Explore the Interviews

Description

Definition: An interesting quote from fan authors that are particularly important.

Number of Codes: 64

Quotes

• Aria: People write political theory when they write fanfic, like a lot of fanfic is political theory, a lot of fanfiction is political.
• Aria: When I'm writing this fic it means something, because I'm like... There's a study I think that says that when you get into rational arguments about things you don't convince them, but if you tell stories you can. And I think that I'm in that place, arguing about politics in the fiction space of the internet.
• Aria: For me, this text begins both as like, I was reading a lot about Stonewall and the context around Stonewall, and also I was reading a piece about PTSD, and it was just very surface, very basic understanding of trauma and PTSD in particular, like something you recover from, in a way that I was not super comfortable with. And sort of the original text, not sure if you would agree. And so I wanted to talk about disability through the context of being something you come to live with, and come to integrate, and come to find becomes a part of you life, but also something you still struggle with, instead of just, I don't know, a lot of us have seen the story a lot like, you get better, and then you get better and you win. And then one day it doesn't bother you.
• Aria: I chose the end of Season Three because it's the place where I felt like I was reading a... I felt like engaging with the original text, I was feeling like I wanted something different, I wanted a more deep and meaningful engagement with disability and trauma in this context. Because reading the original text is like, it's there for a while and then they're better? So it was almost the opposite feeling, what do I think this looks like? And so that's why I chose that.
• Aria: but this is what I was doing with my life. I was on my way to running a queer resource center at a college, so I was doing the work of feeling the political implications of things in the world. And so I was, for me the most natural thing to write about is to write about... Not just homophobia, although this was a story about homophobia, not just homophobia, but this was a story about queerness and politics. And because this was the thing that was radicalizing me, [inaudible] is vile, because... And it was about violence, so I don't just mean violence as a method of resistance, I mean violence as a thing that people survive. Because that's what's radicalizing me at the time. And so I felt the need to wake up that in a sense.
• Aria: I come away from Korra feeling like, "This is a gender thing going on." I don't buy that there's not homophobia in a world with gender in the like weird way that... In ways that still reflect our I think gender and homophobia [inaudible 00:21:13], the way that we have a sense of gender. Big, capital G Gender. And so I thought like, "What does it mean to have culture in the context of... What does it mean to be a cosmopolitan city where... There's both a degree of marginalization for like the Northern Water Tribe closing... Not so much that rules that are really intended to enforce gender norms are going to be there. And also to be like, "Yeah, there's probably a different understanding of gender in context," yeah.
• Aria: I was trying to write a story that engaged with trauma and felt authentic and didn't make trauma seem like the end of the world. Because the binary that's in a lot of literature is either like, "Oh, you either overcame trauma, or you are doomed to misery forever." And I was trying to find some middle ground, trying to tell a story that felt authentic.
• Aria: Whereas Korra grows up in this institution, Asami grows up with a relatively politically progressive father. He's an abuser, but he's also a very, very politically progressive man. He's a radical, he tries to overthrow his government, make the world a more equitable and fair place. It's self-interested, he's a bourgeois radical, but I wouldn't have said that at the time. I imagine Asami as having a relatively normal, relatively healthy understanding of the world in a way, having felt like she, not just knowing that a woman can love another woman, because I guess almost every person in this world knows. This is nothing like, Korra is particularly going to have a hard time because of that institution itself.
• Aria: So to me, Hiroshi's both a man that would destroy his children for the things he believes, and in some sense for his own power. But also a man who genuinely is providing aid and comfort and resources for fighting for what he views as liberation, and that liberation's probably genuine at some level. I think it's fair to say that there is a political bender-like supremacy at the beginning. I mean there is, we know there's a bender supremacy at the beginning of The Legend of Korra. And so that's how I understand Hiroshi.
• Aria: This is the moment when this becomes one of the early queer relationships in cartoons, a relatively good one. There's nothing particularly problematic about it, it's limited, but it's good.
• Aria: It sort of leaves a lot of space for the development of [inaudible 00:47:39], some of the Equalist Asami stuff, and some of the discussion that comes out of that. So I think that's very, very fertile ground for fanfic, and I think that it's liberating for a lot of folks. So it drives a lot of views.
• Aria: Okay, my first guess would be that women who love women will write about women who love women, want to tell stories that have happy endings. I think in a lot of the stories we see in literature are of our destruction as a moral point, or the echoes of authority. That doesn't mean that all of the stories that we see that are echoes of stories are intended as seeing those moral and political tellings, they're just, "That's what our culture tells us." A lesbian love story, so retelling... If women who love women retell stories of women who love women, they're going to tell a lot of stories that are about being happy, at least in my opinion.
• Dialux: Yes. I think my most recent published fanfiction is a Percy Weasley, second person point of view, post canon. In which he is attempting to basically restructure his society by running on a platform of big structural change. Which might sound vaguely familiar. But it was, I think, mostly due to the kind of deep rage that I was feeling over the entire Democratic Primaries over the past couple of months. And almost the past year. In which everything felt very much like a lot of talk, and not a lot of doing. And at some point, you need some catharsis. And kind of putting it out into fiction and seeing something changing. Or, not even seeing something changing. But seeing people trying to effect change, and willing to fight for that change felt very important to me. And basically that entire fanfic is kind of born out of that seething, massive, "I want to see something happening." And I will see it happen in fiction, if not in reality.
• Dialux: I chose to make it Desi because I am Desi. and I wanted to experience it.
• Dialux: And there were a lot of really good fanfic there that used second person point of view. And I felt like they kind of gave an insight into the character in a way that you wouldn't be able to get if you were looking at them from a third person point of view. And when I was doing this fanfic, I was really kind of thinking about how and what I wanted to communicate. And I felt like the second person point of view gave more weight to the entire fanfic, as opposed to the third person.
• Dialux: I think a lot of the research and a lot of the material was just about identifying and pulling disparate ideas together that I knew. From either my own culture because, of course, this is partially my own culture. And also, the historical details of [inaudible 00:27:49].
• Dialux: Because, obviously, race bending is, and can be, very racist if not done in a very respectful manner.
• Dialux: And the reason I did the Jodhaa Akbar tag was actually because I wanted to make sure that people who read more Hindu mythology fic, or other fandoms like that, like Baahubali, were able to identify that this is one such fic. And I think there are people who have said they've entered through that particular tag.
• Dialux: I think I obviously can't give an explanation for a lot of these. But I think that they make sense, to a certain extent, because there definitely are a lot more heterosexual relationships within this fandom than I've seen in a lot of other fandoms. And I think that's probably because we don't have one main character and one side character that's like the sidekick to the main character, both of them being male. You don't have that here.
• GillyWulf: And from those three, you can see that they have very female-centered stories. And then, at least all three are those are canonically queer characters, which are things that now get me really excited and make me want to go, "Okay, well, I want to dive into that. I want to see how their stories could be different," or, "I just really want to see them in this situation," so I try and write it when I can.
• GillyWulf: so it was, when I think I started it, Korrasami hadn't been canon yet. So, it's definitely interesting, the before and after. And maybe, I think, during that time, also, gay marriage was legalized, so it was just definitely different attitudes in that. I think those are some of the strengths in seeing that as well.
• GillyWulf: I know a lot of people like to have full sentences, and get really detailed and say things like that, but I always find that to be sort of distracting, because I know, when I'm personally looking for something, I like to be able to just click through until I find exactly what I'm looking for. So, if somebody has what I'm looking for, but also in that same tag is a full sentence of something else, it doesn't necessarily help me stuff. If somebody's specifically looking for, I guess a long-distance relationship thing, they can just click on that and see, "Okay, well, it's in here somewhere. I'll just find whichever prompt it is." I'm a big fan of just keeping things neat and simple.
• GillyWulf: And then, just seeing the way her relationship sort of evolved with Asami over time, especially once you get into the third season, was like, "Okay, I'm into this. Whether or not they're going for it, I see it." So, it was like, "All right. I and a lot of the people in the fandom seem to agree for some reason, so I'm just going to go there and enjoy that while I'm doing it.
• GillyWulf: So, at the same time, it was also sort of an exploration for me in that I've known I was gay, probably since kindergarten, but I sort of just put it off, put it off, and it wasn't until I started getting into Korrasami that I was like, "Okay, well, I'm meeting a community where this is accepted and this is encouraged even." So, I had decided to come out, and these became sort of two parallels of, "It could be this, or it could be that." Of like, "What is the best case? What is the worst case for maybe how my parents will react?" Thankfully, it leaned more towards Korra's parents than Asami, but it did sort of dip into that a little bit.
• GillyWulf: If you set those boundaries, people generally stick to it. If you tell people flat out, "I'm not going to write that," they generally won't press and press, and ask, "Why aren't you?" Because I just find keeping people as slaves is super ... I didn't want to contribute to it, and it was just that sort of idea [inaudible 00:47:42] maybe are younger and a little bit more impressionable than I am, so maybe it's okay to put things that they haven't been exposed to before, but also, it doesn't need to be a weird thing.
• GillyWulf: Obviously, there's always going to be people who say, "I want a female ship. Going for it. I don't care whether or not they necessarily gel." I'm sure there's people ... I feel like I went back a million years ago and looked at the first Korrasami fics, just out of curiosity, to see when they were published, and I'm sure that they were like episode one, because it's just what people do, and it's great. Ships are meant to be fun, they're not always meant to be canon.
• GillyWulf: So, it was there, but it's not surprising that a lot of people who aren't looking for it don't go and see it. A lot of straight people I know will look at a lot of these relationships and say, "Oh, that came from nowhere."
• GillyWulf: At the end of season three, we saw that development and we saw, especially during Korra's fight with Zaheer, Asami looked the most scared out of everybody, and her reaction to her offer to stay with Korra through her recovery, and help any way she can was sort of, "That's a little gayer than it maybe should be," that sort of look. So, a lot of people took that and decided to go with it, especially since the relationship was [inaudible 01:00:21], whether or not ... Again, and at that time, we didn't know the writer's intention, so it was just everybody, or at least Korrasami fans, picking up on it and saying, "Okay, well, we don't know when season four is happening, so we're just going to kick off from there and this is what could happen."
• GillyWulf: "Korrasami's canon. That's what it is." So, a lot of people were super excited about that, especially since, up to that point, there really hadn't been a whole lot of huge representation for female ships.
• Kittya Cullen: I guess you can say it was a nudge to move from passive consumption to active consumption.
• Kittya Cullen: So it was just discovering a collection of books in my own home from my aunt and my mother and so on, their teachers. And my aunt in particular, she teaches English, and so they had old texts that I found and started reading them. And that's when I began to realize that the books that I had been reading were excluding me. It was something that you sort of knew but you didn't quite know. I guess it comes back to not knowing what you're missing until you finally have it. So when I first read texts were people were actually talking about foods that I would eat or where people were living in communities like mine, where people spoke that way that I spoke, et cetera. Because even though I speak, let's say, like this, how I speak with my family or how I speak with my friends from back home, it's a little different even though ... So, my particular country, we speak English, but it's a particular kind of English. So just seeing that in text and then realizing that the fantasies and so on that I was consuming were ... I don't know, it had these strange things that just didn't quite compute with where I was living. That's where it really clicked for me. And from that point onward, I think that's where I began to see it in everything else. The biggest shift didn't really come until I moved to the US, because back home I was part of the majority, so even though it's absent, you were still seeing yourself in other ways, whether that's being who was teaching you or who was in the news as a politician, et cetera. But here it was a completely different ballgame, so it felt more insidious
• Kittya Cullen: I was on Twitter casually scrolling through something, and someone from back home happened to mention how the finale of the show had gone. Given my own cultural background and the cultural background of the world in general, I was pretty surprised about that, so I started consuming fics and reading the show ... Sorry, not reading the show, but watching the show to get through it to see ... If I could see where it was going and if I would be as surprised as everyone else had been. So when I got through the show, I was surprised, and I was really happy about how it had gone. I felt a need to contribute to the fandom in some way.
• Kittya Cullen: So I think it just came back to capturing that, the imagery of it, the tone of the chapter, the voice of it because, at least to me, it works really hard to put us in Asami's shoes and make us experience it exactly as she's experiencing it.
• Kittya Cullen: It was sort of ... To me, it was groundbreaking in how they handled that because we get to see Korra, who is this all-powerful person, come to grips with what she might be like after having this really terrible thing happen to her and want sort of responsibilities she once had, and how it's still there, but she has all these other things she now has to deal with as well, like her mental health and her physical recovery and so forth.
• Kittya Cullen: It has less to do with fandom itself and more to do with the external world. And even now it's, I guess it's ... I don't know. I think it just seemed like the safer option at the time. But the more time I've spent in that part of fandom, the less I guess I've cared about how it's read or whatever it is. But at the time, it just seemed wiser, particularly if I was having others who may not ... Because fan works and original work for me are on the same level, and so I'm not concerned, I guess, with people reading it for ... people reading it and not seeing a difference in quality, but rather how they experience the content. And so I think I was still considering who the audience would be.
• Kittya Cullen: The universe raises really interesting conversations about inequality and power and change and so forth, but we kind of always see it from the position of the privileged. And I think that's my favorite thing about fandom and fan fiction, how fans sort of delve into all these areas in canon that either there wasn't time to explore or it didn't really seem to be important enough to explore, so things like inequality. When I write now, it's just always in the forefront, "How can I better represent experiences of people in the world," not just for myself, but for other people, what they're going through.
• Kittya Cullen: And I think I'd actually forgotten about this until someone else had written it in their own fanfiction, which is part of what's so fun about reading fanfiction. There are all these ideas that you don't quite pickup on right away, but someone else mentions it, and it clicks, and you start to rotate the world and look at it from a different angle.
• Kittya Cullen: Because there is this thing in fanfiction where we assume that all people who are accessing it are familiar with the text. And while that is often common when we want it to function beyond that world to have relevance in other ways, I think for me personally it's important to integrate more parts of the world, of the universe.
• Kittya Cullen: I think, and I'll probably go with my own fandom experiences, it just comes back to how the world is constructed externally. So just even the idea of imagining inside of what was placed before us, it takes a special kind of familiarity with the boarders of the world to imagine a world that is different from what is presented to you. At the time, I don't know, it was just that Korra and Mako were what was the norm. And so I think it made sense for some people to only be able to see that happening. I mean, I didn't see the possibility of Korrasami until the very end. But when I circled back around after having spent about several months reading several fanfictions
• Kittya Cullen: But yeah, I just, spending so much time reading so much fanfiction from LOK and then branching out into Steven Universe and moving from Steven Universe into Supergirl, there was just more of an interaction with another side of fandom, the slash side of fandom. I don't know. I think you have to be integrated with others who are looking for more than what's presented, looking for more than what's norm, what's the acceptable way of telling a story of any kind of relationship really. Because even when you talk about what characters are bound to get more attention and more interesting and so on and so forth, when you look at fandom in general you'll find that when those characters are black or just generally a person of color in comparison to a character being white, that people are least particular when the fandom's dominated by white faces and so forth. They are more likely to explore those characters and to humanize them and to want to get to know them better, while other characters and what their hopes and dreams and ideas might be for the world are pushed to the side.
• Kittya Cullen: I don't know. I'm not surprised. Plus the allocishets tend to dominate fandom in general, so it made sense that they would sort of own the sandbox and everyone else should be playing to the side.
• Kittya Cullen: Actually, I think it may have come back to that as well, a combination of both familiarity with visual cues in storytelling, both a tendency to read closer in text in general, whether it's literature or visual media, as well as having familiarized yourself with another community. I'm always on the fence sometimes when I'm talking about how people are seeing or not seeing certain things. Because even with my current fandom, it's like half the people are saying that we're delusional or creating things where there aren't things. And then other times you see these exact phenomena occurring in cishet media.
• Kittya Cullen: And you could tell, from a fandom perspective, some people who are cishet won't be able to speak to this, but you could tell that the writer's room was split in how they were portraying the characters because I think they got uncomfortable with how fandom was growing so rapidly and intensely around these two characters, even to the point where they used the black character as a wedge between them. So, just so many layers of so many awful things happening in that show.
• Valk: I'm non-binary, so a lot of my work as I got older started to deal more with gender as well as sexuality, also being bi-sexual. I used it sort of as a tool in some fanfics to work through ideas or feelings that I'd had and didn't know how to properly verbalize yet. I was putting them on paper, using another character as the medium and expressing or exploring different ideas in an area where I felt I was kind of safe to do so. I didn't always publish all of them, but the one that you contacted me over, I did, obviously.
• Valk: Mainly regarding the pairings that would show up, it would be mainly non-hetero pairings if that makes more sense than just saying a pairing because there would be some exploring of gender and what not with some characters. Or I would definitely be focusing on male-male or female-female relationships as well, because a lot of the media already does a lot of the male-female exploration. And a lot of the purpose of fandom is to sort of explore beyond what we're just given.
• Valk: My strengths in this fic for me was being able to try and incorporate as much of Jaime and Brienne's banter and relationship, as much as I could to a modern setting because obviously they wouldn't be having as much of a, you know Brienne wouldn't be considered as horrifying as she was considered in the original text because she was considered man-ish. In modern day context, it's not always encouraged, based on what kind of family you came from, women are often allowed to be tom boys more than vice versa. There was a challenge of trying to see, okay, Brienne wouldn't have had as traumatic a childhood probably regarding her own gender identity. But there would definitely be some push back, but how would that change based on the setting? I made her a little bit more comfortable in her skin than Jaime and also having her there to sort of be a foil and a supportive shoulder for Jaime who was going through a similar thing that maybe she went through as well.
• Valk: I wanted to actually put some Game of Thrones content on those tags to begin with because back when I was writing it, there wasn't a lot really going for it. LGBT fanfics, yeah sure, but gender fluid and gender related things, it wasn't really there.
• Valk: I think I would want to go more into maybe tagging some of the triggers maybe now a days because back then there wasn't as much of a discussion around it. Now a days, you have more of a discussion around what bigger tags to put in to help people avoid it for instance. Now that AO3 has updated its tagging system to include and exclude.
• Valk: There's a lot of, again, fanfic already out there of them being intimate, but it was all very incredibly heteronormative. Just their gender roles and Brienne being vulnerable and weak and all that stuff again. I was just not really feeling it, so I wrote my own instead.
• Valk: I guess I was thinking about also how I had reacted or how my friends had reacted to when I came out to them. I wanted to, I guess write a do-over for some of them about how I would have liked to have that experience with me, like having them knock again and come inside and ask questions and not just kind of leave it right there and not talk again. I wanted to sort of console myself a little bit through it as well as wanted to console Jaime
• Valk: I had some really bad, some really heated discussions with a friend on my dashboard on Twitter. We just did that, like Brienne was actually fully a lesbian and that she hated people linking her with Jaime. And I'm like, "That's an interesting concept, not canon, but concept." She was fighting people on the dashboard about it with the sort of bigger, than someone who has like facts in front of them would argue. And I'm like, "I understand, but this is your interpretation." People who ship her with Jaime don't hate lesbians. Please, do not try and put this away. Yeah, it was a whole mess. People came out in droves, angry for different reasons.
• WriteGirl: And someone wrote a really detailed review, just about how, I remember they said they could taste the road dust from my writing. And I was like, wow. I never thought of it that way. That's really cool. That kind of inspired me to write more, that I could get that emotion out of somebody. They felt like they were actually there with them.
• WriteGirl: So, right when about Season Seven hit, I started getting a little bit upset about the writing in Game of Thrones. And then by the time Season Eight hit, I was just like, "Oh no. No, no, no, no, no. I can't deal with this." I got a bit more involved with writing, because my brain was like, "No, this isn't how it should go. We need to redo all this whole thing." It really started picking up in Season Seven. That was the first time I wrote a Game of Thrones fanfiction. And I believe that was my other OtherWhen series, the first one.
• WriteGirl: I don't know if you're a Dr. Who fan. One of my favorite Doctor Who episodes is Turn Left. And it's a whole episode that's based on the concept of, what if he didn't turn right? What if instead of going the road you're supposed to go, you kind of went that way? And I've always been fascinated by that. I love Choose Your Own Adventure stories, and things like that. I don't like following the written script. So that's one of the reasons why I went into fix-it fics. There's times and places where I was like, that wouldn't happen. I know that's how it happens in the story, but based on the world that they're in, historical context, things like that, that's not how that would. So, that's kind of my brain's way of reconciling not bad writing, but just maybe inconsistent writing, or little things that were just irksome. That's kind of how I got into that.
• WriteGirl: I literally got up off the couch and walked away when she got beheaded. I was very upset. It pissed me off that you have a character like Missandei who is very strong, who survives slavery, got out of her chains, became this person who was herself, and then how did she die? She dies in chains, basically in a pissing contest between two white women. That was very, very frustrating and irritating to me.
• WriteGirl: Yes. [Missandei's] a weird character. Mostly she seems to almost be absent from things. She's window dressing. She's there, she doesn't speak, or she speaks, it's one or two sentences in the entire fic. And it's frustrating because once again in the book, she's such a pivotal character.
• WriteGirl: That was another reason with the fic I kind of wanted to delve a little bit into her as a standalone, not in relation to anyone else. Kind of like, who is Missandei? If you take away slavery, and her being Daenerys' friend, who is this person? What is the one thing that would be important to her? Because there aren't really a lot of fics that focus on her as a character at all. She's just kind of always at the side. That's kind of where I got the thing that is, I don't know if I was a former slave. The one thing I would be sure of when I got my freedom was, I will never be made a slave again in any way, shape or form. So what does that translate into? That translates into, you're not going to use me. I'm not going to stand to be abused anymore. And that's kind of how all that bloomed up. I'd really like to see a bit more of that in Game of Thrones fanfiction. She's really an underused character.
• WriteGirl: One thing I noticed about the Game of Thrones fandom, because I did just kind of jump in, is that tags are very important. I do read comments from other people in fics, and that seems to be the one thing that everyone gripes about. This was tagged unproperly. This should be the tag. The tag should be this. I was like, okay, let me try and tag as properly and nearly as I can, because I don't want to get dogpiled. There's a lot of my favorite fics where there's 10 pages of people just ragging on improper tagging. So I was like, nope, let me be careful.
• WriteGirl: I wanted her to have a little bit more agency. It seemed like from the time we see her in the Baelish dress, with the feathers on it, which she's actually taking on a mockingbird, that that was a glimpse of a darker Sansa, a more politically savvy Sansa, a more adult Sansa. And then, for whatever reason, they backed off of it. And then the next thing we see her, she's just kind of sitting there asking questions, looking dull. And that was a little irritating to me. So I wanted her to get a little more agency, especially when she found out who she was supposed to be meeting. I didn't see Sansa ever agreeing to that.
• WriteGirl: And like she says in the fic even if I get bit by a lizard-lion or I starve, that's my choice. But it won't be going back to a ruined Winterfell to marry a legitimized bastard.
• WriteGirl: Sansa is really presented as one of those girls with her head in the clouds. She's definitely not a Margaery Tyrell. She was definitely never really prepared for court life. She has a view of it that is heavily skewed by stories of [inaudible 00:33:28] of these wonderful knights in their shining armor, these lovely ladies who are just ethereal in their beauty, everything being wrapped up in a bow, happily ever after. Maybe something happens, but someone's always rescued. And through the series, that kind of gets torn away from her bit by bit. The Prince Charming that she thought was a Prince Charming is definitely not. There's no one comes to save her. Her brother's more interested in being a king than coming to rescue her from the tower, and the monsters inside it. So really, Sansa's really forced to grow up, and she's really forced to see all these stories as exactly what they are. They're just stories. They're empty stories to make children happy. So when she's thinking back on this, she's thinking more of the scarier stories that maybe she didn't want to listen to.
• WriteGirl: These were all things she's done because she believes in Daenerys' vision, she believes in a world without slavery. And after having been a slave and experienced freedom, that's something she'd want for everybody. I hate to say it, Harriet Tubman, how many times did she go back and she got slaves and ran them back out? Simply because I'm free, no one should be in bondage, even if it's a personal risk to myself, to my life, that is a risk I will take, because everyone should be free. And I think as a former slave, Missandei really would have that sentiment.
• WriteGirl: She's really seeing Cersei for the creature Cersei is, beyond just being kind of a high-born woman in Westeros. She's seeing the monster that's inside Cersei. Cersei will do anything. She will do anything to maintain power, she will do anything to get back at her enemies, even if it means murder, blackmail, et cetera. And I think Missandei coming from a society where no one would have to hide that from their slaves. She sees it. Like I know you, I've seen masters exactly like you. And she's really recognizing the monster that's in Cersei outside of all of her jewels, outside of her gowns, outside of her façade of being this queen and great lady. It's like, no, you're really this evil thing, and I know it because I've seen it before.
• WriteGirl: But there are just people who are just nasty. In all the fandoms I've been in, it thankfully hasn't happened to me yet, and I've actually had people defend me in comments. They're just like, "Get that shit out of here." I'm like, "Okay, thank you for being nice." But it seems the Game of Thrones fandoms can get real violent. They get real virulent with their hatred in the comments section. I can't muster that kind of hatred. If I don't like something, I just click off of it. I don't get the hate.

Description

Definition: When fan authors mention fan community politics, including particular practices, theories, ideas, or tensions. These may not directly relate to politics, but may reveal underlying ideologies in fan communities.

Number of Codes: 113

Quotes

• Aria: I don't want to be like, "Ah, but I'm writing the version of this character that's a woman." I hate that. I know that that's permissible with the meta text but I don't want to be part of that.
• Aria: mostly I felt like I wound up just getting in like an extension of me arguing on the internet, which is not a super-healthy way of engaging with communities.
• Aria: People write political theory when they write fanfic, like a lot of fanfic is political theory, a lot of fanfiction is political.
• Aria: People are like, "Oh..." When people talk about RWBY, the way they talk about the White Fang is the way they talk about radical politics. And I don't know if they realize it, but I always get really annoyed, because this is like bad political theory. It's very normal American political theory, but it's also bad. It's very much like, "Oh, there's no justification for violence," it's like, "I don't agree."
• Aria: When I'm writing this fic it means something, because I'm like... There's a study I think that says that when you get into rational arguments about things you don't convince them, but if you tell stories you can. And I think that I'm in that place, arguing about politics in the fiction space of the internet.
• Aria: And then I wrote a piece called [inaudible 00:05:42], which was sort of like a revisiting of what does... I guess it was actually about immigration, it's just I never really ever got around to doing a piece about immigration system, but somebody had a bad take about immigration in America in a piece of fanfic and I was like, "God, that's a really bad understanding of that friend. That is utopian and wrong."
• Aria: And that creates fanon, which means you get this whole long space of people being like, "Oh yeah, I am writing about this content of fanon in this alternate universe, I'm going to write a piece about a radio show
• Aria: It sort of leaves a lot of space for the development of [inaudible 00:47:39], some of the Equalist Asami stuff, and some of the discussion that comes out of that. So I think that's very, very fertile ground for fanfic, and I think that it's liberating for a lot of folks. So it drives a lot of views.
• Aria: Just real quick, I'm really interested in the fact that Korra and Mako becomes more common after Korrasami happened. That, to me, is just fascinating.
• Aria: Also, if you're looking at a subtext, my people they were like, "Oh yeah, I want to tell this story, I want to finish this story." And there's a degree to which it a queer reading, there's this political tendency to look at fiction and say, "I am going to tell the story you didn't." And so during the subtext period, you've already got these people who are basically being like, "Yo, I'm going to tell this story.
• Aria: Okay, my first guess would be that women who love women will write about women who love women, want to tell stories that have happy endings. I think in a lot of the stories we see in literature are of our destruction as a moral point, or the echoes of authority. That doesn't mean that all of the stories that we see that are echoes of stories are intended as seeing those moral and political tellings, they're just, "That's what our culture tells us." A lesbian love story, so retelling... If women who love women retell stories of women who love women, they're going to tell a lot of stories that are about being happy, at least in my opinion.
• Aria: And I don't know, I don't know if I'd use the fluff and angst tags anymore, just because I don't talk about my literature in those terms as much anymore, as I used to, but... Largely because nobody...You don't use those tags as much anymore in my view, like we don't talk about... Those are very much Fanfiction.net-y terms that pulled over, I don't see them as I used to.
• Aria: I think that people writing about suffering and happiness, a lot of things happen in love stories in general, particularly in WlW and MlM stuff. Well, I don't know if MlM, I don't read it very much just because one, I am not a man, and two, so much MlM stuff is kind of uncomfortable? A lot it's very clearly written by women.
• Aria: a [inaudible 00:57:08] of the audience that come later are less interested in acknowledging or talking about race. Given this is a proportion, I don't know if [inaudible 00:57:24] but more people as a fandom and those few people aren't interested in talking about race in ways that people who had been there before were, and those people who were there before continued to talk about race, or if there is an effectively gentrifying mmoment that a white fandom comes in, pushes out a fandom of color. I don't know how this tag is used, so I would feel hesitant to say something definite. But I find that a little bit troublesome.
• Aria: because it looks to me here that what you're seeing is a movement from seeing the word girlfriend in a context of a text that's about a set of texts about relationships in a more heterosexual perspective, in a story about women. Because it looks to me that this is a story that, if you see jealous there, that looks like I'm looking at a piece that's from Korra's point of view. But then if I'm looking at boyfriend, I'm also thinking about Korra and Mako.
• Aria: The context is basically just, yeah, things you would expect people would say on a date, things you'd expect people to do on a date, things that writers do when they run out of words, like chuckle.
• Aria: Also this more mature understanding of a relationship, seeing their partner as a dork versus like, seeing them as cute. And obviously you see your partner is cute for a long time after you start dating, that... Viewing someone as a dork is a more developed sense of what a relationship is.
• Aria: That's an interesting set of outcomes, just looking at masculinity as almost sexual in the middle there, an almost dangerous. Because a person's understanding of masculinity are sexual, like the second one is a kind of dangerous, like a kind of danger. Versus like the sexuality in the second one, for feminine as well as that same panel, but it's not like dangerous... That's very interesting, it's very interesting that the middle section feels just more sexual in general. I was laughing at the bottom set for heiress in the middle column, "a-asami" there. It's like, I guess?
• Aria: And to be fair, omega and alpha as being there in the far right column. I don't really understand ABO [alpha, beta, omega] as in general, so I can't talk. They're not as inherently sexual. They definitely struck me as relatively sexual, and that's not
• Dialux: I had a very close group of friends on Live Journal back in the early 2000s. That, I think, probably because I was a teenager. Perhaps this is because of all those reasons. But that kind of close-knittedness has never kind of shown up for me ever since. I think I tend to participate now on more, "Oh, this is really interesting for me. And this is really fascinating." And I'll go into it for the material as opposed to the friendships themselves.
• Dialux: And all of this kind of, to me, I mean, I think that's what a lot of fanficiton is, at least. It's taking things that are already there and kind of pooling them together. And sometimes you have amazing coincidences that people just don't think about. And it's about exploiting those coincidences, and making them sound like, "Oh, I'm so brilliant. I actually had thought about it beforehand."
• Dialux: I was really worried about how it would be perceived by the fandom, how it would be received by people even outside of the fandom.
• Dialux: Because, obviously, race bending is, and can be, very racist if not done in a very respectful manner.
• Dialux: And my friends in the fandom were all like, "Okay, well, we trust you. Because it's also your culture. You know what you're doing, you know where you're coming from. But we would not do it." And, I mean, the vast majority of them were from the U.K. or the U.S., and they were not from the same culture. And they were like, "We would be very hesitant about it, but we trust you. If you know what you're doing, then go ahead and do it." But they were very supportive in that manner. But it wasn't a blanket support, as I was kind of hoping for, I should say.
• Dialux: And I wasn't sure people would think that it was good enough. Because I was also combining both South Indian and North Indian tropes, to a certain extent. And those weren't necessarily very compatible. And there's a lot of history behind that and everything. And I wasn't entirely sure how people would perceive it.
• Dialux: And I was so worried. Because all of this was very close to my heart, and I did not want to have to deal with a lot of backlash, or feedback, or having to fight to say, "Well, I don't mean to be rude on any of these kinds of things." These are meant with respect and they're meant with love. And they're from a part of myself.
• Dialux: And the reason I did the Jodhaa Akbar tag was actually because I wanted to make sure that people who read more Hindu mythology fic, or other fandoms like that, like Baahubali, were able to identify that this is one such fic. And I think there are people who have said they've entered through that particular tag.
• Dialux: Oh. I think I learned that people are far more understanding than I was giving them credit for, especially because I was so afraid about the reception.
• Dialux: So, I could see how much the fandom had increased in size by the time Season Seven had came around. Because it was huge. There were a lot of people there, it had increased exponentially. And Season Eight made the fandom even bigger, honestly, in a certain way. But I also remember that there were a lot of fandom issues going on at the time, between people within the fandom and everything.
• Dialux: But, second of all, the fandom itself, I think, had grown to such a point that it kind of imploded. I do remember that a lot of good authors, and a lot of people did leave the fandom at the time.
• Dialux: Because, first of all, the fandom was terrible.
• Dialux: You can tell exactly what the fandom is focused on here.
• Dialux: And I was actually looking at the most common gender pairings. It's very interesting to me, because I think if you look at any other major fandom, you would probably get male male slash at a much higher rate than you're getting here. And it's just very interesting to me to see how female male has been so prevalent across all seasons. And to such an extent. And, I mean, obviously, there are a lot of theories about why that is, and how that comes about, and all of that. But I think... Oh, wow. Wait. Hang on. I'm looking... There's Gen that's higher than male slash in Season Eight.
• Dialux: I think I obviously can't give an explanation for a lot of these. But I think that they make sense, to a certain extent, because there definitely are a lot more heterosexual relationships within this fandom than I've seen in a lot of other fandoms. And I think that's probably because we don't have one main character and one side character that's like the sidekick to the main character, both of them being male. You don't have that here.
• Dialux: I actually do remember how unhappy people were that Sansa didn't end with a love interest at the end of Season Eight.
• Dialux: And I could understand why people felt unhappy about it. But at the same time, I think you're beating on the wrong bush here. There's a lot of other problems to deal with within this fandom. And within this canon that we don't particularly need as much as you're putting into it.
• Dialux: Tyrion is surprisingly popular to be honest. I didn't think that he'd be as... I knew he'd be popular as a character. But not a person on Archive of Our Own. I didn't think that AO3 people would write a lot about him.
• GillyWulf: so it was, when I think I started it, Korrasami hadn't been canon yet. So, it's definitely interesting, the before and after. And maybe, I think, during that time, also, gay marriage was legalized, so it was just definitely different attitudes in that. I think those are some of the strengths in seeing that as well.
• GillyWulf: And sometimes, there were just prompts that were not necessarily things that I wanted to do or actively didn't want to do
• GillyWulf: I know it's, I don't want to say a popular trope, but it's a common trope in a lot of fanfiction communities, is the student-teacher ... What is that? Student-teacher pairing, whatever. My dad is a teacher, so the idea of that has always just absolutely not been something that I want to encourage, and it just isn't good, so I don't like writing that, I don't like reading it. That's definitely one of the things. I'm sure there's been others, but that's always been a big one for me.
• GillyWulf: I know a lot of people like to have full sentences, and get really detailed and say things like that, but I always find that to be sort of distracting, because I know, when I'm personally looking for something, I like to be able to just click through until I find exactly what I'm looking for. So, if somebody has what I'm looking for, but also in that same tag is a full sentence of something else, it doesn't necessarily help me stuff. If somebody's specifically looking for, I guess a long-distance relationship thing, they can just click on that and see, "Okay, well, it's in here somewhere. I'll just find whichever prompt it is." I'm a big fan of just keeping things neat and simple.
• GillyWulf: And then, just seeing the way her relationship sort of evolved with Asami over time, especially once you get into the third season, was like, "Okay, I'm into this. Whether or not they're going for it, I see it." So, it was like, "All right. I and a lot of the people in the fandom seem to agree for some reason, so I'm just going to go there and enjoy that while I'm doing it.
• GillyWulf: So, at the same time, it was also sort of an exploration for me in that I've known I was gay, probably since kindergarten, but I sort of just put it off, put it off, and it wasn't until I started getting into Korrasami that I was like, "Okay, well, I'm meeting a community where this is accepted and this is encouraged even." So, I had decided to come out, and these became sort of two parallels of, "It could be this, or it could be that." Of like, "What is the best case? What is the worst case for maybe how my parents will react?" Thankfully, it leaned more towards Korra's parents than Asami, but it did sort of dip into that a little bit.
• GillyWulf: And even though the trans experience is not necessarily one that I know for certain, there's plenty of people in the Korra community, in most online Internet communities, where there's plenty of those people and you see what they're going through and you see how their lives are, and I try not to speak for situations that I've never lived through, but you can draw knowledge from that and say, "Okay, well, without going in depth into feelings or things like that, I can add this, this, and this, and make it maybe relatable in that regard."
• GillyWulf: And it's also, given the audience, this is considered a family show. So, I realized over time that maybe I don't have to write that.
• GillyWulf: If you set those boundaries, people generally stick to it. If you tell people flat out, "I'm not going to write that," they generally won't press and press, and ask, "Why aren't you?" Because I just find keeping people as slaves is super ... I didn't want to contribute to it, and it was just that sort of idea [inaudible 00:47:42] maybe are younger and a little bit more impressionable than I am, so maybe it's okay to put things that they haven't been exposed to before, but also, it doesn't need to be a weird thing.
• GillyWulf: Especially with the prompts and setting boundaries like you mentioned earlier. It's writing what you want.
• GillyWulf: Oh, the easy answer is sexism, because everyone sees the main heroine next to a cute boy and decides, "That's good. I'm going to do that," without maybe necessarily putting much more thought into it.
• GillyWulf: Obviously, there's always going to be people who say, "I want a female ship. Going for it. I don't care whether or not they necessarily gel." I'm sure there's people ... I feel like I went back a million years ago and looked at the first Korrasami fics, just out of curiosity, to see when they were published, and I'm sure that they were like episode one, because it's just what people do, and it's great. Ships are meant to be fun, they're not always meant to be canon.
• GillyWulf: So, it was there, but it's not surprising that a lot of people who aren't looking for it don't go and see it. A lot of straight people I know will look at a lot of these relationships and say, "Oh, that came from nowhere."
• GillyWulf: At the end of season three, we saw that development and we saw, especially during Korra's fight with Zaheer, Asami looked the most scared out of everybody, and her reaction to her offer to stay with Korra through her recovery, and help any way she can was sort of, "That's a little gayer than it maybe should be," that sort of look. So, a lot of people took that and decided to go with it, especially since the relationship was [inaudible 01:00:21], whether or not ... Again, and at that time, we didn't know the writer's intention, so it was just everybody, or at least Korrasami fans, picking up on it and saying, "Okay, well, we don't know when season four is happening, so we're just going to kick off from there and this is what could happen."
• GillyWulf: Tahno was just a bully that people decide ... I don't understand why people like that, but people do.
• GillyWulf: immediately after the season finale aired, everyone was sort of unsure like, "This is canon, right? This is canon. That's what this looks like,"
• GillyWulf: "Korrasami's canon. That's what it is." So, a lot of people were super excited about that, especially since, up to that point, there really hadn't been a whole lot of huge representation for female ships.
• GillyWulf: So, to see this cartoon suddenly become canon, against a network that had super tried to, god, just tear it apart, it was invigorating, to say the least. Yeah. That's why I have to imagine people took off with it.
• Kittya Cullen: So I got into forums and fans would translate for those of us who didn't speak Hindi. And obviously people would answer questions if you asked because you couldn't get everything in the translations or the summaries. And during that time, we would talk about the plot of the show, what the characters were doing, where we were expecting things to go at that time. It was just a lot of the basic things at fandom.
• Kittya Cullen: To realizing that there was a community of people who were also interested in discussing how these shows and books and games et cetera were failing us, whether it was in terms of the content or the representation or just releasing new things like thought arcs that weren't followed through on.
• Kittya Cullen: So I am currently in the Supergirl fandom, which has been a mess. I'm saying that nicely.
• Kittya Cullen: But also the fics I had read after the show had finished seemed to focus primarily on how Korra was dealing with ... Obviously, it was a really traumatic experience and so on in how she ... what had happened in the gap years that they hadn't shown us for Korra.
• Kittya Cullen: It's just to be someone who builds and creates with the purpose of fixing or making better, but then not being able to do so for someone within your personal life. But the imagery also for that chapter was, I guess, built in subtext because I wasn't quite sure yet how to engage with what was happening in ways that were visible to other people outside of the fan community, the slashfan community.
• Kittya Cullen: It has less to do with fandom itself and more to do with the external world. And even now it's, I guess it's ... I don't know. I think it just seemed like the safer option at the time. But the more time I've spent in that part of fandom, the less I guess I've cared about how it's read or whatever it is. But at the time, it just seemed wiser, particularly if I was having others who may not ... Because fan works and original work for me are on the same level, and so I'm not concerned, I guess, with people reading it for ... people reading it and not seeing a difference in quality, but rather how they experience the content. And so I think I was still considering who the audience would be.
• Kittya Cullen: The universe raises really interesting conversations about inequality and power and change and so forth, but we kind of always see it from the position of the privileged. And I think that's my favorite thing about fandom and fan fiction, how fans sort of delve into all these areas in canon that either there wasn't time to explore or it didn't really seem to be important enough to explore, so things like inequality. When I write now, it's just always in the forefront, "How can I better represent experiences of people in the world," not just for myself, but for other people, what they're going through.
• Kittya Cullen: And I think I'd actually forgotten about this until someone else had written it in their own fanfiction, which is part of what's so fun about reading fanfiction. There are all these ideas that you don't quite pickup on right away, but someone else mentions it, and it clicks, and you start to rotate the world and look at it from a different angle.
• Kittya Cullen: I wasn't part of the fandom itself, so I didn't quite get to be part of ... Maybe I should be happy for that because I missed all the fan wars.
• Kittya Cullen: I missed the smug satisfaction, but I also missed all the stress and anger, so I'm happy for that.
• Kittya Cullen: Considering my Supergirl years, I can imagine. And then when you [inaudible 00:45:32] Korra is an avatar who's a woman. She's not a dainty fainting flower that they love.
• Kittya Cullen: I think for that particular story I had to remind myself, especially because I had read so many fan fictions where this was ... And I know it's understandable, but I kind find it a flaw for some people. Just keeping the world in focus.
• Kittya Cullen: Because there is this thing in fanfiction where we assume that all people who are accessing it are familiar with the text. And while that is often common when we want it to function beyond that world to have relevance in other ways, I think for me personally it's important to integrate more parts of the world, of the universe.
• Kittya Cullen: I think, and I'll probably go with my own fandom experiences, it just comes back to how the world is constructed externally. So just even the idea of imagining inside of what was placed before us, it takes a special kind of familiarity with the boarders of the world to imagine a world that is different from what is presented to you. At the time, I don't know, it was just that Korra and Mako were what was the norm. And so I think it made sense for some people to only be able to see that happening. I mean, I didn't see the possibility of Korrasami until the very end. But when I circled back around after having spent about several months reading several fanfictions
• Kittya Cullen: But yeah, I just, spending so much time reading so much fanfiction from LOK and then branching out into Steven Universe and moving from Steven Universe into Supergirl, there was just more of an interaction with another side of fandom, the slash side of fandom. I don't know. I think you have to be integrated with others who are looking for more than what's presented, looking for more than what's norm, what's the acceptable way of telling a story of any kind of relationship really. Because even when you talk about what characters are bound to get more attention and more interesting and so on and so forth, when you look at fandom in general you'll find that when those characters are black or just generally a person of color in comparison to a character being white, that people are least particular when the fandom's dominated by white faces and so forth. They are more likely to explore those characters and to humanize them and to want to get to know them better, while other characters and what their hopes and dreams and ideas might be for the world are pushed to the side.
• Kittya Cullen: I don't know. I'm not surprised. Plus the allocishets tend to dominate fandom in general, so it made sense that they would sort of own the sandbox and everyone else should be playing to the side.
• Kittya Cullen: I mean, people are out there writing Korra Tarrlok fanfic. Okay, but Korrasami just seems too weird, okay people. I mean, I was also part of it too, that people were so willing to see all these other, in some ways really twisted, relationship dynamics, but couldn't quite bring themselves to see what others were seeing when they took the allocishet glasses off. I was part of that group as well, until in the end.
• Kittya Cullen: When I saw that I was like, "Okay. This is pretty blatant. I don't see how anyone is not seeing this." But I can't judge because when you go back and you see the way that Korra and Asami speak to each other in the beginning, it's there, but it's not intentional subtext. It's like ... I mean, it makes sense that some people didn't see it.
• Kittya Cullen: Actually, I think it may have come back to that as well, a combination of both familiarity with visual cues in storytelling, both a tendency to read closer in text in general, whether it's literature or visual media, as well as having familiarized yourself with another community. I'm always on the fence sometimes when I'm talking about how people are seeing or not seeing certain things. Because even with my current fandom, it's like half the people are saying that we're delusional or creating things where there aren't things. And then other times you see these exact phenomena occurring in cishet media.
• Kittya Cullen: At that time ... When I first came across it, I was like, "They're probably overreacting," because I know how fandom can get.
• Kittya Cullen: And you could tell, from a fandom perspective, some people who are cishet won't be able to speak to this, but you could tell that the writer's room was split in how they were portraying the characters because I think they got uncomfortable with how fandom was growing so rapidly and intensely around these two characters, even to the point where they used the black character as a wedge between them. So, just so many layers of so many awful things happening in that show.
• Valk: I'm non-binary, so a lot of my work as I got older started to deal more with gender as well as sexuality, also being bi-sexual. I used it sort of as a tool in some fanfics to work through ideas or feelings that I'd had and didn't know how to properly verbalize yet. I was putting them on paper, using another character as the medium and expressing or exploring different ideas in an area where I felt I was kind of safe to do so. I didn't always publish all of them, but the one that you contacted me over, I did, obviously.
• Valk: Mainly regarding the pairings that would show up, it would be mainly non-hetero pairings if that makes more sense than just saying a pairing because there would be some exploring of gender and what not with some characters. Or I would definitely be focusing on male-male or female-female relationships as well, because a lot of the media already does a lot of the male-female exploration. And a lot of the purpose of fandom is to sort of explore beyond what we're just given.
• Valk: Yeah, definitely when it comes to trying to write it realistically as well, but the banter back and forth was very difficult. I read a lot of fanfic where it can be very stalkish and when I think about it and I think about someone saying it out loud, I just like cringe. My face caves in.
• Valk: I wanted to actually put some Game of Thrones content on those tags to begin with because back when I was writing it, there wasn't a lot really going for it. LGBT fanfics, yeah sure, but gender fluid and gender related things, it wasn't really there.
• Valk: I feel for them, a lot of their fics also had a lot of like Jaime being the man and Brienne finally being able to let her guard down.
• Valk: Like, where is this content that should be out there because it's in the books and why is no one taking this up and writing about it?
• Valk: I think I would want to go more into maybe tagging some of the triggers maybe now a days because back then there wasn't as much of a discussion around it. Now a days, you have more of a discussion around what bigger tags to put in to help people avoid it for instance. Now that AO3 has updated its tagging system to include and exclude.
• Valk: There's a lot of, again, fanfic already out there of them being intimate, but it was all very incredibly heteronormative. Just their gender roles and Brienne being vulnerable and weak and all that stuff again. I was just not really feeling it, so I wrote my own instead.
• Valk: And then it just kind of gets more depressing as it goes on. For some reason, John and Sansa's the most popular ship. It's like, I understand that they're not technically related, but I don't get it because in the book, they had this very tense relationship and in the show I know that they were more around each other.
• Valk: Peytr/Sansa, I want to have some words with people.
• Valk: I ship Sansa and Marjory and I tried to write fic for them, but I don't know why it never picked up. Marjory just walked around the whole show just hitting on everyone. I was like why isn't there more of this? It's literally right here.
• Valk: Renly/Lauris, obviously.
• Valk: Sandor and Sansa, I will say that I like their ship name as San-San. I do understand the whole like rough, the woman that warms his heart thing. Again, it's all very like romance novel-y prompts when I've tried to find fic and I'm just like, "I'll just write a Nora Roberts novel." I'd so read her books if I wanted to. I don't need to read them here.
• Valk: Most Game of Thrones fanfic is incredibly hetero normative and it's a lot of university AU, high school AU and I'm like, "What about literally anything else?" I did a modern universe [inaudible 00:37:49] Please, literally anything else.
• Valk: Again, it's Renly/Lauris, Sansa/Marjory. Yeah, there's not a lot really on there.
• Valk: It was just a lot of Nora Roberts style in AO3 for sure. A lot of incest. An exorbitant amount of incest, like beyond what I even take it. I'm typically very do what you want, but even now, I'm just like don't like that.
• Valk: Yeah, it's depressingly small. I know that when I was writing it, there was a lot less fanfic, but you would think even with Jaime and Brienne having that very unique friendship/relationship
• Valk: a lot of the fics, even with Jaime and Brienne is just depressingly, like, "Wow, if I wanted to read this fic, I'd just go to like any romance section and find it."
• Valk: I would almost want to just write fic out of spite.
• Valk: I had some really bad, some really heated discussions with a friend on my dashboard on Twitter. We just did that, like Brienne was actually fully a lesbian and that she hated people linking her with Jaime. And I'm like, "That's an interesting concept, not canon, but concept." She was fighting people on the dashboard about it with the sort of bigger, than someone who has like facts in front of them would argue. And I'm like, "I understand, but this is your interpretation." People who ship her with Jaime don't hate lesbians. Please, do not try and put this away. Yeah, it was a whole mess. People came out in droves, angry for different reasons.
• WriteGirl: Because one thing as a writer that will pull me completely out of a story is if there is a colloquialism that should not belong. Or if you're using words, and I'm like, okay, I've never heard that word used on the show, so now you've just dropped a bomb in the middle of a wedding cake, and there's cake everywhere. It just pulls me out.
• WriteGirl: Yes. [Missandei's] a weird character. Mostly she seems to almost be absent from things. She's window dressing. She's there, she doesn't speak, or she speaks, it's one or two sentences in the entire fic. And it's frustrating because once again in the book, she's such a pivotal character.
• WriteGirl: And so, you get those fics where she either has none of those, she's either not there, or she has really none of those attributes. She's kind of just a yes person. Yes, Khaleesi, no Khaleesi, yes my queen.
• WriteGirl: That was another reason with the fic I kind of wanted to delve a little bit into her as a standalone, not in relation to anyone else. Kind of like, who is Missandei? If you take away slavery, and her being Daenerys' friend, who is this person? What is the one thing that would be important to her? Because there aren't really a lot of fics that focus on her as a character at all. She's just kind of always at the side. That's kind of where I got the thing that is, I don't know if I was a former slave. The one thing I would be sure of when I got my freedom was, I will never be made a slave again in any way, shape or form. So what does that translate into? That translates into, you're not going to use me. I'm not going to stand to be abused anymore. And that's kind of how all that bloomed up. I'd really like to see a bit more of that in Game of Thrones fanfiction. She's really an underused character.
• WriteGirl: One thing I noticed about the Game of Thrones fandom, because I did just kind of jump in, is that tags are very important. I do read comments from other people in fics, and that seems to be the one thing that everyone gripes about. This was tagged unproperly. This should be the tag. The tag should be this. I was like, okay, let me try and tag as properly and nearly as I can, because I don't want to get dogpiled. There's a lot of my favorite fics where there's 10 pages of people just ragging on improper tagging. So I was like, nope, let me be careful.
• WriteGirl: The "What if" tag was very important, because I've had that on fanfiction.net before. People are like, "You should have tagged it as an AU." I'm like, "But it is. It's right there." So I had the "What if."
• WriteGirl: Out of character? I never know. I think my characters are pretty in character, but there's always the one person who's like, "This character would never do that." So I'm just like, "Okay. Just to let you know, it may be out of character."
• WriteGirl: Alternate universe, canon divergence just to let people know, this isn't following canon, because I did not want to get blasted on that one.
• WriteGirl: I've learned a lot about people actually in the fandom. Game of Thrones has a very active fandom. I wasn't prepared for that when I joined. You get people who, there are the butts, there are the trolls. Trolls are going to troll though, so I just kind of push them to the side.
• WriteGirl: But there are people who they're really willing to engage with you, and they have questions. In a lot of other fandoms, some people are just like, "This is a nice story." Game of Thrones fans will have questions for you in the comments. They'll be like, "What about this? And what about this? Oh, what about this? What do you think about this?" It's fun to get that dialog. That's something I never had before.
• WriteGirl: But there are just people who are just nasty. In all the fandoms I've been in, it thankfully hasn't happened to me yet, and I've actually had people defend me in comments. They're just like, "Get that shit out of here." I'm like, "Okay, thank you for being nice." But it seems the Game of Thrones fandoms can get real violent. They get real virulent with their hatred in the comments section. I can't muster that kind of hatred. If I don't like something, I just click off of it. I don't get the hate.
• WriteGirl: But I can see, especially in Season Five, and Six, and Seven, where you see Jon Snow, Sansa Stark, because these two characters kind of get back together in the show. When they're together, you can see their dynamic in everything else. And they look good together. That's always a good thing. It's always big when it comes to shipping, who looks good with who.
• WriteGirl: But I think people really enjoy the Jaime Lannister, Brienne of Tarth is kind of like the person, your frenemy. The person you love to hate. I would rescue you if you're falling off a cliff, but I'd probably punch you in the stomach when I got you back on solid land for being in that position to begin with.
• WriteGirl: Sansa, Petyr, I've always hated that one, simply because he's grooming. It's very obvious. Where I can see Sansa starting to like Sandor because he would rebuff her at every turn if she started to show interest in him, even though he didn't want to. He'd just be like, "I can't deal with this. I can't deal with you." Petyr would relish that. He does everything he can to get her into trusting him, and thinking of him as her friend, and I would do anything for you, and that's really, really creepy. It's always a surprise to me when I see Petyr Baelish, Sansa Stark fics especially ones where it's not manipulative, and coercive, and creepy, I'm like, "What are you guys seeing in that?" That's just odd.
• WriteGirl: I like the modern setting. Modern setting seems to be the most common one.
• WriteGirl: I think it's the same with, I'm also very active in the Star Wars fandom, and that's one thing you see in a lot of Star Wars, especially the new trilogy. People love taking the characters out of where they are and putting them in today. That doesn't surprise me at all.
• WriteGirl: canon divergence, angst, love, romance, smut. Not really. Everything seems to be kind of right where it should be, based on what I've seen. I'm trying to think of a tag that may be missing. No. Fluff, yeah, fluff's there, angst, romance. No, I think everything is there. You just randomly go on AO3, that's what you'd see.

Description

Definition: These codes demonstrate different fanfic uptakes and define basic conventions of these genres based on the fan authors' responses. Uptakes are the ways in which a writer responds to one genre by engaging in another genre, following particular conventions or expectations for how to engage with the second genre. In terms of fan uptakes, these may be fanfics or fan art that respond to the original source material but follow genre expectations in the fan community. These codes include critical uptakes, canon-complicit uptakes, canon-resistant uptakes, and more.

Number of Codes: 142

Analysis: Select different uptake categories for specific analyses.

Quotes

• Aria: People are like, "Oh..." When people talk about RWBY, the way they talk about the White Fang is the way they talk about radical politics. And I don't know if they realize it, but I always get really annoyed, because this is like bad political theory. It's very normal American political theory, but it's also bad. It's very much like, "Oh, there's no justification for violence," it's like, "I don't agree."
• Aria: When I'm writing this fic it means something, because I'm like... There's a study I think that says that when you get into rational arguments about things you don't convince them, but if you tell stories you can. And I think that I'm in that place, arguing about politics in the fiction space of the internet.
• Aria: And then I wrote a piece called [inaudible 00:05:42], which was sort of like a revisiting of what does... I guess it was actually about immigration, it's just I never really ever got around to doing a piece about immigration system, but somebody had a bad take about immigration in America in a piece of fanfic and I was like, "God, that's a really bad understanding of that friend. That is utopian and wrong."
• Aria: For me, this text begins both as like, I was reading a lot about Stonewall and the context around Stonewall, and also I was reading a piece about PTSD, and it was just very surface, very basic understanding of trauma and PTSD in particular, like something you recover from, in a way that I was not super comfortable with. And sort of the original text, not sure if you would agree. And so I wanted to talk about disability through the context of being something you come to live with, and come to integrate, and come to find becomes a part of you life, but also something you still struggle with, instead of just, I don't know, a lot of us have seen the story a lot like, you get better, and then you get better and you win. And then one day it doesn't bother you.
• Aria: I was coming into my own politically, I was becoming my own political individual in a way I hadn't been before. Like I had politics, but this is around the time that I'm really radicalized, and just me engaging with those contexts.
• Aria: There are things I don't like about it, but I like it as a little bit of text. It's there in the text, it was one of those things that was like, "Oh, I love this, I love feeling represented." So I wrote that.
• Aria: I chose the end of Season Three because it's the place where I felt like I was reading a... I felt like engaging with the original text, I was feeling like I wanted something different, I wanted a more deep and meaningful engagement with disability and trauma in this context. Because reading the original text is like, it's there for a while and then they're better? So it was almost the opposite feeling, what do I think this looks like? And so that's why I chose that.
• Aria: I think I was just engaging with the text's portrayal of trauma.
• Aria: So I was under the impression, reading or engaging with this text, I came away with this feeling like the Northern Water Tribe is somewhat... very different from the rest of the world, and there are ways that it plays as... I don't know if it was textual or sort of fan-driven more, but I remember coming away with this feeling that there is a marginalized subjectivity in the Northern Water Tribe. And so telling this story about difference in culture, and we'll get to... I'll get to Korra's upbringing a little bit later, because you're going to ask about 10 minutes later about Korra's upbringing. But I want to... Basically that I think Korra's upbringing is particularly reflective of that culture, yeah.
• Aria: I come away from Korra feeling like, "This is a gender thing going on." I don't buy that there's not homophobia in a world with gender in the like weird way that... In ways that still reflect our I think gender and homophobia [inaudible 00:21:13], the way that we have a sense of gender. Big, capital G Gender. And so I thought like, "What does it mean to have culture in the context of... What does it mean to be a cosmopolitan city where... There's both a degree of marginalization for like the Northern Water Tribe closing... Not so much that rules that are really intended to enforce gender norms are going to be there. And also to be like, "Yeah, there's probably a different understanding of gender in context," yeah.
• Aria: Asami probably can't like cook...because I think it's either canonical or in fanon, and I kind of like that, because I like the notion that... I like the notion that someone who's very good at some things, but just not good at other things.
• Aria: I think that this is a piece that comes from a weird part of what I understood about that world. To me, Korra grows up in a compound with people who are older than her, who aren't likely to tell her the truth about things. Because the White Lotus is an organization of people who are fundamentally keeping her apart. And I remember being like, "Oh, these folks are not going to tell a child about queer sexuality." Particularly sexuality is a hard topic, you grow up in that kind of compound in a world where queer identities are looked down on, you're going to come away with this very strange view about that. And you might just be told nothing.
• Aria: Because I imagine Korra's pain is seeing the cost of her new trauma after time, because her being injured, being in a place where you are tortured to death as a vulnerability. Every time you experience that pain, I imagine that that's a place that engagement is a struggle after time when you're in that pain. So it's an ordeal for Korra to dress herself.
• Aria: Whereas Korra grows up in this institution, Asami grows up with a relatively politically progressive father. He's an abuser, but he's also a very, very politically progressive man. He's a radical, he tries to overthrow his government, make the world a more equitable and fair place. It's self-interested, he's a bourgeois radical, but I wouldn't have said that at the time. I imagine Asami as having a relatively normal, relatively healthy understanding of the world in a way, having felt like she, not just knowing that a woman can love another woman, because I guess almost every person in this world knows. This is nothing like, Korra is particularly going to have a hard time because of that institution itself.
• Aria: In the context of this piece, a lot of my understanding of Hiroshi as a bourgeois radical is that I'm not going to have a [inaudible 00:30:36], because I don't really have a sense of class politics at the time, or have the beginnings of that study. That's only beginning to be born
• Aria: So to me, Hiroshi's both a man that would destroy his children for the things he believes, and in some sense for his own power. But also a man who genuinely is providing aid and comfort and resources for fighting for what he views as liberation, and that liberation's probably genuine at some level. I think it's fair to say that there is a political bender-like supremacy at the beginning. I mean there is, we know there's a bender supremacy at the beginning of The Legend of Korra. And so that's how I understand Hiroshi.
• Aria: I wanted to give a sense of what is the politics of the Northern Water Tribe? And I kind of wanted to say that queerness isn't criminalized in the Northern Water Tribe, or is not criminalized anymore. Also I wanted to say this is a different relationship. But the other thing I wanted to talk about is, what are politicians willing to give up for their family, and what are they not?
• Aria: Because I know what our reactionary politics is like, I think I'd start around the time that Kuvira is beginning to gain power. I'd write it as a story that talks about immigration, and talks about sweeping panic and fear that spill off of that. I'd probably talk about gender through those lenses, and I'd probably talk about humanity in a slightly more complex... I'd probably make it a story that... I'd probably both use modern messages to say that, I'd probably talk more about police state, and police state as endless spying networks where you don't know when you're being spied on and when you're not, and endless police states
• Aria: This is the moment when this becomes one of the early queer relationships in cartoons, a relatively good one. There's nothing particularly problematic about it, it's limited, but it's good.
• Aria: Also I think it's when fiction ends, it does draw people who are like, "Oh, I want to write more on this subject, I want to play with these concepts again." There's also a distinct un-ended-ness
• Aria: I think the redo of the relationship, the exploration is limited, is kind of bad. But I also think that the way that we end somewhere where it's like, they just want to be married, or at the end of their first date, we did see them agree, yeah I want to do this. Yeah, I want to have this, or I like this, it's healthy. I love that! I just see that as a lot of things for writers to engage with.[inaudible 00:47:08] what are other ways we can imagine it?
• Aria: And that creates fanon, which means you get this whole long space of people being like, "Oh yeah, I am writing about this content of fanon in this alternate universe, I'm going to write a piece about a radio show
• Aria: It sort of leaves a lot of space for the development of [inaudible 00:47:39], some of the Equalist Asami stuff, and some of the discussion that comes out of that. So I think that's very, very fertile ground for fanfic, and I think that it's liberating for a lot of folks. So it drives a lot of views.
• Aria: Also, if you're looking at a subtext, my people they were like, "Oh yeah, I want to tell this story, I want to finish this story." And there's a degree to which it a queer reading, there's this political tendency to look at fiction and say, "I am going to tell the story you didn't." And so during the subtext period, you've already got these people who are basically being like, "Yo, I'm going to tell this story.
• Aria: Okay, my first guess would be that women who love women will write about women who love women, want to tell stories that have happy endings. I think in a lot of the stories we see in literature are of our destruction as a moral point, or the echoes of authority. That doesn't mean that all of the stories that we see that are echoes of stories are intended as seeing those moral and political tellings, they're just, "That's what our culture tells us." A lesbian love story, so retelling... If women who love women retell stories of women who love women, they're going to tell a lot of stories that are about being happy, at least in my opinion.
• Aria: And I don't know, I don't know if I'd use the fluff and angst tags anymore, just because I don't talk about my literature in those terms as much anymore, as I used to, but... Largely because nobody...You don't use those tags as much anymore in my view, like we don't talk about... Those are very much Fanfiction.net-y terms that pulled over, I don't see them as I used to.
• Aria: First guess is actually that there's a) an explosion of stories that aren't canon compliant, so people are staying people are saying, "This story is canon compliant," as a way of engaging. In terms of, it makes sense to say something's canon-compliant sort of at the end of the piece, because once the story is over then it makes sense to go back and say, "actually this is canon compliant." A lot of stories before a story ends it's already like, "How could this go from here?" And so I would imagine that the canon compliance people were like, "Well, I'm telling this story based on what literally happened," instead of all of these other tellings that I'm seeing now. That would be my first guess. My second guess is that people are excited to tell stories that were literally just after the end of The Legend of Korra
• Aria: I imagine that it's because... It makes sense to tell a friendship story with characters who are already very close friends, and characters who are becoming close friends.
• Aria: I mean, canon queer relationship is more common because there is canon queer relationship.
• Aria: a [inaudible 00:57:08] of the audience that come later are less interested in acknowledging or talking about race. Given this is a proportion, I don't know if [inaudible 00:57:24] but more people as a fandom and those few people aren't interested in talking about race in ways that people who had been there before were, and those people who were there before continued to talk about race, or if there is an effectively gentrifying mmoment that a white fandom comes in, pushes out a fandom of color. I don't know how this tag is used, so I would feel hesitant to say something definite. But I find that a little bit troublesome.
• Aria: because it looks to me here that what you're seeing is a movement from seeing the word girlfriend in a context of a text that's about a set of texts about relationships in a more heterosexual perspective, in a story about women. Because it looks to me that this is a story that, if you see jealous there, that looks like I'm looking at a piece that's from Korra's point of view. But then if I'm looking at boyfriend, I'm also thinking about Korra and Mako.
• Aria: The context is basically just, yeah, things you would expect people would say on a date, things you'd expect people to do on a date, things that writers do when they run out of words, like chuckle.
• Aria: Also this more mature understanding of a relationship, seeing their partner as a dork versus like, seeing them as cute. And obviously you see your partner is cute for a long time after you start dating, that... Viewing someone as a dork is a more developed sense of what a relationship is.
• Dialux: But I've also recently published work in Fleabag, which was one of the fandoms that I had to write for for my Yuletide assignment.
• Dialux: So, when I wrote this fanfic it was actually one of the... I had signed up for a fic exchange for this one, as well. It's called the Jonsa Exchange. It was their fifth round. Their theme was, "Inspired by film."
• Dialux: So, the person that I was supposed to be gifting to asked for a historical AU, alternate universe, especially a middle aged one, with angst and a happy ending.
• Dialux: And there were a lot of really good fanfic there that used second person point of view. And I felt like they kind of gave an insight into the character in a way that you wouldn't be able to get if you were looking at them from a third person point of view. And when I was doing this fanfic, I was really kind of thinking about how and what I wanted to communicate. And I felt like the second person point of view gave more weight to the entire fanfic, as opposed to the third person.
• Dialux: And then, of course, you have the Targaryen colors, which are black, which are mourning colors according to the Western culture. And all of it kind of comes together. And, of course, Rajput culture is known for its red, its vibrant, blood red. And obviously, that's a Targaryen color.
• Dialux: So, I initially wanted to make sure that it was pretty clear to everyone that this was a canon divergence. Where one where Rhaegar has won, Jon is raised a Targaryen.
• Dialux: And the reason I did the Jodhaa Akbar tag was actually because I wanted to make sure that people who read more Hindu mythology fic, or other fandoms like that, like Baahubali, were able to identify that this is one such fic. And I think there are people who have said they've entered through that particular tag.
• Dialux: But within this particular fic, as I said earlier, I really wanted to already have that tension. Especially that religious tension between Jon and Sansa. And have that difference, where both of them and neither of them are willing to compromise on that.
• Dialux: And the regional tensions, I think, are already there in the canon.
• Dialux: And, I mean, we don't know if she relies more on her religion because she left her homeland, and came to the North. And just wanted some desperate way, something to rely on that's her family, or that reminded her of home. But to me, at least, I can imagine, especially the actual Jodhaa, going to Akbar's Islamic court. And basically being all alone, and not having very many allies. And finding some sort of a solace in her religion of Hinduism.
• Dialux: A Jon who would grow up in a Targaryen court would look very different in the Targaryen [inaudible 00:53:09] than with a Targaryen father.
• Dialux: And the thing is, as much as he looked like Ned on a physical level, Ned is not the Ned that we see in canon. Because he's very much a person who has been basically warring for however Jon has been alive.
• Dialux: Because, actually, Aishwarya Rai, who plays Jodhaa, does not have brown eyes. She has hazel eyes.
• Dialux: I think I obviously can't give an explanation for a lot of these. But I think that they make sense, to a certain extent, because there definitely are a lot more heterosexual relationships within this fandom than I've seen in a lot of other fandoms. And I think that's probably because we don't have one main character and one side character that's like the sidekick to the main character, both of them being male. You don't have that here.
• Dialux: Because I know that a lot of people had mentioned that it was at the beginning of Season Six. Like, when a couple of trailers came out regarding Sansa meeting up with somebody in the North. It was kind of staging with Ramsay Bolton. That Jon Snow and Sansa Stark fandom kind of really took off. And it was the beginning of Season Six that it really, properly emerged. So, it would be interesting to see if there is a cookie cutter point that you can identify like, this is where the general public kind of suddenly said, "Oh, this is the moment."
• Dialux: But Sansa, she didn't have any such love interests. I mean, obviously, I was shipping her with Jon and everything. But there was no actual canonical basis for that on any level.
• GillyWulf: And from those three, you can see that they have very female-centered stories. And then, at least all three are those are canonically queer characters, which are things that now get me really excited and make me want to go, "Okay, well, I want to dive into that. I want to see how their stories could be different," or, "I just really want to see them in this situation," so I try and write it when I can.
• GillyWulf: There's been a couple of fan artists over the years, like plastic-pipes, who is spectacular, always great. And I think the name was [inaudible 00:11:19] at the time, but I think they've changed it. There were a couple times when they did art according to what I'd written, or things like that. And I was like, "Okay, well it'd be cool if I wrote something that was specifically to get an image out of this person's mind."
• GillyWulf: so it was, when I think I started it, Korrasami hadn't been canon yet. So, it's definitely interesting, the before and after. And maybe, I think, during that time, also, gay marriage was legalized, so it was just definitely different attitudes in that. I think those are some of the strengths in seeing that as well.
• GillyWulf: I know a lot of people like to have full sentences, and get really detailed and say things like that, but I always find that to be sort of distracting, because I know, when I'm personally looking for something, I like to be able to just click through until I find exactly what I'm looking for. So, if somebody has what I'm looking for, but also in that same tag is a full sentence of something else, it doesn't necessarily help me stuff. If somebody's specifically looking for, I guess a long-distance relationship thing, they can just click on that and see, "Okay, well, it's in here somewhere. I'll just find whichever prompt it is." I'm a big fan of just keeping things neat and simple.
• GillyWulf: And then, just seeing the way her relationship sort of evolved with Asami over time, especially once you get into the third season, was like, "Okay, I'm into this. Whether or not they're going for it, I see it." So, it was like, "All right. I and a lot of the people in the fandom seem to agree for some reason, so I'm just going to go there and enjoy that while I'm doing it.
• GillyWulf: Yeah. And I always thought her relationship with Mako felt super forced, and then, I didn't like that he cheated on both of them with each other. It was like, "Jeez. No, no. He should not be in a relationship with either of them after this." Yeah. I always felt like maybe Mako should take five steps back, and let's just focus on these two.
• GillyWulf: And okay, well, when you meet somebody, what are the first things you notice? And for Korra, she's an imposing figure, whether or not she means to be. She's got the muscles, she's maybe not as white as everybody else in Republic City, and she's got these really bight eyes. So, those things stand out immediately.
• GillyWulf: Even in the modern drabbles, or the other AU, I tried to keep that as something that, that's what she is, whether or not she can access that.
• GillyWulf: And for Asami, she's gorgeous. Let's be honest. She's gorgeous. So, you notice that, but also, with the death of her mother at a young age, she's sad and growing up with the rich father, she has certain expectations placed on her and where she's going to go in her life according to that company, so she has to be sort of poised and on her toes all the time.
• GillyWulf: They wanted to be friends first, but they were so good together that I wanted to be able to sometimes just say they can be immediate, sometimes.
• GillyWulf: The first being that we only get a certain amount of them in canon.
• GillyWulf: So, it's kind of just how I always imagined her parents were just going to always be there for her. And we do see that in season three, where she's immediately going to bat for them and each other.
• GillyWulf: So, at the same time, it was also sort of an exploration for me in that I've known I was gay, probably since kindergarten, but I sort of just put it off, put it off, and it wasn't until I started getting into Korrasami that I was like, "Okay, well, I'm meeting a community where this is accepted and this is encouraged even." So, I had decided to come out, and these became sort of two parallels of, "It could be this, or it could be that." Of like, "What is the best case? What is the worst case for maybe how my parents will react?" Thankfully, it leaned more towards Korra's parents than Asami, but it did sort of dip into that a little bit.
• GillyWulf: So, I just tried to stay true to that, I guess, in some regard, as far as her relationship went.
• GillyWulf: Well, for that chapter, I want to say, like everything else in the collection, it was a prompt, but it was something that I didn't want to ham-fist it, because Korra's definitely, she's traumatized. We see that more than once,
• GillyWulf: If you set those boundaries, people generally stick to it. If you tell people flat out, "I'm not going to write that," they generally won't press and press, and ask, "Why aren't you?" Because I just find keeping people as slaves is super ... I didn't want to contribute to it, and it was just that sort of idea [inaudible 00:47:42] maybe are younger and a little bit more impressionable than I am, so maybe it's okay to put things that they haven't been exposed to before, but also, it doesn't need to be a weird thing.
• GillyWulf: even though I will always love Korra and Asami, it's not necessarily always easy to write for that, if you're not getting constant updates for it.
• GillyWulf: It was partially based on a drawing by [inaudible 00:50:02] that had Korra and Asami sitting under a tree and just looking out over Republic City,
• GillyWulf: There's a writer, whose name I always mess up. I want to say it's coeurdastronaute. They do a lot of Clarke and Lexa stuff, but she sets the scene super well with like, "Here's the sky. Here's the roads. Here's the this," and I tried to emulate that.
• GillyWulf: And it's okay to learn from other writers. Like I said with coeurdastronaute, everything she writes is like, "I'm in love with this. It's great. How can I maybe write something similar to that? What parts can I take from this that I want to emulate?"
• GillyWulf: Especially with the prompts and setting boundaries like you mentioned earlier. It's writing what you want.
• GillyWulf: Obviously, there's always going to be people who say, "I want a female ship. Going for it. I don't care whether or not they necessarily gel." I'm sure there's people ... I feel like I went back a million years ago and looked at the first Korrasami fics, just out of curiosity, to see when they were published, and I'm sure that they were like episode one, because it's just what people do, and it's great. Ships are meant to be fun, they're not always meant to be canon.
• GillyWulf: At the end of season three, we saw that development and we saw, especially during Korra's fight with Zaheer, Asami looked the most scared out of everybody, and her reaction to her offer to stay with Korra through her recovery, and help any way she can was sort of, "That's a little gayer than it maybe should be," that sort of look. So, a lot of people took that and decided to go with it, especially since the relationship was [inaudible 01:00:21], whether or not ... Again, and at that time, we didn't know the writer's intention, so it was just everybody, or at least Korrasami fans, picking up on it and saying, "Okay, well, we don't know when season four is happening, so we're just going to kick off from there and this is what could happen."
• GillyWulf: Well, obviously, personal preference aside, I think it was the most fleshed out of Korra's personal relationships with any of the other possible love interests.
• GillyWulf: "Korrasami's canon. That's what it is." So, a lot of people were super excited about that, especially since, up to that point, there really hadn't been a whole lot of huge representation for female ships.
• GillyWulf: So, to see this cartoon suddenly become canon, against a network that had super tried to, god, just tear it apart, it was invigorating, to say the least. Yeah. That's why I have to imagine people took off with it.
• Kittya Cullen: So I got into forums and fans would translate for those of us who didn't speak Hindi. And obviously people would answer questions if you asked because you couldn't get everything in the translations or the summaries. And during that time, we would talk about the plot of the show, what the characters were doing, where we were expecting things to go at that time. It was just a lot of the basic things at fandom.
• Kittya Cullen: To realizing that there was a community of people who were also interested in discussing how these shows and books and games et cetera were failing us, whether it was in terms of the content or the representation or just releasing new things like thought arcs that weren't followed through on.
• Kittya Cullen: Actually, I completely forgot, there was a period where I would write like a satirical review of what was happening, because I don't do that anymore for anything really. But it was an opportunity to experiment with writing and being critical of source materials and so on.
• Kittya Cullen: I guess you can say it was a nudge to move from passive consumption to active consumption.
• Kittya Cullen: But also the fics I had read after the show had finished seemed to focus primarily on how Korra was dealing with ... Obviously, it was a really traumatic experience and so on in how she ... what had happened in the gap years that they hadn't shown us for Korra.
• Kittya Cullen: I kind of wanted to see that explored in my own way. And with Asami in particular, and this was surprising for me because usually I'm all for the main character. I never really remember to think about the other ... But with Asami, it felt like there was this big gap available to us for exploration.
• Kittya Cullen: So I kind of wanted to explore that and see how Asami herself was dealing with it. Because for me I like to see how the characters are responding to what's happening to them rather than having the plot happen to them, and with Asami there was just so much room to do that.
• Kittya Cullen: Partly, I wasn't quite sure what tags to use because I was still learning.
• Kittya Cullen: And also on being canon-compliant, but still ... I was working in an area where there was nothing for canon yet. I'm assuming that with the comics now, we'll get more information on that regard. But at the time, there was nothing in that area. So I wanted it to be known that it was still within canon's bounds, but there were going to be things being explored that weren't articulated in canon.
• Kittya Cullen: And in terms of relationships and love and so forth, it was I guess just coming back to what I like to explore in fiction, which is how people are interacting with each other, what it means for them. And especially for certain characters who are ... I'm not sure how I'm thinking of this, but I think what I'm thinking of is where the audience may usually dismiss them or not consider them worthy of further exploration. So I like to see for myself how their worth is existing within these relationships, what it means for them and what it can mean for the audience and so forth.
• Kittya Cullen: Whereas, for Asami, Asami didn't have anyone, or at least maybe in her head she didn't have anyone. So she went back to someone, I guess who is an ... I wouldn't say an abuser because there isn't that dynamic for them. But in the way that the relationship shifts from love and care to an act of violence ... I don't know. I just wanted to explore that. It's just fascinating to me to see how people who were deeply hurt somehow still find a way to circle back around to the people who have hurt them.
• Kittya Cullen: The universe raises really interesting conversations about inequality and power and change and so forth, but we kind of always see it from the position of the privileged. And I think that's my favorite thing about fandom and fan fiction, how fans sort of delve into all these areas in canon that either there wasn't time to explore or it didn't really seem to be important enough to explore, so things like inequality. When I write now, it's just always in the forefront, "How can I better represent experiences of people in the world," not just for myself, but for other people, what they're going through.
• Kittya Cullen: And I think I'd actually forgotten about this until someone else had written it in their own fanfiction, which is part of what's so fun about reading fanfiction. There are all these ideas that you don't quite pickup on right away, but someone else mentions it, and it clicks, and you start to rotate the world and look at it from a different angle.
• Valk: Mainly regarding the pairings that would show up, it would be mainly non-hetero pairings if that makes more sense than just saying a pairing because there would be some exploring of gender and what not with some characters. Or I would definitely be focusing on male-male or female-female relationships as well, because a lot of the media already does a lot of the male-female exploration. And a lot of the purpose of fandom is to sort of explore beyond what we're just given.
• Valk: You never really hear about what Jaime thought about it. I sort of delved into this idea trying to explore Jaime reacquainting himself with these things later on in life, but through a modern lens because I also wanted to be able to relate to it as well.
• Valk: My strengths in this fic for me was being able to try and incorporate as much of Jaime and Brienne's banter and relationship, as much as I could to a modern setting because obviously they wouldn't be having as much of a, you know Brienne wouldn't be considered as horrifying as she was considered in the original text because she was considered man-ish. In modern day context, it's not always encouraged, based on what kind of family you came from, women are often allowed to be tom boys more than vice versa. There was a challenge of trying to see, okay, Brienne wouldn't have had as traumatic a childhood probably regarding her own gender identity. But there would definitely be some push back, but how would that change based on the setting? I made her a little bit more comfortable in her skin than Jaime and also having her there to sort of be a foil and a supportive shoulder for Jaime who was going through a similar thing that maybe she went through as well.
• Valk: Yeah, definitely when it comes to trying to write it realistically as well, but the banter back and forth was very difficult. I read a lot of fanfic where it can be very stalkish and when I think about it and I think about someone saying it out loud, I just like cringe. My face caves in.
• Valk: from the source material where I wanted to kind of explore Jaime's perspective on this, but through a modern lens and later on in life because a lot of Jaime's self-realization in the book comes after he meets Brienne as well.
• Valk: I wanted to actually put some Game of Thrones content on those tags to begin with because back when I was writing it, there wasn't a lot really going for it. LGBT fanfics, yeah sure, but gender fluid and gender related things, it wasn't really there.
• Valk: Like, where is this content that should be out there because it's in the books and why is no one taking this up and writing about it?
• Valk: I think I would want to go more into maybe tagging some of the triggers maybe now a days because back then there wasn't as much of a discussion around it. Now a days, you have more of a discussion around what bigger tags to put in to help people avoid it for instance. Now that AO3 has updated its tagging system to include and exclude.
• Valk: I just find their relationship in canon to be so interesting because it was one of the first pairings, I should add the first male-female pairing, the first hetero pairing that I felt emotionally invested in to a point where I was surprised.
• Valk: There's a lot of, again, fanfic already out there of them being intimate, but it was all very incredibly heteronormative. Just their gender roles and Brienne being vulnerable and weak and all that stuff again. I was just not really feeling it, so I wrote my own instead.
• Valk: even in the context of like the canon, he always had a very strange affinity, but like an affinity for femininity. Weirdly enough, like he loved his mother, he loved Cersei, but he was always very partial to seeing things from their point of view.
• Valk: I think he definitely is someone that would pick up on someone's interests and what not and what that means to them, either subconsciously or consciously channel it when he's handling it.
• Valk: That's definitely something that is taught in canon with him, in terms of never showing your full hand of cards to the enemy, being deceitful and it's all to reach your goal. I think that would still carry over to a modern setting, but it would be more toned down into a more reasonable kind of thing like, "I don't want to seem like this is actually for me. I'm buying it for someone else." If I don't want to get lambasted or judged or anything like that. Residual toxic masculinity and all of that.
• Valk: I wanted to still carry over the kind of relationship that Jaime and Tywin had in the TV show in the medieval setting, but to modernize it more again, but not take away the fact that Tywin was a very controlling father.
• Valk: I wanted to kind of recreate the feelings that I had when I was reading Jaime and Brienne in their notorious bath house scene. Where this was this very raw moment where Jaime opened up and did his monologue about a knight's duty and how it was, pardon my language, full of shit.
• Valk: I wanted something similar, but would still make me feel like that, but wanted to make it more intimate and feel like it was still just as opening, but with actions and not just with words.
• Valk: I ship Sansa and Marjory and I tried to write fic for them, but I don't know why it never picked up. Marjory just walked around the whole show just hitting on everyone. I was like why isn't there more of this? It's literally right here.
• Valk: Sandor and Sansa, I will say that I like their ship name as San-San. I do understand the whole like rough, the woman that warms his heart thing. Again, it's all very like romance novel-y prompts when I've tried to find fic and I'm just like, "I'll just write a Nora Roberts novel." I'd so read her books if I wanted to. I don't need to read them here.
• Valk: Yeah, it's depressingly small. I know that when I was writing it, there was a lot less fanfic, but you would think even with Jaime and Brienne having that very unique friendship/relationship
• Valk: I would almost want to just write fic out of spite.
• Valk: I had some really bad, some really heated discussions with a friend on my dashboard on Twitter. We just did that, like Brienne was actually fully a lesbian and that she hated people linking her with Jaime. And I'm like, "That's an interesting concept, not canon, but concept." She was fighting people on the dashboard about it with the sort of bigger, than someone who has like facts in front of them would argue. And I'm like, "I understand, but this is your interpretation." People who ship her with Jaime don't hate lesbians. Please, do not try and put this away. Yeah, it was a whole mess. People came out in droves, angry for different reasons.
• WriteGirl: And then people would be like, "Oh, your fanfic is this like this one, so why don't you go read this fanfic?" It kind of was a jumping off point for me.
• WriteGirl: So, right when about Season Seven hit, I started getting a little bit upset about the writing in Game of Thrones. And then by the time Season Eight hit, I was just like, "Oh no. No, no, no, no, no. I can't deal with this." I got a bit more involved with writing, because my brain was like, "No, this isn't how it should go. We need to redo all this whole thing." It really started picking up in Season Seven. That was the first time I wrote a Game of Thrones fanfiction. And I believe that was my other OtherWhen series, the first one.
• WriteGirl: I don't know if you're a Dr. Who fan. One of my favorite Doctor Who episodes is Turn Left. And it's a whole episode that's based on the concept of, what if he didn't turn right? What if instead of going the road you're supposed to go, you kind of went that way? And I've always been fascinated by that. I love Choose Your Own Adventure stories, and things like that. I don't like following the written script. So that's one of the reasons why I went into fix-it fics. There's times and places where I was like, that wouldn't happen. I know that's how it happens in the story, but based on the world that they're in, historical context, things like that, that's not how that would. So, that's kind of my brain's way of reconciling not bad writing, but just maybe inconsistent writing, or little things that were just irksome. That's kind of how I got into that.
• WriteGirl: That I've actually written about 200 pages for. But that was just the one pivotal scene. So I was like, okay, I'm just going to take you out and put you here, and then leave you alone.
• WriteGirl: But all of a suddenly, this particular set of characters is no longer in the picture. So how does that affect everything else? How does Daenerys Targaryen deal with a kingdom that is pretty much united with a war hero still on the throne?
• WriteGirl: I think the strength is, I do try and keep it as much as I can in character, and in situ, I guess. I don't like to pull too much of other outside influences in. I think the strength is that people can read it and they can really see it sliding into canon. And if you go into something aside, you don't have to bump too much. And it would fit in the overall narrative.
• WriteGirl: I have a very hard time getting into certain characters' heads, and seeing like, okay, is this the motivation that they would have? Because I do take that very seriously. So, there are times I'm just like, I can't see this person doing this. I can't see them doing that. How do I get this to fit in with their character and not make it too over the top, or too OOC? That's one of my main challenges.
• WriteGirl: Because one thing as a writer that will pull me completely out of a story is if there is a colloquialism that should not belong. Or if you're using words, and I'm like, okay, I've never heard that word used on the show, so now you've just dropped a bomb in the middle of a wedding cake, and there's cake everywhere. It just pulls me out.
• WriteGirl: I chose Sansa in particular, and I think you're talking about the Petyr Baelish one, because I felt she suffered a little bit of character assassination.
• WriteGirl: I wanted to kind of show a Sansa who was still herself. A Sansa who was willing to not listen to him, who understood that, this person is not my friend. This person is strictly manipulative. He's going to take me somewhere that I don't want to go, so my only choice is to find the strength in me that she has, and say, "Okay, I'll run. If it means I have to die, I'm not going to let him use me for whatever his ends are." That's kind of where that idea came from.
• WriteGirl: She was supposed to kind of get lost in the trees, and they were supposed to find her. But I thought that was a little bit ignominious for her. So then I remembered, Oh, Nimeria's wolf pack. I was like, they haven't used that in the show at all, so why not?
• WriteGirl: So, how do I give her, I hate to say the word, but some of her dignity back? If she has to die, I thought it really should be on her terms. That was kind of the motivation for that.
• WriteGirl: That was another reason with the fic I kind of wanted to delve a little bit into her as a standalone, not in relation to anyone else. Kind of like, who is Missandei? If you take away slavery, and her being Daenerys' friend, who is this person? What is the one thing that would be important to her? Because there aren't really a lot of fics that focus on her as a character at all. She's just kind of always at the side. That's kind of where I got the thing that is, I don't know if I was a former slave. The one thing I would be sure of when I got my freedom was, I will never be made a slave again in any way, shape or form. So what does that translate into? That translates into, you're not going to use me. I'm not going to stand to be abused anymore. And that's kind of how all that bloomed up. I'd really like to see a bit more of that in Game of Thrones fanfiction. She's really an underused character.
• WriteGirl: One thing I noticed about the Game of Thrones fandom, because I did just kind of jump in, is that tags are very important. I do read comments from other people in fics, and that seems to be the one thing that everyone gripes about. This was tagged unproperly. This should be the tag. The tag should be this. I was like, okay, let me try and tag as properly and nearly as I can, because I don't want to get dogpiled. There's a lot of my favorite fics where there's 10 pages of people just ragging on improper tagging. So I was like, nope, let me be careful.
• WriteGirl: The "What if" tag was very important, because I've had that on fanfiction.net before. People are like, "You should have tagged it as an AU." I'm like, "But it is. It's right there." So I had the "What if."
• WriteGirl: Tags are hard because they are, it takes me... The hardest part of my posting is tagging, to make sure that I have everything right.
• WriteGirl: Out of character? I never know. I think my characters are pretty in character, but there's always the one person who's like, "This character would never do that." So I'm just like, "Okay. Just to let you know, it may be out of character."
• WriteGirl: Alternate universe, canon divergence just to let people know, this isn't following canon, because I did not want to get blasted on that one.
• WriteGirl: Missandei deserved better, as you've already talked about. She did. So did Grey Worm. I can't believe they took that pairing from me. I thought that if any pairing would last, that one would. And then, [inaudible 00:24:23].
• WriteGirl: I wanted her to have a little bit more agency. It seemed like from the time we see her in the Baelish dress, with the feathers on it, which she's actually taking on a mockingbird, that that was a glimpse of a darker Sansa, a more politically savvy Sansa, a more adult Sansa. And then, for whatever reason, they backed off of it. And then the next thing we see her, she's just kind of sitting there asking questions, looking dull. And that was a little irritating to me. So I wanted her to get a little more agency, especially when she found out who she was supposed to be meeting. I didn't see Sansa ever agreeing to that.
• WriteGirl: I just couldn't see a Sansa, even one who was beaten down, agreeing to that. She's still a Stark. She still has her pride. So, I thought of, okay, so what would Sansa do in this situation?
• WriteGirl: And like she says in the fic even if I get bit by a lizard-lion or I starve, that's my choice. But it won't be going back to a ruined Winterfell to marry a legitimized bastard.
• WriteGirl: That was my take on the scene where Brienne and Pod meet her in the tavern, where she seems to be at first a little surprised, a little relieved, and then you kind of see her shut down a bit.
• WriteGirl: But in my mind, I didn't think she didn't want it because she didn't necessarily trust Brienne, it was more because Peter would never let her go. Even if this person said, "I'm going to help you," he would never allow that, because he wants control of her, and that is something that she realizes, because she's not an idiot. She's seen this man in King's Landing, she sees how he operates. She sees how he operates in the Eyrie. If he doesn't have total control of her, he's not going to allow it. And the best way to do that would be to get rid of these two people. And she doesn't want anyone to die for her. So that was kind of my read on that situation.
• WriteGirl: It doesn't matter if it's to save my life. Even if you said that okay, "This is the only thing you can do to survive," at this point, she's run. She's re-discovered her strength. She's done something that she didn't think she could do. She got away for a time. So, at this point she's just like, "No, I can't do it. I won't do it." That was kind of that whole, what that episode was about was Sansa really re-discovering herself, and what she could do.
• WriteGirl: So yeah, [Missandei]'s such an interesting character. There's so much about her that could be written that isn't written. I just kind of wanted to investigate a little bit. What would life have been like for this character?
• WriteGirl: These were all things she's done because she believes in Daenerys' vision, she believes in a world without slavery. And after having been a slave and experienced freedom, that's something she'd want for everybody. I hate to say it, Harriet Tubman, how many times did she go back and she got slaves and ran them back out? Simply because I'm free, no one should be in bondage, even if it's a personal risk to myself, to my life, that is a risk I will take, because everyone should be free. And I think as a former slave, Missandei really would have that sentiment.
• WriteGirl: She's really seeing Cersei for the creature Cersei is, beyond just being kind of a high-born woman in Westeros. She's seeing the monster that's inside Cersei. Cersei will do anything. She will do anything to maintain power, she will do anything to get back at her enemies, even if it means murder, blackmail, et cetera. And I think Missandei coming from a society where no one would have to hide that from their slaves. She sees it. Like I know you, I've seen masters exactly like you. And she's really recognizing the monster that's in Cersei outside of all of her jewels, outside of her gowns, outside of her façade of being this queen and great lady. It's like, no, you're really this evil thing, and I know it because I've seen it before.
• WriteGirl: It's a smile of, I can't think of the word, but being resigned to my fate. And if this is it, then this is it. And like I say, she recognizes in Cersei the same evil that she saw in Astapor where she's kind of like, "No, you would have fit in well with them. You may think that you're better, you may think that you're better than people from Astapor. You may think that you're better than slave owners and all this, that, and the other, but in the end you are not. You are exactly like them." And in the end, she kind of wants to let her know. It's kind of like a, "I know that you know that I know that you know" moment. Like, I see you. You can't hide from me. I see exactly what you are.
• WriteGirl: Like I said, as a slave, as someone who's been freed, I can't imagine her ever wanting to be in a situation where somebody would be using her against her will. And that would be one thing I imagine you would promise yourself. Kind of like, I hate to use the comparison, but if you ever get out of a really bad relationship, and you're just like, "No, never again. I know the signs. I will never let that happen to me again." And for her of course it's more extreme, from being someone who was taken from freedom and put into slavery, lived a decade plus as a slave, not having a will of their own, and then suddenly getting that will back. No one's ever taking that from me. Like I said, I've found myself. Now that I've found myself again, and I can be myself, I will die myself.
• WriteGirl: There's one thing, to me, if it's too OOC, just out of the block there's no real change, and these drabbles are so short. You can't really see a lot of character development from A to B. Everything kind of has to fit where it does. So I wanted to make sure that it fit and it wasn't too crazy. It's a lot of research.
• WriteGirl: But I can see, especially in Season Five, and Six, and Seven, where you see Jon Snow, Sansa Stark, because these two characters kind of get back together in the show. When they're together, you can see their dynamic in everything else. And they look good together. That's always a good thing. It's always big when it comes to shipping, who looks good with who.
• WriteGirl: I think it's the same with, I'm also very active in the Star Wars fandom, and that's one thing you see in a lot of Star Wars, especially the new trilogy. People love taking the characters out of where they are and putting them in today. That doesn't surprise me at all.

Description

Definition: When fan authors discuss critical uptakes. Uptakes are the ways in which a writer responds to one genre by engaging in another genre, following particular conventions or expectations for how to engage with the second genre. A critical uptake occurs “when writers...resist harmful and exclusive cultural ideologies in their uptake” (Messina, 2019). These ideologies may be embedded in the canonical show or even fan genre conventions.

Number of Codes: 39

Analysis: Each of the authors reflects on critically uptaking a genre, each citing motivations along with their choices in their fanfics. For Kittya Cullen, Aria, Gillywulf, and Writegirl, they challenge how particular characters or groups of people are represented in either the original text or fanfic genre conventions. To write fanfic is not only to engage with the texts, characters, and universes, but to recognize genre conventions from the original texts and either mirror or challenge them.

Fantasy television shows or movies, like GOT, often replicate misogynistic and/or racist conventions in the texts. In GOT, Writegirl argues the writers removed both Sansa’s and Missandei’s agency. Writegirl’s fic is a critical uptake of fantasy genre conventions in which women characters — particularly women characters of color — are subjected to constant violence. Writegirl explicitly states that she “wanted [Sansa] to have a little bit more agency” and she wanted to give Missandei “some of her dignity back.” Kittya Cullen, too, explains that her early writing was satirical as a way to critique the original texts. The satire genre often mimics generic conventions with an intent to both humor an audience as well as address specific political ideologies. Satire, when produced with a critical eye, is almost always a critical uptake because of its familiarity and resistance to particular generic conventions.

While Gillywulf and Valk do not discuss combating specific harmful conventions from the original texts, both address conventions they notice in the large fandom community and fanfic genres. Gillywulf provides a specific example of critical uptake: her TLOK fanfic was a series of short vignettes — 400 vignettes in total — based on prompts offered by other fans. She specifically addresses two prompts: one that asks her to write about a teacher/student relationship and one that asks her to write a slavefic. Both genres are popular in fandoms. The teacher/student relationship imagines a sexual and intimate relationship between a teacher and student, while slavefics imagine a sexual and intimate relationship between a person enslaved and the person who enslaved them. Both genres fetishize the harmful power dynamics.

The critical uptake, here, is seamless and easy to trace. First, there is the general genres of slavefics and teacher/student relationships; then, there is the prompt genre in which one fan requests another fan to produce something; finally, there’s Gillywulf’s actual fic. She knows the conventions well, but instead of accepting the prompt, her fics actively resist these conventions because she “didn't want to contribute to it.” Instead of writing a conventional slavefic between Korra and Asami, Gillywulf imagines that Korra is enslaved by Asami’s father and Asami straight up refuses to accept her father’s “gift.” Instead, Asami promises to free Korra. There is no mention of a sexual relationship. For the teacher/student relationship fic, Gillywulf imagines Asami — the teacher — actively refusing Korra’s—the students’ — sexual advancements. In many teacher/student fics, the student usually initiates the relationship, almost attempting to placate the uncomfortable power dynamics; even if the teacher is hesitant at first, they wind up accepting the students’ advances. Several prompts after kept asking Gillywulf to expand on this story, and she complied, reimaging Korra as a recent college graduate, rather than Asami’s current student.

Valk also discusses fan genre conventions that trouble them, specifically the “incredily heteronormative” conventions in GOT fanfics. Valk points out how the romance genre — specifically romance fics depicting Jaime’s and Brienne’s relationship — usually celebrates traditional gender roles. Valk says, “Just their gender roles and Brienne being vulnerable and weak and all that stuff again.” One of the reasons Valk chose to write their fanfic, which reimagines Jaime (canonically cis male) as exploring his gender identity, to challenge these heteronormative conventions, or as Valk said “so I wrote my own instead.”

Finally, while many of the critical uptakes involve the authors challenging a particular convention they find troubling, both Kittya Cullen and Aria discuss the importance of fiction and fandoms to reshape readers’ perspectives and engage them politically. Aria says, “there's a study I think that says that when you get into rational arguments about things you don't convince them, but if you tell stories you can.” Aria’s fiction centers storytelling for the purpose of reaching and convincing others. Her uptake of original texts and fanfic genres are explicitly to engage others’ critical thinking. Kittya Cullen expresses a similar reason for writing and reading fiction, explaining that one of her goals is “how can [she] better represent experiences of people in the world?” Aria and Kittya explicitly state these motivations that drive their critical writing and uptakes, but these motivations to reshape the world and readers’ perspectives linger through every author’s responses.

Quotes

• Aria: When I'm writing this fic it means something, because I'm like... There's a study I think that says that when you get into rational arguments about things you don't convince them, but if you tell stories you can. And I think that I'm in that place, arguing about politics in the fiction space of the internet.
• Aria: And then I wrote a piece called [inaudible 00:05:42], which was sort of like a revisiting of what does... I guess it was actually about immigration, it's just I never really ever got around to doing a piece about immigration system, but somebody had a bad take about immigration in America in a piece of fanfic and I was like, "God, that's a really bad understanding of that friend. That is utopian and wrong."
• Aria: For me, this text begins both as like, I was reading a lot about Stonewall and the context around Stonewall, and also I was reading a piece about PTSD, and it was just very surface, very basic understanding of trauma and PTSD in particular, like something you recover from, in a way that I was not super comfortable with. And sort of the original text, not sure if you would agree. And so I wanted to talk about disability through the context of being something you come to live with, and come to integrate, and come to find becomes a part of you life, but also something you still struggle with, instead of just, I don't know, a lot of us have seen the story a lot like, you get better, and then you get better and you win. And then one day it doesn't bother you.
• Aria: I was coming into my own politically, I was becoming my own political individual in a way I hadn't been before. Like I had politics, but this is around the time that I'm really radicalized, and just me engaging with those contexts.
• Aria: I chose the end of Season Three because it's the place where I felt like I was reading a... I felt like engaging with the original text, I was feeling like I wanted something different, I wanted a more deep and meaningful engagement with disability and trauma in this context. Because reading the original text is like, it's there for a while and then they're better? So it was almost the opposite feeling, what do I think this looks like? And so that's why I chose that.
• Aria: So I was under the impression, reading or engaging with this text, I came away with this feeling like the Northern Water Tribe is somewhat... very different from the rest of the world, and there are ways that it plays as... I don't know if it was textual or sort of fan-driven more, but I remember coming away with this feeling that there is a marginalized subjectivity in the Northern Water Tribe. And so telling this story about difference in culture, and we'll get to... I'll get to Korra's upbringing a little bit later, because you're going to ask about 10 minutes later about Korra's upbringing. But I want to... Basically that I think Korra's upbringing is particularly reflective of that culture, yeah.
• Aria: I come away from Korra feeling like, "This is a gender thing going on." I don't buy that there's not homophobia in a world with gender in the like weird way that... In ways that still reflect our I think gender and homophobia [inaudible 00:21:13], the way that we have a sense of gender. Big, capital G Gender. And so I thought like, "What does it mean to have culture in the context of... What does it mean to be a cosmopolitan city where... There's both a degree of marginalization for like the Northern Water Tribe closing... Not so much that rules that are really intended to enforce gender norms are going to be there. And also to be like, "Yeah, there's probably a different understanding of gender in context," yeah.
• Aria: Whereas Korra grows up in this institution, Asami grows up with a relatively politically progressive father. He's an abuser, but he's also a very, very politically progressive man. He's a radical, he tries to overthrow his government, make the world a more equitable and fair place. It's self-interested, he's a bourgeois radical, but I wouldn't have said that at the time. I imagine Asami as having a relatively normal, relatively healthy understanding of the world in a way, having felt like she, not just knowing that a woman can love another woman, because I guess almost every person in this world knows. This is nothing like, Korra is particularly going to have a hard time because of that institution itself.
• Aria: So to me, Hiroshi's both a man that would destroy his children for the things he believes, and in some sense for his own power. But also a man who genuinely is providing aid and comfort and resources for fighting for what he views as liberation, and that liberation's probably genuine at some level. I think it's fair to say that there is a political bender-like supremacy at the beginning. I mean there is, we know there's a bender supremacy at the beginning of The Legend of Korra. And so that's how I understand Hiroshi.
• Aria: I wanted to give a sense of what is the politics of the Northern Water Tribe? And I kind of wanted to say that queerness isn't criminalized in the Northern Water Tribe, or is not criminalized anymore. Also I wanted to say this is a different relationship. But the other thing I wanted to talk about is, what are politicians willing to give up for their family, and what are they not?
• Aria: Because I know what our reactionary politics is like, I think I'd start around the time that Kuvira is beginning to gain power. I'd write it as a story that talks about immigration, and talks about sweeping panic and fear that spill off of that. I'd probably talk about gender through those lenses, and I'd probably talk about humanity in a slightly more complex... I'd probably make it a story that... I'd probably both use modern messages to say that, I'd probably talk more about police state, and police state as endless spying networks where you don't know when you're being spied on and when you're not, and endless police states
• Aria: Also, if you're looking at a subtext, my people they were like, "Oh yeah, I want to tell this story, I want to finish this story." And there's a degree to which it a queer reading, there's this political tendency to look at fiction and say, "I am going to tell the story you didn't." And so during the subtext period, you've already got these people who are basically being like, "Yo, I'm going to tell this story.
• Aria: Okay, my first guess would be that women who love women will write about women who love women, want to tell stories that have happy endings. I think in a lot of the stories we see in literature are of our destruction as a moral point, or the echoes of authority. That doesn't mean that all of the stories that we see that are echoes of stories are intended as seeing those moral and political tellings, they're just, "That's what our culture tells us." A lesbian love story, so retelling... If women who love women retell stories of women who love women, they're going to tell a lot of stories that are about being happy, at least in my opinion.
• GillyWulf: And then, just seeing the way her relationship sort of evolved with Asami over time, especially once you get into the third season, was like, "Okay, I'm into this. Whether or not they're going for it, I see it." So, it was like, "All right. I and a lot of the people in the fandom seem to agree for some reason, so I'm just going to go there and enjoy that while I'm doing it.
• GillyWulf: Yeah. And I always thought her relationship with Mako felt super forced, and then, I didn't like that he cheated on both of them with each other. It was like, "Jeez. No, no. He should not be in a relationship with either of them after this." Yeah. I always felt like maybe Mako should take five steps back, and let's just focus on these two.
• GillyWulf: If you set those boundaries, people generally stick to it. If you tell people flat out, "I'm not going to write that," they generally won't press and press, and ask, "Why aren't you?" Because I just find keeping people as slaves is super ... I didn't want to contribute to it, and it was just that sort of idea [inaudible 00:47:42] maybe are younger and a little bit more impressionable than I am, so maybe it's okay to put things that they haven't been exposed to before, but also, it doesn't need to be a weird thing.
• GillyWulf: Especially with the prompts and setting boundaries like you mentioned earlier. It's writing what you want.
• Kittya Cullen: To realizing that there was a community of people who were also interested in discussing how these shows and books and games et cetera were failing us, whether it was in terms of the content or the representation or just releasing new things like thought arcs that weren't followed through on.
• Kittya Cullen: Actually, I completely forgot, there was a period where I would write like a satirical review of what was happening, because I don't do that anymore for anything really. But it was an opportunity to experiment with writing and being critical of source materials and so on.
• Kittya Cullen: And in terms of relationships and love and so forth, it was I guess just coming back to what I like to explore in fiction, which is how people are interacting with each other, what it means for them. And especially for certain characters who are ... I'm not sure how I'm thinking of this, but I think what I'm thinking of is where the audience may usually dismiss them or not consider them worthy of further exploration. So I like to see for myself how their worth is existing within these relationships, what it means for them and what it can mean for the audience and so forth.
• Kittya Cullen: The universe raises really interesting conversations about inequality and power and change and so forth, but we kind of always see it from the position of the privileged. And I think that's my favorite thing about fandom and fan fiction, how fans sort of delve into all these areas in canon that either there wasn't time to explore or it didn't really seem to be important enough to explore, so things like inequality. When I write now, it's just always in the forefront, "How can I better represent experiences of people in the world," not just for myself, but for other people, what they're going through.
• Kittya Cullen: And I think I'd actually forgotten about this until someone else had written it in their own fanfiction, which is part of what's so fun about reading fanfiction. There are all these ideas that you don't quite pickup on right away, but someone else mentions it, and it clicks, and you start to rotate the world and look at it from a different angle.
• Valk: Mainly regarding the pairings that would show up, it would be mainly non-hetero pairings if that makes more sense than just saying a pairing because there would be some exploring of gender and what not with some characters. Or I would definitely be focusing on male-male or female-female relationships as well, because a lot of the media already does a lot of the male-female exploration. And a lot of the purpose of fandom is to sort of explore beyond what we're just given.
• Valk: I wanted to actually put some Game of Thrones content on those tags to begin with because back when I was writing it, there wasn't a lot really going for it. LGBT fanfics, yeah sure, but gender fluid and gender related things, it wasn't really there.
• Valk: Like, where is this content that should be out there because it's in the books and why is no one taking this up and writing about it?
• Valk: There's a lot of, again, fanfic already out there of them being intimate, but it was all very incredibly heteronormative. Just their gender roles and Brienne being vulnerable and weak and all that stuff again. I was just not really feeling it, so I wrote my own instead.
• Valk: Yeah, it's depressingly small. I know that when I was writing it, there was a lot less fanfic, but you would think even with Jaime and Brienne having that very unique friendship/relationship
• Valk: I would almost want to just write fic out of spite.
• WriteGirl: So, how do I give her, I hate to say the word, but some of her dignity back? If she has to die, I thought it really should be on her terms. That was kind of the motivation for that.
• WriteGirl: That was another reason with the fic I kind of wanted to delve a little bit into her as a standalone, not in relation to anyone else. Kind of like, who is Missandei? If you take away slavery, and her being Daenerys' friend, who is this person? What is the one thing that would be important to her? Because there aren't really a lot of fics that focus on her as a character at all. She's just kind of always at the side. That's kind of where I got the thing that is, I don't know if I was a former slave. The one thing I would be sure of when I got my freedom was, I will never be made a slave again in any way, shape or form. So what does that translate into? That translates into, you're not going to use me. I'm not going to stand to be abused anymore. And that's kind of how all that bloomed up. I'd really like to see a bit more of that in Game of Thrones fanfiction. She's really an underused character.
• WriteGirl: Missandei deserved better, as you've already talked about. She did. So did Grey Worm. I can't believe they took that pairing from me. I thought that if any pairing would last, that one would. And then, [inaudible 00:24:23].
• WriteGirl: I wanted her to have a little bit more agency. It seemed like from the time we see her in the Baelish dress, with the feathers on it, which she's actually taking on a mockingbird, that that was a glimpse of a darker Sansa, a more politically savvy Sansa, a more adult Sansa. And then, for whatever reason, they backed off of it. And then the next thing we see her, she's just kind of sitting there asking questions, looking dull. And that was a little irritating to me. So I wanted her to get a little more agency, especially when she found out who she was supposed to be meeting. I didn't see Sansa ever agreeing to that.
• WriteGirl: I just couldn't see a Sansa, even one who was beaten down, agreeing to that. She's still a Stark. She still has her pride. So, I thought of, okay, so what would Sansa do in this situation?
• WriteGirl: And like she says in the fic even if I get bit by a lizard-lion or I starve, that's my choice. But it won't be going back to a ruined Winterfell to marry a legitimized bastard.
• WriteGirl: It doesn't matter if it's to save my life. Even if you said that okay, "This is the only thing you can do to survive," at this point, she's run. She's re-discovered her strength. She's done something that she didn't think she could do. She got away for a time. So, at this point she's just like, "No, I can't do it. I won't do it." That was kind of that whole, what that episode was about was Sansa really re-discovering herself, and what she could do.
• WriteGirl: These were all things she's done because she believes in Daenerys' vision, she believes in a world without slavery. And after having been a slave and experienced freedom, that's something she'd want for everybody. I hate to say it, Harriet Tubman, how many times did she go back and she got slaves and ran them back out? Simply because I'm free, no one should be in bondage, even if it's a personal risk to myself, to my life, that is a risk I will take, because everyone should be free. And I think as a former slave, Missandei really would have that sentiment.
• WriteGirl: She's really seeing Cersei for the creature Cersei is, beyond just being kind of a high-born woman in Westeros. She's seeing the monster that's inside Cersei. Cersei will do anything. She will do anything to maintain power, she will do anything to get back at her enemies, even if it means murder, blackmail, et cetera. And I think Missandei coming from a society where no one would have to hide that from their slaves. She sees it. Like I know you, I've seen masters exactly like you. And she's really recognizing the monster that's in Cersei outside of all of her jewels, outside of her gowns, outside of her façade of being this queen and great lady. It's like, no, you're really this evil thing, and I know it because I've seen it before.
• WriteGirl: It's a smile of, I can't think of the word, but being resigned to my fate. And if this is it, then this is it. And like I say, she recognizes in Cersei the same evil that she saw in Astapor where she's kind of like, "No, you would have fit in well with them. You may think that you're better, you may think that you're better than people from Astapor. You may think that you're better than slave owners and all this, that, and the other, but in the end you are not. You are exactly like them." And in the end, she kind of wants to let her know. It's kind of like a, "I know that you know that I know that you know" moment. Like, I see you. You can't hide from me. I see exactly what you are.
• WriteGirl: Like I said, as a slave, as someone who's been freed, I can't imagine her ever wanting to be in a situation where somebody would be using her against her will. And that would be one thing I imagine you would promise yourself. Kind of like, I hate to use the comparison, but if you ever get out of a really bad relationship, and you're just like, "No, never again. I know the signs. I will never let that happen to me again." And for her of course it's more extreme, from being someone who was taken from freedom and put into slavery, lived a decade plus as a slave, not having a will of their own, and then suddenly getting that will back. No one's ever taking that from me. Like I said, I've found myself. Now that I've found myself again, and I can be myself, I will die myself.

Description

Definition: When a fan celebrates and follows a particular event or character in the original source material (Messina, 2019). AThe term “canon compliant” comes from a popular “Additional Tag” used on AO3 when authors share that their fanfic follow canon. All fanfiction is canon compliant in that it follows from a source material. However, fan communities can vary in the degree to which they allow writers within the community to deviate from the origin source, i.e., the canon. Canon compliant uptakes may include writing a canonical relationship or continuing a canonical plot point. In other words, writers extend an existing story, rather than revising or changing the original character relationships or plots.

Number of Codes: 31

Analysis: Canon compliant uptakes emerge when fans love something in the original text and want to replicate or build upon it in their uptake. Both Aria and Gillywulf use the word “excited” to express the affective relationship between the fan writer, the canonical material, and the fanfic the writer produces.

In TLOK, when Asami and Korra’s budding romance — and therefore their bisexuality — is confirmed canon in the last minute of the show, the fandom erupted with excitement and produced numerous fanfics using the “canon compliant” tag (more about this can be found in “Fandoms by Numbers”). Aria, while reviewing some of the larger tagging trends, pointed out the large increase of “canon compliant” and “canon queer relationship” tags the series finale aired. Tagging practices, such as “canon compliant,” are a method for fan writers to signal to potential readers the different genre conventions and/or content that their piece contains.

Although canon compliant material was found in both fandoms analyzed, the GOT fanfic authors focused more on capturing particular dynamics — cultural and relationship — and characters in their canon compliant uptakes. While Dialux’s, Valk’s, and Writegirl’s pieces do not fall under the “canon compliant” genre — Dialux and Valk are alternate universes and Writegirl is canon divergent, fix-it fics — they make particular choices in their writing that mirror the canonical text. By pulling particular conventions from the original fantasy genre, these writers demonstrate how conventions span across different genres. For example, Dialux believes the regional and cultural tensions in GOT between the North and King’s Landing are similar to those between the Rajput and a Mughal in 16th century India, as depicted in the historical film Jodhaa Akbar. Her piece revolves around these regional, cultural, and religious tensions; she takes up conventions of how to represent cultural difference from two different genres and uses them in a third genre — her racebent, alternate universe fic.

Valk and Writegirl also bring in particular canon compliant choices into their non-canonical fics. Valk centers the tense canonical relationship between Jaime and his father in the original text, and brings that tension into their fic. And even though Writegirl’s fix-it fics reimagine the canon, she wants to make sure her readers can “they can really see [her fic] sliding into canon.” For her, this means also retaining characters’ voices and perspectives to ensure they are not OOC, or “out of character.”

While choosing to mirror particular characters, relationships, and dynamics in a fic is not necessarily a genre in of itself, there are clear expectations in fandoms that fanfics will mirror the canon in character voice and action, unless explicitly stated otherwise. Fanfic writers’ choice to follow canonical details and dynamics is part of fanfic genre expectations, and therefore a form of canon compliant uptake.

Quotes

• Aria: There are things I don't like about it, but I like it as a little bit of text. It's there in the text, it was one of those things that was like, "Oh, I love this, I love feeling represented." So I wrote that.
• Aria: I think I was just engaging with the text's portrayal of trauma.
• Aria: This is the moment when this becomes one of the early queer relationships in cartoons, a relatively good one. There's nothing particularly problematic about it, it's limited, but it's good.
• Aria: First guess is actually that there's a) an explosion of stories that aren't canon compliant, so people are staying people are saying, "This story is canon compliant," as a way of engaging. In terms of, it makes sense to say something's canon-compliant sort of at the end of the piece, because once the story is over then it makes sense to go back and say, "actually this is canon compliant." A lot of stories before a story ends it's already like, "How could this go from here?" And so I would imagine that the canon compliance people were like, "Well, I'm telling this story based on what literally happened," instead of all of these other tellings that I'm seeing now. That would be my first guess. My second guess is that people are excited to tell stories that were literally just after the end of The Legend of Korra
• Aria: I imagine that it's because... It makes sense to tell a friendship story with characters who are already very close friends, and characters who are becoming close friends.
• Aria: I mean, canon queer relationship is more common because there is canon queer relationship.
• Aria: because it looks to me here that what you're seeing is a movement from seeing the word girlfriend in a context of a text that's about a set of texts about relationships in a more heterosexual perspective, in a story about women. Because it looks to me that this is a story that, if you see jealous there, that looks like I'm looking at a piece that's from Korra's point of view. But then if I'm looking at boyfriend, I'm also thinking about Korra and Mako.
• Dialux: And then, of course, you have the Targaryen colors, which are black, which are mourning colors according to the Western culture. And all of it kind of comes together. And, of course, Rajput culture is known for its red, its vibrant, blood red. And obviously, that's a Targaryen color.
• Dialux: But within this particular fic, as I said earlier, I really wanted to already have that tension. Especially that religious tension between Jon and Sansa. And have that difference, where both of them and neither of them are willing to compromise on that.
• Dialux: And the regional tensions, I think, are already there in the canon.
• Dialux: And, I mean, we don't know if she relies more on her religion because she left her homeland, and came to the North. And just wanted some desperate way, something to rely on that's her family, or that reminded her of home. But to me, at least, I can imagine, especially the actual Jodhaa, going to Akbar's Islamic court. And basically being all alone, and not having very many allies. And finding some sort of a solace in her religion of Hinduism.
• GillyWulf: And from those three, you can see that they have very female-centered stories. And then, at least all three are those are canonically queer characters, which are things that now get me really excited and make me want to go, "Okay, well, I want to dive into that. I want to see how their stories could be different," or, "I just really want to see them in this situation," so I try and write it when I can.
• GillyWulf: And okay, well, when you meet somebody, what are the first things you notice? And for Korra, she's an imposing figure, whether or not she means to be. She's got the muscles, she's maybe not as white as everybody else in Republic City, and she's got these really bight eyes. So, those things stand out immediately.
• GillyWulf: Even in the modern drabbles, or the other AU, I tried to keep that as something that, that's what she is, whether or not she can access that.
• GillyWulf: And for Asami, she's gorgeous. Let's be honest. She's gorgeous. So, you notice that, but also, with the death of her mother at a young age, she's sad and growing up with the rich father, she has certain expectations placed on her and where she's going to go in her life according to that company, so she has to be sort of poised and on her toes all the time.
• GillyWulf: So, it's kind of just how I always imagined her parents were just going to always be there for her. And we do see that in season three, where she's immediately going to bat for them and each other.
• GillyWulf: So, I just tried to stay true to that, I guess, in some regard, as far as her relationship went.
• GillyWulf: Well, for that chapter, I want to say, like everything else in the collection, it was a prompt, but it was something that I didn't want to ham-fist it, because Korra's definitely, she's traumatized. We see that more than once,
• GillyWulf: even though I will always love Korra and Asami, it's not necessarily always easy to write for that, if you're not getting constant updates for it.
• GillyWulf: Well, obviously, personal preference aside, I think it was the most fleshed out of Korra's personal relationships with any of the other possible love interests.
• GillyWulf: "Korrasami's canon. That's what it is." So, a lot of people were super excited about that, especially since, up to that point, there really hadn't been a whole lot of huge representation for female ships.
• GillyWulf: So, to see this cartoon suddenly become canon, against a network that had super tried to, god, just tear it apart, it was invigorating, to say the least. Yeah. That's why I have to imagine people took off with it.
• Kittya Cullen: And also on being canon-compliant, but still ... I was working in an area where there was nothing for canon yet. I'm assuming that with the comics now, we'll get more information on that regard. But at the time, there was nothing in that area. So I wanted it to be known that it was still within canon's bounds, but there were going to be things being explored that weren't articulated in canon.
• Valk: I wanted to still carry over the kind of relationship that Jaime and Tywin had in the TV show in the medieval setting, but to modernize it more again, but not take away the fact that Tywin was a very controlling father.
• Valk: I wanted to kind of recreate the feelings that I had when I was reading Jaime and Brienne in their notorious bath house scene. Where this was this very raw moment where Jaime opened up and did his monologue about a knight's duty and how it was, pardon my language, full of shit.
• Valk: I wanted something similar, but would still make me feel like that, but wanted to make it more intimate and feel like it was still just as opening, but with actions and not just with words.
• WriteGirl: I think the strength is, I do try and keep it as much as I can in character, and in situ, I guess. I don't like to pull too much of other outside influences in. I think the strength is that people can read it and they can really see it sliding into canon. And if you go into something aside, you don't have to bump too much. And it would fit in the overall narrative.
• WriteGirl: I have a very hard time getting into certain characters' heads, and seeing like, okay, is this the motivation that they would have? Because I do take that very seriously. So, there are times I'm just like, I can't see this person doing this. I can't see them doing that. How do I get this to fit in with their character and not make it too over the top, or too OOC? That's one of my main challenges.
• WriteGirl: Because one thing as a writer that will pull me completely out of a story is if there is a colloquialism that should not belong. Or if you're using words, and I'm like, okay, I've never heard that word used on the show, so now you've just dropped a bomb in the middle of a wedding cake, and there's cake everywhere. It just pulls me out.
• WriteGirl: There's one thing, to me, if it's too OOC, just out of the block there's no real change, and these drabbles are so short. You can't really see a lot of character development from A to B. Everything kind of has to fit where it does. So I wanted to make sure that it fit and it wasn't too crazy. It's a lot of research.
• WriteGirl: But I can see, especially in Season Five, and Six, and Seven, where you see Jon Snow, Sansa Stark, because these two characters kind of get back together in the show. When they're together, you can see their dynamic in everything else. And they look good together. That's always a good thing. It's always big when it comes to shipping, who looks good with who.

Description

Definition: When fan authors discuss a canon resistant uptake, which is when a fan actively “resists both the implicit and explicit canonical choices made in the original cultural material” (Messina, 2019). This may include writing about a non-canonical relationship, identity bending, or reimagining an alternative plot point.

Number of Codes: 19

Analysis: The canon resistant uptakes demonstrated in the interviews often begin with the writers’ affective responses to a particular moment, choice, or character from the original show. These affective responses may be negative or positive depending on the author’s interpretation of the show, choices made in the show, and the author’s positionality.

Several authors cite they were unhappy with certain choices from the original show that drove them to take their fics in a canon divergent direction. Aria expressed discomfort with the representation of PTSD and trauma in TLOK; she argues the show does not necessarily reflect the reality of living with trauma. In TLOK, Korra recovers from her physical wounds and seems to be able to move past her PTSD, yet Aria points out that many people who experience PTSD have to learn to live with it instead of recovering from it. Writegirl was unhappy with the direction the GOT show writers chose, specifically inconsistencies and plot holes; she specifically uses the phrase “irksome.” She talks about her choice to reimagine Sansa’s storyline, claiming Sansa “suffered a little bit of character assassination.”

Of course, even with their unhappiness, Aria, Writegirl, and the other authors love the source material, as they most likely would not be writing fanfiction for it otherwise. There are other authors, such as Gillywulf, who love specific details or characters in the show that they wanted to capture in their canon resistant uptakes. Gillywulf, for example, began to write romantic Korra/Asami (Korrasami) fanfiction before their romance became part of the official show. Choosing to pair a couple together that is not paired on the original show is a form of canon resistant uptake. Gillywulf talks specifically about wlw (women loving women) ships in fandoms and how fans often imagine characters as developing or having intimate relationships. She says, “ships are meant to be fun, they're not always meant to be canon.” Gillywulf’s original choice to write Korrasami fanfiction came because she liked the idea of Korra and Asami as a couple.

Valk also expresses a love for Jaime and Brienne’s characters in GOT. Jaime/Brienne are the most popular ship in GOT according to the GOT fandom by numbers data analysis, and they do have a romance on the show. Yet, Valk chooses to view Brienne and Jaime differently than many GOT fanfic writers. They reimagine Jaime, who is canonically male, as wanting to explore his gender through the use of makeup and other forms of aesthetic expression. Brienne, Jaime’s roommate in the fanfic, helps Jaime put on his makeup and supports him in his gender exploration and expression. While Valk’s entire piece is canon resistant, they particularly hone in on why they reimagine Brienne as a supportive, stable friend to Jaime; Valk reimagines Brienne as “more comfortable in her skin” than she is in GOT, potentially due to a lack of social forces pushing her to conform to particular gender roles. Valk’s choices in reimagining both Brienne and Jaime’s characters are not only canon resistant, but also resist larger trends in the Brienne/Jaime shipping fandom.

These different examples — the canon resistant uptakes inspired by unhappiness or excitement from an original text’s direction — reveal how canon resistant uptakes are forms of love letters to the original show, but love letters that are written from different positionalities and ways of viewing the world than the original show.

Quotes

• Aria: For me, this text begins both as like, I was reading a lot about Stonewall and the context around Stonewall, and also I was reading a piece about PTSD, and it was just very surface, very basic understanding of trauma and PTSD in particular, like something you recover from, in a way that I was not super comfortable with. And sort of the original text, not sure if you would agree. And so I wanted to talk about disability through the context of being something you come to live with, and come to integrate, and come to find becomes a part of you life, but also something you still struggle with, instead of just, I don't know, a lot of us have seen the story a lot like, you get better, and then you get better and you win. And then one day it doesn't bother you.
• Dialux: So, I initially wanted to make sure that it was pretty clear to everyone that this was a canon divergence. Where one where Rhaegar has won, Jon is raised a Targaryen.
• Dialux: A Jon who would grow up in a Targaryen court would look very different in the Targaryen [inaudible 00:53:09] than with a Targaryen father.
• Dialux: And the thing is, as much as he looked like Ned on a physical level, Ned is not the Ned that we see in canon. Because he's very much a person who has been basically warring for however Jon has been alive.
• Dialux: Because, actually, Aishwarya Rai, who plays Jodhaa, does not have brown eyes. She has hazel eyes.
• Dialux: But Sansa, she didn't have any such love interests. I mean, obviously, I was shipping her with Jon and everything. But there was no actual canonical basis for that on any level.
• GillyWulf: so it was, when I think I started it, Korrasami hadn't been canon yet. So, it's definitely interesting, the before and after. And maybe, I think, during that time, also, gay marriage was legalized, so it was just definitely different attitudes in that. I think those are some of the strengths in seeing that as well.
• GillyWulf: They wanted to be friends first, but they were so good together that I wanted to be able to sometimes just say they can be immediate, sometimes.
• GillyWulf: Obviously, there's always going to be people who say, "I want a female ship. Going for it. I don't care whether or not they necessarily gel." I'm sure there's people ... I feel like I went back a million years ago and looked at the first Korrasami fics, just out of curiosity, to see when they were published, and I'm sure that they were like episode one, because it's just what people do, and it's great. Ships are meant to be fun, they're not always meant to be canon.
• Valk: My strengths in this fic for me was being able to try and incorporate as much of Jaime and Brienne's banter and relationship, as much as I could to a modern setting because obviously they wouldn't be having as much of a, you know Brienne wouldn't be considered as horrifying as she was considered in the original text because she was considered man-ish. In modern day context, it's not always encouraged, based on what kind of family you came from, women are often allowed to be tom boys more than vice versa. There was a challenge of trying to see, okay, Brienne wouldn't have had as traumatic a childhood probably regarding her own gender identity. But there would definitely be some push back, but how would that change based on the setting? I made her a little bit more comfortable in her skin than Jaime and also having her there to sort of be a foil and a supportive shoulder for Jaime who was going through a similar thing that maybe she went through as well.
• WriteGirl: So, right when about Season Seven hit, I started getting a little bit upset about the writing in Game of Thrones. And then by the time Season Eight hit, I was just like, "Oh no. No, no, no, no, no. I can't deal with this." I got a bit more involved with writing, because my brain was like, "No, this isn't how it should go. We need to redo all this whole thing." It really started picking up in Season Seven. That was the first time I wrote a Game of Thrones fanfiction. And I believe that was my other OtherWhen series, the first one.
• WriteGirl: I don't know if you're a Dr. Who fan. One of my favorite Doctor Who episodes is Turn Left. And it's a whole episode that's based on the concept of, what if he didn't turn right? What if instead of going the road you're supposed to go, you kind of went that way? And I've always been fascinated by that. I love Choose Your Own Adventure stories, and things like that. I don't like following the written script. So that's one of the reasons why I went into fix-it fics. There's times and places where I was like, that wouldn't happen. I know that's how it happens in the story, but based on the world that they're in, historical context, things like that, that's not how that would. So, that's kind of my brain's way of reconciling not bad writing, but just maybe inconsistent writing, or little things that were just irksome. That's kind of how I got into that.
• WriteGirl: That I've actually written about 200 pages for. But that was just the one pivotal scene. So I was like, okay, I'm just going to take you out and put you here, and then leave you alone.
• WriteGirl: But all of a suddenly, this particular set of characters is no longer in the picture. So how does that affect everything else? How does Daenerys Targaryen deal with a kingdom that is pretty much united with a war hero still on the throne?
• WriteGirl: I chose Sansa in particular, and I think you're talking about the Petyr Baelish one, because I felt she suffered a little bit of character assassination.
• WriteGirl: I wanted to kind of show a Sansa who was still herself. A Sansa who was willing to not listen to him, who understood that, this person is not my friend. This person is strictly manipulative. He's going to take me somewhere that I don't want to go, so my only choice is to find the strength in me that she has, and say, "Okay, I'll run. If it means I have to die, I'm not going to let him use me for whatever his ends are." That's kind of where that idea came from.
• WriteGirl: She was supposed to kind of get lost in the trees, and they were supposed to find her. But I thought that was a little bit ignominious for her. So then I remembered, Oh, Nimeria's wolf pack. I was like, they haven't used that in the show at all, so why not?
• WriteGirl: Alternate universe, canon divergence just to let people know, this isn't following canon, because I did not want to get blasted on that one.
• WriteGirl: It doesn't matter if it's to save my life. Even if you said that okay, "This is the only thing you can do to survive," at this point, she's run. She's re-discovered her strength. She's done something that she didn't think she could do. She got away for a time. So, at this point she's just like, "No, I can't do it. I won't do it." That was kind of that whole, what that episode was about was Sansa really re-discovering herself, and what she could do.

Description

Definition: When fan authors discuss an implicit-explicit uptake, which is when a fan “analyzes the subtext of the show and makes the subtext explicit in their fanfictions” (Messina, 2019). This may include writing from another characters’ perspective or exploring a romantic relationship that may be inferred.

Number of Codes: 25

Analysis: Fan author’s implicit-explicit uptakes are often motivated by them wanting to explore a particular dynamic, character, or plotline in further detail while also making assumptions based on information provided by the text — also known as interpreting the subtext. Writegirl, Valk, and Kittya each expressed curiosity about a particular character, wanting to explore that character further. Writegirl, for example, wonders what “life would have been like for [Missandei],” and uses this as motivation for her fanfic. This is an implicit-explicit uptake because Writegirl uses all her knowledge of both the show and the novels in order to make assumptions about Missandei’s backstory. Valk writes in the alternate universe genre, which is typically a canon resistant uptake.

However, similar to Writegirl, Valk still wants to explore Jaime’s character based on their knowledge of the show, but in another universe that is not GOT. They point specifically to the “residual toxic masculinity” of Jaime’s character, both in the show and in their fanfic. Finally, Kittya decides to write about Asami because “I like to see how the characters are responding to what's happening to them rather than having the plot happen to them, and with Asami there was just so much room to do that.” This again points to an implicit-explicit uptake of a character in that Kittya follows the plot arc of the show and stays as true to the show as possible, while still exploring a character who Kittya believes received little attention on the show. For each of these implicit-explicit uptakes, the authors reveal both their intimate knowledge of the text as well as their ability to more deeply analyze particular characters based on details from the show.

Often implicit-explicit uptakes occur when a fanfic author is interested in learning more about a character, implicit-explicit uptakes also occur when an author makes assumptions about the original text’s universe or relationships between two characters based on details. Aria describes several choices she made in her fanfic based on assumptions from the show, such as how different cultures in TLOK understood gender and sexuality, a character probably not knowing how to cook, and another character being a “bourgeoisie radical.” Aria’s analysis of the different cultures in TLOK demonstrates both her knowledge of the show as well as an understanding of cultural difference.

In reflecting on often used implicit-explicit uptakes in fandoms, several authors point to popular relationship pairings in fanfics as representative of fans reading the subtext of the original text. Valk, for example, wonders why there are not more Sansa/Margaery fics as their potential romance is “literally right here,” referring to the subtext of the show. Dialux also points to a potential romance between Jon and Sansa based on the trailer for GOT’s season six, when fans began speculating about Jon and Sansa’s relationship. Similarly, Gillywulf addresses the Korra/Asami fics written before the show confirmed their relationship was canonical. Specifically, Gillywulf points to a moment between Korra and Asami in the third season after Korra was injured. She says, “Asami looked the most scared out of everybody, and her reaction to her offer to stay with Korra through her recovery, and help any way she can was sort of, ‘That's a little gayer than it maybe should be,’ that sort of look. So, a lot of people took that and decided to go with it.” Gillywulf points to fans’ abilities to analyze the subtext and draw particular assumptions, then write fanfics about these assumptions. Based on simply Asami’s facial expression, Gillywulf and others performed implicit-explicit uptakes.

Quotes

• Aria: So I was under the impression, reading or engaging with this text, I came away with this feeling like the Northern Water Tribe is somewhat... very different from the rest of the world, and there are ways that it plays as... I don't know if it was textual or sort of fan-driven more, but I remember coming away with this feeling that there is a marginalized subjectivity in the Northern Water Tribe. And so telling this story about difference in culture, and we'll get to... I'll get to Korra's upbringing a little bit later, because you're going to ask about 10 minutes later about Korra's upbringing. But I want to... Basically that I think Korra's upbringing is particularly reflective of that culture, yeah.
• Aria: I come away from Korra feeling like, "This is a gender thing going on." I don't buy that there's not homophobia in a world with gender in the like weird way that... In ways that still reflect our I think gender and homophobia [inaudible 00:21:13], the way that we have a sense of gender. Big, capital G Gender. And so I thought like, "What does it mean to have culture in the context of... What does it mean to be a cosmopolitan city where... There's both a degree of marginalization for like the Northern Water Tribe closing... Not so much that rules that are really intended to enforce gender norms are going to be there. And also to be like, "Yeah, there's probably a different understanding of gender in context," yeah.
• Aria: Asami probably can't like cook...because I think it's either canonical or in fanon, and I kind of like that, because I like the notion that... I like the notion that someone who's very good at some things, but just not good at other things.
• Aria: I think that this is a piece that comes from a weird part of what I understood about that world. To me, Korra grows up in a compound with people who are older than her, who aren't likely to tell her the truth about things. Because the White Lotus is an organization of people who are fundamentally keeping her apart. And I remember being like, "Oh, these folks are not going to tell a child about queer sexuality." Particularly sexuality is a hard topic, you grow up in that kind of compound in a world where queer identities are looked down on, you're going to come away with this very strange view about that. And you might just be told nothing.
• Aria: Because I imagine Korra's pain is seeing the cost of her new trauma after time, because her being injured, being in a place where you are tortured to death as a vulnerability. Every time you experience that pain, I imagine that that's a place that engagement is a struggle after time when you're in that pain. So it's an ordeal for Korra to dress herself.
• Aria: In the context of this piece, a lot of my understanding of Hiroshi as a bourgeois radical is that I'm not going to have a [inaudible 00:30:36], because I don't really have a sense of class politics at the time, or have the beginnings of that study. That's only beginning to be born
• Aria: Also, if you're looking at a subtext, my people they were like, "Oh yeah, I want to tell this story, I want to finish this story." And there's a degree to which it a queer reading, there's this political tendency to look at fiction and say, "I am going to tell the story you didn't." And so during the subtext period, you've already got these people who are basically being like, "Yo, I'm going to tell this story.
• Dialux: I think I obviously can't give an explanation for a lot of these. But I think that they make sense, to a certain extent, because there definitely are a lot more heterosexual relationships within this fandom than I've seen in a lot of other fandoms. And I think that's probably because we don't have one main character and one side character that's like the sidekick to the main character, both of them being male. You don't have that here.
• Dialux: Because I know that a lot of people had mentioned that it was at the beginning of Season Six. Like, when a couple of trailers came out regarding Sansa meeting up with somebody in the North. It was kind of staging with Ramsay Bolton. That Jon Snow and Sansa Stark fandom kind of really took off. And it was the beginning of Season Six that it really, properly emerged. So, it would be interesting to see if there is a cookie cutter point that you can identify like, this is where the general public kind of suddenly said, "Oh, this is the moment."
• GillyWulf: The first being that we only get a certain amount of them in canon.
• GillyWulf: At the end of season three, we saw that development and we saw, especially during Korra's fight with Zaheer, Asami looked the most scared out of everybody, and her reaction to her offer to stay with Korra through her recovery, and help any way she can was sort of, "That's a little gayer than it maybe should be," that sort of look. So, a lot of people took that and decided to go with it, especially since the relationship was [inaudible 01:00:21], whether or not ... Again, and at that time, we didn't know the writer's intention, so it was just everybody, or at least Korrasami fans, picking up on it and saying, "Okay, well, we don't know when season four is happening, so we're just going to kick off from there and this is what could happen."
• Kittya Cullen: I kind of wanted to see that explored in my own way. And with Asami in particular, and this was surprising for me because usually I'm all for the main character. I never really remember to think about the other ... But with Asami, it felt like there was this big gap available to us for exploration.
• Kittya Cullen: So I kind of wanted to explore that and see how Asami herself was dealing with it. Because for me I like to see how the characters are responding to what's happening to them rather than having the plot happen to them, and with Asami there was just so much room to do that.
• Kittya Cullen: And also on being canon-compliant, but still ... I was working in an area where there was nothing for canon yet. I'm assuming that with the comics now, we'll get more information on that regard. But at the time, there was nothing in that area. So I wanted it to be known that it was still within canon's bounds, but there were going to be things being explored that weren't articulated in canon.
• Kittya Cullen: Whereas, for Asami, Asami didn't have anyone, or at least maybe in her head she didn't have anyone. So she went back to someone, I guess who is an ... I wouldn't say an abuser because there isn't that dynamic for them. But in the way that the relationship shifts from love and care to an act of violence ... I don't know. I just wanted to explore that. It's just fascinating to me to see how people who were deeply hurt somehow still find a way to circle back around to the people who have hurt them.
• Valk: You never really hear about what Jaime thought about it. I sort of delved into this idea trying to explore Jaime reacquainting himself with these things later on in life, but through a modern lens because I also wanted to be able to relate to it as well.
• Valk: from the source material where I wanted to kind of explore Jaime's perspective on this, but through a modern lens and later on in life because a lot of Jaime's self-realization in the book comes after he meets Brienne as well.
• Valk: I just find their relationship in canon to be so interesting because it was one of the first pairings, I should add the first male-female pairing, the first hetero pairing that I felt emotionally invested in to a point where I was surprised.
• Valk: even in the context of like the canon, he always had a very strange affinity, but like an affinity for femininity. Weirdly enough, like he loved his mother, he loved Cersei, but he was always very partial to seeing things from their point of view.
• Valk: I think he definitely is someone that would pick up on someone's interests and what not and what that means to them, either subconsciously or consciously channel it when he's handling it.
• Valk: That's definitely something that is taught in canon with him, in terms of never showing your full hand of cards to the enemy, being deceitful and it's all to reach your goal. I think that would still carry over to a modern setting, but it would be more toned down into a more reasonable kind of thing like, "I don't want to seem like this is actually for me. I'm buying it for someone else." If I don't want to get lambasted or judged or anything like that. Residual toxic masculinity and all of that.
• Valk: I ship Sansa and Marjory and I tried to write fic for them, but I don't know why it never picked up. Marjory just walked around the whole show just hitting on everyone. I was like why isn't there more of this? It's literally right here.
• WriteGirl: That was my take on the scene where Brienne and Pod meet her in the tavern, where she seems to be at first a little surprised, a little relieved, and then you kind of see her shut down a bit.
• WriteGirl: But in my mind, I didn't think she didn't want it because she didn't necessarily trust Brienne, it was more because Peter would never let her go. Even if this person said, "I'm going to help you," he would never allow that, because he wants control of her, and that is something that she realizes, because she's not an idiot. She's seen this man in King's Landing, she sees how he operates. She sees how he operates in the Eyrie. If he doesn't have total control of her, he's not going to allow it. And the best way to do that would be to get rid of these two people. And she doesn't want anyone to die for her. So that was kind of my read on that situation.
• WriteGirl: So yeah, [Missandei]'s such an interesting character. There's so much about her that could be written that isn't written. I just kind of wanted to investigate a little bit. What would life have been like for this character?

Description

Definition: When fan authors discuss a fan practice uptake, which is when a fan takes up fan genre practices in the fan community, such as engaging with fan genre conventions or implementing specific tagging practices.

Number of Codes: 30

Analysis: When sharing fan practice uptakes, the fan author's point to larger conventions in fan communities that often occur across fandoms, such as similar practices in both GOT and TLOK fandoms. Of course, these conventions still engage with the original text, but these uptakes are specific to fan communities. Reading each fan authors’ transcripts show shared discourse, such as words like “fanon,” “shipping,” and “AU.” There is a specific, shared discourse when discussing and participating in generic conventions, tagging practices, and other fandom activities.

First, each author reflects on particular fanfic generic forms that are mainly found in fan communities and known by members across these communities. Dialux’s fanfic is a great example. She wrote her fic based on a request from another fan. The fan wanted “historical AU, alternate universe, especially a middle aged one, with angst and a happy ending.” This stream of suggestions, which Dialux was able to accommodate, demonstrates shared discourse and an understanding of common fanfic generic conventions. Aria also points to the difference between fanfic generic conventions and “literary” genres; she says she used to label her pieces as angst or fluff, but recently began seeing her genre participation as separate from these fanfic genre conventions. Participating in and being able to recognize these generic forms demonstrates a shared fan practice; while fans engage and define these practices, they are enacting fan practice uptakes.

Another form of fan practice uptakes are methods for discoverability and authors attempting to reach their audience, such as using hashtags or keywords depending on the platform. Since this project specifically looks at Archive of Our Own (AO3), the fan authors all discuss tagging practices on AO3. There are different author-selected categories for tagging, from the characters that appear in the author’s fanfic to additional tags the author can choose. Each of these tags can be used to search (include or exclude) while readers try to find their ideal fanfics. Tagging is a form of fan practices uptake in that authors need to know specific discourse and use this discourse to reach their audience. Kittya, for example, talks about how she did not understand tagging practices when she wrote her fanfic; she says, “ I wasn't quite sure what tags to use because I was still learning.” However, there is not one proper way to tag a fanfic. While there is a shared discourse, fans can also practice tagging in individual ways. As Gillywulf points out, some authors choose to write full sentences in the Additional Tags, rather than merely choosing a few key words that mirror fans’ shared discourse. While Gillywulf does not like to write sentence-long tags, this example demonstrates that there are particular expectations that fans often break or challenge in their uptake of fan practices.

Understanding tagging as an uptake is important because the author is not only trying to originally reach their ideal audience, but their fanfic must follow through on the tag’s promise. If an author chooses the tag “Alternate Universe,” then their fic typically engages with AU generic conventions. Writegirl also signals how important tagging practices are, especially in the GOT fandom. She says some readers respond to the tags authors use and argue that they used incorrect tags; correcting authors’ tagging choices is another fan practices uptake. So not only are there expectations for particular discourse to be used when tagging, but the actual text must take up the tags’ promises and, if the text does not, readers may critique and potentially ostracize the author from the fandom.

Another form of fan practice uptakes are fan-specific activities that occur in fan spaces. Dialux points to this in her motivation for writing fics. She participates in several fan community activities, such as the “Yuletide assignment” and the “Jonsa Exchange” (Jonsa is Jon/Sansa romantic fanfics). These activities vary based on the fandom, platform, and generic form. Often, though, they are large prompts that invite fans to create art, from illustrations or fanfics. The “Jonsa Exchange,” for example, pairs authors together and they request different types of fics; as I mentioned previously, Dialux wrote her fic for this exchange based on another fan’s prompt. To participate in these activities is a form of fan practice uptakes, as fans are literally taking up the assignments and creating another generic form in response.

Another example of fan-specific uptakes are fan translations, as Kittya discusses. Fans translate particular texts, such as a show or novel for other fans to make the text accessible. Kitya used fan translations after she moved to North America and wanted to continue watching Hindi shows; she could not speak Hindi fluently, so she relied on these fan translations. Finally, fans often inspire each other through their art, and other fans will specifically take up their art. Gillywulf provides several examples of this. One fan artist drew several pictures based on Gillywulf’s fanfic; Gillywulf’s last chapter in her fanfic is inspired by another fan artists’ painting; and Gillywulf specifically mirrors writing practices one of her favorite fanfic authors utilizes in their fanfics. The creativity flourishing in fan communities demonstrates how fans take up fan generic conventions, inspiring and forming bonds with each other.

Quotes

• Aria: People are like, "Oh..." When people talk about RWBY, the way they talk about the White Fang is the way they talk about radical politics. And I don't know if they realize it, but I always get really annoyed, because this is like bad political theory. It's very normal American political theory, but it's also bad. It's very much like, "Oh, there's no justification for violence," it's like, "I don't agree."
• Aria: Also I think it's when fiction ends, it does draw people who are like, "Oh, I want to write more on this subject, I want to play with these concepts again." There's also a distinct un-ended-ness
• Aria: I think the redo of the relationship, the exploration is limited, is kind of bad. But I also think that the way that we end somewhere where it's like, they just want to be married, or at the end of their first date, we did see them agree, yeah I want to do this. Yeah, I want to have this, or I like this, it's healthy. I love that! I just see that as a lot of things for writers to engage with.[inaudible 00:47:08] what are other ways we can imagine it?
• Aria: And that creates fanon, which means you get this whole long space of people being like, "Oh yeah, I am writing about this content of fanon in this alternate universe, I'm going to write a piece about a radio show
• Aria: It sort of leaves a lot of space for the development of [inaudible 00:47:39], some of the Equalist Asami stuff, and some of the discussion that comes out of that. So I think that's very, very fertile ground for fanfic, and I think that it's liberating for a lot of folks. So it drives a lot of views.
• Aria: And I don't know, I don't know if I'd use the fluff and angst tags anymore, just because I don't talk about my literature in those terms as much anymore, as I used to, but... Largely because nobody...You don't use those tags as much anymore in my view, like we don't talk about... Those are very much Fanfiction.net-y terms that pulled over, I don't see them as I used to.
• Aria: a [inaudible 00:57:08] of the audience that come later are less interested in acknowledging or talking about race. Given this is a proportion, I don't know if [inaudible 00:57:24] but more people as a fandom and those few people aren't interested in talking about race in ways that people who had been there before were, and those people who were there before continued to talk about race, or if there is an effectively gentrifying mmoment that a white fandom comes in, pushes out a fandom of color. I don't know how this tag is used, so I would feel hesitant to say something definite. But I find that a little bit troublesome.
• Aria: The context is basically just, yeah, things you would expect people would say on a date, things you'd expect people to do on a date, things that writers do when they run out of words, like chuckle.
• Aria: Also this more mature understanding of a relationship, seeing their partner as a dork versus like, seeing them as cute. And obviously you see your partner is cute for a long time after you start dating, that... Viewing someone as a dork is a more developed sense of what a relationship is.
• Dialux: But I've also recently published work in Fleabag, which was one of the fandoms that I had to write for for my Yuletide assignment.
• Dialux: So, when I wrote this fanfic it was actually one of the... I had signed up for a fic exchange for this one, as well. It's called the Jonsa Exchange. It was their fifth round. Their theme was, "Inspired by film."
• Dialux: So, the person that I was supposed to be gifting to asked for a historical AU, alternate universe, especially a middle aged one, with angst and a happy ending.
• Dialux: And there were a lot of really good fanfic there that used second person point of view. And I felt like they kind of gave an insight into the character in a way that you wouldn't be able to get if you were looking at them from a third person point of view. And when I was doing this fanfic, I was really kind of thinking about how and what I wanted to communicate. And I felt like the second person point of view gave more weight to the entire fanfic, as opposed to the third person.
• Dialux: And the reason I did the Jodhaa Akbar tag was actually because I wanted to make sure that people who read more Hindu mythology fic, or other fandoms like that, like Baahubali, were able to identify that this is one such fic. And I think there are people who have said they've entered through that particular tag.
• GillyWulf: There's been a couple of fan artists over the years, like plastic-pipes, who is spectacular, always great. And I think the name was [inaudible 00:11:19] at the time, but I think they've changed it. There were a couple times when they did art according to what I'd written, or things like that. And I was like, "Okay, well it'd be cool if I wrote something that was specifically to get an image out of this person's mind."
• GillyWulf: I know a lot of people like to have full sentences, and get really detailed and say things like that, but I always find that to be sort of distracting, because I know, when I'm personally looking for something, I like to be able to just click through until I find exactly what I'm looking for. So, if somebody has what I'm looking for, but also in that same tag is a full sentence of something else, it doesn't necessarily help me stuff. If somebody's specifically looking for, I guess a long-distance relationship thing, they can just click on that and see, "Okay, well, it's in here somewhere. I'll just find whichever prompt it is." I'm a big fan of just keeping things neat and simple.
• GillyWulf: So, at the same time, it was also sort of an exploration for me in that I've known I was gay, probably since kindergarten, but I sort of just put it off, put it off, and it wasn't until I started getting into Korrasami that I was like, "Okay, well, I'm meeting a community where this is accepted and this is encouraged even." So, I had decided to come out, and these became sort of two parallels of, "It could be this, or it could be that." Of like, "What is the best case? What is the worst case for maybe how my parents will react?" Thankfully, it leaned more towards Korra's parents than Asami, but it did sort of dip into that a little bit.
• GillyWulf: It was partially based on a drawing by [inaudible 00:50:02] that had Korra and Asami sitting under a tree and just looking out over Republic City,
• GillyWulf: There's a writer, whose name I always mess up. I want to say it's coeurdastronaute. They do a lot of Clarke and Lexa stuff, but she sets the scene super well with like, "Here's the sky. Here's the roads. Here's the this," and I tried to emulate that.
• GillyWulf: And it's okay to learn from other writers. Like I said with coeurdastronaute, everything she writes is like, "I'm in love with this. It's great. How can I maybe write something similar to that? What parts can I take from this that I want to emulate?"
• Kittya Cullen: So I got into forums and fans would translate for those of us who didn't speak Hindi. And obviously people would answer questions if you asked because you couldn't get everything in the translations or the summaries. And during that time, we would talk about the plot of the show, what the characters were doing, where we were expecting things to go at that time. It was just a lot of the basic things at fandom.
• Kittya Cullen: I guess you can say it was a nudge to move from passive consumption to active consumption.
• Kittya Cullen: But also the fics I had read after the show had finished seemed to focus primarily on how Korra was dealing with ... Obviously, it was a really traumatic experience and so on in how she ... what had happened in the gap years that they hadn't shown us for Korra.
• Kittya Cullen: Partly, I wasn't quite sure what tags to use because I was still learning.
• Valk: Yeah, definitely when it comes to trying to write it realistically as well, but the banter back and forth was very difficult. I read a lot of fanfic where it can be very stalkish and when I think about it and I think about someone saying it out loud, I just like cringe. My face caves in.
• Valk: I think I would want to go more into maybe tagging some of the triggers maybe now a days because back then there wasn't as much of a discussion around it. Now a days, you have more of a discussion around what bigger tags to put in to help people avoid it for instance. Now that AO3 has updated its tagging system to include and exclude.
• Valk: Sandor and Sansa, I will say that I like their ship name as San-San. I do understand the whole like rough, the woman that warms his heart thing. Again, it's all very like romance novel-y prompts when I've tried to find fic and I'm just like, "I'll just write a Nora Roberts novel." I'd so read her books if I wanted to. I don't need to read them here.
• Valk: I had some really bad, some really heated discussions with a friend on my dashboard on Twitter. We just did that, like Brienne was actually fully a lesbian and that she hated people linking her with Jaime. And I'm like, "That's an interesting concept, not canon, but concept." She was fighting people on the dashboard about it with the sort of bigger, than someone who has like facts in front of them would argue. And I'm like, "I understand, but this is your interpretation." People who ship her with Jaime don't hate lesbians. Please, do not try and put this away. Yeah, it was a whole mess. People came out in droves, angry for different reasons.
• WriteGirl: And then people would be like, "Oh, your fanfic is this like this one, so why don't you go read this fanfic?" It kind of was a jumping off point for me.
• WriteGirl: That was another reason with the fic I kind of wanted to delve a little bit into her as a standalone, not in relation to anyone else. Kind of like, who is Missandei? If you take away slavery, and her being Daenerys' friend, who is this person? What is the one thing that would be important to her? Because there aren't really a lot of fics that focus on her as a character at all. She's just kind of always at the side. That's kind of where I got the thing that is, I don't know if I was a former slave. The one thing I would be sure of when I got my freedom was, I will never be made a slave again in any way, shape or form. So what does that translate into? That translates into, you're not going to use me. I'm not going to stand to be abused anymore. And that's kind of how all that bloomed up. I'd really like to see a bit more of that in Game of Thrones fanfiction. She's really an underused character.
• WriteGirl: One thing I noticed about the Game of Thrones fandom, because I did just kind of jump in, is that tags are very important. I do read comments from other people in fics, and that seems to be the one thing that everyone gripes about. This was tagged unproperly. This should be the tag. The tag should be this. I was like, okay, let me try and tag as properly and nearly as I can, because I don't want to get dogpiled. There's a lot of my favorite fics where there's 10 pages of people just ragging on improper tagging. So I was like, nope, let me be careful.
• WriteGirl: The "What if" tag was very important, because I've had that on fanfiction.net before. People are like, "You should have tagged it as an AU." I'm like, "But it is. It's right there." So I had the "What if."
• WriteGirl: Out of character? I never know. I think my characters are pretty in character, but there's always the one person who's like, "This character would never do that." So I'm just like, "Okay. Just to let you know, it may be out of character."
• WriteGirl: Alternate universe, canon divergence just to let people know, this isn't following canon, because I did not want to get blasted on that one.
• WriteGirl: There's one thing, to me, if it's too OOC, just out of the block there's no real change, and these drabbles are so short. You can't really see a lot of character development from A to B. Everything kind of has to fit where it does. So I wanted to make sure that it fit and it wasn't too crazy. It's a lot of research.
• WriteGirl: I think it's the same with, I'm also very active in the Star Wars fandom, and that's one thing you see in a lot of Star Wars, especially the new trilogy. People love taking the characters out of where they are and putting them in today. That doesn't surprise me at all.

Description

Definition: These codes examine different fanfic generic forms and rhetorical choices as well as define conventions of these generic forms based on the fan authors’ responses. Because Rhetorical Genre Studies defines genre as social actions that are recurring and re-acted in particular communities, then engaging in a genre means taking into account the conventions of that genre, choosing to resist or follow these conventions, the ideologies embedded within those conventions, who has say over these conventions, and how generic engagement helps community formation. These codes include angst, fluff, fix-it fics, and more.

Number of Codes: 78

Analysis: Select different genres for specific analyses.

Quotes

• Aria: I don't want to be like, "Ah, but I'm writing the version of this character that's a woman." I hate that. I know that that's permissible with the meta text but I don't want to be part of that.
• Aria: This is I think the first piece where I write as a adult writer looking at the world and going, "Okay, what do I actually think? What can I say about this that is interesting," instead of just being like, "I don't know, let's take a thought and just run with it." I think that in a lot of ways it suffers of being really in that space, but it's also a good piece in that I'm genuinely, actually doing literature, in a way that I really was not before.
• Aria: It had two epic story arcs that I didn't know how to integrate, both this love story about disability, and it was this story about queer politics, and I could not make those two pieces meld at the time. The story arcs just never came together, and I couldn't harmonize them, and it sort of died because I couldn't get to the thing I was trying to make, not ambition, but I couldn't make either one of them make sense.
• Aria: So I guess the first three, they're basic tags. You want to read angst, here's angst. You want to read fluff, well, this is fluff and angst. Well I'm not sure how fluffy but...Do you want to read a romance? Here's a romance.
• Aria: And then the last one's a content warning, like yeah, if you read this you'll see homophobia. I can't not publish a story about homophobia.
• Aria: I think I thought it was romantic. I don't remember why I did that, that's one of the ones where just... I think it's part of I had that as sort of my first... It was more like one of the most basic tools that I learned, so I learned, "All right, I'll do alternate points of view."
• Aria: I don't know if I thought about this as a storytelling tool at times, or I thought about it as a storytelling tool obviously that helps power [inaudible 00:17:00], not necessarily about the story if it makes sense. I wasn't telling you things that had happened in the past, to teach you what happened in the past. I was saying, "This is what's haunting the characters, this is what the characters can't escape from in a very physical, visceral fashion." Well maybe physical might be the wrong word, you know what, I'm okay with it, body and mind, if it makes sense.
• Aria: If I remember correctly, this was about writing about suicide. I had been in a fight for a very long time. And I was nearly constantly suicidal. And so writing this piece was an engaging... It was obviously triggering.
• Aria: Okay, my first guess would be that women who love women will write about women who love women, want to tell stories that have happy endings. I think in a lot of the stories we see in literature are of our destruction as a moral point, or the echoes of authority. That doesn't mean that all of the stories that we see that are echoes of stories are intended as seeing those moral and political tellings, they're just, "That's what our culture tells us." A lesbian love story, so retelling... If women who love women retell stories of women who love women, they're going to tell a lot of stories that are about being happy, at least in my opinion.
• Aria: I think that people writing about suffering and happiness, a lot of things happen in love stories in general, particularly in WlW and MlM stuff. Well, I don't know if MlM, I don't read it very much just because one, I am not a man, and two, so much MlM stuff is kind of uncomfortable? A lot it's very clearly written by women.
• Aria: First guess is actually that there's a) an explosion of stories that aren't canon compliant, so people are staying people are saying, "This story is canon compliant," as a way of engaging. In terms of, it makes sense to say something's canon-compliant sort of at the end of the piece, because once the story is over then it makes sense to go back and say, "actually this is canon compliant." A lot of stories before a story ends it's already like, "How could this go from here?" And so I would imagine that the canon compliance people were like, "Well, I'm telling this story based on what literally happened," instead of all of these other tellings that I'm seeing now. That would be my first guess. My second guess is that people are excited to tell stories that were literally just after the end of The Legend of Korra
• Aria: And to be fair, omega and alpha as being there in the far right column. I don't really understand ABO [alpha, beta, omega] as in general, so I can't talk. They're not as inherently sexual. They definitely struck me as relatively sexual, and that's not
• Dialux: But a few years later when I was, I think, 13, my friend introduced me to like crack Lord Of The Rings fiction.
• Dialux: So, the person that I was supposed to be gifting to asked for a historical AU, alternate universe, especially a middle aged one, with angst and a happy ending.
• Dialux: I chose to make it Desi because I am Desi. and I wanted to experience it.
• Dialux: So, I mean, I think the choice to make Westeros Desi was more of, I don't want to do that much work in setting up all of these tensions, and identifying them. And kind of building, and trying to communicate that to the reader when there's already preexisting framework for it.
• Dialux: And it was football RPF (real person fic) fanfiction. Which was very interesting, because I think it was just after the 2018 World Cup.
• Dialux: And there were a lot of really good fanfic there that used second person point of view. And I felt like they kind of gave an insight into the character in a way that you wouldn't be able to get if you were looking at them from a third person point of view. And when I was doing this fanfic, I was really kind of thinking about how and what I wanted to communicate. And I felt like the second person point of view gave more weight to the entire fanfic, as opposed to the third person.
• Dialux: Yeah. I mean, I really do feel like there aren't that many second person point of views that kind of allow you to immerse yourself into that person, or into that character.
• Dialux: I was literally just pulling things from here, and there. And, I mean, there's Rajput culture as well as South Indian culture, as well as there's some random, I think, there's some Bengali culture that I just threw in for the hell of it.
• Dialux: But when I was making the actual list of material, I basically just ran through from top to bottom of the actual fanfic. And basically tried to remember everything that I thought about. And identified the particular things that I was thinking about and trying to identify.
• Dialux: But, yeah. I think just developing the list of material and everything kind of helped me understand on a step by step process, everything that I had kind of... The assumptions that I had made, and where I had taken certain ideas from.
• Dialux: Just building that list kind of helps me know where and how I'm getting the material, and the assumptions that I've made throughout the fanfic. And, therefore, helps make it easier to kind of discuss it later, I think.
• Dialux: Because, obviously, race bending is, and can be, very racist if not done in a very respectful manner.
• Dialux: So, that was one of the primary reasons why I decided to make it in the first place. Because I wanted to be sure why and where I was getting these ideas from.
• Dialux: And it is an angsty fic. It's not like a comedy, there is angst. And it's one of the major points of the entire fanfic.
• Dialux: I mean, this fic is obviously dramatized and all that. But the essential part of it is that both of them have this core feeling that they cannot get rid of, that the world has done them a huge injustice. And as much as it's cathartic to see that in fanfic, I also feel like if you go through life like that, it's a very difficult way of going through life. And it's not necessarily a happy life that you lead when you have that kind of a mentality.
• Dialux: And then the fact that the alternate universe for a modern setting is so [inaudible 01:07:54]. Which, to me, is very interesting. Because I tend to go out of my way to avoid modern alternate universes, because I personally don't like them.
• Dialux: Because, I think one of the major ones is fluff.
• Dialux: I mean, you do see a lot of angst, though.
• GillyWulf: I didn't necessarily want to do full-length fics. I sort of wanted to just spit them out, and then, it came to a point where I was like, "Okay, well, I don't want to have individual listings for each of these," so I just put it all into one thing on AO3 and decided that, "Well, all right, I'll just do the prompts as the chapter titles and just go until I can't."
• GillyWulf: Well, I think for shorter things, there's a challenge in that you have, I think most of them ended up being 200-400 words, so you have to do an entire story in that time. You have to make somebody care about things that are happening in much fewer words, and make it more impactful in less amount of time. If you have 10,000 words to set up a situation and resolve it, and all that, it's definitely different from, "Here's just basically a gut punch of a story, and you maybe don't get the whole thing."
• GillyWulf: There's a couple that, I don't remember which ones, but there were a couple that I sort of left on a weird note [inaudible 00:09:21] on purpose, so that it had to be like, "Okay, well, maybe you want more, or maybe it's good as it is," and I liked that.
• GillyWulf: Well, my audience is pretty much just other fans like me, so it was sort of just, "Well, what would I want to read? And what would people my age think is fun?" Things like that. There were a couple people who regularly sent me prompts, so it was sort of, I knew these were the sort of things they were into, or I know what they're angling for in this question, in this idea. So, I'm like, "Okay, I can sort of tailor it to that,"
• GillyWulf: There's been a couple of fan artists over the years, like plastic-pipes, who is spectacular, always great. And I think the name was [inaudible 00:11:19] at the time, but I think they've changed it. There were a couple times when they did art according to what I'd written, or things like that. And I was like, "Okay, well it'd be cool if I wrote something that was specifically to get an image out of this person's mind."
• GillyWulf: Even though it's 400 chapters, it's book-length. It's like a normal book length. It's easily digestible, and each thing's its own thing, so if you want to stop it and come back to it later, you can. People do usually, if you're feeling a specific mood, and go find that specific one and just go through a couple of those. I like that it's sort of, you don't have to have a super amount of emotional investment in it, like super long, 10-chapter fics that are 100,000 words.
• GillyWulf: Like yes, it's very good. I enjoy it. But sometimes, I'm just in the mood for something light and I like that I can provide that for people who want that.
• GillyWulf: Well, the fact that it was short meant that I did only have a certain amount of words to deal with it.
• GillyWulf: Yeah. Well, absolutely part of it was wish fulfillment. I've never been in any sort of relationship, so it was like, "Okay, this is might what it be like." But also, I'm a big fan of the fact that, of using fanfiction, or TV shows, or movies, or any of that as escapism. You look out your window and things are just not good a lot of the time, so I really like reading things that are just soft and maybe things aren't so terrible for them where they are, and just sort of getting lost in the idea of, they can just relax. They've been through so much, they deserve a little bit of something that's not going to hurt them, with somebody who definitely wants the same for them, who wants the same for themselves. I tried to make that as a focus. Yeah, I just really wanted that.
• GillyWulf: Well, obviously a lot of it is trying to come up with different ways to not use the same descriptions, not use the same words, because you know that once you put it in the drabble, if you keep describing them the exact same way, people might skip over that or it starts to start reading a little bit dull. So, I tried to mix it up on occasion.
• GillyWulf: Even in the modern drabbles, or the other AU, I tried to keep that as something that, that's what she is, whether or not she can access that.
• GillyWulf: Things like that, you notice immediately, but also that it's not necessarily always in a way that maybe the reader is expecting to see it. I don't know. It depends on each drabble, each specific one, and the mood that is also trying to get portrayed.
• GillyWulf: I try and put good outcomes for Korra, in that she's living the life that she wanted to live with a person she loves, doing something she loves. And even though it maybe needs to be a little bit more complicated, because of hormones or things like that, but it's not a huge obstacle, it's just a little something to add to the day. But yeah, it's like the whole mood of most of the things I try and write. I want it to be happy.
• GillyWulf: And especially for this, it's not a serious work, it's meant to be something fun, it's meant to be something that is just for other people to enjoy. And I wouldn't be enjoying it if I was writing those things that made me super uncomfortable.
• GillyWulf: I wanted it to, like everything else, just be soft and be a way of saying, this is their city, their lives are going to go on, and they're going to be happy and enjoy it.
• GillyWulf: So, these big cartoons that are for kids are doing more for those relationships than a lot of live-action things, because live action, you kill people often, and brutally, so it's a lot easier to go, "Okay, cartoons are much more gentle. Cartoons are easier to adjust."
• Kittya Cullen: But basically where you would participate with one fan writing a line, the next fan writing another line and so on and so forth. So that was the first time that I actually wrote anything fandom related.
• Kittya Cullen: And then there was a bit of a lull until my delving into the Indian forums. And there we would do the meta analysis and satirical writings and so on.
• Kittya Cullen: Actually, I completely forgot, there was a period where I would write like a satirical review of what was happening, because I don't do that anymore for anything really. But it was an opportunity to experiment with writing and being critical of source materials and so on.
• Valk: I started writing and initially my own fanfic, so self insert fan fic when I was like maybe about 10 years old.
• Valk: You never really hear about what Jaime thought about it. I sort of delved into this idea trying to explore Jaime reacquainting himself with these things later on in life, but through a modern lens because I also wanted to be able to relate to it as well.
• Valk: My strengths in this fic for me was being able to try and incorporate as much of Jaime and Brienne's banter and relationship, as much as I could to a modern setting because obviously they wouldn't be having as much of a, you know Brienne wouldn't be considered as horrifying as she was considered in the original text because she was considered man-ish. In modern day context, it's not always encouraged, based on what kind of family you came from, women are often allowed to be tom boys more than vice versa. There was a challenge of trying to see, okay, Brienne wouldn't have had as traumatic a childhood probably regarding her own gender identity. But there would definitely be some push back, but how would that change based on the setting? I made her a little bit more comfortable in her skin than Jaime and also having her there to sort of be a foil and a supportive shoulder for Jaime who was going through a similar thing that maybe she went through as well.
• Valk: from the source material where I wanted to kind of explore Jaime's perspective on this, but through a modern lens and later on in life because a lot of Jaime's self-realization in the book comes after he meets Brienne as well.
• Valk: It was part of actually a larger, I guess, alternate universe idea that I had in mind explaining how Jaime got to that point living with Brienne, where Brienne has been before and how she had gotten to living with Jaime.
• Valk: I think it's because he's used to having to perform any way and being very new, if you're very new into like trying to question your gender identity, especially being a man, you are at a higher risk of...I should say more so, if you present male than you are at a higher risk of facing violence or any kind of physical outlashing. Be it verbal or physical, but I think it's a lot of like, you learn to be very secretive. You'll act in ways to protect yourself, more than anything.
• Valk: That's definitely something that is taught in canon with him, in terms of never showing your full hand of cards to the enemy, being deceitful and it's all to reach your goal. I think that would still carry over to a modern setting, but it would be more toned down into a more reasonable kind of thing like, "I don't want to seem like this is actually for me. I'm buying it for someone else." If I don't want to get lambasted or judged or anything like that. Residual toxic masculinity and all of that.
• Valk: I wanted to still carry over the kind of relationship that Jaime and Tywin had in the TV show in the medieval setting, but to modernize it more again, but not take away the fact that Tywin was a very controlling father.
• Valk: trying to work through gender things. I wanted to also try and put someone in the position where they were questioning their gender and actually acting it out, changing their appearance in some way that would fit them better or explore better. I wanted to also work through those emotions with me.
• Valk: I guess I was thinking about also how I had reacted or how my friends had reacted to when I came out to them. I wanted to, I guess write a do-over for some of them about how I would have liked to have that experience with me, like having them knock again and come inside and ask questions and not just kind of leave it right there and not talk again. I wanted to sort of console myself a little bit through it as well as wanted to console Jaime
• Valk: I wanted to kind of write it as like a self-fulfilling fantasy as well as like how I would have pictured them actually going through it.
• Valk: I learned how much writing a one shot sounds good and all in practice, but then it ends up opening all these other doors of should I write more, should I write less. I don't know what I should be doing with this.
• Valk: It was definitely a good writing practice for me also, in terms of knowing that I could go back and explore myself with fan fic if I needed to as well.
• Valk: Most Game of Thrones fanfic is incredibly hetero normative and it's a lot of university AU, high school AU and I'm like, "What about literally anything else?" I did a modern universe [inaudible 00:37:49] Please, literally anything else.
• WriteGirl: And I actually really liked a show called Xena: Warrior Princess. That was kind of my very first fandom. I really liked, see I can't even remember now, Ares and Gabrielle. I wrote a fanfiction about them that was set in modern times. That was my very first fan fic.
• WriteGirl: X-Men comics. And I wrote a story, once again, set in modern times. I kind of do this a lot. I take characters out of their setting and transpose them into reality.
• WriteGirl: I don't know if you're a Dr. Who fan. One of my favorite Doctor Who episodes is Turn Left. And it's a whole episode that's based on the concept of, what if he didn't turn right? What if instead of going the road you're supposed to go, you kind of went that way? And I've always been fascinated by that. I love Choose Your Own Adventure stories, and things like that. I don't like following the written script. So that's one of the reasons why I went into fix-it fics. There's times and places where I was like, that wouldn't happen. I know that's how it happens in the story, but based on the world that they're in, historical context, things like that, that's not how that would. So, that's kind of my brain's way of reconciling not bad writing, but just maybe inconsistent writing, or little things that were just irksome. That's kind of how I got into that.
• WriteGirl: Let me just zero in on the one moment that I think is pivotal, and just kind of get that out, and then leave it alone. Because a lot of my drabbles, they are parts of much bigger fics. I just haven't posted them.
• WriteGirl: That I've actually written about 200 pages for. But that was just the one pivotal scene. So I was like, okay, I'm just going to take you out and put you here, and then leave you alone.
• WriteGirl: The "What if" tag was very important, because I've had that on fanfiction.net before. People are like, "You should have tagged it as an AU." I'm like, "But it is. It's right there." So I had the "What if."
• WriteGirl: Fix-it, cause they're mostly fix-it.
• WriteGirl: Fluff and angst, I cannot write straight fluff. I'm incapable. You have to have pain with your pleasure. I can't do it.
• WriteGirl: Because it has to hurt if it's to heal.
• WriteGirl: I wanted her to have a little bit more agency. It seemed like from the time we see her in the Baelish dress, with the feathers on it, which she's actually taking on a mockingbird, that that was a glimpse of a darker Sansa, a more politically savvy Sansa, a more adult Sansa. And then, for whatever reason, they backed off of it. And then the next thing we see her, she's just kind of sitting there asking questions, looking dull. And that was a little irritating to me. So I wanted her to get a little more agency, especially when she found out who she was supposed to be meeting. I didn't see Sansa ever agreeing to that.
• WriteGirl: There's one thing, to me, if it's too OOC, just out of the block there's no real change, and these drabbles are so short. You can't really see a lot of character development from A to B. Everything kind of has to fit where it does. So I wanted to make sure that it fit and it wasn't too crazy. It's a lot of research.
• WriteGirl: But I think people really enjoy the Jaime Lannister, Brienne of Tarth is kind of like the person, your frenemy. The person you love to hate. I would rescue you if you're falling off a cliff, but I'd probably punch you in the stomach when I got you back on solid land for being in that position to begin with.
• WriteGirl: I like the modern setting. Modern setting seems to be the most common one.
• WriteGirl: I think it's the same with, I'm also very active in the Star Wars fandom, and that's one thing you see in a lot of Star Wars, especially the new trilogy. People love taking the characters out of where they are and putting them in today. That doesn't surprise me at all.
• WriteGirl: canon divergence, angst, love, romance, smut. Not really. Everything seems to be kind of right where it should be, based on what I've seen. I'm trying to think of a tag that may be missing. No. Fluff, yeah, fluff's there, angst, romance. No, I think everything is there. You just randomly go on AO3, that's what you'd see.

Description

Definition: Angst generic forms capture feelings of depression, anxiety, hurt/comfort, and other general forms of angst.

Number of Codes: 7

Analysis: Similar to the fluff generic form, angst is one of the more popular tags and recognizable genres by fans, as Aria suggests when she calls it a “basic tag.” Aria, Dialux, and Writegirl each share their experience and understanding of the angst generic form. Writing an angst genre usually means attempting to capture feelings of pain and sadness. Aria labels angst, along with fluff and romance, as popular fanfiction generic forms that other fans will recognize; she calls them “basic tags,” referring to the Additional Tags metadata authors can self-select on the fanfics they publish on AO3. Dialux also confirms this when she says, “You do see a lot of angst though.” Dialux continues to help define angst as a genre, explaining that angst as the opposite of comedy, which suggests authors who write in the angst genre rarely think about making their audience laugh. Finally, Writegirl hints at a potentially other important convention in the angst generic form: that there is always a form of relief, of healing, within the text.

Quotes

• Aria: So I guess the first three, they're basic tags. You want to read angst, here's angst. You want to read fluff, well, this is fluff and angst. Well I'm not sure how fluffy but...Do you want to read a romance? Here's a romance.
• Aria: I think that people writing about suffering and happiness, a lot of things happen in love stories in general, particularly in WlW and MlM stuff. Well, I don't know if MlM, I don't read it very much just because one, I am not a man, and two, so much MlM stuff is kind of uncomfortable? A lot it's very clearly written by women.
• Dialux: And it is an angsty fic. It's not like a comedy, there is angst. And it's one of the major points of the entire fanfic.
• Dialux: I mean, this fic is obviously dramatized and all that. But the essential part of it is that both of them have this core feeling that they cannot get rid of, that the world has done them a huge injustice. And as much as it's cathartic to see that in fanfic, I also feel like if you go through life like that, it's a very difficult way of going through life. And it's not necessarily a happy life that you lead when you have that kind of a mentality.
• Dialux: I mean, you do see a lot of angst, though.
• WriteGirl: Fluff and angst, I cannot write straight fluff. I'm incapable. You have to have pain with your pleasure. I can't do it.
• WriteGirl: Because it has to hurt if it's to heal.

Description

Definition: Fluff captures a happy, feel-good story, referred to as fluff because of the warm-and-fuzzy affect the writer attempts to capture. It almost always centers around romance and everyday moments of joy or cuteness.

Number of Codes: 9

Analysis: Similar to the angst generic form, fluff is one of the more popular tags and recognizable genres by fans, as Aria suggests when she calls it a “basic tag.” Participating in the fluff genre means attempting to capture happiness in a text. describes fluff as a way for lesbian fanfic authors, especially, to speak back to a larger culture that often writers lesbian romances as tragedies. For Aria, she sees fluff as a popular tag in TLOK, specifically, because “women who love women...want to tell stories that have happy endings.”

Gillywulf has a similar perspective, as her string of Korra/Asami vignette fanfics mostly fall within fluff genre conventions. Gillywulf explains her reasoning, “You look out your window and things are just not good a lot of the time, so I really like reading things that are just soft and maybe things aren't so terrible for them where they are.” Interestingly, while Aria and Gillywulf both wrote Korra/Asami fanfics and self-identified as lesbians, Writegirl — who identifies as demisexual — discusses being “incapable” of writing straight fluff. For her fanfics, most which do not revolve around romance, she wants to capture and include pain.

Quotes

• Aria: So I guess the first three, they're basic tags. You want to read angst, here's angst. You want to read fluff, well, this is fluff and angst. Well I'm not sure how fluffy but...Do you want to read a romance? Here's a romance.
• Aria: Okay, my first guess would be that women who love women will write about women who love women, want to tell stories that have happy endings. I think in a lot of the stories we see in literature are of our destruction as a moral point, or the echoes of authority. That doesn't mean that all of the stories that we see that are echoes of stories are intended as seeing those moral and political tellings, they're just, "That's what our culture tells us." A lesbian love story, so retelling... If women who love women retell stories of women who love women, they're going to tell a lot of stories that are about being happy, at least in my opinion.
• Dialux: Because, I think one of the major ones is fluff.
• GillyWulf: Like yes, it's very good. I enjoy it. But sometimes, I'm just in the mood for something light and I like that I can provide that for people who want that.
• GillyWulf: Yeah. Well, absolutely part of it was wish fulfillment. I've never been in any sort of relationship, so it was like, "Okay, this is might what it be like." But also, I'm a big fan of the fact that, of using fanfiction, or TV shows, or movies, or any of that as escapism. You look out your window and things are just not good a lot of the time, so I really like reading things that are just soft and maybe things aren't so terrible for them where they are, and just sort of getting lost in the idea of, they can just relax. They've been through so much, they deserve a little bit of something that's not going to hurt them, with somebody who definitely wants the same for them, who wants the same for themselves. I tried to make that as a focus. Yeah, I just really wanted that.
• GillyWulf: I try and put good outcomes for Korra, in that she's living the life that she wanted to live with a person she loves, doing something she loves. And even though it maybe needs to be a little bit more complicated, because of hormones or things like that, but it's not a huge obstacle, it's just a little something to add to the day. But yeah, it's like the whole mood of most of the things I try and write. I want it to be happy.
• GillyWulf: And especially for this, it's not a serious work, it's meant to be something fun, it's meant to be something that is just for other people to enjoy. And I wouldn't be enjoying it if I was writing those things that made me super uncomfortable.
• GillyWulf: I wanted it to, like everything else, just be soft and be a way of saying, this is their city, their lives are going to go on, and they're going to be happy and enjoy it.
• WriteGirl: Fluff and angst, I cannot write straight fluff. I'm incapable. You have to have pain with your pleasure. I can't do it.

Description

Definition: : Vignettes are intentionally shorter fanfics, such as 100 words to 1000 words, that capture an entire story in a small word count; 100 word fics are referred to as “drabbles.” Vignettes are more of a medium rather than a generic form — as they rely on a limited amount of written text to tell a story — so they may be multiple generic forms and conventions appearing across different vignettes.

Number of Codes: 10

Analysis: Only Gillywulf and Writegirl incorporated the medium of vignettes or drabbles in their fanfics. Gillywulf wrote a series of short vignettes based on prompts provided to her by her readers. Part of Gillywulf’s reasoning for choosing this medium was because she did not want to write a longer-length fic. She also, however, points out the challenge of writing vignettes because an author has “to make somebody care about things that are happening in much fewer words.” Another challenge of writing a series of vignettes, too, is that she did not want to make her fics repetitive, so she had to find creative methods for describing similar situations. Specifically, she reflects on writing about Korra and Asami meeting for the first time — she aimed to make each meeting special, to make what each character notices about each other unique, and to capture particular moods.

Writegirl, similarly, writes a series of vignettes, each its own chapter, reimagining particular moments from GOT. However, unlike Gillywulf, she plans to use some of these vignettes into a much longer fanfic. Specifically, she has written almost 200 pages — not linearly — of this longer fanfic. She chose to write and post these vignettes, though, as she argues she published on AO3 “one moment that I think is pivotal.” Similarly to Gillywulf, she points to another challenge in writing vignettes: there is no time for character development, so she wanted to ensure her characters were not OOC — out of character — by conducting a lot of research on GOT.

Quotes

• GillyWulf: I didn't necessarily want to do full-length fics. I sort of wanted to just spit them out, and then, it came to a point where I was like, "Okay, well, I don't want to have individual listings for each of these," so I just put it all into one thing on AO3 and decided that, "Well, all right, I'll just do the prompts as the chapter titles and just go until I can't."
• GillyWulf: Well, I think for shorter things, there's a challenge in that you have, I think most of them ended up being 200-400 words, so you have to do an entire story in that time. You have to make somebody care about things that are happening in much fewer words, and make it more impactful in less amount of time. If you have 10,000 words to set up a situation and resolve it, and all that, it's definitely different from, "Here's just basically a gut punch of a story, and you maybe don't get the whole thing."
• GillyWulf: There's a couple that, I don't remember which ones, but there were a couple that I sort of left on a weird note [inaudible 00:09:21] on purpose, so that it had to be like, "Okay, well, maybe you want more, or maybe it's good as it is," and I liked that.
• GillyWulf: Even though it's 400 chapters, it's book-length. It's like a normal book length. It's easily digestible, and each thing's its own thing, so if you want to stop it and come back to it later, you can. People do usually, if you're feeling a specific mood, and go find that specific one and just go through a couple of those. I like that it's sort of, you don't have to have a super amount of emotional investment in it, like super long, 10-chapter fics that are 100,000 words.
• GillyWulf: Well, the fact that it was short meant that I did only have a certain amount of words to deal with it.
• GillyWulf: Well, obviously a lot of it is trying to come up with different ways to not use the same descriptions, not use the same words, because you know that once you put it in the drabble, if you keep describing them the exact same way, people might skip over that or it starts to start reading a little bit dull. So, I tried to mix it up on occasion.
• GillyWulf: Things like that, you notice immediately, but also that it's not necessarily always in a way that maybe the reader is expecting to see it. I don't know. It depends on each drabble, each specific one, and the mood that is also trying to get portrayed.
• WriteGirl: Let me just zero in on the one moment that I think is pivotal, and just kind of get that out, and then leave it alone. Because a lot of my drabbles, they are parts of much bigger fics. I just haven't posted them.
• WriteGirl: That I've actually written about 200 pages for. But that was just the one pivotal scene. So I was like, okay, I'm just going to take you out and put you here, and then leave you alone.
• WriteGirl: There's one thing, to me, if it's too OOC, just out of the block there's no real change, and these drabbles are so short. You can't really see a lot of character development from A to B. Everything kind of has to fit where it does. So I wanted to make sure that it fit and it wasn't too crazy. It's a lot of research.

Description

Definition: Fix-it is usually a canon-resistant uptake and “fixes" something that happened in the canon, like a particular writing choice. These fics usually come out of disappointment from the canonical narrative arc.

Number of Codes: 4

Analysis: Fix-it fics are often created when the canon text did not go in the direction the fan author anticipated. The only fan author who explicitly labeled their fic as a “fix-it” fic is Writegirl. She uses the “fix-it” and “what if” additional tags to signal to her audience that her fanfic will be canon resistant. She points to two main reasons for writing fix-it fics: her unhappiness with some of the writing in the GOT show, and her desire to explore “what if” in context with the butterfly effect — or when one small change ripples across and drastically changes that timeline. Specifically, she points to the lack of agency the GOT show writers provided to Sansa, and she wants to “give her a little more agency.” Writegirl views the GOT show writing as inconsistent, and therefore she decides to reimagine particular moments that she believes the show’s writers could improve.

Quotes

• WriteGirl: I don't know if you're a Dr. Who fan. One of my favorite Doctor Who episodes is Turn Left. And it's a whole episode that's based on the concept of, what if he didn't turn right? What if instead of going the road you're supposed to go, you kind of went that way? And I've always been fascinated by that. I love Choose Your Own Adventure stories, and things like that. I don't like following the written script. So that's one of the reasons why I went into fix-it fics. There's times and places where I was like, that wouldn't happen. I know that's how it happens in the story, but based on the world that they're in, historical context, things like that, that's not how that would. So, that's kind of my brain's way of reconciling not bad writing, but just maybe inconsistent writing, or little things that were just irksome. That's kind of how I got into that.
• WriteGirl: The "What if" tag was very important, because I've had that on fanfiction.net before. People are like, "You should have tagged it as an AU." I'm like, "But it is. It's right there." So I had the "What if."
• WriteGirl: Fix-it, cause they're mostly fix-it.
• WriteGirl: I wanted her to have a little bit more agency. It seemed like from the time we see her in the Baelish dress, with the feathers on it, which she's actually taking on a mockingbird, that that was a glimpse of a darker Sansa, a more politically savvy Sansa, a more adult Sansa. And then, for whatever reason, they backed off of it. And then the next thing we see her, she's just kind of sitting there asking questions, looking dull. And that was a little irritating to me. So I wanted her to get a little more agency, especially when she found out who she was supposed to be meeting. I didn't see Sansa ever agreeing to that.

Description

Definition: Authors’ notes appear at the beginning or end of fanfic chapters. The purposes of these notes are to provide content warnings, reflect on particular choices made in the fanfic, identify authors’ positionalities that relate to their fanfic, or speak back to readers or specific comments. For this code, I am also choosing to include supplemental, explanatory material written along with fanfics that may not just appear at the beginning or end of a fic.

Number of Codes: 7

Analysis: Only Aria and Dialux discuss including author’s notes or supplemental materials to be paired with their work. Aria discusses her author’s note as a space for content warning and self-reflection. Specifically, she uses content warnings, such as the mention of suicide, to practice care for her audience, as her writing may be triggering for some. She also uses the author’s note to reflect on her own mental health at the time and how writing this piece impacted her.

Dialux does not discuss the traditional fanfic understanding of author’s notes -- the notes above or below specific chapters -- but instead shared the creation of supplemental materials to be read alongside her fanfic. Because her fanfic, which merges GOT with the Indian historical film Jodhaa Akbar, uses several cultural references to Rajput, Mughal, and other Indian ethnicities, Dialux links to a list of notes and explanations that she created (posted on her Tumblr) after publishing her fanfic. She cites her motivation not as a guide for readers, but rather “because I wanted to be sure why and where I was getting these ideas from.” Her fanfic both discusses cultural differences in historic India as well as merges some cultural practices, so she decided to trace her choices and make explicit which cultures and traditions she pulled ideas from. She expresses surprise, though, when I mention I read her fanfic along with the supplemental materials to better understand her choices; she did not imagine anyone actually reading the supplemental list. Author’s notes are not only a fan authors’ way of engaging and reaching out to readers, but also a way for them to reflect on their own decisions and make explicit their writing process.

Quotes

• Aria: And then the last one's a content warning, like yeah, if you read this you'll see homophobia. I can't not publish a story about homophobia.
• Aria: If I remember correctly, this was about writing about suicide. I had been in a fight for a very long time. And I was nearly constantly suicidal. And so writing this piece was an engaging... It was obviously triggering.
• Dialux: I was literally just pulling things from here, and there. And, I mean, there's Rajput culture as well as South Indian culture, as well as there's some random, I think, there's some Bengali culture that I just threw in for the hell of it.
• Dialux: But when I was making the actual list of material, I basically just ran through from top to bottom of the actual fanfic. And basically tried to remember everything that I thought about. And identified the particular things that I was thinking about and trying to identify.
• Dialux: But, yeah. I think just developing the list of material and everything kind of helped me understand on a step by step process, everything that I had kind of... The assumptions that I had made, and where I had taken certain ideas from.
• Dialux: Just building that list kind of helps me know where and how I'm getting the material, and the assumptions that I've made throughout the fanfic. And, therefore, helps make it easier to kind of discuss it later, I think.
• Dialux: So, that was one of the primary reasons why I decided to make it in the first place. Because I wanted to be sure why and where I was getting these ideas from.

Description

Definition: Identity-bending is when the fic writer transforms an aspect of a character's identity, such as their sexuality/race/gender, in their fic. Identity-bending is not necessarily a generic form, but rather a rhetorical choice made while participating in genres.

Number of Codes: 10

Analysis: Identity bending in fanfiction may take many shapes, as there are multiple modes of identity. The main fan authors who implement identity-bending genres in their work are Dialux and Valk. Both authors share their motivation to engage with identity-bending conventions as wanting to represent themselves in the texts they love. Both authors also happen to be writing in the GOT universe, which is coded as White/European and heteronormative.

Valk directly mentions part of their motivation in identity-bending was to “be able to relate” to their fic; they wrote this fic as a “self-fulfilling fantasy” after they struggled with their own gender expression and identity. In their fanfic, they reimagine Jaime exploring his gender expression in a modern setting. While their quote about desiring to relate to their fic is mainly in reference to the modern setting, Valk also suggests it is Jaime’s gender exploration that they focus on, as this is the main plot of their piece. What makes this choice an identity-bending generic form is bending Jaime’s gender. In the original text, Jaime seems to be portrayed as a cis male, while Valk reimagines him as not cis, potentially non-binary or genderqueer, in the early stages of “questioning his gender.”

Another area of Valk’s choice for identity-bending is in reference to Brienne’s gender expression and identity. While Valk’s version of Brienne only hints at a queer gender identity, Valk writes Brienne as much more comfortable with her gender because she does not face ridicule for refusing to conform to gender expectations. For Valk, representing queer gender identities and the early stages of questioning was a method for them to fantasize and reimagine a safe space that they were not offered as they questioned their own gender.

Dialux also identity-bends in her fanfic, but focuses on race and culture, rather than gender. She identity-bends the GOT characters and universe, reimagining them as Desi and living in historic India. She explains that there are parallels between the GOT universe and historic India, including cultural and regional differences in the North and South. Part of her motivation to make the characters Desi and reimagine a “Desi Westeros” is because “I chose to make it Desi because I am Desi.” She represents herself, her family, and her culture in her choices, celebrating her culture’s history and traditions.

Dialux does, though, point to potential dangers when practicing identity-bending: “Because, obviously, race bending is, and can be, very racist if not done in a very respectful manner.” Race-bending is important for authors of color who often do not see their experiences and stories represented in popular culture. However, race-bending if not done carefully can also reinforce stereotypes and hurt the very communities and peoples the fics are representing. Dialux explains that, even though she is Desi, she was careful in her writing. She cites the potential to race-bend carelessly as a reason she was hesitant to originally publish the fanfic. Identity bending is a crucial genre in fanfics, but must be done with care towards the identities being represented, even if you are bending identities to represent your own.

Quotes

• Aria: I don't want to be like, "Ah, but I'm writing the version of this character that's a woman." I hate that. I know that that's permissible with the meta text but I don't want to be part of that.
• Dialux: I chose to make it Desi because I am Desi. and I wanted to experience it.
• Dialux: So, I mean, I think the choice to make Westeros Desi was more of, I don't want to do that much work in setting up all of these tensions, and identifying them. And kind of building, and trying to communicate that to the reader when there's already preexisting framework for it.
• Dialux: Because, obviously, race bending is, and can be, very racist if not done in a very respectful manner.
• Valk: You never really hear about what Jaime thought about it. I sort of delved into this idea trying to explore Jaime reacquainting himself with these things later on in life, but through a modern lens because I also wanted to be able to relate to it as well.
• Valk: My strengths in this fic for me was being able to try and incorporate as much of Jaime and Brienne's banter and relationship, as much as I could to a modern setting because obviously they wouldn't be having as much of a, you know Brienne wouldn't be considered as horrifying as she was considered in the original text because she was considered man-ish. In modern day context, it's not always encouraged, based on what kind of family you came from, women are often allowed to be tom boys more than vice versa. There was a challenge of trying to see, okay, Brienne wouldn't have had as traumatic a childhood probably regarding her own gender identity. But there would definitely be some push back, but how would that change based on the setting? I made her a little bit more comfortable in her skin than Jaime and also having her there to sort of be a foil and a supportive shoulder for Jaime who was going through a similar thing that maybe she went through as well.
• Valk: I think it's because he's used to having to perform any way and being very new, if you're very new into like trying to question your gender identity, especially being a man, you are at a higher risk of...I should say more so, if you present male than you are at a higher risk of facing violence or any kind of physical outlashing. Be it verbal or physical, but I think it's a lot of like, you learn to be very secretive. You'll act in ways to protect yourself, more than anything.
• Valk: trying to work through gender things. I wanted to also try and put someone in the position where they were questioning their gender and actually acting it out, changing their appearance in some way that would fit them better or explore better. I wanted to also work through those emotions with me.
• Valk: I wanted to kind of write it as like a self-fulfilling fantasy as well as like how I would have pictured them actually going through it.
• Valk: It was definitely a good writing practice for me also, in terms of knowing that I could go back and explore myself with fan fic if I needed to as well.

Description

Definition: Modern settings, a subgenre of alternate universes, are when fans reimagine characters from their canonical universe into the fans’ modern-day universe, such as high school, college, or a coffee shop.

Number of Codes: 12

Analysis: While Valk is the only fan author who engaged with modern settings in their fanfic, both they and Writegirl discuss the modern setting generic form. Writegirl has written and read several modern setting fanfics across fandoms, like Xena: Warrior Princess, X-Men, GOT, and Star Wars. This demonstrates the shared discourse and genres across fandoms; modern setting, one of the more popular tags on AO3, is a generic form with which many fans engage.

While Writegirl merely expresses that she and other fans enjoy modern settings, Valk provides a bit more insight as to why the modern setting generic form is appealing. Specifically, Valk cites wanting to see themselves in their fanfic and wanting to make the fic more relatable to their own experience. Valk also argues that most GOT modern setting fics are “incredibly heteronormative” and take place in high schools or similar locations; Valk decides to challenge this convention in modern setting genres by writing a queer, potentially platonic story about Jaime exploring his gender expression in both a makeup store and his own apartment. By participating in modern setting genres, fans can more accurately represent their own lived experiences. These experiences, as Valk’s critique suggests, are entangled in systems of power, such as heteronormativity. Fanfic authors can challenge these systems of power by participating in fan genres, but reimagining particular conventions to resist exclusionary ideologies.

Quotes

• Dialux: And then the fact that the alternate universe for a modern setting is so [inaudible 01:07:54]. Which, to me, is very interesting. Because I tend to go out of my way to avoid modern alternate universes, because I personally don't like them.
• Valk: You never really hear about what Jaime thought about it. I sort of delved into this idea trying to explore Jaime reacquainting himself with these things later on in life, but through a modern lens because I also wanted to be able to relate to it as well.
• Valk: My strengths in this fic for me was being able to try and incorporate as much of Jaime and Brienne's banter and relationship, as much as I could to a modern setting because obviously they wouldn't be having as much of a, you know Brienne wouldn't be considered as horrifying as she was considered in the original text because she was considered man-ish. In modern day context, it's not always encouraged, based on what kind of family you came from, women are often allowed to be tom boys more than vice versa. There was a challenge of trying to see, okay, Brienne wouldn't have had as traumatic a childhood probably regarding her own gender identity. But there would definitely be some push back, but how would that change based on the setting? I made her a little bit more comfortable in her skin than Jaime and also having her there to sort of be a foil and a supportive shoulder for Jaime who was going through a similar thing that maybe she went through as well.
• Valk: from the source material where I wanted to kind of explore Jaime's perspective on this, but through a modern lens and later on in life because a lot of Jaime's self-realization in the book comes after he meets Brienne as well.
• Valk: It was part of actually a larger, I guess, alternate universe idea that I had in mind explaining how Jaime got to that point living with Brienne, where Brienne has been before and how she had gotten to living with Jaime.
• Valk: That's definitely something that is taught in canon with him, in terms of never showing your full hand of cards to the enemy, being deceitful and it's all to reach your goal. I think that would still carry over to a modern setting, but it would be more toned down into a more reasonable kind of thing like, "I don't want to seem like this is actually for me. I'm buying it for someone else." If I don't want to get lambasted or judged or anything like that. Residual toxic masculinity and all of that.
• Valk: I wanted to still carry over the kind of relationship that Jaime and Tywin had in the TV show in the medieval setting, but to modernize it more again, but not take away the fact that Tywin was a very controlling father.
• Valk: Most Game of Thrones fanfic is incredibly hetero normative and it's a lot of university AU, high school AU and I'm like, "What about literally anything else?" I did a modern universe [inaudible 00:37:49] Please, literally anything else.
• WriteGirl: And I actually really liked a show called Xena: Warrior Princess. That was kind of my very first fandom. I really liked, see I can't even remember now, Ares and Gabrielle. I wrote a fanfiction about them that was set in modern times. That was my very first fan fic.
• WriteGirl: X-Men comics. And I wrote a story, once again, set in modern times. I kind of do this a lot. I take characters out of their setting and transpose them into reality.
• WriteGirl: I like the modern setting. Modern setting seems to be the most common one.
• WriteGirl: I think it's the same with, I'm also very active in the Star Wars fandom, and that's one thing you see in a lot of Star Wars, especially the new trilogy. People love taking the characters out of where they are and putting them in today. That doesn't surprise me at all.

Description

Definition: Other fan generic forms not mentioned, including roleplay; satire; Alpha, Beta, Omega (ABO, also known as Omegaverse); and crack. There are also other fan mediums mentioned, such as self-inserts, fanart, and one shots.

Number of Codes: 22

Analysis: Each fan author mentions different common fandom generic forms that they either incorporated in their fanfic, in other fanfics, or read. Each one of these generic forms or mediums have rich histories, conventions, and ideologies. This brief analysis, though, will just provide a basic definition and glimpse into them.

Aria argues there are distinct fanfic and literary genres, although she does not go into further detail. She also mentions ABO, or alpha beta omega, which writers imagine characters in different power dynamics based on supernatural reasons; ABO is also known as the omegaverse. Dialux mentions crack -- or intentionally absurd fanfics -- and historical AUs, or historical alternate universes that incorporate history in some way. Gillywulf incorporates several genres in her fanfic collection of drabbles/vignettes and other fan mediums, such as fan art. Kittya Cullen mentions learning to be critical of the source materials through meta-analysis and satire. Valk brings up two other fan mediums: self-inserts and onesshots. Self-inserts are when authors either insert themself as a character in their fanfic or use second person so readers can envision themselves in the fanfic. One-shots are usually one-chapter fanfics in which the story begins and ends within that chapter.

Quotes

• Aria: This is I think the first piece where I write as a adult writer looking at the world and going, "Okay, what do I actually think? What can I say about this that is interesting," instead of just being like, "I don't know, let's take a thought and just run with it." I think that in a lot of ways it suffers of being really in that space, but it's also a good piece in that I'm genuinely, actually doing literature, in a way that I really was not before.
• Aria: It had two epic story arcs that I didn't know how to integrate, both this love story about disability, and it was this story about queer politics, and I could not make those two pieces meld at the time. The story arcs just never came together, and I couldn't harmonize them, and it sort of died because I couldn't get to the thing I was trying to make, not ambition, but I couldn't make either one of them make sense.
• Aria: I think I thought it was romantic. I don't remember why I did that, that's one of the ones where just... I think it's part of I had that as sort of my first... It was more like one of the most basic tools that I learned, so I learned, "All right, I'll do alternate points of view."
• Aria: I don't know if I thought about this as a storytelling tool at times, or I thought about it as a storytelling tool obviously that helps power [inaudible 00:17:00], not necessarily about the story if it makes sense. I wasn't telling you things that had happened in the past, to teach you what happened in the past. I was saying, "This is what's haunting the characters, this is what the characters can't escape from in a very physical, visceral fashion." Well maybe physical might be the wrong word, you know what, I'm okay with it, body and mind, if it makes sense.
• Aria: First guess is actually that there's a) an explosion of stories that aren't canon compliant, so people are staying people are saying, "This story is canon compliant," as a way of engaging. In terms of, it makes sense to say something's canon-compliant sort of at the end of the piece, because once the story is over then it makes sense to go back and say, "actually this is canon compliant." A lot of stories before a story ends it's already like, "How could this go from here?" And so I would imagine that the canon compliance people were like, "Well, I'm telling this story based on what literally happened," instead of all of these other tellings that I'm seeing now. That would be my first guess. My second guess is that people are excited to tell stories that were literally just after the end of The Legend of Korra
• Aria: And to be fair, omega and alpha as being there in the far right column. I don't really understand ABO [alpha, beta, omega] as in general, so I can't talk. They're not as inherently sexual. They definitely struck me as relatively sexual, and that's not
• Dialux: But a few years later when I was, I think, 13, my friend introduced me to like crack Lord Of The Rings fiction.
• Dialux: So, the person that I was supposed to be gifting to asked for a historical AU, alternate universe, especially a middle aged one, with angst and a happy ending.
• Dialux: And it was football RPF (real person fic) fanfiction. Which was very interesting, because I think it was just after the 2018 World Cup.
• Dialux: And there were a lot of really good fanfic there that used second person point of view. And I felt like they kind of gave an insight into the character in a way that you wouldn't be able to get if you were looking at them from a third person point of view. And when I was doing this fanfic, I was really kind of thinking about how and what I wanted to communicate. And I felt like the second person point of view gave more weight to the entire fanfic, as opposed to the third person.
• Dialux: Yeah. I mean, I really do feel like there aren't that many second person point of views that kind of allow you to immerse yourself into that person, or into that character.
• GillyWulf: Well, my audience is pretty much just other fans like me, so it was sort of just, "Well, what would I want to read? And what would people my age think is fun?" Things like that. There were a couple people who regularly sent me prompts, so it was sort of, I knew these were the sort of things they were into, or I know what they're angling for in this question, in this idea. So, I'm like, "Okay, I can sort of tailor it to that,"
• GillyWulf: There's been a couple of fan artists over the years, like plastic-pipes, who is spectacular, always great. And I think the name was [inaudible 00:11:19] at the time, but I think they've changed it. There were a couple times when they did art according to what I'd written, or things like that. And I was like, "Okay, well it'd be cool if I wrote something that was specifically to get an image out of this person's mind."
• GillyWulf: Even in the modern drabbles, or the other AU, I tried to keep that as something that, that's what she is, whether or not she can access that.
• GillyWulf: So, these big cartoons that are for kids are doing more for those relationships than a lot of live-action things, because live action, you kill people often, and brutally, so it's a lot easier to go, "Okay, cartoons are much more gentle. Cartoons are easier to adjust."
• Kittya Cullen: But basically where you would participate with one fan writing a line, the next fan writing another line and so on and so forth. So that was the first time that I actually wrote anything fandom related.
• Kittya Cullen: And then there was a bit of a lull until my delving into the Indian forums. And there we would do the meta analysis and satirical writings and so on.
• Kittya Cullen: Actually, I completely forgot, there was a period where I would write like a satirical review of what was happening, because I don't do that anymore for anything really. But it was an opportunity to experiment with writing and being critical of source materials and so on.
• Valk: I started writing and initially my own fanfic, so self insert fan fic when I was like maybe about 10 years old.
• Valk: I guess I was thinking about also how I had reacted or how my friends had reacted to when I came out to them. I wanted to, I guess write a do-over for some of them about how I would have liked to have that experience with me, like having them knock again and come inside and ask questions and not just kind of leave it right there and not talk again. I wanted to sort of console myself a little bit through it as well as wanted to console Jaime
• Valk: I learned how much writing a one shot sounds good and all in practice, but then it ends up opening all these other doors of should I write more, should I write less. I don't know what I should be doing with this.
• WriteGirl: Because it has to hurt if it's to heal.

Description

Definition: This set of codes examine fan authors’ agency in their genre practices, writing choices, and uptakes. These codes include writing practices such as drafting, audience awareness, motivation, research, and more.

Number of Codes: 207

Analysis: Select different stages in the writing process for specific analyses.

Quotes

• Aria: Some of the pieces I wrote just no longer work as Homestuck pieces because the characters have been changed, and I was like, "I can't really write this story about two women in love because one of them isn't a woman anymore, that story doesn't work as a piece."
• Aria: When I'm writing this fic it means something, because I'm like... There's a study I think that says that when you get into rational arguments about things you don't convince them, but if you tell stories you can. And I think that I'm in that place, arguing about politics in the fiction space of the internet.
• Aria: But I wrote a piece called Addict's Alchemy, which was a piece about...in terms of servicing some of the same things we're talking about today. It's a piece about about trauma... And it [inaudible 00:05:20], that this isn't obviously. It's a piece about trauma and it's a piece about, what does it mean... Really they're both pieces about what it means to be disabled.
• Aria: For me, this text begins both as like, I was reading a lot about Stonewall and the context around Stonewall, and also I was reading a piece about PTSD, and it was just very surface, very basic understanding of trauma and PTSD in particular, like something you recover from, in a way that I was not super comfortable with. And sort of the original text, not sure if you would agree. And so I wanted to talk about disability through the context of being something you come to live with, and come to integrate, and come to find becomes a part of you life, but also something you still struggle with, instead of just, I don't know, a lot of us have seen the story a lot like, you get better, and then you get better and you win. And then one day it doesn't bother you.
• Aria: I was coming into my own politically, I was becoming my own political individual in a way I hadn't been before. Like I had politics, but this is around the time that I'm really radicalized, and just me engaging with those contexts.
• Aria: This is I think the first piece where I write as a adult writer looking at the world and going, "Okay, what do I actually think? What can I say about this that is interesting," instead of just being like, "I don't know, let's take a thought and just run with it." I think that in a lot of ways it suffers of being really in that space, but it's also a good piece in that I'm genuinely, actually doing literature, in a way that I really was not before.
• Aria: First of all I wrote about suicide at a time where I was not ready to talk about it, as a writer. I'm still not sure I can actually talk about suicide now, in a way that's beneficial or useful for me. I'm not sure now I can do that now, or could not do it now, but I could not do it at the time, or I couldn't do it in a way that was healthy. I know I wrote it that it would seem therapeutic, but I also was being retraumatized, and I didn't say that obviously in the tags.
• Aria: But I also struggled because I didn't know how to write about my own trauma, and so I tried to write about trauma in ways that other people were experiencing it. And already the text engaged with that, and those weren't really authentic to me. They weren't things I was writing about at the time.
• Aria: It had two epic story arcs that I didn't know how to integrate, both this love story about disability, and it was this story about queer politics, and I could not make those two pieces meld at the time. The story arcs just never came together, and I couldn't harmonize them, and it sort of died because I couldn't get to the thing I was trying to make, not ambition, but I couldn't make either one of them make sense.
• Aria: I did consult with some folks when I was writing some texts about trauma, because I was like... I wasn't comfortable writing that.
• Aria: But that was the biggest bit of feedback I got was this conversation, and it helped a little bit.
• Aria: And then the last one's a content warning, like yeah, if you read this you'll see homophobia. I can't not publish a story about homophobia.
• Aria: I chose Korra and Asami because they're main characters, I like writing main characters. I liked the love story, it was kind of short in the text, but I liked it. Or not short, but it felt more like a nod than a full
• Aria: There are things I don't like about it, but I like it as a little bit of text. It's there in the text, it was one of those things that was like, "Oh, I love this, I love feeling represented." So I wrote that.
• Aria: I chose the end of Season Three because it's the place where I felt like I was reading a... I felt like engaging with the original text, I was feeling like I wanted something different, I wanted a more deep and meaningful engagement with disability and trauma in this context. Because reading the original text is like, it's there for a while and then they're better? So it was almost the opposite feeling, what do I think this looks like? And so that's why I chose that.
• Aria: I think I thought it was romantic. I don't remember why I did that, that's one of the ones where just... I think it's part of I had that as sort of my first... It was more like one of the most basic tools that I learned, so I learned, "All right, I'll do alternate points of view."
• Aria: but this is what I was doing with my life. I was on my way to running a queer resource center at a college, so I was doing the work of feeling the political implications of things in the world. And so I was, for me the most natural thing to write about is to write about... Not just homophobia, although this was a story about homophobia, not just homophobia, but this was a story about queerness and politics. And because this was the thing that was radicalizing me, [inaudible] is vile, because... And it was about violence, so I don't just mean violence as a method of resistance, I mean violence as a thing that people survive. Because that's what's radicalizing me at the time. And so I felt the need to wake up that in a sense.
• Aria: I think I was just engaging with the text's portrayal of trauma.
• Aria: I don't know if I thought about this as a storytelling tool at times, or I thought about it as a storytelling tool obviously that helps power [inaudible 00:17:00], not necessarily about the story if it makes sense. I wasn't telling you things that had happened in the past, to teach you what happened in the past. I was saying, "This is what's haunting the characters, this is what the characters can't escape from in a very physical, visceral fashion." Well maybe physical might be the wrong word, you know what, I'm okay with it, body and mind, if it makes sense.
• Aria: It was a piece that was sufficiently about me that it would have been fun and helpful for a lot of people. But this, I think it was a good piece, it was a piece that was a whole other world to read
• Aria: I think of a place I was there, and this was particularly...I was engaging with political institutions at the time that were much, much bigger than me, particularly family institutions. My family was pretty chill, but running a queer resource center at community college is like, getting that [inaudible 00:24:12]. You would deal with a bunch of people that were writing about the problems for being gay, or feeling like they can't talk about it, or being the only source of information, of being part of an institution that was the only source of information.
• Aria: I was trying to write a story that engaged with trauma and felt authentic and didn't make trauma seem like the end of the world. Because the binary that's in a lot of literature is either like, "Oh, you either overcame trauma, or you are doomed to misery forever." And I was trying to find some middle ground, trying to tell a story that felt authentic.
• Aria: Because I imagine Korra's pain is seeing the cost of her new trauma after time, because her being injured, being in a place where you are tortured to death as a vulnerability. Every time you experience that pain, I imagine that that's a place that engagement is a struggle after time when you're in that pain. So it's an ordeal for Korra to dress herself.
• Aria: I wanted to tell a story about connection. And I wanted to make it clear that when I'm telling the story, I think that even [inaudible 00:26:39] understands that it's not really about romance as much as it is about feeling connected in a genuine way to people, that that central theme, building a life worth living after injury, or after trauma, is finding an authentic realtionship with people.
• Aria: And so Asami plays that role, being a person to whom Korra wants to relate, is thrilled to relate, is not scared, or she is a little bit scared to relate, but is she scared to relate in the way that she's scared to relate to other people.
• Aria: Whereas Korra grows up in this institution, Asami grows up with a relatively politically progressive father. He's an abuser, but he's also a very, very politically progressive man. He's a radical, he tries to overthrow his government, make the world a more equitable and fair place. It's self-interested, he's a bourgeois radical, but I wouldn't have said that at the time. I imagine Asami as having a relatively normal, relatively healthy understanding of the world in a way, having felt like she, not just knowing that a woman can love another woman, because I guess almost every person in this world knows. This is nothing like, Korra is particularly going to have a hard time because of that institution itself.
• Aria: In the context of this piece, a lot of my understanding of Hiroshi as a bourgeois radical is that I'm not going to have a [inaudible 00:30:36], because I don't really have a sense of class politics at the time, or have the beginnings of that study. That's only beginning to be born
• Aria: I wanted to give a sense of what is the politics of the Northern Water Tribe? And I kind of wanted to say that queerness isn't criminalized in the Northern Water Tribe, or is not criminalized anymore. Also I wanted to say this is a different relationship. But the other thing I wanted to talk about is, what are politicians willing to give up for their family, and what are they not?
• Aria: He's not particularly flawed, because he's willing to play this opportunistic political game. Because he's also capable of looking at his child and going, "Maybe I shouldn't do that."
• Aria: I would also say a little bit about some of the research I'd read at the time, turns out the book I was reading at the time that claimed that knowing someone who was gay had a significant...Or not knowing someone who was gay, but engaging with someone who's gay on the topic of being gay helped significantly with changing someone's political views, or being willing to accept gay people. Turns out that one was actually wrong, like literally the person who put together that study cooked the book.
• Aria: I also sort of wanted to talk... I sort of was thinking about the limits of the political and the [inaudible 00:35:57] of the political. You could do what, when and where, the idea that a politician can't really save the world. I don't know if I was all the way to, "We have to do it," yet, but I think I'm getting there.
• Aria: I was thinking about New York City around the times of the Stonewall Riots. This is where those politics come in. I was playing with, what does it mean... I was playing with, what's particularly violent political oppression? What are the limits of political oppression in a relatively liberal cosmopolitan society? Because I was getting that sense of, there's actually a whole lot of ways that political oppression can happen that I'd never even thought about at this point, and I was learning about that. So I was writing about this character as someone who's experiencing the limits of that political oppression. And this is actually one of the key storylines in my opinion, and it's ultimately a story about resistance to a kind of political oppression
• Aria: This was written obviously before Donald Trump becomes President, and I could see all sorts of things about reaction again. But I was seeing the reaction, I was scared. I don't know where I got this, there was something bad was coming. I knew that I had that sense of fear, so I was writing about... I guess writing a little bit about, how do we fight back when things get worse?
• Aria: I also learned that you have to be careful with how much to take on, and you have to be careful about what you're willing to prune, and you have to be ready to prune things. And you have to be ready to follow a story where it goes instead of trying to follow all the directions you ever imagined. Because if you try to follow a story in every direction you have, then it's going to die like this piece did. It's like, "I don't know how to integrate the story into itself anymore."
• Dialux: I had a very close group of friends on Live Journal back in the early 2000s. That, I think, probably because I was a teenager. Perhaps this is because of all those reasons. But that kind of close-knittedness has never kind of shown up for me ever since. I think I tend to participate now on more, "Oh, this is really interesting for me. And this is really fascinating." And I'll go into it for the material as opposed to the friendships themselves.
• Dialux: Mostly to keep myself writing. Because, otherwise, I would just not publish those materials until it becomes, you know. It's basically sitting on my hard drive for years and years on end, and finally I get the opportunity and the motivation to publish them.
• Dialux: Because, initially, it was definitely a very close-knit, just writing for friends and with friends.
• Dialux: But I've also recently published work in Fleabag, which was one of the fandoms that I had to write for for my Yuletide assignment.
• Dialux: There's a couple of things that you see that are kind of interesting, and then you kind of identify a certain actor, or a certain character that you kind of find interesting. And then jump from there to another.
• Dialux: Yes. I think my most recent published fanfiction is a Percy Weasley, second person point of view, post canon. In which he is attempting to basically restructure his society by running on a platform of big structural change. Which might sound vaguely familiar. But it was, I think, mostly due to the kind of deep rage that I was feeling over the entire Democratic Primaries over the past couple of months. And almost the past year. In which everything felt very much like a lot of talk, and not a lot of doing. And at some point, you need some catharsis. And kind of putting it out into fiction and seeing something changing. Or, not even seeing something changing. But seeing people trying to effect change, and willing to fight for that change felt very important to me. And basically that entire fanfic is kind of born out of that seething, massive, "I want to see something happening." And I will see it happen in fiction, if not in reality.
• Dialux: was talking about that, and I felt like that was a really fascinating look into that psyche. And seeing how Fleabag and the Priest would meet up. And how they would be after having separated for 20, 30 years, coming back to see each other after they have had full lives apart, but somehow still wanting something more. Which, I think, it's definitely, kind of, for me, I am not old enough to be discussing 50 year old, 60 year old life plans. But my life path has never been very straight, or what I felt that it would be. Because when I was, what? 15, I probably thought I'd be an engineer. And then after that I thought I'd be a doctor. And then, suddenly, now I'm a lawyer. And I thought I'd be in the U.S., and I'm in India. And it's a very wildly divergent and strange life path for me. And that's only been over, what? 10 years, 10, 15 years. And I can't even imagine how that would be over 20, 30 years. And identifying that desire for home, and wanting people to be that. As opposed to a given area, or a given job, or anything like that, felt very poignant to me at that particular point in time.
• Dialux: So, that was one fic that I was relatively and very proud of. To be honest.
• Dialux: So, when I wrote this fanfic it was actually one of the... I had signed up for a fic exchange for this one, as well. It's called the Jonsa Exchange. It was their fifth round. Their theme was, "Inspired by film."
• Dialux: So, the person that I was supposed to be gifting to asked for a historical AU, alternate universe, especially a middle aged one, with angst and a happy ending.
• Dialux: And if you're just starting from scratch, then it's difficult to create why two people would hate each other so much. I mean, you need to have that religious, and cultural, and those barriers in order for that to happen.
• Dialux: So, I mean, I think the choice to make Westeros Desi was more of, I don't want to do that much work in setting up all of these tensions, and identifying them. And kind of building, and trying to communicate that to the reader when there's already preexisting framework for it.
• Dialux: And there were a lot of really good fanfic there that used second person point of view. And I felt like they kind of gave an insight into the character in a way that you wouldn't be able to get if you were looking at them from a third person point of view. And when I was doing this fanfic, I was really kind of thinking about how and what I wanted to communicate. And I felt like the second person point of view gave more weight to the entire fanfic, as opposed to the third person.
• Dialux: And that also came across to a lot of readers, is what they were telling me, at least. Because they felt like there was a lot more gravitas to the entire fic that you wouldn't see in a lot of my other fanfics.
• Dialux: I think that for the actual research it was not so much that I did it for this particular fanfic, as it was more that I love that era a lot. So, I had tended to research it before, as well. So, I had a lot of information that I kind of knew in colloquial terms.
• Dialux: But I did not remember the exact way that he had died, so then I kind of went searching for that. And then, I mean, from there it kind of spiraled into researching other things and kind of reading up more about Akbar and more about Jodhaa. And I'm an avid research. I mean, that's what I do now.
• Dialux: Where I just didn't translate them into Rajput or Hindi words. Because I just use whatever I knew, because I speak Kannada at home. And that's another language entirely. And I was just running out of time, and I said, "You know what? No, I'll just handle it myself. And not translate it, and hope that nobody minds.
• Dialux: I think a lot of the research and a lot of the material was just about identifying and pulling disparate ideas together that I knew. From either my own culture because, of course, this is partially my own culture. And also, the historical details of [inaudible 00:27:49].
• Dialux: And I think that was what was very important to me, especially in this story, was puling it all together so that there weren't any open endings. And the research really, somehow, it helped in pulling that together.
• Dialux: Because I honestly expected nobody to do that. It's good to see that people are just as interested in a lot of it, in this stuff. You know?
• Dialux: I think that the thing I wanted to keep in mind was that I was doing the research, but I was also not putting as much research into it as I probably should have if I wanted to make it historical fiction.
• Dialux: I was literally just pulling things from here, and there. And, I mean, there's Rajput culture as well as South Indian culture, as well as there's some random, I think, there's some Bengali culture that I just threw in for the hell of it.
• Dialux: And that was one thing I wanted to be clear about. Because, yes, it was research. But I think I wanted to keep to the spirit of the movie, as well as the spirit of the A Song of Ice and Fire canon.
• Dialux: But when I was making the actual list of material, I basically just ran through from top to bottom of the actual fanfic. And basically tried to remember everything that I thought about. And identified the particular things that I was thinking about and trying to identify.
• Dialux: But, yeah. I think just developing the list of material and everything kind of helped me understand on a step by step process, everything that I had kind of... The assumptions that I had made, and where I had taken certain ideas from.
• Dialux: I was really worried about how it would be perceived by the fandom, how it would be received by people even outside of the fandom.
• Dialux: So, that was one of the primary reasons why I decided to make it in the first place. Because I wanted to be sure why and where I was getting these ideas from.
• Dialux: I was really worried about it, actually. Because I spoke to a couple people before I published the fanfic. Because I was kind of worried about it, and I wasn't sure how it would be received.
• Dialux: And I wasn't sure people would think that it was good enough. Because I was also combining both South Indian and North Indian tropes, to a certain extent. And those weren't necessarily very compatible. And there's a lot of history behind that and everything. And I wasn't entirely sure how people would perceive it.
• Dialux: But people were very kind about it. And I haven't actually gotten a single negative feedback on that fanfic to date.
• Dialux: And especially when she has that fight with Jon and she goes back home. And that was, I think, the point of catharsis. Because especially when you're looking at a lot of Indian mothers, and Indian women who get into marriages at a very young age. You have to deal with your husband's family, you have to deal with that entire kind of stigma. About you have to be the one to adjust and to compromise to a far greater extent than your husband. And all of these kind of had come together and had been marinating for a very long time. And I feel like Sansa, in this, was very much the product of that. Where she was just trying to fight it, she was such a perfect child in that culture. And then suddenly she has to kind of leave her culture behind. Or, not leave her culture behind, but adjust to a new culture. And she feels like she's being punished by her old one for no fault of her own. And all of it, kind of, her desperate unhappiness, her tensions with her mother were a big part of the fic, I think, for me.
• Dialux: And I was so worried. Because all of this was very close to my heart, and I did not want to have to deal with a lot of backlash, or feedback, or having to fight to say, "Well, I don't mean to be rude on any of these kinds of things." These are meant with respect and they're meant with love. And they're from a part of myself.
• Dialux: So, with all of that in mind, the actual fandom response was absolutely wonderful, and absolutely, completely respectful. And none of my fears at all came to fruition.
• Dialux: Because they were all so kind, and so respectful of the entire fic in general.
• Dialux: Because that's what I keep feeling whenever I look back at it, was how I got almost consumed by the characters when I was writing them.
• Dialux: I didn't feel like I could end it with, "Oh, everybody has kids and they're all happy." Because that felt very weird, and kind of disjointed with the rest of the fic.
• Dialux: And in that Sansa can see ghosts. And throughout the entire fic, it's a long fic and everything, but one of the biggest issues for me was, how do I end this?
• Dialux: But to me, it felt like it began with Jon and it had to end with Jon. And it had to end with him finally being triumphant, and finally being happy for his triumph at the end of this fanfic.
• Dialux: So, I initially wanted to make sure that it was pretty clear to everyone that this was a canon divergence. Where one where Rhaegar has won, Jon is raised a Targaryen.
• Dialux: And the reason I did the Jodhaa Akbar tag was actually because I wanted to make sure that people who read more Hindu mythology fic, or other fandoms like that, like Baahubali, were able to identify that this is one such fic. And I think there are people who have said they've entered through that particular tag.
• Dialux: But then the cultural tensions stem almost entirely from the differences within their upbringing, I'm pretty sure. Within their families. And I mean, there are cultural differences within, I mean, people that I've grown up with in India, and people in the U.S. And even though you're living side by side, that doesn't necessarily mean that you have the same cultural background. And I think that's something that both of them don't understand. And both of them kind of try to understand slowly.
• Dialux: And if you're talking about other moments, like when Sansa wants to give Jon his name, and he asks her to read it out loud. I think that's another moment of compromise. Because as much as she's giving him the gift, she's also giving him his name. And she's stepping across her own cultural boundaries to help him with that, which Jon doesn't completely understand.
• Dialux: Especially the quote that you put up here, which refers to Sansa's eyes. Because that was a moment for me, I think, more than anything else.
• Dialux: I think that was something that even when you agree to a marriage, and even when you kind of accept that. Especially when you go into your husband's house, and if you're living with his parents and everything. It's a very difficult concept. And it's a very difficult idea. And adjusting to that is a huge, almost, culture shock to people. To any women, adjusting to that is difficult. No matter who it is, no matter where you're going. So, then, I mean, especially for Sansa, who needs to leave behind her entire family. And doesn't even know when she'll be able to go back. And has to go to a foreign country without any support, and any of her own traditions. She's the one that's upheld every single tradition she has ever done. And especially when you're looking at the Hindu culture, it's very difficult to uphold them.
• Dialux: And then, finally, she slowly starts to grow into that. She starts to give moments of peace. You know, she's kind of giving Jon gifts, and she's trying to bridge that gap. Because she also realizes that it's her life, too. Which, I think, is one of the biggest realizations that a lot of women have. Which is, "Yes, I'm miserable. I want you to be miserable. But how am I going to be miserable for?" You need to let some things go, you need to move on past the injustices... I need to move past the injustices that I have faced.
• Dialux: The one quote that you picked out here, "You stand before your father, bedecked in gossamer and lace and silk, glass thick and shining in your hair." Because that was one that I actually remember. Because I initially put the word jewel, and jewels in the place of the word glass. But then I wanted it, for her, to feel that it was cheaper than the jewel. Even if she had them, they didn't matter to her. Because it was just glass.
• Dialux: As if, her family... Or, she's feeling as if her family is not willing to give her as much as she is owed when she's going into a marriage.
• Dialux: Oh. I think I learned that people are far more understanding than I was giving them credit for, especially because I was so afraid about the reception.
• Dialux: But then, I also think that one of the major things that I learned was probably that some of the anger, it doesn't have to be a very you anger to be a very deep one. For it to seep into your writing. Because a lot of the time, especially when I'm writing angry stories and everything, they tend to be immediate. Like, "Okay, I'm very angry right now. And I want to have a fit. And I want to do it." But this was something that it had kind have been, I think, brewing for a very long time. And then suddenly the anger, and the angst, and the hurt, and the pain, all kind of came out. But at the same time, it was not just that. It was also about passing through that anger, and knowing that there is going to be someone at the end of it who's willing to accept you.
• GillyWulf: I hate that I did it, but I did real-person fanfiction for Paramore. Thinking of it now, it's always like, "God, that's not good. I shouldn't have done it, but here we are."
• GillyWulf: And from those three, you can see that they have very female-centered stories. And then, at least all three are those are canonically queer characters, which are things that now get me really excited and make me want to go, "Okay, well, I want to dive into that. I want to see how their stories could be different," or, "I just really want to see them in this situation," so I try and write it when I can.
• GillyWulf: I'm trying to write something that's original, and that's always a bit more of an endeavor than you expect it to be.
• GillyWulf: Well, it was definitely, when I first started it, it was, "Okay, well, I kind of just want to write, and I want to get better at writing, practicing it." I started it in college, and the professor I had at that time kept saying how, "If you want to get better at writing, you have to write 50,000 words, and then, you have to write another 50,000." "Really? All right. I'll just write, then. People will give me prompts and I'll just write those as they come in." And then, there were a lot of prompts that came in, surprisingly. I was able to stay consistent with it for, I want to say, two, three years.
• GillyWulf: And it's funny, going back to the original ones, the older ones at least, and reading those, because you sent me one. I think it was chapter 37 you mentioned in your email, and I went back and read it and I was like, "Oof, I could do this a lot better now, I hope."
• GillyWulf: Yeah. Just, I wanted to get better at it, and people were really good at giving me things that I could easily do at work,
• GillyWulf: I didn't necessarily want to do full-length fics. I sort of wanted to just spit them out, and then, it came to a point where I was like, "Okay, well, I don't want to have individual listings for each of these," so I just put it all into one thing on AO3 and decided that, "Well, all right, I'll just do the prompts as the chapter titles and just go until I can't."
• GillyWulf: There's a couple that, I don't remember which ones, but there were a couple that I sort of left on a weird note [inaudible 00:09:21] on purpose, so that it had to be like, "Okay, well, maybe you want more, or maybe it's good as it is," and I liked that.
• GillyWulf: Well, my audience is pretty much just other fans like me, so it was sort of just, "Well, what would I want to read? And what would people my age think is fun?" Things like that. There were a couple people who regularly sent me prompts, so it was sort of, I knew these were the sort of things they were into, or I know what they're angling for in this question, in this idea. So, I'm like, "Okay, I can sort of tailor it to that,"
• GillyWulf: There's been a couple of fan artists over the years, like plastic-pipes, who is spectacular, always great. And I think the name was [inaudible 00:11:19] at the time, but I think they've changed it. There were a couple times when they did art according to what I'd written, or things like that. And I was like, "Okay, well it'd be cool if I wrote something that was specifically to get an image out of this person's mind."
• GillyWulf: I like that a lot of people, I still get comments occasionally that are, "I've just gone through this whole thing," and you can do that.
• GillyWulf: I also like that you can sort of see a progression of how I wrote them and how my own skills have maybe, hopefully developed. And even just, it did end up being four years' worth of time
• GillyWulf: so it was, when I think I started it, Korrasami hadn't been canon yet. So, it's definitely interesting, the before and after. And maybe, I think, during that time, also, gay marriage was legalized, so it was just definitely different attitudes in that. I think those are some of the strengths in seeing that as well.
• GillyWulf: So, if there were some things where I'd write the original drabble, and then I might get three more immediate requests in my inbox for a sequel, or for, "Can I get a full length thing of this?" And I didn't necessarily have the time or energy, or just the inclination in some cases.
• GillyWulf: So, I would start to feel guilty, and sometimes would just push one out whether or not I felt it was up to par, even though I hoped it was.
• GillyWulf: I mean, most of it was positive, which was really good. If somebody really didn't like something, they didn't usually tell me. Or if they did, sometimes it was like a spelling error or a formatting error, and it'd be, "Okay, I can just easily fix that." I don't think there were too many outright negative things. There was one. I don't think it was on a prompt, but this artist I really liked at the time commented and said something like, "This would've been better with this movie instead of the one you actually used," and didn't necessarily anything positive otherwise. I don't know if they actually liked it, or if it was just sort of a, "Well, I would've liked it better if you'd done this thing the way I wanted you to." Which, it is what it is, and you sort of have to just say, "Okay, well, this is the way I did it, and I'm not going to change it." But it was definitely a situation where I was like, "Okay. Don't know what to make of that."
• GillyWulf: Most of the time, people are very, very happy about it, because it was just another thing for them to read.
• GillyWulf: Well, I'm very much a person who believes in, if you can't say it in like two words then you probably shouldn't. So, I like to have it, what is this thing? And that's it. I like to be able to say, "This is what it's going to be," and it doesn't necessarily need to be more complicated than that.
• GillyWulf: I know a lot of people like to have full sentences, and get really detailed and say things like that, but I always find that to be sort of distracting, because I know, when I'm personally looking for something, I like to be able to just click through until I find exactly what I'm looking for. So, if somebody has what I'm looking for, but also in that same tag is a full sentence of something else, it doesn't necessarily help me stuff. If somebody's specifically looking for, I guess a long-distance relationship thing, they can just click on that and see, "Okay, well, it's in here somewhere. I'll just find whichever prompt it is." I'm a big fan of just keeping things neat and simple.
• GillyWulf: Well, obviously a lot of it is trying to come up with different ways to not use the same descriptions, not use the same words, because you know that once you put it in the drabble, if you keep describing them the exact same way, people might skip over that or it starts to start reading a little bit dull. So, I tried to mix it up on occasion.
• GillyWulf: And okay, well, when you meet somebody, what are the first things you notice? And for Korra, she's an imposing figure, whether or not she means to be. She's got the muscles, she's maybe not as white as everybody else in Republic City, and she's got these really bight eyes. So, those things stand out immediately.
• GillyWulf: Things like that, you notice immediately, but also that it's not necessarily always in a way that maybe the reader is expecting to see it. I don't know. It depends on each drabble, each specific one, and the mood that is also trying to get portrayed.
• GillyWulf: The first being that we only get a certain amount of them in canon.
• GillyWulf: So, at the same time, it was also sort of an exploration for me in that I've known I was gay, probably since kindergarten, but I sort of just put it off, put it off, and it wasn't until I started getting into Korrasami that I was like, "Okay, well, I'm meeting a community where this is accepted and this is encouraged even." So, I had decided to come out, and these became sort of two parallels of, "It could be this, or it could be that." Of like, "What is the best case? What is the worst case for maybe how my parents will react?" Thankfully, it leaned more towards Korra's parents than Asami, but it did sort of dip into that a little bit.
• GillyWulf: Well, for that chapter, I want to say, like everything else in the collection, it was a prompt, but it was something that I didn't want to ham-fist it, because Korra's definitely, she's traumatized. We see that more than once,
• GillyWulf: So, in this one in particular, she's trying to have a good experience and maybe power through it, but then, in that brief lapse where she forgets that she's tied down and then she tries to sit up, it's sort of like a muscle memory thing, where she's back there the last time she was chained up and couldn't move. But also, at the same time, I wanted Asami to immediately be there and to be immediately helpful and not push her. She was just trying to be comforting. You hear stories about how people try and be helpful and just make situations worse, but at this point in their relationship, Korra and Asami knew each other super well, and even though this is an unusual situation for them, Asami knows how Korra reacts and knows who she is and what she's thinking. She's able to help her come back slowly, rather than try and make it a quick thing.
• GillyWulf: So, I think I'd notice, not spacing errors, pacing errors in that, I could've slowed that down a bit, I could've drawn the reader in a little bit more, just things like that, where it's just like, "I maybe know how to write now," so it hopefully could've made it a little bit more engaging.
• GillyWulf: Well, again, it was the prompts, but it was also, I have personally been a little conflicted on gender for a while, and it's like my sexuality, it was something that I sort of just say, "Well, I'll get to that when I have the chance." So, it's always just sort of in the back of my head
• GillyWulf: I try and put good outcomes for Korra, in that she's living the life that she wanted to live with a person she loves, doing something she loves. And even though it maybe needs to be a little bit more complicated, because of hormones or things like that, but it's not a huge obstacle, it's just a little something to add to the day. But yeah, it's like the whole mood of most of the things I try and write. I want it to be happy.
• GillyWulf: And even though the trans experience is not necessarily one that I know for certain, there's plenty of people in the Korra community, in most online Internet communities, where there's plenty of those people and you see what they're going through and you see how their lives are, and I try not to speak for situations that I've never lived through, but you can draw knowledge from that and say, "Okay, well, without going in depth into feelings or things like that, I can add this, this, and this, and make it maybe relatable in that regard."
• GillyWulf: And especially for this, it's not a serious work, it's meant to be something fun, it's meant to be something that is just for other people to enjoy. And I wouldn't be enjoying it if I was writing those things that made me super uncomfortable.
• GillyWulf: And it's also, given the audience, this is considered a family show. So, I realized over time that maybe I don't have to write that.
• GillyWulf: If you set those boundaries, people generally stick to it. If you tell people flat out, "I'm not going to write that," they generally won't press and press, and ask, "Why aren't you?" Because I just find keeping people as slaves is super ... I didn't want to contribute to it, and it was just that sort of idea [inaudible 00:47:42] maybe are younger and a little bit more impressionable than I am, so maybe it's okay to put things that they haven't been exposed to before, but also, it doesn't need to be a weird thing.
• GillyWulf: even though I will always love Korra and Asami, it's not necessarily always easy to write for that, if you're not getting constant updates for it.
• GillyWulf: It was partially based on a drawing by [inaudible 00:50:02] that had Korra and Asami sitting under a tree and just looking out over Republic City,
• GillyWulf: I wanted it to, like everything else, just be soft and be a way of saying, this is their city, their lives are going to go on, and they're going to be happy and enjoy it.
• GillyWulf: And I also wanted to give the collection itself a sendoff I was proud of. So, I spent a little bit more time on that than I did a lot of the other stuff, just let it marinate. "You know what? This is a good end, and hope you enjoyed," sort of thing.
• GillyWulf: So now, I sort of write when I want to, when I have the motivation. And if I'm feeling it, yeah, I'll do a little bit. Like somebody requested a prompt two weeks ago. I was like, "You know what? Why not. I'm feeling it. We're going to go for it."
• GillyWulf: I learned to just not push it, don't write what other people are demanding, necessarily.
• GillyWulf: My audience should be myself, at the end of the day. I want to write the things that I want to read. Even if I'd much rather prefer just reading it and not having to put the time and effort into clacking my way through it, if I want to read it, I have to write it sometimes, which is fine. But I should enjoy the things that I'm writing.
• GillyWulf: And it's okay that maybe only three other people also liked it, but I like it.
• Kittya Cullen: I think I started writing fan fiction in earnest because I was homesick. Because I had recently moved, and so it was with the intent of writing something that was close to home but also part of fandom that I started doing that.
• Kittya Cullen: But I think with Twilight it was just that phase where you finally find a story that speaks to you, even if you kind of hate it when you look back at it when you're older. But at the time, how Bella was written both as someone who was insular and chooses to form or has a small community and so forth and deals with depression or whatever it is, it just seemed to be something that I could relate to. And so I was both interested in that, and I guess in the power fantasy that she was written to come in to. Usually, at least for me at the time, it wasn't really common to see those characters have that kind of a glow-up, you can say.
• Kittya Cullen: I was on Twitter casually scrolling through something, and someone from back home happened to mention how the finale of the show had gone. Given my own cultural background and the cultural background of the world in general, I was pretty surprised about that, so I started consuming fics and reading the show ... Sorry, not reading the show, but watching the show to get through it to see ... If I could see where it was going and if I would be as surprised as everyone else had been. So when I got through the show, I was surprised, and I was really happy about how it had gone. I felt a need to contribute to the fandom in some way.
• Kittya Cullen: I kind of wanted to see that explored in my own way. And with Asami in particular, and this was surprising for me because usually I'm all for the main character. I never really remember to think about the other ... But with Asami, it felt like there was this big gap available to us for exploration.
• Kittya Cullen: So I kind of wanted to explore that and see how Asami herself was dealing with it. Because for me I like to see how the characters are responding to what's happening to them rather than having the plot happen to them, and with Asami there was just so much room to do that.
• Kittya Cullen: For this particular fic, I think it was just the imagery. I was really trying to grasp something that in some ways is so intangible. I was trying so hard to get just that feeling of desolation and aching.
• Kittya Cullen: But the metaphor itself of the Marching Ants, it was this way of articulating the anxiety that comes along with that.
• Kittya Cullen: So I think it just came back to capturing that, the imagery of it, the tone of the chapter, the voice of it because, at least to me, it works really hard to put us in Asami's shoes and make us experience it exactly as she's experiencing it.
• Kittya Cullen: And in terms of relationships and love and so forth, it was I guess just coming back to what I like to explore in fiction, which is how people are interacting with each other, what it means for them. And especially for certain characters who are ... I'm not sure how I'm thinking of this, but I think what I'm thinking of is where the audience may usually dismiss them or not consider them worthy of further exploration. So I like to see for myself how their worth is existing within these relationships, what it means for them and what it can mean for the audience and so forth.
• Kittya Cullen: I guess the sensation of ants ... I come from an area where you commonly come into contact with animals and so on, so I'm familiar with the actual physical reality of ants crawling across your skin, and there's a way that it feels. It's like a sort of weird, prickling sensation that is very disconcerting, and I guess I wanted to translate that into how the story reflects Asami's own experience with whatever she's feeling. And that imagery just seemed to click with that, just the experience of having something under your skin and on your skin, even if you can't quite articulate what it is.
• Kittya Cullen: With the case of Asami and her father, I think it just came back to how they wrote the final book for the series. I found it fascinating that Asami had reached out to her father after what had happened.
• Kittya Cullen: Whereas, for Asami, Asami didn't have anyone, or at least maybe in her head she didn't have anyone. So she went back to someone, I guess who is an ... I wouldn't say an abuser because there isn't that dynamic for them. But in the way that the relationship shifts from love and care to an act of violence ... I don't know. I just wanted to explore that. It's just fascinating to me to see how people who were deeply hurt somehow still find a way to circle back around to the people who have hurt them.
• Kittya Cullen: I think I was both going for an understanding of how Asami herself is effected by this really terrible thing we see happen to Korra.
• Kittya Cullen: It's just to be someone who builds and creates with the purpose of fixing or making better, but then not being able to do so for someone within your personal life. But the imagery also for that chapter was, I guess, built in subtext because I wasn't quite sure yet how to engage with what was happening in ways that were visible to other people outside of the fan community, the slashfan community.
• Kittya Cullen: It has less to do with fandom itself and more to do with the external world. And even now it's, I guess it's ... I don't know. I think it just seemed like the safer option at the time. But the more time I've spent in that part of fandom, the less I guess I've cared about how it's read or whatever it is. But at the time, it just seemed wiser, particularly if I was having others who may not ... Because fan works and original work for me are on the same level, and so I'm not concerned, I guess, with people reading it for ... people reading it and not seeing a difference in quality, but rather how they experience the content. And so I think I was still considering who the audience would be.
• Kittya Cullen: So both as a black person and as a woman, it was just important for me to recognize that in text and get around to exploring what that might have meant for other characters who weren't within the Circle of the Avatar and had powerful connections.
• Kittya Cullen: Because there is this thing in fanfiction where we assume that all people who are accessing it are familiar with the text. And while that is often common when we want it to function beyond that world to have relevance in other ways, I think for me personally it's important to integrate more parts of the world, of the universe.
• Kittya Cullen: For me, it was just reminding myself that, even though I'm writing something where there are people who are familiar with the text, it's also important to fill in the blanks sometimes.
• Valk: Of course, being younger, you don't really understand romance all typically well. It's all very idealized. Then as I got older, I started liking to delve more into different types of friendships as well.
• Valk: I'm non-binary, so a lot of my work as I got older started to deal more with gender as well as sexuality, also being bi-sexual. I used it sort of as a tool in some fanfics to work through ideas or feelings that I'd had and didn't know how to properly verbalize yet. I was putting them on paper, using another character as the medium and expressing or exploring different ideas in an area where I felt I was kind of safe to do so. I didn't always publish all of them, but the one that you contacted me over, I did, obviously.
• Valk: Yeah, I wrote it in one sitting in a Starbucks near my university.
• Valk: It was around the time when I was questioning whether or not I was non-binary and I tried to sort of work things out with Jaime as the main focal character
• Valk: My strengths in this fic for me was being able to try and incorporate as much of Jaime and Brienne's banter and relationship, as much as I could to a modern setting because obviously they wouldn't be having as much of a, you know Brienne wouldn't be considered as horrifying as she was considered in the original text because she was considered man-ish. In modern day context, it's not always encouraged, based on what kind of family you came from, women are often allowed to be tom boys more than vice versa. There was a challenge of trying to see, okay, Brienne wouldn't have had as traumatic a childhood probably regarding her own gender identity. But there would definitely be some push back, but how would that change based on the setting? I made her a little bit more comfortable in her skin than Jaime and also having her there to sort of be a foil and a supportive shoulder for Jaime who was going through a similar thing that maybe she went through as well.
• Valk: writing it also based off of my own experiences, just exploring the LGBT community in my area, I was kind of writing it from that perspective, but also not having as much information as I would like.
• Valk: That, and also trying to write and finish an entire fanfic in one sitting is very difficult when it's in a public setting. Luckily, it happened and it was a nice exercise as well, just also to be able to sit and write and have it really done in one sitting and then put it out there was very satisfying.
• Valk: I did a very brief look over and then I was like, "Screw it,"
• Valk: Yeah, I got a very interesting response from someone. I believe, maybe a week or two after. They were like, "It's a really well written fanfic, it's great, but why in God's (capital G) name, did you make Jaime like this?" And the moment I saw capital G, I was like I see. I tried to be as cordial as I could and I explained what I said earlier about my inspiration
• Valk: Yeah, that was the one big kick back I got from someone. I was a little bit shocked that I got the capital G person, but what can you do?
• Valk: While I do ship them together romantically, I wanted to write something that also reflected that you could do like a very intimate moment without bring sex into it as well.
• Valk: It's something that I wanted to, again, wanted to bring into a fanfic to kind of make it more relatable to me, but also to other people who might be reading this and wondering the same thing.
• Valk: There's a lot of, again, fanfic already out there of them being intimate, but it was all very incredibly heteronormative. Just their gender roles and Brienne being vulnerable and weak and all that stuff again. I was just not really feeling it, so I wrote my own instead.
• Valk: I guess I wanted to get a very powerful moment on paper. I had all these ideas and notes about what was also going on in the universe and what not, but this was the one that kind of started it. I wanted to make sure that I could get it down and not have it be that fanfic that I write in my head and then I just cannot put on paper later on.
• Valk: I really wanted to address the gender issue and the gender questioning and write how the experiences hit the hardest for me when I was thinking about it. Definitely.
• Valk: I think he definitely is someone that would pick up on someone's interests and what not and what that means to them, either subconsciously or consciously channel it when he's handling it.
• Valk: I think it's because he's used to having to perform any way and being very new, if you're very new into like trying to question your gender identity, especially being a man, you are at a higher risk of...I should say more so, if you present male than you are at a higher risk of facing violence or any kind of physical outlashing. Be it verbal or physical, but I think it's a lot of like, you learn to be very secretive. You'll act in ways to protect yourself, more than anything.
• Valk: Yeah, so at the same time I was writing this fanfic, I was writing another one that kind of delved into the timeline of how Jaime grew up.
• Valk: It went into his relationship with his father, he was caught walking in his mother's red heels and he got very scolded and punished for it.
• Valk: This is a topic that I was a little bit hesitant to tackle because at the time, when I was writing, I wasn't very well-versed in not just having a limb missing as a disability, but also how advanced the prosthetics were and if they could hold things. I did a little bit of research while I was at Starbucks, trying to sort of complete everything.
• Valk: If I were to do this fic over again or update it or add on to it, I would definitely want to go more into his disability as well as his prosthetic and how it worked more. Things like that to sort of flush it out more because I don't think in the fic I didn't do the best job I could at it. It was sort of something I tried to fill out as much as I could in the fic, but I probably could have done better.
• Valk: trying to work through gender things. I wanted to also try and put someone in the position where they were questioning their gender and actually acting it out, changing their appearance in some way that would fit them better or explore better. I wanted to also work through those emotions with me.
• Valk: The first big one is never write an entire fanfic in Starbucks.
• Valk: It was definitely a good writing practice for me also, in terms of knowing that I could go back and explore myself with fan fic if I needed to as well.
• WriteGirl: And then that's when I kind of got feedback, because the first fanfic, I never got any feedback from anyone. I was just like, "Oh, I'm shouting into the dark." So yeah, it kind of changed, and it got me a bit more active, and like, people actually want to say something about it. What did you think about it? I started getting a bit more communication, a bit more activity.
• WriteGirl: And someone wrote a really detailed review, just about how, I remember they said they could taste the road dust from my writing. And I was like, wow. I never thought of it that way. That's really cool. That kind of inspired me to write more, that I could get that emotion out of somebody. They felt like they were actually there with them.
• WriteGirl: So, right when about Season Seven hit, I started getting a little bit upset about the writing in Game of Thrones. And then by the time Season Eight hit, I was just like, "Oh no. No, no, no, no, no. I can't deal with this." I got a bit more involved with writing, because my brain was like, "No, this isn't how it should go. We need to redo all this whole thing." It really started picking up in Season Seven. That was the first time I wrote a Game of Thrones fanfiction. And I believe that was my other OtherWhen series, the first one.
• WriteGirl: I don't know if you're a Dr. Who fan. One of my favorite Doctor Who episodes is Turn Left. And it's a whole episode that's based on the concept of, what if he didn't turn right? What if instead of going the road you're supposed to go, you kind of went that way? And I've always been fascinated by that. I love Choose Your Own Adventure stories, and things like that. I don't like following the written script. So that's one of the reasons why I went into fix-it fics. There's times and places where I was like, that wouldn't happen. I know that's how it happens in the story, but based on the world that they're in, historical context, things like that, that's not how that would. So, that's kind of my brain's way of reconciling not bad writing, but just maybe inconsistent writing, or little things that were just irksome. That's kind of how I got into that.
• WriteGirl: Because I'm a length whore. That's the problem. I get into these fics, and I have these ideas, and then they expand out of control, and then I get into a story that's suddenly 30 chapters long, and then I run out of steam. I'm one of those authors who does kind of get bored, and then starts cheating on my fic, which is happening right now in Game of Thrones.
• WriteGirl: That I've actually written about 200 pages for. But that was just the one pivotal scene. So I was like, okay, I'm just going to take you out and put you here, and then leave you alone.
• WriteGirl: It's not done. It's not a solid 200 pages. I'm a very chaotic writer, so I will get a bit of dialog in my head. I will see something, and I will kind of write around that, and build around that, and string a bunch of scenes. It's 200 pages, but it's 200 pages of broken up paragraphs, bits of dialog, bits of scenery. So if I ever fleshed it out, it would be much longer, because I have a problem containing myself.
• WriteGirl: I've had a couple requests from the other ones. They're like, "I would love to read this story." I'm like, "No, you don't understand. It's a lot to wade through."
• WriteGirl: I think the strength is, I do try and keep it as much as I can in character, and in situ, I guess. I don't like to pull too much of other outside influences in. I think the strength is that people can read it and they can really see it sliding into canon. And if you go into something aside, you don't have to bump too much. And it would fit in the overall narrative.
• WriteGirl: I have a very hard time getting into certain characters' heads, and seeing like, okay, is this the motivation that they would have? Because I do take that very seriously. So, there are times I'm just like, I can't see this person doing this. I can't see them doing that. How do I get this to fit in with their character and not make it too over the top, or too OOC? That's one of my main challenges.
• WriteGirl: I chose Sansa in particular, and I think you're talking about the Petyr Baelish one, because I felt she suffered a little bit of character assassination.
• WriteGirl: I wanted to kind of show a Sansa who was still herself. A Sansa who was willing to not listen to him, who understood that, this person is not my friend. This person is strictly manipulative. He's going to take me somewhere that I don't want to go, so my only choice is to find the strength in me that she has, and say, "Okay, I'll run. If it means I have to die, I'm not going to let him use me for whatever his ends are." That's kind of where that idea came from.
• WriteGirl: She was supposed to kind of get lost in the trees, and they were supposed to find her. But I thought that was a little bit ignominious for her. So then I remembered, Oh, Nimeria's wolf pack. I was like, they haven't used that in the show at all, so why not?
• WriteGirl: There's actually a lot more of that fic that is written that didn't make it in. A whole thing where you get it from Nimeria's point of view where you can see her. She's like, okay, just following to see what's going to happen. And then when Sansa decides to run, that's when she decides to attack. But I thought that was a bit superfluous, so I took all of that out.
• WriteGirl: So, how do I give her, I hate to say the word, but some of her dignity back? If she has to die, I thought it really should be on her terms. That was kind of the motivation for that.
• WriteGirl: That was another reason with the fic I kind of wanted to delve a little bit into her as a standalone, not in relation to anyone else. Kind of like, who is Missandei? If you take away slavery, and her being Daenerys' friend, who is this person? What is the one thing that would be important to her? Because there aren't really a lot of fics that focus on her as a character at all. She's just kind of always at the side. That's kind of where I got the thing that is, I don't know if I was a former slave. The one thing I would be sure of when I got my freedom was, I will never be made a slave again in any way, shape or form. So what does that translate into? That translates into, you're not going to use me. I'm not going to stand to be abused anymore. And that's kind of how all that bloomed up. I'd really like to see a bit more of that in Game of Thrones fanfiction. She's really an underused character.
• WriteGirl: One thing I noticed about the Game of Thrones fandom, because I did just kind of jump in, is that tags are very important. I do read comments from other people in fics, and that seems to be the one thing that everyone gripes about. This was tagged unproperly. This should be the tag. The tag should be this. I was like, okay, let me try and tag as properly and nearly as I can, because I don't want to get dogpiled. There's a lot of my favorite fics where there's 10 pages of people just ragging on improper tagging. So I was like, nope, let me be careful.
• WriteGirl: The "What if" tag was very important, because I've had that on fanfiction.net before. People are like, "You should have tagged it as an AU." I'm like, "But it is. It's right there." So I had the "What if."
• WriteGirl: Tags are hard because they are, it takes me... The hardest part of my posting is tagging, to make sure that I have everything right.
• WriteGirl: Ratings may change, warnings may change, series, spoilers, all those kind of speak for themselves, just to let you know that okay, once again, this isn't static. This is something that changes story by story. Some of them may be Gen, some of them, I haven't written one yet, but some of them may be adult in the future. Some of them may have a lot of violence in them, so just be aware. Don't ever come back to this fic and think, "This is what it is." Because that's not it.
• WriteGirl: Out of character? I never know. I think my characters are pretty in character, but there's always the one person who's like, "This character would never do that." So I'm just like, "Okay. Just to let you know, it may be out of character."
• WriteGirl: I have a lot of Game of Thrones stuff on the cutting room floor, before I decided what to actually post. And there is about 20 other drabbles for the one series that haven't made it yet, because I'm one of those writers.
• WriteGirl: I adore the Dorne storyline in the books, and they completely butchered it in the show. So, that's why I was like, no Dorne's way smarter than this. So yes, he's going to be the Dorne that you get in the books.
• WriteGirl: Alternate universe, canon divergence just to let people know, this isn't following canon, because I did not want to get blasted on that one.
• WriteGirl: I wanted her to have a little bit more agency. It seemed like from the time we see her in the Baelish dress, with the feathers on it, which she's actually taking on a mockingbird, that that was a glimpse of a darker Sansa, a more politically savvy Sansa, a more adult Sansa. And then, for whatever reason, they backed off of it. And then the next thing we see her, she's just kind of sitting there asking questions, looking dull. And that was a little irritating to me. So I wanted her to get a little more agency, especially when she found out who she was supposed to be meeting. I didn't see Sansa ever agreeing to that.
• WriteGirl: I just couldn't see a Sansa, even one who was beaten down, agreeing to that. She's still a Stark. She still has her pride. So, I thought of, okay, so what would Sansa do in this situation?
• WriteGirl: There's a poem that I really like. I can't remember the name of it now, but it talks about moonlight, and how in moonlight, everything is very stark, and it's clearer for all that starkness. She's seeing everything for who he is.
• WriteGirl: Sansa is really presented as one of those girls with her head in the clouds. She's definitely not a Margaery Tyrell. She was definitely never really prepared for court life. She has a view of it that is heavily skewed by stories of [inaudible 00:33:28] of these wonderful knights in their shining armor, these lovely ladies who are just ethereal in their beauty, everything being wrapped up in a bow, happily ever after. Maybe something happens, but someone's always rescued. And through the series, that kind of gets torn away from her bit by bit. The Prince Charming that she thought was a Prince Charming is definitely not. There's no one comes to save her. Her brother's more interested in being a king than coming to rescue her from the tower, and the monsters inside it. So really, Sansa's really forced to grow up, and she's really forced to see all these stories as exactly what they are. They're just stories. They're empty stories to make children happy. So when she's thinking back on this, she's thinking more of the scarier stories that maybe she didn't want to listen to.
• WriteGirl: What I was afraid of, I should never have been afraid of, what I wanted was the thing I should have been worried about. She's really kind of flipped the script in her own mind. And she's standing amongst these wolves, and it's like before, she would have been terrified. She would have been cowering. And now she realizes, this is where I need to be. This is where it's at.
• WriteGirl: These were all things she's done because she believes in Daenerys' vision, she believes in a world without slavery. And after having been a slave and experienced freedom, that's something she'd want for everybody. I hate to say it, Harriet Tubman, how many times did she go back and she got slaves and ran them back out? Simply because I'm free, no one should be in bondage, even if it's a personal risk to myself, to my life, that is a risk I will take, because everyone should be free. And I think as a former slave, Missandei really would have that sentiment.
• WriteGirl: She's really seeing Cersei for the creature Cersei is, beyond just being kind of a high-born woman in Westeros. She's seeing the monster that's inside Cersei. Cersei will do anything. She will do anything to maintain power, she will do anything to get back at her enemies, even if it means murder, blackmail, et cetera. And I think Missandei coming from a society where no one would have to hide that from their slaves. She sees it. Like I know you, I've seen masters exactly like you. And she's really recognizing the monster that's in Cersei outside of all of her jewels, outside of her gowns, outside of her façade of being this queen and great lady. It's like, no, you're really this evil thing, and I know it because I've seen it before.
• WriteGirl: It's a smile of, I can't think of the word, but being resigned to my fate. And if this is it, then this is it. And like I say, she recognizes in Cersei the same evil that she saw in Astapor where she's kind of like, "No, you would have fit in well with them. You may think that you're better, you may think that you're better than people from Astapor. You may think that you're better than slave owners and all this, that, and the other, but in the end you are not. You are exactly like them." And in the end, she kind of wants to let her know. It's kind of like a, "I know that you know that I know that you know" moment. Like, I see you. You can't hide from me. I see exactly what you are.
• WriteGirl: Like I said, as a slave, as someone who's been freed, I can't imagine her ever wanting to be in a situation where somebody would be using her against her will. And that would be one thing I imagine you would promise yourself. Kind of like, I hate to use the comparison, but if you ever get out of a really bad relationship, and you're just like, "No, never again. I know the signs. I will never let that happen to me again." And for her of course it's more extreme, from being someone who was taken from freedom and put into slavery, lived a decade plus as a slave, not having a will of their own, and then suddenly getting that will back. No one's ever taking that from me. Like I said, I've found myself. Now that I've found myself again, and I can be myself, I will die myself.
• WriteGirl: But there are people who they're really willing to engage with you, and they have questions. In a lot of other fandoms, some people are just like, "This is a nice story." Game of Thrones fans will have questions for you in the comments. They'll be like, "What about this? And what about this? Oh, what about this? What do you think about this?" It's fun to get that dialog. That's something I never had before.
• WriteGirl: In one of my other fics, there's the Deviant Lord. We will run out of the character requirement, talking to each other back and forth in comments about things.
• WriteGirl: I learned a little bit, I actually had to do a bit of research on some of the fic, for things like trauma, and how people respond to trauma. Especially in the case of Sansa and Missandei, how do people overcome certain difficulties after being in these different positions? That was a little bit interesting. I did a little bit of in-depth on that, because once again, I'm that nerd.
• WriteGirl: I actually had one troll who just wrote, "Fuck you, you bastard." And I was like, yes. I was just like, "Whoa. Okay. I'm sorry you're having such a bad day. Go have a mimosa. Just don't take it out on me."
• WriteGirl: But there are just people who are just nasty. In all the fandoms I've been in, it thankfully hasn't happened to me yet, and I've actually had people defend me in comments. They're just like, "Get that shit out of here." I'm like, "Okay, thank you for being nice." But it seems the Game of Thrones fandoms can get real violent. They get real virulent with their hatred in the comments section. I can't muster that kind of hatred. If I don't like something, I just click off of it. I don't get the hate.
• WriteGirl: Yeah, mostly it was Googling, recovering from trauma. I did a little bit of research on former slaves, to see their mindset. That was a little bit what I did use for the mindset of Missandei. Because people who've been in that situation, they go through, what is it called? No, goodness, I can't remember. But it was a very good article, and it was talking about how former slaves, they go through this process of not believing that they're free, and not believing that they're free, and not believing that they're free. And eventually, they get to a point where it sticks in their head, that this is freedom. This is what they have. No one can control them. And then, they get very, very almost violently independent, where no one's going to tell me what to do. You can't tell me what to do. No one's going to do that to me. Once again, how some people where to a much lesser extent, when you get out of controlling, overbearing relationships, and then you're finally free, and you're like, "Fuck that shit. Where am I going? I'm staying out all night. And I don't have to tell anybody." They get this burst of a sense of self, a sense of purpose. And I thought that was very beautiful, that there are people who can go through all that type of trauma, and they can get there, and they can fully bloom. And I always saw Missandei as kind of that character, this character who had gone through all of that to the point where here she is, standing tall as a character that knows her own worth, knows her own personage.
• WriteGirl: And then with Sansa, just how people recover from abusive and traumatic relationships, and things like that. The stages of recovery.
• WriteGirl: There's one thing, to me, if it's too OOC, just out of the block there's no real change, and these drabbles are so short. You can't really see a lot of character development from A to B. Everything kind of has to fit where it does. So I wanted to make sure that it fit and it wasn't too crazy. It's a lot of research.

Description

Definition:When fan authors reflect a particular writing choice, process, or moment in their writing. This may be the fan explaining specific choices they made that are not about their audience or motivation for writing.

Number of Codes: 65

Analysis: The interview moments coded as “Reflection” generally point to the author reflecting on a particular moment from their story. Reading through their quotes provides a sense of motivation behind writing choices as well as the particular thought process in capturing particular emotions or experiences. or choice they made. Pairing these quotes while reading their fics also creates an entire new experience, heightening our understanding of both the fanfic and the author. Their reflections demonstrate how personal and political writing fanfics can be.

Each author’s quotes provide rich reflections of their choices; I will point to some of the quotes that demonstrate the interwoven nature of politics and personal experiences when writing fanfiction. Aria shares how she was learning about the Stonewall Riots at the time, which heavily impacted the direction of her piece. In the last chapter written of her piece, she shows police surveillance and violence targeting the LGBTQ+ community as the police harass community members hanging out at a bar in a metropolitan TLOK location. Aria pulls directly from history, adding in details such as folks needing to wear a particular number of clothing items that represent their culturally-prescribed gender.

Kittya Cullen explains why she chose the metaphor of ants crawling across Asami’s skin to convey anxiety. She comes “from an area where you commonly come into contact with animals,” which means she is familiar with the sensation of ants crawling across her skin. By merging both her experiences with literal ants crawling on her skin and her experience with anxiety, Kittya creates a compelling, tangible metaphor.

In Dialux’s fanfic, she focuses on Sansa practicing Hinduism to demonstrate the isolation Sansa is experiencing. Sansa, in Dialux’s fanfic, has an arranged marriage where she must move far away from her home and culture; there are no Hindu people in her new home or region, so she is the only person who practices. While Sansa, much like Jodhaa from the film Jodhaa Akbar, becomes more comfortable with her new home, she continues to practice Hinduism and stays true to her faith. Sansa’s refusal to assimilate demonstrates her power and agency.

Similarly, Writegirl also demonstrates the power and agency of characters who are in subjugated positions. Writegirl reimagines the scene when Missandei is murdered, imagining how Missandei — a Black woman — would speak back to Cersei — a White queen who is intending to kill Missandei. In Writegirl’s reimagining, Missandei “[is] really seeing Cersei for the creature Cersei is, beyond just being kind of a high-born woman in Westeros.” Missandei also compares Cersei to enslavers from Missandei’s homeland. Writegirl’s comparison between Cersei — a White woman in power — to an enslaver also hints at a deeper, political perspective of overt and tacit oppression. Enslavers enact overt oppression, enslaving people from particular cultural backgrounds; meanwhile, Cersei uses a freed woman who escaped slavery as a political pawn for her own gain.

Valk shares backstory information from their fanfic, when Jaime’s father catches Jaime trying on his mother’s shoes, that Valk does not include in the fanfic. Valk imagines Jaime’s experience learning gender roles and expectations — an experience many share — as well as how this learning hurt him. Valk’s reveal about Jaime’s backstory reveals how authors use experiences to help shape and understand characters’ psychologies. These experiences, like Kittya and the ants, may be based on their own individual experiences or, like Aria and the Stonewall Riots, contextual experiences that they may relate to. Even the smallest choice made both in the final product of the fanfic as well as the process of brainstorming, imagining, and drafting the fanfic are interwoven with personal experiences, emotion, motivation, and politics.

Quotes

• Aria: But I wrote a piece called Addict's Alchemy, which was a piece about...in terms of servicing some of the same things we're talking about today. It's a piece about about trauma... And it [inaudible 00:05:20], that this isn't obviously. It's a piece about trauma and it's a piece about, what does it mean... Really they're both pieces about what it means to be disabled.
• Aria: This is I think the first piece where I write as a adult writer looking at the world and going, "Okay, what do I actually think? What can I say about this that is interesting," instead of just being like, "I don't know, let's take a thought and just run with it." I think that in a lot of ways it suffers of being really in that space, but it's also a good piece in that I'm genuinely, actually doing literature, in a way that I really was not before.
• Aria: First of all I wrote about suicide at a time where I was not ready to talk about it, as a writer. I'm still not sure I can actually talk about suicide now, in a way that's beneficial or useful for me. I'm not sure now I can do that now, or could not do it now, but I could not do it at the time, or I couldn't do it in a way that was healthy. I know I wrote it that it would seem therapeutic, but I also was being retraumatized, and I didn't say that obviously in the tags.
• Aria: It had two epic story arcs that I didn't know how to integrate, both this love story about disability, and it was this story about queer politics, and I could not make those two pieces meld at the time. The story arcs just never came together, and I couldn't harmonize them, and it sort of died because I couldn't get to the thing I was trying to make, not ambition, but I couldn't make either one of them make sense.
• Aria: I think I thought it was romantic. I don't remember why I did that, that's one of the ones where just... I think it's part of I had that as sort of my first... It was more like one of the most basic tools that I learned, so I learned, "All right, I'll do alternate points of view."
• Aria: I don't know if I thought about this as a storytelling tool at times, or I thought about it as a storytelling tool obviously that helps power [inaudible 00:17:00], not necessarily about the story if it makes sense. I wasn't telling you things that had happened in the past, to teach you what happened in the past. I was saying, "This is what's haunting the characters, this is what the characters can't escape from in a very physical, visceral fashion." Well maybe physical might be the wrong word, you know what, I'm okay with it, body and mind, if it makes sense.
• Aria: Because I imagine Korra's pain is seeing the cost of her new trauma after time, because her being injured, being in a place where you are tortured to death as a vulnerability. Every time you experience that pain, I imagine that that's a place that engagement is a struggle after time when you're in that pain. So it's an ordeal for Korra to dress herself.
• Aria: And so Asami plays that role, being a person to whom Korra wants to relate, is thrilled to relate, is not scared, or she is a little bit scared to relate, but is she scared to relate in the way that she's scared to relate to other people.
• Aria: Whereas Korra grows up in this institution, Asami grows up with a relatively politically progressive father. He's an abuser, but he's also a very, very politically progressive man. He's a radical, he tries to overthrow his government, make the world a more equitable and fair place. It's self-interested, he's a bourgeois radical, but I wouldn't have said that at the time. I imagine Asami as having a relatively normal, relatively healthy understanding of the world in a way, having felt like she, not just knowing that a woman can love another woman, because I guess almost every person in this world knows. This is nothing like, Korra is particularly going to have a hard time because of that institution itself.
• Aria: He's not particularly flawed, because he's willing to play this opportunistic political game. Because he's also capable of looking at his child and going, "Maybe I shouldn't do that."
• Aria: I also sort of wanted to talk... I sort of was thinking about the limits of the political and the [inaudible 00:35:57] of the political. You could do what, when and where, the idea that a politician can't really save the world. I don't know if I was all the way to, "We have to do it," yet, but I think I'm getting there.
• Aria: I was thinking about New York City around the times of the Stonewall Riots. This is where those politics come in. I was playing with, what does it mean... I was playing with, what's particularly violent political oppression? What are the limits of political oppression in a relatively liberal cosmopolitan society? Because I was getting that sense of, there's actually a whole lot of ways that political oppression can happen that I'd never even thought about at this point, and I was learning about that. So I was writing about this character as someone who's experiencing the limits of that political oppression. And this is actually one of the key storylines in my opinion, and it's ultimately a story about resistance to a kind of political oppression
• Aria: This was written obviously before Donald Trump becomes President, and I could see all sorts of things about reaction again. But I was seeing the reaction, I was scared. I don't know where I got this, there was something bad was coming. I knew that I had that sense of fear, so I was writing about... I guess writing a little bit about, how do we fight back when things get worse?
• Dialux: So, that was one fic that I was relatively and very proud of. To be honest.
• Dialux: And if you're just starting from scratch, then it's difficult to create why two people would hate each other so much. I mean, you need to have that religious, and cultural, and those barriers in order for that to happen.
• Dialux: Where I just didn't translate them into Rajput or Hindi words. Because I just use whatever I knew, because I speak Kannada at home. And that's another language entirely. And I was just running out of time, and I said, "You know what? No, I'll just handle it myself. And not translate it, and hope that nobody minds.
• Dialux: I was literally just pulling things from here, and there. And, I mean, there's Rajput culture as well as South Indian culture, as well as there's some random, I think, there's some Bengali culture that I just threw in for the hell of it.
• Dialux: But, yeah. I think just developing the list of material and everything kind of helped me understand on a step by step process, everything that I had kind of... The assumptions that I had made, and where I had taken certain ideas from.
• Dialux: And especially when she has that fight with Jon and she goes back home. And that was, I think, the point of catharsis. Because especially when you're looking at a lot of Indian mothers, and Indian women who get into marriages at a very young age. You have to deal with your husband's family, you have to deal with that entire kind of stigma. About you have to be the one to adjust and to compromise to a far greater extent than your husband. And all of these kind of had come together and had been marinating for a very long time. And I feel like Sansa, in this, was very much the product of that. Where she was just trying to fight it, she was such a perfect child in that culture. And then suddenly she has to kind of leave her culture behind. Or, not leave her culture behind, but adjust to a new culture. And she feels like she's being punished by her old one for no fault of her own. And all of it, kind of, her desperate unhappiness, her tensions with her mother were a big part of the fic, I think, for me.
• Dialux: I didn't feel like I could end it with, "Oh, everybody has kids and they're all happy." Because that felt very weird, and kind of disjointed with the rest of the fic.
• Dialux: And in that Sansa can see ghosts. And throughout the entire fic, it's a long fic and everything, but one of the biggest issues for me was, how do I end this?
• Dialux: But to me, it felt like it began with Jon and it had to end with Jon. And it had to end with him finally being triumphant, and finally being happy for his triumph at the end of this fanfic.
• Dialux: But then the cultural tensions stem almost entirely from the differences within their upbringing, I'm pretty sure. Within their families. And I mean, there are cultural differences within, I mean, people that I've grown up with in India, and people in the U.S. And even though you're living side by side, that doesn't necessarily mean that you have the same cultural background. And I think that's something that both of them don't understand. And both of them kind of try to understand slowly.
• Dialux: And if you're talking about other moments, like when Sansa wants to give Jon his name, and he asks her to read it out loud. I think that's another moment of compromise. Because as much as she's giving him the gift, she's also giving him his name. And she's stepping across her own cultural boundaries to help him with that, which Jon doesn't completely understand.
• Dialux: I think that was something that even when you agree to a marriage, and even when you kind of accept that. Especially when you go into your husband's house, and if you're living with his parents and everything. It's a very difficult concept. And it's a very difficult idea. And adjusting to that is a huge, almost, culture shock to people. To any women, adjusting to that is difficult. No matter who it is, no matter where you're going. So, then, I mean, especially for Sansa, who needs to leave behind her entire family. And doesn't even know when she'll be able to go back. And has to go to a foreign country without any support, and any of her own traditions. She's the one that's upheld every single tradition she has ever done. And especially when you're looking at the Hindu culture, it's very difficult to uphold them.
• Dialux: And then, finally, she slowly starts to grow into that. She starts to give moments of peace. You know, she's kind of giving Jon gifts, and she's trying to bridge that gap. Because she also realizes that it's her life, too. Which, I think, is one of the biggest realizations that a lot of women have. Which is, "Yes, I'm miserable. I want you to be miserable. But how am I going to be miserable for?" You need to let some things go, you need to move on past the injustices... I need to move past the injustices that I have faced.
• Dialux: The one quote that you picked out here, "You stand before your father, bedecked in gossamer and lace and silk, glass thick and shining in your hair." Because that was one that I actually remember. Because I initially put the word jewel, and jewels in the place of the word glass. But then I wanted it, for her, to feel that it was cheaper than the jewel. Even if she had them, they didn't matter to her. Because it was just glass.
• Dialux: As if, her family... Or, she's feeling as if her family is not willing to give her as much as she is owed when she's going into a marriage.
• Dialux: But then, I also think that one of the major things that I learned was probably that some of the anger, it doesn't have to be a very you anger to be a very deep one. For it to seep into your writing. Because a lot of the time, especially when I'm writing angry stories and everything, they tend to be immediate. Like, "Okay, I'm very angry right now. And I want to have a fit. And I want to do it." But this was something that it had kind have been, I think, brewing for a very long time. And then suddenly the anger, and the angst, and the hurt, and the pain, all kind of came out. But at the same time, it was not just that. It was also about passing through that anger, and knowing that there is going to be someone at the end of it who's willing to accept you.
• GillyWulf: I hate that I did it, but I did real-person fanfiction for Paramore. Thinking of it now, it's always like, "God, that's not good. I shouldn't have done it, but here we are."
• GillyWulf: I'm trying to write something that's original, and that's always a bit more of an endeavor than you expect it to be.
• GillyWulf: And it's funny, going back to the original ones, the older ones at least, and reading those, because you sent me one. I think it was chapter 37 you mentioned in your email, and I went back and read it and I was like, "Oof, I could do this a lot better now, I hope."
• GillyWulf: There's a couple that, I don't remember which ones, but there were a couple that I sort of left on a weird note [inaudible 00:09:21] on purpose, so that it had to be like, "Okay, well, maybe you want more, or maybe it's good as it is," and I liked that.
• GillyWulf: I also like that you can sort of see a progression of how I wrote them and how my own skills have maybe, hopefully developed. And even just, it did end up being four years' worth of time
• GillyWulf: so it was, when I think I started it, Korrasami hadn't been canon yet. So, it's definitely interesting, the before and after. And maybe, I think, during that time, also, gay marriage was legalized, so it was just definitely different attitudes in that. I think those are some of the strengths in seeing that as well.
• GillyWulf: Well, I'm very much a person who believes in, if you can't say it in like two words then you probably shouldn't. So, I like to have it, what is this thing? And that's it. I like to be able to say, "This is what it's going to be," and it doesn't necessarily need to be more complicated than that.
• GillyWulf: So, in this one in particular, she's trying to have a good experience and maybe power through it, but then, in that brief lapse where she forgets that she's tied down and then she tries to sit up, it's sort of like a muscle memory thing, where she's back there the last time she was chained up and couldn't move. But also, at the same time, I wanted Asami to immediately be there and to be immediately helpful and not push her. She was just trying to be comforting. You hear stories about how people try and be helpful and just make situations worse, but at this point in their relationship, Korra and Asami knew each other super well, and even though this is an unusual situation for them, Asami knows how Korra reacts and knows who she is and what she's thinking. She's able to help her come back slowly, rather than try and make it a quick thing.
• GillyWulf: So, I think I'd notice, not spacing errors, pacing errors in that, I could've slowed that down a bit, I could've drawn the reader in a little bit more, just things like that, where it's just like, "I maybe know how to write now," so it hopefully could've made it a little bit more engaging.
• GillyWulf: I try and put good outcomes for Korra, in that she's living the life that she wanted to live with a person she loves, doing something she loves. And even though it maybe needs to be a little bit more complicated, because of hormones or things like that, but it's not a huge obstacle, it's just a little something to add to the day. But yeah, it's like the whole mood of most of the things I try and write. I want it to be happy.
• Kittya Cullen: For this particular fic, I think it was just the imagery. I was really trying to grasp something that in some ways is so intangible. I was trying so hard to get just that feeling of desolation and aching.
• Kittya Cullen: But the metaphor itself of the Marching Ants, it was this way of articulating the anxiety that comes along with that.
• Kittya Cullen: So I think it just came back to capturing that, the imagery of it, the tone of the chapter, the voice of it because, at least to me, it works really hard to put us in Asami's shoes and make us experience it exactly as she's experiencing it.
• Kittya Cullen: I guess the sensation of ants ... I come from an area where you commonly come into contact with animals and so on, so I'm familiar with the actual physical reality of ants crawling across your skin, and there's a way that it feels. It's like a sort of weird, prickling sensation that is very disconcerting, and I guess I wanted to translate that into how the story reflects Asami's own experience with whatever she's feeling. And that imagery just seemed to click with that, just the experience of having something under your skin and on your skin, even if you can't quite articulate what it is.
• Kittya Cullen: I think I was both going for an understanding of how Asami herself is effected by this really terrible thing we see happen to Korra.
• Kittya Cullen: It's just to be someone who builds and creates with the purpose of fixing or making better, but then not being able to do so for someone within your personal life. But the imagery also for that chapter was, I guess, built in subtext because I wasn't quite sure yet how to engage with what was happening in ways that were visible to other people outside of the fan community, the slashfan community.
• Valk: Of course, being younger, you don't really understand romance all typically well. It's all very idealized. Then as I got older, I started liking to delve more into different types of friendships as well.
• Valk: My strengths in this fic for me was being able to try and incorporate as much of Jaime and Brienne's banter and relationship, as much as I could to a modern setting because obviously they wouldn't be having as much of a, you know Brienne wouldn't be considered as horrifying as she was considered in the original text because she was considered man-ish. In modern day context, it's not always encouraged, based on what kind of family you came from, women are often allowed to be tom boys more than vice versa. There was a challenge of trying to see, okay, Brienne wouldn't have had as traumatic a childhood probably regarding her own gender identity. But there would definitely be some push back, but how would that change based on the setting? I made her a little bit more comfortable in her skin than Jaime and also having her there to sort of be a foil and a supportive shoulder for Jaime who was going through a similar thing that maybe she went through as well.
• Valk: writing it also based off of my own experiences, just exploring the LGBT community in my area, I was kind of writing it from that perspective, but also not having as much information as I would like.
• Valk: While I do ship them together romantically, I wanted to write something that also reflected that you could do like a very intimate moment without bring sex into it as well.
• Valk: I think he definitely is someone that would pick up on someone's interests and what not and what that means to them, either subconsciously or consciously channel it when he's handling it.
• Valk: I think it's because he's used to having to perform any way and being very new, if you're very new into like trying to question your gender identity, especially being a man, you are at a higher risk of...I should say more so, if you present male than you are at a higher risk of facing violence or any kind of physical outlashing. Be it verbal or physical, but I think it's a lot of like, you learn to be very secretive. You'll act in ways to protect yourself, more than anything.
• Valk: It went into his relationship with his father, he was caught walking in his mother's red heels and he got very scolded and punished for it.
• Valk: If I were to do this fic over again or update it or add on to it, I would definitely want to go more into his disability as well as his prosthetic and how it worked more. Things like that to sort of flush it out more because I don't think in the fic I didn't do the best job I could at it. It was sort of something I tried to fill out as much as I could in the fic, but I probably could have done better.
• Valk: It was definitely a good writing practice for me also, in terms of knowing that I could go back and explore myself with fan fic if I needed to as well.
• WriteGirl: Because I'm a length whore. That's the problem. I get into these fics, and I have these ideas, and then they expand out of control, and then I get into a story that's suddenly 30 chapters long, and then I run out of steam. I'm one of those authors who does kind of get bored, and then starts cheating on my fic, which is happening right now in Game of Thrones.
• WriteGirl: I think the strength is, I do try and keep it as much as I can in character, and in situ, I guess. I don't like to pull too much of other outside influences in. I think the strength is that people can read it and they can really see it sliding into canon. And if you go into something aside, you don't have to bump too much. And it would fit in the overall narrative.
• WriteGirl: I have a very hard time getting into certain characters' heads, and seeing like, okay, is this the motivation that they would have? Because I do take that very seriously. So, there are times I'm just like, I can't see this person doing this. I can't see them doing that. How do I get this to fit in with their character and not make it too over the top, or too OOC? That's one of my main challenges.
• WriteGirl: She was supposed to kind of get lost in the trees, and they were supposed to find her. But I thought that was a little bit ignominious for her. So then I remembered, Oh, Nimeria's wolf pack. I was like, they haven't used that in the show at all, so why not?
• WriteGirl: There's a poem that I really like. I can't remember the name of it now, but it talks about moonlight, and how in moonlight, everything is very stark, and it's clearer for all that starkness. She's seeing everything for who he is.
• WriteGirl: Sansa is really presented as one of those girls with her head in the clouds. She's definitely not a Margaery Tyrell. She was definitely never really prepared for court life. She has a view of it that is heavily skewed by stories of [inaudible 00:33:28] of these wonderful knights in their shining armor, these lovely ladies who are just ethereal in their beauty, everything being wrapped up in a bow, happily ever after. Maybe something happens, but someone's always rescued. And through the series, that kind of gets torn away from her bit by bit. The Prince Charming that she thought was a Prince Charming is definitely not. There's no one comes to save her. Her brother's more interested in being a king than coming to rescue her from the tower, and the monsters inside it. So really, Sansa's really forced to grow up, and she's really forced to see all these stories as exactly what they are. They're just stories. They're empty stories to make children happy. So when she's thinking back on this, she's thinking more of the scarier stories that maybe she didn't want to listen to.
• WriteGirl: What I was afraid of, I should never have been afraid of, what I wanted was the thing I should have been worried about. She's really kind of flipped the script in her own mind. And she's standing amongst these wolves, and it's like before, she would have been terrified. She would have been cowering. And now she realizes, this is where I need to be. This is where it's at.
• WriteGirl: These were all things she's done because she believes in Daenerys' vision, she believes in a world without slavery. And after having been a slave and experienced freedom, that's something she'd want for everybody. I hate to say it, Harriet Tubman, how many times did she go back and she got slaves and ran them back out? Simply because I'm free, no one should be in bondage, even if it's a personal risk to myself, to my life, that is a risk I will take, because everyone should be free. And I think as a former slave, Missandei really would have that sentiment.
• WriteGirl: She's really seeing Cersei for the creature Cersei is, beyond just being kind of a high-born woman in Westeros. She's seeing the monster that's inside Cersei. Cersei will do anything. She will do anything to maintain power, she will do anything to get back at her enemies, even if it means murder, blackmail, et cetera. And I think Missandei coming from a society where no one would have to hide that from their slaves. She sees it. Like I know you, I've seen masters exactly like you. And she's really recognizing the monster that's in Cersei outside of all of her jewels, outside of her gowns, outside of her façade of being this queen and great lady. It's like, no, you're really this evil thing, and I know it because I've seen it before.
• WriteGirl: It's a smile of, I can't think of the word, but being resigned to my fate. And if this is it, then this is it. And like I say, she recognizes in Cersei the same evil that she saw in Astapor where she's kind of like, "No, you would have fit in well with them. You may think that you're better, you may think that you're better than people from Astapor. You may think that you're better than slave owners and all this, that, and the other, but in the end you are not. You are exactly like them." And in the end, she kind of wants to let her know. It's kind of like a, "I know that you know that I know that you know" moment. Like, I see you. You can't hide from me. I see exactly what you are.
• WriteGirl: Like I said, as a slave, as someone who's been freed, I can't imagine her ever wanting to be in a situation where somebody would be using her against her will. And that would be one thing I imagine you would promise yourself. Kind of like, I hate to use the comparison, but if you ever get out of a really bad relationship, and you're just like, "No, never again. I know the signs. I will never let that happen to me again." And for her of course it's more extreme, from being someone who was taken from freedom and put into slavery, lived a decade plus as a slave, not having a will of their own, and then suddenly getting that will back. No one's ever taking that from me. Like I said, I've found myself. Now that I've found myself again, and I can be myself, I will die myself.

Description

Definition: When fan authors mention their motivation for writing their fanfic or another piece. This may be their own motivation, but also their assumed motivations in the fan community.

Number of Codes: 61

Analysis: Common patterns appear across the fan authors’ different motivations for writing their fanfics. First, several fan authors suggest that external circumstances, separate from the original text, influenced their decision to write. For example, Dialux wrote a Harry Potter fanfic after her disappointment in the 2020 Democratic primaries. She reimagines Percy Weasley as running on a platform of large systemic change — similar to Bernie Sanders’ platform — and winning, explaining that she needed “some sort of catharsis” as Bernie’s chances of being nominated began to decrease. Aria also discusses how she wrote her fanfic at a time when she was reading about Stonewall, learning about trauma and disability, and being radicalized. Her motivation to write her fanfic was partially a result of her exploring her new political turn and embracing her radicalization.

Another motivation several fan authors point to is their desire to explore particular aspects of their identity and/or think through forms of representation that link to their own identities and positionalities. Valk shares how they were questioning their own gender identity — exploring whether they are non-binary — while they wrote their fanfic about Jaime questioning his gender. For Valk, fanfics are a “safe” method for identity exploration. Kittya is also interested in exploring characters outside of positions of power, specifically citing because she is a Black woman. Finally, Dialux cites her motivation for writing a Fleabag fanfic as entangled with reflecting on her own journey growing up and changing her perspective about what she wanted for her life.

Another motivation several fan authors point to is their desire to explore particular aspects of their identity and/or think through forms of representation that link to their own identities and positionalities. Valk shares how they were questioning their own gender identity — exploring whether they are non-binary — while they wrote their fanfic about Jaime questioning his gender. For Valk, fanfics are a “safe” method for identity exploration. Kittya is also interested in exploring characters outside of positions of power, specifically citing because she is a Black woman. Finally, Dialux cites her motivation for writing a Fleabag fanfic as entangled with reflecting on her own journey growing up and changing her perspective about what she wanted for her life.

On the other hand, fan authors also conduct canon resistant uptakes when they are unhappy with a particular choice made in the original text. Writegirl chooses to write about both Sansa and Missandei due to her frustration with the original text writers’ choices. She believes Sansa suffers a “character assassination” and expresses frustration over Missandei’s death, especially how much her death scene moved away from who her character is in earlier seasons and the novels. Valk also expresses frustration with the heteronormativity embedded in both GOT and the fandom. They reimagine Jaime and Brienne’s characters in ways that challenge how fans often depict their relationship.

Finally, Aria provides a moment of reflection not only about her motivation for writing fanfic, but why storytelling can be crucial. She says, “There's a study I think that says that when you get into rational arguments about things you don't convince them, but if you tell stories you can.” Writing fanfics for Aria and for many of these fan authors is not only about loving these original texts and fan communities, but building a platform to reach and affectively impact their audiences so they may see the world through different perspectives and reshape their politics.

Quotes

• Aria: Some of the pieces I wrote just no longer work as Homestuck pieces because the characters have been changed, and I was like, "I can't really write this story about two women in love because one of them isn't a woman anymore, that story doesn't work as a piece."
• Aria: When I'm writing this fic it means something, because I'm like... There's a study I think that says that when you get into rational arguments about things you don't convince them, but if you tell stories you can. And I think that I'm in that place, arguing about politics in the fiction space of the internet.
• Aria: For me, this text begins both as like, I was reading a lot about Stonewall and the context around Stonewall, and also I was reading a piece about PTSD, and it was just very surface, very basic understanding of trauma and PTSD in particular, like something you recover from, in a way that I was not super comfortable with. And sort of the original text, not sure if you would agree. And so I wanted to talk about disability through the context of being something you come to live with, and come to integrate, and come to find becomes a part of you life, but also something you still struggle with, instead of just, I don't know, a lot of us have seen the story a lot like, you get better, and then you get better and you win. And then one day it doesn't bother you.
• Aria: I was coming into my own politically, I was becoming my own political individual in a way I hadn't been before. Like I had politics, but this is around the time that I'm really radicalized, and just me engaging with those contexts.
• Aria: But I also struggled because I didn't know how to write about my own trauma, and so I tried to write about trauma in ways that other people were experiencing it. And already the text engaged with that, and those weren't really authentic to me. They weren't things I was writing about at the time.
• Aria: I chose Korra and Asami because they're main characters, I like writing main characters. I liked the love story, it was kind of short in the text, but I liked it. Or not short, but it felt more like a nod than a full
• Aria: There are things I don't like about it, but I like it as a little bit of text. It's there in the text, it was one of those things that was like, "Oh, I love this, I love feeling represented." So I wrote that.
• Aria: I chose the end of Season Three because it's the place where I felt like I was reading a... I felt like engaging with the original text, I was feeling like I wanted something different, I wanted a more deep and meaningful engagement with disability and trauma in this context. Because reading the original text is like, it's there for a while and then they're better? So it was almost the opposite feeling, what do I think this looks like? And so that's why I chose that.
• Aria: but this is what I was doing with my life. I was on my way to running a queer resource center at a college, so I was doing the work of feeling the political implications of things in the world. And so I was, for me the most natural thing to write about is to write about... Not just homophobia, although this was a story about homophobia, not just homophobia, but this was a story about queerness and politics. And because this was the thing that was radicalizing me, [inaudible] is vile, because... And it was about violence, so I don't just mean violence as a method of resistance, I mean violence as a thing that people survive. Because that's what's radicalizing me at the time. And so I felt the need to wake up that in a sense.
• Aria: I think I was just engaging with the text's portrayal of trauma.
• Aria: I think of a place I was there, and this was particularly...I was engaging with political institutions at the time that were much, much bigger than me, particularly family institutions. My family was pretty chill, but running a queer resource center at community college is like, getting that [inaudible 00:24:12]. You would deal with a bunch of people that were writing about the problems for being gay, or feeling like they can't talk about it, or being the only source of information, of being part of an institution that was the only source of information.
• Aria: I was trying to write a story that engaged with trauma and felt authentic and didn't make trauma seem like the end of the world. Because the binary that's in a lot of literature is either like, "Oh, you either overcame trauma, or you are doomed to misery forever." And I was trying to find some middle ground, trying to tell a story that felt authentic.
• Aria: I wanted to tell a story about connection. And I wanted to make it clear that when I'm telling the story, I think that even [inaudible 00:26:39] understands that it's not really about romance as much as it is about feeling connected in a genuine way to people, that that central theme, building a life worth living after injury, or after trauma, is finding an authentic realtionship with people.
• Aria: In the context of this piece, a lot of my understanding of Hiroshi as a bourgeois radical is that I'm not going to have a [inaudible 00:30:36], because I don't really have a sense of class politics at the time, or have the beginnings of that study. That's only beginning to be born
• Aria: I wanted to give a sense of what is the politics of the Northern Water Tribe? And I kind of wanted to say that queerness isn't criminalized in the Northern Water Tribe, or is not criminalized anymore. Also I wanted to say this is a different relationship. But the other thing I wanted to talk about is, what are politicians willing to give up for their family, and what are they not?
• Dialux: But I've also recently published work in Fleabag, which was one of the fandoms that I had to write for for my Yuletide assignment.
• Dialux: There's a couple of things that you see that are kind of interesting, and then you kind of identify a certain actor, or a certain character that you kind of find interesting. And then jump from there to another.
• Dialux: Yes. I think my most recent published fanfiction is a Percy Weasley, second person point of view, post canon. In which he is attempting to basically restructure his society by running on a platform of big structural change. Which might sound vaguely familiar. But it was, I think, mostly due to the kind of deep rage that I was feeling over the entire Democratic Primaries over the past couple of months. And almost the past year. In which everything felt very much like a lot of talk, and not a lot of doing. And at some point, you need some catharsis. And kind of putting it out into fiction and seeing something changing. Or, not even seeing something changing. But seeing people trying to effect change, and willing to fight for that change felt very important to me. And basically that entire fanfic is kind of born out of that seething, massive, "I want to see something happening." And I will see it happen in fiction, if not in reality.
• Dialux: was talking about that, and I felt like that was a really fascinating look into that psyche. And seeing how Fleabag and the Priest would meet up. And how they would be after having separated for 20, 30 years, coming back to see each other after they have had full lives apart, but somehow still wanting something more. Which, I think, it's definitely, kind of, for me, I am not old enough to be discussing 50 year old, 60 year old life plans. But my life path has never been very straight, or what I felt that it would be. Because when I was, what? 15, I probably thought I'd be an engineer. And then after that I thought I'd be a doctor. And then, suddenly, now I'm a lawyer. And I thought I'd be in the U.S., and I'm in India. And it's a very wildly divergent and strange life path for me. And that's only been over, what? 10 years, 10, 15 years. And I can't even imagine how that would be over 20, 30 years. And identifying that desire for home, and wanting people to be that. As opposed to a given area, or a given job, or anything like that, felt very poignant to me at that particular point in time.
• Dialux: So, when I wrote this fanfic it was actually one of the... I had signed up for a fic exchange for this one, as well. It's called the Jonsa Exchange. It was their fifth round. Their theme was, "Inspired by film."
• Dialux: So, I mean, I think the choice to make Westeros Desi was more of, I don't want to do that much work in setting up all of these tensions, and identifying them. And kind of building, and trying to communicate that to the reader when there's already preexisting framework for it.
• Dialux: And there were a lot of really good fanfic there that used second person point of view. And I felt like they kind of gave an insight into the character in a way that you wouldn't be able to get if you were looking at them from a third person point of view. And when I was doing this fanfic, I was really kind of thinking about how and what I wanted to communicate. And I felt like the second person point of view gave more weight to the entire fanfic, as opposed to the third person.
• Dialux: So, that was one of the primary reasons why I decided to make it in the first place. Because I wanted to be sure why and where I was getting these ideas from.
• GillyWulf: And from those three, you can see that they have very female-centered stories. And then, at least all three are those are canonically queer characters, which are things that now get me really excited and make me want to go, "Okay, well, I want to dive into that. I want to see how their stories could be different," or, "I just really want to see them in this situation," so I try and write it when I can.
• GillyWulf: Well, it was definitely, when I first started it, it was, "Okay, well, I kind of just want to write, and I want to get better at writing, practicing it." I started it in college, and the professor I had at that time kept saying how, "If you want to get better at writing, you have to write 50,000 words, and then, you have to write another 50,000." "Really? All right. I'll just write, then. People will give me prompts and I'll just write those as they come in." And then, there were a lot of prompts that came in, surprisingly. I was able to stay consistent with it for, I want to say, two, three years.
• GillyWulf: I didn't necessarily want to do full-length fics. I sort of wanted to just spit them out, and then, it came to a point where I was like, "Okay, well, I don't want to have individual listings for each of these," so I just put it all into one thing on AO3 and decided that, "Well, all right, I'll just do the prompts as the chapter titles and just go until I can't."
• GillyWulf: So, I would start to feel guilty, and sometimes would just push one out whether or not I felt it was up to par, even though I hoped it was.
• GillyWulf: The first being that we only get a certain amount of them in canon.
• GillyWulf: So, at the same time, it was also sort of an exploration for me in that I've known I was gay, probably since kindergarten, but I sort of just put it off, put it off, and it wasn't until I started getting into Korrasami that I was like, "Okay, well, I'm meeting a community where this is accepted and this is encouraged even." So, I had decided to come out, and these became sort of two parallels of, "It could be this, or it could be that." Of like, "What is the best case? What is the worst case for maybe how my parents will react?" Thankfully, it leaned more towards Korra's parents than Asami, but it did sort of dip into that a little bit.
• GillyWulf: Well, for that chapter, I want to say, like everything else in the collection, it was a prompt, but it was something that I didn't want to ham-fist it, because Korra's definitely, she's traumatized. We see that more than once,
• GillyWulf: Well, again, it was the prompts, but it was also, I have personally been a little conflicted on gender for a while, and it's like my sexuality, it was something that I sort of just say, "Well, I'll get to that when I have the chance." So, it's always just sort of in the back of my head
• GillyWulf: And especially for this, it's not a serious work, it's meant to be something fun, it's meant to be something that is just for other people to enjoy. And I wouldn't be enjoying it if I was writing those things that made me super uncomfortable.
• GillyWulf: even though I will always love Korra and Asami, it's not necessarily always easy to write for that, if you're not getting constant updates for it.
• GillyWulf: It was partially based on a drawing by [inaudible 00:50:02] that had Korra and Asami sitting under a tree and just looking out over Republic City,
• GillyWulf: I wanted it to, like everything else, just be soft and be a way of saying, this is their city, their lives are going to go on, and they're going to be happy and enjoy it.
• GillyWulf: And I also wanted to give the collection itself a sendoff I was proud of. So, I spent a little bit more time on that than I did a lot of the other stuff, just let it marinate. "You know what? This is a good end, and hope you enjoyed," sort of thing.
• GillyWulf: So now, I sort of write when I want to, when I have the motivation. And if I'm feeling it, yeah, I'll do a little bit. Like somebody requested a prompt two weeks ago. I was like, "You know what? Why not. I'm feeling it. We're going to go for it."
• Kittya Cullen: I think I started writing fan fiction in earnest because I was homesick. Because I had recently moved, and so it was with the intent of writing something that was close to home but also part of fandom that I started doing that.
• Kittya Cullen: But I think with Twilight it was just that phase where you finally find a story that speaks to you, even if you kind of hate it when you look back at it when you're older. But at the time, how Bella was written both as someone who was insular and chooses to form or has a small community and so forth and deals with depression or whatever it is, it just seemed to be something that I could relate to. And so I was both interested in that, and I guess in the power fantasy that she was written to come in to. Usually, at least for me at the time, it wasn't really common to see those characters have that kind of a glow-up, you can say.
• Kittya Cullen: I was on Twitter casually scrolling through something, and someone from back home happened to mention how the finale of the show had gone. Given my own cultural background and the cultural background of the world in general, I was pretty surprised about that, so I started consuming fics and reading the show ... Sorry, not reading the show, but watching the show to get through it to see ... If I could see where it was going and if I would be as surprised as everyone else had been. So when I got through the show, I was surprised, and I was really happy about how it had gone. I felt a need to contribute to the fandom in some way.
• Kittya Cullen: I kind of wanted to see that explored in my own way. And with Asami in particular, and this was surprising for me because usually I'm all for the main character. I never really remember to think about the other ... But with Asami, it felt like there was this big gap available to us for exploration.
• Kittya Cullen: So I kind of wanted to explore that and see how Asami herself was dealing with it. Because for me I like to see how the characters are responding to what's happening to them rather than having the plot happen to them, and with Asami there was just so much room to do that.
• Kittya Cullen: And in terms of relationships and love and so forth, it was I guess just coming back to what I like to explore in fiction, which is how people are interacting with each other, what it means for them. And especially for certain characters who are ... I'm not sure how I'm thinking of this, but I think what I'm thinking of is where the audience may usually dismiss them or not consider them worthy of further exploration. So I like to see for myself how their worth is existing within these relationships, what it means for them and what it can mean for the audience and so forth.
• Kittya Cullen: With the case of Asami and her father, I think it just came back to how they wrote the final book for the series. I found it fascinating that Asami had reached out to her father after what had happened.
• Kittya Cullen: Whereas, for Asami, Asami didn't have anyone, or at least maybe in her head she didn't have anyone. So she went back to someone, I guess who is an ... I wouldn't say an abuser because there isn't that dynamic for them. But in the way that the relationship shifts from love and care to an act of violence ... I don't know. I just wanted to explore that. It's just fascinating to me to see how people who were deeply hurt somehow still find a way to circle back around to the people who have hurt them.
• Kittya Cullen: So both as a black person and as a woman, it was just important for me to recognize that in text and get around to exploring what that might have meant for other characters who weren't within the Circle of the Avatar and had powerful connections.
• Valk: I'm non-binary, so a lot of my work as I got older started to deal more with gender as well as sexuality, also being bi-sexual. I used it sort of as a tool in some fanfics to work through ideas or feelings that I'd had and didn't know how to properly verbalize yet. I was putting them on paper, using another character as the medium and expressing or exploring different ideas in an area where I felt I was kind of safe to do so. I didn't always publish all of them, but the one that you contacted me over, I did, obviously.
• Valk: It was around the time when I was questioning whether or not I was non-binary and I tried to sort of work things out with Jaime as the main focal character
• Valk: It's something that I wanted to, again, wanted to bring into a fanfic to kind of make it more relatable to me, but also to other people who might be reading this and wondering the same thing.
• Valk: There's a lot of, again, fanfic already out there of them being intimate, but it was all very incredibly heteronormative. Just their gender roles and Brienne being vulnerable and weak and all that stuff again. I was just not really feeling it, so I wrote my own instead.
• Valk: I really wanted to address the gender issue and the gender questioning and write how the experiences hit the hardest for me when I was thinking about it. Definitely.
• Valk: trying to work through gender things. I wanted to also try and put someone in the position where they were questioning their gender and actually acting it out, changing their appearance in some way that would fit them better or explore better. I wanted to also work through those emotions with me.
• WriteGirl: So, right when about Season Seven hit, I started getting a little bit upset about the writing in Game of Thrones. And then by the time Season Eight hit, I was just like, "Oh no. No, no, no, no, no. I can't deal with this." I got a bit more involved with writing, because my brain was like, "No, this isn't how it should go. We need to redo all this whole thing." It really started picking up in Season Seven. That was the first time I wrote a Game of Thrones fanfiction. And I believe that was my other OtherWhen series, the first one.
• WriteGirl: I don't know if you're a Dr. Who fan. One of my favorite Doctor Who episodes is Turn Left. And it's a whole episode that's based on the concept of, what if he didn't turn right? What if instead of going the road you're supposed to go, you kind of went that way? And I've always been fascinated by that. I love Choose Your Own Adventure stories, and things like that. I don't like following the written script. So that's one of the reasons why I went into fix-it fics. There's times and places where I was like, that wouldn't happen. I know that's how it happens in the story, but based on the world that they're in, historical context, things like that, that's not how that would. So, that's kind of my brain's way of reconciling not bad writing, but just maybe inconsistent writing, or little things that were just irksome. That's kind of how I got into that.
• WriteGirl: I chose Sansa in particular, and I think you're talking about the Petyr Baelish one, because I felt she suffered a little bit of character assassination.
• WriteGirl: I wanted to kind of show a Sansa who was still herself. A Sansa who was willing to not listen to him, who understood that, this person is not my friend. This person is strictly manipulative. He's going to take me somewhere that I don't want to go, so my only choice is to find the strength in me that she has, and say, "Okay, I'll run. If it means I have to die, I'm not going to let him use me for whatever his ends are." That's kind of where that idea came from.
• WriteGirl: So, how do I give her, I hate to say the word, but some of her dignity back? If she has to die, I thought it really should be on her terms. That was kind of the motivation for that.
• WriteGirl: That was another reason with the fic I kind of wanted to delve a little bit into her as a standalone, not in relation to anyone else. Kind of like, who is Missandei? If you take away slavery, and her being Daenerys' friend, who is this person? What is the one thing that would be important to her? Because there aren't really a lot of fics that focus on her as a character at all. She's just kind of always at the side. That's kind of where I got the thing that is, I don't know if I was a former slave. The one thing I would be sure of when I got my freedom was, I will never be made a slave again in any way, shape or form. So what does that translate into? That translates into, you're not going to use me. I'm not going to stand to be abused anymore. And that's kind of how all that bloomed up. I'd really like to see a bit more of that in Game of Thrones fanfiction. She's really an underused character.
• WriteGirl: I adore the Dorne storyline in the books, and they completely butchered it in the show. So, that's why I was like, no Dorne's way smarter than this. So yes, he's going to be the Dorne that you get in the books.
• WriteGirl: I wanted her to have a little bit more agency. It seemed like from the time we see her in the Baelish dress, with the feathers on it, which she's actually taking on a mockingbird, that that was a glimpse of a darker Sansa, a more politically savvy Sansa, a more adult Sansa. And then, for whatever reason, they backed off of it. And then the next thing we see her, she's just kind of sitting there asking questions, looking dull. And that was a little irritating to me. So I wanted her to get a little more agency, especially when she found out who she was supposed to be meeting. I didn't see Sansa ever agreeing to that.
• WriteGirl: I just couldn't see a Sansa, even one who was beaten down, agreeing to that. She's still a Stark. She still has her pride. So, I thought of, okay, so what would Sansa do in this situation?

Description

Definition: When fan authors demonstrate an awareness of their audience and explain how they were thinking about their audience.

Number of Codes: 34

Analysis: Audience awareness when participating in fanfic genres is important not only so authors can actually reach their audience, but because they are often writing for themselves. When reflecting on who their ideal audiences are, Dialux, Gillywulf, and Valk each believe that their audience is — first and foremost — themselves. Dialux asks herself, “Well, what would I want to read?” Gillywulf says, “my audience should be myself.” Finally, Valk less explicitly says they want to “make [their fanfic] more relatable to me, but also to other people who might be reading this and wondering the same thing.”

While imagined audiences for fanfic authors may begin at their own interests, they often publish so that others may also read their work. In order to reach their other ideal audiences, fan authors use specific tagging practices. AO3 provides fanfic authors with a multitude of options for self-reported tags, such as which characters are included, the relationships included, and “Additional Tags,” which are all the authors’ choices. These Additional Tags are particularly important, as authors make clear what fanfic genre they are participating in and include additional information. Writegirl mentions how important Additional Tags are, especially in the GOT fandom, as fans use these tags to discover and read their ideal fanfics. Using proper tagging practices and discourse will allow for authors to reach those readers. Dialux provides an example, too, of crossing over fandoms to reach potential readers who may not be actively looking for her piece. Since her fanfic is a GOT and Jodhaa Akbar crossover, she explains how she incorporated specific tags to reach a Hindu audience or an audience invested in Hindu culture and history. Finally, AO3 author-reported metadata can also be a place to provide specific trigger warnings. Aria mentions how she incorporated content warnings to avoid triggering her audience. This practice demonstrates a particular care for potential readers, putting their mental health first.

Several of the fan authors also share potential tensions or fears in thinking about and reaching their audiences. Dialux expresses how she was worried about sharing her racebending fanfic because she wanted to be respectful to bother her own culture and regionally similar cultures. Specifically, she was worried, “Because I was also combining both South Indian and North Indian tropes, to a certain extent.” This fear came because she wanted to respect and celebrate her culture, but also knew about other racebent fanfics that had stereotyped particular races. The audience reaction to these fanfics demonstrates how harmful these racebent fics can be in that they may reinforce, rather than subvert, racist stereotypes or caricatures.

Gillywulf also expresses discomfort in engaging with a particular genre, although she actively avoided participating in particular conventions of fanfic genres. Unlike racebending, other fanfic generic forms, such as slavefics, are almost always harmful. Gillywulf decided to set boundaries with prompts that requested particularly harmful generic forms by either refusing to participate or actively avoiding harmful conventions. For example, one person asked her to write a slavefic, but instead of writing a slavefic that romanticized the master/slave dynamic, Gillywulf removed all romance and focused on the need to actively speak out against racism and slavery.

FFinally, Kittya’s own discomfort was less about harmful generic conventions or potentially triggering her audience. Her discomfort came from the fact that different circles in her personal life read her fanfics and she was not explicitly out yet to particular circles. In her fanfic, she hints at Asami and Korra’s romance in only one sentence as a way to both protect herself, but also signal to the slashfic community. Kittya says if she were to rewrite her piece, she would bring Korra and Asami’s romance to the forefront, but at the time, she had to navigate these two very different audiences — the community she was not yet out to and the slash community with whom she belonged.

Quotes

• Aria: And then the last one's a content warning, like yeah, if you read this you'll see homophobia. I can't not publish a story about homophobia.
• Aria: It was a piece that was sufficiently about me that it would have been fun and helpful for a lot of people. But this, I think it was a good piece, it was a piece that was a whole other world to read
• Dialux: I had a very close group of friends on Live Journal back in the early 2000s. That, I think, probably because I was a teenager. Perhaps this is because of all those reasons. But that kind of close-knittedness has never kind of shown up for me ever since. I think I tend to participate now on more, "Oh, this is really interesting for me. And this is really fascinating." And I'll go into it for the material as opposed to the friendships themselves.
• Dialux: Because, initially, it was definitely a very close-knit, just writing for friends and with friends.
• Dialux: So, the person that I was supposed to be gifting to asked for a historical AU, alternate universe, especially a middle aged one, with angst and a happy ending.
• Dialux: Because I honestly expected nobody to do that. It's good to see that people are just as interested in a lot of it, in this stuff. You know?
• Dialux: I was really worried about how it would be perceived by the fandom, how it would be received by people even outside of the fandom.
• Dialux: I was really worried about it, actually. Because I spoke to a couple people before I published the fanfic. Because I was kind of worried about it, and I wasn't sure how it would be received.
• Dialux: And I wasn't sure people would think that it was good enough. Because I was also combining both South Indian and North Indian tropes, to a certain extent. And those weren't necessarily very compatible. And there's a lot of history behind that and everything. And I wasn't entirely sure how people would perceive it.
• Dialux: And I was so worried. Because all of this was very close to my heart, and I did not want to have to deal with a lot of backlash, or feedback, or having to fight to say, "Well, I don't mean to be rude on any of these kinds of things." These are meant with respect and they're meant with love. And they're from a part of myself.
• Dialux: So, I initially wanted to make sure that it was pretty clear to everyone that this was a canon divergence. Where one where Rhaegar has won, Jon is raised a Targaryen.
• Dialux: And the reason I did the Jodhaa Akbar tag was actually because I wanted to make sure that people who read more Hindu mythology fic, or other fandoms like that, like Baahubali, were able to identify that this is one such fic. And I think there are people who have said they've entered through that particular tag.
• Dialux: Especially the quote that you put up here, which refers to Sansa's eyes. Because that was a moment for me, I think, more than anything else.
• Dialux: Oh. I think I learned that people are far more understanding than I was giving them credit for, especially because I was so afraid about the reception.
• GillyWulf: Yeah. Just, I wanted to get better at it, and people were really good at giving me things that I could easily do at work,
• GillyWulf: Well, my audience is pretty much just other fans like me, so it was sort of just, "Well, what would I want to read? And what would people my age think is fun?" Things like that. There were a couple people who regularly sent me prompts, so it was sort of, I knew these were the sort of things they were into, or I know what they're angling for in this question, in this idea. So, I'm like, "Okay, I can sort of tailor it to that,"
• GillyWulf: I know a lot of people like to have full sentences, and get really detailed and say things like that, but I always find that to be sort of distracting, because I know, when I'm personally looking for something, I like to be able to just click through until I find exactly what I'm looking for. So, if somebody has what I'm looking for, but also in that same tag is a full sentence of something else, it doesn't necessarily help me stuff. If somebody's specifically looking for, I guess a long-distance relationship thing, they can just click on that and see, "Okay, well, it's in here somewhere. I'll just find whichever prompt it is." I'm a big fan of just keeping things neat and simple.
• GillyWulf: Well, obviously a lot of it is trying to come up with different ways to not use the same descriptions, not use the same words, because you know that once you put it in the drabble, if you keep describing them the exact same way, people might skip over that or it starts to start reading a little bit dull. So, I tried to mix it up on occasion.
• GillyWulf: Things like that, you notice immediately, but also that it's not necessarily always in a way that maybe the reader is expecting to see it. I don't know. It depends on each drabble, each specific one, and the mood that is also trying to get portrayed.
• GillyWulf: And it's also, given the audience, this is considered a family show. So, I realized over time that maybe I don't have to write that.
• GillyWulf: If you set those boundaries, people generally stick to it. If you tell people flat out, "I'm not going to write that," they generally won't press and press, and ask, "Why aren't you?" Because I just find keeping people as slaves is super ... I didn't want to contribute to it, and it was just that sort of idea [inaudible 00:47:42] maybe are younger and a little bit more impressionable than I am, so maybe it's okay to put things that they haven't been exposed to before, but also, it doesn't need to be a weird thing.
• GillyWulf: I learned to just not push it, don't write what other people are demanding, necessarily.
• GillyWulf: My audience should be myself, at the end of the day. I want to write the things that I want to read. Even if I'd much rather prefer just reading it and not having to put the time and effort into clacking my way through it, if I want to read it, I have to write it sometimes, which is fine. But I should enjoy the things that I'm writing.
• Kittya Cullen: It's just to be someone who builds and creates with the purpose of fixing or making better, but then not being able to do so for someone within your personal life. But the imagery also for that chapter was, I guess, built in subtext because I wasn't quite sure yet how to engage with what was happening in ways that were visible to other people outside of the fan community, the slashfan community.
• Kittya Cullen: It has less to do with fandom itself and more to do with the external world. And even now it's, I guess it's ... I don't know. I think it just seemed like the safer option at the time. But the more time I've spent in that part of fandom, the less I guess I've cared about how it's read or whatever it is. But at the time, it just seemed wiser, particularly if I was having others who may not ... Because fan works and original work for me are on the same level, and so I'm not concerned, I guess, with people reading it for ... people reading it and not seeing a difference in quality, but rather how they experience the content. And so I think I was still considering who the audience would be.
• Kittya Cullen: Because there is this thing in fanfiction where we assume that all people who are accessing it are familiar with the text. And while that is often common when we want it to function beyond that world to have relevance in other ways, I think for me personally it's important to integrate more parts of the world, of the universe.
• Kittya Cullen: For me, it was just reminding myself that, even though I'm writing something where there are people who are familiar with the text, it's also important to fill in the blanks sometimes.
• Valk: It's something that I wanted to, again, wanted to bring into a fanfic to kind of make it more relatable to me, but also to other people who might be reading this and wondering the same thing.
• WriteGirl: I think the strength is, I do try and keep it as much as I can in character, and in situ, I guess. I don't like to pull too much of other outside influences in. I think the strength is that people can read it and they can really see it sliding into canon. And if you go into something aside, you don't have to bump too much. And it would fit in the overall narrative.
• WriteGirl: One thing I noticed about the Game of Thrones fandom, because I did just kind of jump in, is that tags are very important. I do read comments from other people in fics, and that seems to be the one thing that everyone gripes about. This was tagged unproperly. This should be the tag. The tag should be this. I was like, okay, let me try and tag as properly and nearly as I can, because I don't want to get dogpiled. There's a lot of my favorite fics where there's 10 pages of people just ragging on improper tagging. So I was like, nope, let me be careful.
• WriteGirl: Tags are hard because they are, it takes me... The hardest part of my posting is tagging, to make sure that I have everything right.
• WriteGirl: Ratings may change, warnings may change, series, spoilers, all those kind of speak for themselves, just to let you know that okay, once again, this isn't static. This is something that changes story by story. Some of them may be Gen, some of them, I haven't written one yet, but some of them may be adult in the future. Some of them may have a lot of violence in them, so just be aware. Don't ever come back to this fic and think, "This is what it is." Because that's not it.
• WriteGirl: Out of character? I never know. I think my characters are pretty in character, but there's always the one person who's like, "This character would never do that." So I'm just like, "Okay. Just to let you know, it may be out of character."
• WriteGirl: Alternate universe, canon divergence just to let people know, this isn't following canon, because I did not want to get blasted on that one.

Description

Definition: When fan authors discuss forms of research they conducted while they were writing, including fan community research, reading about a theory, learning about language or history, and more.

Number of Codes: 14

Analysis: Several fan authors share their research process, either how research they were doing at the time impacted their fanfics or how they researched for their fanfics. Dialux discusses doing research to better depict historical Indian culture and traditions. She is already familiar with some of these traditions, as they are part of her culture; she continues to research, though, as her fanfic focuses on history and she wanted to integrate some historical accuracy.

Writegirl, Aria, Gillywulf, and Valk all discuss researching experiences that are not their own to more accurately represent these experiences. For example, Valk includes information about Jaime’s prosthetic hand, but since they do not have a prosthetic, they did a bit of research on the experience of using and taking care of one. Gillywulf also includes a story about Korra both a trans woman and a trans man in her vignette fanfics; Gillywulf is a cis woman, though, so she “drew knowledge” from trans communities on the internet. Writegirl also did some research on the psychology of people who survive slavery and abuse to better understand both Missandei and Sansa’s perspectives. The integration of research allows fans to more accurately depict an experience they may not be personally familiar with as well as represent that experience as respectfully and accurately as possible.

Quotes

• Aria: I did consult with some folks when I was writing some texts about trauma, because I was like... I wasn't comfortable writing that.
• Aria: I would also say a little bit about some of the research I'd read at the time, turns out the book I was reading at the time that claimed that knowing someone who was gay had a significant...Or not knowing someone who was gay, but engaging with someone who's gay on the topic of being gay helped significantly with changing someone's political views, or being willing to accept gay people. Turns out that one was actually wrong, like literally the person who put together that study cooked the book.
• Dialux: I think that for the actual research it was not so much that I did it for this particular fanfic, as it was more that I love that era a lot. So, I had tended to research it before, as well. So, I had a lot of information that I kind of knew in colloquial terms.
• Dialux: But I did not remember the exact way that he had died, so then I kind of went searching for that. And then, I mean, from there it kind of spiraled into researching other things and kind of reading up more about Akbar and more about Jodhaa. And I'm an avid research. I mean, that's what I do now.
• Dialux: I think a lot of the research and a lot of the material was just about identifying and pulling disparate ideas together that I knew. From either my own culture because, of course, this is partially my own culture. And also, the historical details of [inaudible 00:27:49].
• Dialux: And I think that was what was very important to me, especially in this story, was puling it all together so that there weren't any open endings. And the research really, somehow, it helped in pulling that together.
• Dialux: I think that the thing I wanted to keep in mind was that I was doing the research, but I was also not putting as much research into it as I probably should have if I wanted to make it historical fiction.
• Dialux: And that was one thing I wanted to be clear about. Because, yes, it was research. But I think I wanted to keep to the spirit of the movie, as well as the spirit of the A Song of Ice and Fire canon.
• GillyWulf: And even though the trans experience is not necessarily one that I know for certain, there's plenty of people in the Korra community, in most online Internet communities, where there's plenty of those people and you see what they're going through and you see how their lives are, and I try not to speak for situations that I've never lived through, but you can draw knowledge from that and say, "Okay, well, without going in depth into feelings or things like that, I can add this, this, and this, and make it maybe relatable in that regard."
• Valk: This is a topic that I was a little bit hesitant to tackle because at the time, when I was writing, I wasn't very well-versed in not just having a limb missing as a disability, but also how advanced the prosthetics were and if they could hold things. I did a little bit of research while I was at Starbucks, trying to sort of complete everything.
• WriteGirl: I learned a little bit, I actually had to do a bit of research on some of the fic, for things like trauma, and how people respond to trauma. Especially in the case of Sansa and Missandei, how do people overcome certain difficulties after being in these different positions? That was a little bit interesting. I did a little bit of in-depth on that, because once again, I'm that nerd.
• WriteGirl: Yeah, mostly it was Googling, recovering from trauma. I did a little bit of research on former slaves, to see their mindset. That was a little bit what I did use for the mindset of Missandei. Because people who've been in that situation, they go through, what is it called? No, goodness, I can't remember. But it was a very good article, and it was talking about how former slaves, they go through this process of not believing that they're free, and not believing that they're free, and not believing that they're free. And eventually, they get to a point where it sticks in their head, that this is freedom. This is what they have. No one can control them. And then, they get very, very almost violently independent, where no one's going to tell me what to do. You can't tell me what to do. No one's going to do that to me. Once again, how some people where to a much lesser extent, when you get out of controlling, overbearing relationships, and then you're finally free, and you're like, "Fuck that shit. Where am I going? I'm staying out all night. And I don't have to tell anybody." They get this burst of a sense of self, a sense of purpose. And I thought that was very beautiful, that there are people who can go through all that type of trauma, and they can get there, and they can fully bloom. And I always saw Missandei as kind of that character, this character who had gone through all of that to the point where here she is, standing tall as a character that knows her own worth, knows her own personage.
• WriteGirl: And then with Sansa, just how people recover from abusive and traumatic relationships, and things like that. The stages of recovery.
• WriteGirl: There's one thing, to me, if it's too OOC, just out of the block there's no real change, and these drabbles are so short. You can't really see a lot of character development from A to B. Everything kind of has to fit where it does. So I wanted to make sure that it fit and it wasn't too crazy. It's a lot of research.

Description

Definition: When fan authors discuss the act of drafting, or early stages in the writing process such as brainstorming, outlining, etc.

Number of Codes: 10

Analysis: Dialux, Valk, and Writegirl each share different drafting processes as they composed their fanfics or other pieces of writing. They each discuss a link between the drafting process and imagining the story before actually writing it down; there is a transfer of their thought process in imagining their fanfics to actually getting that fic written. Dialux shares how she conjures her fanfic plots and characters before putting them down on paper, and combs through these different ideas as she’s writing to make sure they are all implemented. This method demonstrates self-reflection as she drafts, explicitly thinking how what she writes captures what she imagined.

Valk similarly shares how they imagined this story before writing. They mention they “had all these ideas and notes about what was also going on in the universe and what not” that they then wanted to translate into the actual fic. Specifically, they cite a fear of not being able to “put on paper” the fic they imagined. In order to actually write their fic, they challenged themself by writing the entire fanfic in one sitting at a coffee shop. When I ask what they learned from this fic, they joke, “never write an entire fanfic in Starbucks.”

Finally, Writegirl also shares how she imagines an entire universe and plot lines with almost 200 pages of this reimagined GOT written. Similar to Valk, she also has notes and ideas written down, sometimes writing extensive scenes. The fanfics she chose to publish, though, are pivotal moments from these 200 pages of her long fanfic. She also expresses a desire to transfer her ideas onto the page, saying “I'm just going to take [the ideas] out and put you here [in the published fanfic], and then leave you alone.”

Quotes

• Dialux: Mostly to keep myself writing. Because, otherwise, I would just not publish those materials until it becomes, you know. It's basically sitting on my hard drive for years and years on end, and finally I get the opportunity and the motivation to publish them.
• Dialux: But when I was making the actual list of material, I basically just ran through from top to bottom of the actual fanfic. And basically tried to remember everything that I thought about. And identified the particular things that I was thinking about and trying to identify.
• Dialux: Because that's what I keep feeling whenever I look back at it, was how I got almost consumed by the characters when I was writing them.
• Valk: Yeah, I wrote it in one sitting in a Starbucks near my university.
• Valk: That, and also trying to write and finish an entire fanfic in one sitting is very difficult when it's in a public setting. Luckily, it happened and it was a nice exercise as well, just also to be able to sit and write and have it really done in one sitting and then put it out there was very satisfying.
• Valk: I guess I wanted to get a very powerful moment on paper. I had all these ideas and notes about what was also going on in the universe and what not, but this was the one that kind of started it. I wanted to make sure that I could get it down and not have it be that fanfic that I write in my head and then I just cannot put on paper later on.
• Valk: Yeah, so at the same time I was writing this fanfic, I was writing another one that kind of delved into the timeline of how Jaime grew up.
• Valk: The first big one is never write an entire fanfic in Starbucks.
• WriteGirl: That I've actually written about 200 pages for. But that was just the one pivotal scene. So I was like, okay, I'm just going to take you out and put you here, and then leave you alone.
• WriteGirl: It's not done. It's not a solid 200 pages. I'm a very chaotic writer, so I will get a bit of dialog in my head. I will see something, and I will kind of write around that, and build around that, and string a bunch of scenes. It's 200 pages, but it's 200 pages of broken up paragraphs, bits of dialog, bits of scenery. So if I ever fleshed it out, it would be much longer, because I have a problem containing myself.

Description

Definition: When fan authors discuss the act of revising, or later stages in the writing process.

Number of Codes: 5

Analysis: Only two fan authors explicitly reflect on the revising process. Aria mentions how she shared her fanfic with a confidant to ensure she was representing trauma in a respectful, accurate manner. In fanfics, this is often referred to as beta-reading (or beta-ing), when a fan creator — either a fanfic author, comic artist, or other fan mediums — asks someone to look over their writing before they post it. Beta-reading can be anything from spelling and grammatical checks to providing larger feedback about the ideas and plotlines. Writegirl also explicitly mentions revising her piece, choosing to rewrite a scene that felt “superfluous.”

Quotes

• Aria: I did consult with some folks when I was writing some texts about trauma, because I was like... I wasn't comfortable writing that.
• Aria: I also learned that you have to be careful with how much to take on, and you have to be careful about what you're willing to prune, and you have to be ready to prune things. And you have to be ready to follow a story where it goes instead of trying to follow all the directions you ever imagined. Because if you try to follow a story in every direction you have, then it's going to die like this piece did. It's like, "I don't know how to integrate the story into itself anymore."
• Valk: I did a very brief look over and then I was like, "Screw it,"
• WriteGirl: There's actually a lot more of that fic that is written that didn't make it in. A whole thing where you get it from Nimeria's point of view where you can see her. She's like, okay, just following to see what's going to happen. And then when Sansa decides to run, that's when she decides to attack. But I thought that was a bit superfluous, so I took all of that out.
• WriteGirl: I have a lot of Game of Thrones stuff on the cutting room floor, before I decided what to actually post. And there is about 20 other drabbles for the one series that haven't made it yet, because I'm one of those writers.

Description

Definition: When fan authors directly mention reader feedback and how their writing was received.

Number of Codes: 23

Analysis: Fan authors each share experiences with positive and negative reception from their readers. Most of the fan authors receive supportive reception on their fanfic, from comments to other fans uptaking their work. Dialux expresses she was originally nervous to publish her fanfic, as racebending fanfics run the risk of reinscribing racist tropes if fan authors are not careful. Yet, she explains that she received nothing but positive feedback, and she hasn’t “gotten a single negative feedback on that fanfic to date.”

Similarly, Writegirl shares positive reception she received on both her fanfic and other fanfics she published. Specifically, she points to one of the first reviews she ever received. Her reader “said they could taste the road dust from my writing.” Finally, Gillywulf also shares mainly positive feedback she received. Because her fanfic vignettes are direct uptakes of prompts her readers requested for her to write, most of her reception was fairly positive. For some of her vignettes, readers requested to see more of particular stories.

As for negative reviews, Writegirl and Valk share specific negative comments they received. On Valk’s fanfic, which revolves around queer sexualities and genders, a reader began with a positive comment and then ended with the question “why in God's (capital G) name, did you make Jaime like this?” Valk points specifically to the “capital G” to demonstrate that the person reading the comment may be religious — Christian — which may explain why they critiqued Valk’s reimagining of Jaime’s gender. For Writegirl, she once had someone comment, “‘Fuck you, bastard’” on one of her fanfics. Writegirl cites this person as a troll and laughs off the comment.

Quotes

• Aria: But that was the biggest bit of feedback I got was this conversation, and it helped a little bit.
• Dialux: And that also came across to a lot of readers, is what they were telling me, at least. Because they felt like there was a lot more gravitas to the entire fic that you wouldn't see in a lot of my other fanfics.
• Dialux: But people were very kind about it. And I haven't actually gotten a single negative feedback on that fanfic to date.
• Dialux: So, with all of that in mind, the actual fandom response was absolutely wonderful, and absolutely, completely respectful. And none of my fears at all came to fruition.
• Dialux: Because they were all so kind, and so respectful of the entire fic in general.
• GillyWulf: There's been a couple of fan artists over the years, like plastic-pipes, who is spectacular, always great. And I think the name was [inaudible 00:11:19] at the time, but I think they've changed it. There were a couple times when they did art according to what I'd written, or things like that. And I was like, "Okay, well it'd be cool if I wrote something that was specifically to get an image out of this person's mind."
• GillyWulf: I like that a lot of people, I still get comments occasionally that are, "I've just gone through this whole thing," and you can do that.
• GillyWulf: So, if there were some things where I'd write the original drabble, and then I might get three more immediate requests in my inbox for a sequel, or for, "Can I get a full length thing of this?" And I didn't necessarily have the time or energy, or just the inclination in some cases.
• GillyWulf: I mean, most of it was positive, which was really good. If somebody really didn't like something, they didn't usually tell me. Or if they did, sometimes it was like a spelling error or a formatting error, and it'd be, "Okay, I can just easily fix that." I don't think there were too many outright negative things. There was one. I don't think it was on a prompt, but this artist I really liked at the time commented and said something like, "This would've been better with this movie instead of the one you actually used," and didn't necessarily anything positive otherwise. I don't know if they actually liked it, or if it was just sort of a, "Well, I would've liked it better if you'd done this thing the way I wanted you to." Which, it is what it is, and you sort of have to just say, "Okay, well, this is the way I did it, and I'm not going to change it." But it was definitely a situation where I was like, "Okay. Don't know what to make of that."
• GillyWulf: Most of the time, people are very, very happy about it, because it was just another thing for them to read.
• GillyWulf: And okay, well, when you meet somebody, what are the first things you notice? And for Korra, she's an imposing figure, whether or not she means to be. She's got the muscles, she's maybe not as white as everybody else in Republic City, and she's got these really bight eyes. So, those things stand out immediately.
• GillyWulf: And it's okay that maybe only three other people also liked it, but I like it.
• Valk: Yeah, I got a very interesting response from someone. I believe, maybe a week or two after. They were like, "It's a really well written fanfic, it's great, but why in God's (capital G) name, did you make Jaime like this?" And the moment I saw capital G, I was like I see. I tried to be as cordial as I could and I explained what I said earlier about my inspiration
• Valk: Yeah, that was the one big kick back I got from someone. I was a little bit shocked that I got the capital G person, but what can you do?
• WriteGirl: And then that's when I kind of got feedback, because the first fanfic, I never got any feedback from anyone. I was just like, "Oh, I'm shouting into the dark." So yeah, it kind of changed, and it got me a bit more active, and like, people actually want to say something about it. What did you think about it? I started getting a bit more communication, a bit more activity.
• WriteGirl: And someone wrote a really detailed review, just about how, I remember they said they could taste the road dust from my writing. And I was like, wow. I never thought of it that way. That's really cool. That kind of inspired me to write more, that I could get that emotion out of somebody. They felt like they were actually there with them.
• WriteGirl: I've had a couple requests from the other ones. They're like, "I would love to read this story." I'm like, "No, you don't understand. It's a lot to wade through."
• WriteGirl: The "What if" tag was very important, because I've had that on fanfiction.net before. People are like, "You should have tagged it as an AU." I'm like, "But it is. It's right there." So I had the "What if."
• WriteGirl: Out of character? I never know. I think my characters are pretty in character, but there's always the one person who's like, "This character would never do that." So I'm just like, "Okay. Just to let you know, it may be out of character."
• WriteGirl: But there are people who they're really willing to engage with you, and they have questions. In a lot of other fandoms, some people are just like, "This is a nice story." Game of Thrones fans will have questions for you in the comments. They'll be like, "What about this? And what about this? Oh, what about this? What do you think about this?" It's fun to get that dialog. That's something I never had before.
• WriteGirl: In one of my other fics, there's the Deviant Lord. We will run out of the character requirement, talking to each other back and forth in comments about things.
• WriteGirl: I actually had one troll who just wrote, "Fuck you, you bastard." And I was like, yes. I was just like, "Whoa. Okay. I'm sorry you're having such a bad day. Go have a mimosa. Just don't take it out on me."
• WriteGirl: But there are just people who are just nasty. In all the fandoms I've been in, it thankfully hasn't happened to me yet, and I've actually had people defend me in comments. They're just like, "Get that shit out of here." I'm like, "Okay, thank you for being nice." But it seems the Game of Thrones fandoms can get real violent. They get real virulent with their hatred in the comments section. I can't muster that kind of hatred. If I don't like something, I just click off of it. I don't get the hate.

Description

Definition: These codes examine how fan authors respond to or analyze the canonical material — TLOK or GOT. These codes include complimenting, relating to, or critiquing the canon.

Number of Codes: 80

Analysis: Select different forms of canon commentary for specific analyses.

Quotes

• Aria: Some of the pieces I wrote just no longer work as Homestuck pieces because the characters have been changed, and I was like, "I can't really write this story about two women in love because one of them isn't a woman anymore, that story doesn't work as a piece."
• Aria: For me, this text begins both as like, I was reading a lot about Stonewall and the context around Stonewall, and also I was reading a piece about PTSD, and it was just very surface, very basic understanding of trauma and PTSD in particular, like something you recover from, in a way that I was not super comfortable with. And sort of the original text, not sure if you would agree. And so I wanted to talk about disability through the context of being something you come to live with, and come to integrate, and come to find becomes a part of you life, but also something you still struggle with, instead of just, I don't know, a lot of us have seen the story a lot like, you get better, and then you get better and you win. And then one day it doesn't bother you.
• Aria: But I also struggled because I didn't know how to write about my own trauma, and so I tried to write about trauma in ways that other people were experiencing it. And already the text engaged with that, and those weren't really authentic to me. They weren't things I was writing about at the time.
• Aria: I chose Korra and Asami because they're main characters, I like writing main characters. I liked the love story, it was kind of short in the text, but I liked it. Or not short, but it felt more like a nod than a full
• Aria: There are things I don't like about it, but I like it as a little bit of text. It's there in the text, it was one of those things that was like, "Oh, I love this, I love feeling represented." So I wrote that.
• Aria: I chose the end of Season Three because it's the place where I felt like I was reading a... I felt like engaging with the original text, I was feeling like I wanted something different, I wanted a more deep and meaningful engagement with disability and trauma in this context. Because reading the original text is like, it's there for a while and then they're better? So it was almost the opposite feeling, what do I think this looks like? And so that's why I chose that.
• Aria: I think of a place I was there, and this was particularly...I was engaging with political institutions at the time that were much, much bigger than me, particularly family institutions. My family was pretty chill, but running a queer resource center at community college is like, getting that [inaudible 00:24:12]. You would deal with a bunch of people that were writing about the problems for being gay, or feeling like they can't talk about it, or being the only source of information, of being part of an institution that was the only source of information.
• Aria: This is the moment when this becomes one of the early queer relationships in cartoons, a relatively good one. There's nothing particularly problematic about it, it's limited, but it's good.
• Aria: I think the redo of the relationship, the exploration is limited, is kind of bad. But I also think that the way that we end somewhere where it's like, they just want to be married, or at the end of their first date, we did see them agree, yeah I want to do this. Yeah, I want to have this, or I like this, it's healthy. I love that! I just see that as a lot of things for writers to engage with.[inaudible 00:47:08] what are other ways we can imagine it?
• Dialux: So then I realized that Jodhaa Akbar, which is definitely a Desi film, had a wonderful set of characters that was definitely angsty, but had a wonderfully happy ending. And allowed me to write about something that was kind of dear to my heart as well. Because it was a Desi film. It was one representation in a way, but not necessarily. I think it was just about freeing those religious tensions, and those cultural tensions, and actually attempting to bridge them. Because you have to. Because it's not just about love, or it's not just about anything. It's about your pride, it's about your family's livelihood. All of those kind of come together, you have to do it. You don't want to, but, somehow, you have to. I think it's that gritting of your teeth, and getting on with life that kind of really draws me in.
• Dialux: I mean that I just don't think I relate to him at the same extent that I relate to Sansa.
• Dialux: I think if you look at A Song of Ice and Fire, technically, more than Game of Thrones, you actually get more of a cultural tension due to just the difference between the North and the South. And all of that. And I do think that George R. R. Martin has kind of perpetuated the idea, simply because he is English. So, the whole idea that in England, where Northerners are tougher and everything than Southerners. And I don't know anything more about it. But I think that's kind of one of the underlying and unconscious biases within the framework of the canon.
• Dialux: I mean, obviously, Season Eight was terrible. That was a given. And the ending did not do anyone any favors.
• Dialux: And second of all, the actual TV show was not doing itself any favors.
• Dialux: Yeah, I mean, I think when I was first getting into the fandom, one of my friends basically told me that the women in this are really strong. And it's true to a great extent. But I think what's even more fascinating to me, is how a lot of them tend to show that strength in so many different ways. Like, you have Sansa, who is conventionally pretty, but she also has, on an internal level, she just kind of lives with whatever society expects of her. Whereas, Brienne is not conventionally pretty, so she has to find another way of gaining power in her world. And then you have people like Margaery Tyrell and Cersei Lannister,
• Dialux: I actually do remember how unhappy people were that Sansa didn't end with a love interest at the end of Season Eight.
• Dialux: I think it's just a relief to see how... Because to me, it's almost like a moment of such growth, is what I felt, when I felt Sansa. Because when you're young, [inaudible 01:20:56]. You want the perfect marriage, and the perfect husband, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But that doesn't mean that you'll necessarily get it. And to me, at least, growing up is balancing those childhood desires, and those childhood needs with whatever you learn as you grow up. And Sansa, despite the fact that as a young child she wanted all of that, in the end she got power, and the ability to make sure that nobody hurt her.
• Dialux: And I think there are other ways that the show actually showed that with the sexual liberation for women, and the feminist liberation for Arya and everything.
• Dialux: And, obviously, there's a ton of other problems. How [inaudible 01:21:42] Daenerys, and Cersei, and Jaime. And a number of other characters.
• Dialux: And I could understand why people felt unhappy about it. But at the same time, I think you're beating on the wrong bush here. There's a lot of other problems to deal with within this fandom. And within this canon that we don't particularly need as much as you're putting into it.
• GillyWulf: And from those three, you can see that they have very female-centered stories. And then, at least all three are those are canonically queer characters, which are things that now get me really excited and make me want to go, "Okay, well, I want to dive into that. I want to see how their stories could be different," or, "I just really want to see them in this situation," so I try and write it when I can.
• GillyWulf: I started in college and I had watched most of Avatar, but I don't think I ever quite finished it. And I think this was just before season three came out, I want to say. I'm not totally 100% on that. But my roommate was very much into that, very much in love with Avatar, so she was appalled that I don't think I'd ever finished Avatar, and made me watch that.
• GillyWulf: "Okay, well, let's just do Korra next," because I was pretty sure that came out. So, we ended up watching that. And then, once we built a routine out of, "Okay, we're both back from class, we're watching this episode now," and it sort of became part of our schedule that, once we both got back from that class, we'd watch an episode. It was a good way to become emotionally invested in it.
• GillyWulf: I was very much endeared by the way Korra was super honest, and her character in general, and how she was just trying her best, and just the art style and everything about her character design I loved, and her personality.
• GillyWulf: And then, just seeing the way her relationship sort of evolved with Asami over time, especially once you get into the third season, was like, "Okay, I'm into this. Whether or not they're going for it, I see it." So, it was like, "All right. I and a lot of the people in the fandom seem to agree for some reason, so I'm just going to go there and enjoy that while I'm doing it.
• GillyWulf: Yeah. And I always thought her relationship with Mako felt super forced, and then, I didn't like that he cheated on both of them with each other. It was like, "Jeez. No, no. He should not be in a relationship with either of them after this." Yeah. I always felt like maybe Mako should take five steps back, and let's just focus on these two.
• GillyWulf: That was Christmas break, but my grandma was staying over for the weekend, so I had to watch it silently at like midnight, and freak out quietly. As soon as Asami showed up on the screen, I must have lost it. But it was incredible. I couldn't believe it. I was like, "This is happening, right?" Yeah. I was like, "Jesus."
• GillyWulf: I loved that. Even if, and I think once Korra sort of got over herself, she started to feel that way about Asami, maybe. It's because of the whole rivalry thing. Initially, it was definitely harder to see that, but I liked that they weren't immediate, for the most part.
• GillyWulf: So, at the same time, it was also sort of an exploration for me in that I've known I was gay, probably since kindergarten, but I sort of just put it off, put it off, and it wasn't until I started getting into Korrasami that I was like, "Okay, well, I'm meeting a community where this is accepted and this is encouraged even." So, I had decided to come out, and these became sort of two parallels of, "It could be this, or it could be that." Of like, "What is the best case? What is the worst case for maybe how my parents will react?" Thankfully, it leaned more towards Korra's parents than Asami, but it did sort of dip into that a little bit.
• GillyWulf: Well, obviously, personal preference aside, I think it was the most fleshed out of Korra's personal relationships with any of the other possible love interests.
• GillyWulf: So, we spend four seasons developing Korra and Asami's relationship from maybe rivals, to best friends, to they're lovers, the relationship that they end on. And it's super great to see that fleshed out
• GillyWulf: So, to see this cartoon suddenly become canon, against a network that had super tried to, god, just tear it apart, it was invigorating, to say the least. Yeah. That's why I have to imagine people took off with it.
• GillyWulf: And it was also good that nobody in that show was white, by definition. When you look at where those communities are meant to be, have drawn inspiration from, nobody in that is white, so it's even more exciting, and it's great, and we need more of that, frankly.
• Kittya Cullen: That was an Indian television show that I was watching, and I happened to be looking for ways to continue to consume the show because I'd been watching it back home, but back home I had English subtitles and so on.
• Kittya Cullen: At the time that the show was airing, it was kind of taboo for divorcees who were women to get remarried, and it was rare for a widower to be portrayed as someone who was intensely devoted to the wife that he had lost, so it was a combination of really interesting things.
• Kittya Cullen: And because I grew up in a country where we have a large Indo-Guyanese population, so Indian content was part of our regular air waves and the music and sound that we listened, so it shaped what I was interested in.
• Kittya Cullen: But I think with Twilight it was just that phase where you finally find a story that speaks to you, even if you kind of hate it when you look back at it when you're older. But at the time, how Bella was written both as someone who was insular and chooses to form or has a small community and so forth and deals with depression or whatever it is, it just seemed to be something that I could relate to. And so I was both interested in that, and I guess in the power fantasy that she was written to come in to. Usually, at least for me at the time, it wasn't really common to see those characters have that kind of a glow-up, you can say.
• Kittya Cullen: I think it was more that it was very books for me because I grew up in the Caribbean ... Well, on South America but as socially, politically part of the Caribbean, so most of the content that we were consuming was either shows from the US or whatever, maybe European shows might have filtered through, and that also was the case for the books that we were reading. And while it was the case within school for us to consume Caribbean literature, it was harder to read Caribbean literature as a person on my own.
• Kittya Cullen: So it was just discovering a collection of books in my own home from my aunt and my mother and so on, their teachers. And my aunt in particular, she teaches English, and so they had old texts that I found and started reading them. And that's when I began to realize that the books that I had been reading were excluding me. It was something that you sort of knew but you didn't quite know. I guess it comes back to not knowing what you're missing until you finally have it. So when I first read texts were people were actually talking about foods that I would eat or where people were living in communities like mine, where people spoke that way that I spoke, et cetera. Because even though I speak, let's say, like this, how I speak with my family or how I speak with my friends from back home, it's a little different even though ... So, my particular country, we speak English, but it's a particular kind of English. So just seeing that in text and then realizing that the fantasies and so on that I was consuming were ... I don't know, it had these strange things that just didn't quite compute with where I was living. That's where it really clicked for me. And from that point onward, I think that's where I began to see it in everything else. The biggest shift didn't really come until I moved to the US, because back home I was part of the majority, so even though it's absent, you were still seeing yourself in other ways, whether that's being who was teaching you or who was in the news as a politician, et cetera. But here it was a completely different ballgame, so it felt more insidious
• Kittya Cullen: I was on Twitter casually scrolling through something, and someone from back home happened to mention how the finale of the show had gone. Given my own cultural background and the cultural background of the world in general, I was pretty surprised about that, so I started consuming fics and reading the show ... Sorry, not reading the show, but watching the show to get through it to see ... If I could see where it was going and if I would be as surprised as everyone else had been. So when I got through the show, I was surprised, and I was really happy about how it had gone. I felt a need to contribute to the fandom in some way.
• Kittya Cullen: With the case of Asami and her father, I think it just came back to how they wrote the final book for the series. I found it fascinating that Asami had reached out to her father after what had happened.
• Kittya Cullen: I think in the first two books, even though Korra does have moments of vulnerability, I guess her experiences are fantastical in a sense.
• Kittya Cullen: It was sort of ... To me, it was groundbreaking in how they handled that because we get to see Korra, who is this all-powerful person, come to grips with what she might be like after having this really terrible thing happen to her and want sort of responsibilities she once had, and how it's still there, but she has all these other things she now has to deal with as well, like her mental health and her physical recovery and so forth.
• Kittya Cullen: I don't know, it just ... There may have been other works of fiction that never really covered that, but for me in particular that was when Korra just seemed more human.
• Kittya Cullen: Korra gets to her lowest point. The implication is that she's about to jump off a cliff. But we don't really get to dwell in the true feeling of that moment, the have to fix it immediately because of the idea that the show may never get to come back to this point, so we don't get to actually see what that means for her.
• Kittya Cullen: we see Korra actual deal, for more than one episode, with how she's effected by these things, and to me that was different.
• Kittya Cullen: You actually get to see an avatar. And yes, Aang did deal with this too, but it's ... I don't know. It's just different for me. Deal with PTSD and depression and just all these changing things. It was interesting.
• Kittya Cullen: everyone has seen someone who they think is all-powerful and infallible, invulnerable to an extent, be ... I don't want to say broken, but be injured in a really drastic way and them not being able to do anything much to help with her recovery in concrete ways.
• Kittya Cullen: I think it's just existing personally as a marginalized person. The way that that storyline was handled in LOK, I think I wasn't quite comfortable with it, just the very idea of the movement disappearing because of one man's end. It seems so unrealistic because there was a real situation with inequality there. Because we see that the world has adapted to cater for benders, and we don't quite know non-benders are faring in that world, what kind of opportunities they're having. And based on the conflict that the show raised, it was clear that non-benders were in a position where they weren't having ends meet or they weren't getting the jobs that they hoped to get.
• Kittya Cullen: The universe raises really interesting conversations about inequality and power and change and so forth, but we kind of always see it from the position of the privileged. And I think that's my favorite thing about fandom and fan fiction, how fans sort of delve into all these areas in canon that either there wasn't time to explore or it didn't really seem to be important enough to explore, so things like inequality. When I write now, it's just always in the forefront, "How can I better represent experiences of people in the world," not just for myself, but for other people, what they're going through.
• Kittya Cullen: With gender roles in particular, I think it's fascinating that within the Avatar universe, we got to see all these really powerful girl and women characters who were, for the most part, respected, at least in later years. Because when we first meet the Avatar world, we know that for a fact Azula isn't ... Even though Azula has all this power, she's in this position where she could eventually have the throne, she isn't respected by her own father.
• Kittya Cullen: But even Katara in the beginning, it was kind of frowned upon for her to use waterbending beyond healing, and she goes on to become one of the greatest waterbenders the world has ever known. And we even get to see her have this really powerful but terrifying and concerning moments where she bloodbends someone who is, up until that point, we assume more powerful than her and more ruthless and so forth. So it was interesting to see all these female characters get to be complex and powerful and not have that held against them, unless you count Azula and how that ended for her.
• Kittya Cullen: But it was nice to see the LOK universe expand upon that and show us that things had changed in some ways. For one, we have Korra, who is the avatar, and she is this figure who is not the conventional or gender-conforming version of femininity that we're accustomed to. She's allowed to be athletic and walk around in pants without concerns about what others are thinking. Even though she does think about her gender presentation, it comes from a place that's not her considering herself inadequate, but because she saw other people I guess idolized in this particular form of femininity being expressed, so we see Korra and we see Lin and we see Sue and Kuvira, and they're all these women who either have power or they're dealing with their own traumas or they have complex relationships with their mothers, and they have complex relationships with their children as well, if they do have children, and so forth. I don't know. It was an example of how that world had changed or was changing possibly for the better.
• Kittya Cullen: And I'm like, "In what world am I supposed to view this as platonic? I mean, I know I was raised in a pretty fundamentalist Christian kind of environment, but I think I'm seeing here things that I should not be seeing between two [inaudible 00:58:53] people." So that's when I became a believer. And the longer I watched the show, the more it seemed to grow.
• Kittya Cullen: And you could tell, from a fandom perspective, some people who are cishet won't be able to speak to this, but you could tell that the writer's room was split in how they were portraying the characters because I think they got uncomfortable with how fandom was growing so rapidly and intensely around these two characters, even to the point where they used the black character as a wedge between them. So, just so many layers of so many awful things happening in that show.
• Kittya Cullen: But we basically had these two actors leaning into it because they didn't have a problem with it, but we see that some of the writers were uncomfortable, or I guess maybe the network or the showrunners were uncomfortable where the story was heading. And so they moved away from what was organically developing to the extent where they took two characters who never said more than a single word to each other, and one of these characters actively disliked the other character, and said, "Hey, we're going to have these two put together. And we are going to have your favorite superhero be shipped with a slave owner. So, yay, have fun with that."
• Kittya Cullen: So when you start off with a show that has ... It's basically girl-next-door, blonde, blue-eyed, sort of hyper-feminine in some ways but also gender non-conforming in other ways super hero dating a black man, or having that black man being put as a love interest when that's usually not the case, especially for that kind of media. And then you break them apart in the second season and conveniently replace him with a white man who just actually makes the character feel terrible and derails her show, and starts to get almost as much screen time as she does even though he's not really an integral part of the show. Just so much went wrong so fast. He was so bad.
• Valk: I just find their relationship in canon to be so interesting because it was one of the first pairings, I should add the first male-female pairing, the first hetero pairing that I felt emotionally invested in to a point where I was surprised.
• Valk: Brienne was what a lot of these men might be experiencing in that they might just be funneled through to these places that they don't actually feel, you know like they've done all the checklists and stuff, but you still won't be happy doing it. And I think that reflected a lot of her issues with not being able to fulfill the role that she was supposed to play with her father with being the heir, giving him a son and all these things. And there might be always that wonder in the back of her head, like what would have happened if I'd gone down that path and Jaime is the answer to it and he's miserable
• Valk: even in the context of like the canon, he always had a very strange affinity, but like an affinity for femininity. Weirdly enough, like he loved his mother, he loved Cersei, but he was always very partial to seeing things from their point of view.
• Valk: I wanted to kind of recreate the feelings that I had when I was reading Jaime and Brienne in their notorious bath house scene. Where this was this very raw moment where Jaime opened up and did his monologue about a knight's duty and how it was, pardon my language, full of shit.
• Valk: as like a side note, I think the show really undercut Jaime and Brienne's relationship as well at the end. One of the big ones is like Jaime and Brienne kissed each other and Jaime was suddenly taller than her. I was like, "Boy is a head shorter than her."
• Valk: That was part of the appeal was that Jaime had this big, beautiful wife that was taller than him and he's like, "Look at my beautiful wife. Isn't she huge, ask him, and wonderful?" That was part of what made it so enjoyable
• Valk: I think that bit of the ending, was actually the one I had the least amount of problems with, out of all of it because its part of the King's guard. This was like an ideal kind of took Jaime's spot in like the head.
• Valk: I mean, personally, I think the whole bit where he leaves and comes back is bullshit. Like, I'm sorry, I can't even mince words with that
• Valk: That would have been a good way to end it, not, we're going to hug each other and we're going to let some rocks fall.
• WriteGirl: I knew everything that was going to happen until about Season Four. And was perfectly happy with it, really wasn't paying any attention.
• WriteGirl: So, right when about Season Seven hit, I started getting a little bit upset about the writing in Game of Thrones. And then by the time Season Eight hit, I was just like, "Oh no. No, no, no, no, no. I can't deal with this." I got a bit more involved with writing, because my brain was like, "No, this isn't how it should go. We need to redo all this whole thing." It really started picking up in Season Seven. That was the first time I wrote a Game of Thrones fanfiction. And I believe that was my other OtherWhen series, the first one.
• WriteGirl: I chose Sansa in particular, and I think you're talking about the Petyr Baelish one, because I felt she suffered a little bit of character assassination.
• WriteGirl: So seeing that, and kind of juxtaposing it against the Sansa we were getting in the show was a little irksome.
• WriteGirl: I literally got up off the couch and walked away when she got beheaded. I was very upset. It pissed me off that you have a character like Missandei who is very strong, who survives slavery, got out of her chains, became this person who was herself, and then how did she die? She dies in chains, basically in a pissing contest between two white women. That was very, very frustrating and irritating to me.
• WriteGirl: That seemed completely out of character for me. The whole scene was out of character for me.
• WriteGirl: So, how do I give her, I hate to say the word, but some of her dignity back? If she has to die, I thought it really should be on her terms. That was kind of the motivation for that.
• WriteGirl: I adore the Dorne storyline in the books, and they completely butchered it in the show. So, that's why I was like, no Dorne's way smarter than this. So yes, he's going to be the Dorne that you get in the books.
• WriteGirl: Which was a twist I desperately wanted to happen in the show that didn't happen, and I was a little upset about that
• WriteGirl: Missandei deserved better, as you've already talked about. She did. So did Grey Worm. I can't believe they took that pairing from me. I thought that if any pairing would last, that one would. And then, [inaudible 00:24:23].
• WriteGirl: I wanted her to have a little bit more agency. It seemed like from the time we see her in the Baelish dress, with the feathers on it, which she's actually taking on a mockingbird, that that was a glimpse of a darker Sansa, a more politically savvy Sansa, a more adult Sansa. And then, for whatever reason, they backed off of it. And then the next thing we see her, she's just kind of sitting there asking questions, looking dull. And that was a little irritating to me. So I wanted her to get a little more agency, especially when she found out who she was supposed to be meeting. I didn't see Sansa ever agreeing to that.
• WriteGirl: I just couldn't see a Sansa, even one who was beaten down, agreeing to that. She's still a Stark. She still has her pride. So, I thought of, okay, so what would Sansa do in this situation?
• WriteGirl: I actually liked Sandor Clegane, Sansa Stark as a pairing, whether it's through platonic, whether it's romantic, et cetera. It was just one of those good ones. I thought they had good scene chemistry together. I always thought he kind of saw her, especially in the beginning as, he called her a little bird. Like, "I see that your parents never prepared you for this. Your best safe kept in a cage locked away, and you can just sing to people." I always liked that about him.
• WriteGirl: Yeah, there's one scene where he kind of corners her, and it's a lot of Chester the Molester, a bit. It's a little stalker-y.

Description

Definition: When fan authors compliment the canonical material, including its writing, ideologies, identity representation, and more.

Number of Codes: 29

Analysis: All six of the fan authors share characters, moments, or identity representation that made them fall in love with and feel connected to the shows. These compliments are not necessarily about what the show did technically well, but how each fan developed an emotional investment with the show.

For fans of both TLOK and GOT, each author expresses excitement for different forms of representation that resist normative notions of gender and sexuality. For example, the final episode of TLOK, when Korra/Asami’s romantic relationship—and thus bisexuality— is confirmed canon, resonates with Aria and Gillywulf. Gillywulf describes elation, saying, “But it was incredible. I couldn't believe it. I was like, ‘This is happening, right?’ Yeah. I was like, ‘Jesus.’” Gillywulf’s excitement in this final episode appears across her and the other TLOK fans’ interviews. In both TLOK and GOT, authors point to the canon resisting gender norms as another reason they love the shows. Several authors describe how different characters oppose gender stereotypes. For instance, from the GOT authors, Dialux cites she was originally drawn to the show because she heard it portrayed “strong women.”

Valk interprets Jaime and Brienne as characters who do not conform to gender norms, saying Jaime has an “affinity for feminity.” Valk also points to this non-conformity as one of the reasons they ship them: “That was part of the appeal was that Jaime had this big, beautiful wife that was taller than him and he's like, "Look at my beautiful wife. Isn't she huge..and wonderful?” Valk specifically points to Brienne’s size in comparison to Jaime’s as one of the reasons Valk loves their characters. As for TLOK, Kittya argues that pretty much every woman from both TLOK and Avatar: The Last Airbender is well-developed and strong. Korra particularly, as Kittya describes, “is not the conventional or gender-conforming version of femininity that we're accustomed to.” Korra is muscular, physically powerful, can be sarcastic, and has a firey temper. Yet, the show's writers allow her to be vulnerable and make mistakes.

The fan authors’ love and compliments for the canon is often tied to characters, specifically how each author interprets characters’ representations as resisting normativity.

Quotes

• Aria: I chose Korra and Asami because they're main characters, I like writing main characters. I liked the love story, it was kind of short in the text, but I liked it. Or not short, but it felt more like a nod than a full
• Aria: This is the moment when this becomes one of the early queer relationships in cartoons, a relatively good one. There's nothing particularly problematic about it, it's limited, but it's good.
• Aria: I think the redo of the relationship, the exploration is limited, is kind of bad. But I also think that the way that we end somewhere where it's like, they just want to be married, or at the end of their first date, we did see them agree, yeah I want to do this. Yeah, I want to have this, or I like this, it's healthy. I love that! I just see that as a lot of things for writers to engage with.[inaudible 00:47:08] what are other ways we can imagine it?
• Dialux: Yeah, I mean, I think when I was first getting into the fandom, one of my friends basically told me that the women in this are really strong. And it's true to a great extent. But I think what's even more fascinating to me, is how a lot of them tend to show that strength in so many different ways. Like, you have Sansa, who is conventionally pretty, but she also has, on an internal level, she just kind of lives with whatever society expects of her. Whereas, Brienne is not conventionally pretty, so she has to find another way of gaining power in her world. And then you have people like Margaery Tyrell and Cersei Lannister,
• Dialux: I think it's just a relief to see how... Because to me, it's almost like a moment of such growth, is what I felt, when I felt Sansa. Because when you're young, [inaudible 01:20:56]. You want the perfect marriage, and the perfect husband, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But that doesn't mean that you'll necessarily get it. And to me, at least, growing up is balancing those childhood desires, and those childhood needs with whatever you learn as you grow up. And Sansa, despite the fact that as a young child she wanted all of that, in the end she got power, and the ability to make sure that nobody hurt her.
• Dialux: And I think there are other ways that the show actually showed that with the sexual liberation for women, and the feminist liberation for Arya and everything.
• GillyWulf: "Okay, well, let's just do Korra next," because I was pretty sure that came out. So, we ended up watching that. And then, once we built a routine out of, "Okay, we're both back from class, we're watching this episode now," and it sort of became part of our schedule that, once we both got back from that class, we'd watch an episode. It was a good way to become emotionally invested in it.
• GillyWulf: I was very much endeared by the way Korra was super honest, and her character in general, and how she was just trying her best, and just the art style and everything about her character design I loved, and her personality.
• GillyWulf: That was Christmas break, but my grandma was staying over for the weekend, so I had to watch it silently at like midnight, and freak out quietly. As soon as Asami showed up on the screen, I must have lost it. But it was incredible. I couldn't believe it. I was like, "This is happening, right?" Yeah. I was like, "Jesus."
• GillyWulf: I loved that. Even if, and I think once Korra sort of got over herself, she started to feel that way about Asami, maybe. It's because of the whole rivalry thing. Initially, it was definitely harder to see that, but I liked that they weren't immediate, for the most part.
• GillyWulf: So, we spend four seasons developing Korra and Asami's relationship from maybe rivals, to best friends, to they're lovers, the relationship that they end on. And it's super great to see that fleshed out
• GillyWulf: So, to see this cartoon suddenly become canon, against a network that had super tried to, god, just tear it apart, it was invigorating, to say the least. Yeah. That's why I have to imagine people took off with it.
• GillyWulf: And it was also good that nobody in that show was white, by definition. When you look at where those communities are meant to be, have drawn inspiration from, nobody in that is white, so it's even more exciting, and it's great, and we need more of that, frankly.
• Kittya Cullen: At the time that the show was airing, it was kind of taboo for divorcees who were women to get remarried, and it was rare for a widower to be portrayed as someone who was intensely devoted to the wife that he had lost, so it was a combination of really interesting things.
• Kittya Cullen: I was on Twitter casually scrolling through something, and someone from back home happened to mention how the finale of the show had gone. Given my own cultural background and the cultural background of the world in general, I was pretty surprised about that, so I started consuming fics and reading the show ... Sorry, not reading the show, but watching the show to get through it to see ... If I could see where it was going and if I would be as surprised as everyone else had been. So when I got through the show, I was surprised, and I was really happy about how it had gone. I felt a need to contribute to the fandom in some way.
• Kittya Cullen: With the case of Asami and her father, I think it just came back to how they wrote the final book for the series. I found it fascinating that Asami had reached out to her father after what had happened.
• Kittya Cullen: It was sort of ... To me, it was groundbreaking in how they handled that because we get to see Korra, who is this all-powerful person, come to grips with what she might be like after having this really terrible thing happen to her and want sort of responsibilities she once had, and how it's still there, but she has all these other things she now has to deal with as well, like her mental health and her physical recovery and so forth.
• Kittya Cullen: we see Korra actual deal, for more than one episode, with how she's effected by these things, and to me that was different.
• Kittya Cullen: With gender roles in particular, I think it's fascinating that within the Avatar universe, we got to see all these really powerful girl and women characters who were, for the most part, respected, at least in later years. Because when we first meet the Avatar world, we know that for a fact Azula isn't ... Even though Azula has all this power, she's in this position where she could eventually have the throne, she isn't respected by her own father.
• Kittya Cullen: But even Katara in the beginning, it was kind of frowned upon for her to use waterbending beyond healing, and she goes on to become one of the greatest waterbenders the world has ever known. And we even get to see her have this really powerful but terrifying and concerning moments where she bloodbends someone who is, up until that point, we assume more powerful than her and more ruthless and so forth. So it was interesting to see all these female characters get to be complex and powerful and not have that held against them, unless you count Azula and how that ended for her.
• Kittya Cullen: But it was nice to see the LOK universe expand upon that and show us that things had changed in some ways. For one, we have Korra, who is the avatar, and she is this figure who is not the conventional or gender-conforming version of femininity that we're accustomed to. She's allowed to be athletic and walk around in pants without concerns about what others are thinking. Even though she does think about her gender presentation, it comes from a place that's not her considering herself inadequate, but because she saw other people I guess idolized in this particular form of femininity being expressed, so we see Korra and we see Lin and we see Sue and Kuvira, and they're all these women who either have power or they're dealing with their own traumas or they have complex relationships with their mothers, and they have complex relationships with their children as well, if they do have children, and so forth. I don't know. It was an example of how that world had changed or was changing possibly for the better.
• Valk: I just find their relationship in canon to be so interesting because it was one of the first pairings, I should add the first male-female pairing, the first hetero pairing that I felt emotionally invested in to a point where I was surprised.
• Valk: Brienne was what a lot of these men might be experiencing in that they might just be funneled through to these places that they don't actually feel, you know like they've done all the checklists and stuff, but you still won't be happy doing it. And I think that reflected a lot of her issues with not being able to fulfill the role that she was supposed to play with her father with being the heir, giving him a son and all these things. And there might be always that wonder in the back of her head, like what would have happened if I'd gone down that path and Jaime is the answer to it and he's miserable
• Valk: even in the context of like the canon, he always had a very strange affinity, but like an affinity for femininity. Weirdly enough, like he loved his mother, he loved Cersei, but he was always very partial to seeing things from their point of view.
• Valk: I wanted to kind of recreate the feelings that I had when I was reading Jaime and Brienne in their notorious bath house scene. Where this was this very raw moment where Jaime opened up and did his monologue about a knight's duty and how it was, pardon my language, full of shit.
• Valk: That was part of the appeal was that Jaime had this big, beautiful wife that was taller than him and he's like, "Look at my beautiful wife. Isn't she huge, ask him, and wonderful?" That was part of what made it so enjoyable
• Valk: I think that bit of the ending, was actually the one I had the least amount of problems with, out of all of it because its part of the King's guard. This was like an ideal kind of took Jaime's spot in like the head.
• WriteGirl: I knew everything that was going to happen until about Season Four. And was perfectly happy with it, really wasn't paying any attention.
• WriteGirl: I actually liked Sandor Clegane, Sansa Stark as a pairing, whether it's through platonic, whether it's romantic, et cetera. It was just one of those good ones. I thought they had good scene chemistry together. I always thought he kind of saw her, especially in the beginning as, he called her a little bird. Like, "I see that your parents never prepared you for this. Your best safe kept in a cage locked away, and you can just sing to people." I always liked that about him.

Description

Definition: When fan authors describes how they relate or do not relate to texts.

Number of Codes: 18

Analysis: As both the canon compliment and the canon critique quotes show, fan authors’ relation to canon materials is usually tied to how their lived experiences are or are not represented in a text. Aria explicitly says, “Oh, I love this, I love feeling represented,” as part of her motivation for writing a TLOK fanfic, specifically in reference to Korra and Asami’s confirmed relationship and bisexuality. Gillywulf builds off Aria’s point, citing the TLOK fan community and writing fanfic as a way to explore different coming out situations. She says “so, I had decided to come out, and these became sort of two parallels of, ‘It could be this, or it could be that.’” Through her 400-chapter-long fanfiction and other ways of interacting with TLOK fandom, she prepared herself to come out, hoping her story would be one of acceptance.

As Gillywulf and Aria describe relating to the queer representation in TLOK, Dialux and Kittya point to how representations of their cultures drew them into specific texts. Dialux and Kittya both talk about texts different from GOT and TLOK, but they still brought up their cultural contexts. Dialux decided to write a fanfic about GOT characters in the Jodhaa Akbar universe, a film about historical India. She mentions she was drawn to the film because, “it was a Desi film,” and she is Desi, but also she wanted to explore the cultural and religious tensions that the film explores, similar tensions explored in GOT. Kittya, when telling her fan story, shares how she grew up in Guyana, where she engaged with Indian cultural content. When she moved to the US, she found herself relying on online fandoms to translate Indian television shows. As she continued to read and engage with texts, she found herself drawn to texts “where people were actually talking about foods that I would eat or where people were living in communities like mine, where people spoke that way that I spoke, et cetera.” She also, though, points to realizing an absence of representation in US culture, which she describes as “insidious.”

The moments when fans describe relating correlate with a lack of normalized representation of their culture, sexuality, and other aspects of their identity. When aspects of fans’ lived experiences and identities are often mis- or not represented in popular culture, fans develop deeper connections with texts that do represent them.

Quotes

• Aria: But I also struggled because I didn't know how to write about my own trauma, and so I tried to write about trauma in ways that other people were experiencing it. And already the text engaged with that, and those weren't really authentic to me. They weren't things I was writing about at the time.
• Aria: There are things I don't like about it, but I like it as a little bit of text. It's there in the text, it was one of those things that was like, "Oh, I love this, I love feeling represented." So I wrote that.
• Aria: I think of a place I was there, and this was particularly...I was engaging with political institutions at the time that were much, much bigger than me, particularly family institutions. My family was pretty chill, but running a queer resource center at community college is like, getting that [inaudible 00:24:12]. You would deal with a bunch of people that were writing about the problems for being gay, or feeling like they can't talk about it, or being the only source of information, of being part of an institution that was the only source of information.
• Dialux: So then I realized that Jodhaa Akbar, which is definitely a Desi film, had a wonderful set of characters that was definitely angsty, but had a wonderfully happy ending. And allowed me to write about something that was kind of dear to my heart as well. Because it was a Desi film. It was one representation in a way, but not necessarily. I think it was just about freeing those religious tensions, and those cultural tensions, and actually attempting to bridge them. Because you have to. Because it's not just about love, or it's not just about anything. It's about your pride, it's about your family's livelihood. All of those kind of come together, you have to do it. You don't want to, but, somehow, you have to. I think it's that gritting of your teeth, and getting on with life that kind of really draws me in.
• Dialux: I mean that I just don't think I relate to him at the same extent that I relate to Sansa.
• GillyWulf: And from those three, you can see that they have very female-centered stories. And then, at least all three are those are canonically queer characters, which are things that now get me really excited and make me want to go, "Okay, well, I want to dive into that. I want to see how their stories could be different," or, "I just really want to see them in this situation," so I try and write it when I can.
• GillyWulf: And then, just seeing the way her relationship sort of evolved with Asami over time, especially once you get into the third season, was like, "Okay, I'm into this. Whether or not they're going for it, I see it." So, it was like, "All right. I and a lot of the people in the fandom seem to agree for some reason, so I'm just going to go there and enjoy that while I'm doing it.
• GillyWulf: So, at the same time, it was also sort of an exploration for me in that I've known I was gay, probably since kindergarten, but I sort of just put it off, put it off, and it wasn't until I started getting into Korrasami that I was like, "Okay, well, I'm meeting a community where this is accepted and this is encouraged even." So, I had decided to come out, and these became sort of two parallels of, "It could be this, or it could be that." Of like, "What is the best case? What is the worst case for maybe how my parents will react?" Thankfully, it leaned more towards Korra's parents than Asami, but it did sort of dip into that a little bit.
• GillyWulf: Well, obviously, personal preference aside, I think it was the most fleshed out of Korra's personal relationships with any of the other possible love interests.
• Kittya Cullen: That was an Indian television show that I was watching, and I happened to be looking for ways to continue to consume the show because I'd been watching it back home, but back home I had English subtitles and so on.
• Kittya Cullen: And because I grew up in a country where we have a large Indo-Guyanese population, so Indian content was part of our regular air waves and the music and sound that we listened, so it shaped what I was interested in.
• Kittya Cullen: But I think with Twilight it was just that phase where you finally find a story that speaks to you, even if you kind of hate it when you look back at it when you're older. But at the time, how Bella was written both as someone who was insular and chooses to form or has a small community and so forth and deals with depression or whatever it is, it just seemed to be something that I could relate to. And so I was both interested in that, and I guess in the power fantasy that she was written to come in to. Usually, at least for me at the time, it wasn't really common to see those characters have that kind of a glow-up, you can say.
• Kittya Cullen: I think it was more that it was very books for me because I grew up in the Caribbean ... Well, on South America but as socially, politically part of the Caribbean, so most of the content that we were consuming was either shows from the US or whatever, maybe European shows might have filtered through, and that also was the case for the books that we were reading. And while it was the case within school for us to consume Caribbean literature, it was harder to read Caribbean literature as a person on my own.
• Kittya Cullen: So it was just discovering a collection of books in my own home from my aunt and my mother and so on, their teachers. And my aunt in particular, she teaches English, and so they had old texts that I found and started reading them. And that's when I began to realize that the books that I had been reading were excluding me. It was something that you sort of knew but you didn't quite know. I guess it comes back to not knowing what you're missing until you finally have it. So when I first read texts were people were actually talking about foods that I would eat or where people were living in communities like mine, where people spoke that way that I spoke, et cetera. Because even though I speak, let's say, like this, how I speak with my family or how I speak with my friends from back home, it's a little different even though ... So, my particular country, we speak English, but it's a particular kind of English. So just seeing that in text and then realizing that the fantasies and so on that I was consuming were ... I don't know, it had these strange things that just didn't quite compute with where I was living. That's where it really clicked for me. And from that point onward, I think that's where I began to see it in everything else. The biggest shift didn't really come until I moved to the US, because back home I was part of the majority, so even though it's absent, you were still seeing yourself in other ways, whether that's being who was teaching you or who was in the news as a politician, et cetera. But here it was a completely different ballgame, so it felt more insidious
• Kittya Cullen: I don't know, it just ... There may have been other works of fiction that never really covered that, but for me in particular that was when Korra just seemed more human.
• Kittya Cullen: You actually get to see an avatar. And yes, Aang did deal with this too, but it's ... I don't know. It's just different for me. Deal with PTSD and depression and just all these changing things. It was interesting.
• Kittya Cullen: everyone has seen someone who they think is all-powerful and infallible, invulnerable to an extent, be ... I don't want to say broken, but be injured in a really drastic way and them not being able to do anything much to help with her recovery in concrete ways.
• Kittya Cullen: And I'm like, "In what world am I supposed to view this as platonic? I mean, I know I was raised in a pretty fundamentalist Christian kind of environment, but I think I'm seeing here things that I should not be seeing between two [inaudible 00:58:53] people." So that's when I became a believer. And the longer I watched the show, the more it seemed to grow.

Description

Definition: When fan authors critique the canonical text, including critiquing the writing, ideologies, identity representation (or lack thereof), and more.

Number of Codes: 34

Analysis: The fan authors’ critiques of the canon often point at the actual writing and character arcs portrayed on the show, demonstrating that each author has their own individual interpretations of the show. Some of their interpretations of the show revolve around the “believability” of characters’ experience; fan authors speak to either their own lived experiences or the lived experiences of people within their communities. Other authors point out that the television show writers’ choices reinscribe harmful dominant ideologies with their writing choices. This critique resonates with the inability for some writers to capture particular lived experiences.

Writegirl and Valk, for example, both critique the GOT’s writers’ choices in season 8. Valk argues that Jaime and Brienne’s love scene contradicts previous aesthetics of their relationship. Specifically, they point to how Brienne is depicted as smaller than Jaime when they kiss, even though Brienne is the taller character. Valk notices that the writers’ and directors’ choices to make Brienne smaller than Jaime reinscribes a heteronormative notion of gender roles — Brienne, as the woman, must be smaller than Jaime, the man. Writegirl also critiques the GOT’s writers’ treatment of Missandei, arguing that their choice for Missandei to “die in chains, basically in a pissing contest between two White women” erases her liberatory narrative arc that her character followed from earlier seasons.

TLOK fanfiction authors also critique the writers’ choices. Aria points to how Korra survives through a traumatic injury and battle, which leads her to developed post-traumatic stress disorder. In the show, Korra lives with PTSD for quite some time, but then slowly recovers from it. Aria expresses that she wished the show better represented how people living with PTSD may not recover and must “come to live with,” rather than portraying it as something that can be fixed. Kittya Cullen has a similar critique that the show brushes past mental health; she points to a moment in season 1 that she interprets as Korra contemplating dying from suicide. Korra’s contemplation quickly ends as the show ends. Kittya wishes that the writers let Korra “dwell in the true feeling of that moment” instead of immediately resolving this storyline. Both Kittya and Aria’s critiques points to how the canon misrepresented the lived experiences of people living with disabilities, especially PTSD.

Quotes

• Aria: Some of the pieces I wrote just no longer work as Homestuck pieces because the characters have been changed, and I was like, "I can't really write this story about two women in love because one of them isn't a woman anymore, that story doesn't work as a piece."
• Aria: For me, this text begins both as like, I was reading a lot about Stonewall and the context around Stonewall, and also I was reading a piece about PTSD, and it was just very surface, very basic understanding of trauma and PTSD in particular, like something you recover from, in a way that I was not super comfortable with. And sort of the original text, not sure if you would agree. And so I wanted to talk about disability through the context of being something you come to live with, and come to integrate, and come to find becomes a part of you life, but also something you still struggle with, instead of just, I don't know, a lot of us have seen the story a lot like, you get better, and then you get better and you win. And then one day it doesn't bother you.
• Aria: But I also struggled because I didn't know how to write about my own trauma, and so I tried to write about trauma in ways that other people were experiencing it. And already the text engaged with that, and those weren't really authentic to me. They weren't things I was writing about at the time.
• Aria: I chose the end of Season Three because it's the place where I felt like I was reading a... I felt like engaging with the original text, I was feeling like I wanted something different, I wanted a more deep and meaningful engagement with disability and trauma in this context. Because reading the original text is like, it's there for a while and then they're better? So it was almost the opposite feeling, what do I think this looks like? And so that's why I chose that.
• Dialux: I think if you look at A Song of Ice and Fire, technically, more than Game of Thrones, you actually get more of a cultural tension due to just the difference between the North and the South. And all of that. And I do think that George R. R. Martin has kind of perpetuated the idea, simply because he is English. So, the whole idea that in England, where Northerners are tougher and everything than Southerners. And I don't know anything more about it. But I think that's kind of one of the underlying and unconscious biases within the framework of the canon.
• Dialux: I mean, obviously, Season Eight was terrible. That was a given. And the ending did not do anyone any favors.
• Dialux: And second of all, the actual TV show was not doing itself any favors.
• Dialux: I actually do remember how unhappy people were that Sansa didn't end with a love interest at the end of Season Eight.
• Dialux: And, obviously, there's a ton of other problems. How [inaudible 01:21:42] Daenerys, and Cersei, and Jaime. And a number of other characters.
• Dialux: And I could understand why people felt unhappy about it. But at the same time, I think you're beating on the wrong bush here. There's a lot of other problems to deal with within this fandom. And within this canon that we don't particularly need as much as you're putting into it.
• GillyWulf: I started in college and I had watched most of Avatar, but I don't think I ever quite finished it. And I think this was just before season three came out, I want to say. I'm not totally 100% on that. But my roommate was very much into that, very much in love with Avatar, so she was appalled that I don't think I'd ever finished Avatar, and made me watch that.
• GillyWulf: Yeah. And I always thought her relationship with Mako felt super forced, and then, I didn't like that he cheated on both of them with each other. It was like, "Jeez. No, no. He should not be in a relationship with either of them after this." Yeah. I always felt like maybe Mako should take five steps back, and let's just focus on these two.
• Kittya Cullen: I think in the first two books, even though Korra does have moments of vulnerability, I guess her experiences are fantastical in a sense.
• Kittya Cullen: Korra gets to her lowest point. The implication is that she's about to jump off a cliff. But we don't really get to dwell in the true feeling of that moment, the have to fix it immediately because of the idea that the show may never get to come back to this point, so we don't get to actually see what that means for her.
• Kittya Cullen: I think it's just existing personally as a marginalized person. The way that that storyline was handled in LOK, I think I wasn't quite comfortable with it, just the very idea of the movement disappearing because of one man's end. It seems so unrealistic because there was a real situation with inequality there. Because we see that the world has adapted to cater for benders, and we don't quite know non-benders are faring in that world, what kind of opportunities they're having. And based on the conflict that the show raised, it was clear that non-benders were in a position where they weren't having ends meet or they weren't getting the jobs that they hoped to get.
• Kittya Cullen: The universe raises really interesting conversations about inequality and power and change and so forth, but we kind of always see it from the position of the privileged. And I think that's my favorite thing about fandom and fan fiction, how fans sort of delve into all these areas in canon that either there wasn't time to explore or it didn't really seem to be important enough to explore, so things like inequality. When I write now, it's just always in the forefront, "How can I better represent experiences of people in the world," not just for myself, but for other people, what they're going through.
• Kittya Cullen: And you could tell, from a fandom perspective, some people who are cishet won't be able to speak to this, but you could tell that the writer's room was split in how they were portraying the characters because I think they got uncomfortable with how fandom was growing so rapidly and intensely around these two characters, even to the point where they used the black character as a wedge between them. So, just so many layers of so many awful things happening in that show.
• Kittya Cullen: But we basically had these two actors leaning into it because they didn't have a problem with it, but we see that some of the writers were uncomfortable, or I guess maybe the network or the showrunners were uncomfortable where the story was heading. And so they moved away from what was organically developing to the extent where they took two characters who never said more than a single word to each other, and one of these characters actively disliked the other character, and said, "Hey, we're going to have these two put together. And we are going to have your favorite superhero be shipped with a slave owner. So, yay, have fun with that."
• Kittya Cullen: So when you start off with a show that has ... It's basically girl-next-door, blonde, blue-eyed, sort of hyper-feminine in some ways but also gender non-conforming in other ways super hero dating a black man, or having that black man being put as a love interest when that's usually not the case, especially for that kind of media. And then you break them apart in the second season and conveniently replace him with a white man who just actually makes the character feel terrible and derails her show, and starts to get almost as much screen time as she does even though he's not really an integral part of the show. Just so much went wrong so fast. He was so bad.
• Valk: as like a side note, I think the show really undercut Jaime and Brienne's relationship as well at the end. One of the big ones is like Jaime and Brienne kissed each other and Jaime was suddenly taller than her. I was like, "Boy is a head shorter than her."
• Valk: I mean, personally, I think the whole bit where he leaves and comes back is bullshit. Like, I'm sorry, I can't even mince words with that
• Valk: That would have been a good way to end it, not, we're going to hug each other and we're going to let some rocks fall.
• WriteGirl: So, right when about Season Seven hit, I started getting a little bit upset about the writing in Game of Thrones. And then by the time Season Eight hit, I was just like, "Oh no. No, no, no, no, no. I can't deal with this." I got a bit more involved with writing, because my brain was like, "No, this isn't how it should go. We need to redo all this whole thing." It really started picking up in Season Seven. That was the first time I wrote a Game of Thrones fanfiction. And I believe that was my other OtherWhen series, the first one.
• WriteGirl: I chose Sansa in particular, and I think you're talking about the Petyr Baelish one, because I felt she suffered a little bit of character assassination.
• WriteGirl: So seeing that, and kind of juxtaposing it against the Sansa we were getting in the show was a little irksome.
• WriteGirl: I literally got up off the couch and walked away when she got beheaded. I was very upset. It pissed me off that you have a character like Missandei who is very strong, who survives slavery, got out of her chains, became this person who was herself, and then how did she die? She dies in chains, basically in a pissing contest between two white women. That was very, very frustrating and irritating to me.
• WriteGirl: That seemed completely out of character for me. The whole scene was out of character for me.
• WriteGirl: So, how do I give her, I hate to say the word, but some of her dignity back? If she has to die, I thought it really should be on her terms. That was kind of the motivation for that.
• WriteGirl: I adore the Dorne storyline in the books, and they completely butchered it in the show. So, that's why I was like, no Dorne's way smarter than this. So yes, he's going to be the Dorne that you get in the books.
• WriteGirl: Which was a twist I desperately wanted to happen in the show that didn't happen, and I was a little upset about that
• WriteGirl: Missandei deserved better, as you've already talked about. She did. So did Grey Worm. I can't believe they took that pairing from me. I thought that if any pairing would last, that one would. And then, [inaudible 00:24:23].
• WriteGirl: I wanted her to have a little bit more agency. It seemed like from the time we see her in the Baelish dress, with the feathers on it, which she's actually taking on a mockingbird, that that was a glimpse of a darker Sansa, a more politically savvy Sansa, a more adult Sansa. And then, for whatever reason, they backed off of it. And then the next thing we see her, she's just kind of sitting there asking questions, looking dull. And that was a little irritating to me. So I wanted her to get a little more agency, especially when she found out who she was supposed to be meeting. I didn't see Sansa ever agreeing to that.
• WriteGirl: I just couldn't see a Sansa, even one who was beaten down, agreeing to that. She's still a Stark. She still has her pride. So, I thought of, okay, so what would Sansa do in this situation?
• WriteGirl: Yeah, there's one scene where he kind of corners her, and it's a lot of Chester the Molester, a bit. It's a little stalker-y.

Description

Definition: LGBTA+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, asexual) or any queer representation in fan communities, fanfiction, and the canonical materials.

Number of Codes: 53

Quotes

• Aria: "I can't really write this story about two women in love because one of them isn't a woman anymore, that story doesn't work as a piece."
• Aria: For me, this text begins both as like, I was reading a lot about Stonewall and the context around Stonewall,
• Aria: It had two epic story arcs that I didn't know how to integrate, both this love story about disability, and it was this story about queer politics, and I could not make those two pieces meld at the time.
• Aria: it was one of those things that was like, "Oh, I love this, I love feeling represented."
• Aria: And so I was, for me the most natural thing to write about is to write about... Not just homophobia, although this was a story about homophobia, not just homophobia, but this was a story about queerness and politics. And because this was the thing that was radicalizing me
• Aria: Asami plays that role, being a person to whom Korra wants to relate, is thrilled to relate, is not scared, or she is a little bit scared to relate, but is she scared to relate in the way that she's scared to relate to other people.
• Aria: I imagine Asami as having a relatively normal, relatively healthy understanding of the world in a way, having felt like she, not just knowing that a woman can love another woman, because I guess almost every person in this world knows. This is nothing like, Korra is particularly going to have a hard time because of that institution itself.
• Aria: This is the moment when this becomes one of the early queer relationships in cartoons, a relatively good one. There's nothing particularly problematic about it, it's limited, but it's good.
• Aria: And there's a degree to which it a queer reading, there's this political tendency to look at fiction and say, "I am going to tell the story you didn't."
• Aria: Okay, my first guess would be that women who love women will write about women who love women, want to tell stories that have happy endings. I think in a lot of the stories we see in literature are of our destruction as a moral point, or the echoes of authority. That doesn't mean that all of the stories that we see that are echoes of stories are intended as seeing those moral and political tellings, they're just, "That's what our culture tells us." A lesbian love story, so retelling... If women who love women retell stories of women who love women, they're going to tell a lot of stories that are about being happy, at least in my opinion.
• Aria: I think that people writing about suffering and happiness, a lot of things happen in love stories in general, particularly in WlW and MlM stuff.
• Aria: I was laughing at the bottom set for heiress in the middle column, "a-asami" there.
• Dialux: It's very interesting to me, because I think if you look at any other major fandom, you would probably get male male slash at a much higher rate than you're getting here.
• GillyWulf: at least all three are those are canonically queer characters, which are things that now get me really excited and make me want to go,
• GillyWulf: And maybe, I think, during that time, also, gay marriage was legalized, so it was just definitely different attitudes in that.
• GillyWulf: just seeing the way her relationship sort of evolved with Asami over time, especially once you get into the third season, was like, "Okay, I'm into this. Whether or not they're going for it, I see it." So, it was like, "All right. I and a lot of the people in the fandom seem to agree for some reason, so I'm just going to go there and enjoy that while I'm doing it.
• GillyWulf: let's just focus on these two.
• GillyWulf: As soon as Asami showed up on the screen, I must have lost it. But it was incredible. I couldn't believe it. I was like, "This is happening, right?" Yeah. I was like, "Jesus."
• GillyWulf: so I really like reading things that are just soft and maybe things aren't so terrible for them where they are, and just sort of getting lost in the idea of, they can just relax. They've been through so much, they deserve a little bit of something that's not going to hurt them, with somebody who definitely wants the same for them, who wants the same for themselves.
• GillyWulf: I liked that they weren't immediate, for the most part.
• GillyWulf: but they were so good together that I wanted to be able to sometimes just say they can be immediate,
• GillyWulf: So, at the same time, it was also sort of an exploration for me in that I've known I was gay, probably since kindergarten, but I sort of just put it off, put it off, and it wasn't until I started getting into Korrasami that I was like, "Okay, well, I'm meeting a community where this is accepted and this is encouraged even." So, I had decided to come out, and these became sort of two parallels of, "It could be this, or it could be that." Of like, "What is the best case? What is the worst case for maybe how my parents will react?" Thankfully, it leaned more towards Korra's parents than Asami, but it did sort of dip into that a little bit.
• GillyWulf: Well, again, it was the prompts, but it was also, I have personally been a little conflicted on gender for a while, and it's like my sexuality, it was something that I sort of just say, "Well, I'll get to that when I have the chance."
• GillyWulf: she's living the life that she wanted to live with a person she loves, doing something she loves. And even though it maybe needs to be a little bit more complicated, because of hormones or things like that, but it's not a huge obstacle, it's just a little something to add to the day.
• GillyWulf: And even though the trans experience is not necessarily one that I know for certain, there's plenty of people in the Korra community, in most online Internet communities, where there's plenty of those people and you see what they're going through and you see how their lives are
• GillyWulf: "I want a female ship. Going for it. I don't care whether or not they necessarily gel."
• GillyWulf: "That's a little gayer than it maybe should be," that sort of look. So, a lot of people took that and decided to go with it
• GillyWulf: or at least Korrasami fans, picking up on it and saying, "Okay, well, we don't know when season four is happening, so we're just going to kick off from there and this is what could happen."
• GillyWulf: This is canon, right? This is canon. That's what this looks like
• GillyWulf: especially since, up to that point, there really hadn't been a whole lot of huge representation for female ships.
• Kittya Cullen: Given my own cultural background and the cultural background of the world in general, I was pretty surprised about that, so I started consuming fics and reading the show
• Kittya Cullen: I wasn't quite sure yet how to engage with what was happening in ways that were visible to other people outside of the fan community, the slashfan community.
• Kittya Cullen: I just, spending so much time reading so much fanfiction from LOK and then branching out into Steven Universe and moving from Steven Universe into Supergirl, there was just more of an interaction with another side of fandom, the slash side of fandom. I don't know. I think you have to be integrated with others who are looking for more than what's presented, looking for more than what's norm, what's the acceptable way of telling a story of any kind of relationship really.
• Kittya Cullen: I was like, "Okay. This is pretty blatant. I don't see how anyone is not seeing this."
• Kittya Cullen: I mean, I know I was raised in a pretty fundamentalist Christian kind of environment, but I think I'm seeing here things that I should not be seeing between two [inaudible 00:58:53] people."
• Kittya Cullen: some people who are cishet won't be able to speak to this
• Kittya Cullen: two actors leaning into it because they didn't have a problem with it
• Valk: I'm non-binary, so a lot of my work as I got older started to deal more with gender as well as sexuality, also being bi-sexual.
• Valk: I was putting them on paper, using another character as the medium and expressing or exploring different ideas in an area where I felt I was kind of safe to do so.
• Valk: Mainly regarding the pairings that would show up, it would be mainly non-hetero pairings if that makes more sense than just saying a pairing because there would be some exploring of gender and what not with some characters. Or I would definitely be focusing on male-male or female-female relationships as well
• Valk: It was around the time when I was questioning whether or not I was non-binary
• Valk: I sort of delved into this idea trying to explore Jaime reacquainting himself with these things later on in life, but through a modern lens because I also wanted to be able to relate to it as well.
• Valk: also having her there to sort of be a foil and a supportive shoulder for Jaime who was going through a similar thing that maybe she went through as well.
• Valk: my own experiences, just exploring the LGBT community in my area
• Valk: I really wanted to address the gender issue and the gender questioning and write how the experiences hit the hardest for me when I was thinking about it.
• Valk: if you're very new into like trying to question your gender identity, especially being a man, you are at a higher risk of...I should say more so, if you present male than you are at a higher risk of facing violence or any kind of physical outlashing. Be it verbal or physical, but I think it's a lot of like, you learn to be very secretive. You'll act in ways to protect yourself, more than anything.
• Valk: trying to work through gender things. I wanted to also try and put someone in the position where they were questioning their gender and actually acting it out, changing their appearance in some way that would fit them better or explore better.
• Valk: I wanted to, I guess write a do-over for some of them about how I would have liked to have that experience with me, like having them knock again and come inside and ask questions and not just kind of leave it right there and not talk again. I wanted to sort of console myself a little bit through it as well as wanted to console Jaime
• Valk: I wanted to kind of write it as like a self-fulfilling fantasy as well as like how I would have pictured them actually going through it.
• Valk: knowing that I could go back and explore myself with fan fic if I needed to as well.
• Valk: I ship Sansa and Marjory and I tried to write fic for them
• Valk: Renly/Lauris, obviously.
• Valk: We just did that, like Brienne was actually fully a lesbian and that she hated people linking her with Jaime. And I'm like, "That's an interesting concept, not canon, but concept." She was fighting people on the dashboard about it with the sort of bigger, than someone who has like facts in front of them would argue. And I'm like, "I understand, but this is your interpretation." People who ship her with Jaime don't hate lesbians. Please, do not try and put this away.

Description

Definition: Homophobic or transphobic statements. Also, references to homophobia/transphobia in fan communities, fanfiction, and the canonical materials. Homophobia refers to discriminating against gay people (bi, lesbian, gay, pansexual), while transphobia refers to discriminating against transgender or gender-nonconforming folks.

Number of Codes: 17

Quotes

• Aria: if you read this you'll see homophobia. I can't not publish a story about homophobia.
• Aria: And so I was, for me the most natural thing to write about is to write about... Not just homophobia, although this was a story about homophobia, not just homophobia, but this was a story about queerness and politics. And because this was the thing that was radicalizing me
• Aria: And I remember being like, "Oh, these folks are not going to tell a child about queer sexuality." Particularly sexuality is a hard topic, you grow up in that kind of compound in a world where queer identities are looked down on, you're going to come away with this very strange view about that. And you might just be told nothing.
• Aria: My family was pretty chill, but running a queer resource center at community college is like, getting that [inaudible 00:24:12]. You would deal with a bunch of people that were writing about the problems for being gay, or feeling like they can't talk about it, or being the only source of information, of being part of an institution that was the only source of information.
• Aria: And I kind of wanted to say that queerness isn't criminalized in the Northern Water Tribe, or is not criminalized anymore.
• Aria: turns out the book I was reading at the time that claimed that knowing someone who was gay had a significant...Or not knowing someone who was gay, but engaging with someone who's gay on the topic of being gay helped significantly with changing someone's political views, or being willing to accept gay people. Turns out that one was actually wrong, like literally the person who put together that study cooked the book.
• Aria: was thinking about New York City around the times of the Stonewall Riots. This is where those politics come in. I was playing with, what does it mean... I was playing with, what's particularly violent political oppression? What are the limits of political oppression in a relatively liberal cosmopolitan society?
• GillyWulf: And maybe, I think, during that time, also, gay marriage was legalized, so it was just definitely different attitudes in that.
• GillyWulf: A lot of straight people I know will look at a lot of these relationships and say, "Oh, that came from nowhere."
• Kittya Cullen: I think it just seemed like the safer option at the time.
• Kittya Cullen: Korrasami just seems too weird, okay people.
• Kittya Cullen: I think they got uncomfortable with how fandom was growing so rapidly and intensely around these two characters
• Kittya Cullen: but we see that some of the writers were uncomfortable, or I guess maybe the network or the showrunners were uncomfortable where the story was heading.
• Valk: gender fluid and gender related things, it wasn't really there.
• Valk: I guess I was thinking about also how I had reacted or how my friends had reacted to when I came out to them.
• Valk: I don't know why it never picked up. Marjory just walked around the whole show just hitting on everyone. I was like why isn't there more of this? It's literally right here.
• Valk: Again, it's Renly/Lauris, Sansa/Marjory. Yeah, there's not a lot really on there.

Description

Definition: Heteronormative statements or references to heteronormativity in fan communities, fanfiction, and the canonical materials. Heteronormativity refers to the notion of heterosexuality and hetero-gender roles as the assumed norm, and how this assumption is embedded in everyday conversations, politics, and social interactions.

Number of Codes: 30

Quotes

• Aria: "I can't really write this story about two women in love because one of them isn't a woman anymore, that story doesn't work as a piece."
• Aria: "This is a gender thing going on." I don't buy that there's not homophobia in a world with gender in the like weird way that... In ways that still reflect our I think gender and homophobia [inaudible 00:21:13], the way that we have a sense of gender. Big, capital G Gender. And so I thought like, "What does it mean to have culture in the context of... What does it mean to be a cosmopolitan city where... There's both a degree of marginalization for like the Northern Water Tribe closing... Not so much that rules that are really intended to enforce gender norms are going to be there. And also to be like, "Yeah, there's probably a different understanding of gender in context," yeah.
• Aria: I'm really interested in the fact that Korra and Mako becomes more common after Korrasami happened.
• Aria: you're seeing is a movement from seeing the word girlfriend in a context of a text that's about a set of texts about relationships in a more heterosexual perspective, in a story about women. Because it looks to me that this is a story that, if you see jealous there, that looks like I'm looking at a piece that's from Korra's point of view. But then if I'm looking at boyfriend, I'm also thinking about Korra and Mako.
• Aria: just looking at masculinity as almost sexual in the middle there, an almost dangerous. Because a person's understanding of masculinity are sexual, like the second one is a kind of dangerous, like a kind of danger
• Aria: Versus like the sexuality in the second one, for feminine as well as that same panel, but it's not like dangerous
• Dialux: And it's just very interesting to me to see how female male has been so prevalent across all seasons. And to such an extent. And, I mean, obviously, there are a lot of theories about why that is
• Dialux: I think I obviously can't give an explanation for a lot of these. But I think that they make sense, to a certain extent, because there definitely are a lot more heterosexual relationships within this fandom than I've seen in a lot of other fandoms.
• GillyWulf: And I always thought her relationship with Mako felt super forced
• GillyWulf: Initially, it was definitely harder to see that
• GillyWulf: the easy answer is sexism, because everyone sees the main heroine next to a cute boy and decides, "That's good. I'm going to do that," without maybe necessarily putting much more thought into it.
• GillyWulf: A lot of straight people I know will look at a lot of these relationships and say, "Oh, that came from nowhere."
• Kittya Cullen: it was kind of taboo for divorcees who were women to get remarried, and it was rare for a widower to be portrayed as someone who was intensely devoted to the wife that he had lost, so it was a combination of really interesting things.
• Kittya Cullen: I wasn't quite sure yet how to engage with what was happening in ways that were visible to other people outside of the fan community, the slashfan community.
• Kittya Cullen: She's not a dainty fainting flower that they love.
• Kittya Cullen: At the time, I don't know, it was just that Korra and Mako were what was the norm. And so I think it made sense for some people to only be able to see that happening. I mean, I didn't see the possibility of Korrasami until the very end.
• Kittya Cullen: Plus the allocishets tend to dominate fandom in general, so it made sense that they would sort of own the sandbox and everyone else should be playing to the side.
• Kittya Cullen: couldn't quite bring themselves to see what others were seeing when they took the allocishet glasses off.
• Kittya Cullen: I'm always on the fence sometimes when I'm talking about how people are seeing or not seeing certain things. Because even with my current fandom, it's like half the people are saying that we're delusional or creating things where there aren't things. And then other times you see these exact phenomena occurring in cishet media.
• Valk: because a lot of the media already does a lot of the male-female exploration.
• Valk: lot of their fics also had a lot of like Jaime being the man and Brienne finally being able to let her guard down.
• Valk: it was all very incredibly heteronormative. Just their gender roles and Brienne being vulnerable and weak and all that stuff again.
• Valk: It went into his relationship with his father, he was caught walking in his mother's red heels and he got very scolded and punished for it.
• Valk: I do understand the whole like rough, the woman that warms his heart thing. Again, it's all very like romance novel-y prompts when I've tried to find fic and I'm just like, "I'll just write a Nora Roberts novel."
• Valk: Most Game of Thrones fanfic is incredibly hetero normative
• Valk: Again, it's Renly/Lauris, Sansa/Marjory. Yeah, there's not a lot really on there.
• Valk: I know that when I was writing it, there was a lot less fanfic, but you would think even with Jaime and Brienne having that very unique friendship/relationship
• Valk: the show really undercut Jaime and Brienne's relationship as well at the end. One of the big ones is like Jaime and Brienne kissed each other and Jaime was suddenly taller than her.
• Valk: lot of the fics, even with Jaime and Brienne is just depressingly, like, "Wow, if I wanted to read this fic, I'd just go to like any romance section and find it."
• WriteGirl: wonderful knights in their shining armor, these lovely ladies who are just ethereal in their beauty, everything being wrapped up in a bow, happily ever after. Maybe something happens, but someone's always rescued.

Description

Definition: How cultural differences play out in fan communities, fanfiction, and the canonical materials. Cultural difference may be tied to racism/antiracism, language, cultural practices, religions, and more.

Number of Codes: 33

Quotes

• Aria: I remember coming away with this feeling that there is a marginalized subjectivity in the Northern Water Tribe. And so telling this story about difference in culture
• Aria: Basically that I think Korra's upbringing is particularly reflective of that culture, yeah.
• Aria: "This is a gender thing going on." I don't buy that there's not homophobia in a world with gender in the like weird way that... In ways that still reflect our I think gender and homophobia [inaudible 00:21:13], the way that we have a sense of gender. Big, capital G Gender. And so I thought like, "What does it mean to have culture in the context of... What does it mean to be a cosmopolitan city where... There's both a degree of marginalization for like the Northern Water Tribe closing... Not so much that rules that are really intended to enforce gender norms are going to be there. And also to be like, "Yeah, there's probably a different understanding of gender in context," yeah.
• Aria: Whereas Korra grows up in this institution, Asami grows up with a relatively politically progressive father.
• Aria: I imagine Asami as having a relatively normal, relatively healthy understanding of the world in a way, having felt like she, not just knowing that a woman can love another woman, because I guess almost every person in this world knows. This is nothing like, Korra is particularly going to have a hard time because of that institution itself.
• Dialux: Because it was a Desi film. It was one representation in a way, but not necessarily. I think it was just about freeing those religious tensions, and those cultural tensions, and actually attempting to bridge them.
• Dialux: I mean, you need to have that religious, and cultural, and those barriers in order for that to happen.
• Dialux: And then, of course, you have the Targaryen colors, which are black, which are mourning colors according to the Western culture.
• Dialux: Where I just didn't translate them into Rajput or Hindi words. Because I just use whatever I knew, because I speak Kannada at home.
• Dialux: And, I mean, there's Rajput culture as well as South Indian culture, as well as there's some random, I think, there's some Bengali culture that I just threw in for the hell of it.
• Dialux: Because it's also your culture. You know what you're doing, you know where you're coming from. But we would not do it." And, I mean, the vast majority of them were from the U.K. or the U.S., and they were not from the same culture.
• Dialux: Because I was also combining both South Indian and North Indian tropes, to a certain extent. And those weren't necessarily very compatible. And there's a lot of history behind that and everything.
• Dialux: Because especially when you're looking at a lot of Indian mothers, and Indian women who get into marriages at a very young age. You have to deal with your husband's family, you have to deal with that entire kind of stigma. About you have to be the one to adjust and to compromise to a far greater extent than your husband.
• Dialux: Where she was just trying to fight it, she was such a perfect child in that culture. And then suddenly she has to kind of leave her culture behind. Or, not leave her culture behind, but adjust to a new culture.
• Dialux: you actually get more of a cultural tension due to just the difference between the North and the South. And all of that. And I do think that George R. R. Martin has kind of perpetuated the idea, simply because he is English. So, the whole idea that in England, where Northerners are tougher and everything than Southerners. And I don't know anything more about it. But I think that's kind of one of the underlying and unconscious biases within the framework of the canon.
• Dialux: Especially that religious tension between Jon and Sansa. And have that difference, where both of them and neither of them are willing to compromise on that.
• Dialux: And I mean, there are cultural differences within, I mean, people that I've grown up with in India, and people in the U.S. And even though you're living side by side, that doesn't necessarily mean that you have the same cultural background.
• Dialux: And, I mean, we don't know if she relies more on her religion because she left her homeland, and came to the North. And just wanted some desperate way, something to rely on that's her family, or that reminded her of home. But to me, at least, I can imagine, especially the actual Jodhaa, going to Akbar's Islamic court. And basically being all alone, and not having very many allies. And finding some sort of a solace in her religion of Hinduism.
• Dialux: Because as much as she's giving him the gift, she's also giving him his name. And she's stepping across her own cultural boundaries to help him with that, which Jon doesn't completely understand.
• Dialux: And adjusting to that is a huge, almost, culture shock to people.
• Dialux: And has to go to a foreign country without any support, and any of her own traditions. She's the one that's upheld every single tradition she has ever done. And especially when you're looking at the Hindu culture, it's very difficult to uphold them.
• Kittya Cullen: That was an Indian television show that I was watching, and I happened to be looking for ways to continue to consume the show because I'd been watching it back home, but back home I had English subtitles and so on.
• Kittya Cullen: So I got into forums and fans would translate for those of us who didn't speak Hindi.
• Kittya Cullen: it was kind of taboo for divorcees who were women to get remarried, and it was rare for a widower to be portrayed as someone who was intensely devoted to the wife that he had lost, so it was a combination of really interesting things.
• Kittya Cullen: I grew up in a country where we have a large Indo-Guyanese population, so Indian content was part of our regular air waves and the music and sound that we listened, so it shaped what I was interested in.
• Kittya Cullen: I grew up in the Caribbean ... Well, on South America but as socially, politically part of the Caribbean, so most of the content that we were consuming was either shows from the US or whatever, maybe European shows might have filtered through, and that also was the case for the books that we were reading. And while it was the case within school for us to consume Caribbean literature, it was harder to read Caribbean literature as a person on my own.
• Kittya Cullen: And my aunt in particular, she teaches English, and so they had old texts that I found and started reading them. And that's when I began to realize that the books that I had been reading were excluding me. It was something that you sort of knew but you didn't quite know.
• Kittya Cullen: So when I first read texts were people were actually talking about foods that I would eat or where people were living in communities like mine, where people spoke that way that I spoke, et cetera.
• Kittya Cullen: Because even though I speak, let's say, like this, how I speak with my family or how I speak with my friends from back home, it's a little different even though ... So, my particular country, we speak English, but it's a particular kind of English.
• Kittya Cullen: because back home I was part of the majority, so even though it's absent, you were still seeing yourself in other ways, whether that's being who was teaching you or who was in the news as a politician, et cetera
• Kittya Cullen: But here it was a completely different ballgame, so it felt more insidious
• Kittya Cullen: Given my own cultural background and the cultural background of the world in general, I was pretty surprised about that, so I started consuming fics and reading the show
• Kittya Cullen: I mean, I know I was raised in a pretty fundamentalist Christian kind of environment, but I think I'm seeing here things that I should not be seeing between two [inaudible 00:58:53] people."

Description

Definition: Resisting, challenging, or critiquing racism in fan communities, fanfiction, and the canonical materials. Antiracism refers specifically to deliberate actions. These actions may include forms of critical representations of diverse races and ethnicities, challenging racial inequality both ideologically and systemically, and more.

Number of Codes: 14

Quotes

• GillyWulf: Because I just find keeping people as slaves is super ... I didn't want to contribute to it
• GillyWulf: good that nobody in that show was white, by definition. When you look at where those communities are meant to be, have drawn inspiration from, nobody in that is white, so it's even more exciting, and it's great, and we need more of that, frankly.
• Kittya Cullen: So when I first read texts were people were actually talking about foods that I would eat or where people were living in communities like mine, where people spoke that way that I spoke, et cetera.
• Kittya Cullen: because back home I was part of the majority, so even though it's absent, you were still seeing yourself in other ways, whether that's being who was teaching you or who was in the news as a politician, et cetera
• Kittya Cullen: both as a black person and as a woman, it was just important for me to recognize that in text and get around to exploring what that might have meant for other characters who weren't within the Circle of the Avatar and had powerful connections.
• Kittya Cullen: dating a black man, or having that black man being put as a love interest when that's usually not the case, especially for that kind of media.
• WriteGirl: Kind of like, who is Missandei? If you take away slavery, and her being Daenerys' friend, who is this person? What is the one thing that would be important to her?
• WriteGirl: I don't know if I was a former slave. The one thing I would be sure of when I got my freedom was, I will never be made a slave again in any way, shape or form. So what does that translate into? That translates into, you're not going to use me. I'm not going to stand to be abused anymore.
• WriteGirl: Missandei deserved better, as you've already talked about. She did. So did Grey Worm. I can't believe they took that pairing from me. I thought that if any pairing would last, that one would.
• WriteGirl: she believes in a world without slavery. And after having been a slave and experienced freedom, that's something she'd want for everybody. I hate to say it, Harriet Tubman, how many times did she go back and she got slaves and ran them back out? Simply because I'm free, no one should be in bondage, even if it's a personal risk to myself, to my life, that is a risk I will take, because everyone should be free. And I think as a former slave, Missandei really would have that sentiment.
• WriteGirl: as a slave, as someone who's been freed, I can't imagine her ever wanting to be in a situation where somebody would be using her against her will. And that would be one thing I imagine you would promise yourself.
• WriteGirl: And for her of course it's more extreme, from being someone who was taken from freedom and put into slavery, lived a decade plus as a slave, not having a will of their own, and then suddenly getting that will back. No one's ever taking that from me. Like I said, I've found myself. Now that I've found myself again, and I can be myself, I will die myself.
• WriteGirl: it was talking about how former slaves, they go through this process of not believing that they're free, and not believing that they're free, and not believing that they're free. And eventually, they get to a point where it sticks in their head, that this is freedom. This is what they have. No one can control them. And then, they get very, very almost violently independent, where no one's going to tell me what to do. You can't tell me what to do. No one's going to do that to me.
• WriteGirl: They get this burst of a sense of self, a sense of purpose. And I thought that was very beautiful, that there are people who can go through all that type of trauma, and they can get there, and they can fully bloom. And I always saw Missandei as kind of that character, this character who had gone through all of that to the point where here she is, standing tall as a character that knows her own worth, knows her own personage.

Description

Definition: Power differentials between different races and how race is a culturally constructed way of identifying, marking, and reading bodies. Forms of racism include white supremacy, the erasure of diverse races/ethnicities, discriminatory behaviors towards a particular race (specifically people of color), and assuming whiteness as the norm.

Number of Codes: 16

Quotes

• Aria: Given this is a proportion, I don't know if [inaudible 00:57:24] but more people as a fandom and those few people aren't interested in talking about race in ways that people who had been there before were, and those people who were there before continued to talk about race, or if there is an effectively gentrifying mmoment that a white fandom comes in, pushes out a fandom of color.
• Dialux: Because, obviously, race bending is, and can be, very racist if not done in a very respectful manner.
• GillyWulf: she's maybe not as white as everybody else in Republic City, and she's got these really bight eyes.
• Kittya Cullen: I grew up in the Caribbean ... Well, on South America but as socially, politically part of the Caribbean, so most of the content that we were consuming was either shows from the US or whatever, maybe European shows might have filtered through, and that also was the case for the books that we were reading. And while it was the case within school for us to consume Caribbean literature, it was harder to read Caribbean literature as a person on my own.
• Kittya Cullen: And my aunt in particular, she teaches English, and so they had old texts that I found and started reading them. And that's when I began to realize that the books that I had been reading were excluding me. It was something that you sort of knew but you didn't quite know.
• Kittya Cullen: But here it was a completely different ballgame, so it felt more insidious
• Kittya Cullen: Because even when you talk about what characters are bound to get more attention and more interesting and so on and so forth, when you look at fandom in general you'll find that when those characters are black or just generally a person of color in comparison to a character being white, that people are least particular when the fandom's dominated by white faces and so forth. They are more likely to explore those characters and to humanize them and to want to get to know them better, while other characters and what their hopes and dreams and ideas might be for the world are pushed to the side.
• Kittya Cullen: even to the point where they used the black character as a wedge between them
• Kittya Cullen: And we are going to have your favorite superhero be shipped with a slave owner.
• Kittya Cullen: And then you break them apart in the second season and conveniently replace him with a white man who just actually makes the character feel terrible
• WriteGirl: It pissed me off that you have a character like Missandei who is very strong, who survives slavery, got out of her chains, became this person who was herself, and then how did she die? She dies in chains, basically in a pissing contest between two white women.
• WriteGirl: Mostly she seems to almost be absent from things. She's window dressing. She's there, she doesn't speak, or she speaks, it's one or two sentences in the entire fic.
• WriteGirl: you get those fics where she either has none of those, she's either not there, or she has really none of those attributes. She's kind of just a yes person. Yes, Khaleesi, no Khaleesi, yes my queen.
• WriteGirl: Because there aren't really a lot of fics that focus on her as a character at all.
• WriteGirl: She's really seeing Cersei for the creature Cersei is, beyond just being kind of a high-born woman in Westeros. She's seeing the monster that's inside Cersei. Cersei will do anything. She will do anything to maintain power, she will do anything to get back at her enemies, even if it means murder, blackmail, et cetera. And I think Missandei coming from a society where no one would have to hide that from their slaves. She sees it. Like I know you, I've seen masters exactly like you. And she's really recognizing the monster that's in Cersei outside of all of her jewels, outside of her gowns, outside of her façade of being this queen and great lady. It's like, no, you're really this evil thing, and I know it because I've seen it before.
• WriteGirl: No, you would have fit in well with them. You may think that you're better, you may think that you're better than people from Astapor. You may think that you're better than slave owners and all this, that, and the other, but in the end you are not. You are exactly like them

Description

Definition: Sexism or sexist statements in fan communities, fanfiction, and the canonical materials. Forms of sexism include patriarchal views of gender roles, power dynamics between genders, discrimination against women, and more.

Number of Codes: 13

Quotes

• Dialux: Because especially when you're looking at a lot of Indian mothers, and Indian women who get into marriages at a very young age. You have to deal with your husband's family, you have to deal with that entire kind of stigma. About you have to be the one to adjust and to compromise to a far greater extent than your husband.
• Dialux: Which is, "Yes, I'm miserable. I want you to be miserable. But how am I going to be miserable for?" You need to let some things go, you need to move on past the injustices... I need to move past the injustices that I have faced.
• GillyWulf: the easy answer is sexism, because everyone sees the main heroine next to a cute boy and decides, "That's good. I'm going to do that," without maybe necessarily putting much more thought into it.
• Kittya Cullen: But even Katara in the beginning, it was kind of frowned upon for her to use waterbending beyond healing
• Kittya Cullen: derails her show, and starts to get almost as much screen time as she does even though he's not really an integral part of the show. Just so much went wrong so fast. He was so bad.
• Valk: But there would definitely be some push back,
• Valk: I think that reflected a lot of her issues with not being able to fulfill the role that she was supposed to play with her father with being the heir, giving him a son and all these things.
• Valk: Residual toxic masculinity and all of that.
• Valk: the show really undercut Jaime and Brienne's relationship as well at the end. One of the big ones is like Jaime and Brienne kissed each other and Jaime was suddenly taller than her.
• WriteGirl: And then, for whatever reason, they backed off of it. And then the next thing we see her, she's just kind of sitting there asking questions, looking dull. And that was a little irritating to me.
• WriteGirl: I always thought he kind of saw her, especially in the beginning as, he called her a little bird. Like, "I see that your parents never prepared you for this. Your best safe kept in a cage locked away, and you can just sing to people."
• WriteGirl: Yeah, there's one scene where he kind of corners her, and it's a lot of Chester the Molester, a bit. It's a little stalker-y.
• WriteGirl: Petyr would relish that. He does everything he can to get her into trusting him, and thinking of him as her friend, and I would do anything for you, and that's really, really creepy. It's always a surprise to me when I see Petyr Baelish, Sansa Stark fics especially ones where it's not manipulative, and coercive, and creepy, I'm like, "What are you guys seeing in that?" That's just odd.

Description

Definition: Resisting, challenging, or critiquing sexism in fan communities, fanfiction, and the canonical materials. Feminism refers to anti-sexist representations of genders, challenging gender inequality both ideologically and systemically, and more.

Number of Codes: 32

Quotes

• Aria: Okay, my first guess would be that women who love women will write about women who love women, want to tell stories that have happy endings. I think in a lot of the stories we see in literature are of our destruction as a moral point, or the echoes of authority. That doesn't mean that all of the stories that we see that are echoes of stories are intended as seeing those moral and political tellings, they're just, "That's what our culture tells us." A lesbian love story, so retelling... If women who love women retell stories of women who love women, they're going to tell a lot of stories that are about being happy, at least in my opinion.
• Dialux: To any women, adjusting to that is difficult.
• Dialux: Which is, "Yes, I'm miserable. I want you to be miserable. But how am I going to be miserable for?" You need to let some things go, you need to move on past the injustices... I need to move past the injustices that I have faced.
• Dialux: Or, she's feeling as if her family is not willing to give her as much as she is owed when she's going into a marriage.
• Dialux: when I was first getting into the fandom, one of my friends basically told me that the women in this are really strong.
• Dialux: Like, you have Sansa, who is conventionally pretty, but she also has, on an internal level, she just kind of lives with whatever society expects of her. Whereas, Brienne is not conventionally pretty, so she has to find another way of gaining power in her world.
• Dialux: And Sansa, despite the fact that as a young child she wanted all of that, in the end she got power, and the ability to make sure that nobody hurt her.
• Dialux: And I think there are other ways that the show actually showed that with the sexual liberation for women, and the feminist liberation for Arya and everything.
• GillyWulf: that they have very female-centered stories.
• GillyWulf: And for Korra, she's an imposing figure, whether or not she means to be. She's got the muscles
• Kittya Cullen: it was kind of taboo for divorcees who were women to get remarried, and it was rare for a widower to be portrayed as someone who was intensely devoted to the wife that he had lost, so it was a combination of really interesting things.
• Kittya Cullen: I guess in the power fantasy that she was written to come in to. Usually, at least for me at the time, it wasn't really common to see those characters have that kind of a glow-up, you can say.
• Kittya Cullen: both as a black person and as a woman, it was just important for me to recognize that in text and get around to exploring what that might have meant for other characters who weren't within the Circle of the Avatar and had powerful connections.
• Kittya Cullen: With gender roles in particular, I think it's fascinating that within the Avatar universe, we got to see all these really powerful girl and women characters who were, for the most part, respected, at least in later years.
• Kittya Cullen: So it was interesting to see all these female characters get to be complex and powerful and not have that held against them,
• Kittya Cullen: we have Korra, who is the avatar, and she is this figure who is not the conventional or gender-conforming version of femininity that we're accustomed to. She's allowed to be athletic and walk around in pants without concerns about what others are thinking. Even though she does think about her gender presentation, it comes from a place that's not her considering herself inadequate, but because she saw other people I guess idolized in this particular form of femininity being expressed, so we see Korra and we see Lin and we see Sue and Kuvira, and they're all these women who either have power or they're dealing with their own traumas or they have complex relationships with their mothers, and they have complex relationships with their children as well, if they do have children, and so forth.
• Kittya Cullen: Korra is an avatar who's a woman.
• Kittya Cullen: It's basically girl-next-door, blonde, blue-eyed, sort of hyper-feminine in some ways but also gender non-conforming in other ways super hero
• Valk: obviously they wouldn't be having as much of a, you know Brienne wouldn't be considered as horrifying as she was considered in the original text because she was considered man-ish. In modern day context, it's not always encouraged, based on what kind of family you came from, women are often allowed to be tom boys more than vice versa.
• Valk: I made her a little bit more comfortable in her skin than Jaime
• Valk: I was just not really feeling it, so I wrote my own instead.
• Valk: he always had a very strange affinity, but like an affinity for femininity. Weirdly enough, like he loved his mother, he loved Cersei, but he was always very partial to seeing things from their point of view.
• Valk: Jaime had this big, beautiful wife that was taller than him and he's like, "Look at my beautiful wife. Isn't she huge, ask him, and wonderful?"
• WriteGirl: willing to not listen to him, who understood that, this person is not my friend. This person is strictly manipulative. He's going to take me somewhere that I don't want to go, so my only choice is to find the strength in me that she has, and say, "Okay, I'll run. If it means I have to die, I'm not going to let him use me for whatever his ends are."
• WriteGirl: I wanted her to have a little bit more agency.
• WriteGirl: So I wanted her to get a little more agency, especially when she found out who she was supposed to be meeting. I didn't see Sansa ever agreeing to that.
• WriteGirl: that's my choice. But it won't be going back to a ruined Winterfell to marry a legitimized bastard.
• WriteGirl: he would never allow that, because he wants control of her, and that is something that she realizes, because she's not an idiot.
• WriteGirl: She's re-discovered her strength. She's done something that she didn't think she could do.
• WriteGirl: That was kind of that whole, what that episode was about was Sansa really re-discovering herself, and what she could do.
• WriteGirl: So really, Sansa's really forced to grow up, and she's really forced to see all these stories as exactly what they are. They're just stories.
• WriteGirl: What I was afraid of, I should never have been afraid of, what I wanted was the thing I should have been worried about. She's really kind of flipped the script in her own mind.

Description

Definition: When fan authors mention representations and understandings of socioeconomic class in fan communities, fanfiction, and the canonical materials. This includes mentions of classism, class imbalances, and forms of economic structures.

Number of Codes: 6

Quotes

• Aria: He's a radical, he tries to overthrow his government, make the world a more equitable and fair place. It's self-interested, he's a bourgeois radical, but I wouldn't have said that at the time.
• Aria: a lot of my understanding of Hiroshi as a bourgeois radical is that I'm not going to have a [inaudible 00:30:36], because I don't really have a sense of class politics at the time, or have the beginnings of that study
• GillyWulf: growing up with the rich father, she has certain expectations placed on her and where she's going to go in her life according to that company, so she has to be sort of poised and on her toes all the time.
• WriteGirl: She was definitely never really prepared for court life.
• WriteGirl: She's really seeing Cersei for the creature Cersei is, beyond just being kind of a high-born woman in Westeros. She's seeing the monster that's inside Cersei. Cersei will do anything. She will do anything to maintain power, she will do anything to get back at her enemies, even if it means murder, blackmail, et cetera. And I think Missandei coming from a society where no one would have to hide that from their slaves. She sees it. Like I know you, I've seen masters exactly like you. And she's really recognizing the monster that's in Cersei outside of all of her jewels, outside of her gowns, outside of her façade of being this queen and great lady. It's like, no, you're really this evil thing, and I know it because I've seen it before.
• WriteGirl: No, you would have fit in well with them. You may think that you're better, you may think that you're better than people from Astapor. You may think that you're better than slave owners and all this, that, and the other, but in the end you are not. You are exactly like them

Description

Definition: When fan authors mention representations and understandings of disability — physical, emotional, or mental — in fan communities, fanfiction, and the canonical materials.

Number of Codes: 22

Quotes

• Aria: It's a piece about about trauma... And it [inaudible 00:05:20], that this isn't obviously. It's a piece about trauma and it's a piece about, what does it mean... Really they're both pieces about what it means to be disabled.
• Aria: also I was reading a piece about PTSD, and it was just very surface, very basic understanding of trauma and PTSD in particular, like something you recover from, in a way that I was not super comfortable with. And sort of the original text, not sure if you would agree. And so I wanted to talk about disability through the context of being something you come to live with, and come to integrate, and come to find becomes a part of you life, but also something you still struggle with, instead of just, I don't know, a lot of us have seen the story a lot like, you get better, and then you get better and you win. And then one day it doesn't bother you.
• Aria: I wrote about suicide at a time where I was not ready to talk about it, as a writer. I'm still not sure I can actually talk about suicide now, in a way that's beneficial or useful for me. I'm not sure now I can do that now, or could not do it now, but I could not do it at the time, or I couldn't do it in a way that was healthy. I know I wrote it that it would seem therapeutic, but I also was being retraumatized, and I didn't say that obviously in the tags.
• Aria: But I also struggled because I didn't know how to write about my own trauma, and so I tried to write about trauma in ways that other people were experiencing it. And already the text engaged with that, and those weren't really authentic to me. They weren't things I was writing about at the time.
• Aria: It had two epic story arcs that I didn't know how to integrate, both this love story about disability, and it was this story about queer politics, and I could not make those two pieces meld at the time.
• Aria: I did consult with some folks when I was writing some texts about trauma, because I was like... I wasn't comfortable writing that.
• Aria: I think I was just engaging with the text's portrayal of trauma.
• Aria: I wasn't telling you things that had happened in the past, to teach you what happened in the past. I was saying, "This is what's haunting the characters, this is what the characters can't escape from in a very physical, visceral fashion." Well maybe physical might be the wrong word, you know what, I'm okay with it, body and mind, if it makes sense.
• Aria: I was trying to write a story that engaged with trauma and felt authentic and didn't make trauma seem like the end of the world. Because the binary that's in a lot of literature is either like, "Oh, you either overcame trauma, or you are doomed to misery forever." And I was trying to find some middle ground, trying to tell a story that felt authentic.
• Aria: Because I imagine Korra's pain is seeing the cost of her new trauma after time, because her being injured, being in a place where you are tortured to death as a vulnerability. Every time you experience that pain, I imagine that that's a place that engagement is a struggle after time when you're in that pain. So it's an ordeal for Korra to dress herself.
• Aria: it's not really about romance as much as it is about feeling connected in a genuine way to people, that that central theme, building a life worth living after injury, or after trauma, is finding an authentic realtionship with people.
• GillyWulf: because Korra's definitely, she's traumatized.
• GillyWulf: she's trying to have a good experience and maybe power through it, but then, in that brief lapse where she forgets that she's tied down and then she tries to sit up, it's sort of like a muscle memory thing, where she's back there the last time she was chained up and couldn't move.
• Kittya Cullen: Bella was written both as someone who was insular and chooses to form or has a small community and so forth and deals with depression
• Kittya Cullen: we get to see Korra, who is this all-powerful person, come to grips with what she might be like after having this really terrible thing happen to her and want sort of responsibilities she once had, and how it's still there, but she has all these other things she now has to deal with as well, like her mental health and her physical recovery and so forth.
• Kittya Cullen: It's just different for me. Deal with PTSD and depression and just all these changing things.
• Kittya Cullen: I don't want to say broken, but be injured in a really drastic way and them not being able to do anything much to help with her recovery in concrete ways.
• Kittya Cullen: to be someone who builds and creates with the purpose of fixing or making better, but then not being able to do so for someone within your personal life.
• Valk: when I was writing, I wasn't very well-versed in not just having a limb missing as a disability, but also how advanced the prosthetics were and if they could hold things
• Valk: I would definitely want to go more into his disability as well as his prosthetic and how it worked more.
• WriteGirl: I actually had to do a bit of research on some of the fic, for things like trauma, and how people respond to trauma. Especially in the case of Sansa and Missandei, how do people overcome certain difficulties after being in these different positions?
• WriteGirl: Yeah, mostly it was Googling, recovering from trauma. I did a little bit of research on former slaves, to see their mindset.

Description

Definition: When fan authors mention representations and understandings of disability — physical, emotional, or mental — in fan communities, fanfiction, and the canonical materials.

Number of Codes: 4

Quotes

• Aria: also I was reading a piece about PTSD, and it was just very surface, very basic understanding of trauma and PTSD in particular, like something you recover from, in a way that I was not super comfortable with. And sort of the original text, not sure if you would agree. And so I wanted to talk about disability through the context of being something you come to live with, and come to integrate, and come to find becomes a part of you life, but also something you still struggle with, instead of just, I don't know, a lot of us have seen the story a lot like, you get better, and then you get better and you win. And then one day it doesn't bother you.
• GillyWulf: You hear stories about how people try and be helpful and just make situations worse
• Kittya Cullen: The implication is that she's about to jump off a cliff. But we don't really get to dwell in the true feeling of that moment, the have to fix it immediately because of the idea that the show may never get to come back to this point, so we don't get to actually see what that means for her.
• Valk: when I was writing, I wasn't very well-versed in not just having a limb missing as a disability, but also how advanced the prosthetics were and if they could hold things

Description

Definition: When fan authors mention other forms of identity representations or systems of power, including around religion, age, and location.

Number of Codes: 38

Quotes

• Aria: I guess it was actually about immigration, it's just I never really ever got around to doing a piece about immigration system, but somebody had a bad take about immigration in America in a piece of fanfic and I was like, "God, that's a really bad understanding of that friend. That is utopian and wrong."
• Aria: I wrote about suicide at a time where I was not ready to talk about it, as a writer. I'm still not sure I can actually talk about suicide now, in a way that's beneficial or useful for me. I'm not sure now I can do that now, or could not do it now, but I could not do it at the time, or I couldn't do it in a way that was healthy. I know I wrote it that it would seem therapeutic, but I also was being retraumatized, and I didn't say that obviously in the tags.
• Aria: I did consult with some folks when I was writing some texts about trauma, because I was like... I wasn't comfortable writing that.
• Aria: And it was about violence, so I don't just mean violence as a method of resistance, I mean violence as a thing that people survive.
• Aria: But also a man who genuinely is providing aid and comfort and resources for fighting for what he views as liberation, and that liberation's probably genuine at some level. I think it's fair to say that there is a political bender-like supremacy at the beginning. I mean there is, we know there's a bender supremacy at the beginning of The Legend of Korra.
• Aria: But the other thing I wanted to talk about is, what are politicians willing to give up for their family, and what are they not?
• Aria: You could do what, when and where, the idea that a politician can't really save the world. I don't know if I was all the way to, "We have to do it," yet, but I think I'm getting there.
• Aria: This was written obviously before Donald Trump becomes President, and I could see all sorts of things about reaction again. But I was seeing the reaction, I was scared. I don't know where I got this, there was something bad was coming. I knew that I had that sense of fear, so I was writing about... I guess writing a little bit about, how do we fight back when things get worse?
• Aria: I'd write it as a story that talks about immigration, and talks about sweeping panic and fear that spill off of that. I'd probably talk about gender through those lenses, and I'd probably talk about humanity in a slightly more complex... I'd probably make it a story that... I'd probably both use modern messages to say that, I'd probably talk more about police state, and police state as endless spying networks where you don't know when you're being spied on and when you're not, and endless police states
• Aria: so much MlM stuff is kind of uncomfortable? A lot it's very clearly written by women.
• Aria: I don't really understand ABO [alpha, beta, omega] as in general, so I can't talk. They're not as inherently sexual. They definitely struck me as relatively sexual
• Dialux: But it was, I think, mostly due to the kind of deep rage that I was feeling over the entire Democratic Primaries over the past couple of months. And almost the past year. In which everything felt very much like a lot of talk, and not a lot of doing. And at some point, you need some catharsis. And kind of putting it out into fiction and seeing something changing. Or, not even seeing something changing. But seeing people trying to effect change, and willing to fight for that change felt very important to me. And basically that entire fanfic is kind of born out of that seething, massive, "I want to see something happening."
• Dialux: From either my own culture because, of course, this is partially my own culture.
• Dialux: this core feeling that they cannot get rid of, that the world has done them a huge injustice. And as much as it's cathartic to see that in fanfic, I also feel like if you go through life like that, it's a very difficult way of going through life.
• GillyWulf: it's a common trope in a lot of fanfiction communities, is the student-teacher ... What is that? Student-teacher pairing, whatever. My dad is a teacher, so the idea of that has always just absolutely not been something that I want to encourage, and it just isn't good, so I don't like writing that, I don't like reading it.
• GillyWulf: You look out your window and things are just not good a lot of the time,
• Kittya Cullen: how these shows and books and games et cetera were failing us, whether it was in terms of the content or the representation or just releasing new things like thought arcs that weren't followed through on.
• Kittya Cullen: Because even though I speak, let's say, like this, how I speak with my family or how I speak with my friends from back home, it's a little different even though ... So, my particular country, we speak English, but it's a particular kind of English.
• Kittya Cullen: And especially for certain characters who are ... I'm not sure how I'm thinking of this, but I think what I'm thinking of is where the audience may usually dismiss them or not consider them worthy of further exploration.
• Kittya Cullen: I guess who is an ... I wouldn't say an abuser because there isn't that dynamic for them. But in the way that the relationship shifts from love and care to an act of violence ...
• Kittya Cullen: And I think that's my favorite thing about fandom and fan fiction, how fans sort of delve into all these areas in canon that either there wasn't time to explore or it didn't really seem to be important enough to explore, so things like inequality. When I write now, it's just always in the forefront, "How can I better represent experiences of people in the world," not just for myself, but for other people, what they're going through.
• Kittya Cullen: I think, and I'll probably go with my own fandom experiences, it just comes back to how the world is constructed externally. So just even the idea of imagining inside of what was placed before us, it takes a special kind of familiarity with the boarders of the world to imagine a world that is different from what is presented to you.
• Kittya Cullen: that people were so willing to see all these other, in some ways really twisted, relationship dynamics,
• Valk: you don't really understand romance all typically well. It's all very idealized.
• Valk: it was one of the first pairings, I should add the first male-female pairing, the first hetero pairing that I felt emotionally invested in to a point where I was surprised.
• Valk: A lot of incest. An exorbitant amount of incest, like beyond what I even take it. I'm typically very do what you want, but even now, I'm just like don't like that.
• WriteGirl: willing to not listen to him, who understood that, this person is not my friend. This person is strictly manipulative. He's going to take me somewhere that I don't want to go, so my only choice is to find the strength in me that she has, and say, "Okay, I'll run. If it means I have to die, I'm not going to let him use me for whatever his ends are."
• WriteGirl: he would never allow that, because he wants control of her, and that is something that she realizes, because she's not an idiot.
• WriteGirl: She's really seeing Cersei for the creature Cersei is, beyond just being kind of a high-born woman in Westeros. She's seeing the monster that's inside Cersei. Cersei will do anything. She will do anything to maintain power, she will do anything to get back at her enemies, even if it means murder, blackmail, et cetera. And I think Missandei coming from a society where no one would have to hide that from their slaves. She sees it. Like I know you, I've seen masters exactly like you. And she's really recognizing the monster that's in Cersei outside of all of her jewels, outside of her gowns, outside of her façade of being this queen and great lady. It's like, no, you're really this evil thing, and I know it because I've seen it before.
• WriteGirl: It's kind of like a, "I know that you know that I know that you know" moment. Like, I see you. You can't hide from me.
• WriteGirl: as a slave, as someone who's been freed, I can't imagine her ever wanting to be in a situation where somebody would be using her against her will. And that would be one thing I imagine you would promise yourself.
• WriteGirl: I actually had to do a bit of research on some of the fic, for things like trauma, and how people respond to trauma. Especially in the case of Sansa and Missandei, how do people overcome certain difficulties after being in these different positions?
• WriteGirl: Yeah, mostly it was Googling, recovering from trauma. I did a little bit of research on former slaves, to see their mindset.
• WriteGirl: And then with Sansa, just how people recover from abusive and traumatic relationships, and things like that. The stages of recovery.
• WriteGirl: I actually liked Sandor Clegane, Sansa Stark as a pairing, whether it's through platonic, whether it's romantic, et cetera.
• WriteGirl: Yeah, there's one scene where he kind of corners her, and it's a lot of Chester the Molester, a bit. It's a little stalker-y.
• WriteGirl: Sansa, Petyr, I've always hated that one, simply because he's grooming. It's very obvious.
• WriteGirl: Petyr would relish that. He does everything he can to get her into trusting him, and thinking of him as her friend, and I would do anything for you, and that's really, really creepy. It's always a surprise to me when I see Petyr Baelish, Sansa Stark fics especially ones where it's not manipulative, and coercive, and creepy, I'm like, "What are you guys seeing in that?" That's just odd.