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Does fanfiction have any sot of merit?
noir_blood
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
I got to thinking about this in the Max Payne movie thread.
Apparently there had been a fan film being made that was issued a cease and desist order from Fox. You can read the film maker's thoughts here- http://www.payneandredemption.com/blog
The last few blog posts have been people venting about how pissed off they are about what happen. And while I can empathize with them up to a certain degree, at the end of the day they were playing with someone else's toys, and they knew that. I can't imagine that it didn't cross their mind at some point that there would be a good possibility they would end up being shut down.
And this also makes me wonder why they didn't just use their own ideas. I mean, even if they wanted to go the noir, hard boiled style of max payne they could have, but why adhere to the game's character and storyline?
Same can be said for the oodles and oodles of fan fiction out there. I'll admit that I did my own fan fic way back in my young years, but that didn't last long, and soon I moved on to trying to create my own worlds and characters. So in that sense, fan fiction helps. But at the same time, there's other people that will just stick to fan fiction, and end up never moving on. So even if it's good fan fic(like The Shocker fan fiction), you end up wondering what they could do with their own characters. THoughts?
Apparently there had been a fan film being made that was issued a cease and desist order from Fox. You can read the film maker's thoughts here- http://www.payneandredemption.com/blog
The last few blog posts have been people venting about how pissed off they are about what happen. And while I can empathize with them up to a certain degree, at the end of the day they were playing with someone else's toys, and they knew that. I can't imagine that it didn't cross their mind at some point that there would be a good possibility they would end up being shut down.
And this also makes me wonder why they didn't just use their own ideas. I mean, even if they wanted to go the noir, hard boiled style of max payne they could have, but why adhere to the game's character and storyline?
Same can be said for the oodles and oodles of fan fiction out there. I'll admit that I did my own fan fic way back in my young years, but that didn't last long, and soon I moved on to trying to create my own worlds and characters. So in that sense, fan fiction helps. But at the same time, there's other people that will just stick to fan fiction, and end up never moving on. So even if it's good fan fic(like The Shocker fan fiction), you end up wondering what they could do with their own characters. THoughts?
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That said, it's also lazy and exploits someone else's work. :P I've done my own fanfiction in the past, but it's not something I'm proud of like my original stories.
What, in that definition, separates it in in any consideration of merit from any other form of fiction?
If you want to claim that it has less merit because of those one or more elements, I am willing to honor that, but I pose this question -- just how much value do you attribute to those few bits and pieces?
I think it's a cool practice. i've never done it but I've thought about it because I've regularly thought about how much easier it is to get out a story when you're given some big pieces like a character background.
I've always wanted to write a Star Wars fanfic because Lucas still hasn't given me a really badass female sith as a central character.
A officially licenced and released Star Wars book isn't really fanfiction. Wouldn't fanfiction be just the opposite?
Only if fanfiction is specifically non-sanctioned. I mean, if you look at the word 'fanfiction', it's fiction written by a fan or fans. The authors of licensed books could very well be fans of the property.
That's just one form. And that's also dependent an a nation's copyright laws.
In Canada, characters and settings cannot be copyrighted.
yes, generally, you are right. I specifically went outside those bounds to make my point.
Slightly off topic, but I'm curious.
EDIT: In Canada, that is.
What about comics? Almost none of the "classic" characters (Spider-Man, Batman, Superman) are written by the original creators. Yes, comic books are licensed, but the people writing them are fans of the original work . . . In a way, it is fanfiction. And sometimes bad fanfiction. I know Jack Kirby got really pissed off when John Byrne wrote a story where Big Barda (one of Kirby's creations) was mind-controlled into making porn films with Superman.
I write fanfics because it's something I enjoy doing. And I like reading them--well, the good ones. There is a ton of crappy fanfiction out there, basically because there are no editors or publishers to stop the terrible ones. But not all fanfics consist of canon characters having weird sex with Mary Sues.
No. Because Star Wars is a registered trademark. However, a cease and desist would probably fail on a fanfiction work not released commercially.
I think the first problem tends to be the most obvious (particularly to outsiders) so it gets the most attention. I don't think that it deserves that much attention though. Ultimately, originality isn't that big of a deal. There's a lot of fiction out there that borrows heavily from works that came before it. Fanfiction is just less abashed about the whole thing. And, why shouldn't it be? As long as the craft is good and it honours the original work than spawned it, that's great. Most fanfic doesn't satisfy one of those criteria though, let alone both.
That brings me to the second, and considerably greater problem. Most fanfiction, though created by fans of the source material, tends to deviate from it considerably in terms of just about everything. Characters do weird things (I'm looking at you, slashfic). Plot elements that make no sense show up (I'm looking at you, crossovers). Blatant wish-fulfilment characters are introduced (I'm looking at you, Mary Sue). Now, the entire realm of fanfiction exists pretty much for the purposes of wish-fulfilment, which is okay I guess, but that means that it will rarely if ever produce anything of real merit.
This is especially true given the final problem. Fanfiction communities, because they're populated by, well, fans, are not going to demonstrate sufficient critical ability. For the most part, a consumer of fanfiction will not engage that kind of work critically at all. This means that fanfiction producers don't have much of an opportunity to improve their craft. They can churn out reams of mediocrity and bask in the glow of their adoring fans, but not much else. Also, because there is so much shit--stuff so bad that even the fans can hardly stand it--the standards for quality fanfiction are considerably lowered.
"I find it hard to believe a work of fanfiction that disrespects the original source material, is unoriginal, and is not subjected to peer editing will ever be worthy of much merit."
However, not all fanfiction is 'disrespectful' (what again is the relevance of this?), it is not uniformly more unoriginal than other works -- and is often more original than many unique properties, on the basis of having to work within already-established canon -- and there is certainly no law that says fanfiction must be kept away from rigorous peer edit and revision.
She's asking you to analyze the merit of fanfiction without assuming all fanfiction is automatically trash.
Everything you just said is also true about romance novels. Well, except for the toxic communities part, perhaps (although romance writers are certainly well-aware of how to gain the approval of their readers . . . it's a very stable formula.) It would be unfair to judge all fiction on the basis of romance novels; likewise it's not fair to condemn all fanfiction because some of it is crap.
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. They are an incestuous pool of soap-opera repetition and ridiculous plot-masturbation. That sentence could also generally be applied to fan fiction.
It allows you to craft a story without having to do those pesky things like develop original characters or an original world.
There's nothing evil about it, it's just there to let people express their fantasies like any other form of fiction. Unfortunately those fantasies usually involve Harry and Snape having... you know what, nevermind. I need to go scrub my brain now.
Don't make me post that Diary of Anne Frank/Dragonball Z crossover.
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Also, I'd like to point out that I only used the word "all" once, and that was in the phrase "at all", so if you think I'm saying that "every piece of fanfiction must be terrible" or anything along those lines, I'm sorry to have misled you. I just think that it has some problems. (And, for that matter, I think a lot of published fiction has the same or similar problems, so don't think I'm only hating on fanfiction. It's just that this thread is about fanfiction, not all fiction.)
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, and that negative reaction to it can produce situations where someone is abducted and killed by aliens before they can ever admit their feelings to those they care about.
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.
If you want to change the debate to be about "does Mary Sue slash fanfiction have any sort of merit?", in light of that, I'm perfectly okay with the idea; I just don't appreciate 'fanfiction' as an all-inclusive term being panned.
That's a pretty generous definition of fan fiction. Would you consider Captain Ahab to be a single element to Moby Dick? By dismissing the driving engine of a story as just a few bits and pieces you are dismissing what made the story that story in the first place. From what I've seen, fan fiction is either stealing a story's essential elements or it is only tangentially related and with some confidence the writer could divorce themselves entirely from their inspiration.
George Orwell wasn't writing We fan fiction when he wrote 1984 (Brave New World might be a better root, since Orwell claimed he had never read We) and Vonnegut wasn't writing 1984 fan fiction when he wrote Player Piano. The influences are pretty heavy down the line but the authors had the confidence to break free of them and to write their own story. Thematically they are all very similar but the premises and conclusions are unique. Alone and together they add something to literature. Alone they can exist without the others.
Can the same be said of fan fiction? I can't think of a situation where something is definitely fan fiction but can exist without the source material. If it can, why not untie the apron strings and make it entirely ones own?
Sometimes an author knows far more about her characters than the fan does. She would then use this hidden knowledge to shape the direction of her story without explicitly stating them. Rowling, for instance, perhaps was writing Dumbledore as a gay character the whole time and used it to shape his actions. This knowledge wasn't essential to the story and was left out (or if you're a cynic it was all a publicity stunt), but if she decides to continue the work she started she could make it essential. Then where do the reams of Harry Potter fan fiction stories stand? Do they need to have an editor's note saying, "this was written before I knew Dumbledore was gay"?
I'm not sure how much merit fiction that is so easily mutable can have.
if somebody wrote a really good, hilarious story about Goku going home and experiencing horrible anxiety and depression because his body is far too powerful to be affected by psych meds, and then attempting to kill himself by various methods that fail because of his power level, all situated within a Freudian penis-envy theoretical framework based on his severed tail, I think it would be pretty great, but would it be fanfiction?
Again, I say it. It's not that fanfiction is inherently shoddy, it's that there are a lot of inexperienced and/or bad writers out there.
I mean, if you had everyone on PA draw a picture, you'd have a few masterpieces, some all around good drawings, a lot of medicore drawings, and a lot of terrrible drawings and stick figures. A good artist produces good work whether they're drawing an original character or Spider-Man. A bad artist produces crap whether they're drawing a self-portrait or Luke Skywalker.
Why couldn't the creators of KOTOR come up with their own magic and laser swords? Or the creators of Star Trek TNG come up with their own spaceships and aliens? Or the creators of Daria and Darkwing Duck come up with their own characters?
Are all those works diminished because they weren't 100% original? Heck, is All Quiet on the Western Front diminished because the author didn't invent WWI?
fanfiction isn't inherently bad, but many bad writers are inherently attracted to fanfiction
for all my blathering, i think that's really all there is to it
And the "but other things are bad too" argument is annoying.
oh, this is what I talked about, where you just redefine the word so that it's inherently bad
nevermind
of course, you said "SOME" fanfiction so this kind of post is completely forgivable, on the basis that it's actually saying (absolutely) nothing. Some things are things and some things are things! More at 11.
And as for the [citation needed] take your pick of any adult fanfiction.
it just tends to be horrible, because those most often attracted to the idea are horrible writers who have horrible ideas about what writing is
A whole lot of fanfiction written by people other than Oboro defies the established conventions of the source material for a few cheap thrills.
At the same time realize most of the really hilariously bad fanfiction is what gets more attention so people have their perception of it skewed.
Now, slashfic, especially furry slashfic involving Kirk and some Tribbles? That's some sick shit.