Meta Monday This is a stunningly good and extensive compilation of fannish meta on the subject of ageism in fandom. We thought we’d chime in with a bit of scholarship around fandom and age. “Access to fanfiction in the post–Star
[QUOTE] From Mel Stanfill – Fandom, public, commons
As fans create, then, they not only create for a public but also create a public; that is, in producing for such a community, they call one into existence. (…) Fan creative production like fiction and vidding is produced for
[QUOTE] From At this late date, fanfiction has become wildly more biodiverse that the canonical works that it springs from. It encompasses male pregnancy, centaurification, body swapping, apocalypses, reincarnation, and every sexual fetish, kink, combination, position, and inversion you can imagine and probably a lot more that you could but would probably prefer not to. It breaks down walls between genders and genres and races and canons and bodies and species and past and future and conscious and unconscious and fiction and reality. Culturally speaking, this work used to be the job of the avant garde, but in many ways fanfiction has stepped in to take that role. If the mainstream has been slow to honor it, well, that’s usually the fate of aesthetic revolutions. Fanfiction is the madwoman in mainstream culture’s attic, but the attic won’t contain it forever. Anne Jamison. Fic: Why Fanfiction is Taking Over the World. 2013 (via agentotter)
Writing and reading fanfiction isn’t just something you do; it’s a way of thinking critically about the media you consume, of being aware of all the implicit assumptions that a canonical work carries with it, and of considering the possibility
Creativity, Fan Fiction, and Compression
cimness: fanhackers: The idea then is to compare the compressibility of amateur creative writing with that of experts. To accomplish this, I took 95 of the top 100 most downloaded works from Project Gutenberg. I figure that these count as
[QUOTE] From Rebecca Tushnet, Economies of Desire: Fair Use and Marketplace Assumptions
On a more doctrinal level, respecting creativity as a human force should lead us to think differently about fair use, among other things, by encouraging us to take account of noncommercial motivations even in contexts current doctrine sees as commercial.
[QUOTE] From Henry Jenkins, Fans, Gamers, and Bloggers, p72
When I try to explain slash to non-fans, I often reference that moment in Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan where Spock is dying and Kirk stands there, a wall of glass separating the two longtime buddies. Both of them
[QUOTE] From Rebecca Tushnet, Economies of Desire: Fair Use and Marketplace Assumptions
Fanworks, as creative endeavors existing outside the money economy, are fundamentally based on the inexhaustibility of the imagination. Yet the creative desires fanworks express and satisfy are not alien to other, marketized creative works. Indeed, creators’ passions are strikingly similar
My concern, as fans and acafans continue to vigorously debate the importance or continued viability of fandom’s gift economy and focus on flagrant instances of the industry’s attempt to co-opt fandom, is that the subtler attempts to replicate fannish gift