Deconstruction: The Subversive Power of Slash-Fic

I've been thinking a lot about fan-fic and slash-fic lately.

Now, it's really difficult to write a post about fan-fic and slash-fic without defining the terms for the readers who aren't familiar with either. And it's really difficult to accurately define these terms because they mean different things for different people. So I'm going to try to define what the terms mean to me, but with the advance warning that I tend to define these terms more loosely and more broadly than many other people do. And, it's worth noting: I don't own the terms and I'm not the definitive guide for using them. So there's that!

But having said that, I use the term fan-fic to refer to stories written by fans of an existing fictional work. The fan-fic work utilizes some or all of the existing work's pre-established characters, world building, and possibly story arcs. I use the term slash-fic to refer to "fan-fic that contains romantic pairings between existing characters that is not directly supported by the established work", but it's important to note that a large body of slash-fic requires changing or modifying a character's established sexuality in order to make the pairing work.

Based on these very broad definitions, I've loved fan-fic for years. Some of my favorite novels are new retellings of old fairy tales or modern rewrites of Shakespearean plays. My favorite Greek plays are the ones that took pre-existing myths and reworked them into new interpretations. I've seen "The Divine Comedy" described in jest as "history's first recorded self-insert fan-fic", but by golly I like that Dante gets to meet Virgil and be Best Friends Forever. Fan-fic has always seemed to me to be a great platform for breathing modern concerns and issues into relevant older pieces, as well as for filling in plot holes or extrapolating what happens after The End.

Slash-fic, on the other hand, I've had a more changeable relationship with, and for that I blame Sherlock Holmes. You see, I like Sherlock Holmes stories, although I think I liked them more when I was a child and the logic trains seemed more clear-cut and less authorially-mandated. But I like them nonetheless, and I especially like that Sherlock Holmes is portrayed, in my opinion, as a rare asexual character in a genre that more often than not seems to center around the hero getting The Girl (if not lots and lots of girls) as a prize at the end of every solved mystery.

But Sherlock Holmes is also one of the most famous literary characters I can think of who is also regularly the subject of slash-fic romance with his sometimes live-in roommate Watson, despite Holmes' (in my opinion) carefully portrayed asexuality and Watson's romantic devotion to his wife. And if you'd asked me a few months ago what I thought about the tendency to slash-pair Holmes/Watson, I would have said it really isn't my thing. But then Melissa McEwan said something that made me reconsider my position.

A few days after I very badly communicated in a Slacktiverse thread that non-canon pairings weren't really my thing because of this hang-up I have with Sherlock Holmes, Melissa McEwan posted on her blog a trailer for the upcoming movie "The Hobbit". And because Shakesville is a feminist blog with a heavily female readership, a delightful conversation sprung up about Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" epic and the relative lack of female characters therein. In the ensuing discussion, I confessed that as a child I had accidentally read hobbit Merry and elf Legolas as females, because I had assumed that someone in an epic adventuring party needed to be female. I also offered that I had been so upset on the realization that there were no women in the LOTR adventuring party that I wrote a truly execrable fan-fic about "Gandalf's daughter". I pointed out that this character I had written was a silly and one-dimensional device intended simply to follow the party around and provide a 'hook' for me to sink into the narrative. Melissa responded by saying:

It doesn't sound silly to me.

It sounds like building a room of one's own (so to speak, and with all due respect to Ms. Woolf) within a literary space.

If feminism is learning the cultural architecture to build rooms of one's own wherever one finds the need, and I believe that it is, then creating a character for an author who couldn't be arsed to create one for you is an act of feminism, not silliness.

"Creating a character for an author who couldn't be arsed to create one for you is an act of feminism." I'd never seen it that way before, and now that it had been said, I couldn't see it any other way.

We live in a world where popular fiction, if it wants to avoid being shoved into the "issues" section, frequently presents a world of monochromatic characters in hetero-normative relationships. Female characters, no matter how "strong" or competent, are more often than not shoved aside in favor of male protagonist pie. Minority characters -- people of color, people with disabilities, people with body fat -- are included rarely, if at all, and almost never as main characters and almost always with glowing neon "issue" signs over their heads. Non-neurotypical characters, including people with multiplicity, are rarely included and almost inevitably whodunit. QUILTBAG characters are frequently silenced or absent altogether.

Of the 100+ books I read last year, only two of them even mentioned gays and lesbians, let alone the other letters in the alphabet soup. One of those books was a non-fiction book with the word 'gay' in the title. The other was a history book about U.S. presidents. The last fictional book I read with a bisexual character was Steig Larsson's "The Millenium Trilogy", and the bisexual female protagonist largely prefers men. I cannot remember reading a fictional book with undecided, intersex, transgender, or asexual characters that wasn't explicitly an "issue" book. I can't remember recently watching a movie or television show with QUILTBAG characters where the issue wasn't largely included to drive ratings or to serve in place of actual characterization except maybe, maybe, True Blood's Lafayette. Who, in addition to being gay, is also a drug dealer and a prostitute (and a perfect example of why television writers need to read up on Wicca before throwing it into a show with Vampires and Werewolves and Fairies as though all of those things is just like the others). Well-adjusted, happy QUILTBAG characters seem to be as rare in mainstream fiction as unicorns.

If creating a character with an identity similar to yours, for an author who couldn't (for whatever reason, because I fully recognize that It's Very Complicated) create one for you, is an act of positive subversion, does it matter if the character is a new one a la Gandalf's Daughter or a new interpretation of an existing one a la Sherlock Holmes?

I'm not sure that it does matter, at least as far as fan-fic goes. Possibly the full power and finance of Hollywood does not need to be directed into turning Hamlet gay for a Hamlet/Horatio pairing, or Mary Bennet lesbian for a Mary Bennet/Charlotte Lucas interpretation, or Odysseus transgender and his classic odyssey through space-time reinterpreted as a modern odyssey through self-identification. With great power comes great responsibility, and with the power that big-budget movie makers wield to create definitive renditions of text, possibly they have a greater responsibility to cleave to the author's perceived intent.

But fan-fic is written largely by the powerless and shared widely among those who are not looking to permanently change the original work. The goal of fan-fic is almost always to enjoy and savor the original piece, but with a few tweaks here and there to make the story more approachable for the fan and their readers. And with that in mind, I now have to think that fan-fic and slash-fic can be positive acts, acts that take an existing work and say, "I know you couldn't include a person of my gender, a person with body fat, a person of color, a person who identifies as QUILTBAG, a person of my religion, or a person of non-neurotypicalness in your narrative. But I love your narrative enough that I'm going to write a fan-fic to fix that for me. And I'll share it with anyone else who has the same needs as I."

I now think that can be a good thing, a positive subversive act meant to signal to the larger world that we -- the non-white, the non-male, the non-heterosexual, the non-neurotypical, the non-body conforming -- are here and we are not going away any time soon. I think it can be an act that signals that we are not only building rooms of our own in new houses that we build from scratch, but we are also building additions to the older, existing houses that we've been given to inhabit.

It's More Complicated Than That, of course. Fan writers aren't always automatically on the side of angels, and things become more muddied when the author of the original work is still alive and the work is still under copyright. (This is one of many reasons why the examples in this post are all works in the public domain.) There's the question of author intent to consider, and how much that author's intent should weigh on the interpretation of the work in question. There's the question of how the fan-fic is written, and whether the newly added elements are 'merely' subversive or actively harmful. (As with, for example, fan-fic that portrays intensely triggering, disturbing, or illegal elements.) Like almost every issue there are shades of gray, and reasonable people are going to disagree here and there.

But considering all that, and purely as my personal opinion, I think that when crafted with love and respect and when shared with the intent to expand and embrace, fan-fic and slash-fic can be positive subversive acts. And I am mostly in favor of that.

--Ana Mardoll

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The Slacktiverse is a community blog. Content reflects the individual opinions of the contributors. We welcome disagreement in the comment threads, and invite anyone who wishes to present an alternative interpretation of a situation to write and submit a post.

Comments

[Laiima]

@Ana, I've read very little fan-fic, and no slash-fic (that I know of). Haven't really seen the point of it. But your post made me think differently about what it could be good for. Thank you for writing this.

[Izzy]

TW: Swearing

This is an excellent point. I read fanfic myself, though I tend not to write it, and...yeah, I'm in favor of it, as long as you respect the original author's preferences, or the original author is dead/Orson Scott Card/Anne Rice/etc. (An expression of love is valid, but requires respect; an expression of "fuck you, original author" is also valid, but requires a good reason.)

I really like working with established stories and archetypes, myself, both as a reader and as an author. It's fun to work something into a different story, or to spot the correspondence and the different take on it. And reframing those things to consider more modern concerns is quite neat.

[Sixwing]

@Izzy, I had to read your post four times to find the swear. I think I've been spending too much time with a very sweary group for that not to stick out. XD

I really like fanfiction - I sometimes like slash fics. Sometimes. (Most of the time they fall into romance-novel levels of awful heteronormativity, even when they aren't hetero pairings, and that makes Six smash.)

I'd never seen it as an act of feminism to carve out a niche for a self-insert, though, and that's a fascinating thought. Though I had thought of it as such when creating a more feminist presentation of an original work (I'm thinking here of Edith & Ben), so... where am I drawing that distinction? I'm not even sure.

Thanks, Ana - I really enjoyed reading this.

[Deird, who likes your thoughts, despite the different definitions...]

I use the term slash-fic to refer to "fan-fic that contains romantic pairings between existing characters that is not directly supported by the established work"

Totally different from my definition. In my circles, "slash" is fanfic centred around a male/male pairing, "femslash" is centred around a female/female pairing, and "het" is centred around a male/female pairing. Absolutely no distinction is made as to whether the relationship is supported by the text or not.

[ZMiles]

Seconding Deird. Whenever I see 'slash-fic' used, it virtually always refers to same-sex pairings, whether or not they are supported in the original text.

[ZMiles]

(And also, I liked this article and found it really interesting and thought provoking).

[MercuryBlue]

Absolutely no distinction is made as to whether the relationship is supported by the text or not.

The distinction is so made. Just using different terms. Canon vs non-canon pairings. Also, we have had the 'how does one define slash' argument at least twice that I can recall--can we skip it this time?

What interests me is, we collectively are so interested in having gay characters that we write many many straight men gay for m/m fics, but women, gay or otherwise? Forget about 'em. Canon female characters get shafted--I'm thinking of Bela Talbot, who got killed off on Supernatural because fans reacted so poorly to her--and in fic, m/m dominates pairing-free and m/f, and there's hardly any f/f at all, anywhere, except in shoujo-ai and other similar fandoms where ninety percent of the ensemble is female to begin with.

(Apparently I lied about not accessing Slacktiverse at work. Shocker.)

[Lonespark]

I totally accessed the Slacktiverse at work today, just lurking.

That's right, I was at work today. Per-diem substitute teaching. Wooo!

[Mmy]

@Lonespark: That's right, I was at work today. Per-diem substitute teaching. Wooo

Huzzah and confetti!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!11

[MercuryBlue]

Yay Lonespark!

[chris the cynic]

@Lonespark

Yay!

[Sixwing]

@Lonespark, congrats! I wish you many hours of happy work (and some time of happy Slacktilurking, too!)

I'm with MB; if we could not get into defining slash/fanfiction that'd be great. >.<

Not sure why m/m is so much more popular than either m/f or f/f pairings. In my most active fandom (meaning the one I'm most active in, not the one that's most active right now - in fact it is mostly dead) the male characters, due to some problems on the part of the authors, tend to be much better and more consistently written than the female characters, which may have something to do with it. It's a lot more fun to write a character whose issues and personality are all right there, laid out for you, than it is to use the shell of a character whose speaking lines are few and far between - at least in my opinion.

Then again, I write very little fanfic. ^^;

[MercuryBlue]

I figure it's a problem with several related causes.

I don't know about fiction writers, but I know movie and TV writers and directors and showrunners are skewed male. (Except for writers on Community, because whatshisface the showrunner did an interview where he made a point of saying his show's writers are half female and he thinks the show's better for it.) Characters, whatever the medium, also skew male, with the exception of shoujo-ai and magical-girl anime. Lead characters skew even more heavily male, same exceptions.

Male privilege being what it is, most of the creators who know much about the female experience are female themselves. Male creators, who again dominate the industry, tend to have trouble writing convincing female characters.

The combination of 'fewer female characters' and 'unconvincing female characters' conditions media consumers of all genders to believe that the characters interesting enough to pay attention to are predominantly male.

And it really doesn't help matters that film schools actively discourage their students from writing screenplays that have two female characters conversing about any subject at all, especially if the subject isn't men. Or that the stereotype of 'girls will consume media regardless of the gender of the lead, while boys will only consume media about boys' exists.

Straight line between two points: most of the characters worth writing about are male => most of the stories being written are about men. Season with the cultural narrative that girlparts are icky...

[Marie Brennan]

Mercuryblue -- that's part of what I wanted to bring up, too.

I have no problem with homosexuality, and I wish we had more Actual Gay Characters in our fiction (rather than homoerotic subtext), especially Actual Gay Characters who are happy and well-adjusted and protagonists, rather than dysfunctional, marginal, or ending in tragedy. But I'm sometimes bothered by the popularity of (m/m) slash, for two reasons:

1) It frequently overwrites other forms of male emotional intimacy, like teacher/student, leader/follower, or even brothers (yeah, not a fan of Wincest here). This actually seems to reinforce the problematic notion that if a man is emotionally close to another man, that makes him gay. Real (Heterosexual) Men don't show squishy things like that!

2) Slash is commonly very popular around stories that lack interesting female characters as an ongoing and central part of the narrative. Not only does this mean fandom rewards (with its interest and engagement) TV shows, etc. which focus on men and male relationships, it can -- as with Supernatural -- loop around into hostility for female characters who "get in the way" of the homoeroticism. I've literally seen a Yuletide request (that's a fanfic exchange, for those who aren't familiar) which said outright, "I want slash about these two guys, and yeah I know Guy A is canonically paired with Woman B, but please ignore that; I think the story spends enough time on her anyway." (And, to add insult to injury -- Woman B is a minor character with far less page time than Guy A or Guy C.)

I don't have a problem with slash itself; I have a problem with the way its popularity can reinforce these problems. If we had more Actual Gay Characters in the media, I'd be happier; if we had more fem-slash stories, in proportion to all the m/m slash out there, I'd be happier; if we had more respect for the female characters in stories (and more female characters worthy of respect), I'd be happier. I do think slash can do good, subversive, feminist and activist things -- but I also think it undermines itself sometimes.

[MercuryBlue]

So m/m fanworks are problematic. What else is new. Also, if I only consumed unproblematic media, I'd be awful bored.

[Will Wildman]

This is a lot like my evolution in understanding of 'slash-fic' (which I have seen 99.9% of the tiem referring to non-canonical same-sex romance). As I understand the etymology, 'slash-fic' was originally used as shorthand to describe 'Kirk-slash-Spock' (Kirk/Spock) fiction, so that would give it a clear male-male-romance origin.

Originally I didn't quite get the point and thought it was kind of gratuitous, and then someone pointed out that, in most media, if you didn't invent gay (or other) character, then they didn't exist at all. And since the experiences of a lot of QUILTBAG people involve keeping their preferences quiet, it could be a very natural extension to imagine that a particular character is doing the same thing on-screen (or on-page or whatever). And suddenly it made a lot more sense.

I'm all for more canonically gay (and QUILTBAG in general) characters, but in the meantime I can't imagine why I'd want to tell someone off for randomly coupling up character whose orientations normally wouldn't be compatible.

When it comes to Sherlock Holmes, I'm a little more on-the-fence, because he seems to be very nearly asexual, and I imagine once in a while it's a relief to asexual reader to encounter a character who really is not interested in those matters. A straight author rewriting a gay character to be straight would be generaly recognised as erasure of a minority. An author rewriting an asexual character to be gay is... replacing one minority with another, and it's kind of tangled at that point to decide whether that's erasure or something else.

[Redwood Rhiadra]

From what I understand, the majority of m/m fanfiction is produced and consumed by heterosexual women. Possibly for the same or similar reasons that f/f pornography is almost entirely produced and consumed by straight men...

This actually crosses over into non-fanfic in my admittedly limited experience. The few professional novels I can think of read that feature or at least mention positive m/m relationships (Dragonriders of Pern, the Valdemar novels, The Stone Prince by Fiona Patton, and Diane Duane's "Door Into..." series) - are written by women.

[MercuryBlue]

the majority of m/m fanfiction is produced and consumed by heterosexual women

I suspect it's more that the majority of fanworks are produced and consumed by women, and it happens that fanworks skew m/m and women skew heterosexual.

positive m/m relationships (Dragonriders of Pern

Please don't make me speak ill of the dead. (If you don't know and you want to, and this is 'trigger warning, object rape' level of you don't want to know, Google 'Anne McCaffrey tent peg'.) And I recall precisely two instances of m/m relationships in Pern, other than the background, and the pair in...Dragonquest? was a pair of jackasses and the pair in Dragoneye? got shredded by wildcats, so I'm not much seeing the positivity. I also can't recall a single non-Pern m/m relationship she wrote.

[chris the cynic]

It's a lot more fun to write a character whose issues and personality are all right there, laid out for you, than it is to use the shell of a character whose speaking lines are few and far between - at least in my opinion.

With the disclaimer that I don't write slash and the derivative fiction I do write isn't exactly fan fiction so my thoughts on this are more abstract than experience based, my impulse is to think the opposite. The character who only has a few lines is an untapped source of possibility. The character who is all worked out is one that severely restricts you and if you don't like those restrictions, and actively break them, you risk having it seem like your story isn't so much about the character as the pod person who replaced hir.

It seems to me more tempting to write the poorly characterized character and by your writing give them the characterization the original author never did. Which would also have the effect of expanding the focus so that it isn't just a special few who are given attention.

On the other hand, historically fan fiction does seem to have both. Euripedies giving plays to Iphigenia seems like expanding on the character whose lines are few and far between. On the other hand Ovid expanding on Catullus's expansion of Ariadne's abandonment was dealing with a character that was already pretty fully characterized. So, based on nothing more than examples off the top of my head, you've got thousands of years of both things going on.

-

An author rewriting an asexual character to be gay is... replacing one minority with another, and it's kind of tangled at that point to decide whether that's erasure or something else.

It feels like erasure to me. The majority is sexual. Sherlock, being asexual, is not a part of that majority. Making Sherlock any flavor of sexual is taking a member of a minority and rewriting the character to be more in line with the majority.

That said, I'm not about to start telling people that what they're doing is wrong because it feels that way to me. It is just a feeling, and it's not something that I've put a lot of thought into.

[Anonymous]

I cannot remember reading a fictional book with undecided, intersex, transgender, or asexual characters that wasn't explicitly an "issue" book.
I recently read a book that seems to meet this, but sort of cheats in a way. This book is John Varley's Steel Beach. It's sort of cheating because it's set in the far future and transgender/etc character are much more common due to changing mores and also significantly advanced biotech. The main character goes through a female to male transition in the middle of the novel, but it is not particularly the major issue or even central to the plot of the book. It wouldn't work set in a modern society, of course, but in the setting of the novel it is quite well and realistically written.

On the topic of fanfiction, I have read a ton of it. The vast majority is poorly written and very bad overall, but there are a few gems in there. My favorite piece of fanfiction is Harry Potter fanfic Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality by Eliezer Yudkowsky, published under LessWrong at fanfiction.net- it has a lot of mixed reviews because it was actually written for a reason and tries to raise awareness of stuff, which some apparantly people have issues with, but it's quite well-written and entertaining even if you don't particularly care about the polemics. The last completed arc even dealt with issues of feminism in fiction in an amusing (though ultimately not terribly complex or interesting) way.

My second favorite fanfiction is the a less well-known Naruto fanfiction of ShaperV's called Time Braid. It has a bit of a slow start but grows into a great story by the end. Initial perceptions by the viewpoint character of some other characters are profoundly negative, and this has led to some backlash against the fic, but by the end the fic resolves this criticism of it more than adequately. The highlights are some of the best use of the first person in fiction I've read, a great conflict with an interesting introduction/premise followed by a huge conflict and very satisfying resolution, and solid writing overall. Some sexual content, as well as disturbing and visceral content leads me to suggest this fic be read by adults. Also somewhat interesting to analyze from a feminist point of view, because the main character is a female bisexual and interacts with both genders, and eventually ends up in a semi-stable multiple-partner relationship by the end of it.

Finally, I recommend Harry Potter fic A Black Comedy by Nonjon. It is the funniest thing I have ever read - getting more laughs per word than Terry Pratchett and Douglas Adams combined.

relationship-fic (Which I define here as slash-fics are defined by Ana above, but where the romantic relationships are the whole point of the story, and anything else in the plot is window dressing if it appears at all) isn't something I've been super interested in very much. Fiction such as the above Time Braid where there're non-canonical relationships are fine and can be great, but I don't really enjoy reading stories where those are the centerpoint of the plot - perhaps because I've never been a huge fan of even original content romance novels, and fanfic versions tend towards the explicitly pornographic over actually having an interesting plot, which doesn't sustain my interest well.

I would like to also state that slash-fic has almost always been defined as same-sex pairings when I have seen the phrase used elsewhere. It's fine to redefine phrases or use them in a non-traditional sense, if that's what you want to do, but you should make it explicitly clear that's what you're doing to avoid confusion.

[burgundy]

The few professional novels I can think of read that feature or at least mention positive m/m relationships ... - are written by women.

I can't think of any counter-examples off the top of my head, but I don't pretend to read a wide range of fiction written by men.

But I do have some vague, half-formed thoughts that I thought I'd put out if anyone wanted to play with them. It has to do with the way fiction (I'm thinking in particular of sci-fi/fantasy but it may well apply to other genres as well) is bought and marketed. There might be a difference in how male and female authors are perceived to write, and the markets for women-authored vs men-authored books, and the importance of relationships in general and heteronormativity in particular.

There is a certain fantasy author that I am very close to. He's got a handful of novels on shelves right now, and has also written some media tie-in work. One of the tie-ins was a novel in the Magic: the Gathering series. It featured two male characters who were very close friends. At one point, they meet a woman and get to be friends with her, and then she has a conversation with one of the guys in which she asks if the two of them are a couple. And the guy laughs, says that they're very close friends, almost like brothers, but they're not together, and they go on talking. And he had to fight pretty hard with the publisher to keep that in the book. It was important to him that there be something that normalized the idea of same-sex relationships. I suspect that if he were writing for a property that had a primarily female fan base, he might not have had to fight so hard. I think there might be a feeling that a male (and assumed-straight) readership is hostile to QUILTBAG stuff in a way that women aren't.

This same author has been trying to sell an urban fantasy book, and having a hard time of it (which makes me sad, because I was a beta-reader and I think it's great.) And he's been told by several people that urban fantasy is mostly written by women, and he's likely to have a hard time selling an urban fantasy book written by a man, with a male lead. Again, it's a question of assumed reader preferences.

So it seems plausible to me that stuff written by women is more likely to be assumed to be read by women, and is more amenable to QUILTBAG characters than is stuff written by men and targeted more at (straight) men.

Re: the distribution of fan-fic, I remember reading that women tend toward fan-fiction, and men tend toward trying to get their stuff actually published (e.g. a woman with a story to tell writes Star Trek fan-fic, while a man with a story to tell submits his story for consideration as a tie-in novel, or an episode, or something like that.) I don't have enough information to evaluate the accuracy of this, but I thought it was interesting.

[Asha]

I do write fanfic, and slash-fic, and I've tried to analyze the reasons for why I personally choose to do so.
I started out like many, with lots of badness and writing insert characters. And bizarre crossovers. Those were always fun. Yet one of the reasons I started into slash (apart from the titillation factor)was that my reviewers never seemed to like my insert characters. I will not deny that there was an immature feeling of "if I can't have X-character, then you can't either." Then I started to get interested in the relationships themselves. Two particular characters had a great screen relationship, why not take it to the next level? The women in a lot of these series, particular shonen anime or manga, tend to be people I could not identify with or enjoy. It seemed logical that the most meaningful relationships these male characters had might involve sex, especially in series that had the main character having a different girl every week.

When it comes to Supernatural, I've always wondered what would have happened if Castiel had been female, and the planned replacement was male. *shrugs* And see where the slash went from there.

So, in other words, very thought provoking Ms. Ana! Thank you!

[AnaMardoll]

I've been away from the house (and therefore unable to comment on Slactivist) all day looking at apartments, but I cannot thank everyone enough for the wonderful comments and wonderful conversation here. It's a delight and joy for me to read. Thank you!

/derail

[MercuryBlue]

I've always wondered what would have happened if Castiel had been female, and the planned replacement was male.

I have seen that fic...somewhere...

Planned replacement? What, Anna?

[Mmy]

@Ana: looking at apartments

<derail>Oooh, exciting. If you want to share some details meet me over on the Board Post.</derail>

[Asha]

@MercuryBlue-

To the best of my understanding, yes, Anna had meant to replace Castiel, though I'm not a big fan of the show. They kept Castiel because he had proven so popular with the fans.

[Asha]

And if I'm blowing hot air, I apologize.

[MercuryBlue]

Hm. I never heard that. I'd heard that Castiel was initially meant to have a three-episode arc and the fan reaction changed the writers' minds (helloooo sexism, on our collective part), but not that Anna was meant to replace him.

Speaking of Supernatural, the latest episode needs so many trigger warnings. I'm not sure what half of them are, but there's definitely rape jokes in probable reference to past rape, and sizeism, and dear FSM Show you do not have the kind of cred in the gay community it would take to pull off the A-plot the way you wanted to do it and we really did not need any media examples of 'gay' = 'serial killer'.

[hapax]

The few professional novels I can think of read that feature or at least mention positive m/m relationships ... - are written by women.

Off the top of my head? That I've read recently?

Mysteries by Josh Lanyon, Michael Craft, John Morgan Wilson and Mark Zubro.

Fantasy fiction by Richard Morgan.

Mainstream fiction by Michael Thomas Ford, E. Lynn Harris and Steve Kluger.

I'm sure that there are plenty more.

[ZMiles]

One m/m professional series that I've read recently was the "A Companion to Wolves" series, by Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette. It's sort of a deconstruction of Pern, and I found it very enjoyable.

[Steve Morrison]

Stephan Grundy's novel Gilgamesh has a non-canonical m/m pairing (Gilgamesh/Enkidu, of course!)

[Nenya]

I suspect it's more that the majority of fanworks are produced and consumed by women, and it happens that fanworks skew m/m and women skew heterosexual.

I think that this is the case. Whenever the topic comes up in my fannish circles, there is a great outcry amongst the queer female slashers, saying "We exist!" There are a LOT of us! Bisexual women writing slash (that'd be me), either M/M or F/F, doesn't surprise me, but lesbians writing M/M is also quite common and the reasons are less clear-cut. Reasons do involve the abovementioned tendency for male characters to be more interestingly written in canon, and a few other things as well. If you're writing M/F fiction, you may have to deal with issues of power disparity between genders, and put in a certain amount of work to make sure you portray your female character as a person with agency. Sometimes women are tired of fighting that fight, all day long, every day, and just want to go write stories with characters that people already assume are equal (because they are the same gender). But why M/M, then, for people who tend towards F/F in their daily lives? Sometimes F/F is too close to home, too personal, and not something you want to put out there into the wild world. (My girlfriend feels this way.) Sometimes it's nice to write for characters who are "allowed" to be sexual, to desire and act on desire without being called sexist slurs. And sometimes an author can have no interest in men in reality, but still like the occasional fantasy about them.

Which is not to say that queer (and straight!) women don't write F/F, because they do. A few men of all orientations write fic too. My corners of the Internet tend to be full of people who write several sorts of pairings (or gen/non-romance fic) at all levels of explicitness. Author A writes everything from ensemble mysteries to explorations of the het canon romance to dark, frightening AUs where Canon Disaster A was not averted, and she brainstorms with Author B who writes competing non-canon het romance, femslash for the female half of the het couple, and really kinky M/M slash.

[Nenya]

And, of course, straight or bi women who write M/M for the hot is, in my books, a good thing--the female gaze and all that.

[AnaMardoll]

or the original author is dead/Orson Scott Card/Anne Rice/etc.

It took me three read-throughs of this comment to go, "Wait, Orson Scott Card isn't dead...?" Ha.

[Kit Whitfield]

I have to say I disagree with a lot of this, but I'll start with something simple: the assumption implicit in Melissa McEwan's statement that a writer 'couldn't be arsed' to represent a section of their reader/viewership.

That strikes me as a tone you'd use when the waiter can't be bothered to bring you the jug of tap water you asked for, which puts my back up when people employ it towards artists ... but I also think it's just a completely inaccurate assessment of the writing process.

I'll give a personal example. A while ago, I tried writing from the perspective of a bisexual woman, including describing her relationship with her girlfriend. I did it because I knew I'd tended towards the heterosexual end of things and not everybody's straight, and why not try giving someone else a turn?

And it sucked.

It was just about the worst writing I've ever produced.

I'm just not good at writing same-sex attraction. I support the rights of same-sex couples in real life; I happily read the words of queer writers (Sarah Waters and Alison Bechdel are two of my favourite writers in general, not just in the 'queer' section my bookshelf [which doesn't exist; I alphabetise]); some of my best friends etc. But my imagination simply doesn't do same-sex attraction: my sexuality is pretty fixedly hetero and doesn't lend itself to imagining same-sex relationships from the inside.

Likewise, I have yet to write a central character of colour. I'll try to include non-narrator characters, but my narrators tend to be white. Not because I want to exclude people, but because I know I have white privilege and am wary of appropriating the experience of others, or just writing something cack-handed and stupid about experiences I can probably never fully understand.

And so on. It's not that I don't want to give certain people fictional space. It's that I write certain kinds of people badly, and I have no place writing anything badly.

'Couldn't be arsed' is a complete presumption of bad faith in the voice of an irritated employer, and I have a big dislike of that.

[AnaMardoll]

'Couldn't be arsed' is a complete presumption of bad faith in the voice of an irritated employer, and I have a big dislike of that.

Well, in context it was a discussion about Tolkien, who is all about including Random Minor Characters Never To Be Seen Again (like the elf who helps Frodo across the river and who was replaced by Arwen in the movie) that are pretty much never, EVER female. So in context, I think it's reasonable to say that Tolkien couldn't be arsed to say "eh, and we'll make this RMCNTBSA a girl for once."

(I strongly believe that the only reason Eowyn even exists is because he wanted to play with the whole "no man born of woman" thing from Shakespeare. And without her, we don't have a single female character in the books that does anything besides be hetero-paired and largely deferential to the public figure of her husband.)

[Kit Whitfield]

So in context, I think it's reasonable to say that Tolkien couldn't be arsed

I don't know enough about Tolkien to say anything definitive, but I don't think the fact that he includes minor characters who are also male proves that he couldn't be bothered. There are too many other explanations. Maybe he considered himself too bad at writing female characters to try creating minor ones. Maybe he was trying to present a fictional world that shared the gender roles of the one he inhabited. Maybe it makes sense in the story.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying I don't sympathise with the frustration of not seeing oneself represented. I'm just saying that I don't think it's reasonable to jump from that frustration to accusing the writer of laziness. It involves presuming one knows what's going on in the writer's head, and that's a dicey business.

Plus, like I say, it has an entitled ring to it.

--

On another note - 'a room of one's own'. I do not think it means what Melissa McEwan is using it to mean. Woolf's point was not that one needs a room of one's own to fantasise, explore one's own identity or even to read. It was that you need a room of your own to work - to settle down to a serious process of creation and intellectual rigour that needs to be uninterrupted if you're to sustain your concentration. I don't think that applies here.

[AnaMardoll]

Maybe he considered himself too bad at writing female characters to try creating minor ones.

Well, I mean, the piece isn't about criticizing authors; it's about accepting their limitations and making a version that is meaningful and useful to one's self. You already know that, of course, but I say that so as to then say this: I worry that "I'm not comfortable writing anything other than white, het males" (which is what LOTR largely is) can be something of an excuse to choose not to grow.

I mean, I consciously wrote three black women into my first novel. And I made mistakes. Mortifying ones. Privilege drips from the page. But I still want to keep going and keep trying because otherwise I think we're going to continue to have a world where fiction is heavily slanted to the white, het, and male.

But again, I'm not criticizing authors for not being able or willing or whatever to include variety. And I don't think Melissa was either -- that's just her conversational style. :)

[AnaMardoll]

(And I'm going to be away from a keyboard for several hours now because of house-hunting. Thank you for the great conversation, all!)

[Kit Whitfield]

But again, I'm not criticizing authors for not being able or willing or whatever to include variety.

Er - so what's all the excuse to choose not to grow suppositions if not criticism?

Never mind. I can see the way this conversation is going to go, and for once I think I'll learn from experience and recuse myself.

[Amaryllis]

I'm dithering between two sides here (as usual).

I mean, I was one of the little girls who read The Hobbit and was convinced in the back of her head that Fili and Kili were girls. And so I was always shocked when the text mentioned their beards. (Don't tell me they're Pratchett-type Dwarves, either; I'm very fond of Cheery Littlebottom, but Tolkien specifically says that Dwarf women in his world never leave their homes.)

And we've got Shelob-- She-lob, for godssakes-- the revoltingly female spider who wants to eat the world; we couldn't have a female Eagle? Or an Entwife, to tell her side of the story? (note that female Ents are Entwives; male Ents don't call themselves Entweres, or something like that, just Ents).

(More parentheticals: I've been reading The Word Exchange, which includes the original Anglo-Saxon for each poem, and chuckling every time I come across a phrase like orþanc enta geweorc . "Cunning work of giants" indeed.)

So, yeah, the lack of female presence gets annoying at times. But, again, that's one specific author writing from his own experience and interests. And the problem is not any particular author, but the overwhelming dominance of the majority viewpoints.

I mean, I don't feel that every book I read has to have a character like me in it-- and I know that's not what's being said here. But if I wanted that, I probably could have it. I might not like the way that straight white women are presented in a lots of those books, but I could find them.

For me, one of the pleasures of literature is getting inside the experiences of people who are not like me, as far as that can be done second-hand. I admit that may not be very far, but it's a start. It's been a start for a lot of us: see the "Imaginary Friends" thread. For me, not so much Imaginary Friends as Imaginary Me.

If nothing that I read had anyone at all like Real Me in it, I can see feeling "erased," and annoyed about it, and wanting to do something about it. And I can also see that that feeling would be stronger in the cases of popular materials like LOTR and HP and so on, the stories that resonate on some basic level. That is, here's a story that's meaningful for a vast number of people, for many good reasons, that's meaningful to me-- and people like me aren't necessary to it.

Again, not everyone is necessary to every story. But not to find oneself in any of the gut-level-popular stories, I can understand that that would be troubling.

But...

I have no problems with re-worked fairy tales, which are really just the bare bones of story and archetype, fair game for elaboration and reinterpretation. I can understand taking a look at "canon" works from another perspective. My own little world has been greatly improved by chris the cynic's Twilight foe-fiction. But...I admit it seems odd to me, to take a specific character created by an individual author, and rewrite that character to be someone different. That seems to be its own kind of erasure, of disregard for the intended artistic effect, of negating an act of creation.

And, I think this was mentioned over on the "Hobbit" thread link, I think it's kind of sad that any strong friendship between same-sex characters seems to be viewed as sexual. It used to be assumed that men and women couldn't be friends, because sex would get in the way. Now we seem to be shifting to accepting male-female friendships, but assuming that any affection between two people of the same gender must be romantic or sexual. I'm enjoying the MarkReads commentaries on LOTR, but, Legolas and Gimli as a romantic pair? No. Just no. And no, not even Frodo and Sam.

Well, that was a muddled wall of text. Excuse it, please, while I go catch up with the chores left undone the last few days.

[Silver Adept]

I may have a slightly different perspective. I don't know if it fits in exactly, but I think it's close enough to be considered in the realm.

Fanfic of all stripes, for me, is the space for the stories that weren't told. Using Holmes as an example, there were always cases that Watson referred to in his narratives that Doyle never wrote. Or that other authors have not yet written. (I think. Since it's been so long, perhaps someone has taken a published stab at all of those mentioned but not written cases by now.) Even then, as the world's most famous consulting detective, there are likely cases that Holmes took on that Watson thought were inconsequential or otherwise unworthy of chronicling. And, perhaps, the story of what happened with the cocaine habit that Holmes had that Watson, as a doctor, surely knew about and needed to keep under control. (That one has been done.) Or the time when Mycroft did something that was notable, but because Holmes and Mycroft's relationship was strained at the time, never got chronicled for publication.

It's the idea that every story involving The Doctor is true, except Noddy. Being a time traveler, the ones we see in the official canon are one strain of the many adventures that happen in between episodes, with or without Companions. There is space in every narrative for all the stories that aren't told, and it doesn't take the explicit idea of Earth-616 continuity being in your work to open up those possibilities. In that space, I think, is where we find critical voices, for those who write reviews, for those who deconstruct, for those who posit alternate interpretations, and for those who want to draw attention to the fact that the knight is white and male, that there are no competent people of color or women around, and that the message that gets across is that Intent is Magic, regardless of results, so as long as things get fixed, then everybody's happy.

How close should you stay to the author's intent and/or written canon? Only as close as you need to for your point to get across. There's a rich tradition of criticism, parody, and satire that's protected under the law when it comes to using someone else's work and canon. There's got to be some space for fanfic in there, too, because there's a lot of all of those elements appearing in those derivative works.

[Kirala]

And, I think this was mentioned over on the "Hobbit" thread link, I think it's kind of sad that any strong friendship between same-sex characters seems to be viewed as sexual. It used to be assumed that men and women couldn't be friends, because sex would get in the way. Now we seem to be shifting to accepting male-female friendships, but assuming that any affection between two people of the same gender must be romantic or sexual. I'm enjoying the MarkReads commentaries on LOTR, but, Legolas and Gimli as a romantic pair? No. Just no. And no, not even Frodo and Sam.

This. So many times over. I enjoy some speculation or ideas, but in bulk it's ultimately unsettling and unnatural to repeatedly see Lucy and Caspian or Hermione and Harry or any other "dear Lord, they're just friends" relationship I can think of. I really wish I could find a fanfic site dedicated to exploring non-romantic relationships between characters so I could enjoy a good friendship fic without combing through pages of various couples or assumed couples.

I don't grudge the slashers their fun. I do get burned out when I can't find good fic about a deep-but-neither-romantic-nor-familial relationship. These friendships exist in literature and in reality; why are they so rare in fic?

[hapax]

Mixed feelings, I haz them. Let me tell you ALL THE THINKS.

I love fairy-tale and myth retellings, and that's mostly what I write as well. But those simply aren't fanfic to me; they are re-workings of basic archetypal *structures*. "Cendrillon" or "Snow White" or in a way even "Odysseus" (who I distinguish from Homer's "Odysseus") aren't characters; they're placeholders for a particular role in the narrative.

Archetypes and tropes are the collective property of mankind, and fair game for any artist. But when a particular artist (or, as in a television show, a particular team of artists) succeeds in implanting a particular version of this common property in the collective consciousness, I think appropriating *that version* for our own ends is a lot more problematic.

The narrative structures of "revenge tragedy" (more specifically "son avenging father's murder", even more specifically "faking madness to carry out complicated vengeance plot", even MORE specifically, "folk hero Hamlet") are free for the taking to any artist who is inspired by them. But when someone starts insisting that Shakespeare's Hamlet is public property (no matter how legal), I get uncomfortable. The text as it is offers a plenitude of opportunities for interpretation to the actor, director, even set designer.

But if the story I really feel the need to tell is how Ophelia drowned herself because she discovered the passionate affair between Hamlet and Horatio... perhaps I need to acknowledge that maybe these really aren't Shakespeare's characters at all, and write my own darn story.

Especially when, to be honest, most of the fanfic --especially slashfic or 'shipfic -- of this nature that I have seen is not a matter of inserting "people like me" into the story. It is usually either more a case of inserting "ME, specifically" into a relationship with someone I think is hot, or else reshaping characters to suit a particular fetish of mine -- which often is less being "like me" than blatantly "Othering".

And I certainly can't criticise people for their fantasies, even self-indulgent ones; nor for writing them down and sharing them with others who have similar tastes.

But I think it goes a bit far to call this "subversive," to be frank.

Which is not to say that subversive recasting of these texts can't be done, especially to point out the glaring lack of representation. But very rarely have I seen this done in anything that I'd call "fanfic." Such subversive derivative works almost always fall under the heading "parody", or even "foefic": Alice Randall's THE WIND DONE GONE, Neil Gaiman's "The Problem of Susan", the wonderful Edith and Ben rewrites, I'd even toss in "Twa Corbies".

And however well those "work" as stories, I think they are very very different from "fanfic", as discussed in this post; if anything, I'd call them a form of "imaginative criticism" -- the point isn't to expand and immerse the reader more fully into the original work, but to highlight the unstated assumptions and deficiencies of that work.

But then...

Legolas and Gimli as a romantic pair? No. Just no.

I read comments like this. And I feel a burning need to once again link to a portion of my very favorite fan mash-up.

So do I contradict myself? Probably, and at excessive length as well...

[MercuryBlue]

I do get burned out when I can't find good fic about a deep-but-neither-romantic-nor-familial relationship. These friendships exist in literature and in reality; why are they so rare in fic?

Gen fic isn't that uncommon, is it? Okay, yes, ask any three people to define 'gen' and you'll get at least five answers, but the common definitions are 'canon-compliant relationshipwise' and 'no sexual or romantic content', and in my experience there's plenty of overlap between the two.

Of course, most of my fannish experience is in Sailormoon (when I was young enough that relationships = ew), Harry Potter (when I was all het all the time), and Supernatural (don't like incest? don't like cross-species or don't want to deal with the consent issues of angel/human sex? write gen). And admittedly most of Supernatural's overabundance of gen is about the brothers.

But in my experience, there is no shortage of fic dealing with close nonromantic relationships. Except, of course, in comparison to the volume of fic making those same relationships romantic, but that doesn't mean gen doesn't exist, just that it's not necessarily easy to find.

[burgundy]

My feelings on the topic are pretty muddled, but this is what I'm thinking right now:

hapax, I think some of what's "subversive" about fanfic is also what some people feel is problematic about it: it's a question of who gets to tell the stories. A fanfic author is basically saying to the creator of the original text, "you may have made all of this, but you do not have complete power over it. I get to tell stories here too." And that can be threatening or insulting to some of the original creators, but I can also see how some of the fanfic writers can find it very empowering, especially in the context of whose stories generally get told in our culture.

But I also don't think that fanfic needs to have some great Serious Rationale to be ok. It's ok because it's fun, because it's part of a community-building process. People have always interacted with the stories around them: kids playing at being movie or tv characters, for example. Fanfic is more organized and accessible now, with the internet, but I see it as an outgrowth of something that's probably been going on for as long as people have been telling stories.

[Mmy]

I worry that "I'm not comfortable writing anything other than white, het males" (which is what LOTR largely is) can be something of an excuse to choose not to grow.

Or it can be an acknowledgement that rather than "speaking for" others one should speak for oneself and work to make room for others to speak for themselves.

[burgundy]

I tend toward the death-of-the-author side of things. I can't access a writer's motivations or intents; all I have is the text. Now, it's very likely that a writer who says "I am aware of my privilege and I don't want to speak for another group or write a bad minority character" is going to produce a very different text from a writer who just doesn't think at all about minorities. But at the end of the day, I don't care about what's in the writer's head. I care about what's in the text (see also: why JK Rowling didn't get many points from me with the whole "Oh, Dumbledore is actually gay!" thing). The point is not to evaluate the writer as a human being.

[hapax]

@burgundy -- I'm 100% behind the idea that Fun! is its own justification (so long as nobody get's hurt and we don't frighten the horses).

I am much more ... ambivalent, I guess ... when fanfic, or LARPing (otherwise known as the grown up version of the sort of play you describe), or reading romance novels, or getting together with friends to play cards and drink beer, or painting portraits of my friends as Orthodox icons (my newest hobby), or *any* creative pastimes that people enjoy, gets what looks from the outside as a little bit defensive and says, "No, really, activity of SERIOUS REDEEMING SOCIAL IMPORT going on here, promise!"

[burgundy]

hapax, that is an amazing hobby you have.

[Kirala]

@MercuryBlue - Gen isn't hard to find, in terms of "fic not about sex." It takes some work to disentangle the "no sex but still romantic pairing" gen from the rest, but again, not too hard to find. The hard part is finding gen which is about the depths of non-romantic relationships between unrelated persons. I'm a fan of White Collar for the bromance; finding fics about the bromance (rather than romance) is hard to do. (Not impossible by a long shot, but hard.) I love the Doctor's complex relationships with his Companions, but it can be hard to find a fic about that without the characters getting romantic in an entirely out-of-character way. (I'm so glad that the last season seems to have finally encouraged shippers to stop trying to make Eleven/Amy romantic.)

The one exception to "all intense relationships are romantic!" seems to be "all intense relationships are romantic or familial!" - which is great when I want to find Luke and Vader fic, but not so great when I want to find Han and Chewie fic.

And again, it's not that my fave style of fic doesn't exist. I just get tired of half of my promising gen-labeled relationship fics turning out to be the prelude to a steamy slash series. (Try finding fic about the platonic relationship between Kirk and Spock or Holmes and Watson. Just try. Then see how many non-platonic fics you accidentally accrue in the process.)

[Mmy]

Mmy tentatively sticks her head up over the parapet....

Try finding fic about the platonic relationship between Kirk and Spock or Holmes and Watson. Just try.

I have read quite a bit of the latter written by this fellow named Conan Doyle.

On a more serious note -- there are many excellent stories with both Watson and Holmes and no steamy slash in Shadows over Baker Street. There have been (without exaggeration) thousands and thousands of stories told in the Holmes/Watson universe (especially if one includes August Derleth/Solar Pons style stories.) I would agree with you, however, if you are speaking only to the type of story usually found in internet fan-fic collections.

[Ursula L]

For a story with a strong M/M relationship that's professional and based on respect but no romance, you can try "Aral Vorkosigan's Dog", which tells the story from Bujold's "Shards of Honor" from the POV of Simon Illyan. The voice is just right, and it fits the cannon with near-perfection.

http://archiveofourown.org/works/135363

[Amaryllis]

Dear hapax, thank you for posting that link. It made me laugh.

And yes, I can see where the author is coming from. So do I contradict myself? Probably.

Still, I'd call that kind of thing parody rather than what I understand to be meant by fan-fiction or slash. Which easily may be just my ignorance of the genre speaking. Or even my laywoman's understanding of the standard terms.

But I think of parody, satire and criticism as genres with which to engage with the work as it is: What's amusing about this work if viewed from the outside? What about it deserves mockery? What may be inferred from it or related to it or influenced by it?

FanFic and Slash seem to be taking the work and re-making it as something different than it is, within the same genre.

So, am I being selective here? It's parody if I like it and slash if I don't? That's a mortifying thought, and maybe there's some truth in it.

But, if the question is, Who has the right to tell this story, as a story? then I'd have to come down on the side of the original author. At least as far as publication goes; private fantasies and writing exercises and such limited-readership productions are a different matter.

And I think it's different, also, for stories which are already "shared-universe." Superheroes, and StarWars, and movies and TV shows which already have multiple authors and multiple story-lines, are much more "fair game" than the works of a single author, no matter how popular.

In other words, more mixed feelings.

[MercuryBlue]

I'd describe 'parody' as works that mock other works without caring about the artistic integrity of the earlier works. Parody is a subgenre of transformative work that has nothing in common with any subgenre of transformative work springing from respect for the original work. It's possible to write such a work in such a way that it reads as parodic (compare the fic somebody did the other month in which the Winchesters say nothing that doesn't sound like the most outrageous of their lines from the show--I wish I had a link, sorry), but there's a difference between parody and crackfic, and respect for the source material is it.

Which is why it bugs me so bad that people say transformative work is only protected under fair use if it's parody or satire.

[Ursula L]

I would say, in terms of stories, that if they're good, an author can't tell it all. You have to edit, their are points of view that don't fit the perspective you've chosen, there are necessary gaps.

But if the story is well told, people will be curious to know more. Something happened between the dinner one night and the next morning. Those secondary and tertiary characters are people too, with their own reasons for being there, which may not be explored.

People have always retold stories as they pleased. Folktales exit in countless variations. We have new ways of sharing the stories, and sharing the fun, now, is all. Professional writers have the benefit of printing and publishing, and a chance to live off their stories in a way that's only exited for about 500 years. And the last 50 have given the imaginations of amateurs new scope, with inexpensive copying and now the internet.

But it's a human thing that's going on with stories, however the economics keep shifting with the technology to share stories.

[Mmy]

@Ursula L: Something happened between the dinner one night and the next morning. Those secondary and tertiary characters are people too, with their own reasons for being there, which may not be explored.

But any story told about those characters isn't really about those characters. They were creations of the author and only the author could tell their story.

For all one knows the author has an fully realized vision of what those characters would or would not have done. If I read a story about what Foljambe said about Mr. Georgie to her husband when she got home -- well the person who is talking isn't Foljambe. Only E. F. Benson could have told me what Foljambe actually thought and said. Benson is dead and anyone else is just "dressed up" as Foljambe.

[burgundy]

Only E. F. Benson could have told me what Foljambe actually thought and said. Benson is dead and anyone else is just "dressed up" as Foljambe.

This is where my ideas start getting really muddled. So I'm just going to throw a bunch of stuff out there.

In some discussion of fanfic I read a few years ago, someone speculated that "flawed" canons tend to attract more fic than really tightly-written canons, because fic fills in the gaps: not so much "what happened after dinner" but "why is this character so inconsistent" or "what could explain this apparent error in continuity" or "what's really going on with this character who seems so one-dimensional."

I've also encountered people who do not engage with texts as created pieces at all. So whereas other people (like me) might say "the writers of Downton Abbey change characterization to fit the needs of the plot, and have nearly destroyed the character of Isobel," these people I'm referring to would say, "the inhabitants of Downton Abbey behave erratically, and Isobel has become remarkably bossy and self-involved."

But I can't quite make that leap, because fictional characters do not actually exist outside of people's heads. I don't feel right saying "only one person knows what this character really thought," because the character doesn't think. It's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead territory: nothing that wasn't included in the text actually happened, the characters don't have a history, they don't have anything except what was created for them.

But at the same time, I have emotional responses completely at odds with that approach. In the afterword to the reprinting of Swordspoint, Ellen Kushner said that after the book first came out, she was afraid of repeating herself or getting stuck and resolved against writing anything else with those characters. So when people asked her what happened next, she said there was a diphtheria epidemic, half the city died, and all the characters were dead. And I still find this very distressing to read, even though I know that she changed her mind and wrote more stuff and they went on to have continuing, interesting lives. And even if she hadn't, there would still be fic. So on some level, I do seem to believe that only Ellen Kushner knows what happens with her characters, and only her pronouncement are real (and they are real even if not included in any of the books.) And I have also never been at all interested in Riverside fic, in part because her writing is so good that no one else could come close, but also because it wouldn't feel "real".

I suspect that I respond differently to fic for tv shows than for books - possibly because there's a difference between group-written properties and single-author properties, possibly because I grew up reading Star Trek novels so I'm used to the idea of supplementing tv shows with written works, possibly because I experience the two media so differently and written fic is too similar to the medium in which I encountered the canon and leads to unfortunate comparisons.

But it might also be the above-referenced difference in quality - for something that's already really good, I either don't need fic or don't recognize the authority of anyone to write it (for example, it's a tv show, but I've never liked any Homicide: Life on the Streets fic that I've read.) But the Supernatural and Torchwood writers are pretty terrible, and I've read a lot of fic that's way better than what actually hit the screen, while still capturing the aspects of the shows that caught my interest in the first place. It's as though these better writers know what the characters "really" think and do to a greater extent than the ostensible property owners do.

Because, again, they only exist in our heads, and I get to decide for myself what the characters in my head are really like, and whose versions will carry the day.

[MercuryBlue]

Only E. F. Benson could have told me what Foljambe actually thought and said. Benson is dead and anyone else is just "dressed up" as Foljambe.

The author is dead, though. The author is always dead. J K Rowling is dead. Yes, she said Dumbledore's gay, good for her--doesn't matter. Dumbledore's sexuality is, at most, implied on the page, and I might not have seen the last three HP movies but I also haven't heard any hullabaloo about Albus/Gellert kissing in either Deathly Hallows movie, so Dumbledore's sexuality is, at most, implied on the screen. And the author is dead, so all we've got to go on is what's on the page and on the screen.

Rowling knows what she was thinking when she wrote the books, so she can speak with more authority than most about what the books are meant to say, but the author is dead. She no more controls her characters than Shakespeare controls his. (Not that Shakespeare ever had much control over his characters anyway, given how much he cribbed from other stories and from history.)

If we want to write Harry/Hermione or Harry/Draco, contrary to the clear text of the books, we're perfectly free to. Same if we want to expand upon the Harry/Ginny relationship the books give us. And probably the Harry in any of these stories won't be quite the Harry in the books (in fact, I have never yet encountered a Harry/Draco story that I think keeps Harry in character), and of course there are differences between Harry as written by one author and Harry as written by another (and some versions may bear very little resemblance to the original model), but at the core, the character is the same.

[Mmy]

@burgundy: In some discussion of fanfic I read a few years ago, someone speculated that "flawed" canons tend to attract more fic than really tightly-written canons, because fic fills in the gaps: not so much "what happened after dinner" but "why is this character so inconsistent" or "what could explain this apparent error in continuity" or "what's really going on with this character who seems so one-dimensional."
[snip]

I suspect that I respond differently to fic for tv shows than for books - possibly because there's a difference between group-written properties and single-author properties,

Ahh, the joys and dangers of commentary tracks. I was listening to the commentary tra ck of a particular episode of a show I know that others in this community enjoy (in fact a show I very much enjoyed when it aired.) One of the people speaking doing commentary was the writer of the episode. It was clear from what that person said that not only had they not see all the previous episodes they did not even know key points in the back story. Key points that should have informed every thought and action of a number of characters in that episode.

In another commentary track a writer responded to the question "how much do you worry about continuity" with the statement "not that much since we know that fans will always work out retcons to explain anything we do wrong."

So I understand why someone who is seriously invested in a fandom/show making the intellectual effort to explain away inconsistencies so that they can continue to enjoy the show. [I have done such intellectual work-arounds myself.] But I don't want to read someone else's fiction explaining away the discontinuities in the characterizations of Methos between his first and later appearances because I know exactly why they happened.[1] And if the showrunner thought some discontinuities created a "problem" for the show then the showrunner had a chance to explain them away in the actual show.

[1] First appearances of characters not intended to be recurring are always problematic.

[Mmy]

@Rowling: Rowling knows what she was thinking when she wrote the books, so she can speak with more authority than most about what the books are meant to say, but the author is dead. She no more controls her characters than Shakespeare controls his.

Rowling is the only person who knows what any passage was intended to mean.

One might argue about her skill as a writer but if one invests the written word with any meaning then one cannot argue that there are an infinite number of "reasonable" readings of a text.

Holmes is not gay. Watson is not his secret lover.

You want to read a book about a gay late Victorian London-based detective who shares room with a medical doctor who lately served in Afghanistan? Fine. Write it. But don't make the argument that just because "the author is dead"[1] that any interpretation of the text is justifiable.

[1] The "author is dead" has to be one of the most misused references to a complex theory -- along with paradigm shifts and the uncertainty principle.

[Amaryllis]

MercuryBlue: I'd describe 'parody' as works that mock other works without caring about the artistic integrity of the earlier works. Parody is a subgenre of transformative work that has nothing in common with any subgenre of transformative work springing from respect for the original work. It's possible to write such a work in such a way that it reads as parodic (compare the fic somebody did the other month in which the Winchesters say nothing that doesn't sound like the most outrageous of their lines from the show--I wish I had a link, sorry), but there's a difference between parody and crackfic, and respect for the source material is it.

I'm sorry, I don't think I follow you here. Are you saying that parody, as it's usually defined, doesn't respect the source material, and crackfic does?

Because, I had to look up the definition of "crackfic," and if I understand it correctly, Id put it the other way around. "Respect," that is, not necessarily meaning to think that the source material is actually good; obviously, parody can be done with affection, but a lot of parody is indeed a savage mockery of the flaws of the original. But it still deals with the original as it is, as a whole creation, rather than selectively highlighting absurdities as if that were all there is.

I think what I'm trying to get at here, is that transformation even for hostile purposes is not the same thing as erasure. Which is what the spirit of fan fiction seems like: I can take your story, your characters, and overwrite them with what suits me better.

Mmy: Only E. F. Benson could have told me what Foljambe actually thought and said. Benson is dead and anyone else is just "dressed up" as Foljambe.
Exactly!

And it's not a matter of professional-vs-amateur, or literary quality, or literally dead authors, either. I glanced at a few pages of Death at Pemberly, by noted author, Dame of the British Empire and everything, P.D. James. And it just wasn't Jane Austen speaking. And only Jane Austen can speak for Mr Darcy as far as I'm concerned; the whole thing just felt off.

Burgundy: Because, again, they only exist in our heads, and I get to decide for myself what the characters in my head are really like, and whose versions will carry the day.
Which is all very well for your private reveries. But when you publish something, you're claiming the right to tell other people what those characters are like.

No, nobody has to read your work, or agree with your characterizations if they do. But you're still putting your characters out there under the same names as the originals, which seems to me to be a deliberate distortion of someone else's act of art.

Mmy: In another commentary track a writer responded to the question "how much do you worry about continuity" with the statement "not that much since we know that fans will always work out retcons to explain anything we do wrong."
No wonder I can never keep up.

That seems to me to be a pretty disrespectful attitude, though. Yes, errors happen; Dickens and Rowling and anybody who writes at length will have perpetrated them. But that's a different matter from treating errors as a feature, not a bug.

But that's why I agree there's a difference between shared and single-author properties: if there's already been a boatload of authorized rewrites and reinterpretations, what's one more fan attempt?

[MercuryBlue]

But don't make the argument that [...] any interpretation of the text is justifiable.

That isn't what I said. 'In-character' is a thing. A very important thing. A Dumbledore who is exclusively attracted to women can still be a recognizable Dumbledore. A Dumbledore who doesn't think the best thing for the [wizarding] world is to load the Horcrux hunt on the head of a teenager...yeah, having real trouble getting there from the text.

'Alternate universe' is also a thing. None of these fics constitutes an argument that in Sherlock BBC, Sherlock or John or both has always been a woman. Ms. Holmes of Baker Street? That is an argument that in Conan Doyle's work, Sherlock was always a woman. I can't speak to how in-character or canon-compliant the genderswap fics are, haven't read 'em yet, but the authors of Ms. Holmes go to considerable length to show that a female Sherlock is both canon-compliant and in-character.

[MercuryBlue]

I think what I'm trying to get at here, is that transformation even for hostile purposes is not the same thing as erasure. Which is what the spirit of fan fiction seems like: I can take your story, your characters, and overwrite them with what suits me better.

Okay. We know, from Supernatural 5x20, that Brady introduced Sam to Jess and later killed Jess. We don't have a hell of a lot else to go with when trying to figure out what of significance happened during Sam's Stanford years. My attempt to figure all that out and write it down and share with the class, that's my attempt to overwrite the story fragments we were given with something I like better?

Seriously?

[burgundy]

Rowling is the only person who knows what any passage was intended to mean.

One might argue about her skill as a writer but if one invests the written word with any meaning then one cannot argue that there are an infinite number of "reasonable" readings of a text.

Holmes is not gay. Watson is not his secret lover.

This seems to be saying two contradictory things.

Yes, only the author knows what something was intended to mean, but because I am not psychic, I cannot ever really know what that intention is. The authors intention is irrelevant to my experience, to the extent that the intention does not manifest in the text. If one invests the written word with any meaning, then Holmes is not gay, but neither is Dumbledore.

I don't at all think that there are an infinite number of reasonable meanings of a given text, but I don't think that there's ever only one either, or that the meaning intended by an author is inherently superior or more authentic. I also don't think that fic must adhere to a reasonable interpretation of a source text in order to be legitimate, or that it somehow harms or distorts the source. (There's an interview with Alan Moore in which he references a story he heard attributed to Raymond Chandler: "where he was asked about what he felt about having his books "ruined" by Hollywood. And he led the questioner into his study and showed him all the books there on the bookshelf, and said, Look—there they all are. They're all fine. They're fine. They're not ruined. They're still there.")

[hapax]

It's as though these better writers know what the characters "really" think and do to a greater extent than the ostensible property owners do.

Because, again, they only exist in our heads, and I get to decide for myself what the characters in my head are really like, and whose versions will carry the day.

Hmm. I'm not sure that I can get behind this, but I might be misunderstanding it.

[warning: incoming labored analogy. This is hapax, what do you expect?]

I see it as sort of like this: The creator(s) of a particular work (let's call her Alice) has built a sandbox. By publishing/presenting/airing it, she has effectively issued a public invitation, "Come play in my sandbox!"

And so we do. Many of us play only the sandbox games that Alice clearly intended. Others come up with unexpected, innovative games, that the creator may never have thought of, but still are clearly within the bounds of "sand-inna-box". Others play games that are frankly destructive -- knocking down the walls, pouring mud into the sand, emptying the sandbox out to see what's underneath.

It isn't always clear to an uninvolved observer which is "intended", which is "creative" and which is "destructive" play. (It's usually even LESS clear to those inside the sandbox!)

However, our laws pretty much give Alice the legal right to say which is which. (I would argue that she also has the moral and intellectual authority, but let's leave that aside for a moment.)

But eventually there comes a point when some of the people in the sandbox say, "Y'know what? Alice's sandbox isn't doing it for me anymore. I can build a better sandbox."

And so they do. Maybe their sandbox has swingsets and water slides and an ice cream stand. Maybe their sandbox is so overflowing with pony rides and carousels and ice-skating rinks that there's hardly any sand anymore, and it's not really confined to a box.

Maybe everybody loves their "sandbox" better and doesn't want to play in Alice's sandbox anymore.

But would all those users really argue that "Hey, this is the BEST 'Alice's sandbox' ever?" Does everybody agree that it's up to the personal preferences of those who are playing there to determine which is the REAL "Alice's sandbox"?

At that point, do the words "sand" and "box" -- not to mention the identity and agency of "Alice" -- become stripped of all meaning?

[burgundy]

I am normally all about analogies, but I'm having a hard time with this one, because while a sandbox is something finite and tangible, an intellectual property is not. There is nothing that a fic author can do that will "damage" an intellectual property - it still exists in its original form. It might change how some people think about the IP, but so do other ways of engaging with texts (critical reviews, casual conversations, blogs about how stupid the physics are, etc.)

I guess for me there's a difference between legal/economic ownership and, for lack of a better term, "mental" ownership. I think that the people who own the Supernatural IP are the ones who should profit off it, and they are the ones who should designate who else may participate in profit-making activities (e.g. tie-in novels.) But they don't get to tell me how I'm supposed to feel about the characters, and if I decide that I like certain fics better than I like certain aspects of the canon, and if I hold multiple parallel continuities in my head, then that's not their business and they have no say in the matter.

Similarly, I have no business telling creators how they should feel, and I am never going to tell someone that they shouldn't be upset about what is being done with their IP. I don't necessarily think they are right to try to stop it, but they are fully entitled to their own feelings and I respect that it can be an emotionally fraught situation.

[MercuryBlue]

But eventually there comes a point when some of the people in the sandbox say, "Y'know what? Alice's sandbox isn't doing it for me anymore. I can build a better sandbox."

Building a better sandbox = writing original fic, I think.

The real Supernatural is the pushing-a-hundred-fifty episodes that Eric Kripke and Sera Gamble have supervised the creation of. Fans can play our reindeer games to our hearts' content, write our own casefics, have Sam sleeping with Jess or Ruby or Dean or young Mary or somebody who never appeared in the show, end the world in a hundred different ways, give the characters as many different happy endings, and when we're bored of the reindeer games, we still have our DVDs and DVRs. The show's still there, intact. We may look at it differently because we've read the fics and watched the vids, but the show hasn't changed. Supernatural's a poor example, because the creators think it's amusing to write fandom into canon, but in most canons, fannish reaction and fannish output will have no effect whatsoever on canon.

[ZMiles]

Well, I can see a certain case when it could be destructive -- when the fanfic becomes more well known than the source material, and people begin treating it as if it's canon. So, like the people who think that Dante's Inferno was actually in the canonical bible, or who mix up Derleth's innovations with Lovecraft's. But that seems vanishingly unlikely in general, particularly for internet fanfiction.

I guess there's also the case where a fanfic author somehow stops an author from pursuing work in his/her own universe because of perceived similarities, but I've never heard of this actually happening when the author isn't explicitly doing things like saying "hey, I read your fic and want to buy it." Marion Zimmer Bradley is sometimes said to be a case of this, but Bradley actually attempted to buy the fanfic first, and then only claimed to be unable to punish her story collection when the fan wanted better terms (see: http://www.jimchines.com/2010/05/mzb-vs-fanfiction).

Outside of the first (very rare) and second (don't know if it's even happened once), I can't think of any case where a fanfic could be said to harm the original. So if it's fun and it doesn't hurt the author, I don't see the problem.

[chris the cynic]

I come at things like this from a classics perspective, as you're all probably already aware since I've used that perspective in this thread, and from that perspective some of the things being said here are somewhat unexpected, even when I don't necessarily disagree with their factual accuracy.

For example, does this:
you're still putting your characters out there under the same names as the originals, which seems to me to be a deliberate distortion of someone else's act of art.

apply to Homer? Are the Iliad and Odyssey deliberate distortions of other people's works? I suppose they are, in a sense, but that's not how we generally approach them. We make note of the fact that they were reworkings of earlier oral traditions, but we don't call them distortions.

That said, this (from the same post):
Which is what the spirit of fan fiction seems like: I can take your story, your characters, and overwrite them with what suits me better.

Does seem to describe pretty much every extant telling of any Greek or Roman myth. Euripides did it so well that, as near as anyone can tell, he changed the story of Medea for all time. Homer did it well enough that no one even bothered to preserve the stuff that came before him. His version supplanted them all.

I mean that's not all there is to it. A lot of fan fiction does seem to be trying not to overwrite the work but instead fill in the blanks and we see examples of that in classical works as well. (Statius writing about the parts of Achilles life not touched on by previous authors, for example.) But that's still taking existing characters and story and making them into your own version and even though it leaves the original intact by changing the context it changes how one interprets the original. Which has the effect of overwriting the original even if it doesn't change the words.

So even considering the cases where things are added alongside the original instead of replacing parts of it I still think that it's the case that the quoted description seems to apply to pretty much every extant telling of any Greek or Roman myth.

-

There was actually stuff from other posts that I was planning on responding to as well, but I didn't want to repeat myself too much and I worry it might be derailing to get classics all over a discussion primarily about modern works. I'd talk about something new and shiny like Shakespeare, but I don't have all that much interest in his works.

[MercuryBlue]

I worry it might be derailing to get classics all over a discussion primarily about modern works.

This is Slacktiverse. Derailing is really difficult.

[burgundy]

I worry it might be derailing to get classics all over a discussion primarily about modern works.

I don't think it's derailing at all. I think it's useful to look at historical precedent for how people relate to stories, and to talk about changes in societal attitudes towards authorship and ownership.

[hapax]

All-righty, to refine the sandbox analogy.

Alice builds her sandbox, and invites us all to come and play in it. It becomes a hugely popular place to play, so much that a whole community is built up around playing in it.

But since everybody is different, we all play in slightly different ways.

Bob likes to see how high he can pile up the sand.
Christine traces different patterns in the surface.
Druga sits and basks in the sun, watching the sand sparkle.
Ethelred carefully counts out sand grain-by-grain, sorting them into "smooth" and "jagged".
Fiona -- truly an "out of the box" thinker -- lies on the ground, tapping out on infectious rhythm on the wood planks used to build the box.
Glee suffers from an extreme case of pica, and huddles in a corner eating the sand.

These different means of playing may or may not correspond with Alice's intent in building the sandbox. Some of them might actually distress her.

But they are all unquestionably playing with "Alice's sandbox." Everything they are doing is with the materials that Alice provided.

Now there are some borderline cases.

Hardy is a professional sandbox reviewer, and examines Alice's dispassionately for the quality of the sand, the soundness of the box, the way they work together to enhance play. Not exactly "playing with Alice's sandbox", but certainly, shall we say, "fair use" of it.

Istvan, on the other hand, is having a grand old time digging in the sandbox with his toy shovel and pail. Is he playing with Alice's sandbox? Or is he *really* playing with his shovel and pail? Are "shovel and pail" so tied to the concept of "sandbox play" that they could be said to be implied? Different people could legitimately disagree on that question.

Now (to break the alphabetic progression) along comes hapax. I *love* Alice's sandbox, and have spent many happy afternoons playing in it. All my friends play there, so if I want to play with them, I've got to play there too.

But today, while thinking about Alice's sandbox, I had a nacky notion. I want to play boat races.

So I dig a big hollow in the sand, and drag a hose over to fill it with water. I bring all my toy boats from home, and start swooshing them across the puddle.

I'm not doing anything to damage Alice's sandbox physically -- the water will drain and everything will return to the prior state. Alice never said anything about "don't play boats in my sandbox." I'm certainly not charging anyone to play boats with me.

And maybe everybody else has a blast playing this new game. They might say it's the best time they've ever had in Alice's sandbox. They might say that they never realized before how Alice's sandbox excluded kids who wanted to play boats. Alice might think it's a great idea, and vow to incorporate it in all of her future sandboxes. Heckopete, after Alice dies, her legal heirs might hire me to design a new chain of "Alice's Sandboxes" that spread across the country bringing joy to backyards everywhere, and make me rich.

I didn't do anything illegal, or immoral, or unethical. I had fun, and other people had fun, and fun is (as I said above), its own justification. I exercised my imagination, and my dexterity, and raised people's awareness of new possibilities of play.

All of these are good things.

But there's one thing I *wasn't* doing, if I want to be honest with myself.

I wasn't playing in Alice's sandbox.

I was playing in hapax's boat pond.

I may have used -- borrowed, appropriated, stole, different people will see it in different ways -- Alice's sand and Alice's box to build my boat pond. (Perhaps I don't have enough sand or boxes of my own. Perhaps I thought it wasn't worth the trouble to fetch them out for an afternoon's silly play.)

Moreover, I used the social and cultural cachet of "Alice's sandbox is a great place to play" to bring the community to play in hapax's boat pond.

None of this is to say that I necessarily did anything to hurt Alice or her sandbox. Indeed, I might argue that the fun of playing in hapax's boat pond increased the value of both.

But I think it is important to be honest about what I am actually doing.

[Kirala]

If one invests the written word with any meaning, then Holmes is not gay, but neither is Dumbledore.

Sooo... I was the only one who got a major vibe of Grindelwald-was-Dumbledore's-first-love when reading Deathly Hallows? I mean, it's not unambiguous; text-alone, there are other valid interpretations. Without Rowling's statement, I probably wouldn't have fought for my impression. But my impression was exactly what Rowling later said explicitly, so the text alone does give at least some support to Rowling.

[burgundy]

But there's one thing I *wasn't* doing, if I want to be honest with myself.

I wasn't playing in Alice's sandbox.

I was playing in hapax's boat pond.

Now I'm so caught up in the analogy that I'm not sure what's being discussed... (I normally don't use emoticons, but it feels important somehow to be able to convey that I'm "saying" that with a smile on my face, because I'm enjoying the discussion, and I'm not responding out of irritation or impatience or anything like that.)

What is it that fic-writers are claiming that is dishonest? More fundamentally, what does it matter if it's called "playing in Alice's sandbox" or "playing in hapax's boat pond"? Is your argument that, after a great enough departure from canon, one cannot honestly call the characters by the same names anymore? Or is any original work inherently different enough that it cannot use the same names?

If so, that's just not something I can agree with. I think we may conceptualize the whole issue in radically different ways.

[MercuryBlue]

Hardy is a professional sandbox reviewer, and examines Alice's dispassionately for the quality of the sand, the soundness of the box, the way they work together to enhance play. Not exactly "playing with Alice's sandbox", but certainly, shall we say, "fair use" of it.

So is "How Much Is That Geisha In the Window?", the vid that makes it oh so obvious how few Asian people are in the world of Firefly despite all the China-inspired set dressing, fanwork or critique? My series of twenty-word ficlets, one Bechdel pass per episode of Supernatural (a show that otherwise is pretty much entirely without Bechdel passes), is that fanwork or critique? Because the way I'm reading you, hapax, fanwork bad, critique good. And it'd be useful to be able to distinguish the two.

Also for some reason now I'm thinking of the fic wherein the apocalypse comes to the Hundred Acre Wood. I don't know why.

[burgundy]

@kirala - but doesn't that put it on the same footing as a lot of slash pairings? If people can point to the text and say, "I got a strong feeling of sexual chemistry in scenes X and Y," and there's nothing in the text that explicitly rules it out (e.g. one character saying of another, "we're just friends"), then it's a valid reading, independent of authorial intent.

[Raj]

Mmy: The "author is dead" has to be one of the most misused references to a complex theory -- along with paradigm shifts and the uncertainty principle.

Don't. Even. Get. Me. Started on the misuse of "suspension of disbelief".

--------------

hapax: painting portraits of my friends as Orthodox icons (my newest hobby)

Does Tuesday around sevenish work for you?

[Kirala]

@kirala - but doesn't that put it on the same footing as a lot of slash pairings? If people can point to the text and say, "I got a strong feeling of sexual chemistry in scenes X and Y," and there's nothing in the text that explicitly rules it out (e.g. one character saying of another, "we're just friends"), then it's a valid reading, independent of authorial intent.

Sure. But if you're referring to my distaste for non-canon slash* - it's not that I think the slash isn't often a valid reading of the text, it's that I personally prefer fic that goes with the more obvious asexual interpretation - perhaps for the same reasons that I prefer Starbucks chai to regular tea (perceived availability).

*wait, that's redundant by Ana's terms. Eh, I'll leave it as stands - redundancy is preferable to ambiguity.

[hapax]

Because the way I'm reading you, hapax, fanwork bad, critique good.

MercuryBlue, I honestly don't know how you got that reading.

I explicitly said in about twenty different ways that judgments of "bad" and "good" didn't come into what I was saying.

What I was saying is that critique and fanwork are different sorts of enterprises.

One uses the materials available in the text, and only the materials available in the text, to build an argument about the text. The contribution of creator of the critique lies in a)how well the original text supports it and b)the significance of the argument to increasing understanding of the original text and/or its cultural context.

The other uses materials available in the text to build an original story that isn't in the text and that the text may or may not support. The contribution of the creator of the fanwork lies in a)the way it *differs* from the text as supplied (whether that is in "filling in holes" or actually altering characters or plot) and b) how well it capitalizes on the appeal factors of the original text.

The fact that these are two different enterprises does not imply that one is morally or creatively superior to the other.

[Kirala]

Hmm. My wall o' text regarding originality and transformative works in history... seems to have disappeared. Which is probably for the best, because I think it was incoherent.

Also, hapax, I love the sandbox analogy. It applies to my feelings about Twilight vampires. Meyer spent a lot of time creating a creature to be an object of fascination and peril and ended up with a potentially interesting supernatural creature that, IMHO, would have been better billed as an exotic sort of Fae. A vampire that has no weaknesses? No association with coffins, burial, or other relics of death? No connection with the darker side of nature? Doesn't really seem to be a vampire.

Nothing wrong with transformative work, but when it's transformed beyond recognition... well, that could serve a purpose for parody or critique, but it seems like bad form to do to something one admires.

[The Board Administration Team]

@Kirala: You aren't in the spam trap -- just checked. TypePad is being TypePad

[MercuryBlue]

hapax: apologies. I may be being overly defensive.

What I was saying is that critique and fanwork are different sorts of enterprises.

And I'm saying, it's possible for a critique of a work to be done in sketch, manip, vid, short-story, or novel format, rather than only and exclusively essays. You're trying to make a distinction that doesn't always, maybe doesn't often, exist.

[Kirala]

@TBAT: Thanks for checking. I am somehow unsurprised that Unreliable TypePad Is Unreliable.

[Kirala]

@MercuryBlue

And I'm saying, it's possible for a critique of a work to be done in sketch, manip, vid, short-story, or novel format, rather than only and exclusively essays. You're trying to make a distinction that doesn't always, maybe doesn't often, exist.

*frowns* I'm reading hapax as saying that critique is possible in multiple formats, but critique is the only reason for a fic to go contrary to the original text - that a work which is strongly contrary to the text ceases to be a fanwork, and if critique is not the purpose, it might be better done as an original piece than a nominal fanfic.

Hapax, correct me if I'm wrong.

[hapax]

that a work which is strongly contrary to the text ceases to be a fanwork, and if critique is not the purpose, it might be better done as an original piece than a nominal fanfic.

Sort of. But "better" is a broad word, and I am not going to endorse every situation.

Here are lots of non-critique situations in which fanfic might be the "best" option:

* my internet buddies and I are going to celebrate Beltane by seeing who can write the funniest bunny-themed Harry Potter fanfic
* I think that both Remus and Sirius are really hot characters, and it makes me drool in all the right places to write about them having sex with each other
* J.K. Rowling's worldbuilding makes no sense, but it's a fun intellectual exercise to try and fill in her plotholes
* I thought Neville was an awesome character and it made me sad that J.K. Rowling didn't write more about him
* I feel like it, all right?

Here is a situation in which I don't think fanfic is the "best" response:

* I think that J. K. Rowling has the right to claim that she knows anything more about Harry and Draco than I do. My stories about their relationship are just as much "Harry Potter" as hers are.

I am aware that this particular position of mine is not universally agreed with. But I would rather not be expected to defend positions that I don't actually hold.

[MercuryBlue]

critique is possible in multiple formats, but critique is the only reason for a fic to go contrary to the original text - that a work which is strongly contrary to the text ceases to be a fanwork, and if critique is not the purpose, it might be better done as an original piece than a nominal fanfic.

In that case we have to define 'contrary to the text'. Because of course something sufficiently contrary to the text isn't a fanwork, but there's lots of ways to be contrary to the text and most of those remain firmly within the domain of fanwork.

One of these days I am actually going to write the story where Jesus was a Harry-Potter-esque wizard. I haven't started because it'd be too much research to get the time period right and also I haven't figured out yet whether it'd be "better" as original fic.

[Mmy]

@hapax: was that supposed to be "I don't think that J. K. Rowling.....

[hapax]

@Mmy -- ummm. Yeah.

[Mmy]

@MercuryBlue: One of these days I am actually going to write the story where Jesus was a Harry-Potter-esque wizard

Just for fun I did some googling :)

REVELATION! Jesus Christ was a wizard like Harry Potter!

Was Jesus Christ a wizard? Did he go to Hogwarts school of Witchcraft and Wizardry?

Was Jesus a Wizard?

[burgundy]

hapax, that makes sense to me.

I think, for me, it comes down to shared understandings. There is a widely-held shared understanding that "vampire" means certain things, and while there's room for variation, there is not room in the term for Twilight vampires. Obviously, that's not a universal shared understanding, but it's pretty common. So there are people for whom Edward Cullen is not a "real" vampire, and people for whom he is, and it's all a question of community consent, because there's no such thing as a real "real" vampire, so it's just about which stories we care to share with each other.

Similarly, I said all kinds of nasty things about the Disney Hercules movie when it came out, because it did not fit within my internal parameters for "Hercules" or "Greek mythology," and I know at least a few other people felt the same way. Enough people had different parameters for it to get made.

Generally speaking, in our culture the shared understanding is that only official canon works are "real". And that's fine. There may be smaller communities that embrace an alternate canon (e.g. pretending that there were only 3 Indiana Jones movies.) There may be even smaller communities, or even just individuals, that embrace wildly divergent canons. I think that's fine too.

I think what's not fine is ignoring the difference in shared understandings. I suspect, being mostly outside fandom and so not witnessing things directly, that this is what goes on in ship wars, or people being actively angry that IP owners don't pair characters off in exactly the right way. If you have created your own continuity in which Harry and Hermione pair off, then that's fine. Because none of them exist anyway, that's just as "real" as anything else. But the community consensus is to accept the words of the book, in which that did not happen, and you will only confuse or irritate people if you act as though the two versions are on equal footing. Maybe, at some point, the community consensus will shift (I'm imagining aliens or far-future researchers looking over the vast collection of Harry Potter folklore) and alternate versions will have more weight.

[AnaMardoll]

Rowling is the only person who knows what any passage was intended to mean.

Warning: Personal experience only, I am only Ana and no one else. I also have a crappy memory, whereas many authors probably do not.

This made me laugh like this: BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. Very loudly. Husband is grimacing at his hurt ears right now. Because as Someone Who Writes, I very frequently do not remember what certain passages that I wrote were "intended" to mean.

Oh, I mean, I have notes from my first draft of that chapter. ("I thought WHAT? Was I really really tired??") and I have copies of my second and third and fourth and fifth draft of the chapter ("Wait, which part is the what now?") and I can tell you my feelings on the final version of the chapter -- the version that has been edited at least 20 times, touched by an editor, by a dozen beta readers, and tweaked just now for Semi-Colon Abuse, but...

...I would never say that I know what that passage is "intended to mean". I have an opinion. And, like MercuryBlue says, it's an opinion that's probably about as well-informed as one can be, but it's still hazy on the edges.

And this is a problem for me. When I look at my work, sometimes I remember things that don't exist anymore. A character changed age. A beta-couple was dissolved. Passages were moved or re-written or re-worked and my brain hasn't kept the "canon" version front and center. And I have to watch myself to keep from opining on how the Fiorita/Flavio romance is intended as a counterpoint foil to the Bella/Ezio romance because, oh yeah, I wrote that part out when Fiorita was downgraded to 14 years old. Whoops. And... ick. And LOL.

So I definitely consider myself a "dead" author*. Even if not for my almost-published book, then also for my year-old blog posts that people dredge up and I re-read and I think "I wrote THAT? What was I thinking?"

* Like so many things, I have a broad definition of this concept that works well with my own evolution-of-Ana's-brain-language thing. So I apologize for unclarity.

[Mmy]

@Ana Mardoll: <derail>How is the house stuff going?</derail>

[MercuryBlue]

...why did it not occur to me that somebody else had thought of this.

Was Jesus Christ a wizard? Did he go to Hogwarts school of Witchcraft and Wizardry?

Because obviously there's a possibility that someone who lived in the Levant circa 2000 years before present attended a school in the British Isles founded circa 1000 years before present. Even given that time travel exists in HP canon, that seems like a stretch.

[chris the cynic]

(Remember back in the old days when I used to produce walls of text? Looks like I can still do that.)

@hapax,

Then would you say that what Fred Clark does to Left Behind is not critique because he does not only use material in the text but instead also uses materials available in the text to build original stories that isn't in the text and that the text does not support. (This one being the first that came to my mind.)

My impulse is to say that no, you wouldn't say that, and it's so obvious that that would be the case that it is stupid for me to ask.

But, on the other hand, I know of no other way to interpret, "and only the materials available in the text," than to mean that if it does contain materials not available in the text it does not qualify as critique.

Also the dichotomy set up doesn't seem to allow for the possibility of overlap so anything that seems to contain elements of both has to be one or the other and since the description of critique explicitly excludes original work where the description of fan work does not seem to exclude critique, that seems to mean that any mixed cases must be fanwork.

As I said before, I'm guessing that's not what you meant, but given the lack of a middle ground created by "only" (as opposed to say "primarily" or something similar) I'm not sure I see a way around reaching that conclusion from your words.

---

I think it's useful to look at historical precedent for how people relate to stories, and to talk about changes in societal attitudes towards authorship and ownership.

I can give some historical perspective (and will), but it's an area where I think it's hard to see the border between useful and the opposite.

For example, The Epic of Gilgamesh contained straight up plagiarism, for example. Bad plagiarism too. (In the era before find and replace sometimes you didn't scratch of every single instance of the name when you stole the story of Bob and turned it into the story of Dave.) But at the same time it wasn't plagiarism because no such concept existed and stealing ideas wasn't stealing it was the way storytelling worked. Intellectual property didn't exist.

Is that useful information, or is that just noise? If we did that today it would be, at the absolute best, exceedingly difficult to make a living as a storyteller. As soon as your story was out there anyone could photocopy it, change a name or two, and call it their own. The publishing industry would cease.

It is so unlike our way of doing things that it would be catastrophic, and does it really help to bring it up? I don't know.

The entire system used to create Greek tragedies, and epics before them, was built on rewriting existing stories or filling in gaps in those stories, or tacking on stories alongside before or after them, or any combination of the previous. Which is to say that it was entirely what we now call fan fiction. For money. And religion. And civics.

In ancient Athens if you were a citizen (which meant if you were an adult non-slave male who wasn't foreign) it was your political and religious duty to show up on the appointed day, sit in the theater, and watch fan fiction all day long.

That's how the tragedies came to be. They were all fan fiction. Many of them were taking a story the audience already knew and retelling it as the play write saw fit, others were telling new stories using the existing characters. (The ones I always think of first are the ones where a play write basically said, "No. That character totally didn't die, she lived, and here's what happened afterward," because it strikes me as a very fanfictiony kind of thing to do.)

And the thing is, we don't know the original authors. Because in the end it was decided that the fan fic was better. For the most part we have no idea what the plays are differing from, because that wasn't preserved. Getting from then to now takes a lot of work (and more than a little luck) and part of what that means is that anything that does survive (the the exception of accidental survival) does so because for a couple thousand years in a row people thought it was awesome. And what did people think was awesome? Mostly fan fiction.

There are exceptions. (Lysistrata seems pretty well original to me, for example.) But for the most part, fan fiction.

Again, I'm not sure if this is useful information in any way.

I was going to talk about Catullus, Vergil, and Ovid, but I think a more useful thing might be to simply think about it in terms of copyright. There was none. Everything was public domain the moment it was out there. So, the three I just mentioned have lives that overlapped, but they were able to use each others works the way that I could use their works today if I wanted to even though I couldn't do the same thing with, say, J.K. Rowling's work.

That does make a difference. Say someone my age has a brilliant idea for a story set at Hogwarts. Say Rowling doesn't particularly want to have anyone else writing such stories. That person will never be able to make commercial use of that story. Say that exact same person with that exact same idea had been born 100 years later. Then they'd be legally allowed to commercially produce the story. And anyone inspired by them would have to wait 70 years after their death to build on that.

In ancient Rome that pace was faster, but in ancient Rome that was because the rich and powerful of the day thought that supporting writers was a good use of their money. Without a system of patronage authors need to support themselves in an entirely different way. Thus we need things like copyright.

But non-profit fan fiction at least allows for the same pace of inspiration. I have no intention of reading the various fan fictions I've heard people bring up, but it's obvious that they've been moved by them, that movement might not result in them doing much of anything, it might result in them writing more fan fiction, or it might result in them producing an original work. I don't know.

What I do think is worth noting is that the classics all came out of an environment where you could steal from someone's work that stole from someone else's work that stole from someone else's work while most or all of those people were still alive. I think that probably did help get creative things moving along a lot faster. You can't have the same with professional work now and so under those rules none of the classics we know would exist.

The possible exception being fan fiction. If you have to wait for copyright to expire getting to the fourth iteration of something will likely take as many centuries, if you don't it just takes as long as needed to read and write it four times. I don't know if that is happening in fan fiction, but it's possible. And, at least in theory, that seems interesting to me. It seems like a partial return to a previous way of looking at the world in a way that doesn't put all the authors out of work and doesn't require us to return to a system of patronage.

And I'm not quite sure how I got there from where I started. Lest I seem like I'm pining for the days of the Roman Empire (I'm not), allow me to take a moment to remind you that they were ethnocentric misogynistic slave holding imperialists and their sanitation systems left a lot to be desired.

-

Apparently that took me more than an hour to write, I'm heading in the direction of sleep now.

[AnaMardoll]

@Ana Mardoll: [derail]How is the house stuff going?[/derail]

AGONIZING, if you're like me and you can't handle waiting and tension and waiting and uncertainty. :)

1. Buyer is still not "locked in" on our house.
2. We've made an informal offer on a house that I want so bad it BURNS, but...
3. ...we won't be pre-approved for a loan until tomorrow...
4. (And Ana will have to take those calls at work which looks unprofessional)
5. ...And the Seller has vastly priced their house over appraisal...
6. ...which the Bank will not cover...
7. ...and we've offered a Very Fair Price that is unfortunately much lower than theirs...
8. ...and since they've only been on the market a short time, they may say no.

So Ana is in the process of having a nervous breakdown from the tension. But I have at least channeled that tension into productivity and:

a. Finalized book.
b. Finished the ISBN information in the Bowker databases.
c. Uploaded final copy to US copyright website.
d. Uploaded final copy to B&N (where they have a hold sitting on my account. Gosh, my Monday will be busy and unprofessional!)
e. Am TRYING to upload copy to Amazon, but the epub-to-mobi conversion is KICKING MY BUTT. Grr.

[AnaMardoll]

(And thanks for asking. I love you all so much. Home away from home, my Slacktivist is.)

[burgundy]

The publishing industry would cease.

It is so unlike our way of doing things that it would be catastrophic, and does it really help to bring it up? I don't know.

The reason I personally think it's useful is that it supports the idea that the stuff we're talking about is culture-bound, and not an intrinsic and unchanging aspect of stories themselves. And furthermore, our intellectual approaches to stories are inextricably tied with the underlying legal and economic structure in which art is produced.

[MercuryBlue]

Say that exact same person with that exact same idea had been born 100 years later. Then they'd be legally allowed to commercially produce the story. And anyone inspired by them would have to wait 70 years after their death to build on that.

If Disney gets its way, nothing is going into the public domain ever again.

Incidentally, I read How to Fix Copyright the other week. Fascinating fact: back when copyright was initially granted for a twenty-eight-year term and could be renewed for another such term, the copyright on most works was not renewed. Because the financial gain to the original author from copyrighting the work was all fairly soon after publication. Much sooner than twenty-eight years.

And meanwhile we have fucktons of media sitting and rotting because nobody who owns the IP cares enough to preserve it.

US copyright law as currently written is designed to protect Disney and the MPAA and RIAA, and everybody else can go hang.

[AnaMardoll]

Chris, I loved your wall of text. But that last caveat made me smile so hard. :D