Writer's Block: Sheldon and Penny 4ever!

[athelind]

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Fanfiction: Do you love it or hate it, or are you totally indifferent? Why?

Intellectually, I respect the concept of transformative art.

As a gamer, well, even if you're not playing in a licensed setting, that's all about pillaging pop culture and repurposing it.

As a creative impulse, though ... I just don't get it.

Let me clarify.

I grew up as a comics fan in the late '60s and early '70s, at the dawn of what the fandom calls The Bronze Age. In addition to everything going on at Marvel and DC at the time, it was also a period when a lot of books were coming out about the history of comics.

I didn't just grow up reading about Superman and Batman, Spider-Man and the Hulk -- I grew up reading about Siegel and Schuster, and Bob Kane and Bill Finger, and Stan and Jack and Ditko and Steranko, all these scrappy, struggling guys, exploding with new ideas as they struggled to create a whole new art form.

And I didn't want to write about their creations.

I wanted to create my own characters.

Am I saying that's somehow "better" than fanfic?

Hell, no!

I've got characters by the score. A lot of you know a few of them: I've roleplayed them, online and on the tabletop. Some of you have heard me kick around ideas and concepts for others. There's a passel of them that even I've forgotten about, or recycled into other characters.

What I don't have is stories, and that, arguably, is a lot more important if you actually want to write. scarfman has shown that it's not hard to take stories originally written as fanfic for licensed properties and turn it into something new and different by substituting different charaqcters.* If you don't have any stories, though, all you have is a bunch of people standing around, doing nothing, with no way to show how cool and exotic they are.

There's a connection to this line of thinking and the irritation that I feel about DC dragging its old Silver Age characters back into the limelight, but I have a beer in me, so that's going to have to wait.

... possibly until I have more than one beer in me.

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*If you don't like that example, remember that Douglas Adams recycled a couple of his mostly-unproduced Doctor Who scripts into one of the Hitchhiker's books and Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency.

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... and who the heck are Sheldon and Penny?

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Comments

[athelind.livejournal.com]

I am nearly insulted that you thought I didn't know about Star Wars: Legacy! Oh, I know about it, all right. ;)

Well, um, Your Obedient Serpent didn't know about it until a year ago, when he got invited to play in a Legacy-era Star Wars Saga campaign.

My original reaction was "Eh, Star Wars. But any game with this group is going to be fun. I've seen the Legacy trades on the shelf at work; I should read'em to get a better feel for the game."

Of course, when I opened the first one up and saw the credits, I realized that this wasn't a George Lucas game -- it was a John Ostrander game, and that was a whole new playing field.

I should note that getting pulled into Saga has also influenced my attitude toward fanfiction. Perusing Wookieepedia introduced me to the better parts of the Expanded Universe (and is a much better way of assimilating the less-impressive parts than plowing through stacks of cheesy paperbacks), and I've discovered that I really, really like it as a game setting, far more than as a literary/cinematic creation.

My GMs, rikoshi and tealfox, have regularly asserted that they really love George Lucas' creations -- they just aren't thrilled with what George has gone back and done with them.

And that, I get.

I recently watched all six Star Wars movies again, in 1-6 order, and realized that, when all was said and done, after all the knee-jerk They Changed It Now It Sucks reactions were out of the way, just watching the prequel trilogy as movies on their own merit ...

... they're really bad.

There's a really good story in there, about Anakin's rise and fall -- and maybe, someday, someone will tell it.

So, yeah. I don't, on a gut level, "get" fanfic. But I'm learning.

And I've gotten to the point where I respect it as much as I do the commercial, official continuations of licensed properties that, because of the twisting and distortion of copyright law in the 20th century, may never make it to the public domain and the cultural commons in our lifetimes.

Relevant to the above

[athelind.livejournal.com]

[cpxbrex.livejournal.com]

I sort of rediscovered Star Wars with the video game Knights of the Old Republic which is a very compelling video game. I've read a fair number of Star Wars comics. They've got a lot of what I'm looking for in a comic and they're often . . . surprisingly well done. I suspect because Lucas doesn't have that much of a hand in them, actually. Like your friends, I like a fair bit about Star Wars - I'm a sucker for sword twirling philosophical martial artists - because it can be exotic without being racist (though, as Lucas himself demonstrated, it certainly *can* be racist) and it's full of action with these well-understood constructs that are useful shorthand when building media (including RPGs).

I, personally, don't even like the term "fanfic". I prefer to think of it is, y'know, writing. Almost all the great literature of the world would qualify as some kind of fanfic, in the sense that it's a derivative work or a work derived from other people's work and characters. It's just that in the pre-modern world the idea of intellectual property didn't exist. So, y'know, when those dead Greek guys wrote a bunch of plays about what happened to people when they got back from the Trojan War, it isn't fanfic but the foundation of Western literature. So, before modern IP laws, if you were writing a story about, say, Gawain, that's what you'd say - "I'm writing a story about Gawain, except its told as if the people at the court of Camelot are as venal and petty as lords are in our world." If you write about, say, Harry Potter, it is "reduced" (and in the eyes of most people, fanfic is "reduced") to the status of fanfic, even if they're writing the Gawain and the Green Knight of "fanfic". So I dislike the term because it's a slur that has been internalized by a lot of the people in the fanfic community.

Officialness is no mark of quality, though big businesses have put a LOT of effort into making sure *we* think that's the case. I think it's an artificial position and . . . I've had a fair bit of direct experience with it. You've heard me talk about how hard it is to get my friends to try reading my stuff - my friends - when they almost constantly consume media that is, frankly, embarrassing in it's awfulness. But they're so invested with the idea that something it's really literature until it's been authorized by a print label that they can't think past this. This is even true when they agree with me, in principle, that this is clearly the case. But at this point we've had a century of this crap, so I'm not terribly surprised a multi-generational propaganda campaign has worked.

I think it is obvious that creating stories with characters and situations not of your own invention has been used at all times and in all places, creating most of the literature that people call "classic" - such as the Hellenic playwrights, the entire corpus of Shakespeare and certainly every epic ever put to paper. The denigration of literature that uses copywritten material outside of established publishing and distribution channels is a recent invention created to keep us buying material out of those channels.

I am *robustly* for fanfic. One could even say I like it so much I bought the company - Adrienne has jokingly referred to Simon Peter as my Jesus fanfic. What can I say? I have written an extremely derivative work wherein I seek to "fix" the problems I see with the Gospels. If I had written a book "fixing" Harry Potter or Star Wars instead of the Bible, it'd certainly be considered fanfic. And there are parts of Revolutionary Boy Martin that . . . I think Dumas would be able to sue, hehe, though he would not. (To quote: "I breathe fresh life into old stories and for this they want to call me a plagiarist?" I fancy that Dumas would approve of how I'm writing RBM.) I am quite consciously basing character attributes of various characters in RBM after The Three Musketeers (which might ITSELF be considered fanfic because it was a reimagining of d'Artagnan's fictionalized memoirs; there is no bottom to this rabbit hole).