Shabcast 41.5: Holly Explains Final Fantasy 7 to Jack, Part 5 - Closing Ruminations

The longest Shabcast ever - both in terms of its total running time and of how long it has taken to release - draws to a close.   In this final fantastic episode, Holly offers some closing remarks about texts, fan art, fan fiction, fantasy and its relationship to real action, play, etc.   As you might expect by now, these remarks are complex, thought-provoking, and challenging.  They take in matters of great delicacy, and even darkness and danger.  Touched upon in our final discussion are: the nature of fantasy, the line between the pornographic and non-pornographic, unregulated fan spaces, attempts to regulate them through community pressure, accusations and abuse in fandom, the safety of children to think through their development through fiction and gameplay, possible exploitation of young fans, good and bad faith in discussions of what is or isn't appropriate, the complexity of moral judgement and legality re representations of criminal and immoral acts, realism as ideology, the tension between exploration and normalisation, etc, etc. Some of this is knotty stuff so content warnings abound.