PepSi Fan Fiction – The Power of Fandom and Why It Still Matters

Hola PepSi University chicas! (And any chicos as well!) First of all, a huge thanks to kalikeca for broaching my idea to be a guest lecturer this time around and Dr. P for allowing me to come and play. Seriously, y’all rock!

With the end of LHDP and the season 9 clusterfuck (sorry, there’s just no other word for it!) fast approaching, I’ve been thinking a lot recently about all this fandom has given me. Granted, I’ve only been a fan of PepSi for less than a year – ep 104 was the first one I ever watched, believe it or not! – but my time in this fandom continues to be increasingly gratifying and rewarding. I’ve been able to witness the unparalleled chemistry of Laura Sánchez and Marian Aguilera as they portrayed one of the most beautiful, realistic lesbian relationships ever seen on screen. I’ve found a fan community that loves to analyze every PepSi look, glance, word of dialog and more – while the folks in this fandom I’ve found to be alternately hilarious, profound, silly and just plain awesome. But beyond that, one of the most important things PepSi did for me was to rekindle my creativity.

I’ve been a writer all my life, but admittedly a chickenshit one. I’ve written dozens of fanfics on various fandoms since I was a kid, but have never showed them to anyone beyond a few select friends. Until I became a PepSi fan. Something about Pepa and Silvia’s onscreen magic fueled an insatiable urge in me to create more stories – to fill in the gaps that might have happened between scenes or episodes or to take the characters in a new direction. Tentatively, and then with growing confidence, I started posting my PepSi fanfic on my
LiveJournal. I was afraid that I’d irrevocably ‘messed up’ these two beloved characters with my first attempt and wondered if anyone would hopefully enjoy or even read what I had to offer. But I kept writing more PepSi stories, unable to stop. And the feedback I received was not only gratifying, but helped give me a huge boost in my self-confidence as a writer. My PepSi fanfic entitled In Love’s Defense was not only the longest piece I’d ever written, it was the most substantial piece of writing I’d been able to finish in over 15 years – just about all of my other writing has been left by the wayside, unfinished and gathering (virtual) dust in the depths of my hard drive.

Now, I’m not only chomping at the bit to keep on writing PepSi fanfic, but have the fortitude and conviction to return to my own original novel (a lesbian romance) after having not worked on it for almost a year. And now I have the confidence that I will actually finish it. I’ve been able to have become more comfortable in my own skin as a woman who’s not only out, but is able to thoroughly enjoy the fantastical creative process that comes with being a writer.

I know that my experience writing PepSi fanfic is not unique. So many awesome fanfic writers have taken Pepa and Silvia on their own journeys – whether filling in the blanks of that missing year in between seasons 6 and 7, creating little slice-of-life domestic moments, or just plain hot, sizzling smutty ones! :D With the end of LHDP upon us, I believe that PepSi fan fiction and fan creativity in all its forms is not only more important, but more necessary than ever. Fan contributions will continue to keep Pepa and Silvia happy, alive and in love. They’re a way of healing and catharsis after the disaster of episodes 104 and season 9. But most importantly, they will keep this community engaged and lively long after the show ends.

A friend of mine who runs one of the most foremost Xena: Warrior Princess
sites wrote after the ending of the series (pardon me, I’m paraphrasing): “Rob Tapert [Xena series creator] may have created the show, but it’s the fans who hold the legacy and will carry it forward.” Like Pepa and Silvia, Xena and Gabrielle also had a similar, tragic ending to their relationship, with Xena’s gruesome death and separation from her soulmate. Fans also felt hurt, enraged and betrayed by the series they loved so much. But I think what my friend said is also true in this case – a lot of us hate what Alex Pina has done to a series and couple that started out so beautifully, but we as fans, can create the ending we want. We can write the ending where PepSi goes off into the sunset on their honeymoon, make a happy ending video or create PepSi artwork that portrays them together and eternally in love. We can keep introducing LHDP and PepSi to others, which can in turn continue to affect people on a personal level, as it has in my case.

I’ve always believed that the story of Pepa and Silvia is more than a television show – beyond the relationship portrayed on screen, it’s a socially important story that needs to be told. How many people have found the courage to come out because of watching Pepa and Silvia? How many have had their horizons expanded or their opinions broadened because of watching this couple? How many have found their muse again? Probably more than we’ll ever know. So let’s keep on writing those fanfics, making those videos, that artwork, or whatever tickles your fancy. Even if it’s the first time you’ve ever written or made a video, give it a try. It may be more of a positive change than you can ever imagine.

Thanks for reading, PepSi peeps. I love this show, but more than that, I love the community it has created.

-lenageek

10 comments:

Anonymous said...

Great essay, lenageek! I hope nobody will mind if I leave a multi-part reply to your essay.

Like you, lenageek, I'm also a post-104 LHdP *and* PepSi fan and have been a fan for less than a year. I lurked on the fandom for the longest while, and de-lurked only recently, and I'm really glad that I did, because I had really needed to vent. When I first saw episode 104, I was *ripped to shreds* by it, and I hadn't even been following LHdP season by season at that point, nor had I even watched all the previous episodes with PepSi scenes in it. I was seriously depressed for two weeks -- dos semanas, people!! That's two weeks of my life that I'm never going to get back, and I still feel that it was completely unwarranted trauma (more on this later).

Now I can only imagine what this episode put regular LHdP fans through: the ones who had been watching LHdP patiently from day one, and indeed, the ones who were fans of Marian Aguilera growing up or long before LHdP even started.

Here's what I want to say. First of all, I'm really not a big TV fandom person myself (the only other major fandom I've lurked on has been that of "Xena: Warrior Princess"). But the trauma of LHdP's S8 finale pretty much compelled me to seek out the fandom to process the pain I was going through. I had had to put all that processing aside for a few months because of R/L and work, but I've gotten a chance to express myself on the fandom quite a lot recently, and it all sort of came pouring out.

Fandoms ARE powerful, especially in the digital era. TV producers have to start taking serious note of digital fandoms, because they have no idea what they're talking about if they think that fandoms have no bearing on the survival of their TV shows. Throughout this entire LHdP debacle, Alex Pina's arrogant attitude about Internet forums was absurd: does he have any idea how many millions of people lurk on forums like that even if they never make formal accounts and sign up? Gone is the era of passive fans watching whatever TV producers shove down their throats. This is an era of copyleft, creative commons, open source software, YouTube, Facebook, blogging, and so on. This is an era where just about anybody can Photoshop or vid anything any way they like from a TV show. This is an era where people don't even watch show episodes when they air -- they can record them and watch them later on whenever they feel like it, or they can watch them streaming from the Internet (that's how I've watched full LHdP episodes), so all the conventional ways of measuring show ratings are just going out the window, really fast.

Anonymous said...

TV producers need to realize that fans are never going to be passive consumers again, and they need to respect this about their audience. We are participants, and we are a HUGE part of how a fulfilling entertainment experience gets created. Pepa/Silvia's relationship is probably the biggest case in point here. This TV portrayal became so popular worldwide in large part because of how the audience responded to it. Without fan participation and response, this experience could not have been so magical. Fans co-created it with LHdP's producers and actors. This is a major reason why the fans felt so utterly betrayed by what happened on the S8 finale. TV producers have a huge emotional responsibility to their fans given that the fans are so crucial in creating this type of entertainment experience.

Indeed, I think TV producers would really benefit from taking the content of fandoms seriously. Fans are not idiots. Many of us are intelligent working professionals, and are capable of serious intellectual and emotional engagement with a TV portrayal. As PepSi U has shown, fans pick up on rip-offs, plotholes, inconsistencies, character assassinations, with quite a bit of ease, and we ARE emotionally let down by these things (I wonder if Alex Pina will ever have the courage to work through the deconstructions of S9 on PepSi U -- I highly doubt his ego could endure more than two minutes of the scathing critiques here).

Fan fiction is something that can really benefit any TV show. People write fan fiction for many reasons: for pent-up emotional release, to flesh out characterizations on a show more clearly for themselves, to relate to characters on a more personal level, to fill in missing scenes and details, purely because they feel inspired by a show and its characters to be creative, and so on. I think that fan fiction (particularly when it is consistent with canon) genuinely enhances the "magic" of a TV show, and again, TV producers ought to encourage it and take note of it to (a) create a more compelling entertainment experience, (b) create a more sincere emotional relationship with their fans, AND (c) to actually IMPROVE the quality of their craft. Some of the LHdP fan fiction I've read is phenomenal: the quality of writing is actually BETTER than that on the real show, as have been some of the plot ideas (see for instance random-flores' fan fiction on LJ). (And this is not a compliment I'm wont to give easily.)

For producers concerned purely with the financial bottom line: I guarantee that if they pay more attention to their fans' emotional needs (within reason -- I realize that if they're just obsessed with being crowd-pleasers, they'll go to the other extreme and totally sacrifice the integrity of their work), their shows are going to run longer and they will rake in a lot more money.

Anonymous said...

Finally, I totally agree with lenageek (and I felt the same way after the experience of the "Xena: Warrior Princess" finale) that once the characters and stories on a TV show have been created, they take on a life of their own. TV producers ought to have the humility to realize that once these ideas have become far bigger than what they imagined or intended due to fan participation and response, the situation is out of their hands and there's not much they can do about that. The ideas, the characters, the portrayals, will live on no matter what TPTB try to manipulate their show's fans into believing or perceiving.

As I said, the era of passive entertainment consumption is over. Fans will no longer be manipulated by TPTB into believing idiotic or unrealistic or jarring things about their favorite characters. I might post on my LJ about this at some point, but having watched 103/104 a few times now, and with the emotional shocks having worn off, I actually do not BUY the emotional anal rape of LHdP's S8 finale: it had too many plotholes, it didn't flow organically from the content of the previous episodes, and from the way the character relationships were set up. Like what happened on the Xena finale, as a plot twist these character deaths were contrived and hack, and this finale felt like a sham.

Alex Pina may well be talented, but a Tim Burton or a Quentin Tarantino he is not, and I can't believe he thought he could pull off the character deaths he decided to execute in that finale in a satisfying way. The plot and character development follow-up to these deaths in S9 has been abysmal, which only proves that Pina was not being sincere to his craft at all. This is why I'm happy to reject LHdP canon from 104 onwards and I await fan fiction that will undo all that stupidity (which I'll archive on my LJ, hopefully).

Anonymous said...

I apologize for commenting so much, but I just want to touch on one last thing ...

"I’ve always believed that the story of Pepa and Silvia is more than a television show – beyond the relationship portrayed on screen, it’s a socially important story that needs to be told."

There is a lot I could say about this topic. Personally, I'm a gay woman from Pakistan (I also noticed people from India, our neighbor, commenting here), who has been working on her getaway from this extremely homophobic (and terrorist-infested) country for some seven years now. My long-term girlfriend and I are immigrating to Canada where we'll hopefully finally get our shot at our own "happily ever after". These issues are REAL, very real, and people like us live in perpetual fear and brace ourselves for tragedy and trauma all the time anyway.

My gf and I have actually discussed the prospect of one of us dying: we have to consider that 1) our families are likely to exclude our partners if one of us died, and we've had to work out ways to prevent this from happening, and that 2) if one of us died, the other's family would never acknowledge the loss and would in fact be *relieved*. The loss of a partner for a gay person is very often going to be much more traumatic than that for a heterosexual person, who will at least still have a family support network.

What was Alex Pina thinking, when he decided to take a minority community that is often ALREADY depressed and traumatized, for an emotional ride, and then so brutally letting us down? I mean, killing Silvia in a bloodbath on her WEDDING DAY?!! At a time when LGBT people are already subjected violence all over the world or at risk of violence? At a time when gay marriage isn't even legal everywhere and managing to marry your partner is literally a dream come true for so many of us?

Yes, unlike my previous comments in this thread, this is more of a social/political critique than an artistic one, but let's face it: art doesn't exist in a vacuum, and art and storytelling are powerful means by which social and political change can be effected in the world. TV is a powerful medium, and TV producers need to take responsibility for what they're doing and stop portraying such meaningless, nihilistic violence (and against oppressed minority communities at that) without at the very least offering a decent plot and character resolution. LHdP made a real mess of Pepa/Silvia's love story in the end, and they owed us a much better plot resolution than merely the appearance of Ghost!Silvia. I doubt the people involved will reflect on the immense impact of the Pepa/Silvia relationship AND the immense negative fallout of the decision to kill off Silvia and Montoya, but I hope other TV producers and TV critics do take note and learn from these mistakes to produce TV shows with more integrity in terms of storytelling and characterization, and with more social/political awareness.

Girlechick said...

Thank you so much for keeping PepSi alive in your fics. You are a very talented writer, but you knew that already! :D

Cela said...

It's awesome what PepSi did for you personally...and even more awesome that you're "giving back" to the community with your writing. (And, really now, when's the next update? Hmm? :-P)

I think the key part of keeping a fandom/community alive and running is through new creations. The show itself - viewing it, discussing it, analyzing it, dissecting it, debating it - will always be the backbone of a fandom, but it's the stories, the videos, poems, drawings, banners and icons, inspired by the show, that keep things fresh and keep people interested. So, good on ya for lending a hand in keeping the magic alive.

Anonymous said...

I have question btw. How much of the PepSi-verse or the LHdP fandom in general accept canon from 104 onwards? How many people are slaves to canon to the extent that they're not willing to work on fics/AUs that don't incorporate 104 and S9? (I'm genuinely curious about how much consensus there is on this in the PepSi-verse. My impression is that the only people left working on new fics are the ones who reject canon from 104 onwards, whereas those who've accepted or reconciled themselves emotionally with canon from that episode onwards have sort of just lost interest in the fandom or the show and abandoned whatever Pepa/Silvia writing projects they had going on.)

ilovepepsi said...

Elemental, Watson. First of all S9 is crap. It has no value whatsoever. Plus Pepsi on S9, no such thing. Personally that GhostSilvia don' t do a thing for me. I think it was cooked by Alex Pina to placate the Pepsi fans' fury and Marian agreed to do it again, to please her fans but it was really a silly idea. Mariano has his monologue says Faith makes people believe in things that do not exist. Why exactly Paco" sees" Silvia? But more relevant Why Silvia appears to Paco? As a ghost she KNOWS Satan is bulshit, there is no Satan BUT her Pepa was in real and present danger but she appears so content and placid. Remember Ghost? How Sam wouldn' t leave Molly nowing she was in danger? Anyway, it' s done.

ilovepepsi said...

The aftermath is so much more complex than the show itself. That really silly propestous cops show. They changed the tone from funny ridicolous to serious from S4 onwards. Silvia shot. Silvia lost baby, Silvia has no man and is lonely. Somebody lightbulb goes on and creates not only Paco' s sister--never ever mentioned at all from S1to mid S5--but she is a Lesbian who will conquest Silvia and become her true love. ALELUYA! Only LHDP was never about Silvia, she was a minor--main character because of who she is-- but minor in terms of TV time. And despite the Lesbian communities around the world, LHDP started losing ratings from S6 on. I wonder wether Marian wanted to leave so bad or the did things to make her leave

ilovepepsi said...

But who is pregnant? I ask because I read some fanfic where Silvia is a bonefide rabbitt. She has like 3 or 4 babies, totally disregard for LHDP canon and Silvia getting shot/ losing baby. Even though L.S. is a mother I can' t see Pepa pregnant. My fic they adopt a girl from Philipines but they named her Marian (love that name ) How they both, and D.L. retired babysit his grand daughter, adored that little girl!

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