The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by John Blonde:

I live and work in Boston, and if the damn things had been on the visible sides of buildings or hanging from crossing lights, there wouldn't have been as much concern. But the first one was noticed in day light, from a distance where the cartoon nature was not clear, hung where, were it a bomb, it would have damaged part of the city's transportation infrastructure. Many of the others were on bridges. The guys hired by the marketing firm were stupid. They hung them in places guaranteed to make security officials and transit employees twitch. I assume it was a thoughtless choice.

Because I hate security theater as much as the next joe, this pisses me off. The marketing drones' idiotic choices of location only adds to the problem of over-reaction. People who work security have no sense of humor about things like this. They're damned if they do, and double damned if they don't and it was something real. Laugh all you want, but the people on the ground take it seriously because they have to. If you don't like it when the dog barks, don't poke it with sticks.

AliceB: Fanfic changes this. Now new authorial voices chime in with the same characters/world/and/or/plot.

The key here is that they're authorial voices, but not authoritative voices, and most of fandom knows that. They treat canon (the copyrighted and trademarked product, which they shell out money to buy) very seriously. Are there idiotic and vocal exceptions? Sure. I don't believe they compise the majority.

Although Patrick Anderson made my point, I'd like to follow up on the dilution and the relative quality issues.

if the commercial and authorized Darkover stories to which AliceB refers were not good, that's a failure of the editors, IMO. The short stories set in Gaiman's Sandman series were quite good. The stories set in the Aspirin- and Abbey-edited Thieve's World, a shared world with multiple writers, were generally of even quality, though they varied in style. Editing is everything.

OTOH, what first drew me into fanfic was finding stories based in Star Trek Voyager that did a far better job than the series writers with the potential in the characters and situation set up by the creators. What kept me reading fanfic was the same impulse that had me re-reading Dune and LoTR and Heinlein as a kid - the desire to revisit the setting. Good fanfic is like that, with the added bonus of new stories. I don't read some fandoms (Dune, LoTR, Babylon5, etc) because, for me, fanfiction stories generally don't add.

OTOH, I absolutely do not think unauthorized fanfic should be publishable for monetary gain. Many fanfic readers and writers are horrified by the idea of a fan writer asking for money because in general their impulse for writing is quite different from original fiction writers. Some of them are insulted when one suggests they might, in fact, try their hand at original stories.

I very much appreciate Theresa's take. I wrote my first novel as fanfiction precisely so that I would never try to publish it. Also, since character and setting were given, I had to work on plot entirely. It was a useful excersize, and as a bonus, the few people who have read it seemed to enjoy it.

That said, and as noted, extending other people's stories isn't anything new. Pepys notes in his diary going to see The Tamer Tamed, which was a Shakespeare fanplay. Who knows what Bill thought of it? I'm sure that through the ages story tellers added on to legends and made new stories with the characters. Maybe Hercules only started out with a couple of labors.

Poppy Z Brite has a comment over on the LiveJournal feed in response to this post that I found just as wierdly self-justifying as all the fandom wank. After disclosing that she's written and published what is essentially RPF (real person fic) and retold a Lovecraft story in her writing life, she then goes on to say, "Personally, when a stranger takes the liberty of writing about my characters, it makes me feel as if somebody sneaked up behind my husband and stuck a finger in his butt."

What I find curious is that it isn't her own butt in question, but one removed. If she weren't married, would there be no problem?

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