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50 Shades of Morally Unambiguous, Part 4 (The Final Post I Swear!)

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Hello, MB! This is the last post in a series of posts rebutting last week’s Dear Author series on fanfiction. (That is, I think it’s the next-to-last. Either way, I just really like saying ‘penultimate.’) It’s also the 4th and final of a sub-set of posts responding to one DA post in particular: “Fanfiction: A Tale of Fandom and Morality.”

(I know, right? you thought it was never going to end and I was never going to move on from rebutting that post. WHAT KIND OF COLUMN IS THIS, you wondered. That makes two of us, guys, that makes two of us. WELL. THIS IS THE LAST ONE, I PROMISE.)

Before I dive in here, let me just issue, once again, the disclaimer that everything I write here is based on my own experiences and encounters with many different elements and aspects of many different kinds of fandoms. I have what I believe is a pretty broad perspective on fandom in general, but none of my thoughts on fandom should be taken as declarations of universal truth. If anyone wants my full and complete fandom bibliography I’ll happily provide it, but you really don’t want it because it’s long and boring and also includes this really awkward year where I was in the Kevin Spacey fandom. Trust me, let’s just not go there.


J/K, Boy-o, it’s cool.

 

In the previous three posts, I talked about the ways in which trying to police how influence works itself out in fiction is nearly impossible, and ultimately bad for the works on either side of the equation. I also talked about how it’d be a bit hypocritical for us to do that in the case of 50 Shades of Grey, our current controversial work of fanfic-turned-pro, given that one of the things publishers want writers to do is to appeal to the audience who shelled out for Twilight. In my last post I also discussed the potential for remix culture to change the way we think about creativity and the origins and ownership of creative ideas.

Now. There are a couple of potential negative aspects to this admittedly warm-fuzzy and optimistic scenario of industry free love. One of them Has mentions in her original post, and others I’ve had conversations with fans about throughout the past couple of weeks. They seem to boil down to the following arguments:

  • pro-fic can threaten fandom by damaging the implicit “no profiting off fanwork” code between fans and creators, thereby causing authors to be, as Has puts it, “more proactive in protecting their books from fanfiction.”
  • pro-fic can damage the quality and kind of fannish output, because instead of writing in order to critique specific canons, writers will come to fandom purely to exploit it and gain fanbases for their original works. We have already seen a bit of this in the Twilight fandom, according to Twilight fans themselves.
  • pro-fic can alter the nature of fandom by jeopardizing the free-exchange and alternative profit structure that fandom has going for itself.

I think these are all really good points, and there’s precedent for each of them. However, the construction of each argument removes autonomy from fans–millions of fans–who have been operating within their own spaces long enough to know exactly what they’re doing and why they’re doing it. Take, for instance, the case of Fanlib, which was an infamous site begun in 2007 which attempted to exploit fan creativity in order to make money for corporate creations. The backlash from my corner of fandom against the whole idea of Fanlib was so strong that it partially fuelled a movement within fandom to create multiple platforms, blogging communities, archives, and even the non-profit organization for fan advocacy that would become the Organization for Transformative Works. All because many of us realized that if we didn’t create our own spaces that people outside of fandom would be all-too happy to exploit it. Former Fanlib user aurimyonys has a great post about realizing what was problematic about the site she loved:

In the end, what is niggling at me here is the idea of corporate invasion into fan fiction – making the things we write fit their molds rather than ours (there was indeed a brochure from the Fanlib company referring to the fan scripts and contests they ran, separate from the Fanlib website, that said fans’ creations were made “to fit in the lines, as in a coloring book”). That basically destroys fan culture. Fan culture allows fans to play with worlds in unique ways. If what we are permitted to do suddenly is assigned a strict formula, that kills fandom. Really and truly.

And that, my friends, scares the hell out of me.

Fandom has a proven track record of withstanding attempts by outsiders or TPTB to take it over, shut it down, or dictate to it. But is professionally written fanfic a kind of corporate invasion? I don’t think so, and the main reason I don’t is because the overlap between pros and fans, as I’ve previously discussed, has always been there. Policing the interplay between them is literally impossible whether the policing is coming from fandom or from copyright holders. The other main reason is that just like with every other creative field, one or two breakout successes don’t suddenly create an entire overwhelming trend of for-profit fics. The reason 50 Shades is getting this much attention is because its success is so unprecedented; there have been plenty of other bestsellers based on fanworks, absolutely, but always tacitly so. Fanfiction that was openly converted into original work which then became a bestseller? This has never happened before. To me, the far more amazing and phenomenal fact about all of this is that members of Twilight fandom actually built and created their own publishing houses in order to truly bypass the gatekeepers of publishing; but that aspect of 50 Shades’ success isn’t really being talked about in the media to any degree. And even when you look at the dozens of dozens of Twilight fics that have been converted into original works, they’re absolutely nothing against the millions of Twilight fanfics that are happily co-existing for free alongside them. Literally, millions. I haven’t actually counted the number of Twilight fanfics over on FF.net, but it’s probably at least 3 million or so. Probably much more. One bestselling fanfic-turned-original work, balanced against all of the others that are still being produced within the culture of free exchange that the majority of fandom is happy to uphold? That’s just simply not a threat to fandom, any more than it is to Stephenie Meyer.

This is also the part where I point out that nearly half a million people on Tumblr alone know what “OTP” stands for. Fan culture is evolving and changing all the time, but it’s converging with mainstream culture in ways that actually strengthen it, not weaken it. Tumblr fascinates me because the whole site is so synonymous with fandom at this point that you really can’t extricate fans who identify themselves as being part of “fandom” from all of the other fans who simply reblog, like, and participate in fandom jargon and culture without realizing that’s what they’re doing. And when you consider that all of this fandom activity is directly supporting the creators, it becomes clear that outsiders don’t need to exploit fandom, because fandom is already a juggernaut of profit-making for any creator with sense. If it wanted to, fandom could prove a formidable enemy to copyright, but it clearly doesn’t want. Its own internal resistance to the idea of for-profit converted fic makes that abundantly clear. (I am telling you, thank goodness Sherlock Holmes is public domain, because if he wanted to, Benedict Cumberbatch could probably summon his own mini-army of fans to overtake copyright and leave it squirming on the floor begging for mercy. )


(Twice.)

 

What’s more, fandom’s respect for its canons actively works to protect creators from those who actually would infringe upon their copyright. Anyone remember Kaavya Viswanathan? When fans of Megan McCafferty got their hands on copies of the book, they instantly twigged that there was plagiarism afoot, and they helped document passage similarities while the story was still breaking. The irony here, of course, is that Viswanathan herself was a huge fan of McCafferty; and not to apologize for her plagiarism, but if we take her statements–that she unconsciously internalized McCafferty’s novels and reused her language accidentally– as being true, then I can’t help but feel that if she’d been a part of a fandom where there was a community around McCafferty’s language and story concepts, then she would have been more self-aware when writing her own works, less likely to plagiarize whole chunks of language and scenes from McCafferty, because that impulse would have been channelled into the creative transformation that fanwork affords.

There’s one final thing that I’ve not yet touched on in each of these posts, and that is the basic question: is for-profit fanfiction ethically wrong?

I say no, and here’s why. I have written numerous articles and blogged many times about how the publishing industry does all of the following things to books because they think it will make them more marketable:

  • whitewashes book covers
  • tries to erase queer and genderqueer characters from narratives, and often succeeds
  • queerwashes book covers to make butch, trans, or androgynous characters appear more binary gendered
  • thinwashes narratives and book covers
  • puts most of its financial and marketing support behind primarily white narratives
  • perpetuates the idea that minorities and women will read stories about white men, but white men won’t read stories about minorities and women, which turns into an awful catch-22 of a self-fulfilling prophecy that has nothing to back up a compelling contrary prevailing belief, because none of those other stories get told.
  • contributes, generally, to the danger of a single story

I believe that all of these extremely common occurrences within the publishing industry are immoral. I also believe that reclaiming heteronormative narratives, making them our own, and diversifying them, offering up alternatives to them, is far more ethical than supporting a hoary traditionalist system that wants to erase me, my friends, and other cultures besides my own. Which is why I believe that taking narratives out of the hands of the gatekeepers of traditional publishing–agents, editors, publicists, book-buyers–and putting them directly into the hands of people who want to read them can only ever be a good thing.

It doesn’t matter that most people wouldn’t find a book of BDSM erotica like 50 Shades of Grey particularly progressive or groundbreaking. To me, its function as a response to a literary phenomenon, its creation entirely within a fandom community, and its being placed directly into the hands of people who wanted to read it are all hugely progressive events. I believe every 50 Shades that a fandom produces actually paves the way for us to have more voices telling more stories, doing more things with narrative and modern technology, and telling more stories to more and more people. I believe that all of these things work to diversify our existing pools of literature, whether we’re writing the next Wide Sargasso Sea or the sixth millionth iteration of a SasuNaru fic where one of them gets turned into a bunny.

 

Plenty of people within fandom disagree with me, incidentally: there are many people who feel that trying to prove that all fanfic is transformative or empowering is a snooty and constricting activity, and I think that’s a valuable viewpoint too. To me, fanfic that is just produced for purposes of escapist entertainment is still transformative, because it’s still free work that’s being published for love and joy, and that still is a kind of response to established traditional means of producing literature. What gets me really excited is the idea that the millions of fanworks that exist can be all of these things at once: dialogic, monologic, pure porn, escapist, profound, literary, shallow, something in-between, or none of the above. And it’s still, all of it, working to increase the number of perspectives that get heard, the number of voices that get to speak. Fanfic that gets converted and published is still helping to do all of these things.

And what could be more “moral” than that?

50 Shades of Morally Unambiguous, Part 3: The Sparkle-Fairy Edition

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Hello, MB! This is the 4th (or 5th, but who’s counting) post in a series of posts rebutting last week’s Dear Author series on fanfiction. And it’s the third of a set of posts responding to one post in particular: “Fanfiction: A Tale of Fandom and Morality.” TODAY IS THE VERY SPECIAL FAIRY EDITION OF THIS POST.

In the previous two posts, I talked about the ways in which trying to police how influence works itself out in fiction is nearly impossible, and ultimately bad for the works on either side of the equation. I also talked about how it’d be a bit hypocritical for us to do that in the case of 50 Shades of Grey, our current controversial work of fanfic-turned-pro, given that one of the things publishers want writers to do is to appeal to the audience who shelled out for Twilight.

In the original post, author Has asserts, “Taking an entire fanfiction story and turning that into a published book is:”

  • ethically wrong
  • a cynical ploy to market books… an easy way to cash in because there’s already a built-in fanbase that is able to market the book via word of mouth
  • [an indication] that the author does not believe what they wrote is strong enough to stand on its own merits but decided to publish it so they could profit by exploiting their fanbase
  • disappointing
  • might start off an ever-crazier circle of fanfiction based on fanfiction.
  • very detrimental to fandom and fanfiction

I’ve already pointed out, in the previous posts, how the “marketing ploy” argument is hypocritical to criticize a fan author for doing exactly what publishers want them to do in terms of appealing directly to a rich consumer base. As for the second bullet point: the whole weight of history is behind the act of spinning old works and characters into new versions and iterations. The idea that the fan author’s writing can’t stand alone/isn’t good enough to be publishable is one fanfiction authors have been saddled with for decades. I’ve already rebutted this argument very thoroughly, so I’ll just add: this argument, that fans surely couldn’t write an original plot, not only debases fanfiction, but it seems to target members of female fandom spaces. It also completely sidesteps the whole point that in most cases, the fanfiction that gets converted into original fiction winds up far removed from the source material. And in many cases already was to begin with.

Okay, now for bullet #4 (I’m skipping around, okay): might start off an ever-crazier circle of fanfiction based on fanfiction.

Hahaha. Okay, well, for one thing, people have been writing fanfiction based on fanfiction for fucking years. How is that bad? I’ve had several works of fanfiction written for my own works of fanfiction, and like every other member of fandom I know, I’ve never been anything but extremely flattered. Just like getting fanart or a podfic of your story, fanfic based on one of your own stories is seriously one of the best things ever that can be gifted to you in fandom. There are even remix challenges that invite authors to write fanfic of fanfic, all over fandom. This is not a serious criticism of the “danger” of published fanfiction, and no one who understands how remix culture works would ever offer it up as one, because the whole point of being in a remix culture is that we’re all gleaning, transforming, and passing on what’s come before.

Which brings me to fairies.

 

Eat, Pray, Love author Elizabeth Gilbert has an amazing 2009 TED talk entitled “A New Way to Think About Creativity,” where she talks about trying to find new ways to “manage the inherent emotional risks associated with creativity.” ((transcript) I would never encourage you to read EPL but I would urge all of you to watch her talk because I think it’s completely brilliant, and her ideas, while they are offered in the context of taming genius, also are extremely relevant to the way we frame the argument about fanwork. Gilbert asks if we can “go back to some more ancient understanding of the relationship between humans and the creative mystery:”

[In Ancient Greece], people believed that creativity was this divine attendant spirit… a “genius” was this sort of magical divine entity who was believed to literally live in the walls of an artist’s studio—kind of like Dobby, the house elf. So, brilliant, there it is, that distance—that psychological construct to protect you from the results of your work. ….

And for me, the best contemporary example that I have of how to do that is the musician Tom Waits, who I got to interview several years ago on a magazine assignment. And we were talking about this, and you know, Tom, for most of his life he was pretty much the embodiment of the tormented contemporary modern artist, trying to control and manage and dominate these sorts of uncontrollable creative impulses that were totally internalized.

But then he got older, he got calmer, and one day he was driving down the freeway in Los Angeles he told me, and this is when it all changed for him. And he’s speeding along, and all of a sudden he hears this little fragment of melody, that comes into his head as inspiration often comes, elusive and tantalizing, and he wants it, you know, it’s gorgeous, and he longs for it, but he has no way to get it. He doesn’t have a piece of paper, he doesn’t have a pencil, he doesn’t have a tape recorder.

So he starts to feel all of that old anxiety start to rise in him like, ‘I’m going to lose this thing, and then I’m going to be haunted by this song forever. I’m not good enough, and I can’t do it.’ And instead of panicking, he just stopped. He just stopped that whole mental process and he did something completely novel. He just looked up at the sky, and he said, ‘Excuse me, can you not see that I’m driving? Do I look like I can write down a song right now? If you really want to exist, come back at a more opportune moment when I can take care of you. Otherwise, go bother somebody else today. Go bother Leonard Cohen.’

And his whole work process changed after that. Not the work, the work was still oftentimes as dark as ever. But the process, and the heavy anxiety around it was released when he took the genie, the genius out of him where it was causing nothing but trouble, and released it kind of back where it came from, and realized that this didn’t have to be this internalized, tormented thing. It could be this peculiar, wondrous, bizarre collaboration kind of conversation between Tom and the strange, external thing that was not quite Tom. ….

This is hard. This is one of the most painful reconciliations to make in a creative life. But maybe it doesn’t have to be quite so full of anguish if you never happened to believe, in the first place, that the most extraordinary aspects of your being came from you. But maybe if you just believed that they were on loan to you from some unimaginable source for some exquisite portion of your life to be passed along when you’re finished, with somebody else. And, you know, if we think about it this way it starts to change everything.”

I like this idea a lot. I like it because it makes ideas a community process of receiving, sharing, and passing on. I like this idea for its potential to revise the way we think about storytelling and narrative theory. I like it because it’s anti-capitalist! I like it because it reconfigures creativity with communal narratives at the center of a kind of group process in which we all give and receive ideas as they come to us. And I like it because it implies an equal balance of agency between us as creators and the fairy-like muses that gift us with stories and ideas.

What if we viewed creators as being strands along a larger, interconnected web of ideas? What if we could agree that original works and the works they inspire could co-exist alongside of one another—since we know they already do—and that maybe that’s okay? And what kinds of new business models could we derive from thinking about creativity this way? What if I write a book that I am willing to openly claim is based on an idea that I drew from your book, and instead of you sueing me, we work out a deal where “Inspired by (Your Book)” goes on my cover? What if, after a certain number of copies sold, both of our books are reprinted and we share the wealth?

What if taking inspiration from someone else’s works didn’t have to get conflated with “plagiarism” (which is when you explicitly copy something and don’t credit) but could instead be seen as a form of literary sampling? Dear Author actually has a post from 2010 arguing for compulsory licensing for ALL fanfiction (um, how about no); but what if a conversation about licensing and royalties could be had without thinking of these things as a way to proscribe the boundaries of fanfiction? What if they could be seen, instead, as potential ways to make it easier for attributed transformative work to be sold openly and linked back to its source inspiration, for the mutual benefit of all parties?

Tomorrow, we’ll talk about the down-side of this new world of Free Love And Published Fanfic! But for now:


(source)

Damn straight!

50 Shades of Morally Unambiguous, Part 2

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Copyright, Transformative Fiction, and Value

Continuing the series of responses to the Dear Author series on fanfiction; this is Part 2 of a 3-part response to “Fanfiction and Morality.” (Part 1 is here!)

To recap, the author of this post, Has, argues that “Taking an entire fanfiction story and turning that into a published book is:”

  • ethically wrong [in part because the fan code of conduct is never to profit off fanfic]
  • a cynical ploy to market books… an easy way to cash in because there’s already a built-in fanbase that is able to market the book via word of mouth
  • [an indication] that the author does not believe what they wrote is strong enough to stand on its own merits but decided to publish it so they could profit by exploiting their fanbase
  • disappointing
  • might start off an ever-crazier circle of fanfiction based on fanfiction.
  • very detrimental to fandom and fanfiction

 

The CoC (my oh-so-hilarious abbreviation for ‘fan code of conduct’) is a lie meant to keep fandom protected from copyright holders, but the reality is that it’s the copyright holders who aren’t protected—not because of any malice on the part of fans, but because of the fact that modern copyright law upholds the value of transforming existing works.

Copyright will always deter straightforward derivative rip-offs of your work, but it doesn’t guarantee your work can’t be really transformed and that money won’t be made off that transformation. The copyright holder can be legally subject to having their work taken and revamped and published in (at least?) 4 ways:

  • The copyright holder can have their work revamped and published as parody under the Fair Use clause—which allows, of course, for the commercial sale of parody, even when works aren’t parodies but are in fact serious, like the famous case of Alice Randall’s bestselling African-American critique The Wind Done Gone.
  • The copyright holder can have their work inspire a new universe with new settings, contexts, and characters, the way Twilight inspired 50 Shades.
  • The copyright holder can have their copyright expire and enter the public domain—at least 50 years after their death for countries following the Berne Convention.
  • The copyright holder can drop off the face of the earth and be unreachable when the remixer comes calling. This is called the orphan works clause, and it allows for your copyright to be overruled if no information about the work can be traced back to you as the creator after a good faith effort has been made to find you.

Obviously the law doesn’t think transformative fair use threatens the copyright holder. And historically the copyright holders themselves haven’t seen it that way either. I just happen to be re-reading Jerome K Jerome’s classic satirical memoir Three Men In a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog), which was originally published in 1889, sold a bajillion copies, and has never gone out of print since. For the 1909 edition (which is printed in my copy, which incidentally was published by Barnes & Noble), Jerome writes:

The world has been very kind to this book. Mr. Arrowsmith speaks only of its sales in Great Britain. In Chicago, I was assured by an enterprising pirate now retired, that the sales throughout the United States had exceeded a million; and although, in consequence of its having been published before the Copyright Convention, this has brought me no material advantage, the fame and popularity it has won for me among the American public is an asset not to be despised.

I find it wondrous and wonderful that one hundred years ago the concept of copyright could so amiably co-exist alongside the idea that monetary value was not the only kind of value that mattered in the dissemination of an author’s works and reputation throughout the world. And it still can and does.

In contemporary Japanese culture, copyrighted manga is sold in stores right next to fan-produced doujinshi of that manga. Wiki notes that doujinshi artists “rarely secure the permission of the original creator,” and that the largest doujinshi con has over a million freaking people in attendance. Nothing about the practice of fanwork is secret or hidden, and neither are fans prevented, either legally or socially, from making money off what they do. As MB’s own Brigid Alverson writes:

Current copyright laws allow publishers to tolerate a certain amount of remixing of copyrighted characters. …on balance, many observers think that the doujinshi phenomenon is good for the manga market, because it builds interest for the series and characters and provides a training ground for new creators—perhaps the best known being Rumiko Takahashi, creator of InuYasha and Ranma 1/2, who got her start creating doujinshi under the guidance of Lone Wolf and Cub artist Kazuo Koike.

Let’s make this even clearer: in Japan, E.L. James could write and sell Twilight doujinshi and no one would prosecute her for it because the culture, production, and sale of doujinshi adds value to Stephenie Meyer’s original product. In Japan, she wouldn’t even have to change the names to a) profit off her work AND b) increase the value of SMeyer’s work.

I’m not making this point to argue that SMeyer shouldn’t get to prosecute people who infringe upon her copyright. I’m arguing that what’s happening here is not really infringement, because even when it is for profit, it still increases the value of the original product.

My friend Silvia Kundera has a quote on my ‘fanfic is okay‘ post that I think is relevant here:

I am actually the proud owner of an authorized & published One Tree Hill Brooke/Lucas, implied Peyton/Nathan novel that I bought at fucking Borders. And it’s ‘real’ fanfic, man. It’s a pairing-centric fix-it that does a shippy re-write on Season 2. for the author’s preferred couples. It’s exactly what I’d expect to bookmark on delicious when I’m in the mood for het. The only difference between this and a 50k Sheldon/Penny fanfic is that:
— one of these is on my bookshelf & someone got paid for it;
— one is on my computer & someone did it for love.

Has’s argument that publishing fanfic as origfic is “a cynical ploy to market books” fails to take into account the value-added worth of a book that can be tied back to a previous source. The One Tree Hill franchise obviously thought that paying an author to write a shippy fix-it fic would add value and meaning to its overall product. How, in theory, is this any different from EL James publishing 50 Shades and then linking it back to Twilight?

For that matter, in what kind of warped thought process does a for-profit novel with no obvious connection to a franchise get branded as less legitimate than a for-profit novel written directly for a franchise? One is a series tie-in, one is a bestselling novel that you would never connect to the Twilight series if you didn’t already know through word of mouth and the media that it began as Twilight fic. The book 50 Shades of Grey has literally nothing to do with the book Twilight.

I said I wasn’t going to tackle Dear Author’s examination of 50 Shades itself, because it’s a maddening, dishonest red herring of a post, but—okay. Look. Dear Author focuses a lot of time on attempting to decode how transformative the new, names-changed version of James’ fanfic is compared to the original version. They devote an entire post to the task of comparison which starts by doing a literal find/replace count on the character names. This is an EPIC example of missing the point. The side by side comparison never once considered how similar the work of fanfiction itself was to Twilight, and how far removed the characters may have been from Meyer’s to begin with. Because honestly, most people picking up 50 Shades of Grey would never be reminded of Twilight—prolly because Twilight is about TEENAGE VAMPIRES AND NOT BDSM PORN, JUST A THOUGHT.

And I’ll add: the DA side by side comparison is also an epic example of rudeness, since they obviously acquired their copy of the fanfic after the author had removed it from the web. In other words, they dug up her deleted fanfic just because they could. There is absolutely no reason for a side-by-side comparison of MotU and 50 Shades except to attempt to humiliate and shame the writer, and to imply that all she did was change some names around, AND to imply that changing some names is all ANYONE does when they convert their fic to original fic. That is. just. SO INSULTING. It’s so insulting that I’m not going to devote a whole separate post to responding to it because I think it’s completely duplicitous.

Because you know what words they didn’t do a find/replace on? VAMPIRE. WEREWOLF. SPARKLE. FORKS. Possibly because none of those central elements of Twilight are anywhere to be found in 50 Shades. Oh my god I just. okay. moving on.

Is the argument here honestly that the success of E.L. James’ novel is somehow a shameful thing because it dares to piggyback on Twilight’s success?

Um. Then what the hell has the publishing industry been doing since 2005?

Because correct me if I’m wrong, but I thought we’d spent the last 7 years seeing hundreds upon thousands of Paranormal YAs flooding bookstores. I thought I’d spent years seeing bookstore displays using “If you liked Twilight, you’ll love this!” as a promo to sell books. I thought I’d seen dozens of books being reprinted specifically to have iconic red and black covers. I thought I’d seen Wuthering Heights, Pride and Prejudice and Romeo and Juliet all being explicitly appropriated and repackaged for teenagers as books Bella and Edward love. Did I just make all these things up?


Er. No?

It is intellectually dishonest to handwring about undue influence because a few dozen of Twilight fandom authors are owning up to doing, explicitly, what the publishing industry has been blatantly encouraging the entire industry to do for years. Why on earth shouldn’t E.L. James market her book’s appeal to Twilight fans, given that that’s exactly what publishers want a book to have?

And the thing is you usually never know what the sources of influence are as long as they aren’t disclosed and aren’t completely overt or apparent in the work itself. What if Left Hand of Darkness really is a Star Trek fanfic? What if Inception really is unauthorized Paprika fanfic? After all, Nolan calls it one of his “principle influences.” What if “Firefly” really is unauthorized fanfic of “Cowboy Bebop? After all, Joss said it had anime influences. I’m pretty sure no rights or attribution was ever given in these cases. Does that mean the influence wasn’t felt? Nolan even said he based the character of Ariadne on the main character of Paprika. But it’s okay, because clearly they’re just general tropes, right? Much like the character trope of a young spunky heroine falling in love with a seductive, dominating hero….

In all of the cases I mentioned above, there is a documented influence because the creator was familiar with the previous work and its genre conventions. Are these things fanfiction? A better question is how aren’t they fanfiction? And what’s more, how don’t they add value to the original work? I like these specific examples because I watched Cowboy Bebop after I heard Firefly was based on it. I watched Paprika and the film Dark City because I heard Inception was based on them both. I finally decided to take the plunge and watch Original Trek after I read Left Hand of Darkness. Even when influence isn’t openly claimed and owned up to, value still reflects upon the original inspiration.

And whether or not Twilight fans and critics want to admit it, there’s nothing harmful about 50 Shades’ success. Stephenie Meyer’s fans aren’t going to stop being fans of her books just because 50 Shades exists. But fans of 50 Shades might decide to go back and read Twilight, if there’s anyone out there who hasn’t yet. These two different novels can co-exist, just like they already do in Japan. These works amplify each other, to the credit of all.

Later: Part 3—the “morality” of all this, and new ways to think about creative autonomy!

50 Shades of Morally Unambiguous, Part 1

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Hello, MB! First off, in response to requests to expand on a few of the terms I’ve been using in these posts (and thank you all so much for your comments!), I’ve created a glossary here! I will update it as new terms come up, and I will try to give more clarity in posts where concepts may not be clear. :D

Also! I have to say thank you to everybody for giving me such a warm welcome and providing such great comments! I really, really appreciate it and I hope that the gargantuan post I’m about to drop in your lap isn’t enough to permanently put you off this column. IF IT HELPS I am also subliminally recruiting for my cult.

Welcome to the second (or, really third) in a series of posts rebutting this week’s Dear Author series on fanfiction. The post I’m going to address today is a doozie: “Fanfiction: A Tale of Fandom and Morality.”


Not gonna lie, this panda is me writing this commentary. I am this panda.
It’s been a few days of oh god please let the horror end / oh god how is this still not done

 

The entire Dear Author series on fic was prompted by the success of the novel 50 Shades of Grey, which began its life as a Twilight fic called “Masters of the Universe.” This novel is not the first Twilight fanfic to “go pro”—there are in fact a shitload of other ones. I have a more general post about the Twilight pro-fic phenomenon over at The Mary Sue today, so in this post I won’t focus on it so much as the argument around it. Fanfiction has for a long time existed as the elephant in the editorial room, and the wild success of 50 Shades is finally, for better or worse, forcing the conversation about whether or not fanfic is legitimate to move foward after a steady decade and a half of rapidly advancing the argument in fanfic’s favor. Suffice it to say that people on both sides of the argument, within fandom and outside of it, are up in arms about the fact that Twilight pro-fics have the audacity to openly link to their fannish origins and then sell different, “original” versions of themselves.

Things I’m Happy About (A Brief List):

  • that the author of the DA post, Has, is someone on my end of the spectrum of perspectives about fanfiction.
  • I’m happy that finally!!!! there is a NEW ARGUMENT about fanfiction! :D
  • I’m happy because Has’ argument illustrates how overwhelming remix culture is, how it’s confusing everyone, how it’s rapidly calling for paradigm shifts in the way we think about intellectual property, property law, copyright, publishing in the age of digital media, and collaborative creative culture.
  • I’m happy because this whole discussion can be seen as as a call to renegotiate copyright in the age of remix culture.

Things I’m Not Happy About (A Slightly Longer List):
Has makes a wide-ranging argument that for-profit fic converted from fanfiction is immoral. These are all direct quotes from the source post but I’m going to bullet-point them in the interest of simplicity. Has argues that “Taking an entire fanfiction story and turning that into a published book is:”

  • ethically wrong
  • a cynical ploy to market books… an easy way to cash in because there’s already a built-in fanbase that is able to market the book via word of mouth
  • [an indication] that the author does not believe what they wrote is strong enough to stand on its own merits but decided to publish it so they could profit by exploiting their fanbase
  • disappointing
  • might start off an ever-crazier circle of fanfiction based on fanfiction.
  • very detrimental to fandom and fanfiction

Okay, so. We have a number of different arguments being made here about why specifically profiting from fanfiction is dangerous, unoriginal, and immoral. There’s also another argument that’s not explicit, but which gets discussed repeatedly by fans in comments: that profiting off fanfiction is a violation of the code of ethics of the fan community. As commenter “S” articulates: “It’s an unwritten contract – fanworks are not to be made for profit.” Has herself is an active, proud member of fandom. She says that “Fanfiction is a great medium where fans can enrich and be a part of the world that they love.” Then she notes that, “historically, however, fandom has not been about making money, and any attempts to do so by fans were frowned upon.”

I want to start by examining this code of conduct in relationship to copyright. Then, in Part 2, I’ll talk directly about the value-added status of works published for profit under Fair Use, and then in Part 3 we’ll discuss the fears that all of this could hurt fandom. And finally we will cycle back around to morality. But first I’m going to give you a gif which illustrates your horror at realizing how involved this argument will be:


you won’t see the copyright infringement coming til it strikes

 

Which Came First, the Fandom or the Fic?

Fandom developed in the margins of pop culture; western media fanfiction in particular is tied to a sense of illegitimate production, subversive content, and bootlegged distribution. As U.S. and European fans have grown more open about what we do, we all insist that we do what we do for love and not for profit. And it’s true, we absolutely do, and will keep on doing so. But what gets forgotten is that this tacit ethical code grew out of the need to protect ourselves against the stigma of being thought of as “plagiarists;” as “unoriginal,” “untalented,” “only interested in porn,” “immoral.”

In other words, it was a code of ethics that grew out of marginalization, shame, and fear. Keep silent about what we do. Don’t give the creators/rightsholders any reason to care that you exist. Stay underground. KEEP IT SECRET. KEEP IT SAFE.

But all of this was before the age of the internet; before music sampling became commonplace; before Henry Jenkins published Textual Poachers, the first seminal academic work to argue that fanfiction was actually amazing; before Comic-Con became cool and creators started routinely interacting with fans; before fans started creating a discourse around what they did which challenged the pre-existing idea of fandom as shameful; before Youtube made fan response to a previous work literally just a click away; before it became clear to many of us that we are currently living in the middle of a remix culture where the gatekeepers of creative works are being more or less obliterated by the nature of global connectivity and the spirit of communal collaboration. And many fans, having grown up in this culture, naturally don’t see why they should keep fanwork secret and safe. It’s not hurting anyone, and it arguably is helping to create a more diverse world and inject multiple perspectives into discourse about creative works. What’s there to be ashamed of? This is a drastically different view of fandom than many people, fans included, hold even now, because the stigma of shame attached to geek culture is so high. But for a rapidly growing number of fans, what we do isn’t subversive at all. It’s creative, inventive, time-consuming, fulfilling, and cool.

I’m relieved that I don’t have to disagree with Has over the legitimacy of fanfiction; but I think we disagree about the source of this legitimacy. Has seems to feel fanfiction is legitimate because of the fact that it has a culture and community around it, because it has lots of people involved in creating an active thriving subculture. In other words, since lots of people are doing this thing, it’s okay.

I think this is completely backwards; and I feel like this is the crux of why so many arguments about fanfiction seem to many fans as though they’re being framed all wrong.

In my experience, most arguments about whether fanfiction is okay begin by examining the relationship of fanfics to copyright law. From this perspective, the Fannish Code of Conduct is always going to be front and center, because when we, as fans, are constantly seeing our activities framed with a view towards establishing their illegality, of course our first line of defense is always going to be “but we’re not doing it for profit!” and also “but look how many of us there are! You can’t sue all of us!” So endlessly the debate about fanfic cycles back around to the fact that since so many fans are doing it but they aren’t trying to profit from it, it’s okay to let them keep doing it.

But the impulse to expand on other people’s stories occurs on an individual level. It is a fundamental part of creativity. It happens whether or not you realize that it’s happening. I still remember reading an interview with Meg Cabot from years ago where she talked about how she wrote fanfiction on her own, privately, without ever realizing it was fanfiction. And Cory Doctorow claims to have written his first story at age 6—Star Wars fanfic. You cannot tell me, you will never be able to tell me that there are not millions of authors throughout the centuries who have not created books/stories/songs/movies/comics/art/parody in just this way. We don’t do it because we make a conscious decision to imitate other people’s styles, characters, voices; we do it because it comes naturally to us. We do it because we yearn to know more about what would happen if characters we love encountered new situations. We do it because imitation is how we learn to find our own voices. We do it because we want to see ourselves participate in something we love. And sometimes we do it because we get paid to do it.

You don’t have to have a community around fanfic to legitimize it. The community, as I talked about in the last post, just makes it that much more vibrant and wonderful, but the community doesn’t control or cause the flow of ideas. Stimulate, yes. Hamper, lol, often, as anyone who’s ever gotten sucked into Tumblr or TV Tropes and subsequently lost hours of their life will tell you. But the ideas exist apart from the community. Fanfiction will exist even if you take fans away from their fandoms. The fannish code of conduct—that we don’t do this for profit—was developed by our subculture to protect itself. It should not be taken as being some kind of literal restriction on the nature of creating fanfiction, because it can’t be. It is physically impossible to place a barrier between you and an idea simply because the idea might be linked to someone else’s.

Most people in the publishing industry know this, because, let’s face it, everyone knows about novels that began as fanfics, of authors who filed off the serial numbers, of fans who stopped writing in the middle of a work in progress to convert their fic into a novel because they realized they wanted to do something different with it. Some of us even know of editors and agents who explicitly seek out authors of fanfic and request that they convert those fics into originals. I have had editors approach me about existing fic; I have had friends approached by editors about their existing fic, as well as to request new fiction from them on the strength of having read their fanfic. These incidents have been happening for decades, and the only difference is that now a few fans are emboldened enough by the openness of the times we live in to actually claim their novels’ heritage as fanfics. They are actually attempting to give credit to the authors who inspired them, instead of changing names and contexts in secret and shame the way fans have had to do for years, all with the tacit complicity of the publishing industry.

When I say that framing fanfiction in the context of its relationship to copyright law is all backwards, I mean that the framework implies a causal relationship: copyright law exists, therefore fanfic is illegitimate. The opposing argument to this view has always been “but the fans are all right so let them keep doing it!” But transformative literature exists whether or not copyright exists, and the impulse to rework pre-existing stories is upheld and reinforced constantly in our society, be it through Pride and Prejudice and Monster Trucks or through endless revisions and retconnings of superhero myths and other comics universes, constant exploiting and profiting off works in the public domain, and literally innumerable examples of historical RPF which no one can copyright.

All of the agency, all of the sociohistorical evolution of narrative, all the power of creative impulse, stands behind the fanfic writer. It does not stand behind copyright. Just as you can’t place a code of conduct around the act of writing down an idea, copyright can never completely rein in the creative impulse to rework stories, because frankly that impulse is mightier than copyright law and will always be. You can’t order the entire of fandom to cease and desist, because even if you did, those works would all continue to be written. Only they would all be written a) in the privacy of their own homes, shared with no one, b) written and passed around via bootleg methods which would probably be impossible to control, and/or c) written and turned into “original” fic, exactly as they have been for centuries.

The code of conduct—fanfic is not for profit—is a lie. (Lol, THE CoC IS A LIE, GET IT /terriblepuns) It doesn’t suddenly erase an entire cultural history of reworking previous sources, or the publishing industry’s perpetuation of the practice, and it absolutely never has kept, never will keep, fans from turning fanfic into novels for profit. All it does is keep fans from admitting that they’re doing it, and it keeps the authors of the original work from receiving any kind of credit or residual benefit for having inspired the succeeding work.

OKAY I NEED A DRINK HOW ABOUT YOU GUYS.

 

Next up: looking at fair use works that make a profit and still fit within copyright. On to Part 2: Copyright, Transformative Fiction, and Value

Fannish Inquisitions: Countering Assumptions About Fandom

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Happy 6th anniversay, KAT-TUN! Thank you for providing us this useful visual metaphor for what often happens when other communities and fandom, er, collide!

 

Hi, MB! This is the first of a series of posts about fandom being written in response to a series of posts about fandom. The romance review site Dear Author is holding a week-long examination of fandom and fanfic—with somewhat confusing results. It’s my goal, through these posts, to argue for a more contemporary view of fandom and fanwork that falls more closely in line with a) how fans actually act in fandom, b) how fanwork actually operates and what it actually does, and c) the actual status of fanwork under the law.

Starting with the first post in the DA series, we have “How I Came to Appreciate Fan Fiction.” This is, overall, a fairly positive post, but it has a lot of outdated assumptions about fandom that I’d like to unpack.

To give Sunita D, today’s contributor, credit where it’s due, there’s probably always a moment of shock upon a first encounter with fanfiction, or doujinshi or yaoi, just like there is with any new concept. Like sporks! Or literal cloud computing! We might think of this first encounter as a moment of simple culture shock. Sunita even describes hers:

Of course I’ve hated certain books’ endings, I’ve wished for sequels, and I’ve thought about the off-page lives of favorite characters. But I’ve never written to authors to ask them to keep writing about a particularly loved protagonist. And I’ve never wanted to write my own versions of books. Not because I thought doing so would be wrong, but because it just never occurred to me.

Whoa, hold on a tic. Already we’ve run into the first of what will be many false assumptions about fandom and especially fanfiction in general throughout the Dear Author series on fanfic.

False assumption #1: All fans long to interact with creators.

“I’ve never written to authors to ask them to keep writing about a particularly loved protagonist.”

Okay, but most fans haven’t either. Most fans don’t need to, because our interaction with a canon has very little to do with what’s going on in the author’s head. This is a key aspect of fandom that many people outside of fandom get wrong. Many fans get very nervous and gunshy when the prospect of interacting with creators comes up, because those fans prefer as little contact with the makers of their canons as possible. Please note that this impulse is often not, not, NOT out of shame or embarrassment or fear of reprisals, but rather from a desire not to have the gatekeepers poking their noses in our business. There are exceptions, of course, especially in RPF fandoms; we are seeing something of a cultural shift happen as Twitter puts celebrities and fans in touch with each other on a daily basis. But for the most part, fans go about their business with little regard for TPTB (The Powers That Be). Which brings me to the next mistaken assumption:

False assumption #2: Fanfiction = Do-Over.

“I’ve never wanted to write my own versions of books. Not because I thought doing so would be wrong, but because it just never occurred to me.”

Most fans don’t want to write their own versions of books either. That’s not what fanfic is. Many people think of fanfiction as the practice of trying to prove a creator got it wrong. Not at all. For most fans, most of the time, fanfiction is not about rewriting canon.

Sure, a fan can write fix-it fic—but then they’ll turn write around and write something completely different. Fans explore their canons and play around with the worlds they’re engaging with in order to do something completely new. Take, for example, what may be the most popular narrative genre of all: the post-canon fic. The canon ends—you write about what happens after. But that’s a story that can be told and retold forever, because the possibilities are endless.

In general terms, fanworks are about expansion, not re-creation.

Happily, this is also the conclusion Sunita arrives at: This path isn’t just about creating new romantic relationships or changing unhappy endings to happy ones. What if you think the most interesting character in the Harry Potter novels is Luna Lovegood and you want to read more about her?…. Even if you adhere strictly to canon, there’s plenty of scope for your imagination.

From this point on, Sunita’s post is a plain, fair and positive view of fanfiction; but it’s a simplistic one. It justifies rather than celebrates. Which leads me to…

False Assumption #3: Fanfiction is just a simple, fun creative exercise that has no serious repercussions!

 

My main problem with all of this justification/explanation of fanfic is that it’s just SO DATED. I have been hearing people “defend” fanfic or try to “explain” fanfic in exactly this way for the last ten years. Two thousand-fracking-two, folks (and incidentally those defenses were on the front page of the NY Times, hardly out of mainstream cultural earshot).

And yes, everyone’s experiences are different, and I’m sure Sunita’s explanation is helpful for many people. But REALLY. TEN YEARS, GUYS. COME ON. CAN WE MOVE THIS DISCUSSION FORWARD A LITTLE? How’s this for an advancement:

  • Fanwork is dangerous because it challenges your worldview and makes you think critically about pop culture, literature, art, and the world you live in.
  • Fanwork has serious repercussions because it operates outside of traditional modes of access to ideas, and it is predicated entirely on a culture of free exchange and non-monetary systems of value.
  • Fanwork is complex and diverse. It opens minds, educates, and introduces new cultural experiences to the fan participant. It is anything but shallow.

SHIT JUST GOT REAL AKA THIS IS THE COOL PART OF THIS POST

In lit-crit terms, fandom is the living, breathing embodiment of Bakhtin’s ideas about dialogic imagination. Canon is monologic, expressing a single worldview, because usually canons have single or very few creators with one narrative goal in mind. But fandom? Fandom creates fics within communities, fics that are partly meta-commentaries, fics that arise out of passionate debates, fics that get reworked and turned into original fic, fics that offer serious literary critique, fics that seek to actively engage other fans in responding to them. Fandom is dialogic imagination.

Canon has to stick to the narrative parameters that define its medium. (Unless you are Homestuck and you are your own medium. Yeah, yeah, we know.) But fandom has no defined parameters and expresses itself any way it wants. Fics written in fictional languages? Have several! Fanart? totally and 100% canon compliant! Fanvids? How much is that geisha in the window, Joss?

Fandom constantly critiques privileged narratives, challenges established sociocultural ways of thinking, and expands the parameters of a particular established worldview. Have some of my favorite examples of fics that critique canonical narratives:

WTF is this b.s. about fanwork being derivative? To quote Lev Grossman in his amazing Time magazine article, which you don’t get a link to because you have to SLOG YOUR WAY THROUGH THIS MESS WITH ME FIRST, these works “talk back to canon.” And they show their teeth.

We could have ended this post here (and I could have saved you 500 words, look, I tried, guys), because Sunita was on the right track! We could have worked with this! ugh, we were doing so good, Sunita. we could have been pals.

Except then we arrive at the money quote:

“Whether the changes authors introduce to these characters are sufficient to make the jump from derivative to transformative is not something we can usually predict in advance, but I think it’s important to have a conversation about what such a transformation entails and think about conditions in which authors might succeed or fall short.”

what. I mean. WHAT.

 

lsjdfksadjklad you don’t suddenly GAIN TRANSFORMATIVITY BY BEING THE SPARKLIEST OF ALL THE FANFIC PONIES IN DERIVATIVELAND, WTF.

(this is one of the results I got when I googled “fanfic pony.” Looks legit.)

False Assumption #4 & #5: Fanwork is Derivative / Fanfiction May Or May Not Be Legal.

I hope that at the end of the week Rebecca Tushnet will come along with her shining orb of Transformative Justice and articulate this idea as part of the DA series much better than I ever could (ETA: YESSSS she has!), but in her stead: There are absolutely no court rulings on whether a work of not-for-profit fanfiction is legal or not. None. That means all fanfiction is legal under the fair use clause of U.S. copyright law, safe and legal until proven otherwise. This protection will most likely last as long as the Fair Use clause exists. To quote the OTW, “current copyright law already supports our understanding of fanfiction as fair use.” And as long as current copyright law supports fanfiction, fanfiction is legally transformative.

It’s dishonest to talk about fanworks as if they pussyfoot around the law when they don’t. The ‘sliding scale’ train of thought implies that “transformative” fics have narrowly succeeded in evading the clutches of copyright law while “derivative” fics are just hanging around waiting to be slapped with a Cease & Desist. This train of thought implies shame, illicitness, wrongdoing, and flat-out genre snobbery and elitism. Most importantly, since presumably all fanfics (in the U.S.) currently enjoy legal protection, many fans don’t act as though they’re engaged in something that’s illegal. So the “sliding scale” perspective doesn’t even apply to us.

For comparison, look at the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund. You don’t see them going “Manga is not a crime! Except for the really, really dirty yaoi, and the shota, and okay, maybe we could really really do without the vore and the bukkake because honestly, people.” Their argument is simple: either all licensed manga, in all its forms, is legal and deserves protection, or none of it does.

By the same token, fanwork does not “succeed” or “fall short” by managing or failing to qualify as transformative.

And here’s the ultimate kicker—a concept that this series of DA posts sadly seems to completely miss: the meaning of ‘transformative’ creative work extends beyond purely legal contexts. It involves the power of creative expression to change the creator and the audience. To many fans, the act of conceiving and creating fanwork is a transforming act, before you ever write the first word. They are transformative because they transform the reader. You and me.

 

Fanworks Cited:

arboretum. “A Resolution of Territory.” Livejournal. May 5, 2008.

Dhobi ki Kutti. “Promise of the पुरवाई.” An Archive Of Our Own. June 30, 2010.

electrumqueen. “i am the hero of this story (i don’t need to be saved).” Livejournal. August 14, 2010.

eruthros. “Ephemera from the Avatar Collection at Republic City University with notes and commentary by the archivists.” An Archive Of Our Own. February 7, 2012.

Glock. “one last thing about Supernatural fanwork” and “Sam and Dean Winchestgopal.” Dreamwidth. June 15, 2010 and July 1, 2010.

Lierduoma. “How Much is the Geisha in the Window? (Firefly).” Youtube. July 24, 2009. (Fanlore listing.)

Shirozora. “So if Castiel was Zoe Saldana…” Dreamwidth. June 10, 2010.

Various authors. “Victorsverse Art and Artifacts. including the Ars Atlantiadae as well as Earth documents.” trickster.org. February 16, 2011.

Lofty idealism? Bitter rants? Might as well just call it “fangirling.”

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Hi, MB! I’m Aja! I’m your newest columnist and I have no idea what I’m doing, but I’ve been brought on board primarily to give a pan-fandom perspective to the work being done on this site, and to regularly infuriate you all with my hastily conceived opinions! So let’s just dive right in, shall we? :D


This is F(X)! This is going to be a long post, HERE, HAVE SOMETHING FUN TO LOOK AT.

 

I’ve been in fandom for 14 years. I’ve been active in lit, media, RPF, and Asian fandoms, writing het, slash, and femslash. If this is all fangirl Japanese to you, please let me know, guys, because I am going to be spending a lot of time talking about fandom in this column (which is why it’s called FANBATTE! is that not the greatest name ever) and I want to make sure I start from the same place as the rest of you! I feel comfortable claiming a general acquaintance with fandom history and culture regarding literary fandoms, “western media” fandoms, comics fandom, sci-fi/fantasy fandoms, anime/manga fandoms, and Asian pop fandoms. I don’t claim that my knowledge is universal (lol what is gaming fandom, what is Vocaloid, what is Homestuck*), but I’m here and this is my column, dammit, so it’s enough to be going on with!

My mission statement, in a nutshell:

♥´¨`♥ Ƹ̵̡Ӝ̵̨̄Ʒ Fanfic is okay. Ƹ̵̡Ӝ̵̨̄Ʒ ♥´¨`♥

 

Not just okay, but amazing. I believe that participating in fandom is a way of engaging in critical discourse about something you love, and I also believe that fanfiction is part of a huge, centuries-old cultural tradition of recursive literature. Fandom is so cool, and I hope you’ll stick around to talk about it with me, because I’m still learning so much and I hope ! :)

The focus of this column will most likely shift between general topics and discussions of specific canons. I have no idea what those topics and canons will be yet, so if there’s something you’d like me to discuss, please let me know, because I would love to!

* lol j/k no one can explain Homestuck

 

 

Now. Let’s talk for a second about Fandom Perspectives. oh wait hang on MJ said this should be a header

Fandom Perspectives~

This week, the respected romance review site Dear Author is doing a series on fandom and fanfiction. Unfortunately, they’re doing it wrong. So, so wrong, you guys. It’s like they’re trying to have peace talks while hemmed in on all sides by barbed wire. FACEPALM.

In most of the posts so far, the panelists’ starting assumptions and their conclusions actually highlight many of the problems you run into when you generalize about fandom. And since part of what I will do in this column is generalize about fandom based on my personal experiences, I want to start by talking about why such generalization is tricky.

Dear Author has obviously tried to round up differing perspectives and different topics related to fanfiction, so kudos to them for that, really. However, they have not secured a plurality of experience or even knowledgeability about fandom, so their discussions are proving very unsatisfying to many actual fans I’ve talked to who’ve followed along.

There are 3 main reasons for this disconnect between us (as fans) and the representations of fan experience in the DA posts:

  1. So far, all of Dear Author’s assumptions seem to be built around the idea that fanfiction has to defend itself, that by way of existing it is encroaching on someone else’s space. This is not only a false dichotomy but completely antithetical to the way most fans do fandom and think about their fanfic.

    I can’t say this enough. To most fans, what they do is not shameful, it’s natural. And why shouldn’t it be? People have been reworking their favorite stories for centuries. Why is fanfic somehow any different? But if you start your deliberation of fanfic from the perspective that fans have something to be ashamed of, then you color the entire discussion with all kinds of icky assumptions and negative stereotypes. What I will be doing, in my first week here at MB, is unpacking some of these assumptions and attempting to offer a more balanced and nuanced examination of what fandom is and how it operates in various cultural corners of the internet.

  2. There are no fans from non-western fandoms represented in DA’s list, nor are there any queer fans (at least none I saw representing themselves as queer fans) or femslash fans. If the only voices you hear coming from fandom are from people who are culturally closest to you, then you won’t ever have a well-rounded discussion on what fandom is.
  3. The majority of the DA discussion about fandom is being had by people who come either from outside of fandom, or from within primarily het fandoms. By “primarily het,” I mean fandoms for which major emphasis is given to canon heterosexual ships within the source pairing, and whose discourse encourage their fans to adhere to canon relationships. (This doesn’t mean that there aren’t subsets of alternate pairing fans within those fandoms, but those other fans don’t typically interact with the rest of the fandom.)

    Among these primarily het fandoms, the major ones claimed by the panelists tend to be isolated pockets of fandom that don’t have any interaction with other fandom communities. Fandom, like every other corner of the internet, is as diverse as the people who are in it. So you can have whole communities within fandom that never talk to other communities, and then you can have whole corners of fandom that are focused around being multi-fandom hubs and pan-fandom hubs (like Livejournal or formerly Delicious), that also have their own limitations and cultural expectations that don’t translate out to the “satellite” communities of fandom. And that can become a problem because you can wind up with people who have drastically different conceptions of: a) what fandom looks like; b) what fans are doing fandom for; c) who is in fandom; and d) what kind of fanworks are produced by fandom.

    D) is especially important because the fanfic that you find on, for example, AFF, looks nothing like the fanfic you find on AO3. By the same token, someone who is in an archive-based fandom would not have the same conception of what fandom is as someone who is involved in primarily livejournal communities, or for example Tumblr, where there are natural overlaps and discourse between all kinds of fandoms and fans. The Austen and Twilight fandoms are both represented several times on the panel, probably because of their close ties to the romance industry. While these fandoms are totally different in many respects, they are both well-known for being primarily archive-based rather than pan-fandom-community based. This means that pan-fandom fans don’t talk to them, and they don’t talk to us, which leads to a huge disconnect on both sides about what fandom is for everyone involved.

    As an example, for years every time rare fandom nomination came up during Yuletide, people attempted to nominate Pride & Prejudice, and every year those of us who actually knew anything about Austen fandom would have to explain that Pride & Prejudice is in no way a rare fandom; that it actually has thousands upon thousands of fanfics and hundreds more published fanfics to its name–they just were all tucked away in archives and not in spaces that the typical Yuletide participant played in. So this disconnect hurts communication on both sides of the divide.

All of this translates into a need to recognize that your experiences are not universal. I’m going to spend a lot of time counter-arguing many of Dear Author’s other posts from this week, so I’ll just point to their post “Fan fiction: a personal perspective” as an example of an open-minded post about keeping your own experience in perspective.

If only the rest of their posts took this advice! Instead, the overall impression of fandom that I and others are taking away from this series is that fandom is primarily shamefaced, defensive, and poorly attempting to justify copyright infringement.

To all of which, over the next week, I will be merrily calling bullshit.

Whew! Okay, so that’s me finished for now! What about you guys? WHO EVEN ARE YOU PEOPLE? Where do you come from? What perspectives do you bring to your corner of the internet? Are you in fandom? (Hint: are you reading this site? Then yes.) Oh my god this post is 1300 words long. HERE, HAVE ANOTHER K-POP GROUP.

Roundtable: On Fanfiction

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MJ: So, I’ve been blogging in this general location about manga since late 2007, and this has long been my “professional” venue for writing about the things that make me fannish. I’ve met nearly everyone I know in the manga blogging community through this blog, including both of you. But what I don’t talk about much here are the many years before that I spent blogging on LiveJournal, in a subsection of fandom focused mainly on fanfiction.

Up until recently, I was the only blogger here at Manga Bookshelf with a real history in fanfiction, but with Sean now on board things have changed, and I admit I’m kinda thrilled to have the opportunity to talk about this aspect of fandom that was once incredibly important to me. To that end, I’ve invited Sean, along with Michelle (whose interest in fanfiction is new and somewhat tentative), to join me in a roundtable discussion on fanfiction.

Now, I have a lot of highfalutin’ ideas about fanfiction, why I wrote it, and why I think it’s important as a form of meta discussion and even criticism, but let’s start by talking a bit about how we got into fanfiction in the first place. Sean? Michelle?

SEAN: As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, I am that sort of person who got into fanfiction, and indeed started writing it, before he got into anime and manga. Barring the usual Battle for the Planets/Speed Racer as a kid, my first exposure was in 1995, when I started reading Stefan Gagne’s Ranma fanfics. This quickly led me to John Biles’ fics, and from there I was hooked. I began writing Ranma in early 1996… and started reading it about mid-1996. XD

I was hardcore Ranma for about a year and a half, but then started branching out to more fandoms. At last count, I’d written for a good 30 or so fandoms, including some Buffy and Phoenix Wright fanfics in the non-anime world, with my last fic to date being in the world of Strawberry Marshmallow. I’m semi-retired (the fancy Internet way of saying lazy), but you never know what will pop into my head.

As for why I wrote it? The ideas get in your head and won’t let go. Or you want to finish the story before the author does. Or you’re rebelling against the preferred pairing. Or you want to see if you can do something people tell you is impossible. Or you want to expand on a minor character’s motives. Or you want to bash. I mostly avoided that last one. Mostly.

I still READ fanfiction constantly, of course.

MICHELLE: And then there’s me. I have read three fanfics so far and written about half a dozen drabbles.

MJ: Yeah, but you did a lot of RP writing, right? That doesn’t seem all that much different to me.

MICHELLE: Oh yes, tons and tons, mostly in the Harry Potter realm. I suppose it’s not that different. Though the way we did it—picking a point in chronology and continuing on from that point—didn’t set off my “canon is sacrosanct!” alarms as much as it would’ve if we’d been trying to wedge our original characters into the official storyline or something.

MJ: Like Sean, I got into fanfiction long before getting into manga, and in fact, I’ve written relatively little in manga fandoms. Though my first formal attempt at fanfic was in 2003, in retrospect I realize I’ve been writing it since I was a child, one way or another. From the epic Zenna Henderson-inspired stories my little sister and I acted out with our Barbies to the Buffy/Angel song from my singer-songwriter days, I’ve always felt the impulse to interact with fictional universes by finding ways to create within them.

With that in mind, I must embarrassingly admit that what actually pulled me into writing real fanfic was the world of LOTR RPS (Lord of the Rings Real Person Slash aka “Lotrips”), where the “canon” was basically movie industry gossip, blown up into a fully-fledged fictional world by the fanfic writers themselves. My friend Jaci lured me in with her own wonderful writing, and before I realized what I was doing, I was participating regularly in the LJ multi-fandom slash community contre la montre, which offered up weekly speed-writing exercises for anyone who cared to join.

For a while, I felt too intimidated by real fictional canons to try writing publicly in them, but reading the fifth Harry Potter book got me over that, and thus my proper fanfiction career began. Though my heaviest writing years were spent in Harry Potter fandom, I also dabbled as a writer in fandoms like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Firefly, and then much later in manga fandoms like xxxHolic, Hikaru no Go, and Banana Fish.

For me, writing fanfiction was mainly a means for participating in what I perceived as an ongoing meta discussion between writers, as well as a vehicle for interacting with the text in a very personal way. Though as I say that, I realize that a huge percentage of my fanfiction was written for either organized challenges or as gifts, some of which certainly seemed impossible or at least difficult at the outset (Neville/Oz, anyone?) so apparently I liked that aspect of it too. Fandom was a tricky place for me at times, partly because I was an omnivorous reader, with an interest in slash, het, and gen, and partly because my concept of an OTP is very, very… loose.

That last point, Sean, reminds me of something you said in your “thoughts on fandom and shipping,” specifically item two: “You can ship more than one contrasting couple at the same time, and not be betraying anyone.” In fact, both of your first two points there made me think, “Aaaaah, here’s someone I can actually talk to about fanfiction.”

MICHELLE: I’ve now gone to that link of Sean’s and returned, feeling rather illuminated about various fanficky conventions that have puzzled me. I must say I haven’t got much of a passion for “shipping,” but there are definitely a few pairings here and there where I think they’re genuinely in love with each other (Remus/Sirius in Harry Potter, Fai and Kurogane in Tsubasa RESERVoir ChroNiCLE) even if I don’t believe they’re actually getting it on.

I think I thought that fanfic writers all did genuinely believe these characters were getting it on, and part of the reason I’ve opened my mind lately is the realization that, for some (perhaps many), it’s a kind of writing challenge or, as Sean puts it, a “what if.”

MJ: Actually, Remus/Sirius is one of those pairings I feel strongly that the author actually wrote into the story and then hurriedly covered up later on when she realized what she’d done. And I stand by that, because clearly Alfonso Cuaron agreed with me on the first bit.

But yes, though there is sometimes generous subtextual support, generally I think non-canon pairings are pulled from our imaginations.

SEAN: As I’ve noted, I don’t WANT shipping in One Piece itself, but love it in the fandom. For one thing, the lack of canon romance leads to less yelling in the fandom. Sure, there’s some arguments between shippers and non-shippers, and the occasional rare slash v. het thing, but it’s mild and easily ignorable. Compare this to Bleach, where you simply CANNOT ignore the shipping. It was fine for about 25 volumes or so, but then Orihime told a comatose Kurosaki that she loved him. (As if this wasn’t obvious before.) FOOM! Made even worse that the two lead females are of almost complete opposite personality type, and you have a situation that simply cannot resolve easily. As a result, even in chapters where neither character appears, the debate tends to rage about them. (Let’s not mention Hinamori right now, that’s another kettle of fish.)

Some worlds are fun to read about, but I wouldn’t write in them, simply due to wanting to avoid arguing. Harry Potter is an excellent example. My ship of choice, Harry/Luna, is a fun one, and I can give you endless reasons why I think it’s best. But one of the biggest would be: “It doesn’t get into the H/Hr vs. H/G wars”. H/L fans tend to sit on the side and eat popcorn while those go on. Before Book 5, I didn’t really ship Harry with anyone, as Ginny was poorly fleshed out, and while I liked Hermione, her fans were insane. This has not changed with the release of Books 5-7 and the movies. :)

MICHELLE: Is there much fic written anymore where there isn’t boffing? I’m fairly smut-averse, myself…

SEAN: There is, but no one reads it. :) Seriously, lots of people write what is called “gen fic,” but with FFNet now providing sorting by pairing, many folks never see it as they sort for the ships they like and it floats by. It also gets far less reviews and attention than a hardcore shipping fic does. A lot of what writers want, especially young writers, is other people reading and saying “You are correct, that is awesome that you wrote that!” It’s easier to get comments if you write romance. Sadly, this is the nature of the Internet Beast

Another problem with fandom being “serious business” is that people start to take their own writing seriously. Yes, many fanfics were written for a need to see deeper characterization, or an epic that spans generation. But other folks wrote a fic as they thought “Wow, those two would be really hot if they screwed each other.” And that’s EQUALLY valid. I can pick apart your characterization, spelling, or lack of attention to basic anatomy, but I can’t attack your desire to write porn. That’s a valid choice, and I approve of it. God knows I’ve done it. A Phoenix Wright fic I wrote was a deliberate attempt to write a ludicrous porn story, with the title “Turnabout Orgy”. It’s not remotely my best work. Hell, it doesn’t even have much detailed sex. But it achieves what I wanted.

MICHELLE: Well, you can do romance without boffing! :) I should note that I don’t, in principle, object to people writing explicit stories or anything. I just don’t particularly want to read them. :)

MJ: Very little of mine involves boffing! Though I will always love a love story. And, y’know, I’m not averse to smut. Some of the most fun writing I ever did was for the recurring multi-fandom challenge, “Porn Battle,” and though even my smuttiest writing tends to be tamer than most, it can feel very freeing and, yeah, sometimes genuinely erotic.

Sean, I have to say if there’s one thing I’ve never understood about fandom, it’s shipping wars. Fortunately, it’s less of a big deal in slash fandom, where I spent most of my time, even when I was reading & writing non-slash. I think maybe because slashers never expect their favorite pairings to turn up in canon, they’re less likely to fight over it. At least that was my experience in Harry Potter fandom. I do recall knowing about some massive flamewars related to Prince of Tennis slash ships.

Also, Sean, to comment on your Harry Potter preferences, I think I tend to be partial to Neville/Luna more than Harry/Luna, but then, I pretty much ship Neville with everyone, so it’s not much of a stretch for me. Even back when I thought I ‘shipped Harry/Draco, my heart always belonged to Neville. ;)

SEAN: I do wonder how xxxHOLIC fans felt about the one or two threesome fics I saw that involved Himawari with the two guys.

Most likely, “Who is she again? Oh right.” :) It’s easy to not have a shipwar when your ship has a monopoly.

MJ: Actually, I think that’s a pretty popular OT3! True, though, there’s only one major pairing in xxxHolic fandom, though I’ve seen some Yuuko/Watanuki fic out there.

SEAN: How did xxxHOLIC fans react to the ending, out of curiosity? I know I had one experience with a fandom, School Rumble, where the manga ended SO badly that the fandom basically completely died. It was stunning to see. Everyone stared, bitched for about 2 weeks, then… stopped. And then the silence. And it never recovered (which is likely why Kodansha hasn’t picked up the remaining books).

MJ: Honestly, I don’t know. I’ve been waiting for the US releases, so I stopped hanging around xxxHolic fandom so as to not get spoiled. I will say, though, that I think Harry Potter fandom has never fully recovered from the Epilogue. It’s still alive—fandoms that big never die—but it’s not what it was.

MICHELLE: Aside from Remus/Sirius, which might as well be canon as far as I’m concerned, I can’t imagine shipping anybody in Potter, really. Like, I love Snape very much. I mean, really really love him. But I don’t want to read about him hooking up with anybody.

SEAN: Remus and Sirius are up in Heaven shagging right now. With Tonks. (runs away fast)

MJ: I can go with that.

MICHELLE: Ugh. :)

SEAN: Part of the reason I’ve always associated fics with shipping is my initial fandom: Ranma 1/2. In many ways, it was the perfect breeding ground for fanfic writers. The series was popular and dubbed in the mid 90s. The manga was coming out in Japan till 1996, but we had no access to Japanese volumes at that time, so theorizing was king. The characters were highly interesting types who were nevertheless two-dimensional, so they inspired fanfics that ‘deepened’ their characterization. The basic premise had implications almost entirely ignored by the author. Again, perfect for fanfics. (What would pregnant Ranma be like? What if Ranma gets a period?) It was an action-oriented comedy harem series, perfect for male writers, with strong female characters and hot guys, perfect for female writers.

So if you wrote Ranma in the 1990s, and you weren’t trying to simply duplicate the series with your own plot, you tended to write continuations (providing your own ‘resolution’ to the romance), the genre ‘For Want of a Nail’, where you change one plot point and see what happens (what if it was Kasumi who was cursed?), darkfics (what if Akane had a genuine mental illness and start to seriously injure Ranma?), or lemons (what if everyone finally got it on?). All of which either involve the romantic pairings, or in some ways are biased towards one or the other.

There was an entire GENRE of Ranma fics circa 1998 called ‘The Bet’, the basic premise of which was similar to For Want of a Nail but with the proviso that Akane was treated poorly or written out. The creator hated her, and said anyone could play in his pool, basically, if they observed the rules and did not pair Akane with Ranma. Likewise, I believe Sailor Moon had many, many ‘Mamoru must die’ fanfics written in the late 90s as well. Which just goes to show, I guess, that the more things change the more they stay the same.

And before anyone asks, no, I was never in the Pokemon fandom, so missed ALL of that.

MJ: Despite my deep enjoyment of gen fic, I admit I tend to associate fics with shipping, too, and for similar reasons, actually, since the bulk of my writing was done in Harry Potter fandom. Romance is one of the things JK Rowling writes the least well, so it’s hard to write in that fandom without wanting to do better, no matter what characters you’re writing about. I think, too, as an adult writing in a universe created for kids, there’s a real impulse to want to grey up some of its more black-and-white concepts, if that makes sense.

MICHELLE: There certainly was lots of adultifying and greying up of Potter going on on the RP game I played. Of the genres Sean mentioned (I admit that “For Want of a Nail” sounds really cool to me, by the way) our game was like a continuation. Everything up through Goblet of Fire (the latest book at the time) was canon, and then we went from there. We defeated Voldemort in our own fashion, and it was fun to see what we actually got right when the official books came out.

MJ: One thing I feel like I should say here is, that in my experience, almost any romantic pairing can work in fanfiction, if it’s written well enough. That’s one of the reasons I never understood shipping wars. Sure, I had my favorite ships, but a good writer could make me like almost anything. I have a couple of issues that are non-negotiable, but for the most part, I’ll give myself over to any writer who can make me believe, even just in the moment.

SEAN: I’d take that further: almost anything can be used in fanfic if it’s written well enough, romance or no. You want to write hot hot fic showing the forbidden romance between Remus Lupin and a potato? Is it well-written and reasonably in character? Sure, I’ll go with it. (Also, the potato totally tops.) If you’re writing a crossover between 270 series, and can make readers keep track of it all without the need for huge charts? Congratulations. Want to kill off the entire cast in a plausible, believable way that’s not just an excuse for gore? Knock yourself out. Want to write a self-insert where you become immortal and end up in Crystal Tokyo running a radio station and married to Sailor Saturn? Well, OK, that one’s been done.

The difficulty, of course, is in making it good. Which is why one needs pre-readers/betas. Sadly, they’re harder and harder to get these days. But they can, if they’re good prereaders and not just “Looks good, write more!” types, tell you when you’ve lost the reader. Why are you quoting your entire record collection in this fic? Why are you devoting 20 pages to saying how horrible this person is? Why is Hermione using an iPod at Hogwarts? For the last time, it’s you’re, not your! That sort of thing. A good spellchecker is not the same thing.

MICHELLE: I get where all of those things you mention would be fun to write and even an admirable accomplishment. I’m just not sure I’d want to read any of them, except the killing the cast one, perhaps. Personally, I still balk at things that challenge canon too much. Like, the first fanfic I ever saw was on a Battle of the Planets mailing list. So I am, like, “Oh, what’s this? Is it a story? What’s going… oh my god! Ken and Joe, noooo!”

SEAN: One other type of fanfic I forgot about, mostly as it’s a fairly recent development that wasn’t around when I was really active, is the Peggy Sue fic. No, not Mary Sue – those have been around much longer. In Peggy Sue fics, the characters go back in time and inhabit their earlier bodies, usually reliving their lives to ‘do things properly’ this time. Yes, this usually involves shipping too, but it doesn’t have to – there’s a fantastic Harry Potter fic called Oh God Not Again where a happy and content Harry in the future accidentally goes back in time – a one-way trip. He decides to simply screw around with everything for his own amusement. No ships whatsoever. This genre is especially prevalent in Harry Potter and Naruto, but I’m starting to see it elsewhere too. (It’s highly variable, as much of the time it’s an excuse for character bashing – ‘if only I’d known Ron was a pedophile rapist wife-beater, I’d never have befriended him!’ etc etc etc.)

MICHELLE: Oh, that sounds like fun. Having some kind of construct like that in play would probably nullify any canonicity issues by virtue of it technically being a continuation. Happily wedded to Ginny, Harry goes back and time and thinks, “Hm, what would’ve happened if I’d invited Luna to the ball that year?”

MJ: I agree with Sean on all points here (including the potato), and I think Michelle, where our view of fanfiction really differs here, is that I don’t actually consider any of this stuff to necessarily be a challenge to canon, or at least that’s not at all the way I think about my own writing. Sure, there are times when one might write a fic specifically with the purpose of “righting” canon, but most of the time, even when there’s a strong urge to diverge wildly from canon or just to seek out nuance the original author didn’t take time with, it’s about exploration, not contradiction.

Often, I’ve taken the smallest detail about a character and formed an entire universe around it, not because I think that’s what should have been in canon, but because it allows me to examine that aspect of the character more fully. For instance, I once basically created an entire piece of fanfiction based on the fact that Remus Lupin once encouraged Neville Longbottom to fight a boggart. I thought about how important that moment might have been for Neville, who generally was treated like a squib, and how that might have affected his feelings and actions over a long period of time, even into adulthood. None of what I wrote actually happened in canon, of course, but I didn’t write it to challenge canon. I wrote it to more deeply explore the potential ramifications of something that was already there. On one hand, it’s sort of an abstract exercise, but on the other, it also serves as way of expressing my thoughts about that one moment to a whole slew of other people more effectively than I could by any other means.

This is where, for me, fanfiction serves as an ongoing discussion between the people who read and write it. Since most of us are doing both, reading and writing, we’re constantly listening to each other and responding in one way or another, even if the conversation itself is completely unconscious.

MICHELLE: I am realizing more and more than “exploration” is the key here, but I spent a lot of time believing that fanfic writers believed what they were writing was true, or at least better than canon, which is the fuel for a lot of my lingering hesitancy. I mean, I’m sure there are people who would argue that The Doctor really is schtupping his companions off-camera, but perhaps they’re not the norm?

SEAN: I don’t. In fact, I was in Who fandom from almost since I could walk, and didn’t even realize there was a possibility of sex in the TARDIS till 1994 or so when I got on the Internet in college. And even then, there was very, very little of it. The sex came with the new series, and in particular the new fans, who saw 9/Rose (and 10/Rose) and had no preconceptions of “The Doctor has no sexuality, he’s above such petty human things” the way old-school fans had. I ship 10/Donna, but not canonically – I just think it’s fun and that they’d be hellaciously sexy in bed (10/Rose not so much, though I get the hurt/comfort value there.)

Another thing to note is that we three are, in Internet years, senior citizens. When I got into fics, most were college age writers and above – they started writing when they got the ‘net at college. Now that everyone has the internet, the age level of fic writers has dropped drastically, and you do sometimes see ‘Sorry, AFF readers, had to delete all my 10/Master porn, my mom found it.’ Not to mention the 12-year-olds writing fics at 7th grade grammar level (or well above, to be fair, but…)

MJ: Also, fandom as a whole is gigantic, and it’s spread all over cyberspace. I was already in my thirties when I started writing fanfiction, but because I had friends from other parts of my life who had already been writing for a while, it was pretty easy on Livejournal to find myself a fandom community of other likeminded adults who wrote thoughtfully and were interested in fanfiction for the same reasons I was. We were all on each others’ friends lists, and we tended to use the same community spaces, so we basically made our own subsection of fandom that worked the way we wanted it to. And there were probably a million other fandom corners on the internet just as specific.

The sprawling nature of the internet can seem overwhelming and unnavigable if you’re just trying to find one good Snape fic, because there isn’t any single, central depository for it all (though plenty of sites have tried to be that), especially in a big fandom like Harry Potter. But there are also real advantages to building small communities with their own group standards, because it means that once you’ve found your community, you can be pretty sure that you’ll enjoy the majority of what it produces.

MICHELLE: Yeah, the “sprawling nature” issue has been another discouraging factor for me. Like, I really don’t want to read something crummy if I can help it. The stories you two have sent me have been works you’ve been proud of (and deservedly) and therefore I enjoyed reading them ‘cos they were legitimately good. I don’t relish the idea of wading through a bunch of dreck. Maybe I am a “private corner” sort of person, too, who will just write my little Buffy things off by myself somewhere. :)

MJ: Of course, one way to pretty much ensure yourself a small fandom corner is to write in a very small fandom. On one hand, you’ll never receive the amount of feedback you might in a big fandom, but small fandoms tend to attract interesting, experienced writers who aren’t in it just for the squee. One of my favorite fandoms to write in was Banana Fish, which I think has something like five people participating in it at any one time. Actually, five may be a very generous estimate. It can be hard to handle the fact that your friends outside the fandom might have little interest in reading your fic, and you won’t get pages of feedback, but what you do get will be really heartfelt. And you have the opportunity to provide that in turn.

That said, big fandom does offer some rewards that small fandom can’t provide. My initial entry into Harry Potter fandom was via Harry/Draco, which was at the time by far the most popular slash pairing in HP fandom (and thus, the wankiest, but that’s another story entirely), with a huge catalogue of fic already written, including a hefty number of established “classics,” and thriving communities on Livejournal, FF.net, and FictionAlley, among other places. The whole thing was a bit intimidating, so when I decided to attempt writing in H/D fandom, I spent over two months planning and piecing together my fic with feedback from four beta readers (including one UK reader to specifically check my Briticisms) and three H/D-loving friends, finally posting it on Livejournal with the pessimistic subject line, “The dreaded HP fic.” I was completely unknown in that fandom, but thanks to a rec from one popular HP writer on my friends list, the thing spread like wildfire, and before I knew it, I had a couple of pages full of comments and recs popping up everywhere. That can never happen in small fandom, even for an experienced, well-known writer. To this day, that “dreaded HP fic” is the most popular I’ve ever written. And while I’d never say that I wrote fanfiction for the feedback, it can certainly be gratifying, especially for a new writer.

Sean, I’d be interested in your thoughts on big vs. small fandom, especially since we ran in completely different fandom circles, from what I can tell.

SEAN: It can help, but it depends on how much you’re looking for an audience. The most responses/reviews I’ve ever gotten were for a) A Kodomo no Omocha fic which I wrote in 1 hour for a contest, which was basically a ‘hit the giant emotional button’ fic, and b) my Sailor Moon self-insert, which is mostly along the lines of “I can’t believe you wrote a self-insert I didn’t hate!”. So one small-ish fandom and one large there. To be honest, though, most of my major writing was in the pre-LJ, pre-FFNet days, so most of my C&C came from mailing lists or on USENET. Remember them? :)

To a degree, we all want our fic to be read and praised (or panned), but a lot of the time when I write a fic, the primary audience is me or my close circle of friends. So while I do appreciate the larger number of reviews I get for, say, writing Sailor Moon or Buffy, I’d argue I feel even better when I get the 1 or two responses I get for my Sol Bianca The Legacy or Ichigo Mashimaro fics. I’m not expecting any audience for those.

So the question them becomes, are you writing primarily to satisfy an urge to write, or for the enjoyment of others? I’d argue most of us do both, but then how do you find a balance? I’ve sometimes taken good honest criticism and not listened to it, simply as while I see the point I want my story to go this way because it’s what I want.

MJ: I agree that I think we mostly do both (writing for ourselves and for the enjoyment of others), and honestly I’ve found some people’s insistence that there’s something wrong with seeking an audience to be pretty disingenuous. If we were truly only writing for ourselves, there would be no reason to post our work publicly, or even just to our friends. But I think do think people who get into fanfiction primarily for the feedback often end up disappointed. And to your last point, I also agree that while there is a lot of value in constructive criticism, it really is okay to listen to it and then still go your own way.

Ah, mailing lists… I think I pretty much missed the peak days of USENET as a means for fanfic distribution, but I was a member of a few mailing lists, particularly in my Lotrips days. Overall, I’m glad online archives and journals moved a lot of fanfic away from mailing lists, partly because I’m one of those writers who never feels finished with anything. I frequently go back and edit older stories, or at least I used to do that when I was writing actively. But also, mailing lists are so transient. It’s hard for someone new to fandom to access older works that way.

MICHELLE: What is “C&C”? Actually, there’s been a bit of lingo bandied about that I’m not very familiar with. “Hurt/comfort,” for example. Does that mean “You are hurt, therefore I shall comfort you?” Or is it, like, I hurt you then I comfort you? What’s an “AFF reader”? Are there more terms I should know?

SEAN: C&C is ‘Comments and Criticism’, as you would get from a beta reader. They read your fic before you publish it and give you advice, which can range from spelling/grammar to telling you to scrap everything as it makes no sense and treats the characters poorly. Ideally, the C&C is pointed and useful without being cruel. And is more than just “Wow, this rocks!”.

AFF is AdultFanFiction.net, which is pretty much what it sounds like. The fanfics there are of a much lower quality than most archives, though there are scattered gems, as always.

As for Hurt/Comfort, just go here. Your first choice is essentially correct.

You know about self-inserts and Mary Sues, right?

MICHELLE: Yes, I know what those are. And also what OTP means. :) Thanks for defining the rest.

MJ: On the topic of self-inserts and Mary Sues, I’d like to state my conviction that they are totally valid and occasionally even awesome approaches to fanfiction. Also, I think most people write one at some point or another, even if they can pretend they haven’t. Any one of us who has written a character we identify with strongly will eventually write something that’s essentially a self-insert, and actually I think those can often be people’s very best work, because they connect with it so strongly. Most of the original authors did this, too, after all. People write what they know.

MICHELLE: In a way, the Potter game I played lent itself to self-insertion. Players could apply for a Feature Character (involving answering a series of questions about the character and their background followed by an audition) or they could create original characters of their own devising who would (when Harry and crew were still young enough) get to attend Herbology lessons alongside the main characters or just otherwise inhabit the wizarding world.

It occurs to me, too, that I made a few crossover characters in my time there, since I had some based on manga characters, like the one who started off based on Minako from Sailor Moon but eventually grew to act more like Harmony from Buffy.

MJ: So, one of the topics I’ve been eager to get back to here is the plight of gen fic. I love gen fic (when it’s great, which it often is), and I’ll agree that not only is it difficult to find an audience for it as a fanfic writer, but it’s sometimes even difficult to get people to agree what the term really means.

One of the types of fic I used to write a lot, was the sort that focused on relationships (sort of) but wasn’t romance. For instance, one of my early HP fics featured a version of Draco Malfoy who was obsessed with maps. He was a little obsessed with Harry Potter, too, but though the two interacted in the fic in ways that might be said to contain homoerotic subtext, there was no overt romance or sexual content involved. Still, given its “universe of two” feel, I figured it read closer to slash than gen, so I originally posted it as slash… only to have quite a number of people complain that it clearly wasn’t. Later, I changed it’s genre to “gen,” only to be told by another batch of readers that it wasn’t that either.

So tell me, in your opinion, what exactly is a gen fic?

SEAN: In general, I regard ‘gen’ fic as being what used to be called, back in the day, ‘Original Flavor’, which is to say it’s using the canon universe to tell a story without resolving or changing much. So, for example, if you write a fic set during OotP which involves a day in the life of Harry going around being angry at everything, that’d be gen. If he thinks about Ginny and his awkward feelings about her, still gen. If he decides to go shag her in a broom closet to do something about it, you’re into het. Likewise, If your fic *technically* doesn’t have any romantic resolution, but the entire plot is Harry realizing that Ginny is a horrible person and that Hermione is the one he has awkward feelings for, that’s het as well, as you’re changing the canon to match your ship.

To sum up: Are you using the universe as close to canon as you judge possible? Are you not resolving anything? If so, I’d call it gen. But, as you noted, many will disagree with me and say gen should have no romantic feelings whatsoever.

It’s especially difficult with the Potterverse as so many people have not only their own biases, but also biases they try to avoid. If you say a fic is gen but it has Weasley bashing, Dumbledore bashing, and the ever popular dark!grey!independent!Harry, even if you don’t pair Harry with Hermione, Luna or Fleur, it’s not gen in my eyes, but an AU. If I see gen, I want a fic that’s sort of what J.K. Rowling could have written (only with deeper characterization, better plotting and thinking out her ideas more).

MJ: Actually, Sean, your response here reminds me that we should talk about… “community standards” (for want of a better term) and how drastically they may differ from one fic community to another. I’ve definitely seen the term “gen” used exactly as you describe it here, yet, within the fanfic communities I most often was a part of, “gen” tended to be a term slapped onto anything that didn’t contain sex or romance, regardless of whether or not it was AU or speculative in nature (which would describe a great many of the Harry Potter fics from my day, since the books were unfinished at the time). Truthfully, I prefer your definition, but in a way, it doesn’t matter what definition I like best, since what really matters in terms of labeling your fics for readers is whether or not the community you’re writing in will get what they expect when they click.

Now, I’ve never quite understood why it’s so horrible to go into a fic without knowing half the story first, but as I’m sure you know, reactions can be downright violent should should readers encounter such horrors as an unexpected ship or, say, character death that wasn’t warned for ahead of time. And while I do recognize the importance of some of these labels (yes, non-con can be a really damaging emotional trigger, I totally get that) others seem… really kind of silly.

SEAN: Tags can be very, very tricky, especially ship tags. If you’re writing a fic that’s all about Orihime’s love for Ichigo, but it ends with her seeing Ichigo married to Rukia, is it an IchiRuki fic? Rukia wasn’t in it except at the end, and it was all about IchiHime. But if you label it IchiHime, you’ll have a lot of angry shippers.

I wrote a Maison Ikkoku fic years ago (I reposted it during the Takahashi MMF as an old shame), where I avoided tags as they gave the game away. If you want to surprise the reader, tags are automatic spoilers, so tagging it ‘Darkfic, multiple characters deaths, OOC’ would have led to a) no one reading it, and b) it losing any impact it had.

That said, as I grow older my reading habits are far more conservative. I have my ships, and like them, and don’t always like being forced out of my comfortable little box. In that case, sorting by pairing or length is something I do quite a bit. (I do wish that FFNet would allow single character search, so that you could search for ‘Harry P.’ without a second person and get fics with only Harry as the character tag.)

Oh, in case Michelle doesn’t know about interro!bangs, from Wikipedia: ‘In fandom and fanfiction, ! is used to signify a defining quality in a character, usually signifying an alternate interpretation of a character from a canonical work. Examples of this would be “Romantic!Draco” or “Vampire!Harry” from Harry Potter fandom. It is also used to clarify the current persona of a character with multiple identities or appearances, such as to distinguish “Armor!Al” from “Human!Al” in a work based on Fullmetal Alchemist. The origin of this usage is unknown, although it is hypothesized to have originated with certain Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles action figures, for example, “Football Player! Leonardo”, “Rockstar! Raphael”, and “Breakdancer! Michelangelo”.’

MICHELLE: I encountered interrobangs used thusly in the RP world, so I’m familiar with them. I feel like I have probably busted out some interrobangs in at least one Off the Shelf column, too.

I’m not qualified to give any definitions of gen fic, but I must say that Sean’s interpretation of “original flavor” fic sounds exactly like the sort I’m most drawn to and how my few drabbles could be classified.

MJ: So, I think I’ve mentioned that I don’t write fanfic anymore, and it’s really for lack of time than anything else. The more serious I got about manga blogging, the more it became clear that in order to be able to successfully maintain my (very) full-time job, my private teaching, and my marriage, I pretty much had to choose between Manga Bookshelf and fanfiction (even reading it), and Manga Bookshelf won. I don’t actually regret that decision, but it’s interesting to note the differences in my “fandom,” now and then. Now, of course, I spend a lot of time engaging with fiction by way of reviews, roundtables, essays, and other types of straight-up meta. Yet there are ways in which I feel that fanfiction is a more effective (and certainly more immersive) form of criticism than any of those things, or at least a form that comes out of a deeper interaction with the text. When I was writing and reading fanfiction, I carried the canon with me in my mind all the time, turning it over and over, considering its strengths and flaws, examining every crevice, and discussing it all through my writing, generally from multiple angles. And while straightforward discussion is certainly simpler to digest, I’m not sure it’s as thoughtful.

Sean, I know you’ve expressed a distaste for people taking their fanfic too seriously, and I don’t mean to suggest that I think my own fanfiction was the most brilliant criticism known to humankind. But if I don’t necessarily take the product seriously, I do highly value the process. Any comments on this?

SEAN: It will come as no surprise to find that my own most active period of fanfiction was when I was either unemployed or working a non-time intensive job. Real life tends to take over, doesn’t it? As for fanfiction as a criticism, I definitely agree. Sticking with good old Harry Potter as an example, I have a lot of issues with Rowling’s books. One of my biggest is the lack of any example of a ‘good’ Slytherin – at the end of the day, I still don’t think Rowling gave any good reason that they shouldn’t imprison them right after sorting for life. And given that’s a horrible prospect, I certainly approve of fanfics that explore ‘good Slytherins’ and the value of ambition.

The difficulty is when criticism becomes ‘bashing’. Disliking Ron and wishing he hadn’t ended up with Hermione is fine. Saying that Ron has all the hallmarks of a future wife beater is another (and yes, I’ve seen writers say that). And while one might blame some of this on the youth of the writers (the trouble with all ‘teen’ fandoms), I’ve seen just as many rabid 40 and 50 year olds saying such things. Finding a balance between analysis of a work and OVERanalysis of a work is a difficult thing to do, and can especially become hard when you’re not arguing a point but lecturing or harping on it instead. And it’s even worse on the anonymous Internet. When does analysis or criticism become an ATTACK on the work or a character?

At the end of the day, if you argue with someone who disagrees with you, can your mind be changed? If not… why are you arguing at all? (Yes, I know, because THEY’RE STILL WRONG. Welcome to the Internet.)

MJ: Poor Ron! I’m happy to say I haven’t had the displeasure of reading any such fic.

As you say, Sean, there’s always the risk of over-analysis, particularly when there’s a pet theory involved, though I’m not sure that risk is mitigated by engaging in only standard modes of criticism. I’ve seen arguments I consider just as wrongheaded from prominent critics in the comics blogosphere, many of whom I expect would consider fanfiction beneath them.

Don’t get me going on Rowling and Slytherin, though. This roundtable might drag on forever.

MICHELLE: Seriously. But know that we both agree with you, Sean. :)

MJ: Speaking of dragging on forever, I suppose we’ve talked everyone’s (virtual) ears off by now. Any final comments you’d like to make on the subject?

SEAN: Just that I’m always surprised when I learn how few reviewers and bloggers in our ‘manga sphere’ are heavily involved in fandom. Leaving aside fanfics and fanart and the bias they can lead to (I try to avoid obvious shipping in my reviews, as I’ve noted), this may also explain another reason (besides the ethical correctness) that bloggers are so anti-scans – they aren’t reading fanfics based off of last week’s chapter, they aren’t getting spoiled constantly in newsgroups/LJ groups/forums, they don’t care that they have to wait 15 months for the chapter to come out in the States. Being involved in fandom means either a) you learn to love spoilers, b) that you avoid reading ANYTHING that’s not marked as being safe to read if you haven’t read ‘xxx’ yet (and still get accidentally spoiled constantly), or c) that you quietly read the scans and simply don’t tell the other bloggers about it.

Fandom means being INVOLVED. It means that you love to talk about things, and argue about things. Hopefully with an open mind. You can’t be in a fandom for something that you only think is pretty good. If you’re outlining an idea for a fic, or chatting on a forum about whether a character is too powerful… you’re there, whether you admit it or not. It’s only a short hop from that to your awesome epic Doctor Who/Stargate/Bleach/Harry Potter/My Little Pony/Elric/Huntley-Brinkley Report crossover, where the tortured spirit of Chet Huntley returns from the grave to demand blood and souls.

MICHELLE: As someone who only recently made a conscious effort to be open-minded about this whole fanfiction thing, I would simply urge others to do the same—turns out it’s not all pr0n.

MJ: … and sometimes when it is, it’s still awesome.

SEAN: So you don’t want the link to my Sailor Moon 10-senshi lesbian orgy fic, then? :)

MICHELLE: Well, I have been considering also making a conscious effort *not* to be so smut-averse, but I don’t think I’m quite ready for that. :)

MJ: Thanks, both of you for indulging me in this roundtable! I secretly hope we’ll continue in comments.