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derivative works in context
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cofax7, Boing-Boing on Bookshop's Post
From boing-boing comment:
A lot of arguments about fanfic revolve around the idea of the lack of creativity--which is absurd--the lack of quality--because pro novels are uniformly good, let me refer you to Brian Fucking Herbert before you even bother--but this one, this one....
But as soon as it starts to mean something independent of the original product, it ceases to be fanfic and becomes part of wider culture.
No, it ceases to be fanfic when authors can legally publish it and potentially get paid for it. Diane Duane's Spock's World had exactly as much context to wider culture as D'Alaire's Voyager fic Word Painter.
Cofax goes into the context bit here, which I agree with and keep thinking I want to add to, but it's more complicated than that.
Derivative works already mean something independent of the original product; that's why they were written. So it comes back to the context issue; a derivative work isn't fanfic if it can stand alone without context.
I could say this; all fiction requires context.
I could say this; some fiction requires more context than others.
I could use this: tell me that Apocalypse Now would work if you were not American, did not know the military existed, and lived on the moon. Fiction accesses context consciously and unconsciously all the time, from general cultural context to historical context to language context--Bastard Out of Carolina, hard Southern: Mairelon the Magician, cockney: Ghost Story, very British. The Yellow Wallpaper requires knowing about the treatment of women by society and the patriarchy in the nineteenth century; Raj needs a basic understanding of India's state under British rule and the effects of colonialism.
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samdonne's Your Cowboy Days Are Over requires some understanding of colonialism and Stargate: Atlantis.
At some point, someone needs to just admit it; it's not about context, and in some ways, it's not even about copyright; it's the subculture around fanfic that makes it unacceptable. Derivative fiction that comes out of mainstream is literary and critical and meaningful and art; derivative fiction that comes out of fanfic communities isn't.
Or as one poster put it:
Yeah. I miss coffee right now.
ETA: Link corrected.
cofax7, Boing-Boing on Bookshop's PostFrom boing-boing comment:
If fanfic wants to be something that expresses a love of / obsession with a particular cultural product and reinforces a shared, often subcultural, identity built around it - which is surely, what fanfic is - then it is unlikely to have much impact beyond that. But as soon as it starts to mean something independent of the original product, it ceases to be fanfic and becomes part of wider culture. Exactly like most of the things on this list, whatever their origins.
A lot of arguments about fanfic revolve around the idea of the lack of creativity--which is absurd--the lack of quality--because pro novels are uniformly good, let me refer you to Brian Fucking Herbert before you even bother--but this one, this one....
But as soon as it starts to mean something independent of the original product, it ceases to be fanfic and becomes part of wider culture.
No, it ceases to be fanfic when authors can legally publish it and potentially get paid for it. Diane Duane's Spock's World had exactly as much context to wider culture as D'Alaire's Voyager fic Word Painter.
Cofax goes into the context bit here, which I agree with and keep thinking I want to add to, but it's more complicated than that.
Derivative works already mean something independent of the original product; that's why they were written. So it comes back to the context issue; a derivative work isn't fanfic if it can stand alone without context.
I could say this; all fiction requires context.
I could say this; some fiction requires more context than others.
I could use this: tell me that Apocalypse Now would work if you were not American, did not know the military existed, and lived on the moon. Fiction accesses context consciously and unconsciously all the time, from general cultural context to historical context to language context--Bastard Out of Carolina, hard Southern: Mairelon the Magician, cockney: Ghost Story, very British. The Yellow Wallpaper requires knowing about the treatment of women by society and the patriarchy in the nineteenth century; Raj needs a basic understanding of India's state under British rule and the effects of colonialism.
And
samdonne's Your Cowboy Days Are Over requires some understanding of colonialism and Stargate: Atlantis.At some point, someone needs to just admit it; it's not about context, and in some ways, it's not even about copyright; it's the subculture around fanfic that makes it unacceptable. Derivative fiction that comes out of mainstream is literary and critical and meaningful and art; derivative fiction that comes out of fanfic communities isn't.
Or as one poster put it:
I read (and watch, and listen to) plenty of things that aren't pushing any artistic boundaries. But I don't pretend it's anything more than popcorn, and for the most part the producers don't pretend it's anything more than popcorn.
Yeah. I miss coffee right now.
ETA: Link corrected.
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*curious* Which part?
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Also, who is D'Alaire and why are our works supposed to be equally contextual? Or whatever. :)
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The long version began with a series of LJ entries by professional authors criticizing fanfic as analogous to rape, creative bankruptcy, and possibly murder, though I missed part of it.
BoingBoing picked it up and comments there were quoted here, including this one:
But as soon as it starts to mean something independent of the original product, it ceases to be fanfic and becomes part of wider culture.
So in response, I cited Spock's World as a professionally published derivative novel that is as relevant to wider culture as
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Erm, sorry to leap in, but this is one of my favorite topics!
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(sigh) Meanwhile, I see we're celebrating the Liminalia again. (What, in May??) Somebody please call me when we successfully define the boundary between profic and fanfic. (This does keep coming up cyclically, kind of like sunspots). Meanwhile, I'll just be off writing, you know, ...stuff. :)
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Retrospectively, I might have seemed hostile, but it was more restrained panic; to understate the case dramatically, Spock's World and related might have been somewhat influential in my Trek fannishness. Earlier pro authors that posted about this negatively didn't matter to me; this is the first time that, for me, it mattered.
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And for my part, "somewhat influential", however understated, is reward enough. In the final analysis I'm an entertainer, and if people got entertained by SW, that's good enough for me. (Apparently the writers of the new ST movie got entertained as well: I hear they sometimes passed out chunks of SW to the actors along with script pages, to help establish context.)
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I don't know if you know how hugely influential your Star Trek novels are and how much they influenced how I view Trek, or for that matter, how they influenced most people who are Trek fans, and that I've used them very often to recruit people into Trek fannishness. They're amazing and among the few novels period I've bought (more than once; I'm hard on my books) in hardback when possible because above and beyond being Trek novels, they're amazing in and of themselves. And I've used them as supplementary canon when I write Trek fanfic as well (and directly credited when used).
Thank you for that.
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I talk in a reply to Seperis about the incredible ST fan novels by Jane Land which had an incredible context/connect to wider culture (http://seperis.livejournal.com/821824.html?thread=24329280#t24329280), and that I think the idea from the comment S. quotes (that fanfic is in some hermetically sealed fan chamber and other derivative works are somehow connected to wider culture (whatever that means)) is (prof speak) problematic to say the least.
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Must say, though, that I have yet to hear a satisfactory answer to the ("original [sole] [inspired] author"'s) most basic query to the ficcing fandom: "Where were you when Page One was blank?" ...Mostly people edge toward the exits, hiding their con badges and muttering under their breaths.
No reasonable person (IMO) could necessarily assume that fanfic was automatically plagiarism. I've been down that road, almost five decades back now: I know better. But certainly primacy of creation -- of a universe, of characters -- requires some acknowledgement, some respect for the person who stared at their Page One and then pushed through the shivers and the daily difficulties to the other side. It would be nice if there was room for us Original Creators (sic) to be acknowledged, at least to our faces, at the very least as primum inter pares.
(wry and somewhat resigned look) But many of us won't hold our breaths.
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It would be nice if there was room for us Original Creators (sic) to be acknowledged, at least to our faces, at the very least as primum inter pares.
If most of us had the opportunity to talk to the original author that we base fanfic on without the worrisome zombie problem showing up, we would. As a fanfic author I'm also a meta writer; the fic I write is my conversation not only with the community I belong to, but with the original text I based fic from, with myself, with the world I live in. To have that conversation with the original author as well isn't something many of us would avoid, as in, we would throw ourselves at it excitedly and devote thousands of words of discussion and argument and enlightenment and sheer excitement--we could say you wrote this and it meant something to me; it was amazing/confusing/enraging/exhilarating/shocking. Thank you. Here is what I thought about it. Here's what I wrote about it. Here is what it meant to me.
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Fandom taught me what I wish I'd learned in my Lit classes about multiple interpretation; not only the author is dead (that in itself was a revolutionary concept) but the desirability of multiple interpretations of a text instead of reference to a single or a few canon ones.
The first paper I read at ICFA was my reading of Bujold's stealth feminism (my term); I didn't realize she'd be there as respondent. I sat there the whole time controlling the urge to throw up, read my paper, and was immensely relieved that she didn't immediately tell me I failed, failed, failed
You know, I wonder sometimes how I'd feel if the author actually interacted with my interpretation of a story; in fandom, it's usually not done directly (passive aggressively in locked LJ entries, yes, but direct, no). Most review boards don't allow it, and I understand the reasons for it and they're very good ones; on the other, I wish there was a way it was possible without it turning into--well, a situation exactly like that which made those rules about authors on review boards necessary.
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Now see what you've done. You've left me with the image of zombie authors staggering down the halls at some zombie-author-con somewhere, moaning and pursuing the terrified fandom, breaking up the panels, barging through the bar... (where doubtless no one would notice that anything unusual was going on, just another con bar, never mind that part of the image...)
Meanwhile, it would be fun to talk with one's fans about their in-your-universe fic... but there are difficulties with this: legal ones. Myself I do not read, for example, any YW fanfic whatsoever, for two reasons: (a) I'm terrified that I might accidentally internalize someone else's character business or whatever and use it in a book: it's my goal to make sure that whatever goes into an original YW novel has come solely out of my head. Think of it as my style of gameplay in the "Great Game" of prose creation. But there is also (b): my legal advisers have told me in no uncertain terms to stay away from YW fanfic, in order to avoid the possibility of lawsuits and similar legal complications. (While I was still working with Trek, the same advice came down as regarded reading any Trek fiction whatsoever except what had been published.)
And (a) and (b) taken together mean I have to forego the pleasure of such discussions. Which is a shame, as the whole bunch of us would probably have a lot of fun.
Ah well.
(Zombie authors. Argh.)
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Writing off the same canon means the writer and reader's interpretation can't be anything but equal; writing in response to each other is another form of conversation that's much more widespread and much, much more fascinating to watch; what we carry with us not only from the fandom we're in but the ones we were in before becomes added to the current fandom. Sometimes, it's complicated thoughts about colonialism, feminism, the effects of homophobia, and spirituality; sometimes, it's leather pants. And by sometimes, I mean always. We always, always bring the leather pants. Community involvement in interpretation is, at least for me, part of the point of writing fic; we're all asking and answering questions every time we post a story, both our own and those of other people and other stories.
It's a different type of interaction than professional authors have with their readers, and I'm not sure the same interaction is even desirable, much less possible (and God knows I wouldn't bother with most of the professional authors I've come in contact with) because the relationship cannot ever be equal, even in the realms of dead (not zombie) authors. And in professional fiction, there can't be the same encouragement of community interaction and synergy; there's no way to translate community interaction and discussion into professional work.
If it's any consolation, the zombie metaphor is officially haunting me as well; it also is making me stare at amazon's Romero movies thoughtfully. This cannot end well for my credit card.
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I think most fanfiction does give credit to the original author(s) keeping in mind that the vast majority of fanfic is written about film and television shows, with book fandoms getting huge boost when the film/television show/series comes out--was a book fan of LOTR since 1965, became a film fan when I saw the first film 45 times before it left the theatres). Credit is given in that way, just as your acknowledgment of D.D. Fontana's role in the creation of the Vulcans is at the start of your novels. That acknowledgment (and love) is not something I see fandom lacking in (at least not in the circles I move in).
But by original author, primary of creation--well.......the Romantic myth I'm referring to is that "original art" is the "sole product" of the author's Imagination (the Romantics which were my major literary influence as an undergrad were prone to caps as well)--that it all springs like Athena from the forehead of the (male) author. That was the myth even though I've read Byron's early verses which were all imitatios of published work of his time.
A person, a writer, sits alone in front of a blank page, but in that writer's head are all the stories all the texts all the influences of cultural narratives, in ways that make any claim to complete originality (i.e. "nobody ever wrote about this fantasy land before) spurious. I teach creative writing (am one of the few teachers I know who allow fanfic). I tend more toward Tolkien's pot of story (which I'm certainly paraphrasing!) than the idea of an imagination uninfluenced by any others.
I think we probably agree more than we disagree--it's my rush in phrasing. But the idea that an author (as opposed to writer!) can control how readers respond to her creations, or that the author is the sole authority on the single meaning of a text (as Anne Rice is notably on record as trying to do) is a different thing: for example, I read Éowyn as queer before I knew the words (I was born in a small town in Idaho during the 1950s), and I know Tolkien didn't "intent" that (but I didn't, and don't care). So I write essays on queering her, and I write fanfic about her (acknowledging in both genres that Tolkien 'created' her (although her Valkyrie roots are clear to all, as Leslie Donovan has written about brilliantly).
I shall now sit on myself because I definitely am prone to tl;dr, especially when nervous around an author whose work I adore (and for whom I've never felt the least need to write fanfic because....well.....your work satisfies me as a reader so incredibly perfectly that I have never felt impelled to do anything beyond read it!).
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Re the Romantic myth: We're on the same page here in the sense of agreeing that nothing comes out of nowhere, or merely out of one head. Every story has antecedents, either in earlier Story or the prose/-aic business of daily life. Yet it seems to me that the inventor/originator of a group of characters and their mutual dynamic brings something to the process that no one else will or can. It's not just about having been there first (though this can sometimes be part of it, I think); it's also to do with being present at / part of the creation or forging of the characters and the adjustments the creator makes in designing them so that they strike the maximum sparks off each other.
Maybe here the recipe paradigm is useful. Recent copyright law (springing from a suit brought by the great cookbook writer Richard Olney) has established that while the ingredients of a recipe cannot be copyrighted -- you know, the list up at the top: 2 cups of flour, 1 package of yeast, 1/4 cup melted butter, etc) -- the description of how to put the dish together can. That part is taken to be the voice of the cook, as it were, or the chef: the unique talent who, after assembling the ingredients, realized that you had to melt that butter first and incorporate it with the yeast batter to make the crumpets rise correctly. (This being what I was occupied with about an hour ago, as if you couldn't guess.) :) Others will later make the recipe and tweak it around to their own preferences, of course. But the amount of tweaking may turn it more into pancakes than crumpets.
(Probably I should get out of culinary mode now. It's dangerous for me to get hungry after midnight, especially when there's ice cream in the freezer...)
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*drools happily at your analogy*
I did not know that about recipes and copyright law -- thank you!
I think it is an excellent analogy for fanfiction -- that the tweaking may turn the original crumpets into a whole variety of other baked goods (when my baking collapses, I blame humidity; no doubt humidity esp. in Texas could be blamed for bad fic). Much better than the "car theft" or "plagiarism" or "mugging" analogy used by some other writers.
And as I said before, I think fandom/fan fiction does acknowledge the original/originary creator through disclaimers and a host of other rhetorical framing devices (because while I happen to subscribe to the author is dead model in terms of who can control or not control interpretation, I think that is much less prevalent in fandom where major creator love is dominant.)
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If it seems that pro authors (and their overzealous champions) are often derided by the fanfiction writers when these discussions occur, that would be because those pro authors tend to start these discussions by (a) insulting the creative work and community of fanfiction writers, using unimaginative and generally uninformed and thoughtless arguments and (b) asserting that a fanwriter who makes the pro author's readers think differently about the pro author's work has done the pro author some harm. So, why exactly should we respect people presenting themselves to us as rude, foolish, thought police?
In a larger context, when talking about Western media fandom, the most frequent objects of fanfiction writing are film and television. Acknowledging any one person as first among equals doesn't make sense in this context. Even at a bare minimum, the writer, director, DP, editor, and actors are the authors of these collective works. The work, the canon, is the thing we can sensibly name, not a person.
And as for your question, "Where [was I] when Page One was blank?", what does that have to do with anything? I didn't write any of your words, but neither did you write any of mine. When I post the story, your work is cited, in the manner customary to our community, such that a member of the community could go back and find your work to experience it themself.
If I want to talk about how well you write or what a nice person you are or how clever and laudable your thoughts seem, I will do that.
Writing fanfiction doesn't actually mean that I think you write well, or that you are a nice person, or that your thoughts are clever and worth upholding. It means you wrote something that gave me some thoughts that I wanted to share with third parties, and, so long as I tell the third parties that my idea was sparked by your work, I see nothing in law or custom to indicate I should approach you with head bowed and hosannas on the tongue.
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Anybody approaches me with bowed head, and I'll assume they dropped some change and get up to help them look for it. As for any hosannas, I'm afraid my reaction would be very muted until I was somewhere private, at which point I'd have to fall over snorting. I'm entirely too aware of the profoundly clay-y state of the feet of a lot of creative people. My own not least among them.
Respect for the creator of a work or a series, though, that is nice: when it happens. In the ficcing commmunity, it doesn't always. And the wise writer-with-a-fandom eventually learns not to expect it, as there are always voices raised to tell you how you should be doing what you're doing a lot better, and they don't usually bother to moderate their language much. Now, when I walked into Gene Roddenberry's office with Michael Reaves to pitch what eventually became "Where No One Has Gone Before", sure, I was absolutely thinking, "Here's a chance to add something that I think this universe, which I have loved a ton for my whole creative life, has been missing." But no way I was going to rub his nose in it. And (at the prose end of Trek rather than the screen end) when I found out that people had been sending Gene mail that boiled down to, "Diane Duane's Romulans are much better than yours!", I was mortified. Not even so much at the possibility that somebody at the Franchise might get the idea that I was putting people up to it. But whatever else might have been said about Roddenberry at the time or has been said since, there is no arguing the fact that he fought the fight to get the original series past NBC and keep it alive, against unusually daunting odds and at great cost to his own quality of life. As someone who's been involved in increasing amounts of TV work in recent years, I've been developing a healthy sense of what it takes out of you: and Gene deserved serious, serious respect for what he'd done in getting Trek started.
As regards the use of origin disclaimers, I understand the intent of those and appreciate them. But in the past I've been alerted to instances when that custom's honored and then (as it were) honored in the breach immediately thereafter: for example, "these characters are from DD's YW universe, but she doesn't really know how to use them, so watch while I show how it should be done." Or sometimes the disclaimer has been accompanied by phrases that have factored down to "And now that I've got that out of the way: I really love this universe, and therefore it's mine now to do with as I please." (I have to say that, happily, this kind of thing is far less common for me than it is for some other far better-known writers. Nonetheless, it grates, and sometimes grates more when I'm considering those other writers' reactions than when it comes down to mine. I can just imagine how it must have been for J. K. Rowling -- who had to suffer a ton more for her art, getting started, than I ever did -- when she had to sit in a courtroom and watch YouTube video of the young man who was saying to a crowded room at some con, "Jo's left the universe. It's ours now." O RLY?) This is the kind of thing that can spark the auctorial Where Were You When Page One Was Blank response. I find myself staring at that damn blank page -- either Page One or one of its four or five hundred successors per book -- every single day. And to have the value or validity of that daily battle, as it sometimes seems, just shrugged off or brushed aside, can make you pretty cranky.
(cont'd in next)
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Also, originality is not an indicator of literary quality or entertainment value.
That reads really differently to me than to you. To me it reflects that, Rowling is done writing about the Harry Potter universe for the general public. And thousands, possibly millions, of people all over the world are not done writing in that universe; they still have hundreds of millions of words of story to go, using those characters and settings. She's had her say, now her readers are having theirs.
As for fanfiction being written which goes places an author never would have gone in the original, well…reader response theory is forty-odd years old. If a writer is upset by, disturbed by, or just unprepared for readers understanding their text differently than they intended it, then writing for publication would seem to be a poor lifestyle choice. But in my experience, no copies of the story I wrote have ever been altered, much less harmed, by someone thinking something about them I didn't intend, or even when I intended the audience to have the exact opposite thought to what was expressed in the story inspired by mine.
FYI, Warner Bros., Bloomsbury, and Rowling have been unsuccessful in preventing the dissemination of adult Harry Potter material. Restrictedsection.org, which received a C&D on this matter, is password-protected and not indexed by search engines, but is still available to anyone who cares to attest that they are over the age of 18.
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...At such times the temptation to remind people that they would not have these toys to play with if you had not built them, at great cost of time, effort and quality of life, becomes pretty strong. Now, I've seen people say, "Wow, if I ever got anything published and people wanted to write fanfic in it, I'd be delighted." My response to that is, "May it happen to you, as soon as possible. And then... then we'll see how long you stay delighted." Because sooner or later such writers, unable to resist the temptation, will read their fans' fic... and find characters in bed with each other (literally or figuratively) who in the creator's mind should never, never have been there, or doing things they never should have done.
The key phrase being, of course, "in the creator's mind." The mileage in other minds will naturally vary. The question becomes one of how wildly. Whether what a fan writer does with your creations is brilliant or tawdry, substandard or creatively outstanding, when for the first time while reading a fanfic you hit one of those situations or occurrences that (for good or ill) you would never have created, it's like going downstairs in your house for the millionth time and finding that someone has come along and added a step to the staircase... or removed one. It's very like the feeling of utter uncertainty you get the first time you experience an earthquake, when the solid earth suddenly ain't so solid any more. And the more successful you are, the more frequent the earthquakes get. Is this pleasant? No. Is this par for the course these days, something that just comes with a certain level of success and can't be avoided? Seems so. And even when you stop reading fanfic (as I did some time ago, first because I was afraid I might accidentally/unconsciously lift some concept of somebody else's, and then had the choice strengthened into policy on legal advice), does the concept of what they're doing with your inventions out there give you pause? Oh yeah.
Anyway. I wouldn't have been much of a psych nurse back in the day if I hadn't understood that love does make people do surprising things... often including the (groundless) assertion of ownership of the loved, sometimes in very toxic modes. And I do still understand the impulse now. But the understanding makes those occasional assertions of ownership by those who didn't do the hard work of inventing a universe no less easy to shrug off: especially when the assertions are accompanied by additional claims of moral right, not at all in the usual droit moral sense. The smart writer learns with time to get philosophical about this... as most of the time, realistically, there's nothing else to be done.
Though it has to be said that special cases exist -- and if things go the way it's looking like they will, the YW universe will become one of them. At the moment I have no choice but to be philosophical about what kind of YW fanfic people write when it doesn't chime with my preferences. But soon enough will come the time when the YW books start being filmed. And once I get into bed with Big Business, the rules will inevitably shift. My preference (for example) that the writership stay away from sexual themes involving my young characters will almost certainly no longer be merely a preference, but something the producers/studio will insist on as a way to protect the Young Wizards brand from becoming contaminated by legally toxic perceptions and issues (since the underage of the target audience is implicit in the intellectual property). At that point the position will doubtless become very similar to the way things are handled in the Potterverse now: tacit permission of fanfic as long as it stays within certain boundaries, vigorous action (including legal if necessary) when it strays outside them.
Am I wild about this? Not particularly. Would it be nicer if ficcers honored the series creator's wishes regarding her creation out of respect for those wishes and without enforcement being involved? Sure. Is this going to happen? (bwahahahahaha) No. Here, as in so many other places, life isn't nice.
... And now back to Page One.
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:-D
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