quasigrecian thoughts
May. 11th, 2010 09:32 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimac1. The British post-election turmoil continues to be the best political show that country has staged since the implosion of Margaret Thatcher nearly twenty years ago. The hilarious part is that indecisive results like this are the norm in most European countries; only the British have absolutely no idea what to do with one. People who are enjoying pointing at other parties and saying "You lost!" don't seem to realize that nobody else won either. A coalition - either explicit or implicit - of losers is the only thing on offer.
2. At risk of becoming a victim myself, I must express dismay at the gangs of rampaging fan-fiction-writing thugs who are running around beating up on innocent authors who have the temerity to object to other people's stories using their characters and their settings. A description of one sober, principled objection as "panic" is typical. Another bruised victim deleted her posts on the topic only to have an opponent promptly make them reappear from cached copies, nicely demonstrating the monstrous sense of entitlement over other people's words that's under consideration.
2a. There's a lot of logical fallacies from the fan-fiction defense side, too, largely consisting of conflating inspiration and appropriation, or transformation and appropriation, or authorized adaptations and intellectual property squatting, and pretending there's no difference. (Some say it's hypocritical for an objecting author to admit to being inspired by Dr. Who or to sell film rights to HBO. It's nothing of the sort.) Also by playing games with what the term "fan fiction" covers. We may need a more precise term for what the authors are objecting to, but the word is not the thing.
2b. Against that, there's an authorial misbelief that copyrights need to be defended aggressively, like trademarks. No, you won't lose copyright control over your existing work if you don't defend it. But if you don't move against infringing works when you find out about them, you can't sue them later on.
2c. My favorite living and my favorite deceased author have each expressed visceral revulsion against would-be writers playing in their private sandboxes, but none in principle against transformation into other media. I believe this attitude is inherent in their greatness as writers, and I know what side my moral bread is buttered on. There's nothing wrong with playing around with others' fictional creations you love; it's a wholly natural impulse. But for ghod's sake, do it in private, and don't assume that the original author is going to like it, or has to put up with it.
2d. What we are coming to.
3. Also remarkably fallacious, this piece of chronological snobbery. Assuming it's serious at all, but these days who can tell? Argues that the computer mouse is obsolete, not for any concrete reason, but because it was invented nearly 50 years ago, and the keyboard is older then that. What about language, then? That's even older still; should we toss that out too?
4. "Nothing Can Possibly Go Worng" Department. After months of insisting that, if your gas and electricity bills suddenly jump up after the installation of one of the new electronic meters, it's your usage that's changed and you just didn't realize it, because their machines are perfect, the utility PG&E finally admits that the dang things don't work.
5. Music Department. Small-town orchestras and ensembles are usually pretty well-behaved and give sober, unobjectionable, perhaps inspired and perhaps not, renditions. For a really eccentric performance, you have to go to the big city.
5a. Due credit to DGK for having previously identified "spectralism" to me. We had some more of it, just not as good.
5b. I said that the pianist looked "as pale as a teen idol vampire," I did. I did not say that he also looked remarkably like Matthew Gray Gubler, nor that the conductor, a peppery little old guy with a startlingly flushed complexion, looked like a cross between Patrick Stewart and Ben Kingsley.
2. At risk of becoming a victim myself, I must express dismay at the gangs of rampaging fan-fiction-writing thugs who are running around beating up on innocent authors who have the temerity to object to other people's stories using their characters and their settings. A description of one sober, principled objection as "panic" is typical. Another bruised victim deleted her posts on the topic only to have an opponent promptly make them reappear from cached copies, nicely demonstrating the monstrous sense of entitlement over other people's words that's under consideration.
2a. There's a lot of logical fallacies from the fan-fiction defense side, too, largely consisting of conflating inspiration and appropriation, or transformation and appropriation, or authorized adaptations and intellectual property squatting, and pretending there's no difference. (Some say it's hypocritical for an objecting author to admit to being inspired by Dr. Who or to sell film rights to HBO. It's nothing of the sort.) Also by playing games with what the term "fan fiction" covers. We may need a more precise term for what the authors are objecting to, but the word is not the thing.
2b. Against that, there's an authorial misbelief that copyrights need to be defended aggressively, like trademarks. No, you won't lose copyright control over your existing work if you don't defend it. But if you don't move against infringing works when you find out about them, you can't sue them later on.
2c. My favorite living and my favorite deceased author have each expressed visceral revulsion against would-be writers playing in their private sandboxes, but none in principle against transformation into other media. I believe this attitude is inherent in their greatness as writers, and I know what side my moral bread is buttered on. There's nothing wrong with playing around with others' fictional creations you love; it's a wholly natural impulse. But for ghod's sake, do it in private, and don't assume that the original author is going to like it, or has to put up with it.
2d. What we are coming to.
3. Also remarkably fallacious, this piece of chronological snobbery. Assuming it's serious at all, but these days who can tell? Argues that the computer mouse is obsolete, not for any concrete reason, but because it was invented nearly 50 years ago, and the keyboard is older then that. What about language, then? That's even older still; should we toss that out too?
4. "Nothing Can Possibly Go Worng" Department. After months of insisting that, if your gas and electricity bills suddenly jump up after the installation of one of the new electronic meters, it's your usage that's changed and you just didn't realize it, because their machines are perfect, the utility PG&E finally admits that the dang things don't work.
5. Music Department. Small-town orchestras and ensembles are usually pretty well-behaved and give sober, unobjectionable, perhaps inspired and perhaps not, renditions. For a really eccentric performance, you have to go to the big city.
5a. Due credit to DGK for having previously identified "spectralism" to me. We had some more of it, just not as good.
5b. I said that the pianist looked "as pale as a teen idol vampire," I did. I did not say that he also looked remarkably like Matthew Gray Gubler, nor that the conductor, a peppery little old guy with a startlingly flushed complexion, looked like a cross between Patrick Stewart and Ben Kingsley.
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no subject
Date: 2010-05-11 06:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-05-11 06:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-05-11 06:20 pm (UTC)Even worse is her claim that the mean old authors have insulted their readers' poor widdle feelings. That's another example of what I described as a monstrous sense of entitlement. Neither the web, nor pre-internet fan-fiction, invented the phenomenon of readers who think they own their favorite authors, and who get terribly confused when the authors turn out not think that they're owned. People who loved Catcher in the Rye so much that they thought they could walk up to J.D. Salinger's house and talk to him, that sort of thing. (Particularly hilarious considering the import of that particular book.) If it's natural for readers to want to appropriate authors, it's equally natural for authors to think their own works are their own. What readers own are copies of the books and the right to reflect in the privacy of their own heads. It's not the objecting authors who need to get over themselves, it's the self-aggrandizing readers.
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Date: 2010-05-11 07:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-05-11 10:13 pm (UTC)As a consumer of both books and fan fiction, I am dismayed that Ms. Gabaldon felt that it was such a disgusting thing, since I find it rather enjoyable, in the same way that daydreaming about various book characters is enjoyable but it's not me doing the daydreaming, it's someone else, so I get the enjoyment of seeing THEIR take on the characters, etc. Sometimes I find out fascinating things about my reactions to the books that way. I have no quibble with her request not to write it in her worlds/about her characters, but I felt that she phrased the request in her first two blog posts in an unnecessarily dramatic way. Just saying "nope, I don't hold with this" would have avoided all dogpiles or pearl-clutching and fandom wank posts.
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Date: 2010-05-12 12:03 am (UTC)And Facebook just makes it easier for companies to exploit their customers' personal information and violate their privacy. As what's pretty much the same Internet flash mob has been arguing in this case, that's no reason not to object with all your might.
Closed doors, sure, but there are no closed doors on the open Web.
"And it is, of course, beyond the pale for a fanfic writer to do anything that interferes in the original author’s ability to make a living from their words."
But what counts as such interference? Bringing the author's original creation into disrepute by flooding the world with cheap knockoffs might count. I once proposed a small-press re-publication, intended for a specialty academic audience, of a non-fiction essay by a best-selling novelist who, though recently deceased, was still actively appearing on the popularity lists, only to have it vetoed by the author's agent, who was concerned that it'd interfere with his plans for re-issues and other posthumous novels, despite my pleas that this would be like a single mosquito interfering with a tank.
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Date: 2010-05-12 12:08 am (UTC)Whether statements are "unnecessarily dramatic" really depends on whether the reader objects to what's being said, doesn't it? I didn't think Gabaldon's phrasing was out of line at all. And it's a funny old world where the more strongly you express your desire for something, the less likely people are to go along with your wishes, isn't it?
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Date: 2010-05-12 01:08 am (UTC)Really, I have no major dog in this fight except as an onlooker. I personally cannot find it in me to try to write fanfic, since I never think I can get the characters right, and it feels like hubris to try. I do enjoy reading it, and I never confuse it with any canonical things (for one thing, it's on the computer/in a fanzine, not written down or presented as a tv show, and for another, I do have SOME intelligence and discrimination), and I find that it enhances my enjoyment of the original text in some (if not all) cases.
As for a sense of entitlement, I have no expectations of any author to do anything to please me, except to continue writing good books and -- if our paths happen to intersect -- being willing to autograph same (if it's explicitly that kind of encounter, of course). That is the nature of my reader's contract with the author -- they write good books, I buy them. If they happen to be charming, interesting, and willing to correspond on lj, that's a plus, but I don't EXPECT it. On the other hand, I do not think that their position as an author excuses their being rude, abrupt, or disgusting in their personal opinions, although I do not allow my dislike for the person to influence my appreciation for their work. It's not as if everyone who writes a fascinating story can be my ideal person, after all.
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Date: 2010-05-12 01:51 am (UTC)I wrote a little Middle-earth fan fiction in my extreme youth. I never dreamed of showing it to anybody, not even when I was publishing amateur SF. (It was lousy wish-fulfillment anyway.) I've communicated with both the Tolkien estate, and UKL personally, regarding things - not fiction, but analyses and discussions that pass beyond the reviewing or academic article level - that I've done with their work, and I've always approached this with extreme caution, knowing that I am trespassing on their property, expecting to be told "stop!" at any moment, and prepared to do it.
As I said before, I didn't find Galadon's tone to be out of line at all. But then, I had no objection to what she was saying. I can't speak for you, but the vehemence of much of the response convinces me that she would have gotten strongly slammed no matter how she phrased her displeasure.
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Date: 2010-05-12 02:02 am (UTC)Closed doors are not locked doors; the metaphor I intend is that you have to explicitly open them and walk in if you want to see what’s behind them. Posting fanfic to a web site or weblog explicitly devoted to the subject is, in my opinion, the equivalent of reading your work in a parlor with a sign on the door declaring “Fanfic Reading in Progress”, and does not qualify as “flooding the world with cheap knockoffs” because you don’t run into the stuff unless you’re looking for it. The Internet just makes it easy to find the parlor and visit it at any time, from anywhere.
Posting it in open discussion forums that are not devoted to fanfic, on the other hand, or publishing the work in the same markets in which the original author is published would certainly qualify as creating a rivalrous good. If someone wants to write slashfic set in the First Age to set up Gandalf’s battle with the Balrog of Moria as a lover’s tiff, I don’t think it dilutes Tolkien’s work if I have to go out looking for Middle-Earth fanfic to find it. A display table in the bookstore for THE PASSION OF MITHRANDIR: AN UNAUTHORIZED TALE OF MIDDLE-EARTH, on the other hand, is flooding the world and affecting the public perception of Tolkien’s work, and I would oppose that.
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Date: 2010-05-12 05:05 am (UTC)Well! It's not set in the First Age, and it's het not slash, but this (http://newboards.theonering.net/forum/gforum/perl/gforum.cgi?post=250378#250378) is pretty close to your suggestion.
-MTD/neb
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Date: 2010-05-12 05:46 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-05-12 05:48 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-05-12 05:55 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-05-12 06:22 am (UTC)You can’t enforce standards across the whole Internet; that’s pointless. But you can uphold standards of etiquette in the forums you frequent, and when you’re a moderator you can delete or disemvowel posts that violate those standards. I think it’s reasonable to uphold a standard of “I would like the author to be comfortable posting to this forum, should they wish to grace it with their presence, and hence there shall be no fanfic of their work here.” (And I suspect Miss Manners would agree that it’s reasonable to say you’re extending that courtesy posthumously to Mr. Tolkien even if your real motivation is “I want to savor the original author’s works and would rather not see fan-fiction.”)
I’m not so sure you would see fewer notices if fanfic were being sold in bookstores. If it were sold in bookstores, it would be making an even bigger splash on the Internet; there would be fanfic review columns in Locus, John Scalzi would have regular posts about The Big Derivative Idea to introduce you to new fanfic authors, there would be entire “how to write fan fiction” tracks at conventions, and so on. I think I’ve only seen about three pieces of fanfic actually surface outside fanfic-oriented sites in the past ten years, and that includes the Very Secret Diaries and the Freud/Jung Slash parody. Of course, you go much more in-depth with Tolkien than I do; are the Tolkien forums riddled with references to it?
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Date: 2010-05-12 01:51 pm (UTC)I thought she was more emphatic and more, mmm, inflammatory than necessary, but I certainly was surprised by some of the more inflammatory responses (some of which were flocked, and so not linked to in metafandom/fandom wank) to her words.
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Date: 2010-05-12 03:38 pm (UTC)If you put them on the public Web, you're publishing them.
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Date: 2010-05-12 03:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-05-12 03:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-05-12 03:52 pm (UTC)And if I'm so preciously sensitive on the subject, how do I delete them from my own comments section without reading them first? Should I avert my eyes from TORN, the leading Tolkien bulletin board, because it mentions and even publishes - ew - fan fiction?
I'm sorry, but this is utterly deluded. A person who wants to discuss an author on the web, but wishes to avoid fan fiction, cannot conduct life that way.
When I expressed my dismay at the Jackson films, a few people trying to be helpful said, "Just don't watch them, then." I could not avoid Jackson by just not watching him. I'd have had to resign from Tolkien fandom permanently, because comparisons to Jackson are not going away (and, in fact, they're infecting Tolkien scholarship even when the scholars don't think that they're citing Jackson, in situations equivalent to people who assume that Baum's Oz is a dream world. It isn't: they got that from the movie). To avoid Jackson, I'd even have had to avoid all popular culture for about five years until the boom died down.
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Date: 2010-05-12 03:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-05-12 03:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-05-12 04:46 pm (UTC)-MTD/neb
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Date: 2010-05-12 06:07 pm (UTC)Yes, standards of etiquette, such as the longstanding Internet trope of posting “spoiler alert!” before revealing important plot points from a story or film that someone might not have gotten to yet. There’s a neologism, “squick”; Wiktionary describes the noun form as “A source of psychological discomfort.” I believe there is a custom in the fanfic community of placing squick warnings on certain categories of stories; it shouldn’t be a big stretch to create a similar notion that fanfic itself needs a warning that will allow non-aficionados to avoid it.
Even if I knew enough about fan fiction that I could have come up with something to meet with your disapproval, I still would have chosen really absurd examples like I did so we could talk about fan fiction without actually getting into it. I think my posts meet the test of “would this be safe for the author to read without getting them into legal entanglements or making them wince at the depiction of their characters?”
Have you seen any evidence of fan fiction affecting Tolkien scholarship the way that the Peter Jackson films are? I would have thought scholars would just roll their eyes and ignore it.
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Date: 2010-05-12 09:44 pm (UTC)Not only are spoiler warnings and content labels and internet filters a bad joke, a topic in itself; but applying the idea to fan fiction utterly, utterly misses the point. The point is not to enable the author's delicate eyes to avoid seeing their fiction fan-fictionized, it's their right to avoid having such stuff in mass distribution. I realize that in practice that would be impossible, but the point is that the makers of this fan-fiction are violating the work, and putting labels on it doesn't negate that.
Sure, maybe your citations and MTD/neb's are not really to the raw sort of fan fiction, but if I'm as scrupulously avoiding such work as you postulate, then I'm not going to know that.
I did not mean to say that fan fiction tropes are infecting Tolkien scholarship the way that Jackson tropes are; I just cited the Jackson tropes to demonstrate how insidious this can be. However, you are quite mistaken if you think that scholars as a whole are ignoring fan fiction. Individual scholars are, of course; but as a group they are falling on it with glee as a new source of scholarly study. I've already seen half a dozen scholarly articles analyzing themes in Tolkien fan fiction, some of it the rawest and most mind-staggering sorts of Tolkien fan fiction.
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Date: 2010-05-13 12:25 am (UTC)Okay, there are fundamentals we disagree on, then. To me, an arbitrary amount of fanfic, no matter how bad, is incapable of doing harm to a work that I enjoy, or to the author’s reputation. If someone presents something that isn’t the author’s words as the author’s, or the author’s words as their own, that is a violation. I don’t see clearly labeled fanfic, unavailable in any medium in which the author’s works are legitimately available, as likely to be mistaken for the author’s words.
I also have grave doubts about an author having a right to prevent people from sharing fanfic in a way that does not infringe on the author’s ability to make a living. That’s getting into the territory of basic free expression, and I am very leery of restricting that. I have yet to hear of an author losing sales because fanfic exists on the Internet, and no one has ever said to me “I can’t stand ________ any more because the fanfic of their stories is so awful!” I oppose allowing fanfic writers to dilute an author’s trademark in the marketplaces where the author earns their living; I just don’t see evidence of that occurring.
Are the papers that analyze fan fiction considered Tolkien scholarship, or sociology/anthropology studying fanfic writers? Are the editors of Tolkien-specific journals accepting articles that are really about fanfic writers and only peripherally about Tolkien and his works? I’m wondering if I am more ready to label something “category error” (as a prelude to ignoring it) than other people.
I’m also wondering if we have different basic moral impulses here. Mine is that I don’t want anything damping the feedback loop that encourages good authors to write more books, and anything outside that is fine. Do you see it as something more basic?
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Date: 2010-05-13 10:46 am (UTC)This doesn't mean, of course, that authors are such valuable delicate creatures that they must be protected from all criticism, still less authors who choose to communicate online. What it does mean, though, at the very least, is that those who write this kind of fanfic should stop pretending that they're doing these authors, or their work, a compliment by hacking it in this way.
To you, no fanfic can do harm to the work or the author's reputation, but you don't get to be the sole decider on this. Nobody's going to say, of course, that the fanfic made them dislike the author's work. Such a person is a straw man; it's far more insidious than that. Changes in mores and language undercut the authority of older literature all the time. Often it's nobody's fault, and not pointed directly at the work; this time it is. Read too much Frodo/Sam slash and you'll start seeing the relationship that way in the original book. This devalues the book and makes it seem just a little bit more risible, a step on the way to damaging the author's reputation. In fact, I take back my disavowal that fanfiction hasn't infected scholarship. There have been a number of seriously-intended articles that do see it that way, and maybe the authors have been reading too much slash fanfic, because it's a ludicrous idea if you stick to the original text and the context Tolkien wrote it in.
Dilution in the marketplace: the web is a marketplace, regardless of free distribution. It's a well-established principle in copyright law that free distribution does not excuse violation of copyright. Whether fanfic violates copyright may be murky, but whether it is or not, you can't draw the line there.
In any case, I see this less as a legal issue than a moral one. Whatever legal rights of free expression people may have, there are occasions when intelligence and courtesy suggest refraining from exercising it, and others get to use their right of free expression to give opinions on what those occasions are.
The articles about Tolkien fanfic fall into the intersection of two literary scholarship subfields that have been fruitful sources of Tolkien scholarship in other respects: popular culture study (which produced some of the first articles on Tolkien in the 60s and 70s, when serious literary criticism was still hesitant to tread there), and reader-response criticism, the latter one of the major forces in literary scholarship. And yes, they do appear in journals and anthologies that purport to be about Tolkien.
no subject
Date: 2010-05-16 04:06 am (UTC)