Ethical fanfic again
I know you'd think I'd said all I could say--but no! There was a side issue I noticed while reading that thread, which, btw, is here, since I keep referencing it. There's one person there defending fanfic and doing a brilliant job staying polite despite everyone being rude and condescending.
Her position is laid out more clearly in her own lj here. At first I thought it was just that naturally I didn't like to hear fanfic writers divided into good ones and sickos who write "freaky weirdness," defined thus:
"And yes, I know, then there are those OTHER stories. Slash (which creates a homosexual relationship between two characters), hurt/comfort (usually involves a major injury/mishap for one character or another just to see how they react), mpreg (male pregnancy. 'Nuff said), and just about any other freaky weirdness known to man has the potential to make it into fanfic. Don't ask me to explain it; in most cases I can't. Fortunately, the three story types [I've previously described] make up the vast majority of fanfic in all but the most popular fandoms."
So was it just that I just reacted to seeing slash and h/c lumped with mpreg like it's all just the same, or that ultimately I just don't see what's so freaky about any of it? If I was imagining slash h/c in my head as a little child watching Batman, it's not weird, imo. Mpreg is pretty out there, I admit, I don't like it personally, but the impulse behind it is pretty logical given what slash is.
Or maybe I reacted badly to the idea that someone was defending fanfic by trying to throw most fanfic writers out the window, raising one group up by pushing others down, setting writers of R-rated gen above R-rated het, and PG-rated het above G-rated slash etc. Maybe I just thought this was a sort of "teacher's pet" sort of thing, like one author trying to get in good with the series creator and leave other fanfic writers behind and cross a line they can’t cross.
Then I realized there was a bigger problem with that whole line of thought: it essentially re-creates the anti-fanfic position. The anti-fanfic people felt that the characters and world belonged to the author even after they'd sold it to a publisher and put it out for public consumption, so you had to respect the author by not using/molesting his or her work. And what this argument is sort of saying is that yes, the characters and world DO belong to the author even after they've sold it to a publisher and put it out for public consumption, but some fanfics DO respect the author by writing stories where the male characters don't kiss and nobody gets hurt and comforted and only ladies have babies-so we're okay. But that doesn't work, imo. I think you have to either think you should be able to write about characters that aren’t yours for pleasure or else you can’t. It's just not up to fanfic writers to decide what is okay and what isn't. They can have objections to certain stories as stories (like not liking chan or bestiality or slash) but they can hardly say one uses characters that aren't yours and one doesn't. It seemed like the anti-fanfic position was that you shouldn't touch their (potential) characters AT ALL. They don't want to see their crime-solving doctor having lunch with Mr. Spock any more than they want to see the two of them fucking.
It reminded me of when this subject came up regarding nocturne_alley. Some players said they didn't like the idea of people writing fanfic about their RPG characters and others countered--how can you say fanfic is bad when these are all characters from a fanfic? And obviously that's true. For me what made it different was simply that the NA players were people fanfic writers knew and JKR wasn't. I don't mean that in a flippant way. There are lots of things people would like us to do, and things we want to do ourselves. Living together means we compromise. That means sometimes we're deciding whether what we want to do is worth ignoring the feelings of someone else--and sometimes it isn't. If a novelist you've never met makes a blanket statement that she hates fanfic I can totally see why someone would really not feel beholden to stop their social hobby of exchanging stories. (They might pull it from public view with a C&D letter.) But if someone you know asks you to stop doing something, well, now you're risking a real relationship, risking trouble in your community.
At the time I remember comparing it to an ex-lover. If your friend's ex from two years ago asks you out and your friend says she would really not feel good about your dating him, even if you really like the guy you might decide to turn him down. The feelings of your friend, whom you care for, and that relationship outweighs your feelings for the guy. But if some guy asked you out and his ex, whom you'd never met, tracked you down and called you and said, "Hi, I'm his ex. We broke up two years ago and I just really don't like the idea of him dating someone else," you probably would date him anyway (unless you were worried she would stalk and kill you because she’s nuts). It's really not an ethical issue, because the guy's free. In the fanfiction case, the author wrote a story and sold it to a publisher to sell to the public. Now the characters are in your head and you can't completely give them back to the author. The copyright is protected so the author doesn't lose money and other related things, but there's no law protecting the author from feeling uncomfortable at the idea of somebody else playing with his/her characters. Similarly, an RPS author might be less likely to write about a celebrity she actually knew who asked her to stop, than just one who were famous.
That's why I feel like the argument, as nicely and rationally as it was present it to people who were not listening, was doomed, because it was giving the author far too much power to begin with. Once you agree that the author has to feel positively towards your story in order for it to be okay, or would have to like it if s/he read it, I think you've conceded their point. And really, maybe the main reason fanfic continues to grow is that most fans do see themselves as interacting socially with others in sharing their stories and not stealing from the author.
Her position is laid out more clearly in her own lj here. At first I thought it was just that naturally I didn't like to hear fanfic writers divided into good ones and sickos who write "freaky weirdness," defined thus:
"And yes, I know, then there are those OTHER stories. Slash (which creates a homosexual relationship between two characters), hurt/comfort (usually involves a major injury/mishap for one character or another just to see how they react), mpreg (male pregnancy. 'Nuff said), and just about any other freaky weirdness known to man has the potential to make it into fanfic. Don't ask me to explain it; in most cases I can't. Fortunately, the three story types [I've previously described] make up the vast majority of fanfic in all but the most popular fandoms."
So was it just that I just reacted to seeing slash and h/c lumped with mpreg like it's all just the same, or that ultimately I just don't see what's so freaky about any of it? If I was imagining slash h/c in my head as a little child watching Batman, it's not weird, imo. Mpreg is pretty out there, I admit, I don't like it personally, but the impulse behind it is pretty logical given what slash is.
Or maybe I reacted badly to the idea that someone was defending fanfic by trying to throw most fanfic writers out the window, raising one group up by pushing others down, setting writers of R-rated gen above R-rated het, and PG-rated het above G-rated slash etc. Maybe I just thought this was a sort of "teacher's pet" sort of thing, like one author trying to get in good with the series creator and leave other fanfic writers behind and cross a line they can’t cross.
Then I realized there was a bigger problem with that whole line of thought: it essentially re-creates the anti-fanfic position. The anti-fanfic people felt that the characters and world belonged to the author even after they'd sold it to a publisher and put it out for public consumption, so you had to respect the author by not using/molesting his or her work. And what this argument is sort of saying is that yes, the characters and world DO belong to the author even after they've sold it to a publisher and put it out for public consumption, but some fanfics DO respect the author by writing stories where the male characters don't kiss and nobody gets hurt and comforted and only ladies have babies-so we're okay. But that doesn't work, imo. I think you have to either think you should be able to write about characters that aren’t yours for pleasure or else you can’t. It's just not up to fanfic writers to decide what is okay and what isn't. They can have objections to certain stories as stories (like not liking chan or bestiality or slash) but they can hardly say one uses characters that aren't yours and one doesn't. It seemed like the anti-fanfic position was that you shouldn't touch their (potential) characters AT ALL. They don't want to see their crime-solving doctor having lunch with Mr. Spock any more than they want to see the two of them fucking.
It reminded me of when this subject came up regarding nocturne_alley. Some players said they didn't like the idea of people writing fanfic about their RPG characters and others countered--how can you say fanfic is bad when these are all characters from a fanfic? And obviously that's true. For me what made it different was simply that the NA players were people fanfic writers knew and JKR wasn't. I don't mean that in a flippant way. There are lots of things people would like us to do, and things we want to do ourselves. Living together means we compromise. That means sometimes we're deciding whether what we want to do is worth ignoring the feelings of someone else--and sometimes it isn't. If a novelist you've never met makes a blanket statement that she hates fanfic I can totally see why someone would really not feel beholden to stop their social hobby of exchanging stories. (They might pull it from public view with a C&D letter.) But if someone you know asks you to stop doing something, well, now you're risking a real relationship, risking trouble in your community.
At the time I remember comparing it to an ex-lover. If your friend's ex from two years ago asks you out and your friend says she would really not feel good about your dating him, even if you really like the guy you might decide to turn him down. The feelings of your friend, whom you care for, and that relationship outweighs your feelings for the guy. But if some guy asked you out and his ex, whom you'd never met, tracked you down and called you and said, "Hi, I'm his ex. We broke up two years ago and I just really don't like the idea of him dating someone else," you probably would date him anyway (unless you were worried she would stalk and kill you because she’s nuts). It's really not an ethical issue, because the guy's free. In the fanfiction case, the author wrote a story and sold it to a publisher to sell to the public. Now the characters are in your head and you can't completely give them back to the author. The copyright is protected so the author doesn't lose money and other related things, but there's no law protecting the author from feeling uncomfortable at the idea of somebody else playing with his/her characters. Similarly, an RPS author might be less likely to write about a celebrity she actually knew who asked her to stop, than just one who were famous.
That's why I feel like the argument, as nicely and rationally as it was present it to people who were not listening, was doomed, because it was giving the author far too much power to begin with. Once you agree that the author has to feel positively towards your story in order for it to be okay, or would have to like it if s/he read it, I think you've conceded their point. And really, maybe the main reason fanfic continues to grow is that most fans do see themselves as interacting socially with others in sharing their stories and not stealing from the author.