Brief Deviation

I know I already posted this week, but my class got canceled for the second time and I found myself with a lot of time on my hands this morning.

I wanted to deviate a little from what we usually do here to bring this to your attention: http://www.tor.com/blogs/2012/03/is-fan-fiction-ready-to-go-mainstream-thanks-to-fifty-shades-of-grey#more

I posted it on Sarah's FB wall, but having discussions on FB these days can kind of be a pain the ass. So I'm putting it here. And I wonder--what do you guys think of this business?


My initial reaction is to reject the idea entirely. I don't know if this is because of my mass media law influence or for some other reason, but things like this scream copyright issue to me. Of course, I know nothing about the book Fifty Shades of Grey, so this is definitely a knee-jerk reaction. (and looking it up on Amazon, I am assured it's not the kind of book I would want to read anyway).

According to Tor's article, I guess the book spawned from some Twilight fanfiction? Aside from what sounds like a bad relationship model based on the one in Twilight, I can't really tell how valid that claim is, though the article's author assures me its there or whatever. But my issue isn't so much with the book itself, but rather with what the article goes on to say about our generation and "sampling," and how our digitized age makes this even easier. I have to agree with the article on this point: it's definitely easier and more common for people to share their fanfiction online, in communities and forums and whatnot. I'm not a huge fan of the whole process (as a reader and as a writer), though even I'll admit I have had some fun playing around in other writers' backyards.

But to me, that's where that sort of writing belongs: in the backyard, free to read online, forever. Fanfiction is a great way to develop your own writing style and voice, a perfectly valid way to exercise your budding writing prowess. The websites and forums you find it on are fun places for fans of the universe created by another author. It crosses a line for me when money gets involved.

I'm not saying that this has happened already--again, from what I can tell from the plot blurb on Amazon, I can't quite see the Twilight connection aside from a super shitty idea of what a functional relationship is. But on the other hand, if what Tor's article says is true, then the work was borne from a Twilight fanfic and simply changed to cut all ties with Meyer's less-than-thrilling universe as created in Twilight. Does that make it okay? Maybe, but in all honesty I'm leaning a little towards "no." No, it does not make it okay. And not necessarily because of the whole copyright infringement thing.

I lean towards no because more and more often, I encounter novels and stories and TV shows that are all THE EXACT SAME THING AT THEIR CORE. Seriously. How many re-imaginings of the supernatural hunter/detective story are we going to see before we finally move on to something different? How many more authors are getting caught up in this trap? This sampling business, to me, is a potential catalyst for the continued destruction of original ideas. I know that having an "original idea" is fairly impossible--pick a novel, any novel, and you can trace an idea back to something else--but I feel people did and could still do a better job if perhaps they "sampled" less. Don't take a core idea--the detective story! with demons and banshees and bears oh my!--take something smaller, some tiny little fragment, and mix it up with something completely different. It might end up being disastrous--or it might end up super fricking awesome.


What do you guys think about all this business? My argument isn't exactly stellar, I know, but there it is.

Oh, and here, have a song:

Love me some Shinedown.