Conceptual Analyses of Fanfiction, and Why They Don't Work

[alixtii]

So many of you, the ones who follow metafandom at least, will be familiar with the rough outline of the discussion: kradical--Keith R.A. DeCandido, the author of, among other things, the Serenity novelization (which I own but have yet to read)---made a post discussing the difference between fanfic and professional media tie-in fic in which he had the bad sense to call tie-ins "superior" (with the scare quotes) because they were a) legal and b) professionally edited. Discussion ensued, in which there was both much blowing what KRAD said wildly out of proportion and people who decided, much as they did during the SGA race discussion, that as long as the conversation was going on they might as well chime in. Which brings us to this post by liviapenn, who puts forth the challenge: "Let's make a list. Of awesome, legal, published fanfiction."

Now this post is wonderful just to see all the derivative works which have made their way into print, some which really boggle the mind, like Flatterland: Like Flatland, Only More So. But what I really find interesting are the places in the comments where fans question the criteria for inclusion into the list, by putting forth some defintion of their own of fanfic--their Theory of What Fanfic Is and Is Not, so to speak--and explaining how Professionally Published Work A doesn't fit into that definition of fanfic. What they're trying to do is put forth a conceptual analysis, the primary tool of "analytic philosophy," in which one attempts to sort out problematic cases. One of my professors from university (very much from the analytic tradition--he had a Ph.D. in math from Cambridge and one in Philosophy from the den of positivism known as M.I.T.) explained it like this: Everyone agrees that it is bad to boil babies and good to help old women across the street (although I must add that of course "everyone" agrees on no such thing), the trick is to tease out the essential qualities so as to address problematic cases and decide whether they fall under the concepts of "good" or "bad."

The goal is to "carve nature at the joints" which, of course, implicity assumes that nature (or at least language, as analytic philosophy has largely dumped metaphysics and epistemology in exchange for philosophy of language) has joints, that there's a clear cut place where something stops being fanfiction and starts being something else, even if no one else has managed to find it or quite agree on where it is.

The best way to point out that someone's analysis of goodness is faulty is to prove that it includes boiling babies or excludes helping old ladies across the street. (This is in contrast to, say, the deontological ethics of Kant, who would start with first principles and run with them irrespective of how ludicrous his conclusions ended up looking.) And with fanfiction, the best way to prove that a given Theory of What Fanfiction Is and Is Not is faulty is to demonstrate that it excludes the latest McShep WIP.

The first Theory of What Fanfiction Is and Is Not was provided in this thread, with the specific problematic case being Gregory Maguire's Wicked:

My problem, having read all of the Baum Oz books (and several but not all of his related fantasies), was twofold. I found inconsistencies in Maguire's borrowings -- I forget specifics now, but the subtleties of what he'd picked up and not picked up from the film and the first two Baum novels were decidedly odd. At the same time, I couldn't discern any sort of underlying, unifying thread in the book that used the Oz references for anything other than labeling. One could file off the serial numbers, publish the text of Wicked as an original work with original characters, and it would be the same story.

My counterexample would be Philip Jose Farmer's A Barnstormer in Oz; that book I would indeed count as "Oz fanfic". I don't entirely agree with some of Farmer's creative choices, but it engaged the original stories in a way I don't think Wicked does.

[. . .]

Wicked, though -- reading it was a surreal experience. I remember stopping partway through, thinking to myself "something's funny here", and then specifically looking for some story element that would blow my theory and not finding it. I swear, it reads to me like a manuscript where the Oz serial numbers were filed on after he'd written the novel.

[. . .]

I'll note here that my comments are strictly limited to the novel; from the little I have seen and heard with respect to the stage musical, my sense is that the musical does engage with the Oz source material.

OTOH, I would be interested in reading any published comments Maguire may have made on the writing and publication of Wicked, and might revise my opinion based on such material.

Now to provide a functional definition of fanfic makes perfect sense to me (I don't agree with liviapenn when she accuses djonn of tying the definition of fanfic to issues of quality), but this definition seems particularly problematic. My problem with dividing fanfiction from "a manuscript where the [. . .] serial numbers were filed on" based on whether the work engages the source material isn't that I think the division is nonsensical, the way that I think a division between gen and het based on canonicity is nonsensical (although producing a workable account of what is and isn't "engaging with the source text" may well prove impossible). It's that it excludes a number of stories from being fanfic which aren't problematic cases--in this case, pretty much any PWP. Indeed, this type of story is so manifestly a part of fanfiction that we've coined a term for it: ATG, or "Any Two Guys/Girls." And the conclusion that these ATG PWP's aren't fanfic is a reductio ad absurdim which for me refutes djonn's entire Theory of What Fanfic Is and Isn't.

Another example can be found here, when azdak takes on the problematic case of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead :

Whereas the driving impulse behind fanfic - and behind many of the works you cite, which definitely fall more squarely into the category - is love of the character(s) and/or the created world of the source text, Stoppard isn't interested in any of the Roz and Guil cast as characters. Actually, that's putting it terribly badly - he's precisely interested in them as characters, in their status as fictional beings, and in the relationship between fictional characters and actors, but he isn't interested in their internal lives at all. He isn't interested in Rosencrantz qua Rosencrantz (and one of his points is that Shaksespeare wasn't either, but unlike Shakespeare Stoppard isn't interested in Hamlet's internal life either.) Nor is he smitten by the world Hamlet inhabits, except insofar as Hamlet inhabits a theatre. Of course it's possible to come up with a broad definition of fanfic that encompasses any use of any character that also occurs outside the work in question, but then I think you run the risk of losing what is special about fanfic. It's not like one of Shakespeare's history plays and it's not like Nixon in China in ways that make it more interesting to me than the similarities do. The love, most frequently the shared love (because people do commit fanfic that never sees the light outside their underwear drawer), the obsessive love, is missing in the "derivative fic" definition.

First off, there's plenty of fanfiction which is written not out of an intense love for the source text, but out of a desire to play with it, to fix it, or just because one thought one could write it and put it down as such for yuletide. So azdak's Theory of What Fanfiction Is and Is Not ignores the rich diversity of motives fanficcers might hold as they work their craft.

Secondly, the definition assumes that fanfic treats characters only as people and never as fictional characters. Some fics are more meta than others, but being a pretentious metafic doesn't make a fic not fanfic. Fic for Stoppard's play continues to treat Ros and Guil as fictional characters even as they slash them, because to remove that element would be to ignore sometime integral to the source text (one'd be writing Hamlet slash rather than Stoppard slash), but it's still fanfic. Most people on my flist are familiar with some of wisdomeagle's mind-blowing metafiction, and I've written a metafic or two myself.

Other Theories of What Fanfic Is and Is Not come off just as badly. Tying fanfic's status explicitly to copyright issue excludes not only the problematic cases but also half of yuletide as well. (OTOH, the Yuletide fics often don't rest as comfortably under our notions of fanfiction as other fics for 'thons might.) Notions of community can't unproblematically make a distinction between literary fiction and professional science fiction are also written in the context of a community (at times an overlapping one with fandom, at times not). cathexys' attempts to delineate a slash aesthetic haven't been as successful as she'd like.

I don't want to come off as claiming that Wicked or Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead aren't problematic cases, or that it isn't problematic to lump Homer's The Oddessy and liz_marcs' Living History in the same category. liz_marcs' story is clearly and intuitively fanfiction in a way that Homer's isn't. But when the definition we construct to exclude Homer also ends up excluding Living History, that's a sign that the definition is fundamentally broken.

As a post-structuralist, I tend to view conceptual analyses as quaint holdovers from the days of Bertrand Russell, when it was thought that language could be made as wonderfully precise as mathematics. (It turns out mathematics ends up being as wonderfully imprecise as language.) But that isn't to deny that conceptual analyses can be great fun as logical puzzles, especially as one comes up with more and more convoluted examples to prove that under a given definition case A which intuitively falls on one side of the line in truth falls on the other. Indeed, that's why analytic philosophers are so much fun to spend time with--they always come up with the kookiest examples. (And then no one in the classroom laughs, and I'm looking around wondering if I was the only one in my Intro Phil class awake.)

Instead, I turn, as I did in the gen vs. ship debates, to the notion of genre, to the post-Wittgenstein idea that language is always-already fuzzy, and no matter how much you look you won't find uncomplicated joints in language or nature. In her defense, azdak recognizes (parenthetically) that what she puts forth may be if not "the defining quality" then "at least one of the central characteristics," but still she seems to think it to be defining enough to disqualify Stoppard's play without needing to refer to any of the other ways it is different from our core notion of what fanfiction is and does. In the end, all we have is partial truths and faulty definitions--and if you've ever looked inside a dictionary, you know that's all we ever have. Fanfiction is about engaging with the source text, except when it's not. Fanfiction is about treating characters as human beings, except when it's not. Fanfiction is about violating copyright, except when it's not. Fanfiction is about community, except when it's not. Fanfiction is written by women for women, except when it's not. Fanfiction is subversive, except when it's not. Fanfiction is about unleashing fantasies, except when it's not. Fanfiction "reads like fanfic" except when it doesn't. A fic that does many of these things will fit more comfortably under our intuitive notion of what fanfiction is then a fic which only does one of them. Some works are clearly fanfiction or clearly not fanfiction, being the fannish equivalent of baby-boiling, while some problematic cases rest in the grey areas between.

So keep on putting forth your Theories of What Fanfic Is and Is Not, but expect me to be there, shooting holes in them, because that's my idea of a good time.

ETA: azdak continues the discussion with more on "Fanfic" as a fuzzy category.

Comments

[kyuuketsukirui.livejournal.com]

Community seems iffy to me, though. I mean, it's true now that most fanfic is written within a community, but pre-internet that wasn't true. Many, many people say they were writing fic when they were growing up. Is it less fanfic just because they didn't have ffn to post it on?

(Not to mention, what counts as a community? If I am active in fandom A, but write fic for fandom B without ever having read other fandom B fic or engaged with any fandom B fans, am I writing fanfic or not? (What if no fandom B exists except for my fic?))

I think if you want to exclude professional texts, the best (and really only) way to do so is to make the distinction be professional vs amateur (that would exclude tie-ins as well, which you probably want to exclude)).

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

I don't know if it used to be not true that most fanfic was written in a community. I of course wasn't around one way or another, but I don't know--nor do I know how anyone could know--how much fic was written completely ferally, without any connection to the fandom. I mean I understand the impulses that could encourage someone to write a Kirk/Spock (or Blake/Avon or whatever) WIP having never previously heard of fanfiction and then never show it to anyone, but is there any reason to assume that it was really going on? Fanfiction--not just having the ideas in one's head, but writing them down--isn't all that intuitive a concept.

And if the person never joins fandom or becomes aware of it, then no one's going to call it fanfic, and it become a tree falling in the forest, did gay people exist in antiquity-type conversation.

And the thing about conceptual analyses is that someone can carve up the posssibilities some way (drawerfic isn't fanfic, for example) and if everyone doesn't share the same intuitions there's not much way to argue with someone who seems idiosyncratic in their definitions.

I don't think community can work as a magic dividing line any more than anything else (although I do think it's crucial), but I think the dividing line between professional vs. amateur is just as problematic, in part because I'm not sure where the dividing line is. If I sold my yuletide story would it stop being fanfic? Hell, what if Joss Whedon bought my Buffy fic? (Both sets of answers make equal sense to me.)

[kyuuketsukirui.livejournal.com]

But many people in fandom have actually said that they did write fanfic (actually wrote it down). It's not just some imaginary thing that may or may not have existed. Unlike gays in antiquity, the people are here and have said this happened. It doesn't seem to be unintuitive at all, but rather a natural conclusion.

[cathexys.livejournal.com]

And just as many do describe sharing it with their friend(s).

Not going to cons or zine/APA community level, but not fully drawerfic either!

[kyuuketsukirui.livejournal.com]

But if the community only has to be your friends, surely professional authors also share with their friends? Maybe not all or even most, but it's not something you can know. I think that's why pro/amateur is the only distinction that makes sense to me (if you have to have one; I think they're all fanfic), because it's the only thing you can know for sure.

[cathexys.livejournal.com]

I agree with you actually. On a purely descriptive level, I'd resist alixtii's potentially sold fanfics and go with an amateur/professional model.

I'd also acknowledge that there are borderline cases (much of RPS AUs that can file the serial numbers off with no more than exchanging names, for examples, would be in that borderline space as would original slash), but I actually thought that the very aspect that the original post brought up, namely potential audience may be a really central effect (not necessarily defining feature, though we might be able to argue that as well?): in other words, if you write drawerfic, you have an intended audience of one. If you writ within a community, you have a very limited audience.

Maybe the difference between Woolf showing her draft to her Bloomsbury friends and Sue and Judy writing MFU fic before zines is that the former is already writing for a larger audience. She doesn't only write for those few that see the initial drafts but intends to write for a larger audience.

I'm more interested in the effects than definitional boundaries. *Because* writing within fandom (maybe that's a better term than fanfiction, b/c it requires the community :) is tied to community, it displays various characteristics (stronger in some stories, weaker in others) that I'm studying. That neither means that all fanfic displays these aspects excessively nor that pro fic doesn't. On the whole, however, more fanfic does it and fanfic does it more :)

[kyuuketsukirui.livejournal.com]

maybe that's a better term than fanfiction, b/c it requires the community

I give it my blessing! XD

And yes, I think intent to publish would make it the same as published (so the example alixtii had somewhere else of someone's manuscript being fanfic until sold would not work for me if I were using the pro/amateur division line).

As for community = limited audience, though, hmm...I'm not sure whether that's actually true or not. In some cases, sure. But for example, emmagrant01 has said that she has a larger audience writing H/D than she would writing gay romance novels and I think that's probably true. She's writing in a huge fandom, gets tens of thousands of hits and hundreds of comments, compared to what would probably be a very niche seller were she to try to get published. (I, on the other hand, can hardly get fewer readers by repackaging my Jude/Ewan stories as original fiction, because the audience in fandom is very small.)

OMG I still haven't finished my remix fic! Must stop procrastinating. >_< How it is nearing 6am already!? *dashes*

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

*procrastinates with you*

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

Hmm, I think my approach here is somehow connected to my approach to identity politics--that there be a self-understanding (on the part of the writer or the audience or the community as a whole, I don't know) of one's process being fanfiction is crucial, even if only in retrospect! Anything else seems to be too essentialist for my tastes, assuming that a work is fanfiction because of its characteristics rather than for its position within the symbol-system.

But ultimately it comes down to needing more than one axis.

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

But nobody questions whether there were people in antiquity who do the sorts of things that gays do today--the question is whether it's appropriate to apply the term to them, when the framework into which those acts were placed was radically different. In the same way, no one is questioning whether there are fanfic-like documents in existence--the question is if they exist within a framework sufficiently similar to that in which the unproblematic fanfic cases exist to be able to be called "fanfic." For me, that framework is the fanfiction community.

Works written by people who later become fans retroactively find a place in that framework.

[cathexys.livejournal.com]

I'm still not certain what is gained by trying to define these clearly flexible boundaries.

It's a little bit like the period debates, i.e., Is Wuthering Heights romantic or victorian; is Heart of Darkness modernist, Beckett postmodern?

Can't we just do a definition where we're describing characteristics and are happy that most elements within the set possess most of these and many outside don't? I guess that why your side of the quad tends to not take mine all that seriously :)

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

Of course, I agree with everything you say here--that was the entire point of the original post, that we can't define the clearly flexible boundaries. So I'm not sure what it is you're objecting to, exactly.

I would disagree that the period debates are pointless, though--hashing them out can involve a lot of good thought and conversation and dialectic as ideas about the periods and texts involved get worked out. As long as no one thinks they're saying the last word on the matter, or that one is working towards a "correct definition" instead of a particular lens, such discussions can be very fruitful.

[trobadora]

Can't we do away with trying to define fanfic at large and just concentrate on describing fanfic as produced in fandom? ;-)

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

I'm still not sure that I see a difference between the two, but I'll be the first to agree that a could just be an idiosyncratic definition not lining up with other's intuitions.

[cathexys.livejournal.com]

No, I agree with trobadora here. Whereas drawerfic may have the same source text connection, it lacks the community aspect and the intended audience (limited and specific to a degree)

FIF (Fanfic produced within fandom :) then would be what we're looking at and it'd satisfy at least some of the caveats and limitations put forth otherwise (I'd maintain that few stories can sell as is. Comparing fanfic from its later serial numbers filed off version in MEDIAfandom or comparing tie ins and fanfic by same author, the central distinction for me was the way the pro writing had to be more descriptive, had to fill in more details).

I think we might want to separate pro fic vs fanfic from tie in vs fanfic, b/c the former has certain characteristics (i.e., we don't know the characters) whereas the latter has different ones (i.e., we need to end up wherre we started)

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

I see drawerfic as a problematic case, just like R&S and Wicked and a Sherlock Holmes story written by Virginia Woolf and (intended to be) read only by, say, T.S. Eliot. We're working on multiple (infinite, even!) axes here, with, say, a McShep WIP that utilizes many fannish tropes being at one of many focii.

[trobadora]

It doesn't line up with my intuition, at least, idiosyncratic as it may be. *g*

[trobadora]

Fanfiction--not just having the ideas in one's head, but writing them down--isn't all that intuitive a concept.

I totally and utterly disagree with that. I've been writing fanfic practically since I could write - it was completely natural to me, to fantasize and imagine stories engaging with whatever I'd just read or watched, and then to write that down. In fact, I was very surprised to discover there were a lot of fans who never did that.

(Interestingly, I mostly stopped writing fanfic after I actually came into fandom, because other people did it so much better. *g* I still imagine, but the urge to write it down has faded.)

Not that I don't agree that we can only talk about what we see, which is the fic produced within the community - but I believe the difference is in degree, not in kind.

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

Well, the point of the original post was that we need to learn to tolerate differences in degree, rather than trying to make everything a difference in kind--a lesson that my theory-oriented brain frequently needs to be reminded of, in fact!

In addition to a very good deal of what was a non-fannish LARP-ing (non-fannish because it lacked the fannish community, just being my brother and me, and thus just like with fanfic I'm not sure the term used really applies, except retroactively), I don't think I ever wrote down my non-original stories until after I discovered Star Trek fiction--and even then I worked on what were essentially spec scripts (although with my love of minor characters already in full effect).

[trobadora]

I'd call it fannish, myself - you can be fannish without being in fandom, at least in my understanding. Definitions, definitions...

Categories are a wonderfully useful thing so long as we remember they're not abolutes. *g*

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

Categories are a wonderfully useful thing so long as we remember they're not abolutes

Absolutely ;)

I can see how what I could say could have been confusing, I meant "not having the attributes of fandom" rather than "not having the attributes of a fan" although I don't know how much the two are related in my mind. Still, it was important for me to hold up my brother and mine role-playing as not being "real" LARP-ing, despiite being both role-playing (I think the word is used broadly enough to not have any specifically fannish associations) and live-action, since it existed apart from the history and tradition of LARP-ing. Just like when I enact the liturgical event at church, I'm doing something with its own completely distinct history and tradition.

If I discovered a book I previously believed to be a novel to be written by an (extraterrestrial) alien, I'd still call it a novel, but I'd find it to be more problematic a usage, more on the fuzzy border than before, because the term has associations that just don't apply to a work written by a non-human.

[cathexys.livejournal.com]

I think this is bordering on my debates I'm having with Sandvoss and Hills (and Jenkins to a degree :) about fannish behavior vs fan behavior. I mean, don't all little kids LARP then? Mine certainly do, but I'd never even consider it proto-fannish; they just play!

I'd probably restrict LARPing to a more well defined and well organized event.

It's actually a similar issue as the writing in and outside of fandom. We all have fannish behavior. Every time someone sets their VCR not to miss the next episode, discusses an episode around the water cooler, reads the recaps online, d'loads from itunes. None of these make them part of fandom I'd argue...

Still happy with the FIF definition here :)

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

Mine certainly do, but I'd never even consider it proto-fannish; they just play!

Exactly. But since I'm now a fan, and can see the ways in which it can be seen as proto-fannish behavior, so it sort of retroactively gets written into the fannish framework--which is akin to how I see drawerfic by people who later join fandom.

Still happy with the FIF definition here :)

But I think that whether a fic is FIF or not is one of the considerations (one of the central considerations?) involved in my intuitive notion of whether something is fanfic or not. Looking at language use, like a good Wittgensteinian, I'm more likely to call a problematic case (like my yuletide story) "fanfic" if it was written within the community.

[trobadora]

because the term has associations that just don't apply to a work written by a non-human

Well, if the non-human produces something that for the audience is indistinguishable from something produced by a human, I'd say it's close enough. I don't think we usually know enough about the circumstances of production to be able to rely on that for a definition. With fanfic, of course, we have the fic that clearly is produced within the context of the community - but that only applies to the people we know to be in the community. Can we make that judgement about a random ff.net poster?

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

Well, I think it becomes a question of how we as language users construct the imagined production process. I'm not going to assume the novel I'm reading is from Mars until I have reason to believe it--and until I do, the notion of its novel-ness hasn't been problematized for me. I think there a certain set of assumptions we routinely make about the people who post at FF.net.