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Dear God, I too have spawned a monster... I lose Internet access for one day (one lousy day!), and see what happens?
Picking up a few points from here & there... I hope this isn't too pedantic, seeing as the "right to readership" question has been fairly throroughly shaken around, but going back to your original reply to me, DeepTrope:
quote: 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.
But aren't I going to do that when I read it anyway? Otherwise I'm not going to be able to understand the characters at all, seeing as I don't have access to the same neuroses, mind, hates & hopes as you made them out of. I mean, I can see there's a difference between me reading the characters differently from the way you wrote them (which is inevitable, to some degree) and me going on to say that the characters *did* something that you didn't write - but I don't think it's as big a difference as you do. Certainly my particular hang-ups are going to be scrawled all over your characters from the moment I open the book. If these things are "your secrets", why are you showing them to other people and thus *necessarily* opening them up to being invested by other neuroses/attachments/etc?
And from the same post, I said:
quote: 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?
and you said:
quote: 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.
But... that's what critics do! I can't obviously refer to any of your work here, but - have you ever read Jean Rhys's "Good Morning Midnight"? Critics have been arguing for years over the ending, where the narrator has sex with a really vile man: is it hopeful, suggesting her openness to the Other and her pleasure in other people, or is it the last stage in her degradation and dehumanization? Speculation over the fates of the characters is perfectly "legitimate criticism" - though again I'll admit there's a difference between that and insisting that, eg, no-one dies at the end of Hamlet (which would be closer to 'fanfic' in the narrow sense).
Ironically, a lot of the debate over Good Morning Midnight focusses on the relationship between the narrator's last words ("Yes Yes") and Molly Bloom's "yes yes" at the end of Ulysses. Meaning and reading really can't take place without reference to other texts...
Incidentally, DeepTrope, if it is the case that (as you said in the same post again!) your characters end where you say they do and don't leave the boundaries of your text, I should think you're at very low risk of being fanficked. As far as I can see, the vast majority of fanfic comes out of multi-authored, serial shows, where even in the original canon it is the case that a bunch of people are playing in the same universe. The late and majestic Terry Nation, who created Blake's 7, was, I'm told, very pissed off with what Chris Boucher did in the last ever episode.
And Ghost Doctor (I think) said:
quote: This may be a simplistic way of looking at things, but I really have difficulty understanding why anyone would want to write fan-fic instead of using their own characters, or at least changing stuff about other peoples characters so they essentially become something new (The Watchmen's use of old charlton characters for example).
I just can't get it. It's the whole scribbling in the margins thing that turns me off.
Well, I like scribbling in the margins.
I was thinking about this in terms of what Jack Fear was saying earlier - whether fanfic refers to/ seeks to change anything outside its canon. For me, the Blake's 7 universe and the canonical events therein make up a fantastic set of metaphors and dynamics which allow me to say something about "the real world" (for want of a better term). The politics of resistance, the gay relationships (subtextual but still "there": slash is NOT just being imposed at random, or at least not by me and the other members of the Pink Triangle Rebel Consortium): questions about the authenticity of experience, the limits of freedom, the destructive side of mourning, what we owe to love vs what we owe to politics, the social structure of late Capitalism and totalitarian states... all there in B7 waiting to be unpacked and explored.
I could do this unpacking and exploring by writing theory about it (and have, and do), or talking to other fans about it (and have, and do) - or by writing fanfic about it (which obviously I also do). Each reaches a different audience and has different effects, but fanfiction gives me much greater possibilities than either theory or, if I'm honest, realfic.
And The Flyboy said:
quote: But most if not all slash fiction not only violates the creator's original intent, but makes a virtue of doing so?
Depends. An awful lot of slash writers (at least in B7, I don't know about these Other Fandoms) see themselves not as violating the original intent, but as restoring the bits of canon that couldn't be shown on the Beeb in a kids' show in 1978-81. It's fairly clear to me and others that Blake and Avon were sexually interested in each other, but due to broadcasting conventions that couldn't be shown...
Of course a lot of other slash writers will say that the sex is metaphorical, a way of exploring the dynamic between B&A (or whoever) in more intense terms. And a lot of others will say that they just put B&A (or whoever) together to see what would happen *if* they had sex, in order to get more insight into one or other or both of them.
God, this is a long post. I need to get back to my slash mailing list and discuss, oddly, slash and books, so I'll bugger off now. |
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