Fanfic

[liv]

papersky wrote a heartrending commentary on The Tempest.

simont wrote a Princess Bride villanelle(!)

damned_colonial writes particularly good Holmes / Watson where she really captures Conan Doyle's narrative voice. I won't explain why I particularly like her two latest, cos either I will give people the wrong idea or commit horrendous TMI, or possibly both. These, by the way, are slash fanfic in the most traditional sense, namely sexually explicit descriptions of imagined relationships between two fictional men. So if you have any sort of objections to that kind of thing, don't read. The text is very definitely NSFW, but the icons were reasonably acceptable last time I looked.

Comments

[simont]

Does the (!) indicate the implausibility of the concept, or the implausibility of me writing fanfic? :-)

[liv]

Villanelles are just implausible in themselves, but a Princess Bride one definitely merits an exclamation mark of bogglement. I'm not surprised that you wrote some fanfic, because in the loose sense nearly everybody writes some kind of fanfic sooner or later. (Most people don't follow the formal genre conventions that are emerging in the internet fanfic and transformative works communities, so in the narrow sense, it's a minority activity.)

[simont]

Most people don't follow the formal genre conventions that are emerging in the internet fanfic and transformative works communities

This sounds as if it's making precise the thought I had when you made the above post in the first place. I've always thought of 'fanfic' as 'that thing lots of people I know do a lot of, but that has never been my thing', and therefore my first thought was "hang on, what am I doing in a fanfic links post?". Of course I then realised that I couldn't actually refute the idea that Villainelle was fanfic according to the actual definition of the term, but it hadn't struck me as such at the time. So your implication here that there are commonalities between fanfic produced by 'the community' which need not be shared by everything satisfying the obvious definition sounds as if it's exactly capturing that sense of cognitive dissonance.

The only thing is that I don't actually know what those commonalities are, and now I'm curious! So what sorts of things, roughly, do you mean by "formal genre conventions"?

[liv]

That's just about what I was getting at, yes, I'm not the best person to explain the genre conventions, because, like you, I don't really do official fanfic. It's something to do with the fact that the story portrays a sexual encounter, usually same-sex or otherwise non-normative. It's based on creating a relationship which is subtextual or not really present in the original story, but if possible showing something in the original that supports the interpretation. The original can be anything, but it's most commonly a current or fairly recent TV series, often with SF elements. There are a whole bunch of tropes that come up, such as "genderswap", "mpreg" (male pregnancy), "dub-con" (ambiguity about whether the sex is fully consensual), AU (something that could only happen if you explicitly change an event in the original story), etc. And there's a style of prose, which is hard to describe but you can recognize it when you've seen several such works.

[simont]

I'm surprised to hear you defining 'official fanfic' so narrowly as to say it has to be slash or slashlike. I had always been under the impression that 'fanfic' and 'slash' were reasonably distinct concepts, even in what I'd have thought of as the 'official' or 'community' definition of the former, and the latter was only a subset even if a large one. For instance, I'd have been startled to think that this was in any way not proper fanfic.

TBH the emphasis on slash has always struck me as the most puzzling thing about the entire concept. I'm right there with the idea that you read (or watch or whatever, but for brevity I'll stick with 'read') a piece of fiction and your imagination is caught by some aspect of it that you want to explore further; that feels to me like the most natural thing in the world to happen to you as a result of reading pretty much any fiction worth its while. Going to the effort of writing down the results of your exploration is only a small step from there, and formatting that writeup itself enough like a piece of fiction that other people can read and enjoy it too seems only sensible if you think you've come up with something they might be interested in. So far, all entirely understandable impulses, even if I don't tend to have the energy to do it myself.

But any given piece of fiction has a huge and diverse range of possible aspects you might want to explore in this way: just as a random sample, one could imagine wanting to further explore characters' motivations or back story or future life after the book, unaddressed what-ifs and how-did-that-happens in the arc of the plot, genre-specific things like taking an SF story's counterfactual science further and working out what other kinds of cool technology could be built on the same principles, extending or rebutting underlying philosophical or moral themes and ideas, exploring parallels with some other fiction or concept, and doubtless any number of other things I haven't thought of, both in between these examples and totally outside the range they span.

And sure, extrapolating a subtextual relationship between characters or inventing a totally noncanonical one is certainly somewhere in that wide range of possibilities, and OK, I'd have expected it to be at least somewhat overrepresented compared to the rest of the field due to the well known fact that Humans Like Talking About Sex; but it's never seemed to me that that idea adequately explains the sheer amount of slash that there seems to be compared to all the other things people could be exploring and writing about their favourite fiction. I've never worked out if there's some appeal to it beyond what I can see (either qualitatively or quantitatively), or if it's something to do with the self-reinforcing effect of lots of people who've written it getting together on the Internet and encouraging each other, or what.