anghraine: a female half-elf with unruly hair tilting her head back with her brows furrowed (larissa (furrowed))
Anghraine ([personal profile] anghraine) wrote2024-04-10 11:28 am

I swear, I'm not going to drag over every weird Tumblr take I see

I promise! In general!

But damn, I was actually thinking this one had some good points riiiiight until the last two lines.



tbh I remain convinced that most fanfic discourse relies on strong generalizations about fanfic without any clear definitions of what fanfic is and, perhaps more importantly, what it is not. I know it's pretentious, but I think that's part of the reason these takes fail to accurately differentiate the ways in which no art stands alone from what fanfic does, and especially fail to distinguish community norms driven by specific social contexts from aspects inherent to the form.

I mean, this take and all the other, usually worse, takes like it are essentially framed in terms of assertions about qualities intrinsic to the forms of fanfic vs original fic, without any attention to the effects of community and culture. They often get annoyed by "what about Shakespeare/Ovid/adaptation?" etc, but an argument based on form does invite those comparisons. I've never seen any of them provide an effective rebuttal based in the same formal reasoning. The terms have to shift to questions of quality or culture or simply "That's different" with no reasoning at all.

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