Fan fiction, and a recommendation

[lowkey]

+ My good friend danchekker has just joined AO3, and to celebrate the occasion, she's posted a top-notch FFVII fan fic. Full disclosure warning: I betaed it.

Title: Two years, fifteen days
Fandom: Final Fantasy VII
Characters: Rufus ShinRa, Yuffie Kisaragi
Rating: G
Word Count: 7817
Summary: People change. They grow, and sometimes they grow together and sometimes they grow apart.

Anyways—if you want to read some top-notch post-game fanfiction, go check it out!



+ owlmoose linked and commented on an article TIME ran about fan fiction, available here. It was a fun, if rather uninformative read, but this little jewel jumped out at me:

Ursula K. Le Guin, another giant of the fantasy canon, writes, "To me, it's not sharing but an invasion, literally — strangers coming in and taking over the country I live in, my heartland."

God damn it, Ursula K. Le Guin, you are AN AUTHOR, and AUTHORS should be among the first to use "literally" correctly. NO, I don't care how much moaning and bitching you throw at fan fiction—guess what? No one is actually, literally coming into your country house and stealing your characters.

And in my opinion, that Le Gin thinks fan fiction writers are literally stealing her characters tells the lie to that entire school of thought.

Comments

[owlmoose]

Yeah, that's a pretty dramatic quote. Sadly, it's not even the worst I've seen on this topic. Remember the time Diana Gabaldon compared fic writing to such unsavory pursuits as stealing her teenage daughter and camping, uninvited, in her backyard? Good times.

Glad you enjoyed the article!

[lowkey]

I read up on the Gabaldon-snafu, which is made that much more funny by her so explicitly using Doctor Who as an inspiration.

But I'm not really surprised by her reaction—for instance, even before I read this article, I knew what George R. R. Martin's take on fan fiction was. But Le Guin's use of "literally" pressed both my "authors who hate fan fiction are dumb" buttom, on top of pressing the "people who use 'literally' incorrectly are dumb" button.

[nal_rene]

Considering some of the things and horribly written fics (Fanfiction.net... enough said) it's understandable that she would feel that way. SHE created the characters and understands them better than anyone else probably ever could, but I can't agree with her lumping it all together. Sure, some fics are completely OOC, but the whole point of fanfiction is not to make money on (thus stealing) an author's characters. It's about bringing out the fic writer's creativity. For that, I think any writer worth their salt would, if nothing else, ignore the perceived misuse of their characters.

I can understand some of the outrage, but once it's published, it's out there. The story. The characters. All of it for the dreams of the readers.

Just so you know, I have yet to read the article. I'm just commenting on what Le Guin said.

[lowkey]

I disagree with what Le Guin says, but I do understand where she's coming from. In Real Life^TM, I'm always hounding on my students to avoid plagiarism, and as a deterrent, I am excessively harsh in my punishment of plagiarists. So I understand an author saying "these are my creations, go make your own unique works."

But I'm also the product of internet, and I'm quite comfortable with characters and settings being appropriated and used in other stories, because in my mind appropriation doesn't necessarily entail plagiarism. Furthermore, I personally believe that fan fiction does more good than harm to a writing career, be that good and harm measured economically or otherwise; a well-managed and engaging internet presence can (seemingly) go a long way toward helping make a professional work of fiction a success.

I also I think that some authors really ascribe to the Geek Hierarchy—"I am a professional, and I cannot brook that non-professionals are sullying my creations." I think that position has embedded in it a purposeful blindness; what author has genuinely never been inspired by or drawn inspiration from another literary work?

So, I understand—but I disagree.