OT - fanfic meta

[leavethesky]

Teresa Neilsen Hayden (senior editor at Tor) pwnz those who equate fanfiction with theft. My favorite bit:

In a purely literary sense, fanfic doesn’t exist. There is only fiction. Fanfic is a legal category created by the modern system of trademarks and copyrights. Putting that label on a work of fiction says nothing about its quality, its creativity, or the intent of the writer who created it.

all I can say is, Worddity word WORD!

edited to add partly_bouncy points to a pager that details the Marion Zimmer Bradley vs. fanfic author story and Teresa (tnh)herself steps in to respond with a link to the original comment thread/context for the quote I pulled and the entire kerfuffle.

I had a long, involved post written explaining my complicated POV as an author/creator (of fiction and music) and a ficcer/thief, when I realized that I have no desire to start yet another, peripheral kerfuffle and end up on teh wank. There's a place for dispassionate discourse on fandom and this really isn't it. This is a subjective, fannish, squee-filled journal of r3cs. Click to comments and follow the links if you're interested.

Also, thelastgoodname is leading a thoughtful discussion on the whole March "Why are they playing in my universe?!" THING here.

Comments

[partly-bouncy.livejournal.com]

This is the best break down of the MZB story and it isn't all that good in regards to that comment there. :/ The MZB thing is very much true.

[tnh.livejournal.com]

I was going to reply to the first comment, but in the process of writing the comment turned into a midsize essay. That seemed a bit much, like delivering a speech to someone you've only just met, so instead I posted it to the comment thread back at Making Light. Still, this was where it was written; so, for the record, it's this one (http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/007464.html#122184).

[partly-bouncy.livejournal.com]

Ah. I know it was a collection of hearsay. I tried getting the details out of some one at Windy Con a number of years ago as I was actively compiling the details found here but the situation was just wow. Confusing. Trying to understand it was difficult. :/ Fen don't really share stories well. But the new details you fill in are interesting. :) (And jms arguably had an agenda in saying what he said when he said it in terms of his own interactions with fen.)

What a creator does is up to them. Based on some of the history, the basic problem seems to be with entitlement issues on both sides or lack of understanding the cultural and historical underpinings of current fan fiction culture. :/

[tnh.livejournal.com]

Wow. I'd never seen that fanhistory site before. I've got some reading to catch up on.

That's a brave thing, trying to pin down accounts of the Darkover blowup. In my experience, fans share stories very well -- unless they're talking about some major social cataclysm on the order of this one or Coventry or the '64 Boondoggle, in which case the closer they were to the storm center, the warier they are about discussing it.

Collaborations tend to breed dissatisfaction, and this was a very large collaboration. As Patrick said, what we're seeing is a story about human conflict, not the nature of fanfic.

[partly-bouncy.livejournal.com]

My history. Still working on adding information to it. Some of the wording is bad and just info dumped. (The amount of stuff out there is huge. Trying to get any sort of big picture history together is difficult.) The MZB thing was just the biggest incident in the fan fiction could hurt the ability of a creator to make a living argument. Lucasfilms, Anne Rice, Yarbo, Anne McCaffrey have all been at varying points anti-fan fiction for various reasons but nothing to the extent where the rumours were out there that they were hurting things. And those fan fiction communities can be the most openly hostile towards the creators who don't let them play. (Harry Potter did that when the movie folks went after trademarked domain names. And Buffy fen reacted badly when the studio went after fen work. But things changed and fen don't seem to view them as openly hostile to fic because they don't have a history of being anti-fan fiction.)