Episode 164: The Year In Fandom 2021
As the pandemic marches on and Flourish and Elizabeth (and presumably many other people) struggle to remember whether individual events happened in 2020 or 2021, they break their longstanding “year in fandom” format and simply revisit last year’s fandom trends, from the influence of the Black Lives Matter movement to the rise of C-dramas in Anglophone fandom to fan campaign movements like #ReleasetheSnyderCut. They also spend time assessing the continuing influence of the pandemic on both the entertainment industry and on fans: In this fractured media landscape, will Hollywood ever see the kind of fandom scale they want again?
Show Notes
[00:00:00] As always, our intro music is “Awel” by stefsax, used under a CC BY 3.0 license.
[00:00:37] “The Year In Fandom 2020,” for comparison. The “sharks are smooth” saga is not considered a meme by Know Your Meme, so weirdly enough, if you want a straightforward explanation of it you’ll have to read The Irish Times. By comparison, “THE DRESS” gets its own page on actual Wikipedia.
[00:03:36] This year we interviewed Nichole Perkins (Episode 157), Gwenda Bond (Episode 159), Brent Lambert (Episode 161) and Freya Marske (Episode 163), all very fine writers that we previously knew and were not paid to feature.
[00:07:15] We will not be linking to anything J. K. Rowling has said here. You can search for it yourself. It’s dire and we don’t want to repeat it. The Slate article about the popular-on-TikTok Marauders fic is here. Also worth checking out: Flourish was quoted in an article by Andrea Grimes that’s relevant to this topic entitled “When ‘Cancel Culture’ Means Letting Go.”
[00:11:42] Dr. Rukmini Pande discussed how fandom talks about race only around particular flashpoints in Episode 89.
[00:17:37] We interviewed Anisa Khalifa in Episode 147 and Dr. Anne Jamison and Maria Alberto in Episode 151, “Teaching Fanfiction.”
[00:22:28] Our interstitial music here and at the end of the episode is “Max Flashback” by Lee Rosevere, used under a CC BY 3.0 license.
[00:27:03] We spoke about the Snyder cut most extensively in Episode 146, “If You Give a Fan a Cookie.”
[00:34:00] The no-show rates at concerts truly are wildly high. If you’d like to hear more about K-pop, our last episode that highlighted it was actually from December 2020—Episode 140, “Miranda Ruth Larsen.”
[00:38:37]
[00:44:19] Not only did Frasier have a Star Trek episode, Frasier himself (well, Kelsey Grammer) played a captain on Star Trek at one point! FIRE PHASERS!!
[00:47:00] If you really want to know more about Flourish’s 2021 fandom feelings, you can listen to Episode 162, “Ways of Seeing.”
[00:49:16]
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 #164, “The Year in Fandom 2021.”
FK: Spoiler alert: it was a lot like “The Year in Fandom 2020” [ELM laughs] because the year just wouldn’t fucking end! It just kept going! [getting higher] Like the pandemic! It just kept on!
ELM: So, have you had this experience, I’ve had it a lot in the last few weeks, where I’ve been trying to describe something that happened, and I will like…literally not be able to recall whether it was August 2020 or August 2021?
FK: Yes. I have had that—yes, all the time.
ELM: Yeah. And…this is happening also like, something will have happened in the first three months of this year and I’m just like, “I don’t know when that was.”
FK: Yeah, was that this year? Didn’t seem like it.
ELM: Couldn’t tell ya.
FK: Didn’t seem like it was another year either. [ELM laughs] I knew it happened! But…
ELM: Right.
FK: Time is meaningless now. It is a, a smooth…smooth circle or something.
ELM: That’s not the line.
FK: Yeah, I don’t know what the line is.
ELM: It’s a, time is a flat circle.
FK: Flat circle!
[both laugh]
ELM: Smooth circle…
FK: [simultaneous] Well, flat, smooth, you know…
ELM: You were thinking about sharks.
FK: [laughs] They’re not smooth.
ELM: They’re smooth. What are you talking about? [FK laughs] Silky. You ever stroked one? So smooth. Yeah. [FK still laughing] That’s a thing from the internet that many of us know.
FK: [overlapping] Oh man, also that dress is, is the dress blue and gold? [laughs]
ELM: What? OK those are very different corners of the meme world. I don’t know what to tell you. [FK laughs] You just pulled a normie meme right into it.
FK: I did.
ELM: So how we do the year in review episodes normally, we look back at the year’s previous five items, we usually do five I believe—
FK: It’s five.
ELM: The things we talked about at the end of the previous year, see how those trends…areas of interest, etc. have evolved or not particularly evolved over this past year. And then we do a bunch of new ones, five new ones, right? To set up the content for the next year. But we reviewed last year’s and we thought about this kind of, muddle of time, and uh….[FK laughs] and decided this was the year to break that, and to talk kind of about how, I don’t even want to say 2021 was 2020 but more, it wasn’t! It wasn’t more, it was just…just. You know?
FK: Yeah, I mean in certain ways it was less [ELM laughs], but on the other hand it wasn’t new, you know? [laughs] Like, not different, but not more.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: but not less. I don’t know. The continuation…
ELM: So, let’s, I do think there are some things that I want to talk about from this past year. So let’s revisit that list. First though, we got a message on Fansplaining.com in our submissions box, that we wanted to address now before we got started.
FK: Right.
ELM: So, it’s from an anonymous person, and they said: “Hello! I’ve been a long-time listener and I’ve noticed an uptick late this year in episodes where you interview an author of a recent book, to whom you had no particular prior connection: Freya Marske, Gwenda Bond, Nichole Perkins. I’ve enjoyed these episodes and I don’t have anything against them in principle, but I’m curious if you’re being paid to do them, and I think it would be nice for you to confirm or deny publicly. Thanks!”
FK: Right. Well, we can publicly tell you that we are not being paid to do these, and actually we have prior connections to most of these people in some way or another, so we totally get that that might not be transparent to you, but we do want to be transparent: we don’t get money for any guests that we have on, and I don’t believe we ever have.
ELM: Yeah, I mean I…I would be surprised, I guess I’m coming from a more critical space, but I would be surprised if any sort of interview piece of media gets paid by the publisher or publicist or something to have a guest on. But we definitely don’t, like… [laughs]
FK: Yeah, we also very rarely actually receive messages from publicists and then decide to have people on, I’m not saying that’s never happened, I think maybe it has once or twice, but like, almost always, maybe even always, it’s somebody who either we’ve heard about their work and were excited about, or somebody that we knew, a couple of those people they were mentioning you’d been on panels with, or there’s somebody we know elsewise that maybe we don’t highlight? But like, you know?
ELM: Yeah, I mean we don’t go into detail on every single guest and how they came to us, but of the four authors we’ve had on in the last four months or so—the fourth not listed here was Brent Lambert—Freya, Gwenda, and Brent were all people that I was on panels with, which I think we mentioned kind of just in passing in the beginning of those episodes.
FK: And I had worked with Gwenda previously in my former day job, too.
ELM: Yeah! I remember actually when I was contacted about moderating the panel that Gwenda was on, I asked “Should I do this?” and you were like, “Oh yeah, I know Gwenda!”
FK: “Yeah she’s awesome!”
[both laugh]
ELM: So that’s not to say like, we absolutely would consider having guests on that we have no connection to, we do get cold emails from people, from publicists, from random all sorts of people, commercial press, you know, trade publications, academic publications. If it looks like a good match, if it looks like someone that’ll have something to say about fans and fan behavior, then we definitely consider it. So that’s how we do it.
FK: Yep.
ELM: So yeah! The official answer to this message is, “Deny.”
FK: [laughs] All right, we could have just said that and not the rest of it [ELM laughs], and just been like, “DENIED.”
ELM: I think that people probably wonder where guests come from, you know?
FK: Totally!
ELM: And I think sometimes we talk about this a little bit, especially when we’ve got, we’ve put out some calls for volunteers for stuff, like in the past Race and Fandom episodes, hopefully early in 2022, you know, having folks on disability, trans folks, stuff like that. So there are times when we are explicitly asking for people to come to us, but for the most part I think most of our guests don’t come in that way. So, I’m sure people are interested.
FK: Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. All right. With that cleared up, shall we move on to the same things that were bothering us last year? [both laugh] That’s not fair. Should we move on to our endless 2020-2021 fugue state?
ELM: Yeah, I’m curious to know what we talked about last year, usually you’re the one who does the digging and then I get to be surprised about the… “Oh yeah, that thing, that thing!”
FK: [overlapping] OK. Shall I surprise you? Shall I do it?
ELM: Yeah, tell me one of the items and I’ll tell you if I think that thing still exists.
FK: [laughing] Well! The, I’m gonna go in the same order that we did them last year because the first one makes me laugh so hard/cry, we started off last year with “J. K. Rowling fucking sucks.”
ELM: Doesn’t exist.
[a beat]
FK: [laughs] I wish! I’ve blocked her and yet somehow you all still put this thing on my Twitter feed, why do you do that? People block people for a reason! Also stop using asterisks in the middle of like, Har*y Potter, I have it muted for a reason!
ELM: Oh my God, you have Harry Potter muted? I love it.
FK: [overlapping] For a reason! Don’t want it!
ELM: Yeah, it’s extraordinary how often I have to hear about her, considering.
FK: I don’t…yeah. She has terrible opinions and she continues to have them.
ELM: Yeah, and it’s like…I… [deep sigh] I don’t know. It happened a few times, I have a very firm at this point no-engaging rule, I don’t want to give it any more oxygen, not that my lack of oxygen-giving makes a difference in this giant sucking chest wound that is J. K. Rowling’s continued [FK laughs and groans] presence in the world, I’m mixing up the medical metaphors here but you understand what I mean. But like, there’s been some stuff where I’m just like, “Oh man, I wanna weigh in, but I don’t wanna talk about this publicly.” And so like, like a few weeks ago there was that Slate article talking about how, there’s this very popular Marauders fic that blew up on TikTok and now has millions of hits on the AO3 and that’s a lot for the AO3 for a single story, and the article just framed it as like, some sort of like, queer reclaiming of Harry Potter and I just got very frustrated that people were—I just have a lot of ambivalent feelings about the way the fandom continues to engage with it.
FK: Yep.
ELM: And it’s hard! Cause I have a lot of friends who are still in the fandom too, I mean they’re not talking about it the way that article was, which I thought was just the most strange, uncritical thing to write about Harry Potter in 2021 in a mainstream publication. But like, I, I don’t know, I just don’t really understand. It’s hard for me to really wrap my head around people who are really really engaging with this stuff now. I just, I can’t, I just can’t relate to that. So it’s kind of hard for me to watch. So I try not to watch it, which I think you also are trying to do.
FK: Yeah, as I’ve said many times, including in published articles, I feel, I think, good for you if you are still able to get joy out of this, go with God, I’m not there, so. You know. Great. [laughs] I’m gonna try not to engage. And in fact I kind of want to just stop talking about this, because it’s so shitty and terrible and like, let’s just move on.
ELM: All right. Next?
FK: All right. Next. [both laugh] All right, well the next thing is also gonna be, all this is gonna, well not all this is gonna be depressing [ELM laughs], a lot of this is gonna be depressing, because the next thing is Black Lives Matter. Literally that’s what we said, and I feel like this is another thing that has crashed into the everybody-cared-about-it-for-five-minutes, and then people, obviously some people kept caring about it, but…it kinda, like all the energy dissipated in a lot of ways. That’s been my experience of seeing it, has that not been the case?
ELM: [overlapping] OK, hang on, break this down a little, I think this is so broad, Black Lives Matter is a racial justice movement—
FK: [overlapping] We literally, yeah, we literally said that though. That’s literally what we said. We said more than just that, it’s true.
ELM: [overlapping] No, we said more than that, there’s, we didn’t just say like, “Black Lives Matter, next topic,” right? So there’s a few things there.
FK: [laughs] That’s true, that’s true. [ELM laughs] We were talking about the impact of Black Lives Matter on fandom engagements.
ELM: Right, ‘cause there’s a few different ways we could talk about this. Like, I know there’s been some pretty clear-eyed coverage about how Hollywood, like most other industries, was a lot of talk last year and very little action. Hollywood I think is probably, I’m not saying that this is an excuse but they do move at a slow pace…
FK: Yeah I was gonna say, we’re not gonna see action for another, at minimum, four or five years.
ELM: Not an excuse but it is what it is, it’s looking more to the commitments that are being made in the last year as opposed to the things that are coming out in the last year. But yeah, I think we talked about the fandom stuff, and we’re still hoping to be able to talk to someone from the OTW or the AO3 about the lack of action on the statement that they put out last summer.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: So hopefully that’s one of the things that we’d like to sort out in the first few months of 2022. It’s interesting because I feel like there’ve been a few waves of conversation about this, not spurred by any incident. Which is interesting, it has me thinking back to some of our conversations with guests who focus on racism and fandom, talking about how a lot of these conversations have flashpoints, you know? There’s some crisis. Rukmini Pande, we’ve had on many times, has brought this up a few times saying like, we have the race in fandom conversation when someone does, you know, someone does something racist and then everyone uses that as a flashpoint [FK does a Wilhelm scream in the background] to then talk about systemic issues. I feel like this year I witnessed some waves that were, I was like, “Was there a thing?” [laughs] You know, was there a starting point here? And I would try to trace it back and there wouldn’t have been.
FK: Right.
ELM: I’m not saying that necessarily feels like progress because it doesn’t really feel like a lot of progress has been made in this realm, but it was something interesting to observe, that if having non-flashpoint kind of steadily percolating conversations about this, is that the way to effect a more systemic change? It’s not just, someone needs to issue an apology right now? [laughs] While everyone kind of spins off into the kind of, you know, I think that one of the issues with the flashpoints is often people bring up all the other stuff that’s been brewing for the previous couple of years around this stuff, and then people are like, “We’re talking about this one thing!” and they’re like, “But this is an example of the things that I’ve been kinda…” you know? And they’re like “No, one thing, we’re talking about one thing.”
FK: Yeah.
ELM: So like, is this more positive development, that you can talk about these broader issues without pinning it on one thing or the other?
FK: Yeah, I don’t know. I mean I still also am feeling like I see people having conversations and there’s still such tension around things like the word “anti,” you know? Which I see, I mean just today someone tweeted something onto my thing being like, “White fans who use the term ‘anti’ like do you understand that you’re supporting, you’re basically supporting racism by talking about antis because when you talk about antis you think it’s people who are being prudish or whatever but what that really means is Black people complaining about actual racism.” And like, I think that that’s true and it’s not true, you know what I mean? It’s one of those things where it feels like there’s multiple conversations and people colliding into each other and it’s true but then it’s also, the discourse is just so difficult around that particular thing, and I feel like that has not been resolved.
ELM: No, honestly I cannot imagine using the word “anti” unless it was to literally have this exact conversation where you’re like, “‘Anti’ has no meaning anymore.” You know?
FK: [overlapping, laughing] Me neither! It doesn’t have any meaning anymore!
ELM: I cannot imagine using that term and thinking there’s agreement about what it means. Like, that’s just, that’s just baffling to me.
FK: [overlapping] Yeah. Right, it’s dead.
ELM: Yeah. And like, you know, I’m not sure there ever was that much agreement about it, but… [both laugh]
FK: No but there’s less now than there ever was. Somehow it’s even less.
ELM: [laughing, overlapping] Trend! A trend! So, yeah, absolutely, I just think that, I think part of it too, not that Tumblr is good, but like, on Twitter, that’s the kind of statement, the thing you just described, that you just tweet, no context. No context if I were to click on your bio, right, you know what I mean? No situating.
FK: [overlapping] Oh, 100%, yeah. Yup.
ELM: Obviously people write threads, right, but it’s much more often you see the thing that gets 12,000 likes or whatever, some strident statement about some fandom thing or another, not necessarily this particular topic, and you’re like “What? We don’t all agree on that!” But you just shoved it out in the world, and people hit Like. And sometimes it’s like, if you actually dig into it a little bit and you read the replies, and the person’s replies, you may have interpreted the opposite of what they meant, right? But most people don’t do that with Twitter because they just see the thing decontextualized and they’re like, “Oh yeah, me, me, I get it.” Boom, like. Right?
FK: Yeah, yeah.
ELM: So I feel like that also leads to this kind of continued fracturing of…not like anyone was ever having one big conversation, but like, just people talking completely past each other in ways that I don’t think Twitter can ever reconcile as a platform. That’s just not the way it works. That’s not the way it’s designed.
FK: I agree with that, and I think, I mean it’s also…if you have a fantasy of their being a community that’s talking about something, it’s clearly not—you know what I mean? That’s not what’s happening. When you look, for instance, at the ways that people get harassed, especially fans of color are getting harassed on Twitter, it becomes quickly clear that you’re looking at multiple different groups of people. Some of whom have no idea who the other ones are. I don’t know, it’s just so dogpiley.
ELM: Sure. Yeah.
FK: I guess. You know what I mean? About anything, not just harassment but in everything. I don’t know, whatever, I’m kind of over all social media at the moment.
ELM: Yeah, no, it’s bad. [sighs] It’s pretty…but don’t you think that actually Facebook is a force for good in the world?
FK: Oh my God, I’m gonna murder everybody, the Metaverse is gonna be our savior.
ELM: I can’t wait for the ol’ Metaverse, what a fun idea!
FK: The Metaverse, which is like Second Life, but somehow different.
ELM: Third Life.
FK: Third Life, you heard it here first people.
ELM: Mark, call me.
FK: All right. I’m not sure that we’re going to, you know, have many more insights on this but I do know that we…what insights are we gonna bring to this problem, right? At this moment? But I really hope that we can soon, next year, get to the bottom of this AO3 situation and talk about that more.
ELM: Yeah, I really am hopeful that we’ll be able to talk to someone over there about some of this stuff. I just think that, when we’ve critiqued this on the podcast in the past, there’s just a lack of communication and a lack of transparency. It’s not necessarily about the lack of action, it’s about the lack of actually letting folks know that they care, and they’ve prioritized this in any way. So like, yeah. I would really love to have a chat.
FK: All right. Well. Shall we move on to the next?
ELM: Sure, let’s do it! What’s next?
FK: All right, we were talking about the rise of C-dramas and K-dramas and Thai dramas!
ELM: All sorts of dramas from Asia.
FK: And I feel like that’s sort of just like, yep! That sure is normalized now! [laughs] There’s not much to say about that one, right? They continued to be a thing! People love ‘em.
ELM: So we had Anisa Khalifa on in the spring, talking about K-dramas, that was great. When we had Maria Alberto and Anne Jamison on, I know Maria’s working on some C-drama fandom stuff and so…we could put those episodes in the show notes. And we are hoping to have some more folks on who specialize in this stuff next year. I’ve found it really interesting just watching how many folks in my sphere have gotten really into K-dramas this year. Last year I feel like was the big year that a lot of white, Anglo-American fans I know were like, “Chinese dramas? I didn’t know!” Just like, yeah, obviously there’s a racialized ethnocentrism to that as a big trend. But like, it is what it is, this is transcultural fandom, right? Transnational fandom.
FK: [overlapping] And we’re talking about like, English-language fandom, you know?
ELM: [overlapping] Yes, yes.
FK: [overlapping] That is clearly the situation this podcast is about, so.
ELM: [overlapping] There’s all those caveats up front, but like, definitely a big trend I think, it’s notable that the top ship or the second most popular ship on AO3 this past year has been those fellas from The Untamed, right? [both laugh] I don’t think that—
FK: Those fellas.
ELM: You know, those fellas with the flutes. [FK laughs] I just am determined to know just, just the tiniest bit of osmosis information about this show.
FK: They have very nice hair.
ELM: Yes, they do. [FK laughs] They play flutes with their flowing locks.
FK: I admire it greatly.
ELM: One of them has a sunshiny look, and one of them has a grumpy look. I have seen their looks in GIFs. [laughs] But yeah, I saw definitely that continued, a lot of my friends have gotten into some other C-dramas, but I have noticed more, even people I think of as not really fandom-fandom people on my feed, just more and more people getting into K-dramas. I think that there’s been plenty of stuff that’s come out in the last couple of years from that, and I think increased access to the programming on the various streamers that you can get all over the world I think is making a huge difference. And I don’t know, in a way that seems really interesting to me.
FK: Yeah, I really wonder what the general audience members are. You know? I have no idea, there’s probably no way to measure that because streamers are terrible with any information about…anything [laughs] but, you know, what’s the mindshare? There we go, look at that, I sound like I am working in my former job.
ELM: You haven’t been gone that long, it’s still a part of you.
FK: I have not been gone that long and it’s still a part of me. Mindshare.
ELM: Yeah, I, one thing I have witnessed around this cross-cultural exchange in the last year is something I also witnessed in 2020 and I think the volume just brings more of it, just kind of cross-cultural misunderstandings. Clashes between predominantly white fans in Anglo spaces, folks from the various Asian diasporas living in these spaces, I’m speaking, you know, on English-language social media and then connecting that back to Asian languages and Asian-language social media, and some kind of things that if I were to be diplomatic I would say things are getting lost in translation. [FK laughs] And, you know, I’ve seen some Anglo-American folks without a lot of prior knowledge of some of these media traditions speak with great confidence [both laugh] about the things they’ve observed being in like x C-drama fandom for a month, right, and it’s like, I don’t know. Not a great look. I think it’s hard sometimes when you are really really into something to not want to just kind of spew out all your thoughts about it. But if it’s something that you don’t have a lot of familiarity with it can be hard to kinda sit back and listen.
FK: Right, and also particularly when maybe people around you, not like on the internet, the people around you don’t know anything about this, so you’re like, “I’m the expert!” and then you’re like, “Ah, the internet is full of a lot of other people!” ’ve certainly done that before, and I’m like, “I’m the only one I know who knows about this!” and then you’re like “Aw shit, the internet’s full of people who know!” [both laugh] “Ah! Ah! Backpedal!”
ELM: Yeah, but like, I don’t know. You’re talking about like, Star Trek. Right?
FK: I mean, yeah, but only by the grace of God. So, you know?
ELM: I don’t know what that means in this context, but OK.
FK: In this context it means that like, I could very well have done this about something—
ELM: [laughs] OK, gotcha.
FK: You know what I mean? Like, trust me, I am fully capable of being that kind of an idiot, so. No, you know.
ELM: No, the moral of the story is never tweet.
FK: The moral—[laughs] This is becoming a theme. Never tweet.
ELM: Skip it.
FK: All right, on that note [ELM laughs], do you think we should take a little break and then come back and discuss the remaining two things from last year?
ELM: I’d love to do that.
FK: Great. Let’s do it.
[Interstitial music]
FK: All right, we’re back, and I think after [laughs] having started this episode with some notes about how we don’t make money from booking guests, we should talk about how we do make money. [laughs]
ELM: Yeah! That’s right!
FK: And by “make money,” I mean the fairly small amount of money that we nevertheless deeply appreciate, because it helps keep us going!
ELM: So smooth! This is as smooth as a shark.
FK: [BIG laugh] That’s an appropriate, I’m gonna, you know, use that. In the future.
ELM: Thank you. Stroke that shark. All right [both laughing], patreon.com/fansplaining is our Patreon, that is the way that we pay for hosting costs for the audio itself, that’s how we pay our wonderful transcriptionists who’ve been doing our episodes for the last few months—
FK: Whoo!
ELM: I hope everyone’s admired the quality of their words—
FK: Woohoo!
ELM: I think the transcripts are pretty good. It’s how we pay to have the pins made that you get when you become a $5/month pledger. You get a cute little pin in the mail. [FK laughs] So, if you have any money to spare, I know we’ve been saying this whole pandemic, obviously it hasn’t changed, people’s finances are in very different shapes depending on your situation so we totally get it. But if you have any money to spare, we have all these levels, we have all these different things, we have potentially some new special episodes coming out… I have more free time ‘cause I was gonna go to the United Kingdom in January, and then every single person that I know [laughs] got the Omicron variant in the last two days.
FK: [sad trombone] Bwa bwa bwaaawh…
ELM: So, that’s, I hope everyone is doing OK. I don’t wanna have to quarantine for…I don’t wanna get COVID and quarantine in a foreign country for two weeks, that’s just not a cool way to spend a trip.
FK: [overlapping] No, nobody wants that. No.
ELM: So I have some time! So we’re gonna spend that time maybe making some special episodes, right Flourish?
FK: Great. Yeah, totally, that’s how we’re gonna spend that time, Elizabeth! Yeah! [ELM laughs] All right, anyway, you know, so—
ELM: [overlapping] Don’t you have time off from classes? Don’t you get like, a little winter break there?
FK: I do. I do. There’s gonna be some time, there’s gonna be some time.
ELM: [overlapping] Yeah! That’s how we’re gonna spend our time! I need activities in January.
FK: [laughs] I like how, I like how this is turned into like, “Well I cancelled my thing, therefore we’re just gonna record special episodes for the entire month of January, congratulations Flourish, you’re now booked!” Anyway…
ELM: [both laughing] To be fair, to be fair, you’re the one who booked me for the last one, Succession one, which you haven’t watched yet, but once you watch it we’re gonna talk about it.
FK: I had thought—but anyway yes, we will, we’re gonna do that. OK. However, if you don’t have money to spare or just don’t want to give us your money, that’s cool too I guess…[ELM snorts] I guess. Anyway. [laughs] I’m sorry, I’m being flippant about this, but my point is there’s other ways you can support us. You can tell your friends about us, you can retweet our episodes, things like that? [ELM laughs] Share our Tumblr posts, be part of our street team?
ELM: Stop it.
FK: [laughs] OK I’ll stop it. But you can do those things, you can also write in, write in comments, write in your thoughts, you can do that by emailing fansplaining@gmail.com; you can also call in and lend us your beautiful voice, 1-401-526-FANS; or you can contact us on social media, we’re Fansplaining just about everywhere. Or use our ask box on Tumblr, anon is on, or our anonymous form thing on our website, basically there’s tons of ways to contact us, and we love it when you do. So, please go for it.
ELM: All right, business concluded?
FK: Business concluded, shall we get on to more of the grinding reality of last/this year?
ELM: I feel like you’re setting us up for, you're kind of dooming us to sound very like—
FK: Well, OK, the next topic, I cannot make this up, what we said was “fan expectations clashing against the bluffs of reality.”
ELM: Clashing?
FK: Clashing. I dunno, that’s what we wrote. “Clashing.” Might have been “crashing”? But I think it was “clashing.” [ELM laughs] I think we just said—anyway it doesn’t matter, whatever our word choice was, you get the image, right? There’s bluffs, the bluffs are reality, and in this case what we meant was like [ELM laughs], the Snyder cut. You’re, Elizabeth is losing it here, we meant the Snyder cut or like, the J. J. cut, right? Like, all the things where fans are like, “Give us the THING!” and they’re like “There is no thing!” or alternately “There is a thing! We made it for you! Please go away and don’t murder us.”
ELM: Right, right. I feel like this trend has quieted a little bit this year.
FK: I agree. And I think that’s for the best.
ELM: [laughs] It’s interesting actually, I’m trying to think of the last time that I saw a real robust fandom conspiracy. [FK laughs] You know what I mean?
FK: Yeah, well, yeah.
ELM: I guess those aren’t really consp—well, there’s some conspiratorial elements to the J. J. cut, you know?
FK: Oh, definitely.
ELM: But like, I don’t know, do you feel the same way? I just feel like…I don’t know, maybe I just haven’t been exposed to the places where this year’s J. J. cut existed but I just feel like that seems a lot quieter this year, and I’m not sure why.
FK: I agree with that, I think that it might have to do with, I don’t know I feel like there’s in certain areas there’s generally less fan furor this year, and I think that’s especially in things like Marvel and DC fandom. Not to say that people aren’t excited about stuff or doing things, but it just feels like, I don’t know, a little quieter than it was in previous years. I don’t know, I too am wondering is that just because I’m not seeing it, or is that a real thing?
ELM: Yeah. I mean, Star Wars obviously, you know, that was around the big, big conclusion of a trilogy, right? We haven’t had anything like that, there’s still Star Wars media coming out but nothing like that.
FK: Well and we kinda had the conclusion on the Marvel stuff, right, stuff is spinning back up, but it’s not like, you know, we’re coming to the crashing conclusion of anything right now, right? We’re sort of still at the beginning of a phase.
ELM: Yeah, and it’s like, this is a specific kind of fan, probably some demographic trends around it, and I think we’ve talked in the past about the parallels between and the differences between that and folks who might’ve thought there was a conspiracy to suppress the actual words Dean Winchester was supposed to say, you know? The translator had the secret info—
FK: [overlapping] Right. [laughs] Or, I will not even mention the Sherlock situation… [ELM laughs] I’ve just mentioned it by saying that. The phrase that came to mind was “Apple Tree Yard” and I immediately went “How??”
ELM: [overlapping] Don’t, I don’t, I didn’t want to—
FK: How is that still, what neuron? I lost another more useful neuron to remember that. Like I was drinking. And another neuron got killed instead of that one.
ELM: [laughs] I was talking to a friend from Sherlock fandom just last week about that season of Sherlock and how the final episode was so batshit that [FK laughs] I understand why your first reaction would be like, “This can’t be real. I don’t believe my eyes. I don’t believe that they would, this, this is, this is an elaborate hoax.”
FK: But I feel like there hasn’t really been anything that’s made anybody get quite that “What the fuck” this year.
ELM: Yeah. It’s interesting, I am not deep in it at all, but I know that there were some complaints when Supergirl wrapped up a few weeks ago, because the big femslash ship did not become canon, spoiler. But I—
FK: Barn door, horse.
[both laugh]
ELM: But I mostly saw discussion about that of saying, “Is this queerbaiting?” Right, it wasn’t “There’s some secret Supergirl cut,” you know what I mean? Or suppression by the network.
FK: [overlapping] Yeah, that’s what I saw too, nobody was like, “They prevented them,” they were like “You dicks didn’t do it!” You know? [laughs]
ELM: Right, I mean, maybe we are just blessed? Hashtag blessed? [both laugh] And we somehow have missed the big, the big flashpoints? But I feel like we would have seen something for some of these things. So like, I don't know, this is something I want to keep an eye on, because I really felt like last year and the year before this was one of the biggest stories in fandom, and this kind of undercurrent that was propelling a lot of franchise media and the way that the franchises were approaching fans with this kind of fearful…this kind of fear reaction of like, “What if they start a campaign” and that kind of thing.
FK: Right.
ELM: Now? I don’t know.
FK: Yeah. To die with a whimper. Well can I ask you something that’s somewhat unrelated?
ELM: OK.
FK: If I got an ironic coffee mug with “#blessed” on it, would you understand it was ironic just looking at it, or would you think that I might be meaning it truthfully?
ELM: I love that—[laughs] It’s like…
FK: When you said “hashtag blessed” I just had this vision of myself talking to you in this call with a mug that said “#blessed” on it. Is it time?
ELM: Here’s the problem.
FK: Uh huh.
ELM: Here’s the problem. I think that once you like, literally start to become a priest—
FK: [overlapping] Uh, yeah, it’s, that door is closed forever. [laughs]
ELM: [overlapping] You don’t get as much of an ironic claim on like, Christian language, right? I think, honestly, I think prior to you beginning seminary you could have gotten away with it but now it’s gonna look like—
FK: Now it’s closed to me, the door is closed.
ELM: Do you know that like, progressive, Christian, queer priests or whatever, they’re so cool, look at all those tatts, and then they say things and you’re like, “Oh, I don’t think you’re being ironic, I think you really, you’re a priest.” You know that vibe?
FK: Yeah! I’m not being ironic a lot of the time [ELM laughs], the hashtag was doing all of the work there. Like, I am blessed.
ELM: [overlapping] You know what I mean though!
FK: [overlapping] But also I’m hashtag blessed. [both laugh]
ELM: It’s like, you, you get tricked, you’re like “Oh, oh, you’re saying that in a real, you’re talking about Jesus for real.” Right?
FK: It’s true! It’s true. I do, and you’ve, [laughs] you’ve in fact encountered that with me directly sometimes. All right, now I know the answer to this is…
ELM: I’m sorry.
FK: Yeah, the door is closed forever. All right, should we get on to the last of the things we talked about last year?
ELM: Yeah, what did we talk about?
FK: Uh, we just were like, “K-pop.” [laughs]
ELM: Sure. I’m certain we said more than that.
FK: What we said was that we felt like it was the time that K-pop, obviously which had been massively popular all over the world for years, finally broke into Western mainstream, here we are at the Grammys—
ELM: [overlapping] No no no, nononono. I think it’s all coming back to me now. I don’t think we said that. I mean yeah, the Grammys, that’s true, and like on Jimmy Fallon or whatever, yes, that was last year, you’re right—
FK: Yep, we did, that was what we said, I just read it, I just read the transcript. [laughing]
ELM: All right, fine, all right. But I think the more compelling story from last year that obviously carries over into this year, and starts to fracture a little bit with concerts sort of beginning again, is one of the most interesting things last year, was the levelling element of the pandemic.
FK: That’s very true, that’s very true, yeah.
ELM: [overlapping] This kind of global flattening saying “Everyone has to engage with them digitally.” It’s interesting, and some of the folks that I observed who I’d never known to be into K-pop and got really into BTS last year, you know, BTS has been performing in person in the United States this year. So it was interesting to see like, is some of the, I don’t know, watching people try to… This has been a big question when we talked about projecting what will happen when the pandemic “ends” whenever that is gonna be, [FK laughs] we talked about that in the spring. Saying like, I think we predicted, ‘cause it was already beginning to happen, correctly this kind of weird liminality of…you can tour, and some people wanna be there, some people definitely wanna be there and don’t care at all, but they’re like “What’s COVID?” and you’re like “Guys!” And some people don’t. And it’s interesting, I actually heard on the radio just now, they said—I don’t know I would have to look up the actual stats, they mentioned this in passing—but they said no-show rates for concerts in the United States of major artists this year were 20%.
FK: Whoa!
ELM: And they said in a normal year, 1%. So wild. People just aren’t…they’re just like, backing out. And they said that was prior to Omicron, that was data from cutting off a few weeks ago. They calculated it.
FK: [overlapping] Wow! I will say, that was—wow. Well, [laughs] I will say that Harry Styles fans must just not be very conscientious about this, because I did not observe 20% empty seats at any of the Harry Styles concerts I attended.
ELM: I don’t know, I mean, I don’t actually have the data of what “major artists” means, but like, you know, you could see an older demographic for an artist maybe feeling less comfortable.
FK: [overlapping] Oh definitely, I believe that.
ELM: [overlapping] Geographic differences.
FK: No I mean it makes sense that it would average out that way, right?
ELM: Yeah, so that’s interesting to see. I feel like that’s one thing I’ve been observing with K-pop folks. But everything else seems like a continuation, we’ve seen very bad journalism, [FK laughs] we’ve seen some of the same anti-journalistic stan responses off on the flip side of that, saying any critical mention is an attack on these guys, and I’m going to destroy this journalist as a result, which our guests who’ve come on to talk about K-pop have talked about at length. You know?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: I think I’ve seen many many examples of all those things this year.
FK: For sure. So we’ve just talked about all of the things that held over from last year pretty much, well not all, but anyway, we talked about the stuff we talked about last year. Most of them did hold over.
ELM: All of them. Well, except for that penultimate one, but OK.
FK: But what is new this year, what’s the new stuff that’s on your mind, Elizabeth?
ELM: So. It’s not new to this year, but I would like to talk about the COVID-19 pandemic.
FK: Gee. Gee. [laughs]
ELM: Specifically around film and television franchises and fandoms. I think one thing we talked about last year on this, multiple episodes, not just in a wrapping-up way, is the rhythms of production and the rhythms of release, and how much of franchise fandom in particular had come to rely on those as part of what fandom was and how they engage with fandom. Like, not just Marvel, but obviously they’re the biggest and loudest and most successful of like, being very public about their release dates and their big phases of waves of movies or whatever, right? And it’s funny actually, I think that they weirdly got lucky by kind of planning the next big thrust that was supposed to come out this year was supposed to be television, like WandaVision and Loki and The Falcon and the Winter Soldier right?
FK: Yeah, totally.
ELM: So like, good for them. They didn’t know. Maybe they—do you think Marvel did the pandemic?
FK: [laughs] Oh my God, let’s not start a conspiracy theory [ELM laughs] just after we got done talking about how we were grateful that there were fewer. No but I think you’re right, about like, you know—
ELM: About that? Yeah.
FK: No, not about that, about like, it’s not just that things that should have been big blockbuster movies obviously are not making tons of money, and who knows how that works out right, because they’re being simultaneously released on Disney+ or HBOMax or whatever, and what does that mean, I don’t know, I don’t know! Maybe if I still worked in the industry I’d have more insight, but I don’t. But also it genuinely feels like there’s less excitement and engagement around those things. Even less when people don’t like them. Like I would have thought there would be a lot more engagement around The Eternals, maybe because a lot of people didn’t like it, you know what I mean? And there just wasn’t.
ELM: No but there was like, three days of discourse about like, yes, diverse, but that doesn’t mean it’s good, and then that was it.
FK: [overlapping] Right, and it was just gone! It was like, out of all of our, right?
ELM: [overlapping] And then I never heard anything about it ever again. [laughs]
FK: [overlapping] Like I almost forgot that it existed except that Harry Styles was in it for .2 seconds. You know? I literally would have deleted that neuron if not for Harry Styles’ appearance.
ELM: Wow. Wow. Yeah.
FK: And it feels like everything is like that. Even the TV to some extent, like earlier it felt like the TV had a little more staying power, like with Loki and with WandaVision and stuff, but it feels like maybe as this has just dragged on, everything has a shorter and shorter shelf life, and less and less engagement. I don’t know.
ELM: Yeah. It’s interesting, I actually, you’re making me think, I heard an interview today on the radio for the showrunner of Station Eleven, which the first few episodes came out today on HBO, which is an adaptation of Emily St. John Mandel’s novel about a terrible, terrible plague that I still have not read because I can’t bring myself to do it.
FK: It has Mackenzie Davis in it, right? Like I didn’t realize it was a thing.
ELM: [overlapping] Starring, starring Halt and Catch Fire star Mackenzie Davis!
FK: [overlapping] Then I was like, “Oh, it’s my favorite!” [laughs]
ELM: Also she was so good, she was in the interview too, it was the two of them, and she was so good in the interview. I love her. But.
FK: Anyway.
ELM: The showrunner was talking about, they’re talking about timing, and this is a special case obviously ‘cause it’s like, a show about a terrible pandemic, and so I think they’re concerned that people are gonna be like, “Absolutely not, I can’t do this.” Right? But he’s like—
FK: Reasonably!
ELM: Yeah, and that’s fair, I don’t wanna watch that right now. Even for Mackenzie…
FK: [overlapping] But it could also be cathartic. Like, I think I would enjoy—I’m excited to watch it because I think it’s gonna be cathartic.
ELM: OK. Those are the two genders, but I’m in the other camp, I’m in the other gender. [FK laughs] So, like, but, I might, I would change for Mackenzie probably, you know? I’m interested in her work. [laughs]
FK: Thank you. Glad. Glad.
ELM: But, the showrunner said, “But you know, that’s the good thing about it, it’s on a streamer. So like, it’ll be there for years—” Which, I mean, it’s HBO so it will be there for years, I don’t think you could say the same if it was Netflix or something, but like, he said “It’ll be there for years, people can find it when they’re ready for it.” Right? And I thought that was interesting, it felt somewhat antithetical to so many of the conversations where we talk about audiences and how they consume media and this whole question of whether you should drop a whole series or watch it episodically or whatever. It’s hard because saying people can find it when they’re ready, then it’s gonna be very hard to ever form community around that work. Right? Because what if I want to watch it in three years? Who’s gonna still be talking about it with me? You know? Even people who’d seen it may have already forgotten, you know?
FK: Right, and the stuff that does have that sort of afterlife typically is stuff that was once extremely popular at the time it came out. I’m thinking about how like all of a sudden every Gen Z-er watched Friends all at once and I was like “Why do you all love Friends?” Or when people got back into the X-Files, which admittedly there were new episodes, but it felt like OK, great, you all found it, but like, also it’s not like it didn’t have a, you know what I mean, there was still community left over, there were still people who cared about it.
ELM: Yeah. Right, right, I mean I watched and really enjoyed Mad Men like, what, five years after it went off the air? And so like…
FK: That’s true, you did do that.
ELM: That’s interesting though, because to think about it, I was talking about it with all my friends, and every single one of my friends was like, thrilled and wanted to be like—
FK: Right, because they’d loved it before.
ELM: Well it was like I had gone to visit all their old friends, so you’re like “Well what’s Pete doing right now?” and I’ll be like, “Well, Pete is, here’s what Pete’s up to,” you know? Which I found very charming the entire time. I think that’s a very specific kind of show. But I had no desire to engage in any of the frickin’...go back and find the discourse from 2010.
FK: [laughs] The discourse from 2010 was bad, you’re not, you’re better off.
ELM: I know it was bad, I’m sure it was bad, right? [FK laughs] I don’t know, it just makes me think about, I feel like we were talking about this in a few episodes ago, talking about our kind of shifting fan relationships, it makes it feel, that kind of thing feels less communal. The whole media landscape feels less communal right now. There’s just so many things, right? And small audiences.
FK: Definitely.
ELM: And you know, maybe even diminishing people’s desires to find other people, right? Like, we’ve talked so much about people feeling less willing to put themselves out there and engage, because people are so shitty and so you’ve got lots of people on their little media islands, loving something in relative isolation.
FK: [overlapping] And we’re all so burnt out!
ELM: Yeah. I mean who wants to talk about this shit.
FK: [overlapping] Yeah. I mean honestly like, exactly, there’s so much, we’re all so tired—
ELM: [laughs] This episode’s going to be such a downer! OK, let me bring this back to some big fandom ideas though. I’m wondering, you’re not in the entertainment industry but I don’t think you can get out of there that easily, I think this is still—
FK: Dammit.
ELM: Sorry, don’t know what to tell you, I can still see it in your eyes.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: But I think one thing that we’ve observed, the kind of trend, the movement that your career directly facilitated or was facilitated by, is Hollywood becoming aware of, really aware, actually aware and not just like, Galaxy Quest-level aware of fans, right? You know what I mean? Not just being like, oh, those six weirdos, but understanding fan groups are real, fan groups are a very reliable audience, that kind of shift that we’ve seen over the last decade. And I think for that to really succeed, it has to scale. And so I think so much of that was driven by, you know, you don’t have Hollywood placing bets on super-small niche fan groups, right? It’s like, we’re gonna try to, we’re gonna find stuff that can scale, stuff that’s already scaled, that kinda thing. And I feel like the pandemic is really hurting that, right?
FK: I think that’s very true. I think that’s very true, although I have to stand up for Galaxy Quest, which is one of my favorite portrayals of fandom in a movie!
ELM: [overlapping] Wait! No, but I’m saying like, I was just trying to shorthand, I should’ve just said a Star Trek convention. Right? [laughs]
FK: Yeah, yeah, no no, I gotcha, I just had to get out there for Galaxy Quest. A delightful film.
ELM: [overlapping] Yeah but so the Frasier where he goes to a Star Trek convention…
FK: Is it as delight—I don’t think it can possibly be as delightful as Galaxy Quest.
ELM: It’s not, they’re mean to people. There’s definitely someone in the Frasier writer’s room who was…
FK: Who’s a Trek fan and is mean.
ELM: Is mean to themselves.
FK: [simultaneous] To themselves. Yeah, for sure.
ELM: There’s a minor character who’s like, Noel Shempsky. Who’s like, the cringiest, right, you can imagine like…
FK: Anyway, anyway, I get what you’re saying, I just needed to set the record straight about Galaxy Quest. A great movie.
ELM: [laughs] That’s, I was never saying it was not a good movie. But OK.
FK: OK. Thank you. Thank you, I’m sorry we spent so much time, it was necessary.
[both laugh]
ELM: OK. All right. Go back. But do you understand what I’m saying though, my scaling point?
FK: I do, I do. And I think you’re right. I think you’re really right, and I don’t know what to, you know, what to do with that. I am beginning to doubt that we’re going to get back to that place that big fandom used to be. You know what I mean? Just from what I’m seeing, from what I’m feeling, I don’t know, maybe there’s gonna be a moment when it feels like it turns around and everybody’s united behind a thing, in certain ways I would be delighted by that, but I don’t know, I kinda feel like it’s, the snowball has rolled too far and it’s just gonna keep going, you know?
ELM: Yeah, it’s like, I don’t know, you see all these, is this the next Game of Thrones, is this the next Game of Thrones? And it’s like, stop, first of all stop. Second of all…
FK: [overlapping] It’s like… No! [laughs]
ELM: [laughs] And there’s a few things on TV right now or on streaming services right now that people are saying this about, and it’s like, they’re not, you know? Like, I don’t know the numbers on Wheel of Time, but…
FK: No, I, I’m lovin’ Wheel of Time, but it’s not, that’s, but it also never was going to be in a lot of ways. You know what I mean? That’s not it’s sensibility.
ELM: [overlapping] Well I saw people talking about it that way, you know what I mean? But like, they’re like, “Oh, it’ll hit and everyone’s gonna want to watch it that way and talk about it that way,” but like, I tell you, for years I could not avoid hearing about frickin’ Game of Thrones even though I want to, and I certainly can avoid hearing about Wheel of Time right now. You know what I mean? Like, just because people are very very fractured. Audiences are fractured rather, not people. I mean people are fractured too, we’re all kinda broken, but.
FK: Yep! We…I mean…
ELM: Yeah.
FK: Pretty much! [laughs] I don’t know what to say. I really do think that’s true. YOu know, another part of me thinks maybe that’s good, like there’s a lot of things about those really big colossal fandoms,and whatever, we were complaining about the J. J. cut and all this, if that phase does go away and that means that those things are not as prevalent anymore, in certain ways, OK! You know? I’m not mad!
ELM: [overlapping] Yeah. I mean, absolutely, maybe that’s actually answering one of the reasons why we feel like we’ve seen less of it, that is a thing that can only happen at scale, because otherwise it’s like, one subreddit with 100 people in it being like, “I think—”
FK: Yep. Yep.
ELM: But you really need that scale to get the fraction of the people who are going to trend that way and then to get a snowball. So.
FK: Absolutely.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: All right, well, we usually round this up with some discussion of where we have each been in our own fandoms. And the thing is, I think we’ve talked about this a fair bit already, fairly recently.
ELM: Yeah, what’s changed for you in the last three weeks, Flourish?
FK: Nothing really, I still love Harry Styles, but I’m not currently going to any Harry Styles concerts because the tour is over and also, you know, COVID spikes and stuff. [ELM laughs] But mostly ‘cause the tour is over, because if it wasn’t then like, I don’t know, I…I’m not a person of great choices all the time, so I can’t speak for myself, I can’t guarantee anything. [laughs]
ELM: Person of choices…
FK: I’m being honest! I’m being realistic, I’m not great always.
ELM: You heard it here first, Flourish is not great always.
FK: A shocker, right?
ELM: Well, don’t—
FK: What about you?
ELM: Don’t just talk about your personal personal stuff. I think that we’ve touched on this a bit, but you’ve had a semester now of school, away from your job, do you have any observations?
FK: Yeah. It feels great, and I’m hopeful that I may be able to have, like after some more detox I may be able to return to having pure fan experiences.
ELM: OK! That’s great.
FK: I don’t think it’s gonna happen this coming semester, maybe not ‘til next year, I don’t know, we’re gonna see, but I’m beginning to feel like, you know, like I’ve gone through some detox and, you know. Maybe, maybe I’ll be back in that space at some point.
ELM: All right, OK, that’s really good to hear.
FK: And not just for, you know, music, but like for a TV show or whatever. That’s not Star Trek. So. What about you?
ELM: Yeah, you’re right, we did talk about this so recently. It’s interesting actually, because we talked about it like a month ago, and you know, the show and those characters were the only thing that I was thinking about for a couple of months, and then I did a fic…thing, for—a fic thing. [laughs] An exchange, for like a, you know, an end-of-year fest, you know what I mean.
FK: Yeah, a fic fest.
ELM: Fest?
FK: Yeah, a fest.
ELM: Fest. For the X-Men. And initially I’ve been like, oh, I don’t read fic in this fandom any—I haven’t read any fic in a very long time, right, other than my own fic. And I was just like, you know, I think I talked about it months prior to that being like, how weird is it that there’s a bunch of fic that I still wanna write for this but I don’t really care about anything else in the fandom. Like obviously I still like looking at pictures of their faces or whatever. James McAvoy did this thing where he read thirsty tweets about himself, it was…I know I’m biased, my love of James McAvoy, cheesy motherfucker that he is, but it was very good. It was one of the most knowing… [FK laughs] You know sometimes you’re like, they do this with these celebrities and you’re like, “How, how, do you own a computer?” Like they just feel like aliens?
FK: [overlapping] Yeah, but James McAvoy owns a computer. [laughs]
ELM: Like he, every single one, they’re all very violent obviously, all of these things are these days, right, they’re like, “I want you to like pull out my intestines and step on my entrails” or whatever, that’s what people tweet about celebrities now, and he was just like, “That sounds quite violent but I’d like to find a way to do it with you in a consensual way.” [FK laughs] And he just did not break, like just the smoothest, right?
FK: We’re gonna put this in the show notes, this sounds delightful.
ELM: It’s very good to watch. So you know, obviously I still enjoy some McAvoy content.
FK: And I know for a fact that you were quite into writing this fic.
ELM: Yeah! So that’s what I’m saying, I was like, “How am I gonna feel about this,” because I’m thinking about all these other characters, and now I get extremely into it, I’m very committed, like committed to a world, and then just thought about that constantly for like a month. So that was really nice to experience. I really like writing fanfiction, and I like feeling very committed to solving the problem that I set for myself in an individual story that I’m writing. So it’s good, yeah, right now I’m a little, uh…a little at loose ends, I’m like, “I finished it.” [laughs] You know what I mean? It’s a weird little, I spent all of my brain power, my free extra brain power other than doing my job and things, trying to solve this, and I solved it. Now what?
FK: [overlapping] Yaaay! Well you know what, here’s my wish for you in the new year—
ELM: [overlapping] More things to solve.
FK: [overlapping] Is that you have more things to solve. That’s my wish for you.
ELM: Yeah, no, I’ve got a long list of things that I wanna write. It’s not that long, I have like three things I wanna write. But like.
FK: And you’ll do it and it’ll be great!
ELM: Yeah. Sometimes that deadline though, really does do it for me. But anyway, I’m very very grateful to have had two relatively different fannish experiences in the last few months, two different sides of my fannish life…fulfilled, right? Something that’s very emotionally resonant to me that I can think a lot about, and then something that’s very craft-oriented and something that allowed me to create. So that’s been very, very rewarding. And in this very bleak time.
FK: That’s wonderful!
ELM: All right. Great.
FK: Well.
ELM: Cool.
FK: I’m very glad that we made another calendar year of this podcast.
ELM: [snorts] Another calendar year.
FK: I mean, I guess I’ll see you in 2022.
ELM: You know I was just talking about this with my coworkers. Remember when you were in like, elementary school and you’d be leaving before Christmas, and you’d all go “See you next year!”
FK: That’s what we’re doing right now. See you next year, Elizabeth!
ELM: [overlapping] And everyone just thought it was like, oh my God, like, see you in the future! See you next year!
FK: See you in the future! [ELM laughs] See you in the future, Elizabeth, may the future be less the same than the past has been.
ELM: [overlapping] It’s gonna be exactly the same, literally it’s gonna be the same, it’s year three of the pandemic, get ready baby.
FK: [overlapping] All right, nonono, take that negativity out of here—
ELM: Get ready.
FK: I’m gonna talk to you later, Elizabeth.
ELM: I’ll talk to you in year three of the pandemic, Flourish.
FK: Bye.
ELM: Goodbye!
[Outro music, thank yous & credits]