Bourgeois Cheese - FFA Post #213

[sunnymodffa]

Is this a good name for a punk band? Discuss.

Or for extra credit compose Bourgeois Cheese song lyrics.

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Comments

Re: Things you wouldn't admit unanon

[anonymous]

presumably the things getting pulled for commercial publication aren't what we're coming to fandom for at all.

I think we're running into issues comparing two very different types of fandoms, which granted, is something I should have taken into consideration in my earlier posts. You're basically saying that the fan community would be the one to police exploitative instances such as these, but simply not supporting wildly AU stories that have too little to do with their canon; we wouldn't be interested in them as a fanfiction, at least not to the point they'd become Big Name Fics.

In Twilight, this is the goal. It has been ever since Breaking Dawn came out four or five years ago. Very few authors were interested in the canon anymore, and yet they didn't want to leave. Most Twilight fic is wildly AU, All Human, or OOC. Actually, probably a good 75% of it falls into one of these. A canonical story would never get big in this fandom. It's a fandom constructed on it.

But I realize most fandoms aren't like this, save for maybe some ATG stuff. Most fandoms actually like their canons and are there for the source, so... touche there.

In which case, it's legitimately earned the right to stand as a reasonably appealing original novel. (That is, if you're not reading it for the canon characters and/or canon setting, but you are reading every new chapter, what is it if not an original novel, whatever the names it's using?)

I disagree with this totally, though. The fact that it's in the fanspace and at least SOME things must be placed there with the intention of appealing to the fandom, be it relationship dynamics or Edward's Volvo or yes, even the names, it is absolutely a fanfiction. There's obviously an emotional connection we make to say... Stiles as a barista in a coffee shop, who serves a grumpy customer named Derek, as opposed to Bob Diddly is a barista who serves a grumpy character named Joe Schmo. Teen wolf fans aren't going to care about DiddlySchmo, but they're going to eat a Sterek coffee shop!AU all up, and it doesn't need werewolves, nor does it necessarily need canon characteristics. We're already looking for those because Derek/Stiles, and if you look hard enough you're going to find them somewhere, and it's probably going to be enough to get that fic a good bit of foot traffic.

Re: Things you wouldn't admit unanon

[anonymous]

Interesting! And you're right: all this is new and alien to me as a set of fandom dynamics.

As I'm sure you could tell, I consider the mundane/human AU one of the curses of my fandom (something in which I'm far from alone). But in talking about mundane AUs here, people who love them have said over and over that for them, the whole point is to keep the canon characters, for them to be recognizably and undeniably themselves and no one else even in this wildly altered environment. And while I've argued, and would again, that there are reasons why I don't believe it's possible to stick some of the nonhuman characters in my fandoms into an always-human AU and have them remain themselves, I also acknowledge that there are people in my fandom who disagree with that, and who when they write that kind of AU are doing it with the intent of being as canon-compliant as possible within the terms of the game they're playing. As readers, that's also what fans of these AUs say they're looking for. So in my fandoms, readers aren't going to make big name fics out of AUs that just keep the names of the characters and maybe a catch-phrase or a fandom joke.

I'm mostly in small fandoms, but judging from what I see from the TW nonnies, I'd have thought that the same would be true for a Stiles/Derek coffeeshop AU. That is, there would have to be something in the fic that made these characters recognizable as the canon characters for readers to make it popular as something other than an acknowledged ATG fic. (Of course, sometimes ATG fics are popular in a lot of fandoms, but again, on meme people have said specifically that they like ATG fics because they can read them as original fic without knowing or caring about canon.) If there's not something more to anchor the AU in canon and character than the names, then you might as well call your characters Diddly and Schmo; just because you call them Derek and Stiles doesn't mean that your readers are going to buy them as Derek and Stiles.

It seems clear from what you say that in Twilight fandom the default reading mode is a little different: that rather than expecting that an "Edward" in an AU will be a logically-extrapolated version of the Edward of canon, as he would be in this universe, and backing away in annoyance if the character proves to be some OC that the author happens to be calling Edward, Twilight readers will seize on any scrap of an excuse to accept that this character is Edward, or perhaps not care whether he is or not. But beyond that, it sounds to me as if Twilight fandom is now more of a community arising from a shared history than a fandom organized around a canon, with a correspondingly different kind of aesthetic than one that arises from how fic relates to and plays with canon?

I was about to say that I'm not sure I see how inserting character names and a few random details like the make of a character's car into what was otherwise a completely original novel could possibly turn that novel into fanfic, no matter what the circumstances of its writing. But then I realized that I was about to relaunch one of the big foundational arguments about what fic is: that is, whether it's defined by its formal qualities, so that a work is fanfic if it bears a certain kind of relationship to a canon, regardless of who wrote it or under what circumstances, or whether it's defined by the circumstances of its production, so that a work is fanfic if (and sometimes only if) it's written by a fan intending for it to be read within and by a fan community, regardless of its formal qualities. I'm guessing that in the end, that may be at the heart of our disagreement here -- you and I instinctively take different positions on that core question. And pulling things for pro publication is likely one of those places where which definition of fanfic you use makes a huge difference.

Re: Things you wouldn't admit unanon

[anonymous]

NA
This is really interesting, thank you.