Episode 213: The Year in Fandom 2023
As they do every December, Elizabeth and Flourish revisit the previous year’s fandom retrospective, and then turn to the biggest fan culture stories and trends in 2023. Topics discussed include the mainstreaming of purity culture, the fracturing of social media platforms, the shortening of fandom life cycles, and, of course, the big two: the Hollywood strikes and the rise of AI.
Show Notes
[00:00:00] As always, our intro music is “Awel” by stefsax, used under a CC BY 3.0 license.
[00:01:17] If you, too, would like to revisit last year’s list: “The Year in Fandom 2022.”
[00:02:15] Our first episode on fandom & AI, from December 2022, was called “Artificial Fandom Intelligence.” Or second, recorded because SO MUCH HAD HAPPENED in just a short span of time, was “Artificial Intelligence 2: Rise of the Grifters,” from June of this year.
[00:05:56] Elizabeth’s piece on platforms in WIRED: “There’s No Such Thing as a One-Size-Fits-All Web.”
[00:13:17] Who has committed the greatest sin? The coiners of KRANCH, MAYOMUST, or MAYOCHUP? (Probably the same people, actually. They should atone for all three.)
[00:14:24] Excitingly (sarcasm), in the few short days since we recorded this episode, it’s been announced that apparently Warner Bros. Discovery might buy Paramount (which already merged with Showtime earlier this year). 😬😬😬
[00:18:47] Universal had to put out a statement saying they were making more physical copies of Oppenheimer. (That article—from late November—also contains this bananas statement: “Best Buy-exclusive steelbook version of the 4K disc is currently going for between $80 and $200 on eBay.”)
[00:22:40]
[00:24:58] Our interstitial music throughout is “Glass android” by Lee Rosevere, also used under a CC BY 3.0 license.
[00:29:02] The whole survey about young peoples’ media preferences was given to 10-24 year olds, but the romance/sex questions were only given to ages 13-24, as Elizabeth remembered. The survey on a whole is…interesting. MrBeast was apparently ranked by respondents as the “#1 most authentic media,” which……
[00:37:26] We started things off with Episode 195: “Fandom Life Cycles.” We had responses to that conversation in Episode 199: “Reflecting Reality?” And we had responses to THAT (which tied back to the original topic as well) at the beginning of Episode 201: “Artificial Intelligence 2: Rise of the Grifters.”
[00:38:30]
[00:51:33] We first talked about this two weeks into the WGA strike, with our resident strikesplainer Javi Grillo-Marxuach. Shortly after SAG-AFTRA went on strike—just before San Diego Comic-Con—we recorded “Solidarity and SDCC.” And at the end of the summer, we discussed the thorny intersections of fan labor and Hollywood marketing.
[00:00:00] OK, not burning a small forest, but apparently every time you make a single AI image it takes the same amount of energy as charging your phone. And for what!?!?!
We decided not to make a new shitty AI Cherik image…just enjoy actual Cherik:
[00:53:54] Elizabeth first wrote about Silicon Valley’s desire to ~disrupt~ the book industry (and fanfiction) with AI, and later wrote about one of the specific things they’re pitching, Character.AI.
[01:09:46] FYI, Elizabeth is writing a fandom column for Atlas Obscura!! Read her first two pieces: on 18th century sentiment albums (featuring one of our very first podcast guests, Evan Hayles Gledhill!) and on the Yuletide rare fandom exchange.
[01:12:30] A reminder! You can see FLOURISH’S FANART in the newest (festive) Tiny Zine! Pledge $10 a month (or up your current pledge): Patreon.com/Fansplaining.
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 #213, “The Year in Fandom 2023.”
FK: Another one bites the dust.
ELM: [very quietly sings “Auld Lang Syne”] Do do do do, do do do do… [FK laughs]
FK: OK, so, as we always do with these Year in Fandom episodes, we’re going to first talk about the things we said last year, that were like, the most important trends or stories or whatever in fandom, and then we’re gonna talk about the things that we observed this year.
ELM: Yeah, you know what? You say “always,” but do you know what we did last year?
FK: What did we do last year? I don’t remember, obviously.
ELM: [overlapping] I’m the one who actually looked at—like, actually revisited it.
FK: [laughing, overlapping] Yeah, you did.
ELM: [overlapping] I did my homework. Um…last year—
FK: You sent me notes, thank you.
ELM: Yeah, that’s right, yeah. I took notes for the person who didn’t do their homework. [FK laughs] Last year, we just ditched the whole format and we were like, “Let’s start fresh.” [laughs]
FK: Well, but we’re getting the format again this year, because it’s, it’s more relevant.
ELM: It’s a revival.
FK: Sure, there we go. But it’s also, I think last year we felt like so much happened, and the previous ones…I don’t know. And this year it’s like…
ELM: You’re speculating about past you, you haven’t gone back and checked the transcript. [laughs]
FK: [laughs] I haven’t gone back and checked the transcript, and I have no memory, so let’s stop. OK. All right, great. Now that we’ve established that I am a goldfish…
ELM: Yes.
FK: Goin’ by that plastic castle. Last year… So we usually do this in order from like, what we think is the least big story to the biggest story? [laughs] And our first, and therefore I guess least big story, was AI and fandom creativity. Which has aged like milk. [laughs]
ELM: Don’t worry about it. I, I do think that it’s possible—so, we first did an episode on AI, it was the one before that, it was the first episode last December. And…I mean also it is kinda wild to think about how much has changed.
FK: Mmm hmmm.
ELM: You know, with ChatGPT kind of coming into public, it was that October I believe?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And so it’s like, we were really at the precipice, and the fact that we had to do another AI episode in the spring, because so much had changed—
FK: Right. [laughs]
ELM: But we had done one and it was mostly about fanart, and an artist wrote in with a long letter, and so I think that’s why we put that one first, was to read that comment? Now I’m speculating about past us, and our motivations. [FK laughs] But I think that, you know, just saying quickly, this is a wild amount of change in a year, this is obviously gonna be in this year’s trends, so I don’t think we should go too much into AI right now, I think we should put a pin in it.
FK: All right, let’s do that. OK. So, the next one we had was TikTok behaviors seeping into places that are not TikTok. The examples we had were like, censoring words, and deleting content if it doesn’t go viral, and just like, erasing it from history.
ELM: Yeah. Looking at the past year, this battle has been lost. [FK laughs] Like, it’s over. Like—
FK: Yeah! I don’t even know the word “lesbian” anymore, [ELM laughs] I can only say “lesbean.”
ELM: [overlapping] What was that? What word are you saying? I don’t recognize that.
FK: Yeah, les, lesbean. [laughs]
ELM: My favorite is seg—segsual?
FK: [laughs] Yes.
ELM: S-e-g…
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Um…or segsy, like, which I read as seggy, like eggy. [laughs]
FK: [laughing] Right, yes, I also read it that way. Yeah. And I find it really funny also when people say the words, but then when they write the captions, [laughing] they have them censored?
ELM: There must be some reason people are doing this, but I also find that very funny.
FK: I don’t know whether—I mean it may be a real reason, and it also may be just that, like, people think that their video’s gonna get nerfed if they don’t. You know? Like the way that people always used to put disclaimers on their fic, and like, they didn’t do anything, but everybody did it anyway, because like…
ELM: Well, it’s my understanding that the censoring of terms on TikTok is also totally, like, folk legend.
FK: Exactly! [laughs]
ELM: Like there isn’t actually…right, yeah. I also have noticed, I do think that one thing that has changed a lot is an increase—this isn’t really a fandom thing, just an observation of what’s going on in social content creation—content creation!—way, way, way more use of automated, probably AI-generated stuff, and so there’s a lot of errors in people’s captions.
FK: Yeah, yeah.
ELM: And that’s really bummed me out. And I mean it’s fandom-relevant too, because it’s an accessibility thing, and also just a broader usability thing for everyone. Like, there’s a lot of times when you are just watching it sound off, even if you’re able to hear the sound if you turn it on. [FK laughs] And it seems like people have ceded so much to these tools that now there’s like—
FK: Right.
ELM: It’s obviously things that, whatever AI tool they’re using, whether it’s in the platform or not, has gotten wrong, and then they don’t check it, and it’s like…this sucks. This is bad.
FK: [overlapping] Absolutely. Yeah, I also think it’s kind of interesting, this was happening last year too for sure, but…how video is so extensive that now video platforms also have, like, I don’t know how to put it, like stratifications between like…now everybody watches video, right? Years ago, back in the days of Vine…
ELM: Yes.
FK: There were Vines, and old people didn’t watch Vines, they didn’t know what they were, right? And then over time, it still felt, like, you know, Vine closed and TikTok was there, and it was like OK, well, you know, people are on TikTok or there’s nothing. And now it feels to me like there’s [laughing] Facebook reels, which is for your great-grandmother, [ELM laughs] and then Instagram reels, which is for me, because I’m old, and then TikTok, which is where things are actually happening, except I can’t watch it because if I do then I don’t do anything but watch TikTok.
ELM: Oh my goodness…
FK: [laughing] I’ve had to banish it from my phone. [laughs]
ELM: Yeah…it is definitely a…that to me, and I, you know, I wrote an article that was somewhat related to this in the spring for WIRED about like—I don’t know if you ever read it—about like, the one-size-fits-all platform?
FK: Yes.
ELM: Which feels relevant to me here. It’s like, obviously all these platforms chased TikTok, but also there is a chicken-and-egg element. If your great-grandmother, apparently, I didn’t know, I didn’t know she was around and on Facebook…
FK: That is, [laughs] that was perhaps an exaggeration.
ELM: I don’t think my great-grandparents ever touched a computer. Who knows. Maybe—
FK: My, my great-aunt is around and on Facebook, so, she actually probably has watched a Facebook reel. She’s also on Instagram now.
ELM: Great-aunt is the generation of your grandparents, not your great-grandparents.
FK: Yeah, I know. I know.
ELM: FYI.
FK: She is almost 100 years old though.
ELM: OK, all right, I’ll give her credit for being…old.
FK: She is someone’s great-grandma. [both laugh]
ELM: Um…but you know, it feels super chicken-and-egg at that point, it’s like, well, Facebook or Instagram or whatever built in this functionality, and yeah, of course people are gonna make things for it this way, and then people are gonna—you know what I mean?
FK: Right.
ELM: It’s like, did they want that? I don’t know. But it’s there now, and so they’re doing it.
FK: [laughing, overlapping] They have it now!
ELM: It’s getting served to them, so why not? And it feels like video, short-form video, is a, a deeply flawed media form for a lot of the things people are using it for, and its ubiquity…even the same way that writing doesn’t serve a lot of the things people try to use it for on the internet, right?
FK: It’s really true.
ELM: So, I don’t know, I find it kind of a bummer, because…I like things to be the form that they really should be, you know? [FK laughs] And I don’t like this kind of, flattening little, you fill in these boxes, or you make a video just because you feel like you’re supposed to, or, you know, that’s the only thing you have to share.
FK: Yeah, I mean, I know this is happening within fandom contexts also, but like, any form of deep interest, whether that’s a medical condition or a fandom or whatever, you find that thing where someone’s got a TikTok meme, and it’s like a sound that they’re putting stuff to, and then whatever content they want to express, it has to be expressed through that format.
ELM: Mmm hmmm. Mmm hmmm.
FK: And I think that’s the one that annoys me the most, because I think a lot of times if you’re in some sort of a deep interest group, there’s actually a lot more depth to that, that you maybe wanna find out about, and the person making the meme probably knows about, but you can’t get there. [laughs] You know?
ELM: Right, right, and in another world, they would like, have a blog post, right, where they could really talk about it. But because they are a TikToker…
FK: Or have like, or at least have the TikTok connected to something else. [laughing] Where there’s more information, you know?
ELM: [overlapping] Yeah, some multimedia… Yeah yeah yeah, oh yeah, absolutely true, I mean that makes me think of our last video. Our last video! [laughs] Our last podcast!
FK: This is not a video podcast, if somebody heard that and thought that it was a video, it is not.
ELM: Like and subscribe! [laughs]
FK: I am not going to be in a context where you can see a picture of me while I’m recording this podcast. No.
ELM: Smash that subscribe button.
FK: All right. [laughs] Should we talk about the next one?
ELM: Uh, yeah. What was it?
FK: [laughs] It was the Johnny Depp and Amber Heard trial.
ELM: No. It wasn’t actually about that. I could tell you for a fact… [laughs]
FK: [overlapping] And more broadly, it was about brands capitalizing on celebrity feuds, but I think it’s funny, because I haven’t thought about Johnny Depp and Amber Heard in probably 12 months.
ELM: Interesting! I have, because there was a moment a few months ago where people were like, “Oh, I guess Amber Heard might not have been an evil bitch.” [FK laughs] And I mostly heard about this because people would, like, screenshot someone saying it, and then be like, “Told y’all.” And it was like… [laughs] I don’t know why we need to litigate this again. Obviously people were whipped into a misogynistic frenzy by Hamburger Helper or whatever on Instagram, you know? I don’t understand— [laughs] I don’t actually know if Hamburger Helper does that kind of brand work. But like—
FK: That does, I have to say, that sounds exactly like a brand that would try it though. [ELM laughs] You know? I was like, “What brands do this? Oh yeah, the cheesesteaks, yeah, OK. Hamburger Helper.”
ELM: [overlapping] Yeah. Yeah, and they’d be arguing with like, Cheez Whiz in the, in the replies and stuff like that.
FK: Yeah, yeah.
ELM: No, part of the reason I think we included this is because, yeah, it was a huge intersection—like, a huge story last year in terms of the intersection of like, brands capitalizing on fannish sentiment.
FK: And behold! That’s continued! [laughs]
ELM: Yeah, but I think it feels a lot different this year.
FK: [overlapping] Oh, it does.
ELM: [overlapping] Like, one of the things that we brought up last year too was the thing that had been more recent, which was the Chris Pine, [laughs] Harry Styles, Florence Pugh, Olivia Wilde debacle with the spitting and all that, you know. And I remember there was like, some, some state governmental agency, I think it was in Colorado, had tweeted something about, like, Florence Pugh’s villain era or whatever, and I was like, “Why are you doing this? Get out of here, I don’t understand.”
FK: I do feel like probably—I don’t know whether this has actually changed overall this year, I just think that the Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce thing is all I can think about with this, and it’s so comparatively nice. [laughs]
ELM: That’s because Travis Kelce is the only thing you can think about, that’s why.
FK: I cannot believe—[both laugh] I got myself into this, but can I just say, for the record, I do not actually find him to be an attractive man. [laughs] I need that on the record.
ELM: Are you saying that I should return my Christmas gift for you? Travis Kelce standee?
FK: Yes. [laughs] It is going directly in the recycling if that is what you have gotten me, Elizabeth. [both laugh]
ELM: Can you imagine?
FK: It would be a gag gift that I hope you enjoy for like, the, you know, ten minutes that I will own it. [ELM still laughing] The Harry Styles standee I owned for a long time; Travis Kelce, no.
ELM: What did you, did you get rid of Harry?
FK: I did eventually get rid of Harry.
ELM: Was it because he spit on Chris Pine? [both laugh]
FK: [laughing] No. It was because Nick eventually got tired [ELM laughs] of having a Harry Styles standee in his house, which I have to say, was fair.
ELM: Yeah, I think that’s something that you gotta do a pact, five years of this, and then…it’s gone now. [laughs]
FK: [laughs] That is…a reasonable, like, there’s some things where I’m like, “Maybe you need to accommodate me,” but when you live in under 1,000 square feet…
ELM: It’s true, it’s true, if you lived in the suburbs you might have a room, like an office…
FK: Oh, that would be, yeah. If I had like, a…I don’t know, a they-cave. [both laugh] Then it could…you know?
ELM: I’m sorry, is that a term you just made up for some reason? [laughs]
FK: Yeah! Because I couldn’t think of—it’s like, man-cave, she-shed…
ELM: [overlapping] First of all, man-cave, they already have cave claimed. So you’re gonna have to think of a different word.
FK: [overlapping] Yeah, I can’t use that.-
ELM: Den is kinda boring…is there a word that’s like, more goblin-like for cave?
FK: Hovel? [both laugh] All right. All right. All right.
ELM: I wanna also somewhat put a pin in this one, because, spoiler, one of our topics for this year is about the kind of fracturing of social media. And I actually do think that that has had an effect. I mean, I think the Travis Kelce/Taylor Swift thing, you’re right, was a real monoculture sort of…I mean, you say this, but I didn’t see—I only learned after we recorded that episode, the Seemingly Ranch thing that was not made clear to me in our conversation, they have a product. Heinz has a product called Seemingly Ranch.
FK: Yes! Well, yeah. I mean, it’s, I think it, the product existed before that. They renamed it.
ELM: They renamed it in honor of a mix of ketchup and ranch.
FK: Yeah. It was called, it was called “Kranch” before, I think.
ELM: That is—God, everyone involved in that name should be fired. That, that’s absurd.
FK: Well, it does explain what it is. [ELM laughs] Yeah, they have a bunch, they have a bunch of products that are like, mix of this and that, you know?
ELM: Yeah, that, that tracks.
FK: And so yeah. They renamed it though, so yes. They did do that.
ELM: Yeah, I do think that is a thing. But I feel, like, we’re gonna talk about this sort of, yeah, the dispersiveness of social, and I do think that has had a big effect on brands. So we should make sure to talk about that brand element.
FK: Sure.
ELM: And its connection back to fandom. When we get there. In the future of this episode.
FK: All right. All right. The next one, which was the next to last one last year, was the, uh…HBO Max debacle. That is…
ELM: Yeah.
FK: Canceling a bunch of shows, pulling a bunch of shows, and then creating Max. Which…
ELM: Well, they had announced they were gonna create Max, that finally went into effect this spring.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Yeah, basically they were telling us what they were gonna do this year, and everyone was like, “That’s bad!” And then this year they did it, and everyone was like, “That’s really bad!” [laughs]
FK: Yeah! It was bad! Although I think, I think that this one does sort of continue in the sense of…I mean, you’ve seen that like, Showtime and Paramount are merging, sort of? And then those might merge with some other service, I guess? Like, it seems like there’s a lot of streamer shuffling that’s still going on.
ELM: Yeah, I mean, I’m not sure if it was the…I feel like Showtime and Paramount is a less—like, the Max stuff bums me out so much, because they really just were like, it was just such a big fuck you to HBO as a brand, you know? It was like…
FK: Yeah, well, and, yeah. Yeah. And Showtime, neither Showtime nor Paramount, like Paramount is trying to make it happen, and it’s not gonna happen, and Showtime is—
ELM: Putting Patrick Steward on like a fake snowy mountain, and being like, “Go ahead!”
FK: Yeah, I mean, I don’t know, whatever, I do subscribe to Paramount+ and always will, so I guess I am their target market. But!
ELM: Of course you are. A person who watches Star Trek constantly.
FK: Yeah, that’s right.
ELM: A person who texted me last weekend and said that they were home and could receive something that I was gonna drop off, and then didn’t answer the door…
FK: My doorbell was broken! It still is broken.
ELM: [overlapping] And then texted later that they were watching Star Trek.
FK: My doorbell was broken. [ELM laughs] It’s still broken by the way, don’t get a new doorbell, they suck.
ELM: [overlapping] Yeah, but I was like, “Oh, maybe Flourish fell asleep,” no.
FK: No, it was— [both laugh] Are you kidding? No, of course I didn’t fall asleep, I was watching Star Trek in Spanish! [ELM laughs] Dubbed in Spanish, which is hilarious, because it’s Castillian and so they're lisping all over the place. Anyway.
ELM: [laughing] OK.
FK: Point being, though, you’re right that the Max thing was much bigger, but I do think that there is overall a shakeup happening within streamers that continues, and that maybe is going to continue.
ELM: Yeah, I mean—
FK: I feel like the market’s just flooded, and they’re trying to figure out what to do.
ELM: Right, this is kinda the contraction, the course correction of like, “Oh, we don’t need this many.”
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Yeah, and I think too that, you know, they were, Warner Bros. Discovery was the first one that was deleting content. Straight up, right? Like Westworld, right?
FK: Right.
ELM: Whereas now they’re not the only ones, right?
FK: No, they’re all doing it!
ELM: Yeah.
FK: But then it also leads to weird stuff, like Paramount+ memory-holed Star Trek: Prodigy, and Netflix picked it up! And so now it’s on Netflix? I don’t know what the deal is.
ELM: Yeah, and I think, I mean this is all obviously affecting fandom, you can see the direct ways. But one of them, too, is like, I think creating this air of like, paranoia?
FK: Oh, yeah.
ELM: So the other day, Watchmen disappeared from Max.
FK: Ahh!!
ELM: And so for like, half an hour, my feed was full of like, “Of course! Of course!” You know? “Oh my God, this is such a travesty.” And then the next post that went up from some news outlet was like, “Oh, it was a technical glitch. It’s there.” You know? [laughs] And it’s like, OK. It did surprise me that they would take that one off, but it was also like, you can see how agitated audiences are by this, because yeah, it feels, it feels like they hate the consumer. You know?
FK: It’s also—yeah, it feels also like it’s a rolling back, right? Because when, when we first were in fandom, stuff aired on TV and maybe you were able to buy like, some best of episodes on VCR, but otherwise you had to save it. You had to tape it yourself if you wanted it. Right?
ELM: You’re talkin’ to someone who did a lot of taping in the 90s.
FK: Oh no, I mean, me too, let me tell you, I know.
ELM: And made my own labels, too.
FK: [laughs] I just, it was actually my neighbor who was taping it, and so she always had like, she had to label them and sometimes they were wrong, and so you’d put it in and find out what X-Files episode it was. But anyway. So that was an era in which we were used to that kind of like, “I might never be able to see this again.”
ELM: Right.
FK: You know, whatever. And then we entered the glorious era of things on physical media. [laughs] Where you could buy the DVD set, and have it all, right?
ELM: Buy the deluxe edition too, right? There was like, actual, they built into the system a kind of way to capitalize on fans that everyone liked, right? Because it was like, “Of course I would like to buy the deluxe edition with the beautiful case, and the extra extra scenes, and the extra cut and all of that.” And they got more money.
FK: Yeah, I, I still have editions of certain things where I’m like, this is obviously the best one because it has the best commentary.
ELM: Yeah! Right?
FK: I will tell you, like, I will tell you which Matrix edition to have because I need this particular commentary.
ELM: I’m just saying, it was a capitalism win/win, right, you know?
FK: Right.
ELM: I want more, they want more money.
FK: Right. But now you can’t guarantee that these things are coming out on physical media, and then they get deleted from streaming, and you’re like, what, is it just gone now? [laughs]
ELM: Yeah. And then also I don’t understand that, maybe you know more about the economics of this, I saw a headline that the Oppenheimer Blu-ray was sold out at like, all the big stores in the U.S., and it’s just like, why did you not anticipate that people would wanna own this?
FK: Right, particularly for a film that is like, a film that…
ELM: A Christopher Nolan film. Obviously people are, people who like buying [laughs] Blu-rays, are Christopher Nolan people.
FK: [overlapping] Yeah, that movie, movie people… [laughs] Exactly. Right, like, literally, literally, yeah. As the owner of a 4K DVD player, [laughs] I can report to you that I am the target market.
ELM: Right!
FK: And obviously…
ELM: Now that you know how to turn off motion smoothing, exactly.
FK: [laughs] Don’t get me started on that one.
ELM: Don’t get me started.
FK: Um…I don’t know. I mean, obviously there are a lot of people who just get stuff on streaming and don’t really care about these things, who previously were buying more physical media, because you know, whatever, I don’t really care, but I do whatever, I’ll get this so that I can watch it.
ELM: Yeah, or like, it’s on, it’s on the sale table at Borders and I liked it and I would watch it again, and I don’t wanna pay at Blockbuster or whatever right? Or like—
FK: Right, and now a lot of people, particularly with smart TVs, if you don’t have a video game system—which a lot of people don’t—then you maybe don’t have a way to play physical media, right? Like, you’ve got your smart TV, you stream things on it, maybe you don’t care if you have a DVD player or a Blu-ray player, right?
ELM: Right.
FK: And that’s—again, it’s built into video game systems, most of them, but even those are switching over to streaming, primarily.
ELM: Yeah, yeah.
FK: So, I mean I do think that there’s an economy of scale issue here, to some extent, but they’ve gotta sort it out, because…
ELM: I just, me saying earlier, deluxe editions in the 2000s were a capitalism win/win, it seems stupid that they are literally leaving money on the table by allowing something like a Christopher Nolan film to sell out.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Like, you should’ve made more of those. [FK laughs]
FK: Yes.
ELM: Because people would like to buy them, and you’re just shooting yourself—you’re over here complaining you don’t have money to pay these actors and these writers, here’s a way to make more money. Sell Oppenheimer Blu-rays to Christopher Nolan fans. Of which there are many who own a way to play it.
FK: Yeah. I mean I’m also, I don’t know enough about this anymore, but I’m also interested to see how that…how the way that studios are marketing these things has changed, because home video release used to be such a big deal.
ELM: Yeah, yeah.
FK: And there still is a period, at least when I was working in this, which was now several years ago and so I don’t want to speak to it, but there was, you know, there was still a home video and home release sort of team for each film, who would be focused on that, and my understanding was that they have been shifting more and more to like, foreign markets, and streaming, and so forth. But I wonder whether some of those changes have not resulted in, like, worse outcomes, because they’re now, the teams now are trying to juggle a bunch of different kinds of release.
ELM: I mean, I honestly feel like—and I know, we’ll talk about the strikes, obviously, and I know it’s been a chaotic year for Hollywood—but like, I don’t even know when things are coming out. Right?
FK: Me neither!
ELM: And I think, we’re probably at a disadvantage too because like, you know, I know a lot of journalists who cover things, so there are movies that I thought were out months ago, that in fact people just saw at film festivals and tweeted about, right?
FK: Right.
ELM: And then they’re in theaters now, and I’m like, like All of Us Strangers, the one with Andrew Scott, I thought that came out months ago, and I missed it. No. It’s coming out now.
FK: Yeah!
ELM: Whereas I just saw Passages, the one with Ben Whishaw, in theaters two days ago. That did come out months ago, but it’s back because it’s an Oscar contender. And so now I’m like, trapped in chaos here, and I’m like…
FK: Right! What? Yeah.
ELM: I don’t know when these things come out, I just happen to, you know, like…if there’s something you really care about, like I really cared about May December, new Todd Haynes, new Todd Haynes. I looked at when it was out, it was in theaters for like four seconds, and I was like, “We gotta go.” Right? I’m a Todd Haynes stan.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: But for anything that I cared a little bit less about? They give you one week to see it in theaters, and… [laughs]
FK: Yeah, the only way that I will ever know is if I happen to open the Alamo Drafthouse marketing email that week.
ELM: Yeah. Yeah. That is actually quite helpful to know what’s going on.
FK: It is helpful, but I also only open it if I think I might have the, like, spare evening to see a movie.
ELM: Right. And then—
FK: Whereas if I already knew about the movie, then I might be willing to rearrange my schedule. [laughs]
ELM: Right, and what happens if you live in, um…obviously if you live in a rural place, you know, those kinds of…more independent movies will probably never be available to you in theaters, but like…you know, we used to drive 45 minutes to Albany to the independent cinema to see, you know, like, a Todd Haynes movie, [laughs] in the year 2000 or whatever. You know? And if these movies are just kind of flitting through and we’re struggling to even figure out when they’re out, where we can see them, and we live in New York City…
FK: New York City. [laughs]
ELM: I just, it’s, it’s chaos, you know? And then it’s like, it’s so fragmented too, because like, I wanted to talk about May December with people, and then it had to come out on Netflix for then there to be any sort of conversation about it, and then the conversation got immediately so tiring, and now people are talking—you know what I mean? So it’s like, it’s a bad scene that we’ve wound up in.
FK: It is. [both laugh] All right, so, should we go on, last year’s biggest story?
ELM: What was it?
FK: The collapse of Twitter.
ELM: Oh. X dot com.
FK: Which, I mean…we’re gonna be talking about again this year. [laughs]
ELM: God, I’m so tired of talking about Twitter. But…
FK: I know.
ELM: I got an email, I got an email newsletter this morning, and the author literally wrote, “I’m very tired of talking about the collapse of Twitter, but yet I have to keep reporting on the collapse of Twitter.”
FK: Oh man. Well…
ELM: Yeah I don’t want to talk about it right now. There’s nothing to say about it.
FK: [overlapping] Yeah, we’re gonna, we’re gonna leave that.
ELM: Put a pin in that. [laughs] Giant.
FK: Yeah. We’ll leave that.
ELM: Put a sword in it.
FK: Maybe we should take a little break, and then we should talk about this year’s topics.
ELM: Um…yeah. I think that it’ll be more…more. Like last year but more, is what I’d say about the ol’ 2023.
FK: I think that this was why we changed our format, because we felt like we were always just saying “last year but more.”
ELM: Things kept happening? Whatever, we’re re-embracing this, let’s say new and daring things in the second half.
FK: We’ll try.
ELM: Cool. All right. See ya in a sec. [laughs]
[Interstitial music]
FK: OK, we’re back! And we should talk about, you know, how we make this podcast through the support of listeners and readers like you. Which mostly comes through Patreon! Patreon.com/Fansplaining.
ELM: There are many levels on Patreon, as little as $1 a month, as much as a hundred…million…thousand dollars a month. Realistically, the top tier people pay at is $10/month, and right now if you pledge or up your pledge to $10/month, and you will receive, sometime after Christmas, but maybe before New Year’s? I don’t know how the mail’s gonna go on that. A very charming—and seasonally festive—Tiny Zine.
FK: [laughs] You also get access, with $10 a month but also with the lower pledge rates, you can get access to all of our special episodes, of which there are many. You can potentially, at $5 a month you get a cool little Fansplaining pin, you can get your name in the credits…yeah! I mean, who would not want to support us on Patreon, is the real question.
ELM: That’s…that is the real question. Yeah, want versus can, we get it. We get it.
FK: So, OK. If you don’t want to, we don’t understand it but we respect your choices. If you can’t, we also definitely understand that. And you can still help us out by spreading the word about the podcast, spreading the word about our full transcripts, which come out for every episode, and also writing in, giving us comments, giving us thoughts, giving us episode ideas. This is how we actually make a lot of the podcast. We cannot know everything about fandom between the two of us, and so getting other people’s perspectives is incredibly important.
And you can do that by emailing us, fansplaining at gmail.com; by putting something in our Tumblr ask box, we’re Fansplaining over there; by using our website, there’s a form, that’s Fansplaining.com; or by calling us at 1-401-526-FANS, and leaving a voicemail. We will not pick up, you don’t have to have a social interaction, but then your voice can be on the podcast!
ELM: There’s a second way your voice can be on the podcast, you can record an audio file and send it. I do know—we just had a voicemail leaver, and they ended their voicemail by saying “Nevermind, delete this.” [laughs] And so, we will not play it.
FK: We did! [laughs]
ELM: We obviously are not gonna play that on the air. But like, I know, some people…it’s a lot of pressure to leave a voicemail on the spot. So if you would rather like, write down your question or do multiple takes, we just ask that you keep it under three minutes, and you could do as many takes as you want, but send over a WAV or an MP3 or whatever, and we will play it just as we would play a traditional phone-delivered voicemail.
FK: All right. Is there anything else we should cover before we get onto this year’s topics?
ELM: Obviously just that we’re still on, uh, Tumblr, Bluesky, Instagram…last and least, X.com.
FK: [laughs] OK. All right. This year’s topics, Elizabeth, are you ready?
ELM: I’m ready, because I wrote them. Yes. [laughs]
FK: [laughs] Sure. But, uh…
ELM: Tell me, tell me what I wrote. Tell me what I wrote.
FK: All right, well, you know, you wrote them with my consent, I guess? [laughs]
ELM: Yeah! Oh yeah, yeah yeah.
FK: Yeah. Full consent. OK. Number five is the mainstreaming of purity culture.
ELM: Yeah, I did write that. Well…
FK: I mean…
ELM: Yeah.
FK: What can we say, we’ve been talking about purity culture for a really long time, but like, yeah. It’s everywhere, and the normies have noticed.
ELM: Yeah, I would say that there have been some…you know, like film critics or whatever, you know, in the last few years, have been like, “These kids have some opinions about sex scenes,” or whatever, right? And this is the year that it was just like, oh my God, you know? There was a…and whatever, I’m not saying that like, people who don’t want to see a sex scene are a part of purity culture, but I do think there is a Venn diagram here, and there’s an overlapping, right?
And…you know, there was a big study that came out that was surveying—I was a little confused about the broadness of this though—something like, 13 year olds to 24 year olds or something, which is a huge range.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And I do think the people at the bottom of that are gonna have different feelings about sex than the people at the top of that.
FK: [laughs] Yes.
ELM: In fact that, that’s very normal and natural, for a 13-year-old to not be vocally…horny during a survey, you know what I mean? [laughs]
FK: [overlapping] Yes. Yes. Yeah! They may be interested, but are they gonna tell you? No. [laughs]
ELM: And they may not be interested at all, you know, a totally, some, definitely some kids are and some kids aren’t, it depends on puberty or whatever.
FK: Yeah yeah yeah.
ELM: And it said, you know, that this majority of that cohort didn’t wanna see any sex screens on scene. [Transcriber’s note: no, that’s not flipped, that’s in the audio!] [Podcaster’s note: lol sorry it’s true] And the way it was framed, when it was mentioned in the mainstream media, it was because they wanted stories about friendship. And it was interesting, because it’s like, yes, and, also, I have all the purity culture context going on here, you know what I mean?
FK: Right.
ELM: And it’s really hard to untangle now, what is just broad generational beliefs versus…I don’t know, it feels, it feels kind of impossible to unpack.
FK: I think it’s also just ‘cause it’s tangled up in so many different things, right? Like…one part of it seems to me to be related to when people feel that they are or might be an adult, which has—I mean, it has definitely changed over the course of our lifetimes, even, when it’s sort of normative for people to be totally on their own. Obviously there are people who are on their own when they’re, like, 16 years old, and there’s people who are not on their own when they’re in their 30s and that’s always been the case, but I feel like the, the sort of center of that bell curve has been shifting?
ELM: Yeah.
FK: So there’s that, which naturally has impacts on when people think that they should be sexually active, in serious relationships, doing different kinds of things, when they think that they’re like, able to do that. There’s the element of people being worried about being shamed for bad behavior, and having a fear of social, you know, becoming a social outcast, which I think relates to the way social media is functioning for everybody. And, there’s also an element of…I guess, sort of like, social concern for other people, and shifting norms in that? Like, ideas around for instance using the right language to refer to everybody, which, to be clear, I think is a good thing. Like, I’m a they/them, I’m not on the like, you know…“fuck a pronoun” category. [laughs]
ELM: [overlapping] In your, uh…what was it? They-hovel?
FK: Yeah. But I also think that there are conversations sometimes where, on that purity culture front, there’s a black-and-white thinking about this, right?
ELM: Sure.
FK: The idea that like, well, it’s never OK to use the word, for instance, “transsexual.” Well, actually, there are older people who identify that way, and would like to use that term for themselves. But to some younger people it’s like, “No, you can never use that, I don’t care what somebody wants.”
ELM: I know younger people who use that term.
FK: Right.
ELM: Sort of transgressive—it’s like, “I’m gonna use it if I want,” you know?
FK: Right, exactly, so, but there’s other people who are like, “You can never use that.”
ELM: Right, right, right.
FK: So there’s this, there’s also that black-and-white purity-culture piece. And I think that those three things sort of inter…intertwingle with each other.
ELM: Intertwingle.
FK: Intertwingle. And it’s hard to figure out what’s what! But we saw those roots in fandom years ago.
ELM: Yeah, that’s why this, the mainstream conversation kinda takes me aback, because it’s like…bro, where have you been, you know? [FK laughs] But it’s like, oh, I understand why you wouldn't have seen this five years ago or whatever, but it’s been so steeped—and like, also I think you have a huge portion of people, way way way more younger people touch fandom, or are involved in fandom, right? You know?
FK: Yes.
ELM: You have these vast numbers of younger people who are anti-shipping, and very vocal about it, right? And these are not people that we ever see in our fandom world, because they hate everything involved in shipping, right?
FK: Right.
ELM: And I only see in, like, the you know, these friction points online, those, that’s huge numbers of people.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And so—maybe I’m overstating it, maybe it just seems like that from social media. But when someone—
FK: How would we know? [laughs]
ELM: Yeah, when someone posts something that’s like, “Anyone who ships is a weirdo,” and they don’t mean it the way that…you know? I mentioned neckbeards in the last episode, they don’t mean it in that kinda classic, geek guy hates female fanfiction writer or whatever.
FK: Yeah, yeah.
ELM: And it has 15,000 likes. I have to assume a lot of those are real people.
FK: Right.
ELM: But yeah, too, I feel like there’s such a…absolutely those factors you were just saying in the way they—I’m not gonna, intertwingle I don’t think is a word.
FK: Posh. It’s my word, I like it.
ELM: I don’t, I don’t know if that’s right. But like—
FK: I like it, it sounds so nice. Twingle.
ELM: I feel like the twingling there is such a, it’s so easy to see the projection involved in a lot of this, right, you know? I saw an exchange where it was an adult journalist and an adult pop star, and she had asked him some explicitly sexual questions, which she later clarified, she asked him in advance, she didn’t try to ambush him, and he gave adult answers, and he didn’t seem uncomfortable. And you know, she’s getting into fights with people in her mentions, and when you click on their profile, they are minors.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And they’re like, “You obviously made him uncomfortable.” And it’s like, this conversation obviously made you uncomfortable.
FK: Right.
ELM: And that’s totally fine, but you have to understand that like, these are, these two people are adults, and…just because you don’t want to see it doesn’t mean that everyone else involved is uncomfortable. And I feel like that kind of lack of boundaries, lack of being able to tell that your personal discomfort isn’t shared by what you’re seeing. And like what we were talking about in the last episode, the lack of being able to distinguish between fictional characters, people’s jobs, you know? Displaying things on screen—“Oh, I was uncomfortable watching this sex scene, so I assume the actors were uncomfortable doing it.” You have no idea. Right?
FK: Right.
ELM: A lot of these actors are like, “Sure.” You know? [laughs] And a lot of them are like, “This isn’t anything, whatever, I take my clothes off for money, that’s my job,” you know? [FK laughs] They’re not too bothered by it, “I do what they tell me,” you know? Obviously there are stories of people being put in bad situations, but an assumption that that’s always what’s happening…
FK: Right.
ELM: I think it’s a lot more about the people who are viewing it than about the people who are making it.
FK: Absolutely. So, one thing that is interesting to me is this question of, what does that mean for fandom more broadly? And maybe that’s a hard question to ask, because I feel like fandom now is so much more broad than it ever was. It kinda doesn’t mean that much to me, because the areas that I am reading fic in…I don’t think are as impacted by this always. I mean there are obviously areas, but when I go and I look at, like, who’s writing what, in whatever section, it’s not having a big impact on me just as a reader right now.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: And I feel sure that there are other areas in fandom, for people who are much more engaged in conversation, where they’re also insulated from it, even though there’s these huge areas where, [laughs] it’s the only conversation.
ELM: Yeah. I mean I do think it, it has, over the last few years, affected some of the things that are made. On the creator side. You see interviews with creators.
FK: Oh sure, yeah. That’s right.
ELM: You know, “We didn’t wanna get canceled!” You know, right? But in a way of, like, we didn’t wanna be accused of, like, locking up our actors in the basement or whatever, you know? [FK laughs] Because they’ve had these run-ins with fans who are making these assumptions and saying everything they do is problematic. I mean I don’t want to sound like some reactionary comedian who’s like, “You can’t say anything anymore.” But I do think it’s not great for art if you’re always creating it with the worries of some reactionary social media conversation. That’s gonna stifle all kinds of speech, I feel like.
FK: For sure.
ELM: So…I think that has knock-on effects in fandom. But yeah, I agree. The only times I see—I mean, whatever, I see this stuff a lot more in my general social media sphere than I do like, on Tumblr where I mostly follow fandom people. You know?
FK: Right.
ELM: It’s jumped the shark!
FK: [laughs] Jumped the shark. OK, great, great reference. Should we go on to the next one?
ELM: Yeah! What is it?
FK: Number four is fandom life cycles shortening. Which I feel like we’ve been talking about for a long time, but it does…I don’t know, it continues.
ELM: Uh, I think that we just talked about it a lot this year, because we had multiple episodes, it kept coming up, people kept responding…and it just kept kind of explaining a lot of what we were seeing.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And I also just think it’s, like, they’re getting shorter and shorter. You know? And it’s like, people, it’s six weeks after the thing went off the air and they’re like, “You’re still posting about that?” It’s like, oh my God, you know?
FK: [laughs] Maybe, I mean I do think that this is a result of the content glut that we have been seeing, and it’s slightly, it’s like a trailing effect, to me. Because obviously there’s been a lot of streaming content for a long time now, but when we initially started getting that much streaming content, I feel like it took a little while for people to begin really getting into that six week cycle, right?
ELM: Yeah.
FK: And now it feels like that’s the norm, at this point. That it took a little while for fandom to adjust to that norm.
ELM: Yeah, I think so, too, and we would have these conversations about like…you know, how is the fandom gonna develop when you drop all the episodes at once?
FK: Right.
ELM: And that kind of trained people to have this sort of immediate boom and bust, you know? The Bear is a great example, right, everyone was talking about The Bear for four seconds this summer.
FK: [laughs] Yes.
ELM: I’m finally getting around to watching the second season right now. Don’t see anyone even talking about it, you know? [FK laughs] I mean I’m sure there’s still a devoted Bear fandom, you know?
FK: Right.
ELM: I know people are writing fic about it. But it’s not the same as it was for the one week when everyone watched it.
FK: Right. Well, and maybe that one week when everyone watched it is also something that we didn’t have before this content glut that also coincided with like, the peak of—I know we’re getting there soon—the peak of Twitter and the peak of like, everybody being on a social media platform and talking about it, not just Twitter, right, but…there’s really been moments where it’s felt like there’s a big conversation happening, which—I mean, yeah, obviously, that happened in monoculture kinds of ways, like Friends in the 90s or what have you. But not in a way that was connected to fandom, usually, quite as much. And so…I don’t know, it just…
ELM: Harry Potter releases?
FK: Sure, but on a much slower scale. Right? Like, there was sort of a moment of talking about it, but it still wasn’t as fast, like yeah, everyone was talking about it, but I wasn’t receiving 20,000 tweets a day about it.
ELM: Oh, you’re say—sure, sure.
FK: Right, like yeah, obviously there were these big moments, but when I think about the volume that I consumed when The X-Files was at its peak, and was like, a huge cultural phenomenon, everybody was watching it, and it was a fandom thing, the volume was still so small compared to like…I don’t know, Stranger Things season one, which I didn’t care about, but I still was subjected to, right?
ELM: Yeah, I mean, I feel like that’s just, you’re just describing social media. We didn’t have social media in the 2000s.
FK: Right, but I think that that impacted this cycle, because if you get that kind of incredible firehose…
ELM: Yeah.
FK: You can’t keep it up forever, you know?
ELM: Right, right, and it’s like, “No one’s talking about this,” and it’s like, yeah, 50 people are talking about it, do you need 50,000 people to talk about it right now? I don’t actually think you want that. But it seems like it’s dead, because yeah, you’re used to that kind of blast, of everyone is discussing Succession right now.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And now that it’s only, you know, the dedicated core of people, it’s embarrassing to still be a part of it or whatever. [FK laughs] Right?
FK: Yeah, absolutely. I mean this is definitely one of the things that has driven me into the arms of Star Trek, further and further, is that Star Trek people don’t care about any of that. [laughs]
ELM: Yeah yeah yeah, exactly. No, I just find it depressing, and it’s like…I do think there’s people who are in fandom who are directly responsible, I don’t think this is necessarily just about a behavior being imposed by the way that media gets made and delivered, and social media.
FK: Sure.
ELM: Like, the other day I saw a post where someone was like, “We should all get back into Stucky.” And then they were like, “You know, we should quote all these old fics, reread them all, leave comments and stuff,” and then someone I know who’s actively in the current Stucky fandom, which does exist, reblogged it and was like, “Or you could read anything that people are writing right now,” you know? [FK laughs] Like, just, to pretend that the moment that you cared about it was the only moment it existed—which obviously I see all the time in my older fandom, when people talk about it, they’re like, “Remember that?” And it’s like, remember when you liked that? Not remember when it existed, [laughs] because it’s currently existing. You know what I mean?
FK: Right! Yeah! And I think it’s easy to be guilty of that, too, I mean like when The X-Files revival was happening, I definitely was like that, I was like, “Remember back about all the X-Files stuff I liked?” and there’s all these people who were enjoying it for the first time now.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: And I’m like, oh, actually, I didn’t get into most of their stuff, except for some of the fanart. But like, it would’ve been nice if I could’ve gotten my head out of my ass [laughing] and enjoyed that more at the time, you know?
ELM: Right, right, yeah. And I think it’s very easy to have this nostalgia-tinged bias, to say, like, “Oh, back then things were simpler.”
FK: Right.
ELM: [laughs] “Back in my old Stucky days,” or whatever, you know. I get it, I get why people—or you saying, “I was a child in the 90s and so everyone’s read on The X-Files in 1996 was a lot better than right now,” you know?
FK: [laughs] Right.
ELM: And it’s like, are you sure? I mean, to be fair, you do go back and read some of this old stuff.
FK: I—well, that one is complicated, because I do think that there are certain ways that some of the old things…like, there’s things that I think were much worse, much worse, [ELM laughs] and there’s things that I think were better, you know? Which relate to fandom trends and how people are, like, the tropes people are trying to fit things into.
ELM: Mmm.
FK: But that’s, but that’s a separate issue, right? Like, I think that there were good and bad things then, and there are good and bad things now, and it’s helpful when you can overlook the, the idea that the life cycle happens once and it’s a flash in the pan, and think about it as a continuous thing. But I’m interested to see if this reverses itself though, I don’t wanna get too far ahead of ourselves, but I do feel like this relates to the next one.
ELM: What’s the next one?
FK: Which is about social platforms imploding and communities scattering, and I do feel like with the social platforms, the social landscape changing, I wanna know what impact that’s gonna have on fandoms like this.
ELM: I would not say that’s gonna have a huge impact.
FK: Yeah. You’re actually in it. [ELM laughs] In a way that I’m not. So I value your take on this. [laughs]
ELM: Yeah, I don’t know…I see so many people posting about, like, how they don’t really feel like they have a home or whatever, all this stuff, that’s something we’ve been following for years.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: I do think that the big, like, you know, we were talking about Succession, the last show we watched together, something like that, maybe. You know, obviously nothing’s come up since then. Half the people I know just aren’t on Twitter at all anymore, you know? And like, why would you be? I don’t know why I still have mine open. Just feels like something that I don’t wanna…I don’t wanna nuke, you know?
FK: No, I, I look into mine every once in a while, and I’m like, oh wow, a lot of people have messaged me [ELM laughs] about things that mostly are cryptocurrencies that I’ve never heard of.
ELM: Oh, I block those people immediately.
FK: I, I…I ignore them.
ELM: [overlapping] Sending a clear signal to the market. Get outta here! [laughs]
FK: Ha!
ELM: Yeah, what is it, like, token in bio? You know?
FK: Yeah, exactly, I’m like, OK.
ELM: What a piece of shit that platform is now. But like, I don’t know, I absolutely see the flash in the pan stuff—I mean, I’m in the, I look in the tags for like, Lestat and Louis and stuff like that, you know, just to, to see what other fanart has been drawn, and people are posting, like, six months after the show aired last fall, they were like, “I know I’m late to this.” And it's like, [whispering] why are you like this? The show is actively in production. They’re making more.
FK: I have to say, you should go over to Reddit, because they have a really good little Interview With the Vampire community happening over there, and nobody is talking about that.
ELM: I don’t wanna go to Reddit, Flourish.
FK: You would, the sad thing is I think that you would actually like chunks of Reddit a lot.
ELM: I’ve gone to Reddit! I’ve looked at Reddit. I’ve never seen a fandom conversation there that I didn’t…no. I don’t wanna insult people who like Reddit fandom. They’re not for me.
FK: OK. You’re right that it’s not the same kind of conversation, just like, the attitude is less like what you’re describing. Of, like, “I’m late,” you know?
ELM: Yeah, I mean also to be fair, this is like, maybe this is a fanartist thing. To say, like, “Oh, you all cared about this,” especially fanartists who chase trends, right?
FK: Sure.
ELM: Because they wanna get a lot of engagement, you know? I don’t know. It’s not a sentiment that I see as unique to Tumblr, the more I think about it that is something I see more often on art.
FK: Yeah, maybe that’s it.
ELM: So I don’t know! I mean I know that Destination Toast is gonna look into some stats around this, of the way people engage with fic.
FK: [chanting] Toasty! Toasty! Toasty! Toasty!
ELM: [overlapping] That’s right. That’s right. So, I don’t know, I just feel like…it bums me out, because it’s like, yeah, there’s still people making Stucky art, but there is something to be said for the fact that thousands of people cared a lot about Stucky for multiple years, right?
FK: Right.
ELM: It wasn’t just like, a super hot fandom for two months, where people wrote some masterpieces. It was like…
FK: [overlapping] Right. No! No, that was a, as annoying as I have historically found Stucky, it was a real thing.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: And I feel good for the people who loved it, you know?
ELM: [overlapping] Right, a sustained sharing of information, you know, encouraging each other…and it’s literally impossible to get that if you were only doing a fandom for three weeks.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Like, you’re gonna have an immediate response, or you’re gonna slot the characters into an AU that you could’ve written about the characters in the next show you fall in love with for a month. And that sucks.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: That bums me out. That’s not sustainable for fandom creativity. So.
FK: Yeah. Well, I don’t know, I mean… [laughs] In some ways I feel kind of lucky that I am at a moment in my life when I’m sort of stepping back from community, and just like, enjoying the fruits of communities every once in a while, but not really taking part very much? At this moment. [laughs] Because it just like, nicely dovetails with my personal feelings of like, OK, great, I’m not distressed about this. This is matching with my vibes, you know? [laughs]
ELM: Yeah.
FK: But I feel bad for people who are not in that place, because that stinks.
ELM: Yeah, no, I mean, but it kinda sucks, imagine future you in five years watches a new show, and you’re like, “Oh my God,” you know, “Oh my Gahhd,” right?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And then…you’re like, “I love this, I would love to read all the fic about it, I wanna write some fic,” it very well could happen.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Right, this part of you’s not dead.
FK: Oh no, it’s not dead, and it undoubtedly will happen.
ELM: And then people, and you’re like, you’re, you’re…skideeting about it on BlueX or whatever, right, and, uh…
FK: [laughing] Did…did…did you just like…[both laughing] combine…
ELM: Yes.
FK: Bluesky, X, and Skibidi Toilet?
ELM: [laughs] I’m just saying, this is what our future social media platform will be in five years.
FK: Sure. Yeah.
ELM: Just a big toilet. And then, um, and then you’re like, “Oh my God, I’m lovin’ this,” and you’re makin’ new friends, and it’s like, everything is golden for the, you know, six weeks the show is on the air, and then two days after the show is over…no one around you ever mentions it again.
FK: Yeah, that’ll be really depressing, let’s not do that. Fix it, people, [ELM laughs] fix it for me, so when I’m ready… All right. Um…what else about this one, should we go on?
ELM: I think that’s enough.
FK: OK, all right. Number two: the Hollywood strikes.
ELM: Feels so long ago.
FK: I almost don’t know what to say about this, because it was a huge conversation, and we’re still seeing, you know, fallout from it. It’s a big deal. But also, I mean, it feels a little bit like we’re in the middle of still seeing what the out—you know, what the fallout is gonna be.
ELM: Yeah, I mean, how has it affected fandom? Because that’s what this is about, right, this is not a…analyze-the-year-in-Hollywood. Obviously a massive year for everyone who works in Hollywood.
FK: Well but this is what I mean, because like, they still haven’t, we have not seen the huge delays. We know that delays are coming, but we haven’t waited through them yet. Mostly.
ELM: Yeah. Let’s talk about how fandom has been affected this year, right?
FK: Sure.
ELM: So, I would say, even this year, I don’t think that people have experienced many delays. There have been a few cancellations that networks and streamers and studios have blamed on the strikes, which is shitty.
FK: Sure.
ELM: There’ve been a broader retraction of “diverse” content that they’re blaming on the strikes. Again, shitty.
FK: Yeah. There has been the panic around what is scabbing, and I do think that has highlighted for people in fandom, even more, that sort of question of fan labor, how is this intertwing—intertwingled, [ELM laughs] I can’t get it out of my head! [laughs] How is it…[laughs]
ELM: [laughing] You just said that just like it’s a normal word, it just came outta your mouth…
FK: It did! Sorry, it’s normal to me now, [ELM laughs] and you’re gonna have to live with it for the rest of your life. Uh…the way that, the way that fan labor is intertwined with studio profits, and where to draw the lines, and how to draw lines also, between professional and fan activity, I think that those things all really came into focus, and…
ELM: You say this, but…
FK: I don’t know if there was any result yet!
ELM: No, I actually—
FK: I just know we all worried a lot. [laughs]
ELM: Yeah, I think that, I mean we talked about this a lot. So I think that we put it in the number two spot, but just to highlight how important it was to fandom, but I’m not sure we have a lot of new things to say. I think that it made a lot of people aware of the economics of the industry, including fans. I think it made a lot of fans mad about that reality.
FK: Sure.
ELM: And feel powerless, which is…true.
FK: [overlapping] True.
ELM: They are, largely they are powerless.
FK: Accurate.
ELM: We are powerless, we are fans too. And…I think a lot of the fans who were inserting themselves into that scabbing conversation and [sarcastic] bravely saying, “Oh, I won’t post about it,” even if they had literally no monetary relationship to anyone involved in Hollywood…I think learned nothing, and made someone else’s labor struggle about theirselves, themselves, rather than lifting up the people who were actually fighting for fair working conditions.
FK: Fair and correct.
ELM: [laughing] So that’s my harsh but true stance on what’s happened this year. And now a lot of them, the actors strike ended a few weeks ago, and they’re like, “Now I can talk about the movies I watched in August!” and it’s like…you coulda talked about ’em in August, and uh…glad we all went through that together. You really struggled, not being able to blueskideet about your… [laughs] Sorry, that platform’s in the future, we don’t have it yet.
FK: Great. I, I don’t really have much more to say about this either, except to say that people should go listen to our episodes from earlier in the year [laughs] about it. So should we—
ELM: Perfect, a perfect plug for me to put them in the show notes. We will.
FK: Right.
ELM: I think it would be definitely worth it to have one of our Hollywood friends come back on, whether that’s Javi or someone else. Maybe in the spring? When there’s been a little bit of time? And say, like, you know, assess, give us a, strikesplain again. Maybe Javi wants to do this one more time. [FK laughs] He is a fan-favorite and he does want to be a record-holder for the number of appearances on Fansplaining.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: But, you know, I know that a lot of the actors were like, “I want the strike to end, but I’m not satisfied by this contract, and I’m gonna vote for it so we can work again.”
FK: Yeah.
ELM: You know, but the, the largely inadequate AI protections…AI, AI.
FK: AI, AI! [ELM laughs] Which is, in fact, our number one story of this year. Which we put a pin in at the beginning of the episode, because we knew we were coming back to it, because holy shit. How quickly has this been normalized?
ELM: Well… Normalized. You tell me.
FK: I think it’s been normalized, real quick!
ELM: Oh man. OK, so here’s where we were last year this time, when we talked about it, let’s just, to give a sense of where we’re at. Right?
FK: Mmm hmmm.
ELM: So, GPT-3 existed, and they had put out ChatGPT, the consumer-facing tool.
FK: Mmm hmmm.
ELM: People were playing around with it, and they were like, “Huh.” And at the time though, it was mostly about Stable Dis—Stable Diffusion, Lensa. I haven’t heard much about Lensa since then.
FK: Nothing! [ELM laughs] Nada!
ELM: Midjourney. You know, the um…
FK: Yeah.
ELM: DALL-E, the art generators, right?
FK: Right.
ELM: You know, the initial questions we had around fandom, or about like, artists feeling like their work was stolen, versus a kind of democratizing argument, most fans are not good at drawing, and maybe this would give the opportunity for someone who will never commission a fanartist to make their heart’s desire. To make Erik and Charles kissing on a bed while on fire.
FK: [laughs] And, the point being of course, that this is really complicated, AI is not doing exactly, you know, it’s not…at the time, in particular, it’s not doing exactly the thing that you want it to do. [laughs] We attempted to make Charles and Erik kissing on a bed on fire.
ELM: You know what would be a fun activity, actually. I dare you to make a better version of that, the tools have improved so much in the last year.
FK: They have, they have.
ELM: I actually wonder what you would get. Would you do this? Would you do this art project for me?
FK: I haven’t looked at any of the tools recently, so I’ll, I’ll see, I’ll poke around.
ELM: Great. Get in that DALL-E. Burn a small forest, just to make me a shitty picture.
FK: [overlapping] And I mean… Oh man. Are we sure that we should do this? Um…I think that things that happened, I mean the conversation transferred over into being about text, primarily.
ELM: Right. So when we did our second episode, in the spring, there had been a huge meltdown around the AO3. There were some misguided statements from the organization about AI, and they were kinda like, “Shruggy! Interesting.”
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And people were like, “Excuse me!?” And then I think there was a, I think a massive overreaction, and I saw some truly horrific things coming from people, including, like, death threats.
FK: Yep.
ELM: Obviously unacceptable. And then also similarly, you had Silicon Valley, and I wrote this article, we talked about it, about someone who I’m pretty sure is involved in Character.AI saying that the, you know, “All these fans are reading these static stories, and we have this free dataset with all their fanfiction, and wait until they see what can be created, they could just chat with a character using the models that we’re gonna build by ripping off the stories they’ve created.”
FK: Spoiler alert… [laughs] Not something people necessarily want.
ELM: You say this, but later I reported on Character.AI, because I’ll tell you what, writing for WIRED in 2023 means you learn a lot about AI. Against your will. [FK laughs] I’m not the only one who feels this way. And—not just for WIRED, but being a journalist writing anything about tech right now. I reported on Character.AI, there’s a lot of fans using it. Right?
FK: I’m sure there are, there’s also people who don’t find it interesting, there’s both.
ELM: [overlapping] Like me. There’s me who doesn’t find it interesting. [FK laughs] But you know, I don’t want to diminish it. I think that when I published that piece, which was at the end of the summer, people came in my mentions and were like, “I’ve never heard of this!” And it’s like, that doesn’t mean people in fandom aren’t using it. And if you actually—
FK: Fair. Fair enough, fair enough.
ELM: And if you actually go in the character tags, on Tumblr for example, you’ll find Character.AI-generated, completely inane chats. [laughs] With the, with a character. Right?
FK: And I think this does get to some of the, some of what I’m thinking about AI over this period, which is just how normalized using AI has become in general.
ELM: For some!
FK: Not to say—yeah, not for everybody.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: But like, for a chunk of people, and the idea that you could use AI being normalized also.
ELM: Yes.
FK: Like, you know, I mean we’re seeing continued problems—I mean this is outside of fandom, but I think that it has a big impact on the way people bring their whole selves to fandom, I’m sure it does. You know, when you’re seeing conversations like, now there’s regularly articles about how students are being accused of using AI in their writing, and sometimes they are using it and sometimes they’re not, but they’re just being accused of it.
ELM: Right, right.
FK: And this is, like, common all over. Which then makes, even if you’re not using AI, makes you think like, “Oh, but other people are.”
ELM: Yeah.
FK: Are they actually? I don’t know. But it feels like everybody is doing it, right?
ELM: Yeah, I don’t know, I’m of two minds about this, because I’ve been in working environments this year—or like, for example, I covered a—I wound up not writing about it because there wasn’t really anything to say, but I went to a conference about the publishing industry and AI a few weeks ago. And one person, who is the head of a very successful publicist, publicity firm, who has clients who are extremely famous, was describing how she used AI in her work, and it was, the only words she seems to type are words into a prompt in an AI tool.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: You know, from top to bottom, every single thing she said, she did with AI. And, I mean it kind of, she wasn’t the only one who had this kind of attitude, but she was the most extreme. And it really bummed me out, because I was like, this is the book publishing industry, you would think that you… a), it wouldn’t be such a hardship to write your own sentence, and b), these are highly sought-after jobs that aren’t super well-compensated. [FK laughs] Like, a love of the written word is kind of what brings you into it.
FK: No, this is, this is exactly what has me thinking about this, is that the other day somebody I know who is, has a Ph.D., is a researcher for a major tech company, but who I respected, and you know, did media studies work and so on, was talking about how like the first thing that he does now, thinking about anything, is going and typing it into AI and seeing what comes up.
ELM: [overlapping] I’m shaking my head, this is not a video.
FK: [overlapping] And I was like, what? You know? Like…
ELM: Yeah.
FK: What!? [laughs]
ELM: Yeah.
FK: But this is what I mean by normalization, right, obviously I don’t do this, I don’t think that I’ve used AI since I was like, trying—you know, for months now. At all. But there are people for whom it’s part of their everyday workflow and life, and it seems just so…
ELM: Right.
FK: You know?
ELM: Yeah.
FK: In a way that I think that last year we would never have—I mean, I guess we would have envisioned it, but it would’ve been like a wildest-dreams situation, like, “Can you imagine that soon or later it’s gonna be everywhere all the time?” and it’s like, uh, it feels like it now.
ELM: But for certain—yeah, what’s weird to me is like, I was telling a friend of mine who works in an industry where I’m assuming, he said his employer banned the use of AI tools. And I’m assuming it’s because the things they create…I assume it’s for copyright reasons, right?
FK: Sure. Right.
ELM: You know, saying don’t, stay away from that, because they sell things that they create, and like…you don’t want that tainted. And when I was telling him about how I encounter people who like, you know, you ask a question and I’m like, “I’m gonna Google it,” and they’re like, “Use ChatGPT!” You know?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And it’s like, [gasp] why?? [FK laughs] I would like to see—first of all, I mean, Google is utter shit right now, it’s so bad. But through all of that, even through the garbage of it, right, the thing that they implemented recently where if you type anything that remotely might be a shopping, something you would shop for, it gives you the shopping result—and it’s like…
FK: No.
ELM: I am not trying to buy a hammer. I would like to know the names of the parts of a hammer. Why are you doing this to me? It makes me angry. But like, even through all of that, you can still decide which sources—
FK: Right.
ELM: I mean at least just go to Wikipedia and read it and look at the sources there, right?
FK: Right.
ELM: I was telling him that people were saying “just go to ChatGPT and ask” and his mind was blown. And I think there’s some people, because of where they work, and because they’re making personal decisions like you and I are, I assume people are listening to this and have not encountered people just asking ChatGPT to write a basic sentence for them at all times, or asking for advice, or—you know what I mean?
FK: Right.
ELM: Or all the things people list they use it for, and I’m just boggled, that those are things you wouldn’t…you know, they’re like, “I used it to write a party invitation,” and I’m like, is that a struggle? [FK laughs] Just say where the party is…just say I’m havin’ a party, here’s the location. I don’t understand.
FK: Yeah. Well, and I think that maybe to bring it back to fandom, although there has been all of this—
ELM: No! I wanna rant about [laughing] AI! Go ahead.
FK: You know that there’s been all of this concern, and I think, I know that there are people using it not just in Character.AI, but also writing, you know, using it to supplement or write fanfic, doing all this.
ELM: Yeah. Sure.
FK: But for me the things that I enjoy about fandom all relate to the mental effort that I’m putting in, to think about this stuff.
ELM: A thousand percent, a thousand percent.
FK: And so…you know, I also feel confident that there are a lot of other people who are like you and me on this one, where it’s like, yeah, the pleasure I’m getting is about thinking about the characters, and asking ChatGPT to come up with something is not pleasurable, [laughs] because it’s not engaging me that way. So, OK, you know, if it’s fun for you, I guess have fun, but I’m never going to go down that path. And I think there’s still a lot of people who are there, in fandom. I think that fandom is a harder…
ELM: Yeah.
FK: It’s not like writing a summary of something that you never wanted to read in the first place.
ELM: Or yeah, doing your homework, like writing a term paper, you’re like, “I don’t even care about this, so here.”
FK: [overlapping] Exactly. Right. Right. Exactly.
ELM: Yeah. No, I totally agree. And there’s the kind of idea of…you become a better writer, it’s not just, like, practicing. It is, like, the process of writing is writing. You know? Like, the process of editing is writing. All of these things, all of these people now are writing about editors on Substack or whatever, kinda bums me out, because it’s like, this could’ve used an editor, and that’s not just like, “Oh, someone should’ve removed that sentence,” it’s like, writing is iterative, you should’ve had someone to be able to go back and forth on this with you, and push you and challenge your ideas and all this stuff, right? And the same with fandom. And I think that like, this absolutely is the, it’s the pleasure, right, is like…and yeah, it sucks when you can’t figure out where to go next.
FK: Right.
ELM: And sure, if you wanna use ChatGPT to like, break your writer’s block, give you something to say no to, no one is stopping you. I’m not saying you should, because I think that that’s a valuable thing to practice doing yourself, because eventually you don’t need it, if you learn the tools to challenge yourself to work out of that, like a hole that you’ve backed yourself into or whatever. But like…if you’re so impatient, and you’re so—first of all, the idea that like, “Oh, I can’t write a good story, so I’ll just get it to do it,” it’s not gonna write you a good story.
FK: No.
ELM: Nothing it writes is good. I’m sorry. Nothing. Sometimes people, even now, a year into this, people will, like, read an example of something ChatGPT wrote, and they’ll, like, read it out loud, and they’ll be like, “Wow.” And I’ll be like, what’s wrong with you? Why are you wowing this? This is the most generic nonsense.
FK: I mean, I do think that there is—you know, we were having a conversation about a piece of writing, and you were like, is it ChatGPT, and I said no, because ChatGPT has better grammar. [ELM laughs] And I do think that for some people, that is genuinely a challenge, and like, having something that is totally correct grammar, which ChatGPT can do—
ELM: I mean, I hate, I hate Grammarly as a product, but I would say use that before you had AI just generate it for you.
FK: Sure, but what I’m saying is, that’s I think one of the things that people find appealing, is like, it looks professional. In that way, right?
ELM: Right.
FK: Similarly, the way that I think people approaching AI are…sometimes feel…God, I don’t even remember where this came up, it may have been something I heard about through my dad or it may have been through you, someone talking about using AI to do concept artwork? This artist, he was like, “Yeah, it’s really interesting, because I can have it come up with a bunch of stuff in a bunch of different styles, and just see what it comes up with and that’s great. But when it comes to the anatomy of, like, an alien I’m supposed to be drawing, it doesn’t know shit about anatomy. And so like…I could never use that, because it doesn’t actually look like a real creature, because it doesn't know anything about that. But it’s still useful because I can like, envision what different palettes would look like really quickly, or imagine different styles. So then I go and I take those ideas.”
And it’s like, yeah, I think a lot of people would look at any one of the things that he generated and say, “Oh yeah, that looks good.” But he knows, because he knows about animal anatomy, that they’re bad, right? [laughs]
ELM: This was not a story you heard from me, and I wanna know about your dad’s alien-drawing friend. I’m very interested in this person’s career.
FK: [laughing, overlapping] I think it must’ve been my dad who told me about this, because he has lots of artist friends who do weird things.
ELM: You may be mixing it up with me complaining about that person who didn’t know what CATS look like.
FK: No, I am not mixing it up, [ELM laughs] that is a separate issue. I also thought that one was fine, it was not…it didn’t look like a cat, but it looked fine.
ELM: No! Everyone should feel bad if they liked it.
FK: [overlapping] This is because you love cats.
ELM: Everyone should feel bad.
FK: Anyway. My point being though, that like, as artists go, I think a lot of that has to do with getting paid, and I think a lot of the anxiety around the writing also relates to people getting paid for what, and the quality being bad, and what will the masses accept? But when it comes to actually making fan stuff, like, if you’re an artist… [laughing] don’t, enjoy making the art! Right?
ELM: Yeah, absolutely! Yeah, yeah, right!
FK: If you’re writing fan, if you’re writing fanworks, enjoy writing your fanworks! ChatGPT can’t take that away from you.
ELM: That example, too, is I think a really good one, and I think one you can see in writing too, of like, this is a person who has the skills to understand that—you know what I mean? I think that, I don’t wanna be too doomy, but like, I think that if everyone just cedes everything to these shitty facsimiles—
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And doesn’t even learn—you know, an artist doesn’t learn basics of composition to understand why the thing that Midjourney puts out looks kinda tacky, right, you know? [FK laughs] Because they don’t understand the way that composition, you know what I mean? Those kinds of things. Or like, how sentences are constructed, how plots hang together, all of these things, you learn through doing and you learn through reading, you don’t learn through generating and trying to kinda backfill, right?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: It’s gonna be impossible for you to figure it out based on an end result. And so that’s always gonna make the act of creation harder for you, because you don’t, you’re not even building up a toolset. And so I don’t know, I guess it just really…it depresses me, but I, obviously 100% the main thing for me is what you’re saying, it’s like…if you don’t enjoy writing fanfiction, don’t? [FK laughs] You know what I mean?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And I get like, oh, maybe you’re not gonna be able to afford to commission someone to create something for you. Stick around in a fandom for more than six weeks, befriend people, and then prompt them into doing things!
FK: You are now entering an Old Man Yells At Clouds [ELM laughs] vibe, that I just wanna let you know about, I’m not—
ELM: [overlapping] I’m trying to tie all our things together.
FK: I’m not mad about your vibe, I just want you to know that you’re really…getting there.
ELM: I, um…it’s depressing! That conference I went to, nothing has depressed me as much about AI as that. Not, like, encountering random people in the wild or in the workplace who are just using ChatGPT instead of actually Googling. It was that one, where I was like, “These people are making books.” [laughing] And this is what they’re doing.
FK: Womp womp. [laughs]
ELM: My favorite, my favorite, my favorite actually, this person was the head of a major university press, and she told her subordinates that—she’s the head of the press, right, she’s the boss.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: To start experimenting with AI tools.
FK: Uh huh.
ELM: And she said, “So my employees came back, and they were like, [laughs] we need some guidelines or some guardrails, what do you—” you know what I mean? Which I think is a really reasonable thing for people who work at a publishing house to say.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And she said, [laughing] “So I asked ChatGPT to write me some guidelines.” And I was just like…but, but.
FK: Welcome, Skynet! [laughs]
ELM: Here’s the greatest, the one thing I will say about this conference, I’ve never experienced this before. Because I’ve been to some, you’ve been to Zoom events where it’s just like, on Zoom.
FK: Sure.
ELM: This was not, this was a very professional virtual conference software.
FK: Yeah yeah yeah.
ELM: And so it was a split screen, one side was the live presentation, and the other side was a live chat. And I have been to many publishing conferences to cover as a journalist, and you sit there listening to executives saying the most nonsensical batshit things, and you just innerly seethe, you’re like, “This sucks, this sucks, this person’s in charge, I hate this.” And in this, [laughing] it was just people in the comments being like, “Oh boy!” [laughs]
FK: “This sucks, this sucks, I hate it, I hate it, this person’s in charge!” Great!
ELM: And it was so cathartic, I was like, this is so pleasurable to see them say nonsense and then be, and then like, have a bunch of people in the comments being like, “Bro what?” I was like, this is what I want. This is a good part of the future.
FK: On that note! [laughs] Uh…that’s your good part of the future, what’s your year in fandom been like, [ELM laughs] what’s the good, just give me one good part. Because we’ve talked about a lot of things that we find depressing, bad, negative trends, whatever. What has been good about your year in fandom?
ELM: My personal year in fandom…well, you know, I started using some pretty cool tools to make my fanworks, there’s um, there’s ChatGPT, there’s uh, DALL-E, that’s how I make all my Cherik fanart…
FK: Murdering you with my eyes. [ELM laughs] Take this seriously. What has been good? I know good things have happened for you.
ELM: Um…as a fan? You know, I mean as a fandom journalist, it’s been a great year, I’ve gotten to start writing for WIRED and Atlas Obscura, two very different publications.
FK: Woohoo!
ELM: Exciting! And so it is really nice to be able to kind of get back in there and have to report on stuff, because for the last few years I’ve mostly been working in tech, and most of my analysis of fandom was just through this podcast, and obviously I’m paying attention, but it is really different when you actually have to go out and interview people. [FK laughs] As opposed to kinda just…gathering.
FK: Right.
ELM: So that’s been great. And interesting. Personally as a fan, not very much has changed. I just keep writing fanfiction. I will say, I do feel like this year—so, I really liked Oppenheimer, right, you know?
FK: [overlapping] You did.
ELM: [overlapping] I should go out and get that Blu-ray, I saw it multiple times. But that reawakened an interest in…you know, and it’s something that already connected to some of the fanfiction I’ve worked on, and so like, it was, it’s kinda fun to get that sort of spark again and be like, oh, I probably have to go buy six or seven really long books and read them.
FK: This is like, your peak fandom, and I love that for you.
ELM: I, yeah, I’m using, you know, I’m using Aboard, the company I work for, to make a board where I save articles and images about some of these topics. [laughs] Like nuclear war. Um…you know, but it’s like, it’s fun. I love writing AUs, but it doesn’t really require you to do that kind of historical rabbit hole stuff that, like, I think a lot of people in fandom really enjoy.
FK: Yeah!
ELM: So, it’s been nice to have that. Basically. Basically.
FK: Aww, that’s nice!
ELM: Thanks.
FK: I, I have nothing to report on my year. I mean, I have just been leaning into what I have, the trend that has been going on, which is sort of not being very online? Every once in a while I pop in to do very, like, learning about the lore or cataloging my books. [ELM laughs] And you know, I, I do wander through and like, go through a phase and read a bunch of fanfic for something every once in a while, but mostly it’s been like, nostalgia fandoms in one way or another for me. Which isn’t bad.
ELM: What were you reading recently that was totally random? Not like…
FK: Oh, I got into Walking Dead for a little while.
ELM: Oh, I was thinking Witcher. No. Walking Dead.
FK: No, I got into Walking Dead for a little while, because for a variety of reasons, [laughs] I’ve been somewhat tired lately, and I’ve been sitting on the couch watching things, and Walking Dead…like, I never got into it, it’s really long. And I watched pretty much all of it, and then I read some Walking Dead fanfic, and I was like, this is not actually the fandom for me, but I have done it.
ELM: [laughs] That’s so sweet, you found a new fandom, The Walking Dead.
FK: I, I mean, I read a couple of fics and some of them were good, and then I was like, no, this isn’t gonna be a long-term thing. But I’m glad that I, like, dallied with it, you know?
ELM: What about your, uh, fanart?
FK: I, I did draw. I started drawing a little bit. And there’s gonna be a thing that I drew in our Tiny Zine.
ELM: But you—more than that though, you've drawn other things, just for yourself, right?
FK: I’ve drawn other things just for myself. I’ve been, I have been drawing again a little bit.
ELM: That’s so nice.
FK: We’ll see. And has been nice, it’s been nice to…you know, sometimes like, when I was younger, I drew a lot, my first job was actually as an art teacher’s assistant.
ELM: I didn’t know that!
FK: Yeah! Like, I, I drew a fair—my dad being a visual artist, that was just like, it was just like, part of, it wasn’t that I ever really…I mean I did consider the possibility of going to art school for, like, textile art at one point. But, and so in the process of considering that, you have to, like, build a portfolio of other forms of art. So I did a lot of art classes actually, at one point. But it’s sort of been nice to be like, oh yeah, once I did this a lot, and I still have some things that I know from back then. Like, stuff that I learned and that I can enjoy using.
ELM: [overlapping] Yeah! So you know what alien anatomy looks like.
FK: I don’t know that, that’s not something I would say that I know very well. But, but anyway, so that’s been fun. So we’ll see if that, um…you know, blossoms further, but even if it doesn’t…it also can be OK to just pick something up and enjoy it, you know?
ELM: A hundred percent, because it’s fun to create things.
FK: Exactly!
ELM: That’s right!
FK: Cute little doodles of Spock.
ELM: It’s fun to read multiple books on nuclear war. It’s fun.
FK: All right. I like this for us.
ELM: Great! [laughs] Great.
FK: Havin’ a fun time.
ELM: Very fun!
FK: Doing things that AI maybe could do for us, but we don’t want it to.
ELM: Why would I want AI to read books about nuclear war for me?
FK: Why would I want AI to draw me a cute little doodle of Spock? That’s not what I’m doing.
ELM: [overlapping] That’s fair, that’s fair, that’s fair.
FK: All right.
ELM: Cool.
FK: Well, it’s been another great year of hangin’ out.
ELM: [laughs] Yeah, it’s been cool hangin’ out with you. [both laugh]
FK: And I guess I’ll see you in the new year.
ELM: I’ll see you before the new year, I’ll see you on—
FK: [overlapping] Well, we will, but like—
ELM: [overlapping] On New Year’s Eve.
FK: [overlapping] In terms of this podcast.
ELM: I’ll speak to you in the context of Fansplaining in 2024.
FK: That’s, that’s, see, you made it weird that that’s what I was trying to say.
ELM: Wow. All right. Goodbye.
FK: Talk to you later, Elizabeth.
ELM: [overlapping] Goodbye, Happy New Year.
FK: Happy New Year!
[Outro music]