Sigh, topics like this depress me. Fan fiction is a term with a legal significance only. It refers to derivative artworks that are based on materials that currently retain copyright and yet do not fall within the boundaries of fair use. The only factor that keep fan fiction from being legitimate is time. In a hundred years (give or take depending on when Lucas dies), everyone will be able to compose and self publish all the Star Wars material they want. Of course, when people make disparaing remarks about 'fanfic' they're referring to the mass of internet published fan-produced material that is often highly derivative, wildly unrealistic, and overall of very poor quality, but that is really being unfare to the concept. It is a statement the legal entities who control liscensing rates have some sort of ability to determine quality, which is absurd. It is entirely possible to write very good fanfiction (it is also possible to write bad fanfiction that gets published and makes millions, see Fifty Shades of Grey). It is even something that properly published writers do (one very good case of which I am aware is the Planescape novel Fire & Dust, which was written unsolicited by James Alan Gardner and then rejected by WotC). If you think Timothy Zahn doesn't have a whole pile of unpublished Star Wars stories lying aroung that never quite got finalized for whatever reason... So really, people who pillory the Star Wars EU for being 'fanfiction' are highly off-base. That's a statement that basically condemns all derivative works of any kind, which is absurd. There's nothing new under the sun. A huge number of great classics are shamelessly derivative ranging from Homer to Shakespeare to everything in between. There are plenty of reasons to criticize many Star Wars EU materials. That they are 'fanfiction' is not one of them.
There is some good fan fiction out there, and I've written fan fiction myself. However, the EU writers, who are often already established in other fields, are subject to editors and publishers' agreements, as well as the trouble of getting an agent and a publisher to even bother looking at their work in the first place. Whereas fan fiction writers can type up their work and post it online without so much as spell check or a beta reader, which is why some of it ends up being as horrific as what I and a couple of others described above. I've found several Padme/Jar-Jar pairings and at least one Shmi/3PO pairing. I wish I were making that up. I'm old, not at all puritanical about sex and it takes a lot to cross my eyes but that will do it. Hardly fair to make the comparison, even among good fan fiction writers and EU writers, that's my point.
This is true, but again it's a legal matter. Lucas liscensing could, if it wished, troll these boards or FF.Net for promising Star Wars stories, contact those authors, assign them editors, and arrange for them to be published after a degree of revision. Yes there is an awful lot of really, really bad self-produced internet published derivative fiction, for whatever genre, but it's bad because someone dashed it off without bothering to even try to write something good, not because it happens to be a derivative work. That's why the argument annoys me, because it uses 'fanfiction' in a fashion that implies a prejorative status by association. People write utterly horrific original fiction and post that on the internet all the time too after all.
okay how did bringing up whether EU is fanfiction or not degenerate into this? in my book, whether EU is fanfiction or not is irrelevant in term of canonicity. EU can be both fanfiction and N Canon at the same time.
There's definitely great fanfiction out there, and it's ridiculous to say otherwise. The only thing that separates fanfiction writers from professional writers is a publisher. It's just much more fun to poke fun at the majority.
(from wikipedia) That's what makes the EU not fan fiction - because it gets published with the Lucas Books label on it, it's officially sanctioned by the original work's creator. eta. And generally, the writing and editing is of professional quality. Obviously, there are exceptions.
Though I was too lazy to check, it appears that there is no synonym for "understatement" in the same manner hyperbole is for "overstatement".
Er, the opposite of the prefix ὑπερ- is ὑπο-, so it'd be hypobole. Duh. (Don't blame me that English has adopted hyperbole and not hypobole).
Yet we are focused on only one corner of the EU within the books and fanfiction. So KOTOR, the Jedi Knight/Jedi Academy games, and The Force Unleashed games fan fiction as well? Comics too... If an artist and a writer plus so many people go in to making a Star Wars comic is it too fanfiction? Sold right next to the Superman novels of the DC Universe.
Well Courtship did have that rather amazing Han line of …”if I were you, I'd go right up there and ask her if she wants to ride on my rancor”
Canon ceased to mean much to me the moment I learned about TCW and the post-NJO (DNT, LotF, and FotJ).
For me, the interesting question would be if all authors can be seen as fans. I recall this one author that, based on their work, apparently didn't really like Star Wars... Karen Miller, on the other hand, writes excellent Ewan McGregor fan fiction.
