Is FanFiction Any Less Legitimate Than The Source Material.

[FuzzyRaccoon]

maybe I need to read the good fanfic stuff but what engages and inspires me is creativity and fanfic seems to exist for people who wish to write but don't want to invest time into being creative. I mean anyone can take two characters and put them in a room and imagine what they'd say if they have material to work from. Creating characters that people feel so connected to that they feel they could imagine their reactions outside the story they're featured in is a talent. Writing fanfiction is an exercise to bring yourself closer to realizing that talent. If you can write in an interesting, well paced way but you require preloaded templates to begin I would call that being a good technical writer, but for me the heavy lifting that makes a writer different to the average joe is creativity and the ability to build things, rather than make use of the assets someone else has built to move around the pieces and play dolls house with. Will never be as relevant, remarkable or impressive.

if your fanfiction is so good that it doesn't require the source material to have impact, and someone unfamiliar with the character histories and relationships you're sponging off can agree its a good standalone piece, then you should write your own characters. I don't know one serious writer who isn't constantly overwhelmed with ideas for characters and worlds and themes and events they wish they had the time to dedicate to but don't because the ideas come faster than they can be committed to materiality and refined. It's hard to imagine someone with passion and a real fire in their belly and something to say dedicating any time to fanfiction, it would be such a waste of time when one could be developing an idea that might otherwise never be heard. Who could bear to work within the constraints of someone else's world and characters except someone who likes or needs to have their imagination dictated to them. Fine as an exercise to build confidence or as a parody, but it will never be as legitimate as the original.

You say this because you don't actually understand what fanfiction is. Or well actually, you might say this even if you knew but I'll tell you anyway. Fanfiction is primarily a vehicle for writers to fix things that they find wrong in the story. Avenue's unexplored, deaths badly written, political or societal issues that were flubbed. There are so many things that are within that same universe. If you consider the fact that all work is derivative to some degree, why would it matter if you wanted to utilize a world that was already there? Even when people write original stories, to say that they aren't drawing inspiration from things is like proclaiming that they just popped into existence in that moment with no other preconceptions or past experiences in anything and somehow just started writing. It's silly.

And even if you are a writer doing your own world, there are so many stories out there right now that even if yours was GOOD, there's no way of knowing if anyone would actually ever find it.

 

[Something Amyss]

Not inherently, no. It just tends to be. That's not to say there aren't good fanfics or bad books, but there is a trend in which fanfics are worse. I could speculate on a bunch of reasons, but I think the most obvious is that people have an "anyone can do this shit" attitude towards writing.

It's not canon though so probably not as legitimate, however some fanfictions are so damn well written, sometimes much better written than some books that have been published. For example, 50 Shades of Shit start as a fanfiction and was published. I don't know how it got the green light, it's filled with so many writing errors.

I've noticed a lot more books of late seem to be in desperate need of real editing. It's an expense publishers over the last decade or so have seemed unwilling to shell out for. However, I'm not sure it matters with Fifty Shades or similar. I imagine the thing that made them successful wouldn't be enhanced significantly by quality editing. Hell, I'm convinced most people who make books popular don't pay too much attention to editing and consistency.

 

[FuzzyRaccoon]

I've noticed a lot more books of late seem to be in desperate need of real editing. It's an expense publishers over the last decade or so have seemed unwilling to shell out for. However, I'm not sure it matters with Fifty Shades or similar. I imagine the thing that made them successful wouldn't be enhanced significantly by quality editing. Hell, I'm convinced most people who make books popular don't pay too much attention to editing and consistency.

That's something that's increasingly disappointing to me. 50 Shades is seen in such a positive light despite all it's faults and yet I wouldn't be able to convince anyone to pick up a damn Brandon Sanderson novel if my life depended on it.

 

[Something Amyss]

well...whats the difference between fan fiction and a tie-in/ expanded universe novel? quality and being paid for it...

Several of the Star Wars EU books are basically published fan-fic, and not particularly good ones. The real distinction is that one has the license holder's seal of approval. In some cases, that means something, and in others it doesn't. Hell, one of the earliest Star Wars books was blessed by Lucas and is so out of step with the second and third movies that one has trouble believing Lucas gave a crap. Douglas Adams actually had a hand in the oft-maligned HHGTTG movie from 2005. Hell, the fifth book was his doing, too. And now we're talking official tier, but that's neither here nor there.

At the same time, there hjave been good Sherlock Holmes and James Bond stories following the deaths of their authors.

It's a touchy deal.

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

Well, it's not canon, and it usually sucks. Little more than wish fulfillment and self-insertion fantasies most of the time.

 

[Entitled]

But, again, this is all subjective. This isn't the actual author or the original source material rewriting things they realized they originally got wrong. This is a fan who, for whatever reason, disagreed with the original author's writing and believing that they could have written it better.

No, it is one person writing a book, and then another person writing another book, and you claiming that there is an objective way to know that only one of these is an "actual author" and which one is merely "rewriting".

It's not that simple. ALL works, including the ones that we don't identify as "fanfiction", rewrite ideas from previous stories. They reimagine each other's premises, develop each other's genres, evolve each other's character archetypes, subvert each other's clichés, etc.

The choice to treat the ones that happen to reuse character and location identifications, as "unoriginal", yet all other forms of it as still "original IPs" and "source works", is in itself a subjective one, largely a matter of copyright law.

If JK Rowling says Dumbledore is gay, Dumbledore is gay. If some schmuck on the internet says Voldemort is gay, Voldemort isn't legitimately gay according to source material

Voldemort isn't real. It is a concept that appeared in a book, and then similar concepts appeared in several other books.

Saying that the "real" Voldemort isn't gay, is like saying that the "real" Santa Clause is white, or that the real Robin Hood is primarily a swordsman. There is NO real one, and the decision to divide it into legitimate source and illegitimate copying, is an arbitrary choice.

You might as well say that Dawn of the Dead is a more legitimate movie than World War Z, after all, Romero is the source of the zombie genre, the others are just taking and using it, or that Wolfenstein 3D is a more legitimate game than Half-Life, or that Battle Royale is more legitimate than Hunger Games.

Yeah, these examples are not "owned" by the creators of their pairs, but that's an entirely subjective judgement as well. WHY does J.K. Rowling own control over which Voldemorts can be written about? Because the british Copyright Act of 1988 says so. It COULD also say that she owns the whole concept of a wizarding bildungsroman, just as well as it could say that she owns the exact texts that she typed and nothing more.

To claim that it could would be to literally claim that someone could steal someone else's idea and make it their own, simply because people agreed that their take of another person's idea was better executed.

At which point, you are calling writing a form of "stealing", as if by creating more words, I could be making former ones my own. So we reach a situation, where some people's books are so important to be protected, that they deserve to censor other people's ability to publish their own books.

When I'm writing this comment, quoting you, using your words, reinterpreting them, am I making your ideas my own? Am I stealing from you? Or are we communicating with each other, me adding my own thought after yours?

Why should fiction be thought any differently? Why is it so important to declare that if someone writes about a swordsman Robin Hood, and later another about an archer Robin Hood, we need to declare which of the two is a real writer, and which one is just stealing? Why not both?

 

[Padwolf]

I've noticed a lot more books of late seem to be in desperate need of real editing. It's an expense publishers over the last decade or so have seemed unwilling to shell out for. However, I'm not sure it matters with Fifty Shades or similar. I imagine the thing that made them successful wouldn't be enhanced significantly by quality editing. Hell, I'm convinced most people who make books popular don't pay too much attention to editing and consistency.

I agree, that the people who make them popular don't pay attention at all. But the thing is, they would be greatly enhanced by the editing. 50 shades suffers with it's lack of editing. So much so that nothing in it really makes sense at all, especially the parts that it's meant to be famous for. If you read it, and read the sex scenes, the writing is so damn awful that it really can't be passed for a sex scene. The tense changes with every sentence and everything is so jumbled up it makes it impossible to read. And from this it gives other people the idea of "Oh, I could bang out a book like that and make a ton of money from it." And then sadly that's what happens.

I'm sorry. I love a good rant about 50 shades and get carried away. I have far too much to say when it comes to that particular block of tripe (in my opinion anyways)

 

[Entitled]

Not inherently, no. It just tends to be. That's not to say there aren't good fanfics or bad books, but there is a trend in which fanfics are worse.

I wouldn't say that fanfictions are a paralle to books. Saying that the average fanfiction is no worse than the average web original fiction, would seem a lot more meaningful in terms of whether the explicit derivativeness itself lowers quality.

 

[Something Amyss]

I'm sorry. I love a good rant about 50 shades and get carried away. I have far too much to say when it comes to that particular block of tripe (in my opinion anyways)

Eh. I can only talk about it in broad terms. I read a little bit of it, but like Twilight, I never really got out of the free sample. I'm sort of happy that way, too. The writing did put me off. I don't need amazing writing, but there should be some level of quality.

It definitely didn't impress me, that's for sure.

I wouldn't say that fanfictions are a paralle to books.

I would say that a good chunk are written in the novel or short story format, quite often literally so. As such, I apply the same standards I would to those. I treat "web original" stories like I would any other independent or self-distributed media.

 

[IamLEAM1983]

This is legitimately the only thing I hate about Martin. He's part of this enormous group that is painting fanfiction in a bad light. Now okay some of it is bad, but some of it isn't. You've got so many writers trying their hand that statistically that's just going to flippin happen.

If you haven't read any fanfiction, especially not those specific stories that are considered cornerstone-reads for every specific fandom how much can you honestly say about how good/bad the writing is? Hell for all the flowery language of the OP there were so many grammatical errors that it actually was hard for me to get through.

You can point to the big ones like Harry Potter or Naruto and mention how many horrible things have come out of there but... well they're juggernauts aren't they? There are so many works in that that it starts to get hard to even find anything that isn't mediocrity. That doesn't mean that all of them are just going to be bad because you assume and say so.

I'd have to admit I think Martin is right, though.

I started with play-by-post RPGs being set in established universes. I was young and a bit impressionable in my movie choices, so I stuck around with a group of people trying to expand upon stuff like Titan: AE or Treasure Planet.

Before long, I realized I didn't have any fun while pretending to be playing as Cale Tucker's long-lost favorite teacher or an old childhood friend of his. Connecting everything and everyone to main characters that nobody ever used or even put to good use was fairly limiting. With that in mind, I divorced my later characters from the established characters. I'd keep the species, the cultural backgrounds or certain social cues - but generally mold them to fit my own creations. That went better, but something was still missing.

I think it was around June 2003 that I more or less figured I'd fuck it all to Hell and open my own board, based on my own universe and with my own RP rules. I designed the setting so others could contribute, all the while excluding characters and concepts that basically were "Like X from Y, but only W instead of Z."

I've been hard at work with this group for eleven years, and we owe nothing to any pre-established canon. Complete originality is a myth and there's a ton of influences in our common themes, but we try to work on our own. If a TV show or a character inspires me, I try not to let my mind just reach out and copy its psyche. I just let it gestate in the back of my mind for a couple months, until I can break it down and assemble the disparate pieces into something I'd be free to consider as being mine. I've learned not to trust those old impulses that make me go "Oh, snap! Cumberbatch's Sherlock is so cool, I'm going to design a thinly-disguised expy based on him!"

Instead, I'd rather think that the character's interesting, and just wait until I get the idea to try and cobble up different traits from different sources. I Frankenstein my characters into being, most of the time, and I try and make sure I know why a given character has this or that trait. "Because it's awesome" never cuts it. It has to bring something to the story.

Forcing yourself to work on your own makes you look out for other sources, and it gives you a healthy amount of respect for the amount of work that goes into nurturing a few neat ideas into a best-selling franchise. Authors put their work out for the public to consume, but what they create exists in such a way that no amount of effort will make OC's become legitimate. It doesn't speak badly of their quality, it just means that they'll never be considered along the main body of work.

Consider Dacre Stoker's sequel to Dracula. Yeah, the guy happens to be a Canadian Phys. Ed. teacher and also an heir to the Stoker name, but that doesn't make him as skilled a writer as his ancestor. I've had fun imagining Dracula hooking up with Elizabeth Bathory and Mina's son Quincy developing into a Victorian take on Blade - but nothing in that sequel has quite the same amount of power as the original.

What I write has no tangible or "classical" literary value. That much I have to admit. The argument of legitimacy isn't as important as how much enjoyment you derive out of what you do. That's why there's a berjillion unofficial sequels to Dracula - a lot of folks have fun playing around with Stoker's provided game pieces.

That said, being as free as possible from someone else's ideas means you're entering reasonably fresh territory, even if it's just for yourself. If we stick to fun as the base factor, then original creations win, in my book - and I say that after being a franchise-based roleplayer for a long time.

 

[peruvianskys]

First off, yeah, most fan fiction is sub-par when it comes to literary merit, but that's not even the biggest problem. It's that the genre is already buckling under the same old recycled plots and cliched characters without a new movement to legitimize this sort of world piracy. the last thing fans should be doing is encouraging even less originality. Why would be surprised that the genre is so stagnant considering that the fans seem to gravitate towards incestuous rehashing of already established situations that are themselves rehashes in all but name anyway.

 

[FuzzyRaccoon]

I'd have to admit I think Martin is right, though.

I started with play-by-post RPGs being set in established universes. I was young and a bit impressionable in my movie choices, so I stuck around with a group of people trying to expand upon stuff like Titan: AE or Treasure Planet.

Before long, I realized I didn't have any fun while pretending to be playing as Cale Tucker's long-lost favorite teacher or an old childhood friend of his. Connecting everything and everyone to main characters that nobody ever used or even put to good use was fairly limiting. With that in mind, I divorced my later characters from the established characters. I'd keep the species, the cultural backgrounds or certain social cues - but generally mold them to fit my own creations. That went better, but something was still missing.

I think it was around June 2003 that I more or less figured I'd fuck it all to Hell and open my own board, based on my own universe and with my own RP rules. I designed the setting so others could contribute, all the while excluding characters and concepts that basically were "Like X from Y, but only W instead of Z."

I've been hard at work with this group for eleven years, and we owe nothing to any pre-established canon.

Actually there's a lot to talk about in what you've said. A lot of points you bring up. At the end though I think my problem with what Martin said is kind of shown pretty well right here, I'm just looking at the events you're delineating from a different perspective. That is to say, you developed as a writer over time, you grew out of things and you branched out and you found your own style. But at the beginning you did need a bit of help didn't you? If I think of some of the character's I made, the first ones? God they were terrible. So many cliches, too perfect, too tragic. And that's the heart of it there. Those characters are in the past, but they're the forbearers, if I hadn't created them where would I be? I just don't actually feel like that advice on his part is particularly good to young writers. Using it as a crutch is bad, but as far as training wheels go, most people start out needing those.

As to the rest, it is kind of interesting. I suppose legitimacy isn't even what's being debated anymore. Just because the stuff that George Lucas comes out with these days is technically canon because he's the original creator, how many of us can say that we enjoy his latest bout of insanity when it comes to the changes he makes? It's got legitimacy, no one but him can actually say what's what, but the Star Wars fandom is it's own beast these days and they aren't going to accept everything because he says so anymore. I guess to that extent that's one of the real problems that's coming to the fore now, the fear by creators that they don't have complete control over their works anymore. People make money off of videogames through Lets Play, artists make money off Etsy or other sites for selling fan made merchandise, and some fanfic writers are changing up their works to make money like 50 Shades.

As a writer it's kind of scary, as a consumer it's kind of exciting.

 

[FuzzyRaccoon]

First off, yeah, most fan fiction is sub-par when it comes to literary merit, but that's not even the biggest problem. It's that the genre is already buckling under the same old recycled plots and cliched characters without a new movement to legitimize this sort of world piracy. the last thing fans should be doing is encouraging even less originality. Why would be surprised that the genre is so stagnant considering that the fans seem to gravitate towards incestuous rehashing of already established situations that are themselves rehashes in all but name anyway.

I don't agree. I can't really give you examples that aren't slash because that's the big thing these days in fanfiction, but I could certainly provide examples of works that are surprisingly good, long, feel like unique situations and so on. In particular there's a Star Trek fic that's a bit long but it's more faithful to TOS and TNG than the two reboot movies combined. And some of the best cornerstone fics that everyone in that specific fandom needs to read are nothing like rehashes and everything like exploring an AU. In that case how is it any different from 1616 vs 616? Different roads for the same characters, just as viable, just as interesting. Not written by the original author but just because it doesn't have that legitimacy doesn't mean it can't be good or enjoyable.

 

[IamLEAM1983]

As a writer it's kind of scary, as a consumer it's kind of exciting.

That, I think, is part of the allure and threat posed by fanfics. It's not a medium that's easy to just dismiss or accept outright, seeing as you'll see a ton of absolutely horrendous cruft and then spot that one-off gem that somehow manages to combine respect for the source material with the writer's creativity and a well-developed sense of character and plot progression.

At this point, though, I tend to think we've left "Fanfiction" behind and more or less entered what I like to call "Unofficial Anthology" material. Jim Butcher curated two anthologies, for instance - one for vampires on the whole and one for his Dresden Files canon. Structurally, everything that's between those two covers qualifies as fanfiction, but you're basically seeing Laurel K. Hamilton trying her hand at playing with Billy Borden's marriage. The tone shifts, Borden sounds less like the typical Butcher character - but there's a lot of respect and a ton of astute perception of what actually does define the werewolf's character. The words are different, but the soul's the same.

You'll find fanfic authors that manage that, sometimes. They stick to the canon, but they somehow manage to not so much alter it as they'll just shine a different light on it. Another favorite example of mine would have to be "Shadows Over Baker Street", an anthology that makes the Chtulhu Mythos and the Sherlock Holmes canon clash.

It makes no sense, it shouldn't work in any shape or form - but Sherlock is *still* Sherlock, in tone and structure. It's just that in this case, he's already mutated into a Star-Spawn, Queen Victoria is actually an Eldritch Abomination, and the last humans are being hunted down using the detective's tried-and-true process of deductive reasoning. It's a great read, if you're not one of the really strict Baker Street Irregulars.

The problem is, that's pretty rare outside of the published circles. For every fanfic writer that has enough of a solid grasp on his or her chosen material, you've got someone who barely surfs above "My Immortal" after realizing that your average word processor is actually a great way to purge your teenage hormones...

 

[MiskWisk]

It honestly depends on the definition of legitimacy. There are so many variables but in the end, my thoughts are thus:
"Is the story fun to read, well thought out and maintains character traits that are established throughout the story? Yes? Well then I'll give it a look and if it grabs me then I'll enjoy the god damned story regardless of its origins."
There was someone a while ago on a thread about the scrapping of Star Wars EU who came out with a response to the "majority of fanfiction is shit" line with:

The problem with fanfiction is not that the "majority is shit", the majority of EVERYTHING is shit, the problem is that with published media, people have an interest in the best top few stories, and ignore everything else that is shit, while with works that are legally declared to be "fanfiction", there is a desire to mock them by focusing on the shitty average and the infamous nonsense ones, instead of the quality ones.

which I wholeheartedly agree with. The fact that I have found fanfics that I feel handle the story better than canon (admittedly, with the way Naruto has gone, that is about as difficult as finding a better love story than Twilight) may give me a little bias on the matter but in the end I enjoy the stories regardless of legitimacy and that's all that matters to me.

 

[Vault101]

I've read some pretty atrocious tie-in novels. I wouldn't place quality as an automatic difference between them. With licensed tie-ins it's sometimes painfully obvious that the author doesn't know or care about the source material and just wants a paycheck.

true but at least its [i/]more likely[/i] to be technically competent and not filled with terrible "beginner mistakes"

speaking of tie in novels

[quote/]
The first time Captain Jean Luc Picard saw the starship Enterprise he he was struck by the sleekness of her lines. It felt [i/]right[/i] to him that a ship of that size and power should also be beautiful as well. Why shouldn't starships be a demonstration of art as well as strength?

The third time Captain Jean-Luc Picard saw the starship Enterprise, he saw it from a different angle and he realised the designers private joke. A quiet, almost unnoticeable smile played across his otherwise stony visage. Starships were always "she"- but this one was more feminine than most. For some reason, he liked the thought. Mabye later he would think about it some more and wonder why. Since the death of celeste, he hadn't let himself think too much about relationships.- wait what the hell am I reading???[/quote]

[sub/]yes that is a real passage from the novelisation of the first episode of TNG[/sub]