In Defence of Fan Fiction

Stop! Before you read this, you actually might want to read this instead. It's a similar argument but it's made by someone who actually knows what they're talking about (a professor of English literature) and is rather more coherent.

Today, on Device Heritic's blog, someone wrote this:

> I would say Fan Fiction is extremely juvenile and mostly for people who can't create there own worlds and characters.

Which I somewhat took exception to. The result was an the following essay in which I try to defend fan fiction a a valid form of artistic expression beyond simply providing a means for beginning writers to cut their literary teeth. Then I found the blog post had been deleted, which I found extremely frustrating because there had been some highly interesting discussion and debate going on. Fortunately I have learned from past experiences to save anything significant I do post there. So I present my case here:

a) There are stories that can be told in fan fiction that would be difficult or not work in at all in regular fiction. Take, for example, the opening part of Past Sins where we have a mysterious mentor/student relationship that is in many respects similar to the stereotypical farm boy/wise old mentor relationship, in that Twilight's actions make very little sense to Nyx because Twilight knows things that Nyx doesn't. However, the story is told from Twilight's point of view, which is never an option in a generic farm boy/wise old mentor story because you'd have to info dump everything all at once at the beginning. There are countless other stories you will find here that would never work as regular fiction because of the burden of explaining the context would break them.

b) The practice of writing fan fiction is much older than you might suspect. The original King Arthur story has been lost and every retelling since has been essentially fan fiction of the original. Sir Lancelot? Somebody's OC who was added relatively late in the development of the saga (I think it was a French writer, but I could be wrong). Damn fan fiction and you might as well damn King Arthur too. There have are many similar legendariums in which stories have been developed in over the course of history but sadly the practice has died out because of...

c) Modern copyright law. The term length of copyright was extended and extended over the years and we have all become quite accustomed to the idea that characters and ideas themselves can be somehow "owned". I would suggest reading Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig, who discusses the effects of copyright law better than I could, as well as putting it into a historical perspective. Thank's to copyright law we find ourselves in a situation where any writer who wishes to progress beyond a certain level of recognition (specifically the level of recognition where they make money, because that is clearly the most valid metric of artistic merit) must pretend to ignore the ideas of others and build up their own little castle of canon and never shall two such castles meet. The only escape being though works of parody and even then it is usual to change the names around.

d) My final argument is purely subjective, however I feel that any argument that somehow relegates the very best literally works of the brony community to the status of juvenile, not based on the actual content of the work, but simply because they build on the ideas of others is somehow automatically and self evidently wrong. Because I have read works produced by this community that are far from juvenile, and I find it as wrong to condemn them for the single sin of standing on the shoulders of a giant than it would be to condemn the output of the scientific community for the same reason.

I rest my case.

Comments

[Bradel]

I am frustrated by my inability to add a blog post to my favorites list.