Scott Rettberg, Director of the Center for Digital Narrative (CDN), interviews Flourish Klink, podcaster and fandom expert, about their rich history with fandom and fan culture.
SR: Welcome to Off Center. I’m Scott Rettberg, the Director of the Center for Digital Narrative, and I’m here today with Flourish Klink. Welcome Flourish.
FK: Hey, good to be here.
SR: Flourish is a fellow podcaster, a podcast guru, one of the two hosts of Fansplaining, and has a fascinating story and a lot of experience with fandom, both as a creator and as an expert, and as someone who’s actually worked in the field of fandom. So, Flourish, I’d like to start out by asking you about your journey.
FK: Sure. I was a very early adopter of the Internet, as much as someone who is only 36 now can be, I got really, really online starting from when I was about 12 and got really involved in fan culture. This was long before the current blossoming of fan culture. I was really involved in Harry Potter, which now is a bit of a sore subject for me because of J.K. Rowling’s views about trans people. But it was really, really formative. I was involved in the first Harry Potter fan convention. I ran a major fanfiction website with a bunch of other people, did lots of adventures, started a nonprofit before I was 16.
SR: Right. And you were famously written about by Henry Jenkins, as I recall.
FK: Yeah. Henry Jenkins in his book Convergence Culture. He basically founded the field of fan studies. There were other people who were doing it before him and during the same time, but now when people point to a book, they always point to his Textual Poachers as the foundational text. So even though it’s more complicated than that, we’ll let it be. In a follow up book to that, Convergence Culture, he was interviewing a bunch of people, and I was one of the people he interviewed about fandom. I did not grow up in an area where there was any connection to entertainment industry or film culture, and so I didn’t see any of that as a possible path for me.
FK: I went to college. I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life. And I, at the end of college, just reached out to Henry as the only academic I wasn’t related to for his advice about grad school. And he was like, “well, you can do grad school with me.” And I was like, “at MIT?” And he was like, “Yeah, come to MIT.” So, I came to MIT, which was really cool and really formative. I was studying fan culture, obviously, specifically anti-fans, like Twilight haters. And while I was there, I met a bunch of people in the entertainment industry, and we struck out and found a company which then led to another company. And then for about ten years, I basically made my own job as a fan culture consultant.
SR: And this is with the entertainment industry?
FK: Yeah, film, television. Basically, I would do both qualitative and quantitative research on the fandoms for different properties, and between that and my knowledge of the space, of both the academic and the in real life parts of fan culture would then be able to advise across different departments. So, I could help people with development if they were looking at questions like do we want to make this book into a movie? I could help people with social media, how are we going to interact with fans on social media, I could help people with media training for their actors so that they wouldn’t fall into big pits that they didn’t know were there. And I was able to work with an incredible team. I thought about doing a PhD then decided, no, actually it’s just way more fun to work on the actual stuff.
SR: Yeah. And to go back a little bit to that story, your first interaction with Henry Jenkins. I read the book some years back, and there’s a really fascinating story about a lawsuit with J.K. Rowling’s publisher.
FK: So, there was never actually a lawsuit. There was a round of cease-and-desist letters which went out to all of the little fans of Harry Potter. And when I say little, I mean we were mostly teenagers, but there were a few people in their twenties. And fortunately, one of the people in their twenties happened to be a lawyer specializing in intellectual property law, my friend Heidi. And so, when this all went around very quickly, everyone banded together and we’re not going to stand for this. We’re going to fight back. So, sue us, because what they were really doing was trying to shut us down. They didn’t really understand the Internet at that point, and they wanted to take control over all of the domain names that fans had registered for. I had alohomora.com, and they can’t just do that.
SR: This was fans, and this is a topic we’re going to be talking about today, fans who, for example, are writing fiction based on the characters in Harry Potter and then creating their own story worlds based loosely on that universe.
FK: Right. And that was one of the things that was and continues to be a challenge for people as they look into these things. When you tell a story, it goes out into the world and people then interpret it any way they want. For instance, at the time there were a lot of people writing Harry Potter, and they were writing slash fan fiction, meaning they were writing stories in which two of the male characters were in a romantic relationship. And Warner Brothers—
SR: And J.K. Rowling didn’t like that very much?
FK: You know, I actually don’t think that J.K. Rowling had much to do with this particular decision. I have my beef with her, believe you me. In this case, I think it was just Warner Brothers lawyers wanting to be like, “if we don’t control it, we don’t want it out there.” And at the time, this was a long time ago, in 1998 - 99. So queer rights were not as advanced. But it’s a challenge for people because there are authors who feel very hurt when people who are fans of their work take it in a direction that they never imagined. But at the same time, that’s human nature. That’s the way that we interact with stories.
SR: It’s also kind of flattering that people want to inhabit that universe so much that they’re willing to go in and continue writing where you left off.
FK: Yeah. I mean, I think it is. But I also I do understand how, when you invest a lot of time in something, it can feel like, “wait, that’s mine. I wanted people to like it, but I wanted it to still be just mine.” But that’s not the way that storytelling ultimately works. If you want something to be just yours forever, then don’t ever tell another human being about it, because the moment you tell somebody, they’re going to have their own perspective on it.
SR: So you ultimately won that conflict?
FK: Yeah, in fact, it was funny because years later I was pitching Warner Brothers and they brought in one of the lawyers who had written the cease-and-desist letters, and he came and he shook my hand and he was like, “Yeah, that was a stupid policy.” I don’t know if he said those words exactly, but that was the gist of the interaction. And it was really validating.
SR: And now the importance of fandom has sort of become recognized, I think, to an extent where, for example, in Norway, the show Skam had a great deal of involvement from fans, and probably even some in your line of work, the people who are producing the shows are also keeping an eye on what fans are saying. Maybe even to the extent that it influences the plot.
FK: I think it’s hard to say how much influence happens. It’s really complicated, particularly when you’re talking about television or even more so film where things are being produced so far ahead of time and where there’s so many different elements that impact the creation of it. But I definitely would say that people are paying more attention to what fans are doing and saying than ever before, and sometimes that’s a good thing and sometimes it’s a bad thing. It’s complicated because there’s a bunch of people who are fans who don’t want the eye of Sauron to turn on them. They’re out there doing their own thing and they didn’t ask. One misconception some people have about fan culture is that the story, the art, all of this is being made for the author, for the person who made the original thing as a tribute. And sometimes that’s true, and to some extent it’s always true. But a lot of times there’s a really strong cultural desire of “No, no, no, they should be over there. And I’m telling my story over here and never the twain shall meet.”
SR: That’s interesting, it reminds me of the literary studies concept of intentional fallacy. Does it matter what the author thought about to begin with? Once you have the story, once you have the world it kind of becomes its own entity, and a lot of critics, this is going back to new criticism, would say that the author’s a nonentity once the work is in the world.
FK: Right. And there’s as many perspectives on this within fandom as there are people. So, there are definitely people who have a strong idea of what the author means or wants, and they want that to be true. Whatever they think is true, they really want it to be true. And if they discover later that the author had a different intention, then it can really ruin their enjoyment of it. Then there’s other people who just don’t care at all. And, again, with J.K. Rowling, this is a perfect example. You can discover things; I no longer engage with Harry Potter in any way because it makes me sad. I’m a trans person and J.K. Rowling says a lot of transphobic stuff. And I never would have thought that would be my position on it.
SR: Not even the movies?
FK: I don’t. I own one set of Harry Potter books. I’ve gotten rid of every other Harry Potter object I’ve ever owned because it just makes me sad to look at them.
SR: Sort of like giving up a piece of your childhood, right?
FK: Yeah, a little bit. Although, it is what it is. Sometimes when something starts hurting you, you have to give it up. And I don’t blame anybody who doesn’t have that reaction. Like I said, I wouldn’t have imagined this to be my reaction. I would have said, “I’m all in on the death of the author, who cares why they do?” But it turns out—
SR: But when the author’s out there TERFing…
FK: I do care, so other people can have a different reaction and that’s fine. But all that is just to say that one of the challenges with fan culture is that it’s so easy to create a monolith, to say that fan culture is one thing. In reality, there’s lots of different perspectives and sometimes they’re fighting with each other internally.
SR: And this is a huge, huge, huge world. I come from the study of electronic literature, of new forms of literature made for digital media, which is a pretty esoteric little corner of the world. And yet, if we look at what’s been transformed in terms of storytelling and with the Internet and digital technology, fan fiction is a is a huge component of this, right? There’s a very, very large community of people creating stories based on not only novels and television shows, but also boy bands. I listened to one of your episodes about Jar Jar Binks. There’s a whole fan community around Jar Jar Binks, the character in Star Wars. These very esoteric corners of culture become this basis for both fan writing, which is maybe an individual thing, but it’s also very interesting to me how these collective narratives evolve.
FK: I would actually say that fan fiction, as she is practice today, is very networked and it doesn’t exist outside of that. It’s not that people are collaborating with each other on writing necessarily, although that does happen. It’s more that each work is being made in the context of all of these other works that are also being made and everyone’s reading and writing in response to each other’s stories. And it is so intensely networked in that way, far more so than anything ever could be in professional writing because it takes time to publish. Whereas with fanfiction you just think and it’s up there. So, you can have such incredibly fast feedback loops happening, but it really is a networked thing. And you can see this in the way that groups treat characters like you’ll have fandom, and everybody will converge on an idea of who that character is. And sometimes it’s quite different than what’s in the original work, but because everybody has been writing these stories, they come together as one characterization.
FK: The other thing I was going to mention is that it can be tempting to say, well, there’s fan studies and there’s all this stuff and that’s basically social science research. Maybe you could do literary research on it, but like it’s all very sort of like that, and it’s quite different from anything to do with generative texts or this or that. But that also isn’t true. You know, right now in fandom the past month or two, there’s been a lot of drama around the appearance of AI writing because fanfiction is the biggest source of writing, especially about copyrighted characters. I think it’s probably the biggest source of free fiction online, that was written recently. Obviously, you can read stuff that’s out of copyright, but if you want something that’s written recently that you can just scrape? So, every AI is trained on a lot of fan fiction.
SR: So large language models, when they go to scrape up all the text on the Internet, they’re actually running across a lot of fanfiction?
FK: And it can be really funny. So, fan authors obviously have mixed feelings about this. Many of them, I would say have highly negative feelings about this because this is not what they posted their work for. And one of the things that happened is people discovered that a large language model had read fanfiction and was now writing a lot of Omegaverse fanfiction. Omegaverse is hard to describe, I would say it’s a kind of alternate universe story. So, you can have an alternate universe where everybody is a knight or an alternate universe where everybody is a doctor. And in this case, it’s an alternate universe where everybody has very different gender and sexuality and genitalia. And it’s sort of based on wolves, but not really, maybe like werewolves.
SR: Was this based originally around a work of fiction, or did it just evolve?
FK: I think it evolved. There’s some debate over what fandom it evolved from. I think it evolved out of Supernatural fandom, even though there’s nothing like this in Supernatural. I think that somebody wrote an alternate universe like this, and then people started picking up on it and porting it into different fandoms, and now it’s in all sorts of fandoms and in fact it’s in mainstream romance novels and things like that.
SR: That’s really interesting, this kind of reciprocal cycle where it feeds back into popular culture.
FK: Right, and there’s all sorts of things like this. They’re not very popular now, but at one time the stereotype that people would put on fanfiction was that it’s always a coffee shop. Everybody works in a coffee shop. Statistically, it was never actually that.
SR: That sounds like Friends.
FK: Well yeah, a little bit. You tune down the conflict a lot, so Kylo Ren is just the jerk barista. But the point being that people notice that these large language models were producing stories that featured the Omegaverse, that used terms that were in the Omegaverse. They use terms like Knotting. Go Google that, I’m not going to say what it means on the air.
SR: There are all these terms you always come up with.
FK: Really, people can go look that one up, it’s not safe for work. The point being that the AI is using these terms that you would never ever use if you were not reading these fanfics. So, fan writers did a campaign, it was called Knot in My Name, and they basically were like, “Let’s write a lot of kinky Omegaverse fanfic and put it online so that we can influence these large language models and make it totally unusable for anybody”, which I thought was great.
SR: There’s a lot of fascinating aspects to that. Of course, the concern too with copyright, because copyrighted works that are scraped then influence, and train models. And then you have fanfiction, which has this very strange, interesting relationship to copyright to begin with.
FK: Right, I would say that fanfiction exists as a response to our modern copyright system. People have been writing things that are like fanfiction in a lot of ways, forever and ever and ever, right?
SR: What are some examples?
FK: I mean, you could say The Aeneid if you wanted to. You could also say the Bronte sisters wrote a bunch of stuff that was like fanfiction to us. When The Wizard of Oz books came out, you didn’t have the modern copyright system, so people wrote all these unofficial sequels and things. But fanfiction is partially about the fact that it’s not officially monetizable. You can’t do some of these things, at least not unless you alter it a great deal. And so, you don’t really see what I would consider to be modern fanfiction showing up until you get into the Sixties and Seventies. People were writing, for instance, Sherlock Holmes stories and so forth.
SR: This just occurred to me, Pamela, which is known as the first novel, there was a novel that came out just a few years later called Shamela.
FK: Exactly. People have been doing things like this for a long time, but I don’t consider those to be fanfiction unless they’re in a copyright regime where there’s clearly an author and there’s fans of the author who are creating derivative works that they can’t monetarily benefit from in the same way as the original author. And this continues, things even go back into fanfiction from the AI problems. Character.ai is very popular right now in the fan world, which is a system whereby you can create AI characters.
SR: My daughter was just raving about this.
FK: So, you can create characters and then have a conversation with them, which is fun in a lot of ways. But when you look at their TOS—
SR: TOS?
FK: The terms of service. It’s basically like “we’re not responsible for any of this.” And the way that they’re getting around this, my understanding is that they’re like, “well, the users prompt our system to create these characters, and then the users prompt the characters to create the interactions. So, we, Character.ai, are not doing anything bad copyright wise, even when our users create a Batman character who is super popular and they’re all talking with him and he’s obviously Batman. He’s obviously the Batman that Warner Brothers owns, but we didn’t do it. Our users did it. And so, we’ll just take it down. And then a new one will pop up, right?”
SR: It’s so funny what we’ve done to the sort of idea of the commons of language over time. And now you really run into these complex issues because in a way, anything that we say, anything that we write is going to be based on and inflected by things that have been said and written before. We don’t have unique languages.
FK: One way that Character.ai is different is that it profits when people use their service, presumably. But you really do have the question of how it is materially different from when a little kid puts on a cape and runs around going, “I’m Batman,” but there’s a difference in sophistication and certainly there’s things that fans are doing with the Character.ai characters that a five-year-old would never do. But how different is it? It’s still people using their own mind and maybe a prop, whether that’s an AI or it’s a cape to run around and to enjoy this fictional character, which you should be allowed to enjoy, right?
SR: Yeah, exactly. There’s a lot of terms involved in fan fiction. I was talking with Joseph Tabbi a little bit about this Character.ai earlier this morning, a lot of these terms come up when I hear you and members of my family talking that just make me feel kind of, you know, not quite Boomer, but early Gen X. For example, shipping. I thought shipping meant that I worshiped this character for many years. I was going around saying, “yeah, I ship that.” Whereas I guess shipping is actually conceiving of the relationship between two characters. And then there was this idea with Character.ai and other platforms like this, of self-shipping. What’s self-shipping?
FK: Well, there’s different terms that people would use, but it’s like writing yourself into fanfiction. People would say it’s a self-insert fanfic. It’s one where you write yourself into the story and that’s not always romantic, but self-shipping is when you ship yourself and Batman.
SR: People do this, right?
FK: People do this all the time. And it’s actually not particularly gendered. People will often say fanfiction is a largely female domain or a largely non male domain. And to some extent that’s true, but it’s not as though everybody doesn’t do this just sometimes through different modes.
SR: I was just thinking about fandoms that go back to before the Internet, like sports fans. It is one kind of fandom, or of cosplay, if I think back to like the 1970s, 1980s: Kiss, the band kiss.
FK: Yeah, absolutely.
SR: People putting on the makeup and extending their tongues.
FK: You know, celebrities have had fandoms since forever, famous actors always had fans. And as time went on, that could be a larger and larger group of people. I would say that there’s probably a difference between an actor in the 1700s with a coterie of a certain number of fans versus how many people could be a fan of an actor today. Although technology has increased the number of people and the one-to-many ness of this, they’re still clearly in the same trajectory. It’s not as though fandom is something that just appeared. Nobody ever was a fan of anyone, and then suddenly it became the year 2000 and we were all fans. That’s not how it worked.
SR: Are there fan fictions around like, say, Michael Jordan or something like that? Just thinking about that connection to fiction, I was wondering whether there are sports fanfics.
FK: So, there is, and there has been in different ways. We actually had an episode of Fansplaining where we talked with Cecelia Tan, who’s an interesting person because she’s been very active in fiction, music and sports fandoms. She’s really knowledgeable about the history of baseball. I’m sure that somebody wrote a fanfic somewhere about Michael Jordan, but I don’t know that there was ever a culture about Michael Jordan fanfic.
FK: I do know that there are sports fandoms now that have a fairly significant amount of fanfic written for them. Hockey, figure skating, there’s a bunch. I do know that in the past, people would write effectively baseball fanfic, maybe they wouldn’t make all the same story choices as people are making today, but they were writing stories about baseball players.
SR: Yeah. I was researching a novel at one point that was set around the turn of the 19th century, 20th century in Chicago, and I read some sports journalism during that time. The amazing thing at that point was there weren’t degrees in journalism, so they all had like literature degrees, so they all wrote with these flourishes where it really was like reading some kind of purple prose fiction.
FK: And at that time, this is actually where we sort of start getting the roots of the way that fanfiction ultimately would be distributed because you start getting these things called amateur press associations. It’s basically people writing their own little hometown newspaper on these little presses, that were sort of the iMac of the time. The were expensive, but if you were upper middle class, your parents might buy you one as a teenager, and you could use it to print your little newspaper. Those ultimately became zines. APAs had a particular distribution method, and zines have a different one, but they ultimately became zines, and they are where some of the early fanfiction culture really started to blossom.
SR: So, this is another interesting topic, the bleed over between something that is an Internet based phenomenon, but also has these materializations in terms of physical gatherings, cosplays are one part of this, there’s various conventions, Comic-Con is a classic example of a of a convention of fans. But if I understand correctly, there’s also conventions of fans of television shows.
FK: Yeah, and we’re actually in a moment of culture change around this too, I think. There was a period where from the seventies to the early nineties, maybe fandom was mostly done at conventions where you would trade zines. When I say fandom in this case, obviously, I mean fanfiction, fandom about television shows and things like that, so, please take this with a grain of salt, there’s lots of other kinds of fandom. And then in the ninety’s things shifted online primarily, and so there was a long period prior to social media where things were being done through like Usenet message boards, mailing lists, sometimes early journaling systems like LiveJournal was a big space and then social media properly comes into play and fandom starts being in places like Twitter and Tumblr and sometimes on Facebook, actually, although not as much fanfic. There’s a big Reddit culture.
SR: You know, AJ was doing stuff on Wattpad.
FK: Yeah, Wattpad is its own thing slightly, but with the demise of Twitter, and also with a variety of ways that social media has made it hard to be on the Internet, we see shifts happening right now too, where people are atomizing.
SR: Moving towards dedicated platforms.
FK: Moving into Discord’s, moving into spaces where it’s more private. Again, the way that things were in the nineties with some of these mailing lists, but on different platforms. And then there’s also the push into video, places like TikTok. Obviously, YouTube was a space where people were doing a lot of fandom stuff, but there wasn’t as much scripted fiction in that space. It was more like, we’re going to play Wizard Rock, which is music based on my fandom, or we’re going to talk about our theories or things like this.
SR: Isn’t there a whole Star Trek series that’s produced by fans?
FK: Yeah, there’s always been some amount of fan films and fan videos in that sense, but they’re really expensive. It’s really hard to make it good enough quality that people want to watch it. So, you would get little cartoony things. And fan films have been a part of the fan culture forever, even when they were shot on literal film. And yes, YouTube made those more accessible, but even then, there are relatively few projects. But with TikTok, people are really embracing the idea of we’re going to make it one minute, and it’s going to be like one-minute bites, or it’ll be a little sketch. That limitation makes it a lot more possible to create fiction that doesn’t seem cruddy.
SR: That you’re willing to watch for a minute as opposed to an hour and a half.
FK: And that can get you into it. Maybe you’re like, “this is a little bit cheesy” for the first minute, but then you get hooked on it and you’re like, “Okay, it’s cheesy, but I love it.“
SR: Let me circle back to this relationship with copyright. One example that I always think of where someone made this jump from fan fiction to commercial fiction is Fifty Shades of Grey.
FK: Yeah, E.L. James.
SR: Right. So, this was writing fan fiction for Twilight and then eventually self-publishing, originally a book, and then it became a huge hit and many films, and is this sort of an aberration you would say?
FK: No, in fact, it’s something that people were doing before Fifty Shades of Grey. They just didn’t get all of the press about it. There’s a lot of stuff. Even Diana Gabaldon, who famously dislikes fanfic written about her work, will tell you that she started writing her Outlander series basically as a Doctor Who spinoff. There’s a bunch of different authors who start their work this way, the term of art is filing off the serial numbers and end up writing something that is then original fiction. The difference with Fifty Shades of Gray is that there was no secret about where it came from. And that has been more and more the norm, that people who have a very successful fanfic pull to publish.
SR: Was there any litigation about that or was it just distant enough that it wasn’t a target?
FK: I think that there was controversy. First of all, litigation is not going to be an issue with Fifty Shades of Grey because it is quite different. There are no vampires, Edward is a billionaire. You can see that there’s a relationship, but there’s nothing to litigate about. Occasionally people in fandom have felt upset about this because there’s certain groups of people within fanfic culture, like I said, it contains multitudes, so there’s some people who are excited about the idea of becoming a published author and really want to do that. And there’s some people who want to do that with their original work and they view fanfic as practice. There are some people who want to take their fanfic and pull to publish, file the serial numbers off because they think that work is great, and they just want to make money off of all the good work that they’ve done.
FK: There are other people who say “no, the fanfic community basically contributed to this, this is a networked project. You got a lot of feedback and help from people, and you can’t just pull to publish and just publish this thing as that. And we don’t get anything from that. That’s not part of the social contract that we’re in. We’re in a social contract to not publish it.” So, it’s complicated. Particularly at that time, I think today people are much more comfortable with the idea of pulling to publish, but with E.L. James being one of the first people who was very open about it, it was complicated for people.
SR: And it’s really interesting how these specific ethics, specific languages, specific terms of art, some of which are terms that are used for other things, like when I hear my kids talking about canon, “that’s canon. That’s not canon.” I’m always thinking Harold Bloom, but what is canon? What does that mean?
FK: That’s a philosophical question. Fans use the term canon to mean, generally, the accepted official story. I will give you an example. And by the way, this can be something that fans come to as a group, it can be something that an author declares, it can be something that people disagree on. So, for instance, within the Star Trek series, you have all of these television shows, and one of them is Star Trek: The Animated Series. I love it, it’s the greatest. But Gene Roddenberry, creator of Star Trek, while he was alive, always said that The Animated Series was not canonical, that he didn’t consider it to be part of the main story he was telling. It was an official thing that was produced—
SR: A spinoff?
FK: He doesn’t really consider any of the information in it to be necessarily true for the story he’s going to continue to tell. So, I personally loved TAS, and if I am writing something about Star Trek, it’s canon to me, baby! But Gene Roddenberry would disagree, and there’s other Star Trek fans who would disagree. So, there’s ways that you get to debate this. Then similarly, there’s things that could be an inference from a story, right? You could say, in The X-Files, we see a scene where we see Scully’s bathroom and there appears to be a pink bottle, and somebody could say, “Scully uses strawberry scented shampoo, that’s canon”, and somebody else would be like, “that’s not canon, that’s fanon”, meaning that it’s something that a bunch of fans agree that they think is true, but is not actually in the official story.
SR: Some of the things that fanfiction is known for, or that people gravitate towards, a lot of it has to do with relationships. One derogatory term I see on this list is PWP.
FK: That’s not derogatory, it can mean plot what plot or porn without plot, but that’s not necessarily derogatory. It’s labeling to you what is in the container. People use that for their own story to express what it is, it’s not something that somebody would say to denigrate someone else’s fic.
SR: RPF?
FK: Real person fiction, and this is complicated because there’s a lot of debate, again, about ethics in the fanfiction space. And one of the questions is, is it ethical to write fanfiction about a person who’s really alive, like a real human being?
SR: Trump Fiction.
FK: That’s something that a lot of Gen X men would say. I’m trying really hard not to judge you right now because that’s so different to what fanfiction would be about. But yeah, sometimes people have written political fanfiction or fanfiction about boy band members.
SR: Yeah, let’s come back to that, because isn’t one of your fandoms—
FK: Yeah, I’ve written some real person fiction about a boy band member and it’s complicated because on the one hand this is a real person, on the other hand, they’re very, very famous. And so, what rights do they have to not be represented in a way that’s not really them, what have they ceded as part of the deal when they became a celebrity? Maybe it’s okay, I’m not saying this is my position, I’m saying this is something that people say, maybe some people would say it’s fine to write this stuff, just never show it to them. Keep the Iron Curtain between whatever your fantasies are and actually interacting with them.
SR: That’s a strange rule, I guess maybe if it’s like the border between stalking and—
FK: Many people would say “don’t hand some actor your naked piece of fan art about them. You’ve drawn their character; their character is naked in the picture. It’s a tribute. It’s a beautiful piece of work.” And so, do you walk up to somebody and be like, “here, I drew this of your character. It’s not you, it’s Spock.” That’s awkward and weird and maybe harassment. But also, some actors love that, and seek it out. So, it’s very complicated.
SR: Some of them would have bodyguards that would tackle you.
FK: Some of they would have bodyguards and others would be like, “Hey, look at this guys. Isn’t it cool? Look at how big I am.” So, it really depends and this is highly debated within fandom.
SR: Let me circle back to AJ, our child AJ, when they were 13. So, this would be like 13, 14 years ago. Avid user of Wattpad, wrote a novel when they were 13 years old. That amazed me. It was fanfic, but I think a big part of why they did that was that they would post a chapter or a half a chapter and there was a community around it. So suddenly they had fans, and they had a peer group, and it sort of encouraged them to keep writing. One of the things that’s really interesting to me is my daughter now, she’s kind of reluctant to read literature in literature class, or to write assignments for school, and yet totally happy to leap in to reading fanfiction and to develop a writing practice out of that. This is an interesting and powerful form of literacy building, and people developing writing skills. What are your thoughts on that?
FK: I think the question of how well people develop their writing skills past a certain point can be debated, but it’s easy for me to understand why people are excited about fan writing and not about other kinds of writing, because other kinds of writing are really static. You read something and you don’t see anybody else’s reactions to it. You don’t get to follow along. As you read Jane Eyre, it can be funny to imagine what people’s reactions to each chapter would be, but you don’t get to see those, and that communal engagement, is one of the things that’s most fun and most exciting, and that feedback is really, really validating. A lot of people that I know write lots of fan fiction have never published anything professionally. I’m in this category myself. I can’t tell you how many novels I’ve written, fanfiction and not, and I just don’t have the patience to deal with the actual process. Not to say that I would be a great novelist otherwise, because that’s a little silly and conceited. But I do think that a lot of people in this space are really, really talented writers, but dealing with the process of submitting a manuscript and then waiting for weeks and weeks and then getting back something.
SR: And it’s a year later and you have to get an agent.
FK: By now I’m thinking about something totally different. I don’t have the attention span for that because when I’m online working with people, I get immediate feedback and we are playing with each other and we’re bouncing off each other
SR: So, its writing as a form of play, as a form of performance, as a form of social engagement.
FK: Right. And again, that’s not the only way that people approach this. I don’t think it’s a bad thing to acknowledge that and see it as something that’s maybe lacking sometimes in the way that our educational system approaches learning.
SR: We’re about running out of time. But really quickly, three most interesting fandoms?
FK: You can’t answer that question. That’s not possible.
SR: Your favorite fandom?
FK: Well, I’m a Star Trek person mostly at the moment. And then X-Files always will have my heart.
SR: What about the boy band? What boy band?
FK: Well, not really a boy band so much. Harry Styles, specifically One Direction.
SR: He’s really popular, he’s all over the country.
FK: Who doesn’t love Harry?
SR: All right, thanks so much. We’ve been talking with Flourish Klink. Where do you find Fansplaining, the podcast?
FK: Fansplaining.com. It’s also on your favorite pod catcher, whatever that happens to be. And we’re on as many social media as we can stand to be on, always @fansplaining.
SR: Fansplaining is going to keep going right? You’re on episode 200?
FK: Yeah. We’ve just celebrated our eighth year.
SR: Fantastic. Well thanks so much for joining us, Flourish.
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References
Brontë, Charlotte. 1847. Jane Eyre. Smith, Elder & Co.
Fielding, Henry. 1741. An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews. A. Dodd.
Gabaldon, Diana. 1991. Outlander. Delacorte Books.
James, E.L. 2011. Fifty Shades of Grey. Vintage Books.
Jenkins, Henry. 1992. Textual Poachers: Television Fans & Participatory Culture. Routledge.
Jenkins, Henry. 2006. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. NYU Press.
Meyer, Stephenie. 2005. Twilight. Little, Brown and Company.
Richardson, Samuel. 1740.Pamela. Messrs Rivington & Osborn.
Skam. 2015 - 2017. NRK.
Star Trek: The Animated Series. 1973 – 1975. NBC.
Supernatural. 2005 - 2020. The CW.
The X-Files. 1993-2018. Fox.
Virgil. The Aenid. 19 B.C.E.
Doctor Who. 1963 -. BBC.
This research is partially supported by the Research Council of Norway Centres of Excellence program, project number 332643, Center for Digital Narrative and project number 335129, Extending Digital Narrative.