, cause it was like, this show gave the female characters so much—they gave them half the space! You know? They gave everyone an equal amount of space to live their complicated…
BO: Yeah.
ELM: …sexy lives, you know?
BO: Yeah! Oh my God, that show was so good.
ELM: And fandom, fandom just didn’t want to pick up on that. And like, you know, thinking about Black Sails and The Old Guard too, it kind of flies against the like, the scarcity argument that people often have. Cause you know, you can say with The Avengers or something, “Well, there’s just the one lady,” like, “I guess you could ship her with the side ladies,” but now they—now it’s less true, because they’ve added, you know, with the new rounds of people added more female characters or whatever. But with something like Black Sails, it was like, “But they’re there, and fandom is making an active choice,” you know, to kind of erase instead of to embrace what’s already there.
BO: Yeah.
ELM: Sorry, that’s not a question.
FK: All right, I have a question though, which is: from your perspective, sometimes I wonder whether part of this has to do with the different ways that people identify with or don’t want to identify with characters.
BO: Mm-hmm.
FK: I was recently having a conversation with another queer person who also reads and writes het primarily, and I was talking about how like, in my early fanfic days, one of the things that I found that was a pleasure of het was being able to imagine myself in both positions and having like, two great tastes that taste great together. [laughter] At a point when I didn’t know anything about my gender at all, or my sexuality, and I was just like, reading it through that lens, right.
And I wonder whether there’s something about like, the closeness of that. Because I think I certainly—when I was younger—found what I called “femslash” at the time, f/f, saffic, more confronting in a certain way.
BO: Yeah.
FK: You know?
BO: Yeah.
FK: Something that was hard for me to look at straight.
BO: Yeah.
FK: “Look at straight.” [all laugh]
BO: Yeah, I’ve heard that from a lot of people as well. And I really get it, too. Yeah, it’s—sometimes, like, not what you want, to be reading something that’s close to your own experience. I think other times it’s very alienating to not have the option of reading something that’s close to your own experience. So. It’s a hard…that’s why we need all kinds of representation! [laughs]
ELM: Well, but this is interesting talking to you about it, because this is like literally why you came to fandom.
BO: Yeah!
ELM: Right? Like—it’s the opposite is literally, that was it. It wasn’t that you watched Sherlock and you were like, “I just wanna spend more time with John and Sherlock,” right? You know?
BO: Right!
ELM: Which is like, the route that a huge portion of fans have into transformative fandom! Right? And so I’m wondering like—I get that you intellectually understand it, but it is kind of the opposite of what you internally experienced, right?
BO: Yeah! It is the opposite of what I personally experienced. Although— [ELM laughing] I also, I wouldn’t say I totally don’t know this feeling. Sometimes you just don’t wanna read like, bell hooks or whatever. You wanna read a comic book! [all laugh] Not saying—
ELM: Yeah, but it could be a comic book with ladies, you know?!
BO: It could, it could.
ELM: OK, so we are running short on time and I have a lot more questions and it’s a delight to talk to you. So one of the things that we talked about when we did our slash—that’s dudeslash—episode a few months ago, is kind of like, slash fandom as an organizing principle, sort of like, losing steam over the last decade. And a lot of newer and younger fans coming in and like, maybe wanting to write about queer male ships, but not necessarily thinking of themselves as capital-S Slash Fandom. And I know that you’re not coming from capital-F Femslash Fandom in that way as an organizing principle, but like, you’ve been in fandom now for what—a decade, right? Or close to it. Like…
BO: Yeah!
ELM: Do you feel like you see shifts in terms of people segmenting about what they’re willing to read? Like, I know we’re describing historical patterns, people privileging male bodies over female ones, but like—do you see any of that changing or do you still find the patterns as strong as ever?
BO: Well, it’s so hard for me to say because I have gravitated towards smaller and smaller fandoms, and like, a more and more niche audience, so I feel like—or like, and I don’t even want to say “audience.” It’s more like “circle of people who read each other’s stuff.” “Circle of fandom friends.” So I feel like I’m not getting as representative a segment of the fandom population as I was when I was just like, throwin’ stuff out there into Sherlock fandom. [laughs]
I do think that the purity culture mindset has, if anything, decreased the comfort with—not my personal comfort, I’m fine if people don’t like me on the internet. But I think it’s had, if anything, a chilling effect as compared to 2012, when I came into fandom on like, writing the kinds of messy or conflicted or violent or like, maybe not-entirely-healthy [laughs] relationships between women. I mean, and between men!
But I feel like that’s the biggest shift that I perceive in how people perceive and interact with the kind of stuff that I like to write, which doesn’t tend to be—which is largely about women, but also tends to be about women in relationships that like, I wouldn’t advise any of my friends to be in a relationship like this. [laughs] If they were, I would probably stage some kind of intervention. I feel like there was more of an understanding, when I came into fandom, that that was like, an accepted thing to explore in fiction, and that that is less of an accepted truism now, but again it’s not specific to women. It’s kind of all across the board.
ELM: I mean, but there’s I guess an argument there of like—as the past decade has gone on, I have noticed in fandom that people are more cognizant of their like, white dude biases, and are trying to write more, but like, does that run counter if the, like, spectrum of what some fans are willing to accept grows narrower? In terms of depicting very healthy dynamics or whatever, right? You know? You wanna be able to like, have more femslash—but all sorts of kinds of femslash, not a narrower, just like a narrower funnel, you know what I mean?
BO: Right.
ELM: I don’t know how that bears out in reality, I don’t know if there’s some sort of, you know, little gauntlet that most femslash has to go through these days, you know? Like… right?
BO: Me neither, I just write my messy ladies and… [laughs] But I think actually those two things kind of play, I think that they reinforce each other rather than conflicting with one another, because I think that like, for the same reasons we were talking about earlier, that people when they write about characters who are less privileged on some axis of oppression, then they perceive that they have a more limited range of stories that are acceptable to choose from.
And I mean, in some cases—I’m not saying there are no stories that are probably wise to avoid if you’re writing, whatever, female characters or mentally ill characters or what have you. But I do think that there’s a discomfort there that like, you have to work through, and if you have in addition a, like, a sort of fandom-wide chilling effect where people are saying “well, writing about unhealthy relationships is supportive of them,” for example—“if you write about it in fiction, you must support it in real life,” that kind of mindset—further, it is another thing that gets in the way of living beyond a very safe and—circumscribed is the word I was looking for—set of narrative possibilities, I guess.
ELM: OK. Well, not a hopeful answer. But… [laughter] an interesting one.
FK: Yeah, this has been an amazing conversation. Thank you so much for coming on and talking with us.
BO: Thanks for having me! It was lovely. I enjoyed it a lot.
[Interstitial music]
FK: That was an absolute delight of an interview.
ELM: Yeah, wonderful. I’m so glad that she was able to come on and, wow. It was so interesting. Her origin story was so interesting! I feel like we just answered that letter last episode about, like, “Did people come to fandom late?” You know, people are always asking this, and much like Betts, who came on about a year ago, who also had a—not that late, people in their 20s or whatever, but you know, not a “I watched this thing when I was a teen—”
FK: Right.
ELM: “—and got really into it,” or whatever, you know, somewhat a different route, but this is like—I’ve never heard of people coming in through this route, and it’s really interesting. She’s a really interesting person to talk to about f/f with, in the sense of like, thinking back to me being discoursey [FK laughs] in our intro segment about like, bodies and sex and women, you know?
FK: It made me feel really discoursey, but like, in a good way kind of? Like it made me— [ELM laughs] That sounds terrible. There is no good way to be discoursey. Don’t be like me. Don’t be discoursey. But it made me think about, you know, obviously—how sticky some of this is. Because I…I do like to…you know, it makes me feel a little bit like I’m going in directions that I don’t normally like to go, but as she was talking I started thinking about like, the idea—I mean, this is gonna sound so cheesy, but the idea of like, false consciousness, and like…
ELM: I, it’s not cheesy because I don’t even know what you mean. Say more.
FK: OK. So, so false consciousness— [laughs]
ELM: Maybe it will be once you explain this to me.
FK: You totally know what this means. False consciousness is holding beliefs and viewpoints and ways of engaging in the world that sort of mask the fact that you are in fact oppressed. So for instance, like, identifying with your oppressor. Right?
ELM: Sure.
FK: So one of the things that I think some people have argued about fanfic—that I have often argued against!—is the idea that fanfic is like, basically you’re identifying with these big corporate things as opposed to, you know, actually like the, the, you know, the work of the folk, the things that individual people do, like, you know. Right, this is a very sort of economic idea of like, oh yes, it’s making you invest in this capitalist like, storyworld.
But this made me think of like, identifying—like she was saying, the idea of the man as the default, right? And if you’re investing, if your escapism is into the man as the default, if you invest all of this time and effort into thinking about that, and that alienates, you know, a person who is female from their body—right? Again, I’m assuming that there’s, in this context I’m assuming that this person is not trans or non-binary and that they don’t particularly, you know, have any of those reasons to have complicated relationships to their body—then it would be very classic for somebody to say: that’s false consciousness! That’s you identifying with men instead of the person you truly are, right, which is an oppressed person in this situation. And the only way that you can actually understand your own situation is by identifying with other oppressed people, and like, recognizing that.
Now, I don’t know that I completely buy this as like, the one, like, structuring way we should think about fanfic or anything! Let’s be clear! But it was really interesting to me, you know, as she was talking.
ELM: Yeah, I mean, I think that that—I mean, I think that that’s a very…I don’t find that cheesy. What was cheesy about that?
FK: I don’t know? I don’t know, “cheesy” is not the right word. It just sounds very, like… It’s like something that my…something that a second-wave feminist would say, you know what I mean? [both laugh]
ELM: Wow. Mean to yourself! I didn’t have to do anything!
FK: Yeah, yeah, but at the same time, you know, second-wave feminists occasionally had good thoughts! [laughing]
ELM: No, I mean—I—you know, I—I was about to go into a defense of the good parts of second-wave feminism and I was like “Life’s too short, we’re not doing this right now.”
You know, that’s true, though I also think that there’s more to, you know, fic has a lot of different components, and it’s not just about like, identifying with a character that you’re writing, right?
FK: Yeah, absolutely.
ELM: And I think one thing that gets tangled, and I think if you have a ton a ton of bi people, or pan people, or you know—
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Whatever label we want. All-desiring people in fandom. And so, you know, your comment about writing, liking het because you got to embody both parts—
FK: Woo!!
ELM: Both sides, or whatever.
FK: Two great tastes that taste great together!!
ELM: [laughs] You know, they’re also, I think that some people are writing from a position of desire. Obviously if you are a lesbian…
FK: Right.
ELM: Then you are writing from the, you know, writing from a perspective of a woman desiring a woman is not surprising! Right? That…but when there are other genders involved‚—
FK: Yeah.
ELM: —in your own, whether it’s yourself or the people you desire, I think it can get a little fuzzier.
FK: Right, absolutely.
ELM: That being said, like, to go back to my point of like, so much of fanfic is kind of fun surfacey romcom stuff, you know—which I don’t mean as an insult to romcoms, I’m not saying that they’re not—
FK: No!
ELM: —hard to write well, or…you know what I mean?
FK: It’s hard to make something that frothy, you know? Like… [laughs]
ELM: But like, you know, I think it’d be wildly overstating it to say that every piece of fanfiction is some sort of in-depth complicated assessment of, I think that absolutely we just, I think people often are not thinking about it, and they just, you know.
FK: Right.
ELM: The patterns get established from whatever kind of branch of fandom that you’re in and that’s the way that you overlay these lenses, these story lenses, onto characters.
FK: Yeah, yeah.
ELM: I mean, that’s only one part of it. Obviously tons and tons of fic is also just in response to the story, and then it’s like, what are you—so you know, that has a stronger relationship to canon. And then it’s like, that then takes another level of like, just as we talked about in these race conversations. What characters are you allowing to take up space in your mind, regardless of whether you’re going to read fic or write fic about them, you know.
FK: Completely.
ELM: And like, you know, mentioning race just, you know, we did talk about it a bit—I, you know, I don’t wanna let this conversation pass by without talking about the intersectional, like, I know even within femslash, white bodies continue to be privileged. I would love to have a femslasher—I wanna have more f/f people on, obviously, to get more perspectives. Like, you know, you see the same arguments about privileging white men that you see in m/m fandom.
FK: Right.
ELM: It’s hard for me to say “m/m.” I just default to “slash” cause it’s an easier word.
FK: Yeah, yeah. [laughs]
ELM: So…
FK: “f/f” is even harder than “m/m.”
ELM: Yeah, those are hard double letters to say. But like, you see those arguments, but it’s like—it seems even more heightened because it’s just like a smaller pool and a smaller number of works, you know what I mean?
FK: Completely.
ELM: It’s not like—at least in Marvel, if there’s 100,000 fics or whatever, at least you might get 1,000 with a character of color or something, you know?
FK: Right.
ELM: But if there’s only 1,000 fics in your femslash fandom…
FK: Yeah, completely.
ELM: Et cetera, et cetera.
FK: Yeah, yeah.
ELM: I don’t know. It’s really hard.
FK: The other, the other—you know, the other piece of this that I wanted to pick up that I thought was sort of interesting was the idea of like, likable characters, and I think that that’s also—that obviously also relates to, to race and to, you know, as well as to gender and everything else. But I thought that was really interesting too, because I was thinking about it and it seems to me—I would love to get more perspective of people who read and write femslash, because it does, it seems to me that the—femslash, I keep saying that. The femslash, the f/f, the saffic that I’ve read does tend to be focusing on more likable characters, but I don’t know that that’s always the case, universally, in fanfic. I’d love to—this is making me think maybe we should have an entire episode about, like, likeable characters and unlikeable characters and the way that that functions, not just in fanfic but in fandom more broadly.
ELM: Yeah. Yeah, it’s interesting. I mean, I feel like some of that touches up—I mean, as breathedout was talking about with the purity culture stuff, and “you shouldn’t be condoning any characters that, like, do bad things,” et cetera, et cetera, right? You know?
FK: Completely.
ELM: And that I think comes to the what’s likeable and what’s unlikeable. Doing a lot of murders? I mean, whatever. I only write fic about cool murderer Magneto who murders bigots, so… and Nazis, so…
FK: Hannibal Lecter is canonically extremely likeable. Like, this is a canonical aspect of him.
ELM: [laughs] Yeah!
FK: Everybody thinks he’s the bee’s knees until he eats them. Like… [laughs]
ELM: Yeah, no! I mean, I remember that from when I was into the Hannibal Lecter material.
FK: Yeah!
ELM: You know I had a Hannibal Lecter period back in the day, right?
FK: I didn’t!
ELM: And I haven’t seen Hannibal the show.
FK: I didn’t, but now I want to like, make you read Hannibal Lecter fanfic of various kinds, because, y’know.
ELM: The thing is, as a vegetarian…
FK: [laughs] The show is all about…
ELM: The cannibalism element was always just like, “OK.” You know?
FK: The show is completely about, the show is like about, has a major vegan message in it, you know that, right? Like…
ELM: Wait, really? Because part of the reason I’ve been avoiding this show is that I was told that if you, like—like, I find like, watching people cook meat gross.
FK: Oh, you’re gonna find it gross, but you’re supposed to. It’s supposed to be like…
ELM: I know, but…
FK: You shouldn’t watch it, because you’re going to be completely disgusted by it, but like, at the end of the show, really if you’re—if your outlook at the end of that show is “I want to eat meat,” then I’m worried about you.
ELM: Well, that would never happen, because I’ve been a vegetarian for…
FK: I know. I didn’t mean you you.
ELM: 24 years, I just had to do the math.
FK: Wow.
ELM: Two-thirds of my life!
FK: That’s many years.
ELM: That’s really something! Yeah, I mean, I guess it’s like a little—it’s interesting for me to listen to, because I do feel like it’s interesting to even watch in the fandoms I’ve been in that have had a lot of fanworks, the different range, the ways that some writers lean into the unlikeability, and the way that others kind of…it’s another version of woobifying, that’s not quite right, you know.
FK: Yeah yeah.
ELM: Like a softening or a sweaterboying of, and, and it really struck me as we were talking to breathedout about like, I’ve seen some of this in my own fandom, and one of the things that I really like about the current ship that I’m writing is that like, they are both assholes and one of them in particular like, the ashholishness—ashshoalishness [laughs]—ass-hole-ish-ness—like, rests on like, the utter, utter like, paternalism and like, patriarchal power, right?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And like—and it’s not, like, when I’m writing him I think, like, “Would he know that he’s being, like, problematic right now?” And like, I’ve actually sometimes had him have too much self-awareness and my beta has been like, “I don’t think he would’ve realized that this was a dick thing to say,” like… [FK laughs] And like a thoughtless, like—
FK: Yeah, yeah.
ELM: Cause he’s got a very default—he’s, he’s in the position of privilege in all axes or whatever. Right?
FK: Right.
ELM: And I think that’s a difficult thing for people to navigate. I’ve noticed in the last like, five years more stories where they’ll have white male characters have like a really, like, guilty internal passing thought that’s like, “Well, he knew that as a white man he was in a position of privilege.”
FK: That’s so funny.
ELM: And it’s just like, oh my God.
FK: That’s wild.
ELM: I, I just like—even if when people think about these things, when I think about my white privilege, I don’t think “Well, of course I know as a white person I’m less likely to be stopped by the police,” like, that’s not like, [both laughing] internal, you know what I mean?
FK: Yeah yeah yeah.
ELM: People have, I assume other people have more complex internal narratives than this.
FK: So this is funny because in het fanfic, I don’t think that I’ve noticed that particularly. What I do notice is a—and maybe this is just because of the kind of characters that I read fanfic about—is a situation where like, the character will be being an asshole, and he’s partially really an asshole, but there’s also like, complicating factors. So at the beginning it’s sort of an enemies-to-lovers situation where it’s like “Wow, I really hate that dude,” and then over time it’s like, “Oh, well, and this is why he was acting that way, and like, this is,” you know, and they grow together and they teach each other things and it turns out he really—maybe he was never that bad, but he’s definitely not that bad now.
But it’s like, there is a context of like, privilege and douchebag dude-ness, right? I mean, I guess just sort of in a similar way, that’s part of het romance stories like, to Pride and Prejudice, right? [laughs]
ELM: Yeah, yeah.
FK: You know? It’s a very classic thread.
ELM: Wait, now I have a question: so this is a bit of a spoiler cause we weren’t gonna talk about this yet. I wrote Flourish this fic for their birthday and it was a het romance.
FK: Yeah!
ELM: So you better be grateful.
FK: I am very grateful! This is one of those cases where you’re not a het person but you did write a het romance once.
ELM: It’s funny because this is not too much of a spoiler to say that there is no redeeming journey whatsoever.
FK: No.
ELM: And you get more reveals as time goes on in this story that he’s even more of a dingus…
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Than she, the protagonist…
FK: Thought.
ELM: …originally realized.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: It’s an unusual journey.
ELM: [laughs] OK! So this is like amazing to me to think about, cause I was like—and as I was writing it I was like, “I’m not in this ship, I don’t read or write het fic, is this gonna seem weird and out of sync,” and I love to hear that it totally is completely out of sync with your expectations, and I hope you didn’t hate that element of it.
FK: No, I liked that element of it! Because I thought that that was much more—it’s not totally out of sync. My favorite stories in this context play with this, right. It’s not like, my favorite stories don’t actually take it just in the like, straight-up, yeah.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: Not that I don’t, I like stories that do that too, but like, you know, the more complex stories [laughing] tend to… Let’s note, I don’t write those complex stories. I write the simple kind. But…
ELM: I mean this was pretty simple, the whole point is [laughs] this dudes’ a loser.
FK: He’s a loser but she’s bangin’ him anyway. [both laughing]
ELM: The biggest challenge was like, how is she gonna find this loser attractive?
FK: All right, well… Now everybody’s wondering what ship it is, but you’re gonna have to tune in next time which is gonna be a long time from now to find out.
ELM: Everyone can guess what this is.
FK: Everyone can guess what this is.
ELM: It’s not that complicated.
FK: It’s not that complicated.
ELM: Who’s a loser in one of Flourish’s ships?
FK: Who is a loser? Actually, a lot of people are losers in my ships, Elizabeth. They’re all losers.
ELM: [laughs] Oh yeah, I’ve actually heard that.
FK: Yeah!
ELM: Anyway, this is not—now we’re talking about men. Look at this! We’re talking about writing male characters!
FK: Yeah!
ELM: Centering them still! I feel really bad. I guess some big takeaways: let’s go back to ladies. Like, it’s interesting because I am writing, I am writing like a mixed, you know, in these big ensemble things, in these big fandoms with a lot of different characters. You know, a tendency to have, like, background femslash ships. And not center them. And some of the ways it just feels like these structures that fandom is kind of wound up in have kind of segmented this more, if that makes sense.
FK: Yeah, absolutely.
ELM: Like, you know, like, obviously there was Xena fandom and there was—for, for femslash, and there was Mulder and Scully, and there was—I don’t know who people liked, Buffy and Spike or whatever, you know what I mean…
FK: To be fair, there was also a lot of—like, later on in X-Files, Scully and Monica, which is an A+ pairing.
ELM: Well this is what I think of: when fandoms get big enough and they are around for long enough, then there’s more time for people to do like more configurations.
FK: Yeah yeah.
ELM: Literally everyone under the sun has been shipped in Harry Potter, right? Someone has written it.
FK: Yes. Mulder and Krycek have banged in more fics than… [laughs]
ELM: So like, when you think about that, but when you think about like how in the last like 10 years in particular—we’ve talked about this a lot—fandom has kind of intersected and crossed over with like, maybe with professional romance kind of tropes, and so‚ and you have a lot of people reading fic without this connection to the source material…
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Obviously a lot of, some of those people are interested in all sorts of stories, but some are kinda there for the romance tropes, and so then it kinda takes away that sort of, even the potential that when you see an ensemble cast—it’s like you have to pick the people that you put in that romance configuration, you know what I mean?
FK: Right, right. Yeah.
ELM: As opposed to like, “I’m interested in the whole Harry Potter world and I think these two and these two and these two.” It’s like, you gotta pick two to have the fake dating storyline. And so I wonder if the structures and the direction that fandom, like, fanfiction has kind of moved in the last 10 years, has made this even harder, because, you know, then you kinda gotta pick out your romance pairing.
FK: Yeah, yeah, exactly. I was gonna say, one of the things I was thinking about a bunch in here was “Hey, maybe we should just like—like people keep saying, make a point, just write some more femslash! Choose to write femslash!” And then I was like “Oh, but that’s actually kind of hard if your structure is around the pairing that you’re reading and writing and engaging with.”
Like, if your structure—more broadly, let’s take this out of fanfic: if your structure in terms of the other fans you interact with are related to that pairing, right, as opposed to a broader range of people who are fans of the property…makes me sound like such a douchebag…
ELM: Yeah, no, the IP!
FK: The IP—then that’s really tough, because that’s sort of about doing something outside of what all of the structures of what you’re choosing to do are.
ELM: Right. Right! And you know, I obviously say people should read and write what they wanna read and write, but it’s undeniable that if you go from writing the juggernaut male/male ship in your fandom to doing the same fake dating story with two of the ladies, you’re gonna have way fewer readers.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And that’s self-perpetuationg.
FK: Yeah, and if you’re like, trying to explore that as something you haven’t done before, then that can be really…I don’t know. If you don’t have the intrinsic drive that you need to do it, like breathedout did, clearly, was like, “I have a drive for this thing!” You know?
ELM: Right, right.
FK: And if that’s not something that you innately feel, that’s rough, and that’s where we get back to that false consciousness thing. So. I don’t know what to say about that.
ELM: Well, this is an extremely interesting conversation.
FK: Very.
ELM: Great Femslash February topic. I will say if people wanna read more femslash, they should tune into “The Rec Center,” it’s not really a tuning-in experience, every February since 2017 we’ve done all f/f lists and art in “The Rec Center,” and it’s basically my sneaky way to get people to send me a ton of femslash so we have occasional femslash throughout the rest of the year!
FK: Woo!
ELM: That’s not, I mean, that’s overstating it. We try to have at least one [laughs] at least one femslash and at least, like, trying not to make the list all—
FK: Yeah. All dudes.
ELM: All male/male, basically, every week. So. There’s a lot of great-looking stuff in there. I am not reading any fiction whatsoever so I can’t vouch for any of it right now. [FK laughs] But there’s a huge range if you’re like, I’m sure there’s something in there for everyone, no matter what your fandom. So.
FK: All right! Good advice. All right.
ELM: We’ll put links in the show notes.
FK: We will do that, and I’ll talk to you later, Elizabeth.
ELM: OK bye Flourish!
FK: Bye!
[Outro music, thank-yous and credits]