Episode 197: Stitch
In Episode 197, Flourish and Elizabeth welcome back Stitch, the media critic and fandom journalist who was one of their original “Race and Fandom” guests way back in 2016! Stitch discusses their career trajectory from omnivorous fan to independent blogger to writing the “Fan Service” column for Teen Vogue, where they’ve tackled everything from escapism to boys’ love fic to racism—and especially anti-Blackness—in fandom. They also talk about the specific dangers they and other Black commentators face in being vocal about these topics—and how the threats they’ve received will likely make their work unsustainable in the long term.
Show Notes
[00:00:00] As always, our intro music is “Awel” by stefsax, used under a CC BY 3.0 license.
[00:00:56] Stitch was specifically an anchor guest on “Race and Fandom: Part 2.” You can find their writing at “Stitch’s Media Mix” or their Teen Vogue column, “Fan Service.”
[00:01:41] We talked about BNFs in “Ask Fansplaining Anything: Part 16.”
[00:02:28] Fanlore quotes a fan in 1989 saying:
When did ‘BNF’ become a pejorative? It's an old and honored term in 60 years of Fandom. BIG NAME FAN has always designated those who WORKED FOR the fandom; put out newsletters, the zines, organized the Cons, brought fans together, disseminated information. They DID IT FOR the fans.
[00:03:58] Our interstitial music throughout is “Thought Bubbles” by Lee Rosevere, also used under a CC BY 3.0 license.
[00:04:27] In addition to being an original “Race and Fandom” guest, Stitch recorded a voicemail for our follow-up pair of episodes in 2020.
[00:05:54]
[00:12:19]
[00:17:50] *Literally* the best companion.
[00:26:15] The “fandom ghost” archetype.
[00:34:21]
[00:36:58] If there’s any doubt about how we felt re: The Rise of Skywalker, we titled our Patrons-only episode on the film “Star Wars: The Lowering of Expectations.”
[00:43:25] That’s “Megan Thee Stallion and Anime—Or, the Male Gatekeeping of Fandom Spaces” from 2020.
[00:45:52] Following the response to the Kelly Marie Tran article, Teen Vogue said: “@stitchmediamix’s work to continually unpack the good and bad sides of fandom culture is incredibly important to us and readers.”
[01:15:24] That’s “The Pain Fandom” by Maria Temming, and the one-off donation link—which will help us fund more journalism like this—is at PayPal.
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 #197, “Stitch.”
FK: Yeah! Stitch is a fandom person and culture critic and has been on this podcast several times before, but is now getting their very own episode.
ELM: Right. So if you’ve listened to our full back catalog, or if you were with us all the way back in the beginning, Stitch was one of the original anchor guests on our first set of “Race and Fandom” episodes, talking about race and racism in fandom with a specific focus on anti-Blackness. And they, for years, have run a blog with media criticism called Stitch’s Media Mix, but in the last couple of years, they’ve been writing a column at Teen Vogue called “Fan Service,” which has some really great stuff, if you are a Rec Center subscriber, you will definitely have seen some of their work before. We have some journalists on to talk about topics, but sometimes we have people on to talk about themselves and their work, and we wanted to do that for Stitch, too.
FK: Yeah. OK, but before we call Stitch up, I regret to report [laughs] that I have a correction to make.
ELM: [laughs] Go for it.
FK: OK. So in our last episode, I said that the term “big name fan” was from, like, the ’90s to today. And egg on my face, I was wrong. It dates, like, way, way, way back, and it was an SFF fandom thing before it was a media fandom thing. Slightly in my defense, it kind of changed meanings over the years. So it started out as a positive, and by the time I encountered it in media fandom, it was a negative thing. But, fact remains. So thank you [laughs] to the folks that pointed that out on Tumblr. I could have looked that up before blithely deciding that I knew what was what.
ELM: I mean, I also could have stopped you and said, “I don’t know if we know that’s true,” and I didn’t. [FK laughs] I just let you keep going, so…
FK: You just trusted that I would know it. You trusted me. Don’t trust me. [laughs]
ELM: Well, I actually—I did find it very interesting when we were reading about this on Fanlore, because there was a quote from someone in the ’80s saying, like, “When did this become a pejorative? This used to mean people who run the cons,” or whatever. And I thought that was so funny, because that’s actually what you invoked when we were talking about BNFs, right? You know? It’s not just, like, Mean Girls or whatever. You were like, “Yeah, sometimes it’s the people who run the cons.” [FK laughs] You know? And it’s like, well, OK. But that is a negative thing? I don’t know.
So I think it’s interesting to see that kind of—that people had noted that shift, you know, a few years before either of us entered fandom. And I guess, I don’t know. It’s interesting to think about, like, the same things, the things that you brought up last time. This sort of, like, yeah, someone has to decide who speaks. But then, of course, you’re gonna get mad that someone is deciding that, you know, not everyone at the con can speak, right?
FK: Right.
ELM: Not everyone gets to go to the con, et cetera, et cetera. So I can understand why this shift happened, and I think it’s interesting, though, to see that it did.
FK: Right, and I mean, Fanlore also says that—I mean, if anybody is familiar with the term “smof,” secret masters of fandom, that’s an SFF term.
ELM: Oh yeah. [laughs]
FK: And Fanlore also notes that that was a pejorative and then became, like, a kind of good thing, right?
ELM: Yeah.
FK: No one uses that term anymore to be like, “Those assholes.” So, you know, maybe could be thought about more. I would need to do more research before we did more conversations about this. Sorry to everybody for misleading you.
ELM: [laughs] Misleading! Oh my God.
FK: Misleading! On this deep and important topic. Look, I care about it! OK? I care about it, that it’s right. OK, let’s move on. We need to call Stitch. [laughs]
ELM: All right. All right, let’s call them.
[Interstitial music]
FK: All right, let’s welcome Stitch to the podcast! Hey, Stitch!
Stitch: Hello!
ELM: Welcome back to the podcast.
S: Yeah, it’s been a while. I think I was in grad school when we last talked. And then, like, recorded the little—I was also in grad school for that. [ELM & FK laugh]
ELM: Yeah, no, when you came on as a guest, that was in 2016, which seems like 100 years ago.
S: I think that was my first or second semester of grad school. I’m so much worse now. [ELM & FK laugh]
ELM: Right. We had you on to talk specifically about race and fandom, but this is about you.
S: Thanks! I love talking about me. [FK laughs]
ELM: So! With guests we usually start by asking about their fandom origin stories, so I’m wondering if that’s where you want to start.
S: I love talking about my fandom origin story. I’ve talked about it a bunch, because I think it is kind of funny, because I’ve been in basically every fandom. Like, my media consumption volume is kind of horrific, in terms of just, like, how much I do at any given point. And so, I can trace my fandom origin back to Sailor Moon fandom as a tadpole, like, an offline fandom me, my niece, and whatever, like, other children we could get into [laughs] our specific brand of Sailor Moon fandom. We used to record—we had, like, a little I guess proto-podcast [laughs]—
ELM: Yeah!
S: —where we’d make with a tape deck, [FK gasps] and so it would be us giving Sailor Moon, you know, Serena and Darien romantic advice. [ELM laughs] It was great.
ELM: I love this.
FK: This is a format of fan creativity that I have not heard of before, and I am living for it. [laughs]
ELM: Flourish, you never made a fake—did you ever make a fake radio show with a tape deck?
FK: No!
ELM: Oh. I did this, too. Not specifically fandom-y. It was like, yeah, my friend and I would make a pretend radio show.
FK: This is amazing. I love it. Go on, Stitch. [all laugh]
S: It was so much fun.
ELM: Tapes!
FK: Describe that more. [laughter]
S: So that was, let’s say I was, like, eight or nine. And so most of my fandoming until I got, like, unimpeded internet access was offline. Like, my niece, my friend. I used to write fanfiction and, like, [laughs] kind of had a bootleg black market of incredibly inappropriate and also poorly written anime fanfiction that, like, passed around [FK & ELM laugh] in school, because I was also into soap operas and I was into The Real World, reality television in the late ’90s.
ELM: Mmm hmmm.
S: And I would write just, “They lived in a house, and they had challenges” kind of things, and it was very shipping-heavy. And I moved up to the United States mainland in 2001, and promptly got a computer, and immediately realized people were writing porn, and I was like, “Oh! [ELM & FK laugh] Can I do that?” Because, like, my inappropriate was, like, for a nine year old it was like, “And they held hands in the dark [FK laughs] where nobody could see them!” And then I was like, “Wait, he can do that—he can put—he can do that? [ELM & FK laugh] OK!” And I think I was writing just, like, horrible, horrible Harry Potter fanfiction. It was my obviously underage self-insert with, like, Lucius Malfoy. [FK gasps] [S laughs]
ELM: Wow. Wow. This is not—you should have made us guess, and we wouldn’t have guessed that.
S: Nope.
ELM: We would have named a lot of characters.
FK: Yeah, I would never have guessed that in a million years, and I love it.
ELM: If you gave me 50 guesses, I would have gotten there. [laughs]
S: [laughs] Yeah, and this was—so, a lot of what I wrote was offline. I loved having my little notebooks and would pass them around. But at the same time, I was increasingly active in digital fandom. I was a literal child, so I had to, like, lie about my age a lot, and I started getting into online anime fandoms. So, like, Weiß Kreuz, which is, like, are flower shop workers by day, tortured assassins by night. [ELM & FK laugh] I was really obsessed with early boys’ love, like, Yun Kōga who did Earthian, which was like—it’s gay and homophobic at the same time, it’s fantastic. [ELM laughs]
FK: I mean, classic early boys’ love vibe, right?
S: It’s so good. You’re like, “Wait, this feels wrong. But also, I can’t stop.” It’s so good, though, that in 2017, I bought the republished volumes, and they came while I was at a hurricane shelter, and I was like, “If anything happens to this, I’m gonna die!” Because it was, like—
FK: [laughs] Oh no.
S: —these are so out of print. And they’re fine, they’re on my bookcase now. And, like, I traumatize my nieces with them often, obviously. [ELM & FK laugh] Yun Kōga also did Loveless, which I just bought on DVD. [laughs] Just now. When I was, what, high school? I torrented that, and we did watch parties. [ELM & FK laugh] I was like, “Hello, fellow children, would you like to watch this show about cat ears and virginity and trauma?” And they were like, “No.” And I was like, “Too bad. You don’t have a choice. I’m the only one with a laptop.” [all laugh] So I was both very popular and very unpopular in high school. Yeah.
Really, it would be easier to name a fandom I wasn’t in or consuming content for, because if I find something I like, I would go and I would read everything. So, like, how I’m really into omegaverse. I will read any omegaverse. I do not care the fandom. But I’m just gonna read it. And then, like, sometimes [FK laughs] I’ll be like, “Oh, so now I have to go and look at the thing this is for.” Like, I wasn’t into the K-pop group Exo but there was this really long fanfic where three of the members—it was, like, an alpha-beta-omega triad, and it was really great!
FK: Yeah!
ELM: Mmm. Mmm.
S: And I was like, “I only vaguely know these people,” because my nieces at the time were into Exo. And then I was like, “And now I have to get into Exo for this fanfiction.” [FK laughs] And it’s kind of what almost happened with BTS. Like, I was reading BTS fanfiction way before I knew anything about the fandom, and then I learned, unfortunately, when I got into learning about the fandom, it was a point where, like, the non-RPF fans were going through a period of really peak anti-Blackness, and I was like, [deep breath].
FK: Hmm.
ELM: Hmm.
S: “What do I do now?” And the answer was get really into BTS, unfortunately.
FK: [laughing] Oh no.
ELM: [laughs] Just double down.
S: Yeah, I was like, “No, I like these guys, in and out of omegaverse. You’re stuck with me!”
ELM: [laughs] You’re very omnivorous in your fanfiction reading, but then you—it’s not just like you looked up their faces, so you were like, “OK, so I can envision these guys.” You then join the fandom.
S: Yeah. [S & ELM laugh] Yeah. Like, when I started with the Exo fic, I was like, “Oh, I have to keep checking to like—so I’m like, “OK, that’s what Chanyeol looks like. OK, OK.” [FK laughs] I would come back when the author updated a new chapter and be like, “OK, OK, Chanyeol again. OK, I gotta look him up again.” You know, by, like, the 30th time, it’s like, “No, I just wanna look at pictures of Chanyeol.”
ELM: [laughs] You don’t even need an excuse.
S: Yeah! I would be like, “Yeah, I just wanna read the fanfiction,” and then I’d get into the fanfiction, and I’m like, “Oh, this is some good shit,” and two weeks later I’ve read, like, 3,000 fanfics, and [ELM laughs] I have watched the series for whatever it’s for, like, 15 times.
My current fandom is Jujutsu Kaisen, and so I got into that because I needed something to do, with everything that’s going on with my dad, and my niece was like, “Yeah, I really like Jujutsu Kaisen, it’s really cool. I think you’d like it.” Because she thought I was gonna like the Kakashi-esque character, and I do. He’s, like, a bunch of the pictures on my wall are of him. But then I got into the worst character, Mahito, and she was like, “Oh, I regret this. Immediately. I regret this a lot.” [all laugh] And so in that first week of getting into Jujutsu Kaisen, I think I read, easy, like, 1,000 fics.
ELM: Oh my goodness.
S: I got no work done. I just laid there. It was, like, eight hours a day of, “Oh, I’m gonna read this. That’s all I’m gonna do.” [laughs]
FK: It’s really cool that you and your niece share so much of this, right? It’s a full, in-person family experience—
ELM: Yeah.
FK: —of, like, nerding out about fandoms.
S: It’s really great.
FK: Yeah, I mean, I don’t have a family member like that. I’m jealous.
S: So, they sometimes regret it. Like, my sister—I have a cup that says “omega slick” on it. [ELM laughs, FK gasps] My sister walked by, and she was like, “What is that?” And I was like, “I don’t think you want to know.” [ELM laughs]
FK: Oh no. [laughs]
S: “Don’t Google it.” And then she was like, “I have to know.” And I was like, “Well, I’m not telling you.” And she Googles it, and she comes back, and she goes, [softly] “No.” [all laugh] And every time for the rest of the night, she would look at me and just shake her head, and she couldn’t even call me out about it, because the niece-lings are there, and so while the one that’s 19 or so is, like, aware, because she’s more active in fandom, so she does know what omegaverse is, Meems is, like, little, and not only would she not like to know, she’d kill us all. [laughter] So it’s like, no, we can’t go into that, and it was just so funny.
FK: Oh, man.
S: And you know, I love being able to do stuff with my nieces. The oldest is the only one who’s not related to fandom, but she likes, you know, she’s a pop culture junkie. She loves John Wick movies, she loves horror movies. And then I do, like, K-pop and stuff with the others, the other two. And so it’s been really cool, like—it’s something that I always think about, because a lot of people will be like, “Children in fandom should know, you know, respect their elders and stuff.” And it’s like, OK, but nobody who’s saying that can have the relationship with random teenagers in fandom that I have with my nieces, or that I had—
FK: Yeah.
S: —or y’all had with adults when you were their age. Like, when I was a 16 year old on LiveJournal, adults were really nice to me. And even when they weren’t, it wasn’t out of a sense of, like, “I’m an adult, you’re a child. Know your place.” It was like, “You’re weird, and I don’t have time, so you go back to your fun, and I’m gonna stay over here.” You know?
And at the same time, they were also creating content. Like, I’m watching people who do not have any measurable, like, output in fandom aside from discourse, you know, complain that children won’t respect them. And it’s like, “Why should they respect you? [ELM & FK laugh] You’re fighting with a 13 year old, because you decided to ship, like, the villain from Sofia the First with character Sofia the First, and those teenagers are like, [disgusted noise] and you have a problem with them having a problem, when it’s like, just block everybody, and also maybe [laughter] don’t watch Sofia the First?
FK: The greatest advice. Just block them. Just go on! Internet’s a big place. You can find someone else to talk to, right? [laughs]
S: Yeah. I’ve never understood that, with either—both the blocking, the refusal to block people, and then, like, going around a block to start shit, because it’s like, fandom should not be at a point where you’re like, “Oh, this person has me blocked, I have a problem with that.” It’s like, well, just assume they’re not somebody you’re gonna enjoy talking to. Even if you don’t know why they blocked you, just go, “Either on their end or my end, this is gonna be bad.” You know? And people just don’t get it. They’re just like, “No! I have to fight with this person!”
ELM: Yeah.
FK: If you think you’re, like, on a block together thing and you shouldn’t be on it, if you don’t know the person, then give it up. And if you have people in common, ask one of your friends to ask them, and then accept whatever the answer is. Just move on.
S: Yeah. I think that people should block whoever they want, but they should also be honest about why they’re doing it, in the case of, like, you’re blocking every single Black person in a fandom. Because that actually has happened in other fandoms.
FK: Yeah.
S: I’ve watched people put out block lists, like, “These are antis, you have to handle them,” in, like, stan Twitter fandoms. And everybody on the list is Black.
ELM: Hmm.
FK: Wow.
S: And it’s like, not only are they not antis, they are fans of the artist, but they are all Black, and they have Black in their bio, they have their selfies as pinned tweets, like, it’s a choice that somebody went through to curate that. Or [laughs] I’ve been on an anti-Batcest block list for 10 years. Would you like to know when I exited the fandom? 2016.
ELM: Wait wait wait. I’m confused.
S: I wasn’t in this fandom anymore. I was leaving the fandom.
ELM: Yeah.
S: I officially was like, “Peace.” Right? I’ve been on a block list for, like, people who ship Batman and assorted Robins, I’ve been on it from 2013, and the person—like, I still get blocked for it.
ELM: Oh, even though you haven’t had anything to do with it for years.
S: [laughs] Right.
ELM: Yeah.
S: I still get blocked, and it’s just like, “Man, at least, like, google all the other stuff that I write.” [ELM laughs]
FK: OK, but, now we’re talking about things that past!you did. [laughs] We skipped right into discourse. Talk a little bit more about where you went from being a fan of a bunch of things, and now you are a journalist doing meta-commentary on fandom. Tell us about that journey.
S: OK, so, it all began with the Doctor Who fandom and the unhinged hatred of Martha.
ELM: The best companion.
S: Literally the best.
FK: She, clearly— [laughs]
S: I love her. So I’d noticed people just being really hard on her in a way that was, like, really unfair. And I didn’t notice it when it was happening. I noticed it after the Merlin fandom. So I’d already kind of had that basis, but I wasn’t talking about it. I was like, “Oh, the Merlin fandom sucks. Let me not engage.” But with me, I guess, revisiting Doctor Who, I was like, “Wait. No, this is the same thing.”
So I would go on Tumblr and I would talk about it, like, “Oh, why are people being so harsh on Martha? She didn’t do anything. Liking that guy is not a huge issue. It’s not wrong to like someone.” And people would be, like, really rude.
ELM: In case anyone doesn’t know Doctor Who, Martha was Black, and she was the companion who followed after the blond, white sweetheart everyone…you know what I mean. Is that the correct description of Rose, right?
S: [laughing] Yeah.
ELM: And the Doctor, who’s the protagonist, was still hung up on Rose. And Martha was, like, pining after him, and he was like, “Leave me alone.” Which was, like, kind of what was happening in the show. And then, Merlin, which I’ve never seen, the female protagonist is Black?
S: Yes.
FK: Gwen, yeah.
S: So Angel Coulby plays Guinevere and immediately, you had all this racism from a bunch of different points. You had, like, “Guinevere means ‘fair lady,’ and she’s Black, so she can’t be fair.” And it’s like, “Well, they put a light blond in her hair. It’s the same thing, it’s fine. Also, she’s light-skinned.” But they were like, “No, this isn’t the same thing.” And so that was, like, broad fandom reacting really negatively to Gwen and Angel, but then you came into the fandom that shipped Arthur and Merlin, and they were like—
FK: Yeah.
S: They hit every single misogynistic trope you could get. They made her aggressive. They made her a sexless—she was both sexless, like, she’s their asexual bestie, and a THOT who’s cheating on poor, innocent Arthur. You know, it’s really hard to document now, because this happened over a decade ago, but at the time we knew Angel Coulby was seeing some of this stuff. We knew that it bled into some of her interactions with the fandom at conventions and stuff.
And it was something that I had in my head, and so I see—being, revisiting the Doctor Who fandom and seeing it happen, even when, after Martha’s run was complete, when she would show up in comics or episodes of the show, or people would start the series over from the beginning, there would always be, like, a, “Oh, yeah, I don’t know what it is about Martha. I just don’t like her. I think she’s just kind of disrespectful to the Doctor and Rose’s legacy.” And it’s like, “It has been, like, 10, 15 years. Please calm down.”
ELM: Yeah.
S: You know, and they do it to Gwen still. They also did it to Zoe Saldaña’s Nyota Uhura. They’re doing it to the current Uhura, played by Celia Gooding. And she’s not even shipped with Spock in Strange New Worlds. Her Uhura in this, not shipped with Spock. She’s, like, the team’s baby.
FK: Yes. There is a—there are multiple other opportunities for you, if you want to be misogynistic about somebody, there are two other opportunities for you to be misogynistic of people who actually have relationships with Spock in that show. [laughs] Uhura does not need to be part of this conversation. If you’re choosing to go there, I don’t know what you’re doing.
S: It’s a lot, it’s a lot. They’re also using it, because Celia is nonbinary, so they’re using it like, “Uhura’s not even played by a woman,” and it’s like, “I will come into your house and leave worms. I will go get worms, [ELM laughs] and I don’t like bugs.” [FK & ELM laugh]
And so I was on Tumblr talking about this, and I started having conversations with other Black fans who were witnessing and experiencing this, because if they liked a Black female character, immediately almost, people would rush to tell them why they were wrong and bad for liking this character. I remember reading a LiveJournal post ages ago that was talking about, like, how people would literally call Uhura a whore, you know. People would say that she was, like, grooming Spock. Her teacher! Her, like, student teacher. She was forcing him—
FK: [laughs] That is not the direction. If something is creepy, it’s not that direction. [laughs]
S: It kept going. I kept seeing all of these moments, you know? I watched Skyfall, and I was like, “Oh my God, people are gonna come out of this, and that shaving scene with Moneypenny and Bond is gonna be, like, great. People are gonna eat that up.” And then, no they didn’t. They ignored that Q says that he’s afraid of flying and they slap him into the scene, you know? So that he could have her role. They desexualized her entirely.
And, you know, the Teen Wolf fandom—and I love Scott McCall an unreasonable amount. That’s my eternal blorbo, my baby. And I liked him, and I was also still shipping Stiles and Derek, because I’m the Stiles. I’m a Stiles. And I would be watching people just say the most out-of-pocket things both about Scott as a character and Tyler Posey as a person.
You know, I’d write about this stuff and some people would agree. A lot of people would disagree. And, you know, even from back then, what, a decade ago, you would have people being, “Well, I’m a POC too and neh neh neh neh neh.” And it’s like, “OK, but you can recognize that this isn’t right.” People were being very personal in all of their attacks. It was, like, a constant. Accusing the actress of being a problem, like how Tyler Posey got accused of homophobia for basically saying that he thought that Sterek was basically a crack ship, or Candice Patton being accused of sleeping her way to her time as Iris West. And this is not dude-bro fandom doing this. These are other queer people, these are other women, these are people of color, who have decided they get to be really cruel to these performers, because they don’t like their character.
And, you know, I was writing about it and I had two different blogs where I did this, where I would do, like, meta stuff. The one I did with a friend, and the other is the one that would be Stitch’s Media Mix, you know, because every time I would talk about this stuff, I would get all of these people accusing me of homophobia, which was always really funny, because I’ve been pretty openly queer for a really long time, and it was like, I would talk about how because of Thor, you had Clint and Coulson as a ship and nobody ever got into Coulson and Fury, even though they had, like, actual interactions. And it would be like, “Well, you just don’t understand that we want blah blah blah blah blah.” And it’s like, “They don’t talk.” [ELM & FK laugh]
ELM: Yeah.
S: “They’re not even in the same scene.”
FK: Right.
S: I don’t actually think they, to this day, have been in the same scene. The issue is that I’m seeing people do this, and then they’re like, “Oh, well, uh, Rhodey and Tony, I can’t ship that because they’re like brothers.” And it’s like, “They’re not brothers, though. They’re really clearly not brothers.” [laughter]
FK: It’s also, like, you can ship what you want in an individual thing, but you have to recognize the larger patterns that are happening and accept that this is part of a larger pattern if you’re doing it, right? And be like, “OK.” And pointing out the pattern, and pointing out the individual things that lead up to the pattern, is not a personal attack. It’s, “Look at this big pattern.”
S: Yeah. Unfortunately, from day one, fandom has taken everything I’ve ever done as a personal attack. And it’s really frustrating, because up until 2020, I did actually try to minimize how I talk about individuals doing this shit. And, you know, it was really made clear to me that it was like, no, if you hide their names, if you censor them, if you subtweet, they’ll accuse you of lying. And it’s like, OK, so I’ll just show your shit, you know? And so on Tumblr I would talk about just the fact that, you know, we’re seeing people absolutely just fixate on these white guys. Like, the blank slate can only ever be a white guy. You know, the fandom ghost is only haunting guys that look like Hux, you know? And it’s just so frustrating, because we’re told all this is, like, super progressive and accessible and welcoming, and it’s like, if you don’t write about the fandom white guys, you don’t get your stuff read, you don’t get likes.
And it’s shifted a little bit now, as people get into more anime, more K-pop, more danmei stuff. But even then, like, there have been, you know, different members of those diasporas talking about how they feel. I have a friend who’s talked about, like, how people draw Chinese characters with stick-straight, high-bridge noses exclusively, and it’s like, “Hmm.” You know? They’re uncomfortable with that, because of how beauty standards work and are forced on people and, you know, they can’t tweet about that publicly without tons of people accusing them of essentializing, you know?
In K-pop fandom, if you go like, “Hey, you know, if you’re writing about Koreans living in Korea, here are some things you should know about what it’s like to be a college student in Korea or live with your family in Korea.” And I’ve seen people be like, “Oh, those kinds of threads are essentializing the Korean experience.” And it’s like, “It’s saying that Korean bathrooms look a certain way. It’s giving you layouts for Korean apartments. It’s saying Korean people take their shoes off when they come inside.” [ELM laughs] That’s not essentializing. It’s just to make your story better. And it’s really wild, coming from an age of Brit-picking—
FK: Hmmm.
ELM: Mmm hmmm.
S: —where, you know, people would go to town to make sure that your little Harry Potter or Sherlock fics were accurate, you know—
FK: Yeah.
S: —a lot of those people are the people going, “Don’t tell me how to write my K-pop fanfic.” And it’s like—
ELM: Mmm hmmm, Mmm hmmm.
S: —but 20 years ago, you needed a British person to make you put your “u”s and “o”s in the right places. [ELM & FK laugh]
ELM: Yeah, and it’s also something too, I’m sure you’ve observed this also, with, you know, kind of the expansion of what, yeah, I’ve historically also thought of as white-guy fandom, into certain types of Asian-guy fandom now. You know, I’ve seen plenty of people talking about—like, presumably, not people of an Asian background—saying like, “Oh, well, none of this race stuff applies to, you know, like, I’m in C-drama fandom now, and it’s, like, that’s not relevant anymore.” And it’s like, “I’m sorry, if you think there are no racial dynamics going on there…” You know what I mean?
S: In 2020, I saw someone say that they—like, in defense of someone else, that they didn’t need—the person didn’t need to be accurate in their fanfiction about The Untamed, because The Untamed wasn’t set in China. It’s set in fantasy China. And I was like, “Where do you think fantasy China is, huh? It’s in China.” [ELM & FK laugh] You know?
FK: Well, it’s also—I mean, I think it’s also frustrating, because it’s one thing to say, like, “I am transporting these characters to this setting, and that is the choice I’m making and I’m being upfront about it and here it is.” Which you may or may not like that choice, because it may or may not show that you’re, like, trying to avoid it, but at least you’re being direct about it, you know? [laughs] And then the other thing, which I think is really frustrating is when it’s just like, “I don’t care enough to care.”
ELM: Sure.
FK: “And nobody else should care enough to care either.” Right?
S: It’s so frustrating. I’ll be reading K-pop fanfics and I’ll see somebody go like, “I don’t know what Koreans eat, so that’s why they’re eating standard American food.” And it’s like, “You could look up, A) what Korean restaurants are serving near you, or look up what restaurants are in Korea in that area.” And I know people are afraid of getting yelled at, and it’s like, “Yes. It sucks. But I will be yelled at for talking about why you should do better, so you could just, you know, do better, so I don’t have to say anything.”
FK: I also think that actually, if you are making a good-faith effort, this has been my experience, and admittedly I haven’t been writing much in the past couple of years, so maybe vibes have changed, and I haven’t been writing in these fandoms. But my experience overall in fandom has been, when you get something wrong, if you in good faith respond to somebody and are like, “Wow, thank you for pointing that out. I’m gonna do X, Y, Z,” then it usually ends up being much less of a big deal than you think it will. You know, I’m not saying that it’s pleasant to get told that you got something wrong, or that you didn’t warn for something, or whatever. It’s very unpleasant, actually. But you get to the other side of it, right? And that’s part of being in community with people, is learning from them, also.
S: Yeah. So that really ties into a lot of what I started doing on Tumblr. So, like, I would talk to people. Like, “Hey, this thing exists. Let’s work on that.” And, you know, I realized, you know, I was reading a lot of different fandom journalism and stuff, and early, for me, fan studies. And a lot of it really wasn’t talking about race or racism or when it was put in, like, when people put in their articles a note about race or racism, it was very much a footnote. I was always seeing people just touch on, like, the barest notes of stuff, or the fandom…I guess discourse that came up never really had to do with race, except for, like, presenting it as these entitled people of color complaining about our content, you know?
And the biggest catalyst for me writing about that on my website was why I was there with you guys in 2016, was, and that whole idea that we were only talking about racism in fandom for some, like, ally cookies. That whole concept of, like, “You’re only doing this for clout in fandom and actually the real problem is kink-shaming.” And it’s like, both of those things continue to be really pervasive attitudes towards fans of color talking about racism. That we’re doing it to get some kind of, like, monetary or social clout, and we’re anti-kink, anti-fun. And it’s like, “No.”
That stance started really being overt in 2016, that, like, people really would say, “You’re talking about this stuff because you want people to ship your ship.” And it’s like, “I don’t want you to ship my ship. You’ve proven you cannot write. Why would I want you to write West/Allen? Why would I want you to write Finn/Poe? Why would I want you to write about Black characters, when you treat Black people like shit, and you are currently actively refusing to do better about Black characters?” Like, I don’t have time for that.
ELM: Yeah, and it also seems, too—I know a lot of these conversations do wind up being, like, a white guy ship versus a Black woman and a white guy ship, like, rivals. But thinking back to Martha Jones, I mean, whatever. I guess people do ship the Doctor and Rose. But I just feel like it’s just about these characters as individuals, too, right? And those are the patterns that—obviously there are shipping patterns here, but a lot of this is about individual stuff, right? You know what I mean?
S: Yeah. Like, I always think about how the archetypes, like, people will say, “The blank-slate thing exists because people love archetypes.” And it’s like, “You do, actually, really love archetypes. The problem is, is that you can only see white characters and now, with the different East Asia media fandoms, those characters slotting into archetypes.”
ELM: Mmm hmmm.
S: “You’re not seeing Black characters, you’re not seeing brown-skinned Latino characters, except for, like, Namor, that’s it. That’s the only character you’re really seeing fitting into these tropes that you like.” To bring up Rhodey and Tony again, people will be like, “Yeah, the soldier and the genius.” That archetype ship is why people really like Stony. And it’s like, “Well, they like Stony because that’s, like, a 50-year ship. That’s why.”
ELM: Yeah. [laughs]
S: But Rhodey and Tony have a very long relationship as well, and they also fit that archetype. Especially because Rhodey is both a genius and a soldier.
ELM: Yeah.
S: When you bring that up, people are all like, “No, it’s different!” It’s like, “No, it’s not. It’s not different.”
ELM: Yeah.
S: I understand that, you know, everybody has, like, I guess their comfort character, and that’s the character that they ship. You know, I have a whole thing about, like, you can kind of tell who somebody likes because of who they torture [laughs] in their fanfiction.
ELM: Mmm hmmm. Mmm hmmm.
S: That’s why, like, in my Jujutsu Kaisen fanfiction, you can really tell I like Junpei, because what I do to him is worse than what canon does to him, right? [ELM laughs] And so you can tell that from these people. Like, yes, they like these characters, they’re gonna hurt these characters. It’s like, fine, this is a really great way to signal it. But then somebody like—a character like Rey, who is obviously a self-insert for a lot of people, or Rose. Rose and Rey function really similar in their respective fandoms. Rose Tyler from Doctor Who, not Rose Tico, who does not really have a fandom.
ELM: Oh, I was, like, [laughs] was very confused for one second.
FK: [laughs] I was having this moment of, “What?”
S: Yeah.
ELM: Yeah.
S: Rose Tyler, not Rose Tico.
ELM: Yeah.
S: So, Rose Tyler, because of her positioning. She is working class, she’s got a poor relationship with her parents, she’s young, she fits so many markers for the fans, who then, like, imprinted on her really hard for her relationship with the Doctor, and what they wanted from that relationship. So they would do and say anything to make sure that happened, if only in fanworks.
And we see that still with Rey and Kylo fans, because they’re like, “I want this enemies-to-lovers relationship. I can fix him. She is just like me. I want him.” And it’s like, that’s legitimately fine, up until the point where you’re, like, also harassing people over it. Why, first of all. But then also, what are you willing to do to defend them? Why are you behaving the way you are in fandom? And that’s something that has been, like, a direct research avenue for me, because it’s like, why are people behaving like this? These aren’t real characters. The performers are real people, and they’re not treated very well by the fans. But the characters 100% aren’t real. Why are you willing to harass people? One either avenue, like, why are you willing to harass people because they dislike your ship? Why are you willing to harass people who like the ship?
So, like, that basically is the chunk of my writing this stuff from, let’s say 2015 to 2019. So the end of 2019 was when The Rise of Skywalker came out, and I hate that movie. Just need y’all to know that. I don’t like The Last Jedi either, but I don’t like Rise of Skywalker. [FK laughs]
ELM: We are all in agreement about that final film.
FK: We are all in agreement about Rise of Skywalker. [ELM laughs] Absolutely.
S: It is so bad. I understand why. I don’t care. [laughs]
ELM: Yeah.
S: So that movie [FK laughs] comes out, and critics got access the week before. And so the week before, you’re seeing all of these, like, people talk about like, “Oh—” Like, shippers talk about like, “Oh, I hope that Rey and Kylo, like, smash, so that Finn/Rey fans are crying.” And it’s like, “This is a PG-13 Star Wars movie. And this is a supremely sexless trilogy. Nobody’s smashing unless they’re crashing [ELM & FK laugh] in their little, like, TIE fighters.” That’s it. And so I was seeing all of this—
FK: Also, we just don’t need—we just don’t need to make people cry. Like, we can just let that be.
S: Right!
FK: We don’t have to have somebody else be sad. We can be happy about something we want, [ELM & FK laugh] you know?
S: But yeah. So you had that week lead-in to everybody else getting the film, and so that was when you had—it was, like, back-to-back, it was, I think John Boyega gave an interview where he talked about the harassment he faced from different parts of the Star Wars fandom—he did not specify—and talked about the trajectory of the movies and stuff. And people purposefully took it as him saying that, like, Kelly Marie Tran was weak for how she deleted her accounts. And that was, like, a complete misrepresentation, it was, like, Lindsey Romain from the Nerdist who, like, originally tweeted that out to 14,000 of her followers, and she ended up apologizing, like, three times for it.
And then, at the end of the month, everybody has seen the movie, in some capacity. You have, like, Kylo’s dead, Rey’s on Tatooine all alone, and you know, [laughs] you had the kiss and dissolve. And so you have this really fraught fandom situation, and John Boyega replies to that comment where someone talks about—I don’t know what the person said, but John was like, “It doesn’t matter who—” I do not remember. It was, like, a lay-the-pipe joke. It was about fucking.
FK: Yeah. [laughs]
S: A thing that we’re allowed to make jokes about when we’re adults talking about adults—
ELM: Mmm hmmm.
S: —even in the context of a PG-13 movie.
FK: Yeah.
S: And immediately all these people maliciously framed it as, like, “John Boyega is sexually harassing Daisy Ridley.” You know, like, I have—
FK: Yeah.
S: —hundreds of tweets, screenshots, videos, of people accusing John of, like, harm towards either Daisy or themselves as shippers. And all of the coverage from, you know, the few outlets that covered it, like the Nerdist, The Mary Sue—I think The Mary Sue actually was like—either The Mary Sue or Pajiba had the, like, “John needs to get out of fandom’s business.” And I don’t remember which one it was, but I remember going, “What the hell? He’s not in fandom’s business. He’s in his business. Fandom is not leaving him alone.” You know?
And I was like, “I need to document this. I need to be really meticulous about making sure all of these tweets are accessible to people.” And I wrote, like, three articles about it. And it never really got a lot of traction, except in some parts of the fandom. And so you had a lot of people going, like, “Well, Stitch’s tone is really bad—she’s really mean! They could have been nicer.” And it’s like, “They were calling John Boyega a rapist. They were saying he was an abuser. They were saying he was a rapist. And people who had more reach than me, you know, staff writers at actual outlets, because until 2021 I was really only writing on my website, all these people with far bigger platforms than me either didn’t say anything or they were like, “Ooh, why is John Boyega fighting with fans? Why are antis controlling him?” And it’s like, I think he has eyes enough to see that the people harassing him suck. [laughs]
And, you know, that was kind of when I was like, I don’t think fan studies and fan journalism are gonna do what I need them to do, when it comes to documenting and analyzing racism in fandom. And it was a real, like, big moment for me. And then I proceeded not to get any journalism work until, like, I think people felt, like, immense white guilt partway through 2020 for the obvious George Floyd reasons, [FK & ELM laugh] and that was a lot.
FK: Yes, there was a wave of white guilt sweeping the nation, in addition to everything else.
S: Yes. Oh, yes, horrifically. One of the things that kept happening was people would, like, send me money. And I was like, “Great.” I didn’t have to pay my rent in full. Like, people gave me enough to pay my half of the rent, but it was like, “But were you better as a person towards Black people? [ELM & FK laugh] I don’t think so.”
And you had, like, that was one of the, like, I saw blacklists comprised entirely of Black people. You had, like, anti-Black celebrities putting their little black squares up, and not engaging meaningfully with their careers or their behavior. And it was just, like, it was a lot. And I wasn’t seeing a lot of coverage about it. It was like, “I can only do so much on my website.”
And at the time I was still working full-time in marketing, and so I was like, “I really don’t want to keep doing all of this work for free.” And, you know, I was trying to figure out what 2021 would look like, [laughs] and then I got fired from my offline job. But that’s because I wouldn’t come into the office, when they moved me from my literal office. They were like, “You have to go and work in an open-plan office. We won’t be wearing masks, and nobody’s vaccinated.” This was right before—
ELM: In 2020?
S: Yeah. Well, so this was, like, December 2020, starting 2021, they were like, “Yeah, so we’re gonna come back in the New Year—”
ELM: Cool. [laughs]
S: “—and you’re gonna be moved into [FK groans] a group office, and we’re not wearing masks, blah blah blah blah blah.” And I was like, “Look. I got the flu in November 2019. I literally almost died. I will not be coming back.” And they were like, “OK, you’re fired.”
And so I was like, “Oh God, what am I gonna do?” And then my editor, my current editor, Claire, emailed me and was like, “Would you like to write for Teen Vogue? And I was like, “Yes?? Hello!” [FK laughs] Because at that time, I had done one article for them already, which was an article about, like, how nobody—no woman is making themselves into a weeb to get male attention. Because there was, like, something with some guy going, like—
FK: [laughs] Yeah. There are easier ways.
ELM: Yeah. [laughs]
FK: There are easier ways. [all laugh]
S: It was, like, over Megan Thee Stallion. It’s like, “Megan Thee Stallion’s a fake geek, because—” [laughs] Like, no!
FK: Do you think that—does anybody think that Megan Thee Stallion needs the help of weebery [laughs] to have men interested in her?
ELM: Yeah.
S: They swear it! They’re like, “Oh, she’s only faking liking Shouto Todoroki.” Shouto? Whatever his name is. I say that, and I have a statue of him right there. [ELM laughs] But they’re like—and so, like, I had already done that, and it was a really fun experience, and so I let my editor know, like, “I would love to do this.” I was like, “Claire, I would love to do this. I just need you to know that, like, people on the internet are really unhinged about me, and so you’re gonna have to deal with that. People are going to actively misrepresent my work, or they’re gonna tell you guys to fire me, or whatever.” And she was like, “Yeah, we can handle this.”
So I started writing for them. So I did the first column, which was on escapism in fandom in late January 2021, and then the next one was in February, and it had Kylo Ren in the header image, and so of course, Star Wars fandoms descended, and, like, racist pro-shippers descended, and that’s basically been the foundation. Like, every time I post something and it might be about villains or about, like, sex, people show up and they’re like, “Stitch is trying to destroy our fandom!” And it’s like, “If you actually read the articles in good faith, you would actually understand that they’re about as pro-fandom as you can get.” Even the last villain article, which I did in November, and everybody was like, “Stitch is saying that liking villains is bad and you’re gonna go to hell!” It’s like, I think I all but advocate for, like, liking villains who do war crimes, you know?
FK: I was gonna say, also, as we have now learned, [laughing] you were once into Lucius Malfoy, so you have some skin in this game.
S: I’m still into him.
ELM: Self-insert!
S: He’s still hot.
ELM: You x Lucius. Yeah, but so, this is what I wanted to ask you about, in terms of these, the blowback that you’ve gotten now, writing for Teen Vogue, because, I can’t remember what article it was, but I remember there was one point where, like, the editor in chief of Teen Vogue came to your defense.
S: That was May 2021. It wasn’t actually about a Fan Service article. It was an interview I did with Kelly Marie Tran.
ELM: It was that one? That’s where it happened? OK, I didn’t realize it was that long—I thought it was last year, but the years, they blend together to me these days. [FK laughs]
S: Well, so it happened again last year. I mean, it is constantly happening because—
ELM: Maybe it was that. [laughs] Yeah.
S: —people are actually, actively getting significant clout in fandom for, like, taking me on. But then they’re not actually taking me on. And I’m like…like, somebody who wrote a 30-tweet thread tearing into my woobification article, like, clearly didn’t read it, because at one point, they start defending Harry Potter fans. They started defending Harry Potter fans because I brought up Draco in Leather Pants, a trope.
ELM: From… [laughs] 2001. [FK laughs]
S: Yeah. And it’s like, I’m seeing people willfully misrepresent my work. And it’s like, “But you don’t even have the range. You’re not even, like—” The weakest point in the woobification article is where I bring up the true crime thing, and it’s like, it’s only weak because I do not specify, like, I should have focused on the fictionalization of the serial killer as a character, not the serial killer itself, themselves, so…
ELM: But it’s my understanding it’s not just—it hasn’t just been people losing their minds on Twitter, but was there an incident where people were actually trying to contact Teen Vogue?
S: Yes. So there’s this person who said that they emailed every single person they could at Vogue from, like, Anna Wintour. They, like, went to Vogue Vogue—
ELM: Oh, at a different publication.
S: Mmm hmmm.
FK: A different Vogue. [laughs]
ELM: [laughs] Did they email Si Newhouse and say, “Hey, you should probably just cancel Vogue and Teen Vogue right now.” Get outta here.
S: Probably. I mean, we saw people saying that they were going to cancel their subscriptions to Teen Vogue, a digital-only publication that has no subscriptions. They filed a police report against me for stalking, and considering where I live, that is about as good as saying they wanted me dead. I live in Florida. Florida is a state where, you know, our cops are very shooty.
It was to a point where I was like, I cannot be public on Twitter, because there are people who are combing through to get my information. You know, they’re contacting my employer at different levels. Like, I can’t talk about my current job because I know that they will—I can’t go, “Hey, I work at blank,” because they’ll show up to be like, “Oh, fire Stitch.” Whenever people tweet, like, “Oh, we’re looking for somebody to talk about fandom,” or whatever, people literally show up in the comments and link to, like, lists of just fake-ass tweets. You know, it’s this, like, really publicly stated goal to destroy my life.
My dad died in October, and so my output has been really shit, because I’m still not up to 100. But I put the woobification article out, and then at the end of the month, end of November, I had that article on my site about Goncharov, because I’m like, “This isn’t racist, but I wanna talk about how fandom is, like, really fixated on white men to the point where they imagine white men.” And people went, like, the people harassing me were like—they basically go through any lengths they can to make it clear that nobody should hire me, nobody should work with me.
You know, they don’t care, like, explicitly do not care that, like, every time they’ve gone after me until, like—if they go after me now, it would be a little different, but I was the sole person taking care of my family, my dad was sick. When my dad died, at no point did they have any empathy for me. You know, even the idea, like, because I haven’t posted for Teen Vogue in a while, they’re like, “Oh my God, I hope that means Stitch is fired.” And it’s like, “What the fuck is wrong with you people?” [laughs]
ELM: Yeah. Yeah. I’m very sorry to hear about your dad, so…
S: Thanks. He was very, very old. [laughs]
ELM: Still.
S: Yeah.
ELM: I guess one of the things that I’m asking about Teen Vogue in terms of them backing you up, is, one of the things that really strikes me about fandom right now is they don’t understand that there are now a lot of people from fandom working in the media in a way that was not true 10 years ago. And there seems to be a disconnect, it just seems very childish, the way, often, they talk about how, they’re like, “I’m gonna write a letter to Anna Wintour,” I guess. I didn’t realize it was going all the way up to [S laughs] adult Vogue. Right? Did they write to Vogue Italia, like… “Buongiorno.”
When I saw some of that go down and then the editor in chief of Teen Vogue just had to come in and be like, “We’re adults. This is someone we hired. This is someone we stand by.” Like, I’m wondering how that feels to you, because I’ve never been a staff writer anywhere, and I know, as I’m sure you know, having—coming from, like, self-publishing, what a difference institutional support can make. And I’m wondering how… Does that bolster you? Or does that not make a massive difference to your work?
S: It felt really good to have backup, because one of the biggest problems I’ve had across all this is that people don’t stand up for me. Like, at any level, people are unwilling to say, “Shut the fuck up. What are you talking about?” They’re unwilling to go, “That’s not true.” Or go, “Hey, you’re saying this. I want to see proof. Give it to me right now, or shut the hell up.” Because they’re very focused on, like, not being wrong, because they would rather ruin my life and spread rumors than do, like, two seconds of fact-checking.
And so I’ve had it, like—I don’t get a lot of support from other people, period. Not fans, not journalists. People just don’t want to support. And I’ve had people go, “It’s because you’re mean!” And it’s like, I am not a mean person on the internet. I have not done anything to deserve any of this treatment, except for going, “Hey, this shit is racist.” And the fact that I say shit, I say fuck, I say damn, and I’m not gonna hold your hands to finding out that racism is bad, people decided that means they get to accuse me of, like, harming children. Literally, people have accused me of harming children. You know, they’ve accused me of suicide-baiting people that I’ve never spoken to. They’ve accused me of doxxing people. And it’s like, “I don’t know any of you people. I’ve never talked to any of you people.”
And the fact is that in fandom, and in entertainment, you know—in fandom it’s more like, “I don’t want to be next. If somebody’s saying this, Stitch must clearly be a missing stair, or they must have missed something.” And entertainment journalism and in fandom studies, it’s like, “Oh, this seems really childish. I don’t have time to deal with it.” And it’s like, I’m forced to deal with this. You know? People are actively trying to destroy my life and my career. And they don’t care.
Like, when people were going after me—I think I was at my dad’s funeral, and, like, yes of course I was on my phone. I was disassociating. And, you know, people were just going in on me, and my friends were like, “Can y’all just calm down? Give Stitch at least, like, a month. God! You guys, her dad just died. They’re going through it.” And they were basically like, “We don’t care. They should mind their business. They shouldn’t talk about villains.” And it’s like, first of all, I’m gonna talk about whatever the hell I want to. You’re not gonna stop me. Teen Vogue could fire me right now, and I would still do exactly what I’m doing, but probably, I would put a lot more information into my posts, because then I could. You know, like, I have to fact-check.
And, you know, having Teen Vogue staff have my back, on multiple levels—like, when my dad died, they were really supportive and really helpful at every level about that. But then, you know, having them say, like, “She’s one of ours, you need to leave them alone. Their writing is good.” That’s the whole thing. I hadn’t had that before, and it’s really great to have that experience. But it also shouldn’t happen. Like, I’m not saying anything wrong. I’m not saying anything harmful. I shouldn’t have to have my editor’s editor’s editors show up to talk down racist fans and fandom.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: Yeah, you know, it seems to me like there’s just a real mismatch [laughs] in the level of vitriol that’s happening, because, look, I mean, I’ll admit, I’ve written some Reylo, and there have been moments where I was like, “I’m gonna put Stitch on mute for a little while, because I don’t need to feel frustrated with this conversation.”
ELM: [laughs] Wow!
FK: I have—you came off—no, genuinely, because I was just like, “Look, I see what Stitch is saying, and I agree, but I don’t need to, you know, be getting upset about this or that, because it’s not actually about me.” Right? And it’s one thing to be like, “Oh, like, my feelings are a little bit hurt, because I have feelings in here,” and it’s another thing to try and get someone fired—
ELM: Mmm hmmm.
FK: —or to try to get someone arrested, or to send the cops to their place. These things are not the same, right? There are real-world implications that people are bringing into your life, and that is not the same thing as having a spicy opinion on the internet that is not bringing [laughs] into somebody’s lives, right?
S: Right.
FK: One of these things, you can choose to disengage, and the other one you can never choose to disengage.
S: Right. I’ve actually talked about this privately, but I couldn’t update my voter’s registration because it is public in my state.
FK: Wow.
ELM: Hmm.
S: If you have my birth date, you have me, and it’s something that, there are people who have made it clear that if they are able to be in any level of proximity to me, they will hurt me. And these are not dude-bros. I know people have had problems with, like, The Fandom Menace and Comicsgate and shit. But the people who’ve made me actually fear that shit’s gonna go down if I go to a conference or a convention or, like, I went to L.A. for a week, or I just went to New York. I couldn’t tell anybody where I was at until I left, because I did not know if somebody was gonna show up at my hotel.
And it’s something I have to worry about, because these people have made it clear, like, they hate me at a level that I had previously only seen happen to people during Comicsgate or Gamergate. And right now, the only people I really see get hit with this level of, like, violent, vicious hate are people like Gita Jackson, or Ashley Reese. Nobody else in our shared field are attacked like this, and it’s almost always people who frame their violence as necessary retaliation for violence done to them, you know? It’s like, “I wouldn’t have to do this if Stitch didn’t keep talking about Reylo.” And it’s like—
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Mmm hmmm.
S: “But I’m not talking about Reylo like you think I am.” You know, like—
FK: Yeah.
ELM: —if I talk about, like, because I have an article I want to write for my website about, like, that whole “save the actor from the awful social media” about Ben Barnes—
ELM: Mmm hmmm.
S: —and I’m gonna write that, and people are gonna accuse me of being anti-Darklina, and it’s like, I don’t have any of those opinions. I’m not actually anti-Reylo the ship. I do not like how the shippers act. And I’ve said this repeatedly.
FK: Yeah. I’m really sorry, Stitch. You don’t deserve any of that. I mean, you know, like, people can be mad about your opinions, but none of that ever should—you should not be dealing with this kind of fear, at all. Nobody should be.
S: It sucks, because I’ve had people accuse me of being the Gamergater in the room. And it’s like, “But you’re the one trying to get me fired. You’re the one—you’re the reason why I can’t post my nieces’ faces on my social media,” you know? “You’re why I don’t have location turned on on anything.” It’s not the dude-bros. It’s not cishet bigots. It’s queer people, other people of color, it’s women in fandom who think that me going, “Hey, you know, I think fandom has a problem because of how it focuses so much on white guys, at the direct expense of other people.” Like, you hear me say that and you go, “Stitch is calling me racist and needs to be beaten for that.” And people across fandom go, “You know, you’re right. Stitch should not be mean to you.”
You know, like, I’ve had people call me slurs—like, a lot of different slurs. I’ve had people send my friends really abusive CuriousCat messages about me, like, not even true. There’s a whole thing where people accused me of liking RPF of underage celebrities, and it’s like, I didn’t even listen to that music. Idols don’t exist to me until they are adults, because otherwise they are babies. And people don’t fact-check or anything. It is frustrating, because I don’t see what’s happening to me happening to non-Black people who are doing this stuff. Like, unless they write a bad music review—“bad” in air-quotes—music review—
ELM: Mmm hmmm.
S: —they don’t get the same shit. I can’t build new friendships in fandom. I am wary of reaching out to people, because I don’t know who’s going to try to be friends with me just so they can feed, you know, my tweets or my posts back to somebody who hates me—a thing that has happened. You know, people follow me from behind their private accounts and repost on other accounts.
And it’s like, every single person that does this says passionately that they are against—not racism. They’re against harassment in fandom, that they really care a lot about making sure fandom is safe, except for me, I guess. I get to be unsafe in fandom because I say that racism in fandom is bad, and it’s present, and it’s hurting real people at every level, because you think John Boyega didn’t see shippers calling him a rapist and abuser?
We are all people on the internet, but some of us aren’t being extended humanity, and in fandom I’m a really good example of that. People get validated in dehumanizing me and acting like they get to, because I hurt their feelings with a post that wasn’t about them, that they didn’t have to read, and that they didn’t even read properly, [ELM & FK laugh] because everybody got really pissed about the woobification article, and it was like, “I think we should let our villains be villains.” Like, I’m sorry, I don’t care. I don’t want a coffee shop Kylux AU, you know? I want them doing crimes! [ELM & FK laugh] You know? Maybe not war crimes, because I’m a little sensitive, but some crimes, you know? I’m watching—
ELM: [laughing] Lower-level crimes.
S: Yeah! Mid—like, serial killer? That’s fine. [FK laughs]
ELM: OK, murders are fine, but not, like, mass genocide.
S: Right! Exactly.
ELM: Yeah. All right.
FK: OK, wow. This is going a way.
ELM: All right.
FK: This is going a direction. [laughs]
ELM: OK, well, so it’s been a very serious topic, and I have a serious question to end on. Sorry to not bring us up at the end here. But, you know, listening to all of this, I think that no one would blame you if you were like, “Fuck all this. I’m done.” And I mean, on a fandom level, and also on a professional level. Like, obviously you have another job, which we are not going to ask you anything about, but I don’t know. I assume that thoughts of walking away cross your mind, and I’m wondering how you think about that, and how you’re thinking about that going forward.
S: So if you look on my website, I haven’t really updated it since…in a while. [laughs] I’ll, every Wednesday, do Webtoon Wednesday and, like, slowly I’ve put out some kinds of content. But it’s like, it feels incredibly unrewarding, and I don’t mean I want money from fandom or whatever, but that I do a lot of research. I do a lot of writing. And I work really hard to actually soften my edges. Like, Meems, my little niece, when I was like, “Yeah, people in fandom really think I’m mean,” they’re like, “How? They don’t have to deal with you when you just woke up.” And I was like, “That is correct.” [ELM laughs]
You know? I am not the nicest human being, but that’s not something that anybody in fandom ever actually experiences, because I used to be—like, ages ago, I used to be a teacher. I know how to educate people. I know how to talk to people. Having to exist in a space where everything I say is purposely misconstrued by people who have no business even looking at my stuff. Like, you know you’re a racist. You don’t need to read my work on not being racist.
It is something where I’m like, if I can get a better job, if I can get a book deal doing fiction or something, I would probably further pull back. I can’t use social media the same way I could even three years ago. I have my Twitter accounts privately locked. I stopped using my account in 2012, because of how many people were, like, using it to harass me. There’s a point where I am just going to stop. I’m going to divest entirely.
I’ve started writing fanfiction again, so I probably won’t leave fandom. My fandom’s gonna be, like, six people watching Trigun Stampede and thirsting over the old guy, [ELM laughs] you know? Not interacting with the fandom, even though that too is a fandom where I’ve seen wildly racist shit. I’m just gonna have to, like, [sighs] duck my head and disengage, because people are so vicious about all of this stuff, that there’s no point, you know, in talking about it. And, like, I don’t think I’ll ever delete my account, like, my blog. I’m not gonna delete that, but there will probably come a time where I just stop updating it, where I stop talking about this stuff publicly, because people, they don’t care.
You know, there are people who will listen to this podcast and they’ll be like, “Stitch is playing victim! This is because they’re mad that a Reylo dumped them in 2015!” A thing that didn’t happen, it’s just an example. [FK & ELM laugh] You know, like, there are people who will hear, you know, in detail that people are dangerous to me on purpose. There are white supremacists in fandom who get away with it, because they’re, like, pretending somehow that they’re better at anti-racism than me, that they’re calling me out on behalf of, like, whatever villain stans are currently upset with me for no reason. And they get away with overt white supremacy in fandom, because they’re pro-fandom, nominally, and it’s like, I don’t want to wait around until I start doing offline events and someone decides, you know, to defend fandom they have to, like, shank me in the line at Comic-Con. People are scarily violent about it. I’ve had people suicide-bait me—I guess, that’s a terrible word, I’ve had people say I should kill myself. You know, I’ve had people wish harm on me. And it’s like, well, if anything happened to me, it’s not like you’d care. It’s not like you would go, “Oh, that sucks. They should have left Reylos alone.” There’s no point at which people will go, “Shit, I really fucked up in supporting this. I’ve made fandom such a bad place.”
Because to them, what matters is that I would no longer be around ruining fandom for them. Forget that fans of color deserve space to be fans of color, and that means positively and negatively talking about race. Forget that we have been in fandom as long as everybody else has. Talking about racism is the real problem in fandom, and anybody who ruins fandom by bringing that to attention deserves whatever they get, you know? People are not going to listen. They’re not going to learn.
I think that if, when I started this, people had been more aggressive in—or aggressive at all in defending me and defending my work, instead of writing it off as somebody else’s problem, or complaining about my tone, maybe things would be different. But we’re seeing just really racist radicalization in all of the different social spaces and political spaces. Like, why would queer transformative fandom be any different?
I don’t know where I’ll be next year, but probably not doing fandom like this. Hopefully I could be, like, a different kind of journalist or have a book deal somewhere, but this is not sustainable, and it’s not sustainable because people don’t want it to be. They do not want any introspection about what fandom is actually like for fans of color, and they do not care that their friends and their followers and their mutuals are people actually spreading white supremacy across fandom and calling it pro-fandom and pro-fiction.
ELM: I will say, as a fellow journalist, it would be a real shame if you weren’t publishing anymore, because I will say, you know, I don’t know if you [laughs] subscribe to my newsletter, which sounds very self-centered—
S: I do! [FK laughs]
ELM: But we include you a fair bit, because you write fantastic stuff, and I will say, you know, earlier you cited Gita Jackson and Ashley Reese, who are also Black people, I think that it should be Black journalists talking about some of this stuff, right? And centering—like, I can write these stories and center my white self, you know what I mean? We need your voices, and the fact that people are trying to run you out of not just fandom but that professional space is, like, it’s a fucking shame. I’m really sorry. And I’m sorry to all of us, because you deserve that platform.
S: Thanks! [laughs]
ELM: [laughs] Sorry.
FK: Well, and we need it too, right? I mean, there is in the space of discourse, right, there need to be people who are saying the hard stuff, who are pushing it in that direction. Those voices are necessary. And if those voices get taken out of the mix, then you’re left with kind of nothingness, you know? [laughs]
S: Yeah. That is the goal.
FK: It’s pretty mealy-mouthed, when you take away the people pushing it. Yeah.
ELM: Yeah.
S: The goal is to make it unsafe and bad to talk about racism in fandom. I’m not the only person that people have tried to get fired. And I’ve watched my one, like, stalker—I have a whole stalker—try to figure out how to get Dr. Rukmini Pande fired.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Wow.
S: And this is being plotted publicly. This isn’t, like, somebody leaked a Discord or a DM. These are on public Twitter accounts. People are like, “If we email Teen Vogue with these screenshots,” you know? “If we email this university and say this…” The goal is to ruin people’s lives for caring about racism in fandom, and somehow fandom at large doesn’t see the problem there, you know?
ELM: Yeah.
S: It’s more important that we all hold hands and like whatever white dude slash ship is really popular than it is to acknowledge the fact that fandom has a problem, and it’s been a problem. It’s like, whenever people are like, “Well, you know, do you think fandom is gonna get better?” No. How could it? There’s no benefit in being anti-racist in queer, feminist fandom.
And it’s just so frustrating because queer fandom is a space where a lot of really good stuff has gone down. But increasingly it is a space where bigots just say the right things and nobody sees what’s happening, because it is easier to just duck their heads and dive into their specific fandom and their, like, group of six people. And it’s like, that’s not fair to any of us. And by the time that fandom, fan studies, fan journalists at large realize where fandom is going, it’s gonna be too late. Sorry, I brought the mood down even more. [laughs]
ELM: No, that’s fine. [laughs]
FK: [laughs] Stitch, thank you so much for coming on. I know that every time you pop your head up, you end up getting some more shit. And we really appreciate you popping your head up to come and talk with us today.
ELM: Mmm hmmm.
S: Thanks for having me! I love talking to y’all. I do. Hopefully people use their knowledge noodles [laughter] and pay attention to the fact that, like, you don’t have to like me, right? Technically, I can be unlikable. Whatever. [ELM & FK laugh] But you do have to—
FK: [laughing] I’m sorry.
ELM: That was beautiful.
FK: If only this were a video podcast, so that people could see the face that you were making. [all laugh] The extremely pained [laughs] acknowledgement face.
S: It’s very difficult for me to admit that. But yes, you know, you don’t have to like me, you don’t have to like my work, but you do have to acknowledge that fandom isn’t an island. It is—
FK: Yeah.
S: —it is a space, and we’re moving in and out of it constantly. Sometimes what we bring in and what we take out, though, are bad things. And this is a space that, for queer and feminist fandom, actively encourages you to engage with your gender, your womanhood, your sexuality. Then one of the things it has never done is encourage you to look at how you interact with people of color and characters of color in any meaningful way. It is enough that you would occasionally like to fuck somebody who’s Black, or you currently ship, you know, Hualian, you love The Untamed, you love BTS. That should not be the limit of your engagement, but fandom says that if you do anything deeper, you are a problem.
You don’t have to like me. Again, I hate saying that. It really pains me. [ELM & FK laugh] But read some bell hooks, read some pop culture commentary, read about why media looks the way it does. Like, the history of cartoons, of animation in the United States is horrific! And, you know, you can see from something like Cuphead that that racist history is still present in the present. So you don’t have to like me, but God, please, read something. Educate yourself. James Baldwin, bell hooks, I don’t even know. Somebody that’s on your speed, on your level, that says things the way you like, but you need to be reading widely to understand that fandom does not exist in isolation, and that we are bringing our baggage, our racism, our bigotry, our everything to fandom, and we are not being asked to unload the really bad stuff.
FK: Amen. Thank you so much for coming on. Really.
ELM: Yeah.
S: Thanks for having me! [laughs]
[Interstitial music]
FK: Well, I’m really glad that Stitch came on to talk with us. I don’t know, like, I knew they were going through a lot of stuff, I don’t know. As I said in, you know, when we were talking with them, I don’t always agree with everything that they say, but they’re, like, [laughs] really getting it on all sides from people in a way that’s just not fair, right? And I really appreciate they were willing to open up and talk about that with us.
ELM: Yeah, absolutely. You know, I know Stitch does talk about it sometimes on social media, but to actually be able to hear that firsthand perspective of it, kind of at length, I think was really illuminating. You know, as I said during the conversation, I am so grateful for their journalism, and I think it’s important to have Black people writing about, you know—Black fans writing about—
FK: Yeah.
ELM: —about the experience of other Black fans, you know? Obviously it’s important for white journalists and for white fans to talk about racism, but I think it’s really important that Black voices are centered in those conversations, particularly about anti-Blackness. So it would be a real shame to lose Stitch’s voice, or any of the other fans of color, in whatever capacity, who are speaking out.
And I don’t blame anyone for not wanting to do it anymore, especially if they feel like their personal safety is at risk. That’s not worth it, you know? No one should be getting death threats for saying that the [laughs] prioritization of these two white guys over this, like—like, fake people, you know? No one should be getting death threats over that, right? So I don’t know. I’m hopeful that Stitch is able to keep doing this work.
FK: Yeah, absolutely. All right, well, I hate to make the conversation take a turn, but we do have one last piece of business to get through, [ELM laughs] which is talking about how we make this podcast.
ELM: Oh, you hate talking about this? Your favorite part of the episode? Business?!
FK: I mean, it just—every time it’s like, do we have to ask people for money? But we do. So [ELM laughs] as you probably know, we fund this podcast through Patreon. patreon.com/Fansplaining. If you can afford to support us, we would really appreciate that. It helps us make these episodes. And there’s lots of rewards you can get ranging from cool online things, like more podcast episodes about additional fun topics to cute enamel pins to occasionally a Tiny Zine, and also having your name in our credits that makes you feel special, as well it should. [ELM laughs] So, you know, consider it!
ELM: Yes, and as we’ve been mentioning in the past couple of episodes, if you’re not interested in becoming a recurring patron, we do now have a one-off donation link. We will make sure to include that in the show notes. That’s via PayPal. You could pledge any amount you want, and we would love to be able to use that money to commission more longform writing. We recently had Maria Temming writing about whump, and hurt/comfort, and we’d love to have more journalists do deep dives like that. So those links will be in the show notes. But…
FK: But, if you don’t have the money or don’t want to give it to us, you can still support us by spreading the word about the podcast, especially our full and complete transcripts that come out at the same time as every episode. And by writing in. You can actually write to us at fansplaining at gmail.com. There’s a form on fansplaining.com. You can go on fansplaining.tumblr.com and use our ask box, or you can send us a voicemail by calling 1-401-526-FANS, and we will use that voicemail on the podcast. Those things really help us, like, come up with new ideas for episodes, and also, like, you know, come up with corrections sometimes when they’re needed [ELM laughs] and it’s just a way to help and support us.
ELM: Man, is this thing keeping you up at night?
FK: A little bit! I hate being wrong.
ELM: [laughs] Yes, and as always, you can find us on social media. Tumblr, Instagram, and yes, still, Twitter dot com.
FK: [laughs] For your sins.
ELM: Elon Musk has not granted us a check against our will.
FK: No. He took away your check, but he didn’t give back any. [laughs]
ELM: I’m glad he took mine away, then I didn’t have to issue a tweet being like, “I didn’t ask for this! I didn’t pay for this! Not interested!”
FK: [laughs] Or change your name so that you get it from—anyway.
ELM: No, I’m not the king of Twitter. I’m not @dril. I don’t have the…I don’t have the…what’s the word? Verve?
FK: Elan? Not Elon. Eh-lahn. [laughs]
ELM: Eh-lahn, yeah. I don’t—you know, I mean, there’s so many ways that I’m not @dril, obviously. But, you know, all hail @dril.
FK: Let me count them. OK, [ELM laughs] I’m gonna talk to you later, Elizabeth.
ELM: OK, bye, Flourish!
FK: Bye!
[Outro music]