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Why fan fiction?
As a deeply serious person, I was not surprised that a number of the RL friends who have stumbled over to this LJ have said to me: 'Fan fiction, Brammers? Really?'
I usually reply, 'Look, I tried cold fusion, but it was really hard!'
More seriously, I am still surprised that the question is asked. As many people have commented, no one asks why artists draw their own variations on famous artworks, or why singers cover other people's songs.
But I think that as well as the blindingly obvious reasons, there are a lot of more subtle ones, and that not all of us have the same motivations. These are the major sets that occurred to me, mostly from the perspective of writing, but also somewhat for readers (most of the writer ones also work for artists, but I did not have enough brain to be specific all the way through). I apologise in advance for missing something obvious, I am still getting over damned influenza. Despite me dividing these groups into sets, I think that most people belong to at least a couple, if not more.
1. It's all about le jeu
There is something enormously fun about playing with a text. The what-ifs, and the between-the-lines; the previouslys and the afters ... Say what you like about Derrida but he hit the nail on the head when he spoke about the way that any story could be enriched by playing about with it. For me, this is the reason why I only do Harry Potter fandom: JKR's worldbuilding is much bigger than her seven books, and so there is an enormous amount of world there that we know nothing about. Her texts invite interrogation, as I would have said back when I was more of a literary wanker than I currently am (oh yes, it could be worse!) and they reward that, too.
The whole idea of slashing characters is a perfect example of this. On the one hand it takes small textual notes and blows them up for investigation, on the other hand it takes the great children's novels of our age and reinvestigates them in the light of one of the great political debates of our age. Ladies and gentlemen of slash fandom, you are quiet revolutionaries.
AU writers do this more explicitly than most. By taking canon events and throwing them to the wind, they let us see the strengths of the canon in wholly fresh ways. In the best of these fics, we have canon characters in worlds utterly unlike the ones that we know, and yet highlighting the character notes that make us love them and showing how much we are made by our world and how much who we are makes it.
But strongly canonical fanfic writers are also engaged in postmodern play. By taking the text out of the hands of the author and into our own, we all step away from the traditional divide between writer and reader and instead say that these are characters for everyone to invest in, both imaginatively and receptively. Of course, we in HP fandom don't want our author dead. We like her a lot!
(Though one can't help being slightly envious of the people making a living off their Jane Austen fanfic. Paid for writing about Lizzie, Darcy and Zombies, genius! (Shame the execution wasn't quite up to the idea.))
( There's nine more to come! )
I usually reply, 'Look, I tried cold fusion, but it was really hard!'
More seriously, I am still surprised that the question is asked. As many people have commented, no one asks why artists draw their own variations on famous artworks, or why singers cover other people's songs.
But I think that as well as the blindingly obvious reasons, there are a lot of more subtle ones, and that not all of us have the same motivations. These are the major sets that occurred to me, mostly from the perspective of writing, but also somewhat for readers (most of the writer ones also work for artists, but I did not have enough brain to be specific all the way through). I apologise in advance for missing something obvious, I am still getting over damned influenza. Despite me dividing these groups into sets, I think that most people belong to at least a couple, if not more.
1. It's all about le jeu
There is something enormously fun about playing with a text. The what-ifs, and the between-the-lines; the previouslys and the afters ... Say what you like about Derrida but he hit the nail on the head when he spoke about the way that any story could be enriched by playing about with it. For me, this is the reason why I only do Harry Potter fandom: JKR's worldbuilding is much bigger than her seven books, and so there is an enormous amount of world there that we know nothing about. Her texts invite interrogation, as I would have said back when I was more of a literary wanker than I currently am (oh yes, it could be worse!) and they reward that, too.
The whole idea of slashing characters is a perfect example of this. On the one hand it takes small textual notes and blows them up for investigation, on the other hand it takes the great children's novels of our age and reinvestigates them in the light of one of the great political debates of our age. Ladies and gentlemen of slash fandom, you are quiet revolutionaries.
AU writers do this more explicitly than most. By taking canon events and throwing them to the wind, they let us see the strengths of the canon in wholly fresh ways. In the best of these fics, we have canon characters in worlds utterly unlike the ones that we know, and yet highlighting the character notes that make us love them and showing how much we are made by our world and how much who we are makes it.
But strongly canonical fanfic writers are also engaged in postmodern play. By taking the text out of the hands of the author and into our own, we all step away from the traditional divide between writer and reader and instead say that these are characters for everyone to invest in, both imaginatively and receptively. Of course, we in HP fandom don't want our author dead. We like her a lot!
(Though one can't help being slightly envious of the people making a living off their Jane Austen fanfic. Paid for writing about Lizzie, Darcy and Zombies, genius! (Shame the execution wasn't quite up to the idea.))
( There's nine more to come! )