Re: Fan fiction in general was: MOVED from MAIN - "sequels" to the classics

[sistermagpie]

> Alla:
> 
> Right, that's all I am saying really – I think that somebody who 
> tries claiming ownership of the canon should be slapped and hard. 
I 
> think fanfic writers should always remember that they are playing 
in 
> somebody else's playground and I do know that many of them do. It 
is 
> not theirs. I know I am saying obvious things, but it looks like 
not 
> everybody considers them obvious ( not you)

Magpie:
I think for the most part they do--though sometimes people will 
point to different behavior that they think shows they don't know 
they're playing in someone else's world, because different fans have 
different ideas of how fanfic "should" be written. 

For instance, there are some people who always think it should 
be 'close to canon'--they stick to character pairings and things 
they feel could have happened between the lines or afterwards. Other 
people make no bones about writing what interests them even if it 
goes directly against what the author seems to like or be interested 
in. I tend to think it's really all about what the fanfic author 
wants to read or write.

As just another fan personally I lean with the second group. 
Ironically, I find the first group more presumptive. If you're not 
the author, your story isn't any "more canonical" than anyone else's 
story. You can't go slipping anything in expecting people to take it 
as "what really happened" any more than anyone else. And also I 
don't really see the point in keeping to the idea of "what the 
author would like" as you write unless you like it yourself because 
the author's not going to read it probably so you might as well say 
what you want to say. I remember one discussion that really proved 
the point to me, where there was a fanfic author who was 
very "canonical" but got called on a technical thing she always did 
that was wrong. Instead of doing what she claimed to do--which was 
take the author's word as law--she argued the text into her own 
interpretation. I just would have preferred it if she said, "Oh 
yeah, I got that wrong. But I love writing about it my way, so in my 
fanfic I pretend this is the case." I can completely understand it 
if part of the suspension of disbelief involves the real author--
sometimes it's just hard to buy a story if it seems to go against 
the "feel" of the universe or whatever.

But fans are always happy to police their community, in my 
experience.:-) Reading this thread I started to think about that 
singer Selena who was murdered by a fan. That's not something a 
person has to worry about from most fans--you just want to be on the 
lookout for the potential crazy person and take some precautions 
against that.

> Magpie:
> Of course courtesy of the copyright holders. I'm not sure what 
you're
> asking about. I'm just saying that fanfic is a part of fandom and 
so
> not necessarily something an author considers a threat or an insult
> to him/her.
> <SNIP>
> 
> Alla:
> 
> I was just saying that Star Treck did not went in print just 
because 
> fans felt like it and did it, they did it because they were 
**allowed 
> to**, no?

Magpie:
Yes, they submitted their story ideas to the show or to the 
publishers and they were bought. ST being a series it has lots of 
authors anyway, of course, but in order to be published they had to 
stay within the guidelines of the series while in fanfic you can go 
all over the place. I might mention that while I've never written 
fanfic I have written tie-in novels and that's a big difference 
between the two. Nobody's getting their Kirk/Spock published as a 
Star Trek tie-in.

Alla: 
> And sure it is not necessarily a threat to the author, most people 
> just want to have fun in that playground, but I think it is a very 
> reasonable argument that it could be a threat from some people at 
> least.

Magpie:
Absolutely--Selena again. People are known to get killed by fans and 
it doesn't get more threatening than that! To me, as I said, I think 
a big change comes from the Internet because it's its own world 
where people are doing very different things and sometimes the 
social and interpretative world of fandom is turned into something 
more like publishing when that's not exactly what it is. It's both 
public and private.

-m