Episode 155: Happy Anniversary #6
Flourish and Elizabeth celebrate their sixth anniversary in the traditional fashion: inviting back guests from the past year to talk about changes they’ve observed in fandom, from the global to the personal. Topics covered include the uncertain future of some fanfiction platforms, growing more protective of your fannish spaces, the ever-growing influence of purity culture, and the year’s racial reckonings (and whether anything has really changed).
Show Notes
[00:00:00] As always, our intro music is “Awel” by stefsax, used under a CC BY 3.0 license.
[00:01:16] Our previous anniversary episodes: #5, #4, #3, #2, and #1!
[00:02:42] Toast has been on several episodes of Fansplaining, but most recently #138, “2020 By the Numbers.” We most recently referenced them in Episode 153, “The Productive Fan.” In this episode, they referred to their “AO3 in 2020” stats, particularly this graph:
[00:06:40] If you aren’t familiar with the Wattpad acquisition, TechCrunch covered it.
[00:11:15] Roz has been a guest in both of our rounds of Race and Fandom series—Episode 22B and Episode 135A.
[00:15:30] Maria and Anne joined us for Episode 151, “Teaching Fanfiction.”
[00:21:11] Like Roz, PJ Punla also joined us for both rounds of Race and Fandom: Episode 22A and Episode 135A.
[00:24:40] We interviewed Para in Episode 135A, “Race and Fandom Revisited: Part 1.” We also got to hang out with him in person!
[00:28:30] We’ve had two full-length episodes devoted to purity culture: Episode 132 and Episode 84.
[00:30:10]
Apparently the complaints about Persephone and Hades’ age gap are related to a particular retelling called Lore Olympus (see this elaborate defense post), but still.
The original Tumblr post complaining that Orestes and Pylades are cousins has been taken down, but here’s a screenshot. As you might imagine, the reblogs are an absolute trash fire.
[00:35:19] Amanda-Rae joined us for Episode 135B, “Race and Fandom Revisited: Part 2.”
[00:40:55] Stitch was part of both rounds of the Race and Fandom series: Episode 22B and Episode 135B.
They’ve written a bunch for Teen Vogue, including the article that set a lot of the harassment off, and our favorite article, an interview with Kelly Marie Tran. One round of people harassing Stitch actually ended up in Oh No They Didn’t, if you need some context.
[00:46:07] Effy gave her thoughts in Episode 135B, “Race and Fandom Revisited: Part 2.”
[00:53:01] Our “pandemic episode” was #150, “Post-Pandemic Fandom.”
Transcript
Flourish Klink: Hi, Elizabeth!
Elizabeth Minkel: Hi, Flourish!
FK: And welcome to Fansplaining, the podcast by, for, and about fandom!
ELM: This is Episode #155, “Happy Anniversary #6.”
FK: Six years of doing this podcast together!
ELM: That’s a lot of years.
FK: Yeah. It’s like, I really truly can’t believe we have not murdered each other. I think I say that every year.
ELM: Wow.
FK: “It’s another year without murdering each other!”
ELM: Wow. You know if one of us murdered the other it would be me murdering you.
FK: Yeah, I do know that actually.
ELM: This is on the record now. Someday, at my trial… [both laugh] Don’t worry about it. It’s fine. All right! So: this is our anniversary episode. We normally do this after we go physically to San Diego Comic-Con. This past year and last year there was no physical Comic-Con, so we didn’t have that marker, which sucks but it is what it is.
FK: Alas.
ELM: But we’re still doin’ this!
FK: Yeah! So every year, we do the same format of anniversary episode, which is we reach out to all the guests that we’ve had on the podcast in the previous year, and we ask them to answer three questions. We ask them to say what trends they’ve seen in fandom over the past year, we ask them how their views on fandom have changed, and we ask them what their personal year in fandom had looked like. And some people answer all three, some people just pick one, some people tie them together, some people don’t. But this year we got a really really good response rate.
ELM: Well, so in previous years we haven’t had a ton of guests just for a variety of reasons. But this year, because last fall we did our double “Race and Fandom” episodes, which had like—what? Like, a dozen participants?
FK: Yeah, yeah.
ELM: We had a much bigger pool of people to write to and a whole bunch of them, the participants from those episodes, sent in their thoughts along with some of our other guests from different episodes. So it’s exciting! It’s nice to hear a big range. Not that we haven’t valued the small range of previous guests in previous years.
FK: Oh my God, Elizabeth, you just made that awkward.
ELM: I just, I don’t know! I just wanna make sure—last year was a good anniversary episode too!
FK: That is very true.
ELM: Even though there was only, we had maybe five people last year?
FK: Indeed, indeed. OK, OK. Should we, like, instead of digging ourselves deeper into the awkward hole, just actually start listening?
ELM: I think your calling it the “awkward hole” is the most awkward possible thing.
FK: [laughing] This is why we have to start listening to the guests, Elizabeth!!
ELM: OK. Who is the first person that we’re going to hear from?
FK: It’s Toast! Destination Toast, repeat offender.
ELM: Ah, Toast. [both laugh] You sound like a dad, so congratulations.
FK: It’s my nature!
ELM: OK. So Destination Toast, if you’ve missed their multiple appearances on the podcast or you haven’t encountered their work in fandom, is most well-known for doing fandom stats work. So a lot of their work focuses on the AO3 because there’s a lot more readily accessible data. They analyze trends and fanworks production, as we called out in the episode two episodes ago about “The Productive Fan.” And so year, I’m curious to see what Toast had to say.
FK: Great, let’s listen!
Destination Toast: Happy anniversary, Fansplaining! This is Destination Toast, letting you know that I’m so glad to have had your podcast in my ears for another year.
I have a few observations about the past year. To start out on a light note, for better or worse, this is the year of the “not-beta-read” AO3 tag, which is more popularly known for subtags like “no beta, we die like men.” This AO3 tag has nearly doubled in popularity over the past year, and it was used on nearly 5% of works updated in the past month. It seems like the tag’s adaptability to different fandom memes is helping it thrive and spread, as I’ve seen variants like “no beta, we die like stormtroopers,” “no beta, we die like Cas,” or “no beta, we fall like Crawley.” I even participated in a fandom linguistics survey recently on which kinds of not-beta-read tags are appropriate to use in which fandom contexts.
Looking at the bigger picture, I feel like the past year deserves the “whump” tag in a big way. So many stressful things have happened that I personally haven’t been able to focus very much on fandom or do anything very creative, and when I’ve read fanfic, I’ve looked for escapism and I’ve spent time rereading favorite comfort fics.
But even being a fan online has come with its own set of stresses: I’ve seen lots of angst this year about fannish practice undergoing various changes, between Wattpad being bought by Naver, Discord changing restrictions on adult content, Tumblr introducing Posts Plus, and observations that Fanfiction.net seems to have quit doing bug fixes or account recovery. It’s been a worrisome year for online fandom platforms, too, on top of everything else.
But despite everything, the data shows that fandom overall is still creating and sharing a huge amount, at least on AO3, where I do most of my stats. In the past year, more than 1.8 million fanworks have been posted or updated on AO3, way more than previous years. Also interesting to me is that not everyone is looking for escapism the way that I am. I’ve seen that there are over 8,000 works that reference COVID, for instance. I’ve also been encouraged to see that following tense discussions about racism and harassment in fandom, some fans are getting practical about how to improve fandom platforms. I’ve seen in-depth discussions about the details of how to implement new AO3 features like blocking and muting and I’ve seen people sharing helpful workarounds in the meantime. I’ve also seen some fans working to create new fandom platforms with different moderation options, which all makes me feel cautiously optimistic, and I hope that multiple of these efforts yield good fruit.
Overall, I’m inspired to see many fans contributing to fandom in a wide variety of ways, in spite of everything that has made this year especially challenging. Once again, happy anniversary and thanks for all you do, Fansplaining!
FK: Clearly the tagline of the episode is “the past year deserves the ‘whump’ tag in a big way.”
ELM: Put it on a bumper sticker, honestly. Agree. This was an extremely interesting voicemail, like, there’s so much information in here.
FK: Yeah!
ELM: In a way that I wasn’t anticipating. A few things strike me: one is, we haven’t really talked that much about these platform shifts over the past year, particularly the Wattpad one—Wattpad being acquired and FFN kind of seeming like it truly may be on the outs—even though it seemed like a somewhat unsupported space for years—it was still being maintained and you could still reset your password.
FK: Yeah, and it’s still a vibrant platform with a lot of people on it!
ELM: Yeah, I mean, that should be said, because I do find with like—I don’t know, our contemporaries or whatever, people that I spend time in fandom spaces with, they’re very dismissive of that or they don’t realize it at all and they’ll say “Oh, everyone left that platform in 2002,” or whatever. And it’s like, “No. I did, and you did, but like, tons and tons of people—thousands, millions of people—have gone to it over the past decade, especially younger fans.”
FK: Yeah, and fans in different—fans in different kinds of fandoms, and male fans.
ELM: Mm-hmm!
FK: You know? There’s actually—I know we don’t like to talk about it, but men also write fanfiction sometimes [laughs] you know?
ELM: Flourish. I’m shaking my head at your statement, not at the content of your statement but at the way it was delivered. [FK laughs] No.
FK: Oh, you know, I’m just poking fun because we do tend to focus on certain, you know, certain aspects of it. But there’s just different populations who use fanfiction.net.
ELM: Absolutely. So it sucks, you know? Like, it’s unfortunate. It’s always been a little bit of an oddity to me, because like, it—you know, at least with Wattpad, their attitudes about fic and the way that they’ve engaged with fic or haven’t over the past few years have been interesting, and not always good and not always bad, but I always felt like they were at heart a commercial company and you knew what they were, right? You know?
FK: Mm-hmm.
ELM: And I give them a lot of credit for not—I haven’t felt like they’ve felt exploitative of fans, right. They have this whole, you know, fan-to-hit-Netflix-series pipeline. Maybe it’s not that robust, to call it a “pipeline,” but there are pathways, right? You know? They understand fans can also be like, create things that potentially could lead to commercial success.
But fanfiction.net, I feel like, doesn’t have the protections or the intentionality of the AO3 as being a noncommercial space—that’s an understatement!—but it also…
FK: [laughing] Does it have any intentionality?
ELM: I think, I think it gives off a little bit of a false vibe, because it’s felt so forgotten.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: You know? It’s like, it’s not like Tumblr where it feels like some corporation might buy you and then sell you. No one’s buying fanfiction.net.
FK: No.
ELM: Like, for what purpose, right? So I think that leaves a little bit of a false sense of security, because it’s non-commercial in that way—I mean there are ads, but you know what I mean.
FK: Yeah. It’s self-supporting, but it’s not…
ELM: It’s not scalable.
FK: It’s not, like, scalable, yeah, exactly, exactly.
ELM: Yeah. So I guess we’ll keep an eye on that.
FK: Yeah. I thought it was also really interesting that Toast put their finger on the fact that people are having really different fandom experiences over the pandemic, right? And over this past year in particular. The fact that Toast is saying “I haven’t been doing as much, but clearly there’s tons of people who are doing a lot!” Right?
ELM: Right.
FK: Toast says like, Toast has been enjoying escapist fics—but there’s like 8,000 fanfics tagged “COVID-19,” you know?
ELM: Well, those might not necessarily…I mean, just cause you tag COVID doesn’t mean it’s not escapist, right? I mean, obviously it’s engaging somewhat…
FK: All right, fair enough, but you get my point, right?
ELM: I’ve just gotta say, not every fic tagged “COVID-19” is like, dealing with someone getting sick or dealing with someone losing their job or whatever. It could be a super fluffy roommate fic that happens during the pandemic and…
FK: But the fact that they’re engaging with the fact that it is the pandemic at all…
ELM: Yeah, it’s not “AU—No Pandemic.” [laughs]
FK: Right? I mean, frankly I’m not gonna read that personally, either, I’m with Toast on the “give me some completely escapist, like,”
ELM: Sure.
FK: Point being, though, I think it’s really interesting to highlight that everybody’s having a super different time. And I think that’s something that’s really easy to lose sight of, because our own experiences are so totalizing and completely—I mean traumatic for a lot of people, for everybody, to some extent, I think. More for some than others. And it’s really hard to see outside what your own experience has been. It’s gonna be interesting to see what it’s like when fandom—if fandom sort of, I don’t know, re-forms, maybe? It feels like things have really fractured in a lot of ways, with people having really different experiences, previous associations, previous groups, previous experiences have kind of spread apart, and it’ll be interesting to see what happens when that comes back together again, if it does.
ELM: I think we should talk more about this when we talk about our own observations at the end of the episode. Spoiler! That’s what’s gonna happen at the end of the episode.
FK: All right. Let’s do that. Should we in the meantime move on and listen to the next guest?
ELM: Yeah, let’s do it!
FK: OK, the next person is Roz.
ELM: OK. So Roz, I’ll be introducing everyone, Roz was a participant in our “Race and Fandom” episode, the redux last year, and our original one, and has sent in her thoughts over the years many times, so you may recognize her voice.
FK: All right, let’s listen!
Roz: Hi Flourish and Elizabeth! This is Roz, answering your questions about what I’ve observed in fandom over the last year. It’s been a weird year, and I haven’t been participating in fandom in the same way. I think I’ve been reading more fic, but not writing my own fic, so I think that’s definitely one thing—I think I’ve seen a lot more stories, whether or not they’ve been completed is a different conversation. A lot more younger fans learning how to write.
When I think about fandom, I don’t think it’s really changed over the last year, but it is hampered when you don’t really have an active fandom. As much as I love the X-Men movies, the last two were kind of cruddy, so that’s a comfortable space, but there’s no necessarily new content. And then my other active reading fandom, Yuri!!! On Ice, has been waiting for a movie for about three years now, which also means that ideas are kind of dying in the same way. I haven’t tried getting myself into any other fandoms just because I haven’t really been watching anything else. I mean, I’ve been watching stuff, but I haven’t fallen in love to read fic about anything else, I should say.
And like, my last year in fandom has been a lot of reading, a lot of rereading, a little bit of writing. And I think that’s just because as an educator, I was focused on trying to teach kids in the middle of a pandemic! So that’s kind of where I’ve seen things going the last year slash year-and-a-half. It’s good to be able to tell you all something and I’ll talk with you all later! Bye.
FK: It’s really interesting to me how Roz calls out, like, younger fans learning to write, and seeing a different sort of quality—not quality meaning good or bad, but feeling of the fic that’s being posted, and Toast being like “And the ‘not beta read’ tag has grown!”
ELM: Yeah, I thought about that too.
FK: Hugely!
ELM: So Roz and I share a fandom. We are fandom friends. And I’ve also observed some of these things. I think personally it’s made it a little harder for me—I haven’t read any fic during the pandemic. I read a few, in the beginning I read a few older ones, but I just literally—and I’m still writing, but I just don’t really feel engaged, and I try to read a few newer ones and it’s hard to find stuff that really works for me, you know? And a lot of it does feel like people learning to write. I think that’s awesome, but it also doesn’t necessarily mean that I want to read it, you know what I mean?
FK: Is this, do we think that this is the “normies getting weird during the pandemic” energy?
ELM: No. No. I don’t know, I can’t speak—maybe Roz is also speaking to her other fandom. But I have noticed in the one that we share, there have been a lot of younger fans who seem to have shown up during the pandemic, and I can’t judge. I watched those movies like three years ago, I didn’t watch them when they came out, you know?
So like…you can show up at any time, and it’s wonderful to have new folks in any fandom, but also it’s a little bit hard when there isn’t a ton of new stuff coming out. I mean, you could say this of any smaller, older fandom, when you’re pretty limited and you make those jokes about having exhausted some tag search, you know, and you go back to the beginning and lower what you’re willing to read or whatever. [FK laughs] Or you can just say, “I don’t know if there’s anything that’s gonna be here for me,” which is like, whatever. I’m getting as much out of fandom as I really feel like I need to right now. I don’t need any hot white heat of the sun—is that the expression?
FK: I don’t know what expression you’re reaching for.
ELM: Hot, yellow…
FK: I don’t know…
ELM: Hot white heart, I’m thinking of like a flame…
FK: I get what you’re thinking about, I just don’t know that there’s an expression. [ELM laughs] That you’re reaching for. I think that you’re envisioning a very strong image and trying to make it be an expression.
ELM: Is a blue flame hotter than a red flame?
FK: I don’t know, Elizabeth.
ELM: Flame colors.
FK: Elizabeth, Elizabeth, I think we need to put this aside and listen to the next person.
ELM: I watched Backdraft when I was in high school. That’s my knowledge of fire.
FK: Great. OK. [laughing] Should we listen to our next guest?
ELM: Let’s do it.
FK: So we’re actually gonna listen to two in a row here, we’ve got—because they came on the same episode together! Maria Alberto and Anne Jamison.
ELM: So, for context, Dr. Anne Jamison, Flourish, is a professor of English at the University of Utah who wrote the book Fic that I think a lot of our listeners may be familiar with. And over the years, on and off, she’s taught fanfiction classes within the English department, so treating fic as literary text and analyzing it that way rather than studying fans as people in Fan Studies often do. And Maria is a grad student at the University of Utah in the English department who taught the class with Anne. And so they’re both coming from a somewhat, you know, they’re different generations of scholar and fans, but they’re also approaching fic in a similar way in the classroom. So yeah, they were our most recent guests and I’m excited to hear from them again!
FK: Awesome. Let’s roll it!
Maria Alberto: Hi Flourish and Elizabeth! This is Maria Alberto, past guest on the Fansplaining podcast, and I’m just giving y’all a call in response to the email about contributing to an anniversary episode.
So you sent us all three questions, and I loved them all, but I feel like the first two would take way longer than three minutes to answer fully, so I thought I’d just briefly focus on the third one: how’s your past year in fandom been personally?
For me it’s been a really rich and interesting year in fandom terms. My longstanding fandoms and the amazing fics they’ve produced have just been a godsend as I prepped for and went through comps, for one thing. So have I read as much fics as I’ve read off my comps list, maybe, no one can prove anything!
But it’s also just been a joy to share some of that fandom life in different places, so of course it was great fun to come and chat with you all on Fansplaining, and in addition it was fun to introduce the students in the fanfiction and adaptation class that I co-taught with Anne Jamison this last year to some of these fandoms, specifically The Untamed and its source text, the web novel Mo Dao Zu Shi, just looking back and thinking of these things, it’s just been a really great reminder of how lucky I am personally that what I enjoy intersects with what I’m working on in these really just personally rewarding ways. Thank you so much for some awesome questions, and I’m super looking forward to this episode! Have a great day.
Anne Jamison: Hi! This is Anne Jamison, I’m happy to report that for the most part my year in fandom was quite joyous, because I actually participated like, just as a fan, just as a…I wrote fic, I did Yuletide which I never did before because it’s always the worst time of year for me, but since I had nothing else going on because I was in quarantine for most of the year, like everyone else, I could write fic! I could do Yuletide! It was so much fun.
And then I taught my fanfic course, and at that point fanfic became work, which is also fun but fun in a different way, and that’s typically the cycle that I go through, but I loved the fandoms that I was in, I love Yuletide, and I was pretty happy with the whole thing. I hope that other people also found fandom to be a bright spot in the less-than-ideal year.
FK: On the topic of people having different pandemics, I think it’s interesting: Roz, who we heard before, is also an educator, going “I was just focused on teaching children during a pandemic,” obviously different kind of educator, and Maria being like “We taught fanfic and that was great! And it’s a different vibe, relationship to fandom within that,” you know?
ELM: Well, I think you’re conflating a little bit of what they were saying, cause they both cited having really rich personal experiences with fandom.
FK: Yeah, that’s true.
ELM: But then they also talked about their work and they said that there was still fic involved, obviously, but it turned fanfiction into work.
FK: Yeah, that’s true.
ELM: And Roz is not teaching fanfiction. So I think you just collapsed it all, Flourish, and I disagree.
FK: Eh, I like collapsing things sometimes.
ELM: Yeah, you’re very reductive.
FK: Let’s just, let’s just reduce it. Works fine.
ELM: I would say, comparing their two answers to Roz’s, Roz was talking about older, a little bit sleepier fandoms. I know that Maria’s been in the Untamed fandom, Anne’s been in Good Omens, these are the…
FK: [laughing] The hot, white heat of the…
ELM: Firey… [laughing] See, I knew you wanted to use my expression, which is a true expression that everyone uses at all times!
FK: Always. Every day. [both laugh]
ELM: Yeah, when you log onto your meeting, immediately you hear it. You can’t stop it.
FK: No, I can’t!
ELM: I gotta say, it is really nice to hear—I feel like, it’s interesting, I don’t wanna overgeneralize, but I do feel like a lot of our guests over the years, because they study fans in some way or like, professionally work with fans, a lot of the time we do get the response of like, “I don’t know, fandom’s not really doing it for me personally,” or “I’m not really engaged right now.” And it’s reassuring to me—and I know that you’ve struggled with feeling like you were kind of drifting out of fandom world, in and out over the course of this podcast—it’s nice to hear from people who have, like, found new stuff to really get excited about.
FK: Yeah, for sure. I think it’s natural. I think most people who are in fandom, over the years you have times when you’re in and when you’re out, and it’s just that usually if you don’t study it or don’t have some other reason that you’re tied to it, then during those periods you just don’t—it’s not like you’re talking about it!
ELM: Yeah, yeah.
FK: You’re not coming on a podcast like Fansplaining, you’re not producing a podcast like Fansplaining all the time, and so I think it’s totally normal, but yeah, it’s really comforting to hear other people talking about it.
ELM: Totally. All right, should we go on to our next guest?
FK: Yeah, for sure, and this one is P. J. Punla. And P. J. was not able to record, so just sent in some text. So if it’s all right, I’ll read it!
ELM: Go for it.
FK: All right. “Even if I’ve been under a general state of lockdown since March 2020, my particular fandom has allowed me to go to amazing and wonderful online concerts, and other satisfying experiences. I keep getting to see the guys do their thing, even with their restrictions and pandemic-induced difficulties. And yes, I feel immensely happy to be part of this huge global thing BTS and ARMY have got going on. But I can't help but wonder about the pressures the guys are under, and the pressures that could fracture ARMY. I've become so much more cautious about dealing with newcoming fans since joining this fandom, or at least since I found my relatively calmer niche in it. On the other hand: being able to link up again with friends from other fandoms who have joined up? Priceless!” And that’s from P. J. Punla.
ELM: This is very interesting. Thank you, PJ, for sending this in. It’s interesting thinking about the quieter fandoms and the pressures from being in, like, the biggest fandom in the world, and feeling like you’ve found a stable place that doesn’t suck, and knowing at any moment because there are giant waves of, of new fans washing in, that it could be like, the vibe could change with like, one giant, you know…what’s the word for a large wave? Tsunami?
FK: Tsunami. You found the word.
ELM: That’s like a big wave? That’s like a weather phenomenon.
FK: No, a tsunami is a big wave.
ELM: There’s gotta be a word for a big wave that’s not a tsunami.
FK: I don’t know.
ELM: I have no vocabulary this morning.
FK: A breaker?
ELM: Yeah, a breaker.
FK: A roller? A rolling breaker?
ELM: You’re useless here right now. [laughing]
FK: Sorry!
ELM: Anyway, a big breaker comin’ in of fans, who could like totally change the vibe and make it an unpleasant experience. That’s gotta be a little bit, a hard thing to have in the back of your mind when you feel like you’ve really found a good balance.
FK: Yeah, and also I think spoke a little bit to the pressures on fandoms that are focused around real people, you know? Obviously BTS is a band fandom, but BTS is made up of real human beings, and thinking about like everybody’s pressure in the pandemic and the pressure on them, that’s a really different vibe than being in a fiction fandom where of course there’s actors and so forth…
ELM: Hmm, yeah.
FK: It’s a different, the site of your interest is different.
ELM: I don’t know. Unless you’re in the like Jane Austen fandom or whatever, if the people who made the thing you like are alive, I think you’re gonna have that human element. I get what you’re saying that it’s different when wholly the object of fandom is real people, but I think that film and TV fans have been engaging with a lot of this stuff too.
FK: Sure, no, you’re right. But I mean, there’s also like, if people are continuing to put on…I guess a lot of film and TV shut down over the pandemic—
ELM: Yeah.
FK: —or had limited, you know what I mean? Whereas I feel like BTS really has kept up a schedule.
ELM: They sure have.
FK: And that is a bit different. That’s a different level of concern that you might have for those people. I mean, obviously we’re all concerned for actors that we like and like, want their sets to be safe and so forth, but they locked down with us too in a lot of ways, right? Whereas…
ELM: All right, that’s a fair distinction.
FK: Yeah, so.
ELM: All right. Yeah. That’s very interesting. Thank you, P. J.
FK: All right. Shall we listen to our next guest?
ELM: Let’s do it.
FK: All right! This is Para! Paracelsus Caspari.
ELM: OK, wait, before Para I just realized I didn’t introduce P. J., who like Roz was a participant in our original “Race and Fandom” episode and then came back on for their reflections in the last one. And then Para was a newer guest to that series we’ve done. We interviewed him to talk about his experiences in fandom and then we got to met him IRL when he came to visit New York City!
FK: Humans!
ELM: Just a few weeks ago! It was a delight.
FK: We’re humans!
ELM: Hi, Para, good to see you again!
FK: All right. Let’s listen.
Paracelsus Caspari: Hey guys, it’s Para. So I’m basically responding to the prompts that you sent. The first one was “what trends did you observe in fandom over the past year?” The main trend I observed was just, I tweet about it a lot, but basically just the increased prominence of morality discourse in fan response to fictional works, whether it’s cartoons, movies, fic, just like—a lot of people who seem to be, like, defining themselves by what they consume, and so because of that they expect moral righteousness out of the things they like. The only conception of how they know to formulate a response to liking or not liking something has to be based in that thing’s virtuousness. So you have people who are like, “I like this thing, therefore it must be morally good because obviously what about me if it’s morally bad,” or vice versa, where you’re like “anything I don’t like has to be morally bad, because otherwise what does it say about me if I hate it and it’s good.”
There’s just this obsession with like, everything I like or everything I ship, everything I watch, everything I read has to be good, because what then. It’s just bizarre to me how much this new Calvinist mindset is infecting a lot of young people, especially—I mostly stay on Twitter, I don’t know how much it is on Tumblr, but mostly on Twitter, so many young people, teenagers on Twitter are just obsessed with moral purity of the things that they consume, and they’re starting to create sort of aggressive tribal instincts to the way that they engage with fandom, which is obviously very concerning.
And how has my thinking about fandom changed in the past year? It’s basically gotten a lot more cynical for those aforementioned reasons. I’m a lot more protective to the friends I do have and more standoffish or hostile to the people who do try to bring that same line of thinking towards my circles. I’m a lot more confrontational, a lot more argumentative I guess, with those sorts of people. I’m a lot more willing to challenge and ask questions of people who think like that and hopefully make them see how it’s not ideal for them to have that sort of mindset.
And the past year in fandom for me personally, how it’s been—I’d say it’s been pretty fun. I mean, like, obviously 2020 wasn’t the best or wasn’t really the most active year for Marvel, which is my main fandom, but those guys are back both in comics and in movies too, which are very exciting, good times for me personally. Enjoying lots of X-Men, enjoying Captain Marvel, enjoying Champions and then of course MCU, Loki, Black Widow, WandaVision, lots of good stuff. Yeah! It’s been nice. Thanks for having me on to do this, it was nice to be on the episode and it’s nice to talk to you guys again.
ELM: OK. So. The thing that immediately strikes me, I mean, you put these in order and I think you did a great job, because similarly, he talks about trying to be protective of—from new people, right? Like, “I don’t know what this person’s vibe is gonna be, and so it’s important to me to kind of make sure they don’t come marching in here with some like, wild purity culture stuff.” Right?
FK: Absolutely, and I think that’s putting a finger on a trend that is happening throughout fandom. We’ve talked about it before on the podcast, although we haven’t really done a specific episode about it. The trend of people, you know, heading into Discords, heading into, you know, smaller spaces, large DM conversations or whatever, where you really have a controlled set of people that you’re experiencing fandom with to keep out some of the wildness that’s happening just everywhere on the internet.
ELM: It’s interesting. I mean, like, I—I think that a lot of these are trends we’ve observed before, but one thing that we talked about over the lpast year is how like, some people have, because of the circumstances of their lives in the pandemic, have really retreated from digital spaces, and then people who—some people want the opposite and got like, extremely extremely online. I think this kind of siloing off and this kind of enclosing of spaces has been a trend we’ve observed over the course of this entire podcast, but I have to wonder if it went into overdrive for a lot of people right now because it just felt like people were just stewing and just spewing out things on the open internet and just feels like it’s bombarding you from all sides at all times. You know? Makin’ the internet sound so good.
FK: The internet has never been good.
ELM: That’s also something I agree with.
FK: Yeah, that’s true. I mean, I think that you’re right that things have gotten more intense. There’s also stuff that, you know, has been a constant issue, right? Like, Para’s talking about purity culture and the idea of things being virtuous, and it’s true that that has gotten…the thing is, I don’t even know that it’s gotten, it’s hard to say “getting worse” or whatever. It certainly, it’s something that we’ve been observing for years now. Right?
ELM: I feel like it’s getting worse. I feel like it’s just growing and growing and growing. The other day—I sent you that comment on the problematic age gap between Hades and Persephone.
FK: That’s true, that’s true. They have a very problematic age gap, Hades and Persephone.
ELM: 2,000 years! It’s huge!
FK: Go back in time and tell the Greeks to fuck right off!
ELM: [laughs] To be fair, that famous post on Tumblr about, you know, the “it’s rotten work,” whatever his name is? You know that quote, right?
FK: No…
ELM: “Not if it’s me, not if it’s you”? There’s like a quote from some Greek play…poem…I’m just mangling this right now so maybe I shouldn’t mention it.
FK: You’re mangling—I’m enjoying whatever you’re mangling, because I really don’t know what it is. So…
ELM: Hold on. It’s Orestes?
FK: Orestes? O-R-E-S-T-E-S?
ELM: Let me find it for you.
FK: “It’s rotten work.” Yes. OK.
ELM: From Euripides.
FK: Yes.
ELM: OK. I’ve just googled it. It’s from Euripides. “I’ll take care of you,” and then the other one says “It’s rotten work,” and then the first one says “Not to me, not if it’s you.” So people were like stickin’ this on their, like, gay aesthetic posts or whatever, right?
FK: Yeah, sure! Sure.
ELM: And then [laughs] there’s a famous Tumblr post where someone was like, “Uh, weren’t they cousins?” Like… [laughs]
FK: Oh my God.
ELM: Like, are you trying to, are you coming for the Greeks? And then there’s an amazing reblog addition where there’s a picture of a Greek, like a stone Greek chorus with their mouths just open in shock, like… [FK laughs] I gotta find this post for you. I think you’d really appreciate it. It was just like…
FK: I’m sure I would. This sounds right up my alley.
ELM: This is not… just like the Hades/Persephone age gap, this is the least of our problems here. But so to be fair, I was gonna say, that post has been around for years, so I shouldn’t act like the problematic Greeks…but I wanna say, I do think that TikTok is an accelerator for some of these dynamics.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: I think that for a bunch of things, right? Like, there’s a completely bananas amount of misinformation spreading on TikTok right now, right? And it’s that kind of thing, and I think that there are, you know, I think neither of us are TikTok experts, we probably see more than maybe our non-extremely-online friends of TikTok dynamics, right? Because we do observe this stuff.
But I’ve noticed over the past year there has been a kind of explosion in, like, decontextualized fandom trends, like there’s a huge A/B/O meme going on there, but it’s like, the trope and the overarching world, it’s nothing to do with actual fanworks, right?
FK: It’s just a concept.
ELM: It’s treating it like a trope.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And so it’s like, when you start decontextualizing these, I feel like they can start spinning out of…not that like A/B/O has to be super good and pure and remain in like, J2 fic or whatever, you know, like, obviously not.
FK: Oh my God. [laughs]
ELM: The goodest and the purest. But… [FK wailing] You know what I mean? I just feel like the kind of things getting like, decontextualized and spiraling out of control, and you have a huge number of young people on TikTok and that is like, the heart of purity culture is…
FK: You know, you say this, but I feel like if it were five years ago, we would be saying this about Tumblr.
ELM: Yeah, well, I think that the 15-year-olds or the 16-year-olds of Tumblr are directly analogous to the 16-year-olds of TikTok right now.
FK: Yeah! I’m just saying like, I’m just saying—I mean, I guess that it is growing just because there is a larger number of people on…you know what I mean?
ELM: Also, you say this, but your average Tumblr post that’s not like a world heritage post gets tens of thousands of notes max, right? You know?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Even in the height of Tumblr when they had millions and millions of users, that was just the way it works. Whereas on TikTok, any old bullshit, you put it on and you can get like, millions of views.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Within a week. Right? Like, that’s, as a platform, it’s much better at surfacing content and spreading it, right?
FK: Right. The heights are higher.
ELM: Yes.
FK: Although I think the average TikTok is probably still only getting seen by like 300 people or whatever, maybe less.
ELM: You say that…
FK: No, I do think that.
ELM: Oh, OK.
FK: Because if you look into TikTok, even people with certain, like, with some very viral TikToks, most of their videos—they put out a lot of videos and most of them are not seen by very many people.
ELM: But it’s pretty rare on Tumblr that you would have a post…I mean whatever, also, we’re measuring two different things, maybe…
FK: This is completely apples to oranges! The point is like—
ELM: Cause on Tumblr you can’t measure views, you’re measuring engagements, so yeah.
FK: Yeah. So this is like a youth culture thing, it has happened before, it will happen again, we have a general sense that it’s growing in terms of total size but we have no way to actually confirm that.
ELM: Sure.
FK: There we go.
ELM: All right, solved.
FK: All right. Let’s listen to our next guest, which is Amanda-Rae Prescott.
ELM: OK! So Amanda-Rae: also one of our newer additions to the Race and Fandom series. This is what I’m calling it now, I’m just leaning into it. I mean, there are four episodes! That feels like a series, right?
FK: It’s a series!
ELM: Amanda-Rae was another one of our interviewees. She is a commentator, journalist, and fan with a focus on period dramas and specifically about racial representation in period dramas. So it was great to talk to her then and I’m so glad she called back for this episode!
FK: Awesome. Let’s hear it.
Amanda-Rae Prescott: Hello Fansplaining! My name is Amanda-Rae Prescott, and the past year since my appearance on the episode about race and fandom has taken a couple of good turns and a couple of not-so-great turns.
The good news is that Bridgerton coming to Netflix has sort of vastly expanded my opportunities for freelancing, not only in terms of writing articles and reviews and podcasting, but also people have come to me offering me spots on their panels and conferences. I had a really cool opportunity last month to talk to some U.K. historians and academics about what’s next for period drama, which was sponsored by a university, which was really cool. I also have finally got a blue check on Twitter for my commentary on period drama and U.K. fandom, which is awesome.
The downside is that Sanditon’s return, now that they’ve been renewed, it’s dredged up some of the old controversy about the pineapple emoji, the use of it, and issues of racism in the fandom. That has kind of dredged up again. But now the new twist is some white fans who want to appear quote-unquote “woke and aware” are now co-opting anti-racism arguments and while that is a good thing, they’re taking it to heart, on the other hand some of it seems a little bit performative, because myself and others struggled last year for people to get the point, and as it is there’s some season two controversy—casting, they added a lot of white supporting cast members, they have not added anyone of color besides Crystal Clarke yet, and one cast member has also issued a weak apology for past racist statements about Caribbean people.
So while I’ve had some good parts of the year in fandom, I’ve had some not-so-great parts of the year in fandom, and what I’m hoping for this year is A, more opportunities to talk to people about anti-racism efforts in fandom, and just hoping that with future seasons of Bridgerton and other period dramas that are more diverse the fandom will hopefully be more welcoming and accepting of people who aren’t white. And that’s kind of where I am, looking back on my episode of Fansplaining. Thank you so much and have a good year!
ELM: You know, I really appreciate hearing from Amanda on all this stuff, and I’m super happy for all the great stuff that’s happened to her in the past year, but I’m obviously very sorry for all the negative stuff. It’s interesting cause I don’t have the full context of this, but it feels like, I feel like with a lot of conversations about racism in fandom…
I mean we, I guess our guests have talked about a lot of different ways it manifests. I do feel like a lot of the time because people are trying to reach ostensibly liberal, well-meaning white fans, who are just being racist, right, and they’re like “I’m not!” and you’re like, “but you are,” right? And that often feels different than like, targeted campaigns.
Obviously the targeted campaigns happen and we talk about those too. It’s stuff like this where there’s specific emojis and it’s like a winking…I’m also thinking, not to take it away from race, but I’m thinking about specific emojis and code words that have solidified in the gender-critical movement in U.K. Twitter in particular, the TERF, the transphobic TERF movement. And kind of using emojis as code for saying, for their bigotry basically. And weaponizing those kind of symbols and words, right?
And it feels like, I mean, obviously this isn’t new and these things come out of the, you know, the alt-right does this all the time and folks like that, very online conservative. But I think that, I don’t know, it just—it somehow feels like more insurmountable to me, this kind of thing, because it’s like, it sort of feels like, you know, masks off, like—that phrase has a different meaning now that we all have to wear masks all the time, sorry. [both laugh] You know what I mean? This kind of like, “we’re gonna use an emoji to say something really specific, and something that’s explicitly bigoted, and it’s gonna be a winking thing that we’re sharing and we’re gonna shove it in the face of people that we think it’s gonna harm the most.”
And I don’t think this is necessarily new, but it’s a specific kind of harassment that I feel like I have observed more of since the pandemic started, when the extremely online have gotten extremely extremely online.
FK: Right. Right.
ELM: Does that make sense?
FK: It does make sense, and it’s also I think in certain ways harder to combat, because I’m sure there are people who come in and don’t have the context and just have some vague sense of it, and then they…
ELM: Yeah, yeah.
FK: You know, right? But I think it’s also interesting what she’s saying about, you know, in previous rounds of Sanditon, she fought this fight, and now there’s a bunch of white fans who are making these anti-racism arguments and that’s really good, but also like, can’t trust it.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: You know? And I really—that is a really hard position to be in, because not on this issue, but on other issues, I’ve been there where it’s like, I was, you know, “I’ve been saying this for years and now suddenly you want to come in and change your mind? I wanted you to change your mind…”
ELM: Right.
FK: “But did you really change your mind or are you just saying it, maybe we can’t be friends even now, even though you’ve changed your mind…” you know?
ELM: That’s so hard because then no one ever really gets the space to actually change their mind because they didn’t do it in a time frame that made you feel comfortable. Which is totally valid for you as well. Right?
FK: Right.
ELM: I think that’s really hard.
FK: Right. And, you know, how do you, you know—is it performative, is it a real change of opinion or understanding, like, you can’t see into somebody else’s head, so you know, you just have to guess and sometimes you really don’t feel like it is! You know? So…that’s a really tough position to be in.
ELM: Yeah. Well, I really appreciate Amanda-Rae sending in these thoughts and I hope that, I don’t know. I hope that the good stuff keeps happening, you know. It seems like for this genre in particular, this is a time of a little bit of a…some increased awareness on the part of the people making these programs, as opposed to maybe 10-15 years ago. I hope they continue to improve now that they, like, actually understand what they should be doing. It’s like the lowest bar I could’ve set for them.
FK: Agreed.
ELM: Try not to be as bad as before.
FK: Fingers crossed. OK. Shall we listen to our next one?
ELM: Sure!
FK: It’s Stitch!
ELM: So Stitch was one of our original interviewees in the 2016 “Race and Fandom” episodes, and they came back on for the last one, sent in their observations on the subject, and this is definitely, this is Stitch’s area of expertise, and in the time since…actually I think in the time since that episode, they’ve started writing a column. Right? I think it launched this year?
FK: Yeah! It did,.
ELM: For ˆTeen Vogue, I believe it’s called “Fan Service.” And there’s been some really great stuff in there. There was an interview I really loved that Stitch did with Kelly Marie Tran, talking about, not just about experiences of harassment that Kelly Marie Tran faced from Star Wars fans, but also talking about her own fandom. Which is great, because it’s so rare that you actually see fans interviewing like, fannish actors.
FK: Yeah! And then talking about that. Yeah.
ELM: Except that you get some dude from like—
FK: Sure.
ELM: You know, comicdudes.net interviewing Kevin Smith, and they’re like “Yeah, I’m a nerd, I’m a nerd!” And you’re like “This is so boring, I’m sorry.” So obviously we’ve had that for a very long time. But I feel like it’s very rare that we see other types of people interviewing other types of fans with that kind of platform. So I’ve really enjoyed that, and I was really glad that Stitch was able to send in their experiences over the last year.
FK: All right, let’s listen!
Stitch: Congratulations on another year of Fansplaining! So, it’s nice to sort of be back. I guess first of all, the first trend I obviously observed in fandom over the past year is that fandom got a lot more racist. I mean, if you’ve kept up with what’s happening on—at least what’s been directed at me and other Black people—people have absolutely gone kind of above crypto-racist to “you just hate me because I’m white and I like white ships.” And it’s like, public stated fandom mantra. Lots of overt anti-Blackness while simultaneously pretending to be pro-Asian, or also just having the Black Lives Matter hashtag in their bio while being super publicly anti-Black to me about Black actors. It’s bad.
I guess, how has my thinking about fandom changed over the past year? I’ve really lost a lot of hope in you guys—in like, fandom. Not you guys like Fansplaining, but you guys as in wider fandom, whiter fandom. It’s very difficult to believe the hype of fandom, even though my actual—aside from all of the endless harassment from racists in fandom and people who don’t think they’re racist in fandom—like, my actual past year in fandom, as somebody consuming and creating media, has been pretty great.
You guys have seen across the past six, seven months I’ve been writing for Teen Vogue and I’ve gotten to interview people that I really love, like, in terms of fans—like, Fangirl Jeanne on Twitter, but also my favorite Korean rapper SleeQ, like, we talk now. That is an absolute thing. I just interviewed Zendaya. And like, I’m able to have really good fandom moments but at the same time I’m watching as transformative fandom, queer fandom spaces, women’s fandom spaces, kind of zero in on this tight spiral of unaddressed white supremacy and racism hinging on anti-Blackness, and supported even by other people of color, not just white people, that people are really unwilling to address, and that’s really toxic.
We’re talking people—not just like the whole “get Stitch fired from Teen Vogue,” but someone said they filed a police report. This isn’t normal but this is racism in fandom in 2021, and I think this is just going to keep getting worse. Yeah. Not a happy note, but that’s what my year was.
FK: Aw, man, I am so sorry that Stitch has been having such a rough year in terms of harassment and so forth. It’s not cool.
ELM: Yeah, and you know, I’m—one thing that I think we’ve observed a lot of over the last year is people brigading writers and encouraging publications to fire them for whatever reason, often it’s conservatives, and media organizations caving under pressure at the slightest hint of an organized hashtag campaign, particularly when it comes to freelancers, and I don’t know if most people know this, but often when you’re on staff at an organization—obviously it varies, but some organizations really do put the full power of their like, security behind a writer when they’re getting harassed. But freelancers never get those protections, or almost never get those protections. With a freelancer, obviously, it’s so much easier at the slightest hint of any hashtag campaign to say, “Goodbye! We don’t need this.” Right?
And so I’ve admired Teen Vogue for standing by, frankly, the values that they purport to have, you know, and not kind of falling for some of these tactics. So. I am obviously so sorry to Stitch for all of the harassment that they’ve faced over the last year over this.
FK: Absolutely. All right. We have one more person to hear from, and that’s Effy.
ELM: So Effy was a new participant in our “Race and Fandom” episodes last year.
Effy: Hi! This is Effy, from the episode on racism in fandom. I am returning for the anniversary episode of Fansplaining! Woo! Woo! [laughs]
All right. So, what trends did you observe in fandom over the past year? Oh boy. I try not to like, keep up with most of fandom outside of like, my chosen space, but what I have found is that there’s this rise in these two polar opposite sides, morally. One side is very purity and morality focused when it comes to fiction, and the other side is very “your kink is not my kink and that’s OK, no bothering me for writing darkfic, and I won’t bother you for writing your kind of fic,” that kind of thing.
I have been seeing this become more and more popular or—or not popular, become more and more of a hot-button topic, slowly, over the years. But I think it’s because of this year, being in the middle of a pandemic, that people have really started to get into this more often. Which is sort of weird, especially since on both sides—there’s always losers on both sides, and I am speaking as someone who is on the ship-and-let-ship side of things. There are often losers on both sides of this, and I think the losers here are still, as always, the marginalized and oppressed in society.
How has your thinking about fandom changed over the past year? Ha ha! I think I’ve grown more cynical about fandom in general. The biggest thing that happened to me over this past year was that there was the Loki thing with all the people who started calling for incest—it’s not incest, it’s selfcest! At least get it right. It’s more like masturbation than incest. But in any case, that was very out-of-proportion to what was actually happening, and I also noticed that the fandom of that show was very extreme in considering their gay ship as canon, even though, you know, it’s a Disney show, so they were never gonna get a gay ship as canon. It was already a miracle that they got canonically bisexual Loki. And I think that’s sort of one of the things that—it didn’t make me cynical about fandom, I was already sort of cynical, but that really just solidified my growing cynicism about it. I love fandom! I’ve never, I can’t imagine who I am without it, who I’d be without it, but I think I can acknowledge that over the years, it’s gotten very toxic and very much more unsafe to be in, mostly for those who are already on the margins.
How’s your past year in fandom been personally? Oh boy! Well, I got back into Critical Role! Which was actually much nicer than Loki, even though sometimes it explodes, like every fandom does sometimes it explodes in accusations and shit. But for the most part I actually really like it there, cause it’s, you know, it’s fun! And I don’t have to—I already have like, canon gay, so…but anyway, I got back into Critical Role in a big way because my favorite character came back! I love him so much. Molly, I love you! And I know that Mr. Taliesin Jaffe will probably never hear this—God, I hope he never does—but thank you so much for that! That was, I cried like a baby for like, two weeks. Anyway.
So I got back into Critical Role. I have been producing a lot more content for that. The difference between that and the previous fandom I was in, which is It, has actually been very very huge, because it’s much more…friendlier, I guess? To people who are not very typical, let’s say that. Also, I really [laughs] also I’m not gonna lie: I thought that, yeah, the It: Chapter Two cast is hot, but like, have you seen the Critical Role campaign cast? Have you seen Exandria Unlimited’s cast? They are so much hotter, oh my God.
FK: OK, can I just say that Effy’s excitement about Critical Role is so delightful and is exactly, I mean, it almost makes me feel fannish about this thing [ELM laughs] which I have never seen anything of. And I mean, it just, it warms, absolutely warms the cockles of my heart.
ELM: You’re just gonna take it on face value, Effy’s claim that the cast of Critical Role is hotter than the cast of It: Chapter Two?
FK: I have no opinions about either of these casts.
ELM: A notably hot cast?
FK: But Effy’s delight in this, it just—it makes me happy! It just makes me happy.
ELM: Yeah. No, it’s totally delightful. All of the little asides throughout this, it is selfcest, not incest, FYI. [FK laughs] And it seems like Effy’s observing a lot of kind of, the big trends that—you know, it is true, I think it is, it’s a little hard year after year to feel like we are talking about the same things over and over again, but they are the things that are happening, right? You know? Like…
FK: Yeah!
ELM: Purity culture keeps happening. And people being assholes because they’re ship isn’t canon keeps happening. Right? You know? Like…and no one ever learns and new people come into fandom and do the same things and it is what it is.
FK: Humans are humans.
ELM: Fine.
FK: Yeah. But you know, I will say this: You’re absolutely right, I think Effy’s response really sort of sums up a lot of different things that a lot of people are talking about, and I guess the thing that I wish for everybody is the experience Effy is having of being like, “All this stuff kind of sucks, and I see the problems, but also I really love the cast of Critical Role!” You know? [laughing]
ELM: Yeah.
FK: This is, this is what I wish for all of our guests and also for us. You know? In general, in life.
ELM: All right. That’s very sweet, Flourish.
FK: OK. I want to know, now, about what your experiences have been like through the past year.
ELM: We’re doing personal and not observational?
FK: I mean, both!
ELM: My experiences as an observer of fandom, Flourish, or my experiences as a fan?
FK: Both!!
ELM: OK. Well…
FK: Aren’t they tied together?
ELM: No. They truly aren’t. [FK laughs] As an observer, you know, I think we talked a lot about this in our pandemic episode, which was maybe five episodes ago, I wanna say? Where we like, reflected on the first 18 months or so of the pandemic and like, kinda looked ahead to the next 18 months or so. And beyond. I was surprised that our guests didn’t talk about the pandemic more here, because I think that that has utterly shaped what’s happening now. I’m not saying permanently, but what’s going on right now, I can’t see a single facet of fandom that doesn’t have the cold hand of the pandemic…I’m trying to do some more folksy language…is it working? Is it working?
FK: No, no. It’s not your, folksy language is my bailiwick.
ELM: You just said “bailiwick.” [laughs]
FK: Yeah, I did!
ELM: That’s very folksy.
FK: Yeah! Cause it’s my thing! Don’t you take my thing away from me!
ELM: [laughs] All right. So. You know, the fracturing of the, the rhythms of things, right? And obviously you know, as you pointed out, BTS is still going, but like…film and television is all over the place, sports is all over the place, you know, lots of stops and starts, obviously just the kind of rhythms that a lot of these—especially franchises—have tried to build up being really stymied, and the way that kind of leads to people, I don’t know, kind of stewing a little bit more and spinning their wheels a little bit more in addition to kind of already feeling that way and already engaging with the world that way, for those people that have more time and they’re spending that time online. And once again, I have to say it a million times: obviously there are millions if not billions of people who are not experiencing the pandemic that way.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And then for those people, you know, who knows how they’re going to feel if and when they return to fannish stuff, right? To see—presumably they will have changed, and also to see these spaces changed. I don’t know, what do you think of that? What do you think of the pandemic, Flourish?
FK: [laughs] It’s bad. [ELM laughs] That’s my thinking. No, I agree with you. I think that so many people have been having major life changes over the past couple of years as as result of the pandemic, as a result of their feelings about the pandemic, as a result of everything else. Maybe I see it this way just because I’m going through a huge life change, if anybody on the podcast doesn’t know, I am no longer going to be working in the entertainment industry. I am going to school to become an Episcopal priest. That starts in less than a month now.
ELM: That’s wild!! It’s August!
FK: Yeah! It’s August!
ELM: It snuck up on me!
FK: It is less than a month before I start school. So for me, that was in the works long before the pandemic, but it’s, you know, combining—I think there’s a lot of people who are quitting their jobs, or who are, you know, changing things, or who were fired and who are finding a new thing to do, who are trying to sort of figure that out. And I think that that kind of life change is also something that people often cite as something that changes their relationship to fandom.
ELM: Mm-hmm. Sure.
FK: Either gets them into it more or, you know, “I had a kid,” another big life change which a lot of people have done…at different times…over…
ELM: The course of human history.
FK: [laughs] The course of human history! I don’t know where I was going with that.
ELM: Yeah, that’s true.
FK: Or “I got a divorce” or you know, whatever it is, “and then suddenly my relationship to the fandom that I’m in totally changed.” And you know, often, like you were saying earlier in this episode, that’s a periodic thing. Right? Temporary in the sense that you—
ELM: Yeah.
FK: —you get really into something and you fall out of it later, you know? Or you get really busy and you can’t do things and then you come back to it. But in the moment it feels, you know, really complete, and I think that a lot of people are experiencing that right now, even separate from the issue of trauma and sickness and all of this stuff. Just purely in terms of everyone’s life being upended in a lot of ways.
ELM: Right, right. But then I think, I mean, think about how many times we’ve cited, “oh, this is a common theme we’ve looked at over the last five years” in this episode. I think there’s a lot of, I mean, maybe this is also compounded by pandemic exhaustion, there’s a lot of exhaustion.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: We have our guests of color in this episode, and I think this was more strongly reflected in our last “Race and Fandom” episode, especially from our repeat guests who, we asked them to reflect on the previous five years, saying “I’m done. I can’t do this any more. How many times, fool me 15 times and I, why am I continuing to participate in this.” Right? And I think that people are feeling this about purity culture, I think people are feeling this—I’m not equating racism with purity culture. But you know, things that make people’s experiences bad.
And I think that the fact that multiple people called out really trying to protect themselves in advance, and shield themselves, I think is really telling, because it’s just kind of like: how many times can you get hit with the same awful dynamics and just be like “I’ll get through it, I still love the thing!” You know? Like, at what point are you unable to love a thing anymore because of other people being awful?
FK: But this feels like, I mean, you’re right, I think that this feels like the real cultural moment across things. It’s not just fandom.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: Because I mean, look at how much—I don’t know, I read The New York Times, it is my local paper, and I mean, usually it’s—
ELM: Flourish. That’s the Post. I don’t know what you’re talkin’ about.
FK: [laughs] Anyway! There’s a lot of terrible things in there and a lot of things that are, you know, really bad. But every other op-ed is about how people are like…
ELM: Tired.
FK: Tired! How people are tired of work situations that don’t work for them, how people are, you know, opting out of like, all of the things that they are just at the end of their rope with, right?
ELM: Yeah.
FK: So I think that this is the moment, the moment of tired.
ELM: All right. Great.
FK: But personally, how’s your fandom life been? Personally, for you?
ELM: I don’t feel tired as a fan! But like, I’m in the same place that I was in last year, which is like, you know, as I’ve already said here, reading almost nothing new, and at this point reading almost nothing in fandom. Like, not even old stuff. I think there’s a limit to how many times you can reread an old favorite. I know people disagree with me on that, but for me personally…
FK: [laughs] There’s a limit?
ELM: I mean, at least you gotta let, like, a year pass so it feels fresh! You know? Like, but I can’t reread the same thing like once a month. That’s not, they’re not that good, you know?
FK: Sure.
ELM: I did watch Dumbo every single day when I was two.
FK: But you’re not two anymore.
ELM: No, I’m not. I just wanna say: I have the capacity for it! [FK laughs] But like, I’m still feeling very motivated to write and I feel like, you know, we talked about this in the productive episode, but I don’t know, I finished a story recently and then like, “All right! What am I gonna write next?” Right? And it’s like: is that me wanting to just produce more? Or is it like, I like that to be kind of sitting in the back of my mind, like, “What’s the story I’m working on? What’s the world I’m spending time in? What small problem do I have to solve in this scene to move on to the next part of the scene?” I really like having those challenges just kind of sitting in the back of my mind, and as a thing to, you know, tackle in a way that I wonder if maybe you feel, sometimes, knitting, where you’re like, “I’m doing a complicated little pattern and what’s the next bit that I can make and look at and say,” you know, say it’s complete and that you put it together correctly, you know? I don’t know if that’s the right analogy.
FK: I don’t think so, but I like where you’re going with it, so we’re gonna move forward.
ELM: [laughs] Yeah, I don’t know! I guess I was a musician for a really long time and you can have that experience with music as well where you’re just trying to figure out a section and you just wanna work on it and work on it.
FK: Yeah yeah yeah, yeah.
ELM: And so that’s, that’s very valuable to me. And would I find that if it wasn’t about, you know, Magneto? I don’t really want to! You know? Because I really like solving little problems with Magneto!
FK: I gotcha.
ELM: Me and Erik, you know?
FK: Mag-neat-o! He’s neat-o!
ELM: [laughs] So it’s kind of funny to think about and even, you know, Roz mentioning—yeah, I agree, the last two movies were, I wouldn’t say “cruddy,” I would say they were truly bad! And it didn’t, doesn’t leave you particularly inspired, but I still have a lot of ideas because they’re compelling characters to me. And that’s kind of a weird place to be in, to feel like—still feeling very engaged with the fanfiction but not really caring about the future of that franchise or the future of those characters or what they’re gonna do next, because like, I don’t care! I don’t know. Is that weird?
FK: Yeah, that is, that is a little unusual to me, but I think that it’s—it makes sense to me. It’s not like it’s, it’s unusual but it doesn’t, it’s not like I hear it and I’m like “Whoa! What’s that? That’s out of left field.” No, it’s… [ELM laughs] “OK, yeah, I get it.”
ELM: Yeah, I don’t know. I guess I just like—I still, I care a lot about these characters but like, I don’t really, I don’t know. I don’t want, maybe also too it’s born out of experience, because it’s like, I’ve come into fandoms when it’s on the later side of the like, the white-hot heat of the fandom. [FK laughs] And then had like, you know, I joined like, Torchwood fandom on the later side, and then there was another season and it was awful, and it was just like: it sucked to see, I was like, “Happy to see you! …Oh. This is really…I wish I had never seen you back again at all.” Right?
And so it’s like, kind of protecting your heart from that experience of like, “Don’t ruin this for me further.” You know?
FK: As an X-Files fan, I get it. [ELM laughs] Boy do I get it.
ELM: Yes, I’ve heard tell of this.
FK: Yeah. They just keep doing it and it gets, it’s, it doesn’t get worse every time, it did get a little bit better, but that was only because it had gotten so bad. Anyway.
ELM: OK, so in sum, in summary, for me personally—to tie it back to the broader themes—I do see some of myself in what P. J. and what Para were saying, not in the sense of that I feel like I’m gonna get a lot of terrible drive-by opinions… Actually, kind of in that sense! Right? I think I mentioned…
FK: You worry about this!
ELM: No, I just don’t, I mentioned at one point when I started my fandom pseud and then I followed a bunch of blogs and then within a day I was like “I hate this.”
FK: Yeah yeah yeah. Nope!
ELM: And then I unfollowed all of them and I felt great about it, and yeah, that means it’s a little sleepy, and yeah that means there’s only a couple dozen posts on my dash in a day, but there are things I wanna—they’re nice pictures and I don’t have to, have you ever clicked in a character tag on Tumblr? Recently?
FK: Not recently. I mean, I have in my life, but not recently.
ELM: Recently. And I’ve done this for characters that I don’t care about also. Brutal. I did this for like, Bruce Springsteen. He’s a character I care about. And it was just like…
FK: Oh no, wait wait. I’ve done this for research purposes and you’re right, it is brutal.
ELM: Just, just…
FK: I was thinking only in fandom terms, I was like “I haven’t done that for my fandoms recently,” but then I was like, “No no no.”
ELM: On Tumblr specifically. On Tumblr.
FK: No no, yes, specifically on Tumblr. I have done this, I’ve done this.
ELM: Just opinions, opinions that make you wanna claw your eyes out and claw your brain—and you’re just like, “Why, what is going on in here?!” And sure, it’s like, everyone’s entitled to their opinion, they can put it out in the world, but like…so I don’t recommend you doing this with any characters you truly like, because then you’ll just…it’s just a very bad experience.
FK: It’s gonna make me sad.
ELM: Yeah. I feel like I’ve found this like, sweet spot where I still find a lot of joy with the characters and with creating fanworks, and I don’t really want anything else, because obviously I love fanfiction more than all of the other things.
FK: I love that for you!
ELM: Yeah, thank you! OK, go ahead. You do you now.
FK: You know, I’m in a weird position because I really feel the most disconnected from fandom that I have ever felt in my entire life.
ELM: Really?
FK: And I feel like it’s totally circumstantial. I don’t even feel really into—I’ve been trying to read Star Trek novels and I haven’t been able to do it, which usually is like, my fallback. If I can’t do anything else, I can read my Star Trek novels. But I can’t even do that right now. And it’s been interesting because I got really into Shadow and Bone for like, a hot second.
ELM: A hot white second.
FK: A hot white second. And then… [ELM laughing] A hot blue second. And then I…
ELM: Is that hotter?!
FK: I don’t know.
ELM: Flourish, don’t taunt me!
FK: But then I fell out of it incredibly quickly, and I really think that that has to do with the fact that I’m having such big life changes and everything happening, you know what I mean? I just can’t focus on it. I can still feel the root feelings, but then I can’t sustain. Not even a little bit.
And you know, I, I have to have faith that that’s gonna change over time, because I would be really sad if I never had those sort of extended fannish feelings again, and if I kept feeling so much like…yeah, I’m gonna watch the new Star Trek, and I’m excited about it, Lower Decks is coming back in like a week. But I’m not feeling that sense of excitement and anticipation that I have historically felt, and I think it’s just cause my brain is too taken up by other stuff, so.
You know, I mean, my wish for the next year is that that comes back and I settle into my new things that I’m doing, and if it doesn’t, then I’m sure it will eventually, because as we’ve been talking about, this is always an ebb and flow.
ELM: But are you excited for Succession Season Three?
FK: I mean I’m gonna watch it!
ELM: Oh man! You’re not even excited for that?!
FK: I’m just not, I’m just not…I’m too full of other, I’m too full of anticipating like, going back to school, like, having complete life change in which literally every part of my day is different than it used to be. You know?
ELM: This is interesting, not to psychoanalyze you, but you really haven’t had a life change of this level in your entire professional career. You’ve had the same job your entire career.
FK: I haven’t! I’ve had—well, I mean, I did have my company end and a new company begin, but it was like doing the same stuff.
ELM: It was, and the same people and…
FK: With some of the same people, like, in the same industry. So yeah, I really have not had this kind of full life shift ever in my professional career before.
ELM: And you moved, but you didn’t move that far.
FK: Yeah, it was not like this.
ELM: Yeah. Well, you’re not moving now, but still.
FK: No, but like—no, I have never changed like, not just industries but like, entire like…everything about my professional career before. I’ve never had a mid-life crisis about my professional…
ELM: It’s not a mid-life crisis, I think it’s weird that you’ve been in the same job for ten years. That is not a normal Millennial experience.
FK: No no no, but a lot of people stay in the same industry. It’s not being in the same job, a lot of people stay in the same industry for 10 years.
ELM: Not people I know. You’re an anomaly amongst my friends!
FK: That’s funny, because a lot of people I know in the entertainment world, they change jobs a bunch, but they’re all in the same industry.
ELM: That’s cause you all get, as you say, “shitcanned” and then get a better job. That’s your way.
FK: That’s true. People do do that. But…
ELM: I just want you to say “shitcanned” once more out loud before you leave the entertainment industry.
FK: Oh, don’t worry. I’ll find new reasons to say the word “shitcanned.” [ELM laughs] You’ll never take that away from me.
ELM: Yeah, no, not to say you’re weird, but it’s just, there are a lot of Millennials, and we’re all over the place. That’s our way.
FK: Sure.
ELM: You may have read an article in like, Business Insider or like…
FK: [laughing] I have read some articles about how this is people’s way.
ELM: Just killing golf balls and napkins as we change industries once every four minutes.
FK: I also use cloth napkins, so I’m a weirdo.
ELM: I use novelty, I use classy paper napkins, so I’m not killing the napkin industry, myself.
FK: Wait, were we killing paper—never mind. We’re not getting into this question. [ELM laughs] This has been a great episode. Happy anniversary, Elizabeth.
ELM: Happy anniversary, Flourish! OK before we go we do have to talk about Patreon, though.
FK: All right. Patreon.com/fansplaining is how we have kept this podcast going for six whole years! And hopefully we’ll keep it going for the future.
ELM: Technically it’s how we kept it going for five years.
FK: Yeah yeah yeah, details details details.
ELM: So. This is a big time for the Patreon because as you have heard, probably in the last episode, we have done a collaboration with Destination Toast!
FK: Our first guest on this episode!
ELM: And these are some tiny stats. They’re extremely cute, and if you pledge $10 a month, you will get that in the mail in the next few weeks! So if you want that, I would encourage you to sign up now, because we’re gonna be doing a print run of those in the next, like, week or so.
FK: Woo hoo!
ELM: And also, the way Patreon works, if you pledge $10 a month, you get access to every level beneath it, which includes $5 a month enamel pin, $3 a month—I’m doing it backwards like you did the other time, it was very confusing and it’s confusing to me right now.
FK: Great.
ELM: $3 a month, you get access to all our special episodes. We just recorded another one about Modern AUs, one of my faves.
FK: Yeah!!
ELM: $2 a month you get to listen to the episodes a day early, on Tuesdays. And $1 a month, well, it’s moot if you are at a higher level because that’s just access to one special episode. But if you only have a dollar a month and you’re interested in pledging, you still get a reward! You get a special episode.
FK: And we are very grateful to everybody who pledges at whatever level.
ELM: Yes.
FK: But, you can also support us by just spreading the word about Fansplaining, or calling in, sending us email, basically contributing your thoughts so that we can, you know, have grist for the Fansplaining mill.
ELM: I don’t like that.
FK: You don’t like that? OK. Well, anyway, 1-401-526-FANS is where you can leave a voicemail. Wasn’t this episode great, with all those voices? Yeah! We would like to have more episodes like that! And if you call us and leave a voicemail, you can be one of those voices! And that can be anonymous, just don’t tell us who you are. No one’s gonna be able to know from your voice.
ELM: Flourish, this is too much. This is too much. I feel like you’re talking to like, five-year-olds right now.
FK: I, I mean, I don’t know!
ELM: Don’t you wanna be a part of this podcast?!
FK: Don’t you? Don’t you? Anyway. You can also write us at fansplaining at gmail dot com, or contact us on social meda. We’re generally speaking “fansplaining” different places. For instance, on Tumblr our ask box is open and anon is on, so just be nice. Be nice, five-year-olds!
ELM: Did you hit everything?
FK: I think I hit everything.
ELM: You said fansplaining.com submission forms?
FK: Oh, you’re right! I did not. There’s a submission form!
ELM: You were so confident in your delivery, but you forgot about fansplaining.com submissions box.
FK: That’s true. And there is also an anonymous option there.
ELM: Yes. OK, I think that is everything now. All right. Well, here’s what I’m going to say: I know that you think that your fandom life is over…
FK: I didn’t…!!!
ELM: And that priests can’t have outside interests, which I don’t know if you know any priests, Flourish, but priests still have hobbies and passions!
FK: I didn’t say that!! I love how you’re like… [laughing] “I know you think this thing that I’ve never said.”
ELM: You did just talk for like ten minutes about how you were feeling like it was an unprecedented time where you didn’t care about anything at all.
FK: And then I made a big point of saying that I thought that this was just a phase!!
ELM: Anyway, I’m gonna predict by this time next year you will be into something else, or whatever, it doesn’t matter if you’re into something else. Hopefully, hopefully the pandemic will truly be ending. A year from now? I can’t think about it. Oh my God, I don’t wanna think about it. Manageable, you know, like hopefully…
FK: There we go. OK, all right, that’s an acceptable…
ELM: No I mean, “over” in the sense of like, it becomes something like the flu, which is obviously not nothing, and it is still deadly, but it’s also like, a thing that we’ve all learned to live with, right? That kind of thing. I think that scientists agree that that is, like, the likely outcome: this is something seasonal and manageable.
FK: All right.
ELM: Anyway, let’s hope that we’re at a place where we would feel comfortable going to a con again, and then for the next anniversary episode it will be hot off the heels of San Diego Comic-Con 2022!
FK: That’s the dream!
ELM: That’s my dream. It’s my dream. It’s been so long.
FK: It has been so long. OK. Elizabeth, thank you for making this podcast with me for so long.
ELM: Oh, thank you, Flourish. No, thank you.
FK: All right. I’ll talk to you later.
ELM: OK bye!
FK: Bye.
[Outro music, thank-yous and credits]