Fan fiction, just a lil' clear up

[KillerMuffin]

I adore fan fiction. Some of it at least. Buffy grates my nerves.

Just wanted to say in case my snotty, holier-than-thou-ishness in previous discussions of this material were misleading on that point.

 

[minsue]

I adore fan fiction. Some of it at least. Buffy grates my nerves.

Just wanted to say in case my snotty, holier-than-thou-ishness in previous discussions of this material were misleading on that point.

I for one always appreciate your holier-than-thou-ishness. I hope to one day be able to do it half as well. (Oddly enough, that's to be taken without a note of sarcasm. )

I do miss your old AV, though.

- Mindy, pining away for those ankles

 

[Boxlicker101]

Re: Re: Fan fiction, just a lil' clear up

I for one always appreciate your holier-than-thou-ishness. I hope to one day be able to do it half as well. (Oddly enough, that's to be taken without a note of sarcasm. )

I do miss your old AV, though.

- Mindy, pining away for those ankles

Don't listen to her, Muffie. I much prefer your ass to your feet.

 

[A7inchPhildo]

Fan fiction is sometimes great and other times really sucks hard. Seems to be one or the other not many in between stories.

I happen to like Sarah, but Buffy stories just don't do anything for me.



"holier-than-thou-ishness" I never noticed! I will have to look harder for the hole from now on and less at the snotty.

You're great KM! Just wanted to clear that up too.

As far as the Av who cares? The feet were real though? I like that.

 

[Boxlicker101]

Fan fiction is sometimes great and other times really sucks hard. Seems to be one or the other not many in between stories.

I happen to like Sarah, but Buffy stories just don't do anything for me.



"holier-than-thou-ishness" I never noticed! I will have to look harder for the hole from now on and less at the snotty.

You're great KM! Just wanted to clear that up too.

As far as the Av who cares? The feet were real though? I like that.

I feel like I came here in the middle of something. Who are Sarah and Buffy? Is this the actress who plays Buffy, the Vampire Slayer and the character? Personally, if I write a celebrity story, I will write it about the character rather than the actress because I know more about the character than the actress. I wrote about Kelly Bundy rather than Christine Applegate because the Kelly persona is so much easier to get a hold on. I would probably never write about Buffy but I might write about Sabrina, the Teen-Aged Witch. I think the only way I would write about an actual person would be a singer or professional athlete or someone else who is herself, rather than plays a character.

I would probably not write about a male celebrity although I have been thinking about David meeting Liberace when David was a lot younger.

 

[A7inchPhildo]

Sarah Michelle Gellar, Yes plays Buffy the Vampire Slayer. She has also played many other characters on TV. and in the movies.

Vampire Slayers do not make good erotic stories. At least not dumb blond slayers, in my opinion. However I will say she is a most attractive female.
Some of her other works may be more suitable for fan-fic stories. Such as Simply Irresistable, or Cruel Intentions, Harvard man, All my children, Girl talk (not sure of her age at the time) co stared with Soleil Moon Frye, Her howard stern interview.

Also she was in several comercials and the Stone Temple Pilots, "Sour Girl" Video just recently. Not to mention the charity works and recognitions and books and...

She is kind of like the girl next door on steroids.

 

[snooper]

... Personally, if I write a celebrity story, I will write it about the character rather than the actress because I know more about the character than the actress ...

Of course it's easier, someone else has done a lot of hard work inventing and establishing that character, and you come along and rip off their work, probably without their knowledge, let alone asking permission first.

Plagiarism is the word. Breach of copyright is the offence in law.

"Hustler Magazine, Inc. et al. v. Jerry Falwell" applies to using celebrities' real life personae, not to stealing other people's intellectual property rights.

I am mildly surprised that "Laurel" goes after other sites for copyright offences so zealously, while allowing the posting of stories based on stolen IPRs.

Edited to add:
Sorry, KM, but you have to repeat things a lot of times for slow learners.

 

[Couture]

Of course it's easier, someone else has done a lot of hard work inventing and establishing that character, and you come along and rip off their work, probably without their knowledge, let alone asking permission first.

Plagiarism is the word. Breach of copyright is the offence in law.

"Hustler Magazine, Inc. et al. v. Jerry Falwell" applies to using celebrities' real life personae, not to stealing other people's intellectual property rights.

I am mildly surprised that "Laurel" goes after other sites for copyright offences so zealously, while allowing the posting of stories based on stolen IPRs.

Edited to add:
Sorry, KM, but you have to repeat things a lot of times for slow learners.

First of all, most any story here is not a rip off of any author's work. These are sex stories. The others are mainstream fiction.

That's a huge difference.

These are stories that the authors of the original work would never in a million years write. And just as importantly, the sex story is not going to take away sales from the original work. In my book, which is not the book of law, these are true derivative works.

Copyright and patent law have taken intellectual property rights entirely too far.

 

[Madame Manga]

Not to mention that if you are Disney or some other large corporation with a strong-arm legal department, you can take stories and characters from the public domain (Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast, Pocahontas) and keep anyone else from using them without your permission by means of heavy-duty legal threats. Also, make sure that Congress passes a exception to the usual law to keep your older characters (Mickey Mouse) from going into public domain because of their age.

Then you can turn around and steal small companies' copyrighted property without repercussions (Kimba the White Lion becomes The Lion King, a French animator's clownfish character becomes Nemo). Disney is a past master at that sort of thing; do a little Googling if you would like to read more. Pardon me if I sometimes believe that copyright law is manipulated in the favor of the big players and against the smaller; it is certainly not applied uniformly in this country, and does not deserve unthinking worship.

MM

 

[Boxlicker101]

Of course it's easier, someone else has done a lot of hard work inventing and establishing that character, and you come along and rip off their work, probably without their knowledge, let alone asking permission first.

Plagiarism is the word. Breach of copyright is the offence in law.

"Hustler Magazine, Inc. et al. v. Jerry Falwell" applies to using celebrities' real life personae, not to stealing other people's intellectual property rights.

I am mildly surprised that "Laurel" goes after other sites for copyright offences so zealously, while allowing the posting of stories based on stolen IPRs.

Edited to add:
Sorry, KM, but you have to repeat things a lot of times for slow learners.

It is not plagiarism because I have never copied a story from "Married with Children". It is not any kind of copyright violation because there is no charge to read the story and I am not making any money from it and never will make any money from it. If I were ever to sell the story, there might be some conflict.

Hustler v. Falwell was a lawsuit for either slander or libel because Hustler had printed a ficticious interview with Falwell in which he described sex with his mother in an outhouse. The court ruled that Falwell, as a public figure, can be publicly derided and that the story was not slanderous or libelous because it was totally unbelievable so the mag. was not in violation of anything.

A paysite has no business charging people to read my stories without my consent. Laurel has every right to go after such violations and I am glad she does.

 

[KillerMuffin]

BoxL, that's not my real ass. It's not legal to purchase a Tanfoglio in the US of A. The feet were really mine, tho'.



I dunno why Laurel posts it and I don't especially care. It's her site and she wants to so she will. My opinion on the matter is that as long as the copyright holder doesn't care, it doesn't matter. I just believe in calling a spade a spade.

 

[Guest]

 

[KillerMuffin]

It's the standard issue tightie whities. You get them after 100 posts.

 

[The_Darkness]

Fan fic's can be both really good or really really terrible. There's a HUGE website called www.fanfiction.net that has hundreds of thousands of fan fics for very nearly any comic, show, cartoon, or movie known to man.

The ultimate problem with fan fiction is that it's written by fans. Some of it is really good, and some of it takes the fiction and puts it in directions that are completely off the wall. Most of the stuff out here, is usually the "slash" type stuff where there's humpin' and lickin' and screwin' and all of those things prrobably don't happen in the show in question.

Still though, fan fics fall into two categories for fans: great and crap. I say write away because it just gives you more writing experience under your belt and will help you become a better writer.

 

[Boxlicker101]

BoxL, that's not my real ass. It's not legal to purchase a Tanfoglio in the US of A. The feet were really mine, tho'.



I dunno why Laurel posts it and I don't especially care. It's her site and she wants to so she will. My opinion on the matter is that as long as the copyright holder doesn't care, it doesn't matter. I just believe in calling a spade a spade.

Muffie, whether that is your real ass or not is all the same to me. I am much more of an admirer of female asses that I am of feet.

 

[Madame Manga]

A couple of weeks ago the New Yorker ran a piece that truly cracked me up: a imaginary story about Michael Jackson, written in the style of Boswell's Life of Johnson.

I'd call that celebrity fic on a couple of counts--obviously somewhat better written than the run of the mill, but still well within genre.

MM

 

[Guest]

Not being a fanfic fan, now you've got my attention, Madam. There is more than one fictionalized novel about Frida Kahlo, the Mexican painter, and one about Tina Modotti the photographer who settled in Mexico and knew Kahlo and crowd. There is much historical fiction to be found too. Then you have Joyce's Ulysses based on Homer's. Not too subtly sequeing, Joyce Carol Oates wrote a novel called Blond about Marilyn Monroe. So, fanfic can be literature after all.

Perdita

 

[pop_54]

Re: Re: Re: Fan fiction, just a lil' clear up

Don't listen to her, Muffie. I much prefer your ass to your feet.

I'm with you Box, never been a feet man myself, Muffie's arse is a much better sight Watch that bloody gun though.

Fan fiction?? Get's right on my bloody nerves, make do with the way they are, and invent someone new.

 

[Madame Manga]

Not being a fanfic fan, now you've got my attention, Madam. There is more than one fictionalized novel about Frida Kahlo, the Mexican painter, and one about Tina Modotti the photographer who settled in Mexico and knew Kahlo and crowd. There is much historical fiction to be found too. Then you have Joyce's Ulysses based on Homer's. Not too subtly sequeing, Joyce Carol Oates wrote a novel called Blond about Marilyn Monroe. So, fanfic can be literature after all.

Perdita

Several years ago there was a bestselling novel, "I Was Amelia Earhart", by Jane Mendelsohn. This was a poetic, completely imaginary meditation on what might have happened to Earhart after her plane went down in the Pacific. I recall another New Yorker story, by Salman Rushdie, in which the main character kept talking about Lt. Sulu from the original Star Trek series and how he might have handled all the situations in which the character found himself. A friend of mine has an anthology of stories by well-known authors--Joyce Carol Oates among them, IIRC--that are riffs off of their favorite movies, celebrities, etc. One story in particular that I remember was an explicit imagining of the sex scene from "Casablanca" between Bogart and Bergman's characters, which was utterly indistinguishable in any respect from a well-written fan fiction.

The reason that most fan fiction is bad has nothing much to do with the fact that it is derivative from identifiable sources. The reason it is bad is because it's largely written as a social exercise, not a creative one. Fans of a particular show congregate in groups to talk about it--obviously this activity has increased by orders of magnitude since the advent of the Net--and fan fiction is a natural outgrowth of this sort of talk. Someone doesn't like a particular episode and wants to show everyone how it should have gone. Someone adores a particular character and wants to demonstrate just how much. Someone thinks an aspect of the show has been under-served, and writes out a scenario that would emphasize it. And so on. Some people write in isolation, but not many. Some people have talent as writers, but in no greater proportion than in the population as a whole. This isn't important in fic circles. What is important is inclusiveness and the reassurance of sharing your fantasies with a sympathetic audience. Most people who participate in fic circles are female; this sort of thing is completely inexplicable to many men.

At any rate, I hope that I judge writing for its craftsmanship, its voice and its ability to provoke thought and emotion, not for its writer's specific inspirations. In the long run, they are irrelevant. It's like complaining that an artist used a model to create a painting. Actually, I've heard that one from people who ought to have known better: an original artist should be able to do everything "out of his head" and never make reference to the masters or to the world around him. One wonders if they have ever set pencil to paper.

MM