I would just like to point out...

Feb 02, 2009 03:10

that I turned off an episode of Life to make this post. Charlie Crews, guys. I walked away from Charlie Crews. I mean, I'm going back to watch it, but still.

***

Okay, folks. This started as a comment exchange, and you know how I tend to take things and run with them. My response got a little long, and I always leave things out, and you all have things to share that I won't know. So I'm going to start off the discussion, and anybody who wants to chime in should feel free. Let's see if we can do the usual stellar job of describing fandom, and fannish works, to the uninitiated. I have faith in all of you to surprise me, and inform me, and prove once again that there are few places better than fandom.

***

The only thing I'm laying down as a rule is this: the original question was asked with the understanding that I had agreed to answer as best I could, it was done in an existing set of comments, and the language of the request is consistent with that conversation. No dogpiling about the phrasing. This wasn't meant for public consumption, and I'm trusting everyone to respect that. Parse the text all you like; just make sure that your responses are civil and not aimed to injure. I'm serious about this. Don't make me look bad by throwing fits about the wording just for the sake of fit-throwing.* I will send Winters to kick your ass if you do. And Nix will be standing by to mock you after.

(I know all of you on my f-list are rolling your eyes, because this is a totally unnecessary warning for you. Humor me. The post is public, and if it gets picked up by people I don't know, I want the ground rules to be clear. You can feel free to dogpile on my phrasing all you like. That, I encourage. I haven't had a decent argument in weeks.

And no, I couldn't have prevented the need for a warning by dropping the last two lines. They're important for directing the answer I gave. Also, it saves us all the trouble of explaining that you can create universes in fanfic.)

* You have my permission to throw fits for the sake of making a point. That's totally different.

***

Q: Why write fanfic instead of creating your own universe? I still can't comprehend it. I mean sure, there's a lot of unexplored space in various story universes, but why not explore it in your own universe? Yes, I know that technically writing fanfic creates its own universe, but that's not what I mean. I guess what I'm saying is that it seems lazy to not file off the serial numbers, but I'm probably coming at this horribly horribly wrong.

***

A: I do both. Fanfic is a particular exercise; it's all about working with the puzzles as they're given and fitting together the edges of things until they make sense. It appeals to my love of interstitial spaces, and of fractals. It's both weirdly limited and infinitely expanding, like the creative counterpart to quantum mechanics.

And it's a good place to push at the boundaries of how I tell stories, the words I use and the texture of how they slide together. The point of fanfic isn't the size of the unexplored space, it's the way that it hovers on the edge of known space, close enough to touch but far enough that we all see something slightly different. It's being given a shape and filling it with the unexpected, rather than starting from nothing and building worlds.

There are people who write gorgeous worlds that share characters with fandom; I'm not one of them. I'm not sure I could hold the characters steady in something that's completely AU, although I love to watch the people who can.

***

Fanfic, and fannish creations in general, are also part of a long tradition of oral narrative and storytelling--the modern equivalent (and successor) of medieval cycles and folk tales, and of paintings of characters that people recognized as archetypes first, and variations second.

Copyright, for all that I recognize the intent and the benefits of the system, has done terrible things to our historical traditions, and to the way that stories used to flow from each other. It truncates the way that art worked for thousands of years, and I find that both sad and difficult to reconcile with the belief that artists ought to be able to own the things they create, and stop other people from selling those things. It's why I push for Creative Commons efforts, and why I argue that fannish works are fundamentally different from the appropriation that copyright was intended to preclude.

I like to poke at that remaining flow of ideas, the things left after copyright, and see what I can do with what I find.

***

All of that said, I write original fic, too. I just don't usually publish it on a fannish LJ, any more than I publish poetry or research papers here. I don't write it with fannish friends through IM and whining on twitter, I write it at a table in a coffee shop with friends who also write original fiction. I keep it in files on my hard drive that are in a different folder from my fannish output. I don't talk about it when I finish a poem or a story that isn't fannish--although I do bitch a lot about NaNoWriMo every November.

For me (and there are people who don't have this line; at some point, I might not, either) this is a safe space for fannish works, and any original works that I create are secondary. I have posted original stuff, and it's coded in the memories as such. It's not announced and it's not even unlocked until well after I've posted. I doubt people even realize that I opened the posts. It's just there. It's for myself, rather than the community.

And ultimately, that's the last piece of the puzzle--fanfic is so fundamentally grounded in the community of fans and the narratives that we all share. It's partly about the fic, sure. But it's also about the vids, and the discussions, and the room to interact with each other that is surrounded by shared narratives. It's about picspams and cons and porn battles and episode rewatches and chatrooms and pairings and comms. It's about challenging each other to write better stories, to think harder about place and time and character, to create something and then give it to other people who love where it comes from and what it means.

The existing canon is where we start, but it's very rarely where we end up.

evangelical fandom, meta

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