1
It is the summer before seventh grade and that show is on every weekday afternoon at 4:00 p.m. and 4:30 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. You know that show. The one with the sensitive alien dude who was born in an egg and the girl with the rainbow hair who you wish you could be even though her best friend is invisible and she’s kind of crazy, but it’s a cute kind of crazy, and her friend turns out to be real in the end so it doesn’t matter anyway. That show. It’s in repeats right now but might come back next fall. There are only twenty-six episodes of that show so in two weeks and change you can see them all though sometimes your mom makes you go to the chiropractor for your sinus headaches so you have to tape it. The same tape, one episode over another, until the image looks like strips of soggy newsprint left out in the rain too long.
2
You do an AOL keyword search, which is what you do back then. You go on usenet, which is what you do back then. You join a letter-writing campaign, which is what you do back then. You harangue the show’s producer about the general downward spiral in the myth arc in season two, which is what you do back then.
You write fanfic. Of course you do.
3
It’s September when you find the club, the fanfic club, the one with the starry background on their website, the one set on a space ship that’s shaped like a bird. You like this club because you have to write a story to apply. I mean, you have to be a good writer to get in. And you took a writing class at the community college this summer and even though the other kids didn’t really talk to you much you know you got this—it’s in the bag. You call your story “On the Loose” after that song you sang in Girl Scout Camp, the one that made all the older girls cry. You show your friend Stephanie the story over lunch and she tells you it’s really good so you go ahead and submit it.
They take their time getting back to you, their delicious time. Do they know how much it hurts to wait? You draw a picture of Radu in your art class. Years later, you wonder if seventh grade art teachers know that all those pictures their students mark out with grids are really just masturbation fodder.
4
They call themselves the Command Crew. They are very important. They tell you your story was one of the best they’ve ever seen, almost as good as Hayley’s.
Who the hell is Hayley, you wonder?
5
Your characters become friends, which means that you become friends. Your characters start dating, which means that you talk about meeting up at the mall sometime but it’s not a romantic thing, it’s just a friend thing, but your mom won’t let you go anyway. A boy joins and writes one drawn-out story whose climax is the reveal of his character’s name, which translates to “clever meat” in another language. He never writes another story after that. You talk to him on IMs sometimes, mostly about Animorphs.
After school, you and Stephanie and Jen B. ride your bikes through the ravine. Yours is second hand, and parts start flying off after you drop it. You traipse mud through the living room, all over your mom’s new beige carpet. Stephanie’s brother calls you a lesbian. Lesbo. Dyke. Fag.
6
Which is all a way of saying you’re different from the kids at school. Maybe it’s because your dad is dead and maybe it’s because your mom is Jewish and maybe it’s because you were in G&T and maybe it’s because you have small boobs and a soft belly and maybe it’s because you read fantasy novels, two or three inches thick. This year you’re trying a little harder, wearing those tight velour shirts and baggy corduroy pants like the girls in the delia*s catalog but honestly instead of cute you just feel kind of sweaty, sometimes.
You draw those girls from the delia*s catalog. Dewy eyes, doe eyes, big ripe alien eyes.
7
It’s a phase, and already it’s fading. You’ve moved on to dragons now. Who knows how long that will last. A year ago it was the Beatles, and two years before that, the local Renaissance Fair. Someday it will be boys, or one specific boy, or one boy after another. But now it’s dragons, and girls with talking swords.
8
You’re reading a book about a girl with a talking sword. You’ve almost reached the part where she finds her brother, the eunuch, whose tongue has been cut from his mouth. You feel like you’re dreaming when you get that email. Hayley’s story. The one about the swords. It takes place on a spaceship, but the words—they’re exactly the same.
9
I thought I should bring it to your attention, you write.
This is a serious accusation, they say.
You sit at the computer in your dining room, the book propped up beneath the heels of your hands. You copy the words down. You paste Hayley’s beneath, in bold face.
We take plagiarism seriously, they say.
10
Years later, you hear about another plagiarist. The famous one, the one with the book deal. You wonder if it was Hayley—some of these RPG friends stayed in fanfic, didn’t they? They moved on to Harry Potter when you started going to punk shows. But no, this was a different girl-or-woman who opened a book and copied out the text, tweaking a word here or there to make it fit within the framework of someone else’s world. A common occurrence, not at all unusual, but you couldn’t help wonder: why? When they had all of language at their disposal.
But then, if you’re honest with yourself, a few years before you traced a few of those portraits of John Lennon. You couldn’t get his crooked teeth right, his long nose, so you held the photos up against a bare light bulb. But I mean, you were learning and it didn’t matter, right? You were eleven.
Hayley is fourteen. She should know better.
11
There’s a public announcement, and a forced non-apology. Hayley says she didn’t know anything about swordfighting. What the hell does a ninth grader know about swords? She hardly ever writes after that. You’re mostly Pern RPGing now yourself. But when they ask you to join the Command Crew, you say sure. Your fanfic is still out there, if you know where to look.
Jen B. goes off to private school. Stephanie gets a boyfriend. It will be two years before you meet Ada—a long, lonely gap. It’s been a few months since you’ve finished a story. There have been dozens of beginnings, but no ends.
Tags: aol, fan fiction, phoebe north, the truth, usenet, your life
This is wonderful.
I never really posted my fanfic or fanart online, at all, but those stupid ‘I was practicing’ or ‘i couldn’t do it myself’ excuses for plagiarism never held water for me. I couldn’t do those things either, but I still tried. You can’t learn how to do it if you just copy someone else.
Now, copying the work of others is good practice for artists and for writers both, but you aren’t supposed to stick your name on it and publish it.
<3 thank you
I mean clearly I did some practice cheating too. I actually think copying is a fine way to learn, it’s hiding it and like claiming the work is your own while you get praised for it that’s weird for me.
(And yet I still feel guilty admitting I traced some of my fan art! So!)
I mean, I once wrote a Smallville fanfic that was LIBERALLY SPRINKLED with dialogue from Steinbeck’s “East of Eden,” and I was fourteen. I will cast no stones here today.
NO I DON’T STILL HAVE IT
I WISH I DID
I wish I did
We all do, Mallory.
I was definitely in an email-based Pern RPG in 1999. My password for everything for years was “greenrider.”
I was on the Prodigy BBS Pern RPG when I was way too young to have read those books in the first place. 😉
7th through 9th grade were almost entirely dedicated to reading the complete McCaffrey back catalogue. You know that time during the passage into adulthood and actual sexytimes, where you realize how much of what you thought about sex was wrong? There was so, so much to unlearn?
Yeah. That. Thank you but also goddamnyou, Anne McCaffrey.
Yes oh god, I think it was somewhere around Masterharper where I realized that the rape stuff is kind of weird?
“He finished entering her, and that’s when her desire swept her concious brain off entirely. No further concious thought or activity was present, let alone decision-making about what comes next. Cut to the next morning.”
The best part is that we don’t even need to make it up! McCaffrey comes right out and says it: http://books.google.com/books?id=WsEJw5pBMFwC&…
Wow we were on that BBS too, except it was SO EXPENSIVE.
I was in an unlicensed RPG that almost got sued by Anne McCaffery for very clearly stealing from Pern, if that counts.
Hey I was too! That almost went in this but then it didn’t fit with the general gist. Which one?
Errrr, I think it was called Karenden, or something similar? It was play by email style, with lots of very long planned stories and very few produced, but I wrote SO MANY. I filled up an entire floppy disk (…probably not that hard in retrospect), which I kept for years after I had a computer that was actually capable of reading it.
(Basically if you swapped in Sailor Moon for Space Cases, this piece would also be my life. It’s already at least 70% there anyway.)
Ah, I think I was in ANOTHER Pern rip-off that almost got sued. (The girl in charge was named Quarla? That’s all I remember, pretty much.) I love the fact that there were multiple Pern rip-off clubs that almost got sued.
Somehow I didn’t get into Sailor Moon until grad school which is clearly a tragedy.
OH MAN, THAT WAS THE ONE. Her name is pretty distinct! (Or she might have run multiple RPGs. And my impression is that McCaffery was pretty litigious, so who knows?)
I had like six characters, but the only one I remember was a villain named Silver who had ~very tragic backstory~ (which thankfully I have forgotten because I am cringing remembering that much at all).
I REMEMBER SILVER!
This is why the toast is amazing.
AHAHA WOW. Hello. <3
I’m so glad that a friend linked me here. I wrote so many letters trying to save this show, probably still have a copy of the Zabagabe ‘zine somewhere back home that included one of my Mary Sues in the “Send us your characters and WE WILL WRITE THEM ALL INTO A FIC” story… I was only on the outskirtiest of outskirts for that show, but it was so incredibly formative an experience for me as a fan and as a member of a fan community. Thank for you for writing this. 🙂
Phoebe! I love this — though I am just old enough that “You know that show. The one with the sensitive alien dude who was born in an egg” conjured up vague, fleeting memories of Mork & Mindy instead of Space Cases, so you can imagine the other references were a little after my time, too.
But even so, it evoked so much of my own childhood and youth, especially the sheer thrill of finding others who share your delight in writing, who will hold you to some standard — and then the crashing dismay of realizing that some of them won’t observe those standards, that some of them will steal the words right from your hands.
There’s no righteous justice like the righteous justice of 14 year old girls.
Hayley is fourteen. She should know better.
SNORT.
I remember a short story I “wrote” when I was 7 or 8 years old, and which I realized later was lifted almost completely from one of those old Alfred Hitchcock collections that my parents used to buy at yard sales. I love the comparison to tracing: that it’s something an immature artist might do for private practice, that it can be a training ground and not a place for shame, and that the trespass is in presenting it as your own work when you’re grown enough to know better.
Hooray, it’s Phoebe!! Everyone should read her books, they’re good!
(Actually I haven’t read Starbreak yet but I really liked Starglass.)
You write fanfic. Of course you do.
Can I talk about how nice it is to read this? I was in the fanfic closet for so, so many years, just me and my AOL keywords and my “online communities” as I called them, vaguely, when my mom asked what I was doing. Thanks for the reminder that I was never actually as alone as I thought.
There have been dozens of beginnings, but no ends.
This, however, was a beautiful end.
Further proof that The Toast is, as ever, MY PEOPLE.
(DragonLance chat rpgs. Sailor Moon PBEM games. Fanfic for other cartoons. Watching the plagiarism debacles go on and on. Spending too much time on Fandom Wank. You write fanfic, of course.)
So many Sailor Moon PBEMs, ones I played in and ones I tried to start. A circle of friends that’s a neverending cycle of PBEMs born in surges of creativity and destroyed by drama flares or lack of activity.
And yes, far too much Fandom Wank for anyone’s good.
….if you have been using the handle Irk since the early aughts I think we may have played in the same games/know the same people.
I have always been Irk. If any rival Irks appear I cut them down. I primarily played in Sailor Angels, trying to pump up the villains with arts until it sort of imploded.
Omfg who are you? 😀
OH MY GODDDDD. I never made it into Angels but I knew a ton of people who did. I’m Nomie (or Nami or Anomie depending on when we met), I was definitely in Sailor Moon Flash and Sailor Mythos aaand I forget what other games. A BUNCH.
My friend/cowriter Char was in Flash! I was gonna app but by that point I was sussing out the major problem with PBEMs at this stage – overarcing stories were hard to plot with a lot of people who weren’t showing up, and I don’t write well without an end game in mind, and RPG runners didn’t tend to like to let the plebes know what their secret end game was until they got in! So I ended up just going to fanfiction and then to noveling. It’s easier when there’s one cowriter instead of twelve.
Were you in uhhh… what was that game with the Primal senshi and the magical senshi, Laris was running it? And there was Arcana, I don’t know if it got restarted after a huge dramasplosion. After awhile I was keeping track of dramasplosions more than game details…
I mostly hung out in the Beseen chat if that’s familiar to you. It’s where the Angels camp sort of lurked and talked and derped. Um anyway I’m irkdesu on tumblr/twitter if you want to chat somewhere non-toasty anytime. xD;
(I have never done any Sailor Moon fandom, but I am so glad you all are my people too! Sex-positive misandrist nerdiness is everything I have ever needed in life.)
Sex-positive misandrist nerdiness is everything I have ever needed in life
brb getting a tattoo
Or at LEAST a cross-stitch sampler
I was out of town during the prize ceremony for the library’s Summer Writing Contest, so I got my 2ND PLACE – PROSE – 12-14 DIVISION certificate in the mail a couple of weeks later.
The certificate came with a commemorative pamphlet collecting all the winning stories and poems. Nice heavy stock, expensive staples. I opened it up to my story to admire the typesetting, and then I flipped back a few pages, curious to see the first place winner.
It was Nina Kiriki Hoffman’s “The First Excuse” with someone else’s name on it.
Coming of age story with a werewolf chase and a playground and some light teen romance? Totally “The First Excuse.” Maybe there was a bit of new stuff in the opening paragraphs, but the plagiarist soon warmed to his task and began heaping in actual dialog and highly reminiscent character names. The twist ending was an utter rip. You could practically see the excess paste welling up around the scissor marks.
What was this kid playing at? What could the librarians be thinking? It was only the second story in Bruce Coville’s Book of Monsters II: More Tales To Give You The Creeps, for god’s sake. Double failures of conscience and due diligence, as I told my parents. We had to call the library right now and alert them to the wrong-doing.
My parents dissuaded me from calling the library, from doing anything. My dad argued (and I have to agree with him now) that I was very close to the case, and any attempt on my part to retract my rival’s victory could be easily dismissed as jealousy.
He did not argue (though I now believe he thought) that I did not have a very easy-going affect at 13 years old. If I took my point to the library, I might end up demeaning myself in public with a lot of choked sobbing.
Which…maybe he had a point. When I think about what would have happened if I had discovered the plagiarism at the awards ceremony, I can hardly begin to imagine the shit show. I would have liked to see it, but I’m glad I didn’t live it.
Oh god yes.
So many feels.
Is THAT what that show was, I saw the one episode where Elmyra showed up and thought it looked really neat but never managed to catch it again!
This is every 90s fandom I was in, wow. Save Our Sailors flashbacks. …Painful flashbacks.
BUY ALL THE POP-TARTS
*Starry eyed nostalgia*
Fandom was my life from about 12-18. Maybe past that, not gonna lie. I had serious feels when Catalina left the show and was replaced by Suzie. It hurts me to this day! And now I’m thinking about finding that wig and coming up with a great Halloween costume…
My introduction to the internet was AOL chatrooms where we did Animorphs RPGs, and it only went from there. Thank god for the internet to feed my teen angst!
This post is amazing. It feels like a hug, or a high-five, or someone saying the secret password that my Harry Potter forum members used to identify one another for like a week in 2003, which I had forgotten all about until now.
I feel like this is a safe space to ask if anyone has heard of/ participated in PanHistoria?? I wrote characters in a couple of their sci fi/fantasy stories (they were definitely all 17-23 year-old females with mysterious pasts).
HOLY SHIT I must have forgotten about Space Cases the day I stopped watching it, because I had this giant reaction to seeing that picture of Jewel Staite but no memory of what the show was called. I just watched the first episode on YouTube. I definitely remember the theme song, the rainbow hair, and the invisible friend Suzee. My mind is blown by the Firefly connection!
I guess I’m just a couple years too old for this Space Cases situation — this is the first I’ve heard of it.* But Star Trek: The Next Generation was this, for me. Fanfic, TNG-themed art in art class (a sculpey Enterprise! It was lumpy), secret passwords with friends, the PROFOUND disappointment when my mom brought me a Star Wars novel from the bookstore instead of a Star Trek novel.
I moved in the middle of 6th grade, brought my TNG obsession with me, and somehow managed to 1) find the nerds and 2) convince them to be fangirls with me. I had been Crusher before, my alpha friend Emily having claimed Troi, but when I moved *I* claimed Troi and let the rest of them sort it out amongst themselves.
* Which is surprising, because Jewel Staite! And written by Peter David! I ruthlessly purged books on a recent major downsizing move, but I kept my hardcover of Imzadi.
Pern RPGing oh my god LET US TELL YOU ABOUT OUR DRAGONS.
Ahem, I mean, this is an excellent piece, I really enjoyed it!
I was just too youthful a youth to experience this permutation, but fandom was a hugely embarrassing part of my adolescence (until I stopped giving a fuck and it became an average part of my maturity). I still have an ancient ff.n account with hack work from the anime my friends liked (we traded fic handles like Facebooks), and an ao3 account with the media they didn’t like so much.
But I need to know what the name of the book about the girl with the talking sword is? Because the only talking sword I know of in SF/F is Need from Mercedes Lackey.
These are things I don’t generally admit in public.
http://www.amazon.com/Sword-Dancer-Tiger-Del-Jenn…
They are actually pretty good if you like this type of thing!
HOOOOLY crap I just cleared those out of my library! I definitely read those.
Space Cases is what my sister always referred to as a “headache show” – before she was young enough to realize what a migraine was, she would spend Sunday afternoons in misery watching these shows on Nickelodeon (much like Hey Dude and Salute Your Shorts) and had no idea why.
Also…was anyone here involved with any online TCGs or the spriting community? That was my main fandom interaction back in the day, which I thought was really good for me as I’ve never been into “fandom” as a whole, but I loved these multi-fandom hangouts. Mystic Cards was my big one, but I was a huge fan of Moonlight and Vines. I could speak for DAYS about the English-speaking pixel art community and how jealous I always was of the Italian girls who made such beautiful dolls. Talk about a nostalgia slam.
Ah Real Monsters, Hey Dude, Beetlejuice, Catdog… all headache shows!! I’m surprised other people experienced this. Can’t help wondering if it was the time-slot (heat peak of the afternoon)
Space Cases is what my sister always referred to as a "headache show" – before she was young enough to realize what a migraine was, she would spend Sunday afternoons in misery watching these shows on Nickelodeon (much like Hey Dude and Salute Your Shorts) and had no idea why.
Also…was anyone here involved with any online TCGs or the spriting community? That was my main fandom interaction back in the day, which I thought was really good for me as I've never been into "fandom" as a whole, but I loved these multi-fandom hangouts. Mystic Cards was my big one, but I was a huge fan of Moonlight and Vines. I could speak for DAYS about the English-speaking pixel art community and how jealous I always was of the Italian girls who made such beautiful dolls. Talk about a nostalgia slam.
Augh even seeing Cassandra Cla(i)re alluded to makes me break out in hives.
I can’t +1 this enough. There aren’t enough 1s in the universe.
SAME. Augh. This is bringing back all the feels.
I never did the fanfic thing—the mid-90s AOL X-Files forums were more my jam—but I do remember middle school attempts at “original fiction” that were sprinkled heavily with lines from (my hand to god) The Langoliers and Politically Correct Bedtime Stories. My best friend caught me out on the latter and didn’t speak to me for MONTHS.
I never did the fanfic thing—the mid-90s AOL X-Files forums were more my jam—but I do remember middle school attempts at "original fiction" that were sprinkled heavily with lines from (my hand to god) The Langoliers and Politically Correct Bedtime Stories. My best friend caught me out on the latter and didn't speak to me for MONTHS.
This is amazing and I remember watching that show and wanting that rainbow hair SO BADLY and I had no idea anyone else knew that it existed—and then somehow I never saw it again but I always, always remembered it. Nor did I have any idea that was Jewel Staite!
But yeah, this was nerding in the 90s and you are my people.
Sometimes I feel like I was a very unusual nerdy teenager who liked fantasy, because all I did was read it (never watched any of the tv shows until, eventually, Buffy) and none of my friends did and I never cared, or considered that it should matter until I started reading all these books about how you had to Find Your Tribe Which Consists Of People Who Like Your Books (hi Among Others) and wondered why I was so weird. It’s like a reverse high school experience.
Sometimes I feel like I was a very unusual nerdy teenager who liked fantasy, because all I did was read it (never watched any of the tv shows until, eventually, Buffy) and none of my friends did and I never cared, or considered that it should matter until I started reading all these books about how you had to Find Your Tribe Which Consists Of People Who Like Your Books (hi Among Others) and wondered why I was so weird. It's like a reverse high school experience.
I had never heard of Space Cases before, but… I watched the first episode, and subsequently the whole first season, after reading this. I have absolutely no regrets. It’s super charming and 90’s-y, it has a surprisingly grown-up treatment of interpersonal conflict and ethical dilemmas, it passes the Bechdel Test with flying colors, it has a smart sense of humor, you can tell that the actors were legitimately friends in real life which is really sweet, the theme song is super catchy, and it’s Canadian so they say “sorry” with a long “o.” This would have been my life if my family had had cable when I was a kid.
I’m sad about the way Season 1 ends, though. I’m not so sure I want to watch Season 2.