Ologies with Alie Ward - Fanthropology Pt. 2 (FANDOM) with Meredith Levine

Episode Date: March 23, 2021

PART 2 with legit professional Fanthropologist Meredith Levine. In this thrilling conclusion, we take Patreon questions and address stans vs. fans, cults and fandom, how fan fiction circumvents the studio system, how showrunners feel about fan suggestions, fangirling, fanboying and a novel term for that plus a bonus tables-are-turned interview about your weird dad’s favorite stuff. Fanthroplogy: a riveting field. Once again, WHO KNEW? Meredith did. Listen to Part 1 here: alieward.com/ologies/fanthropology Follow Meredith Levine at Twitter.com/meredithgene or @MeredithGene on Clubhouse. A donation was made to Partners in Health's and the Sierra Leonean Ministry of Health’s work to reduce maternal mortality in Sierra Leone's Kono District via: http://pih.org/hankandjohn Sponsor links: www.alieward.com/ologies-sponsors More links at: http://alieward.com/ologies/fanthropology Become a patron of Ologies for as little as a buck a month: www.Patreon.com/ologies OlogiesMerch.com has hats, shirts, pins, totes! Follow twitter.com/ologies or instagram.com/ologiesSupport the show: http://Patreon.com/ologies

Oh, hey, it's still that throwback picture from when you wore baggy jeans and shell necklaces. Allie Ward back with part two of a pop cultural and psychological episode. Y'all loved the start of last week, so we're going to finish it off with more of your great questions, shall we? We shall. Okay, so if you have not listened to last week, you want to hop over to part one first. You'll hear the definition of anthropology from an actual living, breathing researcher whose Twitter bio reads,

anthropologist, entertainment futurist, YouTube enthusiast, and defender of teen girl taste. So in part one, we covered sports and religion and K-pop, goblins for good, and the practice of Disney bounding, which I completely failed to ever define. It's subtly dressing like Disney characters in the theme parks in a way that only other Disney fanatics might catch. That's Disney bounding. We talked about fan fiction and Frasier, and how complex and kind of evil algorithms tell us what to like.

We talk about free range children, what to do if your favorite author turns out to be problematic and more. So that is part one. In this episode, we're going to hear about shipping, which is short for relationshiping, I suppose, or dreaming up unions that exist only in your horny daydreams. In fans versus stands, stands being kind of the creepy variety, and the line between cults and fandoms, and the all important question of, if you want to build an empire and fandom over which you preside, how do you become internet famous?

Do you want to be internet famous? All that and more. A quick thanks first to all the listeners of oligies. I could not do these interviews or make the show without the wonderfully weird and insightful questions from patrons. You can give a dollar or more a month to support the show at patreon.com slash oligies, as well as all the folks who just spread the word and the links and leave reviews. I creep on you and I read every single one.

And this week, thank you to Trisha S. and also Bronze Kraken, aka PD, who wrote, Dearest Father, I hope this letter finds you well. I have verily enjoyed your audio recordings. I listened to each new one with gusto and look forward to the next. Your internet child, PD. See? Proof. Everyone else who left one, I read it for sure and your weird internet uncle dad hearts

you very much and is earnestly so happy you're here. Okay, let's shove off into part two of Pantherpology with behavioral researcher and legit professional on her business card, unironically, Pantherpologist Meredith Levine. I'm going to make us go through patreon questions because there are questions I want to ask you that patrons asked. And so I'm going to ask it their questions through my mouth. Is that cool? Great.

Okay. Let's do it. Okay. This one was at the top of my tongue. And it was asked by patrons Anna Thompson, Elma Call, Matt Sicato, Eileen Helley, Bonnie, Tamara Mann, Carrie, Caitlin Powell, Anya, Levi Burke, Hope, Lexi Reitz, Rachel Weiss, Lee Catherine Earhart, and John McLean all kind of wanted to know about obsessive fandom. Bonnie asked, what's the line between being a healthy fan of something and obsession?

And Tamara wants to know, when does fandom cross the line to inappropriate and healthy and then also a stan? When does a fan become a stan? Good question. So let's start with obsessive. Fandom has historically been pathologized in a negative way. And fans generally aren't that. They are generally not malicious.

And when does it become unhealthy? It becomes unhealthy when you neglect all of the things in your life that actually lead to a healthy life like eating and sleeping and like going to work and or school. Who's to say what a good use of time is, especially in an age where one can be a professional fan if that's the thing you want to do? When does it become unhealthy when your life and relationships suffer as a result? Plenty of people have found their life partners and gotten married and stuff through fandom. And that's a thing that happens now.

And by fandom, I mean like pop culture fandom, fandom with like a capital F. So that's not necessarily unhealthy. What is unhealthy is when you have the rogue person and this happens a lot in like influencer culture and those kinds of fandoms because this particular type of object of fandom is themselves for a living where I'm friends with a bunch of creators as an offshoot of my life. And oftentimes they get the question of like what's the weirdest thing a fan has ever done or what's like the scariest or creepiest or whatever.

And that is when it gets to be scary and creepy and bad is in those in person interactions for the most part of like screaming at someone in target or like going and waiting outside of their house. Anything that is a breach of personal privacy for the object of fandom is when it gets to be bad because then it's like actively dehumanizing to those people who are objects of fandom. But wouldn't some people argue that they have taken themselves out of being a human and been striving for something like superhuman where they are getting more than a normal human's share of attention or wealth or privilege.

So I mean and I'm saying this as someone who also knows a lot of creators and is a creator. Is there anything where there's been a consensus that you have surrendered your privacy by selling it? No. In my opinion everyone is entitled to their privacy in as much of it as they want. That being said it's also important for objects of fandom to understand that and be a little bit more careful with their personal information. In the event that you are an object of fandom or want to be an object of fandom, step one

is cultivate an audience but in that process people with kids have to make the decision how much of their kids' lives are part of their brands and that's a personal decision. Especially if their kids are too young to consent to that and there are choices that everyone has to make about how much of their personal lives they want to show and celebrities deal with this also. It's a little bit less of an issue when you're a non-human entity with fans. I'm hoping she means non-human entity like Gritty, the flippy grumpy flaming orange figurehead of the Philadelphia Flyers who has been described by newspapers as, quote, an acid trip of a

mascot and a ghastly empty-eyed muppet. So neither human nor beast. Gritty was born in 2018 out of the design prompt something you'd high five but not hug and sure I did go down a rabbit hole looking at pictures of Gritty tattoos such as one bearing the words chaos reigns. But even still like showing up to a place of home or work is when it gets to be obsessive and bad which is not the same thing as a toxic fandom. Yeah.

Can we talk about toxic fandoms because patrons Mike Monakowski, Samantha Ryan, Jesse Dragon, Anna Thompson, Justin McCormick and Kalini Bee also Will Johnston wanted to know. Will Johnston asked what in your opinion is the most toxic fandom and also what's the best fandom and why is it Terry Pratchett's Disco World or Discworld? I thought it's a Disco World and I was like, that sounds tight but I guess Discworld maybe that's Frisbee. I don't know. I earnestly thought that Discworld was similar to Terry Bradshaw's NFL video game but with

Ultimate Frisbee and then I realized that it's actually John Madden's NFL game. Anyway, Discworld is a series of novels set in a flat world perched on the back of four giant elephants perched on a giant turtle. It was written not by NFL coach Terry Bradshaw but by literary figure Sir Terry Pratchett. My point is that Discworld fandom has nothing to do with sports or disco pantsuits. I would totally go to Disco World by the way. You too dude. I would love it there.

What is the most toxic fandom? What is toxic fandom? When does it become shitty because I'm trying to think of all I can think about are people who are out in 30 degree weather with no shirt on and their body painted sports colors and I'm sure that that is not even toxic compared to what is out there. That's just uncomfortable fandoms. When people refer to toxic fandoms, they refer to intra fandom fighting with ad hominem attacks and actively shutting other people down and yucking their yums and generally

being like know-it-alls, wet blankets, gatekeepers and like shunning and shaming people who like the same things. When those kinds of tools get used within a fandom or when actions are taken against marginalized identities or those are not respected, often times that is another thing that's referenced as a toxic fandom. I'm all for sports fans who go shirtless in the middle of winter to paint their bodies like you do you, your body, whatever. I'm not going to tell you to put on a sweater but kink shamed someone for their fan fiction

which also came up a lot and that's kind of bad or like telling someone that they don't belong or that they're not fan enough. Everyone starts as a beginner and just because someone doesn't have the same fandom origin story as someone else doesn't necessarily make them less of a fan or less of a worthy fan. So do other fans call newbies posers? That's a little toxic. Now confession, I have actually never seen Rocky Horror Picture Show live because I heard

that they write a V for Virgin on your forehead if you've never been like with lipstick and I think that's good natured and not toxic but I was so afraid of getting a constellation of pimples in a V on my forehead on my bad teen skin so I chickened out at every opportunity to attend a midnight fish netted screening but yes, fandoms in which people genuinely not good naturedly harass each other those are the bad ones. Sometimes it happens also when there are ship wars that happen and like there are two dominant ships that come to the forefront of the fandom and they actively like don't believe and are against each other which is this whole shipping culture is this whole other, it's part of

fandom with a capital F but it's this whole other thing and if you want to know a lot more about fan fiction and shipping culture and that kind of fandom, fandom with a capital F, I highly recommend the Fansplaining podcast with Flourish Clink and Elizabeth Minkle. Great podcast if you're interested in capital F fandom. Dovetailing off of that, listeners, Diane Bout, Taryn Fernettes, Kelly Seaman and Jamie Kishimoto. Jamie had a great question and asked, have you done any studies on the phenomenon of queer baiting and how it creates die-hard fandoms of shippers but never delivers a happy queer ending? I would say never say never, the media landscape is shifting and we have an example of that

recently but my guess is there's a specific IP behind this and my hunch is that it might be Teen Wolf? Okay, so I look this up and the MTV series Teen Wolf debuted in 2011 and I'm going to quote an article from the advocate to sum up the beef with the beefy but ultimately empty romance arcs. So the advocate said, the continued teases that a character might be bisexual with no payoff, the same sex romances that end as quickly as they begin, the disappearance of gay characters without explanation and the absence of any well-developed LGBT character for seasons into a show that appeared to bank heavily on its queer appeal early on have left vocal fans howling, end quote. And though its final season was in 2017, many moons ago history remembers

Teen Wolf as kind of a hairy situation. And I personally think that queer baiting is exploitative as are a lot of the tropes that get used like barrier gays and fridging and that sort of thing that shows historically have used and I think that as queer voices become more prominent in writers rooms and in the production process I think that will happen less and less especially since fans also can take collective action and do grassroots like awareness of what these issues are and why it's harmful. Having very coded behavior is also very typically Hollywood and stems from like a very long history of what was acceptable on in film and television by those standards and like Hayes code stuff. What it means to get like a rating for PG-13 versus art.

Hayes code's side note, I looked it up, were essentially written in the late 1920s by a Jesuit priest and a church elder as a sort of code of standards for the motion picture industry and it set precedents forbidding all kinds of fun stuff such as nudity, suggestive dancing, discussions of sexual perversity, any ridicule of religion, any interracial relationships, lustful kissing and any scenes of passion. Obviously this was not friendly to any queer depictions or were wolf makeouts to say the least. There's a lot of institutionalized things to unpack around queer baiting because to attribute it to a writer's room isn't entirely the whole story and to attribute it to a marketing team isn't entirely the whole story. In my opinion it's

unfortunate but also tends to draw out people who are like-minded and want to go into that level of imagining. I don't love it but also the effects of it have done community building things so a lot of the times why queerships exist is because there aren't as many well-rounded characters to imagine and reimagine and reshape that are women and non-binary and on the other gender spectrum. Hollywood is still incredibly male dominated. When it comes to playing around with characters often the best ones are guys. That's interesting that's such a good point. So because movies and TV and comic books seem to be well stocked on man people in general those lead characters are fleshed out with more complexity

and so they get shipped more often in fan fantasies because who wants to ship a boring character? It's like trying to make a sexy sandwich with one soggy bread slice. No thank you. Give me two nutty rich tangy slices. I don't care what gender they are. Now on the topic of that. And kind of off of that listener Sylvia Shariff had a question. They wrote people talk about fangirling or fanboying over a person. What is the gender neutral term for this behavior? It isn't fanning. Signed a gender person who definitely does this thing but is neither a girl nor a boy. So if I had to remove gender from it I would say fanning out as a phrase. I'm fanning out but fangirling and fanboying often like have implied different sets of behaviors

regardless of gender but having to do with typically masculine and typically feminine traits based on their portrayals in the media. So like when I hear fangirling I hear a sound. Yes. Oh of course. Of course. And I'm sure everyone hears the sound of like this hype. It's a squee. S-Q-U-E-E. And it's a sound. And I hear like beetle mania and crying and fainting and a lot of it is associated with proximity to object of fandom. Yes. Yes. Versus like being a fanboy I ascribe to regardless of gender slightly more pedantic behavior and the behavior of like nerdjawking or true fanning which is quizzing people and having all the information and there's a very outdated model about affirmational and transformational fandom that was like an academic

paper from like I think maybe the late 90s possibly the early 2000s about ways that fandom capital F expressed themselves and some is in transformation and some is in completionism of like are you reimagining and playing with the work the work is a springboard for one's own imagination or is it more encyclopedic and religious where like it's about knowing everything and like being an expert in the thing. So transformational fandom is like hey thanks for making this world these characters as fans it's now ours to run with and make more elaborate and weirder if we want to but affirmational fandom is like this is what the creator intended and we may only observe and fawn over and memorize this particular world and characters.

Also if you like video games name all the video games. And so these conflicting models of like what people think of as fans can often inhibit the experience of being one because one of the other questions that gets asked a lot is like do you have to be part of a community to be a fan and the answer is no you can be a fan all on your own and like do whatever it is that you do and not interact with a soul around it and still be a good fan because being a fan is something that one imagines themselves to be not like a set of behaviors. But we would call that in general fanning out. Fanning out. I would say if there's a gender neutral term for having an overwhelming moment of excitement as a result of something having to

do with the object of fandom that makes oneself sensorily overloaded or sensorily like frozen um I would call it fanning out. I love it I love it and on the topic of forging ahead with um neologisms which I is a word that I can never say neologism neologism new words I've only read it neologism um Anna Thompson and four stats had questions do people typically connect more with podcasts than other types of media because listening is more intimate. Oh thank you for your podcast voice I love this ASMR moment. There are a lot of things that have to do with connecting with podcast hosts um part of it has to do with being in someone's ears and how intimate actually talking is especially in the age of like visuals and texting. Part of it

has to do with how much time podcasters spend in the ears of their fans. It's somewhere between 20 minutes and an hour or two a week depending on what kind of podcast you're listening to and it's like every week so this is a friend this is a familiar voice it's the kind of experience you put on to be a little less alone whilst usually whilst doing something else like driving or dishes or laundry or going on a walk that dedicated podcast listening high fidelity style of this is all I'm doing I'm sitting and I'm listening to my voice or whatever a little less prevalent behaviorally but there is a lot of familiarity assuming that the library can sustain that most podcasts don't make it over um over 10 episodes do really yeah a lot a lot fail in the

first 90 days and we'll have a season but to be able to sustain and develop an audience in podcast form often requires a lot of dedication to the the format and ability to do so and there are a lot of people who dabble as the podcast scene gets more robust there are more podcasts that can't go on indefinitely but yes like there is a certain level of intimacy that is similar to vloggers um because of the amount of time that this person as themselves spends with the audience it's a very audience inclusive format and so yes there is a great reason as to why podcast hosts have fandom in a way that feels a little bit more friendly than Jared Padaleck which is beautiful and a lot easier under the like independent creator model than it is to

do when you are in major studio with like a massive legal team and like all sorts of issues like with including any idea that didn't come out of the writers like there are a lot of infrastructural reasons why big studios can't do what podcasters do I know I never thought that I would that I would love this medium as much as I do it's just been so rewarding I think because of that connection to listeners and I have said before and even more so now that we are in a an era of not in-person weddings but if two oligites met through the show and get married I am a universal life church minister I will be happy to soon marry you marriage is what brings us together today I feel like it is my duty you heard it here you heard it here do you want dad word to marry you

too all you have to do is meet somebody and then fall in love and then decide to get married there is um an oligy's facebook singles group I think it's called flirty oligites or flirtology one of those but I'll I'll put it in the side please see the facebook group flirtology singles quote a place for oligites and other nerds geeks dweebs wonks and boffins to meet mingle flirt chat and canoodle there's 908 hot dorks waiting for you so maybe maybe this is the universe aka me telling you to maybe join text to crush about the banks you just cut we're all gonna die anyway just take a chance also quick ad break right now a double donation was made to the project for awesome thanks to sponsors of the show and links to sponsors and to that charity are in the

show notes okay I think we were talking about yes flirtology singles so if you're single and you like learning things about slug dicks let me hook you up with someone a lot of people asked about the positives and benefits of certain fandoms bailey spurling letters from elinor rigby which is great name kerry simo kathleen sacks natalie rhodes and kim bonnaker all kind of asked like what's the most moving thing you've ever seen a group of fans do for someone else or what's been the most wholesome view of the world what kinds of experiences have have really touched you what's having a moment this year which is a really beautiful thing to watch is fans rallying together to be pro-social with causes and to actively help shape the world like there

is this budding form of activism called fan activism and um one of my favorite instances is the project for awesome which has been going on for like over 10 years now which is a nerdfighter nerdfighter john and hank thing but extends to their larger network of creators that actually started as like an algorithmic hack to get on the front page of youtube back when that was a thing and is now a major fundraising for charity experience the fandoms do all sorts of beautiful things there's a great book called will the vampire people please leave the lobby about fans funding other buffy fans in like the 90s to like get them plane tickets and get them to like fan meetups i've seen k-pop fans doing honestly doing some great work this season

there are a lot of twitch streamers and gamers who do a lot of fundraising for charity st jude is a recipient for a lot of those there's a lot of beautiful stuff that happens when you can get a community together and move them in a positive direction like what i'm really enjoying right now is the community of people on tiktok who are building the ratatouille musical is it cast with real rats please say yes no no but it's this beautiful work of like collaborative creativity so this was recorded in december side note out of order with the rats episode which you may reference if you would like to know all about rodents and ratatouille tiktok musicals and also hear a career rodentologist talk about the zinniest things he's seen a rat

abscond with also i do break down into tears about rats giving each other presents like a chewed on biscuit or a dead moth that's normal everything's fine are there any thoughts that you have about fandom being cultish um or religious a ton of listeners who i will say their names your names my mouth let's do it tony jane cat lindsay reagan l hairford hillary larson ashley scribner shabika alahi cathleen sacks and amber lee noel or are those just so different in severity and harm and emotional impact that they're not even comparable oh i mean if you are cutting off all of your social ties and devoting all of your financial capital to a fandom it's probably a cult um but outside of those contexts communities develop language and rituals all the

time and if your ritual is you know buy yourself a dozen roses and have your girlfriends over once a week to watch the bachelorette i don't want to be a cliche but i'm not here to make friends ritual not cult okay um which admirable ritual buy yourself a dozen roses every week that is a great treat why not meredith ever the anthropologist says that from a community evolutionary perspective we as big bald apes are constantly trying to find who is chill and who is sus and when fandoms get too large like even over 200 people in a group it's scary for us to trust each other so people get bitchy folks begin to bicker sub fandoms skism off based on who they ship or maybe what seasons or franchises they like more are they cults mostly not um

again if you or someone you know is cutting off everybody who doesn't belong and also devoting all of their financial resources to this outside organization probably a cult most fandoms are not in fact i can't really think of a fandom that is aside from occasional like actual cults of personality in which case they're small but hold a lot of weight or religions like Scientology which are large and hold a lot of weight i mean do religions offspring off of like off of objects of fandom and like works of science fiction Scientology is an example of that happening so it could happen it's not outside the realm of possibility Scientology episode anyone jk i'm too scared and you know those are based on science fiction

books Scientology in particular and that um one last painter on question i have to ask are so many Hannah, Miss Kitty, Monica, first-time question asker Irina D'Azzo, Caitlin Powell, Monica Aviva-Lizabeth, Paulina Krasinka, Samantha Ryan, Jolanta Benal, Lauren Maskebrota, Deborah Bowden and Samantha Steeleman all had questions about fan fiction and they wanted to know Monica asked what is the academic discussion surrounding fan fiction writing are they taken seriously in academic context and Irina is a first-time question asker and wants to know just what your thoughts are when does it cross the line from creative expression to privacy invasion i have never had fan fiction written about me so i don't have a lot of experience about privacy

invasion but a lot of it is imaginings rather than spying on someone academia takes fan fiction very seriously does it really it's a very interesting subject of research for a lot of people it blends into fan labor discussions it blends into representation discussions there are a lot of people who have done math and like quantitative analyses of the fan fiction landscapes it blends into like legal challenges like it's a really interesting space for fan studies and it's a really interesting place to be which is one of the reasons i think it's so heavily associated with the idea of fandom i think it's a delight i used to read a lot of it i read less of it now mostly because time and tastes change and the fandoms that i'm

interested in reading about like the kinds of thick i want isn't necessarily the kinds of thick that's prolific because i want like story continuity fix like right now i'm starting to hunt down thick for the magicians because that series ended and i really just want more of those characters and of that world and it left on a really great like new beginning ending rather than like everything that had to have been said was said ending um so like there was a lot of negative space in that show for imagining and i really am like interested in that but thick is also really heavily into like it crosses over heavily into shipping although not all thick is shipping by any means and not all shipping happens in thick by any means and erotica and sex positivity there are all

sorts of genres that people may take some sort of issue with like real person thick or dubcon or noncon just a quick jargon rundown fanfic again is fanfiction shipping once again creating relationships and dubcon and noncon i had to look it up and it means portraying sexual elements of dubious consent or non-consent so of course fanfiction about real people and depictions of violence are areas people get understandably squeaky about but one of the things about fanfiction and one of the interesting things about the internet is like when fanfiction was happening there was almost no way that an object of fandom would read it writers rooms can't because they can't risk ideas from thick they can't risk the idea of like idea theft yeah so like writers for

writers rooms can't read thick for their own series or it typically can't i only know a few writers but that's generally the operating procedure which isn't to say that authors don't write thick and like writers and writers don't write thick they do but like under pseudonyms and stuff like that because of the way that like internet intellectual property works um and i think it's fascinating because you can see the most interesting characters are male it's very very white it's a microcosm of the internet world broadly where there are issues of representation and issues of expression and issues of labor like it's just a beautiful little microcosm of all of the other issues that as a society we're dealing with today

in this a varying quality niche-ified experience for people who want that so i'm very pro fanfiction even though i don't read a lot of it so fanfiction is a way to create art that perhaps breaks the bounds of what a lot of typical mainstream studio entertainment looks like where executives have to answer to shareholders and corporations rely on a few big tent pole movies to keep the whole studio standing and fanfiction doesn't have those restrictions anything can happen in your own word processing doc or notebook so creators are kind of like y'all dream up whatever you want but your tweets are not going to influence what i want to write my very very good friend dailin rodriguez is a showrunner for the show queen of the south

and she says her dms get filled with people sending their opinions on storylines and relationships between characters she doesn't even open them she appreciates the enthusiasm but doesn't engage because she has a whole show to run being good on twitter is its own skill i know not all creators of objects of fandom have any interest or ability to be objects of fandom themselves and this is where like respecting the creative process i think happens is like one of the other things that happens a lot is a lot of fan entitlement of like there's a balance between the creative process and what audiences want and it's a lot easier for independent creators to give audiences more of what they want but there's also that uh ford quote of like if i asked the people what they

want they would have said faster horses and so like there's this balance between the creative process and like the stories that creators have inside themselves and want to get out versus designed by committee which you know can be good but also can take things to weird or less emotionally compelling places for the sake of fitting everything in right um last couple questions of my own um biggest flimflam about fandom any myths that you would like to get on a soapbox at bust um that it's only for teenage girls ha ha conversely that teenage girl taste doesn't matter right like how can this be such an important cultural phenomenon and discount one of the loudest contingencies of it if i could soapbox forever it would be like

teen girl taste matters to what actually becomes popular and commercially viable in this and other countries so i think it's like derision of teen girl taste i really hate it when talk show hosts drag out fan fiction and fan art as like a tool for embarrassment of the actors in an ip oh that sucks i hate that um it wasn't written for you and so like there's that there's also the assumption like in my job and i get this a lot is like oh you study fandom so you must study the fandom that i'm in and that is absolutely not the case like i did not grow up in like emo fandom like i can't tell you about the culture of my chemical romance fans i know they exist that's the extent of my knowledge and so it's really easy to have the fallacy of well fandom

only exists in my experience of fandom which is not the case because the experience of being a fan is just like just as diverse as the people who are fans of stuff i imagine you must have heard a lot about really upset game of thrones fans who are just like well i'm done now done forever yeah when fans willfully break uh and are like nope this is not part of my identity anymore not realizing that like hating on something is still a form of fandom because you're still caring yeah the opposite of love isn't hate it's apathy but mostly i hate the way i don't hate you not even close not even a little bit not even at all is that what you hate the most about your job um not game of thrones but people having assumptions

about it or what what's the worst thing about being a anthropologist properly that people have a very monolithic understanding of fandom and really want to define it however they went into it like it's hard to broaden horizons is the hardest part and worst part about my job because it's so tied to identity either on the production side or the consumption side like change is hard and slow and there's a lot of risk aversion is probably the hardest part about my job is convincing people to one take risks and to have empathy for the other parts of the process so a lot of us think we know what fandom is and entails but anthropologists know that identity and self-care and brand loyalty and exploring your own faults through fiction

is very complicated which is why phanthropology is fascinating what about the best that's the coolest part is it all the free lanyards you get and going to conventions when there's not a plague i think it's just opening my eyes to what other people like and are interested in i get to see so many facets of the cultural landscape that i because i work in the private sector not in academia my research is dictated by my clients not my personal research interests and so i get to explore all sorts of other worlds that i would otherwise consider myself too old for or too young for or would not normally gravitate towards it or um any other number of traits so i get to see a much wider version of culture than most people's individual feeds would beat them

how do you feel when people tell you that they're a big fan of you uh doesn't happen a lot i'm i'm one of those professionals that like i know what it takes to be famous and build a brand on the internet and i have actively and deliberately chosen not to do that for myself no man and what do you tell people who are like hey my niece wants to be internet famous and you're like oh yeah i hold the keys to that in a little box what are you what do you tell people i think well okay so if your niece wants to be internet famous i would say that they need to figure out what they like to make and then make a lot of it like make a lot and understand what about it they like what about it they don't like get help where they can

in the stuff that they don't like doing and spend a lot of time watching stuff that they like for the express purpose of understanding why they like it a lot of creative professionals spend a lot of their time consuming other people's content in order to look at it with a critical eye so in the age of the internet it's like well what is unique to you and what do you want to borrow from other stuff you like and having that blend of unique to you and borrowed such that it is familiar is really really important in that beginning stages as is knowing what you want out of being a creator like are you doing this because you want to be famous but do you want to be famous because it's sometimes a proxy for having financial stability like drill down into

the why that is it because you want to have fun and communicate the having fun part is it about having freedom of expression or is it about financial stability or is it about personal growth needs like learning how to develop a skill why are you doing this what do you like about the content that you consume and make a lot of it and understand how to tweak the stuff that you're making if you want to grow like because if you want to be a professional you have to scale to a size that can sustain being a professional but if you just want to make stuff to make stuff then make stuff and make a lot of it and practice and build those skills skill stack skill oh that's that's such good advice that's going to change at least one

listener's life i'm sure which is so exciting that's like literally like the end scene of pulp fiction with the briefcase you're like here's what's in it guys oh my god that's that's what's in it i in no way did i intend to make this a two hour interview and i'm so thankful you stuck around um this looks like it's going to be a two-parter i'm sure this has just been so exciting ever since i was handed your business card it has been on my desk for probably a year so i'm so excited to finally talk to you likewise can i give you my interview questions yeah okay absolutely so ellie what do you consider yourself to be a fan of oh okay um things i'm a fan of i think that i'm the biggest like stan of probably fiona apple i think that if i were to ever meet

her i think and i have met her very briefly and i and i just i don't even think i said a sentence i think i just was like she was like in a lobby leaving an event as i was coming in i think that that would be probably someone that i have so much awe and respect for and whose music and words and mission and ethos have meant probably the most me over time probably yeah she's she's someone who just now i'm never disappointed by her what is your earliest memory of being a fan of anything my early okay um okay all right do you want to know my first cosplay yes okay i was the youngest of three girls and i also is the youngest like just i watched way too stuff that was inappropriate for my age because my sisters were older so like tons of r movies when

i was just barely in kindergarten it was just like they'd be on cable and so but we we would watch escape from new york uh too much and when i was five or six really was excited about dressing up like snake pliskin so i cut off the arms of a shirt into like a muscle tank and i made a rubber eye patch out of an old bike tire and then also took my mom's um she was not happy about it but i took her eyeshadow and made a five o'clock shadow call me snake and i was like in bliss and i think we may have had a toy gun but i just remember marching around the backyard being like i am snake pliskin i'm not dressed as snake pliskin right now i am snake pliskin of escape from new york played by curt russell in a post apocalyptic world and um there's somewhere there exists a

polaroid of it and it's one of those treasures that if my family if we ever find it oh my god the bounty i would pay oh yeah that was me at my most badass i peaked i peaked thanks so much for taking like more than an hour oh i love this are you kidding i was like as soon as you were like i don't have anywhere to be i was like game on so what is the lesson here y'all ask smart passionate people about the smart passionate people they study study people who study people who study characters and cup banks if you want them and just make a lot of stuff just make things get dirty be weirder than you think is okay to be meanwhile follow at meredith gene on twitter she's also on clubhouse where she's been leading discussions on things like fandom and the attention

economy you can follow me if you like at ali ward with bonel on twitter and instagram we're also at oligies on both you can join the facebook oligies podcast group thank you erin talbert for admitting that you can find other oligites in the wild with merch at oligiesmerch.com thank you shannon feltis and bonnie dutch of the comedy podcast you are that for managing all that thank you noelle dillworth for keeping the whole ship running thanks emily white and all the transcribers for making transcripts available on our website at aliwar.com slash oligies extras there's a link for those for free in the show notes as well as bleeped episodes thank you Caleb Patton for bleeping them and thank you to editors Jared Sleeper mega hunk who hosts quarantine calisthenics

every weekday at 9 a.m pacific on twitch and two Jurassic park fanatic and kitty lover steven ray morris of the podcast see Jurassic right and the per cast and a new everything but the movie a star wars books podcast nick thorburn of the very good band islands wrote and played the theme music they have a new album do out in june exciting and at the end of each episode i tell a secret in this week it's not very juicy but it's um something i think about all day every day there's this long strip of plastic tangled in my neighbor's eucalyptus tree and it's probably like 15 or 20 feet in the air and i see it whipping in the wind every day and i think should i risk breaking several femurs to just go remove that because it bums me out and i keep staring at it

and i keep thinking how am i going to get that thing down so stay tuned i gotta make it just i gotta do something anyway okay i'm a fan of you bye bye so