(OP made the original post unrebloggable, but i didn't spend 2 gotdang hours writing the following essay for it to vanish into the abyss, so I'm reposting)
I disagree. This argument implicitly positions fanfic as a concept which is entirely separate and alien from other, older forms of storytelling – as OP says, “a modern concept which can only exist under capitalism and the concept of intellectual property.” (emphasis mine) By this argument, if capitalism is removed from the equation, fanfiction would… abruptly cease to exist or hold relevancy? Because it can only exist under capitalism? Sorry, I think not.
OP also seems to be arguing that fanfic is a new thing (“a modern concept” (emphasis mine)). Just to make the point abundantly clear, basic logic mandates that if it can ONLY exist under capitalism, it must therefore be younger than capitalism (“modern”), rather than something that evolved alongside capitalism. This stance entirely severs fanfic from from the literary lineage that all storytelling is linked into and descended from (the same way that all human beings are linked into the worldwide family tree and descended from common ancestors – this is important, because storytelling is an abstract thing. It does not exist except in the human minds that carry it).
(the rest of my argument under a cut to save your dash, i got Longwinded again)
This denial and rejection of fanfic’s place in the lineage of storytelling (the ongoing “literary conversation”, if you will, in which ideas have been traded back and forth in an unbroken discussion since the dawn of civilization) serves no concrete purpose that I can identify, except to delegitimize fanfiction as an art form in favor of things which have been “proven” worthwhile – which, to put it bluntly, is a position which has historically been very popular among fascists. Additionally, one can’t help but notice that all the examples OP gives (Arthurian literature, the Divine Comedy, and Greco-Roman mythology) are pillars of the white, European, patriarchal literary canon.
Fanfic has indeed been shaped by capitalism and concepts of intellectual property, I won’t deny that. But people did not suddenly come up with it after capitalism – it is simply the modern expression of a very natural human impulse for telling stories based on a shared canon and mutually-known characters. To argue that fanfic is meaningfully different from the Divine Comedy or any culture’s mythology is to argue that a bison kept in a zoo is a different creature than a bison roaming free on the Great Plains. “Free bison are not zoo bison!” Except they’re both still bison, aren’t they? I guess it comes down to whether you think the existence of a wall or a fence is the most important factor in deciding what an animal is. To me, a bison is a bison, even if it has walls around it.
An additional point of flaw in the original argument is that OP seems unaware of the long tradition of reverse plagiarism, which goes at least as far back as the Middle Ages and probably further. In case the phrase is not self-evident enough, reverse plagiarism is when, for example, a poet in the 1500s might attribute their work to “Chaucer” (died 1400) and attempt to pass it off as a “lost work” in order to be taken seriously and to get their writing and their ideas out into the public. This is a fascinating phenomenon, because the official LEGAL concept of intellectual property had not really been invented yet – but the concept that an idea could “belong” to someone clearly had been. Concepts of ideas having “owners” or “originators” (that is, authors) absolutely existed – and the concept of attribution existed, and the concept of a work’s authorship carrying weight and meaning and conferring importance absolutely, absolutely existed. This is true across the world – in Chinese, there are sayings and phrases which have entered common parlance for which we still know the original literary reference and the name of the person who came up with them.
The person writing a poem and attributing it to Chaucer was, presumably, a fan of Chaucer, or something fan-adjacent. After all, they must have at least had an awareness of and respect for Chaucer’s work, otherwise they would have picked someone else to attribute their poem to. So fans existed.
Fandom, likewise, has existed for far longer than you think – we need look no further than the Japanese kabuki houses in the 1600s, which may have independently invented the idea of ticket scalpers and selling celebrity merch, and which were the locations of a lot of screaming riots in which people fainted at the sight of their favorite actors, mobbed the stage, trampled each other to death, or jumped in front of the actor to declare their love and cut their own thumbs off to prove it. (We have actually calmed down a lot in the modern day. Fandom is so chill now compared to 17th century Japanese kabuki fandom.)
So fans and fandom have always existed, and the impulse for storytelling has always existed, and the concept of the importance of the original author (and the inclination to hitch your wagon to a more famous author’s star and borrow a little of their glory) has always existed.
“But copyright law didn’t!” I hear you cry. “Legal intellectual property didn’t exist!” You’re right. But let me tell you a story, as long as we’re talking about kabuki.
The year is 1840. Famous kabuki legend Ichikawa Danjuro VII makes the acquaintance of a Noh costume designer and bribes him to let Ichikawa have a look at some of the costumes – and to sneak him a couple glimpses of a script for a Noh play called Ataka. This was hugely illegal, because attending Noh performances was utterly restricted to the upper classes, and there was mega, mega secrecy around what they were about, what they looked like, the styles of dance, the music, the scripts, everything. But our man Ichikawa 7 had a dream in his heart of evolving kabuki from its common roots (it was started as rowdy street acrobatics or performances in dry riverbeds for anyone to see, before being forced to move indoors into teahouses so they’d stop causing fandom riots; this did not stop the fandom riots) to a more serious and elevated art form – like Noh.
Ichikawa took those glimpses he’d seen of the Noh costumes and the script, came up with his own spin on them, made a very VERY close and faithful adaptation of Ataka called Kanjincho (now one of the most famous and popular plays in kabuki theater), and fuckin staged that bitch, featuring himself in one of the leading roles. Unfortunately, kabuki was popular enough that it was NOT just the common folks who attended performances, but the occasional upper-class fan as well. You know, someone who would have also seen Noh plays like Ataka and could recognize that Kanjincho was absolutely not supposed to be happening. So Ichikawa Danjuro VII got arrested, convicted of violating sumptuary laws, exiled from Edo (modern day Tokyo), and his house was burned down. (Happy ending: He grew so wildly popular in Kyoto and Osaka that he eventually was invited back to Edo about ten years later.)
So okay, sure, copyright law is a new phenomenon. But punishing an artist with severe legal consequences for the crime of “stealing” and “misusing” or “degrading” a piece of art that “didn’t belong” to him, well, that is a thing which has [checks notes] also existed before capitalism.
So the Divine Comedy is fanfic. Arthuriana is fanfic. All mythology around the world is fanfic. Kanjincho is straight up fanfic, including the part where he got sued about it. Unless you believe that a bison stops being a bison when you put it in a zoo, in which case I think we’re facing a problem of taxonomy.
Second, I'd like to add that stories like Arthurian legend and Robin Hood also operate like fanfiction. Both King Arthur and Robin Hood might've been actual historical figures (though we're not really sure), however their stories are almost if not completely fictional, and yet there are certain story beats that have entered a general consciousness: The Sword in the Stone, Maid Mariam being Robin's love interest, The Holy Grail, Robin Hood stealing from the rich to give to the poor, etc. etc.
Most if not all of us (or at least everyone who's from an area that Britain colonized and/or watched Disney movies as kids) are familiar with the general story of Robin Hood and King Arthur, which means that people who want to use those characters/that world have a certain frame to reference. For example, the addition of Lancelot being both a way to explore courtly love which was gaining popularity in France and also the introduction of an OC into the Arthurian mythos. Nowadays, we often get retellings of Arthur and Robin, which often operate like AUs or Canon Divergence. A lot of the time the way we think of the characters work more like headcanons that became more popular than canon, think of how Robin Hood's "steal from the rich to give to the poor" wasn't in the original mythos, he was originally just a thief with better morals than the common thief (and even that was an evolution)
If we want to get pedantic, technically fanfiction has existed since before "Fanfiction" existed. The same way fire existed before we gave it the name "Fire". We give names to concepts that have existed from way before we noticed they existed, so yeah you won't find a monk from the 1400s writing fanfiction and calling it fanfiction but if it quacks like a duck and swims like a duck, bestie that's a duck
Spitballing with the fellas on discord and we've come up with a Star Trek character we want to see: A 200-year-old top Vulcan diplomat attending a function and laughing boisterously and slapping backs with everyone and then just relaxing into resting bitch face the moment nobody is watching him. He takes his job deadly seriously and studied parties extensively in the diplomatic academy. Every year he's brushing up on new developments in party theory. He knows every party nuance you could possibly think of, for the sake of intergalactic relations. Peace in the galaxy depends on it. It's weird but you gotta meet people where they're at, he thinks.
A old post of hers from before Huntrix where she is key smashing over Celine (she was in full CEO gear) gets pulled up and Zoey replies ‘oh so we’re hating on the truth now??’
A video of her sexy dancing while singing Thunder Bringer from Epic
A video with the caption ‘I asked if we can see Wicked For Good and Mira said we have Wicked For Good at Home’ where Zoey is clearly filming Rumi from around the corner as she is just fucking belting No Good Deed as she folds laundry
Bites Rumi’s hand on stream because she tried to sneak snacks
Alright, fine, here's the backstory about replacing my Microsoft Copilot key with a picture of a carp. Warning: that's the whole story.
When I bought my latest laptop, which coincidentally is already losing functionality in multiple keys, I noticed that the right Control button was no longer a right Control button. This was a bad sign for me, someone who fairly frequently used the right Control button. Worse still, it now bore the Microsoft Copilot logo and would open, when pressed, Microsoft Copilot. Not having personal interest in that particular robot, I was now in the market to rebind that key to something else.
I initially considered setting it up as my dedicated The Sims 2 button, but not only do I not yet have The Sims 2 installed on this computer, the way I play that game, it takes upwards of 15 minutes to boot up. I knew I would be constantly accidentally hitting this key, and I did not want to be constantly accidentally opening The Sims 2.
My partner immediately suggested that I set it to open "a jpeg of a fish." I Googled "carp," found an image, and set my right Control key to open a tiny browser window with a link to said fish. Though it is a .png file from pngtree labeled "pngtree-rohu-carp-fish-png-png-image_4022775.png", in an effort to display matrimonial piety, I dutifully labeled it "fish jpeg."
I now accidentally open this link multiple times a day, which is great, because it means I have a lot of opportunities to see a fish. Sometimes I accidentally hit it several times in quick succession, which means I get to see several fish! When I close all my open programs to shut down my computer, I usually find at least one forgotten fish. Things are working out beautifully, and everyone is happy.
The other day I brought up this story to a friend and relayed the saga of my success to her through her obvious confusion. At the end of my tale she asked me, "Why didn't you just bind it back to right Control?" and I had to admit to her that it honestly never occurred to me.
do yall ever just go insane over the fact that lwj fell in love with wwx because wwx was the embodiment of freedom? freedom lwj had never tasted but always knew existed. do you ever go insane about the fact that wwx fell in love with lwj because lwj was the embodiment of permanence? the very thing wwx was always threatened with but never really knew. do you ever lie awake at night thinking about how every time wei wuxian turned around lan wangji was there? about how every step lan wangji took forward was because wei wuxian held his hand and pulled?
my senior english teacher told me that any scene with a woman in a cornfield in every piece of literature ever is about her journey to womanhood/pleasuring herself in the field and i just.... believed her
yeah i like to give my blessing to the most pathetic looking weak little knight at the tournament. she can’t even look me in the eye when i give her my flower and she stutters out that she’ll do her best or something of the like. i think its funny when she has to cry and beg my forgiveness and i get to say “such a shame, i suppose my hand in marriage will have to go to someone else…” and then i get to hear her whimper like a dog. ive done this like 6 times alrea-
I remember one time I was doing an ADHD evaluation with a kid who had asked to go to the bathroom like 3 times during the 30-ish minute part of the interview where we asked his mom questions, so I knew that was his go-to excuse when bored. We get started on the WISC-V after the interview and within 30 seconds of vocab starting he asks if he can go to the bathroom, and I say:
“No.”
And this kid rolls his eyes because DUH and he says “Why not?” all cranky-styles, so I said
“Because you don’t need to go to the bathroom, you’re bored and you need to move. If you need to move, tell me and I’ll let you know if we’re at a part of the test where we can pause. Like, for example, we can pause right now if you wanna race me around the building.”
And this kids face fucken LIT up. We did three laps around the outside of the building and came back in and he finished like 3 subtests and asked if he could move so we got up and tried to see how high we could jump for 3 minutes and the finished the rest of the assessment with one bathroom break. And that was all it took tbh, this kid was SO capable he just needed to move and hadn’t been allowed to do so before. I also like making people mad by pointing out that I know what they’re up to, then just giving them permission to do the thing they were sneakily trying to do in the first place. It’s like being affectionately annoying and it’s part of how I connect to others.
I legit don't think my youngest brother would have made it through elementary school if he hadn't had teachers that let him stand up at his desk and move back and forth during class.
Allow me to give you a gift this holiday season. If you’re like, under 30, next time you hear Charlie Brown come up in conversation around someone 40 or older, pipe up and say with a totally straight face, “Who’s Charlie Brown?” Then watch your older coworker or whoever get yugioh mind crushed before your very eyes instantly. Happy Holidays.
“ohh this episode is about meeting a bunch of dinosaurs who developed space travel and left earth to go live on the other side of the galaxy isn’t that crazy?! isn’t that silly?!” sure yeah maybe a little but by focusing on that but you’re missing the narrative reason for it which is to provide a starting point to explore religious authoritarianism and the production of scientific knowledge
just a spoonful of [nonsense] helps the [critical thinking about uncomfortable social and structural problems that are such a fundamental part of the background radiation of our lives that we can't see them] go down
this is prime proof that this ENTIRE WEBSITE is autistic because nowhere else would a no tags post that's just an informative list about slang get this much traction.
