Episode 112: Rainbow Rowell
In Episode 112, Flourish and Elizabeth talk to Rainbow Rowell, author of Fangirl, Carry On, Wayward Son, and many other novels, as well as the current run of Marvel’s Runaways comics. They dig into the fandom experiences that inspire Rainbow’s fiction, the differences (and similarities!) between fanfic and original writing, and Flourish feels the pain of being the only non-lurker in the conversation.
Show Notes
[00:00:00] As always, our intro music is “Awel” by stefsax, used under a CC BY 3.0 license.
[00:05:36] To learn more and get tickets, here’s the GeekGirlCon website.
[00:07:29] Our interstitial music is “Start the Day” by Paul Rosevere, used under a CC BY 3.0 license.
If you aren’t familiar with Rainbow’s work, do yourself a favor and go read her books! These are the ones that we mostly talk about in the podcast:
[00:11:32] Behold Rainbow at the very first Star Wars celebration. She clarifies that at this point they did not know who Darth Maul or Jar Jar Binks were, they just were given standees to pose with.
[00:13:00] Beauty and the Beast was a lot, people.
[00:14:07] The Lord of the Rings Burger King tie-in was really a thing.
[00:26:27] We’ve had Britta Lundin on the podcast twice, in Episode 43 “A Fangirl Goes to Hollywood” and Episode 73 “Ship It.”
[00:38:49] Rainbow and Elizabeth in 2014 at a Landline event:
[00:39:14] Elizabeth’s piece about being in the Sherlock fandom is, perhaps not surprisingly, also titled “Fangirl.”
[00:43:50] Elizabeth explains the media to Flourish in Episode 109, “Covering Fandom.”
[00:51:00] Nerf Herder joined us on the podcast in Episode 57.
[00:57:45] The article Elizabeth wrote about Carry On is “What is fanfiction, anyway?” in the New Statesman.
[01:02:23] We’re talking about Episode 111, “Canon, What Canon?”
[01:14:34] Our SDCC 2019 panel:
Transcript
[Intro music]
Flourish Klink: Hi, Elizabeth!
Elizabeth Minkel: Hi, Flourish!
FK: And welcome to Fansplaining, the podcast by, for, and about fandom!
ELM: This is Episode 112, “Rainbow Rowell.”
FK: Woo-hoo!
ELM: Yes! Rainbow!
FK: Uh, I am incredibly excited to have our mutual friend Rainbow here to explain…I wanna know all about her fandom journey cause I feel like there are unplumbed depths.
ELM: OK so very quickly. Rainbow, author of books.
FK: Many books.
ELM: Some are YA, some are adult. And I believe most of what we’re gonna be talking about falls on the YA side because there are a bunch of her books—she is, she’s a fannish person, she is in fandom, in whatever definition that means, but like, there are three of her books that I would say have more to do with fandom than the others.
FK: Yeah. So Fangirl was sort of the first book that I ever read, really, that sort of presented fanfiction fandom in a way that I was like “Yeah! That seems real, there you go, there we are.”
ELM: Had you read other books before that, like, fiction that was about fanfiction fandom?
FK: Not mainly—it had been mentioned in books. You know?
ELM: Yeah, yeah.
FK: But like not, you know.
ELM: Right.
FK: Y’know?
ELM: Right.
FK: Carry On, which is a spinoff book based on a story that one of the characters in Fangirl was writing, and then Wayward Son…
ELM: OK, I think we gotta give a little more explanation. [FK laughs] So basically the main character of Fangirl, Cath, is a college freshman who had been a big fic writer with her twin sister, and they get to college and the twin sister is like “I’m an adult now and I’m fun, goodbye!” And she’s like “What, but, I’m not, I still,” you know, “I still love fanfiction, I still love this world,” that they had both loved together, which is a Harry-Potter-esque world called “The World of Mages.”
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Written by Gemma T. Leslie, who is, you know, a JKR. And it’s not a direct, I don’t wanna say it’s a direct one-to-one. But it is a really, you know. That’s the heaviest influence, that seems like what she’s riffing on, right.
FK: Totally.
ELM: And there are these, Simon Snow is the, the main character. And so Cath writes Simon Snow fanfiction and then her ship is Simon and Baz, who’s like…
FK: Vampire…
ELM: Kinda snarky vampire…
FK: Slightly evil roommate…
ELM: Yeah. And so…
FK: He’s the Draco figure.
ELM: Yes. So in the book, there’s her fanfiction, and there’s also excerpts from the actual books, the quote-unquote “actual,” right?
FK: Right.
ELM: So Carry On, which Rainbow wrote a few years later, was intertextually connected but not any, you know, not really either of those things. It was her—
FK: Like Rainbow’s…
ELM: Her original take on this concept she had come up with with these characters she had come up with.
FK: Right.
ELM: It’s not Cath’s version and it’s not Gemma T. Leslie’s version, it’s Rainbow’s version.
FK: Right.
ELM: Which has caused, I think, some anxiety and confusion and…the anxiety frustrates me because it’s like why can’t we just, it is what it is, right? You know?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: It doesn’t have to be like fanfiction of the…you know what I mean?
FK: Yeah yeah yeah.
ELM: So. So anyway. And Wayward Son—
FK: Which just came out. They go on a road trip across America, a familiar trope to anyone who has read Harry Potter fanfiction, but not actually Harry Potter fanfiction.
ELM: You say this…
FK: How have you not read these?
ELM: We already talked to Rainbow and there was a bit that I had to cut out where Flourish was like “Every Harry Potter fic goes to Malfoy Manor.”
FK: A lot of them do!
ELM: And I was like “This is not even remotely true” and I don’t think I’ve even read a single, single fic in Harry/Draco or Remus/Sirius where they go on a road trip!
FK: Really?!
ELM: And I have read thousands!
FK: Really?
ELM: Thousands of Harry Potter fics, thousands! So I don’t know what you’ve been reading.
FK: I have totally read this. It’s like a very, it’s like a, I think that it’s a…I think it may be an era thing. I was thinking about this. Because I think that there’s like…
ELM: Let me tell you when I started reading Harry Potter fanfiction: in 2001. So you don’t get to pull the “well back in the day did this.”
FK: No I’m not saying that, it’s not—
ELM: You don’t get to pull it, no pulling!
FK: I’m not pulling it! I’m not, I’m genuinely amazed. Regardless.
ELM: Maybe on the het side this is popular.
FK: Maybe. I don’t know.
ELM: I remember there was one famous Harry/Draco story where one of them was in hiding in San Francisco. And I do know that that is a, that is a trope that endures, one of them moves to a city in the states.
FK: Moves to, you’re right, you’re right. It’s more being in a city than it is a road trip.
ELM: I’ve never seen a road trip. Just, you know I love a road trip, so.
FK: No, you’re right. It’s more of a, more of a, sometimes there’s stuff about the journey to, but it’s not always like—it’s not—yeah. OK. Fair enough.
ELM: Yeah, in my memory it’s like, they have to decide if you can like Apparate the whole way or if there’s stops or…
FK: Right, right, or then there’s—
ELM: Portkey parts of the airport or whatever, you know.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Have to make all these jumps and all that.
FK: I think that, yeah.
ELM: I’ve read more where they go to continental Europe than going to the United States.
FK: No, I think, I think that that would be…I think I’ve probably read about the same number of each. But…
ELM: Sounds like you gotta read more Harry Potter fanfic.
FK: [laughs] That’s always a solution, right?
ELM: All right, anyway, this has been a really fruitful debate. [both laugh]
FK: OK, OK OK. We should do more thing before we get to our interview with Rainbow though.
ELM: Yes. Which is…
FK: GeekGirlCon!
ELM: Our cross-country journey.
FK: Yes. So we’re going to be at GeekGirlCon and we’re gonna be on two panels. GeekGirlCon is taking place in Seattle on November 16th and 17th, and I believe you can still get tickets and you should if you’re in the area.
ELM: So that is not the weekend before Thanksgiving, it’s actually two weekends before, Thanksgiving is very late this year. And GeekGirlCon has been going for awhile now and I’m really excited, I’ve never been before. You haven’t been, have you?
FK: No, no, I haven’t either.
ELM: So this is a, every year around this time in Seattle, and it is, it’s about women and/or—I assume it’s not as binary as that, you know. AFAB people or whatever. And I think it is inclusive in the sense of people of all genders are welcome.
FK: Yeah, yeah.
ELM: But it is really centering women both in fandom but also science and tech stuff too in those kind of intersections. And I’m really interested to see that actually because…
FK: Yeah, I’m curious about their construction of geek identity. But in any case…
ELM: Yeah, yeah.
FK: We have two panels! So our first panel is on the Saturday at 11:30 a.m., we’re part of a panel called “Research and Data Science in Fandom,” and we’re gonna be talking about some of our surveys.
ELM: Yes, specifically probably the shipping survey cause it’s the one with the richest amount of data. And DestinationToast is also on that one!
FK: Yeah!
ELM: Friend of the pod.
FK: Yeah, friend of the pod!
ELM: Friend of ourselves, also.
FK: [laughs] And then on Sunday at 10 a.m. we’re going to be doing Fansplaining Live!
ELM: Yeah!
FK: And we’re gonna be interviewing someone from GeekGirlCon about the convention experience and creating inclusive conventions and all that good stuff.
ELM: Yeah, I think we’re especially gonna be talking about like diversity in IRL, in like con fan spaces. So.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Yeah! So come see us, people should let us know like, tweet at us or whatever if you’re gonna be there, because like, if there are enough people we should all like totally meet up at a bar, you know?
FK: Or something.
ELM: Nearby, like, in the convention center or whatever, we should say hi. So people should let us know!
FK: Yeah, absolutely. OK. Shall we get on to Rainbow then?
ELM: Rainbow time!
[Interstitial music]
FK: OK, it’s time to welcome Rainbow to the podcast. Welcome, Rainbow!
Rainbow Rowell: Hi, hi hi!
ELM: Hello! Thank you so much for coming on.
RR: Hello! I’m happy to be here.
ELM: We’re happy to have you!
RR: Thank you!
ELM: OK. Where should we start? Should we go back to the beginning? The real beginning, like your Beast self-insert fanfiction.
RR: OK the actual beginning—oh wow. You’ve done some homework. [ELM laughs]
FK: I don’t know about this! Will you tell me about this?
ELM: [through laughter] This is not what you wanna talk about!
FK: It’s what I wanna talk about! [all laughing]
RR: So you want, you kinda want my fandom journey, right?
ELM: Yes.
RR: That’s what we’re doing.
ELM: Yeah, I do want to hear about your fandom journey actually, because I think that, you know, you—you arguably are the person who has written the biggest mainstream book about fanfiction. Right? And so like, how did you, how did you get there, like, how did you make that leap, but like obviously you, you were in fandom prior to that, like, you wouldn’t write a fanfiction novel if you weren’t, you know.
RR: Well. Would I? [laughter] Let me tell you what I did, I guess. Um, so I am much older than you. And I…
ELM: I don’t know about “much.”
RR: Oh. OK. [all laugh]
FK: What counts as “much”?
RR: I’m just someone who gets really into things. I’ve always been the sort of person who gets really, really into things. So when I saw Star Wars, I mean, I was four or five, maybe, when I saw Star Wars? And that just kinda imprinted on me and that became my primary thing. Just, I was always thinking about Star Wars. And something I’ve found talking to other authors is like, it’s really common—and maybe lots of people do this, but to constantly be telling stories in your head, like, every moment that you’re not… So I had this like very constant Star Wars fantasies. Like, from a very young age, where I just had this like, ongoing narrative in my head where I was always writing a story with myself in Star Wars and always falling in love. Like, they were romances from the jump, like even in grade school.
I was falling in love with Luke and then as I got older I was falling in love with Han and they were falling in love with me, and then whenever I would be playing with my friends, like, I found one friend in grade school who became my like ongoing Star Wars person. Where we just had this epic we were always acting out. She had lots of lightsabers.
And so that became kinda just how I was. And so as I got a little bit older, anything that I got really into would get folded into my narrative. So I would have this like, ongoing story where I was like literally part of Star Wars and also in the X-Men and also dating one of the guys in Wham!
FK: So it was like a huge crossover.
ELM: Amazing.
RR: It was like a huge universe where I was the center and everything else just kind of intersected. And it was just, I wasn’t conscious, I was just doing it all the time, writing these stories in my head. And then in high school, not high school. Middle school, I would maybe start writing them down.
But it wasn’t fanfiction, I didn’t think of it as fanfiction because I had no vocabulary for that. And I really had no idea that anyone else in the world had ever done what I was doing. And I thought what I was doing was really shameful, you know, because it was so romantic.
FK: Oh yeah.
RR: Yeah. And so embarrassing. And so I didn’t think like, “Oh, now I’m gonna write some fanfiction where I’m on the X-Men,” it was like, “Now I’m gonna do my dirty secret thing where I write these, like, crazy stories that I’m in.” And I was so afraid of my mom finding them. I feel like I had no community, no sense of fandom, no sense that what I was doing was anything outside of myself. So in high school and college, I mean, always I’m just the person who if I do something I do it hard. Like, if I liked a band I would go see them seven times. I stayed very into Star Wars. So I read every Star Wars novel.
FK: YEAH!
RR: Yep. [all laugh]
FK: Team bad novels! Team bad novels!
RR: Some of them are good, Flourish! [ELM laughing]
FK: I…
RR: The Timothy Zahn trilogy is very good.
FK: OK, but like, possibly only the Timothy Zahn trilogy.
RR: Possibly only. But I, I got really into it.
FK: No offense Star Wars authors! There’s some other ones that are recent that are really good and the old ones gave me much pleasure! No, no dissing! [laughs]
ELM: Wow.
RR: Some are better than others.
FK: There we go.
RR: You could say. Yeah. And my husband was a huge, huge, huge Star Wars fan. Like, massive. Like, before the internet, my husband has the kind of memory where he just can remember every little detail, so if anyone had a question pre-internet about the Star Wars trilogy they would call us and he just, like, knew everything by heart and could…so he, he was a huge fan.
ELM: The internet really stole his thunder! Like, he had such a valuable talent before that, and now the internet does it.
RR: Yeah, like, before, it was very…
ELM: Sucks.
RR: In the evening, people would just call us to ask questions.
FK: What.
RR: Like, I’m not joking about this. Every one of my family, our friends.
ELM: Amazing.
RR: They would call to be like, “What is that lyric,” “What’s that line,” “What’s the actor.”
ELM: He was Google!
RR: He was Google for them! And now, now he’s like…I don’t know that he enjoyed that, so maybe he would say it’s fine. Anyway. But we went to the first Star Wars Celebration together. So.
I was really late to getting the internet. I was broke, I was a reporter, and the internet felt like an expense that we just couldn’t justify. So like the first I heard of the internet was in high school, and there was a girl, I was super into the show Beauty and the Beast.
FK: Yeah!
RR: You know the show?
FK: Oh yeah.
ELM: Classic fandom.
RR: It was very, that’s right up my alley. I was very into it.
FK: Thanks, George R. R. Martin. [laughs]
RR: Actually I’ve read that that was one of the earliest internet fandoms that kinda took off?
FK: It totally was!
ELM: Yeah!
RR: So there was a girl at my high school who was doing weird newsgroup stuff in the school library and making friends with adults. And it seemed so dangerous and creepy to me. [FK laughs] Like, I looked so far down my nose at her, I was like “What’s this weird shit she’s doing? Like, this seems really inadvisable and also, like, antisocial, and…”
FK: Oh my God!
RR: I was not about it.
FK: Oh my God!
ELM: Amazing.
RR: So it was probably almost 10 years later then that I, honestly I didn’t have the internet in my house in a dependable way until my 30s.
ELM: Wow.
RR: That meant that everything that I was into, I was always limited. I’ve just been alone in almost everything I ever loved. So I always go as far as I can on my own, but without the internet that’s not very far, you know? [all laugh] And so…
FK: It’s pretty far compared to the average person’s “far.”
RR: Yeah, I would, I would go to lengths, right? I would do what I could. I would, I got very— Like, OK, I was so into Lord of the Rings when the movies came out. I had the entire Burger King collection of those little, you know what I’m talking about?
FK: I do!
RR: There’s the little ring? Yeah.
ELM: Amazing.
RR: But if I had been on the internet…
FK: I can’t believe you weren’t on the internet for Lord of the Rings! Oh my God!
RR: I was not on the internet for Lord of the Rings.
FK: That was an incredible internet fandom you missed.
RR: And I was an adult! I was an adult. I could have been a part of it.
FK: You missed so much. You missed all of Lotrips. Ahh!
RR: I, I don’t even know what that means.
ELM: I mean, did she miss that much? [RR laughing]
FK: I mean, I’m not sure that it was good stuff entirely, but you missed a lot of events. [laughs]
RR: I feel like I missed a lot of great fic, probably.
FK: Uh…
ELM: I mean that’s still there. You could probably still find that.
FK: You could still find that.
RR: Yeah, but you know how it is. I’ve moved on.
FK: Yeah, you don’t. [ELM laughing]
RR: I’ve fallen out of love.
FK: Totally.
RR: OK. So. No internet, in my 30s, I was like the first person on my block to read Harry Potter, I think I was 28. And I made my adult book club read it. [FK hoots] And got so into Harry Potter. Like, so into Harry Potter. Still not on the internet. Still not on the internet for the Harry Potter books. I’m not on the internet for the Harry Potter movies. I’m starting to be in a functional way on the internet. Like, for working. But like, I worked at the last, probably the last newspaper in the world to give their people internet access. I wrote a book about it actually.
FK: When did you finally get internet at home?!
RR: OK. I, I got dial-up during the Dawson’s Creek years. Cause I remember one of the first things I used the internet for was to read Dawson’s Creek recaps.
ELM: OK.
FK: All right.
ELM: That’s not super, that’s like around the year 2000, right? But you didn’t have it in a fast, reliable way until…
RR: No. I had it where you like paid per minute and it took 10 minutes to get on.
ELM: Yeah.
RR: Yeah. So I used to like, like print things out so I could read them.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Yeah. To be fair, Boomers still do that. [FK laughs]
RR: Yeah, so I, it just felt like—I can’t quite—it felt so expensive to me to have the internet.
FK: Right, yeah, totally, if you’re paying per minute.
RR: Yeah, and you’re paying for it yourself, right? You’re not using your parents’ internet. So now fast forward…I feel like I’m surprising you, right? This is not what you were expecting is it?
ELM: Well I’m not, I knew that you had a very solitary, like, fandom youth.
RR: Yeah.
ELM: And, and in a way that I find—I mean I’m not, OK. You’re not that much older than me anyway, because…
FK: Well I’m not that much younger than you either, so. [laughing]
ELM: You are like a different generation from me Flourish!
FK: Two, one-and-a-half years? [ELM laughing]
RR: How old are you, Flourish?
FK: I’m, I’m 32.
RR: Oh, you’re, you’re older than I thought. You both are. You look so young.
FK: I’m 32 and Elizabeth is…are you 34 now?
ELM: Yeah, I’m almost 35!
RR: You have a youthful aspect.
ELM: Thanks, I’ll take it!
RR: OK, so, we were saying…
ELM: I mean, we’ve talked about this on the podcast so I don’t wanna rehash it, but like, I was writing fanfiction before I had access to the internet and then—but this happened to me probably a decade before you, like, I was like 14 when I came on the internet, right? But I had, I still had, you know, they say like old Millennials are the ones who bridged that gap.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Still remembering what childhood was like without a, you know, any connectedness. And to expand that to fandom a little I feel like that’s something that a lot of people who are even just a couple years younger than us have never had any experience with.
FK: Right.
RR: Right.
ELM: Cause there was never any time for that solitary sort of trapped in your own stories and trapped in your own obsessions with it.
FK: Yeah yeah, and that’s actually a major difference between us too, because although I did—although I too remember life before the internet, you know, I got fast reliable constant high-speed internet access when I was 13 and I never looked back, like—
RR: You were born on LiveJournal!
FK: No! I was born before LiveJournal.
RR: You were just birthed into it, oh my God.
FK: Yeah, I got online before LiveJournal, but like just at the moment, right. So like this is a big difference between us too and this was like, actually something we talked about about reading Fangirl, because like, that’s obviously like a very familiar thing for a lot of people and I was like “Oh yeah, I see this and I recognize this as a thing people do, but my online life has been so around community because I,” you know, my fandom life, I should say, has been so around community because, like, as soon as I was a teenager I was like “Community time!” You know. Whereas like, Elizabeth wasn’t like that and you were extra not like that. [laughs]
RR: Right.
ELM: Yeah yeah, I do think that it, it’s interesting cause it makes me even think, you know, we’re all on the internet right now but I think that fundamentally we may have, the three of us may have different ways of engaging with it and I think Rainbow and I may be in a similar position. Because we have a different foundational…
FK: Yeah!
ELM: And the way that I, and I think Rainbow, I get the sense from you too, it’s, it’s, I have a lot of friends who are in fandom and they have an opinion about something and they let it out, you know? And for me I’m like “I’m thinkin’ about it quietly!”
FK: Oh for sure for sure.
ELM: And I’ll say very loudly like “I’m in fandom!” But like, I’m never like, “And here are all my deep fandom opinions,” you know, “about this thing that I like.”
RR: Yeah.
ELM: Cause that to me is something that I just, the patterns were formed very early of something that’s like it’s deep inside me.
FK: Right.
ELM: Yeah, the shame element too, I mean, I wasn’t writing, I was writing weird things that weren’t romances, but they were still super, super weird. You know my Giles-only fanfiction, it was just Giles!
RR: Just Giles?!
ELM: No romance!
FK: Yeah, it was…
ELM: Just Giles.
FK: Quite weird.
ELM: Just Giles!
RR: Were you in it?
ELM: Oh no no, I was never a self-insert person. Just Giles.
FK: Right. Right.
ELM: I, I like to sublimate myself in middle-aged men, which is a little weird now that I’m almost a middle-aged man, you know like…
RR: I think it’s fine.
ELM: At 14 it was different. [RR laughs] Yeah. But anyway.
FK: Yeah no it’s true, it’s true, well I mean I don’t know…
RR: You picked a good one, though.
FK: I mean I felt some of the shame stuff too, honestly, but like, very much related to in-person. It was like I would go online and that was my online world in which there was no shame about any of this and like, I did all of it and it was great. And eventually, like, over time, it sort of bled more and more into my offline life, and I was like “Actually, I have to integrate these two things.”
RR: Right.
FK: But at first, like, I do—I mean, I agree with you that we come from a different position but I do wanna clarify that I think that that idea of like the shamefulness of loving something so much, even for people who are extremely like out-there about it and are just like “Hello!” Like, a lot of the times I was like “Hello! Here’s this shameful thing, and I’m gonna tell you about it ahead of time, so that you can’t find out about it and hold it over my head! I’m just gonna tell you right now, I’m a fuckin’ freak, congrats!” [all laugh] You know, that was my strategy was like “I’m just gonna tell you ahead of time and own it. And then you have no power over me except secretly in my heart it does.”
ELM: Oh my God teen Flourish was so much.
FK: I’m still, this is still my strategy and you know it, Elizabeth! [all laugh]
ELM: Yeah it’s true.
FK: I’m still that much.
RR: I think that you were surrounded by other people, though, who were also loving it, so you knew you weren’t that…
FK: On the internet, exactly.
RR: On the internet, on the internet.
FK: I knew that there were those, and maybe they weren’t physically near me, but I’d be like “Yeah, but there’s all these cool 20-year-olds in New York City who are into this!”
RR: [laughs] Oh my God. OK. So. I…
ELM: You read Harry Potter.
RR: Oh, man I read Harry Potter a lot. And then I got very into the movies. And then it was at the end of the movies…I think the first fanfiction I read was Twilight fanfiction? Because I really loved Twilight.
ELM: Wait wait wait hang on. Harry Potter movies ended in 2011.
RR: Yeah. It was, it was after the first Harry Potter movie I think—the first-last.
FK: Oh, after Harry Potter, after Harry Potter movie seven part one.
ELM: Seven-point-one.
RR: I think that is when I made the—I wrote Fangirl in the heat of my discovering fanfiction.
ELM: Amazing!
RR: Yeah, yeah.
ELM: I did not know that!
RR: Yeah. So I walked out of one of the—so I walked out of the movie, the second-to-the-last Harry Potter movie, and I said to Kai, my husband—it was, this sounds so ridiculous! It was literally like the sun had just like landed on me. Because a friend was talking about how he wished there were more queer characters in Harry Potter, and he had had a theory about a certain character being queer, and that didn’t pan out, and I was like, “Why did he think that was gonna pan out, one, and two, that character doesn’t seem that way to me, and then three,” I was like, “If anyone is queer in Harry Potter, it’s Harry Potter, he’s obsessed with Draco Malfoy!” [all laugh] And then, and then—this is absent internet! I just, it was just like…
FK: You came to it independently!
RR: Independently! I went on a little rant where I, like, went through all the books and I was like “And this, and this, and this, and this.”
ELM: Your proof post! [laughing]
RR: Right!
FK: Just a personal proof post! [laughing]
RR: In the car, with my husband, he says, “Yeah, I mean, that’s what the internet thinks, right?” And I was like “What?” [all laughing] Cause he was on the internet at that point more than I was so he had seen jokes about that. And he was like “Yeah, I mean, isn’t that what everyone writes, like, isn’t that what fanfiction about? Isn’t this what everybody thinks?” And I took out my phone, I was, I couldn’t have had it—I didn’t get a smartphone till my kids were born. So OK. I took out my smartphone and I typed in “Harry Potter fanfiction,” and it was just like, [explosion noise]. [all laugh]
And I at first thought it was like, I couldn’t believe it. Like, I couldn’t believe it. I spent that whole night reading fic descriptions aloud to him. And I thought it was so, so hilarious, you know? Like, Harry is a shepherd and Draco works at the grocery store. [all laugh] It just sounds so ridiculous! I couldn’t believe it, I couldn’t believe it was real and it was also like discovering a secret room that goes on forever.
FK: Eh, you found your Room of Requirement, right? Which is sort of what fanfic is sometimes like!
RR: Ohh! Yeah!
FK: You, like, “What if this pairing?” And then you go online and behold! There it is!
ELM: OK but like, rarely does it happen where it has existed for 10 years.
FK: [laughing] That’s true!
ELM: And this is like one most popular ships of all time, like…
FK: This is like the best version!
ELM: Imagine if you had, if you had like picked up on some, like, rarepair. You were like “That’s it. That’s obviously,” and you’d gone and there were like two stories and you’re like…
FK: OK.
ELM: “All right, this is…” And you just wandered away again.
RR: Well, and I, I feel that, I have a memory of having read a Twilight fanfiction before this, and it was not very good, and, and that experience made me think “Oh, this is not something I’m into, this is like…”
FK: Right.
RR: “Very amateurish and bad. And I don’t need to do this.” So I just thought that was, I thought that was fanfiction.
FK: Right.
RR: But I also, at some point very early on in that 24-hour cycle typed in “best Harry Potter fanfiction.” [both laughing]
FK: And that was your key!
ELM: Plenty of time to make rec lists! 10 years!
FK: It’s true, and, and lucky enough that was a very, like, rec-listy fandom, right?
ELM: Oh yeah yeah.
FK: In a way that I feel like sometimes, some newer fandoms you’re like, “There are rec lists, but it’s not as easy to google them,” cause they’re like in some weird place on Tumblr or whatever, like, whereas with Harry Potter you google that and you’re gonna get some—
RR: Oh!
FK: —some fuckin’ rec lists!
ELM: Yeah!
RR: It’s also like, the first time I downloaded a doc from the internet. Like a document? And it was like, it was like a Harry Potter rec list and I kept that on my phone for a year and just worked my way through it.
ELM: Amazing.
RR: And I’m very obsessive, as—I’m very obsessive.
FK: [laughing] Yes! We noticed!
RR: And so it wasn’t just like I started reading a little bit now and then, it was like I’m reading 50,000 words a day every day. Like, I’m just—that’s what I’m doing now. And the way that it shook me was starting to do…there was, and I don’t wanna say who it was, but there was a fanfiction writer who I was like “This person is amazing.” And they now write, they’re now an author. And I kind of got super interested in that person’s path, and read everything I could about them on Fanlore, and then I would read people’s LiveJournal posts about that person, and I started to see, like, a different path for myself. Like, I had been very alone. 20 years!
FK: Yeah!
RR: In these—and I just, I know that I would have been writing fanfiction and posting. I was writing it anyway. And I would have been posting it online. And I would have been good. I was a good writer in high school. I wasn’t the writer that I am now, but I—I was good! And imagine what that would have done to have gotten feedback from other people, and I don’t think I ever would have been a community person, because I’m not a community person now…
FK: Yeah.
RR: I just have a hard time with groups of people and sharing myself, but I think it would have radically, radically changed the pathway of my life to have had access to fandom and fanfiction. And so that’s where Fangirl came from. It was like—who would I be now? Who would I be, as a young person now? And that’s why I wrote that book. So I was really new to fanfiction, but I had read, I mean, I had inhaled it. [FK laughs] I just had eaten everything that I could.
ELM: That’s really interesting to think about. I hadn’t realized that, I, I had thought that you’d been reading fic for longer than when you wrote that book. And it is interesting too because I feel like, you know, just one thing that we talked about when we talked to Britta Lundin, because, who is our age, who wrote about, you know, a teenager now being in fandom, and thinking “Oh, you know,” and not, this is not meant as a critique of her or anything, but thinking “Oh, we were like 14, 15 in the ’90s, like,” you know, when we think about our teenage selves and being online, and reading fanfiction, are we too rooted in that? In that period in particular? Is it all tied up? Whereas for you, I mean, obviously to be a YA writer right now you’re not, you can’t get too hung up on “is it wildly different to be a teen now than it is, than it was when I was a teen.”
But you didn’t have that experience of being a teen in a specific era of the internet, reading fanfiction and understanding what fandom was at that time. It was like so fresh for you and I wonder if that was a way that, that worked to your advantage. Does that make sense?
RR: Oh, that I wasn’t stuck in my own experience?
FK: Yeah!
RR: Like, like—in an inflexible way.
ELM: I feel like I could do it, but I think it would be hard for me to untangle the feelings of being 14 and reading on Buffy websites, which were, you know, black screen, red letters, red and white letters, and just kind of in my parents’ kitchen, in the dark. You know? Like…
RR: Right.
ELM: And that’s so ’90s. And obviously I’m online right now so I could imagine what it’d be like to just…I mean I didn’t start reading on my phone until like, until I joined the X-Men fandom two years ago.
RR: Oh wow.
ELM: Right? Cause I just, for me, like, fanfiction was like curling up in the dark with a computer, and now it’s just everywhere at all times. It’s really bad actually.
RR: Oh, so you’re saying like, I came to it in a more modern way.
FK: Yeah! Finding it on a smartphone blows my mind!
ELM: A fresher way.
FK: Like, I mean, it doesn’t blow my mind, I know people do this all the time, but like Elizabeth, I have very like rooted experiences of like, concern for like, speed of internet and like where you can read it and like printing things out and trying to like—
ELM: You just said you had high speed unlimited internet, Flourish! Wow.
FK: I did, but the thing is that I would have that only in my room. Right? And so then if you wanted to bring it anywhere you had to like print it out.
ELM: You had internet in your room.
RR: Wow.
ELM: That’s wild.
FK: It was a big deal.
ELM: I had it in the kitchen.
FK: Yeah no. So the story behind this was that when I was 12, when I turned 12, many of my friends were Jewish and turning 13 they all had Bar and Bat Mitzvahs, and I think that this inspired my parents, because they were all having these elaborate parties, to get me like, a really big 12th birthday present.
RR: Oh wow. That is.
ELM: That’s very nice of them.
FK: And I think they also thought, like, you’re going into high school, you’re gonna need to do stuff, and my dad was working in computers, so they were like…
ELM: Oh all right.
FK: You know?
ELM: It’s a little less weird.
FK: No no no, I mean, literally my best friend’s dad was like a chip designer for Intel and my dad was like doing computer resource training—er, computer resource teaching in like a school district, he was like a computer special teacher? So they got me a bondi blue iMac.
RR: Oh, nice!
ELM: Wow!
FK: And internet in my room.
ELM: Holy shit.
FK: And my entire room was built around, I literally set up my room so that like it was all around the cult of the computer. The computer was in the corner and there were these big windows behind it and like, the whole thing was just set up so that I literally just sat in my room, like in the prow of a ship at my computer.
RR: As a parent I have concerns. [all laugh]
ELM: Yeah, but look at how Flourish turned out! You still have concerns?
FK: In fact my mother, my mother loves to like, tell all of the parents of like, my friends, about how successful I am and how her parenting choices were actually fine. [laughs]
ELM: Incredible.
FK: Yeah. It worked out.
ELM: That’s really funny.
RR: I was also a reporter for so long, and I think that informed…
FK: Oh yeah.
RR: The idea of stepping out of myself and doing a lot of research to write a story didn’t—I think that’s also why I was able to kind of like imagine.
FK: Right.
ELM: For sure, but you, but even just being in the fresh—the fresh knowledge of it too. I would, I just like to imagine what that would be like right now, even. Imagine I was just coming to it, and we, you know, I—I hear from people every day who say “I only learned about this last year,” or, since Fangirl came out which was now six years ago I’m sure you’ve heard this more than I have.
RR: Yeah, lots.
ELM: People definitely say “Oh, I didn’t know this is a thing till I read your book,” you know. Imagine that being your intro into—I can’t imagine. I can’t imagine not finding it yourself. Like, because this is something deep inside you that you’re gonna do. You know? Which is, it’s so interesting.
RR: I hear it from older people. Like a lot of older readers. People my age or even older, or, like, a little older than you, who I feel like through my books have found fanfiction. It just blows my mind, but really, where would they have found it otherwise? I don’t know, you know.
ELM: They would have given an impassioned speech outside the movie theater about how Harry is obsessed with Draco! And then they would have googled it. [all laugh] “Harry obsessed with Draco, question mark?” And then you would have gotten only fanfiction. Yeah. Yeah. OK, but all right, we skipped a little step though. You wrote Fangirl.
FK: Yeah!
ELM: Obviously you’ve written other books too but Fangirl, because this is a fandom podcast, is I think the most relevant here.
RR: So I wrote Fangirl shortly after Eleanor & Park. And I wrote it kind of in my first blush of, like, I was like an evangelist for fanfiction. I, I was going to all of my friends going “Do you know that this is a thing?” [all laugh] I really expected them, especially the Harry Potter fans, to be converted like I was. And they, they weren’t.
FK: No!
RR: You know, they—for a lot of people just loving Harry Potter is enough. They don’t need that. And so I think, I pitched Fangirl to my agent, and one thing we should mention I think is that it was a different time to talk about fanfiction.
ELM: Absolutely.
RR: Even a couple of years ago.
FK: Oh yeah.
ELM: Was this 2012 or 2013…?
RR: No, this would have been 2010 or 2011.
ELM: Oh. So that actually—you might’ve gotten in just before they all lost their shit because of Fifty Shades. I was just writing about this at length.
RR: Oh yeah, I had to change a line in Fangirl because I had Simon say that Baz’s eyes were, like, not 50, but so many shades of grey. Maybe 50. [ELM laughs] I think that’s like a phrase that maybe I used. And then Fifty Shades of Grey came out and I was like “I need to change this.” [all laugh] So yeah it was about that time.
ELM: Yeah. I think if you had—you may have just, if you had done this a year later, just because—cause I was a book journalist at that time and they just completely lost their minds when Fifty Shades of Grey came out, like it was literally going to ruin the publishing industry. That all publishers were gonna want was—I mean this is YA so it’s different, but the idea that all publishers were gonna want was filed-off-serial-number, and it’s all gonna be tawdry, and it’s all BDSM, and blah blah blah, and it’s terrible writing also, you know. This is like a narrative that was going around the publishing industry, and maybe YA was a little more immune from it cause it wasn’t gonna be publishing erotica, but you know what I mean? There was definitely a big anxiety around what fanfiction’s effect was gonna be on the industry.
RR: Yeah, my agent was very much like “do not write this book, I don’t want you to touch it with a 10 foot pole.” He actually I think may have said it was unpublishable. This whole concept.
ELM: Wow.
RR: Because he was like, “Fanfiction is just a big no in publishing circles. Everyone is turned off by it, it seems very, it seems like threatening to publishing and also creepy.”
ELM: Yeah. Yeah.
RR: Yeah. So he just had, it had like—and also I feel like no one wanted to talk about fanfiction, even people who were reading fanfiction. And I remember saying to him that the youngest people in every publishing house, and the youngest authors, were already people who had just been raised on fanfiction.
FK: Yeah!
RR: And I was like, “This is gonna change so fast, because bookish kids, bookish girls especially, that’s what they do now. So like, you’re looking at it as it’s these weird outliers, but the sort of people who work in publishing now are exactly the same people who would’ve read and written fanfiction.” So I kept saying to him like, “If they’re not already there they’re almost there. This is just gonna be so mainstream so fast.” And I also was just like, “Let me write it and you’ll see. Let me write it and you’ll see.”
FK: Yeah!
RR: He was also afraid that it would be very, um, inaccessible. Like I remember him saying “This needs to be a book that anyone can read, not just people who read fanfiction.” And I was like, “Just trust me. Just trust me. Just trust me.”
ELM: Yeah, obviously the number of people who’ve learned about it from you is a sign that it’s a success in that regard. Right? Like…
RR: Yeah and also I think you don’t have to even care about fanfiction to enjoy the book. And not everyone reads the book, most people don’t read the book and then start reading fanfiction.
ELM: Come on, they should.
RR: They should. And I think for a lot of people it’s just like a contemporary novel and that’s it, it’s not like…
FK: Well, it is funny because people would not normally say, like, “You can’t write a book about a tennis player because only people who play tennis will enjoy this book about, like, this person who’s in the tennis finals,” or something.
ELM: Yeah, right.
FK: You’d be like “No, of course, like, obviously like tennis is the backdrop but like this is actually a story about people’s experiences,” you know?
RR: Right.
ELM: Yeah and it’s hard to think of—I mean obviously I just think, it’s very gendered. But you know, the idea of “oh, that’s creepy,” you know. And that attitude of it—if they’d heard of it at all they thought it was something creepy, is something that’s very interesting to me, you know. Cause I don’t know, I was just, I was just writing about this, this time yesterday [laughs] and so I’m thinking a lot about it, and—wait, Flourish, you know my supervillain origin story, right?
FK: I do!
ELM: I don’t think I’ve ever said it on the podcast, everybody want to hear it?
FK: You should say it, say it now.
RR: Yeah, let’s hear it, let’s hear it!
ELM: OK. So I obviously—it was like 2010 or 11 or so, and I had just gotten kinda back into fandom after kind of a cool, like a cooling-off period when…after the seventh Harry Potter book and she had killed the other half of my ship very unceremoniously…
RR: What was your ship?
ELM: Remus/Sirius. It was always my ship.
RR: Oh right right right.
ELM: You were like “Who?” [laughs]
RR: I was pouring tea as I asked you that and I got so interested that I let it go all the way to the brim. [all laughing]
FK: That’s like a reaction gif right there.
RR: It was a reaction gif.
FK: “Who’s your ship?!”
ELM: It was Dobby and, uh…
FK: Hedwig.
RR: I thought you were going to say it was the Weasley twins. She killed a Weasley twin. And I was like… [strangled noise]
FK: No no, that’s my ship.
ELM: No, Remus/Sirius for life. That is not your ship, you know it. But, so I ended up a little bit of cooling-off period and I moved around a whole bunch and moved to New York and I got a job at, I think we—well, you know where I got a job. But it was a very fancy magazine, perhaps the fanciest magazine. And I got into Torchwood. Through a total migratory slash, like, someone who was writing Remus/Sirius was also—a bunch of them started writing Jack/Ianto.
RR: Right, right right.
ELM: So I started watching and I got really really deep into it, and so I remember one weekend I got an idea for a fic and I wrote like 10,000 words.
RR: Oh wow!
ELM: It was like an incredible, like, I do not write that many words that quickly normally. But it was just like, I love this idea, I was so excited, and it was like a total, you know, self-indulgent, everyone is resurrected from the dead to talk about their feelings kind of story that I love. [all laugh] And so I came into the office Monday morning and this woman who I, I would describe as like a good office friend? Like, we had gone out for drinks and stuff.
RR: Right.
ELM: And she was like “Oh, how was your weekend?” And so I said very casually, “Oh, it was actually really great, I was writing this fanfiction,” you know, “and I was so productive,” and I felt really proud that I had written so many words, and she literally recoiled. She was like, “Ugh!” And then she was like, “Never say that word in this office again.”
RR: Oh my God.
ELM: And I just remember so distinctly [laughs] how dramatic the reaction was!
RR: Oh my gosh.
ELM: And it’s just like, I think of it now and literally within like three years—because this was like 2011 or so—editors from mainstream publications were contacting me asking if I would write about fanfiction for them, and I would just sit there being like “Ha ha! How quickly the tables have turned.” Not that I’ve achieved great magazine success on this beat. But you know. The fact that it was so verboten and then, you know, such a turnaround, right? But the, that kind of, the kinda like cringey “Oh, that’s creepy! Don’t say that word.”
RR: Right.
ELM: Not even like “I don’t know what that is,” but “I have a vague sense that that’s gross.”
RR: I think anytime women are engaging with sexuality people are uncomfortable with it, you know? And I think the fact that young people, you know, teenagers…I think like, my story’s about like an 18, 19-year-old girl, and I think on the surface that felt weird to people. I really felt like I could write about it in a way that would be real and not, not be everyone’s fandom experience, but, but that would feel authentic and that would also sort of give people like, a better understanding of what it was. To be. To write fanfiction and to read it.
ELM: Do you feel like, I remember I went to one of your events in 2014.
RR: Oh you did?
ELM: Yeah! There’s a picture of us. I can put it in the show notes.
RR: Wait, was that Carry On?
ELM: No, it was 2014. Do you not know when your books came out? Have you forgotten?
RR: I remember you at my Carry On event, I don’t remember you…
ELM: This was in England. I think it was, it was right when, when I…
RR: OH!
ELM: …when I had started talking to you online. Cause I remember you and I followed each other on Twitter right around when I wrote that big piece about being in the Sherlock fandom and feeling like I was losing my mind, do you remember this?
RR: What I remember is that is a really pivotal piece for me, and then we met later and I didn’t know that you had written it. [ELM laughing]
FK: This is also funny because I just realized that you guys knew each other before Elizabeth and I knew each other, which is wild.
RR: That is wild. But true to form we never got that close. [all laugh] True to form for me, not for Elizabeth.
ELM: Rainbow really connected to my pieces instead of wanting to undermine me like you did.
FK: I did not want to undermine you!
ELM: I promise not to bring this up ever again, but.
RR: That Sherlock piece—
FK: You’re never going to stop talking about…
RR: —was really like the first time I’d read someone talking about it in a way that really, that’s how I felt.
ELM: I’m so pleased to hear that cause I was losing my mind also. But it was that, you must’ve been, I can’t remember what book was out?
RR: Landline, probably.
ELM: Yeah, that’s—2014.
RR: Yeah, Landline.
ELM: And I was living in England and so I went to your event and we said hi. But I remember—I don’t know if it was there or later when I saw you talking about, somewhere, it was in one of the events I went to, this kind of sense of like, maybe not even talking but just my sense of you having to be a sort of, be a representative for fanfiction and for fandom after Fangirl came out? And, cause you would say, I saw you at a few events and they would ask you very like, “Explain how all fangirls feel!” And you’d just kinda have this “I don’t speak for everyone! But, here’s my experience!” And I’m wondering if, like, if first of all, I hope that’s cooled down for you over the last few years. But also like, what kind of pressure that was and if you really felt like—cause obviously you were couching those answers in “I don’t speak for everyone,” but like, that’s really hard cause you were like, this is the only book about fanfiction out there! You know, the only fictional book about fanfiction.
RR: It was hard at first blush, because I think the fact it was called Fangirl made—everyone wanted to see their experience reflected.
FK: Yeah.
RR: And of course it wasn’t going to be that. Of course—so in the first six months I would get people saying, “Well, for me it was like this,” or “I didn’t like that part because for me, that’s not how it happened,” or, and I would be like “OK.” [laughs] You know? But more than that, way more than that, were people just relieved to see fandom on the page in a way that felt real and not patronizing and not…I think I wrote about it really respectfully because I did respect it. And so people more than anything else were just happy to see a book about fandom that was a good book.
FK: Yeah, you know, it’s hard because—exactly what you’re saying. So when I read it I definitely had the feeling…I had both of those feelings, right. I had the feeling of “I love this book and it was a not patronizing [pay-tronizing]…patronizing [pat-tronizing]?” [laughs] I can’t say that word.
ELM: Both of those are correct, Flourish.
RR: They’re both.
FK: Are they really?
ELM: Unlike your normal mispronunciations, yes.
FK: Oh, look at that! Even a stopped clock is right once a day. Twice a day. [laughs] Actually. But maybe only once if it’s me.
ELM: Oh wow.
FK: Goodness. [all laughing]
ELM: Good, good.
FK: But, but yeah, I had this—I had that exactly what you’re talking about, that sort of like dual feeling because…it’s like being happy for something existing but knowing that it doesn’t quite hit…like, for someone whose experience was not like that it’s like “I’m so glad this exists! But I really wanted something that exactly hit what I experienced!”
RR: Right.
FK: “So that I could show it to people and they understood me!” You know? And obviously it’s the greatest feeling in the world when a book is like exactly you, and when a book is like 75% you it’s like “I love it! I also have comments! But I love it but like ah,” you know? And so it must have been a lot to be on the receiving end of like those mixed feelings. [laughs]
RR: It was a lot and I felt like once there were more books…
FK: Yeah.
RR: …about fandom, it would be less pressure on that book.
FK: For sure.
RR: To tell every story.
FK: Yeah yeah.
RR: Because often when someone had a, a complaint or like, “this doesn’t seem right,” I would think “Oh, that’s because you’re a different person than I am.
FK: Right! [laughs]
ELM: Yeah.
FK: Totally.
ELM: Cause it’s like, I don’t—you know, I’m very very reticent to ever draw kind of, to suggest fandom or being in fandom is on par with any particular like identity marker, or being in a marginalized group, but I think you have a similar—I mean, you definitely have a similar sort of conversation going on, especially with YA and #OwnVoices stuff, where people will say “Well, that wasn’t my experience of having this identity, or being from this background,” you know, “and so I’m…” And so you constantly have authors pushing back and being like “OK! So we need like many more stories that are about people from this background or have this identity,” or whatever, or these intersections of identities, right?
RR: Yep.
ELM: So I definitely think it’s a scarcity thing. But there’s also something too, we’ve been talking a lot recently about fandom stuff cause we just did a big episode where I explained the media basically, mediasplained.
FK: [laughs] It was good!
ELM: In this sort of…
FK: By the way. It explained many things.
ELM: And now you’re enlightened. But this kind of problem in the media of, and I find this when I talk to editors, of like, I can’t just say to them “Oh it’s a collective group of people with different backgrounds who are contributing to this big network of texts.” They’ll always say like, “Who’s the main character of this story? Is there a fanfiction writer we can profile? Like, that’d be an interesting lens?” And I’ll always be like “No! That’s, that’s not the, what fanfiction is!” And so I feel like, but obviously you, unless you wanna write some sort of experimental [FK laughs] collective-voiced text, you know, to represent what fanfiction writers are, you’re always gonna have to have a main character that’s gonna have a specific experience talking about a collective practice.
RR: Yeah, for sure. I would say the thing that people found, the people who don’t click with Fangirl, it’s because Cath is so isolated.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Yeah yeah yeah.
RR: But I continue to be very isolated in fandom. [FK laughs]
ELM: Yeah.
RR: So it feels very real to me. Like, I didn’t find fanfiction and then find community. I found fanfiction, and I’ve…don’t communicate at all. I’ve only made one friend in fandom in a natural way and that, that’s because I was so blown over by their talent that I felt like I could not not talk to them, but also because of who I am I didn’t feel comfortable doing it in the comments. Like, I reached out to them and introduced myself and was like, “I just need to tell you how wonderful you are,” and that is my one friend.
But I don’t have people I talk to about fic. Which is why Flourish and I, they don’t have the same ship that I do [FK laughs] but we’re in the same realm, poor Flourish. They get all of my current shippy thoughts because I know no one else in Star Wars fandom.
FK: I didn’t know that!
RR: Yeah, that’s why you get every…!
FK: I love it!
RR: Everything!
FK: I love your everything!
RR: Every once in a while when I just cannot resist, I need to talk to someone, I send…
FK: I assumed I was one of many!!
RR: You’re the only! You’re the only person!
FK: I’m so touched and I will be much better about talking about you about this!
ELM: Wow, did you just leave it on read?!
FK: I’ve been like “All right, yeah,” like, you know, “I’ll respond,” like, you know, every once in awhile, like, you know, you’re getting at me, I’ll type back, if I’m busy I won’t, but now I feel, like, responsible! [laughing]
RR: No, you don’t have to! You don’t have to. I, but it’s OK. You’re, you’re being a perfectly good friend.
FK: I love it.
RR: But I don’t have a single friend in my ship, so. [FK gasps] And I read fanfiction a, like, a lot.
FK: You read fanfiction a lot.
RR: A lot. Like hours a day. Cause I have a really hard time sleeping and I read fanfiction for hours.
FK: I know you do. Because you live-narrate it to me! [laughing]
ELM: Flourish, you’re the only one in this conversation who doesn’t read fanfiction for several hours every day right now, at this moment in history.
RR: Flourish is?
ELM: Yeah.
RR: Oh wow.
FK: It’s true. I read fanfiction for several hours every day when I am in the blush of a new fandom.
ELM: Yeah yeah.
FK: But I’m not right now.
ELM: But now you’re just a filthy casual.
FK: Right now I’m a filthy casual.
RR: I ran out of the ship, kind of like my ship, I ran through everything and I started reading Elizabeth’s favorite fic just to keep me goin’. So I’ve read a lot of—
ELM: Which one?
RR: You, you sent me some Jack/Ianto?
ELM: Oh! Did you read the, the one that I love?
RR: I did, I read that whole thing yes.
FK: I know you’ve always read my fic, like, ships—not my personal fic, but…
RR: I did, read yours, yeah!
FK: But like fics that I like.
RR: Yeah! I had a period where I was just like “somebody give me somethin’.” But! Where I’m going with that is, I have zero community and so for me, Cath’s experience of reading and writing but not ever making friends or making…not making those tight friendships, that feels very authentic to who I am and how I experience fandom.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: I think this is, I mean, this is something we’ve talked a lot with my lurker past, too. I think this is something that’s really hard on the internet, because the people who are gonna speak up to you about “Oh, this doesn’t reflect my communal experience,” are the ones who are talking out loud.
FK: It’s true.
ELM: Because they like to talk on the internet with people! Whereas like, the, the masses of lurkers are never gonna tell you “Oh, this is exactly me,” because they’re way too lurkery to ever, you know, let that out. They’ll tell you privately maybe if they have the opportunity.
RR: They tell me at events.
ELM: Yeah! Yeah. Quietly.
RR: I write a lot about mental illness, just in all of my books, I write a lot about depression, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder, bipolar disorder, so I tend to meet a lot of people who have had those experiences at events, and people with really severe social anxiety—which Cath has and which I have. And so I tend, at events, to meet those people. But they don’t yell at me online.
ELM: Right. Right. But it’s good that you get to meet them elsewhere! [all laugh] Because otherwise it would just seem like people yelling all the time!
RR: Yeah, but that’s the internet. That’s not just my experience.
FK: I’VE GOT A LOT TO YELL ABOUT. I DON’T KNOW WHY THIS IS WEIRD FOR YOU, I JUST NEED TO YELL. That’s my experience of the internet. [all laughing]
ELM: Get outta here!
FK: I’m a yeller.
ELM: Get outta here, that’s you.
FK: Yeah, it’s me.
ELM: Yeah, no, it’s very very funny. Obviously I think that you and I are in very different positions and I’m not like a multi-, multi-book best-selling author. But I do, I have had a lot of this experience too because I, you know, when I started doing journalism and I was one of the few fandom journalists, and all the friends that I made in fandom knew my name, and they had read my journalism, and I kinda felt like I was cheating a little bit.
RR: Yep.
ELM: Like I didn’t do the hard work of posting the fic that they loved, but instead I was like, “Here’s fandom and it’s good!” And they were like “Oh you’re great,” you know.
RR: That’s totally how I feel! I feel like I only am able to meet people through work and professional ways. So only by writing about fanfiction was I able to meet other people in fandom. And I mostly met professional people like you guys.
ELM: Yeah. Yeah.
RR: Yeah.
FK: This is so different. Amazing.
ELM: Yeah you’re a very different person. I just brought Rainbow on so that we could relate to each other.
RR: Well, if you’re someone with social anxiety, it’s easier always to meet someone through work. Like I have a really difficult time, like, when you guys have tried to drag me to parties I’m just like…
FK: Oh no.
ELM: Wow.
RR: I’ll never meet anyone at a party. Ever. But I’ve always met people through like, “Hey! I need to interview you,” or “I have to talk to you for this work reason.”
FK: Right. By comparison…
ELM: To be fair they’re kinda work parties, you know? They’re work-adjacent parties.
FK: Yeah, yeah.
RR: I will never be you.
FK: Right. By comparison, I’m gonna get into a party, and I’m gonna find that person I wanna talk to, and they’re gonna be friends with me, Goddammit!
ELM: Yeah…yeah…
FK: It’s how, it’s how it worked out for us, Elizabeth!
ELM: Uh-huh.
FK: Uh-huh! It is! It works!
ELM: [laughing] So aggressive, Jesus.
RR: Is that how you met Elizabeth?
ELM: Yeah, Flourish attacked me!
FK: We were on a panel together and afterwards I was like “We’re doing a podcast!” And she was like “Are we?” and I was like “Yes.”
ELM: And I was like “OK, goodbye.”
FK: And then we did.
ELM: And then, and then Flourish found me the next day and was like “Remember me? We’re doing this! And here’s the thing, here are all my thoughts about fandom!” And I remember it was so aggressive. [RR laughing]
FK: Yeah, and then I took her on a journey with Lev Grossman to watch Nerf Herder.
ELM: The band that did the Buffy theme.
RR: Oh wow.
FK: Which required walking like three miles [laughing] and in that time she was a captive audience!
ELM: And we learned, when we had someone from Nerf Herder on the podcast a few years ago, that he said that show was the low point of his career.
FK: Yeah!
ELM: Yeah.
RR: Wow.
ELM: It was all happenin’ that day. Everything.
RR: Wow.
ELM: Important moments for all of us.
FK: [singsonging] I made it happen! Doot doot!
ELM: Lev got to hear the theme song three times, loved it.
FK: More than three.
ELM: [laughs] They kept playing the theme song over and over again.
FK: They kept playing it. There was nothing happening but this theme song, I’m not sure they know any other songs, sorry Nerf Herder.
ELM: Stop it, stop it! [laughing]
FK: I know you know other songs.
ELM: No.
RR: I feel like this podcast is missing all of the thumbs up and finger guns that Flourish does. [all laugh] Just constantly.
FK: Anyone who’s ever met me in person will be able to imagine the thumbs up and finger guns, and anyone who hasn’t just imagine it and you’ll get it. It’s fine.
ELM: That’s a, did you do finger guns before you started working in Hollywood, or were you just like, “Pew-pew! In this town! Hey-hey!” Like that?
FK: That is your impression of my business partner, and…
ELM: No.
FK: Yes.
ELM: It’s of you.
FK: I have done finger guns [laughing] all my life. All right. All right all right. Refocus.
ELM: Yeah yeah.
RR: I would like to talk to you about my one piece of adult fanfiction.
ELM: What?
RR: I’ve written one piece of adult—fanfiction as an adult.
ELM: I did not know this was gonna happen and I definitely wanna talk about it.
RR: You didn’t know, what do you mean you didn’t know it was gonna happen?
ELM: What do you mean? That you wanted to talk about your—is this something published with your real name or have you written…?
RR: I’ve never published it.
ELM: OK tell me more.
RR: Cause I talked about it once before, and it got kind of twisted in such a way that I thought it would be good for me to talk about it now so that it could be, like, on the record.
FK: All right, tell us about it!
ELM: This is the, this is the podcast of record. Tell us about it.
FK: The podcast of record!
RR: The podcast of record.
ELM: Adult. Is it adult-adult?
RR: It’s a, it’s more adult than any of my fiction.
ELM: OK. [laughs]
RR: Um, I meant that I wrote it as an adult.
ELM: OK! [laughs] All right.
RR: I would like to tell you guys about the one piece of fanfiction I’ve written as an adult.
ELM: OK.
RR: And it is Harry Potter fanfiction.
FK: Mm-hmm.
ELM: Excellent.
RR: And I told this story once and people got the idea that it was the basis for Carry On and the Simon Snow books. And that was just like, no! Because no. Just no! No. That would be so badly out of character if that’s how I had done that. I was trying to write Landline and it was the first time I had written about an existing relationship. So Landline is a book for adults about adults, it’s about a marriage that’s kind of having a hard time. They’ve been married like 15 years and they’re having problems.
I was kind of nervous about writing an existing relationship, because I had written only falling-in-love stories, and so I decided to write a really short Harry/Draco where they’ve been in a relationship for 20 years and they have, like, grown stepchildren and this sort of middle-aged thing. [FK laughs] So it’s this like…
FK: Very, very Elizabeth.
ELM: I love middle-aged Harry and Draco. Love it.
RR: I love middle-aged anyone, and even when I wasn’t middle-aged I loved middle-aged anything. So.
ELM: Me too.
RR: I just love it!
ELM: Yeah.
RR: So it was kind of my experiment with, like, can I write—like, let me do this as fanfiction where I don’t feel as much pressure to pull it off. So I’ll just do this short story and I won’t show anyone and I’ll see if I can write a compelling story about two people who’ve been in love for a long time. So that was it, but then I never published it, so that’s it. That’s my one piece.
ELM: Well, do you—I say this as someone who’s never published any of my fic.
RR: You have not, that’s right.
ELM: No. Yeah. Do you, do you wanna publish it?
RR: I don’t, no.
ELM: Even under a pseud? You have no…
RR: I don’t.
ELM: It was just like a writing exercise story.
RR: Yeah. It was just for me.
ELM: Yeah.
RR: So it was for me and I don’t have that same…
FK: But now you’re tormenting us by telling us about it. You’re like, it’s like saying, “Oh yeah…”
RR: I feel that you’re not that tormented.
FK: “I, I made this beautiful cake and I ate it all just for me and you can’t have any.”
ELM: This is projection about the fact that Flourish hasn’t read my fanfiction.
RR: Oh this is about you not me.
FK: It’s about both of you.
ELM: I think it’s about both of us, but I think it’s really strongly about me, because this is such a sore point for Flourish at this point.
FK: It does torture me that I’m not allowed to read your fanfic.
ELM: Yeah but the thing is, Flourish has never actually asked, “Can I read it?”
FK: That is not true! I have asked!
ELM: This comes up a lot, this kind of passive-aggressive “You won’t let me read it!” It’s not the same! [FK laughs] And I will say, one of the themes I really like in my current ship is the idea of actually having to ask, to use your words!
FK: Oh my God [laughing] I can’t believe…
ELM: You’re just like Erik Lensherr’s resentful thoughts.
RR: She won’t even do it right now.
FK: Am I the Erik and you’re the Charles?
ELM: No, I’m both of them. This is a unique ship for me. [all laugh] Two nightmares.
RR: Just ask her right now, get it over with.
FK: NO! Because she might say no! I can’t ask her!
ELM: See? SEE?
FK: If I ask her she might say no!
RR: You’re afraid she’ll say yes.
ELM: [laughing] Yeah, no.
RR: You’re afraid she’ll say yes, then you’ll have to read it.
FK: That’s not true.
RR: Then you’ll have to talk about it.
ELM: Oh man.
FK: I love how this conversation just turned into psychoanalyze Flourish time, because Elizabeth got her teammate, Rainbow, here. I need one with my teammate! I need to find a community-oriented teammate and have them on this podcast so that we can psychoanalyze Elizabeth. That’s what I need. That’s what I demand. [all laughing] I demand equal time.
ELM: Sorry! You’re in the minority right now! In the minority! [laughing]
RR: Well, I would like to read your—didn’t you write a Harry/Draco legal thing, like, year or so ago? You didn’t finish it?
ELM: Yeah, so the problem with that, the problem with that one, and I do talk about this from time to time, because I made a lot of progress on it but then I abandoned it when I left the Harry Potter fandom and so now I’ve just, that is literally the toying with people when I mention it because I did not finish it.
RR: That makes it sound like you left. Like you just like got mad and…
ELM: I kinda did though!
RR: …marched out.
ELM: That’s kinda how I feel, and I don’t know. I did reread it about a year ago, what I had written so far, and I was like “Oh, I got so much done! This was dumb of me.”
RR: I never made my fic work, like, the ending doesn’t really work.
FK: I see.
RR: Like on my little short story.
FK: Right right right, so that’s like one of the reasons not to.
RR: That’s one of the reasons—I was—I know I’m not gonna publish it, no. But I also feel like there’s plenty of stuff I’ve written that people can read if they want to read something I’ve written.
FK: That’s true, you have published a lot of things. And so has Elizabeth, to be fair! Just not this kind of thing.
ELM: Yeah, that’s right, Flourish.
FK: Elizabeth, may I please read your fanfic? [ELM laughs]
RR: [gasps] Wow!!
ELM: Yes. Yes! [all gasp]
FK: [claps] I just got given a gift!!
RR: All you had to do was ask for it!
FK: All I had to do was ask for it after literally years of resentfully sniping! [all laugh] Let this be a lesson to everyone.
ELM: If you just wait a little bit it will be done, because I’m at like 40k words right now.
FK: Are you sure?
RR: Ooh.
ELM: Are you sure it’s gonna be finished?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Yes.
FK: OK. Then I’ll wait.
ELM: All right.
FK: Wait wait wait, OK. Now we’ve been down this like fanfiction rabbit hole about everyone’s fanfic, but I actually wanted to bring something up, because it’s something that, Elizabeth, you wrote about a long time ago, which is the “what is Carry On” thing. And I actually want to talk about this because this is—
ELM: Oh yeah.
RR: Let’s talk about it.
FK: This is quite relevant. People keep calling Carry On fanfiction, and not to get ahead of this, but I think—I feel like it’s not, and I feel like everyone here would agree with me and I wanna hear you guys talk about it cause you’re both way smarter about it than me.
RR: You want me to talk about how it’s…?
FK: One or both. One of you.
RR: What I think it is?
FK: One of you can say.
ELM: Well, you’re the one who wrote it. I’m just the analyzer.
RR: I mean, sometimes people say it’s Harry Potter fanfiction. And some people say it’s Fangirl fanfiction. Like it’s fanfiction of…so I created the World of Mages and Simon and Baz as the story-within-the-story in Fangirl that Cath writes fanfiction. So I created this middle-grade series with these sort of parody characters, not just parodies of Harry Potter, but parody of all middle-grade fantasy, there’s like the Chosen One and then there’s the dark antagonist and there’s the clever sidekick, there’s the beautiful blond princess, so these characters were all like, parody middle-grade fantasy characters in Fangirl that she then wrote fanfiction about.
And then with, what happened is in creating the characters and the world, I had been writing about them through Cath and I had been writing about them through Gemma T. Leslie, who is the fictional author in the book. And I realized when I was done that I had, I would do so much more with them if they were mine. And I would do it differently. And that I loved the characters, but I kind of wanted to get—I was itchy to get my hands on them because I felt like I had been writing about them through these filters. They just were plot devices really for Cath, and I kept thinking “If I could get my hands on these characters, I would tell a much different story with them.”
So for me it was like, I’d accidentally created these characters I really loved, and I kind of then wanted to remove the filter and just write them directly as myself. So when people say it’s fanfiction of Fangirl I think, “Well, I wrote that too!” [all laugh]
ELM: Right.
RR: Where is the canon? The canon kind of doesn’t exist in Fangirl!
FK: Right.
ELM: Right.
RR: It’s, it’s the concept of canon that exists, not really the canon. So for me, it was like I had created this, these characters in a backwards way, but then when I was writing Carry On I was sweeping free all the filters and I was writing them very, very directly. So it doesn’t feel to me like fanfiction in any way, I mean, maybe I’m not the best person to argue that, because I’m, I’m so close to them.
FK: Oh so in other words, in other words what Gemma T. Leslie wrote also—it’s not, I think that one of the things people would say is “Oh, obviously the stuff Gemma T. Leslie wrote is clearly what Rainbow would have written,” but that’s not true. What Rainbow would have written is what’s in Carry On.
RR: Yes.
FK: And what Gemma T. Leslie wrote is like, just existing purely for Cath to respond to…
RR: Absolutely.
FK: …and what Cath wrote has nothing to do with either of these other two things. I mean, it has something to do with it, but it’s like…
RR: They’re props.
FK: Yeah.
RR: Simon and Baz are props for me in Fangirl. Gemma T. Leslie is a prop, and everything is just about Cath’s story.
FK: Right.
ELM: Right.
RR: But then when I finished it I was like, there is the seed of a character—of characters there that I could really run with. Because my own feelings about Chosen One stories have started to leak into Fangirl. And through Cath. But still through Cath. And when I’m writing, when I was writing Cath’s fanfiction, I wasn’t writing like me. I was trying to write like Cath.
FK: Right.
RR: You know?
ELM: Right. It’s funny to me when people, and we just went to your Pumpkinheads New York City event, and there was a question in the audience of this kind of blunt literalism of like, “What is the truth and what is the fanfiction of the,” you know, and you were just like, you had kind of like a funny shutting-it-down answer—it wasn’t rude or anything, but it was just kinda like “Oh, I understand, like, the kind of reader you are,” and I’m sure this is like a constant barrage you get of people just trying to…it’s really weird because it, to me it simultaneously kind of misses what fanfiction is while trying to be this very very literal…
Like yeah, you could take two characters from another one of your books and write a whole book about them and people could call that fanfiction if they really wanted to? You know? But like…
RR: Right, but they wouldn’t.
ELM: They’re your characters, like, all of these. And also, it just is such a…it just feels like a very narrow reading of Carry On, which to me is by far in the most—what I feel like it’s in conversation with is Harry/Draco fanfiction. And that world. Right? And I’m not saying it’s fanfiction of that, or it’s like, you just stuck different names on a Harry/Draco fanfiction, but it feels like…if you think of all books coming from some like network of influence on other texts.
RR: Right.
ELM: I feel like it was written in conversation with those, right. And those obviously are conversing with J. K. Rowling, but like, we—our last episode was about, it was called “Canon, What Canon?” and it was like, you know, we talked about fics of other fics and we talked about when fanon becomes so all-encompassing and we talked about Draco in leather pants, and all these things, and like, especially Harry/Draco. So big, so many conventions, so many ways that people just talking to each other and barely talking to J. K. Rowling anymore.
RR: Right, right, right.
ELM: And I felt like you were coming out of that tradition.
RR: I felt like in Fangirl I was definitely in conversation with Harry Potter fanfiction and the fanfiction that I was writing. And that you could see, cause I also, I wrote fanfiction for Cath at various stages in her life, and I wrote some that she had written collaboratively with her sister. I definitely felt like I was engaging with fanfiction and fandom there.
When I started writing my Carry On, I felt like I was then more engaging with every Chosen One story. And I felt, I felt like I was a little bit more in conversation with the actual Harry Potter series and with Star Wars.
ELM: That’s interesting.
RR: And with Lord of the Rings. And with the Bible. Like, I felt like my what-is-fandom and what-is-fanfiction and how malleable that all is, that was for me was Fangirl, but with Carry On I felt like I was much more engaging with what does it mean to be the Chosen One, why do we tell Chosen One stories, are they good for us, and is this arc where you get chosen as a young person by an older person who gives you a weapon and a mission and you sacrifice the rest of your life, like, why do we tell kids those stories? So I felt like a little bit more aggressively in conversation with all of these Chosen One stories that had piled up for me.
FK: But that’s so funny because maybe that’s because a lot of fanfiction deals with those questions also, so maybe that’s part of what—
RR: Right.
FK: Maybe that’s part of what’s going on here, is that you felt like you were doing that but you can hardly help but have been…because of all these other people trying to work through these questions through fanfic…
RR: Oh, absolutely. Right.
ELM: Well, but, I also for me, a lot of that was very there and very strong, it’s, it’s, like a romance! You know? And so I’m thinking about the ship!
RR: Right.
FK: Yeah. [laughs]
ELM: While, while lots of Harry Potter fanfiction deals with these questions in a way, and often more complex ways than I think J. K. Rowling ever does, I don’t know, I’m talking about shipping, you know? Like, and I’m talking about the way that shipping manifests itself in the way you read and write romance.
RR: Yes.
ELM: And that’s not to say that other romance writers…this is something that we talked a little bit about in the last episode too, there’s this kind of explosion in the last couple of years of people being really into, talking very loudly about tropes they like? But I can’t tell if they’re in fandom or if they’re in romance or both?
FK: Mm-hmm.
ELM: And I’ll have to click on their profile and be like, “When they say bedsharing, do they mean, like, original romance? And they just like that trope? Or are they talking about…” And so I feel like this is less, this is even a more muddled conversation now than it might have been a few years ago. But kind of a way of engaging with a ship and writing a ship. And that just felt very…it felt shippy to me in a way that maybe other romances might not feel shippy in that way. But still feel like great romances.
RR: OK. I have a thought.
ELM: OK hook me up.
RR: I feel like the thing that I love about fanfiction, and the reason that it just took with me, is because I like to read romance but I’ve never quite clicked with genre romance, and part of it is that I kind of wanna read…I’m hesitant to say this cause I think that the world of genre romance is like, very diverse and all over the place and there are lots of stories that I don’t know about. But for me when I read fanfiction it was the first time that I was reading like, an epic, where the romance was as important as the other parts of the stories, but where it could be a big fantasy story and also be a big romance. That the genres didn’t have to be so separated. And that was something I felt like I want, I always want more romance from my big epics. Like, I want Star Wars but I want more romance. I want Harry Potter but I want more love and sex and falling in love.
And so that’s definitely a way that I’ve been, um, influenced by—actually I’ve been influenced by, Twilight was the first, that was the first book I read where I felt like the author totally was indulging me as a reader by giving me all of the romance that I wanted. And not being apologetic about it or never going off, off-screen with it, but like, going, “I’m gonna front and center this romance in a way that you get everything you want from it.” And so then reading fanfiction, feeling like you can write a 100,000 word story and you can have mystery and you can have adventure and you could have wonderful, wonderful character development, but you could also have wonderful romance.
So that really affected not just my Carry On books but I think that affected all of my books in that I felt like I wanna be a great writer, I wanna write well, I wanna write great stories, but I also am never gonna be apologetic about the love story being front-and-center.
ELM: Yeah, I think that totally taps into what I was thinking.
FK: And that’s super inspiring, actually, also.
ELM: Well, and the way I’m framing it as “shippy” I think is speaking at it from the same thing at a different angle. Or maybe not at a different angle even. But yeah when you think about, when we watch these big epics and they’re not really privileging romance and we’re the shippers, and we’re like, we’re trying to pull that bit…
FK: Yeah!
ELM: That small bit they give us out of it, right? And fanfiction flips that and gives you all the things you wanted in the original one. I know people complain, sometimes people are like “Oh, I don’t really want a plotty fanfiction,” or “Who needs plot, I’m just there for the, just the conversations…”
RR: Not me!
ELM: I’m like no, I want, I want all of it! You know? Obviously I love a good, you know, a good angsty 10,000 word, they just have a conversation for pages upon pages, love it too.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: If I love the ship, you know. But I want a big story. Right? Like, I love this.
RR: Well, the other way that I was affected by fanfiction is the experimental format and the fact that you can hold conversations that take forever. The idea, when you are trying to get published, they really beat your story into a certain shape. This has gotta be true in film. It is true in film.
FK: It’s more true in film than ever. [all laugh]
RR: Yeah. So stories have to be certain shapes for them to be recognizable to editors and publishers and agents as novels, and so like, my first book got really cut and shaped, you know? And I was, you really are starting to train yourself, once you’re published, to write in this way. And for example, one thing that I would get asked a lot is “this needs a ticking clock.” Everything has to have a ticking clock and everything has to resolve in a certain way.
And I was very inspired by, you know, fanfiction people writing for themselves and their readers, and so their stories have much different shapes, and I—I found that very inspirational, and I use that sometimes when I have this feeling of “Oh, this is just self-indulgent, I’m gonna cut it.” Like, Fangirl actually has a lot of scenes that are unnecessary to the plot, and it was a long book. And as we were talking about cutting it, I could feel my agent and my editor saying “I love this scene, but it doesn’t take us anywhere.” And I was able to push back with saying, “Yeah, but you love that scene,” like, “what, do you have an appointment you need to get to?!” [all laugh] “Let’s just keep it! We all love it.”
ELM: Yeah.
RR: We love it, why are we cutting it just—so that’s definitely from fanfiction I felt very confident that readers would read a different shape of story. So I feel like my, my novels are slightly different shapes from just the standard novel shape. And I know from fanfiction that people will go there with me.
The other thing I know from fanfiction is that people’s brains are flexible. [FK laughs] You know? So you don’t, I don’t get confused. I read all these different AUs…
FK: Yeah.
RR: I’m never confused about what I’m reading. That let me say to my editor, “Look, Carry On is a confusing premise. It’s a spin-off from a story within a story. But just trust me that I’m going to write it in a way that readers will get it. And readers will not be confused.” And I think largely readers are not confused.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: I have that conversation all the time with people who are like—now it’s better than it was, but around 2010 or so there was a lot of conversation: “Will people understand reboots happening at the same time, and different versions of a story, and all of this?” And it’s still a consistent—I mean to to say that everything that goes in that direction is good, but.
ELM: There is still, there’s still especially in fandom in like, especially, not to be gender-essentialist, but the dude side of fandom, people do get very hung up on this still, right?
RR: Which is silly to me, because they’re reading comic books.
ELM: I know!
RR: If you’re reading comic books, you’re reading…
ELM: It gets Jossed! It gets rebooted, just go with it, you know? But this kind of idea of “What’s canon? Is this, does this line up with this?” Obviously this is a thing. But I always find it really funny that people with fanfiction, exactly what you’re saying, and they’ll be like “Oh, well, it’s easy cause they already know the characters, and so…” and it’s like, well, I don’t know. That sets a baseline level of trust there, and yeah, pick me up any old random book, I don’t know…unless it’s an author I already trust, they do have to earn my trust. But I think that also like you’re saying, the sort of idea of like, our brains being flexible, and like, I’m willing to go with it a little bit. And I do understand that there is that little bit of the like, “Oh yes, I know these characters.”
RR: Right.
ELM: But often it can be taken in such a different direction and if you do it well, the people will come with you. And if they don’t, then they click out.
RR: Right, and you know, if you’re good at what you do…like, I’ve had this experience with writing Runaways right now. So it’s like a monthly comic from Marvel. And the experience of writing, it’s not a reboot, it’s just a revival. We brought it back, right?
FK: Yeah.
RR: It’s in the timeline, the same timeline. People ask me all the time, “Do I need to go back and read the whole thing?” And no, they don’t have to. They can start with my run. So that means that for me, I need to make…it’s like I need to tell a continuing story in a way that new people can enter, so that takes a lot of work, honestly.
FK: Yeah!
RR: Just to feel like you’re telling a story with a, the people who’ve been around for awhile don’t feel bored or like you’re repeating yourself, and where you’re hitting lots of…I’m constantly tapping into continuities, I’m constantly making references to past stuff that has happened, but I have to make it clear to new readers so they don’t ever quite feel alienated.
So some of that’s just like craft, right? Some of what we’re talking about is just storytelling craft, like, trust me to write Carry On in such a way that two chapters in…I would say two chapters in people know what I’m doing. The first chapter they’re like, I mean, the first chapter is a little bit like “Whaaaat is this?” But by the second chapter I feel like people are like, on board and they get it.
ELM: Yeah! I, like, I—what you’re describing with Runaways I just, it sounds a lot like fanfiction in the sense too of like, it has to work on a lot of different levels. There are so many people now who read fanfiction without knowing the source material or barely knowing the source material. And like, your story can still work, right? But then there’s also a pleasure for the people who, who know it really well, right? Like, I don’t know. I’m writing a canon-divergent AU right now, right? Flourish, you look, you just are so ready to read it. [RR laughs] So I’m trying to write a story that like simultaneously you could read if you hadn’t seen the thing it was diverting from, but also there is a pleasure to knowing what was diverted and, you know. So obviously not all fanfiction does that, some of it relies really heavily on, you know.
FK: Yeah yeah yeah.
ELM: It’s just like an extension of…but that sort of double pleasure of, this could be wholly new if someone didn’t know it was a missing scene.
RR: Right.
ELM: Or it could be so satisfying if it fills in that gap of the missing, you know what I mean? That kind of, that kind of duality.
RR: My experience of fanfiction is that most of the time I feel like I already love the characters, so they don’t, they just don’t have to work as hard for my investment. And so when I think about—cause we were talking the other day, Elizabeth, about what feels like writing fanfiction, like, does writing Runaways for me feel like writing fanfiction? And I, I know that it’s not fanfiction, but it does feel to me like writing fanfiction. Because I don’t have to build the world. I don’t have to win people over in the same way. I don’t have to, I don’t have build these lovable characters from scratch.
So for me, it feels very much like play and like I’m just walking into like a dollhouse where there are these beautiful dolls just sitting there waiting for me. And there’s this beautiful house waiting for me. And all I have to do now is tell a compelling story.
ELM: But you, you like these characters, right?
RR: I deeply love them. So…
ELM: Right.
RR: That’s the only reason I’m doing it, yeah.
ELM: That’s the interesting part to me. When we had our Comic-Con panel this year and I started thinking a lot about this, this kind of idea of like, we had a showrunner—the Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. showrunner on. And his kind of stance was very like, “You know, I’m proud of the work we did and I’m moving on to my next job.” You know? And so I often think about this and people are talking about, like, when they’re working with established worlds…
FK: Yeah yeah yeah, and he’s even a fan, he’s seen all the—
ELM: He’s a Marvel fanboy.
FK: He’s seen every Marvel thing, which he does not have to do for this.
RR: Right.
ELM: I think that when money gets involved you get this whole spectrum of like, “Yes, I’m a professional and I do my job,”
RR: Right.
ELM: “I care about my characters while I’m working on it, and I’m moving on,” whereas what you’re describing…I mean I also think that there are people in fanfiction, I mean, when you look at Yuletide for example, or I have a lot of friends who just have such a, um…such a whimsical kind of approach to fanfiction of like, “Oh, I can write that,” you know, like, any old, like…
RR: Oh right right right.
ELM: They’ll be like, “dah dah dah!” And I would, I need to feel like I would die for these characters before I sat down and wrote about them! Otherwise it would feel like a writing exercise that I can’t connect to, you know?
RR: It’s funny that you mention that cause my Marvel editor’s frequently trying to get me to write other characters, and my thought is like “Why on earth would I want to write about that character? I don’t care about that character at all.” And I have read every Runaways appearance probably multiple times at this point. I go hard. [FK laughs] For me, I’m, I have to immerse myself on continuity, I have to love them. So when he’s suggesting to me this other character that he needs written, I’m thinking, “I don’t wanna spend, you know, three weeks reading every appearance of this character I don’t care about.” Like, I don’t, I just…it feels like ugh, why would I want to do that? So you’re right, it’s a totally different approach. Because if I were doing it full-time, I would, I would have to be writing characters that I don’t care about. I’m writing my all-time favorite Marvel characters. So it feels very fannish for me.
ELM: Yeah, yeah. That’s interesting. I feel like it’s really hard for a lot of professional writers to kind of sort these things out. Cause they’re like “Of course I care about my work!” But I think that, I imagine you having this, this, you know. That’s not to say that a lot of professional writers aren’t fans either, but I think that you being deeply immersed in the fanfiction world in particular, maybe this is like easier for you to kind of separate those things out, whereas everyone else is like “I’m a professional and I love it! Don’t worry,” you know, and you’re like, “I don’t know!”
FK: Yeah, yeah, totally. I have some bad news. I think that this is literally an entire additional episode’s worth of conversation [laughing] that you guys are like, happily beginning to embark on.
ELM: I, no. We’re gonna leave this. Look, look: people one time, a long time ago, we were like…maybe this was like our 20th episode? We were like “FYI, is this too long?” Cause it was like more than an hour.
FK: Yeah. And everybody was like “No no, this is not too long.”
ELM: People were like “It could be three hours long” and I was like no it can’t.
FK: I’m just, I’m trying to be your superego, Elizabeth. You know. Like, rein it in. Cause I know how you’re gonna feel editing something that is like three hours long.
RR: And she has to edit it!
FK: And I know we could go for three hours because we want to, clearly, right now.
ELM: No no no, the only solution is Rainbow will come back for another conversation.
FK: That’s it! That’s the solution.
RR: I’ll come back.
FK: We’re definitely having you on again, Rainbow.
ELM: Yeah, that’s a commitment!
RR: I really enjoyed this, so much.
FK: Which is a lot coming from someone who like lurks and never talks to anyone!
RR: It’s true. Well, this felt professional so I felt like I could pull it off. [all laugh] But the next time, the next time I feel like Flourish, you will have read Elizabeth’s fanfiction.
ELM: Yep! Rainbow, maybe you’ll read it too!
RR: I would read it! Maybe I could read Flourish’s too, maybe we could…
FK: Are you really gonna do that?
ELM: Oh wow, oh wow!
RR: Do you think that I wouldn’t do that? [ELM laughing] I would, if you want me to, if you don’t mind, if it won’t make it weird…
FK: I don’t mind!
RR: All right, I will!
ELM: Great fic exchange happening.
FK: Great fic exchange. OK. Cool. Maybe we’ll even make it a special episode. We could do that.
ELM: Oh…
RR: We could do a book club!
FK: Why don’t we do a special episode book club about fanfics?
ELM: About your fic, we are not going to discuss my fic in a special episode.
FK: What?!
ELM: Absolutely not. Absolutely not!
FK: Maybe Rainbow and I will just record a special special episode that’s just me and Rainbow. And you won’t have anything to do with it. I’ll just distribute it on the internet.
ELM: Flourish! Oh my God.
FK: We’re gonna do this. We’re gonna do it behind your back.
ELM: I’m gonna rescind my… [all laughing]
FK: OK, OK, OK.
ELM: You’re going to have to find it yourself. You’ll have to find my pseud all by yourself.
FK: All right, OK. [all laughing] All right, all right guys. Rainbow, it has been such a pleasure to have you on this podcast. You are coming back. It’s gonna be great.
RR: Super fun. Thank you guys. Thank you.
ELM: Bye!
RR: Bye-bye!
[Interstitial music]
FK: Oh! It’s so delightful to have Rainbow on!!
ELM: That was a delightful conversation. I mean I learned some things, you know?
FK: Yeah, seriously. And it’s really nice to talk to someone who has a lot of, I mean, lots of people have lots of insight into their writing process, but I feel like…I don’t know. There was just something really cool about that, like, the difference between like, writing Carry On and writing Runaways and I don’t know, I guess I’ve never heard anyone, like, talk about the affective experience of writing like that, very often before with reference to fanfic. It was cool.
ELM: Yeah, this is actually something that I think is really…I mean I don’t necessarily need people in fanfic to be, most people in fanfic don’t have the experience of writing, you know, a run of a comic. [laughs]
FK: Yeah yeah.
ELM: You know, like a comic run for Marvel or a novel or you know, a lot of people in fanfic have experience with writing novels.
FK: Right.
ELM: Right? But I, I even feel like those people don’t talk about their process differences as much, or their process similarities. Because I think that people maybe are a little reticent to be like, “Reminder: fanfiction! I write fanfiction!” You know what I mean? I think while people are more willing these days to talk about their original work, and less like burn that connection between my non-fic and my fic…
FK: Yeah.
ELM: I still think that there, there isn’t as much discussion of this as I’d like to see.
FK: Yeah and there’s also like a wide variety of different ways that writers talk and think about their process, right? I think that there’s a lot of people in fandom and, myself included, who sort of write things without, like, having deeply…thought about their process? [laughs] You know what I mean? [ELM laughs] No, I don’t mean that in a bad way, I mean, lots of, I think there’s a lot of other writers who also do this, who write all sorts of things, and then there’s other people who are very self-reflective and like, have a, have a real…maybe it is just experience, but I think there’s also just like a tendency for some people to, like, think harder about their process than others and it’s cool to hear someone talk about it.
ELM: Yeah for sure! Right, well, thanks Rainbow.
FK: Thank you Rainbow! OK OK. We should talk about Patreon, which is the way that we make this podcast happen.
ELM: Yes! Patreon.com/fansplaining. So we have a whole bunch of different tiers, starts at $1 a month. If you have like any cash on hand, four quarters a month, anything you wanted to send our way. We really appreciate any amount. If you have a little more money to spare and you are a listener of this podcast and you want to help us keep making it, you can go all the way up to…as much money a month as you want. [FK laughs] Realistically, $3 a month gets you special episodes. We just did one about Black Sails.
FK: [chants] Black Sails! Black Sails! Black Sails!
ELM: We’re gonna do one about His Dark Materials after the miniseries has been out for a couple of weeks so we can talk about the books and the adaptation.
FK: Yep.
ELM: And James McAvoy’s sweaters, it’s mostly gonna be about this one…
FK: I know we’re gonna talk about those sweaters a lot.
ELM: You know it, you know it, you signed up for it. Don’t look so sad, you like talking about sweaters.
FK: I also like James McAvoy in sweaters, I think! I think I do!
ELM: All right, great. [FK laughs] Yes. Yes. I don’t need to say any more words. Yes.
FK: OK. OK.
ELM: All right. But the Black Sails one is already out and I really enjoyed that conversation, and then, $5 a month, in addition to getting your name in the credits and getting all those other things, you get this really cute enamel pin with our logo, this little fan on it, and most people have gotten their fans and seem to be fans of the fan. Fans of the fansplaining fan!
FK: Yes!
ELM: I’m a fan of the fan, so.
FK: They are, they are in fact super cute. And! And, and…
ELM: They are.
FK: If you don’t have money to give to us, there are still ways you can support us! By spreading the word about the podcast, telling people that you liked it, sharing it on social. You can also review us wherever there can be reviews and ratings and give us, ideally, five stars, or however many stars are there.
ELM: Max stars. Max stars.
FK: Max stars. That’s the goal. That’s what we hope. We hope we have achieved that for you. You can also send in your questions and comments, we are on social media in a variety of places as fansplaining, you can email fansplaining at gmail dot com, and you can even leave a voicemail at 1-401-526-FANS and we’ll play it on air.
ELM: And as always, if you wanna remain anonymous, just say so in the email, you don’t have to say your name in any way on the voicemail, and we will absolutely respect your wishes.
FK: Cool! So, is there anything else that we need to talk about?
ELM: I’m gonna get Rainbow back because I feel like we, beyond the fic stuff, there’s a lot of other things that she could marriage-counsel us on.
FK: I, I really am holding out for another episode in which someone who’s like super community-oriented comes on and like, takes my side.
ELM: That’s like every other guest we’ve ever had.
FK: Is that true?!
ELM: It’s a lot of them, TBH!
FK: Aw, but it’s not like it’s always been explicit, I feel like this is particularly explicit.
ELM: No this is, this is like you’re always in the majority, and now us in the silent…well we’re the silent majority actually… [FK laughing] Oh, I don’t wanna use that language. But this is what it feels like, you have to be on the other side for once. You’ve never experienced this in your whole life.
FK: Not once.
ELM: Your whole fandom life.
FK: Fandom life. There we go.
ELM: Yeah, mm-hmm.
FK: All right, well, we might need marriage counseling about this, so we’ll have to have Rainbow back.
ELM: We do, we do.
FK: All right I’m gonna talk to you later Elizabeth.
ELM: All right, bye Flourish.
FK: Bye!
[Outro music]
ELM & FK: Fansplaining is brought to you by all of our Patrons, but especially Alaine Sepulveda, Amanda, Amelia Harvey, Anne Jamison, Bluella, Boxish, Bradlea Raga-Barone, Bryan Shields, Carl with a C, Carrie Clarady, Chelsee Bergen, Christine Hoxmeier, Christopher Dwyer, CJ Hoke, Clare Muston, Cynthia, Desiree Longoria, Diana Williams, Dr. Mary C. Crowell, Earlgreytea68, Elasmo, Fabrisse, Felar, Froggy, Georgie Carroll, Goodwin, Gwen O’Brien, Heart of the Sunrise, Heidi Tandy, Helena, Jackie C., Javier Grillo-Marxuach, Jay Bushman, Jennifer Brady, Jennifer Doherty, Jennifer Lackey, Jennifer McKernan, Josh Stenger, Jules Chatelain, Julianna, JungleJelly, Karen, Katherine Lynn, Kathleen Parham, Kitty McGarry, Kristen P., Lizzy Johnstone, Lori Morimoto, Lucas Medeiros, Maria Temming, Maria Mercer, Mark Williams, Matt Hills, Meghan McCusker, Menlo Steve, Meredith Rose, Michael Andersen, Molly Kernan, Naomi Jacobs, Nozlee, Paracelsus Caspari, Poppy Carpenter, Rachel Bernatowicz, Sam Markham, Sara, Secret Fandom Stories, Sekrit, Simini, Stephanie Burt, StHoltzmann, Tara Stuart, Veritasera, Willa, and in honor of One Direction, and BTS, and Francis Crawford of Lymond and Sevigny, and Captain James McGraw Flint Hamilton.
Our intro music is “Awel,” by stefsax. Our interstitial music is by Lee Rosevere. Both are used under a Creative Commons “BY” license. Check the show notes for more details. The opinions expressed in this podcast are not our clients’, or our employers’, or anyone’s except our own.