Imaginary Worlds - Is Money Ruining Fanfiction?

Episode Date: July 29, 2026

The world of fanfiction has changed a lot since our 2017 episode, Fanfiction (Don’t Judge.) At the time, I thought that 50 Shades of Gray – the novel that began as Twilight fanfiction – was a fluke. It turned out to be a harbinger of a controversial fanfiction-to-media pipeline. I talk with Elizabeth Minkel, editor of the site Fansplaining, about how a financial motivation has altered the way fanfiction writers tell stories and the characters from pop culture they choose to focus on. We also discuss how the conversations around representation in fanfiction have become more complicated over the past decade.   This episode was inspired by an episode of The Allusionist podcast. If you like this episode, you should check out our interview with Archive of Our Own co-founder Francesca Coppa and our episode Swept Away by Romantasy, which looks at how the blending of romance and fantasy took over the publishing industry. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend or disbelief. I'm Eric Malinski. My friend Helen Zaltzman has a podcast called The Illusionist, which is all about language. She recently interviewed Elizabeth Minkel about fan fiction. Elizabeth is the editor of the site Fansplaining, and she co-hosted their podcast. My assistant producer, Stephanie Billman and I, did an episode about fan fiction in 2017. called fan fiction, don't judge. We looked at how fans were writing stories

about pop culture characters that the media companies would probably not approve of. And we interviewed one of the founders of archive of our own, which is a huge website for posting fan fiction. So I felt confident that I knew fan fiction well, but when I listened to Helen's interview with Elizabeth Minkel, I realized I am out of the loop.

So much has changed over the last last nine years. So I asked Elizabeth to come on imaginary worlds because I have many questions. You don't have to listen to our previous episode to understand this one, although it can give you context about the history of fan fiction. But there are three terms we'll be using in this episode that I want to clarify. When we did our episode in 2017, the movie version of 50 Shades of Grey had come out a few years earlier. It was based on a novel that was originally fan fiction about Twilight. And there's a term for that, pull to publish. That's when a writer pulls their fan fiction offline, changes the names so they don't get sued for copyright infringement,

and then gets it published as an original novel. I had no idea that in the last nine years, pulled to publish has become much more common. A bunch of Harry Potter fan fiction has been repurposed into original novels. And there's a movie coming out called The Love Hypoise. that is set in the real world, but it's based on fan fiction about Ray and Kylo Ren from the recent Star Wars trilogy. That brings up the second term I want to clarify, shipping. When fans imagine characters in romantic relationships, they're shipping them. This type of fan fiction can be about characters that are already in relationships on screen or in the books, but often it's a departure, like taking canonically straight.

characters and putting them in queer relationships. The term for characters of the same sex in a sexual relationship is slash. The word slash refers to the punctuation mark that's used to label these stories. For example, a story about Kirk and Spock falling in love would be labeled Kirk slash Spock. I started my interview with Elizabeth by talking about 50 Shades of Gray. I told her when we did our episode in 2017, I thought 50 Shades was a fluke. I had no idea it would be the beginning of a trend. She said a lot of people in fandom thought that way.

And she sometimes uses the word fandom as a shorthand for fans and fan fiction. Because a lot of fans really resented 50 Shades of Gray, they didn't think it was good erotica writing, right? They were like kind of upset that this was the one that got picked, you know, is when there's so much good erotica written by fans. It didn't really set a model. It was just kind of like, oh, that nonsense over there. But things were happening in the, you know, behind the scenes within publishing.

More and more people were coming from fandom into publishing houses, into acquisition roles, into these editorial groups that were thinking about the kinds of stories that they wanted to commission. And so more polling to publish started to happen as the 2010s went on. But it was still very much kept as a secret. You would really want to pull your works offline, hide any connection. that they had to the original source material. And that kind of continued pretty much from most of the decade until the very end when we started to see some kind of huge booms

of pulling to publish, where they started advertising where the stories came from. That leads me to heated rivalry. It's a really popular show about gay hockey players that was adapted mainly from the second book in a series of novels called the Game Changer series. I was surprised to learn that the first book in the series had come from fan fiction about Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes, who are also known as

Captain America and the Winter Soldier in the MCU. Fanfiction writers have been shipping those characters for years under the couple name Stucky. But the backstory of that first novel, Game Changer, is a little complicated. The writer Rachel Reed claims the characters in the first book were original to begin with, but she wanted feedback on her writing in a safe space. So she renamed the characters, Stephen Bucky, and posted the chapters as Stucky Fanfic. And it's not unusual for fan fiction writers

to put the characters in real-world situations and take away their superpowers. After getting enough feedback, Rachel Reed pulled her work offline, changed the names back again, and got it published as an original novel. And so it's a kind of weird circle. thing that she claims she did because it's like, oh, you wanted it to be original, but you just

ran it through a stucky, like, wash cycle just to do what exactly, I'm not sure. And if you actually go back and look at this author's fan fiction history, she was writing other things in the fandom. So it's possible that this is just a story she's telling to say she always meant for it to be original and she just kind of used the fandom to publish it, which I don't think is that flattering a story. But it's also totally possible she just wrote up hockey story with these characters, because it's a common thing in fan fiction that you'll stick the characters in random scenarios, different kinds of jobs. They don't have to be superheroes, right? They can definitely be hockey players and baristas. And then she went to pull and publish it. And it's like, I'm not sure

which direction is correct. And I'm not sure why either story is more or less flattering than the other. But that was what she went on the record with. So that's the story as it is in the press right now. I mean, do you, when you read these, when you read the books or when you, when you watch the show, do you feel that the character, let's say, who's based on or had been initially a Steve Rogers type character, does he feel like a Steve Rogers character? Does the Bucky character feel, I mean, like, does there anything that even feels like those characters? Yeah, I mean, as I will say, I haven't read those books. I have watched the show. I do think the show was playing with it a little bit because they styled the actor playing what had originally been the

Steve Rogers' character very much in that way. He's wearing like a tight underarmor shirt as he does his like, Robocop kind of jogging. But I also have been in fandom long enough that I'm a little bit cynical about a lot of NYU, a lot of AUs in the sense of like, AU is alternate universe. Exactly. It's like a lot of them don't feel like the character is that much, right? And you kind of buy into the internal logic of a story. And so like to write a really good AU, I think the characters should be able to ring out across any setting that you put them in. And I actually don't think every fandom works for AUs. I think sometimes a character is so contextually tied to the source material. You know, I write plenty of AUs in my own fandom now, which is a superhero,

fandom is X-Men. And a lot of the time they are in the modern day, they're not superheroes. They just have their powers. And so you're trying to make them really feel like the ones we recognize from the comics or the movies or the books. Well, you made a really interesting point in your conversation with Helen about how many of these characters to begin with already felt like original characters that they had kind of like stretched the skin over, not to be too Buffalo Bill and Silence of Lambs. That's appropriate. That's appropriate.

Yeah, they had stretched the skin over, you know, these original characters to be like, hey, look, you like Stucky. But in fact, it was something original anyway. But it's funny because I remember, you know, I came in with a lot of those stereotypes of fan fiction writers. are these people that probably can't hack it as real writers. And Stephanie really talked to me how, you know, these are really good writers.

You know, these are really good writers and urge me to read some of the stories. And then when people would say, well, why don't you just write original characters that say, well, but I really want to write this character. The point is I really want to write Stephen Bucky, but I want them to do things that the MCU, that the Disney Corporation will never let them do. You know, part of this is because I think fan fiction has changed pretty dramatically over the past few decades. It's like I started reading and writing fan fiction in the 90s.

The world today, I mean, taking away all of the money elements or whatever, right? You know, publishing people, plucking people out. The actual nature of the stories is dramatically different than it was in the 90s. I mean, certainly, like, the 90s stories were very different from the ones in the Kirk's box scenes in the 70s too, right? Like, these stories reflect the time in which they're written, but also the, like, the mechanical means in which they're produced, right? You know, like obviously fanfiction changed a lot when it came online, not least because you could do a lot of different shapes of stories. You could start doing, you know, 100 words. You could do 300,000 words, right?

And you couldn't have done that in a physical zine. But one thing that I've noticed since the archive of our own began, which was in the late 2000s, that's the biggest fan fiction website. They made some really specific design choices that I think have fundamentally altered the way people write fan fiction and subsequently the way they read it. One is they kind of surfaced the metadata right at the top with the tags. So like the names of the characters, the tropes in particular. And so when I was younger, if I wanted to read, I don't know, what's a trope? It's like sharing a bed. There's only one bed left at the hotel or whatever, right?

Popular trope, time immemorial. I would have no way to find that. I would just have to stumble upon it, right? You know, there was a forum that I would read. People would be like, anyone know of any stories where this happens? right? And you'd be like, oh, thank God, someone knows of one story where it happens because you'd have to kind of manually catalog those if you wanted to have any sense of what the content. Whereas when the archive of our own was created, they put that right at the top and you could

click on it. And if you love only one bed, you can click on that tag and you can be taken to thousands and thousands of stories across different source material where they only have one bed. And you might not even need to know who only has one bed. You're just, these are some two guys and you love this dynamic. And so when I started fan-splining in the mid-2010s, we started to hear from listeners, my podcast partner, Floresh Clink and I, listeners would write in and say, you know, I don't even care about who these characters are. I just want to read only one bad. I just want to read like when one gets sick and the other one nurses them. Like, if it's well written, I'll read anything, right? Just very much like people are in romance. You know, they don't need to know these characters.

They don't know the characters in advance. They're new to them. And I think because of the nature of these platforms now being so tag-focused that fundamentally changes the ability, the ease at which you can find tropes first. Meanwhile, also at the same time, you have tons and tons of romance people coming into fandom, and so the line started to get really blurry and fandom people going into pro-romance, writing original romance. And so you have kind of this diminishing of what I think of as a very classic fan fiction thing where you're really inspired by the source and You can't stop thinking about it and you want to write more stories in that world. And I think this is what's undergirding this sort of collapsing of this system right now,

where people are now treating it as this kind of synonymous thing with romance and this thing that can be easily extracted into pro remitts. And so it like kind of blots out a lot of different other kinds of stories. Remitly knows if you live a long distance lifestyle, you probably developed a few unexpected strengths. Like instantly converting time zones. So when a text says, let's talk after dinner in Mumbai, you know they really mean during breakfast in Toronto. Or becoming the unofficial family text support, explaining why Tia Rosa in Mexico City can't hear you when she's the one on mute. Can you hear me? Download the Remitly app today and keep your long-distance game strong.

Remitly, trusted by millions to send billions worldwide. Before I interviewed Elizabeth Minkel, I spoke with my assistant producer Stephanie Billman because she's still pretty involved with fan fiction. Stephanie told me one of the big changes in the last nine years is that a lot of fan fiction writers are putting their work behind paywalls on different websites. And she says that totally changes the vibe around fan fiction because... They go into influencer mode and they're like really promoting their stuff to the point of annoyance. And that completely negates the point of fan fiction to me. Like you're not supposed to be trying to monetize it. you're sharing your love of this fandom through writing stories about that fandom.

Elizabeth agrees that the financial motivation has been a game changer for fan fiction. Yeah, oh, absolutely. It fundamentally has. And I think part of it is like, you know, I'm older school in this way. Obviously, there are many people who are older than me in fandom, but, like, I had always been raised with it as a very non-monetized space. I really value the gift economy. Like, I'm a professional writer, and I'm a professional writer. I have no desire to monetize my fan fiction. This is like, this is my fun writing. And, you know, it's not to say that it's any less serious. I think sometimes I find it more stressful than my professional writing. You can't make the story work. But that's really key to me. But like, you know, I think even going back to 50 Shades of Gray and those Twilight publishers, since then,

in those 15 years, we've had dramatically large numbers of people coming in without these existing norms, right? And they're like, yeah, why wouldn't I? Right? And the rise of side hustle culture, or like, you know, you always have to be monetizing your hatchet content, right? And so it's like, yeah, you know, like, why wouldn't I sell access to this chapter, right? And the only huge barrier that stopping people, well, A, is the law. And B is the archive of our own, which is the main fan fiction platform, is staunchly non-monetized. Like if you say anything about money, asking for money in any way on your story, it will get. taken down because it's a violation of the terms of service. And so that's like kind of the last

barrier from people just wholeheartedly selling things left, right, and center. And I think because of that, you still have a substantial portion of the fan fiction world that kind of clings to these non-monetary values. And then you have a lot of misinformation kind of passing along through telephone where people are like, if a single penny exchanges hands for fan fiction, like, we'll all go to jail. And it's like, I don't know how these, you know, these, you know, these ideas got formed over time because that's not factually true. Fan artists, people who do visual art of these characters, the default now is to sell their work.

And it makes them seem very transactional. I rarely see a fan artist. You don't often see fan artists drawing stuff that feels super idlike or unpopular. It seems like they're very much interested in drawing things that will sell. And fan artists will put up these commission sheets that'll be like, I will draw the guy's head for $40 and I'll add his neck for $10 more and I'll do a torso for $10 more. It's like so transactional.

Like here's how much of this guy you can get for the amount of money you have to spend. And that's very different than I spent hours and hours of my free time creating this labor of love to share for you for free. Yeah. Another thing that seems to have changed too is when we did our episode 10 years ago, fan fiction about real people was somewhat taboo. You know, so it's not just you're writing fan fiction about Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes, but about Chris Evans and Sebastian Stan being in a sexual relationship, regardless of what

their real life sexual orientation is. Back then, I feel like there was more pushback on that, but that line is shifted too, right? Yeah, it's a little tricky because I don't, I wouldn't say, oh, everyone's really into that now. I think it still remains a taboo line. It's interesting because it's always been this kind of taboo line with. in fandom. So it's like people who are already cool writing about the characters, which a lot of people outside fan fiction are not. They're like, how could you make, you know, Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes have sex? That's, that's not right. They don't do that on the screen. You know,

like, how could you have these thoughts or whatever? Which weirdly still people have these reactions. And it's like, just let it go. Who cares? Like, you know, like you're allowed to think whatever you want about these characters. But you also have fandoms that spring up around the real people independently of anything else. So hockey has been a huge one. for a long time. And actually, speaking of Game Changer, the Game Changer series, you know, a lot of people say that one of the biggest ships in that is, you know, it's a Canadian and Sydney Crosby and Ovechkin, I believe. Those are real hockey players. I don't know. Yeah, famous hockey players. I have no idea. I'm pretty sure that's the big ship. I'm like, I have some hockey friends and like, they move too fast for me to follow who's a big happy ship. But like, that was a big one for a long time. I heard Harry Styles, like, is another one that people were a lot of. Harry Styles and Louis Thompson. Yes. I'm trying to think of some other ones. And yeah, that was one also that was independent of any fictional source material. So it was like just about the guys. And like in those, they would often not be musicians. They would have other jobs, right? You know, like I know for fact being friends with some people in this fandom that because Harry Styles once worked as a baker. There are a lot of stories where that's his job, like his actual job, not a, you know, not a baker and pop star I'm waiting. But I think you also have this sort of breakdown happening in mainstream pop culture, mainstream culture.

about how much people feel like they have access to narratives around real people, right? And you constantly see things that are like real person fiction, you know, especially when it comes to actors, right? Like, I don't know if you followed this, but the actors on the bear last season, they had to, like, start separating in the press tour because people were shipping them and they didn't want to, like, add fuel, right? And shipping their on-screen personas. And it's kind of some fraught stuff, right? And then fans are always, you know, over-analyzing like, oh, why did this actor appear in this promo or this one and not this one? It must mean something. And it probably means that they had scheduling conflicts.

But like, you know, you know, and it's just like RPF, this is fiction. I know it's not real. RPF is short for real person fiction or real people fiction. In our original episode, we celebrated the way that a lot of fan fiction writers were reimagining mainstream characters in ways that could be seen as trans-examination. aggressive or subversive. I asked Elizabeth, has that conversation become more nuanced or complicated over the years? Oh, for sure. I mean, I also think that even then there were debates that I don't think fully made it to a mainstream narrative. I think that there's this like kind of very strong historical narrative about fan fiction that is women, you know, resting the texts

from men and like the male creators, male corporations, etc., queer people finding the representation, they don't get on screen, right? But then you actually look at fandom and you look at the output and you see, I think the biggest thing is overwhelming whiteness, right? And like, this was always true, right? And Kirk and Spock, sure. But like, you know, if you go through the entire history of fandom, it is two white guys, two white guys, two white guys. In slash fandom, that's male, male historically. Obviously, there's a parallel lineage of male-female, and again, extremely white and female-female, which is a much smaller group. And also biases, you know, against that, too, because it's like prioritization of white men in particular has always been a thing. So these internal biases, I think, are hard for a lot of white fans to really face because I think they have internalized narrative. It's a fundamentally transgressive act. And it's like, well, you can still reify these things. And then, of course, I think aside from race, the biggest thing over the decades, even way back to the print times, has been the prioritization of men and the kind of demonization

of women, which is ironic because, you know, there's tons of non-binary people and trans people and fandom, there's a lot of cis women. And yet female characters very, very kind of set to the side, often demonized in the pursuit of making the male-male romance be the center, you know, and just like, you don't have to make her evil to get her out of the romantic picture. It's like the canonical girlfriend or whatever, right? And Femnslaschlash, which is female-female, has always been this kind of tiny, overlooked fraction of the broader fanworks. And it's tricky now. I think you still, you see way, way, way more stories about canonical male characters gender bent to be female. So female, Steve Rogers, female Bucky Barnes.

You know, in my newsletter, the rec center, which we feature fan fiction recs every week. And we rely on all our readers to send in. We have thousands of readers and they send in Rex through a big database. And we do Femns slash February every year, which is female, female ships. And, you know, we're not closed off. If you want to write female Steve Bucky, like, I'm all for it. But in the last few years, we've almost exclusively received stories that are ships that are originally male-male and are now being written as female female.

And I'm like, that's quite interesting that people still really don't want to connect to the female characters in our media and often blame the source material. They say, oh, well, she was written poorly. While they're transcending the source material to begin with. Exactly. And, like, also, well, they're, like, inventing men out of whole cloth. There have been some very famous fan fiction ships where the men on screen have, like, three lines or, like, two lines with each other.

And now we've got this man's rich inner life. And it's like, you made up a guy. you can make up a lady too, or just connect to a lady on screen. And it's the same with race. I think people are always like, oh, it's just because there aren't, you know, black characters don't get a lot of screen time. And then you see black characters that do get screen time cast aside and no one wants to focus on them. And so these are systemic problems. They aren't the fault of anyone, one person, writing their favorite two white guys.

I want to bring Stephanie back because she is a personal experience with this. And it has to do with something called reader inserts. In reader insert stories, often one of the characters will be labeled YN, which is short for your name. That way, the reader can imagine themselves in the story interacting with a superhero or a celebrity. Stephanie says to make it work, YN has to be written as generically as possible. The idea is there's supposed to be no description of the story.

character, no mannerisms that would be specific to a certain person. However, that tends to not be the case. What ends up happening is they'll describe something like putting your hair up in a messy bun or like the reader blushed and I'm like, okay, I'm black. I'm not going to blush and I'm not going to put my hair up in a messy bun. Those types of things are the problem. And a lot of times that happens because the writer is white and they're writing it from their experience and they blush and they can put their hair up in a messy bun. I've seen lots of discourse about the fact that because of the way that these reader inserts are written, they're very, they exclude people of color and, you know, white writers get defensive and they're like, well, you know, I don't know

how to write from a black person experience. It's like you're not supposed to be writing from anybody's experience. That's the point of a reader insert. Like if it's written, well. And I've read plenty of them that are written to the point where there's no description at all. Like, I could easily insert myself in there if I wanted to. Well, you were also telling me, too, sometimes they'll take that advice and say, oh, wow, you're absolutely right. I need to work against my internal bias. But then they write something that's supposedly from a black perspective and it's super cringy. Yeah, yeah. That's actually worse. Like I've seen black reader inserts from written by white people where they'll have like big hoop earrings and, you know, they'll talk about, you know, their baby daddy and like going to get their, you know, stuff using their food stamps.

And I'm like, are you serious right now? This is this is how you see black people. What would you like to see happen? Just like if a white writer, you know, suddenly feels like, oh my God, you know, you're right, I keep writing romantic stories about these white characters. Would you want them to imagine a romance with a black character? or if that just doesn't feel organic, at least just develop other black characters in the story? Yeah, I think developing other black characters in a story is good

because you can organically create black characters that have nothing to do with the lore of the property that you're writing about. That's possible. I just don't think they consider that option. I will say this. Some of them will actually specifically call out for people of color beta readers.

They'll freely admit, I don't understand, you know, I'm in the Midwest and I've never, like, personally, like, met a black person. Can someone help me if I'm writing this black character? Can you help me make it more authentic without being stereotypical? That I respect. Like, yeah, you can do a middle ground. And like I said, there are reader inserts that I've read that are really good and don't have any description at all of the person. You could do it.

They just, for whatever reason, refuse to accept that they have a bias. In our original episode, one of the big questions we asked was, who has the power? At the time, we were looking at the push and pull between the studios and the fans that they were trying to please. Elizabeth says that in balance has become very lopsided. She thinks all the industry contractions and corporate mergers have made the Hollywood studios feel more untouchable than ever.

But at the same time, romance and romance. Romanticie, which is a blending of romance and fantasy, have become hugely popular genres for the publishing industry. And now we have the publishing industry coming in as well and like kind of putting their hand very aggressively over fan fiction. And so in a way, it feels like fan fiction writers have less power than they did 10 years ago to me. I feel a lot of despair when I think about the current state of things.

Fan art decided to monetize itself years ago. We're selling our art, right? We're making prints. You like this fan art? I'm like a print for you, right? You know, I'll put it on whatever. There is an element, even though I don't love it, that is still very one-to-one. It's still within fandom.

You know, it's like, I pay you, you make the art for me, right? Or you made the art and I buy it. It's quite different when you have these publishers coming in and kind of tapping certain stories for huge deals. And I think this is also a reflection of how broken the publishing industry is. And anyone works in publishing, we'll talk about this. right, that like there's no more mid-list, there's no more wide range of things. There are this giant blockbuster deals that need to pay out massive dividends, right? Obviously, this is the problem in Hollywood too, but like publishing industry seems much more stark.

And so it's not just that the publishing industry is coming through and tapping these stories and turning them into these big books and selling these big movie deals. It's just like it's a couple and it's for a ton of money. Right. So it starts to feel like the publishing industry is going around with like a lottery magic wand that they might tap on you. I think that incentivizes you to further kind of tool your works, which is supposed to be like, the thing you want to write because you love it and just start to think about what's marketable, right? And it's like start to think about what they might want.

What will get me the most hits that will attract their eye in a specific kind of way that will say, here, have two million dollars, right? You know, the biggest story on the archive of our own for years was all the young dudes, which was about Remus Sirius from Harry Potter. massive, massive numbers, millions and millions of millions of reads. And that's sold at the London Book Fair a few months ago for a seven-figure deal. And by the way, this would be meaning meaning this is, it starts out as shipping these two characters, remiss and serious, and then takes the names off and resets them not in the Harry Potter world. Frankly, I will say I have literally no idea how this author is going to do it because I have looked at this story out of academic interest, even though Harry Potter fandom is very dead to me because this was my ship in the 2000s, those two men. but it starts when they are 11 and going to Hogwarts for the first time and then it takes it year by year. And it's very much, I mean, at least what I saw of some of the earlier bits, very much like the early Harry Potter books just with these characters.

And so it's got all of the like pranks on the giant squid kind of hijinks, right? You know, and it's just like how on earth are they going to take this away from the setting? It's so, so tied to this world, right? Like, you know, and I don't know, go ahead. Like, they're getting millions to do this, right? But, like, that's supposedly what was sold. They said it's going to be set in the 60s instead of the 70s. It's going to be at a boarding school still.

But it's not called Hogwarts then. No, because he's one of them still a werewolf, wolf boy. I'm sure that their lawyers have gone through and just be like, oh, for sure. You can, like, literally word for word, change this, change this, change this. And we can defend this in court. Yeah, I mean, I think this, though, though, that you'd fundamentally have to change it from the bottom up because it's like, And that's what Alchemized, that's what Sen Linu, who the second most popular story was Manacled, which became Alchemized, which was a huge bestseller. My best friend who is my longtime podcast partner read the original fan fiction.

Fan fiction of Manicold, right, which is this big Hermione, Draco story in The Handmaid's Tale-esque world. And Flores said, and it's fine. Try to read the poll to publish version with a whole new world building and tapped out after five chapters and was like, I can't do this anymore. And they were like, world building is hard, but it's not this hard. Right. Because it was just so torture, like, trying to, and you know, whatever. Some people seem to enjoy that book. But I've heard from a lot of people that it was just like, it's tricky.

There's so much in fan fiction that we, it's not to say a fan fiction writer can't write an original world. But it's like so much of the pleasure of fan fiction is that you're kind of playing with this world that we all know. Like I read and wrote Harry Potter fan fiction for years. And like, it's a rich, expansive world full of like many, many, many, underexplore. areas. And, you know, your fan fiction is responding to everyone else's. It's not just responding to the source. And so when you're trying to sever all of that, I think it gets a little loss sometimes people are like, oh, you know, they can't do it without the training wheels. And it's like, no, it's just not as good without the networked tax. It's not as good without that like

communally built scaffolding that we're all kind of working with and that we're all referencing. I think also, too, some of these are being pulled from AUs that were already drawing on a lot of other parts of the culture, like hockey, right? Like she was a big hockey fan, you know, and so she's bringing kind of her hockey fandom into the creation of the AU world for Stephen Bucky. And that's really normal. That's what we all do. When I write my stories, if they're set in the modern day, I'm pulling from my life. I'm pulling from other things that I've seen or watched or read recently that were meaningful to me, you know, in resonant, right? So it's like all these things that we do when we create original fiction, too, we're doing within fan fiction.

It's not just like we're kind of trapped in this very rigidly canonical world where we're just like trying to see exactly what's in the corner of the scene we already saw. So when you look at the future of fan fiction, what are you most excited about in terms of the possibilities and what are you concerned about the most? Well, something very timely and this will have been a few weeks by the time this comes out. But one of the biggest things is AI. And there was a huge blow up going on right now in the fan fiction world. heated rivalry fandom because, you know, we've seen people using generative AI to create often, like, secretly, you know, it's, it's very, it's very, fandom is very, very anti-AI. And it's partly like, why are you using AI? This is for fun and for free. Like, use your imagination.

This is kind of sad, right? Like, where you need the computer to have the fun imaginative thoughts for you? But because the heated rivalry fandom in particular has been so, so massive, so quickly, like there's so many people are coming into fan fiction for the first time through this. like probably, I would say millions of people, right? You know, just like a massive explosion. And the stories in this fandom have so, so many reads and are being written at such a pace. And so a few days ago, someone, a group anonymously published a document saying there's a really big generative AI problem in this fandom. And they had created a script that searched for, I guess, when you copy paste directly from Claude, it pulls in some of the formatting from the tool.

And so obviously this is a bit of a witch hunt energy of people trying to find who use generative AI. But I think it's more speaking to the speed at which this fandom and other new hot fandums are moving that is like frankly unsustainable. Right. So it's like tons and tons of people, extreme appetite. Readers just want more and more and more as quickly as possible. Give me more stories. We want it now. Right.

And so that incentivizes people than to use these tools. And then you're just kind of churning out generic stuff as quickly as possible. for massive numbers, hoping that publishers will notice the most popular one, and then they'll tap it, and they'll give you $2 million, and then you get your book deal and your movie deal, right? And it's like, what a nightmare this is? It's funny. I asked you, what are you most excited about this? It seems like there's a lot right now. I thought it was like excited and worried. I'm excited about my fandom. I still love, love, love writing fan fiction. And so the fundamental active fan fiction isn't changing. Nothing, nothing I've described is going to take away

that desire. And it is a bit of a bummer to think that like these forces are are reshaping the way that readers are even going to approach my work when I post it. But I think that the fundamental act remains the same of people. There's still so many people in fandom who just want to write these stories, right? You know, and like there are so many people doing such creative weird things that like money will never touch because it's just weird, right? You know, or like if you actually look at the numbers. My friend Destination Toast is a well-known fandom stats person. They generate all these interesting analytical stats about fan works. And I was just looking at something the other day. And I think the majority of stories, the vast, vast majority of stories have like one like,

one kudos or zero. Right? And so it's like maybe that's a little sad. But it's also like there's tons of people just putting stuff out there, right? Because they want to post it. And maybe it's bad, sloppy, amateur. Maybe it's illegible. It doesn't matter. Like in the fact that that's still the vast majority and it's not all just people trying to hack their way to success in a publishing deal or whatever is that's very inspiring to me because it feels very, it feels very anti this moment. It feels like like that is a continued resistance against the broader cultural moment when we're in. Does that also, I've heard this expression, no betas we die like men. Is that what that goes to?

What does that mean? Okay. I think everyone should have a beta though. So a beta reader is like your editor. Sometimes people use alpha reader like way back in the day, which would be more of a developmental editor, like a first reader. I have two betas. They do pretty substantial edits. They give me really significant feedback.

They read the drafts as they go along. They're my people that I bounce ideas off of. But yeah, a lot of people just don't do it. And so they've kind of post that as a like, yeah, no one's beta read this. It's a little bit of a joke. Like, no, we die like men. It's like I'm so anti this sort of corporate greed push that, like, like, like I had no beta readers, no editors.

I haven't even spell check this. This is raw, man. But yeah, I mean, I think that is part of the unpolishedness of it. Or like, there's something that the big, the big amateur spirit. Like, I'm 16 is my first story. Like, it's just what I wanted to see. Like, that's so lovely, right? And like, I think a lot of that's gotten erased over time.

I think especially as people, younger people have come online having to put their whole selves online. I think they feel somewhat self-conscious and they don't want to put their weirdest, most unpolished, messy self online. And so I'm hopeful that at least that spirit can continue through because I read things all the time where I'm like, I hate this. This is so weird. I never want to see this again.

Like, good for you. Like, this is not for me. But like, I'm really glad that you just wrote what you wanted to write, even if I don't think that I ever would want to, you know, that I don't want to read. Yeah, I remember the first piece of fan fiction I ever read in the 90s. It was in the 90s. It was Buffy fanfic and it was Spike's Leather Jacket and who sounded like him. And I was like, this is fantastic.

This is like, I freaking love this. That's really funny. Yeah, I think you see way less of that anthropomorphic, they call it, like from the perspective of an inanimate object. This used to be such a thing. And now I would never see it. And I'm like, what happened? We're losing the old ways.

Like, should I be writing from the perspective of Magneto's helmet? Is this on me? Is it because I write them just having sex? It's fine. I want to read that so badly. It'd be so officious. Yeah, or like, you know, when I first got into X-Men fandom, it's such a robust AU fandom. And I was trying to describe it.

I was like, they have everything. There's one where they're bronies. There's one where they're birds. And then I realized it was the same author. And I was like, this person's just doing whatever. It's just, you know? And so, like, that's not gone. But I do feel like now people are trying to write romance novels.

And so it's like, they can't be birds. Like, that's not going to, that's not going to sell. Our 2017 episode was called fan fiction, don't judge, because that was the subject line of the email Stephanie sent me when she first pitched me the idea. I thought it was funny because there was a lot of cultural bias against fan fiction back then. That stigma is not as strong as it used to be. In fact, I think now the main conflict is not with a culture at large, but within the community itself. It's like the writers are saying to each other, this is my way of doing fan fiction.

Don't judge. That is a more challenging conversation to have. That is it for this week. Thank you for listening. Special thanks to Elizabeth Minkel and my assistant producer, Stephanie Billman. If you liked this episode, in 2018, we put out a separate episode. That was a full-length interview with Francesca Copa, the co-creator of Archive of Our Own.

We also did an episode about Romanticy in 2024. We have another show called Between Imaginary Worlds. It's a more casual chat show that's only available to listeners who pledge on Patreon. In the most recent episode, I talked with podcaster J.R. Forresteros, about why we are both totally obsessed with the show Widows Bay on Apple TV. Between Imaginary Worlds comes included with the ad-free version of the show that you can get on Patreon. You can also buy an ad-free subscription on Apple Podcasts. If you donate to the show on Patreon, you get access to a Dropbox account, which has the full-length interviews of every guest in every episode.

And I talked with Elizabeth for over an hour. I've also selected my favorite full-length interviews from the Dropbox account and curated them into folders on Patreon. You can subscribe to the show's newsletter at imaginary worldspodcast.org.