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[byjove]

I love helping everyone rediscover the fact that the opening passage of My Immortal is a parody of the opening passage of The Vampire Lestat and not just a generic exaggeration of the typical fanfic Mary Sue introduction. One of the many delightful goth kid Easter eggs the author planted for the audience.

[byjove]

let the audience decide…

it was a deliberate nod to the opening passage of The Vampire Lestat (1985)

it was accidental

Voting ended onJun 24

[byjove]

Anne Rice COULD write and she made excellent use of narrative voice. Lestat is egotistical, less intelligent than he believes himself to be and above all, deeply unhinged. This is absolutely what his internal monologue would sound like and you have to read her other works to contextualize that. I think it is the same for the author of My Immortal and the fact that they’ve never (actually) come forward to claim ownership makes me think they enjoy the ambiguity.

[finndamerons-archive]

castle // halsey

[spin-the-wheel-polls]

I will regret this and shouldn't make wheels at 2am but

This tumblr sexyman is your son!

Are you proud of him

yes!

somewhat

I shouldn't be but yes

No

NO.

I'm disowning him

I am scared of him

Results

Voting ended onJun 24

(sorry if your favourite is not in this poll, I went mostly off the contenders from this year's poll and the classics)

[gloriousclio]

Luke Skywalker put away his targeting computer to destroy the Death Star so I don't need AI to help me write an email.

[partywizard]

i said seagulls stop it now

[nitewrighter]

"All fiction is derivative in some capacity."

Well yeah but if you're making "this book started out as a fanfic" a selling point of a mainstream published book--and I'm saying this as a fanfic writer myself--that doesn't inspire confidence.

[nitewrighter]

"But I've read fanfics that are better than published books."

Me too! But I would argue that a fanfic loses a lot of its soul, its seasoning when it gets poached for mainstream publishing. It's like treating the live-action remake as 'legitimizing' an animated film when the reality is that it's a soulless cash-grab in a creatively bankrupt capitalist market.

I'm not saying a fanfic writer can't go on to enjoy success in mainstream publishing, in fact, I genuinely hope that fanfic writers can break into that market with their own original works (Hello, Homestuck DNA in the Locked Tomb series...), but I do worry about the precedent set by fanfics "breaking containment" and getting picked up by mainstream publishers.

The whole point of fanfic and its legal protections is that writers are writing it for love of the game--sure, some writers are working on building up an audience, building up their craft, and there's nothing wrong with fanfic communities being a sort of writing nursery where writers can build themselves up before jumping into original fiction, but it's also like... fanfic has a point on its own. It has a purpose as transformative fandom. It has a point in subverting and exploring the text and subtext of the media it portrays from various interpretations. If we start treating it as a rough draft for original fiction and not something in conversation with both a community and a preexisting media... something gets lost on all sides when the serial numbers get filed off.

I mean there's probably more nuance that will bleed into "Everyone can do what they want forever"-- I mean Japan has a lot of fanworks in its doujinishi market after all---but I dunno. Fanfiction communities time and again want to have their cake and eat it, too, and I worry that's going to continue biting us in the ass and keeping us on the margins.

[buffysummers]

Johanna Mason in The Hunger Games (2012-2015)

[hotgirlmeg]

imagine you have a movie with oscar isaac and john boyega and people fixate on adam driver instead. this actually happened

[the-zenith-calls]

My favorite scenes in the LotR books are the ones where Legolas has vital information and just decides it's not important to share.

Like when Gandalf spent literal PAGES trying to figure out why the vibes were off in Moria and Legolas chimes in with just "it's a balrog :) that shit's evil :) we're so fucked :)" like what do you MEAN you knew already and just didn't tell him??

Or at the beginning of Two Towers when Aragorn thinks there's something nearby so he puts his ear to the ground to listen, and then like 10 minutes later is like "hmmm i hear horses" and Legolas is just like "mm yep. there are 105 blond bitches with spears" like you just let your friend put his face in the dirt and you can SEE them??

Legolas please gain a sense of urgency

[knives-in-the-dishwater]

It's because legolas hasn't spent enough time with non-elves to remember that they don't know what he knows.

gandalf is scratching his head in moria, and legolas is thinking "oh man, the wizard noticed something off *besides* the obvious balrog that we all are aware of??"

"I wonder what aragorn is listening for? must be hard to hear, what with all of the horses. How many horses are there, actually? 1... 2... 3..."

[taavicleric]

"What do your elvish eyes see?" is Aragorn saying, as politely as possible, "Because the REST OF US are at a significant disadvantage, Prince Dipshit."

[battyarchamac]

Untitled Goose Game but you play as R2-D2 and your job is to ruin the Empires day.

[generalgri3vous]

It's a wonder day in the Senate, and you are a horrible droid.

[optimysticals]

*grabby hands*

[marlynnofmany]

Press X to make an oil slick right when Palpatine walks by. Press Y to shriek insults in binary.

[twinterrors29]

@barbieinspace excellent proposal!

[assiraphales]

reylo was probably THE worst thing to happen to star wars. just had to drool over a genocidal 6 and help encourage the derailing of an entire trilogy. no luke skywalker shouldn’t have killed him bc it would have gone against his morals but he should have phoned a friend

[assiraphales]

all for a man whose number one personality trait is toddler temper tantrums

[assiraphales]

they were supposed to be the main focus of the trilogy and kylo should have just been a bug they SQUASHED

[gerardpilled]

sad reality of the fanfic-to-published work economy is that the weirdest people are willing to do it. that's why there's now hundreds of shitty no plot cishet hate-to-love enemies-to-lovers books that are ex reylo fanfic. and it's not even good. that's because the people who wrote book-quality steve/bucky and kirk/spock fic are too normal to think to themselves "i should get this porn published". they're too busy working in local government offices

[gerardpilled]

everyone I am happy to announce that the stevebucky fanfic author I had in mind while writing this post has officially reblogged it.

[tiggymalvern]

#imo the writers who write insanely good fanfic can’t file the serial numbers off because they grasped the canon so thoroughly #the shitty stuff is publishable because once you change the names you can’t recognize these people

Prev's tags are correct.

[tomonohebi]

[casgirl]

[jaxschickenleg]

Replayed both games recently and bruh, love this goth queen so much.

[chamerionwrites]

Honestly this gets at my chiefest complaint/frustration/discomfort with fandom as a whole. Which is: in their rush to defend the artistic merit of fanworks I think a ton of people have really valorized transformation and remixing and reinterpretation in and of themselves, when imo those are all quite neutral actions. When done well, they can expand and build upon and subvert meaning in really powerful and thought-provoking (and fun!) ways. When done poorly, they are just as likely to flatten and oversimplify and decontextualize and completely erase meaning. The simple act of changing something does not imbue the choice to do so with creative validity. It is entirely possible for a cover song to be bad (or just boring!). To exactly the same degree that it is possible to transform a pretty shallow and straightforward work into something deeper and more nuanced and subversive, is possible to transform a work into a vastly shallower and less interesting shadow of itself. As with nearly everything in art, it's all about the execution!

But the second you voice this position (which should honestly be a pretty uncontroversial one imo), you get people shrieking at you about being gatekeep-y and pretentious and betraying the sacred fandom etiquette of Don't-Like-Don't-Read.

And like...listen. I was not raised in a barn. I am 150% capable of quietly back-buttoning out of a fanfic I think is bad or boring - which is exactly what I do when I encounter them - and I am obviously not advocating for stupid ships wars or any kind of harassment or leaving hatemail in people's AO3 inboxes. (Which some people will also accuse you of the second you say anything less than lavishly positive about fandom, in true piss-on-the-poor fashion.) Literally all I am saying is that you can't have your cake and eat it too - that if fandom and fanworks (in the broadest sense) have artistic merit then fandom and fanworks (in the broadest sense) are fair game for artistic critique. Which means, in practice, that I can go on my own blog and make a post exactly like this one - critiquing broad trends, or stating that some interpretations are bad actually, or pointing out that subverting or talking back to or reading against the grain of canon is very different from simply ignoring it, or saying "fandom's culture of collage/remix/fuck-canon-I-do-what-I-want can lend itself to to really creative and interesting art but also to a lot of really bland homogenized cut-n-paste art, not to mention some pretty troubling decontextualization." And that if you feel this rains on your personal parade, you are then free to DLDR by back-buttoning out of my blog and/or blocking me so you never have to see my hot takes again, rather than clamoring in my notes about how I should let people enjoy things.

[chamerionwrites]

Tl;dr - The thing about collage and remix is that by definition you are cutting and clipping things out of their original context. There is nothing inherently bad about this (it can lead to art that builds on the original work while being super fresh and interesting in its own right!). But there is nothing inherently good about it either (it can also lead to art where you lose a ton of nuance and complexity and specificity from the original text, and gain nothing but a flattened-out mush in return.) It can be more than the sum of its parts, or it can be meme-y and soundbite-y and didn't-read-past-the-headline devoid of context or substance. All in the execution etc etc

[mobpsycho100]