Episode 113: Transcript
Episode: 113: Let’s Get Sweetweird
Transcription by Keffy
Charlie Jane: [00:00:00] Welcome to Our Opinions Are Correct, the podcast about science fiction that committed unspeakable acts that were later erased from the timeline. I'm Charlie Jane Anders. I'm a science fiction author and my most recent book is the young adult space fantasy Dreams Bigger Than Heartbreak.
Annalee: [00:00:21] And I'm Annalee Newitz. I'm a science journalist who writes science fiction and my forthcoming novel, coming in January, please preorder, is called The Terraformers.
Charlie Jane: [00:00:34] I can't wait for that book. It's so amazing. Y'all are gonna just… you're all in for a treat.
Annalee: [00:00:36] I can’t wait for it to be out there. Yay!
Charlie Jane: [00:00:39] Okay. So today, we're going to be talking about sweetweird, which is a genre term I came up with recently that describes stories in which everything is as strange as 100 razorblade mongooses but some people are still kind and generous to each other, and we can still have chosen family. And later in the program, we'll be talking about speculative fiction’s, propensity to come up with new sub-genres and other fancy terms for different types of storytelling that people are grooving on. So, what makes us want to keep inventing new categories and new labels?
[00:01:18] Also, if you support us on Patreon, next week, we'll have an audio extra in which we talk about The Descendents TV movies, which are part of the oeuvre of our beloved director/choreographer, Kenny Ortega. We just recently finally watched The Descendants trilogy, and we have many thoughts.
[00:01:37] Speaking of Patreon, did you know that that's entirely how this podcast comes to be?
Annalee: [00:01:42] What?
Charlie Jane: [00:01:44] It is entirely independent. It's funded by you, our listeners via Patreon. That is right. Oh my gosh, if you become a patron, you are making this podcast happen. You're buoying us up, you're supporting us. And with every episode, you get an audio extra every other week. Plus, you get access to our Discord channel where we hang out constantly. We’re just in there all the time, posting links and kind of arguing about random stuff. And just chatting. Think about it. All of that can be yours for just a few bucks a month and anything you give goes back into making our opinions even more correct. So, find us at patreon.com/ouropinionsarecorrect. And there's a cat kind of walking across my keyboard right now. So, I apologize if there is disruption.
[00:02:33] All right, let's get sweetweird.
[00:02:37] [OOAC theme music plays: Drums with a bass drop and more science fictional bells and percussion.]
Annalee: [00:03:03] All right, so just like, let's get straight to the info dump. Tell us what sweetweird is and where it came from and why. And how, and when.
Charlie Jane: [00:03:14] Okay, so this started as—
Annalee: [00:03:15] Sorry.
Charlie Jane: [00:03:15] And whomst and wherefore? I'd whereupon, and wither?
Annalee: [00:03:21] Okay, good. This is what I need. All right.
Charlie Jane: [00:03:27] Okay.
Annalee: [00:03:28] You may continue.
Charlie Jane: [00:03:29] We're already getting very quirky which I feel is appropriate for this episode. So basically, this started as a throwaway comment in my writing advice book. Never Say You Can’t Survive, which is mostly about other stuff. But in one chapter, I was talking about how weirdness can be a comfort and a solace in a time when everybody is trying to pretend that a totally bongopants world makes sense. And I mentioned that I [unclear] a lot of stories that were strange as all get out but still featured warmth and kindness, whereas you might have expected weird storytelling to be kind of misanthropic and dark, like nothing makes any sense, so let's just be horrible. It's like, okay, it's like the difference between two TV shows that Mike McMahon worked on, Rick and Morty, which is a brilliantly weird show with a very bleak, kind of misanthropic sensibility. And then Mike McMahon also did Star Trek: Lower Decks, and it's every bit as strange but it features characters who have hearts of gold and really care about each other a lot. So, it has a very different kind of vibe than Rick and Morty even though they share a lot of the same real estate.
[00:04:38] So after the book came out, people kind of asked me about that throwaway reference to sweetweird and meanwhile I was seeing more and more examples of it in pop culture, and you know, the young adult trilogy that I'm just finishing up writing feels very sweetweird to me, because it's extremely bizarre, but there's also a chosen family who are there for each other all the time, and a lot of that kind of emotional content is people taking care of each other and supporting each other.
Annalee: [00:05:05] Yeah, right now I am really appreciating stories about people being kind to each other. I think it's that when the world feels really scary and precarious, we just want stories that remind us of our connections to each other. And this is why, for example, you know, in the 1930s, we see a ton of screwball comedies and silly musicals. People were really suffering, it was the Great Depression, there was a lot of political change, the rise of fascism was going on all over Europe. And people just wanted to escape.
[00:05:39] And I think we're kind of back there. Over the past few years, we're dealing with all kinds of precarity. Political instability, pandemics, economic disasters, climate change disasters, and we're seeing something emerge that is similar to what happened in the ‘30s except now we have these sort of gentle romances and comedies, and adventures with chosen families.
Charlie Jane: [00:06:03] Right. And I was just reading a whole kind of, I've read actually several think pieces in the past week about how disco is back. Because we want that—
Annalee: [00:06:12] Thank God.
Charlie Jane: [00:06:12] —happy vibe, and that kind of friendly shininess that is, you know. We had a lot of angst and there's plenty of reasons for angst in the real world. And I know a lot of people who are, for example, gravitated towards something like Ted Lasso, which explicitly bills itself as a show about capital K kindness. Like if you go to Apple TV, their big landing page says kindness is back. But you know, Ted Lasso mostly takes place in a very cozy Normcore version of the UK, in spite of the occasional weird experiment, like the coach beard episode. And as I said, right now, we're living through a time when the world is a literal trash, fire, and authority figures are spouting actual nonsense. And part of why they're doing that is to say, I can say nonsense, and things that literally make no sense and you can't question me because I'm so powerful. And cruelty is kind of an organizing principle on which our organizations or institutions are working.
[00:07:13] So, if I'm going to consume a story about people being kind and supportive and helping each other, I'd way rather see it take place in a world that is kind of surreal and logorrheic. I'd be way more into Ted Lasso as the show if it occasionally rained eggplants with teeth in the middle of a soccer match.
Annalee: [00:07:32] That's totally season three of Ted Lasso, by the way, eggplants with teeth. So what are some examples of sweetweird storytelling other than Ted Lasso?
Charlie Jane: [00:07:39] Yeah, I mean, I totally want to see that episode of Ted Lasso. So, I'd say a big example, that I've been thinking about a lot lately is the movie Everything, Everywhere, All At Once which is a gloriously off kilter story full of just wacky stuff. But it still made me cry my face off with its warm, friendly vibe about a family working some stuff out. It's a very kind of intimate kind of happy, not happy, but it's a very intimate kind of like, heartfelt story.
Annalee: [00:08:08] Yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:08:09] I also feel like the Guardians of the Galaxy movies have a real family feeling and I'd also, with some caveats include James Gunn's recent Peacemaker TV show. There's also a ton of animated TV shows and I'll just list a couple, Adventure Time, Steven Universe, Summer Camp Island, The Owl House. I guess that's four, not a couple.
[00:08:27] I'd also say that, you know, Our Flag Means Death is both weird and very sweet. And The Good Place also gets incredibly like just bananapants, but it also has this sweetness to it. And in books I'd mentioned, you know, Becky Chambers’s Robot & Monk books for sure. Along with Ryka Aoki’s Light From Uncommon Stars and a lot of people, when we were talking about this online, a lot of people mentioned books by TJ Clune, Sarah Gailey and Ursula Vernon. I'm literally just scratching the surface here. There's so much more.
Annalee: [00:09:00] Yeah, I love that your list includes stories that are fantasy and science fiction, but also Our Flag Means Death, which is I mean, it's heightened, but it's not directly fantasy. There's nothing that happens that directly defies the laws of physics. And you know, Taika Waititi, who stars in Our Flag Means Death. He's also created two sweetweird shows, What We Do in the Shadows, which is about dorky vampires, and the offspring of van Helsing, who is a vampire hunter, who is also quite delightful and sweet, even though he has to kill vampires. And then there's also the spin off from What We Do in the Shadows, Wellington Paranormal, which is another adorable, sweetweird show about small town cops in Wellington, New Zealand who are kind of going after various paranormal events, but they're very bumbling and kind of gentle and not really… they're trying to do their jobs as best they can.
[00:09:56] But I'd also add that there's a whole tranche of stories that fit into sweetweird that are not realistic, but they take place in the real world, especially romances. So there's the romantic comedies like the show Heartstopper, which is based on an incredible comic book, the movie Crush, which we just watched, both of which are kind of foregrounding queer romance, but also have very cute straight romances in them, too. There's also the show Starstruck about a woman who accidentally starts dating a movie star, but she doesn't realize it because she doesn't watch action movies. That's a very fairy tale premise. Like, I accidentally started dating the prince, you know, it has like shades of Crazy Rich Asians in it, but it's much goofier. Like Crazy Rich Asians is just like, I'd say straight up kind of rom com, whereas Starstruck is weird. The main character is a goofball. And so the question is really, like, is sweetweird kind of a know it when you see it thing? Or is there sort of a pattern?
Charlie Jane: [00:11:00] I would say it's definitely an aesthetic or a vibe as much as anything else. And it's just… you know, I don't really want to set boundaries about what can and cannot be considered sweetweird. I feel like it's just people can decide for themselves what to label how. I would say, is off the wall stuff happening and are the main characters still showing kindness to each other?
[00:11:23] So it's a label that might fit if the answer to both of those questions is yes. And when I sort of coined this term, I wanted to talk about some of my favorite stories that I've been loving recently, and also a way to think about these books that I've been working on. And I have been happy that others seem to have been embracing it so far, like M.R. Carey, aka Mike Carey, one of my favorite writers, said on Twitter that he considers the thing that he's working on right now to be sweetweird. And that was a happy thing for me, because like I said, I love his work.
Annalee: [00:11:53] Yeah, I mean, I also like the fact that the way you're talking about this, you're like, I'm not gatekeeping this. You can call whatever you want sweetweird if you want to, or you don't have to call anything sweetweird.
Charlie Jane: [00:12:06] Right.
Annalee: [00:12:07] I think part of writing part of the ethos of sweetweird is like, just be chill. You don't have to be anything really. If you want to do it, fine.
[00:12:18] But I have a question that I think, I mean, this is less of a me question and more of a question that I could imagine coming up as people are thinking about sweetweird, which is, so are you thinking that this is something where people are just like, it's a story about people who are just unrelentingly nice and nothing bad ever happens?
Charlie Jane: [00:12:39] Yeah, I think that that would be really boring. I mean, obviously, there are stories in which nothing major happens. Like, obviously, I mentioned the Monk & Robot stories. And those are not boring, those are incredibly fascinating. So, I don't want to say that nothing bad happening is… but actually bad things happen in those books. They're just very minor bad things, usually.
Annalee: [00:12:57] Yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:12:59] I think that I personally like a story where really bad things happen and people have to deal with it. And it's often an occasion for people to kind of take care of each other. So, I mentioned earlier, I mentioned Steven Universe, a show which features mass murder on an almost unimaginable scale and body horror, and some major trauma, which, as the show goes on, it gets deeper and deeper into that trauma. And I think most of the other examples I brought up do include some events that might be considered war crimes or major atrocities. And you know, my own young adult books are just chock full of horror, including some really intense body horror. So, I think that that's kind of where the weird part of sweetweird comes in. Shit gets really awful sometimes, and it's senseless. That's why it's weird, in a sense, is that senselessly terrible things are happening. And the only thing we have to hold on to is each other.
Annalee: [00:13:51] Yeah, I mean, it's sort of what we were talking about, at the beginning of the episode about wanting stories that are kind of a balm or an escape. But the thing about escapism is that I don't think it really works unless the story also gives you a really strong sense of what you're escaping from. You can't really have a story that's escapist and healing without significantly exploring the thing that's making your characters really upset or the thing that's making your readers upset.
[00:14:27] And so I think, a story, which was unrelentingly nice, I can't even imagine what that would be, like maybe Mr. Rogers or something like that. Like one of the fantasies where he kind of goes into the fantasy realm and Mr. Rogers and the little train.
Charlie Jane: [00:14:38] I always think that that's very dystopian, like they're just trapped in this realm under this like dictatorship of King Friday. Anyway, sorry. Go on.
Annalee: [00:14:45] Yeah, I mean, so maybe that's not I think that's unintentionally dystopian, perhaps. But I think that at periods in history, when we are feeling so upset, we obviously crave chosen family and supportive friends more when the world feels like a surreal nightmare. And I think that's why romance is a big part of the sweetweird aesthetic. But also, there's a ton of stories within sweetweird that explore the romance of friendship, which makes me just so happy because I really want stories that are about the beauty of friendship and how we can have profound connections to each other, that don't involve conventional ideas of marriage, or pairing up into an isolated monogamous unit.
[00:15:32] And I especially think that this is important right now because, as you said, sweetweird is an antidote to a world that feels chaos and bonkers and random, as opposed to a world, say, where everything feels too orderly and too clamped down. And friendship is a way to kind of make sense of things. It's like, okay, I know who my friends are. Even if I can't understand politics, and I don't understand the supply chain, and I'm like, what the hell is happening with the latest variant on the latest pandemic? I know my friends and my friends know me and I feel seen by them.
Charlie Jane: [00:16:11] Yeah, and I'm a huge proponent of like, romantic friendship and romantic family building, chosen family. I think that I would love to see us expand our ideas of romance beyond just some kind of monogamous pairing off kind of thing. And into just like, yep, you can have many relationships that are satisfying and fulfilling. And, yeah, obviously, I crave stories about communities that hold each other up when the walls start melting. And I'll always have a special place in my heart for a show like Blake’s Seven, where the main characters kind of snarl at each other for 52 episodes until spoiler alert for a 40-year-old show, they finally murder each other. But right now in the middle of a slow motion apocalypse where fascists are weaponizing nonsense to fuel their rise. I kind of desperately need stories that let me know that we actually can take care of each other in the middle of an unreal shitscape.
Annalee: [00:17:03] Yeah, it really, it's funny that these are stories that are kind of surreal, oftentimes that are an antidote to surrealism. So, it's kind of like fighting weaponize surrealism with gentle, kind surrealism.
Charlie Jane: [00:17:20] Yeah.
Annalee: [00:17:20] Like, we're all in the realm of absurdity. But the fact is that you can have gentle, kind, absurdist chaos. And you can also have the kind of chaos that makes it impossible for people to understand their own needs and makes it impossible for them to see their community for what it is.
Charlie Jane: [00:17:40] Yeah, and I find order really oppressive right now. I think that the notion of order is, I think of cops, I think of institutions that are trying to keep us down. I don't know.
Annalee: [00:17:49] Yeah, I mean, I think there's order and then there's structure and structure can be very nice. But order is not always… order is not always the best way to impose structure, I guess. Now I've gotten into like deep abstraction. So, are you just gonna write nothing but sweetweird from now on?
Charlie Jane: [00:18:08] No, I don't think so. I mean, my next adult novel, which I'm halfway through writing is currently not looking particularly sweetweird, although it's still cooking, a lot could change. I'm not even only consuming sweetweird right now. I mean, you know, I've been I've been catching up on The Umbrella Academy, which I don't think fits into the sweetweird label, although there are sweet moments here and there.
[00:18:29] But then there are times when the world is just too frickin’ much and I just want to pick up a Squirrel Girl comic and just luxuriate in how gonzo and yet how good natured it is. And you know, I've been happy that people seem to be embracing the idea of sweetweird, but I'm also glad that people want to argue about it, because that's part of the fun of coining new genre terms like this.
[00:18:51] And when we come back from the break, we're going to talk about why the speculative fiction world does seem to constantly come up with so many different ways to describe what we're doing and why it's really fun to argue about these terms.
[00:19:04] [OOAC theme music plays: Drums with a bass drop and more science fictional bells and percussion.]
Annalee: [00:19:08] Today, we want to recommend a podcast called Curious State hosted by Doug Frazier. If you love asking weird questions and finding magical nuggets of knowledge, you’ll like this podcast. Every week, Doug asks a question like, could we have domesticated a T-Rex? How does cyanide kill you? Or what is reality TV doing to us? With help from authors, experts and various other people, Doug endeavours to answer it in 20 minutes or less. You can listen to Curious State on Apple podcasts, Spotify, and anywhere else you get your podcasts
[00:19:45] [OOAC theme music plays: Drums with a bass drop and more science fictional bells and percussion.]
Annalee: [00:19:50] So, speculative fiction has a long history of creating new sub-genres just like every week there's a new sub-genre or there's a new aesthetic or a new term of art. In fact, we just recently did an episode about the rise of dark academia, which is a kind of aesthetic. And I'm just curious, how often do you think a new sub-genre comes along and really takes off?
Charlie Jane: [00:20:14] You know, I feel like it's every several years but there have been periods where new sub-genres were just springing up and then periods where there wasn't so much of that. But you know, for example, in 1982, this writer named Bruce Bethke coined the term cyberpunk, which came to describe this already burgeoning class of stories about futuristic worlds featuring artificial intelligence and oppressive technocracies. And then, in 1987, K.W. Jeter coined the term steampunk to describe a wave of novels that were set in Victorian times and featured steam power technology often way in advance of the technology that actually existed back then.
[00:20:51] And, you know, one thing that I was thinking about the other day is the term, paranormal romance, which was coined in the 1990s. But it really took off in the early 2000s, according to this research paper I found, and it ended up becoming a huge genre in publishing. And I think it was also describing a set of stories that had been existing for a long time before that.
But I’m just scratching the surface here. I feel like you get these terms that kind of come to define a set of stories that are kind of, fit within a larger genre, but they have a life of their own. And then there are some genres that kind of spring up without anybody really kind of proclaiming it, one day. Like I say that at this point, blue collar space opera is a ssub-genre. It's inspired by the movie Alien, but also sparked by recent stuff like The Expense books and TV series. And I've lost count of how many novels, shows, movies, and comics I've seen recently about working stiffs in space. But I could not tell you for the life of me who coined the term, blue collar space opera.
Annalee: [00:21:55] Yeah, there's also Space Sweepers, that great Korean movie.
Charlie Jane: [00:21:57] Oh my God, it was so great.
Annalee: [00:22:00] And that's just like straight up. It's like Space Sweepers, literally the name of a blue collar job combined with space. So yeah, I think that it's true that sometimes there are these trends that don't get named, or that are only kind of casually named like blue collar space opera, which is not really a thing like I've never heard people talk about that in the same way they talk about steampunk, for example.
[00:22:25] I mean, people talk about it, but it's not like a marketing term really.
Charlie Jane: [00:22:29] Right.
Annalee: [00:22:29] Which actually, I mean, a lot of these do end up being marketing terms and that's kind of how they blow up.
Charlie Jane: [00:22:31] Oh, for sure.
Annalee: [00:22:36] So, what about when someone creates a label that doesn't actually turn into a huge sub-genre? What about that?
Charlie Jane: [00:22:43] I feel like that actually happens probably more often. And I'm going to, I apologize to the people who I'm going to pick on but I'm going to name a couple of examples. You know, after cyberpunk became a big thing. One of the founders of cyberpunk, Bruce Sterling helped to create another kind of notion called slipstream. Bruce Sterling wrote this amazing Slipstream Manifesto, which I was personally just massively influenced by as a baby writer. It just changed my life. So, in that sense, and I think it changed a lot of other people's lives. So, it was influential.
Annalee: [00:23:12] It was huge. I was in grad school when it came out studying English literature and people were talking about it there, too. In an English department people like oh yes, “The Slipstream Manifesto,” very important durdedur. So, yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:23:24] And slipstream was this attempt to put a more genre bending strangeness into speculative fiction and kind of merge it with experimental literary writing, which is all extremely my jam. And you know, again it was hugely influential. And there have been some slipstream anthologies and some journals, which I cherish my copies of. But at the same time, I've never seen publishers being like, “his book is slipstream,” in the way that they might be like, “This book is steampunk.” I don't feel like it's become a term that's kind of crossed over into being like a marketing term or into being something that people will affirmatively label a book that in order to kind of get you to read it.
Annalee: [00:24:05] Yeah, I do want us to keep thinking, as we're talking about this, about how much marketing terminology influences what we think of as a successful sub-genre. Like, is it something that you can go to the bookstore and find a section that has that label?
Charlie Jane: [00:24:21] Oh, yeah.
Annalee: [00:24:22] Find it in the description on Amazon, or, also, speaking of other types of sub-genres that didn't quite take off, but were still influential, Geoff Ryman and a number of other people tried to spark a thing called mundane science fiction. In the early 2000s, Geoff Ryman wrote a really influential manifesto about mundane science fiction. It was a little bit like the Dogme 95 idea that had come out in 1995, in the movies. And that was a filmmaking movement that was started by the Danish directors Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg, who wanted to get away from studio-driven hyper-commercial movies that were packed with special effects and technical gimmicks. And the idea was they would shoot on location, there'd be no filters, everything would take place in real time. It was really hard to do. There were only a few Dogme 95 movies and even they kind of broke some of their own rules.
[00:25:21] And this kind of is what happened with mundane science fiction, too, which is, mundane science fiction's goal was to stick to realism and plausibility. So that meant like, no faster than light travel, no teleportation, no aliens, no mind uploads and that kind of thing. Like anything that seemed implausible based on contemporary technology couldn't really be part of mundane science fiction. And I can't think of a single novel, or story and another medium that actually stuck to all of the rules of mundane science fiction, just like with Dogme 95 in film, maybe there were some extremely near future science fiction that did stick to it.
[00:26:05] But the problem is that the idea of plausibility is such a moving target, right? It depends on which scientists and which tech experts you're talking to and listening to. But it also depends on how quickly things are changing in a particular field. So as a result, mundane science fiction became one of those sub-genres or maybe aesthetics that existed as an aspiration and an inspiration. But it was just really hard to do in practice.
[00:26:32] So that's one thing that can happen to a sub-genre is that people really like the idea, but it's such a rigid framework that you can't really impose it on more than a few stories.
Charlie Jane: [00:26:43] Yeah. And I think that that is one pitfall, and that is one reason why you don't want to… like, it’s hard to be prescriptive or hard to be overly rule based when you're coming up with these things. Cyberpunk and steampunk are both kind of like, this is a vibe and do what you want with it kind of a little bit.
Annalee: [00:26:58] Yeah, it's very loosey goosey. It's like, okay, does it have computers in your head and some corporations? All right, great.
Charlie Jane: [00:27:08] Kind of, yeah. You know, we can be here for ages listing all of the terms and sub-genres and aesthetics and things that have come out in the last few decades. It feels like every day there are more genre terms popping up. I'm personally super excited about the idea of hopepunk, which is a term coined by Alexandra, Rowland, and we did an episode about it a while ago. And I see people talking about hopepunk all the time. I don't know if it's gonna get to the… it’s too soon to know if it's gonna get to the point of being up there with cyberpunk and steampunk and the other punks.
[00:27:42] But it's a term that… it's definitely gotten a lot of currency. And it's a very helpful term for talking about a particular kind of story. I'm excited that we're just we're still coining a lot of new terms.
Annalee: [00:27:52] Yeah, me too. So why do we like creating new terminology so much? I was recently on an episode of Tom Merritt’s podcast called A Word. And we were talking about the word “category” and why people who are fans of science fiction love categorizing things, and love coming up with terms for different types of fandom? We came up with a lot of possibilities and I'm wondering why do you think that this keeps happening?
Charlie Jane: [00:28:26] I think that it's fun. I mean, it's like when was 18 and I had this terrible.
Annalee: [00:28:33] That’s an easy answer.
Charlie Jane: [00:28:35] It’s fun, I mean, yeah. That’s my answer. When I was 18, I had this terrible job at a warehouse, where they made the mistake of giving me a label gun. And I just went around putting whimsical labels on everything. And that was the one thing that got me through my long days in this warehouse stacking boxes.
[00:28:51] I feel like it comes out of two extremely virtuous impulses. You either love a particular type of story and want to be able to talk about why and how we love it. Or you're feeling as though there's a kind of storytelling that I crave and I'm not seeing enough of it. And so I'm going to invent a term that describes what I wish I was seeing more of. And it can be a mixture of those two things. I love a particular type of writing that I'm already seeing some of and if I group it together, and kind of label it, maybe I can get to see more of it.
Annalee: [00:29:22] Yeah, I also think that and this is something I talked about with Tom Merritt, was, It is also a form of gatekeeping too. It's like a way of saying like—
Charlie Jane: [00:29:29] Oh, yeah.
Annalee: [00:29:29] These are people and don’t get your narrative in our narrative, because we don't want you to bring in what we consider to be fantasy into what we consider to be science fiction or whatever silly debate people are having. There is often, especially in very old school entrenched fandoms there is this ancient debate between fantasy and science fiction. And in the last 20 years, I feel like almost everyone who loves speculative fiction knows that fantasy and science fiction are really the same thing and that the line between them is pretty arbitrary. And that moving the line around is where you get great new stories from.
[00:30:16] I was also gonna say that a lot of these new terms now are coming out of fanfiction communities that are using different hashtags and categories. And that impulse has carried over into the rest of the writing world, especially because tons of commercial writers are now coming out of fandom. And I think that's because, to go back to what you were saying earlier, as readers, we want to know what we're getting into, we kind of want to have a name for the thing that we crave. And this is really true right now, because so many of us are using stories for comfort or therapy, and you don't want to invest hours in a book or a TV show, and then discover that it's like all about how people you love are garbage, if what you want to believe is that your friends are good. And then the story’s like, surprise!
Charlie Jane: [00:31:05] Right.
Annalee: [00:31:05] They're garbage! Which is a perfectly legitimate story. And also true, friends can turn out to be garbage. Butif I'm looking for something that will make me feel better. I don't want to suddenly discover, hashtag all friends are garbage. Or I don't want a story that I entered into thinking it was going to be sweetweird suddenly going all edgelord and just everyone torturing each other.
[00:31:31] So sometimes these kinds of labels are like whatever the opposite of a trigger warning would be. They're like, oh, you can expect this nice thing to happen or this desired thing to happen. Whereas a trigger warning is like, by the way, this thing that you don't like might be in here.
Charlie Jane: [00:31:49] Yes, I have been spending a lot of time on Tumblr again lately, which feels like I've stepped through a time warp. But I feel as though there's just a kind of self-awareness that comes out of online fandoms that is just delightful. And it goes along with being hyper aware of certain tropes in fiction, and wanting to see those tropes executed well. And often these terms like sweetweird or cyberpunk, or whatever, noseflute, are just baskets of tropes. And I really do think that part of the fun, and I'm going to keep saying it's fun. Part of the fun of coining these terms is getting to argue about them in a hopefully friendly, constructive way. I was being tongue in cheek when I chose to call my sweetweird essay, a manifesto, which was maybe me kind of overreaching a little bit. But I was definitely thinking of things like Bruce Sterling, writing his “Slipstream Manifesto,” which blew the top off of young Charlie Jane’s head, or Geoff Ryman writing his mundane science fiction manifesto. And I feel like this is one of the things that gives speculative fiction its speculative frisson, the fact that we're constantly coining, and reinventing and debating all of these labels.
Annalee: [00:32:59] Yeah, I mean, it is really fun to debate this stuff. It ultimately makes us more savvy readers and audiences. We kind of know what we like but we also can engage really fully with these stories. And especially because fanfic is all about not just engaging with a story by consuming it and then walking away. It's like, no, you take in the story and then you make the story your own and you continue the story. You pick up on threads in the story. You might actually take a story that's a straight up edgelord story and be like, oh, I'm actually going to have like a little side quest that turns sweetweird and take these two characters who normally would just only fight with each other and kidnap each other and torment each other and be like, actually, they're secretly boyfriends. And this is fun time when they both went to the magical Lake together. And only soft things live at the lake. And they just kissed a lot. And then they went back to like murder and stuff like that, whatever. But there’s this real joy in being able to tease apart a story that you like, and reclaim it.
[00:34:14] Yeah, I just want to kind of underscore what you were saying about how a lot of the debates we see in fandom over these things are lovingly sort of. People are participating in them in a loving way. Like we love to over analyze and geek out and like, yeah, people will get heated about it. But I think in a best-case scenario, it's just because it's a way of letting off steam. We're just arguing about fiction.
[00:34:42] And then I do think that yes, sometimes these kinds of debates can get toxic and can become really cruel. And that's not what we're talking about here. We're not talking about like bad things that happen in fandom. We're talking about the fun part of just like, okay, I have identified 60 different aesthetics and here's what they are, okay? And like vaporwave is over here and dark academia is over here. And then there's dark goblin academia and vapor academia. You know, whatever, right?
Actually, vaporwave academia would be amazing. Like, I'd love to see that, but anyway.
Charlie Jane: [00:35:20] I want it. I crave that.
Annalee: [00:35:22] I know, like, hashtag vaporwave academia. So yeah, I think I think that this is… the joy of fandom is categorizing.
Charlie Jane: [00:35:30] Yeah, and I think it's a positive impulse. It's part of how we make things our own. And it's part of what made me a bigger fan. Like when I first discovered people arguing about stuff on Usenet, and on various message boards and just getting to see people just hashing out their opinions about stuff. It just made me love the things I loved in a different way.
[00:35:51] And I think it's important not to take any of this too seriously. I think it's you know—
Annalee: [00:35:55] Yes.
Charlie Jane: [00:35:56] None of this is like brain surgery, or rocket science or whatever. It only gets bad if we start shaming people for liking what they like, or for coloring outside the lines. And, you know, genres, sub-genres, and other labels are meant to be descriptive, not prescriptive, and it would suck if someone was like, it's not a cyberpunk story, because nobody is wearing reflective sunglasses, or whatever. And you know, it just that's, I don't like policing other people's tastes or categorization, or what labels you use.
[00:36:27] But yeah, to return to what we were saying, this is why I love nerd culture most of the time, because we can invent a new buzzword in the morning and be having a spirited debate about it by tea time.
Annalee: [00:36:40] Yes, I love that too. I feel like every category we come up with is a category that is temporary and the fact that these are temporary categories that are always changing, that's what makes this tea time so delightful.
[00:36:52] [OOAC theme music plays: Drums with a bass drop and more science fictional bells and percussion.]
Charlie Jane: [00:36:53] Now I want tea and cakes. Okay, so you've been listening to Our Opinions Are Correct and if you just stumbled upon us, you can find us wherever podcasts are found. If you like us, please do leave a review on Apple or wherever because it helps a lot. Also, we are on Patreon. As we mentioned, earlier at patreon.com/ouropinionsarecorrect. And your support really helps a lot and you get to be part of a really vibrant community. We're also on Twitter at @OOACpod.
[00:37:25] We're just so grateful to our heroic brilliant producer Veronica Simonetti. Also, thanks so much to Chris Palmer for our amazing music. And thanks again to you for your support. We'll be back in two weeks with another episode. Next week we'll have an audio extra and if you're a patron, we'll see you on Discord.
Both: [00:37:41] Bye!