A Different Way To Think About Ideas on the Internet
Does The Pudding have (some of) the answers?
First off: I love when the topic of the newsletter and the podcast serendipitously complement each other — and this is one of those weeks. Today’s episode of
is all about queer romance — who writes it, who reads it, why cis women seem very into to M/M storylines (particularly those written by other women)…..and, best of all, where you can find a lot more of it. My cohost for this episode is Adib Khorram. a brilliant writer of queer romances that aren’t about rich white people in coastal cities. Ali’s a frankly perfect co-host who will make you think a lot more about what sort of romantic storylines you gravitate towards and why.You can listen here — and if you want to become a paid subscriber and get access to the weekly advice section, remember that Culture Study newsletter subscribers get a screaming deal.
Now, on to the newsletter ————
Back in October, I asked readers about their current “rich texts”: objects, trends, and/or phenomenons in culture that might seem relatively straightforward but are layered with meaning, class signification, and emerging/conflicting ideologies about who we are and what we value. Think: Health Supplements. (Being Very Bad At) The Zipper Merge. Surveillance cameras inside the home. Furniture Restoration Reels. And the focus of this interview: the norms and evolution of fanfic.
I’ve read a lot of scholarly work on fanfic, which has become pretty foundational in the world of contemporary media studies. I’ve read fanfic myself, and chances are high you have too: maybe you’re a regular on the boards, or maybe you’ve just read some particularly popular romances that began their lives as fanfic. It’s always been on my general radar, not dissimilar to, say, knitting: something people do, and love, but not my personal thing.
But you know what? Sometimes you just need a really good piece of journalism to make you think about a subject — a rich text — in a totally different way.
So I’m grateful to Culture Study reader Kidsleepy (side note: I love all of your commenter names, truly) for directing me and other readers of the Rich Text thread to this riveting (and beautiful!) data essay by The Pudding, simply titled Who Gets Shipped and Why. (If you don’t know much about “shipping” and how it works in fanfic, don’t worry, it’s explained at the very top of the piece; if you do know about fanfic, I can tell you that the authors scraped the data of ships with over 1000 fanfic works at AO3 to see what dynamics were at play. And, to be clear, this isn’t a blunt scrape; there’s a lot of analysis and contextualization, too).
I loved the piece so much I reached out to the authors to see if they’d be willing to do a Q&A — on shipping, but also on the rest of The Pudding’s work, which visualizes everything from the expanding color palette of NBA jerseys to the great “standing/sitting divide” of American workplaces. The conversation also points us in the direction of today’s subject line: How do you get people on today’s internet to think about stuff in different ways?
We didn’t solve the problem, but we did have a pretty great conversation about it — and the process of creating different ways to visualize, explain, and explore rich texts. And just so we’re clear: even if you’re not a fanfic person, you’re still gonna love this one.
And if you want access to this week’s subscriber-only threads + the weekly things I read & loved + the knowledge that you’re making it possible for interviews like this to be available to everyone, well:
Let’s start very basic — and in a way that will also help introduce readers to the work that The Pudding does. What made fanfic shipping data a good fit for a Pudding essay?
Jan Diehm, Journalist-Engineer at the Pudding: Our official line at The Pudding is that we are a “digital publication that explains ideas debated in culture with visual essays,” but more often I find myself describing us as the “best internet rabbit hole.” On the surface I think it seems that we gravitate toward frivolous or fluffy topics, but I think we’re just really good at attaching seemingly inconsequential everyday things to underlying, structural, and societal issues. I call it the “spoonful of sugar before the medicine” approach. So fanfic — sometimes placed incorrectly in the stereotypical teen girl fantasy realm — made for the perfect vehicle to talk more deeply about things like sexuality, queerness, misogyny, and feminism, things that, if mentioned out right, are often an immediate turn off for readers.
We’re also not chasing current events, so we purposefully pick stories that have a much longer shelf life and likely won’t be covered by mainstream media. In a round up behind the scenes post after we published this piece, I wrote that: “I feel incredibly lucky to be at a place like @puddingviz who trusts me to use “hella gay” in a post and do stories that center queer experiences. 🫶🏻🏳️🌈” It’s super rare to be at a place that respects you BOTH as a journalist AND as a human, where your own experiences are central to the storytelling.
Florina Sutanto, freelancer at The Pudding: Fanfic is one of those things I think has never really gotten the respect it deserves, because it’s often associated with amateur level writing and treated as a cringy juvenile activity that bastardizes an author’s work. But it’s such a HUGE part of culture now – these days you can measure the size and obsessive dedication of a fandom by the number of fics posted to AO3. I’ve always admired the site’s repository structure and believed that a full-scale analysis could yield really interesting stories, but I never thought that a legitimate publication would agree to give me the time and resources to do it until I reached out to The Pudding and they said yes!
Caitlyn Ralph, Studio Director at Polygraph: (The Pudding’s sister studio): I love that this project sparked from a conversation Flo and I were having over coffee about her final project at Columbia’s Lede program (Ashley also separately pitched the idea to The Pudding). Around the time we met up, I had been thinking about how structured AO3 was in particular, and how a data-nerd like me couldn’t help but go on the site and ponder about all the data scraping opportunities that were at our fingertips. A lot of my friends work in media, and I also noticed fanfiction becoming a frequent topic of conversation and debate. Almost always, it’s: Interesting data on hand + conversations with friends over drinks = a story on The Pudding.
We are super process nerds here at Culture Study, so I’d love to hear about how the collaborative process takes shape. How do you communicate, how do you delegate or divide the work, how do you provide feedback, how was the work on this piece similar or different from other pieces for The Pudding, how do you proofread — as much detail as you can provide, we want to hear about it.
Jan Diehm, Journalist-Engineer at The Pudding: At The Pudding, we take pitches year-round. Within a week of each other Ashley and Flo, without knowing of each other’s existence, both pitched us a story on fanfic. It’s never happened to us before, so we did something completely out of the ordinary and asked them if they would collaborate together with us. Luckily they both said yes and we started the nearly year-long project, so this was a bit of an anomaly in both collaborators and timeline.
Our freelance pitch projects at The Pudding typically span 3-6 months and pair one freelancer with one member of our team, who serves as an editor/project manager/coconspirator. We work fully remotely (as did our team pre-pandemic, so there was nothing to rewire), so we spend a lot of time in Slack, Google Docs, and video calls. Before the project begins, we’ll talk with the freelancers to set up a check-in cadence, rough deadlines, and get a general sense of their working styles. We’ve roughly divided our process into 5 parts: 1. data collection and analysis, 2. storyboarding and writing, 3. design, 4. development, and 5. publishing. These don’t need to happen in a linear fashion and often overlap, but they give us some built in moments throughout the process to reflect and gather feedback.
At each of these juncture points the editor on The Pudding side (for this project, myself and Caitlyn) takes the project pack to the larger editorial team for feedback. We operate in a flat hierarchical team structure, so feedback is always framed as suggestions and not mandates. We trust each other to handle the story with care. We have two Slack channels to share project updates: #demo, which is just to show where something is and NOT to get reactions or feedback, here the author(s) just want to share, but aren’t in the headspace to make changes; and then #feedback, where the author(s) are actively looking for team input and in a position to incorporate it.
The editor then brings all this feedback back to the freelancer and together they formulate a plan of attack. The Pudding’s team of journalist-engineers can do each step of the process, but we all have our expertise. For example, my background is in design, so that’s my happy place, but if I’m stuck in data processing tasks all day it can eat at my soul. We try to take these strengths into account (along with subject matter interest) when pairing up team members with freelancers, and then we also try to adapt to what the freelancers’ strengths are as well. We don’t need our freelancers to come in with mastery of every single part of the process, but if they have one skill to lean on, it can help drive the project forward.
Since there were already a lot more collaborators on this project than normal, we settled on a chapter-like story structure which would help divy up the ownership in a way that would lessen any “too many cooks in the kitchen” energy. For this project: Ashley led the Slash section + the design; Flo led the Canon section + data tasks; and Caitlyn and I led the RPF section and split up a lot of the other remaining tasks like development and editing. High level, the process from idea to publishing looks something like this flow chart, but we really try to adapt it to skills and personalities.
Caitlyn Ralph, Studio Director at Polygraph: As fellow editor, I’ll just add a little color from this particular project to what Jan very gracefully explained above — I oversee the studio side of our company (called Polygraph), very rarely have a chance to work on editorial projects, and have an erratic schedule dictated by clients. With that said, this was an interesting process adjustment we had to make when I couldn’t always keep up with the project - Jan definitely stepped up to fully lead the editor side of things, while I was mostly there to consult, sit in on meetings, and review things when needed. I think sometimes, in the process Jan outlined, it works to be purely collaborative - and, sometimes, it’s helpful to have someone just really push the project forward, trusting their instincts and making judgment calls they think is best.
Ashley Cai, freelancer at The Pudding: The others already outlined our process wonderfully, but because I’m a huge advocate for transparency, I want to highlight that it wasn’t smooth sailing at every point in the process. There were definitely times when things were undefined, but that’s part of the process with so many collaborators working remotely!
In the beginning, we had lots of great potential ideas that would have been worse if compromised and merged together, so we had to wait and sort it out through several calls. Throughout, we all would be working concurrently on different sections, as Jan mentioned, but also relied on each other to make more progress before it made sense to continue. Towards the end, we had these long spiraling Google documents peppered with comments and unfinished sections, where we had a general idea of how everything fit together, but we were uncertain if certain narratives would conflict.
Often, we would hop on a call together and Jan would tell us that “it seems like muck right now,” but by continuing to chip away at each section, we would make headway. And she was right!
I’d love to hear about any of your relationships to fanfic/slash before writing this essay — and how analyzing and presenting the data confirmed or challenged some of your own thoughts about it. I’m thinking specifically about the look at the Top 50 fandoms — and just how many of them are dominated by male protagonists (and the connection to women writing M/M slash about those characters, at least in part because otherwise, there is no opportunity for significant romance between complicated protagonists….and so many of the existing female characters are written as objects of the male gaze, not subjects unto themselves).
Jan Diehm, Journalist-Engineer at The Pudding: I really didn’t have too much first hand experience with “capital F” fanfic itself before working on this project. I mean, I knew what fanfic was, what shipping was, what slash, femslash, and canon meant, but I wasn’t a connoisseur or author myself — more so just on the periphery. But, coincidentally right before we got the pitches for this project I had started reading Lucy Neville’s “Girls Who Like Boys Who Like Boys: Women and Gay Male Pornography and Erotica”, which has a lot of relevant overlap.
As a queer woman who grew up always playing the male role in make believe house, or wanting to be the superhero for Halloween, it was easy to see how gendered power dynamics impact fantasization of all types. You kind of just think, oh that’s just me, but through reading that book and working on this project it made me realize that there is a much larger contingent of people who really kinda just want to fuck up traditional gender in every way possible.
Florina Sutanto, freelancer at The Pudding: I grew up reading and writing fanfiction and have made a ton of internet friends through fandom (plus I’ve met a couple of them IRL), so I’ve always felt fond of fanfic for the community it’s given me. The women writing slash part is something I intellectually understand and have seen my friends partake in, but I’m really a femslash fan through and through myself. I think it may be a generational thing – I discovered fandom through Tumblr when the Carmilla webseries was airing and simply followed the femslash migration from there (#himejoshi).
Caitlyn Ralph, Studio Director at Polygraph: I’m an avid reader but not writer. I’ve always been a super fan of stuff, and I knew it existed, but I came to it later because there wasn’t a ton of overlap in the fandoms I was apart of when I was younger - I never read or watched Harry Potter, I thought I was too punk to like One Direction (how wrong I was…), etc. When I first accidentally stumbled across fic a couple years ago, I was absolutely floored at the quality of work these “amateur” writers were posting for free on the internet. No romance novels I was reading (or even movies I was watching) compared with some of my favorite long-form fics. I’ve gotten really militant in my support now because I think these writers deserve the recognition. I know people who think they know the depth of the community because of surface-level, unrepresentative encounters and completely shun it - and I get so heated when I talk about it. I’m not saying things never get harmful - because, like with anything, there are instances where it can, and I personally draw the line, too - but you can’t dismiss an entire realm of internet culture because you don’t agree writing about Jungkook and Taehyung as enemies-to-lovers characters in a made-up college is quote-unquote right. Sorry, I’m angry again, lol.
Ashley Cai, freelancer at The Pudding: I was fairly involved in fanfic communities when I was young, but recently became interested in it again because I discovered one of my best friends is an avid writer of Haikyuu fanfic(a volleyball anime of all men). For context, she is a lesbian who doesn’t play volleyball. Her obsession conflicted with my understanding of why people created and consumed fanfic, which sparked my curiosity and the pitch to The Pudding!
On another note, I’m glad you brought up the angle that “fanfic is heavily biased towards slash because there aren’t enough strong female protagonists, popular media is written for the male gaze, etc”. I think this is the most “excusable” reason for the disproportionately large quantity of slash fiction. Truthfully, I think there’s a taboo associated with non-men writing about men in a sexual way, and blaming the canon is an easy way to make the concept of fanfic palatable. But rather than faulting only sexual desire or the failings of the canon, by looking at the data, we can recognize that there are a lot of dimensions behind the production of fanfic (which is hopefully what our article is able to get at!).
What were some of the limitations of the data, and how did you attempt to acknowledge or address them?
Jan Diehm, Journalist-Engineer at The Pudding: First off, we were so incredibly lucky that preeminent AO3 data expert centreoftheselights allowed us to use their data. They have been scraping and collecting it for over a decade as a part-time passion project, and I’m really humbled and honored that we were able to build upon it. With their data, we knew we had a really solid baseline and we just needed to do some additional cleaning, organizing, and tagging.
Any time you are manually tagging data there’s an opportunity for implicit bias to creep in, so we flagged anything that we were super uncertain about and discussed as a team. Luckily, most of these people/characters were relatively well-known on the internet and there was some public knowledge about their demographics and how they personally identified.
I don’t think I would be doing this kind of manual tagging for non-famous people/characters with non-Google-able names. I’d draw a line. Even with “famous” people/characters, it can feel icky placing them into explicit boxes of identity, when most identity is fluid and operates in more of a spectrum. We try to acknowledge this in our methodology, even including a public data link:
Gender, race, and canon status were all evaluated by multiple people and cross checked, still this data has its limitations. Gender and race data is limited to a single point in time: how a character or person presently identifies, which does not account for the complexity and fluidity of gender and race or any historical changes. And, canon data is somewhat subjective based on personal interpretations of storylines. This is an imperfect method, but by categorizing these data points, we can see important societal and structural trends within fanfic. We recognize the responsibility that comes with this data. If you find any errors in the data please reach out (or leave a comment in the public Google Spreadsheet) and we will issue a correction.
Beyond demographic tagging, there were a couple of other points of contention:
What do you do if a ship started out non-canon, but then later moved to canon in the original storyline? Here we just added a “semi-canon” tag because it would have been nearly impossible to track down all the switches and the exact dates if/when their canon status changed.
We also created collapsed fandoms as needed for fictional universes with multiple offshoots like Star Wars: “Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)”, “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), “Star Wars Sequel Trilogy”, etc. Although the dedicated fanbase, might know the difference, a casual reader probably would not.
The raw number of fanfic counts would sometimes decrease from year to year, likely from authors removing their works or making them private, so for a lot of the year-over-year comparisons we used percentages instead of raw counts.
We also rounded the raw counts when we did use them, since there is a natural fluctuation of those numbers based on when the data itself was originally collected. We wanted those numbers to represent the general range of the corpus of works, but not the definitive number.
ALL data is messy, but we do the best we can to make sense of it!
I’ve been thinking a lot about how difficult it is to engage readers online with so many other spectacular pulls at our attention - and reading the essays on The Pudding manage to be both visually delightful while also offering me a different way into thinking about an issue, whether that issue is who gets shipped or abortion access.
How do you conceive of the place and role of this sort of data system in the information ecosystem moving forward? In other words, if we want more people to engage with journalism….should more journalism look like this?
Jan Diehm, Journalist-Engineer at The Pudding: I’ve sat under this question watching my cursor blink on the blank page for quite a while. It’s not necessarily a hard question to answer, but I think it just reverberates throughout my entire career. I started out as a newspaper page designer, back when that was a career you could have. In the first 10 years of my career, I worked for 8 different places and went through 3 layoffs. I was raised on the idea that journalism was some sort of noble profession, a higher calling. You were almost a martyr for the cause — you lost yourself and your identity because you were told you were supposed to repress them in the guise of objectivity. My theory on why traditional journalism is in decline is because we’ve removed a lot of humanity from it — both from the people doing the journalism and the people it’s trying to reach.
Maybe the best analogy is this: I get asked a lot about all the technical decisions behind some of my designs — how to choose color, or spacing, or typefaces — and I don’t really have a good answer for any of it. And neither does the average person. They can’t tell you the technical reasons behind why something resonates, but they can tell you the emotional ones. So, I’m less concerned about pixel perfect perfection, and more concerned about making deliberate decisions that help create visceral, emotional attachments to my pieces. The idea that you need to FEEL a piece — not simply read or watch it — to then learn from it, grow from it, and pass it on.
I think I’m less convinced that there will always, always be a platform and place for long-form visual data stories. Even in my 6 years at The Pudding we’ve seen our typical presentations change a ton, from just storytelling articles, to tappers, and videos, and audio. I’m not sure if it’s necessarily the medium that makes it cool, or just the feeling that we’ve tapped into something that’s just buried underneath the surface.
I would LOVE for there to be more journalism like this, but I’m not sure we’ll get there without blowing up a lot of the status quo. For example, here are some things I’ve done at The Pudding that would be discouraged at more traditional organizations:
Wrote myself into the story + centered queer experiences + animated Lil Nas X on a striper pole
Had a very clear stance on sexism and racism in country music
Used a data story about a meme to address racism during 2020
Sure, some people will say that this is “journalism with an agenda” or “activist journalism,” but if the agenda is treating all people with respect and dignity, making them feel seen and heard, and helping all of us to be a little bit more compassionate to the world around us, then sign me up!
Final impossible question: What’s your favorite piece on The Pudding?
Jan Diehm: I’m taking the easy road on this one and just saying the piece that I’m most internet famous for: Women’s Pockets are Inferior, where we hand measured 80 different pairs of men’s and women’s jeans to definitively prove how much smaller women’s pockets are… when they exist at all! The piece is going on 6 years old and I still get emails about it. My faves are from middle and high schoolers asking for interviews. Plus, my full name — first AND last — was mentioned on a podcast with Jonathan Van Ness, so maybe I’ve arrived.
Florina Sutanto: It’s definitely this J Dilla beat breakdown, I’ve shared it out more times than I can remember. I grew up playing classical piano (which typically has strict structured rhythms) but took up drums my last semester of college, where I was able to break those rules a little bit and get comfortable with syncopation. I love the way this piece tied in all the audiovisual elements; I feel like I’ve never seen anything like it.
Caitlyn Ralph: The first article I saw on The Pudding was Crowdsourcing the Definition of Punk by Matt Daniels. As a computer science major working full-time at a punk music magazine, it completely changed the trajectory of my career, quite literally - because I emailed Matt to be his summer intern shortly after. :)
Ashley Cai: This is a basic take, but my first encounter with The Pudding was How Bad Is Your Streaming Music? by Mike Lacher and Matt Daniels. I was so taken by its format (and offended by its output), and it absolutely changed the way I saw how web experiences could appear. ●
Go check out everything at The Pudding — and make sure you sign up for their newsletter (to be alerted of new stories) and check out their Patreon, where you can help make their work sustainable (and get behind-the-scenes looks at how stories come together).
Thank you so much for reading — and thank you to paid subscribers for making this post available to everyone. If you’re not already a paid subscriber and want access to the immersive weekly threads (When Did You First Feel Like *Yourself*?; What Do You Wish People Were More Curious About?; and of course What Are You Reading?) consider going paid — you also get the ability to comment on all posts, lurk in all the threads, and read all of links & recs & anything else I decide to paywall because it’s too personal. Join us!
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I’ve been directing grad students to The Pudding for a while now as super interesting examples of how to think about data. And of course it was another student who made me aware of them originally, via the pocket story!
I had never heard of The Pudding before, and I just lost half my day to the various rabbit holes. Not sure if my boss will be super excited about that, but I love it - thanks for the introduction!