Fanfic controversy: loads of interesting misunderstandings...

[hmpf]

as several pro writers encounter fan fiction:

here, and here, and here.

Read, disagree, discuss. Preferably here, so I can see your reactions. *g* I posted my own reactions in someone else's journal, but I don't want to flood his journal with even more pro fanfic propaganda than I already spammed it with, so I'm not posting a link. If you ask me nicely, I may cut and paste my various manifestos here.

Edited to add: all right, coalescent has given his consent to link, so here's his original post and here's the fanfic discussion hidden in the avalanche of replies to that post. :-)

Aaaand... (I guess it is okay to include this link here, since you posted it in this thread, anyway, Scapekid?) - Scapekid says it all, only better than I ever could:

http://zippysatellite4.blogspot.com/2003_09_28_zippysatellite4_archive.html

*is a Scapekid fangirl*

Comments

[carenejeans.livejournal.com]

I keep seeing the same two arguments against fanfiction. One is legal. One is literary. They are often confused.

In a literary sense, most fanfiction is pastiche, not plagiarism. Fanfiction writers don't lift whole passages and pretend they wrote them, but write new stories based on a show (or several shows) using the show's characters. Legally, this can be called theft because the source is covered by copyright. If it's not covered by copyright, you can take the source and do with it what you will.

This is not only legit, it's literature. (Okay, it can be hackwork and drivel too.)

But critics of fanfiction often confuse legit stealing with the other kind, and get all over fan writers' case for writing pastiche as if it were a crime against creativity.

Anne Rice has a lot of gall. Yes, her characters are copyrighted, so she can stomp her foot at you and call in her lawyers. But as far as telling writers to come up with their own original characters, ahem. Her "original" character is interesting (I guess; I've never been able to get through any of her books) but is based on a character whose image hovers toothily in the background whenever one says "vampire." Get a grip.

If you set aside the copyright infringement issue and look at writing -- professional, successful, even classic writing -- that "steals" from other works, there's a lot of playing in other people's sandboxes... Two examples: For literary fanfiction: "new" Sherlock Holmes stories. For Real People Fiction: Elvis novels. Some of it's terrible, some it's brilliant, a lot of it's "eh," but it's all legal, so the authors aren't told to "get a life," or that what they're doing is a waste of time, or that their stories are bad because they're not "true" to the originals from which they're "stolen"... well, not out-of-hand anyway.

(As an aside, I realize there's a difference between writing fiction based on dead/historical people and those still living. And yes I do know Elvis is dead. I'm amazed that some people are so bothered by RPF they're disturbed by fiction about dead real people. Banning Dead RPF would wipe out a great deal of literature.)

coalescent doesn't seem to like fiction based on other authors' characters, and here I think I have a fundamental difference of opinion, because I love it. I especially like whimsical historical fantasy, like Woolf's Orlando, or Ishmael Reed's Flight to Canada, both of which include historical figures (and in Woolf's case, a close friend). I like stories based on other favorite stories, such as Connie Willis's To Say Nothing of the Dog and Jasper Fforde's Lost In a Good Book. I've read and re-read most of Terry Pratchett's books, and just discovered Avram Davidson. I like the idea of cyberpunk, though some of it irritates me.

Sturgeon's law applies here, obviously. Pastiche and historical fiction can be done badly, very badly -- you can hang a sandwich board on a character and call him "Mark Twain," as Philip Jose Farmer does, and it's not going to work. But it's not automatically a bankrupt idea.