Silver Adept (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
silveradept) wrote2024-12-14 11:11 pm
silveradept) wrote2024-12-14 11:11 pm
Entry tags:
December Days 02024 #14: Community: Fanfiction Writers
[This Year's December Days Theme is Community, and all the forms that it takes. If you have some suggestions about what communities I'm part of (or that you think I'm part of) that would be worth a look, let me know in the comments.]
As the joke went, at the time that it was awarded, I had claim to approximately 1 fifty-thousandth of a Hugo Award. (113/5,000,000 works on AO3 (or eventually on AO3, but backdated appropriately, or 1.13/50,000 of a Hugo.) That's one of those things that both showcases the size and scale of the community of fanworks at one moment in time and how much transformative works have been drawn out of the shadows and have become much more part of the normal discourse around fandom, canon, and the like. (And in the intervening years, the amount of fanworks is apparently just over twelve million now, including creation and import of other archives, so the Hugo amounts are smaller than they were before, but probably spread out more among all the participants now.)
A sign of how far things have gone came up this year. One of the guest panelists at the smaller of the regular conventions held in the metropolis to my north, a panelist who has probably contributed more to the idea of hockey as a slashable sport than some of the Hockey RPF diehards, when asked about the fan community and interactions with the same, asked the audience about whether we were familiar with "The Premise." The older fans in the crowd (and those of us who have been exposed to some of the history of fandom through places like Fanlore and some of the meta that gets passed around) raised their hands immediately, but it was not a universally-known thing. Those who weren't familiar got the quick lesson: "The Premise," is K/S, Kirk/Spock, the possibility that James T. Kirk and Mr. Spock had, at the very least, a romantic relationship between themselves on the Starship Enterprise, and while we've been arguing about whether Achilles or Patroclus is the top in their relationship for millennia, most of the transformative works of our time have "The Premise" as an ancestor in the way that the story of the Abrahamic religions usually begins with Adam and Eve.
The panelist pointed out that the codeword was not there simply because someone wanted to be cute and mysterious, but because it was a very necessary shibboleth. If you wanted to talk slash in Star Trek, you had to make sure that the person you wanted to talk slash with was receptive to the talk, or at least knew what you were talking about and wanted to engage in the conversation. A lot of the fan community of the time would have thought "no homo, bro" as an insufficiently thunderous denunciation of the possibility, the mere premise, that there might be homoeroticism in their science fiction, that the "Wagon Train to the Stars" might be a little more Brokeback Mountain. (Which certainly got its own share of thunderous denunciation for portraying people who were cowboys, those pillars of machismo, as gay and in relationships with each other.) There were plenty of gay people in the world, but they were expected to never admit to it in public or have any kind of pride in it. (Not yet, anyway. The last season of Star Trek is the same year as the Stonewall Inn raid, though, so there's some overlap.)
The people who subscribed to The Premise, though, they held discussions. They wrote stories. They published zines. They became a community, and they adapted to the new technologies, but it was not a thing to declare openly, even as the idea of transformative works and transformative readings spread and took root in other places and their creatives did the same thing. When there were brushes between the world of the official creator and the world of the fan-creator, things did not go well, at least not in the worlds of fanfiction, because it's much harder to make your transformative claim when it's all words on a page. (At this same convention, although a different panel, a researcher analyzing fan communities suggested that the communities making anthologies or other published works have long since adopted the attitude of "be gay, do crimes, limited time only, catch us if you can" for their works, which makes it harder to catch them, but also means that it's harder to collect and archive their works.) And, as anyone who's been around long enough to hear the late Anne Rice's most infamous and wrongheaded statement knows, some authors get really protective of their character and definitely do not want to see anything that suggests there's any kind of fan-creation going on, or that fans may have found an interpretation of the work that suits them better than the original creator's interpretation.
Yes, that's why there are disclaimers on fic, it's not a vestigial artifact of previous times, it's people who are and were doing their best to work within the tools they had so that they could make a reasonable case that the gains any creator might have for going after them for copyright violation would be strongly outweighed by the amount of negative press and fan hate they would generate from doing so. Some creators went for it anyway. (And, unsurprisingly, are not particularly liked by their fandoms for doing so, with![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
kittens_and_spitefic usually as the concept underlying how further interactions are governed.) That said, many of those authors and/or their agents pick their battles very carefully about who they threaten or litigate against. Nobody actually wants to test what the courts will say on the legitimacy of fan-creations, because the consequences of losing are catastrophic for whichever side loses. (Fanart sits stronger in this regard, as best as I can tell, because so long as you can tell the difference between something fan-created and something the original creator made, the original creator's potential market remains unchanged.)
Even as the fan-creators adopted new technologies, they hit pushback from other places that didn't want them there, and even places that welcomed them and encouraged them to create would sometimes go through and remove or purge content that they didn't like, or were directed to remove and purge content because the people who were actually giving the money to keep the site going did not want to see their advertisements next to stories about Kirk (or Spock) getting railed and loving every minute of it. Or were trolled by people pretending to be an organization with great moral and political power and threatening bad publicity or worse if they didn't get rid of the "porn" on their pages. And, of course, as website companies and platforms were bought, shuttered, or otherwise decommissioned or placed under the control of new management, the archives had to move, if they had enough warning, or were disappeared, if they didn't. (And now you know the origin story of both Dreamwidth (who gave the finger to LiveJournal after they did a content purge, and because the selling of the parent company to a Russian entity meant the Russian government could go in and crush whatever they didn't want to see. (There was a lot there they didn't want to see.) and the Archive of Our Own (because the only true way to make sure that nobody purges your content is to own the servers yourselves, so you can write the policies about content.)
My origin story, however, into the community of fanficcers is much less fraught with content purges and secret shibboleths. The first fic I have a memory of writing is in a notebook from when I was about 10 years of age. Because creative people make up new adventures for series that have long since finished or write different episodes. This is normal behavior. There's at least one pastiche I wrote for a writing workshop when I was 12 that specifically patterned itself after the Tracer Bullet storylines in Calvin and Hobbes, themselves pastiche of the hard-boiled, hard-drinking, knuckle-sandwich making (and eating) detective serial. A lot of my works, both fiction and non-fiction, are laced through with references to other media and other characters, often because it's fun to sprinkle in a reference and see who picks up on it. Trope allusions or references to other things allows for a dense information transfer to those who understand how to unpack it.
In the era of the webcomics and the beginnings of the Internet, I did a lot of storytelling and role-play activities on various forums and boards, so collaborative fic efforts, and shared universes, and an entire extended universe in relation to an actual canon. Also, Subreality. So I didn't actually stop writing fic. Not that I knew that I was writing fic, collaborative or on my own, or otherwise, because I didn't have the language to describe what I was doing (and what other people were doing.) I hadn't come across that part of the Internet, nor that part of fandom, and much of that was because I was a rural-living child on dial-up Internet whose interests did not intersect with a lot of fandom at that point. Even when I started moving in fandoms where there was a higher probability of seeing fic, and attending conventions where there had to be fic writers, and possibly fic-writing or art as panel options, I didn't end up recognizing myself in those people, or if I recognized people, it was probably of the order of "wow, these fanartists are very good at what they do, I do not have those skills, therefore I am not part of any kind of fan community other than being a fan."
LiveJournal, I think, is where I started getting consciously transformative fandom-adjacent, because LJ, on the Latin-writing script side, anyway, there was a lot of fandom talk, in episode (re)watches, in community discussions, in memes, in journal comments, and in fic recs and the like. With enough exposure to LiveJournal stuff, and then being around LiveJournal as a lot of people got interested in a children's book about a boy wizard and his boarding school experience, it was an effective introduction to the transformative fandom side of things. And also, at least a little bit of being less -adjacent and more participatory. (Turns out that some of my peer group at the time was also interested in such things, and we all shared enough fandom language to have an effective conversation about what the endgame ship was for that series.) When the major LJ purges happened, and Drewamwidth and AO3 came into being, and then LJ was sold to the Russians, it was about that time, in one place or another, that I went back to what I had been doing all along, but with the language I needed to understand and declare it for what it was. I got an AO3 account so I could participate in an exchange, and I haven't really left the exchange circuit since, occasionally supplementing my exchange material with prompt works or the occasional out-of-the-blue idea that gets written down. So now I have a paper trail, as it were, of the places I've been and the works that I've done. Some of which have gone excellently, some of which have not been received as well, and some of which, as appeared in an earlier entry, were vocally panned by at least some part of the community. I don't pretend to be any kind of big name, and the anxiety that comes from perfectionism means I'm always nervous about whether an exchange work will be appreciated by the intended recipient. That it comes off well, or at least the recipients find something complimentary about it, is a good thing every time. It builds confidence that this thing that I have had practice at for decades of my life is something that I'm good at. That not only does skill match taste, my skill can match other people's taste. (With exchanges, admittedly, with the prompt and fandoms list and the like, I start with an advantage of knowing what things are more likely to go well with the recipient, but most creators are working with at least some idea of what their intended audience will like to see, even if it's not at the detailed fandom and pairing level.)
The ratio now is closer to 1/600,000th of a Hugo Award, and in the intervening time, some of the most protective authors have died, the AO3 exists, in and of itself, and instead of being the thing that requires shibboleths and secrecy, fandom is beginning to become something that's leverageable to success. Fanartists, of course, have been able to leverage that to showcase their portfolios and their ability to mimic or wildly diverge from other styles, and sometimes that means getting hired for projects or getting to work on things that they've been drawing fanart for. At least a few traditionally published authors have published their fanworks with the serial numbers filed off. Some of them have found agents because that agent was looking for more of their fanwork. Some openly acknowledge their fannish roots and credit their involvement in transformative fandom for the practice of the craft of writing (and, sometimes, the discipline that the being a professional author requires) and the ability to take criticism from editors and others. Transformative fandom is being studied by srs bzns scholars who are writing papers, theses, and getting their doctorates from those studies. The OTW has an open-access journal for the acafans to publish in, among other places where such material could be found.
In response to the purges and content deletions, and the constant, if not usually exercised, threat of legal action from the corporations and authors who are the original creators of the material transformative fandom uses, the Organization for Transformative Works has staked out a bold claim. According to them, "fanworks are creative and transformative, core fair uses, and [the OTW] will therefore be proactive in protecting and defending fanworks from commercial exploitation and legal challenge". So far, the OTW has not been challenged on that position, although they do put limitations on what kinds of works they will accept at the Archive of Our Own that allows them to defend that position as strongly as possible. (To some degree, still, because nobody wants to be the case where a court makes a decision about the legality of fanworks.) The OTW's position and promise to defend fanworks carves out space that wasn't explicitly present before. Fans have responded in kind, both in providing lots of material for the archive, and in financial support of the archive. It shows just how many people there are who are interested in more stories, more perspectives, making things closer to the reality of the writer or reader, or putting their favorites into situations extremely far-flung from their original contexts. (Or putting two different franchises together to see how well they'll work with each other.)
The difference, I suppose, is that they're more visible now, and more people are willing to say they're part of the community.
As the joke went, at the time that it was awarded, I had claim to approximately 1 fifty-thousandth of a Hugo Award. (113/5,000,000 works on AO3 (or eventually on AO3, but backdated appropriately, or 1.13/50,000 of a Hugo.) That's one of those things that both showcases the size and scale of the community of fanworks at one moment in time and how much transformative works have been drawn out of the shadows and have become much more part of the normal discourse around fandom, canon, and the like. (And in the intervening years, the amount of fanworks is apparently just over twelve million now, including creation and import of other archives, so the Hugo amounts are smaller than they were before, but probably spread out more among all the participants now.)
A sign of how far things have gone came up this year. One of the guest panelists at the smaller of the regular conventions held in the metropolis to my north, a panelist who has probably contributed more to the idea of hockey as a slashable sport than some of the Hockey RPF diehards, when asked about the fan community and interactions with the same, asked the audience about whether we were familiar with "The Premise." The older fans in the crowd (and those of us who have been exposed to some of the history of fandom through places like Fanlore and some of the meta that gets passed around) raised their hands immediately, but it was not a universally-known thing. Those who weren't familiar got the quick lesson: "The Premise," is K/S, Kirk/Spock, the possibility that James T. Kirk and Mr. Spock had, at the very least, a romantic relationship between themselves on the Starship Enterprise, and while we've been arguing about whether Achilles or Patroclus is the top in their relationship for millennia, most of the transformative works of our time have "The Premise" as an ancestor in the way that the story of the Abrahamic religions usually begins with Adam and Eve.
The panelist pointed out that the codeword was not there simply because someone wanted to be cute and mysterious, but because it was a very necessary shibboleth. If you wanted to talk slash in Star Trek, you had to make sure that the person you wanted to talk slash with was receptive to the talk, or at least knew what you were talking about and wanted to engage in the conversation. A lot of the fan community of the time would have thought "no homo, bro" as an insufficiently thunderous denunciation of the possibility, the mere premise, that there might be homoeroticism in their science fiction, that the "Wagon Train to the Stars" might be a little more Brokeback Mountain. (Which certainly got its own share of thunderous denunciation for portraying people who were cowboys, those pillars of machismo, as gay and in relationships with each other.) There were plenty of gay people in the world, but they were expected to never admit to it in public or have any kind of pride in it. (Not yet, anyway. The last season of Star Trek is the same year as the Stonewall Inn raid, though, so there's some overlap.)
The people who subscribed to The Premise, though, they held discussions. They wrote stories. They published zines. They became a community, and they adapted to the new technologies, but it was not a thing to declare openly, even as the idea of transformative works and transformative readings spread and took root in other places and their creatives did the same thing. When there were brushes between the world of the official creator and the world of the fan-creator, things did not go well, at least not in the worlds of fanfiction, because it's much harder to make your transformative claim when it's all words on a page. (At this same convention, although a different panel, a researcher analyzing fan communities suggested that the communities making anthologies or other published works have long since adopted the attitude of "be gay, do crimes, limited time only, catch us if you can" for their works, which makes it harder to catch them, but also means that it's harder to collect and archive their works.) And, as anyone who's been around long enough to hear the late Anne Rice's most infamous and wrongheaded statement knows, some authors get really protective of their character and definitely do not want to see anything that suggests there's any kind of fan-creation going on, or that fans may have found an interpretation of the work that suits them better than the original creator's interpretation.
Yes, that's why there are disclaimers on fic, it's not a vestigial artifact of previous times, it's people who are and were doing their best to work within the tools they had so that they could make a reasonable case that the gains any creator might have for going after them for copyright violation would be strongly outweighed by the amount of negative press and fan hate they would generate from doing so. Some creators went for it anyway. (And, unsurprisingly, are not particularly liked by their fandoms for doing so, with
kittens_and_spitefic usually as the concept underlying how further interactions are governed.) That said, many of those authors and/or their agents pick their battles very carefully about who they threaten or litigate against. Nobody actually wants to test what the courts will say on the legitimacy of fan-creations, because the consequences of losing are catastrophic for whichever side loses. (Fanart sits stronger in this regard, as best as I can tell, because so long as you can tell the difference between something fan-created and something the original creator made, the original creator's potential market remains unchanged.) Even as the fan-creators adopted new technologies, they hit pushback from other places that didn't want them there, and even places that welcomed them and encouraged them to create would sometimes go through and remove or purge content that they didn't like, or were directed to remove and purge content because the people who were actually giving the money to keep the site going did not want to see their advertisements next to stories about Kirk (or Spock) getting railed and loving every minute of it. Or were trolled by people pretending to be an organization with great moral and political power and threatening bad publicity or worse if they didn't get rid of the "porn" on their pages. And, of course, as website companies and platforms were bought, shuttered, or otherwise decommissioned or placed under the control of new management, the archives had to move, if they had enough warning, or were disappeared, if they didn't. (And now you know the origin story of both Dreamwidth (who gave the finger to LiveJournal after they did a content purge, and because the selling of the parent company to a Russian entity meant the Russian government could go in and crush whatever they didn't want to see. (There was a lot there they didn't want to see.) and the Archive of Our Own (because the only true way to make sure that nobody purges your content is to own the servers yourselves, so you can write the policies about content.)
My origin story, however, into the community of fanficcers is much less fraught with content purges and secret shibboleths. The first fic I have a memory of writing is in a notebook from when I was about 10 years of age. Because creative people make up new adventures for series that have long since finished or write different episodes. This is normal behavior. There's at least one pastiche I wrote for a writing workshop when I was 12 that specifically patterned itself after the Tracer Bullet storylines in Calvin and Hobbes, themselves pastiche of the hard-boiled, hard-drinking, knuckle-sandwich making (and eating) detective serial. A lot of my works, both fiction and non-fiction, are laced through with references to other media and other characters, often because it's fun to sprinkle in a reference and see who picks up on it. Trope allusions or references to other things allows for a dense information transfer to those who understand how to unpack it.
In the era of the webcomics and the beginnings of the Internet, I did a lot of storytelling and role-play activities on various forums and boards, so collaborative fic efforts, and shared universes, and an entire extended universe in relation to an actual canon. Also, Subreality. So I didn't actually stop writing fic. Not that I knew that I was writing fic, collaborative or on my own, or otherwise, because I didn't have the language to describe what I was doing (and what other people were doing.) I hadn't come across that part of the Internet, nor that part of fandom, and much of that was because I was a rural-living child on dial-up Internet whose interests did not intersect with a lot of fandom at that point. Even when I started moving in fandoms where there was a higher probability of seeing fic, and attending conventions where there had to be fic writers, and possibly fic-writing or art as panel options, I didn't end up recognizing myself in those people, or if I recognized people, it was probably of the order of "wow, these fanartists are very good at what they do, I do not have those skills, therefore I am not part of any kind of fan community other than being a fan."
LiveJournal, I think, is where I started getting consciously transformative fandom-adjacent, because LJ, on the Latin-writing script side, anyway, there was a lot of fandom talk, in episode (re)watches, in community discussions, in memes, in journal comments, and in fic recs and the like. With enough exposure to LiveJournal stuff, and then being around LiveJournal as a lot of people got interested in a children's book about a boy wizard and his boarding school experience, it was an effective introduction to the transformative fandom side of things. And also, at least a little bit of being less -adjacent and more participatory. (Turns out that some of my peer group at the time was also interested in such things, and we all shared enough fandom language to have an effective conversation about what the endgame ship was for that series.) When the major LJ purges happened, and Drewamwidth and AO3 came into being, and then LJ was sold to the Russians, it was about that time, in one place or another, that I went back to what I had been doing all along, but with the language I needed to understand and declare it for what it was. I got an AO3 account so I could participate in an exchange, and I haven't really left the exchange circuit since, occasionally supplementing my exchange material with prompt works or the occasional out-of-the-blue idea that gets written down. So now I have a paper trail, as it were, of the places I've been and the works that I've done. Some of which have gone excellently, some of which have not been received as well, and some of which, as appeared in an earlier entry, were vocally panned by at least some part of the community. I don't pretend to be any kind of big name, and the anxiety that comes from perfectionism means I'm always nervous about whether an exchange work will be appreciated by the intended recipient. That it comes off well, or at least the recipients find something complimentary about it, is a good thing every time. It builds confidence that this thing that I have had practice at for decades of my life is something that I'm good at. That not only does skill match taste, my skill can match other people's taste. (With exchanges, admittedly, with the prompt and fandoms list and the like, I start with an advantage of knowing what things are more likely to go well with the recipient, but most creators are working with at least some idea of what their intended audience will like to see, even if it's not at the detailed fandom and pairing level.)
The ratio now is closer to 1/600,000th of a Hugo Award, and in the intervening time, some of the most protective authors have died, the AO3 exists, in and of itself, and instead of being the thing that requires shibboleths and secrecy, fandom is beginning to become something that's leverageable to success. Fanartists, of course, have been able to leverage that to showcase their portfolios and their ability to mimic or wildly diverge from other styles, and sometimes that means getting hired for projects or getting to work on things that they've been drawing fanart for. At least a few traditionally published authors have published their fanworks with the serial numbers filed off. Some of them have found agents because that agent was looking for more of their fanwork. Some openly acknowledge their fannish roots and credit their involvement in transformative fandom for the practice of the craft of writing (and, sometimes, the discipline that the being a professional author requires) and the ability to take criticism from editors and others. Transformative fandom is being studied by srs bzns scholars who are writing papers, theses, and getting their doctorates from those studies. The OTW has an open-access journal for the acafans to publish in, among other places where such material could be found.
In response to the purges and content deletions, and the constant, if not usually exercised, threat of legal action from the corporations and authors who are the original creators of the material transformative fandom uses, the Organization for Transformative Works has staked out a bold claim. According to them, "fanworks are creative and transformative, core fair uses, and [the OTW] will therefore be proactive in protecting and defending fanworks from commercial exploitation and legal challenge". So far, the OTW has not been challenged on that position, although they do put limitations on what kinds of works they will accept at the Archive of Our Own that allows them to defend that position as strongly as possible. (To some degree, still, because nobody wants to be the case where a court makes a decision about the legality of fanworks.) The OTW's position and promise to defend fanworks carves out space that wasn't explicitly present before. Fans have responded in kind, both in providing lots of material for the archive, and in financial support of the archive. It shows just how many people there are who are interested in more stories, more perspectives, making things closer to the reality of the writer or reader, or putting their favorites into situations extremely far-flung from their original contexts. (Or putting two different franchises together to see how well they'll work with each other.)
The difference, I suppose, is that they're more visible now, and more people are willing to say they're part of the community.