silveradept | Special Comment: Wherein we visit fanfic-land (Part 3 of 2)

We’re back to fanfiction-land for a little bit because I thought it would make a good appendix onto the whole matter. If you’ll recall, in out last excursion, we took on the premise that fan-fiction is inherently bad on legal grounds, copyright grounds, and inducing squick in the author grounds, with special squick devoted to Rule 34-type fictions. Lacking some in those places were other good responses and results from the fallout - until, that is, someone else found a good bundle and I shamelessly am going to reproduce them. Thanks,

branewurms.

Catherynne M. Valente points out that authors who complain about facfiction hurting them are often big established names, people who can probably count on making their advance back on name recognition purchases alone, regardless of quality. Thus, they don’t have to worry about alienating their fic audience, because there will be enough to cover. Midlist authors or non best-sellers, though, are still scrabbling to get people to read their material, and if someone’s fanfic inspires sales or reading of the original material, then that’s good! It might even be marked as a badge of pride, that someone cared enough about the material to fanfic it. She also points out that for a storyteller to complain about people mixing, borrowing, sampling, and remixing their work in their own contexts has missed the point - we’re all remixing someone else’s material somewhere along the line.

Actually, let’s expand upon that point at great length. We’ll call in guest lecturer

bookshop to show off just how many works, some of them award-winning, are derived from other works, some of which are also award-winning or are considered classics or staples of literature.. (Oh, and at least one instance that would qualify under the trope Older Than Dirt, because both original and fanfic have survived and are read by many today.) Many of the sources have passed into the public domain, and are thus freely remixable, but the point is that remixing a story into another is hardwired into the storyteller’s craft. Just look at the time suck that is TVTropes, and you’ll see that multiple stories across time have been using the same basic building blocks of narrative, characterization, and setting, many of them in unique ways for their times (and others in derivative ways for their times).

thefourthvine details some legitimate reasons for authors to be afraid of fanfic. They all relate, in one way or another, to losing the audience one has carefully cultivated to authors that are better than you and do their work for free. It could be that you took the books in a direction fandom finds poor, fandom-aware writers are doing a better job of appealing to your readers, critical reading of your tale has exposed its anti-feminist underbelly, the lecture hall of writing turning into a discussion forum or call-and-response of canon-fanon, or that you behaved like an ass on the Internet or in real life and are getting called out on it. In all of those cases, your reading audience that normally thought of you as pretty cool finds itself entranced by someone else, or is actively leaving your fandom in disgust, and there goes your sales.

That said, sometimes these kerfuffles do produce positive results - for one, while legally, authors still won’t read your fanfic and will have it taken down if you wave it at them, some of them can change their mind and be okay with its existence. Members of fandom can and should learn not to wave dubiously legal things at creators (it’s in the con book autograph section: Only officially licensed material is permitted, and the final word on the legality of the material is up to the discretion of the con staff and the guest.) so as to maintain a healthy relationship.