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

From Scapekid.

[(Anonymous)]

Hmpf - thanks for the encouragement and glad I was making sense. I was just whining because...I could, I guess. Scifi's far from dead, but it's difficult to convince the rest of the world of this sometimes. (Oh, and yeah, of course it's fine to put the link there!)

On the fanfiction tack, I find these comparisons between the litarary and spoken traditions and the recorded musical and oral musical traditions fascinating. I have been to many storytelling festivals and you are right. They do retell each others stories. Many times they retell great, classic stories in unique ways.

Which brings up an interesting point. Many, *many* people have, over the years, stolen 'archetypal' fairy stories and retold them in novel format. If I recall correctly there's a whole series of books based on fairy tales. ("Jack of Kinrowan," by Charles DeLint, a modern retelling of Jack the Giant Killer; "White as Snow," by, crap, can't remember, a 'realistic' retelling of Snow White.)

When I have seen other characters stolen (pastiched) in novels (and it does happen), they are usually characters from books whose authors are dead, and who are so famous they have, in effect, passed into the human literary mythology. In a way they 'count' as these archetypal fairy stories that no one owns.

So... Then it's an accepted thing to do - retell a story that no one owns? So what makes it accpetable? That, as you say, no one owns it? The idea is conceptual only?

But surely the desire represents something universal. This idea that you want to add to or change a story that is so much a part of our mythology all our lives, growing up.

So doesn't it make sense that a modern day story (told through television, film or book) that we invest time in and becomes a part of *our* mythos, would trigger the same response in us?

*sigh* No. Apparently not. Or perhaps it is just that we're divergent because we're not meant to *care* this much about a story. We're not meant to choose our own mythologies; we're meant to accept the ones we're handed.

Hope that makes sense. Must go now - road trip looms.