A Fan Post I've Been Meaning To Make For A While

[lowkey]

thingswithwings posted a list of the entries that she felt deserved more love in eruthros's (now closed) Top 100 Speculative Fiction Works. I had already voted in the poll, but thingswithwings' post helped me crystalize some of the thoughts I had had about the experience.

At first, I was a little confused by the inclusion of fan works along side "real" works, but then I decided I'd take the entire experience as a chance to be exposed to fan works I had never heard of (because unlike the "real" stuff, all of the fan works are available for free on the internet).

So this is how I came to experience the amazingness that is the SGA fic Freedom's Just Another Word for Nothing Left to Lose. I think I'm going to write a whole piece on why this is an awesome story, and I think I'm going to compare it to another one of my all-time favorite books (which, coincidently, is on eruthros' poll but isn't doing so well), The Years of Rice and Salt.

Comments

[mako_lies]

Very interesting. Thanks for the links, will need to browse the speculative fiction stuff. Looks like my cup of tea. :)

Kinda cool they included fanworks... Haven't seen fanworks included in a poll like that, before.

[lowkey]

I voted for Tamora Pierce's works, of course.

[owlmoose]

I am really not sure how I feel about having fanworks on that list. I certainly believe that the best fanworks can easily be as good as commercially published works. But it starts to feel like a popularity contest: who is best known, rather than what is best. Then again, I have the same twitchiness around any kind of fanworks contest that involves voting, so maybe I'm just weird.

But I do definitely plan to take a closer look at some of the fanworks there, especially the vids. I need to explore the world of vids more closely.

[lowkey]

I've been meaning to respond to this comment once I finally had something intelligent to say, and I think I do now, so here goes:

I totally agree about the popularity thing. But I know that I generally did vote for things that I liked, i.e. were popular with me. There are very few things that I recognize as being not high quality that I nonetheless like; off the top of my head, I can only think of Stargate, the original BSG (with serious reservations), and the original Rollerball (with double serious reservations). Intellectually, I think that the thinks I like are good, and therefore worthy of being voted up in a poll like this. And I think my desire to up-vote the works of Kim Stanley Robinson comes from the same place that made me up to up-vote for flummery's "Handlebars" fanvid.

Buuuutttttttt... the thing about fanworks is that, word-for-word, they're more accessible than many "real" works. A real movie is several hours long; a fanvid probably three minutes. Yes, the fanwork requires knowledge of the original source material... but that original source material is very likely also being voted for in polls like this. It's much more difficult to say "I've never heard of this book, I'll read it and then vote" as opposed to "I'm generally familiar with this fandom, but have never seen or read this fan work; it'll take a few minutes to appreciate, and then I'll vote."

In polls like this, it isn't a simple dichotomy between fan and "real" work; I think that for real works and fan works are embroiled in some sort of asymmetrical warfare.