Fan Fiction: Against

[rolanni]

Robin Hobb has posted a cogent rant here. Link from pegkerr

I know that some folks on my friends list write fan fic, and may thus not agree with Robin's points. If you feel compelled to disagree with them here, please be polite and rational. Posts deemed impolite, irrational, or both, by Eagles Over the Kennebec Management will be deleted.

In the service of Full Disclosure and Fair Warning, I do agree with Robin's points. Scott Lynch (link also from pegkerr) does not.

Comments

Re: Oh, thank the gods, I'm not alone

[djonn]

I just wish there was a way to really encourage all these people to write for themselves.

Ah, but therein lies part of the complexity -- because a great many fanfic writers are not, in fact, writing "for themselves". Rather, they are writing for a community of like-minded readers/writers, and part of their reward lies in the responses they receive from other members of that community. Those responses can consist of critiques (from "beta readers"), reviews, or even other stories that incorporate elements of their work, thereby reinforcing the "vibe" associated with participating in a shared creative endeavor.

And the thing is, that "vibe" isn't unique to fanfic communities. It's the exact same jones that professional writers feed when they participate in shared-world series (see particularly the Wild Cards project or the "Bordertown" cycle overseen by Terri Windling). It's the jones that some professional writers cite as the "fun" of playing in the Star Trek sandbox. And it's the jones that drives Sherlock Holmes fans to try and reconcile all of the editorial inconsistencies in the Conan Doyle canon, or to produce nineteen different versions of the "Giant Rat of Sumatra" story (including several different and mutually exclusive professionally published accounts).

The shared-creation muse and the individual-creation muse are qualitatively different entities -- neither is better nor worse than the other. It's the same sort of quasi-religious dichotomy that divides Mac and Windows users; most of the genuine problems between fanfic and profic writers seem to arise over inability of one practitioner to recognize the validity of the competing muse.

As Hobb and others note, it really is a Bad Thing for collective-creation practitioners to appropriate an individual-creation universe for their own purposes. OTOH, it's an equally Bad Thing for individual-creation practitioners to try and judge collective-creation universes by the standards and models of individual creation.

(It is probably worth observing that even the collectivists acknowledge points of divergence and "alternate universe" concepts -- I note particularly a trio of recent licensed Buffy novels postulating a Buffyverse in which Evil Willow actually stayed evil....)

Re: Oh, thank the gods, I'm not alone

[jonquil.livejournal.com]

I like the dichotomy you propose. I have always felt that appropriating a single creator's work (absent consent or death) was much creepier than appropriating a collective collaboration.