Fansplaining: Five Tropes Fanfic Readers Love (And One They Hate)
| Podcast Episode | |
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| Fansplaining | |
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| Episode Title: | Fansplaining: Five Tropes Fanfic Readers Love (And One They Hate) |
| Length: | 1:04:56 |
| Featured: | |
| Date: | November 2, 2016 |
| Focus: | Tropes, and Results of the Fansplaining Fic Preferences Survey |
| External Links: | Episode at Fansplaining.com |
Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
Fansplaining: Five Tropes Fanfic Readers Love (And One They Hate) is a podcast by Flourish Klink and Elizabeth Minkel.
For others in the series, see Fansplaining
Introduction
Flourish and Elizabeth devote most of the hour to further discussion of the Fansplaining Fic Preferences Survey, where more than 7,500 readers weighed on 144 fanfic tropes and themes. They talk about the purpose of the survey, the choices they made while designing it, some conclusions about the results, and incorporate reader feedback, from long-form responses to a list of tropes the original survey overlooked. They also share a preview of a special episode for Patreon supporters, about the 1998 film Primary Colors.
Links
- Episode, show notes, and transcript: 34: Five Tropes Fanfic Readers Love (And One They Hate), Archived version
- Tumblr Promotional Post, Archived version
- Related article discussing results from Fansplaining, Archived version,
Topics Discussed
- Results of the Fansplaining Fic Preferences Survey
- The design of the survey
- Conceptual differences between tropes, themes, and kinks that informed what was or wasn't included on the trope list
- What they each learned from the process
Excerpts
FK: Oh my God. OK. But maybe we should talk about what the survey was intended, like, obviously people take what you write or what research you do in whatever way they’re gonna take it, but maybe we should talk about our intentions in putting this survey together, because I think a lot of the conversation we’ve had related to that, right? Questions about what the survey could or couldn’t tell us, and questions about what we were or were not trying to understand about fandom with this survey.
ELM: OK. So one thing that we didn’t do is ask for any demographic information.
FK: Right. And we didn’t do that for a lot of reasons, we really struggled with the length of the survey.
ELM: Yeah. I think that one of the reasons why, and we got a lot of respondents, right? More than 7500. I think that if we had gone into a lengthy demographic section in the beginning, we would have had a lot fewer participants, and I think to get any substantive data we would have wanted to have a relatively…we don’t wanna just say “What’s your gender? What’s your age?” You know. “What country do you live in?” I guess I wouldn't say no to that information, but I wouldn’t want that to be used to make any substantive claims about the fanfiction reading audience or something, which I could easily see it being construed that way.
ELM: For something to be a trope it has to be a common enough theme that most of us can recognize it and have a feeling about it. So there’s definitely stuff out there, and you know, I say this as someone who likes a lot of certain, maybe themes isn’t the right word…but definitely there are elements of professionally published fiction that I enjoy, that I can’t really find in most fanfiction. So maybe this isn’t a great example, because it’s not the same thing as “Oh, there’s no mpreg in this fancy novel!” or whatever, you know what I mean? But it’s true that if not enough of us know about it, then it’s not gonna be a trope.
FK: Absolutely. And I think the other thing about this, something also related, was there were a lot of people who wanted to share more about, they really want there to be a Likert scale, right? From one to five of “I really love this,” or “I really hate this,” or “I’ll read it sometimes if it happens to be by a good writer,” or whatever. And we totally appreciate that desire, obviously, that is at war with the idea that we’re gonna have a short survey that a lot of people can take and are willing to, right? And by the way, half the people said that the survey was too long and half of them said it was too short, [laughs] which means we probably got right in the middle, right?
ELM: I was thinking about a Likert scale. That’s just so I can clarify for my own, that’s like a one-through-five…
FK: Yeah, that kinda thing.
ELM: Very positive, positive, neutral.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Somewhat negative, very negative. You know, I think that in some way I do kind of, on the one hand I do wish we had done it that way in the sense of the fact that we got so many yays, I would be curious to know if we broke those yays down into “Oh my God yes, instantly, HIT IT,” you know, or just “Oh yeah, I’m OK with that, I happily read that,” and similarly, “Nah, I don’t really wanna read that.”
[When discussing what they learned] ELM: No, this is a really petty thing I learned, but [laughs] when we did our initial people just responding to our Tweet and Tumblr post, all these people said they hated miscommunication, and I was just like, [sighs]. Miscommunication I think is integral to so many stories, and I just get really annoyed when people are like “Oh, but if only they’d talk to each other!” That’s literally the point, that’s what humans are, wars are fought because of miscommunications, I know it makes people uncomfortable because you’re like “oh if only” but that’s the point, that’s the point. So I have a lot of strong feelings about this. And miscommunication did just fine in our big survey.
FK: Yes it did. Did you feel like, vindicated?
ELM: Yes! I felt vindicated. I think though like a lot of the tropes that people love kind of rest on miscommunication and yeah, the point is it’s supposed to make you feel [makes an “eeh” noise]. Like a fake-dating AU. Somewhere along the way one or both of them realize they have real feelings for each other, or maybe from the very beginning one of them did at least, right. And you can’t just, this is the whole point of slow burn.
FK: So the other thing that I felt like we really learned about this, there is definitely—it made it really clear to me what people were in fanfic for. And I really do feel like a lot of people who were in fanfic in this, they’re in it for happy endings, they’re in it not necessarily for no conflict, but they are in it for not just being tormented, you know what I mean? Not reading depressing stories like A Little Life.
ELM: I don’t think that's necessarily true, because I don’t think that the data showed that. Angst was not that far below fluff.
FK: Yeah but darkfic was the least loved, right, and to me angst is usually resolved happily, but darkfic is not.
ELM: I don’t know what would be considered darkfic, but I don’t think angst is resolved happily always, not at all.
FK: Yeah, that’s true, it’s not always.
ELM: And if you say the definition of darkfic is that it’s angst that doesn’t get resolved, then I think we are working with different definitions of both angst and darkfic.
FK: No, you’re right, you’re right that that’s not true, that sometimes angst doesn’t get resolved. I feel like usually if I read a fic that has angst in it I assume there’s going to be at least something of a happy ending, and sometimes there’s not and that’s OK. I don’t know.
FK [snipped] ...But one thing that did come up, and you brought this up, was that in the list of tropes, a lot of them are really intertextual, which I thought was interesting, because I think that sort of belies the idea that these are just—it may all be about ships, but it’s not just about ships the way a romance novel is about a romance.
ELM: Right, well, obviously I zero in on this because I guess it’s one of the things I always really loved about fanfiction, but I never really thought in an academic or critical way about it until I read Anne Jamison’s book. And I’m sure you did think about this because you were doing media studies, you know, but I didn’t come to thinking about this stuff this way until within the last few years. I just enjoyed it. But one thing that in particular her sections really illuminated for me was about this intertextual game that was going on. Maybe I also zeroed in on it because it seems like the fancy-academic part of fanfiction, right. And obviously you can be fancy-academic talking about shipping or talking about romance. But this is the thing that I find the most interesting about fanfiction, the fact that these stories play, are essentially playing games, even if you don’t even think you’re playing a game. With each other, with the fandom or the ship, with the source material, with other source material.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And a lot of these tropes don’t really exist without these intertextual relationships, and that’s really really interesting and I think kind of runs counter—which I think you wrote about— to the idea that you can just file off the serial numbers and sell it, change their names, sell it.
FK: Yeah, completely. It’s not Fifty Shades of Grey, that’s not how that works. And also, it doesn’t work outside of the tropes of, like, Fifty Shades of Grey works partially because the billionaire romance thing is much more of a romance novel trope than it is a fanfic trope. But a lot of these fanfic tropes don’t work outside of the context of other fanfic. Right? Or they do, but they’re weird. It doesn’t make sense in the same way. It’s very intertextual.
ELM: Just the sheer fact that we could have a list of 144 tropes and 7,500 people will mostly know what we’re talking about!
FK: And there’s more that we forgot! [laughs]
ELM: Yeah, we could have had twice as many! And the fact that these stories work together, so you know, if I’m engaging with tropes in something I’m reading or writing, I’m also thinking of a story that engages with the same tropes in a different fandom that I read 10 years ago, you know? And that’s really awesome. It’s like fanfiction has created this really cool literary web.