Oh, on an academic-philosophical level, I agree with you completely: there aren't really any new stories, or characters, or conflicts. (I had a professor in college who used to say there are 9 plots, 17 characters, and 3 resolutions; I can only remember that his version of "three resolutions" was "ends badly, ends well, doesn't fucking end because the author can't find a good place to stop"... heh.)
But from a writer's perspective, there may not be any new stories as a whole, but there are still distinct stories recognizable not by their individual features but by the way those elements come together. Certainly many people have written blond bimbos, and vampires, and high school life, and geeky friends, and whatnot, but only Whedon put those disparate elements together in this precise way to come up with this specific combination. I mean, you can take flour, eggs, milk, sugar, and baking soda and there's still no mistaking sugar cookies for sourdough biscuits.
The genre tropes are another facet of that mix, too: kinda like how cookies use one egg as a binder, but two if there's a rising/yeast-like action involved. Chemistry, as it were, and the same goes for tropes. Use this one to get this, use that one to get that, and a mix of tropes in this way will be subversive while in that way it'll be classic genre. Fanfiction doesn't have to build the house, I agree on that point, in that it's borrowing the genre-tropes likely already in existence via the original house's construction... but it's not like fanfiction can't radically redecorate, or even gut, the existing house, especially when you get into the more subversive forms of fanfiction -- and I include stand-on-its-head retellings like Wicked or Ash in that. Yes, I do see those as a type of fanfiction, if a bit more professionally delivered, but those stories do require one have some foreknowledge of the house prior to the crazy renovation-and-redecoration madness.
It can be a bind on professional writers that don't necessarily want to follow market forms, and ff gives opportunity for that kind of experiment without making unreasonable demands on the reader.
It also means the author is freed from certain requirements -- not necessarily beginning, middle, end, so much as the time spent to re-introduce you to this character or to describe that one or even to make you believe that these two are in luuuurve. But more than that, as long as a fandom is willing to read anything (as it usually is) so long as certain pairings or characters are in place, the author is freed up to mess around with the delivery over the content. I've read more second-person stories in fanfiction than I think I had in who-knows-how-many-years of published (and unpublished) ofic stories prior, and more wacky fusions of this fandom and that Shakespearean or this Austinian plot, and more strange and baffling short-stories that pivot on style or voice or some other gimmick. I mean, the entire notion of 'songfic' is one big honking gimmick, but it's one you can play with in fandom because you don't have the burden of building the house at the same time you're stapling the furniture to the ceiling.
no subject
Date: 18 Dec 2009 11:21 pm (UTC)But from a writer's perspective, there may not be any new stories as a whole, but there are still distinct stories recognizable not by their individual features but by the way those elements come together. Certainly many people have written blond bimbos, and vampires, and high school life, and geeky friends, and whatnot, but only Whedon put those disparate elements together in this precise way to come up with this specific combination. I mean, you can take flour, eggs, milk, sugar, and baking soda and there's still no mistaking sugar cookies for sourdough biscuits.
The genre tropes are another facet of that mix, too: kinda like how cookies use one egg as a binder, but two if there's a rising/yeast-like action involved. Chemistry, as it were, and the same goes for tropes. Use this one to get this, use that one to get that, and a mix of tropes in this way will be subversive while in that way it'll be classic genre. Fanfiction doesn't have to build the house, I agree on that point, in that it's borrowing the genre-tropes likely already in existence via the original house's construction... but it's not like fanfiction can't radically redecorate, or even gut, the existing house, especially when you get into the more subversive forms of fanfiction -- and I include stand-on-its-head retellings like Wicked or Ash in that. Yes, I do see those as a type of fanfiction, if a bit more professionally delivered, but those stories do require one have some foreknowledge of the house prior to the crazy renovation-and-redecoration madness.
It can be a bind on professional writers that don't necessarily want to follow market forms, and ff gives opportunity for that kind of experiment without making unreasonable demands on the reader.
It also means the author is freed from certain requirements -- not necessarily beginning, middle, end, so much as the time spent to re-introduce you to this character or to describe that one or even to make you believe that these two are in luuuurve. But more than that, as long as a fandom is willing to read anything (as it usually is) so long as certain pairings or characters are in place, the author is freed up to mess around with the delivery over the content. I've read more second-person stories in fanfiction than I think I had in who-knows-how-many-years of published (and unpublished) ofic stories prior, and more wacky fusions of this fandom and that Shakespearean or this Austinian plot, and more strange and baffling short-stories that pivot on style or voice or some other gimmick. I mean, the entire notion of 'songfic' is one big honking gimmick, but it's one you can play with in fandom because you don't have the burden of building the house at the same time you're stapling the furniture to the ceiling.