Here are some ideas about "The Legend of Korra," fan fiction,
and LGBT representation.
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Seeing as how it's almost Valentine's Day,
we thought it would only be appropriate to celebrate love.
And of course, by love, I mean fan fiction.
Also, actual honest-to-goodness love
between two people who may or may not happen to be fictional.
Don't worry.
We'll get there.
But we'll get there by working through the labor of love
and sometimes blinding frustration
that is the reimagining of characters and settings
by fans of those characters and settings-- fan fiction.
We scratched the surface in our "Sherlock Holmes" slash
"Fifty Shades of Grey" episode.
But let's really drill down.
Fan fiction is written by fans.
But that doesn't mean those people are not
professional writers.
It just means that they are not paid
to write fan fiction by the people who
own the stuff the fan fiction is about.
Though even that line is blurry.
Steven Moffat-- sorry-- has said that he
is a fan of "Doctor Who" first.
All of the now-disavowed alternate universe "Star Wars"
novels could be considered fan fictions.
Maybe the important distinction is with canon.
Generally speaking, fan fiction is not canonical.
It does not officially influence the media it is based upon.
[CANNON FIRES]
Were I to write a crossover fic where
John's journal from "Supernatural"
is a journal from "Gravity Falls,"
and progressed accordingly, that doesn't
mean that that's actually the case in either show, no matter
how much I want it to be, which for the record is so much.
This is an important part of fan fiction-- wanting
more from and, in lots of cases, better things for characters
we love and sometimes despise.
Wanting to see them fulfill or further
challenge our expectations.
Wanting to see ourselves and our experiences or ideas
embodied by these powerful personalities.
There is a rumor that all fan fiction is of a sessy nature,
but that is simply not the case.
Though even if it were, I don't see what the big deal is.
Lots of it is romantic, though.
And given everything we've just talked about,
and the fact that it's nearly Bye the Person
You Love Overpriced Chocolates Day, that's important.
Of course, when awesome characters are awesome,
that is awesome.
But some of the other most deeply affecting parts
of the stories we love have to do with romance--
who falls in and out of love, how romances progress or don't
and affect the larger story.
We can become very invested in that romance and how it
progresses or doesn't.
And therein is produced the garden
of forking paths that provides endless territory for fan
fiction writers to chart.
Let me explain.
There is something imparted to us by cultural instruction--
a set of gestures and signs that indicate two people are
meant to be together.
However, both the blessing and the curse of romance
is the ambiguity of its signs.
So many vexing questions.
Does he?
Does she?
Doesn't she?
Doesn't he?
Argh!
Which is to say, even when it's not,
love is everywhere-- between John and Sherlock, Draco
and Hermione, Sansa and Margaery, Kirk and Spock, Peggy
and Angie.
In building complex and interesting relationships
between complex and interesting characters,
official writers-- perhaps accidentally, perhaps not-- are
gesturing at alternate universes towards relationships
that could exist between characters where
the world of the show-- and the world of the world,
for that matter-- not what it actually is.
I see this as the sacred charge of so much fan fiction--
to express the romance left unexpressed in popular culture.
Like, you might have heard of "shipping,"
short for "relationship," as in, I ship Angie and Peggy.
I choose to view them as being in a relation-ship.
A large portion of the fanfic produced
concerns the romantic relationship between two
characters of the same sex.
That's called slash, or slash fic,
because, you know, like, John slash
Sherlock or Logan slash Scott.
Often, slash fic between two women
has its own name-- femslash.
There's a lot of slash and femslash out there,
but there is a significantly more male slash male slash.
A lot of important questions have been asked about why.
But Occam's razor leads us to one simple answer.
There are simply more complex male characters
in popular culture.
There is simply more material to work with.
There is a treasure trove of original research
and sources for all of this in the doobly-doo, by the way.
And a very special thanks to Samantha Close
and Aja Romano for helping out tons with this episode.
This is one of the many, many reasons
that it is exciting and important when
interesting and complex female characters develop
a meaningful relationship of any kind
in popular culture, which brings us finally
and triumphantly to Korra and Asami.
Korra is the titular character of the Nickelodeon
series "The Legend of Korra."
Though young, she is a powerful, spiritual,
and political leader called the Avatar.
Asami Sato is a talented inventor and a business person.
She works with Korra over the course of four seasons
to defeat all manner of animal, vegetable, mineral,
and metaphysical baddies.
There are some regrettable love triangles along the way
but also an undeniable chemistry between Korra and Asami,
something that both fans and fan fiction writers among picked
up and ran with.
The Korra slash Asama-- the Korrasami ship was built.
Would it sail?
Would it become canon?
For lots of viewers, myself included,
having complicated female characters with just,
like, crazy amounts of agency develop
a meaningful friendship in a show like "The Legend of Korra"
was exciting in and of itself.
So it was "insert every positive adjective here"
when the final episode of "The Legend of Korra"
ended with the two female leads standing hand in hand, looking
in each other's eyes, in front of a massive expression
of the powerful metaphysical force that unites us all.
While the point of shipping these characters
either actively or passively by making things or not
isn't to badger the creators into making it so.
That doesn't mean it's not validating
when they do-- validating of our ideas about those characters--
that we know them, that we understand
something about them.
It validates the work put into expressing that understanding
through writing and drawing and et cetera.
But most importantly, it validates the people
who arrived at that ship out of a desire
to see their lives and experiences embodied
by the media they love-- people who
wanted more and better for Korra,
for Asami, and for themselves.
And it's doubly meaningful given the fact that most fan fiction
writers are women.
Of course, Korrasami's canonness could be more explicit.
Hand-holding and eye-gazing is great,
but it can be read as ambiguous or platonic.
Katie Schenkel in writing for The Mary Sue
said that she was 100% thrilled but didn't, quote,
"want LGBT-plus fans settling for anything
less than explicit, because-- dang it-- queer relationships
deserve proper representation.
This shouldn't be the closest we get to explicit confirmation.
"Korra" co-creator Bryan Konietzko
wrote on Tumblr, "Was it a slam dunk for queer representation?
I think it falls short of that.
But hopefully it is a somewhat significant inching forward."
Bryan mentions how Korrasami is something
that they arrived at and not something they planned.
And part of the reason for that is this assumption
that they simply wouldn't get away with it--
that even though the show depicts romance
between male and female characters,
depicting romance between two female characters
would be beyond the pale.
As major market media audiences, we
are not trained to look for or expect it.
And as a creator, he wasn't convinced
that the powers that be would allow it.
And as disappointing as this is, these points ring true.
Could "Korra" have done more?
Maybe.
Could most pieces of major market media do more?
Definitely.
But until including this kind of representation
isn't like learning to metalband,
there is some solace in the fact that we can maybe
find more and better for our favorite characters
in fan fiction.
What do you guys think?
Three questions-- should Nickelodeon
have allowed Korrasami to be more explicit.
Second question-- do you see fan fiction as a way
to address some of the problems of less nimble major market
media.
And three, what are your favorite ships?
Happy Valentine's Day.
Let us know in the comments.
And of course, we hope that you choo-choo-choose to subscribe
to the Idea Channel.
Oh, and one more thing.
You might have noticed that a lot
of the images in this episode were works of original fan art.
I asked on the internet for you guys to send us stuff,
and did you ever.
We even got reblogged by the official "Korra" Tumblr,
so that is a very exciting.
We've credited everybody in the doobly-doo.
So make sure that we have credited right.
And just [WHISTLE] thank you.
It was amazing to ask for fan art
and to receive so much amazing work.
Definitely made several of my days.
(SINGING) I forgot to remember to delete you.
Let's see what you guys had to say about the right
to be forgotten.
First things first-- hey, we did Office Hours last weekend,
and it was so much fun.
I had a great time.
Morgan also had a great time.
Yeah.
We met so many great people.
I had so many great conversations.
It seemed like everybody had awesome conversations
with people they met there.
So it was just-- man, what a great success.
And we are going to try to do it again.
We're not sure when.
Maybe next quarter.
We'll see.
But for anybody who couldn't make it,
wants to come to the next one, or wants
us to do one in a different city, we're working on it.
We'll try to figure it out.
But for everybody who came last weekend, thank you so much.
It was so great.
Also at Office Hours, a bunch of people
brought us records to put on the newly much larger record wall.
So if you want to send us records in the mail,
that is a thing that you can do.
Details in the doobly-doo.
There are some restrictions apply.
So make sure that you understand that.
Wjfarr talks about how it might be ideal
if information on the internet has something
like an expiration date.
And actually, while doing research for the episode,
I came across a paper that suggested something essentially
like this-- that there would be a piece of information
in the metadata of the different files
that would either cause it-- cause that file to be deleted
after a certain amount of time or cause it to be marked, like,
irrelevant or no longer accurate.
And just so you can actually have this sort of, like,
decaying data, or decaying information,
over time, which I don't know that that's a good idea.
But I think it's an interesting one.
AE-lith provides some helpful clarification
on a couple points from last week's episode,
first being that, though search results might be unindexed
by someone's name, they are not unindexed completely,
meaning that if you are clever, you can still
find certain things; and second, that Google
is in a lot of cases the one doing their own oversight, as
opposed to some third-party organization, in that leaving
Google in charge of its own data management
is maybe a complicated or fraught situation.
And yeah, that's definitely an important part
of this conversation.
Thank you for bringing that up.
Rowtow13 points out the irony that Mario Costeja Gonzalez
is now a very famous person.
And to answer your question, I think
it's no, because he is now a public personality
to some degree.
And this is a distinction that I saw
being hashed out in a lot of the comments--
the one between privacy and the right to be forgotten,
which I think the right to be forgotten
is not about when private information
about a private citizen is made public.
It's about when public information
about a private citizen is no longer relevant.
So it is not in that sense-- at least in my eyes--
not an issue of privacy.
It's more of an issue of, I don't know, accuracy maybe?
Nathaniel, I don't know that I see this so absolutely.
I feel very solidly on the fence about this one.
I can see it either way.
But I do-- I do tend to have a problem with the idea of, well,
if you don't want something attached to your name,
maybe you shouldn't do it in the first place,
because that is-- sort of ignores the presence and almost
inevitability of circumstance.
So yeah.
I don't-- yeah.
I would say that my point of view
is definitely not absolute.
And related to a second point that Nathaniel was making,
Paule Patterson talks about how it is maybe
the responsibility of people digging up information
on the internet to weigh it appropriately
and to put it in the context that it deserves.
I was actually talking with a friend of mine
about this the other day, that when
you are looking at things, especially details related
to people on the internet, it's hard to appreciate
the different weight that each piece of information has.
You have to weigh it and decide whether or not it
has some sort of circumstance.
And I think some level of-- yeah,
I don't know what you would call it--
information literacy is very helpful to talk about here.
And last but not least, Wally Zielinksi he
talks about the very important utility of the right
to be forgotten for people who are transitioning genders
and all of the very important and real and unfortunately
sometimes very dangerous reasons that a person in that situation
would want to disconnect from their past.
And this is a thing that I didn't even consider
and is super important.
So thank you for writing this comment, Wally.
This week's episode was brought to you
by the very hard work of these forget-me-nots.
Next week's episode will be brought to you
by the hard work of the Idea Channel editing team
and someone very different.
So we have a very important announcement
about that in video form coming out on Friday.
So keep an eye on your sub box.
We have a Facebook, an IRC, and a subreddit links
in the doobly-doo.
And the tweet of the week comes from OlDirtyForkLift,
who pointed me towards a Buzzfeed quiz
where you have to choose between me and Michael Stevens.
Talk about false dichotomies.
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