Fanfiction

OTW Fannews: Cultural Triggers

While in some places fanfic writers are getting arrested, in others the concern is instead about how fans could be ruining pop culture. "Mr. Rushfield laments that fan culture is set in its ways and does not want to be challenged. I think this is an oversimplification...Yes of course, some fans will never be happy. Some fans say and do things I find shocking and disrespectful, but I think that this is a very small minority...To think that this subset of fans is the driving force behind any artistic decisions, is not giving enough credit to writers and producers in entertainment."

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OTW Fannews: The places fanfiction goes

NYU's student newspaper decided to feature fanfiction with a particularly local angle -- fanfiction set on its campus. "Remember when you were waiting for your acceptance letter? Whether NYU was your dream school or just your safety, you’d catch yourself longing for the city, dreaming of the day when you’d leave your home for the magic of New York...You weren’t the only one dreaming. In fact, some would-be students have dedicated hundreds of pages to their NYU-centric fantasies. So focused are these writers’ efforts that NYU Fanfiction has swelled into its own thriving—if slightly inaccurate—genre."

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OTW Fannews: Fanfiction, where can you find it?

College newspapers are a constant source of stories on fanfiction, but The Varsity tried to take a more comprehensive look at the practice, noting that "fan fiction predates the Internet. In fact, amateur press associations, which first flourished in the early decades of the 20th century, provided a way for aspiring writers to put together and share their own magazines and works of fiction. A distribution manager or official editor would collect the magazines and letter publications and send them to other members of the association. In the 1930s, fans of science fiction magazines printed their own mimeographed or hectographed works which contained their own reviews, printed fiction, and even art."

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OTW Fannews: Fair Use and the Modern Fan

On the Media aired an episode on the Past, Present and Future of Ownership, which included a number of good stories, including discussion of the art piece 'DRM Chair' "that collapses after just eight uses." Host Brooke Gladstone concluded with an observation on the origins of the word 'property.' "Eight hundred years ago or so, property’s meaning was pretty much related to the essential nature of something, as in it’s the property of water to conform to the shape of the vessel it’s in. The fact is property didn’t come to mean possession until the 17th century...Now our world runs on property...Once we dwelled in a brick-and-mortar world. Now, as poet Kenneth Goldsmith observed, we swim in a digital ocean. The only certainty is that in such a fluid situation, 20 years hence, property will not mean what it means today." (Transcripts available)

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OTW Fannews: Fanfiction's here to stay for everyone

The past months have produced a rash of discussions on fanfic ranging from the critical to the deeply personal. The Telegraph kicked this off with a complaint about derivative works. "To take entirely against fan fiction is pointless, not least because it’s clearly here to stay...Nor is being derivative necessarily a sin – after all, the writer who tries to create work from inside an influence-free vacuum would probably never type a single word." However, using someone else's building blocks and using only those blocks are "the difference between writing that pays homage to another’s work, and writing that robs that work wholesale of plot, theme and characters."

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OTW Fannews: Fandom's role in creation

At Slate, Tammy Oler lauds writer Hugh Howey's approach to dealing with fans in a piece discussing the success of his self-published sci-fi novel. "Most intriguingly, Howey has encouraged readers who want to develop their own Wool stories to self-publish and sell their works. In an interview, I asked Howey about why he’s not just encouraging fan fiction but actually endorsing it. 'There’s room for readers to become writers and play in this world,' he said. 'I view fan fiction as the opportunity to teach readers how much joy there is in creating worlds instead of just living in them.' Right now—much to Simon and Schuster’s chagrin, one has to imagine—the first two of what are sure to be many Wool-related fan fiction stories are available for sale on Amazon."

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OTW Fannews: Authors talk fanfic and fandoms

The Salt Lake Tribune talked fanfiction misconceptions with newly published author Christina Hobbs, who says it's a mistake to think "[t]hat there’s a specific type of people who read and write fan fiction — scientists, business professionals, teachers and people who are well-educated to people who haven’t gone to college are all part of it. It’s not just women. It’s not just men. It’s not a certain age group. You have this huge group of people who want to write and read for others, and that’s what’s so amazing about it."

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OTW Fannews: Living with fanfiction

  • An article from the Oakland Tribune provided a good exploration of fanfiction and the activities of people who write it. "The online communities -- fandoms -- are vast and develop their own guidelines, techniques and even vocabularies. People write about, talk about, have mini conventions about, make videos about and even edit each other's stories about everything from favorite novels, TV shows and comic books to Japanese anime and mangas, poems, video games or popular songs...'It's really big, it's really diverse, and if you've only seen one little slice of it, you haven't seen anything.'" The piece also featured discussion with OTW Legal Chair Betsy Rosenblatt, and mentions OTW projects the AO3 and Fanlore.
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OTW Fannews: Is it Fanfic or Isn't It?

Not that fans haven't always known about published works that have had their serial numbers filed off, but apparently the wider world is taking notice. Book Riot took a tongue-in-cheek look at YA literature to speculate on which of its works might secretly be fanfiction. "By now we know that Twilight spawned not one but TWO works of fan-fiction that became hot publishing properties...What’s super-amusing about this is that all the books in the Twilight series are Stephenie Meyers’ fan-fiction-y versions of her favorite classics...I have a feeling there’s more popular YA out there that’s secretly fan-fiction and am going to put on my Girl Detective hunting cap and jump right in and start guessing." Among her choices: "The Fault in Our Stars is just Dawson’s Creek if both Pacey and Joey had cancer" and "Matched by Ally Condie is obviously just fan-fiction for The Selected Works of Dylan Thomas."

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OTW Fannews: Fandom invisibility

  • While there have been a number of comedy troupes around the world doing shows based on fanfic readings, they have largely used fanfic written specifically for the shows by the performers themselves. A recent review of Black Swan Comedy in Toronto, a monthly comedy series focusing on fan fiction, made clear that the performers were reading material pulled from online sources instead. "'We find the best/worst fan fiction. We'll read it once to know that it's perfectly bad at the start, and then find out how horrible it is on stage together with the audience,' says Jeremy Woodcock of Rulers of the Universe." There was an aftershow by the Weaker Vessels which was labeled "a Harry Potter fan fic" making it unclear if it was simply a show based on Harry Potter or one which specialized in reading only from that fandom. Apparently the shortcut is doing well for Black Swan Comedy as the readings are a "sold-out event every month."
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