Episode 38: Metachat Transcript
Metachat Transcript for Episode 38
Hosts: wook77, djin7, elanorofcastile, midnitemaraud_r
Wook: Welcome to the Metachat for Slashcast Episode 38. This is Wook77 and I’m sitting here with djin7 aka DJ, midnitemauraud_r aka Lisa, and elanorofcastile aka eco or jet, and we are going to be talking about fandon wank. So the first topic I personally think that we should be talking about is: What are some of the wanks that stick out in your head?
Lisa would like to go first.
Lisa: I’ll go first with MsScribe, cause that became one of the biggest ones although it was never actually posted on fandom wank it was posted on a separate com called Bad Penny which was made specifically because it was so big it wouldn’t fit on fandon wank. (laughs) I was kind of around for that one..so…
DJ: Yes I recall that one quite well myself.
Wook: MsScribe was one the wanks that stick in my head as well, I mean it had like everything that makes a great wank. It had, sock puppets, it had the plucky girl detective, it had…
DJ: Charitywank .
Wook: Yeah .. it had so much stuff behind it too. It was sort of a behind the scenes in “old fandom”.
Elanor: Yeah, well for me, I didn’t really come into the fandom until like that had already happened so I didn’t read about it until a while down the road. It was really really interesting to read about, versus actually being able to kind of be there and experience it as it was unfolding.
Wook: So Lisa why does it stick in your head?
Lisa: Well that was the first time, I really heard the entire story. I’d heard all the stuff about the Harry/Ginny fandom vs the Harry/Hermione and all the crap that went on before that, you know. But I wasn’t really in that part of fandom, so I didn’t really know anything about it and it was just, I couldn’t believe all the stalking and the sock puppets and the just, how extensive it was. I mean who has that kind of time? (laughs)
Wook: I know right? (inaudible)
Lisa: It was just insanity to me you know that shipping became such a huge, oh God, insane.
DJ: It was her need for popularity of course we’ve all witnessed the frightening things that happen when anybody does that. This was particularly amusing in that she did all the things that anybody claims they never do and they were all proven by screencaps and locked posts and all those type of things. It was a huge investigation involved. Like thousands of people. Trying to break down this whole A&E worthy detective story.
Lisa: I’m looking at the thing now, there is like 10 chapters.Huge!
Elanor: And it definitely cast a shadow over kind of future happenings. When people were trying to do similar things worked in the back of your head.
Lisa: It pulled together all the scary aspects of fandom that people are like the outing and freaking cursing the..
DJ: The lengths that people will go to, to become friends with or to become noticed by people that they maybe admire or they are fans of, such as authors in the internet space, it’s ridiculous to me. And that’s why this is such a great mock-worthy wank, because it’s ridiculous to me how much this particular one person, if all the stories are indeed true, how much this person did in order to gain the trust of the so called inner circle of early fans in those days. Classic.
Lisa: They brought down he Gryffindor tower archive.
DJ: Yes. Well you know shutting down of archives due to insane sort of trolling and things of that nature happen quite a lot, and particularly in the Harry Potter fandom, it must happen in another fandoms anyone?
Elanor: Supernatural, Yeah Supernatural it was the anon meme that shut down, that went crazy
Lisa: That was because it was supposed to be an anything goes anon meme.
Elanor: And it was crazy!
Lisa: Someone posted a promt that had Misha’s real son and wanted a porn story, you know, with Misha’s infant, I mean he is a toddler isn’t he?
Elanor: Yeah if that was too far for people, I mean holy crap the amount of porn that involves the guys and their dogs. It’s crazy!
Lisa: Yeah but you know you get a real life person and a dog.. I don’t know
Elanor: Yeah there is every once in a while you go through a wave of bleh, anyway.
Wook: Speaking of anon memes the star trek 2009 kink meme closed, although I guess it would have got into unfunny fandom instead of..
DJ: Unfunny business?
Wook: Yeah instead of the fandom wank cause of the fact that it was racism wank.
DJ: Which does not belong in the mocking wank forum which is fandom wank of course. Fandom wank is there to mock not to talk about unfunny things like racism or sexism or things of that nature.
Lisa: Well that’s why we should talk about too how everything branched of into all those comms opened up on Journalfen, the Unfunny Business, and then there was Clairvoyant wank. As it was first occurring people would post, do a lookout for this.
Wook: Some were like the elementary school of wank, maybe you graduate the high school of wank some day. That’s how it seems to me.
Lisa: There was OTF wank that had nothing to do with fandom.
Wook: There’s wankity wank. Where people are wanking in the fandon wank community. And remember what wank was it, like somebody came in and they started wanking and it went to wankity wank and the person followed it to wankity wank and they were like shall we make a wankity wank wank (laughs)? Constantly just wanking. OMG it was hilarious. So what other wanks stick in your head? Other than the MsScribe story cause for me, there is one ultimate wank. If you know me, you know which one I am talking about. My Wife is a Horse. I know that it has nothing to do with fandom and it doesn’t have a lot to do with slash but the fact if this guy thought he was married to his horse, and his girlfriend was a human and he wondered if his wife was pregnant and if she had cheated on him, but it was a horse. I mean come on it’s the ultimate wank, it’s hilarious.
DJ: I know, I mean that’s the stuff that fandom wank was designed for.
Lisa: The horse was pregnant.
Wook: Yeah.
DJ: So this guy posts on a polyamory list of some kind or some sort of community where polyamory couples gather to talk about things which is great, that there are things like that on LJ and things of that nature. So he posted this problem he’s having with his wife and his girlfriend in this polyamorous relationship and he was saying that he wants his wife and his girlfriend to be monogamous.
Wook: Stalion mentality
DJ: Cause he can go around sowing his seed everywhere but they should only be his alone. And so this apparently this community responded in kind, they were not wanky about it, they said you know blah blah blah let’s talk about this and let’s see where you are coming from and let’s see why you are coming from there. I guess eventually it got out to the point where somebody called him on it and it turned out that his wife the so called relationship dilemma that he’s been having is a horse.
Wook: Yeah
DJ: Like a real horse. Not a horse faced woman, but an actual horse.
Elanor: I think that my favourite part of that was reliving it when I shared it with my friend Christine, and she had never heard it before and so she was reading the post and she’s like “What…WHAT.. OMG WHAT, WHY DID YOU DO THIS TO ME, Why did you tell me about this?” and she said “I am never going to be the same”.
Wook: My favourite part of this is actually related to real life, I dog sit a lot and I was dogsiting everything this fucker appeared on OTF, everytime I was dog sitting for these extremely conversative Christrian people and I used their computer I would click and I was like god it’s the horse fucker. Every frikking time this wank showed up somebody linked the video of real life pony fuckers and I wouldn’t realise andso I’d click on the links to the video. And this video is like a train wreck you can’t stop watching. And they are talking about the fact that they have a pony that they get fucked by regularly. Have you guys seen this video? So the infamous line that sticks in my head from this video is, she’s talking about how they first met, blah blah blah, and he came over and she wanted to introduce him to her pony, cause you know she was committed to her pony and she takes him down the barn and she like and seriously ‘well and then the next thing I knew my pants were down around my ankles and we were going at it, so I figured he was either into it or not but this would really show him” and he’s like “oh and I really enjoyed it mm hmm sloppy seconds”
Oh my god, OMG OMG OMG you start hyperventilating, like why am I watching this?
DJ: We’re gonna have to warn for bestiality talk when we put this up, we’re gonna trigger someone or something, we’re gonna be on fandom wank.
Lisa: I know I know One of my favourites things and it’s here on the page. Somebody wrote you know the Mr Ed song, they changed the words to go with the thing. And it says “A horse is a horse of course of course, unless you use your horse for intercourse and then of course the horse is my very special wife. I went to the source and asked the horse and she didn’t hurt me which I endorse unless of course, I hurt my for taking another to her bed.
Elanor: I think that besides the fact of the wanks , I think the comments are usually the very best things out of the entire shindig you know. All the different things people come up with like the song, it’s really fun.
DJ: (inaudible)
Elanor: Yeah they are the best.
DJ: If you post a wank apparently the point, of posting a wank is to point out the complete stupid of whoever it is that’s doing the stupid thing that’s worthy of mocking. And then you wait for all the comments to come in so that you can laugh for days and days. I mean that’s usually an ideal situation.
Wook: And I love that when you google His Wife google autofills at least on every computer I’ve ever been on, I know if it tailors to each individual, autofills a horse. Once I type in ‘his wife’ it finishes with ‘a horse’, it’s the recommended search term.
Elanor: I’m going to find out if it does that for me.
Wook: You guys should try it and see if it’s just me.
Elanor: yes its’ third one down for me.
DJ - How do you spell it?
Lisa: Just ‘His Wife’
DJ: Just ‘His Wife’, that’s it? Oh yeah I got it. His was
Elanor: And this is friend’s computer as well.
Wook: It was on Wired. It actually made sort of a well known area where this stupid wank has spread out into the world.
Elanor: If you click on it in google, the first is the fandom wank wiki entry the second is Horse of Mitt Romney's wife eliminated from Olympics team.
DJ - I got the fandom wank wiki, I got wired.com and three I got Mitt Romney.. (inaudible)
Wook: Oh my god I got the same results as DJ.
Lisa: I have the wired third and then abc news.
DJ: The entire (inaudible) is made up of Mitt Romney crap.and then it goes to Trigger Wikipedia.
Elanor: Oh man, I have tears, I have tears and we are only a little while into the conversation.
DJ: You can’t really beat that, I mean there’s been some pretty good ones, I witnessed mostly primarily Harry Potter ones.
Wook: They always seem to be on fandon wank.
Lisa: The astral plane
DJ: Or the Snape wife of that’s a classic, Snape wives
Wook: The altar in the corner of her room that she used to pray to Snape to (inaudible) I like the characters but not enough to create an altar and pray to them.
Lisa: But they fought with each other over who was actually the one receiving the real clairvoyant dreams of Alan Rickman or Snape or whoever it was. They were accusing each other of lying, “no I had the dream , not I had the dream” (laughs) I think the saddest thing thought is the, one of them had young children.
Wook: Another one was a mother daughter team that were both Snape wives.
Elanor: Yeah, I remember that.
Wook: Oh gosh, Snape wives, I forgot about the Snape wives until DJ whatever you said that triggered it in my head.
DJ: Ok you can make up something really bad to that. Thanks you for that! Also I mean there is the crystal funk which of course is not a Harry Potter funk it was Lord of the Rings wank originally. About the girl, she photoshopped herself into with the Lord of the Rings cast. (inaudible) she acted as if she was in all these photos or whatever it was. The best part about the wank of course was when she started getting wanked she started to defend herself, her nanny, aka her sockpuppet started to anonymously come in and defend her honour which of course just lead to…
Lisa: She was selling them though? She was selling something..
Wook: Yeah additionally she sold sketches of Dom on her website which were clearly photographs that had been manipulated to look like sketches again using image manipulation software. And you too can buy one for only $20.
DJ: They call this one the wank that ate the universe, apparently. The “Pasted on yay” that’s where that comes from and that’s fabulous.
Elanor: Oh man thank you, that’s awesome
Wook: Ok so what wanks stick in your head?
DJ: The one where Caina wanted to rewrite Half-Blood Prince. I don’t know if you remember that one. She didn’t like how Harry and Ginny got together so she was going to rewrite it the harmonian way.
Wook: Well there is only one true way and that would be harmonian.
Can I just tell you, fandom wank had got into my real life because it has definitely kinda stirred me away from Harmonian and then my boss confesses that she thought Harry and Hermione would get together at the end and she was very disappointed. And I’m like OMG you’re a Harmonian and it seriously just lashed out and she was like what? And I please don’t fess up to being a harmonian ever again that’ kind of horrifying to me.
Lisa: Oh god, the whole interview too with the staff from mugglenet.
Wook: And I quoted the anvil sized hint line that JKR did these Harry/Hermione people are dropped anvil sized hints.
Then there was always the Bartending in the Dark wank.
Lisa: Ah yeah that was classic! Hogwarts elite right?
DJ: And it was a big deal to get sorted there. I never went there but I believe it was quite the process. It wasn’t like oh I want to join this community and I feel I am a Gryffindor or something. Like that you had to fill out copious amounts of things and all the judges would judge you and they would give you a ranking according to how you complete your multiply amounts of quizzes or whatever it was. Then you got he house that you got and that was it.
Lisa: Wouldn’t people vote on it in the comments?
Wook: Yeah, yeah every member of the community got to vote on what house they wanted. And if Slytherin people started voting you into Slytherin then the rest of the houses were oh right see ya! I guess you’re Slytherin! Cause that was considered the “leach house” and so people used to really slither-push and so they would call it if they could see it being slither-push and this guy caught on slither-pushing and by now the word slither-push does not seem like a really word to me cause I said it so much. And so he like, dude I’m so so Slytherin, I bartend in the dark!
DJ: And suddenly he’s a Slytherin.
Wook: Yeah I think they quizzed him. And then furiosity wrote that fic about bartending in the dark and it was a Harry/Draco fic and it was awesome. Oh I love that fic so much it’s one of my favourite Harry/draco fics. Oh my god I have to link so that everybody can read this swesomeness of bartending in the dark.
DJ: You gotta link the funk too cause the funk is funny.
Wook: Oh my gosh it really was...
DJ: And the he disses Hufflepuff and Gryffindor. You know he’s all emo and goth and he’s wife is scared of him, it’s funny.
Lisa: And he started wailing “it’s just darkness”
DJ: It’s just dark, very DARK dun dun. OMG every time he walks into a room, organs play. Funny.
Wook: Alright any other wanks?
Lisa: What are your thoughts on Yaoi?
Wook: Yeah how do you say it?
Lisa: y-ou-i?
Wook: y-a-ou-i? I’m sure we’ll corrected a million timed by people. Yeah I find that one, I don’t really remember all that was involved with it. But I think that’s kind of funny that this whole has sort of intruded through the rest of fandom and people say it and they don’t really realise that it links back to fandom wank.
Elanor: Yeah.
DJ: Right right. The phrases that come from fandom wank they can be epic and they will forever stick in our heads whether you know or not that they came from there or not. But a lot of the great quips that you’ll see the idioms and stuff that are fandom related the thoughts on Yaoi or however you say it was a particular anime fan she posted in fandom wank generally just a bunch of her opinion with regards to same sex pairings in anime fandoms in general she just went on and on and on and actually did a two part entry about it and to that end it just ended into a tl;dr sort of long running joke, where we don’t really care and tell us how you really feel and so it became the situation we are in now where anybody goes off taking about anything that they want to talk about or waxing poetically about a particular item in fandom or a particular thing, everyone’s yeah but what are your thoughts on yaoi? *laughs* which is the funny part of it.
Wook: And everytime I say it, I expect people to know what it means and then suddenly somebody doesn’t know what it means when I’ve said it and they actually give me their thoughts and I lose my shit everytime. Like ugly ugly ugly snorts coming out of my nose, like sobs of laughter when they actually give me their thoughts.
DJ: Apparently your thoughts on Yaoi are it’s hard to pronounce. Nobody seems to know.
Wook: Yeah I love ‘the server is robost’. Everytime the server goes down I say it.
Elanor: I say that all the time! About all sorts of stuff and get a look sometimes,l ike What? And I’m like ‘the server is robust’. *Laughs* I think I said it to an IT guy on my last job and he thought I was being serious I’m like oh I don’t know what that means, I’m just like fandom wank. I’m like Oh God! Don’t ask me questions.
Wook: Yeah, it’s always awkward to then have to explain it like you thoughts on yaoi I actually just link somebody to it, I’m no actually that’s a meme can you stop telling me your thoughts on Yaoi, I regret ever asking you about it. Are there any phrases that you guys use a lot, like Lisa or DJ?
Lisa: I was looking the ‘pit of voles’ that’s where it came from. The site that must not be named. What if somebody sees, think of the children! That’s one I think about a lot more than I actually say.
Wook: And I love t’he get out of my fandom you make my fandom look stupid’.
Lisa: The tl;dr is definitely one and then people make made the little figures with the actual teal coloured dear.
Elanor: Yeah. ‘The rocks fall, everyone dies’ that’s a fun one as well.
DJ: And that’s come back to life now especially the idiom of it, Song of Ice and Fire. So ‘rocks fall, everyone dies’ but it’s actually true this time. Makes it even more ironic and funnier.
Lisa: Actually I was so amused that all those people who had never read the books were so shocked that Ned Stark died, I’m like Sean Bean played him of course he was going to die.
Wook: And speaking of memes from Fandom Wank and sayings we were sort of talking before we started the chat officially about some of the rules of Fandom Wank and so do you have some favourite ones you would like to go over?
Lisa: Like Snacky’s Rule?
DJ: Snacky’s Rule
Wook: Snacky’s Rule is amazing.
Lisa: It’s a play on Godwin's law which basically, that one says that any conversation on the internet that goes on long enough someone will eventually bring up Hitler and the Nazis, and with Snacky’s Law its about in fandom conversations eventually someone gonna compare somebody in a particular way to girls they went to high school with and once that happens you’re null and void that’s it you’ve reached the limit.
DJ: Yeah you’re the mean girl and then that’s it. That person loses immediately. Soon as you pull up the mean girl argument you’ve delved into some kind of really bad Hollywood movie and that’s it everybody loses in that case.
Wook: Except the wank communities.
DJ: Except the wank communities.
Lisa: But you know what’s funny, I never realized how frequently that actually happens in so many posts and discussions, you know
DJ: It’s true anytime, anything happens usually wank that appear to be serious most of the time in the end somebody inevitably called the other person, one of those mean girls or whatever it was.
Wook: Ok so my newly discovered favourite little law is called Humpty’s Law: When someone uses a dictionary to tell someone else what they really meant, all meaningful discussion ceases, to be replaced with arguments over whether the definition is correct. I love that! When that happens I think it’s hilarious, like always flashes back to Bill Clinton with the whole what definition of is are you using.
So I didn’t know that that Law had a name but know that’s I know that law’s name I think that’s hilarious. And another that’s a favourite of mine is Code of the Comfy Chair, is meant to be a threat but is actually a favor, including, but not limited to:
- If you don't agree with me I'll leave this community forever
- If I don't get X number of reviews I'll stop writing
It’s like please, please stop!
Wait, Wait don’t go I am going to miss you really.
DJ: No wait stop, it’s like that begins in Willy Wonka. No wait stop please don’t go…
I’m kinda partial myself to the variation on shipping war, the Law of Ship Double Standards. In a shipping war there is always someone who argues against a paring while proclaiming yet another pairing which is obviously ambiguous as much as the first pairing is must be romantic and their OTP cause they say so. The hypocrisy of it which is very common. You get a lot of that I the SPN fandom and a lot of others, same thing Buffy had a lot of that going on and Harry Potter did too. It’s a very common one.
Wook: That’s happening now a lot in Teen Wolf.
DJ: Oh is it?
Wook: Yeah you can’t like Derek/Stiles because they can only just be friends and they are not even friends so why are you even shipping them together? And the besides all you Sterek people are a bunch of crazy loons anyway.
DJ: You are all a bunch of mean girls from high school.
Wook: Right, right? Except they assume that everyone reads this? I think this is something to do with tumblr more than anything else. They assume that everybody is under the age of 25 and I’m sitting there going, I’m 35. I just go what? What did you call me? Wow I love you I know you called me an insult but I love you for assuming I’m younger than I actually am.
Lisa: So in Avengers there is the whole thing Clint/Coulson pairing and there’s this group of people I guess that cant stand it they don’t even want it as a background pairing. And the reasoning is that they didn’t have any actual interactions in the Avengers movie so clearly it’s a pairing that came out of nowhere by their reckoning.
Wook: They haven’t been in Fandom long have they?
DJ: Those often tend to be the biggest pairings.
Lisa: They both work together, and they were together in the Thor movie and clearly had a rapport a working relationship. So you know in that case it’s a logical extrapolation to you know, go towards a ship, its not like they are just two random characters who have nothing to do with one another.
Elanor: I would just say that would kind of invalidate any sort of crossover paring ever.
Lisa: But you know, it’s weird because the nature of wank really hasn’t changed, people lock down their stuff more than they used to. But the nature of wank itself hasn’t changed but how people approach it and think of it has changed a lot in the past few years. And you can tell you go to fandom wank website now and nobody posts anything, there’s like two posts a month.
DJ: I think that a lot of the original locking, the spirit of locking became more personal and vicious to a lot of people not necessarily at Fandom wank but in general outside of fandom wank in anonymous places or in the journal of themselves of the people involved and many people got very vicious about many things and I think that what you get then is some kneejerk reaction after a couple of years of that’s everybody is afraid to talk about it or talk to it or participate
Lisa: Because if you posted something the first person would come in and say this is not funny this is unfunny, which is with the whole unfunny, then they start posting recipes and that was the end. It’s the whole this offends me, it doesn’t offend you but it offends me and it’s gotten really complicated and complex.
Wook: When I think with fandom fracturing for it’s primary location. I mean it used to be you could just go on Livejournal and find alike a million wanks and now people are wanking over on tumblr and it carries over on AO3 and sometimes it’s on Dreamwidth or its over here on Livejournal you never know exactly where it’s going to be so it’s harder to succinctly sum up what’s going on with these wanks, especially with the nature of tumblr where you know it blows over in an hour.
Lisa: You post something on your dash and five minutes later it’s gone because everybody is reblogging everybody else’s stuff.
DJ: exactly it’s very transient. I don’t find it very good for any type of conversation or debate for that matter. There is not much happening there it’s a useless format for that it doesn’t work. It can’t work on twitter for the same purposes because you have only so much to talk about on twitter maybe if you do a side conversation But back and forth between people or a major conversation can’t happen on twitter.
Lisa: - Yeah you only have 142 characters.
DJ: And it’s gone in 10 mins because 30 other people have taled about the thing. Like when the Olympics were happening or the presidential debates were on something like that if you try to tag something and you click a tag within seconds there’s 20 more tweets to do with that tag so…
Lisa: But also I think on Livejournal anon memes have kind kind of taken over the role. Some of them have moderation others are just basically a free for all and it’s hard. The big old meme was the LOL meme and that was actually going on during the hay day of fandon wank as well. That was a specific group of people that went on and pretty much posted nonsense, bitched about other people it was a very strange kind of meme. But the other one started up, everybody started up you know, fandom wank used to be all fandom but now lots of the anon memes are fandom specific if you are not in that fandom you don’t have any reason to go those memes so you are not going to see any of the new wank that is happening. Even Metafandom used to link from all different fandoms but people are more insolated and isolated within their own fandoms they don’t know what’s going on in a fandom they have no contact with. That was one of the things that fandom wank did, I mean I didn’t know anything about furries until I saw it on fandom wank.
DJ: And you probably could have lived your whole life and never know about furries.
Lisa: Exactly that’s the thing. But like I said there is no fandom central anymore. People follow, you know, the fandoms that they are interested in even on tumblr and the other thing too is, you know Livejournal and Dreamwitdh between people being on both of those or some people are still on Insanejournal and other people are on tumblr almost exclusively now they don’t post on their livejournals anymore or they are on twitter exclusively and it’s just very fractured and there is nocentral area so all these wanks are going to happen but you know, nobody posts to fandom wank anymore because I think they are afraid people will say well this isn’t funny have some recipes. you know?
Wook: And to paraphrase that ends our discussion on fandom wank and if you have any questions or comments please feel to leave then in any of our different media sites and please of you know how to pronounce Yaoi whatever properly we’d love you to correct us as well.
Transcribed by imifos
Hosts: wook77, djin7, elanorofcastile, midnitemaraud_r
Wook: Welcome to the Metachat for Slashcast Episode 38. This is Wook77 and I’m sitting here with djin7 aka DJ, midnitemauraud_r aka Lisa, and elanorofcastile aka eco or jet, and we are going to be talking about fandon wank. So the first topic I personally think that we should be talking about is: What are some of the wanks that stick out in your head?
Lisa would like to go first.
Lisa: I’ll go first with MsScribe, cause that became one of the biggest ones although it was never actually posted on fandom wank it was posted on a separate com called Bad Penny which was made specifically because it was so big it wouldn’t fit on fandon wank. (laughs) I was kind of around for that one..so…
DJ: Yes I recall that one quite well myself.
Wook: MsScribe was one the wanks that stick in my head as well, I mean it had like everything that makes a great wank. It had, sock puppets, it had the plucky girl detective, it had…
DJ: Charitywank .
Wook: Yeah .. it had so much stuff behind it too. It was sort of a behind the scenes in “old fandom”.
Elanor: Yeah, well for me, I didn’t really come into the fandom until like that had already happened so I didn’t read about it until a while down the road. It was really really interesting to read about, versus actually being able to kind of be there and experience it as it was unfolding.
Wook: So Lisa why does it stick in your head?
Lisa: Well that was the first time, I really heard the entire story. I’d heard all the stuff about the Harry/Ginny fandom vs the Harry/Hermione and all the crap that went on before that, you know. But I wasn’t really in that part of fandom, so I didn’t really know anything about it and it was just, I couldn’t believe all the stalking and the sock puppets and the just, how extensive it was. I mean who has that kind of time? (laughs)
Wook: I know right? (inaudible)
Lisa: It was just insanity to me you know that shipping became such a huge, oh God, insane.
DJ: It was her need for popularity of course we’ve all witnessed the frightening things that happen when anybody does that. This was particularly amusing in that she did all the things that anybody claims they never do and they were all proven by screencaps and locked posts and all those type of things. It was a huge investigation involved. Like thousands of people. Trying to break down this whole A&E worthy detective story.
Lisa: I’m looking at the thing now, there is like 10 chapters.Huge!
Elanor: And it definitely cast a shadow over kind of future happenings. When people were trying to do similar things worked in the back of your head.
Lisa: It pulled together all the scary aspects of fandom that people are like the outing and freaking cursing the..
DJ: The lengths that people will go to, to become friends with or to become noticed by people that they maybe admire or they are fans of, such as authors in the internet space, it’s ridiculous to me. And that’s why this is such a great mock-worthy wank, because it’s ridiculous to me how much this particular one person, if all the stories are indeed true, how much this person did in order to gain the trust of the so called inner circle of early fans in those days. Classic.
Lisa: They brought down he Gryffindor tower archive.
DJ: Yes. Well you know shutting down of archives due to insane sort of trolling and things of that nature happen quite a lot, and particularly in the Harry Potter fandom, it must happen in another fandoms anyone?
Elanor: Supernatural, Yeah Supernatural it was the anon meme that shut down, that went crazy
Lisa: That was because it was supposed to be an anything goes anon meme.
Elanor: And it was crazy!
Lisa: Someone posted a promt that had Misha’s real son and wanted a porn story, you know, with Misha’s infant, I mean he is a toddler isn’t he?
Elanor: Yeah if that was too far for people, I mean holy crap the amount of porn that involves the guys and their dogs. It’s crazy!
Lisa: Yeah but you know you get a real life person and a dog.. I don’t know
Elanor: Yeah there is every once in a while you go through a wave of bleh, anyway.
Wook: Speaking of anon memes the star trek 2009 kink meme closed, although I guess it would have got into unfunny fandom instead of..
DJ: Unfunny business?
Wook: Yeah instead of the fandom wank cause of the fact that it was racism wank.
DJ: Which does not belong in the mocking wank forum which is fandom wank of course. Fandom wank is there to mock not to talk about unfunny things like racism or sexism or things of that nature.
Lisa: Well that’s why we should talk about too how everything branched of into all those comms opened up on Journalfen, the Unfunny Business, and then there was Clairvoyant wank. As it was first occurring people would post, do a lookout for this.
Wook: Some were like the elementary school of wank, maybe you graduate the high school of wank some day. That’s how it seems to me.
Lisa: There was OTF wank that had nothing to do with fandom.
Wook: There’s wankity wank. Where people are wanking in the fandon wank community. And remember what wank was it, like somebody came in and they started wanking and it went to wankity wank and the person followed it to wankity wank and they were like shall we make a wankity wank wank (laughs)? Constantly just wanking. OMG it was hilarious. So what other wanks stick in your head? Other than the MsScribe story cause for me, there is one ultimate wank. If you know me, you know which one I am talking about. My Wife is a Horse. I know that it has nothing to do with fandom and it doesn’t have a lot to do with slash but the fact if this guy thought he was married to his horse, and his girlfriend was a human and he wondered if his wife was pregnant and if she had cheated on him, but it was a horse. I mean come on it’s the ultimate wank, it’s hilarious.
DJ: I know, I mean that’s the stuff that fandom wank was designed for.
Lisa: The horse was pregnant.
Wook: Yeah.
DJ: So this guy posts on a polyamory list of some kind or some sort of community where polyamory couples gather to talk about things which is great, that there are things like that on LJ and things of that nature. So he posted this problem he’s having with his wife and his girlfriend in this polyamorous relationship and he was saying that he wants his wife and his girlfriend to be monogamous.
Wook: Stalion mentality
DJ: Cause he can go around sowing his seed everywhere but they should only be his alone. And so this apparently this community responded in kind, they were not wanky about it, they said you know blah blah blah let’s talk about this and let’s see where you are coming from and let’s see why you are coming from there. I guess eventually it got out to the point where somebody called him on it and it turned out that his wife the so called relationship dilemma that he’s been having is a horse.
Wook: Yeah
DJ: Like a real horse. Not a horse faced woman, but an actual horse.
Elanor: I think that my favourite part of that was reliving it when I shared it with my friend Christine, and she had never heard it before and so she was reading the post and she’s like “What…WHAT.. OMG WHAT, WHY DID YOU DO THIS TO ME, Why did you tell me about this?” and she said “I am never going to be the same”.
Wook: My favourite part of this is actually related to real life, I dog sit a lot and I was dogsiting everything this fucker appeared on OTF, everytime I was dog sitting for these extremely conversative Christrian people and I used their computer I would click and I was like god it’s the horse fucker. Every frikking time this wank showed up somebody linked the video of real life pony fuckers and I wouldn’t realise andso I’d click on the links to the video. And this video is like a train wreck you can’t stop watching. And they are talking about the fact that they have a pony that they get fucked by regularly. Have you guys seen this video? So the infamous line that sticks in my head from this video is, she’s talking about how they first met, blah blah blah, and he came over and she wanted to introduce him to her pony, cause you know she was committed to her pony and she takes him down the barn and she like and seriously ‘well and then the next thing I knew my pants were down around my ankles and we were going at it, so I figured he was either into it or not but this would really show him” and he’s like “oh and I really enjoyed it mm hmm sloppy seconds”
Oh my god, OMG OMG OMG you start hyperventilating, like why am I watching this?
DJ: We’re gonna have to warn for bestiality talk when we put this up, we’re gonna trigger someone or something, we’re gonna be on fandom wank.
Lisa: I know I know One of my favourites things and it’s here on the page. Somebody wrote you know the Mr Ed song, they changed the words to go with the thing. And it says “A horse is a horse of course of course, unless you use your horse for intercourse and then of course the horse is my very special wife. I went to the source and asked the horse and she didn’t hurt me which I endorse unless of course, I hurt my for taking another to her bed.
Elanor: I think that besides the fact of the wanks , I think the comments are usually the very best things out of the entire shindig you know. All the different things people come up with like the song, it’s really fun.
DJ: (inaudible)
Elanor: Yeah they are the best.
DJ: If you post a wank apparently the point, of posting a wank is to point out the complete stupid of whoever it is that’s doing the stupid thing that’s worthy of mocking. And then you wait for all the comments to come in so that you can laugh for days and days. I mean that’s usually an ideal situation.
Wook: And I love that when you google His Wife google autofills at least on every computer I’ve ever been on, I know if it tailors to each individual, autofills a horse. Once I type in ‘his wife’ it finishes with ‘a horse’, it’s the recommended search term.
Elanor: I’m going to find out if it does that for me.
Wook: You guys should try it and see if it’s just me.
Elanor: yes its’ third one down for me.
DJ - How do you spell it?
Lisa: Just ‘His Wife’
DJ: Just ‘His Wife’, that’s it? Oh yeah I got it. His was
Elanor: And this is friend’s computer as well.
Wook: It was on Wired. It actually made sort of a well known area where this stupid wank has spread out into the world.
Elanor: If you click on it in google, the first is the fandom wank wiki entry the second is Horse of Mitt Romney's wife eliminated from Olympics team.
DJ - I got the fandom wank wiki, I got wired.com and three I got Mitt Romney.. (inaudible)
Wook: Oh my god I got the same results as DJ.
Lisa: I have the wired third and then abc news.
DJ: The entire (inaudible) is made up of Mitt Romney crap.and then it goes to Trigger Wikipedia.
Elanor: Oh man, I have tears, I have tears and we are only a little while into the conversation.
DJ: You can’t really beat that, I mean there’s been some pretty good ones, I witnessed mostly primarily Harry Potter ones.
Wook: They always seem to be on fandon wank.
Lisa: The astral plane
DJ: Or the Snape wife of that’s a classic, Snape wives
Wook: The altar in the corner of her room that she used to pray to Snape to (inaudible) I like the characters but not enough to create an altar and pray to them.
Lisa: But they fought with each other over who was actually the one receiving the real clairvoyant dreams of Alan Rickman or Snape or whoever it was. They were accusing each other of lying, “no I had the dream , not I had the dream” (laughs) I think the saddest thing thought is the, one of them had young children.
Wook: Another one was a mother daughter team that were both Snape wives.
Elanor: Yeah, I remember that.
Wook: Oh gosh, Snape wives, I forgot about the Snape wives until DJ whatever you said that triggered it in my head.
DJ: Ok you can make up something really bad to that. Thanks you for that! Also I mean there is the crystal funk which of course is not a Harry Potter funk it was Lord of the Rings wank originally. About the girl, she photoshopped herself into with the Lord of the Rings cast. (inaudible) she acted as if she was in all these photos or whatever it was. The best part about the wank of course was when she started getting wanked she started to defend herself, her nanny, aka her sockpuppet started to anonymously come in and defend her honour which of course just lead to…
Lisa: She was selling them though? She was selling something..
Wook: Yeah additionally she sold sketches of Dom on her website which were clearly photographs that had been manipulated to look like sketches again using image manipulation software. And you too can buy one for only $20.
DJ: They call this one the wank that ate the universe, apparently. The “Pasted on yay” that’s where that comes from and that’s fabulous.
Elanor: Oh man thank you, that’s awesome
Wook: Ok so what wanks stick in your head?
DJ: The one where Caina wanted to rewrite Half-Blood Prince. I don’t know if you remember that one. She didn’t like how Harry and Ginny got together so she was going to rewrite it the harmonian way.
Wook: Well there is only one true way and that would be harmonian.
Can I just tell you, fandom wank had got into my real life because it has definitely kinda stirred me away from Harmonian and then my boss confesses that she thought Harry and Hermione would get together at the end and she was very disappointed. And I’m like OMG you’re a Harmonian and it seriously just lashed out and she was like what? And I please don’t fess up to being a harmonian ever again that’ kind of horrifying to me.
Lisa: Oh god, the whole interview too with the staff from mugglenet.
Wook: And I quoted the anvil sized hint line that JKR did these Harry/Hermione people are dropped anvil sized hints.
Then there was always the Bartending in the Dark wank.
Lisa: Ah yeah that was classic! Hogwarts elite right?
DJ: And it was a big deal to get sorted there. I never went there but I believe it was quite the process. It wasn’t like oh I want to join this community and I feel I am a Gryffindor or something. Like that you had to fill out copious amounts of things and all the judges would judge you and they would give you a ranking according to how you complete your multiply amounts of quizzes or whatever it was. Then you got he house that you got and that was it.
Lisa: Wouldn’t people vote on it in the comments?
Wook: Yeah, yeah every member of the community got to vote on what house they wanted. And if Slytherin people started voting you into Slytherin then the rest of the houses were oh right see ya! I guess you’re Slytherin! Cause that was considered the “leach house” and so people used to really slither-push and so they would call it if they could see it being slither-push and this guy caught on slither-pushing and by now the word slither-push does not seem like a really word to me cause I said it so much. And so he like, dude I’m so so Slytherin, I bartend in the dark!
DJ: And suddenly he’s a Slytherin.
Wook: Yeah I think they quizzed him. And then furiosity wrote that fic about bartending in the dark and it was a Harry/Draco fic and it was awesome. Oh I love that fic so much it’s one of my favourite Harry/draco fics. Oh my god I have to link so that everybody can read this swesomeness of bartending in the dark.
DJ: You gotta link the funk too cause the funk is funny.
Wook: Oh my gosh it really was...
DJ: And the he disses Hufflepuff and Gryffindor. You know he’s all emo and goth and he’s wife is scared of him, it’s funny.
Lisa: And he started wailing “it’s just darkness”
DJ: It’s just dark, very DARK dun dun. OMG every time he walks into a room, organs play. Funny.
Wook: Alright any other wanks?
Lisa: What are your thoughts on Yaoi?
Wook: Yeah how do you say it?
Lisa: y-ou-i?
Wook: y-a-ou-i? I’m sure we’ll corrected a million timed by people. Yeah I find that one, I don’t really remember all that was involved with it. But I think that’s kind of funny that this whole has sort of intruded through the rest of fandom and people say it and they don’t really realise that it links back to fandom wank.
Elanor: Yeah.
DJ: Right right. The phrases that come from fandom wank they can be epic and they will forever stick in our heads whether you know or not that they came from there or not. But a lot of the great quips that you’ll see the idioms and stuff that are fandom related the thoughts on Yaoi or however you say it was a particular anime fan she posted in fandom wank generally just a bunch of her opinion with regards to same sex pairings in anime fandoms in general she just went on and on and on and actually did a two part entry about it and to that end it just ended into a tl;dr sort of long running joke, where we don’t really care and tell us how you really feel and so it became the situation we are in now where anybody goes off taking about anything that they want to talk about or waxing poetically about a particular item in fandom or a particular thing, everyone’s yeah but what are your thoughts on yaoi? *laughs* which is the funny part of it.
Wook: And everytime I say it, I expect people to know what it means and then suddenly somebody doesn’t know what it means when I’ve said it and they actually give me their thoughts and I lose my shit everytime. Like ugly ugly ugly snorts coming out of my nose, like sobs of laughter when they actually give me their thoughts.
DJ: Apparently your thoughts on Yaoi are it’s hard to pronounce. Nobody seems to know.
Wook: Yeah I love ‘the server is robost’. Everytime the server goes down I say it.
Elanor: I say that all the time! About all sorts of stuff and get a look sometimes,l ike What? And I’m like ‘the server is robust’. *Laughs* I think I said it to an IT guy on my last job and he thought I was being serious I’m like oh I don’t know what that means, I’m just like fandom wank. I’m like Oh God! Don’t ask me questions.
Wook: Yeah, it’s always awkward to then have to explain it like you thoughts on yaoi I actually just link somebody to it, I’m no actually that’s a meme can you stop telling me your thoughts on Yaoi, I regret ever asking you about it. Are there any phrases that you guys use a lot, like Lisa or DJ?
Lisa: I was looking the ‘pit of voles’ that’s where it came from. The site that must not be named. What if somebody sees, think of the children! That’s one I think about a lot more than I actually say.
Wook: And I love t’he get out of my fandom you make my fandom look stupid’.
Lisa: The tl;dr is definitely one and then people make made the little figures with the actual teal coloured dear.
Elanor: Yeah. ‘The rocks fall, everyone dies’ that’s a fun one as well.
DJ: And that’s come back to life now especially the idiom of it, Song of Ice and Fire. So ‘rocks fall, everyone dies’ but it’s actually true this time. Makes it even more ironic and funnier.
Lisa: Actually I was so amused that all those people who had never read the books were so shocked that Ned Stark died, I’m like Sean Bean played him of course he was going to die.
Wook: And speaking of memes from Fandom Wank and sayings we were sort of talking before we started the chat officially about some of the rules of Fandom Wank and so do you have some favourite ones you would like to go over?
Lisa: Like Snacky’s Rule?
DJ: Snacky’s Rule
Wook: Snacky’s Rule is amazing.
Lisa: It’s a play on Godwin's law which basically, that one says that any conversation on the internet that goes on long enough someone will eventually bring up Hitler and the Nazis, and with Snacky’s Law its about in fandom conversations eventually someone gonna compare somebody in a particular way to girls they went to high school with and once that happens you’re null and void that’s it you’ve reached the limit.
DJ: Yeah you’re the mean girl and then that’s it. That person loses immediately. Soon as you pull up the mean girl argument you’ve delved into some kind of really bad Hollywood movie and that’s it everybody loses in that case.
Wook: Except the wank communities.
DJ: Except the wank communities.
Lisa: But you know what’s funny, I never realized how frequently that actually happens in so many posts and discussions, you know
DJ: It’s true anytime, anything happens usually wank that appear to be serious most of the time in the end somebody inevitably called the other person, one of those mean girls or whatever it was.
Wook: Ok so my newly discovered favourite little law is called Humpty’s Law: When someone uses a dictionary to tell someone else what they really meant, all meaningful discussion ceases, to be replaced with arguments over whether the definition is correct. I love that! When that happens I think it’s hilarious, like always flashes back to Bill Clinton with the whole what definition of is are you using.
So I didn’t know that that Law had a name but know that’s I know that law’s name I think that’s hilarious. And another that’s a favourite of mine is Code of the Comfy Chair, is meant to be a threat but is actually a favor, including, but not limited to:
- If you don't agree with me I'll leave this community forever
- If I don't get X number of reviews I'll stop writing
It’s like please, please stop!
Wait, Wait don’t go I am going to miss you really.
DJ: No wait stop, it’s like that begins in Willy Wonka. No wait stop please don’t go…
I’m kinda partial myself to the variation on shipping war, the Law of Ship Double Standards. In a shipping war there is always someone who argues against a paring while proclaiming yet another pairing which is obviously ambiguous as much as the first pairing is must be romantic and their OTP cause they say so. The hypocrisy of it which is very common. You get a lot of that I the SPN fandom and a lot of others, same thing Buffy had a lot of that going on and Harry Potter did too. It’s a very common one.
Wook: That’s happening now a lot in Teen Wolf.
DJ: Oh is it?
Wook: Yeah you can’t like Derek/Stiles because they can only just be friends and they are not even friends so why are you even shipping them together? And the besides all you Sterek people are a bunch of crazy loons anyway.
DJ: You are all a bunch of mean girls from high school.
Wook: Right, right? Except they assume that everyone reads this? I think this is something to do with tumblr more than anything else. They assume that everybody is under the age of 25 and I’m sitting there going, I’m 35. I just go what? What did you call me? Wow I love you I know you called me an insult but I love you for assuming I’m younger than I actually am.
Lisa: So in Avengers there is the whole thing Clint/Coulson pairing and there’s this group of people I guess that cant stand it they don’t even want it as a background pairing. And the reasoning is that they didn’t have any actual interactions in the Avengers movie so clearly it’s a pairing that came out of nowhere by their reckoning.
Wook: They haven’t been in Fandom long have they?
DJ: Those often tend to be the biggest pairings.
Lisa: They both work together, and they were together in the Thor movie and clearly had a rapport a working relationship. So you know in that case it’s a logical extrapolation to you know, go towards a ship, its not like they are just two random characters who have nothing to do with one another.
Elanor: I would just say that would kind of invalidate any sort of crossover paring ever.
Lisa: But you know, it’s weird because the nature of wank really hasn’t changed, people lock down their stuff more than they used to. But the nature of wank itself hasn’t changed but how people approach it and think of it has changed a lot in the past few years. And you can tell you go to fandom wank website now and nobody posts anything, there’s like two posts a month.
DJ: I think that a lot of the original locking, the spirit of locking became more personal and vicious to a lot of people not necessarily at Fandom wank but in general outside of fandom wank in anonymous places or in the journal of themselves of the people involved and many people got very vicious about many things and I think that what you get then is some kneejerk reaction after a couple of years of that’s everybody is afraid to talk about it or talk to it or participate
Lisa: Because if you posted something the first person would come in and say this is not funny this is unfunny, which is with the whole unfunny, then they start posting recipes and that was the end. It’s the whole this offends me, it doesn’t offend you but it offends me and it’s gotten really complicated and complex.
Wook: When I think with fandom fracturing for it’s primary location. I mean it used to be you could just go on Livejournal and find alike a million wanks and now people are wanking over on tumblr and it carries over on AO3 and sometimes it’s on Dreamwidth or its over here on Livejournal you never know exactly where it’s going to be so it’s harder to succinctly sum up what’s going on with these wanks, especially with the nature of tumblr where you know it blows over in an hour.
Lisa: You post something on your dash and five minutes later it’s gone because everybody is reblogging everybody else’s stuff.
DJ: exactly it’s very transient. I don’t find it very good for any type of conversation or debate for that matter. There is not much happening there it’s a useless format for that it doesn’t work. It can’t work on twitter for the same purposes because you have only so much to talk about on twitter maybe if you do a side conversation But back and forth between people or a major conversation can’t happen on twitter.
Lisa: - Yeah you only have 142 characters.
DJ: And it’s gone in 10 mins because 30 other people have taled about the thing. Like when the Olympics were happening or the presidential debates were on something like that if you try to tag something and you click a tag within seconds there’s 20 more tweets to do with that tag so…
Lisa: But also I think on Livejournal anon memes have kind kind of taken over the role. Some of them have moderation others are just basically a free for all and it’s hard. The big old meme was the LOL meme and that was actually going on during the hay day of fandon wank as well. That was a specific group of people that went on and pretty much posted nonsense, bitched about other people it was a very strange kind of meme. But the other one started up, everybody started up you know, fandom wank used to be all fandom but now lots of the anon memes are fandom specific if you are not in that fandom you don’t have any reason to go those memes so you are not going to see any of the new wank that is happening. Even Metafandom used to link from all different fandoms but people are more insolated and isolated within their own fandoms they don’t know what’s going on in a fandom they have no contact with. That was one of the things that fandom wank did, I mean I didn’t know anything about furries until I saw it on fandom wank.
DJ: And you probably could have lived your whole life and never know about furries.
Lisa: Exactly that’s the thing. But like I said there is no fandom central anymore. People follow, you know, the fandoms that they are interested in even on tumblr and the other thing too is, you know Livejournal and Dreamwitdh between people being on both of those or some people are still on Insanejournal and other people are on tumblr almost exclusively now they don’t post on their livejournals anymore or they are on twitter exclusively and it’s just very fractured and there is nocentral area so all these wanks are going to happen but you know, nobody posts to fandom wank anymore because I think they are afraid people will say well this isn’t funny have some recipes. you know?
Wook: And to paraphrase that ends our discussion on fandom wank and if you have any questions or comments please feel to leave then in any of our different media sites and please of you know how to pronounce Yaoi whatever properly we’d love you to correct us as well.
Transcribed by imifos