Rant about stupid people. Or, why I will ALWAYS write and support fanfiction.
Yanked this from captainpixie who got it from elsewhere, so by all means, keep spreading it. There are few things that piss me off more than someone ranting about how wrong fanfiction/fantasy/anything like that is, so after you've read that, come back here and read
I could not possibly support fanfiction more wholeheartedly than I do, for a whole host of reasons. But I'm gonna start with a pretty big one, not because it's the first one, but because maybe it'll put this in a little better perspective.
One of the biggest arguments against fanfiction is "well you're not looking at it from the perspective of the author!!!". Ha. Think again. I am already an author, and at this point, it's looking pretty damn likely that it won't be too much longer before I can get published. I have several original stories in the works but I've been focusing lately on my favorite. My latest upper level fiction writing professor told me there's literally just a couple minor scenes he'd like to see me shift around, and then I just need to get the thing finished and start sending it off to publishers. Actually, he told me that in his opinion it was already clearly a fine fantasy novel and I wouldn't even have to finish it first, just send them 100 pages and someone would take it. I really don't have words to describe how shocked and awed and massively happy I was when he said that, but I still think I'm gonna try to finish it first. Who knows. Either way, I'm an author and have faith that I will be a published author, and I can look at this question from that point of view.
This story(which I won't name on here, cause I am thinking this will work out for me, and I wanna keep this journal and my fandom life separate from all of that) is my baby. Literally, I love it like a child. These characters are my creations, my friends, real to me in the way that characters always have to feel real to the one that conceived them. And you know what? If I ever get to be in a position to where fanfiction can be written about them, everyone can go right ahead. They will still be mine, because nothing changes that, but why the hell can't other people have their say, too? What's so wrong with someone taking them and exploring what would've happened if one of them died, if two different ones than I'd pictured together fell in love, if the events that I'd told happened instead a hundred years earlier in our world instead of theirs, why would I be anything other than happy about that fact? To think that people have fallen in love with your characters enough that they want to tell a story that you didn't imagine, to take your characters to a place you never thought they'd go? It's wonderful and fascinating, and maybe in reading how they perceive someone you already know so well, maybe it'll make you see their other sides as well. After all, when you look at your children you see them as you know they can be, not always the darker sides, and sometimes not the lighter sides either.
Besides that, just because a character is yours does not mean they utterly belong to you. The minute you put something out there in the world, it belongs to the world to see and interpret as they please. The artist does not come into your home and tell you how to hang the painting you bought. No author stands over your shoulder as you read, telling you exactly how you should perceive their characters and those characters ambitions; you make your own decisions and form your own opinions of what you've been given. I know that from the time I was four I was writing fanfiction in my head. I can remember lying in bed awake for hours imagining a vivid sequel to The Great Mouse Detective. Should the writer have burst into my room, lawyers on their tail, demanding that I stop thinking for myself just because they'd been the one whose mind those characters came to? Ludicrous.
And I'm gonna one step farther...not only does everyone have the right to think up whatever they like about characters they love, once they think up that new story, it belongs to them. You may have created those characters, but you did not create that story. This is why there are hundreds of Star Wars books and none of them "belong" to George Lucas. I've found it a hilarious irony for years that fanfiction is 'ok' so long as it's published. What, are these random peoples thoughts on where the story should go more or less legitimate than anyone else's? NO. They aren't. They just happened to go through the 'right' channels to get them out there.
The questions that usually comes up around that point in the argument are these: What about all that sex? What about slash? Well, I'll tackle them one at a time. Slash first.
Going back to my own perspective, there's a couple characters in my story that I know will be slashed if I'm ever blessed enough to get that far. They aren't together, nor do I mean for them to come across that way. They're just extremely close, and there's several reasons for that. But that breeds slash, and you know what? I don't care. Even if it's not in my plan for them, it could be in someone else's, and writing how they'd act if they were in love with each other, well, it could be interesting. It could change everything, and what better basis is there for telling a story than that? We tell stories for all kinds of reasons, among those to see what will happen(because I know for a fact, the outcomes often surprise their writer as much as they do anyone else). Personally, I'd be interested to see what could've happened differently if they'd chosen that route. (And similarly, there's a couple of characters that in my head are together, but I'm not gonna expressly put that out there for the same reason a lot of authors don't...it's sad but true that controversy isn't always good for you. But like I said, if I'm ever blessed to get that far, I trust the slashers will take care of everything I haven't spelled out for me.) I mean, just looking at other characters, why would anyone care? You can cry "But they wouldn't do that!!" all you want, but it comes back around to the whole 'why we tell stories' thing. It's the great big 'what if', the same question every author who's ever written a story has asked themselves(Neil Gaimen has an awesome quote about this, but I'm not gonna bother to look it up right now.). What if every puddle on the sidewalk led to another dimension? I asked myself that just the other day, and I filed it away for the future. But what if? What if Han coming back to rescue Luke wasn't because he all of a sudden believed in a cause, but because he believed in the man behind the cause? What if it was love, not conviction that drove his actions? Wow that'd change things, wouldn't it? And I'm not even a Han/Luke shipper, not really. I'm a hardcore Han/Leia shipper that reads Han/Luke when the mood strikes me, but I see the potential all over the place, because there is potential in everything for a story if you're a writer. They're all over the place, begging to be written, and one person could never hope to write the thousands of stories any given character could spawn.
As for sex...well I should think that's obvious. You have a hell of a lot harder time getting respect/attention/whatever if you put sex in a book. That's just true. But I also think it's true that a lot of times, sex needs to be shown, because more than just the physical act, you can learn a lot about those characters through the choices they make. How tight does Kirk hold onto his lovers? If it was Spock, would he hold on any tighter? Would he show more control or less? How would it be different from every other conquest he's ever had, and what would that say about him as a man? Off the top of my head I don't know, but someone out there does, and I'd sure as hell love to read it. Rather, there's a thousand different people with a different view on it, and I'd love to read all of them. Is it hot? Well, hell yeah. But that's not the whole point. If Dean needed to submit to someone after hell, to feel safe because he'd made the choice to do so rather than having it forced on him, wouldn't it make sense for him to go to the one person he does feel safe with? And wouldn't Sam take that chance to take care of his brother, to be whatever Dean needed him to be? I think so, yeah. I can see that. And I can see how in watching them both go through that, we'd learn a hell of a lot more than if Dean broke out the handcuffs and then we faded to black. Some people, they like the fade to black. And that's fine. But that's where the rest of us pick up. Painting every aspect of a character doesn't have to be done linearly. Sometimes, we just have to hand each other the brush. Share. Didn't we all learn that in kindergarten after all? Shit, you'd think these authors were 3, the way some of them carry on.
"But it's MY toy and I was playing with it!!!!!"
Tough luck, sweetheart. Let someone else have a turn.
Fanfiction is natural. It's creative, it's an art, it's a fantastic form of human expression. I could talk about this forever, but I think I've pretty much covered it.
In conclusion, I hate stupid people. And now, I'm gonna go study for my damn physics final. And somewhere in there, keep exploring what would happen if 27 year old Sam went back and lived the most important years of his life over. Because, you know....what if???
EDIT: I realized that while I mostly covered it, I forgot to talk about RPF/RPS, and that's important too, and since this posts rants about attacks on fanfiction, I'd better get that covered here too so it's all in one place, because I really don't want to feel the need to talk about it ever again.
So, biggest argument about RPF/RPS is that since you're dealing with real people, it's an invasion of privacy....say what?!
Ok, even if you've been against RPF/RPS(because I know even some people in fandom are, heck, I used to be one of them a long time ago), humor me and think about this for a second.
If someone writes you screwing your best friend, does that mean you suddenly are screwing your best friend? Unless there's a real life Silvertongue somewhere reading the fic, I don't think so. Just because someone writes something doesn't make it happen, and that doesn't make it real. In fact, most RPF/RPS writers preclude their stories with the fact that they are for sure making it all up.
So...why the hell would anyone care? With the exception of a few hardcore OTP-ers out there, most writers will readily say they're just making this stuff up for kicks and it's not real. And even those that do believe any given couple is together: they're not. Why does it matter what they believe? It's not gonna hurt you for them to believe what they want. The tabloids say a hell of a lot worse on a daily basis, pretend it's true, and they actually get away with it.
But back to the fanfiction. When people write RPF/RPS they're not taking you as a person and putting you into their story, no one can do that. You are yourself alone, and no one can take that from you. They're taking you as a character, as a thought, and that's a whole different matter entirely. They're taking the way they see you, or the way they'd like to see you, or taking a few of your personality traits and making them character traits and shaping their own person around you. It's not you, it's their character-ized version of you, and why should that upset you? They're not forcing you to do anything, they're just telling a story.
Again, a bit from my own perspective. On Sunday, I went out with two of my best friends to celebrate the birth of Nikki's baby horse. (I'll talk about her in another post. She is possibly the most beautiful thing I've ever laid eyes on and I love her to pieces already.) Anyway, as we're leaving Nikki(who's pretty much dead on her feet) says in reference to Lisa "Do you want her or do you want me to want her?" What she meant to say is "Do you want me to take her?" because one of us needed to drive Lis home, but we took what she did say and ran with it. I told her I wanted her to want her, and Nikki then proceeded to scream "I WANT YOU!" which then followed in me grabbing Lisa around the neck and saying "But you can't have her, because I want her. I just want you to want her but not get her.". Now, it was all good fun, but if we wouldn't act any different if we were somehow famous for something. That's just us. And if someone caught it and twisted it around to me and Lisa fucking in the backseat of the car later, I'd be alright with.
Because I know that's not what happened, not anything close to anything that ever would happen, but it doesn't matter because what they'd be writing about would be a character, however closely it was based on me. It's called fiction for a reason, people. Someone's making it up. and the fact that they admit it's fiction, that's what makes it not matter a damn bit.
That's my argument that I've developed during the time I've gotten into RPF/RPS, but here's the argument that brought me into the fold: People have been doing it and publishing it for years. There were stories written about Alexandre Dumas during his lifetime, and published in papers. Edgar Allen Poe has been used as a character in dozens of works. In fact, there's one I'd love to read that includes him living on either Mars or the Moon(I can't remember which)and he's drunk all the time and just this hilarious character. There's plenty of books that use Mark Twain. My dad read a book recently that included J.D. Salinger as a character, and I'm pretty sure it was published while he was still alive. This goes back to the phenomenon of "If it's published fanfiction, that suddenly makes it ok.". It's no more or less 'ok' than the dirtiest J2 out there, because it's all just fiction. They're just stories told for their inherent value as stories, and they have no bearing on a person's personal life.
And now, I think that covers it. K. I'm finished. :D
I could not possibly support fanfiction more wholeheartedly than I do, for a whole host of reasons. But I'm gonna start with a pretty big one, not because it's the first one, but because maybe it'll put this in a little better perspective.
One of the biggest arguments against fanfiction is "well you're not looking at it from the perspective of the author!!!". Ha. Think again. I am already an author, and at this point, it's looking pretty damn likely that it won't be too much longer before I can get published. I have several original stories in the works but I've been focusing lately on my favorite. My latest upper level fiction writing professor told me there's literally just a couple minor scenes he'd like to see me shift around, and then I just need to get the thing finished and start sending it off to publishers. Actually, he told me that in his opinion it was already clearly a fine fantasy novel and I wouldn't even have to finish it first, just send them 100 pages and someone would take it. I really don't have words to describe how shocked and awed and massively happy I was when he said that, but I still think I'm gonna try to finish it first. Who knows. Either way, I'm an author and have faith that I will be a published author, and I can look at this question from that point of view.
This story(which I won't name on here, cause I am thinking this will work out for me, and I wanna keep this journal and my fandom life separate from all of that) is my baby. Literally, I love it like a child. These characters are my creations, my friends, real to me in the way that characters always have to feel real to the one that conceived them. And you know what? If I ever get to be in a position to where fanfiction can be written about them, everyone can go right ahead. They will still be mine, because nothing changes that, but why the hell can't other people have their say, too? What's so wrong with someone taking them and exploring what would've happened if one of them died, if two different ones than I'd pictured together fell in love, if the events that I'd told happened instead a hundred years earlier in our world instead of theirs, why would I be anything other than happy about that fact? To think that people have fallen in love with your characters enough that they want to tell a story that you didn't imagine, to take your characters to a place you never thought they'd go? It's wonderful and fascinating, and maybe in reading how they perceive someone you already know so well, maybe it'll make you see their other sides as well. After all, when you look at your children you see them as you know they can be, not always the darker sides, and sometimes not the lighter sides either.
Besides that, just because a character is yours does not mean they utterly belong to you. The minute you put something out there in the world, it belongs to the world to see and interpret as they please. The artist does not come into your home and tell you how to hang the painting you bought. No author stands over your shoulder as you read, telling you exactly how you should perceive their characters and those characters ambitions; you make your own decisions and form your own opinions of what you've been given. I know that from the time I was four I was writing fanfiction in my head. I can remember lying in bed awake for hours imagining a vivid sequel to The Great Mouse Detective. Should the writer have burst into my room, lawyers on their tail, demanding that I stop thinking for myself just because they'd been the one whose mind those characters came to? Ludicrous.
And I'm gonna one step farther...not only does everyone have the right to think up whatever they like about characters they love, once they think up that new story, it belongs to them. You may have created those characters, but you did not create that story. This is why there are hundreds of Star Wars books and none of them "belong" to George Lucas. I've found it a hilarious irony for years that fanfiction is 'ok' so long as it's published. What, are these random peoples thoughts on where the story should go more or less legitimate than anyone else's? NO. They aren't. They just happened to go through the 'right' channels to get them out there.
The questions that usually comes up around that point in the argument are these: What about all that sex? What about slash? Well, I'll tackle them one at a time. Slash first.
Going back to my own perspective, there's a couple characters in my story that I know will be slashed if I'm ever blessed enough to get that far. They aren't together, nor do I mean for them to come across that way. They're just extremely close, and there's several reasons for that. But that breeds slash, and you know what? I don't care. Even if it's not in my plan for them, it could be in someone else's, and writing how they'd act if they were in love with each other, well, it could be interesting. It could change everything, and what better basis is there for telling a story than that? We tell stories for all kinds of reasons, among those to see what will happen(because I know for a fact, the outcomes often surprise their writer as much as they do anyone else). Personally, I'd be interested to see what could've happened differently if they'd chosen that route. (And similarly, there's a couple of characters that in my head are together, but I'm not gonna expressly put that out there for the same reason a lot of authors don't...it's sad but true that controversy isn't always good for you. But like I said, if I'm ever blessed to get that far, I trust the slashers will take care of everything I haven't spelled out for me.) I mean, just looking at other characters, why would anyone care? You can cry "But they wouldn't do that!!" all you want, but it comes back around to the whole 'why we tell stories' thing. It's the great big 'what if', the same question every author who's ever written a story has asked themselves(Neil Gaimen has an awesome quote about this, but I'm not gonna bother to look it up right now.). What if every puddle on the sidewalk led to another dimension? I asked myself that just the other day, and I filed it away for the future. But what if? What if Han coming back to rescue Luke wasn't because he all of a sudden believed in a cause, but because he believed in the man behind the cause? What if it was love, not conviction that drove his actions? Wow that'd change things, wouldn't it? And I'm not even a Han/Luke shipper, not really. I'm a hardcore Han/Leia shipper that reads Han/Luke when the mood strikes me, but I see the potential all over the place, because there is potential in everything for a story if you're a writer. They're all over the place, begging to be written, and one person could never hope to write the thousands of stories any given character could spawn.
As for sex...well I should think that's obvious. You have a hell of a lot harder time getting respect/attention/whatever if you put sex in a book. That's just true. But I also think it's true that a lot of times, sex needs to be shown, because more than just the physical act, you can learn a lot about those characters through the choices they make. How tight does Kirk hold onto his lovers? If it was Spock, would he hold on any tighter? Would he show more control or less? How would it be different from every other conquest he's ever had, and what would that say about him as a man? Off the top of my head I don't know, but someone out there does, and I'd sure as hell love to read it. Rather, there's a thousand different people with a different view on it, and I'd love to read all of them. Is it hot? Well, hell yeah. But that's not the whole point. If Dean needed to submit to someone after hell, to feel safe because he'd made the choice to do so rather than having it forced on him, wouldn't it make sense for him to go to the one person he does feel safe with? And wouldn't Sam take that chance to take care of his brother, to be whatever Dean needed him to be? I think so, yeah. I can see that. And I can see how in watching them both go through that, we'd learn a hell of a lot more than if Dean broke out the handcuffs and then we faded to black. Some people, they like the fade to black. And that's fine. But that's where the rest of us pick up. Painting every aspect of a character doesn't have to be done linearly. Sometimes, we just have to hand each other the brush. Share. Didn't we all learn that in kindergarten after all? Shit, you'd think these authors were 3, the way some of them carry on.
"But it's MY toy and I was playing with it!!!!!"
Tough luck, sweetheart. Let someone else have a turn.
Fanfiction is natural. It's creative, it's an art, it's a fantastic form of human expression. I could talk about this forever, but I think I've pretty much covered it.
In conclusion, I hate stupid people. And now, I'm gonna go study for my damn physics final. And somewhere in there, keep exploring what would happen if 27 year old Sam went back and lived the most important years of his life over. Because, you know....what if???
EDIT: I realized that while I mostly covered it, I forgot to talk about RPF/RPS, and that's important too, and since this posts rants about attacks on fanfiction, I'd better get that covered here too so it's all in one place, because I really don't want to feel the need to talk about it ever again.
So, biggest argument about RPF/RPS is that since you're dealing with real people, it's an invasion of privacy....say what?!
Ok, even if you've been against RPF/RPS(because I know even some people in fandom are, heck, I used to be one of them a long time ago), humor me and think about this for a second.
If someone writes you screwing your best friend, does that mean you suddenly are screwing your best friend? Unless there's a real life Silvertongue somewhere reading the fic, I don't think so. Just because someone writes something doesn't make it happen, and that doesn't make it real. In fact, most RPF/RPS writers preclude their stories with the fact that they are for sure making it all up.
So...why the hell would anyone care? With the exception of a few hardcore OTP-ers out there, most writers will readily say they're just making this stuff up for kicks and it's not real. And even those that do believe any given couple is together: they're not. Why does it matter what they believe? It's not gonna hurt you for them to believe what they want. The tabloids say a hell of a lot worse on a daily basis, pretend it's true, and they actually get away with it.
But back to the fanfiction. When people write RPF/RPS they're not taking you as a person and putting you into their story, no one can do that. You are yourself alone, and no one can take that from you. They're taking you as a character, as a thought, and that's a whole different matter entirely. They're taking the way they see you, or the way they'd like to see you, or taking a few of your personality traits and making them character traits and shaping their own person around you. It's not you, it's their character-ized version of you, and why should that upset you? They're not forcing you to do anything, they're just telling a story.
Again, a bit from my own perspective. On Sunday, I went out with two of my best friends to celebrate the birth of Nikki's baby horse. (I'll talk about her in another post. She is possibly the most beautiful thing I've ever laid eyes on and I love her to pieces already.) Anyway, as we're leaving Nikki(who's pretty much dead on her feet) says in reference to Lisa "Do you want her or do you want me to want her?" What she meant to say is "Do you want me to take her?" because one of us needed to drive Lis home, but we took what she did say and ran with it. I told her I wanted her to want her, and Nikki then proceeded to scream "I WANT YOU!" which then followed in me grabbing Lisa around the neck and saying "But you can't have her, because I want her. I just want you to want her but not get her.". Now, it was all good fun, but if we wouldn't act any different if we were somehow famous for something. That's just us. And if someone caught it and twisted it around to me and Lisa fucking in the backseat of the car later, I'd be alright with.
Because I know that's not what happened, not anything close to anything that ever would happen, but it doesn't matter because what they'd be writing about would be a character, however closely it was based on me. It's called fiction for a reason, people. Someone's making it up. and the fact that they admit it's fiction, that's what makes it not matter a damn bit.
That's my argument that I've developed during the time I've gotten into RPF/RPS, but here's the argument that brought me into the fold: People have been doing it and publishing it for years. There were stories written about Alexandre Dumas during his lifetime, and published in papers. Edgar Allen Poe has been used as a character in dozens of works. In fact, there's one I'd love to read that includes him living on either Mars or the Moon(I can't remember which)and he's drunk all the time and just this hilarious character. There's plenty of books that use Mark Twain. My dad read a book recently that included J.D. Salinger as a character, and I'm pretty sure it was published while he was still alive. This goes back to the phenomenon of "If it's published fanfiction, that suddenly makes it ok.". It's no more or less 'ok' than the dirtiest J2 out there, because it's all just fiction. They're just stories told for their inherent value as stories, and they have no bearing on a person's personal life.
And now, I think that covers it. K. I'm finished. :D