Adventures in Fandom

[truepenny]

Or: How I Spent my Christmas Holidays, by Truepenny

You have to understand, before I start, that I grew up in a small town in Tennessee, and so--while being a passionate sf/f reader from the age of oh, say, five--my only understanding of fandom was a vague association with Trekkies. The people I met in college who went to cons did nothing to dispel this impression, and in fact convinced me that, if they liked cons, I would hate them. And, of course, the people I knew who read/wrote fanfic were exactly the kind of Mary-Sueish losers you would expect under the circumstances. So I developed this attitude--which this post is both an apology for and a retraction of--that fans and fanfic writers were freaks and weirdos, and they only wrote fanfic because they didn't have the imagination to write their own original stories. As an Aspiring Pro, I sneered at them.

(I'm sorry, okay? I said this was an apology.)

Fast forward a few years. When I got an agent, his first piece of advice to me was "You need to go to cons." I quaked in terror (introvert--freak and weirdo own self, but deal very badly with extroverted weirdness), but went.

And fell in love.

I do. I love cons. I don't go to many because, hello, graduate student, flat stony broke most of the damn time. But I love them.

But I sneered still at fanfiction (without ever having read any, mind, except some very bad stuff written by a friend of mine). Plus I was getting a little hung up on the whole ethics & copyright thing, and I wasn't sure it was Okay for an Aspiring Pro to condone the stuff. (I'm still not sure, but I've decided to get over myself and say to hell with it. Enough Real Pros have said they're okay with fanfic (including Joss Whedon and J. K. Rowling) that I don't think my opinion matters to anyone.) Fast forward again to last year, when I fell for BtVS in a big big way. BtVS is the first thing I'd say I've ever really been a fan of, in the particular way that means my correct plural is "fen." And, of course, my best-upstairs-neighbor-friend heres_luck went and got hooked on the whole vidding thing, and my exposure to people who vid and write fic started to increase exponentially. And I started to think, These are smart people. They can't all be wrong.

And so this holiday season, what with illnesses and writers block, I ventured into the Wild Woods of Fanfiction. And discovered some things.

Firstly, there are people out there writing fanfiction who I would read if they decided to put their laundry lists up on the web. I am so not kidding about this.

Secondly, I love slash. It's embarrassing how much I love slash.

Thirdly: RPS squicks me beyond the telling of it. I understand that people who write it are not being stalkerish or anything, but I am still, ineradicably, squicked.

Fourthly, interestingly, I don't need Buffy fanfic. I've read some great stuff, but the show itself is slashy enough--and, really, I'm so damn Spuffy--that I don't need fanfic.

Fifthly, my very brief foray into LotR slash convinces me that I will never be able to find LotR slash that I like. Because, for me, you can't write Tolkien fanfic unless you're writing Tolkien pastiche (except for parody), and if you're writing Tolkien pastiche, you can't write erotica, because there's no there there in Tolkien.

Sixthly: Harry Potter, on the other hand? Baby, I am there. Am disturbing MH greatly by newfound passion for HP slash.

Seventhly (is that even a word?): my OTP is Harry/Draco. Unless A. J. Hall writes a sequel to Lust Over Pendle, in which case it's Draco + Neville 4Ever.

This has been a humbling experience for me, which is why I'm posting about it, instead of letting it stay a guilty secret. Fanfic writers are doing something that I don't wish to do myself (I find it boring to write about characters who aren't mine), but what they're doing is not a waste of time and it does not lack in creativity. And some of them do it so damn well. Some of them do things with their writing that I only wish I could do in mine.

And really, if people can publish "sequels" to GWTW and Rebecca and Pride and Prejudice and somebody's publishing more Amber stories ... *froths briefly at the mouth*

So this is an apology and a confession. I can't sneer at fanfic any more. And I have a fun new obsession.

Comments

[coffeeandink.livejournal.com]

So I developed this attitude--which this post is both an apology for and a retraction of--that fans and fanfic writers were freaks and weirdos, and they only wrote fanfic because they didn't have the imagination to write their own original stories. As an Aspiring Pro, I sneered at them.

I expect you will find this hard to believe, but I felt the same exact way. Oh, plus a kind of contempt for television/film SF, because all I'd encountered was so much dumber than the written genre.

[heresluck]

And of course you have to go and fall for fic instead of vids. Goddammit.

Oh well. I suppose it wouldn't be healthy for you to get sucked into all of my obsessions.

[boniblithe.livejournal.com]

Pardon me while I giggle and dance around hysterically. That is the traditional way of welcoming a new Harry/Draco shipper into the fold.

When you find yourself at 50,000 words and no sign of slowing down on YOUR H/D slash epic, give me a call, because heres_luck will just mock you, and I will squee in delight :)

[papersky.livejournal.com]

But what about copyright?

Tolkien certainly hasn't said slash/fanfic is OK, nor has his estate.

If anyone did that with my characters I would.... overreact. Badly. Up to and including lawsuits and edged weapons.

If the author has said it's OK, I have no problem whatsoever with it, so if Rowling and Whedon have, that explains why people can do it. But if the author hasn't given their blessing, it is legally morally and ethically wrong, and can lead to the author losing control of the rights to their own characters -- there was a case where an author lost a film deal (and the consequent money) because of fanfic.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Yes, you are absolutely right; there are serious ethical questions involved. It's one of those things where I feel strange about my own liking for the stuff, but I can't deny the enjoyment I get out of it. One of the reasons I posted this was precisely to get a chance to talk about the copyright/ethical side of things, because I'm very muddled about it. I mean, yes, copyright violation, but no money is being made, no harm is intended, and there's certainly no plagiarism going on. It's another way for people to express how much they like a book/movie/TV show/whatever. Do you know any more of the details about this film deal lost because of fanfiction? I didn't know about that at all.

And I should probably be quite clear that plagiarism is not a gray area as far as I'm concerned. There's a circle in Hell for plagiarists.

I don't think that there's any way in the world to stop people writing fanfic or to stop them from posting it online. Copyright laws haven't caught up to the twenty-first century yet, and that's a Bad Thing.

I certainly would not read any fanfic written in a universe whose author has said, No, I don't approve of this. Just like I won't buy the books that are being written about Amber because I know that Zelazny said, emphatically, he didn't want anyone else writing in his universe. (Well, there are other reasons, but that's one of the big ones.) I don't know how I'd feel about it in regards to my own characters. I just know for certain I would NEVER want to read any of it. Never.

And, somebody help me out here, what's the difference between pastiche and fanfiction? Sherlock Holmes pastiches (for example) seem to me obviously to be fanfiction, but they're treated like serious publishing. Is it just author/estate permission or what?

Like I said, I find the ethicality of fanfiction troubling and murky. I don't know how I ought to feel about it; I don't really even know how I do feel about it.

This is incoherent and rambling and muddled, and I apologize for that. I'm stopping now because I'm only going to twist myself into more Gordian knots if I go on.

[heresluck]

Now, now, that's hardly fair. I would not just mock Truepenny; I would almost undoubtedly do other things as well. ;)

[papersky.livejournal.com]

It was Chelsea Quinn Yarbro and her vampire. IIR the details, someone had asked her if they could write fanfic, she'd said no, they'd done it anyway and published it in a fanzine, the fanzine crossed the desk of someone's Hollywood agent and muddying the clarity of her rights to the ownership of the character made Hollywood back away from their previous offer. This has been discussed on rasfc by people who know her and know what they're talking about.

I think you may not be able to stop people writing fanfic, but you can stop them putting it up on web-pages -- most ISPs react badly to being told to cease and desist -- and sharing it and making a huge fuss about it. I've made people take down stuff of mine they've posted illicitly, not fanfic, RPG articles and poetry they had no right to, but I've had no trouble making them.

Once something is out of copyright, once it's in the soup of story, it's fair game. If the author has said it's OK, again, no problem. (Well, I might wish people put rather better warnings on their Potter slash to save me from having to explain what a lot of sexual details were to a then ten year old, and I imagine that happens a lot.)

With things that are in copyright and the author hasn't given permission, I cannot see how anyone can even consider it ethical, there's no case to be made, it's stealing the characters and setting and kicking the author in the teeth. For people who profess to like something, it seems a very odd way to behave.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

If I sounded somehow like I didn't believe you about the Chelsea Quinn Yarbro thing, I apologize. It was a genuine request for more information--which you provided. Thank you.

And I think we're in agreement, by and large. Public domain, fine. Permission given, fine. (I found a transcript of an interview with Rowling, where she says she's actually read some of the fanfiction out there, and is flattered by it. And one of the big HP fanfiction sites is, bizarrely enough, loosely affiliated with Warner Brothers. And I've read interviews with Whedon: he thinks fanfiction is fabulous.) Permission expressly denied--do not pass Go, do not collect $200 dollars, bad.

Are we actually arguing about something? Or are we saying the same thing from two different directions? This is a serious question because my instinct in conflict is always to back down. I don't like having people angry at me, and my tendency is always to assume that the other person is right and I'm stupid and wrong. (This is probably why I deal very badly with Usenet.) So where are we here?

[papersky.livejournal.com]

I'm not arguing with you, who are being sensible, it's just that the whole concept of unauthorised fanfic makes me clench up. What you said in your original post about reading the LOTR slash and not liking it didn't have any implications about it being written being wrong, you just objected aesthetically. It's OK. Sorry.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Oh, okay. That's where I put my foot wrong.

I went looking for LotR slash out of morbid curiosity and became fascinated with the wrongness of Middle-Earth erotica. It tripped one of my intellectual triggers (genre, prose style, what one can and cannot do in a given set of conventions--there's gonna be a post on this later, most likely), and so I forgot about the other issues. Academic's Myopia.

[valancy.livejournal.com]

You are interesting.

It's a pity you can't stand RPs, else I'd reccommend you the slashy Harry Potter Double Cross rp. Or, hell, I'll do it anyways. (http://www.smeg.ws/rpg/) It's crazed and lunatic, but there are incredible parts.

In particular, I liked your comments on being able to fake the completeness of a universe - among other things.

Anyhow, yeah you. :D