Allusiovaults: Yes, As In transcript

Listen to this episode via theallusionist.org/yes-as-in

This is the Allusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, kiss linguistic frogs.

Thanks to all of you who have so far sent me your thoughts about your names – all so compelling, as the topic of our names always is. There’ll be an episode soon with this stuff in it, and I’ll reply to everyone beforehand to check whether you’re comfortable for me to include you; you can actually remain anonymous too if you wish, because the most interesting things are your feelings about your name, even if we don’t include it. To contribute, contact me in writing or voice form via theallusionist.org/contact by, let’s say, 10 November 2026. 

A friend of the show, and a friend in real life, recently died: Andrea Warner, who you can find out more about via the CBC where she was a music journalist, and the archives of the Pop This! podcast which she cohosted for a decade, and the several books she wrote, and her website theandreawarner.com. I’ll be honest: the grief has been making my brain work slowly, so I need to take a little extra time, and the next couple of episodes will be taken from the Allusiovaults.

Today’s is from the first Name Season I did, in 2018, and it is one of my all time favourite Allusionists. At the time I made it, I had just spent 3½ weeks in hospital in Tasmania with the glamorous ailment that is a retropharyngeal abscess – uncommon in the over-5s apparently, the then-38-year-old me was quite the medical curiosity. It was pretty gross and quite dangerous, and took a long time to feel well again, but as I edged away from the hospital and back towards my life, it really was a balm to make this episode. Not least because it is really fun and pretty funny. It is called Yes, As In, and features several people who have names which are more regularly used as common nouns and adjectives. 

Coming up in the Allusioverse, which you can join at theallusionist.org/donate, we have a watchalong of the excellent Agatha Christie adaptation Witness for the Prosecution, the 1957 Billy Wilder film version with Marlene Dietrich; we have livestreams where I read from my collection of weird old reference books, and maybe from my old school reports and notebooks from 1986 that my mum just unearthed. We’re also watching the current seasons of the Great British Bake Off and Canadian variant, and every week you get my drawings of Paul Hollywood in the style of medieval marginalia. And for $5 or more per month, you can get an ad free version of the show. AND your contributions help keep this independent podcast going. So get all that at theallusionist.org/donate – and gift subscriptions are also available, for the pallusionists in your life.

On with the show.

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CINNAMON NIPPARD: People remember your name when you have an unusual name which is good for the most part, but it's kind of bad if you've done something stupid or embarrassing. And when I was a little kid I wished I had a normal name, like Kate or something like that.

CASPAR SALMON: So I have to spell it the whole time. In Starbucks they will never get it right, and I get ‘Buster’, ‘Pasta’...

SAPPHIRE PASTON: When I order a coffee and they write my name on the cup, I say I’m called Sophie, because it makes life a bit easier sometimes.

HZ: Do you like or dislike having an unusual name?
PAUL BAE: I like it. I used to hate it. I used to remember thinking a long time ago, if I was a woman, I would marry a man with a really cool last name so I could take his name, because I hate my name that much. I would daydream about that.

HZ: What is your name?
TIGER WEBB: My name is Tiger Webb.
HZ: Tiger as in tiger?
TIGER WEBB: Tiger like the animal or the golfer.
HZ: Is it the name that you were given when you came into this world?
TIGER WEBB: Yes.
HZ: Your official name.
TIGER WEBB: Yes. The story is that I was born 17 weeks early, or 15 weeks early, so that's a trimester and a bit; which is kind of a big deal now, and it was definitely a big deal in the 80s when this happened. I was born and it was very touch and go for a few weeks, six or eight weeks. I was in this humidity crib, there are photos of me I look like E.T. the extraterrestrial: I'm not a fully cooked baby. Overcome with sentimentality – also pethidine because it was quite a difficult pregnancy – mum said, "You've got to fight for your life like a tiger." And that was the story that's been said ad nauseam my whole life.
HZ: But it worked. Here you are. You survived.
TIGER WEBB: Yeah, I'm not dead!
HZ: Do you find it quite an inspiring story to have attached your name?
TIGER WEBB: No? No, no. Not at all. You tell it so often and it's so hard to – like I wasn't doing anything. I don't really remember any of this. I was not an active agent, Helen.
HZ: And it's hard for babies to be active agents in their own medical care. Yes.
TIGER WEBB: Yes. And people say, “Wow, that's so great you were so strong." I guess? Probably it was just the luckiness of being born in a pretty good hospital that could handle a baby that premature.
HZ: Weren't you lucky that your mom chose the image of a tiger fighting for its life, rather than a cockroach being resilient?
TIGER WEBB: Yeah! I could have been Cockroach!

PRINCESS OJIAKU: Hi, my name is Princess, as in her majesty. How do I feel about it? I like having a unique name. People are like, “Oh, I won’t forget your name!” I always get like a little kick out of seeing people's reactions to it.
I do overall like having an unusual name. But I think it took me a while to come around to not feeling weird about it, liking it. I always tell people that, “Oh, you know, my dad's Nigerian, there's a lot of people named Princess who are West African Nigerian.” I think there was a time when I was younger that I felt kind of weird about it; there was one particular instance where one of my friends was telling me he was talking to his dad about me and his dad was predictably, “Oh Princess, that's her name?” And he was like, “Yeah, dad, she's black.” And that made me feel kind of weird, like, do people think my name is quote unquote ghetto? But as I got older and learned a little bit more about history and tradition, there's a lot of people of African descent, African people in the African diaspora around the world, who name their children very descriptive names, and that's the thing: very unique names that just fit the time, fit who they are, aspirations. Being a part of that tradition is really important and meaningful to me. And I love the fact that I'm a part of that.

STEVE PRETTY: My name is Steve Pretty. And yes, that is ‘pretty’ as in pretty girl, ‘Pretty Fly for a White Guy’, and so on. The name Pretty was my birth name. It's what I was born with. I am a performer, a musician and performer, so sometimes people think it's a slightly misjudged stage name but it's not: it is my real name. Growing up I had all the usual schoolyard taunts and so on. But to be honest it just washed over me after a while; they’re mainly not very original or or funny. But when I was at university I ran for election to run the student union for a year, and my posters, the slogan was “not just a pretty face”. But of course I had them all graffitied, as everyone did. And so it was “not even a pretty face”, “pretty ugly” and so on; fine, easy. But then I did see one which I took down and kept, I've still got it, which someone had just written over my face: “I am an ugly cunt”, which I thought was a really nice bit of interaction with that name, Pretty.

LOVEIS WISE: My name is Loveis, last name Wise, as in the quote by Bertrand Russell: “Love is wise, hatred is foolish.” That name was chosen for me by my father after my great-grandmother, Loveis Edwards, and I'm just happy to have inherited her name. I feel that it was meant to be. Now I feel as an adult that my name was perfectly fitting for me and who I am; I can't imagine it any other way. But before, it would really bother me that my name was so different and I couldn't walk into stores and see my name on keychains or knick-knacks or even not having anyone else to connect to because my name was just so different from anyone else or it was always like a butt of a joke or people turned it into songs, just all of these like crazy things; but now I appreciate it.

PEREGRINE ANDREWS: My name is Peregrine Andrews, Yes, that's Peregrine as in peregrine falcon. My relationship with my name is complicated, and I think my name has probably had quite a bearing on the person that I am; not always in good ways actually. There were certainly times when I was growing up – and even when I was older than that – when I really wished I was not called that. And I grew up in the 70s and 80s, and unusual names in the UK just did not seem to be that common as they are now. So if you met a new group of children or you were in a new situation, it would go round the circle, "What's your name everybody?" And, you know, Darren and Nigel and Mark and Stephen and Paul; and then I would just be willing to die basically, or pretend I was called something else, or maybe use my middle name which is James – but I always felt that that would be sort of giving in. So yeah, there was this complication; there was this baggage that I probably could have done without, actually. I always had the voice of my father in my head saying, "It's a fantastic name, you should be proud of it." Well, in certain situations I really wasn't. I just found it really embarrassing.

HZ: What's your name?
PAUL BAE: My name is Paul Bae.
HZ: As in B A E.
PAUL BAE: As in B A E – it's Korean. So it's actually pronounced ‘beh’, which is how we say ‘stomach’ or ‘tummy’.
HZ: So your name is Paul Stomach?
PAUL BAE: Yeah. Paul Tummy. I was born hungry.
HZ: But then in English, mid 2014, its usage started peaking, as in the internet’s boyfriend.
PAUL BAE: Yeah, I was near the end of my teaching career in high school, and that's when ‘bae' really took off. I'm not saying that contributed to my early retirement, but it did get really annoying.
HZ: What happened?
PAUL BAE: Whenever I got new students in or transferred to my class, in 2014 I think it was around then, the first of the latter half of 2014 – this was in Vancouver, and whenever especially when a girl would transfer, I remember one, she transferred in, I go, “Hi, my name's Mr. Bae.” And she sort of smirked, and I thought, “What the hell does that mean. Like what is that?” I remember the day I figured it out: a bunch of young girls were out assembled outside my classroom, and I could hear them whispering, “That's not really his name, is it? He's got to be joking?”
Because before then, the big thing among my students was, once in a while, the cheeky bastards would call me “Master Bae.” That’s that's their idea of funny, and I'd see them giggling and winking at each other, and I’m like, okay, I get it.

TIGER WEBB: The broad thing about having unusual name is that it's a pretty effective substitute for an actual personality. I never had to develop one, because you could just do anything and people assume you’re interesting, or that there is some sort of grandiosity behind it.
HZ: Very colourful character.
TIGER WEBB: I'm really very boring and quiet. And the fact that I'm called Tiger I think does a lot to mask that. "Oh wow. Tiger, yeah, interesting fellow." I'm not though. But feel free to think that. Also, I’m in a weird class with this unusual name, because absolutely nothing else demographically speaking about me is unusual. You know like boring middle class white guy.

PEREGRINE: When you have a name like Peregrine, you feel like you have to be a writer or a painter or something. And that actually – I think that's created a certain amount of baggage for me; sometimes I feel it's almost like if you're going to have a name as interesting as that, then you need to be doing something interesting and if you're not the most interesting person in the room then how dare you be called something so weird.

DENNIS FUNK: My name is Dennis Funk.
HZ: As in funk?
DENNIS FUNK: As in funk, however you want to take that.
HZ: How do you take it?
DENNIS FUNK: Because people do find it silly, I like to take it as the music, like funk music. So I like to think of it that way. My name is Dennis Funk, but my middle initial is J, so I often do tell people that my name is D.J. Funk, so that it spins it like that a little bit I guess.
HZ: So the Funk name runs in the family?
DENNIS FUNK: Yeah I guess I guess it does, doesn't it.
HZ: Does the funk run in the family?
DENNIS FUNK: Oh yeah, definitely.

PHOEBE JUDGE: My name is Phoebe Judge. Yes, as in a judge. I feel pretty good about my last name. I think it’s a funny last name to have, given I’m the host of a show about crime. I think it's a pretty strong name, Judge, it's much better than ‘convict’.

CASPAR SALMON: My name is Caspar Salmon.
HZ: As in ‘salmon’?
CASPAR SALMON: Yes, as in salmon the fish. It's a family name. But we're not named after the actual fish, which I think is an important distinction. It's not like there were salmon fishers in the family – it doesn't go back to a history of connection with the fish. I think it comes from the from Solomon. It's a derivation – Solomon, Suleiman – all of that. It's Jewish but then it became Salmon, stupidly, which isn't good.
HZ: In what ways is it not good?
CASPAR SALMON: Well, I mean, it's fine, but it's not a very attractive or noble name.
HZ: It's a mighty fish, a very muscular fish.
CASPAR SALMON: It's a really good fish and a brave and determined fish, and the finest tasting I think of all of them.
HZ:  But. You just don't want to be affiliated with fish.
CASPAR SALMON: Well, no. So I'm fine with it. But I do forget, because it's my name, that is the name of a fish. So I just walk around and I think this is my normal surname, and then I'd tell my name to people and they'd say, "The fish?" And I have to think to myself, “Fuck, yes, of course, it's the fish name.”

CINNAMON NIPPARD: My name is Cinnamon, as in the spice. How do I feel about it? I think I felt conflicted about my name since I was small. When I was a child, kids teased me about my name: doughnuts, buns, sticks, bark, etc etc etc. I guess I like my name now, although sometimes I feel other people have some kind of romantic notion about what I'm actually like because of my name. So yeah, maybe I have name imposter syndrome or something.
Some people ask me if it's a stage name, and I have been told it's kind of a stripper name. So yeah, there's a lot of associations people have with my name. People have asked me whether I am spicy, and they think they're being smart or funny – and sometimes it's hard to be cool about it when I've probably heard most of those things before, because I've had this name all my life.

PRINCESS OJIAKU: People say one of three things when they meet me. First of all, people always say, “Is that your real name?” and I'm always like, “Yeah, it’s on my birth certificate. It's my government name, yes: Princess.” The other thing people usually say is, “Are you really a princess?” I mean, I don't know, it’s so corny that I don't know, I just alternate between yes and no, depending on my mood. The other thing people say is, “You look like a princess.” I get that one less often, but I'm not quite sure what that means. I just take it to mean that they think I'm pretty, like pretty pretty princess. But I'll take that one. And I have gotten, “Oh, my pet's name is Princess, that's my dog.” And that’s fine. It’s just an interesting thing to say to someone, “Oh yeah, that's my dog's name.”

PEREGRINE ANDREWS: People would say it wrong, and then they would say 'Pedigree Chum', which they thought was quite funny, and of course 'peregrine falcon' – the number of times they'd say "peregrine falcon" as if no one's ever thought of that. Of course I then respond as if no one has ever thought of that. "Peregrine falcon! No one's ever called me that, wow.”

TIGER WEBB: You say your name is Tiger and then people will be like, "Oh, I know one William Blake poem! Guess which one it is! 'Tyger Tyger, Burning Bright’,” and then they recite it at you. That's a rude thing to do as well. Like I've never learned anyone's name and then done a poem at them.

HZ: How was it, growing up with the name ‘Caspar Salmon’?
CASPAR SALMON: Growing up was okay, because I went to school in France.
HZ: Were you tempted to translate it for impact in France to Saumon?
CASPAR SALMON: Yeah, that could have been a way forward, but it depends on how you pronounce it in French, because saLmon is best for teasing – because if you if you pronounce it Sel-mon instead of Sal-mon, you could call me "Casse-toi sale mon" which means "Piss off you twat".
HZ: Oh, so it's actually worse in French.
CASPAR SALMON: Well, it just it has that possibility, if you want to take it; it doesn't occur to everybody, and it would be wrong for me to suggest it to people who haven’t thought of it for themselves.

TIGER WEBB: I did have a really annoying period in my late teens when my high school friends at parties decided it would be very funny to interrupt my "Yes it's really Tiger, here's my license" and go, "Oh Gareth! Are you telling that story again about how you're called Tiger? This is our friend Gareth; he does this to everyone. It's a fake license. His real name is Gareth, he’s ashamed of it." And that's a really hard thing to walk back.

EMERALD PASTON: Hello, my name is Emerald. Yes, as in the precious stone, or the Isle, or the Pokemon game. My parents wanted to give me a name that was a little bit unusual, and because my mum is Chinese Malaysian, they wanted to be able to translate my name into Mandarin; so they chose the name Emerald, and my middle name is the Mandarin translation of ‘green precious stone'.
Apart from the occasional person asking if my parents are hippies, or telling me that I have a stripper name, the only truly annoying reaction to my name was when I tried to get in touch with a grumpy professor for work. I was emailing him and I wasn't getting a reply; and eventually he responded saying that my email had gone to his junk folder, and then he said something like, “As you can imagine I get a lot of spam mail from women with exotic names like Emerald trying to Skype me.” So gross. But to be honest, I actually feel sorry for the guy: his spam filters are clearly far too sensitive, and he's probably missing out on some really great conversations with people who have jewels for names.
Oh and I have a younger sister, and her name is – you guessed it – Sapphire!

SAPPHIRE PASTON: My name is Sapphire, yes, as in the precious gemstone. So we knew whose stuff was whose, my parents would always assign Emerald the green things and me the blue things. I generally like my name, I think it stands out. The downside is, when I introduce myself to people, I sometimes worry that I come across as a bit hubristic, as if I think I’m a big deal or like it’s a stage name or something.

TIGER WEBB: When you have an unusual name and there is one famous person who has that name, their deeds have an outsized influence on your life. So when Tiger Woods – and his real name is Eldrick by the way – when he was revealed to be quite a serial philanderer and maybe not the nice person people thought he was, I remember going to the bank and the teller said, "What's your name?" I said Tiger Webb. And then she said "Oh well, it's not a good time to be called Tiger, is it?" Which I thought was just like a total breach of bank teller protocol.
HZ: But if you felt like you had been besmirched by his shame, do you also get a share of his glory?
TIGER: No, no; it does not go that way. It's all one way – and no sponsorship money, certainly.

CASPAR SALMON: There's no salmon-connected shame. It's not like salmon was suddenly the poisonous fish at any point.
HZ: I do feel sorry for them for having given themselves such difficult mating habits. because swimming upriver for hundreds of miles is very difficult. I've seen some of them try and they just kept my headbutting themselves on rocks and stuff trying to jump up.
CASPAR SALMON: I know. So many die. And all of that is just to get laid and then die. But I also find it oddly inspirational. I'm really like "Go salmon! They can do it! That's right." And I relate rather to the struggle. And I myself have the skill of weaving through large crowds that are going in the opposite direction. And I feel like that can't be a coincidence. It's predestination.
HZ: Do you feel like you know your search for human sexual contact is identifiable in the salmon's difficult upriver mating?
CASPAR SALMON: Fully. Yes.

LOVEIS WISE: I do feel that my name, Loveis Wise, fits my work and the journey of me becoming an artist or an illustrator or joining a creative job. I don't feel that I built my life on that; but I do feel like it was perfectly aligned. I can't imagine having this name and doing anything else, other than a creative field. Also on another note about my name, I do feel that it has made me more empathetic in a way to others, or more loving and more lovable. It's become a huge part of why I am the way that I am I think, in some weird way. But then again, I do believe in the power of words and what you speak. When you speak of something being of love, it can't be anything other than that, to me. I feel like my name manifested in a way who I’ve become and the loving person that I am, the understanding person that I try to be, or that I strive to be. But yeah; I do appreciate my name for that, and the goodness that is brought to my life, or how it's shaped who I am as a person.

PEREGRINE ANDREWS: I like having an unusual name now, but it's taken until the age of nearly 50 to be at peace with my name Peregrine. Am I at peace with it now? I think I am now. The environment we're in now is that there are a lot of unusual names, there are a lot of names from other countries, and being called Peregrine does doesn't seem that strange really in the context of other names.

DENNIS FUNK: Often when someone takes my ID or something, you know, when I go to a bar or something like that, the doorman will often just say, “Cool name.” And I don't know how to respond to that. “Thank you, that's who I am”?
HZ: I think you do like a little cheesy finger point, don't you?
DENNIS FUNK: I could, I could. “Hey, that's me. Yeah I'm your guy, DJ Funk, I'm here.” No, but it's strange to me. I just feel very lost in those moments like, what am I actually supposed to say to you? How am I supposed to react to that being my name? Because it doesn't mean anything to me. I'll just write it on a piece of paper every now and again.
HZ: Less and less: how much do we use paper now?
DENNIS FUNK: True, true. I type it in a few times every now and again.
HZ: A friend of mine was once in a jazz club and overheard George Melly holding forth saying, “The word ‘funky’ means smelling of stale sex, so when people describe Cliff Richard as funky, I think “He never even smelled of fresh sex!”
DENNIS FUNK: I like that though. I wouldn't mind if that's what people thought when I walked around. I don't know.
HZ: “That that guy smelt like he had sex yesterday.”
DENNIS FUNK: Yeah, “He smells like he had sex yesterday.” Yeah, that's not an insult at all. I’m quite proud of that, actually.
HZ: Do you like or dislike being unusually named?
DENNIS FUNK: I think I used to not like it when I was younger, probably less so, because I don't think I was ever actually conscious of it till I was at school and interacting with more people and like realising, oh, my name maybe does mean something else, and it could be funny. But I think, now, it's a part of me; it's who I am. It's my name. That's it. That's all it is. I don't like or dislike it. I'm kind of neutral about it.
HZ: Never thought “I'll change it”?
DENNIS FUNK: No, no! I've never thought about it. I've never considered it, not once. No.

STEVE PRETTY: Yes, on the whole I'm very happy with being called Pretty. It's quite fun, it's unusual. It's not really ever caused any problems. In terms of whether it describes me in any way: my dad used to remind us growing up that ‘pretty’ in Shakespearean English meant wily and cunning. But I don't think it's ever really been applied in its current meaning of beautiful – maybe ironically it's been applied a couple of times. But beyond that, not really. So yeah, I'm Steve Pretty. That’s my name. I quite like it.

PEREGRINE ANDREWS: I've never been in the same room as another Peregrine and I don't know how I would react to that. People often say, "Oh I know another Peregrine," and I look at them and I think, "Really? There's another one, really?” Part of me gets slightly annoyed by that. I had an experience recently, actually, when I had to speak to an insurance underwriter and she said, "Oh yes, your name is Peregrine, that's a very unusual name." I said yes, it is unusual, and she said, "Yeah yeah, I had a Peregrine in my school actually." And I said, "Where did you go to school?" It turned out that that Peregrine she was talking about was me.
I've never had the experience of hearing my name called and thinking it might be referring to somebody else. I really didn't like that. Peregrine is MY name.

DENNIS FUNK: When you have a name that does stand out or is unusual, people remember you. So you should actually think about maybe a little bit more about how you act in your interactions with people, because when they know your name, you're slightly more memorable to them. Especially when it's interesting. Like people who you may not think all that important might remember you more than you think, just because of your name.

CINNAMON NIPPARD: It's a funny thing having an unusual name. And you just can't escape it.

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Like I said earlier, get in touch if you would like to share your thoughts about your own name, whether for the show or just to get things off your chest privately: theallusionist.org/contact. Also, remember the Draculae miniseries we had earlier this year, about the Icelandic and Swedish versions of Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula? People keep asking me to talk about those books! The Slate podcast Decoder Ring just made an episode about them and I appear in it, and Iris Ichishita, who appeared in Draculae episodes 3 and 4, has brought back her podcast series Power of Darkness which is all about these books, I’m on an episode discussing secret societies, and I’m afraid I did inform Iris about the existence of Pig-gate. Alleged existence. And then this coming week, 5 November 2026, I’ll be talking about the Powers of Darknesses on a panel about translation and truth at the Open University's online conference Telling the truth? Authorship, audiences and authenticity across discourse, texts and narratives. It’s online and registration is free. I’ll link to all of these things at theallusionist.org. 

Your randomly selected word from the dictionary today is… 

hoggin, noun: a mixture of sand and gravel, used especially in road-building.

Try using ‘hoggin’ in an email today.

This episode was produced by me, Helen Zaltzman. The music is by Martin Austwick of palebirdmusic.com and the experimental podcast Neutrino Watch, and the podcast we make together, Answer Me This.

Thanks to Caspar Salmon, Cinnamon Nippard, Dennis Funk, Emerald Paston, Loveis Wise, Paul Bae, Peregrine Andrews, Phoebe Judge, Princess Ojiaku, Sapphire Paston, Steve Pretty and Tiger Webb.

Our ad partner is Multitude. To sponsor this show, whereby I will talk affectionately and persuasively about your product or thing, contact them at multitudeshows.com/ads.

You can listen to or read every episode and get more information about the topics and people therein, see photos of the full dictionary entries for the randomly selected words, contact me to tell me about your name or whatever else you care to share, and donate to receive a bunch of perks and get the ad-free feed and help the show stay afloat, all at the show’s forever home theallusionist.org.

Allusionist 230. Draculae part 4: Transformation transcript

Go to theallusionist.org/transformation to listen to this episode and get a load more information about the topics therein.

This is the Allusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, watch language turn into a bat and fly from my clutches.

This is the fourth episode of our Draculae miniseries, and probably the final one, although it’s not like I’m putting a wooden stake through its heart to put it to eternal rest, so who knows? The other three episodes are about how Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula was contemporarily adapted into Swedish and thence Icelandic with a liberal approach to the source material that has made these texts extra compelling and mysterious to readers in the present; this episode departs from those novels and is more “inspired by”, in a way that is thematically appropriate.

You don’t have to have listened to the rest of the Draculae series to make sense of this one, although do listen to them for a fun and delightfully weird time. They’re all available on your podfeed, same as this one, and at theallusionist.org, where every episode of the show has its own post, containing the transcript, different ways to listen, plus links to the people in the episodes and to some of the materials I’ve perused while researching – there’s loads of interesting stuff related to what’s in this episode, it’s a big topic and smart people have a lot to say about it, so check it out.

Content note: this episode contains some references to – but not descriptions of – sexual content and sex slavery. There is also mention of J.K. Rowling. Let there be no doubt: here at the Allusionist, we want to protect trans rights and trans lives.

On with the show.

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HZ: Throughout the Draculae series, there is a question I have kept asking:

HZ: Why is it that there's a lot more uproar about this, which you could term a sort of literary cover version, whereas music totally normal, films are remade all the time especially in the last couple of decades, just like this churn of old IP; and yet with book, it's extraordinary? And I wonder why that is.

IRIS ICHISHITA: Yeah. Is it something about the medium? Is it something about the non fungibility of text that doesn't lend itself to adaptation? Whereas there's so many different elements in film, for example, where you can interpret a story a different way visually or sonically or the way that you structure a film. Maybe it's just because of text that adaptation isn't that popular.

HZ: Hmm. Maybe it's too much effort — because, gotta say, writing a 300,000 word version of Dracula seems like so much effort someone went to.

IRIS ICHISHITA: It is a lot of effort.

HZ: That was Iris Ichishita of The Powers of Darkness podcast, who appeared in the third episode of this miniseries.

These books that play with the characters and plot elements of Dracula then mould them into quite a different story: are they just doing what a large sector of fiction is doing in the modern day - are they, in essence, fan fiction? And what makes some works derived from other works categorised as fan fiction, but others not? The term ‘fan fiction’ doesn't seem to be applied to the likes of Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys, based on a marginalised character from Jane Eyre, or Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead by Tom Stoppard that spins a whole play from two minor characters in Hamlet – in fact what about all the plays Shakespeare himself wrote that were based on pre-existing stories, are those all fan fic plus time? Help me make it make sense! It’s not plagiarism if the original works are clearly given attribution. So, how do we define fan fiction?

ELIZABETH MINKEL: Hi, I'm Elizabeth Minkel. I'm the editor of Fansplaining, and the co-curator of the Rec Center newsletter, which is a fanworks newsletter. And I've been covering fandom in the mainstream media for, God, almost 15 years. So I would say that long, about as long as anyone else has been doing it. And I'm a fan fiction writer. I'm in an X-Men fandom now. I'm in the X-Men fandom mainly from X-Men: First Class, which came out in 2011. It's been 15 years and we're still writing stories about these two. 

HZ: I'm embarrassed even to ask you this question, Elizabeth, but here it comes: What is fan fiction?

ELIZABETH MINKEL: Oh, wow. Well, depends on who you ask.

HZ: I'm asking you.

ELIZABETH MINKEL: That's right. Well, that's great; no one else gets to weigh in here.

The simplest definition, I think, the very biggest, broadest contextless definition, is when someone takes an existing work and uses that to directly and explicitly create another work. So it's not, "Oh, I was really influenced by this, and you can kind of feel the traces of it in something else;" it is, "I am going to take X text and I'm going to create Y text out of it." Whether it's a response to it or I'm just literally lifting out the characters and not really bearing any resemblance to the original.

So there are big tent definitions of this where you might kind of go back centuries, even millennia where people will invoke – I just saw some terrible person, I can't remember who it was, say that they were making an oh, I can't remember who it was, but they're making an AI adaptation of Paradise Lost, and then it said like “the greatest work of Bible fan fiction ever told” or something. Every every second of that hurt me.

HZ: “Bible fan fiction.” I mean, I would say that the gospels might count – or at least as remixes of each other.

ELIZABETH MINKEL: Sure, right? So yeah, if you take that really big tent definition, there's a million things you can put in there, this kind of idea of explicit transformation, explicit retelling.

The smaller tent definition is the one that I actually prefer. And when I first started writing about fan fiction, I kind of ran for that big definition because I felt like it made my like longtime hobby seem more serious, like I'm up there, you know, with Milton and Jean Rhys, you know, all the greats. But the smaller tent definition is much more intentional. 

The smaller definition of fan fiction kind of has its roots in media fandom. Media fandom is a term that was made in opposition to classic science fiction fandom. It was a lot of women being interested in television shows, in particular Star Trek.

HZ: Star Trek is often credited for stoking the modern fan fiction movement: the first known fan fic based on the show appeared the year after its debut, in the 1967 fanzine Spockanalia, which was "'required reading' for everyone in our offices," said Star Trek's creator Gene Roddenberry in 1968. "The reason for this is that if we all understand what the fans see in the show, and try to understand why they are fans at all, we can then continue to hold those fans." 

Over the years,  Gene Roddenberry also spoke encouragingly about fans creating their own works spun off from the show, as long as they made it very clear that they weren't official publications. Ultimately, it’s all publicity for the original material – that’s the viewpoint a lot of creators and owners of intellectual property featured in fanworks have arrived at. 

The vast majority of writers of Star Trek fan fiction were female - 90% by 1973.

ELIZABETH MINKEL: Those folks in that era started writing their own stories. Star Trek, Starsky and Hutch – The Man from U.N.C.L.E. was a big early one. It was a lot of female fans responding to the text in a way that was kind of specific to their communities in opposition to kind of the very masculine coded official science fiction fandom spaces. And so they were writing stories, putting them in zines, mimeographing them, and they would sell them onto the table or they would mail them out. This is all being done very much under the radar of of the rights holders, because it was a lot more precarious and because a lot of it was gay and this was like the 1970s, so obviously attitudes were quite different.

And when people came online, fan fiction really started to flourish because a lot of people who didn't know this was a thing suddenly learned about it. And so over the last 25 years, you have fans kind of building tools to host this stuff, building websites, using existing websites and also creating new ones to write their own stories about existing properties, creating whole languages, of different tropes and structures and ways of tagging the metadata. 

You have millions of people now reading and writing these stories, and basically almost anything you can think of, someone's probably written a fic about it, because it's anonymous, it's global, you have people from all over the world writing stories in all sorts of languages, it is just a beautifully amateurish space. And so when I go for the smaller tent definition, it's that organicness, that amateur element, that ground up element, big collective thing that I am really emphasising. And I think that's quite different than, you know, Tom Stoppard or Jean Rhys or any of these other people that you might talk about when you're talking about quote unquote literary transformative works.

HZ: They didn't put the time in to the community.

ELIZABETH MINKEL: No, it's not communal and it's also like, people have different motivations. Years ago I heard – it must have been an archival interview with Ray Bradbury, because there was a mid-century adaptation of Moby Dick and he wrote the screenplay. And he was talking about his process and he said that he just read the book a million times until it was internalised within him and then it kind of flowed back out. And I was like, that's literally what I do with fan fiction. I'll watch the movie like 15 times and I'll just read all the fan fiction and I'll get these characters within me and then I have the tools I need to write a story. And it was interesting to me to think about how we might have very similar creative processes here. And I don't know how he felt about Ahab or Starbucks or whatever; like I don't know if he loved them as characters. 

HZ: A different motivation, isn't it, being commissioned.

ELIZABETH MINKEL: Yeah. He's a famous writer writing a screenplay of a famous book, for money. So the context matters, those differences matter. But it was interesting to me that the act and even the process were similar. When I write fan fiction, I'm thinking of fan fiction readers. I'm not just thinking, "Oh, I'm writing a story about these two.” I'm thinking about the context in which we're all creating this stuff.

When I came into covering this, I was like in my 20s, I was feeling defensive, you know, I was like, “It's just like Paradise Lost, it's serious.” Because also it's like Fifty Shades of Grey time is when I started doing this and everyone was like, "Oh, the steamy world of fan fiction!" And I was just like, "Some of those stories are serious and they don't have sex at all." And then I got over myself, and also discovered fan studies: there's an entire academic discipline, academics who study various parts of pop culture or sexuality studies or whatever to say like, oh, there's a seriousness in the act itself. 

HZ: I refer you to Transformative Works and Cultures, the journal published by the Organization for Transformative Works. 

ELIZABETH MINKEL: Even the most inane frothy pop culture thing, you can study in a serious way.  But also too, I started to realise that I don't want to get too precious about it. I don't want to be like, "Oh, these are marginalised people wresting power back from the corporate, you know, like the copyright owners” or whatever, because fan fiction has a lot of its own internal biases and problems within the communities too, so it's not like some great utopia where like every marginalised person gets their day in the sun. But I do think there's a power to that.

And it seems like maybe a frivolous kind of subject to connect over, but I think we're doing something meaningful. I think we're creating really interesting literary texts. And I think that studying them on their own terms and understanding them as these networked texts within these communities, we're all united around these specific sets of practices. And I think the history of media fandom, a lot of people in those communities are trans masc or or non-binary doing something with these male characters to explore gender. You can see the stats: very few cis men are involved in these communities. It's a lot of women and a lot of non-binary people and a lot of queer people, I would say, predominantly.

HZ: Why do you think that is?

ELIZABETH MINKEL: If you think about the X-Men or Star Wars or whatever, these big giant corporations — obviously these people of all genders who are making it, but they are predominantly men, wealthier men, older men. And so the priorities of storytelling, whether that's in a corporate capacity or just in a taste capacity, you can see how much Gen X men have shaped our current pop culture. It's a little too much, I would say. Then fan fiction comes in opposition to that, you're sort of taking it back from these people who are in power in the culture and you're creating your own thing. 

HZ: Making stories that supply what you’re not seeing from the more mainstreamed sources. And those empires might then strike back.

ELIZABETH MINKEL: You certainly have throughout fandom history many, many instances of rights holders trying to take fan fiction down. Like famously George Lucas in the 80s went after gay fan fiction. He went after the male/male romance stuff, trying to suppress that.

One of the most famously litigious people actually was Anne Rice, and that was also around, it was like late 90s, early 2000s. she went after a bunch of writers too, and actually that left a really big scar in the community. But at a certain point in the 2000s, I would say most of the right holders kind of realised that fan fiction was helpful and kind of hands off. I think that they know it'd be bad press at this point. J.K. Rowling did go after a fan, but it was a guy who had written an encyclopaedia.

HZ: Let me tell you, Elizabeth: I worked on the book with him that he was writing while he was being sued by J.K. Rowling.

ELIZABETH MINKEL: Oh my God, that's incredible. Obviously she's done so many worse things since, but…

HZ: Way back before J.K.Rowling was famous for being a campaigner-funder for cisgender supremacy, she was actually an author of a series of books about a boy wizard named Harry Potter; it was very successful and spawned official spin-offs – films, theme parks, stage production – and many unofficial ones.

In my mid-20s, I was an unpaid podcaster by night and by day a barely paid freelance proofreader and editor, and that’s how I worked for a little while with Steve Vander Ark, who in 2001 started the Harry Potter Lexicon, a website which documented pretty much every single thing in the Harry Potter books written by J.K. Rowling, even characters or plants only fleetingly referenced one time. J.K. Rowling herself had publicly expressed appreciation for the Lexicon, using it to remind herself of things she’d written, and check that details were consistent from one book to another. 

After the website had been running for a few years, Steve compiled a book of the Lexicon; before the lawsuit was launched, I also proofread that. I vaguely remember trying to tidy up a lot of inconsistently declined Latin in the etymology of the spells. And then in late 2007, a couple of months after the final book in the original seven-book Harry Potter series came out, Warner Brothers and J.K. Rowling sued the Lexicon book's publisher RDR Books to prevent it being published, lest she might want publish her own encyclopaedia. 

The judge declared the lawsuit in favour of J.K. Rowling and Warner Brothers, and they were awarded $6,750. I don't even know how many multiples of this sum were earned by the lawyers on each side. But Steve Vander Ark's book version of the Lexicon was allowed to be published, with minor modifications because some quotations had been lengthy enough to infringe copyright. This lawsuit could have been an email.

Hi Steve,

make the quotations shorter,
or else

Kind regards!

– yeah, this whole thing could have been a ten-word email.

ELIZABETH MINKEL: It still annoys me so much, the fact that they were arguing that this was not transformative because it's gonna cut into the future — we're gonna make an encyclopaedia, right? Like, that was one of the arguments, that they were going to do it, and so they couldn't have this one out there, and they never did it. And it's like, all you did was make this man cry in court, you know, and destroy his life.

HZ: I do feel ambivalent about this case. And at the time I thought the sensible outcome – with the proviso that I am not a lawyer or an author or the superintendent of the Harry Potter Lexicon website, or someone who wants that author to be making even more money to spend on causes that directly endanger the lives of trans people – would have been if they had collaborated to publish an official lexicon. He could have done most of the work, and she could have taken most of the credit. 

Anyway, while the Lexicon lawsuit was rumbling on for many months, Steve wrote the other book of his that I proofread. It's called In Search of Harry Potter and it's a travelogue, he went around Britain visiting places that may have inspired Harry Potter locations or had their names borrowed to name things in the books — and no, doing that didn’t get J.K. Rowling sued  by a map.

Throughout the existence of Harry Potter, there have been many lawsuits or threatened lawsuits concerning its intellectual property, including some against writers of fan fiction. Which is interesting because recently, there have been some really lucrative books that originated as Harry Potter fan fiction – for example SenLinYu’s novel Alchemised, which was published in book form in September 2025 and promptly hit number 1 on the New York Times bestseller list; the movie rights had already sold for a seven-figure sum.

Alchemised had begun life in 2018, when SenLinYu began posting it in installments online under the title Manacled, which took the dystopia of  The Handmaid's Tale and populated it with the Harry Potter character pairing known as  Dramione. ‘Dramione’?

ELIZABETH MINKEL: It's Draco Malfoy and Hermione Granger.

HZ: Hmm.

ELIZABETH MINKEL: Dramione is a popular ship. 

HZ: Moreover, Dramione is a portmantNO. 

ELIZABETH MINKEL: What was dicey was the publishers were marketing it as “BookTok’s beloved Dramione hits.” And so it's like, okay, well, if you're gonna sever the relationship between the two and change your names and all this, then I don't think you can be marketing it on the back of Harry Potter. And so there was a lot of controversy.

HZ: Nonetheless, using the Harry Potter association didn’t seem to bring legal problems with regard to marketing Manacled AKA Alchemised. Nine months before the story was  published in book form as Alchemised, the online version Manacled was taken down from the biggest fan fiction site Archive Of Our Own, AO3 for short, and the author set about the task of adjusting the aspects that might infringe copyright. This is a practice known as Pull to Publish. 

ELIZABETH MINKEL: Also known as filing the serial numbers off. Pulling to publish, meaning: I want to turn my fan fiction into a professionally published text; I take it off the internet, I pull it, I change it, I publish it.

HZ: What kinds of changes would that encompass usually?

ELIZABETH MINKEL: It has to be a lot, because if you want to sell it – first of all, the interesting thing about fan fiction's legality is it's not so much copyright but trademark. It's not like people are a wholesale quoting the source material very often; that's just not a part of fan fiction.

You can't copyright an idea, obviously, so even the concepts from these worlds would not be grounds for copyright infringement; but the fact that you're writing X-Men, Magneto, the fact that you're using his name, that would be the problem, right? So if I were to pull one of my stories and change his name to something similar, it would have to be sufficiently transformative to get away with it not being an infringing work.

HZ: So the changed name would have to be more of a transformation than, say, ‘Schmagneto’. And maybe to be safe, you’d have to alter what he does and where he is.

ELIZABETH MINKEL: But people have been doing this for decades and the most famous example is Fifty Shades of Grey.

HZ: Fifty Shades of Grey began online  as sexy stories about the Twilight OTP Bella and Edward, under the title Master Of The Universe – dunno if Mattel and Universal would have taken umbrage about that, since they own that name for the He-Man franchise of works and products. Anyway, well before E.L. James published the first Fifty Shades novel in 2011, its name was changed, the characters' names were changed, and their vampirism was also changed.

ELIZABETH MINKEL: I think the thing that people outside fan fiction don't really understand sometimes about this stuff is a lot of the transformation happens far before the pull to publish process. She had already changed a lot of it. So in that particular example, the original story, which was like a big hit within the Twilight fandom was already a human AU – alternate universe, AU. So no more vampires. They're both humans, and it was a billionaire AU, so no more vampires, add billionaire.

HZ: It's a far bigger threat in the 21st century.

ELIZABETH MINKEL: Billionaire romance obviously comes from romance as well. There's so much crossover between the history of pro romance and the history of fan fiction. And if you look at some of these famous pull to publish works, they might have felt like original characters wearing the skin and the names of the characters that you know. 

So in the late 2010s, we started to see a big wave of Pull to Publish coming out of Reylo, which is Kylo Ren and Rey from Star Wars, was a huge fandom when those sequel movies came out. The most famous was The Love Hypothesis by Ali Hazelwood, which was a big hit.

HZ: By the time it made it to print, all the story’s Star Wars references had been removed – the lead characters are now Olive, a PhD student, and Adam, a professor at Stanford University, in our current galaxy. The Love Hypothesis has also been adapted into a film, which is due to be released this September, and as it happens, Adam is played by Tom Bateman, who is in real life married to the actor Daisy Ridley who played Rey in the Star Wars films. So the character she played is the basis for a character who falls in love with a character portrayed by her husband and named Adam after her costar Adam Driver who played Kylo Ren.

By the way, there’s not only Reylo fan fic about the fictional characters, there’s also Daiver fic – portmanteau of Daisy and Driver – about the real people Adam Driver and Daisy Ridley. Oh and The Love Hypothesis also contains a bad egg character named Tom Benton which sounds a bit like Tom Bateman, so you can bet certain corners of the internet are being totally. normal. about what all this means.

Anyway, that’s one of the big recent examples of Pull to Publish. 

ELIZABETH MINKEL: Fifty Shades was like kind of a revolutionary thing, like that definitely exposed fan fiction in the mainstream.

HZ: And now it is really big business, in book publishing and in adaptations.

ELIZABETH MINKEL: There's a lot of people in like hot science fiction and fantasy writers right now, also in romance, who cut their teeth in the 2000s and early 2010s writing fan fiction. And so that's certainly changing sensibilities, among like original stuff that gets written, and also changing sensibilities on the acquisition side of people saying, "Oh, I want this kind of thing," understanding this sort of pan fandom language that, because there's certain tropes and structures and vibes that I think a lot of people who read fan fiction will recognise. 

HZ: And even though the publishing industry is trawling fan fiction for acquisitions, it’s often the case – no longer always, but stll a lot – that when the book or the screen adaptation comes out, authors will hush up that their material originated as fan fiction.

ELIZABETH MINKEL: I'm a bit of a traditionalist and I do kind of want to keep fandom fandom and I don't want it to be like a proving ground for authors or like an audition or people just sticking their stuff on the AO3 so it can get a lot of hits so then they can get a book deal, which is absolutely happening right now. And I think there are ways that Hollywood or publishers can symbiotically work with fans, but you need to know what you're doing.

HZ: The law around copyright and use of intellectual property is very complex, because of course each country has its own laws, which will pertain wherever the material is available – so given the online existence of fan fiction, that’s a lot of countries and laws. And the US, where a huge amount of fan fiction is generated, has some of the most fuzzy and interpretable law pertaining to all this, including fair use.

The Organization for Transformative Works, the non-profit that advocates for fan work as well as runs AO3 and the very useful wiki fanlore.org, describes fair use as, "a basic limit on copyright law that protects free expression. Fair use is a United States legal phrase; however, copyright laws worldwide have limits that keep copyright from being used as a form of private censorship."

ELIZABETH MINKEL: The Organization for Transformative Works, they've been around for almost 20 years at this point, and there were a lot of lawyers among their founders, and they set a very firm anti-monetization policy. So when I write my fan fiction, it's very important that I don't ask for tips, or mention money in any way. They just wanted to set this blanket policy to make it kind of more permissible under fair use.

HZ: Kind of, but not making any money from your works based on copyrighted works doesn’t protect you from being landed with a lawsuit, it’s just a defence you can use in that lawsuit, under US law (yes, other jurisdictions are available). But even if you win or if the lawsuit is dropped, lawsuits are really expensive to be embroiled in; so, in effect, it’s not about which side is right, it’s which side is rich. 

In US law, there are four factors for fair use. 

ELIZABETH MINKEL: I ripped off your work and you took me to court and you'd say I'm infringing and I'd say no, it's protected under fair use and the judge would assess under these four factors. One is the purpose and the character of the intended use. So there's a bunch of like broad categories that are largely considered fair use. 

HZ: "Criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research." Comedy can be particularly complicated - parody is often covered by fair use, whereas satire often isn't.

ELIZABETH MINKEL: This is also about like the character of the work and the transformativeness. The Organisation for Transformative Works, which is the organisation that hosts the Archive of Our Own, ‘transformative’ is right in the name. Because lawyers were involved in the founding of this, they really wanted to emphasise: these are transformative works, this is substantially different. What I write of X-Men does not bear much – if you love the X-Men movies, I don't know if you're gonna love my fan fiction, right? And actually, if you hate the X-Men movies, you might love my fan fiction because they're just fundamentally quite different. I'm interested in different things. I still want the characters to feel like the original ones, but they're in quite different situations and obviously they say very different words and they have sex with each other. Professor X and Magneto, in case you're wondering.

HZ: Is there some kind of rubric about how different something needs to be from an original so that it's not plagiarism?

ELIZABETH MINKEL: One of my favourite analogies for fan fiction is jazz, because it's improvisational, it's collaborative, but it's also like playing with like known riffs and patterns, and there's this language you're working with I say as a musician who's done jazz.

HZ: Someone who has jazzed.

ELIZABETH MINKEL: yes, I have jazzed quite a bit. I took jazz theory in college. So you're all arguing with this language, but like it's in, like the, the quoting and it's called quoting in jazz, is important. It's fun. People want to see those little references. Like fan fiction is metatextual, it's intertextual. So I think that is a bit hard, because you're not trying to plagiarise, you're trying to transform, but a part of the transformativeness often is that deliberate metatextuality and like calling back and that sort of thing. So I think that's a little bit of a tricky thing to parse, and why these are often determined on a case by case basis.

HZ: The second factor for fair use is the nature of the copyrighted work.

ELIZABETH MINKEL: If it is fiction or nonfiction; how it was published; whether it was actually published — every time you make a work, you create a copyright, essentially, but if it's just sitting in your folder somewhere, that's very different obviously than if it was a book out on a shelf or even published on the internet.

HZ: The third factor is the amount and substantiality of the copyrighted work that was used, and what proportion it is of the whole copyrighted work, and how important it is to the work using it. 

ELIZABETH MINKEL: Anyone who's written a book knows that you have to pay, often, to quote people at length, to reproduce their words within that, just like you would have to pay to reproduce an image.

HZ: You even have to pay for the little — what they call the little quotations at the front of the book? You have to pay to run those. The author has to pay.

ELIZABETH MINKEL: I didn’t know that; that's wild. I feel like this is a bit of a scam. 

HZ: I want writers to be paid, but that feels like you're just hurting your own.

ELIZABETH MINKEL: Yes, it does feel like that. I don't have to pay anyone to publish journalism on the internet when I quote people at length. And then this is the one that I often come to the most, the fourth factor, the final one: the effect of the use on the work’s market value. So if you look at the Dramione example, or All the Young Dudes, which is one that just sold at the London Book Fair –

HZ: For more than £2.5m, allegedly. All the Young Dudes  will be published in book form under the title Wolf Boy, by the pseudonymous author BN King. It's a Harry Potter fan fic, about a romance between the characters Sirius Black and Remus Lupin. 

ELIZABETH MINKEL: For Warner Brothers and JK Rowling to have any sort of copyright case against these works, they'd have to say that people aren't buying the Harry Potter novels because they are buying Alchemized or Wolf Boy. Actually, the Dramione situation was really interesting and kind of a brand new wrinkle here, because a lot of people have started binding fan fiction and they'll print out the text and then they'll like create folios and then make beautiful covers. But of course where there's beautiful handmade things that fans make for each other, there's also people doing it on Etsy and charging money for it; people were binding these stories and selling them on Etsy.

HZ: This was the predicament that SenLinYu faced, when their Dramione fan fic Manacled was already very popular online but had not yet been officially published in book form, so then other people were making money from selling it bound into a book.

ELIZABETH MINKEL:  Yeah, that author was the second most read story on the Archive, millions and millions of hits. People were selling copies of that book on Etsy unauthorised for a lot of money. Which really put the author in a bind because then they were like, "Well, I can't sell this story, and now you're making money off my fan works." So there's a lot of external forces I think that are changing the way that the relationships between these texts and the copyright and a lot of people coming into fandom not really knowing very much about these norms or practices. They were just like trying to buy a copy of the book because they heard it was a good romance, like a good dark romance about sex slavery.

HZ: Oh God!

ELIZABETH MINKEL: It's so transformed to me that I can't imagine an argument in which you'd say that that would have any bearing on the value of the Harry Potter franchise. To me, if anything, that book is taking away from the market of, like, the other dark romances in that space. 

HZ: Yes, I feel if you are wanting to read Harry Potter originals with your seven-year-old, choosing something where somebody is sold into sex slavery is… quite a different pace?

ELIZABETH MINKEL: But I think that the people in these communities, especially the adults in these communities, have always been pretty conscious of the fact that like this is for adults. People I think have always been pretty good about the fact that they want to draw these barriers and say, this is clearly, we're writing romantic stories or writing erotic stories. Like a huge portion of fan fiction and a very important part is erotic stories sex. There's a big category called PWP, porn without plot. And it is meant to be, you know, masturbatory fodder and arousing and it's very explicit.

HZ: I suppose some people would be wondering, listening to you talk about that, why not just write PWP about original characters? And thus save yourself several kinds of hassle, including legal; and you might not want to be associated with certain authors after they go off.

ELIZABETH MINKEL: Right. There's different reasons that people are drawn to fan fiction. For me, this has just always been an instinct that I have. I was writing it before I had an internet connection. I was writing it in my room; I was like, "I love these characters. I'm gonna spin up new worlds for them. I'm gonna spin up new narratives for them." And so when people are writing, especially huge, huge portion is romance, and I think it's probably pretty easy to see if you've ever had a romance, if you've ever shipped, which is like desiring to see two or more characters get together – 

HZ: ‘Ship’ and ‘shipping’ and ‘shipped’ derived from ‘relationshipper’, which was a term in online fan communities in the mid-1990s to denote people who wanted Mulder and Scully to get together in The X-Files – that was the ship they shipped. 

ELIZABETH MINKEL: – you can see that potential, you see the vibes, you see the lingering glances or whatever, and it's pleasurable for you to fill those gaps. And sometimes you're doing it with the author and sometimes you're doing it in between the margins.

But for me, and I think for a lot of fan fiction people, it is about this kind of communal thing together. It's not just “I love the idea of these two characters together”; it’s: all those people do too. We all love it together. We're connecting across the words. These are network texts; my work is probably much more in response to the other tens of thousands of stories in my fandom than it is even to the original source material at this point.

HZ: You've mentioned romance a lot; are many of the stories not romance? 

ELIZABETH MINKEL: It's changed a lot over time. So when I got into fandom, absolutely. Romance was a portion. You had a lot more stuff that was what we call gen. So it's like general, no romance, it's just stories. And I think it's now down to like one in eight stories do not have a romantic pairing. And so that's a pretty dramatic shift, I think, after a lot of mainstreaming of these communities, a lot of people coming from romance into them.

And I would say over time, romance has really, really reshaped a lot of this. I think that you get a lot more things with romantic ships. You get a lot more stuff that looks like pro romance. It'll be the shape of a romance novel. It'll have the beats of romance novel. The rules of the romance world, the genre are it must have a happy ending; it must kind of conform to a specific sort of structure in the end. You can deviate from the beats, but you need the beats there.

HZ: Like a Shakespearian tragedy, everyone's got to die at the end.

ELIZABETH MINKEL: Exactly. Sure. Romance and mystery are the two modern genres I think that have the strongest community norms about what needs to happen by the end. 

HZ: There’s a really interesting episode in the Allusionist back catalogue called A Novel Remedy, which talks about how between the World Wars, people turned to cosy detective fiction, death was bloodless and there was a proper ending and no loose ends, because those kinds of stories were comforting after earth-shattering events. And I wonder if there’s some of that at play in our current era in both the burgeoning popularity of romance, and the intensified expectations of what is in it – it has been A TIME TO BE ALIVE, and thus people might gravitate more to material that isn’t going to add stress by springing unpleasant surprises. It feels reassuring to know where it is going to go.

ELIZABETH MINKEL: Back in the day, you'd read tonnes of stories where there would be romantic stuff or sex and they would not wind up together at the end. And now, I can't imagine – every story I write, they have to be together at the end because I just feel like people will scream at me. 

HZ: It doesn't seem particularly ideal conditions for creating your own work if you're worried about people getting really angry because of people not getting together at the end, for instance.

ELIZABETH MINKEL: In mainstream publishing, particularly in romance and YA, you can clearly see in the last like fifteen years, there's a lot of clunky stuff, because people are very worried about an audience reaction. For me personally, there's certainly stuff that I've written in my fan fiction where I've had these thoughts, because obviously I've witnessed like 8,000 blowups across all these different genres and practices in the social media era.

But I've also tried to remind myself that I do wanna tell the story I wanna tell. The one I wrote most recently, they were just married; it wasn't about them getting together. It was a thriller with a murder plot, and like they just happened to be married, so it wasn't about them meeting or doing any rom-com things together, so.

HZ: Wide Sargasso Sea has been very critically respected. A lot of the continuations of Pride and Prejudice, like by Emma Tennant, are respected; Shakespeare adapting Danish or Italian stories, people are like, “Cool.” Why has it been that this stuff from our lifetimes has not been met with similar kind of I'm trying to think of the word... seriousness? Compassion, I guess? Is it the corporations being involved? Because Jane Eyre obviously was not a corporation, so Jean Rhys had a bit more freedom.

ELIZABETH MINKEL: Yeah. I think gender is a big factor. I guess you just named a couple of women, but I think inherently there's a stigma around it that's carried on. I think it is because it's mostly women doing it.

HZ: And mostly women reading it. 

ELIZABETH MINKEL: I think it is because it's like disproportionately gay compared to regular popular culture. And I think also this kind of idea that people might be expressing their most self-indulgent desires because it's fan fiction so you could do whatever you want. It's like, oh, you have the audacity to imagine a story that's not on the page!

HZ: You took your unruly desires and didn't bury them.

ELIZABETH MINKEL: Yeah, exactly!

HZ: Do you think it's time as well? Because if you're doing like Jane Eyre or Pride and Prejudice, that is stuff from 200 years ago, so automatically it has some added respectability of just age. And a lot of things that at the time they appeared were like very kind of controversial, like Dracula, if you read it now, you're like, "Come on, what on earth was getting censored about this? This is dry as." But these things that are from living memory, maybe not enough time has passed yet to neutralise a lot of the currents they're in, perhaps?

ELIZABETH MINKEL: Maybe, but when I think about real person fiction, RPF, which is the subset of fan fiction and shipping that's about real people, you know, there's a strong argument to be made there to say like, "Well, you know, biopics win Oscars" – 

HZ: "Inspired by" the life of Bob Dylan.

ELIZABETH MINKEL: Right – whereas if I wrote Bob Dylan fan fiction where he's having sex with Pete Seeger or whatever, then that would be cringey and embarrassing and I should feel bad, right?

HZ: It was already pretty cringey that he was doing the Judas thing on the wrong continent; and I don't even care.

ELIZABETH MINKEL: I'm not gonna write this one, don't worry.

HZ: It’s OK, Elizabeth, you don’t have to – I searched AO3 for Pete Seeger/Bob Dylan stories, and there are a handful, but rather being sexual, most are in the category called sickfic: Pete and his wife Toshi take care of Bob when he pukes or, in another version, when he has diarrhoea. A Complete Unknown chickened out of depicting that.

Of course there is loads of fan fiction about real famous people – musicians, actors, sports players, historical characters; in fact, the Brontës are not only characters in Real Person Fiction, they wrote it themselves, concocting elaborate fantasy sagas about the Duke of Wellington and Napoleon. 

Now, the real people who are still alive could sue RPF authors for things like libel, although doing so would likely be unsuccessful as long as the material was clearly fiction, and the author’s intent wasn’t malicious or defamatory. On AO3, I learned there is some fic with my brother in it, and I need to know what laws exist to protect me from that, because I don’t think me being harrowed is covered by copyright.

ELIZABETH MINKEL: When I think about 19th century copyright and then I look at where we wound up like 150 years later or whatever, I sometimes despair a little bit because I just feel like a lot of the intentions were very good and they're about protecting an author's right to sell their own work. Dickens famously got ripped off left and right and, you know, those were the kind of protections that were put in place were to say that, like, it was about literally making copies, right? It was like, so you couldn't go write your little Nell stories or whatever and just sell them for half, you know, one penny instead of two.

And now the 20th century story of copyright is, it is these giant corporations kind of having a stranglehold over beloved stories, and it's about, you know, extending the life of copyright for decades and decades and decades — and to the point where sometimes I think people express even reluctance to have creative thoughts about things that are copyrighted. They'll say, "Disney owns Star Wars so I can't think my own thoughts about it that are not canonical" or whatever.

HZ: Look, I wouldn’t put it past any big company to monetize our thoughtcrimes.

ELIZABETH MINKEL: Every year, works of art age out of copyright and they come into the public domain. And for the last few years, I listened to a lot of national public radio they've been very good at talking about public domain and explaining what it is and saying, "Well, now all these works are in the public domain," and I love that, but every time, invariably, the expert they get on to talk about it will say something like, "Now you're free to write your own stories this character, right?" And it's like, you were free to do that before. You were not doing a thoughtcrime before when you imagined, like, Jay Gatsby doing, I don't know, whatever you wanted him to do, like, flying to the moon, and now I'm allowed to think any thought about him because he's not owned by... You know, I feel like we've allowed corporations in particular to have such a venerated position in our culture. I remember being at Comic-Con once and, listening to people argue about who's a better owner of Spider-Man.

HZ: No!

ELIZABETH MINKEL: And it's a little absurd because the actual question here is like, who's making better works with this character? Who's putting together better teams to make better films? Who has a more accurate feeling representation of this character that's had many iterations, but still has this thread of Spider-Maniness running through his history?

HZ: You might put it: whose financial interests are best aligned with the art?

ELIZABETH MINKEL: Right – but they argue about it, they literally sound like who should get custody of Spider-Man, which dad should, like, dad Sony or Dad Marvel or Disney or whatever.

HZ: His aunt has probably got custody.

ELIZABETH MINKEL: But, it's absurd. It's just like the ownership of our stories and the ownership of our imaginations. When you think about what inspires you, or like when I think about my own fan fiction – I don't know if you write fiction?

HZ: No — I haven't got the knack.

ELIZABETH MINKEL: You never know. You should try some fan fiction. It's low stakes,

HZ: I don't feel that about anything. I don't feel that kind of…

ELIZABETH MINKEL: You don't have this instinct.

HZ: I don't have the sort of possession? I’m quite a passive consumer of other people's art where I'm like, "This is what they've chosen to give me.”

ELIZABETH MINKEL: See, but maybe you've just let the corporation colonise your mind, man.

HZ: Yeah, all those, like, Norwegian indie films and shit I watch.

ELIZABETH MINKEL: Colonising your mind.

HZ: Elizabeth Minkel is the co-curator of the Rec Center newsletter about fan culture, and she is the editor of Fansplaining, featuring smart writing about fan culture – analysis, essays and criticism – plus there’s a deep back catalogue of the Fansplaining podcast, all available at fansplaining.com. And that was Iris Ichishita you heard at the start of the episode; listen to her podcasts Powers of Darkness and Or Whatever Movies.

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Look, I might not be a practitioner of fan fiction, but I have been working in a self-published medium for nearly twenty years now: this one, independent podcasting. I’m self-taught – well, I started so long ago there was nobody else to teach me – and the show is owned by me; I’ve never been an employee, and I just make stuff from my living room, except for when I work in bed. The arse has really fallen out of the ad podcast market, since I refuse to do sponsorship that’s to do with gambling, pharmaceuticals or nice-washing banks.

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Your randomly selected word from the dictionary today is…

puissance, noun, 1: a competitive test of a horse's ability to jump large obstacles in showjumping. 2, archaic or poetic/literary: great power, influence, or prowess.

Try using ‘puissance’ in an email today.

This episode was produced by me, Helen Zaltzman, on the unceded ancestral and traditional territory of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations.

Thanks to Martin Austwick of palebirdmusic.com for editorial help and the music, also thanks to alumsionist Caroline Crampton of Shedunnit podcast and excellent newsletter at carolinecrampton.com.

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