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From: buzzard@TheWorld.com (Sean T Barrett)
Subject: Re: Fanfic and imagination (was: harry potter)
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Some of this is written as if the post was written to
me, which it wasn't, but it may (or may not) help
elucidate the perspectives of those to whom it was
addressed.

emshort@mindspring.com <emshort@mindspring.com> wrote:
>Pitch out every author who
>has adopted, recast, changed around the endings, written sequels,
>filled in the unexplored spaces of a story -- and you lose much of the
>literature of classical antiquity, medieval mystery plays, the matter
>of Britain, Dante, Shakespeare, chunks of French classical drama,
>Wagner's Ring, "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead," half the
>musicals on Broadway, and the majority of Disney's animated feature
>films.

One thing that might or might not be relevant is that the vast
majority of the above works (I believe) stand alone; they can
be understood independent of the material they were drawn from.
(So can fanfic, if you choose an appropriate definition of
"understanding", but I hope you can see my point.)

This connects to the use of the word "franchise" in another post;
fanfic tends to be reliant on the knowledge of the franchise.
Of course, even authors continuing their own series build on a
franchise.

The biggest exception to these would be satires and parodies;
curiously, special exceptions are made for these in copyright
law; and as much as we can consider legality irrelevant to the
purpose of this discussion, we can at least think about where
those laws came from and why we have them; in this case, it
seems the community has recognized the importance of criticism
in the form of satire.

Something like "Rosencrantz&G" is much harder to get a handle
on, and perhaps it is necessary to invoke "continuum".

>and they write to
>please, impress, and entertain each other, begging for feedback along
>the way.  (If anyone here is currently sneering down the length of his
>nose, take a look around r.g.i-f and think again.)

The second point I want to make is that this discussion is
based around value judgements people are making about written
works, authors, and authorship. Value judgements are inherently
relative, and beating each other up about them has limited
utility. (I'm sure there must be existing theory about this,
but I'm not very familiar with literary criticism, and despite
being a philosophy major I never took 'philosophy of art'.)
And yet, what we value is universal: that is, if I value A
over B, I want to encourage there to be more A than B, so it
behooves me to go attempt to force my opinion down other
people's throats. (If I can be successful at it.)

Fanfic is accepted as valuable within certain communities.
IF works are accepted as valuable within certain other communities.
You can certainly make the *value* judgement that "that's all there
is to that", and I can't fault you for it.

But as to what, say, *I*, value, well. I don't think I've
I've been particularly shy about complaining about
the focus of the IF community on storytelling, on IF as
literature. Personally I think IF is an interesting area of
the medium of "interactive work". I *do* find works that attempt
to push IF in interactivity--in doing interactivity we'd never seen
done before, in violating assumptions we'd made about what the
medium does, in exploring the possibilities that interactivity
opens up, or simply in using interactivity to engage the reader/player
in a way that would not be possible in static fiction--valuable,
and in a special way, despite the small communities they're
being written for. I even *value* Rameses despite the fact that it
didn't work for me--I don't like it as an experience but I
appreciate it as a contribution to the development of the form.

So in the same way I am unsatisfied with a lot of IF that's
created these days--in that the works are exploring a not-very-
interactive story-driven realm that I *personally* see little
value in exploring (at least not until we're sure that that's
the best we can do for those kinds of stories) ,I think I can
understand being dissatisfied with fanfic. I'm not sure that
my view here is actually related to the unhappiness expressed
by others in the thread, though, since my view leads more to
a sort of sadness that such effort is being put into something
that, to me, has little value.

But now that I've covered that possible interpretation, you
said "r.g.i-f" not "r.a.i-f", so perhaps your point was people
writing these little Usenet posts, not people writing IF. And,
indeed, if we are to judge fanfic by those standards, I have
no problem; I'm perfectly happy to value fanfic in the exact
same way that I value Usenet posts.

But of course I *do* value IF works well above Usenet posts.
Yes, I suppose there are some Usenet posts I value more than
certain works of IF. But denying me the ability to compare the
two as categories would be frivolous. It *would* certainly
seem to imply I don't think it fair to say "Usenet posts are
inherently worthless, or at least worth less than IF games";
but I don't think it wrong to say "The best Usenet post will
never be as valuable (to me) as a good IF game"; and thus I don't
have much problem with somebody making that kind of comparison
between fanfic and "literature", and moreover tossing that
opinion out in public.

>But to dismiss entire classes
>of people as your intellectual and creative inferiors is neither
>politic, nor virtuous, nor wise.

One might advance the claim that by assigning little value to certain
other people's work, and greater value to mine, I am judging them
inferior; that to be sad at how they're exerting their authorial
efforts is to be patronizing. My only defense is that I am aware
that I am making an arbitrary value judgement, and that others
will make different ones. [*]

In late high school or perhaps early college, I was riding around
with friends one day, and one of them took to opening his window
and shouting out periodically to passers-by, "Why are you wasting
your lives?" I presume that we were all well-aware of the irony.

SeanB
[*] But of course history will prove that *I* was right.
