Posts by Lucy Stewart
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Up Front: First, Come to Your Conclusion, in reply to Megan Wegan,
Yeah, no, like I say, I didn’t mean to diss the genre. I actually am interested in why I’m just not interested in it.
I guess, the difference, is the endorsement of the show’s creator…The officialdom?
For me, disinterest is often related to how closed-off I feel the story or universe is – if I’m satisfied with the story as it is, I feel no great need to read fanfic. If there are lots of interesting corners or unanswered questions left – or adventures potentially to be had by the characters – I’m there. I can sort of visualise being satisfied with everything I watched or read as presented. I just never managed it myself.
(Although you could probably make a similar case for John of Patmos.)
LOL.
Looked at in a very specific way, the entire New Testament is an unauthorised sequel.
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Up Front: First, Come to Your Conclusion, in reply to Megan Wegan,
Or, maybe, it’s just that I tend to think, if you’re gonna write, come up with your own characters and backstory.
I must preface this with the note that it is totally okay to not get or be interested in fanfic and there are plenty of fandoms for which that holds for me, but: you just hit one of my big grumpy spots. Believe me, writing really good fanfic takes just as much effort and imagination as writing really good original stories. In some ways it's harder, because (if you're doing it well) you can't make stuff up, it has to reconcile with the established canon, which in multi-author fandoms like comics or TV shows can be wildly conflicting anyway.
We don't say that writers who join the writing staff of TV shows or comic books or write for cross-platform franchises aren't trying hard enough because they're working on something with an established canon. I don't see why it's any different for people who write fanfic - sure, they're not making a living off it, but that's not a requirement of quality. (Or, in many cases I can think of, any sign of quality.)
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Up Front: First, Come to Your Conclusion, in reply to Islander,
“Historical characters” are just that: the padding/’developement’ of such people by fiction writers is an whole other matter, and I would seriously dispute that belongs in the realms of ‘fanfic.’
Depends; if you're sticking pretty closely to a recognisable depiction of historical figures developed by other people, it definitely counts. Just using historical figures doesn't, though.
But, then, fanfic has a much longer tradition than people give it credit for - Shakespeare nicked the plot of Romeo and Juliet wholesale from a poem, and rewrote it as a play. The Aeneid was a "what happened next" for the Iliad/Odyssey. It was really only with the invention of copyright that it started being viewed as problematic.
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Up Front: First, Come to Your Conclusion, in reply to Andre Alessi,
Age, as it applies to comic book characters is obviously pretty fluid, but a character like Damian Wayne is generally portrayed as a child of about ten, even in fan art. Tim Drake is generally portrayed about 17, but again I’ve seen younger and older versions.
See, that's....a little unusual, in my experience. It's not that characters who are pre-pubescent in canon aren't the subject of shippy/erotic work, it's that it's usually set when they're, you know, post-pubescent. But, hey, could be I hang out in the wrong fandoms. (For which, in this case, I am extremely not sorry.)
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Up Front: First, Come to Your Conclusion, in reply to Andre Alessi,
And yet another thing I’m not going to touch with a batarang is the way in which paedophilia is fairly casually portrayed in a lot of these ships.
To clarify, are we talking *actual* paedophilia, or US-style anyone-under-eighteen-constitutes-child-porn "paedophilia"? Because that word gets thrown around a lot more than it needs to be.
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Up Front: First, Come to Your Conclusion, in reply to Andre Alessi,
It can't be easy knowing other people are picking up the stories and characters you worked so hard on and morphing them in ways you would never have thought of, so any writer that makes their peace with that process strikes me as being pretty cool doodz.
Yeah, I'm not saying it isn't hard. But there's a gap between "not liking" and "telling people that they are officially not allowed to write fanfic, and also that everyone who does is a) pathetically unable to be a REAL WRITER, b) committing the moral equivalent of raping your child or c) both".
Sadly, many writers fall on the wrong side of that gap, whereas I've seen very few who say something along the lines of "I find it a bit weird and hard to deal with, and I'd prefer you didn't, but if you must I'd rather you just didn't talk about it to me", which is a position I could entirely support. The only one I can think of off-hand is Pratchett, and I'm not sure he was down on it so much as emphasising he needed to not know about it for legal reasons.
Then there's the writers who "permit" it but try to set rules about it, which is...also kind of missing the point, but I guess a little more well-adjusted. As long as they realise the rules are mostly unenforceable and some people will be moved to break them by the mere fact of their existence.
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Up Front: First, Come to Your Conclusion, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
There’s part of me that is glad George RR Martin isn’t recessive about his seething, incandescent disdain for fanfic, because I’m not sure my tiny little vanilla mind could handle Tyrion slash.
Really not very popular at all, TBH. People seem to take his canonical heterosexuality at face value. (Jaime, on the other, er, hand...)
Personally, though, I think all authors who get pissy about fanfic need to engage in some bridge-building. You put the story out there, people have opinions, people have imaginations; if they're not making any money off it, then deal. GRRM, in particular, is clearly fine with people speculating about future (or past) events in his stories, and what-ifs; the line between extremely detailed speculation and fanfic is paper thin. He can say he doesn't "allow" it all he likes, but to mis-quote Gaiman, fandom is not his bitch. Fanfic happens. The question is whether to be gracious or not about its inevitable existence. Graciousness gets you far more points with the people who buy your work than petulance.
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Up Front: First, Come to Your Conclusion, in reply to Emma Hart,
There is a TON of Aragorn/Frodo. There's a ton of Aragorn/Frodo mPreg. I just... mmm.
I really have to credit internet fandom for teaching me that sometimes other people like different things from me, even wildly opposing things, and that is OK. I can just try very hard to forget about it.
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I think really only two words are needed to disprove this hypothesis: kink memes.
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Hard News: The witless on the pitiless, in reply to Che Tibby,
we have no evidence that he’d even heard of them. my weak knowledge of his worldview is that OBL would likely just think them to be “potential muslims”.
The overwhelming majority of Maori are Christian, to some degree. OBL had views on Christianity, but I'm fairly certain "a source of future converts" was not one of those views - at the least, not the one at the forefront of his thinking.
How dare they grant Bin Laden a quick and merciful death? How dare they let him off without being held to account for his crimes in front of the world?
It does strike me that everyone who thinks merely shooting in the head someone responsible for everything OBL was responsible for counts as revenge is...distinctly unimaginative. (But that's one of the major points of civilisation, really; avoiding imaginative forms of vengeance.)