An article I am reading...
Jan. 30th, 2002 03:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
heidiI am reading an article of his entitled Quentin Tarantino's Star Wars?:
Digital Cinema, Media Convergence, and Participatory Culture which speaks about parodies and ofshoots of things like Star Wars - both the "professional" works, like Weird Al's The Saga Begins, and the "fan culture" things, like FA.
He writes,
"[C]reative reworkings of science fiction film and television are no longer, and perhaps never were, restricted to fan culture, but have become an increasingly central aspect of how contemporary popular culture operates. Too often, fan appropriation and transformation of media content gets marginalized or exoticised, treated as something that people do when they have too much time on their hands. The assumption seems to be made that anyone who would invest so much creative and emotional energy into the products of mass culture must surely have something wrong with them."
I agree with him - of course there's nothing wrong with it.
It's a natural way to story-tell. My son is doing it now - writing, well, telling, fanfic about Winnie the Pooh, Bear in the Big Blue House, Mickey Mouse, etc. He's even telling crossovers involving both Bear and Elmo from Sesame Street. It's instinctive - he tells stories based on the universe he knows. And everyone who isn't Tolkein tells stories based on the universe they know.
Tolkein really did too - it was just a universe of his own invention.
Later in the article, he quotes a fan as saying:
What I love about fandom is the freedom we have allowed ourselves to create and recreate our characters over and over again. Fanfic rarely sits still. It's like a living, evolving thing, taking on its own life, one story building on another, each writer's reality bouncing off another's and maybe even melding together to form a whole new creation.... I find that fandom can be extremely creative because we have the ability to keep changing our characters and giving them a new life over and over. We can kill and resurrect them as often as we like. We can change their personalities and how they react to situations. We can take a character and make him charming and sweet or cold-blooded and cruel. We can give them an infinite, always-changing life rather than the single life of their original creation.
And I guess that pretty much describes my issues with the idea that certain characterizations-in-fanfics in our open-canon HP universe are "canon" characterizations, or, for that matter, the argument created by some in other fandoms that originality - solo originality, where works are created by One Author and posted on One Big File and sort of left for discovery, and not discussed on mailing lists, and not read like some of Dickens' stories were, as Works In Progress, sort of misses the point of the way that a lot of my friends write. We chatter, we discuss, we plot and plan and change characters and give them extra lives, to borrow the title from a book about video games I read a few years back. And I truly love this kind of creation.
Digital Cinema, Media Convergence, and Participatory Culture which speaks about parodies and ofshoots of things like Star Wars - both the "professional" works, like Weird Al's The Saga Begins, and the "fan culture" things, like FA.
He writes,
I agree with him - of course there's nothing wrong with it.
It's a natural way to story-tell. My son is doing it now - writing, well, telling, fanfic about Winnie the Pooh, Bear in the Big Blue House, Mickey Mouse, etc. He's even telling crossovers involving both Bear and Elmo from Sesame Street. It's instinctive - he tells stories based on the universe he knows. And everyone who isn't Tolkein tells stories based on the universe they know.
Tolkein really did too - it was just a universe of his own invention.
Later in the article, he quotes a fan as saying:
And I guess that pretty much describes my issues with the idea that certain characterizations-in-fanfics in our open-canon HP universe are "canon" characterizations, or, for that matter, the argument created by some in other fandoms that originality - solo originality, where works are created by One Author and posted on One Big File and sort of left for discovery, and not discussed on mailing lists, and not read like some of Dickens' stories were, as Works In Progress, sort of misses the point of the way that a lot of my friends write. We chatter, we discuss, we plot and plan and change characters and give them extra lives, to borrow the title from a book about video games I read a few years back. And I truly love this kind of creation.
