And now for a break from continuing flood and/or paper progress coverage.

[icepixie]

Diana Gabaldon is Wrong On The Internet. I've skimmed a few of the comments; it looks like she's getting schooled pretty well by fandom.

I really liked this post from bookshop in response: I'm done explaining to people why fanfic is okay./List of derivative works.

That post made me wonder about something. It seems that there are a lot of academics--specifically in literature, and more generally in the humanities--in fandom, or at least I seem to know/know of several grad students, professors, and undergrads in those disciplines. Basically, there are a lot of people around who like to take a text apart and put it back together in a new configuration, or look something about it from a different viewpoint, or recontextualize it, or look at it in conjunction with another text or theory, or otherwise analyze it and speculate on it. This, coupled with my own experience, got me thinking about whether there might be a connection there.

For me, writing fanfic and writing a paper spring from the same well. I write because I want to know more about a source text. Sometimes that takes the form of delving into books and journals and researching what other people have said on it, then writing my own interpretation. Sometimes it takes the form of reading and writing fanfic. And maybe the results look dissimilar, but really, when you get down to it, there's not that much difference--for me--between 1.) noticing that Eavan Boland uses map imagery a lot in her later poetry, thinking/researching about it, and writing a paper thesis about what it might mean and how we might interpret it, and 2.) noticing that Ivanova and Garibaldi had some kind of flirtation going on in the early seasons of Babylon 5, thinking about it, and writing fic about how I interpret what I see on the screen, and how it might have played out if things had gone beyond flirtation. They use different forms of rhetoric, but for me, they scratch essentially the same itch to look deeper at the source. As bookshop writes here, "Fan fiction is natural. It's also part of a literary tradition of deconstructing, evaluating, and critiquing authorial texts."

Another similarity between my papers and my fics is that both are also in conversation with the source text and other voices. For a paper, it's other scholars, as when I quote from their work or paraphrase their ideas and offer my evalutation; for a fic, it's other fans, other "pro" sources, and, oh, a million other things I've read. One of them has even been directly influenced by academic sources: this fic. Essentially, I tried to take the argument made in the quoted excerpt and demonstrate it in story form. (And now I'm writing a paper on Astaire and Rogers using that as a source! I have Thoughts on the movies, and I want to Figure Them Out, so I write fic, and I write papers, choosing my format after considering what those thoughts are. Same damn thing.)

*

Actually, I lied about the break from flood coverage. This has to be the most uplifting response to a natural disaster ever: Nashville water supply saved by Davidson County inmates. I hear that HandsOnNashville, which is organizing all the relief efforts in the area, had their website go down from the volume of people wanting to sign up to volunteer. The news has been littered with stories of people going out of their way to rescue neighbors from flooded homes, offering shelter, donating all kinds of supplies, etc. Tennesseans are certainly living up to the "Volunteer State" moniker.

Comments

[pellmelody.livejournal.com]

I think what Gabaldon forgets, or maybe doesn't realize, as I pointed out in another post regarding this kerfluffle, is that fan fiction has been around for centuries, both written and oral. When you get down to it, all fiction written using vampires is fan fiction, only with different names. Shakespeare himself wrote fan fiction, as someone pointed out to me, borrowing heavily from Greek plays and stories.

As you say, fan fiction is mostly written out of a love of characters/shows/books. It's is an exercise to expand on what has already been written, filling in that "missing paragraph" that wasn't fleshed out more by the author. Or, for the romantic, to expand on the love/devotion of two characters.

People have tried, mostly unsuccessfully, to stop fan fiction, especially with the advent of internet. Paramount tried more than once to stop written fanzines (pre-internet) from being published, and it didn't work.

A healthier approach would have been for her to treat her audience with respect, not talk down to them like they are wayward children. While I can see some "ego annoyance" in her not wanting her "characters" taken out from her "control", she has to grasp that it's her fans love for her work that is driving them to write, not disrespect. Harlen Ellison, in his railing against fan fiction, never grasped this either.

[icepixie]

A healthier approach would have been for her to treat her audience with respect, not talk down to them like they are wayward children.

Yep.