Episode 147: Anisa Khalifa
In Episode 147, Elizabeth and Flourish talk with Anisa Khalifa, cultural critic and co-host of the K-drama podcast “Dramas Over Flowers.” Topics covered include K-dramas’ structural and emotional characteristics, the way these shows’ export and consumption has changed over the past decade, transnational fandom exchanges between Korean/Korean diaspora fans and international fans, and the enduring legacy of Orientalism when non-Asian fans get invested in Asian media.
Show Notes
[00:00:00] As always, our intro music is “Awel” by stefsax, used under a CC BY 3.0 license.
[00:00:43] Anisa first came on the podcast for Episode 135B, “Race and Fandom Revisited: Part 2.”
[00:01:17] Listen to Anisa’s podcast, “Dramas Over Flowers”! Also find her on Twitter @anisakhalifa_.
[00:02:06] The interstitial music is “How I Used To See the Stars,” from Music for Podcasts 4 by Lee Rosevere, used under a CC BY 3.0 license.
[00:07:17]
[00:20:15] “Wrist-grabs.” (Image from this article.)
[00:37:04] The special episode of “Dramas Over Flowers” about bullying is #90, “School Bullying in Dramas vs. Real Life | When Our Faves Fail Us | Feat. Prof. CedarBough Saeji.”
[00:39:29] The “Dramas Over Flowers” episode that includes discussion of the recent attacks is #92, “What’s Up in Dramaland - Anti-Asian Racism | Joseon Exorcist Cancelled | Upcoming in April.” “Dramas Over Flowers” also did a spoiler review episode of the film Minari, in which they also touch on issues of representation and anti-Asian racism in the U.S. The article Anisa mentioned is “The Flawed Premise of Statements Like ‘Love Our People Like You Love Our Food’” by Bettina Makalintal.
[00:52:45] Read Anisa’s thesis: “Visualizing the Fractured Nation: Narratives of (Un)belonging in 21st-century Indian and South Korean Media.”
[01:01:41] Here are the results of the tiny poll—but make sure you click through to read the responses, which are fascinating.
...and if you’re inspired to watch K-drama after this episode, here are Anisa’s gateway Korean drama recs!
You’re Beautiful - This and Coffee Prince were the best of the genderbending romances that were ubiquitous in the late 2000s. You’re Beautiful is about a trainee nun who temporarily stands in for her twin brother as the member of a K-pop band (who all live in the same house, of course)—hijinks, romance and great music ensue. Wacky but with tons of heart, and holds up even after over a decade.
Stranger - A rare K-drama with a second season that’s surprisingly just as good as Season 1. It was the show I needed to get me through 2017, and again the one that encapsulated 2020 for me—tackling the nature of corruption, the weary, endless fight against systemic injustice, and how and why we keep fighting anyway, with more nuance and humanity than any other TV show I’ve seen. Brilliant in every aspect.
Signal - A sci-fi thriller about a profiler in the present who finds a magic walkie-talkie that connects him to a detective in the 1980s, who he works with to solve real cold cases. It’s excellent in its handling of police corruption and crime-solving, but shines most as a story of friendship between colleagues and across time. You will cry buckets.
Misaeng - A slice of life story about a young man with failed dreams and no useful qualifications, who barely gets in as an intern at a big company and immediately faces the crushing reality of the corporate workplace…but also finds a once-in-a-lifetime mentor, a team of people that he can trust without question, and lessons about how to live a life you can be proud of. Despite its heavy beginning, one of the most uplifting dramas I’ve ever watched. A platonic love story for the ages.
Run On - A realistic slice of life rom-com between a sprinter and a translator, all about the importance of communication, what it means to dream, and the imperfection of happy endings. Chock full of fun movie references, and VERY funny.
Search WWW - Three women deal with the triumphs and complications of being a woman with power at work. Romance exists, but the focus is the relationships between the women, in and out of the workplace, and who they want to be now that they’re in their 30s-40s.
Melo is My Nature - A struggling TV writer and her best friends, who all live together, navigate work, love, loss, and family. Darkly funny, moving, insightful, full of great female friendships and quirky, swoony romance.
Queen In-hyun’s Man - This crosses the historical (sageuk) and sci-fi genres, when a scholar from 1694 repeatedly time travels to 2012 and encounters an actress in a sageuk, and the two slowly fall in love—and wonder how they can ever be together.
Rookie Historian - On our list of K-dramas for book lovers, this sageuk about a female court historian in the 19th century Joseon Dynasty, who falls in love with a captive prince who’s basically the Disney princess in this equation. Shades of both an Austen novel and a period court drama, with particular K-drama flair.
More recs can be found in our 2010s Retrospective series. - Anisa
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 #147, “Anisa Khalifa.”
FK: That name may be familiar to you, either because you’re really into K-dramas and listen to her podcast, or because you listened to our Race and Fandom episodes—the more recent ones, not the previous ones. She had a pre-recorded statement in that, and we’re really excited to have her on for a full episode this time.
ELM: Yeah, so when we asked for volunteers, some people wrote us like, longer responses about their work, you know, people who were studying or were creating fanworks, you know, like, commentary about race and fandom. And Anisa was one of them. She wrote in her email, “I recently finished my master’s thesis on how post-partition nationalism shows up in popular Indian and South Korean media.” And so immediately, first of all, I really wanna read that.
Second of all, she talked a lot about her podcast, “Dramas Over Flowers,” which is about Korean dramas, and so we were really interested in everything she had to say in her letters, so we asked if she could record a statement but also come on for a full episode. And K-dramas are huge, and not something that I think we’ve had a lot of contact with as a podcast. I don’t—maybe some guests have mentioned it in passing as something they were into? But not anything that we looked at kind of at length, as a transnational, transcultural object of fandom. And so that’s really intriguing to me, especially because so much of the Race and Fandom episode was about kind of these transnational clashes? And exchanges, obviously, not all—not all tension, but you know, the way that fans talk across cultures to each other.
FK: Yeah, absolutely. I’m really really excited to get to hear from her.
ELM: OK, well, shall we call her up?
FK: Let’s do it!
[Interstitial music]
FK: All right, it’s time to welcome Anisa to the podcast! Hi, Anisa!
Anisa Khalifa: Hi Flourish and Elizabeth!
ELM: I’m so excited to have you on, like, properly. We’ve had your voice on the podcast before, but we hadn’t actually met you. So this is very exciting.
AK: I’m also very excited to be here in the flesh. In the voice? [laughs] In my live version?
FK: How much, however much flesh one can in a pandemic.
AK: Yes. [all laughing]
ELM: OK. So as we usually start with our guests, can you talk a little bit about your fannish history? It doesn’t have to be a full bio, but what is your fannish background? How did that bring you into, maybe any sort of professional fannish things that you’re doing now?
AK: Yeah, so I was a fan of Harry Potter back in the day, you know, from maybe close to the end of high school—I think maybe around the time the fourth book was coming out until the end of the series, I got really into fanfic and sort of, you know, the forums and all that stuff that I know both of you were also pretty involved in back in the day.
ELM: Wait, hang on: did you have a ship?
AK: I am a little ashamed to admit my ship… [laughing]
ELM: Oh! Oh. You don’t have to say!
AK: But it was—I was really into Draco and Hermione.
FK: That’s fine!
AK: Cause I really liked that, you know…
FK: Yeah!
AK: That conflict, right? I didn’t want to see it happen in canon, but I just really enjoyed that process of how would you write these two people who are so, so different from each other and have such opposing viewpoints and what would that look like. So I was, that was kind of my ship. Although not, I don’t know. I feel like people who say they have a ship, sometimes that means that you want it to happen in canon? In canon, I really enjoyed her punching his lights out.
ELM: I mean, that could also be a part of a canonical ship, but… [all laugh]
AK: That’s true!
FK: Yeah, I was gonna say, you can’t be ashamed of a ship like that; you’re speaking to a Snape/Hermione shipper. It’s, I’m just in the full trash can, so. [all laugh] I’m over here in the trash can with a bonfire lit on me, so.
ELM: Anyway, OK. Sorry. Continue on your trajectory!
AK: Yes! That was kind of like my entry into this thing called “fanfic,” which I had never known about before, and I was like “Whoa, this is something.” And at that time I was also dealing with some really severe health issues that lasted for many years, so for a lot of that time reading and writing fanfic was—and just, like, the community—was a way for me to just have an escape, have something, you know, like something joyful and something…a way to meet people and to make friends when I couldn’t really socialize or, you know, go out or do really anything in real life.
So that element of community also, I mean, I’ve fallen out of love with Harry Potter for various reasons—which I think I talked about last time…but in 2009, while I was still going through all this stuff with, you know, like, my personal struggles, I came across…at the time I had kind of gotten back into reading manga, which I had sort of delved into in high school, and then I got back into anime, and then I also found live-action Japanese dramas that were kind of, a lot of them were based on mangas and on animes, and like, I was like “Ooh, this is like the next level! It’s real people acting out these stories,” right? So I really enjoyed those, and I enjoyed the fact that it was one season and it was a complete story, and often it would be like—you know, 10 or 11 episodes, so it was pretty contained.
And then the website that I used to watch these on, which like, if you are unfamiliar with how we used to watch these back in the day, it was like these really janky like, streaming websites where people would upload these episodes in like, four parts, and you had to like, press play and then press pause and wait for it to load. [laughs] And then come back when it had finished loading, so you could watch it with like, you know, without interruptions. So you know, I mean, nowadays we’re all spoiled.
But so on this same website, there was this one Korean drama. It had K-dramas and I think Taiwanese dramas too, and I was just like, “Well, I’m not familiar with any of that, I don’t,” you know, I had had more exposure to Japanese popular culture at that point. But there was this one show that kept showing up on the front page for months as the number-one most popular drama, and that was Coffee Prince, or as they had literally translated it, The First Shop of Coffee Prince. And it was like this picture of like, these five dudes in vests, and I was like, “What?” Like, “I’m not interested in this!” But eventually it was like, “It’s really popular, there must be something good about it, I have nothing to watch.”
So I watched it, and to just introduce the story, for those who might not be familiar with it, it’s about this really poor woman in like, her early 20s, she’s a taekwondo instructor, but she has like five part-time jobs. She’s the main breadwinner for her family, it’s just her and her mom and sister. And she initially comes across this rich guy whose grandmother basically is like, fed up with his foolish ways where he doesn’t really wanna do, you know, take on the family business and do what she wants him to do. So she’s given him an ultimatum of like—you have to go on these marriage dates, find someone to marry, also join the family business, and he doesn’t want to.
So he runs into her and she looks kind of, she doesn’t present as a woman, although I wouldn’t—I mean, you wouldn’t be able to tell if she was a man or a woman just by looking at her, and he assumes that she’s a dude. Like, she gets mistaken as a man a lot. And so he’s like, “Hey, be my fake boyfriend!” And she needs the money, so she’s like, “OK!” So then he hires her to be his fake boyfriend to get his, you know, his grandmother off his back about marriage. So she wrecks a couple of his marriage dates and they have, you know, cute hijinks.
And then his grandma tells him, you have to, you know, run this coffee shop. And it’s like a failing coffee shop. And he’s like “Ugh.” And she’s like, “Well, I’m gonna cut you off if you don’t do it.” So then he has to do it. But the concept is “coffee prince,” like, it’s just gonna have these young good-looking waiters in vests. This is where the vests come from. [all laugh] If you were wondering. And so he’s like “I’ll hire you!” And she needs money still! She’s very poor, so she’s like “Yes.” And you know, it’s relatable! But then also they’re falling in love, you know.
FK: Of course!
AK: So the conflict is they’re falling in love, she feels guilty about lying to him but she’s afraid that he’s gonna hate her if she tells him the truth, and then he’s falling in love but he’s like “Wait, I’m not gay, what’s going on here.” It’s really cute, it’s really well-written, the chemistry is off the charts. There’s also another story of another older couple who are broken up and they reconcile. But yeah, so I watched this one drama and that was it! Like, I was like, “This is the type of entertainment I’ve been waiting for my whole life.” And I have never looked back since then.
ELM: That’s been your, so you’ve been in K-drama fandom for like more than a decade now. Like…
AK: Yeah. And I think because of where I was in my life in the beginning, I just instantly got very deep into it, just because I was living alone, I was an undergrad, I was you know, very ill, so I had a lot of time where I just like wanted to distract myself from what I was dealing with. So I watched so many dramas. And I definitely don’t have that much time now. But at the time…it was like, I was a serial binge-watcher. [all laugh]
FK: So tell me about K-dramas, because the only way that I—I’ve never watched one. The only way that I am familiar with them is through, like, seeing people talk about them. And the places that I’ve seen people talk about them are like in conversations that like, they’re mentioned next to, like, telenovelas and I mean, obviously like, C-dramas and all of these, you know, other Asian dramas. I get the impression that there are a lot of big differences between them and a telenovela or a soap opera in the U.S.
AK: Yeah. I mean, I think they are somewhat comparable to other Asian dramas. I know like, so my grandmother watches a lot of Pakistani dramas—that’s like my ethnic background—and they are kind of similar. I would not compare them to soap operas or telenovelas. There are some Korean TV shows that you could compare to those, that are you know, daily dramas that are like, 200 episodes long or something and it’s like this sort of endless saga of, like, family conflict and mother-in-laws and daughter-in-laws. There is that type of entertainment.
But when you talk about K-drama as it’s sort of become popularized in the international fandom, it generally refers to these, you know, high production value, generally one-season. It tends to be maybe between 16 to 24 episodes. About an hour per episode, sometimes they’re longer, especially if it’s a really expensive, you know, prestige kind of show. When I started watching them, most of the ones that were available were romances, but in the last 10 years I think they’ve gotten really good at genre stuff like sci-fi and thrillers and like, not…I mean, they do procedurals, but I think what they do is even better than procedurals, because the crime dramas will be like, a full story that takes you through like, a whole arc with the main—so like, if you have, you know, like, I don’t know if you all watched SVU back in the day? [all laugh]
ELM: Back in the day?!
FK: Back in the day?!
AK: I may have watched all 13 seasons!
FK: And I still watch it! I gotta see Stabler come back! They’re comin’ back like tomorrow!
AK: Oh my God, really?
FK: Yes, they’re doing a crossover and Stabler’s coming back.
AK: After Stabler left I just, my heart.
FK: [laughs] Yes. The police brutality daddy is returning.
AK: Yeah, I mean, also, my feelings about police dramas have changed a lot in the last five or six years.
FK: They have.
AK: But the reason I bring that up is because for me, rather than the cases themselves, it was always the dynamics between the team that were so much more interesting, and what K-dramas do are—there is a story with the team. It’s not just like this endless cycle of cases and then the team, you know, some people leave, some come back, but it’s essentially the same dynamic, everything kind of resets at the end of the episode. But here you do have a case of the week, but you also have an evolving relationship between the main cast that actually goes somewhere at the end of the season.
FK: That’s really interesting. I always, for some reason I—whatever stereotype I had of K-dramas in my head, it was that they’re primarily about romance and about the types of stories you would see on a soap opera. But it sounds like that’s really not true any more, if it ever was.
AK: Well, the thing about K-dramas is they are not afraid of emotion. So whether that’s romance or it’s a family relationship, you know, there’s a lot of really beautifully-done dramas that deal with relationships between parents and children, between siblings, between spouses, between grandparents and their grandchildren, and then between found families, which is one of my favorite things ever. Just a group of people who are all outcast for some reason and they come together and they form a team and maybe they originally were, like, fighting crime or starting a business, but in the end they become this really amazingly tight found family.
At the time when I discovered dramas, there was this really strong element of like—especially on TV, but also in movies, of these antiheroes doing bad things and you would just like, follow them for six seasons as they do increasingly bad things, and it’s very cool, and you feel conflicted…I just wasn’t really into that, you know? And to each their own! If that’s your type of drama. But like, I really loved how unashamed K-dramas were about going to optimistic places, to earnest places, to emotional places, not just the female characters but also the male characters.
And so I think there is a lot of like, a lot of genre kind of happening at the same time, a lot of times, so you might have some romance elements, you might have some action elements, you’ll have some comedy elements. I think much in the same way that with K-pop you can have like, a lot of different types of music in one song, but it works. That hybridity, I think you can also find in Korean film and to an extent in Korean dramas as well.
ELM: OK, so you got really into them. Were you writing fanfic about them? Or…what fandom practices were you doing?
AK: Yeah, so interestingly I have not ever written fanfic about Korean dramas, even though I was very into fanfic when I was in the Harry Potter fandom. And even like—I enjoy, I think for the big mainstream Western fandoms that I’ve been a fan of, whether that’s Marvel or Star Wars or Harry Potter or whatever it is, it’s usually a story about—you know, some white guys, uh… [all laugh] Maybe a white woman here or there, occasionally.
ELM: Just one. There’s one!
AK: Maybe a Black guy somewhere in the back? But you know. Before he gets killed.
ELM: Just one.
AK: Yeah. So. I always needed more with those stories. There was always something missing. There was always a desire to see—and also it just, you know, going back to the emotional part, like: I never really got much of that, of those sort of deep character-building emotional scenes that I enjoyed so much, and that I got from fanfic. With K-dramas, I never really felt the need for that.
So in the beginning when I first discovered dramas, I didn’t know anybody else in my real life who watched them or knew about them, but I found like—I found online forums and particularly this one recapping website where they used to do longform Television Without Pity-style recaps of every single episode as it aired, and back then there were only like three main channels. Now there’s a lot of cable channels, there’s a ton of shows coming out all the time, so it’s hard to keep up with everything that’s coming out. But at the time it was a much more limited availability of shows. So you could find out, you could watch the show immediately if you found somewhere to stream the raw episode, or procure it by some other means. [all laugh] As we did 10 years ago, when it wasn’t legally available to stream immediately with subtitles, you know, the same day. But you know, you could find out what happened and you could squee over it with other fans and you could discuss what you think is gonna happen next and the actors and all that.
But like, I’ve never really seen an active fanfic—any sort of active fanfic community around K-dramas. And I was—I felt like you would probably ask me this, so I did go and look whether there were fanfics for K-dramas.
ELM: We’re predictable! [laughs]
AK: I mean, I always love your conversations about fanfic. They’re all so, they’re always very fascinating.
FK: We are a little obsessed.
AK: And I didn’t really find—I mean, I’ve looked before on AO3 just out of curiosity. There’s a ton of K-pop fanfic, hardly any K-drama fanfic. And also, like, on Wattpad I was looking, and there is K-drama fanfic on Wattpad, but it’s like a ratio of like, 1K about K-drama and like 200K for K-pop fandom. So…
ELM: Yeah.
AK: It’s really not, for whatever reason it just doesn’t attract the same kind of energy around fanfics that I think other media does, yeah.
ELM: That’s interesting. Well, but it sounds like, I mean, just based on your description—it sounds like they’re actually, like, some of the things people come to fic for may exist already in these shows, not just the emotionality but like, even your summary of Coffee Prince had some like, kind of delightful-sounding trope elements. Maybe “trope” isn’t the right word, but kind of story structures, right?
AK: Trope is absolutely the right word!
ELM: I don’t mean that negative, you know? [laughs]
AK: I—I don’t think that, I don’t understand the stigma around tropes, honestly. Like, if you’re a K-drama fan, you’re probably an unabashed lover of tropes, because that’s one of the things that I love, right? They will—I mean, literally we’ll talk to each other, fans will be like “Oh, this looks like a cohabitation drama, I’m so excited!” [all laugh] You know, like these things are already there in the material, so you don’t have to go somewhere else to find it, and yes, there are always gonna be bad and corny and sort of clichéd portrayals of these things, but also there is so much joy in these tropes when they’re done well and when they’re executed with nuance and with like, kind of like a wink-wink nod-nod like—we know this is a trope, but we know that we all love it here, you know? Like, we’re among fans. We’re among friends. We can do a smart twist, we can do a meta. So yeah, I think that’s definitely part of the enjoyment.
ELM: That’s interesting. And yeah, if something’s already pretty tropey, do you need to like…I mean, definitely there’s tropey media that people do write fic about. But…
FK: Yeah, but people don’t write fic about romance novels, for instance, right?
ELM: Right! Especially—well, these are self-contained, right? There aren’t multiple seasons of these, right? It’s like one arcing storyline too? Like a romance novel, you know. It’s like, you get a resolution at the end, and so…
AK: And that was always one of my frustrations with American TV and why I don’t think I ever really got into it so much, is because I didn’t want to wait six years to see where this story was going! [ELM laughs] You know, I’ve always been a reader, so I loved just reading a novel and getting the full story. And K-dramas do feel a lot like books, because a movie is great and I love movies, but it’s definitely not the same amount of story and material and character development you can get in a book. Which is why so often you feel like something is really missing when a book is developed into a movie, because you’re like “But there’s so much more here that you didn’t have time for!” Right? I mean, that’s just a limitation of the runtime.
FK: Yeah.
AK: Even if it’s four hours. Maybe we shouldn’t talk about the Snyder Cut. Even if it’s a three-hour movie! [all laugh] You still won’t be able to contain everything that you…
ELM: Totally.
AK: I think the other thing is, also, that as I’ve watched dramas over the last 11, 12 years, I’ve seen them evolve. So even when we talk about tropes, there’s so much self-referential kind of you know, like, maybe in the early 2000s we had these particular kind of dynamics and here’s how it’s evolved, and here’s how we’re referencing how things used to be, and people who have been watching dramas for awhile will notice that and comment on it.
So for example, like, when I first started watching dramas in like the late 2000s, it was really common to have what people call “wrist-grabs,” where the hero will just grab the heroine—not by her hand, but from here, from her wrist, and just like drag her somewhere. And at that time, it was portrayed as something romantic. And in the intervening time, you’ve seen so many dramas where like, the deliberateness of how they will actually like hold each other’s hand instead—and then have sometimes the woman doing it to the man, sometimes having the man doing it to the woman, but they’re taking her hand, or taking his hand. And like, you can tell that the writer and the camera is saying like, “Here’s a less toxic thing than what we used to do, and it’s better and it’s more romantic, and let’s,” you know. And it’s not overt or anything, but it’s just—it’s like how…
And I’ve seen, you know, the roles for women and the characters for women have also evolved. 10 years ago, there were a lot more stories about a poor plucky cheerful heroine who just like, keeps on goin’ no matter what life, you know, throws at her, and she has so much debt and she has like eight part-time jobs and then she meets a rich guy who’s like, you know, crusty and evil on the surface but really has a secret pain in his heart and he just needs to love a good woman to melt—you know, there are so many, like the Cinderella story, this sort of bastardized Pride and Prejudice story that we’ve seen so many times, right? And those stories still exist, because it’s popular for a reason. It’s a classic for a reason.
But nowadays, you see so many more different types of stories. It’s also something that I find a lot of times people are just like, when they describe something that’s from another country, they’re like, “Here’s how it is,” and it’s like unchanging. But everything evolves, right? Like, we’re Americans, we’ve seen the American entertainment industry evolve, and so that’s another thing that we also talk about on—I have a podcast with my two co-hosts called “Dramas Over Flowers,” and sometimes people will ask us things or we’ll mention things and like, everyone comes in at a different time, right? So some of our listeners are very new K-drama watchers, and sometimes they’ll be like, “But why do K-dramas do this?” And then like… “OK, but so here’s the context,” you know? Don’t just paint it with such a broad brush. And it’s much easier to do that and make generalizations when you’re looking at something from the outside and you’re like, “What is this weird thing?” You know?
ELM: Right, right.
AK: You know, like “Why do Koreans do this?” And I’m like, “Just—just slow down.”
FK: Yeah. You know, that’s really interesting cause it’s funny cause it points to a general human thing that humans do, but that gets worse when you’re looking at somebody else’s culture and you’re like “What’s this thing? I have very limited knowledge of it, so I will make big assumptions!” Right?
Cause I mean we talk all the time about, for instance, like, about how all fans don’t want the same thing, right? So for instance, you were talking earlier about how for you, you don’t want a million, you know, a million seasons of something. You want a story that resolves, and for you that’s really powerful and good and that’s the thing that you want. And I think that there’s a lot of people who talk about quote “fans” and what “fans” want who assume “Oh, no, fans want something to run for 40 seasons,” you know? “They just want the thing to continue!” Right?
And that’s obviously—we know that’s not true, if you stop and think about it, but there’s still this gut instinct to be like, “Well, I know what people are like!” And I can only imagine—and that’s happening within, you know, American TV culture, right? There are people who want shorter things. You know, there are people who do want those elements, that’s very clear even if you just stick within Western TV, American TV. So how much more must that apply when you’re sort of trying to think transculturally.
AK: Yeah. My co-hosts and I joke that because of Netflix, American TV is starting to become more like K-dramas. [all laugh] Because it’s like—
FK: It is!
AK: They want this like, one season that you can just binge and it’s over and it’s complete. You know.
FK: Yeah, it’s funny—so the reason I was saying earlier with the telenovelas and the K-dramas was this show that I had worked on, East Los High, had a lot of people who were into K-dramas who watched it, and the reason was that we actually shot the whole first season as just like a single thing, like a K-drama. Because it was self-financed and we didn’t know that we would ever get another season or have anything else. And so it was just like, one story. And then a bunch of K-drama people showed up, and that was cool. But also I imagine probably disappointing for them when it ended up running several more seasons. [laughs] The ending sort of stopped being an ending.
ELM: That’s funny. Wait, OK. So can we talk about transcultural, I mean, we started—we’re going in that direction, but I’d love to talk about transcultural and transnational fandom, and I have a lot of questions, but my first one is: what was it like when you started being a K-drama fan? You’re talking about you know, these big recaps and the janky like, streaming—streaming feels like over-stating it. The janky websites you had to use to watch. I’m wondering what that was like as a transcultural fandom experience.
Like, was there a lot of conversation between English-speaking fans and Korean-speaking fans and other-language speaking fans? You know that kind of thing. But specifically Korean fans versus people in other parts of the world who were coming to this through these kind of layers of…abstraction is not the word I’m looking for. Through all the levels, all the steps you’re describing. You know what I mean?
AK: Yeah. So in the time since I started watching dramas till now, it’s changed so much because back then the only way that you could access this stuff was through the fan labor of, you know, people who spoke Korean who could—basically they were mediating that media for us, right? They were translating it, they were making it available, they were providing subtitles, they were recapping it.
So absolutely, of course, like: Koreans in the diaspora were the ones who were doing this work, right? For the most part. And that labor, that sort of set the foundation for this really niche but very passionate, very hardcore fandom. What I really loved about—you know, we talk a lot about toxic fan culture, and you know, online harassment and bullying and there’s a lot of stuff that goes on, but I have noticed from the beginning that it’s the least toxic fandom that I’ve ever been in. And there really was no gatekeeping. It was all about, like, “Oh yes. We love this thing! And we love it so much that we’re gonna like, write all—like, thousands of words about it so you can also love it with us.” You know? “And then we can have a place to talk about it!”
And it was very much online, I mean, even now it’s all online. Because it’s rare that you’ll find people that you know in your real life who enjoy things, unless you were the one who introduced them to K-drama, like I introduced it to my mom and my sister and my mother and now we all watch them together, and it was me who kind of brought them in, right? I was like “trust me, you’ll enjoy this!” My family was like “Why are you watching this Korean TV, like, what is so good?” I’m like “Just watch it!” And then they were like “Oh yeah, OK, we get it.”
So because of that, I never really…I think maybe part of what you’re asking is, like, whether there is some tension or some difficulties or…
ELM: I wasn’t necessarily asking if there was tension, I’m just curious how this changed, because like, it seems like…I mean, exactly what you’re describing, like, when you got into this there was that level of like, fan labor that was like, integral to it, and now it’s gotta be really really different when you could potentially turn on Netflix and watch one that’s been…
AK: Absolutely.
ELM: You know, packaged by a studio, right?
AK: Absolutely. And at that time, even though there was an element of these production companies wanting to export Korean dramas to other markets, it was mostly directed towards Japan and China and other, you know, some southeast Asian countries as well like Malaysia and Indonesia. So K-dramas have been very popular in Asia for a long time. But 10 years ago, there wasn’t really much of a push towards putting them out towards English-speaking audiences, and so everything that was happening in that, you know, Anglophone space, was all being done by fans.
You know, like, after the episode came out, we would wait to see—when a new drama came out we had these subbing groups, and then they would announce “OK, we’re going to be subtitling this drama so keep an eye out,” and it would take them usually a week to—cause it’s a lot of work, right? And they were all doing it just in their own free time.
And now, most dramas will be legally streamed somewhere. They will be licensed somewhere. You might have to pay a subscription to access them, they might only be available legally in some regions of the world, you know, like I’m sure you both know how licensing works, so like—just because something is available in Europe that doesn’t mean I can watch it. Or it might be coming out weekly in one region and then all come out, be released all as like one drop, like a Netflix-style drop, in another place.
FK: Yeah, time to get—time to get a good VPN. [laughs]
AK: Yeah, exactly! So it has totally changed. And yet I think what was smart on the part of Korean content producers is they didn’t crack down on the fans who were spreading this, being like “Oh, this is ours, here’s a notice, take this down,” you know, “stop doing this—” they were like “Oh look, there’s fans!” They kind of just looked the other way and created ways for people to actually buy access to this stuff where they could actually make money from it.
And I think that was very smart, because if they had done that, a lot of people would have just given up on it and been like “Oh, this is too much effort.” And I know that happened with—some very very difficult-to-watch, most Japanese things legally, so people just, either they don’t watch it or they find some, you know, illegal means to watch it. But I know that because of that, it didn’t grow in the way that the K-drama fandom did.
FK: Right.
AK: So I think that was a smart move on their part.
FK: Yeah, seeing quote “piracy” as actually like, the proof that there is demand.
AK: Right. Exactly. And also, like, you build loyalty that way, right? Because all you want is for them to be like, “Oh, our international fans exist and we are providing things for them,” and people are like “Yes! Take my money!” You know? Because you built such a strong connection to this stuff that you love, and you’ve spent so long being on the margins of that, and then if you feel like “Oh, they’re actually seeing me as a fan,” all of a sudden you want to—of course you wanna engage with that, right?
ELM: What about—I’m curious, you’re making me think so much about that era of fandom for…not even for fandoms I was in, but you know, consuming television, right? Reading recaps of like, Project Runway or whatever, you know? [FK laughs] And thinking of 10 or 15 years ago, how have you felt that fan practices have evolved since you joined the fandom? I’m curious now when you think about new episodes of shows coming out, you don’t have that kind of recap culture for a lot of the shows I see on my dash. You see a lot of reacting culture. “Here’s my instant take, my instant meta, I’m going to give you—” Obviously there’s a lot of more substantive stuff that comes out later, but there’s a lot of quick, Twitter in particular has quick reactions. And I’m curious what it’s like, what you see in your daily fannish life now.
AK: Yeah. So the recap website I was talking about, where I sort of first discovered, you know, recaps and discussion and community, it still—it’s still around, like, I ended up working for them for awhile, actually, I mean, I’m still a staff writer. I just don’t spend as much time doing it anymore. But I met two other women while we were all writing for that website. We started a K-drama podcast together about three and a half years ago, and you know, they’d still do recaps, they’d do a lot of recaps, but I think that the value of being able to immediately go and find out what happened in an episode where, like, you have no way to access translations—that aspect of the value of those recaps isn’t really there any more, just because of how quickly subtitles become available.
I still think there are definitely, there is a sizeable amount of people who do want that space just to still like, discuss what happened in the episode, and they do still value those recaps, but I think the function of them has slightly changed. When we started our podcast, there were only a very few, and now there are tons of K-drama—I mean, not tons. If you compare it to how many movie podcasts there are, it’s still tiny.
ELM: Or like, Game of Thrones Season Eight podcasts. [all laugh] It’s like, “All right, I get it. Everyone wants to speak about this out loud.”
AK: Yeah.
ELM: Wait, can you talk about—we, I don’t know if we’ve actually had a fandom podcaster on before. As someone like—like, I don’t think of us as fandom podcasters. We have a podcast about fandom, but we’re not talking about a thing. We sometimes talk about things we like, but not, you know what I mean. Flourish, you’re making a face at me. You know what I mean! You also host this podcast!
FK: I do also know what you mean, but I was loving watching you sort of go in circles like…like, I don’t know. A dog chasing its tail being like “I’m gonna catch it! I’m gonna figure out what to say about this!”
ELM: Don’t compare me to a dog! So insulting. I’m obviously a cat. [laughs] But yeah, so what has that been like? I’m really curious about the experience of that as a fannish practice, as like a way to engage with the thing that you really like.
AK: So, for me, I have always—I just really love the podcast medium, for one. So when they, you know, approached me and said “We are thinking of doing this, would you like to join us?” I was instantly on board.
I think the reason why we were so passionate about it from the beginning is because we didn’t see other fans like ourselves really represented in a lot of the English-speaking fandom spaces that we were in. It would either be a space run by Korean-Americans or other diasporic Koreans…I mean, of course! It’s like, their space! And we loved that space. Or it would be like, very centered around like, “What is this weird Asian thing that white ladies like,” which none of us are white ladies. We’re brown ladies. So… [laughs]
We didn’t really feel like engaging with that conversation and we wanted to have a space where we could talk about what it’s like to be an Asian but a non-Korean fan of K-dramas, and what kind of, you know—we wanted to bring our full experiences to that fandom and those discussions about the shows that we loved rather than just being somebody who’s just kind of recapping a particular show behind, like, an anonymous handle and just like solely in particular talking about the content itself, and maybe to a limited extent some context, but we love context. And I firmly believe that criticism of any type of media doesn’t exist in a vacuum, you’re always bringing yourself to that criticism. And that’s a good thing.
So we’re talking about, like, transnational and transcultural fandom, the three of us live in different countries, we’re on different continents. I’m in the U.S., Saya is in the U.K., and Paroma is in India, and we’re all South Asian, but we have different backgrounds, you know? So we wanted to talk about why we felt so strongly about watching K-dramas as people of color, and a full show that’s about people of color and why that was like, so moving to us. And things that you know, things about how other people from other races were portrayed in K-dramas, and what we felt about representation within K-dramas. What we felt about certain industry practices. And we have, like, news segments. We have you know, like, special episodes where we’ll talk about particular issues, like sexism or body image or problematic age gaps between male and female leads or whatever. You know? We like to go really deep into, into super-nerdy critical stuff.
So that’s why we started this podcast, and we kind of—we didn’t know anything about podcasting when we started, we’re totally self-taught. My co-host Paroma basically taught herself how to edit, then she taught us how to edit. Now she has a podcast post-production business. You know? So we just kind of built it ourselves and people liked what we were doing and so they stuck around and so we stuck around.
ELM: Do you feel like your experience of being a fan has changed via podcasting?
AK: I think in some ways it has, just because we still don’t force ourselves to watch things that we’re no longer enjoying. Like, if we end up starting something and then we drop it, we’ll just be like “Here’s why we dropped it.” But I think I definitely do start more things that I maybe wouldn’t have started, or finish more things that I maybe wouldn’t have finished, just because I know that I will be talking about it on the podcast. And I usually try to be watching at least one thing, cause I know that like— [laughs] It’s not like homework exactly, but…I’m not gonna go three months without watching anything anymore, the way I sometimes would before, because I’m like, “Well, what am I gonna talk about on the Long Yak?” The Long Yak is kind of our what-we’re-watching segment, which gets very long. [all laugh] And we have a mascot that is an actual yak.
FK: Aww.
ELM: That’s really good! Yaks are great.
AK: They are great! There’s one other way in which I think our relationship with fandom has also changed, which we’ve only really thought about consciously in the last year or so, which is that sometimes when things happen—either in like, the broader sociopolitical context of the world or just like, something that happens in the K-drama industry, or like, if there’s an entertainment-related issue, or a story that we wanna talk about, like—maybe that wouldn’t have been something that I would have talked about publicly before? But because we have this, you know, it’s not a big platform, it’s a small platform. But we have a platform, and so we do sometimes feel like “Oh, we should say something about this. Or we should address this.” Especially when we see, sometimes we’ll see conversations happening in the fandom spaces around us where we’re like—there needs to be more nuance in this situation. You’re like, “There’s something missing, there’s some context missing.” So then we’ll go and do some research, and we’ll create an episode maybe around that, or maybe just like bring it up.
So for example, we did a special episode about bullying that we released a couple weeks ago where we invited a professor of Korean Studies to come talk to us about bullying in Korea, because there was like a huge sort of—a succession of many, many high-profile bullying accusations against celebrities that happened within like a couple weeks. And so we were like, “Oh wow. Why is this happening now? Like, why is it happening so close together? What’s the context for this? Is bullying really that bad in South Korea?” We don’t have that context, and we don’t want to make ignorant statements based on knowledge that we don’t have, so we invited her on and she, you know, she had a really great breakdown of what it looks like for school kids there, and why bullying is particularly bad, and what the cultural context is, and why people are protesting against it now, particularly—you know, things like that.
ELM: I’m curious to go into a very serious recent topic—if you guys have responded to, or if you have feelings about, the recent shooting of the Asian-American women in Georgia, and I partly bring it up because I saw—mostly about K-pop, some commentary about white fans in particular in Asian media fandoms being really into that art, you know? That content, but not actually being there for Asian and Asian-American people in these situations. And I’m wondering if that was something that you guys were encountering.
AK: Yeah.
ELM: The same dialogues.
AK: Yeah, I mean, we just recorded an episode where we talk about what happened and sort of our feelings about what happened and sort of broader conversations around race as they happen in fandom and just in general. And which of those narratives are helpful, and which are not. And we did also talk about that, and that one should be—it should be out by the time this episode is released. So I will share a link to that.
ELM: Yeah, we’ll definitely put it in the show notes.
FK: Absolutely.
ELM: I’d really like to listen to it.
AK: But I definitely think there is an element of consuming something that people make, but not wanting to actually be around those people or see those people as fully human, and I think that happens a lot with Black creators as well, you know? And they’ll say this: you wanna enjoy Black culture, but you don’t actually want Black people. And I mean, it’s complicated because K-pop also culturally appropriates a lot of Black culture. But that’s a whole other conversation.
But there is an element of like, “Oh, I really enjoy this media and I’m consuming it, but like—” I see sometimes, I see this narrative of like, and I’ll share an article that talks about this really well, about “love us like you love our food.” And it’s like, oh, if you love our culture, you should also love us—but you shouldn’t love people because you enjoy what they create, or you’re benefiting from what they bring to your life, you know? Like, it’s just a human thing. Like, just: you should value people for their humanity, not what they bring to you or what you can use them for. You know?
It’s kind of that narrative of the “good immigrant,” like, “Oh, we’re so hard-working, we’re so, we came here legally, we are doing so much for this society, so you should accept us,” but that’s not—that’s just reinforcing structural racism because it’s like, “Oh, well, we’re just going to exploit you, and then when we don’t want you any more you can go back to where you came from” kind of thing.
So I mean, I have seen some of that as well. I don’t know. It’s been, it’s been an upsetting couple of weeks. I think one of the things that the Asian-American community has been really really upset by is that we knew that this kind of violence was gonna happen as soon as Trump started saying things like “China virus” and “kung flu” and you know, “it’s the Chinese people’s fault.” We saw immediately the type of incidents that began happening. And so like, even though this was really shocking and very horrifying—what happened—unfortunately it’s not surprising, you know? And that’s like, it’s really, it’s really upsetting because why do people have to die before you’re willing to recognize that racism makes this, that it’s causing harm. Like, it shouldn’t have to get that bad. So.
And it’s part of a pattern in this country, you know? It happened after 9/11, it happened, you know, with the Chinese Exclusion Act, it’s been going on for a really long time. It’s part of the way this country has been structured from the beginning. So.
FK: So I guess—to turn this a little bit back towards fandom then, I wonder…one of the things that I think we’ve all observed, you were with us for our last big Race and Fandom episode, that was how we met! We’re very glad you wrote in! But the common complaint within fandom, you know, about anti-Black racism, is the total erasure of Black people. Right? Like, as if they do not exist, as far as fandom is concerned.
And that’s not quite the way it is with racism as far as East Asian people go. Right? K-pop is like, the biggest fandom. There’s tons of people who are interested in anime and manga, right? There’s no lack of—in Western media there’s certainly a lack of Asian characters and so on, but not in the stuff that fans are necessarily consuming, right? But it doesn’t seem that that—that only creates different problems, it seems like, rather than, rather than just solving it, right? Representation is not enough, lack of representation is not enough to fix this issue.
AK: Yeah. So, I mean, to go back to some history, and I will always love going back to history cause I’m a history nerd, so bear with me—
ELM: Yeah!
AK: But if you think about the history of, you know, European and American consumption and sort of that gaze on Asia in general, you can’t ignore the legacy of Orientalism. Right? Like, the way that Asia and you know—this kind of started with more Muslim cultures and South Asian cultures, but it kind of spread to encompass East Asia and Southeast Asia, and the Middle East as well. Like, it’s just so—there was this whole industry of knowledge production. So it wasn’t like you don’t know these people, it was like “We are going to study them, but in a very particular way that will set up the West and the East as these like, concrete and opposing things, where the West is advanced and logical and civilized and the East is, you know, savage and it’s degenerating and it’s ancient and it’s, you know, backward.”
It was so powerful, and it’s still so powerful. Maybe that’s something that a lot of people have forgotten about, but it underpins in so many ways the way that Asian people and Middle Eastern people and, like—no matter where you come from Asia, the way that we are depicted, you know? In Western media. And so like, those ideas are so deeply embedded, and like, you know, a lot of scholars have talked about this in the last couple weeks, like: the very particular way that Asian women are sexualized and fetishized and dehumanized in our media absolutely has something to do with why this white man particularly targeted massage parlors where Asian women were working and that they owned. So.
And it’s not only media! Obviously, the media is very inextricably tied to our military conquests and you know, the imperial expansions and just general like, geopolitics of the last hundreds of years. So I mean, I know that’s very broad, but I think that we can’t ignore that context, even when we talk about fandom, because—there is sometimes an uncomfortable element of like, just taking something that you enjoy without…and I was talking about this before, right? Consuming something that somebody creates but just kind of owning it in a really gross way. Just appropriating it and taking it. And I think unfortunately that’s got a very long history.
I saw some of the Korean-American writers and creators that I follow on Twitter like, just a few days ago, saying like: multiple people have said to me “I’m more Korean than you are,” just because they like, enjoy K-pop and K-dramas. Like, what is that?! Like, what? Like—why would you ever even…it’s so gross! Like, why would you ever say that to anyone? But it’s like this—it’s this really gross kind of Orientalist claiming that happens and I don’t see it as being all that different from when, you know, British people in the 18th century would go to the “East,” quote-unquote, and just like fill their living rooms with like, things from the Orient, as they would call them. You know? Like, curiosities from the Orient.
So…yeah. I feel like this whole conversation has been kind of dark, but um…
FK: No…
ELM: I mean, it’s a dark time! Like, I really appreciate your like, your insight and your thoughts on this.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: I think you’re absolutely right about Orientalism being kind of foundational here. I wonder…it’s, it seems, I’m watching so many white people struggle with this right now, because I know a lot of people who have just discovered Chinese dramas, in particular one of them. [FK: laughs] But now more! And not having any way to navigate that kind of line between like, “I’m obsessed with this so I want to learn everything about this culture,” and like, not being able to not cross that line into appropriation or kind of smothering or othering just by being really—you know what I mean?
AK: Yeah.
ELM: I mean, this has been going on—weeaboos are like… [laughs]
FK: I was gonna say, the weeaboo line. We can just call it the weeaboo line.
ELM: Right? But it’s like, that, you know—that’s like a legendary line and yet we’re like, when was that term invented? And how many decades are we on from that being like, a huge point of conversation? And…
AK: And Koreaboos exist too! They’re definitely out there.
FK: [laughs] Koreaboos!
ELM: [laughs] Yeah.
AK: They are called Koreaboos, yeah.
FK: I remember when I learned about teaboos I was like, wow.
ELM: Teaboos. You know, the best one was that tweet that said “Tired: Francophile. Wired…”
FK: Ouiaboo.
ELM: Ouiaboo!
FK: God.
ELM: O-U-I? Anyway, just a bad pun.
FK: Anyway. Onward. Away from weeaboo puns. Back to seriousness.
ELM: Yeah, I just—I feel like it’s about, I’m watching so many well-meaning white people just struggle with this, and it’s like is there…I don’t know how to like, mitigate…I feel like the question is how to mitigate the harm that’s being caused, because like, unlearning centuries and centuries of structural framings is, doesn’t really seem to be achievable in…
AK: Yeah! I don’t know, because like, coming at it from, when you’re looking particularly at being a fan, you know…OK. So as a person who has always been a minority in every society where I’ve ever lived, I’m very used to watching something about a person of a different race or different gender, and being able to place myself in their shoes, and empathize with them, and be like, “Oh, this is a person’s experience who is different from mine, and they’re a full human,” because that’s all I’ve ever known in media my whole life.
I think a lot of times, white fans haven’t had to do that, and so they don’t know how to do it. I don’t really see fans of color having the same kind of issues, although I am sure that they—sometimes that could also be possible. But I don’t know! I don’t know. Maybe white people will have to solve this one. [laughs]
ELM: I think white people do! But it’s just—
AK: I don’t know! Y’all have any suggestions?
ELM: Yeah, I mean that’s what I’m saying: how do you cause the least amount of harm while you’re being a—
FK: But it’s, but it’s—
ELM: Go ahead.
FK: But it’s also complicated by, like, media as soft power and as consciously being used as soft power. Whether that is successful as not, whether it can be successful or not within these, like, structurally racist framings that the West puts onto things, but…
AK: Yeah.
FK: That complicates it too, right? The relationship that white people then have to some of that stuff—not just white people. Anyone who’s not Korean has to taekwondo or K-pop or maybe now K-dramas is different than the relationship that they might have to something that’s less consciously exported as a cultural product, which doesn’t necessarily mean that you can’t be racist while consuming it—in fact it certainly doesn’t mean you can’t be racist while consuming it, as we see all the time!—but it just makes it so complicated also.
AK: Yeah. I think it also comes down to the individual fan and how much they decide to engage with…I guess what kind of relationship do you want to have to this media, right? Do you just want it to be a fun escapist pretty thing that like, makes your day better and helps you forget about your problems for half an hour, you know? Is that all you’re looking for? Or are you, you know, interested in learning more about the culture and the language and the—I mean, just by virtue of being exposed to more media from a place, you’ll understand more nuances, because if you only ever…I mean, I think you kind of touched on this in your episode where you were interviewing somebody about The Untamed, where like: if you have never been exposed to any Chinese people and any Chinese media and then you just watched The Untamed, you might come to some alarming and weird conclusions! [all laugh] Because you have no context! Right?
ELM: Everyone’s a necromancer. That’s the only thing I know about The Untamed.
AK: If you ever watch, if you only ever watched like one Hollywood movie, and you’ve never met Americans…
ELM: Everyone’s an X-Man!
AK: Right!
ELM: That’s all of us. All of us!
AK: You would have weird ideas.
ELM: That’s not weird.
AK: I mean, I think people also have weird ideas about Americans anyway because of the…
ELM: Yes.
AK: …hegemony of American media around the world. But. [all laugh] I guess what I’m saying is, part of it is just that naturally over time, with more exposure, and especially with something like K-drama where it’s not like a three-and-a-half minute song, it’s a story where you really go deep into the experiences of the characters and you’re seeing life through their eyes in a way, like—of course that’s not reality, that’s, you know, K-drama land, any more than Disney is representing what life is like for Americans. But, it’s a way of sort of building context and building empathy.
And then also there are a lot of people who, after being exposed to this type of media, will actually go and like learn the language. And then there’s me, who decided to get my master’s degree and write my thesis partially about K-drama. So you can be like me! But… [all laugh] Probably don’t, because grad school is really rough.
But I do want to actually talk about my thesis, because I think it kind of connects to what we were talking about. So I wrote about South Korean and Indian popular media, and how it portrays post-partition nationalism. And it makes me think about what you were saying about soft power, Flourish, because I think every type of media does have that sort of nationalist…there’s always that nationalist gesture to some extent.
FK: Mm-hmm.
AK: And it depends on the genre, and it depends on the context of the story, how obvious and how overt that is. But like, looking at these two, you know, like…so with India, there’s India, Pakistan, Bangladesh: they used to be one country. And then you have North Korea and South Korea, they used to be one country. But if you look at the media that is produced by those places and which of those countries have sort of dominant global media industries, and how that affects the way that people around the world perceive people from there…and how they perceive the people from the less-glamorous, less-wealthy neighbors of those countries that used to all be one nation! Right?
I think what really became clear was the connections, because sometimes when you’re only looking at one thing, you’re just like “Oh, this is a weird thing.” But when you compare things and you look at more things and you sort of look at connections between: why were these two countries divided right after World War II? What broader imperial power grabs were they serving? Why did this happen? What is the big picture that a lot of times we don’t get to see, because we’re all sort of divided into our little corners?
And I think that’s always a really valuable thing to look at, is the connections and the continuities and maybe I’m getting too academic now, but I just—I just feel like always learning more is the solution and also learning more with empathy and nuance and humility, as well.
ELM: Can I read your thesis? Is it—
AK: Absolutely!
ELM: Is it available?
AK: Yes! It is published.
FK: Yay!
AK: I will share the link.
ELM: No seriously, seriously, I’m 100% going to read it. This is, this—I, can we share it in the show notes?
AK: Sure!
FK: Yeah!
ELM: Amazing. We can all read it!
FK: I’m extremely excited to read your thesis and that’s also a really positive note to end on, after what was sort of a dark conversation, I guess—is the idea that, you know, it is possible to learn more and to do that with empathy and to connect over, you know, cross-cultural barriers. I think that’s really, you know, that’s what we want to have happen.
ELM: Flourish, the vest-wearing cross-dressing coffee shop baristas—that wasn’t a dark conversation.
FK: Uh, no. [all laugh]
AK: Yeah! I just wanted to say like—I just wanna leave this conversation on a note of joy, because that’s what K-dramas have brought me a lot of: Joy and healing, honestly. And so I think, I know we talked a lot about, you know, consuming something that’s not of your own culture, and obviously we should always approach things with context and with thoughtfulness.
But ultimately, K-dramas just really bring a lot of people a lot of joy, and I’ve noticed—one of the things I’ve noticed in this fandom community is how many people come to them when they’ve been going through something really hard, and that it has gotten them through. And it’s something that continuously comes up when I talk to people who really, really love Korean dramas.
So I just wanted to highlight how lovely that is, and that’s why I stay, you know? The format and the K-drama and the joyfulness and the pretty men and pretty women and all that—that’s what brought me here, and the storytelling, but what really keeps me here is the community. So.
ELM: Sounds fantastic.
FK: Thank you so much.
ELM: Thank you so much for coming on!
AK: Thank you so much for having me!
FK: Bye.
AK: Bye!
[Interstitial music]
FK: That was wonderful. I’m so glad that Anisa was able to take the time to come on and speak with us at more length.
ELM: Yeah, she’s such a thoughtful thinker and speaker and I’m so glad she was able to come on again, you know. I don’t know, kinda sounds like you’re sold on K-dramas!
FK: Yeah! I’m so excited to—like, I really am like…you know I love het tropey romance. [laughs]
ELM: Yes, I do!
FK: You know?! Like, you know that I fundamentally just love het tropey romance. So…
ELM: Yeah! Seems like there’s a lot for you to choose from!
FK: There’s a lot of Cinderella stuff in there, there’s a lot of weird power dynamics, I’m into it!
ELM: OK, after you watch your first K-drama, will you report back?
FK: I will!
ELM: All right, and I’m gonna read her thesis, which is extremely up my alley! That’s up my alley.
FK: [laughs] The two genders. All right. [both laughing]
ELM: So, before we go, saved it for the end this time, old-school style, because this is how we used to do it.
FK: Patreon.com/fansplaining!
ELM: Yes. That is our Patreon.
FK: It is the way that we fund this podcast and so if you’re enjoying what you’re hearing now and what you’ve been hearing for awhile, we really really appreciate anyone who’s able to contribute. As little as $1 a month! And at every pledge level, you get some great benefits, which include the most popular level, $3 a month—you get access to a bunch of special episodes. There’s a ton of content there; we just did a bunch of them. But $5 a month you get a cute enamel pin, $10 a month you get a Tiny Zine every once in a while, really there’s no going wrong here. So you know?
ELM: [laughs] Really.
FK: Really!
ELM: Really.
FK: Really there’s no going wrong here.
ELM: Just for context, the most recent special episodes—we did one on WandaVision, a show that we were ambivalent about, and…I feel like I have to say that because I don’t want anyone to pledge thinking we’re gonna be like praising it left and right, but maybe you wanna hear some critique!
FK: We did enjoy it. We did enjoy it as well as critique it.
ELM: Eh, I didn’t—in the end I didn’t enjoy it. I said this last time and I’m going to say it again: just FYI, in the end, the negatives outweighed the positives for me, I’m sorry to say.
FK: Anyway.
ELM: And the other one we did recently was part of our Tropefest series where we talk about tropes, things that sometimes I love and oftentimes Flourish loves.
FK: Often.
ELM: And this one was about hurt/comfort.
FK: A trope that we both like!
ELM: Yes, I like hurt/comfort.
FK: Excellent!
ELM: Who doesn’t?
FK: OK, so Elizabeth, but what if I don’t want to or can’t afford to pledge to Fansplaining? Is there any way that I can support this great podcast?
ELM: Oh my God. [FK: laughs] That’s what I have to say to you. So. Yeah. We absolutely understand that for some people right now, it’s a really difficult financial time. Absolutely understand if you can’t afford to pledge or if you previously were pledging and you had to drop off, we totally get it and we really appreciate any previous support or any future support. But if you don’t have any cash, no worries at all. There are other ways to support us and interact with us.
One is by subscribing to the podcast by sharing its contents. We have full transcripts of every episode. You can share those with friends who are not podcast listeners.
Also, you can get in touch with us, send us comments, questions, they are the basis of a lot of our episodes. So the ways to do that are—you ready?
FK: I’m ready.
ELM: OK! Fansplaining at gmail dot com. Right?
FK: Mm-hmm.
ELM: Yeah, OK?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: You can call and leave a voicemail at 1-401-526-FANS, you can use your real voice on the air.
FK: Great method.
ELM: Really good method! There is a submission form, now complete with an optional spot to put your email address—which we advise you to do if you would like a response from us at fansplaining.com, that’s our main website. On Tumblr, fansplaining.tumblr.com, our askbox is open, anon is on, you can leave us a question there. We might answer it via the Tumblr ask functionality, we might answer it here. And finally, we’re also on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook @fansplaining. Those are not great places to leave us questions or comments but they are places to see what we’re up to! And sometimes to take tiny polls, like the one we did recently about subscribing to one-shots on the AO3. Fascinating!
FK: You’ll have to go check us out on social media to see the results of that poll!
ELM: No, let’s do a teeny-tiny, teeny-tiny preview. Very very interesting results!
FK: Very very interesting results.
ELM: We did a little UX study for the OTW that no-one asked for, like…
FK: We really did. So the poll was saying, AO3 readers: do you ever subscribe to one-shots? And if you do, then answer this poll: what’s your primary reason for doing it.
ELM: Right. Because I had a few people had just subscribed to my most recent one-shot, and I was like “Do they think I’m writing more? Cause I’m not,” like, this was a contained story, right? And I was curious if they, and I’d also seen a post on Tumblr saying that subscribing to one-shots was like leaving extra kudos.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: So I wanted to know how widespread that was, if people were like saying like—
FK: 25% of our responses said that that was why they were doing it! It was like leaving extra kudos!
ELM: Fascinating.
FK: Mind-blowing.
ELM: We specified between like, whether you were kinda absently saying “Yeah, it’d be really nice if you wrote a sequel, just FYI, I’d like to be notified,” versus just like “Hey, please write a sequel!” We weren’t framing it like people were demanding a sequel. But.
FK: Right. Right.
ELM: You know? But some people in the replies were like “It’s easier than bookmarking!” Which is the one, that blows my mind. Because I’m not sure that’s true.
FK: Anyway, go check it out on our Twitter account.
ELM: Yeah, we’ll include a link in the show notes. You can see the full results and replies.
FK: All right. I think that might be it!
ELM: Yeah, I think it is!
FK: All right, well, as always it’s a pleasure talking with you Elizabeth, and I’ll talk to you later!
ELM: Extremely formal sign-off, Flourish, thank you very much.
FK: [laughs] Goodbye, Ms. Minkel.
ELM: Do the wave that people do at the end of Zoom meetings at work. Bye! We’re both waving!
FK: Bye!
ELM: Bye! Bye!
[Outro music, thank-yous and credits]