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

[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!