Fansplaining: Happy Anniversary

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Podcast Episode
Fansplaining
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Episode Title: Fansplaining: Happy Anniversary
Length: 1:09:25
Featured:
Date: August 10, 2016
External Links: Episode at Fansplaining.com, Archived version Fansplaining—About (deadlink, archived), Archived version
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Fansplaining: Happy Anniversary is an episode of the podcast Fansplaining by Flourish Klink and Elizabeth Minkel.

For others in the series, see Fansplaining.

Introduction

"In our anniversary episode of Fansplaining, Episode 28, we’re welcoming back all the guests that made our first year great…

And we’re announcing that WE’VE STARTED A PATREON!"

Links

Topics Discussed

  • Guests returning: what's changed in fandom in the last year
  • Trends in fandom that are popular:
  • Mainstreaming of fandom:
    • Media engaging with responses from fandom community
    • Loss of "outsider" status
    • Creator and fan interactions, and the influence that fans can have on creators
    • Fan entitlement
    • Relationship between fans and brands
  • Social Justice and Fandom
    • Increased push for representation within fandom
    • Fan activism
    • Accountability within fandom and the sidelining of characters of colour

Excerpts

ELM: Yes. So what we did was we reached out to everyone who had been on, and said could you either record a couple minutes or write us a few paragraphs talking about what you think has changed in fandom, whatever that means to you, in the last year. Whether it’s on a broad level from your perspective in your industry, or on a personal level, though most people I think gave us—mostly it was on a broader level, I would say.

Leslie Combemale: To me any kind of fandom that gets a lot of really positive, really powerful press is good for all fandoms and all subjects, all passions, in the world of fandom. For me that’s a really exciting thing to see, and since we represent the official art of Harry Potter, and John Alban who did ET and Blade Runner and Frankenstein and a bunch of other movie posters actually did art for the Pokémon movies, and it’s so funny because we thought “Who’s ever going to buy anything Pokémon?” because it’s been years since people have been really interested in it. But there you go! That’s what happens. Things circle back around.

Betsy Rosenblatt: What’s changed in fandom in the past year? Well, you know I’m all about the law, so my thoughts are about changes in the law. One of the biggest developments may not be a change per se and it isn’t in fandom specifically but it’s about the law that relates to fandom in the US, and it happened just after I was on the show in September 2015. And that’s the decision by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in the case of Lenz vs. Universal, known as the “dancing baby case.” The big quote from that case is, quote, “Fair use is not just excused by the law, it is wholly authorized by the law.” That’s what we’ve always believed, based on the language of the law and statute itself, but now a court has said it out loud, leaving no room for doubt.

Ludi Price: Hi guys, Ludi here. And congratulations on reaching your first anniversary! So the question of what’s changed in fandom over the past year, hm, tough question, but I think there’s three things that really stuck out with me. First is the idea of transcultural fandom I guess, how fans behave in other cultures, other countries. Because there’s been such a focus on Western fandom and being Western fans and that’s slowed everything up, and I think that’s really great to get other perspectives, just to be open-minded about how other fans do things.

Second, is this idea of history of fandom, historicization of fandom. Fandom isn’t just this thing that happened in the 1960s or 70s or 80s, it’s really great that some academics are looking into the beginnings of fandom in the 1880s or 1890s, things like that. And I find that kind of stuff kind of fascinating because I love history, I really think it’s great to look at our roots.

And lastly I think fan studies as an academic discipline is looking out at other areas, other fields, on fans and fandom, and that’s really nice. How religion relates to fandom. How fandom relates to other parts of our culture or cultures, and I think that’s really great as well because that gives room for other perspectives—particularly from my perspective, which is library and information science. So yeah, that’s some of the things that I think are growing fandom now, and I think it’s a really exciting time to be a fan and to be a fan scholar! So thanks!

AL: So things that you would just never have seen before on big, mainstream journalism websites like in the UK the Telegraph or the Guardian engaging with responses from fandom communities, whether that’s the whiny man-baby complaining of the Ghostbusters-hardcore-hate-the-gender-swapped-version people, or whether it’s like “These are all the moments in Star Wars that are quite Finn/Poe slashy.”

CC: Yeah, totally! So it’s not so much that I think fandom has changed in the way it responds to stuff, but just I am now aware that the mainstream media sees it as a topic to write about.

AL: Yeah and it's a tone thing as well. So even reporting on Channing Tatum takes on this very enthusiastic fangirly sort of tone, and it’s kind of bleeding into a lot of pop culture coverage, from what I can tell. My own included.

CC: I think it is a good thing overall, even if it’s done from motives of wanting to appeal to a market where there’s a lot of traffic rather than wanting to do the right thing.

Kevin Fanning: I guess to me it felt like in the past year it felt like this was the year when fandom really ceased to become a separate entity from the object that the fandom worships...

...So now you look at pop culture and you look at the things in our culture whether it’s Fury Road or Star Wars or the Avengers movies, no one’s just a fan of the Avengers movies anymore, to be a fan means you have really strong opinions about Cap and Bucky and now it seems like now that being part of a fandom is, you’re not an outsider anymore, you’re just part of the thing. You’re mainstream and you’re widely acknowledged and to be a fan is just to be part of the thing. So I think it’ll be interesting to see what happens over the next few months, years, whatever as the identity of fandoms start to lose their outsider status.

Clay Liford: Much of fandom takes place in the shadows. I don’t say this in any derogatory sense, and I’m not meaning to infer that the participants are in some sort of hiding, it’s just always existed outside the mainstream while managing to maintain a tenuous relationship with it. There’s been a push not necessarily universally accepted internally or externally to bring fandom out into the light. Blame Twitter, blame any social media really, where creators have direct interaction with fans or hell, don’t blame anyone. In my humble opinion, it’s all really cool. Fans having their voices heard and respected in the sense that they’ve changed the narrative outcome of major properties? In a free market society, this can be a really strong thing. Something that lets the gatekeepers know their audience is paying attention and not willing to accept phoned-in work can only lead, natural selection style, to a place of greater work. Eventually.

Roz: Hi Flourish and Elizabeth, thanks for letting me come back in. This is Roz. I wanted to talk a little bit about fan entitlement. I was just at Comic-Con but I wasn’t in the con proper and I kind of heard about this specific conversation a little bit in a Nerd HQ panel. I went to listen to Joss Whedon and Joss Whedon talked a little bit about how he disconnected from Twitter, he disconnected from fans in a way. And I think in our age of social media and what I’ve watched in fandom over the last 10 years, it used to be that the creators were this, and the Powers That Be, were this separate entity, really high up, didn’t interact with us as fans on a regular basis. And now with Twitter in the last five, six years, you as a fan can interact with your show creator much more easily.

And while it’s good in some ways, it’s also really bad because you get the, you the creator or you the fan feel like you have way more connection to your creator than I think we actually do. I think we need to sometimes maybe leave our creators as an independent being and we don’t really need to pester them with “Hey, can you do this? Can you fulfill my shipping needs? Can you make this thing less problematic or more problematic to fit my specific interests?”

Meredith Levine: I really think this year is a year where brands have become way more aware and in tune with fans and fandom, and are starting to understand what it means to build a healthy relationship. I think that that is really different than in years past.

I also think that this year is a year where we might have to come to terms with how fan culture has previously been experienced. We’re starting to see a lot of creators and professional creators coming from positions of being a fan and now finding themselves in positions of power making works commercially. And I think part of the thing that I’m starting to see, especially with the release of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, is this notion of things that are officially created feeling like fanfiction or feeling like fanworks, and the intersection of commerciality and fanworks.

Evan Hayles Gledhill: point one: I think that the media fascination with fans that started a few years ago and has arguably led to some excellent opportunities for fans, scholars and journalists, has entered the inevitable tabloid backlash period. I think this is in part because of conflation in the minds of many of fans and fandom other cultural investment in a product within a consumer position. So GamerGate and Rabid Puppies models get brought to Ghostbusters whining based on a mild similarity of poor attitudes to women. But then marginalized voices in fandom doing pushback to hegemony in media are tarred with the same brush of entitlement to a product or space. Big difference between “We demand you exclude not-us” and “we demand to be included as us.”

Point two, I think the rifts in fandom’s perception of itself are becoming clearer. Some privileged fans used to being on the right side of the debate are getting defensive about being told to reassess their own attitudes to more marginal voices. When black fans tell you you’re whitewashing, you listen. You don’t pull a Moffatt! [laughs] Yeah. I’m editorializing here! My perception of fandom as more splintered is not just based on seeing problems where before I was unaware — because we all need reminders about intersections we don't live — but also seeing problems dealt with poorly.

I have found myself avoiding Tumblr because otherwise I yell like an old person, “DO YOU WANT A FLAME WAR? BECAUSE THAT’S HOW YOU GET A FLAME WAR.” As an older fan, it’s second-gen narratives to see the same fights. They were on the zines, then on the mailservs, then on the forums, replayed endlessly, because as a subculture we are terrible at keeping our own history, because aging out of fandom is still a thing. We need better cross-generational communication so us old guys don’t sound like patronizing veterans and listen to new developments, also so that new gen fans realize they could really get a lot out of listening to people with a bit more life experience and could get stuff changed often by educating older folks on stuff they might not be familiar with. Less sarcasm on all sides, perhaps.

Sam Pennington: Over the past year, we’ve seen fandom become increasingly more critical. Fans spoke up and spoke out about the need for representation and diversity in media. From social activism like #GiveElsaAGirlfriend, to backlash on The 100 ‘burying their gays', to criticism of J.K. Rowling’s racism and cultural appropriation on Pottermore, marginalized voices weren’t afraid to call out creators and hold them accountable.

“Fanfiction has always provided an avenue for exploration of gender, sexuality, or race that are often underrepresented or underserved. Fans engage in cultural analysis, as writers and readers alike can reimagine, rework, or fix the mainstream media they may find problematic or troubling, and deliver the representation that creators often fail to. Now the expectation is even greater. It’s 2016, after all. Social media has allowed fans to stay connected with creators, opening the lines of communication between them. Fans can pick and choose what media to consume and what they deem worthy of their attention. It’s easy to call it entitlement. There will always be bullies and trolls that take things too far.

“At the end of the day, though, fans are merely asking for a sense of social consciousness they feel they deserve. Fandom should ultimately foster a creative space for speculation and conversation between fans and creators (as long as it’s productive and respectful). Art shouldn’t exist in a vacuum. Fans should be able to engage with the creative work in a way that is meaningful to them, whether it be through fanfiction, community-driven discussion, or sometimes even radical candor.”

Clio: Hi, my name is Clio and what I’ve seen change in fandom in the last year is that I’ve seen people move from talking about representation in fandom to actually doing something about it. There are a lot of fests that are focused around characters of color, around women, around trans characters and disabled characters and lots of other characters that deviate from the sort of white cishet male norm in whatever way. I see this in femslash and also in slash fandoms and it’s such a great sign because even if lots of parts of larger fandom aren’t really responding to these things, you can have a community of people that really are supportive of doing something a little different with their fanworks.

Ebony: The biggest change in fandom since last year for me has been that Hermione is black in the stage production of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. In a fantasy fandom landscape where all too often, women characters of color are nonexistent, silent extras, forgettable fodder, throwaway exotic encounters, or the occasional sidekick, the casting of Noma Dumezweni was a development beyond my wildest dreams. I could not have predicted it when we did our Fansplaining interview last fall. All credit must go to Alanna Bennett for her BuzzFeed article, along with countless fan artists who chose to racebend Hermione for many years on sites like DeviantArt and Tumblr. Talk about being lucky to be alive right now… now, my world would have been complete if one of the scenarios in Cursed Child had been a Harmony, Pumpkin Pie AU, but we’re not quite that lucky. Makes me wonder if Rowling now regrets that Hypable interview with Emma!

“On a more sober note, there was also the entire #MagicInNorthAmerica controversy, which made me sad. It tempered my excitement about black Hermione.” And she provided a link so we'll put that in the show notes. “Suffice it to say that I stand in solidarity with Native American and First Nations fans, authors, educators, scholars and activists who have questioned her worldbuilding. Rowling’s vocal support and defense of #BlackHermione made me very sad about her silence around #MagicInNorthAmerica.”

ninemoons42: Fandom’s made some improvements in acknowledging the existence of non-white, non-Western fans, but it needs to be a continuing process.

Rukmini Pande: I think the most basic aspect of my shift has been my view of canon versus fandom, and how canon creators are generally seen to be straight cis white men creating content for the same demographics. This is a great binary, because of course it puts transformative fandom — especially queer transformative fandom — in rather neat opposition to evil corporations and lets us feel very good about ourselves. But as canons are changing, I think it’s time we started disrupting that binary quite seriously...

...I keep going back to The Force Awakens as a kind of touchstone in these discussions, because it’s been one for me in many ways and made me rethink a lot of my very ingrained assumptions about what fandom is and what it does. To me it asked a very basic question: what happens when canon takes those archetypal roles, those roles fandom loves, and takes them away from cis white dudes and gives them to somebody else. Of course, as any visit to the fandom tag will tell you, will go out of its way to make those very cis white dudes the fandom juggernaut anyway.

I think it’s important as well to see this not as an exception but as a rule. As part of my research I went back to look at how these discussions had been had in the past, and it’s really very depressing that I could copy and paste a LiveJournal post about fandom’s racism from 2006 into a Tumblr post today and have it still be absolutely relevant without changing a word. I think this is partly because we refuse to see whiteness as a racialized identity with specific effects. Whiteness is so powerfully neutral that everything else becomes an exception. So of course Kylo Ren and Rey are a great pairing, because look at the canon. And conversely, of course Phil Coulson and Clint Barton are a great pairing, because who needs canon?

So yes, that’s what's changed for me: this knowledge. That no matter the fandom or pairing, fanfiction’s defining characteristic must be how it deals with this whiteness, queer or straight. I must admit it’s made fandom a little more lonely for me, but on the whole, a lot more honest. Thank you!

Casey Fiesler: And it’s not exactly the mainstreaming of fandom or even tolerance and acceptability, which seems kind of tacit or even negative, but instead that fandom is being celebrated openly and proudly. Even in my professional and academic circles I’ve seen this change. Ten years ago when I first presented work about fandom, a professor openly referred to my study participants as “nutjobs.” But today, I’m totally comfortable and happy telling all my colleagues in my conference presentation that I have written fanfiction and my research about fandom is nearly always met positively and with both personal and professional interest from people. I think that we’re seeing in lots of contexts people being more comfortable talking about their fannish interests in all parts of their lives. I think this is great. Let your fan flag fly!

References

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