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silveradeptChallenge #13 asks us to create a fanwork. Here's the additional text:
Remix is important to everyone. If you subscribe to the monomyth (Joseph Campbell's idea that heroic journeys all follow the same basic template), then there's only one story, being told in countless variations, each a remix of the underlying concept in what characters, settings, and action it uses. The Aarne-Thompson-Uther index classifies stories based on their components and the variations on those components, showing stories that have the same classifications but that might read very differently from each other, based on what other components are added to the mix.
In music, sampling the beat of one song and providing new words on top, or taking a snippet of the original and building an entire new narrative around it is a very common practice, no matter how much it might aggravate the lawyers. The most famous sample forever is the Amen break, but there's plenty of borrowing and shifting and reworking things going on, sometimes with permission, sometimes without. Weird Al gets permission from the artist he's going to make a parody work for. Not everyone has to, though, as parody is one of the transformative works explicitly excepted from the funnel mechanism that is copyright. Which makes sense, because it defeats the purpose of making fun of someone who deserves it if you have to get their permission to do so first. Sometimes, the parody ends up being more memorable than the original (or the polka medley does). Witness the extremely effective skewering of Sarah Palin by Tina Fey on Saturday Night Live. (Which I think has some lineage from the way that Richard Nixon was a straight man, through and through, on Laugh-In, with the exception of Nixon not realizing that nearly as much as he should have.) And, perhaps, the long-running nature of MAD, the Harvard Lampoon, and Charlie Hebdo. Sometimes the most effective way of making someone harmless and powerless is to make tons of fun of them in an unauthorized way.
Even the way a work is performed is often a remix, because subsequent performances, orchestrations, or choices of collaborator can give the work a completely different feel than the original. Witness, for example, the original, Dido's "Thank You", a remixed version, Eminem's "Stan", which transforms the potentially innocent infatuation into an extremely dangerous obsession, and then, Eminem and Elton John did a performance of the song at the Grammy Awards. Same song, but very different vibe.
And, incidentally, this is where the idea of "stanning" comes from, as best as I can tell, which says something about how language itself is always being remixed as well. Words that used to mean one thing can mean another, or be reclaimed from being slurs to badges of pride, and for entire generations suffering under the baleful eyes of constant surveillance from everywhere, the surface meaning of anything posted is innocuous, and wrong. Only by having the correct context can the actual meaning be discerned. Steganography has become an essential tool of the digital world, and that makes it even easier for misunderstandings to erupt when someone lacks the critical context.
(Language transformation was absolutely Shakespeare's jam. So it's fitting that for our days we have people transforming popular works of our time into his language. William Shakespeare's Star Wars, for example, or William Shakespeare's Mean Girls are brilliant ideas. And that's before we talk about how The Divine Comedy is at least as much about skewering or flattering political figures as it is a travelogue through the Catholic afterlife, and how what fragments we have of Chaucer suggest he wanted to build an interplay between stories and pilgrims to show that the supposedly virtuous were no such thing and that the best tales sometimes come from leaning hard into the idea that people are terrible. Or, for that matter, how chivalric romance and Arthurian legend can be seen as setting ideals for the mounted class for them to live up to.)
Transformative works are remixes. Take characters, tropes, settings, and weave a new and different story than the ones that were created in the source material. Create representation where none existed before. Seriously interrogate the underpinnings of a work and either take them to their logical (and usually terrible) conclusion, or decide those underpinnings are long to only lead somewhere terrible and rework them into something better or that hangs together a bit more consistently. Figure out how characters would have adapted and changed to a completely different setting or universe than the one they are in. Have them meet characters they never would have encountered in their home series.
Or, change the medium. Take a text story and transform it into a full-cast production. Draw out the scenes painted so vividly by the prose or the narration. Lay down the soundtrack that is clearly playing underneath the narrative as the action unfolds. Take a picture and write a thousand (or more) words. Take the germ of an idea and bring it into a full production. Pontificate at length about why you ship, or why something makes no sense (or perfect sense). Build with blocks, whether they're made of ABS or voxels. Play it all out as an RPG campaign.
The possibilities are great, and each creator adds their own essence to whatever they create. And, unless it's for an exchange or fest, there are no minimums! You can be as wonderfully minimalist as John Cage's 4'33" or Marinette Uses A Swear Word, or create an expansive space and narrative that's built in pieces interlocked with each other until they become a powerful edifice of their own.
Whether it's your first or five hundredth, whether you hit the flow and just go or you fight it all the way from beginning to end, whether you're just cranking or another or you're trying to get unblocked, the thing you create is going to be wonderful. If you feel like sharing, I'm pretty sure there's an audience for it, but if not, that's okay. You made a thing! You took part in the act of creation.
Now you've done it.
Now you know.
Let's do another, shall we?
Here we go.
(And yes, I did create a more traditional fanwork, even after creating this work about fans. Go read We Didn't Start The Fire to see what happens when someone leaves an outline lying around and I think it's good enough to try and build it into a complete work. It's only about three times as long as the outline, because I apparently tend to work short, but there you have it.)
Hopefully, after meeting so many new people and being exposed to so many new things, our creative juices are flowing! For me, part of the reason I do theThere's also a necessary reminder than "fanwork" is not limited in its definition to certain specific and popular forms.snowflake_challenge is for exactly this purpose. But I know this particular challenge might be difficult for many of us who are blocked for whatever reason.
Fanwork means anything that you, a fan, creates. If you say it’s a fanwork, then it is! But if you want some suggestions, why not see if one of your fav fanworks creators has a transformative works statement? Many people (me included) have them on their profiles, either here on Dreamwidth or on AO3. Then go crazy! Make art, make fic, make a podfic, make a vid, make a cross-stitch pattern. Crochet, knit. Bake a cake! An interpretive dance of how it makes you feel! Anything!I think this is an interesting suggestion to go with, both as a gentle prod to check and make sure that your own wishes are stated about whether you would like to have transformative works done of your works and as an acknowledgement of one of the core tenets of transformative work: the remix.
Remix is important to everyone. If you subscribe to the monomyth (Joseph Campbell's idea that heroic journeys all follow the same basic template), then there's only one story, being told in countless variations, each a remix of the underlying concept in what characters, settings, and action it uses. The Aarne-Thompson-Uther index classifies stories based on their components and the variations on those components, showing stories that have the same classifications but that might read very differently from each other, based on what other components are added to the mix.
In music, sampling the beat of one song and providing new words on top, or taking a snippet of the original and building an entire new narrative around it is a very common practice, no matter how much it might aggravate the lawyers. The most famous sample forever is the Amen break, but there's plenty of borrowing and shifting and reworking things going on, sometimes with permission, sometimes without. Weird Al gets permission from the artist he's going to make a parody work for. Not everyone has to, though, as parody is one of the transformative works explicitly excepted from the funnel mechanism that is copyright. Which makes sense, because it defeats the purpose of making fun of someone who deserves it if you have to get their permission to do so first. Sometimes, the parody ends up being more memorable than the original (or the polka medley does). Witness the extremely effective skewering of Sarah Palin by Tina Fey on Saturday Night Live. (Which I think has some lineage from the way that Richard Nixon was a straight man, through and through, on Laugh-In, with the exception of Nixon not realizing that nearly as much as he should have.) And, perhaps, the long-running nature of MAD, the Harvard Lampoon, and Charlie Hebdo. Sometimes the most effective way of making someone harmless and powerless is to make tons of fun of them in an unauthorized way.
Even the way a work is performed is often a remix, because subsequent performances, orchestrations, or choices of collaborator can give the work a completely different feel than the original. Witness, for example, the original, Dido's "Thank You", a remixed version, Eminem's "Stan", which transforms the potentially innocent infatuation into an extremely dangerous obsession, and then, Eminem and Elton John did a performance of the song at the Grammy Awards. Same song, but very different vibe.
And, incidentally, this is where the idea of "stanning" comes from, as best as I can tell, which says something about how language itself is always being remixed as well. Words that used to mean one thing can mean another, or be reclaimed from being slurs to badges of pride, and for entire generations suffering under the baleful eyes of constant surveillance from everywhere, the surface meaning of anything posted is innocuous, and wrong. Only by having the correct context can the actual meaning be discerned. Steganography has become an essential tool of the digital world, and that makes it even easier for misunderstandings to erupt when someone lacks the critical context.
(Language transformation was absolutely Shakespeare's jam. So it's fitting that for our days we have people transforming popular works of our time into his language. William Shakespeare's Star Wars, for example, or William Shakespeare's Mean Girls are brilliant ideas. And that's before we talk about how The Divine Comedy is at least as much about skewering or flattering political figures as it is a travelogue through the Catholic afterlife, and how what fragments we have of Chaucer suggest he wanted to build an interplay between stories and pilgrims to show that the supposedly virtuous were no such thing and that the best tales sometimes come from leaning hard into the idea that people are terrible. Or, for that matter, how chivalric romance and Arthurian legend can be seen as setting ideals for the mounted class for them to live up to.)
Transformative works are remixes. Take characters, tropes, settings, and weave a new and different story than the ones that were created in the source material. Create representation where none existed before. Seriously interrogate the underpinnings of a work and either take them to their logical (and usually terrible) conclusion, or decide those underpinnings are long to only lead somewhere terrible and rework them into something better or that hangs together a bit more consistently. Figure out how characters would have adapted and changed to a completely different setting or universe than the one they are in. Have them meet characters they never would have encountered in their home series.
Or, change the medium. Take a text story and transform it into a full-cast production. Draw out the scenes painted so vividly by the prose or the narration. Lay down the soundtrack that is clearly playing underneath the narrative as the action unfolds. Take a picture and write a thousand (or more) words. Take the germ of an idea and bring it into a full production. Pontificate at length about why you ship, or why something makes no sense (or perfect sense). Build with blocks, whether they're made of ABS or voxels. Play it all out as an RPG campaign.
The possibilities are great, and each creator adds their own essence to whatever they create. And, unless it's for an exchange or fest, there are no minimums! You can be as wonderfully minimalist as John Cage's 4'33" or Marinette Uses A Swear Word, or create an expansive space and narrative that's built in pieces interlocked with each other until they become a powerful edifice of their own.
Whether it's your first or five hundredth, whether you hit the flow and just go or you fight it all the way from beginning to end, whether you're just cranking or another or you're trying to get unblocked, the thing you create is going to be wonderful. If you feel like sharing, I'm pretty sure there's an audience for it, but if not, that's okay. You made a thing! You took part in the act of creation.
Now you've done it.
Now you know.
Let's do another, shall we?
Here we go.
(And yes, I did create a more traditional fanwork, even after creating this work about fans. Go read We Didn't Start The Fire to see what happens when someone leaves an outline lying around and I think it's good enough to try and build it into a complete work. It's only about three times as long as the outline, because I apparently tend to work short, but there you have it.)
