Episode 149: The Real Character
In Episode 149, “The Real Character,” Flourish and Elizabeth examine the rhetorical phenomenon of framing fictional characters as real, living people, independent of the texts in which they were created. Topics covered include Plato’s allegory of the cave, “comfort characters,” bad writing advice, and how people choose to externalize their emotions.
Show Notes
[00:00:00] As always, our intro music is “Awel” by stefsax, used under a CC BY 3.0 license.
[00:02:50] We talked about this poll in Episode 145, “The Fic and the Source Material.” Make sure to check out the accompanying visualizations! As for Inexplicifics’s fic—that’s from Episode 146, “If You Give A Fan A Cookie.”
[00:05:00] Inexplicifics’s spreadsheet of works inspired by “The Accidental Warlord and His Pack.”
[0:08:45] Our interstitial music is “Wandering” by Lee Rosevere, from Music for Podcasts 2, used under a CC BY 3.0 license.
[00:11:12]
[00:15:10] We talked about the end of Supernatural and the surrounding ~discourse in Episode 139, “The ‘Q’ is for ‘Queerbaiting’.”
[00:19:10]
[00:25:31] The study Flourish is referring to was covered in The Guardian.
[00:29:12] We actually talked about some of the experiences Elizabeth is referring to—feeling as though characters are present when you’re in the place your favorite story is set—in Episode 69, “Fan Tourism.”
[00:32:58] We often talk about external factors in TV writing, but some good starting points are Episode 17, “The Powers That Be,” and Episode 43, “A Fangirl Goes to Hollywood.”
[00:47:53] The full transcript of J. K. Rowling’s interview with Emma Watson is available here. ; Elizabeth’s response was “The Author Sends Her Regrets: J. K. Rowling and Other Writers With Second Thoughts,” in The Millions.
Alas, the original tweet Elizabeth is referring to has been deleted, but it lives on in screenshots:
@bafeldman tweets: “jk rowling wakes up what’s today’s tweet spins large bingo cage hagrid…is…pansexual and…he later joined isis” on Jun 8, 2015
[00:52:35] If you, too, want to find out what A/B/O type you are, be our guest. (Flourish is an “alpha-passing omega,” it turns out, which completely tracks.)
[00:53:24] And for the record, this is the Darkling—or, in Flourish’s estimation, “straight-acting Magneto”:
But then there’s...Real Magneto:
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 #149, “The Real Character.”
FK: The truth about…what character. Some character. Every character.
ELM: Any character, any character.
FK: The truth about Dean Winchester.
ELM: To pick one completely arbitrary example.
FK: Bucky Barnes.
ELM: Another completely arbitrary example.
FK: Having nothing to do with Twitter discourse that we’ve seen recently at all.
ELM: OK. So this topic has been percolating for the last six months or so, I think. We just keep noticing some trends over and over again, we’ll send them to each other when we see these tweet threads or whatever. Basically, these ideas aren’t new, but I think that there are some kind of new and popular and rapidly rising-in-popularity framings around the existence of a true form of a character who has been, like, mistreated, whether they are suppressed or like, sent in the wrong direction, or lied about by the writers who are in fact constructing them because they are fictional characters.
FK: So we wanna talk about this, but I think we have something else to do. We have, like, a letter to read, don’t we?
ELM: We do have a letter to read. Somewhat related to characters and the truth, I guess! So a few months ago we ran a survey that was about whether you had to know the source material to read fic about that source material, and we got a huge range of responses in that survey. The results are fascinating. If for some reason you missed all of this, we’ll put the article you wrote analyzing the results with the data visualizations, as well as the episode where we talked through them all, in the show notes. But while we were covering that topic—what was this? In March? February?
FK: Something like that.
ELM: November? June? I don’t like—time is meaningless.
FK: Time is meaningless.
ELM: Is it 1998? I don’t even know.
FK: It was not 1998.
ELM: Yeah, it definitely wasn’t. I didn’t have…
FK: Body glitter.
ELM: Wi-fi. No, I didn’t have body glitter.
FK: I had body glitter in 1998, but not in March.
ELM: I definitely had the stuff where you could, like, put color in your hair with kind of a lip gloss tube?
FK: Oh, I never had that!
ELM: Yeah, just to give it a little try.
FK: The different—the different kinds of people we are.
ELM: Teeny try.
FK: I’m the body glitter person and—
ELM: I didn’t like actually dye my hair until I was in college, but. All right. Anyway.
So in this year, 2021, when we were talking about this topic, someone wrote in to us to say that they really enjoyed a fic—it was like a massive fic, hundreds of thousands of words—in the Witcher fandom, and the interesting thing about it was the writer had not actually seen The Witcher television show that this was based on. And so that was interesting, starting to think about, you know, how that could have worked, how it could feel compelling, how you could really—maybe, maybe a reader who loves that would care less about the source material and just be looking for a really good story, or the ideas of constructions within fandoms or whatever. And the writer of the fic heard this and wrote in to us!
FK: Aaaaa! That was the noise that I made when we got the email by the way: aaaa!
ELM: Delightful! So do you wanna read their letter?
FK: I’ll read it. OK. This is from inexplicifics, who has a great name.
“Hello! I am immensely flattered to have been mentioned on your podcast!
“I think you’ve hit the nail on the head with the idea of ‘possibility space,’ honestly. I’m not sure writing such an out-there AU would have worked if there wasn’t this gap between (as I understand it) the book characters, the game characters, and the Netflix characters, not to mention the Hexer and the musical versions. I’ll admit my characters were heavily influenced by the gifsets and descriptions I have seen of the Netflix characters—as I understand it, book Geralt is a lot more talkative, for one thing—but just the fact that it’s very hard to point at one canon and say it is the definitive and only canon probably makes it easier for my readers to adapt to the versions I’ve created.
“I did want to say that I am also very confused as to how I’ve turned out a third of a million words in a fandom for which I don’t have any interest in the actual canon. I’ve always read in many fandoms, regardless of knowing the canon—I tend to find an author I like and devour everything they've ever written, then go from there—but this is honestly the first time I’ve ever written in an unfamiliar fandom. I’m going to blame the pandemic for that—I was reading a lot of Witcher fic when the pandemic started, and then I desperately needed something to do to distract myself. (I also think that may be why it's gotten such a positive response—it’s very much a fix-it, make-everything-better AU, and sometimes when the world is going to shit around you, you want a story in which good people win, and the world gets better, yeah?)
“I did want to mention the interesting phenomenon of works inspired by my AU: there are a lot of them, which is part of why I think I may have hit a very unexpected chord somewhere. (I made a spreadsheet!)” And aside, we’ll link to that.
“Anyhow, I'm delighted to have been mentioned on your podcast, and I hope you like my silly AU if you do happen to check it out! All the best, inexplicifics.”
ELM: I am so glad—I’m so glad we got to hear from the writer! And to kind of hear that perspective of actually creating this work as opposed to like, speculating about how someone could do this, right? And it’s interesting to think about, like, the writer potentially being in the same space as the readers who are also doing this kind of reading where they don’t need to, you know, know canon like the back of your hand, as you wrote in the questions on that survey.
FK: [laughs] Yeah, totally. And I think—and it’s also interesting to me that, you know, I think something that sometimes when we’re talking about people’s behavior around fic—at least when I do it—I sometimes like, I guess overstate people’s intentionality in what they’re doing, you know what I mean? I’m like “Oh yeah, and then I chose to read this or chose to read that, consciously, I really chose it meaningfully.” But what inexplicifics is saying here is “I don’t know, I just sort of started writing it, one day I wanted to do it and I just sort of did it. I wasn’t thinking too hard about it, and then I was surprised that I had done it,” you know what I mean?
And I think that’s interesting! It feels—I guess to me it’s like, yeah, OK, I do see that. I do see like, “oh yeah, I just started reading this thing cause someone sent it to me, and then I was reading a bunch of these fics, and then I—” you know? I don’t know. There’s something about our behavior that sometimes I think I want to pin, like, “you made a choice and then you did this,” and of course people do make choices, but they’re not always like super-consciously like, “yes, I’m going to go and find a canon that I don’t know and write a fic in it,” you know?
ELM: This is a very strange—I feel like we constantly talk about how people in fandom make a lot of unconscious choices. [FK laughs] And now you’re saying that you try to ascribe intentionality. But we explicitly discuss how people don’t know what they’re doing. Like—it’s not like they don’t know what they’re doing, they’re doing something [laughs] and they’re unaware of it, and I think that is actually why—I mean, I think that’s why our surveys and sometimes our episode topics too, we’ve gotten a lot of feedback over the years, people saying like “I’ve always done the thing you’re talking about or the thing I had to own up to in this survey question, and I never interrogated why and it’s really interesting to think about why.
FK: You’re right.
ELM: It’s a huge running theme here, right? Y’know?
FK: People always say that, you’re right. You’re right.
ELM: You know I was just sitting here the whole time you were talking being like, “What?!” [laughs]
FK: Yeah, I know! I mean, you’re right that that’s a thing that’s happening, but I think when I talk about it I want—I have this fantasy that I can—and maybe it’s a fantasy also that I fully know what I’m doing, which is never true.
ELM: No, yeah, but I think it’s interesting to deconstruct after the fact. And I think that, I don’t know, you seem very interested in the fact that I seem able to articulate what I want to do in writing, right?
FK: It’s weird!!! [both laugh]
ELM: Right, right! But I also feel like, I—it’s something that I have, you know, obviously have a lot of experience with as an English major and then a literary critic and then an editor, you know what I mean? This is literally my job, it has been in the past. And so I have a lot of experience kind of deconstructing that, and most of the time—like in the 2000s when I was reading and writing fic—I wasn’t able to articulate that particularly well. So it’s OK.
FK: Yeah, it is OK. Anyway, thank you inexplicifics. That was a delightful response to get.
ELM: Yeah! Thank you very much. OK, do you wanna take a quick break before we get into the character interrogation? Character assassination?
FK: [laughs] Character assassination.
ELM: They’re not real, so no one’s actually gonna get assassinated.
FK: Yeah yeah yeah. It is only a metaphor. OK. Let’s take a very quick break.
[Interstitial music]
FK: All right, we’re back, and I guess we should have our little typical message about how you can support this podcast.
ELM: “Typical.”
FK: Typical! Everyday. Usual. Ordinary.
ELM: Quotidian.
FK: In the most—yeah! Quotidian! In the most, you know, specific sense.
ELM: Our quotidian message.
FK: [laughs] What is our message, Elizabeth?
ELM: I’m gonna do it.
FK: Kay.
ELM: So, patreon.com/fansplaining, we make this podcast with the financial support of listeners and readers like you. Got the whole NPR thing going right now. [FK laughs] And so probably everyone knows this, but we like to say it every week: if you are a new listener or a returning listener, if you’ve ever thought about pledging as little as a dollar a month—as much as as many dollars as you want per month—not just dollars! You can do it in a variety of currencies now. I enjoy it when we get a notification that says someone has switched from dollars to their local currency and I’m like “I’m glad this is now an option.”
And so we have a lot of different rewards at different levels. Like at $2 a month, we don’t talk about that one very often, but you get the podcast on Tuesdays! Some of our very loyal patrons will respond to us on Tuesdays, which is exciting. I’m really glad to know people are waiting for that drop.
Our most popular level is $3 a month, that includes the early access, but you also get access to—how many now are we talking? Close to two dozen, I want to say—
FK: Yeah.
ELM: —special episodes. They include us talking about Watchmen and Schitt’s Creek and Succession and a variety of other media properties that we had positive-to-mixed feelings about, I would say. And nothing—nothing that we hated. We wouldn’t bother with that. And then we’ve also been doing this past year a series called “tropefest,” where we talk about different tropes and kind of do some of the deconstruction about why we write what we write and why we enjoy what we enjoy that Flourish was just puzzling and scratching their head over. [both laugh]
$5 a month, you get an enamel pin in addition to all that other stuff. $10 a month you get a tiny zine. $20 a month, ostensibly we’re supposed to come to your town someday—or you come to our town. Hell of a town, our town! I don’t know why I just called it that. If you’re in New York City, ever— [both laugh] C’mon back, it’s the summer of George! And we’re gonna buy you drinks. You know the reference to summer of George, Flourish?!
FK: [laughs] I have no idea what you’re talking about.
ELM: Oh my God, do you not exist on the internet!? There’s a famous Seinfeld where George—George Costanza says it’s gonna be the summer of George, and then things just do not go his way. And there’s a famous image that’s been used a lot in the last year of George in a hospital bed, looking crestfallen, and the caption is “It was supposed to be the summer of George.”
FK: [laughs] I’ve literally never seen this, so I’m glad that you explained the joke to me, Elizabeth.
ELM: It’s like a, it’s like a—oh my God, you don’t have enough Seinfeld memes on your feed. That’s sad.
FK: I don’t have Seinfeld memes—
ELM: Leave!
FK: I do not feel sad for not having Seinfeld memes on my feed.
ELM: Leave. Get outta New York City. Leave. Go.
FK: Oh my God.
ELM: Anyway! Uh, if you…
FK: Maybe I’ll just have to, since I’ll have gotten out of New York City, you might just have to have drinks with Elizabeth, since I apparently have to go back to Northern California where I and all other scourge-of-New-York people come from.
ELM: Get out! [laughs] So that’s that. Those are the rewards. We really appreciate any and all financial support. Do you wanna take over the second half?
FK: Sure! If you don’t want to give us financial support or don’t feel like it or whatever, no problem, we totally get it, and you can support us in other ways: by telling people about the podcast—always super helpful. By writing in to us or leaving us a voicemail. You can email us at fansplaining at gmail.com. You can call us at 1-401-526-FANS. You’ll get a voicemail and then you can leave us a message and we’ll potentially play it on the podcast.
You can reach out to us on social media. We’re pretty much “fansplaining” everywhere, on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Tumblr—probably the best of those if you want to send us a message that’s a real ask or a comment is Tumblr, where our askbox is open and our anon is on. We’ve also got a little form on our website that you can use if you want to send us a message that could be either anonymous or not anonymous, up to you. And obviously, if you don’t want us to read your name or share your information on the air, we won’t do it! But it really helps when we get feedback and also questions and comments from you guys. That spurs many, many episodes.
I don’t know, what else is there to talk about?
ELM: I think that’s all there is to talk about!
FK: Except the reality of characters.
ELM: All right, let’s do this.
FK: OK. So as you were saying before, this is all coming from seeing—I think I mostly have seen it on Twitter, but it’s everywhere else too, these comments that are like…
ELM: “Mostly on Twitter, but it’s everywhere else.” [laughs]
FK: No, I mean, I’ve seen it on Tumblr and things, but I just see it regularly on Twitter, right? It’s coming up a lot of times in people’s comments on Twitter. And I see it, like, I’ve seen it on Reddit threads! Where people are like “This episode was a betrayal of this character and their truth.” Right? “The reality of this character was not represented in this episode of whatever-it-is,” right, whether that’s—literally name your show.
What people are trying to say is “I don’t like the way this character was characterized in the episode, it didn’t feel good to me, it didn’t feel like it was well-written, I’m not happy with the direction the story went,” something like that. But the way that they’re saying it is, “This episode does not represent this character accurately or correctly or truthfully.” And that “truthfully” thing gets me. [laughs]
ELM: Right. I think you’re kind of underselling it a little bit. It’s the sort of idea—and it’s pretty explicit in a lot of this commentary—that the character exists outside of the text.
FK: Yeah. Independently of anything.
ELM: Yeah, it’s a direct betrayal of an independently embodied character.
FK: Right.
ELM: I think that one of the more interesting rhetorical framings of this that we saw in the last year was around the finale of Supernatural, the hashtag for Dean, #theysilencedyou, or commentary “they silenced you,” right? The idea that Dean had some truth to say—the true Dean had truth to say, and that the writers suppressed that truth.
FK: Right. Dean wanted to say that he loved Castiel. But he was not allowed to do that.
ELM: Right. And obviously this has got the direct thing of there was, you know, people chose to translate the scene—or dub the scene differently in different languages, and that’s why there’s this big voice element of “He was able to say it in a different language, why did you suppress him in the native language of this show.”
FK: But it’s also implicit, even when it’s—so that’s an extremely explicit one, where it’s like, Dean—a character who exists separately from this text—had something to say very actively. But it’s also implicit in so many of the framings that we use to talk about characters. “So-and-so deserved better,” right? Well, you know, that’s less active of a thing, but it’s still saying “There was a character—like, Rose Tico—and she existed, and she deserved better.”
ELM: Right.
FK: You know? And like—again, let’s note, I’m not saying—by the way—that I disagree. Sure, I would have—personally, I would have loved to see Dean say that he loved Castiel, and I think Rose could’ve had a bigger part. I’m not coming at this from like a, you know, “you’re delusional and your ideas are wrong about what should happen in these stories.” It’s not that. It’s the specific way that people talk about it that I want to interrogate, personally. You know what I mean? It’s not about the content of what they’re trying to argue for.
ELM: Right.
FK: Cause you see it on every side of the political spectrum and every position you can old.
ELM: Right, right. Yeah. And I do think with statements like “Rose deserved better” or “Finn deserved better,” things like that, sometimes—often—there’s kind of a pairing of the actual actor.
FK: Right.
ELM: And because we are often talking about actors from marginalized groups, then you can say there is an element of “this Black character, this Black actor, deserved better.” Those go hand-in-hand. I totally get that, right?
FK: Right. But at the same time you also see it like—I mean, on the, the side that I would largely consider not the side of the angels, right, when people are complaining about—I don’t know—a multiracial casting, people saying “that’s not so-and-so.”
ELM: Sure.
FK: Which, again, like the “deserved better” thing, that’s much muddier than the discussion of Dean having a voice and not being able to say something, but I feel like it does edge into this idea of like—that there is that character out there somewhere, you know what I mean? And that this person can’t possibly embody them. When the truth is, I don’t know, that’s not how characters work, right? Characters are in texts, and so if there is a text portraying that character in a way, then it can’t be untrue—you know what I mean? Like…it can be incoherent with another story, but it’s not like it’s untrue. And it’s not like it’s fake, you know what I mean?
There’s this idea, there’s this question I have, right—so all of this reminds me a lot of [laughs] sorry, I thought that I was not going to get philosophical for this, but I’m going to.
ELM: Wow. OK. I’m ready.
FK: All right?
ELM: OK.
FK: It’s like Platonic ideals.
ELM: OK.
FK: It’s the idea of the forms, right?
ELM: Yeah.
FK: You know, you know? OK, I’m gonna say this, even though you know what the Platonic ideal of the forms are—
ELM: Go ahead, explain it. I’m sure a lot of people have not encountered this.
FK: So Plato.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: Extremely old philosopher, had this idea about the world. Well, I don’t know that he was old.
ELM: [laughs] Yeah! Some old dude.
FK: He lived [laughs] he lived—
ELM: Wore a toga, man!
FK: He did probably—he wore—anyway he wore drapey garments. I don’t know that it was actually a toga.
ELM: Yeah, not precise.
FK: I’m pretty sure that you don’t actually call it a toga at that point. But.
ELM: No, yeah, probably not, but.
FK: Anyway. So he had this idea, which is—it was an idea about the world, and the way to describe it was, he said: imagine a human being who is raised in a cave and the cave is set up so there’s like images, there’s a mouth of the cave and there’s the whole world outside of the cave, and the shadows of like, all of the animals and the trees and everything, outside of this cave, are projected on the back wall of the cave like shadow-play, right? Because you’ve got the sun shining into the cave with the things—
ELM: Side note, there’s literally no way I can envision this now without thinking of that meme, which depicts it as like an underground cave. You know the meme I’m talking about?
FK: [laughs] I don’t.
ELM: Oh if I send it to you—I’ll have to find it somehow.
FK: I probably, I probably—OK.
ELM: Yeah, yeah. Continue.
FK: So anyway. The images out there are projected on the back wall but they’re just shadows, right? So then the person who’s been raised in this cave and is bound in such a way that they can only look at the back wall of the cave, they think that those shadows are the real things in the world. And so if you like, if you knocked off their chains and like, brought them out of the cave, they would be like “What the fuck, that’s a tree? That’s the thing! That’s the real tree that was just being depicted on the wall of the cave!” And their mind would be blown. They’d be like “Holy shit, I see the relationship! It’s a tree and it looks like the shadow of this tree, but I never knew what the real tree was, it’s so much more tree-like, holy shit, it’s got a smell—”
ELM: Why would that person say “it’s so much more tree-like”?
FK: Well, I don’t know, but Plato thinks they would.
ELM: How do they define “tree-like”? They’ve never seen a tree!
FK: Plato thinks they would.
ELM: I think that’s a big assumption, Plato.
FK: Well, take it up with Plato. So anyway, point being—
ELM: I will!
FK: The idea being then, also, that’s like one of the ways he describes it, but then he also talks about how there are many different kinds of trees, but we know that they’re all trees. And so he’s like, somewhere in between all of these trees—they’re all reflections of the true form of a tree. And the true form of a tree is not like a redwood or a beech tree or anything like that, it’s like, there’s one perfect tree that’s like, the true form of the tree, and these are all poor reflections of this tree.
ELM: I can’t believe I let you take us down this road. Continue.
FK: Anyway, so my point being that this makes me think of that because it’s like these people who are talking about this stuff think that there’s a true form of the Dean!
ELM: Seeing the shadow of Dean Winchester…
FK: And Dean Winchester is only a shadow, like, reflected into our minds, but somewhere out there there’s the true form of Dean! [ELM laughing] Who loves Castiel and wants to tell us about it!
ELM: Oh, my goodness. OK. Thank you for taking us on the, on a path, a journey.
FK: Sorry. You encouraged me to go on this journey! I should let you respond to my journey.
ELM: No no, I think it is helpful. I think that’s one of many tools in our toolbox to analyze this phenomenon. [both laugh]
FK: Gimme another tool, because this is—this is my tool. I’m wielding it like a hammer. Everything is a nail, in the shape of Dean Winchester!
ELM: All right. So there’s a lot of things going on, right? And I—I think that this is, it’s a particularly fandomy conversation, and when I say that I mean that there are a lot of things that fans do that I think viewers, plain viewers—standard viewers?—might not do.
FK: Mm-hmm.
ELM: It makes me immediately think of the very popular current phrase “comfort character,” for example. And if you haven’t encountered that one in the wild, it’s this kind of idea of—it’s like your character, right? Your, I mean, it’s pretty self-explanatory, right? “That’s my comfort character,” or people say “that’s my emotional support character” or whatever.
Just this idea of like—and people will use it sometimes in a joking way, often in a joking way, to kind of deflect criticism. To be like, “Ma’am, that’s my emotional support character. He never did anything wrong,” right? [FK laughs] Like, “I don’t wanna have discourse about this guy, this is just my guy,” right?
FK: Yep.
ELM: And it’s an interesting set of constructions, because it’s this idea of like—this character is so close to me. This is just the character I’ve latched onto, for whatever, reason, whether it’s “I see myself in them” or “they just really appeal to me so I’m holding them close,” right? But the former there, you know, “I see myself in them,” I think is a huge part of fandom. People constantly talk about how they relate to characters, and there’s kind of a spectrum that gets fully into like, kinning and this kind of idea that you feel you embody a character, right? And obviously the lines are really blurry about how these terms get used, right.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Like in roleplaying and stuff like that, right? You may truly feel that you are X character. Or you may just be like, “I enjoy pretending to be this character, we have a lot in common,” you know? And I think it’s within that kind of—“spectrum” even feels too clean. Like, that kind of muddy swirl of these different ways that we relate to characters. That’s where a lot of this comes from, you know, this kind of idea of “This character is mine, and so in my head now they’ve kind of evolved into something that is separate and embodied and they just exist and they are mine and I’m going to see critique of them from fans as a violence—”
FK: Right.
ELM: “I’m going to see any—” you know, I’ve seen so much commentary about people feeling nervous about new installments of their favorite thing, because they are worried about what, you know—
FK: Right, what will happen.
ELM: The separately-embodied character that they love is going to be, you know, what’s going to be done to them, right?
FK: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
ELM: Cause it’s like, outside of their control. And you know, it’s clear that they’re worried about what the writers or the directors or whatever are going to do to them—the viewers, the fans, right? But it’s easier to say “I’m really worried about what they’re going to do to Bucky.”
FK: Right.
ELM: I don’t know, I’m just picking a random character for literally no reason.
FK: Because people are constantly talking about him right now.
ELM: I haven’t muted him yet, I still see his name constantly, no offense Bucky stans. So like, this kind of idea of saying “Oh, what are they going to do to him?” is a deflective way to say: “I’m really nervous that they’re gonna make decisions that I don’t like that are gonna hurt me.”
FK: Right.
ELM: And it kind of lets you externalize your vulnerability onto this—this character can do so much work just sitting out in the world here, kind of taking on—and “Oh, I have to protect, I have to throw my body in front of them to protect them,” too, that kind of thing, right.
FK: Right, completely. Yeah, that’s really interesting. I feel like—you know, you’re saying it’s very fandomy, and I think that that’s true, but it’s not like it’s only fans who experience characters as kind of external to them sometimes, you know what I mean?
ELM: Sure, OK, yeah.
FK: Like, when we were talking about this, I found this article—which has like, which was talking about this study that people at Durham University did—that said that 19% of their respondents said that the voices of fictional characters stayed with them when they weren’t reading. Like, they read a novel and then like, the character would continue to either influence the way that they narrated their world or even like, be sort of an external voice in their head. Like, they would read Catcher in the Rye and then it would feel like Holden Caulfield was commenting on everything they were doing after that, right?
ELM: That would be—I am not a hater of that book but that would be a very tiring day, I have to say.
FK: It would be a very tiring day. But I thought that was interesting, because I was like—that’s just like random normal people, like, a lot of people—
ELM: Well, you don’t know that. You’re making a lot of assumptions.
FK: OK, maybe they’re not random people, but anyway that’s not fans, right? They’re not like, specifically seeking out fandomy people. And so I guess that makes it feel like—one of the things about this is that it is sort of normal, that it is normalized in a lot of ways, when people talk about writing or they talk about reading or they talk about characters in general, I should say, because we’re often talking about TV shows with fandom—there is an idea of the externalized character, and so this—
ELM: Sure.
FK: This seems like it’s just sort of like a natural continuation of the way that people are already talking about characters, just as an everyday behavior, you know what I mean? It’s not like it’s—it’s not like—I don’t know, I think when we too fine-grained and talk about it being fandom, I think that some people tend to like…especially people who aren’t fans themselves, they tend to like, pathologize this, kind of. You know what I mean?
ELM: Well, all right, but you’re kind of taking a step back and bringing it into the kind of foundations of just, you know, viewership and readership, right.
FK: That’s true.
ELM: Which I totally acknowledge.
FK: That’s true.
ELM: I guess I kind of jumped the gun here, because I was adding the level of—like, the affective level, right?
FK: Yeah, yeah, exactly.
ELM: You know, I definitely have had the experience of being really engrossed in a novel and just feeling the presence of that novel, just lingering with me for days and days and days. And thinking about specific characters, or like, there are still some—you know, I mean, this is a very dramatic example, but I would not pass either Lispenard Street or Green Street, where the characters in A Little Life live. Lispenard Street in particular. But I’m never passing Lispenard Street again without thinking, like—
FK: It’s true. Here I am, walking with them down the street.
ELM: Right? And I do this all the time, and I think about, I mean, we live in a place where a lot of fictional characters spend a lot of time. And I definitely, as I walk around New York City, I will think about various characters that have stuck with me—like, being embodied in that place.
FK: Yeah, they feel like sort of—for me it feels like there’s little ghosts of these characters, you know.
ELM: Right, right. Exactly. So I think that’s pretty normal. But also the kind of idea of internal narration staying with you, right? Especially if it’s a very notable style. Like, definitely that stays with me. But it’s not the same thing as when I feel fannish about something. I can feel a lot of affection for the book, and maybe even for the characters, but it doesn’t feel the same way as when I’m in a fandom, right?
FK: Right.
ELM: So I think there’s a kind of a spectrum here. And I’m not saying that everyone in fandom feels this deep level of affect, too. Especially in fanfiction fandom, I think one thing we found a lot of in our research is that there are plenty of people in fanfiction fandom who don’t have that kind of deep, deep, deep character attachment or source material attachment, right?
FK: Right.
ELM: They’re interested in interesting stories and getting attached to one character very fleetingly, getting invested in one story at a time, that kind of thing. So like, I don’t wanna over-generalize. But I’m trying to parse it! When I’m in a fandom, especially early on—especially when I have, like, a ship—I think about the characters a lot. And I certainly think about them, imagine them as real. The fanfiction series that I’m working on right now, whenever I walk in the parts of Manhattan where I’ve set some of the story, I think about them! I think about them physically being there.
FK: Right.
ELM: I imagine them, like, just on the sidewalk, walkin’ around, being like “Oh, this is where they hang out!” Right? Or, “they’ve been here!” Right?
FK: Totally.
ELM: Then I get real cheesy in my head, and I like, overlay the time period and start thinking about all this stuff, and it feels very present and physical to me, and I think of them as real in that way, but I also think of myself as the author of these characters in this context, right? Because I’ve yanked them from authorship, from their canonical authorship [laughs] and they’re mine now, right? And so…but I think of them as the author, I don’t think of them as my friends that writers can do a violence to by writing, making bad story choices, because I think of myself as in control of them as a writer. Right? And I can hold those two things in my head side-by-side.
FK: Right.
ELM: And it’s not a challenge to do that, right?
FK: Right. By comparison, I think that there’s a lot of, you know—not having come from a highly schooled writing background, but just from people who—
ELM: Highly schooled.
FK: Highly schooled, right! Like not having taken a lot of classes about writing, not having engaged with a lot of that, but just coming from—I’ve written a lot of stuff and talked to people who write and stuff, but not in a—
ELM: I gotta say: this is not an area in writing workshops that we’ve spent a lot of time on!
FK: I know! And that’s what I’m—but that’s what I’m, that’s sort of what I’m trying to say is that I feel like one of the things that people talk about, that I’ve never heard in the few writing workshops I’ve taken, is the idea of having the characters who live in your head, or talk to you, or tell you what it is, which I’ve come to—I’ve come to understand that as people saying, “I have instinctual ideas about characters,” or “I have thought about characters a bunch, but I can’t explain to you why I think the character would do this instead of that, it’s just a gut feeling for me: the character would do this instead of that. So it feels like I know another person.”
It’s like how I think “Oh yeah, Elizabeth would do X instead of Y,” because we’re friends and I know you. And I’m not sure that I could say “oh yes, I know why that is,” but just “cause that’s an Elizabeth thing to do and not this other thing,” right?
ELM: OK…
FK: So I think a lot of people in their writing come from that perspective, and it does begin to feel—because they’re thinking of it not in those very “I am in control” terms, and because so much language around it—so many writers talk about it as the “characters who live in their head” or whatever, it begins to get very blurry, right? Like—I think that there’s like a point at which people, not you, but a lot of people, begin to sort of feel that affectively internally as a difference.
And this may be why fans are more likely to have this kind of idea of a character as truly being, you know, separate and hurtable. Because if you are observing—if you’re writing or engaged with writing or seeing other people who are engaged with writing, and all these people are sort of doing versions of this character in that space and talking about it in that way, I guess—I see that becoming normalized, does that make sense?
ELM: OK, no, it doesn’t.
FK: Oh no! [laughs]
ELM: I’m gonna go back to your foundational premise of what you were—the thread of what you just said.
FK: OK.
ELM: This idea that writers talk about their work like “Oh I don’t know, the character just did this.” Yes, I agree, there is a wanky line of writing talk where people are like “the character just came off the page and just started doing—” No. No! I hate that. I hate it! No offense to anyone who’s ever said that out loud.
FK: I’m not saying that you’d like it! I’m just saying that I think it is a thread that exists and particularly in certain corners!
ELM: It definitely exists, but you hear so many writers talking about—maybe it depends on the context and maybe they would have to be giving like a, doing an interview that’s specifically focused on writing, right? But they’ll explain why they made decisions.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And I get that, I get that in a lot of TV we don’t get that insight because, I don’t know, sometimes it seems like frankly these TV writers may not be able to explain why, you know? Or like, there were—as we’ve discussed eight million times in this podcast—there were external factors that meant that certain actors have to do certain things which meant they had to kind of backfill why they would do whatever, right.
FK: Yeah, yeah.
ELM: One writer that I really admire, one TV writer who talks about this really articulately, is Dan Levy discussing Schitt’s Creek, and the kind of character growth that they really worked hard on in the show, and like, talking about like why different characters would do different things at different moments, because this is where they were, and he talks about it really intentionally, about writing choices that he makes. And I actually found it really enjoyable to listen to, because I guess to your point, it’s not that common that people really can go into it. Right? I mean, this was like—
FK: Yeah, yeah.
ELM: This was like watching an hour-long interview at the 92nd Street Y, also. So if you get like three minutes in the press tour, you know, saying like “J. J. Abrams, why did you say somehow Palpatine returned?” or whatever. I don’t know who wrote that line, but whoever did it should feel really embarrassed. You know? [FK laughs] Like, there’s not a lot of space, especially in bigger-budget stuff, for people to talk about why they made different decisions—especially when a lot of these decisions are made by committees, you know. Or like big, working franchise structures, right?
FK: Yeah, but I do, I mean—I do, I agree with you that lots of writers don’t take this tack. I just think there’s also lots who do and there’s a lot of people who have heard that and like, I see it—I guess I see it when, when I was like—
ELM: That’s such a novelist thing, though. No TV writers—
FK: It is!
ELM: “Oh, the character just leapt off the page!”
FK: “Spoke to me!”
ELM: No one ever involved in collaborative writing ever says anything like that.
FK: No, never, never, never. [ELM laughs] But I think like—when I—trust me, never. But I guess one of the things that’s really shaping my thinking about this was a few years ago when I was diving into Wattpad so much and seeing what the writing advice people were getting and giving was.
ELM: Oh, yeah.
FK: Because I feel like—I know! It was not good writing advice, most of the time.
ELM: I know. No offense to them.
FK: And I know that this is the case on Tumblr and so on too, but like—this was the kind of tone that people were taking as they were talking about their writing. Not to say that they weren’t also trying, thinking about themselves as writers and making decisions and stuff, but this was the framing of characterization that was really, really out there.
So that’s why I keep coming back to this, it’s not because I think that like, all writers do X or all writers do Y, certainly not. But I do feel like there is…for better or worse, within fandom, there’s a lot of bad writing advice that gets passed around and I do think it affects the way people think about character in a larger sense, you know?
ELM: This is really interesting. I didn’t actually think this conversation would go down this path, but… [FK laughs] Well, it’s also like…I agree with you on this, I just wonder…this kind of rhetoric is so prevalent, right? And I—
FK: Yeah.
ELM: I feel like a lot of these folks are in fannish spaces, but maybe not in fanfiction writing space or writing space.
FK: Sure, for sure.
ELM: So I don’t know—and maybe, maybe—
FK: But what are the other things that impact this, yeah.
ELM: Yeah, this is what I’m trying to figure out, right? Like, maybe if you don’t actually think about writing or view things that you are reading or watching as written works, you never think about any of this at all, and then it simplifies things greatly, right? It’s just, you know, these—I’m watching this as though these are real people.
FK: Right, right right right.
ELM: With real motivations…
FK: Yes.
ELM: I think that’s a very human response, if you were to just ask, you know, if you stood outside a movie—you know, any old movie—in a theater, like in classic times.
FK: [laughs] The before times.
ELM: And you were like “what’d you think?” You’d probably get a ton of people saying really casually, like, “Yeah, I really liked the main character! Really loved, he seemed really brave, I really loved it when he blew up those cars,” I don’t know what kind of movie this is. But you know what I mean? It wouldn’t be like “I thought the writers made a really interesting decision to mirror the journey of the protagonist with the—” you know? Some people would.
FK: Yeah yeah yeah, right. But one of the fun things about going to a movie is that it feels immersive and it feels like the characters are real and, you know, you’re—yeah, you’re living another life for a moment, and they’re your friends. This is a thing. This is what happens.
ELM: I rarely feel that way, but I salute all of you.
FK: Sure, but for a lot of people, you know? Yeah. Myself included, sometimes!
ELM: No, I wish, I wish it was like that! But yeah, absolutely. If you think about—yeah, just general discourse, about the way people talk about what happens in TV shows, like…
FK: Right.
ELM: I think that things have gotten blurrier over the past few years, because I think that this kind of idea of trying to deconstruct, you know…I’m thinking about podcasts, proliferation of podcasts, big fannish media properties. And not just fannish! Game of Thrones kind of stuff, stuff that kind of crosses over, where people will listen to analysis podcasts of every single episode, right?
FK: Right.
ELM: And I, I think—some of this stuff analyzes writing choices. Some of it, I mean, we do it too when we do our special episodes! Sometimes I find that—like, I found that when we were doing the Succession episode—
FK: Yeah.
ELM: —we just wanted to talk about each character individually. Just talk about them!
FK: Of course we did, and just talk about them as though they were people, even!
ELM: Yeah! And also those are some characters that I think about sometimes when I’m downtown. Just think about Kendall lookin’ sad outside the World Trade Center complex.
FK: [laughs] Yeah. Listening to rap.
ELM: Yeah. Listening to his—anyway. That’s a very natural response. I guess for me, and this is something I don’t know about other humans, for me even when we’re having that conversation, I’m thinking about that the writers wrote Kendall Roy, as portrayed by Jeremy Strong. And I’m thinking about what Jeremy Strong does that makes Kendall more compelling than I think he would be on the page, also, right? So I’m thinking about this whole production as I’m simultaneously thinking about Kendall Roy, sad billionaire man-child—he’s not a man-child, that’s not quite right, but you know what I mean.
FK: I am, I am, I am not thinking about—I mean, I can think about the production and the actor, but I’m not usually thinking about them, if I’m gonna really sink myself into this discussion I’m just thinking about Kendall Roy. The form of Kendall Roy. The ideal.
ELM: I think about them all at once and I think about them when I’m writing, too. I think about all these things happening at the same time. I think that the characters are real and I think that they’re extremely mine, in the sense of they’re constructed by me, right?
FK: Right, right, right.
ELM: And so, like—I don’t know.
FK: So I think one thing, one thing about this though that I do wanna come back around to is—it’s one thing to have these, like, instinctual experiences of characters, and to have these impulses in the way you talk about them, but I do think that—how can I put this?—sometimes using those terms to talk about characters when you’re getting into an argument with other people about what should happen is not fruitful or useful, do you see what I’m saying?
ELM: OK.
FK: I want to take a turn from our experience of the characters, which is like—I think having just talked about all this stuff I feel a lot more, you know, when we were preparing for this episode I used to send you things and be like, “Accept that the Darkling isn’t real! He doesn’t exist!! So you can’t have—” You know what I mean? I would rant about, when someone said like, you know, “The real Darkling would do XYZ,” I was like “No! He doesn’t exist, he’s not real, that’s not a thing!”
But I guess I’m feeling a little more like: actually, I get that. I do it myself, like, you know, he does feel real to me sometimes and I do see why that comes, why you feel that way. But there’s a big difference between feeling it and using it as your primary linguistic way to talk about a character, your primary way to have an argument about what should or should not happen in a movie or in a TV show.
ELM: Right.
FK: And I think there is a real—“danger” is too strong a word, but I don’t know that it’s that fruitful to appeal to the idea of the form of the character, you know, when you’re talking abou what should or should not happen in a story. I don’t know that that’s going to be very successful if you’re trying to communicate with anybody who had an even slightly different idea about that character than you.
ELM: Yeah. 100%. So this is what I see, is like: you immediately made me think of, yesterday I was doing a search on Tumblr for something completely random, and I unfortunately had that experience—it wasn’t any fictional character or fandom thing, it was like, I don’t remember what it was. But sometimes the way search terms work out you wind up getting a bunch of someone’s random fandom things, have you ever had this experience?
FK: Yes, yes I have.
ELM: Like, I was just trying to search for like, this—this artist, but in fact…
FK: Yes, yes.
ELM: Their first and last names are the names of like a ship in something I’ve never heard of or whatever—
FK: Yep yep yep yep. This also happens the other way around, where you’re like “I was just looking for this ship and this is in fact the smash ship name, but it’s also apparently the name of this artist, and now they’re fighting for dominance in this tag, like tongues, fighting for dominance.”
ELM: Thank you. They’re battling. They’re actually battling, not fighting.
FK: Sorry, excuse me, my bad.
ELM: So. Get the lingo right. [FK laughs] So I was reading someone’s headcanon post, and I have no idea who these characters are, and they wrote like—these are my headcanons for whatever, like, you know, warning: this gets pretty dark, or whatever.
FK: Mm-hmm.
ELM: And then I started reading and it’s just like a random list of things. Like “Blank has a tattoo sleeve, and blank—” And I was just like— [laughs]
FK: OK!
ELM: Do we not see the person’s arm? I have no idea who these characters are. This could be like, a game, I don’t know. And I just started to think about like, how many headcanon posts I’ve seen over the years where it just feels like just a random—random bunch of things, mostly about your life, headcanon-writer, that you just kinda slapped on. I’ve seen this in my own fandoms and it’s like, explain to me in three sentences why you thought this random character would have a tattoo sleeve.
FK: Right, right.
ELM: And half the time—
FK: Why does he hate orange chicken, but love moo shu pork? Tell me! What part of him…
ELM: It’s fascinating to me! Because like, you know, I don’t know, I’ve—I think about this too when I have to write, like, characters who like things that I don’t like and vice versa, you know what I mean? Cause it feels like “No! I’m gonna fight with you!”
FK: Right.
ELM: It’s like, I’m a vegetarian, obviously I can’t have my characters be vegetarians unless it made—I’m not just gonna make them vegetarians randomly. [FK laughing] So then I’m like, “Gross! I have to make them eat meat right now?!” Like, I don’t like writing that! Right? Obviously I’m never going to be in the Hannibal fandom.
So it’s like, you start to think about this and it’s like how much of this—this is just what people are externalizing in Tumblr posts. Right? But like, obviously this stuff is going on in your head all the time, and I think we—as humans, I would generalize and say like: I think people often like to assume that the, what I’m just describing makes me uncomfortable, because I wish that my characters liked all the things I like and dislike all the things I dislike, right?
FK: Of course!
ELM: But they’re not me.
FK: Right.
ELM: And so I think we can tend to make these kind of pathways in our head, and so that’s part of constructing who we think a character is, right? And obviously we see people read things completely differently—different levels of depth, people coming at it from different experiences—and so that means that we’re all just seeing some sort of, I just immediately thought of your Plato, Plato thing, and I’m just like…
FK: It’s infected you!
ELM: Ugh! OK, but yeah, I think it’s really relevant, right! So we’re all seeing like, a different version of Dean Winchester. And, you know, that’s why you can read a fic and say “this really felt right to me,” because it’s exciting! Because it doesn’t always happen, right? In fact it doesn’t happen—it happens a minority of the time, because, you know.
FK: Yeah yeah, because there’s so many different views of it!
ELM: Right. And I obviously know some people have, like, wider nets for what they—what feels right to them. But when someone just hits exactly what feels just right to me, I’m just like “Oh! Wow! You got it,” like, you really get this character, right? And I can intellectually understand that means to me, right? But in my—like, you know, with my lizard brain, no, you got it right, you know what I mean? And so we do all this stuff constantly without thinking about it and without kind of having to articulate, “Well, it’s just my interpretation,” you know? It’s like, “No no no, deep down I know what’s right about this character, I know what the real version is.” Right?
FK: Right.
ELM: And so then the next step is to kind of, is that externalization, right? To say like: “I deep down understand what’s right about this character,” and you combine that with this idea of “I imagine them and they’re real, and there’s a true version.” Does that feel like the right path?
FK: Yeah! And so that Plato cave metaphor is right, but it’s also not right. It can be both! [both laugh]
ELM: Cool. Solved.
FK: It describes—it’s right when it describes the experience of, like, the feeling, the internal feeling of this thing, but when you actually look at the world, the only way that this character actually exists is the character as they were written in canon, you know what I mean. If there is an authority about this character, that is it.
ELM: Well, go back to inexplicifics talking about the possibility space, where you have like, a lot of different versions of a character cause there’s so many adaptations and takes, right?
FK: Sure. Sure.
ELM: I think there’s no—the version that exists quote-unquote “in canon” doesn’t count either unless it’s literally just like, Holden Caulfield: not that complicated, you know?
FK: Sure sure sure, but in that case—
ELM: One book.
FK: In that case though, there is no version to appeal to, you know what I mean?
ELM: Right.
FK: The form of the whoever is not a real version that you can appeal to. That’s not a real thing that actually exists.
ELM: Right.
FK: Or it’s actually—this is something that’s—this is also in Plato! It’s inaccessible to us, you know what I mean? We can never know what that thing is! So if we make arguments about what the form of Dean Winchester is, we’re probably wrong, you know? If it’s truly in this Plato metaphor. Plato would say we don’t actually know what that is. We’re like the people in the cave. How would they know anything about what an actual tree is like?
ELM: An actual Dean Winchester.
FK: We don’t know what actual Dean Winchester is like! So like, we can argue about it with each other, of course, but like—because we can never access the original thing, whatever that original thing is, it may as well not exist. It’s not there. It doesn’t—it’s not a thing, you know?
ELM: So that all gets us back to needing to actually think about the things that happen to characters in your favorite piece of media as writing choices. Right?
FK: Mm-hmm. Exactly.
ELM: You sent me one the other day that I thought was really interesting—you know, because we’ve been kind of collecting these sort of externalized embodied characters and the writers kind of either doing things to them or—language around writers doing things to them, or being kind of just conduits to them. And it began like, “The biggest lie the Russo brothers told about Bucky—”
FK: Yeah!
ELM: And it was talking about, it was something about how like, Bucky was OK—psychologically OK—at the end of something, I can’t remember the exact details, right. But the word “lie” was really interesting to me. It made me think about—I hate to bring her up. Sorry. You know who I’m about to bring up. But back in the beginning of my writing about fandom stuff, in journalism, J. K. Rowling gave an interview to Emma Watson—do you remember this?
FK: [sighs heavily] Yeah.
ELM: Where she said that Hermione shouldn’t have wound up with Ron. She didn’t say with Harry.
FK: Yeah. She just said not with Ron.
ELM: Right. Which is correct, no offense.
FK: [laughs] Fully agreed.
ELM: And, I wrote this—what turned out to be like shouting at, like, an oncoming avalanche [FK laughs] kind of piece that people seemed to enjoy at the time that was like “Please stop.” I remember the phrasing I used at one point was like, she sounds like she’s the PR representative for these characters.
FK: Right.
ELM: Right? And then it became a huge meme, “Spins the wheel—Hagrid joined ISIS and is pansexual” or whatever.
FK: Yeah yeah yeah. [laughs]
ELM: That whole thing. [laughs] But she was, she had just started to do this. She had been doing this for a few years at the time, just kind of issuing these proclamations, like, “Actually Neville—”
FK: “Dumbledore is gay and doesn’t wear underwear!” [laughs]
ELM: That was the biggest one, but she’s like “Little bits and pieces for you!” Just like—
FK: “McGonagall was married—and it was tragic.”
ELM: Oh my God, that was the worst one, I’m sorry.
FK: I know. I hated it. So much.
ELM: At least that one she wrote into like, a—into Pottermore like a—
FK: Nope.
ELM: Like a backstory kind of thing, right?
FK: I don’t like it. I don’t like it. At least it was a backstory, I still don’t like it. Get out.
ELM: I’m sorry we’re talking about Harry Potter and J. K. Rowling again. But like…
FK: Yeah! Now I care, I shouldn’t care, I don’t care!
ELM: No, I know, but it’s just like—it’s hard to erase 20 years of caring about this crap, so.
FK: [groans] 20 years of caring about this crap.
ELM: But you know, it’s the PR representative thing. I think that, you know, this was a great example of it. That these kind of characters existed and she was the one, she was the one who knows and she can let us know what they’re up to, right. And you see this all the time with novelists, like, “What happened to blank after the movie?” Or after the, after the book ends, or whatever, you know. “Oh, don’t worry! They’re OK!”
So like, it’s interesting. Obviously there’s been a ton of critique about her doing this and how it relates to her text, the Dumbledore being gay one in particular, because it was like: were you trying to write something subtextual in there?
FK: right.
ELM: Cause I’m not sure that you did a good job. Right? You know? But like—it’s interesting with these properties where, like, I don’t wanna talk about Bucky, I’m sorry. But like, the various people at Marvel are not talking about these characters like they’re PR reps. They’re talking about the writing choices they made.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: You know, I get it, because actors talk this way and in a way they do kind of talk this way—in the sense of like, you know, “We find Bucky—Bucky’s been doing X, Y, and Z, this happened to him, this happened to him, in this show we find him in this spot feeling this way,” right? You know? And like—already at that point you can be like “Oh, well, I think that’s a weird—based on what happened to him, it doesn’t seem like he’d be feeling that way! And based on the different times you’ve shown him in the previous installments, it doesn’t seem like that’s the state of mind he’d be in! Maybe in the show you’re gonna tell me how you got there. Oh, you didn’t?”
FK: Yeah yeah yeah.
ELM: “Oh, actually, that’s not great writing.” Right? You know what I mean? That’s what’s missing. But instead, it’s like, “Bucky wouldn’t feel that way! He’s real! The real Bucky would feel this way and you’re doing him a dishonor by not showing the way the real Bucky feels,” you know, “You’re imposing incorrect things over him.” Which is like, no, actually, sometimes it’s just not great writing! And people don’t think about what they’ve done before, or think about the way a human who’s had different circumstances, you know, different experiences—because, you know, because X is this kind of guy and then Y happened to him…
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Now he’s in Z state! So many times, those things just kind of fall apart because, you know, you don’t think through the X correctly or you don’t think through the Y correctly or you’re really trying to get to Z and it doesn’t matter if X and Y add up to Z. I hope my math here is making sense to you.
FK: Yeah, no, it makes sense, and I think that last thing is what often is happening in superhero stuff. It’s like, “Welp, we’ve decided that this is going to be the plot that needs to move forward.”
ELM: Yes.
FK: “It has to accomplish these things, so,” you know.
ELM: Don’t just pin it on superhero stuff: This is a huge thing on TV, right?
FK: Oh, it’s in a lot of stuff. We were just on superheroes, so I was like, all right, yeah.
ELM: Yeah yeah yeah. I just don’t wanna pin it all on that.
FK: No no no. It’s in lots of stuff.
ELM: I tend to do this, especially with the big franchise superhero stuff, because it does feel like they are trying to just—and setting up pieces so it’s like, “This person has to do this so they can be in the next installment of whatever,” and it’s like, I’m tired.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: You know? Cause then it just feels like I’m watching a really boring game of chess.
FK: Right.
ELM: Probably more like checkers, to be honest.
FK: Yeah. So—I guess where I’m at with this is, I have sort of two…there are two wolves within me on this one right now, right?
ELM: Only two?
FK: Only—well, two big ones. There might be some little ones.
ELM: Wait, side note: did you take the A/B/O quiz?
FK: No.
ELM: Which I’m mad at, because it made me read through—it’s a uQuiz, you know.
FK: I know what uQuizzes are but I have not taken it.
ELM: Oh, there’s an A/B/O uQuiz going around, I want you to take it too.
FK: Send it to me. OK. Send it to me.
ELM: I’m mad at it because it, like all uQuizzes, devolved when it had one question with paragraph-long answers. uQuiz writers: stop doing that! But I just want to let you know that I got “true alpha.”
FK: Yeah, that’s you. There’s no question there. [ELM laughs] I don’t know why I’d even winter that. Um…
ELM: But I had to take the quiz! I also took another uQuiz the other day that said what—I just need to share this with everyone—that said what problematic fictional villain are you. Guess who I got?
FK: Kylo Ren?
ELM: NO! I would not be proud of that.
FK: Magneto?
ELM: Yeah, that’s right.
FK: Yeah, Magneto. You would probably like the Darkling, my new fandom boyfriend, because he is basically Magneto only fantasy.
ELM: What?!
FK: For real. He is very Magneto only fantasy.
ELM: What? I don’t, I’ve seen nothing, first of all—
FK: His entire motivation is that everybody wants to kill the grisha, AKA mutants, and so he’s like “We need to take power because all of these lesser people are trying to kill us.”
ELM: All right, I do support that, it’s just he doesn’t seem very gay.
FK: It’s fully “Magneto was right.” No no no, he’s not gay.
ELM: He seems like straight Magneto. So.
FK: He’s very—he’s like straight-acting Magneto.
ELM: I don’t know if I can—
FK: Byronic Magneto.
ELM: I don’t know if I could get attached to that. [both laughing]
FK: All right, all right, all right. But back to what I was talking about though. Back, back, back back back, let me go back. I have two wolves fighting inside of me in this, and one of the wolves is going like—I want to be a lot more patient and like, understanding about the fact that this is in fact a mode of talking about characters, fictional characters, that is natural, to treat them as real people and to behave as though, like, they exist. And like, I should be less judgmental and also recognize that I do it myself, when I see this happening.
But then the other wolf inside of me is going, “But I actually think it’s kind of harmful to use this as—you know, as just the way that it’s, like, the only way that we can critique stories, and I think that it’s causing problems for people, and I want to like step in and tell people to stop it!” And I don’t know what to make of these two competing impulses. I don’t know. Do you have—
ELM: Yeah, yeah. No…
FK: Where are you at?
ELM: I think this is fair. I, I think this kind of comes back to what we were talking about in the beginning. What I was talking about in the beginning. This kind of idea that it’s easier to say “you did Bucky wrong” than to say like, “I was upset by”— I mean, I think that implied in some of these is “I’m upset that you did Bucky wrong.” But it’s easier to say that than to say “You made bad writing choices and you hurt me.” You know? It’s easier to say that you hurt a fictional character than to say that you hurt me.
Cause it’s also just like—people will just say like, “It’s just fiction. It shouldn’t actually hurt you.” And it’s like, well, that’s absurd. Obviously like—
FK: Yeah, that’s—yeah.
ELM: You know, fiction is a part of the world, and it causes us to have emotions, and it’s totally normal to have emotions. I mean, it’s not correct to threaten people over fictional characters or anything, obviously, you know?
FK: Right.
ELM: But it is natural to kind of feel strong feelings, whether they’re positive or negative or horny, in your case, with this straight Magneto.
FK: [laughing] I’m sorry, I can’t help it, it is just the way I’m wired. Saw it coming a fuckin’ mile away.
ELM: Actually, I would be a little worried if you didn’t feel that way, so it’s reassuring.
FK: Yes, me too.
ELM: Nature is healing.
FK: The buttons are still in the same place and they can be pushed!
ELM: [laughing] Anyway, I don’t know. It makes me think about, I’m sorry, I’m gonna mention Harry Potter again, I really apologize.
FK: [laughing] Oh no.
ELM: It’s just there’s a lot of—OK, I think I mentioned this story on the podcast, but the fifth book came out the weekend before I graduated from high school, and Sirius Black—spoiler: he dies. Sirius Black was like my—“comfort character” feels stupid, but he was like my, the character that I was very attached to.
FK: He was your guy, he was your guy!
ELM: He was my guy. And I think that he fuckin’ sucks. So obviously there is some self-negativity involved, cause it was like, “This guy is pretty bad.” [FK laughing] “An that’s me. I’m Sirius.” Very angsty 18-year-old thing to think. But I still feel very similar to Sirius.
FK: Sure.
ELM: That’s fine. And so, I read the book, and obviously you know what happened, and I was like—just destroyed. And I was sad for months. Right?
FK: Yeah. Yeah.
ELM: And also like, I had been, you know, struggling with pretty severe—very, some of the most severe depression of my life my senior year. It had lightened by the time I, you know, graduated. So I was not in a great, like, you know, mental health space, or like, prone to not feeling great about things.
FK: Right.
ELM: But I was really really sad about Sirius dying, right? And there were a lot of different things going on there. I was really upset with J. K. Rowling for killing him, but I was also just literally sad that he died. Like…
FK: Right!
ELM: Cause he was real to me in that way, right? And then I remember, you know, I think it was one of my parents being like: “It doesn’t really seem like it’s about this fictional character.” And like, sure: maybe there is that too. But it’s easier to say, like, “This is the only reason I’m upset,” than to say “There’s a lot of things going on in my life right now,” right, you know.
FK: Right.
ELM: This is a very—it’s basically externalizing that, you know, saying like: “I put a lot of myself into this character and now he just died in a very stupid way, honestly.” You know? Still not over that writing decision! At least kill him better! [FK laughs] Make him just fall on the floor dead, not behind a mystery veil!
So you know, it makes me think about people who—I don’t know anyone’s life when they’re tweeting these things, right. And I don’t want to be patronizing and be like “Oh, I bet you’re just dealing with something!” You know? But probably a lot of people are! But it’s not to say that they’re disconnected. And I think that was the misreading of the suggestion that it was all projection, it was just, you know, using that, right? I think that I was also truly upset about that!
FK: Right.
ELM: This kind of externalized character that felt real to me, and also a writing decision, and the way it related to me, and all the other things that were not related to Harry Potter that were going on in my life, right?
FK: Right.
ELM: So like, I’m still not a great example, because even then I was mad at J. K. Rowling for killing a fictional character, right? And I wasn’t like, I wasn’t like mad at watching the documentary about the wizard Sirius Black dying, right? I was mad at a book that I knew was fiction, written by an author who made a writing choice that I didn’t see any sense for, right? Obviously—or that seemed like a really dumb, basic writing choice, which it was. But you know.
FK: Yeah, yeah.
ELM: Sorry to talk about her so much.
FK: You weren’t mad that she told a lie about Sirius. You were mad about…
ELM: Exactly, right? You know? And that makes me think about all the people who get really mad at miscommunication or whatever, and it’s like—this is writing! You know. I don’t know. I get it, because if you start to think about everything as a writing choice, that does ruin the fun.
FK: Right.
ELM: Exactly what you’re saying—you like to go to a movie and just—
FK: Whoo!
ELM: —turn that part of your brain off and be immersed, I get why people don’t want to think about why every single choice was made.
FK: Yeah, yeah.
ELM: You know? But then you start to lose sight of the fact that choices are being made.
FK: Well, as always when we get to the end of these episodes, I don’t have any answers for how we should move forward with this beyond sort of—with empathy and thoughtfulness as best we can. But I will tell you one thing: I think that in the light of this conversation, I’m going to go and try and be a little conscious. I’m gonna go and I’m gonna probably read Shadow and Bone, which I have not done before but now I’m doing because obviously I have to, because I have a new internet boyfriend…
ELM: Sure!
FK: And I’m gonna try and notice when I’m, you know…maybe I won’t notice when I’m immersed, but be conscious of that.
ELM: No! That’s literally—
FK: That’s literally the opposite of what I want to do!
ELM: The opposite of the point! The point is to not notice.
FK: Well.
ELM: Yeah, I mean, I guess my parting thoughts here are like: if people do understand these distinctions, as they think about the stuff that they like—cause I think a lot of people do—I think some people don’t.
FK: Yeah! Or at least some of the time, you know what I mean? Like… [laughs]
ELM: So then I think it helps to be more precise with your language, right, and actually talk about…if you’re parsing out these distinctions, you know, cause I think that people are having conversations with other folks who are having trouble separating this stuff and really feel like not only are the characters disembodied and real and a great showrunner violence is being done to them by not having them do what you think they would do, but also that they relate to them really closely and so it feels like a personal attack. You know what I mean?
And I think there’s a way to still feel really immersed and wrapped up and attached to characters, while also understanding that the response that you really mean is disappointment in writing choices that you don’t think are good. And it’s very very natural to feel that characters are real, but it’s having a little bit of understanding that they’re not, I think, can go a long way.
FK: OK, well, on that note, Elizabeth, I think it’s about time to wrap up.
ELM: You know I’m really cheesy? I have to go to Central Park, and whenever I go to the bottom of Central Park, I in fact think of my fanfiction characters who I have moving in space in that area. And I think of them every time I go up there. So I just got kind of excited, I was like “Oh! I get to go up to the east 60s!”
FK: Wonderful!
ELM: How sad is that?
FK: Have fun!
ELM: I don’t want to feel excited about the east 60s!
FK: That’s fine.
ELM: It’s terrible, absolutely terrible!
FK: And yet…you’re makin’ the best of it!
ELM: It’s exciting! Just see them walkin’ around.
FK: All right. Have fun, Elizabeth.
ELM: Thank you! Bye!
FK: Bye.
[Outro music, thank-yous and credits]