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The Body Fictive

  
  

Page: 12(3)

 
 
RiffRaff
11:59 / 05.09.01
There's a lot of posts here, and admittedly, I only really read the last page of them, but I did read the original article...

That said, what about parody? It's certainly protected under copyright law. Is Weird Al Yankovic changing "Another One Bites The Dust" into "Another One Rides The Bus" significantly different from fanfic? What's more, he profits from it.

Here's another situation, up for discussion: Someone writes a hardcore fic involving two favorite anime characters. Someone else, disturbed by it, writes a meta-fic of it, in Mystery Science Theatre 3000 format. So, a fanfic of a fanfic. What about it?

(Okay, I give: 'Someone else' in that last sentence is really me. The meta-fic is [URL=http://www.geocities.com/nconner23/swkdmst.txt ]here.[/URL] End plug. Question's still valid, tho.)

[ 05-09-2001: Message edited by: RiffRaff ]
 
 
Regrettable Juvenilia
13:29 / 05.09.01
quote:Originally posted by Tom Coates:
Thank you Nick for that last line, which is the closest thing anyone has ever said here to the Barbelith OFF switch.

With all due respect, Tom: if every one of us declared it to be lights-out time whenever a thread didn't pan out as we'd hoped, things would get a bit melodramatic around here.

Nick is unhappy because he feels he's never going to change anyone's mind - and he uses an analogy which casts him in the role of the voice of reason, pleading to the deaf ears of foolhardy oppressors. Conversely, I know of at least a couple of people from the other (or more accurately, another) side of this debate who feel exactly the same way. I think the problem with trying to move this discussion "forwards" is that Nick (and others) feel that certain of his points have been clearly established now and we can move on from there. Not everyone agrees.

However, if there's a general consensus that this topic is one on which the future of the boards rests or falls, I'd better re-read that article...
 
 
Cat Chant
14:32 / 05.09.01
Blimey.

Nick wrote:

quote: it seems that whatever I might have said, I was never going to change anyone's behaviour. It's like being the keynote speaker on global warming at a Big Oil conference. The position I keep running into on and off the board is "I like it, I want to do it, I don't care what anyone thinks, and you can't stop me".

Well, guess what? I wouldn't, but I could.

I'm not sure you could, actually. Obviously you can stop fanfic of your own stuff being 'published' in any way, but it seems to be the case that it's the *existence* of fanfic which squicks you, not its publication - or am I wrong?

Aaargh, off to the wrong start already. Sorry, I'm finding it very difficult to find a tone for this: I'm having a horrible week and keep retreating into "pissy" or "defensive" in the posts I compose in my head. Will attempt to squish this, and apologies if I fail.

I do feel like I'm being misread here (since I'm the only person 'on the board', as far as I know, who has said anything like 'I'm going to keep doing it, sucks to you'). Fair enough: misreading founds the possibility of reading and I would be the last person in the world to attempt to police 'proper' reading or insist that I own the meaning of what I've published on this board (tee-hee). But in the interests of attempting to depolarize this debate a bit, I want to offer the following:

1. I'm stuck at the moment on the attempt to theorize the reaction I have to writers asking not to be fanficked - which is, as I've said, "Tough". I actually offered that not as a monolithic "and nothing you can say will change my mind", but in an attempt to expose the untheorized gut reaction to public view and thus progress a little on the way to theorizing it, without overt self-justification. Probably should have made that more clear.

2. As to the way forward... I think my problem with trying to enter your thinking here, Nick, is that I can't see anywhere for *reading* to take place. I can't extrapolate a model for a reading that would respect the boundaries of the body fictive, given that a reader is unable to determine where those boundaries lie and the extent to which any writer's identity is invested in any particular fictivebodytext. And I can't work out where I stand on the ethicality of writing fanfic under this model until I know where the boundary between reading and writing is. This is probably because I'm so steeped in Derrida that I don't think there *is* a boundary.

Hence:

quote: You aren't concerned, apparently, with traducing someone else's identity - even in the rather more obvious and overt way you mention here.

See, that's my point. (See me heroically refrain from getting into an argument about slash art.) I am still not convinced that writing fanfic amounts to slandering the identity of the source author (or the actor, since slash art really switches the terms a bit there). What I think *I'm* interested in, in terms of the next stage, is the asymmetry between the author's investment in a text and the reader's, and whether this asymmetry can be rigorously defended & upheld.

You say:

quote: My response would be that it's not your body, until you make it yours - at which point, as I say, the whole thing becomes much more complex for me, because I accept that once it has happened, the same defenses apply. But that doesn't mean that what you did in the first place was blameless

What I'm interested in is how your body-fictive model allows a 'pure' reading to take place - one where there is a blameless reader who does not make the text into hir body/identity. Or is it just a question of degree?

Sorry if I've contributed to this polarization. I've been trying, in good faith, to test out some of the arguments Nick's been putting forward through reinstating the reader/fanfic writer's position and seeing if it could match up with any of the patterns in the body fictive.

I shall bugger off now, I have to go talk about lesbianism in the Roman world (or, as I like to call it, "slashing Vergil" )
 
 
YNH
18:31 / 05.09.01
Wow, space out for a bit and the world changes.

I've noticed a bit of what Tom's talking about, too: down in TV I'm giving all ground but possibility and being told that if that's it, then why bother.

There's always room for synthesis though. (I wonder if this should start a new thread?)

Anyway, the fool brings up or summarizes a point espoused by a few of us: mainly that our body fictive is interpentrated and colonial. This is the typical postmodern decentralization of the I. Nick questions this move with good reason. Even postmetahumans like Haus likely don't spend much time floating in the ironosphere rather than worrying about what to eat and stuff.

At this point, whichever one might be more true might not even be relevant. In fact, Nick seems to be attempting to define the encounter between the two: an acculturated I experiencing the contradictions of interpenetration. The ambivalent feelings s/he admits regarding existing fanfic versus potential fanfic point this way, too. This is one of the confusing spaces we probably need to be working in.

-Is it all about protecting the fictor?
-Is it about respecting the process and artifacts of identity?

The obvious complimentary topic is Deva's fanfic model of fiction (still undefined, really). Is this an intertextual model of cultural production? One that recognizes the roots of human storytelling - the repetition and embelishment of oral cultures (see, for example, the theory that Homer merely wrote down a version of an old tale and relatively modern anthropological surveys of Slavic stroytellers).

Do we articulate stories from a cultural database (noosphere?) Is the Enlightenment/Romantic construction of authorship/ownership a step forward from a messy past or a contingent byproduct of capital's need to inhabit all aspects of life? Both? Is there a method of protecting one fictor from another while still encouraging vibrant cultural exchanges? Is a dialogue between author and audience, while possibly not the most profitable model, useful or healthy?

How strict should copywrite be? For those who would say, "not at all," such a response won't be very useful. Using Grant Morrison as an example (Ragged Robin is a self fanfic if I ever saw one, by the way, Tom): where would one draw a hypothetical line? Anarchist cells of five locked in a battle between order an chaos? A guy named Gideon liberating a boy named Jack? There are scary cases like artists getting sued by former record companies for using a melody too similar to one the wrote while under the company's banner. AOL/Time Warner owns "Happy Birthday to You" and polices its public use. Are these examples problematic or heroic?

Just in case anyone is wondering, like RiffRaff, about Weird Al: he gets permission before publishing. This poses an interesting question that's probably easily answered: if you say it's okay, is that instance explicitly exempt from any conventions that might exist? And, particularly today, who gets to say so? Most published work, as Nick inadvertently points out, is the provence of the publisher and not the worker.

Does that change anything? Is there a right to engage, alter, and contribute to culture? Nick seems to suggest (in contrast to Deva) that any fictor should respect the wishes of another, but we're still working out to what degree.

I've been thinking about something that flashed briefly thru my head a year or two ago. Is there a space for fictive wherein we simply use footnotes and quotations, as we would with critical or theoretical work?

Similar, but different, could I appropriate the name King Mob (pretty much public domain pre-GM) for a character, Kim Carsons for another, give them guns and place them at the entrance of Lonely Mountain talking to Humpty Dumpty whose sitting on the wall, waiting for King Ubu and his men? Can I further snip bits of plot from Tom Sawyer and Byron's "Darkness?" Even say I change all the proper names... In many ways that might be less a creative act (particularly within the model were in for these threads) than actually roaming around in Chiba City with a young Jules Dean. But the latter would be easier to prosecute, the former being possibly even unrecognizable.

And I'm not sure if Nick ever adressed this, but I'll pose it as an open question: after copywrite expires (say 75 years unless you're Disney - rotten fucking bastards), are the fictive elements free game?

If that doesn't breathe some life into this, then Tom's prolly right.
 
 
the Fool
00:42 / 06.09.01
>>Similar, but different, could I appropriate the name King Mob (pretty much public domain pre-GM) for a character, Kim Carsons for another, give them guns and place them at the entrance of Lonely Mountain talking to Humpty Dumpty whose sitting on the wall, waiting for King Ubu and his men? Can I further snip bits of plot from Tom Sawyer and Byron's "Darkness?" Even say I change all the proper names... <<

Planetary?
 
 
the Fool
04:21 / 06.09.01
I've had an idea, a way we can move this forward perhaps. An experiement.

Let's unpack this notion of transgression by performing a transgression. Someone offers up a fictional character of their own creation to be deliberately fanficed. Once in a deliberately transgressive and possibly offensive way and then again in an attempt to see through the eyes of the creator - as a homage.

Then we examine the reactions of the author and their feelings regarding both pieces. We need more than one author to offer a up character so we can draw comparisons between their reactions, and see if there is agreement to its effect on them.

Finally we have to decide what rules we apply to the fanficers. This might be more revealing than the reactions, and give us an idea of what boundaries we place around things we identify with.

Whadyathink eh?
 
 
We're The Great Old Ones Now
07:31 / 06.09.01
Flyboy:

quote:Nick is unhappy because he feels he's never going to change anyone's mind - and he uses an analogy which casts him in the role of the voice of reason, pleading to the deaf ears of foolhardy oppressors.Uhhh, that would be the 'enlightenment' comment, yeah? That was actually a more general pop at the board as a whole, which Tom took rather more to heart than I imagined. It had little direct bearing on the conversation in hand.

quote:I think the problem with trying to move this discussion "forwards" is that Nick (and others) feel that certain of his points have been clearly established now and we can move on from there.I don't feel that at all. On the other hand, no one's taken much of a shot at knocking them down. Although I expect Haus to bladder me about the head and neck with some post-structuralism at any moment.

Deva:

quote:Sorry, I'm finding it very difficult to find a tone for this: I'm having a horrible week and keep retreating into "pissy" or "defensive" in the posts I compose in my head. Will attempt to squish this, and apologies if I fail.Ooooooh, Deva. We should start a 'week of doom' club. Don't worry, I'll keep my shirt on.

quote:Obviously you can stop fanfic of your own stuff being 'published' in any way, but it seems to be the case that it's the *existence* of fanfic which squicks you, not its publication - or am I wrong? I don't want to stop people. I want them to stop, or at least consider possible implications and adopt a compromise. The more I look around off the board, however, the less I see any likelihood of a compromise position.

quote:I can't work out where I stand on the ethicality of writing fanfic under this model until I know where the boundary between reading and writing is. This is probably because I'm so steeped in Derrida that I don't think there *is* a boundary.And yet the outward differences are fairly obvious. And I experience the two things very differently - how about you? I agree - it's not simple. I doubt that it can't be done, however. I suppose I'd start with the difference between examining an identity record text, partiticpating in it, and extending it or codifying a new one. Actually, now that I think about it, it's not that hard.

quote:I am still not convinced that writing fanfic amounts to slandering the identity of the source author (or the actor, since slash art really switches the terms a bit there). Not 'slandering'. Remaking. I couldn't care less about slander. That's just reviewing...

quote:What I think *I'm* interested in, in terms of the next stage, is the asymmetry between the author's investment in a text and the reader's, and whether this asymmetry can be rigorously defended & upheld. Interesting, but I'm not convinced it makes a difference to my position either way. Why does the reader's 'investment' make a difference? And what constitutes 'investment' here? I've only used the term regarding writing, I think...back to the previous point.

YNH:

...thanks...

Point of fact:
quote:Most published work, as Nick inadvertently points out, is the provence of the publisher and not the worker.It's a little more complicated, I think. Publishers buy the right to reproduce a novel, the actual copyright remains with the writer.

I didn't know someone 'owned' Happy Birthday...what a shambles. That's like the US companies trying to 'patent' basmati rice and secure the name...they lost, by the way, in case you missed that...

I think copyright probably lasts longer than any moral ground not to engage with someone else's body fictive. Most likely by about 75 years...give or take a decade.

Fool:

Um...
 
 
Regrettable Juvenilia
08:38 / 06.09.01
quote:Originally posted by Nick:
Uhhh, that would be the 'enlightenment' comment, yeah?

No. The analogy I was referring to was this:

quote:it seems that whatever I might have said, I was never going to change anyone's behaviour. It's like being the keynote speaker on global warming at a Big Oil conference.
 
 
Tom Coates
08:38 / 06.09.01
quote: With all due respect, Tom: if every one of us declared it to be lights-out time whenever a thread didn't pan out as we'd hoped, things would get a bit melodramatic around here.

Am in hurry, so you'll have to forgive me not digging into everything properly at this point. But I'd just like to say of the above quote that what I meant was that if the attitude that Nick was expressing was representative of the current ethos of the board, then it failed and should be put out of its misery. Perhaps for a more structured alternative to arise in its place. Or perhaps not. It's got nothing to do with the thread, per se - although having said that, if I could persuade people that the fate of the board depended directly upon people coming up with exciting new ideas, then I would do so willingly.
 
 
Tom Coates
08:38 / 06.09.01
Ooh. Interesting aside:

quote: I wanted her to be a cultural phenomenon. I wanted there to be dolls, Barbie with kung-fu grip. I wanted people to embrace it in a way that exists beyond, "Oh, that was a wonderful show about lawyers, let's have dinner." I wanted people to internalize it, and make up fantasies where they were in the story, to take it home with them, for it to exist beyond the TV show.

Quote from Joss Whedon - Buffy feature
 
 
deletia
08:38 / 06.09.01
IS there a worthwhile thing to do with plaisir and jouissance here? I mean, the literary or televisual or cinematic or whatever artifact as closed system can be seen as a process of plaisir where, after a fashion, the function of the reader is to interact with the text as if they were scanning ROM - not being allowed to rewrite or "corrupt" it. And then if the "body fictive" becomes permeable, it becomes a process of jouissance, perhaps for both the reader and writer - didn't Lacan say jouissance could be the expression of unbearable pain?

Just trying to provide another angle...don't kill.
 
 
We're The Great Old Ones Now
10:14 / 06.09.01
Haus, I could kiss you...

Whisky, put down the damn polaroid and help...

Could you push that a little? Lacan's on the bleeding edge of my reading.

Tom - that was the department of Goddamn Profound Ennui sizing up its bills, as I suspect you know. I think the board actually has the potential to be, or maybe already is, one of the places which can make people care.

Hence my horror in the first place.

Flyboy:

Well, yeah. That's how it feels. I never said it was a fair comparison, or even a useful point.
 
 
deletia
10:18 / 06.09.01
quote:Originally posted by Nick:
Could you push that a little? Lacan's on the bleeding edge of my reading.


Alas, no. At least, not without a book handy. I am an absolute fucktard when it comes to Lacan...
 
 
Regrettable Juvenilia
10:32 / 06.09.01
quote:Originally posted by Nick:
Well, yeah. That's how it feels. I never said it was a fair comparison, or even a useful point.

Actually, I'm coming round to think that if we accept that both sides feel like that, it's an excellent point. See the Policy.
 
 
We're The Great Old Ones Now
11:42 / 06.09.01
Yes, but at the risk of stating the obvious, I'm right and everyone else is clearly mad.
 
 
Regrettable Juvenilia
12:03 / 06.09.01
Nick, why don't you just come right out and say what you really mean...

Tom - re: Joss Whedon - the man is second to none. I loved that bit as well... I wish I could find a link to where he talks about his feelings on fanfic, because I know he has... seem to remember a line about how some of it made him feel icky. He also said in a recent interview that there was an idea he'd had for a Planetary story (and Fool, I also thought of Planetary when reading YNH's last post), but since he knew Planetary was Warren Ellis' baby, that story idea had now turned into something else. Ellis praised him on his message-board for having the right idea, for twisting it into his "own" stuff instead.

But I'm digressing... Although I'd point out that Buffy is definitely a show that fanfics itself - even slashes itself, quite a lot in recent series (the queering of Willow being a good example, and if they go ahead with Spike/Buffy or Cordelia/Angel, it's slasharama...). Even to the extent of, if not contradicting earlier stories, than painting them in a very different light (eg, how Angel/Darla in Angel series 2 changes the way you look at Angel/Buffy in Buffy series 1).

And, another interesting thing about that feature, is that Whedon mentions that he doesn't read the Buffy novels, because he doesn't have time to keep a watchful eye on every element of the franchise - does that make these novels fanfic? They're not authorised by the originator of the show, after all...

quote:Originally posted by Tom Coates:
what I meant was that if the attitude that Nick was expressing was representative of the current ethos of the board, then it failed and should be put out of its misery. ... It's got nothing to do with the thread, per se - although having said that, if I could persuade people that the fate of the board depended directly upon people coming up with exciting new ideas, then I would do so willingly.

Ah - okay. Point taken.

And I realise that it may seem a little churlish of me to come back into this discussion at the point at which it seems to be reverting back to the "fanfic bad/good" dichotomy... I'm honestly not just trying to score the easy points. There are bits from the article and this thread I want to wrestle with, but I can't quite put my finger on what's causing me unease. I fear it may be as intuitive as the response Nick has to fanfic of his work. Umm. Will try harder.
 
 
YNH
12:41 / 06.09.01
no time, but...

quote:Originally posted by Nick:
I think copyright probably lasts longer than any moral ground not to engage with someone else's body fictive. Most likely by about 75 years...give or take a decade.

So, er, what: ten years then? Since we're arguably looking for something new here, how long is the body fictive to be considered sacred ground?

Re: the Joss Whedon love-in. Woody Guthrie (an Anerican folk singer) once remarked that having his songs, or even a portion of them, pass so fully into the public consciousness that nobody knew who wrote them would be the highest honor ever accorded him.
 
 
We're The Great Old Ones Now
12:53 / 06.09.01
Oh, dear.

Flyboy, I know you know what I'm going to say.

My response to fanfic is not an emotional one.

It has an emotional component, but it is far more than that.

"Emotional" in this context is just another way of saying "irrational", and "can't be/doesn't need to be argued with". I went to a considerable amount of trouble to trace a reaction I felt was beyond mere artistic pique, and in the process I had to codify some of my ideas about society and modernity.

The fact that I've had to object to the fallback description 'emotional' three times in the last couple of pages is part of why I'm feeling that that exercise was bordering on pointless, even though some of the feedback I've had on it was worth the effort a thousand times over.
 
 
Regrettable Juvenilia
12:57 / 06.09.01
Er... could you read my post again, maybe? I deliberately said "intuitive", not "emotional". I think they're different things...
 
 
We're The Great Old Ones Now
14:27 / 06.09.01
Apologies.

My response to fanfic is not intuitive.

Etc.
 
 
the Fool
23:32 / 06.09.01
quote:Originally posted by Nick:
Apologies.
My response to fanfic is not intuitive.

Then why does it seem to come across that way.

I accept all the evidence of constructed selves, that appropriation of these CAN be a bodily transgression and that an author may wish to retain some control over these fictive constructs once they leave hir internal world. But the conclusions you draw do not necessarily hold across the board. Some people FEEL differently about this issue. As seen with the Joss Wheldon quote. Its why I suggest to play a game. Lets see what it FEELS like rather than theorising about the process. Lets get inside the emotional content rather than deny its at play.

Nick, I think your response to fanfic is emotional and I think that that is important.
Fiction begins as emotion. Creation is expression.
 
 
We're The Great Old Ones Now
06:24 / 07.09.01
quote:Then why does it seem to come across that way. Because you'd rather not be challenged, so it's easier to pretend it's not real?

Couldn't be...why else?

Of course. How wrong could I get? I took a week out to consider the theoretical aspects of my reaction, re-read Giddens, Clifford, Adorno, Fromm, Hayles, and god knows who else, spent a couple of days planning and sketching, and wrote three and a half thousand words of argued theory.

You're absolutely right. It's emotional and intuitive, not reasoned at all. There's no rational basis for what I'm saying. Tra la bloody la...

[deep breath]

Regarding Joss Whedon, you will notice that he left Planetary alone because it was Warren Ellis's baby, according to the same interview. Evidence goes both ways, apparently.

I think your position about theory vs. emotion is actually a valid one. 'Feeling' has been ludicrously outlawed by analysis in the academe.

However... rather casually telling me that my reaction is emotional and intuitive in this context is just rude.

And the 'constructs' do not 'leave hir internal world'. That's a grossly inaccurate rendition.

If you want to argue my theory, go ahead, let's debate. But don't misrepresent it in order to demonstrate its weakness or make vague statements about how my 'conclusions don't hold across the board' without saying which. That's just a sneaky way of dismissing the whole thing.
 
 
Cat Chant
10:18 / 07.09.01
I'm in a much better mood now, which means that I'll be writing disjointed tosh at the speed of light rather than over-cryptic tosh very slowly. Enjoy.

Nick - on plaisir & jouissance in writing you don't want to be looking at Lacan (but then as far as I'm concerned you never want to be looking at Lacan), you want to be looking at Roland Barthes, 'The Pleasure of the Text'. It's quoted and its relation to fanfic is worked thru in, um, some random woman's MA dissertation on slash which ended up on my website. You can see the Barthes bit here if you're interested.

Jouissance (bliss) is a disintegration of the self (orgasm, panic, possession-by-god). Plaisir (pleasure) is a reassurance of the stability of self (Ooh, isn't it nice to be me). I think.

Re-skimming through the dissertation, I notice that its author emphasizes the risks of fanfiction in terms of 'torturing' the text, forcing it to speak not in terms of its own voice but in terms of the power the fanfictor has over it, the desire of the fanfictor as 'fiction of power' to make the text speak her own words. This is here - quote:

"There is a sense in which fanfiction can
claim more authority than canon, claim authority over canon: the rearrangement of canon can be more static than canon itself, a way of forcing canon to stand still, supplying the answers to the questions canon leaves open, becoming a fiction of power, a violent (lethal) interpretative reading."

Is this close to what you mean by the way that fanfiction renders the prosthetic fictive body inert, forcing it to do the fictor's bidding and disregarding the necessary openness of certain questions in canon? Cos if so, this is somewhere that author-pov and ficcer-pov models might meet.

On reading, writing & the difference between them:

quote: Why does the reader's 'investment' make a difference? And what constitutes 'investment' here? I've only used the term regarding writing, I think...back to the previous point.

The reader's 'investment' makes a difference because, as you pointed out earlier, once a text has become part of a *reader's* bodyfictive or set of tools/procedures for making a bodyfictive, that reader's fanfiction has to be respected on the same basis as the source text. What I'm interested in is how the source text solicits investment from its readers - given that some degree of investment, engagement of desire & identity & being-in-the-world is necessary to read in the first place - and how your argument depends on the reader's relationship with the text being qualitatively different from the author's investment in it (otherwise both can claim them as identity-making tools, which is pretty much my position: though I'll agree that the relationship of the spindlemaker to the spindle is different from the relationship of the spinner to the spindle, I don't think that the spinner is violating the spindlemaker's relatinship to the spindle. What a very alliterative analogy.)
 
 
deletia
10:30 / 07.09.01
Precisely - Lacan says something about one of the processes of jouissance being a disintegration of self-control as a sublimating mechanism for extreme trauma, which was why I thought it might be an interesting diversion in a subjecdt about the coopting and traumatising of "bodies", bgut the important stuff is as above.
 
 
the Fool
09:32 / 10.09.01
quote:Originally posted by Nick:
Because you'd rather not be challenged, so it's easier to pretend it's not real?

However... rather casually telling me that my reaction is emotional and intuitive in this context is just rude.

If you want to argue my theory, go ahead, let's debate. But don't misrepresent it in order to demonstrate its weakness or make vague statements about how my 'conclusions don't hold across the board' without saying which. That's just a sneaky way of dismissing the whole thing.

I wasn't actually dismissing it as a whole. I agree with most of what you say. Just not the totality with which you presented it. All I wanted to point out is that there are other ways of interpreting the same evidence to reach different conclusions.

Also I apologies for being rude. Was not my intention at all...
 
 
Disco is My Class War
09:32 / 10.09.01
Okay. I've been AWOL on this discussion, after (yes) having decided last week that there wasn't really any point keeping on arguing. And having far too much work to do, also. I agree that it would be good if we could move on to a further discussion or 'new injection' of ideas.

The plaisir/jouissance distinction seems pretty self-evident to me. If we are talking about the 'reader', what is the effective distinction between a reader who finishes a story or book or television stories and fantasises privately about the characters, in a way which 'bends' it from the 'original', and the act of writing that down, and then further the act of making that writing 'public', if the online fanfic/slash community can be called 'public space'?

We're back where we started, but this is something I would like to ask. It feels important. Because if Nick feels that it's the actual act of writing fanfic (no matter how publicly it's distributed) that is harmful, how is that process effectively distinguishable from the process of thinking about a book you particularly liked, dreaming oneself as one of the characters, et cetera? Seems to me that there is no discernable difference. In fact, I guess I see fan-fic as a creative extension of that imaginative process... which is to be encouraged, even.

But this isn't really to do with the author. Who, of course, I have a resistance to belief in. Oh well.
 
  

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