Episode 169: Ask Fansplaining Anything: Part 12
In Episode 169, “Ask Fansplaining Anything: Part 12,” Elizabeth and Flourish dig into a new collection of listener messages. Topics covered include the “Dead Dove Do Not Eat” tag, the intersections of self-inserts and outsider POV fic, and whether “queerbaiting” is a meaningful term in 2022. They also listen to a pair of voicemails about the recent conversation on pseuds and “the right to be forgotten” in fandom.
Show notes
[00:00:00] As always, our intro music is “Awel” by stefsax, used under a CC BY 3.0 license.
[00:01:44] Our episode about pseuds was #147, “Our Secret Identities.”
[00:02:04] Fellow fandom podcaster Allison hosts “It’s All Fandom,” which Elizabeth was a guest on about a year ago (talking about lurking!).
[00:05:19] The OTW’s Open Doors project brings older, “at-risk” archives and other fan content into the AO3, “aimed at archiving and preserving different kinds of fanworks and artifacts of fan culture.”
[00:08:19] Earlgreytea68 offered up her legal expertise on episode 121, “The Money Question 2: The Appening,” and Casey Fiesler discussed her fair use research, amongst other topics, on episode 91.
[00:09:38]
[00:17:30] Elizabeth was NOT imitating the Joe & the Juice logo man, who is clearly some kind of “business hipster.”
(Also for the record, Joe & the Juice began in Copenhagen and now has hundreds of locations across Europe, North America, Asia, and Australia. Which means that Joe here is a DANISH business hipster.)
[00:19:27] Our interstitial music throughout is “Cloudloop” by Lee Rosevere, also used under a CC BY 3.0 license.
[00:28:50] Keidra Chaney’s been on the podcast twice: episode 101, “Stan Culture,” and episode 128, “The K-pop Narratives.” She also wrote an article for us that touches on some of these themes entitled “The Empowered Stan.”
[00:30:15] We’ve talked about the “toxic fandom” concept many times, but episode 77, “The Truth About Toxic Fandom,” is probably the most pointed.
[00:31:32] Do not listen to Flourish: Michael Bluth does not, in fact, say, “I shoulda seen that one coming.”
[00:34:44] We talked about a whole range of OC/reader insert/Mary Sue-type fic in episode 160, “The Original Character.”
[00:39:23] Elizabeth did find the Fanlore entry for “Bystander fic,” which seems like she possibly saw previously? She swears whatever she read specifically mentioned superhero fandoms, but that may have been some sort of fever dream.
[00:42:14] The official AO3 tag is “POV Outsider,” with more than 15K works. Flourish recalls that in Ye Olde X-Files fandom, it was dubbed “3rd person POV.”
[00:43:15]
Flourish’s Mini Rec List of 3rd person POV X-Files Fic:
“Strangers and the Strange Dead” by kipler
“Future Horizons” by XmagicalX (Xparrot)
“Banging Your Head Against a Red-Haired Brick Wall” by Blair Provence
[00:44:54] It was, in fact, December 2020: “Episode 139: The ‘Q’ is for ‘Queerbaiting’.”
[00:48:58] Flourish was right about the lyric “Can I make it any more obvious?” They were not right, however, about “He was a guy”:
[00:51:06]
[00:54:09] The fruit salad letter was in our last AMA, episode 158.
[00:55:25] Toast sure does have the stats—these are from five years ago, but we suspect Sherlock still ranks pretty high amongst ace fic on the AO3.
Transcript
Flourish Klink: Hi, Elizabeth!
Elizabeth Minkel: Hi, Flourish!
FK: And welcome to Fansplaining, the podcast by, for, and about fandom!
ELM: This is Episode #169—am I allowed to say “nice”? One sixty-nine doesn’t count, does it?
FK: It totally counts! Live your truth. [laughs]
ELM: Niccccce. [FK laughs] Ah, that is, uh, “Ask Fansplaining Anything: Part 12.”
FK: Wow! We’ve had so many bags of mail.
ELM: Yeah, and I mean, I was pulling out these questions, and there’s way more questions in our inbox, so—I mean, I think it’s worth saying, if anyone is wondering if we’ve forgotten their question…
FK: No.
ELM: No.
FK: We have not forgotten your question. It will come back up, probably.
ELM: I, you know, I—we do kind of spring it on people, like, when we turn their questions into episodes, and they’re like, “Whoa!” [both laugh] You know? So, also, maybe your question is going to be turned into an episode in four to seven months. You never know.
FK: Yeah, it could be—sometimes that’s why we’re storing it. We’re like, “This one could be an episode!” [laughs]
ELM: All right, that’s uh, a peek behind the curtain. Pretty great peek. So, we are breaking format slightly, though. Now, in AMAs normally, we don’t do questions that are like, responses to previous episodes, but we had a bunch of responses to the episode before last, about pseuds. “Our Secret Identities,” I believe the title was.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And so, we wanted to play them and read them. There’s two voicemails and a Tumblr ask. So we’ll do that, then we’ll take a break and get to the actual grab bag of questions.
FK: All right, that having been said, should we listen to the first voicemail?
ELM: Yeah, let’s do it!
Allison: Hi, Flourish and Elizabeth, this is Allison from “It’s All Fandom!” the podcast. I really enjoyed your latest episode about pseudonyms. In particular, I found it very thoughtful when you discussed how, when an author would delete their online catalog, and then fans would archive their work without their consent—and again the ethics are different whether the archive is being shared among friends or posted publicly, and I had a personal experience with this that I wanted to share with you both.
The very first fandom that I was in took place on a closed and pretty heavily moderated archive and message board, and it was a really formative, wonderful place for me. I have lifelong friends that I made there, who I still talk to to this day. But sadly, the community came to an end quite badly, and eventually the archive was deleted. But not long after it was deleted, a new archive popped up in its place, put together by someone who wasn’t really in our community. Someone who liked to make drama. And it was very strange, because he showed up and said, “Oh, it’s so sad that the archive is gone, but don’t worry, I saved all the fics on my computer, and now here they are on this website for you all to read!”
It was very strange, and people had mixed feelings about it. On one hand, people like myself were happy that this archive existed. Now, 20 years later, I can go back and revisit some of my old fanfiction and, you know, feel that I’ve improved as a writer and read other fics that I really remember enjoying when I was younger. But on the other hand, there are people—especially people who were very traumatized by the ending of this community—who feel like this new archive is more like a wound than a memory. They had really wanted to put this all behind them, and the fact that it still exists and can be accessed by anyone is a point of contention for them, actually. Especially since it was made without their consent.
I think some of the authors may have requested to have their work removed, and I think the guy who did the archiving may have respected their wishes, but I…I’m not sure. But it does bring up a lot of questions, with regard to the ethics of archiving. And it’s not something that I see talked about so much, so I wanted to bring this up to both of you. I know you both shared your thoughts on it in the pseudonym episode, but it’s a really complicated thing, and the more I think about it, the more issues it tends to bring up. So, uh, ethics! [laughs] Love the podcast, guys. Thank you so much.
FK: Wow, that was a really interesting voicemail. And I’m really glad that she shared that sticky and kind of different experience. Like, different from what we were talking about in ways that complicate it a little bit more.
ELM: Yeah, I mean, not necessarily different from what I was talking about. You were the one that kept trying to make it not about archiving, and I kept trying to be like, [FK laughs] “Well what about orphaning works…” Ah, no. I think it’s definitely expanding upon an area that we talked about in really fascinating ways. So I really appreciate Allison sending this in.
It is very interesting to me, because I feel like…it is one thing for me to talk about the AO3, in particular, trying to give a lot of control around this to users, right? You have the orphaning feature. You have abilities to opt in and out of collections or remove yourself. I know there are some, like, edge cases where that gets really like—there are loopholes where that can get messy, and your work can get—I’ve heard about people’s work getting kind of sucked into a shared creator thing, or whatever. We don’t need to go into the details of that, right? But like, in general, they try to give you control over your own work.
FK: Mm-hmm.
ELM: But, the OTW also runs the Open Doors project, which is about importing old fanworks archives—
FK: Mm-hmm.
ELM: —in for preservation, and, you know, in a lot of these—a lot of the writers don’t know that this is happening to their work. They may not have even known that their stuff was—we’re talking about archives from the ’90s, right? They may not have even realized it was still online, and it’s something that’s done in the name of kind of a collective history—
FK: Mm-hmm.
ELM: In the way that, like, plain old archives [FK laughs] think about general historical archiving, right?
FK: Mm-hmm.
ELM: But I think it gets a little tricky, in the way that archives about people who are still around, and their words, and their writings, gets tricky.
FK: Definitely. I mean, obviously, Allison’s example is heightened by the fact that the person who was making the archive was like, embroiled in the drama that ended this community—
ELM: I mean, this ties it back to your whole thing.
FK: I was not going there with it, but it does.
ELM: Interpersonal drama! [laughs]
FK: I was not going there. I was gonna say that, you know, that adds, like, another layer to it.
ELM: Yeah. Absolutely.
FK: And I think, because it’s easy to say—I mean and, this is true, and I feel like we say it all the time on the podcast: When you put something out on the internet, it is potentially forever, and you have no guarantee that other people are entering into the same social contract with you to not reproduce it, or to not do any of that, right? Like, archive.org may be recording it for all time—
ELM: Sure.
FK: —whether or not you like that. Right? So, there’s that. But that’s not an ethical argument, right? That’s a the-way-the-world-works argument.
ELM: Sure, sure.
FK: Whereas when you start, you know, you start bringing, like you were saying, the AO3, the different impulses that people have, and then it gets even more complicated when you bring in just individual people trying to do this, as opposed to like, at least with the AO3, there is like, an organizational ethic. I mean, you know? [laughs] They express values, like, they share certain values, sometimes those values are in tension, but they’re discussed by a large group of people. Whereas this is something that, like, if you’re just a dude, you can also do that. You know? [laughs]
ELM: [laughs] Yeah, right. Well, I mean, this is a question: So, I know that the author of a fanfiction does retain the copyright to the fanfiction itself.
FK: That’s very true.
ELM: Which is an interesting part of the law, like, uh—
FK: Yup.
ELM: And something that I get to “well, actually” people when they say—
FK: Uh-huh.
ELM: —when they give me a first-panel-galaxy-brain take about copyright and fanfiction. [FK laughs] Um, you know, was that guy violating the law?
FK: I don’t know! We need a lawyer on here. Yeah.
ELM: Right? If he republished their work without their consent?
FK: Well, but archive.org does that all the time, so is archive.org violating the law?
ELM: Oh my God, I guess we’re not lawyers. Maybe I shouldn’t have gone down this rabbit hole.
FK: Yeah, I don’t know. This is really interesting though, and maybe…maybe we should actually get a lawyer on sometime to talk through like—
ELM: I’d love to get another lawyer on.
FK: No, I think it would be cool! Like, your copyright, like, your rights within the context, I don’t—you know. That’s not something that’s—
ELM: Yeah, I mean, it’s definitely something I think that we touched on a bit when we had Earlgreytea on.
FK: Mm-hmm.
ELM: But it’s something that I think we could talk about more, because I see so much nonsense. [FK laughs] Or, uh, when we had Casey Fiesler on, and she did that project where she was like, documenting public perception of fair use—
FK: Yeah.
ELM: —and she saw people write in comments, “Well, fair use is a myth.” [laughs] And she was like, “It’s not mythical. [both laugh] It is, in fact, a part of this law.”
FK: Yup.
ELM: That’s great. OK, great. Lawyers, we’re gonna call you.
FK: Great. Thank you very much Allison. That was a wonderful voicemail.
ELM: Yes. Thank you.
FK: All right. The next thing we have is a Tumblr comment. Shall I read it?
ELM: Please do!
FK: All right, this is from someone anonymous. “About what I assume is the Sarah z diss in the last episode: I'm around your age BUT in a discord with a number of young people (college age) and her video on msscribe was legitimately the first time they heard of it, because they're so young. So maybe not as superfluous as I, or you, would think.”
ELM: OK, so, for context, we were talking about, by way of prefacing the Msscribe incident, which was a catfishing incident that you, uh, were directly involved in, in the Harry Potter fandom in the early 2000s, I had set it up somewhat by referencing YouTubers who do these kind of…you know, a little bit popcorn.gif sort of fandom lore, uh, you know, reconstituted Fandom Wank, [FK laughs] FFA kind of…
FK: I was just envisioning Fandom Wank turned into, like, you know, like a dehydrated soup [laughs] and being like—
ELM: [laughs] That’s great.
FK: —eked out to people over the course of years. Go on.
ELM: [laughs] I will say again, I find a lot of that somewhat frustrating. Uh, not just of the creators, but also the way that people share them in that kind of “ooh, salacious” sort of way. Like, “Wow, crazy shit went down.” And like, they have some secret gossip. I think I mentioned Cassie Clare in passing there too, because I see that a lot.
FK: Mm-hmm.
ELM: You know, people—I don’t know, lots of people witnessed that, right? Like, unless you were directly involved, I don’t think you get to be like—I don’t see the glee of the “oh, I was there, I remember this,” right? You know, like—
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Anyway. This was not aimed at a particular YouTuber. The one that’s mentioned here, I have not watched any of her work, and I did not know that she made a Msscribe video, and so I just want to clarify that. I was speaking more generally, and frankly, some of the folks that I have seen, I don’t know their names.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Uh, they were just things that just kind of passed through my feed. So this wasn’t meant to be a dig at an individual. But I will say, I don’t think that we were saying it was superfluous, and I don’t think there’s a problem with folks who were perhaps, [laughs] you know, I was gonna say not even born, but possibly not even born when this happened, right? Like, if you’re a teen—
FK: It’s true.
ELM: —then you would not have been born in 2001.
FK: As old as that makes me feel! It’s true.
ELM: That’s the time. That’s the time that passes. You know, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with learning about this stuff. I just think that the awareness that it’s not fictional people, it’s the people that you share fandom spaces with—
FK: Yeah.
ELM: —and treating it with that kind of distance and playing it for drama—
FK: Yeah.
ELM: —when you’re probably reopening wounds that people worked really hard to close, I don’t think that’s healthy for anyone, including the younger or newer fans that are encountering this stuff for the first time.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: So, this is my piece of someone who’s not actually involved in this. Go ahead, Flourish. You speak. You speak now.
FK: No, I mean, I agree, it doesn’t surprise me that younger people don’t know about this at all.
ELM: Is that bad? Maybe it’s not. Like, I don’t know—
FK: Yeah! In fact, that’s sometimes the way I would like to keep it, [laughs] you know?
ELM: Well, also, like, you talked a lot about how you felt like people were approaching, you know, strangers, people with unfamiliar pseuds in fandom, sometimes they were acting like everyone was a Msscribe—
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And, maybe if some of these stories didn’t turn into these, like, urban legends, then you wouldn’t go around assuming everyone that you didn’t know was catfishing you—
FK: I definitely agree with that.
ELM: —as is their babysitter, which is a detail that’s strange to me.
FK: I definitely—[laughs]
ELM: OK, go ahead. [laughs]
FK: I definitely—no no no, it’s OK. No, I definitely agree with that. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with people wanting to know about things that happened in the past, and I’ve certainly read things that happened in fandom a long time ago, in a sort of popcorn.gif way. So like, I am not as pure as the driven snow in this regard. [ELM snorts] But, yeah. It doesn’t surprise me that it’s a way that people find out about it. I still don’t love, you know, having that dragged back up, and I think that should be fully understandable to everybody who has had an emotional life. Uh… [laughs]
ELM: So, all humans.
FK: That’s my response to this.
ELM: Literally everyone.
FK: [laughs] Yeah. I think it should be.
ELM: OK. You know, but I appreciate anonymous Tumblr asker here bringing this up to give us a chance to kind of, have a little more clarity around this, because I don’t want folks to think that that was some kind of throwaway—I was gonna say “dig,” but I could use the word that’s used in here: “diss.”
FK: Yeah, and also, I don’t want people to think that we’re like, looking down on young people for not knowing about this, right?
ELM: Oh my God, no. Yeah, that’s a really good point. [laughs]
FK: Like, that’s not it either. [laughs]
ELM: No, absolutely not. And, just as I hope that people who are a few decades older than us don’t look down on us for not having memorized their wank.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Because I haven’t.
FK: I’ve—no.
ELM: Every time I read some of it, I’m like, “I don’t like this. I don’t want to be a part of this.”
FK: All right, so. Should we listen to our final voicemail?
ELM: Second and final, yes. [laughs]
FK: OK, let’s do it.
Cricket: Hi Flourish and Elizabeth. In honor of your recent episode, I will introduce myself by my online pseudonym, which is Cricket. I wanted to say something in regards to that episode, about like, anonymity online, and also creating new pseuds, because I feel like it’s also really important to remember that like, sometimes people make new pseuds because they’re legitimately new to fandom, right? I’m 25 now, and I didn’t get really active in online fandom until a couple of years ago, and that’s when I started using Tumblr and everything. I think it's also really important to remember that like, new people are joining spaces all the time, and like, there’s nothing behind their pseuds, because legitimately they just showed up. And that’s really exciting! That, like, new people are turning up all the time.
But, also, I just wanted to call, because I’ve been wanting to call for a long time, and I always felt like I didn’t have a good enough reason to call, and I had made up my mind that I was just gonna call after this most recent episode, and then it turns out I actually had something sort of relevant to say. But mostly I just wanted to call, because I’m just like, I’m such a fan of this podcast. I’ve been listening for three or four years. I’ve listened to the whole back catalog, and I really look forward to the episodes because I find you both delightful, and incredibly engaging. You’re very well-informed about a lot of things, and I feel like you discuss things really openly, and you try to like, look at all sides and consider all viewpoints in meaningful ways. I find your personalities both delightful. I just wanted to like—that’s mostly the reason I wanted to call, was just to leave a message and say that I think you’re great, and I hope you’re both having a good time of it. OK, thanks!
FK: Aww!
ELM: [laughs]
FK: Aww!
ELM: [laughing] You should’ve seen our faces as we were listening to this. We listened to it simultaneously.
FK: [laughing] And we both sort of starting going, “Aww!”
ELM: Uh, yeah, you could tell that we were like, at the exact same second, even though we hit play separately. Um, so one thing I will say off the bat—well, first of all, thank you so much, Cricket. I will say that normally I don’t know that we would include such effusive praise, because I feel like, that seems like bragging. But, this is a voicemail, so we didn’t have any real way to thank Cricket, aside from calling the phone number here, [FK laughs] which I think would be very inappropriate. So—
FK: [laughing] Yeah, that would be invasive, creepy, and weird.
ELM: [laughing] So, we just wanted to say thank you very much. Also to address the initial, I mean it’s the fake reason for the voicemail, but the idea of a new pseud, like, this is really—I mean, I mentioned this in the episode, you know, like, I created this new pseud—I’m not new to fandom, but I wanted to be new to my current fandom. Like, I wanted to have like a fresh—
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Fresh vibe. And like, I definitely have gotten a few vague comments that are like, “Where’d you come from?” You know?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And it’s like, “None of your business!” Right? [FK laughs] And it’s like, but I could’ve come from nowhere in fandom. You know?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: I could’ve found fandom five years ago and just joined. Like, we hear about people of all ages finding fandom at all times.
FK: Mm-hmm.
ELM: Especially in the last decade, as it’s gotten more exposed and more people can learn about it, you know? So like, I think it’s a really great call-out of another reason why folks looking at fresher pseuds with suspicion, you know, can turn into a form of gatekeeping, I guess, maybe, for lack of a better term. Right?
FK: No, I think this is—that’s exactly it, right—
ELM: That word is ruined, so I just felt bad saying it out loud.
FK: It’s ruined, but this is like, a perfect example of it, right?
ELM: Yeah.
FK: If it’s suspicious for you to be new at something—
ELM: Yeah yeah yeah.
FK: Then that’s the definition of that! And like, you know.
ELM: Right. [doing an old-timey accent] “Ah, haven’t seen you around here before, huh?” Like, yeah. [laughs]
FK: Exactly! Yeah, yeah, with that voice. [ELM laughs] With that exact voice.
ELM: [laughing] With a cigar and a fedora. [FK laughs] “Haven’t seen you around these parts.”
FK: I was thinking of, you know, the uh, you know the coffee shop—Joe & The Juice? I was imagining that logo just coming alive and talking to me.
ELM: Joe & The Juice, like the juice bar? Or do you mean Joe Coffee?
FK: Yeah, there’s—no, Joe & The Juice—
ELM: Joe & The Juice. The juice bar.
FK: They sell coffee too there.
ELM: They do, but that’s not why you should go there.
FK: Well, obviously not—
ELM: It’s for juice!
FK: —but it is called “Joe & The Juice” because it sells coffee, too, that’s the whole point of the name, Elizabeth.
ELM: OK, I went in a much more traditional New York direction, and you brought up this juice bar franchise. [laughs]
FK: I walked by it today! [both laugh] So.
ELM: That I think exists in other countries, let alone other cities in this country.
FK: Oh, it does—it definitely exists in other cities. [laughs]
ELM: I will say, I do love—I last went to Joe & The Juice shortly before the pandemic, and I—oh my God, no, that was like a year before the pandemic. All right.
FK: [laughs] What is time?
ELM: Don’t worry about it. I just remember very specifically where I was, and I felt like—which one it was, it was the one by Carnegie Hall, and they played the music—do you know when you’re like, on an airplane, and you’re about to take like, an international flight—
FK: Uh huh.
ELM: —and they’re playing some music—
FK: Yeah.
ELM: —and maybe like, showing scenes of cities that you could travel to—
FK: Yes.
ELM: —and there’s like, a montage—
FK: Yeah yeah.
ELM: —and this kind of breezy sorta—that’s the music they play in there. And it really—[FK laughs] It’s great sipping that $9 juice, and you’re like—if that, maybe more—and you’re like, “I’m going somewhere!” But you’re not. You’re just going back on the F train, or whatever.
FK: You’re not. You’ve just bought some celery juice, which in fact does not give you any special benefits of any kind.
ELM: I would never spend my $9 on that. I obviously would buy something with kale in it.
FK: [laughs] You’re paying—yeah—
ELM: I’m gonna have kale for dinner after this, in case anyone was wondering.
FK: Great. OK. We’ve gotten off topic. I think we should take a break and then come back and answer some questions.
ELM: More questions! All right, well thank you very much to Allison and Cricket for these wonderful voicemails. And, as always, everyone should leave us voicemails. 1-401-526-FANS.
FK: Voicemails! Voicemails! Voicemails!
ELM: [laughs] OK, I’ll talk to you in a second.
FK: [laughs] See ya.
[Interstitial music]
FK: All right, we’re back! And I’m ready to get into our mail bag.
ELM: Too soon!
FK: Aww! You’re right. We have to do business.
ELM: All right, well I’ve got some news. We will have recorded it by the time this episode comes out, but we this weekend are recording our next special episode. We cannot tell you what it is. [both laugh] But I think by the time this episode comes out, we will have revealed that. Regardless, sometime in the next few weeks, there’s going to be another special episode, and that is for our $3-a-month patrons at patreon.com/fansplaining. So, time to pledge.
FK: Yeah, it’s gonna be a doozy. You’re gonna wanna listen to this one—
ELM: All right, don’t oversell it, we haven’t recorded yet. But it’s happening.
FK: Aw, it’s gonna be great! [laughs]
ELM: It’s happening. OK, so, that’s our Patreon. There’s uh, a bunch of levels. You can pledge $2 a month, you would get access to the episodes 24 hours early. You can pledge $5 a month, you’ll get all those things, plus you get a really cute enamel pin shaped like a fan. Very—I was gonna say cute again—adorable. [FK laughs] And at $10 a month, you get our occasional Tiny Zine. The last one we had a collaboration with Destination Toast on some tiny stats. So, um, I assume our next one is going to be equally charming—I don’t want to oversell that, because we’re not— [FK laughs] Equally charming. Uh, so, patreon.com/Fansplaining. And, I’m hopeful that in the next few months we will do a couple more special episodes. Um, we kind of took a little bit of a break as I think we were readjusting to Flourish’s new life schedules.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: But I’m really glad that you’re still up for doing special episodes!
FK: Woo-hoo! I—of course. They’re the greatest! [ELM laughs] And if you don’t want to give us money or don’t have any money to give, that’s fine. You can support us in lots of ways, especially by spreading the word about the podcast or by writing in to us! Or sending a voicemail! Which creates episodes like this one. So you can do that at our website, Fansplaining.com or @Fansplaining on Tumblr. Our ask box is open, anon is on. You can write us an email, fansplaining@gmail.com. You can message us on social media. We’re pretty much Fansplaining everywhere. We’re not on TikTok, that would be weird—
ELM: You say that. I know some people who have really made—people who are dinosaurs—like I’m just gonna get another dino reference here, like us, who are, you know, giving it the old college try-on, on the Tok.
FK: I am not dedicated enough to join the Tok. [ELM laughs] Anyway, you can also send us a voicemail, as Elizabeth just said. 1-401-526-FANS. And that’s it, I think.
ELM: Business concluded.
FK: All right. Now are we ready to get into the mail bag?
ELM: Yeah. You want me to read the first one?
FK: Yeah I do!
ELM: All right, well I’ll do it. OK. This is from Ellie.
“Hello Flourish and Elizabeth,
“A few days ago, I noticed on my twitter feed that several of my mutuals were retweeting and commenting upon another post that stated that a certain kpop fandom are ‘the kindest fandom.’ I will not be naming the specific fandom (referred to as x) because I do not want to accidentally cause your podcast to get embroiled in a kpop flame war.
FK: Thank you!!
ELM: Thank you very much, Ellie.
“And I don't want to be seen criticizing this fandom as a whole, as I have had wonderful interactions with fans of the band in question while also seeing some inexcusable behavior from others.
“As people outside the fandom who have had bad experiences with it, my mutuals essentially expressed that the idea of x as ‘the kindest fandom’ was fundamentally ridiculous. I responded by positing that no fandom can really be described as "the kindest" since all fandoms have toxic factions. And with a fandom as large as x, a natural consequence is for that portion of fans to be louder and more extreme than seen in other communities.
“These mutuals and I exist in an international jpop fandom space that is much smaller than x, and kpop twitter as a whole. And it is true that the levels of toxicity pale in comparison to what is seen on the international kpop twitter community as a whole, not just pertaining to x. But I still wouldn't frame this specific fan community, or any other, as ‘kind.’
“I come to the perspective of ‘no fandom is kind’ as someone with experience in many fandoms. At this point, I have been involved in online fan culture since about 2009 on many different platforms. I was wondering what your perspective is on this concept. Is it possible to describe any fandom as ‘kind,’ or any adjective really?
“I love your podcast! Keep up the great work.
“Sincerely, Ellie.”
FK: Thank you, Ellie. This really threw me through a loop, because—
ELM: Really? Really?
FK: Yeah! Well, because first I was like, “I agree, Ellie.” And then I realized, I have done this. I have studied a fandom that I was like, “This is—they’re so nice! What is up with it?”
ELM: Oh, you mean you’ve done this for work?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: I was immediately like, you did this for your dissertation on Twilight? I don’t think that’s right, Flourish. [laughs]
FK: Noooo! No! No. For work.
ELM: [laughing] On anti-fandom in Twilight? I was like—
FK: No, they were not—they were not kind. [laughs]
ELM: That seems, by definition, kind of mean.
FK: Yeah, no. I think that the thing I would say about this, though, is that the only reason that that existed—the particular fandom I’m thinking about I won’t name, because it was a work thing, but it was really tiny. Like, really tiny. Like, you know, you would probably get fan meetups—like, there was an international fan meetup that would have like, fewer than maybe like, 30 people? And that was like, from everywhere in the world.
ELM: You studied a fandom that tiny for your job?
FK: Yeah, I did! I did.
ELM: That’s very interesting.
FK: There’s a long story about why. But the point being—
ELM: [laughs] That you can’t talk about.
FK: That I can’t talk about. But—and they had, like, been larger at different points in the fandom’s existence.
ELM: OK.
FK: But the people it had sort of boiled down to were just really, really nice. But the thing is, I think that like, the moment that that fandom grows, you know? When, for instance, a new thing comes out for their thing?
ELM: Sure.
FK: That’s gonna end, because, to Ellie’s point, there are factions within fandoms, right?
ELM: Right.
FK: A small number of people can hold together and have a cohesive culture, but I don’t think that you can actually get that with, you know, a fandom of even as few as a couple hundred people.
ELM: Right. And I think, I mean—you might, you know, especially with a fandom that’s boiled down to a small international meetup or whatever—I don’t know what you’re talking about. I literally can’t guess. But you know, the idea of like, the international fandom is that small, to me actually sounds a little exclusionary. So is that kind? And maybe not intentionally exclusionary, but—
FK: Oh, yeah, absolutely.
ELM: But, you know, you go to an older con or whatever, an older fandom meetup, and everyone’s really, really nice, but you’re like, “But the door does not feel open.”
FK: Absolutely.
ELM: Right? Like, it barely felt open to me.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And so, then I wouldn’t—I mean, who’s kind? What’s the definition of kind, right? You know, like…
FK: Yeah. Yeah, I mean, in this case, part of the reason I felt like they were kind was that they were like, trying to think about this, and trying to work out how—
ELM: Sure.
FK: —to be more open and stuff, so like, that was very sweet. They were super well-intentioned and lovely people, and I really liked them, but yeah. I agree that it could feel exclusionary. I’m sure there’s a bunch of people who like this thing who hadn’t found the organization of that group, you know what I mean?
ELM: Right, right.
FK: I wasn’t—there weren’t any others. It’s not like there was like, you know, other—trust me, I looked. [ELM laughs] You know? But like.
ELM: Right.
FK: You know.
ELM: I think, and some of that goes too to like, [sighs] immediately what the adjective “kind” makes me think of is, like, a kind of toxic positivity.
FK: Mmm.
ELM: And that’s a very kind of cynical immediate thing to flip to. But I think you do see in some super-small, framed as kind, nice, supportive spaces, you know. These are the complaints that fans of color—
FK: Mm-hmm.
ELM: —various queer fans, et cetera, you know, wanting to critique, and saying, “We don’t do that here, this is a kind—this is a space of kindness and support—”
FK: Right, this is for niceness.
ELM: And they’re like, “Not kind to me! If you’re like, not gonna allow me to be like, ‘Hey, you’re only talking about white characters, ever.’” Right? You know what I mean?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And so I feel like there is an element of—when a space is framed as “kind,” to me, I do think there is a little bit of cynicism in me saying this, but, you know.
FK: Mm-hmm.
ELM: To me, that sounds like nice and polite—
FK: Right.
ELM: —and maybe not willing to be open about things, because fandoms are complicated, humans are complicated, and flawed and fraught, and sometimes you need to be frank and honest. You don’t have to be mean, but it’s not gonna be kind, if you’re being super honest, if it’s something that is a problem.
FK: Yeah, I mean, I guess also I would say, I mean, I agree with that. I think that’s also even more so the bigger—like, when spaces get bigger, but there’s still no room for that kind of discussion, you know what I mean?
ELM: Yeah!
FK: Like, small spaces can be like that, but then there’s also times when like, you’ve just sort of hashed out all the problems and, you know. There may still be issues, but like—
ELM: There’s always more problems, Flourish.
FK: There’s always more problems. But you know what I’m saying, right?
ELM: Right.
FK: As spaces get bigger, and then, so when I see this about, you know, a large community that exists within Twitter, and like, has all this, I think, “Well, what does kind or nice mean in that context?” And—
ELM: Right.
FK: You know?
ELM: If your kindness is, “We praise the idols in this group, and we send death threats to the fan that says something mildly critical to them…” [FK laughs] Right? I also think there’s a big stan culture element in what Ellie’s talking about, and when you think about our episodes with Keidra Chaney talking about some of this too, when you think about specific Twitter stan dynamics, right? And it is all about—the kindness is really directed at the celebrity. Right? You know? And I think on the surface it can look like, “Oh, we’re such a kind fandom. Look, we did all this for the celebrity.” But that doesn’t often translate back to the way those fans treat each other. Especially if they don’t agree about the object of fandom.
FK: Yeah, I think that’s very true. I think there’s also just like—sometimes the policing of kindness…I mean, this is what you were saying earlier.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: The policing of kindness also then turns into unkindness. The performing of kindness, and even sometimes the performing of kindness for other fans can become performative, right?
ELM: Mm-hmm.
FK: “We all chip in to help so-and-so!” Like, OK, you know.
ELM: Right.
FK: I don’t know. I don’t wanna be jerks to this fandom, because I think that there truly are some kind people, and there are kind, like, pockets, and people who are trying to be, like, really not just kind, but like, just and fair and open, like—
ELM: Yeah think some people—
FK: —people can be good. [laughs]
ELM: Some people can achieve this balance. I’m not saying—it’s not a zero-sum game here.
FK: Right.
ELM: And I think that Ellie really puts her finger on it by kind of saying, when it’s big enough—
FK: Mm-hmm.
ELM: —it contains everything. Right? You know?
FK: Exactly.
ELM: And that’s exactly right.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And so, like, you know. I think the flipside of all of this is something that we’ve kind of railed against on this podcast, is this like, the narrative of toxic fandom or fandom being toxic in general—
FK: Yeah, yeah. Yeah.
ELM: —because it’s just such a broad brush. But whenever we push back against that, then we’re like, “But…[FK laughs] what about the shitty parts?” So like, I think that this is just the other side of that coin, basically, so.
FK: Yeah, I agree.
ELM: All right.
FK: All right. Thank you very much, Ellie. That was a very thought-provoking comment.
ELM: Agree. Thank you.
FK: All right, what’s our next one, Elizabeth?
ELM: It’s super short, you wanna read it?
FK: All right! Anonymous asks: “Does the Dead Dove Do Not Eat tag do anything? I like it, I think it's funny, but either people are already reading the tags or they aren't, you know?”
ELM: OK, so, “Dead Dove Do Not Eat”—this is my cultural, pop culture osmosis. I have not—I’ve seen one episode of this show, and it wasn’t this one, [FK laughs] but it’s Arrested Development, right? And it’s like—
FK: I haven’t even seen one episode of it!
ELM: Oh, I watched one episode once. I think it might have been on a plane, and I’ve tried to describe it to people who love the show, and they’re like, “That’s like, all of them.” I was like, “There’s like, a frozen banana stand, [FK laughs] and like, there’s a guy who’s like, afraid to take off his pants,” and they were like, “That is so unhelpful.” I was like, “Jeffrey Tambor was in it.” [FK laughs] Anyway. As far as I understand, this is the one where there’s like, a sign on a paper bag in the fridge that says this, right? “Dead Dove Do Not Eat.”
FK: Yeah, it’s a—there’s a gif of it. I only know it from the gif.
ELM: [laughs] OK. We’re terrible. We probably should see this important—
FK: But I know the gif very well. I’ve used the gif 1,000 times.
ELM: Yeah, you know that guy. You know that guy.
FK: Yeah, that guy. He comes to the fridge and he, like, opens up the bag that is labeled “Dead Dove Do Not Eat” and then looks into it. [ELM laughs] And then he looks up with this face, and I think he says something like, “I shoulda seen that one coming?” [both laugh] I don’t know what he says.
ELM: OK—
FK: But he looks up with a face that says that. [laughs]
ELM: So, I think this ask is interesting, actually. Because I think this may be a matter of differing perceptions, and I bet that a lot of people interpret this tag differently. To me, “Dead Dove Do Not Eat,” I agree that you’ve already seen the tags, right?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: So, the tags are describing, you know, “This is gonna be about incest,” for example.
FK: Right.
ELM: The kind of thing that you would apply that tag to, right?
FK: Right.
ELM: Like a, “Hey, big, BIG warning right here, FYI.” Right?
FK: Yeah yeah yeah.
ELM: And so this is like an extra—this is like, “I’m telling you. If you open this, [FK laughs] you’re gonna see what I’m telling you.” Right? And so—
FK: Right.
ELM: —for me, it is not so much—I think it has to accompany the tags. To be like, “I’m serious. I’m not referencing. I’m not just mentioning incest. Like, it will happen in this story, and I am telling you.”
FK: Yeah. It’s funny, but it’s also like, a way of emphasizing that like, just like you’re saying, the tags—this is not a side tag. Like, this is not a tag where it’s like—this is not like, the throwaway tag that happens in the background—
ELM: Well, I don’t think it means anything out of context, right?
FK: Exactly.
ELM: Like, unless you’re literally talking about doves and not eating them, which, you know—like, unless you’re recreating that scene, it doesn’t mean anything at all.
FK: Yeah yeah yeah.
ELM: Right?
FK: Unless there’s something else in the paratext of the story, like the summary or the tags or whatever, that that clearly points to, then it’s—yeah. It’s meaningless.
ELM: Right. So I think it’s a—you know, I don’t think it’s a bad tag at all. It’s kind of like, caveat emptor, right? Buyer beware.
FK: Exactly. Yeah.
ELM: You know, just—again, and I think that there is some level of—I mean, tags like that just, or just ones that aren’t as standardized, you know, just like people freeforming, like, “I’m not kidding. Like, really, read the tags. Like, heed the tags. Like, FYI. The tags here.” [FK laughs] Right? You know, or like, “Read the warnings in each chapter,” because some people are doing them—you know, some people don’t put them in tags, but then they put really clear author’s notes at the top, being like, “I’m gonna warn per chapter—”
FK: Yeah yeah yeah.
ELM: “—like, I’ll put it in at the bottom, and you can jump to it,” or whatever. You know, I think those people are being extra careful.
FK: Yeah!
ELM: And, uh, you know, I don’t—you know, there’s obviously, I don’t want to get into like a, the old trigger warning debate or whatever, but like. [FK laughs] There are times when I’m like, “Ah. That is so much warning.” But then I’m like, “Who cares?” Like, what is that instinct within me, to be like, [imitating a horrible scold] “Do you need to warn for that?” Like, who cares? They wanted to warn for it, right? You know?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And so that’s something that I work on. I don’t know if you ever feel this way, or if you also try to work on it, but it’s just like. I don’t know. It’s interesting to see these evolving.
FK: Yeah, it really is. All right, well, thank you, Anonymous. That was a short and sweet letter.
ELM: Yes, thank you. Actually, since that one was so short, do you wanna read the next one, too?
FK: Sure thing. All right. This one is also from someone anonymous.
“Hey Flourish and Elizabeth! This message is in response to your original character/reader insert episode--which was a wonderful listen! When I first entered fandom, OC x character fic was just about the only thing I read.
“You guys discussed a pretty broad spectrum of reader insert or OC fic, but there is one kind that I've come across primarily on AO3 which was not mentioned. Typically, this kind of fic includes a slash pairing, and the narrator is a young woman or teenage girl who is squeeing over the pairing from afar. In superhero oriented fandoms, this narrator is often a blogger part of an online community of hero watchers who post hero sightings, and snaps a photo of the pairing, revealing that they've been secretly dating (while also narrating how hot they are together, duh). I've also seen a few where the narrator is a barista serving the pairing at a cafe.
“Has anyone happened across this sort of fic? I interpret it as the author admitting that writing this pairing is at least partly a voyeuristic experience—which is sort of admirable to me. I think a lot of slash fans are reluctant to admit that this is a valid kind of appeal. And though OC fic is no longer my jam, some of this fic is a pretty awesome meta experience.
“I'd love to hear your thoughts, Anon.”
ELM: Thank you for this, Anon. I’m delighted by this topic.
FK: Yeah!
ELM: OK, first of all, I know I said in the very beginning that we don’t include responses to episodes, [FK laughs] but I actually made an exception for this one, because I felt like it was kind of—I think without that first paragraph, this question could have stood alone.
FK: Definitely.
ELM: You know? Like, “Are you familiar with this kind of fic?”
FK: I also just want to answer it, so. [laughs]
ELM: Yeah, and to answer that question: Yes, I am familiar with this kind of fic. I assume you are too, Flourish.
FK: Absolutely. And I see it as being part of a genealogy of fic that stretches back, yay these many years.
ELM: Wow. Wow. Uh, please say more.
FK: So, some of the earliest Mary Sues, right? Were not actually Mary Sues in the sense of like, being in a romantic relationship with the—I mean, I’m using the term “Mary Sue” because that’s how people referred to them, but female original characters, right?
ELM: Mm-hmm.
FK: I’m not trying to make a value judgment.
ELM: Author stand-ins also, right?
FK: Author stand-ins. Exactly.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: So some of the very earliest ones were not actually getting together with either of your main male characters. I’m assuming there’s two because there often were. [laughs] Right?
ELM: Sure.
FK: A lot of times, they were the character who brings about—
ELM: Mm-hmm.
FK: —those two characters getting together, right?
ELM: Mm-hmm.
FK: And then similarly, like, this is not only in slash fandom. As time goes on, you sort of see—I’ve seen this voyeuristic element in X-Files fanfic. There’s like, a category of story which is about the—it’s from the perspective of the character that they meet during an episode. You know? Like, the, you know. The—the guest star of the episode—
ELM: Right, right, yeah.
FK: —whatever that person would have been, like it’s from their perspective, and part of the pleasure is that you’re seeing Mulder and Scully from the outside, and this person has never met them before, but they instantly see how much they belong together, or whatever it is, right? [laughs]
ELM: Hang on, hang on. This is fascinating, but I gotta ask. I know your earliest fic was where you, self-insert you—
FK: Yeah.
ELM: —were—were you an FBI agent? Or were they just doing a case for you?
FK: Oh, no, they came to my school. It was 100% this.
ELM: OK, so, in it, were they getting together? Or were you just like—
FK: I didn’t get that far. I was very young.
ELM: This is my question, right, like, yeah—
FK: All—no, I was so young that all it was, it was—I had this vision of like, an idealized-slash-perfect author-insert version of me, who was at my school, and like, Mulder and Scully for some reason were on a case, and they came to my school, and I interacted with them.
ELM: This is—
FK: It didn’t go further than that.
ELM: It’s so cute.
FK: I spent so much time thinking about the like, personal properties of this self-insert character—
ELM: Yes.
FK: —and zero time—
ELM: Oh yeah.
FK: —thinking about the plot. [laughs]
ELM: I used to—I remember I had an OC, as they say, as the kids say, my OC—
FK: Mm-hmm.
ELM: —not for fic, but like, before I knew about fic, and I remember her name was Amanda Lane,
FK: Amanda Lane.
ELM: Doesn’t that sound like an OC that a child in the ’90s would create?
FK: It absolutely does. [ELM laughs] I’m glad that we, together—I think that mine had heterochromia, [ELM laughing intensifies] like every good—yeah. I can’t remember this very well. [laughs]
ELM: I don’t think Amanda Lane ever, she was ever in any stories, I just think I was like, that’s a great name.
FK: Yeah. [laughs] She’s a character. [both laugh]
ELM: OK, so I also think that me asking you about this—your gen fic, here, is—I don’t—this is not just in, uh, shippy fic also, right?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And, Anon here references this in superhero fic, and I—I found this years ago, and I haven’t been able to find it since. Maybe if I actually sat down and did a little bit of digging on Fanlore, there was like a term for it—
FK: Oh yeah? I don’t know the term.
ELM: I had never heard it before, but it was something about like, the subgenre that is particularly in superhero fic, from the perspective of like, an ordinary citizen of—
FK: Mm-hmm.
ELM: —Gotham City or whatever. Or like, also encompassing a genre that I’ve enjoyed before, when it’s done well, because it’s so hard to do, the—like a newspaper article—
FK: Yeah, yeah.
ELM: Where you potentially have the reporter—
FK: Mm-hmm.
ELM: —also being there. You’re not just reading the text of the article—
FK: Yeah.
ELM: —but also like, maybe you’re there for their interview or whatever.
FK: Yeah, or it could be one of those interviews where the author like, inserts themselves a great deal into it, right?
ELM: Sure, yeah, and I think that Anon’s comment about it being also a meta experience is really true. I think that you get this sort of observational distance that lets you make a much stronger argument about like, why they should get together, or what they’re like as a couple, because you literally—it’s more about describing—it’s more about telling than showing, honestly, a little bit, right?
FK: Mm-hmm.
ELM: Because, you know. If we’re in the internal narration of an observer, then they can explain why they like them—they don’t have to, but they could explain why they like them as a couple or whatever, right? That kind of thing. Which, you know, I find in fanfiction—and I think this probably connects to the romance genre, too—many, many characters that people write fic about are emotionally stunted.
FK: Oh yes.
ELM: And are not capable of articulating why they are a good one-half of the ship. [laughs]
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Because they don’t even know [FK laughs] that they have feelings for the person yet, or like—
FK: Yeah, yeah.
ELM: —they’re drunk and woke up married or whatever, et cetera, et cetera.
FK: Yeah, I think it also—this person is talking about the specific subgenre where there’s someone who’s sort of a hero watcher or whatever, but there’s also, you know, a wide range of distance or closeness to those people, right?
ELM: Mm-hmm.
FK: Sometimes it’s like they’re—you’re watching from afar and you’re a blogger and you’re writing about these people—
ELM: Yeah.
FK: And then sometimes it’s closer. You know, sometimes it is like, you get saved by the superhero, or like, somehow—the “you” here being the OC, right?—like, gets drawn into their world in that way. And in those cases, I think it’s also a way that you can create a different kind of tension within the narrative that is—it kind of disrupts some of the classic romance novel elements—
ELM: Mm-hmm. Sure.
FK: —that a lot of shippy fic falls back on. For good reason! Like, I love a good romance novel, and I love a shippy fic that follows those tropes, but this can sort of cut through those tropes, and you can have a plot that’s different from the romance, and you can have this romance playing out in a way that’s like, simultaneously centered and decentered, if that makes sense?
ELM: Mmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah, it does make sense.
FK: I find that really, really pleasurable, personally. Just as a palate cleanser, you know? [laughs]
ELM: Yeah, it’s true. Absolutely, I agree with everything you’re saying. You know, one thing that I am thinking, though, is like—I mean, I really like outsider POV, as they sometimes say. Or like—
FK: Yeah, that’s a term.
ELM: It is a term. And that’s an interesting term, because it’s implying that you’re outside of the ship, usually, right? You know?
FK: Mm-hmm. Yeah.
ELM: Not always used that way, but usually used that way. And I have written—I’ve enjoyed sometimes when you write another perspective outside the ship, and it’s like, someone close to them that’s actually normally in their lives, and then you’re just getting a different character’s perspective on them, and like, it’s fun because—at least with the characters I write, because then you get to be like—
FK: Yeah.
ELM: —you get to see their lower opinions of the other characters than the characters themselves. [both laugh] But if they’re like, close, you know, if they’re good friends or family members or whatever, you’re not gonna get what Anon is describing, which is like, the shippy—
FK: Yeah.
ELM: —when the character is shipping them, you know, like—
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Like, would you ship your friends getting together? Like, not in that—
FK: Yeah.
ELM: You wouldn’t be like, “Ooh, so hot,” you know what I mean?
FK: Right.
ELM: So that I think is a particularly interesting sub-subgenre of what I’m describing there.
FK: Totally. All right, I could keep talking about this. I could give, like, a list of fics like this that are in the X-Files that I love, and I’m gonna resist.
ELM: You’re going to, in the show notes.
FK: OK.
ELM: All right, well, you just said it out loud, so you’d better start looking for them.
FK: All right, the list may actually be short, because I may actually go through them and be like, “No, I can’t recommend that one… All right, that one’s off the internet forever because it’s like, from the ’90s…” You know. It might be short, but I will put at least one.
ELM: Just put it back on without their permission.
FK: I don’t have them downloaded. [makes despairing noise] Crisis.
ELM: At least one fic incoming—
FK: I will, I will.
ELM: —and sadly, not Flourish’s high-school adventures with—
FK: Uh, I believe it was middle school. I was younger than that.
ELM: [whispering] Stop.
FK: Yeah!
ELM: OK, all right. What was the crime?
FK: I don’t think there was a crime! [laughs] I didn’t get that far.
ELM: Why would the FBI come to your school?
FK: Presumably there was a crime, but I don’t know what it was. I didn’t write the story, this was just like, you know, a thing I thought about a lot I think. Or tried to write, but I was—
ELM: Starring Amanda Lane. Yeah.
FK: Yeah. Amanda Lane.
ELM: Mm-hmm.
FK: All right, I think you need to read the next one.
ELM: All right. Thank you again, Anon, this was a delightful topic. Ah, the next one is from Sarah. Sarah writes:
“Hi Elizabeth and Flourish!
“My question is about queerbaiting particularly in the recently ended show Supergirl. In this show, there are several queer couples who do end up together, one even gets a wedding in the season finale. However, I and many fans still felt led on by Supercorp, the relationship we wanted but never got between Supergirl and Lena Luthor. If there are already queer relationships in the show, can we still be queerbaited by another ship? Can we only be queerbaited by shows that only have straight relationships?
“Thank you for all your incredible episodes! I look forward to them every week :)
“Sarah.”
FK: Thank you for writing in, Sarah. I regret to report that I’m gonna say I’m not sure queerbaiting is the right frame for thinking about this.
ELM: OK, talk to me about this. I know we dug into this in our queerbaiting episode…I don’t remember when that was. 2020. [FK laughs] It was around the end of SPN, so—
FK: Yeah.
ELM: —that was late 2020.
FK: I guess I feel like, in the current environment, we have moved—I don’t want to say that we’ve moved on from all queerbaiting, but I think that we’re in a very different historical moment than the moment when “queerbaiting” really meant what I think a lot of people want it to mean? Or, I don’t know. So, when I think about queerbaiting, I think about a situation where people are intentionally trying to hint at a relationship that they’re never going to give you, and that there’s this element of “you should know we’re never going to give it to you.”
ELM: Right.
FK: Right? Because, “You should know that, because we don’t have queer relationships on TV.”
ELM: Whether it’s malicious and homophobic, or as we’ve discussed in the past, even having heard firsthand writers on shows in the ’90s and the 2000s saying, “We put in these bait-y moments for the fans.”
FK: Right.
ELM: You know. “We wanted to give them that little tension. That’s all we can—it’s a gift! That’s all we can do.”
FK: Right, right, right!
ELM: You know.
FK: And…[sighs] And I think that now, I feel like we’ve kind of moved on to a place where at least in like, U.S. mainstream TV overall, I feel like we kinda have to—we’re almost to the point where we have to call it just, you know, they didn’t follow through on the relationship!
ELM: Or your ship didn’t get together. I mean, I think there’s a huge range of these things, and I’ve never seen Supergirl, so I can’t speak to that, and I know it’s a hugely popular femslash ship, but one man’s subtext is another man’s…you know, I mean, like—I just think there’s a huge range of fan interpretations with this stuff. So, you’ll see people talking about shows you’ve seen and they’ll be like, “They baited us! They were gonna get together.” And it’s like, “I don’t know…I never got that memo. Like, were we watching the same show?” You know what I mean?
FK: Right.
ELM: I feel like fan interpretations on this vary so much that there are groups of fans on any given ship that believe it’s a foregone conclusion that it’s gonna happen. And I think, as we’ve discussed in the past, sometimes the reason is because “it’s my ship.”
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Right? And I’m not saying this about this one in particular. I cannot speak to this in any way, but—
FK: Yeah, and I mean—and like, I’m not saying this to try and say that the emotions you feel when this ship that you have really invested in and loved and cared about—I’m not saying those emotions are invalid. Like, just because it’s not queerbaiting in my opinion doesn’t mean that you don’t get to feel upset or think that they missed an opportunity, or feel like it would have been great if it had gone another way.
ELM: Mm-hmm.
FK: Like, or be angry with them! You know, in this case, if they are—I mean, I know that there had been like, some instances at conventions and things—like, if they’re like, dropping hints or making jokes or whatever, like that’s shitty behavior, regardless of whether it’s a queer couple or not.
ELM: Yeah. Right.
FK: Right? Like, that’s also shitty behavior for a will-they-or-won’t-they het couple on a TV show, frankly. You know? Like, it’s disappointing when people are like, “You gotta watch and find out!” Like, that’s—
ELM: Yeah. Right.
FK: I get why they say that. But it also sucks, and like. It can just suck!
ELM: Yeah. I do think there is some element—you know, I—[sighs] I was just talking with a friend yesterday about a show that I’m not going to name, where I know some people are shipping the main male and female characters, and I just think they have the chemistry and potential romantic or sexual tension of a lead balloon. [FK laughs] Um, and my friend disagreed. Uh, and shout out to my friend, because they’re a listener. And I was thinking of this kind of…the heterosexual expectation, right?
FK: Mm-hmm.
ELM: Because I think we get so much television—historically, currently—and there’s a dude and there’s a lady.
FK: They’re gonna boing, right?
ELM: And like, and in poorly written TV—historically and currently—they don’t have to do very much work, because we’re already like, “Eh, it’s a guy and a girl. There you go. Like, here.”
FK: Yeah, yeah.
ELM: Right? You know, like, and that sucks, [laughs] and like, I wish that—
FK: [laughing] To quote Avril Lavigne, “He was a guy, she was a girl. Can I make it any more obvious?”
ELM: Uhhhh, wasn’t it, “Can I be any more obvious? Could I be any more obvious?”
FK: Could I be any more—I—It’s been a long time since I heard that.
ELM: Could I make it—that doesn’t scan. I think it’s—
FK: You’re right, it doesn’t scan.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: “He—he was a punk, she did ballet. [laughs] What more can I say?”
ELM: [muttering] Gender-normative. [FK laughs] You know, and so I think that slash fans and, I suspect, femslash fans too, you know. We have these jokes about slash goggles, where you’ll watch it and you’ll just see these two dudes, and you’re like, [exclamation] you know? Like, [FK laughs] even if they don’t have chemistry either, right? Just like, “He was a boy, and he was a boy. And, OK.” Right?
But the difference is, I think, with that kind of heterosexual romance expectation that overlays TV in particular, I think that it does feel with queer ships—I saw some interesting meta around SPN, talking about some of this, saying like, “No, you don’t understand. Like, I don’t want to watch these good shows with canonical queer characters, and—”
FK: Right.
ELM: “I wanted it to be this kind of show.” Right?
FK: Right.
ELM: And obviously the subtext of that is, “I wanted it to be this show. The one that I like.” [FK laughs] But like, I absolutely got what they were saying, because they were talking about this very kind of long-running, episodic, genre-y show, and there’s a close relationship, and if they were a man and a woman, they would get together.
FK: I agree with that.
ELM: Like, they are very few, right?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: So, I get that. But, on the other hand, this letter does make me think of being in Black Sails fandom, and now you’ve seen Black Sails, so you’ll understand the context, [FK laughs] and some people say that Silver and Flint didn’t get together at the end—spoiler, I think that’s fine for us to say at this point—
FK: That’s fine.
ELM: Lots of people call that queerbaiting! On a show [laughs] where like, by the end, the majority of the characters who are still alive are queer! Right?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And—by which multiple—
FK: And banging on screen, and being together, and like—
ELM: Yeah!
FK: Like, running off together—
ELM: No, like together! Yeah.
FK: —like on ships.
ELM: They’re not like, sad, you know? Like—
FK: Literal ships.
ELM: Yeah, they’re not like, sad, like, grieving gays. They are literally reunited, like, holding-hands-in-the-snow gays. Right? So, that really sent me over the edge, because I was like, this is telling on yourself. This isn’t a—you’re making all the same old arguments that you got to make about all the shows where there was no queer content, just subtext.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Right? And now you’re using the same exact arguments for a show that has tons of queer characters.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: This is just about your ship! You know? And like, I have sympathy for folks who like that ship, or like any other ship, and really wanted to make it happen, and didn’t. But to see the term “queerbaiting” used in there really made me feel like no amount of saturation of representation of canonical queer relationships is ever going to change people’s arguments that they want it to be their ship.
FK: Yeah. OK, Sarah, we’re putting a lot of obviously our—
ELM: This is not on Sarah! This is not on Sarah!
FK: I was gonna say, this is not on Sarah. [both laugh] Sarah, we’re—I shouldn’t say “we.” I’m sorry that your, uh, letter—
ELM: Oh my God, you don’t wanna involve me in your apology?
FK: [laughs] I don’t know! I didn’t wanna speak for you. I’m—I don’t want you to feel bad about, like, you know.
ELM: We! We don’t want that. Wow.
FK: Neither of us want that.
ELM: I don’t want it more!
FK: OK! [both laugh] Anyway.
ELM: No, and I also—this example, I know, is a really beloved ship, and it sucks.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: It, like, sucks a lot.
FK: It really does.
ELM: And, like, the people who made that show knew that, right? So that sucks.
FK: They did, and they made that choice. So. That sucks! [laughs]
ELM: Sucks. But I do feel like, yeah, I absolutely agree with—I think the term “queerbaiting” was never that useful, and I think that it may be a little bit—I think it’s so disparate now, it feels like—
FK: Yeah.
ELM: —whatever it means is just kinda—I imagine, like, a dandelion blowing in the wind.
FK: All right. On that beautiful image, [ELM snorts] I think that I should read our last letter.
ELM: Please do!
FK: OK. This is from fairkid-forever: “Hello fandom experts! Niche question for you. Are you aware of any accepted punctuation convention for indicating that you are writing two characters in a queerplatonic relationship? Romantic relationship is John/Sherlock, platonic friendship is John & Sherlock. Is there a punctuation sign in use for queerplatonic relationships or other explicitly committed and explicitly non-romantic relationships?”
ELM: No.
FK: Alas, no!
ELM: But. [FK laughs] Thank you, fairkid-forever. We really appreciate this question, and if the answer was just no, we would have just answered this on Tumblr. [FK laughs] But I put this in here, and Flourish agreed. I think there is more to talk about here.
FK: Yeah, for sure.
ELM: Where do you wanna start?
FK: I don’t know! There’s so many places! [laughs] I mean, like, this gets into some of the privileging of different kinds of relationships within fandom. It gets into the definitions of these kinds of relationships…
ELM: Yup. I agree.
FK: Ah! It’s this big—it’s a big ball of yarn, and I’m trying to figure out what thread to pull on first.
ELM: Well, so I remember a letter that we got—it may have been in our last AMA about the fruit salad characters.
FK: Oh yeah! The fruit salad letter! That was a great letter, and it was a very vivid image.
ELM: Yeah, characters Apples, Bananas, and Oranges or something. And if memory serves, it was someone who was relatively new to the AO3 expressing confusion about why the ampersand, “John & Sherlock,” here, or “Apples & Bananas,” as they say, [both laugh] is such a catch-all—
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Right? Like, that’s friends. That’s colleagues. That’s siblings. That’s, you know, other—
FK: Yeah.
ELM: —other familiar relationships. Familial.
FK: It’s a story that just happens to be the two of them interacting.
ELM: Right. Well, you don’t have to put that.
FK: But people do.
ELM: They do. Sometimes they don’t, right?
FK: Yeah yeah. I mean, it’s a mix.
ELM: Yeah yeah yeah.
FK: As all tagging systems are.
ELM: Yeah, obviously. You know, and so, I think that letter sits side-by-side with this question, right?
FK: Mm-hmm.
ELM: And I also—to me, this question immediately, honestly, makes me think of, not just because fairkid put John/Sherlock in here, but like, reading fic in the Sherlock fandom where I definitely encountered by far the highest portion of ace headcanoning of a character in a ship that I’ve ever read—
FK: Yeah.
ELM: I bet Toast has the stats to back this up. [FK laughs] I bet that Sherlock is high on the list of characters that get tagged as ace, and the way that people tagged—you know, this was almost a decade ago now, which is kind of nice to say that. What distance I have from Sherlock. [FK laughs] Wow.
FK: And yet you’re not free of it. [laughs]
ELM: Nope. Uh, but you know, I remember that the way people would tag and the way people would express it wasn’t consistent, right? Because they might write John/Sherlock, but it would be an ace!Sherlock and that didn’t necessarily give a lot of indication of—you know, I read some where like, which I did not love reading, where John kind of quote-unquote “cured” Sherlock, right?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And it was like—
FK: “I thought I was ace, but it turns out—”
ELM: Yeah—
FK: “—that I’m actually just demisexual! Only for you!” [both laugh]
ELM: It’s—yeah. It’s like an updated version of, uh, what’s the phrase for like, Dean Winchester is only gay for whatever? You know, like.
FK: Yeah. Yeah. Dean Winchester is gay for Castiel only?
ELM: Only. Castiel-sexual. Yeah. Exactly.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: So, that’s frustrating. But then, you know, it was interesting because I do think for the most part, they would use John/Sherlock, and maybe there would be some more indication in the tags.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: But it was frustrating to be in that fandom, because I would see people complaining, “You’re tagging it John/Sherlock, but they don’t bone.”
FK: Yeah. [laughs]
ELM: And it was like, “Really? I didn’t realize it was a requirement for characters to bone for them to be considered in a romantic relationship.” You know?
FK: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, and there’s also something here about labeling specifically, right? Because I feel like a lot of times queerplatonic relationships, as they appear in fiction, have not historically been labeled as queerplatonic relationships, right?
ELM: Sure.
FK: Like, there is a very legitimate reading of Sherlock Holmes as written as being about a queerplatonic relationship.
ELM: Wait, Arthur Conan Doyle totally put that in the tags [FK laughs] in The Strand? Remember in the front page of The Strand, there was like, “#friendship, #platonic…”
FK: [laughing] #platonic relationship—right?
ELM: Yeah. #casefic…
FK: [laughs] I mean, you know, I’m just saying, there’s a lot of other things like this also, where—I mean like, there’s even, um, you know, since I’m on an X-Files rant today—
ELM: Go ahead.
FK: —there’s versions of X-files stories, where Mulder and Scully were in what I would today define as a queerplatonic relationship. Right? Like, there’s all sorts of this stuff, but it has not always had that term applied to it regularly.
ELM: Right.
FK: And that’s interesting to me, because I think that’s awesome. And like, I would love to be able to search for that term and find some stuff that takes the relationship seriously, but doesn’t have them boning. Like, that would be cool. I would be really interested in that.
ELM: Right.
FK: But it is sort of a new category in certain ways, which is probably part of why it doesn’t—that’s part of why that ampersand ends up doing like, quadruple duty, and then sometimes having that be a queerplatonic thing, and then sometimes it’s like, nope, it’s in the slash tag, and like. You know. Like, it’s hard.
ELM: Yeah. Yeah, I mean like—I think that…I don’t know. It’s hard. I don’t know—I totally get the critique that the ampersand is too broad. Right?
FK: For sure.
ELM: You know, like—because it is, and I do think that as we said in that one too, I think it reflects the AO3’s bias of setting it up around the folks who founded it and a lot of the early users being like, shippers, as they say.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Maybe that’s like, a too-broad generalization, but definitely something that they centered.
FK: Yeah, even if not shippers, people who were used to a fandom culture in which ships were a central organizing feature.
ELM: Right, and we talked about this versus the way fanfiction.net used to be organized, and now it seems like—it used to be, I remember, you couldn’t find—like, ships were not an easy thing to search by, if memory serves, back in the day.
FK: [laughing] They still aren’t really as easy as they probably could be.
ELM: They were—they’re easier now than I remember them being. We looked at this recently and I was like…
FK: They definitely are easier now than they used to be.
ELM: But in the past, it was not like that. And that definitely affects the kind of fic that gets posted there, right?
FK: Mm-hmm.
ELM: And it also affects the kind of expectations.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: I would love if you could tag something with a slash and understand that as romantic, and not have assumptions within fandom—somewhat, I’ve encountered, angry, somewhat entitled assumptions, that the slash between two characters means that they are going to have graphic sex in the story, right? You know what I mean? Like, or the implication of sex, if it’s not rated explicit, right? You know, like.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: I just think that defaulting to that is doing such a disservice to the, like, broad spectrum of human relationships.
FK: Yeah, I would be happy—like, whatever. If—this is because I’m not attached to the term “slash” probably, but like, whatever. If people wanna claim that one as long as there’s other ones that people agree with, you know?
ELM: No, I’m using the literal—the slash sign. I meant that for all kinds of ships.
FK: No, no, I know you are. I know you are.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: I know you did. But I’m just saying like, I—if, as long as there were other tags that like, made it, you know—that made a variety of kinds of relationships clear, I wouldn’t mind ceding that one, if there was another tag that made it really, really clear that like, this could be any, you know, romantic or not sexual—
ELM: Yeah, no—
FK: I mean, I’m not—I’m just saying I’m not attached to that like, sigil.
ELM: I think that we’re actually arguing something in opposite directions. I’m arguing for the tags that exist now to—for people to like, change their minds, and their mindsets to be more inclusive. I’m not arguing for more tags—
FK: Yeah.
ELM: —because I think one thing too, I appreciate—these metas pass my dash from time to time, saying that like, human relationships are a lot more complicated, and I think a lot of fic presents it in a very cookie cutter—
FK: That’s true.
ELM: —first this happens, then this happens, then this happens. Um…
FK: [laughs] First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes the…mpreg baby in a baby carriage?
ELM: [laughs] Right! But, uh, don’t skip over the moist toilet or whatever it is. [FK laughs] Warm washcloth, warm washcloth.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: [laughing] Moist toilet is like, on an airplane isn’t it? [both laugh]
FK: That is—that is an idea of just—I’m imagining that now. That doesn’t sound pleasant.
ELM: Gets cold within like five seconds. [laughs]
FK: Five seconds, yeah. Oooh.
ELM: Um, but, you know, I think that in the real world, things are not linear.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Things are messy, things are fuzzy, and I think that the expectations that—I don’t know. I think fandom is big and there’s a lot of different things going on.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: I think that I’ve seen subsets that think that there are like, super linear paths that they need to depict in a fic, and certain benchmarks and things.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Whereas I think you see more and more people writing about the messiness and the ambiguity and the complications.
FK: Mmm.
ELM: And so, I would argue against—I would argue for fewer tags.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Personally.
FK: Well, I like what you’re saying about that, but I think that people are not gonna do that.
ELM: Really into micro-labeling things.
FK: [laughs] Yeah, so—so I agree with you philosophically, but I have already jumped to the “no one’s ever gonna do that, so what’s the next best option.”
ELM: I think that you should just list the characters.
FK: Mm-hmm.
ELM: And then people can guess what their relationships will be within.
FK: Wow. All right, so. As everyone on the internet starts screaming and running away from Elizabeth—
ELM: I think you should just list the fandom, and then everyone can just guess which characters are involved.
FK: I mean, that—that is the old-school way. Thank you, Elizabeth.
ELM: Yeah. Yeah.
FK: All right. All right! Well, fairkid-forever, thank you for this question. It was very thought-provoking, obviously.
ELM: Mm-hmm.
FK: And we are sorry that we had to answer “no.” [both laugh]
ELM: Right. I do think that this is something that right now, if you want to signal, that is easily solved by including that in the tags.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Like, a fresh tag: queerplatonic relationship.
FK: Go for it. Make it happen. Make it happen! OK. All right. [ELM laughs] That was the last of our mail bag.
ELM: [laughing] All right. Great questions! Thank you very much to everyone who sent them in. And people, keep sending them in, even though I just described our very large backlog. Give us more.
FK: But we love new ones too!
ELM: Yeah.
FK: Always.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: Don’t stop! All right, on that note. I think I’m gonna talk to you later, Elizabeth.
ELM: All right, good luck finding those X-Files fics, Flourish.
FK: Oh, shoot. Yeah, I gotta go find those. OK I’m gonna go do it.
ELM: OK, bye!
FK: Bye!
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