June 20, 2018 • 42 mins
Fanfiction is a space dominated by women, and it is often derided as weird, immoral and/or terrifying. In Part I of this two-part episode, A & B go over the basics of the world of fanfic.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hello, this is Annie and this is Bridget and you're
listening to stuff Mom never told you. And today it's
finally time, finally to talk about fan fiction. Finally. It
(00:27):
feels like such a long time coming. It really does, it,
doesn't it. Yeah, I was telling Bridget before this we
started recording, it's just been coming up a lot and
I'm not sure why, but it seemed right, it seemed
like we had to talk about it. And do you
want to have this disclaimer right at the top. We're
totally aware that fandom can be toxic, and it absolutely
(00:48):
can be extremely toxic, and we will touch on elements
of that here in this episode. We're definitely gonna talk
about it more in depth in a future episode. Today
we're focusing mainly on fan fiction and a little bit
of fan art, but mostly fan fiction. So for folks
out there who don't know what fan fiction is, what
is it? Sometimes called fan fic or f f fan
(01:09):
fiction is writing typically done by amateur but not always writers,
and fans parts the work of other works, usually but
not always works of fiction. So you're kind of in
the fan fiction world. We call it playing in someone
else's sandbox. And if you haven't surmised. I have a
lot of experience with fan fiction. Tell us more about
your experience with fan fiction, Annie, have you ever written
(01:32):
any fan fiction? I have written some fan fiction, probably
as soon as the Internet was available to me. I
had a friend shout out Katie Um who introduced me
to fan fiction. I read mostly Harry Potter, Lord of
the Rings, some Star Trek, some X Files. I guess
I dabbled all over the place, but Harry Potter was
(01:52):
my big one. Later I got into like Supernatural and
Star Wars, but I wrote one for I wrote I
think a couple of Harry Potter ones. I wrote a
Star Wars one that one was the worst, and a
Peter Pan one and a Lord of the Rings one.
So yeah, I have quite a bit of experience. What
about you, Bridget Have you ever read any fan fiction?
I have not written any. I have read some. I'm
(02:14):
a I'm a I guess you could call me an appreciator. Yeah.
I think I think it's cool that people express themselves
via fan fiction and fan art. I think fandom is cool.
I feel a bit left out of nerd fandom because
I am solidly like not in the mix on most
of it, except for X Files fandom maybe like xpils
a lot um So there are a few things, but
for the most part, I feel a bit left out
(02:35):
of like nerdy sci fi fantasy fandom, but I am
a major appreciator of it. From afar. Yes, I'm a
fandom fan because I think I am just fascinated by
folks who expressed their love of different things via art
and cosplay and meticulous recreations and you know, expanding out
(02:57):
a universe to make it, you know, what they want
to see. I think that's really cool. So I'm you
could call me a fan um fan um you just
write fan fiction about fanfiction. Doing the research on this episode,
while being one of the most delightful experiences of research
I've ever ever gotten to do luckily for work, also
made me appreciate fan fiction a lot more. It made
(03:18):
me respected a lot more. So we we've touched on fandoms.
Fan fiction is made up of fandoms like books, TV shows, movies.
You can't even have a real person fiction r p
F as it's sometimes called based on celebrities. And I
know some of our how Stuff Works colleagues have featured
in some fan fiction. Maybe we have Bridget. I don't know.
Is there any Bridget fan fiction there could be? I
(03:38):
love to read it. Here's a challenge for you pretty
much anything you can't imagine. But one misconception to get
out of the way right up front is fan fiction
is not full on adoration of whatever fandom. Often it's
a critique and or subversive and almost always pushing past
boundaries and breaking rules. We've talked about the Barrier Gage show. Before.
Fan fiction was a place for people to course correct
(04:01):
tropes like that, to find representation in fandoms they loved
but we're vastly ignored in, or to write that representation themselves.
It was a place for l g b t q
I stories that were anonymous and where you were generally accepted.
This is actually where some of my fandom fandom comes in.
I really enjoy reading kind of lgbt q I reimaginings
(04:23):
of different stories. I definitely read some good Gilmore Girls
fan fiction. Wherein do you ever watch Gilmore Girls? Okay,
so I've seen every episode twice, multiple times, usually more
than twice. But it was a pretty Actually I didn't
really like the show towards the end, but I kept
watching it but one of the characters on the show Rory,
she has one of those sort of three main boyfriends,
(04:45):
and the question is always like, oh, do you like Logan,
do you like just do you like Dean? And I
enjoy fan fiction where she doesn't date any of them,
but in fact falls in love with her best friend Paris.
So I I really appreciate fan fiction that reimagines characters
as living in the queer identities. I feel they should
be rightfully living. Oh, absolutely of curiosity. Have you ever
(05:08):
read ash? I have not. It is reimagining of Cinderella
with two women as the lovers. Oh is the woman
a princess? Yes? Put that on my list. Yeah, And
that is an example, and we're going to talk more
about this later. But of like actual fan fiction that
has been published, sort of depends on how you define
(05:28):
fan fiction. But anyway, so fan fiction, especially when we're
talking about the online the Internet, can be multi chaptered
or it could be a stand alone sometimes called a
one shot. It could be a drabble, which is a
couple of hundred words, but they're generally, on average about
twenty thousand words, or at least the best reviewed ones are.
I just remembered I did write some fan fiction. Oh
stop everything, tell me more, Bridget it was. This is
(05:53):
gonna sound absurd, No, it was Remember the Babysitters Club.
It was. It was Babysitters Club, Mallory and Jesse all
grown up, living in Brooklyn and having a relationship together.
Oh my gosh, that doesn't sound absert at all. I
just kind of thought, so if you listen, if you've
read the Babysitters Club books, Jesse and Mallory are like
the junior Babysitters are not actual members of the BSc,
(06:16):
not yet because they're younger, but they're always sort of
mentioned in tandem. And Mallory is clearly a lesbian. Like
it's very clear. They could not have made it any clearer.
Homegirl lives in like an Oxford, you know, Like it's
very clear to me. Um, And so yeah, I always thought, like,
wouldn't it be cool if Mallory and Jesse grew up
(06:36):
and moved to Brooklyn and Jesse worked at a dance
nonprofit and Mallory was a writer for Slate. Wouldn't that
be cool? I think it would be. Do you still
have access to this? God? Oh well, this is embarrassing.
I blocked this out, untild this and told this very moment,
(06:57):
we're having kind of an intervention thing right now. I
want to when did you write it? Not that long ago,
like two years ago? Oh my gosh, I thought it
would make a funny series. I'm so on board. All right,
Maybe we're gonna revisit this episode at a later date
and we'll both share a little taste. Fan fiction taste,
fan fiction taste, and not to embarrass our producer to Dylan,
(07:18):
but he also wrote a fan fiction. He doesn't have
his headphones on. He won't hear to you, I know,
but he will hear this later. He's editing it. He
wrote one bro, I don't know if you remember Arthur
the animated. Yeah, he's an art park. He's an ant eater.
Oh gosh, Now I'm having doubts about it. I always
thought he was an art park because when he's in
(07:40):
the Spelling Bee he spells art bark so like enthusiastically.
Oh my god, he's an art VARKA. I don't think
he was an ant eater. I don't know, Bridget, I
don't know. But Dylan wrote a fan fiction about Arthur
and a friend of his getting stuck in an ice
cream shop and eating ice cream together, which I thought
was very cute. I've read some fan fiction that are
(08:01):
over a hundred chapters, some that are less than one
hundred words. Genre rise. They're usually a mix of action, adventure,
romance in a way that a lot of traditional media
cannot be. The chapter ones are like old school TV
shows or even maybe a podcast per se, where maybe
the author has a day each week they published or
try to publish in the meantime. You just I remember
just being like, Oh, I can't wait till the chapter
(08:23):
comes out. I hope this happens. This allows the writers
to learn and adapt from readers as they go and
create a product that appeals to a wider audience because
there is a comment and review function, So it really
sounds like an expression of community kind of standom where
people are excited to read more and they give feedback
about what they want, and so it's kind of a
collaborative project in a kind of way. Yeah, and that's
(08:45):
that's a big, not really point of contention, But some
people say that published works of fan fiction aren't really
fan fiction because they're lacking in that community aspect and community.
It's so important to fan fiction, and if you're one,
drink kind of like, why are they talking about fan
fiction on stuff Mom never told you other than I
love it. Clearly, the community that writes and reads fan
(09:07):
fiction is mostly women are non binary. We're going to
talk about that later in the podcast, but just know
in the back of your mind that this is mostly
a female community and the breakdown is is really fascinating.
But first we're gonna take a quick break for word
for a sponsor and we're back. Thank you sponsor. That
(09:36):
I wanted to talk about some lingo because I love
some fan fiction lingo. You've got a U, which stands
for alternate universe O O C are out of character
o C, which is original character cannon, staying within the
confines of what the fandom has laid out. Usually that
means relationship wise slash, which we're going to talk about
a lot later, and it refers to a noncanon couple
(09:59):
of the same set, usually male females denoted by film
slash impreg male pregnancy crossover when two fandoms crossover for
the for research. For actual research on this episode, I
read a Harry Potter and Avengers crossover and it was
the best. I was so happy. I got curtain thick,
which is a genre of fan fiction that focuses on
(10:20):
domestic situations like say Kirk and Spocker out shopping for curtains,
Like it would never happen on the show, but people
like to imagine what it would be like. I love that. Yeah,
there's hurt comfort. That was one of my favorite things.
Hc race bending when characters are either whitewashed are reclaimed
for minorities. It could be could go either way. Gender
(10:42):
swap when you swap genders of characters UST which I
use in real life, unresolved sexual tension ship which you
can hear probably a lot outside of fan fiction to
ship a couple. And we talked about Mary Sue and
self insert in our Star Wars episode. So those are
some of the some of the big ones write the glossary.
Oh my gosh, there's so many more, And like if
(11:04):
we narrow the focus even even more to fandoms, they
have a lot of their own lingo within fandoms. So,
like I already mentioned on the show, once desty L
from Supernatural, that's Dean and Castile and Harry Potter, you
had snape, Harry was snary, Truemiana is Draco, Hermione are
dreary Draco. Harry had a competition with a friend of
(11:26):
mine to find the most rare couple in all of
HP fandom, and I found never long bottom and memberless Membletonia, which,
if you don't remember, is a plant that he carries
around and the story Neville gets transformed into a plant
and they fall in love. But she found one that
(11:46):
was between Harry Potter and the Giant Squid. Rule thirty four.
You can find sexually related or pornographic material for pretty
much everything, including Harry Potter fiction. Oh absolutely, And if
anyone has this beat, please right in. But I would
like to know. It's a popular misconception that most fan
fiction is weird and pornographic. Most of it is not
at all, not at all, And speaking of Harry Potter,
(12:09):
it is often credited with bringing fan fiction more mainstream.
Fan fiction dot Net, which was where I went when
I was getting my fan fiction, has almost eight hundred
thousand Harry Potter stories. Yeah, there's a lot of Harry
Potter fan fiction writers out there. Yeah. Back in my heyday,
every night I would check so I mean, it's kind
(12:29):
of like search results, and I would just go through
every new page a fan fiction of the day, and
it was usually over thirty pages of new fan fiction
in one day. Yeah, newer, updated, Yeah. Oh. And in general,
fan fiction is free. What Pad does have a premium
ad removed service, but for the most part totally free.
And we are mostly talking about online fan fiction, but
(12:52):
fan fiction exists in several recognized forms of art and business.
The creator and showrunner relationship is a good example. Once
the original greater has left. I think Aaron Sorkin once
famously said, like, you couldn't watch the West Wing after
he left, or you've got the officially sanctioned Star Wars authors,
So tell me more about that, as as our resident
(13:13):
Star Wars expert. Yes, so, I guess it's Disney Disney
on Star Wars now, but Disney kind of picks an
author to write the books that they consider official canon
for Star Wars, and yes, so they kind of are
just writing fan fiction published work. We'll talk a little
(13:34):
bit more about that later because it's sort of an
interesting dynamic, A big trend in fan fiction right now.
Our stories written by teens that more accurately reflect their lives.
So when you were explaining, I'm very interested by your
fan fiction because it showcases a lot of things that
we are going to touch on, but particularly right now,
teens are writing about the prevalence of social media and technology.
(13:55):
Maybe putting that too, Like I've seen so many Harry
Potter gets Facebook and what happens Jenny Weasley, It's very
upset that Harry Potter leaves I emojis under some random
girls Instagram as she should stuff like that. Yeah, that
actually again, that's that's a bit like curtaining the curtain. Curtain. Yeah,
it's a reimagining of something that would never be in
(14:17):
the books, that would never be a plot line in
the book. But it's interesting, right, and it kind of
goes to show what fan fiction is really about, which
is sort of exploring certain aspects of yourself and your life.
According to Publishers Weekly, what Pad, which is a user
generated storytelling app, reached eighteen million users in the space
(14:37):
of seven years, and this translated to sixty four thousand
stories getting updated per day and twenty three million stories
a year. The number of users rose to thirty five million,
with forty five percent of those in the age rage
of thirteen eighteen, some classrooms have started using fan fiction
as a writing exercise now. Of note though, about what
(14:58):
pod this is specifically, Of all of the places where
you can find fan fiction, it does kew a lot younger,
and it is a lot of one direction stories, like
real celebrity stories, so it's a little bit different than
most of the other ones that we're going to talk about. Well,
as a former teacher, I absolutely love the idea of
using fan fic to teach writing classes for young people.
(15:20):
And that was something that I did in my classrooms
quite a bit, where if us, if students won't get
out their cell phones or don't get off social media,
can you find a way to integrate with they're already
you know, loving and enjoying and what they're not paying
attention to your boring lecture to do instead? Can you
find a way to marry those two things? And so
I love, love, love the idea of using fan fic
as a writing tool, because it's just meeting young people
(15:41):
where they're already at. If the fan fiction universe is
being dominated in small parts by young folks, educators would
be you know, remiss to not capitalize on that. Because
it's writing. It's just another way that shows that young
people are fired up about writing, so you may as
well turn it into a curriculum. Absolutely. Another big fan
fiction site, Archive of Our Own or AO three, had
over four hundred thousand users generating over one million seventeen stories.
(16:07):
And I, like I said, I was a fan fiction
dot net person. And DV and Art, which is more
fan art and illustrations Coming Full is another site where
that has a visual component that's really kind of unique
and often beautiful. So if you're interested, I would absolutely
speak it out. In his Time article, Lev Grossman, author
(16:28):
of The Magicians trilogy, described fan fiction in the context
of mainstream culture as quote what literature might look like
if it were reinvented from scratch after a nuclear apocalypse
by a band of brilliant pop culture junkies trapped in
a sealed bucker. That's so good. I know it's really good.
And he was speaking as a fan, but he acknowledges
how strange and extreme fan fix might seem to the
(16:50):
outside observer, particularly the outside celebrity as observer who might
be a bit weirded out by it. Yeah, as you
might be able to guess all authors or creators are
on board with this, some of them are buzz kills.
For example, in author Marian Zimmer Bradley, who broadly encouraged
fan fiction, but when one of her upcoming novels closely
(17:12):
paralleled a fan fiction she read, she attempted to negotiate
a deal with the author to avoid a lawsuit. Now
in the end, Bradley abandoned the novel. Other authors like
Anne Rice and mcafree and George R. R. Martin have
publicly denounced fan fiction for this reason. As the Internet
has grown older, a lot of authors have softened their stance.
And and I were joking earlier off Mike about how
(17:33):
we wanted to do fan fiction about and Rice, because
apparently an Rice is notoriously litigious and if you try
to knock off her intellectual property, she'll basically be at
your door with a lawsuit in her hands. So what
if we did fan fiction about and Rice hunting down
she's a fan fiction hunters, a fan fiction hunter. I
think it will work. Yeah. She posted like a really
(17:56):
intense note about like, you have to trust me on this.
You not. You cannot post fan fiction if you look today.
If we went to fan fiction dot net, you would
find no and rice fan fiction. They won't host it.
And fan fiction is frequently looked down upon, mostly because
of some high profile ones being made into books and
movies that are also generally looked down upon, But either way,
(18:18):
it's popularity is growing. Even Amazon has a fan fiction
website now that lets authors published and receive royalties from
e books from popular license series like Vampire Diaries. They
kind of have a relationship with these companies producing these series.
The Washington Post wrote, what used to be a disregarded
copyright nightmare is a new, youth friendly approach for publishers.
(18:41):
Independent publisher Big Bang Press was founded solely on finding
new voices in fan fiction to write their own fiction novels,
and while getting published is nice, it's not really the goal.
One of the most common arguments against writing fan fiction
is essentially, go write your own thing. You'll never succeed
as a writer with a fan fiction, But most people
(19:01):
who write it are not thinking they're going to be
a published writer one day. That's That's like saying people
who play football are doing so thinking that they're going
to go pro one day. It's a hobby. It's something
that people enjoy doing that's carthartic and satisfying, but most
people are not like thinking, if only I write best
fan fick, I'll get published, although some authors do use
(19:22):
it to like stay up to snuff. Do you think
that one of the reasons why it's so looked down
upon is because it's so heavily dominated by women and
non binary people? Oh yes, and we are going to
talk about that because there's a there's an entire article
that I'm going to reference it later, but it's called
when men write fan fiction. It's seen as academic. Of
(19:43):
course it is right, but I definitely think there is
an element to that. And I, as someone who is
pretty nerdy and tapped into nerd culture, I used to
get really angry when I was younger about how it's
so accepted to be in a sports fandom and I
couldn't figure out the difference. And then when I was
researching this, I had a moment of all, sports is
(20:05):
a very highly masculine fandom, and nerd media fandom is
still kind of machlum, but it's way less. So that's
one of the reasons that I think that we just
accept sports fandom, but we don't do the same with
media fandom, and I think beyond that, you see that
with so many different kinds of fandom and writing, Like
(20:27):
in the episode we did around journaling. Because journals are
associated with femininity, they're seen as un serious. But then
when a man writes one, it is seen as like
his writings, his papers. But its female authors, even very
famous authors, you know, Sylvia Plath, e Lee Dickinson, their
journals are thought of as their sort of frivolous diary.
(20:48):
But men their papers or they're collected writings. You know
that it's seen differently. And I think it's I think
fandom is just like any other thing where when there
is a male association, it's sort of highbrow, and that's
it's a woman doing it. It's just an un serious
thing and you should just quit. Why are you doing
this anyway? Yeah, And I can think of two examples
I ran across doing this research of that. One is
(21:09):
the Beatles. Before, like when it was just a bunch
of fan girls that were mooning over this band, they
were looked down upon. But then when men were like,
you know, actually these albums are pretty good, then it
became like Beatlemania totally acceptable and Another example is Brownies
because I loved my little Ponies, as did a lot
(21:29):
of women for a long time, but it wasn't until
dudes were like, you know what, I really like my
little ponies. I'm gonna dress up. I'm gonna be at
Brownie and then it became legitimate and cool and nerdy.
Before that it was like lame. And now you see
that at conventions like Brownies. So once again, when it
was a largely female fandom, it was not cool at all.
(21:52):
And then when men came in and legitimized it, now
cool Brownies. And not to disparage on Brownie's more power too,
I'm just saying like, culturally, it shows where we're where
we're at when it comes to those kind of things.
More on all of that later, but let's talk a
bit about some some famous examples of published fan fiction.
Because it did. Fan fiction did used to come with
(22:14):
this risk of a cease and desist letter. And if
you write about and Rice, then yes, you still gotta
be Look he's gonna put you down. It'll be and
Rice like at your door. Yes, hello, it's an Rice.
I know your home. I like a book. Rice. She's
behind you. She knows. She knows all in my time,
(22:37):
and I'm sure still now. At the top you always
put like disclaimer, I don't know the powers that be
oh and everything actually do anything or is it just so?
I'm sure it doesn't, but it's supposed to be like, well,
maybe this will soften them if they find it. I'll
be like, well, at least she acknowledges there are these
powers that be that own it. But nowadays you very
(22:57):
well might have read a fan fiction even known it.
We've mentioned before E. L. James, whose Twilight fan fiction
became the fifty Shades of Gray series, and this is
probably the biggest one. It's estimated that at one million copies,
it out sold Twilight, the work it was based on.
I have to ask a dumb question, how is it
(23:17):
a fan fiction when it doesn't involve vampires? Well, so E. L.
James deleted the original fan fiction once she got published,
but there you can still find people who have like
saved it and you can read it. And she just
swapped out the name, so it used to be Edward
and Bella and now it's Christian and Anna. I'm not
sure how much the vampire thing came up in the
(23:38):
original fan fiction, but the characters were essentially the same,
and I believe that side by side comparison showed she
only changed five percent. Yes, so probably just the names.
And this has brought up a lot of questions of
legality and calls a lot of concern about the end
of good writing and original work as we know it.
As one writer at The Washington Post put it, the
(23:59):
most handlest part of Fifty Shades of Gray isn't what
Christian Gray does behind closed doors, is that the book
might well be an illegal art. And I know the
author of Twilight has kind of She's never come out
against it per se, but there's definitely an air of
like she kind of wrote her own fan fiction on Twilight,
which is interesting, can you write your own fan fix?
Would she abandoned a project that was essentially a retelling
(24:23):
of the first one from Edward's point of view, and
she kind of made it sound like it was because
the Fifty Shades of great at least in one interview
I read, it does have to chap her ask that
Fifty Shades of Gray is more popular than Twilight. Oh, sure, absolutely.
You've also got Cassandra Claire's The Mortal Instruments, which was
originally a Harry Potter fan fiction, and I I remember
(24:43):
seeing that. I never read it because I was never
into Gremianny fan fiction. I had very specific things I
would read and that wasn't one of them. But I
remember seeing that one getting updated pretty pretty consistently. Anatod's
After which was based on a one direction and fiction
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies of course, Wide Sargasso c
(25:04):
by Genres, which I read in graduate school, and seminar
on women's writing. So yeah, I was taught fan fiction
when I was trying to get a PhD. It is
being taught in the academic setting a lot of There's
so many examples like that, like Wicked by Gregory McGuire,
it's essentially a Wizard of Os fan fiction, or Roger
and Hammerstein South Pacific, which is the only musical to
(25:25):
win a Pulitzer based off of a work that also
won a Pulitzers. Yeah, but again there are some There
is some debate about whether these count because the community
isn't necessarily there that of curiosity. What's your take on
that divide? I feel like these do count as fan fiction,
but there is a part of me that almost wants
to like classify it differently, if that makes sense, because
(25:47):
the community is a big part of it. Yeah. I
don't know. I would count most of this as fan
fiction honestly personally, but I do think it's missing that
that community part, that part that is so collaborative. You've
also got a series of James Potter novels, sort of
Harry Potter sequels by George Lippard that j K Rolling
has more or less been like, yep, okay, cool. You've
got Meg Cabot and Neil Gaiman who have dabbled in
(26:07):
fan fiction, or Hamilton's, which is sometimes compared to fan fiction.
I mean, if you think about Hamilton's, it kind of
is fan fiction. It's taking this very familiar story that
pretty much everybody knows and completely spinning it on its head. Yeah.
There's a whole article about it on box and it
was quite a lovely read. Here's a quote from it.
In essence, Hamilton's is a postmodern, meta textual piece of
(26:28):
fan fix functioning and precisely the way that most fan
fix do. It claims the cannon for the fan in
this case, Hamilton's canon is history and the fan Miranda
is doing a lot more than simply adapting it. Like
the best fan pick writers, He's not just selectively retelling history,
He's transforming it. That was a that was a good
quote in the article. Enjoyed a lot of it. Also,
(26:48):
Teens south By Southwest saw the premiere of a movie
called Slash, which was supposed to be about a teenager
exploring his sexuality through erotic slash fan fiction. But from
what I read, it really didn't have much to do
with slash fiction after all, and it got most of
what did have to do with it pretty wrong. It
was very erotic and weird, which that does exist, but
(27:09):
again it's the outlier. Most fan fiction is curtain fic.
I wonder where that misconception around fan fiction comes from,
that it's all you know, erotic or sexualized or pervy
or you know, wh Where do you think that comes from?
I think it it kind of goes back to that
it's mostly women writing fan fiction. A lot of it
(27:29):
does have perhaps slash, but in a lot of those
slash stories, like they're buying curtains, you know, like maybe
there's sex, maybe there isn't, and maybe if there is sex,
it's very like tame. I think it's a misunderstanding that
all these women are writing about sex, so it must
be weird. And yeah, there's a lot of misconception about that.
I was someone who really enjoyed like slash that never
(27:51):
had any sexual things, just slashed the relationships like, oh
they're they're close. Look that's intimate. Yeah I like this.
I like this, And a lot of times I would
get to a certain like say, I I'll read nineteen
chapters and then chapter twenty they have sex. I would
just like skip that that. And you did this when
(28:11):
you were in a teenager. Yeah, you're the only teenager
out there skipping the sexy parts. I'm like this, this
isn't for me. A lot of times I really appreciated it,
because a lot of authors would put like, if you're
not into sex, this chapter is not that important, you
can skip it, and I was, I was like done,
thanks for the warning. I really like the and fan
(28:33):
fiction did for better or wors play a role in
learning about sex for a decent amount of as me
included or learnings fan fiction you taught me some things.
An article in Vice deald into this how fan fiction
served as a tool of sexual exploration, especially for women
in lgbt Q who might not get much of a
sex education or see themselves represented in media. Yeah, me
(28:54):
and more than one of my friends definitely learned about
sex from fiction. I remember this per sex fan fiction
because again used to print them out and so I
wouldn't know that was coming. And surprise, surprise to characters
are having sex and I'm trying to understand what's going on,
young Annie with her printed out fan fiction. Oh yeah, man,
(29:16):
I wonder if I still have that stuff. I should look.
Most sites do have rating systems, like the m p
A almost and you can as some of them, especially
like geared towards a younger audience. Do you have settings
that you can set up so that you can prevent
children from getting exposed to some of those things if
that's something you're worried about. Some of them are less
effective than others. But some sites don't allow adult material,
(29:38):
and I kept getting a chuckle out of they would
say fan fiction dot net, because there is adult fan
fiction dot net. But that's where I stumbled onto my
sexy Lord of the Rings And just think you'd be
if you hadn't done that. Who knows what you'd be
I'd be lost, lost at sea. Fan Fiction has also
led to so so so many academic studies. You've got
(29:59):
The Writing and Eating a fan Fiction and Transformation Theory
by Virl van Steenhoys out of Perdue. This one's really
interesting because it talks about how fan fiction does not
need the world described. That part is already done for
you are seen if we're talking about a visual medium,
so like the same is true with the characters, the past,
the memories, their motivations. The readers all know this universe,
(30:19):
how it looks, it's rules. This means that it's extremely
immersive right off the bat, Like you don't have to
spend time setting that up. Everyone's kind of seeing the
same thing, which I didn't really think about, but that
that's again kind of that communal aspect. You're entering into
this world that you already know, and it's it's there
for you, and then they're playing with the characters within it.
(30:41):
Are the rules within it? Yeah, you've got this nice
backdrop already set up for you, like a canvas exactly. Yeah.
I was really interested in this study. Slash as a
Queer Utopia by Dr Eco Willis out of the University
of Bristol. Here's a quote from that one. The reader
has to decide not only what readings of the show
are possible, but what is possible at a fictional universe,
and this decision must necessarily engage what she believes is
(31:03):
possible in her own universe. And you know, as queer people,
that is kind of pitch perfect for our media consumption experience,
sort of deciding what things look like within our own
understandings of ourselves and how that is reflected on these
characters that we, you know, are coming up with scenarios
for yes and letting it play out. Some of the
(31:27):
other studies we found have suggested that writing fan fiction
can help foster empathy, can decrease feelings of depression and isolation,
can improve self esteem and overall psychological well being, which
is all pretty good, and fan fiction does. Like I
mentioned earlier, you do have that review function. In my
experience with it is it was generally a very positive community.
(31:47):
I did live in fear of the flame, the bad review,
but generally most people really encouraging or are appreciative, and
it was a really I had a really good experience
with the community, and perhaps that does go back to
it being mostly women. It's like a little slice of
a woman only internet. I've often thought, what would the
Internet look like if it was just women. I think
(32:09):
it will be a less toxic place. But it seems
like fan fiction is a place where they've kind of
tested that out a little bit. Yes, absolutely, and because
of that it has drawn like a lot of criticism,
a lot of derision, a lot of fear. It's widely
disparaged and misunderstood. Some of the popular stereotypes of arguments
against fan fiction include, it's a much of nerds, you
(32:31):
don't know how to socialize. Nope, all fan fiction is
pornographic slash written by straight teenage girls are middle aged
gay men, depending on who you're listening to. Also not true.
All fan fiction is written by horny teenage girls and
is largely illiterate and immoral. I don't win me yea.
Also not true. And again, stop writing about someone else's characters,
start writing your own thing. And again, it's not about that.
(32:54):
But how did we get here? Well, the history of
fan fiction probably goes back further than you think, and
we'll talk all about that, but first we're gonna take
a quick break for word for a sponsor and we're back,
(33:17):
thank you. Spots are okay. So pending a date two
when fan fiction began is difficult, and it depends on
how strict of definition of fan fiction you're using. Some
arguments say that the Grand Brothers fairy Tales of the
eighteen hundreds or fan fiction, they took oral stories and
then kind of made them into their own thing, telling
their own moral, whatever moral they want to convey. Some
(33:38):
arguments say, the Bible councils fan fiction, the o G
fan fiction, the Bible. Dang, yeah, so that's pretty far back.
Shakespeare often comes up in the conversation with the history
of fan fiction as well. Most of his plays are
derived from a legend or myth that he took and
then added the Shakespeare touch. And it didn't take long
after novels started to become more commonplace in the eighteen
(33:58):
hundreds for popular author is like Daniel Dafoe to voice
concerns of folks quote kidnapping his work a little strong
but all right. Um. Jane Austin didn't seem too worried
about it, though, and fans of her works Ja Nights
engaged in fan fix swapping in the late eighteen hundreds
with early fanzines. This eventually led to the publishing of
the nineteen thirteen novel and Jane Austin fan fiction, Old
(34:22):
Friend and New Fancies. To date, two forty two published
novels that are Jane Austin fan fiction are listed on
good Reads. So she inspired quite a bit of published
fan fiction. Wow, she's like the Harry Potter of her generation.
She was the JK Rolling of her generation. Absolutely. Moving
into the uniteteen twenties, we get Sherlock Holmes fan clubs
(34:43):
and bigger cities like London, and these clubs put out
the Baker Street Journal. The journal had both academic type
research and straight up fan fiction that the authors would
read at fan events. And this is some of the
first recorded self insert fix where the authors are talking
about themselves in the world of Sherlock Holmes. Oh I
love it Yeah. In the next few decades, sci fi
communities pretty much had the market on fan fiction. Folks
(35:05):
in the community coined the term fan fiction in nineteen
thirty nine, but they used it to mean amateur sci
fi writings and professional sci fi writings are profic was
a different thing. The first known fan historian, John Jack
Bristol Spear defined the term in his nineteen forty four
in fan Cyclopedia, and then in nineteen fifty two The
Enchanted Duplicator became the first book that was fanfic about
(35:28):
fans and one of the first uses of fandom and
print in regards to fans of media. That word was
first used in late eighteen hundreds as a mashup of
fan and domain for sports fans. Fan fiction as we
know it got it start in the nineteen sixties with
Star Trek. This property gave fans a new way to
interact with the work through magazines that published a fans
work and conventions. Fans would make copies of zines and
(35:49):
hand the mat at conventions. When Dr Who started to
be included in these conventions in the nineteen seventies and eighties,
this is when we saw some of the first crossover.
So Doctor Who meeting was spuck that I would read it.
I would read it. What about Doctor Who and Spock
shopping for curtains at I ka, Oh, my gosh. I
had a crush on both Spock and Doctor Who. The
(36:10):
tenth Doctor David tended so I would totally read into it. Annie.
Annie is on board as we talked about a little
bit in our Star Wars episode The First Mary Suit
Debuty in nineteen seventy three with a Tricky's tale, although
it was meant to be a parody. Yes, and Star
Trek fandom also gave us the first slash fick in
n a Kirk slash Spock fick called The Ring of
(36:34):
so Schern in which the two characters must have sex
or die, fall in love, and quote spend all of
their remaining days on the planet exploring both the planet
and each other's bodies. Is this a bad Is it
a bad situation for them? Or is it it's good?
This started a whole I mean, I'm about to nerd
out so hard. Okay, get get do it? Okay. So Spock,
(36:57):
his species, the Vulcan species, has this sexual kind of
ritual that they go through. It's it's a called pond
far and you kind of go and heat and if
you don't have sex and bond with someone, you die.
So Spock went into pawn far while abandoned on this
planet with Kirk, and so they had to have sex
are Spot would die. This is actually a popular trope
(37:20):
called her time on fan fiction, where you put two
characters in a situation where they must have sex, forcing
intimacy usually between two men that wouldn't otherwise happen. So no,
this is a positive. I'm going to assume Kirk was like, Okay,
I don't want my friend to die, we can have sex.
And then from there they fell in love and exploited
(37:40):
each other's bodies for their aspect. Yes, and this story
and the Kirk Spock ones that followed calls a lot
of debate in the community during the seventies, and they
were written mostly by women, and that was a part
of the debate that did come up. Now there are
a lot of articles into sense a fan fiction, mostly
(38:01):
penned by women, but the one that really started the
most hubbub, if you will, was in the New York Times.
In this article, she discusses how her professor, a woman,
said that when compared to men, women quote must learn
linear narratives slowly and with much greater difficulty. The author
points to fan fiction writing, saying women who traditionally spend
(38:21):
large portions of their lives working in relative isolation for
little or no pay, bring a different set of motivations
to their writing and art. They want to talk to
other women to express themselves in the science fiction form
that until recently has all but excluded them, which I
think really drives home this idea that it's about a
female form of expression and that it's really it's almost
kind of like anti capitalist. It's not. It's not attached
(38:43):
to this idea that you're going to be rich and
famous from doing this. It's it's more about personal growth
and personal creation. Yeah, And that's another criticism often hurled
at fan fiction is that it's nonprofit, as if, like women,
you have no ambitions. Of course you have no ambitions.
What are you doing. You're wasting your time on this
that's never gonna make you money, which again, it's a hobby.
(39:04):
I mean, would you say that to someone who made
watercolors for fun, or someone who knitted but didn't sell
their blankets they just liked knitting. Yeah, exactly. I mean,
I'm sure someone does. But it doesn't make sense. It's
not it's not it's not a cogent argument. Not everything
needs to be to make money or to get fame
and to get you know, rich and famous. Something is
(39:25):
going to be for the pursuit of creativity, and that's
what it sounds like these women were looking for absolutely,
and as things moved more online in the ninety nineties,
X files that virgin I are a fan of Exiles
became the largest online own fandom. Scotland Yard, worried about
a Heaven's Gate situation, started putting together secret files on
(39:45):
the X files, X files on the x file love
it and on star Check on the fandoms around them.
In at least one case, occult hazardism from fandom, but
it's pretty rare. Also, if we look at violence and
sports fandom, no secret files put together on that. Again,
could it be because that is a male dominated fandom
and therefore cool. Well, people actually get hurt. In Europe,
(40:08):
they have to separate different soccer teams by like a wall,
otherwise they would murder each other. People have gotten hurt
from sports fandom. I don't know that there's been fan
fake murders. Yeah, there's certainly some troublesome aspects in fandom,
but fan fiction specifically, I mean, unless you're talking about
ladies hurt and dudes feelings by entering their fandom, talk
(40:30):
about a murder, you're murdering how I think this fandom
should be Otherwise? Yeah, I don't. I don't know. I
don't know. And there is a lot of discomfort around
fandom and fan fiction to this day, which is about
where the Spring says, for instance, why are those zangus
writing Harry Potter Pard all these women writing about sex
and manly man fandoms? Its ruining are to sturdy, it's moral.
(40:53):
These are all things that you'll hear. I read in
plenty of places, and it kind of made me feel
ashamed and embarrassed. Yeah, did you grow up thinking at
what you were doing was gross and weird and like
for weird perverts, like antisocial perverts. No. I did luckily
dodge that, but I did think it was really embarrassing
and something I should hide. I didn't think that if
people found out. I was barely certain I would be
(41:15):
mocked quite heavily. And it was difficult because again, my
brothers were very much the kind as I've mentioned before
on this show, that would pick on you and would
make fun of you. And we all shared the same computer,
and I tried for so long to hide what I
was doing. Luckily, I don't think they ever figured it out.
I wonder what they thought I was printing out though,
(41:36):
lots of recipes. Yes, for all the all the cooking
that I did not do at that age. But this, yeah,
this kind of brings us to talking about women and
fan fiction and representation and sort of society's apparent fear
and discomfort with that. It's the dreaded fan fic trope,
(42:00):
the cliffhanger. But never fear, we have a part to you,
and uh, we have so much to say about fan fiction,
so please join us for the second part, coming to
your ears soon. M
Hello, this is Annie and this is Bridget and you're
listening to stuff Mom never told you. And today it's
finally time, finally to talk about fan fiction. Finally. It
(00:27):
feels like such a long time coming. It really does, it,
doesn't it. Yeah, I was telling Bridget before this we
started recording, it's just been coming up a lot and
I'm not sure why, but it seemed right, it seemed
like we had to talk about it. And do you
want to have this disclaimer right at the top. We're
totally aware that fandom can be toxic, and it absolutely
(00:48):
can be extremely toxic, and we will touch on elements
of that here in this episode. We're definitely gonna talk
about it more in depth in a future episode. Today
we're focusing mainly on fan fiction and a little bit
of fan art, but mostly fan fiction. So for folks
out there who don't know what fan fiction is, what
is it? Sometimes called fan fic or f f fan
(01:09):
fiction is writing typically done by amateur but not always writers,
and fans parts the work of other works, usually but
not always works of fiction. So you're kind of in
the fan fiction world. We call it playing in someone
else's sandbox. And if you haven't surmised. I have a
lot of experience with fan fiction. Tell us more about
your experience with fan fiction, Annie, have you ever written
(01:32):
any fan fiction? I have written some fan fiction, probably
as soon as the Internet was available to me. I
had a friend shout out Katie Um who introduced me
to fan fiction. I read mostly Harry Potter, Lord of
the Rings, some Star Trek, some X Files. I guess
I dabbled all over the place, but Harry Potter was
(01:52):
my big one. Later I got into like Supernatural and
Star Wars, but I wrote one for I wrote I
think a couple of Harry Potter ones. I wrote a
Star Wars one that one was the worst, and a
Peter Pan one and a Lord of the Rings one.
So yeah, I have quite a bit of experience. What
about you, Bridget Have you ever read any fan fiction?
I have not written any. I have read some. I'm
(02:14):
a I'm a I guess you could call me an appreciator. Yeah.
I think I think it's cool that people express themselves
via fan fiction and fan art. I think fandom is cool.
I feel a bit left out of nerd fandom because
I am solidly like not in the mix on most
of it, except for X Files fandom maybe like xpils
a lot um So there are a few things, but
for the most part, I feel a bit left out
(02:35):
of like nerdy sci fi fantasy fandom, but I am
a major appreciator of it. From afar. Yes, I'm a
fandom fan because I think I am just fascinated by
folks who expressed their love of different things via art
and cosplay and meticulous recreations and you know, expanding out
(02:57):
a universe to make it, you know, what they want
to see. I think that's really cool. So I'm you
could call me a fan um fan um you just
write fan fiction about fanfiction. Doing the research on this episode,
while being one of the most delightful experiences of research
I've ever ever gotten to do luckily for work, also
made me appreciate fan fiction a lot more. It made
(03:18):
me respected a lot more. So we we've touched on fandoms.
Fan fiction is made up of fandoms like books, TV shows, movies.
You can't even have a real person fiction r p
F as it's sometimes called based on celebrities. And I
know some of our how Stuff Works colleagues have featured
in some fan fiction. Maybe we have Bridget. I don't know.
Is there any Bridget fan fiction there could be? I
(03:38):
love to read it. Here's a challenge for you pretty
much anything you can't imagine. But one misconception to get
out of the way right up front is fan fiction
is not full on adoration of whatever fandom. Often it's
a critique and or subversive and almost always pushing past
boundaries and breaking rules. We've talked about the Barrier Gage show. Before.
Fan fiction was a place for people to course correct
(04:01):
tropes like that, to find representation in fandoms they loved
but we're vastly ignored in, or to write that representation themselves.
It was a place for l g b t q
I stories that were anonymous and where you were generally accepted.
This is actually where some of my fandom fandom comes in.
I really enjoy reading kind of lgbt q I reimaginings
(04:23):
of different stories. I definitely read some good Gilmore Girls
fan fiction. Wherein do you ever watch Gilmore Girls? Okay,
so I've seen every episode twice, multiple times, usually more
than twice. But it was a pretty Actually I didn't
really like the show towards the end, but I kept
watching it but one of the characters on the show Rory,
she has one of those sort of three main boyfriends,
(04:45):
and the question is always like, oh, do you like Logan,
do you like just do you like Dean? And I
enjoy fan fiction where she doesn't date any of them,
but in fact falls in love with her best friend Paris.
So I I really appreciate fan fiction that reimagines characters
as living in the queer identities. I feel they should
be rightfully living. Oh, absolutely of curiosity. Have you ever
(05:08):
read ash? I have not. It is reimagining of Cinderella
with two women as the lovers. Oh is the woman
a princess? Yes? Put that on my list. Yeah, And
that is an example, and we're going to talk more
about this later. But of like actual fan fiction that
has been published, sort of depends on how you define
(05:28):
fan fiction. But anyway, so fan fiction, especially when we're
talking about the online the Internet, can be multi chaptered
or it could be a stand alone sometimes called a
one shot. It could be a drabble, which is a
couple of hundred words, but they're generally, on average about
twenty thousand words, or at least the best reviewed ones are.
I just remembered I did write some fan fiction. Oh
stop everything, tell me more, Bridget it was. This is
(05:53):
gonna sound absurd, No, it was Remember the Babysitters Club.
It was. It was Babysitters Club, Mallory and Jesse all
grown up, living in Brooklyn and having a relationship together.
Oh my gosh, that doesn't sound absert at all. I
just kind of thought, so if you listen, if you've
read the Babysitters Club books, Jesse and Mallory are like
the junior Babysitters are not actual members of the BSc,
(06:16):
not yet because they're younger, but they're always sort of
mentioned in tandem. And Mallory is clearly a lesbian. Like
it's very clear. They could not have made it any clearer.
Homegirl lives in like an Oxford, you know, Like it's
very clear to me. Um, And so yeah, I always thought, like,
wouldn't it be cool if Mallory and Jesse grew up
(06:36):
and moved to Brooklyn and Jesse worked at a dance
nonprofit and Mallory was a writer for Slate. Wouldn't that
be cool? I think it would be. Do you still
have access to this? God? Oh well, this is embarrassing.
I blocked this out, untild this and told this very moment,
(06:57):
we're having kind of an intervention thing right now. I
want to when did you write it? Not that long ago,
like two years ago? Oh my gosh, I thought it
would make a funny series. I'm so on board. All right,
Maybe we're gonna revisit this episode at a later date
and we'll both share a little taste. Fan fiction taste,
fan fiction taste, and not to embarrass our producer to Dylan,
(07:18):
but he also wrote a fan fiction. He doesn't have
his headphones on. He won't hear to you, I know,
but he will hear this later. He's editing it. He
wrote one bro, I don't know if you remember Arthur
the animated. Yeah, he's an art park. He's an ant eater.
Oh gosh, Now I'm having doubts about it. I always
thought he was an art park because when he's in
(07:40):
the Spelling Bee he spells art bark so like enthusiastically.
Oh my god, he's an art VARKA. I don't think
he was an ant eater. I don't know, Bridget, I
don't know. But Dylan wrote a fan fiction about Arthur
and a friend of his getting stuck in an ice
cream shop and eating ice cream together, which I thought
was very cute. I've read some fan fiction that are
(08:01):
over a hundred chapters, some that are less than one
hundred words. Genre rise. They're usually a mix of action, adventure,
romance in a way that a lot of traditional media
cannot be. The chapter ones are like old school TV
shows or even maybe a podcast per se, where maybe
the author has a day each week they published or
try to publish in the meantime. You just I remember
just being like, Oh, I can't wait till the chapter
(08:23):
comes out. I hope this happens. This allows the writers
to learn and adapt from readers as they go and
create a product that appeals to a wider audience because
there is a comment and review function, So it really
sounds like an expression of community kind of standom where
people are excited to read more and they give feedback
about what they want, and so it's kind of a
collaborative project in a kind of way. Yeah, and that's
(08:45):
that's a big, not really point of contention, But some
people say that published works of fan fiction aren't really
fan fiction because they're lacking in that community aspect and community.
It's so important to fan fiction, and if you're one,
drink kind of like, why are they talking about fan
fiction on stuff Mom never told you other than I
love it. Clearly, the community that writes and reads fan
(09:07):
fiction is mostly women are non binary. We're going to
talk about that later in the podcast, but just know
in the back of your mind that this is mostly
a female community and the breakdown is is really fascinating.
But first we're gonna take a quick break for word
for a sponsor and we're back. Thank you sponsor. That
(09:36):
I wanted to talk about some lingo because I love
some fan fiction lingo. You've got a U, which stands
for alternate universe O O C are out of character
o C, which is original character cannon, staying within the
confines of what the fandom has laid out. Usually that
means relationship wise slash, which we're going to talk about
a lot later, and it refers to a noncanon couple
(09:59):
of the same set, usually male females denoted by film
slash impreg male pregnancy crossover when two fandoms crossover for
the for research. For actual research on this episode, I
read a Harry Potter and Avengers crossover and it was
the best. I was so happy. I got curtain thick,
which is a genre of fan fiction that focuses on
(10:20):
domestic situations like say Kirk and Spocker out shopping for curtains,
Like it would never happen on the show, but people
like to imagine what it would be like. I love that. Yeah,
there's hurt comfort. That was one of my favorite things.
Hc race bending when characters are either whitewashed are reclaimed
for minorities. It could be could go either way. Gender
(10:42):
swap when you swap genders of characters UST which I
use in real life, unresolved sexual tension ship which you
can hear probably a lot outside of fan fiction to
ship a couple. And we talked about Mary Sue and
self insert in our Star Wars episode. So those are
some of the some of the big ones write the glossary.
Oh my gosh, there's so many more, And like if
(11:04):
we narrow the focus even even more to fandoms, they
have a lot of their own lingo within fandoms. So,
like I already mentioned on the show, once desty L
from Supernatural, that's Dean and Castile and Harry Potter, you
had snape, Harry was snary, Truemiana is Draco, Hermione are
dreary Draco. Harry had a competition with a friend of
(11:26):
mine to find the most rare couple in all of
HP fandom, and I found never long bottom and memberless Membletonia, which,
if you don't remember, is a plant that he carries
around and the story Neville gets transformed into a plant
and they fall in love. But she found one that
(11:46):
was between Harry Potter and the Giant Squid. Rule thirty four.
You can find sexually related or pornographic material for pretty
much everything, including Harry Potter fiction. Oh absolutely, And if
anyone has this beat, please right in. But I would
like to know. It's a popular misconception that most fan
fiction is weird and pornographic. Most of it is not
at all, not at all, And speaking of Harry Potter,
(12:09):
it is often credited with bringing fan fiction more mainstream.
Fan fiction dot Net, which was where I went when
I was getting my fan fiction, has almost eight hundred
thousand Harry Potter stories. Yeah, there's a lot of Harry
Potter fan fiction writers out there. Yeah. Back in my heyday,
every night I would check so I mean, it's kind
(12:29):
of like search results, and I would just go through
every new page a fan fiction of the day, and
it was usually over thirty pages of new fan fiction
in one day. Yeah, newer, updated, Yeah. Oh. And in general,
fan fiction is free. What Pad does have a premium
ad removed service, but for the most part totally free.
And we are mostly talking about online fan fiction, but
(12:52):
fan fiction exists in several recognized forms of art and business.
The creator and showrunner relationship is a good example. Once
the original greater has left. I think Aaron Sorkin once
famously said, like, you couldn't watch the West Wing after
he left, or you've got the officially sanctioned Star Wars authors,
So tell me more about that, as as our resident
(13:13):
Star Wars expert. Yes, so, I guess it's Disney Disney
on Star Wars now, but Disney kind of picks an
author to write the books that they consider official canon
for Star Wars, and yes, so they kind of are
just writing fan fiction published work. We'll talk a little
(13:34):
bit more about that later because it's sort of an
interesting dynamic, A big trend in fan fiction right now.
Our stories written by teens that more accurately reflect their lives.
So when you were explaining, I'm very interested by your
fan fiction because it showcases a lot of things that
we are going to touch on, but particularly right now,
teens are writing about the prevalence of social media and technology.
(13:55):
Maybe putting that too, Like I've seen so many Harry
Potter gets Facebook and what happens Jenny Weasley, It's very
upset that Harry Potter leaves I emojis under some random
girls Instagram as she should stuff like that. Yeah, that
actually again, that's that's a bit like curtaining the curtain. Curtain. Yeah,
it's a reimagining of something that would never be in
(14:17):
the books, that would never be a plot line in
the book. But it's interesting, right, and it kind of
goes to show what fan fiction is really about, which
is sort of exploring certain aspects of yourself and your life.
According to Publishers Weekly, what Pad, which is a user
generated storytelling app, reached eighteen million users in the space
(14:37):
of seven years, and this translated to sixty four thousand
stories getting updated per day and twenty three million stories
a year. The number of users rose to thirty five million,
with forty five percent of those in the age rage
of thirteen eighteen, some classrooms have started using fan fiction
as a writing exercise now. Of note though, about what
(14:58):
pod this is specifically, Of all of the places where
you can find fan fiction, it does kew a lot younger,
and it is a lot of one direction stories, like
real celebrity stories, so it's a little bit different than
most of the other ones that we're going to talk about. Well,
as a former teacher, I absolutely love the idea of
using fan fic to teach writing classes for young people.
(15:20):
And that was something that I did in my classrooms
quite a bit, where if us, if students won't get
out their cell phones or don't get off social media,
can you find a way to integrate with they're already
you know, loving and enjoying and what they're not paying
attention to your boring lecture to do instead? Can you
find a way to marry those two things? And so
I love, love, love the idea of using fan fic
as a writing tool, because it's just meeting young people
(15:41):
where they're already at. If the fan fiction universe is
being dominated in small parts by young folks, educators would
be you know, remiss to not capitalize on that. Because
it's writing. It's just another way that shows that young
people are fired up about writing, so you may as
well turn it into a curriculum. Absolutely. Another big fan
fiction site, Archive of Our Own or AO three, had
over four hundred thousand users generating over one million seventeen stories.
(16:07):
And I, like I said, I was a fan fiction
dot net person. And DV and Art, which is more
fan art and illustrations Coming Full is another site where
that has a visual component that's really kind of unique
and often beautiful. So if you're interested, I would absolutely
speak it out. In his Time article, Lev Grossman, author
(16:28):
of The Magicians trilogy, described fan fiction in the context
of mainstream culture as quote what literature might look like
if it were reinvented from scratch after a nuclear apocalypse
by a band of brilliant pop culture junkies trapped in
a sealed bucker. That's so good. I know it's really good.
And he was speaking as a fan, but he acknowledges
how strange and extreme fan fix might seem to the
(16:50):
outside observer, particularly the outside celebrity as observer who might
be a bit weirded out by it. Yeah, as you
might be able to guess all authors or creators are
on board with this, some of them are buzz kills.
For example, in author Marian Zimmer Bradley, who broadly encouraged
fan fiction, but when one of her upcoming novels closely
(17:12):
paralleled a fan fiction she read, she attempted to negotiate
a deal with the author to avoid a lawsuit. Now
in the end, Bradley abandoned the novel. Other authors like
Anne Rice and mcafree and George R. R. Martin have
publicly denounced fan fiction for this reason. As the Internet
has grown older, a lot of authors have softened their stance.
And and I were joking earlier off Mike about how
(17:33):
we wanted to do fan fiction about and Rice, because
apparently an Rice is notoriously litigious and if you try
to knock off her intellectual property, she'll basically be at
your door with a lawsuit in her hands. So what
if we did fan fiction about and Rice hunting down
she's a fan fiction hunters, a fan fiction hunter. I
think it will work. Yeah. She posted like a really
(17:56):
intense note about like, you have to trust me on this.
You not. You cannot post fan fiction if you look today.
If we went to fan fiction dot net, you would
find no and rice fan fiction. They won't host it.
And fan fiction is frequently looked down upon, mostly because
of some high profile ones being made into books and
movies that are also generally looked down upon, But either way,
(18:18):
it's popularity is growing. Even Amazon has a fan fiction
website now that lets authors published and receive royalties from
e books from popular license series like Vampire Diaries. They
kind of have a relationship with these companies producing these series.
The Washington Post wrote, what used to be a disregarded
copyright nightmare is a new, youth friendly approach for publishers.
(18:41):
Independent publisher Big Bang Press was founded solely on finding
new voices in fan fiction to write their own fiction novels,
and while getting published is nice, it's not really the goal.
One of the most common arguments against writing fan fiction
is essentially, go write your own thing. You'll never succeed
as a writer with a fan fiction, But most people
(19:01):
who write it are not thinking they're going to be
a published writer one day. That's That's like saying people
who play football are doing so thinking that they're going
to go pro one day. It's a hobby. It's something
that people enjoy doing that's carthartic and satisfying, but most
people are not like thinking, if only I write best
fan fick, I'll get published, although some authors do use
(19:22):
it to like stay up to snuff. Do you think
that one of the reasons why it's so looked down
upon is because it's so heavily dominated by women and
non binary people? Oh yes, and we are going to
talk about that because there's a there's an entire article
that I'm going to reference it later, but it's called
when men write fan fiction. It's seen as academic. Of
(19:43):
course it is right, but I definitely think there is
an element to that. And I, as someone who is
pretty nerdy and tapped into nerd culture, I used to
get really angry when I was younger about how it's
so accepted to be in a sports fandom and I
couldn't figure out the difference. And then when I was
researching this, I had a moment of all, sports is
(20:05):
a very highly masculine fandom, and nerd media fandom is
still kind of machlum, but it's way less. So that's
one of the reasons that I think that we just
accept sports fandom, but we don't do the same with
media fandom, and I think beyond that, you see that
with so many different kinds of fandom and writing, Like
(20:27):
in the episode we did around journaling. Because journals are
associated with femininity, they're seen as un serious. But then
when a man writes one, it is seen as like
his writings, his papers. But its female authors, even very
famous authors, you know, Sylvia Plath, e Lee Dickinson, their
journals are thought of as their sort of frivolous diary.
(20:48):
But men their papers or they're collected writings. You know
that it's seen differently. And I think it's I think
fandom is just like any other thing where when there
is a male association, it's sort of highbrow, and that's
it's a woman doing it. It's just an un serious
thing and you should just quit. Why are you doing
this anyway? Yeah, And I can think of two examples
I ran across doing this research of that. One is
(21:09):
the Beatles. Before, like when it was just a bunch
of fan girls that were mooning over this band, they
were looked down upon. But then when men were like,
you know, actually these albums are pretty good, then it
became like Beatlemania totally acceptable and Another example is Brownies
because I loved my little Ponies, as did a lot
(21:29):
of women for a long time, but it wasn't until
dudes were like, you know what, I really like my
little ponies. I'm gonna dress up. I'm gonna be at
Brownie and then it became legitimate and cool and nerdy.
Before that it was like lame. And now you see
that at conventions like Brownies. So once again, when it
was a largely female fandom, it was not cool at all.
(21:52):
And then when men came in and legitimized it, now
cool Brownies. And not to disparage on Brownie's more power too,
I'm just saying like, culturally, it shows where we're where
we're at when it comes to those kind of things.
More on all of that later, but let's talk a
bit about some some famous examples of published fan fiction.
Because it did. Fan fiction did used to come with
(22:14):
this risk of a cease and desist letter. And if
you write about and Rice, then yes, you still gotta
be Look he's gonna put you down. It'll be and
Rice like at your door. Yes, hello, it's an Rice.
I know your home. I like a book. Rice. She's
behind you. She knows. She knows all in my time,
(22:37):
and I'm sure still now. At the top you always
put like disclaimer, I don't know the powers that be
oh and everything actually do anything or is it just so?
I'm sure it doesn't, but it's supposed to be like, well,
maybe this will soften them if they find it. I'll
be like, well, at least she acknowledges there are these
powers that be that own it. But nowadays you very
(22:57):
well might have read a fan fiction even known it.
We've mentioned before E. L. James, whose Twilight fan fiction
became the fifty Shades of Gray series, and this is
probably the biggest one. It's estimated that at one million copies,
it out sold Twilight, the work it was based on.
I have to ask a dumb question, how is it
(23:17):
a fan fiction when it doesn't involve vampires? Well, so E. L.
James deleted the original fan fiction once she got published,
but there you can still find people who have like
saved it and you can read it. And she just
swapped out the name, so it used to be Edward
and Bella and now it's Christian and Anna. I'm not
sure how much the vampire thing came up in the
(23:38):
original fan fiction, but the characters were essentially the same,
and I believe that side by side comparison showed she
only changed five percent. Yes, so probably just the names.
And this has brought up a lot of questions of
legality and calls a lot of concern about the end
of good writing and original work as we know it.
As one writer at The Washington Post put it, the
(23:59):
most handlest part of Fifty Shades of Gray isn't what
Christian Gray does behind closed doors, is that the book
might well be an illegal art. And I know the
author of Twilight has kind of She's never come out
against it per se, but there's definitely an air of
like she kind of wrote her own fan fiction on Twilight,
which is interesting, can you write your own fan fix?
Would she abandoned a project that was essentially a retelling
(24:23):
of the first one from Edward's point of view, and
she kind of made it sound like it was because
the Fifty Shades of great at least in one interview
I read, it does have to chap her ask that
Fifty Shades of Gray is more popular than Twilight. Oh, sure, absolutely.
You've also got Cassandra Claire's The Mortal Instruments, which was
originally a Harry Potter fan fiction, and I I remember
(24:43):
seeing that. I never read it because I was never
into Gremianny fan fiction. I had very specific things I
would read and that wasn't one of them. But I
remember seeing that one getting updated pretty pretty consistently. Anatod's
After which was based on a one direction and fiction
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies of course, Wide Sargasso c
(25:04):
by Genres, which I read in graduate school, and seminar
on women's writing. So yeah, I was taught fan fiction
when I was trying to get a PhD. It is
being taught in the academic setting a lot of There's
so many examples like that, like Wicked by Gregory McGuire,
it's essentially a Wizard of Os fan fiction, or Roger
and Hammerstein South Pacific, which is the only musical to
(25:25):
win a Pulitzer based off of a work that also
won a Pulitzers. Yeah, but again there are some There
is some debate about whether these count because the community
isn't necessarily there that of curiosity. What's your take on
that divide? I feel like these do count as fan fiction,
but there is a part of me that almost wants
to like classify it differently, if that makes sense, because
(25:47):
the community is a big part of it. Yeah. I
don't know. I would count most of this as fan
fiction honestly personally, but I do think it's missing that
that community part, that part that is so collaborative. You've
also got a series of James Potter novels, sort of
Harry Potter sequels by George Lippard that j K Rolling
has more or less been like, yep, okay, cool. You've
got Meg Cabot and Neil Gaiman who have dabbled in
(26:07):
fan fiction, or Hamilton's, which is sometimes compared to fan fiction.
I mean, if you think about Hamilton's, it kind of
is fan fiction. It's taking this very familiar story that
pretty much everybody knows and completely spinning it on its head. Yeah.
There's a whole article about it on box and it
was quite a lovely read. Here's a quote from it.
In essence, Hamilton's is a postmodern, meta textual piece of
(26:28):
fan fix functioning and precisely the way that most fan
fix do. It claims the cannon for the fan in
this case, Hamilton's canon is history and the fan Miranda
is doing a lot more than simply adapting it. Like
the best fan pick writers, He's not just selectively retelling history,
He's transforming it. That was a that was a good
quote in the article. Enjoyed a lot of it. Also,
(26:48):
Teens south By Southwest saw the premiere of a movie
called Slash, which was supposed to be about a teenager
exploring his sexuality through erotic slash fan fiction. But from
what I read, it really didn't have much to do
with slash fiction after all, and it got most of
what did have to do with it pretty wrong. It
was very erotic and weird, which that does exist, but
(27:09):
again it's the outlier. Most fan fiction is curtain fic.
I wonder where that misconception around fan fiction comes from,
that it's all you know, erotic or sexualized or pervy
or you know, wh Where do you think that comes from?
I think it it kind of goes back to that
it's mostly women writing fan fiction. A lot of it
(27:29):
does have perhaps slash, but in a lot of those
slash stories, like they're buying curtains, you know, like maybe
there's sex, maybe there isn't, and maybe if there is sex,
it's very like tame. I think it's a misunderstanding that
all these women are writing about sex, so it must
be weird. And yeah, there's a lot of misconception about that.
I was someone who really enjoyed like slash that never
(27:51):
had any sexual things, just slashed the relationships like, oh
they're they're close. Look that's intimate. Yeah I like this.
I like this, And a lot of times I would
get to a certain like say, I I'll read nineteen
chapters and then chapter twenty they have sex. I would
just like skip that that. And you did this when
(28:11):
you were in a teenager. Yeah, you're the only teenager
out there skipping the sexy parts. I'm like this, this
isn't for me. A lot of times I really appreciated it,
because a lot of authors would put like, if you're
not into sex, this chapter is not that important, you
can skip it, and I was, I was like done,
thanks for the warning. I really like the and fan
(28:33):
fiction did for better or wors play a role in
learning about sex for a decent amount of as me
included or learnings fan fiction you taught me some things.
An article in Vice deald into this how fan fiction
served as a tool of sexual exploration, especially for women
in lgbt Q who might not get much of a
sex education or see themselves represented in media. Yeah, me
(28:54):
and more than one of my friends definitely learned about
sex from fiction. I remember this per sex fan fiction
because again used to print them out and so I
wouldn't know that was coming. And surprise, surprise to characters
are having sex and I'm trying to understand what's going on,
young Annie with her printed out fan fiction. Oh yeah, man,
(29:16):
I wonder if I still have that stuff. I should look.
Most sites do have rating systems, like the m p
A almost and you can as some of them, especially
like geared towards a younger audience. Do you have settings
that you can set up so that you can prevent
children from getting exposed to some of those things if
that's something you're worried about. Some of them are less
effective than others. But some sites don't allow adult material,
(29:38):
and I kept getting a chuckle out of they would
say fan fiction dot net, because there is adult fan
fiction dot net. But that's where I stumbled onto my
sexy Lord of the Rings And just think you'd be
if you hadn't done that. Who knows what you'd be
I'd be lost, lost at sea. Fan Fiction has also
led to so so so many academic studies. You've got
(29:59):
The Writing and Eating a fan Fiction and Transformation Theory
by Virl van Steenhoys out of Perdue. This one's really
interesting because it talks about how fan fiction does not
need the world described. That part is already done for
you are seen if we're talking about a visual medium,
so like the same is true with the characters, the past,
the memories, their motivations. The readers all know this universe,
(30:19):
how it looks, it's rules. This means that it's extremely
immersive right off the bat, Like you don't have to
spend time setting that up. Everyone's kind of seeing the
same thing, which I didn't really think about, but that
that's again kind of that communal aspect. You're entering into
this world that you already know, and it's it's there
for you, and then they're playing with the characters within it.
(30:41):
Are the rules within it? Yeah, you've got this nice
backdrop already set up for you, like a canvas exactly. Yeah.
I was really interested in this study. Slash as a
Queer Utopia by Dr Eco Willis out of the University
of Bristol. Here's a quote from that one. The reader
has to decide not only what readings of the show
are possible, but what is possible at a fictional universe,
and this decision must necessarily engage what she believes is
(31:03):
possible in her own universe. And you know, as queer people,
that is kind of pitch perfect for our media consumption experience,
sort of deciding what things look like within our own
understandings of ourselves and how that is reflected on these
characters that we, you know, are coming up with scenarios
for yes and letting it play out. Some of the
(31:27):
other studies we found have suggested that writing fan fiction
can help foster empathy, can decrease feelings of depression and isolation,
can improve self esteem and overall psychological well being, which
is all pretty good, and fan fiction does. Like I
mentioned earlier, you do have that review function. In my
experience with it is it was generally a very positive community.
(31:47):
I did live in fear of the flame, the bad review,
but generally most people really encouraging or are appreciative, and
it was a really I had a really good experience
with the community, and perhaps that does go back to
it being mostly women. It's like a little slice of
a woman only internet. I've often thought, what would the
Internet look like if it was just women. I think
(32:09):
it will be a less toxic place. But it seems
like fan fiction is a place where they've kind of
tested that out a little bit. Yes, absolutely, and because
of that it has drawn like a lot of criticism,
a lot of derision, a lot of fear. It's widely
disparaged and misunderstood. Some of the popular stereotypes of arguments
against fan fiction include, it's a much of nerds, you
(32:31):
don't know how to socialize. Nope, all fan fiction is
pornographic slash written by straight teenage girls are middle aged
gay men, depending on who you're listening to. Also not true.
All fan fiction is written by horny teenage girls and
is largely illiterate and immoral. I don't win me yea.
Also not true. And again, stop writing about someone else's characters,
start writing your own thing. And again, it's not about that.
(32:54):
But how did we get here? Well, the history of
fan fiction probably goes back further than you think, and
we'll talk all about that, but first we're gonna take
a quick break for word for a sponsor and we're back,
(33:17):
thank you. Spots are okay. So pending a date two
when fan fiction began is difficult, and it depends on
how strict of definition of fan fiction you're using. Some
arguments say that the Grand Brothers fairy Tales of the
eighteen hundreds or fan fiction, they took oral stories and
then kind of made them into their own thing, telling
their own moral, whatever moral they want to convey. Some
(33:38):
arguments say, the Bible councils fan fiction, the o G
fan fiction, the Bible. Dang, yeah, so that's pretty far back.
Shakespeare often comes up in the conversation with the history
of fan fiction as well. Most of his plays are
derived from a legend or myth that he took and
then added the Shakespeare touch. And it didn't take long
after novels started to become more commonplace in the eighteen
(33:58):
hundreds for popular author is like Daniel Dafoe to voice
concerns of folks quote kidnapping his work a little strong
but all right. Um. Jane Austin didn't seem too worried
about it, though, and fans of her works Ja Nights
engaged in fan fix swapping in the late eighteen hundreds
with early fanzines. This eventually led to the publishing of
the nineteen thirteen novel and Jane Austin fan fiction, Old
(34:22):
Friend and New Fancies. To date, two forty two published
novels that are Jane Austin fan fiction are listed on
good Reads. So she inspired quite a bit of published
fan fiction. Wow, she's like the Harry Potter of her generation.
She was the JK Rolling of her generation. Absolutely. Moving
into the uniteteen twenties, we get Sherlock Holmes fan clubs
(34:43):
and bigger cities like London, and these clubs put out
the Baker Street Journal. The journal had both academic type
research and straight up fan fiction that the authors would
read at fan events. And this is some of the
first recorded self insert fix where the authors are talking
about themselves in the world of Sherlock Holmes. Oh I
love it Yeah. In the next few decades, sci fi
communities pretty much had the market on fan fiction. Folks
(35:05):
in the community coined the term fan fiction in nineteen
thirty nine, but they used it to mean amateur sci
fi writings and professional sci fi writings are profic was
a different thing. The first known fan historian, John Jack
Bristol Spear defined the term in his nineteen forty four
in fan Cyclopedia, and then in nineteen fifty two The
Enchanted Duplicator became the first book that was fanfic about
(35:28):
fans and one of the first uses of fandom and
print in regards to fans of media. That word was
first used in late eighteen hundreds as a mashup of
fan and domain for sports fans. Fan fiction as we
know it got it start in the nineteen sixties with
Star Trek. This property gave fans a new way to
interact with the work through magazines that published a fans
work and conventions. Fans would make copies of zines and
(35:49):
hand the mat at conventions. When Dr Who started to
be included in these conventions in the nineteen seventies and eighties,
this is when we saw some of the first crossover.
So Doctor Who meeting was spuck that I would read it.
I would read it. What about Doctor Who and Spock
shopping for curtains at I ka, Oh, my gosh. I
had a crush on both Spock and Doctor Who. The
(36:10):
tenth Doctor David tended so I would totally read into it. Annie.
Annie is on board as we talked about a little
bit in our Star Wars episode The First Mary Suit
Debuty in nineteen seventy three with a Tricky's tale, although
it was meant to be a parody. Yes, and Star
Trek fandom also gave us the first slash fick in
n a Kirk slash Spock fick called The Ring of
(36:34):
so Schern in which the two characters must have sex
or die, fall in love, and quote spend all of
their remaining days on the planet exploring both the planet
and each other's bodies. Is this a bad Is it
a bad situation for them? Or is it it's good?
This started a whole I mean, I'm about to nerd
out so hard. Okay, get get do it? Okay. So Spock,
(36:57):
his species, the Vulcan species, has this sexual kind of
ritual that they go through. It's it's a called pond
far and you kind of go and heat and if
you don't have sex and bond with someone, you die.
So Spock went into pawn far while abandoned on this
planet with Kirk, and so they had to have sex
are Spot would die. This is actually a popular trope
(37:20):
called her time on fan fiction, where you put two
characters in a situation where they must have sex, forcing
intimacy usually between two men that wouldn't otherwise happen. So no,
this is a positive. I'm going to assume Kirk was like, Okay,
I don't want my friend to die, we can have sex.
And then from there they fell in love and exploited
(37:40):
each other's bodies for their aspect. Yes, and this story
and the Kirk Spock ones that followed calls a lot
of debate in the community during the seventies, and they
were written mostly by women, and that was a part
of the debate that did come up. Now there are
a lot of articles into sense a fan fiction, mostly
(38:01):
penned by women, but the one that really started the
most hubbub, if you will, was in the New York Times.
In this article, she discusses how her professor, a woman,
said that when compared to men, women quote must learn
linear narratives slowly and with much greater difficulty. The author
points to fan fiction writing, saying women who traditionally spend
(38:21):
large portions of their lives working in relative isolation for
little or no pay, bring a different set of motivations
to their writing and art. They want to talk to
other women to express themselves in the science fiction form
that until recently has all but excluded them, which I
think really drives home this idea that it's about a
female form of expression and that it's really it's almost
kind of like anti capitalist. It's not. It's not attached
(38:43):
to this idea that you're going to be rich and
famous from doing this. It's it's more about personal growth
and personal creation. Yeah, And that's another criticism often hurled
at fan fiction is that it's nonprofit, as if, like women,
you have no ambitions. Of course you have no ambitions.
What are you doing. You're wasting your time on this
that's never gonna make you money, which again, it's a hobby.
(39:04):
I mean, would you say that to someone who made
watercolors for fun, or someone who knitted but didn't sell
their blankets they just liked knitting. Yeah, exactly. I mean,
I'm sure someone does. But it doesn't make sense. It's
not it's not it's not a cogent argument. Not everything
needs to be to make money or to get fame
and to get you know, rich and famous. Something is
(39:25):
going to be for the pursuit of creativity, and that's
what it sounds like these women were looking for absolutely,
and as things moved more online in the ninety nineties,
X files that virgin I are a fan of Exiles
became the largest online own fandom. Scotland Yard, worried about
a Heaven's Gate situation, started putting together secret files on
(39:45):
the X files, X files on the x file love
it and on star Check on the fandoms around them.
In at least one case, occult hazardism from fandom, but
it's pretty rare. Also, if we look at violence and
sports fandom, no secret files put together on that. Again,
could it be because that is a male dominated fandom
and therefore cool. Well, people actually get hurt. In Europe,
(40:08):
they have to separate different soccer teams by like a wall,
otherwise they would murder each other. People have gotten hurt
from sports fandom. I don't know that there's been fan
fake murders. Yeah, there's certainly some troublesome aspects in fandom,
but fan fiction specifically, I mean, unless you're talking about
ladies hurt and dudes feelings by entering their fandom, talk
(40:30):
about a murder, you're murdering how I think this fandom
should be Otherwise? Yeah, I don't. I don't know. I
don't know. And there is a lot of discomfort around
fandom and fan fiction to this day, which is about
where the Spring says, for instance, why are those zangus
writing Harry Potter Pard all these women writing about sex
and manly man fandoms? Its ruining are to sturdy, it's moral.
(40:53):
These are all things that you'll hear. I read in
plenty of places, and it kind of made me feel
ashamed and embarrassed. Yeah, did you grow up thinking at
what you were doing was gross and weird and like
for weird perverts, like antisocial perverts. No. I did luckily
dodge that, but I did think it was really embarrassing
and something I should hide. I didn't think that if
people found out. I was barely certain I would be
(41:15):
mocked quite heavily. And it was difficult because again, my
brothers were very much the kind as I've mentioned before
on this show, that would pick on you and would
make fun of you. And we all shared the same computer,
and I tried for so long to hide what I
was doing. Luckily, I don't think they ever figured it out.
I wonder what they thought I was printing out though,
(41:36):
lots of recipes. Yes, for all the all the cooking
that I did not do at that age. But this, yeah,
this kind of brings us to talking about women and
fan fiction and representation and sort of society's apparent fear
and discomfort with that. It's the dreaded fan fic trope,
(42:00):
the cliffhanger. But never fear, we have a part to you,
and uh, we have so much to say about fan fiction,
so please join us for the second part, coming to
your ears soon. M
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Samantha McVey
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Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.
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If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.