This is something of a draft. The reason it’s a draft is that I don’t really feel like cleaning it up now. Of course I also don’t know that it’ll ever get cleaned up at all, since I don’t really have somewhere that a final form of this might fit well. Of course I’ve been known to clean things up just for the fun of it, so I suppose we’ll see.
This is my attempt to explain why fandom so often erupts into patently ridiculous arguments over things like fan fiction pieces depicting characters as being ‘out of character’, or over things like who’s screwing who in a given piece of fiction. It turns out that these sorts of disagreements are almost inevitable due to the way that fandom interacts with source texts.
This revelation was sparked by me eventually sitting down to catch up on my Batgirl. I sort of stopped reading around the beginning of this year, and only recently caught back up. And my reaction was pretty similar to one I had seen elsewhere around the ‘net: ‘What the crap? How could you ruin the character like that?’ This is similar to the reaction I had to what was done with the character of Stephanie Brown back in DC’s ‘Wargames’ arc.
Now, I use the term ‘ruin’ advisedly here. I’m going to attempt to lay out why I think it’s a valid, if subjective, description of what’s going on.
I admit that I’m projecting my own media consumption habits onto fandom at large, but I think it may be a valid projection. When I start a new piece of media one of the things my mind immediately begins to do is anticipate some possible directions for the story to go. Some of these are more interesting to me than others.
Generally these threads are differentiated primarily by thematic content. Most fictional characters are complex enough to potentially deal with multiple themes, but I’m only interested in a subset of those themes. I don’t want to (for instance) read another rags to riches story right now. And if I start a story, and I see that you’ve got a great setup to deal with the theme of ‘What is it to be human?’ and instead your story follows some other, less interesting theme, then you bet I’m going to be disappointed. To some degree, I will judge you as having ‘squandered’ your great oppurtunity and ‘ruined’ a perfectly good story.
This sort of analysis and criticism is, from my limited experience, a common occurance in fandom discussions (though perhaps not articulated in quite this way). I see them more often in multi-authored works (like comics), possibly due to the fact that it’s openly acknowledged that no one has absolute authorial authority.
I’ll return to my Batgirl example. I’ve really, really been a big fan of the Batgirl comic (which I’ve discussed before). I think that Cassandra Cain is/was a character full of massive potential for the telling of stories about a number of fascinating (to me) themes: value as a human vs value as someone who gets things done, learning to be human/what it is to be human, the masks we wear in society, and providing an almost child-like view of adult society. This bundle of themes is terribly compelling to me.
But what they’ve done with her in the fiction recently has had nothing (or at least little) to do with these themes. Further, they fictional interactions have made it more difficult to address these themes. It has pulled the thematic content of the fiction away from these themes. This, to me, is a ruination of potential. The tools and context were in place to address what I find interesting, but those tools and context were used to do something else instead, something I don’t much care about.
To bring this back to my original topic: people dislike certain types of fanfiction, or at least certain sub-genres/pairings/whatever for the same reason. We are compelled by a limited subset of the themes from the source text, but more themes than those are there. It’s just that we don’t care about them.
And when someone tells a story that utilizes the uninteresting themes at the cost of the interesting ones, it’s a clear indication that the author does not properly understand what the character is all about. The author has hit upon the unimportant parts of the character, and in doing so has missed what really matters.
The problem with this is that different people find different aspects of the character compelling. Returning yet again to the Batgirl example, I am sure that some people are pleased as punch with the direction the story has gone. It explores an array of themes, which I’m sure people want to explore. It just happens to not be a set of themes that I much care about, and especially not an array of themes that I would want to explore at the cost of exploring the ones I listed above.
So, to summarize: objections to certain types of fan-fiction come, at least in part, from natural disagreements over what makes a character compelling. Since fandom tends to discuss authors ‘ruining’ or ‘breaking’ certain characters from source texts, it is only natural that this sort of discussion is carried over into criticism of fan-fiction. But in fan-fiction the buffer of authority is no longer in place, the characters are no longer the author’s to ‘ruin’. ‘Ruining’ a character in a fan-fiction piece is not just a sad choice on the part of an author, it is a violation of the character itself.
(Quick aside, this phenomenon is one of the reasons that I consider Baen Books’ execution of online sales to be a piece of marketing brilliance. The first 20% or so of every book they sell is available online for free. This is just enough text to establish the context for a huge number of potential themes. I often find myself enthralled by the setup, only to buy and finish the book disappointed.)
Thomas
I think I can mostly get on board with this idea. I’m not really the least bit into fan-fiction of any established works, myself. As a whole, I actually find the idea rather silly. I’ve not really examined my reasons for feeling this way, but I think I’ve always felt so. (a notable exception comes to my mind of a sudden: the “Last Days of F.O.X.H.O.U.N.D.” webcomic at gigaville.com is one I find amusing, and I really like it’s take on the more serious elements of the story)
Where I’m really feeling you though is with the “official” stories and how they change. I enjoyed “Serenity”, but was also incredibly disappointed with it. I felt they slapped together a story and cheapened it.. Rather than exploring the themes I was interested in exploring, they took the least important parts of them, dashed them together with a few action sequences, and basically “ruined” them. My friends who got me into Firefly enjoyed the movie quite a bit though, and don’t feel that anything was ruined. As for me, I find myself clinging to the bit of rumor that the Serenity movie and the Firefly series are different intellectual properties, not simply because they killed off one of my favorite characters, but in hopes that, if the series ever runs again, they’ll be able to explore those themes for real, without even paying lip service to the shoddy job in the movie.
I think that’s fundamentally correct. I also think that when it comes to fanfic, in addition to the absence of a “buffer of authorial authority,” there’s also often an additional sense of entitlement due to the fact that the fiction is being produced in the context of a community with a “by us – for us” ethos.
When the original author “ruins” a character’s plot arc, you sometimes see fans saying dismissive-yet-forgiving things about the author’s need to cater (or even “pander”) to a mass audience. I see this particularly often in discussions of television shows: the idea is that the show’s writers need to stay in the good graces of the mass audience (or the sponsors, or the networks, or some other external group) in order to ensure their ratings and stay on the air. So while fan outrage is common over unpopular developments, it’s also sometimes mixed with a certain degree of resignation.
Fanfiction, on the other hand, is produced “by fans for fans.” Of course, all fans don’t want to see the same things! People tend to forget that, though: they have this tendency to assume that whatever the favored reading is within their particular circle must be some kind of universal “fan preference.” When they run across fanfic that violates those expectations, therefore, there’s often a more personal edge to their outrage, one that combines a sense of entitlement with a sense of something very akin to personal betrayal. “This person was one of us! She was supposed to be writing a story for me! But just look at what she did instead!”
(BTW, would you mind if I brought this post to the attention?)
of the maintainers of
First, I don’t mind at all. (And in the future you don’t need to ask… *grin*.) I’m all for having other people thinking about what I’m thinking, especially if they’ll share their thoughts with me.
I mean, your point about pandering/resignation is an excellent one, and something I’d definitely cover (and even expand upon) in a cleaned up version. Actually, it provides some interesting direction for an entirely new article… Hmmm…
And the ‘by fans for fans’ thing is also a good point. It’s so easy to think of fandom as monolithic, even when we know better…
Thomas