thread: 2005-07-05 : Setting and Source Material
On 2005-07-11, Emily Care wrote:
Hey Vincenzo,I'm late to the party here, but there's part of this I want to comment on: fanfic as analogous to strict fetishization of the subject material. This is a simplification that doesn't hold up, and is a side issue that is detrimental to the point you're making.
Thanks to spending some time with Sarah this week, I've gained some sense of the mores of fanfic. With only my limited understanding, I can already see that it is a much more fully developed world of fiction than it might seem off the cuff. You say that any use of setting material will either be slavish or critical of the original, and I think that, in fact, the complexity of approaches would really surprise you. Just as it is entirely possible for people to use setting as a springboard for creative expression of whatever stripe, so too can a pre-existing cannon become an elaborate set of constraints that the people writing within it's strictures use to develop entirely new, but compatible storylines and engage in sophisticated new narratives. The authors may also comment on the original and real world issues etc. But the approach of the authors need not be critical of the original in order to play with it and extrapolate the source material to natural extensions of the work, or transcend it.
I see two major points you made in this post:
1) that it is a great goal to write rules & mechanics that create structures that help individuals create original setting that address the issues and topics that are important and
2) that truly creative endeavors will diverge in some way from their source material because the creative agents themselves will bring something of their own to it.
But neither of these require the idea that fanfic is by its very nature is non-creatively derivative. Fanfic, fanfic rp, rpg, comics and all other narrative forms can be fruitfully engaged in while using a base text. But do they? And if so why & how? Other good questions to address.
