(ETA: I want to clarify that remixes without permission of the original author are what is being banned.)

Now, I want to be perfectly clear that I am not criticizing the group owner’s decision about what is and is not allowed on a particular group or archive. I remain strong in my belief that this right belongs to group owners; anyone who doesn’t like it can vote with their feet and move on to another group or archive or start their own. There are groups to which I do not belong because I have strong objections to their fundamental principles and rules. I am not objecting to this particular rule. If I was, I would simply leave the group and skip writing a post about it.

What I find curious is the outrage that people feel toward “remixed” fanworks and what this says about our ideas about the ownership of artistic works. This is not the first time that I’ve encountered this idea, although it’s the first time that I’ve seen it incorporated into a group’s rules. Not too long ago, while doing maintenance on one of the sites I manage, I found a user profile that took similar umbrage to people using her original characters without her permission. (Whether this is because someone actually had used her characters or was a preemptive warning I don’t know.) And, in discussing the legal and ethical basis of derivative and transformative works, I have seen authors make similar avowals, that though they write stories based on another author’s work, they would not want stories written based on their own work.

Of course, no one who makes these claims is disingenuous enough to avoid the question of hypocrisy. Generally, this is resolved by pointing out that 1) Tolkien indicated in his letters that he wanted his work carried on by other artists and 2) the Tolkien Estate has made no move to shut down derivative and transformative work based on his books. To the first, yes, this is true:

I would draw some of the great tales in fullness, and leave many only placed in the scheme, and sketched. The cycles should be linked to a majestic whole, and yet leave scope for other minds and hands, wielding paint and music and drama.
~Letter 131 to Milton Waldman

More on that in a moment. To the second point, I hesitate to interpret the Tolkien Estate’s relative silence on fanworks as tacit approval. Since derivative and transformative works currently occupy a vast legal gray area and since lawyerly types provide good rationale why a challenge to the legality of fanworks quite possibly would expand protections of those works, then it seems just as likely to me that rights holders that currently wield some power to control works created at the fringes of that gray area don’t want more distinct legal definitions to make legal what they’d rather repress.

Personally, I’ve always been entirely laissez-faire with respect to my Tolkien-based works and published original works. I am stricter with respect to my unpublished original works simply because allowing aspects of those works to be made public would “use up” my first rights, which would eliminate most markets–and almost all of the good markets–where that work could be published. To the best of my knowledge, no one has ever written anything based on my original work. However, plenty of other Tolkien writers have used aspects of my stories–from details, like names and timelines, to wholly lifting the universe as a setting for their own stories–in creating their own work. Do I care? Nope. I’ve never discovered my work being used without my knowledge. Would I care if I did? Nope. When people email me and ask if they can use details or the whole universe, I always grant permission and tell them that they don’t need to ask me again in the future. Credit is nice because that is the expectation whenever using someone else’s creation, but I don’t expect people to ask for permission to name Maglor’s wife Vingarië or to have Caranthir skilled in osanwë-kenta. Nor do I care if they decided that I did everything all wrong and decide to provide their own take on the questions my stories address. In fact, Another Man’s Cage was borne out of a desire to show the Fëanorians’ side of the story, which at the time wasn’t being widely addressed on the sites where I read. I have always felt that this community’s ability to use art and fiction as a means of expressing opinion and engendering debate is one of its virtues. I would much rather every hateful reviewer on fanfiction.net devote her energy to crafting the stories she’d like to read, to contributing her own perspectives to the ongoing discussion of canon. In fact, I’ve suggested to more than one of them that they do just that.

Given all of that, I find the opposition to using existing fanworks to develop one’s own stories a curious but ultimately illustrative perspective about our perception of the “ownership” of creative work. I’m sure that some of the people who declare their fanworks off-limits have also criticized authors like Robin Hobb and, more recently, Diana Gabaldon who voiced very vocal objections to people writing stories using their characters and universes. Both authors have been mocked by members of fandom for having unhealthy attachments to characters and scorned for their desire to control the way readers think about their stories. How do you reconcile criticism of published authors holding those views with acceptance of fan authors who experience similar horror, disgust, and disapproval at the notion of having their stories “used” by someone else?

I think it shows how close many of us share Hobb and Gabaldon’s views, whether we like it or not. It’s easy to tell a creator to get over the use of her work in ways she doesn’t expect or approve of. It’s a bit harder when it’s your precious character or your well-reasoned perspective that is being “trashed” by someone else. I say this with full admission that my own laissez-faire attitude doesn’t come easily. I can’t say that I would be happy to discover a canatic’s version of AMC up on the web. Or my original stories reduced to porn. I would feel that my work and its purpose were being misunderstood. But, ultimately, I would accept the author’s right to “misunderstand” my work however much she wanted because I believe deeply in the importance of this right.

It is the right that underlies all derivative and transformative work. It is the acknowledgment that creative people will usually respond creatively when faced with strong emotions, be that love or loathing, and that to place some works off-limits to creative transformation is repressive of creativity. It is recognition of the fact that, as humans, our first response to art has always been to redo it or retell it, to personalize it to our own beliefs or experiences, to make it our own.

Judging by the letter above to Milton Waldman, Tolkien knew that. He knew that great myths and stories didn’t arise from a single source but became part of the cultures to which they belonged, which required giving access to those stories to all members of that culture. If we choose to believe that our stories, poems, and art based on his books are carrying on his legacy rather than robbing him of it, then I think we need to think as well about how we respond when others take the same freedom with our own work.

ETA (16 June 2010): Nora Charles has this post on Dreamwidth about remixes, including links to a remix challenge posed by the original creators that went horribly wrong when a story was posted that was unexpectedly critical of the original universe. It’s an interesting look at some of the issues that arise from writing in a shared universe, as we all more or less do.

It is becoming a perennial thing here on the Heretic Loremaster to declare that fan fiction is fiction. As in the fact that fan fiction is the same as regular fiction (if there is such a thing), only it goes under a different and derogatory name. And as in the fact that treating “fan fiction” and “fiction” as separate is itself a fiction.

I must confess a growing weariness of pointing out to people smart enough to know better (like Ms. Gabaldon) that fan fiction is fiction. Until relatively recently, what would today be termed “fan fiction” was the norm, not the exception. In the Middle Ages, for example, it was more common than not to lift ideas, characters, and whole stories from existing, often contemporaneous, works. This doesn’t even begin to touch on how many stories are derived from myths. In fact, if you think back to the root of creating fiction, there is a knot of people gathered around a fire as one tells a story … or I should say, retells a story. The art was as much–if not more–in selecting, recasting, and expanding upon existing details as it was in adding original changes. I believe that it is a human drive to respond creatively to what moves us the most.

So what happened? When did “storytelling” become “fan fiction”? Ms. Gabaldon’s posts get to the heart of this: when we began to commodify creativity, when we began to draw boundaries (in the interest of making money) around my ideas, my characters, my stories. Interestingly, Ms. Gabaldon–like notorious “fanfic” detractor Robin Hobb Lee Goldberg*–used to make her living writing other people’s characters. Watching her justify that in the face of her ignorant stereotypes of fan writers as oversexed, lazy, bad writers too stupid to create their own fiction is unsightly. You see, like Robin Hobb Lee Goldberg, she wrote her own version of fan fiction for those who “owned” those characters already. There was money to be made for someone, so that made it okay.

* I originally–and mistakenly–identified Robin Hobb as the author who had tried some rhetorical gymnastics in justifying a career spent writing other people’s characters (Monk and Diagnosis Murder) alongside an utter despise of “fanfic.” A blog post discussing this can be found here. Lee Goldberg and Cathy Young have a very interesting (and more than a little wankish!) back-an-forth across multiple posts. Anyway. I misidentified Robin Hobb and apologize to her and to my readers here for being lazy and relying on my memory rather than digging up links to back myself up. Robin Hobb’s original rant against fanfic, via the Wayback Machine (having gone the way of Ms. Gabaldon’s anti-fanfic posts) can be found here. Thanks to Mervi for asking the questions that turned up my mistake!

Now, I will pause to say that I do not oppose in any way a creator’s right to make money on her or his creation. In fact, contrary to many citizens of the Internet and many members of my own generation, I believe strongly that if you like an artist’s work enough to want her or him to create more of it, then you owe that person a fair payment for that work.

But this is a different issue. No one is arguing Ms. Gabaldon’s right to make money on her books, and no one is trying to cash in on her creations; people are responding as people have responded to creative work since the first group of people crouched around a fire to swap hunting tales. That intelligent, creative people fail to understand the need to respond creatively to the stories of others is astounding. That intelligent, creative people make the sorts of slanders against those who respond in such a way–as Ms. Gabaldon makes against “fanficcers”–is disgusting.

In her essay What Fanfic Is (and Isn’t) to Me, Dreamflower points out the difference in how most people respond to creative work and how artists (which includes writers) respond:

You can pick up a book or turn on the TV, and you can sit there and consume what you have been given, and then close the book or turn off the TV and forget about it. Or you can interact with the book or the show, by imagining new scenarios or new ways of looking at what you’ve been presented with.

Most people consume the creativity of others. They buy books and pay for music downloads and sit through television programs that are 25% advertisements and maybe talk at the water cooler the next day about what they’ve read/heard/seen but, otherwise, never move much beyond consumption. Ms. Gabaldon herself points out that creative people find inspiration anywhere. For pity’s sake, I find stories in the swirls of fake marble on my bathroom wall. I can’t help but to lift an eyebrow at the notion that, in Ms. Gabaldon’s perfect world, we would legally and morally be able to respond only as consumers to the creative work of others.

Responding creatively is in us. And, culturally, I believe that we remain a species whose very nature assures that creation will, in part, be a collective act. Until fairly recently, that was just creating; we didn’t need any special or derogatory names for retelling another person’s story. When creators and the companies that profited from them realized that they could inscribe tight boundaries and claim “ownership” of stories that, in fact, are the product of the thousands of collectively derived myths, stories, and archetypes that define our culture did we end up with the sneering term “fan fiction,” the heart of which is fanatic, implying instability, obsession, hysteria (the latter particularly interesting given that “fanfic” writers are predominantly female). In reality it is, and will always be, just fiction.