Lascivious

There have been a lot of really great posts in the past two days on author Diane Gabaldon's rant against fanfiction. Here are my thoughts on the whole issue. (This is probably a little disorganized, since I haven't read it over. I just wanted to get my thoughts down.)

Now, I understand where she's coming from. My very first encounter with fanfiction was some NC-17 slash fic featuring the characters from Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles when I was in 8th grade. It was not only my first encounter with fanfic, it was my first encounter with slash, let alone slash of the NC-17 variety. I was so horrified that someone would 'sully' the characters by having them have graphic sex with each other (because it flew in the face of the basic tenants of the series, which is is that vampires don't have sex) that I literally ripped up the fic and threw it away.

(Later that year, I was writing a Little Princess/Witching Hour cross over, in which Sarah Crewe was one of the Mayfair witches who came to Miss Manderly's accompanied by the demon Lasher, and it was definitely not PG. LOL)

So I understand that vehement, irrational response that one might have to fanfiction, if one truly feels that it is sullying the characters that they created.

Except. I was in 8th grade then. And I do feel that many times the response is immature, reactionary, and not at all well thought out.

Now, despite the fact that there used to be (and probably still is, somewhere) fanfic of her books on the internet, Anne Rice is another author vehemently opposed to fanfiction.

In some ways the kind of anti-fanfic stance taken by authors like Diane Gabaldon and Anne Rice strikes me as very arrogant. I can't speak much for Diane Gabaldon, as I don't know anything about her, but as someone who was deeply involved in the Anne Rice fandom to the point of reading all her blog posts and listening to the phone messages she used to leave for fans to call in for, I feel a bit more confident in speaking about her.

Now, Anne Rice, rather infamously does not use an editor. She says, "I have no intention of allowing any editor ever to distort, cut, or otherwise mutilate sentences that I have edited and re-edited, and organized and polished myself. I fought a great battle to achieve a status where I did not have to put up with editors making demands on me, and I will never relinquish that status. For me, novel writing is a virtuoso performance. It is not a collaborative art."

In this view, the author is the sole creator of a work, the only one who knows the story she wants to tell and how her characters would act. (And as to that, frankly, in the final novels of the Vampire Chronicles, many of her characters struck me as being OOC. I believe that an author can write their own characters as OOC if they are behaving in a way that contradicts all of their previous behavior without any acknowledgment or explanation as to why. Which actually, Anne Rice did attempt to do in her Amazon response. Whether it was done in a way that made sense is another issue.)

Not only that, but the author is the only one who knows how her text should be interperated, and of course, there is only one correct way to 'interrogate the text', to borrow another of Ms. Rice's phrases.

All of this discounts the fact that if you are a published author, you work has become public. There are now as many way to interpret the text as there are readers.

I remember reading a post (sadly I forget who it was by) about the Epilogue of Deathly Hollows, and in the discussion that ensued in the comments, someone brought up the idea that perhaps what many of the fandom saw as the themes of the series were in fact very different from what JKR had seen as the themes when she wrote it.

Does that mean those people in fandom are wrong? Not in the least! It's one of the things that makes reading so much fun! And writing, too.

What I don't understand is the idea that fanfic somehow takes away from the original work. There's a lot of really awful Harry Potter fic. Does that make me think any less of the original books? Of course not! There are also fanfic that I think surpass the original books. Does that take anything away from the original books? No, it doesn't!

No matter how many badly plotted, Mary Sue infested, OOC American High School AU fic there are, it doesn't take away from the story that JK Rowling wrote, which is available in almost any book store all over the world. Maybe I like my Draco handsome (albeit pointy chinned and too pale), smooth talking, and in love with Harry Potter. That doesn't change the fact that as JKR wrote him, as he is in the pages of her books, he is none of those things. (Except for pointy chinned, I suppose.)

Far from being the hateful violation Diane Gabolden sees it as, it is in many way the highest form of flattery. (And please can we stop using rape as a metaphor for everything under the sun? There are so many other ways to describe things that don't belittle or trivialize a horrific and life changing violent act.) People don't take the time to spend hours thinking, analyzing and imaging characters they don't connect with on a deep level.

Fanfiction is just writers connecting with your characters and spending their time and love on your characters and exploring the world you created in a way that doesn't take away anything that you have achieved or how readers of your work will think about what you've written. How is that immoral?

Some great posts:

I’m done explaining to people why fanfic is okay. by bookshop

Dear Ms. Garabolden, by pinkfinity

by The Time Has Come to Talk of Many Things: Genre, The Internet & Stories sarahtales

Well, the Cat House was a bit of a letdown. It was full of racoons by nos4a2no9

Stones. Glass Houses. News at 11. by sheafrotherdon