a love like that: Fan Fiction and Why it Matters

Fan Fiction and Why it Matters

FS says: Fan fiction is one of those guilty pleasures of fandom that people pretend not to know about, or read, much less write. But its been done for ages from Hellenistic Greek Tragedy to the first of the Sherlock Holmes pastiches (did you know that Mark Twain wrote one?) to the latest BBC Sherlock crack-fic.

The quote below suggests that, fanfic is just a legal category, not a creative one, which I buy as a reminder of the actual artistic value of fanfic, but I would argue isn’t that helpful to us communication and media theorists who really study fan culture.

Because in essence, fanfic functions theoretically differently than “regular” fiction, and here is why:

1. First the challenge is greater in some ways because the writer must stay in character since their audience consists of experts of those characters.

2. The distribution of fanfic is different. The internet has increased the access of fanfic writers, many who have never been officially published, to an audience directly.

3. There is also an increase in actual interaction with readers, both through positive and negative commentary, and through fan creations like art and additional fanfic inspired by the stories

4. Because there is no actual profit involved, the writer can directly address issues that would not be faced by market driven publishers. More LGBTQ stories, explicit sex, BDSM, trans* issues, consent, disability, and more, are addressed in fascinating ways that allow scholars to really use this fiction to analyze a broader range of actual cultural make-up than officially published material.

5. The tropes of fanfic are different, by far, than those used by officially sanctioned media, which marks it as a unique category of text.

I could go on, and I will (in other posts today) because this is what I find so fascinating about the history of the Sherlock fandom. And (this is the main thrust of my comments) this is why fanfic is of extreme value to the cultural historian or communication theorist. To ignore fanfic as “amateur” or as “silly” and deem it not worth studying is to critically miss both the natural thrust of the reader/writer relationship, but also to loose something that is a valuable resource.

Never let someone tell you that fanfic is silly or stupid or dorky or wrong. Fanfic is something that is an inherent part of who we are as natural storytellers, and something that reveals far more about our daily lives/thoughts/understanding/issues than “published” works do.

I’ll be going on about this later today, but this, my dear fandom is why what we do everyday on here is vital.

saathi1013:

“Storytelling is basic to our species. It’s one of the ways we parse our experience of the universe. Whatever moves us or matters to us will show up in the stories we tell, whether or not we have a socially approved outlet for those stories. It might surprise you to find out how many writers have works of personal erotica tucked away in their unpublished-or-unpublishable manuscript trunks. There’s no good way to get those published, but they write them anyway, because they’re writers, and eroticism is an important part of our lives.

“Good fiction gets under our skin. It can change the way we see the world. But whatever its effect, it’s a significant experience. It would be a bizarre thing—unnatural, even—for writers to not engage with that experience. They always have. I could show you stuff centuries old—heck, some of it’s millennia old—that’s fanfic by any modern definition.

“Of course, it would have to be a modern definition. In a purely literary sense, fanfic doesn’t exist. There is only fiction. Fanfic is a legal category created by the modern system of trademarks and copyrights. Putting that label on a work of fiction says nothing about its quality, its creativity, or the intent of the writer who created it.

“The Pulitzer Prize for Fiction this year went to March, a novel by Geraldine Brooks, published by Viking. It’s a re-imagining of the life of the father of the four March girls in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. Can you see a particle of difference between that and a work of declared fanfiction? I can’t. I can only see two differences: first, Louisa May Alcott is out of copyright; and second, Louisa May Alcott, Geraldine Brooks, and Viking are dreadfully respectable.

“I’m just a tad cynical about authors who rage against fanfic. Their own work may be original to them, but even if their writing is so outre that it’s barely readable, they’ll still be using tropes and techniques and conventions they picked up from other writers. We have a system that counts some borrowings as legitimate, others as illegitimate. They stick with the legit sort, but they’re still writing out of and into the shared web of literature. They’re not so different as all that.

“Fanfic means someone cares about what you wrote.

“Personally, I’m convinced that the legends of the Holy Grail are fanfic about the Eucharist.

“This really is a basic impulse.”

— “Fanfic”: force of nature

by Patrick at Making Light

(Full Article at Making Light)