anghraine

I don't even recall who posted this, but apparently at Worldcon, Seanan McGuire presented this simple flowchart to explain what is and is not fanfic:

I have no grievance with McGuire in general, but this is both elegant and quite wrong, IMO. Sorry, my Austen fanfic is very much fanfic (and there's no need to give the P&P "variations" industry any more delusions of grandeur than it already has, lol—those are very much fanfic, too). Some of my fics could also be considered re-imaginings or retellings—First Impressions is the obvious example as a deliberate retelling of P&P with genderswapped leads, rather than a true what-if AU—but they are absolutely fanfic. They're fiction written as a form of fan expression.

Sometimes there is a real sense of difference between fiction of this kind, especially when written in a fandom context that is clearly informed by or in dialogue with other fanworks, wider trends in the fandom or in online fandom in general, etc vs some literary re-imaginings that interrogate the source material but are not really fannish (not even in a fan hatred way). So it's not that I think all fiction of this kind should be defined as fanfic. I think that has to do with the conditions of creation rather than the novelty of the cast, setting, and/or plot. But the defining artistic criteria of fanfic as a form or genre are not determined by externally imposed legal codes or the opinion of the source material's author.

There have been many attempts to develop an authoritative definition for fanfic that ultimately comes down to "can you legally make money off it?" But that is not what fanfic is, and I'm deeply skeptical of conceptualizing genre, any genre, based on whether or when it can be sold. A lot of licensed IP writers seem very invested in distinguishing their work from fanfic—sometimes claiming it's not about superiority (sure, Jan), but it's just very important to them that they not be perceived as fanfic writers. But I'd argue that what makes licensed work fanfic or not isn't actually the license, or it being a professional job for money, but the approach of the work in question. Some IP writers are very much fans and clearly approached the licensed work as a chance to write fanfic about some part of canon they're super into with authorization from a parent company or something (various Star Trek writers seem to be very much of this type, say). Others don't really seem to be approaching their work as a form of fan expression, which is not morally wrong in any way, but definitely different. Going back to P&P, there are some takes that I wouldn't really consider fanfic (unlike the variation industry), just because the authors don't seem to be writing as fans but for some other goal. So you sometimes get P&P sequels that are really different from the fanfic—more literary in some ways, but often less engaged with Pride and Prejudice or its adaptations than the fanfic tends to be and prone to little canon errors that fans don't usually make. It's a little hard to describe but you can usually tell.

In any case: some licensed IP work is fanfic and acknowledged as such by the authors, while some isn't; some fanfic is based on source material that is long out of copyright (and some other things based on the same or similar sources isn't fanfic), and the time since publication does not merit a specific respectable distinction from, idk, normie fanfic by Marvel slash superfans or whoever is the fannish target du jour.

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Current Music: Barcelona (Freddie Mercury & Montserrat Caballé)

There’s a lot I hate about the ~~wank~~ discussion around “early modern authors wrote fanfic, too!!!” But people using the most renowned early modern writers and the worst of fanfic as equally representative for their pearl-clutching screeds is such a dishonest maneuver. Ugh.

(There is a discussion to be had about extending “fanfic” beyond 20th/21st century fan culture, but that sure as hell isn’t it.)

Tagged: #a) plenty of early modern literature was bad and using only the most ~elite for purposes of comparison is actively dishonest #b) the sneering almost never defines what fanfic even is or why highly derivative early modern fiction is different

[ETA 5/14/2024: heh, the tags are basically a primordial version of this longer and more detailed post I finally broke down and made less than a month ago.]

Current Location: Washington
Current Music: The Power of Love (Huey Lewis & The News)

I normally keep my various personas somewhat separate (mainly: Anghraine + my original fic writing persona + the academic identity). But one of the sf/f magazines I follow on my Twitter original fic account just tweeted out an article for the magazine on fanfiction’s effect on editing, for an unexpected crossing of the thought streams. It was cool, so I looked at the author—and I’ve met her before! In person! It was at an academic conference, under my actual name.

I mean! She attended a panel I was on, asked questions, and gave us all her business card! This was well before she wrote this article, and it’s not like I know her just because we briefly interacted once (she was an editor at Tor lol), but still, the world can be unexpectedly small.

Tagged: #someone i met through my rl self writing about something mostly of interest to my fandom self #coming to my attention through my original fic writing self... weird

steinbecks said:

oooh can you link??

primeideal said:

love it when that happens!

yavieriel said:

Pls link! I’m very curious what that article says

[ETA 5/1/2024: I think I forgot to respond at the time, but I was talking about Diana M. Pho's article in Uncanny here.]

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Current Music: Don't Stop Believin' (Journey)

My best friend and I had an interesting, fairly wide-ranging conversation about the distinctions between adaptation, retellings, fanfiction, other forms of directly intertextual storytelling (à la Wide Sargasso Sea, Lavinia etc), covers (as in music), heavily illustrated editions of texts, collage, sampling, novelizations, ekphrasis generally, translation, and inspiration.

The distinctions here are mainly ones that he makes and I do not. For me, all of these things are on a spectrum or scatterplot of something like intertextuality. As I was saying on Tumblr the other day (re: fanfiction), I don’t actually think that most of these kinds of terminology reflect coherently defined art forms at all. They reflect norms, values, and conventions shaped by laws and corporations and other economic/cultural concerns, not any consistent system of understanding intertextuality more broadly.

This is a frequent point of disagreement between him and me, because he prefers to refine terms like these into … philosophical coherence, I guess? So he’ll say, well, I think of the term as more specifically meaning X, not Y, and that lets us examine the different approaches that X and Y take in a more systematic, artistically formal way. (As in the linked post, this is formal in the sense of form not as in propriety.)

And I’m like … it does, yes, but I don’t think that kind of re-definition corresponds to the meanings of those terms in actual usage. Narrowing the definitions imposes a coherence and logic to these distinctions that I don’t think actually exists. It’s more like a grab bag of imprecise, overlapping categories defined by values and customs and legal practice than anything they’re doing artistically.

Him: inconsistent laws and customs are kind of arbitrary and uninteresting in terms of theorizing categories of art, though.

Me: not to me, but anyway, I think the way we theorize art is very profoundly shaped by modern customs and laws to a degree we often can't even see, and words are defined by usage, not philosophical convenience.

(Yeah, we’re super fun at parties. But seriously, this is how we’ve talked since high school.)

Regardless, his theory is that adaptation is actually a narrower category of intertextual art than in casual (or academic) usage. His view is that an adaptation is an attempt to represent the actual source; there may be new material added, and some of the original material may be removed, but there is an effort to preserve not just character outlines or plot structure or elements of setting, but considerable amounts of the original source, usually in a different medium than the original. A re-telling, on the other hand, is a work that re-casts the source material into new language and sometimes generic (as in genre) form.

This is all according to him, not me. I think all storytelling of this kind = re-telling and that there is no hard line separating these approaches, just gradations of variance.

( Read more... )

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Current Music: Old Time Rock & Roll (Bob Seger)

Today’s Twitter fanfic discourse is … something.

[ETA 4/12/2024: lmao, I am almost certain this was in reference to one of RSB's periodic tantrums over it that percolated through SF/F Twitter circles and pissed a wide variety of people off. I think I actually caught wind of it via John Scalzi of all people, who was like "as the author of Fuzzy Nation, I can't judge fanfic writers."]

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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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Current Music: Leather and Lace (Stevie Nicks & Don Henley)

It feels like I'm increasingly seeing posts that are like "a bold and daring thought: what if genre fiction actually is a lesser art form" and "fanfic really is cringe and shallow in a way original, or at least literary, fiction definitionally isn't, as a natural byproduct of the form."

I have many complaints about fandom trends, both generally and specific to certain fandoms. I have always had lots of complaints about these. But I hate this. I hate the snide, snappy versions of this especially, but I also hate the more earnest arguments about how this just naturally arises from the existence of magic or spaceships or the re-purposing of pre-existing characters. I hate the attempts to pass off nostalgia for ye olde SF/F + handwringing over the corruption of the youth/womenfolk/etc as somehow progressive. I hate framing the most absolutely conventionally pretentious arguments about why less "respectable" genres really truly deserve to be disrespected as revolutionary.

There are deeply ahistorical and short-sighted elements to this that I've ranted about before (most recently with regard to fanfic here), and trying to additionally suggest these ideas are dangerous and transgressive and simultaneously so obvious as to be above criticism is so nonsensical. If you want to talk in sweeping generalizations about how SF/F is trash and fanfic is trash, you can do that, but the demand to be welcomed for doing so in fandom spaces and that the entirely predictable result of people getting annoyed just shows how right you are and how defensive fandom is about their unsophisticated tastes is just raw entitlement and elitism. Upsetting people is not a vindication of your position.

( Read more... )

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Current Music: Mr. Blue Sky (Electric Light Orchestra)

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... )

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Current Music: Somebody To Love (Queen)

On Tumblr, ao3commentoftheday responded to an ask about having one fic that is far more popular than any others and the ambivalent feelings that arise from that. I reblogged a further response from giasesshoumaru about how sometimes a particular fic just strikes a chord with people and we won't always know why (or there might not even be a good reason).

Tagged: #this is weirdly reassuring #given my It's Complicated feelings about SOC

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Current Music: From the End of the World (Electric Light Orchestra)

This kind of needs the original context, so:

ao3commentoftheday said:

the jump from “someone should do this” to “I should do this” is scary, but oh so worth it in the end

beanarie responded:

and then “there’s nothing stopping me from doing this”

fredersens added:

“someone should do this”“…i’m someone”

I reblogged the whole thread and added:

#the origins of the lucyverse :) #i was so WAIT WHAT when i heard that it [ETA 3/12/2024: female Luke Skywalker, not my specific take on her in the Lucy fics!] was actually planned and saw the beautiful mcquarrie concept art #with reasonable clothes and a ponytail! #and was like ... well there's no point to fic since luke isn't really an inherently gendered character ... #though that itself makes certain story options possible ... esp if you assume the misogyny is a real in-universe thing ... #some outlines write themselves

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I reblogged a post from turnaboutprince saying that most fanfiction discourse could be avoided if people read better (professionally published) books and better fanfiction, because generalizations about both mostly reflect unfamiliarity with high-quality work of both types. I added:

#tbh yes #'how could you think boring repetitive smut compares with Real Books for Real Readers' is like ... what fanfics are you even reading #and yeah the 'fanfic is the only way to find this material' (esp when fanfic is deeply indebted to published genres) is also '...'

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adventures-in-anecdotes posted a screenshot of an unknown person's author's note on AO3, which reads "Me? Heavily projecting onto my favorite fictional characters? It's more likely than you think."

I reblogged it from

brynnmclean right after making my genderbending post, and said:

#lol #speak of the devil

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‘Darker riches’ of English aside, a lot of the material I’m reading about is interesting (when I’m not tired). There was this section on an early Italian dramatist who was like “what if some tragedies … had happy endings? but were still Serious Art?” and “I made up the story for this play all on my own and that’s fine, it is actually okay to make up our own stories, too.”

Looking back from the perspective of a corporate, hyper-derivative, yet originality-obsessed culture, it’s like … Earth 2 at times.

Tagged: #the ways that fanfic both resembles ordinary early modern lit and doesn't is pretty unendingly fascinating to me #bc it's not the same but the contempt for /anything/ that uses pre-existing material apart from adaptations and ~subversions~ #is such a total inverse

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I’ve been thinking of what those “I hate the ship/trope you love enough to write about, but I’m willing to overlook it this once in your case” comments remind me of, and it finally struck me

Darcy’s first proposal

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I get that fandom can be annoying and worse than annoying, but … tbh I have yet to encounter a remotely convincing argument as to why fanfic is intrinsically Not Literature.

Tagged: #i am up to my ears in early modern lit right now and while i wouldn't personally term all derivative literature 'fanfic' #bc i think the term is more specific #a LOT of the time when people say fanfic what they mean is 'anything that reuses pre-existing stories/characters for any reason' #apart from direct adaptations #and when they're arguing about why fanfic is not Real Literature the derivative quality is /why/ it isn't Real Literature #'i'm not saying that can't be good ... i'm just saying it can't be THAT good' mmhmm #and then if you point out that a lot of things generally considered That Good share that same quality #hdu compare yourself with the greats! point proved!!!! #the whole rationale just seems totally incoherent and arbitrary to me #bonus points for 'i can't say why it's different from early modern reinterpretations it just is'

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An anon asked:

what do you think about the practice of self publishing p&p fanfic on amazon? It just seems so wrong to me. And a lot of it looks... not very good at all

I replied:

Hmm, I don’t think it’s wrong, as such—in a moral or artistic sense. There’s a long tradition of people writing and publishing alternate versions or sequels of pre-existing stories. (Full disclosure: I did it myself as an undergrad!)

But I’ll admit that there is something about the way it’s done these days that kind of rubs me the wrong way, and the style (from what I can tell) is not to my personal taste at all. I don’t like the industry of it. So … basically my feelings are pretty messy but more negative than not, even while I don’t think it’s wrong.

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I get an enormous kick out of AO3 comments that are basically liveblogs of my chapters <3

(I know some people are self-conscious about doing it, but I'm just heart eyes, haha.)

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It's pretty cool to see other people building their own sites/other archive structures for fic, especially for backing up their own fic. I like the mixture of personal control and connectedness ~~and icons~~ on Dreamwidth, and I'm familiar with it, so I'm just using the Dreamwidth community function for my personal fic archive.

Theoretically, I'd think communities could also work if you wanted the space open for more than one author (like ye olde archives-by-invite, or even a broader, themed space), but there's less pre-established structure for fic specifically. I actually like the freedom to choose what "standard" tags and headers I'm going to use, but with some site structure built in. Others may not, though, so more power to people going with whatever suits their needs (and ideally, diffuses fandom activity).

If any of you are interested in creating a Dreamwidth account/community for archiving purposes, by the way, some of the site styles are kind of aesthetically dire, yes. But here are some that I personally like:

Dark Blue by ninetydegrees—the one on my personal blog and the fic community; I've used it forever and find it very soothing.
Simplicity by timeismymeasure—nice and clean.
Too Much Wine by ninetydegrees—mostly for the convenient sidebar.
Atlantic by ninetydegrees—similar design, but more "writerly" in some ways, if you want that vibe.
Prose by timeismymeasure for Five AM—pleasant and elegant. I almost used it, but wanted more contrast.
Právda by rising for Five AM—similar design IIRC, but more vivid. I considered it for Pride month (the coloring looks kind of rainbow-y), but the orange was just a bit much. Fun if you go for that, though.
Pigeon Blue by dancing_serpent for Blanket—I prefer dark text on a light background, but I liked the look of this for the reverse.
Marble IV by dancing_serpent—same issue with the light text/dark background, but I like the design.
Neutral Good by timeasmymeasure for Practicality—another no-frills but pleasant one.

While I'm here, my own overly involved tag/organization structure for my Dreamwidth community fic archive (

moirharad):
( Read more... )

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I reblogged a post about how getting degrees in ostensibly impractical fields can help you ... write highly accurate fanfic in specific fields. flame-cat on Tumblr reblogged it with:

tolkien ghostwrote this

I tagged it:

#lkadsfjkla #laughing at both but #can't lie a significant part of getting into early modern studies was... not caused by wgdots but def tied up in it #and i can never tell ANYone irl about it lol #THANK U FOR MY ACADEMIC CAREER NEIL JORDAN #actually it was a paper on the borgias that got me into my phd program too #DOUBLE THANKS

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Since I made my fanfic post on Tumblr, I've seen about six more snide ones about how Real Literary Scholars understand that fanfic can't ever be compared with the True Art that is all early modern literature, even if the underlying rationale for dismissing fanfic equally applies, hdu compare A/B/O fics or whatever silly thing the fans are into today to real literature, it insults the degrees that Real Literary Scholars worked hard for, blah blah blah.

And, well, it's silly but that does rouse a bit of my flagging interest in my PhD research. I kind of wish I'd gone for adaptation in early modern and eighteenth century literature, which I considered and which could encompass this debate, but I thought research into early modern family structures (which is also very interesting to me) would be more ~respectable. But anyway. I'm an early modernist and they're full of shit.

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Anghraine

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Entries tagged with fanfiction

Huh

Tumblr crosspost (19 February 2021)

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Thinking about adaptation and fic and other stuff

Tumblr crosspost (16 January 2021)

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

Fanfic + SF/F rant

I guess we're doing Fanfic Discourse AGAIN

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tbh I think DW makes a pretty decent fic archive space itself

Tumblr crosspost (24 June 2020)

I don't actually think Shakespeare wrote fanfic, but...