Note: this post was originally made in 2010 in response to Diana Gabaldon’s epic rant about fanfiction. The original version is still being updated. I’m reposting it to Tumblr by request, but if you have any additions, please feel free to drop a comment at LJ so they can be added to the masterpost!
You think fanfic is a personal affront to the many hours you’ve spent carefully crafting your characters. You think fanfic is “immoral and illegal.” You think fanfiction is just plagiarism. You think fanfiction is cheating. You think fanfic is for people who are too stupid/lazy/unimaginative to write stories of their own. You think there are exceptions for people who write published derivative works as part of a brand or franchise, because they’re clearly only doing it because they have to. You’re personally traumatized by the idea that someone else could look at your characters and decide that you did it wrong and they need to fix it/add original characters to your universe/send your characters to the moon/Japan/their hometown. You think all fanfic is basically porn. You’re revolted by the very idea that fic writers think what they do is legitimate.
We get it.
Congratulations! You’ve just summarily dismissed as criminal, immoral, and unimaginative each of the following Pulitzer Prize-winning writers and works:
If you’re getting grief over creating fan fiction, print this sucker up and hand it out like a pamphlet.
As I work toward publishing my first original novels, I would be beside myself with glee if any of my stories inspired a reader to write fic. As far as I’m concerned, that’s the true mark of how good my tales are–not the number of book sales. (And heck, a couple of the stories I have in the works are legit derivative pieces.)
I told myself I’d reblog this post when it hit 15,000 notes. It’s close enough, so should I tack on the addendum linked above? Here you go, and thanks to everyone who’s continued to pass this post around fandom. <3333
The thing is that fanfic is not something you–by which I mean the publishing industry as a collective–can or should stop. It literally exists by the millions, across the internet and in the notebooks of countless writers across the universe. Not only that, but it’s been going on for centuries. I might as well link to my post again for anyone new to the discussion, because you can’t understand fanfic without understanding the tradition that it is a part of.
You, (collectively) cannot systematically take down an embedded culture of borrowing/remixing/transforming/expanding on Story. Fan fiction has always existed. I remember reading interviews with Meg Cabot years ago where she talked about writing fanfic at home by herself as a teenager, before she knew the word for what she was doing. I’ve heard similar stories from dozens of authors. When I read my first Georgette Heyer novel as a kid, I immediately threw myself into writing stories with original characters reworking the same plot tropes Heyer explored in that book. Fan fiction is natural. It’s also part of a literary tradition of deconstructing, evaluating, and critiquing authorial texts. Literary theory has long held that the author is dead. That is the best tradition by which you can understand fanfic. It has nothing to do with copyright violation. Nothing.
It is a derailing argument to compare fanfiction to internet piracy. Piracy involves robbing something of its initial value. Fanfiction, almost universally, constitutes an example of what the Campbell vs. Acuff-Rose case defines as “an obvious claim to transformative value.”
In other words, unlike internet piracty, fanfic doesn’t rob the inherent original value of a creative work. Fanfic develops and enhances it.
The e-publishing issues [that Diana Gabaldon talked about in her now-deleted anti-fanfic posts] are linked to the sale and transfer of a commodity, the original work. Fanfiction has always operated outside of a commercial framework, because it deals in cultural, not monetary, capital. You’re operating out of the worldview that fanfic is a deflation of your property. But fandom operates as a group collaboration of literary theory applied to your work, one that incidentally enhances your property value by building a community around it, and by adding tropes, new ideas, and emotional attachment to it.
People always assume fanfic is free bc fic writers think they’ll get in trouble by selling it. The reality is that fandom creates its own non-commercial capital around fan work; some fanworks, like Cesperanza’s monumental SGA fanfic Written by the Victors, have entire universes and multiple fics written collaboratively around them. The fanfic writer is *very* interested in profit, but the profit is not monetary. I can’t stress that enough. The profit is purely social/literary/technical/emotional, and the reward is getting to be closer to the canon they love and a community of people that love that canon too.
Fandom does not operate under a capitalist structure, purely and simply. You cannot compare it to internet piracy because the motives, the mechanisms, and the outcomes are different in every respect.
The fanfic as copyright infringement argument entertains the hell out of me, because it’s a fight that can never be won. It doesn’t matter what the law says; in this case you’re up against the hard-wired instincts of the human brain. We consume stories and process them into new ones on a level so fundamental that we’re enacting it before the age of 2, whether it’s with dolls and toys or just running around the house telling everybody we’re a Ninja Turtle.
So these people can bitch all they want, frankly. They might as well try to push the Moon out of orbit by blowing on it hard.
Holy shit this is amazing, a lot to unpack, and a lovely look at the literary value of fan fiction in all its many variations.
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