Snark's THIRD Law of Fanfic

[athelind]

The popularity of franchise fiction rests not only in the stories that are told, but in the stories that could be told in the franchise's setting. The more fertile the ground for exploration, extrapolation and personal interpretation, the more enthusiastic and enduring the fandom.

Comments

[cpxbrex.livejournal.com]

Ooooh. I like this one.

Muah hah hah! He's walked right into my trap!

[athelind.livejournal.com]

Oh, good -- because I had your comments about Harry Potter in mind when I wrote it.

Re: Muah hah hah! He's walked right into my trap!

[cpxbrex.livejournal.com]

Dood! Do you really wanna bring Harry Potter into this?! Hehe. I agree with your point, for crying out loud!

Re: Muah hah hah! He's walked right into my trap!

[athelind.livejournal.com]

hee hee hee. Seriously, your Harry Potter comments were one of the prime ingredients that got tossed into that pot on the back burner from which I'm serving up these tasty reflections on popular culture and the interaction of Medium and Audience.

scarfman's ingenious and funny webcomic, Arthur: King of Time and Space, was another. Mr. Gadzikowski has been drawing and writing "fanfic" comics and stories about Star Trek, Doctor Who, and all manner of other characters for DECADES. A few years back, he decided to recast those years of stories into a multi-threaded retelling of The Matter of Britain... and I found myself wondering, "why do I find this acceptable with an Arthurian cast, when I would have turned up my nose at the same stories with Kirk, SPock, and Doctor Who?"

(Start from the beginning if you decide to sample AKOTAS; that's the most succinct summary of the strips premise possible.)

Re: Muah hah hah! He's walked right into my trap!

[cpxbrex.livejournal.com]

Well, insofar as that goes, and I'm glad that you've gotten something out of what I was saying beyond, y'know, that I don't like HP, hehe, which was NOT the main point, anyway -- but I think it's relevant to remember that, often, there's a few more entities in the mix than just Medium and Audience. The additional big one is "Distributor" (publishers, film distributors, TV networks, etc.) and, really, "Legitimizing Agents" (critics, professors, advertisers).

So I think that fanfic is a way of getting around distributors and legitimizing agents (both of whom I would be happy if they just vanished off the face of the planet) to reclaim our interactions with our media in a more folk traditional sense. But . . . I still dislike that that system of production, distribution and legitimization is centralized in it's currently form, which I think is profoundly corrupt. What we, mostly, are writing our fanfic about are things manufactured for us, and our fanfic is subverted by the system as a promotional tool for personal profit. I don't like that. :/