Truth in Tropes: A Defense of Fanfiction

2014-12-4 Fanfiction img01It’s been a long day. I’m finally sitting down at home in my incredibly comfy papasan chair with a cup of tea that I’ve been wanting all day, intending to spend only a few seconds checking my personal email before curling up with a book or catching up with my latest Netflix obsession. However, my plans for the next ten minutes change suddenly when I see the following subject line:

New Chapter from WriterWoman01* (FanFiction.net)

Yes, you read correctly. I confess. I read, write, and follow fanfiction.

I also confess that this is not something to which I would have admitted a year or two ago, although it was as true then as it is now. Contrary to my expectations, majoring in English has actually increased both my interest in and my respect for one of the most disdained forms of literary expression currently in existence.

This is not a symptom of my mental instability, I promise. Allow me to explain myself.

There are certain things present in fanfiction that I absolutely cannot stand. The idea that native English speakers could mangle their own language the way some authors of fanfiction do appalls me. The kidnapping of beloved literary and television characters for use in a writer’s…shall we say, “less than savory” pursuits, saddens me. However, it also saddens me that these two shortcomings are the public sphere’s primary, and perhaps only, knowledge of what fanfiction can be. Neither of these failings are unique to or definitive of what fanfiction is in its essence. These flaws exist everywhere in modern society, and characterize the Internet in general better than fanfiction in particular.

Putting aside the above complaints, there are three main types of arguments against the validity of fanfiction itself. Some claim that it harms original authors, destroying the integrity of the work on which it is based. Some claim it harms its readers, that fanfiction holds fans captive and prevents them from discovering newer and worthier works of art. And some claim that fanfiction harms its own authors, encouraging creative laziness and destroying the potential for originality. I shall deal with the latter argument first, as it is by far the most prominent, as well as the most ridiculous, of the three.

The critique that fanfiction discourages originality points to a peculiarly modern concern that literature needs to be as unique as possible to truly be called literature. The western world is full of burgeoning young authors who, for fear of being passed over and shuffling into anonymity, want to know how they can make their stories more original. Unfortunately, historical track records show that the way to avoid anonymity relies not only on originality. While a piece of art must be different in some way from what came before it to make it “art,” it also cannot be completely unique from what has come before. Says T.S. Eliot: “[New art] appears to conform, and is perhaps individual, or it appears individual, and may conform; but we are hardly likely to find that it is one and not the other.”**

If you accept the proverb “There is nothing new under the sun,” then it will not surprise you to learn that the plot and character patterns seen in western literature bear it out. John Milton’s Paradise Lost is a poeticized English epic of Biblical history. The Aeneid? Basically a fanfiction of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. Nearly every popular account about King Arthur, Merlin, and the Round Table is a fanfiction of a fanfiction. Even Dante, for all his innovation and strides forward in Italian literature, builds his Divine Comedy around a mix of real historical figures of his day and famous characters originally belonging to other authors.

“Surely, though,” you say, “their source material had to be original! There wasn’t always literature on which to base other literature!” Fair, there was not always “literature” as we define it today. However, there have been stories for as long as there have been humans. Being the first person to write a story down certainly does not make you the first person to tell it. “Literature” is simply an artful and convenient way of preserving beautiful descriptions of the human experience, and human experience is limited. Therefore, we should not be surprised to learn that literature is limited in this way, also.

To those who might feel that fanfiction holds its audiences captive, I say that there is good reason to be captivated. The stories to which an individual or a culture gravitate express the experiences of that individual or culture. People are drawn to particular settings, characters, and plots because those elements of storytelling resonate with their own experiences and desires. One can learn a great deal about a person or a culture by studying which stories most captivate them.

To those concerned about the integrity of the works on which fans base their fiction, I ask: Did Dante or Tennyson wrong Homer and his Odyssey? Both draw pieces from the work. Homer only casually mentions his hero’s final quest as a sort of epilogue to the Odyssey. Dante goes so far as to damn Odysseus for this endless questing, and Tennyson brilliantly fuses both, penning out an Odysseus who will “drink life to the lees,” but who will thrust his own responsibilities onto his son in order to do so. Are these three versions of Odysseus the same man? Yes and no. However, rather than damaging their counterparts, I would argue that each of these versions of Odysseus only enrich a reader’s understanding of the others. This same man, with the same name, family, and experiences, is shown to be three different people in the mind’s eye of three authors—different people, but all valid ideas of a human being who show readers something about life. This enrichment is just what a good “fanfiction” story ought to do for its source.

The public has a lot of disdain for fanfiction, and in many cases this is reasonable. When an enormous group of amateur writers make their work generally available without the weeding process of an editor, one should expect to see a lot of mistakes. Still, if you or a friend has the soul of an editor, the sort of soul that delights in slogging through the ninety-five percent of the Internet that is trash to find its gold nuggets, one can discover yet another beautiful mode of creative expression for the human experience.

 

* A five second search tells me that there is currently no author on FanFiction.net with this penname. It is only meant as an example of the format in which update emails appear.

** This quote originates from a delightful Eliot essay entitled “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” which you ought to go read right now, if you have not already done so.

Pevensie

About Pevensie

Pevensie is primarily a student of English, along with two or three other languages, but to pay her rent and travel expenses she makes cloaks and herds other people’s children. Whether at work or at play, Pevensie seeks to preserve finely-woven tapestries of truth, while picking at poorly-woven conventions old and new with the seam-ripper of logic. She enjoys a good cup of tea, the writings of Martin Chemnitz, and anything with caramel, and in her spare time she builds castles on swamps and scours the black market for dragon eggs.

2 thoughts on “Truth in Tropes: A Defense of Fanfiction

  1. Nikola Nikola says:

    I love your point overall, but I think you are far too kind to Milton. His level of heresy evokes some of the less desirable sides of fanfiction. In that regard, “Paradise Lost”, while very beautifully written, correlates somewhat to “Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality” – it dangerously twists some of the most central themes and ideas of the original work.

    • Pevensie Pevensie says:

      Point there, Nikola. I don’t particularly like either Milton or “Methods of Rationality”, myself, because I think that they are both incredibly wrong. My point in that paragraph was more that Milton used characters and situations described (at least vaguely) in Scripture, and that “fanfiction-ish” tendency did not make him less of an author, even if his use of the subject matter made him a terrible theologian. People have written bad books with original plots and characters, too.

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