Episode 190: Ask Fansplaining Anything: Part 15
In the latest (fifteenth!) installment of “Ask Fansplaining Anything,” Flourish and Elizabeth tackle a new collection of listener letters. Topics discussed include defining “canon” in RPF fandoms, the sad fate of fandoms on Twitter, and what to do about non-fandom friends who judge your fannish activities. Plus: a query about the hypothetical legality of physically printed fanfiction in libraries, with an answer from *actual lawyer* and copyright expert Earlgreytea68.
Show Notes
[00:00:00] As always, our intro music is “Awel” by stefsax, used under a CC BY 3.0 license.
[00:00:46] Flourish’s exact comment on the subject in “Ask Fansplaining Anything: Part 14” was:
Every time you say that, I always go, “Oh my God, it’s Part…14?” And it’s like, “Yup. Actually, time marches on, and we continue to answer letters from listeners and readers like you.”
[00:01:57] Just like queersintherain, you can listen to our Glass Onion episode—or any of our 27 other special eps!—via RSS feed rather than directly on Patreon.
[00:03:34] Earlgreytea68 was our guest for Episode 121: “The Money Question 2: The Appening.”
[00:10:46] The K/S artist who got Jesus and effectively orphaned her work c. 1988 was Pat Stall.
[00:13:37] That was in Episode 189, “No Cultural Impact.”
[00:22:50]
[00:31:40] Our interstitial music throughout is “Under suspicion” by Lee Rosevere, also used under a CC BY 3.0 license.
[00:34:50] We talked about RPF in November, in Episode 185: “RPF Revisited.”
[00:39:10]
[00:52:07] Everyone’s favorite fandom platform talk: Maciej Cegłowski’s “Fan is A Tool-Using Animal”
[00:56:19]
[00:57:33] Pillowfort definitely still exists!
[00:59:08]
[01:00:16] No seriously: this is 100% what these books are like.
[01:04:56] Flourish’s Star Trek novel project on LibraryThing!
[01:07:24] ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ + ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ = <333
Transcript
[Intro music]
Flourish Klink: Hi, Elizabeth.
Elizabeth Minkel: Hi, Flourish!
FK: And welcome to Fansplaining, the podcast by, for, and about fandom!
ELM: Fandom! [laughs]
FK: Fandom! [both laugh]
ELM: All right. This is Episode #190, “Ask Fansplaining Anything: Part 15.”
FK: [laughs] We’ve done so many!
ELM: Yeah, I mean every time we do a new one, this is the commentary.
FK: I know, but it’s, I feel it every time, and it’s all because of our wonderful listeners and readers, thank you, people who wrote in.
ELM: Right, so we got a new batch of letters, things from our website, things from our email, and things from our Tumblr ask box.
FK: Right. And you know, actually, our first letter is also sort of more of a PSA than a question, so maybe worth doing right away?
ELM: Yes, this one goes up first, because it’s just news you can use. I feel bad that I did not know this. [both laugh]
FK: So queersintherain on Tumblr says:
“Hi Fansplaining! I’ve been a patron for a long time, but I’ve never listened to as many special episodes as I wanted to because listening to them on Patreon.com was such a pain. I am kind of embarrassed to report that just yesterday I discovered I could set up the RSS feed for these episodes in my podcast app, and now I am enjoying the Glass Onion episode without having to worry about a website reloading and losing my place! Anyway, just writing in case there are other patrons who are unaware that this knowledge could be shared with, or in case this could be a helpful plug for your Patreon.”
So there you go, that’s a plug for our Patreon, which is more convenient than we knew. [laughs]
ELM: Right. So there are 28 special episodes, queersintherain is enjoying them, from the comfort of their own [laughs] podcast feed.
FK: [overlapping] Yeah, you could be too! [laughs]
ELM: Ah, so, we’ll include in the show notes—we’ll publish that ask on Tumblr and we’ll include in the show notes the link to the RSS feed. I do feel stupid, I’ve worked—I mean obviously I’ve worked on this podcast, but I’ve worked on other podcasts in the past, but this didn’t occur to me.
FK: Yep! There we go. All right.
ELM: All right. Great, thank you very much, queersintherain! [laughs]
FK: Woohoo! OK, onward?
ELM: Yes. OK. So, our first question, because that first one was a comment, is from an anonymous person on Tumblr. And they wrote:
“Hello Flourish and Elizabeth! Anecdote and hypothetical for you: I work in a library and a patron, misunderstanding the ‘FIC FAN’ call number—”
That’s F-I-C space F-A-N, all caps.
“—(that’s fantasy), asked me if we have a ‘fanfiction section’ and now I can’t stop thinking about it. Would printed fanfic, held by a public library and loaned out free of charge and with no eye to profit (in fact, likely at cost due to printing and binding), be more...illegal than fanfic as it currently exists on internet archives like AO3? Thank you for the show and for priming my brain for questions like this!”
FK: Woohoo! And, we didn’t know the answer, and we asked a lawyer. [laughs]
ELM: Yeah, this was one…you know, I feel like there are some questions, and we’re just like, “Well let’s just shoot the shit! Let’s, well let’s talk this one out!” And this one I read it and I was like, “I have no idea.” [both laugh] “We really need to talk to a lawyer.” Luckily, we know some lawyers.
FK: Yeahhh.
ELM: And this one is one that has been on the podcast before, Earlgreytea68. Very, very smart legal mind. And she wrote us a long, intricate answer, which I was very grateful for.
FK: All right, so here it is. Earlgreytea68 says:
“None of this is legal advice and I am not your lawyer! This is just some information about the law that I can provide because it’s a thing I do and know stuff about!”
Great disclaimer. Onward.
ELM: [laughs] Lawyers, lawyers have to say that.
FK: [laughs] They do, that’s why I was…anyway.
“There are actually two levels to this question, because there are two copyright holders whose interests are potentially implicated by what’s proposed here: the canon copyright holder and the fanfic writer.
“Starting with the holder of the copyright to the underlying canon: As anyone familiar with OTW’s stance might know, noncommercial fanfiction is probably protected under the copyright doctrine of fair use. Fair use has four factors, the most relevant for this inquiry being the purpose and character of the work in question (i.e., the transformativeness of the fic) and the effect on the market of the canon material. Fanfiction is generally highly transformative of the underlying canon (you take a very small piece of the canon and leap off into your own worlds and stories) and noncommercial fanfiction arguably has no effect on the market for the underlying canon material (certainly not a detrimental effect). This fair use analysis applies to fanfiction no matter what format it’s in, so it’s not the fact of fic on the internet being digital that protects it. Therefore, fanfiction being provided in a noncommercial way in paper form should be protected by the same fair use analysis: it’s transformative and doesn’t affect the market.
“The bigger issue might actually be the fic writers themselves, who almost definitely own copyright in the original parts of their fics. Copyright holders have a number of rights that belong exclusively to them. One is the right to reproduce (the copy right is the right to copy). Copyright holders are the only people who can make copies of their works. If you want to make copies of their works, you need their permission. Now of course there are exceptions. Copying for personal use or archival reasons is often considered okay, and you can also make copies that are protected under fair use. So the library would have to be able to make out a defense like fair use for printing out the fics (thereby making a copy when they get printed onto paper) and loaning them out. I’m not sure this activity would be permissively implied just by the act of uploading fic to AO3, although people might disagree on that! (Incidentally, libraries don’t get permission from individual authors to lend out their books because they are buying copies that have already been sanctioned by the authors, rather than making the copies themselves.)
“When it comes to fair use, there is no real market for the fics, so that factor would be difficult to assess. It’s unclear whether or not making an exact copy of a fic to loan out would be considered transformative, though (it’s much less clear than with fic as it relates to canon, where canon is not exactly copied but manipulated in myriad ways). There could be an argument that printing out fics to loan them to others is a fair use because it supports public access to these works. Right now, there’s a big debate going on over whether digital lending can be considered a fair use or is an infringement (the case is Hachette Book Group, Inc. v. Internet Archive, 20-cv-04160 in the Southern District of New York).”
Thank you, Earlgreytea, [ELM laughs] I was totally gonna look up those numbers. All right, moving back to what Earlgreytea actually said:
“In that case, the Internet Archive was buying physical books and digitizing them. That would be the opposite of what would happen here with the fics (taking a digital work and making it physical). But it’s a similar process of a copy having been made without the copyright holder’s permission and then being loaned out to others. Many publishing companies have sued the Internet Archive saying that this act is an infringement of their copyright; the Internet Archive has defended that the practice should be considered fair use. There is no decision yet, so we don’t have any guidance to glean from that.
“By the way, I think that a question you might ask that might be interesting might be how many fic authors would be okay with this happening versus how many would be upset if this was happening without their consent. I have no idea! But that would be interesting to think about.”
ELM: Man, lawyers!
FK: Laaawyers! They’re good for things, sometimes. [both laugh]
ELM: Oh my God!
FK: Sorry Earlgreytea, we love you! Extra much, even.
ELM: This is so good and interesting, and it’s a real, it’s um…it’s very nice to hear a lawyer talk about this stuff, because I feel like there’s a lot of half-truths that go around on these topics in fandom spaces.
FK: Yeah!
ELM: That turn into myths that get repeated, sort of. So it’s interesting, and I feel like her question at the end is the exact one. I think that, I don’t know, I think that fanfiction writers can get a bit shirty with things not going exactly where they think they’re going.
FK: I agree… [ELM laughs] I personally would think that was great and I wouldn’t care, but I think there are, that the majority of people probably would not be cool with it. But I don’t know, maybe we should run a mini-survey about this or something, at some point.
ELM: It’s interesting. You know, you think about like, it actually would become, the work would become less accessible—I mean, say it’s not, it’s not gonna be taken off the internet, but say—all right, you know, I, the librarian, print out a fic I love, put it in the library. That physical copy is far less accessible than the story originally was, right? You know, probably, how many people are actually gonna be able to go out and physically take it?
So it is a bit different than being put into a different digital space. But then we saw people gettin’ real mad about these apps, which only a handful of people are using, the ones that scraped the AO3 or reskinned it or whatever. But the issue around that was twofold, because part of that was about the work appearing to show up somewhere else, people got mad about, but also that it was appearing next to ads in a commercial space. And the library, that’s a non-commercial space.
FK: Right. But then there’s also the issue that I think one thing that fanfic writers really like about the fact that they’ve published things on the AO3, like in general, as opposed to—or whatever fanfic site—is that you can always change it, or pull to publish, or take it down, or decide that you want to ghost it, and if you have a physical copy in a library, that can’t necessarily happen the same way, right? So I think that there would be some people who’d be upset that they couldn’t update it, or they couldn’t decide that they wanted to delete it.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: I guess, even though I think I would be happy to have my stuff in a library, sure! There’s stuff that I wrote when I was like, 12, that I don’t know that needs to be preserved. [both laugh] And I could make that, you know, I’ve been able to make that choice, so.
ELM: Yeah. Well, I mean, we’re talking about, in this hypothetical, it would be a very small—I’m not saying that your 12, your fic from age 12, wouldn’t wind up in the library— [FK laughs] but like, you know, I feel like we’re talking about a small handful of things. And to follow this hypothetical, it could be something where. like, there was a checkbox on the AO3 or whatever, or a tag that people use, because you know there’s the like, blanket permission tag, or like the permission to podfic tag or whatever. You know, which would be a pretty small thing.
FK: Sure.
ELM: But that is to say, we see people changing their minds and deleting fics or orphaning ones that I think are incredibly written, and it’s just like, “Why did you do this?” Something psychological going on that makes you wanna not have anything to do with this work anymore? You know?
FK: I mean, this has been going on forever, it makes me think of, there was a very famous [laughs] Kirk/Spock fanartist, who drew a lot of erotic Kirk/Spock stuff, and then got Jesus and never contributed to anything ever again.
ELM: Cool.
FK: And was like, “I don’t want to be associated with any of the work that I previously did.” I mean obviously that’s not my type of Jesus, but like, stuff happens. [laughs]
ELM: Right, right, yeah. Or the reverse of that, you know, maybe you wrote things that were vaguely problematic in the past, and now you’ve learned more things. [laughs] You know?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: About the world, or whatever. There are all sorts of reasons. Or it could be totally, you know, nothing like that in either direction, just totally preference or taste, so.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: I think you’re right, I think that people value how much control they have over their own work. Particularly on something like the AO3, because that’s really, that’s really the point, is that it’s for the fanfiction writer.
FK: Totally. All right, well, wonderful question.
ELM: Wonderful answer!
FK: [laughs] Wonderful in general. [both laugh] All right. The next two questions kind of actually more or less go together I think, they’re kinda getting at the same thing, would you read them?
ELM: OK. They’re both from anonymous people on Tumblr. The first one writes:
“Hey guys, I was wondering if you had talked about when writers of TV shows with strong fandoms seem to actively dislike fans. Main examples that come to my mind are season 3 of Sherlock making fun of fans who tried to figure out how he survived, or the whole thing with Quentin in The Magicians. I get pushing back against entitled fans who want the narrative to go entirely their way (that’s what fanfic is for) but it seems weird to me when writers get mad that people are passionate about their work.
“Love the podcast <3” [reads <3 as “heart sign”]
I’m leaving that in.
FK: [laughs] Thanks, buddy.
ELM: [laughs] And then anonymous number two asks:
“Do you think readers are treated more poorly by writers today because of social media?”
Yeah, I think these are related. I’m not sure they’re the same question. I understand why you put them together.
FK: Yeah, I’m not sure they’re the same question either, but it’s interesting to me to think about that, because I think we’ve talked a lot…I hear the second question as being about fanfic readers and writers, or possibly, maybe book readers and writers, it’s hard for me to tell, there’s no context there, right?
But it’s interesting to me, because I think that we’ve talked before about people feeling upset at the way that writers and TV shows talk about fans. I mean this has been going on for, you know, forever, stuff like this showed up in Supernatural, stuff like this showed up…you know, it’s showed up for many, many fandoms over the years. And then we talk about, like, some of the social things that happen within fandoms, but I think it’s pretty—even though they’re often being driven by the same kinds of technology in the same kinds of situation, we don’t usually put them into conversation with each other.
ELM: All right, that’s a fair point! All right, let’s have that conversation.
FK: [laughs] Does social media just make everybody a shitbird?
ELM: Like, it’s interesting, I feel like last episode you were talking about how the entertainment industry—this isn’t the only time you’ve talked about it but—the entertainment industry is, especially actors and directors, have a particular idea of fans because they remember who they see. And they see the cosplayer, right, or they see the person who slept out at Comic-Con and is wearing the t-shirt or whatever. I think online, you know, I think they probably see a mix. But they certainly see the people who are loud and mean and rude and abusive, right? You know, if they are online.
FK: [laughs] How many times have you had like, 10,000 nice comments from people, just on a daily basis, you’re like, looking through your messages or whatever and most of them are nice, and then someone sends you an out-of-the-blue asshole message, and you just think about that one. And nothing else. [laughs]
ELM: [overlapping] Right, this is exactly where I was going, yes. Right. Right. You know, it’s one thing I’ve seen too, actually genuinely seen this at cons, too, where…at Comic-Con it’s like, very heavily vetted, it’s why they have such boring audience questions like [doing a high childish voice] “What was your favorite part of making this movie?” You know, it’s like, this is not interesting. But I have been at smaller cons where they’ve actively said “No questions about shipping,” right, because there’s some ship that’s dominating all the fan conversation, and they wanna talk about the rest of it. And I can see why it’s protective of those writers, they’re writing a whole show and then they just have fans who mean well, but are just shouting at them, just shouting the name of the ship at them only, right? Or saying, “You’re homophobic because you’re not making this happen” or “You hate us because you’re not making this happen.” Which, the first asker here is getting at. I don’t think that every one of these situations is like that, but I think we have seen a lot of situations like that.
FK: I think that’s true, and you know, I mean I hear that also from people I know who are YA writers, I mean people who I know who are fiction writers in general, but the thing that I think is most interesting is, I see this happening within fanfiction comments also. [laughs] So the other day I was reading a fanfic, I’m not gonna blow up anybody’s spot here, but I was reading a long fanfic, and there was this really dramatic author’s note in one of the chapters. And I was like, “What?” Because this person was like, “OK, I know that you all are like really mad at me for this last thing,” and I was like, I had no idea, I was like, “I didn’t think, I wasn’t mad at you! [both laugh] I didn’t even know that people would be mad at you!” It was not, it was not a situation where they did something horribly outré. They were just like, “I know you’re all mad at me.” So I was like, OK, and I looked at the comments—because she was saying that she had been getting roasted in the comments—and it was like, literally there was one comment. [both laugh] Out of like, fifty! Maybe she got emails, I don’t know, or private messages or something, but like…
ELM: On Tumblr or whatever, yeah.
FK: [overlapping] On Tumblr or whatever, you know, but she didn’t say on Tumblr, she said “in the comments.”
ELM: [overlapping] In the comments.
FK: You know? And I was just like, this is a perfect example, and actually, I mean, I didn’t feel great about the way that she was writing about this situation, she was being like, you know, [in a put-upon tone] “I guess I’m gonna have to rethink the way that I approach this fic, because buh buh buh buh buh.”
ELM: Yeah.
FK: I was like, oh! If I had been the person who had complained about this, I would feel really taken aback by that response. Like, I would not feel like I was being [laughs] treated terribly well, to be called out that way.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: But that was definitely what happened, right? [laughs] Like…
ELM: Did the author, like, respond to the comment itself?
FK: Yeah, there was a conversation about it.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: They had a conversation in the comments. But it was still one person, you know? [laughs]
ELM: Right, right, no, I mean, I, writing longer stuff where you get a lot of comments chapter by chapter, I’ve had a few readers that just seemed like they were not happy, but I felt they were totally off the mark. I was like, “I think you’re just not reading very well. I feel confident here.” And then, you know, just kind of tried to politely push back, but in response to their comment only. But I cannot imagine then going in the next chapter the author’s note being like, “Some of you didn’t like this.” You know?
FK: [laughs, overlapping] Well, I don’t know…
ELM: [overlapping] It’s just, like, why draw attention to that? You know?
FK: I mean, I don’t know, I guess I can kind of imagine it in the sense that, for one of my fics, I got a comment from somebody saying they had been triggered by it, after the fic had been up for a very long time and I hadn’t heard from anybody else saying that they had been triggered by it. And I really started, like, musing on that. You know what I mean? I wasn’t gonna write and be like, [doing a mean voice] “Well you were triggered, buh buh buh buh—”
ELM: OK, no.
FK: But I could see the obsessive mindset, I was starting to like, [laughs] totally perseverate on this idea.
ELM: OK, but this is the thing about critique, right, and criticism. Is this is the way it should all be handled, right?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Like, you take it, you look at it, you say, “Is this coming from a good faith place? Is this coming from a valid place?” You know, when people get called out for racism or homophobia or whatever, it’ll be like, “All right, I’m gonna look at this.” You know? Maybe you talk to a friend who has, if you’re a white person or a straight person or whatever, you go ask, “Hey, gut check, I think I’m being—this is not a fair assessment,” or whatever—
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And then you could take that or you could not. And on a much grander scale, I think that people making professional media could do that, you know? I don’t think that writers—professional writers—necessarily should be sitting there reading all the professional reviews of their work, but if they want to go down that road, I think that taking it in good faith, understanding that someone’s critiquing your work, it’s not necessarily because they’re trying to do a hatchet job [FK laughs] and take you down or whatever, you know what I mean?
FK: Yeah, yeah.
ELM: And say like, “Oh, maybe they have a point, and when I write the next season, maybe I’m gonna think about that a bit, and change the way I approach this character.” But I think what this first question here is describing is something we see is so reactive, I think it’s very knee-jerk. Just saying like, “Oh God, these fucking people!” [FK laughs] And then you wind up writing some nasty fan character, or fan group, into the next episode of your show.
There’s a huge history, predating social media, of writers putting either their rivals or their critics or…like, the way that critics are depicted [FK laughs] in the mainstream [laughs] of books and television and in films and stuff, is not positive, right? And it just, you know. [FK laughs] Whatever! I mean, I guess you’re mad, right, so go ahead, make them look like an idiot in your next book or whatever, make them look like a total fool if that makes you feel bigger. But it just feels like a total, like, [in a whiny voice] “You hurt me, you shouted at me, and I’m gonna make you look dumb!” You know?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And I get it, I think that one other thing is like, the way this first question is worded, “shows with strong fandoms, writers seem to actively dislike fans.” There’s a lot of bad behavior. And why should you say, “Oh, we love the fans,” when you do have a vocal contingent—maybe it’s a minority of fans but you do have some significant number of fans—who are being totally hateful, right? Or suggesting that you’ve locked your voice actors in the basement, you know? [FK laughs] Why then would you be like, “Oh, not those fans,” I could see you just saying, “No. No. If this is what fans are, then absolutely not.” You know what I mean?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: So it’s this kind of question of like, with the Star Wars stuff and they’re like, “Oh, well this isn’t Star Wars fans,” and then you have other people coming in like, “Actually, there’s something rotten at the core of this group.” [both laugh]
FK: Yeah.
ELM: You don’t just get to say that those are a few bad apples when actually this is a fundamental part of the barrel. You know?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: So like…I don’t know, that’s a very negative statement about fans, I’m sorry.
FK: It is, and I mean it’s not totally—but I think that especially when you’re talking like, in the moment, I think that’s really true. I mean there are also…it’s not like there’s no good portrayals of fans, right? I will go to the mat every time for Galaxy Quest, which totally shows fans’ foibles and also is very loving.
ELM: That’s a very specific kind of fandom though. And a very specific kind of fan. And the foibles are like, they can’t tell reality from fantasy, and they’re infodumpers, they’re very classic, archetypal, nerd boy science fiction—you know what I mean?
FK: [overlapping] Yeah, I mean I’m not, right, I’m not saying that—but I’m just saying that there could be, I believe that there could be those kinds of portrayals of other kinds of fans. You know what I mean? And when it’s done from a moment where you’re not like, when people are super in their feelings, but you can’t blame people who are being actively like, having the fire hose thrown at them, you know? [laughs]
ELM: Right. Right.
FK: Like, you can’t expect them to have that kind of perspective on it in that moment.
ELM: Right, but I mean, I guess I’m just saying here, both these examples, season 3 of Sherlock and The Magicians, people who were upset, people who were shouting at them, were queer fans, they were people who ship Johnlock, right?
FK: Yeah, for sure, for sure.
ELM: Conspiracy theorists, I mean that was actually…actually, they wrote the first episode of season 3 of Sherlock before the conspiracy theory was created. [FK laughs] But you know, like, that did start to gain steam, and they had a pretty… I mean, that whole episode, I could analyze it in depth, I think was also kind of flippant about all its viewers, right?
FK: Yes.
ELM: Because they had been like, you remember this episode, right, where they had all the different theories?
FK: [overlapping] I do, yeah yeah yeah, they, yeah.
ELM: It had been like, the front page of the newspaper, in Britain, you’d be like, “How did it happen?” You know? [both laugh] And they were just like, “Haha!” So like, yeah, they just went for a particular kind of female fan, right? And put her in the group. But she wasn’t the only one there. They were trying to, they were doing a send up of all the people who speculated.
FK: Mm hmm.
ELM: And yet, did that one feel a little more mean-spirited than the others? Definitely.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: But it also, I mean I think that they’re not… Whatever, they think they’re smarter than their audience, and I think we’ve learned, after the 4th season, that they’re not.
FK: [laughs] All right, I think that we have answered this question as fully as we possibly can. These two questions.
ELM: [overlapping] Nice to talk about Moftiss a little bit, thank you. [laughs]
FK: [overlapping] So thank you to the two—thank you to the two—I’m like, I’m like, we gotta put a stop in this one at this point, we know it could go on forever. Thank you to the two nonnies for sending in those questions. Much appreciated.
ELM: Yes, thank you very much, this is a perennial topic that I love discussing.
FK: Great. So the next question is also sort of on the topic of people’s emotional experiences of the internet. This one is from O.S. They ask:
“Hello! I’m new to the podcast, but already a huge fan and love hearing your discussions on all things fandom! Thank you for creating a space to talk about these topics.”
You’re welcome, O.S.!
“As someone who spent their teenage years on the internet during the infamous SuperWhoLock era, I’ve unsurprisingly become very immersed in fandom culture. Now that I’m in my mid 20’s, my feelings on different fandoms have naturally evolved. I still really value the impact of storytelling, and find fandom to be such a fulfilling way to engage with these stories. My problem is, I often struggle with feelings that my fandom interests are not seen as acceptable or valid.
“Logically I know that fandom is NOT a new concept and plenty of generations actively engage with it, but I often feel like my own contributions are something I should keep to myself. I acknowledge some of these feelings stem from my own insecurities, but in general I’ve noticed things like writing fanfic or being overly involved in fictional characters are perceived negatively by those who don’t participate in fandom (at least in my own experiences). Many of my close friends aren’t immersed in fandom culture like I am, and I get the impression they find it somewhat weird or an impractical way to spend time. This causes me to avoid talking about it, even when other friends who do engage with it are also present.
“In reality, writing fic and making video edits has been a wonderful creative outlet for me. Consuming certain pieces of media has helped me to better understand my own identity and sexuality, and provided me new lenses to view the world around me. It’s helped me to think critically about representation and the way media impacts our culture. So why do I care what others think? I’m curious to learn your thoughts on this topic and hear if you’ve struggled with balancing similar dynamics.
“Much love, O.S.”
ELM: Thank you very much for this letter, O.S., I feel like you are speaking for a lot of people.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: So, I feel like this puts us into the land of advice columnists a little bit, [both laugh] and I don’t…take this with a big grain of salt. But I was really struck by the bit where O.S. said that they got the impression that their close friends found their fandom activities weird and impractical. And I feel like that is a problem within the friendships.
FK: Mmm hmmm.
ELM: I don’t think that—I think that—first of all, I would say to O.S., I don’t know any more details—you know, advice columnists don’t sit here and give all these caveats, they aren’t like, “I don’t know all the specifics of your life,” they just say it, so I’m gonna do it, too.
FK: [laughing, overlapping] They don’t know any more specifics.
ELM: [laughs] But I would be curious if you talked to them about this, and said, you know, I mean maybe you’re picking up on a tone, maybe they’ve actually said stuff like this, and if they have said stuff like this, I think that they need to fix themselves, and that’s easier said than done, but it’s kinda like…partly too, it’s like, there’s so much media coverage or people talking on social media about how they don’t have any hobbies, right? They don’t have, they don’t have anything to do other than going out, or whatever, and it’s like, OK.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: I don’t know. You know? [FK laughs] I just feel like if this is how your close friends view a perfectly reasonable hobby that doesn’t harm anyone, and is creative and interesting, then this is something that they need to work out. And some of it could be, I’ve had people in my past who, when you mention fanfiction, they’ve been like, [skeptical voice] “Oh, hmm.” And then we started talking about it and it turns out they had a bunch of weird false assumptions about what it meant, right?
FK: Mmm hmmm, mmm hmmm.
ELM: And then you could actually have a conversation about it and say like, “Here’s what it’s like! Here’s what I write about.” Right? You know?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And like, I don’t know, for me personally, I have a lot of friends who aren’t in fandom in any way, and I guess it is a little bit different being literally a professional fan culture expert and having to [FK laughs] write about this a lot, but I think even before I started doing this, when you start talking with a—I don’t know if you’ve experienced this—my friends are so curious.
FK: Yeah!
ELM: Like, I will mention in passing the fic I’m working on actively, and you know, if it’s like an AU or whatever, and they just start asking a million questions like “OK so wait, what’s the deal, [FK laughs] what happens in this story, wait why is he in that—” You know, like, it’s really interesting too, I think especially when it’s an AU it’s really fun because most people who are not in fandom don’t get to think about characters that way. So then they’re like, “Oh, I get it, I see how that works,” you know? And then they get really intrigued.
FK: Yeah. No, that’s been, that’s been my experience too, so. I mean obviously since I quit my old job and moved…into doing church stuff, and seminary, like…basically nobody that I know in my work and school spaces even knows what fanfic is. Like, there’s a couple. But basically they have no idea, and actually it’s a lot of fun.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: And people are like…I mean obviously some people are interested and some people aren’t interested, but that’s sort of like everything else, right? And in fact, you know, there’s points…
ELM: [overlapping] Right, like if you were really into sports, you wouldn’t expect everyone to be like, “Yeah, let’s discuss it!”
FK: Yeah, and this is, I mean one thing that this is really striking, that is really striking me about this, is a common social fallacy that people have, which is the idea—and I’m not saying that you have it, O.S., but your friends might have it—the idea that to be friends with somebody, you all have to be into all the same things.
ELM: Mmm hmmm.
FK: And if you’re not, then there’s something wrong with them, or with you. And so then some people will be like, “Well that means there’s something wrong with them.” And that’s just not true. There’s tons of things that I’m into that my friends are not into, and vice versa, and I even like…
ELM: [overlapping] There are so many things you’re into that I don’t care about in any way.
FK: [laughs] And vice versa! [both laugh]
ELM: False. All my things are cool. Yeah.
FK: Oh man. Anyway, but you know, [both still laughing] we’re able to make those jokes. [both laugh] Right? And I agree with you, Elizabeth, totally. This is, if this is truly something that your friends feel, and they’re looking down on you for it, and they’re not just like, “Yeah, I don’t get it, but do what makes you happy!” then there’s a problem with your friendship. And that’s that. [laughs]
ELM: Yeah. You know, it’s interesting, because the rest of the letter is like, if you take away that part, it feels like O.S. has, you know, really values—one thing I appreciate about this is as I’ve complained in the past, I get a bit frustrated when fandom puts stock in, like, actors saying fanfiction’s good, you know what I mean? They’re like, “Finally, validation!” [FK laughs] And it’s like, come on, really? It had to be this 50-year-old man actor who was like, you know, gave you a pat on the head or whatever? It just lets me down, whereas I feel like this letter has a lot of internal validation, you know? It’s something that O.S. finds really helps them define their own identity, and gives them a new lens to view the world.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And think critically, and all these wonderful things, and it seems to be internal. And it’s like, you’re already there, right?
FK: Right.
ELM: And if the only problem is that your peers…you gotta fix your peers. But all this is to say, maybe this is just a misreading of vibes. Or maybe they just haven’t given, been given the door, you know? If you don’t open the door to let people talk about it, like talking about my friends asking me all these questions, they seem excited that, you know, they’re interested!
FK: Mmm hmmm.
ELM: I’m opening the door, I’m talking about it, and now they have a whole bunch of other questions, right? Whereas I think that if I was just like, cagey about it and like, “Oh, yeah, I’m writing a…[quiet] I’m writing a fanfiction.” Then I think they would think that I thought it was weird, and they wouldn’t want to talk about it further. But because I talk about it as normally as I talk about doing any other thing, then that lets them actually follow a natural curiosity path.
FK: I agree with all that. And then I mean, I think the last thing to say is just, are there people out there who think that everything to do with fandom is stupid? Sure, absolutely there are. And you know what? I think they’re wrong, [both laugh] and I don’t care what they think about it! You know, like, I’ve had people say things like that to me directly even, people who I’ve continued to work with and be not close friends with, but like…continue to function with as acquaintances, and like…OK. [ELM laughs] There’s always gonna be people who don’t like you in the world. You know? And that’s a hard thing sometimes. Like, I’ve had hard times with plenty of stuff in my life, to fully process that. But that might also be something, you know, to keep in mind. Some people just don’t get you, and they’re wrong.
ELM: All right, that’s a solid note to end on.
FK: [laughs] Should we take a break at this point?
ELM: Yeah, I think we should.
FK: All right. I’ll see you on the flip side.
[Interstitial music]
FK: All right, we’re back! And we already did a tiny little plug for Patreon, so we can just say again, to support us, Patreon.com/Fansplaining.
ELM: Yes. Uh…[FK laughs] As a reminder, that’s how we fund the podcast, that’s how we pay our brilliant transcriptionists, so we can put out a full transcript with every episode when it’s released, including all of our special episodes—the audio for those goes up with the transcript every time. We have two relatively new ones, one’s about Interview With the Vampire, one’s about Glass Onion, and we’re gonna be doing another one in our Tropefest series within the next few weeks, so keep an eye out for that as well, we will announce it I think hopefully soon.
FK: Woohoo!
ELM: And that’s at $3/month. Higher than that, $5, you get a really cute fan-shaped pin, $10/month you get our semi-regular—semi-regular is maybe not the right word—occasional Tiny Zine, [FK laughs] where we get great fan creators to kind of toss in their two cents, their 100 words.
FK: And, if you don’t feel like giving us money or don’t have money to give us or whatever, you can support us by making episodes like this one happen! By sending us your questions, comments, thoughts, et cetera. You can do that at fansplaining at gmail.com; fansplaining.tumblr.com, our ask box is open, anon is on; you can use our website, fansplaining.com, there’s a box that you can write in there, and give us your questions; you can also send us a voicemail, which we love in particular, 1-401-526-FANS. No one will answer, don’t worry, you will not have to have a terrifying conversation with a real human, you can just leave a voicemail and we’ll play it on the episode.
ELM: You just did so many gestures.
FK: [laughs] Yeah!
ELM: You were like, you looked like a cartoon character climbing a mountain. You were just like, [FK laughs, ELM is doing a goofy singsong] dur dur-dur dur-dur dur-dur… And then when you said the word “box” you just made a big box with your hands, it was very literal. It’s not like Italian gestures, where it’s, there’s like emotion—
FK: [overlapping, laughing] I was just gonna say, and it’s amazing—
ELM: [overlapping] You were like, miming. [laughs]
FK: [laughs] And it’s amazing hearing this from an Italian.
ELM: No, Italians are speaking with their hands, you are literally miming. [FK laughs] You are just being like, “I’m climbing up, and I’m creating a box.”
FK: Great.
ELM: “I’m puttin’ a letter in the box.”
FK: OK, let’s get back [ELM snorts] to our letter box.
ELM: Oh no. [FK laughs] You’re terrible. All right. So: our next two letters are about RPF, but why don’t we take them one at a time?
FK: Okie dokie.
ELM: So the first one was an anonymous ask on Tumblr. This person writes:
“Hi Elizabeth and Flourish! I’ve just listened to your latest episode about RPF (which was amazing)—”
So that was a little while ago.
“—and all of the complications surrounding it. Hearing about the difficulties of separating the persona from the person, I wondered whether the growing interest on social media in gossip channels and blind items might be a big symptom of that. Big accounts who collect a sort of ‘democratized’ version of paparazzi pictures and stories might further the illusion that you could ‘expand’ the ‘canon’ beyond the carefully curated media image of a celebrity and shed a light on their ‘true’ selves. Would be really interested in hearing your thoughts on this. Thank you for your amazing podcast!”
FK: Uh, nonnie, I think that you are absolutely right! [laughs] I think that that’s absolutely what’s happening. I think that people have always to some extent wanted to do this, but I think it’s complicated because I think that a lot of people don’t necessarily make a distinction between the curated media image and their “true self.” Right?
ELM: Sure.
FK: And I think that even people who do make that distinction, like, to imagine that they could get closer to the knowable true self of the celebrity…I mean, myself included, I’m not, I’m not excluding myself from this. I definitely think that social media—I mean, update accounts are absolutely like this. They’re giving you more information on a daily basis, and it feels like it’s leading you closer to a true self, even though it’s just data. [laughs]
ELM: Yeah. I’m interested in the democratizing element described here, because I really feel like the golden age of gossip on the internet was not right now, but it was, like, the 2000s, right? Or the, you know?
FK: [overlapping] Oh yeah! [laughs] Perez, Perez Hilton had…[laughs] a chokehold.
ELM: [overlapping] Yes, the Perez, the Perez Hilton era. You know, obviously he’s not the only one, but just massively popular gossip things. Which, you know, echoed an earlier—I think of like—
FK: Oh No They Didn’t! [laughs]
ELM: Yeah. I think of the ’90s as a very gossipy decade, but that all was happening in the print press, you know. I mean obviously the whole 20th century—every era has very gossipy moments, right?
FK: Yeah. But I think what felt so special, remembering, thinking about Oh No They Didn’t! on LiveJournal in specific, like even more than Perez Hilton, the thing that was so special about that I think—I mean special, [both laugh] whether you like it or not—was, I think that “democratized” is not a bad way of putting it—
ELM: Yeah.
FK: Because on there you would get somebody who would be like, “Yeah, I slept with Gerard Way like 10 years ago, [ELM laughs] and here’s the entire story of what his dick looks like,” and you’re like, “I did not want to know that, and I don’t know if it’s true, and maybe it is,” and it felt like it could be, and you were like, “Ugh… But also I can’t look away.” [laughs] Like, no.
ELM: Yeah, I think that’s a really good—and there’s a difference between that and like, Page Six in the 90s or whatever, right?
FK: Oh yeah.
ELM: Where I feel like, it’s, the odds of gossip from that era that was printed, probably was closer to the truth than—because at least that was people…you know, famous people talking to each other, right? [FK laughs] And like talking and listening and whatever, right? Whereas once you got into the LiveJournal era and now on Twitter, yeah, anyone could just go in and say—you could just make up a story.
FK: Well, and it could be about much smaller celebrities, right? [laughs]
ELM: That’s true, that’s true. Right. Well, I mean, I don’t know. Some of the Page Six stuff isn’t the biggest celebrities. Maybe just some local ones, right?
FK: Yeah, but it’s a different kind of celebrity, right?
ELM: Yes, yeah.
FK: There’s a particular category of celebrity that has the Page Six gossip, and maybe like…I don’t know, I guess I always associate Oh No They Didn’t! with things about indie bands, you know? [both laugh] Also very much because of the era, or like, emo bands, right? It’s like, no, these people are not getting the coverage, but they are, from the 20 year olds who are going to their shows and sleeping with them and then talking about it constantly.
ELM: Right, right. Whereas like, now I think that there’s a different texture to this, I think it’s bigger, a wider net, I think that you have a lot of people who fancy themselves detectives.
FK: Mm hmm.
ELM: You know, this thing here kind of articulated, the accounts that collect a democratized version of paparazzi pictures, this idea that you could be getting 17 different angles because 17 people had their phones when this person was seen walking down the street or whatever, right? And then you could piece together the clues, like “Oh, I saw, [FK laughs] you know, I saw he was wearing these shoes in this photo,” “Oh, here’s my contribution,” like, “Oh, I’m gonna put it together, like what’s-his-name in the, Charlie Day in the, you know, with the board with all the strings on it,” you know? [FK laughs] You know what I’m talking about, right?
FK: Absolutely.
ELM: And then you have people who then are like, “I’m gonna do analysis!” and make a TikTok where they’re like “Oh and then this happened, and this, and I have all these clues, and I did all this research,” right? And I think that that is something that really could only happen at scale, and that was a scale that didn’t exist in the Perez Hilton era, the Oh No They Didn’t! era, right?
So like, all of these things have different textures to it, but I definitely think that the “democratized” and collective element of it now is interesting, and perhaps toxic in a different way. [FK laughs] But like, if you’re just writing RPF and you’re like, “This is fiction! I’m writing some fiction!” then maybe more fun, because you have a lot of different angles of the person out in public, you know? Or like, a lot of different places that you could be taking “canon” from. But I think that it’s more toxic then for the people who are not doing RPF, and think that they are like, finding some great truths or uncovering secrets.
FK: Absolutely. Thank you so much, anonymous, that was a wonderful question.
ELM: Yeah. Very interested in this topic. And we’ve got another one about RPF!
FK: OK! This one is from Lindsey.
“Hi Elizabeth and Flourish! I recently listened to your episode “RPF Revisited,” and I found your discussion about canon in relation to RPF fanfic very interesting, especially as it compares to my own experience in the BTS fandom. I spent a lot of my time growing up in traditional fandoms, but my experience with RPF is fairly limited outside of BTS. As I listened to your discussion about the various ways the ‘canon of real life’ can affect RPF fic, I couldn’t help but think of how odd BTS fanfiction is in comparison, as it seems that writers often take only small parts of the boys’ personalities and transfer them onto the characters, while the rest is made up of an ‘AO3 canon’ that everyone seems to agree upon. Even on Twitter, people will often talk about ‘AO3 Jungkook’ as a separate character from the real-life Jungkook. The differences between the two are openly acknowledged and talked about. I will see tweets where fans will remind others that ‘AO3 Yoongi is nothing like real life Yoongi,’ and sometimes the boys will even do photo shoots where people will joke that ‘the concept for this one was AO3 Namjoon.’
“The BTS fandom as a whole also tends to shy away from canon-compliant fics, as out of nearly 200,000 fics only about 4% fall into that category, and even then many are twisted in some way, whether that's by putting them in the omegaverse or having a character time travel back to their rookie days for example. Many of that 4% are also just PWPs. I find this really interesting because in my limited knowledge of other RPF fandom archives, it appears that the majority of fics are set within our real life setting, meanwhile BTS are rarely BTS within their own fanfiction.
“Being the fandom experts that you are, I wanted to bring this up to you to see if your experiences with RPF fanfic are similar to this or not. Am I way off base by saying that the BTS fandom differs in this way? As always, I would love to hear what you guys have to think about this.
“Much love and always listening, Lindsey”
ELM: Thank you very much Lindsey! This is a great letter, very interesting. I think my question that I immediately have for you, Flourish, is: you were in the One Direction fandom, [FK laughs] and my impression—I mean, I don’t know if you had a similar sort of, people talking about like, AO3 Louis or whatever, versus IRL Louis. But it is my understanding that the majority of One Direction fics are AUs, and they’re not, they’re not singers.
FK: Yeah, that’s, that’s definitely true. I think that there’s a lot of talk about like, there’s a particular kind of, usually Wattpad fanfic that was popular like, yea these many years ago, which involved, like, them actually being singers.
ELM: Traditional bandom kind of stuff, like when I think about 90s, early 2000s bandom…
FK: Right.
ELM: They’re in a band. [laughs] You know?
FK: There was a little bit of that. There was a sort of trend or a group of fics that were like that, particularly in the earlier days of One Direction fanfic, I feel like. But yeah, the vast majority is AUs. Now, I’m not sure that you have the same, like… “Oh, that’s AO3 [laughs] this person or that person.” But there are definitely—or there were definitely, I guess I can’t speak to, you know, as of the year of our Lord 2023, I haven’t been keeping up—but there were definitely sort of, traits that you would say “Oh yeah, that’s a very fanfiction Harry.” You know? Or a very Wattpad fanfiction Harry, usually, or something like that. So obviously not exactly the same, but I actually, and I don’t know what the percentages are like. But overall, yeah Lindsey, I think that BTS fandom is actually more in line with other RPF band fandoms, you know, of recent vintage, than you’re thinking.
ELM: Yeah, or it’s like, if you take sports fandoms, I think there is a lot…I mean part of this is also partly too—and I say this as a total observer and outsider to all of these RPF fandoms—part of it is like, what is the activity that you have to depict if they are “canonical,” right? We were talking in that RPF episode about how like, you have actor RPFs and it’s like…you know, there’s often some—they’re making this show but sometimes there’s some relation to the show, or they’re actually a lot more like their characters on the show than you’d think, right, it’s not necessarily like—or it’s like, all the stuff in actor AUs, which often does not, as I think we both know, doesn’t feel super like what actually happens [both laugh] to actors in their daily life.
But I’m thinking about sports fandom, and from what I know of it, it often is, they are, you know, they’re playing the sports that they do, but I think that sports are like, they’re a compelling AU setting for a lot of things that aren’t sports. You know? Because like, sports are fun! They’re often homosocial. There’s, like, locker rooms, and there’s dynamics and rivalries, and there’s all this stuff. Whereas like, there’s a lot of built-in conflict into sports. I mean, people are kind of enacting human conflicts within sports, right, with physical activity. Whereas, like, a band…I don’t know, maybe that’s a less compelling…
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Like, canon world to live in. Unless you really wanna make it about, you wanna explore their relationship with the press, or a relationship with music, or something like that, right?
FK: Yeah, I don’t know. I guess I see that as a pretty compelling world. [laughs] To write about.
ELM: [overlapping] Sure! I do! I do. But like…
FK: But, obviously there’s a lot of people who don’t necessarily see it that way. Another question is, how invested are you in thinking about those characters as actual people, and getting into that celebrity fandom kind of piecing-their-life-together part, that the last letter was asking about? Versus how much is it just like, immaculate vibes.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: Don’t care what they’re actually like at all or what’s in their life. And if it’s more the second thing, if it’s like, “I love looking at these beautiful boys, like, look at each other, and I really could not care less what they’re actually like—”
ELM: Sure.
FK: Then yeah! I mean why not! Right? [laughs]
ELM: That’s a lot of AUs for non-RPF as well, TBH.
FK: Exactly, exactly. Exactly.
ELM: Yeah! Right. And I think that, in a way that often doesn’t…whatever, you know, people don’t have to be mean or whatever, but sometimes doesn’t get commented on as much as it could. You know, people are saying, “I love this! This is so…” you know, and it’s like, this is just a story, where I’m imagining these actors in these roles. Basically you took the actors from the movie, and now I’m seeing them play, because their characterizations have nothing to do…you know what I mean?
FK: [overlapping] Yeah, totally.
ELM: [overlapping] And then you get that, at that scale, of BTS, and people are creating something collectively, so obviously it’s a huge fan activity, right? You know?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: But like, it’s not necessarily like…it’s something…I don’t know, it’s something not quite the same. I think it’s interesting to look at this in contrast to the other letter, right?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: You know, where we have this idea of like…yeah, you just wanna see these bodies. Right?
FK: [laughs] Right.
ELM: Like, these guys. That sounds dehumanizing, but that is the way a lot of fanfiction works.
FK: Yeah, and also these bodies, these guys, and the way that other people who also like them, you know what I mean? In that very communal way, exactly, exactly. Yeah.
ELM: [overlapping] Yeah! Yeah yeah yeah. Totally. Interesting.
FK: Well, very thought-provoking letter, thank you.
ELM: Yeah, thank you, Lindsey. Um, OK, so. As I teased early on, we got some letters about Twitter. We actually got several, we’re just gonna read one, because they’re all kinda generally swirling around the same topic. And I think it’s my turn to read, yeah?
FK: It is.
ELM: All right! Well, anonymous said to Fansplaining on Tumblr:
“Hi Elizabeth & Flourish! [ELM laughs] I’m quickly dropping this message while daddy Elon is wreaking havoc on Twitter dot com.” [FK laughs]
This came in…this came in in November, by the way. [FK laughs harder]
“I’m part of a K-pop fandom right now—” [FK still laughing] Yeah.
FK: I’m sorry, I just need to process. Anyway, OK, go on.
ELM: Yeah, this was like the first time that daddy Elon—right when daddy Elon rolled up to wreak havoc. So, uh…
“I’m part of a K-pop fandom right now, and I get a lot of info and translations from Twitter. It’s just the best suited for what I need and what is relevant to this specific fandom, I think. The updates Elon is making will make it very difficult for fannish interactions to proceed there, especially since it’s voluntary labor and I doubt someone who translates for free will pay $7.99 so people will actually see their posts. Do you think there is a platform that could replace Twitter? Do you think something like a nonprofit, AO3-like platform for fannish interactions could be something useful, or feasible? Love you and take care ♥️” Heart emoji!
FK: [laughs] First of all, nonnie, thank you, this is a question that many people have been asking themselves. I am coming from a particular perspective on this, because I’m in a Slack that includes a bunch of people, some of whom are trying to run a Mastodon instance right now, they’re very technically-oriented people, right, and you know, I mean, Mastodon in a lot of ways is sort of the option that currently exists, that most closely replicates Twitter. And man, it’s a mess. [ELM laughs] It’s just…
ELM: I was wondering where that was going.
FK: Really hard! [ELM laughs] Like, it’s just really hard, and these are like, smart coder people who have thought about moderation a lot, and they’re like, tryin’, and it’s just a fuckin’ mess. And honestly, I don’t know guys, I think that a lot of what’s great about…well, what’s “great”, what the functionality of Twitter works, is its size.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: Right? Its massiveness. And I think that when you’re running something like Mastodon, or, you know, any kind of social media thing, you can scale it up to a certain size, and then after that it just gets so miserable and difficult and hard to deal with. I really see that as being where a lot of, a lot of places that are trying to roll up a new social media platform fail. Because big is hard.
ELM: Yeah, I mean…
FK: So, no. Is my summary. No! [laughs]
ELM: I, I think that Mastodon is pretty different from some of these other startup-y ones that have come—
FK: Yeah, yeah, well Mastodon is more like an AO3 kind of, like, by the people, for the people thing.
ELM: Right. Whereas there have been some other alternatives that people have bandied about, because there was…when this came in and when the other ones came in on Twitter, the questions that we got, it was definitely in the period where there was a lot of talk on Twitter about “Where should we go?” And like, I assume some of those people went somewhere, because it definitely is less active. And I, you know, I don’t know how many followers I had before all this started, but I’m pretty sure I have fewer now because I think people did delete their accounts.
FK: Mmmm hmmm.
ELM: And so, I don’t know what’s going on over there, but one thing I have noticed is, in at least a few of these, Post was the most notable one, it was like…creating platforms from scratch that were already embedding some of the problems in Twitter? [FK laughs] Like for that one in particular, they put out a thing saying that accessibility wasn’t on their priority list right now, and it’s just like, that’s how you’re gonna lead? [FK laughs] And then they had a list of what protected classes were, and they didn’t include gender identity.
FK: Whooo!
ELM: They did include net worth.
FK: [pained] Ohhhhh…
ELM: So you can’t, [laughs] and you know when someone describes it as “net worth”...
FK: [overlapping] As “net worth.” [laughs]
ELM: [laughs] That’s a specific, they’re not talking about class, they’re talking about rich people.
FK: [overlapping] Yeah, they’re not, they’re not, and they’re not talking about “low net worth individuals.” [both laugh]
ELM: So…you know, it’s just like, “Ugh, this is the starting place?” Like, that’s not great. The things you wish you could change from Twitter, pre-Elon or whatever.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And that’s where we’re starting from. But for the, you know, I have a lot of sympathy, it’s interesting, the people who seem the most upset about Twitter imploding, from the fandom perspective, are people in international, multi-language fandoms. Right?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Especially K-pop. But not just that, you know? Just, people who are really into various Asian nation dramas.
FK: Right.
ELM: Stuff where they need things translated from the actors, they need that kind of group fan labor. I think that one of the things that strikes me here is like, you know, we talk a lot about with platforms and fans and that, that talk that I love so much that I think you probably love too, the “Fan is a Tool-Using Animal.” From the Pinboard founder, right.
FK: [overlapping] Yeah. [laughs] Everyone loves that talk.
ELM: It’s a really good talk! It’s, I mean it’s really smart—I think that everyone who works on the internet should read that talk, not just people who are interested in fandom. But you know, part of his point in that was that, like, fans knew exactly what they wanted. When you do needs-gathering for a platform, fans know what they need, because they know what they need to do, right? And so much of platform history in fandom is fans like, trying to wrest the…[FK laughs] shitty platform into sorta the shape that’ll sorta work for them. I don’t think Twitter is an ideal platform for the uses that are described here.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: But people have made it work. If you were to design a platform from scratch—
FK: And because the scale is there—
ELM: Right.
FK: Like if there’s enough people who are present, then you can decide like, “No, this does feel great.”
ELM: Yeah.
FK: But the scale is what makes it so hard to start a new thing. I mean, the only thing that has come out of fandom that’s social-network-like—other than Pinboard, which you can debate whether that has anything to do with social networks—but the only thing that continues to exist, and it’s not even a social network, is Dreamwidth.
ELM: Hmmm.
FK: Which…you know, I mean, like, that functions, it has been stable for many many years, it exists, all that. But I’ve seen so many things come and go, other than that, which was basically just a fork of LiveJournal, it’s just LiveJournal except run by somebody that we kinda trust. [both laugh]
ELM: Right.
FK: And so I guess that’s what’s driving my, my doubtfulness on this, is that I think it’s really hard to do this, and most of the benefits that you see—even though a fan can say exactly what they want and need, most of the benefits that you’re actually getting in an international fandom like that have to do with, you know, having a certain volume of people on it.
ELM: Right.
FK: And that’s the thing that usually makes a small or volunteer-run or nonprofit thing fall over.
ELM: Yeah. I also think, too, one thing that’s interesting about K-pop to me, at least even just observing from my own feed, obviously many, many people, millions of people probably, have K-pop-specific accounts. Whether it’s an alt that they have, or that is why they’re on Twitter, right? But I have so many people in my life, not just fandom people, who are tweeting about K-pop. So part of me is like, “Well, why don’t people just go make a K-pop platform?”
FK: Mmm hmmm.
ELM: And I remember we did this Twitter space, that was run by Aja Romano, and this, this was coming up a lot, because you had a lot of people who were in international fandoms, talking about the death of Twitter or whatever. And someone mentioned that there was a BTS-specific network, but it was like, you know, run by the management company, or run by the group.
FK: [laughs] Yeah.
ELM: Like, or run by the corporation. And so obviously that also changes what you’re gonna do, like what if you wanna be critical, but if you’re never gonna feel… And, what if you’re multi-fannish? Then you gotta go over there to the BTS forum to talk about them, and then like, you wanna go talk about…
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Stray Kids?
FK: [overlapping] And historically—
ELM: I’m trying to name another— [both laugh] another K-pop band—Blackpink? [both laugh again] I know some bands!
FK: Yeah, and historically that is the way the internet was, for many years, and maybe we’re gonna see people go back to that kind of experience, right? But it’s not suddenly people are like, relishing the idea of… [laughs] now.
ELM: Yeah, I mean that’s the whole thing with Discord, right, this isn’t new, this is just kind of a return to form, you know? And we’ve seen this for years, people writing in to say like, “This is why I spend all my time on Discord or Slack or in group texts or whatever, it’s because I don’t want that scale, I don’t want this giant wide-open field of people shouting at me. I wanna be in a space where I understand who’s in charge and feel respected and safe.” You know what I mean? But I think, you keep bringing up scale and I think that’s exactly right, I think some of that is antithetical to this sort of massive, international, free-for-all, fan labor, sharing of information. I think that’s gonna be really really hard to replicate.
FK: Yeah. All that said, I mean, that sucks, nonnie, I’m sorry that this is happening in your fandom, and I hope that you find a way that you can keep doing it, and enjoying the translations that you need and want.
ELM: Yeah. Thank you very much, and to our other Twitter questions, thank you, we obviously will keep talking about Twitter until… [sighs] Elon trips over an extension cord and unplugs it permanently.
FK: [laughs] All right, last question. This one’s also from someone anonymous. They ask:
“I’m feeling really disconnected from fandom lately and I know a lot of it has to do with the platforms much of fandom is currently on—Tumblr, Twitter, Discord, et cetera. I try to just do things where I want to be and try to spread the word so maybe others will join, but it feels like a Sisyphean battle and I’m just not sure what to do. I guess my question is: how do you get back that fannish feeling when you feel like no one’s on the platforms you actually like?”
ELM: Well thank you, anon, I feel like this is an issue that a lot of people struggle with.
FK: Yeah, definitely. And honestly, like…I don’t know that there’s a great… [laughs] answer for it, because if your fannish feelings are tied to social interaction on a specific, on a platform in sort of a social media-y way, I don’t know. When the platform’s not there, then that’s a problem, and I don’t know that I have an answer to it, if that has to be the way that they’re tied together.
ELM: You know, in light of the last discussion topic, I wish that anon had told us what platforms they do like. I’m genuinely curious.
FK: [laughs] Me too!
ELM: [overlapping] I don’t know, like, Pillowfort or something? I’m thinking of ones that haven’t really caught on in any significant way, you know, like…
FK: Does Pillowfort still exist?
ELM: Yeah! People on my Tumblr feed will mention it, so I’m almost positive it still exists.
FK: [overlapping] Whaaaat? Woooow.
ELM: But I think that’s kind of the thing, you know, and I have a few friends who I know were not happy with Twitter, not happy with Tumblr, and they’ll describe their experiences going on sites, trying to set up accounts, being like, “It’s a ghost town over there.”
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Not necessarily there, but in platforms like that, where it’s just like, you can’t even get…talk about scale, you can’t even get a small number of fans, right?
FK: [laughs] There are not two fans to rub together here. [both laugh]
ELM: Wow, is that what you want from your fandom experience?
FK: [both laugh] Yeah. I mean, I guess for me, I quit Twitter, that was pretty much the only place that I was doing significant fandom—like, I’m on a couple Discords but I don’t really do fandom on Discords. And for me the big thing has just been…finding the things that were not social [laughs] that I liked about my fan culture stuff, you know? Or, finding the one person and texting with them. And this is part of why I really struggle to give any better advice, because if I had told myself this, you know, 15 years ago, I would’ve been like, “What?! The thing I enjoy about fandom is interacting with other people, so you’re like, go find something that you can do that you like that’s just on your own?” Like, that is not a solution. [laughs]
ELM: But you are interacting with other people, you are…by having one on one, or small group chat interactions, which, I’ve talked about that for years, about like, that’s what I find the most fun, right? And obviously I’ve—
FK: [overlapping] That’s true. [laughs]
ELM: I still like Tumblr, and like, you should be glad that I’m still on Tumblr, because I can pass along some of the great Interview With the Vampire content that you would miss otherwise. [laughs]
FK: [overlapping] It is, it is…[laughs] It is so symbiotic, it’s true, it’s true. I talk about Interview With the Vampire with you, and I talk about Star Trek with my friend Jenny, at very weird times.
ELM: [overlapping] Yeah, everyone’s gonna know your two fandom friends. [laughs] Everyone on this podcast knows.
FK: [overlapping] I literally, right now, right now I’ve got two fandom friends who I talk to all the time, like, constantly, about these two different fandoms, and that’s how I vibe. So, yeah. No, I mean, you’re right, you’re right. I think what we’re saying is, I’ve gotten on your level.
ELM: Right, but it’s not entirely my level [FK laughs] because I am the one who is actively using Tumblr, because…partly because, yeah, people are writing really funny posts about Interview With the Vampire [FK laughs] and they’re drawing good fanart, and I wanna see it, right?
FK: Yeah, you’re, you’re my, you provide me with this service.
ELM: Your conduit. [FK laughs] And so like, I mean this is all, but again it all comes down to behavior, which is what we were just talking about with the previous one too, and what I always feel like I bring up with it, well what do I want out of Interview With the Vampire? I wanna read these batshit books, and I wanna see batshit posts! And like, gifs. [FK laughs] Right, you know? So there’s two things I need for that, I need the complete works of Anne Rice, in my, in my reading app, and I need a Tumblr account.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: But I don’t need anything other than that, you know? Whereas in the X-Men, what I want is to read and write fanfiction about it, and so really all I need is the AO3, but I have a Tumblr, too, which is nice because then I get to see, you know, fanart or whatever. And that’s it, and I don’t really feel like I need someone to discuss it with.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: But I also don’t think that I’ve ever been…you know, I wasn’t like 1999 Flourish in any way, ever, right? [FK laughs] I’ve always really valued having a relatively small—I like one-on-one discussions about stuff that I’m really into, because I feel like those are always more meaningful to me than like, meta going out into the big wide world. That’s just not something that works for me.
FK: Yeah, and it’s tough, because anonymous, it sounds like you’ve thought about this, and you’re like, “Yeah, one of the things that I really value is having other people to talk to sort of in a social media-y, more than one or two people way.” And you just can’t get people to come to a platform that you love. I mean, unfortunately sometimes I think the answer is, you have to decide, “How important is that to me?” Because I do think that if you really try and push through and actively try to learn a platform, you can do it. And you can decide, “I’m going to teach myself to like this thing,” and like, push through it, and do that. I do believe it.
ELM: You say this, but I don’t know. Like, people are still complaining about Tumblr and they’re on, they’re like, “I never wanted to be here, I wanted to be on LiveJournal,” and it’s like, why are you still here? It’s been like, 10 years! What are you doing?
FK: This is a mental issue.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: Like I’m just saying, if you—I mean I say this as somebody who worked helping people learn about social media for like, as part of my job for a bunch of years—
ELM: Sure.
FK: It’s amazing, you can get somebody who is like a producer in their seventies, and if they decide that they think it’s important for them to do and start teaching themselves how to use a platform, they will eventually decide to like it. [ELM laughs] And they will like it. And I really believe that all of us have this ability in us.
And if it doesn’t matter, if you’re like, too irked by it and you don’t wanna put in that time and you don’t wanna like, trick yourself into liking a thing, or it’s just too hard, then that’s maybe information that you have to accept about yourself, and I don’t think that you can force it. If the only way you can get the fannish feeling is with other people, and there’s no place that you’d like to be that has other people, then you may not get the fannish feeling. I don’t think I have a trick for that.
ELM: Yeah. I think that’s really fair. And it’s true, I think that there’s, there’s an element of psychological resistance here, exactly what you’re describing, or like the people who are still complaining about Tumblr not being the fannish place for them, and it’s like, well it’s not the default place anymore, so I don’t know why you’re acting that way.
Because when I think about, I joined Twitter in 2012, because…2010? Whatever. Somewhere back then. [FK laughs] Because my editor at the time said I had to. She was like, “Someone’s gonna make you eventually, so it’s me right now,” and I was like, “OK…” [FK laughs] Because you know, every journalist has to be on it, or had to be, kinda still has to be. And for the first four years maybe? that I used it, I just thought it was just totally pointless and I actively disliked it.
And then I started using it differently, and I started doing a lot of replies, and actually having conversations with people, and there was a period in there where, you know, whatever, it’s not my favorite place in the world, but I got value out of it. And I didn’t feel like I was just logging onto it out of habit, I felt like…and I made friends there, you know?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: So part of that, truly that was my mindset, I was like, “I don’t, this is pointless,” before, and then I started using it differently and thinking about it differently, and I had a different experience with it. So…that being said, Twitter really sucks right now, so don’t go there.
FK: Yeah. I don’t know, I mean I guess… OK, the one last thing I will say is, I do think there’s some value of just trying things, and then being like, “OK, how did that go?” [laughs] And I say this because for many many years, I resisted having anything to do with LibraryThing, or Goodreads or anything like that, I was like, “Nope, not for me.” Absolutely not.
ELM: [overlapping, quietly] You’re using Goodreads?
FK: I’m using LibraryThing.
ELM: OK. [laughs]
FK: Not Goodreads. Um.
ELM: [laughs] Flourish, I was like, “I’m gonna cancel this podcast if you’re using Goodreads.”
FK: No! No. But I’m using LibraryThing, because I decided to move my Star Trek book reading project over there, and you know, within like 24 hours I had had people messaging me about this, and I was like, “Oh, this is actually really nice! [laughs] There are fans here who are interested in some of the same things I’m interested in!” I could be into that.
ELM: [overlapping] That’s interesting, yeah.
FK: [overlapping] So I had like, I had resisted it for so many years, and I like…you know, it’s not my favorite interface, and there’s certain things about the whole process, the whole project of LibraryThing that I’m like, “Eh, I don’t know, I could take it or leave it.” But I’m happy that I went over there. So, I guess I do also just want to encourage anonymous to like, be open to stuff, even things that you’ve resisted for many years, because you might be surprised.
ELM: I mean, that’s a really very kind of fascinating to me…like, we always talk about these, hoping one of these big platforms is gonna be a one-size-fits-all, “Oh, everyone can go from LiveJournal to Tumblr,” where LiveJournal wasn’t very useful to, like, vid makers or fanartists, you know? Like, it really wasn’t designed for that, it was for people who liked to write long text.
FK: [overlapping] Yeah, like, they dealt with it, but they didn’t really, [laughs] there were lots of problems.
ELM: [overlapping] Yeah, it wasn’t really ideal for them, right? I think about, I have a lot of friends on Letterboxd, right, and what they’re doing is pretty fannish, you know? And they’re writing reviews, they’re movie fans, but like, no one ever talks about Letterboxd when they’re talking about, “Where should fandom go,” but that’s totally a fan behavior. Like what you’re describing with LibraryThing.
FK: [overlapping] And horror, horror fans are on Letterboxd, right? [laughs] I mean like, you know?
ELM: [overlapping] Right, right, but we have this kind of idea that capital-F Fandom is gonna be on one platform, and then obviously that’s only a small subset of fandom, and you know, there’s people who think all fans are on Reddit or whatever, so it’s just like…
FK: Yeah, totally.
ELM: Behaviors. And I think that you’re absolutely right about the social component here.
FK: Reddit, speaking of another, another thing that people could try if they’re really tired of stuff.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: Like, I know, I know, for years also I was like, “Reddit is a pit full of horrible men,” and some parts of Reddit are still pits full of horrible men, [laughs] but there’s also a lot there that you might discover you like.
ELM: No, and it’s interesting, I have a lot of friends who I think of as very much the same kind of fan that we are, and they are not men, and they are on Tumblr and Reddit, you know? Or Twitter and Reddit. That’s just another component of their life, because they enjoy the discussions that they have in the subreddit for the show that they like or whatever. So like, yeah. It’s a big wide internet, I guess. Doesn’t feel like that, but…
FK: [sighs] We wish you well, nonnie! [laughs]
ELM: Yeah, yeah seriously. Because I think this is a real struggle a lot of people have, so, you know, good luck.
FK: I mean, it’s hard to say good luck when I’m like, “I just found a new group of people that I like, and also my life’s doing fine without it!” But genuinely, I wish only the best, and that you too achieve this level of…fan chillness. [laughs]
ELM: Note for the record that Flourish did the climbing up the mountain gesture again, so. [FK laughs] Make of that what you will. It’s kind of like the um…what’s the, what do they call like, kaomoji? The, you know the one who looks like he’s kinda running in a jaunty way? You know what I’m talkin’ about?
FK: I don’t think I know what you’re talking about, so I will look forward to it.
ELM: Is it called kaomoji? I think it is called that. And I’ll put that guy, I’ll put jaunty running guy in the show notes for you, and you’ll say that’s—
FK: [overlapping, laughing] Oh! I know jaunty running—[ELM laughs]—Now that you’ve said jaunty running guy, yeah! He’s jaunty!
ELM: [overlapping] You immediately did it! You look just like him, yeah! That’s you! Climbing up that mountain, yeah! [laughs]
FK: [overlapping] That’s me. All right, great. On that note… [laughs]
ELM: [overlapping] And I’m the shruggie. Ehhh… [laughs]
FK: Yeah, you are the shruggie. OK. Goodnight, shruggie, I’ll talk to you later.
ELM: OK, goodnight jaunty running guy.
[Outro music]