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[Michela Ecks]

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Message: Interesting article about fan fiction though parts rub me the wrong way.

The Globe and Mail, Thursday, April 26, 2001

Stranger than fiction
  When fans write stories based on their favourite movies or TV shows, it's out of love. Did they ever hear of copyright?
By Mike Doherty


TORONTO -- It is a truth universally acknowledged: No matter how much one is obsessed with something, one can always find someone more obsessed -- and increasingly that person can be found on the Internet.

The World Wide Web has, of course, become the medium of choice for myriad subcultures, and one of the most impressive -- and bewildering -- is the Internet community of fan-fiction writers.

Mostly ignored by the mainstream press and operating under pseudonyms, these authors are inspired by their obsession with certain books, TV shows and other creative works. They toil away at their computers without hope of remuneration or fame. Often the only recognition they receive comes in the unwelcome shape of a lawsuit. Their task is quite literally (and literarily) a labour of love -- in most cases, love for people they've never met and will never meet, but with whom they feel they have deep, personal relationships.

Nonetheless, fan fictioneers produce great quantities of work, and in the process raise questions about appropriation of voice, authorial integrity, the validity of copyright, the point at which private creation becomes public property.

Anyone seeking a window into the world of fan fiction will find it by visiting http://www.fanfiction.net, a huge archive of stories, poems, novels and screenplays.

Enchanted by Monty Python but unhappy with the ending of Holy Grail? Three fans have come up with alternate endings. Impressed with Nintendo's video games but never thought Super Mario's brother Luigi got the attention he deserved? Several stories set out to redress this wrong. Passionate about Dawson's Creek but upset that Dawson and Joey aren't together? Various authors set out to fulfill your wishes.

Of course, some fan writers exalt the more obscure. Remember the 1980s spy show Scarecrow and Mrs. King? Fanfiction.net boasts close to 600 stories based on its characters. Author Kim D., who describes herself as "a stay-at-home mom with a love for writing," asks: "Ever wonder about the scenes we didn't see during The Legend of Das Geisterschloss?"

Perhaps a more pertinent question comes to mind: Why should anyone care?

Jennifer Hale, who has written pseudonymous biographies of Xena's Lucy Lawless and Buffy's Sarah Michelle Gellar for Toronto's ECW Press, has come across quite a bit of fan fiction over the course of her research. Her theory is as follows: "Some people have always written, whether it be poetry or short stories, but when they discover a show like this that really changes their life (and when it comes to shows like Xena or Star Trek, the fans live the shows as much as watch them), it inspires them to use those characters in their stories. And in many cases, they may be frustrated with the way the plots are going on the shows, so they write them differently, learn to control the characters, and make the plot go the way they wish it had on television." The work itself "ranges from practically unreadable to so good you wonder why the head writers on the shows aren't hiring these people."

In a recent survey of visitors to fanfiction.net, 70 per cent of the 56,000 respondents claimed to be between the ages of 10 and 19 -- no stay-at-home moms these. Many, it seems, are aspiring writers. Sixteen-year-old Gareth Owen Jones, for instance, has posted his full-length screenplay Honey, I Shrunk the Kids -- Again! There is, admittedly, a limited audience for such pieces (one reviewer on the site comments, "Do you have a life?"), but Jones writes that he has the "ambition to become actor and screenwriter."

Writers like Jones attempt to hone their craft by having their stories reviewed, and sometimes workshopped, on the site. A number of columns and forums deal with issues such as character development, research and even grammar -- the site seeks to provide what schools do not. "Jekkal," a high-school student from the southern United States, writes both fiction (based on the science-fiction book and TV series Animorphs) and a column for fanfiction.net. She remembers how she began writing fan fiction: "It was spontaneous. . . . A great deal of my school writing assignments before I discovered the Internet was fan fiction, albeit done in such a way that most people wouldn't recognize the true source."

Much fan fiction is explicit in revealing its sources, and the copyright issues involved are heating up. In some ways, the debate resembles a literary cross between the decade-old war on hip-hop sampling and the current Napster controversy. Jekkal writes a column called "Corporate Bandwagon," in which she regularly takes corporations and writers to task for banning fan fiction and shutting down Web sites devoted to it. "My opinion," she states, "is that most fan works are for personal use, and thus do not infringe on a trademark/copyright as long as the work is not made for monetary profit (feedback and praise is technically 'profit'), and the fan does not make a claim to the trademark."

Jekkal's column provides a list of companies that she believes "stomp on personal expression and imagination," including Fox, which is trying to shut down a popular science Web site called The Why Files, and Warner Bros., which appears to be busy stamping out Harry Potter fan sites.

She also mentions authors, such as Anne Rice, who forbid fan fiction -- and it's here that the issue gets complicated.

It's one thing to write stories based on characters created by a long-dead author. Martin Amis once mused, after reading Pride and Prejudice: "I found myself thinking I could do with a 20-page sex scene, with D'Arcy acquitting himself uncommonly well." Although the Jane Austen-based stories at http://www.pemberley.com are unfortunately not very lascivious, there's little stopping one from fulfilling Amis's literary desire. When it comes to living authors, however, some feel it imperils the source of their livelihood.

American fantasy writer Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, for instance, has been embroiled in legal battles surrounding her St. Germain series of historical vampire novels. "I have absolutely no sense of humour about copyright infringement," she writes. Yarbro has dealt with four instances of infringement during her career, including one where a fan story was printed in a magazine against her express wishes and the writer even mentioned as much in an introduction. Although Yarbro has managed to settle these issues out of court, she points out that in the U.S., "willful infringement, meaning you know the writer has said no and you do it anyway, carries with it a maximum federal fine of $250,000 and a maximum of five years in a federal penitentiary."

When asked whether non-profit on-line fan fiction constitutes at least a grey area, she responds: "I think it is nonsense -- and that is a mild word for the one I would prefer to use -- and that fans who do it show a profound disrespect for the writer and the work they misappropriate in such cases. If fans want to write, they should make up their own stories with their own characters. That's what fiction is all about."

Even more potentially litigious are stories concerning real people. For instance, the "slash" variety of fan fiction deals with homoerotic relationships between characters or people who often are ostentatiously, even vociferously, straight. Many of these stories are written as fantastic pornography for and by women, and many are amusing, whether intentionally or not.

Consider the following passage from the story Silent Tears by "Chaos," about Eminem and Fred Durst (of Limp Bizkit infamy): "Em could feel tears building up in his eyes. Fred saw it also and hated himself for causing Em pain. 'Fred, can't you see I love you? What do you want me to do? I love her and I love you, she gives me the chance to be with both of you but, no, you don't like that idea,' Em said and let the tears fall. Fred could see the tears falling from Em's face and couldn't help but take him in his arms. Shhh . . . I'll try it okay? But if I don't like it then I'm sorry.' "

Touching as the story is, Yarbro's comment about making up one's own characters can be a point well taken. Some fan writers have branched out: Jekkal, for instance, is "currently attempting to write an original novel using the most difficult and time-consuming method I know -- writing by hand." Then again, one can always "discover" one's own author, which is what the Emily Chesley Reading Circle has done.

The group, based on-line at http://www.emilychesley.com, is dedicated to the promotion of the work of a "little-known" early 20th-century writer of "speculative fiction" in London, Ont. The site provides biographical details, academic insight, and even unpublished manuscripts by a forward-thinking (but somehow unrecognized) author.

Mark Rayner is the group's "acting secretary" and a lecturer at the University of Western Ontario's Faculty of Information and Media Studies. He and his London colleagues have crafted an impressive on-line compendium of Chesley's bawdy adventures and literary endeavours, and even provide some of "her" writings on their site. The group has put out a call for Chesley-inspired academic papers on the Internet, but Rayner cautions those interested in writing fan fiction based on the work of an author who may herself be fictional. "One thing we have learned about the Chesleyan oeuvre is that it is volatile stuff, not to be trifled with by the 'unlearned' scholar. That said, we can imagine that Emily would have no compunctions sanctioning whatever consenting adults decided to do in the privacy of their own homes (electronic or otherwise)."

It seems the Reading Circle is well-placed to put the whole issue in perspective. As Rayner notes, "Emily wrote an interesting novel called The World Wide Waste that hypothesized a world devoted to an electronic device (fancifully termed, IntraVision) in which the population of the world was hypnotized by its own incipient dreams of banality.

"Predictably, this story was not a roaring success."
Sites galore
While http://www.fanfiction.net is a good starting point, here are more choice sites to explore: 

    Wrestling Slash 

    http://www.wrestlingslash.co.uk 

    Several "slash" (i.e. homoerotic relationship) stories involving the WWF's finest lumbering combatants. So much for subtext. 

    Diana Memorial Fiction Library 

    http://www.mmjp.or.jp/amlang.atc/fiction/index.htm 

    As if Elton John's rewrite of Candle in the Wind weren't enough . . . some revisionist history in which Princess Di goes to the Winter Olympics, meets Karen Carpenter, and has an affair in Tasmania. 

    Beatles Fan Fiction Directory 

    http://www.geocities.com/SunsetStrip/Palladium/1623/directory.htm 

    Many fun snippets of dubious literary value (and no, we're not referring to McCartney's poetry).



Copyright 2000 | The Globe and Mail

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