You raise some really interesting points,
Alanon! I haven't thought about comparing fanfic to nonfiction approaches to engaging with a work, but now that you point it out, I agree that there are lots of similarities, and that the differences in how we treat them don't make sense.
I'll try applying this to the concrete examples mentioned here:
Quote:
Originally Posted by leebase
What if....Donald Trump (or if you like him, pick someone you despise) decided to use your characters, your universe, to promote his campaign?
What if a pro-abortion group...or an anti abortion advocate....used your work to promote their agenda?
What if someone made your characters "gay" in a gay advocacy way? Or....did the opposite...but your characters and universe into a morality play against homosexuality?
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I can write an article arguing that, given their actions in the books, Harry Potter would endorse my preferred political candidate or cause, and Voldemort would support the opponent using dishonest Facebook ads and political violence. And I can write a fanfic where this happens. Morally, these seem equivalent, and in my opinion, both are OK. (Of course, if Rowling disagrees, she might answer publicly, so it might be a risky thing to do.)
Interestingly enough, if I switch medium, and imagine a billboard or a TV spot with the same message, it feels iffy, regardless of whether I use the "argument based on analysis of the text" or "fanfic" approach. I'm not sure why. Intellectually, the medium shouldn't affect the morals of using a fictional character this way, but my gut feeling disagrees.
Quote:
Originally Posted by leebase
Or....simply....what is you had plans and story ideas in your mind that you hadn't written yet, and someone else writes fan fic that gets popular enough that YOUR story plans are no longer compatible?
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I'm sure this is unpleasant for the author. I'm thinking of that time fans got so angry about Arthur Conan Doyle killing off Sherlock Holmes that he felt pressured to revive him. And when fans complained about the lack of LGBT+ representation in the Harry Potter books, and Rowling responded by declaring that Dumbledore was secretly gay and had a thing with Grindelwald in his youth, it just never appears in the books or films. And the "Team Jacob" and "Team Edward" stuff, where some fans had strong feelings about who Bella should end up with in Twilight, and no matter what Meyer chose, she'd disappoint a significant part of her fanbase. And the fan campaigns "Give Captain America a boyfriend" and "Give Elsa a girlfriend", where the creators decided to (presumably) ignore the campaigns and go with their original plans for the characters.
Another example: Many fans were disappointed with the ending of the Marvel film "Endgame". I've seen articles arguing that 1) key characters acted in ways that were inconsistent with how they have been portrayed in earlier films, 2) it's bad storytelling because long story arcs were disrupted, 3) it's problematic in (among other things) the ways that it treated female characters. I've also seen a lot of fanfic rewriting the ending in different ways to deal with these objections, for instance revealing that a key character had been replaced with a shapeshifter, and the other characters in the story going "Oh, that explains why he was acting so uncharacteristically". Again, to me these seem morally equivalent, and completely OK.
And sure, the creators probably disagree with the criticism, and might feel that the proposed changes would completely destroy everything they were aiming for artistically. *shrug* Tough luck. I hope noone would advocate that literary criticism should be censored to protect the feelings of authors, and I fail to see how this is different.
If you write something that becomes popular, a lot of people will engage with it -- not just by reading, but also by thinking about your work, discussing it, criticising it, dressing up like characters from it, and having feelings about it. Some of that engagement may push a story in a direction the author doesn't want it to go, or interpret it in ways that the author dislikes. I get that this can be stressful. But I don't see that engagement can -- or should -- be avoided (unless it descends into harassment, that is of course never OK).
When we're talking about the public engaging with works of art, and how that impacts creators of art, I don't see that writing fanfic is morally different from writing a review, writing a an article, or creating a #GiveCaptainAmericaABoyfriend-hashtag. If an author demanded that no reviewers should criticise how they handled LGBT+ issues in their work, we'd rightly laugh at them. I'd view an author who demanded that noone write gay fanfic of their work the same way.
But even while I argue - at length - that fanfic is morally equal to other engagement, I find that I'm not completely consistent, because I still feel that fanfic is only OK if it's noncommerical.
OK to do for profit, IMHO:
Not OK to do for profit, IMHO:
- Publish a fanfic of a work that's under copyright
I'm not sure I can defend the difference, though.