Let's talk about fanfic.: seanan

Let's talk about fanfic.

So I've had this lovely link about fanfic and why some people may not be comfortable with it and why maybe those are feelings that should be examined sitting at the top of my link file for literally three years. I mean that. Three years and a month, it has waited for me to feel up to talking about it.

Y'know what? Sometimes you just gotta stop waiting.

It's no secret around here that I love fanfic, although it's one of the three Big Truths that I feel the need to reveal for the first time every six months or so, as new people wander in and are totally shocked to discover that...

1. I have OCD.
2. I am Mira Grant.
3. I love fanfic.

These things are sometimes equal in their shocking nature. "Wait, you can be a best-selling author without being neurotypical?" Yes! "Wait, Mira Grant isn't a real person?" She's real, she's just, you know, me. "Authors can love fanfic?!" Yes.

Yes we can.

If I had the power, I would ask all the authors in the world to do Yuletide or something like it every year. Sign up for a fic exchange and write some porn for a stranger; tailor your stories to an audience of one, let go of the long-form plots and the careful wide-spectrum appeal, embrace the joy of spending a hundred words on Carlos's perfect hair or Buffy's perfect shoes or Jo's perfect knives. Remember the joy of waiting for one person to open a story and see what it contains.

Because fanfic is joy. Fanfic is fixing the things you see as broken, and patching the seams between what's written and what is not, and giving characters who got cheated out of their happy endings another chance. There was a time, not that long ago as we measure things, where all fiction was what we would now call "fan fiction." Shakespeare didn't come up with most of his own plots. He wrote plays about the stories people already loved. We didn't get a thousand versions of "Snow White" accidentally: people changed that story to suit themselves, and no one said they weren't storytellers, or looked down on them for loving that core of red and black and white, of apples and glass and snow.

Originality wasn't the god of fiction until the last few centuries, and even then, we didn't fixate on it until we reached the era of modern copyright. Mickey looks a lot like Oswald, if you know what I mean. Wanting to work with characters you already know and love is not a new urge. Hell, all television and non-creator-owned comics can be viewed as fanfic, if you squint and cock your head, because much of it is being written about characters and situations created by other people. It's just fanfic with contracts behind it.

I recently accomplished the fanfic writer's dream: I was paid to write a story about a character created by Charlaine Harris, Amelia Broadway, which was published in the anthology Dead But Not Forgotten. I admit, I kissed that check, because it was the fulfillment of a life-long dream. I didn't make canon, necessarily, but I made fanfic for the world.

I encourage and celebrate fanfic of my work, even if I can't read it right now. Because fanfic is amazing, and it's important. It allows us to interface with the things we love in a way that is otherwise virtually impossible.

That's amazing.

aerden

June 15 2014, 14:49:12 UTC 3 years ago

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I like fan fiction, but I find that most of it is just romance stories using the canon characters, usually in relationships that the original creator(s) never wanted or intended. I don't believe it is right to play with someone else's characters that way, even though it is fun to. :)

And the fact that the stories are almost always romances does frustrate me because, for instance, when I'm reading a Criminal Minds fan fiction story, I don't want a romance,, especially if it's between two characters who don't love each other on the show. I want a new 'episode.' But most fans don't know how to write such a thing because it requires very specialized knowledge.

So, even though I might enjoy something about Reid and Hotchner in a romance as part of the story, I'm at the same time rolling my eyes at it and am not feeling very satisfied because 1. I don't believe it, and 2. It's not giving me what I really want.

igenlode

June 15 2014, 15:02:50 UTC 3 years ago

Same here; I love fan-fiction, I write fan-fiction myself, but... if I were a published author, I really wouldn't want fans drooling around over my characters and pushing them into romances they never asked for or wanted. And I'd be more than a little miffed if the only part of my original work that my readers appeared to be interested in was the potential for sexual escapades!

I don't think it's selfish for authors to feel possessive about their characters - especially given that the process of writing involves putting facets of yourself into even the most disagreeable people. Seeing them made into the puppets of some over-enthusiastic reader can't be fun.

lenora_rose

June 15 2014, 16:54:19 UTC 3 years ago

I dunno. As part of my creative process I do sometimes contemplate pushing certain characters of my own together who weren't listed as interested in one another in my plot outline or my prior draft. Why not? Usually it comes to nothing and I figure out why the versions of those characters in my head would never get together, but once in a while, the story changes. The romance (if any) that gets into the final draft may not be the original plan at all.

(Also, I've read fanfic with a romance that would be unconvincing in the canon, but the rest of the story is too good to deny. Neville/Draco, for one.)

naath

June 16 2014, 10:30:30 UTC 3 years ago

I find it weird when people say "I wouldn't want fans writing my characters doing ..." do they also say "I wouldn't want fans thinking about ..."?

I don't write fanfic (I am awful at writing), but I have an active imagination, and often find myself imagining what the characters are getting up to outside of the "on screen" time. I don't think I could really read fiction *without* imagining such things.

archangelbeth

June 16 2014, 23:53:25 UTC 3 years ago

I sit on both sides of the fence, author-wise. I mean... I have personally written a quintillion (...or thereabouts) fanfic pairings of various characters in a particular (gaming) fandom... Which are mutually exclusive in most of the cases. I hold many AUs within my head.

I think there are some pairings of my characters (yeah, I have originalfic published, too) that I would not want to read, because it would just be Too Wrong For My Headcanon. But so long as no one rubs my nose in anything but the details? I'll be over here thinking things like . o O (twincest? okay, sure, I'm not feelin' it and it 100% ain't canon, but knock yourself out so long as I don't have to read it.)

The most recent thing, that's still being edited, one of my beta-readers said they had an OTP, and I promised that if they wanted at the end, I could write them fanfic for that... (They may yet take me up on that, but I need to get back to the editing grindstone. It's been going slowly because Reason. O:p )

Which is a rambly way of saying that while I can sympathize with people who don't want their characters played with... The only real way to keep that from happening, if only in friend-locked posts or the like, is not to publish in any way, shape, form, or fashion. Writer writes, reader reads, and the result is an amalgam; fanfic grows out of that. An author who tries to micromanage the reader's brain is doomed to fail, and risks a fail-state that comes off badly if it goes public. But I might sympathize a fair amount with "Please don't do this kind of fic because it goes against the 'brand' I'm trying to create; I want the expectations of readers to be set by my own words (for weal or woe)" -- that's... pragmatic.

But even if there weren't legal muddy areas, I think it would not be ethical to inflict fanfic on an author. No emailing those twincest fics to me, please!

djonn

June 15 2014, 22:39:48 UTC 3 years ago

A good deal of fanfic is indeed romance, but by no means all of it falls into that category -- and didn't, even way back in the printzine era. There was, for instance, a printzine back in the day called Holmesian Federation, which consisted wholly of Sherlock Holmes crossovers -- mostly with Star Trek, but also bringing in Doctor Who and an assortment of other oddities (Cthulhu mythos, anyone?), and the stories were almost all what we'd now call "casefic" -- straight mysteries, without even any Holmes/Watson slash subtext. I actually wrote a story for that zine -- and conventions being what they were at the time, published it under my own name -- involving the cat from the TOS episode "Assignment: Earth" being time-traveled back into Holmes-era London, requiring Kirk and Spock to go back themselves to rescue her.

Let me think for a bit, and I should be able to come up with a shortlist of recs for not-romance stories....

seanan_mcguire

June 24 2014, 15:44:36 UTC 3 years ago

Interesting. I have some thoughts about this; there may be another post.

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