At the risk of getting tedious, I feel have to speak up against being lumped in with the academically backward conceptual analysts and point out that I ALSO said in liviapenn's journal:
"When it comes down to it, of course, fanfiction is a category with fuzzy boundaries and there is no list of necessary and sufficient characteristics that will identify fanfic and only fanfic. However, there are examples of the category that are more central and examples that are less central, and R&G is definitely an outlier. As is also, for instance, the stuff written for Anthropomorfic, that plays with identifiably fanficcy conventions without being based on any source text at all."
And on the issue of fictional characters I said:
"I don't think, however, that anything I said implies that fanfic *cannot* treat characters as fictional characters - there's a kind of sub-genre about fanfic characters reading fanfic about themselves, and another kind where the characters meet the actors who play them, but the way they treat those fictional characters is very different from Stoppard's treatment of R&G. I haven't read any Stoppardfic, so I can't comment on what that looks like, but the other metafics I've read have had an interest in the characters as individuals, so that even though they're acknowledged to be fictional, they are treatde as if they were real people."
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Date: 2007-04-12 06:31 pm (UTC)"When it comes down to it, of course, fanfiction is a category with fuzzy boundaries and there is no list of necessary and sufficient characteristics that will identify fanfic and only fanfic. However, there are examples of the category that are more central and examples that are less central, and R&G is definitely an outlier. As is also, for instance, the stuff written for Anthropomorfic, that plays with identifiably fanficcy conventions without being based on any source text at all."
And on the issue of fictional characters I said:
"I don't think, however, that anything I said implies that fanfic *cannot* treat characters as fictional characters - there's a kind of sub-genre about fanfic characters reading fanfic about themselves, and another kind where the characters meet the actors who play them, but the way they treat those fictional characters is very different from Stoppard's treatment of R&G. I haven't read any Stoppardfic, so I can't comment on what that looks like, but the other metafics I've read have had an interest in the characters as individuals, so that even though they're acknowledged to be fictional, they are treatde as if they were real people."