Interview with riseofthefallenone

Interviews by Fans
Title:	Interview with riseofthefallenone
Interviewer:	Joshua Khuvis, Tessa Myren, Vanessa Solis, Stephanie Jeong
Interviewee:	riseofthefallenone
Date(s):	April/May 2015
Medium:	online
Fandom(s):	Supernatural
External Links:	Interview with riseofthefallenone, Archived version
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Interview with riseofthefallenone was conducted in 2015 by Joshua Khuvis, Tessa Myren, Vanessa Solis, Stephanie Jeong as part of a college class assignment at Princeton University. The assignment was due April 29, and the interview was posted to the class blog on May 6.

riseofthefallenone is the writer if the SPN fanfic Out of the Deep.

Excerpts

How did you get started in fandom and writing? I’ve been writing for as long as I can remember. I tried writing fanfiction for things like DragonballZ or Digimon when I was much younger, but never finished anything or really put much thought into it – plus there was always that Mary-Sue self-insert so “I” could hook up with the character I had the biggest crush on. I’ve kind of been skirting fandoms for the most part my whole life. I read fanfic, read the manga or watched the anime/show, I had merchandise and dressed up as Sailor Moon for Hallowe’en. But I was never really a part of fandom. I didn’t go to forums, post fanfic, talk with other people in the fandom. I was just a ghost. There, but not really. I never even really knew about fandom until I came to Tumblr. I came to Tumblr thanks to Sherlock. I watched the first two seasons, flipped my lid at the ending of season two, and was desperate for anything Sherlock. If a friend had never mentioned to me the fact that I should stay away from the fandom on Tumblr, I probably never would have caved and investigated it. Through the people I followed, I eventually found Supernatural.

Did you post OotD with the original intention to eventually publish the fic? Honestly? No. I had no idea that it was even a possibility since it was fanfic of all things. And even fanfic is a gray area with copyrights and everything. If so, why? If not, what made you change your mind? I almost hate to say this, but it probably had to do with 50 Shades of Grey. I’ve never read the book, but it became a huge thing around the time OotD was beginning and growing. It got out that 50 Shades was originally Twilight fanfic and that really opened my eyes to the possibility of publishing something that I’ve been working really hard on and devoted tons of time to, even if it started out as a fanfic. Following that, a bunch of my readers started commenting that if OotD was a book, then they’d buy it. Others were telling me that it was so good that it should be it’s own original story. Some were begging me to publish it. And that kind of boosted my courage into hopefully one day making that a reality.

To what extent was this language created/used to add a deeper meaning to the fic? I really wanted to make it obvious that Cas was just from a completely different place and had a whole different perspective on the world than the humans. What better way to do that then for him not to have the same kind of vocabulary? I took a great deal of delight out of doing my best to describe an everyday object without using words that I would know but a fin-kin wouldn’t. Cas doesn’t have a word for plastic, or for a screen, so trying to describe a computer monitor was fun. I used to test it out on my friends by sending them a description of something and asking if they could tell what it was from that alone. They were often right. Using language like that displaced the reader. It really puts them into Cas’s head space to see and understand the world through fin-kin eyes. That was my ultimate goal when I made the decision to change up his vocabulary from what we’re all used to.