Fansplaining: Fandom Trumps Hate

Podcast Episode
Fansplaining
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Episode Title:	Fansplaining: Fandom Trumps Hate
Length:	1:08:13
Featured:	bamfinacuddlyjumper and porcupine-girl
Date:	February 8, 2017
Focus:	Fandom Trumps Hate
External Links:	Episode at Fansplaining.com
Click here for related articles on Fanlore.

Fansplaining: Fandom Trumps Hate is a podcast by Flourish Klink and Elizabeth Minkel.

For others in the series, see Fansplaining.

The episode was cited in "Hidden Transcripts and Public Resistance", a 2020 article in Transformative Works and Cultures on how some fans use fandom to process political events .

Introduction

Flourish and Elizabeth wondered how to record a podcast while the world was on fire. So in episode 41, “Fandom Trumps Hate,” they speak to @bamfinacuddlyjumper and @porcupine-girl, two of the organizers of the @fandomtrumpshate fanworks auction, which raised more than $32,000 (!) for charities resisting the Trump agenda. They discuss the origins of the auction, how it worked, how it was received, and plans for the future. They also grapple with the role of fandom at large right now, and what individual fans can do.

Links

• Episode, show notes, and transcript: 41: Fandom Trumps Hate, ^{Archived version}
• Tumblr Promotional Post, ^{Archived version}

Topics Discussed

• The early days of the Trump administration
• Fandom's worth and meaning in the face of political crises or upheavals
• The first Fandom Trumps Hate auction, how it started and behind-the-scenes work
• Fan Activism and other ways to organize for political causes outside of fandom auctions and political self-expression through fanworks or fan objects (like pins or signs at protests)
• Slactivism, and how to get organized or involved in political activism in real ways
• How politics affects fans and fandom, and vice-versa

Excerpts

ELM: OK. So, right off the bat so you know who our guest is, if you are in certain corners of fandom on Tumblr and the AO3, you may have seen Fandom Trumps Hate, which was a big multifandom charity auction where people wrote fic, drew art, offered up their services as beta readers and other things like that, made vids, to raise money for charities that are working to protect us from Donald Trump and his administration.

FK: Right, so the way that it would work is you’re a fic writer, and you’re like “I offer to write a 2,000 word fanfic about anything that a person chooses,” maybe.

ELM: But it wasn’t like that, it was like, “Hi, I'm a fanfic writer and these are the fandoms that I would be willing to write in,” and every time I looked at one it was like 17,000 fandoms, it was like “How are you people able to offer so much?” So you’re like “I could write you stories for these pairings or these fandoms…”

FK: Right, that’s true.

ELM: “… and this is the link to my work,” so a lot of people who have followings and readers who love them, or visualizers… I was like, “What’s the equivalent of a reader if you’re looking at art?” Viewers.

FK: Yeah, so then—yeah.

ELM: “So then yeah.” [laughs]

FK: So then yeah! If you’re a reader, or a “visualizer” as Elizabeth so eloquently put it, you go like “Oh man, my favorite fic writer has offered this! I want them to write me a fic about my favorite pairing. I will offer to donate $10 to the ACLU if they write me this fic!”

ELM: And then I’m like, “I love this writer more and I am gonna put in $20,” cause it’s an auction.

[snipped]

Then, you know, the bids go up and then the person who wins the auction donates the money and I think provides proof of donation to the organizers, and then the fan creator creates! And so it’s a great system. I was first introduced to this kind of setup after the earthquake in Haiti. I remember very specifically—and I wasn’t like, I was just a reader, I wasn’t active in fandom, but I remember very specifically one of my favorite stories ever someone through that auction purchased a one-shot [FK gasps] that was set, like, 10 years in the future from the main story.

ELM: Absolutely. So—before we start talking about the impetus for this episode, we gave you all the background of Fandom Trumps Hate, we reached out to the organizers and two of them are gonna come on. bamfinacuddlyjumper and porcupine-girl. I believe Winter was the spark behind this.

FK: The instigator.

ELM: The instigator. And I know there were at least half a dozen, probably more people involved so…so I am excited to talk to them about how this all got set up and how it went. I know they’ve raised a lot of money and I know they had a lot of participants and I think it’s been a really…one of the few concrete things that I’ve seen out of fandom in the last few months that I’ve felt happy about. And that’s not an indictment of fandom, it’s just as you know and everyone else who listens to this knows, I’ve had major disconnect from feeling like, it’s hard for me to find the spaces where fandom matters right now.

FK: Mm-hmm. For sure.

ELM: So the reason that I wanted to talk about this this week, this was my suggestion, was because this is the first time we’re talking to you when POETUS—“pee-oh-etus” or however we were saying his name—is now POTUS. This is the first episode of the Trump administration being in power. And since I last talked to you I’ve been to like [laughs] five protests, so…I don’t know, I think that I speak for a lot of people when I say I didn’t think it would get this bad this quickly? I thought it was gonna be bad, I was mad at everyone who’s downplaying it, but I was not aware that they were going to, you know, hit the gas so hard on everything they had intended to do. I assumed that they would try to do it in a more sneaky way, which they’re not competent enough for that apparently. [FK laughs] And it occurs to me, and I think you said this too, this is not going to be a one-off. This is not going to be the only time where we’re gonna need to think “Oh, how do we balance fandom and Trump.”

FK: No. There was this moment where we were like, I was like, “I know people who are stranded outside the United States right now, who are green card holders who can’t get in, who are visa holders, personal stories—” not just stories but literally human beings that I know, what the fuck are we gonna do, how are we just gonna talk about fandom for this podcast like everything is on fire…and then there was this moment of like, “This is not gonna be the only time that everything is on fire.” This is the first time that everything is on fire since, in this incredibly palpable way, but it’s definitely not the last. So how are we gonna handle that?

ELM: Right. And how is this something that is sustained and useful and, I think this is something that a lot of people are struggling with. And I’m not sure that we have any answers. And when I was initially talking to you about this episode, I was like, “I think it’d be really great if we could come up with some kind of action plan. We could say, here are some concrete steps, you, fans, who are listening to this, people in fandom, people who are interested in fandom, here’s what you do. Here’s how you balance this.” And we have no fucking idea. We do not have an action plan.

FK: You did! You found something. So we were talking about what to do and there was this moment where we were like “Ahh do we just cancel the podcast because everything’s on fire,” and then we were like “No we won’t do that, so what do we do,” and then you sent me this quote, which I thought was really good. Which is from Linda Holmes, who is a person on NPR, yes? [snipped] So what she said about this is this: “Did you see The Martian with Matt Damon? He’s got a big thing which he’s trying to solve, which is that he’s stuck on Mars and he has to get back to Earth. And they spend a lot of time in the movie on the fact that he has to figure out how to grow potatoes on Mars. The potatoes on Mars do not actually get him back to Earth. He is not actually solving the problem. But if he doesn’t have potatoes, he’s not going to live long enough to solve the problem and get back to Earth. So to me, my hope is, the songs you love, the books you love, the TV that you love, the conversations that you have about people that are kind of nourishing to you, help you. Those are your potatoes, and you have to have that stuff in order to make it long enough to get back to Earth.” And I was like, “Oh, that’s the nicest, that’s the best formulation of the argument of things we need to do for self-care.” Right?

ELM: Self-care can’t be a ticket to, a get-out-of-civic-engagement-free card, you know? Or a get-out-of-paying-attention-to-the-world card. And also, self-care doesn’t equal, if you suffer from mental illness, which I have suffered from multiple…I have had a long struggle with mental illness so I definitely, I obviously speak from a place of understanding. And so when people are saying, like, when I say things like “self-care shouldn’t equal selfishness,” understand that that’s not meant as an attack on anyone who struggles with any mental illness that prevents them from engaging in the way that people say they’re supposed to engage. Does that all make sense?

FK: Yeah, it makes perfect sense. And it also makes… but it makes sense also that it’s more of a, that the call is to each person to honestly think through what’s going on with them and find what they need and find what they can do. Right? [snipped] ... And if you take it from that spirit, I think it’s really important. And we’ve had a lot of people tell us that Fansplaining has been helpful to them, that they’ve enjoyed it, that they like that we’re doing it, that they don’t want us to stop talking about fandom and what fandom is and that they feel like that would be a negative thing. So I guess that kicked out the idea that maybe we should quit this and just start spending all the time on protesting or—

ELM: Was that, was that our plan at any point?

FK: I don’t think it was really our plan at any point, but it pretty much completely destroyed that.

FK: How did Fandom Trumps Hate get started? What was the spark of making this happen? Other than Trump existing.

Winter: Which…that was definitely a proximate cause. You know, after the election, I, like a lot of people, was just, “What is this reality we’re in?” And of course, you turn to fandom, you look at your Tumblr, you read your fic, and I remember that I had seen similar fandom auctions for Haiti, for AO3, as fundraising auctions, and I thought, “Well, there’s never been a better cause than this.” So I had a Tumblr post that was basically like, “Is anyone organizing a fandom charity auction for this?” And got a couple hundred notes and some people saying, “Yeah that’d be great, someone should do that!” And you kinda look at yourself: “Someone should do that, I wanna do that, I guess I’m doing that.” [all laugh]

Which was actually a terrifying thought, but one of my fandoms is Supernatural, and Misha Collins is kind of an inspiration. I just kind of said, “What would Misha do?” And he would try to do something to help, so I contacted some of my friends, PG, tiltedsyllogism, some others, and I said “I wanna do this thing, I don’t know how to do this thing, but I want to do this thing,” and then we reached out to the people that had run the AO3 charity auction and I said “Can you tell me how this works?” And Roan was kind enough to share some of their Google forms that they used to run the bidding and some other stuff with us. So we had a few templates, very few templates. And I was just astonished. I had no idea it was gonna get this big. I had a handful of my friends, no real idea of what we’re doing, I made a little logo for it, I made a Tumblr and I thought maybe we’d get—maybe a hundred people would sign up.

Porcupine-girl: Maybe we’d raise a couple thousand dollars.

Winter: Yeah! Which was still more than…

Porcupine-girl: It’d be great!

Winter: Still more than I could donate! But I think what happened was a lot of people were looking for something concrete to do, something they could say “This is an action I’m doing.” The nice thing about a fandom auction is people that can’t donate money could donate their work, their fan labor, their art, their fic, whatever, even if they couldn’t donate money. And then people could, you know, support their artists, get work…I’m excited that going forward in addition to the money that we’re donating which is super super important, there’s gonna be all these fanworks generated that wouldn’t exist except that, you know, going forward on top of everything else we’ll have more fic to read. We’ll have more fanart to look at. You create in fan economies, it’s a gift economy. Everyone gives forward. And we’ve got that to look forward to too, but I think a lot of people just really wanted something they could be a part of a community and do something.

Something that you could…for me it’s been great. It’s been so, I think we all look around and say “Am I doing enough?” And you’re never doing enough, but at least you can say “I did this. This happened, I accomplished something.”

PG: We’ve picked up a few more people (to mod). Originally it was just some of Winter’s friends, we all know each other originally through Sherlock fandom, but then as we went we picked up a couple people who messaged us over Tumblr being like “Can I help with this?” and we were like “YES” and some of them, like, captain-bunnicula is someone who joined us who’s a computer scientist and was able to help us automate some of the form making and stuff like that—because it was generating 700 of these. It was just, it was a very big task.

FK: I imagine that there’s something also about, I know that I felt really guilty taking part in fandom or I didn’t even want to, at first, because I was like, “Everything is so horrible, the world’s on fire,” it was a combination of feeling guilt that I would waste time doing this and also a feeling of numbness and not wanting to engage. And it seems like maybe something like Fandom Trumps Hate helps… certainly seeing things like that helped me get back into the connecting-with-fandom feeling. It was like, “OK, this is all right actually.” Not only do we need both the thing that makes you happy and the action, but also, it can be a positive thing, maybe.

Winter: I mean, fandom is community and if you get a community together to do a common thing, there’s power in that. If you can get people engaged. And it’s so tough too because some people need that separate space and some people are like, “But there’s no separate space for me.” As a friend of mine said yesterday, “My body is controversial.” If you’re someone who’s affected by this directly, you don’t necessarily have the space to be like, I’m just gonna go over here and ignore it. Cause I would have to ignore myself. I think there can be a danger to trying to cut things too much, but we also need to stay sane. It’s not gonna be over next week or next year. We don’t know how long it is.

Porcupine-Girl: So the total amount bid, the high bids, added up to $24,000.

FK & ELM: WOW!

ELM: That’s amazing!

Winter: And then there’s the total amount donated, which between people saying “I wanna give my second bidder an option,” “I wanna give my third bidder an option” in some cases, and people just donating above and beyond what they committed to, and again, this is still a little woobly, but over $31,000.

(On keeping Fandom Trumps Hate a once-per-year giant multifandom auction compared to smaller auctions occurring)

Winter: We would not be able to offer! We need people to have time to actually write all the shit they said they were gonna write.

Porcupine-Girl: Nobody’s finished their first ones yet. Nobody can offer more. But yeah, for next year we’re trying to get better infrastructure. This time we were relying entirely on Google Forms and Google Docs and Tumblr. Those two things don’t talk to each other very well, so it made it hard to… we had to make all the Tumblr posts by hand, because we couldn’t just tell Google Docs to take the stuff from the spreadsheet and spit it into this Tumblr post. Although captain-bunnicula did manage to automate that a little bit, but it’s still a huge thing.

So next year we're hoping to, hoping, hoping to get more of this stuff on our own site, where we can get all the stuff working together so that it can be better automated and we don’t have to do everything one at a time by hand. Cause that was… like we said, it was a lot more auctions than we were expecting. If we were doing a hundred auctions, that wouldn’t have been that big a deal, but doing almost 700 of them that way… it was, we were spending several hours a day each doing this stuff and we were still getting people complaining because we were behind schedule on things.

FK: Don’t wanna oversell this, but maybe, you’re considering the possibility in a serious way that is not announced yet by any means. Um, and there’s other people who are running smaller auctions for individual fandoms, I guess one thing that’s come up a lot has been fandom is a great community to meet other people and organize through the community, but there’s other stuff maybe that we need to do as well. So I guess I wanted to raise the, OK, is Fandom Trumps Hate… is that the thing? Is that the fandom thing? Or what else is necessary for us to organize and actually make a difference beyond giving money and auctioning off fanworks and stuff?

Winter: It’s a thing.

Porcupine-Girl: I think that there’s definitely lots of possibilities as far as, I mean, people organize fandom meetups all the time. All the people in this city who are in this fandom get together, or whatever. And you could turn that into volunteering for things, you could turn that into going to a protest together, you could leverage that a lot of ways.

Winter: I’m thinking about all the protest signs I saw that referenced pop culture, where they’re…

ELM: I took a lot of pics of those, yeah.

Winter: Star Wars, Harry Potter, all the stuff, I mean, we already use the stories that we love to understand our lives, to understand ourselves. And there's no reason you can’t keep going with that. But yeah, we could absolutely organize a group and then go to a protest, organize a group and then do something else with that. It’s important to donate money to do this stuff, because I can’t myself sue the government…

ELM: [laughing] Come on, why not?

Winter: These are organizations doing absolutely valuable stuff, but it can’t stop at “I give them money once a year,” right.

ELM: It’s interesting, because all of those suggestions that you guys both just said, they’re not about—the object of fandom is largely removed. Except a Star Wars protest sign or whatever. But like, it’s about the people that you’ve met in fandom and taking that community and those friendships and going and doing normal social justice things. And the one place that I’m getting tripped up at is, I can’t find that bridge between the actual fandomy things… aside from this auction. This is like the only thing that I can think of. Right? I love Harry Potter, and I love the messages in Harry Potter, I don’t find it that…I don’t know. I’m not really participating in any way in fandom right now. You know. Except these podcasts or my newsletter, right?

Winter: Oh, just a podcast about fandom and just a newsletter but other than that NOTHING.

FK: When there’s tear gas or when somebody’s hurt or when the police are menacing that’s a different story, but if it’s just a bunch of people and it’s fine, that’s its own reward for me. But for most people it’s not that. It’s like going to a protest or volunteering or whatever is something that it’s a chore that you have to do, and then it doesn’t feel like you get feedback. Whereas with fanfic one of the great things about it is that you get feedback and people like it, right. That’s the thing I’m trying to balance within myself also, there’s other things I don’t like doing: I don’t wanna call my representatives ever again and I hate myself for hours after doing it but know I need to. [laughs]

Porcupine-Girl: Right. Yeah.

Winter: Well obviously we need Protest Of Our Own, where people can rate your resistance activities [all laugh] and see what you’re up to.

Porcupine-Girl: Give you kudos!

ELM: Oh my God!

Porcupine-Girl: You post “I called my representative,” you get a kudos for it! Honestly though Tumblr, Tumblr a little bit functions as that now, because everyone is talking about this and everyone, you know, I can go to Tumblr and be like, “I called my senator. It was so scary! I hate calling people.” and I get other people replying like “I hate it too but I do it anyhow!” It makes it more social.

Winter: If you’re a woman, your body is currently a site of protest. If you’re queer, your body’s a site of protest. If you are a person of color, there’s any number of things right now where your body is a site of protest and fandom and what space it is and isn’t for people, and it’s all sorts of different things to different people, but you have to acknowledge that there are people where—there’s no dividing line about politics and not politics if it’s your life being affected. You can’t say “politics are over there. I'm setting politics aside.” You can’t set politics aside. It’s embodied within you. There are people that want to do things because you are you. So you can’t draw that, like, “Oh, let’s…” there’s just not…that’s not to say that every second of our thoughts needs to be devoted to this, but we have to recognize there are people that can’t, there’s not a stepping out of this.

ELM: We’ve talked about this a bunch, I think on the podcast, talking about the danger of saying fandom is a safe space. When fandom can be such a racist garbage fire for example. And the idea that…

FK: Or that fandom is a progressive space necessarily. The only reason it’s a progressive space is if progressive people are in it.

ELM: I feel like, I feel like it was a very clear-eyed discussion which I appreciated. I think that one thing that gives me hope, fandom-wise, is I think that this auction is something that people can replicate. And I think in particular every day I see a lot of arguments about identity politics or about politics of a certain television show, and I would love to…I think this is an extraordinary way to see these arguments and people have great comments and I would love to see some of that be able to translate into concrete action. And unfortunately when it’s a fictional property there’s not a lot of concrete action you can translate things into, right.

FK: Not if it’s just within the world of that fictional property.

ELM: Obviously you can read and write fanfiction or you can support works of fiction about marginalized characters, that celebrate them, but there’s a limit to how… obviously there’s a great effect, but I think that in the face of…in the face of what we’re facing, that was not eloquently put, there’s gonna be a limit to how far that can go, and I think that this is a way to wrap all of that up and kinda put money in the pockets of people like they said who we, fandom can’t sue the government. But we can indirectly sue the government. You know?