Episode 188: The Year in Fandom 2022

Continuing an end-of-year tradition, Flourish and Elizabeth review five big fandom-related trends they followed in 2022. Topics discussed include clashing norms between fans on different platforms, the increasing precariousness of the streaming space, brands doubling down on fandom—and anti-fandom—in high-profile celebrity stories, and yes, of course, the collapse of Twitter. Plus: they read a letter from an artist in response to the previous episode on AI and fanworks.

---

Show notes

[00:00:00] As always, our intro music is “Awel” by stefsax, used under a CC BY 3.0 license.

[00:02:17] If you would like to hear us giving up: “The Year in Fandom 2021.”

[00:02:53] Our most recent episode, “Artificial Fandom Intelligence,” was about AI tools and fanworks.

[00:13:05] Anyone can repeat the “Pol Pot Václav Havel” experiment using ChatGPT, which Nick was inspired to try based on this New York Review of Books article. Ian Bogost also wrote an article in The Atlantic about why “ChatGPT Is Dumber Than You Think” that covers some related ground.

[00:14:14] The This American Life segment from writer Vauhini Vara on grief and GPT-3 is on a 2021 episode called “The Ghost in the Machine.” This radio segment was based off Vara’s piece in The Believer published earlier last year. 

[00:29:06] In case you missed Harry Styles’s…take on queer male cinema.

[00:29:42] 

[00:32:03] Episode 113: “Waffle House is a Reylo”

[00:34:56] A quick rundown of the Duolingo TikTok debacle. The person who was running the account, Zaria Parvez, posted on Twitter: 

I made a mistake. It’s deleted and I’m listening. I’m 24 – a yr out of college – managing an account that I didn’t expect to grow how it did & learning social responsibility on a curve. Taking full ownership. It’s an early career lesson for me and I’m learning to be better.

Interestingly, prior to this, there was a whole slew of press (here’s one example) praising Parvez’s work, particularly when it came to connected with the TikTok zeitgeist and commenting on pop culture/celebrities. Which, ya know…¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[00:37:23]

[00:38:03] Flourish is just mad that the Luddite Club beat them to getting a flip phone. 

[00:39:36] Our interstitial music throughout is “You’re enough (version b)” by Lee Rosevere, also used under a CC BY 3.0 license.

[00:40:32]

[00:42:25] Facts checked: Warner Bros., which has been HBO’s parent company since a merger with Time Inc. in the late 80s, merged with Discovery Inc. earlier this year. David Zaslav, the head of the new Warner Bros. Discovery, was previously the CEO of Discovery, and is apparently looking to bring their whole ~thing~ to a new combined streamer that might be called just “Max” which…lol.

[00:45:14] TO BE FAIR to Ancient Aliens they did give us this meme…

[00:49:46] Actually Halt and Catch Fire *is* on AMC+!!! All four incredible seasons!!!

[00:50:34] “Want to Understand Television’s Troubles? Look at AMC.”

[00:59:30] Keidra first joined us to talk about metrics-based fan culture on episode 101: “Stan Culture.” 

[01:09:58]

Squarespace sadly will not let us embed the longer version, because it is formatted as a “YouTube Short,” so if you enjoyed this, treat yourself… 💅🏼

---

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 #188, “The Year in Fandom 2022.”

FK: Well here’s what I will say in the defense of 2022: is that last year when we did this—

ELM: [overlapping] I—I didn’t even insult 2022, you need to defend it already?

FK: Oh, I think I need to defend it already.

ELM: Go ahead.

FK: Last year when we did this, we did it like, “You know what, 2021 was just an extension of 2020 in the worst way.” And I will say that 2022 feels like a new, different thing.

ELM: Yeah, I’ll give you that.

FK: Not a better thing, but a different thing.

ELM: I mean, I, I think I still have some of the like, I can’t actually remember when certain things happened, I’ll be like, “It was in the spring,” and then I’ll be like, “Vaccine? Were there vaccines? Was it this year or was it last year? Were we boosted?” You know?

FK: [overlapping] Which, which spring? [laughs]

ELM: I don’t know. I still have a little bit of that kinda fuzziness. But yeah, I think this year was pretty different. A lot happened.

FK: Yeah, because last time when we did this, we just like…[laughing] did all the same things again, because we were like, “It’s, we’re stuck in a time warp.”

ELM: OK, yeah. So, for context, if for some reason you haven’t listened to the previous 187 episodes—

FK: [sarcastic] Gosh, imagine that someone might not have been able to listen to all 187. [laughs]

ELM: [laughs, overlapping] Every, every year our final episode of the year is our Year in Fandom, and we talk about five big trends, stories, things that we observed, and then the following year we look back at the year’s previous five before we do that year’s five. So it’s like, a lot of items. I think it’s a helpful format sometimes, you can see like, “Oh, that seemed like a really big deal in 2018 and in 2019, no one talked about it.” You know? [FK laughs] Or on the flip side, it’s like, “Oh yeah, that only got worse,” so you could see the foundations being built of this thing that really blew up the following year.

FK: [overlapping] Yeah, that’s true. 

ELM: But then last year we were just like, “I give up.” So we just talked about what happened in 2020. [both laugh] But this year, startin’ fresh, we have a list of five items and they are not the items of the previous two years.

FK: Which is, it’s actually a bunch of new, like, pretty new things. So this is why I’m saying, 2022, it’s different.

ELM: Yeah! It is, that’s a great slogan. “2022: Different.”

FK: “It’s different.” [laughs]

ELM: Yeah.

FK: OK, the first thing on our list is actually something that we just were talking about. The whole AI creativity thing.

ELM: Yeah, if you didn’t listen to the last episode, so we’ve been talking about a few different AI things that have really been in the creative zeitgeist recently, and definitely fandom has been a big part of that, both the writing side and the art side, and I think we’re still seeing that a couple of weeks later, particularly on the art side. You have a lot of artists posting, like, you know, “Say no to AI-generated art,” right?

And so I feel like it’s not just because this is on our minds and we just talked about it, I do think that this qualifies as one of the biggest stories in fandom of the year, and I think this is gonna be one of the ones where we’re gonna revisit it a year from now and see some foundations being built. So…yeah.

FK: Definitely. We also got a letter—the other reason for us to talk about this is that we got a really interesting letter following up on our episode. So, maybe—

ELM: [overlapping] From a fanartist, which is exactly what we asked for.

FK: [laughs] Exactly. So, so can I read it?

ELM: Please do.

FK: OK. This is from an anonymous fanartist.

“Hi Flourish and Elizabeth!

“I’m a long-time listener but this is my first time writing in. I listened to your episode about AI writing and image generators yesterday and really appreciated that you treated such a complicated issue with nuance. As someone who has been creating fanart since the 80s, and was a freelance illustrator for several years, I thought I might weigh in on the art side of the topic.

“I still create fanart now, though it’s strictly for my own enjoyment, so I’m not at risk of losing income due to individuals or companies using AI images rather than hiring artists. That said, I don't like that so many people’s art is being scraped to generate AI images, but it’s such a complicated technology that is going to continue progressing whether any of us like it or not, so what I think about it doesn’t really matter.

“Website scraping (and other terms for it that I’m not tech-savvy enough to use properly) is entirely legal—that’s how search engines work, after all—and I can’t even conceive of how AI image-generation companies could be regulated across the global internet. Would there somehow have to be a ‘public domain’ internet and a ‘keep your filthy AI ones and zeros off my art’ internet? And truthfully, if large, powerful companies do start using AI images rather than hiring artists, that means they will save money, which means they will never allow any regulations to be put in place to limit the data sets that AI generators use.

“I haven’t talked much with people in fandom about this, since I tend to get shouted down with the black-and-white statement, ‘it’s art theft, period,’ but I have mentioned the rise of photography to a few people, just as you did in the podcast episode. The history of art, much like human history in general, has been heavily influenced by technological advancements. Photography allowed people to capture images more quickly and accurately than a painter could, and it allowed average people to have images of their loved ones, when before, only the most wealthy could afford such a luxury. Now photography is widely considered just as legitimate an art form as any other, but at the time of its rise, it was considered lesser, unoriginal, and unskilled. As you pointed out, yes, many other artists did lose their jobs or had to adapt in some way, but that’s just how people work. We want things that are faster, cheaper, and better (although that point can be argued), so of course, photography overtook many other art mediums.

“The same sort of thing happened with CGI, and it put countless traditional animators out of jobs, but I don’t see anyone complaining about that when we have movies like Up!, Toy Story, and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.

“So yes, it will suck if—and more likely, when—artists begin losing jobs to AI image generators, but so far I haven’t seen any evidence of that yet. Even the few anecdotal stories I’ve seen, where artists post their images alongside AI-generated ones, don’t entirely convince me.

“For example, I was recently shown several screenshots from a fanartist who created an image of a particular Mandalorian character from Star Wars. The text in the screenshot said that a friend of theirs had entered the character's name into ‘an AI art generator,’ so I don't know if the friend added any additional information to the text prompt that was fed to the generator. Nor do I know which one they used, so it’s hard to get any real information from this limited context.

“The resulting images were very similar to the original, though they lacked the line art, and one of them had armor that was clearly much more inspired by fantasy-style armor than Mandalorian. As for the pose and lighting, all three images showed a standing warrior, from the thigh up, with a smokey sort of background that went from yellow at the bottom to blue at the top. Honestly, I can’t tell you how many images I’ve seen over the years, from all genres of art, that look almost exactly like this, and there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s cool and people like it. But out of curiosity, I Google-image searched the character’s name, and even a couple of the screencaps that were some of the first results looked quite similar, down to the lighting.

“As you pointed out, fanartists are already making derivative and transformative works, so it seems to me that we don’t have much of a leg to stand on when complaining about AI images derived from our works. Again, I don’t like that artists’ works are being used without our express consent, but we did put these images on the internet, and I’m quite sure that all of the TOS to which we agreed gave Tumblr, Instagram, Twitter, etc. some rights to our works.

“Unfortunately, this is the way the internet works, but I think that calling anyone who uses an AI generator an ‘art thief’ is disingenuous at best and deliberately inflammatory at worst.

“AI image generation is a complicated topic with a lot of grey areas and nearly infinite moving parts. I very much doubt it’s going to go away, and I hate seeing so much vitriol directed at individuals who use the generators for brainstorming or as the basis for more original works.

“Thanks for such a great show!”

And that’s from an anonymous artist.

ELM: Thanks for such a great letter, Anon!

FK: [laughs] Yeah, absolutely!

ELM: [overlapping] Talk about nuance, it was so good. Oh man, that’s so interesting. One thing that immediately struck me in that is um…just thinking about the kind of, the writers that have gotten so up in arms about fanfiction over the years, are the ones who perhaps are the closest to fanfiction. Not just in subject matter, but stylistically, and I don’t mean that as an insult, obviously.

FK: [laughing, overlapping] You are thinking about Anne Rice, you are talking about Anne Rice right now.

ELM: [overlapping] I was thinking of some high-profile fantasy writers, but I’m also thinking of Ms. Anne Rice, yes, indeed. [FK laughs] You know, and I’m also thinking of flare-ups in similarities you see throughout different genres of literature—including romance, not just sci-fi and fantasy—and it’s always so interesting because it’s like, in this space where everyone is kind of riffing on each other and kinda doing the same thing all together, that’s where people can get the most protective and the most reactionary of their individual versions of it. 

Obviously that’s not the same thing as what we’re talking about here, but it does make me think of the kind of emotional response that creators sometimes have. I mean, just the example of, like, “Oh, I went back and looked for this character and the screencaps from the TV show had this framing and these colors and this artistic composition,” right, you know? 

FK: Yeah.

ELM: It’s like, everyone’s kind of crunched into the same space. 

FK: Right. 

ELM: And so I understand why you’d feel extra protective of it.

FK: I definitely agree with that. And I think, one thing that I kind of regretted not talking about a little bit more in our last episode on this topic is like, I actually have a great deal of sympathy for the fact that it feels shitty to think that somebody took the work that you’re doing and is like, putting it into this kind of faceless AI thing, right? Because at least with fanfiction—like, I’m talking on a purely emotional level, not on a logic level—again, that’s not to say that one thing is better or worse, emotion is real thought, right, [laughs] emotion is worth your time.

ELM: Yeah!

FK: At least with fanfiction, one of the things that I think we often say is like, “Man, if only writers who got freaked out about fanfiction understood how passionate and excited and delightful fanfic writers are!” Right? How much they’re into this, how much it’s a labor of love, and a lot of times there’s this idea that it’s just stealing and derivative and unoriginal and awful, and it’s like, “No, well, it is derivative, but if only you understood the emotion behind it.” Right? That makes the emotion more OK. That makes the experience more OK. 

But with this, like, the generator doesn’t—is inhuman, right, and the people who coded it aren’t themselves the kind of artists that the artists whose work is being scraped, and so it feels very distant. 

ELM: Right. 

FK: I mean I think that there could be an argument to be said, like, there are people using these tools in artistic ways, and they should be recognized as artists and we should talk about it that way, but I totally get why as an artist if you look at this you’re just like, “Absolutely fuck that.” [laughs]

ELM: Sure. That’s interesting though, because I…you know, as I said last time, we have skin in the game, we are people who’ve posted fanfiction on the internet, so potentially we could be part of this as well, right, you know?

FK: Sure.

ELM: And obviously I don’t know what it would be like to be a visual artist and feel this way. But part of that to me is like, “OK, so I’m offering a few hundred thousand words amongst billions of words.”

FK: Yeah.

ELM: “I’m just a few, I’m just a small, tiny dot amongst many, many, many dots,” right, the same way I kinda feel about like, if, whatever, I don’t really wanna be spied on by corporations but I don’t get too twisted up in knots about it because I know that generally I’m a data point, you know, amongst millions of data points, you know what I mean?

FK: [overlapping] Yes, yes! Absolutely, that is correct, you are. [laughs]

ELM: Right. As compared to the example I gave last time about the very famous digital humanities project where they were scraping the text of Agatha Christie alone, and then making, like, medical proclamations about her state of mind, right? 

FK: Right.

ELM: That feels very personal, whereas like, my…you know, my couple hundred thousand words going into a giant giant pool feels very anonymized, so it’s hard for me to take that personally. I’m like, “OK, well, they’re gonna see.”

FK: Also, your words have already been scraped in those ways, right? [laughs] Like, you’re on Twitter, you’re on, you know, you have things, it’s already done.

ELM: I also am a journalist, right, but you know, I don’t know, I guess…it feels very different, and I think that it was very helpful for me to have you explain to me how the art ones work, because I think that on the surface if you look at it, it really does look like plagiarism, it looks like copying, right?

FK: Right, right.

ELM: But it’s kind of just reconstructing things that are in the mass—

FK: Yes.

ELM: The ether, you know what I mean?

FK: I mean the fact is, ChatGPT is also like this, it’s just maybe harder slash or easier to see. It’s solved the five-paragraph essay. But there’s… Nick actually showed me this thing recently, it was like, “Put into ChatGPT, ‘compare Pol Pot and Václav Havel,’” and it’s like, a perfect-structured five-paragraph essay, but starts off and it’s like, “It’s actually impossible to compare Pol Pot and Václav Havel, [ELM laughs] they were both very important figures in their nations,” and you’re like… [laughs] 

ELM: Fair. That’s totally fair.

FK: [laughing] OK, it’s never, if it can’t come up with a, it can’t come up with a moral judgment between Pol Pot and Václav Havel… [laughs]

ELM: [overlapping] That’s great. I wish—more students should try this approach. Can’t, I can’t do that, you shouldn’t have asked. [laughs]

FK: [overlapping, still laughing] Because it doesn’t know what either of them did. [laughs] Like, it knows in the sense that it can produce facts, but it doesn’t understand that like, one of these people is a hero and the other one is, like, the worst.

ELM: Yeah. That’s interesting. It was actually funny, they re-ran—This American Life this past week re-ran an episode from this time last year, and I hadn’t even registered it at all last year, I remember being like, “I don’t care about this,” and this time I really listened, it was about a writer whose sister had died of cancer, and she used GPT-3, the…have you heard this story?

FK: Yeah, yeah yeah! Yeah.

ELM: And she used this to, it was a really really interesting story, because she found she couldn’t write about her sister, so she started putting prompts in to see what she could get out of it, and it was so fascinating because it was actually like, there were parts of it where it was producing I think some pretty generic things about two humans, you know? 

FK: Right.

ELM: Like, “I looked down, and she held my hand,” and the idea of finding that moving is like, “Yeah, those are universal experiences, holding hands with a loved one or whatever,” right, like…

FK: Totally.

ELM: But it was actually very interesting too, I mean I think people should listen to it, because it was like, I mean it’s sad, but the parts where it becomes the most computer-like—there are parts where it’s, it kind of gets trapped in these recursive circles and they described it as like a Roomba getting stuck in the corner, just kinda bumping into the wall over and over again?

FK: Yeah yeah yeah yeah, just burnk—ay! Burnk—ay!

ELM: The writer said that those were the parts that she connected to most, because that’s what grief felt like. You know? 

FK: Yeah.

ELM: You just felt like you were trapped in the corner just hitting into the wall and not able to find a footing. I thought that was kinda fascinating, it was like, after all these conversations about replacing our, you know, replacing artists, it was like, it was interesting. So…

FK: Yeah!! Yeah!! Yeah.

ELM: Anyway, this is a little far afield of fandom, I just wanted to put a shoutout to that because it was an interesting story.

FK: OK.

ELM: But, for fandom, I don’t wanna make any proclamations. I’m really curious to revisit this one in a year’s time and see—or sooner.

FK: Yeah. I agree. I feel like this is one of the ones that’s like, let’s put a little pin in this one, so that we know that we were thinking about it right now, and see where it comes. 

ELM: [overlapping] Digital pin. 

FK: Digital pin, great.

ELM: But Anon, one more thank you for this letter, it’s so helpful to hear from, you know, we’re coming from the perspective of writers with this tool and it’s really really fantastic to hear the personal experiences of an artist here. So, more artists, please write in, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

FK: Absolutely. OK. Next up: TikTok behaviors seeping into places that are not TikTok.

ELM: OK, but not just TikTok, but—

FK: [overlapping] That’s our number two trend.

ELM: [overlapping] Did you say number two? It’s number four. We’re countin’ down.

FK: We’re countin’ down, I’m sorry, it’s number four.

ELM: Like David Letterman.

FK: [laughs] It’s the second trend we’re talking about, number four.

ELM: Second trend, number four. So, I put this on the list. I don’t know how much of this you see, do you want me to explain what I mean?

FK: I don’t, I don’t see that much of it.

ELM: I thought you wouldn’t. OK. So, this has been going on, some of this kinda stuff has been going on for a few years, but I really feel like it came to a head this year, where you see people coming from other platforms into the AO3, and into Tumblr, and kind of importing some of the behaviors. And we’ve talked about this a little bit, some of it, we’ve talked about the very fast deletions of works.

FK: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

ELM: Another one I think we talked about too is people thinking that if you like someone’s story, like, kudos someone’s story if it’s more than a few weeks old, it’s like stalking?

FK: Yes. Absolutely. In the way that it would be if you were on Instagram or whatever.

ELM: Yeah, exactly. And then you also have seen, this year in particular, you’ve seen people talking about censoring terms—

FK: [overlapping] YEAH, yeahyeahyeahyeah, yeah. 

ELM: —because TikTok has some pretty heavy rules about what words you can say or not, and they will censor you.

FK: Absolutely, and it results in the absurd, like, TikTok—it’s almost like Cockney rhyming slang, you’re like “What are you even talking about? Ohhh, I understand.”

ELM: Right, you can’t say “dead,” you have to say “unalive.”

FK: Unalive.

ELM: It’s fascinating. Fascinating.

FK: And like instead of “lesbian” you say like, “let’s beans” or whatever?

ELM: You can’t say “lesbian” on TikTok?

FK: Uh, I mean, you can, but I think it gets you nerfed? 

ELM: Oh my God.

FK: There’s definitely, like, all queer terms have their own weird TikTok slang.

ELM: [laughs] That is like Cockney rhyming slang.

FK: It is!

ELM: [still laughing] That’s really funny. So you see all these different things coming in, and it seems like it’s causing a lot of tension, and part of me too is a little bit like…one post I saw at one point this year, they were like, “Stop it, you’re allowed to kudos and comment on something if it’s years old, no one’s gonna mind!” And then I looked, and someone in the replies was like, “I did this and someone did mind, and they called me a stalker.” And it’s like, well sure, if you have two people coming from this same place of that part of the internet where it seems like stalking…

FK: Yeah.

ELM: Then absolutely, there’s not some universally agreed-upon set of behaviors, and I think that people can get a little myopic about this and be like, “These are the norms over here and you weird outsiders are coming in—you young people with your stupid rules, are coming in, [FK laughs] ruining it.” 

FK: Yeah yeah yeah.

ELM: Where it’s like, this is just an ever-expanding community and these are platforms with very different values, and I think we’re just seeing them really just butt up against each other in a way that I think is kind of detrimental, and feels somewhat unhealthy for the ecosystem. Because I think the behaviors that are designed into TikTok in particular, but also Instagram, are fundamentally unhealthy for fanworks and fandom. Just because of the ephemerality of it, just how quick it is and how quickly you discard things. Whereas fandom kind of needs that solid base, you know? It shouldn’t be embarrassing to say you like something that someone posted a month ago. That’s, that’s not gonna get you anywhere. That’s only gonna get people feeling…I don’t know, you know what I mean?

FK: I do know what you mean, although I’m hesitant to agree with you for fear that like, I mean I think that this is very much from our own perspective, as people of a particular age and like, background, and coming from all that stuff, right?

ELM: There is no way you’re gonna convince me that posting a story and deleting it two weeks later because it doesn’t do the numbers is a good thing for fandom on a whole. Maybe it’s good for you as an individual…

FK: No, I don’t, I wasn’t trying to argue that. [ELM laughs] But what I was gonna say is that there may be other stuff that people are valuing about that very ephemerality and quick turnover and so forth, that I just don’t, like…have as, I’m not as engaged with, right?

ELM: [laughs] No! No! No! I, there’s been a massive amount of research on this, and you’re not gonna convince me that, like, getting really quick dopamine hits from fast-fast-fast-fast likes and follower counts is a moral…a moral good or a morally relative good, right? These are deliberately…

FK: [overlapping] Whooo. [laughs] I was gonna say, when you, “morally relative good” [ELM laughs] I accept, when you were saying “a moral good” I was like, “Whoa, who brought morality into this one, buddy?” [laughs]

ELM: [laughing] I was trying to just get the phrase out. 

FK: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

ELM: Like, there has been so much research, and absolutely…you know, working in the tech industry, like, it’s not a secret, and TikTok in particular was designed in a very specific way, right? And it wasn’t designed to foster connection or to inspire depth and spending real time with individual content, it is just the fastest, fastest, fastest cycle through of content.

FK: For sure.

ELM: And so you’re just kind of stuck and trapped. So like, yeah, I don’t wanna be dismissive of the experiences and preferences of people who are coming from those platforms, and people who’ve, a lot of people who have grown up with those platforms, honestly, or come of age with them, because they didn’t really have a say. You know? 

FK: Yeah.

ELM: That was the internet ecosystem into which they came up. But the behaviors that these companies have instilled in people are bad. [FK laughs] And I’m gonna say that. [laughs]

FK: Yeah, I mean, of course, the reality is that I agree with you, right, [both laugh] I’m just, I’m just—

ELM: I’m allowed to say this, I got a Master’s degree in the internet, I can say it.

FK: Hey!

ELM: It’s all right. [both laugh]

FK: Ah…yeah, no, I mean, I, I agree with…I agree with you on that. I mean, whatever, I’m the person who’s like, chucking their, chucking the internet pretty much to go and wave incense at people all the time. [laugh] So…

ELM: Wait, how does, what does that have to do with anything? [laughs]

FK: I don’t know, like, turning away from, I just feel like a lot of what I—

ELM: [overlapping] No no no no no. No no no no no. Now you’re presenting like a, I feel like that’s giving up—whatever, I’m not saying your job is giving up—but I do not think it’s like, TikTok or become a priest and never go online again, right? Like, for humanity.

FK: [laughing, overlapping] No, I’m not saying that those are the options, I’m saying that obviously I have chosen one of those options, although they’re not the only two.

ELM: [laughing, overlapping] I, I know, but I mean, you also, I still see, you’re still using Instagram, I see you over there.

FK: I still use the, I still use the Instagram, it’s true.

ELM: You want those cheap, cheap likes.

FK: I do, I can’t get rid of the dopamine. I’ve cured myself of Twitter, but I had to replace it with something, Elizabeth. [laughs]

ELM: Um, so, the, I don’t know if you’ve seen this, because I don’t know if you ever log onto Tumblr these days, but in the last few weeks there’s been a resurgence of pornbots.

FK: Oh, don’t love that!

ELM: Yeah, so it’s like a lady’s name, and then a string of numbers, they’re very easy to identify, they have totally blank profiles, and they, their bios say something about OnlyFans usually, or like, their location and their age, or whatever, and it’s all so totally fake, right. And there’s been a bunch of funny memes being like, “I don’t know what you guys are talking about pornbots, I’ve just got a bunch of new very sexy lady followers who are intrigued by my content.” [both laugh] So, so it’s like, it’s been a fun joke and people are like, “Oh, native species are repopulating Tumblr” or whatever, because this used to be a big problem back in the day. 

FK: Yeah yeah yeah.

ELM: But I saw some commentary yesterday saying that people had seen people saying, “Oh, don’t report and delete these, you’ll have a higher follower count.” And it’s like, first of all, they’re pornbots, so I don’t know if that brings you pride, like, is that, are you proud of this? [FK laughs] Are you like, “Oh look, 20 more sexy ladies in my follower list!” 

FK: Yeah.

ELM: Second of all, Tumblr’s follower count is hidden! It’s only visible to you!

FK: It’s hidden! [laughs]

ELM: And it’s like, if you’re sitting there thinking about your secret follower count, it’s like…free yourself. Free yourself. Tumblr’s giving you the means to free yourself by never displaying this, right? I mean, they used to, 10 years ago or whatever, more than that now, but like. This is one of the nicest things about it.

FK: It is.

ELM: That, that part is removed from the…

FK: Yeah.

ELM: From the general sphere, and yet people are still, they’re keeping garbage just so it could look like they have a bigger pile of garbage, you know?

FK: Yeah, I do know. That’s right.

ELM: No offense to all those sexy ladies in my area. [laughs]

FK: So I mean, what to say about this. I feel like, it’s funny, I kinda feel like this is another one that’s going to continue, maybe not with TikTok particularly but you could also have said this, maybe not with the same exactly disruptive negative aspects, but there’s sort of generational and platform change across fandom, way back in time. Right?

ELM: Sure.

FK: “Oh, we’re leaving Usenet and we’re going to like, people on the World Wide Web,” you know, I’m sure that there were moments where people were like, “Yeah, that’s a weird Usenet thing that you’re bringing here,” or vice versa, you know? 

ELM: Mmm.

FK: So I’m interested to see what the next wave is gonna be, because like, obviously right now it’s TikTok, and yes, it’s very addictive, and yes, it’s got all of these aspects of it, but I don’t believe that we’re going to be on TikTok forever. Maybe for the next 10 years, but like, you know. Not forever.

ELM: Until like, President DeSantis does a national ban.

FK: Until Elon Musk buys it too. I don’t know.

ELM: He doesn’t have enough money for that. [laughs]

FK: He does not have enough money for that. Anyway, you know what I’m saying, right? 

ELM: Yeah.

FK: That, like, these things are almost cyclical, so I imagine that we’re going to be having this conversation again at some point down the line, we’ll be like “Hey, remember when TikTok people showing up to Tumblr was a thing? And now it’s—insert this new social thing.” [laughs]

ELM: [overlapping] Well yeah, no, I just—yeah. I wanna clarify too, it’s like, Tumblr, TikTok, Twitter, these are kind of clashing vibes. I’m mostly talking about people bringing those kinds of sensibilities to fanworks and fanfiction in particular, right, and to the…

FK: Sure. Sure. 

ELM: And like, I think that you can say, I mean there’s a lot of different wys to do fandom and fandom looks very different on Instagram to Twitter to TikTok to Tumblr, right? And I think there’s space for all of that, and I think there’s gonna be friction points when people cross over from one platform to another, and people need to have a little bit of grace but also…[sighs] You know, they don’t need to like, completely change—Tumblr users do not have to start acting like they’re on TikTok because they are actively choosing not to be there. That being said, I’m saying, things like the behaviors that are designed, that TikTok teaches you to do, are antithetical to something like the AO3. 

FK: Yeah.

ELM: Right? So that’s just kind of like, I don’t know. I feel like I’ve seen so much sadness about it, you know? And also the kind of people, like, clamoring for an AO3 algorithm because they’re like, “Algorithms show me what I want!” It’s like, [laughs] oh, no, again, free yourself! You know? That’s not right.

FK: Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

ELM: And it’s just like, that’s so disheartening, and obviously that’s never gonna happen so there’s no danger there, but, like, it’s just sort of like…

FK: [laughing] Yeah. Imagine the AO3…

ELM: I can’t. 

FK: …providing you with an algorithm, I can’t.

ELM: It is what it is, and maybe there’ll be another fanworks platform that emerges that’s gonna have all those things that people want—those folks want—and, great, go do it there. But for right now? I think we’re seeing a fundamental mismatch, and that’s just causing a lot of people to be sort of bummed out.

FK: Yeah. I think that’s right. All right. On to the next? This one, number three, I’m not sure how to best formulate. We wrote down “the Johnny Depp-Amber Heard trial,” but we’re not really talking about just the Johnny Depp-Amber Heard trial.

ELM: Another TikTok classic. And Instagram classic. [FK laughs] A Twitter classic.

FK: Yeah.

ELM: So…

FK: So, what are we, what are we really talking about here?

ELM: The reason I thought of this initially, I was like, obviously this is one of the biggest entertainment media stories of the year, sure.

FK: [overlapping] Sure, stories.

ELM: And I think, you know, I definitely think a big fandom story. I think that a lot of the responses we saw…if you frame them carefully, which a lot of journalists did not, [both laugh] you could, there’s a very strong fandom argument to be made about the way that people talked about Johnny Depp and the way that, an anti-fandom argument about the way that they kind of coalesced around hating Amber Heard.

FK: Absolutely.

ELM: But that aside, one of the things that really struck me was months later, and I said this to you, it was during the giddy heights of the Don’t Worry Darling, Venice Film Festival, [FK laughs] Harry Styles spitting on Chris Pine…allegedly…

FK: They were giddy heights. 

ELM: That was a funny few days on the internet. I enjoyed it a great deal.

FK: It was so good. [ELM laughs]

ELM: Everyone looked great, everyone seemed like they were doing ridiculous things, and so…

FK: Also, by the way, I finally saw Don’t Worry Darling, and it was totally fine.

ELM: Interesting. 

FK: I would classify it as “fine.” OK, moving on.

ELM: No one ever told me, after, how it was, and so I didn’t know.

FK: It was not, I mean it wasn’t like, notably great? But it was also not bad. I did not feel bad that I had spent the time watching it. And you know, whatever, like…it was fine. It was a sophomore effort as a movie and it was fine.

ELM: Did you, have you watched the other Harry Styles film of the fall?

FK: No, because I heard it was terrible, and I’m not going to.

ELM: But Flourish, he was showing you something you’ve never seen on your screen before: tenderness between men.

FK: [laughs] OK. Move on. [ELM laughs] You brought this up, because during this…

ELM: There was a, there was a kind of similar dynamic narrative going around that Olivia Wilde became the Amber Heard figure for a lot of people, right, [FK laughs] a somewhat…

FK: [overlapping] She did, she really did.

ELM: A somewhat constructed female villain. And interestingly, Florence Pugh became like the…a lady hero, right? But kind of a fun, mean one, you know?

FK: Yes. Yeahyeahyeah.

ELM: That bit where she skipped the press conference and she was strolling through the thing, remember? And so…

FK: Yes, the very, very memorable photo of her—

ELM: And so—

FK: [laughs] Just looking like butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth.

ELM: So it was during all of that, and someone retweeted onto my feed, I cannot remember what government agency it was, I believe it was like, something from the State of Colorado, it was like, [FK laughs] some state agency, a lot of these random government agencies have like, fun social media personas or whatever? 

FK: Yes.

ELM: Sometimes they are fun, I shouldn’t be dismissive, right? And like, whatever.

FK: Sometimes they’re genuinely fun, and like, good.

ELM: [overlapping] Yeah, I get that they have some boring shit that they have to promote, and so why not jazz it up, you know? It’s like, I don’t know, they’re talking about fire safety or whatever in the, you know. [laughs]

FK: Yeah, absolutely, no, that’s a great, great…

ELM: And so, whatever agency this was had like, put that picture, and they said something about like, “Entering my villain era and practicing self-care by establishing boundaries” or something, and I swear to God I don’t have any memory of what, it could have been the forestry department, right, it was some absurd, [FK laughs] like this has nothing to do with, you know…what are you doing? And I was like, “practicing self-care by setting boundaries?” You don’t know anything about this actual situation. I don’t. I guarantee you people don’t, but you just created this weird narrative. And partly memey, but partly fandomy, right, it’s got a little RPF vibe. 

FK: Yeah, yeah.

ELM: And so it’s like, people were like, “How amazing, ha, loved this!” And it’s just like, this is so weird and gross to me that this is now…we’ve talked for years about brands kind of cashing in on the fandom thing, “Waffle House is a Reylo” was an episode that we did years ago, but this feels different to me—

FK: Yeah.

ELM: Because it sort of feels like…there’s a cruelty to the way that some of these brands became anti-Amber Heard fans, right? And there was a, there was a strange tint to the way that brands, like the tweet I’m describing, had constructed narratives about Olivia Wilde and Florence Pugh, right, you know what I mean?

FK: Yeah. So I mean, I see where you’re going with this. So it’s not that it’s new—it’s definitely not new, it’s as old as tabloids and as old as celebrity fandom, that you have like, feuds and all this stuff, right, I mean like—

ELM: Sure. Right, right, Princess Diana.

FK: Yeah.

ELM: Absolutely.

FK: Yeah, whatever, you know, the Jennifer Aniston/Brad Pitt/Angelina Jolie love triangle of yore.

ELM: [overlapping] Well, we already declared that we think that Angelina Jolie is the superior lady. We took a stance on that last time. [laughs]

FK: Yes. Although, although, although I have to say, I’m feeling, you know, my heart goes out to Jennifer Anison right now, she’s airing a bunch of stuff that is…she’s choosing to air, you know, whatever.

ELM: Obviously they’re both vastly superior to Brad Pitt, who’s the worst person.

FK: Yes, OK good, yes. Anyway.

ELM: [overlapping] And bad at acting.

FK: Point being. [both laugh] This is, this is like, that’s a tale as old as time, and it’s not even that it’s new that the wider public, right, like I had some brief conversation with my barber where he was, like, anti-Amber Heard, and I was like, “Great, we’re never talking about this again,” you know? 

ELM: Yeah. Yeah.

FK: That’s not new either, but it is, the idea of brands jumping on it in this particular way. It just feels so, like…gross. [laughs]

ELM: Right. Yeah, and it’s just sort of like, there’s something about the Duolingo owl bit, do you remember this? I just feel, I feel a little… [laughs]

FK: I don’t remember this.

ELM: [still laughing]…ridiculous saying words right now. So, there were a bunch of brands during the—

FK: I use Duolingo every day and I don’t remember this!

ELM: Well, the Duolingo owl TikTok. So, on… [laughs] There were a few brands, during the Heard-Depp trial, that made their thing, their thing to get engagement, that they were like…

FK: I remember that, yeah.

ELM: Violently negative about Amber Heard, right? Some of them had like, actual real connections, one of them was some makeup company that, you remember?

FK: Yeah, I remember that, the makeup company thing.

ELM: [overlapping] And they were like, weighing in. But one of them that got the most press was the Duolingo owl. And it was like, run by a 23-year-old, and she like, talked about her work on her Twitter and she was like, “Yeah, they hired me because I’m good at TikTok,” and it was like, this doesn’t even feel like a brand, this is like, a young person who’s a good social media poster. 

FK: User, yeah.

ELM: Right? And that’s why you hired—so that doesn’t—that also felt like, the way that she talked about her job at the time, and I don’t know, I imagine these tweets have been deleted now, but it just felt like there wasn’t really a strategy there. They were like, “Hey, we don’t really understand TikTok, you’re a young person, you do the TikTok.” And so then she turned the TikTok into like, now Duolingo’s official stance is that Amber Heard is a lying bitch, you know? It’s just like, how is that…what does that have to do, it has nothing to do with your brand!

FK: Yeah, I mean this goes back to the like, how are people incentivized, and if the way that they’re incentivized is just to get the most metrics, then of course you are incentivizing your brand to do shit like this.

ELM: Yeah! No, but it’s bad! But I just think that the way, I think that what feels equally toxic to me is the way that people respond to it, like “Oh, this is just my friend in the Amber Heard anti-fandom who hates her as much as I do, me and the Duolingo owl want her to die.” And you’re like, what? [FK laughs] Like, you know that you’re being, can’t you tell you’re being manipulated here, can’t you tell you’re being whipped up because they just want clicks? This has nothing to do with what they’re actually selling, but now you think of this as like, I don’t know, you just give them more clicks and then it’s on your feed more, and then…

FK: It’s social proof, right, there’s social proof that you’re right about Amber Heard or whatever.

ELM: Yeah. Right.

FK: Or your idea about what happened with Florence Pugh, or this or that or the other.

ELM: Right. It was interesting too, I really feel like we didn’t talk about it very much in the podcast, but there were so many weird things going on with that trial, you know, and I remember at the very end, a bunch of journalists were like, “We really should’ve been paying attention to this, this is not that complicated a trial, it’s not a he-said-she-said, and like—

FK: Yeah!

FK: Because we thought this wasn’t serious enough to bother with, then we ceded the ground to people who hate this woman.”

FK: Absolutely. And did you see that she just recently paid $1 million to make his defamation suit go away? This was in the paper this morning.

ELM: Just great. Just…just cool.

FK: Yeah. It’s horrifying.

ELM: Yeah. And like—

FK: The official stance of this podcast [ELM laughs] is that Johnny Depp sucks, to be clear, and we don’t know anything about whether Amber Heard is a good or a bad person but she doesn’t deserve the shit she’s been going through, because nobody does.

ELM: Doesn’t matter. That’s not really how the law works either, doesn’t matter if you’re a good or a bad person, it’s about what actually happened.

FK: Yup!

ELM: So. Give me my law degree. [FK laughs] And I remember once I was listening to the radio and they were doing call-in about reactions, and a woman who had like a teenage son said that she had not talked about it with him at all, and then he came down and started talking, and he was saying violently misogynistic things, and she’d always thought of him as a very sweet boy. And he had just immediately been radicalized by, like, a month of TikTok on this, right? 

FK: Yeah.

ELM: And it was just like, what are the effects, what are the, I’m sure we’re seeing effects of this now, and I’m sure it’s just spiraling and spiraling. And it’s just like, they always talk about that 2014 4chan—or 8chan merges—you remember the Gamergate Venn diagram? 

FK: Oh yes, I do, believe me, I do.

ELM: [overlapping] Bronies, what happens when no girlfriend, yeah. 

FK: Yeah yeah yeah.

ELM: And everyone talks about how that was like, this prophetic text, which it was, and it’s like well, what are we seeing here from this year that is laying a foundation for current teens in particular? Because that was huge for people in our generation, a decade ago, right?

FK: Right, and it’s absolutely…yeah.

ELM: That’s cool. All right. 

FK: Well, this is all making me want to go uh…it’s, you know what it’s doing? Did you see that horrible New York—well, I shouldn’t say horrible, well it is horrible—that terrible New York Times article about the “luddite club” that just made me so embarrassed for all of the kids involved? Having had their normal teenage activities put on blast in The New York Times this way? [laughs]

ELM: I didn’t read it, because I never have any free articles for the Times even though I read zero, so I don’t understand how that happens every month.

FK: OK, OK, I get mine free through school, and it seriously was just like, it was an article about how there was a club of teenagers…

ELM: [overlapping] Oh, I saw, I saw a lot of people talking about…I think I’m mutuals with the authors, so I saw a lot of people talking about it.

FK: Yeah, and let me tell you, this is, at the time I was like, “These poor kids, they don’t, this is gonna be great on their college apps but they’re gonna be stuck with this article about them forever.”

ELM: Why don’t they, no, why are you judging them, that’s, that’s, they’re livin’ their truth.

FK: I guess, but anyway, now that makes me sort of want to join them and get a flip phone. All of this.

ELM: I would love it if you got a flip phone, that’d be great.

FK: [overlapping] And also like, enforce every child I know to join this club and get a flip phone and not open TikTok.

ELM: [overlapping] You already have an Android, so when it comes to group texts it’s like you already have a flip phone, to me. Basically. [both laugh]

FK: Did you like the part where they were like—oh, well you didn’t read it—there was a part where they were like, “You know, the thing that really shocked me was that like, when I switched to a phone that just was not an iPhone, a bunch of my friends stopped texting me [ELM laughs] because they were so mad about not having the blue, and I realized that they were never really my friends.” [laughs] You’re right, I agree with you, kid.

ELM: I’ve put up with you despite your Android. This is one of your fatal flaws.

FK: [overlapping] Yeah, that’s how I know that you’re really my friend. [ELM laughs] All right, I think we should take a break, because we’re really off-topic at this point, and we’ll come back for numbers one and two.

ELM: All right, let’s do it.

[Interstitial music]

FK: OK, we’re back, and it has been another wonderful calendar year [laughs] of Fansplaining, and now is the time that we talk about how we have made Fansplaining for this past calendar year. [ELM laughs] And the answer is…with the support of listeners like you, I’m not ceding the ground, Elizabeth, you’re making this face because I’m making it awkward. [laughs]

ELM: Oh my goodness. Patreon.com/Fansplaining. Last time this year that we’re gonna say it. So, we have a new special episode that we will be recording shortly, and hopefully will be coming out around the time of this episode, maybe just in the beginning of the new year, on Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery.

FK: Yeahhh!! Yeah! We enjoyed it.

ELM: We did. If you didn’t get a chance to see it in theaters for the week that it was there, it is on Netflix currently, and we’re going to be talking about it. At $3/month you can listen to that, you can listen to our magnum opus—our episode about Interview with the Vampire—[FK laughs] and 26 other special episodes.

FK: And, if you give a little bit more, we have these cute little Fansplaining pins, I just sent out a bunch to some new supporters. And if you don’t have money, don’t want to give your money, you can also support us by spreading the word about the podcast, or by sending in your thoughts to fansplaining at gmail.com; put things in our Tumblr ask box, anon is on; there’s also a form on our website, Fansplaining.com; or give us a call, 1-401-526-FANS, and leave a voicemail.

ELM: I’m gonna say one more thing about Patreon, since this is the last episode of the year. This was our first year with our transcriptionists, Maria and Rachel—

FK: Yeahhh!!! Yaaay!! [applauds]

ELM: [overlapping] And so Patreon money has been supporting them all year, they’ve been doing an incredible job, we love them, and so, one of them is listening and transcribing these words, but thank you to both of them! [both laugh] I actually think they both listen when they’re not transcribing, so…so, we really appreciate their work and we know that a lot of our readers also really appreciate it. So just wanted to shout out. 

[Transcriptionist’s note: <3]

FK: Absolutely. OK! On! To number two! Which is: the HBO Max debacle. And really sort of streaming’s current situation in general.

ELM: OK. I feel like I’m explaining all of these, but I did make this list, so, I’m going to explain this one as well. [FK laughs] Um…

FK: That’s OK, I’m ready to, this one I’m ready to respond. Man am I ready to respond to it.

ELM: [overlapping] Yeah, yeah, you give me your expert opinion. So. [sighs] HBO Max, has been going—HBO has been going through some…changes. So—

FK: [singing quietly] Ch—ch—ch—ch—changes…

ELM: —correct me, they merged, they were purchased by Warner Bros.?

FK: I believe that’s right.

ELM: And how does, is Discovery involved in this? There was some kinda big merger, right, and shuffling around, whatever, I should have fact checked this. Whatever. They’re all together.

FK: [overlapping] There’s a merger…yeah.

ELM: And HBO Max, if anyone is not an HBO subscriber, is a streaming service that launched within the last few years, and there’s a lot of the programming that I think of as HBO programming is actually HBO Max original programming. Right? Like Our Flag Means Death is an HBO Max show, it’s not an HBO show.

FK: Right. Right.

ELM: Though HBO Max also carries the HBO shows like White Lotus and Succession and things like that, right? 

FK: Right.

ELM: So like, there’s things going on there. [laughs] And this dude comes in—

FK: Well it’s like, yeah, it’s one of those things where they basically created, they almost created a little new mini company to be a streamer, and that company started commissioning things in addition to the parent company.

ELM: Right, exactly. And I think, interestingly, HBO I feel like has always had a pretty rigorous, buttoned-up brand, and HBO Max seemed a bit more loosey-goosey in terms of the range of things they were willing to take a chance on, at least initially.

FK: [overlapping] Yeah, they’re willing to do more kinds of things.

ELM: Yeah. I mean, for better or for worse, some great stuff and also some stuff where you’re like, “HBO would never do this.” [FK laughs] So, through all the merger shenanigans, things started happening with Warner Bros. and with HBO, right, and one of them famously over the summer was they announced—they were already in post-production, I believe—that they were canceling the Batgirl film.

FK: Yeah, which was really shocking. Like, for a wide variety of reasons, but one of the big ones being that…well, I don’t know, there’s, I literally don’t think it’s ever happened before. Not when it’s that far.

ELM: At that scale, and that late in the game, right, that’s huge. It’s just like—

FK: Especially something…yeah.

ELM: Chucking money down the drain at that point, like a ton of money.

FK: There’ve been movies that get made and finished and never released, but not like…a franchise movie [laughs] with the expectations all built and everything.

ELM: Right, and obviously DC seems to be troubled, and for years they’ve been all over the place.

FK: Right.

ELM: And that’s been their strength and weakness, they’ve made some really interesting stuff but also some “What are you guys doing.” 

FK: Yeah.

ELM: So that was one of them, and then there was a big thing over the summer where HBO Max slashed a ton of its animation that they had—animated shows they had commissioned, right, and they started removing animated shows, and so all these animators were freaking out. 

FK: Yeah.

ELM: And then this presentation leaked over the summer where they talked about how they were gonna merge it all with Discovery, and they’re basically gonna turn it into like…Discovery, it’s just…if you’re not American or don’t watch cable TV, that whole cluster of channels is just garbage, right? You know what I mean?

FK: It’s like, stuff you might watch when you’re high, maybe? 

ELM: [laughs] I was gonna say like if you’re—

FK: [overlapping] Genuinely, that’s how I think of Discovery, I’m like, “Oh, there’s some animals and a show about ancient aliens,” and like… [laughs]

ELM: Yeah, it’s not, it’s not like science though, it’s just, yeah, Ancient Aliens, it’s like, it’s just nonsense, right, even The History Channel, it’s like this isn’t history, this is just conspiracy theories about Hitler, you know? It’s not…it’s just…and The Learning Channel…

FK: [overlapping] Right, it’s nonsense and it’s the something you get high and watch and you’re like “Wow, that’s still pretty stupid.”

ELM: [laughs] So whatever, so their goal, “We’ll do all this, we’ll bring all this together,” very very—just some bad stuff that leaked out of that presentation about who they thought their viewers were that made anyone who liked any HBO show feel very concerned.

FK: Yes.

ELM: And then in the last few weeks, they’ve started canceling shows—including Westworld, which is one of their big shows, right? And removing the shows from the streaming platform, and that’s the part that seems most inflammatory, because people are, you know, people were initially like “This is just so they don’t have to pay residuals to the cast and crew,” but as people were pointing out, streaming residuals are very, very small, doesn’t really seem like a money-saving thing, so…people were trying to figure out, what’s the motivation here for not just canceling shows and retracting season renewals, which they’ve done a few of, but like, just wiping this content from the face of the Earth, which seems…

FK: Yeah.

ELM: I don’t understand what they’re doing.

FK: Well the residuals are—you’re right, the residuals are small for them, but they’re not necessarily small for the people, that’s the thing, right, that’s what’s so frustrating. Is that they’re not small for the people—

ELM: [overlapping] No, yeah, sure, but like, from the perspective of the network, it’s like, [laughs] it’s like spare change, but for them it’s like, yeah, yeah, exactly, right. Yeah.

FK: And even, even when you get to like, a later point, I mean I think I was saying this to you, that I still get residuals on this one show that I worked on, and like, it’s not very much, it’s less than…it’s less than what comes in from, you know, Fansplaining, for certain, much less than that. [ELM laughs] Like MUCH less than that. But it’s still like, yeah, I did this work, and people are still watching the show, and it was valuable, and like…so I get to go out for a nice dinner every year on that. But there’s people for whom their stuff adds up to actually being able to continue to live.

ELM: [overlapping] Right, yeah, if it’s your whole career, absolutely, yeah, yeah, that absolutely all adds up.

FK: [overlapping] Right, and sometimes it is your whole career, especially if you’re starring in a TV show, and then you get associated with that TV show and it’s hard to get other kinds of parts, like…you know? So it’s really, separate from whatever they’re doing, from a—I would suspect, right, that they don’t want to be putting the, they don’t want to be investing any time, any effort, anything into a back catalog that they don’t think is really bringing any new viewers in. Because with so many streamers, that’s the whole name of the game, that’s the only way they make money, is by continually getting new people to sign up.

ELM: I don’t really understand that though, unless there’s—it doesn’t seem like that—from a tactical level, the continued presence of four seasons of Westworld isn’t like, breaking the servers, right? And it’s like, how many—yeah, maybe it’s not pulling in new people, but it’s something else to have. I don’t understand. Is there, there’s not a finite amount—I mean there’s technically a finite amount of space, but that’s not it, that’s not breaking the bank here, right? It just…it doesn’t make any sense to me.

FK: I don’t know, I really don’t know. 

ELM: So—

FK: I mean, maybe they continue—maybe there’s deals where they continue to have to pay—I don’t know.

ELM: That, that’s actually, yeah, I was wondering about that. And they were saying that some of these, I mean some of these could wind up on other streamers if they wanted them, because they could cut a new deal with them or whatever, so.

FK: Right, I suspect that there’s a contractual element where they have to pay some amount to have it. I mean this happens with all sorts of stuff, right, like I was thinking the other day, I was like “Oh, hey, I never watched The Walking Dead, maybe I’ll watch The Walking Dead, it just ended, maybe I’ll go back and see what the first season is.” Turns out it’s not on AMC+. 

ELM: What?

FK: It’s on Netflix. 

ELM: Ohhhhhh.

FK: You can watch later seasons on AMC+, but the first season is like, contracted to Netflix, and I don’t have Netflix right now, and so I was like, “Well I guess I’m not watching The fuckin’ Walking Dead, am I?” You know? But it’s like—

ELM: [overlapping] That’s funny. Just read a, read a summary of the first season, and then jump on in the second season.

FK: I mean maybe I will ultimately do that. But, but—you know, I’m just saying that like, yeah, the stuff…

ELM: [overlapping] It’s such a fucked-up landscape, yeah. So fractured.

FK: Yeah, the stuff gets broken up. But I mean, then there’s also the bigger deal, which is that actually streaming is kinda not working out as well as people might have thought.

ELM: I mean I don’t think people thought it was working out well in the beginning either, I think everyone was like, “What’s this?!” You know, I think that—

FK: Yeah but now the “Oh, we invested a lot of money and it’s not actually, we’re in the underpants gnomes thing and there’s no result!” [laughs]

ELM: Right. Right. Well, this is a lesson that Hollywood’s had to learn, that the tech industry has known for its entire existence: this is how it works. 

FK: Yeah.

ELM: And like, I think that if anyone in the entertainment industry didn’t think this would happen, that was quite naive of them. They could watch a show called Halt and Catch Fire, which is about the history of the technology industry, and then they would’ve learned. But. [laughs] It’s on AMC.

FK: Well, OK, but, so—

ELM: [overlapping, laughing] I don’t think it’s on AMC+, I think that’s on Netflix too! [both laugh]

FK: Amazing, amazing, so maybe I can’t watch this show right now.

ELM: [overlapping, still laughing] The most AMC show! You can watch it, ‘cause I own it on iTunes, so you can come over and watch it with me anytime you wanna look at Joe’s beautiful face.

FK: Wow. OK, thank you.

ELM: OK, but anyway. So the reason I put this on this list was not just about the Warner-HBO stuff. I think that’s the most dramatic, and the one with the most shenanigans, [both laugh] but, one of the things that I’ve been observing since I joined a new fandom for AMC’s masterpiece, Interview with the Vampire, [FK laughs] is there’s a lot, a lot, a lot of anxiety about streaming. I guess I hadn’t been in an active fandom for a show that is actively airing, and AMC in particular is like—there actually was an article, oh, I used my one free click for the Times today, there was an article in the Times, did you read it? 

FK: [overlapping] Yeah! I read that article too!

ELM: With Lestat’s beautiful face as the art. You know, saying that AMC was a really illustrative example of how streaming was going wrong. We’ll put that link in the show notes. But it’s fascinating because there’s so much anxiety in this fandom, and I see it in other fandoms too, about the instability of the thing that you like. And like, yeah, that’s how television has always been, right? You know, you never knew if you were gonna get renewed for another season. But I think this kind of…there’s a lot less predictability now, like I think about Our Flag Means Death and the second season renewal, which I felt—you know, this is not my fandom, maybe I’d feel differently if I had an emotional attachment to that decision, but from my observation, it felt quite cynical, because it seemed clear that they had seen it was a hit, renewed it, and then waited months to kinda whip the fandom into this frenzy, you know? This desperation, like “Please, please, this is all I want, please please please,” and then the first day of Pride month they were like, “Here you go.” Right? And the cast and crew were posting like, “Phew, finally we can tell.” And it was like, all right, I get how this benefitted you, because that garners so much more attention and people are like, “Oh I’ll check that out, people really want another season, it must be great,” right? But that also feels quite manipulative to me.

FK: Yeah, I mean I think more than that, they were probably chasing having queer press report on it, because they were like, all the usual press are gonna report on it, but if we do it on Pride month, then queer press will report on it.

ELM: Right. Yes.

FK: You know, which actually I don’t know how much that has to do with the level of—I mean it does have to do to some degree with the level of fandom excitement, but I think it also just is like, what a convenient day to pin it to. [laughs] You know, which is like…

ELM: [overlapping] Yeah, yeah, right. And so I’m like, looking at other fandoms, I mean Interview with the Vampire was renewed for a second season before it premiered. 

FK: Yeah.

ELM: And I understand that strategically because then you say, “OK, this thing’s got legs, I can get invested now,” right, or like, they renewed Yellowjackets before—you know what I mean? They’re renewing things well in advance.

FK: They saw that it was getting such good reviews early, and they were like, “Great, we’ll do another one, because we know it’s gonna be a hit.”

ELM: But, you’re also seeing these renewals get retracted, and it’s fascinating to me with Interview with the Vampire, I see people in the tags being like, “Well they took it back for other shows, so they could take it back for us, too.” [FK laughs] And it’s like, great, so everyone’s just gonna live in like, terrified fear until they actually see it with their eyeballs. 

FK: Yeah.

ELM: And it’s just like, that’s not a fun time to live in, you know? And I get it, but just watching people get burned over and over again—or the Netflix shows that they just dump after, you know, one or two beautifully reviewed, well-received seasons with supposedly tons of viewers according to them, and then they’re just like, “And we’re done.” You know? 

FK: Yeah.

ELM: It just, it seems like, I absolutely understand why people, I’ve seen people say “I can’t give my heart to any show because I just feel like they’re just gonna abandon me in the middle of a story” or whatever. 

FK: Right, absolutely. I mean it’s also interesting because it does lead to very different sort of processes for thinking about it. I don’t know, like Twin Peaks: The Return got made because—and the way that that got made is they were like, “We don’t care what is in this show, we know that it will garner us x number of people signing up for Showtime.”

ELM: Well, that was—

FK: “And all we care about is the number of people that are signing up. And so like, we don’t care what’s in it.” And that’s very honest, in a way, which is what—

ELM: But that’s so rare.

FK: It’s exactly what Netflix is doing though, in a certain way, in that Netflix is saying like, “We know that there’s no new signups from this show after three seasons, so it doesn’t matter how good it is, we’re never gonna give you more.” That’s like the flip side of the coin.

ELM: Sure. Right, right, right.

FK: I’m not saying that it’s common that you have the beautiful thing. [laughs]

ELM: Yeah, no, and I mean, I think the Twin Peaks example is kind of an anomaly in a bunch of ways, it’s also a very famous director, and it’s an iconic TV show. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

FK: [overlapping] Yes. With a famous fandom, and like, a high, high income bracket of people who care about this thing, so people are gonna like—

ELM: A one-season thing, right? It’s really different to get invested in a limited series than it is, you know, I have to say, the idea that they might not make season three of Interview with the Vampire…

FK: Yeah.

ELM: Which is supposed to be the, my favorite book and probably yours, too, right, The Vampire Lestat, [FK laughs] that devastates me, in advance, and we’re talking about like, three years from now this could potentially come out, and I’m already sad about it. And it’s just like…

FK: Yeah.

ELM: Just because of business decisions? I don’t know, it’s not a way to live, man.

FK: Yeah. OK, so this is another one where we’re putting a pin in it and we’re coming back next year and the year after that, and we’re gonna be talking about whether The Vampire Lestat is indeed getting made.

ELM: [sighs] God. I think that we shouldn’t revisit it in a year, I think that we’re gonna learn a lot more about what’s going on with HBO in particular. People are already kind of aggressively reporting on this and trying to be like, “What the fuck are you doing?” And I suspect from all the chatter I’ve seen online that the unions in Hollywood are gonna actually start pushing back.

FK: [laughs] Yes, they’re gonna have some words about this. All right. So on to our first and last thing. [laughs] Which is, of course, what many people have been waiting a long time for us to talk about, the collapse of Twitter. Which feels like really the collapse of Twitter at the moment that we’re recording this, I have to be honest.

ELM: OK, so, for context: it is Monday, December 19th, and yesterday it felt the most collapsey that it has, amongst many many days of collapse. 

FK: It did.

ELM: It was the day that Elon Musk put up a poll that said [laughs] “Should I resign?” and, yes. The yes votes won. I voted yes, I thought I should put in my two cents there. [FK laughs] So…

FK: After banning people from talking about other platforms.

ELM: They've already retracted that, but yes. So they—

FK: No, no, I know they’ve retracted it, but it was, it was just a total clown car moment of like, “You’re not allowed to post your username on the other service.” [laughs]

ELM: [overlapping] But only certain platforms, and Tumblr wasn’t among them, so Tumblr was like, “OK…” [both laugh] Um…yeah. So, just a fucking shitshow. I think it’s impossible for us to like, talk about what is happening beyond just giving that context of where we are. I don’t really want to assess the future of Twitter. I’m mostly…just say it’s going, because it feels very unstable, right? And it is definitely already breaking. I don’t think you’re on it very much, but like, it is struggling.

FK: Oh, no no no, from the day that, like, I logged out when Elon Musk, and I’ve only checked in twice since.

ELM: Yeah, you’re missing almost nothing.

FK: I am delighted. I mean whenever I check back in, I’m like, “No! I’m enjoying this! I’m enjoying not being here!” [laughs]

ELM: There’s like a lot of glitches because they gutted the staff, and everyone who’s still working there is like, four Elon Musk fans and everyone else who’s tethered to the company because of their visas, right? [laughs] 

FK: Yeah.

ELM: But I have so much sympathy for them. The latter, not the former. The former can fuck themselves.

FK: Yeahyeahyeahyeahyeah no no no, obviously.

ELM: No, but I mean, not even in terms of the discourse, which is very much like “Oh my God, how many times do I have to hear you’re leaving, could you just go?” It’s like people are at a party and they’re like, “All right I’m gonna go!” And then five minutes later they’re like, “I’m leaving.” [FK laughs] And then ten minutes later they’re like, “Hey, in case you want to know where I’m going next, here’s the address.” And you’re like, “OK.” 

FK: [laughs] Yeah.

ELM: And then ten minutes later they’re like, “Yeah, I’m gonna go there later.” And you’re like, “I don’t, I said goodbye to you, could you go?” And I… [FK laughs] I think people need to look inward and ask themselves why they’re continually saying they’re leaving and yet I keep hearing their voices. [sighs] I’m just feeling very, very tired. But I do think that, since this is about fandom, one of the things that I’ve found somewhat frustrating about the, like, “Where should people go from Twitter” conversation is that I don’t think there’s been enough focus from the fandom side about the fandom behaviors that are specific to Twitter.

FK: Yeah. Yeah. That’s right. And you know, this whole time I’ve been sitting here thinking like, the fandom behaviors that are specific to Twitter are the ones that all of the people who are like, analyzing fandom, the people who have my old job, those are the ones that they’re primarily looking at. I mean they’re looking at other stuff too, I’m not saying it’s only Twitter, but Twitter had the best API. Twitter makes it possible for you to, like, snoop in these various ways. And also the things that people talk about on Twitter, the things that people in the entertainment industry care about, and so I’m sitting here going, “Thank God I got out.” [ELM laughs] I don’t know, I mean, this is a nut that I don’t care to crack. [laughs] Where you’re going next.

ELM: Right, the organization elements, the metrics elements, you know, the campaigns that are run through there. Absolutely none of the alternatives that people are naming—I mean a lot of them are deliberately designed to not be like that, right? Like, you can’t—

FK: And power to people, to be clear, but… [laughs]

ELM: Yeah, no, but the idea that every BTS fan would go to Mastodon and they could organize—that’s not, that’s not… I mean whatever, maybe they could have a BTS-only Mastodon, maybe there already exists a BTS-specific Mastodon instance. But like…

FK: Oh man, the thing is that that’s gonna get so like, federated social media is just like, it’s a recipe for even more drama than already exists. Can you imagine the drama of federation on top of the drama of like, BTS fandom on Twitter? I can’t. I actively can’t.

ELM: Yeah, I don’t wanna imagine that. So it’s like, that kind of thing, but I also think that with a lot of the metrics-based stuff, I mean we talked about this forever—whenever we talked about stan culture, our conversations with Keidra Chaney, amongst others, a lot of these metrics are created by the fans, and presented—the metrics of success are created by the fans—

FK: Right.

ELM: And then retroactively justified as like, “This is what we have to do!” And it’s like, you made up that goal. You were the one who said you need to reach, you know, two billion views, right? 

FK: Yeah yeah yeah.

ELM: You could set a different goal. [FK laughs] A different, you know. And it doesn’t have to be the number of views on something or the number of retweets or whatever.

FK: Right.

ELM: It’s like you’re…as a group, these groups are setting their own goals, so they could set, they could do other things, it doesn’t need to be on Twitter. Right?

FK: Right.

ELM: But that’s where it is. And so it feels like, “What am I supposed to do? This is where my thing is, and this is how we organize.” And it’s like…

FK: Totally.

ELM: It reminds me a lot of a couple years Facebook went down, and this was when Facebook Groups were really going strong, and people got very defensive, saying, “How dare you suggest that people shouldn’t have their groups on Facebook, this is how they organize, this is how they share local resources or whatever,” and it’s like, yeah, I’m saying that maybe they shouldn’t put their eggs in Mark Zuckerberg’s basket. Like, I understand [FK laughs] this is an accessible tool because so many people have it, and you know, lots of people who are not super digitally literate can use it, but this man is a bad basket-of-eggs holder. And you know who’s worse at holding eggs…is Elon Musk. [laughs] So it’s like, move, get away from there.

FK: Yeah! Yeah, totally. I mean, this is one of those things where it’s like, those people—yeah, like you were saying, it’s not that they don’t have a point, right, learning new tools is not easy for everybody, including young people.

ELM: And migrating a group! I have absolute sympathy for every marginalized group that has found great community and has built structures on these platforms. They’ve literally built something. 

FK: Right, right, right.

ELM: It’s not just like they all showed up there and started talking, you know, they did the work. But like, I don’t know, it’s like they built a really great corner of a bar and Elon Musk bought it, and he’s like “This is a Nazi bar now, and I’m just gonna do a bunch of shit over here, and I’m gonna shout at you.” And it’s like, you gotta pick a new, you gotta find a new place to hang out, because this man is a bad bar owner.

FK: Exactly, exactly. And this is worse than, like, I mean, Facebook’s pretty bad and detrimental to the fabric of society, [ELM laughs] but on a basic level of usability this is far worse than anything that has ever happened on Facebook.

ELM: [overlapping] You say that, but every time I log onto Facebook I’m like, “What the fuck is going on over here?”

FK: Oh yeah, I’m not saying Facebook is good, [laughs] I’m just saying the bar is, you know…

ELM: Also despite these usability issues, despite the fact that it’s kind of limping along right now, there are still many, many jokes on Twitter that make me chuckle, and Facebook makes me frown.

FK: Well, I’m glad that I have you to bring me the jokes that make you chuckle. Because that means I don’t have to look at Twitter.

ELM: I’m not looking at it very often, you know. I don’t wanna hear about your, about the other platform. I muted “Mastodon,” the term, and then…I muted the term “post” too, and then I realized I wasn’t seeing a bunch of stuff, and I was like, “That’s a common word in the English language and I’m a journalist.”

FK: Yes, it is.

ELM: [laughs] So I put that one back. But then people started using the fuckin’ elephant emoji, and I was like, don’t make me mute that! It’s a cute emoji, come on! [FK laughs] It’s fine.

FK: Well, OK, so I mean, I don’t know what this is gonna mean, and I agree with you that we can’t really prognosticate, so I guess actually I kind of feel like a lot of the things we’ve talked about in this episode are things that feel like they’re the beginning of a new set of, a new trend. Maybe not a new trend, but like, they’re sort of a thing that we’re putting up here, being like, “Hey, where’s it going?” 

ELM: Yeah.

FK: And this is one of them, and I don’t have any answers to it either, and…

ELM: I don’t think this episode is about answers, I think it’s about asking questions.

FK: [overlapping] I’m interested to see… Great. Wow.

ELM: Complaining about problems.

FK: Well, it’s certainly about that.

ELM: Yeah, and I think it’s one of the reasons that I feel like we’ve been—maybe not even deliberately, but sort of wanting to punt slightly on talking about Twitter, because it feels very fast-moving and it doesn’t feel like there’s a ton to say, beyond description right now. Like “Oh wow, what a clown show!” You know? “You wouldn’t believe what Elon Musk did today.” [laughs]

FK: Right, and there have been moments where it’s like, I kind of, you know, obviously different people are—on the one hand it seems a little silly to be like, people are having big emotions about this, but people are, because they have communities on Twitter, they’ve spent a lot of time there, that’s totally reasonable. And so the other thing is, I have not wanted to police other people’s emotions and experiences within it, at least, you know, obviously every once in a while I might make a joke about someone who says they’re leaving and never does, that’s fine, but like, there have been moments where I’ve been like, “I don’t know guys, I can’t take part in this conversation, because you all are having a big feeling about how you wanna fight for this thing that you love? [ELM laughs] And I don’t feel like I really love it, and haven’t for a long time, and now I’m feeling freed.” [laughs] 

ELM: Yeah.

FK: So you know, there’s that too, there’s, it’s very fast-moving, it’s sort of volatile on a personal level I think, for people who spent a lot of time on there.

ELM: Yeah. My analogy for this is it reminds me a bit of graduating from high school, [FK laughs] and you have the phone numbers of your friends, and if there’s anyone you don’t have the number of, you’re gonna get it on purpose.

FK: Yeah.

ELM: And people are writing in each other’s yearbooks, their phone numbers, and you’re like, “I’ve, I don’t know why suddenly I’m gonna call you. We weren’t really…we shared a space, and we had some times, and good luck to you in the future,” and then simultaneously you’re just describing everyone’s like, “Remember that time in tenth grade when we all had this…” and I’m just like, “No, I don’t remember, I had some fun with my friends here, but I am not sad to graduate, it’s time to leave.” And that’s how I feel about this whole thing, it’s like, “We had some times.”

FK: [laughs] And the times are now over.

ELM: Yeah, times have finished, and yeah, I absolutely would feel differently if this was my primary space of fandom, but it never has been, so. Just me personally…that…eh. 

FK: Yeah, I don’t know, I mean it definitely was the primary place that I did a lot of fannish things for a long time there, and I’m still ready to let it go.

ELM: Yeah.

FK: So.

ELM: All right.

FK: So that’s 2022 in a nutshell. Personally for me, I feel like 2022 has been a year that I’ve been…again, I think I said this last year, but the trend continues, I’m enjoying things in a fannish way and I’m not engaging with like, fandom-fandom as much. And I’m kind of OK with that. I’m likin’ it, actually.

ELM: You don’t think that your shared fandom with me is fandom-fandom?

FK: Well it is, but the thing that I’m enjoying is that like, I have that with you, and I have a Star Trek friend [ELM awwws] who I met at San Diego Comic-Con this year who I text, like, every day about Star Trek.

ELM: Aww, I’m glad you made a Star Trek friend.

FK: [overlapping] And that’s how I’m enjoying fandom. I did.

ELM: Because I remember you used to send me Star Trek things, and I was like, “Flourish, you really need to get a Star Trek friend.”

FK: And I don’t anymore, because now I send them to Jenny. Shoutout to Jenny.

ELM: Oh, I didn't know you became Star Trek friends with Jenny! Amazing!

FK: Yeah! We text like, every day.

ELM: Oh my God, Flourish! [laughs]

FK: So that’s great! Like, you know, I’m enjoying this form of fandom. [laughs]

ELM: Oh, that’s great. 

FK: One of my, yeah, one drunken night at Comic-Con and I made a Star Trek friend for life.

ELM: [overlapping, quiet and drawn out] Ohhh, that’s sooo sweeeet….

FK: OK. [laughs] What has your 22…buhbuhbuh, I can’t even say the name of the year. 2022, what has it been like for you?

ELM: [overlapping] Let it go, say goodbye to that! Um, well, I’ve had a wonderful—I mean it’s more the last few months, but I think that, you know, I had a big revelation about myself as a fan…

FK: Hmm.

ELM: Where…OK. So, you know I was really into Black Sails, like five years ago, right? 

FK: Oh yeah.

ELM: I mean, still love it deep in my heart, obviously, one of the greatest shows ever.

FK: Of course.

ELM: And I read a bunch of fanfiction, and I was like, kinda followed a bunch of blogs and saw some discourse and was like, “This is starting to make me hate this show actually.” And I was like, it must be the discourse, right? 

FK: Yeah.

ELM: But then, you know, the fanfiction, I was like, some of it was well-written but it’s just like, not doing it for me. And I was like, “Why am I doing this? This is not working,”

FK: Yeah.

ELM: And then last year I really fell in love with Halt and Catch Fire, and I read fanfiction and it was deeply not doing it for me, and actually it was like, “This is not, I need to get out of here, because this is like, I shouldn’t be here.” Right?

FK: [laughs] Yeah.

ELM: So this year, when I fell in love with Interview with the Vampire, and I was like, “You know, I think I’ve learned something about myself, I have literally zero desire to look at the fanfiction. Absolutely none.” 

FK: Yeah?

ELM: And I think my mistake with those other two shows is, because I also respected those two shows, I should never have gone on the fanfiction route, and I think I’ve always been very, like, firm about like, “Oh, it’s not just about fixing bad media, [FK laughs] you know, it’s also—” 

FK: That’s true.

ELM: But I think for me actually it’s about fixing. [laughs]

FK: It is. [laughs]

ELM: Maybe not fixing bad media, but like, things where I feel like there’s a lot of wasted potential, whereas I think the thing that I had a hard time unpicking, which I still, which I feel like I have a better sense of now, is I just wanted to spend more time in the world and with the characters. Which I think is a great reason, but like, the fanfiction wasn’t doing it for me.

FK: Yeah.

ELM: I’m blessed—

FK: And now instead you can read every book Anne Rice ever wrote, and that will serve it for you.

ELM: [overlapping] I’m blessed because Ms. Anne Rice wrote so many words about these characters, there are so many ridiculous words to read, and I love her, I know that she’s a complicated figure in fandom, but like, you know how much I love her. One of the all-time greats.

FK: It has been one of the joys of my life [ELM laughs] to watch your approach to Anne Rice change from “Well, I have this super negative feeling toward her but I bet you’re gonna read all the books because you’re a completionist,” 

ELM: No! That’s not what happened!

FK: To “I’m reading these books and I love them!” [laughs]

ELM: No! What I said was, I’d never given her much thought, because I had only thought of her in that fandom context, and I literally had not given her any thought other than that.

FK: [laughing] I love, I love that you’re defending yourself right now.

ELM: No! Because this is recorded, our listeners know this is what happened too, I literally said it in the episode. You never listen to them again, so you don’t know what you say after you say it. [FK laughs] But you were like, “I’m gonna read all of them because I’m a completionist.” And I was like, “OK, you do you, but that’s silly,” right, “Your completionist thing is silly.” And then I started reading them and then I was like, “I’m reading all of them because I wanna spend more time with Lestat.” That’s not the same thing! 

FK: I also wanna spend more time with Lestat, [ELM laughs] it was just a foregone conclusion that I was gonna do it because I am a completionist. All right. Well, you know what I can say though, one of the greatest gifts 2022 has brought us is being in the same fandom. I’m delighted by that.

ELM: [overlapping] I hope you’re enjoying it. I think I’m pretty fun when I’m in a fandom. I see all the great memes. [laughs]

FK: [laughs] You are! All I want is for you to send me more gifs of Lestat, and you provided.

ELM: Oh, should we put my favorite, I think both our favorite vid in the show notes?

FK: Yes! Yes, we should.

ELM: [overlapping] Yeah, let’s do it, let’s do it.

FK: [overlapping] It’s goin’ in there. All right.

ELM: [overlapping] A true masterpiece.

FK: Well, I know it’s a couple days early, but Happy New Year, Elizabeth!

ELM: [laughs] Happy New Year, Flourish! I’ll see you, I’ll see you—

FK: [overlapping] I’ll see you in 2023!!!!

ELM: You wanna say the name of the, the name of this outgoing year? Try it one more time?

FK: 20…2…..2. [both laugh] Goodbye, never again.

ELM: You’re gonna be so relieved, you’re so relieved that you don’t have to say that again. OK, goodbye Flourish!

FK: [both laughing] Bye!

[Outro music]