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This whole discussion of fanfic, slash, pro vs. amateur writing, and the community of fandom has fascinated me so much that I wanted to put together some of my posts which I made on other people's journals so I could have them in one place for future reference. Anyone who's been following this discussion closely has probably read a lot of this before, though there is some new material as well.
I'm not going to get into legal aspects at all here-- this is just about what I find interesting and appealing about the whole phenomenon.
I'd written a bit about all this in February, when I'd just started reading manga.
I elaborated a bit on this later, in the current discussion. (I'm referring here to shoujo and fantasy manga and anime, not all manga and anime in all genres.):
"The commonalities between manga/anime, fanfic, and romance novels seem to me to be not only a focus on emotion but the sense that the emotions of the characters are the most important thing in the story, and the thing the readers are most interested in; a lack of irony as a device to suggest that the entire concept of taking passion seriously is silly (irony may be used for other purposes, though); and a tendency to give small emotional moments as much or more weight as big plot-significant moments.
Possibly also the tendency to give central characters jewel-colored eyes, great powers, and grandly melodramatic dark pasts, although I think fanfic and manga/anime go further in that direction than romance does, though perhaps supernatural/fantasy romances might be more likely to, say, have a protagonist with amethyst-colored eyes who suffered as a child because he wasn't quite human, then was responsible or felt responsible for the deaths of everyone he knew, and then committed suicide by not eating or drinking for seven years (that not quite human thing...), then was reborn as a god of death who has bigger and better powers than any of the others yet is still tormented by his past, and who has everyone he meets fall in love with him or want to kidnap and experiment on him.
What manga/anime does more often and better than anything but maybe Hong Kong movies and really good children's fantasy is to use any bizarre plot element-- four guys tooling across ancient China in a jeep that's actually a dragon while paying for their adventures with a gold card issued by the hermaphroditic Goddess of Mercy and fighting off demons sicced on them by a mad scientist obsessed with a stuffed bunny, say-- and to make full use of their humorous and absurd potential yet still milk the story for tragedy, angst, sex, and sophisticated subtext.
The "everything including the kitchen sink" approach, which is the opposite of how we're usually taught to write (and read) fiction often manages to create a world which feels both brighter and more intense than reality, and yet also more real than a lot of realistic fiction. It's because the willingness to do anything also includes the willingness to tap into parts of our emotional landscape that are usually considered off-limits-- too touchy, too dirty, too extreme, or too weird.
Some of this filters into fanfic as well, and also into fantasy, although there it's usually presented in a more metaphoric way."
And when I'd started dipping my toe into fanfic, I wrote a bit about why I was doing it:
"I read my first fanfic when I was about fifteen, on a Xeroxed fanzine with a staple at one corner. It was PG-rated hurt-comfort Han Solo/Princess Leia, and I had a sneaking feeling that I really shouldn't have enjoyed it as much as I did.
I blame![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-syndicated.gif)
untrue_accounts. She beckoned me down a dark alley and gave me free samples of good writing. Then there was also that pesky manga addiction of mine. The last straw was when I started getting paid good money for writing. I figured that as long as I was writing for pay, then fanfic in moderation could not possibly be sucking up all my energy and preventing me from... writing for pay. I wanted to practice writing short stories, which I've never been able to do before. And since short stories generally cost more in submission postage than the money you make off of them, why not write a few purely and solely for fun? I could use them as warm-ups or exercises to hone my skills. (A drabble is damn hard to do well, and a great medium with which to practice all sorts of things.)
Which is all true. But I think what really sucked me in, which you all of course are well aware of, is the sense of community. Fandom in general is one, but what's different about fanfic is that it involves communal creation. Once women would gather in a single parlor and sew quilts together. Now we gather in our separate rooms and write gay porn together. But it's really the same thing: it's about pleasing each other with the skills of our minds and hands, chatting about the things we've created, and putting them up for all to see.
The more things change, the more they stay the same. (Now I want a Hakkai/Gojyo quilt...)"
I later elaborated a bit on![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
sartorias's journal:
"I suppose I should confess that I started writing fanfic drabbles this year, because I was obsessed with certain anime/manga, I was reasonably certain the creators of those wouldn't mind, and I wanted to practice writing in a short form, and drabbles (exactly 100 words, no more, no less, title not included) seemed a good way to practice writing concisely, when I tend to write way too verbosely. Of course it's easier to tell a complete short story in 100 words in fanfic because the background and characters are already known to the readers.
I got a lot out of doing it-- new skills, fun, and a creative jump-start. But then I've always enjoyed and learned from technical challenges.
I don't think drabbles intersect that much with the Id Vortex, though; they remind me more of haiku than of anything else, as so much has to be suggested as so little can be said."
And then it occurred to me that this is all connected with the other media I've spent most of my writing career in:
"Personally, it would delight me if people wrote fanfic about my characters, though I probably wouldn't read it unless it was really good, and might have to pretend I never read it at all. But I like the idea that people are that engaged with my work-- that they might be drawing pictures of Mark and Reza kissing and passing them around electronically.
But then, I've always been drawn to collaborative writing: first theatre, then TV, now comics. I like having people add to and play around with my creations. The annoyance of having them screw it up is offset by the delight of them bringing in things that are great and that I'd never have thought of."
Of course, it can also drive you batty, which is why I quit TV to take up prose. But now I'm sneaking back into TV, and manga as well. In my ideal writing world, I have both collaborative and non-collaborative projects. Which is what's going on for me now.
Did I start writing 100 word stories about manga characters because I was having a creative surge, or did I jump-start my writing by doing them as challenges and feed it by getting encouraging feedback? I don't know, but I've been very productive recently, my career has been going well, and now and then I have time to write a bit of fanfic. All I know is, I'm not messing with a system that's working.
And in all this, the slash angle is almost irrelevant, as far as I'm concerned:
" have no particular thing for slash, but have been reading it because of the interesting things some writers are doing around the side, so to speak. Which doesn't mean that I don't find some of it hot, but only that I used to find it hot despite the fact that it was two men, and now I tend to read fanfic without caring particularly about the genders of the characters who are involved with each other. Which doesn't mean that I'm pairing neutral (Hakkai + Gojyo 4EVER), just that I'm gender neutral when it comes to pairing.
In other words: even within slash, the slash itself is not necessarily the most interesting thing going on."
Finally, this link sums up a lot of what I find charming and wonderful about the entire fanfic phenomenon: the community, the artistic collaboration, the fast gratification, and, of course, hot guys kissing:
http://www.livejournal.com/users/telophase/55825.html
I'm not going to get into legal aspects at all here-- this is just about what I find interesting and appealing about the whole phenomenon.
I'd written a bit about all this in February, when I'd just started reading manga.
I elaborated a bit on this later, in the current discussion. (I'm referring here to shoujo and fantasy manga and anime, not all manga and anime in all genres.):
"The commonalities between manga/anime, fanfic, and romance novels seem to me to be not only a focus on emotion but the sense that the emotions of the characters are the most important thing in the story, and the thing the readers are most interested in; a lack of irony as a device to suggest that the entire concept of taking passion seriously is silly (irony may be used for other purposes, though); and a tendency to give small emotional moments as much or more weight as big plot-significant moments.
Possibly also the tendency to give central characters jewel-colored eyes, great powers, and grandly melodramatic dark pasts, although I think fanfic and manga/anime go further in that direction than romance does, though perhaps supernatural/fantasy romances might be more likely to, say, have a protagonist with amethyst-colored eyes who suffered as a child because he wasn't quite human, then was responsible or felt responsible for the deaths of everyone he knew, and then committed suicide by not eating or drinking for seven years (that not quite human thing...), then was reborn as a god of death who has bigger and better powers than any of the others yet is still tormented by his past, and who has everyone he meets fall in love with him or want to kidnap and experiment on him.
What manga/anime does more often and better than anything but maybe Hong Kong movies and really good children's fantasy is to use any bizarre plot element-- four guys tooling across ancient China in a jeep that's actually a dragon while paying for their adventures with a gold card issued by the hermaphroditic Goddess of Mercy and fighting off demons sicced on them by a mad scientist obsessed with a stuffed bunny, say-- and to make full use of their humorous and absurd potential yet still milk the story for tragedy, angst, sex, and sophisticated subtext.
The "everything including the kitchen sink" approach, which is the opposite of how we're usually taught to write (and read) fiction often manages to create a world which feels both brighter and more intense than reality, and yet also more real than a lot of realistic fiction. It's because the willingness to do anything also includes the willingness to tap into parts of our emotional landscape that are usually considered off-limits-- too touchy, too dirty, too extreme, or too weird.
Some of this filters into fanfic as well, and also into fantasy, although there it's usually presented in a more metaphoric way."
And when I'd started dipping my toe into fanfic, I wrote a bit about why I was doing it:
"I read my first fanfic when I was about fifteen, on a Xeroxed fanzine with a staple at one corner. It was PG-rated hurt-comfort Han Solo/Princess Leia, and I had a sneaking feeling that I really shouldn't have enjoyed it as much as I did.
I blame
untrue_accounts. She beckoned me down a dark alley and gave me free samples of good writing. Then there was also that pesky manga addiction of mine. The last straw was when I started getting paid good money for writing. I figured that as long as I was writing for pay, then fanfic in moderation could not possibly be sucking up all my energy and preventing me from... writing for pay. I wanted to practice writing short stories, which I've never been able to do before. And since short stories generally cost more in submission postage than the money you make off of them, why not write a few purely and solely for fun? I could use them as warm-ups or exercises to hone my skills. (A drabble is damn hard to do well, and a great medium with which to practice all sorts of things.)Which is all true. But I think what really sucked me in, which you all of course are well aware of, is the sense of community. Fandom in general is one, but what's different about fanfic is that it involves communal creation. Once women would gather in a single parlor and sew quilts together. Now we gather in our separate rooms and write gay porn together. But it's really the same thing: it's about pleasing each other with the skills of our minds and hands, chatting about the things we've created, and putting them up for all to see.
The more things change, the more they stay the same. (Now I want a Hakkai/Gojyo quilt...)"
I later elaborated a bit on
sartorias's journal: "I suppose I should confess that I started writing fanfic drabbles this year, because I was obsessed with certain anime/manga, I was reasonably certain the creators of those wouldn't mind, and I wanted to practice writing in a short form, and drabbles (exactly 100 words, no more, no less, title not included) seemed a good way to practice writing concisely, when I tend to write way too verbosely. Of course it's easier to tell a complete short story in 100 words in fanfic because the background and characters are already known to the readers.
I got a lot out of doing it-- new skills, fun, and a creative jump-start. But then I've always enjoyed and learned from technical challenges.
I don't think drabbles intersect that much with the Id Vortex, though; they remind me more of haiku than of anything else, as so much has to be suggested as so little can be said."
And then it occurred to me that this is all connected with the other media I've spent most of my writing career in:
"Personally, it would delight me if people wrote fanfic about my characters, though I probably wouldn't read it unless it was really good, and might have to pretend I never read it at all. But I like the idea that people are that engaged with my work-- that they might be drawing pictures of Mark and Reza kissing and passing them around electronically.
But then, I've always been drawn to collaborative writing: first theatre, then TV, now comics. I like having people add to and play around with my creations. The annoyance of having them screw it up is offset by the delight of them bringing in things that are great and that I'd never have thought of."
Of course, it can also drive you batty, which is why I quit TV to take up prose. But now I'm sneaking back into TV, and manga as well. In my ideal writing world, I have both collaborative and non-collaborative projects. Which is what's going on for me now.
Did I start writing 100 word stories about manga characters because I was having a creative surge, or did I jump-start my writing by doing them as challenges and feed it by getting encouraging feedback? I don't know, but I've been very productive recently, my career has been going well, and now and then I have time to write a bit of fanfic. All I know is, I'm not messing with a system that's working.
And in all this, the slash angle is almost irrelevant, as far as I'm concerned:
" have no particular thing for slash, but have been reading it because of the interesting things some writers are doing around the side, so to speak. Which doesn't mean that I don't find some of it hot, but only that I used to find it hot despite the fact that it was two men, and now I tend to read fanfic without caring particularly about the genders of the characters who are involved with each other. Which doesn't mean that I'm pairing neutral (Hakkai + Gojyo 4EVER), just that I'm gender neutral when it comes to pairing.
In other words: even within slash, the slash itself is not necessarily the most interesting thing going on."
Finally, this link sums up a lot of what I find charming and wonderful about the entire fanfic phenomenon: the community, the artistic collaboration, the fast gratification, and, of course, hot guys kissing:
http://www.livejournal.com/users/telophase/55825.html