A whole lot of fanfiction written by people other than Oboro defies the established conventions of the source material for a few cheap thrills.
Again, this says nothing because, oh my god, some writers are bad, regardless of their subject matter. This include published writers of original material.
Most fanfic is badly plotted, badly structured, badly characterized, and badly written.
Most bookstore-sold fiction also has these characteristics.
However, with fanfic, it's a heck of a lot easier to see it, for two reasons:
1) It's available for free on the Web without having to be vetted by a publisher or editor, so some stuff that would never ever ever ever ever make it onto bookshelves can still be thrown up in a newsgroup.
2) You can quickly get a sense of whether the writer has the ability to write the voice of an established character (Nick Stokes, Professor Snape, Commander Data) rather than having to read a new character and figure out whether the voice is bad or just deliberately written that way. It's harder for me to say "Delindara the Lightbringer wouldn't say that!" when my only source of knowledge for Delindara the Lightbringer is the bad fantasy novel in which she does actually say that. It's easier to make a firm "Wow, that's bad" point when there's an official version to vet the tie-in fiction against. (This is just as valid for authorized media tie-ins. Zahn's Leia Organa-Solo is more thoughtful than Lucas's Princess Leia, which makes her a bit off, but still an interesting character (arguably more interesting than in the movies). Kevin J. Anderson just parrots lines from the movie in somber tones, turning every character into a parody of the movie version.)
(1) is just a flat statement. The more quality-assurance hurdles you have to go through to get something out to the public, the more likey that the truly wretched stuff will get caught before hitting the shelves, leaving only mediocre and up.
(2) doesn't magically make everyone agree. Some people honestly don't understand why a certain line is just plain wrong for Captain Picard, and they never will. Other times, you'll see legitimate disagreement between the guy who remembers Worf as serious and grim and the guy who saw Worf flirt with Dax and sees a bit of a lighter side, and who thus thinks that line is just fine. Still, having a canon to judge against provides some level of bullshit detection, however tenuous, while in original-world fiction, you've got nothing to judge against but your own taste and writing knowledge and the internal consistency of what you read.
ETA: I write my own fiction. I don't usually even read fanfic. However, back in college, when I was young and crazy, I made some mistakes. If I'm on a horse, said horse is very low to the ground.
You know I'm having difficulty seeing what's so controversial about Grid System's whole "some things are one thing etc." despite the resounding "yeah and?" It's pretty much a "yeah and?" situation, after all. Fanfiction, like it or not, is stereotyped as it is because what people see when they look up fanfiction are the critique-immune enthusiasts who, regrettably, end up a lot more memorable than their more talented equivalents.
It's a simple issue as far as I'm concerned: if a fanfiction piece has any sort of literary merit (which is a whole different kettle of fish but bear with me) then it has merit regardless of being fanfiction. The "problem" is that it's associated with being downright terrible, mostly because there happens to be a lot of downright terrible writing in fanfiction. And there's nothing controversial about saying that a great deal of fanfiction is pretty awful: of course a great deal of "legitimate" writing is also terrible, and so here we have another "yeah, and?" moment. It's like common sense to me.
EDIT: GOD DAMN IT TAK YOU ARE TOO FAST FOR ME.
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DVGNo. 1 Honor StudentNether Institute, Evil AcademyRegistered Userregular
edited August 2008
Merit to the world at large? Probably not. Because these are not works which, by design, can be published and shared with the world at large, just with whoever happens by them on the internet.
However, there is a lot of merit to any sort of creative outlet for the person doing the creating as well as the folks they know who enjoy it. The idea that you have to be good at an art form to benefit from it is far from the truth. Think about artists who spend their days drawing other people's character. They get to create images they want to see without worrying too much about the design of the character or where the character has been, and they get to advance their skills in the process. The same can be applied to fan fiction.
It's true that a very large majority of fan fiction is bad, but it might have been an author's first attempt at writing something, it could have just been the byproduct of being bored on a Sunday, or it could have just been an exercise between their more serious projects.
I think lots of fan fiction is poorly writen and uninspired because people that really do know how to write tend to write their own original content. Or at least fan fic tends to have much more poorly writen material in it.
JebusUD on
and I wonder about my neighbors even though I don't have them
but they're listening to every word I say
I think lots of fan fiction is poorly writen and uninspired because people that really do know how to write tend to write their own original content. Or at least fan fic tends to have much more poorly writen material in it.
It seems like we're not really clear on what the question is. Is the question "Is any fanfiction valuable as art?" to which the answer is yes in almost all cases, or is the question "Is any fan fiction well written?" which is also yes, though relatively rare.
I think lots of fan fiction is poorly writen and uninspired because people that really do know how to write tend to write their own original content. Or at least fan fic tends to have much more poorly writen material in it.
"Is any fanfiction valuable as art?" to which the answer is yes in almost all casesQUOTE]
whoa whoa whoa
whoa
let's not get crazy here
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JacobkoshGamble a stamp.I can show you how to be a real man!Moderatormod
I would argue that the vast majority of comics don't have any "merit" either, besides whatever entertainment they provide in presenting good drawings of muscular characters punching each other through buildings.
I...uh, don't really think you know what you're talking about here.
I would argue that the vast majority of comics don't have any "merit" either, besides whatever entertainment they provide in presenting good drawings of muscular characters punching each other through buildings.
I...uh, don't really think you know what you're talking about here.
Believe me, I know plenty about comics. I know there are plenty of perfectly good "meritous" comics. I enjoy them, and they are even the subjects of academic discourse!
But most comics, especially mainstream superhero comics, are shit. Well, really empty and vapid entertaining shit, to be fair.
I read a lot of fanfic and I admit that the vast majority of it is trash, but there is some high quality stuff out there. I find the best fanfic writers tend to also write original stuff (one of my favourites recently sold her original fantasy trilogy for 6 figures to Simon and Schuster.) I've found one reason a lot of these types start off with fanfic is that they a) will have an interested audience right from the start, which can lead to a lot more constructive criticism than they would get from posting original work and that b) if their story is good, that interested audience will be a motivating factor to finish it. Hordes of fans begging for the next chapter every day makes it much harder to procrastinate.
I still find that for someone who is serious about their writing, original fiction is the only thing that's going to really make them improve, but fanfic isn't without merit. It's entertaining and, when done well, has plenty of respect for the source material.
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JacobkoshGamble a stamp.I can show you how to be a real man!Moderatormod
Believe me, I know plenty about comics. I know there are plenty of perfectly good "meritous" comics. I enjoy them, and they are even the subjects of academic discourse!
But most comics, especially mainstream superhero comics, are shit. Well, really empty and vapid entertaining shit, to be fair.
I'm still disagreeing with you. If you're reading off the academically-approved safe lists generated by professors looking to cash in on one of the last great unmined art forms then you're probably reading a lot of bloodless, sanitized shit. I don't apologize for bad comics, but the pressure cooker of monthly superhero work has produced a ton of astonishingly good work that never gets press because it requires more than the sort of bullshit cursory overview you'll get from a condescending article in the Village Voice.
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DVGNo. 1 Honor StudentNether Institute, Evil AcademyRegistered Userregular
I think lots of fan fiction is poorly writen and uninspired because people that really do know how to write tend to write their own original content. Or at least fan fic tends to have much more poorly writen material in it.
"Is any fanfiction valuable as art?" to which the answer is yes in almost all cases
whoa whoa whoa
whoa
let's not get crazy here
Point being, if we expect artists to be always good all the time, then we may as well just say we don't want to have artists anymore. Art is always valuable, even if the artist in question is still developing their skills. (See my previous post on art being it's own reward)
I mean, here. I'm bored. Let's make this personal. I won a trophy for the following piece of fan fiction, about the video game Earthbound.
One of the male protagonists in this game [Jeff] has a doting friend named Tony who calls him several times over the course of the game to see if he's okay. After the game came out, the developer publicly announced this was indeed intended to signify a homosexual attraction towards Jeff by Tony. Also in this game is a sequence where you infiltrate a base of operations of the antagonist -- alien invaders -- who have collected in tubes a seemingly random assortment of NPCs from the game; Tony is among this assortment.
The fanfic illustrates a phone call from Tony to Jeff on Christmas morning, naked in its intent though not explicit, which is intercepted by the technologically-advanced alien invaders. Jeff, a boy genius, has also developed an eavesdropping technology which allows the reader to see -- in the second half of the story, a mirror of the first -- the aliens recognizing a relationship between Tony and Jeff and deciding therefore that abduction and study of Tony would be wise. Of the specific language used, the aliens use the verb "loves" to encapsulate that relationship between the two.
The piece won the award for being 1) original, 2) undisruptive to the canon, and actually providing a possible explanation for something unexplained, while also 3) drawing positive attention to the homosexual feelings of one character, by showing that -- to the otherworldy aliens -- the love of Jeff by Tony is no different than that of another character's father for her (another of the assortment of NPCs in test tubes), nor any other kind of love ... while Tony, in the first half of the piece, is so shamed and afraid of overtly admitting his feelings that he instead dances around the subject and ultimately leaves it in the air.
The specific merit of this piece, if you want me to venture that too, was that it was read primarily at the fan website for this video game -- Starmen.net -- and produced many comments from its primarily 12-16 readership that the progressive undertones actually got to them and they realized how silly it was to differentiate between homosexual and heterosexual love.
i think that when fanfiction is written not out of fan-ness, but rather to use the setting or characters to make a specific point, it has value. to just play around with another author's characters or plot or setting is empty of any value. to defamiliarize a familiar pop-culture character like a superhero or Sherlock Holmes is a different thing. you're not writing to jerk off with the characters, you're writing to write something.
because of this it's also more difficult for fanfics to do anything meaningful because the characters they reference are often obscure and wouldn't resonate with the average reader, but that depends on the target audience.
Didn't you read it? She didn't use Ness at all.
;-)
I think fanfics walk a very narrow line over being shit.
It's very easy to tumble into the pile at any given time.
Let's use Earthbound again. There was a Let's Play in the Something Awful forums that fleshed out the characters. This traversed the line carefully. The characters were essentially the same. Ness was heroic, Paula was strong-willed but kind, Jeff was intelligent but shy, Poo was loyal but quiet.
But when you DO change a character (I am planning a Chrono Trigger LP with a few changes) you have to be careful.
In my CT LP, some things are changed. I.e Lucca and Crono being the couple rather than Lucca and Marle. This is for 2 reasons:
Childhood friend seems a likely candidate for love than "girl I met five minutes ago."
Lucca balancing her intellect with a crush, and Marle being a crazy, clingy bitch amuse me.
Now, again, there's a very treachorous line, and changing characters CAN topple you to one side...so long as you can justify the change. I.e Why is Spider-man making out with Daredevil? Neither one is gay, Spider-man was married, and Daredevil sees Spider-man more as a partner in (fighting) crime.
Now, if Spider-man starts flirting with Sue Storm, there's some president for it. He's met her before, he's the Human Torch/Johnny Storms' best friend, and he's now single, as well as Sue having some troubles with her husband Reed Richards. Now there's a reasoning behind the characters change (albeit a bit flimsy).
Fanfiction, like all internet-borne creations, is a very tricky subject. The loudest, most vocal of writers tend to be ignorant douchebags who just want Zuko and Sokka to suck face, which of course makes someone who had a really kick-ass idea for a side story that alters nothing and maybe explains something left unexplained look like a fool.
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INeedNoSaltwith blood on my teethRegistered Userregular
If you want to move the goalposts so that fanfiction is, by definition, those things which are derivative and without merit, be my guest -- all it shows, though, is that you're fantastic at moving goalposts while convincing people to continue using the word.
Oboro, I think your definition of fan fiction (from your first post in the thread) is intentionally much broader than the definition most people work with. This doesn't mean people are 'moving goal posts', it just means you're being all-inclusive and other people aren't.
I think fan fiction as it is generally used almost specifically applies to non-licensed, unpublished and non-commercial works (not necessarily bad or unartistic works, I guess, although I (and I'm sure some other people) find the idea pretty distasteful overall.)
I think (for example) under a definition like Oboro's that works like Stephen Baxter's The Time Ships and Wicked are fan fiction, and I think under the definition I (and some others, I expect) use, it wouldn't.
Original fiction doesn't necessarily exploit existing material to expand its readership. Fanfiction does.
Let's try this.
J.K. Rowling puts out a Harry Potter book. A really bad Harry Potter book. Like insanely bad. With Harry and Ron making out.
It sells. Horrendously well.
This is exploiting existing material to expand its' readership, and it's original fiction.
Just to play devil's advocate, I'd throw out the differentiator that the Rowling work happens to exploit an existing universe. Fanfiction by definition does so.
Your argument as I understand it is like me saying "Oranges are orange," and you pointing to an orange tabby cat and using that to argue that the cat and the orange are on the same footing. One happens to have a quality. The other is defined by being that quality.
Note that I'm not saying that trying to exploit fan interest in a setting is a bad thing. An author who starts a new series in a familiar setting so that fans get more of Middle Earth, Midkemia, Belgarionland, or Krynn is doing the same thing, unless you differentiate fanfic by specifying that it's unauthorized exploitation of an existing setting.
That difference, though, actually makes sense to me. When I read, say, a Kevin J. Anderson Star Wars novel and say "This reads like fanfic," I am indeed saying that it's bad, but that's shorthand for me saying, "This should not have been approved by the holders of the license, because I do not believe the quality standards are high enough." I've read good fanfic and said, "This should be a licensed tie-in," too, often with an addition of, "Provided the SG1 guys and the Farscape guys could work out the legalities..."
That difference, though, actually makes sense to me. When I read, say, a Kevin J. Anderson Star Wars novel and say "This reads like fanfic," I am indeed saying that it's bad, but that's shorthand for me saying, "This should not have been approved by the holders of the license, because I do not believe the quality standards are high enough."
Except in light of the prequels it's hard to make a "this doesn't meet the quality standards of Star Wars" about anything anymore.
Instead of a hypothetical Rowling exploiting the HP universe, we have an actual example of the original author exploiting the SW universe.
Original fiction doesn't necessarily exploit existing material to expand its readership. Fanfiction does.
Let's try this.
J.K. Rowling puts out a Harry Potter book. A really bad Harry Potter book. Like insanely bad. With Harry and Ron making out.
It sells. Horrendously well.
This is exploiting existing material to expand its' readership, and it's original fiction.
And that's bad. Probably worse than fanfiction too, because it's making a profit where fanfiction doesn't.
I don't enjoy them anymore, that was when I first learned of the internet at 12 and read pokemon fanfics (oh my bob so sad).
But what I will say is it depends on the way it's written. If it rides on characters too much to tell the story, then it's lazy. But if they have original plots, interesting writing, and good desricptions, I can over look the 'lazy' parts and see what they've done on their own.
Bad fanfiction is characters and romance. Leave that to the real thing, guys. You over do it.
Good fanfiction draws from the source just enough to establish a setting quickly, and tell a new story in an interesting way.
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Nova_CI have the needThe need for speedRegistered Userregular
edited August 2008
Well, I read this one Harry Potter fanfiction by a published author. Can't remember her name. Cassandra something or other. Anyway, it was this massive epic story that was way better than anything I'd read in the HP series at that point (I believe it was before Half-Blood Prince came out). When I realized that anything that Rowling put out would not live up to this story, I never read any HP again, and I thank the author for that.
Let's use Earthbound again. There was a Let's Play in the Something Awful forums that fleshed out the characters. This traversed the line carefully. The characters were essentially the same. Ness was heroic, Paula was strong-willed but kind, Jeff was intelligent but shy, Poo was loyal but quiet.
But when you DO change a character (I am planning a Chrono Trigger LP with a few changes) you have to be careful.
In my CT LP, some things are changed. I.e Lucca and Crono being the couple rather than Lucca and Marle.
Funny, I don't remember any lesbian overtones between those two in the original game. :winky:
Original fiction doesn't necessarily exploit existing material to expand its readership. Fanfiction does.
While certainly a great deal of fanfic exploits the orignal source material in various ways, I don't think there is anything intrinsic to material written by fans and based on pre-existing sources that will automatically make it exploitational. So I don't agree with this point of yours.
I'm going to add an additional thought, something that came up in another discussion:
The question of shortcutting your own work by standing on another artist's shoulders isn't one that fanfic people face all alone. The author who writes a fantasy set in in a kingdom with dragons and elves is going to get criticism that he's ripping off Tolkien. He's still writing something more original than a fanfic writer who writes a fantasy novel in Feist's Midkemia but then uses all his own characters, taking only the setting elements and rules for magic and so forth. And that fanfic writer is in turn writing something with more originality than a fanfic writer who writes a story in the Potterverse that uses Rowling's characters. It's always a question of degree.
The reason that asking "Does fanfic have any sort of merit?" gets my back up is that it sounds like someone wants to play both sides of the fan/creator field. If you want to be a fan and write stories in somebody else's worlds to share on newsgroups, knock yourself out, and if you and your friends like it, who cares what anyone else thinks? If you want to be taken seriously as a writer, be prepared for people to call you on places where you're sloppy or lazy in your writing. Actual writers deal with critiques. Sometimes those critiques help them improve. Sometimes those critiques are full of crap, and the writer matures by realizing that he or she believes in the work strongly enough to leave it as it stands despite the criticism. Even people who aren't writing Alias/Dune crossovers have to deal with people not thinking their dialog was realistic.
But you don't get to be a fan when it's time for criticism and a writer when it's time for self-congratulation. "Does fanfic have any sort of merit?" is a question asking for a pat on the head, not a serious request for discussion of artistic merit. If you want respect, earn it.
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Nova_CI have the needThe need for speedRegistered Userregular
Looks like the author (Who is Cassandra Clare) has taken down all of her fanfiction. Anyway, it was called The Draco Trilogy, which you might find in other ways.
How about we just consider fanfic its own field, with its own great works and its own lesser works? Then the writer-elitists can just write it off and not give a shit and have to come up with these contrived reasons about how anything that isn't 100% original isn't actual writing?
You guys can have your own field. Go ahead and take it. I'm sick of the meme that all fanfic goes without actual critique, is without artistic merit because it's too deeply cribbing, and all this other shit. So, let's just not call it writing. I'm fine with that. Writing original fanfiction and writing fanfiction are their own mediums.
In the spirit of compromise I'd be willing to say that fan fiction is it's own meritless medium. Also, we would like you to remove the missiles from Turkey within 6 months and we promise not to publicize a link to these negotiations.
Are you claiming our press release describing the removal of the missiles was merely fanfic?
... what tipped you off? It was the union of the traditionalist insurgents under the modern government as a result of an unexpected same-sex love affair and marriage between east and west, wasn't it?
Could we also acknowledge that most fanfic is crap? I mean, I'm happy to acknowledge that most fic is crap, too, if that makes us feel better. I pass up most of the fantasy aisle because I am a quality-level elitest, not because I am a genre elitest. I pass up most fanfic for the same reason -- but given the signal to noise ratio, it's not easy to find the gems among the crap, and I don't have the time for things that aren't easy at this point in my life, not with games on the console and shows on the tube and all.
Passing me off as a writer-elitest, which you seem to be doing, unless I am mistaken, kind of goes to my point of not being able to handle being treated like writers of non-fanfic fiction get treated. That's the tone I took from the early posts in this thread, and that's the tone I'm continuing to hear here.
Original fiction doesn't necessarily exploit existing material to expand its readership. Fanfiction does.
While certainly a great deal of fanfic exploits the orignal source material in various ways, I don't think there is anything intrinsic to material written by fans and based on pre-existing sources that will automatically make it exploitational. So I don't agree with this point of yours.
Fanfiction.net, the biggest online repository of fanfiction that I'm aware of, has an Alexa rating of 311. Fictionpress.com, a site with the same format dedicated to original fiction, has an Alexa rating of 10264. Whatever problems Alexa has aside, that's a pretty big difference, and one that I think pretty clearly shows how fanfiction attracts more attention than original fiction (of similar quality and availability). I think most if not all of this extra attention comes from the existing popularity of the source works. You're welcome to disagree, though I'm interested in what alternate explanations you might offer for this phenomenon.
I'm willing to acknowledge that the bulk of work in any medium is poor when measured on most metrics, but also that no shared work is without some non-zero amount of merit.
If you want to argue that there's a special kind of merit that original fiction may contain that fanfiction may never contain, I might be able to entertain that? I have no idea what kind of merit, though, nor what kind of fiction would be delivering it.
Also, given I am a writer of non-fanfic fiction, and that my fanfiction is as thoroughly vetted as my original fiction -- I take great offense to the insinuation by you and others that fanfiction is always untested, unedited garble.
I'm willing to acknowledge that the bulk of work in any medium is poor when measured on most metrics, but also that no shared work is without some non-zero amount of merit.
Deal.
If you want to argue that there's a special kind of merit that original fiction may contain that fanfiction may never contain, I might be able to entertain that? I have no idea what kind of merit, though, nor what kind of fiction would be delivering it.
I don't want to argue that. My argument is that fiction that is paid for and published by a third party in some format has, by nature, more checkpoints that have a chance to block crap. This results in professionally written fiction having a higher average quality level, since the bottom third of it never sees the light of day.
Also, given I am a writer of non-fanfic fiction, and that my fanfiction is as thoroughly vetted as my original fiction -- I take great offense to the insinuation by you and others that fanfiction is always untested, unedited garble.
Please quote where I insinuated that, as I did not intend to do so. I'm targeting you, not all fanfic writers everywhere.
Wait, so you're comparing published fiction against fanfiction? That's unfair. How about fiction both published and unpublished against fanfiction ... since, you know, those are both still fiction? This is all still tangential, of course, unless you want to prove that quality correlates directly to merit and if the most quality a particular fanfic could attain is insufficient to attain meritous status.
EDIT: I mean, again, this is a thread about merit -- not quality. Maybe if we try and define merit we can make some more headway here?
Large amounts of fanfiction is crap because there are practically no barriers to entry. Anyone with access to the internet can write it and post it.
However, the idea that fanfic is never critiqued is pretty ridiculous. Fanfiction writing is based largely on reputation. Now, some writers get a great deal of recognition because they write smoking hot sex scenes between Goku and Vegeta. It happens. (Look at some romance novels for more hot sex = famous. Not all romance novels, mind you.) However, a substantial portion of the audience is literate and enjoys reading well-written stories better than badly-written ones, especially because there's so much to choose from.
As for "respect for the original," I'm not sure what the point is. If someone writes a story set in an alternate future for Harry Potter where he gets a job at Hogwarts and slowly grows to respect and care for Snape, who cares if Rowling didn't intend for Snape and Harry to like each other? The fanfic author isn't claiming that his or her story is the "real" story. The original story isn't diminished by the fanfic. Beyond that, why should we care?
The cheif difference between it and most is that, since the Wizard of Oz is in the Public Domain, there's no problem selling it.
This makes it "a dark and different look at a familiar story" instead of "useless wankery cooked up by fans"
It's a story told from the point of view of the villain, revealing her motivations and the like. A common fanfic device. And then, for crying out loud, a sequel was made starring her kid. (Kids of the main characters is another common fanfic device)
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Again, this says nothing because, oh my god, some writers are bad, regardless of their subject matter. This include published writers of original material.
Most bookstore-sold fiction also has these characteristics.
However, with fanfic, it's a heck of a lot easier to see it, for two reasons:
1) It's available for free on the Web without having to be vetted by a publisher or editor, so some stuff that would never ever ever ever ever make it onto bookshelves can still be thrown up in a newsgroup.
2) You can quickly get a sense of whether the writer has the ability to write the voice of an established character (Nick Stokes, Professor Snape, Commander Data) rather than having to read a new character and figure out whether the voice is bad or just deliberately written that way. It's harder for me to say "Delindara the Lightbringer wouldn't say that!" when my only source of knowledge for Delindara the Lightbringer is the bad fantasy novel in which she does actually say that. It's easier to make a firm "Wow, that's bad" point when there's an official version to vet the tie-in fiction against. (This is just as valid for authorized media tie-ins. Zahn's Leia Organa-Solo is more thoughtful than Lucas's Princess Leia, which makes her a bit off, but still an interesting character (arguably more interesting than in the movies). Kevin J. Anderson just parrots lines from the movie in somber tones, turning every character into a parody of the movie version.)
(1) is just a flat statement. The more quality-assurance hurdles you have to go through to get something out to the public, the more likey that the truly wretched stuff will get caught before hitting the shelves, leaving only mediocre and up.
(2) doesn't magically make everyone agree. Some people honestly don't understand why a certain line is just plain wrong for Captain Picard, and they never will. Other times, you'll see legitimate disagreement between the guy who remembers Worf as serious and grim and the guy who saw Worf flirt with Dax and sees a bit of a lighter side, and who thus thinks that line is just fine. Still, having a canon to judge against provides some level of bullshit detection, however tenuous, while in original-world fiction, you've got nothing to judge against but your own taste and writing knowledge and the internal consistency of what you read.
ETA: I write my own fiction. I don't usually even read fanfic. However, back in college, when I was young and crazy, I made some mistakes. If I'm on a horse, said horse is very low to the ground.
It's a simple issue as far as I'm concerned: if a fanfiction piece has any sort of literary merit (which is a whole different kettle of fish but bear with me) then it has merit regardless of being fanfiction. The "problem" is that it's associated with being downright terrible, mostly because there happens to be a lot of downright terrible writing in fanfiction. And there's nothing controversial about saying that a great deal of fanfiction is pretty awful: of course a great deal of "legitimate" writing is also terrible, and so here we have another "yeah, and?" moment. It's like common sense to me.
EDIT: GOD DAMN IT TAK YOU ARE TOO FAST FOR ME.
However, there is a lot of merit to any sort of creative outlet for the person doing the creating as well as the folks they know who enjoy it. The idea that you have to be good at an art form to benefit from it is far from the truth. Think about artists who spend their days drawing other people's character. They get to create images they want to see without worrying too much about the design of the character or where the character has been, and they get to advance their skills in the process. The same can be applied to fan fiction.
It's true that a very large majority of fan fiction is bad, but it might have been an author's first attempt at writing something, it could have just been the byproduct of being bored on a Sunday, or it could have just been an exercise between their more serious projects.
Art is it's own reward.
but they're listening to every word I say
GM: Rusty Chains (DH Ongoing)
It seems like we're not really clear on what the question is. Is the question "Is any fanfiction valuable as art?" to which the answer is yes in almost all cases, or is the question "Is any fan fiction well written?" which is also yes, though relatively rare.
I...uh, don't really think you know what you're talking about here.
Believe me, I know plenty about comics. I know there are plenty of perfectly good "meritous" comics. I enjoy them, and they are even the subjects of academic discourse!
But most comics, especially mainstream superhero comics, are shit. Well, really empty and vapid entertaining shit, to be fair.
I still find that for someone who is serious about their writing, original fiction is the only thing that's going to really make them improve, but fanfic isn't without merit. It's entertaining and, when done well, has plenty of respect for the source material.
I'm still disagreeing with you. If you're reading off the academically-approved safe lists generated by professors looking to cash in on one of the last great unmined art forms then you're probably reading a lot of bloodless, sanitized shit. I don't apologize for bad comics, but the pressure cooker of monthly superhero work has produced a ton of astonishingly good work that never gets press because it requires more than the sort of bullshit cursory overview you'll get from a condescending article in the Village Voice.
;-)
I think fanfics walk a very narrow line over being shit.
It's very easy to tumble into the pile at any given time.
Let's use Earthbound again. There was a Let's Play in the Something Awful forums that fleshed out the characters. This traversed the line carefully. The characters were essentially the same. Ness was heroic, Paula was strong-willed but kind, Jeff was intelligent but shy, Poo was loyal but quiet.
But when you DO change a character (I am planning a Chrono Trigger LP with a few changes) you have to be careful.
In my CT LP, some things are changed. I.e Lucca and Crono being the couple rather than Lucca and Marle. This is for 2 reasons:
Childhood friend seems a likely candidate for love than "girl I met five minutes ago."
Lucca balancing her intellect with a crush, and Marle being a crazy, clingy bitch amuse me.
Now, again, there's a very treachorous line, and changing characters CAN topple you to one side...so long as you can justify the change. I.e Why is Spider-man making out with Daredevil? Neither one is gay, Spider-man was married, and Daredevil sees Spider-man more as a partner in (fighting) crime.
Now, if Spider-man starts flirting with Sue Storm, there's some president for it. He's met her before, he's the Human Torch/Johnny Storms' best friend, and he's now single, as well as Sue having some troubles with her husband Reed Richards. Now there's a reasoning behind the characters change (albeit a bit flimsy).
Fanfiction, like all internet-borne creations, is a very tricky subject. The loudest, most vocal of writers tend to be ignorant douchebags who just want Zuko and Sokka to suck face, which of course makes someone who had a really kick-ass idea for a side story that alters nothing and maybe explains something left unexplained look like a fool.
Oboro, I think your definition of fan fiction (from your first post in the thread) is intentionally much broader than the definition most people work with. This doesn't mean people are 'moving goal posts', it just means you're being all-inclusive and other people aren't.
I think fan fiction as it is generally used almost specifically applies to non-licensed, unpublished and non-commercial works (not necessarily bad or unartistic works, I guess, although I (and I'm sure some other people) find the idea pretty distasteful overall.)
I think (for example) under a definition like Oboro's that works like Stephen Baxter's The Time Ships and Wicked are fan fiction, and I think under the definition I (and some others, I expect) use, it wouldn't.
J.K. Rowling puts out a Harry Potter book. A really bad Harry Potter book. Like insanely bad. With Harry and Ron making out.
It sells. Horrendously well.
This is exploiting existing material to expand its' readership, and it's original fiction.
Your argument as I understand it is like me saying "Oranges are orange," and you pointing to an orange tabby cat and using that to argue that the cat and the orange are on the same footing. One happens to have a quality. The other is defined by being that quality.
Note that I'm not saying that trying to exploit fan interest in a setting is a bad thing. An author who starts a new series in a familiar setting so that fans get more of Middle Earth, Midkemia, Belgarionland, or Krynn is doing the same thing, unless you differentiate fanfic by specifying that it's unauthorized exploitation of an existing setting.
That difference, though, actually makes sense to me. When I read, say, a Kevin J. Anderson Star Wars novel and say "This reads like fanfic," I am indeed saying that it's bad, but that's shorthand for me saying, "This should not have been approved by the holders of the license, because I do not believe the quality standards are high enough." I've read good fanfic and said, "This should be a licensed tie-in," too, often with an addition of, "Provided the SG1 guys and the Farscape guys could work out the legalities..."
Except in light of the prequels it's hard to make a "this doesn't meet the quality standards of Star Wars" about anything anymore.
Instead of a hypothetical Rowling exploiting the HP universe, we have an actual example of the original author exploiting the SW universe.
Hooray for agreeing?
But what I will say is it depends on the way it's written. If it rides on characters too much to tell the story, then it's lazy. But if they have original plots, interesting writing, and good desricptions, I can over look the 'lazy' parts and see what they've done on their own.
Bad fanfiction is characters and romance. Leave that to the real thing, guys. You over do it.
Good fanfiction draws from the source just enough to establish a setting quickly, and tell a new story in an interesting way.
Funny, I don't remember any lesbian overtones between those two in the original game. :winky:
While certainly a great deal of fanfic exploits the orignal source material in various ways, I don't think there is anything intrinsic to material written by fans and based on pre-existing sources that will automatically make it exploitational. So I don't agree with this point of yours.
The question of shortcutting your own work by standing on another artist's shoulders isn't one that fanfic people face all alone. The author who writes a fantasy set in in a kingdom with dragons and elves is going to get criticism that he's ripping off Tolkien. He's still writing something more original than a fanfic writer who writes a fantasy novel in Feist's Midkemia but then uses all his own characters, taking only the setting elements and rules for magic and so forth. And that fanfic writer is in turn writing something with more originality than a fanfic writer who writes a story in the Potterverse that uses Rowling's characters. It's always a question of degree.
The reason that asking "Does fanfic have any sort of merit?" gets my back up is that it sounds like someone wants to play both sides of the fan/creator field. If you want to be a fan and write stories in somebody else's worlds to share on newsgroups, knock yourself out, and if you and your friends like it, who cares what anyone else thinks? If you want to be taken seriously as a writer, be prepared for people to call you on places where you're sloppy or lazy in your writing. Actual writers deal with critiques. Sometimes those critiques help them improve. Sometimes those critiques are full of crap, and the writer matures by realizing that he or she believes in the work strongly enough to leave it as it stands despite the criticism. Even people who aren't writing Alias/Dune crossovers have to deal with people not thinking their dialog was realistic.
But you don't get to be a fan when it's time for criticism and a writer when it's time for self-congratulation. "Does fanfic have any sort of merit?" is a question asking for a pat on the head, not a serious request for discussion of artistic merit. If you want respect, earn it.
Looks like the author (Who is Cassandra Clare) has taken down all of her fanfiction. Anyway, it was called The Draco Trilogy, which you might find in other ways.
You guys can have your own field. Go ahead and take it. I'm sick of the meme that all fanfic goes without actual critique, is without artistic merit because it's too deeply cribbing, and all this other shit. So, let's just not call it writing. I'm fine with that. Writing original fanfiction and writing fanfiction are their own mediums.
Does this solve everything? Are we good?
... what tipped you off? It was the union of the traditionalist insurgents under the modern government as a result of an unexpected same-sex love affair and marriage between east and west, wasn't it?
Passing me off as a writer-elitest, which you seem to be doing, unless I am mistaken, kind of goes to my point of not being able to handle being treated like writers of non-fanfic fiction get treated. That's the tone I took from the early posts in this thread, and that's the tone I'm continuing to hear here.
If you want to argue that there's a special kind of merit that original fiction may contain that fanfiction may never contain, I might be able to entertain that? I have no idea what kind of merit, though, nor what kind of fiction would be delivering it.
Also, given I am a writer of non-fanfic fiction, and that my fanfiction is as thoroughly vetted as my original fiction -- I take great offense to the insinuation by you and others that fanfiction is always untested, unedited garble.
You see? It goes both ways! Whodathunkit!
No. Next question.
Deal.
I don't want to argue that. My argument is that fiction that is paid for and published by a third party in some format has, by nature, more checkpoints that have a chance to block crap. This results in professionally written fiction having a higher average quality level, since the bottom third of it never sees the light of day.
Please quote where I insinuated that, as I did not intend to do so. I'm targeting you, not all fanfic writers everywhere.
EDIT: I mean, again, this is a thread about merit -- not quality. Maybe if we try and define merit we can make some more headway here?
:P
However, the idea that fanfic is never critiqued is pretty ridiculous. Fanfiction writing is based largely on reputation. Now, some writers get a great deal of recognition because they write smoking hot sex scenes between Goku and Vegeta. It happens. (Look at some romance novels for more hot sex = famous. Not all romance novels, mind you.) However, a substantial portion of the audience is literate and enjoys reading well-written stories better than badly-written ones, especially because there's so much to choose from.
As for "respect for the original," I'm not sure what the point is. If someone writes a story set in an alternate future for Harry Potter where he gets a job at Hogwarts and slowly grows to respect and care for Snape, who cares if Rowling didn't intend for Snape and Harry to like each other? The fanfic author isn't claiming that his or her story is the "real" story. The original story isn't diminished by the fanfic. Beyond that, why should we care?
Most definitely.
The cheif difference between it and most is that, since the Wizard of Oz is in the Public Domain, there's no problem selling it.
This makes it "a dark and different look at a familiar story" instead of "useless wankery cooked up by fans"
It's a story told from the point of view of the villain, revealing her motivations and the like. A common fanfic device. And then, for crying out loud, a sequel was made starring her kid. (Kids of the main characters is another common fanfic device)