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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Where were you like in your life when you first started reading fanfic?
I was a preteen when I stumbled upon fanfiction.net. Like, they were talking early 2000s here. You know, that whole contraption where, like, the family desktop is, like, in that room and, you know, and I'm, like, looking over my shoulder. But it was kind of convenient that my parents are both older, so they had no idea what I was doing or reading.
So I was also a fanfiction.net guy a little later than Ashley. I think I came to it when I was like 12, 13. I started reading and writing fanfiction on fanfiction.net and did that for about four years. And I was very into the Hunger Games fandom, and then I branched into other fandoms as well. Glee, when that started, and HouseMD as well, which I got into in my later teens.
So Eli, you are a fandom hopper.
Very much so, yeah.
I'm not loyal at all. So one thing about me is that I'm nosy. If something is going on that people are talking about, that they feel passionate about, I don't want to be on the outside of it. And one thing that started showing up on my radar a few years ago was fan fiction. Fanfiction has been around a long time, centuries actually, so it's not like I hadn't heard of it before.
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Chapter 2: What role does fanfiction play in mainstream culture?
So I did some sleuthing. I checked it out and I saw all kinds of things. Some very creative smut, for sure. Some really compelling novel-length narratives about existing characters. But most of all, people connecting over shared fandom. And I don't think it's just me that's been curious about it.
If you are anywhere near fan spaces online, even just as a passive enjoyer of tweets about specific shows, You've probably seen people talking about fanfic, but it's also behind some of the biggest books of the last decade. Some of the publishing industry's greatest hits started as fanfic. Fifty Shades of Grey, which was a whole thing.
The Love Hypothesis by Ali Hazelwood, that was number one on the New York Times bestseller list. And so was Alchemized by Sen Lin Yu. Those latter two are both getting screen adaptations as well. Studios are spending millions of dollars in deals to adapt these stories.
To get into how fanfic is becoming mainstream and the burgeoning culture war over what gets published and who reads it, I'm joined by Ashley Reese, writer, cultural commentator, and fanfic veteran. Welcome, Ashley.
Hi, thanks for having me.
And Eli Cugini, culture writer, PhD student, and author of a defector article called Fan Fiction's Total Cultural Victory. Hey, Eli.
Hi, happy to be here.
Hello, hello. I'm Brittany Luce, and you're listening to It's Been a Minute from NPR, a show about what's going on in culture and why it doesn't happen by accident. So the first fanfic I ever read was for The Pit on HBO. Someone linked to their own fanfic on their ex-account. And I was like, okay, I get now why people are into this.
But then I started to learn about Omegaverse, which has really kind of opened up a portal in my brain.
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Chapter 3: How did the guests first encounter fanfiction?
I mean, we've always called it filing off the serial numbers when you turn a fanfic into another piece of writing that doesn't belong to an IP already. For example, what happened with Alchemized, that was Draco Hermione fanfiction called Manacled. I know that Love Hypothesis was a Reylo fanfiction, which is... Which is like a Star Wars, Kylo Ren. Yeah, exactly.
We've slowly seen the success of filing off the serial numbers. While it's becoming profitable and more mainstreamed, there's still something about it where I don't feel comfortable talking about it with, as I call it, civilians. Back in the day, fanfiction...
felt a little more coistered a little more secretive over time of course now there's only like what three apps that we use on a regular basis forums aren't really a thing anymore and now we have the new generation of fandom girlies putting their whole government names and faces attached to videos about fandom activity and stuff like that that used to be a little bit more oh like
we do this, but we don't really talk about it for like the whole world. It's not even like a shame thing as much as like, there's too much to explain here. It's been a really fascinating shift in that way in which, you know, normies know about fan fiction now in a way they did not, you know, 15, 20 years ago.
I talk about some of this in the article I wrote. One of the main things I have noticed is that fanfiction adaptations and romances are not exactly the same thing. There are obviously fanfiction adaptations that aren't romance, but it is the most common form for that kind of adaptation to take. The explosion of romance post-pandemic has really affected how fanfiction is seen in the mainstream.
I worked as a bookseller from like 2019 to 2022. Oh, so you've seen probably a huge shift, yeah. Massive shift, yeah. Like at the start of that, when people came in and they wanted romance novels, which were often more marketed towards like women like my mother's age, we'd often have to specifically order them in.
In the relatively short time I spent bookselling, we went to having like a full big table of romance in the front. The book covers were kind of drawn up to attract a younger audience.
and that was very much due to the explosion of book talk fan fiction adaptation is very popular in that space i wouldn't go a week without my friend lena who is very involved in fan culture and knows various big writers being like hey did you know that book is actually this kind of fan fiction reskinned uh someone else once pointed to a ya book that i will not name
with a Black girl protagonist, came up to me and, like, whispered, that's race-swapped Jungkook fanfiction from BTS. Stop. Which is probably the craziest thing I heard on the job.
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Chapter 4: What are the economic forces driving fanfiction's popularity?
I wonder, like, is this sort of deep embrace of fanfiction, possibly promoting things that might be more slop-adjacent?
So, interesting question. I have to talk about this quite carefully because, yes, a majority of fanfiction is slop because that's just kind of how the production of community writing works. I think you could quite successfully argue most books are slop. There are a lot of books published every year. We see like a tiny, tiny sliver of those books kind of actively promoted.
And some of those books aren't even any good. And I say this as someone with a deep, deep love of literature who has dedicated my life to it. Most books aren't good. That's fine in my opinion. There's something for everyone.
In fanfiction, you have a lot of very young writers, you have untrained writers, you have writers who are kind of prioritizing a sort of excitement of engagement over editing. And I do think that can dovetail with certain existing problems in the literary landscape, like less availability of editors. Editors are often just so overworked now. There's a lot of understaffing in publishing.
Friends of mine who've written books, like, the editor doesn't even really be editing the book. They'll just read it and be like, all right, give me more. Ready for the next set of pages. Yeah.
I think this is particularly a problem with genre authors. I think this happens a lot with debut authors in general and minoritized authors in particular across all kinds of axes of minority. Like, I'm very worried about that kind of problem. But sometimes you get people kind of like, well, fan fiction is killing publishing.
Hell, I wrote about fan fiction in, I think, a relatively even-handed way.
Mm-hmm.
And I had various people like, why are you not talking about this like it's the apocalypse? And it's like, because I don't think it is. And I think if it is, that's not really fanfiction's fault. But like, you have some very good books out there that have obvious affinities with fanfiction. I do, however, think it often requires certain kinds of skill to rarify tropes in that way.
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Chapter 5: How have perceptions of fanfiction changed over the years?
It's like you are not you are not the audience.
You are not the primary audience that these retailers are aiming towards. The other thing I'll say is that I also worked in a bookstore throughout the time that I was in college, and men were coming in all the time and buying the worst books you could possibly imagine, like the 48 Laws of Power and things like that.
I mean, there are tweet threads that are better than some of these books that a lot of men... buy, to be honest, and buy in large numbers. So it's like, I don't know, I think all genders have their own slop that they engage in different ways. With men, it's like grind set slop. Yes, yes. But I got one more question.
What are people getting out of fanfic or fanfic derived books that people want and like and are maybe missing in other kinds of culture?
Yeah.
as someone who does care about craft, it really helped me realize I want to do this all the time. It made me realize I want to become a writer. But I think the thing that keeps people in fandom spaces and keeps them wanting to be in fandom spaces is honestly the community. It's like, I cannot explain the extent to which
I have developed lifelong friendships with people I met 15 years ago while talking about a fanfiction. Now we've gone to each other's weddings. We've developed like real relationships with other people just based on like fun thought exercises.
Fanfiction is very closely engaged with what people want. Like I think to an extent when you're writing, you're always in some way getting at like What do I want to see? What do I want to put on the page? Or what do I want, like, in myself to express?" or something. But fanfiction gives you this kind of ready-made structure.
It asks you to tap more deeply into a kind of register of desire that can be kind of shameful for people, partly because it can be sexual, but it doesn't necessarily have to be sexual, it can be.
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