You might have to bear with me on this one...
I find myself wondering what the fascination is with things that aren't there, inside a universe that already doesn't exist. I tend to see this a lot with popular fictional stories, like Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, and a lot of anime series. There is this obsession among some fan groups that two or more characters of the same gender (and sometimes different genders, or in the case of Hermione and Crookshanks, different species) are madly in love with each other, even if, in the universe created by the author or authors, there is no evidence that these two are in any way attracted to each other.
And I feel terrible thinking this, because it's not like I don't write fanfiction myself. It's not like I haven't already created fictional things that become even more untrue because they take place in someone else's fiction.
Okay, if I try to break this down too much, it's going to be longer than you can stand, so I'll try to make it as simple as possible for the sake of my brain. Authors, artists, and the like create fictional universes that, of course, don't exist except in the imagination of the creator and the one viewing the creation.
Fanfiction then becomes an interesting phenomenon where you create a false reality inside of an already false reality. For some, the initial fictional world cannot even exist to them unless they accept the fictional aspects that they created to fit into it, though this tends to be an extreme case.
Fiction inside of fiction makes my head spin, even though I'm guilty of all of the above myself.
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2 comments:
The thing is, the difference between fanfiction and good fanfiction comes from how a writer handles the universe they're writing in. If people are getting thrown together who have nothing to do with each other, no history or chemistry with each other; are being written too far out of character; are being put into situations way outside of canon-- that makes for bad fanfiction. That's just called original fiction. Writing good fanfiction is a matter of working within the constraints of a canon that already exists, with the details you already know about, and then interpreting it in a new way; taking those characters somewhere they could conceivably go but haven't yet.
(Joss Whedon, Russell T. Davies-- ultimate fanboys.)
In this sense, I don't know if I'd say it's a false reality existing in a false reality. Taken in the context of itself, the 'fictive dream' can be very real, should be real. Fanfiction should conceivably be able to exist within the storyline it comes from, thereby being part of that particular reality, thereby being 'real' within its own context.
Courage, Jack -
I think you've really hit on an aspect of postmodern writing in general when you say, "writing good fanfiction is a matter of working within the constraints of a canon that already exists, with the details you already know about, and then interpreting it in a new way" - a lot of writers that are considered postmodern do exactly that. This is especially true after modernism exhausted the advancement/possibilities of literary form.
Rachel, you're definitely onto something with bringing up fanfiction. In a way, lots of fiction considered postmodern is a type of fanfiction, because writers are riffing off of/sampling other writers and plots. Look at Wide Sargasso Sea - written from the point of view of the madwoman from Jane Eyre. Or Grendel, written from the Beowulf monster's point of view. Or, all of Kathy Acker's work, like Don Quixote, which we'll be reading. The idea is that nothing "new" is really possible anymore, progress as a value is over - let's re-interpret what we have, with irony, parody, politics, new emotions, or previously marginalized point of view.
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