Episode 160: The Original Character
In Episode 160, “The Original Character,” Flourish and Elizabeth discuss the ways that fans create their own characters in their favorite story-worlds—especially when those characters are some version of themselves. Topics discussed include the history of the term “Mary Sue,” imagines and x Reader fics, generational shifts in the way original characters are perceived, and that time Flourish wrote a second-person One Direction fic that could arguably be described as sheer self-insert wish-fulfillment.
Show Notes
[00:00:00] As always, our intro music is “Awel” by stefsax, used under a CC BY 3.0 license.
[00:01:48] Flourish’s Phantom fic (don’t judge!!!). We talked about this in Episode 151.
[00:05:56] We’re referring to Episode 44, “Mary Sue,” and Elizabeth’s article on Mary Sues—and self-inserts, x Reader fic, and imagines—is here.
[00:13:24] The listener asking about stories featuring original characters was in Episode 151, “Ask Fansplaining Anything: Part 11.”
[00:16:32] OK, you knew Flourish was going to take this opportunity to include a picture of Harry Styles, right?
[00:27:45] On autofiction: “Our Autofiction Fixation” by Jessica Winter.
[00:31:34] The “Tenth Walker” entry on Fanlore assumes the tenth walker is a Mary Sue, which...may or may not be true, and anyway, that term is often used with no self-consciousness… 😬 Maybe someone could give entry some love, huh? Also, there’s still plenty of them being written in this, the Year of our Lord 2021, as per the AO3 tag...
[00:35:35]
[00:36:27] We talked about people’s relationship to the characters they write and read in the Shipping Survey. We discuss the process of creating the survey in Episode 97 and the results of the survey in Episode 99; Flourish also wrote an article analyzing the responses.
[00:46:40]
[00:49:06] Flourish was very confidently WRONG about this one (should not be a surprise, Elizabeth literally sang the song in the fifth grade talent show so she would know lol). Christine is indeed only singing with her best friend!! Then there is later a reprise with the Phantom which is what Flourish was remembering.
Transcript
[Intro music]
Flourish Klink: Hi, Elizabeth!
Elizabeth Minkel: Hi, Flourish!
FK: And welcome to Fansplaining, the podcast by, for, and about fandom!
ELM: This is Episode #160, “The Original Character.”
FK: You know this is, like, one of my favorite topics of all time.
ELM: Cause it’s about Adam and Eve?
FK: [laughs]
ELM: [laughing] Just wanted to hit you—
FK: [laughing] What?
ELM: [laughing] —hit you with a seminary joke immediately.
FK: Thanks, thanks for that!
ELM: They’re the original characters.
FK: They were, they, [laughing] thanks. [ELM laughs] They were? But also, uh, no, because I am really interested in and attached to questions of how fans like, place themselves in the things they’re fans of, fantasize about that, write about that. Or don’t, you know?
ELM: Yeah.
FK: I am stoked to get to talk about this today.
ELM: OK, we are talking about it because we got a letter. So, I don’t think we have any business to do up front, why don’t we just read the letter and start talking about it?
FK: OK great, shall I do it?
ELM: Yeah, please.
FK: All right. This letter is from Liv.
“Dear Flourish and Elizabeth,
“First of all, I absolutely love the pod. Thank you for making fandom feel like a real intellectual pursuit and always giving me such interesting things to think about.”
It’s always nice to start an episode with like, somebody being really nice to us. Thanks Liv. OK, back to what Liv actually said.
“In a recent episode, one of you mentioned a Phantom fic where you essentially rewrote Christine with a vastly different personality. Then in the most recent AMA you touched on OCs and reader fic. This got me thinking about my Phantom/OC fic that I wrote at 15 that no one but God can judge me for. THAT got me thinking about how all my major fics across fandoms have been OC fics. This hasn’t been intentional, it’s just how my brain works. I have enjoyed this feeling of underestimation, really writing a character that feels like they belong in the story and making readers love them despite their usual prejudices.
“That train of thought got me thinking about how my best friend, just getting into transformative fandom, ONLY likes character/reader fics and how they’re all I see now. I am trying to get over the prejudice that there is less craft involved in these than in creating a character because I don’t want to be like the people who dismiss OC fic.
“I feel like these are the natural progression of the OC fics I love, but for whatever reason, I find they make me personally uncomfortable. I can’t actually see myself in any of the imagined scenarios. I literally see a white vapor where the other character should be. I don’t like the idea that dialogue is being put in “my” mouth or that I am being plonked into a setting, when an OC could be crafted that really belongs there. I get very curmudgeonly about it! Don’t tell me what to imagine!
“I find it so interesting that we spent decades afraid of our original characters being accused of being Mary Sues and self inserts and now this new generation is saying, I am going to create a form where you must insert yourself! I think it’s really brave while also getting exhausted trying to pick through them.
“I would love to hear your thoughts on the rise in popularity of this format. It feels like it really happened overnight. Maybe you can help me figure out my discomfort. What are your experiences with OCs as well as reader fics? Thank you so much for all your inspired work. Liv.”
ELM: First of all, thank you very much, Liv.
FK: Thank you for providing me with catnip. I am now a high cat.
ELM: Wow. OK. [both laugh] I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a cat on catnip.
FK: I have!
ELM: Oh, OK.
FK: I’m not actually very much like them.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: But, you know. People do say “that’s catnip for me” so I was just trying to get with that.
ELM: Yeah I got it, I got the expression. OK, so, first things first, I can’t believe Liv said “one of you” did that. [FK laughs] Wrote that Phantom of the Opera fic. I feel, I feel maligned, that I was even—
FK: [laughing] Gosh! Which one of us was it?
ELM: —even considered in this group. Sorry.
FK: [laughing] Sorry, you’ve associated with me.
ELM: No!
FK: You’re stuck with it now.
ELM: Yeah, I guess so. By association, it’s true. But this is very very interesting, and look, interesting enough obviously for us to do a whole episode, and I think there’s a few things to unpack. Should we like, talk through, just kinda, set some terms first and like, set some definitional sort of boundaries?
FK: I think that would be good, because we’ve heard from a lot of people that not everybody shares the same backgrounds as we do, and so I think it’s nice to like, this may be 101 for some people but for other people they’re gonna be like, wow, hey, I didn’t know that was a term, right?
ELM: I honestly think that for a lot of our listeners, based on who we hear from and who engages with us, so the like, you know, rough picture—it’s obviously the people who are speaking out, but like—I think they would be less likely to be engaging with this kind of fic, right?
FK: Mmhmm.
ELM: And perhaps be the, you know, people who fall into the more, the bias that Liv is talking about, right? And it’s definitely something that like, me as a reader, I will own up to like, some personal...preferences that I—I don’t wanna describe it as bias—
FK: [laughing] That was, that was...that was, that was such a pause.
ELM: But I was trying to say that personal disinterest in these forms, I mean I guess we’ll get to that right?
FK: Right, that’s not the same thing as like, judging them or hating them.
ELM: No. But I would definitely put myself in this camp of “not for me personally,” but it’s something that I’m very interested in studying.
FK: Right. OK, so terms.
ELM: Terms. All right, so, very first term I think is “Mary Sue.”
FK: Right. Classic term. Long-term term.
ELM: Oh my God. A long-term term. We have done an entire episode on Mary Sues, we actually talked about some of this in that episode too because the boundaries are pretty fuzzy, and I wrote a piece to go along with that episode where I talked about a lot of this. We’ll definitely link to that in the show notes. And that was a few years ago, and I think this has only like, this whole space has only grown, you know, it’s continued to grow by massive amounts since then.
FK: Hugely.
ELM: I’m glad we’re looking at it again. But “Mary Sue,” very short summary. “Mary Sue,” it was a term coined in Star Trek fanzine culture by a particular person in the 70’s, she was observing a pattern, she saw people sending in stories about original, usually teenage girl characters, who were very confident, very desired, very desirable, you know, and like, fifteen-year-old lieutenant or whatever, right, that kind of thing, you know, somewhat self-indulgent kind of stuff.
FK: Right.
ELM: Maybe like, died dramatically and everyone, you know, like—
FK: Right, yeah yeah yeah—
ELM: —Kirk and Spock were like [dramatic mourning wail] [laughs]
FK: Right, which I feel like is different than what we usually think of as Mary Sue today, right, like a lot of times people talk about Mary Sues and they, I don’t feel like associate necessarily with dying dramatically, right?
ELM: I don't know if that’s true, I still think there’s—
FK: Oh yeah?
ELM: I think there’s a long, long thread of this sort of, girl...writing herself into a tragic, you know, like a beautiful, a beautiful dying, you know, that kind of thing, and I don’t think that’s changed, I bet if we were to really dig into some of the stuff that some, I think this is particular—for teenage girls in particular—I think if we were to dig into some of that stuff—
FK: Maybe, maybe you’re right.
ELM: And I will say, when I did the research for that piece, I mean I think I maybe referenced an article, there’s some scholarship that draws parallels to or traces a line from Victorian—
FK: Oh yeah.
ELM: —self-inserts, of this very like, a common theme for girls, right, being—
FK: Yeah.
ELM: So.
FK: I guess it, I guess I think of it as an older one but maybe you're right, I’m sure you’re right in fact, I’m sure it’s still happening today, I just don’t see it as much. But that doesn't mean it doesn't exist right?
ELM: Yeah, yeah. So, “Mary Sue,” just to trace it up to the present day, like, the very short story of what happened is this term caught on, there was limited real estate in paper fanzines and people would say “no Mary Sues,” and this kind of, when it moved to the internet it sort of turned more into, it was more purely about taste, and demeaning people’s writing, right? It was not so much about like, there’s only a few pages and we don’t want this kind of character in here, it was just about “this kind of thing is wrong.”
FK: And it really extended too, to not just...original characters who behaved in certain ways, but like any original character not being OK. Especially original characters who were female. But I feel like I saw it used all the time, and maybe it still is, I don’t know. But for a long time in the 90s and 2000s it was like, any original character.
ELM: Hold on. You saw people describing male characters as Mary Sues?
FK: [simultaneous] Gary Stus.
ELM: Well, Gary Stus, sure—
FK: Gary Stus.
ELM: Well, that’s different, that’s different. I think you’re jumping the gun a little, we’re talking about Mary Sues.
FK: But I do think the rejection of this kind of character in a lot of places led to no original characters as the main character, or even no original characters at all, like they’re all suspect.
ELM: Right, you’re already moving on to the next step, but to follow the Mary Sue thread onwards—
FK: Oh no! [laughing] Sorry!
ELM: —once it moved out of the original character land it moved into a descriptor for female characters in published media, right?
FK: Right.
ELM: So you have people describing like, Uhura, Rey is a famous one in Star Wars, right—
FK: Yeah, people calling Rey a Mary Sue, it’s like, what?
ELM: —and especially, you know, in this kind of hyper-competent, right, there’s such a trope that’s not a great trope either of these super, super competent female characters actually doing all the things, right, and so.
FK: Right. Which, in fairness, Rey, I mean, I don’t love the critique that people make of this, but Rey does get behind the wheel of a thing and it’s, you know how to fly it. So.
ELM: She’s not allowed to be just like, immediately talented? Wow.
FK: Augh! Anyway.
ELM: Flourish, if that—that is maybe, like, number 579 on the list of...things I think are very bad writing choices in Star Wars. [FK laughs] You looked, you were so rapt, you were waiting for that sentence to finish.
FK: [overlapping] I was waiting, I wanted to know what you were gonna say, I was rapt, I was like, where is it going?
ELM: [overlapping] You were like, where is that going? [laughs]
FK: Anyway, I don’t, I mean obviously I love Rey, I’ve written lots of fanfic about her, but it’s complicated, right. And, and, though I will also say right, in addition to this, you start getting people talking about—can I move on to the next thing?
ELM: Yeah, go ahead.
FK: You start getting people talking about characters in fanfic who are like, a Hermione Sue or something like that.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: When people write fanfic and they write a female character in fanfic but the idea is that either the female character is shown as overly competent, or sometimes just, you’re identifying with them too much, right? And either way this term then gets appended, the -Sue appendation.
ELM: Right, right. And I think maybe Hermione, that definitely is a thing that happens with that character, but I've seen this around female characters that are not super fleshed out in the canon, so it’s like—
FK: Oh yeah.
ELM: —actually fleshing them out is what gives them the label, then they get the Mary Sue label and it’s like, really? Because you gave them a little more backstory and you made it seem like they read a book once? And now they’re too competent? [laughs]
FK: Right, and yet, all this not to say that, I have certainly read plenty of stories in which, I mean, admittedly in my case this is mostly Hermione because that was where I was reading, you know, that was the fandom in which I was reading stories that would be like this. But I’ve read plenty of them where Hermione suddenly becomes like, so massively competent and successful and awesome and everyone loves her and you’re like, oh, OK…you know...
ELM: Is that not in the, is that not in the book?
FK: [laughs] All right, in the case of Hermione, possibly it is in the book a little bit, but you know.
ELM: It’s a weird example, right? She’s already like that in the book.
FK: [laughing] It is, it is a weird—well not everyone loves her in the book, although mostly people are wrong to not love her in the book, so.
ELM: Wow. Wow. All right.
FK: Anyway, point being though, this is not to say that there’s not bad writing that happens in these contexts, it’s just to say that there’s a critique of that writing which is clearly not really entirely about the writing.
ELM: Right, right. OK, so these are gendered, right, but going back, taking a step further to your general OC thing, I do agree with you that all OCs are, have been a source of derision for a long time in fandom.
FK: Right.
ELM: And I think it is because fanfiction fandom skews female, historically. I feel like it is more likely that OCs historically have been female.
FK: Yeah I think that’s right, and I also think that in fanfiction spaces that are male-dominated, OCs are often more OK. Right? Like when I look on Fanfiction.net in male-dominated video game fandoms or on Reddit or something like that, there’s more acceptance of male OCs in ways that I feel like, female-dominated or you know, not-male-dominated fandom spaces are. I mean the not-male-dominated fandom spaces are female-dominated right, it’s not like there’s only nonbinary people here, so I don’t know why I said that.
ELM: I understand what you were trying to do, don’t worry.
FK: Yeah, you know, I was trying to be inclusive of myself but actually it is mostly women.
ELM: [overlapping] There could still be a majority in a space, it is what it is.
FK: Yeah, yeah. So I feel like in those spaces, actually the men would totally make fun of Mary Sues but like, women are self-policing, you know?
ELM: That’s interesting. Right? Now I’m thinking, so our last AMA which I think is partly what prompted this letter, where we had a letter from a male listener talking about how he was looking for fanfiction spaces for him, and talking about this idea of like, all original crews in Star Trek universe, right, that kind of thing. So I definitely think there’s, I don’t want to diminish that, it’s not like that’s just a couple of people in the corner somewhere—
FK: Not at all, no.
ELM: —there’s whole subcultures of fic that, I think that you are better than I am at bringing some of this stuff up but I think partly because you wind up researching some of these corners in a way that I just often don’t encounter them as a fan.
FK: And also like, just being in Star Trek fandom has brought me to more of these corners than I previously would have been, right? But women got into x Reader fics, so x Reader fic, then, is the next thing.
ELM: Right. OK, so to me x Reader fic, I think this is the huge area, the one that’s been only growing since the last time we talked about some of this stuff, right, since the last time we were talking about Mary Sues. It seems like a logical progression, you have very classic self-insert original character, so, the female character that like, multiple members of One Direction are really into, like, as a stand-in for you. Right?
FK: Right. And then I feel like that’s a really good place to point it at, because I feel like that is the fandom that like, that became super normalized in.
ELM: This was also, this has always been a thing in boy bandom and bandom in general right?
FK: Oh for sure, for sure, I just feel like, it was sort of this huge, like, it started seeping out everywhere from there.
ELM: Sure, and I think that a ton, a ton of people came into fandom and came of age in the One Direction fandom because it’s just so large, right? And it like, hit at a really specific time for the internet and for the growth of these platforms and stuff, like Wattpad in particular.
FK: [overlapping] Right, and earlier people might have been Twilight fandom or something, which, Twilight fandom had its own trends that were not necessarily the same aesthetics as everybody who had previously been in fandom, but they weren’t original character trends, you know what I mean? Like, Twilight fandom was the growth of AUs, all that stuff, really, really, really showing up in a big, big way, and that’s what older people would have been into at that time.
ELM: But that being said, I’ve probably encountered hundreds of, there’s a new student at Hogwarts and she’s from America and like, both Ron and Harry are really really into her, so…cause she’s American...
FK: [simultaneous, laughing] Oh, of course, naturally, of course we have. These impulses never go away, they aren’t new impulses.
ELM: [laughing] I mean, is this an impulse you have? Are you blushing because you wrote this story, Flourish?
FK: I never wrote that exact story, but yeah, obviously it’s an impulse I have [ELM laughs], you’ve read my fic!
ELM: Yes, all right, I get it, I get it. So, there is that. I mean I don’t want to say that any one fandom invented this, though I do think there are huge waves that brought people into it.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: I guess maybe the One Direction thing too is interesting because I feel like a lot of that stuff in Harry Potter fandom was mocked and was seen as juvenile, right?
FK: Exactly, exactly, and nobody was, not within One Direction fandom, people weren't doing that.
ELM: I mean I’m sure there was some mockery in One Direction fandom, but it was much more like, seen as normal and not something to be beaten out of you. So if you take a self-insert, so she’s got a name, she has a backstory, often she is like, she’s probably not like the head cheerleader and the most beautiful and popular person everyone loves, she probably, it’s surprising that these beautiful boys from One Direction are fighting over her or whatever, maybe she has low self-esteem and that’s the way that she’s relatable or a stand-in for the writer working through adolescence.
FK: Sure.
ELM: That, I feel like, leads directly to, then, the world of x Reader fic and you just take away the name and it’s either second person “you” or there’s a Y/N which is supposed to be “Your Name,” and then it gets farther and farther and some of them then have all these like, fill-in-the-blanks, like you’re playing Mad Libs, you know, like you just got home from like, insert your school here or whatever. [laughs]
FK: Right, yeah.
ELM: It’s supposed to just, you just got home from school. Those are really interesting to me because some of them that I read for my research, and I feel like you probably even read more than me so you can speak to this, but some of them still say things about the “you” figure, the Y/N figure, and don’t leave everything as a big blank, but some of them are really meant to kind of keep it super loose so then you can overlay as much of yourself in there as possible.
FK: Right.
ELM: Whether it’s like, really stripped down, you know, not a lot of detail so you have to do a lot of imagining, or whether it’s a fill-in the-bank situation so no detail would throw you off because you don’t directly think that’s your favorite ice cream flavor or whatever.
FK: Yeah, and I feel like this is related, definitely, to imagines, which is the form in which, I mean they vary from sort of more extended ones to short ones, but like, you basically have almost like what might be a writing prompt? Like, you know—
ELM: A thought prompt.
FK: Imagine—
ELM: An imagination prompt.
FK: It is, it’s an imagination prompt, right? To draw from my own recent life, imagine that you're in the pit at Madison Square Garden, and Harry Styles sings directly to you.
ELM: He locks eyes with you.
FK: He locks eyes with you and he sings like, a whole verse directly to you.
ELM: Right.
FK: And that’s an imagine, even just that little bit. That’s an imagine I just wrote. Or it could be more extensive, where it’s like a longer, you know, couple of paragraphs or something like that. But the point of that being, it is just intended to have you literally imagine this scenario and then you go off and think about it.
ELM: Right and I feel like those, because so many of them are so short, they don’t even have to go into any of these questions of like, how much about you are you gonna say, it’s literally just, it’s not like you and Harry Styles have never met and, like who cares? It’s just in this exact moment, you come up with a backstory, you come up with what happens next. This is something that’s always fascinated me, I don’t know if you actually ever take imagines to heart, how many people are truly imagining, or is it more just the pleasure of like, similar to just seeing a GIF of the characters that you love, you know? Like, mmm, what a fun thought! Or is it literally like, you start to map out—and then after the show he would like, I’d get a tap on the shoulder and they’d be like, “Mr. Styles wants to see you backstage.” [both laugh] Or is it like, literally just imagining the moment that he sings to you and what that would feel like?
FK: I mean I think it can be both, right? When I’ve encountered them, sometimes it’s one, sometimes it’s the other.
ELM: Do you engage with imagines? I don’t know if you do.
FK: I haven’t recently. I did when I was like, at the very end of One Direction/the beginning of Mr. Styles’ solo career, they were hard to avoid.
ELM: [laughing] Mr. Styles would like to see you.
FK: [laughing] Can you imagine? [ELM laughs] Anyway, no, I mean I haven’t engaged with them recently but yeah, sure, at the time.
ELM: So when you engage with them, would you think of more story or would you just take the pleasure of the moment they were describing and just kinda sit in it?
FK: Totally depends on, like…
ELM: Interesting.
FK: ...my mood or the moment, right?
ELM: Very interesting, but both.
FK: Sometimes it would just be like, oh yeah, ha ha! Sometimes it would be like, what the fuck are you talking about, that would never happen. [ELM laughs] Right? Like occasionally you’d get an imagine and just be like, really? That doesn’t fit with what I would envision this person to do.
ELM: That’s really funny.
FK: Whatever. And then sometimes it would be like, yeah, oh wow, there could be a whole story out of that.
ELM: That’s very interesting. I didn’t know you were an imaginer.
FK: Not really, I’m like, I never really sought them out, but you know at a certain point you’re, at the time I was still actively on Tumblr, and you sort of couldn’t avoid them, so they would just. You can’t help but have a thought when you read that, you know what I mean? [laughing] You read it and you’re like, the thought naturally shows up, you know?
ELM: My problem is the ones I’ve encountered in my own fandom—no offense to any of these folks, I hope it works for them—but they usually just make me laugh out loud. [FK laughs] And so, I’ve never had the scenario to imagine.
FK: Yeah, you’ve never had the moment where you were like, in sync with them.
ELM: They'll just be like, “your dad, Erik,” and I’ll be like, [laughs] oh my God, everyone is a young person.
FK: Yeah, OK, that would be bad. [ELM laughs] I couldn’t, there are some of those with One Direction where I was just like, really?
ELM: Your dad, Mr. Styles?
FK: Your dad? [laughs]
ELM: You’re babysitting for Harry Styles’ child and he offers to drive you home…
FK: Oh my God, literally I’m sure this is a thing that someone has written and all I can say is, “your grandma, Flourish…” [both laugh]
ELM: Oh, you want me to say, “your grandson, Harry Styles, comes over for some fresh cookies…”
FK: Oh my God...
ELM: No, sorry, your friend’s grandson.
FK: [laughs] Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for that.
ELM: [simultaneous] Yeah, I wasn’t setting you up with a grandma-grandson incest relationship.
FK: Thanks for not making it an incest story, I really appreciate that. OK, OK OK. But, I think there’s something in this about the different kinds of pleasures that people get from different kinds of reading, right?
ELM: Well...yeah, and writing too. I want to talk to you, while we’re on the subject of Mr. Styles, about the fact that you wrote a second-person fic. And like, how you conceived of that. Was that meant to be a stand-in for you? Were you thinking of that character as a wholly original character? Why was it in second person?
FK: Yeah, well it wasn’t entirely in second person, so like it was in a bunch of different veins, but there was a big chunk that was.
ELM: [simultaneous] Sure, but there’s a significant portion.
FK: Yeah, so you know, when I started writing this fic—which is not actually online in its entirety right now, maybe I’ll put it back up sometime soon—I was thinking really hard about this stuff because I was really engaged with, you know, Harry Styles fandom, One Direction fandom more broadly. I was seeing a lot of imagines, I was reading, for the first time in a long time, a lot of stories that were clearly self-inserts. And also a lot of stories that were like Liv was talking about, people who were trying to create OCs who were not just self-inserts but something serving more purposes than just as sort of your stand-in in the story. And I was really sort of—
ELM: Wow, that language, “just self-inserts.”
FK: Well, right, but like, I was trying—I mean, this is what my prejudiced brain was doing, [ELM laughs] but at the same time I was enjoying the self-insert stuff—
ELM: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
FK: —so I was trying to write a fic in which I was sort of struggling with these questions. And in the story, maybe half of it is this “you” story, which is super much a self-insert, it was totally id fic, completely like, absolutely it was about my fantasies, are you kidding? Like, clearly.
ELM: Right, hold on though. That’s a really interesting distinction. Not to cut you off, but I would like to kind of dig into that slightly.
FK: Sure.
ELM: It’s about your fantasies, or it’s about you? Your personality?
FK: No, no, my fantasies. Different than my personality. Very different.
ELM: [overlapping] Right! I think that’s really interesting that you said it was a—I think that there’s an idea of a self-insert that is also, like, you.
FK: Right, absolutely. And in this case it was, I was not writing it as being me. I was writing it as being a fantasy me. [laughs] Much younger. At a different point in their life, different friends, different all of that, right? But still written in second person, written with the idea that someone would read this and the reader...the engine driving what I wrote was my fantasies, but the ideal reading situation was that someone would read this and feel like it was hitting their id. Like it was, like they could be that person.
ELM: Sure.
FK: Or they could imagine themselves as that person or whatever. Right? And then later in the fic, various things happen and that gets really complicated. Like, the character basically becomes more and more themselves and less and less a self-insert or a “you” stand-in.
ELM: That’s interesting.
FK: I mean, whatever, I did some—
ELM: Mpreg…
FK: Yeah, well, also like weird postmodern shifts in what was happening in it, and so forth.
ELM: You’re trying to like, over-intellectualize your deepest desires.
FK: A little bit, but I think I was also trying to think about...I think I was doing that, but I think I was...this was really…[laughing] I was also indulging those desires, let me tell you. So, I think I was doing that a little bit but I think I was also trying to negotiate the lines, right? Between those desires and the “me” and the story that you’re telling other people. And the artistic aspects of it. This story that I wrote was really all about my trying to like, come to terms with some of those questions. And to think about some of what Liv was saying here I think a little bit, some of that internalized shame about having fantasies or desires. I mean, Liv wasn’t saying this, I don’t want to put that on Liv. But some of the idea of like, why do I resist some of these forms, why do I not want to identify or encourage other people to identify too closely with a character, why does that seem shameful to me? And how do I make it feel un-shameful to me? And what do I lose when I do that? And what do I gain, obviously, because there’s plenty to gain as well.
ELM: Yeah, it’s interesting though, because part of it feels like—the things you’re describing right now—part of it feels like a totally different thing than like, writing prose fiction to me. You know?
FK: [laughs] Yeah!
ELM: Not to like, overly or over index on a narrow definition of what fiction is, but I mean, also tying it to the literary world, there’s a lot of conversations right now about autofiction. Which is kind of straddling this weird gray space between memoir, nonfiction, autobiography memoir, and the end of the spectrum of fiction where everyone is like a thinly-veiled version of someone you know and/or yourself, you know? If it’s described as autofiction, often it’s like someone who’s really explicitly acknowledging that they are writing something about themselves, but it’s somewhat fictionalized, right?
FK: Right.
ELM: And so, that’s a weird space that I think people have a lot of trouble with. I mean obviously there’s some very, very trendy books in the last few years that have fallen under this label, but I also think it is something that readers do have a hard time...I don’t know, I think that it can make people uneasy, a little bit, to kind of wonder about...you know, they say this with kinda straight-up regular old fiction too, if it seems like it’s about a rough topic and they’re like, is this something that happened to you? [laughs] And writers are like, please stop, it’s fiction.
FK: Yeah, and I think it actually gets even more personal. Because one of the things about some of these, I think something that I struggle with, and I think something that a lot of other people in fandom struggle with too, is the expression of their own desires or fantasies, and wanting to at the same time indulge those things and also distance themselves from those things. Right? I think that people have lots of different strategies for doing this. [laughs] And lots of different relationships to this. But I do think that’s a common thread running throughout, especially fanfiction fandom, but really fandom overall. Including people who are doing roleplaying, including people who are doing cosplay, all of this, I think there is this question of like, it almost bumps up against like, do you know the difference between reality and fiction? And the idea that your desires are suspect because your desires make it seem like you really want this in real life. If you really desire this, do you know the difference between reality and fiction? You know?
ELM: I feel like that’s a big leap though. I feel like that’s only one tiny corner of this. I don’t disagree with what you’re saying, but like…
FK: Oh, I’m sure it’s only one tiny corner, it’s just my corner! The corner I’m in!
[both laugh]
ELM: I don’t know, when I think about...going back to Liv a little bit, I think that there’s a lot of people in fandom, in fanfiction fandom, who are writing about desires. But I also think that—I mean, maybe you were not being this narrow. But I also think that often in those conversations, that is framed mostly as sexual and maybe romantic desire, right? Whereas when I look at people’s Reader x fics, just as I’m kind of browsing through just to see what the kids are writing about these days, it feels...I don’t know. Some of it feels purely like “I want to be in the story.” Right? And “I want to go to Hogwarts, I’m the American student at Hogwarts!”
FK: Oh, I think that’s super true. But that’s also kind of embarrassing in certain ways. [laughs]
ELM: It’s a desire! But I just want to steer us away from being too narrow with the—you know what I mean? Because I feel like—
FK: I agree, I agree. It’s not just about sexy times desires. Not at all. It’s about power fantasies, it’s about, yeah.
ELM: Yeah, and thinking about, you know, your cosplaying and roleplaying examples too, like I just went to the Ren Faire, right, and one thing I admire about the Ren Faire is that no one is ashamed to be wearing elf ears and carrying this little orb thing they all have on their belts, I don’t even know what it’s for, but I noticed so many, it felt like a video game character thing, I don’t know. Everyone was just like, I’m sure in their daily lives they don’t wear elf ears, and it was a nice kind of place where it was very normalized to wear the ears or the wings or whatever, you know? Or like, dress like a “pirate.” Most of those people did not look like pirates, let me tell you. Not in a historic way.
FK: Yeah, yeah, yep.
ELM: You know what I mean? So yeah, is there something embarrassing in saying like, “I wish I was in The Fellowship of the Ring, I wish I was the fifth hobbit,” I don’t know, who do people want to be, hobbits? I’m sure they do.
FK: It’s the ninth walker usually, the tenth walker, excuse me.
ELM: Wait, who’s a walker? Who are the, I—
FK: The Fellowship is nine people and they’re all walking to Mordor, and so then the tenth walker is like, a, there’s a class of fics in Tolkien fandom, not all sexual, not all desire, not whatever, but the idea of a tenth walker fic is when you add yourself into the Fellowship.
ELM: OK, I need to know which of the four genders or whatever, the four races, do they say race?
FK: Yes, they say race.
ELM: Elves, and dwarves, and you know, right, the four genders, which of those do people usually choose?
FK: I think elves.
ELM: Cool. That’s a cool choice.
FK: I feel like elves.
ELM: Elves are really cool.
FK: I feel like hobbits have been rising in esteem recently.
ELM: No one wants to be a man.
FK: Humans are always there, no no, people want to be humans, dwarfs are the things no one wants to be for some reason.
ELM: What?
FK: Yep. I mean partially it’s because dwarfs, as far as we know, there's never been a female dwarf that has had any significant screen time.
ELM: I thought the cool thing about dwarfs is like, everyone headcanons that female dwarfs also have long beards.
FK: Ah, it’s not just headcanon, there’s jokes about it in canon.
ELM: [laughing] All right!
FK: So, yes.
ELM: So like, that’s super cool!
FK: But we’ve never actually seen one.
ELM: All right!
FK: I think it’s cool! Look, I played a female dwarf in “World of Warcraft” for years. You don’t need to talk to me about how great female dwarfs are.
ELM: [laughing] OK. All right. I took us down this path. [FK laughs] But yeah, I think that, yeah, I get why people are embarrassed by this, right? It feels a little, even me, someone who’s spent a very long time being like, “fandom’s great! Do whatever you want!” I’m like, “Mmm, slightly cringey. Oh, you think you should be in that group?” You know? And that’s a weird thing, maybe not just to make this about gender but I think that a lot of this is about age, and I know I’ve been talking about the kids doing stuff a lot in this and I do think it is younger people often writing this stuff. But you know, when little kids say “I want to be on the Yankees!” Right? “I want to be an astronaut!” You’re not, almost definitely not, but no one’s like, how embarrassing that that five-year-old boy thinks he’s gonna be on the Yankees. But if he was 45 and he was like, I imagine I’m one of the Yankees, I don’t know, I think people would judge that. Because it would be seen as a childish sentiment.
FK: I think so, and I think, frankly I think that’s kind of sad. [laughs]
ELM: Yeah!
FK: Especially, I mean, this is one of the things that I think is interesting within Star Trek fandom in specific, because Star Trek is something that people, many Star Trek fans will just openly say “Yeah, I wish I was in Starfleet!” I absolutely wish that! Of course, I don’t think I would be like, Captain Kirk, I wish I was a biologist in Starfleet.
ELM: Yeah. I really admire that some people are like, no no no, I wouldn’t be the star of the movie, I would just be in there somewhere, you know?
FK: And this is like, a common thing in Star Trek fandom, you know? I think partially because Star Trek has, because of a lot of the stuff in the story which is encouraging you to think in those terms. But it’s totally a thing, but it’s also like, [singsong] what’s the prime fandom in science fiction that people make fun of when they’re not in fandom? And they mock, and say that you’re gonna wear your Starfleet uniform, you cringey nerd? [laughs]
ELM: Flourish, I think Harry Potter may have outpaced this in terms of people making fun of it.
FK: It may have, yeah.
ELM: It’s more of a specific burn to Millennials.
FK: Harry Potter is a specific burn to Millennials, I feel like Star Trek is maybe not at its peak making-fun-of, but I think it might have more longevity.
ELM: Definitely longer-running, But I don’t know if it’s gonna—I think it’s waning.
FK: I don’t think it's waning. Do you know how many Star Trek shows are on the air right now? [laughs]
ELM: No, I was saying that people using it as the default—
FK: [simultaneous] Oh, people making fun of it, yeah, sure, sure. [laughing] People making fun of that, yeah, maybe that’s waning.
ELM: Look, as you know I’ve watched Frasier 50+ times, they make fun of Star Trek every other episode.
FK: It’s true.
ELM: There’s a Trekker, I think he calls himself also, like you, on the show.
FK: Yep. Do you remember how Foxtrot had an entire Star Trek gag running for, like, our entire youths? The comic in the newspaper, Foxtrot?
ELM: No, Flourish, I did not read the comics in the newspaper as a child, I’m sorry to tell you this.
FK: You didn’t read the—[laughs] what?
ELM: Actually, I do think I read Peanuts at one point, but in general I found them very unsatisfying.
FK: [simultaneous] I thought everybody read the comics. [laughs]
ELM: [simultaneous] And sometimes I liked looking at Garfield.
FK: Well, I will tell you that Foxtrot, in the newspaper—
ELM: [laughs] Animals only.
FK: —every day had a long-running Star Trek joke.
ELM: OK. All right, all right. Refocusing a bit. Back to self-inserts. So, I know I steered us away from only talking about people’s sexual and romantic desires and whatever. I’m thinking of Liv’s “white vapor” comment, right?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: I don’t necessarily think that that is only about not wanting to see yourself, not wanting to...I think we’ve talked about this a lot over the years, of people’s relationships to sexual and romantic desire and characters in ships. You know, and some people feeling like they are...we’ve tried to parse this one out in some of our surveys talk about it, like do you mostly write from one POV so you can gaze at one of the characters or vice versa, or do you feel like you’re both of them at once, or looking at both of them from above, or whatever. And so I think that there’s a direct line from here to there, if you don’t want to be in there at all, or if you’re interested in, say, going back to our slash episode or anytime we talk about slash really, if you are not a cis man and you’re writing about cis male characters, and part of it is because you don’t want to spend time with female bodies for personal gender reasons, that’s very, extremely understandable, right? I think there’s a lot of people who don’t, for whatever reason, or huge varieties of reasons, you’re not happy with your body and it’s not related to gender, there’s a bazillion reasons why that might be true, you know?
FK: For sure.
ELM: And you don’t want to see that body stuck into this story where you’re trying to enjoy yourself, which is like, you know?
FK: I think there also may be something about the way that we expect fiction to work on us? What I mean by that is, if I read a sentence that is engaging in detail and about two characters that are not me having an emotional engagement with each other somehow, then I may find that more affecting than reading something that is an imagine or a Mad Lib. Just because those are actually fundamentally different things. Right?
ELM: This is what I was saying earlier about, we’re actually talking about, kind of, different kinds of writing. I don’t actually think of these— .
FK: [overlapping] Right, fundamentally. Or different kinds of reading even. Right?
ELM: [also overlapping] Yeah, yeah, inherently.
FK: Right, and obviously it’s different kinds of writing, but from the pleasure perspective it’s like, in one of these cases you are being carried along by the author’s imagination of this thing and you’re filling in the details and you’re engaging with it but, fundamentally it is like the author is doing a lot of that work for you. And in the other, it’s like the author is giving you a skeleton that you have to flesh out. And all that’s being given to you is the skeleton. Maybe that might be a little bit more elaborated in some of these, right, but if you’re down to a point where it’s saying like, “insert your favorite ice cream flavor”?
ELM: Which I have seen.
FK: I feel like that’s still pretty skeletal. You're not enjoying that just on the basis of what is written on the page and then Mad Libbing in your favorite ice cream flavor. You are clearly enjoying that, there’s a lot more going on in your own imagination for that.
ELM: Well, yeah, and thinking about this kind of idea of, to me, truly great writing totally removes you from your head and pulls you deep into the narrative and a really great narrator, with a great free and direct style where you have like, big chunky paragraphs or whatever, where you’re in this world. Or even, I don’t usually prefer first person, but I’m reading a first person novel right now and she’s a—I’m reading The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner and the protagonist feels a bit unreliable, the narrator, and very interesting, and I’m very happy to be inside her head and I feel inside her head. And I’m in there, I’m in her world, and I’m not thinking anything about...obviously there’s a little bit of readerly distance, where I’m kind of analyzing what’s going on and admiring sentences or whatever, but for the most part I really feel like I’m just inside of her...head. Inside of her head. [laughs]
FK: Right. Yeah, yeah.
ELM: And so I feel like there’s literally no way to do that if you’re asking me what my favorite ice cream flavor is, because then I gotta be like, oh my God I’m here, I’m filling out a survey right now, you know? There’s no way I’ll ever get that pleasure I get from reading out of something like that, where I have to continually participate.
FK: And you know I have to say, if I were to go back and rewrite that story that I wrote, I think I was very much on the side of, yeah, okay, this is a second person fic but I’m gonna make it a really writerly second person fic, you know what I mean? It’s definitely like, there is a lot of that character there even though I think if I were to go back and rewrite it I would actually start with the very Mad Libs, maybe even an imagine. Like a Mad Libs thing.
ELM: [overlapping] Flourish, Flourish, I think you’re prompting yourself right now.
FK: Maybe I will do it, we’ll see. But I think this is a really interesting topic. I think you’re totally right.
ELM: I think we should be precise here, like, second person POV is not inherently what we’re, you know, I’ve read, I don’t really enjoy second person, I think that most people consider it their least favorite because you’re like, who’s “you,” where are we, right? But when it’s really done well and it’s a really compelling character it can do some of the same things that first person does, where you feel like you’re in it, right? And you feel like you are them, you’re not yourself. I think, to kind of bring it all back, I think that that is a kind of a spectrum within all of these categories that we’ve discussed so far, right? You can be a “you” who’s meant to...I don’t know, thinking of Liv’s phrasing, I think that some of these, you’re supposed to be a white vapor. I mean, there is a white vapor there, right, and Liv doesn’t want to, [laughs] put their body on top of that vapor, right, or displace the vapor, but they’re literally leaving that vapor there for you.
FK: Right.
ELM: Whereas there are second person fics, there are self-inserts, there are plenty of OC things where it’s like you were doing in your fic, they are fully fleshed out, they’re super embodied, they can do all the stuff that first person does, except slightly askew. Just being really deep inside someone’s head. And maybe even more than first person because you really feel like you’re getting that direct perspective in a way that you feel like you have to do in second person because in first person you’d be like, “and then I looked at blank.”
FK: Yeah, yeah, totally. The thing is that second person signals to you that you’re supposed to be feeling an immediacy, right? That’s the main thing between second and first person. They can do all the same things but with second person it’s like saying, “no, you should be putting yourself into these shoes. You’re supposed to be, that’s what we’re trying to do here, it’s you.”
ELM: Right, right.
FK: It’s like, really waving a semaphore about that. [laughs]
ELM: Yeah, and it’s also like, first person also I feel like, can really span a lot of this space. Like when I read adult literary fiction with first person narrators, they don’t often say “and then I felt like this. I felt embarrassed, and I felt my cheeks grow hot” or whatever, and when I read YA, which is so often first person, they are describing that kind of thing. So that also kind of spans that gap, and I think that’s that immediacy and embodiment that you’re describing. I don’t know, I’d be curious to read second person that didn’t do that.
FK: Well I think there’s also an element of the unreliability or reliability of the narrator here, right? Because here’s one thing about it, when you read a Y/N fic or you read a whoever x Reader fic, or you read a second person fic that’s really intended to make you feel like you’re embodied in that way, the narrator is not unreliable.
ELM: Sure. There’s very little narration. I mean there’s narration, but there’s very little narrator, right?
FK: Right!
ELM: There’s no stepping back and assessing and paragraphs talking about your interiority or whatever.
FK: Exactly, exactly. Whereas if you do something that’s more on the sort of, writerly end I would say, I’m not saying writerly like these things are bad and these things are good, but one of them being more engaged with like, a traditional literary mode, then you can have even a second person fic in which it’s clear that you are being unreliably told that you do this, right, that you’re lying to yourself.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: And you can certainly have that in first person, far more than...
ELM: Yeah, but I just think I don’t see very much of that, and I’ve got to say, this is not a massive sample size, but I think I’ve browsed across hundreds of the fics that we’re describing over the last few years.
FK: Oh yeah, and they don’t in general do this.
ELM: Yeah. And a lot of them are pretty short, so I actually will read through them or read part of them, so I feel like I get a pretty good sense of what a lot of the narration’s like and how people are framing themselves. And that’s how I know people do write “your favorite ice cream flavor.”
FK: Yeah yeah yeah! It’s straight down the middle, right?
ELM: Yeah. And also like, what’s my favorite ice cream flavor? Do you have one off the top of your head?
FK: I mean, I think that I probably have one that I buy most, but I don’t think that’s necessarily my favorite.
ELM: Just takes me right out of it! Then I gotta sit there and be like, also I don’t buy ice cream!
FK: I mean I do buy ice cream and often I buy chocolate chip cookie dough, but that doesn’t make it my favorite, that just makes it the thing that everywhere has that I like.
ELM: It’s a good flavor.
FK: It is a good flavor, right?
ELM: I like a peanut-butter-oriented flavor.
FK: If I were gonna pick a favorite I think it would probably be like, rose, but you can’t get that most places. [ELM laughs] I like rose flavored ice cream! What can I say, it’s a really good flavor!
ELM: Harry turns to you, and he says “I’ll buy you whatever you want.”
FK: [laughs] A pint of rose flavored ice cream.
ELM: “One cone of rose, please,” I said. Sorry, you said.
[both laughing]
FK: You know, Harry Styles, I will fully believe, also likes rose flavored ice cream.
ELM: Oh, you’re both so pretentious together.
FK: Oh yeah, we’re both so pretentious and I believe it.
ELM: I have a hard time with things like rose, or like, lavender, cause it’s just, it evokes a lot of soap. Soap vibes for me.
FK: I do, I understand why you have that feeling. I don’t share the feeling but I understand where you get the feeling.
ELM: I try to push past it as I’m eating those things but it wouldn’t be my first choice.
FK: [simultaneous] But it doesn’t work for you.
ELM: If Harry Styles wanted to buy me a rose flavored ice cream cone…
FK: Uh huh?
ELM: I would say yes, cause that would be a very nice offer.
FK: [laughs] I’m glad to hear it, you’re so polite.
ELM: Yeah! I would say “thank you very much, Harry. Mr. Styles.”
FK: Yeah of course! Who would not? [both laughing] Mr. Styles. [simultaneous coming-down-from-a-laugh sighs] Anyway.
ELM: So, I want to shift back a little bit as we’re nearing the end of the hour, because I do want to talk about original characters. There’s a meme that I sent you that was like, the, you know the meme I sent you the other day?
FK: I know, yeah, I do. All right, should I read it to you?
ELM: Please do.
FK: So. Four squares, right? You’ve got John Mulaney going “No!”
ELM: Oh yeah.
FK: And it says “creating an OC.” Right? Then it’s like—
ELM: You gotta do it with the accent. [Mulaney impression] “Nehw!”
FK: [overlapping] I can’t do that. I can’t do it.
ELM: [overlapping] Yeaaaah.
FK: [overlapping] That’s not going to be possible for me. Then yeaaaah!
ELM: Do, do John Mulaney doing Mick Jagger. “Yeaaaah.”
FK: And then “Yeaaaah!” [ELM laughs] “Fleshing out the story of an extremely minor background character to the point that they are no longer recognizable.”
ELM: OK wait, so like—
FK: Oh, such a familiar fandom thing.
ELM: OK. So the first, the “No!” one was “creating OCs,” and the second one was “fleshing out a minor character.”
FK: Fleshing out that minor background character until they are unrecognizable, yeaaaah!
ELM: All right. I think it’s also worth mentioning the cousin of this, writing the major character in a way such that as you did, as you did, not me, I had nothing to do with this, [FK laughs] but as you did with your Christine...Christine? Is that her name?
FK: Christine!
ELM: Christine, the other Erik. Erik?
FK: Erik.
ELM: And what was the other guy, Raoul?
FK: Raoul!
ELM: Yeah. I had the piano book. I listened to the soundtrack a lot and I had the piano book.
FK: Oh yeah!
ELM: But I never saw it and I in fact don’t know the plot of that musical or book. Is it a book?
FK: Really? Yes, it’s a book.
ELM: I don’t know! Yeah, I have no idea, do they get together in the end? It’s been long enough, you can tell me.
FK: No.
ELM: Ok, that’s probably for the best.
FK: It is. But also sort of not. It’s a tragedy at the end.
ELM: Sure, that tracks, they’re French right?
FK: Yeah yeah yeah.
ELM: Yeah, that’s right.
FK: French. The thing that’s memorable about the musical is that a giant chandelier crashes in the middle of it and it seems like it’s gonna crash on the audience, that’s the big, you know, shocker piece. Because it’s set in an opera house so when you’re in a musical it’s like, it’s actually sort of meta, right, cause you’re in with the musical.
ELM: [overlapping] Oh I know, yeah, people in theater, they love things about theater.
FK: They love, they love that.
ELM: Yeah, no, there’s a song that goes “masquerade, dah dah dah dah dah dah dah…” I know all the songs very well, I can play them, I can play them on the piano with the—
FK: [simultaneous] Yes! Exactly. I know you know all the songs. But you don’t know about the chandelier, is something you kinda have to, like—
ELM: Yeah, that wasn’t in the book. But you know I can play arrangements with the proficiency of like, an eleven-year-old who’s taken piano lessons for four years. [FK laughs] It’s that level of piano, so.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: I do know.
ELM: And, and! I sang one of the songs in the fifth grade talent show. It was that duet with the other girl? Her, like, her mousey best friend or whatever I assume.
FK: I don’t remember this at all.
ELM: God, now I gotta think of it, hold on. [a pause] It went like…I’m thinking of all the other songs right now. Pause. I’m not gonna move on until I find this. [FK laughs, ELM sings softly] Oh, it’s “Angel of Music.”
FK: [laughing] Oh my God, I can’t believe that you thought that that was with her mousey best friend. That is with Erik.
ELM: No!
FK: “Angel of Music”? “Angel of Music” is sung with Erik.
ELM: No.
FK: Yes.
ELM: OK. Almost definitely, in “Angel of Music”, I remember the best friend’s like, “Christine, what are you talking about?”
FK: Oh yeah! No, she shows up and she, like, yeah—
ELM: [singing] Angel of music, guide and guardian…
FK: —but I would never call that a duet because Erik actually sings with her in a duet and the best friend just like, sings in at her.
ELM: [simultaneous] Yeah and I remember, and he’s like, [singing] “I’m here, the Phantom of the Opera…”
FK: Yeah, yes, exactly.
[both laughing]
ELM: What if I just do all the songs for you right now, and then we can do Cats, and then we could do like, ah, I’m trying to think of my next favorite Andrew Lloyd Webber musical.
FK: [simultaneous] Do you wanna know the plot of this?
ELM: No.
FK: OK, I didn’t think so.
ELM: I don’t want them to be spoiled for me for when I eventually see it, now and forever.
FK: But yes, yes, I absolutely did write a version of Phantom of the Opera in which Christine, I believe that this was my summary, “in which Christine has half a brain.” Which—
ELM: Yes. And you were thinking of writing a fic for the—
FK: Which was similar.
ELM: —the broody man, [FK laughs] where the sad sack girl had a personality. I don’t remember any of their names.
FK: [overlapping] Yeah. I find it annoying when you have a broody man and a sad sack girl, I find those intensely appealing but also really annoying and I always want to give the sad sack girl a personality.
ELM: OK, what are their names? Ben Barnes…
FK: [laughs] Alina and the Darkling.
ELM: Oh, yeah. Thank you. I feel like you were into that like, a year ago and it was probably in April.
FK: It was in April, pretty much.
ELM: Was it literally in April? [laughs]
FK: It, it burned hot and hard and it will come back I’m sure.
ELM: Yeah? OK, good.
FK: But yes, no, I mean absolutely this is the thing. I find, as I was saying, sad sack girl, broody man...I’m deeply annoyed when the girl is too sad sack and I want to rewrite her so that she’s less sad sack.
ELM: Yeah. So that’s interesting, that’s like a deliberate rewrite and it sounds like that’s what you like to do, right?
FK: I mean it’s one of many things I like to do, but yeah.
ELM: Whereas like, fleshing out the minor characters, I love doing that, and part of me is like, when I do it it’s like well, we’ve been given very little information, right? This character has ten lines, I’ve got some vibes from the lines, but honestly, you could take him in a bunch of different directions because he doesn't say very much. In the X-Men I gave a little backstory to a character who has zero lines and just a lot of screentime.
FK: Right.
ELM: And really great hair. And it’s like, well, he has a life! And I could make any decision.
FK: Any.
ELM: [laughs] I just have to get him to the physical location that he is in the movie, why would he wind up in this situation, you know? And so it’s interesting because I feel like people do, with these minor characters, people do have their, they’ll read different clues into things and take their headcanons or just interpretations in a totally different direction, and so that’s why they can start to feel OOC. But with some of these characters it’s like, there’s nothing to be OOC about them because they didn’t give you a character and you’re making a kind of an original character to stand in there.
FK: Yeah. And I think sometimes people find it annoying because they’re like, “well this feels OOC to me,” and you’re like, “why?” And they’re like, “well, because that character’s not that important.”
ELM: Yeah.
FK: But, yeah, obviously it’s OOC because anybody who’s not the hero is not that important, right? And you’re like, I guess?
ELM: [overlapping] I mean, that’s a, that’s a critique of someone who I think is not very good at understanding character.
FK: I mean I don’t disagree, but I do think that’s one of the things that makes people feel like, why is this a thing?
ELM: Sure, but the protagonist, their personality is not why they’re the protagonist, right?
FK: Nope! Nope! Nope, nope, nope, nope.
ELM: [laughs] So I think this phenomenon is interesting too, and I think that the ways that accusations around “oh that’s an OC, that’s just an OC, what are you doing,” right, that’s even different than what Liv’s describing that they do, or what you’re describing you do, which is like, either deliberately changing the character we know or deliberately writing in someone fresh. It’s interesting, I’ve certainly read good OCs, but I gotta be honest, sorry Liv, I do have this, you know, this deep-seated, “oh, OC, I dunno…”
FK: Well it seems like Liv likes that, right? Liv wants to be the person who writes the OC who makes you go “Oh yeah that’s good!”
ELM: [overlapping] Yeah, the underdog, Liv’s the underdog in fandom right, who’s like “I’ll show you that OCs can be great!” But I probably wouldn’t click on it though, especially if it was centering an OC, because then I’d be like, “No I’m here for the characters that I know.” And for interesting, correct-sounding backstories for the characters that have little to no personality in the movie, right?
FK: [overlapping, laughing] For minor characters!
ELM: And these are such weird, ingrained biases that make no sense. I read original fiction all the time, and I’m sold on these all-original characters at all times. If they’re well-written then they work for me, so I don’t really understand that block in my mind. It’s not like, something that keeps me up at night, but it isn’t my favorite tendency, you know?
FK: Maybe we, look, we have long complained, I mean every generation complains, about how older people have brain worms about certain things. Maybe these are our brain worms, you know?
ELM: That’d be very nice if these are our brain worms and not like—
FK: And not worse things? [laughs] Yeah.
ELM: And not like, terrible anti-vaxx conspiracies.
FK: I would love that, let’s, I will keep in my prayers that this is out brain worm. [ELM laughs] I will.
ELM: Oh man. I don’t know, it’s all really interesting, and I don’t think that anything could, I mean reading is one thing, I cannot imagine ever wanting to write an OC if it was in a fanfic. I’ve obviously written OCs in original fiction, you know? And I don’t know, I do think that there is something there that doesn’t get at what fanfiction is about for me. We’ve talked about this before, but different people get different things out of fanfiction, writing and reading, and I think we get different things out of fanfiction, but for me, I think that compared to you, and compared to a lot of people I know, I’m really really interested in the relationship between the source material and the fic. Understanding how characters are being interpreted, how they’re being reworked, how they’re being put into new situations, in a good AU how they still ring true despite being in a completely different scenario and basically a different person but still feeling like those connections exist. And so to me, a well-crafted OC is just a totally different fictional project, and it’s just one that I’m not super into. But I also respect it as an artistic endeavor.
FK: Yeah, yeah, gotcha.
ELM: I feel like that’s me trying to sort out my own preferences.
FK: Right, but I think also, what Liv is saying, Liv, I don’t think that you have to make yourself love Reader x fic. You don’t need to make yourself love that. It’s OK.
ELM: [simultaneous] The vapors? No! Why? [laughs] It’s fine.
FK: You need to respect it as something other people love, I think that you should recognize that there is a craft to it that exists, but you don’t have to make yourself like it. You can say “It’s doing a different thing! Not the thing that I’m into in fanfic.”
ELM: That’s a really good parallel, the thing that Liv’s doing is something that does not work for me because it’s just not something that I’m, it’s not why I’m here, and neither Liv nor I are here for the thing that Reader x stuff is doing for those people. It is what it is. I definitely agree with Liv’s overall summation about a new generation not being as encumbered by some of these old biases, particularly around young female characters or, you know the number of self-inserts I see that’s specifically, say, plus size or fat reader, and there’s always something in it where like the celebrity or the fictional character is like, very positive about their body, and it’s so, I find it so, oh man, I hope that not just for the writers of these but I hope there are readers who are finding ones where they really feel like they can actually insert their body and feel good about it. I think that serves a wonderful purpose. But also it’s just not my scene. And maybe your scene, maybe, you’re gonna go write some imagines.
FK: I think it’s closer to my scene but I don’t think that I am all the way there, you know?
ELM: I think the problem is that it would be your scene for an intellectual exercise, but it’s not truly your emotional scene.
FK: I think that’s very accurate.
ELM: It feels a little against the spirit of this particular thing to do it as an intellectual exercise and not like a pure vibes thing.
FK: That’s it, that is it. It’s not, yeah. But, super there for anybody for whom it is.
ELM: This was a very interesting conversation. I love this topic, I know you love this topic.
FK: Yeah I do! [ELM laughs] Thank you, Liv! This was a great ask.
ELM: Yeah, thank you so much for this letter, I’m so glad we got to talk about it for the full hour.
FK: All right, before we go we should remind people about patreon.com/fansplaining!
ELM: The Patreon that we have.
FK: Right.
ELM: [laughs] Sorry, did you want me to say more than that?
[both laughing]
FK: Um, as you may know—
ELM: Our Patreon—
FK: As you may know, we now pay a couple of transcriptionists to help us out, and your Patreon dollars help go to paying them, and also just keeping this running, keeping everything going, you know, keeping the lights on basically. You can support us at any level from $1/month up to however many you want, and, yeah. However many. I’m leaving it open, leaving it up to you!
ELM: Could be, if you were Jeff Bezos, I think we’ve already said this, but you could do a billion dollars a month.
FK: [overlapping] Yeah! If you were. And there are rewards at each level. They’re pretty great. They include a bunch of special episodes, like a lot of special episode content. They include getting a Tiny Zine at $10 a month, they include getting a really cute Fansplaining pin, so you know. Check that out.
ELM: You’re going all out of order!
FK: I know. People can look and see what the order is, if they want to.
ELM: Yes. If you have thought about becoming a Patron, never a better time! Flourish signed us up to do another Succession episode last time.
FK: I’m excited for it!
ELM: I didn’t know about it, this was all in your head and then you blurted it out like you were doing me a solid, and I was like, what? OK!
FK: [simultaneous] I just assumed it was gonna happen! [both laugh] I’ll note that you didn’t overrule me.
ELM: No, no! It reminded me a lot of, can I say, I remember the first time we met up after the deepest of lockdowns in the beginning of the pandemic, and you were like, “No, we should meet up, I can really tell that you’re having a hard time because you live by yourself.” And then it was so clear that you also just needed some time [FK laughs] with someone who is not the person you’d been with, stuck in the apartment for the whole time, and I was like, “Yes, Flourish, this is just for me! No one else is getting any benefit from this outing that we’re going on right now.” And that is a lot how I felt.
FK: Nobody else, not even one person. [ELM laughs] All right, all right, all right. If you don’t have any money to donate to our Patreon or don’t want to, that’s also totally fine.
ELM: [simultaneous] Oh man! This is mine! You’re taking my bit!
FK: [simultaneous] But you started talking about pandemic lockdown. Do your bit!
ELM: [laughing] OK, so, yes. Absolutely fine. Speaking of the pandemic, I know some people have a rough financial situation right now, and so we totally understand if you want to pledge but can’t, or if you don’t want to pledge at all, no worries, no judgements. So, the ways that you can help us out that are not monetary: you can send us a letter, like Liv did, fansplaining@gmail.com; you can leave us a voicemail, 1-401-526-FANS; you can leave asks on our website, fansplaining.com, or on Tumblr, you’re doing a weird little dance that’s not making this any easier. [FK laughs] You can follow us on social media: Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, those last two, maybe they're not gonna stay up! Whatever, we’re gonna be on them as long as they exist, whatever, the other ones could also go at any point. And then, one of the most helpful things is subscribing to us on your podcast app of choice, and sharing our transcripts, transcribed by, as Flourish mentioned, our lovely new transcriptionists who are doing an amazing job, because that really helps us grow the Fansplaining universe. Again. Last time I said “ecosystem,” this time I said “grow the universe,” and it’s just like, work, I just can’t get it out of my head.
FK: I think this means that we have to hang up this call now.
ELM: Yeah. No, I gotta go to sleep so I can do like fifteen more work calls tomorrow. [sighs]
FK: Great. It was a pleasure talking with you, Elizabeth.
ELM: [laughs] Yes, this was a delight, I really enjoyed talking about this topic.
FK: Talk to you later.
ELM: OK bye!
[Outro music, thank yous and credits]