Episode 175: Ask Fansplaining Anything: Part 13
In the latest (13th!) installment of the “Ask Fansplaining Anything” series, Flourish and Elizabeth tackle a fresh batch of letters from listeners. Questions posed include: Are author’s notes “unprofessional”? What are the distinctions between fusions and crossovers? Are some fans writing x reader fic to avoid engaging with canonical characters of color? Would it really be so hard to make a new fic archive? And what can fans do when their object of fandom likes fic…a little too much?
Show notes
[00:00:00] As always, our intro music is “Awel” by stefsax, used under a CC BY 3.0 license.
[00:06:26] Brent Spiner, of Frasier:
[00:08:18] fairkid-forever’s most recent question—on tagging queerplatonic relationships in fic—was featured in our last AMA!
[00:19:56] Anisa Khalifa’s letter about reader-inserts was in response to episode 160, “The Original Character.”
[00:20:26] “Our trans episode” was episode 166, “Writing Trans Characters.”
[00:24:30] She truly is one of the sexiest!
[00:27:14] Our interstitial music throughout is “Try anything once” by Lee Rosevere, also used under a CC BY 3.0 license.
[00:34:25] C’mon Ginger Wolf Magic!
[00:34:38] The famous SPN Hogwarts AU is “Old Country” by astolat.
[00:37:00] The X-Men/Inception series Elizabeth loves is “Chessmen” by kaydeefalls. Erik-as-Batman is “The Masked Man (Who Has Everything)” by Traincat.
[00:42:26]
[01:01:44] The OTW’s original statement on racism in fandom—including a section specifically about the AO3—from June 2020.
[01:03:10] Elizabeth specifically reported on the AO3’s frontend for the software engineering magazine Increment.
[01:05:52] “Dependency”:
Transcript
[Intro music]
Flourish Klink: Hi, Elizabeth!
Elizabeth Minkel: [laughs] Hi, Flourish!
FK: And welcome to Fansplaining, the podcast by, for, and about fandom!
ELM: This is Episode #175, “Ask Fansplaining Anything: Part 13.”
FK: All right. Now, we have done 12 of these episodes before, and the title’s really self-explanatory, so I feel like everybody knows what is about to happen.
ELM: OK, maybe you, maybe someone’s choosing to start listening with 175 because it’s such a solid number, you know, it’s like an increment of 25, right? A classic.
FK: And they don't know what “Ask Me Anything” means.
ELM: Maybe they don’t use Reddit. So for you, listener. New guy. [FK laughs] We’re gonna, we’re gonna read some letters that our listeners sent in, and then we’re gonna answer them to the best of our abilities.
FK: [laughs] OK—
ELM: Thanks for joining. Thanks, thanks new guy.
FK: Thanks, new guy. OK. Shall I read the first one?
ELM: Please do.
FK: All right, this one is from someone anonymous.
“Hello! Love your pod! Quick question: I’m in a music fandom right now. The lead singer is aware of fanfic and is supportive about it. He thinks it’s great people are writing about them. Problem is he won’t shut up about reading it lately and people are (maliciously/innocently) sending him recommendations, asking him to do reactions, etc. It’s stressing writers out. Got any tips? We cannot be the first fandom with this issue (I’m new to RPF).”
Oh, nonny.
ELM: I’m very sorry to all of you. Yes, you are not the first fandom to experience this.
FK: And I don’t know what you can do, beyond yelling at people to stop sending him recommendations! I don’t know, man!
ELM: OK, all right. Step one, because I know this is the norm in a lot of RPF fandoms but I’m not sure about this one, so a lot of RPF fandoms archive-lock their fic. Right? If they’re on the AO3. So that means you have to have an account to read it.
FK: Yep.
ELM: And the link will, like, you know, I don’t know if you’ve ever been logged out and sent to that page, but like it’ll be pretty clear, there’s a very strong barrier saying “Stop, you can’t go further.” Which, like, I’m guessing this guy has an account at this point if he’s so, so into it, but like, at least for him sharing with his followers, that will stop. Like, most of them aren’t gonna be so curious they’re gonna go create an AO3 account, you know? They’ll probably be like, “Oh, OK, this is not for me.”
FK: I mean you could also go old-school and create any sort of, like, locked community or list or something like that, that people have to apply to join or something like that. Now, I know that’s not the same pleasure as putting out a fic that lots of people can view, and that the person you’re writing about is never going to look at. Like, I get it, I get that that limits one of the pleasures of publishing fanfic on the internet. When you can get thousands of comments or kudos or whatever. But it is an option, if it’s really stressing you out.
ELM: Yeah, I mean, I don’t think total safety of your works is compatible with the scale that you’re describing, right, this is the tradeoff, you know?
FK: [overlapping] I agree.
ELM: And I, you know, I really feel for anyone who’s in this position, I’ve had the luck or the privilege to never have been in a fandom where the actors seemed like, extra interested in fic. And I don’t know, it’s kinda bothered me over the last few years to see some high-profile actors sort of get into it and get into like, fun, winky exchanges with people on Twitter, and seeing fans, even old-school fans who came up in a more like, strong-fourth-wall era like we did, being like, “Oh, but since he likes it [FK laughs], then it’s totally great! He thinks that my gay fanfiction is great, so I’m totally happy for him to look at it.” And it’s like, no, I don’t want him to look at it and I don’t want the homophobic guy to look at it either, right, I don’t want either of them to look at it.
And so, I feel like these are some attitude shifts that have surprised me over the last few years that, I think that trying to tell your fellow fans to stop doing this is gonna be pretty futile, because I think a lot of people are really latching onto the validation they’re getting from celebrities who are not…inherently anti-fanfic.
FK: Yeah, absolutely, and I think that there also was always, if you put your stories out in a public place, there was always some chance that the person who, you know, you were writing about, would read it? Or that the actor would read it, or whatever. And having a plan for what happens if that is the case is kind of part of, to your point, putting stuff out in a large public space. Right? The chance may be infinitesimally small, but thinking through that is important. I’m not saying it’s pleasant, obviously I have great sympathy and I totally would, I don’t think I would want…you know…[laughs] the people I’ve written RPF about to read that RPF, I think I would be very uncomfortable with that. But.
ELM: [laughs] I’m imagining you at some party talking to Harry Styles…
FK: Yeah, right, like it would not be good. I wouldn’t…want that.
ELM: [overlapping, still laughing] The face you…the face you just made!
FK: [laughs] Right. But at the same time, you know, upon publishing that, I had to accept the possibility, however tiny, that could in theory happen and then I would have to deal with whatever the emotional fallout of that was, and that was a tradeoff that I was gonna make. So I mean, that’s not very helpful to say, but it may be worthwhile thinking of it in those terms, as opposed to like, how do we get this guy to stop?
ELM: Yeah.
FK: Because you can’t make him stop, right, and you can’t make other fans stop. The only thing you control is your own reactions to this situation, and really processing those and trying to make good decisions for yourself.
ELM: It’s interesting, I feel like fanartists had to go through this years ago. Right? Like…
FK: Oh, definitely.
ELM: I think that the world, Hollywood or whatever, this is a band, you know…the Powers That Be learned about fanart, started looking at fanart in a more serious way, a while ago?
FK: [overlapping] Yeah. Yeah, and people were like, shoving fanart in people’s faces to sign it or whatever, like people in the early 90s were having to deal with the fact that someone had shoved their picture of Brent Spiner as a centaur in his face and made him sign it.
ELM: [laughs] Right.
FK: Brent Spiner is Data on TNG, if anybody doesn’t know, and yeah. It’s a whole thing.
ELM: [overlapping] Who doesn’t know that? Who doesn’t know that?
FK: Youths?
ELM: Also he has a, you know, a famous cameo in one of the final episodes of Frasier.
FK: [laughs] The youths don’t know about that either. Anyway.
ELM: [overlapping] They should know, they should know, it was in the 2000s when the final season of Frasier aired, so.
FK: Yeah, I mean they should also know because he’s on Star Trek right now, but this is a separate issue.
ELM: Youths do love CBS-Paramount’s Picard.
FK: [laughs] All right, do you think that we’re at the end of this letter, should we read the next one?
ELM: Uh, yeah. To anon, good luck, and you know, one final thing I will say is, if you see anyone you know and that you’re friends with in the fandom doing this kind of thing, I think it’s worth saying, you know, instead of the like, I see this a lot, the sort of concern trolling sort of, “Um the reason why we need to not show actors or musicians our fic is like, these historical reasons” or whatever, instead I would say present it from a personal perspective—
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Center yourself, and say “Hey, like, I know it’s cool that he doesn’t hate this, but actually this makes me really uncomfortable, makes me wanna not put my stuff out there anymore, hopefully me as a fellow fan, my reaction is more important, my psychological safety is more important to you than this guy who is not in the fandom, he’s the object of fandom.” Right, you know, and really try to center yourself and your fellow writers there as opposed to…I don’t know, I just see this kind of genenralize-y, well-meaning shamey thing when people talk about this, and it’s like, I don't feel like that’s the best strategy tbh.
FK: Definitely agree, “I” statements are good.
ELM: Yeah, succinctly put!
FK: All right, will you read us the next letter?
ELM: All right, I’ll do it. OK, next letter, I was gonna say, what’s it called, not first-time caller…long-time letter writer? [FK laughs] Not first-time, long-time? You know what I’m trying to say.
FK: Yeah, long-time. Long-time.
ELM: fairkid-forever, we have read fairkid’s letters before, they’re great. So this one says:
“I would love to hear your thoughts on author’s notes! I recently read a take from a fan author I like that ANY author’s notes detract from what ought to be standalone text and undermine the readers’ confidence in the writing itself, because published novels don't contain authorial glosses at the beginning and end of each chapter. I can understand that position but also fic publishing can be much more communal than traditional publishing and author’s notes are one of the main ways that back-and-forth relationship is established. That said, ever since reading that post, I’ve kept my author’s notes very brief and to the point. It feels more...professional? Somehow? Idk. Would love your thoughts. Love the show!”
FK: I think this is a totally cultural/subcultural norm, and everyone’s mileage may vary. I personally don’t write super, super long author’s notes, but I don’t know, I mean it seems weird to me to say that it’s unprofessional or like, that’s not even the right word, that it undermines readers’ confidence to write long ones? Because in different spaces, that’s sometimes the norm. What do you think, Elizabeth?
ELM: Yeah, yeah. I don’t think “professional” should come into this at all, these are literally not professional texts, right?
FK: [overlapping] Yeah. That’s the point. [both laugh]
ELM: I also think that, you know, these are networked texts, these are, as it says in the letter, communally constructed texts. I think it’s contextual, it depends on the work, right, but many fics do have this direct, “Oh, I took your comments from the last chapter and I incorporated them,” or like, “You guys said you wanted this, and so like…” you know, it really feels like that's the only way you can have a conversation, is within the work itself and not in some sort of behind-the-scenes outtakes over on your Tumblr or whatever. We’ve had a long history, even predating the AO3, of kind of showing that process, right?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And that is one thing that makes fanfiction genuinely interesting from like, with my English major hat on, you know?
FK: Yeah!
ELM: That being said, like you, I try to do very few author’s notes, in the beginnings of fics I will maybe thank the prompter, thank betas, I will say where I got the title from because I usually yank titles from somewhere else…publishing long fics, if there were any delays I would say sorry about the delay. But I will say, and this is about me, not about me judging anyone else’s work, but one of the things I try to do is, after doing a probably silly amount of research, as you’ve seen firsthand, it’s important to me to feel secure enough to not show my work in a bunch of notes at the bottom, right?
FK: Right.
ELM: And like, I will say for me personally, when I see a ton of people being like, “Did you catch that reference? Did you?”
FK: Yeah. [laughs]
ELM: That’s a bit of a turn-off for me. You know? And I totally get the impulse, and whenever anyone in a comment is like, “I caught that reference,” I’m like “Yeah! I knew someone would notice!” Right, you know? But like, it does feel to me—and maybe this is my own internalized whatever—but it is important to me…so I guess in a tiny bit of a way I do share some agreement with the OP of the statement fairkid is talking about here.
FK: Right. I do think that there are things you can say in your author’s note that undermine your work. I think it’s very possible to do that. I think that there, like people…
ELM: [overlapping] Oh, like, “I suck,” you know, “this is garbage.”
FK: [overlapping] Yeah I mean, or just saying, “I’m not sure about this, I’m really anxious,” whatever.
ELM: Yeah, yeah.
FK: Sometimes you can incept people into understanding the work in a particular way that they might otherwise not care. Like I’ve seen authors be like, “Don’t yell at me, don’t yell at me, don’t yell at me,” and then when people yell at them they’re like—
ELM: Right.
FK: “I told you not to!” and it’s like, well, I don’t think they would have even thought to yell at you about this if you hadn’t said that. But I don’t think that has to do with the length of the author’s note.
ELM: No.
FK: It has to do with what you’ve chosen to put into it. Similarly you can talk about delays in ways that are incredibly annoying.
ELM: [laughs, overlapping] Yes, yes.
FK: You know, right? But you can also talk about them in ways that are like, “Here’s what’s going on in my life,” and I think I’ve really enjoyed sometimes, there have been some authors that I’ve read who leave really chatty, kind of long author’s notes that talk about what’s going on in their lives and how they’re doing and everything, almost like a little blog post on the end of a long chapter, and sometimes I’ve found that really charming.
ELM: [overlapping] Oh, you like that?
FK: [overlapping] Because it is, like if I’m not following them on Tumblr, right, you know what I mean, if I’m not following them elsewhere it’s like “Oh yeah! How are you doing?” [laughs]
ELM: This is so funny. I don’t want that, personally. I’m not gonna hold it against them unless it feels very, like…actually sometimes, oh my God, I love how I was like, felt very strong out of the gate on this one, “No, that person’s wrong,” and now I’m like, “Actually… [FK laughs] these are things that deeply turn me off.” Sometimes, what I will say—and I totally get this because I was a youth once—there’s a strong vibe of like…I don’t know, did you do this, when you had to email professors to explain to them why you’re missing a class or why you need an extension, and you…there’s a famous meme about this now, where you write five paragraphs—
FK: [overlapping] Overexplaining. Yeah.
ELM: [overlapping] Yeah, and then they’re like, “Great, thanks. Professor J” or whatever, [laughs] and students are like, “What?” But sometimes if I ever encounter emails from back then, from in college, and I’m like, “What was I doing, why did I give that much information? They don’t care!” Right, like, I just need to say “I’m so sorry, I’m late, I can get it to you by this time.” You know? And this is, like, things I’ve learned being in the working world for…quite some time now actually. [laughs]
FK: [overlapping] Yeah. I agree. Yes.
ELM: [overlapping] And it's something I definitely have noticed, training young people who, fresh out of college and stuff like that, in previous jobs. And I think there’s some element of that that you see in fics where it’s like, people are giving you a lot of details and you’re like, “I didn’t need to know all that, just tell me that life is busy.”
FK: [overlapping] I agree with that. Yeah. Right. [wavering] Ehh…
ELM: [overlapping] But to your credit, maybe people wanna know, like, the exact day that they had to move, right? [laughs] And exactly what that entailed to them emotionally, the act of moving, as though we don’t all immediately know what moving is, you know what I mean?
FK: I don’t know, I mean like I said, if you’re not getting a Tumblr, if you’re not getting anything else, I think that there are times when I have enjoyed that. Not all the time, but there have been times when I’ve enjoyed that.
I mean, similarly, saying something doesn’t stand up on its own, I definitely agree with you that I find it annoying when people put every reference that they made. Like, no, too much. But sometimes, every once in a while, someone has a little note and is like, “By the way, this is the dress that I envisioned so-and-so wearing.”
ELM: Sure.
FK: And with a little link to it or whatever, and I find that enjoy—like, sometimes I find that enjoyable. I mean I’ve done some similar things like that, “Just in case, in case you need a visual reference, here it is!” Which is sort of undermining it, I hope that people don’t need a visual reference to enjoy it, but it’s also kind of, you could also think of it as like, “Here’s a little multimedia thing!” [laughs]
ELM: DVD bonuses or whatever. [simultaneous] Yeah.
FK: [simultaneous] Yeah!
ELM: I think that, in writers that I think are truly spectacular, sometimes they’ll do this and I’ll be like, “Oh, you’re a genius, and there are some of your sources,” right, and that’s such a high bar for me that I just set…that’s like, an impossible bar, if I’m like “You can do that if you’re a genius.” [FK laughs] In reality, anyone could do this, and…none of you care if your work is for me, right? You know? Like, who cares.
FK: [overlapping] Exactly! Like, not everybody’s work is for everybody.
ELM: [overlapping] Yeah. And like, if people are back, backspacing…backspacing? Hitting “back” on your fic? [FK laughs] What is the term for going backwards? [laughs] Hitting the back button?
FK: Hitting the back button.
ELM: [laughs] On your fic, because they don’t like…I don’t know, the things that we’re describing in author’s notes you can also do in the tags in ways that turn me off too, when they’re like…
FK: Sure!
ELM: You know, I honestly think that people should not bother to say that they haven’t beta read it. I’ll notice, right? I’ll probably be able to tell if you haven’t beta read it. I get that it’s kind of like…
FK: [overlapping] And if you can’t tell, then why did you tell me?
ELM: Right! Yeah! And maybe it doesn’t matter to you, maybe you’re not a super careful reader, maybe English is not your first language and it’s less noticeable to you because you’re not fluent, right?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: So don’t tell us. And I get, I think that the thing you were describing earlier about like, it feels someone protective, it’s kind of this preemptive sort of like, “Oh, I’m sorry, I don’t know, I don’t know what I’m doing here,” you know?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: That happens in tags, not just in author’s notes, and I would love it if people would kinda cut that out, because I think they are undermining themselves sometimes. Fake it ’til you make it, and don’t, don’t broadcast your insecurities, and you’ll probably be surprised! People probably aren’t gonna catch them, and if they do, you’ll never know, because you’re really not supposed to say negative things on fics these days. [laughs]
FK: [overlapping] Yeah! Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. That said, I think it’s important to note, this is not a one-size-fits-all like, “Never put in author’s notes because it’s unprofessional” thing, I think that’s the wrong way to frame it.
ELM: Oh, absolutely, I totally agree. I mean we both write author’s notes.
FK: Absolutely.
ELM: That’s, I think that is an integral—I mean you don’t have to, but I think that is a core part of fanfiction, so like, it’s weird to suggest that that’s like…you know. And I guess one final thing I’ll say on the subject too is, if you read a published novel, yeah, they don’t put little notes at the beginning of each chapter, but they do say a lot often in the acknowledgements, they may say, if they write an introduction of some kind, probably not for a novel but in a book, you know, they’ll say a lot of things. So, you know, the idea that the author just slaps the core story at you and then vanishes is not…it’s not realistic, I don’t know any genre, any kind of published work, that makes the author be so invisible.
FK: I agree. I agree. All right, shall we move on to the next letter?
ELM: Yes, thank you very much, fairkid-forever, as always. Great question.
FK: Yes, thank you. OK. Next one. This is from someone anonymous.
“This email is about a really insular issue that I’m not sure is common among other fandoms but has really been bothering me. I watched the new Batman movie and was immediately enamored with the dynamic between Batman and Catwoman. It’s a classic ship but I loved the new dimensions the film added to it. I immediately went to AO3 and found that Bruce/Selina fic was easily eclipsed by Bruce/Reader fic. I didn’t necessarily have an issue with this until I started reading the fic and noticed that many of them had the exact same dynamic as Bruce and Selina except with Selina swapped out for the reader.
“As the weeks went on and the content gap between the pairings widened it started to really bother me. I couldn’t help but see the racial dynamic at play. I am a black woman and so is Selina in this version of Batman. And despite the actress, Zoë Kravitz, being the most “acceptable” version of black according to Hollywood I still think her race has hindered some authors from investing in that character. I know people can write what they want and that reader fic isn’t just projection but it still comes off to me that majority white authors cannot get fannishly invested in black characters like they do white characters. Like would the fic gap between these pairings be as wide if Selina was played by a white actress? I don’t think it would be.
“Is this something you’ve witnessed in other fandoms? Can reader fic be a way for white authors to circumvent having to write black or nonwhite characters? I understand y’all aren’t black but I’d love your perspective.
“Thanks, Anon”
ELM: Anon, thank you so much for writing in about this, we were really, really interested to read this, because I feel like this is a real world example of some of the more theoretical framings that, that we and some of our listeners have written in about talking about Reader x fic.
FK: Yeah. Absolutely.
ELM: [overlapping] Right? Like, I’m thinking of the letter specifically that Anisa Khalifa wrote in to us, right, and we had a few other people I think kind of tackle this stuff too, and this sort of idea that like, the blankness of the “reader” is a white person.
FK: Yeah. The blankness is in fact whiteness. [laughs]
ELM: Yes, right? You know when they always draw the like, the blank character, and it’s like that little bald-headed guy, right?
FK: [overlapping] Yeah, little bald-headed dude, yeah.
ELM: And, anyway whatever, people do draw him in different colors, but often he’s drawn as a little white guy. So. [laughs]
FK: Yeah. Yeah!
ELM: And on a similar dimension too, you know, in our trans episode I know we had folks talking about this as well, saying like, “You know, you say gender neutral reader, but actually it seems like you’re describing a cis female reader.” But to hear the specific racial elements here, obviously very troubling, but I, I appreciate hearing a really specific example of something that we—also something so recent that we can like, kind of understand and contextualize.
FK: Yeah! I mean, I think, I think that anon is right, I think that this is racial. And I think that it’s racial both because people are racist, and I think it’s also racial because people are…afraid of writing characters of another race because it’s not Own Voices, you know, or they don’t understand, or what have you. I don’t know how to fully address that.
Like, I’ve written fic about a white man and a Black female character who are in a ship together, and I was very nervous about it, because I was like, even stuff just as simple as how she deals with her hair when she goes to bed, and things like that, I was like, “I don’t know those details, and I need to go research them, and also is it weird for me to be writing that detail?” Like, I’m writing a—you know, it was a complicated thing, is what I’m saying.
ELM: Right. Yeah.
FK: And I think that, that’s not to let people off the hook for doing this, because I don’t think they should be let off the hook, I think that that’s like, [laughs] if you really like that character, you know, if you really like the Batman character, you should be willing to invest in the pairing that you’re clearly vibing with. You know? Enough to do that research.
ELM: Yeah, I think it’s the distinction of that, it’s not like they’re just really into Robert Pattinson’s…I don’t know why I’m calling him all those words, the RBatz, right, you know…
FK: [overlapping] RBatz!
ELM: [laughs] You know, and they really liked his vibe, and they’re just like, because I see plenty of Reader x stuff where it’s like, so clearly they just have a—I shouldn’t say it so diminishingly but like—so clearly they have a crush on this actor.
FK: Right.
ELM: And often I’ll read through this, because you know, I think we both encounter this looking through the tags of characters on Tumblr, but like…and the character has no resemblance to the character, but there’s a picture of them and you’re like, “OK. That’s just a nice little fantasy,” right?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: But to hear that it has, often has that dynamic, is very damning. Because there obviously would be an argument to be made that if you didn’t want to write that dynamic, but it would feel OOC to write Catwoman, I don’t know, being super domestic or whatever, I don't know what you would want to do with her, like, sure.
FK: Sure, but on the other hand, it doesn’t really stop people most of the time, right?
ELM: [overlapping] Yeah, that’s fair.
FK: [overlapping] When you think about it, there’s lots of characters who we classify as a Little Black Dress of fandom, right, they’re written in any way with any person, and like, those characters…
ELM: [overlapping] You shouldn’t do that with Catwoman though, that’s inappropriate, she’s so sexy. [laughs]
FK: Yeah, I mean I don’t think people should do that particularly with any character. My point being though, I do, I think you’re right that there’s an argument to be made with that, and I think that somebody could, with integrity, make that argument, but I also think that when you see it as like an overall trend? Because most people do not make that argument with integrity for white characters, [laughs] and they’re certainly not doing it for Black characters.
ELM: Yeah, absolutely. No, the, the funny thing about this too is, now you have me thinking, because as you well know I have written another Zoë Kravitz character.
FK: You have.
ELM: But she is the…the object of, I’ve written from the POV of the other half of the ship, right?
FK: Right.
ELM: Which in this case is femslash, and…that’s interesting to me too, to think like, well, these are people who want to write Reader x, they don’t wanna write from the perspective of the guy, right, these are het readers who probably are women, you know what I mean?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Yeah, no, I mean not to objectify Zoë Kravitz, but I felt like a total creeper because I had to watch a bunch of things to describe her boobs accurately. [FK laughs] Really made me feel like…really made me feel like, I don’t know, it’s different in femslash, I feel like. [FK laughs again] With dudes I’m like, whatever, I’ll look at all the pictures of you I need to.
FK: [overlapping, laughing] Objectify away!
ELM: Yeah! I’ll, I’m like, who cares, go ahead, wear less so I can describe your proportions correctly. But there I was like, “Oh, I’m sorry, [FK laughs] I don’t, eh…I feel like I’m ogling you,” you know?
FK: You, you were, a little bit.
ELM: I mean I kinda was! She’s sexy! [laughs]
FK: She—I—there’s no argument here.
ELM: [overlapping, still laughing] She’s like, one of the sexiest!
FK: Yeah, I agree, I agree with this. OK. I think…
ELM: [overlapping] Anyway, I’m not trying to pat myself on the back for writing fanfiction about a character portrayed by Zoë Kravitz, but I’m saying, I think to your point, as a white person, I’m not sure I would feel super comfortable writing from her perspective. I love including the character she plays in my, in my fandom source material, right?
FK: Right.
ELM: But like, she is, but I’m never inside her head. And I feel like I’m trying to treat that character with integrity, and trying to understand where she would be coming from, but that’s really different than being like, seeing the world through her eyes.
FK: Right.
ELM: And that being said, do I see the world through the eyes of, like, a blue shapeshifter? Like, maybe, because that’s a character that’s coded as white also, but you know what I mean?
FK: [overlapping] Exactly! Yeah, yeah yeah, no, no, I do. I mean that was…yeah. I think different people are gonna come down in different places on this, but I do suspect that most people who are doing this, like I think there are lots of places that you can potentially come down, and also I’m not the arbiter who gets to decide that and neither is any individual person really, because everybody can have different opinions about how this works in art, but I think that likely the people who are writing reader and RBatz fic are as a whole probably not thinking that deeply about this and are probably acting on like, unexamined anxieties around this issue. And that sucks.
ELM: Right! I mean, like, with racist subtext, racist undertones, right, I think it’s worth reiterating again, you know?
FK: [overlapping] Right! Yeah yeah yeah. Yep.
ELM: Is the unexamined white perspective here. Right, you know?
FK: Yeah. All right, well, that’s depressing, I’m sorry nonny, but you’re not nuts.
ELM: No.
FK: That’s a thing.
ELM: Yeah, I would love to know, I mean I think reader-insert fic is only getting more and more popular, I’d be curious to know if anyone else has encountered other examples like this?
FK: Please write in and tell us.
ELM: Yeah, I’d be interested to hear. I think this is hard, I think that anon is kind of hitting it in the way that they’re describing, too, it just feels like this is what’s happening, kinda the vibe I’m picking up, right, but this is a really hard thing to quantify, no one’s tagging their work this way, but like—I said this last episode, but—you know it when you see it also, right? So.
FK: Yeah, “This is in fact Reader and RBatz, Catwoman but white!”
ELM: Yes.
FK: Yeah. [sighs]
ELM: All right. Well I, and I’m sorry to anon too, that sucks, I wish more folks were writing fic about uh, Zoë Kravitz, the sexiest.
FK: Yeah! Or—
ELM: [overlapping] Just, I’m gonna objectify her on the way out. [laughs]
FK: [overlapping] Yeah, or, or about whatever, or RBatz and Reader where the reader is not coded as white, right, like that also would be nice. [laughs] But, you know.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: All right. I think that brings us to a good point to take a break, should we do that?
ELM: Yeah, let’s do it.
[Interstitial music]
FK: All right, we’re back, and before we dive back into our letterbox, it’s worth noting how you can send us a letter!
ELM: Yeah, we gotta make Ask Fansplaining Anythings 14 through 20!
FK: Yeah. OK. So, you can support us in lots of ways. The primary one is to pledge to our Patreon, patreon.com/fansplaining. There’s lots of different levels that you can pledge, and you get lots of cool things like access to our special episodes, a neat little fan pin, a Tiny Zine every once in a while depending on your level…so go check that out, and if you really like what we’re doing here, that helps us keep making the podcast. But, also, if you don’t have money or don’t want to give us money or if you’re just really inspired by this episode, you can send us letters!
ELM: You can give us money and send us letters. That’s the best of both worlds, honestly, we’ll send you stuff, you send us stuff…
FK: Right.
ELM: Money and letters.
FK: Money and letters, OK. [ELM laughs] So you can do that by: emailing at fansplaining@gmail.com; calling 1-401-526-FANS and leaving a voicemail, which is exciting and cool and your voice gets to be on our podcast in that case; you can leave us an asks in our Tumblr ask box, or we have a form on our website, Fansplaining.com, that you can fill out to get us a message; you can also reach out to us on social media, we’re Fansplaining on Twitter and Instagram. So, lots of ways you can get in touch with us, and your contributions make episodes like this one happen.
ELM: I’m just hung up on the fact that you describe leaving a voicemail as “exciting and cool.”
FK: I mean…
ELM: Like, just a hint of youth pastor energy.
FK: I—wha—look—
ELM: Kids, you know what’s exciting and cool?
FK: Exciting and cool? Jesus! [both laugh]
ELM: A guy called Jesus, yeah. That’s right.
FK: There is, yeah, there is, there’s like a running joke of, “You know who else did x thing? [ELM laughs] Yeah, Jesus.” And I couldn’t quite work that in here.
ELM: [overlapping, laughing] No, this is like, I feel like, a meme on Twitter where it’s not just that it’s like, “Turns baseball cap backwards, flips the chair backwards, [both laugh] ‘Hey kids!’” Or the other one, like “Pulls out my guitar like ‘Hey kids,’” you know? Yeah, yeah.
FK: [overlapping] Oh yeah, yup, absolutely, absolutely, let’s all sing “Sanctuary” together. Anyway. All right.
ELM: Sorry to bring up Christianity again. I do apologize. [laughs]
FK: It’s, it’s fine, that’s my—
ELM: No, apologizing to everyone else, not to you, priest school person.
FK: [overlapping] OK, that’s right, that’s correct.
ELM: All right.
FK: OK.
ELM: Business done.
FK: Shall we?
ELM: Yes, let’s shall.
FK: Will you read us the next letter?
ELM: Um, yeah, it’s my turn?
FK: It’s your turn!
ELM: OK, I’m ready. Another anon. Big group of anons here, love it.
“Hello Fansplaining, love the podcast!
“I have some questions about crossovers and AUs, what a fusion is, and where the line is. I’ve done some googling and I don’t see clear answers.”
Sidenote: I love this, I love this summary up front. I feel like I’m about to read a technical article, you know? Like, “This article covers: crossovers, fusions!” [both laugh] OK.
“To me a true crossover includes characters from multiple media properties interacting, and probably characters from both are fairly major characters. If some non-character aspects of one media were involved, I’d call it something else. I’d consider if the characters from media X go to Hogwarts a Hogwarts AU, unless characters from Harry Potter appeared. If the media X characters had Dæmons, I’d consider it and Dæmons AU, not a crossover with His Dark Materials. These cases seem simple but I’m not sure where the line is, or about less established AUs.
“Even though I think these cases are fairly simple, skimming AO3, some people seem to tag Dæmons AUs with His Dark Materials in the fandom tag, even though, as far as I can tell from tags and summary, HDM characters do not appear. So, it seems other people have different ideas. Other people must draw the line somewhere else. Where?
“If one namedrops some characters from HP in a Hogwarts AU is it then a crossover? What about if the characters appear in a minor role? I’m not sure.
“I wouldn’t want to read a fic if I didn’t know any of the main characters, even if I was familiar with the setting, but I might read a crossover between a fandom I’m familiar with and one I’m not if my favs were some of the important characters. I read a wonderful Inception crossover with one of my favorite fandoms many years before I watched Inception, but I wouldn’t have read it if half the main characters weren’t from my fandom even though the setting was from my fandom. Are other people happy to read crossovers/AUs if they’re familiar with the setting (and maybe some background characters) but not the main characters?
“With Hogwarts or Dæmons, there are tags in the additional tags from AO3 to choose if one doesn’t use the HP or HDM fandom tags. What if I want to write a magic AU for my fandom X, but specifically take the magic system obviously and directly from small fandom Y. How would I tag? “Alternate Universe – Magic” and then mention in the tags/authors notes that it’s inspired by fandom Y? Make a new tag: “Alternate Universe – Fandom Y Magic”? or “Alternate Universe – Fandom Y Fusion”? or should I use the fandom tag from Y as well as Fandom X?
“What is a fusion?” [both laugh] I feel like this letter’s so, this letter is rapidly reminding me of Jerry Seinfeld being like, “And what’s a fusion?”
FK: [overlapping] Yes, it is! [laughs] Go for it.
ELM: [overlapping] Anon, that’s a compliment. I mean, Seinfeld, you know. OK.
“What is a fusion? I only have a vague idea what it is, but I thought it involved a closer mashup than the sorts of things I’m talking about. Like a fic writer decides two high school mangas actually take place at the same school and draw on setting and characters from both. But I’ve seen some definitions saying the opposite: a fusion is characters from fandom X in world Y, and what I just said with both characters and worlds is a crossover.
“I want to use words in a way people will understand what I’m talking about. And I want to be able to tag the fic so relevant people can easily find or avoid my fic. I am not sure of the definitions of these terms, and am also not sure there are clear widely agreed upon answers. I’d love to hear your thoughts!
“Best, Anon”
FK: All right, nonny. I don’t know if everyone agrees with me on my definitions of these terms. But I’m ready to go in.
ELM: [overlapping] I’m gonna say they don’t. They don’t, because I see the way people are confused on this from just The Rec Center submissions.
FK: Great. Well, I’m gonna go in with what I think these terms mean.
ELM: Hit me, hit me.
FK: OK. So I think that a crossover between two fandoms is indeed a crossover where the main characters from one fandom interact with at least some characters from another fandom in a substantial way. Not necessarily—
ELM: [overlapping] You’re saying main? Main?
FK: I think that you have to have main characters from at least one fandom interacting with characters from another fandom for it to be a proper crossover.
ELM: What if I want, um…Wesley from Buffy and Angel…oh, no, he’s a main character in Angel. What’s a true…Oz, from Buffy, meets Seamus Finnegan from Harry Potter in a bar.
FK: Sure. OK. That could be a crossover. But I think that there have to be—
ELM: [overlapping] Like, they could be the same level, right?
FK: But I, yeah, right, I think what I mean is like…
ELM: [overlapping] Characters we’d recognize if we had consumed that media.
FK: Sure. I think that it’s characters from one story interacting from another piece of media. That’s a crossover to me.
ELM: [overlapping] You know my Oz/Seamus, it’s called, uh…”Ginger Wolf Magic.” [both laugh]
FK: I think an AU is taking characters from one media property and plunking them into another media property wholesale. So if you write a story in which like, a very famous one that exists, where Dean and Sam from Supernatural discover actually that their Hogwarts letters got delayed and they go to Hogwarts, [ELM laughs] and they’re at Hogwarts and they don’t, you know, in the background Harry and Hermione and so forth are mentioned but they don’t actually interact with them, or they interact with them basically not at all and it’s really just focused on those two characters? To me, that is a Hogwarts AU, potentially.
ELM: Sure.
FK: Or a Hogwarts AU could also be where you just take—this is not what this fic is like, but—it could be a story in which you just took them and it’s not like their previous life ever existed, they are just in Hogwarts, there’s no explanation of what the deal is, they’re just in Hogwarts and it’s all within that.
ELM: [overlapping] Right. I have encountered these Hogwarts AUs. Yes.
FK: Those are both, to me, those are both Hogwarts AUs. Then a fusion is something where you take one concept from a, you know, from a world, and put it into another. So to me, if you say like, this is a Sentinel fic, most Sentinel fics are, to me, stories that take the concept of Sentinels…most of those are actually fusions. Or if you take the idea of like, drift compatibility from Pacific Rim and you just take the Pacific Rim idea and put it into a world that is otherwise the same as the original world of the media, so you’re just pulling over a magic system, or you know, a concept like having a dæmon or something like that, to me that’s a fusion. So, those are my definitions of those things.
ELM: Interesting. So I definitely agree with you on crossover. To me, a crossover, I’m gonna need to see two characters from two different properties interacting. And they don’t need to be the stars…
FK: [overlapping] Right, you’re right. You were right on that one. I was being…
ELM: [overlapping] It could be farther than that, it could be like, who’s been in one episode of—the Mayor, from Buffy, and I’m trying to think of a Harry Potter character that you see very little of.
FK: Dolores Umbridge!
ELM: You see so much of her!
FK: Sure.
ELM: That’d be such a boring story, I’m sorry. The Mayor is such a good villain, and Dolores Umbridge is…not.
FK: [overlapping] Fine. But, yes, I agree with you on that.
ELM: OK, crossovers, yes. Your AU and fusion divisions, I’m not sure I 100% agree with. So like, I totally get the, the conceptual thing, right, that is usually what you encounter, the dæmon AU, the, there’s an X-Men series I love that, where they all do Inception. Right? And there’s a passing reference to Leonardo DiCaprio, whatever his name is in that movie, Cobb, right?
FK: [overlapping] Yeah. Him. That guy.
ELM: [overlapping] You know, yeah, they’re like, it’s like a cautionary tale that someone mentions in passing, and actually they’ve really fleshed out the whole world, what it would mean if there were other people doing this too, which I’m sure Inception fics do all the time. But it felt like, I assume it was in conversation with those fics as well. But I'm also thinking of an X-Men fic that I love a great deal, where Erik Lehnsherr, Magneto, is Batman.
FK: Right.
ELM: That’s not like, is that a concept? Because the concepts that we’re talking about are like…
FK: No, I think that’s a Batman AU.
ELM: I don’t, I think I’d put that in fusion.
FK: Oh, maybe. Maybe.
ELM: [overlapping] I don’t, I think that “AU” is kind of a meaningless term here, I think it’s too broad an umbrella. Yeah, it’s, it’s an AU, it’s a Batman AU, right, you know, I definitely, yeah, sure. The other one’s an Inception AU. It’s also a fusion.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Right? A Hogwarts AU, right, but is also a fusion.
FK: [overlapping] Yes, that’s right. Uhh…
ELM: Because like…I don’t know, I feel like, then it, you’re defining fusion as only big concepts. And I don’t, I’m not sure that’s, that I agree with that.
FK: Well, I will say I do think it’s marshy in actual use. Like, whether—
ELM: Oh yeah.
FK: These are the terms that I would use to tag my fic, probably? But also there’s some fandoms in which a particular way of tagging a fic is normalized. So like, if “Inception AU” is the way people talk about something that I would normally call a fusion, but everyone’s using the term “Inception AU,” I’m gonna use that term.
ELM: [overlapping] Well, I mean, why wouldn’t you use both, also? Like, first of all, if you say “fusion,” that doesn’t hurt anyone.
FK: [overlapping] Yeah, maybe both. True.
ELM: [overlapping] And then you know, if you wanna say “crossover” go ahead, but I think that it's confusing. I think that the trouble comes when, like, as anon’s describing, people start then tagging Inception in there, and that’s gotta be super annoying for people in Inception fandom that wanted to see Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Tom Hardy bone. Right?
FK: [overlapping] I agree with that.
ELM: Or, or any of the other pairings, I’m assuming. Like, as someone who was in the Harry Potter fandom for a long time, I have literally no interest in reading random characters of shows I’ve never seen in the Harry Potter world, right, you know?
FK: Agreed.
ELM: Because, presumably then you’re missing all the references from those CW shows or whatever, right? Like…
FK: I don’t even like watching—I don’t usually even like reading crossovers with things I don’t know. Occasionally I’ll do it, but pretty rarely.
ELM: I think crossovers are very polarizing, I think a lot of people just straight up hate them also. There’s a reason why this is the main thing you can exclude.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: It’s an actual built-in functionality thing on the AO3 now that you can say “exclude crossovers” because I think people—I mean I think part of that too is, I think a huge part of the reason they implemented that was because so many people were doing the 100 drabbles in 100 fandoms in one fic right? Like, I get it, you know?
FK: Yeah, yeah, or alternately something where you have like, characters from 20 different things showing up in a way that doesn’t necessarily…
ELM: That’s a crossover!
FK: It’s a crossover, don’t wanna read it. To me that’s very different than some other kinds of crossovers, but.
ELM: Yeah, there’s a special kind of one too, where it’ll be like, the top 20 white male slash ships.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Like, all in one fandom, and it’s like what? What’s going on here? I saw one where it was like, “They all live on the same street,” and I was like, “Oh no. Not for me.” [laughs]
FK: Yeah. All right, well, what would you then say to our anonymous writer-inner?
ELM: I would think strongly about readers as you’re tagging. And I agree with you that fandoms have certain norms. But you know, I’m conscious of this, I imagine you are too, if I have a background ship, especially a very minor ship, I’m not putting it in the ship tags, because I know how disappointing that can be to click on what you think is gonna be about your ship, and they’re actually just mentioned in passing or like, have one scene or whatever, right?
So similarly, don’t tag it “Inception” if it’s just using the concept from Inception. You have the whole additional tags section there to then say “Inception AU.” “Fusion.” In addition to the tags, you then have the, uh, the author’s notes, tying it back here, where you could say, “This is based on, this is taking the concepts from Inception” or like “This is set in the same world as Inception, but our characters don’t know Joseph Gordon-Levitt.”
FK: Mm hmm.
ELM: So just like, be really clear about that. But first and foremost, that story is probably about the main fandom you’re writing about, and so that’s how you should tag it. So like, I think you could do a lot of work not just in the tags but really use the author’s notes and make it clear, if you’re borrowing a magic system from another book…I don’t know what good it serves to really put it in the tags, because you’re probably just gonna be misleading people who really loved that book that you took the idea from.
FK: Yeah, I mean you could even, if you want to advertise the fact that it’s related to that book, you can put it in your description, right? You have to— [laughs]
ELM: [overlapping] You should! Yeah! Right? Exactly, yeah yeah yeah.
FK: Right. Cool.
ELM: I mean I’ve certainly used concepts from things and like, just put it in the notes in the beginning, so you’re like “This is based loosely on this concept, you don’t need to know anything about that, just letting you know, you’ll recognize it if you do know that thing.” Right? But I wouldn't advertise it that way.
FK: [overlapping] And maybe you’ll enjoy it!
ELM: Yeah!
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Exactly, exactly.
FK: All right. Thank you very much, anonymous, that was a great question, and I’m sure one that many other people have.
ELM: Sorry I called you Jerry Seinfeld, but. I mean, it was meant to be a compliment in that scenario specifically.
FK: OK. [laughs] All right, shall I read the next letter?
ELM: [overlapping] Not, not in other scenarios. [laughs]
FK: All right, I’m gonna read the next letter. This is also from someone anonymous.
“Hi Fansplaining! I have a question about bad TV. My friend and I are pretty active in a CW show fandom, we love the fanfiction, art etc. but we truly think the show is horrendous. Why are some of the biggest fandoms from shows that are so bad?? Why are we so invested in a plot that doesn’t make sense? Do people who work on the show truly believe they are making good TV or are they just following a template for ‘bad’ TV?? I’m so genuinely curious and mean no malice to any of these shows.”
ELM: All right. [doing a hardboiled voice] Gonna let you in on a little industry secret. You get into town—Hollywood, that is—[FK laughs] and they take you to…I dunno, what’s a street? La Cienega. [both laugh] And they’re like, “Here. Here’s the template. Here’s the template for the bad show. And you memorize it, and then you go make a bad show.” [FK laughs] I dunno why, why this person has such a strong outer borough accent right now, but that’s—
FK: [overlapping] I have no…is it because it’s your…
ELM: [Still in the accent] What if I, what if I did the entire podcast like this?
FK: I would murder you and quit the podcast. In that order. [ELM laughs] I would murder you and then quit the podcast.
ELM: [laughing] You’d do one last episode by yourself. “Here’s how it went down.”
FK: [overlapping] I would! I would. [ELM still laughing] I would be like, “I’m sorry, not that I did murder my podcast partner, but if I did it…” No, I mean, it’s like…I think everybody who makes TV is trying to make the best TV they can, I think that people are aware of the…limitations of their shows, like there are definitely, I don’t think people writing on a CW show think they’re making an HBO show. Right? [laughs] They’re still trying to do a good job within the limitations of what that show is, but I don’t think people are, like, thinking that it’s Shakespeare.
ELM: Well, I feel like that was a very complicated statement that you just made. [FK laughs] First of all, “They know it’s not an HBO show,” what does that mean?
FK: Um…HBO shows…
ELM: Like, more rigorous standards?
FK: I think to some extent more rigorous standards, but I think also higher, much higher budgets, which actually make a much larger difference to most of this stuff than people outwardly understand.
ELM: Sure.
FK: And I think also a different audience. Like, I think that there is an audience for bad TV, “bad TV,” right? I mean what are you gonna do, are you gonna say that like, I don’t know, there’s a lot of shows that are just sort of popcorn, they’re not great art but you really enjoy watching them, and there’s an art to making that kind of show.
ELM: True.
FK: The plot doesn’t make sense? OK! That’s not the point of the show sometimes. So yeah, I think that people are invested in trying to make things good on some axis, but it may not be the axis of, like, quality. Do you see what I’m saying? [laughs]
ELM: Interesting. Yeah, yeah, I mean I also think, it’s interesting, I feel like people, when I talk to TV writers, they, you know, I think it’s a little muddled now with these streaming services, but I do think that they can tell what band they’re writing for, of the audience. Because, like, yeah, I don’t think you’re gonna walk into the CW show and just be like, “We’re gonna assume our audience is just gonna get the smartest, top-level, they’re gonna get everything.” Right?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And part of me is like, what if you did do that? But I feel like that wouldn’t work, I feel like there’s so many reasons why that wouldn’t work.
FK: No, I mean and one of the reasons is that like, you don’t necessarily always want to be eating some kind of fancy, gourmet dinner, right? Sometimes you have a craving for McDonald’s.
ELM: [overlapping] OK, that’s…I don’t know, HBO shows are also not that complicated. But they do feel very well-written. [laughs]
FK: Sure! But, I don’t know. I mean…
ELM: It’s not like reading, you know, it’s not like reading…I dunno, what’s a hard book? I’m looking at a bookshelf to see which one looks hardest.
FK: Ulysses!
ELM: [laughs] Yeah! None of it’s like that. There’s nothing on commercial television like that.
FK: Uhhhh…. Twin Peaks: The Return.
ELM: You say that, but sometimes…
FK: Twin Peaks: The Return.
ELM: Things are just abstract and not actually that deep.
FK: Maybe. I dunno. Anyway. It’s challenging though.
ELM: [laughs] Sure.
FK: I’m not sure that I think that…OK, Ulysses is the wrong place—I’m not sure that I think Finnegan’s Wake is entirely deep, I think it’s complicated, and it’s full of lots of stuff.
ELM: [sighs] All right. Now we’re talking about whether books are deep or not. So, going back to this.
FK: [overlapping, laughing] OK, let’s move on.
ELM: I think that there were a few elements to this question, too. I, I get a little weary of the kind of fandom line that there’s an inverse proportion between the quality of a show and the like, ability to create a fandom. I don’t think that’s true.
FK: [overlapping] Yeah, it is not true.
ELM: I think that so much of what creates a fandom is, you know, obviously certain genres, certain styles, and the writing on these and the performances on these can vary widely, right?
FK: Yes.
ELM: To the point where it seems more like similar dynamics across shows matter a lot more than similar quality of writing or similar tone. And like, there aren’t fandoms around a lot of the really crappy shows. You know?
FK: Absolutely, absolutely.
ELM: So if there was truly this inverse relationship, then those would be the hottest shows of all. Right? [FK laughs] And like, no one would ever bother to write fic about…I’m trying to think of a show that's truly critically acclaimed that people also wrote fic about. [deep sigh] Can’t think of anything.
FK: I dunno, it’s also different, now versus like, the 90s what “critically acclaimed” meant. [singsong] Boop boop. [laughs] So.
ELM: Sure, sure, sure. I think there are a lot of factors at play, but I don’t think that quality is necessary…I mean I understand when people say, when they’re like, “I don’t wanna fix this, it’s too perfect.” You know? Like, I get it.
FK: Sure, yeah. And I would say there is, to some extent, that level of frustration and wanting to fix things, which is one of the reasons why sometimes we get invested in plots that don’t make sense, right? We want them to make sense. We have, we’re pattern-seeking beings, like why am I invested in the X-Files conspiracy arc? It’s not because it makes sense! It’s because I really wish it did. And it never will, it’s broken. Sorry. [laughs]
ELM: I love how many X-Files references there have been on recent podcast episodes.
FK: I’m, I’m rereading a lot of old X-Files fanfic, and I’m loving it.
ELM: I know, I know.
FK: I guess the other thing that I would say is, “bad” is also in the eye of the beholder, right? There’s a lot of shows that are bad that lots of people in fandom think are good, and there’s shows that I think are good that I know for a fact other people think are bad, and I’m not saying that it is like, an entire nothingness, I’m not saying that anything goes and that there’s no real good or bad or anything, but I would say that, you know, whatever, maybe it doesn’t really matter if the show is good or bad. If you’re enjoying the fanfiction and the art, then do you need the show to be good? [laughs] You know?
ELM: Yeah. You know, I gotta say, a few of the very large fandoms that I’ve seen of television shows in the last few years, that people, some people said the shows were good, and I thought they were some of the worst shows I’ve ever seen.
FK: Mm hmm.
ELM: And I’m just gonna say that. Just sit in that.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: It absolutely is subjective, right, so yeah, I mean I get it, we’re talking about like, a CW show here, and I mean whatever, CW has a range, but I can imagine the worst CW show and I’m sure that that has a fandom.
FK: Yeah, yeah. But like, you know, I mean I think, personally, that the only thing to be worried about is when you decide that you really love writing fanfic or you wanna see these characters smash and then you convince yourself that the show is good because you love the fanfic and stuff. And you’re not doing that, nonny! So as far as I’m concerned, you’re golden!
ELM: I mean, is there anything wrong with that?
FK: I dunno, it’s just annoying from an exterior perspective, because other people, you know, I can understand being like…
ELM: [overlapping] Oh yeah. Seeing it currently, yes.
FK: Right? Like, I can understand being like, someone saying to me “Well I don’t think the show is that great, but man am I entranced by it.” Like, great! Go with God. But when someone is like, “This show is the best show and you must also think it’s the best show, because I’m entranced by it,” and I’m not feeling it and the show is not very good, that’s very frustrating, so.
ELM: Um, it is very frustrating, but it also happens constantly, and I feel like it’s a losing battle to fight against it.
FK: [overlapping] Yeah, it’s true. Alas.
ELM: Anyway. This ask made me chuckle. So thank you, anon.
FK: Yeah, the next one is also related. So will you read it?
ELM: I will. New anon, anon #6, I believe. [both laugh] No, fairkid was not anonymous. Anon #5:
“My primary fandom right now is a video game fandom, and the game itself has writing that is, shall we say, weak. This has led to a situation where, at least on AO3, there seems to be one agreed-upon fanon interpretation of characters and relationships that’s widely shared; the fanon is plausible within a canon that barely characterizes any of its characters, but is also far more detailed and specific than canon ever is.
“The majority of fics seem to adhere to this same fanon, and the fic writers often face significant backlash if they break from the fanon in how they portray characters or relationships. I’ve seen people position fic that doesn't adhere to fanon as ‘attacking’ popular writers and fics that do adhere to the fanon, simply by not doing the same thing.
“I’m curious whether this kind of ‘fanon party line’ is a common experience across all fandoms, or whether it's more common in fandoms where the source material is less narratively deep or coherent; or whether there might be other factors at play. And broadly, when a fandom develops a strict fanon superimposed on or even detached from canon, do you think that has any impact on a fandom’s social dynamics or inclusiveness, or is it just a different way for a fandom to present the same dynamics that all fandoms experience?”
FK: Excellent question. I will start by saying, I definitely think that this kind of fanon party line is a common experience across many fandoms. Maybe not all.
ELM: Yes.
FK: I do think it’s more common, or maybe more marked, in fandoms where the source material is less coherent or deep, and I’ve definitely seen it play out in multiple fandoms, that characterizing a character in a very different way than a big name fan, or than the average person or whatever, is seen as an “attack.”
ELM: Yes. Yes.
FK: Absolutely all of these things happen across fandoms. It’s a thing.
ELM: I think the specific detail of, in the video game there’s very little characterization period, is an especially hard one. Like, I mean I think there’s a few different things here. One thing I have observed is, in fandoms where there is more characterization within the source material, people don’t always adhere to that, especially with desires to perhaps woobify—
FK: Yep.
ELM: As they say, or…
FK: [laughs] “As they say.”
ELM: [overlapping] I dunno, Draco-in-leather-pants-ify, whatever we’re calling that term, you know, dark-fuck-prince-ify, whatever, that can certainly turn into a fanon party line that runs counter to any stated characterization, it doesn’t matter how much characterization there is. Right? Or how well these characters are written in canon. If people have decided that, you know, part of the ship is a little…I was gonna say cream puff, but cinnamon roll is the term that already exists, you know what I mean?
FK: Yes it is. [laughs]
ELM: So there is that. But I think in fandoms where there’s like, very little characterization of any depth, I feel like people kinda have to do that, and I think a lot of that is also probably coming from other fandoms, because fans just kinda repeat patterns and look for dynamics, as we’ve discussed a lot recently.
FK: Yeah, and also I would say that if you’re in a fandom for something that has that little writing, then it’s hard for me to…like, to some extent people are coming for the made up aspects of the characters.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: And so it seems like…I mean, obviously it’s unreasonable to view someone having a different view of a character or a different idea about it as an attack. But it seems reasonable to me that people are like, “Yeah, I liked that, I like that!” You know? “I like that it took the images of these characters that I’ve seen in the video game, and it gave them this depth. And that’s what I envision of them now, so I’m gonna write more stories that are like this, that follow along in these footsteps.”
ELM: Yeah.
FK: I mean, it’s not something that’s been my cup of tea in a fandom to date, but I totally see how that happens, and it becomes sort of this…you talk about it all the time, Elizabeth, this kind of collaborative writing process among an entire group of people. And I don’t think that’s a bad thing, I think that it’s, you know, it’s not great that people are getting attacked for deviating from it, but I think that in itself it’s not bad.
ELM: Yeah. No, I mean, I agree, but it also makes me think of like, I think there’s a scale element. So like, I’ve known friends in pretty small fandoms where the fanon party line has been established and it seems very hard for them to break out of that. Because if you have a pretty small group and someone has decided what you’re doing, it’s very easy to see who’s deviating.
FK: Yes, and then it can truly be a personal thing, if you’re like, “No!” [laughs]
ELM: [overlapping] Yeah, right, exactly. Right. I’ve also seen it at scale, and that just feels like a giant snowball, rolling down the mountain at you. You’re like, “Well everyone’s decided he’s like this, even though that’s not in the movies…so I guess I have to too, otherwise people are going to yell at me.” And that feels insurmountable.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: But it’s interesting, what you were just saying made me think of, um, I hate to do this, as we say every time, but every time we have to bring up a Harry Potter example we’re like, [uncomfortable noise] but I think about the range of backstories and characterizations for…because my ship was Remus/Sirius, right, before the fifth book, of Sirius in particular. All sorts, people were going all different directions, and then I’m sure you experienced this—
FK: [overlapping] Yeah. Yup. This happened with Snape too. Yeah. [laughs]
ELM: [overlapping] I was gonna say, before the sixth book, Snape, all over the place. And in both these examples, very broad range of, like, class positioning for both of them before they were given.
FK: Oh yeah!
ELM: And in retrospect I’m like, it makes sense, of course I know their backgrounds, but then I was like, you know, I would believe anything, I would read one where Sirius was rich and I’d read one where he was like, you know, father had an auto body shop and that was why he liked the motorcycle so much. [laughs]
FK: Yeah, I mean, we did not know! There was not enough information. Yes, what came out was at least moderately coherent, [ELM laughs] I will say that the things that J. K. Rowling wrote in this case were pretty coherent, although maybe not what I would have written, they were coherent, you know?
ELM: [overlapping] Yeah! Yeah, yeah, I think in both those cases, no no. You could tell she thought about those in advance.
FK: Right. But the other stuff was too, with the limited information that we had, right? So, OK.
ELM: Right, yeah, exactly. And when I think about, like, how interesting it was to see just kind of, different—basically creating almost different OCs—version of this, was pretty enjoyable actually. And for someone who talks so much about how much they like fanfiction to draw out elements from the canon, you know what I mean, like, that actually wasn’t that at all, but it was still very interesting to see, and very enjoyable, and it’s a shame that it seems like fandoms do not tend in that direction generally.
FK: Yeah. I agree.
ELM: I mean, that was just also such a massive fandom, that’s a scale that you, it’s very hard to compare it to almost anything else. So…
FK: Yep. Yep.
ELM: But you know, anon, I would say this is very common, and unfortunately that kind of where my diagnosis has to…that’s where it comes to a stop, because it’s not a problem within your fandom, and so unfortunately I think these are dynamics that both of us struggle with within our own various fandoms.
FK: Definitely.
ELM: I dunno, like, yeah, you don’t want anyone sending you threats because you decided to make different backstory choices about a character from a video game, but also if you could deal with potentially alienating people, I would say just write the character the way you wanna write them.
FK: Absolutely. All right, thank you for that letter, and I am now going to get on to our very last letter!
ELM: All right, let’s do it!
FK: This is from another anonymous person.
ELM: Anonymous 6.
FK: Anonymous 6, OK.
“I listen to your episodes out of order, and so I can’t remember if I’m responding to something old or new, but you two talked in one episode about how it would be difficult for anyone to just set up a fanfiction archive. You were specifically talking about how people often use ‘just make your own’ as a defense for AO3.
“While I agree that it would be difficult to set up such a large project all at once, and funding would have to come from somewhere, I’ve always wondered if there was anyone who might actually be looking into doing so, or if it might be feasible on some large or broad scale. Certainly, there are a lot of people who are not fond of AO3’s content policies and what they allow, namely, the content that typically gets tagged as Dark Fic or Dead Dove content. While it would be hard to set up such an archive, we’ve seen that it’s possible, and AO3 certainly didn't exist on such a grand scale when it first opened as a website.
“It makes me wonder if it would be plausible to do so, if everyone who truly wanted a website with a stricter content policy and more moderation banded together to make it happen. It seems like it should be possible with how many people there are who oppose AO3’s lack of moderation of content on the website itself. There are obviously contractors and professionals who step in to get involved as necessary, though I assume some of that work can be offset or shifted by simply copying AO3’s own open source coding and tweaking it alongside AO3, something that is plausible for people to do. They’d need money for servers, but surely, with how many people there are, that seems like something they could pull off if they actually grouped up to do it.”
And that’s from an anonymous person.
ELM: Anon, I really appreciate you writing in, I feel like you are expressing some questions that a lot of people have.
FK: Definitely.
ELM: I have a bunch of different answers. So where should we start?
FK: Oh good, because I think you have, you have the most to say about this. You have more background than I do on this topic I think.
ELM: I mean, I think you do too. So the first thing I would say is not about the website at all, but I don’t think the numbers of the AO3’s detractors are as large as anon is potentially making them out to be. I don’t think there are tens of thousands of people who would donate hundreds of thousands of dollars to do this.
And I’m not saying there aren’t tens of thousands of people who hate the AO3 with a fiery passion. I’m saying most of them don’t want another website. Right? Like, whenever I see anti-AO3 statements on Twitter, and they’re like, “That fuckin’ pedo website,” and it gets 12,000 likes or whatever, I don’t think most of those people actually want a different fanfiction archive, I think they just want to hate on this one. So, there is that—
FK: I mean that’s the case with everything, right.
ELM: Yes, right.
FK: This is not unique to anti-AO3 people, this is like, across the board when people criticize something, unfortunately—or maybe fortunately depending on how you think about it—most of them are not willing to actually do anything, even anything as simple as donating money to fix the problem.
ELM: [overlapping] Frankly, the people I’m describing, the 12,000 people who are like, “This fuckin’ pedo website” or whatever, I think most of them probably don’t like fanfiction.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: You know, which they think is all like, pedophilic material or whatever, right? They are often people within other kinds of fandom with, like, anime avatars, who hate fanfiction, right? And assume that…whatever.
FK: Sure.
ELM: So like, I don’t think those are people who want something else. So there’s that, to start. Then I think if you were to take the people who do want a different fanfiction archive, I don’t think that they all have a unified set of reasons for why they want a different one. I don’t think they agree on what those moderation rules would be. Obviously we have major critiques of the AO3 and I wanna say while we’re talking about this, we still have on our radar the hopes of talking to someone over there about in particular the lack of—now on the two-year anniversary of the start of the 2020 racial uprising—no further statements about…
FK: Yeah! Two years of no communication! Great job, gold star, you guys.
ELM: So, we would like to follow up on that, and I apologize for delays on our end. But that is a priority of ours for some point this year. So I wanna keep that critique in mind. But I do think that one thing they often say about their maximalist approach is, “Where would we draw the lines if we started drawing them?” And I think it is a fair point, because I do think that you would have a really hard time, for all of the detractors who might want an alternate site, to actually agree.
FK: And also, like, I think that there is a concern of who’s gonna do it, right? It takes a lot of people to do it on the AO3 already, they are looking at a bunch of this fic, and I think that you really need a large volunteer base to do any kind of moderation, and those people have to be willing to look at really gnarly stuff.
ELM: Sure.
FK: And that’s hard! If everybody who’s doing this is doing it because they want an archive that doesn’t include the gnarly stuff…[laughs] so that they’re not being traumatized, then who’s gonna be the volunteer to look at this stuff?
ELM: Right, absolutely, and I don’t think it’s realistic to say that if you set really strong rules at the start that people will not try to upload that, because we all have the internet and we know that’s not true.
FK: Yeah, in fact it’s more likely to be the opposite, right?
ELM: Right. So there’s that. And then I think on a technical level, it’s not like you can open up to…you know…inspect the source of an AO3 page and then hit copy-paste and then you’ve got your code. And I will say too, from the reporting I’ve done—from a software engineering perspective, and you know I say this as a tech industry person but not an engineer—from what I understand, the site was built in a variety of ways, some choices seem…I’m trying to put this diplomatically. [FK laughs] I’ve gotten the sense from people who worked on it initially and I think they’ve explicitly said so as well, that they would not make the same choices that they made, but now it exists and it’s kinda just floating along, and they’ve definitely made some improvements, and there’s professional engineers volunteering their time and professionals who are being brought in, as letter-writer says, to do some of the very heavy lifting that you kinda can’t manage on a volunteer basis.
FK: But this is part of why it’s so hard to get anything done on the A—like, this is part of why it’s hard to make any changes, is because it’s like, it’s a rat’s nest.
ELM: [overlapping] Yeah, it’s…so some complicated choices were made, also it’s been around for a while, and also it’s all volunteers, and etcetera, etcetera. And I’m not an engineer and I’m not on the tech squad there, so I cannot speak for them in any way, but like, yeah. I don’t think that if you were to create a fanfiction archive now, in 2022, you would want to copy their code in that way.
FK: [overlapping] No. You wouldn’t. [laughs]
ELM: [overlapping, laughing] From what I’ve heard from people…
FK: [overlapping] I mean, I can say this from a position of having created and been involved in coding a fanfic archive built on things, like, many years before the Archive of Our Own—
ELM: [overlapping] Flourish, you were like 19 internet generations before.
FK: I know! But what I’m saying is, one of the things that you quickly learn is that that thing that you did that was really stupid because you didn’t know exactly how to do it and also it was the best option you had at the time, and also like, I don’t know, Jimmy knew how to do this particular thing so we just let Jimmy do it and maybe that wasn’t smart? Like, not saying that AO3 was this disorganized, but I think that all volunteer projects are a little bit disorganized like this.
ELM: Yep.
FK: Then, very quickly, sometimes within like, a year, you learn that that was all a dumb idea, and actually now you can never undo it. So…no, I don’t think it would be smart for somebody to just take the whole code base of the AO3 and be like, “Now I’m doing my new site which is based on the AO3 stuff.” For a variety of reasons, one of them being that even with all of the people and all of the resources that the AO3 has, which, one of the reasons people would like the AO3 to not do the thing is that they think that they’re over-resourced, and maybe they are. But they still can’t make the fixes, and it’s not just because they’re incompetent or don’t want to, it’s because there’s actual deep problems within this that make it really hard to do that.
ELM: Yes.
FK: And I have great sympathy, because I have been there.
ELM: [laughs] It’s like, um…do you know that xkcd cartoon where it’s like, all our technical systems, and then there’s like, this one…it’s like a bunch of physical objects balanced on top of each other, and there’s this one tiny piece and it’s like, “Some guy maintaining a server in Nebraska or whatever from 2003,” this tiny little thing that everything’s hinged on.
FK: [overlapping] Yes! Yes! I mean, the internet is literally like this. [laughs]
ELM: [overlapping] That is actually, that is kind of what a lot of our, uh, our digital infrastructure is like! Across digital spaces, not just on this one space.
FK: Yeah, yeah.
ELM: So, you know, I don’t know…what choices, I’m not an engineer, I don’t know what choices people would make from a technical perspective if they were making this from scratch now. And I think one thing we’ve talked about too when we talk about earlier eras of fan-created stuff is, you know, people don’t like, stand up their own websites as often these days, they don’t own the servers, like yeah you can make that a priority in the way that these folks did when they founded this, but like, the internet is pretty different than it was 15 years ago, and obviously much more different, much different from when you were making a fanfiction archive. And…it’s a lot more locked down, and a lot, a lot lot more commercialized, right? So I think that that would be a real challenge, in addition.
FK: And the things that people are going to want, like a mobile interface for instance, like, are actually…
ELM: [overlapping] Yeah, like a, an actual, a slick interface in general. Good UI.
FK: [overlapping] Right. Those things all only complicate it more. Now that said, I don’t wanna be a total Debbie Downer, because I do think that if people want to create archives, particularly for like, their fandom, on a smaller scale? That’s completely doable. I feel very confident that if I got together five or ten other people and we wanted to create a little archive of fanfic, for a small fandom, that was going to be heavily moderated, we could achieve that. The thing is, it wouldn’t be on scale, you know, that’s one of the problems, is the scale issue.
ELM: Right.
FK: And so if you really, if you do have a particular group of people, or an area that you want to, that you want to be engaging in this in, I don’t wanna say don’t do it, I just wanna say like, consider for yourself, do you really need to duplicate the AO3, or do you wanna create a space that feels good and comfortable for you?
ELM: Right, yeah. I think that people see the scale of that, or any of these sites that are meant to scale, you know, meant to take in as many fanworks as possible, like you can see that on Wattpad too, they were never like, “This is just for a few,” they were like, “As many as possible please!”
FK: Yeah.
ELM: I think it’s hard for people to imagine that smaller thing, because I think that the web has changed so much. I think that if you grew up on the early web, you can recognize that as something from the past, you know, like…
FK: A possibility.
ELM: I remember back in the old, you know, when the specific rarepair ship had their own little archive with like, 20 fics on it or whatever and a manifesto about why they’re great, like…you could absolutely do that, but I think it’s kind of hard to shift your mind back when you have seen the scale and the ease of a big, navigable archive, not just the AO3, but any of the current ones that are large.
FK: Right. But this is the tradeoff that we made. Because those small archives did often have very strict moderation policies.
ELM: Sure.
FK: They had policies that were even stricter than just being about not seeing horrifying things in your fic, right?
ELM: [overlapping] You could say, “I will not,” you know, speaking of a fanon party line, you could literally set the fanon party line and be like, “I will not take fics where, where x character is doing this.”
FK: Right.
ELM: Right, you know? Or no, no, I dunno, I was gonna say like, “No bottom whatever,” some stupid thing where you could set arbitrary rules, right?
FK: [overlapping] Right, right, exactly, exactly, “None of this ship.”
ELM: Yeah, yeah.
FK: So if you really, if it really matters to you to have control over the fics that you’re interacting with in that way, and it matters to other people that you know…I mean I actually, I wouldn’t mind that. Like, on the one hand, do I love having the AO3 and having everything be centralized? Sure. But there were also wonderful things about that older model of engaging with fic, and I mean, that would be cool, if we saw people spinning up things that were along those lines. Maybe not looking exactly like the old archives did, but along those lines. Right?
ELM: Yeah. I think it’s hard, because I also think that like, you know, what we’re kind of describing now, you also saw on LiveJournal, it wasn’t that long ago, you don’t have to go back to 1998 to see the like…
FK: No, you don’t.
ELM: The strong rules saying, “Here’s what can get included in this community.” But I do think now if you were to ask me like…I mean I guess you could just build your own website from scratch, right, but like, even the blogging platforms have gone by the wayside, ones that actually allow you to publish something of any substance, length-wise.
FK: Right.
ELM: And I think people see the spaces they’re on, they see TikTok and they see Tumblr and they see Twitter, and they see very brief spaces. And so…I dunno, I think that the web has kind of backed a lot of people into a corner.
FK: I definitely agree with that.
ELM: But I would say, I don’t think the “Go build your own” response is a useful one, because no one ever takes 20 minutes [both laugh] to be like, “Here are the nine reasons why you probably can’t build your own, but you could,” like, I just don’t think that, I don’t think it’s a helpful response. I think most of the time it’s not rooted in fact. I think that anon here very thoughtfully asked about the details and kinda laid it out, right? But I think most of the time it’s used as a way to shut down the conversation. To your point, you could absolutely build your own small thing, but like, “Go build your own” at that scale?
FK: Right.
ELM: I think that’s a somewhat flippant comment that I would love if people didn’t make.
FK: I agree with that, and I think that the analysis of this may indeed be, if you are very serious about your feelings on AO3 in this regard, I support you in not being on the AO3 and trying to create alternatives, I think that that is actually a good thing to consider. I don’t think that that should be the thing that people are saying to you to shut you down. But it is something to consider. But it’s probably not gonna look like the AO3. [laughs]
ELM: I mean, for better or worse. [laughs]
FK: For better or worse.
ELM: [overlapping] Like, you know, I also think that’s the spirit of the AO3, the whole point was like, “We’re gonna go build our own.”
FK: [overlapping] Mm hmm, oh, it absolutely was!
ELM: [overlapping] So I’m sure that they’d be the first people to say, “Yeah, you can go make your own too.” But I think they would also say, “Caveat, here are all the complicated things that led to the initial decisions.” [laughs]
FK: [overlapping, laughing] Yeah, “Learn from our thousand-yard stare.”
ELM: Yeah. And like, all of this, all of this is underscored by, we are not, we are not software engineers.
FK: No, we are not.
ELM: Just wanna say that again.
FK: Nope. And back when I was building that archive…no one was a software engineer who was working on it, and boy, could you tell. [laughs]
ELM: You say that, but I went to college with your webmaster, and now he is in fact a software engineer.
FK: That is true, he is now. But at the time. [laughs]
ELM: He was just a boy, a boy learning to code.
FK: We were learning to code together. [ELM laughs] Anyhow. All right. That rounds it up! Nonny, thank you so much for that thoughtful letter, I’m really glad that you asked and I think that it is an important thing to talk about, and I hope that we were not too Debbie Downer, and that also we recognize what you were really asking.
ELM: We didn’t even really get into the idea of like, what if these people wanna charge money, and law, and the law…
FK: [overlapping] Oh, that’s not, that’s, oh man, that’s too much. Too much, too much, too much, too much, too much. I think that comes, that we’re now at the bottom of our mailbag. That’s the end, Elizabeth.
ELM: [overlapping] Yeahhh…I, yeah, just, the very quick note is, it’s not all technical, right, there are also a bunch of other things going on.
FK: [laughing] We could go into so much more, but we’re not going to, because I believe we have answered the spirit of the question.
ELM: All right. You want, I, I, I get it.
FK: Well, thank you to everybody who wrote in. I think this was a great episode, if I do say so myself, I really enjoyed all your letters! It was great because of you, writer-inners!
ELM: Yeah, you don’t think it was great because of my, uh… [doing the voice] old-timey voice?
FK: No. No.
ELM: Down on La Cienega Boulevard? [laughs]
FK: That knocked many points off of it, and if you keep doing it, I may have to retract my statement that it was a great episode.
ELM: [overlapping, still doing the voice] Hey, hey Flourish, I got the book for ya, the template right here.
FK: Elizabeth, I’m going to hang up on you.
ELM: [laughing and still doing the voice] All right, I’ll see ya sleepin’ with the fishes.
FK: Goodbye.
[Outro music]