Go forth and vote!
eruthos has posted the long list of nominations for fandom's Top 100 works of speculative fiction (in all media). I have voted already, but I'm almost certain to go back and change my votes.
For one thing, I'm checking out every fan work that got nominated. I'm discovering (rediscovering? after all, there was that whole weird Tiptree incident....) that I have complicated feelings about comparing fan works with professional works, because they play such different roles in my life and I respond to them so differently. Surprisingly, I'm finding myself more willing to vote for vids rather than fic (surprising, in that fic is so much more central to my own fannish experience, although I do love vids too). Fic excels at intense engagement with its own particular source text, and it also engages (sometimes critically, sometimes lovingly) with fandom and its fannish trends and tropes. But I feel like it's harder for fic to really wrestle with the larger matter of speculative fiction in general. There aren't that many works of fanfic out there that I feel have some sort of conscious, independent relationship with the SF genre as a whole, outside of their relationship with their source text.
I think that's something that is much easier for vids to achieve, and I'm trying to pin down why that is. I think it has to do with the ease of combining multiple sources and multiple media (song + visuals, certainly, but also multiple media within the visuals). So far all the vids that I'm inclined to vote for are multi-source (and that includes sisabet's Clark/Lex Bad Romance vid, with its brilliant, BRILLIANT use of comics and cartoons). Even though these vids are built entirely out of pieces of other works (and in that sense, someone might argue that they were "less original" than fic, because the fanfic author pulls potentially thousands and thousands of original words out of her own brain), I still feel like their stance in relation to the SF genre is more like that of an original work of fiction, and less like fanfic, while still including a uniquely fannish, communal component.
Am I making any sense? Please argue with me if I'm not! Or, go ahead and explain my own ideas to me in better words, because I'm still not entirely sure what I'm saying here.... *g*
This entry was originally posted at http://loligo.dreamwidth.org/424093.html.
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