Episode 141: Community and Connection

Welcome to episode 141 of the Three Patch Podcast. community and connection i'm immigrant and i'm here with caroline laurie So this is our March 1st episode, and here in North America, March 1st is kind of a weird time. It's heading towards spring, but in many places it's still very much winter, and people are just sick and tired of that.

If you're in education at all, then you're in the middle of the long slog of the semester. You're counting down the days till spring break and just trying to get through the midterm season. So this is a rough time of year. You might not have had much time to engage in fandom and maybe desperately miss feeling part of that community. Or maybe you are engaging with that community as a distraction from everything that's going on in your real life.

Either way, fandom communities are an important part of our lives. And in this episode, we're going to explore that idea of community and talk about what it means to us here at 3Patch. So first, I'm going to put my teacher hat on.

and talk a little bit about the theory of community building. So bear with me here. There's a lot of work out there about how communities are created. But M. Scott Peck's 1987 work on building community, I feel like is applicable to my experience with fandom communities. So I'm going to talk about that a little bit as like a framework for what we might be thinking about here.

there's a lot of like educational and business models of community building but this one feels like it reflects what happens in fandoms so

According to Peck's work, communities go through four stages as they develop. The first one he calls pseudo-community, and that's when communities first come together and everyone's super excited and they're like... being friendly and sociable, but they don't really dig deep beneath the surface of their emotions. They don't go into conflict resolution at all. Like the whole point is to avoid conflict and maintain this like appearance of a facade of community.

So everything's positive and exciting and we're not really creating any kind of a safe space for honesty or bad emotions yet. It's just kind of there on the surface and we're all happy to be there. And this to me feels like where fandoms start.

So when you first get into a fandom or a fandom is new, you have that feeling of, oh, everything's great. There's a thousand fics. Everyone's producing wonderful stuff. And we're so happy to be here. And the actors are on Twitter and they're great. And everything is wonderful and loving everything. Right.

So according to Peck, the second phase that communities go into is one that he calls chaos. Okay, so what happens in chaos is that suddenly, like, that facade of everyone is happy and everything is great, everything is... what's the song from a lego movie everything is awesome right awesome right yeah so that is just sort of crashed and negative emotions start flowing through and the members of the community start to vent their frustrations and their annoyances and their differences and

It's really chaotic, but Peck says that's really important for growth because it's a sign that people are finally starting to be real with each other. So if you've ever been in a fandom, you have been in this position where suddenly...

The beautiful, wonderful, everyone is happy. We're enjoying all of each other's fan works phase ends and the ship wars start and people start arguing about tropes and who tops who. And like in the worst cases, like antis come out and appear and there's just some genuinely awful behavior that starts to happen.

And you're like, what happened to my wonderful, happy space that I was in, right? We've all been there. So the next phase of community development, he calls it emptiness. And he doesn't mean by that that you feel empty being part of it.

It's more that like people sort of start to shed off all of the things that prevent them from communicating. So they start to... work through like getting rid of like any biases they had any need for power and control any sort of self superiority feelings any sort of motives like around protecting their ego and they start to open themselves up to like being empathetic to other people's perspectives to being vulnerable to paying attention to other people's needs to trusting each other

And so they just start to empty out all the distortions of their emotions and their mental states. And they start to really understand each other. And it's like a painful and difficult, but like they're on their way to really.

becoming a real community at that point so this also feels familiar to me from fandom because there's that point in a fandom where like you just start to get tired of the arguing right and you're like you know what i'm here to ship this particular pairing and that's what makes me happy and i'm just gonna just fuck it right i'm just gonna

go with this, I'm going to have fun, I'm going to ignore the haters. But you also learned from the experience of hearing that kind of feedback, and it has affected the way you interact with people. So you've taken those experiences and those perspectives into account. And you've decided what you're going to keep and what you're going to ignore. And then you're connecting with people around what our shared values are now and that we're in this space.

that happens and then the fourth phase is called true community according to peck and he says that after we've worked through all that bullshit then we're at a place where we can feel empathy with each other we understand each other we're able to relate to each other and even

though you can still have like kind of heated discussions you're having it from a place where you understand each other's motives and you understand where people are coming from and there's just sort of a deeper sort of sustainable level of discourse that can happen and

That to me, that feels like that sort of point when like the antis have moved on to another fandom tournament and the people who are left are the ones who've been through so much shit. But now we're like, we're like a real community. I love this framework. I feel like it really reflects like my experience with all the fandoms I've been in. I would love to hear what y'all think about this. Do you think this mirrors your own experience?

Oh my god so I was I was trying to wrap my mind around that phase three because it sounded I guess the way you phrased it made it sound organic to me like it just falls away whereas to my mind that's culling. That's like putting up blockers. That's using a block list. That is like putting up blinders and being like, I'm ignoring this shit.

I know exactly who the troublemakers are and I am like, they are on mute. They are on block. They are, they're on notice. Goodbye. You know, like, here's the gate. I'm gonna, you know, and it's like specifically putting up walls to me.

at least in fandom like you know but like I mean I guess that kind of sounds organic in the sense that like if you want to continue being in this community you need to do that for self-preservation reasons because otherwise you will lose all investment in like you know you have to find that that like a smaller like a smaller subsection you can't just kind of wade out into the wide wide pool you have to like find a corner um and

and to continue you know um so but when you said like i think it was like the phrase like falling away i was like a picturing I don't know, the cliffs of Scotland just like, you know, like just like falling into the ocean. Not quite, not quite, but... I don't know. That's what I, that's, so it sounded organic, but I was like, I think that's a real culling process. I think that's a. Yeah. And I don't know, honestly, I mean, this is like a super serpacy. I'm not a psychologist.

like i'm this is super surfacy reading of peck's work here um i'm just looking for like a framework because that's what i do but i think that he might

I wonder what he would say about that. I have no idea. Do you know what communities he was studying? Like where he gathered? You know, that's a good question. And I should have probably... looked that up but i'm not sure but i do know that he was looking more at creative communities and like communities of like activists and people like that whereas a lot of community building work is looking at like business organizations like how do you build a team in your business right he was

Not looking at that. He was looking more at, I don't know what specific communities he looked at, but it was more like people who do social justice work and stuff like that. Nobody's that passionate about business, really. Right. Because you're kind of being forced to do the team. Most people. Most people, yeah. The thing that struck me as different from what you were saying is that the fandoms I think of.

are split along generational lines. And I don't experience something achieving an equilibrium of becoming a true community. except within generations oh that's interesting because a lot of the conflict the chaos a lot of that to me I observe it coming as developmentally part of people being in their early adulthood. And whatever piece I found, I feel like a lot of that just comes from being older.

Because I see a lot of the same cycles play out, but it's to me less about the life cycle of a community, of a fandom, than it is human life cycles and stages of life and knowing which... projections and angsts are just how you feel at that age and you know eventually they'll become less important to you you know or Being old enough to know which arguments can't be won. And I guess the fandoms that I've been in recently are so multi-generational that I just see this.

the circle of life happening, you know, at different stages all over depending on, partly depending on how old the participants are. Also, because I'm thinking about figure skating, there's this other element which You'll recognize from any youth activity where people are extra crazier because they're protecting their children. Also, there's sexualizing of, if not children, then not quite adults or very young adults. So there's a really heightened sense of alarm.

Yeah, people can really go off the rails. And in comparison, a media fandom like BBC Sherlock. is safe because oh bless them they were all grown-ups you know there wasn't anyone in the cast where If you like had a fantasy about them, then you felt dirty because they were 17 or whatever.

You know, they were all nice and old. That's really interesting because I was thinking about, okay, so from my fandom experience, my first real fandom community was Star Wars prequels. And so those were all adults, right? And everyone that... To my knowledge, because this was on Yahoo groups like 20 odd years ago.

Everyone seemed like adults, but it wasn't like we were we were not interacting in ways where this is back in the day when people if they were underage, they lied about it. Right. So everyone seemed like they were adults, certainly. And I was like in my early 30s at that time.

My second big fandom was Harry Potter. And though the characters were definitely young, there was a wide variety of people in the fandom, but my experience with it being mostly on LJ was definitely... people who were closer to my age or people who were like kind of in their 30s to like 60s right it was like the kind of typical adults i had interacted with in fandom before um

So it wasn't really until the Sherlock fandom that I felt like I was in a space where suddenly people were letting us know that they were really young and they were reacting to the content that people were creating. in different ways even when i was in the harry potter fandom i don't feel like it didn't feel like age and maybe i'm just missed maybe i'm not remembering it correctly but i don't remember feeling like the age piece was as big as it feels like now

And I don't know if that's a modern culture thing or if it's just a relic of the fandoms that I happen to have been in. Caroline, what's your experience been with that? Well, I was just thinking that I kind of think...

I think it's a little bit of both, but I actually think that Gen Z have a lot more like rules about, you know, DNI and like... Like, not even, like, be over 18 to talk to me, but, like, be over 25. Like, be over, like, just have, like, whole, just, like, a dating profile. Like, do not even approach me if you're under six foot. Like, just kind of that vibe.

you know, but I feel like that's something that I feel is, um, I don't know. I've just, maybe it's because I've been feeling very much like older millennial lately. Um, like.

just very I have left my 30s like I am 40 at this point and like 40 in like three months so I don't know and I and I just feel like not a complete adult still in a lot of ways but I look at the actual 20 year olds and the actual 25 year olds and i'm like but i'm not that either um i'm you know uh and i think about like the energy that i used to have just to be on twitter

I just used to have a lot more energy. I mean, maybe it's because I have to parent two kids now. But I'm just in a different place, I guess. And like...

And also just, I don't know, being active still on places where I am very aware that everyone is quite a bit younger. TikTok. K-pop fandoms. And I mean, like... k-pop is like both both the rpf is is there and also everyone is quite young and they're younger and younger like i learned that like new jeans which is quite a big like a quite a popular girl group Has a member who's 14 years old. Oh, my God. But I also learned that JoJo, not JoJo Siwa, no. Not JoJo Siwa, but JoJo, I think.

is her name is a singer from like the 90s her big single she was 12 but like in my mind I You know what I mean? Like, that's not, that's not K-pop. That's like somebody, like, assigned a 12-year-old, you know, in the 90s or whatever. And she was just, like, an alternative to, like, I don't know, like, a young, even younger than Britney Spears' demographic, right?

It's still truly in the Disney Mickey Mouse Club kind of demographic. I don't know where I'm going with this, but it just feels to me that... I don't know. I feel older and I feel like much more that gap between me and like people who are... 20 maybe because they're all they're all like labeled with like dni and i'm like i'm i'm not eyeing i'm not interacting you know even though i'm not necessarily like hitting those numbers nobody is saying don't be too old to talk to me

I hardly ever see that, but I'm completely rambling and I don't know what my point was. But it's interesting because you're primarily in a lot of K-pop. I mean, well, that's one of your big fandoms right now, right? It's a lot of K-pop fandoms. Okay, so like one of the bands that I know like you and some of the folks are really into right now is Atiz, right? And I have a niece who is the same age as my kid who is really into Atiz as well.

So like I've been kind of like on the fence. Like I really would like to get into this because this is where like a lot of my friends are going and they are so excited about it. On the other hand, my... 15 year old niece loves them too. And I feel like, okay, this is feeling a little weird. My, I'm at least I'm with like this. I, I'm actually.

Like, I like them, but I don't actually sexualize them for myself in any way. Like, that's like, it's, and part of that is, and to say that they're young, the youngest one currently, I think, is 23. 23. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because the majority of them, five out of eight of them are turning 24 this year because they're all year of the rabbit. So I know that. And then the youngest one is only one year down.

23 years old and the oldest one is only like 25 two of them are 25 but like yeah they're really young Like, yeah, but, and like, it's kind of like awkward for me to like look up early footage or whatever. And I'm like, they're 19. They're like, they're, they're super young. But I also don't like, I don't kind of want them for myself, like at all. Like, that's kind of why.

so i don't know that's the vibe for me um so i feel let's come up and yet i'm already conscious that like if they come into new york and i'm going to be able to see them in concert at some point people will look at me

And, like, be like, she is a pedophile or something. Like, I'm gonna have that vibe put with nothing else, no other context, like, without having the experience of having gone. Like, I just have this... vibe and I think it's because they're so young and I'm like am I gonna just suck it up and be like I'm gonna go anyway

You know what I mean? That's such an interesting thing about like we know a lot of people who go to a lot of like K-pop concerts. And there are people who are like in their 30s, 40s and older. And I try to imagine myself going to see like Stray Kids who I would love to see to be honest. And then I'm like, they're babies. And I can go and appreciate them as babies. Like, absolutely. I went to kids bop concerts. I can appreciate very young singers. I get it.

But yeah, you're right. There's like such a boundary for me because they're so young and I can appreciate everything that they're doing and they're so great. And I, you know, but. Yeah, it's not the same as if, like, I went to see Ewan McGregor in a play. I'd have a very different feeling. Yeah, exactly. And I'm like, I almost want to, like, I don't know. Like, I think that there's even a term for, like, I don't know what it is. It's like Ajumab.

fans or something like that you know like bringing like auntie vibes kind of but like you know like yeah the aunt vibes or whatever and i'm like i don't mind doing that i can be there and be like you know are you eating well are you like that's kind of what i'm put on a jacket yeah yeah or you know you don't like your shoulders are nice like you know but like stuff like that but um i don't know where where my mind was going with this

um but yeah i don't know lately i've just been very aware and it kind of it shapes my online fandom spaces because i will just not be i mean like i feel like i felt that the most on Twitter, but because of the Elon Musk thing, I've just backed away from Twitter by a good deal. Which means that my fandom communities are pretty small. They're like Discord, which is where I'm already like, it's a little siloed.

you know it's just like friends and then friends of friends a bit and then they become my friends and so we're all just friends you know um or um or it's a like watch alongs which is still kind of like for me like a like a friend of a friend thing like everybody that has you know it's like a very very close knit

kind of a situation i guess i guess the commitment is also like you know like here's like seven months of my life to do like this show um you know so everybody's like kind of close quarters it feels like

Oh, this is actually a really good segue into something I want to talk about anyway, which is this like fandom doesn't really have a home right now. Right. I mean, like. For a long time, we were, like, fandom was mostly based on LJ, and then fandom was on Tumblr. And then after Tumblr pornocalypse, I can't say that, after the Tumblr pornocalypse, a lot of fandom shifted over to Twitter. But with Twitter kind of doing its...

thing people are just it's fracturing in ways that are really interesting and so a lot of folks are on discord but as you say discord feels like these little sort of silos of of people and you kind of have to know somebody to really be engaged in that community

And the three of us who are on this call are in multiple communities like that. But we're not necessarily connecting with... people outside of that right and it's hard to do that now so like how are you how has that changed the way that y'all participate in in fandom or find community in fandom

I'm actually on several discords that have, like, I can see the opportunity to meet new fans, like, to just... you know not even do a friend of a friend thing just sort of like you just pop on and like for instance ATEEZ has a uh oh wait no the rose has an official that's a k band um the rose has an official

Discord. ATs doesn't have an official Discord, but, like, one of the larger, like, open communities out there has to do with, like, their lore, like, their universe lore. So I joined that, and then I made the mistake.

of looking at the introduction like channel and people were in there at 14 and 15 years old and I was like oh okay like I just you know and they have An incredible energy that I remember once having the hint of, like I remember, like it's an energy of posting a picture and then fawning over it for like six, I'm like, you know.

So I wish that I could filter in a way. Like, it could just be, like, Tumblr where it's, like, I could go into the channel that's dedicated to just pictures and see only pictures. But I can't. It's a picture. And then, like... you know 10 inches of like lines of of of just of of people fawning all over it or whatever and i'm supposed to be and i can tell like

Part of my brain is telling me like, you should like one of these people or you should pick some people in here to befriend. But I'm like, no, because they're all. like sophomores like in high school like you know like i don't want to just walk into their lunch table and be like hi like it just it's weird um and literally some of them are asking for like homework help

And, you know, just things like that. So I'm like, you know what? I just venture into some of the channels that have, like, minimal chat, which is kind of... i don't know it's kind of like me trying to recreate like a tumblr experience you know and then and then and then and then leaving again i'm in a i'm in several things like that where it's like if you spent the time you definitely could make friends

if you spent the time i just don't think that i have the energy and time like if there's like some kind of trifecta of like you know like meeting the energy level of the people near you being near those people And I don't know.

Having the time to, like, build that community, I guess. And I don't even have that. Like, I don't have any of that. And so, like, I dip in and out. So the people that I talk to are the same people that I talk to over and over again. It's those channels that, like, I'm always on, you know? It's...

for me so and then i tried oh god mastodon which is one it's it's sort of kind of a twitter replacement although if you talk to anybody who's hardcore into the setiverse they won't really like that description because it's like a separate thing it's like it's like i don't know they're just two they're four different things and they they want engagement in different ways which is to say that like the fediverse is not built for engagement

And they think of all of the ways that Twitter is built for engagement is really for rage farming. And so, you know, so for example, they hate the quote retweet. They don't, it's built from the ground that like, it's not there. even though I never use the quote retweet to just rage, you know, but, but certainly like that's, that's the vibe over there. And so they don't have it. It's a different community. And over there, it's also weird. I'm like,

So I've talked to a couple people, but for the most part, nobody, they're not even friends of friends. It's just people who are kind of in the same fandom as me, but not quite in the same fandom because they're not even in my ship. it's extra weird. It's like, it's, it's extra weird to talk to people who are and I'm like, it's very cordial. I'm in that phase one of that community building. Or I'm just like, like, I don't know what we haven't even hit chaos. We have not.

um and it's not built for that mastodon specifically um oh that's interesting i don't know so laurie thinking about like i was thinking about caroline's comments about the feeling looking around and seeing how young the people were in the fandom and sort of the ways that Caroline's navigating that. And I'm just thinking about your experience. with figure skating fandom, which was, again, in a sort of real people interaction way and not like all this online stuff. But, I mean, do you...

Do you have like some sort of thoughts about how, how that was different from what we see now? Well, when I was in figure skating fandom, it was so long ago. It was on Usenet. And it was in the 1990s, the 20th century. Yeah. And. What it's the similarity is that when now when something happens from the past from the figure skating fandom past that I was part of. I find the other people that I knew from then, whom I haven't kept in daily touch with anymore, but we still share a past.

And I'm feeling something similar happen now because we've been dispossessed and or deplatformed. And there were other places to go. But at this point. When there have been these Twitter alternatives coming up, I was hanging back to see which ones took off. And so far, I haven't seen anything that made me think, okay.

It's safe to go there. It's taken off. I had, you know, brief hopes for Spoutable before they pissed off Courtney Milan. I missed that one completely. I don't even know what that is. Spoutable? Spoutable? Yeah. It was formed as an alternate to Twitter. But Courtney Milan asked a very reasonable and innocent question about like their... porn policy or something and the guy in charge blocked her and John Scalzi said on Twitter like oh

This will go about as well as it ever goes when people piss off the romance writers. Especially the ones that used to be U.S. Supreme Court clerks. right and also invented the dinosaur emoji she's i i and and our she's also like a huge figure skating fan she is just oh wait i knew that i knew that because of user yeah okay okay Yeah, no, just amazing. Yeah, so I haven't actually committed to anything.

to replace Twitter. I hate Discord, even though I'm on it, because the insularity is frustrating to me. You know, the thing that I liked about Twitter was that you would have private conversations out in the open. So if people wanted to know about a certain thing that could come find you, which, you know, it's not happening on all the like private rooms in discord. And.

I tried with half a heart to see if I could make myself go back to Tumblr, but since I hated Tumblr every second, I was on there. And I never left Dream With. Well, I hated Dream With and I was always on LiveJournal until... It was so much a part of the Russian interference with U.S. infrastructure that I couldn't lie to myself anymore and I had to leave. So I'm still on Dream With because all I ever wanted was long form.

And it was strange giving that up for Twitter, but I accepted it because the openness was welcome for me.

I also strangely find myself now that Twitter is nothing but like the GI tract of a narcissistic stupid head. I've strangely spent more time on Facebook, which, you know, of course, like during the 2016 election was another was a hotbed of horrible political interference. But it has the openness still where people can find each other. And also because...

Facebook is so notoriously compromised and such a terrible breathing ground for any sort of social interaction. People know to be circumspect there. And that is so refreshing. You know, like teenagers will. Avoid it like anything because you can't say anything slightly stupid and of the moment there. You know, it'll compound upon you so rapidly.

You know, and all your grandparents are watching your every move. Yeah, it's definitely a place for like, like adults who are of a certain age. Yeah. Yeah, there's none of this Instagram.

safety like there's there's just no safety in Facebook and that has in fandom for fandom purposes has the happy effect of putting people a bit on their better behavior because they know so much like how bad it can get and how quickly if they are if they say something that's a hot take like you know cool your takes to room temperature at the very warmest before you dare put them on racist uncle book.

So Facebook has been an interesting place to go to find people and then go take the conversation private. But you can't do that on... The many, many splintered, fractured, not quite good replacements where you're not sure where to find people or if they had to like put an underscore in their username. I don't know what. It's been very uneasy. Mostly what I've been doing is finding people that I knew from other fandoms and cling to them as friends.

when I want fandom companionship, even if the source material isn't shared. Oh, that's a good point, yeah. Yeah, what I find is that the approach, the perspective, the... The standpoint that I'm, you know, from which I'm reacting to source material as a fan, that's the thing that people understand, that other fans understand completely. Like, oh. I know you've never seen this show, but this particular scene showed me where my mind is these days.

10 years ago, that scene wouldn't have been important to me. 10 years ago, I would have responded to this other thing in the show instead. But I recognized this sudden feeling like, oh, I guess that's showing me where I am. Or if somebody says, oh, I've fallen into this hole of this ship in a show you've never seen. And so I've read 10 fics in the past week. And you don't need to share the content.

And it's a little sad because when you can share the content and scream all together, that's very exciting. But... I would rather find people whose Spanishness I know who have never read the book I'm talking about and just sit with them and be with them. And that to me... is more rewarding than finding people who maybe are into the same material, but don't have the same approach that I do.

You know, that actually, you know, I think that what you're describing is something that's also very familiar to me, too, that like, I think the last five years in particular, my fandom experience has been. it's multi-fanish in one way because it's like I feel like I'm hopping around to a lot of different things but also I feel like most of like my fandom friends are doing that and every now and then will intersect

And other times we won't. But there's always that commonality of knowing what fandom means and what kinds of things, what kinds of activities we engage in and what kinds of... Spanish practices we value. Just kind of appreciating the squee, I think, is a big thing. I have this really strong memory of, and we were all at the Three Patch had this retreat in Atlanta.

And there was a group of people that went to the K-pop store and came back. And, like, I had no idea what they were talking about. But their energy, their excitement was so contagious that it was just wonderful to sit in the room and watch them do it. a show and tell of what they had bought at the K-pop store.

And that's kind of how I feel on discord, like 90% of the time in the groups that I'm in is I don't know what people are talking about. But wow, you're so enthusiastic about it. And you're posting like really pretty pictures of people. And I'm appreciating the pictures, even though I don't get half of what you're saying.

Like, yeah, I find that's been a lot of my Spanish experience lately is like kind of living vicariously through other people's Spanish joy somehow. You know, come to think of it, I think that a lot of...

What I see these days is like when people are like planning a fun night. Right. Like on Discord. You know what I mean? It's like a night out, but it's on Discord. Yeah. But when they're planning like a fun, random, you know, like a weeknight or something, like a Wednesday or something. And they're like, let's do like, we'll just do like.

five-minute PowerPoint presentations, you know? And they're, like, fan-ish in nature. So, like, they're funny. You can have dick jokes. Like, it's funny. Like, you can just, you can do that. And it's not, like, people will understand your in-jokes. When I tell people that The Untamed starts with Reichenbach...

They're like, you got to be kidding me. And then I show them the first scene and they're like, holy shit. I'm like, yeah, there's a cliff and everything. It's Reichenbach, you know, like the language, that common language. Like, I feel like there's been... plenty of folks i think that i have marched through the untamed all 50 episodes which you know once weekly takes like six seven months to do and we're on our fourth watch along i have dragged multiple people through and they don't become like

mega fans they just sort of go okay now I'm done with the canon that was all right and now I'm literate and now I'm literate and when you say like when you say the ship names and when you say when sunday says toilet hat then i'll understand what you mean and it's like it's like yep

it's just unfortunate he's the only one who's wearing that hat in the show and that therefore you can just identify him by that hat like it's unfortunate anyway but it's interesting that like the the fact that you're talking about using like fandom sort of lingo and yeah For helping fans understand another property or another piece of fandom, right? Because we all share the same alumni network. We all graduated from the same school of, I don't know, of Sherlock.

knocks you know yeah like the intersection of like people who went through the harry potter fandom and then people who went through the sherlock fandom and then like that Like that's like the basis of so much of like, at least the people that I interact with in fandom, at least people who are of a, you know, let's say millennials and up. And I'm not sure.

People who are younger than that, I don't know like what their background is, but that there's certainly so much like common lingo and common understandings and like norms of fandom and just sort of the way that ships work and tropes.

All of these things that are so familiar and they just kind of get transferred from fandom to fandom in a way that makes it feel very comfortable. So like I've read K-pop fics where I went in and I was like, wow, this fic has like a gazillion kudos. I bet it's good. And about.

five paragraphs and I'm like okay no this is not anything that because I have a particular idea about how a fanfic should be structured and how it should go and then I'll go to like I could literally pick any I could go to like the Highlander fandom I could go to any fandom where I

I know nothing about the canon. I could probably read the same five paragraphs and go, OK, I know what's happening here. I know where it's going. So that's been that's an interesting thing, too, is that there are some some of the fans fan fics that are written by younger fans. I'm often. finding myself like going oh okay

This is not what I was expecting. I'm sure it's great for what it is and other people are loving it clearly, but I need to go find something else. And fortunately, in a fandom like The Untamed, it's so massive that you can find plenty of what you're looking for, no matter what you're looking for.

One of my biggest selling points for The Untamed is that it has a very, very healthy population of fans who are just middle-aged lesbian librarians. Like, those are like... Mark of quality. It's an excellent dowsing rod. Go wherever those people are. Just go, go there. What are the middle-aged lesbians doing? What are the librarians doing? They're writing really good fic. Yeah, they are. It's hands down. That's what I found about Sherlock fandom in the early days.

In 2012, 2013, I was like... wait that person's also a librarian and that person's also a librarian and i was like collecting where are all these librarians doing here yeah i was like collecting librarians i was absolutely like oh you're my fave like you're my favorite like you're you know

And I was like in love. I was like, and then I learned. I was like, oh, go there. Go wherever they go. Just go wherever they go. I tell you what, I've never looked at libraries the same way again. Like if I go to a library now, I'm like. Wow. I know what goes on in here. Yeah, for me, it was teachers. I wasn't aware of how many of my favorite people in fandom were teachers until lockdown started and they were all going to.

the same traumas like oh i i you know like if i could think of i had like a group of 10 friends Oh, yeah, I guess seven of them are teachers. You know, like one of them teaches first grade. One of them, you know, is a tenured professor, but like in all these different ways.

Or one of them is like a gym teacher, like teaching karate. But they all have the exact same stress. Not that I've counted, but I'm sure that... you know many of them are no longer teachers quite a few but yeah that's you know an overlapping population with the like lesbian librarians yeah um a difference for me coming from

old school figure skating fandom, but I've seen it carry over is that that fandom is a lot about the etiquette between fans and creators. Yeah, the fourth wall kind of situation. Without it being a literal fourth wall. It's like the glass. Yeah, the plexiglass. The plexiglass wall. You know, especially because... Figure skaters are the kind of performers where you put your whole self out there and you want to affect people emotionally. And that's the gauge of success.

So you do want to see the mirror of your effort reflected back to you from human response, but only in an okay way. There are many, many not okay ways. And you would love to filter all of them out, but you can't completely shut down. and ignore all of it because you're not meant to do this in a vacuum. That's not the point. The point is to communicate. The point is to feel something, transform it into art and therefore transmit it into another person who's then going to feel it.

and respond, which is, you know, all art. But with something like writing, you know, you can write it and then somebody else can read it some other time and respond to it. And it's not so immediate. So there's elaborate, unspoken, wildly misinterpreted, badly followed rules. But I learned them.

Partly because, you know, I was not a teenager. So, you know, I saw some of the bad things happening and, you know, like, no, no, no. Hey, kids, when that happens, don't say that to them. Try saying this instead.

Everything I ever needed to know about negotiating toxic fandoms, I learned from figure skating. Wow. Those are some bloody wars in Sherlock fandom. There was the parasocial conflicts between the fans and the creators. There were various people who were hounded off with Twitter. There were Martin and Benedict tormented by demands that they kiss or whatever, to the point where they looked haunted and bitter. I mean, they were part of a generation.

What they went through really helped the people who are stars now, because now everybody knows to expect that and, you know, has some defenses against it. You know, the one K-pop group that I've managed to make myself familiar with is BTS. And, you know, one of the members that I really enjoy, you know, when they're told, you know.

The fans want to see you kiss. We'll just, like, let loose this shriek. Like, what are you even, how can you even do that to us? Duh, yuck, no, stop. Like, you know, it's, they're familiar. They know how to handle it. But we watched Benedict and Martin be among the first people to break us all in. And boy, they suffered for it. So here's an interesting thing that happened.

the thing that's brought figure skating fandom back to my mind recently is that a very good friend of mine recently died whom i met i first actually i i encountered him because i was a skating fan i just saw a program of his and i thought it was amazing and i was at the time a journalist so i said can i interview you and then he decided that we were friends like right away and

There is a way for fans to talk to figure skaters that they can't get from anyone else, but it has to be super, super filtered. You get it from coaches and judges, and that's stress. It's necessary, but it's stressful. You can't really ask your friends, hey, how good was I? Because, you know, they want you to feel better. They can't be honest.

You know, you can't ask like your mom because your mom thinks you're amazing, right? But if you're a performer like this and you felt like a... performance was different and really like you felt transformed by it and then you see that an audience is crying and giving you a standing ovation then because performers any any creative, when you give it all of your effort, then you lose all your self perception, your perspective, you really need somebody to come and say, here.

I recorded my responses to you. I'm going to reflect you back to you. You know, I'm going to put your soul back into your body and be honest and nurturing. affirm that what you felt you know that wow you really put yourself out there tonight that it was real And that people responded and here's what they responded to you. Here's the parts of you that you didn't even know were so beautiful in you until they just came out tonight. And this is what we saw.

Because you were in it, you were making it, so you couldn't even remember what you did. But we saw it, and it's from you. You didn't get that from anyone else but you. But I've recorded it. And when you see it, you'll recognize it. But, you know, you'll also think, wow, did I make that? That's amazing. That's something that. For Sherlock, for example, a bunch of us watched the same show at the same time and felt that and had a super thunderous mass reaction.

And that's something that the creators, whether writers or actors or set designers or cinematographers, they were starving to hear what they had done. Okay, we felt it when we were making it. Did you feel it? And it wasn't really possible for them to get the reflection back that they needed without all of the crap that we also... vomited in their direction that was so poisonous the chaos part of the and you know like of course if if you speak as an artist to an audience the way you catch on them

is from your flaws catching on their flaws, you know, which is what Sherlock is about when Sherlock and Eurus talk about how beauty comes from mistakes. So yeah, it's thunderous and emotional, but... How is a creator going to get that life-giving response and reflection without all the yuckiness that just makes you feel really gross and sick as a creator? Having people put all their really gross projections on you. Learning how to give feedback as a fan is a whole discipline and fandom.

Not that everybody learns all of it all at once, but collectively, if you go through fandom, you see people developing etiquette. For example, here's something that Tumblr is super good at. If there was an episode of a show that was like amazingly a highlight that really broke new ground in emotional truth on Tumblr, they can get a GIF.

and break it down. And then just like a bunch of people will just put little phrases one after another underneath that moment when right there, right there, and then they'll slow it down or they'll get a still of it. And they'll say, see, they could have made this choice, but they made this other choice. And it was new. That happened with Our Flag Meets Death during the Fleetwood Mac song. Yeah. When there's a touch of feet.

like one of the pirates just surreptitiously makes contact with the other pirate and which apparently was you know an acting choice on the moment But it really resonated with a ton of people. Oh, yeah. People have that tattooed on their bodies. Yeah. So fandom collectively knows that when a creator gives you that kind of gift. and it resonates collectively, then collectively you gather the archival material to show them, here, we brought you a present.

You know, we collated all of our reactions into this big gift for you so you can know that thing you did, it made us feel. And that is etiquette. That's a good fandom thing. And that's what creators...

And in my case, I'm thinking about figure skaters, but, you know, creators of any sort, they can't get that from anywhere except from a self-trained fan population.

You can't get that from trained critics. Yeah, you sometimes can, but... job of a critic is different in that fans also hold tenderness or in my opinion should about the creators as humans with emotions rather than performers that have to be rated like you know if you're a judge you have to grade that's what they want from you but if you're a fan you don't have to grade you just

reflect back, this moment worked. This moment I could never have gotten from anyone but you and you alone and you personally and here's why. And that's what a creator is craving. You know, when you go through all of that to put something out and hope that people see it. And it also, it makes the fans who respond that way into their own types of creators.

If you want to deliver a gift like that to somebody, you can't be that savage because they have human emotions like you do. All this is making me think about...

So all this idea of these fan norms and practices that are sort of built over time and we get indoctrinated into sort of here's how you respond to creators, here's how you don't, here's how you show your love for a piece of work. It's making me think about the Gontrov phenomenon. I love Goncharov so much. There was not really... I know, right?

Because it happened in November and it was such a surge. Yeah, it just happened like for three weeks. It was at the end of November. Yeah. But that whole sort of like, there was no creator really, but people just started responding to it. Right. And, but it was the fan practices were. absolutely familiar it was you could write a phd dissertation on that maybe someone is working on it right now but like it was so yeah brilliant and and then you could

Like you could see all these little things that were happening and you could piece it all together. And it was indistinguishable from what we do in fandom spaces. But yet it was like not even, I wouldn't even call it a parody. It was like a loving tribute or something. It was an orgy. But like all the things that you're talking about that fans do, we did it even when there wasn't a creator.

Yeah. It's amazing. Like we love it so much, right? It was an encyclopedia. Yeah. Like if you wanted to design an experiment to see how fans would respond to something, you couldn't do any better than that. Like that was amazing.

So, Laura, you were talking about fan practices when you were in figure skating fandom. And I know that your fan-ish history goes back even further than that to your interactions with Judy Blume. I was wondering if you would talk a little bit about that and what's come of that more recently. That goes back so far that I don't even remember it. When I think about me and fandom, it was so foundational because.

This was in the 1970s, and I was nine years old. And the other fourth grade girls made me read Judy Blume because I knew nothing. And I had never read fiction like that before, where... her voice derived its authority from first person girl narrators. You know, these are not people who are empowered. You know, first of all, they're just kids, but you can't tell them that.

They're wrong. They have authority. And this was so different from the kind of greatest hits Western classics that my parents were trying to make me read at that age with immigrant anxiety. I had a friend who had written to Judy Blume and gotten back a signed note. And that blew my mind. I didn't know you could do that. And I just could barely contain myself.

Wow, you mean I can tell somebody what I'm thinking, the thoughts that I had because of what they wrote that I read? I have so many things to say. And I just wrote, I wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote. And she liked it and she wrote back and we continued to write. She at that time was getting about 1,000 to 2,000 letters, fan mail a month. Wow. And she kept them all. And before pandemic, it was like 2017, she sent them all to the Beinecke at Yale. So that's where her papers are.

over the years she kept asking me I have all your letters do you want them back and I would say oh god no I never want to see them again but yeah it was continuous since I was nine and I thought well you know here's an author who is writing about kids but You know, kids remain little and adults get older. So maybe I can chronicle some dispatches, you know, I said dispatches from, you know, from fifth grade.

When her books were published, she would send me a copy and I would read it and I would just tell her what I thought of it. Wow. And, you know, this part worked and what just because I thought even if it was like. kind of insulting or or whatever it's her whole signature was that it's better to be truthful with kids than worry about them being insulting you know so I just thought well you know anything I write to her she can use just as like this is feedback that's amazing yeah

And I think I did. I only realized this today. I think maybe that's where I got this conviction, even when a piece of media, even when a book or a show. makes me really angry. I always remember there's just an individual at a keyboard on the other side. And that was hard for me when like people who really... fantasize about terrible fates for Stephen Moffat. Or, you know, other people who shall not be named who have done many actually much more damaging things recently.

Steve Thompson, who committed a racist act with a blind banker. A macroaggression. And I think it almost offended some people because I still thought of him as a person who had written something. Dumbass. Mistakes all over it. But, you know, he wrote it. Any one of us could write something and put it out there and discover from everyone's reactions that we really truly knew a lot less than we thought we did. Oh, I've done that multiple times.

I really have not encountered that many writers who are perfect, who can write about every kind of person perfectly. Most of us are not that and are nice and safe. Pointing out when somebody has only written 90% of their characters perfectly. Yeah, so I think the fact that when I wrote to Judy Blume when I was nine, and she wrote back.

And, you know, sometimes she would say, oh, I'm working on this novel and this is the age these characters are. And then yesterday I went to see a movie with kids that same. age and I was a little worried because they seemed to be more or less mature than what I'm aiming for but then I went home and I thought it over I'm like no no I'm gonna stick with this you know just process

Or she would send writing advice like, oh, you know, if that was really good, you should do it this way and not that way because this way is more true. You know, don't worry about making this or that. perfect that's not what people will remember i guess that was really early training and how to talk to a creator as somebody who tries and has drafts and has feelings and cries because they fought with their kid and, you know, just had a bad divorce. And, you know, and...

wants good things to happen for other creators. On March 4th, I'm going to a screening. It's basically a premiere of this documentary, Judy Blume Forever. which covers, there's a lot of interview footage of Judy and also of a bunch of people who have interacted with her work. And it's also some history covering the 50 years that she's been.

a creative force in U.S. culture. And I'm one of two long-term correspondents that is interviewed for this movie. And I mean, it's like a couple minutes of screen time total. But it really shows that not every creator has to take a personal interest in how they affect their audience's lives. But she did. And therefore, person by person, you know, like if you think about all of the letters in the Beinecke.

Or, you know, you listen to me or the other long-term correspondent, one person at a time, you can see how an artist affected their culture and how she was able. to see in this feedback, the reflection that, you know, well, yes, I know I felt something writing that and here are these children saying that they felt something reading it. So the whole point of human communication.

trying to share feeling and transmit feeling and bring people closer. It's working. It's worthwhile to be an artist. You can only get that from a fan. I'm really excited to see.

i mean i i grew up loving judy bloom too and the idea that like i was a kid and then you were a kid another place and you were writing to her and had this like correspondence with her oh my gosh i'm really looking forward to to seeing this um to seeing this documentary and it's do you have any sense of when it's going to be available for more yeah wide streaming um

Yeah, it's going to be on Amazon Prime starting April 21st. Oh, my gosh. And that's going to be a week before the theater release of Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret. Yes, which I'm also very excited about. Yeah. And yeah, and there, so there I was during lockdown, trying to keep my two kids from flunking out of school and trying to.

get them to at least cry at their desks instead of on the floor. And these documentary makers were like, oh, can you find a picture of yourself from... seventh grade and I'm like must die I remember that I remember when you were looking for a picture and you were like nobody wants to see me in seventh grade no one wants to see anyone in seventh grade And, you know, oh, do you have this letter that she wrote to you? I'm like, somewhere. I don't know. I'll look for it, I guess.

That's really amazing. And so I hope that, like, this may be news to a lot of our listeners, but it's something that I think all of us in 3Patch have been hearing about in progress. And I know I'm looking forward to seeing it. Yeah, mostly me complaining that I tried to find something or other and a book fell on my foot or something. That's so amazing, though. I think it's such a great story about how the humanization of the creator.

is one thing but again it goes back to this theme of connection that I think that we've been talking about for the last what hour or so but connection is like a thing that we're finding in fandom even if it's like this one-way connection between you and that creator or like other kinds of one-way connections when you were in figure skating fandom and then scaling that up to the kinds of connections that we are we have built around

different media properties that we've all been into over the years. It's been amazing for me now, since my friend Doug died, having people from within skating reach out. to somebody like me in fandom to say, can you talk about this? Because the participants, they're not trained in talking about it. Oh, wow. You know? I mean, some of them are, but like...

That's the thing about fandom is, you know, when you're a fan, you take the emotional intensity and you distill it and you record it in a way that can be transmitted to fellow fans to be enjoyed together. And also possibly to be delivered back to the creator as a thank you note, which made me think, okay, there are two things that fandom is for me. One of them is a mirror and the other is a thank you note.

And yeah, as a fan, I knew how to do that. I knew how to chronicle some art that was happening in the moment so that it could be preserved and transmitted. the artist or creator saw it and said, yes, that's me. Thank you. You know, then even after they're gone, their loved ones can say, okay, he saw himself in that. Can we have that? Do you still have it? Yeah, I do. I still have it. It's really messed me up, this guy dying. I'm very annoyed with him. He should stop being dead right now.

yeah he was i met him once in las vegas when he came to the the con that we were at and what what an amazing guy I was very happy to get the two of you together to talk about writing porn about hockey players. That was amazing. I had an amazing conversation with him. Yeah. Nothing like a gay figure skater to write about. hockey porn yeah that was very enlightening i have to say very enlightening i think very few people have that experience of like when in vegas that's like very unique it feels

all right so before we go um i wanted to ask what are some things that y'all are excited about in fandom right now what's what where are you finding connection and community uh well So for me, I, oh God, I'm such a little baby 18ie, like just newly indoctrinated into like the 80s fandom.

It's been less, is it been like a month even? Like I don't even, I don't know what time is anymore. It definitely was after the new year, but I can't actually tell you when I went into the fandom. I probably documented it somewhere.

But I don't know where to find that. Just scroll back on Discord. I know. Like, my life is balkanized, you know? So I am... big into ATEEZ now officially I guess and I spend a hell of a lot of time just sending videos to Mads like back and forth like she sends me videos I send her videos like I send And then, like, after every watch along that we already have scheduled, mind you, like, in the evenings, we'll watch, like, either The Untamed or we'll watch one of, like, the...

GL, Girls Love, things that we have going on or K-drama or something. We've literally, for several of those nights running, everybody else would be logging off. Like leaving the Zoom room, leaving Jitsi, whatever. And then Mads would stay behind and go, hey, hey, Caroline. And then we would watch ATEEZ for like another three hours. Wow. Yeah, I know. It's a lot.

I have not gotten a lot of sleep, as you might imagine, in the last several weeks. Everything's fine for certain values of fine. And anyway. But it's fun. It's fun being in like the new rush of all that, despite what I said earlier about being very self-conscious about being old. I mean, there is that too, but then I just ignore it and then I go and watch videos. So that's fun.

uh and apart i can make that work with the framework too and apart from that um i'm in uh my fourth watch along for the untamed which seems crazy so um Yeah, so I'm kind of excited about that and connecting with some of the new folks because every watch along is marked by the fact that we have new people in it, like brand new people who've never watched the show. And so I am like their tour guide through the ancient fake China. So I'm like, until you're left, you will see the duct tape.

and to the right you will see the metaphor of the cut sleeve and how that means you know gay it's just a lot of fun times um but yeah those are my things in my life right now and i'm still very excited about them And I'm just going to continue being like, I don't know, like a sleepless, obsessed person about ATEEZ, I guess. Yeah. And also being like twice anybody's age. I'm going to just go have feelings about that separately.

It's so funny because it's probably about a couple, it was a week or two ago that I like happened to watch a couple of AT&T's like videos. And I just popped onto the Discord channel and I was like, hey, I watched these two things. And within like five seconds, Caroline was like, what did you watch? What did you think? Who do you like? Who's your favorite guy? And I was like, oh, my God. I was like, I don't even know who these people are.

vaguely know like that there's like some of them are demons or something i don't know i remember this you told me that you got through 90 minutes of my oh no that's true that's true it wasn't just a few videos that's not a couple you had posted right you had posted a playlist and i was watching it it was like a saturday night and everyone else was like i think like my partner had gone to sleep my kid was doing his own thing and i was like wow i have 90 minutes to myself

What am I going to do? And I found your playlist. I thought, I'll watch a couple. And then the next thing I knew, an hour and a half had gone by. And so anyway, so yeah, then I just made a comment about this. But the other thing, too, is that I was like, I don't understand the lore. Maybe this would all make more sense if I did. And then Caroline sent me.

the link to like this document this google doc 92 pages yeah yeah it was like 100 pages long and it was not and and it's like very dense it's like very dense explanations of the lore of this band and i just thought I read two pages and I was like, okay, I can't invest any more of my time and energy into this. But it's amazing. I love fandom. I love the people.

have done that and so when you describe like staying up until like all hours and not sleeping because you're so enthusiastic about connecting with people over this band i'm like that's fandom to me and i love it

I don't have the energy for it right now, but I love that people do. And I just, I live vicariously through, through, through like your enthusiasm. So I love going through and looking at. It is the absolute weirdest things that keep me going. Like I'll learn something about somebody. It'll be like a linguistic thing.

Like I'll just like learn something about somebody's name and I'll be like, oh, and then I can tie that back to something that I do know about because I don't know Korean. I'm trying to teach. I'm trying to tell myself to not try to learn Korean like really hard. You don't need that. You don't need to be that confused in your life. I mean, you already learned a lot of Chinese, right? I mean, you knew some Chinese before. And Japanese. Formally, I study Japanese. Informally, I'm studying Chinese.

And they build off of one another. Korean builds off of it, too, because there's a lot of these crossover words. And so that's why... bee dropped something in discord earlier today and i like listened to it it was an entire tiktok that was in korean because it's like a skit and at one point the guy said jesus by yesu name

And I was like, and I pulled it out of the sentence, right? I was like, oh, he said yes in him. Tell me that's Jesus. And I was like, oh, my God. Like, it's kind of, I don't know. It's the weirdest little things that, like, keep pulling me back. Like, something will ping as, like, interesting and, like, novel or whatever. And it's, like, you know, the other day it was me realizing that, like, it's not, like...

like, 哥哥 and 姐姐, it's like, it depends on who the speaker is, is like, if you're male or female, like, you wouldn't say... oppa if that and you wouldn't say like you know so like it was a thing and i was like what and i was like because it went against what i knew about chinese and japanese And I was like, mind blown Korean. Anyway, I'm trying to tell myself not to learn. But...

You need like the three hours of sleep you're getting per day, right? I mean, you don't want to eat into that anymore. Yeah. Anyway, it's like the littlest things that I'm just like, oh, it's like novel information, I guess, that I'm excited about. I mean, it's little hits of pleasure because it fits with the way your brain goes anyway. And then trying to impose discipline on it and be good, quote unquote, and shut it down means...

you know, going away from the natural pleasure. Like if you were to give in, it would just kind of be like living in Asia where you just pick up a little bit of this or that Asian, you know, different. versions of the same words like oh I see so in Japan you would say this way okay and it just means letting information come in at a natural pace and you know except Fandom means that everything is like accelerated and binged. With great enthusiasm. Yes. Yeah. No, I mean. No.

Yeah, no limits. Like, no, when it was specifically Emma, who's not on Discord all the time, when it was specifically Emma who had been like, tell me more about ATEEZ for a second, I jumped on that because I was like, Emma, you're really into musical theater. I really think that you... like ATEEZ because ATEEZ is so extra about that like in a way that I have seen literally no other K-pop group be that way

And so I was like, I was extra. I was just like, I'm here. I'm on Discord anyway. Let me curate your onboarding experience. Yeah. For you personally. I like dressed up as like Britney Spears and Toxic and I was like, let me show you on board. I was like, I was there. I was there. It was great. And I know I'm looking for like another window of time when I can dig back in and watch more because.

Yeah, it's just, yeah, they're so many great. But also the fact that, like, I know so many people who are really into them right now is, like, encouraging. Or maybe it's just me and Mads being very loud. Maybe it's just the two of them, but they sound like eight people. It's true. But they sound like they're having so much fun. And that's part of like, again, that's part of the community piece of this, right? Is that when you see like a bunch of people having so much fun with the thing.

Like, like as much as all like, like our flag means death. I really enjoyed that show. And I wanted so badly to get into the fandom because I knew so many people who were just so into it. And I just couldn't quite get there. You know, it was like, oh, that's not quite what I'm into.

right now well speaking of but yeah two of that fandom that that definitely has been happening yeah i'm excited to see to see that that'll be really fun that's true i was trying to think really hard because i've had i mean i've had my without going in too much detail my I've been really swamped by work and we're talking like it's like nights and weekends level of swamped. It's like I have very little free time. And so I've missed fandom. So a lot of is like.

for my fandom life lately has just been checking in on discord and looking what people are excited about and going, Oh yeah, that's right. Look at them having fun. That's so great. That's been a lot of my occasionally clicking on the TikTok that they've linked there or reading a fic that someone has wrecked. That's kind of the level of which I've been able to engage.

But a couple of things that I was like, OK, I must have looked at something that would be remotely vanished lately. And there's two things I was able to come up with. One.

is that um my partner and i finally watched lower deck star trek lower decks the last season which came out like in last fall this has been out for a long time this is not new news but it was just amazing and i think if i don't know if any either y'all are star trek fans but this show it's like the animated series that that is um i think it's on netflix or i don't know i've seen one episode of it it's so brilliantly parodies

like everything in star trek and the fourth season of this of this one in particular there is not a single star trek property that does not get parodied or like made fun of at some point and it's just done brilliantly like i mean there's these moments where like like there's

This one moment where like, oh, are we going to have to go back in time to like save some whales or something to like fix this problem? Not like we've never done that before. I mean, that's like they're doing that all the time, which is really fun. It's also fun. The main character, Beckett Mariner.

she this season she's in a queer relationship which is really a beautiful uh but her her girlfriend is andorian and the andorians were like in the very like one of the very first like star trek episodes ever they were like the blue aliens with like the antennas on their but her name is jennifer which i just i'm just like so amused by the fact that like her andorian girlfriend is named jennifer which is like this like like white

girl gen x name right like i was like of all the names they could pick for her and dorian girlfriend it was jennifer um and it's just there's so many wonderful things so much great character development that happens in this season and it's just if you love star trek and if you have seen it which probably everyone but me already has who cares but if there's anyone out there like i highly recommend it and the other thing that i've been really having fun with lately um

I'm coming up on my one-year Duolingo streak. Yay! And I'm doing that 100% because of Fanish Friends. Like, a bunch of people, again on Discord, were doing Duolingo, and I was like, okay, I'm going to do this. I'm finally going to go back and relearn all the Spanish.

i forgot from like high school and college so i've been doing spanish which is really great but i've been listening to um the spanish podcast that duolingo produces and season 17 if anyone out there is a spanish speaker or is a spanish learner season of their podcast is this incredible incredible journey it's the um the mystery of a ship that wrecked off the coast of chile in like 1922 and the ship was called el vaporitata and it's like the steam ship from like world war one

that sank loaded down with like lots of people, like 500 people died. It's the worst shipwreck in Chilean history. It's basically the Chilean Titanic. And it was lost to history until these two guys decided, like just happened to stumble across the story. And so this whole series of this podcast is like a dramatization of their experience of digging into it and like finally.

finding like newspaper articles about that they like actually had to flip through the old yellowed copies of the newspaper it wasn't even microfiche right they had to like you know hold them with like gloves and read the articles finding a book that was written by one of the survivors that was only like a few copies were left in print and they found it at some obscure library.

I'm going to the town where there were like a few people who whose grandparents had helped the survivors like up under the shore and they. like finally in the end they find spoiler alert they find the shipwreck of this and the coincidences and the incredible things that happen in the story i like listen to my car on the way back and forth to work and there were so many times that i was just sobbing in my car listening to this is it an incredible story it just i can't even the drama and like the

the passion of the people who just said, we're going to solve this mystery and we're going to work. We're going to spend 10 years of our lives trying to figure out what happened to the shipwreck a hundred years ago. Maybe I'm not selling it enough, but it's really incredible. So if you speak Spanish or. Because it's like half in Spanish and half in English, but it's highly understandable if you're a Spanish learner. So highly recommended.

Those are my two things. Meanwhile, I'm here going 100 years ago, but that was 1920s. That was only 80 years ago. That was only 80 years ago. What are you talking about? I know, right? But the one episode of Lower Decks I saw...

I kept forgetting that it wasn't a fan-made production. It feels like fanfic. Absolutely. It's very deliberately so. And the main characters are fans of Star Trek. That they're... the world that they're in that's true they're like fanboying and like in vanguard like totally and the finale of that show centers around um so like the the ship that they're on through all these seasons it's called the california class ship

And the funny thing about the California class ships is they're nothing like the ships that are in most of the series. They do all the heroic things. The California class ships, they're named after these, like, minor cities in California. Like, the main ship is called the Cerritos. And there's, like, all these different, like, they're named after, like, minor cities in California.

California and they're like kind of quirky and the ships go and they do like the kind of like work that the big ships would never do that's kind of their deal And so like in the big finale, they're kind of facing off against this other class of ships called the Texas class, which are evil drones that are unmanned.

And like, it's the best thing ever. Like, so like as a person who lives in Texas, like watching this, I was just like, this is beautiful. I love this. You have this little quirky California ships and all the Texas drones that were evil. It was amazing. Do they have drone nuts dangling? You know, they should have. And you know, if I go back and watch, I'm gonna have to look for that. There may be a bit of an Easter egg in there. Easter eggs. But, um,

Easter cojones. It was so beautiful. The cojones. Yeah, exactly. Oh, my God. Yeah. Anyway, I just I loved it. I just laughed my way through that that entire series. And I'm oh, I love it. Laurie, do you have anything else? I'm just.

gonna reread the Judy Blume books I have some of the original ones that I used to own in the 1970s and be prepared for the renaissance that's gonna hit in April oh that's so amazing yeah Well, thank you all so much for joining me tonight to talk about fandom community and connections and at this very... interesting time of year when we're all kind of waiting for the weather to turn and for spring to come and and for con to happen which is coming up hopefully hopefully sooner than we

It's something that it feels like right now. I have my tickets. Me too. Well, thanks for listening. And so listeners check the show notes for links to some of the things that we've talked about here. And as always, if you've got any suggestions for us, any.

feedback for us on this episode any thoughts about where you found community and connection in fandom over the years any suggestions for other topics you'd like us to talk about uh you know where to find us our call of our contact information is in the show notes As well, if you would like to help support our podcast with either a review on Apple Podcasts or if you would like to contribute to our Patreon, we're completely...

fan funded and volunteer funded and self funded much of the time. So any of your donations, any dollar that you submit will help us to kind of keep paying the bills and keep ourselves going. So thanks so much for listening. And we'll see y'all next month. Bye. Bye.