Episode 196: Ask Fansplaining Anything: Part 16
In yet another (the sixteenth!) installment of “Ask Fansplaining Anything,” Flourish and Elizabeth discuss a fresh batch of listener questions and comments. Topics include portmanteau ship names, permissive fanart attitudes amongst video game developers, fic self-promotion etiquette, and a pair of letters about big name fans, and what exactly that term means in fandom right now.
Show Notes
[00:00:00] As always, our intro music is “Awel” by stefsax, used under a CC BY 3.0 license.
[00:02:15] That’s Special Episode #25: Tropefest: Modern AU.
[00:03:50]
[00:27:09] Fox Estacado was our guest on Episode 193: Ask Me About My Fanart.
[00:31:26] Our interstitial music throughout is “Last call” by Lee Rosevere, also used under a CC BY 3.0 license.
[00:33:02] In addition to Patreon, if you’re interested in making a one-off donation—especially to help us commission more articles like Maria Temming’s piece, “The Pain Fandom”—you can do that via PayPal.
[00:38:03] If you’re interested in the etymology of slash (and ship), Flourish wrote an explainer way back in 2016.
[00:41:25] See, you look at Tumblr’s Fandometrics and you think, “Bowuigi? Surely they made that up.” And then you click on it and you realize: they did not.
[00:42:58] To quote directly from “Fan is A Tool-Using Animal”:
But the single change that killed fandom dead on Delicious was no longer being able to type "/" into the search box.
There is no God, life has no meaning, it's all over when you can't search on the slash character. And fandom started freaking out on Twitter.
[00:44:03]
![Animated gif from Interview with the Vampire depicting Louis and Lestat kissing and Louis stabbing Lestat. Caption: [Kissing. Stabbing.]](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/57d81f7f9f74567839f5633b/ea218441-6a14-4c13-bc49-2ec203648fe7/tumblr_8225872976dff47787b15a22fff52063_9a111c78_540.gif)
[00:45:08] Riot Games’s Fan Project Guidelines and Mihoyo’s Merchandizing Authorization.
[00:49:38]
[00:59:56] A (Cherik) fic Elizabeth loves that was inspired by a gif: “Everything you know is wrong” by aesc and pocky_slash.
Transcript
[Intro music]
Flourish Klink: Hi, Elizabeeeth.
Elizabeth Minkel: Hi, Flourish.
FK: And welcome to Fansplaining! The podcast by, for, and about fandom!
ELM: [laughs] OK. This is Episode #196, “Ask Fansplaining Anything: Part 16.”
FK: If each part is a year—which it isn’t—then it could drive.
ELM: Which it isn’t.
FK: [laughs] Sorry, I don’t know how to respond to these [ELM laughs] other than, there’s some more questions and we’re gonna answer them! [laughs]
ELM: [overlapping] Oh my gosh. You don’t, [laughs] you don’t have to. You don’t have to!
FK: It’s a compulsion.
ELM: [overlapping] It’s like, you…I feel like it’s not exactly the dad-joke gene, but it’s like a, a related, you have a variation on that, yeah, for sure. And it’s like…you can’t—
FK: [overlapping] A little bit. Yeah. The pun husky.
ELM: Yeah. Yeah, you can’t stop it, it has to come out. It’s not even a pun! [both laugh]
FK: OK, OK. Why don’t I read the first letter in our little mailbag?
ELM: OK. Do it.
FK: It’s from anonymous. They say:
“Hi team! I have been back-listening to a bunch of your special episodes, and am up to the one on Modern AUs. I would like to take a moment to propagandize my very nitpicky, product of irritation alternative term of... DUN DUN DUNNNNN: ‘Contemporary AU.’ What is modern? Modern shifts, however contemporary always exists within the context of the time it was written. Yes, I realize this is pedantic. No, I am not going to stop my sneaky campaign to change the jargon. Love the show! xo.”
And that’s from anonymous. [both laugh] So if we take this on, does this mean that, like modern art, modern AUs become like a very particular mid-century period? [laughs]
ELM: [overlapping] A period? A period? That’s funny. Yeah, you know, I actually wonder where the term came from. So if—context, if anyone doesn’t know, we have a series of special episodes called Tropefest, and we did one on modern AUs, which, yeah, people definitely use the term “modern AU” to mean set in the present day. But as I think I even mentioned in the last episode, like, when you’re reading a fic that’s more than a few years old, it can start to feel like it’s from a different time, even when it’s labeled “modern.” Right?
FK: Also, we are now post-postmodern, Elizabeth. [laughs]
ELM: [overlapping, grumbling] Oh my…oh my God, get outta here.
FK: We aren’t just postmodern, we are post-postmodern.
ELM: [sighs] Yeah, I mean, anon, I don’t think either of us disagree with you. I think the horse is not gettin’ back in that barn because [FK laughs] it’s a very, very popular tag—
FK: The fast horse.
ELM: —on the Archive of Our Own. [FK laughs] But, it’s true, and I think it’s something that, it’s definitely worth…you know, as I was mentioning in the last episode, because a lot of the fic in my fandom was written in 2012…
FK: Yeah.
ELM: It feels like it’s coming from a different era, so I’ll read it and I’ll look back and I’ll be like, “Oh.” You know?
FK: Yep.
ELM: So, it’s something that’s funny to think about. I mean, obviously, when you read stuff that’s a lot older, you’re like, it’s from a different era. But it is funny to see the passage of time feel so swift, you know?
FK: Sure, sure! I mean, it’s also funny…I don’t know, like, [laughs] I always have to bring Star Trek into it, but there’s all these times in Star Trek where they like, travel to what was contemporary at the time, and now you look back at it and you’re like, “Ha ha ha ha ha!” Right? That it’s not like that.
ELM: [overlapping] Yeah. That’s funny though, that’s such a nice, it’s like a time capsule, you know what I mean?
FK: Oh, it’s perfect. Watch Star Trek IV, the one with the whales. That’s my advice. To anybody who wants to experience, like, peak this.
ELM: [overlapping] I’m not going to, but thank you. That’s…OK, that’s sliding past me, and that can go to everyone else.
FK: [laughs] OK, great. [ELM laughs] I agree. I like this idea, but realistically we gotta tag things so other people find them. So. Alas. [laughs]
ELM: [overlapping] Yeah. I’m sorry about this, uh, this pet peeve, anonymous. Good luck. [laughs]
FK: All right, OK. The next two letters are…they go together. [ELM laughs] So, would you read the first one and I’ll read the second one?
ELM: Um, I would be happy to do that. So, the first one is from an anon, and he writes:
“Hi Elizabeth and Flourish,
“Love the podcast and thank you so much for all your insightful work! I've been thinking a lot about ‘big name fans’ and I was hoping I could get some insight from y’all.
“For a while, I thought these kinda mega fans were a thing of the past especially as fandom became decentralized, people got involved with multiple fandoms at once, and people became weary of the drama of the past. Recently, I’m not so sure. I've gained a sizable following on TikTok and it’s strange to see how people’s perceptions of me have changed. I see a lot of people in my comments section with a textbook case of a parasocial relationship. For me! But I’m just a normal fan, I don’t feel like a ‘big name’ but recently other people that I’d consider influential in my fandom space have followed me.
“The whole thing has kinda shifted my perspective. There are fans with more influence than others, but they’re also just normal people, but they’re also doing meets and greets at cons. Ugh, I don’t know what to make of it. I think the vast majority of ‘big name fans’ are just talented people that make good fan works, but I’m still weary of the drama from not that long ago. This hierarchy among fans makes me uncomfortable, but is there anything we can do about it? It feels weird to be a fan with fans, but I’m also a fan of other fans if that makes sense.
“Do you feel like you have authority in your own fan spaces and if so, what are you doing about it? Or do you think of popular writers and artists in your own fan spaces as having authority? Is this just a natural part of fandom or can we all just acknowledge each other as talented artists that all love the same thing without assigning a hierarchy?”
And that’s from anonymous.
FK: All right, this next person is also anonymous, but they have designated themself “Nonny,” which is my favorite term for anonymous people, so good job, Nonny. OK. [ELM laughs] The letter is:
“Very open question: How have BNFs changed over time? How have possible things a BNF can do with their big-name-ness changed? And how have attitudes towards the idea of a BNF changed?
“I assume things like Patreon changed things recently, giving a direct way to convert a following to financial support (anything before Patreon is before my time paying any real attention to fandom, so I wouldn’t know to compare), and in the other direction, I was skimming Fanlore once and saw that some early Star Trek BNFs, like, got an entire book of fic published as a licensed collection, which was controversial but only within fandom? WTF, that's completely wild to me.”
And that’s from Nonny.
ELM: [laughs] All right. Anon and Nonny. BNFs. [FK laughs] So we actually thought about doing a whole episode on this, and then we test-drove it a little bit, and it’ll just be a segment on this episode, is what I’ll say. Complicated topic, though.
FK: But we should define BNFs first. Big name fans, what does that mean to you, Elizabeth?
ELM: Big name fans. So…I find it interesting that first anon talks about this as a thing, as something that feels like it’s in the past, because I definitely understand that vibe, right, to me when I think—the first thing I think of when I think of BNF is like, shenanigans? From 20 years ago. [FK laughs] Of a particular…obviously I’m, like, thinking about Cassie Clare, right—
FK: [overlapping] Yeah, yeah, yeah.
ELM: —but like, and some other people more recently that I’m not gonna name. But like, you know, it’s that kind of thing, of, like…when I think BNF I think…the first thing that comes to mind is Mean Girls in fandom. Right?
FK: Mm hmm.
ELM: You know, but then I think about, like, other fandoms that I’ve been in, and I think it’s the people who feel like the most popular fans. And sometimes that seems to correspond to fanwork creation, and sometimes it just seems to correspond to loudness. And…that’s always interesting. And not necessarily fanwork creation like, I feel like they’re the most talented creators.
FK: Right.
ELM: But just the ones that are the most popular.
FK: Right. I might also add that I feel like sometimes there’s…the category of people who have the closest relationship with the Powers That Be, with the creators of whatever the thing is, right?
ELM: [overlapping] Yes, yes.
FK: There’s some people who have that, and then sometimes there’s people who like, for whatever reason, end up getting a lot of press about them.
ELM: Yeah…
FK: And sometimes there’s people who like, run a con. You know what I mean? Who are functionally, like, they run a con, or a fanfiction archive, more in the past than today, but who are running some service, kind of, and therefore people know who they are.
ELM: Yeah, I would add, I guess, in addition to the access to creators, I think in fandoms—not any that I’ve been in, because I haven’t really been in these fandoms—but ones where kind of, like the Creation cons or whatever, Supernatural cons or whatever. You definitely see people who go to a lot of them.
FK: [overlapping] Yeah yeah yeah. There’s like, the con…yeah, the con…
ELM: [overlapping] They get a lot of attention, right? And so that’s partly like, that’s an access thing too, it’s not necessarily that they are like, best friends with Misha Collins or whatever, but they do go to a ton of the cons and so they’re the ones livetweeting the, you know, they’re the ones who are on the ground at the thing when they were saying these things.
FK: Right. Right.
ELM: And so they get a lot of popularity boost from that.
FK: Not to mention that people just know them, because they go to the cons and they meet a lot of people, right?
ELM: [overlapping] Right, right, yeah, yeah.
FK: [overlapping] So there’s this, there’s definitely…to me one of the big things that we’re talking about in common here is they’re people who know everybody. And more than that, where everybody knows them.
ELM: Sure.
FK: One of the funny things about this to me, right, is that it seems really obvious to me that there are like, there are clearly big name fans now, because you see them, you know, having millions of—maybe not millions. Sometimes millions—thousands, hundreds of thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of followers on social media accounts, right? Getting comments, getting all this stuff.
So when I think back to when I first got into fandom, BNFs—and yes, this does include the infamous Cassie Clare and all of these things, so, you know, I can’t talk about that without fessing up to that, being a part of that situation—uh, I think about how many people were following them, and the answer is like, 1,000 people. You know? [laughs]
ELM: Sure.
FK: It’s LiveJournal, it’s the year 2001, and 1,000 people is a lot of people. So I think that’s the other thing, if we’re talking about how BNFs have changed over time, that was a lot of people at the time, and it gave you access to stuff—not money, definitely not money at that point…at least, not if you didn’t want a huge scandal. But like, very very different than what we think of as BNF-ness today, which I think is really interesting.
ELM: Well, it’s interesting to think about that, in that era, there were very few public-facing metrics, too.
FK: Mmmm hmmm. Yeah.
ELM: And so I think that in a way, it maybe incentivized people if they wanted to seem like they had power, to play specific sorts of games. Right? [FK laughs] Whereas now obviously people are still playing games to achieve kind of, some sort of power status, but there is some element of number…you know, number generation involved.
FK: Right, right.
ELM: Whether it’s, “Oh, my fic has the most kudos” or whatever, or “Oh, I have the most followers on Twitter.” And I think that those aren’t necessarily…you know, I think it’s all connected, but I think the dynamics change a bit around that.
FK: Oh, I definitely agree. I mean like, if you think about those Star Trek big name fans, right, which I feel like the term wasn’t even in use back then, I don’t think. When you think about those people, there’s no—they don’t have followers! That doesn’t exist. [laughs]
ELM: Yeah. Right, right, right.
FK: But there still are human dynamics, like in every human situation…I mean, just, like, a large amount of priest school is like, learning how to deal with people having these dynamics in the context of the church, right? [laughs]
ELM: [overlapping] Don’t, don’t get me started, Flourish, do not get me started. About your politics.
FK: [overlapping] Right? But you know what I’m saying?
ELM: Yeah, this is something that I think is worth stressing, because it’s obviously not unique to fandom, and…you know, when I think about some kind of parallel subcommunities where you can see some of these same dynamics, I think about the specific genres, right, in pro publishing, and you know, there’s obviously power dynamics on display, and some of that is based on…there are, the BNFs of X genre [FK laughs] are the bestsellers, they get the best deals, or they maybe, maybe are the most talented, rarely it seems to line up exactly that way. Maybe they’re just really good at social media, and they’re really good at wielding the high follower count that they have.
So like, I think that that is all…it’s easy to see those dynamics, but then of course in those spaces there is money involved, and in a lot of fandom spaces—obviously we have, Nonny, you’re talking about Patreon, and we have anon here talking about like, fans doing meet and greets at cons, which, probably a lot of that is non-monetized still, right, if it’s like a fan-run con or whatever.
FK: I mean, we… [laughs] we do meet and greets at cons, in a sense.
ELM: Meet and greet? That’s not, no, like, you know.
FK: [overlapping] It’s not really, I mean I’m just saying, you know, we do a meetup, and we’re hosting a meetup of people who are Fansplaining listeners, you know? It’s a thing.
ELM: Sure. I mean, that gets us into a different area, and I do think that there are people in fandom who are doing a similar thing to what we’re doing in the sense of…they have built a following around talking about fandom on a meta level.
FK: Right.
ELM: I think that’s different than a fan creator within individual fandoms.
FK: Oh, agreed, for sure.
ELM: Right, because like…I mean whatever, obviously that’s not totally different, but I do think it feels a bit different to me. I don’t know.
FK: I do think that there is one thing that, you know, the first anon said that I thought was really interesting, which was this idea of like, “becoming a big name” or becoming better-known like, sneaking up on you. Right?
ELM: Mmm.
FK: And realizing, like, “Wait, really? Me?” You know? [laughs] And I think that that’s an interesting observation, because I think that there are people who are very invested in their, in those power games, and in building their brand, either because they want to make money or because they want to get to the top of a heap or whatever. And then there’s other people who it seems like just sort of…are doin’ their thing, and kind of stumble into it.
ELM: Yeah, yeah. I don’t mean to portray all BNFs as like, Regina George-level fandom schemers, you know? [both laugh]
FK: Right, right, I mean, yeah. I don’t, I’m not saying that it doesn’t turn out that way sometimes, right, because you can stumble into something…
ELM: [overlapping] There are some, though.
FK: [overlapping] …and then become a jerk, but. [both laugh] Yeah. Yeah.
ELM: Yeah. No, I think that the, I absolutely understand, and like, you know, it’s interesting with fanworks, because…I mean, whatever, I also just gave the example of pro writers in various genres, but it’s interesting with fanworks because you have this weird intersection of like, cults of personality and interest in people’s work.
FK: Right.
ELM: As opposed to like, you know, you see power dynamics and hierarchies forming in all sorts of spaces, right, like in a forum or something, and it’s not like anyone in the forum is creating—maybe you’re doing great posts or whatever, you got good jokes—but it’s not like anyone’s creating the greatest work of literature you ever read or something in forum comments, right? And you still have, you can still see—you’re making this face like you’re read some really great literature in forum comments, so maybe I don’t want to be dismissive.
FK: Well, I don’t know about literature, but I do think that there are people who, people go like, “Yeah, they have really great insight,” you know?
ELM: [overlapping] Yeah, yeah, that’s fair, that’s fair.
FK: [overlapping] They’re writing great meta in forum comments, or they’re like, again, providing a service. Like “Oh yeah, I can always count on this person to like, do the recap,” you know? [laughs]
ELM: [overlapping] Sure. All right. Yeah, I guess I shouldn’t put like, fanart and fanfiction on a pedestal.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: But I do think, or vids or whatever, but these kind of polished, published fanworks.
FK: Right.
ELM: As opposed to—and you have these, everyone always, [laughs] people like to talk about the mysterious fanfic writer who drops the greatest story you’ve ever read and then vanishes, and then replies to your—you know, there’s that famous post—and then replies to your comment three years after you leave it with just “Thanks,” right, you know? [FK laughs] And you’re like, “Who are you, mysterious person?” And those people, tons of people follow them because they write incredible stuff, and they don’t seem involved, they’re super reclusive in fandom spaces, right?
FK: Yeah. Right.
ELM: As opposed to…you know, I’ve definitely been in fandoms where there have been some BNFs who I don’t think created anything beyond spicy takes on Tumblr. [laughs]
FK: [overlapping] For sure. Yeah yeah yeah. [laughs]
ELM: And yeah, that’s content, but it’s really really different to me than creating a work of fiction that I love, you know? It’s someone who’s, like, a hardcore poster.
FK: Right.
ELM: And you can see how the power gathers. And those are the people, often times, where I feel like it is something that they are consciously building.
FK: Yeah, I agree with that. I mean, it’s interesting because the first anon is really focused on this question of sort of authority.
ELM: Mmm.
FK: And being looked up to, and the second person who wrote in seems like they’re really focused on money. And I think that those two things are different. They’re sometimes related, but they’re kind of different pieces.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: That both come into this BNF question these days.
ELM: Yeah. So the authority one is really interesting to me, I think not least because that’s, except for these Regina George things I’m describing, when I think about BNFs, I think the authority really gets to the heart of what I see.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And you come into a space, and you can quickly tell who is the most popular, and their opinions are the most popular.
FK: Right.
ELM: And if you don’t…[laughs] If you don’t agree with their reads, you’re sitting there just like, stewing, you know? [FK laughs] Because you’re just like…it’s not just that you have bad opinions, but everyone is saying that it’s good, right, and you’re like, ugghhh, why?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And I remember this distinctly, and I was not, you know, I was very much a lurker but kind of watching it, when new Harry Potter books came out and the loudest, most popular voices would drop their takes, right? Or when I was in Sherlock, and the new season came out, right?
FK: Sure!
ELM: And it’s just like, you’d see people gravitating towards the people who already had the biggest following, even if they weren’t saying anything particularly insightful, and I can definitely see why that stirs up resentment.
FK: Yeah, for sure.
ELM: And it’s this kind of idea of…it starts to feel very anti-democratic at that moment when the new bit of canon comes out, right? It’s not, “Oh, we’re all talking about this together,” it’s, “Oh, everyone is gravitating towards the loudest voice, who’s continuing to just be louder and louder in a self-perpetuating way.”
FK: Yeah, I definitely see that. It’s also interesting because it’s…that’s sort of about conversation share, and then there’s also the level of like, I’ve been in spaces or I’ve…there’s another kind of authority or BNF-ness that exists I think, which is like…I don’t know, people who really admire someone’s writing, and are like, “Their taste is great,” you know what I mean?
ELM: Mmmm hmmm. Mmmm hmmm.
FK: Like, you get a comment from, sometimes you get a comment from a fanfic writer and you’re like, “It means so much to get a positive comment from you, because I love your work. And you love my work, oh my good—” right?
ELM: Yeah.
FK: I understand that’s not the dramatic kind of BNF, so people don’t always call those people BNFs, right, maybe this is back to that reclusive writer thing too to some degree.
ELM: Yeah, yeah.
FK: But I think they are, right? Just as much, also, as when I’ve been in con spaces, the people who are like, actually running the convention, who everybody knows, those are BNFs also in a certain sense, in the sense of having authority within a fan space. And everybody knowing who they are, people going to them to solve problems and do things, right, there’s a level of power that they have.
ELM: Sure.
FK: But maybe doesn’t get talked about as a “BNF” in the same way, even if they’re, like, famous in that conference series, you know what I mean? Even if everybody knows, whoever’s gone there. [laughs]
ELM: Yeah, I mean I think that kinda thing often gets talked about as a BNF, and something like that, or like a zine editor now, in the days of super exclusive zines where you have to submit, you know?
FK: [overlapping] Yeah…yeah yeah. Sure.
ELM: But there’s a difference I think, necessarily, between…there’s also an element of people can see those figures as gatekeepers, right?
FK: For sure.
ELM: At a con you’re literally deciding who gets to speak, right, in a conversation, and the same in a zine. And I think there’s some overlap there too.
FK: I think that’s fair.
ELM: It’s not just that they have a loud voice, but they even get to decide who the voices are, right?
FK: Right. And I mean, I totally get why that doesn’t feel great. [laughs] You know? And I haven’t always liked it.
ELM: Sure.
FK: I mean, I will say that I have spent probably more of my time in fandom on the side of deciding whose voices get heard than I have on the side of like, feeling helpless in that way, overall? So, maybe I’m not the most sympathetic, maybe I’m just not the most empathetic, not having had that all the time, because I don’t know how you get an alternative. Like, I see this, I see this bubbling up, you know, in place after place, just because…well, if you’re gonna have a con, someone’s gonna have to decide who talks. [laughs] Right?
ELM: Yeah! Yeah, I mean, obviously, and that’s the short answer to it. But like, it doesn’t…or it doesn’t change the feelings, and you can very easily say, “Well why don’t you run it then?” You know? But there’s a whole host of reasons why they may not be able to run a con.
FK: For sure! Yeah! And I mean, not even getting into the structural, in this particular case, structural inequalities and so forth, right? [laughs] Like, there’s a huge chunk of stuff.
ELM: Yeah, absolutely. I think it’s worth, you know, related to biases within fandom, and whose voices, who gets attacked for their identity, right? As opposed to who gets validated and lifted up. So…I think all these things are really tricky.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: But I also think, looking at anon’s comment about, he has people who he feels are developing a parasocial relationship…like, not only do I think that that is literally unavoidable [both laugh] in all sorts of spaces, right, but I think that fans may be even predisposed to more of that.
FK: Yeah, for sure.
ELM: Because you’re already kind of a fannish person, like I’m sure there are small group spaces where there are power dynamics, but like, the people involved are less inclined to start to have a really close personal internal relationship with the people whose work they admire, or whose hot spicy takes they think are the coolest thing on Tumblr, you know? I don’t know, I’m trying to get in the mind of someone who really loves a power-hungry BNF on Tumblr, [FK laughs] what do you want there? You know what I mean?
FK: Sure. Yeah.
ELM: That’s my own fanfiction. [laughs] Yeah, like just this kind of idea, I think that fans…I don’t think that all humans—I know from talking to people—I don’t think all humans create narratives about other characters in the world in their heads, right, I think we do that at different levels depending on how your brain is wired and how you see stories. So like, I do think there is some element of fandom specificity here that makes this more likely to happen in that way.
FK: Yeah, and I think also there is naturally, whenever there is sort of a one-to-many conversation, which happens, yeah, OK, technically speaking fandom can be many to many, but if you’ve got a particularly popular person or somebody who’s, you know…in that BNF position, it effectively becomes one to many. In all circumstances like that, you end up with some level of parasocial relationship, even when you get to the place of, like, your teacher, or your professor, right?
ELM: Oh yeah. Oh yeah.
FK: You’ve got 20 students in the class and you are only one of them, and you might feel very strongly about them as a mentor, and they may be lovely to you and maybe be a mentor to you, but they’ve still got a bunch of other mentees, right? [laughs] Like, you’re not the only one.
ELM: I’m sorry, this is so funny listening to you, person who married their former professor, talking about…
FK: OK, well, you know, maybe I was the only one. [both laugh] But, you know what I mean though, right?
ELM: [overlapping] I’m sorry, you’re just like, “You’re just one of, only one of one student,” and it’s like, not for you! [FK laughs] You were the one.
FK: OK, OK.
ELM: To be clear, Flourish and Nick got together after that.
FK: Yeah, I was not his student at the time. [ELM laughs]
ELM: Just wanna, I feel like we have mentioned this in passing on the podcast, so I don’t think we’re breaking any news here, but I wanna make that super clear, is that OK? [laughs]
FK: [overlapping] No, it’s, it’s fine, I was, it’s totally fine. No, but you, you know what I’m saying, right?
ELM: Yeah.
FK: Like, there’s lots of, I mean that’s not the only one example of this. I mean, I will also say, I think that that’s fine. Like, there are people that I have parasocial relationships with, absolutely.
ELM: Oh yeah.
FK: And I know that there are people who listen to this podcast and I’ve heard from some of them, like people who I knew many years ago and now listen to the podcast regularly, and they’re like, “Yeah, hey what’s up with your life?” and I’m like, “I don’t know a single thing that happened to you, I’m sorry, maybe that makes me a bad friend, but also you could send me a fucking email!” [laughs]
ELM: I had this experience…yeah, I have a friend from college, and I saw her for our college reunion—I don’t know if she’s listening or not, I think she’s very busy [FK laughs]—but I saw her for our college reunion a few years ago, and um…she was just staring at me, and she was like, “This is so weird, I’ve just been listening to your podcast for a while,” [both laugh] and I was like, “We’ve known each other for a really long time, this is funny,” but you know, she lives in another state, so it’s like, I only get to see her once a year or whatever. But she had been listening to my voice every other week for the past several years, so I thought that was very funny. [laughs]
FK: Right! And I think like, that’s also fine, [laughs] you know what I mean? We’re all living in this world.
ELM: Podcasts in particular, I think, are famous for this. Or radio.
FK: Definitely.
ELM: I think, to Nonny’s focus on money, because we talked about authority for a lot of this too…the specific thing with money and BNFs in fandom right now is, it’s not just a simple case of… You know, take the subgenre examples I’m having in pro publishing, like YA or romance or sci fi or whatever. If someone is jealous of someone else, and their, like, high position in that subcommunity, a lot of it comes down to money.
FK: Right.
ELM: But like, all the cards are on the table, you know? There’s a certain number of publishing deals, some people get more money, some people get less, you know how much money the magazines pay for stories or whatever, you know what I mean?
FK: Right.
ELM: In fandom, we don’t even agree on whether there should be money involved. You know?
FK: Right.
ELM: And so then you have this whole extra added layer of like…you know, I’ll say it, sometimes when I see a fanfiction writer with a Patreon I’m like, “What are you doing?” [FK laughs] and then I’m like, “Wait, I don’t care.” You know? And then I move on.
FK: Yeah, yeah.
ELM: But I’ll just, I have the instant reaction of like, “Do you think you can do this when no one else can?” [FK laughs] and then I’m like, why am I being this person, I don’t wanna be that person.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: But I totally get that instinct, right, or whenever we all get so tangled up, even when we had Fox Estacado on as a longtime fanartist talking about her, kind of conflicting, ambivalent feelings about, oh, fanart gets money and fanfiction doesn’t, you should do it for love, but your labor is worth something, et cetera, you know? I think all these complications come in, and when someone is clearly making money in a space where you think that you’re all doin’ it for love, obviously that adds an extra layer of resentment.
FK: Right, and it gets even more complicated when you get into that sort of shift over into geek press space, or historically geeky YouTube space, to some extent still, but I feel like it’s less red hot than it was. You know, there was a period where you were in a fandom, and you’re having your fan experience over here, and then there’s like, some people making YouTube videos with like, extremely boring and basic takes [ELM laughs] about this, and clearly making a bunch of money from it!
ELM: Yeah.
FK: Or anyway, it looks like they are, and they’re getting, you know, they’re going to YouTube events, and like…and then, oh, you know, maybe they’re hoping that they’ll be sucked up into the world of getting to be a talking head on the SYFY Channel or something. You know what I mean? There’s this…like…
ELM: This is a specific group that you’re thinking about right now.
FK: Kind of! But you know what I’m talking about, right? I guess I was exposed to them more because of working in the entertainment industry.
ELM: Sure, sure.
FK: So having connections with some of that stuff. But that gets weird too, right, because now suddenly you’re talking about, well there’s big name fans, but then there’s also, like, people doing commentating, kind of, who are maybe fans…but are they in the same kind of fandom? [laughs]
ELM: Yeah, all right, all right all right all right. But I think it’s a little funny, you’re… [laughs] you’re picking on a specific group here, it’s a little funny talking about this. I mean, you definitely…I mean, whatever, we already talked about your BNF era and cons or whatever. [FK laughs] But certainly, certainly like…there’s been pushback to people like myself writing about fans in mainstream journalism, and this kind of idea of speaking for fans. Right? And so I think that’s an element of it, too. And again, that feels like, I mean I guess I brought up earlier people who are well-known as fandom…like meta fandom commentators, right, you know?
FK: Yeah yeah yeah.
ELM: Even when they’re doing it in a purely fandom space, and it’s not like, for mainstream magazines or on YouTube or whatever. So I feel like that’s adjacent.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: But then there’s another element involved too, of like, people yelling at me or whatever for like, “Oh, you know, you’re revealing all our secrets” or whatever, and it’s like, I’m really not! [laughs] I’m trying to get them to stop being dicks to us, you know, that’s how, by explaining basic things to them. [laughs]
FK: [overlapping] Yeah, if, if…yeah. Yep. Yup.
ELM: But yeah. I get that objection, this kind of idea of speaking for fandom or whatever, which I never…I never purport to do, but that feels very different to me than like, being in fandom spaces…in specific fandom spaces.
FK: [overlapping] Right, that kind of BNF versus…yeah yeah yeah.
ELM: Yeah. Because like, again, a lot of it to me comes back to like, there is some element that connects back to the source material, and you know, when I’m lovin’ some popular fan’s takes and their fic and I’m like, “Yeahhh, I love it, too,” right, and when I feel like… [laughs] we fundamentally disagree, I’m like, [in a deep growling voice] “Why, why is this the most publicly, get outta here,” that kinda thing, right? So it just heightens it. And I would reject the idea that these are things from the past. I just think that it feels different. And honestly, I said Cassie Clare for a reason, I truly think all that shit looms large in the minds of people, sometimes who were not even born then. Right? Like, and they think that…
FK: [overlapping] God, don’t remind me, do not remind me…
ELM: [overlapping] You know what I mean though? Right? And it’s like…
FK: [overlapping] Don’t remind me. I do know, believe me—
ELM: [overlapping] Pop…popcorn dot gif!
FK: I know, I know. Believe me. [both laugh]
ELM: Right, and that’s just like, this idea, I mean it’s not lost on me that that’s not that much earlier than Mean Girls, too, this kind of idea of, you know, you have these big Regina George-like figures, but whatever, I have seen this in other fandoms since then, and I’m sure it’s happening right now.
FK: Yup. All right, well, I don’t know if we answered all those questions, but I do think that it’s time for us to go take a break.
ELM: OK, thank you to anon and to Nonny. [laughs]
FK: Yay, thank you very much!
ELM: All right, let’s take a break.
[Interstitial music]
FK: OK, we’re back, and it is time for us to remind people of how they can [laughs] support this podcast on Patreon.com. And how they can write in.
ELM: Why do you laugh, Flourish?
FK: Uh, because we just got done talking about BNFs asking people for money. [laughs]
ELM: The money is to pay our wonderful transcriptionists…
FK: That’s true.
ELM: And our hosting costs, so there is that.
FK: [laughs] There is that. OK. Patreon.com/Fansplaining. There, if you enjoy the podcast, you can help support us, make everything that we do happen, and in exchange you can get all sorts of delightful rewards, including things like tiny enamel pins that are adorable—that’s a $5 a month perk. You can get access to all of our special episodes including the Tropefest ones we were talking about earlier—
ELM: Contemporary AU! Imagine every time we say “modern,” we said “contemporary.”
FK: —“contemporary” instead. We sometimes do little Tiny Zines, you can get your name in the credits, so…look into that if you’ve got some money to spare and you’re willing to share with us.
ELM: And we will say again, if you are not interested in signing up for a monthly, sustained thing, we also have a PayPal you can donate in a one-off capacity to. So we’ll make sure to include that link in the show notes where you can find it on our website.
FK: Absolutely. And, if you don’t have or don’t want to give us money, you can still support us by spreading the news about the podcast and especially our full, complete transcripts! Which we love. And two, writing in! And giving us questions to use in episodes like this one, or to inspire episodes entirely. So you can do that by sending in the email to fansplaining at gmail.com; you can leave a comment in our ask box on fansplaining.tumblr.com, that’s open, anon is on; you can drop something in the form on our website, Fansplaining.com; or you can call us and leave a voicemail at 1-401-526-FANS, and we will play your voice on the air.
ELM: Business concluded?
FK: Business concluded.
ELM: All right, shall I read the next message?
FK: Yes, please!
ELM: So, this is from…a submission on our website, as just described, Fansplaining.com—said that with a lot of enthusiasm, DOT com [laughs]—and it’s from Mackerel Pizza. So they write:
“Hi! I’m a long time listener and I wanted to ask you about ship names. I recently started using Tumblr again after being inactive for years, and I was surprised to learn that the tagging system nowadays accommodates tags with a slash sign in them, like Louis/Lestat. [FK laughs] If my memory serves right, in the heydey of Tumblr any tag that used the / sign would become broken and unsearchable and we would have to find other ways to tag ships. I always attributed the shift to portmanteau ship names (like Loustat)—”
Don’t like that one, but I said it out loud…
“—that are now widely used in English-speaking fandom, to the fact that fandoms had to adapt to the tagging system on Tumblr. Not sure if that is actually true or not, but I think the portmanteau ship names are here to stay.
“I personally prefer the format character/character, but portmanteau names can be more easy to use in casual speech. Having lurked in Japanese fandom spaces a lot, I have also picked up the Japanese ship naming custom where you combine one or two first characters from each of the character’s names, creating another type of portmanteau. Sometimes these ship names carry over into English-speaking fandom, even if they don’t make much sense if you don’t know any Japanese (Erwin/Levi becomes Eruri, for example).”
[ELM hesitates, draws the name out, and both laugh] I tried, sorry.
“Sometimes these ship names can become quite conceptional. For example, I have seen the kanji for ‘white’ used to signify a character called Blanca in a ship tag. This type of conceptual ship naming reminds me of the English-speaking fandom’s idiosyncratic ship names where the character’s names may not be used at all, like Remus/Sirius becoming WolfStar.
“All of this got me thinking about the usefulness and purposes of different ship naming customs. I think some ship name styles are more useful for tagging; others can be used more as a sort of insider speech that only other fans who are in the know will get. Using ship names that don’t fully spell out the characters’ names can also probably be used to make sure that only the people who are actually looking for that specific ship will find the fanworks.
“Have you observed any shift over the years in how people are naming ships? Do you have any preferences when it comes to ship names?
“Thanks for the delightful podcast and keep up the good work!”
From Mackerel Pizza.
FK: Oh, Mackerel Pizza, a question after our own hearts, I think. I love talking and thinking about this. [laughs]
ELM: I feel like Mackerel Pizza already did a lot of the work on this question, like, that’s a pretty comprehensive letter right there.
FK: It is, it is extremely comprehensive. The one thing that I will say is that portmanteau ship names definitely existed before Tumblr. They got like, highly popularized with the Tumblr stuff, but they definitely existed before that. I think popslash was one of the sort of, central places that it got started in?
ELM: I mean…do you think that’s actually separate from, contemporarily, Brangelina? Right? Like…
FK: No, I think it’s, like, early 2000s, I definitely think that that is where it came from.
ELM: Do you think that it was because people saw “Brangelina” and whatever on the front page of People magazine and they were like, “I’ll do it too”?
FK: I don’t know for sure, but I kinda think so, actually.
ELM: [overlapping] That’s interesting. Yeah.
FK: [overlapping] I think that that’s the direction it came. But I don’t know that for a fact, I just, it’s just my memories, right, of how that sort of seeped into the culture.
ELM: That’s interesting.
FK: At that time, like, the ship name with the slashes in it had been around for many many years, and the sort of idiosyncratic names had sort of…like, were almost at their peak around that time, right, and they’ve sort of since been kind of supplanted primarily by smush names.
ELM: Idiosyncratic names, I feel like, had a real resurgence in the mid-2010s.
FK: Yeah, that may be true. That may be true.
ELM: Like with Star Wars, I think that Star Wars was really goin’ for it, when the new trilogy came out?
FK: [overlapping] Yeah, that’s right, you’re right.
ELM: [overlapping] Because like, their names were so short that you couldn’t really smush them easily.
FK: That’s true.
ELM: People were like, doin’ wacky things with...
FK: That’s very true.
ELM: Yeah. I mean, slash, obviously, is super old, predates the internet, right? That’s literally where the word “slash” comes from, is the slash.
FK: Yep, absolutely.
ELM: So there is that. So, we have talked about this before, years ago, and I’m glad we get the opportunity to talk about it again, because my feelings have evolved.
FK: Yeah?
ELM: “Evolved” makes it sound like I was in a bad place before and now I’m in a…whatever. I’m more open-minded now. I feel like when we started this podcast, and when we had early conversations about this, I was a very hardliner [FK laughs] when it came to, you know…I don’t know, Remus/Sirius, right—
FK: But now you’re into Cherik and you’ve had to accept it. [laughs]
ELM: Yeah. And so now to me it’s like a, a case-by-case basis. Because Loustat, absolutely not, I’m sorry, I hate that.
FK: [laughs] I think that’s really funny, that you hate that one. I don’t mind, I mean it’s fine.
ELM: I don’t…like…it doesn’t keep me up at night. [FK laughs] But I’m never gonna say it. Whereas I say “Cherik” all the time.
FK: Right.
ELM: It’s just, it just works. I don’t know why, but it just works for me. So I feel very idiosyncratic, right, I’m not consistent, but you know, that’s how I feel about—Cherik also is like, you know, where I like AUs. I don’t want any frickin’ Loustat AUs. [FK laughs] Anne Rice already took care of that for me.
FK: She did, she did already take care of that for you. Anne Rice wrote everything that you could ever possibly want in that category.
ELM: Nope, I could’ve taken more. Again, I would have liked her to live another 40 years, [FK wheeze-laughs] until she was 130, just puttin’ Lestat on the moon, puttin’ him in a centrifuge, we have so many ideas for her.
FK: [overlapping] Great. Yep. Yep. Well, I will say that I also have become more open to certain ship names, although, like you, there are some that I reject. I have even come to accept that I will live with Spirk. [ELM makes a derisive noise] I have come to accept it, however anything with Snape and somebody, like, it just all sounds horrible to me, so. I also feel that this is—
ELM: [overlapping] Herape!
FK: Yeah. Terrible. [ELM laughs] All of it’s terrible. All of it’s terrible. So, you know, yeah, it’s a case-by-case basis for me, that’s my feeling. But it’s also just like, I mean that’s, it’s purely an aesthetic thing as far as I’m concerned.
ELM: Yeah, one thing this does make me think of as something that I feel like we have seen evolve over time, and thinking about you in particular, you weren’t just a Reylo shipper. If you were into that, people would, you’d call yourself a Reylo. Right? It became your…like you were in the, like you were a Barb or something, you know, right? Or like…
FK: [overlapping] Like having, like being a Larry, before being a Larry meant that—
ELM: [overlapping] A Larry! Yeah yeah yeah yeah!
FK: [overlapping] But before, before being a Larry meant that you were like, truly obsessed in a like, conspiracy theory kind of way. [laughs] There was a time in the past… Anyway. Yeah.
ELM: [overlapping] Sure, OK, yeah. Whatever, whatever. Whatever. Right. You know, obviously there’s these, like, labels for a fan contain multitudes, you know?
FK: Right. But you don’t use ships like that for all of it, right you don’t say that someone’s “a Spirk.”
ELM: Go ahead, I’m gonna start doing it.
FK: Oh my God, don’t do it. [laughs]
ELM: Yeah! I’m not “a Cherik.” I ship it, and I write it, and I like it, you know?
FK: Right.
ELM: So like, I think that’s interesting, how ship names can become identities but only sometimes.
FK: Yeah, very curious.
ELM: So, I will say that the Tumblr thing too, it’s not just that Tumblr changed how tagging works, the people who work at Tumblr started smushing names themselves. They have these metrics every Monday called Fandometrics, where they talk about the top 20 items, and they have all these different categories, like one of them is ships, they have television shows, video games, they have one for K-pop now. And I remember when they started doing this, and I was like, “Guys, what are you doing?” Because they were just smushing names together, and it’s like, I actually don’t know if they were picking up on cues from the many smushers of the Tumblr user base, or they just started smushing themselves, and then it became a kinda self-perpetuating…
FK: [overlapping] I mean it could be both. In different contexts, yeah yeah yeah.
ELM: Yeah yeah yeah. But it’d be like, brand new stuff, and all of a sudden they’d be smushin’ those names together, and I was just like, “Oh, wow, I didn’t…OK.” [FK laughs] And in a way, that’s a little bit of a like…I mean there’s probably some folksonomic element of it just like on the AO3 how the tag wranglers take their cues from the user base, but also have to make kind of a decision to sort of try to standardize this stuff.
So I think that’s interesting, and it’s obviously an interesting shift in Tumblr, it’s one of the many ways I think Tumblr is very tuned into its user base, right? You know, you have the famous Pinboard talk that we talk about all the time, the thing he was talking about was they screwed up how tagging worked, right?
FK: Yeah. Exactly. Yep, for sure.
ELM: And I think it had to do with how people couldn’t put their ship names in, was one of the things.
FK: Yup.
ELM: I know the slash has always haunted people making [laughs] you know, social networks and other kinds of websites, where there are tags, right?
FK: Because it’s so useful for other purposes, [ELM laughs] and they want to use it for those purposes, not for fandom purposes. [laughs]
ELM: [overlapping] Yes. Right, right, exactly.
FK: [overlapping] Totally. Yeah. All right.
ELM: So, yeah, I think this is super interesting. I don’t know, it’s also a question of like, I reblog a fair amount of Interview With the Vampire fanart and gifs, and I don’t write a ship name on there at all, which is interesting to me. I also, I don’t really think of it as a ship. It’s kinda like…there. You know what I mean?
FK: Many people would say that about Kirk and Spock also.
ELM: I’m sorry, did uh, [FK laughs] did they fuck? Naked on screen? Did they? [FK laughs harder] I’m not saying it’s not real, but I think you’re picking a bad thing to compare it to. You’ve seen it.
FK: I’m…I’m picking a thing to make a joke to you, to compare it to, Elizabeth, [ELM laughs] I love that you were in such an earnest fandom place that you’re like, “It’s not the same! My ship is different!” [laughs]
ELM: I’m not saying they’re ships! No! I’m just saying, I just wanna make it clear to anyone who hasn’t seen Interview With the Vampire, that they do fuck on screen.
FK: Elizabeth, I think we’re done with this comment. [ELM laughs] Thank you, thank you very, very much for leading us to this place, Mackerel Pizza, I am now going to read the next thing in our inbox.
ELM: I can’t wait to make the show notes, I’m gonna find a gif of them fuckin’ on screen.
FK: [laughs] You keep saying this just with such glee, repeatedly. [ELM laughs] OK. Next, next conversation. Next letter. This one’s from Megan. It reads:
“Long-time listener, first-time commenter. While I do make fanart, I would not consider myself in the fanart community. I loved this episode—”
That is, our recent episode on fanart.
“—and the perspective from a veteran fanartist! Currently, my fannish interests lie in online multiplayer video games. I think many online video games have poor fanart guidelines (e.g., developer Riot Games is allowed to use your fanart commercially without your approval).
“However, I would like to highlight the way certain video game developers interact with fanart is quite out of the norm. Particularly, developer Mihoyo’s guidelines for “Genshin Impact” fanart outside of mainland China (I’ve linked below)—”
We’ll include that in the show notes.
“—give very specific guidelines for commercial fanart which I’ve never seen before in my time being an online multiplayer video game fan. This year, I’ve been trying to be more active in my favorite fannish communities instead of just lurking around.”
And Megan links us to these guidelines, which is really interesting.
ELM: OK. So yeah, on the “Genshin Impact” official guidelines, they say, “Travelers are free to create original secondary content from already published content of the Genshin Impact series, and produce physical merchandise to give away or sell. However, production of physical merchandise is subject to the following conditions.”
So to summarize, because it is not short, [FK laughs] and gets pretty legal: first of all, they’re like, “Go ahead, you can make stuff to give away, and you can make art,” it seems like that’s like, go for it, you know?
FK: Yeah. Yeah.
ELM: But, if you’re making physical merch—I just said merch, I’m so sorry—which Fox was talking a lot about, that’s where they can get really…
FK: Yeah yeah yeah.
ELM: Shirty at people—rights holders—so they’re saying if you’re making physical merchandise, um, it can’t violate any laws and regulations under any circumstances. It can’t infringe on the rights and interests of third parties, like you can’t use other IP within it, I’m assuming? Right?
FK: I guess.
ELM: You can’t trademark it, which feels fair.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And then they make it clear that if you’re making “light hobby merchandise,” and it’s just like, you know, for relatively small distribution, that’s totally fine.
FK: Right. I think this is really interesting, because you know, this does happen in game spaces, obviously, here’s two examples. It doesn’t really happen outside of that, right?
ELM: Mmmm.
FK: And there was a period of time when I was, you know, in my old job where I was really interested in this question of how to get a fairer shake for fanartists, or like, a better relationship between people who are making fanworks in general—fanart particularly but fanworks in general—and the owners of the IP, how you could create sort of lines in which people knew that they would be safe.
ELM: Yeah, without it being like, the official, go in our official space and like, in our weird nanny state, yeah yeah yeah.
FK: Right. Exactly, like how could you do this, and there were lots and lots of challenges to this idea, because…I mean, basically because people were afraid of putting anything in, like, legally didn’t wanna put anything in writing about what they would permit, in case something happened and they later wanted to change their mind.
ELM: Hmmm.
FK: Because as long as you don’t say anything, you can just leave stuff alone, and then decide, right? But if you actually like, say to people, “You’re allowed to do X,” and then you later regret that decision, you can’t go back on it. So none of these legal departments are like, they’re like, “What’s the benefit to us, in telling people they’re allowed to make things?”
ELM: Yeah.
FK: So I find it really interesting that video game developers like, talk about this as being—that they actually try this. Whatever the terms are, that they’ve tried it at all is interesting.
ELM: Yeah. I wonder what the difference is there, I mean I feel like you have different sorts of people…maybe not, actually, it’s not that different, I was gonna be like, “You have different sorts of people working at video games than at major movie studios,” but…
FK: You do.
ELM: You think they are different?
FK: Yes, I do.
ELM: Oh, tell me more!
FK: God, just my interactions with people in video game studios, even the very corporate ones, are very very different.
ELM: They’re just more cool? You’re saying more chill, more like…
FK: I wouldn’t say cool, but I would say more like…nerdy.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: And more likely to have actually interacted with fanart and engaged with it in a personal way.
ELM: Interesting.
FK: Video game studios also often tend to—and this is, this is also the source of some of the bad things at video game studios, right? Like, there’s often cults of personality going on, there’s like, you know, the idea that we’re all just making this thing that we love, and they’re all spending like 300 hours…
ELM: Yeah yeah yeah.
FK: You know, they’re spending crunch time and jillions of hours, and like, all of this stuff, and so there’s a much more scrappy attitude towards things. And so yeah, I’m not surprised that you would see video game studios, if they’re independent of a bigger conglomerate, making some of these choices. Or even if they’re within a bigger conglomerate, but they’re still empowered to make those choices for their own products, in a way that a movie studio is never going to do, because they are corporate. And them being corporate actually, like, also people who make movies are unionized, [laughs] you know?
ELM: Yeah. Yeah.
FK: I’m not saying that it’s a perfect, I’m not saying it’s a perfect industry, it’s not, but it’s way better than, on some axes, than video games are, you know? And that’s partially because of it being more corporatized.
ELM: It’s interesting, I’m not a lawyer, as you know. As you know, Flourish, I’m not a lawyer.
FK: [laughs] But you play one on TV.
ELM: I wish. But… [laughs] I don’t actually, that’s not a dream of mine. If I had to choose between being a TV lawyer and a real lawyer, I would like to be a real lawyer. [FK laughs] I think it would probably pay better. We just, I took Flourish to see The Devil’s Advocate.
FK: Ohh…
ELM: A movie I love. [laughs]
FK: Ohh. I also love it. At the end of the movie, I…
ELM: I’m so glad you enjoyed it, what a movie.
FK: [overlapping] I turned to you and I was like, “That was even more than you promised, I didn’t believe it could be as much as you promised, but it was actually even more.” [ELM laughs] Actually I think what I did was I turned to you and I said “That is a movie that I will buy on DVD.” The highest compliment.
ELM: [laughs] You can probably find it on DVD!
FK: I’m looking forward to it. Anyway, you were about to say?
ELM: [overlapping, still laughing] You know like at, like Target, on one of those racks, you know, by the register? Do they still have those? I don’t know.
FK: [overlapping] Oh yeah, it’s a perfect, it’s a perfect random Target rack find. Ideal.
ELM: If either of us spot it, we gotta buy two copies, and we’ll give one to the other, even though I don’t know how to hook up my DVD player anymore. Anyway. Anyway. I’m not a lawyer; I’m not Al Pacino in The Devil’s Advocate, sadly, that is my actual goal. But I don’t, like…is there a legal way to say, “Generally it’s fine, we reserve the right to say it’s not”?
FK: I don’t know, I mean you can look at the way Creative Commons licenses work, and there may be…you could look to that for some ways that people have like, restricted people’s right—you know, basically given licenses, effectively, to everyone to use their works in certain ways. So, I don’t know.
ELM: Yeah, but that’s different than like…I think the issue that we’re describing here of you saying they don’t wanna say yes, because then what if they change their mind, it’s like the vast majority of stuff that fans are making for other fans, for small amounts of money relative compared to their actual revenues at these studios, right, is like…not stuff they’re ever gonna make. You know? When you think about the really fan-made merchandise…
FK: Yeah, I mean I think that the problems that I encountered, one of the things that I sort of was trying to talk people into, was the idea of saying well what if you created something that was sort of like a Creative Commons license, that said, for instance, you’re allowed—like, fans, go ahead and make, I don’t know, this category of merchandise. Right? Like, go ahead and make…
ELM: Stickers. Pins. Things like—yeah. Yeah.
FK: [overlapping] Stickers, we’re never gonna make stickers, you know? Go for it. And again, the problem was always, “Well what if we do wanna make pins in the end?”
ELM: Oh my God. They’re never gonna make pins!
FK: This was my point. [ELM laughs] This is why we get back to this corporate issue of people not wanting to give away anything, right?
ELM: No, I get it.
FK: Because as it stands, they’re allowed to let everybody make pins until the moment they decide not to, whereas if they offer a license that says you’re allowed to make pins, they can’t revoke it retroactively, and then wipe everybody off the market.
ELM: Right. I feel like every lawyer I know in my real life right now is sending me a telepathic message being like, “Lawyers are fundamentally conservative on these matters,” [both laugh] You know what I mean? “Why would they ever open the door?” It’s always about the most measured, cautious option in these things. So yes, I understand. But.
FK: Yeah, for sure.
ELM: They’re sending me so many messages right now, it’s pretty cool.
FK: They are. OK. OK.
ELM: [laughing, overlapping] All the telepathic lawyers I know.
FK: Onward. We have, we have one more message to read, should we go for it?
ELM: All right, our final message. From Cee. C-e-e.
“Hello Fansplaining!! Love your show, thanks for doing what you do, you always have really thoughtful answers!”
Thanks!
“I’m writing about a conundrum I saw on Tumblr a few weeks back. I reblogged a gifset of a show and realized that at the bottom of the gifset, someone who was not the original poster had added a promo and a link for their OWN fic.”
That’s “OWN” in all capital letters, but that’s also how I would’ve read that.
FK: Their OWN fic!
ELM: OK, uh…
“I found this pretty rude! While meta being added to gifsets is common, the fic didn’t engage with the gifset in the same way meta would have or start a dialogue or discussion (the only thing they had in common was being set in the same episode). It felt like the author was trying to capitalize on the popularity of a gifset just to boost their own work, without thinking about the original creator at all. I think gifset creators are really devalued in fandom despite the huge amount of work they do. You’d never post your fic on someone else’s fanfic promo post, so why is it OK on a gifset?
“On the other hand, maybe I’m being too sensitive and this is the way some people on tumblr start to build fandoms and communities! Visual mediums get a lot more traction and fanfics tend to get none, so I can see this being a good way to link together AO3 fic and fandom on Tumblr, which don’t really connect as fandom sites even though they’re both vitally important to the fandom ecosystem, as it were. Maybe this is a step in the right direction??”
Two question marks.
“I’m curious as to what you guys think about this. Is it rude to promote your own work and/or is this just natural engagement when you have an online community?
“Thanks again!”
From Cee.
FK: All right, this is one that I’m gonna have to like, throw over to you, because while I have some instinctual feelings, I’m not actually on Tumblr these days, so I don’t know what the natural, like, I don’t know what the current practice is.
ELM: I mean, all right. I don’t think…you have been on Tumblr, I don’t think norms have dramatically changed.
FK: [laughs] OK, OK.
ELM: Whatever you’re thinking right now is correct. But… [FK laughs] What I would say is, it’s wild to me that someone would just stick—not, OK, so here’s what, here’s what I’ve seen in my fandom, which is older, there are still posts kicking around—and people do this a lot less than they did ten years ago, even, you know, six, seven years ago—where someone would post some gifs of like, I don’t know, James McAvoy, not from X-Men, but doing something else. And then people would be like, “Cherik it,” to go back to the portmanteau ship name. They’d say “Cherik it” or “Charles it” or whatever, right, and then someone would write a ficlet in the reblog.
FK: Right.
ELM: And that to me felt like in the spirit of the kinkmeme, or that kind of…
FK: Yeah yeah yeah.
ELM: You know, prompting culture, like, I’m gonna start here, and then I’m gonna add value to it, I’m gonna use this as inspiration, I’m still gonna put it in a reblog to the post, I’m not gonna post something totally new.
FK: Right.
ELM: I’m just kinda building on it. Right? And you obviously see this in Tumblr culture at large, like with not-fandom stuff, people making a post and then someone draws fanart of it, right, like some post that’s not about fandom, you know, and then they’re like, “I had to do it,” or like, it’ll be a picture of a cat and someone’ll be like, “I had to draw a picture of this cat,” [FK laughs] that kind of thing, you see that all the time.
FK: Yeah, totally.
ELM: But it feels like you’re in conversation with them, which is really different than rolling up on someone’s post and slapping on a distantly-related item that really feels like, is like, “Look at me! Look at me!”
FK: Good. Agreed. Yeah. My feeling— [ELM laughs] OK, I’m glad to know that Tumblr has not changed that much, because my feeling about this was like, the only circumstance in which I could imagine anything remotely approaching this being OK would be if you were like, “This gif inspired me to write this fic.” You know? [laughs]
ELM: [overlapping] Yes, yes, exactly.
FK: [overlapping] Which is not what’s happening in this, it’s just a random thing. And like, you know, I can get—I do understand the impulse to put gifs…like, to promo your fic and have gifs that represent things that were in the fic on it. But I feel like this is not the way. This is not the way. [laughs]
ELM: Well, no, and you know, obviously there’s this whole issue of gif makers, I think, are getting more and more vocal now than they have ever been about how they, they’re like, “Don’t steal my gifs, don’t steal my gifs.”
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And I think that’s really hard, you know? And yeah, we include gifs in the show notes, and we don’t credit back to, a lot of them come from Tumblr, we’re just finding them by Google search—
FK: Yup.
ELM: And so you’re not even going to their Tumblr, you’re just yanking them from there. And like, yeah, we do that too. Obviously bazillions of people do that, right? And I have started to notice, particularly not just people who are like, giffing stuff, but people who are making really carefully chosen gifsets and creating a set.
FK: Right.
ELM: Like the fanwork itself, you know, saying they just don’t want their stuff yanked out of context. Because—
FK: It was part of the set that they made.
ELM: Yeah. I mean, and maybe this is like, saying it out loud, maybe we should be crediting where we got stuff from, but then, I don’t know.
FK: Yeah, I don’t know, I mean I think that one’s particularly hard because gifs do get circulated so much, so sometimes you don’t even know whether that is where we got—you know what I mean?
ELM: Yeah yeah yeah.
FK: Sometimes the gif is already going around. In fact a lot of times, because a lot of the gifs that we’re using are for like, famous moments, right, it’s not…
ELM: Yes. Yeah.
FK: We’re not using like, highly edited gifs, or you know, gifs that are like, uh, a tiny little detail. Usually, you know what I mean?
ELM: Yeah yeah yeah.
FK: Like the moody charactery thing, right? So I think it’s complicated, and I, I don’t know, I have a lot of feelings about this, I used to commission gifmakers from within fandoms to make gifs for me when I was working on shows, because that seemed like it was the right thing to do, because even though I could get somebody to make them for me in-house, but it felt like it was a nice thing. Was that nice? I don’t know.
ELM: Well, they’re getting better now, but like, ten years ago the people making official gifs for people were…
FK: Oh, they were terrible, yes, that’s correct.
ELM: Bad at it. [laughs]
FK: That’s why. I could, I could, that’s honestly the real reason why.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: It was like I could babysit somebody, [laughs] and sit over them until they made the gif I wanted, or I could just pay somebody in fandom to do it and they would do it right the first time. I will say that I think that Cee is right, that there is, this is an attempt to get attention to AO3 fic within Tumblr by putting some kind of an image on it. And I think that people are doing it the wrong way, because it is disrespectful, but I also appreciate the problem of like, then what do you do?
ELM: I mean, but this isn’t putting an image on it, we’re not talking about a situation where someone took the gifs from the set and made a new post and used the gifs…
FK: That’s true, you’re right, that’s fair, that’s fair.
ELM: [laughs] They’re literally just getting in someone’s…you know, someone’s replies or whatever and being like, “Look at this!” and that feels spammy, honestly.
FK: Right, yeah.
ELM: You know, like “Click this link here! Do you want singles in your area?” You know? Like, I don’t know.
FK: [laughs] Singles! [ELM laughs] Singles in your area.
ELM: It also just feels like, I, I feel like this sort of promo culture feels very antithetical to that kind of conversational culture I’m describing, right?
FK: Agreed, agreed.
ELM: “Oh, I saw your gifset and I was so inspired by your choices that I’m gonna do it,” or it’s of the actor, like James McAvoy, and I’m gonna imagine this is like an AU where he’s doing these things, and like, some of my favorite fic actually started in posts like that. Where someone had an idea, they pulled together clips from other movies of the actors, put them together, said “X AU, here it is!” and someone was like, “Oh. And now I see it, and now I’m gonna write it.” You know?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And that’s awesome, and that sort of conversational element, I feel, doesn’t, it clashes with the sort of like, the promo culture that we see really heavily I think coming from other social media sites and these, you know, places where you do the numbers and all of that. Right? So…
FK: Yeah, I completely agree, and it’s funny because the other thing I was thinking about is, you know, you’d never post your fic on someone else’s fanfic promo post, and that’s true, you wouldn’t. I could imagine saying, “Hey, I read this fic and it was so incredible, and if you also loved this fic that this person was promo-ing, I’ve written another fic that’s kind of like it!”
ELM: Yeah.
FK: And that would be much less…like it might be a little bit ehh, but it would be much less annoying to me, because it would be like, OK, no, I really read that fic, I loved that fic, you would have to genuinely convince me that you had read it and liked it. [laughs] You know what I mean?
ELM: Yeah.
FK: And that the two things were related to each other. And if that’s true, then that’s actually OK. Right? I could imagine finding a thread of fics that were like, you know, all a particular kind of AU, or had a particular vibe or whatever, with people promo-ing their own, and being happy to find that, because they were in real conversation and not just being like, spam spam spam.
ELM: Sure. Yeah yeah, so, it reminds me…so “The Rec Center,” we have a policy, and it’s written, it’s written very clearly on the form that you have to look at to send in your story, [FK laughs] though people still are like, “What?” and it’s like, “Nope, we wrote it down here for you,” of no self-recs.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Because I don’t actually think, I don’t even think you can self-rec, you know? You can self-promote, but like, we’ve had some people try to rec their own stuff, and they’ve tried to describe it in the terms of a rec, and it’s like, “Nope. Sorry.”
FK: Their own fic? Uh uh.
ELM: You know, I try not to be mean about it when it happens, and a lot of it, it’s just people sending in stuff, so we won’t reply.
FK: Right.
ELM: When we have a, an incomplete rec sent in, we don’t reply to that either obviously.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: So if there’s…I’ve got a little tab in my spreadsheet of like, troubled, [both laugh] troubled recs that I don’t know what to do with. But what I do say in the copy on that form is, if you want to self-promote, do a rec list, do an explainer, come in there and, you know, come into the newsletter, write something, create something, and then you can link to your own work. And then ideally that’ll mean that people who are like, “Oh, this person has really good insights,” or like, “Oh, yeah, I love this show too and they have the same read on it,” or like “I love these fics,” and then they’ll click on your work and they’ll check it out.
FK: Right.
ELM: And I feel like that’s similar to the sort of like, it feels like a really, like a good-faith conversation.
FK: Right.
ELM: And I don’t wanna be too like, “Oh, it’s cringe to self-promote” or whatever, I don’t think that’s true at all. But if it feels like you’re just waiting for someone to stop talking before you start shouting about your own thing…
FK: Yeah, yeah. Yeah.
ELM: Which is I think what that could feel like in a post, if you were like, “You like this? Look at me look at me look at me!” As opposed to…
FK: [overlapping] Right, because nobody’s saying it’s cringe to self-promote on your own Tumblr, like, making a promo post, go for it, absolutely, making multiple promo posts, absolutely! That is great. It’s just, yeah, it’s the shouting over people that’s the problem.
ELM: Yeah, and it doesn’t feel like you’re shouting with them, [FK laughs] it feels like you’re like, “No! Give me the spotlight!” So…Cee, we agree with you, this is not cool. This behavior that you witnessed.
FK: Now that we, this is, now that we have declared our judgment upon this, I think that was the last of our letters! [ELM laughs] So uh, I hope that, I mean we’ll hear about it if people disagree with our fandom judgment.
ELM: I would love if people could reblog our post and put links to their fic and be like, “Look at me!” [laughs]
FK: I am imagining a little bit like, you know, having a little segment which is sort of like, you know, like John Hodgman’s “The Ethicist?” [ELM laughs] Or, it’s not “The Ethicist,” “Judge John Hodgman.” I’m thinking of two different things and mixing up—”Judge John Hodgman.” They’re very different judgy things.
ELM: [overlapping] Yeah. Those are two different judgy things. [both laugh]
FK: But thinking about “Judge John Hodgman,” right, I’m imagining a fandom Judge John Hodgman being like, “No.” [laughs]
ELM: [laughs] Is that the, is that the role that you would like?
FK: I don’t think I would be very good at it, because I’m not funny enough, but I want somebody to do it.
ELM: [laughs] All right…
FK: Maybe you!
ELM: That’s a— [laughs]
FK: Maybe that could be a new bit in “The Rec Center.” Judge…
ELM: [overlapping] Aw, you think I’m, you think I’m funny enough to be…[laughs] to be the Judge John—
FK: [overlapping, laughing] Judge, yeah, you could be funny-mean, in a perfect way.
ELM: Thank you so much, I really appreciate that. That’s so nice. [FK laughs] I would wanna be called, though, I would be called Fandom Judge John Hodgman.
FK: I think that we have just brainstormed something, people, send Elizabeth these things, because I wanna see it happen.
ELM: Look, we’re firing on all cylinders right now, we’re really, pitch me more ideas, pitch me more ideas.
FK: [overlapping, laughing] All right, no. Goodnight, Elizabeth, this is it. [both laugh]
ELM: OK, bye Flourish!
FK: Byyyye.
[Outro music]