Episode 214: Ask Fansplaining Anything: Part 18
In the newest installment of the long-running “Ask Fansplaining Anything” series, Flourish and Elizabeth tackle a fresh batch of listener comments and questions. Topics discussed include fic that “breaches containment,” AI and fanworks, differing norms around the AO3’s “Major Character Death” tag, and what to do when Someone Is Wrong On the Internet.
Show Notes
[00:00:00] As always, our intro music is “Awel” by stefsax, used under a CC BY 3.0 license.
[00:03:24] There are mainstream articles about the weird number of high-powered millennials who have a cult-like devotion to “Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality,” but as you can imagine, they tend to be pretty shitty on fic generally, so we recommend you just read the Fanlore article, a…rich text.
[00:14:37] Anon is responding to our episodes not specifically on gen fic, but on friendship (we haven’t actually done any on gen broadly—not all of that is about friendship of course!). That’s our most recent “Tropefest” special episode, “Friends to …?” and a bunch of responses to that in our last AMA.
[00:22:22]
[00:23:11] EarlGreyTea68 was our guest most recently on Episode 211: “The Copyright Conundrum.”
[00:29:13] It was, in fact, everyone’s “favorite” contrarian philosophy professor:
You may more likely know her as “the lady that throws away her children’s Halloween candy.”
[00:31:28] If you missed it a few months back, some high-profile novelists—including George R. R. Martin, Jodi Picoult, and Jonathan Franzen—are suing OpenAI on copyright grounds..
[00:33:19]
[00:35:57] Our interstitial music throughout is “Vaping in L.A.” by Lee Rosevere, also used under a CC BY 3.0 license.
[00:36:44] That’s “How U.S. Copyright Law Fails Fan Creators.”
[00:37:25] These Tiny Zines? Very festive. https://patreon.com/fansplaining!
[00:39:46] “Ask Fansplaining Anything: Part 11” came out in September 2021.
[00:58:59] This is in response to Episode 208, “What Fans Owe Each Other,” and here is the famous XKCD comic in question, “Duty Calls”:
[01:03:30] That’s Tom Gould’s “Us vs. Them.”
[01:07:24] These “baby announcement videos” are true masterpieces.
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 #214, “Ask Fansplaining Anything: Part 18”!
FK: [laughing] Eighteen!
ELM: Eighteeeeen!
FK: Eighteen! “Ask Fansplaining Anything” can vote.
ELM: You’re gonna do this every time, aren’t you?
FK: Yeah. I will.
ELM: If we do another one what will you say? We probably will do another one.
FK: I won’t say anything, but—
ELM: What magical thing happens when you’re 19 years old?
FK: I don’t know. We haven’t done one every year, though. This is also not apropos in that way, so… In any case, we’ve done a lot of them, hurray!
ELM: Yeah. We’ve done a lot. We’ve done a lot.
FK: [laughing] OK.
ELM: So you know how this works. I know how it works. The listeners know how it works.
FK: Yeah, so, I will say, roughly in the first chunk of it, we’ve got stuff about fic, and in the second chunk, we’ve got stuff about etiquette.
ELM: OK! All right.
FK: Some of them are about both fic and etiquette, but you’ll get there. We’ll get there.
ELM: Fic-equette? Fit-equette? Fic—fic—
FK: Fic—fic—no. None of that—doesn’t work. It doesn’t work like net—I mean, I guess technically speaking, it’s about netiquette. If we wanna get real 1995…
ELM: You just wanted to say netiquette again.
FK: …in here...all right.
ELM: All right, go ahead, read the first one. You’re up.
FK: [laughs] OK. This one is from someone anonymous.
“Hi Elizabeth and Flourish,
“Love the podcast. Thanks for providing me with hours of thoughtful entertainment. So, I’ve been thinking about the scenario when a fic quote-unquote ‘breaches containment’ and becomes known to people outside of the fan space it started in.
“Specifically, in the fandom I’m in—a popular non-canon ship, for a popular fandom—there’s one fic that I often see talked about outside of fannish spaces. People in online book chat spaces—for regular books, not fic—will say, ‘I’ve never read [name of original canon], but I keep seeing this fanfic everywhere. Should I read it?’ Or I’ll see people say, ‘I don’t even read fic, but I see this everywhere, maybe I’ll read it?’ [ELM laughs]
“I guess I have a few questions—”
ELM: [laughing] Good impersonation.
FK: [laughs] Thank you.
“I guess I have a few questions: Am I a snob for feeling weird about this? Another question is, it’s just very confusing to me why this fic is so hugely popular, and how it even met these people’s eyeballs, who are not in the fan space for this fic! To be clear, the fic is good! But, there are tons of fics in this fandom that are just as good. So why this one? Why did it blow up so much? Do you have any insight into why a certain work will become popular enough to quote-unquote ‘breach containment’ outside of fandom? Or, is it just random, the way it sometimes is whenever anything in pop culture gets hugely popular? And my last question is, what are your general thoughts on this? Thanks!” From someone anonymous.
ELM: Hmm. Thank you, Anonymous. I got thoughts. Here, let me complain a little bit to start. All right, so—
FK: Is this gonna be about “Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality”?
ELM: Hold on.
FK: [laughs] A topic about which I am ready to complain—
ELM: Hold on.
FK: —ad infinitum? [laughs]
ELM: So with these little weirdos in Silicon Valley, Sam Bankman-Fried’s polycule or whatever, if anyone doesn’t know…what is the name of their movement? Effective Altruism.
FK: Y—well, yeah, and then, like, Less Wrong—
ELM: Is the author of “Harry Potter and—”
FK: —was the author. And I feel like he used the phrase Less Wrong to sort of refer to his group, maybe? Am I not remembering that right?
ELM: OK, all right. Let’s take a step back. The people—Sam Bankman-Fried, the people involved in this crypto scam, really particular sort of Silicon Valley millennials right now, a lot of them are not just really into this fic, “Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality,” but, like, know the author and kind of are really into the fic, like, in a cult-like way. [laughs]
FK: Yeah, like, I mean, I’m not gonna say there is a cult there, but I will say that as a person from, you know, the Northern California area, [ELM laughs] I have known people who have known Eliezer Yudkowsky’s people, and they have described the house that he lived in with a bunch of people as “cult compound-like.” [both laugh]
ELM: This is the author of the fic.
FK: Yeah, his real name. Yeah.
ELM: OK. So there was a long period where I felt like any time anyone made a reference to another Harry Potter fanfiction, “My Immortal,” [FK laughs] I would just get so annoyed in a tired way, because it was just so easy, right? You know?
FK: Right.
ELM: People in fandom do it, too, but it was often people who touched fanfiction fandom but weren’t really in it, and they would be, like, trying to get a punchline.
FK: Right.
ELM: And they would just toss it in. And in the last year or so, you know, as Sam Bankman-Fried has been convicted of all these things, et cetera, and things keep popping up about—the guy that was gonna replace Sam Altman as the head of OpenAI is also in this sphere, right?
FK: Yes.
ELM: And he paid money to have his name put into this fic, right?
FK: Yes.
ELM: He’s a minor character in a scene, right? [laughs]
FK: There’s a lot of people who did this. I have to say, there is—you cannot imagine the depth of obsession with “Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality” that I experienced circa 2009 at MIT.
ELM: [laughs] I can imagine.
FK: And in the circles around that, like, there was a particular hacker meetup that I used to go to, and at least once a month, someone would want to talk—they would find out that I was studying fanfic and stuff, and they would have to sit me down and tell me about how great this fic was. [ELM laughs] So that’s a different feeling than your feeling about “My Immortal”—
ELM: No, no!
FK: —because they’re making fun of it, and in this case, they were, like, telling me how great it was, and I was like, “It’s— [ELM laughs] I mean, it’s fine, I guess!” [both laugh] You know?
ELM: No, no, what I’m saying, though, is I’m familiar with that, prior to the last year or two, but now it’s replaced “My Immortal”—
FK: Right, the punchline.
ELM: —as, like, the in-reference for, “Did you know? Do you know about this fanfiction that these weirdos like?” You know, people who are, like—
FK: Yeah.
ELM: —making the singularity together, right now? You know?
FK: Yeah yeah. Absolutely.
ELM: And it’s a lot of the same people on my feeds. And again, they’re fandomy people, but they’re not fanfiction people.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And it just feels like a reference. And that’s different than what Anon is talking about. But I wanted to complain about it, because I think it’s related.
FK: No, it is related. I mean, that’s—what Anon is talking about, I think is more related to, like, my experience of this in 2009 or, you know, your experience of this prior to the past couple years, where people who are not in fandom for fanfic would find this one fic and either be really into it or think that was the one they should read or whatever, and you’re just sitting here going like, “That one?”
ELM: Yeah.
FK: You know? “You picked that one?”
ELM: Well, no, but that’s like—both of those examples, “My Immortal” and “Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality,” are, like, weird metatexts. Right? You know?
FK: That’s true. That’s true. That’s true.
ELM: As opposed to, like, if someone comes at me, and they mostly read romance, and they’re like, “But I read ‘Manacled,’ the Dramione fic—”
FK: [laughs] Right.
ELM: “—or ‘All the Young Dudes.’”
FK: I actually sort of was wondering whether it was Dramione until she was—that particular one until the anonymous person was saying that—they were saying they had never read the original canon, [ELM laughs] and I was like, “That’s not true. It can’t be Harry Potter.” [laughs]
ELM: Yeah, but that one, or there’s that Marauders one, “All the Young Dudes.”
FK: Right.
ELM: And they’re, like, big on TikTok, right?
FK: Yeah yeah.
ELM: And you see romance people being like, “Oh, maybe I’ll give that one fanfiction a shot,” right?
FK: A shot, right. Exactly.
ELM: Or there was that really—that horny Mandalorian one that was really viral for a while.
FK: [laughs] Yes. Yeah yeah yeah.
ELM: You know the one that I’m talking about, right? Where he keeps the helmet on the whole time.
FK: I do.
ELM: You know, and that feels like romance crossover, and those I do wonder, you know, like, I’m sure that those fics are really well-written and really engaging, but that to me feels like the breaching containment, because it’s like—
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Why…why those? You know? As opposed to—it’s not like there’s something particularly special.
FK: Well, it kind of makes sense to me, though, because all that it requires is one person who is in that position of both reads a bunch of these fics and particularly happens to like this one—
ELM: Yeah.
FK: —and also is someone who, like, whose recommendations mean something to romance people or whatever, right?
ELM: Sure, sure.
FK: Because all that needs—I mean, it’s just down to one person’s taste. We all know somebody who likes a particular fic and you’re like, “All right, it’s fine.”
ELM: Yeah.
FK: And they’re like, “No, I love it!” Right?
ELM: I sure have had that experience. [laughs]
FK: Yeah, no, I know! I mean, I know! I’ve been on the other end of that experience with you, and it’s been fine. My point being that that’s all it takes, right? And so it makes sense to me. I mean, I don’t know that there’s an answer of, like, why this particular fic, as opposed to that one. I don’t know that it actually has to do with becoming super popular, in the sense of having more reads from fanfic people. I think it just has to be the right person who read it—
ELM: Hmm.
FK: —and told—you know, took it into that new audience.
ELM: Well, but take Anon’s aside that you just referenced, that people are saying, “I haven’t read the canon, but…” You know?
FK: Mmm hmm.
ELM: So there are, obviously, there are very popular fics where you can not know the canon and really enjoy the story, right?
FK: Right.
ELM: Especially if it’s a good romance or a good fantasy plot or whatever.
FK: Yeah yeah.
ELM: What’s the new word that we’re saying now? Romantsy?
FK: [laughs] Romantsy?
ELM: Romantasy? Romantasy.
FK: Romantasy!
ELM: Romantasy.
FK: Romantasy! OK, yeah, the way you were saying it, I could not figure out what you were saying.
ELM: Romantasy.
FK: Romantasy. Yeah.
ELM: I knew it really—that had breached containment when it was a question in our trivia league.
FK: Yes! Yes, I also was like, “Really?” [laughs]
ELM: And then there was a story on NPR yesterday where they were talking to librarians around the country about what was the most popular this year checked out, and a lot of them said that. That genre.
FK: Yeah! Well.
ELM: Makes sense.
FK: I will say, as an aside, that I fully appreciate people loving that genre, because when I was a teenager, it would have been right up my alley, but today, I’m sorry, I can’t get into any of them that people have recommended me.
ELM: It’s interesting.
FK: I’m shocked, because it seems like it should be my thing.
ELM: Coming from a Reylo, which is literally a romantasy.
FK: I know. It is. But—and yet, somehow…
ELM: Literally.
FK: I guess that’s my way of saying, you know, if people—
ELM: Oh, no, that’s fantasy. That’s a sci…it’s a scimance.
FK: No, it’s Star Wars. It’s fantasy.
ELM: Oh, it’s not a space—
FK: It’s much more fantasy.
ELM: Space-based—
FK: It’s space-based fantasy. Yeah.
ELM: You’re saying that this is not interesting, speculative…
FK: Yes! Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying. [both laugh]
ELM: [laughing] All the cool technology.
FK: That is not what Star Wars is about.
ELM: You’re right, you’re right.
FK: Anyway, OK. All right, what else do we have to say? [laughs]
ELM: So, you know, I absolutely get Anon’s feelings about feeling snobbish or, you know—
FK: Right.
ELM: Like, “Oh, that’s so annoying.” Because, like, yeah, it would annoy me too. Right? If I saw this happening in my fandom? Especially if I didn’t think it was the best the fandom had to offer.
FK: Right.
ELM: Because it just sort of feels like, it sort of feels like, you know, one of the things I’ve really struggled with as a journalist working with editors about fanfiction stories—and this has happened to me multiple times—is they’ve come and they’ve said, “We want a story about fanfiction. We love this topic, we love your writing, whatever.” And I’m like, “Cool. OK, well they’re networked texts. Let me tell you, here’s some ideas about how they all work together as a unit, blah blah blah.” You know? Like, it’s a—
FK: Mmm hmm.
ELM: And I’ve gotten a response a few times of, like, “Oh no, we need, like, can you just profile one fanfiction writer?”
FK: Right.
ELM: “Can you just focus on one story?” And it’s like, no! You know?
FK: That’s beside the point.
ELM: And, like, I say this as someone who’s really happy to, like, lovingly write a rec for a single story where I’m saying, “Look at this. Look at this one story.”
FK: Right.
ELM: But that’s really different than—it just feels like people are outside fandom—outside fanfiction fandom, only engaging with one thing, it just kind of feels—it doesn’t—I mean, this is overstating it to say it feels like a “fuck you” [laughs] to the fandom.
FK: Yeah yeah.
ELM: But it doesn’t feel great in relation to the fandom, I would say.
FK: I will say that, I think there’s another aspect of it, which is, the frustration when people decide that this is the fic that they might try.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: And then refuse to engage with any of the rest of it. You know, not just like, “Oh, you picked this one.” But like, “You picked this one, and you’re not going to go looking for any others.” You know?
ELM: Yeah, yeah.
FK: It’s a little bit like…I mean, I think people who read romance novels have had this experience, where people go, “Well, I don’t like romance novels except this one—”
ELM: Mmm hmm.
FK: “—which was good.”
ELM: Sure, sure.
FK: And you’re like, “OK, wow, you liked that one. What about this and this and this? I could offer you them.” And they’re like, “No. Uh uh. [ELM laughs] No.” And you’re just like, “OK, but why? You clearly didn’t think it was that good, then, if you’re not even willing to, like…” You know?
ELM: Yeah.
FK: And/or, your judgment about the genre is such that you are willing to be someone who’s just broad-minded enough to read one, but not not enough [laughs] to actually get to know it, right?
ELM: Yeah, sure.
FK: And that was—I mean, that was certainly how I felt about a lot of, sorry to be gender-essentialist, but [laughs] there were an awful lot of young men who read “Harry Potter and the Lessons of—and the Method of Rationality” who then refused to interact with any other fanfic.
ELM: I mean, did you want those young men to interact with any other fanfic?
FK: Well, some of them were people who I was actually friends with, you know?
ELM: Mmm. OK.
FK: People who I actually liked and was friends with, in the context of technology spaces and so forth, and who had interesting ideas about, like, fandomy topics, and things—
ELM: Mmm hmm.
FK: —who I could get into a discussion about a character with, you know? But it was like they just could not—they just had these blinkers on, right?
ELM: Yeah. Yeah, totally.
FK: And I feel like that—I mean, obviously that’s a very specific thing in that context, but I suspect that that’s one of the things that our anonymous person is, like, annoyed about, too.
ELM: Yeah. Yeah, totally. For sure. All right, this is a fun topic to kind of lightly complain about.
FK: [laughs] Yes, and hopefully relatable to our listeners.
ELM: Yeah, I hope so.
FK: OK. On to the next?
ELM: Yes! I will read this one. All right, this is also from an anonymous asker. We got a lot of anonymous asks over the holiday season. OK, so Anonymous says:
“Hello, long time listener, first time asker, and an avid genfic fan. I listened to your special episode and normal episode on genfic and found that neither really touched on any of my experiences as a gen fan, and I thought a lot about why that could be. That’s when I realized that my entire gen fandom experience is actually (mostly) separate from my fandoms and ships in my ship-focused fandoms, which seemed to me the bulk of what was discussed and focused on.
“In my experience, even though I love gen, what I find fannish in gen fandoms and fannish in ship fandoms are different and rarely overlap. So when much of the discussion is around, quote, ‘Why aren’t people writing more gen in this ship-focused fandom?’ it feels alien to me, because I rarely cross the streams like that.
“One of the biggest fandoms on AO3, Batman, has a huge gen community focused on the complicated relationships between Gotham’s heroes, which I feel little to no ship feelings for and tremendous gen feelings for. The three top quote-unquote ‘ships’ on the AO3 are all gen. Transformers is another fandom I feel a ton of gen feelings for, but that’s less about relationships between characters, and more on the interesting alien worldbuilding and politics that Transformers writers will create. Or even back in the day with Homestuck, where romantic friendship is one of the culturally significant relationships for the aliens there, and the same importance as other non-platonic types of romance and even primarily ship focused fics—if they are long enough—often need to put some focus on who the ship’s romantic friendship partners are.
“I’m not entirely sure where I’m going with this, but just that the idea that because I write and read a lot of gen doesn’t mean I feel like I need to write and read gen for my non-gen fandoms. It’s kind of like shipping I guess? Just because I like het doesn’t mean I'm interested in reading het ships in my fandoms I got into for a slash ship. I like OFMD for its main ship. I have no interest in writing or reading gen about it. Not that I don’t care about the platonic relationships. I just don’t feel fannish about them. To be honest, it's really rare for me to feel really fannish about a romantic ship and a platonic relationship in the same fandom at the same time. Just like it's rare for me to feel really fannish about two different ships in the same fandom at the same time.
“I know lots of people have lots of different experiences with this, but I wanted to throw my two cents in there about it. Love the show, Anon.”
FK: Ooh, what a great letter.
ELM: Yeah!
FK: And, you know, that got me thinking about my own, like, experiences of this and feelings about this, and made me wonder if maybe my having been involved in ship fandom has made me, like, less able to find genfic in fandoms that I’m more interested in gen stuff about, and I wonder whether I should go and seek that out. So thank you, Nonnie, for making me think of this. I should see about fic [laughs] for some fandoms that I’ve not been very fic-ish about because maybe I would like the gen there.
ELM: Yeah, I think it’s interesting. I mean, I think this comment also reflects sort of…you know, for me, historically, yeah, I often have a ship in my fandom, right? I guess always. But when I’m in a fandom, I’m in the fandom…like, I’m not there—I guess the ship is really important to me?
FK: Mmm hmm.
ELM: But I’m also, like, there, you know what I mean? That’s not very articulate. [laughs]
FK: Right, you’re not just there for the—the ship may be the thing that you’re writing about, but you’re there for the whole work, not just for the ship.
ELM: Right, right. And, like—
FK: Whereas there are people I know who are there just for the ship—
ELM: Yeah, exactly.
FK: —and are not interested in the whole work. That’s definitely something that happens.
ELM: Yeah, I guess this is really interesting to me, and I really appreciate Anon writing in, because I do think that, yeah, everyone has really different experiences with this, and what Anon’s saying here feels quite distant from my own experiences, in a way that I find interesting, right? I think it’s interesting that you’re, like, “Oh, maybe this is a route in for me.” But, like, it has me thinking about, like, I can’t imagine being in a fandom and not kind of caring about one of the relationships.
FK: Mmm hmm.
ELM: You know what I mean?
FK: Sure.
ELM: And I also can’t imagine being in a fandom caring about one of the relationships and not caring about the constellation of other relationships and the world, you know what I mean? It’s hard for me to imagine liking Our Flag Means Death—
FK: And not wanting to read gen set in that world.
ELM: Yeah, right. Exactly. And, you know, I think that my critique for myself would be like, “Oh, am I more likely to click on this if it’s got the ship in it than if it doesn’t?” Yes.
FK: Right.
ELM: And that is a critique, because obviously, I mean, you’ve read the fic I’ve written. A lot of my stuff—
FK: Yeah.
ELM: I care a lot about the other relationships, right? And I care a lot about group dynamics—
FK: Right.
ELM: —and the different ways that, you know what I mean? And so that is—this is something I wanna self-critique, obviously, is, like, well then I still do privilege the ship. But I can’t imagine—it’s hard for me to put myself in Anon’s shoes. I’m very interested to hear about it, obviously.
FK: Right.
ELM: But I can’t imagine, you know, having these really different angles.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And, like, in this one I’m shipping, in this one I’m genning, you know?
FK: Yeah yeah.
ELM: Because for me, being in a fandom is doing all of those things at once.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And then critiquing my own—
FK: Right.
ELM: —leanings within that space.
FK: I’m not sure that—I agree with you in that I think that in fandoms where I have a pairing that I’m into, a romantic pairing, I am pretty much always also interested in gen.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: But the thing that I was thinking about here in specific was, like, there are a bunch of Star Trek shows that I don’t actually have a ship in. You know, whatever, like, in Deep Space Nine, I’m like, “Oh yeah, ha ha, you know, Garak and Bashir, you know, that’s cute when it goes across my dash,” but I don’t really care.
ELM: I was like, “Wait, isn’t that the one with the famous slash ship?” Wow.
FK: Yeah, I mean, that’s fine. But, like, I’m not going to—I have no interest in reading an epic-length story about the love of Garak and [ELM laughs] Bashir. The fanart’s cute, you know? I find it charming. But I’m not gonna—and that has sort of stopped me from reading a lot of fic in that fandom.
ELM: Mmm hmm. Mmm hmm.
FK: Because although I’m really involved—like, I’m very invested in many of the characters, but I just have never really, like, found a starting point.
ELM: Hmm.
FK: And this makes me think, oh, well, maybe what I need to do is, instead of being in this mindset of always sorting things by ship, and [laughs] finding stuff that way often, you know what I mean?
ELM: Yeah yeah yeah.
FK: I need to rethink how I’m approaching reading fic for that whole fandom, and then maybe I still will enjoy some fics that have relationships in them, but if I’m reading the fic for the gen—
ELM: Mmm hmm.
FK: —for the world-building, maybe I’ll discover a bunch of stuff that I really love that’s great, you know? That’s not primarily shippy. I don’t know.
ELM: Get out there and do it!
FK: Yeah! I am looking forward to it, in my copious spare time. [ELM laughs] It’s gotta be better than Star Trek novels. That’s all I’ll say.
ELM: I mean…
FK: With the few exceptions of Diane Duane. Diane Duane has my heart, [ELM laughs] but, uh, you know… [laughs]
ELM: Yeah, no, it’s super interesting. And I wonder—I bet Anon is not alone. I bet a lot of people do it this way, right? You know?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And similarly, like, it reminds me a bit, too, even though gen isn’t, like, [laughs] a marginalized group, but it reminds me of the trans fic conversation, or the ace fic conversation, or whatever. Obviously, I would want it in the fandom I’m already in.
FK: Right.
ELM: You know what I mean? Whereas some people would be like, “Oh, we’re all here, because of this character.”
FK: [laughs] Right.
ELM: Or, “We all came here, we’re all in that spot,” right? You know?
FK: Right right right.
ELM: And so I think that obviously people are motivated by different ways in, here.
FK: Yeah, and people have different attitudes towards, like, I thought it was interesting that they were saying, like, “I would never want slash in my het fandom, or het in my slash fandom,” or whatever, you know?
ELM: Yeah.
FK: And I was like, “No, actually, most of the fandoms that I’ve been in, like, I have been interested in more than one ship.” Maybe not primarily, but I’ve, like, enjoyed—whatever. Like, in The X-Files, don’t you worry! I have enjoyed plenty of slash fic within The X-Files, even though I’m obviously a Mulder/Scully person for my whole life, right?
ELM: Sure.
FK: You know, and so that’s just also a different way of approaching fandom, I guess, you know what I mean?
ELM: Yeah yeah yeah.
FK: It’s just, we all come to these things really differently, and sometimes it’s like, no, I’m really into this particular flavor and I don’t want any others, and other times it’s more sort of omnivorous than that.
ELM: Yeah, interesting.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Thank you, Anon.
FK: Yeah. Really, really wonderful to get, I mean, you already said this, but this is one of the reasons I love having people write in is that [laughs] our two viewpoints are not the only two ways that people interact with fandom ever, you know?
ELM: It’s weird. It’s weird that you would suggest that. Yeah, shocking.
FK: Yeah. Totally. OK, onward?
ELM: Yes please.
FK: OK. This one is also from someone anonymous. These are probably not all the same person, although I am now imagining, what if they were.
ELM: Incredible.
FK: [laughs] OK, anonymous asks:
“Hi, I am new to the podcast and just listened to the episode on copyright with EGT. I found it super fascinating! I am in a lot of fannish spaces but fanfic has never clicked with me personally. What EGT said about characters being archetypes is the most sense it has ever made to me, lol.
“I am surprised at how negative fan spaces are about the new LLM and AI collage tools, because I thought they were doing something pretty conceptually similar to what fanfic and fanart creators are doing: taking elements of other peoples’ work as a starting point for making new material.
“I promise I’m not being dense—I’m just not sure what the difference is. Does the use of computers change things for people? Or is it the profit motive of the companies involved? It just sounds strange to me that, on the one hand, everyone agrees that Anne Rice was batty for trying to control how people engaged with her writing, and, on the other hand, everyone’s upset that the algorithms are getting too much out of the work they’ve chosen to put up online.
“The podcast eps I’ve listened to have been very insightful and nuanced, so I’m sure if you choose to respond to this, you will be able to articulate what I’m missing here.”
And that’s from an anonymous person, who I think is brave. [both laugh]
ELM: I think that they are putting a lot of faith in us to answer this with nuance, but we can try.
FK: [laughs] OK, what’s your shot?
ELM: AI. Let’s do it. OK. There’s a few things going on here. What were those two suggestions? Is it because of the—
FK: The profit motive or the use of computers versus humans.
ELM: Yes and yes.
FK: Yep.
ELM: Like, yes. For the profit, yes yes yes. And I think that looms over everything.
FK: Yeah, the degree to which fanfiction writing is a space that is, like, the monetization of fanfiction is such a big discussion, it’s not a—it’s like—yeah. Profit is a scary and—it’s not good. Like, it’s just so antithetical, I don’t even know how to say how strongly that reaction comes up.
ELM: Right, and so, like, you have this idea of, “I put it lovingly on the internet for free, and now you’re gonna scrape it and then charge a ton of money for people to use it?”
FK: And specifically, “I put it on the internet for free, and I’m not allowed to profit from it, because it belongs to other people, supposedly.”
ELM: Yeah.
FK: “Oh, so there’s one rule for me, and another for thee, oh large, you know, AI company?” [laughs]
ELM: [laughs] Right. Yeah. “Oh, large AI company.” Man who loves “Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality” [FK laughs] running that one right there. I actually don’t know about Sam Altman. I’m assuming he’s also a little cult-like weirdo, like they all are.
FK: I mean, we can just make the assumption, it’s fine.
ELM: So awkward.
FK: These are, you know, many of these are people who I have known and [ELM laughs] experienced deeply and liked, even, sometimes, and they are all little freaks, because we all are, ultimately.
ELM: [laughing] OK. Anyway. [FK laughs] OK, so profit, yes, and computers, yes. Definitely. I think that our conversation with EarlGreyTea68 helped articulate for me, and the article that she wrote, you know, this kind of idea of—and talking to other copyright scholars about this too, this kind of idea of, like, why are the human copyright laws just, they just transfer over to a computer?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: I don’t know. There’s a lot of machines that now do things humans did, are they treated the same way legally—you know what I mean?
FK: Right.
ELM: There are many other examples where those aren’t one-to-one equivalents, right? And so, you know, early on in the AI stuff, when it was really kind of coming to the mainstream, about a year ago, or a little longer, I did find the argument that, oh, a large language model is just doing what we already do at scale, you know? I read a bazillion books, I synthesize them in my mind. There’s a finite number of words, and I’m reconstructing the ones that I’ve—you know what I mean? I found that to be compelling, and now I’ve thought about it for more than three seconds, and I don’t find it that compelling anymore, because my brain is not a computer with millions and millions of data points.
FK: Yeah, I mean, I think that one aspect of it is the fact that—I mean, people, again, this relates to the profit thing, too. I think for people who fanfic has never clicked for, or who have not been involved in fanfic as a community, often—I mean, you were saying this earlier in this episode—don’t understand the degree of network and community that this is, right? And by its nature, an AI cannot be part of a community that way. The creator of an AI maybe can.
ELM: Right.
FK: You know, like, if I train a language model and I’m developing it, that person can be in community with me.
ELM: But none of these jokers are in this community. Absolutely not. Right.
FK: Exactly! Exactly, right? And I do think that fandom would have a very different attitude toward somebody who, in an ethical way, wrote a bunch of fanfic or got permission from people and built their own model and had it produce things and was doing that in conversation with other people—
ELM: I don’t think that—
FK: I think that—
ELM: I don’t think they get permission from that many people.
FK: I agree, but I’m just saying, like, I could imagine a way that somebody could be doing this in a community-oriented way that I think would be a lot less controversial. The issue here being that this is, like, a big, faceless, totally uninterested, totally unengaged, like, this is not—there’s no community here.
ELM: You say they’re faceless, but in fact they have faces and they talk a lot on Twitter, or X.com as we know it now. [FK laughs] You can tell them by their blue checks and the words “venture capital” in their bios.
FK: Right.
ELM: They would really love it if we could stop reading books and just have books summarized to us—
FK: That’s right.
ELM: —because that would basically be the same thing.
FK: They’re basically, like, they’re as different from my interests and ethos as a fanfic writer as I think it’s almost possible for a human to be. [laughs]
ELM: What did I see the other day? I don’t think this was a VC, but it was this kind of brainworms that they have, where it was like, “If you could create a clone of yourself—” This wasn’t that crazy philosophy professor, was it? I think it was. Do you know that philosophy professor? The, like, conservative woman who doesn’t let her children eat candy on Halloween?
FK: What?!
ELM: Don’t worry about it.
FK: Of course it’s—if this person didn’t exist, they would be born out of the internet like Athena from the head of Zeus.
ELM: I’m pretty sure she was the one who said it. It was something like, “If you could clone yourself and then your clone could read all the books for you and then give you summaries, would you do that?” And it’s like, “Why do you hate reading so much? You’re a professor.”
FK: Yeah, that’s—no. I would not— [laughs]
ELM: No, I’d be jealous of my clone for getting the pleasure of reading!
FK: I wouldn’t do that! [laughs]
ELM: And getting all the things you get from reading that allow you to be a better reader and writer.
FK: And also all the things from reading that a summary is never going to give you.
ELM: Yeah. I’m gonna fact-check that one.
FK: Great.
ELM: I’ll tell you all about her in the show notes.
FK: Yeah. But I do think, maybe to get back to the point, I do think that this, like, I do think that the anonymous person here, I see why they’re comparing it, but I think that that’s from a very product-, not process-oriented viewpoint.
ELM: Mmm hmm. Mmm hmm.
FK: And it’s the process of it, I mean, OK, the product is also the problem to some extent, but I think that the emotional is coming—like, the emotional reaction is coming from the process—
ELM: Mmm…
FK: From the fact that the way that this is being made is so antithetical to everything.
ELM: I think the product is the problem too. The idea that they’re gonna scrape all your stuff and then they’re gonna make shitty AI—or, like, use the stuff that’s scraped for these LLMs that are now going into every software that you don’t want it in, that’s coming from our work.
FK: But that’s—that is the process. What I’m saying is that the product—
ELM: It’s also the output. They’re charging—
FK: But if the output was good, people would still be mad.
ELM: The output will never be good, in that way. That’s not realistic.
FK: Yeah, but my point is, that if it was, if you did have an AI that was producing, like, fanfic, for instance, that you really, really wanted, like good fanfic, people would still not like that.
ELM: Yeah, that’s true. That’s true.
FK: They would not want it. They would still be upset that their stuff was being scraped.
ELM: Right.
FK: They would still be upset about the entire situation, because the whole process is antithetical to the process of creation of fanfic. And if you’re coming from outside that community, and you’re only reading the product, then I can totally understand why that might be kind of opaque.
ELM: Right, but I think that the same—I mean, it’s the same for all those authors whose work appeared in the corpus, who are now suing, the people in The Authors Guild who are now suing.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: The product matters too, right? Because they’re saying, “My hard work—” And, yeah, their monetary, you know, it’s a monetary risk to them too.
FK: Right.
ELM: Has been taken, and now they’re gonna use this to generate things that they’re gonna sell.
FK: Right.
ELM: So that is the same issue that fanfiction people have.
FK: Right. Yeah, I mean, I do think that there is a little hypocrisy in the way that some people talk about it sometimes, which I think this anonymous person is pointing out, which is, if your only annoyance is that you have created something that in an infinitesimal way is being transformed and turned into something else, if that is your only problem, then I think there’s some hypocrisy there.
But I think that the cultural context of it, that is a really, really reductive way to talk about what’s happening, right? [laughs] The cultural context of this is super different from that. The cultural context of fanfic, yes, it’s true, that fanfic authors are reading Anne Rice’s stuff and, you know, taking bits of it and making things. But they’re doing that in a critical conversation, in a relationship with a human, you know, in an emotional reaction, typically not with a profit motive, you know? All of these things which modulate that occurrence.
ELM: Yeah, I mean, I think it is worth acknowledging. I mean, it’s beyond, first of all, Anne Rice didn’t want people writing fanfiction because she was kinning her own protagonist.
FK: Yes. [laughs]
ELM: And didn’t like people doing things with him.
FK: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. That’s more or less why almost everybody who is really mad about fanfiction is upset about it, you know? They’re either kinning their protagonist—
ELM: I’m sorry—
FK: —or their protagonist is— [laughs]
ELM: —no one is—no one ever did it like her.
FK: No one— [laughs]
ELM: No one ever kinned like her.
FK: No one ever could do it like her.
ELM: No, no one ever could create such a character to kin as she did.
FK: That’s true. You’re—I’m—she was the dark queen. [both laugh]
ELM: But I think to Anon’s point, I think it is worth acknowledging, you know, and yeah, all of these contextual underpinnings of, “We’re doing it for love, and gift economy and networked texts, blah blah blah, community, community.” Fans get super weird when people do things to them that they’re doing to other people’s texts, including, you know, recording a podfic, right?
FK: Oh yeah. [laughs]
ELM: The things that people have said about podficcers, in the past, are bananas, right? You know?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And, like, or translating, or “I wrote a remix of your story without your permission” or whatever.
FK: Yeah yeah yeah.
ELM: Or, “I’d like to write a remix of your story, may I please.” And they say, “How dare you.” You know?
FK: Right.
ELM: That’s been documented for a very long time, and so I think that’s important to say. I don’t want to give fanfiction people full carte blanche here, because I do think that is a weird hypocritical element of fanfiction, the fanfiction world, and yeah, is that because of those contextual underpinnings of, “Oh, we’re not making any money, and now you’re gonna take this from me too? Now you’re gonna lovingly read my words out loud [FK laughs] and post them and say that you loved my story?” I don’t know. I think that’s part of it, but I also think that there—I mean, I think there’s a little bit of the Anne Rice in all of us, in that regard, right? You know? “You’re not doing what I—like, I had this in my head, and now you’re trying to do something else with it? He’s mine.” You know?
FK: [laughs] Yeah, absolutely, absolutely.
ELM: I don’t know. I think the one final thing I’ll say on this, too, is I think that fanfiction people’s responses are not—they’re not separate from, and in fact they’re extremely overlapping with, the stances of the majority of creative professionals.
FK: Mmm hmm.
ELM: Particularly novelists and other people who write prose.
FK: I think that’s true.
ELM: Right? And so it’s not like they’re out of step. If novelists were like, “I love this,” [laughs] and fanfiction writers said they hated it, then I think that we could really put a lot of weight on those contextual factors, like the non-monetization elements.
FK: Right.
ELM: But to me, when I look at this, it just feels like it’s in step with the rest of people who are making creative works, so—some of whom I think have extreme nonfactual stances about what AI is and what it does.
FK: [laughs] Yes. Yes.
ELM: But that’s cool.
FK: Yup. [laughs]
ELM: All right.
FK: That is what it is. Thank you so much for writing in. I was glad that we were provoked to talk about that a little more, and I think it might be time for a break.
ELM: Yeah, let’s do it!
FK: K.
[Interstitial music]
FK: All right, we’re back.
ELM: We’re back.
FK: Business.
ELM: I’m gonna do it this time. Patreon.com/Fansplaining. That’s where we do our business. [FK laughs] So we have a lot of different levels you can pledge at. The money that people pledge pays for our transcriptionists, it pays our hosting costs, it pays us to publish articles like EarlGreyTea68’s piece on copyright and fanworks. We also have another article coming out, I think, this month. More on that soon. We would love to be able to publish more.
And so if you have even $1 to spare, as much as $10, $15, $20 $30, $50, $1,000 a month? At $10 a month, we still have a couple of our festive Tiny Zines leftover, and we would be happy to send one out to you. And in fact, if you pledge at $10 a month, you will also get the $5 award, a little fan-shaped pin.
FK: Cute little pin!
ELM: You get those both in a little package. Not a package, it’ll be in an envelope.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: So that’s Patreon.
FK: And if you don’t have or don’t want to spend money on Fansplaining, you can still help us out by spreading the word about the podcast, especially about our transcribed episodes. Every episode is a transcribed episode, including all the special episodes. And [laughs] you can also send us questions and comments, like the ones that we—
ELM: Why didn’t you just say transcripts? [laughs]
FK: Because I couldn’t think of the word at the minute.
ELM: Go ahead. Questions and comments.
FK: You can also help by sending in questions and comments. That’s how we make episodes like this one, obviously, but it’s actually how we get a lot of ideas for our episodes. So you can do that by emailing fansplaining at gmail.com. There is a little box on our website, fansplaining.com, that you can type things into. Our ask box on Tumblr is open, anon is on. That’s fansplaining.tumblr.com. You can also send us a voicemail at 1-401-526-FANS. I think we have a voicemail later in this episode. You get to hear your voice on this podcast.
ELM: You think?
FK: I know. [ELM laughs] I think and I know. I know it, and I’m thinking about it.
ELM: Yes. Also as a reminder, voicemail-wise, you don’t just have to call the number. You could also record yourself, keep it under three minutes, please, send an .mp3, send a .wav, and we will include your voice that way. And a final piece of business, we are on Tumblr, Bluesky, Instagram, X. [FK laughs] Someday, I’ll just say that list and guess what won’t be at the end.
FK: Yup. It’ll just be dropped.
ELM: That day will happen, sooner or later.
FK: [laughs] Probably sooner. OK, let’s get on to the rest of our comments and questions.
ELM: OK.
FK: I guess they’re really questions, mostly.
ELM: All right, I’m next.
FK: You gonna read the next one?
ELM: I’m next.
FK: K.
ELM: OK, this is not from an anonymous person, yay!
FK: Wow.
ELM: Thank you, Ari. I don’t—I’m not saying that like I’m trying to shame anyone for being anonymous, that’s totally fine. But this is from Ari. [FK laughs] And they write:
“Hi Flourish and Elizabeth,
“I love the pod! I’m making my way through it somewhat slowly, and I had this thought while listening to AMA #11—” Oh my gosh, we’re on #18 “—when you were talking—” I don’t know when that was. A couple years ago. “—when you were talking about the etiquette around tagging relationships and surprises in fics. I apologize if you’ve covered this already, but it’s something that’s been on my mind for a while.
“I’ve noticed some differences in my fandom in how people define major character death. For example, in one of the fics I read—a big fandom phenomenon—they had not tagged MCD because no one with a POV in the story died, but many other characters very dear to our hearts—and not so dear—that had large roles in the story did die. They were very clear about how they meant MCD, and it became somewhat of a game, thinking about who would die and who was safe because they had a POV.
“This week, I read another fic that was tagged with MCD but then quickly reassured us that no one in the main ship would die, and they were the only two with POVs. In the end, it was the villain and his sidekick that died, which I think must be who the tag was referring to, though it didn’t really feel like it was MCD. I think what I typically associate with MCD is one of the big characters that everyone loves dying. It has very sad connotations for me, like I can expect to be crying by the end of this.
“Also muddling all this is that most of the fics that tag MCD are canon-compliant, since everyone dies in canon, and most AUs that I’ve read are fluffier and don’t include a lot of deaths. One that I remember as an AU with MCD had one person in the main ship who died. I can’t remember if he had a POV, but he definitely counted as a major character. Another one was longer, and while it was updating, the author was reminding people a lot that there was MCD tagged and everyone reading was trying to guess who would die.
“I realize it may differ somewhat from fandom to fandom, but my question is, what is the common practice of tagging MCD in general? Is it less common in other fandoms? How do people determine who’s a major versus minor character? I haven’t been in fandom for long and this is my only real fandom—I’ve dabbled in some others—so I have no idea.
“Thanks, Ari.
“P.S. Can you guess the fandom?”
FK: [laughing] I cannot guess the fandom, but—
ELM: The only one I can think of was Rogue One, everyone dies.
FK: Yeah, everyone does die in Rogue One. Maybe.
ELM: Maybe.
FK: All right, I guess that’s our guess. OK.
ELM: That’s my only guess. That’s my only guess.
FK: All right, but this is interesting, because I realized that I have tagged things MCD, and I have read things tagged that way, and I have never really, like, dug into my expectations about it.
ELM: Go back. What—OK. When you tagged it MCD, who died?
FK: Um—
ELM: First of all, did these stories—did you do it more than once, or just once?
FK: This was in Harry Potter a long time ago.
ELM: Who died?
FK: And I think that it was actually just—
ELM: Voldemort.
FK: I don’t remember. I don’t remember. I know that I’ve done it. I wrote some, like, really tra—stories when I was a teenager where a lot of people died.
ELM: Wow. [laughs]
FK: Like, rocks fall, everyone dies, kind of situations, [ELM laughs] you know? Tragedy, whatever. Like, Harry died, or something, you know? But it was always—
ELM: But not Snape or Hermione.
FK: Oh, I’ve definitely—I’ve definitely read and I think I’ve written ones where Snape died.
ELM: Tragic.
FK: I don’t know about Hermione.
ELM: Tragic.
FK: Point being, though, that I realized, thinking about this, that both when I read fics like that, and when I’ve written them, my assumption has been, number one, that it’s either a major character in canon or a major character in the fic. So, like, if the fic is about a minor character in canon and they die in the fic? Then tagging it major character death would make sense, because the fic is about them, right? And they die.
ELM: Mmm hmm.
FK: And I’ve always understood it to be that, like this person is saying, that the major character death is somebody you’re going to be sad about. [both laugh] And, you know, that it’s going to be—that it’s going to be sort of a tragedy that that’s going to be a central thing, that it’s going to be—maybe not the point of the story, but that it’s going to be, like, it could hurt, as opposed to, like, “Well, they fought and then the villain died at the end,” you know? [laughs]
ELM: Right, right.
FK: I also would have been surprised to have something tagged major character death, and then if the villain was not written sympathetically, to have it be the villain dying at the end. I’d be like, “Oh, I guess.” You know?
ELM: Yeah. Yes. I think—so I’ve never written major character death. I don’t want to kill any major characters.
FK: I don’t anymore, either. This was definitely when I was an angsty teenager, to be clear. [laughs]
ELM: Yeah, that tracks. And I tend to not read it, because, like Ari says, usually when I see that, I assume I will be very sad. Right? [FK laughs] You know, I always think about that famous Sherlock fic where he has a brain tumor.
FK: Right.
ELM: He dies! It ends with him dying of a brain tumor.
FK: Yeah. He actually dies.
ELM: Did you read that one? Because he dies.
FK: No, I didn’t. I heard about it. [laughs]
ELM: Yeah, it was, like, one of the most famous Sherlock fics, at the time when that fandom was really popping off. But it was real sad. And you knew going in. You, like, sign up for it. You’re like, “This is gonna be devastating.”
FK: Yeah. I read a bunch of stories in which, like, Mulder dies, and yeah. They tell you. They’re like, “Mulder dies in this fic.” [laughs]
ELM: But it’s interesting, well—
FK: It’s like, 100,000 words long, and at the end of it, he’s dead! [both laugh]
ELM: It’s interesting, though, because you know, like—I’m like, we’re talking a lot about Harry Potter in this one. Whatever. It is what it is. You know, my ship for the whole 2000s was Remus/Sirius. They both, canonically, spoiler, they both die, right? You know?
FK: Yeah. Yes.
ELM: But because there was no AO3 then, there was no major character death warning, and a lot of the time, you’d be reading something that was indicated to be canon-compliant, and you knew they were gonna die, right?
FK: Right.
ELM: And I feel like that felt different than them being killed off in the story in some other way, right?
FK: Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah. Yeah.
ELM: Like, if they die in the canonical way, you’re like, this is sad, but if—
FK: But I know that I was in for this. [laughs]
ELM: Yeah, but if they kill them, like, if they just knock them off some other—in, like, some—that feels cruel, you know?
FK: Right.
ELM: And I’m not really sure what the distinction is there. I guess I’ve already made my peace with the canon.
FK: Yeah. Yeah, I think that’s right. I also would feel like, you know, I mean, so this is something that happens in Reylo fandom, also. One question is, yeah, if Han dies in the fic, do you tag it major character death?
ELM: No. Not in a Reylo fic. I agree with Ari. I think that it’s about POV characters. If it’s a shippy fic, a member of the ship.
FK: Mmm hmm.
ELM: That’s how I’ve always encountered it. Obviously, there’s no rule about any of this stuff, right? You know—
FK: Yeah, that’s also what I would always assume. Yeah.
ELM: Yeah. If I saw major character death in my current fandom, I assume that Charles or Erik or both will die.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And usually I don’t want that because I just, like, no thanks, you know?
FK: Yeah, I mean, character death is a different thing from major character death.
ELM: No, if I saw the warning, the Archive warning “major character death.”
FK: Yeah yeah yeah. Exactly.
ELM: Character death, sure. When someone writes “character death” in the tags separately—
FK: Right.
ELM: —with no major Archive warning, I assume it’s someone that I’m, like, “Oh, I liked them but—”
FK: Not gonna be central, yeah yeah yeah.
ELM: But I also find, too, with major character death, in my experience, it’s very central to the plot.
FK: I agree with that, yeah.
ELM: Whether it’s Sherlock dying of a brain tumor—
FK: Yup yup yup.
ELM: —or, like—
FK: Mmm hmm.
ELM: —tragedy. And so then you know you’re signing up for that particular kind of story, where it’s just tragic from start to finish.
FK: I agree.
ELM: And then, sometimes, you’ve probably experienced this too, I have read major character death ones where it’s felt like the death is cheap, you know? Or just meant to be, like, a cruel twist of fate, or whatever.
FK: Right.
ELM: You know? And that feels different, too, because then that feels almost incidental to the story, as opposed to—
FK: Yeah.
ELM: —once again, Sherlock has a brain tumor. That’s, like, in the summary, right? You know?
FK: Right.
ELM: So…
FK: Discussing this—and this is slightly off topic—[ELM laughs] but discussing this is—
ELM: OK.
FK: No no, it’s not that off topic. Discussing this is really reminding me that some years back in the romance community—and I have unfortunately forgotten the title of the book—there was a big drama because there was a book in which the first chunk of the book was about a hero and a heroine, and they’re in love, and then the hero dies.
ELM: Mmm hmm.
FK: And then the second half of the book is about the heroine finding love with someone else.
ELM: Uh oh. Subversive!
FK: Right, and it has a happy ending, and it’s not, like, you know, it was a romance novel in which, you know, you clearly were supposed to be happy with the ending for the heroine—
ELM: Mmm hmm.
FK: —and, you know, the second hero.
ELM: You know, I just, I do love the way you say “hero.” Hee-roh. Hee-roh.
FK: It’s just how I say it.
ELM: Yeah, it’s very folksy.
FK: [laughs] I can’t help having been born in Nebraska.
ELM: That’s true.
FK: Anyway! So I mean, I wish I could remember the title of this book. I’m sure somebody who’s listening to this will remember it, if they were paying attention in romance world, like, 10 years ago, or so.
ELM: Hmm.
FK: But, you know, it was a real question of, like, is this, you know, within romance, because there’s an expected way the plot goes, and, like, is this sort of false advertising for people, because they’re going to fall in love with this one character and then have their heart broken? And I always, I think, you know, that’s making me think about this with major character death, too.
ELM: Well, yeah. It’s interesting, too, when this email came in, and I was tagging a fic that I wrote recently, and I was thinking about all the plot points in the fic, you know, and what tags should I use, something something something. And my beta on the fic was like, “I don’t think you should include any of those.” You know?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Obviously, you gotta warn, if there’s something triggering, right? You know, like, there’s no death or anything in the story, right? But, like, I was thinking about what I was trying to articulate what this letter made me think about, not about MCD, but about, like, you know, kind of accuracy-based tagging versus sort of like vibes-based tagging.
FK: Right.
ELM: Right? Like, you read this. It’s a fake relationship story, and—
FK: Yup.
ELM: —am I tagging the fake relationships? No! But, like, accurately, you know what I mean?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: But then, also, then it’s like, false advertising for someone who really wants to read one of those as a real relationship, right? And so, like, it’s that sort of—
FK: To be clear, I would absolutely not tag the fake relationship. I would tag—I would write “fake relationship” and then I would not tag the relationships, because that’s not—
ELM: Yeah, like, you know, I’ve written stories where I’ve included a relationship that I didn’t ship but it was in the story.
FK: Oh, absolutely.
ELM: Didn’t endorse it, but it was there, you know what I mean?
FK: Yeah, but this is different because these were not real relationships—
ELM: You’re right.
FK: —and there was no, like, yeah.
ELM: But you know what I mean, though? It’s just kind of this idea of, like, there’s so much in Ari’s statement that I am like, “Totally, totally agree.” But it’s so vibes-based, right? You know?
FK: Totally.
ELM: Like, if you were trying to explain this to someone who wasn’t in fandom, and you were like, “Well, it’s got to be the POV in half of the ship to be counted as a major death,” right? And they’ll be like, “Yeah, why not Han Solo if he dies?” And you’re like, “No, is that Reylo?”
FK: Right. Right, exactly, exactly.
ELM: You know? And that sounds bananas, right?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: But it makes total sense to me, because of tagging being vibes-based, you know?
FK: Right. I agree.
ELM: And just, like, you wanna give people a sense of what they’re getting into—
FK: Yeah yeah.
ELM: —without sort of misleading them by being a weird stickler and setting rules, you know what I mean? So…
FK: Yeah, agreed. Agreed. Yeah, for sure.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: All right. Ari, you have quickly caught on to the nuances of this situation.
ELM: I think so.
FK: Great job. [laughs]
ELM: If anyone is in a fandom or a ship or whatever who has had a vastly different experience than the three of us, I would love to hear about it.
FK: Absolutely.
ELM: So, also, taking guesses on what fandom that is. Everybody dies. [FK laughs] I think my guess is pretty good, to be honest.
FK: Yeah. I’m—it could be some Eastern fandom.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: Like, a Chinese, uh—
ELM: It absolutely could be. I would have no idea.
FK: It really—in fact, I would be very unsurprised if it was some Chinese thing.
ELM: Yeah, you could tell me every single character in The Untamed dies in the last scene and I would be like—
FK: And I would be like, “Oh, wow. I guess they do.”
ELM: “Wow, that’s pretty tragic. OK. Sorry, guys.”
FK: That is—that is a classic…
ELM: Yeah.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: It’s true.
FK: All right. OK, so I put these last two together because I think they sort of bounce off of each other, so let me read the penultimate one.
ELM: OK.
FK: All right, this is from an anonymous person.
“Hey guys, longtime follower, first time asker, and I just want to vent for a minute. I recently saw a post where someone was saying that they were having a hard time seeing a manga that I like—She Loves to Cook and She Loves to Eat—in a non-fetishy way after learning about a particular kink, feederism. Part of me wants to make a post—not a callout or a vaguepost, just a general post—about why that isn’t the case, featuring images from the manga, including a panel addressing that particular concern, along with a little spiel about genre conventions and the like. But part of me feels like I would be feeding the trolls or getting into an argument that just isn’t worth getting into.
“TL;DR: I saw a take on a piece of media I enjoy, and I can’t decide if I want to make a post talking about the poor reading comprehension required to have such a take or if I should just leave well enough alone.”
And that’s from Anonymous.
ELM: Thank you very much, Anon. I like the TL;DR. Really makes me feel like we really are on Reddit, in our AFA.
FK: Yeah, it does. It does.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: And I have a short and pithy response to this.
ELM: Go ahead.
FK: You already know [ELM laughs] that you don’t want to make this post. I hope that in the time it took us to respond to you, by writing this out, you know what your heart is telling you is true, which is: Don’t make this post! Who cares?
ELM: Yes. [FK laughs] And… You know, I also think it wouldn’t be super fruitful to make that post because, frankly, I’m not sure I agree. I mean, if we’re taking the substance of the comment, there are people reading that manga, I am quite certain, who are reading it as a feederism story. I don’t know this manga, [FK laughs] but if it’s about one character cooking for a romantic partner who is eating it, there are people who are reading it that way, because some people like that. There are people who are looking at pictures of feet [FK laughs] that I just see a foot, and they’re thinking sexy thoughts. You know what I mean? You can’t control, I mean, to take it in an extreme—you know, there’s people looking at pictures of children, et cetera, et cetera, you know? You could do any example of this, right? You know, you could say, if it’s important to you, to say, “This was the author’s intent.” Sure. But you’re not gonna stop that person from feeling triggered by it, and on the flip side, you’re not gonna stop people who are into that from reading it that way.
FK: Right.
ELM: And so it just feels, like, fruitless—like, yeah, no matter what this topic was, if you wanted to write it and you were, like, questioning whether you should make the post, the answer’s obviously no. But for this specific one, too, I would even say, no, don’t make that, because I don’t actually think that this is something that you can really argue with people about, because you can’t control the way other people are ever gonna read something. You know what I mean?
FK: I do know what you mean. I think that we have just given some great, sage advice.
ELM: You know, here’s my biggest piece of advice. Get—you probably already have this, because most people do—get some DMs. [FK laughs] Get someone you can DM. I think that it’s very important to be able to DM something that you think is a bad take, to your friend or friends.
FK: Yes. Oh yes.
ELM: Sometimes even if the other person doesn’t respond.
FK: And maybe this served that for this anonymous person, right?
ELM: We’re the DM. We’re the DM.
FK: Maybe we’re the people that you’re DMing, basically. I feel honored.
ELM: I just, like, can’t endorse this enough for anyone who struggles and feels like they wanna make callout posts, or whatever. It is always a better idea to put it in the DMs.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And after—and honestly, I feel great when I do that, right? You know? [FK laughs] Because sometimes I’ll be like, “God, I wanna tweet about this, it’s so annoying,” or whatever, and I’ll write a tweet, and I’ll erase it, like, five times, and I’m like, “It’s not worth it.” All I had to do was message it to you and be like, “Would you look at this stupid thing?”
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And you just have to respond with an emoji, and I’d feel like, “OK, it’s done now. [FK laughs] It’s out of my system.”
FK: It’s really true. I also have this feeling, like, I mean, this is similar to, you know when you, like, OK, well, you’re not on Reddit, so, but you know sometimes something shows up and it’s like an “Am I the asshole?” post, and there’s all of these people with a response—
ELM: You think that—I’m sorry, you think that someone needs to be on Reddit to be familiar with “Am I the asshole?” posts?
FK: Well, no, I don’t really think that. I’m just trying to, you know, not assume that—
ELM: A thing that’s ubiquitous on every social media site on the internet?
FK: —on everywhere on the internet. That’s true. OK. I mostly encounter it on Reddit, because that is where I get a lot of my social media these days. But it’s true that that exists everywhere on the internet. But you know, sometimes you look at it and, like, literally 10,000 people have responded to it, and they’re all like, “You’re the asshole, yes, you’re the asshole, you’re the asshole.” And sometimes, somewhere in me, at least, there’s a desire to respond and be like, “Yes, you’re the asshole, [ELM laughs] and here’s all the reasons why.” You know? And I just, [laughs] sometimes I just have to sit there and think, what could I be adding that these 10,000 people have not already said? [laughs]
ELM: That’s so funny. Obviously, the solution to that is to send it to me or someone else and be like, “Can you believe?”
FK: [laughs] Exactly!
ELM: Because that’s gonna be so much more validating also than just shouting, adding, being 10,001, right?
FK: Yeah, shouting—yes.
ELM: To say to your friend—
FK: Yup.
ELM: —and for your friend to be like, “I can’t believe you brought this to me. [FK laughs] This is the most absurd thing that I’ve ever read.” Right?
FK: [laughs] Right, exactly. Exactly.
ELM: And they’re your friend, so they’re probably likeminded, you know?
FK: Right, exactly.
ELM: I mean, you know, so they’ll—
FK: They’re going to agree with you about this, or if they don’t, it’s going to be interesting to talk about and not like when the internet doesn’t agree. [laughs]
ELM: Yeah, you can be like, “I mean, like, I think that maybe you’re taking this one a little too far.”
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Or like, “This guy seems totally normal. It’s totally great that he threw out all of his girlfriend’s things [FK laughs] because they brought her joy, and he found them weird,” which is literally 90% of those posts.
FK: That is 90% of those posts. It’s true.
ELM: Yeah, you know that whole meme where it’s like, “It’s always the sickest sounding girl. And she’s like, you know, ‘I raise iguanas and I knit my own iguana socks,’ [FK laughs] and he’s like, ‘I threw away her iguanas. I didn’t like that she liked them.’”
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And you’re like, “God, ladies, get away from these guys.”
FK: It’s true, like, yeah. A lot of the real answer to “Am I the asshole?” is, “Consider dating women instead.” [FK laughs]
ELM: It’s always the guy saying it, too. It’s like, “Aren’t I right, fellas?”
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Like, “Wasn’t I right to throw away her beloved collection of items?”
FK: I do appreciate that the internet usually tells them that, no, they are not right. [both laugh] All right, all right, all right. OK. All right. I think we should listen to this final voicemail, because it actually connects to exactly what we’re talking about here.
ELM: All right, perfect. Let’s play it.
FK: All right. Let’s do it.
Voicemail: Hi, Fansplaining. This is dia star, and I am calling about the episode about what fans owe to each other. You mentioned at the end of the episode that you’d like to hear from other fans, particularly those who might have a more optimistic take on the possibility of incentivizing or just helping fans to not be dicks on the internet. And I think I am such a person. So I wanted to chime in.
I think that there are a lot of fans who don’t want to be jerks. And I do think that there is value in providing people with heuristics that help them [laughs] to achieve that goal. And one particular example I wanted to give is from my own life. I’ve been in fandom on the internet for quite a while, and I really do try not to be a jerk. One thing that really sticks in my head when I get a rude ask, or I see a post on Tumblr that I disagree with that has a take that I think is wacky, and as I start to compose a response, this XKCD comic will flash into my head, it’s at xkcd.com/386. It’s called “Duty Calls.” I think a lot of people may have seen it. It’s the one where there’s a little stick figure person sitting at a computer, and someone is saying, “Are you coming to bed?” And the person at the computer says, “I can’t, this is important.” And the other person says, “What?” And the person at the computer says, “Someone is wrong on the internet.” [laughs]
And when I start to, you know, compose some, I don’t know, fiery response to something on Tumblr, that comic flashes into my mind. And I often will actually say out loud to myself, “Someone is wrong on the internet,” and then just kind of laugh at myself. And it helps me think about, like, “Do I really need to go off on this person? Do I really need to contribute to this discussion?” And usually the answer is no.
And I guess I would be interested in hearing whether other people might also have, you know, similar little heuristics or, you can call them memes, because that’s really what they are, that help them, and if so, then I think that does make me feel hopeful that things like Destination Toast was suggesting, you know, memes that can be passed around that give people these, you know, little sound bites that will hopefully pop up in their head when they’re about to do something dumb. [laughs] You know, go off on somebody unnecessarily. Yeah, I am hopeful about that. I think that most people in fandom don’t want to be jerks and just sometimes don’t know how, or they’re overtaken by impulse. But I think there are ways to get around that.”
FK: Right! Like, someone is wrong on the internet. [laughs] Great advice.
ELM: Yeah, I really enjoyed the delivery. I can picture it in my head so clearly, because I’ve seen it so many times. But hearing it, like, described and then read out loud was very pleasant. In a way, like, I listen to NPR a lot, and sometimes they do segments where they, like, talk to photographers, and you’re like, “OK, we’re doing a lot of work here.” [both laugh]
FK: Well, I also just loved it because I have literally done the same thing. I have sat there and typed up an angry response to something, and then thought of that XKCD comic.
ELM: And Nick pokes his head in, and—oh, oh.
FK: Yeah, no, literally, I—
ELM: You haven’t reenacted the comic.
FK: Not only has this happened where I am, like, about to argue with someone on the internet and Nick is like, “Are you ever coming to bed?” [ELM laughs] But also, [laughs] which is shocking, because Nick goes to bed way later than I do.
ELM: Yeah, yeah.
FK: But sometimes you get into a real fight. [laughs] But also, like, yeah, sometimes I literally am writing out my angry response, just flames on the side of my face, and I think of that XKCD comic, and I delete it. This has happened to me, too.
ELM: That’s funny.
FK: She’s right!
ELM: Yeah.
FK: There is a good heuristic that has helped me be less of a jerk on the internet.
ELM: Yeah, I mean, maybe it’s something about it, too, like, I think that, you know, I love Toast. Hi, Toast. You know, I did kind of chafe at the idea of creating these sort of acronyms, because I’ve just seen the way that people wield them, and actually, since we recorded that episode, I have seen people weaponizing the ones that already exist, right? And being like, “This is the LAW, and you’re violating it!” And I’ve just been like, “Oh my God.” And I don’t think that that would happen with an XKCD cartoon. That’s just, like, a fun little callback mantra, sort of, you know what I mean? And so—
FK: Yeah, it’s making fun of the behavior that we all know is innately make-fun-of-able. [laughs]
ELM: Yeah. And also, yeah, and it’s more light-hearted even than something like “touch grass,” which I initially liked, and now is starting to feel a little—
FK: Mean.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: It is. It feels mean to me sometimes.
ELM: Yeah. Yeah, something about it. Like, in the beginning I was like, [laughs] “Yeah, people really do need to get out there and touch some grass.”
FK: Yeah—
ELM: And now I’m just kind of like, “Eh, I don’t know…” You know?
FK: It’s also dismissive in a way that suggests that, like, you, the enlightened person, has recently touched the grass, which is rarely true. [laughs]
ELM: It’s like, you are typing out the letters, t-o-u-c-h g-r-a-s-s on your phone.
FK: Exactly! You are literally sitting here telling someone to touch grass in the moment that you are arguing with them on the internet.
ELM: You’re touching your own bed right now. You’re not on the grass. [laughs]
FK: [laughing] Exactly! Exactly, right? So it’s, like, it is self-defeating in that way.
ELM: Yup.
FK: You’re not taking your own advice.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: Whereas “someone is wrong on the internet,” it’s like, “Yes, and I bet they’re saying the same thing about me, which is why we’re arguing right now, it’s so true!”
ELM: Do you think someone’s ever made one where there’s two—they put the comic, double it, side by side, [FK laughs] just mirror it? You know, and it’s two different couples being like, “Honey?” [laughs]
FK: Yeah, which really reminds me of the, you know, the classic XKCD-like, but not actually XKCD thing with, like, you know, “Their evil hordes.”
ELM: Oh yeah, yeah yeah yeah.
FK: [laughing] “Their, you know, wicked castle. Their—”
ELM: “Our glorious whatever.” Yeah.
FK: Yeah. [laughs]
ELM: Totally. Yes.
FK: Yeah, exactly.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: I like it. Great—I mean, I just, I wanted that to be our little button, because I think it’s such good advice. [laughs]
ELM: Yeah, no, and it’s also, it is nice to hear from people who are hopeful about this. Obviously, we were begging for it, and I’m glad that people delivered, because, I don’t know, it’s nice to hear that people aren’t as defeated [laughs] as we are about this topic.
FK: [laughs] That made me feel a little—that made me feel a little less defeated.
ELM: Yeah, me too.
FK: Great.
ELM: Made me wanna go look at some XKCD. It’s been a while.
FK: XKCD is a gift and a joy forever.
ELM: Did you ever read the dinosaur cartoons, back in the day?
FK: Yes!
ELM: I associate them with a similar era of when I was like, “Lookit! A little comic strip on the internet!”
FK: Oh yeah. Yup. Yeah.
ELM: It’s a different vibe, I would say.
FK: It is a different vibe. And I used to read a bunch of other comic strips on the internet, also, and those were different vibes in themselves, too, so…
ELM: That Oatmeal one.
FK: Well, Oatmeal—The Oatmeal is a—I don’t know if that’s a strip. I’m thinking of Sluggy Freelance, do you remember that?
ELM: That sounds vaguely familiar. Describe it.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Do some captions.
FK: It was the one that had, like, a bunny with a switchblade, and it was much more like a classic newspaper cartoon. There were, like, characters.
ELM: Sure.
FK: And they had little, you know.
ELM: Do you, you know I worked at the New Yorker for, like, 10 years. Would you like me to describe some of their cartoons to you? OK, so there’s two people, and they’re sitting at a table, [FK laughs] and they both have glasses of wine.
FK: OK, great. Great.
ELM: Can I make a fake one off the top of my head? I don’t know if I could do it.
FK: I don’t know.
ELM: It’s hard! It’s hard to mimic.
FK: It is hard! It’s actually hard. They’re very much a genre, and it’s not an easy genre. All right, that’s it as far as our AMA items.
ELM: No more. No more A’s for today.
FK: Yeah. There is one tell left.
ELM: [laughs] Wow, you did not make that cool.
FK: I can’t make anything cool.
ELM: Hey, can I do an AFA? “Ask Flourish Anything?”
FK: Sure! [ELM laughs] What are you gonna ask me? [laughs] What’s your question?
ELM: Flourish, is anything new with you? [both laugh]
FK: That’s the question you’re asking. Yes! Yes, I’m gestating a human.
ELM: That’s a weird way to say it.
FK: Yeah! I love Star Trek, what can I say?
ELM: What if I pretended I didn’t know? [laughs]
FK: That’s not what we’re gonna do to any of our—we’re not—first of all, I don’t trust your acting ability enough, and second, we’re not gonna do that to our listeners.
ELM: Flourish, I’ve been in so many plays. I’m good at acting.
FK: That does not mean that you’re gonna be able to sell us on you not knowing that I’m pregnant. So, yeah, I’m pregnant!
ELM: Yeah!
FK: There we go. That is not at all an awkward way to announce it, but how else you gonna do it? [laughs]
ELM: Yeah. I mean, you could do it, by, um—
FK: All right, all right, I will—You know what I’m gonna do? I’m going to say the things that everybody asks immediately afterwards.
ELM: OK, OK.
FK: Which is: I’m due in June.
ELM: All right.
FK: Yes, we do know the sex and we have a name, but we’re not telling anyone until the baby is born.
ELM: Wait, you haven’t told me the sex. This actually is breaking news.
FK: Yeah, but we’re not telling anybody until the baby is born.
ELM: [gasps] Oh my God!
FK: And I will tell you that the name is not Harry. [laughs]
ELM: Thank God.
FK: [laughs] I know many fandom people, at least two fandom people, I shouldn’t say many, I know at least two fandom people who have named their child Harry.
ELM: Different Harrys, though.
FK: [laughs] Nick just stuck his head in and asked, “Are you giving anything away?” No! I said that the name will not be Harry. That’s not giving something away. [laughs] Nick is very, very, very committed to—
ELM: Secrecy.
FK: Secrecy. Which is fair, because I am, too, but I don’t think that that is violating it.
ELM: I was gonna say, are you familiar with that couple that they make fun of, like, straight baby announcement, like, gross baby announcements?
FK: Yes!
ELM: Like, “He put the turkey baster in my whatever.”
FK: Yes. Yes.
ELM: And, if anyone hasn’t seen these, they are so funny, because the woman is the—she obviously comes up with all the jokes. It’s clearly part of it is she doesn’t tell him any of them in advance, [FK laughs] and so they’re always in that position where, like, he’s standing behind her with his arms around her—
FK: Mmm hmm.
ELM: —and then she says one of these awful things that you could, like, see on Facebook, and he just dies, every time. His reaction is extraordinary. I’ll put one of them in the show notes.
FK: Yeah, put them in the show notes, because that’s where they—we’re not doing that.
ELM: You and Nick should do that, but he would be the one saying the words, because he’s so good at making cringe-worthy jokes.
FK: [laughs] No! No! We’re not doing that. We’re not doing that. In fact—
ELM: All right.
FK: No.
ELM: You have a few months to think about the different kinds of TikToks you could make to talk about this. [laughs]
FK: There will be no TikToks. There will quite likely be no, like, social media posts in general. I just feel like you, our listeners, deserve to know. [laughs]
ELM: You’re not even gonna put it on, like—all right, this is false. You’re gonna put it on Facebook, because you—and you’re gonna put it on Instagram.
FK: When the baby’s born, sure.
ELM: Because you normally post in both those places. You gotta put it up there.
FK: I’ll do it when the baby’s born.
ELM: OK.
FK: But I have no desire to, like, post a bump update. [ELM laughs] So I hope no one’s hoping for that! [laughs]
ELM: So yes, yes, I’m throwing the gender reveal party. I’m trying to decide what would cause the most destruction.
FK: [laughs] If there is a gender reveal party of any kind, I am going to demand that the gender that is revealed is a swarm of bees, please.
ELM: That’s part of my plan to cause a lot of destruction.
FK: [laughs] Great! We’re on the same page.
ELM: [laughs] All right, well, congrats, Flourish.
FK: Thank you.
ELM: Pretend I never heard this before.
FK: [laughs] OK, well, there we go. All right. I guess that is actually it, unless you have some, you know, important news that I don’t know about for real.
ELM: Nope, nope. I would not break it right here.
FK: Great.
ELM: Wouldn’t that be funny if I had, like, huge news and then I waited until this exact moment?
FK: I worried about it a little bit when you were like, “Should I pretend that I don’t know?” I was like, “Uh oh.” [laughs]
ELM: Very paranoid. All right, well, it’s exciting. That’s the news.
FK: All right! I will talk to you next time, I guess.
ELM: OK, bye, Flourish!
FK: Bye!
[Outro music]