- Fanfic Bingo!

[mirabile-dictu.livejournal.com]

Inspired by the discussion of OTW at John Scalzi's blog, Ithiliana, Half Elf Lost, Kitsune13, and Cofax7 created the Anti-Fanfic Bingo card.

They have kindly permitted the OTW to use the card, and we'd like to ask all of you to come up with responses for the objections to fan fiction. Serious responses, funny responses, rude responses, heart-felt responses. Prose, poetry, icons, banners, art, vids -- any response at all! We ask that you stay on topic, but our hope is to create something fun and, well, educational.

You can see the entire Anti-Fanfic Bingo card here, but right now, let's focus on the top row:



How would you respond? Tell ComRel!

Graphic by the wonderful Ciderpress.

-- femmequixotic, bethbethbeth, ciderpress, bethbethbeth, mirabile_dictu, shrift, svmadelyn
Community Relations Committee

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Comments on this post have been disabled on insanejournal, which prevents me from responding.

http://asylums.insanejournal.com/otw_news/5826.html

Please enable the comments there to allow fans on IJ to respond.

[(Anonymous)]

Comments on this post have been disabled on insanejournal, which prevents me from responding.

http://asylums.insanejournal.com/otw_news/5826.html

Please enable the comments there to allow fans on IJ to respond.

Yonmei
yonmei.insanejournal.com

[penguin-attie.livejournal.com]

It's illegal!

Surely you mean tortious (http://legionseagle.livejournal.com/13718.html).

[elf]

They may mean "tortious," but they keep telling us it's "illegal."

And in the non-lawyer understanding of the term, meaning "against they law," they'd be correct. Civil laws are indeed laws; the fine distinctions used by lawyers are often ignored in casual conversation. And I *think* everyone involved knows you can't go to prison for copyright infringement. (I hope, anyway.)

And, of course, if it were clear-cut against any laws, civil or criminal, any lawyer could compose a single polite letter to FF.net, Yahoogroups, LiveJournal, or any other popular fic archive, saying "you are supporting lawbreaking; please to delete the accounts of these seven thousand users in accordance with your TOS." That this hasn't happened indicates that the laws in question are a lot more blurry than the anti-fanfic crowd wants to believe.

Certainly, if there were a widespread collection of communities that exchanged contact info and phone numbers and ages & pics of children not their own, for the purpose of contacting those children with the intent of seducing them--they'd damn well be shut down. Even if the groups insisted that they meant to seduce said kids after their 18th birthdays, which would hypothetically be legal.

[mimi-sardinia.livejournal.com]

It's illegal! and It's copyright infringement!
Show me the legal ruling that says so!

You have to ask the writer for permission!
No I don't. I'd only have to ask permission if I were going to make money out of it.

You're insulting the writers whom you claim to love!
No, the writers are interrogating my actions from the wrong perspective. Besides, I love the characters, not the writers. Some of the stuff the writers do pisses me off. I didn't like it that Hasbro handed down orders to kill off all the season 1 characters in TFTM. That however does not stop me from loving Rodimus and Ultra Magnus.


Nobody can say anything about my characters but my, the original writer!
Then I won't read your books, I won't buy your books and I won't read fanfiction about your works. I'll read someone else's books, I buy someone else's books and read fanfic based on someone else's works - someone more tolerant than you!

[eyra.livejournal.com]

It's illegal and It's copyright infringement

There's an old post linked on metafandom awhile back; Stop Calling Yourselves Criminals! (http://elfwreck.livejournal.com/204820.html?format=light) by elfwreck. It's a good post, with some interesting links. It all converted me as I was reading it, and I still like it for these issues.

You're insulting the writers whom you claim to love!

Actually, there are writers who love it, who feel flattered and honored and who get awfully glowy when they find out people love their worlds enough to play in them.

Nobody can say anything about my characters but me, the original writer!

Are you fucking insane? What do you think English majors do all day? They say shit about characters! They walk into Shakespeare class and say "Hamlet and Ophelia were totally doing it" (direct quote, actually). The relationship between a work of fan fiction and a literary essay is a complicated one, but I do have a working point: you simply cannot tell me that no one but a writer is allowed to interpret the text. That's so patently ridiculous that I'd be speechless if I hadn't heard it so damned often before.

Readers interpret. It's how you engage with the material. You know, in middle school, I was encouraged to read in such a way that could have resulted in fanfic? We were supposed to stop after every chapter of whatever we were reading for our book reports and hypothesize about what could be revealed next.

And - this is stretching it, but - you know what? Writers don't always know everything about their characters. I am constantly surprised by some of my characters. They can be secretive bastards. And some of my characters really fucking hate me, and it's a situation I've heard other authors come up against. Some characters won't tell their writers a damn thing. That doesn't mean they can't speak to their readers.

[dharma-slut.livejournal.com]

For number five;

Pray they never make your book into a movie, then...