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Sham bam bamina! posted:What I can't stand is when people need Paradise Lost to be fanfiction in order to validate themselves for all the fanfiction they read and all the books they don't – a dissonant combination of trying to legitimize fanfiction by conflating it with the classics and at the same time trying to take the classics down a peg, effected by conflating fandom and spirituality in a way that really turns my stomach – which might not be what everyone in the thread is doing but which I've seen drearily often regardless. I don't think that "high culture" is something that needs to be "inviolate" and uncontaminated by the rabble, but I do think that serious art does something that fanfiction is fundamentally uninterested in; it tries to bring you beyond yourself in some way, rather than give you more of what you already know you like. This has nothing to do with what I enjoy or don't enjoy (I can't stand War and Peace or Infinite Jest precisely because of their ambitions, and I like a fair amount of pulp that takes the "give them what they want" approach that divabot correctly mentioned as a common quality of pulp and fanfiction), and plenty of "literary" fiction is similarly hidebound by its own sets of tropes (everybody loves dunking on the "horny mid-life crisis" epidemic that John Updike and Philip Roth kicked off), but fanfiction is never going to produce a Shakespeare or a Dante, no matter how insistent the comparisons, because the superficial similarities don't change that they were driven by deeply different impulses from what drives fandom. Shakespeare was driven by the impulse to gets paid, which is rarely a possiblity in fandom, I'll give you that much.
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Jan 22, 2021 19:28
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Tenebrais posted:Dante not having access to the right websites is the only reason none of the circles of hell involve being vored by a six-titted cow-woman There is one that involves people merging with dragons and snake monsters plus lots of involuntary human-reptile shapeshifting and bodies melting like wax, and I'm pretty sure there are fetish webcomics about just that.
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Jan 22, 2021 20:25
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Cornwind Evil posted:99.99% of the time, racism is a moral failing. With Lovecraft, I really truly feel the man was deeply mentally sick. Like, if you could somehow magically take away his racism (but the racist has to legit want to give it up), I think he'd have gone for it. Its sort of a both/and situation. Feeling that the world isn't as it should be and fearing your own powerlessness in the face of it is a pretty common anxiety, and bigotry is a widely promoted excuse for why things aren't right. Holding onto your racism or misogyny end up being a lot of people's first step into believing that evidence is just proof of conspiracy, and if you've got other mental health issues ramping up your fear an anxiety then the more you'll obsess over what what you perceive the problem to be. As for fanfic, what a lot of people fail to understand, or deliberately to do to score cheap points, is that it serves two functions- 1. its an easy outlet to practice writing, and a lot of people use it just for that. They work on the basics, they play with genre and form, and they practice their art. If you want to draw a comparison to great masters, a better one would probably be painters and sculptors copying the work of masters who came before in order to improve their skills. Fanfic does a lot of that and the real limit on it is mostly in what it chooses to reflect; I've read some very good rewrites of films, but no literary masterworks. The really talented writers in that community Ive come across, I felt would benefit greatly from a strong creative writing course and exposure to better writers. The real issue is that fanfic as a community is really amateur, not that its base on other works. 2.Filling a desire the commercial market isn't which is mostly porn. Theres noble parts to that like an expression of honest desire from queer people and women who were marginalize from conventional pornography outlets. And there's a bunch of weird fetish poo poo for which there is very little market so free stuff on the internet is pretty much all you got. Theres some overlap between 1 and 2, but they usually just pull a story into different directions. there wolf has a new favorite as of 21:21 on Jan 22, 2021 |
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Jan 22, 2021 20:44
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there wolf posted:As for fanfic, what a lot of people fail to understand, or deliberately to do to score cheap points, is that it serves two functions- 1. its an easy outlet to practice writing, and a lot of people use it just for that. They work on the basics, they play with genre and form, and they practice their art. If you want to draw a comparison to great masters, a better one would probably be painters and sculptors copying the work of masters who came before in order to improve their skills. Fanfic does a lot of that and the real limit on it is mostly in what it chooses to reflect; I've read some very good rewrites of films, but no literary masterworks. The really talented writers in that community Ive come across, I felt would benefit greatly from a strong creative writing course and exposure to better writers. The real issue is that fanfic as a community is really amateur, not that its base on other works.
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Jan 22, 2021 23:22
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Yeah, I think that's well-stated. Fanfic is fundamentally amateur hobby writing, which is perfectly fine, but the nature of the modern fanfic scene is not really conducive to development of craft or serious creative ambition -- partially because the community is focused on positive reinforcement instead of constructive criticism (it's often considered rude to leave any criticism on a stranger's story, which has led to very little healthy critique culture), and partially because the major creative goal of fanfiction is to create comfortable familiar experiences for the reader, building off of established characters/plots/tropes instead of creating one's own and doing the hard work of building reader investment. Like other forms of pulp, you're basically creating a delivery system for known ideas, which is perfectly reasonable if that's your goal but isn't really going to develop your skills or create stuff of lasting interest.
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Jan 22, 2021 23:35
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Sham bam bamina! posted:I don't think that "high culture" is something that needs to be "inviolate" and uncontaminated by the rabble, but I do think that serious art does something that fanfiction is fundamentally uninterested in; it tries to bring you beyond yourself in some way, rather than give you more of what you already know you like. Sounds like someone's unfamiliar with the fanfiction works of Eliezer Yudkowsky! 
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Jan 22, 2021 23:36
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I think I do agree with the practice by copying point fundamentally, but there is one obvious difference. Someone copying a famous artwork is presumably copying something of the technique, whether that is the actual painting style, the eye for anatomy, or whatever. Does fanfiction really copy the style or craft of the original? It seems to me it usually copies the subject matter while using totally different styles. Kind of like imitating the brushstrokes of a portrait verseus sketching the subject on a trip to the beach.
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Jan 22, 2021 23:56
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It's not particularly concerned with prose but is obsessed with emulating characterization. In your specific version of the painting analogy, it's "the eye for anatomy" but not "the actual painting style". (I would argue that it's more like learning anatomy from How to Draw Manga than from an actual art class, but I don't want to be too much of a prick here.)
Sham bam bamina! has a new favorite as of 00:09 on Jan 23, 2021 |
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Jan 23, 2021 00:06
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Strategic Tea posted:I think I do agree with the practice by copying point fundamentally, but there is one obvious difference. People regularly paint images of fruit in a bowl to practice their painting skills. It’s even a trope and happens for real in art schools. This is people practicing their art by using the same subject. The person above talking about the only-positive-feedback response is absolutely correct though. Or at least I thought so until twilight, ready player one, etc.
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Jan 23, 2021 00:13
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Fandom also has the benefit of having an extremely low barrier of entry. To use the painting metaphor as an example, even amateur painters have to invest in canvasses, paints, paint brushes, and while there are cheaper options available, they won't necessarily produce something as nice looking as more expensive materials would. Conversely, it doesn't matter if you're using Word, Google Drive, Open Office, or Scrivener: the end product will always be a bunch of words on a screen. Publishing is a matter of having an email and hitting some buttons. Anyone can just wake up, create an account, write something down, and publish it. Strategic Tea posted:I think I do agree with the practice by copying point fundamentally, but there is one obvious difference. The trouble I find with most fanfic is that they don't copy the original style (which would be difficult to do for non-written source material, although authors can try to imitate other aspects such as character voice, tone, etc), it's that they're often just copying each other's style. Spend enough time in AO3 (and I have!) and you'll start to notice writing quirks getting repeated across different stories by different authors. I assume this is because most fanfic writers don't read anything but fanfic.
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Jan 23, 2021 00:29
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Yeah, AO3 House Style is definitely a thing, reinforced by the fact that fanfiction culture is very insular and a lot of writers only read fanfic (or fanfic-adjacent writing, like the tropey YA and SF/F stuff that fans-gone-pro often produce). Fanfic is extremely samey, which in many ways is the worst thing about it; I used to love reading random garbage fanfic, because you could find nuggets of compelling weirdness, but these days most of it's just so boring.
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Jan 23, 2021 01:20
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Strategic Tea posted:I think I do agree with the practice by copying point fundamentally, but there is one obvious difference. It does, but how much really depends on the fandom. Having a consistent, distinctive a style in the source material, and how important that feels to the tone of story matter a lot, so does just having a big fandom that attracts more good writers who care enough to do it. There is a lot of LOTR fic that does try and sound like Tolkien, and a lot of MCU fic that tries to do Whedons snappy dialog. It can also go the other way, with particular authors styles becoming tropes themselves, Jane Austin probably being the most popular one. But Sisal is right that there's also a fanfic style, that's more akin to a genre style and its becoming more common as fan-sites becoming more centralized. Most people write fic as a hobby and aren't really interested in pushing their skills, so they aren't really going to go out of their way too much to try something different.
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Jan 23, 2021 01:35
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Yeah, fanfic is fine as a hobby, there's nothing wrong with reading and writing fanfic, much like there's nothing wrong with ordering pizza every once in a while. But the whole, "Dante's Inferno is fanfic," nonsense is just people desperately looking for an excuse to not expand their own horizons or think about what might exist outside their own little world.
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Jan 23, 2021 01:42
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Where does Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's book Inferno fall? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inferno_(Niven_and_Pournelle_novel) (Reading the summary I forgot they found L Ron Hubbard down there)
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Jan 23, 2021 02:17
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Based on that summary, I'm gonna go with "bad"
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Jan 23, 2021 02:55
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Antivehicular posted:Yeah, AO3 House Style is definitely a thing, reinforced by the fact that fanfiction culture is very insular and a lot of writers only read fanfic (or fanfic-adjacent writing, like the tropey YA and SF/F stuff that fans-gone-pro often produce). Fanfic is extremely samey, which in many ways is the worst thing about it; I used to love reading random garbage fanfic, because you could find nuggets of compelling weirdness, but these days most of it's just so boring. Doesn't help that a lot of fanfic is then frequently copying, commentating on, or ripping off each other. It's the nature of the beast with engagement-based online content really, like all those dumbass TikTok fads, or to get older, webcomics. Gets particularly funny when people hop fandoms and basically bring all of the same habits with them, down to character archetypes and voices to the point where they become interchangeable. Still, a lot of it is amateur writers trying to fill niches left empty with content appealing, sometimes very specifically, to them and their circles. Like the anime boom in the 90s when there was a large chasm between 'this is for kids' and 'this is for grown-ups' that it took foreign media to properly bridge, though western animation had certainly been trying, and that became the basis for so much fandom content because it explored themes and ideas that other things weren't. Also doesn't help it's usually written by teenagers and general shut-in nerds who are marinating in the stuff to get ideas and maintain enthusiasm.
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Jan 23, 2021 04:06
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you can tell how human centipede a fandom is by how many fanon concepts end up being created which aren't in the original work
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Jan 23, 2021 04:14
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I want only this, that the wiki never possess the fan.
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Jan 23, 2021 04:36
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Tunicate posted:you can tell how human centipede a fandom is by how many fanon concepts end up being created which aren't in the original work That's a feature, not a bug. Fandom is by its definition a very communal space, for better or worse. I think that's what makes fan works so appealing, is not just that there's a built-in audience but that there's a community willing to interact with the work. Often it's just "I think this is neat" and "wow! I agree! I would like to write about that as well!" It's usually pretty harmless stuff.  That said, I will say that I've seen the darker sides of fandom. When you get into the horny stuff, that's usually where it goes off the rails. Sisal Two-Step has a new favorite as of 05:00 on Jan 23, 2021 |
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Jan 23, 2021 04:58
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Sisal Two-Step posted:That's a feature, not a bug. Fandom is by its definition a very communal space, for better or worse. I think that's what makes fan works so appealing, is not just that there's a built-in audience but that there's a community willing to interact with the work. Often it's just "I think this is neat" and "wow! I agree! I would like to write about that as well!" It's usually pretty harmless stuff. That's their secret They're all horny
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Jan 23, 2021 05:51
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Patrick Spens posted:Yeah, fanfic is fine as a hobby, there's nothing wrong with reading and writing fanfic, much like there's nothing wrong with ordering pizza every once in a while. But the whole, "Dante's Inferno is fanfic," nonsense is just people desperately looking for an excuse to not expand their own horizons or think about what might exist outside their own little world. I mean I think the problem is people refuse to deal with Dante’s inferno for what it was and it’s kind if the same with Shakespeare, putting it up on a pedestal it really doesn’t belong on instead of looking at the context of what it was. Though that’s more a problem with it in general it seems to be more a vechile for kids these days rather than the more realistic those were the pizzas of their days
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Jan 23, 2021 13:56
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Yeah, with a lot of the writers being literal children and teenagers and how the critical culture of the 00s internet turned toxic and Helldumpy super quick, after a while I think people quietly realised it had become kicking over sandcastles.
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Jan 23, 2021 14:09
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CharlestheHammer posted:I mean I think the problem is people refuse to deal with Dante’s inferno for what it was and it’s kind if the same with Shakespeare, putting it up on a pedestal it really doesn’t belong on instead of looking at the context of what it was. Though that’s more a problem with it in general it seems to be more a vechile for kids these days rather than the more realistic those were the pizzas of their days Yes, those were the pizzas of the day, perhaps, the problem with the comparisons made itt is that fanfic isn't the pizza of today, it's Play-Doh baked in an Easy-Bake Oven. The pizza of today is what the general public actually reads.
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Jan 23, 2021 14:15
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steinrokkan posted:Yes, those were the pizzas of the day, perhaps, the problem with the comparisons made itt is that fanfic isn't the pizza of today, it's Play-Doh baked in an Easy-Bake Oven. The pizza of today is what the general public actually reads. Where would you fit 50 Shades Of Grey into this? It's trashy and worthless and a smash-hit bestseller that got several movies. And a fanfiction with the serial numbers filed off.
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Jan 23, 2021 14:35
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Thus nicely illustrating that the difference between fanfiction and popular fiction is that one has a publisher.
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Jan 23, 2021 14:37
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Seems like a couple of people itt just poo poo themselves in rage every time they hear the word "fanfiction".
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Jan 23, 2021 14:46
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any story that possesses elements of the real world in it is fanfic for the real world fandom
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Jan 23, 2021 15:13
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OwlFancier posted:Thus nicely illustrating that the difference between fanfiction and popular fiction is that one has a publisher. Nah. Unless by popular fiction you mean genre fiction, in which case there is a clear fanfiction to published fiction pipeline, but that ignores the vast majority of what is printed and sold, not to mention how those writers got to the point of finding a publisher, and also speaks of the really poor state of genre fiction (which is sadly nothing new) as the refuge for people who don't really like to explore anything new and are content with just rehashing the same stuff over and over again, as somebody mentioned about fanfic earlier in the thread. steinrokkan has a new favorite as of 15:32 on Jan 23, 2021 |
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Jan 23, 2021 15:26
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Djeser posted:any story that possesses elements of the real world in it is fanfic for the real world fandom I wouldn’t call myself a fan of the real world tbh
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Jan 23, 2021 15:40
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I think the bigger problem is people (at least online) are a bit to obsessed with labeling everything. Stuff has to be high or low art to mean something. It’s like the tedious are video games art discussion. The correct answer is who cares.
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Jan 23, 2021 16:18
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Looking around from the context I'm guessing there's more of a culture clash over fanfiction than I realized when I kramered in. More fool me for being an outside observer and not engaging with the fanfic scene for good or ill. Though in the plus side this means I'm fortunate enough not to have dealt with the fanfiction scene. CharlestheHammer posted:I think the bigger problem is people (at least online) are a bit to obsessed with labeling everything. Stuff has to be high or low art to mean something. It’s like the tedious are video games art discussion. The correct answer is who cares. This is probably the correct answer tbh
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Jan 23, 2021 16:26
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literature is when i stub my toe, fanfic is when you fall down a hole and go to destiel double car hell
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Jan 23, 2021 16:43
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The car went to heaven, actually. Anyway a lot of 50sog's structural problems are the result of it being fanfic with the serial numbers filed off. The weird, pointless, go-nowhere plot threads; the long chapters where conflicts are introduced and then immediately resolved; the repetitive porn scenes that feel tacked on; superfluous characters who have no personality and who develop immediate connections to each other for no reason; etc. The weird, meandering, episodic structure of each chapter is pretty common in a fanfic that updates weekly in order to keep itself visible in fanfic.net's "recently updated" page, or to keep itself on the top page of the fandom. A lot of this stuff could've been fixed--the story was basically complete at the time of publishing!--but EL James apparently dug her heels in and refused to make any major changes to the original manuscript. She got the original editor removed from the project and switched to someone she worked better with (which I'm assuming means someone she could push around). The superfluous characters is what gets me, though. Do we really need Christian Grey's little sister? Does his little sister really need to have a tacked on romance with Ana's roommate's brother? Does Ana's roommate need to have a romance with Christian's older brother? Well, yes, because this is Twilight fanfiction and all those characters are the Cullenses. Authors don't have to bother fleshing out characters in fanfic when they're introduced, because all of that was done in the original work. None of these characters add anything or do anything to impact the plot but it doesn't matter, because they're the Cullens and they need to be there because it's fanfic. loving Jose basically disappears after the first book. I bet one of the original notes on the manuscript was "remove/combine some of these characters". There's no reason why Ana's roommate couldn't have been the one kidnapped at the end of the story. It would've actually been better because Ana (in theory) likes her roommate and it would be a more personal connection to her.
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Jan 23, 2021 16:56
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I genuinely thought this poo poo was self-evident and not really a value judgment either way, whether towards classical derivative works or modern fanfic. Just an observation, albeit a wry one. And ngl it was funny as hell seeing people get, from my perspective, irrationally and increasingly irate over the equivalent of pointing out that Christmas borrows a bunch of old pagan traditions. But if there actually is a "movement" of fanfic writers who take that observation way too seriously then, well lol
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Jan 23, 2021 17:01
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Sisal Two-Step posted:The car went to heaven, actually. I had a brief thought of "someone should rewrite 50 Shades as if EL James had a competent editor" but it would still be trash even if it wasn't obvious twilight fanfiction
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Jan 23, 2021 17:32
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That urge to rewrite things in a better or more personal way is, I think, the core motivation behind both fanfic and things which are not fanfic but some people jokingly call fanfic. When I was watching Star Trek TOS as something to do during lockdown, I would frequently come away from an episode wanting to fix its obvious flaws, and it's the sort of impulse that comes up a ton in a bunch of different places. There was some horror-story of an RPG setting someone was describing (I think on SA, in fact) and everyone I showed it to went "wow that's hosed up, but if you just changed some things..." in conclusion, reinvention is both human nature, and a land of contrasts
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Jan 23, 2021 18:02
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If a piece of media or idea space affects you then wanting to pursue something creative in the same cognitive space is a pretty normal way to further experience that space.
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Jan 23, 2021 18:11
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Xarbala posted:I genuinely thought this poo poo was self-evident and not really a value judgment either way, whether towards classical derivative works or modern fanfic. Just an observation, albeit a wry one. And ngl it was funny as hell seeing people get, from my perspective, irrationally and increasingly irate over the equivalent of pointing out that Christmas borrows a bunch of old pagan traditions. So what it really happened is that a lot of the early criticism of internet fanfiction was entirely that it wasn't valid because it was so immediately derivative of other works. So people responded by pointing out experimenting with cannon is a practice as old as literature and many famous works do just that. Some people really latched hard onto that comparison, and they're pretty dumb. And some people pop their loving monocles at the very idea that you could draw any sort of connection between Dante and My Immortal, and they are equally dumb.
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Jan 23, 2021 18:26
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steinrokkan posted:Nah. Unless by popular fiction you mean genre fiction, in which case there is a clear fanfiction to published fiction pipeline, but that ignores the vast majority of what is printed and sold The majority of what is printed and sold is genre fiction. Romance and mystery novels are the two best-selling market segments, at least in the English-speaking world, followed closely by historical novels. Science fiction and military novels also make up a big percentage of book sales. My recollection is that you’re from Norway, so the relative percentages might be different, but mystery and crime novels are very big there, right?
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Jan 23, 2021 19:45
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CharlestheHammer posted:I think the bigger problem is people (at least online) are a bit to obsessed with labeling everything. Stuff has to be high or low art to mean something. It’s like the tedious are video games art discussion. The correct answer is who cares. If I recollect, the high/low distinction is a relatively recent distinction although pre-online. Mark Twain spoke about sailors reading Shakespeare (which in turn has a lot of crowd-pleasing moments for the mob).
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Jan 23, 2021 20:51
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