Noel King

Fan fiction's growing popularity is great for fan fiction, right?

Well, maybe.

Clubby fanfic sites like AO3 have found themselves attracting a flood of writers and readers.

Whoa!

Francesca Coppa is a professor of English and film studies at Muhlenberg College.

She co-founded the nonprofit Organization for Transformative Works that created AO3.

Why did you start it?

It's very clear you wanted this to be a safe space for people who write and enjoy fanfiction.

And there's been this influx of people relatively recently, and that has supercharged some debates over who is allowed to be here, how you should conduct yourself once you are here.

Today we're talking about random etiquette because the heated rivalry of fanfic writers unionized.

Tell me a little bit of the downside of this thing that felt very, like, private going very public.

In the first half of the show, we talked about how publishers, with the popularity of fan fiction and the understanding that like a good or like a popular fan fiction can have like a million eyeballs on it.

actually maybe call that a million eyeballs, like a million people, right?

So, but, but okay.

But if you work in publishing, you look at that and you say, well, that's 2 million eyeballs that might buy my book at Barnes and Noble or Waterstones or whatever.

So this is a tension we have talked about a lot where you have a culture that is trying to keep itself pure, if I can use that word, versus a kind of capitalist imperative that says, let's make money off of this.

And that leads, as we've all learned, to enshitification, you know, a sort of dynamic we're all familiar with.

The thing starts out great and now it's crap.

How do you, knowing how popular this stuff has become, knowing that there are people with money looking at the people who write on AO3, how do you keep it from getting crappy?

And is there tension there when somebody discovers this and doesn't sort of know the etiquette or the history or the how long we've been around of it all?