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You know, the thing about the history of fanfiction is that I don't think (for instance) that Shakespeare's plays based on pre-existing narratives are actually fanfiction in the contemporary sense. But I certainly do not respect any take on fanfic and its relationship to its source materials that does not engage at all with the very, very, very long history of human beings responding to pre-existing stories by re-telling and re-imagining those specific* stories in a wide variety of ways, often within the same or a similar medium.
People have always done this. The laws and norms and expectations around it do change, the forms it takes change, but the practice of responding to stories by drawing directly on those stories to create other versions of them is not unique to modern fanfiction. If your argument about fanfic (especially if it's ones about the unique evils of fanfic) is contingent upon assumptions or assertions about that general practice rather than anything specific to modern fanfic in particular, your argument is short-sighted, painfully ahistorical, and poorly reasoned.
Like, here's a very obvious example. My favorite Shakespeare tragedy is King Lear. The story told in King Lear was drawn from the pre-existing narratives around the mythical King Leir. This had recently appeared in the anonymous play King Leir (which seems to date from the 1590s, while Shakespeare's Lear was written in the very early 1600s). A version of the story shows up in Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene (published in the 1590s as well). Shakespeare integrated other narratives into the core Leir story he took from the King Leir play written and performed just a few years earlier (most of the extra narratives in King Lear also have pretty obvious pre-existing sources). Famously, Shakespeare altered details of the traditional story in this process, and especially of the King Leir version, to suit his artistic preferences. In some versions, for instance, Cordelia survives the events of the main Leir story only to be killed years later. Shakespeare didn't even come up with the idea of Cordelia dying tragically after initially seeming triumphant (one of his main changes from King Leir). But he integrated her death into the main story in a more cohesive and streamlined way than it was generally done.
So Shakespeare didn't invent the essential narrative of Leir/Lear. He didn't invent most of the characters in it. He didn't even "file off the serial numbers" in the modern phrase; the characters are meant to be recognized as those familiar, pre-existing characters to a contemporary audience. Part of the power of the play for its original audience would come from their familiarity with other versions of the story and characters. In general, say, they would expect Cordelia's return to the story as an ally of Lear's, but not Cordelia and Lear's tragic defeat. Modern audiences unfamiliar with any other version of the story can still register the shock and horror and bleakness of Shakespeare's handling of it, but not usually in the way that an audience of the time would have registered it. The power of the conventional Leir narrative was such that in later years, Shakespeare's version would get "corrected" back to the established Leir story as appearing in things like King Leir. It was only much, much later that the King Lear of Shakespeare would be regularly performed as he wrote it, without making it more digestible to then-contemporary sensibilities or closer to the "canon" he was working off of.
( Read more... )
People have always done this. The laws and norms and expectations around it do change, the forms it takes change, but the practice of responding to stories by drawing directly on those stories to create other versions of them is not unique to modern fanfiction. If your argument about fanfic (especially if it's ones about the unique evils of fanfic) is contingent upon assumptions or assertions about that general practice rather than anything specific to modern fanfic in particular, your argument is short-sighted, painfully ahistorical, and poorly reasoned.
Like, here's a very obvious example. My favorite Shakespeare tragedy is King Lear. The story told in King Lear was drawn from the pre-existing narratives around the mythical King Leir. This had recently appeared in the anonymous play King Leir (which seems to date from the 1590s, while Shakespeare's Lear was written in the very early 1600s). A version of the story shows up in Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene (published in the 1590s as well). Shakespeare integrated other narratives into the core Leir story he took from the King Leir play written and performed just a few years earlier (most of the extra narratives in King Lear also have pretty obvious pre-existing sources). Famously, Shakespeare altered details of the traditional story in this process, and especially of the King Leir version, to suit his artistic preferences. In some versions, for instance, Cordelia survives the events of the main Leir story only to be killed years later. Shakespeare didn't even come up with the idea of Cordelia dying tragically after initially seeming triumphant (one of his main changes from King Leir). But he integrated her death into the main story in a more cohesive and streamlined way than it was generally done.
So Shakespeare didn't invent the essential narrative of Leir/Lear. He didn't invent most of the characters in it. He didn't even "file off the serial numbers" in the modern phrase; the characters are meant to be recognized as those familiar, pre-existing characters to a contemporary audience. Part of the power of the play for its original audience would come from their familiarity with other versions of the story and characters. In general, say, they would expect Cordelia's return to the story as an ally of Lear's, but not Cordelia and Lear's tragic defeat. Modern audiences unfamiliar with any other version of the story can still register the shock and horror and bleakness of Shakespeare's handling of it, but not usually in the way that an audience of the time would have registered it. The power of the conventional Leir narrative was such that in later years, Shakespeare's version would get "corrected" back to the established Leir story as appearing in things like King Leir. It was only much, much later that the King Lear of Shakespeare would be regularly performed as he wrote it, without making it more digestible to then-contemporary sensibilities or closer to the "canon" he was working off of.
( Read more... )
