Francesca Coppa

I mean, it is 12 years old.

And I say that because you're supposed to be 13 and older to be on the site.

And then at some point they click the button and they lie.

But there are 12-year-olds and...

There are 85-year-olds.

I mean, the first generation of women who wrote Kirk Spock, I mean, many of them are passing.

They're grandmothers.

Kirk Spock stories were kind of stories that posited a romance between Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock.

And women in the 60s started writing Kirk Spock slash sort of in the late 60s, early 70s and collecting them in zines.

In fact, one of the projects that I worked on in the early days of the OTW, Organization for Transformative Works, was that we were being contacted by women in their 70s and 80s who were like having to move in with their kids or going into nursing homes.

And they had like 3,000 fan fiction zines.

And what do you do when your kids are finding your entire giant zine collection or what do you do with them?

You know, Grandma was writing fan fiction with a typewriter.

And, like, now Grandma's online.

In fact, one of the delightful things is people assuming that they know the age of the person they're talking to and then having them talk about, like, their grandchildren or that they have a high school exam.

And those two people are communicating.

Like, they might be having a great time on the same story and one of them is 16 and one of them is, you know, 60, right?

It is overwhelmingly women.

There is a lot of non-binary, a lot of queerness, you know, a whole series of identities.

Fan fiction meets needs that the market has up until now not really been very interested in supplying, right?