Your Children Are Not Yours

[Aura]

Yesterday, I provoked the people who expect 50+ orgy H scenes with acrobatic positions, today I provoke our core fanbase. Also for once the blog illustration might actually be more inflammatory than the content. I just can't win can I? Also second day in a row where I skip lunch in lieu of writing blog posts.

http://katawashoujo.blogspot.com/2011/0 ... yours.html

for clarification if you can't interpret my contrived thoughtflow: I think fan creations are quite all right.

ps. any suggestions as to which demographic I should provoke next?

[Richiter Bromont]

The African American Demographic.

[Pimmy]

Personally, I see fan creations as a form of love. Even if the writer can hardly write or the drawer can hardly hold a pencil, they create these things out of the love they have for the series. Maybe some people only create to see what they want to see, but for the most part, I believe it is one of the most sincere forms of flattery possible; to put that extra effort into being a fan.

It's sort of the reason why I love things that a lot of people dislike. The caramel dansen meme for example, is extremely annoying and tired to many people. I can see why. But for me, I view the meme as an honest labor of love. The way I see it, the creator of any version of this meme is celebrating the characters and their love for them. As is the same with even the stupidest, raunchiest fiction.

So it kind of seems weird to me when authors/artists flip out at fan works. I don't think anyone goes about creating a fanwork with any intention of snatching the characters from their owner's hands. Well, maybe some do, but they often get banned off of the Deviantart they came from pretty fast.

That said, I would still get pretty ticked off if someone was perpetuating poor or incorrect characterization to the fan community as a whole! Widespread fanon can definitely be a valid thing to get miffed about.

[Aura]

I'm gonna use a bit inappropriate analogue here, but bear with me:

While you and fan fiction writers see fan creations as a form of love, so do stalkers see stalking as a form of love. And Robin Hobb and her ilk think they are a similar affront to personal space. And "but it's not true" is not an argument here, that is her personal opinion and the way she experiences her works.

I don't get why anyone would get bothered by out of character writing in fan fiction or fanon though? If you think fan creations are all right, but only if they do not pervert the original content, you are closer to Hobb than I am, for instance.

I wish you had been on IRC for the conversation I started to get this blog post done, I think you would've had good input.

[ElisaMasah]

I was more on Pimmy side once, then I spent some times lurking TvTropes and the SoBadIsHorrible Fanfiction sections ... and I'm not confortable to call that ... things an act of love and the good ones doesn't stand up enough to compensate. So in the end if fell more on side with Robin Hobb, there is too much bad fanfiction that maim, burn and kill what the Author work of, sometimes even suffer, this is a case where ten good persons doesn't save Sodoma.
If fan does love the works, they better stop doing fanfiction without the Author autorization.

[gainare_tottori]

I'd be amazed if anybody here was seriously that against remix culture considering the both literal origin of the project and the site from which it spun off of. Mashups as far as the eye can see are inevitable with both the products of digital culture and the tools for modifying it so easily available.

As a sometime fan artist I enjoy doing it as a sort of change of pace to get me out of my usual routines and off into something new. Having a built-in fanbase for comments is nice of course, but the major thing that keeps me doing it is that often I learn a lot trying to do something I never would have done for my other works.

As far as the link goes, the author is quite up front about her irrationality on the issue before proceeding apace, so I don't feel there's a real reason to flog her for being all YOU DAMN KIDS GET OFF MY LAWN. (Besides, I guarantee you that by putting her name and references to her books all over that rant and firing it off into the Internet, ever since then she has been randomly flamed by people who have just read it... and this will probably continue to be the case for the rest of her life. Archives and a decent bit of Google notoriety are awful like that.)

The caramel dansen meme for example, is extremely annoying and tired to many people. I can see why. But for me, I view the meme as an honest labor of love. The way I see it, the creator of any version of this meme is celebrating the characters and their love for them. As is the same with even the stupidest, raunchiest fiction.

Procedurally, a lot of memes are basically fan fiction regarding reality. What else would you call a world of cats having cheeseburgers and Massimo D'Alema making faces at everything?

[ContinualNaba]

Troll the Jews. Make a post claiming the final product will not only be tax exempt, but tax deductable.

In all seriousness, you know my feelings on the matter. It's not really a question of legality or morality or license to me, but more a form of effort. Fanart (Generally. Hopefully. Certainly should) takes more effort to create and less effort to identify than fanfic. A novel that is created generally has little artwork to it, but a great deal of effort put into its production regardless. Crappy fanfic not only insults the author, but the material he has created by expressing such an utter lack of grunt in its replication.

[valderman]

Any work is built upon the works of countless others, both explicitly as with direct inspiration from other works, and implicitly as with all the experiences that made the author who she is. Why should authors be allowed to use all of these previous "works" to create theirs while at the same time denying others the right to do the same? While it's one thing to protect one's actual work, claiming ownership of every concept embodied in that work is ridiculous. A character isn't a work, neither is a place or an item. Descriptions of said character, place or item is, but not the concept itself, which is why Wikipedia doesn't need to pay royalties to everyone and their grandmother.

It's flat out silly to make claims to someone else's work just because said work is designed to be experienced in conjunction with something you wrote. Unfortunately, copyrights are often quite ridiculous.

I was more on Pimmy side once, then I spent some times lurking TvTropes and the SoBadIsHorrible Fanfiction sections ... and I'm not confortable to call that ... things an act of love and the good ones doesn't stand up enough to compensate. So in the end if fell more on side with Robin Hobb, there is too much bad fanfiction that maim, burn and kill what the Author work of, sometimes even suffer, this is a case where ten good persons doesn't save Sodoma.
If fan does love the works, they better stop doing fanfiction without the Author autorization.

How does fan fiction work in any way affect the original? If you don't like it, don't read it. I wholeheartedly agree the vast majority of fan produced stuff is crap (though these Tolkien, Jordan and Shakespeare dudes are pretty good,) but so are most of the original works that get created. If you really love litterature, stop writing because it's very likely that your work will be crap, and thus an affront to writing itself?

Besides, why would authorized fan creations be any better? Take a look at the Hollywood version of The Ring (or any other good foreign movie Hollywood has slaughtered with the permission of the original copyright holder) and you'll see that authorization doesn't change the odds of a work being bad.

[ElisaMasah]

How does fan fiction work in any way affect the original?.

You will be surprised ... but they do.

If you don't like it, don't read it.

I not so easy they are like cockroach ... you try to ignore them and one day you found your kitchen floor is just start moving and crawling.

stop writing because it's very likely that your work will be crap, and thus an affront to writing itself?

As a matter of fact, YES.

[Morph]

When Robbin Hobb's thinks the changes fans do in their fictions are to correct or to improve the authors idea of the world or characters he created he is misunderstanding most of his fans.
I think most of the fanwriters like his work that much that they want to read more of it or think about some "What if..."-scenarios and as they won't push the author to write stuff they have imagined they do it on their own.
And these fanfics (if they are good ones) show the author how the reader interprets his work and the way he understands the characters and the story.
There are also bad ones or those that don't make sense at all, but I don't think that they are a problem. If I understand Hobb's right, the most important point to him/her(I don't know him/her ) against fanfiction is that these might have a negative effect on his/her reputation.
But why?
Fanfictions should be clearly marked as such and I think most of them are. They refer to his/her work but it's not his work.
They might change or create the view of readers to his characters, but everyone has a different view to them anyway. And so it is clear that there might be some the author didn't want or didn't expect. He can't force the readers to experience his work in the way he wanted them to do.

[Leotrak]

How does fan fiction work in any way affect the original?.

You will be surprised ... but they do.

How?

If you don't like it, don't read it.

I not so easy they are like cockroach ... you try to ignore them and one day you found your kitchen floor is just start moving and crawling.

I fail to see how this analogy works - avoiding fanfic boards is quite easy. In fact, in most cases you have to actively look for them...

stop writing because it's very likely that your work will be crap, and thus an affront to writing itself?

As a matter of fact, YES.

You really should work on your explanations... IMO, whether something ends up as "crap" or not depends on the writing ability of the person writing something, and in most cases, the editing abilities of those around them as well.


Morph: right on, man, right on. (there's a pun in there somewhere, I think...)

[luinthoron]

Ah, fan fiction... Been there, done that. It's been a while since that time, though. There's good fan fiction out there, but sadly there's also a staggering amount of badfic.

Anyway, what I've come to believe is that fan fiction is an easy way to start writing. You start in an established world, with existing characters you already know. While you have the freedom to change some things around (even if you sometimes should not), you are already familiar with your characters and what drives them. After reading a lot of truly great original stories I've really come to appreciate this part of the fan fiction phenomenon. It is very, very hard for a beginner to create such worlds or characters, as (as I know from personal experience from my noob times) they write pretty much without truly planning ahead. To write good original stories, in addition to writing what your characters are doing in the particular part of the story, you also need to know what they plan to do later and why, whether their plans will work or not. Sometimes when re-reading a great story you will notice a lot of small details that hinted at the final outcome, while at the first time you might just look at them as random unimportant words. In fan fiction a lot of this is already taken care of by the original author, so you may be able to create a better story in their world than you could in your own original setting. But at some point it would be good for a budding writer to leave the security of fan fiction and truly start creating something more than that.

Different authors seem to have different thoughts on fan fiction. Some hate it, even to the point of asking it to be removed from fan fiction sites. On the other hand, there are also authors who don't mind this at all. I myself see fan fiction, fan art, and similar creations as something that keeps alive the fans' interest in the original work, sometimes even drawing in new fans, so it certainly is a more positive than negative phenomenon in my eyes.

[Darlat]

You know, if we should be technical about it, then isn't Katawa Shoujo a fan work on the image by Raita?

[Aura]

How does fan fiction work in any way affect the original?.

You will be surprised ... but they do.

How?

Fan works certainly can affect the original work. First example that comes to mind is the Touhou series because of its immensely huge fan scene. I think in many cases touhou fanon surpasses canon, and many fans even totally disregard the "plots" of the original games, or other descriptions ZUN's made of the setting. Also, Valve (and other game studios) likes to assimilate some fan works or fan cretors to their games and teams. That's fan creations directly affecting original work. A fandom might be more known for their insanity/infighting/drama/terrible fan creations, which really could affect the original negatively in the minds of people not part of the fandom. Example: Twilight series. There are many more examples, but generally suggesting that the influence between original and fan works goes only in one direction is patently false.

You know, if we should be technical about it, then isn't Katawa Shoujo a fan work on the image by Raita?

Considering the difference of magnitude, more accurate would be to say that KS is a work influenced by that image. However, anyone's free to define "fan work" as they will, but by the definition you imply everything that's ever drawn, composed or written is a "fan work" of something or multiple somethings that precede them.

[Leotrak]

Fan works certainly can affect the original work. First example that comes to mind is the Touhou series because of its immensely huge fan scene. I think in many cases touhou fanon surpasses canon, and many fans even totally disregard the "plots" of the original games, or other descriptions ZUN's made of the setting. Also, Valve (and other game studios) likes to assimilate some fan works or fan cretors to their games and teams. That's fan creations directly affecting original work. A fandom might be more known for their insanity/infighting/drama/terrible fan creations, which really could affect the original negatively in the minds of people not part of the fandom. Example: Twilight series. There are many more examples, but generally suggesting that the influence between original and fan works goes only in one direction is patently false.

Now -this- is a proper explanation, as opposed to a generic "but they do".

Srsly, the vague stuff some people write off as "answers" sometimes... Makes my skin crawl -_-"