Imaginary Worlds - Fanfiction (Don't Judge)

Episode Date: November 2, 2017

Sci-fi and fantasy have always been a big part of fanfiction, but fanfiction hasn't always gotten respect in return. My former colleague at WNYC Stephanie Billman guides me through the landscape of fanfiction, debunking many of my preconceptions. We talk with Francesca Coppa, author of The Fanfiction Reader and one of the creators of the fanfic site Archive of Our Own. Britta Lundin, a writer on the CW's Riverdale, explains why writing fanfiction was a great way to train for writing TV. And fanfiction writer Savannah Stoehr explains why Kirk/Spock is the great love story of our time. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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I'm Eric Molenski, and I am joined in the studio by my friend Stephanie Billman. Hello. Hi. Stephanie and I used to work together at WNYC. I would say we were fellow geeks at a place where there were a lot of nerds but not a lot of geeks. Would you agree? Yeah, I totally agree with that. Yeah?

Yeah. So, Stephanie pitched me this idea about fan fiction. First of all, the title of the email was fanfiction, parentheses, agree with that. Yeah. Yeah. So Stephanie pitched me this idea about fan fiction. First of all, the title of the email was fan fiction, parentheses, don't judge, which I love so much that I decided immediately that was going to be the title of this episode. And so before we get to this tier pitch, which we're going to talk about in a second, I should say that I was always very skeptical about doing an episode on fan fiction because, I mean, I have to admit I'd never read any fan fiction, but I just assumed it had such a bad reputation. Like this season on Game of Thrones, a lot of people were complaining, oh, it feels like fan fiction this season. Meaning it feels like the characters are just sort of fulfilling the fans' greatest wishes regardless of whether it makes sense for the story. Fan service.

Fan service, yeah. Well, that's the other thing too, is I was telling you that I've struggled to write. I tried to write screenplays for years and I was in all these writing classes and paying people to give me professional feedback. And I just got my ass handed to me over and over again. I just like I just have a new appreciation for how freaking hard it is to write. So to me, the idea of fan fiction was somebody who was like, I'm going to write a story. I'm going to put on the Internet and everybody and everybody tell me it's great, and I don't want any criticism. And there is that. There's definitely stories where the author's note will say, I don't want any criticism, just kudos only, kudos and positive comments only. But there's also an equal number just of really quality fan fiction, of really great creative writing. And in fact, you told me something that completely debunked my whole stereotype of fanfiction, the role of the beta. What is a beta? So a beta is someone that you can actually find online. And there's a whole system for how you can be matched up to betas. And what they do is they read your story. Either they read it as you're

going along and writing it, or they read the finished product. And they can read it for content. They can read it for grammar. They can read it for both. And it can either be a collaboration where you're going through, the writer's going through and collaborating with the beta, or it's just providing you feedback at the end of your story. So why don't they just call them editors? Because I think the reason why is because at the beginning of fan fiction and the whole idea, there were so many people that are in the computer industry.

So beta is like the testing phase. Oh, that's cool. So that's where the actual terminology, I think, came from. Oh, and the betas, they don't get paid, do they? No, no. It's totally voluntary. It's totally free. And you don't actually have to use a beta if you don't choose to.

But I find that the stories that I enjoy the most are the ones that use betas and particularly ones that use the same beta over and over again. But yeah, so that when you tell me about betas that that sold me on this idea. And then also you pointed out something which should have been obvious to me, which is that most writers rooms, most movies get made by straight white guys and bring that perspective to these stories. And that fan fiction, because it's open to anybody, completely changes the perspective on how we see these stories. And that's where I was just like, tell me more. I mean, you know, I'm a woman of color and I've always been in the geek space. So like I was a huge fan of Star Wars growing up. So when I would go to the comic book stores when I was younger, I would be often the only person of color and almost always the only girl in that space. So coming into fan fiction, it's really great

and refreshing to see all these different perspectives that aren't just straight white males. No offense to you, Eric, of course. It's... No, but I'm not taking... It's lovely. Yeah. All right. So yeah, no, we talked to a bunch of people as well. Yeah, we talked to Francesca Coppa, who's a professor at Muhlenberg College. She. All right. So, yeah, no, we talked to a bunch of people as well. Yeah, we talked to Francesca Coppa. I was a professor at Mullenberg College.

She studies fan fiction. She wrote a book called The Fan Fiction Reader. And I myself have been a fangirl since I was about, you know, 12. So I have some cred in that area, too. She was totally fascinating. Like, I didn't know that fan fiction, I thought it started with Star Trek fan fiction as we know it. And she was saying that it started well over 100 years ago with Sherlock Holmes. And almost right away, people started writing more Holmes.

And they did a lot of the things that we associate with modern fandom, like they had a campaign. I mean, he killed Holmes off after the 10th story. And people wore black armbands and they protested in the streets and they wrote letters and they made him bring him back. And so and then this was like a worldwide trend of people writing stories about Holmes and Watson. Yeah, and back then those stories were mostly written by men, so there wasn't that stigma that's currently attached to fan fiction. It was like a gentlemanly pursuit back then? Exactly.

And now fan fiction is mostly written predominantly by women and read by women as well. Yeah. And then also Francesca pointed out there's another difference between fan fiction then and now. We're only having a special episode about this because we're in a place with intellectual property, which is a very recent phenomenon, where suddenly this very natural making stories out of other people's stories is being legislated. Only special people are allowed to tell stories out of our common culture, at least in this legal sense. But fans are saying, well, but this is the human activity. We want to tell more stories.

And you kind of can't stop us. It's a kind of illegal act, but it's a profoundly human act. And then, of course, we get to modern fan fiction with Star Trek. We still know those original women who kind of built Star Trek fandom. But many of them were, in fact, professional science fiction writers. And in fact, it was originally a Hugo Award for fan fiction writing.

And then there was a kind of split where basically like science fiction book fandom kind of felt that women science fiction writers liked Star Trek kind of too much and for the wrong reasons, which is, by the way, something people always tell women. We like the of too much and for the wrong reasons, which is, by the way, something people always tell women. We like the story too much and for the wrong reasons.

And when she says the wrong reasons, is that because the women writing fan fiction are more interested in the relationship between the characters and not whatever the big high concept sci-fi ideas? Yeah. I mean, with fan fiction, you can explore the relationships that you don't have time to explore in a movie or a TV show. And then the other thing that fan fiction is known for is putting characters who are supposedly straight in a romantic relationship. But the most famous pairing, of course, is Spock and Kirk. Or Spirk. Spirk. I just found that out recently that their couple name is Spirk. Yeah. And the other thing that was interesting. I just found that out recently that their couple name is Spurk. Yeah. And the other thing that was interesting, too, is that the women that Francesca is talking about, the women who kind of started modern fan fiction, were called the Four Smutters, which is based on four mothers. So the idea about Four Smutters is we praise the older women who had the courage of the dirtiness of their imaginations. They were smutty. Francesca studies fan fiction, but it's also personal for her as well. She was part of

the second generation that picked up the mantle after the four smutters. And we had to do it old school in the mail. You had to get your mom to write you a check for a fan magazine, and you had to go to a collector's shop, and you had to go to a bookstore. You needed needed to get a plane ticket to fly to a convention or get your mom to take you or get somebody to get a check to to send away for the zine. Like you couldn't do it if you were 13 years old unaided. But now you can because it's online. You can do it from your bedroom. Not only does she read and write fan fiction she also helped to create one of the biggest clearinghouses for fan fiction called Archive of Our Own. We started in 2007 and we started with a blank cursor of code, my friend. I mean, we designed it and people started saying, OK, here's what we need.

Do we have lawyers? Turns out fandom has lawyers. Like, do we have professors? Turns out we have professors. Turns out we have journalists. We had all of these sort of women come together and the coders literally were like, well, since we're building it from scratch, let's build it to do exactly what we want. So you suggested, you know, we talked to Francesca, you also suggested that we talked to Britta Lundin, who I think is part of maybe the third generation of fan fiction

readers and writers. But she's actually a writer for Riverdale, which is a new show on The CW. Which is, I keep calling it Dark Archie. Which I actually love. It's from the looks of it, it is pretty dark. People will look back at this as the exact moment that last bit of Riverdale's innocence finally died. And she

discovered fanfiction pretty much around the time her family got an internet connection in the 90s. And one of the first things I did was go on like AltaVista.com and like search for the X-Files. And it's like just a hop, skip and a jump from like that very first search to finding like people writing short stories about the X-Files on the internet. What I thought was interesting, too, is that she was saying that, you know, writing TV isn't that different from writing fan fiction, which had never occurred to me. The idea of, like, writing characters

who already exist in someone else's voice that already exists, writing, for example, Mulder and Scully and trying to make it as close to Chris Carter's vision for the show as possible, that is basically what it's like writing for the X-Files, you know? When I'm writing an episode of Riverdale, I'm not writing Britta Lundeen's imagination of what an episode of Riverdale should be. I'm writing as close to

my showrunner's vision of what an episode of Riverdale should be. I'm writing his idea of Archie and his idea of Betty and Veronica. And that's the job, you know. And if you bristle at the idea of taking someone else's characters, if you're someone who thinks fan fiction isn't real writing because you're not making up the characters and you haven't done any of the real work of like building the world, then you're going to have a hard time writing TV because that's all you're doing is taking someone else's ideas and trying to write the best episode possible. But that line between, you know, the professional writer and like the hobbyist fan fiction writer has gotten blurred lately because, you know, Fifty Shades of Grey, as we all know, started out as Twilight fan fiction, or as they say, it was it was Twilight fan fiction with his

serial numbers filed off. Exactly. And then this started this whole interest from companies about making money off of fan fiction. So what is Kindle Worlds? So Kindle Worlds is actually a still fairly new platform where they've actually purchased the rights to various properties. And someone, a writer, can go on there and actually write fan fiction based on some of these preselected intellectual properties. Do they own the rights to your fan fiction or do you own it? They actually own the rights to it. Not only do they sign it, you get paid for it. So

you do get actually every time someone downloads your story, you get a certain percentage of it. But at the end of the day, Kindle, Amazon still owns the rights to that story. Yeah. Francesca was not a fan of the system. And I know she also felt that just in general, adding money, you were saying before how the betas do this for free and adding money to that relationship changes things a lot. Yeah. So I'm worried about the power that is trying to turn my subcultural hobby into something that exists in the marketplace because money changes things and it changes relationships between people. It also changes, it sounds like the whole point of fan fiction is to write without writing to a marketplace. And suddenly if there's a marketplace entering fan fiction. Right. Or if people are seeing it that way. So for instance, the big file off have all been

turned into heterosexual love stories. One of the reasons I don't like Fifty Shades is that it's not that original. Fan fiction is much more interesting as an out of the box genre and convention defying art form. Why do we want to turn it more conventional? Because the marketplace wants it conventional. So I don't want their limitations. I don't want their money. I don't want any of it. So fan fiction is getting bigger and bolder to the point where it's actually butting up against the commercial mainstream franchises that it's borrowing from. So, you know, like it's one thing to imagine characters and relationships through fan fiction, but the fans are now saying that's not good enough.

They want those relationships to play out on screen. And of course, that kind of lobbying is called shipping. And shipping can work and it can actually change the course of the shows themselves or it can create conflict. The showrunners are like, no, we're not going to do that. Stop telling us how to do our jobs. Yeah. Things like that I find fascinating. Yeah. Well, we're going to get to that after the break. All right. So I'm back with Stephanie Billman talking about fan fiction. And we talked to another fan fiction writer, Savannah Stower. How did you know her?

I actually met her through my husband. He belongs to a Star Trek meetup group. And they met when he was, I believe, at the 50th Star Trek celebration. And that's when he realized that she was not only a fan fiction writer, she was actually one of my favorite fan fiction writers. Because she told him what her fan fiction pseudonym is? Yeah, or her street name, as you like to call it. Is that what people in fan fiction call it, their street name? Yeah. Oh, that's cool. And one of her favorite types of fan fiction to write is slash fiction. Yeah. And tell me what slash fiction is, because I love this explanation. So when fan fiction was early on when it was starting, in order to be able to delineate the character relationships, you would say Kirk slash Spock. And because of the slash being a male-male relationship, they decided to actually call it slash fiction. I love that punctuation has created an entire sub-genre

and an important one of fan fiction. Very, yes, very much. And now, if it's a female-to-female character, it's called Femslash. So some of her early fan fiction work was Kirk slash Spock. Yes. And she's still actually pretty new to Star Trek. She only discovered it recently because of the reboots.

And her father, who's a big Star Trek fan, was like, you have to go back and of the reboots. And her father, who's a big Star Trek fan, was like, you have to go back and watch the original series. And being into fan fiction, she came into Star Trek already thinking of Kirk and Spock as a couple. I really liked that Kirk and Spock were equals and not just equals, but that they had this intense mutual respect and this almost reverence for each other. A starship also runs on loyalty to one man and nothing replaces it for him. There's a line from a season one episode,

City on the Edge of Forever, where Kirk is talking about a 22nd century novelist or something. Let me help. Who recommends the words, let me help over I love you. A hundred years or so from now, I believe, a famous novelist will write a classic using that theme. He'll recommend those three words even over I love you. There's a word in Star Trek fandom.

It comes from the novelization of the first original movie Star Trek the motion picture it's a word t-hyla it's a Vulcan word that translates to friend brother lover and it's supposed to represent the like incredible bond that Kirk and Spock have that it's just like they like sort of unbounded devotion that they had to each other and like this like intense understanding please can't be not in front of the Klingons. So, yeah, I was really curious to hear how she imagines their relationship in her fan fiction. You know, the transporter is always screwing up sometime or other in the in the original

series. And so I wrote a fic where there's a transporter malfunction that splits Spock into a Vulcan half and a human half. Oh, that's a great story. Yeah. I think that's the concept is sort of an eye catcher. And I think that's part of why it became so big. But that was a slash story too? It was. Was it the human part that says to Kirk that this is true feelings or?

No, I mean, a little bit that was that was the interesting thing for me was I didn't want it to be quite so easy as like oh well now that he's human he'll just say it like you know Spock is Spock whatever his race if he has feelings for someone but he doesn't trust his feelings what is he going to do about that probably nothing even if you split him up and have one Vulcan half and a human half maybe the human half would be a little more overt about sort of discussing those feelings. But he still probably wouldn't take a risk on them. And so the story was sort of, you know, spoiler alert. It ends with after Kirk has a conversation with each half separately, he sort of puts together the way Spock's been feeling, and it's him sort of prodding Spock and saying, like, listen, you can take this risk.

Like, I'm here for that, you know, that whole, you know, let me help that finally sort of brings them together. Wow, that sounds really, sounds moving, actually. It's one of my lighter ones. You know, we talked to Francesca, who is a professor that studies fan fiction and she writes fan fiction. And Francesca was saying slashes is really important part of fan fiction, especially the idea that you have so many women. Imagine these supposedly straight male characters as gay.

Some of it, again, depending on who you ask, some of it was a way of creating a queer literature before there really was as much queer literature as there is now, and there could still be more, but gay representation extremely thin on the ground in 1960, 1970, 1980, especially heroic queer representation. So if you had a gay character in 1992, they're the wacky best friend, right? They're not Kirk. A third reason was women wanted to create a literature that showcased equality and that in some ways almost gender politics were almost too toxic. So when you tell a story about Kirk and Spock, you don't have to deal with even the questions that you deal with with Mulder Scully, kind of gender politics or she's going to get pregnant and who's going to stay home with the kid. Like everybody gets to be a hero. They're both allowed to kind of be equal in that love

relationship. And so it was a way of kind of be equal in that love relationship. And so it was a way of kind of sidestepping or working through some of the gender politics that I would say infected male female couples. So I knew about Kirk slash Spock or Spirk. But until we started talking, I had no idea that there was this other huge couple in fan fiction, which is a fairly new ship, but it's big. Stucky. What is Stucky or who is Stucky? So Stucky is the ship name between Captain Steve Rogers or Captain America and James Bucky Barnes. This is the relationship based on the MCU, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, not necessarily in the comics. Right. And then you're also saying that like a lot of Stucky fan fiction is not really about like them confessing their feelings for each other. Like they're already a couple. And it's

more about how Steve Rogers helps Bucky recover from his PTSD because he was a brainwashed assassin. Yeah, it's that's exactly what it is. And for people who are struggling with mental health issues, I struggle with depression. I struggle with anxiety. So I really identified with watching with that struggle that Bucky was going through. What's going to happen to your friends? Whatever it is, I'll deal with it. I don't know if I'm worth all this, Steve. In my relationship with my husband, he's more like Steve, where he's actually trying to help me deal with my very bad days and my very good days.

And he's along with me for that journey, because he loves me. So for that, that's where my interest in Stucky started. Hmm. Now, when we were talking to Francesca, now Francesca writes Stucky fanfic, and I hate the fact that the microphone was off.

You asked her who she is, what her fanfiction name is as a writer. And she said, turn the microphone off. So I did. And when she told you what her name was, your reaction was amazing. I was like, you made me turn off the mic for that? Why were you so excited? She's like the Jane Austen of fan fiction for Stucky. Her stories are so rich and so complex.

And part of the reason why I love what she does is she creates this world for Brooklyn, particularly 1940s Brooklyn, that is so authentic. I grew up in Brooklyn. Steve Rogers comes from Brooklyn. So does Bucky Barnes come from Brooklyn. In a culture that was sort of my father's. My father right now is ill. And in fact, I have all of this kind of hands on knowledge of Brooklyn in the 40s that I'm really enjoying kind of deploying to create a richer, more realistic Brooklyn and a sort of sense of these Brooklyn boys growing up in the sort of late 30s and 40s. I'm not alone in that. There are wonderful stories that have Steve working in the chewing gum factory that used to be in downtown Brooklyn, right? This is not, when you think of fan fiction,

you don't think of like Steve Rogers, union activist. I mean, I can name you three stories that would do that. And then there are people who like to do AUs. What's an AU? An alternate universe. They're ballet dancers. They could be anything. Who would they be if they were werewolves?

Why not? You got something against werewolves? By the way, I've listened to the tape of Francesca many times, and I will never get tired of her saying, well, you got something against werewolves? All right. So that brings us back to Britta Lundin because, you know, she's a fan fiction writer. She's staffed in Riverdale. And she says that one of the things she's learned by being on the inside is that there are a lot of factors that go into what we see on screen.

You know, it's not just the writers deciding, you know, they want something to happen and then poof, it happens. There's budget. There's actor negotiations. There's the weather. to happen and then poof it happens there's budget there's actor negotiations just the weather and so the same thing is true when the fans are lobbying for a gay ship to become canon you know just because they hear nothing like marvel has been really quiet about the stucky thing it doesn't mean that behind the scenes there's no discussion going on especially on tv where there's more flexibility than they might have in the movies they don't know know if, like, are the showrunners really considering it and the execs shut it down? Did the showrunners shut it down?

Did the actors shut it down? Or maybe they just don't even talk about it because they don't think it's worth even considering. And that's the saddest version to me, to not even consider making that creative choice. And I think that, like, the big question that we're circling around here is who has the power? Because I mean, obviously, Hollywood makes this stuff, you know, they've got

the money, they've got the distribution networks. But if the fans turn on them, the show's over. And you know, that terrifies them. Rightly so. I've seen a lot of think pieces online, for example, of like, what is this? All of a sudden fans think they're hot shit and they should get to decide what happens on shows, not the creators. And to me, it's like, OK, I mean, I get where that's coming from. I think where that's coming from is you're upset that you can finally hear fans' opinions. The fans have always had opinions about what the show should do. But now they can like actually say it.

They can at the showrunner and like tell them exactly what they think ultimately fans still don't really have any power ultimately no matter how many messages a showrunner gets on twitter like they are still in charge of like what happens on the show or not um as you know i got into fan fiction because of shipping i was watching arrow Arrow and they were pushing Oliver Queen to get into a relationship with Laurel, who is his canon love interest in the comics. But he had better chemistry with the actress that played Felicity, who's another character. That's when my husband was like, you know, they're a popular ship. And that's when you discovered fan fiction? That's exactly when I discovered fan fiction, yes. But this is a case where the showrunners listened to the fans, or maybe they saw the chemistry themselves because

it was pretty obvious. But they switched and made Felicity his love interest on screen. But the fan fiction of Alicity, which is their ship name, it was much better than what became the on-screen version of their relationship. Wow. Yeah. It's interesting because, you know, talking to you and Britta and Savannah and Francesca, like I've actually started to question what is real in fiction, which sounds weird because it's obviously all made up. But, I mean, that's like a perfect example where, you know, because for so long I, whatever came from Hollywood I took as canon and everything else I thought of as a joke. But that's like a perfect example of how it's not the case sometimes.

Where the fan fiction can be better than the Hollywood version. And then which do you choose to believe? So I actually did go on to Archive of Our Own. Oh, congratulations. Thank you. Please tell me more about this. So when you say there's everything there. Yeah, there literally is everything.

Oh, my God. There's fan fiction of Chinatown. Yes. And like Tootsie. I finally came across Fringe, and I loved Fringe. And so I found this one story. And also I know now to look up how many kudos they got. And I got one of the highest kudos once.

And I was really impressed because it was set very specifically between certain episodes. It's where the character Peter is looking for his love interest, Olivia, in an alternate universe. Like on Fringe there's only one alternate universe, but this writer imagined many of them, so we got to see all these different versions of Olivia that we never got to see on the show. Oh, that's fascinating. But then in this story, the one

thing that all the Olivias had in common was that they had the same favorite spot on the Charles River, because the show's set in Boston. I'm from Boston. I thought, oh, that's really lovely. And then when it came time to mention what that spot was, it said in parentheses, in all caps, TBD. And it, like, completely ruined my suspension of disbelief.

Oh, I guess he didn't have a beta. Yeah, he had two. He had two. He thanked them. I was like, you couldn't look at Google Maps? So I also, and then there's also, you know, the really wild stuff. Like, I came across this one fan fiction story where Arya Stark from Game of Thrones, first of all, she was an adult in this story.

Secondly, she's in our world. Thirdly, she's an FBI agent. And then fourthly, she meets the terminator and i was like really offended really yeah because like i i was really mad at how far they had strayed from the source material but then i was like why who cares i mean is my imagination really that conservative well see and that's but see but you found fan fiction that fed to your conservative viewpoint. And the thing that's what's so great about fan fiction is you don't have to abide by what Hollywood gives you. And to quote Sam Winchester.

Who's Sam Winchester? He's one of the brothers from Supernatural. Ah, right, yeah. He says one time in one episode, at the end of the day, it's our story. So we get to write it. So he said that in the show once and you were like, oh, my God, that's fan fiction. Yeah, that's totally what I think encapsulates the beauty of fan fiction. And what better way to end our conversation than by quoting one of one half of the most popular ships in fan fiction.

The ship between Sam Winchester and? Dean Winchester, his brother. Really? That's a big ship. It is a big ship. It is actually. A vincess to a ship? It is, and they call them wincess. Which I still don't understand. Just to be clear, I am not a fan of Wincest.

All right. Well, thank you, Stephanie. Thank you so much. And thank you to Francesca Coppa, Savannah Stower, and Britta Lundin. By the way, Britta, besides being a TV writer and a fan fiction writer, has written a novel called Ship It, which comes out this spring. It's about a teenage girl who tries to make a gay ship canon and how that affects the people behind the scenes making the show. I hope that someone can just be like, oh, hey, it sounds like you're dealing with an issue

similar to that was in that book Ship It. Maybe you should read this. And then, you know, they read it and maybe like have a more nuanced view of both sides of the issue. Imaginary Worlds is part of the Panoply Network. And let me know what your favorite fan fiction is. I tweeted Emalinski or you can join the conversation on Facebook. And my website is imaginaryworldspodcast.org. Thank you.