One slide, I wanted to start by thanking Republica for having me and having me on the big stage again, which is a very exciting and intimidating place to be, and thanking you all for getting up so very early

to come and listen to me talk about the things I love the best. So I'm not gonna dazzle you with slides, partly because I tried to do that once before and I got distracted by my own slides. You can actually see that happening in the video of my last Republica talk, it's brilliant. I'm like, ooh, there's another slide.

Let me look, oh, I'm giving a talk. Shit, yeah, so that happened, I'm gonna just avoid that. So we've made a little collage of all the best things from the internet, and there's kind of a bingo, so if you can spot what all of them are, you get some kind of prize, and the prize is knowing that you watch too much television.

So I'm Laurie, I'm a writer and a journalist and a feminist activist of some kind, and I also write fiction, and I'm a huge, huge nerd, and in the rest of this talk, we're gonna go deep, deep down the nerd hole,

and if anybody's not okay with that, because it is early in the morning, you can go. We're gonna talk about fan fiction and D&D and all of those awesome things, so if that makes you uncomfortable, then you can, I understand, and I understand there's some prejudice, because I'm a fan ficker at heart, hello, man with a camera, and fan fic,

there is, nerds like to think that we don't have a hierarchy, but we really, really do, and fan fic is a kind of somewhere down there below tabletop role players and larpers and somewhere above furries who actually get kind of a bad rap. I'm not a furry myself, but I can,

I think people should just be nice to them, because really, we're not nice enough to furries, and that's the first lesson of the day. All right, so we're gonna talk about stories and why stories matter, and this is something I think about a lot, both as a journalist, as somebody who writes fiction now,

but also as somebody who reads a great deal of fiction, and really reading fiction and watching TV is what I do with most of my life, and I imagine quite a lot of you guys, and I think the stories that we tell matter a great deal, and I'm gonna be talking here about pop culture,

TV, comics, science fiction, I think science fiction is the most important form of literature and culture by far right now, and it has been for many, many years, but particularly when so much of our collective imagination is engaged in trying to form a picture of what the future is gonna look like and often getting it wrong.

William Gibson said recently that he is considering stopping writing near future science fiction because it just doesn't make sense anymore. It's dated so quickly. So I'm gonna start in 1977, and on or around the early months of the year 1977,

literary history changed forever because that was when the story Desert Heat was published in a small self-published zine journal, and the story Desert Heat was one of the most popular

and well-known bits of Spock, Kirk, slash fan fiction, and look, there they are. It's like we found, it's really hard to find good, actually appropriate to put on stage pictures of Spock and Kirk. You wouldn't believe this, but it really is, but just Google it and turn off your safe search,

and yeah, your day will be better at least. Well, your day will be stranger, but it will also be better. So fan fiction was important to Star Trek, and the whole world and the mythos of Star Trek from the very start. In fact, fans were instrumental in getting the second series commissioned because they were gonna cancel it,

and the whole history of 20th century science fiction would have been different if that had happened, but from the very start, fans started to write different stories within that world, and one of the things they started to write most enthusiastically was stories about Spock and Kirk getting it on, and thus slash fiction was born.

Desert Heat is a, I really encourage you guys to read it, it's completely brilliant. It's basically the story, does anybody know what Ponfar is? We're deep down the note here, yay, some guests. So Ponfar, I don't know if any of you, for the rest of you guys, the normal people out there, you should know that Vulcans, which is what Spock is,

they go into a sort of heat where they have to have sex or they die, and this is the plot line that launched all of fan fiction and all of slash fiction. So the story of Desert Heat is that Spock and Kirk are trapped on a desert planet.

Spock goes into Ponfar and he's like, oh no, I am in Ponfar, I must have sex or I will surely die and Spock and Kirk goes basically, I volunteer as tribute and thus slash is born. But part of what was interesting and important about that,

apart from the rampant silliness, which I think is an important part of any mythos, is that in Star Trek itself, which was already a very radical show in many, many ways that just don't translate today, they had a black woman as a relatively major character, they had a Russian character,

which was now that doesn't look like the big deal that it was, but having a Russian character as a heartthrob, I mean the point of Chekov is basically just to be the guy who looks a bit like maybe a member of the Beatles who's snogging some girl in the back of the set, but Chekov was really important. Anyway, stop talking about Star Trek.

But what they couldn't show was the friendship between Spock and Kirk becoming something more, because I mean if you watch that show, they're clearly in some kind of relationship. The Spock-Kirk relationship is the most important part of that show emotionally, and some of the fans were like, well, they can't show it on TV, but we know what's going on really,

so we're gonna write it. We're gonna write it because we love this show, but it's not quite there, it's not quite enough, and we're gonna write our own version. It doesn't mean we don't love the original show, but we think there should be different versions of this story, and I think that is a really, really important moment with fans and readers

and audience members taking control, and so fan fiction, yes, it predates the internet. This was happening in zines and in fan journals being passed around and shipped across. One of them was called The Passionate Vulcan, which sounds like a kind of ladies' home companion journal, which I love.

I really, if anybody wants to give me the best present ever, find me an original copy of The Passionate Vulcan, and it'll be my most treasured possession. But anyway, the fan fiction now, is fan fiction exploded because of the internet? And we're gonna come to that later,

what that meant for culture and how that has changed culture and how the ethos and spirit of fan fiction and collaborative, radical retellings of monomyths and modern stories have changed the way we interpret culture. But I wanna make it clear that stories

are not just things we tell to entertain ourselves. Stories are a way of transmitting culture and in some ways, homogenizing culture, and they always have been. Did anybody here study literature or English literature? Oh, not, yes, yes, a few. You don't have to, I know it's a tech conference,

but you can put up your hands, it's okay. We're entirely unemployable, I hope, and that's okay. But the earliest studies of English literature and the development of English literature as a discipline, well, one of the stories about it

is that it was introduced as a way for women when they were first entering universities to study something light and silly because we couldn't do classics or physics because our brains would overheat and then our wombs would kind of migrate up and strangle our brains, which is science, or was until quite recently science. But actually, that's kind of awful in itself,

but that wasn't the earliest teaching of English literature as a discipline. The earliest teaching of English literature as a subject, as a discipline, and this is from Anthony Burgess's history of the subject, was in the Raj, in the British Empire.

Because when the British colonized the whole world, which of course we're all very embarrassed about right now, we had to find ways of making sure that British culture was indoctrinated among the local population. And in most places that we took over, Eddie Izzard's study, do you have a flag?

We did this through religion. We did it through Christianity. We sent in missionaries. We made sure all the local kids were raised to believe in Jesus and the ideals about God and proper behavior that Jesus seemed to be a fan of, which in that interpretation probably included

never rebelling and being just kind of quiet and good the whole time. But in India, this didn't work because in India there were already huge religious problems and huge religious tensions and introducing a new religion into that mess was not gonna work. So instead, they decided to teach all the kids

in the schools that they set up English literature. They decided to teach them Shakespeare and Dickens and Jane Austen to transfer the ideals of British culture. And actually even today, I was in a writing class recently with two students from India.

And they said, well yeah, we grew up reading Dickens and reading Shakespeare and reading Jane Austen and learning that this was what literature was and this is how you do a story. And this is what the hero of a story looks like. They're almost always white and they're almost always middle class and they're English. And that's what you have to be to be the hero of a story.

Heroes of stories can't be Indian. They can't be living outside Europe. That's just silly. And this is how culture is still transmitted in the formation of those canons. The whole idea of a canon, the literature that really matters. Harold Bloom, who is a very complicated theorist, calls this the Western canon.

The idea that there are totemic writers and these are the ones who really matter. These are the stories who really matter. We have a list. We update it every 50 years or so, but really it doesn't change. It's just lots of white guys and Jane Austen. And interestingly enough, Ursula Le Guin is one of the,

yeah, great, Ursula Le Guin is one of the writers he includes in his last update of the Western canon as the kind of self-appointed guardian of this. So the idea of monomyths and one story and one set of stories being important is something that persists throughout English literature

as a discipline, but you don't have to study English literature to understand that there are certain stories that we think are important and certain stories that we don't think are important. And this is kind of reflected in nerd culture as well. If you're a nerd, you like science fiction. Until quite recently, you've probably been used to hearing that the stories that you love aren't really important.

Dickens is important. Buffy isn't so important. Star Trek isn't so, but Star Trek is really important. Have I mentioned that I think that? Anyway. So around the middle of the 20th century, has anybody come across the hero's journey? The hero's journey, anyone? Oh, one or two, yes. Yay. The hero's journey was a pattern of story.

It's called the monomyth, the one myth, and it was invented by this guy, Joseph Campbell, and in this book, The Hero's Journey, and his idea was that really in every decent story, it's one pattern. It's one pattern of how the story goes.

One arc, you know, you have the hero, and the hero then meets the mentor, and then there's the call to adventure, and at first, the hero resists the call to adventure, and then the hero goes on the journey, and then you meet the second mentor or the wise person, and then there's the princess or the love interest, and then there's the meeting with the father figure,

and you can already tell that this is the plot of Star Wars, right? It's also the plot of The Matrix, The Lion King, and a lot of film and TV and popular stories that have come out since then, and there's a reason for that. It's because they copied it. Joseph Campbell actually was talking to the creators

and writers of Star Wars, and it was specifically developed along those lines. It was one of the first films to do that, and The Hero's Journey is something that annoys a great many writers and thinkers, as well as probably a great many people who consume culture, because actually,

one story, if you see it again and again and again, and I know, you know, I'm not dissing on The Matrix. Everyone loves The Matrix and The Lion King and Star Wars, but it gets boring if you're seeing that story again and again and again, because part of the reason it's boring is the hero always looks the same. He's a young, generally white dude.

The fact that he's a man is very, very important, because the women appear along various parts of the monomyth as secondary characters. Joseph Campbell was actually asked about this by a student of his, asked, you know, can women ever have their own hero's journey?

Can we be the heroes? And according to one critic, what Joseph Campbell said was, women don't need a hero's journey. All through the monomyth, the woman is there. She just needs to realize that she is the place

that everyone is trying to get to. And this sounds like such bullshit to me. I was so angry when I read that, but it explains so much of why women don't appear as heroes and genuine heroic characters with flaws and obstacles to overcome for so long, because it's just not seen as the done thing.

Anyway, so we're gonna skip forward now to the 1990s, and specifically to 1998, which was when the establishment of the website fanfiction.net, which was when fanfiction really took off in a really new way. And an interesting thing was happening at this time.

Within mainstream literature, and actually also contemporary experimental science fiction, a lot of writers were, do you remember back in that time when everyone was really excited by the internet, and the internet was just gonna be this amazing thing that was gonna change everything, and everything was gonna be brilliant, and live journals still existed.

Around that time, writers thought, well, we've got the internet now. We don't have to have stories in the same way. Why don't we experiment? Why do you need a story with a beginning and a middle and an end? Why do you need characters? Why do you need development? You know, you could have a story that's set on a train carriage with various little bits you can click on.

People were so, writers got so excited by hyperlinks. It's really, really cute. It's so lovely reading some of this stuff. I actually studied some of this in uni. I wrote a completely nonsensical, I mean, it made sense to me at the time, but that's because I'd been in a library for about three months, solid. And I came out with going, I've invented three new words!

And they were like, right, okay, yes, have a mark. It's fine, now can I go and have a walk in the sunshine? But anyway, all of this stuff, this hypertext literature, was trying to change the basic form of story and what a story is meant to do. And it turned out that people still want traditional stories.

People want stories with beginnings, middles, and ends, stories with heroes and protagonists you can follow, stories to impose a general pattern on the horrific randomness of life, stories that can act as mirrors and as windows and can change you and that you can then take on

and change your own world, and stories that can comfort you and provide you with a way to rehearse trauma. And all of those things that stories are supposed to do and they do do, people still wanted that. But what they wanted and what people were starting to do over on fanfiction.net, they just wanted those stories to be a little bit different. They wanted different kinds of heroes

and they wanted different ways of telling it. And now I go deep in the nerd hole and reveal my own beginnings as a reader and a writer, which is in Harry Potter and Buffy fanfiction. You know, Harry Potter came out in 1997 and it was so important to me.

I was actually, I was 11 at the time and I read the first Harry Potter book on the night of my 11th birthday. And I sat up all night waiting for my Hogwarts letter. And it didn't, I know, I know it didn't come, but in a way it sort of did. But yeah, and, but then quite soon afterwards

when I was allowed to use the one home computer, I was, I found this world where people were writing all these different versions of the story. And it was really interesting to me. People didn't just want to read this one story about Harry Potter and what he gets up to. People wanted to make it a bit dangerous and a bit sexy.

They wanted to see Harry and Draco get together. They wanted to see Harry and Snape get together, which was a bit odd. They wanted to see various other, I mean, a lot of it was about sex, yes. Partly because a lot of it was being written by girls in their early teen years. Fan fiction has always been a hugely female thing.

I think that's not a coincidence. Women often, women are the biggest readers and they have, you know, a frustration that they don't necessarily see the stories they want to read and the experiences they want to see mirrored represented in the most popular myths of our time.

But what was interesting about fan fiction was the community that developed around it. You know, nobody was saying that, everybody's excited to see Harry and Draco get together, but nobody's saying that the main story is wrong because it doesn't have that. This is just an addition. This is another reading. And then there's the version where

Harry and Draco kill each other and it all goes into a dark Gothic world and there are self-insert characters who are probably boning in the ruins of Hogwarts and, you know, all of that stuff. And all these stories exist at the same time. Some of them are incredibly well done. Some of them are incredibly badly done. Some of them are just porn and that's okay.

You know, it's okay when you're 14 and you don't wanna, you know, you wanna add boning to your favorite book which has to be rated for kids. But the thing that's most interesting to me is that all these stories went on at the same time rather than one story, many stories, all occurring within the same mythos.

And the Harry Potter fandom was one of the places where they really got very early into copyright law and into, J.K. Rowling has always been very okay with fan fiction being created as long as people don't make money off it and you have to put a disclaimer at the top saying, I don't own these characters myself.

I'm not making money off this. This is just a tribute. This is a fan work and that's fine. This is not a talk about copyright but I really wanna see a talk about fan fiction and copyright. So I hope maybe for scheduling next year. It's, and in these stories,

the hero's journey looked a little bit different and there were rewritings like, you know, there were race bent characters and there were gender bent characters and you had Harry as a girl and you had Hermione being the most important character and you're actually getting to make decisions for herself rather than just following these two random dudes around

when she's clearly the smartest one in the room and so something interesting is happening in culture right now which is that all of the kids, especially the young women who grew up writing that fan fiction and reading it, a lot of them are now in their late 20s and early 30s

and they're starting to become powerful within the media themselves and they're starting to create stories themselves and they're starting to affect culture and demand more from our collective storytelling and this is where we get stuff like this and that up there is fan art rendering. This is all fan art by the way

and I'm gonna link to the artists on my Twitter so really important to credit fan artists but that is a picture of Hermione imagined as a African American girl and that was something that had already happened. A lot of fans, you know, reading the description of Hermione's hair which is massive and out of control,

we're just assuming in their heart of hearts their own canon, their head canon which is a word I really love. Hermione was always black and a play has just come out. J.K. Rowling has released a sequel to the Harry Potter books in the form of a stage show called The Cursed Child and the actor who's been cast to play Hermione is black

and that is a huge, I mean you would not expect this to be as huge a deal as it is. Maybe I'm naive, maybe you would but the internet went bananas at which it often does but the backlash was huge. How can you possibly have a black Hermione?

The world, this is beyond the pale of imagination and it's funny, isn't it, how so many people who can imagine dragons, yeah, potions that turn you into somebody else, fatal curses, death eaters, they can imagine all that

but imagining Hermione as not white is somehow beyond the pale of imagination and it's a failure of imagination and this is the case in so much of the critique and the backlash which is on against this new form of storytelling and look, I've got all these stories, we had a lot of fun yesterday looking for all of these and picking the best ones.

This is here, this is gender-bent Esmeralda from Disney, gender-based is Ray, Mad Max, Fury Road, this is some pop art from Star Wars, Poem Finn and all of these ideas, all of the stories that are coming out now this year, we've got Mad Max, Star Wars

which is essentially, look, the Star Wars film, I loved it just like everybody else loved it, right? But it is the same story as the original Star Wars. What makes it radical is they've just changed up the gender and race of the main characters. They have a female heroine, a female hero and they've got a black love interest

and that is all you need to make a story so unbelievably radical these days that it will have half the internet up in arms saying, no, this is too far. Real science fiction is about men fighting wars on the moon and that's all it can ever be and all it ever will be which just shows that you haven't read

half science fiction so I don't know. But and this is, it's the same monomyth but it's just because it's got a female lead, it looks so different and it looks so radical and the backlash is definitely on. The backlash is on against all of this stuff

because of this giant, because of this failure of imagination that people are having and I'm gonna, I've got some notes on my phone so I apologize. So it's important first not to get carried away with how much culture is changing. You know, these stories and these retellings are still exceptions to the rule.

You know, women and people of color are still paid less, promoted less and respected less at almost every level of every creative industry and you know, for every Jessica Jones there is a daredevil where women exist to get killed or rescued or provide some kind of pneumatic, you know, interest and plot points for the hero

and that's it. Daredevil is also the hero's journey by the way. The hero's journey crops up time and again in comics it's green arrow, it's everything. But you know, for every orphan black, yay, there's a Mr. Robot and there's Narcos. You know, this, and I watch it, I actually watch a lot of television if that's not becoming clear.

But the point is that what we have right now is not equality. It's not even approaching equality but sometimes and for a certain kind of fan, when you've been used to seeing yourself represented in every story and imagining yourself as the hero of every story,

equality looks a bit like prejudice. When you're used to privilege, equality looks like prejudice and that is the case in many, many social justice arguments that people are having right now but particularly in storytelling because it's something that's so intimate and so important to so many people

and the rage that white men have been expressing loudly, violently, over the very idea that they might find themselves identifying with the characters who are not white men, the very idea that heroism might not be particular to any race or gender,

the basic idea that the human story is vast and various and we all get to contribute a page. That rage is petty and it is aware of its own pettiness and it is like a screaming toddler denied a suite. It becomes more righteous the more it reminds itself that it is only a story.

Only a story. Only the things we tell to keep out the darkness. Only the myths and fables that save us from despair, to help us establish power and destroy it, to teach each other how to be good, to describe the limits of desire, to keep us breathing and fighting and yearning and striving

when it would be so much easier just to give in. Only the constitutive ingredients of every human society since the Stone Age. Only a story. Only the most important thing in the whole world. The people who are upset that the faces of fiction are changing are right to worry because it's a fundamental challenge to a worldview

that has been too comfortable for too long. The part of our cultural imagination that places white Western men at the center of every story is the same part that legitimizes racism and sexism. The part of our collective mythos that encourages every girl and every brown boy to identify and empathize with white male heroes

is the same part that reacts with rage when white boys are asked to imagine themselves in anyone else's shoes. What does it mean to be a white cis... Oh, thank you. Oh, I got a little clap. Aw, that's nice. Pum pums.

So what does it mean to be a white cis boy reading these books and watching these new shows? Watching Mad Max, there was a huge anti-feminist backlash to Mad Max, which I loved so much. Basically, people were putting out warnings saying, don't watch this movie. It's too entertaining. You know, you'll love it and you'll find yourself loving it

and then they'll get you. Feminism will get you. Don't go. And so what does it mean to be a white cis boy reading these books and watching these shows? Well, it means the same thing. It's meant for everyone else to watch every other show that's ever been made. It means identifying with people who don't look like you, talk like you, or fuck like you.

It's a challenge and it is as radical and useful for white cis boys as the rest of us because stories are mirrors and they are also windows. They let you see yourself transfigured but they also let you live lives you haven't had the chance to imagine as many other lives as there are stories to be told without once leaving your chair.

Look, the people who get angry that Hermione is black, that Rey is a woman, that Furiosa is more of a hero than Mad Max, people who get angry that Steven Universe exists at all. I understand the anger. Anyone who has ever felt shut out of a story by virtue of their sex or skin color

has felt that anger and now imagine that anger multiplied a hundred fold and feeling it every time you read or watch or hear or play through a story and imagine how over time that rage would harden into bewilderment and finally mute acceptance that people like you were never gonna get to be the hero,

not really, then imagine that suddenly starting to change because at the end of the day, capitalism is just a story, religion is just a story, patriarchy and white supremacy are just stories, they are the great organizing myths that define our societies and determine our futures

and I hope that right now the start of a huge rewriting is underway. We can only become what we can imagine and right now our imagination is being stretched in new ways and we're learning as a culture that heroes aren't always white cis guys, we're learning that life and love and villainy

and victory might look a little different and depending on who's telling the story and that's a good thing and it's not easy and it's not over yet, nobody said it was gonna be easy but changing the world is never easy, it takes courage and that is something I learned from Harry Potter

and that's my talk, thanks, thank you. Does anybody have any questions or comments? Go on, surely somebody just asked me about Star Trek,

doesn't have to be a smart, this is Randall Monroe yesterday, ask stupid questions, this is fandom, alright.

Here's a question about Star Trek, do you think Klingons, when they are kinky, then they have gentle sex? I'm sorry, please repeat that. Klingons, you know the klingon? Yeah, I know klingon. Poplar, moktor sha. Did you just speak klingon just then?

A bit and when they get kinky, when they have kinky sex, is it just gentle? Oh yeah, oh that's lovely, that's such a lovely idea. I don't know, you'd have to ask, if I was a fanfic editor, I would commission that,

I think it's lovely. Actually the stuff that's been done with Klingons is very interesting lately, even in the transition between original series and then the next generation. Do you remember that episode where they all go back in time, trouble with tribbles, and they meet the horrible racist stereotype people in blackface made to look like kind of scary Arabs,

which is what the Klingons were meant to be, and then Worf, who's the Klingon hero of the next generation, somebody looks at him and is like, what happened? And they're like, we do not speak of it. And that's how they explain that word, I think it's wonderful, yes. You know, that's very embarrassing,

let's not speak of it again. Anybody else? Yeah, I read an article from you, it was about female robots, and about, I watched Ex Machina, for example, one of the important future vision movies lately,

and what do you think about femininity and future visions as females being robots or machines? What do I think about female robots? Yeah, do you think it's an important? I have a lot of thoughts about female robots, I'm so glad you asked. So, okay, one of the interesting things

is that people have always written stories, right from Metropolis on, for almost 100 years now, people have been writing and telling stories about feminized or female androids and AIs, and it is this really interesting mode, really interesting fictional mode,

because from long before we actually had the capacity to make AI, we've been imagining robots and imagining what it might mean to have robots do basic work for us for free, and the clue is in the name, robot derives from the Czech word for slave, and right through from Metropolis

up to Battlestar Galactica, recent, the Ex Machina, the film Her, we had, there is this, the writer Catherine Cross calls this a guilty memory of the future, and the idea that we are gonna, you know, we have these creatures, we're gonna exploit them, and what's that gonna look like? And I think it is no accident

that we imagine these exploited creatures who are designed to be exploited, we imagine them as women, because I think it's not just about working out whether robots are human, it's about working out on a basic level whether women are human, and you can see that the story is always the same, right, it crops up in comics,

and everything, the story is, you know, the young, normally shy, nerdy, sexually frustrated man meets robot girl and goes through this emotional process of trying to decide is she really human, can I really love her, can she love me back, is it okay to have sex with her,

maybe it's okay, I don't know, and it's the story of this guy trying to figure out whether robots are human, but actually it's a story about guys trying to figure out whether women are human, and you can watch, I mean, if you're a woman who dates men, then you can, especially in your teens and early 20s, you can watch this happening in real life. You can, yes, you can watch it.

Has anybody ever told, I don't know if any woman who dates men here in this audience has ever been told, you know, after a couple of dates with any guy, oh my goodness, you're just different from all the other girls. Has anybody been told that? Yeah, it's the same thing.

It's like, oh my God, I've realized you're a human being, I can really talk to you, you know, and it's like, oh, thank you, you've just insulted more than half my friends. It is meant to be a compliment. You're not like all these other women, you're real, you're actually a human being, and recognizing women, you know, an oppressed sex class still as fully human

is an identity challenge to men and it still is on a deep level, and I think that's one of the things that's being worked out, and it's, you know, our expectations of technology shape our expectations of the future itself, and they're shaped by our expectations of gender,

and it is both interesting and worrying that a lot of the AIs we're designing, and when I say we're designing, I mean mostly dudes are designing, are female or feminized. Siri's default setting is female. Cortana, Alexa, the kind of terrible experiment

that Microsoft had making the AI Tay on Twitter. You know, she was meant to be a happy teenage girl, and then, you know, making sex bots, making fembots, you know, all these, you know, it seems that people are more comfortable designing a creature to serve their intimate needs

and do emotional labor for free. They're more comfortable designing that creature as female because if they designed it, I think it's because if they designed it male, they would have to treat it like a person, and I think that's the answer, so yeah. That's my robot rant. Hey!

Thanks. Hi. Back here, okay. Hi. My question is, what's your thought on how studios portray some characters

that are maybe in, that put them in other races or change the gender or something like that when it's made into a movie? Maybe this story was about an Asian character, and then they cast a generic white guy.

Oh yeah, it's bullshit, isn't it? Really, I mean, like, yesterday, what was the hashtag that was trending yesterday? And I don't know who started it, so I can't credit the person. Anybody hashtag trending on Twitter? George Takei was involved, I know, about Asian people not seeing themselves, oh, whitewashed out, that's what it was.

Asian people not seeing themselves represented on screen because even stories that are taken from anime and taken from, you know, Japanese and Asian stories and then done again by Hollywood, they're like, they're recasting them as white characters. And it's, yeah, I think there is clearly somebody

in the studio who is saying, well, nobody's gonna watch a movie with all Japanese characters or all Asian characters. That's just silly. Nobody watched, was it, oh, nobody watches anime, nobody likes that stuff, nobody watches that stuff, so we'll just cast Scarlett Johansson in everything.

I don't have a problem with Scarlett Johansson. And I think, but I also think that somebody else should get to play robots someday because I think, has anybody seen, like Scarlett Johansson is now playing all of these robots and all the characters that we're now wondering if they're human and, you know, with the new ghost in the shell we're talking about, we're now wondering if they're human.

It's always Scarlett Johansson. We seem to be, as a species, having an existential crisis over the sentience of Scarlett Johansson. And somebody has now actually made a Scarlett Johansson robot, a real one, that they can have sex with and marry, and I don't know what, I would really like to know what Scarlett Johansson herself thinks about that.

But anyway, yeah, I think whitewashing is something that is still going on. I know the last Airbender as well, that happened, and it is, again, it's a way of, in the name of making money, of pushing back on the change in culture

and the change in stories that is happening. And yeah, I don't see any way that it can be positive. It's taking, it's making, people seek, look, I think studio producers still see white, and normally white and male, as the universal, as the default, the default story

that everybody can relate to. And any deviation from that, in the view of Hollywood producers, I imagine, is a challenge, and it means it's a threat, and it means that people at the box office won't go and see it, because everybody wants to relate to these characters, and the idea that white people

could relate to Asian characters is just beyond the pale, it's nonsense. But one thing that I think is interesting and good is that that idea of the lowest common denominator, as culture becomes more diverse, as the internet becomes more and more powerful and important in shaping culture

and in shaping how these stories are produced, you know, so much TV is now watched through Netflix, for example, and other streaming services, that idea of box office, lowest common denominator is actually becoming less important in terms of how our monomyths and our cultural myths

are created. So you don't now have to make a product that will appeal to everyone across the board who might possibly be watching at one time, because you can find your audience all over the world, and you can find, they can tune in at different times. You know, a show like, for all its problems, and it has many problems,

there are some huge racist problems with it, but like The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, which is one of those disappointing shows which is quite feminist, but also quite racist, but even that was considered too radical for prime time TV, but it was then commissioned and picked up by Netflix. Netflix has picked up a lot of shows like this,

and then it went bananas, and shows like Orange is the New Black, shows like Orphan Black, they have a life online which they could not have at the box office, and this is why I think movies are becoming just less and less and less important and less and less relevant. I think episodic narrative television is a preeminent form of narrative

of this moment right now, and that's one of the reasons. That's it. Hi. You were talking about the hero's journey, and I totally agree. Oh yeah, hello. Sorry. Yeah. I totally agree that it's already an advantage

to have female, black, Asian characters, but how would you imagine a change in the story itself? A change in storytelling from the hero's journey? Yes. Well, okay, look. So one of, thanks. So one of the things about the hero's journey itself is that if you tell exactly the same story

over and over again it gets boring, and that is one of the things that's unusual that's happening right now within culture is people are realizing that more diversity in culture and storytelling is, it's not just good because it's more diverse and people are seeing themselves represented in new ways.

People aren't just going to see these things because of that. They're also better stories because they haven't been told yet. You know, it's, they're just better. They're just more fun. And this, you know, things like Mad Max, it's, oh yeah, somebody likes my, hi, yeah, I love it too. Things like Mad Max and people going,

don't see this story. It's too entertaining. You'll get, they'll get you. It's like that people might go or not go because of the diversity element, but actually these stories are popular because they are original or they seem original because there are new ways, you know, they have got new heroes. They've got new problems.

They've got problems that people have actually been having for many, many years and centuries and generations. They just haven't been told in public, in public narrative in the same way. But actually the heroes, I think if the hero's journey is gonna have an afterlife, it's gonna be in things like Star Wars, the new Star Wars where they just recast it.

And that's the only way to do the hero's journey in any original way right now. One of the things that's interesting, okay, if you look at the hero's journey and it's very, very precisely like this happens on chapter, in chapter four and chapter, by chapter five, he or she must have gone, well, he must have gone to the new world of adventure

and taken the first step. One of the things, one of the stories that hits it almost like page for page is The Hunger Games. The first Hunger Games book is just the hero's journey, chapter by chapter by chapter. Nobody has really noticed this because it seems so powerfully original

because it's about a girl, because girls aren't meant to be heroes in that way. And that's one of the reasons that it is so shocking and such an important piece of culture, even though it's just the hero's journey, again, because they imagine a woman, not just as your kind of basic, strong female character, which is nonsense,

but a woman and a hero with flaws and obstacles to overcome who gets to be the hero in that monomyth. So yeah, I love The Hunger Games. I didn't get to talk about it much today, but yeah, that's one of the reasons that is so interesting and powerful. Hello. Hello. Ah, oh.

Sorry, sorry. Oh, hello. You're next, yeah. Okay, finally. I'm very interested in your answer of the big Star Wars fan question at the moment. Is Rey a Mary Sue character? Oh, isn't she? A Mary Sue character. A Mary Sue. Yeah. Well, I mean.

You know what it means. It's a fiction character who is very, very perfect. Sorry. I mean, so what if she is? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So what if she is important because women, female main characters have to be allowed to make failures and not just to be a perfect incarnations

of fan fiction. Well look, so the whole idea, is anybody not familiar with the concept of a Mary Sue? Anybody? Yeah, okay. So a Mary Sue is a concept that developed within fan fiction and it's the self-insert character. You know when you write the Harry Potter story where there's the exciting new character

who's both a vampire and a witch and gets to have sex with Harry and Draco and everybody loves her. That's a Mary Sue and generally a Mary Sue has no flaws. And the criticism of Rey from many different parts of the internet was that Rey is a Mary Sue insert

and I think it's interesting in itself because yeah, Rey is a character who's heroic and yeah, badass and she has all these amazing skills. How did she pick those up? But the idea is that firstly it's a recognition that this is a fanfic coded retelling of Star Wars

but also it's the idea that a woman, a Mary Sue is meant to be a kind of interruption in the story. It's not a real character. It's a kind of upstart character. That's the criticism. And you know, a woman who is perfect and has tons and tons of skills must be an upstart. She has no place in the story.

Whereas, I mean, Daredevil is a Mary Sue, Batman is a Mary Sue. So many male characters are Mary Sue, or Mary Sue, what's it? Maxie Stu's, yeah. Somebody remind me what the, Marty Stu, that's it. That's the version. But yeah, all of these characters are, it's the same self insert sort of perfect character.

And you know, it's not criticized when that's a dude because the dude's meant to do all that. Yeah, but actually I think Rey is quite a boring character because she doesn't have any flaws. Like Katniss is different because Katniss is frightened all the time and she's kind of stubborn and nobody really likes her. That's what makes her an interesting character.

Whereas Rey is a bit, I think they were just a bit nervous about doing what they'd done anyway so they didn't bother to give her any flaws. She's kind of a fighting girl and that's it. But I mean, what we can, it's Star Wars. It's never gonna be massively radical. I didn't believe I said that. Hi, I'm sorry, it's gonna be a dumb question.

What's your favorite ship? Oh my God. Oh, actually weirdly, my favorite ship was always Remus and Tonks, but then that became canon and which was kind of disappointing because I thought it was just a thing that I was into and liked, but that was way back in the day.

I always, I actually, I found, thank goodness, most of my fan fiction, I read and was involved in communities, but most of the stuff I actually wrote was on paper in notebooks. I'm very glad about that right now. But the other day I went back to my mom's house and I found some of my old fan fiction.

It was brilliant, it was Buffy fanfic and it was an amazing, it was such a Mary Sue character. It was amazing. It was this kind of amazing vampire woman who was like English and short and got to have sex with everyone. And she was also a witch.

It was so good and really embarrassing. But yeah, apart from that, I couldn't choose. I couldn't choose. Anybody else? So one more question. Yeah, one more question and we're done. Ah, where? Oh yeah, come on.

Well, I forgot what my actual question was, but back to the Mary Stu, Marty Stu thing, if you think about it, Luke Skywalker clearly is a self-insert character for George Lucas. So obviously, I think I actually read a post by the Hamill guy, Mark Hamill,

who played Skywalker and he basically just behaved like George Lucas would and this got the part perfectly. And yeah, totally. That's adorable. That makes so much sense. Thank you. Oh, we're done or should we have a question?

So one more, please raise your hands. Oh yeah, over there. So I have a Harry Potter question and I hear people talking about the sexual orientation of Dumbledore. And I want to know what do you think about it

because sometimes I think it's a homophobic thing. They need only a scandal and only looking for some gay scandal in Harry Potter. And they don't interested in everyone or interested in the sexual orientation of anybody

only in the gays. Do you think it's homophobic? Oh, no, I don't think it's necessarily homophobic. The interesting thing about Harry Potter, like a lot of YA is that there's really no sex in it at all. I mean, actually Remus and Tonks presumably have sex because she's pregnant in the last book, but it's not ever mentioned.

But yeah, all the adult characters are apparently asexual because that's how YA is written. But Dumbledore, the wife is never mentioned and a lot of wives are mentioned in the book. And JK Rowling just comes off and says in one interview that she'd always imagined Dumbledore as gay.

And that, I think the reaction to that was like, wow, oh my God, this is such a scandal. But actually it made sense to a lot of people who've been writing and reading fan fiction. And it made sense to a lot of people who had been imagining slightly different versions of those characters for ages. JK Rowling is actually a really interesting writer

in terms of how she engages with fans and what she allows people to imagine. Like with the casting of Hermione as black. When she was writing that book back in the 90s, was she imagining a young black British girl as Hermione?

Probably not, to be honest. But she is open to the, she understands that fiction is more important than that and that the life of a book is, that books can function in a much more broad way than just one writer's version of it. And she actually tweeted, massive support for this,

Rowling loves black Hermione. And of course that made everybody even more upset. And I think it's, yeah, revealing that she'd imagined Dumbledore as gay. It was really exciting to a lot of readers because there are no openly gay characters in Harry Potter. And well, I mean, I don't think so anyway.

People have different ideas about the Kenneth Branagh character in the second book and movie, but that's just like there. But no, the third book and movie, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. But yeah, there are no openly gay characters and this is a way of rectifying that because culture has moved on so far in the 20 years since that book was being written.

It just has. And it's a way of keeping it in many ways relevant. Okay, that's it. Thank you very much for your time. Thank you very much, Laura Penny. Great.

Help us on stage one. So we're going to go to the power zone and we'll see you in 15 minutes. Thank you.