Episode 152: Ask Fansplaining Anything: Part 10
In Episode 152, “Ask Fansplaining Anything: Part 10,” Flourish and Elizabeth tackle a new batch of listener questions that all center on the theme: “free your mind by cleansing your timeline.” Topics discussed include mismatched expectations on Tumblr, monetizing Twitter stan accounts, ageism in fandom, and the growing trend of pro publishers using AO3-style tags in book marketing.
Show Notes
[00:00:00] As always, our intro music is “Awel” by stefsax, used under a CC BY 3.0 license.
[00:08:27] People really went wild for 280-character tweets (remember how the rollout was staggered, so not everyone got them at the same time, resulting in much sturm und drang on the part of the sad left-behind 140-character Tweeters and articles explaining how to get long tweets enabled?), but apparently the change had a negligible effect on the actual length of the average tweet.
[00:12:12] Our conversation with breathedout about tagging took place in Episode 144, “Writing Women.”
[00:14:24] We are not 100% sure but we *think* the Tor book AO3-style tagging debacle was in fact the same book our questioner was referring to. themoreyouknow.gif
[00:16:39] While the “should there be an MPAA for books” conversation had a lot of facets, Elizabeth was specifically talking about BIPOC writers reporting that user-generated tags were being weaponized against them on a site called The StoryGraph.
[00:18:08]
[00:28:11] Here and throughout the episode, our interstitial music is “The Little Painter Man” by Lee Rosevere, used under a CC BY 3.0 license.
[00:32:02] We’ve had two episodes on the topic of purity culture, #84 and #132.
[00:53:31]
[00:54:43] We’re talking about Episode 85, “Age and Fandom.”
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 #152, “Ask Fansplaining Anything: Part 10.” Double digits!
FK: Wow, wow, wow!
ELM: So many AMAs! We get so many questions!
FK: So many great questions.
ELM: Yeah! So we have a new batch. I’m very excited to get into these. Should we get right to it?
FK: Let’s do it.
ELM: OK, you wanna go first?
FK: I can do that.
ELM: OK.
FK: This one is from GT.
“Hi Flourish & Elizabeth! I just started listening to your podcast this year and I’ve been slowly working my way back through past episodes, so I apologize if this is a topic you’ve addressed before.” Spoiler alert: It’s not! Anyway, OK. Back to the thing.
“While scrolling through my Tumblr dash the other day I came across a short smut fic. I read it and liked the post. The next day I got a notification that someone had tagged me. The author had reblogged the story and tagged me and five other people who had read the story but not reblogged it. This was what the author wrote: ‘Hi guys! Please reblog the fics that you like!!! This is very discouraging to content creators! Thank you! <double heart emoji>’
“I’ve been on Tumblr since 2013 and this is my first time being shame-tagged by an author for not reblogging their story. I found it kind of rude, to be honest, and I really have no desire to interact with this person’s fic again.
“I post fic on Tumblr as well, but it’s usually cross-posted on AO3 and I use Tumblr primarily to collect prompts and notify readers of updates and new stories. I have noticed lately that there seem to be more fics posted directly to Tumblr, particularly Reader Insert fics.
“I’ve also noticed that the pressure to reblog fic has increased. I’ve seen several posts complaining about the likes-to-reblog ratio on fic and I’ve seen the claim that likes ‘mean nothing.’ I disagree with that. I think that someone who likes your fic is someone who might reblog the next fic or share it with friends directly (particularly smut fics or other fics with sensitive content) but I’m curious what the two of you think. Is Tumblr fic all about the reblogs or are there other ways to build an audience?
“Thanks so much, GT.”
ELM: All right. I have a lot of feelings.
FK: Sock ’em to me!
ELM: Thank you very much for this. Well, OK: the very first thing I thought about when I heard this story of the shame-tagging, which is frankly absurd—the shame-tagger; GT is not in the wrong in any way— [FK laughs]
There was one season when I was working at the racetrack, as people might know I take bets at the racetrack a lot. Thoroughbred racetracks. And I sat next to this woman for the entire season, and she was quite rude to customers. And sometimes that didn’t really work in her favor. But I remember one time she shouted at this older British couple, “You bastards! You don’t tip?!” as they were talking away, and they literally turned around and the man quickly, panickedly pulled out a $10, and was like, “I’m so sorry! I’m so sorry!” and came back and handed it to her. And I don’t think that, wouldn’t have worked if they hadn’t been foreigners, like I think they were like “Oh no, I didn’t know the customs.”
FK: Yeah yeah yeah. I feel like that’s very much an “I didn’t know the customs and now I’m very embarrassed.” [ELM laughs] Also they were British, so they were probably extra embarrassed for that reason.
ELM: Yeah! There’s way less tipping, in my experience, living in the U.K. than there is in the U.S., so I think that they were like “Oh! I didn’t know, I’m so sorry.” And I was just like—
FK: Yeah. For people who don’t live in the U.S., generally speaking the policy is if it’s something that you might conceivably in any possibility tip for, try tipping for it and people won’t be mad. That’s my policy. Just like, if you think that there could be a tip involved, then there probably is.
ELM: Yeah. As an Italian-American, we are a big tipping culture, and Italian guys will come to my window and they haven’t even won yet and they’ll give me like a dollar and they’ll be like, “For luck! There ya go. For luck!” [FK laughs] And I’ll be like, I’ll take it! I’ll take these luck dollars. It adds up. But anyway.
FK: Yeah, for luck!
ELM: I just like that. For luck! Just do that as you’re going around town.
FK: What's the point of this story vis a vis GT’s story, Elizabeth. Because I love the story, but it must have a point.
ELM: No, it absolutely reminds me of like—what response is this person, they’re hoping for “Oh, I didn’t know the custom, I’m so sorry, here’s $10,” right? Like…
FK: Right.
ELM: If I, if I got that—if I was tagged in that way?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: If I just liked something, which I made an active choice to like it and not repost it on my own blog?
FK: Right.
ELM: And they were like, even passive-aggressively like that, even in a kinda nice way like that? Ostensibly, quote-unquote? I would block them. Like, I’m sorry. Sorry to anyone who feels that way or has posted that thing about their own work and their readers, but that to me is audacious, you know? That’s my biggest takeaway from this, is that is such an entitled attitude. And you, you don’t have any right to come into a reader’s space and demand that they interact with you.
I feel this way about kinda somewhat strident fic commenting requests on stories on AO3, even, saying “if you don’t comment, I will never write again,” like, “this is the only,” and it’s like: all right, stop writing! Like…
FK: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I do think there is something to be said…not for the way that they approached that. I do think to the question of like, is there, are there other ways to build an audience on Tumblr other than reblogs, right, obviously there are various ways to build an audience across the internet that are not reblogs. But it does seem to me that reblogs are a big way to build an audience on Tumblr. That doesn’t mean that that person should be harassing you to reblog them, and it doesn’t mean that you should feel obligated to reblog someone’s fic—in particular on your blog, which may or may not have anything to do with fic.
ELM: I mean, I think this is a complicated…Tumblr is not a great medium for posting anything more complicated than a drabble, right? Or a…
FK: It’s really not, it’s really really not.
ELM: It’s not a great reading experience, so you know, when it’s like “how do you build an audience”… I mean whatever, obviously tons and tons of people use that as their primary or their only place where they post fic. But like, lots and lots of people build audiences—who post on the AO3—build audiences on Tumblr, by posting…I mean, it’s different, right? They post a summary and “hey, here’s my fic.” You know the way those posts work, right?
FK: Right, right.
ELM: “Here’s the title, characters,” that kind of thing. Or, people rec them on rec lists and those get shared around, right? I mean, I guess that people consider—I absolutely understand that there are probably people who are like, Tumblr-only, Tumblr-first publishing, who think that that is the primary means in which their work will be shared, not being put on a list, because honestly the fic is pretty short, right? Are you gonna rec a 200-word story or a 500-word story? Probably not, right? I get it. But I just think that asking someone to put it onto their own feed is like a big step.
FK: Right, particularly when your own blog may or may not have anything to do with fic. There’s lots of stuff that people enjoy on Tumblr that’s not stuff that’s appropriate for their own blog for whatever reason, right?
ELM: Yeah!
FK: If you look at like—not that I use Tumblr that much, but like, at any time that I’ve been using Tumblr there’s all sorts of stuff that I would not reblog to my own main blog.
ELM: Oh yeah.
FK: That I’m still enjoying. Right?
ELM: Yeah, yeah! Wait till they hear that there’s even people who are reading it and they’re not, they’re enjoying it but they’re not even…
FK: Not liking it, right?
ELM: [laughs] Yeah. I also just think, this is a huge commentary piece in the fanart world, and it’s different because—I mean, I think that there is a money element here. And actually, there is for fic as well, right.
FK: Oh yeah.
ELM: The reason you’d be punishing on Tumblr is because you don’t want to publish on the AO3 because you’re not allowed to directly monetize.
FK: Right.
ELM: So the long-standing thing with fanartists for the last few years has been this kind of, you know, “Likes kill our careers, likes means that no one will ever see us,” right, that kind of thing. And I absolutely believe folks when they say that they’ve seen a drastic shift in the ratio of likes to reblogs. But like, internet cultures change, and there are UX changes, and…less so on Tumblr than on Twitter, for example.
FK: Sure.
ELM: But the way we engaged with tweets five years ago is really different than now.
FK: Yeah!
ELM: Just cause they’ve changed a bunch of things, right?
FK: Yeah yeah. You look back at my tweets from five years ago and I’m like, “What was I doing?” [laughs]
ELM: Remember when they introduced 280 characters and we all lost our minds?
FK: Wow.
ELM: “There’s no way that will ever work, that’s way too long.” It is true that people were literally trying to fill up the 280 characters for the first few weeks and it was like, just, just…
FK: You can, in fact, tweet shorter. This is not a requirement.
ELM: You know, there’s ways to say it, to say, if you’re explicitly monetizing your fic or your fanart, I think you might need to say that. Don’t just say there’s an expectation, like, if you like this you must reblog it cause you must further my career. You say like, “Hey, I work on commissions, please share this if you like it so other people can see my work.”
FK: Right, or I mean, anything like that also—even if it’s not about commissions, just having something like that that’s on…even if you wrote a fic and had a little note at the bottom that said, I don’t mind when people say like, “Comments really make my day and I would love it if you would, even the simplest comment would make my day.” Like, OK!
ELM: Sure!
FK: You may or may not, but it’s not like snitch tagging [sic]. That’s aggressive. It’s the snitch tag [sic] part.
ELM: And it’s not like “If you don’t comment I’ll delete my blog,” which I see.
FK: Exactly, exactly.
ELM: Obviously everyone’s within their right to write all those things, but that doesn’t mean I have to engage with you going forward.
FK: Yep.
ELM: You know?
FK: All right.
ELM: So I don’t know. I think Tumblr fic is pretty fraught, and I understand people are publishing on there cause there’s different fic cultures, and it’s true: self-inserts, imagines…and there’s actually I noticed way way more of it on AO3 in the last couple of years than I had noticed previously.
FK: Yeah, for sure.
ELM: But I totally get why that exists within the Tumblr space, and I don’t know. I, I don’t know. If I were GT, I would only reblog what I truly loved and not feel shamed into putting things on my feed that I didn’t want to, particularly smut. Maybe that’s not something that you wanna repost on your own blog. That’s private.
FK: There we go. That’s our answer, GT. Thank you for writing in.
ELM: Yeah. It’s a very interesting question. I really appreciate it.
FK: All right. Tell me the next one, Elizabeth.
ELM: I’ll do it. All right! Next one: so, we got this one through our submissions form on our website, www.fansplaining.com.
FK: Thanks! Thanks for that, Elizabeth.
ELM: All those W’s. I actually don’t think you need to type those anymore. [laughs] So, the message is, “In a recent episode (I don’t know which as I jump around, but I do know it was recent!) you talked about using AO3/fic style tags to market books. It’s something I've thought a lot about since I saw it done for K. M. Szpara’s First, Become Ashes, and I’m a little conflicted about it. On the one hand, as someone who has been active in Fandom for about 20 years, AO3/fic style tagging gives me information I know that I want. On the other hand, I think divorcing the practice from the context of fanfiction does a disservice to the books as most of the people who see this marketing won’t have that context and won’t understand how exactly this style of tagging is meant to work.”
FK: Right. Well, you now, I think this is the kind of thin ghat sort of works itself out in the wash eventually, you know what I mean? People won’t have that context, won’t understand exactly how it’s meant to work, and then people like, take that and make it into their own thing, right? The different community takes it and makes it into its own thing. And like, we may or may not like that cause we may or may not think that tagging in a fanfiction context is better, but I guess saying it does a disservice to the books feels like—I think that people who don’t understand it are going to ignore it, and follow all of the things that they are used to seeing in books, and read based on that, and people who do understand it are going to be into it. And people who are in the middle are going to sort of run with it. So, OK.
ELM: So I do not necessarily agree with you.
FK: Hmm! Tell me why.
ELM: Well, there was a big debacle maybe a year ago around this—I think maybe it was a Tor book?—and they mimicked AO3 style tags, and this gets back to a conversation, I know we were having it with breathedout, about tagging versus content warnings, right? And just, there’s like three different ways tags can work, right? Maybe if I’m missing one you tell me, maybe there’s more than three. There’s advertising what’s in it…
FK: Yep.
ELM: You like bedsharing! It’s got some bedsharing!
FK: Yeah!! It’s got bedsharing!!!
ELM: There is just literally informing. Like, I’ve started tagging “alcohol.” Because it’s not a judgment, I’m not saying these characters drink too much, I’m not judging the kinds of drinks they’re drinking, but they are drinking. It’s not alcoholism, it’s not a warning…
FK: Or maybe more to the point, something like “dogs.”
ELM: Right.
FK: There is a dog in this fic, if you wanna read about a dog there’s a dog in it.
ELM: So like, just literally identifying what it is, for reference. There are dogs and alcohol in this fic.
FK: Right.
ELM: And then there are warnings.
FK: Right.
ELM: And you know, I think it’s fuzzy in between all of these. Like, dogs: I might just be saying “there’s dogs in the story, that’s just like an element,” and for you that’s like “Dogs!!! I’m in!!!” Right? And for me it’d be like “OK, there’s dogs.”
FK: Right.
ELM: And if someone was like, bitten by a dog once and they were traumatized by dogs, they maybe don’t wanna read about dogs.
FK: Right right right.
ELM: And that serves as a warning, right?
FK: Yeah yeah. You can see this even more strongly with anything that’s more controversial than dogs.
ELM: Dogs are pretty controversial!
FK: I’m sure to some people they are.
ELM: My grandmother, my grandparents were scared of dogs.
FK: Wow.
ELM: Yeah! Don’t make fun of my grandparents.
FK: I didn’t make fun of anybody! I just said they’re not controversial to me.
ELM: [laughs] I think they found them pretty controversial!
FK: [laughing] Anyway OK, go on though, because you’re saying good things. You’re saying good things. Tags act in all those ways, and sometimes they act in all those ways at the same times. To different people, the same tag can mean any of those things, and it varies.
ELM: Right. So in the space of the AO3, I’m not going to sit here and say that there’s universal understanding—that everyone knows that there’s all three of these ways. Obviously there’s a lot of people who interpret tags differently or think they only serve one purpose, right?
FK: Right.
ELM: But, you know, in general, it is what it is. Everyone understands it’s a huge massive amateur folksonomic mass, right? To me, that’s pretty different than a publisher selecting a set of tags. So there was this debacle, I don’t know when it was, I think it was within the last year—maybe two years ago—and I think it was a Tor book, but don’t quote me on that, where they did AO3 style tags, and most of them were like “Fun! Whee! Tropes! Trope, trope, trope,” and then it was like, “Content warning: dubious consent.”
And it was like, what? You know? We were in the “Woo hoo! Fun! You’ve got your bed-sharing! Your murder husbands!” I have literally no idea what this book was about, right? But that kind of tone, right. “The grumpy one and the sunshine one!” and you know, that stuff. Which is not my favorite way of rhetorical framing, but that’s fine.
FK: Right, but that is a very big—the grumpy one and the sunshine one, and, like, I like dubcon! But it is a total difference going from, yeah.
ELM: So I saw a lot of critique on my Twitter feed in particular on this, about this kind of context collapse. You’re just going to put these side by side? You know? And to be fair, in the AO3…
FK: It would be side by side on the AO3, that’s the thing.
ELM: But dubcon would not be. Dubcon would be in the major archive warning. And this is a huge part of the AO3, right? Because it’s rape and noncon. Dubcon is, you should, if you’d use dubcon you should probably use that tag. I mean this is also open to interpretation, you know what I mean?
FK: I feel like that’s open, because I would use dubcon for a lot of things, a very very wide number of things that I would not put…
ELM: Eye of the beholder, but like…
FK: We could discuss it, but you’re right: this is a question that would come up for you is, should I be using this? Should there be a major archive warning on this? Sure.
ELM: And so, I don’t know! I feel like it’s really different when publishers use it because it feels like a specific editorial choice coming from, while the people who are doing it are inside fandom, it’s actually not coming from within fandom. It’s coming from a professional publisher.
FK: And that’s true, and it is—it’s a recontextualization of tags into a purely advertising context, which then makes it like weird when you have one that’s not a purely advertising thing, or that could be an advertising thing. Like if your point is “this book has dubcon in a really juicy way that if you like dubcon you’re gonna be into,” you know.
ELM: Right, right.
FK: But then, does that match with the rest of what you’re saying? Yeah, I get that.
ELM: I think too, this past week—I don’t know if you’ve been following it, there’s been a huge conversation around tagging and professional books.
FK: I haven’t.
ELM: There’s been a massive controversy about readers, this particular site that aggregates user tags and people have been tagging people’s books, and they’re like, weaponizing those tags against authors of color in particular.
FK: OK, I—this is putting some context. I’ve seen bits of it, but it’s all been bits where I was like “Oh yeah, that content warning that you’re complaining about does look pretty patronizing and that one—there’s some reason you’re talking about this right now. What’s the reason?” [laughs]
ELM: Right. So for context, I saw authors saying that their books had been tagged with racial or homophobic slurs—not people using slurs as tabs, but saying the books contained slurs.
FK: Right, that there were slurs in them.
ELM: And they were like “What are you—this is not in my book at all.” Or saying, I saw one saying their book had been tagged “alcoholism” and that was literally not an element at all.
FK: Like, someone had a drink of alcohol and someone tagged it “alcoholism.”
ELM: That’s what I’m saying, right? People were noticing that people were piling on certain ways and actually kind of using the aggregation as a weapon. And so then, people started talking about well, maybe there needs to be like an MPAA—
FK: That’s the part where I jumped in, to which I said, “have you fucking looked at the MPAA? Absolutely not, get it the fuck out of here.”
ELM: So the MPAA, for people who are not Americans—and other countries have their own versions of this—is the board, organization, that does the standardized ratings for films: G, PG, R, et cetera, et cetera.
FK: And if you haven’t watched the documentary This Film Is Not Yet Rated, I highly recommend that you watch it, because you will never take an MPAA rating seriously ever again.
ELM: Is it really true that they’re allowed one swear word in PG-13?
FK: It’s one “fuck.” You’re allowed one “fuck.” [ELM laughing] They also have to edit things like, to get it down from—cause nobody wants to have your movie tagged NC-17, and it will be like, “there are too many thrusts in the sex scene. You have to cut out and reduce the number of thrusts.” I am not joking.
ELM: So dumb. I’m sorry.
FK: Go watch this documentary, Elizabeth. I’m going to make you do it because it’s so bad.
ELM: Yeah, I actually would be really curious. Cause I’ve seen actors joking about how they got to say the one “fuck,” but I thought that was one swear word, but it’s literally one “fuck,” so…
FK: It’s one “fuck.” You’re allowed to say other swear words in a PG-13.
ELM: Delightful, delightful
FK: Yeah. It’s just one “fuck.”
ELM: So, the idea of doing that for books is completely bonkers and not only that, but books are so much more fragmented than—obviously there’s indie films and stuff like that, but it’s not like books open a big, a big book opens on every cinema…I mean obviously there are big books and there are small books, but…
FK: And you can get around ratings, because now you can open a movie on a streamer or whatever, but MPAA ratings are really about, you know.
ELM: OK, so maybe that is now fragmenting. And so there are these kind of ideas rolling around about what happens when the author themselves is not tagging their own work, right? And in professionalized contexts. And it’s just a mess! And it’s like, you know, obviously, if I want to rec a fic on Tumblr, I’m gonna pick some tags for it! And they may not be tags that match what the author does. Or for example, in “The Rec Center,” we require that people leave content warnings with their recs. So I don’t know if these are the things that would match what the writers want, but like, you have to take that with a grain of salt.
But all of that is fully non-monetized fan-fan space, you know, and it’s not like…
FK: And not an official…
ELM: An official book board, you know, or readers trying to destroy people’s careers.
FK: You have convinced me that this is bad, but not, I think, for the reasons the person writing in said.
ELM: I think that their reasons are, it feels somewhat…maybe “exploitative” is pushing it too far, but in that realm. This also turns me off. We’ve talked about this around tropes, this kind of like…it just feels a little memey at a certain point when a publishing house is like, “the grumpy one and the sunshine one!” I don’t want the publishing house to say that, you know what I mean? And that turns me off, right? And even if it’s actually a dynamic that I enjoy. I don’t, it just feels like—but I also hate in fandoms when there are cheesy fandom-specific tags, like…
FK: Yeah, so this may be a personal problem, Elizabeth Minkel.
ELM: It’s a me problem! But it also may be an our-letter-writer problem too, you know?
FK: Oh no no no, I’m not saying you’re the only person in the world who has this problem.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: Just that not everyone does.
ELM: You know, I just think, people—there’s stupid posts I hate on Tumblr that’s like, something about reading jacket copy and like, begging publishers to tell them what the book is about. Like, I don’t know what books these people are reading, but jacket copy usually does tell you what the book is about. If you’re talking about the blurb that they might put, the critics’ blurbs, that is literally not the job of a critic to tell you—to summarize the book, right?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: You know? Like, I can’t remember the last time I picked up a book that I didn’t have some sense of what it was about by reading the copy on the jacket. So I just, I don’t know where this narrative came from. Maybe people are reading advance copies where there’s no jacket copy!
FK: Maybe so. All right. I feel like we’ve put this one to bed.
ELM: Yeah! I think it’s interesting and complicated, what publishing houses are doing around this right now. I’m curious to see how that evolves over the next year or two.
FK: Indeed. Thank you for a very discussion-provoking question, nonny.
ELM: [laughs] A lot of feelings.
FK: All right, shall I read the next one?
ELM: Yeah yeah yeah.
FK: All right. This one is also from someone anonymous.
“I was really interested in your DNI episode! I do have a question: what's your take on public fandom events that include DNIs? For example, ‘Welcome to our fandom Pride fest! Join us! Unless you ship X (problematic, fictional, queer) ship. Even if you don’t create a work with this ship in it, you are not welcome at this event.’ I’ve seen several of these, and wow, does it rub me wrong. Thoughts?”
ELM: I, uh, I like how the theme of our questions tonight is “different ways I would remove someone from my life.” [FK laughs] So when we, I think when we both initially read this we like, read it quickly and misread it, and I initially thought the questions was like, “What about someone running a fest who sets boundaries around what can be submitted,” which I’ve definitely seen.
FK: Yeah yeah yeah.
ELM: I think that’s great.
FK: In fact, one of my friends got, had a fandom furor around this because they had a rule of “no copaganda” in a fest they were running. And it’s like, well, OK, great: don’t write copaganda for this fest.
ELM: Yeah, and actually, watching all that go down was just wild to me, because if you really want to write a cop AU for The Untamed, I believe it was…
FK: Just write it and don’t submit it to the fest!
ELM: Yeah or start your own fest! It’s not like saying “start your own archive.” Starting your own fest is not as much work as starting your own archive, you know what I mean?
FK: And I’m pretty sure that you could, even, if you really wanted to, if you were that devoted, you could start an all-cop-AU fest for The Untamed and there would be plenty of people who wanted to just write cop AUs.
ELM: [laughing] What a problematic idea for a fest that is!
FK: I’m just saying! If this is the hill upon which you wish to die, I’m sure there are other people who are willing to throw their bodies down there with you!
ELM: Literally no one’s gonna stop you. And so like, I think that is one great thing about fests: you can say whatever you want! And you could, like, the rules around your fest could be super bigoted and I would say “cool, I never wanna engage with your fest,” right. You’ve literally identified who you are, you’ve wrote it down in words and I am not going to engage with you in any way, right? But it is their right to post what they want on the internet.
FK: Right.
ELM: I might critique them, but they are also allowed to post it.
FK: Right.
ELM: So that was initially how we both read it, and then I read it again and I was like “Oh. This is like, thoughtcrimes?” [laughing]
FK: “Because you have ever thought that these two would be cute together, you are dead to us.”
ELM: And so I guess I would say that my answer is the same but even stronger. That would be a very clear indication that I don’t want to engage with that person running the fest ever again. I think they’re absolutely within their rights, they can say whatever they want. They can say “if you hate the color pink, you can’t participate,” you know what I mean, and you’d be like “That’s extremely weird, but…” They are totally allowed to say that, right? It’s not the first amendment. They can do whatever they want, and that’s arbitrary, and I don’t want to engage with you going forward, you know?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: So I think that’s interesting that the letter-writer has seen this multiple times. I wonder if this is gonna be a thing going forward, cause that’s like…I’m tired.
FK: You know, it actually reminds me, it actually reminds me of some of the stuff that happened back in the bad old days of the Harry Potter fandom ship wars, where there were spaces that you were not supposed to be a member of if you shipped certain ships, you know.
ELM: Mm. Good. Fandom never changes.
FK: Fandom never changes! This is not—I mean, it’s new to me that it’s in the context of fests and framed as DNIs, but there were definitely archives on which you were not welcome to… I mean, I don’t think it was usually framed as “you aren’t allowed to even think this is cool.” It was usually framed like “we will have absolutely no discussion of this ship of any kind and you can’t touch it,” which is again, totally within your right, you know.
ELM: Yeah, but that’s interesting, like, yeah, so there were different archives for different ships, right, and that was, predated—that was the same with the fandoms we were in in the ’90s too, specific archives for specific ships, right? And…
FK: Sure, but also sometimes like, constellations of ships, right? There was a major archive where it was like “Yeah, this is mostly a Ron/Hermione archive, but here is a list of ships you’re not allowed to, you’re not allowed to have any queer ships in it except for Remus and Sirius, because we believe in Remus and Sirius and we don’t think any of the other queer ships are real.”
ELM: I mean, Remus and Sirius is real, so.
FK: Agh!
ELM: But so back then there was no, there was fanfiction.net which was like the Wild West, but otherwise it was pretty rare to have a centralized archive—like there were a lot of…
FK: No, every archive was sort of a little fiefdom. Which was like a little… I mean, their own little fests.
ELM: That reflected the other structures of like chat rooms and message boards and stuff like that. They would set rules, and like, that’s something that, you know, something I’ve talked about a lot over the years, kind of like: I know those were not perfect days but at least there were clear rules when you would enter a digital space, right?
FK: If nothing else, you knew for a fact what ships you were supposed to talk about and which ones you weren’t in that context.
ELM: Right, right. Yeah.
FK: Didn’t make me wanna be there, but you know, OK, cool.
ELM: So this is, you know, in an archive that is ostensibly welcoming of most if not all content, there are no ways to draw those boundaries other than setting up a fest.
FK: Right.
ELM: So these are the tools people wanna use!
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: Well, nonny, we support you in being rubbed wrong by this and not wanting to interact with the person who set up that fast, so.
ELM: Rubs me wrong as well. I’m rubbed.
FK: All right, well, on that somewhat disturbing phrasing…
ELM: What’s wrong with rubbing? You rub sunscreen on. You rub, I’m trying to think of other things you rub.
FK: That aren’t dirty.
ELM: Yeah. Other parts of the body that you would rub. [FK laughs] You rub various lotions on.
FK: Yeah, like, uh, it puts the lotion on its skin.
ELM: You did not have to go there.
FK: To take it to a problematic place.
ELM: Moisturizer. You just use moisturizer.
FK: Yeah, well, uh, anyway, as I was saying though, I think that that brings us to about the point where we should take a break.
ELM: Yeah, this is a break time.
FK: All right, should we do it?
ELM: OK, let’s do it!
[Interstitial music]
FK: All right, we’re back, having purged our brains of the word “rub.”
ELM: There’s the rub.
FK: There is the rub. Anyway, before we get on to answering more questions, I think we should talk about supporting this podcast!
ELM: We should talk about it. You want me to talk about it?
FK: I want you to talk about it.
ELM: OK. So, we make this podcast with the generous support of readers and listeners like you via patreon.com/fansplaining, our Patreon. Everyone who has listened to this podcast has heard this before, we’re gonna say it every time anyway: there are different levels, you can pledge as little as $1 a month—or the currency of your choice, by the way. I had mentioned it before, but I truly love seeing people changing to their local currency. I want people to pay exactly how they wanna pay.
A dollar a month, our most popular level is $3 a month, you get access to all our special episodes, almost two dozen special episodes on various TV shows and films. Also our Tropefest series, that we are going to add to soon! $5 a month, you get a little enamel pin that’s super-cute, like, extremely cute. Also, if you’re going back out in the world a little bit more…
FK: Yeah! Show it off!
ELM: Yeah, I just thought like—if you go to a con someday, you want that pin…
FK: Someday there will be cons again.
ELM: On your lanyard? That’d be so cute, you know?
FK: Yeah!
ELM: So get that in advance! And you get your name in the credits and $10 a month you get all of those things, plus a semi-regular tiny zine. And the tiny zines are extremely cute!
FK: They are super cute. If you do not want to or can’t support us monetarily, there’s some good ways you can support us without that. You can spread the word about the podcast. You can also send in questions and comments and thoughts to be in episodes like this one, or even to inspire, like, whole topics of episodes. That is a really great way to support us. We love having interaction with our audience. So, do that. You can go on our Tumblr, fansplaining.tumblr.com, our askbox is open, anon is on. You can also email us, fansplaining at gmail dot com. That’s probably the best way for like, longer questions. There’s a form you can use on our website, fansplaining.com, which Elizabeth actually called out earlier in this episode.
ELM: WWW.
FK: Yep, dub dub dub.
ELM: HTTPS.
FK: Yes. Dub dub dub is the preferred way of saying that for me. But anyway. Or, you can contact us on basically all of the social networks. We are Fansplaining. So I don’t know why you would want to ask your question via Twitter message, but if that’s the only possibility for you, you can do it. Yeah! So.
ELM: Wow, you really left out one of the most important ones.
FK: [gasps] You can call us! At 1-401-526-FANS! We love getting voice mail and we love being able to listen to other people’s voices on the podcast. So do that if you are remotely inclined. All right. Now we’re done.
ELM: We did it.
FK: Shall we go on to…?
ELM: Yeah, it’s my turn!
FK: Yes. It is your turn.
ELM: All right. So, this letter writer writes:
“Hi Flourish and Elizabeth! I stumbled across your podcast back in February when your survey came across my dash, and have been slowly getting through your episodes since. I just listened to your latest episode on giving fans a cookie, and that made me think of something that’s happening in my current fandom around negativity and criticism of the source material, how some people just want to be allowed to like the thing without seeing negativity, others want to be allowed to freely criticize without censure, and how that’s beginning to form a divide in what is a relatively small community of fans. I’m also listening to your anti/purity culture episode which also has me going dingalingaling for a completely different fandom I’m in but that’s another story.
“As someone who's been in fandoms since 1997, I’ve seen a lot of bad behavior, sockpuppeting, message boards with over the top rules, and BNF bad behavior, but this is my first experience with being in the thick of a major debate on an unmoderated space like Tumblr. I’ve seen fandoms implode as an onlooker, and what's happening now in my current fandom is starting to look very familiar. We even have a couple of BNFs that I thought went the way of the dodo years ago (hint: they didn’t!)
“On one side of the debate we have people who are irritated they’re being asked to tag posts as anti-[whatever] when this is subjective and often their comments are valid criticism of the thing. Often these fans are fans of color who feel they’re being censored or having their tone policed. On the other side, we have a group who insists it’s an unspoken rule of Tumblr that everyone should always tag their anti-posts, that everyone should be doing it if they want to be part of the fandom, and that unfollowing people isn’t an acceptable choice if untagged things are on their dash claiming this is a ‘culture of blocking and unfollowing.’ I’m sure by the way I’ve framed this you realize I’m of the opinion that people should curate their own experience and that means making whatever choice they want when it comes to tagging/following/blocking etc., because it’s none of my business and fandom isn’t about your clout but your own personal enjoyment.
“I guess my question is, how do you feel about Tumblr as a place for fandom as a whole? Do you feel there is an unspoken ‘rule’ to tag everything, or is that your own call to make as long as you accept the potential consequences? As I write this I’m shaking my head at the pettiness of the whole conversation and how exhausted I am by it, but then I wonder if I’m being dismissive of others’ opinions.
“I would be interested to know your thoughts on smaller fandoms, and the idea that this makes you a ‘community’ who needs to work together in symbiosis without conflict.”
FK: Whoo!
ELM: Yeah.
FK: Whoo! Well, I mean, I think that this gets to my primary—the primary reason why I think, like, you know, the two sides of the coin of Tumblr, right? It’s the two sides of the coin of the unmoderated space. Because you do have this very large space in which no one is in charge and what a community norm is is completely up for debate and may differ depending on what part of the conversation you’re in. And if you’re in a smaller fandom space, then where you came from—the people may be coming from very different locations and having very different ideas about this.
I don’t know that there’s a solvable, I don’t know if anyone who’s trying to fight the battle of “everyone must do X” or “everyone must do Y” on Tumblr is fighting a losing battle inherently.
ELM: Yeah, and I think—all right, I think in 2021, anyone who’s saying “you must do X on Tumblr,” maybe they just arrived? I can’t, tons of people don’t tag things. Tons of people tag in ways that only make sense to them. Every day I see critical meta come across my dash, and the only tag is the show. Right? Or like, it’s not like they are explicitly writing “Character name. Character name. Anti-whatever.” Right? Obviously I follow other people who tag really robustly, and I don’t know, I’ve been on Tumblr for almost a decade now and I feel like I’ve seen a huge spectrum of behaviors. And so yeah, I absolutely agree. That’s my view of Tumblr now.
And I think that one of the problems with Tumblr in particular, since that’s what we’re talking about, though some of the things that you were just describing apply to anything, like Twitter or any sort of big social network that doesn’t have clear rules or boundaries, is: one of Tumblr’s biggest problems has always been the reblog.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: To return to that subject, you know. The idea that it’s really impossible to thread a conversation properly. So I post something, you reblog it…
FK: Right.
ELM: Joe reblogs it and Sally reblogs it and the three of you get a bunch of different, and then I’m like trying to manage, like, I was writing meta early on when I was on Tumblr and I will never do that again. Because even if it’s like a good conversation, it just spirals off into weird directions, because people are literally republishing my content and adding their own links to it if they’re not…
FK: There’s no way to follow it, yeah.
ELM: And just, then people start talking across each other or saying opposite things for different strands of it, and trying to manage all these different strands and I’m like—I just wanna create a master post of responses, or…I’ve seen people do this, right? Where they’re like “And then Joe said this!” And it’s like, “Oh, why! If this was a blog, people arguing in the comments,” you know.
FK: The nicely threaded comments.
ELM: Yeah! And so it’s such a fraught space in that way, and then people can delete stuff, but it lives on in reblogs and all that, whereas like on Twitter for context, if people don’t use it—if I delete one of my tweets, it will vanish if you’ve retweeted it.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Whereas on Tumblr it’ll live forever, even if I delete the original post. So like, it’s a fraught social network in that regard, and it really never was built for text in particular, and I think that’s always been hard for fandom, because I mean, it wasn’t built with fandom in mind. And the needs of fans. Right? I mean, that’s not to put too firm a boundary around fandom; obviously it’s really great if your mode of fandom is gifsets and reblogging images and sharing images and creating moodboards and stuff like that.
FK: Right, right right.
ELM: That’s a huge fannish practice, and there wasn’t anything like that prior to Tumblr in that way.
FK: Yeah. Yeah. You know, bringing Twitter into this makes me think about sort of what on Twitter—what’s bad behavior on Twitter that people get mad about? And it makes me think about like, snitch tagging people, right?
ELM: Sure.
FK: For a lot of people, if you snitch tag someone—meaning if you, if someone’s subtweeting, I don’t know, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and then you like tag the Archbishop of Canterbury into it…
ELM: Gotta bring it back to your priest thing, Flourish!
FK: This is just because there were people getting mad about this exact instance on Church Twitter. Anyway…
ELM: Oh my God.
FK: People, like, for a lot of people—
ELM: So, no, hold on, let’s define this better. So I’m like, “The Archbishop of Canterbury is a jerk.”
FK: Or better, you call him, like, “the Arch of C” or something so it’s not googleable, because the point is you don’t want the Archbishop of Canterbury to be able to like…
ELM: Right, right, I’m subtweeting him, I’m like, “Certain head of a certain church of a certain denomination…”
FK: “Is a dick,” right. You say this.
ELM: Two ways—there’s a few ways to snitch tag. You might be mad at me, right? So you tag in the—the AoC, as I call him. Cause you’re trying to show him that I’m subtweeting.
FK: Yeah yeah yeah.
ELM: But I find just as often there’s the ostensibly well-meaning but awful where people quote-tweet it and they’re like “Whaddaya have to say about this, Archbishop of Canterbury?” Like…
FK: Yup yup yup.
ELM: “You’re problematic! I think you’re problematic! He does!” You know. You’re like, “I didn’t want him to read this! I was just saying something negative.”
FK: Right, exactly. And so for a lot of people on Twitter, snitch tagging is like an instant—it’s like an insta-ban offense.
ELM: But people do it all the time so I don’t actually believe that these are universally understood rules!
FK: They are not! They are not.
ELM: Also, people are doing it because they think they’re supporting you. They’re like, “I too think that guy’s a jerk! I’m going to let him know directly” and you’re like “Please, I don’t want to be involved in that. I don’t wanna talk to him.”
FK: But the ways that people deal with this is they, if they want to continue talking to this person, they say “Please stop snitch tagging, here’s an explanation of what that is,” or you just, if it’s a rando, ban them!
ELM: Ban is not the word, Flourish.
FK: OK, whatever. You block them.
ELM: “Ban.”
FK: I was thinking about instaban or permaban, you know, from an older…
ELM: That’s what Twitter does to users, you don’t get to do that.
FK: Yeah, I know you don’t do that.
ELM: You just remove them from your house.
FK: I was thinking, my brain was still in like, forum days. But my point being though, right, you—it is widely accepted that you have that responsibility to decide if you’re going to interact with somebody or not, and it is, you know, to quote what this person is saying, “a culture of blocking and unfollowing.” That’s the culture on Twitter. It is a culture of blocking and unfollowing.
ELM: But ostensibly that is the culture on Tumblr too. When someone says something I don’t like, I unfollow them.
FK: You want the choice. Yeah.
ELM: I think I’ve mentioned this once on the podcast: when I started my fandom pseud, a couple years ago, I followed a whole bunch of people, and then within like a day I was like, “Oh my God, I’m starting to not like this fandom and these characters,” and I was like, “what happened?” And I was like “Oh, I started a Tumblr and I followed people and they’re, like, discoursing about each other,” not even a about the thing, they were like eternally fighting not about the thing that we were fans of at all. And I was like, “I don’t need to see this and they’re ruining it for me” and I just unfollowed all of them and now my dash is great.
FK: Great.
ELM: It’s just pictures.
FK: All right, so actually the theme of this episode pretty much is “free your mind by cleansing your timeline.” Yeah.
ELM: Yeah, I think it’s hard on Tumblr because I totally get it: small fandom, I’ve long felt sad that Tumblr doesn’t have a mute feature. I follow a lot of people whose interests have really diverged since I first, you know, I might even know them—might have met them at a con or whatever, and I do not want to see almost anything. There are people who I have almost all the things that they tag blocked through Tumblr’s blocking feature. And so all their blog for me is just like a sea of blocked posts. [FK laughs] And I’m like, “this is silly.” I would just like it if I could just mute them from my feed. I don’t want to disrespect them, cause I don’t…
FK: It’s not that they’re a bad person, you just don’t want to see the content.
ELM: And ostensibly they might even be my friend, you know? But I don’t want to see their things. And so I really wish Tumblr would implement that, because that’s one nice thing on Twitter: there are some people I like a lot, I just don’t like their tweets.
FK: Completely! And also sometimes, sometimes I need to have a break. Just a lil break.
ELM: Sometimes I unmute people and then I realize that was a mistake and they go back to Twitter jail. [both laugh]
FK: Back to Twitter jail! OK, next question, next question.
ELM: All right, all right.
FK: This is from a person with the amazing name of “Min Yoongi’s Perfect Cheekies.” I believe that the context for this name will become clear as I read the comment.
“I’m reaching out to you from perhaps the biggest fandom right now—the BTS fandom. I joined the ride in 2018 as an adult fandom enthusiast and every week there is new fandom discourse (and drama) being dissected. On top of seven beautiful and talented Korean men, the fandom is a gift that keeps on giving, and I have enjoyed seeing the fandom come up in your conversations as well from a more critical perspective.
“There is conflict that has been going around the fandom lately that I can only poorly paraphrase: people selling their social media accounts, usually with tens of thousands of followers (if not hundreds of thousands), dedicated to member X or Y. This selling of Twitter and other social media accounts has coincided with sponsored giveaways, which usually involves signing up to a third-party website somewhere. Thus fans are giving their details and data for a chance to get a free album from a fan account that gets money from the website or third party.
“Many fans have been furious over this, people have been blocked and cancelled, as large account runners turn their followers, there to hype their bias, into something to make money out of. Yet some consider this fair game—the account runner has doubtlessly put endless hours into providing content, they have a huge platform, so why not? But the exact same thing can be said of fic writers, fan artists, fan volunteers, and others who put in unpaid labour (and want to keep it that way, too!), although these people rarely reach similar numbers of followers.
“You have often discussed fandom as a demonetised space, and where those lines blur and fail. I wonder what your take on these behaviors is—and surely this is not a completely new phenomenon? At the heart of it, I sense a fear of ingenuity: is the account even being run by a true fan or Mike from Michigan who is exploiting fandom behaviours to get X amount of followers and then sell the account on? Often such people run dozens of competing accounts to see what sticks, too, and cross-promote accounts to maximise followers.
“If I am only looking to get content of Member Y’s perfect face on my feed, do I care if the account is run by a fellow fan or not? Is this invasion and abuse of fan spaces—or if the account runner is a true fan but decides to make money while at it, is that somehow betraying the ethos or community spirit of fandom? That same would hardly be said of a fan artist or smut writer who sets up a Patreon. Who gets to decide when it’s okay to start making some money—and does it come down to transparency with followers and people being able to opt in or out? Is there a whole perspective on this I haven’t clocked yet? Probably!
“Sorry to make you consider fandom and capitalism yet again! Thanks for the pod. Love from, Min Yoongi’s Perfect Cheekies.”
ELM: Great message. Really good.
FK: Great message.
ELM: Very interesting. I’ve got a lot of thoughts.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: All right, so I’m going to say first—there’s like a hundred different things here. But like, one thing that immediately strikes me is like, I think the one thing that the NFT nonsense has shown me, has shown us, shown all of us, is like—I don’t like NFTs, I think they’re really harmful in like 9,000 ways, but like…for culture, for the environment! But, if someone wants to sell something that seems pointless and someone else wants to buy it? Nothing’s stopping them, right? You know?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: So these accounts, if they wanna do it, and even if they get canceled and shamed out of existence, they wanted to cash in on that? Nothing’s stopping people from doing that transaction, right? Especially because like, what’s actually being sold here is like, a Twitter account. It’s not a fanwork, it’s not like, there’s no legalities here, right? So like, it’s only about whether you can weather the pressure.
FK: Yeah, exactly, and to their point also: this is a common practice in other spaces. There’s a lot of dog accounts that people build up and then sell. On Instagram this is a completely normal thing.
ELM: Yeah! OK, this is what I was going to say: I feel like this question gets into this space with like, Twitter stan culture in particular, the stuff that you see around Kpop but not just that—like, a lot of Western artists as well—that overlaps with influencer culture—
FK: Exactly!
ELM: —and those lines sometimes feel super blurred to me, right?
FK: And so like, you know, do I feel betrayed if I am following… I mean, I’ve seen this in Western fandom. I’ve seen this for like, big meme accounts for big Western fandoms, right?
ELM: Yeah, yeah.
FK: Especially the really old long-running ones. And it’s like: do I feel betrayed when an account that I followed because it shows, like, puppy pictures, you know, suddenly flips over and starts monetizing the puppy pictures and even changes to something else, right? Like, yeah, that annoys me. I don’t want whoever the fuck you sold this account to. I don’t want their content in my feed. I’m gonna unfollow, you know?
But I think that it feels a little different here because there’s a lot of assumptions—like, I’m not making any assumptions about the person who posted the puppy pictures, right. Like, I am in fact probably assuming that it is someone who’s just using those to get higher follower numbers, in probably a skeevy way, but I don’t care. But like, you’ve got an assumption about this person running the stan account, right? You’ve got this idea…
ELM: Mike from Michigan?
FK: Right! I mean obviously, obviously Min Yoongi’s Perfect Cheekies is thinking about this. But for a lot of people, you’re assuming that, you know, whoever it is who’s running it is actually as devoted to it as you are. You know?
ELM: Also potentially you’re assuming demographic things about them—maybe you’re assuming it was a young woman, right? Or whatever. And maybe they are using extremely stannish language, you know, and emojis and things, and creating fancams or whatever in a particular style, and you are a teen, and you’re assuming they’re also a teen, right? And like, that’s gonna feel like you’re being catfished, right?
FK: Yeah!
ELM: But like, they never said that “us teen girls love BTS,” they probably just said “look at BTS, aren’t they great,” you know?
FK: And let me tell you, this is a big part of being an effective social media manager, you know? Being able to come up with a voice like that, even a voice that’s not your own, and doing it. Like, that’s part of the problem too is that like, when I look at people working in social media, most of the people who I know who are very successful in it have done this at least once or twice. Not with BTS, but like, they’ve built out some account from nowhere. Maybe they did or didn’t care about the content of the account. But they found a niche and did it and like, that’s how they’re like, honing their trade, basically, right?
ELM: Yeah, yeah.
FK: That’s part of the job, is to be able to find that niche and get a high follower count and figure that out. So you know? I don’t know what to say about that.
ELM: It’s interesting cause obviously these are massive fandoms, and there’s a lot of different corners, but like, most K-pop fans I know are pretty interested in metric culture. So that is interesting to me too. Obviously there is huge transformative culture, and also you can be both kinds of fan, you can love BTS fic and also be really invested in metrics.
FK: Right.
ELM: But I do find it is interesting to think about in that context too, right, which feels a little bit different from the meme account, even if it’s a fannish meme account, right? There’s such an investment for so many people I know, being a BTS fan is caring about how much money they just made in a two-day concert, right? Which is wild to me. Why do you care? You know what I mean? And I have multiple people on my feed who are thrilled that they made so much money, and I just don’t get it, right? But you know, like, whatever. That’s bringing them joy, so that’s fine, you know. Or how many streams did they get? We’ve expressed our ambivalence and confusion about…
FK: And my occasional enjoyment, you know! Occasionally I get it.
ELM: Oh yeah, yeah. When you used to do this, stream I remember.
FK: Someday, someday Harry Styles will once again release new music and then I’ll do it. [both laugh] Someday!
ELM: No, you’re gonna have to go see his movies like 50 times. That’s the true sign right there. That makes him money.
FK: That’s true, that’s true.
ELM: You could spend a couple hundred dollars, make him some cash right there.
FK: I could do that.
ELM: I know how movies work, so actually for every ticket you buy Harry Styles gets a quarter.
FK: He does get… he does get something. Some part of it.
ELM: In his lil pocket. Actually, he does get some money, right?
FK: That is, yeah, most likely he has a deal whereby for every ticket you buy he gets some money. Yes. That is very likely.
ELM: Do you think it’s as much as a quarter? That feels too high.
FK: No. It is not that. It is definitely not that.
ELM: It’s like a fraction of a cent.
FK: It’s definitely not that, and it’s also, that’s a great simplification. But fundamentally yes, he probably gets some.
ELM: No, I love this image though. This is like when on NPR, on WNYC whenever they talk about the pledge drive, sometimes they’ll do this thing where they’ll say if you pay like $25 a month or whatever it’s like…no, what would be the right amount of money? Like $10 a month or whatever, it’d be like putting a quarter in your radio every day to turn on. And I find that a very charming image. You’re like, “It’s time to pay the radio machine!” So I also like the idea of popping a quarter into Harry Styles’s pocket as you walk into the theater. In my mind he’s wearing like 1950s pants, you know, that kind of baggy cut?
FK: Mm-hmm! Yeah yeah yeah.
ELM: Is that what you were also imagining?
FK: Well, he does wear those kinds of pants fairly frequently.
ELM: That’s what I was thinking! [laughing]
FK: All right all right. So, so…
ELM: I think, I think it’s complicated in fandoms like this, and I’m not gonna lie and say that I know what it looks like on the inside of any corner of the BTS fandom. I see so much of it and I’m just observing, right?
FK: Yeah. Same.
ELM: But I find the idea of…there are some, I’ve noticed on Twitter in my own fandom, which is pretty small and pretty old, there increasingly have been some accounts created that just seem to be for the likes. Like, I assume this is happening in every fandom.
FK: Oh yeah! Yeah yeah.
ELM: They’ll be like “The best of Cherik” or whatever. It’s actually funny because there’s someone, I try to keep that totally only on my fandom Tumblr, I don’t follow these accounts, but someone I follow on Twitter has started reblogging or retweeting some of them, and I’m like “I do not want to see James McAvoy right now!” [FK laughs] “This is on Twitter, I’m trying to read tweets about the media and you are context-collapsing on me right now.” But like, they’re even making fancams and stuff, and it’s like, what’s the…
If that’s their fannish expression, sure, but it also feels very generic to me. It doesn’t feel like, I know there’s a person behind it, but it just feels like it’s for the content creation and the likes and the retweets, you know? And so like, that’s nothing that I can connect with as a fan. So I do find it interesting imagining connecting with that as a fan and thinking about that other person as the same kind of fan as me. Cause I feel like that’s not, you know, I also love looking at James McAvoy’s face! But like, know what I’m saying?
FK: I do know what you’re saying, Elizabeth.
ELM: I don’t know.
FK: Will you read me our final question now? Because as much as I really, really love this question—and I did—it opens up so many cans of worms that I’m not sure we’re going to get to, you know.
ELM: It’s very…
FK: Yeah.
ELM: It’s like a worm shop. Bait shop.
FK: Thanks for the bait shop, Min Yoongi’s Perfect Cheekies! I had to get in one more use of that amazing name.
ELM: [laughs] All right. Our final question. You ready?
FK: I’m ready.
ELM: OK, so this is from Addie.
“I’m a long time listener and lover of the podcast! I recently joined the fandom for a show with a pretty young fanbase. I’m only 21 but I feel like an old lady among all of the teens. Shipping wars, purity culture, and fighting is pretty common but on the whole most of them are very sweet to me. Though I don’t really engage with them very much outside of posting memes and liking the occasional tweets.
“I migrated from a fandom that had been ongoing for a while and almost everyone was 30+. A few people in that fandom also came to the new one along with me. They’re all in their 30s and love making fun of the teens in 18+ Discords or on locked Twitter accounts. I know the teens can have bad opinions, but it rubs me the wrong way to make fun of them as much and with as much vitriol as the older fans do. Their behavior seems just as toxic as the teens’ to me? I’d like to leave the Discord/unfollow them on Twitter but then I’d be left without anyone to really interact with.
“Am I being a stick in the mud? Should I lighten up? Should I find a new fandom?”
FK: All right, this is in fact a great moment for the “Da Share Zone” meme which I will be putting in the show notes, which I think is the theme of this entire podcast, which is the one which is like “You can leave! Walk out! Anything! Too-fancy weed store! Co-op! Awkward party! Friends! Just get out!” Right?
ELM: [laughing] It was, you sent it the other day, it was “friend” space “ship.” This meme does not translate, saying it out loud does not express how good it is.
FK: I’m glad that I brought you joy with this meme. So I mean, here’s my take on this: some people really like complaining about things, and that can be a big downer when you’re not into it, and it can be really mean to other people, and sometimes that’s not the vibe that you wanna be in. And you have to decide like: do you want to talk to them, be like “hey, this is really bringing me down, can you not do this cause it’s mean,” or if you’re not the kind of friends with them to have that conversation, then you gotta—you gotta leave! You gotta walk out. You gotta go maybe make friends with the teens, who sound like they’re relatively chill, you know?
ELM: No, I mean, this is a really tricky place to be in. Here’s what I’m going to say: Back when we did our “Age in Fandom” episode, we actually talked about how ageism literally does go in both directions. Unlike…
FK: It really does.
ELM: Unlike other, like, phobias [sic] there’s no reverse ageism because ageism is literally just about people of different ages, you having some issue with them. You know?
FK: Right.
ELM: And I have noticed, since we did that episode a couple years ago, that I’ve seen some completely batshit behavior from teens, you know—like, people screenshotting it, coming into people’s mentions or DMs and saying “I’m a minor and before I follow you I need you to verify that your opinions are correct,” and it’s like…
FK: On an aside, did you see that video where someone tried to say “I’m a minor” in real life and almost caught hands for it?
ELM: What did they say? Can you tell me what happened in it?
FK: Oh yeah, it was like a video at an amusement park or a concert or something like that, someplace with barricades like that, and this girl was like “I’m a minor! You can’t talk to—are you gonna talk to a minor like that?” And the other girl was like, she looked ready to go. She was like, “I’m also a minor, bitch.” You know? [ELM laughs] And it was just like: yes, this is what happens in real life when you try and say this, is someone possibly punches you in the mouth, because you’re being really dumb right now.
ELM: OK!
FK: It was a real moment where this person tried to pull something and the real world was like, right there. In the form of another minor! Who was not going to stand for this.
ELM: Man. That’s really something. Yeah, I’ve seen a lot of that. But I have also seen this kind of rise of the like, 18, you know, the 18+ emoji in bio of just being like—you know, whatever, I mean, just being ageist! You know?
And I think that one thing that both you and I, maybe more me in my journalism than us as a podcast, have worked really hard to do is to like, kind of lift up teen girls in particular, because they’re such a punchline in music fandom or whatever, right? Or any kind of, why would you dismiss that interest, and these are smart people with smart taste or whatever. And a lot of this 18+, “the teens fucking suck” attitudes feels like, wait, isn’t this the same? You know what I mean?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: It’s like, a different behavior, but sometimes it feels like it’s cut from the same cloth.
FK: Yeah. I’m not sure that we’ve always, on the podcast, done the best job of separating out like: here is a trend that we see that seems to be mostly young people doing it, and it’s a trend that we don’t like, versus like—you know, “get off my lawn, you teens,” but I think it’s worth saying here, like: it’s #notallteens, but also why are we…
I’m having a hard time saying this, but I really would hate for someone to think that I’m sitting here being crusty and being like “teens suck,” or like, making fun of people, even when I dislike something like, a purity culture thing or whatever. I hope people, I hope I’m not making fun of anybody, right?
ELM: Yeah, I think we try not to do that. I hope so. Teens, if any teens listening feel that way, they should definitely call us out, or anyone of any age who wants to call us out on that. I do think that we can be critical of some elements of what fandom youth culture—
FK: Sure.
ELM: —or internet or fandom behaviors that are predominantly happening amongst current teens or the teens of five years ago when we started this podcast. [FK laughs] They’re not teens anymore. And I think some of that is coming from a place of: we too were teens, and it wasn’t that long ago, and there are things that I would say to my teen self, right, or certainly I’m sure there were things you’d say to your teen self about fandom engagement…
FK: Right.
ELM: And I also understand that that might sound patronizing no matter how we deliver it, because it always sounds like, you know, “A lesson I learned, youngster!” Which a lot of people just don’t want to hear that in any way, you know? So like…
FK: Right, right right. But it feels to me like if anybody does feel like we get like that, A, tell us, and then B, Da Share Zone saying “You can leave! Walk out!” You know? And I know that that’s hard, Addie—
ELM: “Too-fancy weed store.” [laughing]
FK: Too-fancy weed store!
ELM: OK, I’m sorry.
FK: Elizabeth is now dying.
ELM: It’s like, that’s such a specific example of what you might want to leave from.
FK: But it’s true, right? If I walked into a too-fancy weed store, I have had this experience! I walked into a too-fancy weed store and I was like “nope, uh-uh, not for me! No, I need someplace that smells more like bongwater!” [ELM laughing] Anyway…
ELM: Go—
FK: I do think from Addie’s perspective, it’s easy for me to say “walk out.” But Addie, it does sound like you’re in a rough position because these are your friends and they’re suddenly doing this thing, which makes you feel really bad.
ELM: I don’t know how confrontational a person Addie is, but one thing you could do with the older friends in the fandom is—if you’re actually friends with any of them, like friends-friends with them, like if there is someone you would DM comfortably—
FK: Yeah!
ELM: Write to them and say like, “Hey, I was only a teen a couple years ago, and sometimes the way you talk about teens is like, I feel lumped in with that. I’m a couple years older than them and I’m much closer to their age than your age and I’m wondering if you’re aware of this.” Because I think that one thing that we talk about in these ageism conversations is how, like, utterly dehumanizing it is, right?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: If people say “Everyone under this arbitrary line of 18 or whatever it is, or everyone over it, is like X,” it’s like: do you know anyone over or under that line? Are they like X? You know? Like… [both laugh]
FK: Completely.
ELM: So I wonder, that could be a solution, but also it’s totally possible that that’s not the relationship. I mean I don’t have those kind of relationships with almost anyone, even people I’m mutuals with and friendly with, you know? In my fandom. I wouldn’t feel comfortable. I’d feel more comfortable unfollowing someone in the fandom space than I would actually talking to them about why they were bothering me, so.
FK: Yeah, although sometimes those do have—you know, I mean, sometimes those conversations can invite you into a closer relationship with somebody, if that’s what you want, also.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: Not to, I mean, it is a gamble, right? But there is—I think a lot of times when people think about that gamble they’re like “well, they might hate me.” It’s like, OK, but you already didn’t like what they were doing and you were considering blocking or muting them, so like…
ELM: Yeah.
FK: There’s not a big loss! It may be disappointing, but it’s not a big loss. But the other possibility is maybe they go “Oh yeah! Wow, hey, sorry.” I just had a conversation with somebody like this where they had been posting something that I found, I was like, “did you read the link? I find this really cruel, this thing that you posted, and here’s why,” and you know—
ELM: Wait wait wait. Tell this story again. What happened?
FK: Somebody, a friend of mine posted a joke about, whatever. A main character of the internet. Whoever was the main character of Twitter that day. And I was like, you know, “did you actually read about this person and what they were doing, because I think that you’re being really cruel right now. I would not reblog that and I don’t like that.”
And they were like, “Yeah, you know, I just clicked through and I’m reading it and this does seem really fucked up and I shouldn’t have posted that,” you know. And I was like, “Great!”
ELM: Burning with curiosity about the subject of this. You can tell me later.
FK: OK. I was like—anyway, point being, sometimes that can be like a good thing! And people will, I wouldn’t say I was surprised by this because I knew this person was a reasonable person and I had a general sense that they would react positively. But like, you know, people surprise you with their goodness, sometimes, also. So you know. If you do feel, if you don’t feel comfortable don’t do it, but if you do feel like you could take that chance—I don’t know. I guess I always think that more communication is usually better when it’s honest and you’re trying to talk.
ELM: Yeah. It is funny that so many times in this episode we’ve just advised, like, walking or whatever. [laughs]
FK: For the last one to be like “try talking to them!” But also, you can walk out.
ELM: Right.
FK: You can walk out.
ELM: I think maybe take a grain of this, the last question salt in all of our answers. Especially, fandoms are made up of people with different levels of friendship or acquaintanceship, right? And you shouldn’t assume that everyone just, it’s not just a bunch of strangers sitting in a space together. You may have DM-level relationships with these folks, and then just talk to them, say “what do I do? I don’t like this, how should I handle it,” you know.
Or if it seems like someone’s on a—maybe for a bunch of these problems the people are writing in about, if it seems like someone is on the same page as you in their posts, maybe that’s a way to spark a DM. On Tumblr you can send someone their own post and be like “Hey, I don’t really wanna talk about this publicly, but I, it seems like we might agree, I’m having a lot of trouble with this, are you having trouble with this dynamic too?” And see where you go from there. Backchanneling! I love backchanneling.
FK: Backchanneling. That’s a solution.
ELM: Yeah. I mean, when I said it that way, it suddenly made it sound not great. But like… [FK laughs] Whatever. All right. Cool.
FK: Well, I thought this was a really great episode, and it turned out to have themes that we didn’t know it was gonna have when we planned it!
ELM: We did not know that.
FK: But it turned out to be thematic.
ELM: That’s weird too because we read all the questions in advance and put them in a specific order, and then each time the next one came up I was like “Wow, we really kinda started this and now we’re gonna—how did this happen?”
FK: Yeah! Great questions, everybody. That’s down to our wonderful audience.
ELM: Absolutely. And I should say that we have a few questions sitting in our various askboxes and inboxes that, they’re the kind of questions that I think don’t belong in an AMA. They should prompt full episodes. So anyone who’s waiting to hear from us, sorry, we’ve got a huge backlog, and a bunch of them, honestly, we’re trying to find the right time to do a full episode, or like the right guest to talk about it. So. Especially if you left a question on Tumblr, it’s just gonna sit in the askbox because if we, there’s no way to answer it without it vanishing.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Cool functionality.
FK: Cool functionality, Tumblr!! All right.
ELM: So sit tight and we really appreciate every suggestion for an episode and some of our best episodes, I think, have been listener suggestions!
FK: They definitely have. All right. I think that’s it. I’ll talk to you later, Elizabeth?
ELM: OK. Bye, Flourish!
FK: Bye!
[Outro music, thank-yous and credits]