So, as many have doubtlessly heard by now, the Tolkien Estate is yet again publishing some of the Great Dead Professors’ writings. This time, it is The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun, a Norse epic in verse.

You know, I may be committing a mortal sin as a Tolkien fan in acknowledging this publicly, but when I heard about this, I wasn’t even a little bit excited. I mean, I can already get Sigurd and Gudrun if I want it. (And I already intended to read it at some point between the end of this semester and beginning of the next but because of its influence on his books, not his relationship to it as a translator.) So what if it doesn’t have Tolkien’s name on the cover. It’s not Tolkien’s story.

Juno mentioned the new book on her journal, and I commented there that I felt like the Tolkien Estate is becoming crass in trotting out unfinished, doctored, and reworked (by CT) manuscripts every few years. Not because I don’t think that JRRT’s early and incomplete writings and notes should not be shared: quite the opposite! I consider myself not just a fan but a student of his work and, as noted already, S&G was already on my radar for its influence over his Middle-earth-based writings. And his version of S&G might allow additional insights as to how he saw the story, which might illuminate how S&G came to influence his own original writings. I probably will buy it but my excitement over its imminence only marginally eclipses the excitement I felt for reading S&G in the first place and, trust me, given some of the other books on my between-semesters reading list, that wasn’t particularly overwhelming.

My distaste isn’t caused by the book itself but, rather, the feeling that the reputation of The Lord of the Rings (and, to a lesser extent, The Hobbit, though I expect this to change once the movie’s out) is being used to fuel interest in and hype a book that is really better aimed at students and scholars of JRRT’s writings. This is not to say that fans of his more popular books can’t and should not try to enjoy S&G. To the contrary, I hope that at least a few of the people who pick it up only because of his name on the cover do enjoy it and perhaps develop a deeper understanding and appreciation for the mythological influences on LotR and TH. Furthermore, I hope that for at least a few of them, S&G will act as a springboard into a deeper, lifelong interest in medieval literature and mythology, much as The Silmarillion jumpstarted my interests in the same topics. It would be fitting to allow a professor to continue to inspire students in his field.

But I doubt that’s what will happen because I doubt that the new book will be presented in such a way to foster that attitude and approach by its readers. Adam B. Vary of Entertainment Weekly gushes that,

Maybe this new Tolkien story — which the good professor reportedly wrote before spinning his tales of furry-footed Hobbits and ring-seeking dark lords — would prove just as richly filled with fodder for a sweeping fantasy epic that wins oodles of Oscars.

Until he realizes that, ick, “it’s written in verse. Eeep. And it’s a retelling of old Norse epics. Yikes.”

Yeah, I suspect that will be the reaction of a lot of people who pick up S&G (a reaction likely compounded when they realize that “verse” isn’t even the lilting metered, rhymed verse of French origins, certainly not limerick, but alliterative verse, that kind that doesn’t even rhyme! Double ick.) Only they probably won’t have even done the minimal research required of an EW blog post beforehand; they will see a favorite author’s name on the cover, which will inevitably be appended with the exclamation Author of the bestselling The Lord of the Rings! Now a major motion picture! and correctly assume that the book is more of the same.

I know because it happened to me. I was smitten by LotR when I heard of The Silmarillion and tracked it down in the store, expecting it to be a lot like LotR. The cover didn’t do much to dissuade me. “The Epic History of the Elves in The Lord of the Rings,” it promised. The blurb on the back didn’t help much either:

The Silmarillion is Tolkien’s first book and his last. Long preceding in its origins The Lord of the Rings, it is the story of the First Age of Tolkien’s world, the ancient drama to which characters in The Lord of the Rings look back, and in which some of them, such as Elrond and Galadriel, took part.

Elrond! Galadriel! I know them! Lord of the Rings! (Mentioned three times on two covers!) The blurb is more about LotR than the Silm, intentionally written to snare LotR fans. No one tells you that The Silmarillion is the Old Testament with Elves; no one tells you that it’s nothing like LotR. I hated it. Yes, your resident heretic loremaster and the founder of the Silmarillion Writers’ Guild hated the Silm the first time she read it. It was only when I went back and read it again–prepared, this time, for what to expect–that I could here the story past the anguished scream in my brain of “THIS IS NOT LotR!!” to appreciate the stories it contained on their own merits.

This, I think, is the reason for my distaste with the Tolkien Estate’s long-running habit of drudging up old stuff to put into print. It’s not that I don’t think that his unpublished works shouldn’t be published, and it’s not that I don’t think that they can’t be read and enjoyed by readers who aren’t normally inclined to Norse epics written in alliterative verse. (No modern reader is normally inclined to Norse epics written in alliterative verse, so we must arise from somewhere.) What I dislike is that, through JRRT’s primary association as the author of LotR and The Hobbit, they are presented as writings by JRRT the Popular Author and not JRRT the Scholar of Medieval Literature. And anyone who knows anything about JRRT knows that his incarnation as the Popular Author was fleeting, an accident of chance, and the Scholar was the one who was there to stay, and did. Presenting his scholarly writings otherwise is deeply unfair to readers who go in expecting “a sweeping fantasy epic” and get something very different.

But what to do, what to do? On the one hand, Dawn (you might say), you want his writings published because you want to geek out over them. On the other hand, you don’t want readers feeling misled by what those writings are. What do you want, a disclaimer like: LotR fans beware! Severe nerdiness enclosed! Don’t buy this unless you want to become a nerd! (possibly enclose a photo of Dawn Felagund staring vacant-eyed at her computer screen on a Friday night, partially obscured by a pile of books) Legolas sold separately! Trying to have our cake and eat it too, are we?

Not necessarily. My unasked-for suggestion to the Tolkien Estate is to, yes, please continue publishing JRRT’s drafts and notes and unfinished works for those of us who wish to study them without taking our vacation at Marquette University every year. But publish them online. Make some free–so that fans of his books can explore and see what they’re all about–and require a subscription for the rest and the compilations that CT is inclined to produce. Maybe make such compilations available in print through the site for those who want them. (Some, I hear, like to keep a shelf with all their Tolkien books, even though they use e-books for almost all research purposes, just because it looks impressive. *ahem*) But this habit of riding the wave of success from LotR and The Hobbit to peddle almost completely unrelated scholarly books looks like you’re just trying to make a killing on a legion of fans who salivate at the mention of Tolkien’s name (yes, the deplorable cult), and it’s getting unsightly.

Filed under: Literature, Tolkien by Dawn
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In this week’s stupid-scary tech news, Slate magazine reports on a case about a Web start-up that was sued by a law firm for linking to publicly available biographies on the law firm’s website. The law firm argued “trademark infringement” on the grounds that visitors would think that the start-up was associated with the law firm.

Lolz, right? The Internet is all about linking; it is one of the major reasons why it is a more powerful platform for communication than traditional print. Anyone who’s been on the Internet for more than a few minutes gets the hang of the fact that anyone can link to anyone without implying or intending affiliation. And while individual communities have developed etiquette about how and when to link to others’ content, then, in general, it is understood that publicly available content is fair game. It is, after all, publicly available. The right to link is rather like the right to point at a painting hung in a museum and say, “Look at that!”

When I first saw the headline (via MSN) about the potential illegality of linking, my first thought was that it was another version of the hoax about how the U.S. Post Office is going to charge 5¢ per email in an attempt to recoup lost revenue from the rise of electronic versus snail mail: Shrieky panic caused by the fact that the Internet still sometimes seems too good to be true as a platform for information and communication.

Unfortunately, this one can’t be filed away under Hoaxes and forgotten. When the judge refused to dismiss the case and after incurring six-figure legal fees, the small start-up was forced to cave to the law firm’s pressure and settled the case, agreeing to format any links to the firm’s site in a specific manner, as determined by the law firm.

While it’s not time to hit the panic button yet, this opens a scary-big can of worms. The original article sums it up best:

Paul Alan Levy of Public Citizen described the lawsuit as a “new entry in the contest for ‘grossest abuse of trademark law to suppress speech the plaintiff doesn’t like.’ “

Writer Wendy Davis goes on to note,

But in a larger sense, [law firm] Jones Day won. The firm gained control over how an online publisher builds hyperlinks. The actual change Jones Day wrought may be small, but it signals to companies that they can force sites to revise their linking styles by alleging trademark infringement. And Judge Darrah’s decision not to dismiss the suit signals that Web publishers may have to spend significant sums to deal with this kind of litigation.

Just like net neutrality, I see this as another sign of the squirming discomfort felt by those who are accustomed to buying gold-star treatment with their fat wallets. That doesn’t happen online. We are all, in theory, on equal ground here. With a domain name, a plot of Internet real estate, and a little bit of tech-savvy, my theoretical start-up Dawn’s Dusty Books could compete with giants like Barnes & Noble and Amazon. This isn’t true offline, where I can’t afford even a tiny shop on the back of a Carroll County strip mall. If something like this were to take hold, the burden it would place on small Internet outlets (like me!) would be insurmountable.

I hope that, should this sort of case ever come up again, it comes before a judge who might have used the Internet once or twice. (This judge, clearly, by his astounding ignorance of how the Internet works, never has.) Someone who will seal up this big bucket of worms with a nice red bow on top before little ways of privileging the financially elite online slowly bleeds dry those of us who can’t afford to bow and scrape to their every whim.

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In slightly older news that is no less stupid-scary, Australia has finally figured out the answers to that thorny question of how to define child pornography.

As anyone who lived through the LiveJournal Strikethrough debacle of 2007 probably remembers, child pornography gets messy when one realizes that not all visual depictions of children intended for sexual gratification involve real children. What to do about squicky drawings of underage Harry Potter doing naughty things with Professor Snape? Our gut instinct often seems to say that such drawings could only be made by Bad People™ who, by their ready association in our minds with those who abuse real-actual-living-breathing children, deserve to be punished.

Well, those of you who rolled your eyes at Strikethrough and proclaimed, “Only on LiveJournal! Only in fandom! Only there could such idiocy take hold!” might be disappointed to learn that, a year-and-a-half later, you are proven wrong on that. The Supreme Court of New South Wales, Australia, recently affirmed that fictional images can count as child pornography. Yes, a major nation is waging a Strikethrough, only the penalties are criminal convictions, not getting booted from an Internet site. The case in question involved children from the television show The Simpsons engaging in sex acts, so it’s not even that these are visual depictions of children who might, somewhere in the world be real-actual-living-breathing children. No, this is Harry-and-Snape fake (without even the complicating existence of Daniel Radcliffe), and it is the same stupid-scary notion that drove Strikethrough.

William Saletan writes:

What’s happening to child pornography is what’s happening on the Internet and in software generally: Technology is blurring boundaries between action and thought, public and private, real and fake. … This gray area unnerves us, so we prosecute it. … I understand why we do this: We’re afraid that if we don’t prosecute cyber-perverts, they’ll move on to the real thing. But the danger runs both ways. How far will we extend felony prosecution into the realm of the private, the fake, and the abstract? If the Simpsons count as child pornography, what’s next?

The problem is that there are plenty of perverts who skipped cartoons straight to the “real thing.” And, in the economic crunch, as public safety budgets are being slashed to save states’ money, we’re going to be stretching thinner and thinner to apprehend people whose actions have lifelong consequences for their very real victims far beyond someone’s refined sensibilities being insulted by a naughty drawing of Bart Simpson. I know because, when I’m not being all heretical and stuff on the Internet, I work for a law enforcement agency. I see the amount of time, energy, and resources that goes into investigating child sex offense cases and apprehending offenders. Indeed, some of that time and energy is mine! Sometimes it seems there just aren’t enough hands to go around or enough hours in the day. Do we really want to devote fewer hands and less hours to the people hurting real kids in order to go after those whose idea of what makes attractive, funny, or sexy artwork might raise our eyebrows but, in the end, harms no one?

Furthermore, it is an insult to the victims of actual pedophiles to associate an injury done to them that may well last a lifetime with … drawings we don’t like? I don’t know about everyone else, but my outrage against child sex offenders originates with the harm done to the most vulnerable members of our society in the name of the sexual gratification of their abusers. It has nothing to do with aesthetics; it has nothing to do with thinking that something is icky or immoral but with harm done. Sorry Bart, but confusing the two is a slap in the face to the real victims of childhood sexual abuse.

Filed under: Fandom and Online Life by Dawn
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Bobby and I went to see Coraline last week on opening night; I purchased the book a few days earlier (for $13 paperback–ouch!) and read it so that I could go into the movie with my canatic’s cred intact.

I had all intentions of reviewing the movie, being as this blog weble is primarily concerned with fantasy literature and the issues that it raises, particularly for those marginalized by traditional discussions of literature. Besides being a fantasy classic in the making, Coraline concerns a lot of these issues. However, since I can’t pick a focus and have decided that I do not want to, then this is the Coraline Grab Bag, a motley of unrelated musings on the novella and the movie.

***SPOILER ALERT!***
I am not going to shy from discussing details and outcomes of the plot when they are relevant to the points I am discussing here. So if you want to go into the book/movie without knowing the details of how it will turn out, get thee to the bookstore or theater and then come back to this post.

First, as far as general impressions of the movie, it is one of the few instances where I feel that a movie adds something significant to the book on which it is based. This is not to say that it is better than the book, but the novella Coraline nearly begs for a visual presentation, and this movie delivers. Oh, does it deliver.

Here is a hundred-word synopsis:

Coraline is an eccentric tween whose parents are workaholic-bordering-on-neglectful. Like many children in such a situation, her imagination becomes her escape. A bricked-over doorway entices her and, one night, she discovers that the door leads into a parallel life where her parents and home embody what she believes to be the ideal. As the story progresses, she realizes that the perfection is a guise for something much darker. And, yes, one of those dark attributes is that everyone in the parallel world sews black buttons into their eyes. Coraline must save herself and others entrapped here from its dark snares.

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One thing I’ve heard muttered about this movie is its dark premise. I will start off by saying that I do not think that this is a movie for children. Or, at least, most children. The MPAA has given it a PG rating, which is generally interpreted as being pretty safe. I would personally place it higher, as a PG-13.

It is a dark story. It becomes even darker when ideas that were left to the wilds of ones imagination in the novella–like the buttons-for-eyes concept that the movie exploits for every squirm-inducing ounce of dark joy it’s worth–achieve the added tangibility of presentation on the big screen: like the sharp, shining needle and Coraline’s aghast eyes and the Other Father’s suavely creepy assertion that “It’s extra-sharp so it won’t hurt.” This invites the viewer to contemplate the act of exchanging one’s eyes for black buttons that is more easily avoided in the books.

To offer further anecdotal evidence about the need to take care with children at this movie, when we went last week, we had a small child seated in the row behind us. The opening scene shows a ragdoll being remade in Coraline’s image, and as a pair of scissors tore open the doll’s back, the little girl behind us gasped and cried out. This was the first ten seconds of the movie. The rest of the movie was similarly punctuated by little yelps and shrieks from the row behind us. Despite being a kid person like most cats are dog people, I felt truly sorry for the little tyke, whose parents probably saw “Animation!” and thought “Perfect to pacify little Madysyn for two hours!” Not the case, folks. Give serious consideration to taking any child to Coraline who is, well, younger than Coraline.

So there are mutterings about how Coraline is dark and misplaced as a children’s or “family” movie. Well, to be blunt, no shit. I empathized fully with the outrage directed at Despereaux earlier this year. Not only was the movie G-rated, but the previews gave no indication that it would include such scenes as a young woman being tied up to be eaten alive by rats or a rat (however deserving) being trapped by a murderous cat while we the audience are treated to his offscreen death throes. To me, it seemed perhaps the most egregious example of how “child-friendly” or “family-friendly” has come to mean “without sex or curse words,” ignoring the fact that children remain largely ignorant of the meaning of sex and curse words but understand full well what’s going on when that rat gets trapped in a helm with a hungry cat and the helm starts rattling. I was disturbed by scenes in Despereaux, and I write dark fantasy and horror fiction.

The issue with Despereaux was that these elements were sprung upon an audience that expected something very different. As Emily Bazelon notes in the article linked above, parents have a hard time finding out the extent of dark themes and violence in “children’s movies,” things that might not necessarily be revealed in the preview, reviews, or the source material. I agree. But, sorry, you can’t use that excuse with Coraline. The paperback copy of the novella that I bought identifies it as “One of the most frightening books ever written,” at least according to the New York Times Book Review. The two previews I saw of the movie in theaters–before fantasy movies as different as The Strange Case of Benjamin Button and Inkheart–left no doubt that the movie would be dark. The previews even showed the famous buttons-into-eyes scene. In other words, no one is trying to hide that Coraline is a dark story. So I must admit that my patience wears very thin with those who are grumbling that, despite all this, Coraline is a dark movie.

No shit.

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The gender issues in Coraline are impossible to ignore. The question seems to be: What are they saying?

I found Filthy Grandeur’s review of Coraline via Feministe. On the darkly seductive Other Mother, Filthy Grandeur writes:

Also, her whole identity is based on being Coraline’s “other mother.” She provides what Coraline desires, which amounts to what Coraline thinks a mother should provide.

Thelma Adams for Women on Film says of Coraline’s real mother:

Yet the disturbing part is the depiction of a self-involved, self-obsessed mother who can’t bother to see to her own daughter’s needs because she’s so worried about getting clean copy to her publisher. She’s a garden writer who can’t grow her own garden — or tend her own plant (Coraline).

Yet, with all due respect to these reviewers, I think they’re only halfway there. Yes, Coraline’s mother is the stereotyped image of the harried, snappish “working mother” whose priority is her career and not her child. The Other Mother is the stereotyped domestic goddess, both in her traditionally feminine interests and in the center-of-my-world treatment that she lavishes on her child. The contrast and conflict between these dual expectations is part of what drives the story. In the novella, there is a particularly revealing scene that was left out of the movie. Coraline’s Other Mother, in an effort to convince Coraline that her missed parents are alive and very well, shows her a scene of them returning from holiday:

In the mirror it was daytime already. Coraline was looking at the hallway, all the way down to her front door. The door opened from the outside and Coraline’s mother and father walked inside. They carried suitcases.

“That was a fine holiday,” said Coraline’s father.

“How nice it is, not to have Coraline any more,” said her mother with a happy smile. “Now we can do all the things we always wanted to do, like go abroad, but were prevented from doing by having a little daughter.”

Filthy Grandeur notes that it is “sort of strange that the child was trying to enforce this gender role,” but I’m don’t find it particularly strange at all. Traditional gender roles are still so prevalent and, most importantly, so subtle in mainstream Western culture and media that I don’t see how a child like Coraline could not absorb the expectation that her mother should be making her child more of a priority than she is. Overcoming these expectations take a conscious effort and a level of thought and analysis that eludes many adults. In a way, Coraline is about Coraline’s growing awareness of how such unreal expectations placed on the shoulders of women tend to play out in actuality.

The important point, for me, is what is revealed in the end of the story. Domestic bliss is an illusion literally created by the Other Mother who, amusingly, in the words of the black cat, describes the Other Mother’s motives as,

“She wants something to love, I think,” said the cat. “Something that isn’t her. She might want something to eat as well. It’s hard to tell with creatures like that.”

The ancient, devouring mother; the stage mom or soccer mom screeching at her mortified and inadequate offspring; the mother who invests herself so strongly in her children that her identity becomes lost and conflated with theirs, who figuratively consumes them in pursuit of her own self-worth: this is the dark side of the domestic bliss in Coraline’s parallel reality. It is a cautionary tale not about women who focus too strongly on something other than their children but about the opposite, about confining a woman’s worth and identity within the home (note that the parallel reality, as an explicit creation of the Other Mother, does not extend much beyond the home) and her children.

In the end, I think that the movie makes its statement about gender roles in Coraline’s choice: Left to choose between domestic bliss with the Other Mother and her imperfect life with her real mother, she chooses the latter. And a glimpse of the price of perfection is enough to change her views of her own mother and family. Especially in the movie version, Coraline’s family at the end seems much better than her family at the start. Have they changed? Or has she? Here, Gaiman and Selick play a subtle game with point-of-view and invite the audience to consider whether Coraline’s life was really so awful to start. Or was a young girl with a vivid imagination simply engaging in fantasy based on what she had absorbed of gender-role “ideals”?

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As for Gaiman canatics, the movie sticks relatively close to the book, right down to borrowing lines from the book (like the black cat’s words about the Other Mother’s motives, quoted above). One of the biggest changes is the addition of the character Wybie, an idiosyncratic black boy who becomes acquainted with Coraline at the movie’s outset. Filthy Grandeur also notes the race issues brought up by Coraline with his addition, notably the concept of the silencing of the black male, literally, by the Other Mother, an act that Coraline at first expresses her support for as part of the typical pre-adolescent drive to find and exploit every negative thing about a new kid, a sort of sandlot version of survival of the fittest. Like the progression of her views on domestic bliss, though, I think that Coraline’s views on Wybie come to change radically, and she and Wybie together defeat the Other Mother at the end, and their acquaintance solidifies from one of competition into friendship.

The movie dwells far longer on the blissful scenes whereas the book focuses on Coraline’s quest to save her parents and the souls of other children that the Other Mother has taken. I suspect this is to show off some of the dazzling and innovative scenes and concepts: a garden in the shape of Coraline’s face, a lawnmower built like a giant mantis, the jumping mouse show, a chandelier that doubles as a milkshake dispenser, and so on. I think the shift here was mostly advantageous: Getting to share in Coraline’s discoveries and wonder was a real treat. However, the game of souls at the end felt a bit rushed to me because I was accustomed to the book version and the loving detail put into the full horror of it. Here, the movie scimped a bit, though as dark as the movie was already, I can understand that it may have been a necessary action to keep the movie from tilting into PG-13 territory by MPAA standards. Likewise, Coraline’s prophetic dream meeting with the three stolen children was much more lavishly treated in the book, a scene that I had looked forward to and missed somewhat in the movie, although the unreal sense of time essential to this scene in the book may have presented insurmountable challenges on the screen.

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Whether you like to debate and analyze what books and movies are trying to say or whether you just like to be glued to your seat in suspense and wonder, both the novella and movie versions of Coraline are sure to please. Aside from its commentary on gender roles (and race issues in the movie), it is a darkly dazzling fantasy straight out of a childhood nightmare with an irresistable heroine and eye-popping imagination.

I give it a full four E.L. Fudge Elves Exist cookies out of four.

Filed under: Book Reviews, Literature, Movies by Dawn
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There were a pair of posts this week on the FanHistory blog (here and here) about how to become a successful fan writer. The title of the first post is pretty much its thesis: “Fan fiction, social media & chasing the numbers with quality content (Hint: Doesn’t matter).” The basic premise is this: If you write fan fiction and you want to be successful at it, and you define “success” entirely in numeric terms–by page clicks or comment counts–then screw writing quality work: It doesn’t matter; you need to “follow all the cool kids” and be where it’s at with two turn-tables and a microphone, even if that’s not where you want to be.

And, yes, this is true. If you aim for one thousand comments on your novel, you’re probably not going to get them writing Silmarillion. (Another Man’s Cage currently has 185 comments on ff.net.) You’re much better off in Twilight or Harry Potter, even The Lord of the Rings. (My friend JunoMagic’s LotR-based novel Lothíriel has 995 reviews on the same site.)

My contention is not with whether or not this is reality. It’s pretty in-your-face obvious, if you ask me. My contention lies with the very notion of recognizing rewards for our writing in such terms.

Because the fact of the matter is that people who post their fiction publicly are looking for something for doing so. Oh, I’ve heard the wide-eyed assertions of people who claim, “I only post for myself!” I call bullshit. You may write for yourself–I hope that you do!–but if you’re taking the time to join groups/archives and format stories for uploading and to actually upload them and write summaries and debate the rating and so on, you’re doing so with hopes of getting something from someone else. That might be simply getting read; it might be in-depth concrit; it might be the adulation of masses claiming that Shakespeare is currently licking the taste of your road dust from his lips. So there is some hope for reward, maybe not even anything particularly tangible, but something. Write for myself, post for others: that is my motto, and I fail to see how there is any shame in standing on a stage and hoping for an audience.

And, of course–idealist though I may be–I can also see things in realistic terms, and I know that nothing I say will change the fact that there will be people for whom the sole measure of success is reaching a certain number of comments or page clicks. I count these people alongside those who take 80-hour-a-week jobs for the six-figure salaries and the ability to accrue shinies like a million-dollar home that might as well be a million-dollar motel room for all that they’re in it, complete with a professional-grade kitchen that never gets used because their dinners are slurped out of Chinese takeout boxes, and a vacation home in Bethany Beach that never gets used because they’re working eighty hours a week, every week. But the collection of such shinies is their mark of success; intangibles like contentment or personal enrichment are of little to no matter.

But, of course, there’s no meaning in such an existence, just as there is no meaning in fiction that is penned solely to entice the greatest number of eyeballs to look at it. Traffic accidents earn that much.

This concept is nothing new. In professional fiction, the term for it has been sanitized and euphemized as “writing for the market.” Those with blunter tongues call it “selling out.” Last year, horribly enough, I had to write an essay on Terry Brooks’ The Sword of Shannara for a course called Modern Epic Fantasy, and while looking for information on the book, I found an interview with the author during which he was asked how he handles critical reactions to his work. “I write first for myself and for what I perceive to be the market” was part of his answer. Having read no further than Sword of Shannara (because, as I often admonish fandom trolls, if organisms lacking a central nervous system nonetheless possess the capability to learn a basic avoidance response, then what does it say of human beings who cannot do the same?), I can say that it is painfully obvious that Brooks writes foremost for a market. “Writing for the market” necessarily means that there must be a perceptible market in the first place, which means that there must be a body of books that is being overwhelmingly purchased (and, thus, published) over another body of books, which means walking in the ditches created by the passage of all those authors’ feet before yours, which means stale ideas and writing that lacks anything close to daring.

However, I am not so naïve not to understand that professional writers are just that: They are professionals, and so they need to make money on their work. So they must remain at least cognizant of the market for that work. I know firsthand the allure of that “market,” of leaving an idea about which I was passionate for another because I thought that the latter had a better chance of “selling.” It made me a miserable writer and drove me to give up writing for two years. I suppose it’s the same as the caveman’s urge to hoard more deer legs in one’s cave than one can possibly eat because that stack of rotting meat in the corner represents success and, ultimately, survival. Never mind that it reeks.

But this is professional writing. After my failed stint as a writer of literary fiction, it was “fan fiction” that brought me back to writing, and it brought me back in part because it was something that could not be sold. It kept me honest much in the way that a job at Denny’s and not Applebee’s keeps a recovering alcoholic honest by not even providing a whiff of temptation into the old habits. There was very little “market” for Silmfic beyond a slightly bigger audience for some characters and pairings over others; it was the closest I’d ever seen in a fiction-writing community to the ideal of 1) writing only what one’s heart and mind cries must be written and 2) having one’s work judged foremost in terms of how well it worked for its audience. This is not to say that the Silmarillion community was (and is) without any favoritism paid to some works, genres, and authors over others. But that an unknown author could march into the room with her big, hulking novel that never once touches on an event mentioned in the texts and still find readers and get comments on her work is, I think, a testament to the difference between fanfic and o-fic. Let me try the same thing with an original novel and see how far I get.

So I find this notion of recognizing and writing for a fanfic market to be dismaying. What the FanHistory posts encourage (especially the first) is abandoning one’s own passions as a writer in favor of writing to fit a perceived market. Fuck quality. My heart and mind pull me to contemplate the early lives of the Fëanorians, the quality of my writing (I hope) reflects my passion and interest in this topic, but as my “mere” 185 reviews on ff.net reveal, this isn’t enough. Never mind that I’ve never read Twilight and strongly suspect that I would object to some of the books’ basic premises, but this is where it’s at. I can surely scratch together a story about Bella and Edward (see, I know the main characters’ names at least!) that will probably get more comments in a week than AMC has gotten in three years.

I don’t object to the reality of this claim but whether this is a measure that we should be putting upon fanworks in the first place. It’s bad enough that, in order to make a living off of their art, writers must mash and corset their creative passions to suit the “market.” What is to be gained by placing the same impositions upon fan-writing? It takes fan-writing from something that is driven by creativity and the community that forms around sharing that creativity and turns it into a capitalist enterprise, only instead of success being measured in dollars or euros or pounds or kroner or pesos or yen, now we’re measuring in page clicks or comment counts and shifting our creativity and our communities to accrue those meaningless little tick marks. We can’t even feed our families off hits on ff.net. In such a system, tiny fandoms–like Silmarillion, where the stories being written are overwhelmingly of high quality and the communities are extremely dedicated, passionate, and close-knit–must necessarily lose out in favor of–what exactly? Stacking our archives with the same pulp that I saw when, two Christmases ago, I wanted to buy my husband a book by Ursula K. LeGuin (any book by Ursula K. LeGuin) and, in the local B&N fantasy/sci-fi section with its bright-colored covers featuring shovel-jawed, sword-wielding heroes and dew-eyed, diadem-wearing princesses, I found one copy of The Left Hand of Darkness? Terry Brooks, on the other hand, probably had a shelf unto himself.

The difference between piling rotting deer carcasses in the corner of your cave if you’re writing professional fiction versus fan fiction is that, in fanfic, those carcasses are never a matter of survival. They just stink.

Filed under: Fandom and Online Life by Dawn
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On one of the Tolkien discussion lists I’m on, the perennial question about Maedhros and Thangorodrim was posed: What does JRRT tell us about how Maedhros survived up there for so long?

The answer to that question is simple: JRRT doesn’t. At least, not in any of the books published during his lifetime or posthumously to this point.

The issue is a larger one. That this question comes up at least every year is indicative of its importance. This is a major event and a popular one to write about. Surely JRRT told us something about it! It is the fanfic writer’s instinct, when confronted with the desire to write about a particular event, to go to the texts for answers. But when there are no answers to be had …

What next?

My short answer was, and is: Use your imagination. Take what you know from the texts and how you personally interpret the texts and make something up. Yet I think that our perception of our relationship with the texts and of the texts to our stories sometimes makes this easier said than done. There is the uncomfortable feeling that one should not simply make up details about an event of such importance. Surely the answers lie in the texts somewhere, to the writer savvy enough to know where to look and know how to put the clues together!

I remember when I wrote Another Man’s Cage, my first reaction to posting that story was to label it as alternate universe (AU). The first reaction of many of my readers was to suggest that I do the same. To use a somewhat odd metaphor, imagine that I hold a rock, and that is my story. The big barnside is the text on which I am writing. If I peg the rock at the side of the barn, and it lands off in the tall weeds somewhere well away from and out of sight of the barn, then that is how scantily AMC was related to anything concrete in the texts. The texts shaped the direction of the story, but the story was quite independent of the texts after that initial toss.

I’ve already discussed at length elsewhere that this is not the same thing as AU. Yet that still does remove all of the squirmy discomfort that, in lobbing stones at barns, where those stones land might still be somehow wrong.

I do think, in writing Tolkien-based stories, that a lot of times we get hung up on questions of canon when the question should be writing: How to create an engaging and internally consistent story from one’s own head. Take the Maedhros-on-Thangorodrim example: JRRT gives us little help. Few events get such varied treatment in stories. I’ve seen,

• Morgoth sending a minion or going himself to force-feed Maedhros;
• Morgoth sustaining Maedhros unnaturally using “magic” (think Húrin);
• Maedhros only hanging for days or weeks, not years, because his story was exaggerated by loremasters and bards looking to tell a good story, so the how of survival isn’t even an issue;
• Maedhros surviving because, as an Elf recently arrived from the Blessed Realm, he had the endurance to do so; and
• Maedhros surviving on bugs and rainwater and determination until he’s rescued.

None of these are right; none are wrong. Each writer can provide his or her own facts from the texts to justify one interpretation over the other, and we’re no closer to an answer than we were at the start.

I love analyzing and discussing canon. I love taking the details used to arrive at each of the above interpretations and evaluating the relative worth of each, combining and recombining and questioning them, but at the end of the day, discussing “canon” about such questions with hopes of arriving at definitive answers to be applied to stories is pointless. It’s like arguing about whether Mexican, Thai, or Indian is the superior type of food. Each person can make her or his argument, but in the end, it really is a matter of taste.

On my list of things that I wish the Tolkien fandom would just get: stop turning such questions into questions of canon. Turn them into questions of writing. Accept that we will still be arguing about this twenty years from now, and–barring the publication or discovery of some textual evidence for the validity of one interpretation over another–we will still be no closer to an answer. What matters, at the end of the debate, isn’t what JRRT said or didn’t say, but how we present our stories, make them compelling, and make them work within our own visions of this world in which we play.

However, I think that anyone whose seen a couple of these go-arounds knows that such discussions tend to deteriorate into a squabbling over which set of facts is better put together than another. The question of how a writer uses her or his freedom to weave a compelling story around a major event where we have little help from the original author is never addressed; at least, I’ve never seen it. But that, I think, would be a productive conversation to have.

Filed under: Tolkien by Dawn
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Usually, this blog is devoted quite adamantly to book-based fandom because media-based fandom has more than its share of outlets for news and discussion. However, this is an issue that I have been following for some weeks now about the upcoming movie Avatar: The Last Airbender. The movie is based on the popular Nickelodeon animated program Avatar. The initial fandom buzz about this movie infuriated me, but I didn’t jump into the fray because it wasn’t *my* fandom. I’ve since reevaluated this stance as, at best, ignorant and, at worst, an attitude that allows bullshit like this to perpetuate in the first place.

To sum up: Avatar is a popular animated television show on Nickelodeon. The program is fantasy, but the imagined cultures are rooted strongly in East Asian and Inuit culture, and the characters–in keeping with this–all appear as East Asians and Inuits as well.

As they do with just about anything that has achieved success, Hollywood decided to make a movie based on Avatar. Only, when the major casting decisions were announced, all of the actors chosen were white. Never mind that the source was inspired and based on a culture and people completely unlike these kids, in the words of one of the stars, “I think it’s one of those things where I pull my hair up, shave the sides, and I definitely need a tan.” Wow.

To add insult to injury, a second casting call was put out for extras. The first call, for the lead actors, asked for “Caucasian or any other ethnicity.” (I am quoting from memory as I seem to have lost the post where I originally saw this. I will add it if I find it. ETA: I got the quote right, and the original post can be found on Alas, a Blog.) This time, people of “ethnic background” were sought. Part of the casting call reads, “You’re asked to dress casually or in the traditional costume of your family’s ethnic background.”

So, when they’re looking for the leads, for the faces that will represent this project to the world, they explicitly favor white faces? But, when they need a little local color to fill in the background, please, by all means, show up in your “traditional costume”! (Even the word costume makes me cringe. When I put on a feathery leotard for a skating performance or dress up like an Elf for a Ren Faire, those are costumes. Clothing that has real-life, actual significance to real-life, actual cultures of people are not costumes, with all the implication of playing dress-up or putting on a performance.)

I would highly encourage my fellow fans to join me in communicating how wrong this whole situation is.

First, I would encourage everyone to read some of the posts being made about this by fans of color. Even if you’re not sure that you agree with me (or you’re adamant that you don’t, and there’s no problem with the casting for Airbender), I’d suggest reading some of these posts before you choose to do nothing. I am white. I cannot communicate what it is like for people of color to constantly see their faces and cultures disregarded and appropriated to make way for the white “norm.” I cannot communicate the pain and frustration of knowing from a young age that certain avenues were closed off to me because of my skin color or the breadth of my nose or the shape of my eyes and that people like me had no place in the important stories being told in mainstream culture. Their words and anger and hurt are what matters, not mine.

Here are a few suggested places to start. The posts are rather long, but both are well worth the time spent on them. These posts link to other posts, so it should not be hard to read more beyond this list. I also encourage those of you who have been following this mess or who discover posts that you feel are worth sharing to link them in the comments. I will add them to the list here when you do.

Seeking Avalon: A Conversation I WANT to Have
Ciderpress: What We Talk about When We Talk about
Shewhohashope: In the collective unconcious: cultural impositions, internalised racism & the colonised mind

Second, please pass on the word about this. I haven’t heard about it anywhere in the ivory towers of book-based fandom, and it’s important. It’s worth getting the word out. You may link here, though I’d prefer if you’d link to one of the posts by people of color who are telling their stories. For ideas about taking action, here is a post on the Angry Asian Man blog that gives specific details. If you’re so inspired, write your own blog/journal posts. Let’s get the word out.

Third, don’t see the movie. One of the arguments that is constantly trotted out in debates about casting whites in the roles of non-whites is that white people don’t want to watch movies about characters of color. White allies against racism should take this as the insult that it is. And we should all put out money where our mouths are by demanding a fair and diverse representation of the world’s many, many non-white cultures in mass media. Personally, I want to see human culture and beauty in its many colors and shapes. And I’m tired of being told that I don’t want to.

Fourth, tell the studios that you aren’t seeing the movie and why. Movies flop all of the time, and it’s anyone’s best guess why they do. We need to make clear, if this one follows many of its predecessors into the abyss, that the racist casting decisions were a big reason–if not the reason–why people chose not to see this movie.

There is a community on LiveJournal called Aang Ain’t White that is organizing letter-writing campaigns and protests. Check in here for updates.From Angry Asian Man, here are the latest addresses:

Mr Mark Bakshi
President Features Production
5555 Melrose Avenue
Shulberg Building
Suite 211
Room 115
Los Angeles, CA 90038-3197

and

Kathleen Kennedy and Frank Marshall
Kennedy/Marshall Company
619 Arizona Avenue, Fl. 2
Santa Monica, California 90401

---

It was the last post on the Seeking Avalon blog, along with following the unfolding debate about race on Metafandom that finally pushed me to comment on this. Before that, it was easy to dismiss my silence because it wasn’t *my* fandom and I have no interest in anime and I probably wouldn’t have seen the movie in the first place.

Last week was one of those *omgwtf* atrocities in terms of school- and work-load, so I missed most of the posts about the latest racist idiocy on Metafandom. However, I did skim the excerpts to at least make a mental note about which ones I might like to return to in the future, and one particular line jumped out at me from the excerpt of Shewhohashope’s post In the collective unconcious: cultural impositions, internalised racism & the colonised mind:

Not seeing things in terms of race is an aspect of privilege, as I’ve said before. I can’t not see things in terms of race, because people will always see me in terms of mine.

And something somewhere, in conjunction with the Avatar atrocity, just clicked, and I realized that my ability to brush off something that I felt passionately about was a reflection of my own privilege as a white person, at always getting to see “my” culture represented as the standard and the norm, at always getting to see faces like mine represent both heroes and villains and people from all walks of life, at getting to be part of the “important” stories being told in mainstream culture.

I mean, I’m in the damned Tolkien fandom. It’s a mythology constructed by a white guy for perceived white audiences in an attempt to give a richer mythological history to a white, imperialist nation. Often, when I meet people from fandom or when they see my picture online, they gasp and say, “Dawn, you look just like an Elf!” because I have skin that refuses to tan, my blond hair reaches my butt, and my eyes are bright blue-gray. The mythology Tolkien wrote represents … me. And, to a degree, my heritage. On my mom’s side, I am descended from the Stuart clan in Scotland. Had my distant, distant relative gotten her way, she would have been queen instead of Elizabeth I. I am connected, in every way, to the stories that I have chosen to study and reinterpret as part of my own fiction. And, looking at me, no one ever doubts it. And I never have to worry that some dominant group will try to steal the connections that I feel to these stories from me and replace me with someone better and more acceptable to the normative culture.

How lucky I am, to not only have found stories that I’m passionate about studying and never to have to worry about those stories being taken from me and given to someone else! Even as a woman–with my own uphill battle against male privilege and ignored and maligned, as a gender, in my favorite books–I did not have to worry that Peter Jackson would decide that Galadriel was too wise and powerful for anyone to believe that she was really a woman, and to switch the roles of Galadriel and Celeborn so that she was in the background and he became the hero. Or turn Éowyn into a guy. Or for Christopher Tolkien to make Lúthien an obedient, submissive bootlicker to her idiotic father and fiance, or to make Morwen a whiny hand-wringer instead of one of the strongest and most courageous characters in the story.

I am so lucky not to have these fears part of my daily life. This, I think, makes it all the more necessary that I speak up when I see it happening to others.

Filed under: Fandom and Online Life by Dawn
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Today, while making my daily blog-reading rounds, I found this article on Slate’s Human Nature blog. The article is about female sexuality, and how new studies are discovering that, whoa, female sexuality is really complex! And not at all what we expected based on reading What Women Want columns in men’s magazines!

I come bearing excerpts:

During shots of lesbian coupling, heterosexual women reported less excitement than their vaginas indicated; watching gay men, they reported a great deal less; and viewing heterosexual intercourse, they reported much more. (emphasis mine)

Is anyone reading on this blog surprised by the fact that women are turned on by gay men (or by lesbians, for that matter), or surprised that women who are turned on by gay men (or lesbians) are not likely to report it?

Human Nature then goes on to discuss another facet of the study, which is that some women (a good number, based on the numbers quoted in the study) have rape/assault fantasies. There is much uncomfortable tiptoeing around the question of why. I get the feeling that all involved–the researchers, the blogger–are uncomfortable with this fact about female sexuality and what it might imply about the nature of women and (perhaps worse) mean in terms of fueling those cretins still intent on arguing against the right of women not to be raped, no matter what they wear, how much they drink, or how much the male perpetrator perceives that they “want it.”

But, again, I find myself utterly unsurprised by the study’s revelations. There is, after all, a niche of fandom that writes “rapefic” and “noncon,” and discussion concerns less the appropriateness of this (and never, to the best of my knowledge, dissects what went “wrong” with the authors and readers of such stories to make them enjoy this particular fantasy) but rather how to best flag such stories to protect victims, how not to be exploitative in one’s writing, and so on.

As I read about the study, I couldn’t help but to feel annoyed at the gape-mouthed surprise that some of the study’s revelations met with. None of the study’s conclusions seemed odd to me. Female sexuality is complex. A half-day in fandom would demonstrate that women really do want something more than rescue fantasies and to feel taken care of. If you can imagine it, I can guarantee that somewhere, in a dusty corner of the Internet, there is a woman writing it, probably with at least a handful of readers enjoying it.

I remember Bobby once got an issue of Men’s Health (or something along those lines) in the mail as a freebie to lure him into subscribing. Hey, I’m interested in men, so I picked it up. “What Women Want in Bed” was the subject of one of the articles. Now I was really curious! I wanted to know what I wanted in bed! (Or, at least, what I was perceived as wanting. This is the same urge as listening in on a conversation about myself when those talking about me don’t know I’m there so that I can giggle or blush or seethe later, depending on what was said.)

The only item on the list that I remember in retrospect was that women like it when men make them feel “secure.” The article suggested that men should support their partner’s buttocks or the back of her head to accomplish this. The back of her head?! This calls to mind the instructions given to not-kid-people like me when we’re required to hold babies: “Support the back of the head.” I always have this image that, if I don’t, the head will drop right off from its own weight and go rolling across the floor.

Needless to say, this particular piece of advice nauseated me. These people propositioning my husband wanted to teach him to use the same gestures with me during sex that he would use with a newborn infant, and for the same purpose? I felt vaguely horrified and offended and tempted to write whatever imbecilic (male) author came up with this ridiculous idea to tell him that, no, women do not want that! At least, this woman didn’t.

And I think that’s when I realized that women’s desires and sexuality can’t be neatly organized in the same way that you’d sort nails and screws when cleaning the garage. (Yes, that pun was bad, and intentional. Sorry.) Someone had given this poor columnist the idea that women like to be treated as infants in bed. So, sure, some do. But the thought of well-meaning guys everywhere treating their partners like infants sickened me.

Given the surprise that the whole homosexuality- and rape-kinks met with (and these are fairly common, at least based on the number of women in fandom who regularly write these sorts of stories), I don’t even want to imagine what these people would think about, for example, twincest or Morgoth-tortures-Maedhros-in-Angband fantasies. Or mpreg. Oh my Eru, mpreg. I can only imagine bloggers trying to twist evolutionary explanations for women who like to fantasize about Sam impregnating Frodo and then Frodo giving birth to his hairy-footed Hobbitling through his butt.

But you know what? For the first time possibly ever, I felt like fandom had let me in on a secret that the rest of the world was just catching on to. I felt somewhat savvy, flicking my fingers at the people gaping over all of this and saying, “Rape fantasies? Homosexuality fantasies? You ain’t seen nothing yet!” As someone whose “savviness”–at least in this community–is defined by the ease with which she can defend the morality of Fëanor’s actions using obscure textual quotations learned by heart, this sudden plunge into worldliness was surprising but not too uncomfortable. Having been through the knee-jerk “What? NO!” reaction to the fantasies of my fellow fans, and gotten over it, I imagine that there were a lot more “savvy” women (and probably even more men) squirming at the ideas presented in this study. I felt relatively cool and … well, cool, for once.

Then I got annoyed because it felt like, in the attempt to explain the results of the study, there was a need to defend or legitimize the fantasies and desires of not even some but a good number of women. There was the need to squeeze their fantasies into an explanation that was at once scientific and feminist. Pulling and tugging over the right to explain rape fantasies as “evolutionary” or “narcissistic.”

Feministe picked up on the same study and, in the post, I found a sentence that pretty much summed up why I was feeling annoyed:

There are people … who basically argue that women feel enough guilt about sex, and feminist critiques or evaluations or even explorations of rape fantasies are inherently anti-feminist, because, come on, people get off on all kinds of things and we should just leave it alone; if some women like rape fantasies, let ‘em like rape fantasies.

It seems to me that the same people shocked that women like watching gay men would not be shocked at the fact that men like watching lesbians. Or that some men like being dominated. Or that some men are turned on by pregnant women. I mean, all of this stuff is eight-o’clock sitcom fare. When we discover the same diversity among women, we wince and get tongue-tied and pull out the microscope.

Not for the first time, I find myself wishing the world could take a lesson from fandom and worry less about why people are different and–from each individual’s point of view–weird and just accept that it will always be that way and move on.

Filed under: Fandom and Online Life, Personal Musings by Dawn
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Maeglin the iPod died on my way to work today, so I was left alone with my thoughts for the whole of the hour-plus-long drive home. Amid the maelstrom of my thoughts on mythology and women and Tolkien and feminist revision (related to an end-of-term research paper due this weekend), I got to thinking about Mary Sue. And a couple of ideas occurred to me that I wanted to get out of my head before I forgot and, also, to see what others thought of them.

Point the First. To what degree are Lúthien/Beren and Arwen/Aragorn a male version of the Mary Sue fantasy? I’m not talking about character traits–the idea of both characters but especially Lúthien as a “canonical Mary Sue” is nothing new–but rather the influence the male characters have on these ethereal female protagonists as compared to the influence that female characters in fan-authored Mary-Sue stories have on the male canon characters.

I’ve often seen Mary Sue defined in this way: not as having purple eyes or a six-syllable “Elvish” name or possessing a unicorn but as the force she exerts on the personalities and motivations of the canon males. For example, Leilamelaniewë joins the Fellowship and, suddenly, Legolas is lovesick and emasculated; Aragorn is driven into a homicidal, envy-induced rage; and Boromir forgets the Ring and Gondor to pen love sonnets while his sword grows rust.

By the same token, are not Aragorn and Beren similar to Mary Sue as fantasies of male influence upon women? Think about it: part of the outrage against Mary Sue is the exaggerated influence she has on men who should be well above such frivolities; they are warriors and princes with kingdoms to defend, not carefree playboys with nothing to lose if they dash off to marry Leilamelaniewë while Sauron achieves world domination. Likewise, both Arwen and Lúthien should be above the influence of their respective mortal suitors. They, too, have a lot to lose. Both Beren and Aragorn are presented as somewhat bedraggled and beneath the ethereal and impossibly beautiful women they woo. Not only do Arwen and Lúthien “fall” for Aragorn and Beren, but they go so far as to forsake their immortality. Just like Legolas forsaking his father’s kingdom or Aragorn his crown, these women relinquish a birthright, a defining point of their identity for love of a man.

It’s no secret that JRRT liked to imagine himself as Beren and Edith as Lúthien. What a fantasy! To believe that you are loved enough by a woman that she would give up everything in the name of that love! … her family, her heritage, even her claim to life everlasting.

Yes, it sounds to me more like something out of the pen of a moon-eyed teenager than a curmudgeonly linguistics professor!

To make matters even more interesting is the opposite scenario of an Elven man smitten with a mortal woman. As part of Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth, Andreth recounts her failed love affair with Finrod’s brother Aegnor, and Finrod says that he rejected her because,

This is time of war, Andreth, and in such days the Elves do not wed or bear child; but prepare for death – or for flight. Aegnor has no trust (nor have I) in this siege of Angband that it will last long; and then what will become of this land? If his heart ruled, he would have wished to take thee and flee far away, east or south, forsaking his kin, and thine. Love and loyalty hold him to his.

Which makes me ask, what of the kin of Lúthien and Arwen? These are very different standards, and the choice of Aegnor seems relatively easy compared to the choices and fates of Lúthien and Arwen, both of whom suffered immensely to outlive their beloveds. That an immortal prince would fall for a woman “beneath” him is very much a typical fairy-tale fantasy a la Cinderella. But Tolkien didn’t write it that way … for Andreth.

So, is this a male fantasy, to have beautiful and powerful women forsake it all for love of a man? Is it similar to the Mary Sue fantasy in this regard?

Point the Second. Is Mary Sue herself something of a feminist figure? I know that some will immediately leap up to point out that there is much about Mary Sue that defies feminism, but, again, I’m not looking at individual traits or behaviors but rather the force she has over the male characters and, in a sense, how her embellishment places her as an equal to them.

It seems to me that, if young women wanted to insert themselves as love interests into a story, imprisoning themselves in Barad-dûr to await rescue by their chosen hero would be one way to go about it. That they’re taking the journey with the male heroes, granting themselves powers that put themselves as equals or betters to already souped-up canon characters, suggests something different.

So, am I completely crazy in all this?

Filed under: The Crackpot, Tolkien by Dawn
20 Comments »

Every now and then, I encounter something written (usually online) that is so blatantly idiotic and offensive that, upon brief consideration of it as a topic for The Heretic Loremaster, I shrug my shoulders and move on because, given the people who read here, it would be preaching to the choir and not likely to generate much discussion beyond high-fiving as we nod emphatically in agreement with each other. But, this time, I can’t resist. For one, this guy is so blatantly idiotic and offensive that I can’t let him squeak by without giving an answer. For another, it’s been a busy week at school, I’m too tired to take on someone worth the argument, and I feel like cutting my teeth a little, so here goes.

Josh Tyler has written a post called We Don’t Need More Female Superheroes. (Thanks to Sinneahtes for first spotting it and to Juno Magic for the heads up!) This post was in response to a post by Thera Pitts that deconstructed the female characters in recent superhero movies, coming to the conclusion that women tend to be “characterized” toward the negative extreme of whatever role they occupy. “Did you ever stop to think that it isn’t just the actresses who sully your favorite movies but the comic book movie industry’s lazy attitude towards women characters in general?” asks Pitts. “The actress is only as good as her material, and the material is seriously lacking.” She notes that women overwhelmingly tend to be characterized as helpless victims in need of rescue, “moody emo-bitch[es],” or as the fateful She Who Ruins All by tempting, betraying, or distracting the hero unto his ultimate doom.

This is an insightful observation, and it echoes a broader trend across centuries of legend and literature. No matter what a female character’s role, she is shoved to the most negative extremes of that role. If she is strong and autonomous, then she becomes a bitch, a ball-breaker, a man-hater. If she is kind and compassionate, then she becomes weak; she is overwhelmingly the victim incapable of helping herself; she is the one who trips on a flat stretch of land and can’t do more than squeal and kick futilely as she is raped/murdered/abducted by her stronger male attacker. And then there’s the Eve effect: Women who, through their failings, bring about the destruction of the male hero, the kingdom, the world. From the rise of pre-Christian patriarchy, these one-dimensional negative archetypes have been women’s lot in literary life (for tempting Adam to the apple, of course). These archetypes are old enough to put the Old Testament on the New Releases shelf, and even as literary styles changed drastically over the centuries, this one thing did not. Women, when not being marginalized or ignored entirely, were maligned in literature, a trend that has extended to film as well.

Of course, when women done went and got uppity and started to complain about their shallow, scathing treatment in literature, men got all pie-eyed and innocent-like because it was only fair! It was only reality! It’s just the way that women were/are! They (the wise male authors) were being true to their subjects! And, anyway, what woman wants to read that ol’ fusty Tennyson when Danielle Steele has a new novel on the bestsellers list?

This is where Tyler’s post comes in. Rather than tackle Pitts’ argument (which is one of characterization and fair treatment in fiction to, oh, more than half of the human race), he attempts to nullify it altogether by … well, I don’t think I can paraphrase it well enough to capture the full wow-factor of Tyler’s words, so I’ll let him dig his own grave:

Men and women simply have different interests. Men are interested in action movies with heroes blowing things up and saving the girl. Men are interested in imagining themselves as ass-kicking heroes. Women are interested in movies about relationships and romance and love. Women are interested in imagining themselves finding the right guy and dancing till dawn. Little boys play with guns, little girls play with dolls. Neither version of play is superior to the other, it’s just different. Nobody is out there trying to force men to get interested in movies about romantic weekends in Paris, so why are we so dead set on forcing women to get interested in movies about beating people up? There’s something unintentionally sexist about it, it’s as if we’re saying women’s interests are somehow inherently inferior, and to be validated they must instead find ways to be more like men.

In the comments on this post, there is much hand-raising from women who did not spend their childhoods wiping the plastic asses of doll-babies but rather careened around the backyard on fantastic quests, using exhausted wrapping-paper rolls for swords and wearing bathrobes for ceremonial robes and converting a quarter-acre swatch of trees into a dark, deep, ominous forest as full of potential for danger and adventure as it was for conquest and reward. Okay … that was my sister and me. But I don’t think I need to go thrusting my hand into the air for playing Hero more than House, and I don’t think I need to poll the women reading here to know that far more of you got together with girlfriends, sisters, and cousins to go battling the hordes of dark minions in your backyard than to play princess tea party in order to prove or validate women’s interest in subjects beyond boy-meets-girl love stories culminating in domestic bliss.

Nor do I need to ask how many women here got far more excited this summer over the release of Prince Caspian or The Dark Knight than Sex in the City or Mamma Mia!.

Of course, this does not make stereotypically “women’s movies” or “women’s interests” inferior. In that sense, I agree with Tyler. But … I think his self-righteous defense of the fairer sex is a straw man bigger than the one in which Nicholas Cage was torched by a bunch of misbehavin’ womenfolk back in 2006. Hollywood doesn’t have a problem making the sorts of movies that Tyler believes serves the “female interest.” In any given week, there is a romantic comedy or somesuch in theatres that is aimed at women. Nor do women have problems going to these movies, if that’s their thing. Witness Bride Wars‘ quick ascendency to the #2 spot in U.S. box-office sales this weekend. Witness the fact that men being “dragged” to “chick flicks” by their excited wives and girlfriends is perennial fodder on primetime sitcoms. Tyler makes it out like Sex in the City was a come-from-behind indy flick and Hollywood reject, or as though there are lines of people pegging tomatoes at women as they walk into Nights in Rodanthe. Not hardly. In our family, the lists of new movie releases are, weekly, the source of first excitement, then scrutiny, then inevitable disappointment because neither my husband nor I are interested in this sort of movie, and they often seem to crowd out the independent and limited-release films that rarely make it as far as our rural corner of the world. Trust me, there is never a dearth of chick flicks, which means that there is no dearth of women lining up to see them. If it doesn’t sell, Hollywood doesn’t keep making it. (Which–as in the constant peltering of Friedberg & Seltzer spoof flicks–can often act as a sorry commentary on the state of our species.)

Nice try, Tyler. Pardon me if I’m writing this blog post instead of getting signs painted to march on the Mall this weekend in recognition of women’s unalienable right to see chick flicks or in defense of the women “forced” to see “movies about beating people up,” an issue that surely deserves its place right alongside my outrage at sex slavery. This feminist finds it far more frightening that, in the year 2009, anyone seriously makes the argument that one’s interests even tend to divide neatly along the same lines as the possession or lack of a Y-chromosome.

This kind of thinking–not arguing for more female superheroes in movies–is what is sexist and offensive.

It has nothing to do with validating women’s interests by how closely they fall to the interests of men. It has everything to do with perpetuating stereotypes that have, for centuries, been used to dismiss and subjugate women as inferiors to men. In the comments to Tyler’s post, a few people expressed outrage at his generalization about how girls play with dolls. He retorted by asking, where was the outrage for the little boys pigeonholed into violent gun play? And I’ll be the first to speak out against stereotypes, whether against males or females. But the stereotyping of women is more dangerous. It is more offensive. Why? Because the stereotyping of men and the interests of men is not used to excuse the subjection of men to women’s benefit.

(In fact, I must speak out against offensiveness in this post that goes beyond that which affects me as a woman:

Of course some women actually are interested in superheroes, just as there are guys out there who are really into touchy-feely musicals. Most of them are British, but even here in America you’ll occasionally run into a guy with a twisted love of Mamma Mia!.

As an American, I despise when my culture and language is thought automatically inferior because of stereotypes like the ones that Tyler is embracing here. For the love of all things heretical, stop with the chest-thumping, my-balls-swing-harder-than-yours nasty rhetoric implying that British/European men are less “manly” than we red-blooded, steak-eatin’, pickup-truck-drivin’ ‘Mericans because we like seeing things blow up more. It is “twisted” to enjoy a musical more than an action movie if you are a man. Veiled homophobia much?)

Inherent in Tyler’s argument is the assumption that women are predetermined to be softer, gentler, and more nurturing. They are incapable of strength, assertiveness, or competitiveness. This has been used to keep women illiterate, ignorant, without the vote, without rights, under the thumbs of their fathers, under the thumbs of their husbands, stuck in the home, barefoot and pregnant, married against their wills, out of schools, out of jobs … need I go on? Do you see, Mr. Tyler, why your opinions on female superheroes are so offensive? Why recognize the spectacular range of human interests–i.e., not confined to or deemed acceptable for one gender or another–when we can pigeonhole people tidily into interests based on what is most acceptable to the dominant patriarchal culture?

Ironically, Tyler’s argument ties back into the root cause of the phenomenon that Pitts’ observed in her post. Women have been maligned and misunderstood in literature–which now extends to that which is written for the screen–for a very, very long time now using arguments just like those that Tyler uses to dismiss a woman’s demand for better-written female characters. Women deserve no better than to be sluts, bitches, poisoners, traitors, witches, victims, and agents of downfall and destruction because we all know–as Tyler points out to us–that this is simply the way that women are. It is against our own best interests when we dare to argue otherwise. Thank you, Mr. Tyler, for the enlightenment.

Filed under: Literature, Rants in My Pants by Dawn
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I don’t like it.

It’s inaccurate. It should be just “fiction.” The addition of the word fan is not a comment on the writing but a comment on the writer that is being used to project judgment on the writing and set it inherently lower than “non-fan fiction.” This is an unfair, spurious judgment, and we should be less complacent in accepting it.

To begin explaining why, I think we need to start at literature’s roots, before it was literature or even writing. I do believe that our use of language and, most importantly, use of language to tell stories–whether of a successful hunt earlier that day, an ancestor’s triumphs in battle, or a completely made-up account of a colony on Mars–is one of the most important traits that defines us as human apart from our brethren in the Animal Kingdom. Prehistoric evidence shows that, as far as you want to go back, if there were people, then they were telling stories.

All over the world, for example, we see a rich tradition of oral storytelling among preliterate peoples. Because these societies did not yet have writing, then all of their stories were a form of what we now call fan fiction: If I am a storyteller, and I hear something that I like, then I retell that later. Only, because it was not written down, then I am less concerned with fidelity to the original and invent where I might have forgotten exactly how it goes or reinvent when I think that I like a different idea better. Or I reframe an old story so that it is more relevant to the present day: think of all the Christian elements in Beowulf, a poem about a pre-Christian Pagan civilization.

Nor am I the first to make this argument; Natasha Walter gave fandom its favorite quote to validate its existence when she said that “when it comes to fan fiction, the internet is giving us back something like an oral society, in which people can retell the stories that are most important to them and, in so doing, change them.” The SWG uses that quote on its LiveJournal community, and I see it resurface occasionally in an email sig line of some fan defending her dirty habit against the scorn of the literati. Fans are, I have found, really proud to “return to their roots,” so to speak, in engaging in collective and revisionist storytelling as old as the species. But there is actually a return to nothing. Writing based on the words of those to come before us never stopped. We are upholding a tradition of storytelling as old as the species, defending it against commercial interests.

It is hard to find a medieval fictional writing that does not have a source. Religious and Biblical stories, myths and legends, historical accounts, and the work of other writers formed the basis of much of medieval literature. If you look at Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, for example, it is a poem made up of two plots, each coming from a different Celtic legend. Even in combining them, scholars can’t agree as to whether this was done first by a French author, and the anonymous Gawain poet was just copying what he’d read elsewhere, or if he’d originated the concept of putting two familiar stories together into one. Or, to put it into “fan fiction” terms: did the the Gawain poet invent the crossover?

That medieval literature largely derived from existing sources makes sense since much of medieval literature began as oral storytelling: Building upon, expanding on, and reinventing favorite stories was how literature was done. Nor was there copyright to complicate things. A story was “owned” by anyone who heard or read it.

But derivative and transformative fiction–fan fiction–did not end in the Middle Ages. The American author Washington Irving is credited with writing the first short story: “Rip Van Winkle.” “Rip Van Winkle,” however, was not Washington Irving’s story. It was a rewriting of the German story “Peter Klaus the Goatherd” by J.C.C. Nachtigal, which Nachtigal had transcribed from a folk tale. Irving liked it, so he retooled it a bit and wrote it in English. Yes, a fan fiction writer invented one of the most prolific genres in literature today: the short story!

Of course, conditions for writers were not ideal in the 19^th century. There was no such thing as international copyright, so an author could publish a story in the United States and discover it reprinted and selling like proverbial hotcakes in England (or vice versa), without ever having given his permission–much less earning payment–for the sale. This is clearly not ideal if we want to encourage a system where writers can make a living on their work (which, of course, allows them to produce more of the work that we love). So maybe one could argue that making copyright stricter in order to protect writers is what made certain kinds of fiction into fan fiction, a genre inferior to its brethren where the connection between it and the sources that inspired it are less apparent.

But fan fiction is not only being written but being published even today.

Neil Gaiman is regarded as one of the most imaginative authors in speculative fiction today. In his last short story collection, Fragile Things, he included a story, “The Problem of Susan,” that dealt with questions raised by C.S. Lewis’s Narnia stories. “The Problem of Susan” supposes a basic familiarity with Lewis’s writings (even though, like most good fan fiction, it can be read and enjoyed without it) and even uses Lewis’s characters. Gaiman could never understand why Susan, of all the Pevensie children, had to remain behind and never return to Narnia:

I read the Narnia books to myself hundreds of times as a boy, and then aloud as an adult, twice, to my children. There is so much in the books that I love, but each time I found the disposal of Susan to be intensely problematic and deeply irritating. I suppose I wanted to write a story that would be equally problematic, and just as much of an irritant, if from a different direction ….
Fragile Things, Introduction.

He writes about Susan’s life, long after Narnia, to address the questions the book raised for him.

This should sound familiar to fan fiction authors. The curtains close on a part of a literary history, only questions, even dissatisfaction, still linger in our minds. So what do we do? We write as though that curtain never dropped and consider the continuation of the story that the author never embarked upon. We use that author’s ideas to make sense of the story’s outcome, or not. My story Rekindling does this: Tolkien never described the ending and remaking of the world into Arda Unmarred. Using some of his early ideas, I consider one possibility. Keiliss’s beautiful and haunting Star’s End is another such story that looks at Arwen’s death and Maglor’s fate. MithLuin’s intriguing novella Lessons from the Mountain takes Maedhros’s story beyond where Tolkien left us at his death and tells of his rehabilitation in the halls of Mandos. Stories that consider Elladan and Elrohir’s choice between mortality and immortality fit as well, as do Legolas and Gimli’s Fourth Age adventures. Maglor in history and Frodo sailing to Tol Eressëa are common enough that they are practically their own genres.

So what is the difference between what these authors are doing and what Gaiman has done? Many of the authors of Tolkien stories like those described above treat the texts on which they are based just as thoughtfully–even more so–than Gaiman’s treatment of Lewis’s works “The Problem of Susan.”

Responding to a story by answering it with stories of our own is a human trait. We have been doing this since we have been. In every literary epoch, even as it dwindles as copyright tightens and “originality” becomes increasingly valued, we see writers engaging stories in this way. It is neither new nor primitive: It is simply human.

This is the first reason why I detest the term “fan fiction.” Until recently, fan fiction has simply been fiction. Creatively engaging another author’s story was no different than creatively engaging a philosophical idea, a scientific concept, or a historical event. That Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle” was a rewrite of an existing German story didn’t make it subpar; it was simply a fact about its creation that didn’t impede enjoyment of the story any more than knowing that Ayn Rand wrote Atlas Shrugged about a free-market economy or that Michael Crichton wrote Jurassic Park about dinosaurs and DNA impeded enjoyment of those: These authors are all engaging aspects of their world and doing so creatively. Why is literature–ironically, of all subjects!–roped off from such inquiry?

I believe that the term “fan fiction” has nothing to do with the fiction and everything to do with the fan. In other words, it is not derogatory because of the kinds of stories it produces; I hope that I have adequately shown that these sorts of stories were and continue to be natural displays of human creativity. It is derogatory because of who the writer is perceived to be, and that is why we should be insulted by it.

What is a fan? It derives from the term fanatic: someone who is passionate to the point of irrationality about something. Think packs of men breaking off the necks of bottles to glass the opposing team’s fans after a sporting match. Think animal liberationists who throw fake blood on families visiting the zoo. Think religious zealots who leave tracts as tips as restaurants because they honestly believe that the words and hazy illustrations will benefit their underpaid server more than money to feed her family. These are not people who deal thoughtfully and rationally with anything where their subject of interest is concerned.

Fan derives from that. It has, of course, earned a milder meaning over time. I can say that I am a fan of the actor Ioan Gruffudd without worrying that I might be misconstrued as a stalker who is–as I type this essay on fan fiction–sitting outside of his house, waiting for him to emerge so that I can kidnap him a la Stephen King’s novel Misery. Or I can be a fan of country music, Japanese motorcycles, wine bars, or Marvel comics.

Our fannish interests as humans are unlimited, but they are invariably regarded as frivolous. Once I get into a certain realm of “serious” subjects, I am not longer a fan but maybe a student or a scholar. I don’t say, for example, that I am a fan of medieval literature. In that I enjoy it, in that I spend a lot of time and thought on it, it is much like the fannish interests I just listed. But to say, “I am a real fan of Piers Plowman!” sounds almost as ridiculous as saying, “I spend my weekends reading, fishing, and performing neurosurgery!” I think it is generally assumed that certain subjects eclipse fannishness and become matters of serious study.

So why am I a student of medieval literature but a fan of Tolkien’s stories? Actually, Tolkien’s works are a perfectly valid subject of study, and there are people who consider themselves not fans but students of his work. Why am I any different? Because, of course, one of my primary ways of dealing with the texts to this point has been through exploring them creatively: in pondering what Pengolodh’s authorship of The Silmarillion means for that text, I wrote a story about it; in trying to explain the story of Lúthien in mythological and historiographical terms, I wrote a story about that too. Who can take that seriously?

I remember that I once got a comment on a story on FanFiction.net from a reviewer who identified herself or himself as a “Tolkien scholar.” I remember nothing else about the comment except for that (and the fact that s/he misspelled the word gonorrhea). I remember, at the time, finding the comment hugely funny. What sort of “scholar” would come up with such wonky views about Tolkien and what sort of scholar would misspell gonorrhea? And, most importantly, what sort of scholar would waste her or his time debating with a fan-fiction writer? The idea of “scholar” and “FanFiction.net” could not be reconciled in my mind; it was contradictory, along the lines of “fighting for peace” or bombing clinics for “pro-life” causes.

When I think of myself as a fan-fiction writer, I can’t possibly take myself seriously. I see a parody of myself: a squealing little girl leaping up and down and clapping her hands until she faints for a lack of oxygen. That high-pitched squeal is all that I have to contribute to the discussion of his works; I am a fan and lack rationality and the perspective that comes with it. But I know that the study I’ve made of Tolkien’s works has been serious. There has been very little leaping up and down and no fainting. My study and writing about Tolkien has been largely grounded in rationality, in a desire to better understand something that I enjoy. Coupled with the human drive to express myself as a storyteller, my ideas take shape as fan fiction.

So what makes me a fan-fiction writer and Neil Gaiman simply a writer? Well, of course, he had proven himself as a writer long before writing “The Problem of Susan”: He had work published, he won awards, he sold lots of books. He’s earned his credibility in expressing ideas creatively, even ideas about works of literature that would ordinarily be corralled as “fan fiction.” With the few publications to my name all in journals or anthologies no one has ever heard of, I don’t carry that credibility. When I interact creatively with a text, it becomes a frivolity, even a perversion. It becomes something to be ashamed of and treated as subpar to so-called “original fiction” or to the derivative/transformative/(fan) fiction of proven writers like Neil Gaiman.

Even look at how we talk about ourselves. Of course, there is fan fiction and fandom and fannish, all words derived from that word fanatic, with all the implications of hysteria and irrationality intact. Then we are “playing in So-and-So’s sandbox.” We are not engaging the texts as fellow readers, writers, and critics. We are children, making silly artifacts that are easily stomped into nothingness. We are “fangirls” and “fanboys” (except for Juno Magic’s reimagined “fancrones,” which I love): again, children. Again, tiny, insignificant voices piping well below the range of adult hearing, sequestered away at a kids’ table where we need not bother the grown-ups with our nattering. We talk about ourselves as frivolous and in need of growing up but, no, I don’t believe that this is always true. I don’t believe that we have nothing to offer, either in analyzing the stories we write about or as writers of fiction independent of those stories.

I see the so-called “real” world of writing fiction as one where there is a lot of scrambling going on to assert the value of one’s work by devaluing the work of others, often without ever having read it. Genre fiction gets trod upon by the literary genre, and sub-genres get stomped by their mainstream counterparts. (Has anyone else ever heard the sneer in the voice of journals that, for example, accept fantasy and horror but “nothing with vampires or werewolves”?) I see the label of “fan fiction” as another way of devaluing a genre of writing. Except that “fan fiction” is perhaps the oldest genre of writing around; I think it deserves better than this.

And I think that we deserve better than this. The Internet is transforming how we write. No longer do we have to be “good enough” (read: unoffensive enough, mainstream enough, know enough of the right people) to be read. More people have probably read my novel Another Man’s Cage than have read all of my published writings combined. It must be scary, for an industry accustomed to acting as arbiters of quality and taste, to consider us. In reading arguments against fan fiction, it is inevitably mentioned that fan fiction has the potential to take a paying audience from a writer. We are cast as thieves. Implied in that fear is that fan fiction about a story may be better than the original. That as a series creaks on indefinitely, fans dissatisfied with the plummetting quality might get their “fix” of characters and a world that they enjoy through fan fiction, not through purchasing the original author’s books. Whenever I see literary snobbery in action, I hear a note of fear underlying it: that someone who we thought took writing less seriously than we did somehow managed, despite that, to produce a better story. What’s left after that but to discredit the story’s very existence, to claim it as inherently inferior?

“Fan fiction” is not inferior. It is a continuing form of storytelling that is older than writing itself; it is the way that humans always have and always will engage the stories that interest and inspire them. It is a way that authors celebrate not only their love for those stories but analyze, discuss, and otherwise make sense of those stories. What we do is not inferior or even immoral; this–not the idea of derivative or transformative storytelling–is the novel attitude, and it serves the commercial interest of those who would compartmentalize stories as saleable entities. We should be less complacent in accepting this, beginning by not willfully labeling our work as inferior.

Filed under: Fandom and Online Life, Literature by Dawn
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