riddle me this

[kaigou]

Define fanfiction.

note: that's fanfiction, so it's okay if you can't think of the ninety-nine other categories of fan____.

Comments

[pseudo_tsuga]

Hmmm....I think it plays some but the impact is overrated. Almost everyone has stories about how they wrote about themselves interacting with fictional characters so it seems to be a pretty broad impulse. (I think I remember reading in Beverly Cleary's biography that for a school assignment she wrote herself going to Fantasyland and meeting all the characters from the books she read) Fandom just accelerates and codifies the process, so much so that it goes to places that a solitary writer wouldn't. It's similar to how people interacting in a group of like-minded people tend to be more extreme than just them formulating their opinions by themselves.

[kaigou]

Fandom just accelerates and codifies the process, so much so that it goes to places that a solitary writer wouldn't. It's similar to how people interacting in a group of like-minded people tend to be more extreme than just them formulating their opinions by themselves.

Heh, I'd say the opposite -- or more like yes and then no. Fandom validates a newcomer's impulse to reimagine an original work, which is the codification part of the process, but past a certain point, fandom also can slam down pretty hard on those who go wildly off into the blue yonder away from canon. Fandom can be both transgressive and incredibly conservative, all at the same time, which is part of its beauty but also the root cause (I think) of much of its worst wank. We're transgressive, but we're only transgressive in these ways, and that other way is not okay. In that sense, a solitary writer, shooting off from fandom, will go places a non-fandom-influenced writer might not go (thanks to fandom's primary cultivating/encouraging element), but will also likely take fandom's step-removed and become an outlier going even farther in the re-interpretation.

I guess: fandom uses canon as a springboard, and then solitary writers in turn can use fandom itself as yet another springboard.