Poll: Separation of Canon People and FF People

[thefourthvine]

(Note: I'd like to get responses on this from as many different fan writers as possible. Anyone who pimps it will have my eternal gratitude. And if you leave a comment letting me know where you pimped it, you will get my eternal gratitude and an imaginary cookie.)

This poll is for anyone who has ever written fan fiction and in some way shared it - internet, zine, carrier pigeon, coded broadcast to Alpha Centauri, whatever.

So. If someone connected with the canon found and read your fan fiction, how would you react? For the purposes of this poll, I would like you all to imagine that we live in a world where there are no possible legal consequences. In other words, your weird new readers can hate you, but they can't take you to court or send a C&D.

[Poll #698126]

Comments

[thefourthvine.livejournal.com]

Interesting. The results of the poll thus far seem to suggest that people feel weirder about hijacking people's bodies than their heads. (I'm getting that from the greater average discomfort with actors reading FF than writers doing so.) And they feel the greatest discomfort of all hijacking bodies and names, as with RPF.

I agree with you, though - to the extent I can differentiate at all (because my overall reaction to the question is a phobic, "Noooooo! Go away, canon people!"), it seems slightly worse to have a book creator find my stuff.

There is nothing worse than the mere thought that canon might not progress naturally because of something you did.

Don't you think that's kind of inevitable with serial canons? (I.e., book series and TV shows.) The later stuff always seems to me to be in some way a response to audience reaction to the earlier stuff. (Eee, that was the worst sentence ever. Sorry. It's late and I'm tired.) And that's true whether the serial has our kind of fan base or not. There just doesn't seem to be any way to stop that action-reaction pattern from happening.

Maybe this is why I feel more comfortable with closed canons. Hmmm.

[mzcalypso.livejournal.com]

results of the poll thus far seem to suggest that people feel weirder about hijacking people's bodies than their heads.

Interesting way of putting it. My view is that by the nature of their work, actors loan out their bodies for other characters to inhabit. A fictional character is drawn from an actor's experience, but was actually created by a writer, so for another writer to play variations on the theme is not actually impinging on the actor's personal identity.

(I'm getting that from the greater average discomfort with actors reading FF than writers doing so.) And they feel the greatest discomfort of all hijacking bodies and names, as with RPF.

I don't mind the RPF where someone plays with humor -- the notion of actors' reaction to a really terrible script, for instance. When it gets into actors' sex lives ... sorry. Again, humor, fine. Serious ... I'm surprised there haven't been lawsuits and I almost wish there were -- except that would probably start a crackdown on fanfic of all sorts.

I don't write book fanfic for living authors unless they've indicated they're OK with it, and usually not even then. I would hate it if someone hijacked my OCs. Bookfic characters are entirely one person's creative energy; it's too personal.

[shusu.livejournal.com]

I suppose I should qualify the serial-canons comment -- my diction's horrible, ack. It's not the narrative itself: it's whether the author is affected by reading the fan-work. In a staged kind of universe, one that has a specific structure and relies on characters not deus ex machina... like let's say a character's death is going to be the next step. For sure. Author has said so.

Now I turn around and think of the coolest thing that character could possibly do in his last moments. Fulfilling my every wish. Even mimicking the author's style. And then the author reads it.

In that case, that perfect ending is *gone*. I will never read it in canon, and even if mine was the losing bet to begin with, it becomes a sure thing that my fondest wish will not come true.

Whereas, serial-canon that does allow deus ex machina and Jossing is perfectly happy to bring characters back from the dead. Which is why it's less of an issue in television; after all, they re-cast major characters at will, why would they worry about mortality in the conventional sense? The Hollywood machine will perpetuate the plot at any cost. Feedback *is* part of the process, but except in reactionary cases (wow, we didn't see that slash coming, we'd better get him a girlfriend), there's little chance that a possibility is completely closed. After all, there's ratings to think about.

Whereas a book author is the last stop. There is no higher authority, no production staff, no casting director. Even if the chance is so slim as to be astronomical, when you kill an avenue of inquiry, it is *dead*, passed on, joined the choir invisible.

[dossier.livejournal.com]

this is an interesting poll!

I'm stuck so far into the backwater that I have no fear of affecting on-going canon, so I've never even considered the idea in reference to myself. In cases where something shows up in canon that appears that it might have been fanfiction-inspired, I'm completely illogical for a moment--'hey they stole that idea right out from under so & so!' Then I get a grip and realize, A)it was stolen in the first place and B) sometimes the natural progression is so logical that it had to be apparent to everyone.

I've always tried to write so that if Actor X read the story, they wouldn't want to claw their eyes out over it. I don't know if this is true in el-jay land, but often actors (or their agents) would have a sockpuppet that would join mailing lists to keep an eye out for what was going on. After I twigged to that fact, I was more careful than ever about RPS & speculation on their private lives. Of course in LJ, they don't have to join, so you have no ideas who's out there reading it!

I'm torn between the idea of FF as an homage to a writers work, and the idea that it's unrightfully co-opting their brain trust. I usually prefer the source rather than the faded mimeos, but there are occasions that's not the case. Yeah, torn.

[shusu.livejournal.com]

For myself, I've really refrained from expounding my meta-ideas in this post; I do write original fiction and things like ownership and creativity and shared universes so forth are much on my mind.

This, because a few years ago I met one of my favorite authors, and suddenly all my airy academic philosophies were less than nothing next to my emotional reaction. It made it personal. It was really disconcerting to have it focus down to that.