The difference in attitudes to fanart and fanfic

[alias_sqbr]

General meta about fanworks tends to be written by fanfic writers(*), and I often get a squidgy feeling of "that's not right" when I try and apply their conclusions/assumptions to fanart. Unfortunately I suck at this sort of sociological analysis so this is just some vague impressions, please let me know if your experience is different

Comments

[violetsquirrel]

It is an interesting difference, yeah. I'd love to see research into it. I think there's also some kind of sense of not expecting art to necessarily be in character? I don't know why but I think it's easier for the creator of a work to see art as a parody or a joke or something not to be taken seriously if it's something wildly out of character, than a 3000 word story about it. So it's not seen as as embarrassing to show it to the creator (or person! People draw fanart of real people all the time and send it to them and that's seen as perfectly acceptable (at least in Japanese fandoms, maybe I'm wrong about Western ones) whereas you'd never send them fanfic of themselves). Maybe it's because fanart doesn't have context, so it feels less like trying to take control of the character? I'm not sure if that's quite the way to express the feeling I'm thinking of.

FTR though I don't think Japanese fanartists are worried about being sued, I think they're worried about a) being exposed to their RL contacts as fans/geeks/otaku/whatever and b) more recently, foreigners stealing their art and making icons etc from it (which is partially tied into not wanting to be discovered and partially just not wanting their work stolen). You mentioned that it's hard to see the artist behind the art, I think people tend to think about it even less when the site isn't in English and they can't really communicate with the artist. It's at the point where there are some sites that require passwords to get into, with the password being easy to work out from a riddle written in Japanese on the front page- just to keep out people who can't read Japanese.

It'd definitely be weird for them to be worried about legal action considering that doujinshi are sold at huge famous commercial events and shops.

[alias_sqbr]

Hmm. That's interesting. People quite possibly do see it that way, personally I don't but that may be because I draw (and my art is often telling a story as much as my fic) The specific issues around pictures of characters that are played by real people and how that differs from pictures of that actor is this whole other very interesting thing I have no idea about :)

Aha! I knew I had to be wrong somewhere about Japanese fannish attitudes. Thanks.

[violetsquirrel]

Seconded. I've seen JP fansites shut down specifically because they goofed on putting anti-indexing code on their pages (to block against Google and/or Yahoo), and could only undo the damage by obliterating themselves and going into hiding. It's a really heavy onus of shame to be identified, even under an alias, it seems.