00:10:05.800they post that on Archive of Our Own and then they they also post it sometimes on like SoundCloud
00:10:10.120so you can you can listen to it as if you were listening to like an audiobook or a podcast as
00:10:14.300well it reminds me of like radio shows absolutely radio shows you know yeah um you know I know a lot
00:10:20.900about the history of fan fiction because it was um part of my my PhD in media studies was we would
00:10:27.420always do like various weeks on the history like Henry Jenkins is someone who is very influential
00:10:33.340and like one of the first people to write very publicly about fan fiction but like how much do
00:10:40.100you think how do you think about the history and how the history like how canon how all of these
00:10:45.380things like how much it contributes to where we are now i know that's a huge question yeah but you
00:10:50.960can take that wherever you want i like what you said earlier about i love this thing so much i i
00:10:56.340need more of it i think that is like the history of fan fiction in a nutshell too is like a lot of
00:11:01.420people will say, oh, I could have started with, you know, everything's fan fiction. Like people
00:11:05.640do fan fiction of Virgil and things like that. But I think in the modern age, which I don't know,
00:11:11.080like 20th century, 21st century, these books and movies and TV shows that we see,
00:11:17.540people, individual people love the thing so much. They then seek out other people to connect about
00:11:26.460it and then maybe create transformative works about it i would say i always go to star trek
00:11:32.000because it was one of the first sort of like demonstrated or like remarkable fandoms where
00:11:37.360people really got together in person and also literally mailing things to each other yep and
00:11:43.160created fan fiction and transformative works around this piece of media that they loved so much
00:11:49.880and from there it sort of evolved along with the technology fan fiction has like a really a
00:11:55.340parallel journey from snail mail to early internet to like the modern era so you can kind of trace
00:12:03.220like the society and technology along with the history of fan fiction too so i love that about
00:12:09.100it you know we all kind of date the start of fanfic to star trek but there were like clubs
00:12:15.360around jane austen's books and sherlock holmes that were like mailing each other stories and
00:12:21.460things like that in the past yeah yeah and there's also um a term that i learned from doing the
00:12:27.480podcast called drawer fic which i've i have a hard time pronouncing the word drawer because i'm from
00:12:32.040philadelphia so um but drawer drawer drawer um where people would write fic and then just keep
00:12:40.320it to themselves it's and they would keep it in their drawer and so i think that's an important
00:12:44.180part of like the fanfic history and experience as well you know even though maybe no one else read
00:12:50.240it um the fact that people were always inspired to do that is is great and so we don't know about
00:12:56.680some of that but like that's something that definitely happened i know i know people who
00:12:59.820definitely wrote drawer fic well and also it's something that you learn as a young child like
00:13:04.420i don't know how many little short stories i've read by like some of the kids in my life about
00:13:09.320like iron man right like you know what i mean like you're like oh here's a character and sometimes
00:13:15.960they they learn of this character not even through like source text like they're too young to watch
00:13:22.360Iron Man but they have Iron Man the character in their lives through some you know representation
00:13:29.020or a figurine or whatever it is and you get to come up with a story about this person how fun
00:13:34.160yes like it's amazing yeah I also think the example of Star Trek is always like a useful
00:13:40.560one to think about because people are I think most people are familiar with some of like the
00:13:45.840base outlines of the text and also understand how there were a lot of constraints right so like you
00:13:51.000had a black character who didn't do anything right or you had other female characters who
00:13:56.700also didn't do anything and you had like this profoundly sexualized character who also like
00:14:02.900didn't really have I don't know like didn't have meaningful relationships that were satisfying I
00:14:08.660think too of most women viewers like what he wasn't like and like he was sexy but in the wrong
00:14:15.300way i don't know how else to describe kirk wait oh kirk i don't know oh emily's about to have an
00:14:21.000opinion i love james kirk y'all and i love no one can do a slash shirt like him like i know
00:14:28.340oh my god it's so real but like but not like i don't know like the whole the prevalence of
00:14:36.480fic that places him with spock always communicates to me like oh we want these sensitive men to like
00:14:42.660be sensitive with one another and then also maybe have sex with one another um as a treat0.87
00:14:47.720yeah as a treat well the thing is with that is like for a lot of assigned female birth folks
00:14:53.820and queer folks you know you don't really see media depictions that are um that capture the
00:14:58.600types of relationship you want or that you want to be part of and so it's just being able to take
00:15:03.280these characters which you see all the time and say man I wish they could express themselves this
00:15:08.320way because that's how I feel and so I think you're totally right like the character it's not
00:15:13.180that it's he's bad it's that there are things about it that are not um they're just not vibing
00:15:19.360with the way that we want to be or want to see ourselves and it's an idealized like version of
00:15:25.060reality really okay so are we ready for the questions oh my gosh we're so excited about the
00:15:30.840much. We are so ready. Okay, we are excited for this first question. Let's hear from Tina.
00:15:35.740I would like to see fanfic explored as a distinct genre of romance writing,
00:15:40.320with its own long, unique, and ever-evolving history and culture. A potential subtopic for
00:15:46.180discussion could be its strong culture of queerness, how many people writing it are
00:15:51.140queer women, the historic prominence of slash, and how and why it has been gradually mainstreamed.
00:15:57.240It's no longer so taboo, especially in a room of Gen Z folks, to admit you read it.
00:16:03.360But whatever you and your co-host come up with, I will avidly listen to.
00:16:07.840I have been reading fanfics since I was 13, and I'm now 40.
00:16:12.320I'm sure I'm far from your only listener with this kind of long personal history with the genre who would be thrilled at an episode on this topic.
00:16:20.860What did this comment slash question make you think about?
00:16:23.840Well, the amazing thing that I immediately thought of is that Archive of Our Own does a demographic survey of the people who write fic and submit it to them.
00:16:38.080and the 2024 survey obviously this is self-reported yeah you know but 81.4 percent of
00:16:47.340people identified as lgbtq plus in some form which is a huge number um and i think that
00:16:57.740it is such an important part of fanfic that often gets pushed to the side in a lot of mainstream
00:17:06.620discourse about it which is like oh it's just these like horny straight women they're just0.97
00:17:10.960writing about stuff but that's really not the story of fanfic to me and I I think obviously0.53
00:17:17.060to many of the people who are writing on AO3 at least for me it was a gateway for me to
00:17:25.160understand my own queerness and to like explore aspects of that before I was ready to do it
00:17:31.980in real life. And also the community building aspect of it, it has put me in touch with a lot
00:17:39.120more queer people, because we have a similar shared interest. Now, admittedly, being in the
00:17:45.240Our Flag Means Death fandom, which is explicitly a queer show is a little bit different than a lot
00:17:49.700of fanfic, which is queering shows or other media, which is explicitly not queer. And that has
00:17:56.760honestly been a pretty refreshing experience for a lot of us i think oh i bet i bet um instead of
00:18:02.660like looking for queerness and trying to fit it in there it's been really exciting to be able to
00:18:09.600write about canon queer characters um and to also have like the support of the uh the showrunner
00:18:16.720and the actors not only the support the purchase yeah the excitedness of it yeah our the uh the
00:18:24.440show creator wrote some fanfic for the show on blue sky over christmas for us to read for us to
00:18:31.440read uh which is a pretty unique experience in fandom i think yeah but so yeah that that's where
00:18:37.340that goes for me is how important fanfic is to people who are queer who are interested in this
00:18:44.220as a playground to explore things and also for people who are not queer but maybe are thinking
00:18:50.940about their their straight sexuality and wondering about it it's still a great place to explore
00:18:55.540things that maybe you would not do in real life but you want to know about it you want to write
00:19:01.040about it and think about it yeah emily do you have anything that that makes you think of i would say
00:19:06.100yeah i'm looking at the question too like in terms of like the genre of romance writing right so i
00:19:10.740think one of the things that v and i have talked about a lot just you know ourselves like obviously
00:19:15.780people can write romance and publish it and there's that traditional publishing aspect of it
00:19:20.540where you go through channels to get your book edited and published and put it out there on the
00:19:25.520market. And then the fan fiction side of it is this really primarily gift culture, sort of non-capitalist
00:19:34.360and also very participatory avenue for writing. And it's just a really unique way to engage with
00:19:41.880writing. And you're also getting immediate feedback from readers, which is really kind of
00:19:47.720different than traditional publishing as well which I think to V's point helps create that
00:19:52.980community of people who share interests and want to explore things and also just have fun together
00:19:59.260too like that's part of it it's like you know you don't have it has stuff doesn't have to be
00:20:02.740super serious but it can be serious and like like V was saying too like I definitely as a kid was
00:20:10.320reading fan fiction because I was like I don't know I'm I don't see myself in these mainstream
00:20:14.960stories. I'm confused about where I fit into this. How do I, you know, can I explore this?
00:20:20.800And fan fiction was a way to help me like process that really. And so I think people do that a lot
00:20:27.080and comment on fics and engage with each other that way, which is, I think, a little different
00:20:31.220than how traditional like published genres work in some ways. Yeah, there's so many things I want
00:20:38.300to pick up here. The first is that I always think back on my time in my growing up in my small town
00:20:42.980in idaho about how there just weren't very many like representations of ways to be in the world
00:20:49.880that were available to me not only just in like the people i knew in real life but also even just
00:20:55.400in like the access i had to movies like i just had the very we didn't even have a blockbuster
00:21:00.260until i was in high school like they're you know limited television like i access the internet
00:21:05.800through aol and when i think about like the version of fanfic that i knew how to access i
00:21:10.760knew how to get to like bolt some bbs's but like a lot of it was role-playing in aol oh yeah chat
00:21:17.580rooms chat rooms right yes it was so good yeah yeah yeah um but then also just the idea i think
00:21:30.040for a lot of us in our 30s who have like job jobs and maybe have tried to figure out like okay
00:21:37.360what do I do for me like what is my hobby and I don't mean to like use that word in a demeaning
00:21:43.780way like what is the thing I do without monetizing it that I do because I love it yeah and I think
00:21:49.500that it can be a real outlet in those in those terms where there isn't this push to always be
00:21:54.600like okay well if I'm good at it then I have to figure out how to like sell this book right yeah
00:21:59.380that's a that's a big tension though that I felt like I um this is like a tangent but I would always
00:22:05.180often talk to my parents be like oh I just published this fan I do tell my parents I write
00:22:09.460fan fiction which I know I know not everyone does but I don't well that's great they would say
00:22:15.240they would say oh that's great when are you gonna publish a real like when are you gonna really
00:22:19.200publish something and I'm like right I am like you know it doesn't have to we don't always have
00:22:25.380to produce like and achieve what we've you know society thinks that's the end goal I will say
00:22:32.380though of course there's nothing wrong with like get getting published and like having your book
00:22:36.620out there and traditional publishing of course like there's that's great but i think for fan
00:22:41.440fiction it's not only about kind of making the work and putting it out there it's about that
00:22:47.120community aspect and and also it takes again some of that pressure off um which we don't need any
00:22:53.460more pressure um yeah these times so this is our fun hobby that we do for fun yeah i say that all
00:23:01.160the time when people are stressed about their pick people say this all the time actually in
00:23:05.700my dahlia group um my dahlia facebook group because it's like very can get very intense
00:23:10.340and people like hunting for special varietals they're like you guys these are fancy potatoes
00:23:15.340like this is our fun hobby that we're having fun let's touch grass aka touch potatoes yes
00:23:22.680sometimes it's type two fun but we're having fun yes
00:23:25.740this episode of culture study is brought to you by graza it's actually been my favorite olive oil
00:23:34.100for a little while like several years it's fresh it's never blended it comes from a single type of
00:23:40.140olive the piqual straight out of hayin spain where over half the world's olive oil is produced
00:23:46.420my favorite thing is the squeeze bottle like this is the innovation to end all innovations
00:23:52.060who thought like oh we have this giant lug of olive oil and every time you use it it goes like
00:23:59.540dribbling all down the side the squeeze bottle is so pleasurable to use you know exactly how
00:24:06.580much you're gonna there's no like glug glug glug as it like pours out and you're like oh no
00:24:11.060and they have three types so there's this frizzle type which is new and I use it to
00:24:16.580do my tofu now. And it is perfect. It's at a higher 490 degree smoke point. So it's great
00:24:22.740for frying, crisping, anything that you would do in a wok. There's the sizzle, which is for
00:26:40.200And there are a ton of authors right now who have straight up said, I also publish fanfic.
00:26:50.460So like Evarina Maxwell, Freya Marsky, Foz Meadows.
00:26:54.660Another great example is Tamsyn Moore, who wrote the Gideon IX series. There's obvious references to fanfic in that series, which is kind of like a fantasy sci-fi hybrid.
00:27:09.580That being said, in the last few years, there have been several mainstream romance novels which are based on Reylo fics.
00:27:22.500So Reylo is Rey slash Kylo Ren from the Star Wars sequels.
00:27:27.860The two biggest romance books based on those are The Love Hypothesis by Allie Hazelwood and The Hurricane Wars by Thea Guanzon.
00:27:36.400and both of those were originally fixed that were then traditionally published so that particular
00:27:45.100pairing um seems to be popular and then similarly the the drameone pairing i'm not sure if i'm
00:27:52.540pronouncing that right if we ever read it but it's like draco pronunciation now drameone drameone
00:27:59.180it's not like dramium like like like you know the anti-nausea drug yeah the dramamine um fanfic
00:28:06.780is very popular but both both of those ships i would classify as being like kind of like a
00:28:14.600a heathcliff type like dark tortured guy and then more of like a nerdy but powerful1.00
00:28:22.880like woman who can be relatable to the reader right melody you've read a bunch of dromiany
00:28:30.940dramamine i've read one i heard it was so many it was like 800 pages so that's what you meant
00:28:39.740but was it the famous one it was manacled oh yeah there we go and melody is a she's a um
00:28:45.940a huge romance reader uh what did you notice if anything about like how it was borrowing
00:28:52.580any tropes that you would recognize from romance oh I'm sorry I'm putting you on the spot yeah I
00:29:00.160didn't prepare you um you can think about it for a second while I know quickly that something that
00:29:04.940I'm just noticing thinking about like tags and how like how fics are sorted is what I've noticed
00:29:12.580has become much more prominent within romances which is like the very clear like sorting by
00:29:19.120tropes yeah signaling what it is yes very like being like here is the how this opens here's how
00:29:24.420this opens like you can you can really refine what you're looking for and sort it in a way that
00:29:30.300i don't think was always possible but melody back to you okay i'm gonna actually twist the question
00:29:36.060just a little bit um in that i follow a lot of bookstagrammers and tiktokers who cover romance
00:29:44.060and all of them are talking about i pronounce it dromione oh that makes way more sense
00:29:52.600they're like and especially like right i read manacled maybe like two years ago but right now
00:30:00.940like all of these creators are like i'm only reading germany right now wow and so i think
00:30:07.500there's this element of like it's a comfortable universe it's like nostalgic for childhood
00:30:12.860but it's inherently an enemies to lovers type trope um and with that comes with the comfort of
00:30:22.820like something you thought was evil is no longer evil but i don't i don't think these creators like
00:30:29.780broadly read fan fiction so there is like something where it's like oh yeah i read like
00:30:35.380allie hazelwood i read megan quinn or whoever and i'm also reading specifically germiney fan
00:30:41.680fiction it's so containment yeah i think it's also like a strong element of like i can fix him
00:30:48.140you know like that's an everlasting trope yes i think romance and fanfic have like a symbiotic
00:30:55.280relationship in a way because when I think about fan fiction tropes and so when we think tropes is0.54
00:31:01.060kind of a fanficy word like tv tropes so yeah tv tropes so you know enemies to lovers idiots to
00:31:07.180lovers my favorite categories that you would place mostly relationships in and I think a lot of
00:31:13.840romance novels use those tropes and a lot of people a lot of those tropes are sort of like
00:31:19.020universally exciting to people and so we borrow them from from romance which isn't to say that
00:31:24.940we read romance necessarily but certainly like the the story arcs of a lot of romance novels
00:31:30.740will follow similar arcs as fan fiction does and I think it's because those tropes are
00:31:35.420kind of universal in a way they like relate across media right and that that makes sense
00:31:42.460to me that they would then like this like I wish I can fix him type of thing is so real
00:31:47.080the other thing that I was just thinking of is that the other thing that I've seen pop up is
00:31:51.780acotar fan fiction yeah and so i think it very much goes to what we were talking about at the
00:31:55.720beginning of the episode of like there is this world that i can't stop thinking about and i just
00:32:00.100want more out of it yeah i i think one final point i want to add on that is that it's interesting to
00:32:06.880me that romance is largely going with these straight ships whereas sci-fi fantasy is going
00:32:15.400with the queer ships and and that that's just an interesting observation that i have to say
00:32:21.600i don't have further thought on it but i wanted to note it yeah well one thing about the akatar
00:32:26.200fanfic at least as far as i know melody is that a lot of it actually is queer because there is no
00:32:30.480queerness in the books explicit queerness and there's also like it's very monogamous like
00:32:35.360there's a place in one of the books where it's very clear that two of the guys should have sex
00:32:40.740with one of the girls like that they should have a threesome and like and supposedly there's like
00:32:45.700lost pages and those lost pages have been reimagined but like and that the ones i've
00:32:52.580read are all like filthy like five people in a hot tub nice kind of thing so yes yeah yeah yeah
00:33:01.300um okay next question is somewhat related and also i think will help us get into the conversation
00:33:06.440about public perception this one comes from rayanne as someone who started in the fanfic
00:33:11.680world, and only recently got into romance, fanfiction feels like it gets more flack?
00:33:39.620the question of all questions oh man man this is a good question though i mean
00:33:48.960so i think both romance and fan fiction have been stigmatized out in the in the world because
00:33:57.280in my opinion it's mostly because it's afab and queer folks who are gravitating towards these
00:34:03.720things you want to read romance and you want to read and write fan fiction and the afab and queer
00:34:09.260experience in our society isn't super uh valued and is often denigrated and so i think just
00:34:17.680inherently the fact that ladies like my mom literally reads romance i see like the stacks0.95
00:34:24.100on her dresser and i can just picture certain people in society saying oh these ladies in
00:34:29.440their romance like oh my goodness you know and it's it's almost like it goes back to jane austen
00:34:33.780like now we think of jane austen books as these you know great works literature which they are
00:34:38.140But they, I think, probably had a similar thing where they're about romantic relationships and they're not about, you know, some dude actualizing himself on the sea.
00:37:05.340They were written by men. And that was just such a stark contrast to me.
00:37:10.800Personally, I do not share my real name or tell people in my public life that I write fanfic.
00:37:18.020It's not really a big deal to me. But like Emily was saying, sometimes you just don't want people
00:37:24.560to make those assumptions about you. I want to have a space to experiment that the people I
00:37:30.520manage at work for example don't know about you know right so yes yes no that totally makes sense
00:37:37.980and I think like there are a lot of the assumptions that people make are based on like
00:37:42.500like a paragraph that they read somewhere sometime right like not firsthand experiences
00:37:47.880at all when people say like oh the writing is bad I'm like have you read most non-fiction works
00:37:54.100like just generally like there is very little editing that goes on in most of the quote-unquote
00:38:00.500legitimate publishing world like i think that the writing is significantly better in so many cases
00:38:05.360yeah um or even like the idea that every single fic is like absolute like it's just all porn
00:38:10.820right exactly right yep which i think is very prevalent and yeah there's some hot sexy stuff
00:38:16.820but it's not every single that's certainly not all of it yeah well um and even if it is i think
00:38:23.480like in america there's this kind of and this is just my experience there's this kind of purity
00:38:30.320thing where we're like well we mustn't literature mustn't talk about the naughty bits like you know
00:38:35.040and it's like you know i think human sexuality is really cool and interesting and like really fun
00:38:40.220and and i think it's awesome to be able to explore that because we don't really get a lot of avenues
00:38:45.860in our society especially as you know i identify as a woman i'm afab and i wasn't encouraged to
00:38:53.220talk about sexuality as a you know growing up and so the fact that we can access that in fan fiction
00:38:59.320which again I'm not not to say that you can't talk about it in traditional publishing but
00:39:04.280there's certainly a lot of steps and hoops to jump through in order to kind of have those
00:39:09.380discussions that maybe don't really exist in fan fiction because you can literally write and push
00:39:14.180post immediately you know yeah and yeah and think about how much literary fiction is like men writing
00:39:21.400these sex scenes about women that are you know and those are considered like that's the height of
00:39:26.920literary fiction i've read some bad ones yes absolutely um whereas it's like considered
00:39:35.840illegitimate for women to write these things and to read these things um but it's like high
00:39:41.860literature if a man is writing it so yeah yeah that's that's changing somewhat but i i agree
00:39:48.640with emily that there is definitely this feeling that you can't have like real character development
00:39:53.320or like real real plot movement through sex which i think all of us who are alive understand that a
00:40:01.360lot of character development and plot development occurs because of that for ourselves so yeah it
00:40:06.500feels like these books are just or or whatever media is just missing this chunk of the human
00:40:12.500experience because of some like weird morality rules yeah okay this next question is kind of
00:40:18.760along these lines and it comes from Peel and I very I wanted to include it because of my history
00:40:25.000as an academic so here we go. This is more of a comment I suppose. I feel like when academics
00:40:30.520talk about fan fiction it is quite alienating and judgy in many cases. Usually there's no one
00:40:37.320involved who's ever been in fandom or if they have they have since stopped writing or participating
00:40:42.360and tend to be quite ashamed about it. Why do you think that people approach the specific topic
00:40:47.080this way is it because the reputation is that this is for teenage girls for the record many
00:40:52.920of the people i write with are adults who've been doing this for years or even decades all right so
00:40:58.600we gestured to this in the beginning that like ao3 has an academic journal yeah and i i will
00:41:04.480just say that my experience when i was back in the academy there was an emerging field called
00:41:10.680aka fandom oh aka fandom which is a horrible i don't know if i love it it sounds like an
00:41:18.460insurance company or something i don't know yes yeah yeah uh but that was trying to suggest that
00:41:24.760there is real power in being a practitioner of the thing that you study and to collapse some of
00:41:30.740the the understanding that like whatever you are analyzing that you have to have this significant
00:41:35.940can distance from it in some way. So what is your experience with this?
00:41:40.300I actually had one answer until you said that last bit about collapsing the experience.
00:41:46.500My background is that I have a higher degree in anthropology. And of course, a long standing
00:41:54.300debate in anthropology is, are you actually an observer of these subjects? Or are you not? And
00:42:01.180I think we're all coming down hard on the side of you are not just an observer, there is no such
00:42:04.980thing as an objective observer sorry to the victorians there is not um but i i was a little
00:42:12.660surprised to hear that question because fan studies is actually like a pretty active and
00:42:18.020flourishing field in academia yeah so i i'm sort of wondering like what what type of academia that
00:42:23.920person was thinking of um through the r flag fandom i have met several people who are academics
00:42:30.700and fan studies who like write about that fandom and participate in the fandom and it's kind of
00:42:37.300interesting to hear them talk about like how do i separate out my persona that i'm like teaching my
00:42:42.920students or presenting at a conference or publishing a paper and then also this persona
00:42:47.480where i'm like screaming about this behind the scenes video or something yeah so i maybe there
00:42:54.260are some corners of academia that are very dismissive of it i'm sure there are i'm sure
00:42:59.680we all have a picture in our head right now of what that person looks like but in general i think
00:43:05.020that there is a flourishing field of academia full of fans who are also studying what it's like to be
00:43:11.820a fan i would say that that that mirrors my experience in terms of the people who are in
00:43:17.600fan studies are not talking shit about it right it's people who are in the other corners of media
00:43:23.920who are like still studying somehow like mid-century French cinema who are who are talking0.94
00:43:31.680shit right because they don't think of that corner of the discipline as legitimate I would also say
00:43:37.360that some of these people are probably English PhDs I know a lot I love a lot of English PhDs0.94
00:43:44.000but there is some shittiness on the part of people who think that media studies do not belong under
00:43:48.600the umbrella of English as a discipline. So yeah, I think so. I went to college for writing and
00:43:55.040publishing and literature. And I don't think fan fiction was very welcome in that major at my
00:44:02.160college because it just they people love to put things into silos and boxes. Yeah. And so fan
00:44:09.780fiction doesn't fit into the box of traditional writing because it doesn't follow the same steps
00:44:14.460and all these, you know, this, that, and the other thing. And so I don't know if it was hostile
00:44:20.180necessarily, but certainly I didn't, you know, I couldn't talk about my fan fiction writing in my
00:44:25.600writing workshops. I had to talk about original work because that's the real writing. So I think
00:44:29.880the English PhD piece, I don't think, you know, every English PhD, but certainly people who are
00:44:37.080really used to one way of producing literature and writing and that's kind of the way yeah you
00:44:45.280know it's a conflict because fan fiction doesn't really ascribe to a lot of those rules and i think
00:44:51.220that's just inherently what it really is but i think people who study media um really get it
00:44:57.760because fan fiction is like writing fan fiction is like the ultimate sign that you are like so
00:45:05.100excited about media. And like, so that's a great person to look at when you're talking about media
00:45:09.300and like thinking about media studies. Yeah. Yeah. And who are like very invested in thinking and
00:45:15.500talking about that thing too. Like, I mean, part of this is just also a divide between people who
00:45:20.300are only interested in the creation of the thing and the thing as itself, right? Like it's a
00:45:25.180discrete item. And then people who are very interested in how people make meaning out of
00:45:29.760that thing yes it's a broadly understood as like reception studies and for me that's always been
00:45:35.700more interesting the production part is is interesting in terms of like a process piece
00:45:40.560but then like the various ways that the thing takes on a life of its own once it goes out into
00:45:46.940the world like that's endless right there's so many iterations yeah and I think there's also
00:45:52.000like I don't know if it's I don't know who decides this but somehow culture and society decides what
00:45:57.400is like high art and what's just for everybody else and everyone's having fun and like those
00:46:01.680things that everyone's just having fun and watching are somehow not really worthy of
00:46:06.740this like right this you know studying and things like that and it's like no we can talk
00:46:11.520about the marvel universe like that's fine you know it's it's it's also driving our culture
00:46:15.740it's driving culture it's human experiences but i think for some reason like i don't know
00:46:19.840you could see like the sopranos at one point probably wasn't and now all of a sudden with
00:46:24.180enough years it's like cross the threshold into this like high like thing that people are writing
00:46:28.860you know dissertations about and stuff I I think there's this weird like separation between what
00:46:34.420folks consider to be worthy of study and not you know yep yeah I mean like novels were originally
00:46:40.940just silly things that women read scribbling women right scribbling women uh yeah no and I
00:46:47.040think that that like the the opinion even that like popular culture shouldn't be studied is one0.90
00:46:52.340that is retiring and or dead but there are still some people who hold on to that view
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00:49:05.460our next question i am so excited to think about this one because it's an overlap of my interest
00:49:13.540in like celebrity studies and all of this so let's hear from beth what are your thoughts on
00:49:19.520romance novels that are based on celebrity fan fiction i explained to my husband that there are
00:49:24.060many many adam driver romance novels out there and he was flabbergasted why do you think this
00:49:29.200has happened how do you think it feels for the celebrities that are used as characters
00:49:32.960and should we care about how they feel about it such a good question the the thing that i should
00:49:38.720mention first is that um the idea of you is supposedly there's a lot of controversy about
00:49:45.620this it's supposedly harry styles and like olivia wilde fanfic um i love not olivia wilde just harry
00:49:55.200styles and a normie oh and mary self-insert yeah but also like older like olivia wilde like i think
00:50:02.460that there's like some olivia wilde similarities going on here but yes you're right no you're right
00:50:07.660melody i love that this that beth said at the end should we care about that yeah and it's also going
00:50:16.460to bring up one of my favorite apocryphal george clooney stories because i cannot find it anywhere
00:50:22.220but i remember it vividly which was like some interviewer asking if he cared about celebrity
00:50:28.620gossip that he was gay and he was like why wouldn't I want people to believe that if it
00:50:34.080made them happy that's great George like why I don't care yeah like if that if that gives someone
00:50:44.060pleasure to like live that reality in their lives it's not offensive to me yeah but that I've always
00:50:50.200thought of as like the way that a celebrity should think about any of the ways that people imagine
00:50:55.740their lives or their characters lives or anything like that but what do you think yeah so the
00:51:00.600question is it kind of is like oh romance novels based on fan fiction about but so it's really like
00:51:05.060um i think you can identify in certain romance novels oh this probably is about the celebrity
00:51:10.120but in fan fiction there is a very real thing called real person fan fiction yeah um and it
00:51:15.600is on archive of her own you can go on there and you can look up fan fiction about actual real
00:51:20.880celebrities. And actually, there is a huge movement in band-dom, which is fandom about
00:51:27.240bands, a lot of K-pop bands and other things where they write fan fiction about this, you know,
00:51:33.400musicians and singers in the band. And it's something that is a little, it's, people feel
00:51:38.460differently about it, depending on who you ask in fandom. But I think what we often see is that
00:51:43.540celebrities aren't really real people in terms of, I know you and I talk to you on the, you know,
00:51:50.460in our house and I talked to you about your interests they're sort of these archetypes
00:51:54.640and characters that are part of our media landscape and they're not necessarily
00:52:00.680three-dimensional in many ways unless you're really you know you know this person and you're
00:52:06.360really into that person and know everything about them but it's hard to know other people in that
00:52:10.100way period and celebrities are so far removed from many of us that they do feel like I don't
00:52:15.040know I don't want to say superheroes because that's like giving them too much but like they're
00:52:19.060they're like fictional characters they do images right and there's a distance between like who the
00:52:25.160celebrity is as a person who like goes to the bathroom and like lives a life right like and
00:52:31.700then there's like their their image which is a very carefully curated understanding of who they
00:52:36.460are yes and i think that what people are making these fictions about they are based on that image
00:52:43.780they're not based on like this is not you don't write a fanfic about like oh i went to high school
00:52:49.040with i don't know harry styles and thus i know him and here's my story that i'm writing about him
00:52:54.840um and i always think too about the fan magazines used to have um so many different stories that
00:53:02.120were always written by press agents uh and said to be authored by the star itself so it would be
00:53:07.580like marilyn monroe writing a story about like what kind of wife she was and really those are
00:53:13.460like it's like the press agent writing a fanfic about the image of marilyn monroe because it was
00:53:20.240based on what they wanted the public to understand her to be right it was never actually marilyn
00:53:26.960monroe writing any of those words or saying any of those things so people are always building
00:53:32.720like imaginary understandings of who these people are it's just the their their faces and the way
00:53:38.460that they behave in their movies and all of that sort of thing like that becomes the source material
00:53:42.100Yeah. And there's always a performance aspect of being a celebrity, especially if it's an actor or a musician. You're putting yourself out there. I'm thinking of Harry Styles and the way he – Harry Styles, like, by way of David Bowie, who – David Bowie literally created characters that he portrayed, and he dressed up in certain ways to align with that.
00:54:00.660And so that is like a heightened version of what actually happens all the time, where celebrities are these kind of like distinct characters sometimes.
00:54:08.420Now, that said, it's totally fine if people are like, I'm not really comfortable with real person fan fiction.
00:54:15.420But I definitely have tried to kind of think of it that way as people just playing around with these characters that they see on their TV screens and on their phones constantly.
00:54:25.740now the thing that gets tricky is when you confront celebrities and say look at this
00:54:31.700thing somebody wrote about you that is a big no-no and in fandom one of the things that we
00:54:37.580really try to do is make sure that it's like because when you're confronting people with
00:54:42.780that kind of thing it it puts the celebrity on the spot and also kind of denigrates like the fan
00:54:48.160and just yes that's something that i think is clear for me anyway of like the kind of a hard
00:54:53.300line but I think people just are seeing celebrities all the time and they're fascinated by them and
00:54:59.040they want to like kind of play around and see what would happen if they went to the coffee shop and
00:55:03.560met a cute boy you know yeah so and the cute boy was Harry Styles yes yeah no that last point about
00:55:11.860um the ethics essentially of like you know I've seen it happen in like junkets where they're like
00:55:17.820let me read this segment of this steamy fic to you and it's it is it's condescending i think it's
00:55:24.600exploitative of both the celebrity and trying to get their reaction and of the writer um and i think
00:55:30.400that it's one of those things that people just don't think that much about yeah before they do
00:55:34.840it and if you did think about it for longer than five minutes then you you might have a different
00:55:40.120reaction to it yeah i'm super excited for this one because i know you guys have done specific
00:55:44.540episodes on this. So this is about a specific corner of fanfiction that comes from Scout.
00:55:49.880I'm really interested in delving deeper into the genre of AU alternate universe fanfic. I think
00:55:56.900that AU lends itself better to some series than others. So for example, I read a lot of Interview
00:56:02.540with the Vampire fanfic, but I specifically avoid AU fanfics that are too far removed from the
00:56:08.700original setting for that series because I find the concept of them being vampires directly impacts
00:56:14.180of how they move about the world and informs the characters worldview etc so i find without that
00:56:19.580key element that characters are just not as interesting to me and don't feel as much like
00:56:24.520i'm reading a story about these characters i know and love whereas i love reading au fig for a series
00:56:31.100like bridgerton can your guests speak a little bit to why they think the au phenomenon is so
00:56:36.760common in fan fiction and why it works for some things but not for others okay so can one of you
00:56:43.380explain just briefly what au fanfic is yeah au stands for alternate universe so to take a very
00:56:52.200simple example i think everyone will know you want to read or write some harry potter fanfiction
00:56:57.120and you decide in this universe they're not wizards there's no magic and so that is the
00:57:06.680alternate universe that these characters are now existing in we did an entire hour-long episode
00:57:13.540about this on our show which by the way is called mind the tags that episode is called the multiverse
00:57:19.780of fanfic but that's a really fun question i am not very familiar with interview with the vampire
00:57:26.160i mean i know the the basics of it but i can see how taking them out of the vampire setting
00:57:32.280um would fundamentally very much alter those characters yeah whereas for harry potter
00:57:39.480fanfic i think a lot of people the magic is pretty incidental to what they're interested
00:57:46.200in about those characters um and so part of it is to me i think if you have a creator who
00:57:55.480is clearly interested in like world building or in the implications of the setting that they've
00:58:03.300put these characters in or if the characters don't really make sense in a modern setting
00:58:09.460or not modern but in in an alternate setting then in that case it might not work like my
00:58:16.020understanding is that an interview with the vampire they do a lot of like killing each other
00:58:19.600and having really toxic relationships so that seems like that would be tougher to translate
00:58:25.400into like they work at a coffee shop together kind of story i like that you point out that like
00:58:31.360some people like they have more interest or pleasure in something like world building so
00:58:35.660part of it is almost like it's an experiment to see okay what happens yeah when i do that yeah
00:58:41.160yeah yeah and like star wars i think is a good example of that where the star wars universe is
00:58:47.100like so vast there's so many places to tell stories there that honestly you could write a
00:58:54.040story set in the star wars universe where they work in a coffee shop and they just serve like
00:58:57.760blue milk lattes or whatever but when you get to interview with the vampire or similar fix like
00:59:04.140that or thinking of like game of thrones a lot of those characters also uh act in ways that would
00:59:10.020not be acceptable if they worked in a coffee shop um so taking them out of that setting might be
00:59:15.000difficult to maintain the integrity of the characterization um yeah i do you have anything
00:59:22.320you want to add to that emily yeah i think it's the translatability of the characters because in
00:59:28.780interview the vampire for example one of the things about louis is that how does he deal with
00:59:33.100being a vampire like that's one of the central questions of his character and the interesting
00:59:37.380thing so that i think is like one of the driving parts of the character so i would understand if
00:59:42.880someone's like yeah i'm interested in that versus maybe an alternate reality where he's you know
00:59:48.200hanging out and i don't know working in a movie theater but i think for some characters it's more
00:59:54.880about learning about themselves building relationships with other people their identity
00:59:59.660and that that can be in any universe you can plop them into truly anywhere um famously in
01:00:05.900our fandom we have you know our pirates are all over the place they're aliens they're on spaceships
01:00:11.440they're doing you know they're world-class musicians they're rock stars and it's all the
01:00:16.020same story and the same characters of you know discovering things about themselves and making
01:00:20.860connections and as long as you feel like the character is recognizable in whatever universe
01:00:26.920they're in that's kind of what what sort of builds it for people um but i i totally think that there
01:00:32.280are some media properties that lend themselves to that and some that are more very very place-based
01:00:37.760and based in that universe yeah okay so our last question is for all of you who are listening who
01:00:43.480are like i've got to get into this or i used to be into this and i want to get back into it this
01:00:48.360one comes from casey as a tween and young teen i was a voracious consumer of harry potter fanfic
01:00:54.300during the heyday of the early 2000s internet and then i just sort of stopped seeking it out
01:00:59.540my question is if i want to get back into it where are we going these days to find the good stuff
01:01:04.860By which I mean quality writing and delightfully insane but somehow plausible plot lines.
01:01:10.040I think a lot of my big feelings about seeking out sources of fanfic again are wrapped up in my general unease about the way that being online feels today.
01:01:18.680And a nostalgia slash yearning for the way that surfing and reading online used to feel before social media.
01:01:24.960Like the internet, TM, was this big amazing world full of wonders to discover.
01:01:29.580And so second question, do you think that reading fanfic again can help me and other
01:01:34.240former AOL chatroom kids time machine back to the better feelings that we had about being
01:01:54.280and actually um there are more back in the day it was very siloed like me was saying like you
01:02:00.580were on an individual websites where you could find fic about this particular thing now it's
01:02:05.440it's wide open which kind of seems like scary in a way but archive of our own or ao3 is like
01:02:11.100i would say the biggest repository and definitely the most notable place where fan fiction is and
01:02:16.820you can filter your journey you can really get all any fic that you specifically want about these
01:02:24.740characters and this trope you can really filter it down to exactly what you want and so even though
01:02:30.220it's really big there's ways to make it so that it's um you know catered to what you want as well
01:02:35.680i want to throw in that on archive ever own if you are overwhelmed for choice you can also sort
01:02:41.520by how many hits this uh fanfic has received to see how popular it is or there's also something
01:02:48.800called kudos which is how many people have said i liked this and so you can sort by either of those
01:02:54.640so if you're looking to start out you're like hey i love molder and scully you can search for
01:03:00.380i want to look at x-files fandom that specifically has the pairing molder and scully and i want to
01:03:05.120see the top kudos so the most liked fanfics in this genre yeah there's tons of ways to parse it
01:03:11.640and again it's like it can be a little overwhelming but but so much of it is in one place which is
01:03:17.620really nice because before you'd have to go running around looking for it i will say that
01:03:21.140ao3 or archive everyone is a project of the organization for transformative works so
01:03:25.880otw is what kind of runs ao3 they also run other things um and then there's other sites as well so
01:03:32.820V mentioned fanfiction.net, which is still up and running. God bless. And then there's also
01:03:37.840Wattpad, which I don't really, I've never really like explored, but a lot of people put fanfiction
01:03:43.400on Wattpad now. Um, I would say there's also original fiction, a lot of original fiction on
01:03:49.300Wattpad and other things. So it might be like a little bit more challenging to find. I'm not
01:03:53.600totally sure. And then in terms of like the social media internet of it all. Yeah. I feel
01:04:00.580like fandom has lived on tumblr for a long time certainly since live journal kind of went by the
01:04:07.600wayside and for a while i thought tumblr was dead but she is alive y'all she's out here thriving
01:04:12.900okay so get get you to the tumblr you know it's out here and it's still very much a fandom like
01:04:20.380fandom friendly place where you can find a lot of things i think and yeah um a lot of us in fandom
01:04:26.060now have our own discord servers and that's where we are convening and talking about fan fiction
01:04:31.600and talking about other things and so you can kind of poke around and find out if fandoms that
01:04:36.680you're interested in might have like a little discord server to join yeah and and depending
01:04:41.540on your fandom it might also have a big presence on tiktok or instagram um our fandom has a really
01:04:47.920big presence on blue sky now so it it might be a little dependent on what your fandom is
01:04:53.500But I think that Tumblr and AO3 are great places to start.
01:04:58.240Does AO3, you know, anytime I hear about like the conglomeration, for lack of a better word, of a lot of individual contributors into one space, like, it always just makes me very wary, right?
01:05:23.360Yeah. So OTW is a nonprofit, but it's pretty much all volunteers. And a lot of them, there's a ton of people involved. So that kind of immediately takes away like, oh, it's just this one person kind of thing. Although, of course, there's like people leading it and stuff. But one of the things that AO3, I think, struggles with is that they really try not to censor. They don't come in here and say, well, this FIC is appropriate and this isn't and this is not.
01:05:47.300And that has been challenging because there have been folks who say, hey, there's some problematic stuff up here.
01:05:55.400And AFTW, I think, always has had the position like, we're not going to police what's going on up here.
01:06:02.240The users, in a way, are kind of doing that.
01:06:06.380Like you can report things and certainly.
01:06:08.780So I think they've tried to have a distanced approach to trying to tell people what to do and things like that.
01:06:16.640But it's it's definitely led to some concerns. I know in 2020, for example, there was a lot of concerns raised about how AO3 doesn't have a lot of filters for racist material and content and that there's some things out there that maybe could be really problematic and harmful.
01:06:31.380And I think OTW has always been very slow moving purposefully because they don't want to come across as we're going to gatekeep fan fiction now.
01:06:39.720you know it's supposed to be a very open archive of fan fiction and its main purpose is as an
01:06:46.020archive not as like a curated space is that right right so it's an archive not a platform which
01:06:53.500leads to some of the the difficulties that totally makes sense yeah i was gonna say i feel like they
01:06:58.980face a lot of the same censorship questions that every social media network every place that has
01:07:06.380multiple contributors are facing and continue to struggle with um and yeah we should mention the
01:07:13.800protest that happened in 2023 2024 that was uh end racism in the otw and racism in the otw
01:07:24.240fans put it together and just talking about some of the really valid concerns that um were brought
01:07:29.900up about how to make AO3 safe for folks but also not censor folks and sort of how to thread that
01:07:37.040line because it's self-tagging people could write really horrible things and not tag them
01:07:42.780and you know that's a problem so but I think one of my ending questions I want to say is like does
01:07:50.060it feel like it's still a good place on the internet for you especially within the fandoms
01:07:54.340where you choose to hang out oh yeah absolutely i io3 is open constantly on my computer yeah i
01:08:01.300see that little logo i see that little logo and i'm like i'm home it's like that little logo it's
01:08:07.860just like calling to me like she's my little friend i just i love it um but it's because
01:08:13.920i think i i know how to navigate it and filter and make sure that i'm protecting myself
01:08:20.760and if I feel like I'm getting uncomfortable