Episode 212: Fandom Truthiness

Fansplaining

In Episode 212, “Fandom Truthiness,” Elizabeth and Flourish break down the recent pair of (GREAT) video essays on James Somerton, a YouTuber known for queer (and often fandom-related) media analysis who’s been wholesale lifting passages from others’ articles and books—while playing fast and loose with the truth in his original writing. Somerton himself fed plenty of falsehoods into the fannish ecosystem, but how much of this is about a pattern of, to borrow Stephen Colbert’s phrase, fandom “truthiness,” which we can see far beyond a single bad actor? Plus: they read and respond to a pair of letters about Episode 210: “The RPF Tipping Point.”