Fanfic

[rowyn]

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I have a multi-layered answer to this, which I will unpack in parts.

First, I want a definition for "fanfiction". I am going to start with the broadest possible definition:

Fiction created by one party using the characters and/or setting of another creator.

This is a definition that encompasses not merely Harry/Snape slashfic and Mary Sue seducing Aragorn, but Star Wars novels, shared-world stories, RPG tie-ins, remakes of Godzilla, and, indeed, probably 90%+ of all television (since most TV series are written by multiple different screenwriters, often none of whom created the original characters or premise), plus the vast majority of DC and Marvel comic book titles.

When I was younger, I had a tremendous disdain for this kind of fiction. I refused to read Star Trek novels. I insisted on setting my RP campaigns in worlds of my own devising. I scorned running modules. I certainly didn't write fanfiction.

Of course, I had the kind of Mary-Sue-esque self-insert daydreams that so many fanfic writers use. By the time I was twelve or so, I'd created a whole stable of original characters who wreaked havoc in the plots and among the characters of the novels I read. But I never wrote any of that down; it seemed like a waste of effort to write about someone else's characters, where I didn't own the copyright and couldn't make any money off of it. Mind you, I couldn't make any money off of my own original creations, either, but my adolescent self was oblivious to this truth. At 12, I thought far more highly of what I could write then than I think today of what I can write now.

It wasn't until I got much older that I started to mellow out. I realized that some authors do great work with characters that they didn't create. Alan Moore's run of "Swamp Thing" is excellent, making some of the dumbest B-list superheroes and villains into interesting figures. I enjoyed the first several books of "Wild Cards" even though the authors were generally writing in someone else's setting using some characters they hadn't invented. And ... I'm sure I could come up with some film and TV examples here, too, if I worked at it, but I generally haven't paid as much attention to visual media as a whole, and even less to who was writing which bits.

I came to realize* that my games were never going to result in publishable stories; in 2004, I started running a game based on Zelazny's A Night in the Lonesome October. Last year, I started running a game in World Tree -- the first time I ever used a published setting. I even used the provided starting city!

* My conscious mind realizes it, anyway. I think my subconscious is still hoping.

So, on the one hand; at this point in my life, I don't think that writing someone else's characters or setting means that the result will necessarily be inferior to what the same author would have done with his or her own.

On the other hand, in my choices of what I actually read, I'm still biased in favor of authors who write about their own characters in their own settings. This bias is less pronounced in my film and TV choices, though perhaps that's because sequels and franchises are far more common in those media. Also, scriptwriters are overshadowed by actors, directors, and producers; it's often hard to tell who counts as the "creator". And I don't know if my bias against derivative works has any basis in my actual relative enjoyment of them.

Possibly my comparative lack of interest in derivative works is that I'm not that attached to particular characters or settings these days. I tend to prefer stories that wrap up in several hundred pages or so, and I find reading story after story after story about the same protagonist is often ... tedious. Or strains credulity. After you've saved the world a couple of times, what's left? I mean, really. Give the guy a rest already.

Okay, I wanted to blather on about the narrower and more common definition of fanfic too, sooo:

Fiction by one party using the characters and/or setting of another, without explicit legal authorization

I talked about the first category initially, because the difference between "any derivative work" and "unauthorized derivative work" isn't that huge to me. On the quality front: sure, unauthorized works tend to be lower quality than authorized, but in much the same sense that the slush pile tends to be lower quality than what gets published. I'm not going to heap scorn on unauthorized fanfic only because it hasn't been authorized yet. And sure, lots of fanfic is unpublishable drek. I've written hundreds of thousands of words of original fiction that is also unpublishable drek. Who am I to criticize?

On the ethical front: I do think that the author's wishes should be respected. If an author doesn't want anyone else writing about his characters or his world, fans should respect that and not write it. Or at least not show it anywhere that the original author can see it; I don't think writing it for your own entertainment and showing it to your friends is particularly egregious. Publishing it to the web is not appropriate. Sending it to the author and then suing the author when he publishes his next book because you think he stole one of your ideas is JUST WRONG.

Other than that, I don't much care. Reading and writing fanfic isn't my thing, but neither is playing baseball, concert-going, gardening, cooking, or any of dozens of other hobbies that lots of other people love. As long as the original creator's not complaining about people writing fanfic of his work, it seems like a perfectly reasonable sort of hobby to me.

Comments

[terrycloth.livejournal.com]

'Posting it to the web' and 'sharing it with your friends' don't necessarily have a bright line of separation between them. I mean, if I post something to LJ, who's going to read it?

There is a big fanfic community that posts things for other people in the community to see; that's probably the sort of thing you were talking about?

[rowyn]

Really what I mean by "posting to the web" is "posting in public to the web". It's not so much how large your personal audience is as the possibility that the author can do a Google search for his name, or his character's names/setting name/etc., and find your fanfic. Which authors well might do -- even if they're not looking for fanfic, they might be looking for reviews or "what people are saying". Or they may be aggressively policing their copyright, which copyright law requires if you want to maintain your right to police it (and keep people from selling ripoffs of your work). Other fun legal hassles: if the original author later publishes a work that's similar to yours, you can sue the original author on the claim that they saw your work, since it was publically available.

Anyway, my point is that what may be an obscure corner of the web for Unknown Original Fic isn't necessarily obscure for Big Name Fanfic. If it's on the web but behind some kind of friends-lock, that's probably good enough. If it's at marysue.geobookpage.com/myfanfic/marysue-n-spock-4ever.txt, it's still Google-searchable and not really obscure enough.

[terrycloth.livejournal.com]

The aggressive policing requirement is for trademarks, not copyrights. The characters fanfic authors borrow are trademarked *too*, I guess, but copyright is the big one and doesn't have any such requirement.

And while you *can* sue an author for copying your copy, you're not going to win. You can sue anyone for anything.

[rowyn]

I don't know the exact legal details, but as I understand it, while you can't lose the copyright on your book, you can lose the right to block imitators. So you could lose the right to stop people from writing books in your setting with your characters. Or sell merchandise based on your work. I guess it works much like trademark enforcement? But I don't think you actually have to trademark everything in your story in order to retain control of the characters, etc. and stop other people from using them.

[terrycloth.livejournal.com]

It doesn't work that way at all for copyrights. At least not in the US. I looked it up to verify it just in case before my last response.

If it *did* work that way, the RIAA wouldn't have been able to start suing 7 year olds and grandmothers for millions of dollars for copying their music, since they ignored it for a few years first.

[rowyn]

Oh hey, that's interesting. George R.R. Martin was just ranting about fanfic in his blog, in part because (according to him) you could lose control of the copyright if you didn't police it. I was thinking that meant merchandising and sequels and other derivative works, rather than the original.
GRRM is in a position to know, since he does license merchandise and TV shows and stuff, on the one hand. On the other, just because it's in his interest to know this stuff doesn't mean he'd necessarily have it right. >:)

But if a copyright protects your interest against derivative works, why does Disney trademark all their characters? If it doesn't, why don't people ripoff those who don't trademark them all? Maybe it's a matter of "trademark provides a stronger legal defense but copyright is still sufficient in most cases?" Just like you don't need to register a copyright to have one, but it still helps to do so? Law is weird.

[terrycloth.livejournal.com]

The only thing I found was that if you didn't fight the copyright right away, you lost the automatic presumption that your work was the original being copied, and you'd have to prove in court that yours was the original. But that doesn't apply if you registered the copyright, which I'm assuming any published author would.

Trademarks, yeah. You have to protect those. I didn't find much information on what else they give you though.

[jordangreywolf.livejournal.com]

I don't have specifics (that'd take some time to dig up), but I remember being warned that I shouldn't rely wholly upon what copyright law says, because it's fuzzy enough that it ultimately boils down to what the judge decides. And I think I was told that if it could be shown that you were being lax in your defense of your copyright, or selective, then you'd have a less-strong case. Plus, registering your copyright isn't technically required, but you'd have a much stronger case if you did so for when a potential violation came up and you had to actually do something about it. Not a solid case, not a guaranteed case, but the details boil down to "stronger" or "weaker," I gather. You have to persuade a judge/jury.

Anyway, copyright covers the printed material. You can copyright a story. You don't trademark a story. (Maybe you could ... if it was a crazy-short story that you slapped onto every single box of Crazy-Short Story Crackers that you sold.) Disney characters are trademarked because their identifiable likenesses can be associated with a product. Put Mickey Mouse on something, and it immediately says, THIS IS DISNEY, just the same as if you saw the Burger King logo on something.

However, the way trademark law is written, the owner has to diligently defend the trademark. If the trademark term demonstrably enters the public lexicon, it can lose its validity. That is, if we got to the point where it was universal that people would say, "I need a Kleenex to blow my nose," and it DOES NOT mean a KLEENEX brand facial tissue, then the Kleenex company is in a load of trouble. There are certain rules the owner of the trademark must use when using the logo/emblem/name/whatever in their own published works to make it clear that KLEENEX (etc.) is a brand name, trademarked logo, etc., and not just a thing.

[terrycloth.livejournal.com]

Now, there are fanfic authors who think it's unfair when someone suddenly starts policing their copyright because 'everyone else does it and you never went after them!'

The real reason it's unfair is that copyright violation doesn't have any punitive component, so you shouldn't be able to sue people offering things for free (unless they're actually replacing the market for your own work) -- but they put in these ridiculously high 'statutory damages' (up to $100,000), so you can. Yay.

[jordangreywolf.livejournal.com]

Too many categories for me to lump it all together.

Derivative works of fairy tales, fables, and myths? Hey, sure, that could be an interesting hook. Even a derivative spin off of Victorian heroes as if they were members of some sort of a legion of remarkable heroes would be cool ... except, in my humble opinion, I really don't like the way it was actually done by a certain author.

Taking Star Trek, Harry Potter, or whatever, and imagining pairings of this and that character, or marching a Marty Stu or Mary Sue across the stage? Not my cup o' tea, not even getting into copyright issues. I suppose half of it is because the creator is still around and might take issue with someone doing twisty things with his creations, and I can sympathize with that. Half of it would just be personal experience at how it usually actually turns out.

I haven't much trouble with derivation at all when it comes to RPGs. That is, when running a campaign, I freely "rip off" various popular sources. I need my players to be familiar with the gist of the setting, rather than inventing a new and bewildering mythos from whole cloth, and requiring them to do some intensive reading.

This is one reason that right now I'm running a "Savage Ghostbusters" game (though it doesn't involve the movie characters at all), and why in the past I've based campaigns off of "simple genres" such as 1920s pulp, basic sword-swinging fantasy, etc., and then introduced the "twist" over the course of the campaign, or introduced a "new world" piece by piece. But, hey, at least I won't pretend to impress anybody with my ORIGINAL CREATION when it clearly isn't.

I can understand that someone has the same intent when writing fan fiction. The world is already established. Things happen, and as you read the story, you might imagine what happens next, or even HOPE ... and it doesn't. "What if?" can spark ideas for a new story. Maybe someone else will sympathize. If it's a popular enough story, you might have an audience already up to speed because, hey, they read the original book.

I can UNDERSTAND it. However, a lot of the time it just becomes a shortcut to wanting to latch onto the magic someone else created, this really well-developed character, etc., and the only real addition is, "... and my alter-ego character shall therefore be awesome, because watch as he/she/it OUTDOES THEM ALL!"

Anyway, it's not something I get terribly worried about. Maybe one of these days, I could write some "fan fiction" set in the Deadlands universe ... and actually find a place to print it (with permission from the original creator). I've just been too busy, and I don't know enough about the old west to feel comfortable doing a quasi-historic piece, unfortunately. (Last time I attempted such a thing, it got shot full o' holes by someone who knew more basic history than me, pronto!)

I couldn't imagine running a setting as weird as "World Tree," because my players wouldn't take well to reading assignments before they can even start playing.

For a "Slipstream" game (retro sci-fi), I would be more inclined to introduce the game with the heroes either being from something resembling REAL Earth circa the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s or all of the above (people from different time periods), who get sucked into this bizarre setting, OR I'd play it up as being inspired by the 1980s Flash Gordon movie (wouldn't take long to get everyone "up to speed" and extrapolate from there), etc. I would be reluctant to use the official setting and details and expect everyone to be NATIVES of the Slipstream and knowledgeable about the rest of their "universe" from the get-go. Too many alien races to explain, too many factions, too many weird rules. It would be easier to do the Flash Gordon approach and have "ordinary Earthman sucked into new world" with the PCs being normal humans and let them switch to aliens midway once they're more acquainted.

I think the same thing happens with story-writing sometimes. Uhm ... continued in another note.

[jordangreywolf.livejournal.com]

"Big Trouble in Little China" was going to be a very different movie, according to what I'd read of it. Originally, it was going to be set in the old west, and the truck driver was going to be a cowboy instead. Trouble was, the producers thought that was too many steps of removal from normal reality. Old west? That's one step of removal. Old west with SUPERNATURAL elements? That's another step. Old west, but it's Chinatown, so the supernatural elements are from the ORIENT? Whoa, whoa, whoa there, pardner! That's just TOO DADGUM CRAZY!

So it got changed to "modern day" (circa the 80s), our pseudo-hero is a truck driver, and so on. It's a campy movie, worth the watch just for fun awfulness ... or at least, I THINK it is. Honestly, I haven't seen it in ages, so I can't be sure whether it's aged well.

Ahem. Anyway, nowadays, "western with supernatural elements" might not seem quite so crazy, perhaps because "western" is becoming more mythic the further it slips into the past.

I can see how some stories are basically going for the same thing someone goes for in fan fiction when they try to latch onto a familiar genre. That is, if you choose "western epic," you expect most of your audience to already have at least some basic understanding of what to expect there, and what issues there might be to explore. It's just that it doesn't require the offense of grabbing someone else's creative work and laying claim on a recent name ... and you might actually have to do some sort of research so you don't end up a laughing-stock. (Again, my intimidation at writing Deadlands fiction on account of the historical element. I have enough trouble getting pegged on historical inaccuracies when I [i]draw[/i] WW2 soldiers and cowboys and such.)

By comparison, rip off Harry Potter, and the only "research" you need is to read all the books ... though an American author might embarrass by knowing little about the UK, unless the story is suddenly transplanted to America (which in its own way can be embarrassing). And Star Trek? It's ALL made up, and most folks don't "understand" the technobabble anyway. Small wonder it's a popular route to get going. ;)

[rowyn]

I know what you mean about "unfamiliar setting". Running a World Tree game is weird because -- even having done the required reading -- I often feel like there's stuff from the setting I'm not portraying casually enough. Magic isn't at all rare, but how ubiquitious should enchantments be? Are there things people would never bother doing by hand because they'd use magic instead, or would they rather conserve magic for more important things? Or just do it by hand because they ran out of the day's cley and are too busy/impatient to wait for tomorrow? O.o

I'm surprised I got as many takers on the game as I did, actually. But most of them were already fans of Sythyry and the setting already, so it was more of the hand-up that you talk about getting from fanfic than an obstacle. :)

[jordangreywolf.livejournal.com]

This prompts me to think of Sinai and Wild Cards and a few other "shared universe" projects. Wild Cards was amazing at first. I was fascinated in paying attention to the authors of each chapter and the change in tone in the depiction of the same character by other authors (even though at first the authors seemed to mostly just introduce their OWN characters). After a while, I got disappointed when it looked like most of them were "playing fair," but the creator of "Fortunatis" was doing the shared-universe-writing equivalent of "power-gaming" with his own chosen hero, while tearing up others' creations in comparison. (E.g., please forgive me if my memory is fuzzy on this point, but I recall how Golden Boy's wife, even when pregnant, could not be immune to Fortunatis's charms while Fortunatis's writer was at the reins - and Golden Boy would suddenly become a jerk in order to "justify it.")

Er, I digress. The other thing I noticed was that as it went on, the "mythos" got more cluttered, the conflicts and powers bigger, and it looked a lot harder to introduce "smaller" characters to fit in.

Similarly, on Sinai, at first the world was a blank slate. Then, when I got a chance to do things, I kept filling in large parts of the map ... or even starting a world map to begin with. We had struggles over how to portray the Temple: early PCs wanted to solo-roleplay or coop-roleplay with it as the cackling bad guys and Darksiders as misunderstood "loveable rogues." I wanted some sort of Law-vs-Chaos thing going on, where the Law could be FOR you or AGAINST you, depending; it wasn't necessarily good or evil. Later on, some folks (and I contributed to this) started to portray it as more benevolent ... and it was suddenly a break if it turned dark again. Once more precedent had been set, it was harder to strike off in a new direction.

Plus, it meant more of a learning curve for someone new to play, and more creators to consult if you wanted to GM something with someone else's creation.

[rowyn]

The shared universe phenomenon has a lot of pros and cons for it, yupyup.

And I totally hated Fortunatis, too. He reminded me of the authors who ruined Thieves' World for me. Some people just can't play well with others. :P

There's a fine, fine line

[hotspurre.livejournal.com]

To a certain extent, nearly all work is derivative, because it draws from someone else's work, going all the way back to the ancient Greeks. Sure, there are many ways to freshen up old ideas, but when we go too far off of the beaten path, the beaten plots, that's when we find stories that seem unsatisfying and characters that don't seem right. The archetypes are archetypes for a reason.

Of course, the's a difference between "derivative" and "recognizably derivative." You may get a kick out of this train of thought. A few weeks ago I was reading a comic which featured a sort of a “negative-world Justice League” and was unsatisfied with them (not the author’s fault, he was working with established characters.) I just didn’t think they were terribly logical opposites, while still being true to the characters. So as a thought experiment, I came up with an “opposite Batman.”

What seemed logical to me is an extremely adept martial artist who also ran a crime syndicate (he’s absolutely brilliant, that’s what makes sense for an opposite.) He would maintain a secret identity (since that’s crucial to the character,) particularly since his normal identity would be well known. Being cautious, he would keep his secret identity from pretty much everyone, inclusing his underlings. He would probably be a thief and assassin (good opposite qualities,) but since he largely runs his shadow empire, he will only occasionally do jobs himself. But he will, just to keep himself in good shape, and to prove to his underlings he is someone to fear. Speaking of fear, he would be pretty damn scary, and would emphasize this in his costume, etc.

The funny thing about the above description is it almost exactly matches Matt Wagner’s “Grendel.” It makes me wonder if this train of thought went through his head 30-odd years ago, and he decided he liked it enough to change the character enough so there would be no copyright infringement.

Re: There's a fine, fine line

[terrycloth.livejournal.com]

So the opposite of batman isn't an unemployed hobo who strips totally naked and wanders around in broad daylight with a shotgun shooting random innocent people?

Re: There's a fine, fine line

[jordangreywolf.livejournal.com]

I don't know. Spandex doesn't exactly conceal much, so "naked" doesn't seem quite the right opposite. Maybe he'd be more of an opposite if he wore normal clothes, light-colored, but no mask ... except maybe a muffler to cover his lower face. Yeah, that's the ticket!