Episode 158: Ask Fansplaining Anything: Part 11
In Episode 158, “Ask Fansplaining Anything: Part 11,” Elizabeth and Flourish read and respond to a new batch of listener questions. Topics covered include the primacy of shipping in fanfic culture, the ethics of pirating Chinese novels, how to organize your fic collection, and how worried we should be that the entertainment industry is spying on fandom.
Show Notes
[00:00:00] As always, our intro music is “Awel” by stefsax, used under a CC BY 3.0 license.
[00:04:30] Fact-checking note! There are five “deluxe paperback” volumes of Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation at a list price of $19.99 each. The other novels, Scumbag System and Heaven Official’s Blessing, are also being released in multiple volumes. None of them are actually released yet; the first volume is coming out in December.
[00:09:53] This year Check, Please!: Year Four made $500k on Kickstarter.
[00:13:27]
[00:16:24] The letter refers to Episode 156, “The Exit Interview.”
[00:22:05] https://twitter.com/Hello_Tailor/status/1437522136466436113
[00:23:00] Casey Fiesler was our guest for Episode 91. Her website includes lots of publications, but one that’s particularly relevant is “Ethical Considerations for Research Involving (Speculative) Public Data.”
[00:30:00] For all your romance-finding needs: Help A Bitch Out.
[00:30:59] Our interstitial music is “The secret to growing up” by Lee Rosevere, used under a CC BY 3.0 license.
[00:36:08] We’ve discussed the definition of “fandom” many times, but most notably in Episode 8, “One True Fandom,” and Episode 127, “A Fan of Fandom.”
[00:37:41] The term “Mary Sue” is so popular that there’s a (good!) article in Smithsonian about its origins. Elizabeth also wrote an article on Mary Sues!
[00:40:33] “Erik with a K” is referred to in Episode 153, “The Productive Fan.”
[00:51:18] Our last AMA episode was Part 10.
[01:01:15] The AO3 Ship Stats project, which we’re referring to here, is by centreoftheselights.
[01:07:34] If you’re intrigued by our Tropefest episodes—“Enemies to Lovers”! “Omegaverse”!—just pledge to our Patreon to listen!
Transcript
[Intro music]
Flourish Klink: Hi, Elizabeth!
Elizabeth Minkel: Hi, Flourish!
FK: And welcome to Fansplaining, the podcast by, for, and about fandom!
ELM: Wow! Please.
FK: I ate my Wheaties today!
ELM: Too much! This is Episode #158, “Ask Fansplaining Anything: Part 11.”
FK: Eleven bags of letters!
ELM: [laughs] This is an energy that you are blindsiding me with. We were just chatting before we hit record, and this is not what was going on, so it’s really hard for me to process. I love it! I love it.
FK: I’m, you know why I’m so energized? I’m energized because of these amazing messages we got…
ELM: Oh my God.
FK: …from our listeners, who are great!
ELM: No. They are. It’s a great batch of letters, like all the batches, and I’m excited to answer to them, but before we do that we have some business that is unprecedented. This is an unusual bit of business.
FK: [laughs] Talkin’ it up, huh?
ELM: I’m just saying! We’re hiring, is the way I would say. Is that too much of a…too bold?
FK: No, that’s exactly accurate! So we are looking to hire a transcriptionist who can transcribe our episodes.
ELM: The reason we are mentioning this on the episode is because we would really love to hire a listener or two, I think we would be totally happy to split this up if a couple people were interested, because I think if you are a listener or reader of this show, you understand that there’s a lot of terms, there’s a lot of slang. There’s, you know, a kind of—ways of speaking that both us and our guests have, and so we really would want someone who is in this general fannish world to transcribe, because you know, if anyone’s worked as a transcriptionist before—and we both have… Well. I have for things that aren’t this podcast. You have for this podcast. [FK laughs] It’s working as a transcriptionist!
FK: I learned a lot of things in transcribing this podcast.
ELM: No, but it does make a difference, you know, whether you have a baseline of knowledge or not, how much extra work needs to happen. So! If you are interested and you have, what would we say? The bandwidth to transcribe one episode once every two weeks, or potentially once a month, write us an email at fansplaining at gmail dot com. Put something about this in the subject line. And we will be paying by the episode as a chunk of time, rather than by the minute.
FK: Obviously we’re not going to, if it’s a double episode it will be for two episodes, right?
ELM: [laughing] Yes, yes.
FK: But we’re not gonna go, it evens out, it’s about an hour every time. So.
ELM: Yes, yes, that’s true. So hopefully there are some folks who are looking to pick up a little extra work. Maybe they enjoy the podcast and wanna listen to it early, cause that’s what you will get if you’re the transcriber!
FK: [singsongs] Early!
ELM: And also we’re gonna work out a schedule because Flourish is in school now, so we’re gonna do all the recording pretty early moving forward. You’ll have tons of time to turn this around. When I say “tons of time” I mean like “a week,” but still. Some time to turn around! It’s not like an instant overnight kind of thing, so.
FK: Yeah yeah. Not overnight as sometimes happens.
ELM: So I’m really hopeful that there will be a person or a few people who wanna get involved! We would love to have some listeners be working with us on this.
FK: And just as a reminder, you can email us—fansplaining at gmail dot com—if you want to talk to us about this opportunity. And now I’m done sounding like a corporate person.
ELM: [sighs] Oh man. So, OK. Business done. Speaking of fansplaining at gmail dot com, that is the email address that several of our letter-writers used to get in touch with us!
FK: [laughs] What a segue!
ELM: [laughing] So we have eight letters and messages, and they’re on a variety of topics, so do you wanna go first? Should I go first?
FK: I can go first!
ELM: OK, please do.
FK: All right. This is from someone anonymous.
“This is my second time writing in and, as before, I still listen and love the podcast! I appreciate all the deep dives you guys continue to do (as well as the banter).
“There recently has been drama on Reddit and Twitter in regards to the official English release of MXTX’s novels (Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation aka the Untamed drama, Heaven’s Official Blessings and Scumbag System) by Seven Seas.
“On Twitter I’ve seen most of the dialogue be both excited about the release, but sour grapes towards fans that are privileged enough to afford the release. The novels are being split into different parts, released on a schedule, each part costs about 20 dollars. There are some popular tweets going around talking about how American fans aren’t being sensitive towards fans from other countries, or how wealthier fans aren’t being sensitive because 20 dollars per section is a lot of money according to peeps. I am of the opinion that in America 20 dollars is really not a lot for a book, but I do feel for those who can’t afford it.
“On Reddit people have gotten really up in arms about fans requesting now-illegal copies of the novels that were previously free for people online. People are worried the original author might pull them if they get pissed about people requesting these on Facebook and other public forums. They are also worried about the general ethics of the situation.
“One complicating factor is that the translations have been up for many years, and some people who are new to the fandom might be currently halfway through a novel and now have to wait for it to be released (in parts); in addition these online novels were important reference sources for fanworks.
“Wondering what your thoughts on this issue is? I definitely see valid points on both sides of the argument.” And that’s anonymous.
ELM: Interesting. This is a great place to start. Thank you, anonymous.
FK: Yeah, I wanna hear your thoughts on this, Elizabeth, as someone in the publishing universe.
ELM: Well, OK. Let’s kinda break this down. There’s a few different things going on here, and I’m basing this entirely on this letter, I don’t have any additional knowledge about this situation, though I saw in extremely distant osmosis that this release was happening. But I didn’t encounter the discourse. Just for the record. I don’t know if you did either.
FK: No, not really, I’m afraid.
ELM: So I will say that my knowledge of Chinese publishing is literally zero, so I don’t know if the idea that pirating will mean the author will pull future works is a valid concern. I think conversations around pirating on twitter.com in particular are the actual worst, truly, truly cursed discourse on so many fronts. It’s up there with like, copyright discourse.
FK: UGH.
ELM: You know?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: A similar sort of morass, you know. You have small creators who—small creators who stand the most to lose from, say, copyright infringement or from pirating, defending systems that overwhelmingly—copyright is a lot more extreme on this front—overwhelmingly benefit massive rightsholders and things like that, right? And so you’re like, “Oh, why are you arguing in favor of this thing?” Right? When actually it benefits Disney the most. And I think it’s a bit different with pirating. I think that’s a lot more fraught. But if someone were to present this argument around an Anglo-American published book, I would say that’s not realistic. But I do not, I just wanna say for the strong record I do not know about the Chinese publishing…
FK: You mean it’s not realistic to expect people not to pirate it after it had been out for so long.
ELM: Yes, even though I have negative feelings about pirating, yes, I don’t think that’s realistic, and I also don’t think that a lot of pirating is gonna mean that people won’t publish books in the future.
FK: Yeah. I’m also curious about—20 dollars for a part of a novel, I know these are long novels, but I don’t know what that means. Because 20 dollars does seem like a lot for many types of book, not in hardback, you know? Like—I don’t know, on the one hand it’s not a big deal to buy a 20 dollar hardback or a 20 dollar book in general, but there’s lots of genres in which like—you’re not buying a 20 dollar romance novel, right? That’s not a thing. So I don’t know, it’s really hard for me to judge without more knowledge.
ELM: Flourish, it’s not our fault that the written word is so devalued that you’re now saying that like—
FK: That’s fair, that’s fair.
ELM: —books should be less than 20 dollars.
FK: No, I mean, I’m not saying that it should be, I’m saying if you’re a person who’s used to paying a certain amount, you know what I mean? I’m not trying to say people should be paid less. I think people should be paid more and we should value it more, however, if somebody’s sitting around being like “Well, I normally read things like X,” it’s devalued, but I understand why people would respond that way, do you see what I’m saying?
ELM: Sure, but I also think that the fan structures we’ve created now have a lot of people who are used to paying zero dollars, right?
FK: Yeah, that’s very true.
ELM: Not five, you know? And you see this discourse all the time on Tumblr, people saying “Why would I ever pay for something to read when I can read all this stuff for free, and I’m not guaranteed a happy ending or the exact stuff I want if I’m gonna pay for something, so why would I ever pay for something” kind of stuff, right? But people pay 20 dollars to see the worst Marvel movie every time, right?
FK: Yep.
ELM: And absolutely, there are people who can’t afford that, right? And maybe you can go to the movies once a year, and asking you to pay—I don’t know how many books are in this series, but $`100 for something? Wildly out of a lot of people’s price ranges. And I get that, you know.
FK: Yeah yeah yeah. But proportionally it’s—yeah.
ELM: I also get that the translations have been on for a long time too, and like—so there is something to be said for, sometimes opportunities, many times opportunities arise in fandom for people with means to get something official and shinier, right? You know what I mean?
I’m thinking about the Check, Please! Kickstarter, which was astronomically successful, right? And people were dropping significant amounts of money for something that, I think there’s special content, things that are unique and exclusive to that that they’re getting, but also it was a chance for people that I saw in that fandom who had loved this free thing for a long time to—
FK: Yeah.
ELM: —be able to put a bunch of money in, not like a million dollars or something, but like $100, right? To receive something physical that they could have forever as a specific physical object that represents their fandom, and you know, has that sheen of something special. Right? You know? And so I get that, but I also totally get this is true of people who can’t go to cons. This is true, people who can’t collect the exclusive thing, or can’t take time off work to wait on the line for the special limited-release thing.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Fandom, when there’s material concerns involved, and even when there aren’t, when time is money, et cetera—fandom is all about inequities in terms of like, who has the resources to enjoy the things, right?
FK: Yeah. For sure. All right, I’m not sure that we came up with like, a statement, a moral—
ELM: No.
FK: —a strong moral statement of what to do. But I do think I have sympathy for both sides, and I’m not going to morally judge anybody. If you pirate the thing, I’m not gonna be like “you’re an irredeemable human!” You know what I mean? Like, I do think it’s probably a morally better situation to pay for it, now that that’s offered to you, just the same way that if you have a dubbed anime or something like that that was fan-dubbed and then it comes out, you know, you probably shouldn’t be too mad that you need to get Crunchyroll or whatever to see the official one, right?
ELM: Yeah.
FK: But that doesn’t mean that I think that people are jerks for deciding to do the other thing, y’know? We’re all just tryin’ to get through the day.
ELM: So true.
FK: All right, will you read us the next one?
ELM: I will, I will. OK, this is unrelated to monetary things, but their name was listed as “Cheapest.”
FK: Amazing!
ELM: Yeah. So, this was sent in to our website, fansplaining.com. You too could send a message to our website that we might read on our next AMA. The subject line is, “Does it count as shipping if I don’t want the characters to get together?” OK. So Cheapest writes,
“There’s a show where I’m enamored with the idea of one of the characters endlessly longing for another (let’s call them ‘Dearest’). In canon, this character thinks extremely highly of Dearest and actively pursues a closer (platonic) relationship despite Dearest’s hostility. It is a major motivation for bettering himself and drives a lot of his character development. I like the idea of broadening and complicating this platonic admiration with romantic and sexual desire. I also like the idea of Dearest dealing with guilt; trying to be kind while also frustrated at needing to deal with feelings they never asked for.
“I think about them a lot. I look at the fanart and know the handful of fics that are truly unrequited.
“I feel like this is shipping, but is it really shipping if I don’t want them together? If I don't want Dearest to feel love in the slightest and I want our poor fellow to be in perpetual heartache?”
This is an incredible message. “Dearest.”
FK: All right, I’m gonna come out for this is shipping! And here’s why! [ELM laughs] Shipping is about the romantic relationship between these two characters, and there is a romantic relationship even if it’s an unrequited one, even if it’s one-sided. You’re interested in one of the characters feeling romantic love for the other! That does not mean that it’s not romantic and that it’s not a thing. This is shipping, it may be weird shipping, but let your freak flag fry— [laughs] Let your freak flag fly, my friend!
ELM: All right, so immediately thinking about something one could read as a ship: Steve Urkel/Laura Winslow. I know you didn’t have TV in the ’90s, but do you know who those people are?
FK: But I do know who those people are.
ELM: I mean that one’s fraught because it’s like, you know, would you even want them to get together? He’s kind of a creep, right? That’s the whole revisiting of that show, that kind of dynamic.
FK: Sure.
ELM: One person longing for the other and the other person being like, “Please stop.”
FK: But there’s also like—I’ve read lots of X-Files fics that are unrequited between Mulder and Scully. They’re still clearly within the context of the ship, even though the person who’s writing it—there’s no evidence that they think that they should get together, and sometimes there’s lots of evidence that they shouldn’t. There’s whole fics about how they should not actually be together, you know what I mean? But that dynamic is so compelling.
ELM: Yeah, you know, I’m glad you mentioned an older ship because I feel like this highlights—you know, I think we talked about this on the podcast before, I think there’s been a lot of conflation of the conventions of romance with the fanfiction world and by extension the shipping world, right? And also there’s this huge, in the last decade, kind of shift in shipping cultures towards an endgame result. Right? And like, not just an endgame in your fic, but like, an actual proof of concept in the source material, right?
But like, when I think about reading within a ship, over the first 15 years I was in fandom, there were plenty of times when they didn’t wind up together in the end, right? And now I feel like that’s something a lot of people would require a content warning for.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: People saying, “I read something where they didn’t get together in the end and it wasn’t warned for and I think that’s wrong, that’s as bad as not tagging for assault” or something like that. And I disagree that that is like not tagging for assault, for the record, right, but I think the fact that I see this kind of commentary a lot suggests a real shift in attitudes, right?
FK: Yeah, for sure. For sure. I mean, people can shift their attitudes. I’m not shifting my attitudes. You’re shipping, my friend! [laughs] That’s the final word!
ELM: No, I’m just saying—
FK: No, but you’re right, you’re right. It may be swimmin’ upstream, right?
ELM: Yeah, but I don’t think this would have been a question in 2005 or 2001 or something like that.
FK: Yeah yeah.
ELM: This would be just a part of the big rich tapestry of shipping. I get it! And also, people still write unrequited stuff all the time and they tag it with the relationship thing. I think if you tag it well, then the people who get really mad when it’s not tagged for will just not read it.
FK: Agreed.
ELM: Cause they clearly hate that. So.
FK: Yup.
ELM: Yeah! Yeah. I agree. You’re shippin’.
FK: Ship on.
ELM: Cheapest.
FK: Cheapest.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: All right, shall we go on to the next one?
ELM: Yeah, why don’t I read the next one? Because actually this one’s directly addressed to you.
FK: OK!
ELM: And so, so it makes more sense for me to set it up for you.
FK: All right.
ELM: So this was in response, normally in AMAs we try to take these kind of evergreen questions, but this one was in response to a recent episode, and if anyone didn’t listen to it, it was called “The Exit Interview” and I interviewed Flourish about their time working in Hollywood, because Flourish no longer works in Hollywood.
FK: Nope!!
ELM: Yeah. So anon writes,
“Finished Flourish’s exit interview, and it shocked me. Naively, I didn't realize the extent of how much fannish online content is being mined like free marketing data for media companies. Coming up in transformative fandom spaces (mostly femme, queer, ND), I’ve always had an expectation that we were somewhat insulated due to marginalization. Now certain ship wars and anti discourse seem more self-aware about our impact than I gave credit for. I feel angry, violated, and uncertain how to move forward.”
FK: Oh, man. So, anon, first of all, I’m really sorry that you feel so angry and violated. That’s not ever fun and, you know, that really sucks.
That said, I do want to give a little bit of a corrective on here, because I think that one the one hand, yeah, transformative fandoms paces are mined for data. Right? Particularly if you’re like, on Twitter, in which case all of that stuff gets, all of your Tweets get ingested, and there’s hashtags and you can search in the hashtags, things like that, right? Or by particular terms, whatever.
However, I will say, I don’t think that most companies [laughs] are doing a terribly good job of this, and I also don’t think that most companies care that much about like, anti discourse or ship wars. Right? The most that they’re going to care about it in general, on a company level, right—there may be individuals who care about it, obviously I know about ship wars and anti discourse, and when I was working with a client, I would know those things. But the client wasn’t asking me “Hey, can you tell me about people’s issues with purity culture around this?” They don’t care. They’re just like, I don’t know, “What are the characters that people like most? Are there any ships that we don’t know about that people really care about a lot?” You know? Like on a very, very, very basic level.
So I’m not saying that you’re wrong to feel violated or worried, particularly if you were never thinking about the Twitter stuff, but people are not going in and reading a lot of fanfics, they’re not going in and reading all of the Tumblr conversations, probably people can’t tell you what the current discourse is in fandom—even people like, there are some people like me who are in fandom themselves and who are engaged, but even then, it’s not necessarily filtering up. It’s a, on the one hand, they probably know about more than you were thinking, but on the other hand, it’s probably having less impact than you’re worried about. I hope that’s comforting.
ELM: Can I add something to this that I’ve observed that is…?
FK: Yes, and you should! [laughs]
ELM: Is…how to put this. So I immediately thought of, I cannot remember the name of this show, but there’s an animated show and they were talking about their second season that they were writing, and they said they were gonna make sure they weren’t gonna put any like—they had a phrase, it was like “shipping oil” or something.
FK: Shipping oil! Yeah, shipping oil!
ELM: I can’t remember what show this was. I think it was on Netflix. So if memory serves—and this was not the only show like this; obviously the most famous one is Voltron, also Netflix and animated—is like, no one on those shows needed to go into the tags or mine people’s content to understand what the arguments were, because people were sending death threats to voice actors over their ship wars.
FK: Right.
ELM: And so part of me is just like, people in Hollywood do know about this! But it’s not because they’re looking for it, it’s because they’re getting dragged into terrible, terrible nonsense.
FK: [laughs] That is also true.
ELM: The shipping oil thing, for context, was they were saying they were literally changing the way they wrote the next season to not give fuel to the fire of these ship wars that people were threatening voice actors—like, all right. It’s the voice actor thing that seems so far to me. It’s just like, it’s not even their face, right? It’s literally just their voice and people think they have something to do with the decisions here.
So the point is not to say “Oh, fans are at fault here,” but it is also to say, I think that sometimes when we see how much Hollywood knows about fandom, a lot of that is because fans have brought it to their door. These are the problems with the fan-creator breakdown that has happened in the last 10 years in social media, is like, how are some of these folks on these shows supposed to avoid knowing that there’s a ship war when they’re like…
FK: Yeah.
ELM: “You support blank ship, you should die, comma, actor,” and you’re like, what?! You know?
FK: That’s very true. That’s very very very true. And I mean, I’ve observed that myself also. Like, I’ve worked on projects where it was like, nobody cared very much until the actor started getting terrible comments, and then people need to know about that one thing and they’re like “Please explain to us what the fuck is going on.”
ELM: Yeah.
FK: And they wouldn’t have cared! They wouldn’t have known. They would not have needed to get in there. And by the way, when they did want to know what the fuck was going on, they still did not read your fanfic, don’t worry.
ELM: Oh man, this made me think of—did you see the other day, did you watch the Hawkeye trailer that just came out?
FK: I did not.
ELM: Yeah. I don’t care about this show. But there was like a….
FK: I did see someone posting about it in my neighborhood blog, because they shot in my neighborhood. [ELM laughs] They were like “We didn’t see anything from the neighborhood in there!” So I was like “OK great! They didn’t see anything from my neighborhood, so I don’t need to watch it.”
ELM: I can’t wait till everyone tunes into the first episode of Hawkeye and you’re like, trottin’ down the street in the background. [FK laughs] There was a passing shot of Times Square and it was like, a clear clear pastiche of Hamilton, and it said like “Rogers: The Musical.” It was a silhouette, exactly like that, right? And someone screenshotted that bit and then screenshotted a fic that was like, “Rogers: The Musical,” and it was a direct Hamilton pastiche, right? And they were like, “They’re reading your fanfic,” or whatever. And…
FK: They are not reading your fanfic!!!
ELM: I was so grateful that Gav, Gav Baker-Whitelaw, Gavia Baker-Whitelaw, my newsletter partner, had a thread about it where she was just like, “There are ideas.” I mean, there are ideas that exist in the culture. That one was galling to me too because it was about Hamilton, it wasn’t an obscure fic about, you know.
FK: Right.
ELM: Like, that wasn’t about some off-off-Broadway play that was like, you know what I mean? It’s Hamilton.
FK: Yeah yeah.
ELM: It does not seem that wild that they would make, if they were gonna do a musical parody poster, they would make it of that musical.
FK: Yeah. All that said, I do want to respect anon’s feelings because I do think it’s distressing when you haven’t really thought about the fact that a lot of your words are on the public internet and people may just poke around in them.
ELM: Yeah, sure.
FK: It sucks to feel that way, and you know, Casey Fiesler does a lot of really good work on the ethics of this stuff, which I have to say I don’t think the entertainment thinks very frequently about the ethics of some of this stuff [laughs] so if you’re interested in questions about how people think about that, her work might be a good one to look into.
ELM: Yeah, let’s put some of that in the show notes. I think that folks would be really interested to read it.
FK: Great. OK, should I read the next one?
ELM: Yes, please!
FK: All right. This is from nocturnus33, who asks,
“Hi: I have a huge collection of fanfics that has become unmanageable on my e-reader. At first I organized them by pairing or by tone. This is no longer useful as, for example, the ‘fluff’ folder has hundreds of stories. I’ve grown curious about how people organize their fanfic collections. Thanks!”
ELM: Well! This is a fun little question. So, I do not have hundreds of stories saved, nocturnus33, so I do not have this problem, and…I’m like, do I even like hundreds of fics? Maybe this would never be a problem for me.
FK: Oh! Elizabeth! [laughs]
ELM: I mean, you know, though! But one thing that I did do when I got into my current fandom is I started—so, historically here’s what I’ve done: I do not use AO3’s bookmarking feature. I use the browser bookmarking feature, because that’s what I did in like 2003, right? [FK laughs] And so, one thing, whenever I changed computers, you know, once every five years or so I have to get—my laptop literally stopped working and I had to get a new one—I would just lose all those bookmarks forever.
FK: Oh no!
ELM: It was kind of a, you know, it was like a little fresh start, you know? Just like, all right: what am I gonna put in now? And I’d be like, “I vaguely…if it was that good, I’ll find it again,” you know? And I have found things again.
But in my current fandom, I—and now Apple’s changed it so they carry your bookmarks over, and it kind of ruined my little fresh-start experience. But in my current fandom, I started to think like, “Well, I run this newsletter now, ‘The Rec Center,’ and I do rec fic, and what if we were doing, what if we picked a theme and I wanted to include something?” So I created a doc with a few dozen of my favorite stories, and I wrote like, short little recs with like a few tags about themes that I could use as a cheat sheet if ever we were doing like, I don’t know, friends-with-benefits, or like, you know…
FK: This is so fascinating! [laughs]
ELM: You know what I mean? So then I could just pull it out, right?
FK: Yeah, I do, I do! This all makes sense.
ELM: And so that was interesting too because there were, some of the stories I really liked, but I had a really hard time even putting any tags on them, because I was like “this isn’t really—what list would it even go on in ‘The Rec Center,’” you know?
FK: Right.
ELM: So I didn’t always put tags on them. But this is only a few dozen stories. This is not hundreds. But ostensibly, I mean, not on an e-reader, it is something you could do in a doc.
FK: Yeah, you could do that in a doc. So I historically—
ELM: Spreadsheet.
FK: Yeah! A spreadsheet. I historically used Del.icio.us and then Pinboard, and I probably should get back to using Pinboard, because that was a great way to do it. And there are some older things that aren’t on AO3 that I would like to keep track of better, right? But I sympathize with this e-reader problem, because I love reading fics, like, exporting them on AO3 and putting them on my Kindle, especially ones that are—like, I don’t buy things on the Amazon store anymore, I just use my Kindle to read fics, right?
But I’m not quite—I’m not even to the hundreds of stories point but it’s already annoying. Because I’ve got folders for pairings, and then within them occasionally I break it down by length or tone, right, but…
ELM: Are these stories you haven’t read yet or stories you have?
FK: Uh, it depends. Usually I’ll go through and I’ll download a bunch of them in a particular pairing that I’m into, and I’ll put them all on my Kindle, and organize them, and then I’ll go through and read them all like in a binge over a week or something.
ELM: Sure. I don’t understand why those need to be organized. Like, if I were doing that I would just open 20 tabs.
FK: Well, the thing is because it has to be sent over to the Kindle and then I organize it because later on I’m gonna want to look through it, right?
ELM: Mm, OK.
FK: They’re gonna stay in my Kindle in the future even if I hate them.
ELM: [laughs] OK.
FK: They’re just gonna stay there forever. So anyway, I, but I do sympathize because the Kindle has a really bad, I mean, you can put folders in there, but it’s a really slow system and stuff and I don’t have an answer to that. So nocturnus33, I feel you.
ELM: Yeah, I’m looking at this question one more time and I’m not 100% sure if these are to-be-read stories or stories they have read.
FK: I mean either way!
ELM: Cause it does make a difference. Well, if it’s stories you have read, then I would definitely say: make a list somewhere that’s not a Kindle. I used to build publications on Kindles and Nooks, and they’re terrible devices in my opinion.
FK: No, they suck! The only think they’re good at is when you just want to read a thing that’s not on a glowy computer screen. That’s the one thing that they’re good for.
ELM: Yeah. I even don’t enjoy that experience. I respect all of you that do, and you know, we’re not gonna get into whether they’re more wasteful or not or whatever—
FK: Yeah.
ELM: They work for some people, also they are more accessible to some people because you can really mess with the font size, et cetera, et cetera. But I would say, having literally made these files, like: they’re not meant to, it’s not meant to be able to like, sort in that way and tag and things like that. So that feels like something to do back in your AO3 account or with bookmarks or like mine, with my fun doc.
FK: Right. And then just search your Kindle for the thing that you want afterward.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: Yeah. That’s probably the way.
ELM: But actually, I would strongly recommend writing a little tiny rec for yourself, because you know, just tone or just a fluff tag isn’t gonna do it.
FK: Yeah, years later you’re gonna come back to that also and not remember why you loved the story. This has happened to me with my Del.icio.us and Pinboard recs. I’ve been like, “Why did I like this? I don’t remember what I saw at the time.” But maybe if I did then I would know and I would like that.
ELM: Also there’s, I remember when I came back in the Harry Potter fandom after being away for 10 years, there were a couple of fics that I really wanted to read again and all I could remember was little details.
FK: Oh, yeah!
ELM: I remembered the overall arc, but they were just stories about the pairing, like, in a specific period.
FK: Oh yes. Yep.
ELM: Nothing notable happened. They didn’t have weird jobs or something. So I was just like googling all these terms that seemed vaguely right but not quite right, and obviously I couldn’t find it. It was probably off the internet. I have no idea who the author is. So even leaving notes like “this is the one with the scene where they do blank” or whatever, that would trigger your memory, that stuff is so invaluable when you come back to it years later.
FK: It is, it is. This exact thing happened to me with X-Files and I’m so grateful that it happened to somebody else [ELM laughs] because I was like “OK, what is that fic called where like, Mulder was abducted for a long time and then they got new people in the office, and then they came back and, what was it called?” You know what I mean? “Mulder abducted” is not going to get you here, my friend. [laughs]
ELM: Yeah! No!
FK: He gets abducted a lot.
ELM: This is totally like when people write those things in, “I’m looking for a fic and these are the random details I remember,” and everyone’s like “I’ve never heard of this thing you’re talking about,” right? This is us to ourselves.
FK: But sometimes they find it!
ELM: Yeah, that’s true.
FK: I do love it. Like, this happens in romance communities too, Smart Bitches Trashy Books has a thing that they do regularly, “Help a Bitch Out.” [ELM laughs] In which you like, list—and sometimes it’s like the color of the cover and the era, like, “I read this in about 1984 and the color was pink and it featured an interracial romance,” and it’s like, OK, color pink, interracial romance, 1984. Let’s do it. And they find it! And you’re like “How!!!”
ELM: That’s really good. You know that everyone who has ever worked in a bookstore says that everyone does this color thing all the time, right?
FK: I know, I know!
ELM: Yeah.
FK: But when you’re in a bookstore you can’t help them, but with the collective intelligence of the internet you can help! All right.
ELM: All right. OK. Good luck, nocturnus33. Hopefully, hopefully, I don’t know. You can find some way to organize all those. Sounds like there’s some great stuff in there.
FK: All right, shall we take a break now and get back to our mailbag soon?
ELM: I think it’s a break time, yeah.
FK: All right.
[Interstitial music]
FK: We’re back, and it’s probably a good moment to remind folks of how we support this podcast!
ELM: Which is?
FK: Which is patreon.com/fansplaining! You too can be a supporter and help us keep this thing on the air.
ELM: And help pay the wages of the future transcriber/transcribers that we’re going to hire!
FK: That’s very true. Very true.
ELM: Yeah, it’s true: that’s labor and we’re paying for it! So we would love your help paying for it. So even as little as a dollar a month—it adds up. And at every single level you get rewards. $3 a month is our most popular level. You get access to 25+? 25-ish? Special episodes? Around 25 special episodes.
FK: Lots of them! That’s like 25 hours of content.
ELM: That’s a lot of extra content! If you are looking for something to listen to and you’ve run out of episodes in the regular podcast. Also, it’s in the special episodes that we actually kind of talk about cultural products, so we’ve talked about movies we liked, movies we had mixed feelings about, TV shows we liked and TV shows we have mixed feelings about. [FK laughs] Oh, also, also! Start the clock! Succession comes back in like one month! I can’t wait, Flourish! FLOURISH I CAN’T WAIT!
FK: [laughs] I know, I know, I know. This is gonna be the thing that I’m gonna watch TV for. I haven’t been watching TV lately. It’s gonna be the thing I get back into watching TV for.
ELM: I can’t wait, I can’t wait! And then we also have our very popular Tropefest series, which is about half a dozen episodes where we talk about specific tropes within fanfiction, like enemies to lovers, the Omegaverse, found family, stuff like that. So, you get access to all those at $3 a month. $5 a month you get that plus an enamel pin, extremely cute, shaped like a fan, and $10 a month—even cuter!—you get our Tiny Zines, and I think that if you pledge now you will still get access to the most recent one, which went out a few weeks ago, a collaboration with Destination Toast.
FK: It’s true.
ELM: So if you would like that in the mail, we will send it to you, but you have to pledge.
FK: All right, great. You can, if you don’t want to or can’t afford to support us monetarily, also support us by spreading the news about the podcast or by writing in and helping us make Part 12 of our AMAs [ELM laughs] and also, you know, doing other things like giving us ideas for whole episodes and so forth. You can do that by emailing fansplaining at gmail dot com; you can do that by leaving something in our Tumblr askbox, it’s open, anon is on; you can go to our website, there’s a form there that you can fill out to leave a comment; you can leave us a voicemail at 1-401-526-FANS. And any of these ways you can potentially be anonymous if you feel like it, and you can also contact us on social media—we’re “fansplaining” everywhere.
ELM: All right, I think that’s it for that piece of business!
FK: All right, shall we hear from the next writer-inner?
ELM: Yeah, do you wanna read it or should I?
FK: You go for it. I read the last one.
ELM: OK. So this is from lizard-socks, and he writes:
“Something that’s been on my mind lately is the fragmented nature of fandom—in particular, the different spaces where fans interact with each other, the overlap among them, and how that intersects with the way people think and talk about fandom in general (as opposed to the fandom for a particular movie, book, etc.)
My biggest fandom right now is Star Trek, and each Star Trek show, for the most part, is about a new crew. AO3 has plenty of great Star Trek fic, but stories about entire starship crews of original characters—a well-established format on fanfiction.net and Star Trek message boards—are really hard to find there. I wonder if this points to a more general divide, either in Star Trek fandom or in fandom as a whole. It’s not lost on me that the writers who are imitating the format of the shows this way are often doing so in spaces that are generally populated by men, and the writers who deviate from that format are in less male spaces. But I do wonder what the implications are for the term ‘fando’ itself—does it include people who do in-universe analysis on Reddit or draw fan characters on DeviantArt? Or does it specifically describe the spaces AO3 users tend to come from, like Tumblr and LiveJournal, where people share the same terminology and common practices? And if not, then what term does? And I suppose you could extend this even further, and ask the same question about people who are fans of a movie or band or sports team, and express it by spending their money on tickets and merchandise. Is that behavior ‘fannish’?
Anyway, I’d love to know if you or your listeners have any related thoughts. I’m always interested in learning what other fans are up to and how they navigate the world and find the places that are right for them. And maybe I’ll find a place someday where people are writing exactly the kind of stories I want—after all, isn't that the dream of every fic writer?”
FK: Well, live long and prosper, lizard-socks! I am into a fellow Trekker writing in.
ELM: I knew that was gonna happen.
FK: Second of all, I’m gonna guess from this that you are a more recent listener, because we’ve actually talked about a lot of these questions over the course of various episodes, and we’ll put some of those links in the show notes.
But I think that something we often talk about is that “fandom” as a term has gotten used by all kinds of people and all kinds of ways to refer to all kinds of different groups, right, of fans. So the way that fandom started off as a term, as far as we know, was in science fiction and fantasy like, book reading and writing. Those were the first group of people who called themselves “fandom.” And there are still people who only think that fandom refers to like, the kind of people who are reading and writing science fiction books. And that’s their thing. And they consider all other stuff to be, you know, “Well, that’s just baseball fandom,” or something. “That’s just media fandom. True fandom is, is science fiction book people.” I mean, are they right?
ELM: No.
FK: No. [laughs] I mean…you know, I mean I guess from their perspective if that’s where their center is? Our center is often in like, you’re pointing out, fanfic fandom, but we try pretty hard to situate ourselves there, you know?
ELM: Well, but he’s talking about multiple kinds of fanfic fandom.
FK: Oh, sure!
ELM: I obviously agree with all of that, but one thing that really strikes me here is, I think that there is a reason—a very self-fulfilling reason—why the kind of practice of, you know, the all-original crew, all-original Star Trek crew fic, is a heavily male-dominated practice, and it’s because the term “Mary Sue” comes from a person trying to write one original character in a freakin’ Star Trek fic, you know?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Imagine the vitriol that people direct towards girls in particular about writing original characters into like, a quote-unquote “real” professionally-made world.
FK: Right.
ELM: It’s so strong that at this point, after—you know, that’s from four decades ago now, right. Five decades ago? Are we at the 50th anniversary of the Mary Sue? It’s gotta be coming up soon.
FK: I’m not sure we’re quite—it’s coming up soon, yeah.
ELM: Yeah. Oh man, that’s weird to think about. It feels a little bit like why would anyone open themselves up to that at this point, if you’re immediately gonna get like, trampled all over. But you know, obviously we see a huge rise of people writing original characters into stories now in, like, imagines and stuff like that, and like, reader insert fics and that kind of “reader X blank character,” so that’s shifting a bit, but still.
FK: I also think it’s kind of interesting to have this called out within Star Trek fandom in particular, because in Star Trek fandom here have been—I mean, I think that the overall thing that lizard-socks is talking about is true, particularly in the past 10 years or so, but there’s a long tradition of people dressing up in a Star Trek uniform and coming up with their own character, and it’s not only men who do that, right? That’s not writing fic in the same way, right, but there’s lots of people like, I’m encountering a lot of people in Star Trek fandom who are not in fanfic fandom—in fact, I’m not really in, I mean, I’ve read a couple Star Trek fanfics, but I would not say I’m centered in fanfic fandom for Star Trek.
ELM: A couple. Flourish.
FK: I’ve read a bunch of them, but I’m not like a shipper-centric person…
ELM: Yeah.
FK: I’m not reading on AO3 very regularly, you know? Like, maybe once in a blue moon, but it’s not my main way of engaging, right? And I’ve also noticed people doing stuff, there’s stuff on TikTok about people’s, you know, original characters, and there’s a lot of women doing that, right?
ELM: Yeah.
FK: A lot of non-binary people also. That’s a thing. So I mean, I agree with what lizard-socks is talking about, but I think that actually out of all the fandoms in the world, Star Trek is one of the most diverse in terms of the ways that different people engage with the stuff, and I think that you find, you know, you just find a wide variety. So I have hope that lizard-socks will find his people.
ELM: That’s interesting. Yeah, I think that—let’s definitely put some links in the show notes, because these boundaries of fandom I think is one of the main themes of the show. Hopefully stuff that lizard-socks will enjoy and anyone else who hasn’t listened to those before.
FK: Great!
ELM: Cool.
FK: Well, shall I read us the next one?
ELM: Do it!
FK: All right.
“Hi Flourish and Elizabeth! I recently discovered your wonderful podcast and have been happily making my way through the episodes—thank you for creating such engaging and thoughtful-provoking content, I can’t tell you how much I’m enjoying your discussions!” Aww! All right, back tot he question.
“Before I get to my question, a couple of things: first, you totally made my day when you referred to the Phantom in one of your episodes (blanking now on which one) as ‘Erik with a K,’ which is what I called him as a child when I was back in my very first fandom (early ’90s, pre-internet POTO fandom ftw!). Second, in your recent episode “The Productive Fan,” you joked about those people who get up at 5am to write 2,000 words before work…which is my actual writing routine…and I was actually listening to the episode to try and talk myself into lowering my expectations of myself, so thanks for totally calling me out and making me see reason, haha!”
ELM: Good. Good.
FK: “So my question is this. I recently got back into fandom (thanks largely to having to cope with the pandemic) after about a decade of focusing on work and original writing projects. It’s been such a wonderful, affirming experience coming back to fic reading and writing after all these years, and I’ve thrown myself into both whole heartedly—engaging in transformative works has made me feel like myself again—but I’ve had a lot of catching up to do where fandom culture is concerned. My question is in regards to tagging ships and the element of surprise.
“The first fic I embarked upon reading was a massive 400k novel that was tagged as featuring my OTP as the main couple. It was truly a masterpiece, the best piece of writing—fanfic or otherwise—that I’ve read in years—but right away I noticed that not only did it not seem to be going in the direction of my OTP, but the relationship between those two characters was increasingly worrying and toxic. I kept reading, thinking that if the author managed to get them together by the end they would be outdoing Jane Austen, but the couple never actually materialized in the fic. The relationship tag turned out to reference a dream one of the characters had, nothing more, and the eventual romantic conclusion turned out to be an entirely different and un-tagged couple.
“Now, the couple that did get the happy ending is also a favorite of mine, so that gave me some consolation, but my wife who was reading the story along with me was FURIOUS that she hadn’t gotten what the tag seemed to promise! The author went on to state in the comments that they left out the true relationship tag because they wanted to have the element of surprise in the final reveal, but it raised many questions for me and left me wondering—what is the etiquette around not tagging to preserve a plot twist or element of surprise? Is this common practice?
“From what I have seen of recent tagging practices on AO3, authors seem to err on the side of transparency whenever possible so that readers can both curate their experience and avoid triggers. What are your feelings on the subject of surprise endings or true will-they-or-won’t-they stories in fandom? Is there space for stories that have surprise relationships at the end or do you feel that this is a betrayal of reader trust? Having loved the novel so much, I had very complicated feelings when I walked away. I loved many things about the resolution, and the revelation was satisfying, but I felt it came at the expense of the couple I thought I was getting and it has left me distrustful of relationship tags in general.
“All that being said, I am currently working on my own long fic which has its own romantic reveal late in the storyline, and I’m not sure it’s something I would want to tag when I finally do post it. Having been burned by this practice once already, I’m not sure what the best course of action is for myself. I understand the importance of transparency in tagging, but I also understand an author’s desire for suspense. All I know for sure is that I definitely don’t like walking into a story thinking I’m getting one thing and ending up with something else, and had I not been so gung-ho about the secret pairing this fic ended up with, I would have been as pissed as my wife.
“So, short version: what are your feelings about not tagging relationships to make their reveal a surprise, and what are your feelings on tagging relationships that don’t actually materialize in a story just because of dream/fantasy content? I would love to hear your thoughts. Keep up the great work, and May the Force be with you (guess my fandom).”
ELM: Now I wanna know what ships! It was all a dream. All right, well, this is funny, since I somewhat referenced this topic like 15 minutes ago.
FK: It is!
ELM: Talking about people who get mad when the ship doesn’t get together in the end. That’s a little bit different than “it was only in a dream,” to me.
FK: Yeah, it’s not clear to me in this how much it’s like, they had a toxic relationship and then they broke up, or is it like, they had a toxic relationship and then they had a sexy dream and then they never got together in the first place? I feel like that makes it very different for me.
ELM: Yeah, all right. Well, I feel like this is a fraught question these days.
FK: [laughs] Fraught.
ELM: I don’t know. It is! I feel like there’s a lot of people who assert that the thing that they want is the correct thing to do, rather than like a norm or a preference, you know what I mean?
FK: I do know what you mean.
ELM: Some of my favorite writers barely use any tags at all, and it’s just like “All right! We’ll see what happens in there!” But I also—and I’ve certainly read and seen pieces of media that I personally found triggering to specific things, like, terrible things that have happened to me in the past, and brought them up, and I was like, “This sucked.” Right? But I also, I absolutely understand if people don’t ever want to have that experience, or have a much stronger reaction, right? You don’t want a fic to give you a panic attack or whatever.
FK: Definitely. I think that the thing that to me feels wrong about the way this particular fic was tagged is that they made tags that they knew would be misleading.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: In my opinion, it’s one thing to say “I don’t wanna tag this, so you know, come in and you get what you get.” Right? Or to say like, “I have tagged this really minimally,” and I would probably leave an author’s note and be like “I tagged this super minimally on purpose, there’s elements of surprise in here, Godspeed.”
ELM: Yeah.
FK: That seems fine to me, right? Even no tags at all: OK! Whatever you wanna do. For findability reasons you probably don’t want that, but maybe you do, right? But I feel like if you start tagging it, you should not tag things that you are intentionally misleading somebody with, and in this case they’re doing that. So to me, I would say that’s—A, that’s going against the norm, I think the norm in AO3 is to over-tag, to be transparent, at this moment.
ELM: Sure.
FK: It’s also going against what I think is kind of ethical as a contract with the reader. It’s fine to say it’s a surprise. It’s fine to give all the information. I don’t think it’s cool to be like, dangle dangle.
ELM: Forget ethical, it’s like, cheap. You know? It’s like, hackish, right? [FK laughs] “Ooh, a twist!” I don’t know. It makes me think of like, all these bad endings of television shows where they’re like “We wanted to make sure you couldn’t guess so we gave you deliberate clues, whoops!! Switcheroo!” And it’s like, “You’re bad at writing! That’s bad writing.”
FK: Yeah, yeah.
ELM: Actually. You know? I guess this story this person was good at writing, or at least our letter-writer thought so, her wife didn’t, so.
FK: Yeah, I mean, I will say that I have at times obscured a content warning, like, I’ve said “OK, I’ve tagged this and there’s a content warning, but it’s something that’s a twist in the story, so if you have any triggers, please avail yourself of this ROT13 thing,” you know what I mean? I feel like that’s fine. I don’t think that someone needed that. I’m sure someone could’ve read it and been like “OK.” But it was really hard to tag for without, it was just—I get it, right? But I still feel like, don’t, yeah, just give people the information if you’re gonna give any information, you know?
ELM: No, I agree with that. I will say that some of the stories that I have liked best are ones that told me very little things. Right? Because it’s like…
FK: Yeah.
ELM: It’s a totally different reading experience, and I’m not gonna begrudge anyone who wants to have the entire thing spelled out for them in tags or in summaries or whatever in advance, so they know exactly how it’s going to end, but like, I remember there was one story that I read where the author said “choose not to warn” and I was like “oh, that’s interesting, OK, all right” and I just kind of moseyed on along, and it was a super fucked-up story, and it haunts my dreams… [FK laughs]
Maybe like chapter seven out of nine or something, I was like, “Oh. The main characters are gonna die.”
FK: Yeah.
ELM: I was like “There is no way this is going to end without them dying.” And I was like, “Oh shit.” Then I went back and looked at the tags again and I was like, “Oh, they said ‘choose not to warn’ and I just glossed right over that.”
FK: Yep.
ELM: And like, I’m actually glad! I mean, as I said, it haunts my nightmares, it was a very upsetting story, but if they had labeled it “major character death” I wouldn’t have wanted to read it, you know?
FK: Right.
ELM: So it’s interesting to me that not having that information made it such a heightened experience, because it was very suspenseful, and it wasn’t a cheap death, it was a well-earned one because it was integral to the plot and it was a sacrifice that they made, right? And it didn’t feel like they were trying to shock, but it felt like the natural conclusion to what had happened in what was generally a pretty fucked-up story. So. I’m really sellin’ this story right now that I’m not gonna tell you the name of.
FK: Yeah. To summarize then, what—what’s our outcome here? Right? What are we recommending that this person do?
ELM: Yeah! I mean, I think that I, look: if someone, OK. So in their specific situation, let’s see. A romantic reveal late in the storyline. Well, all right: think back to our previous letter-writer in this episode, who was talking about whether an unrequited ship is still a ship, you know? Is there an expectation that, if you put two ships and each ship shared a character like Joe/Sam and Joe/Bob or whatever, right, my favorite show, the Joe Show, then like, you know, you have to assume that one of those will not be happening by the end, right?
FK: Yeah. If they’re not like, listed as a triad, also.
ELM: Yes, just those two separate ones, right?
FK: Then one’s comin’ out on top, yeah.
ELM: So that happens, certainly, I feel like people do. If a character has a bunch of different relationships throughout, they’ll list them. Is saying that this romantic storyline’s gonna happen later, is just putting a ship in a huge spoiler? Maybe not, cause there’s a lot of different ways that people use ship tags, right?
FK: Agreed.
ELM: And it’s not necessarily just about “this is who’s going to be doing a big romantic sweeping kiss at the sun sets in the final moments of the last chapter,” right?
FK: Yeah yeah yeah. Yeah.
ELM: So I don’t know if that’s a huge spoiler. But then also, otherwise I would say go real minimal and say “choose not to warn,” you know, and say “keeping tags really minimal cause there’s a surprise, and if that doesn’t work for you don’t read it.” But like, I think that—I don’t know. I’m saying a lot of different things here, but I feel like a story can tag really robustly and still be really enjoyable to read, you know?
FK: Oh yeah, for sure, for sure!
ELM: I’m saying this as someone who was just praising a story that gave me no information and was shocked along the way. I also think that knowing it in advance, if it’s well-written, doesn’t actually ruin an experience. I think that’s a falsehood.
FK: Yeah. Spoiler alert: Hamlet dies.
ELM: Flourish, why would you spoil that?!
FK: All right, we should read our next episode—bleh bleh bleh!
ELM: What about Laertes? What happens to Laertes?
FK: Got some bad news for you.
ELM: What about Polonius? Does he make it?
FK: So much bad news!!! All right. Our next letter.
ELM: Ophelia does though. She survives. She’s the final girl, right?
FK: Read our next letter, please, Elizabeth. [both laughing]
ELM: OK. This is a message on our website.
“Hi Elizabeth and Flourish. I listened to your recent Ask Anything episode,” this was about our last AMA, “and wanted to comment on something you said discussing the letter about ageism in fandom. You mentioned Twitter profiles with an 18+ emoji cropping up and you viewed this pretty negatively. It was a throwaway comment, but it really stuck with me because this happens a lot in my current fandom (BTS).
“BTS fandom (transformative and otherwise) has a huge age range so conflict around age is bound to come up. A recurring theme is adult writers or fanartists creating nsfw work getting anon hate or being publicly dogpiled by younger fans for creating and sharing these works. So to me, having someone put an 18+ sticker on their profile reads similar to an AO3 rating or warning, saying ‘there’s adult content in here, keep reading at your own risk and don't come crying but I'm a minor to me when you run into it,’ Of course that's not going to deter anyone looking to stir up trouble, similar to other DNIs in profiles, but I still think it serves a purpose. If nothing else, it’s a good indication for people who do enjoy adult content are are actively looking for it that they've found a like-minded fan.”
FK: OK, so I just pulled up what we said, and I think that we were a little bit unclear, because we were—like, to us we were clearly talking about a subset of people who use the 18+ emoji in their bio and who then go on and be super ageist. And we were just talking about them, but I don’t think we made it clear enough that there are plenty of people who use the 18+ bio in their emoji [sic] for reasonable reasons that aren’t ageist. You know?
ELM: Right, right. Wait, so what did we say exactly? You’re looking at it now.
FK: Yeah. We said, “I’ve also seen this kind of rise of the 18+ emoji in the bio of being just like, you know, just being ageist, and I think one thing you and I—maybe more me in my journalism than us as a podcast—have worked really hard to do is to kind of lift up teen girls in particular because they’re such a punchline in music fandom or whatever, 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+, quote, the teens fucking suck attitude, is like wait, isn’t this the same, you know what I mean?”
So we were just making it a really quick—and then I agree with you, and like, you know, we talk about it a little bit more. But basically we’re just using this as like a, “we see this sometimes,” you know, and we were casually throwing it off as “this category of people.”
ELM: Yes.
FK: But I get why somebody might feel defensive.
ELM: I think that, yeah, I agree, that wasn’t super explicit. This is a subset of people who use this emoji, and this is something I continue to observe every single day.
FK: Mm-hmm! Me too.
ELM: [sighs] It’s frustrating and there are like, other commonalities between them, and I see a tendency to lump all teens together and say “all teens are puriteens” is a phrase I see used a lot, right.
FK: Yeah. “Puriteens.”
ELM: So like, when you make your whole stance one of being preemptively or reactively angry at what is probably a pretty small subset of teens as well—albeit a very loud one—and you tie that up with the age status, like, yeah. You know? I would stand by that. But absolutely there are millions and millions of, you know, adults in fandom talking about their age and like, just trying to warn people and saying like, “Adult content here! Buyer beware! Don’t say I didn’t warn you!” You know?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: People, there is this kind of reverse DNI, like “DNI with me.” DNIWM. I see it on Tumblr a lot. Where people will be like, “18+, NSFW sometimes, if you’re a minor and you follow me like, mute these following tags.”
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Right? And then it will list the tags that they use for stuff like that, right. So it’s kind of preemptively saying, “OK! Well, if you’re mad at me, I told you what to mute, and I consistently use these,” you know, that kind of thing.
FK: Yeah yeah yeah. Totally.
ELM: And I think that’s really responsible behavior, right?
FK: Definitely! And it sucks to get dogpiled, so I’m really sorry to the folks who have gotten dogpiled in BTS fandom for having NSFW stuff. That sucks. So thank you for this corrective, in case there were other people out there who had the same like, “Hey!” You know?
ELM: Totally.
FK: OK.
ELM: We have one more letter.
FK: We do! Is it my turn to read it?
ELM: It is your turn!
FK: All right. This one is from Fruit Salad, who has a charming name.
“Hi Flourish and Elizabeth, I’m relatively new to fandom and discovering your podcast has been a blessing! There's so much I don’t understand but each episode of your podcast has given me context and nuance to the things I'm seeing. I've only listened to a few of episodes so I hope this question isn't something you've already covered/is common knowledge/is unknowingly bigoted!? Ahhhh… Anyway, here it goes:
“Does AO3’s set-up preference romance fics? Is this the case on other platforms? And if so, what are the effects?
“It feels like the majority of fanfics involve romantic/sexual relationships as a core part of the story. Is this a fact? Or am I just in certain spaces? I like romance but a recent attempt to find a friendship fic on AO3 has left me wondering if the search/filter system on AO3 (possibly other sites) makes it difficult for fics outside of romance to thrive. Here was my experience searching for a friendship fic involving my favourite characters, Apples and Oranges (pseudonyms).
“First I had to differentiate between the ‘Apples/Oranges’ tag and the ‘Apples & Oranges’ tag. From what I know, the forward slash denotes a romantic or sexual relationship, whereas the and sign denotes a platonic relationship. It’s a weird way to categorise relationships and feels like it makes romantic/sexual relationships the default. There's ‘romantic/sexual relationships’ and everything else. Rather than a whole breadth of relationships like family, friends, acquaintances, peers etc.
“Even within the ‘Apples & Oranges’ tag, the majority of fics only feature Apples and Oranges as side characters to a central romance. There's no way to prioritise ‘Apples & Oranges’ as the main characters I want to read about, so its tag gets swamped by other romance fics.
“So I dig a little and find there’s Categories—M/M, F/F. F/M, Multi, Other, Gen. I guess ‘Gen’ is what I'm looking for but these categories, once again, make romance the default. Why not categories have like ‘Action & Adventure, Comedy, Crime & Mystery, Romance’ etc.?
“I also realise I’m missing all the friendship fics that do centre around Apples & Oranges, but also feature their good mate Bananas. I’m OK with Bananas. So now I’m doing separate searches for ‘Apples & Oranges,’ ‘Apples & Oranges & Bananas’ and any other friendship combination I can possibly think of!? At the end I’m still scrolling past tons of incorrectly tagged fics.
“I’m probably doing this wrong. I'm probably on the wrong site. There's probably context I don’t understand. But I can imagine this also being a problem for people who want to read/write about individual characters, familial relationships, less popular pairings or non-monogamous relationships. Fanfiction feels like it should be a medium with endless potential and a scope wider than oceans. But sometimes it feels small and fixed in convention. Part of me feels like more could be done to give other types of fanfiction space. What do you both think?”
ELM: OK, well, now it occurs to me that “Fruit Salad” is a reference to the letter and not their name.
FK: Oh my God. [both laughing] I love, I love that they signed it like that, however. Thanks, Fruit Salad!
ELM: Thank you Fruit Salad! My good mate Bananas. OK. This is a very interesting letter and I really appreciate you writing in. I have a bunch of things to unpack here.
FK: Unpack ’em!
ELM: You ready to unpack?
FK: I’m ready!
ELM: So, this is interesting. I am trying to take my mind in the Wayback Machine, is the phrase I was just gonna use, which makes no sense, but like—I’m trying to remember prior to 2007 if and how friendship was tagged for, period. I mean, there weren’t that many tags prior to then!
FK: There was, no! Because typically if you were looking at a big fanfic archive, right, it was fanfiction.net, which did have ‘Mystery, Comedy, Action/Adventure’ as the main categories.
ELM: Yes, you’re right! So first of all, it sounds like everything that Fruit Salad wants is actually on FFN, where non-romantic fic is very very popular and they actually categorize stories that way, right?
FK: Yeah. For sure. Although they too now have pairing tags, these days.
ELM: Do they? Cause they didn’t as of a year ago.
FK: Oh, maybe they just have the two characters that you can search for together, but it doesn’t separate out pairings! Let’s find out.
ELM: Fanfiction.net… [clearly typing in URL]
FK: This is the easiest thing to find out about.
ELM: I’m gonna look at Miss Marple fic. That was the first one that I set my eye on.
FK: Filters… Ah!
ELM: Wow.
FK: Yes, you can put ‘pairing’ or not-pairing.
ELM: What!
FK: So you can say you want a pairing of characters A, B, C and D, or you want a not-pairing, which means you’re just looking for those characters. This is a bananas filter system.
ELM: My good mate, Bananas!
FK: [laughs] Uh, the fanfiction.net filter system has never been of the best, I will say, although it does have more options in certain senses. Not more options, but like, a different tone than AO3.
ELM: OK. Oh my God. Somehow I accident—I just did like three clicks and now I’m in a Doctor Who/Big Lebowski crossover. [FK laughs] Aww, nothing found! Nothing found. I’m sorry. I thought that that was what I was gonna get.
FK: Oh, but you didn’t get it. Disappointing.
ELM: Live journey on fanfiction.net. So I thought that there was actually, I looked into this awhile back because I was like, I was trying to figure out something on FFN and I was like, “They barely even—it’s not set up in a way to tag for shipping, I wonder if that’s why there’s so much less shipping on here,” right?
And I think that there’s a few things going on on FFN, and one is that it’s always been a space for younger fans, like, it’s young fans now, it was young fans when we were on it. People age out of it, and that’s not to say that you age out of wanting platonic stories, you grow up and you want romance. That’s obviously false, right? But it is true that 12-year-olds are less likely to want romance.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Than, than people of a variety of ages. Right?
FK: Yeah, yeah.
ELM: And so then I started, you know, some of the questions Fruit Salad is asking I was thinking about with AO3 about whether it starts to become a self-fulfilling prophecy if you have an archive that is organized and so often analyzed around ships, right? People look at like the top 100 ships. “What are the numbers on my ships?” Right? Analyzing the demographics of like, how many women are in the top 100 ships or how many Black characters are in the top 100 ships or whatever.
And it’s like, that is one metric, but it also doesn’t show me how much screen time the Black characters get—you know what I mean? Or who gets to be the protagonist in the story or the POV character or whatever, right. So we rely on that metric a lot, and also I think it does affect the way some people structure their reading and writing experiences.
FK: Yeah! I completely agree! I think we do wanna like, pull it back though, because Fanfiction.net existed before the Archive Of Our Own.
ELM: Sure did.
FK: So did a bunch of other little archives. And the thing was, back in the day with Fanfiction.net, that was before you had any ability to say what characters or pairings were in your fic, right? It was just the genres.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: And people—the thing is, that was like the most requested thing. People really wanted to be able to sort by pairing.
ELM: Interesting.
FK: People really, really, really wanted that, and you could see that because there were lots of fanfiction archive other than fanfiction.net that were pairing-specific archives, right? For every fandom you would have our Spuffy archive and your Spangel archive and your—
ELM: Stop. Stop. We wouldn’t have used those words then! That’s completely inappropriate! [both laughing]
FK: Anyway, you get my point though, right? So when Archive Of Our Own was made, right, they’re trying to take a—keep in mind what people were looking for at that time. What people wanted to search by. And I do think, I agree with you completely, I think it’s become kind of a straitjacket in its own way, because now a lot of people—I’m sure—search by pairing. I know that I have in the past. And I’ve let that limit my reading just because, like, I think “Oh yeah, I’d like to see this.” Whereas in the past I might’ve gone on Fanfiction.net and seen a bunch of other stuff that looked interesting as I went, you know?
ELM: That’s true, but you know, I’ve always read by ship—that’s what brings me into fandom, a fandom, is a ship, right? And that’s something that we’ve talked a lot about on this podcast and it’s a way that we are different, right? I haven’t had that many ships. And I think we’ve also talked about too my favorite kind of fic, which you know, and you’ve read some of what I’ve written—obviously some of the stuff I’ve written is much more ship-focused. But some of it is plotty with the ship going too, right? And that is my favorite kind of fic, right? Is like, a long fic where there’s some ship stuff but it’s not a romance novel.
FK: Right.
ELM: The ship is not the plot, right? The ship is like, an element of the plot alongside the other characters’ relationships and non-romantic relationships with each other and the, whatever, the driving force of the plot is whatever. So I can get if you totally don’t want to read about any kind of romantic or sexual pairing, but suggesting that all ship-based content is about that, just because it’s labeled—going back to our other question about labeling, right?
FK: Right, just because it’s labeled. Yeah.
ELM: Doesn’t necessarily mean, like—obviously if you were like, totally looking to avoid any conversations about that kind of relationship, then yes. But if you just are not looking for something that’s first and foremost a romance, the problem is—it’s definitely something you can find. And I’ve found hundreds of stories that I love that are in this realm. But that’s not so easy to just glean from a search and a reading of a summary.
FK: Right.
ELM: And one of the problems with the AO3 is that people become so reliant on search and summary and they’re wonderful, wonderful taxonomic organizational tools, and searching functions, and I’ve praised that element of it cause it’s something I always wished I would have been able to do in the past—but also in the past when that didn’t exist, people would write rec lists where they would explain what a story was about, and maybe there’d be like, they would say in the rec “You know, ostensibly this is about this ship, but mostly it’s about the relationship between…”
FK: Yeah, yeah.
ELM: “This may be an Apple/Banana fic, but mostly it’s about the close brotherly bond between Apples and Oranges,” you know?
FK: Right, totally.
ELM: That’s—it’s hard for, I think it’s something you’d be less likely to even write that about your own work. That’s something someone else would say about your work, right? You know?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: So.
FK: Yeah, following on from—I think that you’re right about that and I think the other thing I would say, going back a little bit to this question of like genre, right—on the one hand, I remember—I’m in a real reminiscing about The X-Files mood today. I remember reading X-Files, there was an X-Files novel-length fanfic archive, and it divided things up into sort of genres, like, topics maybe more like? And I read through all of the ones that were case files or that featured like, profile, like profiler case files, right? All the ones about serial killers. And I was like, “I love this. I don’t care what the ship is, I just wanna read lots of long plotty serial killer fanfic.”
ELM: Yeah.
FK: And that was great, you know? At the same time, I also remember feeling so frustrated in the Harry Potter fandom on fanfic.net because so many fics did not fit into a genre like “romance” or “action/adventure” or something like that, right? There’s a lot of stories that don’t fit in any of those genres, because fanfic does its own generic things, right?
ELM: Yeah yeah yeah.
FK: So on the one hand I totally see why you want that, but on the other hand I also remember the pain of being like, “But this doesn’t fit!” Like, “These categories are not made for fanfic!!” So I don’t know what to say about that.
ELM: Well, that’s interesting cause it makes me think of all the conversations we have about tropes. Because those are the actual ones that describe things. If I had to think about my favorite fics, I don’t think they fall into any of the categories that are listed there, and all those categories are perfectly reasonable categories for genres of different types of stories, right? But like, they wouldn’t fit in any of them. They’re not horror, they’re not romance, they’re not action/adventure. Maybe they have some elements of those, but like, they wouldn’t fall into those. But they might be like, I don’t know, I’m trying to think of any of my favorite fics right now and I’m coming up empty, but like…
FK: Yeah.
ELM: They might have been like a case fic, or an enemies-to-lovers, or whatever. And so a lot of those tropes are about relationships, because the enemies—this is something we find when we’ve done the Tropefest. A few of the ones we’ve done are romantic, some were not. We did Found Family, right? You know? Which is—
FK: Right.
ELM: Kind of not romantic at all. It’s about platonic relationship. I just feel like if you spend a lot of time deep within your fandom, you start to recognize things like that and maybe you do want a tag like “Found Family.” People use that really robustly, and usually that’s a way to explore non-romantic relationships between characters, if you are tagging it that way, you know what I mean? Or “Teamfic,” right. And it’s just like, that is first and foremost—I used to, when I was in the Torchwood fandom, that was my favorite thing. It was about how they worked as a team and what it meant to be a team, right? And that wasn’t about…but, two of the characters were also boning.
FK: [laughs] Right!
ELM: And so it would be tagged in that ship as well. But the story would be about them working as a team, not just the two of them, but the whole group.
FK: Right. So maybe, maybe just to try and summarize some of what I think we’re saying here…
ELM: Yeah, do it.
FK: Number one, Archive Of Our Own does preference, in its sort of actual layout and search functions and the way it does, it does prioritize shipping to some extent.
But number two, it seems like Fruit Salad is relatively new to fanfic and so they probably are not yet finding all of those tags like Found Family, et cetera, that may be really helpful to them as they begin to discover what kinds of fics they’re interested in and what tags match up with those things.
Number three, they also might like looking at other fanfic sites like Fanfiction.net, I don’t know what fandom they’re in so I can’t advise, but for plenty of fandoms there’s still other long-running sites; sometimes there’s Reddit communities, things like this that tend to have more friendship-focused fic.
But then four, there’s not a silver bullet for any of this because most of those sites don’t have better searching and tagging functions than Archive Of Our Own does, so you’re sort of just stuck trying to figure it out. Is that fair?
ELM: It is. I also think that like, Fruit Salad knows the relationship that they want between Apples and Oranges. They know what Apples is to Oranges, right?
FK: Right.
ELM: So yeah, I get it, there isn’t more granular “Apple + Oranges, Friends” and “Apple & Oranges, Siblings,” you know what I mean? But I will say I have had this personal experience, I went through a huge kick when I got into the X-Men fandom of really wanting to read about Magneto and his dumbass fast grey son, Quicksilver, right? So I’m looking up, you know, Erik Lehnsherr & Piotr Maximoff, and I know what they are to each other, right? And every single one of those stories is about a stupid father and his stupid son, right? And some of them had romantic, background romance, some of them didn’t, you know what I mean? So it’s like, if you canonically—a lot of times the relationship you want is probably the one that canonically exists, like a father/son, or siblings, or two best friends in a show.
FK: Right.
ELM: I definitely think people tag things incorrectly, right? But I don’t know, I also feel like if you know what you want…I know that’s hard, we’re saying “you’re just browsing, but you should know what you want,” but it’s not a blank slate, right? The AO3’s never going to suggest things to you, there’s never gonna be an algorithm of “you might like,” there’s never gonna be those categories that aren’t fan-created categories. So I think that if you know what kind of dynamics you want, people should be tagging for them, and maybe it’s a small fandom and there just isn’t that much there, you know?
FK: Yeah, totally.
ELM: So my last recommendation to Fruit Salad would be, especially if it’s a medium to larger fandom, find people who are doing rec blogs, make rec lists, or anyone that runs any communities.
FK: Have a robust bookmarks, you know.
ELM: Yeah. I know people in individual fandoms where people will write in and say “Hey, do you have any stories that are really about X character, that are about Bananas?” You know? And they’ll be like “Yeah! These are my favorite Bananas-centered fics,” you know, or “about the relationship between Bananas and Apple,” because so much of that, like I’ve been saying throughout this whole answer, is the only way you’re gonna find out if those dynamics exist. You’re not gonna get it through tags. You’re gonna have to get it through reading.
FK: Yeah, you’re gonna have to read it.
ELM: So find people who’ve already done the work and, you know, either browse what they’ve already done or ask! And I think that this stuff is out there, unless this fandom is super small, in which case I’m sorry, it’s not out there. Write your Banana, Apple, Orange fic.
FK: All right.
ELM: I’m done.
FK: I think that rounds it up for our mail for today.
ELM: That was, it was interesting! When we put them all together, I didn’t think there would be so many about tagging, but then in retrospect it feels like a lot of conversations about tagging.
FK: That was kind of the theme.
ELM: Yeah! It’s good to have themes.
FK: All right, well, it was a pleasure to talk through this stuff.
ELM: Yeah, it was! It’s interesting to think about. I also, I feel like because I’ve barely been reading any fic during the pandemic, I haven’t even bothered with keeping track of anything. [FK laughs] I’m not really reading anything new so it’s like “who cares,” you know. At this point I kinda don’t wanna keep track of it because I wanna be surprised by it when I come back to it in a year and a half or whatever. Be like, “Oh, this one! Oh, this one!” Which is what I’m doing right now with someone’s back catalog.
FK: Said like someone in a very old fandom.
ELM: Yeah. You know, it’s nice! It’s nice to just kinda lurk in the old corners. So.
FK: OK. Well, my lurking friend, I hope you have a wonderful lurk between now and the next time we talk.
ELM: That’s weirdly creepy but OK. Thank you. Yeah! I hope you enjoy—
FK: You’re the one doing the lurking! That’s the creepy bit.
ELM: I actually am not, I don’t lurk in this fandom, but I’m kind of skulking.
FK: Skulk, there we go. OK, you’re right. Fair, fair.
ELM: It’s almost October! That feels right.
FK: All right. I will talk to you later, my skulky friend.
ELM: OK, bye Flourish.
FK: Bye.
[Outro music, thank-yous and credits]