I have a whole page devoted to my expectations for this site and other writers who join me. In a nutshell, the HL looks at literature and book-based fandom. You do not have to like or write about Tolkien to write for this site. In fact, I would love some posts on Harry Potter other book-based fandoms about which I know little. You do not have to agree with me on everything (or anything!), although this site looks at literature and fandom from the perspective of people typically oppressed or sidelined in mainstream literature and discourse. All posts do not have to address that angle, of course; just looking back at my posts will show that I ramble about all manner of things. Two posts per month are adequate, though more are welcome, of course. My posts are generally long, but this isn’t a requirement. 500 words would be a good minimum to aim for in most cases.

Email me at DawnFelagund@gmail.com or leave a comment on this post if you’re interested and we’ll take it from there!

(Also, guest posts are welcome, so if you’ve written an essay or meta and think it might find an audience here, please contact me and we’ll see about getting it posted as a guest post!)

Now for my real reason for being here. The other day, I was reading another Metafandom post on remixing, since that has been a recent subject of discussion here. The post itself pretty much agreed with my thoughts on “unauthorized” remixing (and, by that, I mean using the universe or characters created by another fan-writer without permission, not lifting whole sections of story and changing the bits you don’t like). What caught my intention was a rather offhand remark made by Angiepen: “Except for Harry Potter, the vast majority of fictional-person fandoms are based on TV or movies.”

Initially, this provoked a “Bwhuuh?” sort of reaction because I don’t think that over 45,000 Tolkien-based stories archive on ff.net exactly makes it a fandom to sneeze at. However, once my initial surprise at being so casually overlooked wore off, I realized that, yes, actually, Angiepen was completely justified in not mentioning us. Tolkien-based fandom is somewhat isolated from fandom in general. It’s not that we’re invisible. It’s more that, in the big noisy banquet hall that is Fandom, we’re off in the corner playing by ourselves.

I’ve always wondered a bit at this. I’ve even talked about it before, in comments here at the HL and on LiveJournal, with some of you. Tolkien fandom seems to differ in a lot of ways from fandom in general, the majority of which is media-based. Here are a few differences that I’ve observed. I’d be interested to know of any others that people can think of.

• Reliance on fandom-specific archives versus LiveJournal (and clones, most notably, lately, Dreamwidth) and general fandom archives like ff.net and an Archive of Our Own. The whole LJ strikethrough incident that happened a few years ago sent far deeper tremors through fandom in general than it did Tolkien fandom. In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me if most Tolkien fan writers either didn’t know about strikethrough when it happened or didn’t really care, as it didn’t affect independent archives where most work is kept.
• More authors and artists are single-fandom. Reading on Metafandom, it seems to me that in most fandoms, people either create work for multiple fandoms or move on fairly frequently as their tastes change. In contrast, many people I know who create fanworks based on Tolkien’s books have never participated in another fandom and/or have no interest in participating in other fandoms. (Both would be true of me, for example.) Those who do seem to choose fandoms similar in nature to Tolkien–Harry Potter and Chronicles of Narnia, for example.
• Motives for writing vary. A reason I hear Tolkien writers give a lot of times for why they write and read fiction based in his world is a love of the world and a desire to stay there a bit longer. I’ve never seen this reason given for why people write in other fandoms. I’m sure it exists, but it doesn’t seem to be such an overwhelming reason as it is in Tolkien fandom. Instead, other fandoms seem to focus more on issues like social justice that are touched on by only a small contingent of writers in Tolkien fandom. Sexual expression also seems a much stronger motive in general fandom than in Tolkien fandom. While there are certainly Tolkien authors who write primarily for reason of sexual gratification (and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that, for the record), the vast majority do not. Again, too, fandom in general seems much more open to exploring contemporary issues relating to sexuality (gender identity, for example) than we Tolkien writers are.
• Critical discussion or “meta” has an internal rather than external focus. Tolkien writers tend to focus more on “canon” and how to interpret and communicate details within the texts. I’ve seen exhaustive (and exhausting!) conversations on character hair color, eye color, family trees, and timeline nitpicks. There are certain questions occurring within the texts that we will never have an answer to and never tire of arguing over. How long did Maedhros hang on Thangorodrim? Was Legolas a blond? Was Celegorm? Did Fëanor & Sons go to the Everlasting Darkness? Et cetera. In contrast, most fandom discussions focus on how fictional universes and our depictions of them communicate about the world beyond the fictional universe. Tolkien fandom does not often discuss issues of race, gender, sexuality, and ability, or of oppression and privilege, and when it does, does so only with great discomfort. In other fandoms, these discussions happen much more frequently and willingly.

What are the reasons for these things? I think there are a few.

• Tolkien fandom is old. Many fans have been active for years, so there was already an infrastructure and some community ties in place when the Internet became more widely available and gave more people access to fandom and allowed new fandoms to be created. Other older fandoms–Star Trek and Star Wars come first to mind–also tend not to be involved in general fandom, at least not that I’ve seen.
• The source material for Tolkien fandom is much more complex than some other fandoms. I do not intend that to insult or diminish other fandoms, but we are talking about, literally, a man’s life work which was, in turn, built on centuries of myth. The published source material itself is complex and contradictory, to say nothing of the reams of unpublished or hard-to-find materials. And then there are the works that are clearly related and cast light on Tolkien’s canon, like looking at Celtic myth to better understand the Elves. It’s no wonder that much of our discussion focuses on resolving our own understandings of those works.
• Because Tolkien fans don’t tend to participate in other fandoms, we are less aware of discussions or issues affecting fandoms outside of our own.
• There tend to be more conservative fans in Tolkien fandom than elsewhere. There are pockets of fans who prefer to look at Tolkien from a Christian perspective and who expect stories written about it to reflect conservative values. These people are also less likely to want to participate in discussion about oppression, and their presence (even if they are a minority) in the fandom make starting such discussions much more challenging when participants aren’t even on the same page about whether or not oppression exists or is important to discuss. When you’re arguing with one person about whether homosexuality is a choice, it’s hard to maintain a discussion with someone else about whether slash fiction is exploitative. So we argue about canon, where the same progressive-conservative divide can also be seen but occurs at one extra remove and, to many, probably seems less uncomfortable. After all, we’re arguing about whether sex between half-first cousins would have been acceptable in Elven culture, not about whether it’s okay to write Maedhros/Fingon in the first place.

Am I missing anything?

I am less certain about whether I would want Tolkien fandom to have more involvement in discussions and issues that are considered important by fandom in general. On the one hand, I think that many of the issues discussed by fandom in general are deeply important and need to be discussed. I have learned a lot from reading meta posts written by people in no way involved with Tolkien fandom. And because I don’t tend to mind confrontation, I wish that we could confront some of the biases in our own fandom rather than having to cloak everything in canon discussion all of the time.

At the same time, I like becoming deeply involved in the discussion of this world. Must the two be mutually exclusive? Not necessarily, but one is likely going to distract from the other.

(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.

One of the thoughts that has crossed my mind and is currently sticking in my mind like a cockleburr and annoying me and refusing to be dislodged is how a similar conflict exists between writing and fandom. I say “fandom” because this blog is largely aimed toward fandom and because fandom is where I am most comfortable, but really, I think it applies to any sort of group that encourages (or is even based solely or primarily on) creativity and is maintained by a collective effort by members of the community. For example, I am also a member of the Society for Creative Anachronism, and I find many of the same conundrums that I experience in fandom arising there as well.

Writing or creating artwork is a selfish endeavor. It is done alone, usually in solitude or silence (as, indeed, I am alone right now in the house with the only sound the humming of my laptop; even the dogs are outside). At times, the drive to write and escape from social obligations drives me to the brink of madness, and I become a truly unpleasant person to be around. Luckily, Bobby understands this and packs me off into an empty room with my laptop and a couple of hours to write. I am not the first writer to lament the words on the page and how they might have translated better into folded laundry or dishes put away or time spent in the company of others who might feel hurt that I am not around. I sometimes feel like an exceedingly selfish person for my writing. (In fact, I should be finishing a school paper right now and even feel a little guilty that I am writing this instead.) For the few years that I participating in NaNoWriMo, November was such a time of peace and relief. It was something official and even impressive-sounding (”I am a participant in this year’s National Novel-Writing Month” *polishes fingernails on the front of waistcoat*), and it was a good excuse to avoid other activities and write instead. I remember when Bobby was playing in a particularly far-off hockey league, and I used to go to all of his games so that he was not driving home exhausted and alone, and I used to take my laptop and write while he was playing. And, sometimes, people I knew would sit down with me and make conversation, and how I longed to say what I was thinking: “Would you just fuck off and let me alone to write?” Only that was exceedingly selfish, so I never did, and who knows how many words didn’t get written because of it. I feel guilty, even now, lamenting those lost words when, clearly, socialization was the right and proper and human thing to do, and people were just trying to be nice to the lonely eccentric woman over by the soda machines. But when NaNoWriMo was going on, everyone was warned up to a month in advance, and I was left alone, and I didn’t feel guilty about it. I was, after all, serving a project larger than myself; it was not so selfish as writing simply because I wanted to.

Fandom, on the other hand–or groups like the SCA–are entities that value unselfishness in the form of service to the community. Forget the above paragraph for a moment and meet Dawn the Archive Owner and Webminister and Volunteer. One of my most passionately uttered values is the importance, as part of a community from which one derives as much enjoyment as I do fandom and the SCA, of contributing in some significant way to that community. Fannish communities are built almost entirely on the contributions of members of that community; if, tomorrow, the co-moderators, volunteers, writers, and reviewers of the SWG all decided that they wanted to leave the time and effort that they spend on their various contributions to someone else, then there would be no SWG. That is the surest way to shut us down.

But the SWG (and many other fannish groups) is by name and definition a group of writers and artists, people whose work is by its very nature selfish and solitary. Almost four years after I formed the SWG, I’d have to say that my only regret, in creating this group for fandom and doing all of the service that that entails, is again, the lost words: the stories that I wanted to write and didn’t because obligations to the community. I am beyond proud, delighted, and thrilled with the SWG and what it has accomplished, and I would never ever unwish it, but sometimes–in the midst of doing the fannish equivalent of changing dirty diapers or playing stuffed-animal tea party–I lament the lost ability to be selfish and wonder what I could have produced in the last four years if I’d never created the SWG.

I have always been proud of my involvement with fandom–and this, quite unexpectedly, has increased the more that I study literature–because I see its collective, shared creativity as more of a return to the creativity that has been natural to the human race since our distant ancestors first started singing verses around the campfire at night, adding and changing where they saw fit. I see the recent turn that creativity–writing in particular–has taken, with its obsessiveness over possession and markets and profit, as the abnormality, not the desire to create based on what has already been done by others. But, at the same time, writing is largely a solitary act. How does that fit into a collective community? For me, I find that I have the same balancing act as that described by mothers who are also writers, who have to make the choice between a crying child and a whispering muse (1), only my choice is between the whispering muse and a webpage that needs updating, emails that need answering, a newsletter that needs writing, announcements that need posting … all of these things that need to be done in service of the fannish ideals in which I believe so strongly and which, almost always, trump my creative ideals, in which I also believe but are easier to defer: They are selfish.

The first creative communities, artists/authors produced songs and stories for the entertainment of an audience that was usually not artistic itself; the artist/author might find able subsistence from this audience: “singing for one’s supper,” if you will. In the modern “real” writing world, markets exist that seek and publish fiction to provide to an audience and, hopefully, these markets compensate writers fairly for their work (excuse me while I have a good laugh at that last point ………….. thanks, I’m better now). In both cases, the artist/author is independent from the majority of consumers of his or her work, and the “community” in which she or he operates is also maintained by people who are not usually themselves artists/authors. Therefore, the creation and maintenance of the infrastructure by which such creativity is produced and shared does not interfere much with the actual production of that creativity.

Fandom is different: The same people who are producing creative works are usually also those who are building and maintaining the communities necessary for that work to be produced and shared. Most archive and group owners are themselves writers; most of our volunteers (and all of my co-moderators) with the SWG are also artists or writers, and so whenever they give their time to their group, then that is taking time from their writing. The audience for fannish works is also, largely, the same people producing those works, so whenever I hear of people who review x number of stories for the MEFAs or review everything posted on a particular archive or community, then I can’t help but to think that that contribution comes at the expense of their own creative endeavors. But, of course, they are making a very necessary contribution.

What is the solution here? There is no solution. What is beautiful about our communities–that they are collective and run by those who are themselves artists and writers (versus those looking to turn a profit on the efforts of others)–is also to our detriment: Those who believe most strongly in service to their communities will feel the pull of both obligations, and it won’t always be pleasant, and the “selfish” and creative will most often lose out, which is itself a loss in words unwritten and ideas unexpressed.

I do wonder, also, to what extent this is a manifestation of fandom being a “female space,” as some like to call it (amid much controversy, of course). Most cultures teach young girls to be selfless, to be helpers, to put their needs below the needs of the group. In women, selflessness is still valued, as evidenced by the continued fervor of the debate over whether or not mothers belong in the workplace. Boys, on the other hand, are taught to value more their individual accomplishments, and it is understood that a degree of selfishness is to be expected. (I remember reading once, when I was very young, that American culture teaches us to see psychopathology in the mother who chooses her needs over those of her children but not in the man who uproots his family, takes his wife from her family and friends and his children from their peers and familiar home, in order to pursue a career that will not benefit that family in the least; in fact, might be to its detriment as the responsibilities of said career take him away from home even more than he already is and, possibly, to a city or living conditions that are ideal to no one but him. That might have been the moment when I became a feminist, being as this point has stuck with me across, literally, almost the entirety of my life. I only wish that I could remember where I read or heard it to give proper credit.)

I wonder how these values that are still taught to girls and esteemed in women have shaped fandom, and I wonder how this will affect our creative accomplishments. Is there a connection? I don’t know. There are, of course, men in fandom, and several Tolkien-based writing groups are run by men, and I do not intend to dismiss or diminish their contributions. But the Tolkien-based writing community is 95% female (at least) and so, presumably, the culture of that community is female as well. I wonder, sometimes, what male-dominated fandoms (and they do exist) look like compared to female-dominated fandoms, like the Tolkien fandom. Do they feel the same conflict between personal creation and contributing to the collective? And this goes, I think, beyond something so large as creating a group or archive. Do they drop everything to write a ficlet for a collection dedicated to a friend whose going through a rough spell? Do they read every story participating in an award or fest and leave comments for all the authors? Do they set their own work aside because a friend needs a last-minute “emergency” beta-read? Most of the people that I know in the Tolkien fandom–male and female–have done at least one of these things at some point, but the Tolkien fandom–being dominated by women–would of course have evolved a value system created largely by women.

To what extent are these values female and not merely fannish and expected parts of any collective community?

These are questions whizzing through my head lately.

An Afterword …

I don’t often write about my experiences as the owner of the SWG for the simple fact that such “confessions” seem to result in an outpouring of gratitude and back-pats that I think people feel are obligatory and that make me feel bad and slightly dirty, as though I have solicited something undeserved for an endeavor that I find very enjoyable and gratifying without people feeling the need to regularly prostrate themselves before me. I make a conscious decision to continue as the owner of the SWG because I love my group and am proud of what it has accomplished. I am breaking my personal rule about writing about my experiences with the SWG here because, as the owner of a mid-sized fannish group, I work well as an example for this topic; nothing more and nothing less. This is not a hint of dissatisfaction or a fishing for praise, pity, or gratitude, and I am going to request that people not turn this post into a session of the above. The contributions of members and associates of the SWG that have allowed us to accomplish what we have, despite being a small and very niche community, have been and continue to be gratitude enough.

References

1. Susan Rubin Suleiman, “Writing and Motherhood,” in The Longman Anthology of Women’s Literature, edited by Mary K. DeShazer, 621-637. New York: Longman, 2001.

Then, last week, Michelle sent me a link to a post on the FanHistory.com blog called Fandom as a Business. FanHistory.com and I are kaputs. It seems that the fundamental aim of the site is not why I got involved. The fundamental aim of the site is something with which I strongly disagree. And this time, all of this is in the site owner’s own words, removing the need to get swept up in any bloodthirsty, vindictive mobs in order to make my final decision about my involvement with this site.

Aside from the fandom-for-money debate, which I don’t feel legally qualified to wade into right now (although I know that, personally, I want no part of it for various reasons), I take issue with several statements that Ms. Hale makes in her post Fandom as a Business.

• “[A] lot of fans who are in fandom for pure enjoyment, they have a general goal of not making waves, of finding ways to participate that don’t create additional strife for themselves, where they can express their love of canon, of finding a ways to enjoy the source more, of connecting with like minded [sic] people.”
• “If you’re a fan, you might shut your mouth and avoid controversy at all costs. If you don’t, your enjoyment of fandom might decrease.”
• “If you’re a fan, the rules might be that you might be constrained by personal relationships. You don’t want to offend your friends, alienate people who could help you be happy in fandom. These rules on a micro level mean you can’t say and do certain things.”

Throughout the post, there is a tidy dichotomy: You either are in fandom for fun and, therefore, have the luxury of going with the flow, or you’re in fandom for profit and don’t have that luxury. As the owner of a moderate-sized group and website–not-for-profit group and website, I must add–I take umbrage at this. Ms. Hale’s depiction of not-for-profit fandom as a bunch of happy-go-lucky lemmings is not the reality of fandom for me, nor is it the reality for many other people in fandom either.

Over the course of the just-over-three years of the SWG’s existence, I have had to make many decisions based on criteria well beyond “a general goal of not making waves.” People have left the SWG because of decisions that I’ve had to make. People don’t like or agree with everything that I do. People don’t like me because of decisions to do with the SWG. I’ve had to reprimand friends and defend people whose behavior or ideals I usually do not approve of. I’ve even lost friends over SWG-related incidents. Do I say all of this to elicit pity and pats on the back or praise for my efforts? Not at all. I say all of this because, in light of it, I find the idea of not-for-profit fandom as all roses and sunshine downright laughable, with the implication that by swimming against the popular currents, for-profit fandom has earned a right to make money on what they do. The rest of us in our happy fannish Utopia, of course, are too busy singing harmony on the “Tra-la-la-lalley” song from The Hobbit to understand that.

And, as I said, I know that I am not alone in my experiences. Quite the opposite. The SWG is not what one would call a controversial entity; that I have had such intensely negative experiences as part of my founding and governing it speaks less about my struggles than it does about what other group/site owners experience who have found themselves more often amid controversy. For example, as part of the MEFA and ALEC writing competitions, both Marta and Alassante open the workings of these events to public scrutiny and critique. I’m sure that they don’t do this for “pure enjoyment.” Nor do I suppose that either enjoys having her hard work belittled by fans who are vocal against fandom awards altogether. And both admins, I know, have at times made decisions that go against what a friend, an influential person, or even the majority of the group were asking for because it was the decision that needed to be made. How is this compatible with not offending friends? With “avoid[ing] controversy at all costs”?

I’m sure that in the heyday of controversy over HASA’s review system, the owner, admins, and most visible authors on that site didn’t always enjoy a comfortable fandom experience. When I first became involved with fandom, I heard HASA trounced by more people than had neutral or positive things to say about the site. And, no, at the end of the day, those who spent their time and energy building a fannish home for those who wanted it didn’t get to curl up around a healthy profit or dismiss their choices as “business decisions.” Despite the headache and heartache, fandom was still “only a hobby.”

I could keep going with examples from nearly every group where I know the admin(s) relatively well. Many of the people reading this blog are or have been leaders in fandom in some way. And I have no doubt that most of them know exactly what I am talking about.

In the end, Ms. Hale is correct: She cannot hope to run her site based on the contradictory and fickle impulses of “fandom.” But pretending like she is alone in that reality as a for-profit site–with the implication that making such a sacrifice entitles her to her spoils–is deeply unfair to fans who have faced similar controversy and pressure and censure in the process of creating fannish spaces and fanworks for the love of it and who don’t even register such terms as “bottom line” and “product” and “profit” as part of what they do.

Furthermore, I have to wonder exactly how secure Ms. Hale is in making decisions based on business models (versus being motivated by a push for comfortable popularity, like the rest of us) when she makes posts like this in the first place.

“The ten percent unfavorable are not part of our potential audience,” she writes about FanHistory.com’s latest decision to add LJ users to the site using a bot. Then at whom is the extensive defense she writes aimed? Surely, that hypothetical 90% don’t need to be persuaded to accept her business goals before participating; in fact, I don’t see how it is advantageous to make them think too hard about fandom-for-profit at all. If I am competing in a beauty pageant and a judge says, “Dawn, you have a lovely face!” my first response will not be to point out what has been identified again and again as my biggest flaw by saying, “Did you notice the purple wart beside my nose? People tend not to like that, but I think that purple warts can be pretty too, don’t you?”

Or, to put it slightly differently, consider another business that I do not frequent: WalMart. I do not shop at WalMart because I do not support many of their policies and am uncomfortable giving my money to the company as a result. Now, WalMart surely recognizes the presence of conscientious objectors like me and counts us as a loss unlikely to be recovered, just as Ms. Hale does her obstinate naysayers: Unless WalMart changes some of its core business practices–those which allow it to profit in the first place–then they will not have my patronage; unless Ms. Hale abandons her business model, then she will not have the support of many in fandom. Neither is an option, given their goals.

But WalMart does not try to woo me. They do not argue against my points. They do not try to convince me. They ignore me entirely. It’s best to pretend I don’t exist. By engaging me in a debate about their labor practices, fair pay for women, and the importance of small businesses remaining viable in a community, then they will invite people who otherwise would not have questioned these things to pause and say, “Hey, wait a minute …” This may well lose them more current customers than it will earn them new customers.

I think that fandom provides some interesting case studies to this point. Fanfiction.net is a for-profit site. Their blinking, garish ads generate grumbles, but few protest the idea of Fanfiction.net using banner ads to make a profit on the site and, therefore, the fanworks hosted on the site. Even I have stories hosted there. I don’t think of it as “a for-profit site” but as “a site with lots of readers, some of whom are thoughtful reviewers.”

Then consider the now-defunct FanLib.com. FanLib.com did not hide their hopes of making money on their enterprise. They were more forthright about it than Fanfiction.net, but–I think–more importantly, they took issue with any fan or group that challenged their “right” to make money off of fanworks. I know plenty of people who signed up for FanLib accounts when the site first debuted. They weren’t naive to FanLib’s purposes, but these were secondary to the possibility of finding a broader audience for their work or discovering a vibrant new fan community. It wasn’t until FanLib admins starting picking fights with fans and invading forums that questioned their policies that many of the people who were willing to give the site a try–for-profit or not–decided that they wanted no part of it.

For me–and, I suspect, for a lot of other people as well–FanLib’s primary association was not as an archive or a community but as the strongest symbol of the fandom-for-profit movement. Supporting the site came to mean supporting the philosophy on which it was built. And, because I was and am opposed to fandom for profit, then I had trouble seeing past that to enjoy what else the site had to offer.

I’m afraid that FanHistory.com has become similarly tainted for me. I got involved with the site because I agree strongly with its professed aim as a project “dedicated to documenting the history of fandom” and, like any good fandom member, I recognize that if I want to see a goal reached then I must do my part in achieving it. When I think of FanHistory.com now, I no longer think of that. I think of the debate about whether making money off of fanworks is acceptable, and by Ms. Hale’s continual defense of her right to do so, I think of my choice to participate on FanHistory.com as an assertion that I agree with her. She likes business models, so my choice to discontinue participating on her site because of her “product”–not because of any personal grievances that I have with her (because my sole communication with her was pleasant enough)–shouldn’t upset her, right? Nor should my decision to give my time and efforts to what I see as a superior “product”: FanLore.org. That was simple.

I find the argument of those most vociferously in the NO camp to be a little disturbing.

Because what is an “academic” reading–which, based on the posts I’ve read, is being defined as detailed analysis of whether and why a story works–of fanworks if not simply one of many ways to approach a very broad and diverse topic?

Swatkat24 put it best: “I find the anti-aca/fen debates that make the rounds in fandom every now and then worrisome, and very opposed to that aspect of fannish culture I’ve come to cherish over the years: tolerance of other people’s weird obsessions.“

The argument against “acafen” (those fans who enjoy and engage in academic analysis and discourse about fanworks) seems to revolve primarily around the idea that to analyze a work too deeply ruins it. In K.A. Laity’s original post that spurred this current round of discussion, one commenter put it as, “Funny thing I’ve found– when you cut the living dog into pieces, it never acts the same afterwards, even if you put the pieces back where you found them.” Twistedchick drew a similar parallel with, “I have never liked dissections and vivisections” and goes on to write,

See, when you take all the living bits of a story apart, out of context, skin them and stake them out and dance around them while they’re drying, what you’ve got is something that you’ve killed, and it’s dead. It might make stew, but it’s not a story any more. You haven’t ‘controlled the narrative’, you’ve slaughtered it, and it’s attracting flies and smelling pretty bad. You can say you’ve got Einstein’s brain, in a jar on the shelf, and you can measure it and figure out what shade of pinkish-gray it is this week, but it’s not a living mind any more, is it?

These are pretty extreme reactions, I think, when one considers that under discussion is a single way to read and interpret literature. We are not, in fact, talking about cutting apart living, sentient beings. The argument against literary analysis in no way parallels the argument against vivisection. (Take it from one who has spent a good part of her life firmly in the camp making the latter argument.)

The above arguments fail to account for the fact that a story analyzed by one reader does not leave that story in shambles for subsequent readers. If one takes apart that hypothetical dog, then that dog can be wholly restored for no one. It’s not as though you can cut him to pieces and I can adopt him and take him home, healthy and whole, the next week.

Which gets to a second issue that is being discussed in this context. The comments on Twistedchick’s post reveal both hurt and anger about having work discussed in such a fashion without consent and her own opinions being disregarded because she wasn’t thought capable of understanding the discussion because she was not an academic.

With the latter, I have to empathize … but I don’t think that it’s the same question as to whether academic analysis is appropriate when applied to fandom or fanworks. Such experiences as Twistedchick describes don’t belong to academics. They belong to assholes.

Can academics be assholes? Sure.

Can non-academics be assholes? If ff.net proves one thing, it is that stupid people can be jerks too.

Telling someone that she is not intelligent enough to understand the discussion of a story that she crafted takes a galling amount of condescension. Providing someone with unasked-for critical analysis of a story is a completely different can of worms and not that much different than the ongoing discussion/debate about constructive criticism and whether or not it is polite or appropriate to critique a story where the author has not given his or her permission to do so. Publicly critiquing a story is even more of a touchy issue.

Why should the question be any different if it is an “acafan” talking down to me about my competency as an author or a barely literate commenter on ff.net who can nonetheless lecture me on the myriad complexities of eschatology in Tolkien’s world?

Personally, I’m inclined to write off both as socially inept and possessed of overinflated senses of self-importance and to seek constructive comments from those whom I trust to provide a kind of critique with which I am comfortable.

But the reality of publicly posting online is that, with it, one opens himself or herself to public comments and “use” of the material as inspiration, example, and so on. I touched on this in a previous post, The Many Faces of LiveJournal, about how some LiveJournal users want their public posts to remain available to a public readership … but to simultaneously inhabit some nebulous twilight realm as far as commentary and fair use of that material goes. My feelings on this remain mixed, to an extent, but I find myself leaning toward regarding this outlook as an example of wanting to have one’s cake and eat it too: If public authorship confers benefits that locked/limited or private authorships do not–such as an increased readership and level of discussion or positive attention from peers–then it seems a bit unfair to ignore the negatives that come with public authorship, such as negative attention or fair use of one’s words for purposes with which the author may not necessarily agree, as when one LJer discovered that her public LJ posts had been referenced in a published book. At the same time, I do understand that a nuanced understanding of commenting on and using another fan’s work–even when that work is public–has been not only tolerated but encouraged in fandom. So while I find myself raising my eyebrows at the writer who would publicly share a story and yet expect that story to remain off-limits for certain kinds of critique, then I nonetheless do understand from where such an attitude derives.

Rolanni brings up a related point about the appropriateness of academic study and discussion of “genre” fiction, particularly science fiction, also related to Laity’s original post. I think this is relevant to fan writings. “Genre fiction” has long been derided by many in the “literary fiction” arena; my writing program in university made its utter disdain for “genre” shamelessly explicit. But authors of both types of fiction have found common ground in their hatred of “fan fiction,” those derivative works that are subpar and escapist at best and theft at the Robin-Hobb extreme of the worst. It is a typical example of defining ourselves not by what we like but by what we hate and stomping down other people’s work to make our own stand taller.

Yet, despite the long loathing, both genre and fan fiction have found academics suddenly peering past thresholds they once wouldn’t be caught dead crossing. Rolanni writes, “Science Fiction has had an Inferiority Complex almost since its mass market birth, when it was viewed (by academics, my mom, high school English teachers, and other Right Thinking People) as being on the same intellectual level as porn, and was often displayed on the same spinners in the newstands,” and goes on to argue for the value of escapist fiction.

With which I would agree wholeheartedly.

But, again, I am puzzled by the assumption that a piece of writing must be one or the other–either worthy of analysis or simply “escapist”–and cannot exist as both to different people or even the same person. I read Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Left Hand of Darkness for pleasure and loved every minute of it. I didn’t attempt to analyze it or figure out what it means. Yet it is a science fiction novel that could definitely be analyzed and could also hold its own against many works of so-called “literary” fiction. Likewise, I was rivetted by the plot, characters, and world-building of Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, not with trying to figure out what she was trying to say. She was definitely trying to say something, but it wasn’t why I read the book. Oh, and Margaret Atwood is definitely a “literary” author.

For that matter, are novels so easily dichotomized as “literary” or “genre”?

Part of the reason that I insist on using the annoying quotation marks each time I type those words is because I don’t believe in the pure existence of either form of fiction. Really, what separates “literary” from “genre”? When I inquired in one of my writing courses about how science fiction is defined, I was told that it takes place in a dystopian future and uses “formulas” of the genre, like unrealistically perfect protagonists. In this case, Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (which is celebrated in literary circles) can be dismissed as “genre” because it takes place in the future (and that future is definitely dystopian)?

And the acceptable “literary” stories written by my classmates–which inevitably dealt with divorce or alcoholism or prematurely dead friends–no matter how bland the writing and tired the subject, were not formulaic?

The more I write and the more I study literature (and–full disclosure–I am not an academic: I have one Bachelor’s degree in psychology and am working on a second in English, and my money is made doing work related to neither for the government; I do, however, hope to earn advanced degrees in my studies someday), the more I balk at classifying literature as one or the other of anything. Literary, genre; serious, escapist; original, derivative … I think that every story falls somewhere on a continuum between these extremes (and where on this continuum will vary from reader to reader), and no story can be wholly one and none of the other.

So, my point is that while I won’t fault Rolanni for her pride in her “escapist genre fiction,” I think that attempting to define what this is is essentially pointless: It will vary from person to person. For example, plenty of people write off Tolkien as escapist, genre tripe. And yet plenty of people also see Tolkien as a serious author with Something to Say that is worth studying.

Therefore, excluding a work from study because it meets one individual’s classification of “escapist genre fiction” is just as pointless. I may think that your escapist genre fiction really and truly does have something to say.

But, later in Rolanni’s post, she goes on to say,

What seems not to be understood is that academics don’t study and write articles in order to Validate the object of their study. Academics study and write articles in order to Validate themselves. As more and more people become academics, they must look further and further afield for subjects, and lo! suddenly Science Fiction isn’t genre trash anymore; it’s a way to secure tenure.

Ouch.

Considering that she froze and eventually made invisible the comments to this post, I suspect that I’m not the only one who takes umbrage at this point.

Clearly, if I think your escapist genre fiction has something to say–or your fan fiction, for that matter–then if I wish to study it, then this has little to do with my own enjoyment as a reader or curiosity as a researcher as it does attempting to strike into new territory and being hailed as pioneer in my discipline, presumably with great personal gain (i.e., tenure). This sort of broad-sweeping ad hominem attack is not only untrue but terribly unfair.

And, here, I think the argument about academia and fandom comes full circle.

The heart of the debate really has nothing to do with ruining fiction by “dissecting” it or ignoring its escapist purposes to search for something deeper (which, apparently, does not exist, no way, no how). It has to do with an intense dislike of academia and academics and–perhaps beyond that–intellectualism or finding pleasure in analysis. Here is where I come back to my original point that this is a disturbing argument.

It is disturbing because, as Swatkat24 pointed out in the above-referenced quote, fandom is obsessively tolerant of all sorts of people and ideas. While it is generally accepted that everyone be permitted their preferences in what they do and don’t like to read, it is frowned upon in most fan communities to attempt to bar someone from writing what they wish, be it smut or slash or AU. Or academic “dissections” of stories. People are trusted to avoid what they don’t like. And fandom especially stresses the importance of critiquing stories and not authors. Attempting to exclude a person from participating in fandom as an author or a reviewer because of his or her sexual orientation, race, religion, marital status, or gender identity would cause an uproar.

So why are fans sitting idly by and allowing fans to be excluded based on their chosen careers, fields of study, and level of education?

If I stated that people without college degrees should refrain from commenting on stories because their comments are inevitably shallow, uninsightful, and useless, I would (rightfully) be derided because I am not judging a review but a reviewer, much as telling an author that “Young authors like you should wait until you have more life experience before trying to write love stories,” I am not critiquing the story but the writer, and we generally accept that this is irrelevant and wrong.

Here, I find a rather intriguing connection to real (read: outside of fandom) life, at least in the United States, where there is lately an ever-escalating debate on “intellectualism” that increasingly attempts to cast the opinions of those deemed as “intellectuals” as unwelcome or inferior to those of “ordinary folks.” As the current presidential campaign really got underway, I found myself baffled at how many people I heard scorning Barack Obama’s “intellectualism” as somehow making him unfit to serve as President of the United States. “Why so?” I often wanted to ask; it seemed to me that devoting one’s life to careful thought and reasoning and problem solving was an asset in a presidential candidate.

But, as I delved deeper into this debate, I found aspects of it striking … and remarkably similar to the “acafen” discussion going on in fandom. It seemed that many people proudly titling themselves “anti-intellectuals” often spoke of suffering hurt and condescension from those whom they considered intellectual. Slate magazine’s XX Factor blog had a discussion about this, and conservative blogger Melinda Henneberger wrote of how “I did work for an intellectual at one point—and I know this because he spoke of it constantly; in fact, he talked so much about his own heapin’ helpin’ of smarts that one wondered, as he would have said, how wide-ranging his great thoughts really were.” Rachael Larimore–also conservative–wrote that, “What makes people angry, and blood-thirsty, if we must go there, is when elites and intellectuals condescend to everyone else and belittle their views.”

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

And whether applied to politics or fandom, this view is troubling because it excludes people based on perceived intelligence or preferred way of interpreting information. It does not analyze the merit of what they have to say but judges that, whatever is said, it will be offensive simply because of who is saying it. Being an “academic” isn’t a guarantee of asshattery, nor do academics and intellectuals hold monopoly on being jerks.

I don’t believe that all authors need to encourage or even welcome an academic reading of their work. Just as intellectuals aren’t the only pains in politics, I’m sure we could all name certain kinds of review(er)s that we find annoying or detestable and would prefer not to receive. In some spaces–like on LiveJournal–an author can control this, screening or deleting comments that she or he finds contrary to her or his purpose in writing, and I would not protest that right. But I think that it is quite a leap–and a dangerous one–to say that a certain type of thinking or people who enjoy that type of thinking are wholly unwelcome in fandom or their preferences any less worthy than anyone else’s.

I have heard the criticism made against fandom before that it is too easy on writers. Even the worst stories tend to find one or two people willing to say something nice about them. Comments on stories are almost all praise, even on sites–like the SWG–where concrit is not only allowed but encouraged. We are, by and large, a community that anguishes over how to write good feedback and the ethics of when, where, and whether constructive criticism is appropriate. A common defense by flamers is that they are toughening up fan writers and forcing an honest consideration of their writing because most of their peers will not. It is true that the process of sharing fannish writings is largely different from sharing original writings, at least in my experience, and, in my opinion, largely because of the pressure to publish that comes with original but not fan writing.

But in the midst of the debate about how we do and should treat authors, the experience of reading as a fan and in the so-called “real world” of writing is often overlooked. And I think that it deserves some consideration, at least equal to that which we give to authors and perhaps more, since there are far more readers than writers in fandom. Just as many fandom participants feel that authors are coddled by the culture that has developed around fan writing, I feel that readers are likewise coddled by a culture that is hypersensitive and caters to their “needs” in a way that the broader world of creative writing does not.

The complaint on the MEFA list reflects this. Fan readers are, at times, obsessed with the idea of “spoilers.” It is an unwritten rule that story reviews that contain significant revelations about the story’s plot should indicate this loud and center at the top of the review. Software like LiveJournal lets spoilers be hidden “behind the cut” and away from the eyes of readers who don’t want to see them, and it is understood that LJ users will make good use of this tool. The MEFA’s implementation this year of the spoiler flag writes as a rule this unspoken agreement between author, reviewer, and reader.

But the MEFAs are not alone in their official consideration of spoilers. As my comoderators and I developed the rating/warning system for the Silmarillion Writers’ Guild, finding a method that would not spoil a story was a frequent point of discussion and was treated as a priority. Even our ratings policy assures readers: “We are willing to work with authors when warnings may spoil the plots of their stories.”

This is unique to fandom. In the “real” world, if you choose to read a review, or if you insist on a rating system for an artistic medium, then you should expect some degree of spoilage.

Right alongside spoilers as a frequent point of discussion are ratings and warnings. I don’t think that the SWG entertains questions and dissatisfaction about any single point more than it does ratings and warnings. We have received emails in the past from authors asking for guidance on whether we think a story is best as Adults or Teens, as though the gradation is as clear as deciding between red, yellow, and blue. The graduated system of warning for sex and violence–mild, moderate, and graphic–earns its own handwringing as authors debate what degree of explicitness nudges a story from one to the other. Yet a discussion on our Yahoo! list showed me that readers are pretty clear on where they stand on ratings and warnings: They like them, they want them, and they won’t read on an archive that doesn’t make an attempt at providing them. I think it’s illustrative that the fiction archive software, eFiction–which is largely aimed toward creating fan fiction archives–makes nearly every detail optional through the control panel, but “[r]atings are a required element for story submission.” In other words, archive owners must have the PHP/MySQL knowledge to alter the software directly to get rid of ratings altogether or else find a creative way of recasting the required rating field as something else entirely. Or, when LiveJournal developed its own rating system for journal entries, the discussion of whether this was ethical to start was as loud as the discussion of another concern: that ratings in the story body would be hidden behind LJ cuts and readers actually had to click on the story to find them.

Literature outside of fandom is so far untouched by the ratings bug that has made a color-coded alphabet soup out of movies and television in many countries in the world. Perhaps it is assumed that if you are mature enough to pick up a novel for entertainment, then you are mature enough to handle the fact that it might represent real life in some degree of explicitness, including sex and violence. Or perhaps rating literature inches too close to censorship in a culture that still feels the heat of past book burnings (a phenomenon that we haven’t entirely thwarted in this century either). Or maybe it is assumed that you really can judge enough about a book by its cover (and the blurb on the back) to discover whether its content will be to your taste or not. Or maybe fan writings are really that much more explicit overall than original writings, making meticulous ratings and warnings a far greater imperative.

There is a movement among fan writers to shuck the system of ratings and warnings. I am among them: My homepage The Midhavens does not include a single story rating and uses warnings only when I think that a story contains something that might work as a “trigger” to victims, such as those affected by rape or suicide. But we are in the minority, and, even among us, it is understood that scrapping ratings on public archives is an impossible dream. In reconsidering the warning system used by the SWG, a member wrote to me to say she thought it’d be best to get rid of it altogether … but that she understood that readers would never go for it. Yet, briefly, we entertained the thought of an experience where the reader would judge a story on its merits and not which warnings it could be shelved under.

But what is the point of all of this? Surely, pleasing readers and site visitors is not a bad thing.

And I agree that it’s not, just as I agree that the more delicate and tolerant treatment of authors in fandom is not a bad thing either. But gripes about how things are handled in fandom compared to the “real writing world” tend to focus almost exclusively on the kid-glove treatment that the author receives. Very few fandom readers–when making a loud show about spoilers and ratings and the other luxuries they enjoy here but not elsewhere–seem cognizant of the differences between fannish and original literary communities and the burden that creating an absolutely flawless reading experience puts on archive owners and, more importantly, authors. I have heard complaints about the sorts of reviews attached to barely coherent stories that invoke such bland, vague praise as “great grammar!” or “you really use your canon!” just so the reviewer has something nice to say. Yet this requires no more verbal gymnastics than does the sort of warning I remember from my early days on fanfiction.net: “warning for slash (well, maybe, Maedhros and Fingon do hug each other in one scene, but they’re cousins, so you could see this as slash or not, depending on how you want to look at it, but I thought it safer to warn anyway).”

Or when a MEFA reviewer writes, “Aragorn and Arwen are my favorite canon couple!” without using the spoiler tag, and a reader huffs and puffs that now the story is ruined because the writer could not possibly carry the story on skill alone now that the story’s pairing is revealed!

Fandom is ridiculous at times. Anyone who has been around it for more than a week generally knows that. But, as an author and an archive owner, I find myself caught between wanting to please everyone who supports my writing and my site and tossing their more ridiculous requests in the bin where my own judgment says they belong and start treating my writing and that of my peers more like literature and less like that despised label evocative of squealing, irrational children: fan fiction.