Snark's Observations on Fanfic

[athelind]

I should note, incidentally, that some people assume that the term "fanfic" is perjorative. That is not my intent in this matter.

When the Second Law says "indistinguishable", it means indistinguishable -- functionally identical in all important respects.

Alan Moore's Watchmen is a superhero story of unparalleled excellence.

It is also pure, unadulterated fanfic, in all but a single respect -- and that respect is that Moore recieved a paycheck from the corporate entity (a legal fiction of no literary relevance) that the copyright (another legal fiction of no literary relevance) to the characters upon whom the graphic novel was based.

EDIT: Thinking about it, with the possible exception of V for Vendetta, all of Moore's major works are fanfic.

Comments

[hedgegoth.livejournal.com]

Thinking about it, with the possible exception of V for Vendetta, all of Moore's major works are fanfic.

My brain just imploded. Damn. That's an extremely good observation.

How about "From Hell" - I'm not sure whether that fits into the fanfic....

[athelind.livejournal.com]

It's Jack the Ripper fanfic.

And yeah, I just pretty much dumped the entire genre of Historical Fiction into "Fanfic That Just Happens To Be About Real People".

I mean, seriously, how much difference IS there between "The Seven Per Cent Solution" and "Time After Time"?

[scarfman]

Most online practitioners of it call it "fanfic". I don't, the same way I don't use l33tsp34k, though the analogy isn't exactly fair. If there are people taking it that way, I suspect they're people whose own consumption and/or production of fanfiction predates the internet.

[cargoweasel.livejournal.com]

You're casting a pretty wide net there. By that logic, everyone since siegel and shuster who's written a superman comic is writing 'fanfic'. Every TV writer who wasn't a creator of a show is writing 'fanfic'.

[cpxbrex.livejournal.com]

Nietzsche said that there are no original sources. Yeah, everything is fanfic. Everything. The interruption was that, as industrialized print and then radio and TV became bigger and bigger they were able to temporarily stem that tide.

Even Simon and Shuster were doing fanfic, secularizing Jewish patriarchy stories in a new medium. Moshe Kent! :)

[doc-mystery.livejournal.com]

And siegel and shuster wrote fanfic about the Doc Savage pulp series...

::B::

[cpxbrex.livejournal.com]

I will come out in full support of Athelind on this one.

I adore the concept of fanfic because it subverts what has, for entirely too long, been a one way relationship -- media firms distribute stuff and consumers consume it. Before the printing press, really, all storytelling was a fairly interactive thing. Without even the concept of intellectual property, every story was everyone's story. I mean, look at the vast panoply of, say, Arthuriana where Arthur is depicted as a romantically tragic figure in Mallory, to a brutal warlord in the Alliterate Morte DArthur to a coward in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. That's the way that stories used to be told, the characters and situations being adapted for the audience and by the audience. Fanfic and role-playing games give the audience that power back, and it's probably the most significant literary event of at least the past hundred years.

[athelind.livejournal.com]

Thank you! I was drafting comments along this line; you've saved me the trouble.

I don't know if the public appropriation of stories ever really went away, though. Even in a period when copyright was firmly established, we got stuff like Edison's Conquest of Mars.

[cpxbrex.livejournal.com]

Oh, sure, it's never completely died out. As a youth in the pre-Internet days some of my own earliest writing was fanfic, though there was no term for it, then -- fiction based on characters and situations of someone else's invention. But I think that in the age of centralized publishing and distribution, for a while the cultural acceptability of modifying "someone else's" story dropped to a very low point relative to previous periods.

I mean, hehe, I was thinking of writing a post that talks about great works of literature where I was going to point out that Shakespeare wrote basically nothing original, and merely retold existing storylines. He totally retconned Hamlet! ;) In former years, derivative literature -- I mean Shakespeare, Milton, Mallory, Chaucer, you name it -- defined quality literature. The biggest names in English lit did not write original stories. The ability to retell existing stories defined quality literature! Not anymore. And I'm not necessarily suggesting the way we do things now is bad (but we might want to consider it, given the dominance with which, y'know, fanfic dominates great English literature with an iron fist) but at one time fanfic defined quality literature. The ability to retell an old story well was far more important than the ability to tell a new story.

So, yeah, it never stopped, but the acceptability and perceived literary relevance has changed a whole lot. And I do think that fanfic is part of the reversal of that trend . . . though I suspect the road is going to be rocky in v. many ways.

[stalbon.livejournal.com]

I would quite agree to the term 'fanfic' being non-perjorative. I've read fanfics that would far exceed things written by the original creators...the Extended Star Wars universe novels being among the best. Lucas' original three scripts are most excellent, but when you enter this decade's works, I'd far prefer reading the novels of authors paid to use his characters in novels than his drivel of a storyline. The Star Trek Titan novels, which you likely term as fanfics as well, are also among my favorites, though I hardly see their original source material in as bad a light.

[stalbon.livejournal.com]

Ok...thinking it over more, I suppose I agree in the non-perjorative sense on fiction and movie licenses, etc. It would be hard to include a few genres into the all-encompassing term you write it to be, but...it works for most. I still stick to what I said about most of the science-fiction 'fanfics' I've read.