Episode 205: Fanfluencers
In Episode 205, “Fanfluencers,” Flourish and Elizabeth use a listener voicemail on fan screenings for Red, White & Royal Blue to dive into a broader conversation about influencers, fandom, and the Hollywood strikes. Marketers today know more about fans than they ever have before, and more types of properties are both targeting and featuring fans in their promotional campaigns. How does that sit within the broader entertainment ecosystem—and what does it mean for fan communities?
Show Notes
[00:00:00] As always, our intro music is “Awel” by stefsax, used under a CC BY 3.0 license.
[00:01:29] Bodge (pronounced like “dodge”!) was one of our “Disability and Fandom” guests, and she sent in reflections for our anniversary episode as well. You can find her on Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, and the AO3.
[00:02:47] The post on Crabs Day and accessibility on Tumblr.
[00:07:26]
[00:09:41] “Fake Relationships” was, in fact, our ninth “Tropefest” special episode.
[00:11:28] Our interstitial music throughout is “Vaping in L.A.” by Lee Rosevere, also used under a CC BY 3.0 license.
[00:16:43] For example, the two-day Twilight Forever Fan Experience, held in honor of the box-set release of all five films in 2013, included a marathon screening, giveaways, trivia, a tour of costumes and props, and more.
[00:27:04] Technically it was $28,000 for an Only Murders in the Building TikTok: “Hollywood Strike Leaves Influencers Sidelined and Confused.”
[00:28:28]
[00:31:20] On MovieTok vs. film criticism.
[00:39:35] If you’re curious about the RWRB fan screening and how it was presented, here’s some footage.
[00:44:26]
![Animated gif of Jacob Anderson and Sam Reid with the caption: [Jacob] I had a neck hickey, so.... [Sam] Yeah. Yeah.](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/57d81f7f9f74567839f5633b/44867b09-06d1-482c-8086-197299a7fd8b/565f8282239646ac6c6bd8a0766df2c1fbf741e2.gif)
[00:56:39]
Transcript
[Intro music]
Flourish Klink: Hi, Elizabeth.
Elizabeth Minkel: Hi, Flourish.
FK: And welcome to Fansplaining! The podcast by, for, and about fandom!
ELM: This is Episode #205, [crisply enunciating] “Fanfluencers.”
FK: [after a pause, laughs] You know, I did agree to this title, but I kinda can’t believe it, because it’s…I mean, “Fanfluencers?”
ELM: I proposed it in writing, on Slack, and I didn’t anticipate what it would be like to say it out loud. [FK laughs] Even to this moment, I hadn’t said the word out loud prior to one second ago, and that was a surprise to me. [FK laughs] To do it that way. Anyway, we’re gonna, we’re going to listen to a voicemail we got recently, talking about kinda the murky lines between fans, and influencers, and…promo, and strike stuff, and I feel like that’s enough of a teaser.
FK: But before we do that, we have a couple of little pieces of business to finish. So first, can I read a little update we got?
ELM: Yes please.
FK: OK. This is from Bodge. If you recall, Bodge is the person we quoted in our last episode, and who’s been on for the disability episode, really struggling with Tumblr’s usability.
ELM: And, up front, we should say we both said Bodge [with a long o] last time, Bodge [with a short o] has politely corrected us, [FK laughs] and this is the danger of reviewing your old transcripts and not your old audio, because I’m fairly certain we got Bodge right the first time.
FK: [overlapping, laughing] Yep, good job to us…
ELM: And that information left our heads. So apologies to Bodge.
FK: Yeah, that’s, that’s all very correct. Saying people’s names wrong is just such a [laughs] commonplace thing for me that I was just skatin’ right over it…
ELM: [overlapping] I, this is not, look, it’s not my normal, you know, it’s not my baseline, so I’m, yeah.
FK: It’s not your normal, yeah, understood. OK. All right. Bodge says:
“Thought I should give you an update on the Tumblr situation. I can now scroll past the ‘pay us’ screen using kiwi, but I still can't post using it. So I am sending this to you on the app (looking only at my thumbs while typing 🤣) It has been 18 months since I first asked (and only got what I got fixed, fixed because of zingring who hopped onto the don't buy crabs post), the fact that I have to send asks to the COO of Tumblr to even get a response is... something.”
And Bodge linked us to the anti-crab post, and we’ll put that in the show notes.
ELM: Right. So, I appreciated this update, and the crabs links so I could understand what was going on there. [FK laughs] But yeah, it’s interesting. I mean, I do think that Tumblr…has a relatively, a much smaller staff than they used to at this point, but yeah, absolutely, I mean it shouldn’t, you shouldn’t have to catch the ear of one of the executives of a website to have them actually address an accessibility issue, you know? That should be every engineer and designer should be involved in that.
FK: Yeah, and there should be a clear way to actually communicate accessibility issues, right? [laughs]
ELM: Right, like it does seem to be, this is what Tumblr’s doing right now, it’s like, “Hey, we’re here, we wanna hear from you!” And so Tumblr just—I don’t know if you’ve logged on, but Tumblr just redesigned the entire dashboard to mimic Twitter—sorry, X—and, um…and it seems to be universally despised. [laughs] And it’s a little bit like—and they literally, they explicitly said it was to make new users feel more welcome, which is, I think, fairly insulting. [laughs] To all the like…
FK: Well, I didn’t—I’ll be fair, I didn’t like the previous iteration of the Tumblr situation, because I liked the one before that, because, you know, not that I’ve used Tumblr very much…so, all I’m saying is, this is a missive from another world for me.
ELM: [laughs] I’m just saying, they’re over here like—
FK: [overlapping] It seems like a bad world.
ELM: [overlapping] They’re like, “Let us know, maybe we’ll change it back,” and it’s like…yeah, sure, man. Change it back. Make it more accessible, and don’t try to appeal to this mythical Twitter exile.
FK: Right.
ELM: Cool website. They’re all bad.
FK: All websites are cool.
ELM: They’re all bad right now.
FK: [laughs] Yeah.
ELM: That’s fine. So Bodge, thank you very much, and please keep us updated. It’s, I think it’s helpful for people to understand. Yeah, like we were saying last time, there’s a million different accessibility things, and a lot of it I don’t know about, you know? You don’t know about either, right?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And it’s helpful to hear people’s specific issues with stuff, and specific ways that fandom spaces just aren’t accessible to them. I think it’s, it’s important to keep hearing about that stuff.
FK: Yeah, very much. And I mean, It’s also the kind of thing that, you know, yeah. Obviously, if you’re on Tumblr all the time, and that’s your primary way of communicating with people, and some people can’t use it, you never hear about the problems, right? [laughs]
ELM: Yeah, totally.
FK: I think it’s good to have…yeah, to just hear about that, and if people have problems with other sites as well, I mean, I’m always interested in finding out about this.
ELM: Not, not X. I don’t wanna hear about its problems, because I don’t…
FK: No no no, not that one. No no no. I’m thinking about… [laughs]
ELM: Yeah. No. I mean like, I gotta say, too, I was thinking about this this week, because there have been some institutions, and…not, “brands” is overstating it, but you know, cultural institutions, I saw some publishers and stuff, announcing this past week, “OK, we’re done with this place,” regarding Twitter.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: So I just wanted to say, like…here, in this, you know, on the record, on the podcast, there may be a moment when I think we should do this with Twitter, too.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Right now, I feel like…there’s enough engagement on the posts that I do suspect this is the only way some of our listeners are really hearing from us?
FK: Right.
ELM: But…you know, like…and I’m hesitant to say “Move all that over to Bluesky” because it’s still not open to everyone.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: But I just wanted to say that it’s something that I’m cognizant of, because I am still on that platform, and I know what…like, I’m not, I think we toss around “cesspool” and “hellsite” or whatever really casually, but literal—not literal—but it’s like, [FK laughs] real, real cesspool. You know? Real metaphorical cesspool going on there. And I absolutely understand why institutions and organizations are being like, “Absolutely we can’t do this anymore.”
FK: Totally.
ELM: So, I guess we’ll give people warning, but I’m not sure what that moment would be. But I do feel like that moment could come before the site literally collapses into the sea.
FK: [laughs] OK. Great. I think that we could use cheering up after thinking about that, so uh, we have another really really really cute voicemail, should we listen to it?
ELM: Uh, yeah, let’s listen to it.
Voicemail: Hi Flourish and Elizabeth, this is also an Elizabeth. I encountered the podcast only recently, but immediately subscribed and binged all of it, and love you both very much. And I just wanted to let you know that I was listening to an episode in the car with my 71-year-old father-in-law, who has now developed an interest in fanfiction and is happily sharing his headcanons about the Jack Aubrey Master and Commander books with me. Thank you very much for the work you do! Take care.
FK: Aaaahhhh!!! [ELM laughs] Canonical dad books. Which I also love, and there’s some great fanfiction for those books. And I’m just, I, I’m overwhelmed.
ELM: I love this. You know, I’ve had this experience recently, I was talking to a friend of a friend, you know, and telling him a little bit about the fanfiction world, and it was clear that, like, he connected to elements of it. But he had never realized—he was like, “This is something people do?” I’m not saying he was about to go look up fic, but you know, the idea that people like, have crushes on fictional characters, or you know, that kinda thing, right? It was just not something that he had ever—and I could see the like, “Oh! Are there other people?” You know? [FK laughs] And that is so charming to me. And I love this voicemail so much, in a similar way.
FK: [laughs] Yeah. Absolutely. I just, I mean, I can’t. I can’t. [both laugh]
ELM: All right, everyone—
FK: [overlapping] Thank you so much, dear listener, for sharing this with us.
ELM: [overlapping] All right, everyone put your older relatives in the car with you, and just hit play and see what happens. We wanna hear all about it.
FK: Oh man, do we ever. [both laugh]
ELM: Delightful. So…we’re gonna take a break, but before we do that, why don’t we talk about Patreon now? Let’s mix it up!
FK: Sure thing! We support this podcast—we make this podcast—with the help of listeners—and readers—like you. And you can support us.
ELM: [laughing, overlapping] I said “Patreon” and it’s like, it’s like a flipped switch in your brain, [FK laughs] and you instantly turn into this weird William Shatner robot that you do, and it’s like… [in a Shatner voice] “Patreon. Dot com. Slash Fansplaining.”
FK: People love it, hush, they love it. [ELM laughs] They love it.
ELM: All right…
FK: Anyway. Patreon.com is the way that you can support us, there’s lots of levels, you can pledge to support us anywhere from $1 a month to $10 jillion a month—
ELM: Mmm hmmm, mmm hmmm.
FK: And you get rewards for the different levels, including things like cute enamel pins, getting your name in the credits, listening to many, many, many, many special episodes, and I think we’re gonna do a new one soon, right?
ELM: Yes, it’s going to be the newest installment in our “Tropefest” series…and we’ll say no more right now, [FK laughs] but that series has been pretty popular among special episodes, we’ve kinda deconstructed a bunch of different tropes from fanfiction specifically, like we did recently fake relationships, trapped together, enemies to lovers, found family, canon-divergent AU, all sorts of stuff. And so, I think there’s maybe eight or nine of those now, I can’t remember exactly? But a good…ly number.
FK: [laughs] A goodly number.
ELM: Mmm hmmm!
FK: All right. And, if you don’t have money or don’t want to support us on Patreon, you can help us out by sharing the news about the podcast, telling your friends, telling your 71-year-old father-in-law, telling people especially about the fact that we have transcripts of every episode, that come out just at the same time as the regular episodes do, because you know, not everyone wants to listen to a podcast.
ELM: [laughs] That’s true. Um…you can also send us your thoughts, your voicemails like this, we love—this is gonna be a two-voicemail episode, so it’s pretty exciting—and we have a bunch more voicemails in the queue that we’re just, you know, waiting for the right moment to use. I don’t know why that made it sound so weird and strategic.
You can call us at 1-401-526-FANS; you could also record your own voice, we ask that you keep it under three minutes, and send us an MP3 or a WAV or something like that. You can write us at fansplaining at gmail.com; you can leave a message at Fansplaining.com in our submissions, or in our Tumblr ask box, and as we said, we are still on Twitter; we are also on Tumblr, Bluesky, and Instagram, and of those, Tumblr is probably the most active space. But you know, maybe that will change.
FK: All right. Well. Having talked about that, should we take a quick break, and then get into the main part of the episode?
ELM: Let’s do it!
[Interstitial music]
FK: All right, we’re back! Shall we just go right ahead and…listen to our voicemail?
ELM: Yeah, let’s do it. So this voicemail came in only a few days ago, we’re recording this…on a weekend in late August, just to give a little context. We wanted to do it now because it’s fairly timely. So let’s play it.
FK: Cool.
Voicemail: Hi Fansplaining, I am calling in because, first of all I love the pod, I’ve been following you guys for years, but I have been thinking a lot about the actors strike right now, and how it’s impacting the way that a lot of films and television series are doing press, and the example that I keep coming back to—primarily because I am a really big fan of this book and the movie that just came out—is the Red, White & Royal Blue movie promo.
What I thought was really interesting was, in lieu of being able to do an actual premiere for the cast, they did these like, fan premieres, where they invited a lot of fans, and I think kind of…I don’t know if you could even really call them Big Name Fans, because the fandom is pretty niche, but they invited people who had like, Red, White & Royal Blue-related fan accounts to come to an advanced screening. And they really treated them like celebrities kind of, in that, you know, there was a red carpet that they walked, they did kind of press photos, there were swag bags, all of that. And I know that that kind of stuff had already been happening, was pretty widely adopted in terms of early screenings, but I feel like the way they ended up then using that material to promote the film was really interesting because I feel like it was pretty clear that had there been an actual premiere, that would not have been the center of the conversation, like the center of the promotional material for this movie.
And I feel like it’s kind of…like, I actually saw it as something really positive, in that, again, I think you always wanna be careful when it comes to toeing the line between listening to fans, being responsive to fans, centering the fans, and doing purely fanservice? But I just think it’s sort of an interesting move in this direction that a lot of media, like entertainment media, is already going, where fan input is more and more valuable, and I think kind of what people are interested in seeing and sort of, like, the feedback that people give is being incorporated a lot more.
So anyways, I just thought of this and I was curious if you guys have any thoughts about it. So yeah! That’s it. All right, thank you, I hope you have a good day. Bye!
ELM: All right. Thank you very much, voicemail-leaver. I don’t think they said their name. So. Voicemailer.
FK: [laughs] So you’re gonna be Voicemailer.
ELM: Yeah. Such an interesting voicemail. Very timely, very topical, I think very interesting to talk about right now while the strikes are going on, but also something that, as they pointed out, has been happening for a while, and so the recontextualization of this within the strikes is interesting. But I also think the broader trend is interesting.
FK: Definitely, definitely. And I feel like [laughing] I feel like I should say this off the top, which is that I actually have worked on a bunch of Amazon original things, and I did do some research on Red, White & Royal Blue like, several years back, for Amazon. I had nothing to do with these fan—this particular promo thing, but I just wanted to throw that out there, because it’s interesting to me to see the way that this has all evolved, right? From, you know, from the kind of conversations people maybe had about it before the strike, and then seeing what impacts the strike is really having, I think that they really put their finger on it.
ELM: Right. OK, so let’s take a little historical context pre-strike, here. Definitely don’t think this kinda thing is new. I think the kinds of fans that would be approached and the kinds of…properties that Hollywood realizes have fans, maybe has evolved. If you think about like—so, I didn’t realize until we were, I was doing the show notes for one of our recent episodes, it might’ve been the Dylan Marron Jar Jar episode, but it might’ve been the Comic-Con one, that Star Wars Celebration was begun by Lucasfilm for fans, as part of the press lead up for The Phantom Menace. Right?
FK: Yeah, I didn’t—I mean I knew that it had been created for fans at some point, but I didn’t realize it was that old.
ELM: And it was specifically promotional for that, right?
FK: Right.
ELM: It wasn’t just like…“Oh, we love you and celebrate you,” it was like “Get hyped! We’re back! [FK laughs] We’re makin’ movies you’re gonna love them, there’s gonna be this guy you love, Jar Jar Binks! You’re gonna change your whole opinion of this franchise!” [laughs]
FK: [overlapping] Yeah, yeah. And that is the classic place that people have thought about fans as existing, you know? In the sci-fi/fantasy space. But I will say that I think that there has been more engagement with fans in properties that are often still sci-fi/fantasy, but “female-coded,” like…Twilight—
ELM: Sure.
FK: The Twilight series did a huge amount of fan interaction and fan engagement, and fans who were not “that big,” right? [laughs] They really, they really dug deep. And I think that was around the time, the Twilight books coming out and then into the Twilight movies, that people began really considering the idea that oh, maybe it’s not just the stereotypical Trekker who, in the mind of a Hollywood executive, is male? [laughs] And white?
ELM: Right. Right.
FK: Now you can be a white woman, too! Haha! [ELM laughs] But you know what I’m saying.
ELM: Do you not think that Harry Potter had a bit of this too, though? And that was earlier even.
FK: Yeah, but I think that with Harry Potter there was still a lot of…Harry Potter didn’t actually do all that…all that much that was really fan-focused. I think that was early enough that they were struggling to figure out how to do this, because I think that they didn’t realize that it was going to be—you know? [laughs]
ELM: Yeah.
FK: They were like, “Oh wait, but these aren’t Trekkers, so wait, should we be doing this?”
ELM: I do think that they brought in a version of fans, I remember, early on in that fandom. But they were, like, children, and they were readers. You know?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: So it’s just like, a different perception of a fan, as opposed to like, maybe teenagers or adults who were like—you know, stuff that you were involved in, that’s a different understanding of fans—
FK: Right.
ELM: —than oh, ten-year-olds are gonna wanna come to this castle and ask [laughs] basic-ass questions about these books of J. K. Rowling, which they did! But that’s also a different demographic.
FK: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And the thing is, they did I think come around over time, to have a more holistic understanding of the people who were interested in that property, right?
ELM: Right.
FK: But yeah, but it was complicated at first. And there was also just a lot more desire, I think, to keep a real lockdown around it, you know?
ELM: Yeah.
FK: To really control the narrative, in a way that the people working…like, I know the person who architected the Twilight fan interactions, and they understood that they were not gonna be able to be in control of this, right? [laughs]
ELM: Right, right, right.
FK: That this was something where fans were gonna engage. So I think that this is, you know, I do think though that this is one of the first things that I’ve seen…not the first, but they’re really doing a lot with sort of a very classic slash fandom space. And that’s the target. And they know that’s the target.
ELM: Right. I do think that is a development, I’m trying to think about other…
FK: I mean like, obviously people knew later that Hannibal had that, and like, Interview With the Vampire, but even in those cases it was only one part of a holistic understanding of who all the people who could want to watch this are.
ELM: Even, I don’t think Interview With the Vampire, I don’t think they were going for slash fans, I think they were definitely going for queer people, you know? Which, correct, right.
FK: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right.
ELM: But I don’t, I think there’s a difference. And I also, I mean I do think that that—you know, I’m not an expert on the Red, White & Blue…Red, White & Royal Blue fandom, can’t even say those three colors in a row—but you know, just looking at it over the last few years, there’s a big contingent from slash fandom, but there’s a lot of people I don’t think of as like, very fanfictiony at all who are really into it. There’s, there’s a few big queer properties right now that I think are kind of hitting a point—Heartstopper is another one, right, you know, where you will encounter, you know, gay men of a variety of ages, who are like, “I like that little teen show about those boys,” right, and that’s not what I think of as classic slash fandom.
FK: Right, and there’s also this sort of YA overlap, right?
ELM: Yes. Yes.
FK: Where you’ve got people who are not doing slash fandom, but they’re, they’re into YA books, a lot of which are written by people who did come out of slash fandom, but now they’re not in slash fandom themselves, right?
ELM: Right.
FK: It’s like, there’s a genealogy. And I think, I mean I have to say, it’s really hard for me and I think for anybody else to read Red, White & Royal Blue and not be like, [laughing] yeah, this person wrote some fanfic, you know?
ELM: I mean, that’s fine though, like, you know, I’ve read some royal AUs that I thought would make great…I mean, and then some of which actually did become [FK laughs], you know, and it’s like…
FK: [both laughing] I might’ve recced you some royal AUs that might make some great…
ELM: Which is fine, because like, we’re in a very different universe now than…I mean, the idea that, so many of the popular genre writers our age not just came out of fanfiction, but also like, are fans, and possibly still in it, right? And the…
FK: Oh yeah.
ELM: Sometimes when I tell younger or newer fans about the stigma that existed around this literally ten years ago, right, when I started doing journalism about fandom, and they don’t believe me. They’re like, “No, that doesn’t, that’s wild.” [FK laughs] You know? And it’s like, I don’t know what to tell you. Like…
FK: And the stigma in multiple directions, too, right?
ELM: [overlapping] Yes. In all directions.
FK: [overlapping] I mean when I think about, like, obviously there was a stigma if you were a fanfic writer. But when I tell people like, there’s lots of stuff going on with Cassandra Clare, but one of the big elements, not the only big element, but one of them, was a real crabs in a bucket mentality where there were a lot of fanfiction writers who were like, “You can’t go pro!”
ELM: Yeah. Yeah.
FK: “Fuck that!” You know? Like, “I can’t stand to see one of us going pro.” That…look, there were lots of things going on with that drama, but that was definitely one of the big elements, and it was common, right? Even into the Fifty Shades of Grey space where people were like, “No, can’t stand it. Hate it.”
ELM: Right. Exactly. Right, and you were a bad member of the community. I’ll always remember, because—I think it’s in Fic, Anne Jamison’s book, there was kind of a deconstruction of this sort of, even before that happened, how she was publishing, she wasn’t in community the way the—I mean, this is also people’s perceptions after the fact or whatever, right?
FK: Right.
ELM: But to say like, it wasn’t like she was like, “Here’s a batch of readers and now I’m test driving it here and now I’m gonna level up to massive bestsellers,” right?
FK: Right.
ELM: And I think that’s also been some of the tension here, the kind of idea of feeling, like, other fan writers and fanfiction readers feeling like they’re being used. You know? As like, “Oh, you were just waiting for your chance to go for the real writing world,” you know?
FK: Right. And that’s complicated, and I feel like other subcultures have similar…some similar tensions. I don’t know, you know, I mean when I think about like, people I know in the hip hop world, there’s a lot of people who are absolutely uninterested in recording contracts and all of that.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: And the way the relationship of people who are like trying to make it big as recording artists have to the…frankly, the vast majority of people who are rapping or doing anything like that, it’s interesting to me to see how it can be similar and different from the fanfiction space.
ELM: Yeah, yeah, right, or all this about monetizing your crafts or whatever, you know.
FK: Mmmm. Mmmm hmmm.
ELM: And I think…yeah, there’s an element of all that too, of the like, not just why did you go in this direction, but feeling like you have to justify yourself for not doing it too.
FK: Mmm hmmm!
ELM: OK, so, all right, getting back to the fanfluencer thing. So, Twilight was a long time ago, that was almost two decades ago.
FK: Oh my God, it was.
ELM: To make you feel—Obama was elected almost—no, that was 15 years ago I guess, but like…
FK: Yeah, that was later, actually. [laughs]
ELM: Still! [both laugh] Don’t you feel like it just happened? Right? Don’t you feel like you just graduated from college?
FK: I, I do! [ELM laughs] Every once in a while I remember that all of Supernatural happened between when I started college and now, and I go, “That’s a long time.” [laughs]
ELM: Unlike you, I had a, you know, couple years of college when there was no Supernatural. If you can imagine what that was like. [FK laughs] It was a totally different world. Sometimes I see things from that era, from when I was in college, from pop culture, and I’m like…wow, I was, we were so disconnected. I don’t know what it was like when you were in college. But like—
FK: There was no YouTube.
ELM: Yeah! [laughs]
FK: YouTube didn’t exist.
ELM: Right! No YouTube…
FK: YouTube did not exist when we were in college! [laughs]
ELM: I didn’t, we didn’t have Wi-Fi in college, we got—we started to get Wi-Fi in my senior year, so it was like, there wasn’t even a lot of internet. Because you had to be like, sitting at your desk. In your dorm room.
FK: We had, we had Wi-Fi in my college.
ELM: Fancy. You’re younger.
FK: [overlapping] Like, in my college house.
ELM: [overlapping] You’re just a young person to me.
FK: It’s true. It’s true, I am younger. And it was—but you’re right, that was the moment at which Wi-Fi started becoming a thing that you just had. But even then you didn’t have it everywhere, are you kidding? I was not using data!
ELM: [overlapping] Even then…right. [laughs] We sound like…anyone who’s like, more than three years older than me is probably listening to this going like, “What, come the fuck on!” [both laugh]
FK: Sorry, Gen Xers. Get outta here.
ELM: But it is true how much you just are like, I got a laptop for college and that utterly changed the way I could use the internet, as opposed to like, using my parents’ desktop, which is what I did all through college, just sitting in—or, all through high school, rather. You know? So like…
FK: But when I imagine something like this stuff happening then, it’s like…that is a different universe.
ELM: Something like what happening?
FK: Something like the things with Red, White & Royal Blue. Bringing us back to the topic. [laughs]
ELM: [overlapping] Right, so…OK, let’s get back to the topic here. So like, setting aside fandom, I think that also connected to this is there’s a big conversation going on right now about influencers, right?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: So…it’s not just about the strikes, which like, TL;DR, we talked about this in previous episodes recently, but like, SAG-AFTRA in particular caused a lot of confusion when they issued some vague guidance and then luckily some more concrete guidance for influencers. Because they basically didn’t want the studios to be paying people to do promotion, because that would undercut the actors boycotting that, striking from that. Right, you know?
FK: And I imagine that they were particularly concerned about like, people who are cosplaying at a very high—you know, I shouldn’t say at a very high level, but people who are cosplaying, like, screen accurately, people who are maybe seeking to become actors, who could see, “Oh, I can get my foot in the door by being paid to do x, y and z for this premiere, for this or that or the other, right?
ELM: Yeah.
FK: That was really where their minds seemed that they were at.
ELM: Well, did you read that article in the Times that I shared, that was really I thought well-reported, talking about, like “Who are these influencers?”
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And that was really helpful to give concrete examples of what the kinds of things they were having to turn down were. And it was like, one TikToker who said that they had to turn down, you know, it was like $30,000 to make one TikTok, for Only Murders in the Building. Right, you know? And it’s like…
FK: Right. $30,000, for a union you’re not a part of. That’s a lot.
ELM: Right. Yeah, and maybe, some people in that article were like, “I’ve literally never heard of SAG-AFTRA,” but they don’t wanna shut the door on themselves ever, you know, maybe they wanna become actors someday, or like, they didn’t want to end that possibility, because they don’t know what they wanna do, they’re 25 and they’re getting $30,000 [FK laughs] to make a TikTok. Like, who knows what’s next for them, you know?
FK: Right!
ELM: But like, it’s also not…making, a TikToker making a promotional, paid TikTok for Only Murders in the Building, no one is ever going to think that is actually Selena Gomez. It’s not like… [FK laughs] It’s not like they’re actually—people have been tossing around the word “scabbing.” To me the word “scabbing” actually has a defined definition. That is: if I am Paramount and I still wanna make the movie that I was making, and a bunch of non-union actors show up to be in my movie, they are scabbing. Right?
FK: Right.
ELM: You know, it’s like, bringing in people to do the labor of people who are striking.
FK: Which the people who are striking would have been doing, but now they’re bringing somebody else in, yeah.
ELM: Right, right. In a non-acting context, in a much more clear one, a much less murky one, you know, some of the hotel unions in Los Angeles have been on strike recently, and in Southern California. Me hiring a bunch of cleaners, because someone needs to clean the hotel, those people are scabbing. Right?
FK: Right. But I think that from SAG-AFTRA’s perspective, one of the things actors are paid to do is make promotional TikToks, right?
ELM: Right, but it’s interesting because no one’s gonna…like I said, no one’s gonna mistake this TikToker for Selena Gomez. And the power of Selena Gomez…sorry, or Martin Short, or Steve Martin, [FK laughs] I didn’t forget about those important guys, you know, like…it’s a totally different appeal. And I’m not saying that SAG-AFTRA is wrong to tell these people not to do this.
FK: Right.
ELM: But similar to the idea of like, oh, they brought in fans of Red, White & Royal Blue, put ‘em on a red carpet, no one’s looking at those pictures from the red carpet and being like…you think different thoughts about that than you would if you saw all the actors, you know what I mean?
FK: Right, not to mention that as our voicemailer pointed out, they’re already doing things like that with fans, maybe they put a little less emphasis or effort into it, but that’s the kind of thing people have been doing with fans for a long time. It’s just that now that’s the thing they can do, and so it takes center stage of the promotion, in a way that previously it wouldn’t have.
ELM: Right. You know, and it’s hard to, I feel like this is an instance of, for the publicists working on this—I mean this is just a total armchair observation—but like, it kinda feels like making lemonade out of your lemons in the sense of, there is a really robust fandom for this. And it’s like, in a way, maybe they had an easier time pulling in that, refocusing on that element. Because, if you can think about something that…you know, for example, I mentioned in a recent episode, when I was at Comic-Con the director of this new original sci-fi film, the creator, Gareth Edwards, was there. If the strike is still going on when that comes out, there’s no fans to invite, you know?
FK: [overlapping, laughing] Right, right. Right.
ELM: [overlapping] Because it’s new! Whereas this is like a pretty devoted existing fandom.
FK: And within a group of people who, they definitely already knew were… [laughs] you know, where significant, there’s a BookTok element, there’s a Tumblr and slash fandom and a, you know, all of these elements existed. They’re aware of that, right? [laughs]
ELM: Yes. [laughs]
FK: And this is a group of people who are going to do a lot of promotion for the movie, if it’s good, anyway. And they’re going to hate it and slag on it if it sucks, to their, you know, from their point of view, anyway. So, [laughs] obviously if you’re smart, you’re doing promotion for this, you’re gonna lean into them more than you might for something like, even Only Murders in the Building. Right?
ELM: So, it’s interesting you say this, because I think this gets to part of the broader conversation that’s not just about fans, it’s going on with influencers. So there’s been a lot of commentary this summer about journalists, critics, influencers, and Hollywood. So like, there was a big article, a deeply flawed, deeply uncritical article in the Times a couple weeks ago, about MovieTok.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And it’s about, you know, the people who have massive numbers, just like BookTok, that’s talking about movies, and no—apparently no ethical boundaries whatsoever. So… [FK laughs] you know, if they get paid by, uh, I don’t know…Lucasfilm or whatever, I don’t know why I picked that. A24 probably, you know?
FK: Sure.
ELM: And then they’ll say, “I love this movie, it was a masterpiece.” Right, and no critic would ever do that. And if they do do that, then they should quit their job and get a new job, right, because journalists have these hard lines.
FK: Right. But these people aren’t journalists, they’re people who got on TikTok to talk about movies they liked or didn’t like.
ELM: Right.
FK: In a non-critic context, and so.
ELM: So then you have like, established critics, [laughs] who are doing all this hand-wringing being like, “Well, I guess this is the new generation, and they’re fresher and more interesting?” And it’s like, no, you are literally, you saying this is OK is like, you are literally signing the death warrant for criticism. Like… [FK laughs] Not to be too dramatic, but like, if, you know, it’s a different space. BookTok is a different space of people communicating about things, but because these industries know about it now, there’s a lot of money swirling around there, right?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And like, no one should ever mistake any of that for…independent criticism. Because yeah, of course you can come up with your own feelings about a book, or a movie, if you’ve been paid to say something about it. But there’s a spectrum here between like, they’re gonna invite you to the premiere, give you really nice treatment, give you a bunch of really great prizes, then they say things like, “We’d love to see your positive social media posts about this!” Right? And are you gonna then say, go on there and trash the movie, even if you thought it was garbage? No, because then you’re literally, you’ll be taken off the list, and you won’t get to go to the next one.
FK: Right! Which, I mean, is exactly what people have been doing with fans, ever since, I mean evidently, the Star Wars sequel trilogy, right? [laughs] It’s, it’s the same kind of, “Hey, we know that you’re gonna have an opinion about this, so we’re gonna be nice to you, we’re gonna share things with you, we’re gonna give you things,” you know, “Don’t you like us more now?” Which, I mean, I don’t know, I’m not totally mad about that as a fan, but it is hard when that bumps into like, actual criticism.
ELM: Are you not mad about that as a fan though, coming from the kind of fan culture where people get to be critical? I mean there’s a lot of different fan cultures, but when you start to say, like, “Oh, well, I did get to go to the premiere, and they did give me all this awesome stuff, and they were so nice to me. [whispered] I hated it, [full voice] but also they were so nice to me, and now that I have a taste of this, I want to be invited to the next one, and so now I’m gonna go make a post talking about how great it was.” Right? Like, that should be for fandom, too. Obviously there’s an element, there’s good portions of fandom, that are always super positive about the thing, but there’s huge portions that aren’t, right?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And like, that totally shuts down avenues of critique. I don’t know, what if they really fuck up and you wanna tell them “I wish that you hadn’t handled it this way,” you know? “I wish that, for x thing, you had been a little more sensitive” or something. Right? But you’re not gonna do that, because you don’t wanna get taken off the list.
FK: Well, I mean, I don’t know. I don’t know any other way that that works. Right? I mean, fans are not critics, and they don’t have a platform like The New York Times or something, where they can’t afford to be—you know, where like the movies can’t take you off the list [laughing] if you’re the film critic at The New York Times.
ELM: They—well I will say, that movies have started taking critics off the list. Because they want, they want positive reach.
FK: Right, I mean, OK, right. I’m just saying that fans never were in this position. Right? I think more than that, having been in both places, things that I really cared about and loved, if the thing that they made sucked and I really hated it, I hope that I would be able to be like, “I hate this.” It’s more the things that I feel neutral about that I’m easier to like, [laughs] that I’m easier to sway on.
ELM: Yeah, but that wouldn’t hap—that’s not—we’re talking about in this scenario that you just brought up, you’d be the fan. Of the thing. So you wouldn’t feel neutral about it.
FK: [overlapping] Sure, sure. But what I’m saying is, the movie talkers aren’t, are coming in more neutrally, right? That’s what I’m saying.
ELM: Right, sure. Sure sure sure.
FK: So I feel less, I feel actually worse about it in the context of somebody who’s just a fan of movies, and doesn’t have a, like, long-term deep engagement with a particular property, because I do think I trust somebody with a longer-term deep engagement with a property. Not everybody, but like, from some critical parts of fandom, I trust them a little more [laughs] than being able to overcome, you know? Because actually…
ELM: [overlapping] I don’t know why you’re saying that, I don’t at all. If, if Lucasfilm invites you to their special secret premiere and gives you like, a frickin’ lightsaber, [FK laughs] are you ever gonna say anything negative about Star Wars franchise again? Publicly? You want another lightsaber!
FK: I don’t know, sometimes another lightsaber is not worth it.
ELM: I—I think that’s not how people work! [laughing] I think people want more lightsabers!
FK: Yeah, but you’re saying this like, we’re both saying this as people who have at times—well, I don’t know if you have, but—I have definitely at times gotten shit from the Harry Potter franchise, [laughing] and now I literally don’t own any of it because of how mad I am at J. K. Rowling.
ELM: That is a, that is a special circumstance. I think you would want a second lightsaber so you could do a lightsaber battle with your friend, and so even if you hated the first movie, you would still say, “So awesome to get this opportunity from Lucasfilm to see this movie early, you guys gotta check it out.” Smile.
FK: I don’t know.
ELM: I don’t, I—I think—
FK: [overlapping] I think that you’re, I think that you’re right that that’s a real danger overall. I just, I like to imagine that… [heavy sigh] people might value things more than access, maybe.
ELM: [laughing] I don’t know why you’re saying this. We live in the world.
FK: [overlapping] I wanna believe, Elizabeth…
ELM: And also, like, take fans into—take the level of fandom into account too, and I think there’s a, there are parallels and crossovers with influencer culture, it’s not just, “Oh, it’s my favorite thing,” it’s the exclusivity of it. Right? The idea that I’m—
FK: [overlapping] Sure, that’s absolutely true.
ELM: I’m one of a hundred Star Wars fans who got to see this thing, was handed a lightsaber, you know?
FK: Right.
ELM: And like, I certainly experience that, getting things at Comic-Con when it’s been stuff that I liked, you know, and been like…I’m here, and I was given this thing. You know? [both laugh] OK, you know? And am I gonna turn around and be like, “This show sucks!!” Probably not, because…not because they asked me not to say anything negative, but because they just earned goodwill points, because they gave me a thing. You know?
FK: I don’t know, like, I literally saw you get Harry Potter stuff, and then turn around and talk about how awful you found Johnny Depp. [laughs]
ELM: It’s true.
FK: I saw you do this!
ELM: It’s true. I felt like, I feel like—
FK: I’m just saying, I agree that this is a danger, I just think that you’re like, “Everyone’s gonna do this!” and I’m like, no they won’t, because I’ve seen you not do it.
ELM: Yeah, but the Harry Potter franchise made it so easy for me to be negative about them, right? Whereas other ones…
FK: Yeah, but a lot of them do.
ELM: I don’t know. And I do think, I feel like we’ve seen, in the last few years, a huge rise in exclusivity culture within fandom, because—
FK: Sure.
ELM: I mean, look at the music space, you know? I feel like once they realized that this was something that people really valued, and saying like, “People would like to pay to be the superfan,” right, or, “People will broadcast how much they love our thing if we treat them like a superfan, if it’s a free thing, we give them one of the ten spots in this room, and we got ’em. And they’re gonna evangelize this thing, because we gave them the special access.” I don’t think these things are super new, but I do think that these industries are really kind of hip to the, the reach now.
FK: Gosh! Who on this podcast might be responsible for some of that? [both laugh]
ELM: Right, I mean, you can’t take credit for the music stuff, but you know what I mean? Sure.
FK: [laughing] No no no no no, I’m not taking—and is it taking credit? [both laugh] At this point? I don’t know if it’s credit.
ELM: Right? So like, you know, I get it, but it’s also…I don’t know, does it make fan spaces worse? Like, is it bad that the, you know, a bunch of Red, White & Royal Blue superfans got to go to the thing? I don't know, I’m not gonna say that. But I do think…I don’t know. I feel very mixed about this. I think more than you.
FK: Well, it’s hard for me to…you know, I am coming up from ten years of doing this for a living, so. Uh, check back with me in ten years once I’ve detoxed, and I’ll tell you what I actually think about it.
ELM: Well, all right, hold on, go back though. All right. Talk about your job though. Like, you were not necessarily…like, you didn’t go into every meeting and be like, “All right, the number one strategy here is you gotta have exclusives for a couple of fans.”
FK: I mean, but I did help organize things like, the boxes that certain superfans would get, determining who would get those special packages, determining who was invited to some of these, literally sometimes I was involved in identifying people—again, let’s, I’m not saying this is, I was not part of this conversation at that point for Red, White & Royal Blue, but for other properties, absolutely. You know? My team would do those things.
ELM: All right, nevermind, you are responsible for this. But I was gonna say—
FK: [overlapping] I am, sorry! [laughs]
ELM: [overlapping] To your credit, I also think that you were simultaneously thinking about that top-tier fan, and you were thinking about the fandoms broadly, and saying like “Will the fans on a whole value these things in this franchise,” or, you know, there was some scale element too, it wasn’t just, “If we surprise and delight these 100 people, then they’re gonna convince the great unwashed fannish masses to like it, too,” right? It wasn’t always a big top-down strategy, it was kind of more up and down the chain, right?
FK: No, definitely not, there was—I mean there was certainly some, obviously if you’re trying to do something like this, then you do want to reach out to people who have big audiences. I mean, among other things, think about this even separately from the issue of whether there’s “bribery” or whatever, like, gosh, where should you send somebody to do a podcast? If you can send somebody from the actual show to talk to a fan podcast, that’s good for a variety of reasons. One of them being, you’re gonna have better questions and conversation and real stuff than you would on any other space, right, so it’s like, to some extent there’s this “bribery” element, but to another extent it’s also just like, well, no one at Entertainment Weekly cares about the specific things that we would like fans to know exist in this property.
ELM: Mmm hmmm, mmm hmmm.
FK: But the fans do care about those things, and they will tell each other about them, so let’s get that—you know? [laughs] Let’s get that message out to the people who actually care about those things. That’s like, the nicest [laughing] formulation of this that you could possibly make, but I really think that that’s true, that is one of the things that’s behind it, it’s not just a pure bribery idea, it’s also like, no, the people who are being invited to this fan premiere, sure it’s making them feel good and all that, but they’re also the people who are gonna be the most advanced readers of the film [laughs] in a certain way.
ELM: Sure, yeah.
FK: They’re gonna know what the film is trying to do, and who it’s for, because it’s for them.
ELM: Right, right. OK, I mean, that’s, that’s fair. [both laugh] Yeah.
FK: I’m not saying this is the, this is a perfectly good thing. I mean look, when I got into doing the work that I used to do, it was from the perspective of, someone’s going to do this job, and I would like it to be me, because I trust myself more than I trust [both laugh] other people to do it.
ELM: Sure.
FK: Which is still not very much. You know? So, I mean, the best that I could hope for is that maybe I did have sufficient insight into a community to not just do it in the dumbest possible way. [laughs]
ELM: Right, right. So…put yourself in a hypothetical, imagine you were doing that job currently.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: You know, I think that voicemail leaver—[laughs] good ol’ VL—I think that their observation that this replaced—you know, this is an interesting example, too, because it’s like, these are not particularly known actors, right?
FK: Right.
ELM: You know, I do think—
FK: Other than Uma Thurman.
ELM: Right. Right. I mean, you know, Stephen Fry.
FK: Sure.
ELM: I guess, I was about to say like, oh, would people be as interested—maybe not in the premiere or whatever, because I think that there’s a limited, people have limited interest in that kinda thing, beyond like…I think there’s more interest in that kind of thing for big celebrities, right? You know?
FK: Right.
ELM: But, I look at the press that the Interview With the Vampire actors did together, and that definitely I think sparked a lot of fandom, because they had such good offscreen chemistry too. And people didn't know who they were at all, I remember seeing them before I had seen the show, and I was like, who are these jokers? And afterwards I was like, gotta see every single time they’re on camera together, you know? [laughs]
FK: Every joker clownface thing that they’ve ever done!
ELM: But you know, so it’s like, the timing of this, they did lose the opportunity, and I have no idea if the two of them have good offscreen chemistry in that movie. But like, it was an opportunity to see them do it, and that was lost. Right?
FK: Right.
ELM: So I guess my hypothetical for you is like, so say you were working, maybe not this example, but a pretend property right now. Is highlighting the fan premiere, is it necessarily because there are no actors to highlight? Or is a more generous read of this situation, you know, this is a very fannish property, also, and so they get goodwill by being like, “We get it, we know that you love this,” on an organic level, you know what I mean? Thinking about this, I’m asking you a hundred questions, go ahead, go ahead.
FK: No, I mean, I think that that is true, I think there’s—I think that most properties, highlighting a fan premiere would not be the right choice.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: I mean, they might do it because they don’t have any other option, I guess, but sometimes that might be worse than not doing anything, in certain ways, right? [laughs] Like, sometimes it might undercut the credibility of certain kinds of shows, where you’re like, really? Did you just show me— I mean I’m trying to think of what an example of a show for this would be, but like…there are all sorts of stuff where people would really be like, what? [laughs] You know? What are you talking about?
ELM: Succession.
FK: Yeah! I mean I think that that would kind of undermine it, right? [laughs]
ELM: Yeah, if the new season of Succession had come out and they had highlighted a fan premiere…yeah. People are cosplaying Kendall…
FK: [overlapping] Yeah. Like, what? And even if it were like, the things that really went viral, you know, even if they were highlighting the people who had made all of the user-generated content that went really viral about Succession, it would still be like…what are you doing, guys? [ELM laughs] Like, no. What’s happening, right?
ELM: Right.
FK: So it’s only something like this, or like a lot of things that maybe are more classically thought of as “fannish” that you could get away with that for.
ELM: Right, right, yeah. So that’s interesting.
FK: And! And that’s also something where they would be doing it anyway, it just, again, the highlight wouldn’t be on it as much, because there would be other stuff they were doing too.
ELM: So, your read on this is it was kind of like, taking advantage of a, a built-in advantage—like, it’s a built-in advantage this already had.
FK: Yeah!
ELM: Right, and so it’s like, in lieu of anything else, at least we have this, right? Whereas like, there are other properties coming out right now where they’re not gonna do stuff like this, because you’re right, that wouldn’t make sense.
FK: Yeah, exactly, exactly. And I wouldn’t be surprised if there were other properties that are more fannish, that do follow in these footsteps. But again, I have no doubt that those properties would already be planning fan outreach. Maybe, again, maybe not to the total amount, but also like…probably part of the reason they’re able to do more of that is because like, if your budget, [laughs] for promo is gone in every other space, you may as well…if the money is already earmarked, you may as well put it to some kind of promo that you can do, right?
ELM: Right, right. Yeah. And it’s interesting too, you know, it’s like, I’m thinking also about—I mean we’ve already talked about this a bit—but like, the fan, “fans doing any fan activity is scabbing” conversation.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: You know, whatever, I respect what SAG-AFTRA is saying here, and so the person who had to decline the $30,000 Only Murders in the Building TikTok deal…sorry. That sucks.
FK: And also good for you for supporting a union, you know?
ELM: Yeah, right? And I’m sorry you were put in this weird, kind of in between position where you’re trapped between two things, et cetera, et cetera. But I think we’ve made it pretty clear in other episodes but I would reiterate it here, that I don’t think that anyone, any fan who went to the Red, White & Royal Blue events and were featured in that way, that to me is nothing to—that’s not scabbing at all, right?
FK: No. No.
ELM: That’s never the replacement of actors’ work, right? And I think as we tried to emphasize last time…you know actually I don’t know if I’ve mentioned on the podcast, but I saw a good corrective—there are so many posts on Tumblr since the WGA strike started, and I assume on Twitter too, that were like, “Go ahead, strike! I’ll wait as long as you need.”
FK: Yeah.
ELM: “I’ve got a big backlog of stuff.” And I saw a post recently that I really appreciated that was like, “Hey, could you stop saying that, actually? Because that implies that there’s no current demand for them to make new content?” [laughs] And that’s like…kind of evidence that people could, that studios could devalue their work…
FK: [overlapping] Right. Right…could just chill? Yeah.
ELM: Because like, you know, oh what, you’re telling me you don’t need any new content for five years? Great! Watch our back catalog and keep paying us your monthly subscription fee. So, like, I thought that was a really good corrective.
FK: Oh my goodness, yeah. Are you kidding? I think about this a lot, you know, being an active Star Trek fan and Paramount+ being the house that Star Trek built, like, again, people have said “Don’t cancel your streaming,” so I’m not canceling my streaming, but I have thought about like, well, you know…actually if Star Trek fans kept subscribing to Paramount+ without them making new Star Trek, that would be bad! [laughs] That doesn’t help, you know?
ELM: Right? But how do you send that signal? You can’t, you know? So like—
FK: Right, I mean, I’m doing what the union tells me to do and not canceling anything, right, but it’s definitely like, nope, I want them to make new. Make new.
ELM: Right, and it’s not just “don’t cancel anything,” but it’s like, “and stop talking about how you don’t want anything new.” Exactly, right?
FK: Exactly.
ELM: It’s tricky, too, there’s so much…even before the strike started, there’s so many, like…Neil Gaiman’s done this a bunch, and I know he’s well-meaning, but it’s like, “instructions for viewers” to try to, et cetera, et cetera, like “You must watch it in this time period, so it counts.” Right?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: “You must do this so it counts.” And I understand why creators like him and others are trying to say this, but like, in reality, I’m not sure how much that matters, because they’re so, it’s such a black box, from everything we’ve heard, you know what I mean? The executives are not actually sharing a gamifiable system that…
FK: Yeah, I mean like, I don’t know, maybe Neil Gaiman does hear specific things, just him, you know what I mean? Like, so he’s probably the person who I would be most likely…
ELM: [laughing, overlapping] Yeah, he might be the one example.
FK: He might be the one example of somebody who actually knows. But not every creator does get that information.
ELM: Right, I mean most of them, even at his level, talk about how they don’t, you know?
FK: Right.
ELM: And they’re like, “I don’t understand, Netflix showed me some numbers and they were huge, and they canceled it anyway.” You know, and it’s like…yeah. In fact maybe this isn’t about numbers at all. [laughs]
FK: Well yeah, I mean, there’s a lot of, there’s also stuff about the way that contracts work and how many seasons things run, it’s really, it’s quite complicated. There are reasons why you might cancel something after very few seasons and then start a new one. The reboot. [laughs] You know?
ELM: Right, exactly.
FK: Contractually speaking.
ELM: I guess I bring this up to say, I think it’s important to follow the guidance of the unions and not just think you’re doing some sort of great moral act by saving $10.99 a month and canceling your Hulu or whatever, but like, it’s also tricky to say, how do you send a signal? Literally no idea.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Because they, even the top showrunners don’t know how to send signals, you know? They’re just like, “Maybe you all could watch it in the first week,” and it’s like, sure, OK, I don’t know… [FK laughs] I’ve also heard that that doesn’t—
FK: It’s complicated.
ELM: That that doesn’t matter at all. How many signups or re-signups matters, or like, what’s the first thing that you watch after you watch the thing, and that matters, you know?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And it’s like, all these metrics that, many of which you may not be able to effect. I’m still paying for AMC+, even though I haven’t touched it, yeah, happy to give them $100 a year if that will help them make Interview With the Vampire season three. [FK laughs] And I’m like, this is so stupid, that probably makes no difference, right, and I’m just wasting…however much it costs a month.
FK: Yeah, I don’t know.
ELM: So I don’t know, I think the whole thing is very…it seems like a lot of people create narratives to try to explain what we should do in an unexplainable—it’s explainable if you’re a top-level executive at a streaming company, but like, [laughs] it’s not explainable to anyone else.
FK: Yeah, I don’t know, I mean even if you are, I think that there’s also a question of how you should measure those things. Right? There are genuine questions about what the best way to measure value is.
ELM: Sure.
FK: And how to tell…you know? [laughs] So obviously it’s explainable in the sense that they could express why certain things were canceled and why they weren’t, but I think that those things are also being altered and modified and rethought on a regular basis.
ELM: Well, and also just seem utterly arbitrary. Like, literally yesterday, I don’t know if you saw, they took back the League of Their Own—did you see this?
FK: No.
ELM: [laughs] I, since you’re in your offline summer I’m gonna deliver you some news. So, A League of Their Own supposedly did really well, I mean I see a lot of people, on a very biased feed, but like…
FK: [overlapping] Lots of people talked about it not on the internet.
ELM: Yeah, yeah, it’s true! So, they said instead of a second season, they were gonna do like a truncated one? Instead of giving them a full second season? This was months ago. Yesterday they announced: nevermind. It’s canceled. And one of the reasons they gave was they were like, “Strike strike strike,” just total nonsense, right, and then they were like, “Also because of the strike, there’s gonna be a glut in the firehose” or something, I can’t remember what the exact language, in 2024-25.
FK: A glut in the pipeline because there’s too many things that they wanted to make but couldn’t make because the actors and writers were striking, and so everything would go into production at the same time.
ELM: [overlapping] Pipeline. That’s the word.
FK: Hmmm.
ELM: That’s what they said!
FK: Interesting.
ELM: That’s what they said!
FK: Hmm.
ELM: And it’s like, I have no idea. No idea.
FK: I mean that may be true, that doesn’t sound totally bananas, but also like, what? [laughs]
ELM: Well it’s also like, why did you renew it but only for a couple episodes? I don’t know.
FK: Also a question.
ELM: Yeah, there’s a lot of questions here, and it is true, I would love for someone to actually crunch the numbers. There is a sense, out on the internet, that a lot of the “diverse programming” the streamers were very proud of commissioning has been more quick to be canceled.
FK: Right.
ELM: I don’t know if that’s true. It feels like that, but then maybe plain old boring straight white guy show is also going, and I don’t see a thousand tweets about it every time, you know what I mean?
FK: Right. Hard to say, yeah, totally. Because I mean how would you ever, you wouldn’t even know about them necessarily. [laughs]
ELM: Yeah, right, right. So that’s tricky.
FK: Yeah, I don’t know.
ELM: I don’t know, I guess I’m bringing all this up too just because I feel like…we’re all in one big ecosystem together, but different people have different stakes, and different people have different abilities to actually help. And like…we’ve talked about this in the strikes, in other episodes, but I think there’s a real desire from fans to actually feel like they’re an active part of things, in a way that sometimes I think that fans are just not. It’s not your job. But I think that’s hard, when we have—and we’ve talked about for years, and lots of scholars work on this—ideas of fan labor, and like, the actual work that fans are doing in these ecosystems.
FK: Right, and it’s a balance, it’s like on the one hand you’re really important to the ecosystem, you’re also one algae. You know? You’re one piece of algae. [ELM laughs] In this big ocean, and the algae are really important ‘cause otherwise the ocean, like, you know, loses the ability…is even algae in the ocean? [ELM laughs] You know what I’m saying, whatever. Like, a…a krill.
ELM: [overlapping] A pond, we’re in a pond now. Yeah. OK. All right. Sure.
FK: [overlapping] Yeah, a pond, or a piece of krill, you know what I mean? Yeah, they’re really important, also each individual doesn’t have a big impact. Also maybe the impacts that you have are not, like, as obvious as the impacts of like, a whale. [both laugh] You know? All right, this is a stretched metaphor, it’s complicated.
ELM: [overlapping] Who is the, the whale? I love whales, and I feel like in this scenario a whale is like, Bob Iger, and I’m not happy about that. So. [FK laughs] Can it be like, Matt Damon or something? Can it be an A-list actor could be the whales?
FK: That’s what I was thinking, I was actually thinking about an A-list actor as being a whale.
ELM: OK, Bob Iger, he’s like international shipping. Right? He’s like…
FK: Yeah! Or possibly a whaling boat. [laughs]
ELM: Yeah, or like an oil tanker, something bad, you know? [laughs]
FK: Right, OK. All right. Anyway, point being though, that…just like actual ecosystems, it can be really hard to know what matters and what doesn’t matter, right? And what’s gonna be really important, what something else will fill the niche of… Like, we actually don’t know, there’s all sorts of crazy stuff, like do you know that some scientists believe that we could kill every mosquito on earth, and it wouldn’t make a difference to our ecosystem? Is that true? I don’t know! Some people think it’s true. So anyway, all I’m saying is, it’s complicated.
ELM: Why are we not doing this? I’m sorry, no offense to the mosquitos, but…they do spread a lot of terrible diseases, and…
FK: I would like it to be true, because I would like all mosquitos to die. They eat me up, [ELM laughs] they love my blood. Anyway. Point being, who knows?
ELM: Have you, oh, you’ve been gone all summer, there really are a lot of—do people outside of New York know about the spotted lanternfly and our zeal to kill them? I never wanna kill them, they’re—
FK: Oh, there’s so many of them…
ELM: There’s so many, so it’s this beautiful, beautiful bug that’s invasive, and the guidance that New Yorkers were given—other people on the East Coast too I think—what, like, two summers ago? Was if you see one, murder it. And so…
FK: And it’s still the advice.
ELM: It’s so beautiful, one time one landed right next to me and I couldn’t do it because it was too beautiful. But today I went and I was having breakfast sitting on the Promenade in Brooklyn, just looking out over New York Harbor, and I hear this giant stomping sound right behind me, and I turn—it’s a man pushing his baby carriage, [laughing] obviously he’d seen one and he went for it, and I was like, we’re just having a civilized morning, and he’s murdering bugs out here. But it’s like, he’s just following the rules, he’s doing what he’s told, you know?
FK: Yeah, saving us from invasive species, one stomp at a time.
ELM: My favorite was I was listening to the radio, someone from the New York State Department of Environment or whatever was talking about it, and they were like, “Please stop calling us when you see one, unless you like, work on a farm.” [both laugh] It was like, this is not a sighting hotline, it’s like if you see one on the street…
FK: Just kill it.
ELM: Please kill it.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: But I was just, I love the idea that people were like, calling them up being like, “There’s one in my backyard!” And they’re like, “Is this gonna affect the agriculture sector? Then no, I don’t wanna know about it.”
FK: I don’t wanna know what, in this metaphor of ecosystem, what the spotted lanternfly is in the fandom ecosystem, so I’m just gonna say that I think that we should—
ELM: [overlapping] Beautiful. A beautiful bug.
FK: We should, we should wrap this one up, maybe…
ELM: Well, I don’t, you’re the one who came up with this ocean ecosystem, I don’t know the hundred algae that get to be in this special spot on the whale, because the whale picked them out or whatever, or the whale’s boss picked them out. [FK laughs}
FK: I like…the whale… [both laughing]
ELM: Yeah, well, the second I said that I was like—
FK: [overlapping] OK, all I was, the only thing I was trying to communicate with this is [ELM laughs] that like…it’s hard to know…
ELM: [overlapping, laughing] Imagine Matt Damon selecting those algae, you know? Like…
FK: I, it wasn’t meant to be a perfect metaphor. All I’m trying to say is that it’s hard to know what impact you’re going to have, and it’s really complicated, so, you know. Maybe we all need to just accept that we’re a tiny impact and do our best and then let it go.
ELM: It’s true. And I don’t know, I feel like I’m doing all this handwringing, like [in a snooty voice] “What of the critical fan—” like, “Whither the critical fan?” I don’t know. If you, if you follow someone in your fandom who gets some special prize from the IP owners, then I think you get to decide whether you think anything they say about the thing is tainted, or, you know what I mean? I think that there are some people who just don’t care. And they’re like, “I got this great prize, this great swag box from whoever,” and you’re like, great, I like you and I like your commentary and I understand that you have been bought and paid for on a very low level, no one’s actually paid you probably, but they have given you nice stuff…
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And if you say the movie’s great, that’s up to me to decide whether I, I’m like, “Oh, sure,” or…
FK: Trust it. [laughs]
ELM: You know, for me personally, when I see that, I would not think that person…I would not be particularly interested in their opinion at that point, you know? That’s just me! So like, that doesn’t harm me, it’s just not someone I wanna follow.
FK: Well, thanks Warner Brothers, for that chocolate Sorting Hat that one time. I’m still never interacting with anything ever again.
ELM: I’m sorry, go back. Tell me—Warner Brothers gave you a chocolate hat?
FK: Yeah, when we were doing Harry Potter fan conventions one year, they gave us a life-size, made of chocolate Sorting Hat.
ELM: [overlapping] Oh, wow…that’s big…
FK: It was, like, a group of people, it wasn’t just me. But I will always remember that as like, pretty great. [laughs] But I still…[both laughing] am not interacting with Harry Potter anymore.
ELM: Surprised and delighted. That’s an interesting example, I know we’re trying to wrap up here, but it is an interesting example, because I’m certain at those conventions—sorry, those conferences—there was critical conversation about the franchise.
FK: Oh yeah, there absolutely was! I mean the reason that they were doing it was because—I don’t think it was to try and stifle critical conversation of the franchise, I think it was that they wanted us to continue holding conventions. [laughs]
ELM: Yeah! Right, right, and like, those knock-on effects too, right, like, “Oh if we play nice to the organizers” or whatever. I feel like that’s a lot of the targeting of influencers and people with these huge platforms, right, it’s like…
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Is like, trying to keep that virtual convention going. If we, you know, if we keep this person on our side, then they’re gonna keep talking about our thing, and their thousands and thousands of followers are gonna keep listening.
FK: Yeah. I will—OK, I’m gonna correct one thing. If they sent me another life-sized chocolate Sorting Hat, I would accept it and eat it.
ELM: Like, right now?
FK: Yeah, if they did that right now, I’m not saying that I would say anything nice about the Harry Potter franchise, but I would eat the Sorting Hat.
ELM: I think it’d be pretty funny if they did that, and you did post about it, because that would be funny. You know? [FK laughs] It would be like, “Can you believe this is what they tried to get me back, even though this is dead to me? They gave me this giant-ass chocolate hat?” Like, that would be funny. I guess then you’d be giving them kinda promo.
FK: All right, if someone from Warner Brothers [both laughing] is listening to this right now, we have a request. [laughs]
ELM: I don’t want that! I don’t like chocolate that much. I definitely don’t want their chocolate hat. I’m trying to think of what they could give me that I would want. Like…cash. If they just gave me some cash…
FK: [overlapping] Something made of strawberry gelatin.
ELM: Yeah, you’re right, if they made a giant hat out of like, material—
FK: Strawberry Haribo?
ELM: That you make… [laughs] Right, a giant Haribo…
FK: In the shape of a Sorting Hat? [laughs]
ELM: A giant Haribo Sorting Hat. Yeah, I’d take that.
FK: All right. On that note.
ELM: Listen up.
FK: [laughs] Now that everyone knows how to buy us, at least for a minute…
ELM: I just want the candy, I’m not gonna say anything nice about Harry Potter.
FK: Yeah yeah. [ELM laughs] That’s how they all start saying it. But then! All right. This has been a delight, thank you so much, voicemail leaver.
ELM: Very interesting voicemail, yeah. It’s, it’s an interesting thing to look at. And actually I would like to keep an eye on, as the…I hope the strikes are resolved very soon, I suspect they will be resolved not super soon, but hopefully this year, from everything I’m hearing. You know, I’m curious to look at properties like Red, White & Royal Blue, and the way, when actors can come back and do their normal thing, to see if we see more of this, right?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: I’m curious how effective that is. I was just, as an observer, and there are people who are doing your former job who are actually looking at it, but like, I think it’s something to keep an eye on, because I think it’s easy to over-index on… As voicemail leaver rightly points out, people were already doing stuff like this, I think it’s easy in the absence of the actors to be like, “They’re taking advantage of the fact that fans like it too!” which voicemail leaver was not doing, but I definitely have seen people doing on social media, and like, I think it’s good to get some perspective to look at what happens when…things get back to “normal.” Sorta.
FK: Definitely. All right, well, I guess I’ll talk to you next time, Elizabeth! Hopefully over a large Sorting Hat made of candy.
ELM: We’re getting two Sorting Hats now, for our two candy tastes. I’m really excited about this.
FK: Point.
ELM: Great.
FK: All right. [both laugh]
ELM: Cool. K, bye!
FK: [overlapping] OK, talk to ya later. [both laugh]
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