Look, the outsiders have discovered fanfic again

[firecat]

This is an ~30-minute episode of a Vox podcast called “Today Explained.” There is a transcript.

”How fan fiction went mainstream: The community that underpins Heated Rivalry, explained” by Danielle Hewitt and Noel King

It’s a pretty good intro to fanfic and how it’s become something publishers and creators of TV/movies pay attention to. They interview Francesca Kappa, a co-founder of the Organization for Transformative Works, which created AO3.

Things I learned and some bits I liked:

• AO3 was created in part to prevent commodification of fanfiction and the social connections it facilitates.
  
• “one of the projects that I worked on in the early days of the OTW organization for transformative works was that we were being contacted by women in their 70s and 80s who were like having to move in with their kids or going into nursing homes and they had like 3,000 fan fiction zines.”
  
• It was claimed that AO3 is “much bigger than Wikipedia.” I’m not sure what metrics they’re using to come up with that.
  
• [AO3 is] “structurally unenshittifiable” because “we don’t have customers and we’re not a business.”
  
• (Discussing copyright) “it would have been terrible if Shakespeare had to, like, negotiate with Netflix for the right to Hamlet and then didn't get it. Like, that's the world we live in, right? We're like, Netflix owns Hamlet, it has a five-year option, Shakespeare really has a great idea for it, but like, no, I'm really sorry because JJ. Abrams is going to do Hamlet.”
  (I need to know which circle of Hell shows JJ Abrams’s Hamlet on repeat, because I really want to avoid it.)

Comments

[kore]

[AO3 is] “structurally unenshittifiable” because “we don’t have customers and we’re not a business.”

True! altho right now they're leaving terrible trouble with spam bots, *abuse* bots (WTF WTF) and floods of AI fic. The bots are so awful! They even get at locked fics. I wonder if Wattpad and FFN have bots??

[firecat]

Chances are, yeah >:(

It happens again and again but

[jesse_the_k]

Heated Rivalry seems to have had the biggest impact so far.

Ah, autocraptions have come to podcasts. The interview subject is Francesca Coppa, whose open-access book A History of Vidding explores the ”History of Western, Live-Action Media Fandom Music Video, as it traces a narrow but cohesive cohort of mostly female fan vidders from the 1970s to now," complete with 135 captioned full-length vids.

Re: It happens again and again but

[firecat]

Wow, that sounds amazing!

I wish I had liked better the half-episode of heated rivalry that I watched.