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

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. :/