Episode 146: If You Give a Fan a Cookie
In Episode 146, “If You Give a Fan a Cookie,” Flourish and Elizabeth consider the Snyder Cut: What happens when fans demand something…and they get it? Topics discussed include the inherent conservatism of (some parts of) fandom, whether the Snyder Cut was worth the financial gamble, and how it might impact fans’ expectations in the future. They also respond to a pair of listener letters about the “Fanfiction & Source Material Mini-Survey.”
Show Notes
[00:00:00] As always, our intro music is “Awel” by stefsax, used under a CC BY 3.0 license.
[00:00:48] Joshua Rivera’s article, “Releasing the Snyder Cut won’t end the calls to #ReleasetheSnyderCut.”
[00:05:17] We talked about the “Fanfiction & Source Material Mini-Survey” in Episode 145. You can also look at some data visualizations and download the raw data.
[00:08:43] We talked about tropes in Episode 137. If you’re a patron, also make sure to check out our “Tropefest: Omegaverse” special episode.
[00:15:02] We spoke with breathedout in Episode 144, “Writing Women.”
[00:16:52] Read “The Accidental Warlord and His Pack” and check out Inexplicifics’s Tumblr.
[00:17:34] Here’s just one example of Inexplicifics’s Tumblr posts on the subject of how little Witcher canon they’ve consumed.
[00:19:57]
[00:21:55] Our interstitial music is from Music for Podcasts 2 by Lee Rosevere, used under a CC BY 3.0 license.
[00:23:25] If you’re a patron, listen to our special episodes about hurt/comfort and WandaVision!
[00:30:02]
[00:32:46]
[00:33:39] Comparing Snyder’s shots vs. Whedon’s regrading and reframing of the shots is fascinating. (These two images are from a whole thread about it.)
[00:56:25] Some folks have pointed out that in a cost-per-hour analysis, compared to major TV shows right now, the Snyder Cut doesn’t cost that much and may have already done its job for HBO Max. The “Abrams Cut” would be way more extensive to make happen.
Transcript
Flourish Klink: Hi, Elizabeth!
Elizabeth Minkel: Hi, Flourish!
FK: And welcome to Fansplaining, the podcast by, for, and about fandom!
ELM: This is Episode #146, “If You Give a Fan a Cookie.”
FK: [laughs] And we should give credit for the title, because that’s also gonna tell you what this episode is about. The title comes from this article which is subtitled “What happens when you give a fandom a cookie.” But it’s titled “Releasing the Snyder Cut won’t end the calls to #ReleaseTheSnyderCut.” It’s by Joshua Rivera, and this was the germ out of which this episode grew.
ELM: So, very very briefly, before we get into some other stuff—Snyder Cut. All right, this is my understanding, is there’s the DC Cinematic Universe.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And I think we’ve discussed this in a recent episode, maybe it was in the special episode about WandaVision, talking bout the inconsistency—and that’s not an insult—you know, like, the various different takes within all the films that are made by, about DC properties, versus the kind of homogeneous vision of the, the very deliberate homogeneous vision of the MCU, Marvel Cinematic Universe. So apparently some people really like Zach Snyder’s, Zach Snyder the director’s vision of these, right?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And he was directing the Justice League film, and then he had a personal family tragedy and had to withdraw, and so then Joss Whedon finished the film.
FK: Right.
ELM: And people were mad about it and didn’t think it was a good film and thought that the Zach Snyder version, if it had been allowed to be completed, would have been vastly superior.
FK: Right.
ELM: So they started to hashtag—this was several years ago—they started a hashtag campaign, #ReleaseTheSnyderCut. Some of it got extremely toxic, seemed to attract a wide variety of fans but also a very loud, specific type of what we would describe as maybe a “toxic fan.” And there was a lot of commentary about it being kind of a hostage situation, sort of, saying like “We’re just gonna keep shouting about this until you give us what we want, which is a new version.” And then Warner Brothers said they would, and apparently it cost $70 million to redo this cut, to add more effects.
FK: Yup.
ELM: For Zach Snyder to put it all together.
FK: Yup.
ELM: And it’s four hours long. And it’s out now on HBO Max. And I don’t really care about whether the Snyder Cut itself is good or not.
FK: [laughs] Right.
ELM: Or a better film. Do not care. It’s more about the precedent that this sets, and that’s what this article is getting at. It’s talking about, you know, when you give a mouse a cookie—famously, in the book where this title actually comes from—the mouse asks for a glass of milk, and then the mouse is just extremely entitled the entire time. Or just, you know, just being your friend and he’s like “can I have some milk?”
FK: OK!
ELM: It’s a little bit maligning the mouse in there! But I think the big takeaway—and we’ve been talking about this in some recent episodes—is there’s this kind of assumption that if you don’t like something as a fan, there is a better version out there that’s being kept from you. And by kinda validating that, it’s like, what can of worms just got opened here.
FK: Yeah, yeah, and I think there’s also some really interesting stuff in that article about like, what fans or audiences can or cannot, like, think to ask for or know to ask for. But I think that we should—we should put a pin in that for a second though.
ELM: Wait wait, was my summary correct? Did you agree with all that?
FK: Oh yeah! Yeah, no, your summary was spot-on, and I think the one thing I would add is if anybody here—probably most people have some vague vision of this, but Zach Snyder has a very particular sort of directorial stamp, you know. Zach Snyder movies look like Zach Snyder movies, they look sort of cold and dark and like, hard-edged and all this stuff, and that’s very different than Joss Whedon. So that was another piece of it. The one thing that I think was left out a little bit was that was part of the reason this was so controversial, is there’s like this big difference between what a Zach Snyder movie is like and what a Joss Whedon movie is like, right.
ELM: Right, right.
FK: And Joss Whedon was not making any attempt to make a Zach Snyder movie. He was not like “Oh, yes, I will finish this for you, sir, and like, you know, do it the way you would’ve wanted.” He was like “Nope, goin’ my way.” So.
ELM: Yeah. Which is a little bit different, I would say, and we’ll get into this, from other parallel calls for, say, the biggest one I can think of is this idea that there is, #ReleaseTheJJCut. That there is a different, better version of J. J. Abrams’ last Star Wars film. That is less about a different vision, like a physical—
FK: Right.
ELM: Different visual language, and more about the content that was shot but not included in the final edit.
FK: Right right. And that was part of this too but—anyway, we’ll get into that. We’ll get into that. Because first I think that we ought to talk about a couple of pieces of, I guess “leftover business” makes it seem less important. We have a couple of questions and comments about the Fic and Source Material survey.
ELM: It’s not leftover business! They were responses! People wrote us letters in response to our analysis of the Fic and Source Material survey.
FK: I’ve started moving on, I’m like “Oh, you’ve got responses? OK! I’m on the to next thing.” No no no. OK. People sent us responses and we want to read a couple of them.
ELM: All right, so very very quickly the Fic and the Source Material survey was something that we ran in the last week of February based on a listener letter talking about the relationship between the fic people read and their knowledge of the canon. Because anecdotally, we’d encountered a lot of people over the years who said that they didn’t need to know the source material or only needed to have seen a couple of episodes, maybe read the Wikipedia summary or whatever, to enjoy fanfiction, and a lot of those people said that they had done it because they seek out certain tropes, right. Like, they want to read enemies-to-lovers, and it’s a well-written story, then it doesn’t matter about its relationship back to—you don’t need to know who Harry and Draco are. If it’s a compelling enough story, that’s what they’re there for. That kind of thing. Right?
FK: Right.
ELM: That’s not the only reason people do this, but that seems to be a very popular one these days. But our letter-writer said that it’s really the relationship between the things, the source material and the fic, that’s really important to them, which is how I feel—I think you slightly less, but still!
FK: Yeah, still! Still.
ELM: And so we were in this big survey, we got close to 7,000 responses, and we got a huge range of opinions. I would say that it did skew towards our side—our side. I don’t wanna make it sound like a, you know, it skewed towards more people said that they did care about—
FK: Right.
ELM: They wanted, fic was in conversation with the source, right? But a lot of people, thousands of people, said that it didn’t matter too much to them and that’s not really what they were there for. So that was very interesting, and you can find full analysis in our last episode, which has the full transcript you can read where we go through the results, or in the accompanying article with data visualizations that we wrote. So we can include those in the show notes. But then yeah, we got those two responses. Do you wanna read the first one?
FK: Sure thing. This one is from an anonymous respondent, and it goes: “I really enjoyed reading the results of your Fic and the Source Material survey. I thought the responses on why people don’t like to read fic for unfamiliar source materials make a lot of sense, but I feel like there’s a missing link between them and the reasons people can enjoy reading fic without knowing the source.
“I too find myself reading and watching less original work in the pandemic because I agree that getting invested in something completely new just takes too much brainpower right now. However, I still occasionally read fic for unfamiliar source material.
“While the relationship between the source material and the fanwork doesn’t come into play when reading in an unfamiliar fandom, I find there is still a high level of intertextuality due to fanfic as a genre. Since many people are multi-fannish or fandom serial monogamists, tropes, trends in writing styles et cetera span across fandom divides. If I read a lot of A/B/O fic in my own fandom I might read an A/B/O fic in an unfamiliar fandom because it contains an interesting twist on the trope. In that case my enjoyment stems from exploring the relationship between these stories from different fandoms without having to reference any of the source material.
“This intertextuality also makes fanfic for an unfamiliar source less of a surprise than reading or watching a new original work. Even if I don’t know anything about the source material, I still know exactly what kind of a story I am getting if I open any fic on AO3 and see the tags ‘bed sharing,’ ‘fake dating’ and ‘friends to lovers.’”
ELM: OK, this is very interesting and I feel like it touches on some of the conversations we’ve been having around tropes over the last year, which we’ve had a lot of talk about tropes, between the special episodes we do in the Tropefest series and then we did one on the main podcast where we talked about it a bunch in October, Novemberish?
FK: Yeah, absolutely, and we talked about A/B/O specifically in one of those episodes, and I thought that was a really interesting example for this person to bring up, because I really see what they’re saying specifically about A/B/O, because that’s sort of its own little mini-genre, like its own little world with its own rules, right? In a similar way that there’s certain fusions that really only exist within fanfic and that have these very tight connections between them.
I feel like, you know, obviously bed-sharing, fake dating, friends-to-lovers, these terms come from fanfic but now they’ve sort of bled out into romance—as we’ve talked about—and, but those things existed in romance novels before they, you know. I mean, at the same time as they existed in fanfic, right? It’s not like those were innovated from within fandom. But things like A/B/O does come from fandom. Things like a Pacific Rim fusion, which has far outstripped any actual Pacific Rim, or a Sentinel fusion or whatever it is—
ELM: Yeah, yeah.
FK: Those things come from within fandom and they’ve become divorced from their original source material and now they’re just fandom things.
ELM: Yeah, that’s true. Yeah, I mean, I think that’s a really good distinction actually though. Because it is true—and not just in romance novels, but like, enemies-to-lovers and sharing a bed and stuff like that are stalwart tropes of like, lots of TV, right? And it’s true, you don’t know in advance necessarily that there’s gonna be a bed-sharing scene, but when it comes along…
FK: I know what this is!
ELM: Amongst the will-they-won’t-they couple? And so like, yeah! There’s a difference between this. You don’t like, go to Netflix and write like “bed-sharing” in the tags, you know? That’s not—especially if it’s an element like that and not kinda the overarching story structure like enemies-to-lovers. Enemies-to-lovers and that kinda thing, I feel like they might even signal the, you know. I’ve been re-watching Cheers and Sam and Diane are, you know… “Enemies-to-lovers” is putting it too strongly, but they’re a classic kind of in-and-out, constantly bickering, you know…
FK: The quarreling couple.
ELM: Yeah, yeah. Exactly. So I think it’s interesting. It also makes me think, like, you know—one thing I feel like we got into a bit in this conversation, and some people brought up in their responses, and I think comes up too when we talk about characterization and what “OOC” means, is like: lots and lots and lots of fic that claims to be, you know, connected to the—not “claims to be.” I don’t, I’m not trying to be judgmental here. But like, you can click on a fic, you know, in your fandom, that’s ostensibly directly tied to the source material, and it can actually not feel like it has much to do with that, right?
FK: Right.
ELM: And this is something that I’ve definitely found reading A/B/O.
FK: Oh yeah.
ELM: Other kinda biological determinism stuff.
FK: Yeah, whenever you get stuff that fundamentally change who the characters are…
ELM: But there’s a knowing way to do that, there’s an “I’m overlaying this”—we talked about this in the A/B/O episode, right? There’s a knowing way to say like, “If this was the world,”
FK: Right.
ELM: “How would they be? And I’m gonna show that I’ve thought through that overlay twist,” and then there’s just a lot of fic where it’s just like [laughs] these are the characters, and you’re like “This has literally nothing to do with what they’re like in the rest of the fandom or in the source material,” but that’s fine, because it’s internally consistent and so it works for a lot of people. You know?
FK: Yeah yeah yeah, absolutely.
ELM: I mean obviously all these things are completely subjective and what I think is bad characterization…
FK: Yes.
ELM: You might think is great! Not necessarily you. Maybe—
FK: But maybe, who knows!
ELM: But you know.
FK: Yeah, totally.
ELM: Yeah, but I think this is something that is kind of hard to…it’s one of the things, I think this letter actually gets at some of the things that bothered me a little bit about this kind of crossover into romance, and now you’re seeing it a lot in SFF marketing, you know. Whether it’s adult or YA, saying like, “Oh, we’ve included AO3-style tags,” you know, and I don’t know. There have even been some kind of controversies around this, because with the decontextualization it’s led to some kind of misuses of the way these are done.
FK: Right.
ELM: Like, I remember one recently that caused a furor because they had like, listed a bunch of fun tags like bed-sharing or whatever alongside, like, dubcon or something. And it’s like, the way that all these marketers are using these tags is like in a very fun way. Like, “Hey, there’s bed-sharing and battle couple and hey!” You know? And then like—but whereas, a lot of people are using tags to just say, like, “Here’s the content. And there is dubcon in here,” right? And just—a mix of kind of like, advertising and warnings. And…
FK: Yeah, for sure. For sure. That’s how I use tags, absolutely. Why wouldn’t you?
ELM: Right!
FK: And also like—it’s so frequent. Obviously you have—I mean, if you’re writing, it’s not like…one of the things that frustrates me sometimes is the conversation that suggests that you’ve got stuff that only has, “Oh, you’re writing dubcon or something like that, so therefore everything in it is going to be this dark, terrible,” you know. Everything! It’s like no, actually, a lot of times, you know…
ELM: This is an element.
FK: Like in life! [laughs]
ELM: Right.
FK: There are some things that are bad and also some things that are fun, like…
ELM: Right, exactly, yeah. And that’s the way I think of tags too: is there anything in here that’s really worth letting people know? If it’s something that’s common, commonly triggering or commonly…
FK: Yeah yeah yeah.
ELM: …kinda fraught. Just to say: “This is in here.” And it’s not like “Hey! Hey! Got this troubling element! Hey!” Which is how I think a lot of these selling-by-tags things are happening in the pro-publishing space. And it’s just like, it just feels like the kind of—the leap over into that space has kind of muddled the way that tagging often works.
FK: But the tagging is also—it is also positive advertising in certain ways, right. There’s certain situations like, I don’t know. When I was reading a lot of Snape/Hermione fic, I wanted to see that someone had tagged dubcon, because if they didn’t tag dubcon, I would be like “Are you really gonna treat this seriously? I want to see you tag it this way and I’m actually interested in that,” that’s why I wanted to read this, right?
ELM: No no no, but you saw—I don’t remember what book this was or what specific genre it was, but if you saw like a pro book and they were like “Hey! This has got…”
FK: “Bed-sharing! And dubcon!”
ELM: [laughs] “Bed-sharing,” you know, and listed with little emojis? Like “Here! This is what it features!”
FK: Oh yeah yeah yeah. The emojis would tip me over. The emojis are, I’d be like “Oh, that’s not an emoji thing!”
ELM: Right? So just like…
FK: It might make me wanna read it, but it’s not an emoji thing.
ELM: Yeah. I think it’s complicated. I don’t know, we got some interesting commentary in response to when we had breathedout on the podcast, a couple episodes ago, talking about how she hadn’t tagged for specific sex acts because—
FK: Right.
ELM: —it was amongst big, plotty fic, and people who were looking for facesitting or whatever—I can’t remember what the example was, fisting or whatever, if they were searching by tag—
FK: Right.
ELM: —then they were gonna be like “What are these 100,000 words of plot, I was just here for the fisting,” whereas there’s a difference between that, advertising what’s in it—not necessarily advertising, but just saying what’s in it, versus like, did you think that that was something to warn for? If people had read it and said “Oh, I don’t want to encounter that.” You know? So…
FK: I’ve struggled with that myself actually, with the last big long plotty fic that I wrote. The stuff that’s in it that sort of people are coming for, it also included a, you know, a subplot that involved pregnancy loss, miscarriage. And I was like, I don’t—this is not a story about this miscarriage. The miscarriage happens, and it’s one of the things that happens in this long plotty story, and obviously I need to warn people for this.
ELM: Right.
FK: Very important, because it’s a serious trigger for a lot of people. But also, do I want that to be up in the tags of this very long fic? And I think I decided to put it in there eventually, but it was a struggle because I was like—this is not a fic about that, right. That’s not the, you know.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: So it is sort of hard to decide sometimes, I think.
ELM: Right, right. I like how—this is a little bit afield of this letter. But you know it’s all connected.
FK: We’ve gotten afield. All right. Should we do the other letter and then…
ELM: Yeah, let’s do it.
FK: Then come closer?
ELM: Yeah, I’ll read it. OK, this also came in through our website. This person writes, “I’ve been really enjoying the published results of your survey on how fanfic readers and writers interact with source material! Have y’all looked into the fic series ‘The Accidental Warlord and His Pack’ by inexplicifics?” That’s a good name.
FK: I love it!
ELM: There’s a link to, we’ll include the links to the story and the author. They are included here. “It’s a long fic series which got me absolutely hooked earlier in the pandemic when I really needed something to sink my teeth into. Personally I find it both oddly IC,” that’s in-character, “and wildly OOC,” out-of-character, “for a Witcher fic, as someone who has played Witcher 3, read one of the books, and watched the show a couple of times (so you can guess where I tend to fall on the scale of consuming the source material, haha).
“But, yeah, idk, something about the series really scratches an itch for me, and clearly for a lot of other people since the first entry has 9500 kudos. One of the most fascinating things about the series is that the author has apparently not ever consumed any of the source material, in any format??” [FK laughs] Example post on author's blog on the subject—
FK: We’ll put that in the show notes.
ELM: And when we clicked on it, they were like “Yeah, I don’t know what to tell you, I’ve read the Wikipedia,” [laughs] You know?
FK: I was, it was wild. Yeah.
ELM: “I’m deeply Intrigued by the popularity of this AU and the amount of time the author has put into it (the series is currently at 320,847 words), all when last I checked the author had no interest in watching the Witcher show, playing the games, or reading the books.”
FK: I mean, my mind…on the one hand, I knew that this happened. I knew that people wrote things for things that they hadn’t seen or watched or read or whatever. On the other hand, my mind is also completely fucking blown by this, because I cannot—like, God bless inexplicifics for being able to do this. I cannot even imagine doing this, and it’s not that I don’t see how that could happen. I just can’t empathize in any way with the mindset that they must be in, even though I don’t think it’s a bad—I don’t think that’s wrong, there’s no wrong way to do this here! But also: what?!
ELM: Yeah! It is fascinating to me. I think that one of the things that we didn’t have space to get to in the survey, we talked about including writing and then we were like, this would be a double-length survey then, because obviously your reading and writing habits are different.
FK: Yeah, too much.
ELM: And I bet we’d see people saying “If I’m going to write fic, I do need to know it.” I bet we’d see more of that. But I think there is a—
FK: Yeah yeah yeah.
ELM: There’s a weird assumption underpinning a lot of this, and maybe from us too, that the writers of the stories people are reading without knowing the source material know the source material. And it’s wholly possible that, you know, you could totally do this. I don’t know if inexplicifics reads a lot of Witcher fic—
FK: Yeah.
ELM: In which case, you’d pick things up by osmosis. But like…
FK: Right.
ELM: I don’t know, it’s funny. I had this experience right when I got into my current fandom. There’s a very popular author who hasn’t been in this fandom for years who has some very popular stories, and I read all of them, and looking back I find them all completely OOC. [FK laughs] But they were very compelling, right? And it’s funny cause it’s like—I thought about rereading some of them because they were very compelling internally, and then having read a lot of other fic where everyone is in conversation with each other and with the source material, I’m not sure if I could, you know?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And I think it’s interesting where the letter-writer comes in on this saying “I really liked this a lot,” and they’re saying it’s both in-character and wildly out-of-character. Probably like, hitting on that ambivalence of—this compels me, but…
FK: Yeah yeah yeah. I mean I think it’s also weird with The Witcher because I also have read some of the books and played The Witcher 3 and watched the TV show, and like, they’re kinda different characters in each of those things. They’re not different different, but it’s not the most unitary thing. They’re slightly different takes on the characters. So you know, maybe that’s also something about it too is like the—there’s like a possibility space for some characters, right.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: This happens in Game of Thrones also where there’s the characters from the TV show and the characters from the books and they’re not exactly the same, and that sort of creates a possibility space in which these characters can be OOC or IC, you know.
ELM: Right, right. And it gets me thinking about—you know, I’m in a fandom that has a lot of different versions and there’s some commonalities throughout, but…
FK: Oh, yeah.
ELM: You know, it’s been around for a very long time and there’s a bazillion takes on it. I think I said when we were discussing this last time: I wouldn’t go and read a comics-only based X-Men fic, because I would feel like I was really missing something, but when I started in this fandom, I felt a little…I didn’t have strong feelings, you know, about that broader context, and so these stories that I’m describing, this author who shall remain nameless, you know, it didn’t immediately turn me off to say “Why are they doing these things?” It doesn’t seem like, you know.
FK: Right.
ELM: And it’s interesting too, being in a super AU fandom, these were all AUs, and it was still like they didn’t—they didn’t ring true to me, looking back at them.
FK: Right.
ELM: So I don’t know. I think it’s interesting.
FK: I do too. Thank you very much for sharing this with us. I am not sure whether or not I will read this story-universe, but maybe, because it sounds—I mean, I’m curious now. So thanks.
ELM: You’re gonna read it?
FK: Maybe, yeah!
ELM: All right.
FK: I don’t really read Witcher fic, but I have seen all the stuff and I’m curious to find out what this is like, so I may as well.
ELM: This does sound very compelling. All right! Great. Report back!
FK: If I do, then I will.
ELM: OK cool. Do you wanna take a break?
FK: Yeah, I think that’s a great idea, and then we will enter the Snyderverse.
ELM: I don’t wanna, I don’t wanna enter the Snyderverse.
FK: All right, well, we’ll negotiate that later.
ELM: OK.
[Interstitial music]
FK: All right, we’re back and that means that it is time to talk about Patreon.
ELM: Dot com, slash fansplaining.
FK: Yes. So as you probably already know, we are funded solely by listeners and readers like you, and we do this through Patreon. You can pledge at a variety of levels, like from as little as $1 a month to as much as $10 or $25 a month. Anything you can do to support us is great, and at those different levels you get different levels of special stuff, like we’ve got a bunch of special episodes, for instance. And we also give little pins…
ELM: Hang on, hang on! Let’s talk about what they are.
FK: All right.
ELM: We just put out two within the last month!
FK: We did.
ELM: One was part of the aforementioned tropefest.
FK: Tropefest!!
ELM: And it was “Hurt/Comfort.” Then the second one was about WandaVision, a show we felt squandered its potential.
FK: Aw, I mean, we liked it too.
ELM: The more time that passes the less generous I feel because of that squandered potential, but you know, I think it was a pretty…it was a complicated conversation, so if you had complicated feelings about WandaVision and liked parts of it but wanted more from it or different things from it…
FK: There we go.
ELM: Then I think you’ll enjoy it! And it’s just $3 a month.
FK: We also, at like $5 a month we’ll send you a cute little enamel pin. At $10 a month you’ll get a tiny zine every once in awhile. So you know, look into that stuff!
ELM: [laughs] Look into that stuff.
FK: Look into that stuff! But if you can’t afford to, don’t want to, whatever, send us money, we totally get it. There’s other ways you can support us.
ELM: Yes.
FK: What are they, Elizabeth Minkel?
ELM: I guess I could tell you all about them. Well, one of the best ways to support us is by spreading the word, by, you know, sharing our stuff. I think a lot of people are not podcast listeners—we have full transcripts if people are readers. Also obviously we occasionally write these articles, like the one about the Fic and the Source Material Survey.
Also, you can be a collaborator as it were. You, too, can send in commentary that will then become a part of the podcast. Those two messages were sent in via fansplaining.com. We’ve modified our form now, reminding people if they would like a response they have to give contact information.
FK: Yes.
ELM: But you absolutely don’t have to, it can be totally anonymous. Also anonymous: you can leave us a Tumblr ask. We answer those sometimes on the air, sometimes on Tumblr. Or most straightforwardly, you can write fansplaining at gmail dot com, or you can call and leave a voicemail, 1-401-526-FANS. In all these places you don’t have to give your name or you can give your pseud, just clarify that you don’t want that stuff included if you sign it or something like that. We are totally happy with anonymous commentary.
And then obviously we’re also on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Those are places where one can message, but it’s not an ideal place to leave questions, but you can see more of what we’re up to, future surveys, more content, et cetera, on those platforms.
FK: All right, with that said, shall we get into it?
ELM: Yeah, all right.
FK: [laughs] OK. So I always hesitate to talk about, like, this is a really hard issue to talk about within fandom I feel like because—so, in the past we’ve talked about issues of like, “fan entitlement,” right? And that sort of relates to what we’re talking about here. I also proposed earlier when we were talking about what we were gonna say here that we talk about, like, “fan conservatism,” meaning the way that fans care…some fans, many fans, care about particular elements of the thing they’re a fan of and want those things to stay the same.
ELM: Right.
FK: But that doesn’t really get to it either. There’s really sort of a, this particular moment there’s like a stew of different things happening with regard to the way that the entertainment industry is interacting with their fans and the way that fans are expecting to be interacted with.
ELM: Yeah. OK, this is a lot to unpack here. I’m not sure, you didn’t—you didn’t really set us off on a path there. You just kinda threw out some stuff.
FK: I did do that. OK. Well…
ELM: You like threw out the gear for the journey, and then I’m like “No, what trail are we taking?” And you’re like…
FK: “Here’s some gear!”
ELM: “I put a backpack on the ground, pick that up!”
FK: I did put a backpack on the ground.
ELM: Yeah, so I think that first of all we should parse a little bit what we mean by “fandom” here. Because to some degree, when I read and even make my own commentary about this stuff, this kind of—you know, the Snyder Cut debacle—I think “Oh, that has nothing to do with me personally as a fan!”
FK: Mm-hmm.
ELM: And then I see like, you know, Supernatural fandom saying “Surely there’s a better version that they’ve suppressed,” and I go “Oh wait, that’s not distant from my…” [FK laughing] It’s not my personal fandom, but this is my own dash, these are people I’ve, people are suggesting, you know. And then I take a little step back and I’m like, “Where did I meet these people? Oh, in Sherlock fandom, where people were convinced that there was a secret fourth episode.” Maybe not people that I was personally friends with, but obviously tons of people I saw in my daily life in that fandom.
So like, that kind of expectation that something is bad and you think there’s a better version…I think that’s something that affects all sorts of fans, but some of the specifics of the Snyder Cut stuff and like, the J. J. Cut, and these big movements that get a lot of press, I think they kind of default to talking about a specific type of fan that is very eager…well, actually, let me walk that back slightly. I think that some of these articles make assumptions about what kinds of fans they are, the kind of fan that is looking for easter eggs.
FK: Yes.
ELM: And references. Right? And you see this a lot with the current Marvel shows, like WandaVision and now The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, saying like: “Fans are discussing what the cameo’s gonna be and what the references are gonna be!” and all this stuff. And it’s like—yes, but now you’re fueling this by creating a media narrative about “fandom equals I am looking for specific points.” And I think that gets back to your conservatism element, too, saying: “I already know this stuff and I am expecting to see it now.”
FK: Right, right.
ELM: Which isn’t necessarily the only thing that was happening with the Snyder Cut or the J. J. Cut or if you draw that line back to the homophobic Spanish dub or whatever—no. The Spanish dub was not homophobic.
FK: Yeah. The Spanish dub was the non-homophobic one.
ELM: Right.
FK: Yeah, I mean, I think that this also goes back to things like, so right—I work on a lot of projects where people are taking a book and they’re translating it to film or TV or whatever, right. And one of the things people always are trying to find out about is: what are the things that the fans need to see. Like, what are the non-negotiable bits? Right?
ELM: Right.
FK: And it’s funny because I do think there are non-negotiable bits, right? When you’re taking a book or a comic or whatever to screen, there are some things that are too beloved to change.
ELM: You mean like “Harry Potter is a wizard.”
FK: Yeah, or like, Harry Potter—if Harry Potter doesn’t have black hair, you know, then people are going to be like “What?” Now, now—
ELM: Wow, wow, immediately got into a racebending question here!
FK: Well, right, because that doesn’t mean—that doesn’t mean that it’s a bad thing to change that, but it does mean that people are going to go “What? That’s not how I pictured him!” Right?
ELM: I mean, I think that—coupled with racism—is at the heart of a lot of these, right? Like, “Oh MJ from—” MJ? Mary Jane?
FK: “That’s not how I pictured her!” MJ.
ELM: “She has red hair, that’s so important,” and it’s like “What if this Black actress dyes her hair red?” And they’re like “She’s a redhead!”
FK: “BUT NOT LIKE THAT!” Right, exactly. So there’s things like that but I mean, obviously that’s like a—that’s a fueled by racism piece of it, but there’s also other stuff that people just get upset about that are not, I mean, that’s just like—I envisioned it X way. Like, I don’t know. “This character wears blue! You can’t have her wear a color that’s not blue! Blue is the color she wears,” right?
ELM: You know, I’m gonna admit: I remember when the first Harry Potter movies came out and you know Daniel Radcliffe couldn’t wear the green contacts, cause they hurt his little tiny eyes…
FK: It upset me too! I wanted his eyes to be green!
ELM: I was like “She keeps talking about how green eyes are so fundamental!” And in the end, that didn’t mean anything at all, because the whole point was that he had the same eyes as his mom.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: But she kept saying in interviews, “Green eyes, it’s a clue. Green eyes,” and I was just like “It’s gotta mean something! It’s Slytherin or something,” right? Like…
FK: Yeah yeah yeah, completely!
ELM: So I really blame J. K. Rowling for that and most other things.
FK: Right, but I guess what I’m trying to say is there’s a lot of attention on what you need out of the core material and the things that “fans need and fans want and fans expect,” and that’s—
ELM: Side note: you were doing big air quotes there with “fans need,” “fans want,” “fans want,” “fans expect.”
FK: Yeah, and that can be extraordinarily limiting, right? Because there’s so many ways to take a written word and translate it to the screen, and a lot of times some of the most, like, most interesting ways to do that are taking a position on it, right? Changing it, doing something unusual. Taking advantage of the medium of film, right.
ELM: Right, right.
FK: And to do that sometimes, you know, you have to break a few eggs. You have to change some things, you have to alter stuff, to make it interesting and cool and there’s a real challenge when you’re, when everything is focused on “Well, what are the easter eggs, what are the things the fans are going to love,” you know. And the things the fans are going to love are…I don’t know, it’s just all framed around fans wanting to love conservative things, wanting to love things that are like the original, and there’s no framing around “well, what if they will love this really cool thing, because it’s just so cool,” right.
ELM: Right, right. Yeah, this is interesting. You have me thinking about adaptations in general now, where there isn’t a big geek franchise underpinning it, right? And like, what adaptations people think are successful. I mean, obviously for 1,000 years people have said “Well, the book is better!”
FK: Right.
ELM: And there’s usually a lot of reasons why they book is better. One I think is this kind of fear of…this faithfulness! This conservatism of a lot of adaptations, saying—to actually make a story work in a visual medium, you gotta let go of some of what makes it compelling on the page, right? But they’re so busy trying to make a faithful adaptation that they wind up doing a weird little Cliff Notes version that doesn’t have any of the emotional heft or the—
FK: Yeah.
ELM: —the feeling of the world or whatever. And I’m, as I’m thinking about this in my head I’m literally only thinking of one-off book-to-movie adaptations that don’t have anything to do with anyone wearing capes or having powers or whatever, you know what I mean?
FK: I mean, so the one I think of immediately that changes a lot of things but that people still like both of them is Howl’s Moving Castle, the Miyazaki movie that translates Diana Wynne Jones’s book Howl’s Moving Castle. Which, as you know…DWJ! One of my favorite authors! And…
ELM: OK. [laughs] I didn’t know! I didn’t know you…
FK: I have talked to you about her before.
ELM: …had that kind of chant about her inside you.
FK: The chant is new, I just invented it. [ELM laughs] But the Miyazaki movie is very very different, it makes some big plot changes and visually it’s nothing like what I imagined when I read it, but it goes in a direction, right?
ELM: Sure, yeah.
FK: One of the things, though, that’s funny—Howl’s Moving Castle partially succeeds so much because we know what a Miyazaki movie is, right?
ELM: Mm, that’s interesting.
FK: Like, there’s Howl’s Moving Castle and it’s like Diana Wynne Jones, and then you know what a Miyazaki movie is gonna look like and you’re like “OK, how’s that gonna work? That’s interesting, we know what direction it’s going.” So I kinda wonder, thinking about the furor over the Snyder cut, this makes me think about like knowing what to expect and knowing what you want from a director. Like Zach Snyder, who love it or hate it, you know what you’re gonna get when you go to a Zach Snyder movie, you know?
ELM: Right. That’s why I find the Snyder Cut stuff actually a little more interesting, despite my like, proclaimed lack of interest in this, is the sense that there’s a little bit—and the J. J. Cut with the Star Wars stuff is a little bit of, like, it’s not just a little bit, it’s very auteurish in the sense of like— “I really like that director.”
Whereas I feel like when we talk about this stuff with some of the other properties, particularly Marvel, you know, when Marvel Comics fans or X-Men comics fans talk about this stuff, they talk about these different runs or these different, like, you know—this is the Claremont run or whatever, or whoever the artist or the writer was that was like, spearheading kind of an era of these properties in comics. And they talk about them like they’re very different and they’re very different takes and I like this because of this and this because of this—and when it comes to translating that to screen, and I always think like: this is really interesting, and actually it’s a bit like, these are the parallels to fanfiction fandom. Because it’s like, you know, I could really like a bunch of different writers in the same fandom that have pretty different takes, you know?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And it’s just like: you took me in that direction and you delivered, or here’s why I don’t think what you did worked for me. Right? When it comes to the films, and I’m not saying this is the same overlap of people, but a lot of people talking about these films…it’s reduced to the most basic, it’s like, “I’m waiting for this character to appear.” And it’s like, it fundamentally feels extremely conservative in the sense of not, “I trusted these artist to do this and these artists to do this, and I didn’t love his direction but like, that direction was awesome in the next run” or whatever. It’s like, “I am looking for an exact one-to-one of the things I would expect to see in this. I would like to see this character. I would like to see them reference this thing,” right?
FK: Right.
ELM: And maybe it’s just cause these are such huge fandoms with so many different people that there isn’t actually an overlap between the person who’s like…
FK: Right.
ELM: “I loved all these different directions in the comics,” and the person who’s like, “I need to see this person on screen or it’s not a faithful version!”
FK: Yeah, yeah.
ELM: “Then it’s all wrong to me!” Right? Maybe those are completely different people and I don’t know. You know what I mean?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: But it, as a whole, when I think about superhero fandoms—comics, comics film adaptation fandoms, I think of them as fundamentally conservative, or I think of Star Wars—a lot of those hardcore Star Wars fans as fundamentally conservative. “This is what I—I learned the lore—”
FK: Right.
ELM: “And now you’re saying Luke Skywalker is a washed-up old asshole?! NO.” You know what I mean? And it’s just like…whereas me with no feelings about these characters, was like, “I love that guy.” You know?
FK: Right, right. But I think that it’s not, you know, it’s not only those fandoms, because I mean, I think that there are lots of people within fanfiction fandom who don’t like it and who feel like it’s character assassination when, you know, the characters go and do something that you don’t like. Right? Like—
ELM: Sure, sure.
FK: And yeah, you can say “Well, no, people in fanfiction fandom really care about those characters being in character, and then it’s really frustrating when it seems like the TV writers just did something weird for the sake of making there be a cliffhanger and that was stupid,” like: Yeah, you can say that, and maybe it’s even true, but also, you are making a decision about what you think the in character thing should be. You’re not trusting the writer, you’re saying like, “That’s bad writing” or whatever, and you’re not accepting it. You are drawing a line here for what that important place is, right?
And I mean, obviously these are not the same. It’s not the same to be like “It must have this particular,” I don’t know, “sigil or else it’s all stupid—”
ELM: Right, right.
FK: Versus like, “I need your character to be internally consistent,” but I do think that that’s one of the things that makes this such a muddy conversation is that there are some things that fans are right about.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: There are some things that actually do matter. And things that actually are important. And then there’s things that are not. [laughs]
ELM: Right, but important to the, the story that’s being told? Or important to the broader property? I think that’s what makes this really thorny.
FK: Right.
ELM: When I talk about these novel adaptations into one-to-one film, like, you’re looking at two works of art or two pieces of media and you could say “What’s the relationship between the two,” or you know, I talk a lot about transformative literature that’s not fanfiction. You could say “this is the original, this is the post-colonial critique novel,” you know, “look at them side-by-side, is this successful or not.”
FK: Yeah.
ELM: But this isn’t a one-to-one. This isn’t “I’m turning this one comic into a film.” This is like the weight of the fandom and the lore, and like, the story-world, and like, “Does this belong in here? Is this faithful?” And it’s like—it just feels like impossible. You either need to be extremely determined in your vision and just say, “This is what we’re doing,” which is I think what Marvel has done, and I think their vision’s pretty boring, but like…
FK: [laughs] But they’ve done it!
ELM: It’s consistent! And they said they were gonna do it and they put out the plans. You know, they signaled what they were doing and then they did it. Whereas some of this other stuff—it just seems like they’re trying to balance so many different desires and priorities, right? And one of the things I loved about this article was there was this amazing paragraph, can I read it?
FK: Sure!
ELM: OK. I highly recommend people read this article by the way, even if you don’t feel like this is your part of fandom, because I think it is—if you’re in fandom, it has something to do with you. So about halfway through it was talking about how the DC universe has had a bunch of different installments that feel very different, like Birds of Prey and Wonder Woman and Shazam! Right? And that there are some movies that are DC properties that don’t feel that they’re connected at all, like Joker, you know, the serious, quote-unquote “serious.” [laughs] And the new Batman film. And it said, but people really like the idea that Zach Snyder would be at the head of some kind of overarching MCU-esque kind of vision of this interlocking story-world or whatever.
FK: Yeah yeah.
ELM: And it says, “A year ago Zach Snyder’s DC Universe seemed to be over. The release of Zach Snyder’s Justice League suggests that status was only temporary, and fans are now latching on to that suggestion. Most fandom is in a state of wilful delusion about its own importance: it is generally foolish to think billion-dollar companies care about your opinion of a movie. When it seems like they do, that feels intoxicating and empowering, even if the power is only an illusion. It’s like hearing your crush say they’ll go out with you when, quote, ‘Waluigi is added to Smash,’ and responding ‘So you’re saying there’s a chance.’ A taste of power can turn the tiniest glimpse of blue sky into a wide-open universe of possibilities. The #ReleaseTheSnyderCut stans have that blue sky, and they’re responding with another hashtag: #RestoreTheSnyderVerse.”
FK: Right.
ELM: Right?
FK: Yeah, yeah. And I think that, I think that that’s a really great point, which is that this also has to do with the idea of…that, that universe or that vision. And you know, the very next paragraph is the one that I liked the most in this article.
ELM: Do you wanna keep reading? Should we just read this whole article?
FK: I’m not gonna read the whole article, but the point of the next one was that George Miller, who directed Babe: Pig in the City and then later Mad Max: Fury Road, was supposed to direct Justice League! Like, there was a Justice League version with him at the helm that never went anywhere. No one’s clamoring for the Millerverse right now because we don’t know what the Millerverse would look like, right? And it points out that if Miller had done a film and it had sucked, then people would be like “No, bring back Christopher Nolan, because we know what that is and we liked that,” right.
ELM: Right.
FK: It gets back to that conservatism but also to that desire to have consistency. Right?
ELM: Yeah.
FK: Again: you know what, I may have, I may dislike it but I know what I’m getting if I watch a Zach Snyder film, and maybe that’s preferable to having ups and downs.
ELM: Right! But so then, you’re losing all the people who want to see something new. Right? Like: I know a lot of people who don’t fundamentally dislike the idea of a superhero film or whatever, but do find the MCU films samey. They’re probably gonna see them anyway, to be honest. But you know, you might be losing people if they felt like “Wow, every single time I go to see one of those movies it’s weird and different,” you know, “and some of them are bad and some of them are good.” And so then you wind up with the people who wanna see the thing that they already like, and then there’s a big overlap with those people who wanna see, like, specific points hit and get mad when you deviate from those points, or from what they think of as fundamental characterization. And so it just become a self-fulfilling thing, of saying “This is what the audience, this is what audiences want.” Maybe not necessarily studios focusing on fans, but thinking this is what audiences want, right?
FK: But this is, but this is also you get back to this question about like—yeah, separate from fans, think of this like, completely different from movies, think about like, quality control or something like that in any other—in any other thing, right? Like, imagine that you go to a bakery and half of the cakes that you could buy are amazing and the other half are poop. [ELM laughs] And you’re like “Wow, at a certain point I don’t know if I wanna go to that bakery. I’m gonna go to this other one where they’re all mediocre but I know exactly what kind of mediocrity I’m getting and I’m never surprised by how bad it is,” you know?
ELM: OK, what an extreme example. Can it just be something edible that’s not excrement?!
FK: Sure! It can just be bad. It can be just bad. Edible but bad. So like, I’m just saying that like—from a money standpoint, right, like, how do you retain audiences standpoint. From a “how do we make the most money out of these incredibly,” like, God, it costs so much money to make each one of these! Then like yeah, sometimes you wanna roll the dice and see…do you wanna roll the dice and see, is this gonna be an amazing one that everybody agrees is amazing? Or is it, are we gonna make an amazing movie but we had a bunch of flops before it so nobody goes to see it, right?
ELM: Yeah.
FK: Do you wanna have that dice-rolling or do you wanna have this fundamentally conservative idea that everything is going to be kind of the same kind of pabulum, you know? And “pabulum” is maybe too mean. But…
ELM: OK, but isn’t this inherently—isn’t this inevitable in franchise media? Like, when I think about—I’ve seen some pushback from some critics recently. I can’t remember where I was reading this, this woman wrote about it at length talking about how like, people complain about the modern advent of everything being franchised and some kind of universe coming out in installments, but in fact if you look at the box office from the ’70s and the ’80s there were tons of sequels.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: To me that feels a little bit different, because it’s like, a sequel is a very reactionary responsive thing. “They loved it! Let’s do another!” Right? And obviously the old joke, or the old stereotype, is that all sequels are terrible, right, except for The Godfather Part II. But now you’ve franchised media, and everything is like six movies and a theme park, right, and that feels very different to me because that’s like building this sameyness into the system as opposed to just like, copying.
FK: Right.
ELM: Trying to duplicate something that worked well, which is how I think of a lot of sequel culture from the ’70s through ’90s, right.
FK: Right, exactly. And it’s funny because I remember—I am elderly enough to remember, when I started working in the industry, that it wasn’t the very beginning of franchises or anything like that—that was many many years ago, but sort of the early—awhile back before this was so thoroughly entrenched in absolutely everything, you know what I mean.
ELM: Right, right.
FK: Before the concept of—when people, when a lot of these franchises were twinkles in Disney’s eye or whatever. When people, and, and the funny thing is I do think actually—if I cast my mind back to that, the situation we’re in now, it’s still better than the “We’re gonna make a sequel and we’re just gonna make a crappier version of the first thing,” you know. I do think it’s better than “let’s just make a crappier version of the first thing that someone will still pay money for.”
And I also feel like I had—and I still kind of have—some hope that maybe, if you build your franchise big enough and strong enough, that it then has the ability to have that space for different kinds of things within it. Unfortunately doesn’t seem to be playing out.
ELM: You say this, but…
FK: Viz WandaVision.
ELM: Even less evidence as time goes on! You say this and it’s like “How often can you say this before you just give up and say that’s clearly not happening?”
FK: Yeah, it’s true. It’s true.
ELM: Because people want this predictability.
FK: Well and people also—one of the things with fandom, to bring it back to fandom, is one of the things about fandom is that it is comforting. Right? That is fundamentally one of the reasons why we get obsessed with something and like, come back to it again and again and again, is because we know what it is and we love it and we love thinking about it specifically and sort of sinking into it like a warm bath. Right?
ELM: OK, sure—I mean, I don’t know. That doesn’t really jibe with my experience of fandom. Fandom, to me, is like—I get into something and I’m like, “Shit. I really just think about this constantly. I have a lot of thoughts about it. I’m just thinking about it all the time. All the time.” And then I’m like, “Time to read some fanfiction. I wanna see a lot of different takes. I wanna see different responses. I wanna see new things. I don’t wanna see, like, well-constructed but completely OOC AUs! Except I do in the beginning!” You know what I mean?
FK: Yeah, yeah.
ELM: To call back to earlier. But for the most part I’m like, “Give me all the permutations. Give me all the arguments. I wanna see this,” you know.
FK: Right.
ELM: And I don’t have that approach of like, “Ah, it’s just returning, comforting. I’m just happy to see them again.” To me, that is like me watching Parks & Rec, or I’m watching Frasier.
FK: I’m not saying that’s the only thing.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: I’m just saying that’s one of the things, and maybe—maybe, in fact, this is where we get back to the problem, which is… Another problem, I should say, not the problem. Another problem, which is the very framing of fandom and the way that people talk about this when they make these decisions about who to respond to within fandom and what to do. Because you know, when you talk about fans or fandom to the people in the film and TV industry, what they really mean is people who are repeat engagers with the thing.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: And repeat talkers about the thing. And in that context, man, I am a Law & Order: SVU fan, apparently.
ELM: Yeah, yeah!
FK: I don’t consider myself that, but I do return to it often, because there is no better background TV.
ELM: Yeah, I mean, am I in the Frasier fandom? It’s not in any way how I would describe “fandom.”
FK: Right.
ELM: But I’ve seen Frasier more than any other thing. I can talk about it at length.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: I know details about the production. All of these things, I know more details about…
FK: That all would make you considered a Frasier fan by…
ELM: I’m a Frasier evangelist, I tell random people to watch Frasier, but I would never describe myself that way. I know more about Frasier production details, or like writing details, than I do about the things in my current fandom!
FK: Right.
ELM: Which to me are texts that I enjoy and the actors I like looking at that are a baseline for what I think of as “fandom activities.”
FK: Well, and in that regard, right, I do wonder sometimes how many—I would love to do a…I wouldn’t love to do this. I’m not going to do this. But I am vaguely interested in the idea of doing a breakdown of like, all the people who are using the #ReleaseTheSnyderCut hashtag, and understanding how many of those people are people who are actually engaged in regular discussion about all of these characters. How many of them are people who watch Zach Snyder movies and like them and would like to see some more Zach Snyder, right? And thought that Justice League kinda sucked when Whedon took it over, right?
How many of them are people who have these different approaches, because I kinda suspect that there are a lot of people who—because of the role the media plays in this, because of the way that you know, geek media shares all this stuff—a lot of people who touch these things lightly and in that sort of comfort-based way…which isn’t bad! But it’s not the same thing as that kind of, it’s not the same thing either as what you’re talking about or the “I am obsessive about this particular thing having to happen” fandom. Right?
ELM: Right. So maybe you’re gonna do a big study right now on the fans of releasing the Snyder Cut?
FK: I don’t think I’m going to do that. But I’m gonna think about it a little bit!
ELM: OK. Let’s kinda circle back as we kinda look at the arc of this conversation. Towards the giving the fandom, giving the fan a cookie. Because I think establishing this kind of idea of the conservative elements of fandom, you know, this mouse wants a specific cookie also, right?
FK: Right. It’s not just any cookie.
ELM: They’re like “Give me a chocolate chip cookie.” Maybe it’s more specific than that. “A dark-toned but heavily saturated—”
FK: Yes.
ELM: “—moody cookie.”
FK: Yep.
ELM: I agree with this article wholeheartedly that this is an extremely bad precedent. And I agree with that paragraph that I read where it’s actually somewhat incidental, or a business decision. And fans, I think, across the spectrum—and I’ve seen a lot of this in my corners of fandom recently—seem to be extremely convinced that the thing that they want is the thing that makes the most business sense. Right? Because they’re like “Look at everyone around me thinks these two guys should get together.”
FK: Right, right.
ELM: “And so X network or X studio, you’re leaving so many dollars on the table,” and it’s like…
FK: Yeah.
ELM: The thing I always love about that is, you literally devoted every second of today to blogging about this and I know you’re mad but you’re also still talking about it, and you’re also still reading and writing fic about it and you also still watched all of it, so in fact they did not lose anything here. And…
FK: Yep.
ELM: I do think that there is some truth to the statement that, I think that shows with…for this segment of viewers, and fans, shows with canon queer like, a couple that gets together—like, I know people are watching Schitt’s Creek because they heard that it’s, that there’s a queer, like, a canonical queer couple at the center, right?
FK: Yeah yeah yeah.
ELM: That being said, where’s the overlap between that and a regular queer viewer, I’d like to see some queer characters, right? You know what I mean? That’s kind of a Venn diagram that overlaps, right. So like…
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Yeah, I don’t think it’s completely bonkers to say that if one of these shows with a big slash fandom actually delivered on it they would bring in viewers. I think they would.
FK: Mm-hmm.
ELM: That being said, exactly what I just said, you’re still spending a lot of energy devoting yourself to this. And they haven’t lost any money from you.
FK: Yeah, I think—I think that’s true. I think there’s also, we talk about this all the time: there’s also questions about trade-offs, right? About, you know, is this—this may bring in some people here, but will it turn off other people over there? All of these things. And I think that there is also, you know, this very big question: the issue with this particular thing, you know, with the Snyder Cut more than with having a queer relationship get together, is that this is a big and expensive cookie. Right?
ELM: Yeah.
FK: Like, how—this is a real expensive cookie.
ELM: This is a $70 million cookie.
FK: It’s a $70 million cookie that was just, you know, provided. And is that $70 million cookie going to result in $70 million worth of people signing up for HBO Max?
ELM: Probably not.
FK: Is it going to result in $70 million worth of, you know, tag-on people watching the next DC Universe film, which they feel better about or something? I don’t know. I have a hard time believing that it’s going to.
ELM: Zach Snyder didn’t do that one.
FK: He did not!
ELM: Isn’t the next DC Universe the Robert Pattinson Batman?
FK: It sure is!
ELM: Like a totally different film!
FK: Which I am excited for. But…
ELM: R. Battz.
FK: [chants] R. Pattz. R. Pattz. R. Pattz.
ELM: R. Battz.
FK: R. Battz!! R. Battz.
ELM: I didn’t invent that, Flourish.
FK: I’m sure you didn’t, I’m sure it’s been online and I just missed it but I am delighted by it.
ELM: Yeah. R. Battz.
FK: I think what I’m trying to say is like, it’s also like ultimately—this whole cycle I find frustrating and kind of toxic, because the entertainment industry, the money, doesn’t care about your feelings at all. I mean, individuals in the entertainment industry care about your feelings very much.
ELM: Some of them.
FK: Some of them. But as an industry, as capitalism, it does not care about your feelings and that’s not what’s being maximized here.
ELM: Sure.
FK: Right? So in certain ways, like, you can give a fan a cookie or not give a fan a cookie, but it’s not like—I mean, this is one of the ways in which this metaphor is kind of bad, because if you give a mouse a cookie, the problem is the mouse keeps asking for things and that’s annoying to you. Right? And gives you no benefit but you keep giving the mouse things and then you’re like “Why am I just giving you those things,” right.
ELM: Yeah, what’s the takeaway in that book?
FK: I really don’t know.
ELM: It’s kind of a, it’s kind of a mean-hearted message. It’s like, “Never help anyone ever cause they’re just gonna keep demanding shit from you.”
FK: Right. But this is not how that’s gonna fly in, you know, I mean—I’m not saying that capitalism is a perfect system of like, sheer rationality or anything. But it’s not, people are not gonna continue making $70 million cookies for fans if there’s no outcome to that.
ELM: Well, all right, this is my question! My question for you as the entertainment industry person. So like, the Star Wars folks see this and they’re like, “Oh! The people who wanted the Snyder Cut love it. Maybe we should release the J. J. Cut.” Would they do that? I mean you don’t have to say, predict it, because they obviously could, but what’s the benefit here?
FK: Well I would say that if this is successful in the sense of like, if it drives people to HBO Max, everybody thinks of it as a positive like, it is reported on broadly and everybody agrees like: this worked, then yeah, maybe they do release the J. J. Cut.
ELM: Drive people to Disney+.
FK: To drive people to Disney+. That’s the kind of thing—this is also the same category of like, what’s the purpose of this thing. This is like, when they gave David Lynch a, just a shit-ton of money to go make some weird things to get people to sign up for Showtime, and it worked. And they didn’t care how many people watched it after that, because all they wanted was to drive people to sign up for Showtime and it worked.
ELM: Sure, right.
FK: So you know, if it works in those regards, then they’ll keep doing it. If it doesn’t work then they won’t do it. But what it won’t have to do with is—you can maybe demonstrate the existence of a demand, and make this happen in some sense. But just doing that won’t be enough if it doesn’t…
ELM: Yeah.
FK: Pan out monetarily.
ELM: Right.
FK: And I don’t know that I believe that this is going to pan out monetarily, and I don’t know that…
ELM: Right.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: I also just feel like the scale of this, the high-profileness of this, sets a precedent that will not be matched by almost anything. Right? Like, a few tens of thousands of people or thousands of people doing a hashtag and Tumblring a lot about your television show…
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Saying, you know, take Sherlock. Take it. Please. The [laughs] the, you know, people being super mad that there wasn’t an extra fourth episode didn’t inspire them to go do another season. Obviously there’s a lot of other factors involved, right? But in fact it had the opposite effect. They were like, you know…
FK: Nope!
ELM: I think a lot of people would argue that the fandom, their resentment of the fans actually had a detrimental effect on even the stuff that they made, you know. You know, I think this tends to get overstated sometimes. People say like, “Well, they didn’t give them any screen time, because people were afraid they’d ship them,” like all sorts of things. And I think sometimes there’s some truth to that, but sometimes there were other dumb reasons they wrote their bad scripts for things, you know?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: But like—the Snyder Cut stuff, this is a very large hashtag, very big, and it is true: all they had to do is give Zach Snyder $70 million. Which is like, I don’t know: that’s a little, that’s a little less of a lift than saying, I mean, when I bring up the J. J. Abrams stuff like—then they’d have to decide how much of the things that they filmed would then become canon, which matters a lot to people in Star Wars. You know what I mean? There’s other like knock-on effects that aren’t just “Here’s a pile of cash, make your visual version.”
FK: Yeah, “take the stuff that you already shot and like, zhush it up.”
ELM: Right. Whereas a J. J. Abrams cut of The Return of— The Rise of— what the fuck is the name of that movie? [laughs] The Rise of Skywalker, like, they, people who want that want different story choices. They want different scenes. You know?
FK: Yep, yep, yep. That involves—that’s realistically that is not going to happen.
ELM: But like, also ones I’m not even 100% sure exist when I see people talking about this. It’s like—you think there’d be a better story in there if they just cobbled together some different things they shot? Like, you know. And then you get into, it starts veering towards conspiracy theories when they say, “Well, I believe that this content exists because I’ve seen hints here and here and here.”
FK: Yeah yeah yeah.
ELM: And so I think this is a really bad precedent in the sense of like, in a vacuum, in a one-off sense, I can see the capitalistic, you know, equation that you’re describing and it actually probably does make sense. Are they gonna make $70 million off of this? Maybe! Right? You know?
FK: I don’t know! I don’t know.
ELM: Are they gonna take a loss? I don’t know! They could. And so that seems like it’s worth it. Right? Whereas like, some of the things that fans want and are convinced would be good business decisions…
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Are not.
FK: Yeah. And don’t exist and they can’t have. Yeah.
ELM: And so I think this is really hard to say, because then you start to say—it starts to sound like, well, your opinions don’t matter to these corporations. And I mean, they don’t really, and I think the incidentalness of this…
FK: Yeah yeah.
ELM: The people who really wanted this for some deep-down reason now are gonna feel validated, and I think that’s really hard.
FK: I agree.
ELM: Cool.
FK: I don’t know that I have anything else to add to this. I mean, I’m trying to come up with sort of a nice wrapping-up thing to talk about here, but I don’t think that I really have one! Except, except to say that I hope that in all the discussion of #ReleaseTheSnyderCut and really #RestoreTheSnyderverse or whatever, that people don’t lose sight of that and that people don’t think that this is, this is going to be like, the revolution in fans demanding what they want, either in a—either in the positive or the negative way. Like, [laughing] I don’t, I just, I mean—I think it’s a bad precedent but I don’t believe that it means that those relationships are fundamentally changed and the power dynamics are different, because I just don’t see how that’s possible.
ELM: Yeah, but how do you tell fans that? And then it just leads to more…more resentment and more feeling like, “Oh, I don’t get a voice in here? Like, we’ve unionized! Why won’t you give us what we’re asking for?” And it’s like, it’s not—they’re not your boss, you know? And the way that you can show them that you don’t like the decisions they’re making is to never ever monetarily support them.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And that might even not send the signal that you want.
FK: Right.
ELM: That might just say “Oh, they didn’t like this, they didn’t like this, so do something completely different that they’ll also hate,” you know? But it’s not—you know, I absolutely understand why fans really want the things they want. I want the things I want! You know?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: They’re my wants!
FK: They’re your wants!
ELM: I get it, and I understand why in collectives it feels like really powerful. We all want this!
FK: Yeah, right.
ELM: But they’re not gonna give it to you, and if they do, it’s just a weird incidental thing, so like maybe keep trying if you think that you’ll win that lottery, but like…I just think it’s gonna cause more harm because it’s gonna cause more “Why didn’t I get that,” “Why wasn’t it my hashtag that led to the thing I wanted.”
FK: Right. Well, on that note, I’m going to go and try and find something that there is no way will be ever adapted into anything. Ideally where the creator is dead. And I’m gonna go read that.
ELM: What? I thought you were gonna go read those Witcher fics!
FK: Oh. Shit. I’ll go read both those things but like…
ELM: You have a lot of things.
FK: But sequentially, not at the same time.
ELM: I’m gonna go read the new Ishiguro, which is like a completely different universe from this conversation.
FK: Great. That sounds, I love that for you.
ELM: Thank you! I love it for me too. He’s so good at writing. Kazuo Ishiguro, Nobel Prize winner. One of the best.
FK: All right, well, I guess I’ll talk to you later about Ishiguro and also—
ELM: Would you like to? Let’s discuss it!
FK: I haven’t read it but maybe I will!
ELM: Yeah!
FK: All right.
ELM: Yeah, I’ll tell you all about it, don’t worry.
FK: OK, talk to you later.
ELM: OK, bye Flourish!
FK: Bye.
[Outro music, thank yous and credits and disclaimers]