(no subject)

[scarfman]

 

ursulav has been discovering fanfiction lately. She has a very interesting perspective on it, and one new to me, perhaps because I've been a consumer and producer since I was only a little older than the age she's flashing back to.

 

But the real reason I mention this is because I want to preserve in my journal things I've written in the comments on her post.

para_cynic, a professional editor who dislikes fanfiction on practical grounds, brought up the you don't own the characters thing.

 

That's a fallacy. It's not that the characters don't belong to me. They do, because they belong to everybody, the way Hercules belonged to everybody two thousand years ago, and King Arthur belonged to everybody five hundred years ago, and Paul Bunyan belonged to everyone a hundred years ago. The fact that these characters who belong to everyone are copyrighted intellectual properties is a modern aberration. The hiccup in normality isn't that the characters are treated by me as if I own them, the hiccup is that big corporations own them.

For more academic arguments saying this same thing, google MIT professor Henry Jenkins.

nornagest responded to my comment, in part, "I think there's a significant qualitative difference between King Arthur or Hercules and, say, Buffy or Captain Picard. Retellings of myths recycle plot. You can write a version of the Christian War in Heaven where Lucifer is a basically sympathetic, if deeply flawed, character and everyone will recognize it as the War in Heaven as long as the proper events occur in approximately the proper order ... Mythic characters start out as blank slates ... They only become well-defined after many iterations, if at all; Odin is fairly well characterized, as is Robin Hood ... Fanfiction relies much more heavily on character structure. You can put Buffy, or Picard, in a plot ... unrelated to the original works, and people will still recognize them as the same characters ... I think this is a consequence of a change in the way stories are told; the concept of a canonical set of stories is relatively recent ... and the idea of intellectual property pretty much came in with it."

 

That's a great point but I'd argue that, while it reflects a new dynamic in the community folk hero's adjustment to the electronic communication age, the phenomenon of "canon" doesn't hold the omnipotence you seem to be arguing it does.

Characters like Buffy and Captain Picard are too new and young to be good examples. James Bond, on the other hand, has just featured in a very popular reenvisioning of his character (even if that "reenvision" was an exercise in bringing the characterization closer to what it had been in Fleming's novels than the films had ever achieved before). Gregory Maguire's novel Wicked which casts the Witch of the West as a sympathetic character is a bestseller, has been made into a stage musical, and has a new sequel out. The last two decades have presented movie theatres with comic remakes of mid-twentieth century cop tv dramas like Dragnet and Starsky and Hutch. And while Captain Picard is too new a character for such treatment, Captain Kirk is rumored to be getting a continuity reboot in the film J.J. Abrams (Lost, Alias, What About Brian?) has in pre-production. And actually, Buffy was a movie before she was a tv show.

The concept of "canon" plays a large role in the creation and appreciation of fanfiction, but today's lasting community characters are truly no more restricted by it than the lasting community characters of all of human history before them. Me, I stopped applying the word "canon" to bodies of fiction, because I feel it implies things that aren't true.

I may add to this post if the discussion over there continues.

Comments

[ladyrutile.livejournal.com]

"...has in pre-production. And actually, Buffy was a movie before she was a tv show."

yes, and a comic book before she was a movie...