Field of Heather

I am fire. I am death. I am Batman. And I'm your father, Luke.

[firefly09sblog]

POV: Quaritch and Lyle post movie

Reposting another TikTok I made

[broughtchaburger]

[reddherring777]

me: yeah, so one of your most famous works is actually just that commission of a woman that you kept. Honestly, it's less of the piece itself that lead to its fame and more the mystery surrounding it, so I was hoping you could clear that up the decayed corpse of Leonardo Da Vinci that I resurrected: Hai detto che hanno chiamato una tartaruga che combatte il crimine con il mio nome?

[girldante]

among all this talk about space i must remind everyone that dante's divine comedy was launched in space in 2021 and will be floating eternally through the cosmos as "testimony of human ingenuity" (the exact word was ingegno. which makes me normal). the magnum opus of this small, human man who died centuries ago will be travelling further than even his own enormous genius could possibly imagine or think possible. and it will do so on behalf of all humankind. which is exactly what he would've wanted but so, so, so far beyond his wishes. i wish he could know about it

[broughtchaburger]

[petrarchesco]

Dante sketches by Raffaello Sorbi (1844-1931):

Dante walking on the riverside

Dante meditating

Dante on the banks of the Arno river

Dante

[jakesullymakto]

he would

[kikaikitai]

i will remain delusional and believe "quaritch's goofy scream as he was falling was how he calls cupcake because spider never did finish teaching him how to yip"

[peachdoxie]

I love characters who are extremely hypercompetent and simultaneously massive losers

[marroniere]

so @fieldofheathers-stuff made an astute observation that the ISB recruits either people who look like Bond supervillains or the most uwu catboys ever

we agreed that somehow Heert is both. So I made an infographic to illustrate the point

[mengyaosevilpussy]

tragedy enjoyers when a character upholds the system that they themselves were a victim of

[shadowsofpandora]

i cant stop thinking about this

meanwhile:

[wolverinecore]

Here to push the quarlyle agenda ♡

[fieldofheathers-stuff]

I need people to understand that when I'm saying "I want to see a Quaritch redemption arc", what I mean is NOT for the narrative to do this to him

but THIS

thank you for coming to my ted talk

[fieldofheathers-stuff]

I love art when it's earnest. I love art when it's so sincere it's borderline cringe. I love it when you can see an artist's whole soul reflected in the thing they created, no embellishments, no dissimulation, just the pure distilled essence of the human spirit's imperfect nature. I LOVE IT

[fieldofheathers-stuff]

Just a thought

Allow me to preface this by saying that I am an unabashed lover of fanfiction as a genre. I have been consuming it for more than half of my life, and I doubt I will ever tire of reading it. It is a beautiful medium that allows people from all walks of life to participate in a wonderfully enriching creative endeavor, and the idea of someone giving their free time to create something out of pure enjoyment for the craft will forever move me.

However, I sometimes wonder whether the increasing popularity of fanfiction has skewed the general public's expectations of what purpose original stories serve, what they should look like, and what the proper audience-author relationship should be.

I am saying this because I have noticed, in the several fandoms I have been involved in through the years, that there is a growing tendency for fans to write statements such as "X should have happened" or "Y should not have happened", "X character doing XYZ felt so OOC", and honestly, these statements just baffle me, because they are often not framed in a "I wish" sense, like someone generating prompts for an AU or something, but as genuinely valid criticisms of the story.

The last statement feels particularly offensive to me, because it is literally IMPOSSIBLE for a character in canon to be OOC. You could maybe say that a certain story choice feels badly justified or underdeveloped, but it still remains a fundamental building block of the story in question, and it should always be taken into account when discussing it within the context of canon.

The concept of OOC-ness, in my opinion, is something that can (and should) exist solely in the fanon sphere. When an author creates fanfic or fan art, that person is allowed to pick and choose the elements of a character they want to highlight, which might or might not be radically different from the canonical version of said character. They also should be free to do it without facing any backlash for it; fanfic is a big sandbox, and we're all allowed to play in it.

Besides, much of the appeal of fanfiction is self-indulgence, and I use the term without any sort of moral judgment attached to it: as I said, it is a medium made literally for free, by the people for the people, so if there's any type of art that is allowed to be 1000% self-indulgent in this world, and have no guilt associated with it, it is fan works. XD

However, that same logic of self-indulgence cannot be applied when critiquing original works, and I wonder if the growing popularity of fanfiction we have witnessed in the past few decades has caused people to overlay this specific kind of "fanfiction logic" on the way they perceive original stories as well, fundamentally tarnishing their experience of these "primary sources".

Thoughts?

[or-midnight]

hard agree on so much of this, although I tend to think that fanfic is more a solution than a cause to what's bugging you. If you dont mind, I'd like to coin a term for this: instructive criticism. Where the critic/consumer/reader is offering instructions to the author or artist as a response to a work.

In general this has always struck me as just being something that illustrates a profound lack of understanding for how any kind of creative work, uh, works. It has varying degrees of annoyingness depending on context, but it usually does mean you're an idiot that's never made a piece of creative work in your life. Like. It's not a crime, it just instantly and permanently transforms everything the critic says into seagull noises for me.

That being said, I wonder if the overwhelming prevalence of conducting all the discourse on social media is more to blame than fanfic, specifically. As much as I find instructive criticism to be aggravating and useless at best, it bothers me a lot less in an informal setting like a book club/group chat/personal conversation. There, it can easily be a result of casual language and poor skills at communicating about fiction. People phrase things poorly and don't all have lit degrees and that's fine. People are allowed to not like things and not have great language for articulating why beyond kinda wishing they'd read a different book, and i get that. Huge skill issue but entirely understandable in that context.

I think the issue is that everyone has a platform now, and a lot of things that really should be casual conversation are presented as like. Actual criticism intended for an audience.

Story time, I haven't done pro work in forever, but one early piece I published got a paid (paid!) review that said (I'm paraphrasing but not exaggerating) "this author should really rewrite this and do (xyz)." You guys, I broke the first rule of pro work and actually responded directly to the critic because. Like. I literally can't do that?? It is prohibited by my contract with the publisher??? It wasn't even an invalid criticism if it had been delivered by my editor! Essentially: work was too short and needed to be developed further, which was something I actually discussed at some length with the publisher, but it was not that serious of a piece of fiction and we were all tired of messing with it and just wanted to get it to press already.

So yeah, I think a lot of people that don't have any skills or credentials for media engagement (let alone criticism) are going ahead and doing it anyway (sometimes even for $$) because they are unaware that they aren't just chatting at book club.

I think I'd blame the platform(s) where we conduct book discussions much more than I blame fanfiction in particular, although fanfic has certainly contributed to the democritisation of media engagement for better and worse.

Also, what really kills me the most about this is that people doing it are SO! FUCKING! CLOSE! to creating a fan work of their own, and failing to make that leap is the difference between being a turbo annoying jerk and a delightful fellow fan. The most inexperienced piece of fic or art will always be better for everyone than the very best piece of instructive criticism.

Edited to add: this footnote regarding source canons involving characters with marginalized identities where the property changes creative or editorial hands for the worse. I don't think that's what OP is talking about above, but it definitely bears mentioning and clarifying.

[fieldofheathers-stuff]

Thank you for your commentary, this is so well put!

Regarding the point about fanfic being the answer to my issue, I completely agree! Perhaps I did not express myself clearly enough in the original post, but I was writing more from the perspective of a reader of fanfic than from that of a writer. Writing fanfic is by definition is the perfect tool to actively engage with a story, and I encourage anyone to do it! Write fanfic, draw fanart, create cosplays, do all those things, people! It's legit the best way to engage with a piece of art, and the artists love it.

Perhaps the term "reader" isn't even the correct one in this case. I think what I was thinking about is a consumer of fanfic, and this is where I think my argument intersects with yours regarding the influence of social media on this attitude (which I completely agree with, by the way). I think there is a deeply consumeristic mentality behind these attitudes, born out of this age of "content" in which we all live in. Media is a product and the audience is the consumer, and since the customer is always right, people feel entitled to criticize a story based on their own personal wants and needs, with no regard to the dignity and intent of the author, nor the mechanics of the creative process itself (a point you already touched on, and expressed perfectly).

I LOVE the phrase "instructive criticism", thank you for teaching me that, I will add it to my vocabulary immediately. XD

Regarding your point about the commentaries on the OOC-ness of characters written by multiple people, I think you are right; in that case, the discourse does become much more complex. I am not able to comment specifically on the issue of marginalised characters (I am not from the USA, and since much of that discourse is very culturally specific, every time I try to follow it I find myself lacking much of the context to properly appreciate its nuances), but I think in general the wider principle of engaging with any type of art still applies: you have to take into account the author, their intent, and the context in which that piece of art was created, to interpret it correctly. I don't know if it's clear, but I am not a big believer in the "death of the author"; not in the sense that I think the concept is entirely unjustified (ilu Roland Barthes pls forgive me), but that I think it should be treated with much more nuance, especially in the extremely polyphonic society we live in. Otherwise, any kind of discourse inevitably devolves into chaos and pure, atomized individualism, or gets superseded by other forms of ideology, kind of like you already pointed out in your addendum.

TL;DR: In essence, we need to learn to differentiate between critique and opinion, and learn to express both of those accordingly. XD

[ferithtolkienesque]

The Silmarillion fandom is genuinely insane. Like, you hang out on tumblr, read fic on AO3 and you think, yeah. Lots of people have read the Silmarillion. It’s Tolkien. Everyone’s read Tolkien. Barnes and Noble has a whole bunch of the HoME and also a bunch of books by people writing about the legendarium. This is mainstream, surely.

But then you actually touch grass and talk to normal people. Not even that, you talk to people who self diagnose as hard core Tolkien fans. And. None of them have read the Silmarillion. The Silmarillion is famously a book that nobody reads.

And yet. On AO3 The Silmarillion and Other Histories of Middle Earth has more works than The Lord of the Rings. Think about that. That’s baffling. It’s ridiculous. Like I realize that LotR fandom is split a bit by the movie, but still. The Silmarillion has almost four times as many fics as the LotR movies. Everybody has watched the movies!

I need to know what percentage of people who actually read the Silmarillion went on to write fic or draw fanart about it. Because it must be insane, surely. Like, I’m pretty sure the Silmarillion wins some kind of record in this department.

Thinking about the fanfic bell curve where on one end you have “Perfect, needs no improvement or elaboration” (LotR sits here) and on the other you have “So bad it’s no fun to even think about” with the middle being the fanfic zone. But I think there may be a secret fourth Silmarillion option. Which is a book that is perfect* but simultaneously non existent. It’s not even a real story! The language is super pretty and deeply incomprehensible (especially to people who, unlike me, were not raised from early childhood on both the Bible and classic literature). And it’s more of an outline and an abstract painting of cultural and world building vibes (not cultural and world building facts and information) than an actual narrative. There are story hooks galore. There are vivid and fascinating characters, but their lives are glossed over and you only get one or two paragraphs of prose that will reorder your brain chemistry and haunt you forever. There are countless more characters who only exist as names, the implication of whose existence is fascinating. All of this is deeply frustrating, both to casual readers who just want a Normal Enjoyable Book, and super fans who want All the Lore. But it is catnip to anyone who engages in transformative work.

*I am aware that not anyone who is a fan of the silm thinks it’s perfect