So @hejeksbs saw that post about fandom olds freaking out about IWTV stuff being posted on the AO3, and said they’re new to fandom and fandom culture and don’t understand. So congrats, Hejek, you’re one of today’s lucky 10,000. This is going to be a basic primer, but I encourage others to chime in with details. (Also, thanks for reminding me I need an Interview exhibit in the museum. I had that written down somewhere.)
So if you go back to the 1990s and early 2000s—the pre-AO3 digital years—you’re going to see an official disclaimer on just about every fic. These basically said “I don’t own anything here, please don’t sue me.” Some were quoted elaborate.
These started because of Anne Rice.
See, Anne Rice was, how can I say this nicely…an asshole? The day she died there were literally people posting crab rave and “Ding Dong, The Witch Is Dead” from The Wizard of Oz on Tumblr. Because before Harry Potter fanfiction was pretty frowned upon and you might get a C&D if you didn’t keep your head down properly, but Anne Rice.
ANNE RICE.
Anne Rice literally recruited her “loyal fans” to harass people who made fanworks. At least one person was doxxed to her workplace by rabid Ricers, and at the time fanfiction was taboo enough you could absolutely get fired for that. I was eleven and friends with someone who was 13 who’d just read Interview and drew this wonky I-am-a-kid-who-can’t-really-draw-yet-but-I-loved-this-SO-MUCH piece of fanart of Louis and Lestat, and she literally dipped off the internet because she got an extremely nasty “I’m suing you” threat from Rice. (Are you out there, Mercury000? It’s me, sailorsharon0722.)
Anne Rice did everything in her power to ensure there was no IWTV fandom at all. I’ve heard from people older than me that she used to host a “vampire’s ball” every year in New Orleans for her “loyal fans” but if you showed up and she felt your costume outshone her own, she’d make you leave. People didn’t dare so much as put “Lestat” and “fanfiction” in the same sentence.
And then, irony of ironies, when her reputation got so bad she was struggling to sell books, she…became a Christian and started writing Bible fanfiction to sell.
Yeah.
Over the years there were claims she’d changed her mind about fanfiction, but nobody ever had evidence to back this up. I even saw a dude on Quora claiming to be a close friend of hers saying we were all lying, and he got absolutely ratioed by fans going “I still have my C&D letter, you wanna fucking try again?”
Incidentally, I would like to point out that her attitude wasn’t uniform. It’s easy to say “that’s just how it was,” but Neil Gaiman has been around since the 1980s and has always appreciated fanfiction. Stephen King’s approach is “please tell me, to my face, that me explicitly writing about Cthulhu isn’t fanfiction” and otherwise pretty lassez-faire (he has no interest in knowing you’re writing fanfiction of his stuff, he just genuinely doesn’t care), and his first book was published in the early 1970s. Gene Roddenberry, creator of Star Trek, actually accepted submissions of fanfiction scripts DURING THE SHOW’S ORIGINAL RUN, at least according to popular lore. (@dduane, can you check me on this?) Mercedes Lackey—who’s 1980s-and-1990s fantasy royalty—has been asked on Quora about why she “changed her mind about fanfiction” and her response was “I never changed my mind, I just had to talk my publisher into accepting it. I’ve always been okay with it but I had to say no because of my contract.” Sure, Diana Galbaldon was out there comparing fanfiction to rape(????), but even among those who disapproved of fanfiction, Rice’s attitude and actions were extreme. And they persisted into the 2000s, too, with her egging on fans who harassed and sent death threats to a YouTube reviewer who didn’t like one of her books.
AO3 changed ALL of that.
AO3 said “here is our well-researched legal claim that fanfiction is legal, and if someone gives you shit about works you have posted on our website, our lawyers will represent you. You can post safely here. It’s okay. We got your back.”
Even so, the fear about Anne Rice continued. And can you blame people? This woman’s name held the same power in fannish conversations as “Voldemort.” (A moniker by which I’ve actually heard her called.) She all but destroyed the old guard, on purpose.
….and then a new generation of fans happened. A new generation that didn’t remember life before AO3, had never known anyone who literally had to move house to get away from Rice’s minions’ threats and harassment. I know we use “nature is healing” as a joke on this website, but really truly, that’s what happened here. She left charred tree trunks and bushes that were old-school fans and from their ashes tiny little 2010s-fans seedlings began to grow.
The thousand-odd fics you saw in those screenshots (which I feel I should clarify are from before the new show came out—a show that must have her turning in her grave, because she was absolutely adamant that all her vampires were STRAIGHT and if you thought otherwise you were DISGUSTING, and I hope she spins so hard her corpse combusts) are absolutely shocking to us older fans because it’s like staggering out of a nuclear wasteland and spotting a little garden with signs saying “free nuclear-illness medical services” and realizing it’s real. What the fuck, what the fuck, but also, holy shit y’all we’re so proud of you. YES. Keep going. Don’t let the witch get you down.
The funniest thing I can second about Mercedes Lackey is I have MET this woman, but also I met her Writing partner at a Con and spoke to him first.
Apparently, they definitely Very Much (then during 2015? or was it 2017? It’s somewhere around there) and they both advocated not only Fanfiction (and D&D) but also ‘Filing the serial plates’ off of your fanworks if you think it’s good enough.
Compared to Anne Rice, who didn’t seem to rescind or change her mind until 2012 or something. (Along with her, also Laurell K. Hamiliton and Robin Hobb to Add to the list of those that hissed at Fanfiction. LKH is one of the second offenders because she cracked down HARD on Fanfiction from her stuff, and also engaged in siccing her fans on other fans that questioned or didn’t LIKE the changes she made to some of her books. She’s not *as* horrific as AR only because AR’s fandom was older and had a longer time to fuck with people. )
Like even if she Changed her Mind, the Damage was DONE.
She literally Traumatized So. Many Writers that they never wrote again.
Never.
She Loved ART
but she HATED fanfiction.
Hated anything that changed or expanded her little world.
I actually had a really cool conversation with her (ML) on Quora where she’d shared a pretty cool idea and I was like “would you mind if I took a stab at that? I’ll credit you of course” and she was like “?????? Those words were in English but what” and I was like “in the fanfiction community it’s rude as hell to just swipe someone’s idea that way, is it not the same in traditional publishing?” and we had a chat about fanfiction etiquette. She was delighted to find out such a thing actually exists, even if both of us were baffled by the rules the other person’s camp usually follows.
You can also add George R. R. Martin to the list of authors who don’t like fanfiction (even though he has written fanfiction himself-but importantly to him-with direct consent of the original creator/owner). He seems to think that if he knows about a fanfiction‘s existence but doesn’t pursue legal action against it...he will somehow lose the copyright to his worlds and characters...or something. Idk if his views have evolved any since this blog post or not.
From his blog:
My position on so-called "fan fiction" is pretty well known. I'm against it, for a variety of reasons that I've stated previously more than
So while GRRM is wrong, I actually do know how he got here from there, so I’m going to explain for people who may encounter this argument.
What he has done is to confuse or conflate COPYRIGHT with TRADEMARK.
So, copyright says I can’t make and sell work about, say…Danaerys. I’m not allowed because that’s his intellectual property. At this precise moment, “fanfiction falls under fair use provided it is not sold” seems to be the legal line in the sand. Nobody’s tried challenging the AO3 on it (as far as I know), so the legal precedent is drawn from non-transformative cases. If I write and publish a book called The Life And Times Of Danaerys From Game Of Thrones and he doesn’t pursue me legally, well….I probably make money, but he doesn’t lose his copyright. Danaerys is still his and he can still choose to sue me for damages at any time.
TRADEMARK, however, is different. You know those “style guides” you see on sites like Adobe that say “don’t say ‘I photoshopped it,’ say ‘I edited it using Adobe Photoshop’” and after the word “photoshop” there’ll be a little “tm” in a circle? That’s a trademark, and what they’re trying to do is prevent you from genericizing it. This is a legal term. A genericized trademark is one where the brand name has come into wide use as the name of the thing or action writ large via casual usage, and once it happens, you do in fact lose your legal right to enforce that trademark and get money from it.
Genericization is a natural form of speech, which means trademarks have to be guarded pretty viciously. Here are a few examples you’ve probably heard in daily life, although some will be US-based. Not all of these have been challenged in court, but you’re still going to see what I mean pretty quickly:
“Hey, can you google ‘trademark versus copyright’?”
“Did you see that ASOIAF cover somebody photoshopped to put Benoit Blanc on the Iron Throne?”
“I’m crying from how ridiculous it is for a dude with GRRM’s money and lawyers to be this uninformed, pass me a kleenex.”
“If GRRM wants to be mad about fanfiction, maybe he should start with the show. Just throw the whole thing in the dumpster.”
YOU PROBABLY DON’T EVEN KNOW WHICH WORD IN THE LAST EXAMPLE IS A GENERICIZED TRADEMARK. It’s “dumpster.” Dumpster used to be a brand name.
Copyright by nature applies to longer works. Like, once upon a time I made a post to this site that just said “RICE.” Why? Because I wanted to scream “rice” and see what happened. (About 100 people liked the post and two reblogged it, that’s what happened. I love you inscrutable assholes.) I did, technically, produce a creative work that consists of only the word “RICE,” but I’d probably be hard-pressed to find a lawyer willing to defend it as copyrighted work. Nobody’s gonna do that, and it’s a word in common usage, so I can’t trademark it, either. Meanwhile, if I’d written a poem about how much I love rice, THAT would be copyrighted. I could literally go “I love rice, it’s so nice, every day I eat it twice, add some chilies for a little spice” and technically I have just written something I could go to court and say “Seanan McGuire used my poem about rice in one of the Wayward Children books, I want to sue her.” (I would never. Seanan is a gem and does not plagiarize. But also since she’s very pro-fanfiction I assume she will not mind if I use her as an example to demonstrate.)
So: GRRM is correct. About a completely different branch of law that does not apply to his work.
