Fansplaining: A Fangirl Goes To Hollywood

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Podcast Episode
Fansplaining
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Episode Title: Fansplaining: A Fangirl Goes To Hollywood
Length: 1:21:41
Featured: Britta Lundin
Date: March 8, 2017
External Links: Episode at Fansplaining.com
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Fansplaining: A Fangirl Goes To Hollywood is a podcast by Flourish Klink and Elizabeth Minkel.

For others in the series, see Fansplaining

Introduction

Elizabeth and Flourish talk with Britta Lundin, a longtime fangirl who’s now a staff writer on the CW’s new Archie Comics adaptation, Riverdale. Topics covered include her journey from fan to pro (including what it’s like to be a fan *and* pro), working with your idols, the writer’s room process, and fan/creator interaction, with special focus on two points of controversy on Riverdale: potential queerbaiting and asexual/aromantic erasure.

Links

Topics Discussed

Excerpts

FK: The discourse that is currently happening in Riverdale fandom, for those of you who don’t spend a lot of time in that corner of the internets… [snipped] comes in two flavors.

ELM: Are you going to spoil things for people right now?

FK: Quite possibly so. But I think it’s gonna be hard to get through this conversation if you’re not willing to be a little bit spoiled.

ELM: OK. So maybe that’s a…if you are watching the show and you’re not all caught up, hold off.

FK: Yeah.

ELM: I would say that everything that we’re gonna talk about is stuff that you would have encountered if you, like, have a Twitter and you are broadly in fandom, these are probably things that will have crossed your dash.

FK: Right. But if you wanna be safe then wait until you’ve seen Episode Six. Which actually is an episode that aired after we recorded our interview with Britta that we’re gonna play in a minute. So, that’s an interesting combination. But let’s talk about what the discourse around Riverdale is first in case you’re not in Riverdale fandom. So discourse part one is around the pairing of Betty and Veronica, who are traditionally in Archie Comics— they’re in a love triangle with Archie, and then on Riverdale they maybe have some sexual tension… maybe a lot of people really want them to smooch… and maybe there’s queerbaiting happening. And that’s one bit of discourse.

ELM: And maybe they actually did smooch in the trailer.

FK: Yeah.

ELM: And which, I think it’s pretty widely known, was a fake-out, so that I think— particularly the fact that it was used in the trailer I think was what caused a lot of anger.

FK: Yeah, absolutely absolutely. That’s a correct description. So then the other piece of discourse is around Jughead, who in the Archie Comics series has always been portrayed as not really being into… certainly not really into women. Not really into sex in general. Really likes eating. Burgers, specifically. And he recently came out in the comics series as asexual, which is complicated because on the show he’s sort of been broadly— definitely not really explicitly asexual for the first five episodes, just sort of broadly, you know, a character who’s not entangled in a romance, and then in Episode Six he smooches a lady. And the context of the smooch has been, like, widely debated, it’s not like [dopey voice] “Hey, baby, come on” situation or anything, but it’s obviously really problematic from the viewpoint of a lot of ace and aro people. So that’s discourse part two. And as we said before, that kiss had not happened when we interviewed Britta, so keep that in mind as you listen to that interview.

ELM: Take a quick step back because I wonder, I think you’ll be hard-pressed to find a listener who didn’t know the difference between, say, L G B and T, or what those specific letters stand for, but I think asexuality and aromanticism may be…when we say ace and aro, those are two separate things actually, and some people ID with both. Asexual obviously means you’re not interested in sex, those experiences and preferences can vary within that ID, and aromantic means you’re not interested in pursuing a romantic relationship and obviously you can have sex without romance and romance without sex.

ELM: When Viola Davis was talking about the power of story she was talking about my obsession with Sweet Valley High. [all laugh]

BL: I mean but kind of, yeah! She was talking about all of them! I don’t think—that's the thing when we’re sitting around in the Riverdale writers room or something and we’re just sort of chatting about what we’re gonna do the next episode, you’re not thinking about the fact that a million kids are gonna watch this show. Not kids but you know, people, and many of them young and impressionable or whatever, are gonna watch this show and maybe you’re gonna shape their views on a subject. And I think everyone definitely knows that in the back of their mind, but it’s also the sort of thing that’s really—if you dwell too hard on it you get paralyzed and you can never create anything, so you kind of have to not think about it too much, but also yeah, when an episode comes out you never know when you’re gonna introduce the silicon chip magnate that inspires some kid to become an entrepreneur and changes their life forever!

[snipped]

FK: That must be a weird experience where you’re like, “On the one hand I have this huge power potentially in someone’s life, on the other hand it’s so weird to say I have this huge power in someone’s life, that’s absurd!”

BL: I know cause someone will be like, “Relax Britta, it’s just Riverdale, it’s not that big of a deal.” And probably for most of the people watching, it is not that big of a deal and they’ll tune in, they’ll watch it for an hour and then they won’t think about it later, but for some people it might just hit them at just the right moment and it actually becomes a model for the way they want to live or shows them something that they had never seen before in a way that makes them think about their own life. I think about the times when I fell most deeply into fandom and it was times when I was, like when I was in high school and I was really struggling socially and not doing that great—or times even when I’m older like in my 20s and 30s when I was maybe unemployed or struggling with some sort of problem in my life where I was like, not doing well in real life, and so I sort of fell into this world that was fictional and those were the times when those fictional worlds had an outsized effect on me and had a lot of power over me in ways that I think I still am struggling to wrap my head around how it worked. But yeah, that’s the kind of thing where you never know, when the right person sees the right episode of television it changes their life forever. AY. OH. AY. But maybe!

BL: I think with Riverdale I think it, to a various extent I think everyone recognizes how lucky they are to be able to create something that’s gonna be watched by over a million people. And I keep saying a million people cause that’s how many watch live, that’s the number that comes in the next morning. I know that number’s actually way higher cause people will watch it later or they’ll illegally stream it or they get it on Netflix or whatever so it’s probably millions of people by the time all is said and done.

But there’s definitely people who understand it more than others. We’ve a couple writers in the room who’ve worked on Glee, and I don’t think anyone can go through an experience writing on Glee and not understand the power of fandom because that show had such a powerful fandom.

BL: I guess it’s interesting because I always, for a long time I’ve known I wanted to get into TV writing. So I’ve been researching it and learning about the process a lot, so I feel like more so than most fans I for a long time I had a perspective on what the writers’ room process was like, and so…you know, one of the things I think sometimes fans mistake is they think that when an episode has a writer’s name on it that it’s just purely that writer’s work, and nobody else really touched it, and so something they hate happened in a specific writer’s episode that it was that writer’s fault. And every writer’s room works differently and sometimes it is a little bit more like that, it’s never entirely like that, because the writer’s room is always a team and they always work together and the end of the day it’s probably if you have a problem with something that happened on the show it's best to take it up with the showrunner and not the specific writer of that episode. So there’s no episode that’s solely one person’s vision except maybe the pilot, which is really Roberto’s, who’s our showrunner, Roberto’s vision. But even that is guided by network notes and studio notes and producer’s notes and all of these things, it’s such a group effort.

And that’s one thing that I kind of wish was like, better understood among fans. Because I understand that when you see something that you don’t like, wanting to be able to hold someone accountable for that, I get that, because you know, like I said, TV has a lot of power and when you see something on TV and you feel like that TV show that you love very dearly just screwed up in a way that you don’t like you wanna hold someone accountable for that and it makes sense to hold the person accountable who has the name on the episode, when really it’s like a team effort. Your favorite basketball team lost the national championships, you can’t blame it on one player, it’s the whole team’s problem. So if you have a problem with something that happened on Riverdale I guess it’s all of us. Bummer. [all laugh] We all screwed up.

[On Jughead and asexual visibility]

BL:I mean the Jughead situation’s interesting. Jughead has been a character that’s been around for 75 years, he, you know, people have talked about what his love of hamburgers and total disinterest in women has meant in the past, and I think—and I guess just to give context in the most recent run of the Jughead comics written by Chip Zdarsky, who I love, and I love those comics, everyone should check them out, Jughead came out explicitly as asexual in those comics. That’s not to say that he’s necessarily asexual in every comic, although I guess fans are free to read him that way whenever they want to. He’s never really shown interest in women and he’s always loved hamburgers and you could definitely read that as asexual for 75 years. Of course. And now it’s finally been made explicit because our society has advanced far enough.

That’s not to say that all the comics share the same canon, because they don’t. There's a comic where there’s zombies, there’s a comic where Predator shows up, there’s a comic where Jughead slips on a banana peel, falls and breaks his head open. That's not canon in Riverdale either. So there’s lots— [snipped]

There are comics where, there are versions of canon where Jughead dies. I mean there’s just like a million different canons, right. This is one that feels close to home I think because it’s like, “OH. That explains Jughead in a way that makes sense.” It’s, he’s like not explicitly anything in Riverdale right now. I think everyone is aware of, like, definitely when Jughead came out as asexual in that one comic, it was a sonic boom across media. And our showrunner Roberto is the creative director for Archie Comics and so he was definitely aware of that and knows all about that and knows Chip and stuff. So he knows all about this, and I mean, I don’t know what the right answer here is, because I think the best thing to do is be truthful, and the truth is, it’s not addressed in Season One. We don’t know if we’re getting a Season Two. If we do get a Season Two, they may address it, or they might not! And I don’t actually think they’ve decided yet. So…

FK: It’s really refreshing to hear somebody on the writer’s room side say that, like, say “we don’t know,” not say “watch and learn!” but say just, like, “I don’t know guys! We’re gonna find out!”

BL: Yeah! I mean and that’s kinda the truth, like, I don’t wanna say that in a baity way of like “yeah you should keep watching and maybe we’ll do it!” But, if it makes you uncomfortable, don’t watch it and go read those comics where he is ace. That’s still there. It exists and you should absolutely embrace that. I don’t know, I honestly don’t know if Riverdale’s gonna make it canon or not. I don’t know.

BL: I get a lot of feedback on Twitter, I’m pretty active on Twitter and I’m active on Twitter for a long time, and once Riverdale started airing I started getting a lot more feedback about what people thought about our episodes on Twitter. And I will, I love feedback, I love it all. The only stuff I don’t like is, there’s a specific brand of feedback that is violent. And I think this is not tone policing. I think this is just a basic standard where if somebody says, so the Betty/Veronica ship is Beronica, if somebody says “Make Beronica canon or I’ll open fire on my whole family,” that is the type of response that immediately gets you muted or blocked and actually hurts your cause. So I think…you know, I’m not telling people not to use profanity, like, fuckin’ use profanity, go, yeah. Go for it. Get angry if you’re angry. I think all of that is fine. I think as long as you’re not threatening violence against yourself or other people, I think it’s fair game.

ELM: Channel your this, though. What, what’s your general feelings about it, about shipping, representation. Your general feelings about shipping, go ahead.

BL: I LOVE SHIPPING.

FK: Oh my God, Elizabeth, you can’t just ask someone their general feelings about shipping!

BL: My handle is “BrittaShipsIt,” I love shipping.

ELM: Yeah, you had a project even about shipping, yeah?

BL: I did! I wrote a feature film called Ship It about a teenage girl who was basically a slashtivist, to use the modern terminology. She wrote a lot of gay fanfiction about her favorite show, the show itself was not gay, but she wins this contest to go to Comic-Con or like a series of conventions with the cast of her favorite TV show, and she uses this opportunity to convince the cast and the showrunner that they have to make the show gay just like it is her fanfiction. And they’re like, “No fucking way,” and she’s like “Oh yes you will.” And they butt heads! So it’s basically a script about fan-creator relationships, it’s about gay shipping, and about basically what is the right way to convince someone to make their show gay if they don’t wanna make their show gay. [all laugh]

BL: Yeah. I mean. I don't know. I think, when I think about shows that are classic examples of queerbaiting, I think the ones that always come up are Sherlock, Supernatural, and several others. But let’s talk about those. People are accusing Riverdale of queerbaiting and honestly I am the last person to be able to decide whether our show’s queerbaiting or not because I’m way too deep in it. I can’t, I can’t see this. Even though it’s, like, my favorite topic to talk about. I’m too deep in it, you know? I’ve no pushback there. So obviously it’s for some outside observer to decide or not.

But you know Riverdale, audiences have seen five episodes already, and maybe that’s enough to decide and maybe it’s not. I think Supernatural got leveled with queerbaiting accusations after a significant period of time between Dean and Cas where people were like, “Guys come on, at this point you’re writing to an expectation that fans have, and it’s unfair to those fans, because we know you’re never gonna follow through on it.” And I think that's what queerbaiting is, is like, pretending like you’re gonna do it and then not actually…having zero intention of actually doing it. I don’t know if Riverdale’s pretending like we’re gonna do it. I mean. Do you guys feel like we are? Do you feel like you’re watching the show and you’re like, “They’re doing it, they’re gonna do it?”

FK: I feel a little bit like…honestly I felt a little bit like that in the pilot.

BL: Yeah. With the kiss.

FK: Yeah. Because I felt like the kiss really set something up for me, and there's just no…I totally understand that maybe that was not intended to be that way, that maybe it is—I mean that is a thing that women who are not gay for each other do, at times, I’m…I’m a bi woman, I’m not trying to play into the “women do this to get attention,” but women also do this to get attention, it does happen in the world, so like—fine, I understand that from a writing perspective, but from a viewing perspective I definitely was like…

BL: Yeah. Yeah. She's making a face like “Oh my God.”

[On pitching ideas in the writer's room]

FK: The last piece of “you get to keep your job” being really important.

BL: REALLY important. Really important. But that’s a lot of mental arithmetic you’re doing for every potential idea that flies in and out of your head. I don’t think I can do that and also be thinking of what I-as-a-fan want. Cause if I just pitched things that I-as-a-fan want, I don’t… I don’t think…I think eventually Roberto would be like “Britta, just…what?” [all laugh]

You gotta pitch toward what you know he’s already going for and you gotta pitch towards, like, we already—the first thing we did when we came together as a writer’s room was set up where we're going with Season One. So we figured out what would happen, what every character’s arc was over the course of Season One. And we deviated a little bit from that as we actually wrote the season, but you kind of already know where you’re headed by the time you start writing. So when you’re writing Episode Six you can’t suddenly be like “Oh, I think this person falls in love with this person” if you know that person’s supposed to be with a different person by the end of the season. You have to be pitching toward the light at the end of the tunnel that you’ve already decided on.

So even if I as a fan want like, Miss Grundy to start boinking Alice, Betty’s mom, like, I can’t pitch that—spoiler alert, that does not happen in Season One. I can’t—

ELM: Why are you baiting? My God, that was my new ship!

BL: I can’t pitch that in the room because people will be like, “What are you even talking about? Do you need to take a breather, go walk around the lot for a minute, come back and start pitching ideas that we’re actually gonna do?”

And then the other thing I’ll say is, by the same token, Roberto’s doing the exact same mental arithmetic in his own head. He’s trying to figure out stuff that he likes. He's listening to all of these pitches and pitching himself and trying to pick the ones that he thinks most closely resemble the show that he's trying to create, while also trying to satisfy the executives at the studio level, the executives at the network, the producers, Greg Berlanti, everyone else who’s involved in the show, and then also trying to create something that’s produceable, that’s not going to be over budget, that when we send the script up to Vancouver where we shoot they’re not gonna come back and say “This is a million dollar script, there’s no way you can shoot this.”

There’s so many different constraints that are playing into every decision that we make that I know I’m doing mental gymnastics, Roberto’s doing mental gymnastics, I’m sure the executives are doing mental gymnastics based on what’s worked on other shows they’ve worked on and what hasn’t worked. Everyone’s just making, there’s a million different decisions that go into why they do anything on the show. So I mean, that’s to say I can go in the fan space to a certain extent, it can’t not affect me, I’ve pitched multiple lesbian storylines on the show already, they—at this point they're expecting it from me. [all laugh] If we have a day player I’m like “But what if she’s gay!”

ELM: I loved, you were much more frank than I thought you would be able to. So I really appreciate that.

BL: Yeah! I really hope I don't get in trouble. I don’t think I will though, because I think the worst thing anyone can say in this situation is “The fans are all crazy, they should go fuck themselves!” And I think anything, I think the best thing to do in these sort of situations is kinda be frank and be like “This is the process, there's a lot of complications in the process and none of it is a clean line, and all that we can all do is try to keep the world better, so you keep doing that and we’ll keep doing that and hopefully we’ll come up with something great.” That’s really messy, but it’s kind of the true answer.

ELM: Well, it just also sounds, too, like, in a lot of these conversations I don’t feel like…I want fans to give creators the benefit of the doubt, even if they are continually disappointing people, and talking to you and hearing about the [inaudible] out there, I’m very inclined to give these people the benefit of the doubt—instead of certain other shows and certain other showrunners where it’s just like, “You don’t deserve that good faith, because you’re literally…you don’t, you’re not even gonna care that people are upset by this.” It’s not a matter of shoving them down, just “I don’t even see why this bothers you” kinda stuff. And obviously you can see why people might want various kinds of representation or storylines or whatever.

References

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