Fanfic discussion on Twitter

Not sure if this will be lost in the world of Twitter but it's worth mentioning.

Initiated by @DelReySpectra

I'm not sure how to get all the relevant posts but try with a search for @delreyspectra

Thoughts? Want to weigh in on Twitter? @JenHeddle, the new LFL editor for Star Wars is contributing to the conversation. She put up some good resources.

 

Gee? If you want to protect your child, keep them home. As soon as you decide to share them with the world (for a profit?), you have to accept that sharing means letting fans write fanfictions.

I liked this because it's kinda how I feel about it. But then @DelreySpectra has a good point:

Ultimately, I think #fanfic will live regardless of authors' intent. But I do think authors' intent should be taken into account by writers

They are never going to stop it, there is no way that could happen. If the MPAA can't stop movie pirating, a single author probably can't do much. Be that as it may, if an author I really love says no fanfic, I probably won't do it.


While I can understand an authors objection in theory, I really don't get it. They don't have to read it or go anywhere near it and in fact they will tell you they can't. But we've all seen how fanfic can help keep a fandom going year and years after something has ended and continue to make that person money. I got into several fandoms because of fanfic and have then gone out an bought the original product because I wanted the cannon events.

 

If it wasn't for fanfiction I don't think I would have bought the last 20 Star Wars novels. Really, there has been very little to like about them. Angst, angst, killing, killing and turning to the Dark Side.

That's not what it should be. Look at what George Lucas made in the '70s and '80s! It was three movies where there were good guys and bad guys and the good guys won and we felt GREAT after watching the movies. I remember watching Luke getting his medal from the Princess in 1977 and just feeling elated.

How many people have felt elated after reading a SW book after VotF? It's like they all have to be angst and hardship.

But I can read a story from RedGold or JediMara77, ginchy or Hazel (I like L/M mush) and feel GOOD!

Okay, I can see George Lucas maybe getting a little peeved at the Vader/Luke slash over at AFF. Some of that stuff is... I don't even know the word for it. But most of the people around here take the characters and give them happy stories.

I think fanfiction is what is keeping this fandom up and running. Personally I think if I became a famous author and I had a fandom I would be cool with that as long as they are not publishing books with my characters.

If you kill your fandom you kill your profits. And I would think that would be counterproductive to any writer.

 

They're tweeting about fanfic? Hmmmmm, I guess fanfic is mainstream, now. I can never find anything on a twitter stream. What does the new LFL editor say?

I think that it's fine for any author to demand that people not post fanfic; writing is a very personal thing after all. And I do think that copyright laws should protect the author as the owner of any profit made from their work. But I don't know how any author could stop it without an army of lawyers, and they still wouldn't get everything that goes underground.

 

I can just see an army of lawyers swooping down on some 18 year old kid writing SW and Grimm crossover fanfiction in their parent's house. If they tried to stop fanfiction we would just set up personal online meeting sites where we email the stuff to each other. It's not as fun as a public forum, but it has been done.

I guess I can sort of see an author being protective of some characters. If I developed a well-loved Mother Teresa-like character with heavy religious overtones...then I probably wouldn't want to see that character used in a DOM/Hurt/slash fanfic in an adult fanfic site. But I don't think that was the case with this particular author since the fans were complaining about the angst he put his own character's through.

I'm just glad for fanfiction. You can ALWAYS find something good to read on TFN.

 

It's probably worth keeping in mind, too, that fanfic was around before the internet. My college library ran an exhibition of local fanfiction a while back, actually. Locally-made fanzines and stuff like that. I didn't get a chance to go see it, but y'know, there you have it.

Interesting to see it up on Twitter though. I guess it's getting bigger and bigger, thanks to the internet. But I'll say that I don't see why authors get upset about it. I know their reasons, sure, but I still don't get it. If my original fiction were popular enough for people to write fanfic about the characters, then I'd consider myself made. =P And very lucky.

 

I don't get authors being negative about fanfiction as a whole.

It's better to give it your blessing, so to speak, and lift up good examples of fan works you approve of (I know that this has happened on occasion in Star Wars universe), so that you can develop a community wanting to be in line with those ideals - better to do that than say no fanfiction absolutely never ever. For one thing you stifle the fanbase significantly.

For another - and this is the larger point to me - is that the people who are writing the really unfortunate stuff don't give a damn about what the author wants anyway. That hardcore Palpatine/Vader/Luke rule 34 fanfic is going to happen whether or not George Lucas says yea or nay. So if fanfiction and fanworks are supported, it becomes much easier for communities... like TF.N ... to develop to self-censor and keep inappropriate fanfiction nicely cornered off.

(Of course, I personally disagree with the no-slash rule TF.N has and hope that when the forum switchover occurs we can lose that rule, because it's one handed down from the forum owners iirc. But by inappropriate I basically mean NC-17 stuff, which thanks to rule 34 is rampant for any and every fandom. ...ever. No seriously. All of them.)

 

I hate twitter, personally. I can't understand what most people are saying most of the time. All those silly codes are just too confusing.

 

And usually they are saying things you really don't care about. Why do I need to know you are at Starbucks getting a coffee and apple danish. Hate social networking in general except these types of forums.

 

Jen Heddle linked to this resource - Fanlore.org. The list of authors who are for and against was pretty interesting. I believe she was responsible for bringing Jim Butcher to Roc (a Penguin imprint). He's supportive of fanfic. There's some interesting quotes from authors about fanfic.

 

Well I do follow @DelReySpectra on Twitter (my handle is @lunatalita) and I did see the fan fiction debacle. Personally, I think the quickest way to alienate your fans is to condemn fan fiction. I wouldn't have bought Star Wars novels, if it hadn't been for fan fictions. Plus, canon is so depressing; people dying, angst, Sith Lords, and writers aren't nearly as creative as they were back then in the 80s. Fan fiction is the only thing that anchored me to Star Wars; other than the original trilogy.

Granted, there are crack!fics out there I'd like to purge out of my memory. But there are also amazing fics that topped the profics. So, there.

 

Actually, a writer has no right to tell any author not to WRITE fanfic, no matter what it is. It's POSTING or PUBLISHING or any other way of passing it around to others is where the complications start.

 

I know, right? It's not like we get ANYTHING out of it other than personal satisfaction and new friends.

 

I'm sorry Del Ray hates Fan fiction, but they've lost my attention after Mara Jade's death. I'm just tired of all my favorite characters being killed off, and I think Timothy Zahn is too. Whenever he writes a new Star Wras story, he never goes in to the future, he goes back to where all the characters are alive or before. Del Ray has killed Star Wars in my opinion!

 

I agree. I hope Zahn does more stories about Luke/Mara. I would enjoy the period from TTT to the Vong War. I hate the Vong War.

 

Del Rey isn't against fanfic. It was George R.R. Martin who said he didn't want fanfic to be written about his works. The Del Rey people were asking for comments on that. Hence, the debate.

 

They don't have fanfiction. At CV I was introduced to Shelly Shapiro who is an editor at Del Rey and one of the people in charge of the SW novels. I was introduced as a fanfic mod here and at first I was freaking out that she would think I was an evil, terrible person but she actually said she liked fanfiction on the whole. That she, of course, couldn't read any of it but liked how it kept people in the fandom and got people writing. We had a nice little conversation about it.




I agree that authors should retain their rights as far as sales, I don't think any fanfic author should have the right to make money off of someone elses characters, but that isn't why most of us do it anyway. We write fanfic because we love the characters and the universes, not to make a profit.

 

I wouldn't take their question as Del Rey has an opinion one way or another about fan fiction. George R.R. Martin is one of their authors and his preference is no fan fiction published for his books. On the flip side, Aaron Allston, also a Del Rey author, has publicly supported fan fiction. They started a conversation about how people feel on the matter.

 

Oh, i misunderstood, Del ray may not hate fan fiction, but it still feels they hate the star wars fans, by killing off all our favorite characters. As for George Martin, I'm not a fan of any of his stories, but if he things fanfiction is only about having the characters getting it on, he's got no idea what fan fiction really is.