We do it all for you.

[scarfman]

As mad as I was the other day about people who say, "Why don't you write something original instead of fanfiction?", once I calmed down I never actually expressed my own position on that aspect of the topic.

One way it was put to me was "working with someone else's energy". Here's what that made me realize about it: It's not just someone else's energy. It's my energy too. In fact, it's everyone's energy. Just like Hercules was everyone's energy two thousand years ago, and King Arthur was everyone's energy five hundred years ago, and Paul Bunyan was everyone's energy a hundred years ago.

Patrick Stewart in something I read once told a story, back when he was still appearing as Captain Picard on our screens every week. The press was always nagging him, "How does it feel to have had this illustrious career with the Royal Shakespeare Company and in I, Claudius and all, and then doing this silly science fiction thing?", and finally he blew up at them: "All that Shakespeare was just preparation for Star Trek! It's the same exotic language, the same fantastic adventure, the same high philosophy and moral discourse! Get a life!" [He didn't actually say, "Get a life!" in what I read; I'm paraphrasing.]

And here's another quote from academia to go with the one earlier this week from the guy at MIT. The Arthurian scholar Eugene Vinaver, in his introduction to King Arthur and His Knights (an abridgement of Vinaver's edition of Malory), wrote of the evolution of the medieval romances: "In most cases, when a 'branch' or an incident was added, the purpose of the addition was to elucidate or to anticipate stories which were already in existence. ... This 'backward' growth of the narrative implies a method still clearly distinguishable in the works of Rabelais, who began with the adventures of Pantagruel and then went on to the life story of Pantagruel's father, Gargantua; a modern novelist would probably have written his Gargantua first. ... On the wide and constantly expanding canvas of a cycle of romances there is always room for a further lengthening of any one of the carefully interwoven threads." That's what fanfiction does - it expands upon our culture's present body of folklore.

The fact that this energy that is everyone's is owned by big corporations is an aberration, a hiccup in normality, as I discussed in that earlier entry this week. In our own way, by ignoring the stigma of writing fanfiction, we are battling for Truth and Justice just as much as the heroes we write about do.

Comments

[dave-iii.livejournal.com]

I don't have a problem with fan fiction... I only have a problem with bad fan fiction. As in lifting the characters and situations and reusing them, without any level of understanding what makes them good or why. What you do with the Arthurian characters is take them and expand on thier personalities and relationships by placing them in similar, but essentialy different, situations. In some ways, your parody versions have a kind of backwash effect, placing the replaced character into a new light cast by the prism of the Arthurian character. (Which is also cool, if perhaps unintentional.) This tells me you have a fundimental and thorough knowledge of the stories involved, of what makes a story work and why this bit connects to that bit, and how to put it all together in a way that is fun and entertaining, especially if you get the in-jokes (but not requiring it). This makes you a good writer.

Then, over here, got your Mary Sue stories. *twitch*

[dave-iii.livejournal.com]

And I really wish I could edit my reply to someone else's post... pretend only the word "bad" was italisized, and the rest is in normal mode, please.

[scarfman]

If you click on "More Options" at the bottom of the comment dialog box, one of the options is "Preview".

Yeah, a lot of fanfiction is bad. But no more of fanfiction is bad than of any other fiction. It just seems that way because its media largely have only amateur editors. Or - since the internet age, more often than not - none. Fanfiction, especially netfanfiction, hasn't a higher percentage of garbage than other genres: it has a higher percentage of exposure (to such audiences that are disposed to it at all). Webcomics culture goes through the same thing. Speaking of which, thanks for reading.