Episode 173: The Meta Episode
“The Meta Episode” isn’t an episode about episodes: Flourish and Elizabeth use a listener letter about fan meta—nonfiction writing about an object of fandom or fandom at large—as a springboard to talk about the past, present, and future of the practice. Topics discussed include the shift from mailing lists to LiveJournal to Tumblr, narrow and expansive definitions of meta, and how the lack of shared foundations across many different kinds of fans can place limits on meta writing and reading.
Show notes
[00:00:00] As always, our intro music is “Awel” by stefsax, used under a CC BY 3.0 license.
[00:03:54] Saving you a Google: the Fanlore page for “meta”
[00:06:52]
[00:14:16] RaceFail, the 2009 pan-fandom discussion about racism in fandom and SFF publishing, involved a lot of mostly LJ-hosted meta.
[00:17:00] If you’re unfamiliar with the written side of Fansplaining (not…meta…depends on your definition??), some pieces to check out:
Keidra Chaney on stan culture
Caroline Crampton on serialization and WIP fic
Elizabeth on SDCC and corporate fandom
Flourish on the etymology of “ship” and “slash”
[00:17:30]
[00:22:38] Flourish was conflating two sets of abduction imagery in The X-Files, one of which is more like Vitruvian Man (#duanebarrywasright) and one of which is more like maybe-sexy-Mulder-torture (???) but neither of which, on their own, are particularly Christ-like. Regardless, Scully’s voiceovers are always heavy on the religious references.
[00:23:37] “The fandom-tinted glasses thing,” aka episode 170.
[00:25:03] The “angry Scully fic” is “Iolokus” by MustangSally and RivkaT.
[00:32:20]
[00:48:40] 🥰 Mag-NEATO!!! 🥰
[00:49:15] Not only did Flourish intellectualize their shippy feelings with a Reylo meta, but we recorded an entire episode about the meta.
[00:50:05]
[01:04:26] Our closing music this week is “Making it look easy” 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 #173, “The Meta Episode.”
FK: This does not mean that this is an episode where we’re going to be talking about episodes, it means that it’s an episode where we’re going to be talking about fan meta.
ELM: You say this, but a lot of our episodes wind up being episodes where we talk about episodes, because we have made this podcast for a long time.
FK: OK, well it might be both things. But, but! But. OK, we’re gonna be talking about meta, and we’re gonna be doing that because we got a letter from somebody. Should I read it?
ELM: Yeah, let’s just, let’s just hop right into it.
FK: OK. This letter is from J.
“Hi Flourish and Elizabeth! I’ve been wanting to write in for a while to talk about fandom meta, but until now could never think of a specific point that I wanted to make about it. I am one of (what seems to be) a minority of people for whom, although I do enjoy fic, vids, etc., my primary fannish interaction has always been reading meta and analysis. Partly this is just what I’m like as a person—I’m about to pursue a degree in English literature, and I often end up reading analysis, reviews, academic articles on things I’ve read or seen but don’t feel fannish about. To me, analyzing and deconstructing something is a pleasure in and of itself, so of course I would do that in fandom.
“But since listening to other people’s commentary on fandom, I’ve heard a lot of people make disparaging comments about meta—often saying that ‘you can make the same point in fic’ or it doesn’t really add anything to the discussion, or that it’s a good thing it seems to be dying out—which makes me want to defend it as a practice more broadly. The comment that meta can be replaced by fic especially puzzles me, as I’ve always viewed fic as doing a completely different job from meta.
“To me, one of the qualities of fic is that a good writer can make me enjoy a story whose set up I don’t agree with or contradicts my interpretation of canon, because good writing is good writing, regardless of what your views on canon may be. It doesn’t act as clarification or condensation of the original work, but rather a supplement or transformation of it. Listening to your recent episode ‘Fandom-Tinted Glasses’ and how you feel some fandoms are losing their specificity, it occurred to me that you could see one of the functions of (good) meta is pushing back against that—analyzing a work closely for patterns and subtext, reading the opinions of others and forcing yourself to verbalize what your own opinion is stops you from seeing the elements of a story as interchangeable, but rather important and necessary threads in creating the tapestry of the thing you love.
“But regardless of whether this point is true, I’d love to see you do an episode on meta in any way—there’s so much to talk about, such as the way its quantity and quality has definitely degraded since the pivot away from text-based social media, or how there can be just as much bad writing there as in any other fannish practice lol.
“Apologies for the monster length of this ask, and I hope you have a great day! — J”
ELM: Thank you very much, J, delightful letter!
FK: Excellent letter.
ELM: Like, 173 episodes and no one has asked us to talk about meta. Which is interesting, and maybe illustrates something.
FK: Aaahhh! OK but we should talk first about what “meta” means, because I bet there are some listeners to this podcast who don’t know what meta is.
ELM: Yes. Well, I think, much like many things we talk about, I think that there’s a spectrum of definitions? [FK laughs] So I wanna say that off the bat, I mean I feel like we could put that disclaimer in front of almost everything we talk about. But you know what I mean.
FK: Yeah, I do, I think particularly for this one. OK, but if you were going to define it, what would you say?
ELM: Well, you know, I have looked at the Fanlore page, so I’m not gonna cheat, if I was gonna define it before I did that… [FK laughs] I would say meta to me, right now in 2022, is an umbrella term that encompasses a big range of nonfiction writing about specific fandoms or about pan-fandom trends, that is deliberately created for and by fans in fannish spaces.
FK: Mm hmm.
ELM: So, that clarification to me is important, because you could write literally the same piece and pitch it to a publication, a mainstream publication, and they’d publish it, and that to me means it’s not meta anymore, if you take it out of that context.
FK: [overlapping] Right, right.
ELM: So, that is the way I define it, is fans writing for other fans within fan spaces, but within that, I think that what constitutes “meta” is enormously broad to the point where I’m not sure it’s an effective term anymore.
FK: I might, that’s interesting, I might also add, and I’m interested to see if you agree with this, I think of meta as something that’s single-authored usually. So like, I mean there might be a Tumblr thread full of individual metas, but I’m not sure I would call a Tumblr thread with people responding “a meta.”
ELM: Right.
FK: And that doesn’t, it could still be like a Twitter thread, or it could be a Tumblr thread written by one person, but usually I guess I think of it as being sort of more long-format, right? Like if it's a Twitter thread it’s gonna be a long Twitter thread, it’s not like a single insight.
ELM: Yeah, I have a hard time…maybe this is the confines of my own mind here, but I have a hard time thinking of Twitter threads, even long ones, as meta.
FK: Yeah, no, I mean, I would say that’s, those are edge cases. Like, that would definitely be…
ELM: Yeah. OK. So, I think there are some more classical definitions, and I think that, some of that is what J is getting at a bit, right? Like, I don’t think that J—I would guess J doesn’t necessarily, when they think “meta,” don’t think of every scrap of nonfiction writing under the sun on Tumblr.com. [FK laughs] Like, in a given fandom, right?
FK: [simultaneous] Probably not.
ELM: [simultaneous] Maybe not, maybe not, you know, I don’t know. So I was curious to know, when did we start calling it meta? So I went to the Fanlore page.
FK: What did you find out?
ELM: Well lemme tell you. So as Fanlore points out—and Fanlore of course, obviously, authored by individuals but it’s a collective wiki, so if people dispute this history, they can go in and change it—is it pointed out that in the ’90s, and in analog years too, you know, a lot of fandom was done by mailing list, and the kind of default of the activity you do there was discussing the thing, right?
FK: Right.
ELM: And maybe that would involve, you know, you writing an essay about the thing and sending it off to the mailing list, right?
FK: Right, or something long-format anyway, yeah.
ELM: Yeah, right. It didn’t always have to be that way, but you know, a lot of people were being like, you know, “Here’s an argument for why Spock is whatever.” You know? And then it would be an actual essay, arguing it, right?
FK: [overlapping] I appreciate that you brought my, my fandom into it this time.
ELM: I was thinking more classic, but it was for you Flourish, don’t worry.
FK: Well, if, if you were just think—cla—Kolchak: The Night Stalker is like this. You know?
ELM: Oh my goodness, OK, that can be your example. [FK laughs] So it was saying that the term “meta” in that case meant a discussion, the term specifically was then used to separate out the way that the word “meta,” it’s the way that the word “meta” works in the English language, which means commenting on itself, right?
FK: Right.
ELM: So like the way we use “meta” as a prefix, more broadly in culture, is because…so, in Greek it means “after,” right?
FK: [very cheery] It sure does!
ELM: Yeah. [both laugh]
FK: Sorry, to those…I’m taking, like, a refresher course in Greek right now because of being a priest, so this is like, literally something that was on some tests for me. [laughs]
ELM: Oh, did you get it right?
FK: Yeah. I did. [both laugh]
ELM: Well so, I mean, do you have a sense of how, in modern usage, meta has come to—so when we say that something is metatextual, we usually mean it as commenting on itself, or it’s commenting on like, the context in which it exists.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Right? Looking inward. So people will be like, “That’s so meta,” and it’s like, kind of recursive, you looking back at the thing as it’s looking at itself, etcetera etcetera.
FK: [overlapping] Yeah, and I have no idea how it made that journey.
ELM: OK. I, I didn’t, [FK laughs] know if you would learn that in priest school or not. But like, I guess you just learn the Greek from back in the day and then you don’t connect it to now.
FK: Yeah, it’s not, it’s not, yeah, my goal is not to read things that people wrote in Greek like, after about…I don’t know, 500 A.D. [both laugh]
ELM: Wow. All right, just cutting off all of modern Greece.
FK: I mean, love you, modern Greece. But realistically—also, also, also the language has changed a lot, so like, it’s not gonna be the same. Right.
ELM: [overlapping] Different, yeah, I can imagine. Yeah, I get it, I get it. OK. So, meta—
FK: [overlapping] They make all their vowels sound like “e” now. [laughs]
ELM: All right. Leave Greeks alone. We’re moving on. OK, so meta discussion in mailing lists, then, was the way we kind of think of meta in the general world, right, is like, a discussion about the discussion. Right, you know?
FK: Yeah, so basically like, what we would call “the discourse” now.
ELM: Well, yeah, right? [FK laughs] I mean…
FK: Imagine, just imagine, I’m just imagining someone on a mailing list being like, “Oh my God, I’m so tired of the meta.” You know? [both laugh]
ELM: Yeah, I mean, the…I think that in a way that the term “the discourse” is a very, is very flattening, right, because “discourse” immediately makes me think of wank.
FK: Oh yeah!
ELM: Whereas like, “discourse” could also just be like, you know…robust…discussion about, you know…pan-fandom topics or whatever, it sometimes is!
FK: [overlapping] It, it could be…but is it? [laughs]
ELM: All right, so anyway. So like, the default activity was what we would later think of as meta in these spaces, right?
FK: Right.
ELM: I’m taking this all from Fanlore. But then with the rise of LiveJournal, because of the way that LiveJournal functioned, people would be writing essays there, whether they were about the individual source material or whether they were like, “One thing I’ve observed in slash fandom,” or whatever, right?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And so that’s where the term “meta” really emerged from and people started calling those essays “meta.”
FK: Right, well also it makes sense to me because on a mailing list, you wouldn’t be posting updates about your life, or pictures—I mean…
ELM: Yeah.
FK: I was on some mailing lists at that time, I think you probably were too, although I didn't encounter the term “meta” at that point, I didn’t encounter it until I got to LiveJournal. But on a mailing list, if you’re on like, whatever, “Harry Potter for Grownups,” you’re only writing stuff about Harry Potter to that mailing list. It’s not like…
ELM: I mean, yeah, the mailing lists I was on were literally only for sending fic. Right?
FK: Right, right. Right.
ELM: Yeah, and they had a big, big set of rules, you know, that came out at—it still comes, do you, you still get these, right?
FK: I do.
ELM: Actually I haven’t logged on to that account where they come to in the last like, two years, but they may not, but like, it was really sad, for years, you just, just to keep getting, they’re like, “Here’s what’s allowed!” and you’re like, [groans]
FK: [overlapping] For a long time. Yeah, the rules, which, aw, that was sad, yeah exactly. The point being though that like, when you move to LiveJournal, suddenly you’re getting a mix of people’s commentary about their lives as well as their essays about fandom and stuff, and so then it makes sense that you would be like, “OK well we need to talk about what, what do essays about fandom mean, as compared to posting some pictures or—
ELM: Sure, sure.
FK: —stuff about your own life or whatever?” Right, suddenly it becomes only one of a variety of genres of message that people are sending through LiveJournal.
ELM: Right, right. And then, you know, not long after that when the AO3 was created, it was explicitly…I mean obviously it’s a tiny, tiny fraction of what’s posted there, but like, explicitly made to also house meta. To treat it like, this kind of like, “I sat down and wrote an essay.”
FK: Right.
ELM: Not that everything on AO3 needs to be polished or whatever, obviously they're really like, they make that really clear that it's also, you could put ephemera up there if you want. But it’s not just like, “Bang out some thoughts,” or, “This is something I was chatting about in the comments,” or, “Here’s a few stray thoughts about this thing,” this is like, they also want to say you could sit down and write an essay and treat it with the same seriousness that you might treat a fic, and they could sit side by side.
FK: Yeah, and I think that LiveJournal also really emphasized that, because the way…I mean, you know, you go to LiveJournal and there’s like a top level post, and there’s a comment section beneath it, right?
ELM: Right.
FK: And that really, I think that really encourages, as compared to something like Tumblr where you sort of, everything is almost on the same level when you comment on—
ELM: Yeah. Yup.
FK: That really encouraged the idea that you were going to sort of spend some time on the top level post, even if it wasn’t super polished, it was still usually like longer and bigger and whatever, and then the comment section would be all referent to it.
ELM: Right, right, I think that’s a really important functionality distinction here, because like, on Tumblr, and I engaged in meta on Tumblr in the Sherlock fandom, I wrote a few things, I like, definitely saw, [laughs] saw a lot of meta, for better or for worse, in that fandom.
FK: Oh yeah!
ELM: And you know, you’d have someone write 1,000 words with an arc to it, like “Here’s my argument, here’s four paragraphs digging in my evidence or whatever, and in conclusion,” I just said they wrote a five-paragraph essay, that’s fine. [both laugh] But then you’d have someone reblog it, and then write a similar-length thing, and then that would be the thing you would see on your dash two weeks later, you know.
FK: Right.
ELM: And it would be totally contradictory, and they’re sitting there side by side and so some people would be reblogging it because they were like, “Oh, OP has really got it,” and some people would be like, “OP is an idiot.” [FK laughs] “And second P has really, you know, like, this person…” Right, you know, and—
FK: [overlapping] Right. 2P.
ELM: [laughs] Let’s make that one happen. [both laugh] So like you know, but it didn't feel like a discussion either, because it’s just kinda like, two people, like one person put out, put a megaphone out and they were shouting, and then someone went up to their face with their megaphone pointed directly at them, right, and then you had other people being like “That guy!” “No, that guy!”
FK: Right, right, whereas when stuff like that happened on LiveJournal, if you were going to write like a 1,000 word thing, maybe you would write it in the comments, but usually you would have a conversation with that person in the comments discussing what they had written, and then maybe you would go and write your own meta on your own LiveJournal.
ELM: [overlapping] And say like, “This is inspired—” or “This is a response to this person's thing,” yeah yeah yeah.
FK: [overlapping] Exactly, and you would like, link to the previous one, and so then there were two discussion threads about the two metas, and they were in conversation…
You know, it’s funny, this is really making me think about—I mean, metas could be, I don’t know whether you’d call it a meta, but—it’s making me think about the way that discussion happened in really big conversations, like RaceFail and so forth. [ELM hums] And then people would like, create sort of, almost index posts, where they would be like, “Here are all of the posts—”
ELM: [overlapping] Yeah, like a roundup, yeah yeah yeah. Right.
FK: [overlapping] Roundup, thank you, a roundup post.
ELM: Yup.
FK: Which, I feel like that also sort of stopped being a thing on Tumblr, there’s not a roundup post culture that I remember seeing on Tumblr, maybe there was.
ELM: I feel like I have seen it on Tumblr. Definitely…in a way that I don’t see a ton of fic rec lists, but I certainly see some, and all throughout fandom, you know, like, I definitely see people wanting to highlight writing, and say like, “Oh, here’s some of my favorite, you know, writing on, I don’t know, John Silver or whatever, these five pieces or whatever.”
FK: Yeah.
ELM: It’s interesting, just like a fic rec list, on Tumblr, it doesn’t all have to be all super polished, it can be like, “Oh, this person’s two paragraphs really resonated with me, I thought this was a really good point.”
FK: Right.
ELM: It’s on the list, right, you know? Just as you could say, like, “Oh this person’s little Tumblr fic, love it, one of my faves, alongside this epic on the AO3 or whatever.”
FK: Right.
ELM: So, I’ve definitely seen that in the last decade, I definitely don’t see it now in my current fandom, but I think the fandom I’m in is kind of in a very different, it’s not, that’s not the kind of culture that exists. Perhaps I’m not seeing it and I’m not following people who are doing it, but like, I see a lot of people making commentary but it's, it’s rarely something I would describe as meta.
But—I don’t know, maybe we should like, I’m over here drawing these weird lines in my head, should we actually talk about what we think of as meta?
FK: Yeah, sure, because I, I too would, like this is leading me down that path.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: And I think it is good to sort of establish it before we go on talking about what we’re seeing today. Because when I think about meta, I think about like, when I think about meta the way that it used to be, I think about a really wide variety of things, right? I guess the sort of classic kind of meta that I would think about would be something that was discussing…themes in a story? In a very classic, like, you know, English essay kind of way? [laughs]
ELM: Sure.
FK: Um, but there were a lot of other things that could be categorized that way, as metas.
ELM: Yeah, that’s definitely what I think of when I think of classical meta, within a fandom, right, so like, I think of the two different kind of branches, right, where you’re in one fandom and you’re talking about that, or maybe comparing a couple or something like that, you know, comp-lit kind of way. Or you’re talking about fandom at large.
FK: Right.
ELM: Right? And so, I have written a little bit of the former, back in Sherlock, um, and I have written a bunch more of the latter. Which brings me back to my distinction of like, are you writing it within and for fandom, or are you writing it out in the world?
FK: Right, right.
EL:M Because I don’t say vastly different things in the ones I write for fandom, except maybe a bit more shorthanding, and a little less explaining.
FK: Right.
ELM: But like, I think of those things as meta, whereas if I’m writing about fandom, even if I’m writing on fansplaining.com about fandom, I don’t think of that as meta.
FK: Right.
ELM: Even though, interestingly, our posts constantly get reblogged on Tumblr—
FK: As meta. Yeah.
ELM: [overlapping] —like, our articles? Yeah, tagged “meta.” And I’m like, “Interesting. OK, so like, any, any writing from within fandom is called meta? Like, OK.” You know?
FK: [overlapping] Maybe, yeah, edge case. I guess. But it’s also funny, you know, you saying that made me think about like, fan theories, and the way that those now get sort of taken up by entertainment websites, yeah.
ELM: [overlapping] Publications? Yeah.
FK: [overlapping] Like, it made me think about Westworld and how when Westworld was still cool, a long time ago now, right, there was such active discussion of Westworld on Reddit, some of which I think I would call meta, personally. Not all of which. But how then that, those theories got sort of sucked up into every kind of slightly junky entertainment website. [laughs]
ELM: Yes.
FK: And they were like, “Here’s the fan theories!” So that’s a case where meta’s getting cannibalized by, you know.
ELM: I too have witnessed this, and I think it’s fascinating, and sometimes I’ll look at those things and I’ll be like, most meta I’ve read that’s labeled as meta and published on Tumblr or whatever is more thought-out than this piece of crap [FK laughs] that someone paid you probably, frankly, $10 for, and I’m not exaggerating. It’s, it’s not…
FK: [overlapping] Yeah, so. Maybe, maybe they got what, they got what they paid for? [ELM laughs]
ELM: No, I mean, no, actually I was gonna say, “No offense to these shitty websites,” but full offense, [FK laughs] you’re junking up the internet with your SEO garbage, and I don’t like it, and it’s not news.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: All right, anyway.
FK: Yeah absolutely. But I think it’s also funny, because there’s stuff that I think I used to call meta or think of as meta that today I’m not sure would be presented that way? So I’m thinking about like, I don’t know, in X-Files fandom, like, a piece of writing—I’m sure I couldn’t find this now—but arguing that Mulder is Jewish. Right? Which is a headcanon, and like, you know, not a bizarre headcanon, right, [laughs] there’s a lot of reasons why it’s reasonable to consider the possibility. But I definitely saw arguments like that presented as meta, and I feel like today you wouldn’t necessarily see them presented that way. You might have a Twitter thread about it that was like, sort of very casual; you might have a headcanon written on Tumblr, like, one line, and then people going, “Yas queen!” you know? [both laugh]
ELM: Flourish. Have you not been on the internet for maybe five years? [FK laughs uproariously] Is that what we’re seeing right here? [laughs]
FK: Um, I woke up this morning with that in my head and I don’t know why, [ELM laughs] so I guess my brain just like, time traveled back to five years ago? I noticed it earlier today, I thought about that, I was like, “I haven’t heard that in a long time,” and now it’s apparently bubbling up out of me. But um. But anyway, you get what I’m saying as far as like, the response, even though it would not be in those terms right now.
ELM: I do get what you’re saying, but I think I disagree with you. I feel like I see much more of that now, and I think that people maybe are not describing it as meta.
FK: Right.
ELM: But it feels exactly the same. I certainly see, you know, multi-paragraph posts arguing why a headcanon is true.
FK: Yep.
ELM: Or saying, here’s some textual evidence to support why I read X character as trans, right, you know?
FK: Yeah yeah yeah, for sure.
ELM: And those can have really fuzzy…boundaries around intent? You know, sometimes it’s clear they wanna convince you, like “Actually this character is trans,” right, like, you know, “Here’s all the evidence,” by the time you finish reading this you’re gonna be like “That’s a trans character,” [FK laughs] you know? And that runs all the way to the other end of the spectrum of like, “I read them as trans, here are the things that I, the things that spark that for me.” You know? So to me, “This is how I’m gonna continue to interpret this character,” or, “This is how I’m gonna approach someone when I write them in fic or whatever,” right, and it’s kind of the meta argument that you might accompany with a characterization decision in fic.
FK: Right, right.
ELM: You know, if you were to write a connected essay to be like, “Why did you choose to write the character that way?” and be like “Well,” you know, there’s a nonfiction component to that, as opposed to just showing it in your fiction.
FK: Right, and that’s interesting with what J was saying about fic.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: And meta. Because yeah, I do think that actually, I mean maybe I disagree with J here and J is obviously much more committed to meta than I am, so I feel like, you know, their, their viewpoint also clearly stands.
ELM: Fight. Fight. Fight. Fight.
FK: Nooo…[laughs] but I think that, I don’t think meta can be replaced by fic, but I think that actually the really good meta can potentially convince you of something that isn’t really in a, you know what I mean? Or maybe not isn’t really in, but it can, it can skew your idea of a show or a, an original piece, it can make you see what they’re arguing for, even if there’s lots of other possible ways that you could view it, right?
ELM: Hang on, it sounds like you’re aggressively agreeing with J. J’s saying other people say, “Why don’t you just write fic, you can show it much better in fic?” And you and J both believe you can actually show it just as well in meta.
FK: Well, J says that, “One of the qualities of fic is that a good writer can make me enjoy a story that contradicts my interpretation of canon.” OK, yeah, no, I guess you’re right, because, because J’s saying, like, that meta could convince them to see that as their interpretation of canon, whereas in fic, they could enjoy it even if was against what they thought. But like a meta that didn’t convince them wouldn’t be good. OK. I guess you’re right. J, I am aggressively agreeing with you now. [both laugh]
ELM: Wow, you, you know, you accuse me of doing this to you, and now you’re doing it to J. [FK laughs] You are just as guilty here.
FK: I’m, we’re all guilty.
ELM: Yeah. None of us are without sin, didn’t someone say that?
FK: Wow. Wow, I did not make this a religion thing, and you did it.
ELM: Fox Mulder?
FK: What? [laughs]
ELM: I dunno, would he say something like that? Here’s why I think he would say that.
FK: [overlapping] Uh, well, he does, he does, he does appear in very like, you know, Jesus-like ways at certain points in the series.
ELM: [laughing] Write that meta right now!
FK: Oh man, noooo, it was cringeworthy…
ELM: I’ve never seen this show, so. OK. So I kinda wanted to dig in on that point, because I think that was one of the biggest things that struck me in J’s letter, and it’s definitely something that I kind of disagree—l don’t disagree with you and J, I think that for me personally—I’m saying this as someone with an English degree, who certainly…appreciates a well-reasoned argument.
OK, so it’s, it’s interesting to me, because this was the part of the letter that really struck me the most, and I’ve certainly seen people say this, right, like, “What’s the point of meta,” like, “Why don’t you just do it in fic, show it in fic?” So there’s a few things that I would say to that. First of all, I think a lot of people think they’re showing it in fic when really they’re just kinda tellin’ it in fic?
FK: Very true. [laughs]
ELM: And I’m kind of bastardizing show and tell here and the way that they’re used in writing classes, but like, just slapping your interpretation of a character onto it, I mean this is going back to the fandom-tinted glasses thing, right, like yeah, you might be showing me, like it might be a very enjoyable story, but have you made some fundamental argument that’s gonna change the way I think of the canonical character?
FK: Right.
ELM: I mean maybe! You know what, sometimes, right, there’s a, there’s that, there’s a few fics in my current fandom that I really enjoy and think they’re wildly OOC, right, and by the end of it I’m like, I have to like, turn my brain back around [FK laughs] to get back into like, because I’m like, “Oh no, now I’m thinking of them as those two, and actually…that was only internally consistent.”
FK: Yeah.
ELM: But the author was so effective that they kind of rerouted my brain for the length of the story, right?
FK: Yeah, absolutely, I feel like there’s a lot of fics that sort of, they start from a starting point, but they don’t necessarily go back and prove to you how they got to that starting point. They’re just like, “OK, here we are.” Right?
ELM: Right, right. And I think that, I think that’s a really hard distinction to make, and it’s actually really hard to talk about in the abstract, right, because like, all fics start at a starting point? But… [laughs]
FK: [overlapping] Sure, sure. But I’m thinking about—
ELM: [overlapping] You know what I mean?
FK: Yeah, I’m thinking about like, I mean, I don’t know, I’m sorry I’m bringing up all these X-Files things, I’ve actually been rewatching The X-Files, so I’m thinking about it. Like there’s one particular fic…
ELM: [overlapping] Oh, is that why? I’m sorry, I’m sorry, you chose, you’re like, actively choosing not to watch the greatest show currently on TV, Severance…
FK: It’s because I don’t have Apple +.
ELM: I’ll buy it for you, it’s $5 a month. [FK laughs]
FK: I’m just lazy.
ELM: [overlapping] Happy birthday, Flourish, I’m gonna buy you a year of Apple TV.
FK: Oh my God. [laughs] Anyway, I’m thinking about a particular fic, which starts off with this like, very angry Scully, and it would be easy for fics to just…you know, like, you can imagine just saying like, “Scully’s angry, and that’s my characterization of her, and we’re gonna move forward,” but this fic actually sort of goes back and points to all of those points in canon—
ELM: Yeah.
FK: Where you could, you could interpret her facial expressions in different ways, and it makes it clear that this, you know, and then you get to the end of it and you’re like, “Oh yeah, actually like, she is angry! I think she’s angry in canon right now!” [ELM laughs] Right? Which I didn’t think before. Yeah.
ELM: [overlapping] Right, right. Right, I don’t think all fic has to be, I mean now we’re talking about fic, sorry to J, but we’ll get back to meta. But like, you know, I don’t think all fic has to be proving something about the canon, right?
FK: No.
ELM: But I, I do think that I encounter a lot of fic that is deviating from canon and hasn’t really explained to me why? You know? I think I’ve complained about this a lot, but there’s a sweaterboyification of, of one half of my ship. [FK laughs] And it’s just, just like a, an insecure little sad sack, and I’m always like, “How did this happen?”
FK: Yeah.
ELM: You know, if you give me a, a whole invented backstory for this AU world where like, you’ve just slowly beaten down over time, right, you know, and had a bunch of huge setbacks, but other than that, if you don’t give me that context, then…
FK: Where did it come from? [laughs]
ELM: So what I’m saying is, you don’t have to be making an argument about the original canon, but I, to me, a fic is only, is less successful and doesn’t work as well for me if it just feels like arbitrary decisions were made and just like, kinda plowed forward without thinking—without that kind of, sitting the canon against the fic, basically, and kind of reflecting this together.
FK: [overlapping] Right, for sure. Right.
ELM: So, OK, but this is all talking about fic. But I wanted to go back to this point of like, “Oh well so this is what you can do in fic, you can’t do in meta.” I guess I, I don’t necessarily disagree with you and J.
FK: Mm hmm.
ELM: But I also feel like, I think one of the reasons why I’m not quite on the same page with that, and I think this is very much about me personally and my preferences, right, is…kind of exactly what we were just talking about. If you can continue to write a character, if you can pluck that character and keep him moving along, and it feels right and it feels connected and it feels, he feels embodied and he feels in-character to me…
FK: Yeah.
ELM: That, to me, is gonna be more convincing than any amount of nonfiction words describing who he is.
FK: Sure.
ELM: Right? And like, maybe that is something about like, thoughts versus actions, right?
FK: Yeah. I think that this does, to some extent, come down to, like, a preference? For how you sort of, just how you sort of take it in.
ELM: [overlapping] Yeah! I’m couching this in my preferences, yeah yeah yeah.
FK: Because something that I think is really cool within meta is that you can be very precise and specific about your argument, right? Like, you can show screenshots, and point to, I don’t know, whatever, like the use of color, and be like, “So this is why this is their point,” you know? You can say, “I have a fan theory about what’s really going on in Westworld, and here’s what I think is going to happen,” and you can be quite specific, or in Lost or whatever, one of those sort of puzzle box shows.
And you can be very specific about, like, how you think it’s gonna happen and why, in a way that you can maybe be more convincing in fic in some ways, but you aren’t necessarily going to be marshaling all of the evidence, right, because you’re never gonna use all of the evidence in a story that you have, for this thing. Whereas in meta, you can be exhaustive.
ELM: This is fascinating, though, because you've zeroed in on one specific kind of meta.
FK: Well, that’s true, but I mean I think that you could say that for, you know, other kinds as well, I just, I think that’s the one where it’s the most clear to me.
ELM: That’s interesting. And I think that’s what like, the predictive stuff, or the proving stuff, is often where we kind of come down with meta, and I think that frankly that’s part of why it’s become tarnished, [FK laughs] and I agree with J that there’s disparaging feelings about meta out there, right?
FK: Definitely, because I mean, you read enough metas and they don’t happen and you’re like, “Welp!” [laughs]
ELM: Right, right, and if the success of your piece of writing is predicated on you accurately predicting something, immediately you saying that, talking about, “Oh well in a meta you can predict what’s gonna happen,” made me think about the difference between meta after Sherlock season two and fic after Sherlock season two.
FK: Right.
ELM: Right? Where a huge majority of it was about like, the—if anyone hasn’t seen Sherlock, skip it now—but like, you know, at the end of season two, Sherlock fakes his death and John thinks he’s dead, right, so you knew that the next thing had to be like, “Well what happens next?” Right?
FK: Right.
ELM: And obviously it’s based on the original stories, etcetera etcetera. You know, there were lots and lots and lots, it was just analyzed to death, about what had happened in “The Reichenbach Fall,” which was the episode where Sherlock fakes his death, and what would happen next, and how is John feeling, how is John gonna react? But to me, far more convincing, were the stories that actually said, “Well what happens next?” and then extrapolated everything they knew about John Watson’s character, and then showed him responding. Which is something that meta will not be able to do, because that’s inherently fiction, right?
FK: Right.
ELM: You know, and you’re not predicting, “I think next he’s gonna do this and this,” it’s so much richer to me personally to actually show him doing this and this.
FK: Right. But at the same time, it’s a lot harder to have a conversation and an argument about, maybe it’s not harder, but I feel like it doesn’t happen as often that there’s like, really an ongoing conversation about like, the things proposed in a fic in that way. Right?
ELM: Right.
FK: Like, in meta, in my experience, obviously it’s complicated when you start trying to predict stuff, but on the other hand, people get a lot of pleasure out of it, even when they’re wrong sometimes. Right? I mean I’m thinking about everybody considering what’s gonna happen in Lost or what have you. Sure, whatever, maybe there’s a [makes a sad trombone sound] at the end when it’s not put together in the way that everybody has thought about it, but in the process I think that there’s some real pleasure to be had, and part of that pleasure has to do with refuting other people’s points, disagreeing, like, going back and forth. And I think that’s something that fic doesn’t support as well, which is not to say it couldn’t ever, but just there isn’t the same culture of doing that.
ELM: I also don’t think that’s really the…I don’t know if that’s really the point of it.
FK: [overlapping] Yeah, I agree!
ELM: [overlapping] I think those are two pretty disparate fan practices, right?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: You know? Maybe not disparate, that’s maybe overstating it, but those are two different fan practices.
FK: Yeah, definitely.
ELM: And I absolutely understand what you're saying. I think that the lines are blurry between, like, speculative conversations with folks, in like, you know, forum threads, Reddit threads, where you’re predicting and you’re like, “Oh, but did you see this clue?” and you’re like “Oh shit I didn’t see that clue!” [FK laughs] “Oh, that changes everything and now I know the ending! Oh, none of us know, because the writers don’t know either because they didn’t think this one ahead.” [both laugh]
But like, I think that to me is a little bit different than the kind of analysis that is written in a very intentional, “I’m writing you an essay, here’s my analysis, here’s my argument and I’m going to now publish it” culture that we’ve kind of mostly been talking about throughout this. I think that there are tons of overlaps in those cultures.
FK: Right.
ELM: But I also think that “my grand theory of what happens in X show”—I don’t wanna say Sherlock because that provokes some terrible memories for me—but my grand theory of what happens in, I don’t know, Severance…[FK laughs] I mean, I would never write that, also. I find no pleasure in…obviously I think like any human I speculate a bit when I see something and I’m like, “Oh, I wonder what’s gonna happen next, how are they gonna solve these problems they’ve set up for themselves for themselves,” right?
FK: Yeah. Right.
ELM: But I don’t really enjoy speculative fan culture, that’s not really my jam. So like, to me, thinking about meta, if I was gonna write one about Severance, I would be like, analyzing some of the writing choices and detailing them and showing like, “Here’s why this show is brilliant.” I saw the other day, I don’t know if they would term this a meta, but it was like one paragraph describing specific, they were like, “You know, Severance is so carefully set up”—I’m glad that I can talk about a show I like right now [FK laughs]—“Severance is so carefully set up, there’s so many little things that have these specific consequences and it’s so carefully written,” and then they described like, three of them, in one long paragraph.
FK: Uh huh. Right, yeah.
ELM: And I was like, “Oh, shit, totally!” Right, you know, I read it and I was like “Yeah! You really so quickly articulated—
FK: Right.
ELM: And that paragraph represented how sharp all of the writing on the show is by you just showing these three examples. Like, you didn’t have to go to some great length with screenshots and pull quotes from the script or whatever.”
FK: [overlapping, laughing] Yeah, yeah, yeah.
ELM: And to me that was a meta, but I have no idea if that writer would ever think of it as meta, or if they were just like, “Here’s a thought I had about Severance! One thing I love about this show is” [makes typing noises], you know, post! Right? I don’t know if they would think of that as a meta.
FK: Well maybe, maybe one question then, and this is something J doesn’t make clear in their letter, is it really about there being a lack of writing about these properties? Or is it about the fact that it’s not categorized in a way that helps you find, “Oh yes, this is a meta, let me go find it, it’s gonna be long and it’s gonna be in this particular format.” Because I can definitely, you know, I definitely relate to—I mean whatever, I see this on Twitter all the time, people come by with like—I wouldn’t classify it as a meta, but like—people swing through pointing out something really interesting and you know, insightful.
ELM: There’s no other way to be on Twitter, you have to swing through, drop your take, and you swing on out. [laughs]
FK: [overlapping] Well they do swing through! Exactly! Right? But like, there’s actually a lot of, there’s a lot of them that I enjoy, I get a lot of that kind of discussion.
ELM: Literally what I’m describing about this Tumblr Severance post, I’ve definitely seen…well, I haven’t actually, I haven’t, I’ve seen a lot of inane swinging through.
FK: [overlapping] Yes. [laughs]
ELM: [overlapping] They’d be like “Oh, Severance is really about like, what work means to us,” or something, and you’re like…
FK: OK.
ELM: That was a thought that you should have kept in your head. That, like…[FK laughs] if it’s so basic they wouldn’t even put it in the pitch deck, I don’t think you need to say it out loud. Just, you know. But for other things, certainly, in 280 characters—
FK: I do have some bad news for you, which is that I don’t think that there’s anything that is so basic they wouldn’t put it in the pitch deck. [ELM laughs] But we can move on, we can move forward. I have seen some pitch decks, Elizabeth. [laughs]
ELM: “It’s about work-life balance.”
FK: Elizabeth.
ELM: No, I know. [both laugh]
FK: That’s literally the tagline of the pitch deck.
ELM: Severance: a show about work-life balance.
FK: [simultaneous] —life balance! [both laugh]
ELM: Oh my God. That’s fine. Anyway, yeah, no, I absolutely know what you’re talking about, a shorter version of what I’m describing, where it would be like, “Oh, I think it’s so neat how X show does this by way of—” in one sentence, and you’re like, “Oh, what a thought.” Am I calling that meta? No, I’m not gonna call that a meta, that’s like, a thought. You know? [FK laughs] I don’t know, I gotta draw a line somewhere, and I’m drawing it there. If it’s one sentence—
FK: Definitely.
ELM: That’s the argument, and I think that J is really making a strong case for meta as argument, right? Meta with a thesis, meta with a point.
FK: Right.
ELM: I mean, one thing that I wanna talk about and it kind of segues into that, is one of the things that J’s letter really struck me, especially referencing studying English literature, and as someone who has also done that—and Godspeed, [FK laughs] yeah English majors!—I think one of meta’s great weaknesses, and I think one of the reasons why it has, I think, fallen out of favor for a lot of people, is, you know, within academic disciplines, there are…academic…academia, as you know, as you extremely well know, is very…referential isn’t even the right word.
FK: Insular.
ELM: Referen—OK, sure, right. But it’s like, referentially layered, right?
FK: [overlapping] Yes, yes, that’s very true.
ELM: Anyone that’s read an ac—right, so you read an academic paper, and it’s just these constant citations. “As someone said in 2017,” and then you to go that person and they’re like, “As someone said in 2014,” and you’re like, I get it, you’re all reading each other, you’re all building on top of each other, maybe you’re too into this, and you’re not actually saying words, you’re just citing. So.
FK: Right, and sometimes you get to a place, and you’re like, OK, the turtles do indeed go all the way down [ELM laughs] to the foundations of everything, there is no foundation, there are only citations. [laughs]
ELM: Right. Fandom, on the other hand, has often none of that, right? And so I think—
FK: [overlapping] Absolutely none. [laughs]
ELM: Right, and so I think one of the hard things here is, when I read a paper in an English class, like a, you know, when I read some theorist, right, you know, like, to understand it often I’m gonna have to have that context, and I think that’s one of the reasons why the humanities can be, the particular way the humanities can be inaccessible. Obviously all fields in science have their own inaccessibilities in that way, but like, if I didn’t understand, if I didn’t…read X thing then I’m not gonna understand this post-X thing, you know what I mean?
FK: [overlapping] Right, and it really builds, so that if you, if you get off the train early, then it’s hard to get back on it later, right, like if you’re in high school and you don’t learn about, I don’t know what you would be learning about in high school, but if you don’t learn about the sort of early building blocks, then you’re gonna be totally lost by the time you get to later and you’re like, “All right, so, Foucault!” and everyone’s like, [makes a confused noise] you know?
ELM: Well, I would argue that in high school you’re doing something utterly different than what happens in higher-level English, right? I mean, in the same way that, I don’t know if you’ve taken a higher-level history—
FK: Yeah, I have.
ELM: —it literally feels like a completely different field once you actually start taking, like, you know, undergrad- and graduate-level history.
FK: [overlapping] That’s true, that’s true. Yeah.
ELM: And my best history teachers in high school weren’t just teaching dates, right, they were like, “History is about making arguments,” right? In English, obviously there’s a huge range of instruction. But like, the kinds of things that like…state boards of education want you to do, or like…
FK: [overlapping] Yeah, no, those are not, those are not getting there, yeah. [laughs]
ELM: Finding the “themes,” right, and the five-paragraph essay, and all of this stuff. And that, I don’t know, that bears very little resemblance to what actually happened to me in college and grad school.
FK: That’s, that’s very true, I think I kinda meant like, if you’re not lucky enough to have somebody who begins to introduce you to some of the ideas about theory, right, like what’s New Criticism? That’s something that I didn’t know anything else, but by the time I was a senior in high school, someone had told me what New Criticism was, and what a couple of the alternatives were, and so then, you know, I could think like, “Oh, well,” —not that I’m particularly great at English, you know this, that I’m not—but then I was able to think, “Oh, there’s different ways of thinking about this!” You know, and like, not be totally lost.
ELM: [overlapping] I don’t know that! Wait, go back, go back. What makes you think you’re bad at English?
FK: Oh, I just don’t have, I mean I’m not bad at it, I just don’t have the same depth of knowledge. Like, I could not trace all these, I would get lost if I tried to get in that.
ELM: [overlapping] Yeah, well you didn’t, you didn’t like, major in English, so why would you?
FK: [overlapping] No, I didn’t! No of course, I didn’t mean bad at, I just meant like, not knowing.
ELM: [overlapping] Don’t put yourself down, Flourish!
FK: [overlapping] Thanks, Elizabeth. But you get what I’m saying, right?
ELM: [overlapping] You’re a good writer, you’re a good speaker, this is boost Flourish time right now.
FK: [overlapping, laughing] It’s so, OK, this is the boost Flourish time.
ELM: [overlapping] Flourish, you’re great, let me tell you some things that I like about you.
FK: [overlapping] OK, OK, but the point being [ELM laughs] that meta isn’t like that, for better or worse.
ELM: [overlapping] OK, so, yes. So, I’m not saying it should be, and I think that’s one thing that has caused a lot of friction in the past, and I was gonna say discourse and I, I, [FK laughs] I pivoted and yet I still brought up the word discourse. You know, you have people with different levels of education in the same space, right? You have, I mean, frankly, I love academics, but sometimes you have them weaponizing the academic knowledge that they, you know, to say like, “Well you haven’t devoted your life to studying this, so you don’t actually have any grounds for argument.” And I don’t think you need to have a PhD to be like, “Here are some things I observed in…” [FK laughs] “Severance,” I’m not going to say a fandom that I’ve been in.
But like, I think one of the problems that we often find is, because there is no culture of citation within meta writing, even stuff that resembles academic analysis and argument, then you don’t have people setting their terms. You don’t have people setting their frames. Right? People just barging in and being like, “I watched a show. Here’s my argument.” [FK laughs] And I think because often people don’t have a background in setting terms and setting frames, then they don’t know that they should, and so they take…maybe they don’t have the tools to even identify those frames, right? They just know, they know what they know, they watched it, they have some feelings.
FK: Right.
ELM: And they have some thoughts, and they’re like, “Here they are, I’m convinced this is what they mean by this, and I’m gonna argue it all right now.” And I think you can have a truly successful argument, right? I’ve read some things where it just felt like, completely raw and out of pure observation, and they’re just very good noticers, right, or just have a really innate sense of character or understanding humans, and could express that, right?
But I also think that people are trying to sometimes make theoretical or structural arguments without having any grounding in the vague kind of theory that they’re referencing, and then you have tons and tons of people who are not native speakers, or who are in high school, and haven’t had a lot of education yet, or all these various ways that people are coming in—or are adults who are English speakers who just haven’t had a lot of education, I shouldn’t say it’s only young people, right, you know, huge range of people with different backgrounds, different levels of access to kind of, these foundations. And they just are completely talking across each other.
FK: Yeah. Yeah. I agree with that, and I think that also gets to some of what J was mentioning, there’s bad meta, and it made me, I thought immediately of some metas that I’ve read that are like, in what I would call a pseudo-academic style, right, like, very…
ELM: Yes. That’s kinda, this is the undercurrent of everything I’ve just been saying, by the way. [laughs]
FK: [overlapping] It is, I’m, I’m just saying it right out loud. But I mean I think…
ELM: It was subtext that you picked up, because you’re pretty good at English.
FK: [overlapping] Oh, I picked up that subtext and I just, and I just made that subtext into text. [ELM laughs] And I don’t blame people for writing in that kind of a, you know, I guess I would describe it as often like, overly elaborated, sometimes like…you know.
ELM: Yeah, stilted, trying to just spruce it up, make it formal, “formal.”
FK: [overlapping] Trying, trying really hard, using a lot of words that are…you know, very large and maybe slightly misused, and I think that that’s like, that comes out of a desire to write better. People are trying to write something that is written well. And they’re missing the mark. And…it’s really hard because I don’t want to disparage anybody for trying to write well, you know? [laughs]
ELM: Sure, yeah yeah.
FK: Like, I really don’t, and I think that when people do this, that is what they’re trying to do. Um, but it is rough because there’s no way to, there’s not really a…and I don’t think there ever has been, a culture of critiquing the way people write meta. Like, critiquing the arguments in the meta, yes.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: But the way that the meta is written, I don’t know that I’ve ever seen any, I mean I see people, it’s not all of the time, but I do see people talking about how you write fanfiction.
ELM: Yes.
FK: But I’ve never in the history of my time in fandom seen anybody critiquing the way that you write meta and suggesting how to write it better, right? [laughs]
ELM: [overlapping] Yeah, yeah yeah yeah. How to structure an argument, yeah. Right, right, I mean, yeah. I absolutely have seen far more, “You shouldn’t even bother because you don’t have a PhD” arguments than I’ve ever seen like, constructive feedback, because I think that especially if you’re in academia, I mean neither of us have PhDs, but we have gone to graduate school, like, I think sometimes it’s hard, I can’t imagine what it would be like to go through all that in a PhD and feel like, “No, I did all that, so there’s no way you’ll ever, you know, without that background.” I think it’d be hard.
FK: And it’s also complicated, because a lot of people who have PhDs are not very good, clear writers. I mean, they’ve thought about stuff…
ELM: [overlapping] Wow, we’re just gonna bring all the academics here to murder us right now, that’s fine.
FK: No, I, look, academics will be the first ones to say it, right? [laughs] You know, I mean…it’s tough, because you’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this and you’re really great at thinking about it, and you’ve got really wonderful ideas about it, but that doesn’t mean that you’re the best communicator, particularly in an outside of an academic audience, right?
ELM: Well, what I see more often is like with a lot of commentary from academics despairing the fact that clear, straightforward, “simpler” writing is actively penalized in a lot of fields, you know?
FK: Yeah, absolutely!
ELM: You’re literally asking me to obscure the argument with more citations and more like, kind of, opaque theoretical references, when I’m just trying to argue a thing, and you’re asking me to put a bunch of shit in the way, basically.
FK: [overlapping] Yeah, exactly, exactly.
ELM: I have a lot of sympathy for that, absolutely.
FK: [overlapping] And so then how can you blame somebody who’s trying to write better, and has access to reading academic writing, you know, but maybe doesn’t have any guidance anywhere else in their life on how to write better. For writing something that is sort of obscure and bad, you know? [laughs]
ELM: Yeah.
FK: And pseudo-academic. Even the people who are in school for a long time are getting the bad messages about how to write this, right, like you can’t blame people for it.
ELM: Yeah yeah yeah. I mean, this is interesting, because what it’s really making me think of, as you were talking about people like, dressing up and trying to make it sound very formal, I was thinking of some meta I see which is the opposite, which is literally just pouring out feelings on a page. Right?
FK: [laughs, overlapping] That’s also true. The two genders.
ELM: [overlapping] Yeah. And…and the, yeah, the tl;dr of a lot of these is just, “I just think they’re neat!” [FK laughs] Right? “The way that he looks at him, and then there’s that thing, and that means this!” And I can absolutely see, I think that we’ve, there’s a running theme throughout fandom, of people being afraid to center their emotions as their reason for being there.
FK: Right, right.
ELM: So you say, like, people can’t say “I ship it because I would love to see their faces just press into each other.” Right, you’re literally doing the gesture right now.
FK: Yeah. [laughs]
ELM: Right, so they have to say like, “No, this ship is important,” right, “this ship is, it’s gonna legalize gay marriage everywhere.” [FK laughs] You know what I mean? Like, OK, all right.
FK: Or “This ship is, this ship is so well-written that it, people should write dissertations on it, and I’m going to do it to prove it!”
ELM: Right, exactly, and I think that yeah, my favorite stuff makes me wanna write, you know, serious academic things about, I could write you like an essay right now about Magneto if you’d like, would you like that?
FK: Actually, yes. Write me that essay please. [ELM laughs] I may not, I may not be up for writing stuff about the X-Men, but I’m clearly very up for reading it, as you well know, so, you know, sure.
ELM: [overlapping, laughing] Maybe this’ll be how I…oh no, OK, I’m…
FK: [overlapping] You, you have like, slightly incepted me into X-Men fandom. [laughs]
ELM: Yes!! YES!! This is you and my beta, and a couple friends of mine, I just, I love it, now you get it.
FK: You just pulled us, pulled us right in. I don’t have, you know, it’s not, it’s all about the fandom for that. But anyway. Anyway, write me that essay, but.
ELM: Yeah. But, I feel like…yeah, am I gonna go up there and be like, “I just think Magneto is neat.” Right, you know? No, I don’t wanna do that.
FK: [overlapping] Mag-neato! He’s neatooo!
ELM: [overlapping] Yeah, oh, he’s so neatooo! Right, you know, I guess whatever, I’m doing it right now and I literally feel that way, [FK laughs] I have a deep emotional like, [makes a cooing noise] feeling about him, like “Oh he’s so great, I love it when he like, murders some people.” [FK laughs] But like, you know, the…[laughs] don’t worry about it. But you know, like, “I’m serious, I’m smart, I would like to show you,” and so for me, the way that I feel like I can show you that, my smartness or whatever, a little facetious here, is like, I think I can write him pretty convincingly in a fic, you know, and that’s the challenge for me, that’s the goal, right?
FK: Right.
ELM: But also there’s a bit of distance there, because it’s not me being like, “Magneto!!” It’s like, “Here’s my story about Magneto, a character I admire and love.” You know? So I think this is something we see all over fandom.
FK: And you know I do it, for a fact.
ELM: Oh, absolutely! Yeah, no, for sure, right? You literally wrote a whole meta about Reylo.
FK: Shhhhhh.
ELM: And then I love that by the time you got to the same thing in um…what do you call it? [FK laughs] What do you call that…one you just like…
FK: [overlapping] Shadow and Bone.
ELM: Yes, thank you very much, it literally escaped me. You were like, trying to write this super-cerebral fic, and then you were like, “Fuck it, I just love it, I love that guy! I love that dynamic!” [laughs]
FK: [overlapping] Yeah! You know what, I just decided, I decided, I got all the way into planning this super-cerebral fic and I was like, “You know what? I just wanted to think about it a lot because I love it, and I did that and it was great, and now I’m done.” Looking forward to season two! [both laugh]
ELM: Oh man. When is it coming out, are you gonna fall back into this hole?
FK: I don’t know, but the answer is yes, I’m gonna fall back into this hole, I love his face.
ELM: I’m really glad. I’m very glad that you have little holes that you drop into.
FK: I do! It’s like…[laughs]
ELM: I wish you had a bigger hole. [both laugh]
FK: Oh man, Elizabeth.
ELM: [overlapping] That you could stay in longer I guess.
FK: [overlapping] Elizabeth! I’m happy in my hole jumping.
ELM: Your small hole that you just pop in and out of. All right, I’m gonna stop saying hole. [both are still laughing]
FK: This is…too much.
ELM: All right. So, OK, all of this is to say, tl;dr, I get it. I get why people dress up their arguments and make them…you know, try to impress upon people the seriousness of the interpretation.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And people do this without flowery language also, right, they’ll be like, “You have to see, I am proving this to you, here’s a screenshot, here’s the lighting, here’s the lighting in this shot, here’s the lighting in this shot,” and you’re like, “Oh actually if you talk to the lighting director, they’re gonna be like, ‘This is just the way the lights happened.’”
FK: [laughs] “I was, I was only concerned with making sure that you could see everybody.”
ELM: [laughs] One of my favorite things in the entire world is when people like, do these elaborate theories about why an exact thing happened, and then you read an interview with one of the technical, like the, you know, technical practitioners or whatever and they’re like, “Yeah, so here’s all my concerns,” and it was just like, “This is why they had to wear this costume for this reason of their body,” [FK laughs] right, it wasn’t like, “I analyzed the script, I thought so deeply about the character, and then I made this specific choice.”
FK: [overlapping] And it’s like, “Nope, this actor just hates the feeling of wool,” [ELM laughs] “so we originally had them wearing this sweater, but they couldn’t wear the sweater, so they just went without the sweater and then they were wearing a t-shirt and that was how we shot the scene.” Like, OK.
ELM: You know, I was reading the other day, it was so funny to me, it was perfect, I mean, this isn’t, is this fandom? No, maybe not, but. So I was doing research for a fic, and it was set in the canon era of X-Men so it was in the 60s, so I wound up doing a lot of research to just get little details?
FK: Sure.
ELM: And um, I was reading about menswear, and one of the best ways to get clothing details is to read all the things around Mad Men, because there was so much research put into Mad Men, and so many…
FK: [overlapping] Right, yeah yeah yeah, and they were so happy to share it with you.
ELM: Yes! And then so many pedantic people analyzing it, right, like, “Well, they didn’t get this quite right, actually it would be more of an avocado.”
FK: [overlapping] Oh, yeah. Especially the fashion, yeah yeah.
ELM: So I wound up on this menswear blog, and they were like, I think they were maybe analyzing literally everything that Don Draper wore.
FK: Sure, I believe it.
ELM: And they were like, “I really wish that they, one of my biggest issues with Mad Men,” [laughs] I love these people, so zeroed in on this one thing, is they were talking about how the fabrics in the 60s were a lot heavier than the ones for the stuff that they had made for the show, right?
FK: Right.
ELM: So they were like, they were exactly precisely mimicking the cut and style of these suits, but the fabrics were a lot lighter.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And they were like, “It’s not exactly accurate, I wish they were wearing—” and I was like, yeah, I get it, it would drape a bit differently, I’m sure the costume people thought deeply about this, but in fact maybe you can’t have these actors wearing heavy wool suits [FK laughs] when they’re like, filming this shit for ten hours a day or whatever, under these hot lights! Like, I’m absolutely certain that is why they were in lighter fabrics, you know what I mean?
FK: Right. Yeah.
ELM: And so like, I don’t know, it was just a very funny thing to me to read, and it wasn’t exactly fandom, but I was like, “Oh, everyone has these kind of like…”
FK: That is exactly fandom, are you kidding? That’s exactly fandom! That’s absolutely fandom!
ELM: [overlapping] I mean, their fandom is like, no, these are like, these are like fashion history people, right?
FK: Yeah, but they’re, they’re obsessing over Mad Men and that makes it fandom.
ELM: They weren’t, they were mad at Mad Men for the weight of the suits.
FK: What is more fandom than being mad at your show, Elizabeth?
ELM: No no no, these people were not Mad Men fans.
FK: Oh, OK. They were, they were fashion history people who were talking about—whatever, it’s still, to me it’s still fandomy enough.
ELM: Canon to them is actual real-life suits in history, right? It’s like, 1961: suits. That’s their canon, right, you know?
FK: [overlapping] 1960…[laughs] Whatever. I, I’m still, I’m including them in the spirit of uh…[ELM laughs] you know, the spirit of anything can be.
ELM: Right, but it was so similar to me to fans, and like, they weren’t coming from a place of like, emotional desire, they were coming from, I mean they obviously had a lot of emotions…
FK: [laughing, overlapping] I was gonna say, they were!
ELM: Yeah, they were emotional, don’t get me wrong. But so, anyway, I love that stuff, when you see the like, the lighting director or whatever who’s like a total expert in their field, and they'll be like, “Yep, I literally was just trying to make their faces show up on the screen. There’s no message in the lights, I didn’t do Morse code in the lights for you, to say ‘They’re gay!’” [FK laughs] It’s so weird how much lighting is trying to tell people that they’re secretly gay? It’s like, I didn’t know, you know?
FK: Yeah, it’s true. OK, OK, so I think that we’re coming towards the end of the episode, so I think that we should…like, what’s our, do we have takeaways? What are our takeaways from this? What can we say to poor J, who just wants to read more meta and thinks meta is really important?
ELM: Well, one question I have for J, and we don’t have J here, is like, what J’s boundaries of meta are. If J wants more analysis, I think that it seems to me that the world of analysis and nonfiction writing, maybe it’s a little short and a little less polished, but seems very robust to me. Before I had to mute Our Flag Means Death tags, [FK laughs] because it was too much content, I saw lots and lots of analysis, right?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And what I saw, and I’m not in this fandom, so maybe I’m only seeing a tiny fraction and it’s not representative, but what I saw was a lot of like, nonfiction reaction posts. You know, like, six, eight paragraphs, like, “In this scene, Ed and Stede do this, in this scene they do this, and that’s why my overall argument is like, here’s how they are.”
FK: Right.
ELM: And to me, that’s absolutely meta, like what else would it be, right? But I feel like, sometimes we think if it doesn’t have like, a title, and we’re tagging it “meta,” you know, then it’s not, it’s a post on the AO3 or whatever, a very formal, or like you’re describing with screenshots or whatever, or like quotes from the script, and it’s like well-researched and whatever. And like, I think the same affordances that we try to have for fic, to say there’s a huge range and you can dash off five paragraphs, like instant reaction to the last episode of the show, how the, a glance, a moment, or their interiority for five paragraphs. It’s not for me, but I certainly know it’s for a lot of people, a lot of people love that! You know?
FK: Right.
ELM: Little moments in their head. And so, I think a lot of people are willing to accept that fic encompasses all of that, but maybe don’t think of meta as encompassing all of the nonfiction things that come across their dash.
FK: Yeah, I think that’s, I think that’s right, and I think that it might be, it might be worthwhile for…I don’t know, I’m, I’m interested now in thinking about, I’m gonna go out and as I just go through the world, start thinking about where am I seeing that analysis, what format is it taking? And also, if I were going to sit down and write something like this, how would I format it differently for different platforms? Right, like what would that look like, what would the best version of making my argument look like on all of these different places where I talk with people? Because I think it would be different, right?
ELM: Sure.
FK: Like, on LiveJournal the best format might have been an essay, but that’s not the best format on Tumblr or on Twitter or on Instagram or TikTok or wherever, right? And I don’t know, I’m curious to think about that, I wonder whether, you know, next time when I have some insight like this that I want to talk about, maybe if I’ve thought through that, I would actually make a choice between what platform to…like, how to communi—you know what I mean?
ELM: Yeah.
FK: I think there’s a conscious choice we can make about how to communicate and where to look for that stuff, which isn’t to say that I don’t miss the essay, but…I don’t know.
ELM: Well this is, this is kinda fascinating and I hate that you brought it up at the very end, but this has been such a text-based discussion, the second you just said TikTok I was like, “Oh fuck, what about YouTube?”
FK: [overlapping] Oh, yeah! There’s a ton on YouTube!
ELM: [overlapping] You know, where actually, like, YouTube is probably the current, like, biggest home of what we would think of as a classical meta in the fannish tradition, right? Like, people are literally talking for an hour, right? But like, I don’t like that? That’s just not something that vibes with me, I don’t know why, which is ironic because I have a podcast and I make people listen to me talk for an hour.
FK: Well, that said, you know, we might have to do the meta podcast part two, and subject ourselves to YouTube stuff that we wouldn’t normally find and talk about that, I don’t know.
ELM: I don’t want to do that, Flourish, leave me alone. [FK laughs] I just don’t enjoy YouTube and I know…like, absolute respect to everyone who really finds a lot of, um, pleasure in fannish analysis on YouTube, but it’s not for me.
FK: Maybe we’ll, maybe we’ll find a guest who wants to talk about this. We’ll, we’ll think about this, we’ll figure this out. [laughs]
ELM: [overlapping] Yeah, who loves YouTube…yeah, no, but it is interesting to me, because what I have read in, people who are studying YouTube, is even with the rise of TikTok commentary, which again, is this a meta? You talk for two minutes, you could be like, “The thing I love about blank, here’s my little argument,” right? Or is that a Tweet?
FK: [overlapping] Bing bing bing bing bing! [laughs]
ELM: Yeah, ex—oh, that was a really good TikTok impersonation.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: But it’s always gonna be super short, does that fall under meta and commentary, right, but actually they’re saying YouTube videos are getting longer and longer.
FK: Oh yeah.
ELM: People are saying more and more. So that’s very interesting to me, how you can have a space where people are putting more words into the world at a time when it feels like most other platforms are kind of shrinking the amount of space that you have to express what you’re trying to say.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: So I don’t know, but, like, maybe J is like me and has literally no desire to ever engage with meta on YouTube. So, then we’re back to square one here.
FK: Yeah, it’s true. Well, I mean, we’re back to square one, but I think this was a super fruitful letter, thank you so much for writing it, J.
ELM: Absolutely, I really appreciate it. I, you know, I feel like, my biggest takeaway here is I suspect that if we can broaden our definition of meta, it will seem more accessible to people. If they know what they’re already doing is meta, they know that writing a couple of paragraphs about how they feel counts, right? And maybe that’s not gonna be satisfying if you want, like, a really deep, well-reasoned, thought-out, polished essay. Right? But if there’s space for that whole spectrum within it, I think that, like, I’m just gonna go back to that Severance post that was one paragraph long but illuminated more than most commentary I’ve seen about the show. You could make a powerful argument briefly, also. I mean, I can’t, but like, one could.
FK: Yeah. [laughs] Absolutely. All right, well, I don’t know that I have that much more to say until our, you know, future meta podcast part two in theory…this is a theoretical…
ELM: [overlapping] No! I am not doing this YouTube episode with you, [FK laughs] you can have a guest on, that’ll be my week off, I am not participating in this.
FK: OK, all right, well.
ELM: [overlapping] No, that’s not true, I shouldn’t shut myself off to a huge swath of fandom culture. If we have a guest who analyzes YouTube, I would love that.
FK: [overlapping] You would, you would take part in that?
ELM: [overlapping] I would love that. Absolutely, I would love to have them on. If you know of anyone who studies this in any capacity, hit us up, fansplaining@gmail.com.
FK: [laughs] All right, I feel like I really twisted your arm into this one, so I’m sorry about that, and also thank you for talking with me about this.
ELM: [overlapping] No no, I love to talk to a guest about literally anything.
FK: OK fair, fair.
ELM: Not literally anything, but like, a lot of things.
FK: I was gonna say, I could come up with some stuff.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: All right, before we go though, we have some final business.
ELM: Yes, we do! And that business is to talk once again about Patreon. Patreon.com/fansplaining is the way we fund the podcast, the way we pay for our hosting costs, for our transcriptionists to transcribe every episode. You can pledge as little as $1 a month up to as much as literally $44 billion dollars, Elon, [FK laughs] if you think that maybe you’d like to do that instead, I would take back all the mean things I said about you.
FK: Great. And if you support us on Patreon, you can get all kinds of exciting—
ELM: Hang on, you’re not gonna object to Elon Musk owning our podcast?
FK: No! If he pays us enough money, he can own our podcast.
ELM: $44 billion dollars. [laughs]
FK: Yeah, that’s fine.
ELM: I’ll do it for $40 billion.
FK: I would do it for $1 billion. [ELM laughs] Let’s just be honest with ourselves here. Anyway. I would probably do it for significantly less than $1 billion, Elizabeth. [both laugh] And so would you.
ELM: Yes, I would.
FK: Anyway—
ELM: Sorry.
FK: Anyway—
ELM: Sorry.
FK: Anyway—
ELM: We live in a capitalist society.
FK: If you do support us on Patreon, then you can get all sorts of exciting rewards, such as we have a ton of special episodes, our most recent one is about The Phantom of the Opera. [pause] I thought for a bit…
ELM: [overlapping] Oh, do you want me to…
FK: I thought you were gonna sing.
ELM: [simultaneous] You want me to sing?
FK: You’ve sung every time we’ve mentioned this for the past several episodes.
ELM: You, you just think I’m a, a singing monkey? That you can command to sing?
FK: I do. Anyhow, there’s also—
ELM: [singing] In sleep he sang to me…in dreams he came…
FK: You are, you are a singing monkey.
ELM: [singing] That voice which calls to— [FK laughs] I’m not singing it as high as she does, to make it as annoying as her you have to do it high.
FK: [overlapping] High. Yeah. Anyhow, there’s also things like a Tiny Zine that comes out every once in a while, and we’ve got these cute little enamel pins, so you should go and look at all those rewards and sign up at the level that will get you the reward you want. And also, if you don’t have money to support us or don’t feel like you want to or don’t think any of those rewards sound cool, then all right. [both laugh] But…no.
ELM: OK.
FK: You can, you can also support us by spreading the word about the podcast, telling people about it, subscribing on the podcatcher of your choice, or writing in and talking to us and inspiring episodes like this one.
ELM: Right, so. The places you can do that: fansplaining@gmail.com; Fansplaining.com, we have a submission on our main website, a submission box; you can call and leave a voicemail and we’ll play your voice on the air, 1-401-526-FANS, we would love more voicemails as always; or you can leave us an ask on Tumblr and you can be anon, the way a lot of our asks come in is on anon.
We’re also on Twitter and Instagram, but I think it’s worth mentioning here that we have suspended our Facebook presence. [laughs] Not deleted, but turned off the Facebook page. We didn’t have…it was our least-trafficked platform and we really hate Facebook, so we decided it was time.
FK: Yeah. It needed to go.
ELM: If there’s anyone out there who was really relying on our Facebook posts, which seems literally unlikely, but if you do exist, please email us at fansplaining@gmail.com, but I don’t think that, I think you’re a fantasy. The Phantom of the Facebook.
FK: All right. With that, I don't know, do we have anything else to say?
ELM: Uh, no, no, I think that’s it! Business concluded.
FK: All right. In that case, I guess I’ll talk to you later, Elizabeth.
ELM: All right, bye Flourish!
FK: Bye!
[Outro music]