Episode 126: Social Media Fic
In Episode 126, “Social Media Fic,” Elizabeth and Flourish welcome Gavia Baker-Whitelaw, culture journalist and Elizabeth’s collaborator on “The Rec Center,” back to the podcast to talk about how fanfic has expanded across Twitter. Topics covered include the fuzzy lines between fiction and roleplay, changing norms around pseudonymity, and generational shifts around fanworks and ephemerality.
Show Notes
[00:00:00] As always, our intro music is “Awel” by stefsax, used under a CC BY 3.0 license.
[00:00:44] Gav and Elizabeth collaborate on “The Rec Center.” Find Gav on Twitter @HelloTailor, or listen to her earlier appearances on the podcast: Episode 31, “Get Recced,” and Special Episode 11, “The Marvel-Industrial Complex.”
[00:03:28] Tropefest episodes: Special Episode 18, “Omegaverse”; Special Episode 17, “Enemies to Lovers”; Special Episode 16, “Canon-Divergent AU”; Special Episode 15, “Trapped Together.”
[00:09:03] If you aren’t familiar with “Texts From Last Night,” it pretty much does what it says on the tin.
[00:15:48] “Written by the Victors,” by Speranza, is a very well-known Stargate: Atlantis fic.
[00:16:10] The “BTS story that got lots of press” was called “Outcast,” by flirtaus. It has been taken down, so of course we can’t link to it, but it’s kinda bananas when, like, Billboard is covering one particular fanfic.
[00:20:04] If you wanna read “Star Trek: PBS,” here’s the first Tweet in the thread. What a delight!!
[00:28:06] Flourish is talking about @livinthefuture on Instagram.
[00:31:02] Read @turtlecreek_tv! It also has transcripts for accessibility — something that we didn’t cover in this episode, but which is a real concern for social media fics.
[00:45:32] The Torchwood audio drama featuring Burn Gorman is called Iceberg, by Grace Knight’, and it comes out sometime this month!
[00:47:43] OK, so, “favorites” became “likes” in 2015 (thanks to The Verge for covering this vitally significant, and offensive-to-some, change).
[00:58:04] “Cut the Strings” is @stringscut on Twitter.
[01:01:14]
[01:09:33] If you’re not familiar with the AO3’s “orphaning” feature, it’s really cool!
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 #126, entitled “Social Media Fic.”
FK: And we’re going to have on a very special repeat guest, Gavia Baker-Whitelaw.
ELM: [laughs] Very special repeat.
FK: Yeah! Very special and repeat.
ELM: So Gav is my newsletter partner. If you are a subscriber to “The Rec Center,” that is the two of us—the two of us meaning Gav and me, not Flourish and me…
FK: We have to say this every time because people continually get it mixed up.
ELM: Yep. So. Gav and I are usually only written collaborators, but now we’re gonna confuse people further by having her back on the podcast. She first came on in…I think it was 2016, I wanna say? She talked about reccing fanfiction. And then she came on for a special episode as well, when we talked about the MCU.
FK: Yes, about Captain Marvel!
ELM: Yeah.
FK: And other parts of the MCU also. And the military-industrial complex!
ELM: It was about all those things. So the instigating incident for this episode was someone actually tweeted, I was tagged into the thread but they were like “Are you going to do an episode on social media fic?” And Gav was like “No, I think you mean Fansplaining.” [FK laughs] That is not what Gav does on her podcast, which is more cultural criticism. And then I was like “You can come on and do it if you want!” So it’s, it’s an interesting topic. We should leave it to Gav to explain what it is.
Basically, like, there’s been a huge explosion in the last couple of years and especially recently of fic that’s on Twitter and meant to be just read, written and read and shared on Twitter only. And it’s very interesting from a reader perspective, and from an archiving perspective, and so I don’t know. It’s not something that I have read much of or something that I’m particularly interested in reading personally, but I’m interested in hearing about it. I don’t know about, if you’ve read any of them or how you feel about it, cause you—you’re in, you’ve been in RPF fandoms and I think they are popular with some, you know, boy band fandoms and stuff like that.
FK: Yeah, I haven’t really followed any. And I’m really interested to talk about it, because I used to be very very engaged in roleplaying, and there’s a lot of sort of Twitter roleplay and so on, and so I’m very curious to know about how those things do or don’t intersect, because I see them every once—the first time I saw one I thought that it was somehow involved with roleplay and I was like “What?” And then I realized, “No, actually, that’s not at all what’s going on,” so I’m looking forward to having that clarified for me. [laughs]
ELM: Great, all right!
FK: Great! Clarifications. But before we do that, we should talk about our Patreon.
ELM: Yes we should. So we don’t have to force Gav to sit there and listen while we talk about it in the middle.
FK: Exactly. So OK, we have gotten a lot of Patreon support lately and we are so grateful. Thank you to everybody who has supported us. For those of you who might not know, perhaps you normally…I don’t know, follow Gav and have come here that way? We are totally patron-supported. Without you guys we don’t get to make the podcast. And we have lots of really exciting rewards for our Patreon supporters, including we are very shortly going to release—like, within the next week or so?—a new special episode in our Tropefest series, about Omegaverse fanfic.
ELM: Yeah!
FK: Yeah!
ELM: I mean…
FK: I’m excited.
ELM: You’re excited? Yeah, you’ve been reading a lot of it recently.
FK: I’m excited.
ELM: I have read enough of it to comment on it, is what I will say.
FK: Yeah. Yeah!
ELM: It’s not one of my favorite tropes. Spoiler. That’s a spoiler for the episode. But it’s not like I’m gonna—
FK: It’s gonna, it’s gonna be interesting! We’re gonna have a good discussion.
ELM: But the other Tropefest episodes that are already available to people who pledge $3 and up are “Trapped Together,” “Enemies to Lovers,” and “Canon-Divergent AUs.” So we’ve done whole hour episodes on each of those where we, we talk about the way that these tropes function within fandom and fanfiction and we’ve found a lot of points of…divergence feels a little bit strong, but we’ve found some places where like, we interpret the tropes a little bit differently.
And that’s been really interesting, because I don’t know, I think that tropes get talked about really reductively in fandom these days, you know? Like, “Give me some of that bed-sharing, sprinkle in a little fake dating!” And it’s like, OK. You know? Or it’s like…these are actually interesting story structures that are communally written! You know? So. Sorry. That was an aside. Anyway. You pledge $3 or more and you get that kind of great commentary! That was pretty great, I know. Mm-hmm?
FK: It was pretty great. There’s also lots of other different rewards. [ELM laughs] The ones that require us to go to a post office and send them to you are currently on pause for pandemic reasons, but we will make sure to get those out as soon as we can, and there’s other ones that don’t, you know, require going to the mailbox, like you can get your name read on the podcast as part of our, you know, thank-yous at the end, things like that. So.
ELM: Truly, truly, truly. do you just say “on pause” because that is the official State of New York—
FK: Yes.
ELM: Is that like, in your brain now?
FK: Yes. That was a joke.
ELM: Oh, that was—you did that deliberately.
FK: It was sort of a joke, it was a deliberate joke, but it is also in my brain now.
ELM: It’s good. It’s good.
FK: We should also just mention that is patreon.com/fansplaining, and if you can’t support us that way there’s other ways that you can support us, and Elizabeth’s gonna tell you about them!
ELM: Wow, way to put me on the spot. Yes. Absolutely, it’s a very very challenging time financially for a lot of people so we absolutely understand. I don’t know, I think about this whenever—I think about many things whenever there’s an AO3 fundraiser. But like, if you’re not able to donate to that or if you listen and you wanna pledge to us but you can’t afford it, like, that’s totally fine. And there are a lot of ways that you can support us otherwise, like calling us and leaving a voicemail at 1-401-526-FANS. Remember when you thought I would never get that number right and I totally got it right?
FK: [laughs] You totally got it right.
ELM: Yeah! That’s right. I actually have a good memory, but if I don’t want—I truly do. Don’t you believe it? [FK laughing] You made a face!
FK: I know! I know you do, I know you do. I just love teasing you.
ELM: Yeah. But so there’s that, you could leave a voicemail, tell us your thoughts, you could write us at fansplaining at gmail dot com, you could…I don’t, you can’t really give us substantive commentary on Twitter or Tumblr or Instagram or Facebook, but you can find us at all those places at fansplaining. Or you can spread the word about the podcast, which is super super helpful for us, especially if you know people who maybe aren’t podcast listeners but are interested in the topic—we have full transcripts, we have lots of articles on our site, fansplaining.com, paid for by our Patreon support. We have surveys, you can dig into the data, there’s all sorts of stuff around these topics. It’s not just listening to podcasts. So spreading the word really helps and, uh, that’s, that’s the end of the spiel!
FK: All right, shall we call Gav?
ELM: Let’s do it!
[Interstitial music]
FK: All right, I think it’s time to welcome Gavia Baker-Whitelaw to the podcast! Hey Gav!
Gavia Baker-Whitelaw: Hello!
ELM: You know, since you’ve come on this podcast twice now, that was such a formal introduction, I’m just like…I feel like you’re supposed to be like “Hey Gav.” [GBW laughs] “Hi.”
GBW: It’s been like, what, many years. Many years. Hello to the audience!
ELM: Yeah you were in a special episode last year, when we talked about the MCU and the military-industrial complex.
GBW: Oh my God, that was last year?
ELM: Yes.
GBW: Time has no meaning.
ELM: Yes. That was about a year ago and Captain Marvel invented feminism. I don’t know if you remember.
GBW: Oh, yeah. I do recall that. Vividly.
ELM: Yeah.
GBW: An important time for us all.
ELM: [laughs] The one-year anniversary! But yeah, you came on the first episode, I believe it was Episode 31, and this is Episode 126, so it’s been awhile.
FK: Wow.
ELM: Welcome back!
GBW: We’re all seasoned professionals now.
ELM: That’s right, we know what we’re doing, this is gonna be significantly better.
GBW: Excellent.
FK: Wow. Don’t, don’t over-promise, Elizabeth. [laughter]
ELM: OK. But I want Gav to go first. Because you are writing a social media fic, I think that you, Gav, should be the one to start the conversation, just help us understand like what they are. Because I think a lot of our listeners will not actually, are like, probably mostly AO3 readers, I would say.
GBW: Yes.
ELM: Which is different.
GBW: I think that kind of the concept of what a social media fic is has definitely evolved over the past couple of years. Cause like, for at least a decade, probably longer, there has been fic that’s sort of about…that involves social media posts from the characters, or chatfic which has been super popular for ages, or kind of text fic, which I think kind of really grew in popularity out of “Texts From Last Night” style, like, memefic 10 to 15 years ago, like, on LiveJournal.
But now, there is a hell of a lot of fic that is being posted directly to Twitter, and it’s kind of riffing off the kind of recent-ish trend for fic that’s told through kind of chat logs and text messages, like, Wattpad has a whole app that is literally just for telling stories in chat form that they launched in like 2017. So it’s like a very mainstream thing. But Twitter’s social media AUs are super-popular, particularly in kind of band fandoms, so like, BTS, like, One Direction fandom is currently huge in terms of, like, chatfic on Twitter even though it’s like not necessarily as big as it was as a normal fandom like five years ago, and also kind of weirdly compared to the other fandoms—which are mostly kind of music, pop-based—It, Steven King’s It, huge fandom on Twitter for social media fics.
And kind of the way they work is that often it’s like you, people will create a new account just for their fanfic, and like, it will be where they’re posting all of the posts, like in serialized format, so you’ve got like, you know, screencaps of fake Twitter accounts for the main characters and loads and loads of kind of screencapped chatlog fic, and people kind of use apps that were originally designed for like, prank fake text message screencaps, but like, as far as I know most of the people who are now using like, fake prank text apps are just doing it for fanfic purposes now cause there’s so fucking many people who are doing it!
But yeah, it’s kind of, I would say it’s definitely like more of a younger thing, cause all of these are, BTS, like, K-pop fandoms are definitely kind of skewing younger. I’m not actually in any of those fandoms, but I am kind of into It fandom, which I think is like, maybe a little—average age, maybe a little older. And there’s some really amazing fanfics there that are doing really interesting stuff with kind of multimedia and combining kind of fake websites and chatlogs and Twitter accounts and all that kind of stuff. And then sometimes there’s a bit of kind of traditional fanfic in there as well, but usually it’s just confined to Twitter and it’s very different from what I think AO3 users are used to.
FK: And just for my own understanding, this is—so this is also different than like, journal-based roleplay or social-media-based roleplay, right?
GBW: Yeah, so like, obviously there’s still like roleplayers, which I’m not really into, particularly, myself, but this is usually one person who’s just writing a fanfic, and like, they will have their own personal account elsewhere. Or like in my case—I am writing a social media fic, as Elizabeth mentioned, but like, it’s not fully in like, the zone of most of them because like, I’m doing a combination of prose and kind of fake websites and chatlogs and other stuff as well rather than just being like 100% a Twitter thread that’s all chat.
ELM: But isn’t it—I mean like, it depends on your definition of “roleplay.” If roleplaying is like, inherently communal, like if one person can’t roleplay alone, then sure, but like—a lot of these are, do have like, a single user impersonating various characters and embodying what they would be like if they had social media accounts, right? Or is it not always like that?
GBW: I mean I would not describe that, I would describe that as just the same as writing. [laughs] Like, it’s just…
ELM: That’s funny.
GBW: It’s just like posting fiction in a different kind of format than people are used to, cause like definitely there are roleplaying accounts, but for the most part it’s just like for kind of privacy or just like archiving reasons, you start your own new fanfic and kind of…like loads of people just have like loads of separate accounts for their fanfic content on Twitter.
ELM: Yeah.
GBW: Just your alts.
FK: Right.
GBW: And you just have like an alt, because it’s like, if you’re following the fanfic as a reader, it’s a lot more convenient to just follow that account and get updates from there. It’s like subscribing.
FK: Yeah, I think this also gets into that question of like where does roleplay end and like, writing begin.
ELM: Yeah…
FK: Just pure writing. Which I think in some roleplay is a question, right, in some cases it’s like, “No, we’re actually just writing a collaborative fic,” like “Oh, we’re gonna write an epistolary fic and we have two writers writing epistolary,”
ELM: Right, right.
FK: And one of them’s each writing a letter, right? Well, is that roleplay? Well, sort of…
ELM: I’m also thinking about, like, people creating, like, whether they’re creating fic on Twitter or not, like, people have long created like, social media profiles for characters that they liked and like, something about that feels different to me. The kind of, like, embodying a character and pretending they would exist in this space and what they would do in this space feels a bit different to me than the way that you think about characters when you are writing a prose narrative in a more traditional fashion.
Like, that being said, obviously writers all the time—outside of fanfic—like, all writers talk about how they…not all writers. Lots of writers talk about how they might, like, you might create a profile or like, create a playlist or something pretending you’re your character to try to get in their head or whatever. People definitely do stuff like that, or like, “What would this character do in this context?” Like, “How…” That’s a way that people can try to build characterization. So it’s not like, it’s not wildly different, but…
GBW: I mean, I definitely—I feel like you can just kind of instinctively tell the distinction, because like the other day I kind of recommended a social media fic on Twitter and then someone was kind of recommending some other stuff to me and they recommended, there’s this incredibly popular account for like The Untamed where actually it’s a roleplaying account where they’ve created, it’s like “oh, the idol persona where it’s like one of the characters is this huge celebrity.” And then all the people who are following this account are like, fans of this fake celebrity. And I was like, “That’s not what I’m looking for, because I’m looking for like narrative fanfic, where it’s like a pre-planned storytelling thing where the character is a celebrity on Twitter and there’s someone who’s like the author who’s got a distinctive voice who’s serializing the story about them.”
ELM: Right, right.
FK: That makes total sense, and it also sort of makes sense in terms of the pleasures of it, because in one case the pleasure of it is as a writer, or, excuse me. As like the reader of it, the pleasure is reading the narrative, even if the narrative is told through text messages and social media and so on, there is a plot, there is a narrative that happens, you’re maybe tracking it through documents and so on but that happens. Whereas it seems like maybe if you’re following a roleplay idol account, then the pleasure is in, like, the little interactions and there’s not necessarily a plot that you’re following as much as like, day-by-day. Do you think, is that right?
GBW: Yeah.
ELM: Hm. All right.
FK: I mean I think that’s where it gets sticky too because occasionally like, you could imagine a situation where you had an RP account that was like, pushing some kind of a plot and then that’s where it begins to fall into the “Well…” Just like storytelling games versus writing a story, right.
ELM: Yeah…
GBW: I mean a lot of the stuff that I personally have been really enjoying has been kind of a marriage between chatfic and kind of the multimedia fanfic that’s been around for ages, so stuff like “Written by the Victors” in Stargate: Atlantis fandom is obviously like, iconic.
FK: Yeah.
GBW: And there’s loads of kind of Captain America fanfic where it includes historical records and that sort of thing, I’m sure if you go to Fanlore you will find examples of other stuff like that, but…
FK: Yeah yeah yeah. I’m thinking about some Battlestar Galactica fic, and some…
GBW: Yeah. And like I remember a couple of years ago, I did not read this, but there was this really really popular BTS story which went viral kind of mainstream and got all this media attention and it was like a horror story that was serialized on Twitter that had all these multimedia elements as well.
FK: I remember that.
ELM: I also remember that.
GBW: So I think that may have, like, popularized the form.
ELM: Yeah. Well, I don’t wanna get into it too soon, but if memory serves—and I’m wondering if you’ve observed this elsewhere—that, I remember that having a bit of context collapse around it because of the mainstream element and I think one of the biggest questions I have about a lot of this stuff is…Twitter can be tricky in terms of context.
I’m thinking of the very, what do you call it? The very shaky kind of disparate reports people were giving me a few weeks ago with the Chinese AO3 movements debacle, however we’re gonna frame it, when AO3 was shut down in China people were saying that AO3 was a place where people were publishing lies about their favorite celebrities. And I don’t know how much of that was true, I don’t know if you guys saw this, people were like telling me… and I was like “OK, I don’t…” I felt like I was just getting a lot of, I’m not reporting this as factual, I’m just saying that’s what some people believed was happening.
GBW: There was a lot of confusion which was mainly exacerbated by a huge language and cultural barrier.
ELM: Yes. So I basically, like, I got some Chinese and East Asian fans, like, sending me messages explaining it to me, and I was like “Well, I appreciate all of this,” I’m not about to say “This is the narrative and this isn’t” because it’s like conflicting information. But one thing I thought was interesting was the idea that like, decontextualized, someone can look at AO3 and say “This is a bunch of lies about celebrities,” right? And it’s like, we can look at it and say “It’s fiction,” you know?
But if you didn’t know what it was, you potentially could say that this is a bunch of fake lying stories about real people, and you know, so I could say like, “Oh, well on somewhere like the AO3 or somewhere that’s explicitly about fiction, you have an easy argument,” saying “Oh, it’s clearly labeled fiction.” But on Twitter, I feel like that kind of falls apart, especially if there’s some element of trying to make it seem very authentic, and I’m wondering how that’s played out for you as you’ve looked at this stuff.
GBW: I think there’s like a really specific format that people follow, and also it’s kind of less accessible almost than AO3, because I feel like you can look at AO3 and kind of understand quite easily what the website is for and be like, “Here’s a short story.” And on Twitter, like, the format that people use for social media fic, it kind of expects quite a lot of pre-existing knowledge. It’s quite hard to like stumble across. Like, if you were looking up stuff to do with One Direction on Twitter, you’d probably come up with a bunch of this stuff, but I don’t think anyone would be like, “This is real.”
And also, do you guys use, do you guys use like Twitter alts at all, or is that like classified? Yeah.
ELM: What do you mean by—what’s it, what do you mean—
GBW: Just having like fandom, just having a fandom lurker account. Cause I feel like now loads of people just have dozens of just, like, fandom-specific Twitter accounts.
ELM: Dozens!
GBW: Just disposable.
ELM: Do you have dozens?!
GBW: I don’t have dozens.
ELM: Um, I mean, my fandom was most active in 2011, so there’s not really a lot of action on Twitter.
GBW: Cause I don’t actually have any, I don’t have any lurker accounts at the moment. Cause like, the only fandom I’m like, quietly lurking in is It. And then I just like bookmark a bunch of fanfics.
ELM: I love it.
GBW: Elizabeth’s just like shaking her head at me.
ELM: I just, I’m obsessed with this, it’s my favorite thing, it’s my favorite detail.
GBW: It’s so, it’s just ridiculous. But like, last year I certainly did, and it’s like, you definitely can tell that like, people will have just an account that they’ll set up for a particular fandom or like for a particular fanfic and then delete and then also the entire audience is people who are just there on like a fandom-only account, and then you’re using it to create like your social media fic.
ELM: Right, right.
GBW: And that’s like the only purpose, and like, the format is like, in a single thread and there’s all this behavior that you’re expected to follow. I mean I actually did find the—so the fanfic I’m writing is, it’s Original Series Star Trek, and my concept is that it’s a reality show [laughs] where it’s like a sci-fi reality show where they’re contestants that have to roleplay that they’re on a spaceship, which is like, it’s…
FK: It’s a delight.
GBW: Thank you! This is, this is my relaxation at the moment. And I was like “Fuck it, I’ll just do it.” I didn’t really put much thought into starting it, I was like “This is just a fun thing that I’m gonna do.” And I very quickly realized that because I hadn’t created a fandom alt for it, I was posting it on like my main Twitter account [ELM laughs] which is like a verified Twitter account—
FK: Yep!
GBW: Most of my followers are like, or at least half my followers are maybe not in fandom. There was so much fucking confusion. People keep replying to it being like “Where can I watch this show?” Like… [laughter] “Is this real?” “What are you liveblogging?” And I’m like, I put at the top of the thread that it’s fanfiction, it’s all invented! But I don’t think that’s a problem most people are gonna have.
ELM: Oh my gosh.
GBW: No one’s stupid enough to post fanfiction on their, like, public Twitter account! [laughing]
ELM: As a journalist.
FK: I’ll tell you where people do have that problem though, which is on the other side, if you’re like running the official Twitter account or whatever for somebody, because then…
GBW: Oh God! [laughing]
FK: Genuinely because this stuff pops up, right? You’re following the hashtags, you’re following their name, all of that stuff. And so I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to explain something like this to someone. Like, usually a pissed-off…
GBW: Or dozens of people tweeting at the same time “Oh God, I can’t believe that Harry Styles killed him!” [all laugh]
FK: Right, exactly! You know what I mean? Genuinely it’s stuff like that and you get a Twitter alert or something that says that like, conversation about your topic has spiked because someone is saying that someone killed someone, you’re like “Ah, shit!” You know. Um…and usually it’s like, people who are not very online, right, because a lot of these people are not very online.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: And it comes into their life and they’re like “What the fuck is this? Fix it!” And I’m like…you have to be like “There’s nothing to fix, and I need to now carefully explain to you what’s going on.”
ELM: Yeah!
GBW: “People are discussing their fantasies on a public forum—”
FK: “That you can see!”
GBW: “—and it is private conversation which you happen to have stumbled across.”
FK: Right, which they don’t realize that you can stumble across, so you can’t tell them that you’ve stumbled across it, because like they don’t want you there, and it’s fine, and no one’s gonna care…
ELM: But I mean like, this is getting to exactly what I’m asking about. Like, I think that this is like, thinking about what Twitter wants, I don’t know. I was dragging Flourish the other day, and Flourish deleted this tweet so I really shouldn’t bring it up, Flourish made the reference—can I bring it up, Flourish? [FK laughs] A reference to “blue checks,” right?
FK: Yeah, I mean, just like, I mean—whatever. It was like a casual like, you know. I don’t know. I was annoyed at, it was…
ELM: Some people…so if you’re not on Twitter…
FK: Some people…
ELM: Verified accounts, you get a little blue check mark next to your name. I have one, Gav has one, Flourish does not, because Flourish is not a real—
FK: Womp-womp.
ELM: —verified person, so.
FK: I am not a verified person.
ELM: But, I was thinking about this, cause—and I made fun of you because I think people like to use “blue-check” to mean, like, whatever they’re mad at, basically. It doesn’t actually mean anything.
FK: To be fair, in my job there literally are things that say “Alert me when only blue-check people, verified people, respond to a thing.” This is like, you know, a thing that Twitter has built into everything. It’s like a difference.
ELM: The thing that’s very weird to me is people who are not Twitter users, I’ve even found this from people who are only casual users, like, the reason most journalists you know are verified is because in like 2014, they went through and verified most journalists.
FK: Yep.
ELM: Who were active at the time. That’s probably when you were verified, yeah?
GBW: Yeah, so that’s why I’m verified, everyone at my workplace was verified and it’s for basically like fact-checking purposes, but then also at the same time loads of people are verified cause they like sent their passport to Twitter, so.
ELM: Right, right. So like, I was a freelancer and all, but I was freelancing for one place, and they wouldn’t give it to me because I wasn’t a salaried staff employee, and so I was pretty angry because at the time there were special security controls for verified people and I was getting the same threatening shitty tweets from Milo Yiannopoulos fans that the rest of my colleagues were, except most of them had already blocked him at that point. And so when they opened it up to everyone I got verified because I wanted those controls, and then literally like three months later they opened it up to all Twitter users, because people were like “This is absurd that you’re not just, make this default, make these controls over like, who can see your,” you know. And it’s like really basic stuff, but like it made a huge difference at the time.
But so, thinking about verified Twitter and what Twitter has wanted itself to be and how it’s completely off the rails, but like, there’s definitely been a lot of times when they’ve wanted to make it like a place of authority and facts, and that doesn’t lend itself super well…
GBW: [laughs] Hilarious, hilarious.
ELM: So you have all these people like, lying, and distorting facts on purpose, but then you have people who are trying to do fiction, and that’s when it gets really murky, right? Because it’s like, you’re not trying to say that Harry Styles is a murderer. And that’s completely different. I’m thinking about like, when deepfakes came into the kind of public consciousness a few years ago. People were saying “This is like RPF, if you like, if you put a—if you do a deepfake of—”
FK: Right.
ELM: “—celebrities having sex, then it’s just like writing sexy RPF.” And it’s like…
GBW: [groans] Is it?
ELM: It’s got the word “fake” in the title!
GBW: No.
ELM: Like, it’s meant to fake you out!
GBW: I’ve never heard that but no.
ELM: Yeah, I’ve seen a bunch of this.
GBW: Just my little kind of ethical subconscious there just gives that a big “No.”
ELM: Right. So I think that these are the, like, muddy waters that all of this exists in, and I think—I’m curious to know, as someone who doesn’t read social media fic, is it ever the goal to try to…not necessarily trick, but try to like, not be super blatant that it’s fiction. Like, I know you’re saying that like, if you read them then you can recognize the patterns and you kind of have to have this insider knowledge, but you know what I mean?
GBW: In my experience no, but also I’m not super plugged-in to One Direction or BTS fandom or like other Kpop fandoms, which is where this is like the most popular. But in my experience, like, pretty much the decided-upon format is that there will be, like, a single thread and the top of the thread will be kind of the equivalent of any other fanfic summary. So it’s like you’re saying what the AU is, you’ve got like your art at the top that’s like, the book cover, you’ve got instructions on how the readers are meant to interact with it, and then it just continues as a thread, so like, if you start at the top of the thread it’s pretty clear [laughs] that it’s fictional, and like, it rarely gets retweeted out of context because it’s only being followed by fandom accounts.
ELM: OK, that’s interesting. Do you find that…I feel like I’m just grilling you right now but I have so many questions. Would you say the vast majority of it is stuff that really depends on the form? Like, depends on Twitter as the way that a tweet exists and…
GBW: Yes.
ELM: OK.
GBW: Yes. In fact, a lot of people are like, resistant to including any of the prose stuff. So it’s like, most of the stuff I follow and have, like, come across is it’s like, the entire story or almost the entire story is told exclusively through texts, and like, tweets.
ELM: Exchanges between people, there’s like, no narrator, there’s no like…
FK: But—
ELM: Overarching voice.
FK: But when I’ve seen this it seems like there’s often like…it’s often done in screenshots of other things.
GBW: Right.
FK: So it’s not necessarily that Twitter itself…
GBW: It’s not like they’re making accounts, they’re making fake accounts and screenshotting it.
FK: Right, and then it seems like—but it seems like, so in other words I think that in most of these fics that I’ve seen, it seems like the delivery method is through Twitter.
GBW: Yes.
FK: And yes of course they’re not having prose, but you could just as easily put all of the screenshots on a website and just scroll down. I mean obviously it wouldn’t be good for, you know, distribution.
GBW: The delivery method for mobile is really good on Twitter, because it’s a mobile app—
FK: Right.
GBW: —where you can have a screenshot of like a text message conversation.
FK: And it shows, right.
GBW: And it’s the right size for your phone.
ELM: And you can thread it, right, because on Instagram—
GBW: And everyone is just following a thread.
ELM: —like, you couldn’t, you couldn’t actually thread something that was permanent. You could make a story…
GBW: Yeah, cause these things are like, you’re reading like 800, like a thread with like 800 installments.
ELM: Right, right.
FK: Yeah.
GBW: So.
FK: Yeah, so like, I follow a story account on Instagram—I mean, lots of people do, it’s very very popular, @livinthefuture, and it’s like, it’s images from—it’s like cartoon images from this future time and this person who’s, like, gone through time into the future. But it’s, it really limits you because you can’t really have a narrative in the same way, because when things are on the grid it’s like, well, you naturally drop into the middle of that. It’s really hard to scroll all the way back to the beginning of the grid and like, start from there, almost no one gets it that way, and also like, Instagram is asynchronous anyway in the way it feeds you pictures, so it sort of has to be kind of, you know, just…drop-in-able. Whereas, yeah, like you’re saying, on Twitter it’s all, it’s all there and it tells you that you’re in a thread and it asks you if you wanna go to the beginning of the thread.
ELM: Yeah.
GBW: And also like, loads of people just write fic on Twitter, just normal fic. And you just write it as a thread, just the same as like, you know, back in the olden days people would’ve done as like LiveJournal comment fic.
ELM: Right, right. Just even thinking about that too, and it’s all in one place. Because I’m thinking about Tumblr and like, the problem with Tumblr is it can start getting reblogged out at different points, and then you have this incomplete thing and sometimes it’s really hard. And like half the themes, when you go back to someone’s page, are not readable beyond like five retweets, or five reblogs rather, right?
GBW: One of the things I really love about Tumblr is the number of themes where you can’t find the button to click page two.
ELM: Wow, yes.
GBW: That is just a really amazing element of Tumblr that I respect so much, it’s like, do you wanna read the next page? Fuck off.
ELM: Just don’t worry about it.
GBW: No.
ELM: Here’s my Tumblr critique, I gotta put it out there: I cannot edit any of my pages. It happened after they did the new update, I cannot like, edit, like, my About page. So it has my job from a year ago, and… [FK laughs] I don’t know what to do.
GBW: You can’t edit your about page?
ELM: I can’t! I’ve gone to all the places where you used to be able to and it’s gone.
GBW: What a great website. I love Tumblr.
ELM: I love Tumblr. I love it. I love it.
FK: But this is bringing us to something that I think is really kind of interesting and curious about this: is this just—is this stuff naturally ephemeral because it’s on Twitter in this way? I mean, and what is the thing with archiving? This is a problem that spans most multimedia online things, right?
ELM: I think part of the appeal is that it is. And also a lot of these things, it’s like the amount of work and time that goes into it and you’ve done this incredible story and then as soon as it’s done, like, it’s not—I mean, you can leave the account active, which some people do, and some people just delete them once they’re done. Like the really popular BTS one, the horror story, that creator infamously deleted their account and no one knows who this person is and it’s like, “Who’s Flirtaus? We don’t know who Flirtaus is!” [laughs]
But, um, yeah, it’s like, the purpose of creating a new account just for one story is ephemeral, and some people go and, you know, transfer it all over to AO3 in kind of a more digestible format, and some people are just like, you know, I’m gonna leave it here and people can find it if they want, or they’ll just delete. I mean, my big recommendation for anyone who’s listening who wants to get started is that there is one which you can find very easily on Twitter which is called Turtle Creek that finished a couple weeks ago, and it’s like an It AU which is about the characters are kind of writers and actors in like a Netflix drama that’s sort of vaguely like Hannibal, and it’s just like so fucking well-written, it’s amazingly good, they’ve done really—
ELM: Wait, this is in the It fandom? You didn’t say what the fandom was.
GBW: Yeah!
ELM: All right.
GBW: It’s It fandom. Yeah. Which I realize is just really hard to say. Stephen King’s It. [all laugh] Loosely based on. The characters are all, are all now actors and writers and it’s kind of a really great mix of like, the different formats and it was all on Twitter. It was really popular. The writer has now started like a different AU which I have not started yet, cause I’m like “I don’t want to be just like, desperate for the next installment like I was last time!” [laughter] But it was so emotional and just really, really talented writers. So. Well done to that guy, whoever he is.
ELM: Wait, so how do you find—do you just have to regularly check, or, check to see if it’s updated? Cause there’s no way to subscribe.
GBW: I mean you can follow the Twitter account.
ELM: Yeah but then you have to like, catch it in your feed. Don’t you follow like a lot of people?
GBW: As far as I know there is no app you can download that allows you to follow one thread on Twitter.
ELM: Yeah, right. That’s what I’m sayin’! So then you gotta just check it.
GBW: I just bookmark.
ELM: Yeah.
GBW: In my bookmarks. The ones that I’m following, and I read them. You just gotta check.
FK: I mean wouldn’t, couldn’t you just create a List that is just all of the fics you’re following so it would be much shorter than your normal one?
ELM: You could do that.
GBW: Yeah. Or that. Like, loads of people.
FK: And then you would get them all mixed, but that’s OK.
GBW: Yeah, for sure.
ELM: Such a List fan. I mean, here’s my question about the ephemerality, like—it’s interesting to me because… [sighs] If we think that people mostly writing Twitter fic are on the younger side, I do feel like there…you know, sometimes I feel like there’s a little bit of a tension between like the old, stalwart, elderly fan, people who are like our age—obviously much older than us too, there’s a big range—of the AO3, we need to archive everything, it needs to be permanent, because I’ve watched so many things be deleted. And some younger fans and newer fans who are like “Well, I liked that for like six months, and now I don’t really like it any more, and whatever. I’m doin’ something else now,” with less of an interest in this sort of like, “It needs to be archived for fandom, for posterity.”
And I’m wondering if that’s happening here in the sense of like, people are creating and consuming in the moment and aren’t particularly concerned with the shelf life of these works, they’re just interested in making something enjoyable right now. Do you think that’s a fair assessment?
GBW: Well I think—I mean some people are and some people aren’t, but definitely there is kind of a generation—maybe like aged over 30—where it’s like, you will have your kind of fixed account that’s like your screen name and that’s where you publish stuff, rather than having like a million disposable screen names.
ELM: Right.
GBW: Which is actually in some ways better, because it’s like harder to track and there’s less pressure and like, I get it. You know?
ELM: Yeah!
GBW: The fandom is sort of spread over Discord and Twitter and stuff rather than just being like, I’ve got this AO3 account that feels really official.
ELM: Right, right.
FK: It’s funny to think about this in the context of, you know, like, 10 years ago the stress that a lot of older people—people our age—were having was like “Oh, all these young people”—yeah, we’re older now, right?—was “Oh, all these young people, their names, their real names, their Facebook names are attached to everything and so there’s not pseudonymity, and people are not as committed to their pseudonyms as they used to be! And that’s like a real problem because you know, then you don’t have the same freedoms and everyone’s just—” you know, right? But then actually, they’re more committed to pseudonyms, you know?
GBW: Yeah!
FK: They’re way more—there’s sockpuppets, right—of course you can take these pseudonyms and turn them into sockpuppets, but 15 years ago having those pseudonyms would be considered having sockpuppets, as opposed to like, now it’s like, “Well, if you use them like that…” But there’s no problem with having them at all.
GBW: Yeah. I hadn’t even considered that that was a sockpuppet, because I’m just like, I mean, I’m not like—when I set up like a new fandom alt, I guess I don’t—I also like don’t really, I don’t like, put any of myself into it.
FK: Right.
GBW: I’m just like, “This is where I’m, like, posting my new stuff.” Cause I didn’t want to, like…
FK: I’m realizing I should probably define “sockpuppet.”
ELM: Yeah, do it, do it.
FK: Which, so—[all laugh] “sockpuppet” is when you have like, your real account, and then you—I don’t know—wish that you had an army of winged monkeys to come and yell at people you don’t like, and so you create like six—
GBW: It’s inherently deceptive, it’s inherently deceptive.
FK: It’s inherently deceptive. You create a bunch of alternate accounts and like, they go and say things and I think you know, 15-20 years ago, if you had a main account and an alt, people would be very instantly suspicious of that.
GBW: Yeah.
FK: Because they would assume that you were doing that in order to be deceptive. And now that’s just not the case.
GBW: I mean I think it’s also like, it’s privacy and it also allows for more freedom. And also you tell, you’re like “Oh, this is my new account.” You tell a bunch of friends and like, you know what their new accounts are and stuff, so you know.
FK: Right.
ELM: Yeah. Wait, how many accounts do you have? I know you have accounts you won’t even tell me about,
GBW: Well, I mean, I currently—I don’t have, I am not operating any secret accounts at this time, Elizabeth. [all laugh] I’m not using, I’m not in any—like I’m not writing in any extra fandoms.
ELM: Yeah.
GBW: But like, because I’m in kind of a weird position because I have like, I have an AO3 account which is functionally attached to my real life identity.
FK: Yeah.
GBW: Like, obviously I am only gonna post like, wholesome content! I’m like, I’m only gonna be posting like, “Oh, here’s this—”
ELM: Now I see.
GBW: I mean like my mother follows me on Twitter! So it’s like, if I wanna write just some absolute garbage, it’s gonna be on like some other account. You know?
FK: Yeah. Yeah, it’s—I was, that makes me feel, that makes me feel good because like, I guess I am kind of old because I only—I mean both of us, we each only have one alt as far as I know, unless you’ve been holding out on me, you know?
ELM: Flourish, yours—the thing is though like…
FK: Mine is so obvious.
ELM: It’s so obvious.
FK: It’s just like a paper tiger.
ELM: Because you—it might not have been obvious when you were just posting, so, OK, Flourish has like Flourish’s Flourish account, right? Which has got like fic from back, you know, when Flourish was 12 and everything. I don’t know if you actually have any of that there. But then…
FK: Uh, I have some pretty old fic. Not from 12.
GBW: I’ve got like my old account which I haven’t posted anything on but people know is my old fanfic account. And then I’ve got my newer fanfic account, which is like, basically attached to my name.
ELM: But you’re—that’s to your professional name. So Flourish has got this account which I think maybe when we started this podcast it might have been hard to fine, but now because you published fic in every fandom that you’ve been very vocal about under that name, and you describe them in detail, you’re like—
FK: It’s fine, because the only purpose of it is to prevent any immediate Googling, right?
ELM: Right, right.
FK: If someone wants to find it, then I don’t care.
ELM: Yeah, right.
FK: If you’re that committed, then you saw the sign on the bag that said “dead dove, do not eat” and you went there and you knew.
ELM: Right.
FK: So like, why’d you do that, you know?
ELM: It’s the same thing that my friends who are professors who are in fandom often have, right? It’s like, it would take a very mediocre detective to connect the two sides of your…
FK: Right, right. But also like for me professionally, right, because people have to know that I write fanfic and do fan things anyway, in order for me to be like, credible professionally.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: It’s not like that part’s a secret. So like, you know, then the only question is: did you decide to go down and find out which of the people that you personally are friends with I’ve written sex scenes about? No? Good job!
ELM: Wow.
FK: Glad you had some, glad you had some barriers, you know?
ELM: OK.
FK: A little self control!
GBW: There’s less kind of pressure to write anything of quality if it’s like a different account. It’s like “Well, if it’s bad, or if I write something in one afternoon, it can go there and it doesn’t matter.”
ELM: Wait, so that’s one question for you Gav, when you choose to put something on the HelloTailor account and like, link to it in “The Rec Center” and share it with your like 10,000 followers or whatever you have on Twitter, like, do you feel a kind of pressure there?
GBW: I feel like it’s a bit more, like…I feel like I am less likely to write there, like it’s less—it’s harder to write there because like subconsciously I’m aware that like, that could be clicked on by just like, some random businessman who follows me on Twitter [FK whoops] for journalism purposes. You know? Rather than if I like, created like, a new account that was just to write about—I don’t know. Like, I was like, “OK, this is my account where I only publish Westworld fanfic.” And I’m like, the Westworld alt account. I’m just picking something I would never write fanfic for in my life. [all laugh]
FK: Do you have a Westworld alt? Because…
GBW: No, I don’t even watch Westworld! I was like God, the most exhausting show on television. In an interesting way, but like, you know. Too intellectual for me.
FK: I don’t like the latest season, I’m judgin’!
ELM: No, Flourish, you cannot disown your past self!
FK: I liked Westworld and then I got partway through this season and I ragequit, so.
GBW: That’s very fair. But yeah, it would be like, you know, there’s just no pressure whatsoever. And I think that’s a lot of the reason why, along with the fact that it’s just like, you know, for ease of use it’s you can just like create a new account. And we all know people who did that, like, before—like in the olden days, people who would have like throwaway LiveJournal account because they were, like, too self-conscious.
ELM: Right. But so do either of you miss having like—like, so my pseud is like, that is my like, persona, right? I, you know. And so it’s like, it feels much more old-school to me as opposed to you two, who are just creating these accounts so you can post with some freedom. Like, do you miss having that like, alter-ego element where you’re like…
GBW: Not really because I don’t really want to feel like I’m, like, hiding something.
ELM: I mean, I don’t necessarily feel like I’m hiding something, it’s just like “Hey! This is like the fandom space,” you know?
GBW: Yeah, for sure, because when I first started out—you know, when I was a teenager obviously it’s like my personal identity would not have been public, it would have been just like a screen name. But it’s just like, I don’t know I just hadn’t really, yeah. I’ve never really considered, I think maybe also I just wouldn’t have time to like, set that up.
ELM: Yeah.
GBW: Yeah, I…
ELM: Especially if you’re just like creating, I don’t know how often you create alt accounts, because if you’re doing that pretty regularly whenever you join a new fandom, there’s not a lot of time to say like “This is me!” You know? You’re just like, “I’m posting.” Right? And then “I’m gone, I’m not into this anymore,” right?
GBW: I feel like all the fandoms that I’m really invested in it’s just like automatically ends up on my main account cause that’s what I’m talking about, so…
ELM: You rarely talk about It.
GBW: That’s true. Well, there’s nothing to say about It. [laughter] I feel like, there’s a lot to say about The Untamed, which I’m watching at the moment, but it’s like, there is—I have nothing to say about the film It. I am very much enjoying the fanfic that other people are very imaginatively creating about this film, which I think most people will agree was not good, including people in the fandom. And people in the fandom have no respect for Stephen King, so I don’t feel like any It fans in the podcast audience are going to be offended by my statements here.
Yeah, I mean, I don’t even know what I would tweet about that. I think the only thing I’ve tweeted in the past few months about It is recommending the fanfic “Turtle Creek,” which is really good. [all laugh]
ELM: Wait this is about the adult It people, right? Like not...or is it about the teens?
GBW: Yeah, the grownups. They’re like 40.
ELM: yeah.
GBW: So the first It movie they’re kids and the second It movie they’re like 40 years old.
ELM: You, you know I’ve seen it.
GBW: Yeah. But for the purpose of listeners.
ELM: Right, maybe they missed it.
GBW: Yeah. The first It movie is better than the second It film, but the It film, the second one is the one that stars like famous middle-aged actors. The main characters that people ship are a character played by Bill Hader and a character played by an actor that no one will recognize.
ELM: Except as the man from It.
GBW: So he’s now got this like vast internet fandom. [all laughing] I know nothing about him as a person but I’m sure he’s fine.
FK: OK, let’s, let’s bring this back though because as you’ve been talking about this, it struck me that one of the things about social media fic versus, like, roleplay or you know, particularly like dedicated roleplay, is that actually social media fic requires less of a…it’s still really hard to make and so on, but it seems like it’s easier to sort of fit into a schedule [laughs] to fit into your daily life, right? Because you can prepare these posts, you can write them all on your own, you don’t have to have another person with you to, to roleplay it, necessarily. You can, you know, sort of fit it in wherever and then you just post it.
Whereas I feel like with roleplay it really is almost like creating an alt, like Elizabeth’s alt. It’s almost like creating an alt that is going to be the version of you and you’re gonna go there and you’re gonna spend time on there interacting—
ELM: The life that you’re living. I mean that’s the pleasure of roleplaying is like—
FK: That’s the pleasure!
ELM: That’s what you’re there for, right, it’s not—
FK: Exactly.
ELM: It’s not for the text you create, it’s for the act of doing it.
FK: Yeah, it’s inherently part of that sort of, it’s a time-based medium as opposed to social media fic which is like, the fiction has time in it, but it’s not time-based.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: That’s interesting to think about, because yeah, I agree with you that I wouldn’t have enough energy to create an entirely separate alt that I didn’t tell people about who I was, and I am really, I admire you greatly Elizabeth for being able to do that.
ELM: It takes almost no energy, all I have to do is like—I mean the energy part is like, writing fanfiction, which is something that you’re also doing, and all I have—it’s like, I definitely, I’ve made a couple friends there and like, it’s exciting! And it’s different friends, and also like, I don’t have a lot of friends IRL who are in my fandom—
FK: Right.
ELM: And there’s, so it’s like, where am I gonna talk about that with people?
GBW: I hadn’t really considered that, like, all of my—virtually all of my real life friends are like, nerds, and a lot of them are in fandom, and a lot of my real-life…
FK: Very specifically for me right now everyone’s seen Star Trek and they’re ready to bullshit about it with me!
GBW: I don’t need to find, like, the underground Star Trek fandom! [laughing]
ELM: But also like, you tend to be like, in like, not quickly but like, I don’t know. In my observations collaborating with you for the last five years, I guess it’s only four years? But like, you tend—I think you both kind of do tend to like, often be in fandoms that are like, happening right now and—
FK: Right.
ELM: Not for super long periods of time, like…
GBW: Mm-hmm.
FK: Yeah. It burns hot and fast!
ELM: As opposed to like—I’ve spent the last two years—
GBW: Temporary fandom.
ELM: —in a fandom that was mostly active, again, 10 years ago, and there’s still people doing it, but again, you have to find them where they are. So if I just started tweeting about X-Men: First Class under my—people would be like “I remember that movie and I enjoyed it,” or whatever, and it’s like, cool. We’re gonna have—there’s nothing else to talk about beyond like, your nostalgia for this thing that happened 10 years ago, you know? Which is not, that’s not a fandom, that’s just—I can also talk about how much I miss the terrible show that was Torchwood, but like, that’s not fandom activity. That’s just me casually talking about things from the past, you know what I mean?
FK: Yeah, totally.
GBW: Elizabeth, did I tell you that my friend Grace Knight just wrote a Torchwood audio drama starring Burn Gorman.
ELM: Stop. Wait, just—just starring Owen?
GBW: Just starring Owen. So it’s him voicing the audio drama. It’s out this month, so I haven’t listened to it yet, but I’m now officially one degree of separation away from Torchwood. [laughs]
ELM: Incredible! Wait, what is, do you know what the plot is? Like, why is it just him, is it like a prequel?
GBW: Well, I think they just—they do like a bunch of kind of shorter dramas that are just one actor so they can just have like one actor in the studio. Like the company that does all the Torchwood and Doctor Who audio dramas.
ELM: I listened to a whole bunch of them but most of them were like multi, like, they made a whole bunch of them a few years after the show ended?
GBW: I think they’re like experimenting with other formats.
ELM: That’s, that’s exciting! Wait, are they gonna make one of just Ianto?
GBW: I have no idea. I would imagine if he’s available yes. [laughs]
ELM: I’m sure he’s available, no offense to him, but, uh, great. All right maybe I’m gonna get back into Torchwood fandom, watch out! But you’ll never know about it cause I’ll have a secret account and I won’t tell any of you. [all laugh] Yeah.
OK, back to social media fics though. Do people ever archive them on the AO3?
GBW: Yeah!
ELM: OK.
GBW: Yeah, for sure.
ELM: AO3 is like famously not great for visuals.
GBW: I mean if you’re doing it just in texts…
ELM: Yeah.
GBW: Then you just transcribe all the texts.
ELM: Right.
GBW: Cause I followed one recently that was just texts. Which a lot of them are. Like, if it’s just texts or just tweets, you know, you can transfer that over and you’ve got your archive if you can be bothered.
ELM: Right.
GBW: But it’s not as mobile-friendly and everyone’s reading on mobile.
ELM: For you a lot of the pleasure is in reading it in that specific place, right, with the functionality of Twitter and like—on your phone…
GBW: Yeah, it’s really convenient and everyone loves serialized fiction. [all laugh] That’s what we are all here for. And it’s just like, a really cool form of serialized fiction!
ELM: Do you like fave every tweet?
GBW: I don’t fave anything cause I’m on my main account. But I also, I don’t use faves, I use faves as a bookmarking tool. So I don’t actually fave any tweets by anyone.
ELM: Interesting! Oh I always wondered if you just hated my tweets, but no. It’s not just me.
GBW: [laughs] No, I don’t fave anything.
ELM: I fave a lot and I get into like, endless fave, fave exchanges where you’re just like “Thank you! Fave!” And you’re like OK, when can I leave this. I’m a faver.
FK: Are you guys talking about liking?
ELM: Yeah—is it called liking?
FK: “Faving.” I always call it “liking.” [ELM laughs]
GBW: I mean whatever it is—
FK: The heart!
GBW: —I don’t like or fave anything.
FK: The heart button!
ELM: Yeah!
FK: We’re all talking about the heart button.
ELM: Did you just sit there listening to us have this whole conversation and you were like “I don’t know what they’re talking about right now?”
GBW: [laughing] Like “What the fuck are you talking about?!”
FK: I was, well, I was sitting here, I was literally my entire mind was just on a loop going “Is liking called faving? Is faving liking?” [ELM laughing]
GBW: No, it’s definitely called liking because when you go to the website twitter.com your likes are under the like page.
FK: It’s called liking!
ELM: Hold on, is there somewhere where it’s called faving? Is there a site where they say…
GBW: I don’t think I think of it as anything specific in my mind. I think maybe Elizabeth said “liking” first, so it’s your fault.
FK: “Faving,” yeah.
ELM: People definitely use that word to talk about liking.
FK: I think it may have been a historical word that they used for it and then they changed it.
ELM: I think because Facebook tried to copyright the word “like” and the action of liking, probably, which is like, you know.
FK: OK. Well, anyway, now my confusion has been cleared up, please carry on. [all laugh]
ELM: Go on!
FK: I just, you know, again, like when you see something that has like—that’s just horribly confusing and you’re like “Am I, do I have, like, a problem with my brain?”
ELM: Yes.
GBW: I’m gonna go ahead and assume that of the three of us you’re the one who knows the most about this topic?
ELM: About faving? No, I’m the faver. I’m just gonna keep saying it. I truly do think that’s what they used to be called on Twitter.
FK: I think so too.
ELM: It just shows that I’m an old-school Twitter user. I’m sure you’ve both been on Twitter longer than me, I didn’t get it till 2010.
FK: [laughs] Yes, I have been on Twitter longer than you.
ELM: I got on Twitter because I was forced to, actually it was more of a soft force. My editor at the time said “You should just start one.” And I said “Do I have to?” And she said “Pretty soon you’re gonna be forced to.” And so I started one! It’s a cool way that journalists go online.
GBW: I couldn’t afford a smartphone for ages, so I initially used Twitter via text message from my like, Nokia phone.
ELM: That’s very old school.
FK: Yeah!
GBW: But that was like, that was like by which point everyone else had a smartphone, so it’s not like I was doing this before the smartphone era, I just couldn’t afford a smartphone. [all laugh]
ELM: It’s like 2014 and you’re like, SMSing to Twitter.
GBW: Literally if you find a tweet from me in like 2011 it will definitely be from, like, it will definitely be from like a Nokia.
ELM: That’s hardcore. Was it like a brick, or did you have something like a step up from a brick?
GBW: I never had a good phone until I, like, had a smartphone.
ELM: The brick is a good phone! I don’t know what you’re talking about.
GBW: No I mean, a phone that doesn’t look like a comical old-fashioned prop. All of my cell phones in university were like that. But it wasn’t—I mean I’m 30, so it’s like, in 2011 I was 21.
FK: That’s a lot.
GBW: I was definitely still using like a flip phone.
ELM: I mean that’s not super late. I just, when I lived in the U.K. when I was studying abroad, I got the classic, the really solid brick, like, not a flip. You know, like the little…and it really, it got the job done.
FK: Candybar format?
ELM: Yes, yes.
FK: Yeah yeah yeah, yeah.
ELM: It was really good. Also we didn’t have texting at the time, like no one texted—it existed but like, this was in 2005 and for some reason Europe was way ahead of the curve on this, and so…
GBW: You didn’t have texting in the U.S.?
ELM: It was not very popular.
FK: We didn’t really use it. It was not very popular. Like occasionally you would use it. But I didn’t regularly text until probably—I don’t think I really regularly texted until like 2008.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: Like I mean—you would use it very rarely.
GBW: I was in high school then, so I was texting.
FK: You would use it very occasionally before that, but it was…
ELM: Probably not until…yeah, I got a smartphone in 2009 and that was when I really started texting. Except when I lived in the U.K. because everyone texted me and they put the freakin’ Xes at the end of their texts and I was like “I don’t know what’s going on here” and I had like two pound fifty on my phone at all times, so I was very limited… [GBW laughs] If I had to call anyone, it would be just like a nightmare, because I’d be like “OK we have to hang up right now because I have like literally a dollar on this phone.” It was a special time. Really really enjoyed it.
FK: I just will always remember my first experience with Twitter, which possibly I’ve talked about on the podcast before. I bought a smartphone in 2008 with the money I’d gotten from people because I’d graduated college, and it was like a first-gen iPhone. It was like, very very, you know.
ELM: Pretty hardcore.
FK: It was super fancy, right? It wasn’t first gen, but anyway, it was early. And it had GPS which I had never experienced before, and I was like in Cambridge for the first time and I was at a burger joint and I like tweeted that I was at this burger joint with GPS on and like, someone messaged me back and said like, “Try this burger!” Like, this specific burger off the menu. And I was like “The future!!!!”
ELM: Do you like this? You thought this was good.
FK: I don’t know if I thought it was good. I thought it was like, boggling. It was like, “Oh it’s the future! And there’s people who are talking to me because they know where I am right now and they have experiences of it!”
GBW: That’s terrifying.
FK: “And like, I don’t know what’s going on!” It was just like, I don’t think I had positive or negative feelings about it. I think I felt like the future had come into my face and just been like, FUTURE! [all laugh] So. And now I regret that this ever happened.
ELM: That you thought it was cool, yeah.
FK: Well I don’t know that I thought it was cool, again, I think I just thought it was like “what the fuck,” you know?
GBW: Yeah. I guess also it was awhile ago, because now I would never post that I am somewhere.
FK: Yeah, right?
GBW: Basically don’t post about my life.
ELM: You do, you post your outfits!
GBW: No, I post about my life but I don’t really post like, you know, events that are happening in my private life.
ELM: Checkin’ in, yeah.
GBW: “Here my friends are.”
ELM: “Here I am.”
FK: Yeah yeah. Which is kind of funny because so often social media fics are based around, like, not totally based around, but like, when you do have people tweeting in them, like, right, a lot of times you use the GPS or you use whatever!
GBW: Yes!
FK: You know what I mean? You use the location, which we would not use, but they use it because it’s really convenient to be able to tell people where they are.
GBW: I find really interesting about like, social media fic is because I’m fascinated by kind of the intersection of public and private life. And a lot of these are specifically popular in fandoms where that’s a key element of the canon. Right? So it’s like, all the ones where it’s RPF, these characters are celebrities, so like, it feels natural to be accessing their lives through a combination of what they’re posting on social media and what they’re saying privately in text messages, so you get kind of the visceral appeal of seeing like a famous person’s, like, private messages.
FK: Yeah, it’s the fantasy, right?
GBW: And a lot of the AUs from other fandoms are kind of incorporating levels of that, so it’s like a lot of the kind of, a lot of the It, like, fics I follow—it’s like I follow one where they’re podcasters. So like, they all have podcasts. And I follow one where like, they’re hockey players, and like, a lot of—and they’re kind of really incorporating like, people are just kind of subconsciously tapping into like, what type of story you have on social media.
So like, I’ve only read one social media fic for The Untamed, but it’s like, The Untamed is a historical fantasy story, and one of the main characters would never in a million years have any kind of social media accounts if they existed now. So it’s like, you have to like engineer a situation where like, characters would have social media, which is like what I was finding really amusing writing for Star Trek.
Cause like, Spock would never go on Twitter. [laughs] Like, he wouldn’t! He wouldn’t fucking have Twitter. So I’m like, “He’s been legally obliged to have a Twitter account and all he posts on it are like links to educational NASA pages.” But like, yeah. You have to, I think that’s part of the reason why it catches on in some places and some, like, not in other fandoms because it’s like, it has to be plausibly texting each other.
And obviously you can just write quite out of character stuff, where it’s like, people are texting, but to me I kind of read some things and I’m like, “I can’t imagine this person sending a meme,” so I’m just like “I’m out.”
ELM: This is fascinating to me because it’s even got me thinking—so when I was talking about the distinction between roleplaying and setting up social media accounts for characters and what we’re talking about now, I was thinking about some in my current fandom where people have set up—they’ll like screenshot fake Twitter accounts or whatever and it’s like, on Tumblr. But it’s always done in like, it’s modern obviously because they have social media accounts. But it always frames them as them being public figures. It’s never like, “They’re just people living their lives!” You know, and they happen to have social media.
GBW: If that’s X-Men—
ELM: Yeah.
GBW: Then it makes sense for Magneto and Professor X to be public figures.
ELM: Yeah, right.
GBW: But you definitely get loads of fanfics where they’re not public figures, like, people aren’t public figures for sure.
ELM: Right so—oh you mean on social media AUs, where they just have social media.
GBW: Yeah, yeah where they have social media.
ELM: Yeah, but it’s like, it’s interesting to me because it’s like, it often frames them—you don’t, not every fic about them makes them public figures. Sometimes they just have jobs and know each other. You know? But like, the desire to put them into a social media space taps into that sort of public/private like, what you’re talking about. Like, what would they…you know.
GBW: And the audience are all in fandom, so we’re used to—like, we get to exercise the fantasies that we have as fans that we already are like, accessing through social media, but like, we get more satisfying content from like, what usually is probably quite like a policed public presence.
ELM: Right. Wait, so have you read any social media fics where it, they weren’t some kind—I mean like podcasters even count as public figures. Where they didn’t have that sort of…
GBW: Yeah, I’ve read a few where they are not public figures, I’ve read some where it’s just like, they’re normal people and you get their internet history and that sort of thing. The most interesting one I’m reading right now in It fandom, because that’s the vast majority of fic I’m reading, social media fic, is in It, is one which is just like a really—it’s like a really unusual concept that I really appreciated, which is like, they’ve taken…
So in this story there’s like, the characters are battling the demon clown, whatever, I’m sure you guys know this. And but also, a lot of them, in kind of the nightmare hellscape that they are stuck in for awhile, there is kind of nightmare versions of those characters in some capacity, if only for like a couple of brief scenes, they’re like a hallucination that’s made to scare those characters.
And this person has written this fic where it’s like, it kind of takes the format of one of those AUs where it’s like “What if the characters were all roommates?” But the characters that are roommates are like the evil, demonic, opposite evil twins of the main characters, so they all have the reverse personality of the characters in the movie, and they act in really bizarre supernatural ways and they’re really, like, some of them are sort of like eldritch creatures, but they also are like talking in Twitter. Talking in texts. And like one of them is, has mutism, cause they had their mouth sewn shut, so they have to text. And it’s like, this is like so elaborate. It’s called “Cut the Strings,” if anyone wants to read it, it’s on Twitter.
But I was like, “This is so imaginative!” Because it’s taking what is usually the most banal format, which is just like “Oh, they’re all roomies and they’re in their 20s,” which is like, fine, but it’s not an interesting kind of AU concept, and they’ve made it like, such a weird interesting idea that is like, fully original. Like, it’s barely any resemblance to the original. I’m like, “Great!”
ELM: That’s fascinating. And you think, and there’s something—you don’t think that could’ve worked, obviously you could transfer that over AO3 but I don’t, there’s something inherent about it being on Twitter or in social media.
GBW: Well in that case not necessarily.
ELM: OK.
GBW: Cause it’s just like an AU concept. But for the most part, it’s like, the appeal of like these stories is that you’re reading a serialized story where you’re getting like—it’s also really good for unreliable narrators, because you get the perspective of certain characters and you see group chats between different groups of people who are misunderstanding other people and like, it’s a top-tier trope for romance stories when you’ve got like one person who’s pining and is talking in one group chat, and the other person is getting shitty advice from their friends in the other group chat.
ELM: That’s funny!
GBW: It’s my kind of, it’s very like, real.
ELM: Yeah, so you do find more in Twitter fic—do you find more, like, more multi-POV stuff than…? Because you’re…?
GBW: Yeah, it’s kind of intrinsically more a multi-POV.
ELM: Yeah.
GBW: And also it’s like, it is a bit of a different, a different kind of perspective you get in like a lot of traditional prose fanfic, where usually you’re only getting…you either get you’re watching from above and you know everything—what’s the term for that?
ELM: Third person omniscient?
FK: Third person omniscient?
GBW: Third person omniscient, that’s the term I was looking for. Or like you’re looking at it from like, either one of the two lead perspectives or both. That’s like the main three ways that you’re reading fanfic, right? But like I hadn’t thought of this before, but yeah, you’re right. When you’re reading chatfic, you are getting like—cause you’re seeing the text messages of each individual character, so even though you’re not getting their internal monologues, you’re seeing how they’re presenting themselves to other people and like, it’s a lot more kind of clued-in to just the way that we like generationally communicate with each other.
So instead of it being sort of the equivalent of like an old-fashioned epistolary story, you can see them having like reactions in the moment, and you can also see people kind of typing and then deleting text messages that they’re not including, like, what they’re nervous about. So it kind of, it just works because it’s like, that is the way that I—and I presume you two as well—are like, used to communicating with people for like, a lot of the time.
ELM: Yeah, yeah. That’s really interesting.
FK: I feel sold, you know.
ELM: You were already sold, Flourish!
FK: This is making me wanna go—I was already sold. But this is making me feel more sold, to the extent that it makes me want to go, right now, hang up on both of you—
ELM: Wow, wow.
FK: —and read some social media fic.
ELM: I thought you were gonna like wanna write one. It totally seems, this is like right up your alley Flourish.
FK: I mean, I might. But I need an idea.
ELM: Well why don’t you pretend that the characters of Star Trek are… [GBW laughs] Wait, before we go though, Gav, I wanna know: have I already talked to you about and did you watch the Channel 4 reality show where they tricked people into thinking they’re going into space?
GBW: No. In fact, I’ve really not watched very much reality TV at all.
ELM: This was in 2005.
GBW: I recall they took them all to like a location and then put them in like a tank or something—they put them in just like a warehouse?
ELM: I think they flew to like Surrey or something. They flew them like in circles for hours and said they were going to Russia to train. And then they had like, it was the most elaborate, it was one of the cruelest things I’ve ever seen on television.
GBW: I have vague recollections of this.
ELM: It’s just because you’re writing about a—you’re writing about people actually going to space, right?
GBW: Yeah. I’d completely forgotten that that even existed, I should look that up for research purposes. But no, I did not ever see that.
ELM: It’s called Space Cadets and for some reason I was—cause I often tell people about this because I want to express to them the cruelty of British reality television in contrast to American reality television—and I read the Wikipedia page and the like, the amount of, the structure underneath it was so elaborate because they had like, psychologists involved and like actors, and they like—they like, weeded the people out to the final contestants because they were looking for people who were incredibly suggestible, and it’s like, I mean, it’s incredibly dubious, this thing. So.
GBW: That, yeah. That is.
FK: Yeah, so now I feel depressed [ELM laughs] about the state of the world. I was feeling excited about social media fic, but now…
GBW: This was 2005.
ELM: Yeah yeah, don’t worry Flourish, it was 15 years ago, I think these people have probably gotten over it. Also, I don’t even know—they were, they seemed a bit upset at the reveal, but like, these people were real chill people, so I’m sure that they were just like “Well, that was a laugh.” They probably got paid by the network, so.
GBW: I mean British reality TV is a real nightmare.
ELM: It’s, I mean, it’s interesting, but it’s fraught.
GBW: I mean also—yeah. I mean I don’t, I don’t watch, really, much reality TV. But like, we have—I feel like in the U.S., it’s like, there’s more the kind of the really kind of—the really like grotesque American reality shows are like, so kind of professionalized and false.
ELM: Yeah.
GBW: So like there’s the whole subculture of people who it’s like your career is to be like a really ridiculous extreme person on reality TV. And then here you have loads of really predatory shows where it’s just like, being unbelievably cruel to some poor person.
ELM: And then they seem very ordinary.
GBW Not like a C-list celebrity. Yeah. It’s just like someone who’s like ordinary and it’s like “Let’s, like, pick apart this person’s hideous disgusting body,” and I’m like, “This is awful!” [laughs]
ELM: Do you remember the one where they had them have sex in the box on the stage?
GBW: Oh, Sex Box. [all laugh] You mean Sex Box. Of course I remember Sex Box. I mean that was more of a, that was like an educational game show.
ELM: Yeah.
GBW: That wasn’t even like a—Flourish, do you know Sex Box?
ELM: Yeah, you know about Sex Box?
GBW: They have sex in the box. [all laughing] And then like, what was it, who was—
FK: I have to say…
ELM: I think it was, was it Dan Savage involved?
FK: I do not know Sex Box, I literally am going to hang up on you guys right now because this is too much. Gav, I really—
ELM: They would like discuss, afterward they would have them like really really blandly discuss what happened in the box afterwards. They’d be like “Yeah, and then we 69ed, and then we,” and then they like deconstruct their…
FK: Gav, it’s been a delight having you on this podcast. [all laugh] I really appreciate all the things you brought except for the part where I learned about Sex Box because that I did not want to know about.
ELM: To be fair, I brought these things. Don’t blame Gav for that. She did nothing wrong.
FK: Gav aided and abetted you. Gav, I’m kicking you out.
ELM: No! [all laugh]
GBW: Thanks!
ELM: Thank you very much for coming on, this was fascinating!
[Interstitial music]
FK: It’s always a pleasure having Gav on the podcast for a variety of reasons, one of which is I love having some accent diversity.
ELM: Wow. Way to make her feel like the Other. With a capital O.
FK: Oh no! Oh no! It was meant to be a compliment!
ELM: Gav has a very lovely accent, yes.
FK: And also lots of very lovely things to say, let’s be clear! [both laugh] Oh no. Oh noooo.
ELM: It’s fine! I hope, I hope that you comment on everyone’s voice after we have them on.
FK: Oh no! [laughs] I’m gonna like, I’m like a little hermit crab crawling into my shell.
ELM: And yet I’m not gonna allow you to erase what you just said! It’s fine.
FK: Oh no. There’s no…
ELM: Yeah, it’s super interesting. There was so much in there, and I am very interested, as someone who studies social media and like, did my master’s thesis on Tumblr six years ago now—so it’s starting to feel like a historical experience that I had…it was, because it was a different platform then!
You know, I have been very interested over the last like, since around that time, in the rise of social media spaces that are meant to be ephemeral and temporary and how that kind of clashes with this kind of, as I was talking about in that conversation, like, there is an old-school fandom desire to archive, archive, archive. Because I think it’s the remnants of people who’ve been around for awhile feeling pretty sad about all the stuff that didn’t get saved, whether that was physical stuff from the ’70s or ’80s or the first 15 years of the Web, which is for a lot of people a digital black hole.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: But I also think that there are times when the fannish desire to archive is not even really about archiving, it’s just about straight-up preserving without a lot of archival judgment. Because it’s hard to know what, especially something that’s so communal and like, folks—folks—like, you know, folksonomic? You know.
FK: Folksonomic.
ELM: Is that the word I’m looking for? You know, something that’s so, it’s not like you’re creating an archive of like one person’s writings, which is like, very different on like a measured thing about creating a collection. I think there’s an instinct by some to say “We just need to save everything,” to the point where it’s like, you may be saving things from people who moved on from those spaces 15 years ago or 10 years ago and don’t ever want to return to them again and would rather those were just lost to the sands of time.
And so I think it’s really interesting to see a rise of fannish activity on platforms that are inherently more short-term, you know, especially people doing any fannish activity in an Instagram story that doesn’t get saved or on Snapchat or anything like that, you know, where it’s literally deliberately meant to vanish and it’s supposed to be a super timely experience. I feel like there’s a fundamental clash between those two mindsets about fannish activity.
FK: Yeah, I mean, I would agree. I think that there’s also just questions about what people think that they’re doing when they write fanfiction at all, or for that matter when they roleplay or something like that. So historically if you think of fanfiction that’s something that’s like the stuff that would be in a zine, right, that you’re publishing your fanfiction, then maybe it makes more sense to think of it as “we need to archive that fanfiction.” It’s novels, you know, it’s like books, right?
As opposed to—this was something that interested me about that connection to roleplay, which is people don’t think of…of course people archive, do different types of archiving around theater or other kinds of ephemeral performances, but people always know that those are not—that’s, you know, you’re archiving things about it, you’re not able to archive the actual thing that happened.
And so to me, it’s really interesting to see people who are doing roleplay and then see how maybe this is sort of…I mean it’s not like roleplay at all, right? It’s not like roleplay in the sense of people inhabiting the character or anything else, but there is something about that ephemerality that I feel like is closer to…no one is shocked that a LARP that happened 15 years ago, there’s not a lot of good documentation of, you know?
ELM: Yeah, right.
FK: And no one would say like, “that’s a tragedy.” I mean, people might regret that they didn’t save things from the LARP if they were part of it or if it was meaningful to them or whatever, and someone might want to do an oral history of it or something like that if they thought that that was important, but there’s no sense that like, every LARP has to have full documentation at all times. Like, that’s something that just happens and goes.
So you know, I kind of wonder whether maybe we just don’t have a sense yet—because everything is different online actually [laughs] quite different! Right? Maybe we just don’t have a sense yet of what things should be archived or should be expected to be archived or how and what is, you know, what is more ephemeral and what’s not. You know?
ELM: Yeah. But it’s challenging because it’s like, there is an element…I think the AO3 orphaning feature is really fundamentally…kinda puts a stake in the ground about how, what the AO3 thinks fanfiction is. Which is—
FK: Yes.
ELM: You know, it’s for the community, it’s not for the writer in that sense.
FK: Right.
ELM: It gives you that choice, you can absolutely delete your fic, but it’s saying “Hey, why don’t you think of this as something that now belongs to the fandom and not to you.”
FK: Right.
ELM: “If you don’t want anything to do with it anymore.” And that’s, that’s incredible. And there isn’t actually, you know, I can’t, there are not a lot of analogous features in like, outside of, you know, even in fannish spaces for that kind of thing. And so that’s, that’s really interesting to me and it makes me wonder…
Gav and I actually like, we didn’t mention this in the conversation, I kinda wish I had brought it up, but we’ve had some…“fights” is maybe too strong, with some of our readers, but exchanges with some readers of “The Rec Center” trying to rec things that have been taken down and are on, in a Google Doc.
FK: Right.
ELM: Or you know, in some kind of file. And saying things like, “No. We’re not,” you know. That may be something that you can pass to a friend, but we’re not gonna send this to thousands of people. Like, the writer took it down and whether you disagree with—whether you think that was a great injustice, that they would deny the world that work, that’s not your decision, you know? And so passing around kind of a bootleg copy is not something I feel comfortable doing in that context. Because we are, you know, we’re using our real names, we’re journalists, and we’d be sharing it with thousands and thousands of people.
FK: Right. I’ll be clear, I have no problem with doing that, I do that all the time—to one or two people.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: But I think that there is a difference of scale.
ELM: Would you, I mean, would you put it on your Twitter or your Tumblr? “Check out, here’s a link to this fic that someone took down.”
FK: Um…I think that it would be very cir—the answer is “almost always no,” but I think there are some cases where circumstantially I might do it.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: But, but probably—my instinct is to say no, I wouldn’t, because that’s a public forum and that’s different than having, I mean, for all they know I could’ve downloaded the fic. I mean whatever. You’re allowed to download fics. You can download a fic and share it with your friend, you know.
ELM: Sure.
FK: I coulda printed it out, you know?
ELM: Right, right.
FK: So yeah, I don’t know.
ELM: But then it’s like, you aren’t really allowed—I mean you could, but it’s ethically dubious—you wouldn’t then go republish it and say “attributed to this person.”
FK: Right.
ELM: You know? Especially if they’re like, still around, you know?
FK: Yeah, yeah.
ELM: Even if they weren’t still around, you know? That’s, completely goes against their wishes.
FK: Totally.
ELM: So then it’s like, where is the line between, if you’re republicizing it as opposed to republishing it. Obviously there’s an obvious line of like, you copy/paste the text into a thing and hit “publish,” you are republishing. But you know what I mean.
FK: I do. Well, I’m interested to see how this all shakes out over the course of the next decade or so, probably, because I think that is the scale on which things are going to change. It’s not going to be something that we can see in the next few months.
ELM: I don’t wanna think about Twitter being around for another decade.
FK: Well let’s not then. It could just like go away. Talk to you later, Elizabeth.
ELM: Uh, really? You just wanna leave on that note?
FK: Yeah, why not? I don’t know? What else is there to say?
ELM: Wow. No, there’s a lot more to say, but you know, we should probably go.
FK: [laughing] OK, I really will talk to you later, Elizabeth.
ELM: OK bye Flourish!
FK: Bye.