Apparently this site, unknown to me, has been syndicated on livejournal. So if you have an lj, and want recs to appear on your friends page, go to Templum Bellonae’s livejournal syndication page.

Site Stuff

No, Really by Basingstoke

Atlantis

And its sequel, Yes, Really.

And I thought group sex fic was only found in *Nslash. John, Rodney, Teyla and Ronon are trapped in a cave.

You know, it’s funny how popular a cliché cave sex is, considering how completely unsexy actual caves are…

“There will be neither pee-drinking nor dying on this mission!”

Het // Humour // NC-17 // PWP

Sorry, no new recs right now (although maybe some later tonight—I have a whole load of SGA fics I want to rec, along with some leftover Angel recs I didn’t get around to.) I feel the need to say something about canon authors vs. fanfic, because I’m vaguely annoyed by some critiques of fanfiction as a phenomenon that I’ve read in the past day or two.

First of all, I don’t know why I read these kinds of posts; they almost never make any new points, or put an interesting or original spin on the old points, and yet I continue to subject myself to them. And by “them”, I mean, of course, various non-fanfic fans’ opinions about who writes fanfic, why they write it, whether or not they should be allowed to write it, and whether or not authors are right to be upset by it.

Not that I would ever be likely to come down on the anti-fanfic side, as the existence of this site testifies, but I’d be a lot more inclined to give credence to these pseudo-authoritative analyses if they didn’t almost always seem to start with some variation on “I’ve never really read any fanfic, but…”

Okay, stop right there. You’re going to tell me how fanfic is hurting “real” authors even though you’ve never read any? Oh yeah, there’s an opinion that’s going to be worth listening to. I don’t think one need to be a fan of fanfiction to criticize it, but I don’t think some familiarity with the overall fanfic community is an unreasonable prerequisite to any meaningful discussion of its implications.

That said, author Hal Duncan (whose books I’ve never read, so maybe that makes us sort of even?) had some interesting points to make about why some authors might object to fanfiction being based on their works, even though he himself doesn’t. I don’t think any of them constitute a legitimate reason not to write fanfic, nor are most of them particularly new, but I was…not unimpressed by the way he expressed himself.

The point that was most interesting to me was the one he makes about fanfiction changing our experience of the original narrative. I think he’s right about that, to a degree, but not in a way that’s particularly relevant to a discussion of the legitimacy of fanfiction.

It’s true: fanfic can change the way we experience a piece of fiction. But only good fanfiction, in my experience, and generally only on purpose. But here’s the thing: if a good writer wants to present readers with a new perspective on a canon narrative, she doesn’t need to use fanfiction to do it. I even have an example in mind:

A.J. Hall is the author of the Lust over Pendle series of Harry Potter fanfiction. She also used to have a livejournal where she discussed various fannish things, including some rather compelling essays outlining her reading of Fred and George Weasley as intolerable bullies, and of Neville Longbottom as the victim of bullying and abuse from his family and various Gryffindors. As it happens, after reading her essays I think she is right, but that’s beside the point.

The way she feels about the treatment Neville receives at the hands of his peers is implicit, and sometimes explicit, throughout the LoPiverse. For example, in Second Night, she has Neville tell Draco:

“You can forget school. Given that you behaved like a total little shit—and you did—”

Draco’s squawk of protest was lost as he surged unstoppably on.

“You still had one thing going for you which no-one else in that dump—pupil, staff, cat or ghost—had.”

“Ack?” Draco, it seemed, was too overwhelmed to make his question coherent. Nevertheless, Neville gestured explanatorily in his direction.

“You were the only one in the entire fucking place who treated me exactly the same as he treated Harry.”

The point is, A.J. Hall could have further explored Neville’s history of being abused and bullied through fanfic, and in fact she did, but she also did it explicitly in various livejournal posts (unfortunately no longer available online.) She certainly changed the way I viewed the Harry Potter universe. Fanfiction, when done well, certainly can change a reader’s experience of the original text, but that’s not a quality in any way inherent to fanfiction. Essays about, and critiques of, original texts are perfectly acceptable, and there’s no reason fanfiction should be singled out for disapproval. At least, not for that reason.

But that brings up another point—granted, authors have intellectual property rights over their own creations, and I largely believe it is right that they should do so. The question is, do they have any right to control over the way people experience their texts? A right not to have that experience sullied by unapproved sources? Frankly, I don’t think they do. An author may create a text in order to communicate with an audience, but how an individual reader interprets that communication is not, nor should it be, under the author’s control. To assume that a reader is likely to be more influenced by a piece of fanfiction that by, oh, say, her own life experience is rubbish. To assert that authors worrying about fanfiction tampering with their “one true vision” in the minds of their readers have a legitimate cause for complaint seems to me ridiculous. It also implies things about the validity of the author’s intent versus the reader’s interpretation of a text which I am not particularly comfortable with, but that’s a whole other rant.

I don’t know if I’ve really covered all the reasons why I was so bothered by that particular point in Mr. Duncan’s essay, but this rant is already overly long. Before I end it, I’d just like to mention Parhelion’s intriguing post about the freedom she finds in writing fanfiction, as opposed to original fiction, and to contrast it with an old post about fanfiction and “real” fiction by Andrew Wheeler, which would have annoyed me at most times, but which, coming on the heels of Parhelion’s post, merely seemed laughably ignorant.

Site Stuff