mouseworks

Yeah, I'm watching from the sidelines of the current fanfic discussion and thinking that a lot of authors seem to be completely missing something special here.

I totally understand the dislike of fanfic. My own personal writing background grew out of role-playing games heavily influenced by the shared universes created in superhero comics, so it had very different expectations and standards. Everyone made up the NPCs and shared them around, but the core protagonists were yours, often even considered some aspect of yourself (as is typical for RPG PCs), and there were huge, very angry flamewars when people used them without permission. I was dead-set against fanfic for a long time because of that background and set of assumptions.

What convinced me on the moral front was looking at how much recasting and respinning other people's stories has been part of literature for as long as we've had literature, and getting more political about my dislike of the collapse of the informational commons. But what convinced me on more of a gut level was, I think, having a deeper understanding of fiction as art and artifice, as opposed to ego projection.

Those fanfic writers that published commercial writers are so upset about are a gold mine as readers; they're critical, engaged, building and maintaining their own enthusiasm about the world, and highly likely to both purchase new works and to encourage other people to do so. As with all kinds of fame, that comes with a price, but someone who was deeply reading the text and playing with it and writing around it to look at it from different angles sure sounds a lot more appealing to me than a fan who was equally avid about wanting to get to know the writer as a person and get involved in their personal life. At least the fanfic folks are both engaged and engaged on the right thing.