Special Episode 31: Tropefest: Friends to ?

In the newest “Tropefest” episode, Elizabeth and Flourish look at the full range of friendship within fic: platonic relationships, friends to lovers, friends with benefits, work partnerships, team dynamics, found family…it’s a long list. Topics discussed include “ship supremacy” in (relatively) normative friends-to-lovers arcs, the term “pre-slash,” historically and today, and how the lack of friendship ties in modern life are reflected back in fic—and in the media that fic’s based on.

Show Notes

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

[00:40:00] Technically we forgot the “Tropefest” in the title—because this is the latest installment of our “Tropefest” series! If you’re a Patron at $3 a month or higher, you can listen or read full transcripts for:

• “Trapped Together”
• “Canon-Divergent AU”
• “Enemies to Lovers”
• “Omegaverse”
• “Found Family”
• “Hurt/Comfort”
• “Modern AU”
• “Soulmate AU”
• “Fake Relationships”

[00:03:10] Googling “hard gen” gets you a bunch of results about whether Gen Z is a difficult generation in the workplace 😂 but here’s the SuperWiki page with some of these terms (including “gencest”). And yes, it was one of the terms respondents were least familiar with in our tropes survey—the second-least-known, in fact.

[00:05:25]

[00:15:50] Interestingly, the Fanlore entry on “pre-slash” offers another historical angle: it could be a signal that no explicit scenes would occur in a fic (whether you were actively seeking that out or actively trying to avoid it). Since early internet fic as well as pre-internet analog fic didn’t often have tagging or explicitness ratings, it could be hard to tell from a title and description alone.

[00:21:35]

(And yes, the second female character is Cameron Diaz.)

[00:25:53]

[00:27:37] That was “Femstats February” from earlier this year.

[00:34:42]

[00:44:00] Aja Romano did a great interview recently on found family:

“...we graduate into independence in adulthood that really often means isolation, because I think that’s probably true for a lot of fans who turn to these fandoms for simulacra of healthy interconnected friendship networks.”

[00:52:54]

[00:59:00] FACT CHECK: Elizabeth found a literal email thread between her and Lev Grossman from SDCC that year coordinating meeting up…so perhaps Flourish is correct about that point…but Elizabeth is also correct about the stalking.

[00:59:36] 😇

[00:59:54] Our outro music “Knowing the truth” by Lee Rosevere, also used under a CC BY 3.0 license.