Fansplaining

In Episode 103, Flourish and Elizabeth interview Leah Hennessey and Emily Allan, creators of “Slash: The Play,” which they recently performed at Joe’s Pub in New York City. Topics discussed include lurking, the appeal of “bad” writing, presenting ideas about fanfiction to people outside fandom, and the complicated interplay of irony and sincerity in fandom and in art. They also tackle the vitally important question, at length: What houses would the characters of BBC Sherlock be sorted into at Hogwarts?

In Episode 102, Elizabeth and Flourish talk about characterization: how fans interpret it, get attached to it, and fight about it. How do fans collectively come to an understanding of a fictional character? Does this change with textual vs visual source material? What does “OOC”—“out of character”—mean to people in different fannish spaces? They also respond to a listener letter about the history of fandom, and discuss what can be documented—and what cannot.

In Episode 101, “Stan Culture,” Flourish and Elizabeth talk with Keidra Chaney, co-founder and publisher of The Learned Fangirl, about the terms “stan,” “stanning,” and “stan culture.” They discuss the evolution of “stan” from a derogatory term to point of pride (for some), the structures of stan culture, similarities between pop music and sports fans, and the transactional nature of some stan behaviors.

In Episode 100, “The More You Know,” Elizabeth and Flourish celebrate the ways they’ve learned and grown in the past four years of Fansplaining, reflecting on key areas where they’ve changed their frameworks—and their minds. Topics covered include lurkers, the realities of TV production, racism in fandom, and our old friend, capitalism. Here’s to a hundred more!

In Episode 99, “The Shipping Answers,” Elizabeth and Flourish are joined by special guest and DATA PROFESSIONAL verity to analyze the 17,391 (!!!) responses to the Fansplaining Shipping Survey. How do these bazillions of people define “shipping”? Following along with verity’s interactive data visualization, they discuss topics including “active” vs. “casual” shipping, how fandom impacts shipping practices, and exactly how much people care about their ships being “endgame.”

In Episode 98, “The After Effect,” Elizabeth and Flourish talk about characterization and RPF, pegged to the release of the film After, adapted from Anna Todd’s massively popular Harry Styles fanfic. What happens when different groups of fans clash over their interpretations of a celebrity—especially when some are interested in trying to divine the “truth” about their fave, while others are primarily interested in personal fantasies? They also answer listener questions about anti culture, fanfiction, and cycles of attention online.

In Episode 97, “The Shipping Question,” Elizabeth and Flourish unveil their brand-spanking-new survey, on shipping and what we mean when we say we’re doing it. They discuss the inspiration for the survey, what’s included (and what isn’t), and their own shipping histories, practices, and preferences. They also read a trio of listener letters: on shipping and speculation, on fanfiction tastes, and a follow-up to the discussion on “creativity” vs. “originality.”

In Episode 96, “Ask Fansplaining Anything: Part 4,”  Flourish and Elizabeth respond to a plethora of listener letters on a wide variety of topics, including genderbending, imagines, political leanings across fannish platforms, Fandom Wank, kink memes, and how to deal with a friend who has GENUINELY TERRIBLE IDEAS ABOUT FANFIC.

In Episode 95, “Back to the Fans,” Flourish and Elizabeth discuss director Jason Reitman’s recent comments—that the upcoming Ghostbusters film would give the franchise “back to the fans”—and contextualize them in both the morass that is online Ghostbusters discourse and the ways that people in the entertainment industry frame “fans.” They also untangle the conflation of fan entitlement, critique, and transformative works, and they answer a listener question about queerbaiting, shipping, and TV writers.

In Episode 94, “Save Our Show (It’s A Metaphor),” Elizabeth and Flourish talk fan petitions—to keep a show on the air, to get a ship together, to de-canonize a piece of content, and everything in between. On a recent trip to Los Angeles, Flourish gathered perspectives from a variety of entertainment industry professionals, asking the question: Are fan petitions ever effective?

In Episode 93, “User-Generated Content,” Elizabeth and Flourish tackle the thorny intersections between making stuff you love and getting paid. They start with the recent round of layoffs at BuzzFeed—including the revelation that a good portion of their traffic comes from uncompensated “community” members—and segue into a conversation about the uncompensated things fans enjoy doing, and the complicated ways that the tech, media, and entertainment industries profit off fans’ work. What is exploitative—and what is just fans having fun?

In Episode 92, “Ask Fansplaining Anything: Part 3,” Elizabeth and Flourish read and play another batch of listener letters and voicemails. Topics covered include fandom’s future platforms, TV revivals, the dehumanizing aspects of RPF, and a return to The Discourse Trilogy™, from parallels with American fundamentalist church culture to the relationship between purity discourse and happy endings.

In Episode 91, “Casey Fiesler,” Flourish and Elizabeth welcome the information science professor back onto the podcast to discuss her research, especially her study on the way transformative fandom migrates across platforms. Topics covered include feminist HCI, if you can truly get a “representative” sample of fans for a survey, privacy concerns as fandom comes under more scrutiny from researchers, and what Tumblr could have done—and still could do—better regarding the Great Porn Crackdown of 2018.

In “The Year In Fandom 2018,” Elizabeth and Flourish discuss the events of the year: What trends from 2017 continued, what was less important, and did anything new begin to emerge? Tumblr fell apart; #metoo did not save us from the way systems enable abusers; K-pop more fully entered mainstream Anglophone culture; moral panics around shipping only intensified; and capitalism shaped everything in fandom, forever and ever, amen.

In Episode 89, Elizabeth and Flourish welcome back Dr. Rukmini Pande, a fan studies scholar whose new book, Squee From the Margins, explores race in both the field as well as fandom at large. Topics discussed include defining the boundaries of “fandom,” how queerness and gender structure fan studies while race typically does not, closed vs open digital platforms, how fandom discussions of racism are often relegated to “crisis points,” and more.

In Episode 88, Flourish and Elizabeth interview Kenyatta Cheese, a founder of Know Your Meme and currently of Everybody At Once, the company behind the social media presences of Doctor Who, Orphan Black, and other shows. They discuss EA1’s philosophies of community and fandom, the way the entertainment industry understands fan culture, and how official accounts navigate fannish spaces—plus a good ol’ critique of 20th-century Marxist frameworks.

In Episode 87, Elizabeth and Flourish offer up an extra (and possibly unwanted) fourth installment of THE DISCOURSE TRILOGY, entitled, “What We Discourse About When We Discourse About the Discourse.” Brace yourselves. They read and play responses from five listeners, on topics including the connections between broader cultural conversations and fandom’s purity debates, the Feminist Porn Wars of the 1980s, the ways that fandom fosters cross-generation connections as well as divisions, and Flourish’s deep and abiding love for Twilight. 

In Episode 86, “The Money Question,” Flourish and Elizabeth complete their inadvertent DISCOURSE TRILOGY with a conversation about the monetization of fanfiction. The first half focuses on the Archive of our Own, a nonprofit fanfic archive that strongly discourages authors from monetizing their work. The second half focuses on Wattcon, a recent conference run by Wattpad, a reading-and-writing app that welcomes fanfic—and, as a for-profit company, both makes money from fanfic and encourages fic writers to think of themselves as entrepreneurs.

In Episode 85, Flourish and Elizabeth talk about the ever-contentious topic of age in fandom. They start with childhood—are there aspects of childhood that are naturally fannish?—and continue on through later stages of life, including the way mainstream society pits fannishness against maturity (unless you’re a sports fan!). Topics covered include ageism, the empathy gap online, Ann M. Martin, and the glory that was the mall in the 1990s.

In Episode 84, “Purity Culture,” Elizabeth and Flourish brace themselves and dive into a topic they’ve been asked about many times before. They define and deconstruct the term, along with the related “antis” and “stans”—who they are, how they behave, and what impact they have on fandom as a whole. They also address listener letters about the monetization of fanfic, new EU copyright law, and their interview with Javier Grillo-Marxuach.