#to transition to original works. but that's not 'getting worse' that's having a different skillset

[elftwink]

i’ll be the first to say that fic readers/writers often make completely wild claims about the quality of fanfiction overall but also it’s very weird that we’ve looped back around to the “inherently bad” argument wherein someone will literally just say “fanfiction can be good sometimes” and some of u start frothing at the mouth talking about how it makes you a worse writer and it could never possibly be as good as published books etc etc and it’s like... why are you so bent out of shape at the idea that someone can be a good writer and also use that talent to write something you consider kind of silly or wasteful. obviously there are bad fics; that’s what happens when anyone can publish anything at any level of skill and any point in the process. but just like law of large numbers some of those pieces of writing are going to be at least decent and if you haven’t found any that kinda sounds like a you problem

also while i fully agree that if you think you dislike published books you probably just don’t know how to look for what you like to read it is true that sometimes shitty books get published by bad writers who suck (at writing, not just generally) and that almost certainly there are good fics better than bad books. and frankly even the idea of trying to do a large scale comparison between the two (to claim that all or even most books are better than all or most fics, AND vice versa) is laughable because like... based on what? how you personally feel about the works? newsflash, that’s the same thing that the ppl claiming fics are better than books are doing! why are you trying to make an objective statement about the overall quality (already subjective even for individual works) of literally millions of creative works. you sound exactly as dumb as the ppl you are attempting to criticize. at best you could claim that published books are more likely to be good quality in terms of polish because they go through an editing process before they are in front of you and you see less works by total amateurs but u aren’t claiming that. u are trying to claim that by virtue of being fanfiction, it makes a work poorly written. you don’t have to like fanfiction but your taste doesn’t actually mean anything to anybody but you and im certainly not going to accept that all fics are inherently trash bc some blogger on tumblr dot edu personally dislikes them and stated that as a fact instead of as their own opinion. which is what it is.

if you wanna be a hater that’s fine and i support that but then just admit to being a hater instead of trying to find a way in which you’re objectively right. like just say you dislike fanfiction. a true hater would just hate shit without needing to justify it.

[aion-rsa]

Monsters at Work Review (Spoiler-Free)

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This Monsters at Work review contains no spoilers.

Disney+ launched with the promise of bringing many adored Disney franchises to the small screen, but with big picture ambition, storytelling, and production values. So far, that promise has mostly been met, with the Disney+ original series like Mighty Ducks: Game Changers and The Falcon and the Winter Soldier feeling like stretched out features diced into episodic instalments. However, Monsters at Work, Disney+’s new sequel series to Pixar’s Monsters, Inc., feels more like traditional television than a “X-hour movie,” for better or worse.

Monsters at Work takes place immediately following 2001’s Monsters, Inc. After Mike (Billy Crystal) and Sully (John Goodman) discover that laughter generates ten times more power for the Monstropolis power plant than screams, Mike and Sully are put in charge. and tasked with helping the company transition from an organization of scarers to jokesters. 

Meanwhile, recent Monsters University graduate Tylor Tuskmon (Ben Feldman) arrives at Monsters, Inc. as the top scarer in his class, but finds that his skillset doesn’t fit in with Monsters Inc.’s new corporate culture. He’s assigned to the MIFT (the Monsters, Inc. Facilities Team) crew, a misfit group of monsters comprised of warm leader Fritz (Henry Winkler), over-enthusiastic Val (Mindy Kaling), down to business Cutter (Alanna Ubach), and threatened brown-noser Duncan (Lucas Neff). Tylor is torn between pursuing his dream of getting on the scare floor or falling in with his new whacky work family.

Despite a talented and more-than-game voice cast, Monsters at Work feels more like the TV spinoffs of popular Disney movies of yesteryear that used to populate the Disney Channel more than a proper extension of the Pixar property. This makes sense considering Pixar is not involved with Monsters at Work and the show is produced by Disney Television Animation and overseen by Bobs Gannaway, who previously worked on shows like Timon & Pumbaa, Lilo & Stitch: The Series, and The Emperor’s New School. The new series looks cheaper than its predecessors and also lacks the sharp writing. While children may find more to laugh at, the average adult viewer will be charmed by, but not laughing at anything much in Monsters at Work.

Another thing that takes some of the excitement away from Monsters at Work is our familiarity with the Monsters Universe. After two films, the wacky character designs and world-building feel familiar and therefore are less likely to surprise. However, exploring the unsung heroes of Monsters,Inc., the maintenance folks and other day-to-day operational players is an intriguing idea with room for growth. In the two episodes screened for critics, it does appear that the show is presenting the idea that college isn’t the only path to a fulfilling and meaningful career, which feels wildly different for kid’s entertainment and a welcome, necessary message. 

Monsters at Work also looks like it will have fun playing with tropes of workplace comedies, taking aim at institutional businesses during transition. Anyone that has been through a company merger or a “culture reset” can find something recognizable in Mike and Sully’s struggle to redefine what Monsters, Inc. is. There’s also some lighthearted jabs at workplace burnout that are fun to see.

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Monsters at Work does not feel like a genuine article sequel to Monster,s Inc. or even a “X hour movie,” but it doesn’t necessarily need to. While the writing is a bit underwhelming, every comedy series needs some time to gain footing. Monsters at Work will have to do more to surprise audiences who are already familiar with this world, but by looking at the unsung heroes of the workplace, it has an interesting and fruitful avenue to explore and a talented voice cast to really sell the whole enterprise should things really get cooking. Though it isn’t Pixar, it still may end up being something serviceable.

The post Monsters at Work Review (Spoiler-Free) appeared first on Den of Geek.

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[phoenixagent003]

In Defense of Fanfiction

So, fairly recently (at time of writing), a fellow writer decided to disparage authors who cut their teeth writing fanfiction which, in their words “actively teaches you to write worse.”

Now, as someone who did cut their teeth writing fanfiction, my gut instinct to seeing this tweet was to angrily quote tweet it with the reply “Oh fuck off.” But that much as a I wanted to do that, I didn’t for several reasons. For one, I just generally try to be restrained and selective for who I get that angry and confrontational with online, reserving it mostly for politicians, celebrities, and DC’s Titans. Entities at once morally bankrupt, and largely immune to any kind of damage that I personally can inflict due to an absence of actual humanity.

And that all being said, this person was… well a person. A person with a narrow-minded and incorrect opinion, but still a person. And a fellow writer. So then I thought about refuting their bad-take, but that felt too much like swooping in to mansplain writing to someone who by all accounts seems to have been doing it at least as long as I have, and who’s been considerably more professionally successful at it.

Plus, like I said, I got my start in fanfiction. My origins are quite literally being targeted and attacked here. And feeling targeted can make people say and do some really stupid stuff if they don’t stop and think beforehand.

Basically, I didn’t want to start a Twitter beef over this because quite frankly the internet would be a happier place if we all just did that less, but I still saw a lot of bad arguments and missed points, so I couldn’t just say nothing. And so here we are, at a compromise between Twitter arguing and saying nothing—blogging about it.

The writer in question turned her single tweet into an entire thread that brought up a lot of very different, very unrelated issues, some of which I want to touch on as well, but before I do any of that, I want to answer the central argument, taking it as much as I can on face value and inferring as little else as possible: that fanfiction “actively teaches you to write worse.”

Does it?

Twitter is a terrible medium for communication. It rewards broad, inflammatory statements and its character limit leaves little room for nuance. Some people attempt brute-force circumventions of that limit, but most don’t, and the site isn’t suited to it. So it is unsurprisingly difficult to parse out exactly what they meant, but I can take a stab at it by covering as many bases as I could think of.

Does the medium of fanfiction inherently teach poor writing fundamentals, like prose, plot structure, or character development?

No. Writing, like most skills, is honed by practice. Every time you think about the best word to put on a page or the best way to structure a sentence or story, you are getting better at writing. You start a sentence, and think to yourself, “Hang on, there’s gotta be a better way to word that.” And that moment, where you reflect on your craft and look for ways and spots to improve it—that is you learning. Developing. Maybe you think of a way to word that sentence better, maybe you don’t. But the act of thinking, of searching, of even just acknowledging that it could be better is still work towards improvement. Doesn’t matter if it’s dialogue written for Harry Potter or for your original character, do not steal.

90% of fanfiction is crap. But 90% of everything is crap. Fanfiction is perhaps more famous for being mostly crap, but it’s really not hard to understand why. First off, the only barrier to entry for writing is basic literacy. If you can read this sentence, you can try your hand at writing. The difference between fanfiction and say, traditionally published works, is that fanfiction kind of keeps that low barrier to entry, whereas to get traditionally published you typically have to impress at least two other people—your agent, and then the editor you agent sends your shit to. And even then, that’s not a insurmountable barrier to entry. A metric butt-ton of people do it all the time.

In short, with fanfiction, the “slush pile” is open and visible, whereas with most other stuff, the only people who have to read that garbage are agents and editors, God have mercy on their souls. But rest assured, there is just as much shitty original fiction as there is shitty fanfiction.

In addition to the low barrier to entry, fanfiction is where a lot of people first dip their toe into this gig. And unless you are an unparalleled prodigy, when you’re new at something, you are bad at something. Which is fine. Doing something poorly is the first step to doing something competently. Practice is practice.

Now, you can practice something incorrectly and do yourself wrong—anybody who knows about proper weight lifting form can tell you that. But for the most part, a writer working on fanfiction is no more likely to do this than someone writing anything else.

The two exceptions I can think of are character and worldbuilding. Somewhat unique to fanfiction (we’ll talk about that in a minute) versus original fiction is that in fanfic, the characters and world are already established. Depending on the kind of fic you write, you may very well not get practice or experience making characters or worlds, since you’re using someone else’s work to basically cover that for you. So, sometimes, in this one specific area, fanfiction does feature something of a crutch that could theoretically lead to deficiencies in a writer’s fundamentals.

That said, that is very much dependent on the type of fanfic. Some works feature entirely original casts, telling a new story with new characters in an established setting. And even in fics which predominantly focus on the established cast, fanfic writers are downright notorious for adding new, original characters into the mix. Most of them are… awful. But we already covered why that is. Remember, bad writing is not the same thing as bad practice.

Ditto worldbuilding, where we’ve got plenty of fanfics that outright replace the world of the established story. The Alternate Universe concept is a very popular one in fanfic.

I will say in a closing than with worldbuilding and character, fanfiction does typically replace only one of these while keeping the other. Mainly because if you changed both, you’re liable to have left the realm of fanfiction altogether.

Does fanfiction, by its nature, leave you unprepared for making the transition to the professional writing world?

Let’s pretend for a moment that we didn’t just shoot down the idea that writing fanfiction means you never honed your ability to create your own original world and characters. That’s nonsense, but let’s say for purely hypothetical arguments sake, that if you start out writing fanfiction, your character-creating muscles will atrophy and you’ll only be able to work with pre-existing concepts, worlds, and characters. Does fanfiction leave you unprepared for making it in the world of professional writing?

For your consideration, I present: the very concept of episodic television. TV shows regularly bring on writers who did not originate either the show or its characters. TV writers craft stories borrowing a world and characters that somebody else came up with. The only difference between them is fanfiction is they got paid and get to be stamped as canon. Same muscles getting used. Same kind of exercise.

The spec script, the method by which most people showcase their ability to write for TV, is literally just fanfiction.

Then we have adaptations and retelling of both licensed and public domain properties, where once again, we have scores of writers, taking characters and concepts that they did not come up with, and using them to tell their own stories, or even just put different spins on the originals. What if Hades and Persephone, but without the whole “against her will” thing? Hey Marvel, can I use your Norse god character to tell a story about how societies built on the back of colonialism are inherently flawed and shouldn’t be preserved at the expense of the people?

The skillset of playing with other people’s toys to make something compelling is an incredibly valuable one for a writer to have. If anything, I’d argue that fanfiction is even better suited to teaching this skillset than writing original fiction.

And as a quick aside, that practice of playing with other people’s characters and constantly asking “Is this in character for them?” is a very useful practice that actually translates very well to writing your own characters. When you invented a character, it can be tempting to declare anything you write “in-character” since, well, you wrote it, and they’re your creation. But that thinking can easily lead to disjointed characterization.

I routinely ask “is this in-character?” while writing for characters I created. It makes me a better writer, and I learned how to ask that question and how to identify the answer from writing fanfiction.

Does fanfiction distort your sense of good taste?

This is the closest I could possibly come to agreeing with the original argument. The last time I was actively involved in it, the fanfiction community had pretty low standards, actually? I say this, because when I was writing fics, I was actually heaped with praise and attention, almost all of which was near universally good.

But I was not good. I was bad. I was very bad. Because I was in junior high, and an idiot, and those fics were the first thing I ever wrote that was longer than seven pages. But I updated my fics daily over the summer, in a very popular fandom that predominantly targeted people my age. So I got lots of fans and praise, and I started to think I was a good writer. Even worse than that, other people thought I was a good writer, and told even more people that I was.

Which is an affront to good taste.

That having been said, even though I do hold fandom and its nature partially to blame for the single most humbling aspect of my entire life, I also just hold adolescence in general to blame? Maybe? I like to think that much as I grew beyond my poor grasp of my own woeful incompetence, so too did my audience grow up and get a better understanding of what actually good writing is.

But then again, EL James and Reki Kawahara have made more money than I’ve ever seen in my life. So maybe neither fanfic nor adolescence is to blame. Maybe sometimes trash just sells.

As an aside, I hope this doesn’t come off as me trying to be mean or make fun of all those people who liked my old stuff. I know I’m embarrassed by it, and the only reason I haven’t deleted it all is because I need an ego check every now and again (and they’re also how I met my wife). But whether you also did a 180 on my old stuff as you got older or you still unironically think it’s good… thank you for the support. You are my humble beginnings and I would not be the person I am today without all of you.

…and that’s enough getting sentimental and making this about me, let’s go back to debunking opinions that are objectively wrong because I disagree with them.

The Other Stuff

I feel I’ve thoroughly said my peace on the original argument put out by my colleague. Namely, that they are wrong. But I’d also like to very quickly address the everything else they spewed out. My takes on this are considerably less long winded and probably could have been sanded down to a Twitter reply, but I still figure their inbox is getting enough shit already, and I want to make this more about the arguments than the person.

I’m not going to cover everything in detail, especially since I am super not qualified to speak on some of them—there is only so much I as a cishet dude feel comfortable giving my opinion on—but I will cover the bits that stood out and ground my gears.

EL James and Cassandra Clare are “fucking terrible”

No disputing the EL James part. Her character work is atrocious, her understanding of actual kink and BDSM dynamics and lifestyles is woeful, her plot bears clear evidence of serialized work that was not properly cleaned up prior to publication.

I haven’t read Cassandra Clare’s work. I have heard both good and bad things about it, but let’s say for argument’s sake she’s also not great.

This comment shows a distinct lack of knowledge of just how many authors, many critically acclaimed, write fanfiction on the side or got their start in it. Neil Gaiman writes fanfiction—and usually manages to get paid for it. I could go on with a long and yet still non-exhaustive list of authors who have done or still do it. Bottom line, there are some very high profile, not good writers whose start in fanfiction has been effectively weaponized against them to further underline their badness—“Of course EL James is bad. What did you expect from someone who started in fanfiction—while simultaneously many good writers have their connections to it downplayed by either choice or their own profile.

“Low effort formulaic lowest-common-denominator writing is bad actually”?

I almost brought this into main discussion, but I said I would infer as little as possible and on its own, this tweet didn’t directly say it was talking about fanfiction. I would argue it heavily implied it, and I very much doubt the author of the tweet would disagree with me, but I made the no inferring rule and I stuck to it.

I’m actually still going to take this argument on its own for a moment. I’ve already covered how and why fanfiction is generally seen as bad—low barrier to entry and the bad stuff is as easy to find as the good stuff—so I want to talk about something else. “Low effort writing is bad. No real arguments. I could jokingly say Neil Gaiman could drunkenly scribble something on a napkin that would outclass my best efforts, but I actually don’t have that low an opinion of myself.

Lowest-common-denominator writing is probably bad. In general, I think trying to appeal to the lowest common denominator is a good way to make uninspired trash, but on the other hand…fuck it, I’m liable to be included in that lowest common denominator most of the time. That’s the whole goddamn point of the LCD. It casts a broad net. And there’s a place for that. I don’t think it should be a big place, but still a place.

“Formulaic writing is bad” though? That I also just straight up disagree with. Formulas are a tool. And like every tool, they can be used really well, or really poorly. Used well, a formula can provide a solid structure around which to build interesting stories or ground the audience in otherwise unfamiliar settings. Don’t call a hammer a bad tool just because you’re hitting the nail wrong.

Several arguments discussing fanfictions relationship to queer and female audiences/writers/identities:

Nope, not touching that.

Oh fuck off.

Fanfiction isn’t collaborative or about community because “it's all corporate IP” and “Ultimately, someone else legally owns it, and you are choosing to give a corporate entity your creative energy.”

And this is actually something that’s been bugging me a while, specifically regarding the relationship people have with corporately owned IP and how it being owned by a corporation doesn’t automatically invalidate it as a source of emotional investment or cultural symbolism. But quite honestly, that really deserves its own post, so I’m just going to put a pin in this that and say we’re done here.

Glad I got all that off my chest.

So that was a thing. If you’ve got your own experiences with fanfic, good or bad, I’d love to hear them in the comments or over on Twitter.

If your curious about my history in fanfiction, like I said, it is all still technically out there, and very bad, but I’m not so much of a masochist that I’d link it here. I wouldn’t read it if I were you.

I write newer, much better stuff now. Some of it is here on this website, and some of it is in a novel coming out Fall 2021! Check that out instead! I promise it’s a much better use of your time.

[flauntpage]

How Gymnastics Is Trying To Take Over Parkour And Make It An Olympic Sport

In the last several months, proponents of parkour, the obstacle course discipline of French origin, have been involved in a fight both with external foes and within their own community that might well shape the future of the sport.

But this fight isn't merely about parkour. It's about who controls the new youth-centric sports that are the Olympics' future. It's about whether legacy sports federations, amidst declining participation rates and popularity, can muscle their way to governing these new sports, even if the people who actually play them don't want that.

Parkour's fight, like many turf wars, is less an honest dispute than an invasion. In this case, it's between people who actually practice the discipline and the International Gymnastics Federation (FIG), which has enlisted the help of two of parkour's founders to help them take over the sport.

If FIG's involvement sounds odd to you, you're not alone. Parkour is not gymnastics. The two sports have completely different histories, cultures, and purposes. Any overlap is superficial. Yet, this hasn't stopped FIG from going full speed ahead on subsuming parkour for its own gain.

Leading the fight against this takeover is Eugene Minogue, president of Parkour UK, which is recognized by UK Sport as the the National Governing Body for Parkour the UK. Minogue has issued several open letters to FIG and officially petitioned the IOC in an effort to have FIG cease and desist what he calls its "encroachment and misappropriation" of parkour.

"You lose all of that culture, that heritage, the authenticity, the very fabric that makes the sport and the community what it is and what makes it so different to other traditional sports," Minogue said in an interview.

Many other parkour organizations from around the world have signed letters supporting Parkour UK and calling for FIG to back off, including organizations from France, New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, Poland, Finland, Germany, Switzerland, Mexico, Sweden, Denmark, Argentina, and Italy. In a recent Inside The Games poll, 75 percent of respondents voted against the FIG's attempt to take over the sport.

Parkour's fight essentially began with Agenda 2020, the IOC's long-term roadmap for the future of the Olympics. Published in 2014, it called for the IOC to be more youth-centric: "We want to engage with them [the youth] wherever they are," wrote IOC president Thomas Bach. But, incorporating youth-centric action sports into the Olympic program presents a culture clash the IOC is still navigating today. There's a distinctive Manifest Destiny-like tone to Agenda 2020, an implicit assumption that action sports are for the Olympics' taking.

Fundamentally, parkour's fight is not about whether they want to be an Olympic sport, but about who gets to decide. There is a tremendous amount at stake for parkour. The future of the sport will be determined by who governs it. And if recent history is any guide, the outlook for parkour isn't good.

The IOC first required all Olympic sports to be governed by a recognized international body in 1920. Since then, existing federations have had tremendous control over organized sport. Whenever a new, popular sport came along, it was much easier and quicker for an existing federation to claim ownership rather than letting a new federation organically form.

Generally, this transition is done under the guise of helping the new sport's development, creating an elite level, which in turn promises to grow the grassroots. But sports historian David Goldblatt, author of The Games: A Global History of the Olympics, says, "the argument is always the elite layer somehow nurtures, encourages, and develops a broader grassroots. And it's not true. it's just not true."

When the aim of the burgeoning sport is expressly to become an Olympic sport, this acquisition process is more or less fine, like a startup getting bought out by a major corporation. The problem is when the new sport's culture and aims may not align with the IOC's, who nevertheless sees dollar signs in absorbing it. This is precisely the case with many action sports.

The IOC, a highly bureaucratic organization, has little in common with youth-centric, non-hierarchical action sports that prize experimentation while minimizing rules and boundaries. In many ways, the "Olympic Movement" and action sports practitioners could hardly be more different. Yet, IOC has pegged its future to these action sports.

Snowboarding, one of the first action sports eyed by the IOC, became an Olympic sport at cost. Photo by Andrew P. Scott-USA TODAY Sports.

The best way to explain what's at stake for parkour is to look at the history of action sports getting absorbed into Olympic programs. Perhaps the first prominent instance of this clash came in the early 1990s with snowboarding, about a decade after snowboarding competitions were first held. In 1998, the IOC included snowboarding for the first time in the Winter Olympics, but under the International Ski Federation's (FIS) umbrella, rather than ushering in the burgeoning International Snowboard Federation (ISF). In effect, snowboarding became a sub-discipline of skiing.

This went down with snowboarders about as well as you'd expect. Terje Haakonsen, one of the most influential snowboarders ever and the best in the world at the time, boycotted the Olympics in protest. "The thing is you have guys directing the sport who don't actually do the sport—people who are just in it for the commercial interest," Haakonsen told Snowboard Magazine in 2013. "You don't have the athletes involved who actually know about the sport that can make better progress in the sport, that can experiment with the sport, and make their snowboarding life a lot better. It's all about sports politics and commercial interest."

Haakonsen accused organized skiing of using its leverage to prevent the ISF from getting lucrative television contracts. This stunted the ISF's growth, according to Haakonsen, which made it easier for FIS to absorb snowboarding. The ISF shut down in 2002. Haakonsen described the whole process as "like stealing candy away from a kid."

From a cultural perspective, snowboarding has suffered ever since. Olympization of snowboarding fractured the community as some competitors perfected their skillsets for Olympic-style competition, while others like Haakonsen adhered to previous ideals of creativity and expression. In Haakonsen's opinion, this made the sport worse, and many view the standardization of competitions as detrimental to its founding values of riding whatever the terrain provides.

But the lessons extend far beyond snowboarding's experience. Damien Puddle, a PhD student at the University of Waikato who is writing his thesis on parkour, wrote a blog post outlining what has happened to other action sports. His post serves as a warning for parkour that there are few good outcomes—and mostly bad ones.

Take the three action sports debuting at Tokyo in 2020, the year Agenda 2020 is to be put into practice: BMX, skateboarding, and sport climbing. In BMX's case, the Union Cycliste Internationale—the same federation that governs all other Olympic cycling events—absorbed BMX because, well, they also use bicycles, despite their "independent cultural heritage," as Puddle put it. Now, BMX practitioners have little sway in what funding they receive from their national governing bodies because they're small fish in a big pond.

As for skateboarding, many skaters don't want to be in the Olympics at all. But that didn't stop the IOC from politely asking the International Roller Sports Federation (FIRS) to see about governing skateboarding so it could be included in the Olympics, despite the existence of the International Skate Federation (ISF, and I'm sorry about all the acronyms). FIRS and the ISF eventually agreed to jointly run the Tokyo 2020 Skateboarding Commission, a short-term Band-Aid to what promises to be a protracted legal fight over who owns skateboarding.

Sport climbing probably has it best of the three, since the International Federation of Sport Climbing (IFSC) gained official recognition and governs the sport at the Olympic level. But even the IFSC doesn't have total control, as evidenced by the actual sport climbing program. In Tokyo 2020, the sport climbing event will be a "vertical triathlon," which combines bouldering, lead climbing, and sport climbing into an aggregated score and a single medal. From a sporting perspective, this makes little sense, as the three events are very different and few practice all three. It also means climbers who ply their trade mostly on outdoor rock without pre-defined paths will have to practice indoors on standardized routes. But, for various reasons due to the IOC's bureaucracy and requirements, it was one of the few options available.

Nevertheless, the decision was made without IFSC consultation, which will have a trickle-down effect on how the sport is practiced. Fifteen high-profile climbers surveyed by Climbing.com unanimously disapproved of the format, with one climber likening it to middle-distance runners being told to compete in sprinting. Another simply called it "bogus."

Aside from the 2020 sports, Standup Paddleboarding (SUP) has had to postpone its Olympic inclusion while the International Surfing Association and International Canoe Federation battle over who owns it, despite Canoeing having essentially no legitimate claim to SUP. But, Canoeing has been involved in the Olympics since 1924, so the IOC won't tell them to back off.

With all of this precedent, Puddle wonders what possibly could be beneficial for parkour with FIG's attempted takeover. "If this is the experience of all action sports before us, why would anyone do anything but work with their own community?"

Here, Puddle may be indirectly referring to David Belle and Charles Pierreire, two recognized parkour co-founders (nine people have been credited with starting parkour) who are working with FIG and lending their takeover a minimal degree of legitimacy. Belle and Pierreire will chair the "FIG Parkour Committee" and provide some oversight on the sport's future. But, it's unclear how much power or influence they will have.

Belle, Pierreire, and seven others founded parkour in France in the 1980s and played key roles in parkour going mainstream in the 1990s and early 2000s. In its two decades of mainstream existence, parkour has established itself as one of the fastest growing sports in the world.

Although parkour is growing, it has barely had time to organize itself on a national level, much less an international one. This year, Parkour UK was formally recognized by UK Sport, the first such parkour organization to gain national recognition.

But many don't trust the founders now that they've partnered with outsiders. Holly Thorpe, an associate professor at the University of Waikato who studies action sports, told VICE Sports "many in the parkour community feel betrayed" by Belle and Pierreire and others who have aligned with FIG.

When asked for comment regarding their efforts in Parkour, a FIG spokesman sent VICE Sports links to previously published press releases and otherwise declined to comment.

But the debate is just starting. There are obvious reasons for FIG to move as quickly as possible to incorporate parkour. The faster it happens, the less time parkour will have to organize its own international body and challenge for ownership. But, perhaps even more importantly, Paris is all but certain to be hosting one of the next two Summer Olympics, most likely in 2024. Surely, the IOC and FIG would love to capitalize on the Summer Olympics being held in parkour's home country.

These are the types of considerations—hosting televised competitions, Olympic participation, and commercial viability—that parkour enthusiasts generally eschew, which goes back to something Minogue said during our interview. To him, this is about parkour's right to self-determination. Although FIG claims to respect parkour's traditions and understand the philosophy, its own actions belie that message. In trying to absorb parkour, FIG is violating one of parkour's central virtues. No matter what the environment, each person determines their own path.

How Gymnastics Is Trying To Take Over Parkour And Make It An Olympic Sport published first on http://ift.tt/2pLTmlv