Eh, I thought the original Star Trek writers were fanfic writers who were invited to make their work 'official'. (Or was that the Star Wars writers?) From what I can tell, such work would undoubtedly be adaptations and/or cross-format continuations, so it's not like they're not as intertextual as fanfiction is, just without the fandom-element.
Thing is, I don't mean to give the impression that it's better, somehow, to be WUIoF -- only that it's different. It shapes what one writes, differently, to have expert-level (or self-proclaimed-expert!) fans able to keep one in line when it comes to "that's OOC" or "you just totally broke the timeline, dude," and so on. I don't think it's even a matter of having a canon defined; I mean, look at the average American superhero comics. I tried once to decipher their idea of 'canon' (they have like FIVE canons in Batman, I think!) and it was seriously eyeball-bleeding. But it's still canon, even if people pick and choose.
More importantly, there's still fandom influencing via conversation and other fanworks and previous fanfics and debate and reviews, helping to shape a work even when it stands on the edges of anything canonical. The community element still influences the work in some way, at least from what I've seen... and if you don't have that community influence of equally-knowledgeable fans, then you have an adaptation -- and possibly even a very good adaptation/continuation -- but I'm still not convinced that it'd qualify as fanfiction, at least by my measure.
I mean, if 'fan/dom' has nothing to do with it, then aren't we only just writing derivative fiction?
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Date: 1 Jun 2010 03:29 am (UTC)Thing is, I don't mean to give the impression that it's better, somehow, to be WUIoF -- only that it's different. It shapes what one writes, differently, to have expert-level (or self-proclaimed-expert!) fans able to keep one in line when it comes to "that's OOC" or "you just totally broke the timeline, dude," and so on. I don't think it's even a matter of having a canon defined; I mean, look at the average American superhero comics. I tried once to decipher their idea of 'canon' (they have like FIVE canons in Batman, I think!) and it was seriously eyeball-bleeding. But it's still canon, even if people pick and choose.
More importantly, there's still fandom influencing via conversation and other fanworks and previous fanfics and debate and reviews, helping to shape a work even when it stands on the edges of anything canonical. The community element still influences the work in some way, at least from what I've seen... and if you don't have that community influence of equally-knowledgeable fans, then you have an adaptation -- and possibly even a very good adaptation/continuation -- but I'm still not convinced that it'd qualify as fanfiction, at least by my measure.
I mean, if 'fan/dom' has nothing to do with it, then aren't we only just writing derivative fiction?