• A post at eConsultancy placed fanworks among other examples of the 'death of the author'.“While the barriers to entry for authorship have declined, the ability to remix and distribute content has dramatically increased. The ability to publish to the web, combined with applications that allow content remixing (Adobe Premiere, Wordpress, Instagram) has meant that original authors now find themselves with significantly more challenges to their intellectual property. Remix culture can completely change narratives to the intentions of the remixer. This is most clear in the remixing of television shows into vignettes that have normally satirical intentions.”
• The New York Times described How to Make a TV Drama in the Twitter Age. Gathering together various show runners, they spoke about how audience perception was increasingly understood as shaping the narrative. "Robert King: Sometimes there are lapses of storytelling not even in the script. But when you get to the execution, either in the editing or in the acting, a bead is lost. When you realize when 50 people on social media are misunderstanding that in the same exact way, that’s something we have to correct. Carlton Cuse: When you’re telling a story, no matter how rigorous you are with yourself and your collaborators as to the clarity and intention of the story, you’re still in a bubble. The moment that the audience becomes involved, that bubble dissolves. Perception is reality. So, however they perceive it, is actually what it is."
• Indie Wire featured Austenland as an example of what fans have taken from Austen's works. "'Q: You were saying that girls look to Jane Austen to learn about love, and because they want to be romanced. What do you think the moral of "Austenland" is with regard to love and what to expect from love?' A: I think the moral...is 'Girls, get your crap together, because it's not real.' And that's the whole thing, reality versus fantasy. [Keri Russell's character Jane] had to figure it out herself and stand on her own two feet, and not be so dependent on this fake world, and at that point she finally can find love. Because she took it to the nth degree and she needed a reality check...to my young daughter, I will say...[g]o for the Mr. Bingley. You need to go for that sweet boy. He seemed more real, in that the girl didn't have to change him."

What stories about changing authorship and audience do you know of? Write about them in Fanlore! Contributions are welcome from all fans.

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• It's not only communication between entertainment creators and fans that's becoming common, but also a creative dialogue. Anna Pinkert at Spinoff Online wrote about the benefits of embracing slash and other fan creations. "At a recent event, a reporter showed The Avengers star Mark Ruffalo a series of drawings of his character snuggling with Robert Downey Jr.’s Tony Stark. He began giggling, and then even made up captions for one of the cartoons, “Would you like a gummy worm?” Better yet, he told the reporter, “I endorse [this art] 100 percent. You know what it is? It’s open-source creativity.” She suggests that "[h]omoerotic fan art might be a new signal that you’ve arrived in Hollywood. People know your face (and your abs) well enough to do 30 sketches of you embracing another star." At least some actors are ready to invite fans to play.
• Of course, direct collaborations can be a mismatch of expectations. The L.A. Times wrote about Paul Verhoeven's semi-crowdsourced film Tricked describing the problems. Fans were asked to develop chapters of a story that were then filmed. "Nearly 30,000 people...were part of the community submitting or commenting on prospective "Tricked" elements...Nor was the process cheap -- production on the film only cost about $800,000, Verhoeven said, but the expenses incurred running things such as the online-submission platform approached $4 million." Assembling disparate suggestions was also challenging. "When the suggestions poured in...they again found themselves with a mess (one writer might drop in aliens, another would dial in characters more at home in “50 Shades of Gray"), Verhoeven kept fiddling, working on the episode for several weeks, shooting it and repeating the process. Finally, after nearly a year, he had a film that was about 70 minutes long."
• A better model seems to be to adopt after the fact. "[W]hen ZeniMax Online Studios and Bethesda Softworks noticed singer-songwriter Malukah's covers of songs from their hit game Skyrim had gone viral on YouTube, the companies approached her to create an original song about the upcoming massive multiplayer game "The Elder Scrolls Online" (ESO)." Suggesting that a game is by nature a collaborative creative work, writer Yannick LeJacq concludes "We can probably expect more blurring of the lines between fans and creators in the next-generation as the technology behind game development becomes ever more accessible and democratized."

What do you think are the best collaborative fandom playgrounds? Write about it in Fanlore! Contributions are welcome from all fans.

We want your suggestions! If you know of an essay, video, article, podcast, or link you think we should know about, comment on the most recent OTW Fannews post. Links are welcome in all languages! Submitting a link doesn't guarantee that it will be included in a roundup post, and inclusion of a link doesn't mean that it is endorsed by the OTW.

• 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."
• BookRiot hosted a guest piece by writer Jill Guccini who pondered how to evaluate professional/fan collaborations. "So here’s the question: Is this unbelievably cool and innovative? Or is it simply, as the AV Club called it, 'a dizzying cycle of mutual promotion and self-promotion?' Can it be both? Fandom is a more sprawling, often intimate, force now than it ever has been before in every variety of the arts, including books. I used to know authors simply by, you know, what books they wrote; I now gauge a lot of them in my head unwittingly by their social media personalities. And sometimes they reblog the same things I reblog; sometimes they follow me back; and they become weirdly closer, somehow, to That Guy I Went to High School With, as opposed to The All Mysterious Author. Essentially: the fourth wall has already been broken. So does authors reaching out to fans enrich the literary world? Or does it cheapen it? Alternately, does a corporate-sponsored, preconceived interactive project still count as 'reaching out'?"
• Aja Romano over at the Daily Dot is also concerned about how fans are valued in these interactions, and writes about the way they are spoken of in SXSW panel blurbs. "[F]andom itself is growing to be synonymous with geek culture as a whole—both of which are seeping inexorably into the mainstream. That’s a huge reversal from where things stood even a few years ago, and not everyone is quite on board with this change. We can see this anxiety in the very language two of this week’s SXSW panels use to summarize the fan/creator relationship." Questioning the panelists on 'Frenemies: Fanning the Flames of Fandom' and 'Creators vs Audience: Next Chapter in Storyteling', she notes "the introductory angle that both panels take seem to pit fans and creators against one another, rather than as potential partners in a relationship built around shared love for a story."

Share your own stories about fan and creator collaborations on Fanlore! Contributions are welcome from all fans.

We want your suggestions! If you know of an essay, video, article, podcast, or link you think we should know about, comment on the most recent OTW Fannews post. Links are welcome in all languages! Submitting a link doesn't guarantee that it will be included in a roundup post, and inclusion of a link doesn't mean that it is endorsed by the OTW.

• 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."
• Le Figaro highlights some RPS written about George Hergé, author of Tintin and his friend Tchang Tchong-Jen. In Georges & Tchang : une histoire d'amour au XXe siècle the graphic novel speculates on the private life of Hergé "because of the ambiguous sexuality of Tintin." The creator, Laurent Colonnier describes himself as a fan of Hergé who was inspired to create the work after reading an interview given by Hergé where he describes his work "Tintin au Tibet" simply as a story of love and friendship. This made Colonnier wonder about the loves of Hergé, given his solidarity for Tchong-Jen's views of China. Similarly, Tchong-Jen praised Hergé's work as a magnificent lesson against racism.
• Slashfilm.com started off its review of Bates Motel by saying "The line between prequel/sequel and fan fiction blurs further." They ponder what constitutes canon given that "[t]he movies don’t have the clearest story path with respect to what is 'official'." At the TCA's, producer Carlton Cuse "explained that, when it comes to the film series, “We don’t really view any of that as canon.” The show might be likened to another reboot, Sherlock, given that "[t]he TV show takes place in the modern day, rather than in the ’50s or ’60s, and...the origin of Norman Bates 'will not be what you expect it to be.'"

What reboot, prequel, and fanficcy rewrite is among your favorites? Tell us something about them in Fanlore. Contributions are welcome from all fans.

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