dynamics of fandom, 2
5 Jun 2010 12:17 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kaigou[continued from pt1]
Where I meander, I'm also busy trying different ways to approach and/or assess the evidence at hand. In case you weren't already aware of my hermeneutic habit trails.
Whenever I read of Authors dismissing fanfiction as intentional (if not outright malicious) distortion, and the way that such tarrings sometimes spread to an implied tarring of all fandom (beyond just the writers and their readers), it strikes me as ignoring a benefit that might outweigh that of the distortion-risk drawbacks.
By that I mean: there is a derivative benefit to Authors from the connections that exist between fans not by virtue of their shared baseline fandom (focus on an original story) but on their participation in fandom itself, as a generalized entity or way of being.
The dashed lines above are the connections, pulling together two fans of one group with a fan of a second group, but without connections created (yet) between each yellow-circle and the unfamiliar/unconnected original story. That's probably common sense to many Authors, in that if you're a fan of this genre story, then you'd probably also like that genre story; same basic logic as Amazon's "other people who bought this also bought..." addendums on any purchasing page.
What got me, in considering the dynamics at play, was in recalling several Author-statements (and I name no names here due to in part being the kind of fool who reads Author-statements by Authors whose stories and/or genres are totally unfamiliar to me, which often leaves my response nothing more than, "and who are you, again?" not to be a smartass but because I really am that unaware of that genre's big names). On the face of it, it'd seem like one would want fans of one fandom to connect with others, and hope for a bit of cross-pollination, as it were.
What I can't figure out, though, is whether the Authors refusing or discouraging this kind of cross-fandom pollination are doing so just as part and parcel of the kneejerk anti-fanfiction stance, or because the Authors really are/were that savvy about just what's going on. If the former, well, whatever; if the latter, well, no use trying to sugarcoat what I see, then.
The author's green-circle sphere of influence is no longer the intermediary for interpretation; the role of introductory intermediary is -- in this type of instance -- taken over by the fandom interpretation (fanon).
In effect, it seems to me that the more fandom itself takes center stage -- the co-interpretation and/or interaction between fans of similarly-themed original stories -- the more the fans' own interpretative texts become introductory points to new/unfamiliar original stories. Where the Author's imposition as intermediary asserts a force in terms of interpretation, the fans' imposition as intermediary does the same, but distorted, once step removed.
That, obviously, is what some of the Authors fear: that fan-distorted interpretations bias readers ahead of time. (I suppose the logic is that it's okay if it's your own work that you're biasing people towards, or against.) What I have no way to measure currently is whether the positive biases outweigh the potential negative: whether there are more fans expressing appreciation of the text with affectionate fan-interpretation, or whether there are more fans using their perspective to critique the original story. And, I imagine, plenty of Authors (or at least judging from the noisiest ones who are anti-fanfic) consider any such critique of the original story to be tantamount to a personal insult.
The thing is whether the Author sees all re-interpretations as critiques in disguise, or as adoring emulations by fans (some of whom, shall we euphemistically say, just don't know better, bless their hearts, and distort without realizing just how much it hurts the canonical Author). How to rationalize the risks of having your work introduced via someone else's interpretation?
Or perhaps it's better expressed as: maybe it's time to recognize that fans of any work, regardless of fanfiction tendencies, have always exerted their own interpretation on a work when introducing it to others. In this, fanfiction acts as a textual re-imagining working along the same lines as a serious book review. The difference is that fans don't get interviewed, have their references checked, and suffer annual employee reviews to warrant the right to critically review an original story. Then again, seeing how some Authors react to critical reviews even by seemingly educated and erudite Serious Book Reviewers, maybe it doesn't matter who's making the noise.
Moving along, what had been marginal-positioned (ex-canon) fanfic, some in-canon fanfic, and cross-fandom connections, becomes considerably messier when we move into the more recent (past decade or so) of the Internet Era. Or more specifically, the rise of the massive multi-fandom archives, and I'm looking at you, Fanfiction.net and Mediaminer.org.
These are all drawn (err, so to speak) from what I've seen happen in various fandoms/fancircles. At the top left, for instance, marked with a (1) is a blue-bordered square with a medium-blue thick line leading from a yellow circle. That fan-writer is, as marked by the light blue dashed lines, part of the general 'fandom' that centers on the original story (top middle, in the pinwheel). But this fan's ex-canon story now not only has garnered several fans in its own right, these fans are not only not connected to the original canon, they have also connected to each other (2).
In essence, it's a mini-fandom of a fan-interpretation of a canonical story.
Over on the top right, at the spot marked (3), is the next stage in that evolution. Same premise: fans connected to each other, focused in their appreciation for an ex-canon story -- and one of that story's fans has, in turn, produced an interpretation (4)... of what was already an interpretation. This is true fanon: where a fan incorporates another fan's perspectives in absence of a significant (or any) connection to the original story, and thus may not know (or may not even care) that the next level of interpretation is more than just a few jumps to the left.
Granted, I think this is also one aspect that Authors fear the most, when they're anti-fic-ranting; most frame it as a dislike for being distorted, but this is a level of distortion beyond what the Author can reasonably influence. It's well past the borders of the general canon-facing (or canon-aware) fandom.
But it doesn't stop there, because an influential interpretation can also become the locus of a fandom and not just in terms of fans grouping around a specific and more-appreciated re-imagining. The next evolutionary step after the two-steps-removed aspect is when the secondary fan's interpretation loops back at the primary interpretation in a move reminiscent of the way, in affirmational fandoms, the fans' story-interpretations loop back to fall within the Author-gatekeeper scope.
The dotted and solid lines here are not random; they're based on actual observed overlappings and interactions in a fandom. At the (1), there's a fan who self-identifies as being 'within' the scope of the canon-focused fandom, with two interpretative works in play. The first is in-canon; the second is ex-canon and significantly transformational. A number of fans have grouped around this second ex-canon work, and are linked to each other as co-fans of the (1) fan's story.
One of those fans, at (2), has in turn produced an interpretation of the (1) interpretation, as noted in the evolutionary point previous to this image. But it doesn't stop there; a third fan gets involved; a fan who, unlike the second, is also connected to the originating fandom -- and is not a fan of the first fan and/or the first fan's work (no solid blue line connecting, there). And this third fan's work overlaps significantly enough with the second to imply a sharing of the fanon-based, ex-canon interpretation of this fan, even though the third fan is well-familiar with the original story.
This is one path to the development of a shared world or zoofic or whatever the fandom calls it this month -- a re-interpretation, often with added original characters, which in turn become fodder for other fans to pile on and draw/write within the same world. (I say one path, but it's also the path I've seen most often, where substantial twist added is from someone outside the specific fandom, though not outside fandom in general.)
There are paths to create the same where the players/writers are all at least somewhat familiar with the original story, but I highlight this particular wacky process as reminder that this ain't necessarily so. With enough fanfic (either a little from many writers or a lot from a few), secondary derivations can develop that in turn lead back to the mainstream fandom...
...And, to what is probably the horror of a few Authors reading this, the significant movement in the image is not that of (2) writing about an unfamiliar canon. It's that (3) turns away from the original story and intentionally focuses on an ex-canon version.
It can happen within the boundaries of the general mainstream fandom (the dashed blue circle ringing the original story) or exterior/marginal to it (as the example above). Either way, what you get is a bubble of fanon sitting in an uncomfortably close proximity to the original story. Well, uncomfortable if you're the Author, I suppose.
The green space is the bubble within which (from what I've seen) the fans then create a new, derived canon -- based loosely or closely, but almost always with additional elements or specific interpretations as foundation -- which is then policed just as much as original canon. That is to say, if the fandom already tends to police its canon tightly, then it's likely to do the same for its shared-world bubbles; if the fandom's pretty easy-going about the dividing lines of canon, then it seems this also affects its attitudes towards shared-world subsets.
(Well, not always: I've heard of a few instances where wildly chaotic fandoms produce strictly-controlled bubble-worlds, but in that case my suspicion is that it's fandom-reaction, a need to have some kind of comprehensible and coherent canon when the original story is nothing but a hot mess -- a favorite mess, but a hot one all the same.)
When I read posts and missives from Published Authors expressing their fear/aversion to fanfiction (and/or, sometimes, misbehaving fandom itself), it seems to me there are two things Authors fear. Naturally, I'll start with the slightly-lesser of the two evils, first. I say that with the caveat that upon reflection, I don't think this is truly a fear so much as it is an alternative perception. (The problem there is that opinions are strongly personal and therefore hard to quibble over, since opinions aren't nearly as malleable even when you do have all the facts).
I say 'perception' because it's important to note (if you haven't noticed already) that I've taken somewhere between a neutral approach to the dynamics I'm pondering, and a somewhat fandom-positive approach. It may not seem like it, perhaps, and in case that's so, I'll explain why I think (or hope) I've achieved that: because while canon may be supplemented by fan-interpretation, I don't think it's entirely overrun, nor do I think most fans would see canon as ever being truly surpassed, or made irrelevant.
The reason for stating that explicitly is because, from Author complaints and rants, this is the impression I get of what they think is a more accurate representation when we talk about fan imposition on the original story.
That's right. The fandom-created interpretations, the fanfiction stories, are crowding the original story, to the point of burying it. This seems the only logical explanation of Author-verbalized perceptions; it's the only one that makes sense when I consider those Authors who fight against fanfiction -- and the way they express their fears.
They're convinced that the more fanfiction there is, the more their own version, at the center of the pinwheel, is being drowned out. Those are not re-interpreted stories, bounded neatly by canonical square, but warped re-tellings, twisted all out of shape in comparison to the Author's vision of the original story. Fanfiction is not just potential competition, it's actual competition, and it's winning, and it's doing so through incredibly distorted presentations: perversions of canon.
The expected result, if allowed to multiply unchecked?
Not only does the original story lose its solidity, compromised and re-interpreted and buried by the fanfiction, but the Author hirself ceases to exist anywhere in the picture. The Author has lost the Authority of being the creator, and I use that Author/Authority/creator connection quite intentionally.
Back when I first got into a particular fandom -- which we'll say is simply That Fandom Which Shall Not Be Named, because let's not get into the specifics, shall we? Some incendiary devices should be left to rot peacefully -- I had a conversation with a fellow fanwriter that went something like this.
Friend: It's an article of faith among the majority of the fandom that despite the lack of any canonical basis, such-and-such character was repeatedly assaulted, sexually and physically, for most of his childhood.
Me: Did you mean to use that phrase, there?
Friend: What where?
Me: That it's an article of faith. Like it's some kinda religious tenet.
Friend: ... well, it fits, and it's true. If it all it took was hitting the Enter key to lob a grenade at someone else through an internet connection, most of this fandom would be dead and buried under about twenty feet of rubble. Wars have been fought over less, my dear.
Me: ... *what the hell have I gotten myself into?*
In the past few weeks, I've seen several references to this same notion, but framed in reaction to (if not outright derision of) Authors who cling with their last bit of fingernails to the Authority vested in them as the internal vision of an original story. Some fan-critics, likethefourthvine, have spoken of "the Anointed Few", while others have used phrases like "the Voice of God" or "speaking from on high" and so on. All of these are strongly religious-colored takes on Authority, mixing in the power of the Creator-author with a Creator-god. I don't think it's a slip of the keyboard, either. Both the Judeo-Christian mindset (and the West's dominant paradigm for god-like critters) and the snark against Authorial Authority contain the assumption, obliquely or outright, that the Creator-god is a distant God; to be granted the chance to hear the God's words is a marvelous, and unusual, event.
In other words, the sacredness with which the readers are expected by (some) Authors to treat the text is, when you strip back the neuroses and the protests, also the sacredness with which the readers are expected to treat the Author's interpretations of that text. The Author is supposed to take precedent, but more than that, really. The Author is not just the biggest baddest force on the playing field, the Author is the only force on the field.
Thus, I don't think it's that much of an exaggeration to draw a thick and solid line between the religious concept of "not worshipping graven images" and the authorial concept of "not worshipping derivative stories". I wouldn't be surprised if some Authors do sincerely wish for the ability to smite those who write blasphemous fanfiction in the Author's name.
The lynchpin here is that despite these articles of faith that say worship of anything else is tantamount to denial of the rights and privileges due unto the Canon, I didn't draw the fandom side of things with those distortions because I think those are present only in the Author's viewpoint. From the perspective of readers/writers of fan-interpretations, it's not necessary to excessively warp the illustrated version as some kind of reminder of the fan-version's unnaturalness or wrongness. It's not like we ever confuse the two. We don't need the additional visual stimuli to remind us which is the "real" story and which is the "derived" story.
I think that's the point where the twain shall never meet; the fearful contingent of Authors -- or those who long for Affirmational-only, well-behaved fans who color neatly within the Author's designated lines -- will never be able to see the same map as the readers. Because I've yet to meet a single fan, ever, who can't tell the difference or who isn't aware which is a story by a fan versus by the Author.
And that's really the issue, isn't it? Competition versus cooperation, and to the average fan, these things co-exist: the original canon and the fan-created interpretations. At a fundamental level, of course, there's the fact that fanfiction is free and canonical stories are not (setting aside things like borrowed books and libraries). If fans have limited money, at least they're not spending it on fanfiction -- the cash goes to the Author, and payment for fanfiction is (often but not always) reviews or other time-sinks.
The former also carries the stigma of 'derivative' (or even outright 'stealing') while the latter is prized, so there's additional social weight on fanfiction writers to justify themselves. Like all good capitalistic costs, the fan-writers transfer this weight onto the canonical story, so it bears the burden for their attention to fan-interpretation. Basically, "I only do this because I love the story just so much, and it's a really great story that deserves this level of attention."
Yet the tension remains, because a number of Authors see themselves as displaced, dislodged gods of their created universe, with ungrateful fans busy worshipping false gods. What the Authors don't get is that in the eyes of most fandom members, I'd say, the Authors weren't really much of gods in the first place.
Distance and pre-eminence (and careful cultivation in online/early-Internet Affirmational-style interaction) may have temporarily given that impression, but fans don't worship false gods, because that implies there were ever true gods. If we truly believed there were a 'true' god of any Original Story, would we even be writing fanfiction in the first place?
Or maybe it's just that we're not half so stressed by the Author's insistence on recognizing hir Authah-ey-tay, so much as a fear we may actually share with savvier Authors: of a God already present and quite voracious in fandom itself.
Yes, dear reader, it's the Big Name Fan.
Rivaling the size and scope of the original story in terms of influence and audience-power, faster than a fanfiction.net "new story!" alert, able to leap Mary Sues in a single bound, it's the dreaded Big Name Fan (BNF)! And no kryptonite will take this puppy down, either.
The birth and upbringing of the BNF is a fascinating thing, worthy of a National Geographic study, but I'll leave that for some other post. Instead, here I only want to point out what is possibly as much of a nightmare for an Author as the notion of reams of derivative, repetitive, and distorted re-interpretations (with porn!) of the original story: a voice in the wilderness of fandom that has power to rival, if not drown out, the Author's own.
That's why I drew the pinwheel lines as curves, above, rather than direct straight lines: because one aspect of a BNF is that (intentionally or unintentionally), the BNF becomes like a medium-sized sun in an asteroid belt. The gravitational pull warps everything in its vicinity, and those fans who cluster the closest will find -- whether or not they realize it -- that their interpretation of the original material is distorted away from a direct line to fall in line with the BNF's version of events.
Granted, the BNF doesn't get that way just on sheer charisma; there must be significant production of works that maintain a certain consistency in their approach to the original work. This is the BNF's ideology (and I use this is as neutral a sense as possible), and just like fans will cleave to an original story whose world-perspective aligns with their own, fans will also cleave to a BNF who exhibits the same.
That's how you get people who go from fandom to fandom not because they've discovered a fandom, but because they're trailing along in the gravitational wake of the BNF. Those are the fans exterior to the blue square's perimeter, above; those fans are linked to both the BNF and the BNF-produced stories. And just like in the earlier stages of fandom where access-to-Author made validation-by-Author both possible and important, there are fans whose connection to the BNF is not by dint of a specific story but directly to the BNF.
On top of the distortion in perspectives of the canon, a major BNF-presence can also warp other stories -- either in the creation, or in the judgment other fans lay upon the story. It can be as simple as "So-and-so likes it, so it must be good, because I love So-and-so's work/perspective". That's how you end up with the BNF writing/posting a story that's borderline canon, and other stories then positioning themselves as closer to the BNF-version than to the original story (or even the writer's own personal interpretation).
If that's not bad enough for an Author -- probably in paroxysms of terror at being rendered obsolete by the BNF -- it'd be compounded by any realization that the BNF's gravitational pull is now tilting people away from the canon to focus solely on the BNF's version of things... and the Author, hidden within the canon text, can't do a damn thing about it.
In part, of course, because even acknowledging the BNF's existence may lend authority to an already-bloated power imbalance, but also because to recognize a BNF requires, most of the time, recognizing that which gave the BNF that authority: the fan-interpretation and ideology that drives the BNF's attractiveness to other fans. And, thanks to such wacky copyright laws as what we got right now, it seems many Authors are of the mind that just being even vaguely aware of fanfiction puts them in the position of having to tell their publishers and let loose the hounds of cease-and-desist letters.
Thus, the BNF can continue to reign supreme, thanks to a unique combination of circumstances and some deft timing and no small amount of skill at tapping into what, exactly, the fandom is really craving (that, usually, is missing from the original story). I've noted these characteristics amongst many a BNF-example... but the truly powerful BNFs, the ones who can capitalize on this (sometimes to a scary degree), are the ones whose metaphorical diagram looks more like this.
The BNF creates a kind of fandom that revolves around the BNF and/or the BNF's works. This may include BNF-sanctioned or -blessed derivations of the BNF's derivations, like shared worlds or spin-offs other writers have done based on the BNF's own work. But first and foremost, it's a fandom that revolves with its center not as an original story, but with what's effectively a substitute-author.
This, I think, is possibly what seems to give nightmares to those Authors who make enough noise to let slip between the cracks what they fear. As if it's not bad enough that not only are they sequestered away (to be fair, more commonly by legalities than outright insecurities, I think), unable to interact directly with fan-writers and/or fan-interpretations, but this enforced distance is no longer prized. That is, when the Author breaks the silence and speaks, the fandom world has become so used to chattering amongst itself in the past twenty-plus years of Middle Internet Era that they don't even think to stop talking long enough to fall silent and soak up the words of their Creator-god-Author.
Instead, when Authors speak, it's ex cathedra in some way, a distanced voice that has little bearing on the fan-interpretations because, after all, the Author can't even acknowledge the existence of the fan-creations, let alone comment or validate them... but the BNF can.
And, too, the BNF is not distanced, locked within a cone of legal silence when it comes to fanfiction; the BNF stands squarely in the center of a swirling mass of fanfiction, derived-from-derived, shared-world, new fandoms, crossovers, and connections to other fans and fellow BNFs. Where the Author is a silently producing Creator, the most powerful BNFs are those whose fandom interactions are driven by connection, connection, connection.
The greatest irony of all, of course, is that the most skillful of the BNFs manage to master the art of inspiring, even as their own prolific creativity -- that which got them into their position in the first place, really -- drops off. That is, BNFs don't necessarily fade away from the public/fandom awareness, if they do it right, unlike an Author who risks no next book deal if a certain threshold isn't satisfied. So while an Author has external pressures to meet and satisfy (books sold, deadlines met), and failure means a loss of status as an Author, a successful BNF's success is marked by fewer external pressures -- because part of the art of the BNF, at the highest grade (from what I've seen) is in, effectively, getting other people to write your stories.
In other words: the BNF is the Author's shadow-side. Where the Author creates the world and is hampered by legal, social, personal, and professional issues to both counter and refute the fandom's interpretative and transformational creativity... the BNF is perfectly positioned to capitalize on this creativity. The Author can never take a break by saying, I won't have that new book out right away, but in the meantime, you can read all these re-imaginings of it -- which is exactly what a savvy BNF does do: I haven't written that story I promised, but I had this idea for a shared world, and here are three chapters written by these other people, using my idea.
The BNF can take the credit (and a rightful credit, most times, for a creative idea) without losing prestige, because the fandom doesn't revolve around the same limitations as given to Authors. That, I think, is where Authors are recoiling in greatest horror and terror from their own fandoms, if they even remotely suspect their fandom has become home to one of the supernova BNFs.
As if it's not bad enough to feel as though the fandom were leeching off the Author's own creativity (while simultaneously denying the Author's rightful Authority), it's got to be salt in the wound to know there's someone who is so thoroughly working the system -- a system based, in large part, on the Author's vision in the first place. And worse, to intuit that if the Author stops writing, the fandom will not only carry on, but that the only one who suffers if the Author stops is, in the end, the Author and only the Author. Fandom can and will continue long after the story's written, and there's nothing like the pull of a BNF to help dynamo the fandom into new and unexplored corners.
This isn't where I expected to end up, but logically, it does make some sense (though discussion and contemplation won't hurt, as part of processing) -- that the Authorial fear isn't just of fandom itself, nor entirely (I think) of fandom's production. It does seem as though Authors, even mid-fanfic rant, do seem to recognize that the vast majority of fan-interpretations are both dreck and unlikely to ever be mistaken for the real thing. Yet despite that, Authors continue to express an overwhelming (and almost always near-irrational) terror about some kind of dreaded eight-headed monster that will consume them, their works, and bury them, leaving only distorted perversions in their wake. And if there's anyone in fandom, any fandom, who could pull that off, it'd be a BNF.
Wow, look at that: I found something against which both the little people of fandom and the creator-Authors could struggle in unison! Except that then we're right back to the original issue. The Author may be the equivalent (potentially) to a three-ton gorilla bearing down on BNFs who, even with plenty of BNF-ness, can't really top more than a ton and a half in comparison -- but recognizing the BNF and using those fandom-connection tools against such extreme distortion means recognizing fanfiction in the first place.
Not to mention, once an Author recognizes fanfiction, then the question becomes: what if the next step in the process is not to long for the days of the one-voice affirmational fandom, but to find a way to use transformational fandom -- and its powerhouse BNFs -- as a force for good?
note: there is slight hyperbole about authors vs. bnfs, for the sake of irrepressible humor, but really only very slight. or another way to put it: I ended up thinking in this direction because I do think there's a kernel in there worth digging at, so what you see here is sort of the 'first pass', with characteristic irreverence, of the dynamics of that particular aspect of fandom.
Where I meander, I'm also busy trying different ways to approach and/or assess the evidence at hand. In case you weren't already aware of my hermeneutic habit trails.
Whenever I read of Authors dismissing fanfiction as intentional (if not outright malicious) distortion, and the way that such tarrings sometimes spread to an implied tarring of all fandom (beyond just the writers and their readers), it strikes me as ignoring a benefit that might outweigh that of the distortion-risk drawbacks.
By that I mean: there is a derivative benefit to Authors from the connections that exist between fans not by virtue of their shared baseline fandom (focus on an original story) but on their participation in fandom itself, as a generalized entity or way of being.
The dashed lines above are the connections, pulling together two fans of one group with a fan of a second group, but without connections created (yet) between each yellow-circle and the unfamiliar/unconnected original story. That's probably common sense to many Authors, in that if you're a fan of this genre story, then you'd probably also like that genre story; same basic logic as Amazon's "other people who bought this also bought..." addendums on any purchasing page.
What got me, in considering the dynamics at play, was in recalling several Author-statements (and I name no names here due to in part being the kind of fool who reads Author-statements by Authors whose stories and/or genres are totally unfamiliar to me, which often leaves my response nothing more than, "and who are you, again?" not to be a smartass but because I really am that unaware of that genre's big names). On the face of it, it'd seem like one would want fans of one fandom to connect with others, and hope for a bit of cross-pollination, as it were.
What I can't figure out, though, is whether the Authors refusing or discouraging this kind of cross-fandom pollination are doing so just as part and parcel of the kneejerk anti-fanfiction stance, or because the Authors really are/were that savvy about just what's going on. If the former, well, whatever; if the latter, well, no use trying to sugarcoat what I see, then.
The author's green-circle sphere of influence is no longer the intermediary for interpretation; the role of introductory intermediary is -- in this type of instance -- taken over by the fandom interpretation (fanon).
In effect, it seems to me that the more fandom itself takes center stage -- the co-interpretation and/or interaction between fans of similarly-themed original stories -- the more the fans' own interpretative texts become introductory points to new/unfamiliar original stories. Where the Author's imposition as intermediary asserts a force in terms of interpretation, the fans' imposition as intermediary does the same, but distorted, once step removed.
That, obviously, is what some of the Authors fear: that fan-distorted interpretations bias readers ahead of time. (I suppose the logic is that it's okay if it's your own work that you're biasing people towards, or against.) What I have no way to measure currently is whether the positive biases outweigh the potential negative: whether there are more fans expressing appreciation of the text with affectionate fan-interpretation, or whether there are more fans using their perspective to critique the original story. And, I imagine, plenty of Authors (or at least judging from the noisiest ones who are anti-fanfic) consider any such critique of the original story to be tantamount to a personal insult.
The thing is whether the Author sees all re-interpretations as critiques in disguise, or as adoring emulations by fans (some of whom, shall we euphemistically say, just don't know better, bless their hearts, and distort without realizing just how much it hurts the canonical Author). How to rationalize the risks of having your work introduced via someone else's interpretation?
Or perhaps it's better expressed as: maybe it's time to recognize that fans of any work, regardless of fanfiction tendencies, have always exerted their own interpretation on a work when introducing it to others. In this, fanfiction acts as a textual re-imagining working along the same lines as a serious book review. The difference is that fans don't get interviewed, have their references checked, and suffer annual employee reviews to warrant the right to critically review an original story. Then again, seeing how some Authors react to critical reviews even by seemingly educated and erudite Serious Book Reviewers, maybe it doesn't matter who's making the noise.
Moving along, what had been marginal-positioned (ex-canon) fanfic, some in-canon fanfic, and cross-fandom connections, becomes considerably messier when we move into the more recent (past decade or so) of the Internet Era. Or more specifically, the rise of the massive multi-fandom archives, and I'm looking at you, Fanfiction.net and Mediaminer.org.
These are all drawn (err, so to speak) from what I've seen happen in various fandoms/fancircles. At the top left, for instance, marked with a (1) is a blue-bordered square with a medium-blue thick line leading from a yellow circle. That fan-writer is, as marked by the light blue dashed lines, part of the general 'fandom' that centers on the original story (top middle, in the pinwheel). But this fan's ex-canon story now not only has garnered several fans in its own right, these fans are not only not connected to the original canon, they have also connected to each other (2).
In essence, it's a mini-fandom of a fan-interpretation of a canonical story.
Over on the top right, at the spot marked (3), is the next stage in that evolution. Same premise: fans connected to each other, focused in their appreciation for an ex-canon story -- and one of that story's fans has, in turn, produced an interpretation (4)... of what was already an interpretation. This is true fanon: where a fan incorporates another fan's perspectives in absence of a significant (or any) connection to the original story, and thus may not know (or may not even care) that the next level of interpretation is more than just a few jumps to the left.
Granted, I think this is also one aspect that Authors fear the most, when they're anti-fic-ranting; most frame it as a dislike for being distorted, but this is a level of distortion beyond what the Author can reasonably influence. It's well past the borders of the general canon-facing (or canon-aware) fandom.
But it doesn't stop there, because an influential interpretation can also become the locus of a fandom and not just in terms of fans grouping around a specific and more-appreciated re-imagining. The next evolutionary step after the two-steps-removed aspect is when the secondary fan's interpretation loops back at the primary interpretation in a move reminiscent of the way, in affirmational fandoms, the fans' story-interpretations loop back to fall within the Author-gatekeeper scope.
The dotted and solid lines here are not random; they're based on actual observed overlappings and interactions in a fandom. At the (1), there's a fan who self-identifies as being 'within' the scope of the canon-focused fandom, with two interpretative works in play. The first is in-canon; the second is ex-canon and significantly transformational. A number of fans have grouped around this second ex-canon work, and are linked to each other as co-fans of the (1) fan's story.
One of those fans, at (2), has in turn produced an interpretation of the (1) interpretation, as noted in the evolutionary point previous to this image. But it doesn't stop there; a third fan gets involved; a fan who, unlike the second, is also connected to the originating fandom -- and is not a fan of the first fan and/or the first fan's work (no solid blue line connecting, there). And this third fan's work overlaps significantly enough with the second to imply a sharing of the fanon-based, ex-canon interpretation of this fan, even though the third fan is well-familiar with the original story.
This is one path to the development of a shared world or zoofic or whatever the fandom calls it this month -- a re-interpretation, often with added original characters, which in turn become fodder for other fans to pile on and draw/write within the same world. (I say one path, but it's also the path I've seen most often, where substantial twist added is from someone outside the specific fandom, though not outside fandom in general.)
There are paths to create the same where the players/writers are all at least somewhat familiar with the original story, but I highlight this particular wacky process as reminder that this ain't necessarily so. With enough fanfic (either a little from many writers or a lot from a few), secondary derivations can develop that in turn lead back to the mainstream fandom...
...And, to what is probably the horror of a few Authors reading this, the significant movement in the image is not that of (2) writing about an unfamiliar canon. It's that (3) turns away from the original story and intentionally focuses on an ex-canon version.
It can happen within the boundaries of the general mainstream fandom (the dashed blue circle ringing the original story) or exterior/marginal to it (as the example above). Either way, what you get is a bubble of fanon sitting in an uncomfortably close proximity to the original story. Well, uncomfortable if you're the Author, I suppose.
The green space is the bubble within which (from what I've seen) the fans then create a new, derived canon -- based loosely or closely, but almost always with additional elements or specific interpretations as foundation -- which is then policed just as much as original canon. That is to say, if the fandom already tends to police its canon tightly, then it's likely to do the same for its shared-world bubbles; if the fandom's pretty easy-going about the dividing lines of canon, then it seems this also affects its attitudes towards shared-world subsets.
(Well, not always: I've heard of a few instances where wildly chaotic fandoms produce strictly-controlled bubble-worlds, but in that case my suspicion is that it's fandom-reaction, a need to have some kind of comprehensible and coherent canon when the original story is nothing but a hot mess -- a favorite mess, but a hot one all the same.)
When I read posts and missives from Published Authors expressing their fear/aversion to fanfiction (and/or, sometimes, misbehaving fandom itself), it seems to me there are two things Authors fear. Naturally, I'll start with the slightly-lesser of the two evils, first. I say that with the caveat that upon reflection, I don't think this is truly a fear so much as it is an alternative perception. (The problem there is that opinions are strongly personal and therefore hard to quibble over, since opinions aren't nearly as malleable even when you do have all the facts).
I say 'perception' because it's important to note (if you haven't noticed already) that I've taken somewhere between a neutral approach to the dynamics I'm pondering, and a somewhat fandom-positive approach. It may not seem like it, perhaps, and in case that's so, I'll explain why I think (or hope) I've achieved that: because while canon may be supplemented by fan-interpretation, I don't think it's entirely overrun, nor do I think most fans would see canon as ever being truly surpassed, or made irrelevant.
The reason for stating that explicitly is because, from Author complaints and rants, this is the impression I get of what they think is a more accurate representation when we talk about fan imposition on the original story.
That's right. The fandom-created interpretations, the fanfiction stories, are crowding the original story, to the point of burying it. This seems the only logical explanation of Author-verbalized perceptions; it's the only one that makes sense when I consider those Authors who fight against fanfiction -- and the way they express their fears.
They're convinced that the more fanfiction there is, the more their own version, at the center of the pinwheel, is being drowned out. Those are not re-interpreted stories, bounded neatly by canonical square, but warped re-tellings, twisted all out of shape in comparison to the Author's vision of the original story. Fanfiction is not just potential competition, it's actual competition, and it's winning, and it's doing so through incredibly distorted presentations: perversions of canon.
The expected result, if allowed to multiply unchecked?
Not only does the original story lose its solidity, compromised and re-interpreted and buried by the fanfiction, but the Author hirself ceases to exist anywhere in the picture. The Author has lost the Authority of being the creator, and I use that Author/Authority/creator connection quite intentionally.
Back when I first got into a particular fandom -- which we'll say is simply That Fandom Which Shall Not Be Named, because let's not get into the specifics, shall we? Some incendiary devices should be left to rot peacefully -- I had a conversation with a fellow fanwriter that went something like this.
Friend: It's an article of faith among the majority of the fandom that despite the lack of any canonical basis, such-and-such character was repeatedly assaulted, sexually and physically, for most of his childhood.
Me: Did you mean to use that phrase, there?
Friend: What where?
Me: That it's an article of faith. Like it's some kinda religious tenet.
Friend: ... well, it fits, and it's true. If it all it took was hitting the Enter key to lob a grenade at someone else through an internet connection, most of this fandom would be dead and buried under about twenty feet of rubble. Wars have been fought over less, my dear.
Me: ... *what the hell have I gotten myself into?*
In the past few weeks, I've seen several references to this same notion, but framed in reaction to (if not outright derision of) Authors who cling with their last bit of fingernails to the Authority vested in them as the internal vision of an original story. Some fan-critics, like
thefourthvine, have spoken of "the Anointed Few", while others have used phrases like "the Voice of God" or "speaking from on high" and so on. All of these are strongly religious-colored takes on Authority, mixing in the power of the Creator-author with a Creator-god. I don't think it's a slip of the keyboard, either. Both the Judeo-Christian mindset (and the West's dominant paradigm for god-like critters) and the snark against Authorial Authority contain the assumption, obliquely or outright, that the Creator-god is a distant God; to be granted the chance to hear the God's words is a marvelous, and unusual, event. In other words, the sacredness with which the readers are expected by (some) Authors to treat the text is, when you strip back the neuroses and the protests, also the sacredness with which the readers are expected to treat the Author's interpretations of that text. The Author is supposed to take precedent, but more than that, really. The Author is not just the biggest baddest force on the playing field, the Author is the only force on the field.
Thus, I don't think it's that much of an exaggeration to draw a thick and solid line between the religious concept of "not worshipping graven images" and the authorial concept of "not worshipping derivative stories". I wouldn't be surprised if some Authors do sincerely wish for the ability to smite those who write blasphemous fanfiction in the Author's name.
The lynchpin here is that despite these articles of faith that say worship of anything else is tantamount to denial of the rights and privileges due unto the Canon, I didn't draw the fandom side of things with those distortions because I think those are present only in the Author's viewpoint. From the perspective of readers/writers of fan-interpretations, it's not necessary to excessively warp the illustrated version as some kind of reminder of the fan-version's unnaturalness or wrongness. It's not like we ever confuse the two. We don't need the additional visual stimuli to remind us which is the "real" story and which is the "derived" story.
I think that's the point where the twain shall never meet; the fearful contingent of Authors -- or those who long for Affirmational-only, well-behaved fans who color neatly within the Author's designated lines -- will never be able to see the same map as the readers. Because I've yet to meet a single fan, ever, who can't tell the difference or who isn't aware which is a story by a fan versus by the Author.
And that's really the issue, isn't it? Competition versus cooperation, and to the average fan, these things co-exist: the original canon and the fan-created interpretations. At a fundamental level, of course, there's the fact that fanfiction is free and canonical stories are not (setting aside things like borrowed books and libraries). If fans have limited money, at least they're not spending it on fanfiction -- the cash goes to the Author, and payment for fanfiction is (often but not always) reviews or other time-sinks.
The former also carries the stigma of 'derivative' (or even outright 'stealing') while the latter is prized, so there's additional social weight on fanfiction writers to justify themselves. Like all good capitalistic costs, the fan-writers transfer this weight onto the canonical story, so it bears the burden for their attention to fan-interpretation. Basically, "I only do this because I love the story just so much, and it's a really great story that deserves this level of attention."
Yet the tension remains, because a number of Authors see themselves as displaced, dislodged gods of their created universe, with ungrateful fans busy worshipping false gods. What the Authors don't get is that in the eyes of most fandom members, I'd say, the Authors weren't really much of gods in the first place.
Distance and pre-eminence (and careful cultivation in online/early-Internet Affirmational-style interaction) may have temporarily given that impression, but fans don't worship false gods, because that implies there were ever true gods. If we truly believed there were a 'true' god of any Original Story, would we even be writing fanfiction in the first place?
Or maybe it's just that we're not half so stressed by the Author's insistence on recognizing hir Authah-ey-tay, so much as a fear we may actually share with savvier Authors: of a God already present and quite voracious in fandom itself.
Yes, dear reader, it's the Big Name Fan.
Rivaling the size and scope of the original story in terms of influence and audience-power, faster than a fanfiction.net "new story!" alert, able to leap Mary Sues in a single bound, it's the dreaded Big Name Fan (BNF)! And no kryptonite will take this puppy down, either.
The birth and upbringing of the BNF is a fascinating thing, worthy of a National Geographic study, but I'll leave that for some other post. Instead, here I only want to point out what is possibly as much of a nightmare for an Author as the notion of reams of derivative, repetitive, and distorted re-interpretations (with porn!) of the original story: a voice in the wilderness of fandom that has power to rival, if not drown out, the Author's own.
That's why I drew the pinwheel lines as curves, above, rather than direct straight lines: because one aspect of a BNF is that (intentionally or unintentionally), the BNF becomes like a medium-sized sun in an asteroid belt. The gravitational pull warps everything in its vicinity, and those fans who cluster the closest will find -- whether or not they realize it -- that their interpretation of the original material is distorted away from a direct line to fall in line with the BNF's version of events.
Granted, the BNF doesn't get that way just on sheer charisma; there must be significant production of works that maintain a certain consistency in their approach to the original work. This is the BNF's ideology (and I use this is as neutral a sense as possible), and just like fans will cleave to an original story whose world-perspective aligns with their own, fans will also cleave to a BNF who exhibits the same.
That's how you get people who go from fandom to fandom not because they've discovered a fandom, but because they're trailing along in the gravitational wake of the BNF. Those are the fans exterior to the blue square's perimeter, above; those fans are linked to both the BNF and the BNF-produced stories. And just like in the earlier stages of fandom where access-to-Author made validation-by-Author both possible and important, there are fans whose connection to the BNF is not by dint of a specific story but directly to the BNF.
On top of the distortion in perspectives of the canon, a major BNF-presence can also warp other stories -- either in the creation, or in the judgment other fans lay upon the story. It can be as simple as "So-and-so likes it, so it must be good, because I love So-and-so's work/perspective". That's how you end up with the BNF writing/posting a story that's borderline canon, and other stories then positioning themselves as closer to the BNF-version than to the original story (or even the writer's own personal interpretation).
If that's not bad enough for an Author -- probably in paroxysms of terror at being rendered obsolete by the BNF -- it'd be compounded by any realization that the BNF's gravitational pull is now tilting people away from the canon to focus solely on the BNF's version of things... and the Author, hidden within the canon text, can't do a damn thing about it.
In part, of course, because even acknowledging the BNF's existence may lend authority to an already-bloated power imbalance, but also because to recognize a BNF requires, most of the time, recognizing that which gave the BNF that authority: the fan-interpretation and ideology that drives the BNF's attractiveness to other fans. And, thanks to such wacky copyright laws as what we got right now, it seems many Authors are of the mind that just being even vaguely aware of fanfiction puts them in the position of having to tell their publishers and let loose the hounds of cease-and-desist letters.
Thus, the BNF can continue to reign supreme, thanks to a unique combination of circumstances and some deft timing and no small amount of skill at tapping into what, exactly, the fandom is really craving (that, usually, is missing from the original story). I've noted these characteristics amongst many a BNF-example... but the truly powerful BNFs, the ones who can capitalize on this (sometimes to a scary degree), are the ones whose metaphorical diagram looks more like this.
The BNF creates a kind of fandom that revolves around the BNF and/or the BNF's works. This may include BNF-sanctioned or -blessed derivations of the BNF's derivations, like shared worlds or spin-offs other writers have done based on the BNF's own work. But first and foremost, it's a fandom that revolves with its center not as an original story, but with what's effectively a substitute-author.
This, I think, is possibly what seems to give nightmares to those Authors who make enough noise to let slip between the cracks what they fear. As if it's not bad enough that not only are they sequestered away (to be fair, more commonly by legalities than outright insecurities, I think), unable to interact directly with fan-writers and/or fan-interpretations, but this enforced distance is no longer prized. That is, when the Author breaks the silence and speaks, the fandom world has become so used to chattering amongst itself in the past twenty-plus years of Middle Internet Era that they don't even think to stop talking long enough to fall silent and soak up the words of their Creator-god-Author.
Instead, when Authors speak, it's ex cathedra in some way, a distanced voice that has little bearing on the fan-interpretations because, after all, the Author can't even acknowledge the existence of the fan-creations, let alone comment or validate them... but the BNF can.
And, too, the BNF is not distanced, locked within a cone of legal silence when it comes to fanfiction; the BNF stands squarely in the center of a swirling mass of fanfiction, derived-from-derived, shared-world, new fandoms, crossovers, and connections to other fans and fellow BNFs. Where the Author is a silently producing Creator, the most powerful BNFs are those whose fandom interactions are driven by connection, connection, connection.
The greatest irony of all, of course, is that the most skillful of the BNFs manage to master the art of inspiring, even as their own prolific creativity -- that which got them into their position in the first place, really -- drops off. That is, BNFs don't necessarily fade away from the public/fandom awareness, if they do it right, unlike an Author who risks no next book deal if a certain threshold isn't satisfied. So while an Author has external pressures to meet and satisfy (books sold, deadlines met), and failure means a loss of status as an Author, a successful BNF's success is marked by fewer external pressures -- because part of the art of the BNF, at the highest grade (from what I've seen) is in, effectively, getting other people to write your stories.
In other words: the BNF is the Author's shadow-side. Where the Author creates the world and is hampered by legal, social, personal, and professional issues to both counter and refute the fandom's interpretative and transformational creativity... the BNF is perfectly positioned to capitalize on this creativity. The Author can never take a break by saying, I won't have that new book out right away, but in the meantime, you can read all these re-imaginings of it -- which is exactly what a savvy BNF does do: I haven't written that story I promised, but I had this idea for a shared world, and here are three chapters written by these other people, using my idea.
The BNF can take the credit (and a rightful credit, most times, for a creative idea) without losing prestige, because the fandom doesn't revolve around the same limitations as given to Authors. That, I think, is where Authors are recoiling in greatest horror and terror from their own fandoms, if they even remotely suspect their fandom has become home to one of the supernova BNFs.
As if it's not bad enough to feel as though the fandom were leeching off the Author's own creativity (while simultaneously denying the Author's rightful Authority), it's got to be salt in the wound to know there's someone who is so thoroughly working the system -- a system based, in large part, on the Author's vision in the first place. And worse, to intuit that if the Author stops writing, the fandom will not only carry on, but that the only one who suffers if the Author stops is, in the end, the Author and only the Author. Fandom can and will continue long after the story's written, and there's nothing like the pull of a BNF to help dynamo the fandom into new and unexplored corners.
This isn't where I expected to end up, but logically, it does make some sense (though discussion and contemplation won't hurt, as part of processing) -- that the Authorial fear isn't just of fandom itself, nor entirely (I think) of fandom's production. It does seem as though Authors, even mid-fanfic rant, do seem to recognize that the vast majority of fan-interpretations are both dreck and unlikely to ever be mistaken for the real thing. Yet despite that, Authors continue to express an overwhelming (and almost always near-irrational) terror about some kind of dreaded eight-headed monster that will consume them, their works, and bury them, leaving only distorted perversions in their wake. And if there's anyone in fandom, any fandom, who could pull that off, it'd be a BNF.
Wow, look at that: I found something against which both the little people of fandom and the creator-Authors could struggle in unison! Except that then we're right back to the original issue. The Author may be the equivalent (potentially) to a three-ton gorilla bearing down on BNFs who, even with plenty of BNF-ness, can't really top more than a ton and a half in comparison -- but recognizing the BNF and using those fandom-connection tools against such extreme distortion means recognizing fanfiction in the first place.
Not to mention, once an Author recognizes fanfiction, then the question becomes: what if the next step in the process is not to long for the days of the one-voice affirmational fandom, but to find a way to use transformational fandom -- and its powerhouse BNFs -- as a force for good?
note: there is slight hyperbole about authors vs. bnfs, for the sake of irrepressible humor, but really only very slight. or another way to put it: I ended up thinking in this direction because I do think there's a kernel in there worth digging at, so what you see here is sort of the 'first pass', with characteristic irreverence, of the dynamics of that particular aspect of fandom.
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Date: 12 Jun 2010 01:03 pm (UTC)The other thing that stood out to me as I read was back where you were talking about how fans have to reinterpret what they watch or read, automatically, as a function of closely invested and emotionally involved reading and watching. Because in some sense we are all watching different shows, whether we then go on to write fanfic and share our reinterpretation with others.
And the feminist critique or the antimilitaristic critique or the anticolonialist critique or the antiracist critique or the anti-heteronormative critique can ONLY happen when fans do that -- when they reject, spin, decenter, or emphasize things in their viewing or reading that were not emphasized or foregrounded in the original.
There are plenty of canons that I would walk away from in rage if I didn't have the ability to focus on what makes me happy in that canon and close my eyes to what makes me foam at the mouth. One sees this all the time fandom, and among viewers, whether it's fanfic writers or not.
thanks again; fascinating and knotty and amazing stuff.
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Date: 12 Jun 2010 05:42 pm (UTC)I think any critique you can name really flows organically out of that process, and that process itself is one that's incredibly enabled/extended by this great jumble of tubes we call the intarweebs. I mean, we've always watched shows and read books and listened to stories -- and by "always" I mean "as a facet of the universal human condition" -- but what the internet gives us is a chance to bounce those stories back out at everyone, even on the simplest of levels: "what the HELL was going on in the last five minutes of tonight's episode!?" You might think you have an interpretation (even if it's mostly just baffled silence), but it's the ability to connect with someone else, well-nigh immediately afterwards (or even while in the middle of experiencing the story) that really ups the ante exponentially in terms of our critiques.
I really think the fan-interaction (of whatever degree) is crucial to the process, too, because getting swift feedback and reinforcement is what helps/encourages many people to move from "I watch this show/read this book, and I like it" to "this is WHY I like it" to "this is what I do NOT like about it" to the nitty of critique, which is usually expressed as "here is what I would FIX, damn it!" ... but it's that ownership of declaring what you'd fix, or what you see underneath the story's surface, that comes only after you've developed a base for understanding that such critique is acceptable.
It's not, I think, that fans before didn't think this way, only that now we are able to express to each other in massive numbers that it's okay to have the reaction, turning what had been isolated musings into huge rumblings through the intertubes.
(also, I consolidated the four posts into two, to make it easier on the metafandom linkage, so if you don't mind moving your #2 comment to the #1 post, and the #3 comment to this post, then I can save them for posterity and anyone else's contemplations. would be much appreciated, and my apologies for making you do that -- I'd not realized the link was up for posting today, or I would've done that house-cleaning sooner. sheesh.)
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Date: 12 Jun 2010 10:10 pm (UTC)thanks again for the thinky.
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Date: 12 Jun 2010 10:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 12 Jun 2010 05:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 12 Jun 2010 05:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 12 Jun 2010 05:06 pm (UTC)~
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Date: 12 Jun 2010 05:33 pm (UTC)or at least fake it decently
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Date: 12 Jun 2010 07:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 12 Jun 2010 10:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 12 Jun 2010 09:24 pm (UTC)Fascinating.
Some thoughts:
What about story-worlds with multiple canon authors, who can exert opposing influences on the source work? Some things come to mind - the Star Wars expanded universe is one level of this, while many long-running TV and comic series - I think immediately of Buffy and Star Trek - are another. When these authors present differing impressions of canon, or different takes on the same canon, does this split the work? Perhaps both authors start to seem more like BNFs than "Authors".
What about fix-it stories? When Rowling announced that she'd always thought of Dumbledore as gay, that can magnify the author's role. Does it minimize the author's role when their writing - such as the last books of Harry Potter - alienates many fans so much they choose to ignore that part and create their own branching canon?
It seems to me like you were centrally trying to get at the difficulty authors have with fan writers, but I find myself especially interested in the way you depict the relationship between fan writers and the works they've created, as opposed to the relationship between authors and the works they've created. Why do authors get to remain entirely within their texts, except when they explicitly divorce themselves from it, while all fanfics are basically separated from their writer? Maybe this is just a limitation of the diagram... I'm not sure whether you meant that or not.
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Date: 12 Jun 2010 10:03 pm (UTC)Bingo: diagram issue.
I messed around with several ways to draw it, and visually to have fans sitting inside texts got to be really confusing. Part of that also was because when we talk about canon, most of the time (most! not all!) the author's telling is relatively linear. You don't get Rowling or Meyers or even King giving us the same story eight different ways, with radically different pairings and some entirely AUs or crossovers or whatever... but that's how fans can, and do, sometimes write.
I mean, if you laid down end-to-end all the fanfic I've read for any given single author, it'd be contradicting itself all over the place. On an intertextual level, it's technically the same function: fan-work in dialogue with original story. Except the fan is a slightly schizophrenic and fairly multi-identity half of the dialogue. I couldn't think of a single way to represent that without confusing the living hell out of most people (what ARE those crazy multi-colored shapes around the yellow circles?), so I went with seeing each story as split off from the fan-writer.
On top of that, the fans (as, really, mini-BNFs in their own right) have the same benefit any BNF gets, which is to introduce and discuss their own interpretation and reworking of canon. Just about anyone who's ever written a non-canonical (especially non-popular/non-traditional non-canonical) pairing has had to defend his/her work at some point. In forum and on elist, servers everywhere have got to be filled with endless non-fiction/persuasive discourses from fans over whether their interpretation was accurate (or whether they even give a damn about accuracy) and whether their story is good support/demo of their take on things.
To that extent, it seems to me that fanwriters exist in a sort of overlap with their various wacky interpretations and takes and retakes on a story, able to discuss (regardless of willingness) in ways the Author can't. Well, the Author can, but only one-sided: "This is what I meant," as opposed to the fan-writer who can say, "I meant this, and I see from your story that you meant that, and what got me thinking was his story with this other detail, and then this other story..." in the course of defending or asserting or just discussing their interpretation.
Additional issue is that the Author is self-referential by definition: "on page 17, you'll see..." to support an argument of why the story is X or Y. Either the Author tells us what s/he intended, or s/he uses the story to make a point. The whole copyright crap means some authors end up very oblique even in talking about inspirations; they can't even bloody well say (at least not noisily or publicly), "I based her on Buffy." The bigger the copyright holder, the less humor they have for that kind of thing. So, wise authors (from what I've seen) tend to limit their interpretation to a purely self-referential point, to what's in the text or what's in their head, and they discount/set-aside external influences beyond the most general.
Fan-writers, though, can be intra-referential, "my friend wrote this story and I sort of took that side-idea and ran with it," which requires not only knowing the canon but having some familiarity with the friend's story along with, possibly, the story of the fan-writer in question. Fans also have considerably more freedom pegging cross-cultural influences, too: "it's a total redux of the first season plotline in such-and-such a series" or "he's a walking twin to character so-and-so in last year's blockbuster movies".
Now, putting that on paper? Hey, I like Adobe as much as the next non-graphical person, but I's gotta say, I ain't that good. (Heh.)
(ETA: my brain was in some other meandery, AJAX-tainted place when answering, and I didn't even respond to your first two points. That wasn't intentional! Just being absent-minded and doing too many things at once -- writing a reply in pieces always seems to lead to too-long replies, guhhhhh.)
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Date: 13 Jun 2010 01:36 am (UTC)I find myself suddenly fascinated with Illustrator, by the way. Apparently, I can use circles and lines to depict my thoughts, and suddenly they won't just form a big intimidating block of text - they'll form a big, intimidating block of text, plus strange pictures!
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Date: 13 Jun 2010 01:51 am (UTC)Honestly, my understanding is that to acknowledge someone's derivative work does not infringe on your ability to protect your copyright. I thought the whole "if you let them get away with it, you lose it," was solely trademark stuff, where the mark must be defended. I thought copyright, you retained even if you chose not to defend it at certain points. But the way authors talk in the past year or so, it sure sounds like they believe (or their publishers believe) that defense of copyright is as crucial as defense of trademark. Maybe the laws changed with the DCMA, could be, could be. If so, then it's not author/publisher superstition but actual fact that acknowledgment of violation/derivation by another is effectively the same as permission, and that copyright must be defended. In that case, either the author turns a completely blind eye or there must be cease-and-desist letters.
However, given that there are authors who are mellow about fanfic, and others who allow it under CC, and others who decry it and yet make not a single move to declare that C&D letters will be forthcoming to SMITE anyone's ass... I'm going with "this is an authorly-and-publisherly superstition", or possibly in the category of "if we repeat it enough, maybe everyone will believe it and then they won't violate copyright anymore for fear of automatic defense slap-down".
Adobe is absolutely the ultimate rock. Charts are now my SEKKRIT WEPPIN! Just be careful: you get in there, start playing, and you end up with a lot of pictures and no actual text written. Gah.
no subject
Date: 13 Jun 2010 11:47 am (UTC)But, because copyright is automatic, an author who acknowledges that they read fanfic may actually open himself up to a suit if he ever publishes anything that seems similar to a previously posted fanfic of their work. In this situation (if I understand the law right, and I've certainly been wrong about it before), the fan-writer may actually assert copyright himself and force the author to attempt to prove they had never read that specific fanfic.
Actually, that wouldn't apply when the original work was published under a CC license, which - I think - requires all derivative works to be published under the same license, which shields the original author from an infringement claim.
Alas, I'm no lawyer myself.
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Date: 15 Jun 2010 01:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 14 Jun 2010 04:27 pm (UTC)I feel your pain. Some fandom friends of mine, who are like a mad hivemind of awesome AUs, have created intra-referential stories that build on each other's AU ideas until we're so many (as
And this, in short, is why I love fandom.
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Date: 15 Jun 2010 03:47 pm (UTC)You mean shared or licensed worlds? They're not really collectively created -- not like television shows or movies, where a variety of people (from scriptwriters to directors to actors to editors) influence the final product -- so I've usually seen individually-created works as the same general category regardless of whether it's shared/licensed. And I've sure heard plenty of grumbling from Star Wars fans about the growing contradictions in canon, borderline canon, and whether you can have fanon that's been semi-canonized... which is probably an entire post in its own right, and one I'm not sure I've done enough thinking to address, myself.
I guess the question there would be: is the author really the canonical voice, or is the author work-for-hire? Does it make a difference? My understanding of a lot of the licensed worlds (including multiverses like Star Trek and so on) are effectively work-for-hire, but I could be wrong. (I'm fairly certain Dragonlance and other game-related licensed worlds are, at least.) When the author isn't the one ultimately holding the copyright (like in shared/licensed works), I wonder how much of a difference that makes as to the author's care for, and obsession about, protection of that copyright? I mean, if you see yourself as "just one more voice" then are you less likely to staunchly protect your "one more voice" against all mimicry/adaptation attempts?
As for multiple authors "splitting the work", again I think we have to divide between collective authorship (like in Buffy's television seasons) vs individual authorship within a collective multiverse, or at least define where the internal consistency begins and ends. For individual authorship -- or a single television episode -- with a single author, then we have clear minimum of the story hanging together, that the author's own text doesn't contradict the rest of the author's own text. Add more authors (or more episodes) and contradiction-points can grow exponentially... but I'm not sure that 'splits' the work, so long as the overall story (ie television series or series of consecutive books) remains somewhat consistent.
TL;DR: uh... I hadn't gotten that far but there's lot of questions still to ask..?
What about fix-it stories?
Do you mean by the author (retconning) or by the fans?
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Date: 12 Jun 2010 09:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 12 Jun 2010 10:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 12 Jun 2010 11:03 pm (UTC)"Canon" is itself religious terminology, and I think for many people, religion has been replaced by fandom, in terms of something to be passionate about, sometimes dangerously so. I mean when I see something as nasty as the what happened in HP fandom when the sixth book came out--the fans who had predicted what would happen correctly not being content simply to have got it right, but also attacking dissenting groups who had the temerity to be unhappy with what they got and in some cases actually seeming to be surprised that those groups didn't just shut up and die--I can't help but think of the way people behave during religious schisms.
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Date: 13 Jun 2010 01:55 am (UTC)I should probably note that my original degreework was in 20th century European theology, so... yeah. I know exactly where 'canon' originates, and that's one reason I throw it around with gleeful abandon, because it's freaking perfect. In some ways, the shipping wars of my fandom, and the mass chaos fight-to-the-death nuttery of late-HP fandom, are like some kind of sociological heirs to every major religio-political group that's fought to establish a firm canon. Political underhandedness! Forgeries! Bribes! People suddenly get waylaid on the path to Damascus, err, the Leaky Cauldron!
Good times, good times.
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Date: 13 Jun 2010 06:11 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 15 Jun 2010 03:42 pm (UTC)Following the metaphor, it's worth bearing in mind the origins of the word 'fandom' itself; fan from fanatic, refering to religious or political zealots well before fans of books or film or media. And the fact that people will openly admit to 'worship' of a character or actor, setting up shrines in their honour. Yep, makes perfect sense to use the terminology. (At least fandom hasn't yet lead to large scale actual wars or massarces...)
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Date: 15 Jun 2010 03:49 pm (UTC)Like my friend said, if only you could lob a grenade through a computer screen...
Yeah, sometimes I dislike the word 'fan' because of its etymological roots, and then fandom 'splodes somewhere all over again and I think, no, actually, the etymological roots are pretty damn accurate. Heh.
oh my dear God you are AWESOME
Date: 14 Jun 2010 03:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 14 Jun 2010 03:44 pm (UTC)Honestly, I had plenty of thoughts about fandom but I was missing the crucial ingredient -- that there are different kinds of fandom, in how people interact with the author (beyond interaction with the text). That 'affirmational vs transformational' was the key to explaining how we could shift from what seems to have dominated (if not in numbers, at least in popular perception) the earlier years of the internet and author-interactive fansites, to now, where the author seems to be a vague object in the distance and barely even noted by many even when the author does speak up. Not to mention the extreme backlash inherent in examples like RaceFail, where the authors got it coming and going. Not saying they didn't fully deserve getting it, just that I'd never expected that so many people would be willing to question authority, so thoroughly, so unrepentantly. It said to me that somewhere the power had shifted, significantly, but I couldn't put my finger on how or why, not until you so clearly (and much more succinctly, I should note!) pointed out the baseline dynamic.
The diagrams there are because otherwise it'd be three times as long and then everyone on my flist/dwircle would be sporking me in effigy for putting them through that. Besides, charts! Definitely worth a thousand words. And fun to make, too.
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Date: 14 Jun 2010 04:12 pm (UTC)Diagrams are pretty much my favorite thing ever. I never end up making them, but any time someone else does I just go OOOOOOOHH.
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Date: 15 Jun 2010 03:59 pm (UTC)This is the same process whereby philosophers and theologians and other thinky-heads have debated and developed concepts over what's got to be the entire millennia of human existence, regardless of culture. I mention that because it always tickles me how people online can get so frantic (similar to fandom and canon and whatnot, but maybe that's just another aspect of "text, text, text") about how we discuss things, who said what first, who added which parts... as if to shore ourselves up against some kind of chaos caused by the new media/medium of these messages. I have to wonder, did fans of Murakami or Guanzhong or Aristophanes struggle over the changes in communication-styles as writing/printing became more widespread, and the changes this brought to their (oral) debates over a bottle of booze at the local gathering-house?
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Date: 25 Aug 2010 06:52 pm (UTC)"I have to wonder, did fans of Murakami or Guanzhong or Aristophanes struggle over the changes in communication-styles as writing/printing became more widespread, and the changes this brought to their (oral) debates over a bottle of booze at the local gathering-house?"
I know both Plato and Socrates spoke against writing, because they felt that it would lead to a kind of laziness, where people relied on notes rather than on their own memory. Makes it seem somewhat ironic that their ideas were preserved in part by being written down.
Re: oh my dear God you are AWESOME
Date: 14 Jun 2010 04:00 pm (UTC)* I feel like Martin Luther should be the patron saint of wank, having been one of the first people to have his rants distributed via print, thus causing widespread commotion that took centuries to settle down. I love looking at the start of the Reformation as if it was the Wank To End All Wanks; it follows a pattern we've all seen a million times. A guy rants, his rants are linked everywhere, people argue about it, those arguments get linked everywhere, BNFs show up to tell him to settle down, he gets so mad that he starts calling the BNFs agents of the devil (if Godwin's Law had existed then, it would totally have been about calling people agents of the devil or the Antichrist), he gets BANNED, sets up his own segment of fandom, fandom wars break out, everything gets further fragmented and everyone ends up hating each other. He even went on random bigoted tangents that had nothing to do with anything!
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Date: 14 Jun 2010 04:42 pm (UTC)Although that would make Paul (Saul of Tarsus) the original BNF, seeing how he managed to almost single-handedly rewrite an existing canon into a fanon that endured for almost 1500 years, pissing off the entire affirmational fandom that existed with his transgressive version that didn't just transform, it brought in fans of all stripes who'd wanted nothing to do with the original collective authorial take... so naturally, once you have fanon vs canon, you must at some point have wank! ...and the idea of popes being BNFs just tickles me to no end.
humans seem to react to any central text this way, and human interaction re: religion runs on the same rails that human interaction re: fandom does
Absolutely. I think it's because of the power of the text, itself, in (at least Western-oriented) societies. Like the old joke, that "it must be true, because I read it in a book" -- which has become, both in a humorous way and a very telling way, "it must be true, because I read it on the internets". That's one thing that fascinates me, that originally "the text" was a concrete, inalienable kind of thing, a true touchstone for whatever flowed from it; whatever you did that drew from that origin-point must at some point circle back around to touch the text again, for credibility and legitimacy.
Now, our sense of text isn't just fluid in and of itself -- as in, many things can be "text" -- but even those texts are themselves in flux. That's the tension I see in the invariable conflicts arising in the past two, three years, as people have grappled with the question of whether it's acceptable to 'edit' (or bhalete, or completely revise) a text, especially in cases where the revisions/reworkings don't include bread-crumbs back to the original text. At the merest hint of controversial text, people come out of the woodwork (almost wrote wordwork, which might even be more appropos!) to get screenshots, to seal the text into that place and time so it's not overwritten by later text/re-text.
It comes up in the question of longterm blogs/journals (or at least it's a question I ask myself): is there a purpose to keeping these posts written two, three, four years ago? Or more? Aren't those rendered obsolete by later textual overlayings (newer posts) and if so, does obsolete automatically mean 'of no import at all'? At what point does (or can) a simple journal post become not-worth-saving, or is all text by definition of some intrinsic value, such that deletion or revision is a betrayal of some vague audience or textual standard? Or in the case of ephemerals like fanfiction, does revising a work significantly also violate this notion of text-as-permanent -- even if, from as objective a view as possible, this increases the work's internal quality -- such that it's violating some kind of Universal Textual Law to backtrack on released/published texts? If there's no law to violate (or such violation is barely even a misdemeanor), then what is the reason so many people kick and scream at an author revising earlier works, or even later authors removing problematic textual elements -- like racism, sexism, colonialism, and so on. Is a text a living entity that should update with its times (as it's often treated in terms of internet texts) or should it be considered "in stone" and a marker of its creation as a point-in-time? Does it reflect most the where and when of its creation-point, or should it speak to the reader that-is-now and thus be fluid enough to move away from its creation-point to be updated, revised, reworked, to match the audience-member's point-in-time?
These things keep me amused, and pondering, on late Monday mornings. And, okay, Tuesday evenings, Thursdays when it rains... hell, most days that end in -y.
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Date: 20 Jan 2011 02:17 pm (UTC)The way I see it, as long as we have the storing space (and it seems endless online), why not preserve? I'm working on my MA thesis right now, and I've used posts from 1994 to 2011. We can always add comments to the original text, write another version or a follow up and link to it in the earlier post if we become dissatisfied with what we've written. I think preserving earlier posts (or texts) and naming your sources like you did with obsession_inc's post are tremendously helpful when a reader wants to know more about the thing discussed. It creates a sense of tradition, and tradition is a tool of organization (well, OK, I use it as such^^).
Also, earlier posts, texts and discussions can be used to demonstrate patterns or recurring themes, structures etc. if one is so inclined. And sometimes, one can find answers there.
Does this mean that texts have an intrinsic value? I don't know. All I know is that I would much rather add to an existing (in this case published) text than destroy it (which means when I rewrite, I let the two or more versions and their respective comments coexist, maybe link them). Much like fandom without the canon-fanon hierarchy, actually^^
May I link to this post in my thesis?
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Date: 22 Jan 2011 05:43 am (UTC)To your points: I wasn't aware there was a theory concerning textual-values (of text itself as a 'thing') but I'll definitely look that up. Hey, it's not like I don't have enough to read already. Wait, I do, but so what, I'm sure there's got to be an extra few square inches somewhere in the brainpan that can take just a little more, if I shove hard enough.
As for linking to previous (online) texts... that makes me think of something (everything always does, damn it) but it probably deserves a post of its own, rather hide it back here. Hopefully a much shorter post than this one, though. I can always try, at least.
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Date: 23 Jan 2011 12:41 am (UTC)Thanks! :)
Most of the stuff I've read so far only mention it in passing or implicitly, but there has to be more explicit stuff out there. When I find it (or it finds me^^), should I give you a shout?
And do I know that feeling!^^
Good luck with that *grins* *looks at some of your other meta posts* *grins some more*
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Date: 23 Jan 2011 02:49 am (UTC)HEY. Let a dog DREAM, wouldya. I cling to my dreams!
Or delusions, as the case may be. Still!
*clings*
(I have been coding. This makes me punchy. Forgot to add: yes, if you find anything explicitly outlining the theories, please do drop me a line. Always up for more larning!)
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Date: 23 Jan 2011 01:11 pm (UTC)Will do.
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Date: 23 Jan 2011 02:09 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 23 Jan 2011 02:47 am (UTC)Re: oh my dear God you are AWESOME
Date: 15 Jun 2010 01:55 pm (UTC)Re: oh my dear God you are AWESOME
Date: 24 Aug 2010 03:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 15 Jun 2010 01:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 15 Jun 2010 03:51 pm (UTC)As for diagrams, I joke, but really, I'm much more visually-oriented than I sometimes think I should be, seeing how much I use words in play and in work. But a single graphic really does have the potential to nail something so much better, sometimes, and when I can't think of a way to verbalize an argument, I can almost always think of a way to non-verbalize it.
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Date: 24 Aug 2010 06:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 25 Aug 2010 08:15 am (UTC)I do think it's interesting, what stories inspire rabid fans and which don't (or at least, not ones intent on fanfiction.) I think what the bigger fandoms usually have in common is either a world that's got a lot to explore and play in, but not too far off common experience (fandoms that require a lot of research to play in tend to be smaller), or the source material has promise but is such a mess that people get a burning need to fix it.
I wonder if there's ever been a documented case where an author has been harmed by fanfiction? Where it killed their sales maybe? (Though I don't know how that would be documented...maybe it's an urban legend for authors? Like it gets told around the publishing table, complete with agents making *scritch, scritch* noises and shouting "Argh!" at the end. Maybe with s'mores from the microwave.)
Not making any sense! Must...Go...To...Bed...