Slashcast Metachat with Jackie and Kath -- Age and Slashers

Interviews by Fans
Title:	Slashcast Metachat with Jackie and Kath -- Age and Slashers
Interviewer:	charlottechaos
Interviewee:	Jackie (jcho) nd Kath (katho)
Date(s):	May 27, 2006
Medium:	online transcript, podcast
Fandom(s):	Harry Potter, anime
External Links:	online transcript here, Archived version
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Slashcast Metachat with Jackie and Kath -- Age and Slashers is a 2006 interview at Slashcast. The interviewee is charlottechaos.

For more in this series, see Slashcast Interview Series.

Introduction

Today we're going to discuss 'The Great Divide' or 'Slash: The Choice of the New Generation.' It seems these days that any discussion of fanfiction seems to eventually boil down to questions of age of fanfic writers. Younger writers often feel rebuffed by older fans over quality of writing or quality of plots and older fans often feel irritated by younger fans over topic of legality or criticism that they shouldn't be participating in what some might deem a children's book fandom. So I wanted to start off by kinda of talking about what we think the reality of it is. There seems to be at least the perception that slash fans are in general older. How old do we think, when we're talking about older people in fandom, at what point do you think people become that older age that start getting critical of younger writers?

Note: in the end, the interview did not really discuss the topics above but instead focused on age disclaimers, legalisms, and navigating Harry Potter fanfiction as an underage fan.

Some Topics Discussed

• fan age and fandom
• self-insertion
• fandoms and the ages of fans in them
• anime
• Harry Potter
• age disclaimers

Excerpts

Kath: Um, well I don't even know if it is, like, older people who are critical of younger writers. I think even people who are younger writers are critical of writers who are younger than them anyway, but I think the, like, old line might be the mid-twenties. Yea, probably. I've never really been able to figure that one out.

Char: What counts as old and what counts as young, I guess. I kind of looked over my own friends list and to me, it seemed like most of the people on Live Journal who'd friended me, presumably mostly for slash since I write very little het, were somewhere between 18 and 24, which I think is probably about average for most slash fans. What do you guys think?

Jackie: Yea, that was with anime. And, um, I was sort of on the younger verge then, and then I stayed in it and when I was in my mid-teens I kept meeting people that were younger than me when I started out. It's a lot different from what I see. And then getting into the Harry Potter stuff, I'm noticing that a lot of the slash fans are a lot, well, maybe not a lot older than me, because I'm older too.

Kath: Well, I think Harry Potter fans- I think it kind of, for some of them, it just takes them a while. Once you read the books and you're like- well, I read the books when I was 12 and I think right after you read them, why'd you be going to fandom is looking at the books, and if you haven't had a lot of experience with fandom, which I hadn't - I read Harry Potter before I had a computer. So I didn't have a lot of fandom experience at the time and at first, I think, you just kind of want to talk about canon ships a little bit more unless you already have experience with slash so that it kind of occurs to you more readily. I had to find it. I didn't know- Harry Potter's my only fandom and I didn't know it existed until I found it in Harry Potter.

Char: Well, I will say, though, and this kind of brings me to the next kind of segment of what I wanted to talk about here, because I really don't tend to look at the ages, but I will say that - I guess it was about a year and a half ago, there was a big issue with a couple 14 year olds who were mod-ing adult communities on Live Journal and, you know, writing smut fics. And, to me, that's really where it gets to be a problem, you know. Because that is actually really illegal, for us to read and, you know, to participate in fandom that way and I totally understand, you know, being 14 and curious and wanting to write and participate in these fandoms, but I think a lot of the attitude that you get from older fans kinda comes from being burned like that, by younger fans that really just kind of don't think through the consequences of the people that are reading this.

Jackie: Yea, generally you see that, but I don't know. It's something that I've noticed a lot in other fandoms. Just generally, older fans will like a sort of more mature sort of pairing, I don't know. Not so much in Harry Potter do you see it. You notice it somewhat with, like, the Snarry fans. I noticed that a lot of them seem to be on the older side.

Kath: I was thinking about that and I honestly have no idea. When- 'cause I don't think what I was looking for when I was 14 or 13 in a fic and what I'm looking for now has changed a whole lot. I think it might have changed since I very first came into fandom and had no idea, really, what fic I wanted to read, but since I figured out what kind of fic I want to read, the pairings might change, but the fic itself really hasn't changed that much, so I totally can't say.