Interview with "Runescriptor" author of "Happy Pothead and the Fornicating Phoenix" and "Tilde" pan-fandom fan fiction reader
Q: Background?
Runescriptor: Undergraduate student.
Tilde: Attending university.
Q: When did you start writing fan fiction?
Runescriptor: Writing I guess I started in 8th grade. I didn’t know it was fan fiction at the time. I mean you read a book and the author ends it and says, "I’m never going to write anything ever again," and you’re like “no, that’s unacceptable. I will write it for you!”
Q: How was posting on fanfiction.net?
Runescriptor: It was fine. They TOS'ed off my stuff because of content, I assume. That was fine, but what annoyed me was that all the comments were lost and the flames so amused me.
Q: How do you deal with flames?
Runescriptor: I laugh at them. The thing is, they're so ridiculous because flames in general are all upper case they're badly spelled, they wander. Flamers haven't really read your fic they just want to talk about anything. But for "Happy Pothead," I got the most amazing flames back because people didn't read the last two sentences of the introduction like I told them to. Instead of a summary I just put "read the last two sentences of the introduction" So they all thought I was bashing J.K. Rowling, but I wasn't. And then they'd write back a little while later going "oops, sorry! I get it now!" and I'm like "you idiot."
Q: How do you think the original authors would feel about people writing fan fiction?
Runescriptor: I think they should be flattered that people spend so much time in their world, that they love their books so much that they would dedicate pages upon pages to it. It inspires people to write. People who otherwise might not…or should not, but still do. It’s good. It’s propagation of writing and it’s wonderful. And we don’t make any money doing it, so it’s not taking anything away from them.
Q: What do you like about reading fic?
Tilde: I like missing scenes, things that that fill in stuff that was missing from episodes or part of the movie. I like fill-ins that could be part of canon but maybe aren’t. I like hurt/comfort. That goes way back. If I have a yen to read something of a certain type I generally gravitate toward the hurt/comfort kind of storyline. Sappy romance, not so much, unless it’s two characters I feel sappy and romantic about.
Q: What squicks you?
Tilde: I don't like incest. A whole bunch of slash pairings freak me out a little bit. RPS I've never actually read and don't want to. Ever.
Runescriptor: Anything with Hagrid. Snape/Hagrid. Snape/giant squid...
Tilde: Actually some of the giant squid stories are really quite fun. Squids have feelings too, you know!
Runescriptor: I'm sure they do.
Q: So what about slash?
Runescriptor: My first exposure to slash was unintentional and it was Hercules/Iolas. I was like, oh dear lord. What the hell? But then I got over it. Now, I don't like reading Hercules/Iolas slash. I only like reading certain kinds of slash. Right now that's Harry/Snape, and that used to squick me, until I read this one set of fics that single handedly converted me. No underage stuff. You just don't put them in your mind as being twelve. In your mind they're of "advanced years" or "comfortable age."
Q: Aside from bad spelling, grammar and punctuation, what are your pet peeves about fan fiction?
Tilde: Bad grammar really pisses me off. It's really hard because sometimes writers have really good ideas for fan fic, but it's so hard to get past the misspellings and grammar irregularities. I don't like it when characters are so out of character for some plot device. The names are the same but everything about the character is so totally different. This isn’t a story about the characters I want to read about. This is something that just happens to have the same names.
Runescriptor: In certain moods, though, it can be really funny. For example if you ever wanted to see Snape as a rock star or Snape in Yuletide glamour gleam glimmer flash. Alternate universe can be amusing but generally speaking, bad characterization is just bad. There's a set of stories in the Harry Potter fandom where Snape gets wounded and spends the rest of the story recuperating and that’s fine, but Snape seems so squishy and puppy-like and that’s not Snape.
Tilde: And then there's what they call "whumping" in the Stargate fandom. These writers like to beat up their characters. There’s this one girl in the Harry Potter fandom who beat Harry to pieces. She did terrible, terrible things to him. I got halfway through this one epic story she wrote and I just couldn’t take it anymore. It was excessive. I don’t know, maybe it was some kind of channeling of aggression. But people loved it. They ate it up. She had all sorts of feedback. I don’t get it. Some of it I don’t understand.
Q: What about fandom as a community?
Tilde: There's feeling fannish about things and then there's going out and interacting with other fans.
Runescriptor: I went to this convention for a screening for an independent film done by Jason Carter and Garrett Maggart these two actors, one from Sentinel and the other from Babylon 5. A bunch of us paid a great deal of money to fly up to LA to see this screening where the actors would be present. I was one of the few Babylon 5 fans. The convention was pretty much piled full of Sentinel fans all who were reading fan fiction dedicated to Garrett Maggart’s character. They all knew each other and they had built this giant community. They were staying in the same hotel rooms to keep down costs, they were that comfortable with each other. They said that because Sentinel was over, they were all skipping over to Smallville as a body.
Tilde: I’ve never actually met someone who I only interacted with online via fanfic. But when there’s a convention and you have the means to go, you end up meeting people in real life who you’ve met online. Sometimes friendships last sometimes they don’t. Sometimes once you’ve met someone in real life you interact with them more online. That’s how some collaborative relationships start up people write stories together, make videos together...
Runescriptor: I had two friends from the West Wing community. It started off with fan fiction, we were into the same character. So all three of us would email each other in a round robin and we’d collaborate writing fan fictions. We spoke to each other on the phone and knew what was going on in each other’s lives. After a while it just kind of died but for a while, yeah.
Tilde: You go through fandom cycles. When you find a new one that you’re just starting to get interested or there’s some new aspect you’ve discovered you can get a little obsessed. And if you find a website of an author you absolutely adore and suddenly it’s 3 o' clock in the morning and you’re only halfway through the archives and you’ll read anything you can get your hands on. And once you go through the massive overload of everything, you develop tastes, opinions you find people you really like, you get your pairings down your OTP for the group. You get discriminating and more discriminating and then maybe another fandom comes along and the first one gets pushed to the back.
Runescriptor: But it never really goes away. You can always come back to it.
Tilde: I know some people who are…unifandomy. They’re loyal to one thing and one thing only and that’s it. I don’t understand that. I don’t understand how you can be obsessed with only one thing. I’ve never been obsessed with only one thing. Sometimes the love gets revived like a second honeymoon or something. You think oh, I’ve put that one away because I have this one and it’s bright and shiny. And then something happens, a new book comes out in the series, a new episode or the fall season’s back and your love just re-emerges. But it is your hobby. Instead of playing computer games or watching tv, you do this.
Interview with "Bubbles" maintainer of the Dom-Land Caribou
Q: When you're not writing fan fiction, what are you doing?
Bubbles: I'm a graduate student. I have a BA in English and journalism as well as baby degrees in French and theatre.
Q: Show off. You have no background in computers?
Bubbles: Not really. A few layout classes in journalism is all. I learned some photoshop at the local animal shelter. I put up the online "personal ads" for the pets. I used to work for the athletics department and I read my share of sports journalism, so that colors the stories at the Dom-Land.
Q: When did you start writing fan fiction?
Bubbles: In high school, actually before I even knew what fan fiction was. My friends and I wrote a number of crackpot stories containing characters from movies, tv shows, books, comic books, our favorite bands, sports guys...
Q: Some of those are real people.
Bubbles: Yeah, it was basically a bunch of teenage girls writing out their crushes on celebrities and fictional characters. I still have it somewhere. It's pretty funny. I'm the only responsible character in the lot and I get pissed off constantly. At one point, I'm just this loud disembodied voice. If you want to talk about working out adolescent sexuality, some of us wrote our own abusive relationships, and we meant for them to be funny. In case you're wondering, I was borderline psychologically abusive in mine. Sometimes I wonder why I didn't just write myself as a dopey sexpot like everyone else.
Q: Thanks for the TMI. How did you start with the Dom-Land Caribou?
Bubbles: I have a link for that. Actually, the first story I wrote was the Legolas and the Stanley Cup story for another website. Then I made the trading card. Then it just sort of clicked. Nine companions is just enough for two lines a defense pairing and a goalie.
Q: How long have you been running your site?
Bubbles: Since Jan. 25, 2003. I update once a week. Or I try to anyway.
Q: How long does it take you to update?
Bubbles: Several hours. Sometimes I split up the work and photoshop the picture earlier in the week. The story is almost always written the night I update. Or morning, as it usually happens.
Q: How do you make the pictures?
Bubbles: There's a lot of screencap websites on the internet. I just find a head that matches a hockey body and plonk that puppy on. Searching for the right head sometimes takes a long time. The photoshopping takes anywhere from 15 minutes to an hour. The stories take longer.
Q: Who's the hardest?
Bubbles: Frodo. There's something about Elijah Wood's face-to-neck ratio that gives me fits trying to cram it into the helmet. And Legolas' hair always gets cut off by the widescreen bars. I harvest the hair off this one Eowyn picture to fill it in.
Q: Where do you get your ideas for stories?
Bubbles: The turtles whisper to me in my sleep.
Q: No, really.
Bubbles: The hockey stuff comes straight from the NHL games on ESPN. If there's a particularly good play or goal or fight during the week, it usually makes it into the Dom-Land.
Q: The other stuff?
Bubbles: Turtles, dude.
Q: ...
Bubbles: Okay. Some things, like the Fun Fact on Boromir's trading card, came from the cast commentary on one of the extended edition DVDs. Actually a lot of those fun facts came off of extended edition commentaries and the extra stuff on the DVDs. I also read bits here and there on the internet about the actors and try to fit some of the funny bits in. I read a story, a long time ago about Billy Boyd getting chased by a seal. I always think one of these days I'm going to have a seal chase Pippin around. Sometimes my friends chip in ideas. Sometimes I just throw in whatever I'm interested in, like Gimli knitting. Newsies made it into the Dom-Land.
Q: That's an awful movie.
Bubbles: But I love it so.
Q: Do you consult the books?
Bubbles: I have to. I have books about the books as well. I came to the books from the movies and I have to check my facts. More than a few of the Dom-Land readers are much more in tune with the books than I am, and they kindly let me know when I've got something wrong, and I try to correct it. Actually I had one rather screechy email because I made a mistake, but it wasn't a LOTR fan, it was something else.
Q: Did you correct the mistake?
Bubbles: No.
Q: How much traffic do you get at your site?
Bubbles: About 50 unique hits a day. A "unique hit" does not include the same IP address reloading the page in a 24 hour period.
Q: Can you tell where they're from?
Bubbles: All over the world. At least their IP addresses are. The nasa.gov one made me laugh. 50 hits a day is peanuts compared to some of the other fan fic sites and communites out there, by the way.
Q: What about slash?
Bubbles: I run a G-rated site, so there's no sex, although there's lots of bizarre hockey violence.
Q: Do you read slash?
Bubbles: I actually don't read a lot of fan fiction, except for funny stuff, and I mean really funny stuff. Not the same Monty Python lines MST3K'd over the same parts of the films. Yes, Faramir's not dead yet. Yes, he feels happy. I've never heard that one before! I don't mind people saying it. It's just when they act like they're the first to think of it. Anyway, the slash I've read almost always had humor in it and not just, "tee hee, boy touching!"
Q: Do you have a ship?
Bubbles: Not really. I'm a fangirl more than a shipper. I was writing really warped Mary Sues in high school. I want all the boys to myself. I really don't care who ends up with who. Although I do hope Lupin hooks up with someone. In stories like these, the alternative to hooking up is usually death. There's going to be a sad little Bubbles if Lupin joins the ranks of dead canines.
Q: Wolves aren't canines.
Bubbles: Neither are werewolves. Don't be retentive.
Q: What about RPS?
Bubbles: Well, I wouldn't go there, but I know people do. Then again, we associate actors so much with the characters they play that the line between "real person" and "fictional person" is really, really blurry. After all, the pictures at the Dom-Land feature the faces of the actors, albeit in character, and I use bits and pieces from articles and interviews with the actors. But really, it's a lot funnier to see Gandalf with Ian McKellan's face as a goalie than just plain Ian McKellan as a goalie.
Q: Do you feel obligated to your fans?
Bubbles: I'm kind of uncomfortable calling them 'fans.' I prefer 'readers.' Actually I feel bad that I don't respond to their emails. They don't email that often, so I should be able to get to them, but I don't. I'm just really, really crap about answering email. I'm just lucky the Dom-Land readers are pretty undemanding.
Q: Do you worry about getting sued?
Bubbles: Sometimes. I'd hate to have to take my site down. I've worked for nearly two years on it.
To email me, click the penguin
handsqueeziedeath@yahoo.com
© 2004 F.B. Pendergast
Last updated 12/19/2004