[Meta] Fanfiction, and what authors shouldn't feel entitled to tell their fans

[ishime]

I've been keeping this on my hard drive for a while now, but soleil_ambrien  has a poll about original VS fanfic and her questions reminded me of this. So.

Warning:
This meta argues against professional authors' right to tell their fans not to write fanfictions. 
Old and Unbeta'ed.

So for better or worse, fanfiction has grown well-known enough for some authors to have heard of it, and it seems like a lot of them feel like they have to make a statement of sorts about how they do or do not like or want it. And while there were some authors who had a really nice and welcoming reaction toward their fans writing it, others have stated opinions that I find entitled, rude or, sometimes, borderline hysterical.
The main problem with fanfiction is about copyright and defending the author's right to earn money for their work - some nice authors have been abused by their fans in the past (see Marion Zimmer Bradley) and now a lot of authors are scared. I do understand that an author needs to defend their source of income, but I also think that calling fanfiction a theft, especially if you compare it to stealing a car, is dubious at least, and damn dumb and hypocritical at worst. Not to mention offensive to the people who are writing it.

I guess I'm a bit of an extremist on this topic, because I see a lot of people being all cautious about fanfiction, saying that it's only okay as long as the author allows it and all. To be honest, I don't think published authors should have a say in this. My point is that:
    * we, fanfic authors, are fans. There are always exceptions, of course, but writing about a series you haven't read is rare and frowned upon by a lot of people. So before we started writing anything, the vast majority of us were readers of the author's work. That is to say that we are customers; we bought their book(s), and/or their movies, comics, or whatever it is we are writing about.
    * let's say what we brought was a book. Now, and that's my main point here, what did we pay for when we bought the book? The paper and ink? If that was what interested us, we could have bought a ream of paper and a bottle of ink. The pretty image on the cover? While we might appreciate it, it is mainly a device to get our attention on the book. No, the book itself is nothing more than a packaging - we might like it, but what what we really want to buy is its content.
    * so we bought the content of the book. We didn't only buy the characters on the paper or the stack of paper sewn together - we bought the story. That's why any comparison between writing fanfiction and stealing a car is entirely inappropriate at this point. We didn't break inside the author's computer to rob them of their words, characters and plots, they chose to sell it and we bought it. More precisely, we bought the right to use and enjoy it, as opposed to the right to claim it your own or to make money out of it. Which brings us to the definition of fanfiction: what is it, and which of those two types of use does it belong to?

Fanfiction is, by its very definition, gratuitous. It's not a business, it's a game - it's about enjoying the characters of a story, fantasizing about them in the broader sense of the word. I cannot understand how some people manage to place that in the "claiming the original story as your own or make money out of it" category. Fanfiction, by its very definition, denies its author any claim on the universe and/or characters they are writing about. That's why there is a custom to put a disclaimer at the beginning of a fanfic.
To give you an appropriate comparison, writing fanfiction about a series is like playing with figures of its protagonists and creating stories with them - except that instead of buying a copy of a character made of plastic, you bought one made of words. No child would seriously believe that he owns the name of a character he owns a figure of, or every copy of the character ever made, neither would his parents try to sell movies they took of their child's games. Yet both them and their child do consider it the child's right to play his stories with the figures he bought, and nobody would deny him this right, because that's why he bought the figures in the first place.
Some people enjoy a story by simply reading it. Others enjoy it by drawing its characters. Fanfic writers enjoy it by playing with its universe, characters and plot, together with other fans. It doesn't mean they want to rob the author of his or her rights over the story - they just have a different way to appreciate the author's work.

That being said, I would also like to add a few remarks.

Fanfiction is not a recent phenomenon in history. In fact, what is a (relatively) recent phenomenon is an author claiming universes, characters or plots, and denying others the right to write about them. A lot of great authors have written masterpieces with characters and plots they had taken from others' works. Besides, the law only does forbid fanfiction about works of living/recent authors, so it's not a matter of fanfiction being right or wrong. It's about protecting authors' right to make money out of their work.

I understand why some authors tell their fans that they have to forbid them from writing fanfiction, for fear of someone using their authorization to write fanfic as an authorization to make money out of their work without paying them. I do not, however, agree that the problem lies in fanfiction itself. The problem here is that fanfiction has not been legally defined regarding copyright laws. Classing it as fair use as long as it is free and credits the rightful author could probably settle this problem without having to stop fans from having their fun with the stories and characters they love.

I have no statistics to prove this, but I do think that fanfiction sometimes promotes a series to people on the Internet.
The sole fact of seeing the name of a series on a fanfiction summary could count as promotion. It makes people know that it exists - which is, after all, the necessary first step toward getting interested enough to buy the book(s) or the movie(s), etc. I can't prove that it happened to others, let alone to numerous others, but I did get to read some series or books because some great fic author had written about it.
Another thing to keep in mind is that fanfiction is not a game you can play alone. You need at least one author and one reader for it to happen - and since different fanfiction writers/readers like to write/read different sorts of fanfiction, it takes more than just two for the game to become satisfying to all parties. This leads some fans of not-very-popular series to actively promote them in order to get fellow fans to play the fanfiction game with.
So yes, authors might actually have something to gain out of fanfiction - besides keeping those weird, embarrassing fans of theirs happy. (Since money is the main point in these issues, I don't really buy the "authors would rather not have fans like those" idea - they might think they're entitled to order fanfic writers to become a different sort of fans for their own convenience, but they are interested in fanfic writers, if only for their money.)

It seems that a lot of people have a problem with a certain type of fanfiction rather than fanfiction in general. Namely, porn or gay fanfiction. Or Heaven forbid! Gay porn fanfiction.
As a writer of both those types of fanfiction, I must confess to resenting these people even more than I resent authors who call me a car thief or a rapist (yes, some people do that).
Let's go back to my character figures comparison. If you were selling figures and a teenager came and bought some of them to go back home and rub them against one another to pretend they were fucking like rabbits? Well, you sold the figures, they bought the figures, the figures are theirs now, and it's none of your damn business what they choose to do with it. (It might or might not be their parents' business, but not yours anyway.) If you can't stand the idea of someone imagining your characters having sex or being gay or whatever? Don't sell them. Now stop ordering people about what they are or aren't to do with something you gave up to them in exchange for their money.

Comments

[ishime.livejournal.com]

...woops, wrong account. C'était mon commentaire, au dessus. ^^U