#ALSO another interesting angle is fanfic as a specifically unlicensed counter-copyright practice

[jewfrogs]

Heyo! Your posts about Greek myths not being fanfiction (excellently said ) but also that retelling have roots and reasons, how would you class the percy Jackson series, could it be fanfiction about the myths? And how would you class very loose retellings of myths, for example Uyllesse Dies At Dawn the album by The Mechanisms?

hello! that post seems so ancient to me, it’s wild that it’s going around again…..

i don’t disagree with anything i said, but i wish i’d drawn more on fan studies scholarship (remember that this is a subject of real, meaningful academic study!); nonetheless, what i wrote is similar to what seems to be the disciplinary consensus. the introduction to the fan fiction studies reader understands fanfiction as “historically situated in the last forty years, tending to respond to a specific form of media texts, and encompassing a specific amateur infrastructure for its creation, distribution, and reception.”[1] i would argue that these parameters are definitional, the pillars that make fanfic fanfic. i don’t believe fanfic can be fanfic without intention—that is, it’s not fanfic if you don’t know you’re writing fanfic.[2] ripping fanfic out of this framework deprives the form of meaning.

the works you mention are adaptations, which are another beast entirely.[3] linda hutcheon places adaptation alongside “imitation, allusion, parody, travesty, pastiche, and quotation as popular creative ways of deriving art from art”[4]—we might add fanfiction to this list. it is another way of deriving art from art, a way which happens within these “amateur infrastructures” of fan communities, which responds to a source with work inspired by and dependent on that source,[5] which is produced by and for fans and within fandom. fanfic occupies spaces that original fiction cannot. thus something cannot simultaneously be original fiction and fanfiction; they are mutually exclusive.[6]

re: greco-roman mythology specifically, i feel like we can safely say that this has been sufficiently absorbed into the social milieu as a “cultural universal”—to borrow a phrase from john djisenu[7]—that drawing on/responding to something so broad and ubiquitous is far distinct from writing a story about the characters and occurrences and settings of, say, one singular book series (with a single author, owner, publisher, etc.). classics are everywhere. classical adaptations, in various forms, far predate fanfic (and, in almost all of those forms, their aims and efforts are very, very different from fanfic). these are simply not the same. ask yourself: could someone post this on ao3? if not, it is not fanfic. rita dove would not post the darker face of the earth on ao3. it is not fanfic.

i appreciate your asking! have a delightful day! (footnotes under the cut)

[1] karen hellekson and kristina busse, the fan fiction studies reader (iowa city: university of iowa press, 2014): 7.

[2] i don’t mean this as any sort of moral maxim—people may write what we might call fanfic without knowing the word fanfic, such as a 7 year old writing a story where the my little ponies hang out with her, but overwhelmingly knowledge (and readership) of fanfic precedes production of fanfic. people who write fanfic are always aware that they are writing derivative, transformative fiction spun out of other fiction.

[3] with their own academic discipline! there is lots of literature in adaptation studies; as a sampler see thomas m. leitch (ed.), the oxford handbook of adaptation studies (oxford: oxford university press, 2017) and the oxford journal adaptation (started in 2008).

[4] linda hutcheon, “on the art of adaptation,” daedalus 133, no. 2 (2004): 109.

[5] this is not to diminish the artistic merit of fanfic, which can undoubtedly be beautiful and may be appreciated outside of its origins (i’ve read and loved my fair share of friends’ fic that i know nothing about), but it is naturally unable to stand alone; there is no fanfic if there is nothing to write fanfic about.

[6] this is why we see the phenomenon of “filing off the serial numbers” when people want to publish fanfic as original fiction; the work must be stripped of its nature and repainted to pass as something it is not. (this is also why that practice is only possible with fanfic that wasn’t very good to begin with—good fanfic is strongly rooted in its characters and canon [whether or not it is compliant with that canon].)

[7] john djisenu, “cross-cultural bonds between ancient greece and africa: implications of contemporary staging practices,” in lorna hardwick and carol gillespie (eds.), classics in post-colonial worlds (oxford: oxford university press, 2007): 72.