Interview: Kouri Arashi

Interviews by Fans
Title:	Interview: Kouri Arashi
Interviewer:	Gigi Kiersten
Interviewee:	Kouri Arashi (gingersnapwolves)
Date(s):	May 11, 2015
Medium:	online
Fandom(s):	Teen Wolf
External Links:	Interview: Kouri Arashi page one, Archived version Interview: Kouri Arashi page two, Archived version
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Interview: Kouri Arashi is a 2015 interview at Fannishery.

Kouri Arashi is a Teen Wolf fan.

Introduction

Kouri Arashi or gingersnapwolves is one of the most popular authors in the Teen Wolf fandom. Kouri Arashi has been writing original stories and fanfiction for years, but she really didn’t start to catch everyone’s attention until she wrote the fanfic story, “Coming Undone.” The fic itself snowballed in a huge juggernaut, “The Sum of It’s Part Series.” Kouri Arashi managed to take what weathered and professional writers who were writing for the actual tv show and make her own fantastic mini-canon that is more well thought and planned with its own mythos than the actual show.

Excerpts

So how long have you been in fandom?

I first started writing fanfiction when I was 13, and that was before I even had the internet.That was for seaQuest DSV (I was so into Lucas Wolenczak it isn’t even funny). A few years later, when the internet was getting bigger, was when I got into anime. My friends and I created a Fushigi Yuugi fansite and wrote a ton of FY fanfic (mostly silly crackfic or self-insertion fic, because, you know, we were sixteen). To this day I have no idea whether or not anyone ever visited those websites.

In your most recent stories in the series, you have been adding some elements from the past two seasons. One of them is Malia Tate and Jennifer Blake. Malia especially, is the most controversial character in the fandom right now, what made you take the chance and write her into your series?

The thing is (and this is going to sound terrible), I’m not really interested in Malia. I just wanted a way to bring Peter Hale back into the series. I’m an enormous Peter Hale fan, as some of my other writing makes evident, and I really missed the opportunity to have him interact with the other characters, particularly Stiles. Him having a biological daughter was a way I could get him back into the story. Malia herself has a very small role, and I don’t really plan to bring her in much beyond her brief appearances. I hate the way TW canon writes her, so even when I do include her, it basically has nothing to do with canon Malia.

Since season three of Teen Wolf there has been a diffident rift between the fandom and the show, how has that helped or hampered writing the TSOIP series so far?

I stopped watching after 3A, so I’m only peripherally aware of what’s happening in canon, but I don’t know that it’s really changed much. I think Sterek fans will always read Sterek fic, regardless of what happens in canon. And since I’ve basically been ignoring 75% of canon since the very beginning, it hasn’t really affected my writing very much.

The element that makes the TSOIP stand out the most from other sterek fics is that Derek and Stiles are in an asexual open relationship, what was your inspiration for that?

I sort of flipped and flopped on the Sterek in TSOIP at first, and you can sort of see it in the first few fics. It was intended to be gen, not a pairing at all, but then they just had this vibe together that felt really good to me. Then I thought about making it a traditional Sterek fic, but for some reason that didn’t feel right. Kind of hard to say why. I love Sterek and I’ve written it in other fics, but in TSOIP it just didn’t seem to work. It took me the better part of three fics to figure out that TSOIP!Derek is asexual. And then everything made perfect sense. I’m in an asexual relationship myself, so a lot of how I write them is based on my relationship with my girlfriend.