yeah, like...I saw people celebrating AO3 being delisted in Germany, because apparently not censoring content they find objectionable means the whole site should go
In the Star Wars fandom, some 13 year old put together a whole excell spreadsheet of 'problematic' SW writers, mostly ones who shipped things this person deemed problematic
Yeah I don't know why this person is even in fandom if they can't accept that writing stories about what you enjoy has been a part of these spaces longer than I've been alive
I feel like if they're gonna tell me to do my taxes...you're 13, go do your math homework. I only gotta do taxes once a year...you've probably got homework from Aug to May/June
Gemakai
: I wouldn't be too hard on yourself for it. I think a lot of us carried lots of guilt about the things we enjoyed and their attitudes pokes and preyed on that guilt and insecurity
Kaysper
: oh no, they're cute. I could see them as little animal crossing like game characters, or in a toy set (like...actual toys. a little village of semi squishy fisher price characters with houses and a town and everything, not just figurines for a shelf) T_T they're precious
i long for times where your idiotic takes had a reach of maybe 30 people, and you actually had a decent chance they will get forgotten in two years max, and not amplified by other similar teenagers in their teenage brain phase
omg, if someone sent this ask to my inbox, I think I'd have to crack the fuck up. Or think they were a troll. Por que no los dos? Either way, I'm not coddling someone trying to cancel people in fandom because they write fanfic.
^ look, to each their own, but I've read more abundantly healthy, loving, kind relationships (romantic and otherwise) ...more REALISTIC relationships... in fanfic than in ANY classical lit. And if that's purely masturbatory fiction there, then I'll take it.
I feel like I should know what book that sarcastic tweet(?) is referring to but it is entirely because Captain Janeway was playing the part of the employee in her holodeck downtime
The Wide Sargasso Sea, a novel accepted in the literary canon, is a prequel to Jane Eyre written by another author more than a century later: in other words, fanfiction
I mean other than "are things teenage girls enjoy and are therefore to be shunned" what even IS the difference between "fanfic" and "derivative written work/homage/parody/unofficial (speculative) continuation by another author"
Like when you R E A L L Y get down to it, most forms of fiction writing are masturbatory by nature. Basically the ask comes from a person that has some issues.
...well yeah fanfiction is literally as old as storytelling. Nearly all stories are, in some fashion, retellings of and expansions on older stories. The difference between that and fanfiction is a spectrum of how far you go in filing off serial numbers.
which means that any argument denigrating fanfiction as Not Real Art is inherently an argument that artistic creation is merely the practice of vigorously hiding sources, rather than actually having things to express or expressing them well
our modern notion of fanart as separate from art is mainly a product of the rise of copyright law as interpreted by publishing corporations, who have a vested interest in denigrating any art that isn't making them money or that count be construed as narrowing the scope of their control over the profits from artistic work
that is to say we're told that "commercially published author" is somehow a more true form of artist than "fanfic writer" because publishing companies get money from the former but not from the latter, and if the latter is taken seriously, in an era of feasible self-publishing, it drastically reduces the market power of publishing companies
hi I have a whole warehouse of soapboxes about how BS the notion is that being paid to write things grants magically unbounded, unimpeachable authority, when it actually just means that you were given money
(though I'd argue that Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is more 'adaptation' than 'fanfic' because the vast majority of the text is still the original text)
the most interesting thing about Inferno I think was the organization of Hell and the punishments, along with the who's-who of the sinners...when they were someone who wasn't very specific to his time and place
And llike...I don't remember exactly what it said or how it was said, but it sounded reasonable overall and made points (I think) about showing respect for such an important cultural work
But tbh, it's never sat right with me, as evidenced by the fact that I still remember it ages later; it's been chewing on a corner of my brain this whole time
Because the thing is, I don't see how comparing Inferno to fanfiction is reductive unless you consider fanfiction an inherently inferior form of writing to begin with
(And like...I think the only argument that holds any real water re: fanfiction potentially being lesser is that it involves using characters, world-building, settings, etc that are not yours, so you don't have to expend the creativity to make them whole-cloth, which is certainly a big shortcut to take over original fiction)
(But even that argument holds zero water re: Inferno not being fanfiction because Dante used SO MANY real world figures for Inferno!!!! Like, did he have one homebrew character in the whole thing???)
But yeah, I don't think "important works of cultural significance deserve to be treated with respect" and "Dante's Inferno is fanfiction" are incompatible statements at all
Which is that actual Italians were getting pissed at someone who was genuinely being kind of flippant and ignorant about Inferno without understanding it...but they were also being really judgy about fanfiction
yeah, I remember that post and it always rubbed me the wrong way because if it's down to "shortcuts" and not creating things for the world of the story yourself then any piece of fiction that takes place in any part of the world past or present, would also count as like "real world fanfiction." and it's just really stupid sounding when you put it that way.
And like...yeah, it's reasonable to say that you can't historically call Inferno fanfiction because the modern concept of fanfiction did not exist at the time, the same way you can't call historical figures modern flavors of queer because they didn't have the same view or definitions of queerness that we do now
it's nearly impossible to have a fully original piece of fiction. there's always things that are going to be built upon other things. whether that's history, language, people, cultures, personal experiences, etc. all we can really do is stop treating fanfiction as lesser than and using it as an insult.
But like...that's getting into semantics, frankly? A historical male figure who only slept with other men might not have been considered gay in his time because they didn't use that term for it, but the fact that he would be considered gay now by modern definitions and exhibits the same traits of what we now recognize as a gay man is a relevant observation
In the same way, just because there was no concept of fanfiction at the time Inferno was written doesn't mean that, by the definition of fanfiction as it exists today, Inferno doesn't qualify
Using pre-existing characters, settings, and cultural underpinnings of tropes, concepts, and current events to write a story you want to tell - how is that not all the hallmarks of what we now recognize as fanfiction?
You are starting by equating a fan fiction to the mere pre-existence of some characters into “popular” culture (which already is, hm, laughable, because Medieval Italy popular culture is in no way comparable to modern concepts of media usage and, even if they were, the type of knowledge Dante had access to was in no way popular or fannish in nature)
Of course medieval Italian culture was different, but just because media worked differently back then, what about that means that well-known public figures of the time do not count as 'popular culture'
how is popular culture a few hundred years ago different from popular culture now...i mean we've got different mediums, and greater proliferation, etc, but it's still "popular" "culture"
Yeah, pop culture as we see it now is drastically different from what would have been pop culture then, so it would be ridiculous to act like Dante criticizing the religious figures of the day is some 1:1 equivalent of someone making a Justin Bieber callout post
But that doesn't mean Dante wasn't using the popular culture of his day in a roughly equivalent way to how people writing fanfiction use our pop culture today, in the general sense of using already known and understood characters (or even real people) as narrative shorthands and social commentary
sometimes you read old stuff like shakespeare or water margin and they make all sorts of references to pop culture that we totally miss because it is culture that is no longer pop-
And god, there are so many elitist comments throughout that whole mess that illustrate very plainly that while these people may write fanfic, they consider it culturally worthless
You don't have to think all fanfiction is equally meaningful, because it sure isn't, but then not all books are equally meaningful, so I don't see how that matters
Some fanfiction is deeply masterful and impactful and treating it as culturally void of meaning or significance or longevity is frankly just artistic gatekeeping and snobbery
Because when Anton Ego experienced a work of humble origins that blew him away, he accepted that while not everyone can create, a meaningful act of creation can come from any origins
These people have presumably read, maybe even written, incredible fanfiction...but they consider it worthless still because it's too humble and commonplace, and therefore it cannot possess real value
We can't let our awe of cultural masterworks and old classics lead us to think that it's impossible for anything or anyone contemporary to even be remotely comparable to them, and refuse to even compare them
Inferno doesn't exist on some different level of fiction than the lowest-viewed fanfic on AO3; they might be at total opposite ends of the scale of literary achievement and value, but they're still on the same sliding scale
And then you have these people denying the clear and obvious similarities of using contemporary famous figures in fiction between Inferno and contemporary fanfiction for??? reasons??? Because the culture back then was different, I guess, so comparing how Dante and how xXsesshoufucker69Xx use the popular figures of their day in their works is ~insulting~
Never mind that pop culture when I started writing fanfic at 16 is different from pop culture now, so I guess you can't compare shit from the Aughts to current fanfics because It Was A Different Time
I'm reminded of the news that in Japan someone found their grandmother's journal and it she apparently wrote Shinsengumi shipfic a hundred and fifty years ago.
Yeah, like...just because the modern understanding of fanfiction hasn't existed all along, that doesn't mean people haven't been doing what we would currently recognize as fanfiction since forever
The only way to take insult from that is to consider all contemporary works, without exception, inferior to old masterworks...which means you're aggrandizing the old and refusing to even assess the new
(Although, interestingly, they'd be considered historically valuable now as glimpses into the time period, and someday even xXsesshoufucker69Xx's body of work will be considered a glimpse into history, should it be preserved)
i feel like part of it (in regards to dante in particular) is a refusal to admit that "bible fanfiction" is a thing but maybe that's just my impression?
I mean, I can't speak to that in any way, but it is a fact that Italy is the heart of Christianity, so...it's entirely possible they find that whole concept offensive
i've never heard of italy being the heart of christianity, but i do remember when i read The Betrothed a few months back the christianity was inseparably ingrained into the plot so i'm willing to believe it
I don't know if that reflects on the religiousness of Italians in any way, in that I haven't looked this up at all, but I can certainly say it would not surprise me if a lot of Italians are Christian as a result
i suddenly thought of how buddha is a recurring character in a lot of asian fiction...multiple buddhas, in active roles, punishing sun wukong in ancient times or working as office management in modern china or sharing an apartment with jesus in tokyo
like in the broad scope of history if you said "and then sports fans got rowdy and threw a statue into the water.....they had to fish it out later because they thought they were cursed" you'd have to narrow it down
Honestly, at this point, I think fanfic is beginning to go through a paradigm shift, the way penny dreadfuls were the beginnings of the modern horror genre. At the time, everyone thought penny dreadfuls were abysmal, but man did they love reading them. And then some people started writing really fantastic horror, and now, people hold it up as one
of the most popular, well-received genres of literature. Honestly, off the top of my head, two of the most famous writers are specifically horror authors.
iirc there was also this cuneiform tablet some archeologists found a while ago which was either the World's Oldest Customer Complaint or the World's Oldest Yelp Review
Get rid of all stories, we can't let people know we WRITEPeople like this need to get over themselves and let people enjoy things.
The Wide Sargasso Sea, a novel accepted in the literary canon, is a prequel to Jane Eyre written by another author more than a century later: in other words, fanfictionI'm not saying they're necessarily GOOD fanfic. ALVH did not commit hard enough to its conceits imho but that's beside the pointPride and Prejudice and Zombies was surprisingly good, though.hi I have a whole warehouse of soapboxes about how BS the notion is that being paid to write things grants magically unbounded, unimpeachable authority, when it actually just means that you were given moneyI get it. As a comp lit major, I get itYou are starting by equating a fan fiction to the mere pre-existence of some characters into “popular” culture (which already is, hm, laughable, because Medieval Italy popular culture is in no way comparable to modern concepts of media usage and, even if they were, the type of knowledge Dante had access to was in no way popular or fannish in nature)even if i hate him in his regular form