Episode 177: The Good, the Bad, and the Popular
In Episode 177, “The Good, the Bad, and the Popular,” Flourish and Elizabeth use a trio of listener letters to talk about the various factors that make fandoms spark and grow. Is there actually any relationship between the quality of the source material and the size of a fandom? Are there any reliable reasons why fandoms form in the first place? And does a show/film/book/etc being labeled “good” mean something inherently different within fandom?
Show notes
[00:00:00] As always, our intro music is “Awel” by stefsax, used under a CC BY 3.0 license.
[00:00:42] The aforementioned AMA: “Ask Fansplaining Anything: Part 13”
[00:02:08] Elizabeth’s beans were Rancho Gordo’s Buckeye Bean (via the greatest thing in the world, The Bean Club!!!) and they 1000% did have, in the package’s words, “an addictive creaminess.”
[00:06:12] We (and lots of other people in fandom) reference Henry Jenkins’s fascination + frustration framing a fair bit, but the full quote from his 2006 book Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide is:
Fandom, after all, is born of a balance between fascination and frustration: if media content didn’t fascinate us, there would be no desire to engage with it; but if it didn’t frustrate us on some level, there would be no drive to rewrite or remake it.
[00:09:54] That’s episode 174, “The Classification of Fandom.”
[00:17:06] Orlando the book: A+++
Orlando the cat: A++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
[00:19:36] Breathedout was our guest on episode 144, “Writing Women.”
[00:21:38] For a great deep dive into the troubling opaqueness of streaming service numbers, check out Kathryn VanArendonk and Josef Adalian’s recent Vulture piece interviewing showrunners on the subject.
[00:23:12] To get a sense of scale, on the AO3 (obviously not the only place fic is published, but still!) the cut-off to make the list of the top 100 fandoms as of 2021 was about 25K works. Brooklyn Nine-Nine is the most popular Mike Schur show there, with 5.7K works; Parks and Rec and The Good Place have 2.3K and 1.5K, respectively. Schitt’s Creek is an outlier amongst recent sitcom fandoms, with 8.7 works. And Two and a Half Men? 42.
[00:25:42]
[00:29:06] All three Hamiltons. 😎
[00:36:55] Our interstitial music throughout is “Let that sink in” by Lee Rosevere, also used under a CC BY 3.0 license.
[00:45:00] The review of Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis Flourish read was David Ehrlich’s, at Indiewire. Elizabeth is referencing Bob Mondello’s NPR review, where he said specifically: “How you feel about Tom Hanks’ vaguely reptilian Parker will have a lot to do with how you feel about the movie. He’s unavoidable, performing from under what must be pounds of latex jowls with a cartoonish accent.”
[01:00:19]
[01:00:54] Our conversation with scholar Liang Ge about BL-adapted series was episode 176.
[01:06:32] Now we can announce the time! If you’re SDCC-bound, please join us:
And here’s the official blurb:
Over the past decade, fans and creators have had more access to each other than ever before—and sometimes, the results have been painful. How can creators take in fan feedback without altering their work in a reactionary way? How can fans express good-faith critique without placing demands on creators? Featuring panelists who spend time on both sides of the fan/creator divide: Sarah Kuhn (the Heroine Complex series, Star Wars: Doctor Aphra) Javier Grillo-Marxuach (Lost, The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance), Britta Lundin (Riverdale, Betty), Justin Bolger (StarWars.com, Fantasy Fight Games), and Flourish Klink (Fansplaining), moderated by Elizabeth Minkel (Fansplaining).
Transcript
[Intro music]
Flourish Klink: Hi, Elizabeth!
Elizabeth Minkel: Hi, Flourish!
FK: And welcome to Fansplaining, the podcast by, for, and about fandom!
ELM: This is Episode #177, “The Good, the Bad, and the Popular.”
FK: [laughs] The name makes me laugh, but it is based on three asks that we received to our most recent AMA, and you know, when we get a bunch of asks, and they’re all kind of about the same thing, it’s a sign.
ELM: It is a sign, the people are clamoring, they wanna discuss this topic. [FK laughs] So, the topic was kind of actually two different letters in that AMA. They were about, one of the questions specifically was asking about why we write fanfiction or like, start fandoms, for objectively bad television shows, just like, the worst CW show I think was the way it was framed, right? And one of the things that I said was that I get really frustrated that in fandom there seems to be this like, ever-popular self-perpetuating meme, or observation, but it’s memeified now, that there’s some sort of inverse relationship between the quality of a show and the size of the fandom or the size of the body of fanworks. And I just don’t think that’s true. And I think that really flattens the reasons that people choose to engage with something on a fannish level, or write fanfiction about it. And I don’t understand why people keep writing these posts, and why people keep reblogging them onto my feed. Like, I don’t understand.
FK: Yeah, I mean, I think I have some ideas of why people might say this, but I feel like if I [laughs] start elaborating on them, we’re gonna get into the meat of the episode before we have even…
ELM: The meat! Flourish!
FK: Oh I’m sorry, the beans, [ELM laughs] the beans of the episode, my vegetarian friend. The tofu of the episode.
ELM: I just made some beans before we started, and uh, on the label they said they were “addictively creamy.” And they are. [FK laughs] I cannot wait to have those beans.
FK: [laughs] OK, OK—
ELM: For context, it’s the Rancho Gordo Bean Club, no normal bean company would write that their beans are addictively creamy on the packaging.
FK: [laughing, overlapping] Addictively creamy…yeah.
ELM: But they’re right, they’re not lying. Delicious.
FK: Great. Well, now that we’ve had that aside, I think that what I meant was, let’s read those asks—
ELM: [simultaneous] Bean time.
FK: —and then we can come back to this thoughtful thing that you just said, how’s that?
ELM: All right, let’s do it.
FK: OK. The first one is from dm-me-your-weltanschauung, whose name always makes me laugh. [both laugh] I can’t resist it, it’s so good. OK, they say:
“I’m a bit curious about a remark Elizabeth made in your most recent AMA episode re: the inverse correlation between the size of a fandom and the quality of the source material. I agree that there’s no connection, as I’ve seen fandoms built around great source material (e.g., Avatar: the Last Airbender) and bad (e.g., [redacted]).”
Sidenote, we did not redact this, they redacted it. We don’t redact our letters. OK, back to the letter.
ELM: [overlapping] That would be amazing if we, I would love it if we just started redacting things.
FK: Well, I don’t know, somebody could think that we were like, “This is a radioactive fandom and we’re not gonna say it,” you know?
ELM: [laughs] Yeah, that’s fair actually. All right, continue.
FK: OK, back to the letter:
“I was wondering if you have any thoughts on what the alchemy is that makes a work develop a passionate fandom. In any case, thanks for taking my questions and keep up the great work!”
So that’s the first question. And then I think it would be productive to read the first two questions together. OK?
ELM: Sure, let’s do it.
FK: So the next one’s from Sarah. And it goes:
“Hi Fansplaining,
I have a question following last week’s episode about fandoms and ‘bad TV.’ I do agree that there’s no correlation between quality of TV and size of fandom, but is there a correlation between quality TV and fanfic?
“As a personal example, I’ve followed a ‘bad’ CW show (Supergirl) for some time now, but am also a big fan of a ‘good’ TV show, Killing Eve. I tend to recommend and talk more about Killing Eve, yet I’m always disappointed with the fanfic. In contrast, I will absolutely rave about Supergirl fanfic, but can’t say I do the same for the show. Is this a trend for others? Or have I just not found the right Killing Eve fanfic? Or maybe Villanelle and Eve are already so trope-y people don’t feel the need to write fanfic about them? I don’t know, but super curious to hear your thoughts!
“Thanks so much for all your great work, Sarah.”
ELM: Thank you very much, Sarah, and dm-me-your-weltanschauung.
FK: [laughs] I’m sorry, just makes me smile every time. Even though it was only five minutes ago. Less than that.
ELM: [laughing] It was, like, two minutes ago.
FK: I know, and yet. [both laugh] But these are great questions.
ELM: All right. Well, where should we start?
FK: Well, I don’t know, maybe where we left off, which was you going, I have no idea why people say this, that there’s this inverse relationship.
ELM: Yeah. All right, look, I have some idea. But I think that the desire to like, I’ve seen people making charts and graphs and matrices and stuff, and trying to scientifically plot this out, and it’s just so…I dunno, part of it feels a little bit to me like, not to get right into it, but a little bit self-protective?
FK: Mmm.
ELM: You know, because you can say, like, “Well, I really like this really respectable, well-made television, [FK laughs] but here’s the scientific reason why actually I spend all my time in this large fandom about a show that is garbage.” Right?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Like, “Here’s the proof, there’s some sort of formula to it. And I can’t help it. This is why me and everyone else is drawn to this”—which isn’t true.
FK: Yeah, and I mean, I think that is self-protective. I think it’s also drawn from observations that I think are true, that have been, like, floating around in fandom and in fan studies for a long time, right? Like, Henry Jenkins’ famous “fandom is fascination plus frustration” idea. Which I think…
ELM: Sure.
FK: You know, I mean I’ve found very few fans who would disagree with that, like, if you just love something, then maybe you just love it and you consume it, and then OK. But if you love something but it’s bugging you, [laughs] you know, then maybe you obsess more. I think a lot of people agree with that. But then that sort of gets turned into this idea of like, “Oh, so fandom is for things that fascinate us but they’re bad.” Which is, I don’t think what he was intending to say, entirely.
ELM: Right. So, I think that one of the problems that I have with this is, it rests on this kind of idea too, that like…well I don’t know, maybe I’m just very out of step with the world, but there’s very few things that I unreservedly love. And I have strong critiques of almost everything that I watch, right? It’s very rare that I’ll come out of something and I’ll say, “Flawless, no notes.” Right?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And there are things that I love and, you know, a new season comes out and I think that they made poor writing decisions, and I think about how I would fix it, but that isn’t…I don’t know, that’s not a fannish love to me. But there’s something embedded in this idea of the way people talk about the things that they consume, that they wanna write fanfiction about, that’s kind of this, like, inhalation process. [FK laughs] Like, “Oh I just suck it all in, I take it all in, and it’s really flawed so I’m gonna solve it as I absorb it!” And then this idea that, “The things I don’t want to fix are the things I just love, I’m so dazzled!” And there’s something very uncritical and this kind of, very id-like—
FK: Yeah!
ELM: Just kind of bypassing, that the act of consuming media just bypasses your critical functions entirely, and it’s only when there’s like, gaping holes, you know? Like, in the long-running episode of the, monster-of-the-week, 22-episode show, where you feel like there are things you have to fix. You know what I mean?
FK: I do, you know I think that also has maybe been something that has changed over time. Because I feel like more recently I have seen people have the sort of, “No notes, only love!” [laughs] reaction to things in a fandom context, like I feel like I’ve seen that much more strongly recently.
And I don’t know if that’s really true, that might just be my feeling because of the things I’ve observed. But I’ve noticed, like, there’s been a bunch of TV shows that come out, and it’s like, “No, this is the greatest thing that has ever been made, and I love it unreservedly in every possible way,” and it’s like, usually you’re like, I’m not saying it’s bad, I’m just saying, I feel like that might not be true. [laughs] Right?
ELM: Yes.
FK: Not that you don’t love it, but just that it might not be the greatest thing ever made. But that’s impossible for people to process. Whereas I feel like in the past, sometimes there was a lot more…Sturm und Drang, you know, around like, “I love it! But also I hate it. But I love it! But I hate it.” You know?
ELM: Yeah. Hard agree.
FK: That was more normalized.
ELM: OK, let’s break this down a little, because I’m really interested in this and I strongly agree, and it’s a thing that frustrates me a lot. So one thing I would say is, I think that the fourth wall boundaries, you know, the fourth wall getting thinner, the veil between the [laughs] the fan and creator getting thinner, the access to creators on Twitter, the ones that get labeled “good” ones that you don’t feel like you have to have an oppositional relationship with, the ones that affirm your view of the show—even if it’s not a textual view of the show, but it’s like your headcanon. I can think of a few big examples.
FK: Yeah. Oh yeah.
ELM: So that removes the kind of classic, somewhat oppositional relationship that I do think was a part of a lot of fandoms of all sorts, a few decades ago, right?
FK: Oh yeah! And it wasn’t purely oppositional, but it was, like, tense.
ELM: Right, I mean, thinking back to our episode a few episodes ago about the, you know, false binary of the transformative and affirmational fan, right, even within those framed affirmational fans from the classic fanboy, they were the ones that complained the most about the Star Wars prequels, right?
FK: And still are! Like, stick your nose in Star Trek fandom right now and you’ll observe plenty of affirmational fans being real bad complainers. [laughs]
ELM: Right, right. But like, to hate the new installment of a thing, you define yourself, “I’m a Star Wars guy, I’m a Star Wars fan,” and the new one comes out and it sucks, the response was not to say like, “Oh, because this is Star Wars and it’s bad, I’m bad.” it was more like, “Rejection! I’m gonna argue about why this is the worst!” You know what I mean? Because it wasn’t…
FK: [overlapping] Yeah, right, that’s Return of the Jedi, right, the third movie of the trilogy and we’ve already got that vibe going. [laughs]
ELM: Yeah, yeah, exactly, and it wasn’t like, a threat to their, themselves as fans, whereas I feel like what we see a lot more now—and I see this across the board, not just in, like, critical media fandom or whatever or the spaces that we spend time in—is people absorbing this kind of…their love of something, and their identity, as an X fan, right, an X—not “ex” but XYZ fan, right, and seeing any critique of it as wounding them personally.
FK: Right.
ELM: And I think part of that is, I think it’s a combination of these less oppositional relationships with showrunners, but I also think that, frankly, even people who would never frame it this way, but there are some purity culture elements to it, even people who claim they never want anything to do with purity culture, because if they see it as good, they see themselves as good.
FK: Right.
ELM: Like, “I love this thing, and it’s good, I’m good, we’re all good together.” Right? “And if you say it’s not so good, then I’m bad.”
FK: Right, and then conversely that also brings us to like, the “I’m sitting in a dumpster” discourse, right? [laughs]
ELM: Yes, yeah.
FK: Like, if you can’t be good, then you’re like, “OK, then the show I love must be total trash, and I love it because it is trash, and I am like, carefully building the trash into a special found object sculpture like I’m Duchamp or some shit.” You know? [laughs]
ELM: [overlapping] Wow, you are, you are sculpting in the air right now, [FK laughs] that’s really…
FK: But you know what I mean, right?
ELM: [simultaneous] Have you ever thought about a career in mime? Have you thought about that?
FK: I, they can’t see me attempting to mime, but, but I’m bad at it.
ELM: [overlapping] Flourish is in the box. In the box. [both laugh]
FK: I’m very bad at it, so just imagine someone very poorly miming.
ELM: You’re not making the, um, you’re not making the like…concerned face that a mime does. Yeah, you’d be like, “Oh no, there’s a wall!” Yeah, oh, oh, I wish everyone could see this.
FK: [overlapping] Yeah, no one can see this, this is a bad podcast idea. [both laugh] The Mimecast. Anyway. But you see what I mean though, right? When you have, it sort of becomes this situation where it’s like, either the show you love is trash and therefore it has something in it that causes huge fandoms to show up, because that’s just natural, or the show you love is perfect.
ELM: Yeah, yeah. Well, I don’t think it’s always a trash show, I feel like, you know, we see trash ships, right? I feel like I see that more often, or trash characters.
FK: Yeah, yeah.
ELM: And it’s like, this covering, like “I’m gonna put the dumpster cover on top of my head so you can’t throw anything at me. I know this is, this is…” You know?
FK: [overlapping, laughing] Gosh, that might be…I might be familiar with this.
ELM: You’re familiar?
FK: Imagine!
ELM: Just saying. Just saying.
FK: [overlapping] Imagine that. [both laugh]
ELM: OK, so winding back a little to how we got here, because this isn’t exactly what Sarah or dm-me-your-weltanschauung were talking about. But I do think that it’s interesting to talk about how people currently, in this year, 2022, are framing the way they think of even good and bad shows, right? Or, we shouldn’t be saying shows, it could be any kind of media.
FK: Yeah, I think that’s really interesting, and I mean, it’s also…one thing that’s interesting here too is the question of the size of the fandom, which comes up, and I think that’s a really hard thing to judge also. It’s a lot easier to talk about how much fanfic there is, the way Sarah is, because, I mean of course there are places that you can have fanfic that are harder to count, you know, you can have your green text fanfic, you can have your Reddit fanfic, whatever. But you know, I feel like you can sort of get an idea of how much fanfic there is. How big a fandom is is a really fuzzy question, right? Like, I don’t know, how big is the Lord of the Rings fandom? There’s a lot of different metrics you could use for that. There are people who have never posted online who named their kid Eowyn, right? [laughs]
ELM: [overlapping] Sure. Right, right.
FK: [overlapping] So, so, I find that hard to talk about even. Not that we can’t talk about the question, but just to say, it’s complicated.
ELM: Well yeah, and also there’s a kind of idea of like, I often will look at, Tumblr will do the week in whatever, their kind of metrics assessment, right, and they have categories for ships, and TV shows and whatever, and there’s one for fandoms. And sometimes I’ll look at it and I’ll be like, I’ve never heard of half of these things, they’re not things that align at all with the top stuff that’s on AO3.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And I don’t doubt that the people are doin’ the fandom thing with this stuff, right?
FK: Yeah!
ELM: They are making gifsets, they are posting about it, maybe they’re drawing fanart, I have no idea, maybe they’re writing meta. But they’re doing things on Tumblr, and there would never be that kind of imprint of them if you were just looking at fanfiction.
FK: Yeah. Completely. And I think that’s hard too, because then you enter into a whole realm of things that are not just like…I mean, where it’s almost hard to compare quality of the source material, right? Like, how do you compare a webcomic to a film? [laughs] Like, I don’t even know how you’d, you know?
ELM: Sure. Well, I mean, I think then that’s why fanworks actually makes it a bit easier, right, because if your mode of fandom, like it is for me, and mostly is for you, is fanfiction, then you can start to compare, right? Because you can say, “Well, it generated, there’s this many works, and I can tell you about the overall quality ‘cause I’ve read a lot of them,” right?
FK: Right.
ELM: And “I think this fandom is a better fandom, this has made better stuff.” You know what I mean?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And I think that’s pretty hard with other kinds of fan activities, because it really feels like apples and, like, broccoli, often.
FK: Yeah, and it gets even harder when we start getting into the affective stuff that you often champion, correctly, as I have now come to admit, right [laughs] like, what do people, I mean there are novels that inspire people to—I mean I know I’m on this like, naming your kids schtick for whatever reason, but—there are novels that people care deeply about, enough that they are engaging in, they’re naming their pets and their children and they’re doing all sorts of stuff, but these are all fairly private choices that they’re making, ultimately, and they’re not connecting with a larger fandom even though they obviously changed someone’s life deeply. So there’s this issue, like you can never measure that.
ELM: Wow, you are pushing the bounds of fandom, a group of fans.
FK: I got you to say that I’m pushing the bounds of fandom! I thought you were all about the idea.
ELM: [overlapping] Yeah, because you’re talking about fanhood, you’re not talking about fandom, if it’s like—
FK: [overlapping] OOOKKK, all right.
ELM: Me privately naming my cat Orlando after a Virginia Woolf novel, it’s not me being in the Orlando fandom of one—I mean I am [FK laughs] in the Orlando fandom, for the novel and especially for the cat.
FK: Wow.
ELM: That’s not a fandom of one, that’s a fandom of everyone who’s ever met her to be honest.
FK: She’s a great cat.
ELM: Thank you, I’ll tell her.
FK: Great.
ELM: I guess. But like, let’s stop trying to complicate this so much. [FK laughs] The letter writers, Sarah at least, was talking about fanfiction, so let’s go there.
FK: OK.
ELM: Because that’s where we often go, and I think that’s what we were mostly talking about in the original episode. So, Sarah’s question is complicated to me, and I’m not gonna like, I don’t wanna put too much on these examples, but I do think that when you start to do this sort of thing with like, fandom A and fandom B, it often becomes quite situational in a way that I’m not sure we can draw generalizations.
Like, I haven’t seen Supergirl—if we’re just gonna stick with this example for a minute—haven’t seen Supergirl, haven’t seen Killing Eve. Know those are two of the largest femslash fandoms in fanfiction writing, right? Obviously familiar with both. I know Supergirl is like, the juggernaut, the big current or recent, of the last five years, the big femslash fandom, right, you know?
FK: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
ELM: I also would say that those are different kinds of shows. They are on different kinds of networks.
FK: Very different.
ELM: One was on a cable channel and one was on the CW. I think BBC America for Killing Eve, right?
FK: Yeah, I think so.
ELM: I don’t know, I mean, I assume you could see it on streaming but like, that’s a different set of access, right.
FK: Yup.
ELM: So I don’t know about their viewership numbers. Of the two ships in question, Killing Eve, Sandra Oh, woman of color, one half of the ship, as far as I know, Supergirl, that the juggernaut ship there is two white women.
FK: Yep.
ELM: So, not an insignificant note there. And beyond this, I will say I have no idea about the nature of the…you know, the kind of trends within these fandoms, of what they write. These are not my fandoms obviously, so I have to really caveat that. But you know, you find there are certain ships, especially big ones, that really attract a kind of, you know…it’s a big tent, so then you get a lot of people writing all sorts of AUs and things like that, you know what I mean?
FK: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
ELM: I can think of a few male slash ships like this too. I don’t know if this is what Supergirl is like, but I suspect it might be, whereas, like, I know Killing Eve has a dynamic, right? And so…
FK: A very specific dynamic, yeah.
ELM: When I think of that, you know, I think that as we, when we had breathedout to talk about femslash and she was specifically talking about Killing Eve, I think that the question I often see with that is like, not comparing it to another femslash ship, but to say why not Hannibal? Or why Sherlock, why Hannibal, and why not Killing Eve? Right?
FK: [overlapping] Right. Yeah! Absolutely.
ELM: Because if you, if you like this dynamic so much, right, if you like this genre so much, why will you give these men a shot but you won’t give these women a shot, etcetera etcetera. So I think all those factors are in there, and it’s hard because I don’t wanna, like, hyperfocus on just one example.
FK: Yeah. And I do think there might be a question about numbers with this. I mean, you were saying that you don’t know what the numbers are, but I would normally expect that a show like Supergirl would just sort of like, if it’s on CW, it’s getting sort of the lowest number of network TV ratings, is still gonna do higher numbers than a show like Killing Eve that’s on a cable network.
And just the sheer number of people who watch it is gonna have a really big impact on the number of fanfics that are written. You know, I mean, totally separate from anything else. Now that’s not, that might not actually be true, I don't know what Killing Eve is like in terms of its international reach and all this stuff, maybe it has as big of a reach, but I would be kinda surprised to find that out.
ELM: All right, so, counterpoint, let me think of some of the biggest hits, numbers-wise…you know, a few HBO things.
FK: Sure.
ELM: Succession, massive. Game of Thrones, obviously, but like, Game of Thrones also has a huge and varied fandom, so set that one aside.
FK: Yep.
ELM: Something like Succession. Watchmen. Stranger Things—there’s, for the number of people who watch that, there’s not that much…
FK: [overlapping] Stranger Things is a, I think Stranger Things is a better argument, because I think that it probably…I mean, this is also weird, right, because we don’t even know the way Netflix counts the number of people watching it is really fucked up. [laughs]
ELM: Sure. Right. But, OK, but go back to these huge HBO hits, right, there are, there have been some.
FK: Yeah, but you could even, I mean a better argument would be to say something like, you know, then why are there not these large, I don’t know, Two and a Half Men was watched by, like, almost everybody in America at some point in time. Obviously it doesn’t have a dynamic or anything, but you would think that there would be some fic that comes out of that, and it’s like, [makes a sad trombone noise]
ELM: Why would you think that, have you ever, with your own two eyes, watched Two and a Half Men?
FK: Yes, I have. People have written fic about way stupider stuff.
ELM: [laughs] Well, I don’t know if we were talking about this on the podcast, I’ve thought about this, I’ve definitely written about it in the newsletter, I find it interesting that sitcoms actually generate so little fic, because they literally are, they’re just setting up a new thing every time, right, so you would think that the format would be great. Like, write your own episode, what’s your own situation, that’s what so much of fic is, like let’s put these guys in a situation and that’s literally what situation comedies are like! What’s the situation this time? You know?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And often sitcoms, I mean not Two and a Half Men, which is not good, [FK laughs] but you know, sitcoms are very character-driven, because they have to be, so the characters are sturdy enough to stand up to these machinations, right? These situations, in a way that applies to fanfic, and I find it fascinating that sitcoms have never really, even in the days of just network television, when we think of the classic fandoms, the pre-internet classic fandoms writing fic, that there were not sitcoms amongst those.
FK: [overlapping] Right, yeah, there’s a few exceptions, like I feel like there’s a bunch of Brooklyn Nine-Nine fic and so forth, but they’re few and far between. And they’re not big in the sense that other fandoms are big, necessarily, right, I mean I guess I haven’t looked at this, so I shouldn’t say that so confidently, but I don’t think that, I think that they’re a thing but not like, a THING.
ELM: I think for the size of their audiences, no.
FK: Yes.
ELM: I think they’re, the number of people who have seen, like, the Mike Schur shows, I think the amount of fanworks is pretty small. But then again, back to your question of “What’s fandom?” obviously those are hugely popular, you know, on Twitter, on Tumblr, right?
FK: Right.
ELM: Like, all these places where people can share gifsets and quotes and stuff. But if the way we’re measuring things is by people sitting down and creating new works about them…
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Which I don’t think is a bad bar, that’s what we’re talking about here, right?
FK: Yeah, I think the other thing though is like, I don’t know how much fanfic…I mean, some fanfic is still about like, let’s create another episode of this thing, but I actually don’t know about how much of it is like that right now. One of the things that startles me sometimes is realizing how much that’s changed over time, and maybe it’s just the fandoms I’ve been hanging out in, but like, I much more frequently see people writing, like, a romance novel about these characters that has nothing really to do with the genre of the original thing, than I do see someone like, aping the original thing. Right? In the past, I saw a lot more of that, I feel like.
ELM: Interesting. So you’re saying you see less of a canon setting?
FK: Yeah, yeah, less of a canon, less of a canon-typical story. Or if it is a canon-typical story, the outline of the story is like that, but the genre has been shifted, so now it’s a romance with a canon-typical story in the background. It’s really been striking to me.
ELM: Right, but I mean, I’m talking about historically, too. Like, no one…
FK: Of course, I’m not saying this isn’t a thing in the past, I think you’re very right about that.
ELM: Right, and it’s just like, I don’t understand, you know, whatever, I mean I love certain sitcoms and I’ve never felt compelled to write sitcom fanfiction, so I…I should just, I should look inward here instead of saying, “Why doesn’t anyone wanna do this?”
FK: [overlapping] Yeah, you don’t understand yourself! Why don’t you wanna do this? [both laugh] Yeah, write me a Frasier episode! [laughs]
ELM: [simultaneous] No, look, if you wanted me to write a Frasier fanfic, I could do that right now. I could do it, a hundred percent. So.
FK: If you do it, I might watch some Frasier.
ELM: I’ve already told you there’s so many Frasiers you should watch! The one where he pretends to be Patrick Stewart’s boyfriend?
FK: No, I know I should watch that, I’m just saying I haven’t done it yet, and I obviously need more motivation to do it.
ELM: The one where, in an act of revenge, the Trekkie teaches Frasier Klingon instead of Hebrew [FK gives a drawn-out gasp] to read at his son’s bar mitzvah?
FK: Oh, you might have found the thing. [laughs] You might have found the one that makes me watch Frasier. This is…this is…
ELM: [overlapping] It’s, OK, I don’t, I’ve already given away the twist, but it’s, to watch Kelsey Grammer go like, [imitating Klingon, both laugh] he’s like, and he’s saying it so sincerely, and so heartfeltly, and the little nerd friend of his son is like, “That’s Klingon.” [both still laughing] It’s really, it’s really exquisite.
FK: Oh, I want it. OK, OK, OK, OK. All right, but we’re now, we’re over here, [both laugh] and the original point is over here. I mean, I think that what we’re establishing here though is that there’s a lot more than the “bad” and “good” nature of these things that’s impacting it, right, like I mean you can have a, people are not out there writing fanfic for bad sitcoms or for good sitcoms, particularly, right?
ELM: Yeah, right, right. Or for, you know, the best HBO drama and the ones that are more middling, right?
FK: Right.
ELM: Or, I’m trying to think of some other examples where it just doesn’t seem like people are interested. You know, going back to dm-me-your-weltanschauung’s question specifically, what is that magic, what makes it happen, right? I think that there are factors with that, coming from within fandom, that we, it would be a mistake to look at things like, only look at things like viewership and network and the tone of the original, right? Because I think that one of the things that we’ve obviously said a million times over the course of this podcast and it’s become only more evident as we enter our eighth year of the podcast—can you believe that?
FK: Wow, eight years…
ELM: Yeah. Well, it’s been seven years, we’re entering our eighth year.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: We’re turning eight.
FK: Our podcast has entered the age of reason, it has had its First Communion, it’s headed towards its bar or bat mitzvah.
ELM: OK, I’m gonna eject you, I’m gonna excommunicate you. [FK laughs] No. So one thing that we talk a lot about is patterns, right, and some of the big fandoms right now, when I see them, when I see the source material, I see immediately the types, the dynamics, of five other things that I know fandom loves and has loved for the last, like, fifteen years, right?
FK: Absolutely.
ELM: Or, you know, I now have, it’s been a decade since I originally was in the Sherlock fandom, and it’s been really interesting to watch all the people that I know from there move on from fandom to fandom to fandom, to see where they’ve gone, right? And I can see some of the patterns there, you know? I mean like, I can see patterns in some of the stuff that I like too, right?
FK: Absolutely! I certainly see it in my stuff, like, are you kidding?
ELM: Flourish, you are a one-note wonder here, [FK laughs] you’ve got this dynamic, hot for teacher, dark hair, brooding fuck prince…
FK: Obsessive…
ELM: Hyper-competent girl…
FK: Yeah!
ELM: But actually she wants to be ravished, but she’s really smart too, but actually she wants to be ravished…
FK: [overlapping] Great, thank you, wow.
ELM: Arranged, trapped in a castle together…
FK: [overlapping] You’ve got, we’re going too deep, and I could do this to you but I’m not doing it. [ELM laughs] I just want you to know that I here am standing on the high ground, and you’re like, you know.
ELM: No, I think I told you, but um, as I was working on some X-Men, I was re-reading some Black Sails fic where my favorite ship—I liked all three Hamiltons, or the Hamiltons and Flint together, but particularly Flint and uh…
FK: [overlapping, laughing] Yeah. All three, all three Hamiltons are like, you just made him a Hamilton…
ELM: [overlapping, also laughing] Yeah! James Hamilton…
FK: Uh huh…
ELM: And, uh, and his two spouses. But particularly Thomas and James, and I was re-reading some Black Sails fic and I was like, “Oh no, this is actually quite similar to my current ship.” [FK laughs] Not in the style of writing that I was reading, obviously, but like…
FK: [overlapping] No no no, but the dynamic, there’s dynamics that people are into!
ELM: [overlapping] Well, it’s like, two people who are certain that they are correct, and one of them has a more generous view of the world, and one of them is, like, a revolutionary. It’s fine. It’s fine. I think that these are all very, ah, admirable qualities in a character.
FK: [laughs] Great. Anyway.
ELM: Pirates.
FK: Yeah, so there’s, there’s—
ELM: Mutant terrorists.
FK: —there’s dynamics, or like, I mean some people might say tropes, but I don’t think I would use the word tropes to talk about this.
ELM: No, and I think using the word trope is maybe a misreading of this phenomenon, right?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: You know, because to me a trope is independent of character, I think that there are some tropes that, like, lend themselves well, but there’s a reason why you can slap “enemies to lovers” onto a situation, right? That describes more the thing that’s going to happen between them, or like…you know, it’s very funny, I kind of enjoy these, but I see them on my Tumblr dash all the time, people saying like, “One trope that they can pry from my cold, dead hands is…” You know, like, characters totally beat up and they’re saying, between gasping breaths, like [in a gravelly low voice] “I’ll be fine, I’ll be fine,” right, and you’re like, “Yeah, that’s a good one, love it,” right?
FK: Yeah!
ELM: And that’s just like, that’s a moment, that’s almost a cliché, right, but it’s also one where you’re like, “I love that.” Limping off, right?
FK: Yeah, yeah.
ELM: That’s, those are tropes or clichés or whatever, but that’s not about dynamics or character types to me. Maybe a character that’s more inclined to do X thing you’re describing, but I think those are two different things.
FK: Yeah, I agree completely, and I would say this is one of the places where, I think, fandom readers actually differ from, like, romance novel readers, because romance novel readers are often much more engaged in some of those tropes, like, properly tropes, like, I want to read stories about arranged marriage, and it doesn't really matter who the characters are, and in fact I’ll find it interesting to read an arranged marriage story about characters who are quite different from the usual, you know?
ELM: Sure! Yeah yeah yeah.
FK: Like, I want all that, right, I mean, and hey, it’s me. You know? I’ll do it.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: But that’s a different issue than…so I like that trope a lot. But that’s a different issue from the dynamic that I like between characters, which is the thing that follows me from fandom to fandom.
ELM: Right, yeah, exactly, exactly.
FK: And yeah, maybe those two tastes are often, like you’re saying, maybe they’re often two great tastes that taste great together, but they’re actually separate interests.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: And that’s part of what’s so different about those things. And also one of the reasons why I find it weird when you have, like, people talking about it as though romance novels and fanfic are interchangeable. Because…they overlap, in certain ways, but like, it’s not the same.
ELM: [overlapping] Shaking my head. Anytime anyone makes an argument like that, even if they are an extensive reader of both, uh, worlds—I hesitate to call fanfiction a genre—I think that they’re not a very deep reader.
FK: Yeah. I’d agree.
ELM: I have very limited exposure to romance, but like, from everything I know of it—I say that with a giant, giant grain of salt, a block of salt—
FK: [laughs] I’ll back you up.
ELM: [overlapping] Like, the thing, a salt lick. That’s right, a romance reader backed me up, that's cool. OK, so you have these dynamics, and then also, like, I mean we’ve talked about all this stuff a million times, but genuinely, what makes a fandom often like specific kinds of bodies, you know, or specific actors, right?
FK: Yeah!
ELM: There are some things that I do not think would have the fandoms they had if they had cast someone else.
FK: Nope.
ELM: Like, for whatever reason, not just for previous bringing in people, or like, that being the doorway in, but also just the way that that hits, when a certain character or a certain set of actors have chemistry together.
FK: [overlapping] And yeah, chemistry is a huge deal, right, it’s really a huge deal.
ELM: Right.
FK: And I mean…obviously there’s cases that are famous about this, but I feel like it’s actually even more pervasive than people give it credit for. Everyone’s, you’ll hear people say, “That show only works because of the chemistry between the two lead actors,” but I think that almost always in fandoms it’s because of the chemistry that makes people get obsessed.
ELM: Yeah, almost always, I can think of some exceptions, I’m not gonna name them, [FK laughs] you know, like redacted, and also redacted?
FK: [overlapping] Sure, like redacted and redacted. [ELM laughs] I’m not saying it’s universal, I’m just saying it’s a big factor.
ELM: Yeah, yeah, I totally agree. And I think that that’s part of, like, that…I think that that is a huge indicator of what can spark. That’s the actual…it’s not, “Oh I need to fix this,” it’s that you can see the potential, because they’re so good together, they have so many moments that work. But it just feels like they’re not in the most competent hands, and perhaps [FK laughs] fandom, fans would be a little more competent, you would treat them right, you would let them actually do the things that you wanna do.
FK: That’s interesting. So you’re like, it’s not that you’re upset that this thing is bad, it’s that you can see that there’s all of this unreached potential, and those are actually quite different things to be feeling.
ELM: Yeah. Or OK, let’s go, my example here would be Succession. I think we both really love Succession on a whole but were both disappointed with the third season, right?
FK: That is correct. That is a correct assessment.
ELM: And I don’t think it was the worst thing I’ve ever seen, and I wasn't like, “This show is dead to me” or anything, but I was disappointed. I felt like…
FK: Yeah, I’ll see season four, but I’m gonna come into it like…eh…
ELM: Oh yeah, I’ll, I’m ready.
FK: Let’s hope, you know?
ELM: No, I’m more excited than you, I think. I really like these characters, right, they’re awful people but they’re very compelling, [FK laughs] you know what I mean? But they don’t spark a, “Oh I see so much potential and if only they were in different writers’ hands it would be incredible.”
FK: Right.
ELM: Because when I look at the third season and what didn’t work for me, I see…writing choices, pacing choices, some fundamental problems with the setup of the world that I think they’re not gonna be able to solve, like the fact that Logan is infallible and like, why does anything matter if he always wins, etcetera etcetera. You know, we’ve talked about this before.
FK: Yeah! I do!
ELM: But to me that’s not squandered potential, that’s just like, it didn’t quite line up for me and if I had to give notes to them, when they were writing their drafts, because I know they’re just clamoring for my feedback, [FK laughs] I would’ve said, “This is how this doesn’t quite work for me.”
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And it’s a lot more the way that I approach, like, if I’m writing a review of a book or whatever, and it’s a book I really like, but I’m still looking at it with a critical eye, right? And that’s not, that’s never thinking, “This is the book I would have written instead” or “This is what I would have done with these characters instead, I just wanna see them together.” I just think that’s—and not together like shipping, even setting that aside, right?
FK: Yeah, yeah. It can be, but also just like, “More of them!”
ELM: Right! Or like, even, not just the characters but I think about what appeals to me about the X-Men—and I’m not a comics reader, and what I’ve read of the comics…it’s just not for me, like, a lot of it is, I’m not really into the superhero thing, you know, feats.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Feats are not for me. [FK laughs] But I’m really interested in the X-Men conceptually, so one of the reasons I really like X-Men fanfiction is that you can take the idea of like, what if they were mutants, and put them into these different situations, you know what I mean?
FK: Totally.
ELM: So that’s not even about my ship or liking the characters, that’s also liking the concept.
FK: Yeah!
ELM: But not really feeling like…feeling like it has potential that is not met for me by those films, or by what I’ve encountered from the comics.
FK: Absolutely, absolutely. I think that that’s a very familiar feeling to me also. But we, we should probably take a quick break, and then read the third letter, ‘cause I think that we’re getting into territory that gets us towards this.
ELM: You saying we’re jumping the gun a little? Going too fast? Going too far?
FK: Maybe.
ELM: Flying too close to the sun?
FK: All right, Icarus, let’s take a break and then we’ll come back, read our third letter.
ELM: OK.
[Interstitial music]
FK: All right, we’re back! Before I read that third letter, Elizabeth, please tell us about how our listeners can support this podcast.
ELM: Very bossy. What if I wanna read the third letter?
FK: Do you?
ELM: No. [both laugh]
FK: I’m bossy because I know what’s right for you.
ELM: [laughs] Wow, you’re trying this one on for size, huh? I don’t think it’s gonna last.
FK: [laughs] I doubt it, but you know, enjoy it while it is.
ELM: OK. So, Patreon.com/fansplaining is the way that we make this podcast, the way we fund this podcast. We have a variety of levels: $1, 2, 3, 5, 10, 1,000. Unlimited, [FK laughs] the Jeff Bezos tier. We have a variety of rewards, you get all our special episodes at $3/month, you get an extremely cute enamel pin in the mail at $5/month, at $10/month you get all that stuff, plus you get our semi-regular Tiny Zine, and we are starting to put together this summer’s Tiny Zine. No preview yet, but we will be sharing some more information about it as it comes together. So we’re hoping to get that out to $10 and up patrons before the summer ends. Yeah! So we really appreciate even $1/month if you can spare it, it really helps us pay our transcriptionists, pay our hosting fees, and pay us far below market rate [FK laughs] for the amount of time we make for this podcast, but we appreciate it all the same.
But, if you do not have any money, if you do not care to share that money with us, if—you have some—you can also write to us. The best way to get in touch is fansplaining@gmail.com. You can also leave us a voicemail, 1-401-526-FANS. There is a submission box on our website, Fansplaining.com. There’s also a submission box on Tumblr, fansplaining.tumblr.com, that is where we got at least one of these messages; the ask box is open, anon is on, please be polite if you use anon [FK laughs]. And finally, you can find us on Twitter and Instagram, though not a great place to leave substantive questions or feedback.
FK: All right!
ELM: Did it!
FK: That business! Has been said! And our third letter is from Oki:
“Hi Flourish and Elizabeth,
“I always appreciate how much your comments and others letters make me think, and the latest AMA is no exception. I found it especially interesting when y’all talked about the supposed relationship between a show’s quality and its fandom size. Now I completely agree that I think it’s bunk—there’s plenty of truly amazing stuff with huge fandoms BECAUSE they're amazing, and there's plenty of things that are just terrible and remain as such because no one even cares enough to fix it in fandom. But there is definitely a personal curve for me, as an individual. Like my favorite video game of all time, which I truly believe is a work of Art. I am NOT in the fandom and never would be. Yet I acknowledge the fandom is huge which is why I can find lots of fun fanworks when I go to general artist alleys and went to a fan event in Japan just for this game. And maybe I'm splitting hairs by claiming those aren’t fannish activities and I’m not ‘in’ the fandom, but for me they just don't feel like them. Which kinda ties into your discussion about classification of fandom and ways of being a fan, and that maybe I should get more comfortable saying that just because I don't want to read or write fic or even talk to other fans doesn't mean I'm not ‘in’ the fandom in some capacity.
“I also want to, I guess, complicate? the idea that being emotionally invested in something in a show doesn’t necessarily make it good. Yeah! It doesn’t! But there is a huge amount of room for nuance and different levels of discussion here depending on who you’re talking to. Like, if I was trying to get someone—a friend, you—to watch a show I loved, I would try to be more ‘objective,’ whatever that means. I’d talk about my own feelings and how I overlook some flaws. And when I’m talking to other fans, I am always ready to weigh in on how X arc was awful and what if XYZ happened instead, you know, fanfic stuff, as well as just gushing about how much I love it.
“But if someone comes at me, especially someone who, for example, likes an earlier iteration of a long-running series with many different shows under a single umbrella, and aggressively wants to argue about how the version they like is objectively better, I will be throwing hands and throwing around words like ‘No, this is the best thing ever.’ If this sounds like a personal beef, it’s because it is! I know there are flaws in my favorite shows, I literally wouldn't be in the fandom if I didn't think there were, as I mentioned before, but I’m still going to be defensive of them! ‘This show sux AND is the best thing ever’ is basically where shows have to be for me to be fandom-involved :D
“Thanks for always being so thought provoking, Oki.”
ELM: A delightful letter, Oki, thank you very much.
FK: [laughs] Man, I relate so much to that like, the moment someone critiques being like, “No! Fuck you!”
ELM: Yeah, no, I totally get it. So this is a really interesting letter to read this far into the conversation, and to think about everything we talked about so far.
FK: Yeah, I totally agree! Because I think that up to this point we’ve been sort of talking about like, bad and good as though that’s something that you can totally determine objectively, as if it’s something that people talk about in a like, kind of objective way? [laughs] And it’s not, and not just because of the way Oki is describing, although that’s obviously one chunk of it. There’s a lot more going on here than just, like, what’s bad and what’s good on some baseline that we can’t necessarily agree on.
ELM: Well, it’s true that we haven’t defined, like, we’re not term setting in any way when we’re talking about bad and good here, right?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And I think that’s one thing that’s very important to me when I am critiquing something, is like, explaining what are the terms of success, and if I think something didn’t work, like, say the last season of Succession didn’t work for me, and it’s not like it didn’t work on an emotional level, it didn’t connect with me or something, like, I think that the writing choices that were made did not line up in a way that I could articulate if we were actually talking about Succession, for more than as a passing example. You know?
FK: It didn’t fulfill the promises that you feel like it made, or the thing was trying to do.
ELM: I just don’t, I don’t think that it was…if everything was a, like imagine a bunch of pieces on a puzzle on a table, I think that they didn’t slide in as nicely as what I’ve frankly come to expect from them in the way that I found in the first two seasons, right?
FK: Right, right.
ELM: And I’m not saying that like, that every show needs to be a puzzle that comes together, it’s not like a mystery or something, but imagine these pieces of a whole, and you can say “Well, because the way you paced it this way” and it was mostly about pacing, but there were some character decisions too that I felt like…you know, whatever. And I also will say with that example, and I feel this way about a lot of stuff sometimes, you know, you can assess an individual season but you also might feel like they’re playing a longer game, and obviously I’m not gonna write off the show because of this or whatever. It’s just like…
FK: Right right right. Right. So what you’re saying is there could be a show that’s very campy and cheesy but you still felt like the pieces sort of fell together, and it was the thing it was supposed to be, in some sense, and it all hung together and it all worked, and you’re saying like, for you, that’s when you decide something is bad, is when it doesn’t all hang together in that way.
ELM: I don’t just think for me, I think anyone who’s a decent critic understands that work needs to be assessed on its own set of terms.
FK: Yeah. Yeah.
ELM: And you need to figure out what those terms are, that’s part of your job, you know? And that’s why I would say people get their panties in a twist when people parachute in from another genre and try to review the—you know what I mean?
FK: Yeah, yeah yeah yeah.
ELM: It happens with all sorts of genres, right?
FK: Right.
ELM: To say like… And I think that sometimes that can get a little reactionary, and they’re like, it can get weirdly gatekeepy because you know, sometimes on a prose level some of this stuff is not very good. [laughs] And you don’t have to be a scholar of the genre to say so, right?
FK: No, no. Yeah, yeah. Or also like, people not understanding what the audience wants out of it. Like, you and I disagree about Baz Luhrmann, but there was that, I like it, you don’t, in general, overall, maybe particularly about Great Gatsby, but um…there was a review of the Elvis movie, which I have not seen yet to be clear, so I have no idea whether it’s good or bad, but I can tell you that reading this review was a total pan, but everything the review said made me want to see the movie more. [laughs] I was like, “What do you mean you don’t want this? [ELM laughs] I want that! Put it in my eye holes!” You know? And it was like, all right, it’s fine, I’m not saying that that’s about good or bad, like I think that there’s a level of understanding the genre, which was what you were talking about, and then there’s another level of like, understanding what the audience wants. [laughs]
ELM: Well sure, but you know, I think with that kind of thing, too, it’s necessary to say, I think that Baz Luhrmann has a spectrum, [FK laughs] and some of his work crosses over into normal audiences’ level of tolerance, and some of it pushes you so far.
FK: [overlapping] Yes, and other ones are only for weirdos… [laughs]
ELM: It’s interesting, I was listening to the NPR review of that movie, and Tom Hanks plays a very cartoonish villain who’s very obvious and does what sounds like a truly terrible accent, and the reviewer said—
FK: Oh, it sounds, it sounds incredibly bad.
ELM: Yeah, so bad. And so then to your point, the reviewer said, “How you feel about Tom Hanks’ character will probably determine whether you like this movie or not.” Right? And just even your reaction here, like, “Wow that sounds like shit, I love it, [FK laughs] that’s so stupid and over the top, give it to me!” [laughs]
FK: [overlapping] I’m running for the mustache to twirl. [laughs]
ELM: Whereas I heard him say that and I was like, “He should feel embarrassed.” [FK laughs] So I’m like, like a friend who I see blockbusters with invited me to this and I was like, “I am not spending $18 on this, I’m sorry.” [FK laughs] I mean, we saw It: Chapter Two together. [laughs]
FK: I am, yeah, oh I am looking forward to spending $18 to see this. But anyway.
ELM: Fine. So, like, obviously there’s objective things, or subjective things, here. I think, I will say, I think that there’s some media that’s so shoddily made, [FK laughs] written or filmed, that I feel fine saying objectively, “This is bad.”
FK: And it doesn’t come all the way around and make you love it again.
ELM: I could never love that.
FK: Wow, big words from Elizabeth Minkel. All right. I believe that about you.
ELM: [overlapping] I think that if the dialogue is stilted, if I feel like I’m watching one of the plays in high school I was in—that’s probably too generous [FK laughs] to these shows that I’m thinking of, you know, and too cruel to our high school selves, I’m sure we were decent—
FK: No. No, don’t be sure.
ELM: I’m sure. I’m sure.
FK: Sure for yourself.
ELM: [overlapping] You know some of those people went on to be real actors! So, you know, like…
FK: They did, they did, that’s true.
ELM: Yeah! I’d be willing to say those shows are bad. I don’t know.
FK: Yeah, I think also even, like, the stuff…to bring us back to this point, even the stuff that I’m being like “Yeah, I love campy shit, woo!” That’s not stuff that I’m gonna write fanfic about, right? And it’s not really what Oki is talking about. Oki is talking about, like, things that are in that category of, like, you see some problems with it, but it’s your baby.
ELM: Well, that brings us all the way back to where we started in the very beginning, about saying, like, if you internalize this idea of yourself as an XYZ kind of fan, right? Then yeah, it starts to feel like you’re being personally attacked if someone says something negative about your thing, right? And this is something I’ve experienced for sure, you know? And I think we’ve talked about this before, like, the idea of if it feels like the critique is coming from within fandom, someone who gets it, it’s fine.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: But if it’s from someone who’s not, you know, hasn’t really spent enough time with this to really understand why it doesn’t work, you know, then you’re like, “Fuck you, you’re the stupidest person I’ve ever met and you’ll never understand this work of genius.”
FK: We get this way about sort of fanfic writ large sometimes, I feel like. I do, anyway. Every once in a while I’m like, “Yeah, a lot of fanfic is shitty, but you can’t say that, you asshole! Get outta here!”
ELM: Well yeah, if it feels like they’ve never actually read any, then I don’t actually care about their opinion of it, you know?
FK: Well exactly, or sometimes I care about their opinion and I wanna yell at them, you know? [laughs]
ELM: I care about none of these people’s opinion. I care about whether they’re given a platform to say these things.
FK: There we go, that’s the one.
ELM: Just saying.
FK: That’s the one.
ELM: I think there’s some element of like, for me, I don’t know, it’s not that I feel like I’m personally wounded, I don’t know, like the X-Men are inside of me or something, right? You know what I mean? It’s hard to articulate exactly why it upsets me. Because I think some of those movies are awful.
FK: Oh yeah, they are.
ELM: But when I see people saying, like people on Twitter or whatever, some random, I don’t know, journalist, saying that they are, I’m like, “I’m gonna mute you forever!” [both laugh] I’ve literally muted people!
FK: [overlapping] I do know, trust me, I know! Yeah, I know.
ELM: And I don’t, I don’t understand why. I can’t actually figure out why that context matters to me so much.
FK: [hums] I think I relate a lot to this specific situation Oki’s talking about, where it’s like there’s a bunch of shows, and people who like the old ones are being jerks about the new ones, and you’re like, “Fuck off!” You know? Get mad about it. And that’s hard because that’s sort of a call coming from inside the house in a certain way. But it’s also that like, there’s often this exclusion aspect of it, which is very different from what you’re talking about, because in this case it’s like, a lot of times it’s like, well the new people, they aren’t real fans. Right?
ELM: Sure.
FK: No true Scotsman would ever love this abomination of the latest thing. And you’re like, “Well, but I love it, fuck you,” you know? I don’t know, there is something. I mean I know you’re saying it’s not about, like, the X-Men living inside of you, but I do think there is something about identity here. About having somebody think something about some property that you love, that casts an aspersion on you, to some degree. Whether that’s from inside the fandom being like “No true Scotsman” or whether that’s from outside like, “You must be an idiot for being into this.”
ELM: I don’t know if I’m following, or buying the like, trying to say that this is two sides of the same coin. [FK hums] Like, let’s think about the internal critique, right, especially the thing you’re talking about, intergenerational, long-running franchise. I think you and Oki are talking about different franchises, which I find interesting, but I can see the subtext within both of you.
FK: Oh, yeah, I think this is a common thing, among…
ELM: Yeah. I mean we’ve brought up Star Wars earlier and I didn’t even bring up the current trilogy, but…
FK: Yeah. Yep.
ELM: Obviously that as well. You know, I think there’s, some of what you’re describing is a reactionary to a reactionary. There’s people who are like, “Only the original is the best!”
FK: Yeah.
ELM: From what I’ve observed also, this is your experience so you tell me, but it’s like, people misunderstanding the original, or like, taking bad lessons from it?
FK: Oh yeah, yup.
ELM: So then you feel like you’ve all been there in the same space the whole time, and you didn’t even realize you had divergent interpretations.
FK: [laughs] Yes, yes, “I can’t believe you people didn’t understand the true meaning of X.” You know?
ELM: Right, right.
FK: Which obviously I’m right about. In all of these situations. And those other people are wrong. [laughs]
ELM: Well, that’s the third thing that I was gonna say, I think there is an element of…I’ve had so many experiences where I’ve seen the newest installment of a thing that I like, of my fandom at the time, and in the privacy of my own head there’s like, all the voices were whispering like, “This is not very good.” Right? [FK laughs] Like the first Harry Potter movie.
FK: Sure! Yeah.
ELM: Where I was just like… [groans, then laughs] Like, OK…? Or like multiple seasons of Sherlock. But then you turn to your friend, or you log on, and you’re like, “Oh my God, what do I actually, am I gonna stick to this?” I get so, I hear the like, I cannot block out the reaction of the…like, I immediately absorb the reaction of the rest of the fandom.
FK: I’ve had this experience also, where I’m like, “I don’t know about this one, guys, but I guess I’m stuck defending it? Am I? Do I have to?”
ELM: Right! I’ve definitely had times where I felt like, because…I also have had times where I saw it and I’m like, “Oh, amazing!” and then I return, like leave my head, right—I mean, obviously I said I’m critical about everything, but you know, mostly amazing—and I leave my head and I’m like…
FK: [overlapping] Yeah, yeah, you enjoyed it.
ELM: “Oh. I don’t really…oh, actually…” Right? And like, it’s rare for me to dig in my heels and say, “No, it was still good.”
FK: Yeah.
ELM: I can be talked out of it pretty easily, because especially if people start being like, “Oh, whatever, your id was erasing over in your enjoyment of it, actually it was glossing over these giant problems,” and I’d be like, “Ugh OK…” Right? But that is not something, I have no idea what’s inside people’s heads, but I do see fandom, I feel often pretty disconnected from fandom currently, because I do feel like, like you said in the beginning, there’s not as much complaining about things, I feel like.
FK: Yeah, or if there is complaining, then it’s like, immediately sort of shoved aside as like, “This is a reactionary response.” You know? And sometimes it’s right! [laughs] But it’s still…it’s still hard, then, if you…
ELM: Or the complaining I’ll see is like, there’s still “This is problematic,” that kinda stuff I still see certainly.
FK: Right, exactly.
ELM: And often I’m not sure that’s 100% coming—I think sometimes it’s coming from within fandom, but I think it’s sometimes coming from people interested in critiquing media more broadly, you know what I mean?
FK: Yeah, absolutely, absolutely.
ELM: And you don’t see as much of the flip side of that, of people being like, “I’m just casually going to put out my positive feelings about…” you know, the thing that you guys, you know what I mean?
FK: Yeah, absolutely.
ELM: People who critique pop culture, which I absolutely get, but I see less of like, I dunno, I feel like I see less disagreement. Less arguing about whether we think the plot is good, or whatever.
FK: Right, right. Yeah, the arguing always ends up coming down to, like, I hate using the term “culture wars stuff,” but I mean that, because I mean that sometimes it turns into this situation where it’s just like, what side are you on in this? [laughs] You know what I mean?
ELM: Well, do you think that leads people to, I mean I’m gonna think about Star Wars or Star Trek or something like that, do you feel like that leads people to have to take a side of like, “Well I don’t wanna be like a, a weird racist reactionary or whatever, transphobic reactionary like these complainey—” I was gonna say old men, but I think some of them are like, alt-right 25-year-olds or whatever.
FK: [overlapping] Yeah! I mean, I’ve, I’ve, absolutely. I think so.
ELM: [overlapping] Yeah, so you’re like, “No, it’s great! It’s wonderful!” But then that doesn’t give you the space to really think about the show on its own terms, as opposed to like, as a proxy in some sort of battle, right?
FK: Yeah, I mean like, I have extraordinarily mixed feelings about many of the seasons of Star Trek: Discovery, and I have not been highly vocal about those on the internet, not because I’m not thinking about it, but because I don’t want to like, lend to people, the voices of people being jerks about the people of color and the queer people in that cast.
ELM: Sure, right.
FK: I just don’t want to add to that chorus, I have no interest in it, they’re already getting enough shit on the internet, they don’t need me to critique the plot. [laughs] Right?
ELM: Yeah yeah yeah.
FK: I think that much of the recent seasons of Star Trek: Discovery were so poorly written that I had a hard time watching sometimes! [both laugh] It wasn’t great! There were things I liked in it, but like, a lot of it I was like, “Can we stop with the therapy in space now? It’s done, don’t need more.” You know. I mean I do think it impacts it, and that is having a negative impact on my experience in fandom. Not to say that I want to exactly change what I’m doing, because I don’t…I think I am making the best choice I can, but it’s still kinda fucked up.
ELM: Yeah, I’m wary of this sounding like, “Oh, you can’t say anything anymore, you just gotta say positive things about it if you wanna—”
FK: [overlapping] That’s not how I feel! [laughs] Yeah.
ELM: No, I know, right, I hope that the nuance is coming across here, because I definitely have observed this, and it’s not something that I feel like I personally have experienced in my fandom, any of my fandoms recently. I don’t need to defend the white guys in the X-Men, it’s fine. [FK laughs] We’ll be fine.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: But it’s something I’ve observed with friends, I mean Star Trek in particular I feel like, is kind of…and it’s so stupid because so much of this proxy war shit is like, I don’t know, I don’t think these people are in fandom in any way. I don’t think these Star Wars people who are like, who are trying to make it into this, to get it on Fox News or whatever, like, I don’t think there’s any version of it that they would enjoy. Right? I don’t believe it.
FK: Yeah, yeah, I agree with that. I agree with that.
ELM: Even if they made it an all-straight, all-white cast…again. You know?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: So it’s hard, I feel like this is especially a problem on Twitter. I don’t feel like that stuff is an issue in other spaces.
FK: I definitely agree with that. And I don’t think that it…I mean, again, this is like where we’re sort of going between different spaces of fandom, or kinds of engagement, right? Because, what does this have to do with the question of like, what produces the most fanfic? I don’t know that it actually has that much to do with it. [laughs] Maybe?
ELM: Yeah, it depends on how you wanna like, how you live your fannish life, right? If you feel like you…I dunno, if they feel like the discourse on Twitter or the stupid culture war shit they’re trying to start stifles you, then maybe you start to think about it less. You know? And then maybe, say, I dunno, this whole thing is such nonsense.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: A lot of people did leave Twitter, or leave Tumblr a few years ago, and they’re like, “Twitter, Twitter seems bad, I don’t like it here.” And don’t know where to go or whatever. And I think that does make a difference, I think if you don’t have a space of people who wanna have the same conversation as you, it makes you a lot less likely to wanna, like, create stuff in that world.
FK: Yeah, I think that’s very, very true.
ELM: I mean, we’re almost out of time, but it does make me think about platform, and about timing, and I think how that actually is a big factor in what makes a fandom also.
FK: Oh, yeah, absolutely. [laughs] A huge, a HUGE factor.
ELM: And you think about some of the shows that were…some of the fandoms that really exploded in the early 2010s, I think probably owed a lot to the popularity of Tumblr at the time, and—you know, the kind of rising star of Tumblr, not like now where it’s like some weird giant snowball, you know? You know what I mean?
FK: Yeah, yeah yeah, I do. I do.
ELM: And the AO3 emerging at the time, I think. There are certain fandoms that I feel like fizzled out because they hit right at the end of LiveJournal—they hit in the in-between bit, and I think if there had been a stable space for people to talk to each other and post their works, they would’ve lasted longer and continued to grow, probably.
FK: I think that’s very true on that end, I think it’s true on the other end, too. I think that the rise of streaming in a variety of ways really impacted many fandoms, especially things from the BBC that were finding a larger audience and so forth, and obviously, you know, if we look over in music fandom, there’s all kinds of fandoms that are much larger now because music is much more accessible. When I think back to like, I don’t know, Gackt or something like that, like, around the 2000s, I’m like, “Oh yeah, why was that not as big as BTS? Oh, gee, I wonder why, it’s because music distribution was fundamentally different.” So it’s, it really is functioning on so many different levels here. I think that that’s another thing that really complicates this question of bad and good and what the largest fandoms are.
ELM: Right, or even thinking back to our last episode, with Liang, talking about these C-dramas that were big hits coming from like, BL adapted C-dramas, and you know…I don’t know why, but prior to that conversation I had thought there were like, a lot of them that had made it over to the West? And these are just the big hits? But it sounds like those were the ones that got made? [laughs]
FK: Yeah, I think so!
ELM: And they were hits in China and then they were hits when they came elsewhere in the world, when they came onto Netflix, and I was like, oh, it’s so interesting, it isn’t even a question of like, “How did those break through when the others, the many many others.” I was like, oh those were the ones. [laughs]
FK: [overlapping, laughing] It’s like, it’s just those, yeah. I mean that also makes me think about ten years ago, when suddenly people in the United States started being able to access K-dramas because a bunch of them came on Hulu, right? English-speaking people in the United States who were not gonna encounter these elsewhere in their lives, but you’re going through Hulu and like, “Hey, that looks like a cute soapy thing. Ah! I’m really into it!” And all of a sudden it just totally changes the vibe.
ELM: Sure, sure. Yeah, absolutely. And then I think the final thing that I would say too, that I don’t want to discount, though you know I am curious about how much of an impact this has now, but I definitely think, when I think of days of fandom past, [FK laughs] the effect of a BNF is not insignificant, you know?
FK: Yeah, it’s true.
ELM: There are certain fandoms I can think of that I never would have predicted, and you look back and you’re like, “Why did that happen?” And you realize, oh, those two writers with massive platforms who write great fic started writing in that fandom. And then they, like, pulled a bunch of people with them, and like, that’s huge! You know, especially if we’re talking about fanfiction in particular, that kind of network effect, I think is one that’s like, wholly invisible to people outside fandom.
FK: Yes.
ELM: And then sometimes not, actually…commented on as much within fandom as you’d think it would. Like, “Oh, the reason I started reading that was because X person started writing there.” Like, obviously tons of people do this.
FK: I think that’s really true, and I think that it’s actually more true even now, than it’s easy to see.
ELM: Really?
FK: I really, I really believe that there are sort of seed crystals of people who show up and start creating sort of signs of life in a space, that then if it hits at the right time, it starts to snowball. Because the reality is, if you get really into something and then you go and you search, or type something into Twitter or Tumblr or whatever and there’s nobody else there, you’re just like, “OK.” You know? There’s not, like…what are you gonna do? Some people stick with it—
ELM: [overlapping] I’m not, Flourish. I just start writing fanfiction because I love the characters. I’m special that way.
FK: [overlapping] Yeah, but not…but that’s, that’s maybe because you’re one of the seed crystal people, right? [laughs] There’s some people who just sort of stick around and…
ELM: [overlapping] No, I think that I just really like fanfiction. [laughs]
FK: OK. All right. But you see what I’m saying, right? I think that there are people who sort of start off, start bringing their networks over, all of that.
ELM: Mmm hmm.
FK: I just think that because it’s more sort of distributed, it’s harder to pinpoint. Whereas like, in the ’90s or the early 2000s maybe you’d say “Oh yes, it’s this BNF who caused all that.” Now there’s just so many more people.
ELM: [overlapping] Yeah. [laughs] You could literally be like, “It was that story…” Yeah.
FK: Yeah, but I still think it’s, I still think it’s operating.
ELM: Yeah, and then you have to add in this kind of, I agree and I also think there’s an element of…the metrics, quantitative element of…you know, I see some fanartists gravitating toward super big fandoms right now because they can get the notes. Right?
FK: Yup. Yeah.
ELM: Like, that’s a somewhat cynical reading, but I have seen people kind of referencing it, like “Oh all the good fanartists are in X fandom right now so here I am too!” You know?
FK: I know people who explicitly and intentionally have done this in fanfiction.
ELM: Yeah. Yeah.
FK: Like, have just said, “I made the choice to start writing X because I knew that that was going to get me a lot of attention and I wanted people to know my name.” And it did! [laughs]
ELM: Sure! Right. You see the reverse too, I see people saying all the time, “I’m not gonna write in this fandom anymore, there’s no one here anymore.” You know?
FK: Yep, exactly.
ELM: So. Yeah, OK, there’s like a million factors. This is like, it’s hard because I feel like, you know, I somewhat regret ever getting into kind of those comparison things, like how we were doing earlier with Killing Eve and…I mean I don’t regret that, I don’t want us to delete it or something, but sometimes I’m like, there are so many factors, and there probably are so many things with those two examples, with Killing Eve and Supergirl, that we have no idea about, because we just are not in those fandoms nor have we seen the source material, right?
FK: Yeah, absolutely.
ELM: Like, there could be a lot, a whole bunch of different, there could be a couple famous femslash writers [FK laughs] who got the Supergirl train going and then everyone wanted to be in there with them because they wrote such fun or compelling stuff. Like, I have no idea.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And I think that it’s really hard, I think that it’s even hard within your own fandom that you’re in for people to agree on those points. And people write these metas like, “Why do we all like this character?” and then they’ll list a bunch of shit that I would never, ever say, like, that wouldn’t be on my list! Right, you know what I mean? So it’s just like, it does really hammer home the, for all my talk of some things are good and bad and it’s not subjective, everything is actually subjective.
FK: All right, I think that’s the best thing that we can end on, because that’s all we got.
ELM: It’s all subjective, man.
FK: All right.
ELM: Yeahhh.
FK: Well, thank you to everybody who wrote in, we really appreciated your letters, and we hope that this has been a fruitful episode for you, we think it has been.
ELM: I hope people write more letters about this subject, I think it’s very interesting. One last bit of business before we go we should say, because this episode is coming out a week beforehand, but if you are going to be at San Diego Comic-Con, we’re not allowed to announce the time or date of the panel yet, hopefully by the time this comes out we’ll be allowed to say so, because I guess it’s still being finalized. But we are going to have a panel.
FK: Yeah!!
ELM: Mask wearing will be required inside spaces.
FK: And they’re gonna require that you either have a negative test or a vaccination. Not that that means that much, in the grand scheme, but it’s good.
ELM: So, so just wanna say that as a caveat, if you’re in the, I mean you probably know if you’re going by now or not, but like, [laughs] if you’re considering it, this is what we know about it. But we do know that as we’ve done in the past, on Saturday evening we’re hoping to have an outdoor meetup like we always do. So, just watch Twitter and Tumblr, we will share information about that within the next few days, and if you are going to be there, or if you’re in the area but not attending the con, we’d love to meet you and say hi.
FK: Yeahhhh!!! All right! Well, as always, it’s been a pleasure to talk, Elizabeth.
ELM: Yeah. I, well, I won’t see you in California, I’ll see you in New York first probably.
FK: All right, talk to you later though.
ELM: K, bye!
[Outro music]