Transcript
Speaker: Welcome everyone to Contents May Vary.
Speaker: I'm Angie Fiedler Sutton talking to geeky people about geeky things.
Speaker: I'm a proud fangirl geek with pieces published in Stage Directions, Den of Geek, The Mary Sue and more.
Speaker: This episode's guest is Caroline Toy.
Speaker: J. Caroline Toy, she, her, is Learning Experience Manager in the Center for Learning and Teaching
Speaker: at Champlin College in Burlington, Vermont, and adjunct professor in the college's Humanities Corps.
Speaker: Her research and teaching focus on religion, popular media, and fan cultures, specializing in how fans use types of ritual and narrative practices that are traditionally associated with religion.
Speaker: Trained as a scholar of folklore and religion, she is also interested in religion in public space and protest in the United States and changing rural and urban experiences of place.
Speaker: She has published in venues including the Journal of Fandom Studies, Transformative Works and Cultures, Understanding Religion and Popular Culture, Second Edition, and the Humanities Commons, and has appeared on the MuggleNet podcast, Reading, Writing, Rowling, now Potterversity.
Speaker: Caroline is a huge, huge Doctor Who fan and a lifelong trekker, has an it's complicated relationship with Harry Potter and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and will try basically any mystery novel.
Speaker: When not geeking out, she paddles dragon boats and spoils her cat, St.
Speaker: Aaliyah and the 18 Knives.
Speaker: You can find samples of her work at academia.edu.
Speaker: Welcome to Contents May Very, Caroline.
Speaker: Thank you, Angie.
Speaker: I'm glad to be here.
Speaker: Now, how we met, quote unquote, you had reached out to me to help you with your research for the FAM Pilgrimage Project back in 2019.
Speaker: Now, obviously, that's been a few years ago, but I figured we could start the session by talking a little bit about that, what you were hoping to accomplish, and what the project was about.
Speaker: Right, definitely.
Speaker: Yeah, so we met virtually, I think, only by text.
Speaker: I think this might be the first time that we have had live voices together.
Speaker: I was working on my dissertation project on fan and media pilgrimage.
Speaker: Like Angie said, I'm a scholar of religion, folklore, and fan culture, and so I was taking the sort of unusual tack of looking at
Speaker: religious practices in fan pilgrimage, not with the goal of saying, you know, fans are religious because they love Harry Potter or something like that, which would be super reductive, but with the goal of kind of investigating how religiousness works outside of religion, outside of things we call religion, and how fans utilize some of those types of practices to, like,
Speaker: reestablish or cement or publicly perform and bond over some of their attachments to things like Doctor Who and Harry Potter and Sherlock.
Speaker: So in that project, I had gone to a lot of fan pilgrimage locations, mostly in the UK.
Speaker: And I was also able to interview a good number of people who had been to those locations, including you, Angie.
Speaker: So that's where that conversation started from my point of view.
Speaker: For listeners, I had been able to go to London in 2010, and I managed to do a Sherlock tour as well as hitting a couple of other places.
Speaker: So how did you get into something like that?
Speaker: What made you decide to, I mean, why religion?
Speaker: Why this project?
Speaker: Yeah, so that's kind of an interesting story, or it's two parallel stories, really.
Speaker: So around 2012, I think it was, I was actually in the UK.
Speaker: I'd never been in the UK before, but I had a family member who was over there.
Speaker: And so I went over there for a week on vacation.
Speaker: And we went out to Cardiff and we went to the Doctor Who experience.
Speaker: And Angie, that was actually my favorite story that you told me was about your visit to the Doctor Who experience of flying the TARDIS.
Speaker: And I think we were probably there around the same time because 2012,
Speaker: The experience, I believe, had opened that year.
Speaker: That was definitely in the middle of the Matt Smith era of Doctor Who.
Speaker: And I was just so excited.
Speaker: I was more of a, or I would say I am more of a David Tennant fan than I am a Matt Smith fan, although Peter Capaldi for the win.
Speaker: And so I was super excited to see all of these sort of post-David Tennant displays that they had there, the reconstruction of the 10th Doctor's TARDIS, and just all the kind of like
Speaker: fiddly little behind the scenes props that they had gone out of their way to make look low budget, kind of in keeping with the vibe of the series.
Speaker: So I had a really great time there.
Speaker: So that's the first part of the story.
Speaker: The second part of the story is that a couple of years after that, I was working in a job that had heavy summer seasons.
Speaker: And so when I left that job, I had to leave in the spring so they could bring in and train somebody who could work the whole summer season since I had to start grad school in August.
Speaker: And so I had quit that job in April and said, what am I going to do?
Speaker: So I went and spent a chunk of my savings account bumming around in some parts of Europe, living on granola bars.
Speaker: And one of the things that I did when I was over there was I walked the last 200 kilometers of the Camino de Santiago in Spain, which is a, it's been a Catholic pilgrimage route for about a thousand years.
Speaker: And I'm not Catholic, but I knew a lot of people who had done this.
Speaker: And I was like, I want to see what this is.
Speaker: So I actually did the kind of
Speaker: medium distance for the Camino walking pilgrimage participated in that tradition.
Speaker: And so when I got to graduate school, I had been intending to study religion in television or possibly religion in fan fiction, like how people use religious motifs from fantasy worlds in fan fiction.
Speaker: But I kind of tossed all that aside.
Speaker: I was like, okay, I've got these two experiences, this fan pilgrimage experience and then this
Speaker: like traditional religious pilgrimage by a person who is not part of that religion experience.
Speaker: What can I do with that?
Speaker: And that's how I ended up with the fan pilgrimage project.
Speaker: Awesome.
Speaker: For listeners, yes, my 300 plus photos from the Doctor Who experience are on my Flickr.
Speaker: I took as many as I could because I was there without my wife and I wanted to make sure she was able to see as much as I could, which is a good thing because now the Doctor Who experience is no more.
Speaker: Yeah, I went there actually about a month before it closed and it had gotten a little bit sad, but I was very sad to see it go.
Speaker: Yes, yes, it was a...
Speaker: You got to operate a Dalek, you got to operate the TARDIS.
Speaker: It was fun.
Speaker: And I definitely, I can see what you mean by the crossover with religion, because it definitely felt like not going to church per se, but it had that same kind of, you know, belief in there.
Speaker: So how did you get from there to learning experience manager?
Speaker: Yeah, so like a lot of academics in the humanities, you know, I graduated with my PhD and there are no jobs in my research area.
Speaker: And so I actually work in instructional coaching.
Speaker: So I work with professors at the college and talk with them about their teaching, do some coaching there.
Speaker: And then I also teach humanities courses, which is nice because it means I get to inflict my interest in religion and popular culture on the next generations.
Speaker: As Gaseya, what kind of humanities classes?
Speaker: Do you have a couple of titles you can give us?
Speaker: Yeah, so the department that I'm in is actually, it's not a, you know, religion department or an English department.
Speaker: It's just the gen ed department for the college.
Speaker: So the course that I'm currently teaching this semester is called Religion and Popular Imagination.
Speaker: Just thinking about how religion, what we imagine religion to be in popular culture in public spaces and in activism.
Speaker: So I'm doing that right now.
Speaker: In the past, I've taught kind of more straight up, you know, American religion or intro to popular culture, that kind of thing.
Speaker: But this is cool because I get to put them all together.
Speaker: Talk a little bit more about, you know, the religion in the public space and protests.
Speaker: How is that combined?
Speaker: I mean, that's definitely a very big topic, especially now with the 2024 election coming up.
Speaker: Talk a little bit more about that and your work there.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So when I was in graduate school, I'll do a little plug for the American Religious Sounds Project, which is a research project that went on for, I think, about six years.
Speaker: The grant ended, but the project is still publicly available.
Speaker: And I was a project manager on that and a field researcher.
Speaker: And, you know,
Speaker: 2015, with the 2016 election cycle starting up, things started to get really interesting in terms of the quantity and visibility of public protest and the influence of religion on public protest.
Speaker: And then the entire Trump administration, there was sort of this endless array of material.
Speaker: We were doing audio recording.
Speaker: And so I went to Black Lives Matter protests, immigrant rights protests,
Speaker: you know, anti-Muslim ban protests and was recording those.
Speaker: And one thing that was particularly interesting to me was how people combined the kind of important narratives or important affiliations in their lives when they were creating protest signs and, you know, just the way that they presented themselves at protests.
Speaker: So you would see things like, you know, at a anti-Muslim ban protest at the airport in Columbus, Ohio, which is where I was living at the time, you would see like
Speaker: Muslims protesting the Muslim ban, you would see Jewish people protesting the Muslim ban, you know, saying Jews for equality and Christians saying, you know, we don't throw people out based on their identity.
Speaker: And so people were mining those religious affiliations.
Speaker: But I also, and often it's similar or even the same events, saw people referring to Fanish affiliations.
Speaker: So people who had based their protest signs on Harry Potter,
Speaker: That was actually pretty common.
Speaker: People who were riffing on other pop culture products to kind of get these messages across.
Speaker: And of course, you know, there were other types of slogans, other types of signs, signs that didn't have any particular kind of reference.
Speaker: But those were sort of two fairly common categories that I was seeing.
Speaker: People referencing their religious beliefs and people referencing what was important to them in popular culture and as fans.
Speaker: Now, is this something that you've always wanted to get into or...
Speaker: Like from a kid or is that fairly recent?
Speaker: So I grew up a trekker and there's a family joke.
Speaker: Well, it's not a joke, but I was writing fan fiction at the age of six.
Speaker: I had a notebook.
Speaker: I had an illustrated Star Trek The Next Generation story that I was writing in there, which I never finished.
Speaker: And hopefully we'll never see the light of day, but definitely was raised as a fan.
Speaker: And didn't really kind of consider myself, I didn't really identify as a fan or identify as part of geek culture until I was in college and actually was around a lot of other people who identified themselves as being geeks or as being fans of something.
Speaker: And who also, you know, exposed me to lots of different kinds of media.
Speaker: So I would say it was always sort of brewing in the back of my mind, but it took some time to kind of come to the foreground.
Speaker: Let's talk a little bit more about training scholars, folklore and religion, how that is combined and how they're similar.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So basically, well, my graduate program was also an interdisciplinary program.
Speaker: It was comparative studies at Ohio State.
Speaker: And the expectation is that you come in thinking in more than one framework.
Speaker: And so as a person who was training in
Speaker: in the folklore kind of subset of that department, we were very interested in how do you talk to people?
Speaker: How do you elicit stories from other people and kind of follow those stories where your interlocutor wants to take them?
Speaker: And how do you think collaboratively about the work that you're doing rather than saying, oh, I'm just going to take all these interviews and go and do something with them, but thinking really thoroughly about are you respecting the perspectives that people are coming to you with?
Speaker: Are there opportunities to, you know, take your research and have conversations like this with people who have contributed to that research?
Speaker: And in some other cases and other projects that I was working on as part of that program to do research that contributes back to a community.
Speaker: So that's a little bit different from some of the more traditional text-based approaches to studying popular culture or traditional text-based or observation-based approaches to studying religion.
Speaker: So I would say as a folklorist, it has more to do with how I think about working with other people and the narratives that they are able to share with me.
Speaker: In terms of advice, if someone wanted to get into this field or if you could time travel and talk to yourself when you were getting into it, what would be some of the things that you would advise people?
Speaker: Yeah, that's a really complicated question.
Speaker: I'm thinking of fan studies specifically here because there are so many aspects of fan culture.
Speaker: The way that I did my research is
Speaker: is not necessarily effective if somebody is studying fan fiction or if somebody is studying, as a friend of mine did, the communities that develop in comments on Archive of Our Own or any number of other things.
Speaker: So I would say, identify what it is that you're interested in and then identify the toolboxes that you need to address that in ways that
Speaker: folks haven't done it before, you know, don't assume that you can address a particular question with only one intellectual toolkit.
Speaker: So I'm obviously a dedicated interdisciplinary in here, but I really do think that when you're talking about something like fan culture that is so diverse in its manifestations and its conflicts and its participants, that it really helps to have as broad a tool set as possible.
Speaker: Now, can we talk a little bit more about some of those tools?
Speaker: Do you have any suggestions or any examples?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So I think, you know, again, it depends on what people are interested in.
Speaker: My tool set had a lot to do with observation, with travel, and then with interviewing, as you know, I've mentioned before.
Speaker: So, and I was privileged to have the resources and to secure the funding to go to a lot of these places, but also to develop the practice of deep observation,
Speaker: sort of the willingness to sit in one place and not get the itch to say, okay, well, I've seen this.
Speaker: Let me move on to the next thing that I need to look at.
Speaker: And that can be challenging.
Speaker: And I actually, when I was doing field work at the Wizarding World of Harry Potter in Florida, so there's a, I can't remember the name of the ride.
Speaker: It's this incredible, immersive indoor roller coaster.
Speaker: And it's a great ride.
Speaker: it makes people motion sick who never get motion sick on roller coasters.
Speaker: And so I had a friend who had gone to the wizarding world at the same time that I had, and we had gone on this ride together and we got off and we're just like, we have to sit down in the shade.
Speaker: And we had to sit down in the shade for about 45 minutes, which ended up being a gift in some ways, once you got past the nausea part, because, you know, we had to sit there and you've
Speaker: like what's happening in front of you?
Speaker: What are you hearing?
Speaker: What are you seeing?
Speaker: And you start to kind of see this is in the Hogsmeade village section of the wizarding world.
Speaker: You know, how does the fake snow on the roofs there change your perception?
Speaker: Like, do you still feel like you're in Florida?
Speaker: How does the music that they're playing, they play music on a loop in that space, how does it change your perception of the space?
Speaker: And that was actually, now we're down this rabbit hole with this example, that was actually a really revealing piece to me.
Speaker: They were using some of the music from the third Harry Potter movie, which is the first Harry Potter movie that really shows you Hogwarts and Hogsmeade, like big picture, and then kind of how people in the movie move through space.
Speaker: And they were using that music in areas of the exhibit that were
Speaker: immersing you, that were sucking you in, that were kind of propelling you to move through that part of the wizarding world.
Speaker: And it was just, it was very clever.
Speaker: And I didn't, you know, I didn't find it manipulative to realize that.
Speaker: I just thought, okay, here's another piece of, you know, what's bringing us into this frame of thinking, yeah, I'm in Florida, but actually I'm in Hogsmeade.
Speaker: So yes, the piece of advice there is sit down,
Speaker: And sit down and listen.
Speaker: Sit down and watch.
Speaker: Read slowly.
Speaker: Do you have a favorite fan pilgrimage?
Speaker: Or is it like picking a favorite child?
Speaker: You know, that's tricky.
Speaker: I've been to probably... So...
Speaker: With the usual caveats about Harry Potter, and I did this research before 2020 when J.K.
Speaker: Rowling started to be involved in these really controversial conversations about gender, and I had a kind of a less critical relationship, we could say, with the Harry Potter stories before that.
Speaker: But I did go to the Warner Brothers Studio Tour twice, or no, sorry, three times I've been to the Warner Brothers Studio Tour.
Speaker: And the scale model of Hogwarts in the Warner Brothers Studio Tour, I think, is probably the coolest thing that I saw in the research that I did for this project.
Speaker: Is there someplace on your bucket list that you haven't been that you'd like to go?
Speaker: Oh, yeah.
Speaker: So where do I even start with that one?
Speaker: For kind of the...
Speaker: The media properties that I've been interested in in the past, like the Doctor Who and Harry Potter, which were sort of the primary texts that I was thinking about when I was doing this research.
Speaker: There is a forest, I believe called Puzzlewood, outside of Cardiff in Wales, that has been used as a filming location for a number of TV shows and movies, including, I believe, the Forest of Dean in the Harry Potter movies,
Speaker: And I can't remember what the exact reference in Doctor Who is, but it's this very weird sort of twisty old forest that's a little bit off the beaten track.
Speaker: Like you can go there with like a fan tour, but you can also go there without a fan tour.
Speaker: A little bit like the area where in Doctor Who they filmed Bad Wolf Bay.
Speaker: And I would love to be able to go there.
Speaker: I would also love to be able to go to Skellig Michael.
Speaker: I'm not a huge Star Wars fan, but that's the location where they filmed Akhto, the planet where Luke Skywalker has run away to in the sequel series.
Speaker: And it's just so impressive as a location in that film.
Speaker: And so otherworldly, but also such an important historical landmark in our world that I would love to see that in person.
Speaker: Any Star Trek related ones?
Speaker: You know, so much of Star Trek is soundstage.
Speaker: I don't, you know, I've never, and this is kind of weird now that I think about it, I've never had a particular desire to go on a tour, you know, seeking out Star Trek stuff.
Speaker: Although I did at the age of six get taken to a Star Trek convention in Boston by my parents who clearly did not know what to expect at a Star Trek convention.
Speaker: You know, they thought, oh, we're going to take our kids in costume.
Speaker: It'll be cute.
Speaker: And here are these, you know, full grown Klingons everywhere.
Speaker: So, no, not particularly, but the convention experience as a small child was very good.
Speaker: So my name is Neil Tasheda.
Speaker: I'm a volunteer at the Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library in Indianapolis, Indiana.
Speaker: And I've been geeking out with Angie Fiedler Sutton.
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Speaker: And now, back to my interview with Caroline Toys.
Speaker: What other authors do you typically follow or other academics that you would recommend people check out?
Speaker: I think it depends on what your fandom is that you're interested in or what your specific area of study is.
Speaker: Because I study Doctor Who, I really like Paul Booth's work and Ross Garner's.
Speaker: But I think that a lot of the important stuff for people to read to kind of get a breadth of knowledge in fan studies is sort of less known, I think.
Speaker: You know, everybody can benefit from reading a bit about transcultural fandom, about reading about fandom in non-white majority countries.
Speaker: And there's some great work that has come out of South Asia in the last 10 years that I think is really important for understanding some of the equity issues in fandom and inclusion issues.
Speaker: But it's also just really, really smart work that has a different perspective because it's not so embedded in
Speaker: in sort of the prevailing trends of fan studies in the United States and the United Kingdom.
Speaker: Now, as an academic yourself, do you feel like you have to have, like, I guess separation is the best word to use, from other fans to where, since you're studying the process, or do you feel like you're just one of us, one of us?
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, it's...
Speaker: That's also a complicated position.
Speaker: I mean, you used the term ACA fan a minute ago, and like Henry Jenkins, who I believe coined that term, yes, he has talked a lot about kind of the complicated position of the ACA fan, you know, wanting to be a fan and seen as legitimately a fan and also occupying the position of the academic.
Speaker: And then Matt Hills, who's a very significant theorist of fandom, has also articulated kind of the different but overlapping positions of
Speaker: fan scholars and scholar fans, where a fan scholar is somebody who identifies primarily as a fan and isn't in academia, but does scholarship from within fandom, right?
Speaker: They're writing meta, they are contributing to wikis, that kind of thing.
Speaker: So you've got the fan scholar and then you've got the scholar fan who is somebody who is doing scholarly work in academia on fan culture and also identifies as a fan.
Speaker: And I think as a scholar fan,
Speaker: there is always a tension there because any work that you do, you are inevitably representing or taken to be representing fan culture to non-fans.
Speaker: But it's, you know, fans like to talk about fandom, like fans understand fandom and have lots of opinions.
Speaker: And so it's kind of a tricky position to be in where as an academic, you are speaking to people who aren't fans, but
Speaker: fans themselves frequently have better things to say, right?
Speaker: Or more nuanced things to say than I can communicate.
Speaker: So I do enjoy being in fan spaces kind of incognito.
Speaker: Like I have my secret identity on Archive of Our Own.
Speaker: Like I like going to, or before the pandemic, I like going to conventions.
Speaker: I'm from Atlanta, so my home convention is Dragon Con.
Speaker: And kind of the anonymity of that, like,
Speaker: being able to go and dress as like the, you know, Victorian steampunk TARDIS in like a four layer costume that's totally inappropriate for August in Atlanta.
Speaker: And that to me is very different experience from doing research.
Speaker: In terms of publishing, how do you get into that?
Speaker: You've published a couple of venues in the journal of fandom studies.
Speaker: Let's talk a little bit about that work.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So academic publication is tricky because a lot of it is about, you know,
Speaker: finding the publications, figuring out how to fit your ideas into the writing styles and the structures and even the links that a journal or a book wants.
Speaker: And then sitting through a process of publication, which can take years, like literally you can go years from submitting a thing to a journal and seeing it in print.
Speaker: That you mentioned the Journal of Fandom Studies and I think the article that I published in there, I believe was almost two years.
Speaker: It was about 18 months from submission to print.
Speaker: And that's not at all uncommon.
Speaker: So I think, you know, for me, one of the fun things is figuring out how to write for different audiences, but that can also be challenged as a new writer.
Speaker: And if you are interested in publishing and you're not based primarily in academia,
Speaker: There are some venues that are more accepting of that than other venues.
Speaker: And I like Transformative Works and Cultures, which is the academic journal that's associated with the Organization for Transformative Works, aka the Archive of Our Own.
Speaker: Because that journal is open, it's open access.
Speaker: Anybody can go and read it, so you have the opportunity to kind of see how it works.
Speaker: But because Transformative Works and Cultures is part of this collaborative between
Speaker: fans and creators and academics, there's more of an understanding in that audience that contributions from across that spectrum are really valuable.
Speaker: And that's a little bit more friendly than some more traditional academic venues.
Speaker: What's your favorite part of all this research?
Speaker: My favorite part of, I got to say the fieldwork and the interviewing for my fan pilgrimage research, you know, the fieldwork of course is great because you have an excuse to go to all these places.
Speaker: And occasionally if you're very lucky, somebody else is paying for it.
Speaker: Sometimes they're not, sometimes, you know, you're, you're on a tricky budget or you just don't end up getting to do as much fieldwork as you wanted to, which has certainly happened to me.
Speaker: But yeah,
Speaker: Being able to go into some of these places with the dual mindset of, okay, I'm here to do research, but also this is really freaking cool.
Speaker: That is really fun.
Speaker: And then having conversations with people who have done that, who the best interviews are when people are like, I just get to squeak about this cool thing that I did.
Speaker: And if somebody wants to hear me talk about it, I'm just going to talk about it.
Speaker: that can be really fun too.
Speaker: And, and a lot of the stories that people have told me, you know, they really stick with me because they're just fun.
Speaker: What would be your least favorite part of your work?
Speaker: My least favorite part of my work.
Speaker: Honestly, I find a lot of the writing really enjoyable, but there's always a phase in academic writing, you know, because of the length of a chapter or the length of an article where it
Speaker: you know, you're writing the first draft and you're like, wait, I know I just said five or six cool things and I have two more cool things to say, but have I backed myself into a corner?
Speaker: Like what's going on?
Speaker: How do I bridge this stuff?
Speaker: So, you know, the, I would say the process of academic writing is one of ideally productive frustration, right?
Speaker: And ideally it's productive.
Speaker: Sometimes it's just frustrating as anybody who's ever written a college term paper knows, but sort of on steroids, right?
Speaker: So that's not super fun.
Speaker: The other thing that, you know, I always feel a little regret about is how much there is out there that I can't include, you know, where I have to draw a boundary.
Speaker: Like in my fan pilgrimage research, you know, I picked sites
Speaker: which, you know, to be honest, they were sites of interest to me or fandoms of interest to me that, you know, I had some background in, and this is a challenge with fan studies research is like most people who are studying fandom are studying fandoms that we care about, but you end up not including some things, some phenomena that would be really interesting and important to cover.
Speaker: So like,
Speaker: There is a whole phenomenon of fan pilgrimage in Japan.
Speaker: I don't know anything about fandom in Japan to speak of.
Speaker: So, you know, that's a really informative cultural context based on what I have read about fan pilgrimage in Japan, but it's not something I can really speak to.
Speaker: And I have not been able to write more than in passing about, you know, the whiteness of fan pilgrimage.
Speaker: You know, when you go into most of the fan pilgrimage places I studied,
Speaker: like you are not seeing a lot of faces of color.
Speaker: And I think that's partly due to, you know, who are the characters in the thing that the fandom is centered on.
Speaker: And it's also like, how do we talk about who has the privilege of going?
Speaker: Like who is safe in particular spaces?
Speaker: Who, depending on their national origin, is able to travel to particular places?
Speaker: Who has the money to go to particular places?
Speaker: And so there's an element of,
Speaker: exclusion that's hard to talk about in Fan Pilgrimage because you're talking about what's not there or who's not there.
Speaker: And I've never really had the bandwidth in these projects to delve into that.
Speaker: So, you know, that always feels to me like a gap that I should be addressing and I have not yet hit on the specific project where it really works to address that.
Speaker: Now we're getting close to the end of the interview and to the final questions, but before I go into the
Speaker: How did people get ahold of you and whatnot?
Speaker: Was there something that you thought I was going to ask that we didn't or something that you wanted to talk about that we haven't?
Speaker: Not particularly.
Speaker: I do like your kind of lightning round questions that you had on the website.
Speaker: I thought a lot of those were fun.
Speaker: We'll get to those.
Speaker: We'll get to that.
Speaker: Okay, cool.
Speaker: Yeah, I can't think of anything that I had in mind that's like, oh, you should ask me about this.
Speaker: For people who want to know more about you, how would be the best way to get ahold of you?
Speaker: Yeah, so I have some samples of my work and profile and stuff like that on academia.edu.
Speaker: I don't have a personal website at this point.
Speaker: I just haven't had time to do that thing that I should have done three or four years ago.
Speaker: And given everything that has happened with the entity formerly known as Twitter, I'm not particularly active on other forms of social media at this point, but my contact information is available on academia.edu.
Speaker: And I'm happy to talk to people who are interested in getting into studying fandom by academic paths or looking for advice about that, or just want to talk about fan pilgrimage.
Speaker: And then what are you currently geeking out about?
Speaker: What's something that you've been watching, reading, listening to that you've just
Speaker: tell everybody about that you like.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: You know, that's hard.
Speaker: There's so much on TV.
Speaker: So I think, you know, in the last couple of years, my favorite thing that I have
Speaker: seen on TV.
Speaker: Well, we're going to, because I've already talked a bit about being a Doctor Who fan and doing Doctor Who research, like, I will just say, I think Shuri Gatwa is great.
Speaker: I'm super excited for the upcoming season of Doctor Who.
Speaker: Like, I loved Jodie Whittaker, but just the
Speaker: The special, the 2023 specials were so good.
Speaker: So super excited about that.
Speaker: But in the last couple of years, I think the thing that has really jumped out at me in kind of the geeky television sphere is Strange New Worlds.
Speaker: I think that's still the newest.
Speaker: I was about ready to ask you about that.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And I think Strange New Worlds is great.
Speaker: I grew up in the next generation era of Star Trek.
Speaker: So, you know, my childhood Star Trek was this very adventure of the week format that Strange New Worlds like very explicitly wanted to go back to.
Speaker: But it's just such a well done show.
Speaker: You know, the characters, it's very character driven in a way that not all Star Treks are.
Speaker: And the way that they pursue sort of thematic arcs and character arcs through those very episodic stories is just really well done.
Speaker: And I think it's a jump back to what Star Trek, you know, originally was, originally was supposed to be.
Speaker: You know, if we look back at Star Trek in 1966 and you've got, you know, a bridge crew that's, you know, inevitably the captain is a white American dude, but you've got
Speaker: the half alien, you've got a Japanese guy, you've got a Russian guy, you've got a black woman, like this was inconceivable at the time that you would have that kind of work environment.
Speaker: And it kind of, you know, asked the question, like, what if we lived in a world like this?
Speaker: Like, what if our world was like this, and this was just normal, and it was fine.
Speaker: And I think Stranger Worlds is asking a different question, which is,
Speaker: What if we were willing to do what we had to do to get to a world like that, right?
Speaker: You have these characters who all have these kind of traumatic backstories who are looking to build a better world.
Speaker: And that's the story that we're following is that striving, not just kind of the imagining a better future.
Speaker: And they're really leaning into that, I think, in ways that are exciting and renewing for the franchise.
Speaker: Now, for those who are familiar with the podcast, they know what's coming up next.
Speaker: But if you're not familiar with the podcast, I end each episode with the lightning round questions.
Speaker: These are kind of more silly, sillier or non-serious questions that are still kind of personality driven that I figure are the best way to kind of get to know the real you.
Speaker: So I am going to.
Speaker: All right, I'll do my best.
Speaker: Randomize them real quick.
Speaker: Oh, best one first.
Speaker: Would you rather see Captain Kirk become a Jedi or Luke Skywalker become captain of the Enterprise?
Speaker: Captain Kirk become a Jedi.
Speaker: And this is funny because I like Luke Skywalker better than Captain Kirk, but I think Captain Kirk would benefit from a little Jedi meditation.
Speaker: If you were a superhero or villain, what power would you want?
Speaker: I just don't have enough time in my life.
Speaker: Let's say teleportation.
Speaker: When getting dressed, do you button and zip or zip then button?
Speaker: Button and zip, I think.
Speaker: Favorite color?
Speaker: Purple.
Speaker: What's your comfort movie?
Speaker: This is slightly embarrassing, but Love Actually, and specifically the scene where Hugh Grant's character dances through Downing Street.
Speaker: Like that two minutes is my comfort movie.
Speaker: Favorite or lucky number?
Speaker: Eight.
Speaker: What's your favorite curse word?
Speaker: And you can swear.
Speaker: I like making up my own.
Speaker: You know, whatever stream of angry dribble comes out.
Speaker: What's your favorite made up one?
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: That's the joy of them is they're so random.
Speaker: What's your favorite superstition or conspiracy theory?
Speaker: You don't have to necessarily believe in it.
Speaker: Oh, man.
Speaker: I have to think about that one.
Speaker: Favorite smell?
Speaker: Rosemary, I think.
Speaker: Geek or nerd?
Speaker: Geek.
Speaker: Definitely geek.
Speaker: Because I'm not a math person.
Speaker: I feel like to be a nerd, you have to be a little bit mathier than I am.
Speaker: Thoughts on pineapple on pizza?
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: What's your go-to song to sing in the shower?
Speaker: Oh, God, I have no idea.
Speaker: I try not to sing in the shower.
Speaker: It scares my cat.
Speaker: Pirates or ninjas?
Speaker: Oh, pirates, I think.
Speaker: If they're the pirates from the Doctor Who episode, Legend of the Sea Devils.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Who would you want to play you in the movie about your life?
Speaker: I'm going to have to pass on that.
Speaker: There's the running meme that you know you're an adult when you have a favorite stovetop burner.
Speaker: So what's your favorite stovetop burner?
Speaker: Upper left, upper right, lower left, lower right?
Speaker: Lower right.
Speaker: I never thought of that as a marker of adulthood, but there we are.
Speaker: Favorite meal?
Speaker: Favorite meal.
Speaker: I think today my favorite meal is avocado with chicken salad in it.
Speaker: Favorite drink?
Speaker: It can be alcoholic or non.
Speaker: Yeah, I'm a craft beer girl.
Speaker: Now, My Little Pony has those cutie marks where it's the image of something that they're fascinated at, you know, that defines their personality.
Speaker: What would be your cutie mark?
Speaker: Part of me wants to say the TARDIS.
Speaker: Yeah, I might have to go with the TARDIS.
Speaker: What is your favorite time of day?
Speaker: Sunset.
Speaker: And then we've already talked about your favorite doctor, but favorite Bond or Batman?
Speaker: I think my favorite Bond is Daniel Craig because...
Speaker: Bond is so over the top, but he makes it seem not quite as over the top as it is with some of the other Bonds.
Speaker: And that's a wrap for this episode.
Speaker: Thanks to Caroline Toy for being interviewed.
Speaker: As always, any websites mentioned are in the show notes for this episode on my website.
Speaker: Thanks also to Neil Tasheda from the Mid-Show Plug.
Speaker: I interviewed him as part of episode 44.
Speaker: This is Angie Fiedler-Sutton from one-on-one interviews to red carpets and conventions to roundtable discussions.
Speaker: I bring you a little bit of everything.
Speaker: After all, contents may vary.
Speaker: Thanks for listening to Contents May Vary, the theme song of Schoolyard Hayes by Yari Picnican, available via the Free Music Archive.
Speaker: More information about the podcast is available on my website, angiefsutton.com.
