this is where fanfiction enters the picture. so to speak.

[kaigou]

[cont from part I]

I know I love to analyze, but this is mostly because it comes easy to me, and that in turn is because I was raised to see patterns in everything. Stories are just one more instance of a (created) pattern; when I'm reading, I'm also building a mental picture of a string of discreet points, each drawing on the previous. Eventually the story's points — be these allusions to coReal axioms (ie, the implication that US laws continue to apply in this story), or character-points (eg backstory details), or the author's own overlaying axioms — wrap around and form a shape that becomes the story's whole.

[note: for lack of any more succinct way to put it, I'm using coReal to indicate the reality we share. It's the this-world, but without delineating whether we must share culture to get the coReal, since that's an entire discussion on its own. Besides, I got tired of typing out "shared reality" and misspelling "reality" as "realty". Bleah.]

Incidentally, this is one reason that major info-dumps early in a story — like in the first five pages — drive me absolutely crazy. They interrupt the logical flow of information with side-trips that form a chunk of information, and are most obtrusive when the succeeding paragraphs don't continue from there. That is, the digression isn't a lazy way towards the next step, but is actually a tangent that requires the author (and reader) backtrack to the topic at hand. I don't knit, but it feels like what I imagine it must to start a new project and be following along, only to have to back up and undo the last six stitches before continuing. Make me do that more than twice, and I will, more often than not, just close up the story and not bother with more. I'm already losing the pattern, and that makes me frustrated, and it's awfully hard to see any good in a story when it starts me right off bewildered and annoyed.

I don't mean to give you the idea that I'd say a story has a square shape or a cloverleaf or an eighteen-point star; it's not that precise. More like some stories have complex shapes, and others have simple shapes. Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, girl dies in teeth of combine engine: probably a circle or a square, something relatively simple. A complex whodunit with a variety of potential culprits, and we're getting into loop-de-loop territory as the detective tracks red herrings, comes around again, tries something else, and so on.

Past the loop-de-loop or cloverleaf are stories like Shogun or A Game of Thrones and who the hell knows what those shapes are. Maybe fractals. On acid.

But for the sake of illustration, here's a story.



Each color-patch is a discreet point of information related in the story; intersections can be any of a number of things. It can be where foreshadowing plays out, in that the story loops around and runs over the same track of (intersects with) what was foreshadowed. It can be the use of repetition, such as a adult character who hints at a backstory of being orphaned at a young age, and then later in the story meets a newly-orphaned kid: the adult character's reaction to the present situation is in part due to the intersection of present with the past (backstory) axiomatic-point.

The intersection point can be a mystery's red herring, where the detective hares off on a chase only to reconsider and realize this isn't the true culprit. That's where the story loops back to the cluster of red-herring-related axioms and retreading them but with a different perspective, and thus moves out of the loop and continues — until the next herring, at least.

Basically, the loop and repetition are big parts of storytelling, and most authors do it pretty instinctively. (It's the really ham-fisted ones that hit you over the head with it; it's the even worse ones who never loop at all.) Hell, even in a simple girl-and-boy conflict, there's some looping going on, such as boy-likes-girl that later gets intersected with girl-likes-boy, for instance.

That said, a story doesn't exist independently of the world we know. Even if this is an other-world story, we still have a pretty fair notion of hate, love, jealousy, anger, fear, sadness. We're able to grasp the rudiments or implications of most technologies (even if this means reducing to a common denominator with our own reality), and we probably take it for granted that birth and death happen unless and until told otherwise.

Inside our heads, then, consciously or unconsciously, we're running a background program that lays the story's presented string of axioms against the world-we-know. (Okay, for those of us having love affairs with analytical chocolate cake, it's not quite so much in the background as blasting out in a neon sign in the foreground, but hey, we all have issues.)



The overlapping story above is my attempt to illustrate a pattern I find in well-written fiction (of any genre); the story runs close to the coReal in some points, and moves away from it elsewhere. Where the story's internal axioms mirror or reference coReal axioms, the story's shape mimics coReal structures. In the architectural analogies I used before, you could say this is where the story is using existing super-structure and building itself in the spaces between. Where the structure deviates from coReal axioms is where the story must create an internal structure, having no coReal structure to use as framework.

This where fanfiction comes in, and it's what fanfiction — at its best — is very, very good at.

The simplest model of a fanfiction story is that which exists within the scope of the story and the coReal. It uses no internal structure of its own, being bordered by the story and the coReal for all its points of information. I find this shape most often in twice-told fanfiction, that is, fanfiction that mimics closely the story's structure while tucking itself into an empty gap: stories that retell a scene from a non-POV character's POV, or fill in the blanks of what really happened between when the gang left the warehouse and before they got back to headquarters. It's a type of closed loop, in that the author may add color to a previously empty space in the story's landscape, but that overall this addition doesn't impact the story's pattern.



Moving past the simple twice-told style, we get into the fanfiction techniques that don't really have a correlation — not to this degree, at least — with original fiction. These techniques use a new story to highlight the intersections of the base-story and the coReal, sometimes with additional new story-structures laid over top.

Seems to me that there are six basic functions that fanfiction uses to play out, regardless of intensity. Somewhere in any piece of fanfiction, you'll find one of these patterns, and sometimes more.

1. Internal intersection



This is where fanfiction highlights an overlap of a single point or series of points in a story. Not a story-created intersection, but an incidental one. This type of highlight can really get the kudos from fans, when it's outlining something the story's author didn't intend or missed or didn't realize — but in which there was no conflict (intersection) outlined in the original story.

The best illustration I've seen recently is courtesy branchandroot, who notes that in the Harry Potter series, there's an in-story axiom that goblin law says artisan-goods (eg swords) can only be leased, never sold. An additional in-story human law says that one can purchase a crafted product and be considered the item's owner. Later (and underscored by Rowling's own words), the story posits that goblin anger against human theft is unfounded, because any goblin-made object is owned by the purchaser.

In other words, the story's later axiomatic revelations created a series-intersection in which the later information is in direct conflict with existing axioms: that humans declaring ownership are, in fact, in violation of the laws of the goods' creators. There is most definitely a conflict, but the author resolves it by dismissal, pulling a deus ex authora to justify pooh-poohing a legitimate axiom-based conflict.

[I'm almost positive there's a trope for this, but I'm drawing a complete blank on which one it might be.]

This is exactly the kind of internal yet unacknowledged conflict (also sometimes taking the shape of a plothole) that fanfiction authors can spot at twenty paces, and nail in ten thousand words.

2. Parallel Axioms



This one's a bit easier for the starting fanfiction author. Let's say the original story has kids who are being trained as warriors to protect their planet. When the fanfiction author transports these kids into a coReal analogue (most often high school), the fen-author is drawing axiomatic parallels between the story-development in the story versus how that story might develop had the fen-author's own coReal axioms been in play.

3. Story-Real Intersect



A story-real intersection is the easiest for a writer to ignore in a story, because it doesn't always necessarily indicate a plothole, or at least not a majorly noticeable one. For instance, if the original story posits that everyone gets married at the age of 12, one fanfiction tool/method is to highlight where the story's axioms are in conflict with coReal axioms, such as the notion that getting married so young is patently ridiculous.

In the hands of a newer fan, this is where you get crossovers and "Harry Potter lands in our world!" stories, because those are the easiest way to draw a line between the in-story axiomatic expectations versus the reader's coReal expectations. In more advanced-writing fans, you can get some quietly biting critique in the narrative tone highlighting where the story crosses a coReal axiom but doesn't then have a logical continuum that matches the coReal logic.

Or more literally, "the story's logic does not reflect our earth logic."

4. Story Continuous over coReal Intersection



In the coReal, we have intersections all over the place: age and gender, gender and race, race and power, etc. There are some real hot-spots of intersectionality in our coReal axioms, like where "white men get ahead" runs headfirst into "gay men aren't real people" — for a gay white male character, obviously, here we have intersection. If the story's axiom crosses through this point — of a gay white male character — and does not contain nor reference such a coReal axiomatic intersection, it's entirely possible the original story sees no conflict in the way it makes this a non-issue.

But see, fanfiction isn't really about what the original author intended; it's about what fans can find in the text, and a great deal of what we find is based on what we're used to looking for — and we learn our patterns in 'what to look for' based on our understandings of the coReal axioms in our lives. It's the same thing as the Purple Chevy Syndrome, or when people cry that "you're being too sensitive!" when you see racism or sexism or ableism — because in learning to be aware of a pattern, you then start finding it everywhere... and for a fanfiction writer, sometimes not finding a logical pattern is as much of a red flag as finding it.

5. Story Intersection over coReal Continuous



This is the corollary to #4, in which the story posits a conflict-intersection between axioms but where none would exist in the coReal. A common treatment for a situation like this is for the fanfiction to run a twice-told on the story, trying out, as it were, how it would affect the story if its axiomatic intersection had no conflict but instead continued in a coReal linear direction.

Again, this method in the hands of a newer fanfiction-author can become a use for either a self-insert (who provides the coReal voice of axiomatic wisdom), or by making one of the characters become a mouthpiece wherein the character posits an alternate path that just happens to mirror the coReal.

6. Story Intersection over CoReal Intersection



This is, to my mind, the ultimate instance of fanfiction at its most powerful: when the author (intentionally or no) pegs an in-story intersection that lies over a coReal intersection, and uses fanfiction to explore how the two differ. It's also a kind of fanfiction that seems most likely to end up going off on a completely different ending than most fanfiction, of which the bulk does try to maintain some continuity with the overall base-story. But when you get into this many conflicting and intersecting levels, it's really damn hard to yank the story — in a logical contiguous manner, at least — back into alignment with either the coReal or the story-axioms, because what's being created is a kind of amalgamation of both and a fair bit of neither.

It's also the pattern you're most likely to find in well-crafted fanfiction that simultaneously pisses the hell out of the fandom, in my experience. I think that's because it's a construction based on two sets of familiar logic: the story's internal axiomatic logic, and the coReal we share. Taking an intersection in the story that's been shaped by fore and aft axioms, and highlighting its juncture via a completely different (but relevant) set of coReal axioms can, for some fans, be tantamount to gutting the story.

This dissonance between story and coReal is also where flamewars start, when it's just fen discussing (with no sign of fanfiction, although I've observed my share of conflicts that were triggered by a fanfiction work asking the questions, which then get repeated extra-fiction, and the ramifications explored more fully than can sometimes be done inside a fictional set-piece).

A hopefully-not-too-triggery example: let's say in the story, character A tells character B, "you're saying no, but I know you really mean yes." If the story takes this as a logical intersection of "A likes B, B is ambivalent" and then leads into "B realizes B likes A, too," the axiom underlying this segment amounts to "being pushy will get you what you want." When the fen draw a line between this and the coReal intersection of sexual attraction and physical assault (more bluntly, the juncture where rape or attempted rape may occur), that can be massively disillusioning for some fans, who don't want to or aren't comfortable with the subtext.

Since that's one thing coReal axioms can be, in some contexts: they're the subtext. They're what we read into the fiction based on our own set of expectations. When someone glances sideways like this, it means that, and when someone reacts like that, it means this. Independent of the author's intention or the text on the page (or the transcript on the screen), that subtext is the intersection of the story and the coReal. It's also one of the most marvelous breeding grounds for fanfiction, and a beloved tool of slash-fen everywhere.

But if you ever land in the middle of a pairing war, then chances are you're seeing either #4 or #6 in action — where a fan's story or comments indicate that in the coReal, there would be an intersection that does not mesh with the story's apparent actions. "But there was that really long look they shared in episode five!" and so on... and the race is on for the fen to sharpen their tools and begin the battles that really amount to each person's insertion of their personal comprehension of the coReal, against their own understanding of the story's axioms... and thus we have flamewar supreme.

But that's not really the point of this illustrated essay. In fact, this has been entirely for the sake of reaching this final step, because I wasn't sure this last bit would make sense unless I explained how I got there. Fortunately, we're there now.

---

Fanfiction — regardless of the individual tools/methods it may use — is essentially the overlayment of a story on top of a base-story that in turn lays on top of the coReal. While fanfiction does, of course, pull in the coReal via the fanfiction author's own (potentially contrasting) understanding of the coReal, it's still predominantly focused on seeing the relationship between the story and the reader's own self-insertions of any axiomatic expectations.

One favorite tactic in fanfiction (especially in certain fandoms, which I think is due to the story's own structure lending itself to this treatment) is to do a twice-told, from start to finish. I see this most commonly when someone is retconning to either pull out the subtext, or layer over new maintext, to support a specific relationship (often sexual, but not always). If we posit one of the story's original foci was that the two characters are friends, shifting the balance of this relationship to lovers will naturally pull the story just a bit off-center.



The blue-gray is the coReal, and the purple is the story, and you can see how the fanfiction piece mirrors... but not exactly. Even if the fanfiction's intent is to retell the story from start to finish (not all that uncommon for beginner fanfiction writers and for fandoms in which the original was in visual format and the fanfiction is in textual format), it's never quite going to mesh perfectly with the original.

I'm sure that drives some authors even crazier — that fanfiction writers aren't just mucking about in the author's sandbox but mimicking the author's story-path so closely — but that's where the goals of original fiction and fanfiction are just plain different. One isn't really better than the other, because the purposes one serves can't really be satisfied by the other. Original fiction works as a contrast to its external or mirrored axiomatic points in the coReal; fanfiction's tension rests on a dialogue between the two, as the fanfiction reader/author is the representative of the coReal. (Never the story itself, whose only authoritative representative is its canonical creator, no matter how dimwitted such creators may act sometimes.)

In sum, the diagram above is of a fanfiction, whether a twice-told or an Alternate Universe (or crossover or fusion), in which the author tries to mimic closely the patterns in the original story. That's rarely the fanfiction that gets people raving, though. For that, the fanfiction can't just parrot, but must both reflect and distort, often by using a combination of the six methods I outlined above.



Pure conjecture, since I have no idea how we'd go about illustrating such a shape (really!), but hopefully this gets across the visual in my head. The purple is the original story, and the yellow star laid over top is the fanfiction. It most definitely is engaged in a dialogue with the story, in that it's using the main points/shape of the story's axiomatic structure but it's drawing completely different lines between them.

At some points in the fanfiction (compared to the story's internal points), the fanfiction is meeting at a coReal intersection that wasn't mirrored in the original story; other junctures (the external points) you can see where the fanfiction is drawing attention to story-coReal intersections and junctures.

The blue dashed circle (upper-left point of the star, if you can't see it clearly) is in there to draw attention to what I think is one of the most-utilized (but much beloved) tactics in this kind of dialogue-minded fanfiction. It's where the fanfiction has followed a completely different path from A to Z, but where Z is a scene — logically following within the fanfiction — that overlies perfectly with a scene in the original story.

That is, the fanfiction has arrived at the exact same point as the original story, but by entirely different means and (when done really well) without breaking either the story's axioms or any coReal axioms. And this, I think, is where we find the tool called potential plausibility: because that's the function that gets us off the story's axiomatic path and onto the fanfiction's path. But it's used most powerfully when it then leads us back to the original story's resting places.

That kind of literary movement seems to be where fen will react strongest and most emotionally to fanfiction, regardless of the fanfiction's innate quality or style or technique. It's because, somehow, when the fanfiction comes to rest at the same point as the original story, it's a way of affirming the original story's inevitability. To my mind, it's not unlike listening to a symphony and having that innate sense that where the note has rested, at movement-end, is exactly where it should be, almost as though it were pre-ordained; not predictable in the mundane sense so much as the perfect final note that logically follows from all the preceding notes. (This is one reason ending a song a half-note off, even if that does have a special and acceptable name in music theory, can still feel like the song is 'incomplete'.)

It's also a way to really jack up the intensity of the fan's moment of 'I see what you did there', because that corollary-moment can sometimes sneak up unawares on the reader (especially in Alternate Universe and Divergent Future stories, where things may be all tossed about). Coming around the corner to find a favorite moment from the original echoed logically and inevitably in the fanfiction-mirror just highlights back again upon the original in a wonderfully referential manner.

Those sorts of stories are also the ones — especially when Alternate Universe — that are most likely to get pushed and prodded into becoming original fiction. It's when a fanfiction author reaches this point — of creating a story that, superficially, has such a radically different design from the original and yet hits all the right resting-place-notes as the original that fans just go bonkers. It's a new story with a unique pattern separate from the original, yet it bangs hard on and draws down all the emotional weight of the original by dint of crossing those important similar-inevitable junctures like the one encircled by the blue dashed line.

However, if anyone were asking me, I'd say this is possibly the least successful type of fiction, in and of itself to be translated into a successful origin-independent story.

First is because the overlaying story — if you look at the illustration — doesn't really contain anything within that blue dashed circle. That intersection doesn't really exist in the fanfiction; it's adapting that juncture from the original story. That is to say: if the fanfiction author were not working specifically towards that exact intersection and that exact intersection were not laden with the weight of a thousand emotional fan reactions, would the intersection remain as inevitable, as weighty, as important?

Second is even more damning, to me.



That's the fanfiction shape, without the intervening story, and laid right on top of the coReal. I couldn't think of any other way to illustrate this, so I hope this gets across what my gut tells me when I'm reading a former-fanfiction work that's been converted to original fiction: it's like listening to half a conversation.

Fanfiction is, after all, a dialogue with its original text, and if that original text is removed, the fanfiction work must now try to bridge the intermediary gap and have a dialogue with the coReal. You can see how that doesn't really work, not really, not without what's going to require a fair bit of rewriting (to the point that the story's shape may end up utterly different, and not even come down on the same juncture-spots with its original inspiration). See where the blue dashed line now circles — there's nothing there.

I'm not saying the scene would be gone, but that if the original juncture carries weight based on reference to another story, then removing that reference removes the impact of having that juncture occur in that spot — because there's nothing in the coReal to indicate that this is where a juncture would logically occur. It's like things have been stretched out of shape (as compared to the unfamiliar reader's expectations per coReal axioms) and for no apparent significance. The story is pivoting on something that is not a pivot-point in coReal logic.

This, I think, is what's going on in the piano-playing scene discussed in the review that inspired all this. It's got all the earmarks of an emotionally significant scene, a pivot-point or intersection for the characters, and yet there's not a damn thing to pivot on if you don't have the intermediary story providing half the conversation.

And for all that fanfiction does and does very well, it's this final point where fanfiction can end up completely failing at the leap to become a full story in its own right.

Comments

[hokuton_punch]

... ahhhhh, I want to marry your brain. *_*

I also want to drag you over to my writing LJ and beg you for critique on everything, but I will try to let good taste rule me in this regard and refrain. XD But really I LOVE YOUR BRAIN. *takes so many notes!*

[kaigou]

someday I will, I promise! ...just right now I need to motivate to, uhm, clean the guest bedroom BEFORE MY MOM ARRIVES NEXT MONTH so right now I'm doing a bit of procrastinating fixing to get ready.

You're welcome to my brain if you pay for my grad school in return. One brain, going cheap!

[hokuton_punch]

Ahaha, yeah, real life always trumps! XD Don't worry about it.

If I could pay for my *own* grad school, I'd take you up on that. X3

[kaigou]

If I could pay for my *own* grad school, I'd take you up on that.

Yeah, well, there is that. Durnitall. What I really need is-- what's the reverse of a sugar-daddy? A sugar-kid?

[hokuton_punch]

Cougar-prey?

... you know, for all the yaoi I read I should really be able to remember at least one time someone's had to come up with a term like that. XD

[reileen]

A very fascinating series of posts; thanks for the thought-food! I have to admit that for some reason I got really confused when you tried to illustrate the six main ways that fanfic interacts with both the coReal and the base story, but the last few graphics showing the interaction between the AU fanfic, the source story, and the coReal definitely make sense to me even without fully understanding the previous six graphics. Still, I'm doubling back and re-reading previous installments in this mini-series.

I'm reminded of a couple of instances in fandom where people do AUs or they play with (what others consider to be) really OOC versions of the characters, and almost invariably someone's gonna ask, why not just make that original fiction, since we can barely recognize the characters? It's because enjoyment of the fanfic's plot arc almost always rests on the weight of fannish knowledge and emotion. And it doesn't even have to be a scene or a particular set of events; it can be the mere existence of a character. It's not necessarily that being a vampire is anything particularly special; it's that it's This Particular Character who is now a vampire that makes the fanfic special to some readers. It's not necessarily that being an angsty woobie is notable; it's the fact that Severus Snape is the angsty woobie in question that makes that type of personality or whatever interesting to a certain subset of Snapefen. Which is to say that I'm pretty much just blabbing about my own experience of the phenomenon you expressed under the "Parallel Axioms" heading.

[kaigou]

It's hardly scientific, these crazy illustrations, but they make sense to me, damn it! Though mostly I included them because it seemed to me that the final conclusion about what doesn't work wouldn't make sense if I didn't clarify that I do think there are a lot of ways in which fanfiction is incredibly powerful as a fen-tool for understanding and interacting with a text.

why not just make that original fiction, since we can barely recognize the characters?

When I was rewatching Seirei no Moribito, I found myself bemoaning the lack of any significant fandom -- mostly because I'd love to see someone explore the interactions between the young astrologer and the young second of the assassin-team. Then I realized, well, hell, post-story events, what would make it anything other than just original fiction with similar names on it? But you're right: it's This Particular Character(s) and their attendant backstories that make the story worthwhile, in terms of a fen, at least. I guess it's kind of like being a fan of a certain actor such that even if the actor's in the worst possible tripe, you go see the movie just freaking because, damn it. It's just that in this instance we're fans of the character, and whatever they show up in, gets read, just freaking because. Even if it is tripe.

Although the notion of Severus Snape as an angsty woobie makes my eyeballs bleed.

[reileen]

Though mostly I included them because it seemed to me that the final conclusion about what doesn't work wouldn't make sense if I didn't clarify that I do think there are a lot of ways in which fanfiction is incredibly powerful as a fen-tool for understanding and interacting with a text.

Right. I think it's important to establish that there are a number of ways in which fanfiction successfully creates a story, because then it holds up the point that fanfiction and original fiction function in different ways for readers, and thus trying to say which is better is like comparing peaches to pineapples.

Although the notion of Severus Snape as an angsty woobie makes my eyeballs bleed.

lulz. I brought up that specific example because there was a recent wank on Fandom Wank that pretty much involved Potter fandom teal-deering about whether or not Snape was just Grossly Misunderstood, to the point that someone earnestly wrote a fanfic in which Snape moonlighted in the Muggle world as a counselor for abused Muggle kids. Or maybe that was a different Snapewank. Or maybe that wasn't even a fanfic, that was just some wyrd-ass speculation. Whatever the case, it was...eenterestink.

But to steer this back on-topic (sort of), I'm beginning to think that rampant OOCness in a fandom is partly bad writing and partly because there are at least some fans who see the space created by the intersection of the source material with coReal (if I'm understanding your term usage properly).

[kaigou]

rampant OOCness in a fandom is partly bad writing and partly because there are at least some fans who see the space created by the intersection of the source material with coReal

I think one thing fanfiction teaches you is to be willing to push and shove at the source text, from a little to a lot, to make the space for your story to fit. Some folks just do that with a bit more finesse, is all, and I think it's those folks who get less of the OOC-charge, while the writers with less finesse are more likely to get OOC-charges thrown at them. Or even if not, they get some other vague complaint, because even if your characters are pretty damn IC, if the premise of the story is too unbelievable, that can undo any enthusiasm regardless. Like, oh, I dunno, setting everything in an American high school -- if a fandom's burnt on that, no matter how IC you are, people just might not see the source text as stretching enough to make that premise work.

I think OOC is a broad term that has a variety of nuances, because it's not always grounded in characterization, when you actually put pressure on folks to explain what, exactly, is OOC about a piece.

[reileen]

I think OOC is a broad term that has a variety of nuances, because it's not always grounded in characterization, when you actually put pressure on folks to explain what, exactly, is OOC about a piece.

Agreed, mostly. It's easier to say that Fic A, with bad formatting and spelling and cliche writing, is OOC; it's probably more difficult to say that Fic B, with tight plotting and excellent handling of scene and a sharp style, is also OOC. In the case of the latter fic, people may be willing to overlook the OOCness (in whatever degree it's there) to enjoy the other well-done elements. (Actually, that applies in some degree to original fiction as well, genre or literature. People will find one element that they really like, for whatever reason, and be willing to overlook everything else just for that one element.) Something can be totally IC and yet bore the hell out of fans for whatever reason.

The source material for one of my fandoms has stock characters in practically all of the main roles. It's a wonder that anyone got together and built up a thriving fandom around these games, but then again, the gameplay and related elements were excellent and the story had potential, so I think that was more than enough to let writers run free with building up and fleshing out the characters - certainly that was the case for me.

This, of course, led to some problems early on in the fandom (actually, there's still this debate going on, to some extent) about what was OOC and what was not, since it wasn't like there was really a whole lot to go on in canon. You could make some generalizations (frex, it's probably highly unlikely that the true-to-type gentle female healer character would be inclined to rape one of the other female characters with a mace), but the nuances were either fuzzier than mold or completely nonexistent. So I think for the most part, cries of OOC were based mostly on personal preferences of characters and their personalities. (Frex: There was one author who was massively popular early on with her shipping fics, and practically defined the fanon for a while, and while it could be argued that her characterizations of most of the characters fit mostly within what's known of canon, I personally find them...not OOC, exactly, but they're just poorly handled and uncompelling beyond the fact of the shipping and the fact that I got to read about characters that I wanted to know more about beyond the game canon.)

[starscream]

I just want you to know I had planned on making this large acid fractal image for A Song of Ice and Fire just for you, but I could feel that a brain aneurysm would be in my near future and had to abandon all plans for such a thing. Then I came around to thinking of this huge XKCD chart, and attempting to come up with something like that... only to realize I'd be better off throwing cans of paint at a canvas and calling it done.

[starscream]

I should add I know they're two entirely different things -- that XKCD chart and you story loops -- but that somewhere in my mind I connected them anyhow. :')

[kaigou]

No, it's very much the same thing, just different ways of presenting the information -- the XKCD chart just shows the separate strands of character-movement instead of stringing them all into one big strand. Now do a layer on each for any fanfiction version you want, and there you go. Hilarity ensues.

Mostly the rather random chart(s) were just my attempt at a fast draw version, trying to illustrate the way my brain sees patterns in stories. (And everything else, I admit.) If it got the message through to anyone, then it worked, even if it's a bit crazy on the way there. It was really just that I realized it'd hopefully be easier than bothering to write another equally long post just to describe the idea, and the last thing anyone really needs is more excessively long posts from me. I try to parcel them out so as to not overload anyone. Bleah.

Actually, all I really want for xmas is a freaking off-switch for my brain.

[kaigou]

I had planned on making this large acid fractal image for A Song of Ice and Fire just for you

Wow, I can so totally feel the love. /snark

I could feel that a brain aneurysm would be in my near future

Would this be before or after I suffered from one myself? Because I can't even begin to imagine parsing out the bazillions of data that make up any of Martin's stories. Cripes.

[starscream]

With respect for Robert Jordan, I have this horrible feeling that George Martin is also going to kick the bucket before we get an ending to that series. I could deal with Wheel of Time -- I called that a lost cause after the fourth book -- but I'm not so sure I can leave Ice and Fire alone if we don't get a conclusion. Hell, at this point -- now four years after A Feast for Crows -- I'm willing to accept a book of trolling (isn't that really what his books can be?) just to get the story moving again. I have my suspicions on the plot and where some of the characters are going, but I know I should just turn my brain off and forget his books even exist until the next one has a definite release date.

Why?

Because once Dance with Dragons comes out, it'll be 4-5 years before we see the next one; by the time Martin finishes these books, I'll be pushing 40, and I just turned 24.

( As for an off switch, I like your brain being on. You make some of my favorite posts to read. )

[maire]

I love your diagrams for explaining how fiction that references other stories relies on those stories for its impact, but I don't entirely agree with the division 'fan fiction versus original fiction'.

There's too much 'original fiction' that relies on exactly the same effects.

Dorothy Sayers' excellent 'Strong Poison' gets a lot of its impact from the contrast with the many detective novels of the time in which the detective meets a young woman who seems likely to have committed murder, intuits that she's innocent, and then successfully proposes to her.

Both Gaiman's 'American Gods' and Jones's 'Eight Days of Luke' rely on the reader having a reasonable grip on the story of Ragnarok.

Austen's 'Northanger Abbey' relies heavily on the reader's familiarity with contemporary Gothic romances.

Unless one redefines 'fan fiction' to include a huge proportion of what is generally considered 'original fiction', I don't think the distinction really works.

[kaigou]

Oh, I don't think it's necessarily a fanfiction versus original fiction -- I'm not saying that original fiction doesn't use those techniques, only that fanfiction relies considerably heavier on those techniques. When you get into mythic fiction -- like Gaiman's work, or Holdstock's novels -- then that, IMO, is also a kind of fanfiction, in that it's fiction that has a significant reliance on pre-existing stories, even if those stories don't have a copyright and a known author.

I mean, so technically Wicked is considered 'original fiction' and not 'fanfiction', but I read it and had never read Wizard of Oz, so I'd say about half the book made sense on one level, but I missed the implications and nuances. Friends, including CP, who'd read Wizard of Oz and then read Wicked were absolutely in thrall to the masterful turn-around on the original storyline. Not knowing the original (and no, I'd not even seen the movie all the way through, either), I thought the story was decent but some of its most powerful moments to me were, uhm, okay but not all that and a bag of chips, sheesh, people.

But what saves Wicked -- despite really being some fancily-dressed fanfiction, IMO -- is that its story, like that of Ragnarok, is somewhat well-known, even if only on a vague level. Some girl from Kansas and her dog meet up with a tin man, a lion, and... something else, and there's a green witch who melts, and Pay No Mind To The Man Behind The Curtain: enough bits and pieces have become solid parts of our culture (can you even count how many movies and television shows and books have used "We're not in Kansas anymore" at the start of something creepy/otherworldly?) that fanfiction almost becomes cult-fiction, if you combine the notions of cult and culture.

Fanfiction gets decried as being low-class or less-valuable-than original fiction, and my point here is that it's a pretty powerful set of techniques in its own right. A lot of fanfic writers work hard to unlearn these techniques, but I do think they have a place in original fiction, if applied with skill. Where they fall flat is when the audience doesn't know the source material as well, so if a story leans too hard on the source material (or if the source material is badly misunderstood or popularly bastardized), the secondary story will fall. Wicked had enough pop-culture roots (and an author with a deft touch) that I didn't need to know all the ins and outs of the original to get the majority of the story -- but if* the story had required that I had, then if the story probably would've fallen flatter than yesterday's souffle.

Case in point: roommate in college raised by totally-secular parents; they weren't atheist from what I could tell, they just weren't any religion at all. The family celebrated Christmas and did the easter egg thing, but not a peep about the mythic or socio-religious origins. So roommate announces he wants to see Last Temptation of Christ, so he can find out what all the fuss was about. We watch. I'm kinda iffy on watching because I thought the script was flat due to a flat and semi-bastardized comprehension of the original text, while my friend (Catholic school-raised) was annoyed because it tweaked too much of the original text in ways that got on her nerves. Roommate, meanwhile, is perfectly silent through the whole thing, until the very end, when he said, "I don't get it. Where was the guy with the boat?"

The boat, we said. What boat?

The boat with all the ANIMALS, roommate says, getting a little annoyed and giving us that and-you-two-know-everything look like kids do when they think they've just discovered that in fact, no, you are NOT so smart and they've just FOUND YOU OUT.

Finally, friend says, slowly, carefully, you mean... Noah?

Roommate: Yeah! Noah! The guy with the boat! He never showed up!

Me: that's old Testament.

Roommate: So? What's Old Testament?

He had no clue. None at all -- which meant that every twist and flip in the movie missed him completely, because he didn't know the source material being riffed. So the story, for him, was an absolute failure. That is what I mean by the power of the fanfiction technique, in original fiction, can be incredibly powerful, but if you rely on it totally -- as in, assume your audience knows as much as you do -- that your story may fall flat. (Obviously, that movie had a better-than-even chance of the average person knowing the source material, but not all books can claim the same. I mean, really, how many people have really read Moby Dick in order to grasp the nuances in that book that retells it from the POV of someone's wife?)

* I went through all that and forgot to add the single 'if' that was the actual reason for editing in the first place. I think my brain is dead for the evening.

[maire]

Interesting. Thanks for the considered response. I've just spent three-quarters of an hour writing and deleting bits of response to it. Sadly, my time on this computer is about to run out (I'm at an internet cafe), so I'm going to have to post this so I don't lose it. Please forgive me if I'm a bit discursive.

I think derivative works can act as introductions in a way that is often underestimated.

When I did first-year English, many years ago, I remember they gave us all a book explaining the main points of Christianity that we'd need to understand to get the most from the texts we were studying. It surprised me, because I grew up with that cultural information all around me (despite being the child of a fervent atheist and someone easiest described as an agnostic), and I'd never really considered that others didn't. I remember, though, that the people I knew who actually didn't have that canon in the backs of their minds didn't read the book before they started. They mostly seemed to use it as a reference when they thought they might be missing or misunderstanding something, but they relied largely on the texts themselves to show them what they needed to. I thought they were unwise, at the time, but it's how I read, myself, mostly.

I have always read a great deal of derivative fiction. It's introduced me to a lot of things I doubt I'd have enjoyed without it. Reading Colin Wilson's tributes to H.P. Lovecraft is, in many ways, a better introduction to H.P. Lovecraft than randomly dipping into his stories, because the beauty of the sheer scale of the universe is presented without the astonishingly purple prose (although that has its own attractions). Reading Northanger Abbey gives me more patience with the interminable descriptions of landscape in Mrs Radcliffe's work than reading it cold would, because Austen has told me what to look out for in 'Mysteries of Udolpho' that's exciting and human.

When it comes to fanfiction I am generally in the same situation as your roommate. I haven't watched TV or movies frequently for over a decade now. I think the only major fandom I was familiar with the source for before I read stories was Buffy, and possibly Xmen (but only because I read the comics when I was a kid). I sometimes look up plots and characters online if the fanfiction I'm reading doesn't set things up clearly enough for me, but really not very often. I read the first six Harry Potter books four or so years back, well after reading a great deal of fanfiction, purely because I felt bad about having opinions about the quality of the work of a writer I'd never actually read. I've never sat through an episode of Supernatural, Stargate Atlantis, Due South, or Torchwood, despite having read a lot of the fanfiction.

Generally, I'm simply reading the characters and plots as the authors write them, and I don't find I run into problems from this.

However, I'm familiar with a number of the genres of fanfiction, and that makes a huge difference. Your roommate was clearly not familiar with the genre of 'artsy movies about religion'.

Where I think fanfiction often differs from 'literature' is in its similarities to other types of 'genre fiction'. What makes genres genres is their use of consistent sets of tropes. The vast majority of the fanfiction I've read falls into one or another genre that I'm familiar with (many from reading sci-fi, fantasy, and detective fiction).

I don't have to know the canon for a story in which an ex-hero is portrayed as an adult who is still confused by the way adult life doesn't centre around a heroic quest. It doesn't matter whether the character is Harry Potter with alcoholism, Barney Drew trying to make it as an artist, or Teyla's son, shortly after the Wraith are finally defeated, trying to learn to farm, because the basic conflicts are familiar to me (after being geared for questing, how does one settle into a routine?).

Similarly, when I read 50s science fiction, I don't need to have previous familiarity with the author's particular universe, because the story overall conforms to the established tropes of 50s SF.

[kaigou]

Your roommate was clearly not familiar with the genre of 'artsy movies about religion'.

Ah, but he was very well-versed in horror movies, and if that doesn't give you a peculiar slant when viewing a different genre, nothing will! Like tensing up when someone leaves the room, figuring okay, now they're going to get whacked... oh, wait, WRONG GENRE. Heh.

In a related note, when I was in college a friend sat me down to watch a movie, and put in Led Zeppelin's rockumentary, The Song Remains The Same. I watch for about fifteen minutes (bored stiff but too polite to say it), wondering what the point is of watching some long-haired british dweebs who seem to think they're all that and a bag of chips. *eyeroll* Friend decides the movie isn't quite what he wanted, so he pops it out and puts in This Is Spinal Tap instead. Which, you may know, is a parody of rockumentaries. Great. Except I didn't know that! I thought it was as serious as the other movie. So I settle down, and watch it as a serious film, and the entire time I'm thinking, "that guy looks just like Sqiggy from Laverne and Shirley, imagine the coincidence!" and "man, these people are IDIOTS, rock stars really are as stupid as they're said to be!"

I was nearly done with the movie when friend asked me if I didn't think it was that funny. I allowed that I did (though privately thinking it was funny in a sort of man-you-people kind of not-supposed-to-be-funny way), and that was when he enlightened me: it's a parody. AHHHH. Gotcha! Last ten minutes were hysterical.

And then he put The Song Remains the Same back in.

And I laughed myself silly nearly all the way through, until he reprimanded me, rather upset that I was laughing at his favorite band.

Whoops. Not a parody. This one is for real.

Riiiight.

Context is everything.

THAT SAID, if you don't know the genre tropes, you're either going to laugh at the wrong times, cry at the wrong times, or just plain not get the point of doing it this way versus that way. If you do know the genre tropes -- and tropes exist in every type of literature, from Very Srs Bzns Literachur to pulp genre -- then you can come into a new story, braced, and ready to laugh or cry on cue. Without pissing off the author, or your date. XD

[maire]

Have I already mentioned the high-school teacher who taught 'Northanger Abbey' as a Gothick romance? Her students mostly didn't get the jokes, either, even though they'd practically leapt off the page at me when I first read it at age nine. It's amazing how strong can be the effect of thinking you know what genre you're dealing with. Similarly, reading or watching 'Waiting for Godot' can render almost any subsequent social interaction either depressing or hysterically funny, depending on one's mood.

(Sorry about the clumsy wording there, but I couldn't seem to make my meaning fit a less clunky phrasing.)

[nnayram.livejournal.com]

I will come to read all of this after finals. But, damn!, gotta say that I now wish I could actually find a geometrical shape to represent the Shogun plot. *grin* I wonder if that would qualify as a special project for next semester... Though I might as well give it a try over the break.

*hugs* I love reading everything you write!

[kaigou]

Hahaha. I think Shogun is, uhm, probably one of those massive Victorian ornamental facades, maybe art-nouveau, with all the curlicues and little sideways decorations squeezed into tiny spaces. Okay, yeah, still pretty fractalicious. And if you want to try, BE MY GUEST. I'll be over here. In the corner. Kicking the cat.

hah! always good to know someone likes what I write -- else it'd be a pretty lonely place, stuck here with this overactive brain!

[multitudeofm]

I think you've just sent me on a fractally tailspin in my head. *wub*

[kaigou]

*salutes*

Just here to help, ma'am!

[ninamalfoy]

... wow. Just, wow. This is so... damn, I already see someone above wants to marry your brain. Your brain up for bigamy in any case? *winks*

But, yeah. I'll memorize that to hell and back, and yes, I actually am that brain-dead now (it's after 1am here in good old Germany) that I can only point to your theory and nod wildly because it's all there, yes - the overlay, the twist, the intersection - what if you took Road X going from Road Y and not Z as in the original story? What if? And what if, and this is what you said is the best kind of fanfic, what if you then - no matter how much your story then differentiates from the canon, if you've taken x different roads, if you still arrive, more or less all in one place, at Entrance # where you were supposed to end anyway? Yes. Like you said, It's when a fanfiction author reaches this point — of creating a story that, superficially, has such a radically different design from the original and yet hits all the right resting-place-notes as the original that fans just go bonkers. It's a new story with a unique pattern separate from the original, yet it bangs hard on and draws down all the emotional weight of the original by dint of crossing those important similar-inevitable junctures like the one encircled by the blue dashed line.

Word. Wordy McWord.

Also, maire has some interesting points, namely:

What makes genres genres is their use of consistent sets of tropes. The vast majority of the fanfiction I've read falls into one or another genre that I'm familiar with (many from reading sci-fi, fantasy, and detective fiction).

I don't have to know the canon for a story in which an ex-hero is portrayed as an adult who is still confused by the way adult life doesn't centre around a heroic quest. It doesn't matter whether the character is Harry Potter with alcoholism, Barney Drew trying to make it as an artist, or Teyla's son, shortly after the Wraith are finally defeated, trying to learn to farm, because the basic conflicts are familiar to me (after being geared for questing, how does one settle into a routine?).

Similarly, when I read 50s science fiction, I don't need to have previous familiarity with the author's particular universe, because the story overall conforms to the established tropes of 50s SF.

I'm there. So there. I've read a lot of Starsky&Hutch and The Sentinel fanfiction, despite buying the original material of the former much later and only watching like one or two episodes of the latter overall. I didn't know the canon, but reading the stories got just as pleasurable as with the ones that I did know the canon inside and out when I had read just enough stories to get familiar with the... touchstones, the intersections, to borrow from your theory.

Uh. So many thinky thoughts and I'm so tired! *laughs* But anyway, do consider the offer of brain-marriage and thanks for letting us see your brain workings! *smiles and waves tiredly*

[kaigou]

Hey now, I try to cultivate interesting points on my journal -- gets discussion going and prompts me to think again (and more), and then I write more posts, and it's a lovely neverending vicious circle of the best kind. Cake-tasting!

I didn't know the canon, but reading the stories got just as pleasurable as with the ones that I did know the canon inside and out when I had read just enough stories to get familiar with the... touchstones, the intersections, to borrow from your theory.

My theory is that this is possible because those stories employ some kind of basic archetype ingrained in our culture (in many cultures, since many archetypes are pretty universal: the hero, the princess, the sage, the jester, the sidekick, and so on). In some cases, a fandom uses an archetype -- the Gundam franchise is absolutely famous for it, IMO -- and the rest of the characterization is just details, little things that aren't contradictory to the archetype nor overwhelm it, such that we can say, "aha, this is basically Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid all over again!" ... and carry on from there. My impression of the Sentinel canon -- of which I saw, uhm, maybe half a show at most! -- was that it combined the BCatSK buddy-style archetypes ("they get together and fight crime!...erm, are criminals!") with the Odd-Couple archetype personality conflict, of two personality opposites who somehow work well together despite that. So reading the fandom didn't hit me with any unexpected points, and can be pretty enjoyable even if I'm clueless about actual canon.

As for the brain: believe me, there's more than enough to go around. Besides, if I can spread it out thin enough, then I'm not overloading anyone I see, in-person, who might otherwise bear the brunt of my insane contemplations on every topic under the sun.

[pseudo_tsuga]

I wish I could say something more intelligent and add more to the discussion but I love those graphs and how you set out story structures in a consistent, compelling way. I can't reproduce it in words but those graphs make everything clear in my brain.

[kaigou]

Just here to entertain! *salutes*

More seriously, it's always good to know I'm not alone in seeing sensical info when I come up with this stuff -- the more I get used to my brain, the more I realize I'm a strongly visual thinker, so analogies to engineering, and mapping things out, helps me organize copious information that might otherwise just free-float around in my head. Posting on the 'net, I've found, means at least I get to find out that I'm not alone in having a brain that works like this. Weeee. Kindred spirits for the win.

[ladysugarquill]

there's an in-story axiom that goblin law says artisan-goods (eg swords) can only be leased, never sold.

Actually, not really. There is a bunch of extremist goblins who hold that view, but most goblins don't think that.

And it is not an unacknowledged conflict, it's pretty acknowledged since a bit of the plot hangs from it (Griphook being one of those goblins).

[kaigou]

Not having the fandom's/series' nuances perfectly memorized, I could only go by what I read second-hand. It's not the only example I know of that fits the particular argument, but it was the only one I could think of at the time of writing the essay. Brain going blank while typing fast and all that, y'know.

[nny]

Wow.

I... really chose the wrong time to read these posts - it's after midnight and I went out last night and I'm not nearly so well slept as I should be - so I don't think I understood them nearly so well as I'd like. I'm looking forward to wrapping my brain around them again when it's a little more flexible, but in the mean time I thank you for making them. The bits I can say I definitely understood were pretty awesome. :D