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quote:I hope nothing I'm about to say comes across as offensive, but I'm interested in this. Don't worry - I'm not offended by debate. I'm not actually 'offended' by fanfic. It's a far more visceral reaction than that, like gagging, or protecting your home.
quote:Can I ask what medium you create in (ie comics, prose, TV)? Just because there seems to be a feeling among fanfic writers that book-fanfic is morally more dodgy than ... well, than any other kind except Real People Slash. I think that's because fanfic & original text are in the same medium, so it feels like a more direct co-optation.All of the above.
I think you're probably right about why book-fanfic has a little more guilt attached. There's an awareness of the ghost of 'passing off'. But to me it makes no difference. It's the appropriation of my work, and my mind, by someone else.
quote:Can I also ask where you draw the line? If I read some of your stuff, came up to you and said "God, I loved it, I spotted a bit of a sexual subtext between X and Y" or "I think Y probably went to London after the end of the work", would that make you want to kill me?Assuming we were in the pub, I think I'd just wear my tolerant face and get a little uneasy. I may not have thought about what happened next. That may be the point for me, that it ends there. These are not real people. Their lives do not continue. They stop when and where I say so. I'm not comfortable with interpreting or extrapolating from my work unless I'm doing more on the same topic. quote:Would it depend on whether you agreed with me about the subtext/going to London thing, and had deliberately put them in, or whether you thought I was a fucking idiot who couldn't understand a word of what you were trying to do? What about if I speculated about the fates of the characters, or possible implications of the universe you'd created, in the form of a review or paper? Or would you just be upset if I wrote it down in narrative form?If you wrote about it in a review, I'd think you were either missing the point or wishing you were a writer, not a critic. Which I would respect, up to a point. You see quite a few reviews where the critic obviously wishes they'd written the novel.
But no, it's you sitting in my seat that winds me up. You're wearing my clothes, breathing my breath...but it's not me, it's you. You have other neuroses, other loves, and you will invest my characters (my alternate identities and fragments, my secrets) with your mind, your ideas, your hates and hopes. Short of deliberate psychological or physical attack, I can't think of a more profound violation.
And it's done so casually! As if I won't care at all. When I work with a collaborator (and I do from time to time) we have to be profoundly careful of each other. We do not, ever, mock. We are careful to preserve the integrity of the characters, their tensions, their subtexts. This stuff is often about doing the opposite. It's about the traduction of the characters, warping them to whatever single aspect or unlikely fantasy you've decided they should follow, or about extrematising them. Kirk fucks Spock. Ho ho ho. And by implication, two aspects of self which are in exquisite and possibly painful tension are brought smashing together.
Even when this kind of thing doesn't happen, when it's just about continuing the plot, that's quite bad enough. It rules out avenues, because once it's done, there are copyright issues, but also because if I see it, it messes with the extremely delicate lattice in my head which is the pattern to write more in that vein. It pollutes the pool from which I drink to make the stuff in the first place.
quote:And I also wanted to say that
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It hurt me to make that up. Some of my neuroses and my loves and part everthing I am went into that.
applies equally to my fanfic. I've just finished a three-month redraft on a 18,000 word story and it damn nearly killed me. It's not like fanfic is easy.
I'm sure that's true, at least for you. I saw your site ages ago, and one of the things about which is patently obvious is its intelligence. That's why we're even having this conversation.
But frankly, if you can write well, you can write well, and you have the tools to make your own world. Lifting someone else's is shorthand at best. At worst, the reason for doing it is somewhat darker: satisfaction from getting the characters to traduce themselves, or to suffer events which are utterly out of character for the universe in which they live. Part of who they are originally hinges on the fact that they don't do they things they act out in fanfic. There's sexual tension which they do not fulfill. There's love or hate which is never expressed. And they'd be amazed if it were pointed out, or horrified.
Even when the plot and characters follow a plausible path, that just means you've taken from the writer the chance to deal with those issues in his or her own way.
So I don't get it. Fanfic is the theft of creative space. If you can do anything worthwhile there, why not make your own space? Where your own identity can blossom without running up against the ghost of someone else's? And how, as a writer, can you ever imagine that this kind of thing is anything other than a ghastly personal invasion, like breaking into someone's house and sleeping in their bed? |
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