The Verge 2017 Interview with Flourish Klink
| Interviews by Fans | |
|---|---|
| Title: | The Verge 2017 Interview with Flourish Klink |
| Interviewer: | |
| Interviewee: | Kaitlyn Tiffany |
| Date(s): | June 17, 2017 |
| Medium: | online |
| Fandom(s): | |
| External Links: | The Verge 2017 Interview with Flourish Klink
Wayback link |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
The Verge 2017 Interview with Flourish Klink is embedded in an article by Kaitlyn Tiffany in "The Verge" called "Crowdsourced definitions of ‘fan fiction’ hint at a sprawling, formless genre: The creators of the Fansplaining podcast do a loose academic study."
See the interview itself for the links embedded in it.
Some Topics Discussed
- Flourish Klink and Elizabeth Minkel, co-hosts of the fandom podcast Fansplaining
- discussion about the 3,564 responses to their survey about the definitions of fan fiction, see Fansplaining: Defining Fanfiction: The Survey, Episode 46
- "It’s not like fan fiction was just invented on Tumblr. Fan fiction, depending on how you define it, of course, has been around for a really long time."
- Master of the Universe, Fifty Shades of Grey, After, Carry On
- the longest fic ever written: The Subspace Emissary's Worlds Conquest (4,061,129 words)
- discussion of some "pro works" and whether they fit the definition of fanfic
- fandom, fanworks and visibility
- much more!
Excerpts
What’s your background in fandom? Why did you decide to do this research?
I started off as a fan, running a major Harry Potter fan-fic website, and through that met this guy Henry Jenkins who’s one of the founders of fan studies. I did grad school with him. And then Fansplaining is a podcast that the journalist Elizabeth Minkel and I have been doing for almost two years now. We have two episodes every month and they’re an hour each, and we talk to fans and people who work in the entertainment industry.
Before this, we ran another survey that was about people’s favorite tropes in fan fiction. That was a shorter survey, and it was taken by about 10,000 people. And through that we got a lot of attention from folks. Fandom really loves taking surveys and hearing about themselves. So when we did this one all we had to do was say, “Hey, here we are, we’re doing this survey.”
Please be clear on this, this is not a scientific survey or anything. Honestly, it’s just for fun. I say this as a serious researcher: this is not actual research that I would rely on for anything but it can help us to get a baseline idea. If I really wanted to do this for real, it would have to be promoted in different ways and we would have to make sure that it was representative and well-designed.
Was there anything you saw in the responses that surprised you?
It was remarkable — and again this is highly unscientific — that people who had entered fandom in the ‘90s were much more likely to talk about fan fiction as being not-for-profit, as being separate from the creators, and separate from the powers that be. Again, I’m not saying that this is a watertight case, but I thought that was a very interesting correlation that appeared. If I was going to do another study that was more scientific, I would definitely have that as a hypothesis now.
I was a little surprised that so many people mentioned that fan fiction can be of any length. Other types of stories, other types of novels, poetry, etc., those things all have limited length. They have to be a certain length in order to be published. Fan fiction can be any length that you want, from 100 words all the way up to literally the longest work of fiction ever written. That’s a formal aspect of fan-fic that I was not very attentive to, but Elizabeth was like “of course, duh.”
You mentioned in the results that there’s been some overlap between fan fiction and the entertainment industry in the last few years. What do you think is causing that?
The blend between fan fiction and professional fiction wouldn’t exist if not for changing ideas about fandom and changing understandings of fan fiction on the part of the public. Not just entertainment. Personally, I think this has to do with the advent of the internet and the fact that now more people have access to this tiny subculture. In the past, in the ‘80s, you had to be a big enough nerd to go to science fiction conventions and find the fan fiction that people were selling in zine format. With the internet, you no longer have to do that. You can stumble upon it, and more and more people have done that. It’s become normalized.
And in the process of that, the entertainment industry has seen that fan fiction is a great breeding ground for new talent and that it actually serves to promote the things that it’s about. Of course there are lots of other reasons to write fan-fic besides coming to participate in the commercial enterprise, but from an industry perspective that’s why it matters.
Can you explain that phrase? “The serial numbers rubbed off?”
So, you know when you steal a car? Stolen engine parts or whatever, they have serial numbers on them so that they can be traced. If you rub the serial numbers off, you don’t know where it came from, you can’t trace it. When people rub the serial numbers off their fan-fic, what that means is they take out all the things that make it fan-fic and just leave the story itself, the archetypes of the characters, and rename everything. Fifty Shades of Grey is like this. It started off as fan-fic with Edward and Bella, [E.L. James] rubbed the serial numbers off, and now it’s a professionally published story.
There are a bunch of other examples, but unfortunately when people “rub the serial numbers off,” often they don’t want it to be very public. Fifty Shades was the first one where that was very public.