There’s a fascinating debate happening over at Jeff Mariotte’s blog regarding the Pulitzer prize winning novel MARCH by Geraldine Brooks. Is it a tie-in? Is it fanfic? Is it a literary homage? Or is it an entirely original work? Be sure to check out the lively comments to his post.
Fanfic
Punishing Yourself
I leave the country for just a couple of days and the nation falls into anarchy. I got this email while I was away:
Your friend James Kosub has posted some damn fine — and damn patriotic —
PUNISHER fan fiction on his blog. I’ve read it and, well, it made me think
and it moved me on an emotional level. And, of course, he mentions you in
the premamble to the post…
Jim is, afterall, the President of my fan club. So I took a peek at his introductory comments:
It isn’t the greatest thing I’ve ever dumped out of my brain and onto
paper, but it’s still a solid, post-9/11 action/commentary story.[…]Coupled with my very positive
experience playing The Punisher on the Xbox, and finally seeing the new movie with Thomas Jane, I figured now was as good a time as any to share.
And already the critical raves are coming in…from his wife.
Still a powerful and effective piece, and it could easily be expanded beyond the "Punisher" main character.
I haven’t read the fanfic, but I doubt anything could capture the enormous cultural, political, and emotional impact of 9-11 quite as well as some of James Kosub’s fanfic stylings. But I’m with Jim’s wife on this one. It’s a crying shame that he chose The Punisher as his muse instead of Willy Wonka.
Fanfic Fool
From my brother Tod’s blog today:
The other day, my friend Alex told me that in a creative writing
class he teaches at UC-Riverside, someone turned in Willy Wonka fan
fiction and wasn’t totally clear why that wasn’t allowed in a college
creative writing class.
The student would be much more at home in a creative writing class at Texas State University taught by Dr. Robin Reid, champion of "Real Person Slash Fanfic." Not only would she accept that assignment, but probably one about Gene Wilder getting his Willy Wonked by Johnny Depp, too.
THE F WORD
Showtime is staging an unusual promotional event, inviting fans of THE L WORD to help a writer on the show pen a spec script for an episode. The press release calls it "the first network-sanctioned collaborative fan event."
During the sponsored, multi-week event,
the show’s millions of fans will be invited to collaborate on an
original script for the show. Each week, fans will write short scenes
based on an instructive "scene mission" provided by the writer from THE
L WORD. Each week, fans will vote on their favorite scenes. At the end of each week,
the winning scene will be added to the script in progress. The process
will repeat each week with a new "scene mission" until the entire
script is complete.
Once the script has been pieced together, the L WORD writer will
perform a final polish to complete it. Contributors of highly rated
scenes and other winners will be featured prominently online during the
event, giving them a taste of online fame. FanLib’s innovative system
enables Showtime to maintain control of THE L WORD brand while
establishing an incomparable consumer generated media community where
fans can interact with each other and with their favorite show.
A couple of people who emailed me about this called it a "breakthrough for fanfic." It’s not. The key phrase in the release is that the program "enables Showtime to maintain control of THE L WORD brand." In other words, this "fan event" is a licensed tie-in, done with the full participation, consent, and control of the network, studio and writer of the show.
At the conclusion of the event, Showtime and FanLib will publish a free
commemorative eZine (a downloadable digital magazine) featuring the
completed script, plus a number of alternative scenes and editorial
features including profiles of the winning contributors and other
participants. Each fan whose work is included in the eZine will receive
an exclusive gift package from the show and the sponsors of the event.
The eZine will be distributed online to all of the participants and
voters and other members of the show’s online community as a pass-along
memento of the event.Though the script will not be produced as part of the show’s upcoming
third season which will have wrapped production before the start of the
event, Showtime and the producers of THE L WORD have the option to
produce the finished script in the future.
It will be interesting to see how "event" works out, if the fans embrace the corporate managing of their fanfic, and if the cobbled-together script is the least bit readable. My guess is that the L WORD writer is going to take a pretty heavy pass through the material and that it will probably never be shot.
How Dense Can a Person Be?
Anybody who reads this blog knows I’m not a supporter of "fanfic," that I think it violates the legal and artistic rights of authors, and that I take every opportunity to point out how inane and offensive most of it is. So you can imagine my amusement when I got this email today:
Hey Mr. Goldberg–
I know this is going to seem really random but there is no
way around it. You made a post a while ago about a fanfic writer
named ‘cousinjean’. I don’t really care about the whole situation
surrounding her asking for money, more I was wondering if you knew any way to
get in contact with her. I don’t want to harass her, I just wanted to know
if she still had a site up with her work on it because some of it I
never got to finish reading and the link doesn’t seem to work any longer.
This request is really bizarre. It’s sort of like asking a Jew to direct you to some really rocking anti-Semitic screeds. Yeah, sure, Trish, I’ll be glad to.
“t3h ebil fanficcers”
There was an interesting comment that somebody calling himself Inside Fandom left in the "Masturbation" post. I didn’t write it, and I don’t know who did, but I didn’t want it to get lost in the clutter:
"t3h ebil fanficcers"
Fanspeak. Sort of like jive, but with wurz speling. In fandom communities the
presumption is that anybody who isn’t really a fan – they actually refer to it
as ‘passing’ – can possibly get it, when they say ‘get it’ they mean ‘fandom in
general’.In other words, youse either with us or you don’t get it. Sorta like what we
used to tell our parents when we were teenagers and they wanted to know the
names of the kids we were ‘hanging’ with, and what funny smell emanated from our
clothes, or how pretty the plant with five leaves growing on our windowsills was
and how nice we’d taken an interest in horticulture.At some point, the childish stuff ends. That happens when we grow up. When we
just get older and we don’t grow up, we look for fanfic about TV characters
masturbating so that we can masturbate to it. We continue to have the hots for
David Cassidy in all his 15 year old glory on the Partridge Family. We have
intense and heated arguments with others over the characterizations of cartoon
characters.We keep doing that even after we get degrees and jobs and look perfectly
normal to the outside world. Whenever somebody questions our proclivity to
invade the sexual privacy of real people, or why we like to write fanfiction
about children having sex, we trot out the degrees and the jobs and we call what
we do ‘scholarship’ and wonder what sort of pervert the person questioning the
action is. That’s called transference.The most intense discussion of what happens here on Mr. Goldberg’s blog takes
place in LiveJournal land in threads that are largely protected.Authors, scholars, whoever, do not make any statements here because who wants
their publisher or tenure committee to know that they used to write, and maybe
still do write, lies about real people’s sex lives. Heaven forfend they know we
get off on writing stories about underage people having sex. How about it coming
out that the author of that hot new fantasy series still gets off on Mutant
Ninja Turtles slashfic and spends her off hours making fun of people on Fandom
Wank under an assumed name then TALKS about it on the journal she keeps under
her real name?There are academic papers to be had in all of this, but the only ones taking
it seriously are the ones with a vested interest in making it appear harmless.
This rings true to me. How about you? And I may be revealing my vast ignorance (which I do here daily) and the limitations of my well-thumbed edition of Websters Dictionary, but is there really such a word as "forfend?" Is there a reason why the "fen" don’t use the word forbid?
Masturbation!
"MarytheFan" defends her search for masturbation fanfic and is applauded, in later comments on her blog, for being a classy gal ("Just wanted to say that I fangirl you madly at the class you’re showing"). Anyway, MarytheFan writes, in part:
I have zero interest in a discussion with someone who functions on the
middle-school level that equates masturbation with something stupid and pathetic
that only losers do because they can’t get anything better, rather than as one
perfectly valid, healthy and fun sexual option in a smorgasboard of sexual
options. Maybe if my actual masturbatory experiences had consisted solely of
sad, pathetic situations in which I was a loser who was only masturbating
because I couldn’t get anything better, rather than situations in which I was
enjoying my own body because holy good god, that felt good, I’d think it
was a pathetic and loser activity. Guess what? You also don’t go blind or have
hair grow on your palms, in case anyone out there was still functioning
furtively in the shadow of those old myths. Well, unless you poke yourself in
the eye, I suppose, in which case, wow. Bendy, aren’t you?
I have no problem with masturbation, Mary. It’s healthy, feels good, and
keeps Cinemax in business. What I find pathetic are people who
masturbate over fanfiction that portrays TV and movie
characters masturbating, and the people who write fanfiction about fictional characters masturbating, and people who would announce to the world that they are
searching for fanfiction about TV and movie characters masturbating that they can
masturbate to.
This would also probably be a good time to, once again, mention Lindsay Lohan’s nipples.
Potter Pedophilia
Fanficcers think authors should be flattered by their work. Using their inane logic, JK Rowling should be overjoyed by "We Are the Women Who Love The Boys of Harry Potter," a LiveJournal community "created for the sole purpose of discussing the beauty of the Harry Potter boys."
If
you are of legal age (18 years old or more) and feel more than just a
little attraction to the lovely boys of the Wizarding World, then
WELCOME! 😀 You will find your kind here.We do conceed that
this community does show that we are, to some small extent, pedophiles.
Well you would be too, if you just looked at the boys! 🙂 We just
enjoy beautiful things. We can’t help that! 😀
Between Real Person Slash, DUE SOUTH Masturbation stories, and Harry Potter Pedophilia, what isn’t there to love about fanfic?
(Thanks to "Maggie Thatcher," who provided the link in her comments on my Wank Fic post)
Wank Fic
The new, living definition of "pathetic": someone who searches the Internet for masturbation fanfic:
Do you have any idea how difficult it is to search for wanking fic? I mean, are
there any useful search terms to use? Googling "masturbation" and
"fanfic" turns up things from Lee Goldberg and his ilk, with the yadda yadda
about how it’s all some poor, unimaginative substitute for … no, I’m not going
to go there. At any rate, OMG, rec me some fanfic with masturbation in
it. Any fandom. It just needs to be hot and to involve someone touching themself
in sexy ways.
After "MarytheFan" posted her fervent plea on LiveJournal, someone enthusiastically recommended DUE SOUTH masturbation fanfic.
I haven’t read them in a while, but I recall there being a few damn hot ones in
there.
I wonder if they include the dog.
(Thanks to Tig for the link)
Teach Your 14-Year-Old How To Write Gay Fanfic Porn
Skrike discovered a lengthy primer at Fanthropology on teaching 14-year-olds how to write better explicit gay fanfic. Here’s some of their advice:
So how do you make a fourteen year old write better fan fiction? More important,
according to a fourteen year old acquaintance, how do you make your fourteen
year olds write better m/m slash?Sex and intimacy, important components of slash and good slash. Another
component is fan fiction, m/m slash culture. The last component, and possibly
the most important one, is putting all of that stuff together.Teaching
all this is not a simple thing. Remember, this age group isn’t always the most
receptive to valuing feedback in certain forms, isn’t necessarily writing to
learn about writing to become better writers. They write for fun, like feedback,
can and do use it to become better writers.But hot damned, how do you teach a person to write in character? How do you
teach your teenage m/m slash fan to write in character in the context of a story
involving two guys going at it? There are two options that come immediately to
mind.Sex and intimacy. Ouch and wow. My fourteen year old Good Charlotte slash
writing buddy’s answer to teaching her teen friends on how to write better
slash? Pop them all in front of a television, watch a little gay porn and they
should be set. My reaction to that as a twenty-five year old not interested in
gay porn was horror. There is this double edged sword here. Younger writers can
teach their own, to a certain degree, about the sexually explicit material and
how to write it using those examples. Adults teaching a fourteen year old how to
write erotic or pornographic sex scenes featuring two guys, citing pornography
and adult material, this might be a bit of an ethical nightmare and legal
liability.The next thing to do is create general rec
lists of stories featuring m/m sex scenes. To cover your butt legally,
make sure the story ratings and contents are spelled out and don’t
explicitly label your rec list as “Read these teenage writers! Read
them and behold the writing of good m/m slashy sex scenes that will
make you wet! Yeah!” Try for something a bit more subdued and less
obvious. You get good examples out there and no one needs to be the
wiser that you have ulterior motives of teaching the teeny fangirls how
to become better m/m slash writers.
If it wasn’t for the good people at Fanthropology, imagine all the poor kids who wouldn’t have a clue how to write convincing fanfic sex scenes for Kirk and Spock, Harry and Ron, and Willy Wonka and friends. Thank you, Fanthropology, for this important public service. I’m sure pedophiles everywhere appreciate it.
Maybe now professor Robin Reid will write an article for kids on how to write "Real Person Slash Fanfic." Wouldn’t that be nice?