Is FanFiction Any Less Legitimate Than The Source Material.

[Vault101]

. People make money off of videogames through Lets Play, artists make money off Etsy or other sites for selling fan made merchandise, and some fanfic writers are changing up their works to make money like 50 Shades.

As a writer it's kind of scary, as a consumer it's kind of exciting.

thats "technically" not much different from being "original" in the first place....no matter "where" you got your story from some are going to be hacky/good either way,

what makes 50 shades an anamoly is not that it was based on fan fic...was that it got so insanely popular..not only because it was terrible but because the erotica genre has existed long before shades came around and say "hey guys! did you know you can put SEX..in a book??"

in fact I'd almost say the difference is before the internet we might not have known the first place the X was just a reworked fan fic of Y

And even if you are a writer doing your own world, there are so many stories out there right now that even if yours was GOOD, there's no way of knowing if anyone would actually ever find it.

I'd much rather write my own stuff...even if no one would read it, its hard to write if you're not doing it for yourself first and foremost (and really like a lot of these things you kinda have to, otherwise its discouraging}

 

[RedDeadFred]

Hmmm.... I don't know.

Spoiler: Seems legit to me.

Clearly that is just as legitimate as the great work that it took its inspiration from.

 

[Entitled]

People make money off of videogames through Lets Play, artists make money off Etsy or other sites for selling fan made merchandise, and some fanfic writers are changing up their works to make money like 50 Shades.

As a writer it's kind of scary, as a consumer it's kind of exciting.

People have been working on pre-existing IPs for a very long time. All the sequels, adaptations, reboots, spinoffs, etc, that pop-culture is so full of, are largely made bysomeone else than the source's artist.

Fanfiction isn't really scary for "writers", it's scary for the franchise holders who presume to control the "canons" and employ artists to work inside them at their bidding. For artists, it's a matter of whether or not they want to ask for permission and instructions before creating art.

First off, yeah, most fan fiction is sub-par when it comes to literary merit, but that's not even the biggest problem. It's that the genre is already buckling under the same old recycled plots and cliched characters without a new movement to legitimize this sort of world piracy. the last thing fans should be doing is encouraging even less originality. Why would be surprised that the genre is so stagnant considering that the fans seem to gravitate towards incestuous rehashing of already established situations that are themselves rehashes in all but name anyway.

If you are worried about unoriginality, you should be a lot more concerned about "world ownership", than about "world piracy".

For thousands of years, creativity has happened derivatvely, that's no big deal. Our classic mythologies, folk tales, even our early novels and theatre plays, were not created by worldbuilders, but by a series of derivative artists.

But only in the past century, as we traded this for licensed franchises owned by corporations, did we see a surge in exploited IPs, miriads of reboots and prequels and spinoffs and merchandise, as these corporations got interested in exploiting their respective monopolies over them.

If anyone can make a new story about Shakespeare plays, then the only reason to make them is because the individual artist trusts his own skill to add something to them and produce interesting enough works.

If only Sony can make Spiderman movies, then you can damn well bet that they will see this as an edge of the market worth several hundred million dollars, and do anything to exploit it against their competitors.

Shunning and criminaliziing freely written fanfiction, has led to less originality, not more.

Meanwhile, actual fanfiction communities, not binded by commercial interests, can be hot spots of originality: even the terrible ones, say what you want about their overall professionalism, can afford to wildly reinterpret settings, and add elements that would not be tolerated by the traditional industry.

And the good ones, meanwhile, are capable of challenging taboos, reinventing whole genres, mixing unimaginable concepts and having a surprisingly coherent result, and generally having unrestrited FUN without having to worry about the formalities of Proper Literature.

 

[rorychief]

I think I've arrived at at what make me contemptuous of fanfiction. It's dependent fiction in that it needs the original to have done its job in having made people care. Characters have been characterized offstage, the world building too. The significance of events shown depends on events that are not featured. It rides the waves of emotions left by something else. This seems lazy or ay least distrustful of ones ability to create characters and events of significance. Its what reboots do, attempt to feed off or take advantage of the good will or attachment you have with something pre existing. I'm sure fanfiction can be of good quality and bring new takes and ideas, but again if it continued on its trajectory of quality then it would inevitably have no more need for the association to prop it up, and the pretense that these are the same people you're familiar and have a history with is just an obstacle to making the work legitimate.

My idea is that if fanfiction transcends the original then why should it continue to be reliant on it for enjoyment, when people say if you like X you should read what inspired it Y, its not the same as saying if you like x you should read y where its characters, setting and events are lifted from so then you'll have an understanding and appreciation of the characters, setting, and events being referred to in x.

 

[Entitled]

I'm saying that I, as of this moment being thus far unconvinced of fanfictions legitimacy, cannot fathom how someone with the talent to weave together circumstances, motives and tone into an expert narrative could bear to be shackled to pre existing characters. It just seems such a contradiction to me, to have the creative drive but to be content to relinquish control in area. If the names and details are irrelevant why not make it your own rather than having it always be in the shadow of the original? Maybe I'm just a control freak. I never work commission because I resent interference.

Like I have referenced in my examples, the problem with that kind of thinking is, is that if you think that working through an universe/characters made by someone else is INHERENTLY so inferior, you should denounce not just the amateur novellas uploaded on fanfiction.net, but also all the licensed works such as the Walking Dead video games, or the Public Domain-based stories such as the play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.

I wouldn't say, that any of these creators, or for example, Alan Moore who wrote the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, (that is 19th century literature's crossover fanfic), he has "relinquished control" over the ability to be original, or that Jean Rhys "relinquished control" by writing Wide Sargasso Sea, which is an unlicensed prequel of Jane Eyre.

It's quite the opposite: They were MORE free, to write whatever they want, than anyone who dogmatically insists on only creating "original fiction". Free to write older characters, and either subtly add to them, or entirely twist them around. Free to add new characters and locations as they see fit and necessary. Free to make commentary, to satirize, and to rebuild as well as build from the ground up.

I think I've arrived at at what make me contemptuous of fanfiction. It's dependent fiction in that it needs the original to have done its job in having made people care. Characters have been characterized offstage, the world building too. The significance of events shown depends on events that are not featured. It rides the waves of emotions left by something else. This seems lazy or ay least distrustful of ones ability to create characters and events of significance.

EVERY work of fiction is dependent on predecessors being there in the audience's mind. They don't exist in a bubble.

The Lord of the Rings is dependent on norse mythology, classic Disney animation is dependent on folk tales, Harry Potter is dependent on the bildungsroman formula, etc.

And this doesn't mean that the latter works are just lazily riding on the wave of success. Just because Lord of the Rings depends on mythological inspirations, doesn't mean that it adds nothing of value. It was built on the shoulders of giants, but it is a giant itself too. Tolkien wasn't "distrustful of his ability to create" mythology, he just knew that to create, first he must take.

The same can apply to works like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, that borrow the characer names to make a point, and if it can apply to them, it can also apply to Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, that first takes characters and events, to later create them.

when people say if you like X you should read what inspired it Y, its not the same as saying if you like x you should read y where its characters, setting and events are lifted

It's not "the same", but it's not clear that one of the two is self-evidently less creative.

You only treat the usage of CHARACTER NAMES as as lazy, as if they were the only way to ride on the success of something before you, while in reality they are simply the easiest to spot and put a finger on, and the easiest to criminalize.

Works that are merely being "inspired" by something else can also be extremely unoriginal, uninspired, and feel derivative, while they can also use it as a basis for something equally interesting.

And works that are "lifting names" can provide an exhilerating new story of new events for them in a new universe (The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen), and works that "lift settings" can fill them with new interesting characters and events (The Walking Dead games, the Alexandra Quick series).

if fanfiction transcends the original then why should it continue to be reliant on it for enjoyment

This is a strange question.

"If the idea of the Internet transcends the telephone, then why should it continue to be reliant on it for enjoyment?"

What do you even mean by "continue to be reliant"? It should stop being what it is? Stop using electronic cable transmissions? Stop using voice output? Stop being based on a network of homes?

It can't do that, because it's fundamentally reliant on the former technology's existence. It could only transcend the telephone, because the telephone existed in the first place.

The same goes for fanfiction. If Methods of Rationality is so great, why can't it work without Harry Potter? Because it depends on Harry Potter, it's built around the existence of Harry Potter, it conceptually can't be separated from Harry Potter any more than you can remove norse mythology's inspiration from Lord of the Rings, or you can remove electronic transmissions from the Intenet, just to make it "original".

 

[FuzzyRaccoon]

The problem is, that's pretty rare outside of the published circles. For every fanfic writer that has enough of a solid grasp on his or her chosen material, you've got someone who barely surfs above "My Immortal" after realizing that your average word processor is actually a great way to purge your teenage hormones...

Yeah that's true. Even those fics that I keep touting as great required "beta readers", sometimes two or even three individuals going over the work and helping the writer along. Not to mention that for all that I've really enjoyed some fics, they involve pairings that will never see the light of day. When you add the pairing of two characters into the mix the concept of how true someone is being to the characters get even more convoluted.

Also can I just say how nice it is to have a good conversation about this stuff without the thread devolving into angry ranting back and forth?

 

[FuzzyRaccoon]

And even if you are a writer doing your own world, there are so many stories out there right now that even if yours was GOOD, there's no way of knowing if anyone would actually ever find it.

I'd much rather write my own stuff...even if no one would read it, its hard to write if you're not doing it for yourself first and foremost (and really like a lot of these things you kinda have to, otherwise its discouraging}

Yes that's certainly true. I write for myself although if I ever wanted to actually publish anything? God that would be a nightmare. I'm not any kind of consistent in how I crank things out so if it was a series I'd need to be close to final proofs for maybe three books in advanced and going without an editor even in this age would be unthinkable to me. Thoughts like that make me want say I'll outline everything and have someone unearth all the stuff long after I've died. Haha.

And I suppose I don't want to discourage you from writing something if you've got a feel for it. Hell I don't know, you could be the next Frank Herbert, there's no way for me to know. I guess that only stemmed from my own frustration as a fantasy reader, trying to find something good when there's just so much physical and digital content to go through. And even websites like GoodReads don't even seem to be all that helpful. It doesn't tell you for example, what demographic is rating it in what way. So you'll get things like glowing reviews for something that really should only be read when you're in your teens.

I do have a fanfiction I'm writing as a gift to a friend, but I accept that it's not something to take seriously. Even I don't, I'm just putting as many references to all my silly interests and quietly wondering if anyone will notice.

 

[FuzzyRaccoon]

Anyways, OT:

Nope. It is not. Its the same as modding games though.
Highly ambitious fan fiction/mods can theoretically be great, canon friendly or just plain AWESOME for the community.
There is a REASON why STALKER is still popular. And that is mods. Same with fan fiction for books.

Then again, its usually only these that thread new ground that remain or get turned into cannon/fan cannon/ games/ products etc.

Some of those mods are truly great really. I remember when Counter Strike came out. I was just a kid but that game just blew my mind. I know that when you compare it to things now it wasn't all that great but at the time? It really felt revolutionary to me. I'd sneak into my brothers room when he was off doing stuff and I'd turn off the mic and play with his buddies. At first I was just so awful it was hilarious. Then after a while they were giving me orders and trusting me to carry them out. I'd never had this sense of online community before, not in that way, so it was really special to me. I suppose though that's a special case because it started as a mod then Valve really jumped on board with it. That was a good outcome though.

 

[masticina]

I want you to see the other side, are most ideas not already written. How many different types of vampires can you really write about that aren't thought of yet. Indeed it is hard not to take an idea someone else had.

For many people sticking to a story and world that is already defined allows them to quicker get to the point they want to go. IF that is indeed having harry potter being gay well ..

Writing stories in a new world with new rules and new places and new.. it takes allot more time and work to make it happen. So fan fiction, why not I wouldn't put it above the original content and in case of slashfic I definitely see a rather specific market. But eh can't be against it.

I try to write short stories and roleplaying worlds myself and it is allot of work. Even if you take bits from here and there. My content even if I try to be as clean as possible is well it has a source. I use vampires, elves, trolls, humans, different times, different themes. But yes like any human I have a memory and based much of my "Hey that is a good idea" upon what I have seen working somewhere else.

If I had to write pure clean it wouldn't be a story you would either understand or desire to read. Because every story has underlying themes, themes that strongly influences the rules of the world and the story. What can happen and what definitely isn't happening.
I will put out the sky pirate for instance. There is no way you can get sky pirates to work in a Lord of the Rings setting without actually taking the piss. There the sky is for insects, birds, nazgul and giant eagles. Adding skypirates would be.. well.. it would break up allot of rules.

For instance "Why couldn't have they taken a giant eagle to drop the ring into mount morder" because Giant Eagles have special meaning. If you add sky pirates to LOTR this would be a huge problem for this VERY IMPORTANT PART OF THE STORY. Because they just could hire sky pirates.

I am not against slash fic but it isn't my thing.

But I can give it a twist or I can rethink how things would work. I can have a world in what there are elves and trolls yet it is is truly technical with hacking and...oh that is done.

Erm I could see this is the problem. Almost everything is already done but you can change it.

Now I agree with some here that when you want to write better one trick is to not write directly into a world out of another story. Because that comes with charactes, places, events en in effect rules.

Any world has rules, and when you write a story in a world that you design yourself you can define the rules. You can make elves into flying air pirates. Go ahead. But trying to have flying air pirates in Lord of the Rings is not going to work. So make your own darn world with flying air pirates.

And please do research if you write your own stories. Think well about how you implement things..

A story for me is something you break like a lego car and put together another way. Break it, take the good working ideas, rework them think about why they work so well. Then use what you learned from that to write something better.

 

[FuzzyRaccoon]

I love Martin's books. I really do. He is a favourite author of mine.
But I will say it as I see it. His opinion on the matter, I equate to absolute dog shit.
Well, its impossible to do that to an opinion. But lets say... I do not take it as something worthwile .

The reasons are simple:
1. Using pre-existing characters WELL is HARD.
2. Using a pre-made world well is HARD as well.
3. Who the f*ck are we (or anyone else really) to say what is and is not quality work? Ours are opinions, at most informed opinions.

Can I equate Fan Fiction to video game mods? If so, let me say that there is a pretty damn big amount of ambitious, well made, well coded, cannon-friendly mods out there.
STALKER Lost Alpha is one of the most ambitious games released this year. Its a free mod currently in early access (and still is being worked on a lot!). And it makes AAA developers with original IPs look like pationless, barely able to code monkeys in comparison.
Then we have Black Mesa, Research and Development, Minerva, Valley of Silence, FOTOGRAPH, Eastern Front...
And games like Portal, Team Fortress, Counter Strike, Killing Floor, Day of Defeat, Gmod...

I hope I made my point clear !

Yes! This, I completely agree with this. I really appreciate Martin's writing, his books, and some of the things he says are good. People have trouble sometimes when you hate with a passion something someone has said but still appreciate other things. I can like Ender's Game and disagree with Scott Card. I can appreciate some magical concepts that L.E.Modesitt Jr. has brought to fantasy and still think he needs to stop writing himself and his wife into every set of protagonists he's ever written.

I also thought what an act of hubris it was for him to liken his work to Tolkien, a man whose world is a lot deeper just on the basis of all the linguistic work he did.

But I still like his writing, his stories are still compelling.

 

[FuzzyRaccoon]

People make money off of videogames through Lets Play, artists make money off Etsy or other sites for selling fan made merchandise, and some fanfic writers are changing up their works to make money like 50 Shades.

As a writer it's kind of scary, as a consumer it's kind of exciting.

People have been working on pre-existing IPs for a very long time. All the sequels, adaptations, reboots, spinoffs, etc, that pop-culture is so full of, are largely made bysomeone else than the source's artist.

Fanfiction isn't really scary for "writers", it's scary for the franchise holders who presume to control the "canons" and employ artists to work inside them at their bidding. For artists, it's a matter of whether or not they want to ask for permission and instructions before creating art.

I want to make something clear here. If you look at my sentence you can see that I'm talking about myself. I said "as a", so that when I think of myself as a writer potentially publishing things there is existing worry. I understand your insistence on talking about who might have ownership over an IP because it is an important distinction so I'll use it now. If as a writer I publish a work and maintain ownership of my work there exists the possibility that others will profit from that work given the examples I had given above and many others. As an individual with the potential to go forth with publishing something at some point, the prospect is daunting. I don't even know if I could help from alienating my own fans because in real life I'm unconsciously such a jerk that saying something terrible might be a matter of course.

 

[peruvianskys]

If you are worried about unoriginality, you should be a lot more concerned about "world ownership", than about "world piracy".

For thousands of years, creativity has happened derivatvely, that's no big deal. Our classic mythologies, folk tales, even our early novels and theatre plays, were not created by worldbuilders, but by a series of derivative artists.

This argument comes up a lot and is incredibly spurious. Comparing the creation of mythologies or folk tales, which happened through culture-wide retellings and reworkings based off traditional stories passed down through time, to taking the characters and world of one specific person to remake as a continuation of that work is completely different. Works like Romeo and Juliet, for example, are indeed retellings of a traditional story created over time many years before the author, but they are not comparable either in style or motivation with fanfiction. Are you telling me you really don't see the difference between one author doing her own interpretation of a traditional narrative, and one author just lifting the characters, setting, and style of another wholesale for the purpose of continuing that narrative?

The works you're referring to here happened inside of an informal exchange in which agents of a culture worked together to create a narrative that expressed their collective experience. That's the key word here: Exchange. The creation of myths, legends, folk tales, etc. are egalitarian transmissions of shared ideas across a culture. Fan fiction is inherently different because it's taking one person who single-handedly created the world and characters and just iterating on that in a way that will never "find its way back", so to speak, to the author. This is a massive difference that totally disrupts your argument.

A better example of writing that is actually comparable to early mythological/folkloric transmission would be Creepypasta, for example - and while it's not the kind of stuff that interests me at all, I think that community is great! Because it's a shared creative enterprise among equals, not a reaction to the work of someone outside the community.

But only in the past century, as we traded this for licensed franchises owned by corporations, did we see a surge in exploited IPs, miriads of reboots and prequels and spinoffs and merchandise, as these corporations got interested in exploiting their respective monopolies over them.

I agree that the system of copyrighted franchise production is horrible. There's no need to swing this far in the other direction.

Shunning and criminaliziing freely written fanfiction, has led to less originality, not more.

I don't want to criminalize fanfiction, but I do want to encourage a community that values the creation of new worlds and new characters as well as one that respects the author's ownership of a product.

And the good ones, meanwhile, are capable of challenging taboos, reinventing whole genres, mixing unimaginable concepts and having a surprisingly coherent result, and generally having unrestrited FUN without having to worry about the formalities of Proper Literature.

Again, probably the worst thing about us is that, as a community, we don't seem to care about the "formalities of proper literature". Are you really telling me that the writing you see in most sci-fi and fantasy novels is bogged down by being too good?

The reasons are simple:
1. Using pre-existing characters WELL is HARD.
2. Using a pre-made world well is HARD as well.
3. Who the f*ck are we (or anyone else really) to say what is and is not quality work? Ours are opinions, at most informed opinions.

Again, is the sci-fi/fantasy fan community at a point now where we justify things by saying "The other way is too hard?" Talk about low standards.

The whole problem with a lot of sci-fi today is that too many folks, even published authors, don't give a fuck about ambition or innovation but are content to just rehash or re-consume the same old bullshit because, well, yeah, it's hard to do something better. It's hard to be a good writer. The reason GRRM is so popular is because he's the first person in a while to largely break free of that morass and do something new, because he *is* a good writer - maybe we should follow his advice?

 

[FuzzyRaccoon]

And please do research if you write your own stories. Think well about how you implement things..

Research is certainly essential. I don't know if they still do it but there used to be two editors for books. Content and Copy editors. Conetent editors to catch discrepancies for time periods or pick out things in the narrative that just don't make sense and Copy editors to make sure all the grammar and the look of the page was being taken into account. I think if I wrote something I'd beg for trusted friends to take on those roles for me.

 

[masticina]

And please do research if you write your own stories. Think well about how you implement things..

Research is certainly essential. I don't know if they still do it but there used to be two editors for books. Content and Copy editors. Conetent editors to catch discrepancies for time periods or pick out things in the narrative that just don't make sense and Copy editors to make sure all the grammar and the look of the page was being taken into account. I think if I wrote something I'd beg for trusted friends to take on those roles for me.

Yeah an editor is a great idea
Definitely because even if you try your best your own mind colors your reading experience positive or negative. And yeah it makes you look over for others obvious mistakes. Even after 20 times reading you still fly right over them. Oh and another thing PRINT ON PAPER, a computer screen makes you see less mistakes.

It would be interesting to find a digital watch in the 1830's.

 

[CrazyGirl17]

Legitimate? As in canon? That's a bit of a thorny question, innit? I suppose it technically isn't... but if well-written, it's certainly worth as much a look.

 

[FuzzyRaccoon]

If you are worried about unoriginality, you should be a lot more concerned about "world ownership", than about "world piracy".

For thousands of years, creativity has happened derivatvely, that's no big deal. Our classic mythologies, folk tales, even our early novels and theatre plays, were not created by worldbuilders, but by a series of derivative artists.

This argument comes up a lot and is incredibly spurious. Comparing the creation of mythologies or folk tales, which happened through culture-wide retellings and reworkings based off traditional stories passed down through time, to taking the characters and world of one specific person to remake as a continuation of that work is completely different. Works like Romeo and Juliet, for example, are indeed retellings of a traditional story created over time many years before the author, but they are not comparable either in style or motivation with fanfiction. Are you telling me you really don't see the difference between one author doing her own interpretation of a traditional narrative, and one author just lifting the characters, setting, and style of another wholesale for the purpose of continuing that narrative?

The works you're referring to here happened inside of an informal exchange in which agents of a culture worked together to create a narrative that expressed their collective experience. That's the key word here: Exchange. The creation of myths, legends, folk tales, etc. are egalitarian transmissions of shared ideas across a culture. Fan fiction is inherently different because it's taking one person who single-handedly created the world and characters and just iterating on that in a way that will never "find its way back", so to speak, to the author. This is a massive difference that totally disrupts your argument.

A better example of writing that is actually comparable to early mythological/folkloric transmission would be Creepypasta, for example - and while it's not the kind of stuff that interests me at all, I think that community is great! Because it's a shared creative enterprise among equals, not a reaction to the work of someone outside the community.

But only in the past century, as we traded this for licensed franchises owned by corporations, did we see a surge in exploited IPs, miriads of reboots and prequels and spinoffs and merchandise, as these corporations got interested in exploiting their respective monopolies over them.

I don't know about this. I mean I'm not saying that I completely disagree with you. Just ah, have you been a part of a fandom and been involved in reading fanfiction? If so than you can start to see a smaller scale version of that evolution of folklore in fanfiction. That is to say, what the fandom considers canon, or a kind of collective "fanon" is not precisely what the show or whatever way the narrative is being told in purports the characters or events to be. Everyone in the supernatural fandom collectively agreed that Gabriel wasn't dead, the same with Coulson in the Marvel movies. And the strength of that mutual agreement came to make it actual canon.

Now these are some extreme examples. If we want to go back to just what the fandom collectively agrees with we can talk about how a great number of the Teen Wolf fandom characterizes one of the characters circa Season 2 and ignores most of the changes that have happened to him since then. We can talk about how in The Eagle fandom there are some interesting concerns related to pairings and power dynamics that everyone seems to explicitly agree upon. We can see that in the BBC Merlin fandom everyone agrees as a collective to generally leave the show as is an then expound on those same characters with the recarnation concept introduced at the end.

I mean it's not exactly the same but it does have it's similarities to that cultural evolution on a work.