[ SECRET POST #2435 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #2435 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 049 secrets from Secret Submission Post #348.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 1 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[fscom]

06. http://i39.tinypic.com/23u4jki.jpg

[kaijinscendre]

I love fanfiction, but I really think it should just stay fanfiction. I think publishing it (without MASSIVE edits) makes it awful because you lose a lot of the world building that is created by the original show/book/movie.

[(Anonymous)]

Eh. I think the type of fanfiction that gets most commonly sold as original stories are original stories mainly masquerading as fanfiction anyway. I mean, come on, you mention RPF fic. Like RPF stuff has any canon. It is just some stuff people interpret from vague interview cues, which gets diluted even further when they write RPF AU fics. Most of the time if dude A wasn't called Jensen, you wouldn't even be able to recognize him as being Jensen. That shit is already an original story, people just slap the fanfiction banner on it to have a bigger audience.

[(Anonymous)]

I'm not sure if 50 Shades of Grey is the best example to use for this as from what little I know from people who did read it, the original fanfiction version had pretty much nothing to do with Twilight other than the names of the characters. If your fanfiction is so AU that all you need to do is change the names of the characters and nobody who hasn't read the original can recognize what its based off of, then you might as well publish it.
In the cases where the setting is AU and none of the characters are acting in character, then I almost feel like passing it off as fanfiction is more deceitful as your just glomming on to character names and physical descriptions to attract an established reader base. At that point it's no longer really fanfiction, it's just fiction with familiar character names attached.

[(Anonymous)]

Why do you feel this way? Jealous that your fic didn't get published? I think quality writing should be published and crap shouldn't be published. So not only shouldn't have 50 Shades been published, neither should have Twilight, so it's kind of irrelevant that 50 Shades is fanfic.

[(Anonymous)]

Cassie Claire and E L James are well known for this because they had huge followings as fanfic authors, and because they had that huge following decided to change the serial numbers of the stories that made them BNFs. But if you were ban any story that originally was heavily inspired by another's creative world then you would find yourself dismissing a whole lot more than you thought, I bet.

Plus, 50 Shades, regardless of its many flaws, started a public dialogue about women's sexual desires (something that is pretty frankly discussed in fandom), and I'm okay with it for that alone.

Also, what's wrong with changing the names of an RPF story and selling it? There's no canon the authors are ripping off in RPF, and no characterisation. Do you want to ban stories with characters inspired by real people now?

Whenever I see people complaining about fanfiction and its bastardisation of the 'creative process', it just makes me think that the people complaining are the ones who don't understand the creative process.

Cassie Claire is getting what she deserves though.

[(Anonymous)]

Myeh, I had an Opinion about this, and then I remembered that editors are giving me money for things that were inspired by other properties and now bear little if any resemblance to them, so I bought a plane ticket with one of those checks and went to a writing retreat instead.

[kallanda_lee]

Firstly, the overwhelming majority of fanfic writers never see a single cent.

Secondly; I think if it's unrecognizable to the point where names can be interchangeable, and the original characters are so OOC nobody recognizes them, who cares? So you used a characters as inspiration, big deal.

A lot of characters in popular fiction are archetypes anyway, if you change the story and a large part of the personality, then for all intents and purposes, they ARE different characters.

Twilight and 50 Shades are both an umpteenth rewritten Beauty and the Beast Rehash, while Martin uses classic Archetypes (tough he then subverts them and makes them interesting). But you can use those building blocks for other things.

spittake

[(Anonymous)]

WAIT HOLY BATMAN AM I READING THIS RIGHT?

Fanfic should be about celebrating the original world of someone else and sharing stories about it with similarly obsessed people - not money.

Did Cassie Clare actually say that?!

WHAT

WHAT

oh come on

[(Anonymous)]

the only fanfic authors who can get away with the "change names and publish" game are the ones that wrote AUs with characterization so crappy that changing the names of the characters erases away whatever tenuous connection the story ever had to canon

[transcriptanon]

[Picture is a photograph of the writer George R.R. Martin (an old man with light skin and a white hair and beard wearing eyeglasses, a black cap and a blue shirt with dark denim pants and suspenders with the comic text bubble saying "It sucks!", the cover of the book "The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones" (a naked man jutting out of a city) and the cover of the "Shades of Gray" book (a masquerade ball or carnival silver mask).]

I'm beginning to agree with some less-than-thrilled authors' opinion on fanfiction. Fanfic should be about celebrating the original world of someone else and sharing stories about it with similarly obsessed people - not money. I've seen people on my f-list write Real Person Fic and then sell it as gay erotica story.

Fan fic is all fun and games until you switch the names and publish it as an original. I get the argument that nothing can be original anymore, everything is derivative, but writing a fanfic and then transforming it and making money off of it is fucked up and it's like a reverse of the writing process.

Go create your own characters, this is not cool. Seriously.

[ex_mek82]

Eh, an argument could be made that really way out there from the source material AU-y things (like say, a Barista AU with Star Wars characters set in the real world) can be justified in having the serial numbers filed off and re-purposed as an original novel. I don't see any issue with that, as I've always felt that if you're going to do such a hugely different AU, you may as well make it an original story altogether anyways.

Taking a fanfic that's set within a world and merely painting over the characters/places without changing much of the source material's inspiration, however, that's where I side-eye a little.

[blueonblue]

Aside from 50 Shades, it doesn't seem like people are making that much money. There's lots of self-publishing, but you don't make much when you sell your books for dollar on amazon.

[(Anonymous)]

Speaking of City of Bones, I heard they call "normal people" 'mundanes' or 'mundies'. Is this true? Did CC really not even try to hide that this was a HP fanfic? LOL

[(Anonymous)]

Okay, but how can you be sure whether a published book started out as fanfic?

Unless the author was known as a fanfic writer and/or the original fic was published online and was popular, you can't be sure. If the author never put the fic out for the public to see (or it was only published in some obscure zine that hardly anyone ever saw) and if the author kept their fic-writing persona completely separate from their real identity (whether they use a pen-name for their pro fic or not), you would never know. You may wonder about it, if you can spot similarities to another piece of media, but that's not proof it was fanfic, just that there may have been inspiration taken from that piece of media, or that both stories happen to use similar archetypes, cliches, and conventions. You've probably read some disguised fanfic without ever knowing it.

[(Anonymous)]

I completely agree with this.

It's cheap and lazy to write fanfic and then change it just enough so that it can be passed off as "original." You're piggybacking off of someone else's research and world-building and character creation. You're skipping over all of the truly hard parts.

Fanfic is fantastic if you want to practice and get some quick feedback. But if the only way you can sell yourself is to leech off of something someone else has written, then you might as well volunteer to be James Patterson's ghostwriter, because that's all you're good for.

[(Anonymous)]

Original fic should be about celebrating a world you've made and sharing stories about it with obsessed people - not money. MONEY FOR NOBODY!

[dragonimp]

Except people have been doing this sort of thing for ages. It's just modern copyright laws and the internet that have drawn the line between "fanfiction" and "fiction".

[akacat]

File off enough serial numbers, and who cares? 90% of profic is probably unintentional fanfic anyway.

[(Anonymous)]

To be fair, 50shades/Twilight's characters are basically just bland self insert girl and equally bland "tall, dark, and handsome" Harlequin romance novel guy and Cassie's characters bear pretty much no resemblance to canon HP characters (snarky cool, leather pants wearing Malfoy? Ahahaha)

...but what IS the writing process, then?

[nyxelestia]

I mean, as many others have pointed out, absolute 'original' crap gets published all the time and there are some real, quality writing gems to be found in fanfiction. A great deal of our modern and not-so-modern works are derivatives anyway, and on many levels, the publishing process has always been about money, regardless of literary value.

[anonlulz]

As a writer of both types of fiction, I agree completely with this.

The same Base Plot can be re-told over and over, but the Story won't be the same.

That's NOT THE SAME THING as basing your entire story off someone else's published story.

I don't care if you change names, and remove some elements. You wouldn't have thought of it if it wasn't for that other story.

[rbhudson]

Agreed. Also Cassandra Clare is a giant bully.

[(Anonymous)]

Wow, Santa's fashion sense is getting worse. First that Coca Cola deal and now he's looking like a railroad worker.

[(Anonymous)]

I can't take G.R.R.M's opinion on fanfic seriously, since Song of Ice and Fire started as War of the Roses fanfic.