Sauce For The Ficcing Gander
May. 19th, 2010 12:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
caper_estWhen I am very rich, and Oscars are showering down upon Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt for their sensitive twilight performances in Kick-Ass Kate and Bo Backhand II: Getting Medievaler!, I shall be in no position to whine about the resulting outbreak of Woodlandian fanfic. No, not even the fifty-page novella consisting entirely of the Elf-King's daughter making hot sweet'n'sour BDSM lurve to Kate and Legolas whilst cogently dissecting the folly of fantasti-Keynesian economic policy - although, should such an epic ever be perpetrated, I reserve my right as a citizen of the Universe to object to the waste of scarce typeface.
The idea of other people's playing with my characters doesn't, however, squick me by itself, as it does some authors. Why so? Because many of them are being ficced, wildly and inaccurately, even as I write them!
And it is part of their stories. I write - often from a fallible-omniscient, in-world point of view - about the sort of people of whom tales get told in their own world. I try to tell the truth about my characters, but the very viewpoint I prefer is inherently somebody telling a tale of them. Behind the veil of dramatization, we all know that people-in-life are not quite people-in-tales anyway. However, my narrators are not the only tale-tellers in their universes.
The most popular tales and songs of my heroes are, almost inevitably, way inaccurate - for one reason and another - and this often has an impact on either them or their inheritors. In The Deed of Katy Elflocks, there is a song of the same name which the narrator quotes several times. It is moving and popular, and the picture it paints has several important consequences in Killer-Kate now. It is also romantic, stereotyped, fanboy cobblers - and that's one of the most intelligent secondhand interpretations of events.
In the other world I mentioned yesterday, Locket the Gilded Lily and her Court Sorceress Sapphire are two of the most important people in history. Epicurean, affectionate Locket once led an expedition to the round world's edge to get Sapphire back; chilly, beautiful Sapphire once pulled down a piece of the -ing sky to make Locket a cloak with. They are not, in fact, lovers. A large strand of the Latcher oral tradition over the next several centuries is essentially PG-rated Sapphire/Locket slash. This does such a good job of making dramatic sense of their story, I've actually written some of it myself. It just happens to get both characters and story plausibly - but radically - wrong.
I could go on.
Knowing that other tales than mine exist about my characters in their own realities, how should it matter to me if some emerge in my world too? Fanwriters can tell stories about fictional people, just as they can about living or historical ones: they can't touch the originals, nor change the cores of what they are.
Not even Brad and Angelina can do that!
The idea of other people's playing with my characters doesn't, however, squick me by itself, as it does some authors. Why so? Because many of them are being ficced, wildly and inaccurately, even as I write them!
And it is part of their stories. I write - often from a fallible-omniscient, in-world point of view - about the sort of people of whom tales get told in their own world. I try to tell the truth about my characters, but the very viewpoint I prefer is inherently somebody telling a tale of them. Behind the veil of dramatization, we all know that people-in-life are not quite people-in-tales anyway. However, my narrators are not the only tale-tellers in their universes.
The most popular tales and songs of my heroes are, almost inevitably, way inaccurate - for one reason and another - and this often has an impact on either them or their inheritors. In The Deed of Katy Elflocks, there is a song of the same name which the narrator quotes several times. It is moving and popular, and the picture it paints has several important consequences in Killer-Kate now. It is also romantic, stereotyped, fanboy cobblers - and that's one of the most intelligent secondhand interpretations of events.
In the other world I mentioned yesterday, Locket the Gilded Lily and her Court Sorceress Sapphire are two of the most important people in history. Epicurean, affectionate Locket once led an expedition to the round world's edge to get Sapphire back; chilly, beautiful Sapphire once pulled down a piece of the -ing sky to make Locket a cloak with. They are not, in fact, lovers. A large strand of the Latcher oral tradition over the next several centuries is essentially PG-rated Sapphire/Locket slash. This does such a good job of making dramatic sense of their story, I've actually written some of it myself. It just happens to get both characters and story plausibly - but radically - wrong.
I could go on.
Knowing that other tales than mine exist about my characters in their own realities, how should it matter to me if some emerge in my world too? Fanwriters can tell stories about fictional people, just as they can about living or historical ones: they can't touch the originals, nor change the cores of what they are.
Not even Brad and Angelina can do that!
