Episode 223: The End of the Flourish Era
After nine years of collaborating on Fansplaining, Flourish and Elizabeth mark Flourish’s final regular episode by casting back to the state of fandom when they first met on a panel at San Diego Comic-Con in July of 2015. A decade ago, we were at the height of Hollywood’s “Geek is Chic” arc, facing the rapid mainstreaming of fandom and the beginnings of the “creator-ification” of fanworks. What’s changed for the better—and what’s gotten worse? Plus: in the ultimate ironic twist, Flourish accepts their own personal journey into lurkerdom, a truly fitting end to a podcast run that nearly ended during a fight on the subject 215 episodes ago… 🥰
Show Notes
[00:00:00] As always, our intro music is “Awel” by stefsax, used under a CC BY 3.0 license.
[00:00:48] FYI the Cretaceous Era (145 to 66 million years ago) apparently had dinosaurs AND birds and mammals, it was all happening!!!
[00:02:00]
[00:03:06] SDCC 2015—the official name of the panel was “Fandom Is My Fandom.” Here we are with fellow panelist and friend-of-the-pod Amanda Brennan:
We talked to all of our fellow panelists within the first few episodes of the podcast:
Amanda, who was working at Tumblr at the time
Our very first guest, Meredith Levine, was doing industry-side work studying fans in Hollywood (somewhat like Flourish back then!)
Aron Levitz of Wattpad
Jules Wilkinson of SuperWiki
Heidi Tandy and Betsy Rosenblatt of the OTW Legal Committee (Heidi also organized the panel!)
[00:04:04] This is the video that pulled Flourish into 1D fandom (and continued Harry Styles fandom) approximately one month into our partnership:
[00:04:26] We are, of course, referencing our Famous Fight in Episode #8, “One True Fandom,” where Flourish took a “lurkers don’t really count” stance—which they did start to walk back many years ago, to be clear. (Especially ironic considering where this episode ends up…you’ll see!)
[00:10:06] Elizabeth’s early pieces on fanfiction for The Millions:
“Fifty Shades of Fan Fiction” in 2012
[00:14:00] “One Fixed Point: ‘Sherlock,’ Sherlock Holmes, and the British Imagination” and the more explicitly fannish B-side, “Fangirl,” the latter of which begins with a sort of found poem from one of Elizabeth’s Sherlock friends that surely speaks to all of us, regardless of fandom:
I wonder
why I am enjoying being so invested in this show
because I wouldn’t say it’s making me happy, per se
[00:15:45]
(Though neither of them seem *particularly* thrilled here, it’s far from the cringiest of the era—often, the celebrities looked like they wanted the floor to swallow them whole. Also note that McAvoy seems sincerely curious about whether women are turned on by the idea of two men together—AND NO ONE ELUCIDATES THINGS FOR HIM. Hopefully in the decade since someone in his life has cleared this up.)
[00:31:17] Joe Russo said, amongst other things, “This next generation is looking for ways to tell their own stories that service their own sort of collective ADHD.”
[00:46:54] Elizabeth’s piece on the affordances of digital platforms: “There’s No Such Thing as a One-Size-Fits-All Web.”
[00:57:14] Thank you to Transcriptionist Extraordinaire Rachel who reminded us of this perfect post: “ONLY YOU CAN PREVENT YOURSELF FROM LOOKING LIKE A JACKASS ONLINE!”
[00:59:33] The whole thread about “private fic Discord servers” is *so* depressing…
[01:13:27] That’s Patreon.com/Fansplaining!!
[01:18:24] Our outro music is “We'll figure it out together” by Lee Rosevere, also used under a CC BY 3.0 license.
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 #223, Flourish’s last, final episode, which we have entitled: “The End of the Flourish Era.”
FK: [laughs] It’s like the end of the Cretacean Era.
ELM: Yes, you are like…I don’t know what creatures existed in that era, but…
FK: I don’t, I, I mean they were dinosaurs, presumably. I don’t know. Is that one of the eras where there’s dinosaurs?
ELM: OK, we shouldn’t’ve gone to science so quickly. [FK laughs] All right. So, Flourish’s last—it’s funny, because we have already agreed to do another special episode after this, so it doesn’t feel as final as I initially thought it was going to. I’m like, “We’re just gonna do this again in like a week.” [laughs]
FK: Well, assuming that I don’t have a baby before then. [laughs]
ELM: I don’t—first of all, this isn’t even about the podcast, I don’t think you should have a baby that early. I think you should wait until the due date.
FK: I agree that I should wait, however I did—if, if I came, if the baby came at the same time that I came, I would be in labor right now.
ELM: Oh, you were that early? That explains so much about you.
FK: [laughing] I was a month before my due date, and I was fully cooked. Like…
ELM: That’s very eager of you.
FK: Yeah. So, um…you know. There’s that. That’s why I’m so paranoid about this. [laughs]
ELM: Well, what, so what if that happens. Then, you know, we can talk about Interview With the Vampire…in a few months, when you have a free moment to breathe.
FK: OK. All right. Sure. Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, we are gonna talk about Interview With the Vampire, because there’s so much to talk about, about it.
ELM: I’ve only seen one episode and I have so much to say. OK, but—
FK: [overlapping] I know.
ELM: We’re not, we’re not doing that right now. Right now we’re going to look at—This Is Your Life As a Fansplaining Co-Host. [FK laughs] Over the last nine years.
FK: Sure. I mean, is it more gonna be this is my life, or is it more going to be this is like, the life of Fansplaining over the past years? Because I feel like there’s a lot to talk about, as far as just, how fandom has changed. Like, it has been a long time [laughs] that we have been doing this podcast.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: And I was shocked thinking about like, what was—you know, you were like, what was, what’s changed since 2015? It’s like, what was I even doing in 2015? Oh wow. That was a long time ago.
ELM: OK, well, let’s take people back. Because I’m sure some people listening have literally listened for nine years. Maybe don’t remember where we started, [FK laughs] like, not everyone has mainlined it in the last month, right? Some people, I know, listen more sporadically and maybe haven’t gone back to the very beginning either.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: But like, let’s situate—not just you, but both of us.
FK: I was gonna say, you too, you gotta do this too. We’re goin’ down memory lane.
ELM: [overlapping] All right. All right. All right, all right: 2015, Comic-Con, meet on the panel, start this podcast…what were you doing? Professionally and in fandom?
FK: Right, so in 2015, I was…it wasn’t a new thing, but it was relatively fresh that I was working with people in the film industry. Like, it had been a couple of years, maybe, one or two years.
ELM: Wait, when did you graduate from grad school?
FK: I graduated from grad school in 2010, but I was working mostly in TV and marketing at first.
ELM: [overlapping] Oh, oh.
FK: [overlapping] I had a different company.
ELM: [overlapping] Film versus TV. Yeah, all right.
FK: Yeah, I’m sorry, this does matter to people. [laughs]
ELM: OK, I get it, I get it now. [laughs]
FK: So, I had had another company, and then that company had ended, and we’d started this new one, and it was much more film- and TV-based. And I’d been doing that for maybe a year or two. And I was…sort of in between fandoms, I was just at—like, I was just about to discover One Direction, I think?
ELM: Yeah. That literally happened within the first like…six weeks of the podcast.
FK: Right. But I hadn’t discovered that yet. So I was feeling kind of in between fandoms, I was like, still in Harry Potter kind of, but it was odd. I wasn’t really into Star Trek at that point, that much—I mean I’d seen Star Trek, but I wasn’t like, in Star Trek in the same way that I am now. And I would say like, I was very focused on things in fandom that were measurable?
ELM: [laughs] Are we already gonna talk about that early fight?
FK: No, we are, we are! Because this is one of the things, I mean I am still, I’m still kinda focused on that. But I think that I was very much in that space of like—because of the kind of work I was doing, I was really focused on things that you could measure, things that you could see, things that you could count. And…I was really engaged in sort of trying to figure out how to do that. And I was not actually terribly interested in, like, soul searching. [both laugh] That’s how I would, that’s how I would describe where I was at at that moment. What about you?
ELM: [overlapping] All right! Well, contextual—no, first, before we talk about me, contextualize this a little bit, I think it’s important for people to remember, ten years ago—I mean, it’s nine years ago, but—a decade ago, we’re talking about like, this was the moment with fandom when…there are a few things that I think made it particularly metrics-driven at that time. Obviously this was your work, but, like, Twitter was really positioning itself as like, this is the platform where people gather to have these big conversations, right, you know?
FK: Mmm hmm.
ELM: And so, in a way that…I don’t think, I mean people talk about TikTok numbers all the time, but no one’s talking about TikTok as a conversational platform, even if—obviously people are interacting with each other—that’s not the way it’s discussed, right? It’s discussed as content creation.
FK: Right. And—Twitter was positioning it that way, and it was also providing, it was genuinely providing metrics. And that was kind of a new thing, you know? I mean, it was still fresh and exciting that you were able to get all of these numbers.
ELM: Well, and they were actively courting it, remember there was a lot of talk around that time about them saying like, maybe this solves the second screen problem, maybe you’ll be watching…
FK: Yes!
ELM: Watching the movie or the basketball game or whatever, live in Twitter, and then having a conversation, you know?
FK: Exactly. And that had been going on for a little while, but they were like, really, the firehose was available, and all of these tools had just sort of spun up to enable you to use that really well, even if you were not yourself a huge programmer. Or if you were, but you were lazy. [laughs] You know?
ELM: Yeah. Right.
FK: And those things were suddenly becoming accessible enough that they were part of the conversation in entertainment spaces, as well as I think in fandom spaces, right? People were…it was just in the air. That was what was going on.
ELM: Right, and I think it’s interesting, obviously the last two years of Twitter’s story are incredibly stupid and not worth talking about, but it’s interesting to think about like, how Twitter got an even bigger and bigger space for fandom, but not in a way that I think Twitter necessarily wanted. Like, stan culture kind of spun out of control—
FK: Right.
ELM: —in the same way that was mirrored with, like, political stuff spiraling out of control, which is a kind of parallel stan culture dynamics, you know?
FK: Right.
ELM: And Twitter came to be seen as kind of this very loud, very toxic space…pretty quickly after that, right? And then obviously just took a total nosedive and is now like, “nudes in bio” central, right? [both laugh]
FK: Right. Yes. “Buy my shitty cryptocurrency.” [ELM laughs] Um…yeah, and I mean I think also at that time there was a lot of, use this branded hashtag.
ELM: Yes. Yeah.
FK: And people used them! You know? [laughs]
ELM: Well, and like, getting little…getting this little special custom emoji made for the event, you know, like Captain America: Civil War, you could use your little guy, right?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Like, obviously that stuff lasted for a while, but that was the moment when I feel like it was really happening.
FK: It was just starting, it was like, blossoming. That was when people were like, “Oh, we could do this, let’s do it.” You know?
ELM: Right. Right. And then the other thing that I would say, thinking back to that time, that is really what I think of as the apex of film franchise build—like that was the moment when they were really convinced that like, it’s the height of the MCU, right, this is it.
FK: And a lot of the sort of transmedia crossover stuff overall was at its peak. Yeah. Exactly.
ELM: Yeah. Yeah.
FK: It was…
ELM: And so this kind of idea that you could have all these numbers across all these different places, right, you know?
FK: Mmm hmm. Right. Which was sort of what…I mean, that was what my early career had been built on in this, right, was being one of Henry Jenkins’ students, and people who are here in fan studies know Henry Jenkins from fan studies, but actually, I think, far more influentially in the film industry, he wrote this book Convergence Culture, and that really spawned the idea of transmedia storytelling in a lot of ways. Spawned, in fact, a lot of stuff, like what the MCU is doing across TV, you know? He wasn’t the only one talking about that, but he was sort of the granddaddy of it.
ELM: Yeah. Literally, Big Granddaddy Energy.
FK: Oh. The Biggest.
ELM: [laughs] That’s a compliment.
FK: It is a compliment. But yeah, so I mean…I was in probably the peak moment where my fan culture, my fandom and my work were really connected to each other, and I felt like I was doing both those things at the same time, and like… [laughs] You know?
ELM: Yeah.
FK: But where were you? Because I…you were in a different position vis-à-vis all of this. [ELM laughs] Like, very different.
ELM: I know you don’t want me to reference the fact that you had read my articles before you’d met me and resented me. But I’m gonna say it.
FK: Of course I resented you, are you kidding? [ELM laughs] Absolutely I resented you, I was like, “Who’s this chick?” [both laugh]
ELM: Um…that’s fine. It’s good to, good to go down memory lane. Yeah, 2015, so I had um…the first thing I really wrote about fandom was in 2012 when Fifty Shades of Grey came out.
FK: Mmm hmm.
ELM: And I was super annoyed with the media coverage, and so I wrote like—as I’m sure I’ve referenced a thousand times here—I wrote the very classic first-panel-of-the-galaxy-brain, “Isn’t actually, you know, Paradise Lost fanfiction? Huh? Huh? Huh? [FK laughs] And also it’s not all sex, OK? It’s actually pretty serious.”
FK: Look, for 2012, that was a daring and forward-thinking article. [both laugh]
ELM: Well, it was just because I was literally—I was slowly going insane, just reading all these terrible, terrible—
FK: Right.
ELM: It’s interesting now, we’ve talked about this so recently, with the “Manacled” stuff, but it feels very similar to now, where it felt like we were really losing the plot and people from outside of fanfiction were saying, “What a fun trend! This is gonna really change things, I hope there’s more fanfiction like this,” and I was like, “I don’t hope that.” [FK laughs] Which, I mean, I guess that was like a huge…it does give me a little bit of hope for, that we’re not totally losing the plot here with the “Manacled” stuff. Because that didn’t destroy fanfiction as we know it, in 2012, you know?
FK: No, and that was much bigger than “Manacled,” honestly, it was.
ELM: You say that, but…I mean that was one flash in the pan, how many things are being yanked off—all right, anyway. Let’s not talk about it now. [FK laughs] Let’s not worry now. So, that was the first thing I wrote, and then I wrote another piece…this was all at The Millions, which was a pretty big book site at the time.
FK: Yup.
ELM: So I wrote a bunch of pop culturey things for them, in addition to writing normal book criticism. I wrote another one about when Kindle Worlds was introduced.
FK: Oh yeah!
ELM: You know, being like, “I…don’t like this.” You know? [laughs]
FK: Yes. Wow, Kindle Worlds, I have not thought about Kindle Worlds in a minute. [both laugh]
ELM: I hadn’t either!
FK: [overlapping] I also didn’t like that. [laughs]
ELM: But I was just looking at my list of pieces for some other reason, I have a whole list on my, on my website, of all my clips, and I was looking at what I had written for The Millions, and I saw the one about Kindle Worlds and I was like, “I literally blocked that out.”
FK: But that was also like, such a thing of its time, you know, one of the things that I was really into for a while, just shortly before we met, was I really wanted to convince companies to do something kind of like Creative Commons licensing, where they would, like, explicitly permit certain uses of their characters and so forth.
ELM: Mmm. Mmm hmm.
FK: Like, I was really really hot on this idea. And now I think about it and I’m like, that would have never worked for all the same reasons that Kindle Worlds didn’t work, you know what I mean? Like, there are lots of bad parts of it, but at the time it felt like…maybe? [both laugh]
ELM: You, so you wanted to build a sandbox, but like a nice, free sandbox.
FK: I think that it was more like, there were a lot of things where companies would like, you knew they were never going to make this merchandise, because it was never going to be something that would be big and money-making enough?
ELM: Mmm hmm, mmm hmm.
FK: And so I was trying to convince them that like, “I know that you want to be conservative and hold onto the rights to absolutely everything, but you could give away this chunk of things.”
ELM: Yeah.
FK: You know what I mean? Like, “You’re never gonna make tea sets, so why don’t you just say anyone can make a tea set?” [ELM laughs] I mean obviously that’s not what, that’s not the category, but you know what I’m trying to say, right?
ELM: Yeah! Yeah yeah yeah. Totally.
FK: So I was trying to convince people that that was maybe a good strategy. And again, I don’t think that it actually would have worked, now that I look back on it 10 years later almost, but… [laughs]
ELM: That’s funny.
FK: [overlapping] You know, at the time, again, it felt like, it felt like that was a possibility, right? It felt like there was a chance that maybe…
ELM: Yeah.
FK: Maybe some sandboxes could be good sandboxes.
ELM: Yeah. Kindle Worlds? Not that.
FK: No, Kindle Worlds was not that. [laughs]
ELM: But anyway. Not to linger too much on my every individual piece that I wrote at that time, but very quickly, TL;DR: in 20—when Sherlock season three came out in 2014 I wrote a piece talking about like, fan reactions to that, fan reactions to when Conan Doyle killed Sherlock Holmes in the 1890s, very buttoned-up, you know… “Oh, this is a serious piece” or whatever, and then I wrote to my editor and I was like, “Can I write another piece about Sherlock that’s like, [FK laughs] actually how I feel?” And so I wrote this piece called “Fangirl,” and it was really just kind of a coming-out-as-a-fan piece.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And it was a huge hit! And like, tons of people—especially in Sherlock fandom, so now I have all these mutuals who are like…like EarlGreyTea, I have all these Sherlock fandom, like, BNF mutuals, and I was like, “I didn’t actually write any Sherlock fic or create anything, [FK laughs] all I did was write an article that people really liked.” Whatever, I created something. And so that led to me writing regularly for the New Statesman. So in 2015 that was mostly where I was writing.
FK: Right.
ELM: I had a regular column on fandom that I started in 2014.
FK: Yup.
ELM: And at the time the kinds of things that I was covering were very of that moment, so like…you know, I wrote a piece about the Sad Puppies at the Hugos, which—this is gonna be a blast from the past, everything I’m gonna say—that got Milo Yiannopoulos, got people to like, tweet shitty things at me, right? [FK laughs] And I was like, it’s like, oh man, can you imagine that, I can’t, that was so miserable, just imagining what the actual people involved, like, the actual victims in GamerGate were experiencing.
FK: Yeah, yeah.
ELM: This is the GamerGate era, right, this is shortly after that.
FK: It was, yeah.
ELM: I was writing pieces, trying to like…there’s so many pieces in 2015 or so, like the “toxic fandom” narrative was spinning up. The…
FK: Right.
ELM: All of these fourth wall things, you know, Graham Norton was—I didn’t know at the time that I would come to love them, but he was having Michael Fassbender and James McAvoy reenact Cherik fanart on the show.
FK: [laughs] Because it was, it was also sort of almost the height of that geek, you know, geek culture is really spinning up, sort of a thing. It wasn’t the height of like, when it was crammed into the most people’s eyeballs, but I feel like it was on that upswing where you’re like, oh, that’s where we’re going. [laughs] You know?
ELM: Yeah, but I mean, and different parts of it, so it’s like, oh, the MCU is really trendy, oh nerds are cool now, whatever, right?
FK: Mmm hmm.
ELM: But that was the big era of like—the Sherlock premiere, I went to the third season of Sherlock, in late 2013, and that was when Caitlin Moran had Cumberbatch and Freeman…
FK: Right…
ELM: Read someone’s fic. You know? Like, no one—and that was, it was devastating for the author, I know, they wrote about, so it’s like…that was that big time, so it was like this very rapid mainstreaming, it happened with Fifty Shades, and then there were people like, on your side—not you obviously, but like—people in the, on the industry side who were trying to capitalize on it in a shitty way, you know, like saying, “Oh, I hear you have a, there’s a ship war here, we’re gonna do tweets, are you Team Whatever or Team Whatever,” and it’s like…
FK: Oh, I mean, I wasn’t, I’m not above, I was not above ship-war tweeting, [ELM laughs] you know? To be clear, to be perfectly clear.
ELM: All right, I was trying to—I was trying to give you an out. [laughs]
FK: But probably not above ship-war tweeting, no, no, absolutely not.
ELM: That’s funny.
FK: I shouldn’t say that. There are certain kinds of that that I would not engage in. [laughs]
ELM: Right.
FK: But as a blanket statement? No, no. [laughs] I, uh…I think mostly I, mostly I was just like, I want people to know what they’re doing so they’re making a good strategic choice, because I feel like most of the people who are doing that did not really have any idea what they were playing with, you know what I mean?
ELM: Yeah, 100%. I mean, I think that one thing that we’ve always been united on, and I think even from the very beginning, is we both saw what was happening and were both like, very realistic about the fact that like, [FK laughs] you know, the horse is running, the barn is open…is that the expression? I tried, I tried to do this one a few episodes ago and I didn’t get it right then either.
FK: [overlapping] Yes. Yes, the barn door is open, and the horse is running, there is no point trying to close the barn door.
ELM: [overlapping] Horse…out… Right. So like, you can either ride the horse, or you can like… [FK laughs] uh, you can write articles about horses, just like, kind of explaining, don’t be mean to the horse, you know…the fan is the horse there… [laughs]
FK: [laughing, overlapping] Right. What, what, what is the horse in this metaphor? But yeah, no, I definitely agree with that. And that was one of the things that I felt like when we initially met, was like…I was like, “Oh! Yeah!” You know? [laughs]
ELM: Right. But it was interesting, and you know, we’re friends with people who were on that panel, but the panel kind of represented—where we met—represented that moment, too, but it was really interesting because there were people from different corporations there that all had a vested interest in fans.
FK: Right.
ELM: And neither of us were coming from that position.
FK: No.
ELM: And the reason we always say people were talking across each other is because these corporations had different—their vested interests were quite different, and somewhat oppositional, and it’s interesting to think about like, where… I mean, just to name, one was Wattpad, one was Tumblr, you know, and just to see kinda the trajectory that those companies have taken with their users, their fan-users, since then, is…interesting. [laughs]
FK: Right. And to be clear, I don’t think that either of those were particularly like, you know, bad offenders of not knowing what they were playing with. [laughs] There were other people who I had a bigger problem with, you know, Tumblr and Wattpad had actually, both, I felt like, were fairly well-informed—it was not a misinformed situation, it was just a situation where…yeah, they had very different interests.
ELM: Right, and not necessarily, you know—and then someone from the OTW was there, too, so it’s like, that is something that is just about fans, and obviously they’ve had their share of problems, but, like, they exist for fans, as opposed to these other companies.
FK: Actually, they had a completely different, you know…OTW folks in general had a completely different attitude toward all this than those people—I mean, to some extent me, who were like, playing in the corporate world to some extent, [laughs] right?
ELM: Yeah, yeah.
FK: And correctly so, to be clear, I’m glad that they’re doing that thing.
ELM: Right.
FK: It was not a non-conflictual situation.
ELM: Yeah, so it’s interesting, because I feel like…just looking back to that stretch of time, we’ve seen… The mainstreaming I think has fully happened, right? You know?
FK: Oh, yeah.
ELM: I think that was—
FK: Utterly.
ELM: That was the biggest thing that you could feel happening at the time, and it was like, “Oh shit, what’s going on here?” And you know, it’s like, it’s interesting to think about, there are people who listen to the podcast now, and certain people who are in fandom now, who when all of this was going down, were like, you know, teenagers. Right? And like, [FK laughs] this is, so we were like, “Oh, God, the winds of change, how can we help navigate them,” whatever, whereas this is the world of fandom that they’ve always known.
FK: Right.
ELM: And there’s so, so, so many more younger fans than there were when we were younger fans.
FK: [overlapping] Oh, yeah. Yeah.
ELM: Just because of the nature of the scale of this, right, and the exposure, you know? And to see, a decade later, how much of what I thought of, you know, in 2016-2017, as a “fandom” thing, is a Gen-Z thing. You know? [FK laughs] And I’m not saying that all of Gen Z is the same or whatever. But like, the purity culture stuff, you know?
FK: Yeah!
ELM: Or like, there’s things within fandom that we were observing then, now it’s just like, you see normies being like, “What’s up with the kids, why are they talkin’ this way?” I don’t think that, there aren’t hard lines between…everyone in Gen Z seems a little fandomy to me.
FK: I think that’s, that’s absolutely right. And what’s funny, what’s really blowing my mind thinking about this is that in 2015 I would have said, fandom has already mainstreamed so much, right?
ELM: Yeah.
FK: If I was in 2015 looking back at 2005, [ELM laughs] I would be like “Wow!” And now I feel like fandom has mainstreamed so much that it has almost…you know, it has…like, in 2015 was also almost the peak of sort of that centralization.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: Like, at Comic-Con, 2015, 2016 maybe. But 2015 for sure, that era—when I think about, like, the era of everyone is at Comic-Con—by everyone I mean all the celebrities from all the things, all the corporate…
ELM: Yeah.
FK: Twilight has busted the door open to it being not just about comics…it was never just about comics, but in the narrative, that’s what’s going on. [laughs]
ELM: Not just about properties related to comics.
FK: Exactly. [laughs] I mean—and I’m gonna be a little bit silly here, but that was also the era of like, the really rockin’ Comic-Con parties, [ELM laughs] where you were like, there’s every, there’s the party with every A-lister, and there’s the party with every B-lister, and the party with every C-lister, which one can you make it into, you know? [laughs] And I mean, it was just a moment where it felt like there was so much different stuff all coming together, and so much money and heat and attention, and also fans from so many places.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: And that has blown apart, and become molecularized, right, like Star Wars does its own thing, this does its own thing, that does its own thing. And they’re all very corporate. [laughs] You know?
ELM: Right. Right. Yeah, yeah, totally.
FK: But they’re not together, and corporate. [laughs]
ELM: Well I think that, because I see this more broadly reflected in all sorts of, like, you know, now it feels like there’s a kind of con-ization of everything.
FK: Right.
ELM: You know, I mean obviously like, there’s BravoCon, right?
FK: Right!
ELM: Like, the idea…
FK: [overlapping] Exactly, this is exactly it.
ELM: Yeah! You know, like, I used to watch Bravo all the time in the 2000s, and the idea that there would someday be a con…you know? Where you could go and see like, the people from Top Chef or whatever, [FK laughs] or like, The Real Housewives, you know? I watched the original season of Real Housewives, the whole thing, so.
FK: I did not know, this is unplumbed depths of your psyche.
ELM: I would say the Minkels—just my sister and I, not my parents [FK laughs]—I think are deep down…I mean I watched, I watched Project Runway and Top Chef, and particularly Top Chef, for years. Which is weird, because I’m a vegetarian, and I loved Top Chef.
FK: Yeah, but Top Chef is compelling television, and in fact right now Top Chef is my…
ELM: Are you watching it now with the current—
FK: Oh yeah.
ELM: And the new host, she seems cool.
FK: I’m not watching it with the new host, I’m watching it because it’s something with a million seasons, so that if I can’t move off the couch ‘cause I’m too tired ‘cause I’m pregnant, I can just keep watching and there will be…I’m in season nine right now. [laughs]
ELM: Have you thought about watching, um…House, MD again? [laughs]
FK: I actually genuinely did think about it for a little while, [ELM laughs] and then I decided that I couldn’t do it twice in a row.
ELM: Anyway. No, but I watched several different Real Housewives, early on.
FK: Wow.
ELM: So, the point is, it’s not just that, or it’s like the…you know, the stuff going on with that, that D&D, the Dimension 20 thing that’s going on.
FK: Right, yeah.
ELM: [overlapping] Selling out Madison Square Garden, if you had told me that, like…I still don’t really understand the D&D thing, this is outside the scope of this podcast, [FK laughs] but like…it, the fact that that, that like a live-action D&D project can sell out a sports arena…
FK: [overlapping] There are things that are…
ELM: [overlapping] Just blows my mind!
FK: Can I, can I just say that as a, as a long-time roleplaying game player, why is it D&D and not White Wolf Games that are doing this, because White Wolf is so much better! OK I’m done now.
ELM: Outside the scope, Flourish, I already said, and yet you tried to put it in the scope. That’s outside the scope. [both laugh]
FK: I’m sorry, I couldn’t help it, I had like a, I have a visceral reaction every time I see a d20 and I want to be like “NO, d12!” Anyway.
ELM: All right. You, you get your cred points, don’t worry.
FK: I, I just want it to not be D&D.
ELM: OK. Anyway. [laughs] So, you have this con-ization of everything, right?
FK: Right.
ELM: You know, and this kind of idea…and I think that follows on from this kind of, the mainstreaming and the mass-culturization of fandom, I definitely think. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it lowered the barrier to entry of even claiming a fannishness, right, you know?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: I think that—and I’m not, I’m not trying to be like, “Oh, you should have to read every single Captain America comic” or whatever. [FK laughs] But the fact that you could go to Target, buy a Captain America shirt, and then show up for the movie on opening night and then you’re a superfan, you know?
FK: Right.
ELM: I think suggests something about—the fact that around the time that we started this podcast, people, marketers started using the term “superfan.” Right?
FK: Right. [laughs]
ELM: Because they had to create an additional category to which they could sell extra things, and not just the fan category that assumed that you would show up, right?
FK: [overlapping] “Fan.” Right.
ELM: I think that this is all kind of connecting into this sort of idea—there’s a sort of cheapness to the way people talk about fans now, you know? I think you see it in TikTok, when people talk about subcultures there, and what they really mean is a trend. [FK laughs] You know? Like, cottagecore is a bad example because that’s all over the place, but like, you know, the, like the mafia, the mob-wife thing.
FK: Yes.
ELM: And it’s just like, OK, so people just chase these trends for a few weeks and they post about them a bunch, and then you could say this many million people watch videos about this, and then it’s gone, and you’re, like, calling it a subculture?
FK: Right.
ELM: You know what I mean? And it’s like, that’s, what are words anymore, right? So it’s this kind of like…this sort of shallowness…
FK: Yeah…I think, when I think about this, I think about the term “superfan” and I think about the ways that people identify “superfans” around that time, and the way that that has sort of continued. And one thing that I noticed then is that a lot of that, when you were talking with people on the corporate side, or if you were like, talking about who are they gonna reach out to, right? It often had to do with some kind of impressive feat. Like owning the most stuff.
ELM: [laughs] Yes.
FK: Or, having a lot of followers on something actually it was less important in certain, in some ways, but having a website with all the stuff, or…there was like a feat element to it. You know? You had to, or…
ELM: Well…it’s the era when people were like, doing news stories about how long you camp out for the iPhone, right?
FK: Exactly, exactly. Camping out for a long time, or this or that or the other, right? I don’t think that that’s necessarily the wrong thing to do in certain ways, in certain contexts, as far as like, seeking out a fan to profile or whatever, you know what I mean?
ELM: Yeah.
FK: Like, sure, I guess so? But it definitely led to…again I think we go back to sort of this question of metrics and measurability, and the question of like, whether that measurability or visibility thing is the most important thing for fans, and is it a useful thing for corporations, and I don’t think that either of those things is necessarily always true. [laughs] Right?
ELM: Yeah. Yeah.
FK: But at the time, because you could sort of surface all this stuff and find it, it was like, “Oh, this is a new world.” But also, again, it didn’t mean that anybody on the corporate side understood what was going on in the hearts of any of those people. [laughs] You know?
ELM: Right, right. Yeah. I mean, that speaks to exactly the kind of…it’s like, Hollywood looking at the output, looking at the affect, the emotional connection that someone had, and kind of just…trying to reverse engineer it I guess?
FK: Right.
ELM: Or like, say “If we make more, then they’re gonna feel this way,” and you look at the IP, the endless IP recycling—which was well underway at that point.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: But I think it really, it’s really gotten to a truly stupid point. [FK laughs] Like, I feel like I could’ve said that every year since then, but…
FK: No, but finding out they’re doing a new Lord of the Rings is like, really?
ELM: [overlapping] Oh my God, they’re doing two.
FK: I know.
ELM: Gollum part one, two.
FK: No no no, it’s not that, it’s the reboot of Lord of the Rings.
ELM: Oh!
FK: The Hunt for Gollum is its own issue, we can talk about that, but the idea that they’re going to reboot the Lord of the Rings films…
ELM: I did, I did see that. It’s embarrassing! They should be embarrassed, everyone should feel bad about that.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: David Zaslav should be embarrassed.
FK: I agree completely.
ELM: [laughing] For so many reasons.
FK: [laughing, overlapping] Do not reboot the Lord of the Rings films, for the love of God.
ELM: Right, and like, this idea that you could look at the current Lord of the Rings fandom—I mean it’s so, it’s so masks-off at this point, right? Like, look at the deep, deep love people have for those movies, and the fact that every year millions of people rewatch those movies in a very ritualistic, fannish way, right, and you’re…
FK: The fact that they sold out Radio City Music Hall like, four times to have the live singing version [ELM laughs] of it, because… [laughs] Yeah.
ELM: Right, right. And then, but where does that leave you? If you’re Hollywood, how are you making money from me—not me personally, but like one watching their special-issue DVD into a pulp, right?
FK: Rewatching. Right.
ELM: They don’t. You know? And so the only thing they can see is, “Oh, they loved this, so I guess we should do it again, they’ll probably see it out of curiosity, right?” [both laugh] You know? It’s like, it’s so, I don’t know how much data people need at this point to see that this is not a winning strategy, but like…
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Over the length of this podcast we’ve just seen this devolve so much, and so much evidence, at this point.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Like in the beginning you’re like, “This feels tired, is this what we’re doing?” And now you’re like, “This is tired, are you looking at… [FK laughs] all these,” you know? I don’t know if you saw this the other day, the, one of the Russo brothers, maybe it was both of them, I don’t know. [FK laughs] The directors of the, you know, the…
FK: Oh yes.
ELM: They directed Infinity War and Endgame. And they said the reason, it’s not superhero fatigue that the MCU has been flagging, it’s that Gen Z doesn’t wanna go to the movies and they just want like, Quee-bee videos or whatever. Qeep—Qooby? Quibi? I don’t remember how to… [both laugh]
FK: I had also forgotten about…Quibi, or whatever it was.
ELM: [laughs] You know, and it’s like…oh God, how out of touch! Like, there was a tweet which rightly said, “Yeah, that’s why that movie about *checks notes* famed nuclear physicist [FK laughs] J. Robert Oppenheimer made a billion dollars at the box office,” you know, it’s just like…
FK: Right.
ELM: I don’t think it’s that.
FK: Right.
ELM: I don’t think, obviously I think that attention spans, I think the way we consume media, it has changed a lot over the course of this pod, I think it’s changed quite quickly, you know?
FK: Oh, yes.
ELM: But I think, and partly in response to the way that the—we’ve talked about this at length with television—the way that the models have changed, right?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: But obviously there’s some element of people, including you and me, that still like goin’ to the pictures. [laughs]
FK: Also, attention spans is BS, people are binging things, you know, in ways that require actual attention being paid to them over a long period of time, right? You know? Like, it is obvious that it’s not the length of it. [laughs]
ELM: Yeah, it’s not my fault that you keep makin’ the same old crappy superhero green-screen city, you know, like, I don’t know, I tried to watch a few of the more recent MCU things just out of curiosity, and I didn’t make it very far at all, because it’s just…you know, they felt quite flat. And it’s a shame, because of course as has been widely remarked upon, they are much more diverse now then they were before. But like…even the ones that aren’t particularly diverse, the quality of them, they just feel, it’s just so stale. You know?
FK: And, and we’re seeing that in fan response. I mean obviously there’s still people who love the MCU and who are seeing all these things, but it is vastly different from the [laughing] way it was at the peak, right?
ELM: Yeah, I think that…all right, let’s talk a bit about, we’ve been talking about the industry side a lot, I think it’s worth talking about fandom. You know?
FK: Exactly, yeah.
ELM: I do think that around when we started this podcast, I think that there was, there was more within fandom—transformative fandom, let’s talk about our side of fandom—it wasn’t, I don’t wanna sit here and say it was like a bunch, kinda monoculture-y, right, but it did feel like a few fandoms took up a lot of oxygen.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And now, you know, if I look at the top 100 ships from last year, it’s all over the place, right? Like…
FK: Yep.
ELM: Maybe if I looked at the top 100 ships from 2014 or whatever I would say the same thing. And to be fair, Harry Potter, for example, is still extremely dominant in fandom, right? So that’s not to say that there aren’t…but whatever Harry Potter fandom is doing right now is confusing to me, so there’s that, it’s not like they’re, you know, just saw the latest installment and they’re…
FK: Right, Harry Potter fandom is happening, but it’s not like…there’s not… [laughs] it also is fractured, right?
ELM: Yeah, definitely fractured, but also like…you know, I’m not gonna say that I’m a deep studier of the Harry Potter fandom currently, because I don’t personally engage with it, but from what I’ve seen, too, it’s a little bit like a reflection, and I think you see this in other fandoms, too, I think that we’re seeing, because so many people kind of swimming in the ether of fandom, right, and it just is like, a lens for their whole world?
FK: Mmm hmm. Right.
ELM: You know, a lot of Harry Potter fandom that I see feels like they’re kinda doing one big OC…you know what I mean? [FK laughs] Like, it’s shared names, and maybe shared world?
FK: Right. Right.
ELM: But actually they’re writing original fiction, you know? Some of the top Harry Potter ships are, like, characters that [laughing] didn’t have any lines in the book! Or like, never actually appear, they’re just referenced in passing?
FK: Right.
ELM: And so at that point it’s like, if you have that scale, and you have enough people who are fannish and who know fanfiction and wanna write fanfiction, but they’re actually writing kind of original fiction in this fanfiction space, you know what I mean? It’s to the scale…it’s something that I can’t imagine, when we were teenagers, that would’ve felt…
FK: Oh…
ELM: Wild, you know? Like…
FK: Absolutely unimaginable.
ELM: Right.
FK: And I think that that scale is part of why, I mean I do think the scale changing is part of why we’re seeing this not as much of a monoculture situation, I feel like in 2015, fandoms mainstreaming, all these people are coming in through the MCU, through Sherlock, through, you know, a few of these large fandoms—
ELM: Fifty Shades of Grey.
FK: Through Fifty Shades of Grey actually, through Twilight.
ELM: [overlapping] For real. Tons of people learned about fanfiction that way.
FK: Yeah. I mean through Twilight and then through Fifty Shades, and then onward, right? And those people were not in fandom because they had been like…a Star Trek fan for their whole life long, and are, you know, sort of having this ambient existence of fandom, right? [laughs]
ELM: Yeah.
FK: They’re here because something grabbed them, and then they discovered fandom. What are they gonna do next? The next thing that grabs them, they’re gonna go to the next thing, and they’re gonna go do fandom about that, right? Because now they’ve learned this way of being. And I think that…
ELM: Yeah. Well, but that’s, that’s what I did when I was 14.
FK: Oh, that’s what we all did.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: But I’m just saying that it’s a different situation to somebody who’s sort of operating in a…I do think it’s different, to some extent, than some of what you’re describing happening in Harry Potter, some of the people happening in Harry Potter, right, or in some of these sort of really large, long-term fandoms. That’s happening too. But there’s also the, “I’m going to go apply this lens to something else,” and when you have like, so many people doing that at once…
ELM: Yeah.
FK: That’s how we get to, now we’ve got 50 different K-pop fandoms, all of which would be unimaginably huge in 2005, any one of those K-pop fandoms would’ve been the biggest fandom, right?
ELM: Right, right.
FK: But that’s only the 50 K-pop fandoms, we’ve also got [laughing] all of these other ones, you know?
ELM: Yeah. Right.
FK: And it’s because people are taking this way of being to whatever thing gets them.
ELM: Right. Right, and I think this ties back to, you know, over the last couple of years we’ve talked at length about—and this is definitely something that’s changed since 2015—the rapid shortening of a life cycle, right?
FK: Oh, yeah. Yep.
ELM: And this kind of idea that like, people put their whole fannish selves into something while it’s airing—I mean, I’m geared up right now, I am ready for this Interview With the Vampire fanart to return, and I know in two months it’ll all be gone, right?
FK: Yeah. Yeah.
ELM: And I’m like, I gotta take it now, I gotta do as much as possible right now, right? Because they’re gonna go. You know what I mean?
FK: Well even, even my own behavior, I see myself doing this. I just started relistening to the Interview With the Vampire audiobook and I’m like, “Great.” [ELM laughs] You know? Like, over the next couple months I will do that, I will sleep deprivedly read, I’ll reread a bunch of Anne Rice novels, and I’ll probably get three our four more down the path, in her oeuvre…
ELM: Blood Canticle, here we come! [laughs]
FK: Right? [laughs] And then it will be gone. You know? Until the next season of Interview With the Vampire comes out. [laughs]
ELM: OK, but you’re talking about consuming, I’m talking about creating and participating.
FK: No, but I’m saying, I’m saying both, though, right?
ELM: Yeah.
FK: I’m saying that it’s not just, it’s consuming, it is creating, it’s participating, it’s the entire thing of like, well when it’s airing, or there’s this moment and it’s a short moment.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: As opposed to like, years ago, where it would’ve been, that would’ve been extended over the course of years, right?
ELM: Right, right, yeah, exactly. So it’s like, but, years ago, a lot of people maybe felt this way. Like you know, “Oh, my show’s back…”
FK: Right.
ELM: “I love it, think about it all the time.” But because they didn’t have access to fandom, because they didn’t know about it, because those modes and structures didn’t exist—in an an analog space, definitely not, right, because “fandom” is like, the Star Trek convention at your local, at the Ramada or whatever… [laughs]
FK: Right. Oh, the Ramada…
ELM: [laughing] I was trying to think, trying to think of the right hotel to put it in. [laughs]
FK: Yeah, yeah. Or because they had one thing that they did have fandom for, and then there wasn’t another thing to jump to, right?
ELM: Yeah, but I’m—
FK: When there was, when there was not a new Harry Potter book, there was no other fandom thing that I was as into [laughing] at that time, you know what I mean? That I was gonna jump over to and do. Because there weren’t that many fandoms.
ELM: Right, but I’m saying that there is also maybe a more…not necessarily, I’m not saying that people are less into stuff, but I definitely think—again, this is about kind of a lower bar of what fannishness means.
FK: Right.
ELM: Which isn’t always a bad thing, but if you’re like, “I am such a stan of that, I’m obsessed,” and it literally only lasts for the six weeks the show is on the air or whatever… [both laugh] And you know, the way that the, the language of…the ADHD language of “hyperfixation,” right, or autistic, you know…
FK: Right.
ELM: Neurodivergent language, obviously a lot of people using the term “hyperfixation” are neurodivergent, but the fact that that has entered the lexicon as a way you describe…you know?
FK: Yeah, absolutely.
ELM: A short-term obsession with something, which, that’s a whole other subject, but it’s like, the fact that that is now kind of an embedded part of the language. And I remember when that started and I saw neurodivergent people being like, “Uh…are we actually…” and now it seems like it’s jumped—it’s gone now, you know?
FK: Yeah, and there is an element of hyperbole to all of this also, right?
ELM: Yeah.
FK: I mean obviously there are people, and I know them, who are truly throwing, who are in it with their whole…self. But there’s a lot of people also who are…
ELM: Their whole self? Because you could’ve said they were in it with their whole something else, Flourish.
FK: I don’t know what I—I was looking for another word than self, but I couldn’t find it.
ELM: Oh, I was thinking of the internet expression where you do some variation on the word “pussy.”
FK: I mean maybe that was what I was looking for.
ELM: [overlapping] Your whole fan-ussy, you know? That kinda… [laughs]
FK: Maybe, maybe, maybe that was what I was looking for, I could not tell you. At this stage I feel like the child inside of me is, like, sapping at least, you know, a good 25% of my neurons.
ELM: [overlapping] Your whole Fl—your whole Flourishy. [laughs] I can’t…
FK: [laughing] You know, there just…I don’t know what happened, it’s a brain-sucking situation. Anyway. Point being though, that like, there are some people who are doing that, but there’s also a lot of people who are just, who are really into something, but they’re also using hyperbole to talk about how into something they are.
ELM: Yeah. Sure.
FK: And they’re talking about it a lot, and it’s very easy to repost stuff, as compared to the many hours that it might’ve taken you to [laughing] do similar things years ago. And so years ago, the only people doing this were the ones who were truly going to spend that many hours of their life.
Whereas now, you can say that you’re obsessed and feel into it, and I’m not trying to diss this, Because again I do this same thing, I’m like, “I’m so obsessed,” but I’m not obsessed the way I was obsessed about Harry Potter when I was 13, you know what I mean? [laughs] Not even the way that I was obsessed about One Direction in 2015. [laughs]
ELM: Right. Right. Yeah.
FK: That’s not the same thing. [laughs]
ELM: No, I mean I think a lot of this comes from the internet, from social media in general. And I think that it’s important…it’s important to say, too, we’re talking about nine years where, like, social media as we know it really, I would say really kicked off in 2010, right? Ish…
FK: Agreed. Agreed.
ELM: Yeah. You know, like obviously we had Facebook for half a decade at that point, a little more, but…
FK: And there was a little bit of Twitter, but like, not real Twitter. Twitter was not itself yet.
ELM: Yeah, and there’s also the somewhat pedantic distinction between social media and social network, right, you say like…
FK: Yeah yeah yeah.
ELM: But 2000s era Facebook prior…we talked about this before, when they introduced the news feed, we lost our minds. We were like, [FK laughs] “This is not what this site is for, I do not need all this noise here,” you know? Like…
FK: “This is a site purely for stalking people.” [ELM laughs]
ELM: Yeah, and putting up pictures from the party, and then they’re like, “Please take that down.”
FK: Yeah, yeah, “This is the site to put up literally 200 pictures every Friday and Saturday night.” We did this. Youths, you would be horrified to discover that we just, we just put our entire camera rolls on Facebook.
ELM: I didn’t.
FK: And let it all hang out.
ELM: Flourish, I gotta tell you, I don’t know if you’ve ever looked at my Facebook, but I made very beautiful, curated albums.
FK: Great. Most people… [ELM laughs] who were not you, just put their entire camera roll from that night that they got blackout drunk on Facebook and then like, prayed. You know? [both laugh]
ELM: Right. But so, if you think about like, you know, 2010—the 2010s really, that was Twitter starting, Instagram starting. Obviously Twitter started before that, but you know what I mean. Really started to get momentum, you know, beyond it being…
FK: [overlapping] And Twitter was very different in…Twitter was very different before that. [laughs]
ELM: Yeah.
FK: Twitter was quite different in 2008 than it was in 2010.
ELM: Right.
FK: You had to send text messages to things, children. [laughs]
ELM: All right, grandma, let’s get you to bed.
FK: Yeah, exactly.
ELM: Imagine me doing the actual meme right now.
FK: K.
ELM: [laughs] You know, yeah, but celebrities joining, right, celebrities being, like Instagram, celebrities coming on Instagram and all that stuff, right?
FK: Yeah, yeah.
ELM: Whereas, since the second half of the decade, I think it’s been all doom and gloom around social media. [FK laughs] We’re like, why—is this destroying society? It seems like it’s destroying society, you know?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And so like, I think a lot of the way that fandom acts and behaves, it’s not…I mean it’s a bit chicken-and-egg, right, but it’s like, a lot of it is because of these structures, a lot of it is because people either have come of age on these structures.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Or have changed, you know, people who are older have, like, come to embrace the language and the patterns, you know what I mean?
FK: [overlapping] Oh, God, yeah. My brain has been utterly rewired. [laughs]
ELM: Yeah.
FK: You know? Like, I remember what it was like before this, and it was not like this. [laughs]
ELM: So, you know, like…obviously yadda yadda yadda, you know, unprecedented levels of connection, and there’s so many good things you could talk about with all this, right?
FK: There are! And some of those things are real, some of those promises that people, in 2015, were still pretty bullish about, some of those are true!
ELM: Right.
FK: But.
ELM: But…I think with the… It’s hard, you know, when I think specifically about transformative fandom, and that’s so much of what we, we’ve talked about so many different elements of that over the years, obviously that’s our main focus. I do not get a lot of satisfied vibes right now.
FK: No. And that does have to do with platforms. And not just the big corporate ones.
ELM: Yeah, I mean, I think the platforms are a part of it, I think that the…we talked about the television networks, right, you know? And obviously not everyone’s in a TV fandom, but like, that stuff sucks. What’s going on with movies sucks, right? Like…
FK: What’s going on with Ticketmaster sucks.
ELM: [laughs] I mean, is that really about transformative fandom, not so much, but like, you know, that’s true, it does, that’s a fandom thing that sucks.
FK: [overlapping] No, but well, but it does like, if you’re in a music, if you’re in a music fandom, it does relate to that ultimately, right?
ELM: Yeah, I mean, I don’t know, if you can’t go see Taylor Swift, can you still write RPF about her? Yes, you can, but…
FK: You can, but it’s…anyway. [ELM laughs]
ELM: Yeah. And like, you know, I feel like this entire time…in the early days of the podcast, you know, there are people complaining about how [laughing] LiveJournal was gone, and like…it’s still, I feel like, a) I don’t think LiveJournal was that great, b) this still, nothing has solved the, “Oh, it’s too decentralized, I can’t find where I can talk to people, oh it’s so loud—”
FK: Yeah.
ELM: “Oh, this fandom’s so dead, oh, this fandom is too noisy and it’s full of stupid people’s opinions,” [FK laughs] right, you know? And it’s like…I’m not saying that things were magical in previous eras, but I just feel like everyone is like, “This isn’t what I want.” And…I don’t know, you know?
FK: Well, and a bunch of it comes from people trying to make things that we did want, right? Like, I mean when I think about how happy I was with the AO3 having like, good ship-pairing tagging, you know? The AO3’s tag system, I was so happy with, and now I’m like…I don’t know that it’s helped. [both laugh] I think that maybe it’s made things worse. Maybe, maybe this was too much. [laughs]
ELM: We talked about this in the last episode, obviously, and we’ve talked about this a million times, right, but like…yeah, kinda? You know? Or like…I saw, there’s so many, I mean it’s a, it’s very much—you know, I wrote a piece last year for WIRED about affordances, right, and this kind of idea—
FK: Yeah. Right.
ELM: What a platform allows you to do, and this sort of idea that the platforms kind of rewire our brains, you know? And this question—
FK: Yeah, they discipline your thought.
ELM: Right? Yeah, and you’re like, “Well this is, there’s a box of this shape, and so I’m gonna make things that fit in that box.”
FK: Right.
ELM: And I think that the AO3 is a…the effect that that has had on fandom. In its own way, and we looked at this last, but Wattpad too has had a huge effect on a certain generation of fan creators, and the way that they think about…
FK: Right. That’s right.
ELM: Chapters, you know? Or the way that they think about…right? But the AO3…in a way, great tagging system, right? As obviously…
FK: Yes! I, to be clear, I think that this is a triumph, and it’s also… [both laugh]
ELM: But like, you know, I saw a post the other day too, not just about the tags but like, I saw a post the other day and it was like…you know, totally well-meaning person, but like, my God. And they said…the post was like, “How do you guys determine if you’re gonna read a fic? I usually go by a kudos to hits ratio of 1:10.” [laughing] The face you just made…was the best…
FK: [laughing] If only this was a video podcast…
ELM: And then the first reblog on the chain I saw was “I blame Amazon for this.” And it’s like, OK, sure. But like, I blame the AO3 for this, they didn’t have to make those stats public.
FK: Yeah. Yeah.
ELM: They made a choice. You know? And…
FK: [laughing] I feel like I should note that it was, it was actually the yikes emoji face, I think, that I was making. [both laughing] Because there could’ve been a lot of faces. But it was the yikes emoji face.
ELM: Would you say it’s…
FK: [overlapping] And I’m still feeling very yikes.
ELM: The grimace, it was a little bit like, you know, with the big teeth, yeah, now you’re doing it, thank you.
FK: Exactly, the yikes one, that to me is the yikes one.
ELM: [overlapping] Yeah, yeah, yikes. [FK laughs] Like, yeah, they made that choice, and now you have people worried about the metrics, and…
FK: Right.
ELM: “Oh, I’m not gonna read this fic because it doesn’t have enough kudos” or whatever, you know, and it’s like… [sighs] oh God. And it’s like, you can’t wholly blame them, because this behavior also is, like, all of social media is about how much engagement, “engagement,” you get. But again, they did make a design choice to surface…
FK: Right.
ELM: Things like hits, which you never would have any sense of that on LiveJournal, you know?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: I have literally no idea, some of the fic I wrote in the 2000s, if it was popular or not. Like obviously I knew some things would show up on rec lists a lot.
FK: How many comments were there, maybe.
ELM: Yeah, maybe comments, but even then, like, a story that was good with a lot of comments, it would have like, 40 comments?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: You know, right? [laughs] And like, I loved it and I didn’t comment, [FK laughs] because I was a lurker, you know?
FK: Right.
ELM: I don’t know, it’s, it’s very…it bums me out. I’m bummed out.
FK: Yeah, me too. I…I don’t know. For me so much of the journey since we started with this podcast has really been a journey of…I’m gonna say like, disillusionment with…
ELM: [laughs] OK…
FK: Online life in general, you know what I mean? I mean, not that I had that many illusions at the beginning of it, but I think I had an idea of like…well, there’s lots of stuff that sucks, but we can make it better.
ELM: Mmm.
FK: And I think I’ve lost the idea that…I could make it better. [laughs]
ELM: [overlapping] That Obama, the Obama spirit really drifted away, huh? Yes we can’t. [laughs]
FK: [overlapping] Yeah, it really drifted away, I don’t know that we can, and…I have been on a journey more towards like, towards in person things, towards physical things, towards, you know, just not engaging as much online. And that has been true in a very slow-burn way, I think, over the course of the entire podcast actually.
ELM: Slow burn, that’s a really popular tag, Flourish.
FK: Oh my God. You know what I’m saying though. It’s interesting to me to think back those ten years, and think about what place I was in then and what place I’m in now. Maybe my feelings about internet fan—the internet in general and internet fandom will be different in time, but…it’s felt really depressing to me. [both laugh]
ELM: Well, I mean, you know, we’ve said…you haven’t really had a fandom. I mean obviously you’re, you feel it for Star Trek or whatever, right, but like, not in that way, you haven’t had a participatory fandom in years now.
FK: Yeah, I haven’t been…I mean, I think that by anybody’s metric I’m a big Star Trek fan, but not…yeah, ironically enough, I have gone from being super, super participatory…
ELM: Lurkerrrr…
FK: To becoming a lurker, exactly!
ELM: [laughs] That’s so funny.
FK: And I don’t, I don’t know. Maybe that will change someday.
ELM: Yeah, I mean I feel like we’ve been saying that since you last, like, drifted away from participatory fandom, you know?
FK: [overlapping] That’s the problem! That’s the problem. I feel like I’ve been saying it [laughing] for a really long time now!
ELM: Yeah, yeah. Because this is like, I think about when I didn’t have…you know, I still would say when I was lurking, I extremely, I felt like I was a part of participatory fandom, right?
FK: Right.
ELM: You know, I was kind of actively reading, and like, lurkin’ on people’s LiveJournals or whatever, right?
FK: Yeah, yeah.
ELM: There was a period where I wasn’t really in fandom at all, but it was only a couple of years, and it was partly somewhat circumstantial, like, I didn’t have the internet for a few months, right? [FK laughs]
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Well, I did, but it as, like, you know, I lived in a hostel in a room with 14 other people, my computer kept dying because I didn’t have anywhere to plug it in, you know. [laughs]
FK: Right, right. Totally. Totally different.
ELM: Well it’s very funny to think about, because it’s like, if that was now, I would have a phone.
FK: Yep.
ELM: And I assume I would be able to charge my phone.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: [laughs] You know? And so I probably would be, I probably would’ve been reading fanfiction all the time, you know?
FK: Totally.
ELM: But I remember, it was in 2007, and I remember I was there, I was in Scotland, you know, along with J. K. Rowling herself somewhere around the corner, and she put out her statement about Dumbledore being gay, and I remember being like…that was like a missive from a foreign land. [FK laughs] I was just so disconnected from the internet, I was like, “Oh, what news?” You know? [FK laughs]
FK: Right, right.
ELM: She just issued a press release from probably literally like, two miles from where I was or whatever. [laughs]
FK: Totally.
ELM: That was circumstantial, I feel like you’re having some circumstantial stuff. But also like, I feel like someone who is far more participatory than I ever was in the last five years, it feels like an uphill battle, you know?
FK: Right.
ELM: I, I love writing the fic that I do, and I love the responses that I get, and I love, you know, making friends with people, with my pseud and stuff like that. But, you know, I’ve talked about this before, it’s a bummer to see people come into a longer-running fandom and be like, “Oh, it’s so dead,” and it’s like, fuck off, you know? [FK laughs] Get outta here. Or like, “I love this, too bad that no one else does,” and it’s like, we can all see you. You know?
FK: Right.
ELM: We’re all right here. Or like, “I wish someone,” the thing I’ve been seeing so much recently, which I’m slightly losing my mind, is like, “If only someone would write x kind of AU,” and it’s like, I can name five of them!
FK: Yep.
ELM: And it’s not like they were all written in 2011 either. AO3 has a wonderful search functionality, in fact you could just look at Cherik and then… [laughs]
FK: As we’ve, as we’ve noted with the tags. [both laugh]
ELM: You know? And it’s like…I don’t, I don’t really understand…I’ve talked about this here before, there’s been so much commentary about this, but people will put in the comments, you know, that they’re worried it’s too late for them to comment on a story that’s only a few years old. And it’s like, I don’t know what to—I’m obviously still there. Like, you know, I published a story recently, right? And even if I hadn’t, would I find it offensive that you were like…? [laughs]
FK: “I read this years later.” No.
ELM: No! And like, if it was something that was truly dead to me, I feel like I probably—you know, if you disavow a past fandom, you probably orphan your works, you know? Like…or delete them outright.
FK: Right. And that’s pretty strange to me too, is the idea that those old things are…yeah, that there’s this time limit.
ELM: But this, we’ve been talking about this for years, and it just feels like it’s reached its fever pitch now.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And it’s like, you know, I’ve seen so much commentary recently of people saying “I’m afraid to comment, because I don’t wanna get into an argument.” And it’s like…I don’t, what’s—unless your comments that you wanna make are kinda mean, no one ever leaves me comments that lead to an argument, you know? Like…
FK: Yeah.
ELM: They’re like, compliments, and I’m like, “Thank you, I’m really touched.” You know?
FK: Right.
ELM: It’s just…I feel like everyone’s been just kind of bludgeoned to death by the internet, and like…
FK: Yeah!
ELM: It’s a real fear reac—it’s a real instinctive, I see young people have grown up getting cyberbullied on Instagram, you know?
FK: Right.
ELM: And it’s just like, yeah, obviously I feel like that’s gonna have deep-seated effects even if you don’t actually sense it outright, can have subconscious effects about the way you think about interacting with people.
FK: Yeah, and there’s, I mean there’s also just the…for me, I will say that there’s also this element of, even under a pseud, feeling like the internet is…like it’s really real, in certain ways, you know what I mean? [laughs] Like, I don’t know, but I…I never really had any fear of doxxing or anything like that, until fairly recently.
ELM: Hmm.
FK: And to some extent that’s circumstantial, because I do feel like becoming a priest, there’s a higher standard that people are holding you too, to some extent. And/or…
ELM: Not me.
FK: Maybe…
ELM: My standards for you are just as low as they always were.
FK: No, but I mean I think that there’s lots of people, there’s lots of things that somebody could decide to go after you for, and I’ve got a lot of ’em out there, [laughs] so you know. That’s fine, and maybe I don’t wanna add to that.
ELM: Your infinite twincest generator?
FK: Yeah, that’s one of them. Look, it comes up on my first page of Google search, so, [ELM laughs] I’m sorry. Commission on Ministry, if you did not see that, then I feel like I did not hide anything.
ELM: Look, look, you got a Master’s in media studies, you can always bust that out and say it’s academic.
FK: It has literally been cited in multiple academic papers. [ELM laughs] It has been taught in university classrooms. That is a totally defensible [laughing] eternal twincest generator.
Anyway. So there’s some of that, but I do think that it’s also that that has become more common. But I think in general, there’s also just more…you know, there’s more of the like, “Well here’s the receipts,” for everybody, which is what, I mean, it’s exactly what, exactly what you’re saying. As far as cyberbullying, all of that, right?
ELM: Yeah.
FK: And to some extent, like, all the time I find myself typing something, and then being like…am I really contributing to this conversation by adding this?
ELM: I do that all the time. But I’ve been doing that for years.
FK: No!
ELM: No, that’s healthy though.
FK: Me too, and it is healthy, but now I don’t post anything.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: Like, [laughs] you know what I mean? The bar has become so high for me to post something that I’m just like, maybe not, maybe I don’t, maybe, maybe participating isn’t worth it.
ELM: Well, I mean, I will for fandom stuff, but in general I’m just kinda like, you know…I started doing that years ago, where I would just type the tweet out and then I’d be like, “Oh God, I actually…” I can’t, if I’m exhausted at the idea of having to defend what I’m saying, then I’m not doing it, right?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Like if I’m not ready to fight…then it’s not comin’ out.
FK: But I feel that way about like, all my fandom opinions, [ELM laughs] and everything else as well, you know what I mean?
ELM: You…that’s a little bit, not hypocritical, but you do, you have had this fandom podcast, so you do get to spout off all the time.
FK: That’s right, you know what, you know what might happen?
ELM: You’re gonna start—become a capital-P Poster. [laughs]
FK: I might become a Poster, because I no longer have this outlet anymore.
ELM: [overlapping] You’re gonna be in the hospital, and you’re gonna be just tweetin’ away—X-in’ away. Skeetin’ away.
FK: I don’t believe that. [both laugh] Among other things, because my hypnobirthing [ELM laughs] recommends that you put your phone in a lockbox so that you don’t distract yourself out of your hypnotic state. [laughs]
ELM: We would need a whole other episode to talk about your hyp, hypno-plans, here. [FK laughs] I don’t wanna trigger you right now. No, you know, and one thing I think that, a huge trend we’ve seen—and we started seeing this very early on—but we got so many comments from listeners talking about how they were getting off the big wide internet, right?
FK: Right.
ELM: And going to Discord, and going to group chats, and all this stuff. There was a, there’s a big post going around recently—to connect it back to the fandom, the fic behavior stuff—of a fic author saying they saw that, they saw a post of someone saying, “I’m gonna start a fanfiction book-reading Discord,” you know, and then the replies on this post were so depressing, because it was like… [FK laughs] All these authors saying… There was one, and I saw this long reblog chain of this post, and there was one that haunts me. This person said they found out that this fic that they had written that had like a really small number of kudos and comments, like, very little interaction.
FK: Right. Engagement, yeah.
ELM: They found out that there was an entire roleplay [laughing] of the fic happening in a Discord.
FK: What!
ELM: And they only learned that this was happening because they were so discouraged by the lack of reader engagement that they took the fic down. And then the people complained. That’s what they said in the post, anyway.
FK: Wow.
ELM: And I was just like, can you imagine loving a fic so much that you’re gonna roleplay it, and never letting the author know?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And so it’s like we’ve seen the shift into these smaller spaces—obviously the other factor with that is like, this kind of consumer culture in fanworks, right, you know…
FK: Right.
ELM: Thinking of…there’s the author, and then there’s all of us readers, right? That bums me out, because I feel like that’s a trajectory that is headed in one direction that we can’t stop, you know?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And again, this is a platform thing. When I think back to, you know, a LiveJournal kink meme or something, where everyone was in the comments just kind of on equal footing, prompting, writing snippets, saying, “I’m gonna turn this into something bigger,” like…everyone’s a reader and everyone’s a writer, and now there’s the mass of consumers and then there’s a few writers, who feel discouraged because no one’s talking to them, [laughs] you know?
FK: Yeah. Yeah.
ELM: I guess, I will say, you know, maybe this is kind of a silver lining here, but I feel like there is a parallel thing happening with like…when we started this podcast, we were at the peak of shitty fan-creator interaction, you know, it was like, so often early on we talked about, “Oh, the fourth wall, where is it, I miss it,” right? But like…I do feel like we’ve seen a major decline in celebrities and creator-side people capital-P Posting, you know, like they’re putting the phone down?
FK: I feel like that’s partially because of this mainstreaming, they know more—you know what I mean? [laughing] They know more about it.
ELM: [overlapping] You think it’s because they know? I thought it was ‘cause they got burned so much that they’re like, “I’m too tired,” like they’re obviously…
FK: [overlapping] I think it’s both! I think it’s both.
ELM: Yeah. I mean it’s like, they’re not…I mean, I think it depends, right? But like, celebrities were on Twitter in 2015, and now…obviously not now, [FK laughs] like obviously a lot of people are going “fuck this,” right, but it doesn’t seem like, if you’re a certain kind of celebrity, it doesn’t seem like it’s mandatory that you’re on x, y, and z platform the way it really felt—it doesn’t seem, people are realizing that’s not necessary to build your brand.
FK: Right, there’s that, I also think that if we’re talking fan-creator interaction more broadly, I do think that writers…writers and Hollywood in general are somewhat better educated than they were…
ELM: Yeah.
FK: About this, right, like not just about the norms of interacting with people online, about fan culture in general. It’s still not that people are, like, experts in this, but they have some knowledge, as opposed to [laughs] no knowledge and just bumbling into it.
ELM: Yeah…
FK: Which was still happening all the time in 2015.
ELM: Well yeah, and I also think that, yeah, there’s less first-timer-ness to it, it’s not like, “Holy shit, the fannns!” You know? It’s like, even if they haven’t personally been on that kind of receiving end?
FK: Yeah, yeah.
ELM: And it definitely seems like the media training is much, much, much more savvy now, right?
FK: People are also just more savvy because, [laughs] you know, they’re younger people.
ELM: [overlapping] Yeah, time… Yeah, it’s true. But you know, I also think that…I do think there’s a parallel, like how I started this, you know, talking about this topic, like… I think that, not for an A-list celebrity or whatever, but there was a time where you saw from, like, a showrunner, a real anger that they weren’t getting the respect that they deserved, and that anyone could come in their mentions and just talk to them.
FK: Right.
ELM: And they would just keep going at it. And now I think that, I think a lot of them have seen, that is not a good use of your time. [FK laughs] You know?
FK: Yes.
ELM: And maybe matured a little bit past that, and say like, just ignore. Move on.
FK: Yup.
ELM: And maybe also you don’t need to just constantly be…posting every passing thought you have, either.
FK: Mmm hmm. I think that’s right. Yeah.
ELM: So that’s positive. [laughs]
FK: Well no, OK, there are some other positive things. I will say this: when I talk about drifting farther away from certain kinds of participatory fandom, you know…I’m actually really enjoying my, my lurkery Star Trek thing.
ELM: [laughing] This is so funny.
FK: And I’m looking forward to like…you know, hangin’ out and doing my fanbinding. And like, you know, I mean not that I’ve actually bound anything yet, but because I’ve been busy gestating, but I’m like, I have plans. I’m excited about this, I’m excited about…
ELM: What, you don’t got a hand for a scissor? And a… [FK laughs] book…glue? Actually I don’t know what, I’ve already forgotten, Tiffo, I’m sorry, what are all the parts that you need?
FK: [laughs] Well we’re actually in the process of building a book press right now, [ELM ooohs] so this is genuinely in-process. Because binding is something that, that my partner is also into from a different perspective, so this is, like, something that we can do…you know, and both use the stuff.
ELM: [overlapping] That’s very romantic. A shared…
FK: [overlapping] It’s very romantic.
ELM: [overlapping] A shared book press…
FK: A shared book press. Um…but I’m actually enjoying, you know, I’m enjoying the sort of consumer Star Trek stuff that I’m doing, and I’m enjoy—I’m looking forward to no longer being in grad school, and like…actually trying to dive into fic again a little bit there, and trying to get below the ship tagging, and really explore some of that. You know?
ELM: Yeah.
FK: I’m, I’m, that’s something that I think that I had not really put my finger on, like oh, maybe I could find a way around that, and I’m, I’m looking forward to doing that, right? And that’s still consumery, I’m not saying I’m gonna write fic necessarily for this, but I’m not feeling like…the enjoyment of those things or the enjoyment of narratives, or even the enjoyment of talking with people, you know, shoutout to my Star Trek friend, like… [both laugh] You know, these things are—yeah, Jenny—these things are still a part of my life, and I am looking forward to rediscovering what some of that was like before I started having participatory internet all the time. You know? [laughs]
ELM: Yeah.
FK: I wanna go back to that, and then see, OK, well what, what are the things that I can do online and connecting with other people that really do feel good and happy and exciting for me? And I hope that I will be able to do that, and, you know. Maybe form a new relationship to fandom. Once my child is old enough that I can think about anything fandomy. [laughs]
ELM: I like how you assume you will have no thoughts.
FK: Oh, I’m, this is based on what people have told me, and if I do—my idea is that if I have thoughts, it will be a nice bonus.
ELM: Sure. Yeah, I don’t know. Ah, I haven’t had a child, but I have had friends who’ve had children, who have managed to still maintain thoughts.
FK: I’m, I’m hoping.
ELM: [overlapping] I’m not saying you’ll have a lot of free time, but they, in the privacy of their minds, [FK laughs] they are not only thinking about diapers.
FK: I am hoping that this will be the case, I’m just trying really hard not to make assumptions, because there is the possibility… [laughs]
ELM: Yeah. Well, I like how you immediately took it to you, which is fine, because this is your last episode, but like…think a little more holistically. Do we see good thi—like, from where we started in 2015, I do think there are positives, right? I think that the things, you know, showrunners with Posting Disease, [FK laughs] I think have gotten treatment, or, you know, it’s killed off their internet selves. That’s chilled out. Graham Norton is not showing fanart to…I don’t know who he would show fanart to these days, the men from Red, White & Royal Blue, you know?
FK: Yeah. I actually like the fact that it’s not as much of a fannish monoculture, and I think it’s cool that there’s all of these different places that you can go and be, whether or not I’m into like, the flash-in-the-pan-ness of some of it. But you know, whatever, a lot of these are not that flash in the pan either, right? It’s not like BTS has stopped being [laughing] a thing.
ELM: They sure have not. Yeah, that’s true. And like, BTS is actually an interesting example, too, like that’s definitely, there’s a positive there in the sense of, like, the scale of the mass social media, I think, has been really responsible for people all over the world really being able to have deep participatory fan culture around that, right?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And not just it being…when you think about how Americans or Westerners were able to consume various Asian media products when we were growing up—you did, I had friends who were really into, like, anime or whatever, right? It was—
FK: [overlapping] Oh yeah, I mean, J-rock was the thing when I was in high school, that people were into. [laughs]
ELM: [overlapping] Yeah. But it was not easy—
FK: [overlapping] Gackt. [laughs]
ELM: I’m, I’m probably like, you know, animesplaining to actual fans from the 90s of anime things here, but like, it was not easy, right?
FK: No.
ELM: To— [laughs] And so like, that’s super cool. Or the fact that tons of people have gotten into C-dramas and K-dramas recently in the United States, or the West…basically because of international deals that were cut, so now they can watch them on Netflix, you know?
FK: Right.
ELM: And like, there’s negatives in that too, about Netflix or whatever, but like, I don’t know, that’s super cool that people could make these, these, you know, these global fandom connections.
FK: Yeah!
ELM: And be exposed to different kinds of fan cultures and stuff, like obviously one of the main themes of this podcast has been clashes around transcultural fandom, right, [FK laughs] but, with all those negatives, I think there are also, have obviously been a lot of positives.
FK: I think that’s true. And I think that—I did bring it back to me, but I do think that—
ELM: [overlapping] That’s fine, you can. Talk about yourself.
FK: But I think that there are other people who are doing that also, and I don’t think that, you know, maybe…yes, you have waited for this final episode for me to eat crow, and say that in fact lurking is a thing, but uh…
ELM: Wooowww.
FK: But I do think that that is not always a bad thing, and I don’t think that just because people retreat from the kind of public participatory fandom, it doesn’t mean that I’m not enjoying these things, and it doesn’t mean that other people are not enjoying these things, and I don’t think that that necessarily is a bad thing. If, if people are retreating into a Discord, or retreating into a conversation, whatever, like, that can be fine and maybe even healthy as a, you know, as a wave. [laughs] As a natural ebb and flow of the way that people are interacting across fan culture things.
ELM: Yeah, I think it’s just the dividing lines that are so hard, you know? Like if it was a…the way I’m doing fandom right now, I’m like, posting stories, in a way that I think that we have learned to do on AO3, right, you know?
FK: Yes. You are. [laughs]
ELM: And if there was a space that was like a kink meme…
FK: Right.
ELM: And we were writing little snippets and stuff like that, and maybe that’s happening in a Discord and I don’t know about it, right, you know?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: But I would totally do that, that’d be super fun!
FK: Hey people, tell Elizabeth about it if it’s happening in your Discord.
ELM: Yeah, you know, like, I just think that the…there’s an element to the, the…I don’t know, amateur-ness of it, that’s kind of left? You know?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: You know, the kind of DIY of it feels diminished?
FK: Yup.
ELM: And I think the metrics thing is a big part of that, right?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: I think that the way that creator economy culture has colored everything that we make and post online, you know, you have people watermarking their gifs, right?
FK: Right. [laughs]
ELM: And like, I’m not trying to diminish the work of a gif-maker, but it’s also like…every single thing you make for a fandom becomes then your product, even if you’re never gonna profit off it, you know?
FK: Right. Right.
ELM: It’s just like… And so, I don’t know, I feel like…I don’t know. I took it back to a negative place again, I’m sorry.
FK: [laughs] Well, I don’t, I don’t have any way to redirect it from there, but I can say that I am…I don’t know, I’m interested to see where things go. I’m happy to be moving into a little bit more of a back seat for a while. I’m excited to see what you’re going to do [laughing] with the next stuff with the podcast, because…
ELM: Well…
FK: No, because, for at least a little while, I still have access to all the Fansplaining Google Drive and stuff, and so I can see some of the things that you’re— [laughs]
ELM: I’m not gonna kick you out of that, unless you wanna leave it, unless it’s like, getting in your way.
FK: I mean, I probably will leave it just for the sake of like, not, uh, having the alerts come up for me and stuff.
ELM: You get alerts? I don’t get alerts.
FK: Yeah, on my phone.
ELM: That’s really funny.
FK: Anyway, I probably will leave it just for the sake of—but it’s nice, everyone…
ELM: [overlapping] Flourish, turn off alerts on your phone.
FK: [laughing] Every once in a while, every once in a while I like, poke my head in and I’m like, “Ooooh, what’s this pitch?” [ELM laughs] So I’m excited to see all those things. I really, really am. Genuinely.
ELM: Oh, I’m glad. I, you know, I truly wish that I had more, [laughs] I had more money to commission stuff, because I’ve started, you know, I’ve commissioned like…six, seven, eight articles? I’d have to count, I have a little doc going. You know, people, some people are actively writing right now and will have it to me in the next month or two, and we’ll start publishing in June.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: But then I kinda had to put a pause, and so now people are like, in a “Can I get back to you at the end of the summer, [FK laughs] when I make sure that I have enough money?” Because it’s like, I can’t commit more than…first of all, I can’t commit all of the Patreon money to this, because then I’m working for free.
FK: Right.
ELM: [laughing] So I do need to be compensated for my labor. But it’s a shame, you know, if some rich person just gave me a real budget, because all I wanna do is edit these articles, there’s so many good pitches.
FK: [laughs] All right, maybe this is the good time to mention that even though this is my final episode, it doesn’t mean that you should, like, stop supporting Fansplaining. Because you should do that. Continue supporting Fansplaining. [laughs]
ELM: Thank you, yes, that’s true. So one thing we should say, Patreon-wise, is we have put out a special episode, you may have seen, on House, MD.
FK: [chanting] House, MD!
ELM: [laughs] That’s right. We didn’t even, in the episode, call it Hate Crimes MD. I guess we didn’t wanna appeal to the kids. [FK laughs] But that is what they call it. [laughs] But so, that is for, that’s one of our 33rd special episodes, so there are 33 in that back catalog, $3 a month or more. And as long as Flourish doesn’t go into labor tomorrow, I think we’ll do a—I mean, it’ll be halfway through the season, so we won’t have all the answers, but like, I think you want live slug reaction, [FK laughs] as the meme—we didn’t have that meme in 2015.
FK: [overlapping] No, we did not.
ELM: [overlapping] Think of all the memes we didn’t have back then, huh?
FK: No, we were still in a world of cheezburgers.
ELM: We didn’t—OK, no, it wasn’t, [both laugh] it wasn’t 2006, what are you saying here? Oh my goodness. You know what we didn’t even talk about is the memeification and the genericization, I was just thinking about the, like, you know, an incorrect quotes account?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And you just slot your fandom—there’s so many things that, like, that was not a thing ten years ago.
FK: You know what, I was trying to get us on to talking about Patreon, and you have pulled us back in.
ELM: [overlapping, sotto voce] I got more things to complain about… Anyway. So there’s Interview With the Vampire, House, MD, 32 other special episodes, so tons of back listening for your pleasure.
FK: Yep.
ELM: And as we’ve talked about in the past, Flourish probably will, time permitting and brain permitting, wanna come on and talk about that, so it’s—a face you just made right there—brain permitting, do another special episode later in the year. And so you have that to look forward to. And if we get any new patrons at $5 or $10 a month, I am still planning on putting together a Tiny Zine this year.
FK: Woohoo!
ELM: FYI, no offense to Flourish, but that’s mostly been me in recent…
FK: Yeah, that’s, that’s true.
ELM: You’ve been a participant, I bet you’d do that again, you would probably draw more fanart right?
FK: I cannot guarantee that. [both laugh]
ELM: All right, fine, I’ll get another artist, I don’t need you.
FK: [laughs] OK, good.
ELM: So all that stuff’s gonna stay in place. There may be a time when I change…depending on the fate of the podcast portion, which, I will say—Flourish, cover your ears, but—it is very likely that it will continue.
FK: Yaaay!
ELM: OK, I guess you're happy about that.
FK: [simultaneous] I’m happy about that.
ELM: You’ll be a listener. I’ve been talking to some people recently, more to come on that. There is a, there is always a chance that Fansplaining will abandon the current Patreon model and move to some other kind of…I don’t know, there’s other ways. There’s other ways to be fiscally supported by your fans these days.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: I don’t know what that would entail, but obviously we would give everyone plenty of warning on that. So. Anyway, thank you so much to everyone who is still a patron, because literally couldn’t [laughing] commission these articles without you.
FK: Seriously. And thank you to everybody who’s supported us throughout all the years, I can now say, I mean it’s meant so much to me, and I know it’ll continue meaning a lot to Elizabeth. But you know. Thanks.
ELM: Yeah. Well…I know I’m gonna talk to you shortly, also it’s weird because it’s not like you’re, it's not like you’re dying or moving away or something, I’m like, I’ll still see you!
FK: Yeah, you’re literally going to be the godmother of this kid, so.
ELM: I’m just gonna see the kid, I’m gonna like, OK, everything I know about godparenting I learned from Harry Potter, and I know that we have a fraught relationship with Harry Potter, but I still think Sirius Black is a pretty great godparent.
FK: [laughs] OK.
ELM: You know, he’s my guy, he was always—
FK: So you’re, so you’re going to prison, in other words.
ELM: But for a noble reason. But for, like, a foolish reason. A foolish, noble reason.
FK: OK.
ELM: Yeah, when you’re murdered, I will, uh… [laughs] I don’t wanna spend the last moments of the last Flourish episode talking about Harry Potter, I apologize.
FK: Thank you, thank you for that.
ELM: I’ll just be cool in my leather jacket, don’t worry about it.
FK: Great, love that.
ELM: [laughs] Well, Flourish, it’s not actually your last Fansplaining, but it is your last normal one, do you have any reflections, thoughts, feelings? About…this partnership?
FK: Ohh… [ELM laughs; a long pause; ELM laughs again] I don’t know, I mean…I don’t wanna get weepy. [ELM laughs] I’m gonna get weepy if you make me do this, Elizabeth.
ELM: [overlapping] I make you cry…
FK: You’re gonna make me cry…
ELM: Don’t know what to tell you… [laughs] Give the people what they want, they want you in tears.
FK: I— [laughs] They’re getting it! [ELM laughs] Um…I don’t, I mean I don’t know what to say. It’s been…it’s been great.
ELM: Yeah. It has.
FK: It has been great.
ELM: Awww…
FK: And um…and I’m really grateful that uh, you were flexible enough to be like, “I guess I’m rolling with this absolutely insane idea.” [laughs]
ELM: Just being dragged around San Diego…
FK: Yup. Yeah.
ELM: With Lev Grossman.
FK: With Lev Grossman, who was there.
ELM: He could’ve been a third in our podcast this whole time. [laughs] You just made the most shocked face.
FK: Imagine that alternate universe.
ELM: Yeah, imagine if you had hard-sold it to the both of us at the same time.
FK: Wow.
ELM: Well…
FK: No. No. [ELM laughs] Sorry to Lev, who is definitely not listening to this. [both laugh] All right. On that note…Elizabeth, I am…yeah. I’ll…I’m not gonna cry.
ELM: What if I said I love you, Flourish.
FK: Mmm, I love you too, Elizabeth. [ELM laughs] All right, now I’m hanging up, goodbye, Elizabeth.
ELM: Bye Flourish.
[Outro music]