Perpetual Food Coma, James Bond Fluff Fanfiction

Interviews by Fans
Title:	Perpetual Food Coma, James Bond Fluff Fanfiction
Interviewer:	"an anonymous student"
Interviewee:	PerpetualFoodComa
Date(s):	April 17, 2015
Medium:	online
Fandom(s):	James Bond, others
External Links:	Perpetual Food Coma, James Bond Fluff Fanfiction, Archived version
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Perpetual Food Coma, James Bond Fluff Fanfiction is an interview with fanfiction author PerpetualFoodComa by an anonymous student.

The interview was done for "Fanfiction: Transformative Works from Shakespeare to Sherlock," a class at Princeton University taught by Anne Jamison, and posted on the course's webpage.

Excerpts

... Bond is such a traditional masculine character. Is there an appeal in terms of turning that masculinity into fluff?

Of course. It’s funny. A lot of humor can come from taking a very conventional ideal of what the characters should be and turning it on its head. It’s classic subverting of conventions. This is the writing equivalent of drawing characters as cheebies [Editor’s note: if you don’t know what this is, Google Image search it. It’s really hard to describe it in words].

Also, you know how with the new James Bond movies, the directors made a big deal out of making it darker and grittier and less campy? You always have to keep the body of James Bond, but the clothes you dress it in are interchangeable. If you can reboot Bond and turn it from campy into dark, you can also dress it up as fluff.

So fanfiction is like wearing flippers when swimming.

For me. That’s part of the reason I’ve tried to do it less since getting more serious about my writing. I want to be a professional writer, so I have to spend most of my creative energies on that. If I was working a 9-5 in a law firm, I’d spend a lot more of my creative energies into fanfiction, because there’d be a lot less guilt in spending my creative energy on that.

Don’t get me wrong though, fanfiction still allows you to practice your craft, but it produces less of a tangible product.

I’m reminded of something: George R. R. Martin discouraged a lot of people from writing fanfiction of A Song of Ice and Fire because he thought it would make your creative muscles weaker. He encouraged people to write their own original characters and worlds instead, in order to keep their creative muscles strong.

Have you read any good fanfiction that upended your expectations of what fanfiction could be?

Both of them were Harry Potter fanfictions, actually. I was in high school, and they were the most memorable and transformative in terms of giving me an idea of what fanfiction could be. The first one is To Children Ardent for Some Desperate Glory. It’s really well-written and really literary. I don’t know how well it would hold up if I read it again, but it gave me the idea that fanfiction could have serious literary merit besides just something fun. It ticks a lot of boxes I didn’t know fanfiction could tick. The other one is this series called The Denarian Renegade. That’s a crossover between Harry Potter and Dresden Files. It’s a quarter of a million words. It’s pretty run-of-the-mill fantasy adventure, where Harry gets magical powers, then fights off enemies. What stuck out to me was that someone was able to create a fanfiction series that ended up being a long, fully fleshed out fantasy series in fanfiction form. It’s fanfiction brought to the level of being just as strong if not stronger than published writing.