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[META] The censorship problems faced by anime and manga fans

For fans of manga, anime, and other Japanese media, pointing and laughing at inaccurate mass media portrayals of Japanese pop culture has been something of a sport for decades. A few weeks ago, however, things took a slightly more serious turn.

The ball got rolling when early in June, the Japanese House of Representatives approved a long-overdue law banning the possession of child pornography. Up to now, creating and distributing child pornography was as forbidden in Japan as anywhere else, but “simple possession” had not yet been criminalized. The new law applies only to “real” child pornography and leaves alone completely fictional depictions of underage characters in sexual situations in manga, anime and other media. This exception came about after vocal protests from manga publishers, creators, fans and free speech rights activists. The story was widely reported in non-Japanese media. However, most of these reports focused on handwringing about Japan’s “failure” to clamp down on sexually explicit manga. Most shared was a CNN article filled with outrage about how the new law supposedly permits Japanese bookstores to fill their shelves with shocking cartoon porn about children. (more…)

[META] Parafanfiction and Oppositional Fandom

[P]arafanfiction…refers to a particular subset of parafictional art that claims to be fanfiction of, or some other record of, an external media object that does not actually exist. The most notable examples of this are the Homestuck Anime and Squiddles, both of which are spinoffs of the actual Homestuck hypercomic. The idea with those projects is to fabricate an entire alternate reality where Homestuck is an anime and the in-comic show Squiddles actually exists. The fans participating in these projects create objects ostensibly taken directly from the shows in question—screencaps, pictures of old VHS tapes, GameBoy Advance cartridges, gif edits, and so on and so forth—in order to sell the idea that these shows actually exist.

Parafanfiction and Oppositional Fandom by

[META] Artistic Freedom, or This Is Not a Review of The Hobbit

This is not a review of The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, but I’ll share some impressions for context. Though it kept me entertained, I didn’t think it was very good. The story felt padded; the implausible action scenes lacked tension; the moralizing was often forced. But for all that, I’m glad the movie was made because it means that the narrative of Middle-earth is still alive.

Storytelling belongs to the public consciousness. All the copyright laws in the world cannot stop that being true. It is human nature to imitate: it is how we learn to talk, to dress, to be polite, to live in society. It is embedded in human nature to take in stories and breathe them out again. This is not to say there is no place for copyright. As long as we live in a nominally free market society, artists must be able to make money from their work for art to flourish, and copyright (ideally) gives them control over distribution of their work to prevent market saturation and grant them remuneration. But if copying must be restricted, the creation of art itself is naturally free: the mind flies to it as it flies to love, and no prison nor prison sentence can stop it.

One common complaint about derivative works is that they are often bad quality. And this is true. (It’s true of original works just as much.) I would argue that The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, despite a great deal of talent and effort, is bad quality in many ways. It’s a legal, licensed work, but aside from giving it a big budget, that doesn’t affect whether it’s good or bad art. Likewise, some still claim fan fiction has dubious legality, but that has no bearing on whether it is brilliant or painful to read. Art is speech, and democratic society has long understood that respecting freedom of speech exposes us to reams of stupid speech. That is a very small price to pay for the freedom to share thought and learn and grow as individuals and cultures.

I don’t doubt that Tolkien would be rolling over in his grave at the excesses of the Jacksonverse. In this particular movie, I suspect he’d find the Elf-Dwarf romance ridiculous, the sex joke appallingly inappropriate, the fight scenes mostly absurd and undercutting of the quieter narrative of Bilbo’s clever heroism—and that’s just for a start. I wouldn’t be surprised if his heirs have similar feelings. I have many of the same feelings myself.

Who cares? We don’t really deserve any say in how others choose to retell a tale. I mean this as a statement about natural rights rather than gracious conduct. A gracious standard of conduct might well choose to consult with a respected original author or their heirs, might make an effort not to bruise their feelings, might listen to critiques and revise accordingly. But a narrative belongs to the mind of every person it has touched. And no one has a right (regardless of the current law of the land) to tell any person not to re-envision that narrative however they wish.

Without such re-envisioning, The Hobbit is just a novel, a good novel, written in the 1930s in Britain, growing slowly more remote from the language, tastes, and customs of the new century. Without this re-envisioning, one day it will die. And so we create new versions, and they have women and more action and additional tie-ins to The Lord of the Rings and sex jokes and a younger, sexier Thorin and a scarier Ring. And out of what might be considered the mess of this particular version, out of the sloppy, poorly paced, bad taste et cetera comes a new perspective on an old story.

I liked the scarier Ring, the almost-heavy handedness in showing its immediate hold on Bilbo, the changes in his behavior when he fears he’ll lose it. I liked the general tone of foreboding, the sense of social breakdown among the Wood Elves and the Lake Men that presages the cataclysmic War to come in The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien could not have done this for the simple reason that he hadn’t yet written The Lord of the Rings when he wrote The Hobbit. Whether or not he would have done it if he had already developed the full history of the War of the Ring is moot (as an Ent would say). The story left Tolkien years ago. It is our story now. It is Peter Jackson’s. It is mine. It is yours. And as the years pass and its iterations continue to ripple out—a cartoon here, a CGI-heavy trilogy there, a radio drama, a few thousand fan fics, and who knows what—it will be reshaped by the minds it meets, often badly but perhaps one day with hammer-blow of genius that will truly reinvent it. Perhaps Tolkien has yet to meet his Shakespeare. But the tale will always be reshaped to meet the changing world it continues to speak in. And it will keep living, as art has to if the human spirit is to thrive.

Submission by Arwen Spicer

[META] Storify by Bertha Chin: tweets and pictures of the Fan Studies Network Symposium 2013

Storify by Bertha Chin: tweets and pictures of the Fan Studies Network Symposium 2013:

Tweets from the Fan Studies Network Symposium, hosted by the School of Political, Social and International Studies at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, on Saturday 30th November 2013. Featuring a keynote by Professor Matt Hills, and over 30 papers from international delegates.

Going on right now: Fan Studies Network 2013 Symposium

The Fan Studies Network Symposium is taking place in Norwich right now and being live-tweeted at #FSN2013. Check out the program:

09:30 – 10:20: KEYNOTE
Professor Matt Hills (Aberystwyth University) (Chairs: Lucy Bennett & Tom Phillips)
10:30 – 10:45: BREAK
10:45 – 12:00: PARALLEL PANELS
Panel A: Spaces and Performance (Chair: Tom Phillips)
Panel B: Celebrity (Chair: Sarah Ralph)
12:00 – 13:00: LUNCH
13:00 – 14:30: PARALLEL PANELS
Panel C: Gender (Chair: Bertha Chin)
Panel D: Classic Fandoms, New Narratives (Chair: Ruth Deller)
14:30 – 14:45: BREAK
14:45 – 16:00: SPEED GEEKING (Chair: Richard McCulloch)
16:00 – 16:15: BREAK
16:15 – 17:45: PARALLEL PANELS
Panel E: Transculture (Chair: Nele Noppe)
Panel F: Textualities (Chair: Bethan Jones)
17:45 – 18:00: CLOSE  - Lucy Bennett & Tom Phillips (Fan Studies Network)

More info and abstracts

[META] Anime gets its own Veronica Mars Kickstarter: overseas fans raise $150.000 in 5 hours for ‘Little Witch Academia’

As reported by Anime News Network and others, Japanese animation studio TRIGGER’s Kickstarter campaign to make a sequel episode to their Little Witch Academia OAV met its goal of $150.000 in less than five hours. The Kickstarter is at $285.000 right now, with a whopping 28 days still left to go.

In the Kickstarter video, TRIGGER co-founder Masahiko Otsuka explains that after the studio uploaded the single-episode anime on YouTube, they got an unexpected flood of comments from overseas fans, many urging them to hold a Kickstarter campaign so they could make more episodes. TRIGGER looked into this Kickstarter thing and decided to give it a go.

TRIGGER was only asking for $150.000 to make one episode, not 2 million like the Veronica Mars movie Kickstarter. I think it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to compare the potential effect of the Little Witch Academia campaign on that other now justifiably famous and much-discussed fan funding success, though. TRIGGER has raised almost twice what they asked for already, and the Kickstarter isn’t nearly done.

On the English-speaking part of the Internet, where the concept of using Kickstarter to raise money for creative projects is already very familiar in and of itself, The Veronica Mars campaign fueled a lot of talk about the ethics of pro creators asking fans for money (for a product that they will end up paying for again once it’s ready for sale). I reckon that the discussions surrounding the Little Witch Academia campaign will be more about how Kickstarter could enable overseas fans to support the Japanese anime industry. Overseas fans not only motivated TRIGGER to start the Kickstarter in the first place; they were probably also largely responsible for its smashing success. It sounds like Japanese fans can also participate in Kickstarter campaigns via their Amazon accounts, so there’s no way to tell for sure how many of the people who participated in the Kickstarter were non-Japanese fans, but the comment section seems to be almost entirely in English. 

In the video, TRIGGER’s Otsuka urges other Japanese creators to consider Kickstarter as a way to raise funds for projects among overseas fans. I wonder if any anime studios, game studios, or other individuals or companies will follow TRIGGER’s lead soon. Fan funding in and of itself isn’t a new thing in Japan, of course; Ken Akamatsu’s J-Comi, for instance, regularly holds very successful “fanding” FANディング campaigns to raise money to re-issue out-of-print manga, special sets of manga that include material previously issued only in dojinshi, and so on. These campaigns are aimed at Japanese fans, though. I don’t remember any examples of Japanese creators aiming directly for overseas fans with a fan funding campaign. The success of the Little Witch Academia campaign should certainly give ideas to other studios.

(On a totally different note, I’m no doubt the millionth person to mention this, but could anyone point me to a discussion of how Little Witch Academia is a cross between maho shojo and Harry Potter? There’s a lot of meta in there. Here is TRIGGER’s YouTube upload.)

[META] New issue of Transformative Works and Cultures on comics fandom

Fan studies journal Transformative Works and Cultures has published its thirteenth issue on comics fandom. Here are links to all the articles, on topics ranging from women in comics fandom to fans on 4chan to Captain America and various other Avengers-related things. Enjoy! As usual, we’ll be posting some good quotes from the articles too.

Editorial:

Matthew J. Costello: The super politics of comic book fandom

Theory:

Suzanne Scott: Fangirls in refrigerators: The politics of (in)visibility in comic book culture

Praxis:

Catherine Coker: Earth 616, Earth 1610, Earth 3490—Wait, what universe is this again? The creation and evolution of the Avengers and Captain America/Iron Man fandom

Lyndsay Brown: Pornographic space-time and the potential of fantasy in comics and fan art

Tim Bavlnka: /Co/operation and /co/mmunity in /co/mics: 4chan’s Hypercrisis

Symposium (short articles):

Forrest Phillips: Captain America and fans’ political activity

Babak Zarin: The advocacy of Steve Rogers (aka Captain America), as seen in hetrez’s “Average Avengers Local Chapter 7 of New York”

Amanda Odom: Professionalism: Hyperrealism and play

Rebecca Lucy Busker: Fandom and male privilege: Seven years later

Kayley Thomas: Revisioning the smiling villain: Imagetexts and intertextual expression in representations of the filmic Loki on Tumblr

Ora C. McWilliams: Who is afraid of a black Spider(-Man)?

Interviews:

Matthew J. Costello: Interview with comics artist Lee Weeks

Kate Roddy, Carlen Lavigne, Suzanne Scott: Toward a feminist superhero: An interview with Will Brooker, Sarah Zaidan, and Suze Shore

Reviews:

Daniel Stein: “Comic books and American cultural history: An anthology,” edited by Matthew Pustz

Drew Morton: “Of comics and men: A cultural history of American comic books,” by Jean-Paul Gabilliet

[META] Worldcon Site Selection

This is the third in a series of posts by Emma England on fannish issues surrounding Worldcon, the longest running science fiction and fantasy convention in the world. Emma is the 2014 Worldcon academic track organizer and is currently researching the history of conventions. The first post introduced Worldcon, the second post debunked the myth that “traditional” conventions are only about literature, and this post is about the site selection process for the 2015 Worldcon.

The location of Worldcon changes every year and is decided upon by members of the Worldcon at the convention two years prior. So Loncon 3, the 2014 Worldcon, was voted for at Chicon 7 (Worldcon 2012, Chicago). At the 2014 event, to be held in London, the site selection for 2016 will take place. The process for site selection involves:

1)      People from a city decide they want to form a team and put on a bid, at which point they have to set up company, find a venue, hotels etc.

2)      Each bid answers Smofcon’s Fannish Inquisition questions (Smofcon is an annual convention for science fiction convention organizers. Each con includes inquisitions for major conventions)

3)      Bids organize election campaigns, including developing websites, running social media campaigns and sending volunteers to different conventions

4)      Voting at the Worldcon. To vote a person must be a paid up member of the Worldcon where the voting will take place. Membership can be attending or supporting. If the person has supporting membership and cannot vote in person they can send in a voting form. The voting is undertaken by Preferential Voting. This means that each person votes in order of preference. If, when the votes are added up, there is not a clear winner, the candidate with the least votes is knocked out and the votes allocated to them are transferred to each voter’s second choice. This process is repeated until there is a winner. They then become the official Worldcon and can start the real work of organizing the convention. The site selection page for 2015 is here: www.lonestarcon3.org/wsfs/wsfs-site.shtml

Some years only one team is in (serious) contention. Other years there is more than one serious bid with a chance of winning. This is the case with the 2015 site selection, to be voted on at Lonestar 3 (the 2013 Worldcon, Texas, USA). There are three possibilities and with two months campaigning to go there is no clear frontrunner. This is all the more significant because the bids represent different kinds of approaches to Worldcon and SF/F fandom: traditional, radical, and mediatory.

Spokane (USA) If Spokane win, the Worldcon is likely to be fairly traditional given the extensive Worldcon history of the committee. The Bid Chair, Alex van Thorn, is a member of the establishment (with the positive and negative associations that brings). The location is safe and likely to have a warm but not blistering temperature, but it is not a major tourist destination, which may count against it during voting. The convention center, hotels, and transport to Spokane are all suitable and so far seem reasonably priced. Furthermore, there are authors already in place who are working on advertising the Bid, including C. J. Cherryh who does not fly and is therefore rarely accessible for fans. In order to win Spokane has to persuade people that experience and tradition is more important (or, at least, safer) than change and taking risks. They also have to persuade people that Spokane is worth visiting more than Orlando or Helsinki.

Orlando (USA) If Orlando win, there is the potential for a considerable shift in the nature of Worldcons. It is calling for a Revolution by explicitly aiming itself at media fandoms and other non-traditional SF/F (especially young and/or female) fandoms. Even the logo is radically different, focusing not on the location of the city, but on popular fandoms. For some this is a positive step at uniting fandoms and trying to extend the reach of a valuable and historic but stagnating fan enterprise, while for others it is an unwelcome challenge to the traditions of Worldcon. The event will be held at Disney’s Coronado Springs resort which keeps the costs down dramatically, both for membership and accommodation (i.e., a room with two queen sized beds is $139 per night). However, the size of the site is so vast that people will be relying on the free busses, which could mean standing around in very hot weather trying not to wilt. In order to win, can Orlando persuade enough non-traditional fans to pay to vote and/or can they persuade enough attending members that their convention will be well run and support existing fans. This is especially the case because the committee are, while experienced conrunners, not known to Worldcon members.

Helsinki (Finland) If Helsinki wins this will be the first time that Worldcon will have been held outside of North America for two years in a row. This will make the convention a truly world event, as well as it being the most northerly Worldcon ever. This has the potential to build a solid fan base for Worldcon among Europeans who go to Loncon and Helsinki, perhaps even tempting them to go to America for future cons. It is, however, controversial among many American fans who do not want to have to miss the con two years in a row or to have to decide between them if they can only afford one. US fans are, even at European Worldcons, the largest single nationality represented. On a more detailed level, the convention center seems very well equipped and the city is providing free transport for all Worldcon members, but the hotels are widely dispersed around the city. As far as content goes, the committee are diverse with experience of running a range of SF/F cons for different media and types of fans. This suggests that the Helsinki Worldcon would be able to attract a wide range of people not necessarily accustomed to going to more traditional Worldcons. To win, however, it needs to persuade enough non-attendees to pay to vote or to persuade attending members that travelling to Europe two years in a row is manageable.

It is perfectly possible that the 2015 election will be chosen in the second or third round and that people’s second choices will win it. If people do vote and they don’t have a second or third favorite, they may do better to leave some blanks.

As the election draws ever closer it will be interesting to see how the voting campaigns progress and who eventually wins. Surely, it is worthy of some study!

For further commentary see:

File 770. Commentary and news about the Worldcon sites, each with their own tag and tagged under “Worldcon”

Lawrence M. Schoen. “Spokane vs Helsinki: Cognitive Dissonance and the 2015 Worldcon” 17 September 2012

CD Covington, “On Worldcon Bids” 10 September 2012

Cheryl Morgan, “Forthcoming Worldcons” 5 September 2012

Site Selection Presentations, 3 September 2012

[LINK] Timeline of Fandom and Profit

Inspired by the discussion around Amazon’s announcement of Kindle Worlds, here’s a preliminary timeline on Fanlore of notable happenings related to fandom and profit. Famous instances of commercialization of fanworks, of exchange of money in fandom, profit-related incidents between fans or between fans and professionals, and so on.

Any examples to add? Please edit the wiki page or drop the info here so I can edit it in. There’s a great deal still missing, especially about commercialization of fanworks besides fic (fan films, mods, fan translations etc), and I have vague memories of reading about many more profit-related incidents in academic works and elsewhere.

[META] Amazon announces publishing platform for licensed fanfic

PaidContent reports that in June this year, Amazon will be launching Kindle Worlds, a legal publishing platform for fanfic. According to Amazon’s announcement, Kindle Worlds will start out by allowing fanfic based on Gossip Girl, Pretty Little Liars, and The Vampire Diaries.

It’s not necessarily bad news that companies are trying to create options for “licensed” fanfic, and I’ll leave the in-depth analysis of the legal aspects of this to professionals. Legal issues aside, though, I certainly hope that Kindle Worlds won’t become a model for other attempts to legalize fanfic. This concept seems to repeat a lot of fan-unfriendly aspects of previous forays by companies into the weird world of fic monetization. Kindle Worlds would allow fic authors to sell works “without hassle”, as PaidContent says, but apparently also without many rights, and within the boundaries of extremely strict content guidelines.

The platform refers to fandoms as “Worlds”. Copyright holders can give Amazon Publishing a license to allow fic writers to upload stories about licensed media to Amazon Publishing, which will then offer the stories for sale. Since this is not a self-publishing platform, Amazon Publishing will be setting the prices:

Paidcontent:

The fan fiction authors get a royalty of 35 percent for works of at least 10,000 words, and a royalty of 20 percent on works between 5,000 and 10,000 words.

Amazon’s “Kindle Worlds for authors” page:

Amazon Publishing will set the price for Kindle Worlds stories. Most will be priced from $0.99 through $3.99.

Fic authors will get a monthly payout. Amazon will be paying an undisclosed amount of royalties to the copyright holders of the media the fics are based on, and presumably also keep an undisclosed amount of money for itself. In short, while fic writers will get some money, they have zero control over how much they might want to charge or how much of a cut they deserve, and no options to negotiate. Amazon can organize its business the way it pleases, of course. But this “you will take what we offer you or nothing” approach may offer a big clue to how Amazon believes the rights of all parties should be balanced out when fic writers and copyright holders try to share income from fanworks.

An ever-returning problem with “official” fanfic contests and corporate websites is that they tend do have content guidelines that are rather more restrictive than what many fans feel is sensible, and Kindle Worlds is no exception. The copyright holders who license their properties to Amazon to allow fanfic on Kindle Worlds will be deciding which content is allowed:

World Licensors have provided Content Guidelines for each World, and your work must follow these Content Guidelines. We strongly encourage you to read the Content Guidelines before you commit the time and effort to write.

It’s not immediately clear if this means that there will be different content guidelines for every fandom on top of the content guidelines that Amazon itself sets. But Amazon’s basic content guidelines are as follows:

Pornography: We don’t accept pornography or offensive depictions of graphic sexual acts.
Offensive Content: We don’t accept offensive content, including but not limited to racial slurs, excessively graphic or violent material, or excessive use of foul language.
Illegal and Infringing Content: We take violations of laws and proprietary rights very seriously. It is the authors’ responsibility to ensure that their content doesn’t violate laws or copyright, trademark, privacy, publicity, or other rights.
Poor Customer Experience: We don’t accept books that provide a poor customer experience. Examples include poorly formatted books and books with misleading titles, cover art, or product descriptions. We reserve the right to determine whether content provides a poor customer experience.
Excessive Use of Brands: We don’t accept the excessive use of brand names or the inclusion of brand names for paid advertising or promotion.
Crossover: No crossovers from other Worlds are permitted, meaning your work may not include elements of any copyright-protected book, movie, or other property outside of the elements of this World.

This is rather incredibly restrictive, but I can’t say I’m surprised. In other fanfic contests and corporate fic-hosting endeavors, media companies have also set content guidelines that prohibit sexual content or other hard-to-market things. (Also check out this thesis by Suzanne Scott and this article by Roberta Pearson for more discussion on this.) Last year’s MTV-organized Teen Wolf fanfic contest caused some amazement precisely because it wasn’t explicitly hostile to slash or porn.

Needless to say, these guidelines will be excluding a massive number of authors from legally monetizing their fic – from those who write smut to those who like to write some violence, have their characters curse, or just don’t manage to provide a good “customer experience”. I’m curious what Amazon will make of non-sexually explicit slash.

Some may also consider it an issue that there will apparently be DRM on the stories to prevent them from being read on non-Kindle devices and programs:

Stories will be available in digital format exclusively on Amazon.com, Kindle devices, iOS, Android, and PC/Mac via our Kindle Free Reading apps. We hope to offer additional formats in the future.

And then we come to where the copyright on the submitted stories will go:

Amazon Publishing will acquire all rights to your new stories, including global publication rights, for the term of copyright. (…) You will own the copyright to the original, copyrightable elements (such as characters, scenes, and events) that you create and include in your work, and the World Licensor will retain the copyright to all the original elements of the World. When you submit your story in a World, you are granting Amazon Publishing an exclusive license to the story and all the original elements you include in that story. This means that your story and all the new elements must stay within the applicable World. We will allow Kindle Worlds authors to build on each other’s ideas and elements. We will also give the World Licensor a license to use your new elements and incorporate them into other works without further compensation to you.

Exactly what this implies is best explained by a legal professional, and I have no doubt that the OTW’s lawyers will have some advice ready soon, as they did with earlier corporate attempts to solicit fanworks. However, it certainly sounds like Amazon acquires all publication rights and will give the copyright owner a license to use a fan’s contributions without any compensation in any further commercial media they publish. (Whether Amazon gets any additional income from this licensing to the copyright holders isn’t mentioned either.) I’m curious about whether, for instance, this licensing agreement with Amazon would permit a fic writer to still offer her story for free on another fic archive.

Regardless – since claiming all rights to fanworks is another thing that many “official” fanwork-soliciting endeavors from Syfy with Battlestar Galactica to the fic contests planned by the infamous Fanlib have been lambasted for, I’m not sure if this will go down well anywhere.

All this doesn’t sound like the Kindle Worlds was designed to take fans’ rights and concerns into account. The list that Amazon gives of advantages that Kindle Worlds offers to fic writers is tellingly meaningless:

Writers benefit from Kindle Worlds because:

  • Amazon Publishing has already secured the necessary licenses to write about any Kindle World
  • They can earn royalties writing about established characters and universes
  • The Kindle Worlds self-service submission platform is easy to use

The first point seems to imply that fic writers need a license to be allowed to write fic at all, which is a contested idea at the very least; many legal scholars writing about fanworks would probably argue differently. The second point, earning money with fic, may be considered a good thing by some fic authors; I’ve argued in favor of fic writers considering commodification options, as have others, so I’d personally say that this can indeed be a legitimate advantage – although as mentioned earlier, the fact that fan writers would have no control whatsoever over pricing makes this a qualified “okay then” indeed. The third point, that Kindle Worlds is easy to use, is just silly. Plenty of websites where people can publish fic are easy to use. I get the feeling that they just needed a third point in there to match the three-point list of advantages for copyright holders, and couldn’t think of anything.

Again, I’m not against the idea of “licensed” fic in and of itself, and those who want to agree to Amazon’s terms certainly have the right to do so. However, something like Kindle Worlds can be only one option among many for licensing fic, and it definitely shouldn’t be a model for other “solutions” to the legal uncertainties surrounding fanworks. The only option for publishing fic legally can’t be a platform that takes or licenses away many rights, doesn’t give fic authors the option to set prices, and excludes large numbers of fans with its content guidelines. Hopefully, alternatives that strike a better balance between the rights of fans and copyright holders will emerge soon to counter this.

[META] Worldcon, Not Just Literature

This is the second in a series of posts by Emma England on fannish issues surrounding Worldcon, the longest running science fiction and fantasy convention in the world. Emma is the 2014 Worldcon academic track organizer and is currently researching the history of conventions. The first post introduced Worldcon; this post debunks the myth that “traditional” conventions are only about literature.

Fan history is a disparate venture, with fans and scholars often limiting their explorations to that which interests them, as everyone does. A result of this is that many (but by no means all) people believe that media fans have never been welcome at Worldcon and that media was never a part of it as a traditional con. There may be a predominance of literature Guests of Honor, but the historical records prove that film and TV are part of Worldcon history (with comics getting their first dedicated panel in 1966). Worldcon is part of media fandom history. Some significant examples demonstrate this:

  • There was a screening of The Lost World followed by a Masquerade Party (costuming, early cosplay) at Denvention I, the 3rd Worldcon, in Denver, 1941.
  • The Day The Earth Stood Still had an advanced screening for attendees of Nolacon I, the 9th Worldcon in New Orleans, 1951.
  • Star Trek screenings were included on the Tricon program at the 24th Worldcon in Cleveland, 1966.
  • Gene Roddenberry, creator of Star Trek, gave a talk entitled “To Boldly Go Where No Man Has Gone Before” at Baycon, the 26th Worldcon in Oakland, 1968. In the program book there is a full-page ad “from Roddenberry” thanking Worldcon attendees for their support of Star Trek. Amusingly, there is also a quarter-page ad claiming “SPOCK is a bad lay.” With the words: “This ad was sponsored by the committee to nominate Patrick McGoohan and ‘The Prisoner’ for a HUGO.”
  • Ray Harryhausen, the groundbreaking Visual Effects Designer, was a Guest of Honor at Conspiracy ’87, the 45th Worldcon at Brighton, England, 1987.
  • Roger Corman, the famous horror movie director, was a Guest of Honor at L.A. Con III, Anaheim, 1996.
  • J. Michael Straczynski, the creator of Babylon 5, was Special Guest at Bucconeer, the 56th Worldcon in Baltimore, 1998 and the following Worldcon, Aussiecon Three in 1999 in Melbourne, Australia.
  • Frankie Thomas, the actor in the early science fiction series Space Cadet, was Special Guest at L.A. Con IV, Anaheim 2006.

Additionally, the Hugo Awards have given awards for Best Dramatic Presentation, in various formats, every year since 1958 (except 1964 and 1966). Winners have included episodes of The Twilight Zone, Doctor Who and Battlestar Galactica (reimagining) and movies such as A Clockwork Orange, Star Wars, and Inception.

It is also worth noting that Worldcon has, in most programs throughout its history, included plays, ballets, bands, and numerous other art forms based around science fiction and fantasy.

If Worldcon has historically included media, why is there an apparent separation in contemporary fandoms and fan analysis? Why did Star Trek fans start their own conventions, with many claiming that they no longer felt welcome at Worldcon and other traditional cons and club meetings? A common answer is “gender and snobbery,” but there are alternative answers, although these are not mutually exclusive. Reasons for the separation may include the idea that types of fannish activities are valued differently; a critical mass of fans for one specific show/author/medium leads to a separation (as well as Star Trek conventions, Tolkien, comics etc had their own meetings and events) to maintain pre-existing diversity of the original event while enabling more focused activities around the new fandom; and some fans are more interested in going to conventions only of their specific subject.

Whatever the reasons are for the seeming separation of fandoms, it is true today that it is possible to be in a fandom for one specific TV show, book series, comics franchise, and so on without having much, if anything, to do with other fandoms. In reality, however, it is rare that fans only enjoy one text, or even type of work. Few fans are only interested in reading books or watching movies.

A challenge for Worldcon today is what direction to take the convention in: should organizers expand and overtly reach out to fans who would not normally attend a traditional con and who may bring their own “non-traditional” fan practices and (fan-)demographics; should Worldcon stick with the current attendees and format, thereby maintaining traditions; or is there a middle way that encourages media fan attendance by acknowledging the traditions of Worldcon and, perhaps, media’s place within it?

Currently, site-selection is in progress for Worldcon 2015 and the three options could be seen as representing different approaches to the challenge of identity and the marketing of Worldcon. This challenge will be discussed in the next post in this series.

[META] Fan Art Law at Comic-Con (by deviantart)

Fan Art Law at Comic-Con (by deviantart)

From a review of the video by Boing Boing:

Here’s an hour-long presentation on copyright law and fan art from San Diego ComicCon 2012, presented by a lawyer from DeviantArt who once worked as a copyright enforcer for Paramount. It’s a pretty good overview, though — predictably enough — the presenter waits until quite late to talk about fair use and other public rights in copyright, generally downplaying them and omitting the de minimis exemption to copyright (the idea that it’s not infringement if you take a small enough piece, for reasons that are separate from fair use) altogether.

During the Q&A, he also mischaracterizes SOPA and PIPA as having been concerned with “mass-scale” infringement (the laws allowed for censorship if there was a single link to a website that infringed), but makes up for it somewhat by plugging EFF, Public Knowledge and other public interest groups.