At 19, Ask Fansplaining Anything can drink in Canada! :)
😭 (a reference to an exchange in our AFA #18—thanks queersintherain hahaha, we will remember for the next one)
I'm currently an undergrad at UCSB doing an autoethnography on fandom and my solitary consumption of it. I just listened to your guys' episode 8 and was hopeing to get some more information. A big question I still have is can you be in a fandom with out producing and interacting with others as long as you consume the content that fans create.
Hi onionhairs! Elizabeth here. So the first thing I'd recommend is probably checking out more episodes—that was a very early conversation (we are now on episode 193!) and definitely one we've been building on a lot throughout the past seven years.
But tl;dr what I would say is 1) "being in fandom" is about self-definition (if you say you're in fandom, you are, regardless of what you "do" as a fan and 2) discussing what "counts" as fandom is contextual, and it's very important to define that context.
If you're talking about "participatory fandom," for example, a lurker who doesn't engage with other fans in any way might not "count." Scholars and industry researchers often look at participatory fandom because those are the fans they can see—they can't write a paper or report on the thoughts or feelings of lurkers, because how would they know what they are? Deeper into the industry side, someone might define "fan" as a person who spends money on a ticket to a thing: it doesn't matter if lots of other people think of themselves as fans, because your only metric is a fan's monetary value. (This is reductive, but as the saying has historically gone in Hollywood, it's all about "butts in seats.")
Speaking as a person who lurked in fandom for about 15 years, I think you're well-positioned to write about these paradoxes, and about feeling like you're part of a community even though it's totally one-sided—you really feel like you're in the room, but nobody knows you're there. Or at least that's how I always felt! It's a hard thing to talk about with folks who've never lurked—especially because the "participatory fandom is the only fandom that counts" argument can be delivered very loudly—and harder still to find other lurkers to relate to, since they are usually still lurking.
The classic internet community ratio is 90-9-1: 1% creators, 9% commenters, 90% lurkers. Anyone who creates fanworks can see this imbalance in their stats. The idea that "fandom" is only the people in that 10% has never been true, at least as long as fandom has been conducted in digital spaces where people could lurk. And I think the answer to the "can you still be in fandom if [x]" question is always "yes"—the real question here is what does it mean to be "in" a community when you aren't communicating with anyone else?
Anonymous asked:
Hi! Spotify doesn’t seem to have the episodes before 95. Is that a mistake or is there anywhere else I can listen to them?
Hello! So when we launched Fansplaining, there were no podcasts on Spotify at all, and if memory serves, when they did introduce them it was only fancy people at first and—I feel like it was a few years before normies were able to submit any old podcast? We first got on there in 2019, hence episode 95. I'm not sure it's possible to add older episodes—like a lot of podcast-listening apps, Spotify does not host audio, so Fansplaining is automatically populated there via our actual hosting platform, Libsyn. We can look into it, though!
In the meantime, Libsyn of course has our whole back catalogue: https://directory.libsyn.com/shows/view/id/fansplaining This page also has links to the show's RSS feed as well as iTunes page, which should have everything back to episode 1. And of course you can listen to each individual episode on the website, where the show notes and transcripts live: https://www.fansplaining.com/episodes/
Do you have any advice, guides, or opinions on how write a good rec list?
WELL! This is Elizabeth, and as the longtime co-curator of "The Rec Center" newsletter (with @hellotailor) I do have *a lot* of thoughts about rec lists. 😊 I'm delighted you asked, because as I'm sure both Flourish & I have mentioned on the podcast, rec-list-making is way less prominent now than it has been in previous fandom eras, and I think that's a shame. Reccing can be a great critical tool, and rec lists make a fanwork space richer—not least because they can move readers beyond the mostly quantitative metrics of the AO3.
I'll put the rest of this under the cut:
fansplaining reblogged
Anonymous asked:
dear both, thank you so much for your recent disability and fandom episodes, it’s so much appreciated. but the amount of times elizabeth said “not to center myself/my experiences…” only to then do exactly that was a bit frustrating. i know it’s probably to relate to the guests and their lived experience, but why not just say so. anyway, this does not take away from my gratefulness that you two tackled this important topic and centered disabled perspectives.
Hi anon! Elizabeth here. Thanks so much for your kind words about the episodes—we're very glad to hear that they're appreciated. <3
As I was editing the audio, I did notice that I was using that phrase repeatedly, and yeah, I do regret not just...saying the directly relevant thing that connected our participants to my own lived experiences (as Flourish does at one point in part 2 without disclaimers). And I was thinking about why I felt so compelled to couch it that way—I'm still not wholly sure, but I do wonder if it's about a reluctance to claim any part of a "disability" framing when it comes to myself. For the physical difficulties that I share with some of our participants, I always think of them as "this post-concussive shit I have to live with," even when that shit is debilitating or bars me from certain social (and even professional!) situations. For my struggles with mental illness—and especially for my experience in a mental hospital—it's not something I like to talk about, period. Just mentioning it on the podcast, even without a scrap of detail beyond "this happened"...was distressing. Writing about it here is distressing. But Rebecca was describing something directly relevant to my life, so I used that to frame my question, and her answers were very valuable to me personally.
I think there's a delicate balance in these kinds of episodes—Flourish and I do have to situate ourselves to some degree (throughout the race and fandom episodes, we're always popping in with "as white people," which I think is pretty important for a white-person-hosted convo about race) but we also don't want to take up too much space. I don't think we always get it right, but we do always try. And I think this repeated phrase reflected my uneasiness about my positionality—throughout the episodes we discuss not knowing what it's like to use mobility aids, for example, which is also bringing ourselves into the discussion? So why did I feel the need to slap up a big disclaimer when describing something that could actually be framed as a disability? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Idk idk.
ANYWAY, SORRY TO NAVEL GAZE, but you did hit on something that I struggled with putting these episodes together, and I wanted to offer a bit of what I've been mulling over. Thank you again for writing in, and I hope what I write here makes sense.
I was going to just reply to this, but my reply got too long! So:
When disclosing lived experience, it's especially difficult to disclose instances of iatrogenic harm. Medicine, including psychiatry, is upheld in our society as the source of all true knowledge and authority where health is concerned - not the patients themselves. To suggest that those institutions are not just failing people but actively harming them means not just risking disagreement but pushing against the things society has brought us up to believe. (This is one of the reasons Mad Studies has a heavy thread of psychiatric survivor experience within it). The medical model of disability, which positions disability as a 'defect that medicine will appear and solve so that you can be normal again', is a really weighty hurdle to get through.
To add to this, disclosing a psychosocial disability (Madness, or mental illness, or however you wish to term it) can be even harder. Discussions & representations of disability remain, at large, focused on physical disabilities. I read a lot of Disability Studies books that just plain don't discuss anything mental at all. It is no coincidence that I personally began to accept calling myself disabled only when I developed a physical disability at 33, despite having been psychosocially disabled my entire life, and despite some of the things I experienced being physical. Now some people deliberately don't like to identify as disabled, but this doesn't feel like what's going on here - it feels very much like Elizabeth is describing having realised how that subconscious belief that her experience isn't "a real disability" is manifesting linguistically.
So for what it's worth: if you (Elizabeth or anyone else!) feel like you are disabled, you are. It doesn't matter whether you have an 'official diagnosis' or not, because accessing those can be difficult, dangerous, or even impossible. If you've spent time thinking on it and educating yourself, self-diagnosis is absolutely fine. Likewise, if you do or don't want to use the disabled label/term, then that's okay too. It's all a personal choice and one that should only ever be yours to make - it's just one that we all have to work through messily, because we are brought up to believe a doctor has to tell you you're disabled.
Most importantly, I want to mention that it was an honour to bear witness to Elizabeth's story, and remind both her and everyone that stories of our illness don't spring into the world as fully fledged novels. As disabled, chronically ill, Mad, neurodivergent people - whatever we may be - part of our journey is wrestling that experience into a story that we can make sense of. Sometimes we choose to share that in fragments along the way; sometimes we wait until we're ready to tell it all; sometimes we are never ready, and keep it to ourselves. (That repeated need to explain ourselves to both ourselves and others is something disabled people share with trans people and other queer identities - a reason I think it's so important for marginalised people to listen & learn from one another).
It is not the neat restitution package of 'healthy to disabled/ill to healthy again' that we see in inspiration porn. It is messy, complicated, and riddled with misunderstanding. And that's okay.
This is Elizabeth again—just wanted to highlight the responses from Rebecca here and @sophiainspace in the replies, which are beautiful and thoughtful and infinitely more articulate than mine. I appreciate these thoughts so much, and I imagine some of our other listeners/readers will as well. 💗
Anonymous asked:
dear both, thank you so much for your recent disability and fandom episodes, it’s so much appreciated. but the amount of times elizabeth said “not to center myself/my experiences…” only to then do exactly that was a bit frustrating. i know it’s probably to relate to the guests and their lived experience, but why not just say so. anyway, this does not take away from my gratefulness that you two tackled this important topic and centered disabled perspectives.
Hi anon! Elizabeth here. Thanks so much for your kind words about the episodes—we're very glad to hear that they're appreciated. <3
As I was editing the audio, I did notice that I was using that phrase repeatedly, and yeah, I do regret not just...saying the directly relevant thing that connected our participants to my own lived experiences (as Flourish does at one point in part 2 without disclaimers). And I was thinking about why I felt so compelled to couch it that way—I'm still not wholly sure, but I do wonder if it's about a reluctance to claim any part of a "disability" framing when it comes to myself. For the physical difficulties that I share with some of our participants, I always think of them as "this post-concussive shit I have to live with," even when that shit is debilitating or bars me from certain social (and even professional!) situations. For my struggles with mental illness—and especially for my experience in a mental hospital—it's not something I like to talk about, period. Just mentioning it on the podcast, even without a scrap of detail beyond "this happened"...was distressing. Writing about it here is distressing. But Rebecca was describing something directly relevant to my life, so I used that to frame my question, and her answers were very valuable to me personally.
I think there's a delicate balance in these kinds of episodes—Flourish and I do have to situate ourselves to some degree (throughout the race and fandom episodes, we're always popping in with "as white people," which I think is pretty important for a white-person-hosted convo about race) but we also don't want to take up too much space. I don't think we always get it right, but we do always try. And I think this repeated phrase reflected my uneasiness about my positionality—throughout the episodes we discuss not knowing what it's like to use mobility aids, for example, which is also bringing ourselves into the discussion? So why did I feel the need to slap up a big disclaimer when describing something that could actually be framed as a disability? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Idk idk.
ANYWAY, SORRY TO NAVEL GAZE, but you did hit on something that I struggled with putting these episodes together, and I wanted to offer a bit of what I've been mulling over. Thank you again for writing in, and I hope what I write here makes sense.
Anonymous asked:
You can make bookmark collections on AO3, but they're less visible since they don't show up on a work, only on a bookmark.
Hello anon! Thanks so much for this message. This is Elizabeth, and for other folks’ context, this is in response to our last AMA, where a listener wrote in to complain about the current (mis)use of the "Collections" feature on the AO3.
So! I'm actually poking around and can't actually see the functionality you're describing. When I go into one of my bookmarks, I see these fields:
As far as I can tell—and posting here so folks can please correct me if I misunderstand it, I did read through a fair bit of the FAQ—this is just a shortcut to put any of your bookmarked fics into regularly created collections, which still leads to what OP was complaining about. From what I can see, you can’t make a collection within bookmarks? You could make a “collection” of sorts via bookmarking tags (it’s clear tons of people are doing this, based on the tags like “Faves” or whatever). Again, I could absolutely be missing something...
The question about user intent/desire versus the site’s UX/UI remains; I’m thinking again of the comparison we made in the ep to playlists, and how you want other people to see your playlists (probably? lol I assume) but the artists on Spotify or whatever don’t have all these randos’ playlists in a big prominent list along with the other metadata about their work. So many folks appear to be using both bookmarks and collections to save and catalogue for personal use—I’m curious how many people are actually trying to broadcast those lists. 🤔
ANYWAY please let me know if I (and Flourish, who also did some poking around with me) fundamentally don’t get what’s being described here. I’d actually like to make a collection of bookmarks! I just don’t want to put them in a capital-C Collection........
Following up on your fest episode: I'm trying to put together a fic/fanart prompt bingo in a small fandom with a lot of young fans who are unfamiliar with some of the old school fandom events, and I'm pretty baffled by the Ao3 prompt meme collection feature despite the help documentation. There's a lot of cool features but I'm not sure what is mandatory and what isn't (do I have to set a deadline if I want it to be open-ended? Do people have to sign up in advance? If they select a prompt, can someone else not use it?) I am super excited to introduce the practice of fests and prompt memes to my small fandom but I'm nervous that if it's not executed smoothly, people will not have much fun with it and not wanna participate in similar events in the future. Any advice for first-time prompt fest organizers?
Hello! Elizabeth here. Answering this on Tumblr rather than saving this for the podcast because I have limited experience with this kind of fest (Flourish has none!), and I'd love for folks with more experience to share any thoughts in replies/reblogs.
So! I cannot tell you what is mandatory (poking around on AO3 I'm immediately finding the Prompt Meme FAQ*, which seems pretty oriented towards participators, not mods) and I hope that someone can share any helpful posts (presuming they exist!) that break this down for you. But if all the questions you detail here are optional, then to make those decisions, I think you ought to base it on your/friends' experiences participating in prompt-oriented fests.
My two cents, with your specific questions: I think deadlines are good and helpful, and I think it's easier to introduce folks to this kind of fest if there is a set time period—when I think of the ongoing kink/prompt memes of yore, it's stuff on LJ and DW, where people were spending their social media time as well, and I think it's harder to keep something this open-ended on the AO3, which is not a place where people can "hang out" in that way. IDK, maybe folks are doing it successfully! But also, you know I love a deadline, so.... :-))
When I have participated in this sort of thing in the past, there is a set period for submitting prompts, but claims go up until the end of the fest, which feels like a nice balance of openness + deadlines. They've also allowed multiple claimants on a single prompt, which I like a lot; it encourages people to take ideas that really appeal to them, not whatever's left, and it's interesting to see different takes on the same prompts.
I think you could also be honest with folks and say you're new to modding and that this fest is a bit of an experiment, and then keep track of feedback from folks and any confusion you get from younger/newer fans. I also think being really clear about rules and guidlines are helpful for participants, so it's probably worth reading the FAQs of fests you or your friends have participated in and seeing the kinds of stuff people articulate there.
If anyone else has any resources/thoughts, please share them! And good luck organizing this @fairkid-forever!!!
*ETA: @naryrising very helpfully points towards this FAQ for modding, not participating. And see their reblog for additional info!
I just listened to your queerbaiting episode and I just wanted to say that I really appreciate the nuance you brought into the discussion. You managed to talk through some of the problems and questions I have when the subject of queerbaiting comes up and I love how you navigated the challenge of bringing that nuance and those questions and the nature of doing while still respecting the shippers who feel wronged. I shipped Destiel but never expected it to be canon and eventually I found it hard to stay in the fandom and I think you put your finger on why - particularly the part about fans wanting to be "right." I love the show - thanks for taking on such a loaded topic
Thank you so much, @sugarless5!! <333
In case anyone missed it, you can listen or read a full transcript here.
Am I delusional or did y'all do a deep dive at some point into slash fic, the women who write it, and all its implications, both empowering and problematic? I went through the archive and saw Slash: The Move and The Play but couldn't find Slash: The Discourse. Let me know!
Thank you very much for this question which was also sort of a suggestion! While we don’t want to set up an “ask and ye shall receive” precedent for ALL episode topic requests....
This conversation was loooooong overdue and even clocking in at more than an hour, it only touched the surface!
(hope you don’t mind that we straight-up lifted your title, @tsthrace. it ~felt right~)
Anonymous asked:
Hello! I'm curious to know your opinion. I've been working on this long fic for months. Ever since I started writing there has been a bunch of anon's under different names telling me how to write each chapter. Saying things like "make (A) do this", "(b) needs to do that." "I expect this to happen to (C)" Etc. On one hand I'm grateful for the feedback, after all what writer isn't, but of 10 comments, 9 are like this. I'm starting to feel my writing isn't good enough for my readers.
Hello anon! Elizabeth here. Hooooo boy let me tell you, as I was reading this I went on a **journey**. When I reached “9 out of 10,” I went, “WHAT.” I have a few thoughts, and without knowing the full context (what your story is like, what fandom it’s in, etc etc) some of this might apply and some might not. But I think it’s all generally useful for fic writers and readers to think about.
This actually got pretty long, so I’ll put my thoughts under a cut.
Anonymous asked:
Any advice for writing summaries for Fics?
Hmmm! Well first to tag recent Fansplaining guest @bettsfic, who has written many more fic summaries than me (this is Elizabeth) and probably has great advice on the subject (or perhaps has already written tips and can link to them).
But I do have some thoughts as a two-decade-plus reader of fic, and many years as a professional writer and editor who’s written a lot of, as we say, display copy (things like deks, subtitles, summaries, etc).
[Please take all of this advice with a grain of salt, because it’s fic, so people can do whatever they want!]
1) Fake it til you make it
If you’re having trouble writing a summary, the number one thing I suggest is DO NOT TELL US ABOUT IT. I may be a slightly choosier reader than some, but “lol I suck at summaries” in the summary (or the tags) is a huge turn-off for me as a reader. I know why people do it! It’s a bit of ironic cover, ~I’m worried this is bad so I’m just gonna beat you to the punch and say this is bad nothing matters ha ha ha.~ Many (all?) of us are guilty of this kind of thing somewhere in our lives, but you don’t need to do it! Just pretend you think you’re great at them, and plow ahead—and the reader will be more likely to go with you.
2) Quote yourself
The tried-and-true, most straightforward summary method is obviously a quote from the fic—an exchange of dialogue or maybe a short paragraph that really captures the essence of what happens in the story. Choosing a good exchange or passage is obviously easier said than done! A few things I’d recommend:
a) Don’t pull, like, huge blocks of text. I’d suggest this no matter what summary route you’re going, but I find people tend to do this with quotes *a lot*. Especially in the past few years, as phone-reading has become so prevalent, being hit with a paragraph the length of your phone screen makes most readers slide past, just because of the way our brains process information.
b) Don’t be afraid to mix and match, or to play around with your own words. You can pull out a bit directly from your story, or you can modify it, you can pair it with a fresh sentence that isn’t a quote at all. It’s fic, there are no rules.
c) Get another human to read it! Ideally a beta! Someone who’s read the story! A second opinion—someone who can say if they think the passage you quoted is misleading, or isn’t doing your story justice, or feels just right—is invaluable.
3) Distill your story into a tweet
This is a tip from my journalist self, originally suggested by a wonderful editor that I worked with for years. If I found myself spinning my wheels 2/3rds of the way through a piece, she’d say, “What will we eventually tweet to promo the piece?” I actually recommend this for all kinds of writing if you’re stuck. What am I arguing or showing or exploring? How am I going to convince other humans that the thing I’ve written is something they’d want to read?
Fic is obviously different from reported features or whatever, but I can’t think of a single fic I’ve read that I couldn’t promo in a tweet. I’m not saying you need to summarize the entire plot in 280 characters. But in a sentence or two, can you tell me what it’s about? That might be wholly emotional description—lots of fic has very little plot, of course. But it’s still about something.
Once you have this distillation, you can expand on it. Is this the information you want to give your readers in advance? Do you want to hold some of it back and tease? Do you want to give them more? You’ll be surprised how much clarity you have on your own work—what you’re trying to put out in the world—when you can describe it succinctly.
4) Situate the reader
So fic is different from other fiction because we already know who the characters are. But, importantly, we don’t know where you’ve placed them—where are they, in relation to the source material we probably already know? If they’re in an AU world, where will we find them at the start of the story? If it’s canon-divergent, tell us about that divergence—that’s the “what if” intrigue that will bring us in as readers.
Think about who has the POV, and if it’s only one person, decide whether you want to limit the summary to the way the world looks from their perspective. I recently finished writing a fic, and in my haste to get ~all the fun details~ into the summary, I included information that the protagonist would not have access to until the very end of the story. I want the reader to be deep inside her head, only seeing her limited perspective—and I want the summary to reflect that.
Even though you’ll get plenty of readers who don’t know the source (all our surveys show plenty of fic readers do this!), you can also send out signals to the people who do know the source/ship/etc. The protagonist doesn’t know the other half of the ship yet—can you use teasing language so *we* know who this stranger who comes into their life is before they do? Fic is full of this kind of pleasurable dramatic irony, and summaries are a great place to lean into it.
~~
I could go on and on, but I should probably cut myself off at some point lol. If anyone has any other resource/tip posts—summaries *are* hard, for all kinds of writing—please leave them in the replies!
Hey, I loved your most recent episode! Just had a question about Elizabeth publishing her fic. I totally get being hesitant to post a link to the published fic on a platform that is linked to the podcast/professional stuff, but would you be willing to share which fandoms the published fic are in? (I ask partially because I think the only fandom we have in common is Black Sails, but Elizabeth's takes on that show are Very Good and I started watching because of Fansplaining in the first place.)
cont. (Also, Flourish, re: Rise of Skywalker... I am sorry for your/our loss and I hope some excellent fix-it fic or meta sparks joy for you soon! I went to see the movie with my sisters (who aren't super fannish) over the holidays and even with them not being really into fanfic/transformative fandom, we left the theater yelling improvements to one another and had re-storyboarded it by the time we got home so. I feel you. It's bad.)
Hello! Elizabeth here. First of all, I am v flattered by the things you said about my ~Black Sails takes~ and I am thrilled that I got you into watching it!!!!! Thank you.
I read this ask and I was like, “uh I did say what fandom it was tho...” but then I looked at the transcript and I DID NOT hahhaha, just talked about it a lot. But I have mentioned it a bunch on the podcast over the past 18 months—it’s the X-Men film fandom, which tends to lightly center around X-Men: First Class, or the characters, anyway, a good nine years after the film came out, a delight. :-))) I am v sorry that I retreated from Black Sails before finishing any of the fic I was working on, because I got a bunch of encouraging messages about it, and I truly wish there was more Hamilton-oriented fic in the world (have you read everything on the list a friend and I put together in late 2017!) but it is what it is.
And re: Flourish, in case it wasn’t clear, Flourish wasn’t upset about TROS—when we recorded they had not seen it and continued to drag their feet for another endless week before giving in. For the record, I, a person who does not care about Star Wars at all, also spent the first four days after I saw it furiously re-storyboarding the film and thinking, “no, that idea would be good in fic; that one would be good in a film” and then screaming into the void. I DON’T WANT TO KEEP THINKING ABOUT THIS FILM!!!
Hi! First of all, love the podcast. I was wondering if you'd consider doing an episode about f/f shipping? You talk about queer ships fairly often but it's re: your m/m ships, and f/f shipping has particular properties/trends/tropes/problems etc that would be interesting to unpack both from a fangirl's perspective and an academic/critical theory perspective.
Anonymous asked:
I love how frequently you guys talk about fan studies (and to people who, er, study fans), but I've noticed that so much of your fan studies discussion was just... you guys talking about the CONCEPT OF fan studies, rather than actual fan studies. I would love to hear you guys dive a little deeper. What are some of these studies? What do they study? The discussion currently feels stale and superficial, and it's frustrating for me as a listener.
Hi anon! Elizabeth here. So…Flourish and I are a bit confused by this, especially after the most recent episode, when I specifically talked about the work of a whole bunch of fan studies scholars at the FSN conference, including:
- Tom Phillips on women’s wrestling fandom
- Briony Hannell on SKAM and teenage female Muslim fans (I didn’t name Briony in the conversation, MY BAD, though we do in the show notes)
- Kathy Larsen on “Bundy erotic fanfic,” the political as fandom and fandom as political (this paper, like many of them, is in progress, so I’m not finding anything on it online with a quick search)
- Cecilia Almeida Rodrigues Lima on shipping/activism/representation re: Brazilian f/f telenovela couples (we’ll hopefully be having her on to talk about this further—as you know we’re very into this topic)
- Emily Roach on antifandom and tinhatting
Obviously since this episode was meant to be an overview of the whole conference, we couldn’t go into any of these in great detail (though as we mentioned, the conference was heavily tweeted, so following the link in the show notes will give you a fuller sense of their presentations through the many, many tweets).
But we’ve also had a number of scholars on who talked about their work in-depth, and that’s why I’m particularly confused about this ask. Some define themselves as a part of fan studies, and others do not, though all their work touches fandom in some way. Just for reference, that includes (and is possibly not limited to, if I’m forgetting anyone):
- Ebony Elizabeth Thomas on race and children’s literature
- Evan Hayles Gledhill on fans through history, in particular 19th century female fans
- Casey Fiesler on fans mourning online (this was for a specific topic—we’d like to have Casey back for a full ep to talk about all her other work)
- Ludi Price on how fans organize and tag information
- Rukmini Pande on race and fandom centering whiteness in shipping (Rukmini is another person we’ve had on to discuss specific topics and who we hope can join us again)
- Rukmini Pande and Lori Morimoto on shipping and activism
- Stephanie Burt on…a lot of things haha, but especially fan taste cultures and (how fans engage with) trans representation in media
- Lori Morimoto on transcultural fandom
Whenever we talk about “fan studies” as a whole, it’s true, there’s likely to be a bit of discipline talk—this is the nature of academia, in my experience, and yeah, sometimes in grad school I got frustrated that we spent so much time defining our field (which I’m sure I’ve mentioned on the podcast was possibly more amorphous and big-tenty than fan studies).
I think for the last episode in particular, you can understand why we’d be discussing the field itself, fresh from their annual conference. Our conversation with Lori also spent a good deal of time with the field itself, because Lori is doing a massive amount of work trying to get scholars and fans to talk to each other, which inherently is more about fan studies and fandom as whole units than any subset or focus.
But taking stock of the field and what it encompasses matters as much as the content of these scholars’ work, in my opinion. Who gets to study fans? What work counts as “fan studies”? As you can see from the last ep, this has very real consequences: when a conference is overwhelmingly white, for example, or weighted towards male speakers, what sorts of fan experiences are likely to be overlooked and under-discussed? It’s analogous to discussing patterns in whole fandoms or across fandoms—we might see a racist incident in one place, but there’s a massive amount of value in looking at this in the context of “fandom at large,” as spurious as that term might be haha.
If we misunderstood this ask, apologies! Please help us understand what you meant? But it’d be a shame to suggest that the scholars we’ve had on aren’t discussing their work…
Hi guys! I recently marathoned Black Sails and i loved it! the only thing I'm sad about is that i didn't watch it in real time... I don't care if my ship is cannon, but I found that seeing it all at once means i know what happened to everyone, and I'm having a hard time shutting it off. I want to be into it, bc there are so many characters and ships i like in BS, but i don't know how to make the story feel open for exploration. any ideas or thoughts on how to incept myself into BS fandom?
Hello! Of course Elizabeth is answering this. This is a GREAT ASK, thank you, and not just because the entry point to this question is Black Sails ⚓⚓⚓.
(I’ll have you know this is one of, like, three gifs of Flint smiling in the entire series. I also googled “Black Sails happy” and…no one looked happy.)
OK so it seems like there are a few things going on here. Apologies for taking what’s ostensibly about one show and turning it into something broader, but I think it gets at fundamental questions of fannish engagement, so I’M GOING IN.
1) Watching/reading a series all at once
Flourish and I talk about this one a lot, because we (and many others) have observed that younger/newer Harry Potter fans approach characters and plot elements VERY differently than we do, and we chalk a lot of this up to reading the books as a complete text versus reading it with miserable long gaps in which to turn over every freakin detail only to have 75% of it jossed when the next book came out. In 2002 I legit read this one page of Dumbledore dialogue in GoF 100 times thinking there was a clue that was just…under…the surface.
I think that with some texts and with some fans, the serialized nature of TV and book series are the way in—we climb into those gaps and lingering there, waiting and obsessively turning things over and imagining all the branching possibilities, all the future reveals, all the resolutions, is part of the pleasure. I sure as hell wouldn’t have fallen for Sherlock if I hadn’t shown up to poke at the gaping emotional wound between s2 and s3. (Frankly if you showed me all four seasons at once I’m not sure I’d even like the show—my lingering emotional loyalty was the only thing that kept me saying anything nice about s4.)
If I had not watched Black Sails all in one go it would have been LITERAL TORTURE FOR ME. I had to pause for a week while traveling and I started to read fic that actually spoiled parts of the fourth season WHOOPS. :-/// But I can also understand how watching it all in one go wouldn’t give you enough space. But then, we watched the same way and I am deep in it, plotting out fic and everything. So maybe…
2) A complete text can stay with you but might not give you a way in
This happens to me with books *all the time*. I’ll read something that shakes me—I’ve often used the metaphor “knocks your world off its axis” when describing a really great book, like it can be the subtlest tilt and you’ll feel like everything’s changed. I think it’s pretty normal for texts to stay with you? If they’re good or if they touch you in some specific way? Especially if you’re fannish and really feel the media you’re consuming.
But one thing I often find about books is they’re more…complete. Even when television shows end properly, rather than being cancelled, they might stretch for longer than what was initially planned, for example, so it doesn’t feel like the arc of the plot was as carefully constructed—often it can’t be, especially with long-running American shows (and of course with classic episodic television, say, a monster-of-the-week show, it’s not even structurally designed to have the same sort of ~ABCDE structure as a novel might).
Black Sails is not one of those shows—they knew they were bringing the story to a close, and the entire show rests on carefully-plotted narrative arcs. (Not to mention there was an actual ~canonical endpoint for all the Treasure Island characters, ie where the book begins (like, sort of). I mean, there were also canonical endpoints for Jack, Anne, Vane, Blackbeard, Hornigold, and every other historical figure, but…)
Over the years I’ve joined fandoms for WIPs as well as finished products, and often for me fandom’s been a way of trying to mend the wounds of a media property I found incomplete, either narratively (with bad writing) or literally (like, when a show ends abruptly). I think for some fans, this is a crucial piece—they say that when they find something too complete, there’s nothing to mend.
3) Different modes of fannish engagement
So here’s another thing I’ve observed—different friends have different definitions of “fandom.” So people are like, “Oh yeah, I’m in the fandom, I love that show!” And I find out that means they enjoy the show and livetweet it and look at some gifs and that’s that. Which is totally fandom! And then there’s me, nodding nervously as I debate mentioning that, “Oh yeah, I’m in the fandom, I love that show!” for me means “THIS IS THE ONLY THING I WANT TO THINK ABOUT, HELP ME, I AM DROWNING.” It’s funny, sometimes I think about archetypal nerdboy fandom and its dick-measuring fact recitation, and then I think about all the times I tried to read the room to see if it was safe to let another person know how much I thought about something I loved, how much I felt about it. Even in totally fannish spaces, I still hesitate. :-/
There have been some things in the past few years that I’ve really enjoyed and toyed with checking out fandoms for, but what I’ve come to realize over the years is for me, it needs to be like falling in love. I think for some people, interest and obsession grows, and for others, you fall in head-first. And for others still, it depends on the thing.
I understand this ask might have been specifically looking for resources or suggestions and while I’d just say if you’re not feeling it in this way, that’s cool, there are lots of different ways to fan, and you can keep thinking about something even if you aren’t drawn to, say, create transformative works about it? But maybe I should say something about Black Sails in particular…
4) Black Sails-specific: unreliable narrators and transformative works
If anyone hasn’t finished Black Sails, stop reading here, I’ll keep it vague but there’s only so much I can do. This is one thing that’s especially interesting to me about this ask: while I’m going on about how final and precisely plotted it all was, it’s not…that final. Because the entire point of the show is about narrative, right? Who gets to write them, who gets to own them, how they can be manipulated, how they shape “civilization.” Characters constantly talk—and constantly show—how both Flint and Silver (and, like, most of the characters, from Max to Thomas to Vane to Woodes Rogers) are these masterful shapers of narrative. Flint is the victim of clashing narratives: what’s actually happened to him, what he tells the world he’s doing, what he’s actually doing (note that explosive scene when Miranda calls him on this, ahhh I love Miranda). But the show’s choice to shift to Silver’s narration to wrap up events is a really fascinating one: the man who works so hard to obscure his past, laying out the narratives of the future. Should we believe him?
I recommend this interview with creators Johnathan Steinberg and Robert Levine—the Flint section at the start is really delightful if you’re into artists being super into open-interpretation of their work. “Do we have a sense of what we imagine is happening?” Steinberg says when asked if we should believe Silver’s speech to Madi. “Yes, but if I was someone else, I wouldn’t want to watch it with my interpretation coloring it.” They talk about how this is essentially a transformative work (they don’t use that term)—a certain decision “made sense as a way to both acknowledge the book and spin it.”
So this is like the literal opposite of, say, JK Rowling, who seems intent on letting us know every freakin detail of canon and post-canon and seems genuinely unhappy at the idea that people will interpret things in ways that “aren’t true.” (At least in interviews I’ve seen/read of hers in the past few years.) Steinberg and Levine seem to be the ultimate “open to interpretation” guys, which really is like this big blank slate for fandom building on and playing with this world they’ve created. That being said, if oppositional fandom is your cup of tea—if you love fic and fandom as a corrective, as a way of wrestling a creator over the text—then the, “Go for it, interpret however you want” thing is probably not super appealing.
This is the first time in my entire fandom life, going on two decades now, that I have simultaneously been really satisfied with a show’s ending and still wanted to write and read fic. And that seems…weird to me? So I don’t think it’s that weird that it wouldn’t work for someone. TL;DR: I’d just say if it happens, it happens. But it’s OK to love something and not find a way into the fandom. But if that changes for you, I’ll be there. :-)
Hi Flourish and Elizabeth! I'm a big fan of your podcast, I'll write my bachelor's thesis about book fandom(s) in Germany and listen to you all the time to collect some more knowledge - I've learned so much even though I'm only on episode 6. My question/suggestion is, have you ever talked solely about book fandom(s)? Like, what are they like, how do they grow, does making a movie/tv show have an impact on book fandom, do fans differentiate between book and film fandom, what can be the (tbc)
HELLO! Elizabeth here. You are in luck because our next episode is about book fandom!! BUT. Possibly not about what you’re after specifically—I mention in the episode that I’d like to do a separate one on this realm of book fandom you’re talking about, how specific book fandoms grow, how they differ from visual media fandoms, the connections (and sometimes tensions) between the original book fandom and a subsequent book + movie fandom. Flourish and I were in Harry Potter fandom for 100,000 years, so that’s as good a foundation as any, and I’ve been a book journalist for a long time, so I’m extra interested.
But the next episode—out tomorrow for Patrons and Wednesday for everyone—comes at book fandom from another angle, based on my years covering BookCon, a consumer-facing part of America’s biggest book industry event, BEA. We talk a lot about how the (American) book industry approaches book fans, and the idea of a capital-B Book Fan, someone who’s not after a specific title or even genre, but someone who’s really committed to the medium.
Funnily enough, I too wrote a dissertation on book fandom, for my digital humanities MA at University College London! You should totally send us your work if you publish any of it. :-)))