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#1: The Ramifications of Pope Yaoi Hazards
40 Plays19 days ago
Allegra and M.W. (Memento Whori) discuss: why were fans so upset when Emily Gould posted a fairly complimentary rec list of The Pitt fanfics in The Cut???
Plus: extensive Conclave the film/IRL conclave fandom discussion, homophobic fujoshi discourse, fan demographic shifts, & more!
Remember to follow the newsletter to get new episodes emailed to you when they're out: http://fandomnewsnetwork.beehiiv.com/
Transcript
Introduction and Episode Overview
00:00:05
Speaker
Hi there. Welcome to the official first episode of Fandom News Network, the podcast. If you tuned in for the last episode and said nice things about it to us, we'd say you're the reason we're doing another one, but that would be a lie because it's mainly for our egos.
00:00:21
Speaker
I am your host, Allegra Rosenberg, and I've got my co-host, Memento Hori, with me.
Upcoming Discussions and Listener Engagement
00:00:27
Speaker
um And this week we've got Fujoshi discourse, fourth wall discourse, and a huge heaping load of Pope discourse, so strap the fuck in.
00:00:36
Speaker
And we'd just like to remind anyone and everyone that you can send in tips, do moi style, to lookinsidethepaperbag at gmail.com. Pope found in a fan cam?
00:00:47
Speaker
Likely place for him to be. Also, this is cool. I didn't know this. You can leave us comments on Spotify. Thank you to Puba.
00:00:56
Speaker
Truly the platonic ideal of listening in on the best conversation. Well, that is a lot to live up to, but we'll give it a shot. So first up on the docket is our lightning round roundup of Fujo news from the last few weeks.
AI Bots and Fandom Accessibility
00:01:10
Speaker
Memento Hori, do you want to take it away?
00:01:12
Speaker
i shall. All right. So one of the first things that was going around in the wild, wild world of Fujo's was that ah there have been AI bots have been scraping AO3. And so many, many people were locking their fix. So that is just, you know, watching out for as the generative AI specifically and like language learning models ah yeah continue to encroach on fan spaces, which has definitely been a large topic ah this past year.
00:01:45
Speaker
And something that is super interesting about that, this is not the first time this has happened, first of all. Second of all, the the number of people increasingly locking their fix, I mean, it's a feature that I think has been available on AO3 from the beginning, but the more people that lock their fix, the harder it is for um people coming in from outside of fandom to find the good stuff, which is something that we're going to talk about in just a second.
00:02:09
Speaker
But like people without accounts, when they browse AO3 and they try to get a sense of what fandom is, increasingly more fics by longtime fandom people who tend to be good authors are actually being hidden from them, which I just think is a super interesting dynamic, that sort of protectiveness ah versus like
Film 'Challengers' and its Cultural Impact
00:02:27
Speaker
people coming in. and like You see this a lot with Taskmaster fandom. It's a whole thing. But anyway, go on.
00:02:32
Speaker
Oh, yeah. And I mean, just for... We'll get into this later, but ah none of my fics are publicly available. All them are locked. um So another...
00:02:43
Speaker
ah thing in the world of Fujo's was we recently celebrated the one year anniversary of Challengers, um a movie for Fujo. She's about Fujoism and its platonic ideal, which is when you like destroy homoerotic rivalry, kind of recenter it around yourself, marry one of them. The other one's career is kind of like destroyed. And then years later, when you're all adults, like you have children, adults,
00:03:09
Speaker
kind of like come back together and bring back the homoerotic sports rivalry that also is an affair. So, you know, just yeah thank you, Cinema. Thank you, Cinema. Thank you, Luca. I cannot believe that movie did not like get nominated for any Oscars. Did it really not get nominated for any?
00:03:25
Speaker
think it was maybe nominated for something. Like maybe the soundtrack, but was like – Deserved was soundtrack and editing. Those were the main things to me that I was like – Watching that movie –
00:03:39
Speaker
I know we said that we weren't going to talk about ourselves as much this episode, but I did see that movie on the day my dad died, and I still love it. So that tells you how good of a movie it is. It hasn't actually been ruined for me because that's how good it was. that's Yeah, that, I mean...
00:03:55
Speaker
but I saw somebody refer to like being misinformed about the the show The Pit as, oh, they've challengersed this show, which is bizarre to me because they literally kiss and challengers.
00:04:06
Speaker
like How is that misinforming you about what the movie is about? yeah and makes no sense. One of those things where it's like no one actually misinformed you. You made decisions based on seeing posts that didn't even have text in them.
00:04:22
Speaker
Just images that you saw online and you were like, are they showing porn in theaters? And they're not. um They stopped doing that. ah But they do kiss in Challengers and she has sex with both of them.
Understanding 'Fujoshi' Across Cultures
00:04:38
Speaker
Yes. And it's representation. It's representation. And also I don't think anyone, I don't, I don't understand how you would have like tuned into the pit thinking There was anything other than doctoring happening on it.
00:04:53
Speaker
Yeah. I think that people have – they aren't learning how to osmos properly the problem. No, not at all. Not at all. Speaking of Fujos, we've got some major Fujo discourse happening these last couple weeks on the site formerly known as Twitter.
00:05:08
Speaker
Oh, yes. The word fujoshi is back in the world discourse. So just, of course, the kind of... There was one tweet.
00:05:19
Speaker
I can't even... Oh, yes. Here we go. From Chainsaw Chu, which I believe was towards the end of April, um which was just, homophobic fujoshis are so fascinating.
00:05:31
Speaker
And... Someone else had quote tweeted it, and I have screenshotted couple of different versions of the same kind of ah post that was getting quoted on here, which is, Fujo's PR is so good, y'all have forgotten what they used to be like.
00:05:45
Speaker
um And they're still like that too, especially in non-Western fandom spaces, and then kind of this whole discourse surrounding the um idea around how Fujoshi, the word, transitioned from it being this or what it meant originally in one culture and what it means now.
00:06:04
Speaker
Yeah. um Yeah. The the cycle the is our Fujo's mostly cis-het homophobic women who are like, You know, the big F word, the fetishizing word are they mostly like transgender people who haven't realized it yet.
00:06:22
Speaker
um There also was, of course, a great tweet from Twitter user at Sodomy Lover. I like fujoshis and I feel comfortable around them. Who gives a fuck if you're a woman jerking off to dudes touching each other? Love is love.
00:06:34
Speaker
and So, you know, we've got there's all kinds of opinions that people have. Yeah. Yeah, i I think that this is one of the more interesting and prominent examples of this idea of like transnational fandom, movable practices, how a word or, you know, a sort of ah way of identifying it it within the context of fandom gets picked up and and sort of moved and and adopted and and sort of the context shifts.
00:06:59
Speaker
Just like the word fandom itself, right? So remind me what Fujoshi originally meant and sort of how it got coined. My understanding is that it originally meant like rotten women or whattten rotten girls um relating to...
00:07:19
Speaker
Just, yeah, women who enjoy... And then, like, there's two different versions of the history that I've seen, that it was either coined by women themselves claiming that they were rotten... This is in Japan. In Japan, yeah, specifically in Japan.
00:07:33
Speaker
Readers of EL. Yeah. yeah And that's boys love yaoi. Which, again, is one of those things where it's, like, when we talk about... Like, when people talk about yaoi, that is a genre that's a sub-genre of, like...
00:07:47
Speaker
Printed manga. Yeah. um So and not the more catch all that it's become today. Yeah. Where people are like, why wasn't there Yowie in the pit? And it's like, well, so that is in fact a live action American television show.
00:08:01
Speaker
But then again, it's a word that is we've picked up and we've used because it's really useful shorthand. Exactly. Because this could be a whole other discussion about when do you say slash versus when do you say yaoi, which is interesting.
00:08:14
Speaker
I want to do a deep dive into that. Because the word slash is completely – nobody uses that anymore. Like it's completely fallen out of the And that shows how sort of Western fandom terms, some of them have like shipping, and some of them have sort of lost this priority, like slash versus yaoi, which is, I think, more commonly used.
00:08:32
Speaker
um So people and women in Japan use the word fujoshi. Well, so there's the ah letter there're the two versions of it where it was either the women in Japan calling themselves that because they enjoyed quote-unquote rotten and homosexual love, or it was the men on forums in Japan calling women that because they were quote-unquote rotten because they cared more about their own interests, including yaoi, than dating and being appealing to straight men.
00:09:00
Speaker
right Which are two very different meanings of the word rotten. Which then think leads to totally different. Yeah. and There's that interesting word where it's like, well, if if if if evil straight men used to call us that, then it's okay to reclaim it. But if we started calling us that and being proud of it, then it's like bad and we shouldn't.
00:09:20
Speaker
So this this is my favorite tweet from this discourse. So there was that, um there was a quote retweet of the original tweet. And this was someone saying, homophobic Fujishis are such a massive phenomenon in religious all-girl schools. You do not know the horrors I've been through.
00:09:34
Speaker
And then this person replied to themselves saying, base Yaakov Fujishis are so fascinating because even when some kids were barely allowed to watch non-Jewish media, they still found a way to Fuzo out. And I just, first of all, I love the idea of specifically like Jewish religious school girls, like needing to find like, like David and Jonathan, like biblical Yowie in order to satisfy that itch. Because I do think about a lot, like what if I was, it 200 years ago in the shtetl, I would still find a way to Fuzo out, right? because the Catholics have it like so easy. in terms Yeah, they have it so easy. And we'll get we'll get more into that later.
00:10:11
Speaker
But I love that i love that that angle on it, which is that fujo-shism as something that teenage girls go through naturally, even when they're, like, sort of not integrated into, like, mainstream online fandom, it's a rite of passage. And, like, girls will find a way to fujo-out, which I really admire.
00:10:31
Speaker
But that doesn't necessarily mean that they're going to like become progressive, right? So there's that element of like, well, there still do exist this religious and homophobic fujoshi who thinks it's, well, it's only okay when it's in media, but not in real life.
Identity and Fandom Practices
00:10:44
Speaker
Like, I think it's interesting to have this discourse because yeah, some of us sort of forget that that's probably a thing in the rest of the world.
00:10:50
Speaker
It's very much a thing in the rest world. And I think also what people forget in this discourse too is that, like you said, like there are aspects of it that are like things that might in some way be like,
00:11:01
Speaker
normal, typical developmental, um experimental behavior that become like embedded in fandom as fandom practices that could also just be regarded as like regular teen practices. um Although, I don't know, we'd have to double check with Margaret Mead about whether they're ah with the teenage girl and the invention of the teenage girl and whether they were girls growing out. right But the thing about that is also that it's like you also have, I don't like the quote unquote homophobic ally is thing Yeah. She exists even if she doesn't engage in fandom at all. Yeah. And has never Fujo'd out.
00:11:42
Speaker
Right. Is still very much a thing. And I think also that's what that poster was hitting on with the all-girls school too, which I think is another thing that comes up a lot with the like Fujo thing is that when people talk about the homophobic Fujo, because some people are like, well, ah no, I would, for example, sodomy lover, a cis gay man saying like...
00:12:00
Speaker
He's never been made to be uncomfortable by Fujoshis. And I believe that. And I believe that there are plenty of Fujoshis who already that. And I also know that like as a non-binary person who has experienced being out as like a lesbian or as like a trans, like masculine person in different contexts and different identities, um,
00:12:20
Speaker
Like I've had plenty of experiences in which, and I went to a historically women's college. So I think that's also why I'm really wary of when people start down the path of, well, fandom historically is this like women and queers space. So it's only good things happen there.
00:12:34
Speaker
That's not true. That's not how anything works at all. um And you still have girls who are like, oh, I want a gay best friend. And when you're like, I'm gay, they're like, you know what I mean? Like a faggot.
00:12:45
Speaker
And you're like, oh, but they still think anal is disgusting. Yeah. Right. And this is historically very interesting because, and this is a conversation that I actually got in like 15 minutes deep with Julian the other night where he's like, well, why does the fandom demographic look like this?
00:13:01
Speaker
And I'm like, it's interesting because when media fandom, as we know it, started in the 1960s, it was mostly adult professional women, probably identified as straight because it was the 60s, in their late 20s and 30s who could afford to spend the time and money on what fandom was at that time,
00:13:16
Speaker
which was going to conventions and buying and producing sort of print products. And as fandom, media fandom spread and became more accessible and also things like women's lib and, and you know, like queer rights happened, yeah the demographics shifted to become younger and more queer and more diverse just by nature of how the internet opened things up to everybody.
00:13:38
Speaker
It is true that historically media fandom as we know it the The subculture that AO3 is sort of born out of was historically sort of adult straight women. Would some of those people not identify as straight today? Yeah, probably. It was like the frickin' 1960s, early 70s.
00:13:53
Speaker
So it's it's you can't – this is a getting into like this whole like archival retroactive research thing. Well, you can't like declare retroactively who all these people would have been if they were around today. and But fandom as a subculture is something that has always appealed to people who felt a little bit out of step with the mainstream, even if it's just because they were a housewife and they didn't want to be. Right? That counts.
00:14:14
Speaker
And you can also go back and read like Lou Sullivan's diaries who leads this, I'm sure you've heard of him, this like famous guy, essentially considered the first openly gay trans man to like live as a gay trans man.
00:14:29
Speaker
Yeah. And he, there, all of his diaries are published posthumously, including his, from his like youth and his, when he was a teenage girl, as he described himself, like even as an adult, which I think I find his writing really interesting. And like, yeah he was in his diary being like, oh my, like this total fixation on the boys in his life. Um, and on the Beatles and on like wanting the, like being like, oh my god, like John and Paul's friendship is so crazy. yeah like Not full fandom because it wasn't fully embedded in it um because it was super rural or whatever, but still like that innate curiosity of kind of, oh my god, what's also the term?
00:15:12
Speaker
There's some kind of like psychological, sociological term for ah people kind of explaining so many people marry like their neighbors or childhood friends or something you know proximity there's some kind of it's it's got to do with proximity but there's like a specific um oh i don't know but
00:15:32
Speaker
i i do wonder about like kind of the yeah because so much of it and especially when we think about like fandom in terms of this fujo thing in terms of like when it um comes through the lens of like sexuality exploring and desire.
00:15:45
Speaker
Um, because then you also get into just like histories of like porn and stuff, because you do start to see, um, like with visual porn in the porn industry and when like what straight cis women have talked about and like what feminist scholars have looked into and the things that the porn that like women watch, for example.
00:16:02
Speaker
And I think, Similar trends can be seen in the things that are focused on in erotica. um And that is why you do also get people who are like, well, they, yeah, of course there are people who are interested in it because they are only attracted to men.
00:16:14
Speaker
They are only attracted to straight men. They are going to say like homophobic things. You also get plenty of people who are not that. because it's all microcosms of larger societies. Yeah. And this comes back to the Joanna Russ quote. She was a lesbian who entered into fandom spaces and recognized slash fiction as erotica as pornography in a really valuable sociological way.
00:16:33
Speaker
I also want to bring up related to the Lou Sullivan thing, someone like Pamela DeBar, the famous groupie of the 70s, who when she was a teenager, role played John and Paul from the Beatles with her best friend and they like made out as John and Paul, which is just this fantastic quote.
00:16:49
Speaker
And it's not as if she, but she was like a fan, but in a very different way than Lou Sullivan was a fan because she really wanted to fuck those guys. And then she ended up fucking a lot of them. So, but it's, it's this big tent thing that we, we end up coming back to when we talk about fan was like no single fan is going to have the same experience as another.
00:17:08
Speaker
And the the the difficulty of communicating these specific internal experiences of of arousal and of sexuality and of gender, that and then introduce that into sort of the the contextually collapsed environment of the internet is where so much of this discourse eternally springs from.
Real Person Fiction and Catholic Fandom
00:17:27
Speaker
Absolutely. Yeah.
00:17:28
Speaker
Yeah, it's just super interesting. um So related to girls at religious schools fujoing out, let us move into our rpf update segment.
00:17:44
Speaker
In RPF updates this week, we've got the Conclave fandom in the spotlight because of the IRL Conclave. I was hoping to make this before the new Pope announcement so we could really talk about, you know, everybody's doing their sort of guessing games. But guess what? We have a new Pope.
00:18:02
Speaker
He's from Chicago. and Nobody in my family cares because we're Jews from the north side and he's a Catholic from the south side. Whatever. I'm sending memes. They're not liking them. It's fine. Oh, my entire family has been losing our minds, obviously, because I love this for you.
00:18:15
Speaker
New York Catholics. Yeah. um and I went to ah like also there's the main line connection in my family with Nova. But there's been quite some discourse because this has probably been the largest blow for like New York Catholicism ever. um And no other Catholic school will ever recover probably from this.
00:18:36
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, and I love that you brought up that this, you know, this Catholic fandom discourse, it's literally about the separation of church strength and Of church and state. Which is something that we say in relation to, like, the fandom fourth wall a lot, but, like, this time it's literally about the church, which is crazy. Yeah. So I just, like, let's talk about this timeline here for a second.
00:19:00
Speaker
So Conclave, the movie, comes out in 2024 And there is this small, close-knit, you know, kind of elevated but very horny fandom of people who enjoy the old man homoeroticism the intersex representation and that sort of very earnest, you know, approach religion. ah Shout out to Edward Berger. Like, there's a big overlap here with but the terror fandom.
00:19:25
Speaker
And the Conclave fandom has all this usual fandom stuff like fic and fan art and fan cams for the fictional cardinals and, you know, ah all all this usual stuff. And for the actors. And for the actors.
00:19:36
Speaker
And I would say like the Conclave fandom, like when it was first going on, it reminded me of like pretty classic, you know, one-off movie fandoms of days of yore, like the way we were all really obsessed with the social network and Inception. It's good to, and the challengers. It's good to have like a good movie that you can do fandom stuff with that isn't like a fucking franchise or like isn't some tv show that's going to be drawn out forever. It's good to have a good movie that you can do fandom with.
00:19:58
Speaker
But then the pipeline, right? so as we saw in the terror, for a standalone or closed canon, once you've exhausted the possibilities for the canon but are still obsessed, you have two roads, right?
00:20:11
Speaker
A, getting obsessed with the actors, and B, getting obsessed with the history slash IRL counterparts of the media. And in Conclave's case, many did both. But in this specific case, the timing was fucking crazy, obviously, because it just as Conclave fans started becoming invested into like, well, who are the IRL counterparts, the fucking Pope literally died. and And that is how we got Pope Crave being interviewed by Vulture and the New York Times. I mean, I don't know if you were like following this sort of ascendance. It's just crazy to see.
00:20:44
Speaker
i mean, like sort of because i have, as I mentioned on our last podcast, a future of mine is very active in the Conclave fandom. And I've been posting about, like, because they were going to be, like, submitting to the zine or something. And that is what Pope Crave originally was.
00:21:01
Speaker
Right. It was the conflate fandom zine. Exactly. So I have been, like, yeah, tangentially following all of this. And it has also been very – yeah, it's just been very funny because I think also – with the context of there's also this like blur here between, and there's been quite a lot of arguments about this on Twitter that I've seen the blur here between like what constitutes Catholic cultural practices and fandom practices.
Fandom and Cultural Identity
00:21:29
Speaker
It's so interesting. It is just endlessly interesting because like, Do you have a little icon card that you carry around that's nicely decorated? Maybe you have like favorite people. And there were yeah there were a lot of people, which also was making many people mad in different ways. But I think that people were getting...
00:21:51
Speaker
there was like some tweet that was going around where someone was talking about like feeling kind of sad thinking about the new Pope having to like leave behind his community. um And a a lot of the reactions were basically being like, oh my gosh, you've gone like too far fandomizing the like real thing.
00:22:07
Speaker
And what was interesting when I went back, first of all, that post had actually... left its containment and was ah about the character Benitez who becomes the Pope in the film, based on passages from the book that the film is about.
00:22:23
Speaker
And the poster, who was like an actual Filipino Catholic teenager, had just had a similar conversation with their mother, about like thinking about what it would be like to become the Pope.
00:22:37
Speaker
And I saw same, like the same thing, which I sent you from Cardinal Pizzabala's mother about this relationship. But like, this is something that was in the fiction within the fandom and is already how people like Catholics are thinking about it because it is, you know, like it it's a, it's the promotion you can't come back from. Cardinal Pizzabala's mother was saying she was glad he wasn't the Pope because she wanted to make him the pasta he liked.
00:23:02
Speaker
Oh my God. But that's like fandom catnip also. And so, you know, we had the, I don't know how much of like the Cardinal fan cam stuff came from Conclave fans. i was um I would imagine that there's a large amount of overlap, but it's not a hundred percent that there are people who are like enjoying or making like IRL- Catholic fan cams who were not necessarily super involved in the Conclave transformative fandom.
00:23:27
Speaker
But it's it's hard to prize apart in a really interesting way. The overlap seems enormous. Yeah. And so here's a tweet from um at Agnes Wickfield saying, some fans of Conclave getting uncomfortably close to fandomizing real-life Catholicism.
00:23:43
Speaker
Let's all watch actual Academy Award for Best Picture winner Spotlight 2015. Stanley Tucci is even in that one too. And this person turned off replies. But obviously, most of the quote tweets were like – girl, like Catholic fandom came first and someone replied, ah where do you think the term canon and idols came from? Which I just thought was, you know, kind of the perfect rejoinder to that.
00:24:09
Speaker
um Because yeah, it's, it's like, it's almost it so progressive. It's regressive. Right. Yeah. And I mean, that's also where I think a lot of people like that is, I think where you do like get the I don't want to say like baseline correct or baseline incorrect, but technically linguistically true, like statement that I think needs to be built upon, but like this concept of fandom being inherently reactionary, um just in terms of literally what reactionary means politically um and like culturally. But I think the, yeah, the whole idea of the Catholic fandom thing, because as I said, like I was going onto these people's accounts and being like, all right,
00:24:51
Speaker
What exactly is going on here? like are you Did you just watch this movie and trick yourself into like actually not knowing anything about like Cardinals and being like, oh, I'm literally, like these are just old men?
00:25:03
Speaker
Pretty much every single person that I could find admitted somewhere else on their page and or you can tell because they tweet in another language as you and I were texting about who had been tweeting about either Pizza Ball Tegel, the like kind of big ones, were Filipino or Italian.
00:25:21
Speaker
And like actually Catholic. And actually Catholic. And there were a ton of Spanish language tweets about it or like there would be English language tweets from primarily Spanish language accounts. And I think that was also where people were like missing things a little bit was – Yeah. i was like, yeah, um that is also because like people do genuinely believe these things and like we're saying like there is these migratory practices.
00:25:41
Speaker
and Like, yeah, you can have an issue with it, but that's not really like – the fault of quote unquote fandom or conclave fandom specifically or conclave fandom specifically at all it's the fact that like this is how yeah as we were saying that's how the canon works this how idolizing works this is just i mean that's also how people behave about like politicians in different places sometimes not to the same degree but quite a bit Specifically in this case, what we're seeing is young people, young Catholics in non-English speaking countries who probably tweet all day you know otherwise about K-pop or TV or something like that are moving their fandom practices to their family religion in a way that's comfortable and natural for them and allowable by the affordances of the platform and the communities that they're a part of online.
00:26:32
Speaker
And also because they're seeing that they're getting good engagement from it because other people are enjoying it.
00:26:39
Speaker
So Memento Horry and i were going back and forth looking at conclave tweets from 2013, the last time there was a conclave just because, well, Twitter existed then and people were tweeting about it. um And fandom Twitter existed then too. Like I had a Twitter in 2013. I was tweeting about i like Doctor Who and Twin Peaks.
00:26:55
Speaker
But there was not that crossover as far as we could find. There was, first of all, the tweets, you just like they probably are now, were mostly not in English. But also the English language tweets that did exist about, um you know, Bergoglio who became Pope Francis were, you know, people just like being like, I bet he's going to be the Pope or like, you know, making kind of like 2013 Twittery jokes about it. There was no crossover between the conclave and these young fandom spaces that definitely existed on the platform at the time were probably treating about one direction.
00:27:27
Speaker
And I find that really interesting because it' it's evidence of how those practices have moved and spread in the last 12 years. Yeah, because they yeah they have become like so much more common.
00:27:38
Speaker
And I think also one of the things that I was thinking about too is like when people are...
Historical and Modern Fandom Practices
00:27:42
Speaker
like Yes, it's become like the fandom practices are more visible on Twitter. But I think also... Another thing that where where people were kind of, I think, like mistakenly blaming the movie Conclave for people being fans of stuff yeah at large is...
00:28:00
Speaker
like Yeah, i like I said also, it was like therere the last time part of it is also that like the English-speaking world is much more in tune with it because of this English-speaking language. And more people are being like, oh my God, people talk about this?
00:28:13
Speaker
And it's like, well, yes, this is just an entire conversation that happened somewhere else last time. And I think also... like i think also In 2013, there were some K-pop fan camps, but people didn't make them for One Direction, for example. Right. That wasn't really a thing in the same way.
00:28:31
Speaker
and but i i like I wonder if we would... Like, was there anyone out there who made like a quote unquote ironic, like collage, like Tumblr glitter collage of Cardinal Bogoglio, you know, something like that?
00:28:46
Speaker
And if not a teenager, I know somebody's aunt did. I know for a fact somebody's aunt made a beautiful, beautiful candle with Cardinal Bogoglio's face on it to pray to. Because yeah a lot of it is like it's these religious practices that are kind of twisted to like this almost ironic and fun way.
00:29:04
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. And there's something that I saw it in these sort of like alarmist tweets about like, oh my God, you guys are fandomizing Catholicism, which as we know is evil.
00:29:14
Speaker
there's There's something about how this unifified universal signifier of something being fandomified by icky teenagers, women and queer people is people saying, you're doing K-pop with this. It's becoming K-popified or you're doing this just like K-pop.
00:29:29
Speaker
which I saw with these tweets about Catholicism. This also happened in Formula me One fandom very recently, um where, you know, an individual fan with a more transformative fandom background specifically suggested, you know, on Twitter, because Tumblr is irrelevant in that case. They're all doing that over there. But they suggested on Twitter that the Formula One fandom should do more zines and and fan events and creative stuff. And so many people were performatively outraged and disgusted.
00:29:53
Speaker
I think this person had said we should do more fandom events and some... idiot teenager was like, oh but the races are the events. And and the people that had been in non-sports transformative fandoms before Formula One were all on the side of the OP. And the people for whom Formula One was like their first fandom were like, ew, you're disgusting. You're going to do K-pop with the drivers. I'm like...
00:30:16
Speaker
The teams are doing K-pop with the drivers and like offering fan calls and like making merchandise. And it's just like that that that disgust, that performative disgust at being associated with the stuff that women and queer people and teenagers do is everywhere.
00:30:32
Speaker
oh and I think it's also like it's definitely also, I think, in in both the these cases of when it's specifically targeted as a K-pop reference in the case of both the F1 and with the Catholicism thing,
00:30:43
Speaker
There is absolutely this like very like anti East Asian racism factor going on because it is. seen as this like Eastern way of engaging like inappropriately with music or with fandom or with sports or with religion.
00:30:58
Speaker
Because again, as I keep going back to it, I'm like the the Cardinal who most people were like the most fan camps, most everything ah of the Cardinals was Cardinal Tegel, the Filipino Cardinal. um And the majority of the people tweeting on him were from like, if not the Philippines, they were from like Malaysia, Indonesia. There was a lot of East Asian, a lot of like, um,
00:31:18
Speaker
Southeast Asian, a lot of just like Malaysian and except like huge swaths of people, a lot of them from areas that had been either like directly impacted or worked with or under Cardinal Tegel.
00:31:32
Speaker
And their reactions to this person that they like actually personally had some understanding of were being taken as this like, oh, this is all these like This stupid like East Asian teenage girl brain way of thinking about this. Right. And um yeah, and just seen as especially inappropriate because, you know, like, I mean, like the Beatles fans were crazy, but they're at least they weren't the K-pop fans. Right.
00:32:01
Speaker
Right. There's a racialized aspect to it. Yeah. And it's, the yeah, absolutely. um i have written here, Cardinal Yowie and the ramifications of his hazards. I just like that phrase. I don't actually know what I was going to say, but I will say that the fact that the Pope Crave account, which started as a fandom, a transformative fandom fanzine account,
00:32:20
Speaker
and is run and features material by shippers and Cardinal Yaoi appreciators is wonderful and slightly terrifying, but, like, I have to deeply respect it because, like, why do I never get interviewed by the New York Times when I go insane publicly in a fandom way?
00:32:36
Speaker
Well, this girl, like, she knows what she's doing, like, the main admin. yeah She used to be in Les Mis fandom, so I've
Media Representation and Fandom Ethics
00:32:42
Speaker
heard. yes, I've seen some of her... Her stickers were going around. um She was doing all those boys. I was never a Les Mis kid. I don't know anything. Sure. yeah sure And Bill Ross.
00:32:55
Speaker
right in this But it shows like if if you're if you are around for long enough and then you adapt to new platforms, like the people running that account, they they're so funny. And they get a lot of their they draw a lot of their memes from like a small Discord community. And it just shows like the power of that community to put forward... Honestly, they're doing the press stuff very well.
00:33:17
Speaker
They're putting... an amazingly positive and charity focused spin this sort of fandom project that is the Conclave zine. And then the larger mission, know, once the Pope actually died is spreading news about the Conclave in a very accessible way.
00:33:29
Speaker
So I will say that while, you know, a lot of the stuff that we're seeing is is very organic and comes from these Catholic communities in other parts of the world, using the fandom practice that they actually have, like I will say the impact of Pope Crave is probably absolutely non-negligible in terms of encouraging people to to take that aspect of fandom and apply it to the Conclave. Right.
00:33:47
Speaker
Yeah, and I think that there is reason, I think there is perfectly legitimate reason for people to then be like kind of frustrated with that and frustrated with the like the Catholic Church gaining more to hold with a younger generation. But I think instead of, I think people are getting very upset at like this individual account for it and it's like, well, we are kind of within this like larger global backside, et cetera, et cetera.
00:34:17
Speaker
blah blah, blah, blah, blah. The politics within the Catholic Church themselves are complicated. um But I think also, yeah just the, like, and but I think also, like, this idea that, um I don't know, there's almost this idea that, like,
00:34:37
Speaker
And I think maybe this is because there's been so much like breaking the fourth wall discourse around the separation of church and state of fandom, quote unquote, not fandom recently. But the like layer of, for example, like people being like, oh my God, they're going to be writing RPF about the real Cardinals or about the Pope. which Which they have, which they have already. There was already fan fiction about Pope Francis on AO3. Yeah.
00:35:01
Speaker
um Because, of course, there was. There's, like, Obama and Trump and whatever. And, like, there's an entire catalog about Luigi Mangione. um Because, like...
00:35:12
Speaker
ah people are horny it's like folk it's like folk tales it's like going around the town telling tales of the highwayman with luigi specifically sexy highwayman yeah the sexy highwayman because uh the majority of them are luigi slash reader and yeah of course of course duh and i think that like with this similar thing it's a little like okay with luigi there's probably a higher chance that he maybe eventually is given access to a cell phone with a a three on it or whatever.
00:35:41
Speaker
But the car, the, the Cardinals of the Catholic church are not watching fan cams. Yeah.
00:35:52
Speaker
Yeah.
00:35:55
Speaker
Um, with that and the knowledge that there are already four works in the Pope Leo, the 14th tag on AO three some of them where he's being shipped with Tegel.
00:36:06
Speaker
We will move on. We will move on to the yeah made main topic of our episode today.
00:36:18
Speaker
this is... Continuing, actually, on kind of the last topic, that was a great segue, ah Memento Hori. We're going to be talking about what happens when fan fiction breaks containment, as it did quite recently with none other other than Emily Gold's Recklist of Pit fix in ah Vulture. Or was it in the cut? I don't know. was the cut. Yeah.
00:36:40
Speaker
yeah So this article was not that bad. People were freaking out. And I was like, she's not really being that mean, like at all.
00:36:54
Speaker
think I think... so i think um there The thing that is definitely odd, like, in terms of phrasing, the very first sub-hiding of the... Oh, yeah, that was... Yeah....article. Like, that being the very first one.
00:37:10
Speaker
For those who, for some reason, want to imagine Dr. Melking as a sexual being. Extremely patronizing, like, completely being like, you're weird for this, and also, try like, pulling in a quote from the actor, like...
00:37:26
Speaker
discouraging the concept as well and then like yes she's very nice about her like actual rec um and then and another one and I think So yeah, like a lot of it, like most it's nice. And then the one that's like, if you're looking for the absolute weirdest, but yeah, the rest of the phrasing was like kind of fine. I would say that opening one was like just mean spirited.
00:37:50
Speaker
yeah but also having then like followed up on it in a way, there was this whole period where then people were, um, yeah. So the people that,
00:38:08
Speaker
were cited because part of the problem being that these fics were linked, like direct clickable links. So multiple people then um added author's notes, for example, um saying, hello, people who found this fic through that absolutely weird cut opinion piece.
00:38:27
Speaker
And no, Emily Gold did not ask for him permission or give me a heads up about using my fic in her opinion piece. Oh, well, enjoy it anyway or don't, but please be kind regardless. Yeah. um It's been brought to my attention that this was linked in an article about the Pitt fanfic. I was not asked nor did I consent to my work being included in it. I feel really uncomfortable and paranoid about it. So please, if you're from that article, just turn away. I'm considering taking this down entirely, but we'll see.
00:38:50
Speaker
um And then like another one, this is literally my first fic ever. So you can imagine this freaked me out to be put in the cut article. I privated the work for the time being because I really this as a creative exercise for myself. And I don't want this on the jumbotron for my mind and the cast sake.
00:39:02
Speaker
Funnily enough, I have a journalism degree and my own opinions on the work ethics of publishing work without the creator's consent. But I guess I'll put it here because I do not that I do not consent to my work being published by outside sources.
00:39:13
Speaker
um Yeah. Yeah. So a lot of pretty much as far as I can tell, like most of the authors who were linked in that fic either like locked their fics or added notes specifically clarifying that they not only did not consent, but were very uncomfortable with that situation. And I will just say also like from my perspective, like, yeah, if anyone were to like link a fanfic directly in something that like i under no circumstances would I want that happening to me. And I know that like other people feel differently, but like, yeah.
00:39:41
Speaker
Yeah. Asking would have been probably a good call. Yeah. it's It's really interesting, especially because i can see from the perspective of someone that is not actively involved in a fandom community or has never been or isn't currently now, that it might not even cross your mind to to ask or to think twice because you're like...
00:40:01
Speaker
well, this is public. If I can see it, so could anybody else. And I think it's good. So why not tell people about it? Because yeah as a journalist, you want people to be sharing links to your work. You want to be recommended, especially by Emily Gold at or The Cut. you know It's probably like the best thing that can happen to you.
00:40:17
Speaker
And I can see... you know Maybe this is extending a little too much empathy, but I can see why it literally wouldn't cross her mind that people would be mad about this. But she's like, I'm complimenting your work. I'm recommending it to my wide readership. Isn't that what you want?
00:40:31
Speaker
Because the fandom mindset of a work being made quote-unquote published, but really being for – A community, a small community or even specific individuals is so it goes against what mainstream, you know, what non-fandom writing is sort of about and for.
00:40:50
Speaker
Right. Exposure. yeah Yeah. And I think it also yeah comes back to this place of like, so to use another kind of example um of one of my own fics having kind of like, there's like a shorthand nickname for it that people use. And in a Discord server with like members of the crew of the show in it, people were like joking about asking, like tagging the director of the show and asking him about this fic.
00:41:21
Speaker
or messaging the actor who plays one of the like characters who's the main like pairing in this fic, questions about the pairing and about the fic itself.
00:41:32
Speaker
um And when I found out about that, and I posted this on Tumblr to clarify, and like Pretty much anyone who had done so apologized to me for this. But I was like, I just want to be extremely clear that this is not like you are sharing like some art that I posted publicly. like Also, mine are all locked. That's the other thing. Yeah. It's not like you're posting some you're not like sharing art that I shared publicly. You're not like complimenting me in some way.
00:41:56
Speaker
You are leaking my sexual content and harassing me. You are cleaning my nudes to unsolicitedly send them to someone who does not want to receive them.
Fan Fiction Exchanges and Creativity
00:42:08
Speaker
And that is sexual harassment. And I think that's also like where it comes into this strange place of people. Like you said, it is like, well, you, what? Like there's this, like, aren't you proud of this? I'm complimenting you. Yeah.
00:42:19
Speaker
And for the people who are like, you just leaked my fucking nudes. I don't care think I'm hot. Right. Well, this is this is an interesting element of it, which is about NSFW and about explicit fan fiction, which is the stuff that Emily Golds was recommending, where there actually is quite a gulf of difference in between the whys and wherefores of of someone posting and sharing explicit fan fiction versus like other fan fiction no and what the ramifications of the hazards are in the world. If you're sharing that outside the fandom.
00:42:50
Speaker
So for example, every year Yuletide is this big fandom gift exchange that's been going on for about 25 years. It's like one of the reasons that AO3 works the way it does is so it ah can accommodate this exchange.
00:43:00
Speaker
um And every year in December... ah fans sign up to give other fans gifts of fan fiction about rare fandoms, so fanfictions like, ah under 1,000 fics. So this is when a lot of fic about, like, memes get and, like, obscure novels and, like, movies that no one's written fic before gets written about during Yuletide because, like, that's what it's for. It's right, fan fiction about stuff that doesn't usually get ficked about.
00:43:21
Speaker
And so usually every year, what happens is, like, one Yuletide fic about... like Anthony Bourdain or like a McSweeney's article or like The Chronicles of Narnia, something like that, will will break containment and get posted outside of AO3 and shared on like you know Slate or something like that.
00:43:38
Speaker
And it's usually cause for for celebration because it's yous never an explicit fic. It's something really, really creative and not in the usual fandom mode And Yuletide is kind of like a crab and bucket situation where you want to be the one that wins Yuletide because there's so many fics that get posted all for very obscure things. And you want to be the person that sort of hits the zeitgeist and write something that everybody is like, oh my God, I never knew I wanted to read this, but this is amazing.
00:44:01
Speaker
So that's an example of when it is appropriate or like when it is a celebrated thing to share fix sort of past the fourth wall. But also we're not even really talking about the fourth wall here.
00:44:12
Speaker
The fourth wall is traditionally between fans and creators. We're talking about like the fourth triangle where it's like fans on one point, um creators, actors, the powers that be on another point and like the gen pop and the media on the other point of that triangle. So it's it's like a prism.
00:44:29
Speaker
And I think that's also where it gets complicated too because like in my specific example, I was like, do not break the fucking fourth wall specifically. Right. With the actors. Yeah. Yeah. With the actors. And I'm like, I have other reasons also for like not wanting whatever. But with, I think where this gets into this blurry place of like, is it the fourth wall or is it this like weird prism i of the media is that, I mean, actors read articles about the show that they are in.
00:45:01
Speaker
And for example, like one of the main stars of the pit, he's entering that space where he's reposting a lot of fan art. And so people are like DMing it to him or whatever. And like he's reposted some stuff that was getting a little shippy and people are like, this could be entering into a place where he's like going into fan spaces and like reposting fan content that maybe doesn't need to get shared to a wider audience because it draws like harassment or whatever.
00:45:23
Speaker
Who knows? We'll see if that happens. yeah Probably, who knows? yeah Probably not, whatever. But- It comes to this place where also like if, for example, when Emily Gold cited the actress who plays Mel King and like tagged an article that she been mentioned in, um like if that actress, for example, had or her agent have like alerts on her and she goes and reads this. And like the first thing she reads is like in the first context being making fun of fans who do have this transformative version of her character.
00:45:56
Speaker
For those fans, that is breaking both of those fourth walls where they are being linked to and a larger audience
00:46:05
Speaker
I'm go to say there there is this long history of the media and journalists being the ones to to make that crossover happen and to bring the fan fiction to like source it and then because they have to be that go-between, right?
00:46:16
Speaker
Because it's not going to be the fan unless... you know In some cases it is, but usually the fan is like, okay, this is private and it's a journalist who plucks it out of obscurity and like shows it to the actor being like,
Fandom Status and Creator Proximity
00:46:27
Speaker
isn't this crazy? And the most famous...
00:46:29
Speaker
ah Example of this was um in 2013 when the journalist Caitlin Moran at a Sherlock promotional event had Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman read some fan fiction that she had found on the internet. And this was like, I think in the Tumblr era, one of the first big blow ups.
00:46:45
Speaker
of this kind of thing happening. And everybody was made incredibly uncomfortable, including the actors, including the fans. Nobody likes this, but like, because like journalists like tend to think it's funny, it keeps happening.
00:46:58
Speaker
And I'll also say that like back in the day in the 1960s and 70s, like fans and actors, because of the way that the convention circuit
00:47:08
Speaker
There was a show called Blake Seven, and there's a really great article in ah the Fansplaining website called The War That Almost Broke a Classic Fandom. And this is the deck. Blake Seven fans and actors mixed regularly at cons and on the pages of zines until an anonymous letter changed everything. And this is one fan...
00:47:25
Speaker
There was all this internal drama because some fans were closer to the actors than others. And then one person decided to snitch on someone and say, well, she writes nasty porn about you. And then the actor got freaked out. And it basically was this huge, huge blow up.
00:47:37
Speaker
So this is the sort of thing that honestly has been happening forever because fans, they want to do two things. They want to, There's two ways to gain status in fandom, right? One is proximity. One is being the person that knows the actors, that knows the creators, that has a relationship with the powers that be.
00:47:55
Speaker
And the second way to gain status in a fandom is proficiency. Being the one that writes the best fan fictions, draws the best fan art, and is like good at fandom. And a lot of BNFs manage or sort of inevitably end up combining both, which is a recipe for disaster.
00:48:11
Speaker
Proficiency and proximity. Yeah. Yeah. And I think another factor that I think is also like very present for me, at least in like my perspective with, I mean, like the dates on these being 2013,
00:48:28
Speaker
um gay marriage had just been legalized in England. It was not yet legal across the United States. So I think that's also another thing is it's like when we're talking about people mocking these like fanfictions and like bringing them in as like jokey things and like why there's this disgust is it is also like rooted in homophobia and like that's the shame of it is it's supposed to be like isn't this disgusting that people are thinking you might be gay and so it creates this like extra like part of the reason that it creates these like toxic environments isn't just that it then like shames fans or like creates like more limited interactions between fans and actors it
00:49:06
Speaker
um is how we get all of those spots with um different actors and showrunners and crew members talking about like just guys being friends and how important it is to show male friendship clarifying that they themselves are not gay that they don't have any like gay experiences or whatever the hell and it just creates this like larger culture of being like oh well like Gay is so crazy and so out there. yeah Yeah. I mean, and this was back then, 2013, Supernatural was also at its height. And this was a show that had such a strong response to the the main relationship of the two brothers in the first two seasons that by like season three or four, they'd incorporated incorporated mockery of the fans into the plot of the show itself.
00:49:48
Speaker
And that was something that that changed as the culture changed around the show. And by the end of it, I think they were a bit better about it. And then Misha Collins had to come out as straight. um but Supernatural in particular, I'm going to recommend another book.
00:50:01
Speaker
There's a book um that was published in 2012, actually, by Lindsay Burness and Katherine Larson called Fandom at the Crossroads, Celebration, Shame, and Fan-Producer Relationships. And this is a fantastic book. If you are interested in examining...
00:50:13
Speaker
these specific problems as they were emerging at that time through the supernatural fandom mainly, but they also have other examples of these boundaries. And it's like the boundaries, when people say, oh, back in the day, this didn't happen. What I'm trying to say is the fourth wall has never really existed. i mean, Leonard Nimoy was coming over to people's houses while they made zines. I mean, it's never real. And I think also like it,
00:50:35
Speaker
Yeah, and also like when we're talking, like we're talking mostly about the media fandoms, but if we're going back to 2012 and 2013, when again, being gay is straight up not legal in a lot of the Anglophone world.
00:50:48
Speaker
You know what the other major, most popular ship that was breaking into like public knowledge was? Oh my God. Larry. Yeah, yeah exactly. the Larry. And I think we have all, over the last decade, witnessed whatever that did psychologically to Harry Styles.
00:51:05
Speaker
um And also how one of the members of One Direction died last year in like a drug overdose-fueled flinging himself out of a window. And so that is where people, I think, get concerned about these ideas that like because With RPF, sometimes it can cross into like celebrity gossip that when yeah journalists bring fic into it because they're bringing it in the sense of celebrity gossip instead of in the sense of this collaborative expression between fans.
00:51:31
Speaker
right But then it's like you see another – the opposite almost example of that is someone like Gerard Way – who was able, I think, to kind of grasp this idea of like, wait, fic is kind of, there's things about it that are amusing, but not because it's like gross or whatever. Like when he did the read-along of the milk fic or whatever it was on- that Oh my God, that is an icon't is like the most iconic fourth wall break to
Public Perception and Media Narratives
00:52:00
Speaker
me. Nothing else matters except Gerard Way reading the milk fig.
00:52:03
Speaker
We're going to do a whole Bandham episode next time and and we can go in on this because I think- it's Yeah, because the fourth wall breaks in Bandham are- crazy Right. Well, there's – that's why it's like there's this spectrum. It's like, well, what does a fourth wall break mean in a fandom where it's like a band that's kind of like, you know, you could meet versus what does it mean when it's like a kind of very distant celebrity on a popular TV show and you're writing about the character and not the celebrity? It's like this huge – and what does it mean when you're writing about the fucking Pope, right? Yeah.
00:52:32
Speaker
yeah huge spectrum. It's not a one size fits all. Like this is what should be done. This is what should never be done. I think, I hope that Emily Gold learned her lesson.
00:52:43
Speaker
yeah um but I also don't think she was probably paying attention to the people being like, this is not good. I think she actually probably doesn't care because she's Emily Gold, which is fine. Yeah. And I think it is just one of those things where it's like, I know that probably a lot of the People complaining or that are, like, tweeting that you have, like, some anime profile picture or, like, they are clearly some teenager and they're tweeting it in, like, some way or whatever. But it's, like, just from a journalistic standpoint.
00:53:08
Speaker
Yeah. Like, consider for a second. Yeah. Like, maybe it's talking to curses about things like that. One the... One of the pitfalls of fandom, the way that everything is fandom now and the way that the practices have spread to encompass so much of of what we do online is that there's almost like it's been forgotten or maybe never learned by some journalists in particular that media fandom you know was and and to some extent still is a subculture yeah Of course, there's an entire genre of journalism that relies on mining subcultures and spotting trends for stories.
00:53:43
Speaker
But, you know, fandom, even though it's not like a closed subculture, perhaps not as closed as it used to be, relatively speaking, it is a subculture. There are practices that are done in fandom that are not done elsewhere and vice versa. And one of those is, you know, keeping fan fiction and NSFW fan fiction in particular, you know, politely not sharing that out.
00:54:03
Speaker
Yeah. And I think like there was another example within the past week of another like quote unquote fourth wall break in a fandom where some of the fans started like freaking out. And this was one where I watched it and was immediately like, this is absolutely the ideal situation you want. What happened?
00:54:21
Speaker
Severance. ah ah Brit Lower, i don't even know what the event was at, but it was some like smaller news coverage that they mostly do like kind of fan oriented stuff for like prestige tv and movies um yeah and they were interviewing brit lower on the carpet and she was talking about how she was just like oh i'm just been so blown away by the response to severance all of these just like i've seen people composing musical scores i've seen people like making animated films people are making all this art they're like
00:54:51
Speaker
doing off and then she was like are people i bet I don't know but I'm imagining are people writing poetry are they writing novels is are people writing out there and the journalist who is like holding the video um and I'm not I'm like 90% sure that that particular journalist is a mutual of mine who is very active in the severance fan fiction community so I know what was going through their mind in that moment of like oh shit ah Most of the Mark Kelly fan fiction on AO3 right now is extremely cunnilingus focused. I don't want to tell her that.
00:55:21
Speaker
So they go, ah yeah, fans definitely write a lot and some of them write like novel length works. um It's called fan fiction. Like they mentioned, they were like, fic is a big cultural practice that people do.
00:55:32
Speaker
They kind of explained that. And then they were like, so people, a lot of it will revolve around a pairing they like. And Brit Lower goes, oh, of course, like it makes sense to And then the interviewer is like, so for example, they might write like a whole novel about what if Mark and Halle ran away to the circus? Because that's something the actress has like mentioned in interviews that she once wanted to run away.
00:55:51
Speaker
So, and then the actress was like, oh, I would love to read that. And then she said, see, that's great. That's the perfect thing to do between seasons to like keep yourself thinking about it. Cause you can, you can kind of see her thinking about it in her mind and realizing, oh, that's so cool. I want to see. And then understanding maybe why she hasn't heard about fan fiction or given, been given examples before.
00:56:11
Speaker
The author does not, like the interviewer did not mention any websites, did not actually name any specifics, was just like, yes, this is a thing that happened because she directly asked do fans write stories. Yeah, story yeah, yeah. You can't lie. And she also, I think, understood that she was like, oh, that is probably where there's a little bit of like, i don't necessarily want to cross into that space. That's not necessarily for me.
00:56:31
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, and it's, it's, it's, I don't want to say it's only going to get worse, but this is just something that as fandom, you know, grows like a, you know, giant amoeba to encompass more of culture, to encompass, encompass Catholicism and encompass like pretty much everything we say and do.
00:56:48
Speaker
Like the, it's shocking to me almost that, Brit Lauer has never heard the word fan fiction or seemed to have never heard the word fan fiction before because I'm like, she's like a millennial. like She's like super offline.
00:56:59
Speaker
oh Well, that's nice for her. But I mean, it has been like people that like mainstream journalists have been writing about fan fiction like since the 80s. Like it has been a thing. Like I think when I, when Emily Gold thing came out, I posted a link to like a Slate piece from 2000 where they did also link individual fics.
00:57:14
Speaker
um So yeah, I mean, it it remains to be seen what the next major fourth wall break will be and and what chaos it'll bring, but I'm sure it will happen sooner rather than later. um think that's it for this week's episode of Fandom News Network. um I just want to remind everybody that you can send in your hot tips about things we should talk about to lookinsidethepaperbag at gmail.com.
00:57:40
Speaker
um Tell us what we should talk about next week. Otherwise, we're going to talk about Bandom for an hour, which we would love. We don't know if you're going to Oh, and it will never stop. It will never stop. um I have been Allegra Rosenberg, and this is my co-host.
00:57:53
Speaker
Memento Hori. Memento Hori. and that's ah that's all for this week. See you next time on the Fandom News Network.