Imaginary Worlds - Fanfiction (Special Edition)

Episode Date: August 9, 2018

Last year, I interviewed Francesca Coppa for my episode Fanfiction (Don't Judge.) She's the author of the book "The Fanfiction Reader," and one of the founders of the fanfic site Archive of Our Own. Francesca was such a great source of information that I always regretted the fascinating parts of our interview which ended up on the proverbial cutting room floor. So this week, I'm featuring a full version of our conversation -- ranging from the ancient roots of fanfiction to the reasons why a TV showrunner might anonymously publish fanfic of their own show.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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You're listening to Imaginary Worlds. I'm Eric Malinsky. So every August, I like to do something different with the format, You're listening to Imaginary Worlds. I'm Eric Malinsky. So every August I like to do something different with the format, like playing an interview from a previous episode that was so good, I always regretted the moments that didn't make the final cut. And so today I'm going to play an extended interview with Francesca Coppa, who's a professor at Mullenberg College and the author of The Fan Fiction Reader. She was also one of the founders of Archive of Our Own, a website where you can post and read fan fiction.

But our discussion wasn't entirely about her work. It was more about the history of fan fiction and why it's worth studying. Now, she was so much fun to talk to. We talked for over an hour. So even this version is slightly edited. For instance, I'm not including our discussion about Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes slash fiction, because that conversation was in the original episode almost in its entirety. And I wanted to focus on material that ended up on the proverbial cutting room floor. But if you haven't heard that episode from last fall, you should

check it out. It's called Fan Fiction, Don't Judge. So anyway, I started the interview by asking Francesca how she first became interested in fan fiction. You know, I started with Star Trek like almost everyone and then very quickly went to Star Wars and the early 80s. I look much cuter than being around in the early 80s. But in the early 80s was a great time for science fiction. I mean, sort of 1980 to about 1985, you had Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi and Star Trek II, Wrath of Khan and Blade Runner and the Indiana Jones films. And it was a really kind of amazing time to kind of be in fandom and to be kind of a teenager in fandom. So that was kind of the moment that I got involved. 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 like a collector's shop. And you had to go to a bookstore and stand on a ladder and look for terrible ace paperbacks on the top shelf on a ladder that might kill you. So there wasn't any of this internet stuff. So you had this passion as a teenager and as a kid. And then you go into academia, which is this big, you know, rigorous thing to become a professor. Did you know throughout that whole process that you wanted to use academia

to study fan fiction? Not at all. But no, I got into it late, literally because fandom was this kind of very underground subculture. And the internet started bringing it, making it visible. And so then you had people talking about it

who didn't understand it. And it was one of those cases where I felt poised to say things about it because I understood it and I was in it. And even now you get stories that are, you know, it's a silly thing that teenage girls do and it all sucks. Yeah. Before we turn on the mics, you're telling me other misconceptions about fan fiction. Is one of them that it's not very good and it's all about hooking up characters that were not hooked up? Sure. So it's not very good. I like to say that if you went to a publisher and looked at the slush pile, you would be like, wow, this thing, the novel, it sucks. I often like to compare it to being in a garage band, which is a wonderful collaborative thing that people do.

And nobody goes, wow, how weird you get together and you play like other people's music. Like, what a crazy thing that you do. And many garage bands are terrible and many will be great. Like somebody will break and be awesome. Right. So in terms of quality, it's just about what you see. And often there's a kind of picking on, you know, 14-year-old girls. You know, why would we pick on them? I mean, so they're writing fiction. What are you doing at 14, right? I feel like a 14-year-old guy who's playing guitar, like, you know, keep at it, kid. Keep playing that guitar.

Why would you say, what's the point in saying it's bad? Yeah, no, that totally makes sense. So actually, I love you. I mean, as a professor, I'd love to hear you tell me the history, the sort of origins of fan fiction. Well, so I spent a lot of time on this in my book, The Fan Fiction Reader, which is quite a special book and a crazy book in that it's the first book of fan fiction where it's published as fan fiction. In other words, it's not published with the serial numbers filed off. It's not licensed. Right. off. It's not licensed, right? I'm claiming transformative use. I'm claiming fair use for this book, that these stories are in themselves transformative uses of other people's copyrighted material. So there is a school where Batman and Iron Man went to boarding school together,

and there's a Star Trek story where Uhura saves Spock's life, and there is an X-Files story where Mulder meets God. Anyway, those stories are in the book. But anyway, in the introduction, you know, I talk about different ways that you could slice the question of what fan fiction is. So if you just want to say it's stories using other people's ideas, you know, did Virgil write, you know, fan fiction of Homer? Are the Arthurian tales all fan fiction where, you know, there was no originally there was no Lancelot-Gwenovere plot, right? Later people added that because they thought it would be kind of awesome. It was also oddly about hooking up.

They really wanted Lancelot and Guinevere to hook up for some reason, right? There's Ivanhoe fanfic where, you know, a lot of people really felt strongly that Ivanhoe had gotten together with the wrong girl. They wanted to fix that. My Fair Lady is George Bernard Shaw fanfic. And by the way, that's the opposite, where people keep wanting Henry Higgins to get together with Eliza Doolittle. And the erudite in your listenership

will know that Shaw was really adamant that she does not get together with Henry Higgins and kept writing essays as to why she does not get together with Henry Higgins. Well, fandom doesn't like that, right? Fandom will get Eliza together with Henry Higgins. So if Fandom doesn't like that, right? Fandom will get Eliza together with Henry Higgins. So if you want to say that's all fanfic, it all is in ways that really seem like fanfic. I actually tried to move away from that for technical reasons,

which is that if that's the case, then why are we having this conversation, right? If all literature is fanfic, then why do we have to have this special episode? And the answer is 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. So I tend to focus on the fact that it's copyrighted and the extent to which only special people are allowed to tell stories out of our common culture. But fans are saying, well, but this is the human activity. We want to tell more stories about Princess Leia. And you kind of can't stop us.

It's a kind of illegal act, but it's a profoundly human act. Yeah, but in recent modern American history, like when did fan fiction as we know it now begin? Right. So I would say that it comes with serial narratives. And so people point to the big first fandom as being Sherlock Holmes, which ran very much like television, monthly stories in the strand. 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. 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, which to me is a very fan-ish activity. And all through the 20s and the 30s, there were people playing what they called the great game and writing essays about it and what we would call meta and writing fanfic. But they were mostly men. And so it didn't necessarily always rate, but you could point to Holmes. And then I think you go to Star Trek in the modern era. We've had a, let me put it this way, with Star Trek, there's direct lines of influence and continuity, right? We still know those original women who kind of built Star Trek fandom. Who were they? Well, there's any number of them, but many of them were, in fact, professional science fiction writers.

Oh, there's any number of them. But many of them were, in fact, professional science fiction writers. And in fact, it was originally a Hugo Award for 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 story too much and for the wrong reasons. There's a right way. You wouldn't know this, Eric. There's a right way to like books, and apparently I never like it that right way, my PhD notwithstanding. So the sort of break-off happens there where these women sort of say, well, we're going to make our own conventions to talk about Star Trek. And then I assume the Internet was probably the next big game-changer in the history, the recent history of fan fiction?

Right. Fandom has always used whatever technology is available. So mimeograph machines, and when you're in the 60s and 70s, you're talking about zines. And then the photocopier is a huge deal and postage. And the VHS is a huge technology, both for sharing canon source of shows to get people writing fan fiction. When you don't have on-demand television, which many of the people listening will not remember a time before on-demand television, but it used to be that you saw it and it was over, so there was no way to get your back Doctor Who or whatever. And then the next big, obviously, yeah, the internet. And fans are huge early adopters of all of this technology, maybe because

so many of us at our core were science fiction fans. So fandoms on all Star Trek, all TV Star Trek, is one of the earliest Usenet newsgroups out there. So fans are on the internet from about 91. This is pre-browser. This is pre-Google. This is when the internet is not even visual and people are posting fan fiction on the internet in Usenet newsgroups by then. So the story in The Mary Sue is really interesting to me because I often see this term Mary Sue used on the Internet as always like a critique against a female character

that's supposedly too perfect or too flawless. So tell me the history of that term. You mean just what a Mary Sue is? Yeah. And how it started in fantasy. Yeah. Well, it was an early, I think it's 74, but it was a relatively early Star Trek story that was written as a parody of, I guess, some stories that were being written where Lieutenant Mary Sue, who is young and beautiful and perfect and goes on to the Enterprise and everybody falls in love with her. And she's a hero and she saves everybody and she's smarter than Spock and braver than Kirk and then dies tragically while they all kind of gather around her

and tell her how wonderful she is. And this was written as a parody story to sort of make fun of the idea of self-inserting in this kind of obvious way or these sort of obvious kind of wish-fulfillment stories. So it was a mode of criticism vis-a-vis parody. But the terms have stuck, both in fandom, where fandom has all sorts of ways in which it shapes its quality and has a kind of critical language for talking about what it thinks is good and what it thinks is bad.

And Mary Sue is one of the ways in which kind of critical language that fandom has developed in order to try to steer people away from projecting maybe too much onto the characters. But it's also become useful language in media criticism. be too much onto the characters. But it's also become useful language in media criticism. I mean, because, you know, in fact, so much of mainstream culture is really Gary Stoos. I mean, you know, Luke Skywalker, George Lucas is Luke Skywalker, who is a teenager who lives in kind of space California and races cars before discovering he's like the most special guy ever. There's a way in which Luke Skywalker is a Mary Sue. Yeah. I think Bruce Wayne's the ultimate, frankly.

But yeah. Well, Bruce Wayne. I mean, you know, this sort of sense that you're writing somebody who's like you, except, you know, is more attractive, gets more sex and lives in a nicer house. Yeah. So, I mean, it's interesting that like the idea that, you know, the Mary Sue becomes a type of criticism within fandom. I mean, given that anything goes, are there other kind of unwritten rules or taboos within fan fiction? You know,

I mean, yes, but when we find a taboo, we like to march right up to it and then explode it. I'm trying to think of something that remains a taboo. We still don't like, I mean, for a long time, writing fan fiction about real people was taboo. So writing about actors, which is kind of funny because, of course, in mainstream magazines, like fan magazines, there was all sorts of kind of fantasy writing about Hollywood stars. But in fandom, that was kind of considered not done up until relatively recently, but that's been kind of exploded. So there's great One Direction, very famously, but boy bands and actors and even actor Slash, which is sort of putting, you know, for a long time that was very taboo because even though you knew you were writing fictionally in Slash being the creation of kind of homoerotic stories between, well, typically men or femme slash or between women who are not known to be gay. In the era where more people were closeted, that was more taboo because you were really doing something that could get somebody into trouble or was illegal or was a serious stigma. Well, you mentioned slash. Let's talk about slash fan fiction. How did that develop? And I also think I love the idea of how the term slash originally came from like simply the keyboard slash and how that all developed. The Virgule punctuation sign. Yeah, that's so interesting.

Yeah. Yes. If you don't know. So it's a genre in which people are creating romantic shading toward erotic. It's somewhere between romantic and erotic depending on how explicit the story is. Relationships between male characters generally in mass media properties. And you might say, why? And I think there's a lot of reasons to why. One of them is about the sexism of the original texts, where, let's go to Avengers,

just because it's fun. So Avengers is a team of five men and one woman. The woman has no friends at all, just like all the women I know. I mean, I actually just wrote an essay about this. Like Black Widow doesn't have like a single girlfriend to like vent with and have a glass of Chardonnay with, right? Because that's just like life. Women have no friendships at all, while men have many interesting and varied friendships and relationships with each other, right? So there's a bunch of bros who are really tight. And then this sort of isolated, mysterious woman in a catsuit who doesn't even drink white wine. So one of the things that women do confronted with that situation is like, well, clearly they're in love with each other. Right. Because when you really in real

life, I don't see men having this and I wish they would, but don't have this kind of enormous, great variety of male friendships. Right. And they seem so much more involved with each other, like deeply involved with each other, like deeply involved with each other. If you look at all the kind of buddy dramas or buddy comedies, right? There's a sort of sense in which like your buddy means much more to you than like, you know, any woman in the world. You know, one is not crazy to sort of think maybe there's something going on at the very least, like I said, at a minimum to say that there is a deep homosocial caring bond between these guys is, to me, a completely unproblematic thing to say. To actually say that they may have

been in love or that this may have shaded into some physical sense is not an unreasonable interpretation. So some of it's just interpretive and about women trying to make sense in some ways of the emotional relationships of source material that do not resemble actual emotional relationships at all. 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, 1960, 1970, 1980, especially heroic queer representation of any kind. So if you had a gay character in 1992, they're the wacky best friend, right? They're not Kirk. They're not Steve Rogers, right? A third reason was, or people talk about, that 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. 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 sidestepping or working through some of the gender politics that, I would say, infected male-female couples. Let me add, too, that one of the things I don't think gets said enough

is that one of the things that fan fiction does is typically, typically, is turn movies and TV into prose. And I say that because that's a major shift of medium. Right. That's true. To turn usually external, spectacleized genre TV and film into prose fiction is to deploy a whole interiority, a whole set of literary tropes. There are things you can do in fiction in terms of the scale of the story that you can't do with, I mean, you can do with a voiceover. I mean, there are ways of getting interiority in film. But it itself changes it. And to turn them into short stories, the short story has its own history, you see, of tricks that you can play. Yeah. But prose is one of them. Now, back in my fan fiction episode from last fall, you might remember that Stephanie Billman was my co-host, my guide through the world of fan fiction.

And she was also in the studio that day with Francesca. And she asked her about the website that Francesca co-created, Archive of Our Own, or AO3 for short. Can you tell me a bit about the start of AO3? Sure. A bunch of us sort of said, well, we have to own our own servers. We have to own the ground on which we're building fandom and not depend on either fly-by-night startups or people who have no ideological commitment to us legally or culturally in any way. And so 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. Do we have professors? Turns out we have professors. Turns out we have journalists. Turns out we have sysadmins because of our great deep history in science fiction. We had coders. We had database managers. We had front-end design people. I mean, because it's, you know, you're talking about both incorporating a nonprofit in a legal way where you have to pay. Do we have accountants? We have accountants. Great. I mean, so when I tell you we're not 15-year-old girls, you don't put this 400-person nonprofit company together pretty much overnight out of 16-year-olds, right? I mean, we had all of these sort of women, and they were mostly, you know, 99.9% 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. You can download to eBooks and make EPUB or MOBI, you can tag any way you want. There's an elaborate tagging system on the archive, which I have been asked to speak at libraries about. They envy it. It's called a curated folksonomy. We developed a kind of metadata tagging system so that you can extensively label a story

and search by the elements. So if there's something you want, I want a werewolf AU featuring Steve Rogers, you can click those things and get a list of stories. But say you have a hatred, you hate werewolves, you had a bad experience with a dog, you never want to see a werewolf, you can exclude terms. You can have warnings, you can have spoilers. So it's very, very flexible and customizable. So I will say that fandom has been way ahead of this whole discourse about triggers and trigger warnings and spoilers. I mean, everything is labeled and you can find it if you

want it or avoid it if you don't. And this was all built, this was a piece of software built from a blinking cursor in 2007. And just can you tell me a little bit about the difference between that you see between fan fiction, like when it began in the early, like in the 2000s, to what it is now? Like when we talked to some other people, they talked about how fan fiction writers now tend to not like criticism as opposed to when it started, they seemed more interested in like the quality of what they were doing. Do you see that difference? Well, sure. But I would say that it's really a difference of scale. Right. So when when it was on paper, you had to submit to an editor. There were people with a role of zine editor in fandom and paper fandom days was the role like any editor. You submitted it and you got edited. They didn't just pop it in the old zine. I mean, in other words, it was like publishing. Right. And so you got notes or proofs and the whole thing. So there was a kind of

apparatus with paper fandom that got lost in the transition to the internet where you could just put it up and not go through any kind of editorial process. The other thing is just the explosion of people doing it. And so some people really, it's considered kind of good form to have what they call a beta reader, which is essentially an in-house editor. Most fans do get the stories beta read, which means that some, you know, and often there's a kind of pairing. You know, you beta for them, they beta for you, where somebody will read, give notes, plot points, grammar, you know, essentially a real editorial role, not just the kind of copy editing, in fact, you get nowadays. a real editorial role, not just the kind of copy editing that in fact you get nowadays. But the way that the interfaces go where you could just put your work up means that people who don't want to do that, who want to be in a more expressivist mode, have that outlet. And then plus you end up with the expansion in terms of age. Because one of the great things with fandom

is that, well, you know, years ago you had to be of a certain age to be in it. It's one of the reasons that the culture is kind of old in its heart. Like you 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 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. So the demographic has skewed much younger, which I think is great because what it means actually is I think of all these young women who are writing and editing video and drawing and thinking of themselves as artists from a young age, which I think is wonderful. But I think there's a certain thin skinness that may come with youth, but I wouldn't say that's

typical. And do you use a beta reader? Oh, yes. Oh, my God. Sometimes three or four. Oh, really? Well, sure. Because, yeah. Well, yeah. Because, sorry, if you're really asking, I mean, there might be the first person who's reading all along, but then they know the whole story and you've worked it all out with

them. So then if you're trying to see if the effects work, you might want to give it to somebody totally cold to read to see if your plot twists and turns land, right, if the sentences land the way you think they're going to land. And then you might have like another person who sort of goes and does a grammar check because at that point you've all been staring at it for so long. And then there are Brit pickers if you're in Harry Potter or if you're writing about a culture not your own or there are whole slews of readers who specialize specifically in, you know, it's trainers, not sneakers and jumpers. specifically in, you know, it's trainers, not sneakers and jumpers. And so Harry Potter developed a whole culture of people who would read specifically for Britishisms to try to improve the Britishness of the syntax. So Brit pickers are popular. Have you been a beta as well? Have you played that role?

Oh, yeah. Yeah. What's that like for you? Or what kind of beta are you? I'm quite, well, I mean, I'm a PhD in English. I'm an amazingly good beta, as you would imagine. Well, I figured you would be. I'm just curious. I assume betas have their own, as any editor would. You know, different editors have different things they're looking for, different things that they tend to value. Sure, but, you know, it's like old school literary editing, you know, like the best of the 40s, you know.

I mean, you usually have a relationship with people so that you're trying to help the person achieve their aims in the story. You don't want to, I mean, a good editor, I think, doesn't say you should do what I want you to do. And I don't have to go by commercial. Often, in fact, in real life, an editor might say, OK, you know, right now paranormal, paranormal is a really hot. Can't you give me a subplot with such and such? Or I want you to do this because, you know, for the market. I don't have to care about the market. I just have to help the writer become the best writer they can be.

I will say, too, many fans are also professional writers. I mean, I myself am a professional writer, though I'm an academic writer, but many fans are also professional fiction writers. We have professional screenplay writers. We have, I can think of, you know, one writer who I won't name because she doesn't want to be named, but I mean, who is hired to write for the show for which she writes, also has written fan fiction, has been a showrunner on shows. She's writing the stories that the network would never allow her to tell. Sure. And in fact, that's exactly, you've answered my question before I've asked that, right? I mean, why would they do it?

Because professional writers have to write within limits and fan writers don't. And professional writers often have stories they're dying to tell that they can't tell within the limits of the marketplace. Well, I mean, the big question that we want to explore in the end with this episode is where does the balance of power lie? Is it between the, you know, the creators on one hand have millions of dollars and access to millions of eyeballs. On the other hand, if the fans don't like what they're doing, their project is dead in the water. So, I mean, where do you see the balance of power lying? I don't think that's the – that's to me not the power issue that we're facing at the moment. Those are almost two separate ecosystems. I think the more dangerous power dynamic happening is the extent to which, as fan fiction mainstreams, that there's a tendency to want to actually have it enter

the marketplace in a particular way, right? So you're starting to get Kickstarters for fan fiction and you're starting to get, I mean, in fact, even this book in its limited way, my fan fiction reader is very much a kind of, it's a labor of love. It's a transformative use. I'm donating all royalties. Nobody got paid. It's an academic volume. But the extent to which money is getting involved in the fan-ish subculture, I think, is something to be a little bit worried about. It's complicated because I think on the one hand, people want to say, well, women are doing all this wonderful writing. Shouldn't they be being paid for it? And as a feminist, some part of me is like, yeah, you know, money can be useful, particularly to the kind of pink collar workers who write fan fiction.

Why should J.J. Abrams make millions of dollars doing Star Wars and this writer not? On the other hand, I have to say I really want to preserve the love in this culture and the play in this culture and not turn it into work. But then there were things like Kindle Worlds, which wanted to kind of have licensed fanfic. They were signing up people and saying, you can write fanfiction in this small list of worlds and the money would go to them. And if you have any ideas, you're selling your rights away. any ideas. You're selling your rights away. I mean, there's all of this sort of ways in which mainstream culture is trying to kind of commodify fan activity in ways that I think is bad for the women of fandom. Well, what's your concern? Where do you see that going in a worst case scenario? Right. Well, so let's talk Fifty Shades for a minute, which is not a book I particularly

like. I much prefer, if I'll give it a shout out, C.S. Picard's Captive Prince trilogy. But Fifty Shades of Grey was a filed off Twilight fan fiction, as everybody knows. And she wrote a fan fiction and then she said, wow, I think I have an original fiction. Rewrote it, sold it, made a lot of money and movies and is now very rich. I'm happy for her. And I like I'm fine with that. If she had published it on Kindle Worlds, if she had published her fan fiction in a way that somebody would have owned the underlying stuff, she wouldn't have been she would not have owned her own ideas. She would not have been able to sell the book. She would not have been able to sort of do the derivative movie rights. Right.

The way that the Kindle Worlds platform is structured, if she had published her fan fiction, they might have claimed kind of rights under the underlying thing where it's neither fish nor fowl in other words it's fan fiction but you don't even own it and you're then not allowed to turn it into something original which I think you should do but also you might be sort of selling your fan fiction in the marketplace in ways that kind of pervert the whole thing and in fact one of the stories of Fifty Shades

that nobody tells is that she wrote that original fan fiction kind of collaboratively. She had beta readers. She had a whole community of people cheering her on. And then there was a sense in which she went, right, bye guys, I'm going off to be a millionaire. Like that's not good for a culture. That's not good for a community, right? If I beta read for you for free, Eric, and then you come and beta read my story, we're in a relationship. If I beta read for you and free, Eric, and then you come and beta read my story, we're in a relationship. If I beta read for you and you sell it for a million dollars, now I'm your unpaid editor. It's different.

Do you see what I'm saying? In other words, we're renegotiating what work means in a culture where everything has to be work. 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 means different. It also changes, it sounds like, the whole point of fan fiction, as 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, even if they were slash stories underneath, you know, the big successes have all been turned into heterosexual love stories. Of the most, 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. Like, 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 at this point in the interview, Stephanie asked Francesca what name she writes fan fiction under. Francesca asked me to turn the mic off. I did. And when she told Stephanie what her pseudonym was, Stephanie was blown away because she had been a huge fan of Francesca's fan fiction without knowing it. So I quickly turned the microphones back on,

and I asked Francesca why fan fiction writers tend to hide their identity. Well, you say hide my identity in an odd way. I feel like sometimes the real me, my real self, is online. But, you know, it's sort of got a long history. I mean, in the early days of the Internet, nobody would use their real name. Your name, I should say, is reputation bearing in fandom. So it's not considered to be cool to be like changing your name every three seconds. Like you have a name and you have a reputation and people know who you are. But it doesn't have to be one that affects, you know, every every third cousin, you know, like on Facebook. I'm not on Facebook for that reason, in fact. I don't want to be found by every third cousin. I don't need to talk to my high school boyfriend. And I think, you know, early, early in the Internet, we knew that this was all trackable.

And I think female fans in general, I mean, look how much crap people have gotten for being female on the Internet in any number of geek. I'm friends with Anita Sarkeesian as well, actually. She's a friend of mine. And so I can tell you right away, I mean, you know, you have to be careful about how you, you know, just, just being a woman on the internet is tough enough. Uh, so it's, it's, it's a protection, but it's also, um, it's a little

bit like your rap name, you know, your street name. Uh, it's fun having another identity, a secret identity. Do you feel like there's any stigma associated with it? There used to be, if I say so myself. I myself personally have done a heck of a lot of work to reduce the stigma. But I can remember, I remember really well the first time as an academic I went to do, I was on a panel about fan fiction. And it was at an art gallery downtown here. And somebody asked us, I knew they would, but they asked it in a sniggering way. They're like, I hear that there's, you know, FEC where, you know, Kirk is boning Spock kind of thing.

You know, before gay marriage, before whatever. I mean, that was, you know, and I just remember taking a breath and stepping into it. And I was like, yeah, there is. It's great. You should read some. And you could just feel the room change. And I was terrified. You know, and I thought, yeah, I'm just going to step into

that question and say, yeah, there is. And it's really interesting. And here's why it's interesting. And then I felt like I was free. I was like liberated. But, you know, it's been a lot of work, even just mainstreaming, you know, anything that women do is funny. Women and erotic things are always funny, right? Women's desire is hilarious for some reason anything having to do with star trek is hilarious you know i mean there's all these ways in which you're anything teenage girls do right is still mockable you you have to protect yourself a little bit from this and that uh and that things are much better but they're better because a lot of the grown-ups in fandom myself included were like okay what's so funny? You know, I'm going to stand up and say, what's so funny? That is it for this week.

Thank you for listening. Special thanks to Francesca Coppa and my assistant producer, Stephanie Billman. Imaginary Worlds is part of the PandaPlay Network. You can like the show on Facebook. I tweet at emolinski and Imagine Worlds pod. Our Patreon page is now connected to our merchandise store. You can learn more by clicking the donate button on my site imaginaryworldspodcast.org

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