First, the brainy and still making my head spin around with the ideas: Why there is no Jewish Narnia from the brand new Jewish Review of Books. The author, Michael Weingrad, examines why there is no Jewish fantasy author on par with Tolkein and Lewis, particularly given the depth and history of Jewish mysticism.
His answers and ideas are so thoughtful and interesting I am still pondering, and I had to share. If you’re a fantasy or science fiction fan, this article looks at the genres from allegorical perspectives, and draws some conclusions as to why Jewish writers number very few among the fantasy genre:
Some readers may have already expressed surprise at my assertion that Jews do not write fantasy literature. Haven’t modern Jewish writers, from Kafka and Bruno Schulz to Isaac Bashevis Singer and Cynthia Ozick, written about ghosts, demons, magic, and metamorphoses? But the supernatural does not itself define fantasy literature, which is a more specific genre. It emerged in Victorian England, and its origins are best understood as one of a number of cultural salvage projects that occurred in an era when modern materialism and Darwinism seemed to drive religious faith from the field. Religion’s capacity for wonder found a haven in fantasy literature….
To put it crudely, if Christianity is a fantasy religion, then Judaism is a science fiction religion. If the former is individualistic, magical, and salvationist, the latter is collective, technical, and this-worldly. Judaism’s divine drama is connected with a specific people in a specific place within a specific history. Its halakhic core is not, I think, convincingly represented in fantasy allegory. In its rabbinic elaboration, even the messianic idea is shorn of its mythic and apocalyptic potential. Whereas fantasy grows naturally out of Christian soil, Judaism’s more adamant separation from myth and magic render classic elements of the fantasy genre undeveloped or suspect in the Jewish imaginative tradition. Let us take two central examples: the magical world and the idea of evil.
Christianity has a much more vivid memory and even appreciation of the pagan worlds which preceded it than does Judaism.
If you like a little analysis, comparative religion and discussion of world building and fantastic allegory with your coffee, enjoy that. I’m still pondering and would love to hear what you think.
From the brainful to the bodaciously awesome, we have one link containing a whollle lot of awesome: bid early, bid often in the 2010 Brenda Novak Diabetes Auction. Bid Early, Bid Often. I have one item up for bid, an author interview that may or may not create a lifetime of minty-fresh breath.
And finally: brainful, bodaciously awesome, and… Bwuhr? Everything I need to know about the internet, I learned from Fandom Wank. Today’s lesson, fanfic!
Fanfic is a hot topic, and no, not the kind where you shop for really tiny t shirts and shorts that require a bikini wax. Some authors hate it, some loathe it, and Diana Gabaldon wants to set it on fire. I much prefer Jim Butcher’s approach, which uses Creative Commons licenses to delineate what belongs to whom and wherefore and why and whatnot.
LauraBryannan wisely states in the thread that, “If something is popular, there will be a fandom created for it.” Is this the wrong time to confess I totally wrote Archie/Betty fanfic based on Archie comics? Probably. I can’t believe he ended up with Veronica. I think I might have to go find that middle school notebook of mine.
Either that, or I need some hot Jewish fantasy fanfic, like, Right Now. Who’s in?
@John J and @Ann Somerville nailed my sentiments exactly. I started writing in fanfic simply to see if I could write at all. I needed the pre-made characters, setting and world – heck even the dialogue rhythms I knew so well – to support me as I explored the basics of telling a story. Before long I found myself adding new characters, and those characters became more interesting to me than the original fanfic ones. Now, the idea of writing fanfic seems boring because I’d rather focus on my own things. But without that beginning, I never would have began writing in the first place. Fanfic is the writer’s equivalent to those little push toys babies use to learn to walk. Pretty soon they realize they can stand on their own two feet and don’t need them anymore.
Too, even the probably-false praise decent fanfic can earn is a huge boost to a fledgling writer’s ego. Putting something like that out in the world is a major risk. Doing so with the cushion of a pre-made fanbase who is mostly happy for stories in which the spelling and grammar are decent is necessary to build up that confidence needed to send your babies to the big bad meanies in the real publishing world.
Published writers who get their panties in a twist over fanfic really do turn me off. What I wouldn’t do to reach that point in my career where people love my work so much they are inspired to keep my characters alive any way they can. As long as no one is trying to cash in or claim ownership, then what’s the big deal? They should be grateful for the free publicity their characters are getting while they are busy writing the next book.
Argh! Would people please stop doing that? Just because someone has an egotistical, speshul snowflake freakout on the internet does not mean they’re autistic!
And you’re not autistic if you’ve “never developed adequate social skills”; you’re just anti-social and possibly even a jerk. It’s not that autistics don’t develop social skills, so much as we lack the means necessary to have them instinctively. While I struggle at times, my social skills are overall quite adequate when I need them to be, mainly because I’ve learned. I’ve had to. When someone smiles at you, you smile back; I don’t have that instinct. I have to remind myself to do it.
I don’t think Gabaldon has been in the business enough years to be one of those authors who could’ve made it in spite of a complete lack of social skills. Even if she was autistic and didn’t know it, she would have had to develop some. But honestly, I don’t think that’s her problem. Generally, I don’t think that’s the problem of most speshul snowflakes on the internet.
So I (and likely other autists) will thank you kindly not to pull the autism card when this sort of thing happens. We’ve got enough problems with Internet Aspies running around.
P.S. Sorry if that sounded a bit harsh, but this riles me terribly. Being autistic =/= egotistical, mean-spirited, stupid, greedy, ignorant, and/or etc. etc. etc. Those traits are, fortunately, doled out on a person to person basis.
Diana Gabaldon’s rant points out that she does not really understand what fan fiction is about. I would point everyone to this post that has tons of examples of well regarded published fanfiction including Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next series and the musical Rent.
Let’s not forget that Ms. Gabaldon has previously stated that she based the character of Jamie on a Doctor Who character.
Also, her argument about writing fanfiction then changing the names is baffling. A character and world should be unique enough that just changing the names is not enough to erase any familiarity. By that logic I should be fine writing about Maggie James who travels with a ChronoDuke called The Physician in his marvelous ship that looks like a telephone box.
All in all authors like Jim Butcher have a much more rational and realistic stance on fanfic.
I’d like to step sideways on this discussion about Christian/Jewish fantasy fiction with this idea: Smart Bitches are looking for Love—and we want to read Romance. We want our favorite authors to give us romance that leads to undying love in all it’s incredible diversity. We want authors to introduce us to romance that shows love in all ways; we want stories of sexy, emotional and often spiritual experiences as evidence of true love between a couple of human beings, no matter their gender, or human/other beings, no matter their furry/fanged or alien otherness. WE WANT LOVE!
And we are getting it. Romance is THE best selling thing around in most cultures (off the top of my head here) because we NEED to believe in love. Religions preach that, but often don’t act it out except in bizarre ways that often look like intolerance or hatred.
I believe that romance writers and readers are helping human beings to IMAGINE a world of love, where love triumphs, where sex is GOOD, not some version of original sin caused by a woman, where women are strong BECAUSE they LOVE, even when thay also kick butt, fight evil with guns etc.
Second point about myths: As soon as oral traditions were supplanted by the alphabet and writing, women were systemically erased from important balancing roles by male scribes, priests etc. In my view, the almost constant and universal bashing of women’s fiction over hundreds of years is part of the analytical, linear thinking of the left brain that developed as more and more people became literate. Literacy is a good thing, but those who invented and practiced it created a world where the positive contributions of half the population were erased or distorted, and historical texts made the the XX chromosome EVIL!
Romance as we Bitches love it today, is, I think, a crucial “underground” rebirth of women’s place in the universe. Someday, when Bitches have righted the balance by expanding the opportunities for women and men to embrace their creative, loving, sexual, accepting and including sides, the world will be in a better place.
For anyone who would like to follow this poorly made argument with some extremely well written and science based discussion of myth/belief/religion, get a copy of The Alphabet Versus the Goddess, by Leonard Shlain, a vascular surgeon whose experience with brain surgery helped him understand the differences between the hemispheres of the brain.
JamiSings said
Fantasy smantasy, I want my Jewish romance novel heroes and heroines!
…May I introduce you to Elinor Lipman? I’d suggest trying The Inn at Lake Devine first.
Thank you, MB! I was starting to despair. My library system is full of Jewish mysteries and Christian romances, but Jewish romance – like I said, only three things come up and two of them aren’t even romances and I’m just not that into Barbara Streisand.
@ JamiSings: Not a book, but have you seen Crossing Delancey? One of the best movies EVAH.
And I’m deferring to the vast knowledge of the bitchery, here, but it seems odd to me that there is not more Jewish romance. Jewish men are teh hot. They respect their mamas and transfer a lot of that to their mates. They embrace the power of an education. They don’t spend their adult years in chest beating rituals of masculinity because when they are thirteen they stand up in front of God and their families and announce, “Today, I am a man.” And they believe it, as does their community.
Plus, in Jewish tradition children are raised to believe that your purpose as a spouse is to serve your spouse. Husband or wife, your role is servant to the other. How awesome is that? And very romantic.
Laurel wrote:
A rich Jewish literary tradition would not have been permitted. This
doesn’t mean there were not any Jewish writers, just that the smart ones
kept to themselves and their communities. Any work they produced would have
been suppressed. Which pretty much sucks.
Tthere’s medieval and Renaissance material in Yiddish, including some interesting takes on Western myths. There’s just not a lot of people with the skills and access to deal with mss. in Yiddish. There are tales about Esther for instance, and even a Middle Scots version of Yiddish in a few mss. But it requires not only a great deal of facility with Yiddish, but a conventional background in medieval paleography, and philology.
B:
You’re right. I didn’t mean to be flippant, but I was and I apologize.
When people behave like Gabaldon, the chick on Amazon, et al, I’m inclined to think there must be a reason besides “she’s an asshole.” Gabaldon’s far from the worst, of course – her little rant reeks of entitlement and self-obsession, but she didn’t melt down in full view of the Internet.
I’ve never understood why anyone would think that an utter disregard for other peoples’ opinions and feelings would be good for a career. Even if you didn’t care about being mean, it would seem counterproductive, so I always figure “gee, X must not realize how this sounds to other people.” But you’re right – it’s much more likely that they just don’t care. Being a self-entitled twit clearly hasn’t hampered Gabaldon or Hoffman or lots of other authors. Maybe success warps authors just like it does movie stars.
I was thinking of my mother in law, and of a friend of a friend, both of whom struggle with personal relationships and frequently cause hurt and offense quite unawares. No one’s ever told them “Your social receptors don’t function properly. You’re not connecting, and people don’t understand that.”
But then, they don’t behave like these authors either so, yeah. You’re right.
JoAnn Chartier wrote:
As soon as oral traditions were supplanted by the alphabet and writing, women were systemically erased from important balancing roles by male scribes, priests etc.
Yeah, no. First of all, romance as a modern literary genre grew out of Medieval romance, and women were the primary readers of medieval romance. The mss. were made for them and quite often, by female scribes and even more often, by female illuminators. Look too at the influence of women like Marie de Champagne on literary genre; look at the works of Marie de France; all of the lais are built around romantic love and passion.
In terms of erasure, yes, it’s harder to find signed works in early texts, and of those it’s harder still to find works by women. But there are a very large number of romances specifically dedicated to and written for women, and romance mss. that were owned and created for women.
I’m quite convinced that more often than not, Anonymous was a woman.
@ Lisa: Yiddish is probably why they survived. That and low levels of literacy until after the printing press was invented and everyone wanted to learn to read…so they could read the Bible, which for the first time was made widely available in native languages.
The Church did Latin, not Yiddish, or they may have taken a more active interest in these mss.
@Laurel – I like your stance on fan fiction! lol
Here is a link that I tried to post yesterday, which got flagged for spam (moi?!) and so I am going to attempt to re-post it now. It is an animation of Diana Gabaldon’s blog entry, with minor revisions. 😉
Bon Apetit
Jim Butcher totally rocks. He and Shannon came and spoke at a teeny tiny 30 person fanfic writing convention I attended a few years ago and they were wonderful.
To this day I am blown away that they were willing to do that.
Of course there’s no Jewish Narnia. C.S. Lewis was a devout Christian who wrote a thinly veiled Christian resurrection story. But, that doesn’t mean there are no Jewish fantasy writers. Check out super heroes. Superman is Jewish, for one. Seriously, most super heroes from the old comic books are Jewish.
My heroine in my science fiction work, Captured, is Jewish, and I plan to write more Jewish heroines and heroes.
Besides, Jewish mysticism is a buried strain in Judaism. Ask most Jews what they think of Kabbalah and they’ll mention Madonna. That’s pop-Kabbalah. It’s like a word of the day calendar or a piece of chocolate. Entertaining, maybe even tasty, but meaningless.
Ok, OK, give Gabaldon a break here guys. I remember fan fiction around Star Trek that was painfully awful. I mean, while you might have daydreamed that Spock would take one look at you and renounce logic for the rest of his days, no no too painful to read porn where he suddenly takes to threesomes with Bones and the ensign. I can’t imagine the pain of an author carefully crafting a complex and sensitive gay character like Lord John to read some drivel where he suddenly discovers he’s “cured” by the love of some virginal, magic who-ha!
If you spend months and months writing and rewriting to get just the right phrase of a conversation and just the right tone in an interaction you might start off on an ill-considered rant that you cringe to read later about someone bumbling like a bull in a china shop through your world. I’m sure she probably wishes now she’d taken the Creative Commons route and even more, wishes she’d hit delete instead of send. The problem with email and the internet is that we make it painful clear to the world when we post something illadvised why we write and re-write dialog before we send it to the publisher!!
I believe the issue with Nora Roberts regarding fan fiction is not the plagiarism issue. There was a huge grouping of fan fiction about 10 years ago that consisted of adaptations of Nora’s books, with literally the character names and locations changed to that of the fictional world (soap operas, I believe). That is considerably more than someone than most fan fiction writers do. In that case, I’m completely on Nora’s side.
As I said on Diana’s website, I write fanfic and original fic. If my sales equaled my fanfic numbers (60,000 unique hits per month, as per the stats of one of the more popular websites), I would be a very happy author indeed.
I know it might be annoying, maybe even painful (although the sensitive artist thing bores me) to pour your heart and soul into a story and then read some ridiculous fanfic about your lovingly crafted characters – b/c joyken is right, there’s some weird, nasty, turgid and ungrammatical crap in fanfic land.
It’s not fun to pour your heart into a story and then watch a reviewer rip it to pieces, either, especially when it seems like the reviewer has a reading comprehension disability or didn’t bother to read the book at all.
But it’s something you just have to live with. If you’re going to create something and then put it out there for all the world to see, you have to be prepared to have it judged (fairly or not), talked about (nicely or not) and maybe (if you’re lucky) serve as inspiration for fanfic. (It’s FANfic, after all – people don’t write fanfic based on books they hate.) The only thing you have a right to not deal with is plagiarism.
But you can’t control the discourse. You can’t tell people how they may or may not speak about your creation. That’s what authors who hate fanfic are doing – they’re trying to control how people talk about their work. I don’t understand why they want to do it or why they think they can.
Now, I do understand concerns like Nora’s, that some goofus who wrote Nora Roberts or JD Robb fanfic will pick up a book and decide Nora stole her idea. Unfortunately crazy people file lawsuits all the time. I don’t know if it’s likely, and I’d like to think such a suit wouldn’t get far.
I don’t know of any authors who’ve actually sued fanfic sites. I know networks and production companies try like hell to keep fanfic about shows off the Internet, but I think they’ve been ineffective so far. Am I wrong?
@joykenn
“I remember fan fiction around Star Trek that was painfully awful. “
I don’t think the quality of fanfiction has anything to do with the morality of fanfiction. Or the motivation, or anything else.
I’ve read pro books which are worse edited, squickier and vastly less entertaining than fanfiction. In fact, if you’re talking about m/m, I’d say most pro stuff struggles to reach the same level of readability and sheer interest that the best fanfiction does. The quality issue is a red herring, and certainly should never be a basis for trashing fanfiction authors or calling them criminals.
Once a book is out, trying to control the reaction of readers or reviewers is a waste of time, intellectually barren. Fanfiction is a reaction of affection, and authors needs to get over the fact they can’t decide which reactions they will allow. I’ve had fanfiction written about my fanfiction, and it was pretty damn horrible, but god, it was amazing that anyone cared that much.
Gabaldon needs to see a doctor about her raging case of authoregoentitlmentitis.
There’s a pretty rich and constant Jewish literary tradition, not all in Yiddish. Sephardic Jews published in both Spanish and Hebrew throughout the Middle Ages. After their expulsion from Spain in 1492 they continued to do so, although their Spanish gradually diverged from the mainstream spoken language to become “ladino” or “judeo-spanish.” (In Amsterdam refugee Sephardic Jews went into publishing in a big way, because Spanish was the lingua franca of the 17th century, but the inquisition’s censorship made publishing in Spain difficult. To this day, “Querido” is one of the major Dutch publishing houses.) A number of Spanish-Jewish writers are absolutely part of the Iberian canon (I’m thinking of Yehuda Ha-Levi here) and much of their non-religious work was love poetry.
That said, I think it’s a striking confirmation of Weingrad’s point that so few Iberian Jews turned to the novelas de caballeria (e.g. sword and sorcery fantasy novels) parodied by Don Quixote. Guzman de Alfarache was written by Mateo Aleman, who I think was a converso (i.e. from a Jewish family that chose conversion rather than expulsion from Spain), but I don’t think he was actually Jewish. And when the historian and poet Daniel Miguel Levi de Barrios started writing profane literature he harked back to Greek myth and called it the “Flor de Apolo.”
I’d add that the best fantasy treatment of golems that I’ve seen comes from Terry Pratchett’s Feet of Clay. (I always cry at the end when Dorfl writes about “words in the heart.”) Pratchett is not Jewish, but the Discworld does a better job than most of incorporating golems (and the “deep down dwarves” in The Fifth Elephant are hysterical, and do seem to recall the orthodox at times).
So I do think Weingrad has a point: Jews who are interested in theology tend to not use fantasy as a medium, but rather turn toward history (past or future).
Sorry for the long post. This has been on my mind lately because of a work-in-progress. (Give me a year and the good luck to find an interested publisher, and I might have a historical romance for you, Jami. 😉
Where did Ma and Pa Kent find a mohel with a kryptonite knife?
For Jewish Sci-fi – Kathleen O’Neal wrote a great Trilogy called “the Powers of Light (Abyss of Light; Redemption of Light and Treasure of Light) in 1990-1991. She conducted Ph.D. studies at the University of California in Los Angeles and did post-graduate studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel and she was an archeologist before turning to full time writing. But this series was excellent – until that point I had never considered Sci-Fi books in a religious context – always more adventure.
. Here is a description of Abyss of Light off of her website ” quote]WHEN THE GALACTIC MAGISTRATES –
aliens with incredible destructive capability – forced world after world to join their Union of Solar Systems, only the Gamant people continued to resist subjugation. For although the Magistrates’ Union brought peace and prosperity, it also stole the individuality of its member races.
And to the humans known as the Gamant people, their heritage was more important than life itself. For they were the Chosen ones, blessed with the gift of the Mea Shearim – an interdimensional gateway to God. But were the beings of light with whom wearers of the Mea communed actually God and the angels? Or were they aliens beyond the comprehension of flesh and blood mortals, a race to whom the Gamants were mere pawns in some universe-spanning game?
Either way, the Gamant faith would soon receive its ultimate test as the Galactic Magistrates mobilized to put an end to their rebellion, even as many among them turned to a messiah who might betray them all…
One of the best answers I heard about rich fantasy universes created by Jews pointed to the works of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby (supplemented and enriched by other Jews like Chris Claremont) – namely, the Marvel comics universe, which has been going strong for over 50 years…
For Jewish romance, there’s a historical novel I love called The Marranos by Liliane Webb. I’m always surprised it isn’t more popular, but I often see it in used bookstores. It’s set in Inquisitorial Spain; the heroine and her family are secret Jews in a time when that was literally a capital offense.
@Laurel – Yeah. All that and the fact that Judaism is the first religion (and as far as I know still the only religion) that makes it illegal for a husband to rape his wife. Sex is suppose to be all about her and her needs, never his. If she says no, he’s suppose to back off. The woman’s role in the family is seen as MORE important then the man’s – that’s why there’s that prayer men say thanking God they weren’t born women – not because of an anti-female sentiment, but because the role of the woman is so much more important that a woman does not have to stop and say prayers if she doesn’t want to. The man is simply saying thank you because he has to pray more then women do.
When you get down to a lot of it, Judaism is, in many ways, pro-feminism.
I think it was in one of Rabbi Shumely’s books that I read one of the reasons Jesus isn’t accepted as the Messiah is the claim he is “God’s only son.” That makes it sound like men are more important then women and they’re not.
I joke a lot about how Harlequin has all those Greek tycoons and sheiks and how they need to break with that and write “The Jewish Musician’s Sexually Repressed Bride” – but it’s really only half a joke. I’d talk more about it but it’s getting into TMI – let’s just say when I joke about it, I imagine myself as the sexually repressed bride.
I write fanfic. I read fanfic. I always use disclaimers and have never considered making a profit. I’ve written things of my own, but never considered the fic to be publishable, no matter how enjoyable it might be—especially the crossovers.
As for Archie and Betty, they did get together—happened in the arc after Archie married Veronica. He got to have it both ways, and twins each time. Which was somewhat disturbing.
Ma and Pa Kent didn’t need a mohel – Kal-El had his bris on Krypton! LOL! Yup. Jewish.
How come all the posts are coming out italics?
@Taylor –
I remember that. It was Sailor Moon fan fiction. There were a couple of girls who were rewriting romance novels (I don’t remember if they were Nora’s, but it was from category romances) and using the names of the amine characters instead of the original names. Caused a huge stink when they were discovered. I was 20 and just got into that series and remember being horrified.
Oh my God not the fanfic debate again. I can’t even drum up the energy to try to gather all of my arguments in defense of it on here, so I’m just going to link to my link roundup:
http://fineseculi.wordpress.com/2010/05/04/flotsam-welcome-to-the-world/
I’ve been in fandom for more than ten years and been creating fanworks just as long. It’s an amazing creative community and has taught me so much, not just about art but about social justice and being a good person, so it really gets my goat to hear it compared to theft and home invasion. There’s just a fundamental misunderstanding here about how creativity works.
It is ALL about the Reggie/Betty.
@Mal
OMG, that animation was a hoot and had me snickering!
Captcha is “high84”: NO, I’m not high, it was just that funny.
What sort of writer cannot comprehend the concept of writing for love? What sort of writer believes that the only valid form of writing is that which produces a paycheck?
And how oblivious must you be, after all these years of seeing the effect in practice, not to realize that the people who love your work enough to read and write fanfic about it are the SAME ones who are going to campaign years and DECADES later to get your stuff back in print/get your show back on the air/buy your albums, when the rest of the mainstream no longer knows or cares who you are?
And how STUPID do you have to be to viciously attack the very people who are the very core of your fan base – and your revenue stream?
I’ve never read her stuff, and now it’s a certainty that I never will. The sheer gall of her post is contemptible, and I hope it has exactly the effect upon her income that it deserves.
Not being a writer but being someone who has, unfortuantly, written fan fiction, I can kind of see the authors’ dislike for it. I mean, here are characters you put your heart and soul into. And then here comes some kid rewritting your character.
I especially dislike slash fiction. I’m sorry, if you want to break up Gambit and Rogue to set him up with another woman, fine, but Gambit has been established time and again as straight. Do not make him gay just to satisfy your tastes. And as well do not make Northstar straight when he’s pretty much been established as gay.
Keep true to the basic characters’ personalities. Don’t Harry Dresden suddenly become a fundelmentalist magic hating Muslim. But if you’d rather see him with Murphey then Ludico or Susan, fine. Don’t have him wind up in bed with Kincad or Butters, however. Don’t have Michael cheat.
But people do all that in fan fiction and more. I remember an uproar about a fan fiction that had Dumbledore as a pedophile who raped Snape as a child. And this was before Rowling said that Dumbledore is gay. (Since the majority of pedophiles are actually straight anyway….) That’s just – it’s just wrong. Yes, I wrote HP fan fiction. Yes, I made them Mary Sue so I could end up with Snape. But I didn’t change the basic natures of the characters – other then go with the rumors that Snape was a vampire. (This was before the fifth book that I wrote them.)
I even wrote a Star Trek: The Next Generation fan fiction that I flat out called “Star Trek: The Mary Sue.” I had Lore, with the help of the Borg, break through to our reality and kidnap me from the sadly now defuncted ride, Star Trek: The Experience. Then I wrote a sequel where Kirk turned out to be alive (having been rescued by Gary Seven who, in a Kirk disguise, died in his place) and he ends up being ordered by Gary’s old bosses to save Spock and myself. And yes, I wrote it so I could do the dirty with Spock. But I did not have Spock do it with Kirk.
I think if you stay true to the original intentions of the author, fine. But remember that these characters are their babies, not your’s. Write with respect and don’t change their sexual preferences, beliefs, or moral attitudes.
That being said, now that Jim Butcher seems okay with fan fiction – I should write one with me and my favorite Dresden-verse character, Bob The Skull! LOL J/K (Though Bob is my favorite. I mean, he likes romance novels!)
@JamiSings wrote:
Let me introduce you to this amazing new concept – it’s called bisexuality.
Oh come on, where’s the fun in that? If Guy Ritchie had followed your advice, we wouldn’t have had the wonderful Sherlock Holmes being played as gayer than a tree full of monkeys on nitrous oxide. Do you really believe that Conan Doyle’s Victorian sensibilities should prevent people reinterpreting Sherlock Holmes over a hundred years later, so brilliantly? (And if you think Irene and Mary mean Holmes and Watson weren’t as married as a married thing in that movie, well, I guess we saw different movies.)
For someone who claims to write fanfiction, you sure don’t understand the point of it at all, or how imagination or creativity functions. And like Ms Gabaldon, you really don’t get the central principle at all – whatever fanfiction does to a character, doesn’t change that character in your head. One writer can kill off a beloved character, another one can revive them. One can write them as a flaming great queen, the other can write them as a stoic, unemotive closet case. One can marry them off to her favourite Mary Sue, and another one can set them up with their best friend or pony. None of that alters the original concept and incarnation!
Think of it as alternative universes. Or sandboxes. Or cubicles. You play in yours with your resolutely hetero versions, and I’ll play in mine with the ones which like it coming and going and having five in a bed every other Saturday night, wearing a cockring and anal plug while they’re out fighting crime. Your version is no more – or less – valid than mine, and mine is no more or less valid than the creators. Characters aren’t your children, and even children get to go out in the big wide world and have their hair messed up by strangers.
@Rebecca earlier: Yes, there’s a lot Jewish-inspired in P.C. Hodgell’s Kencyr people, I’d agree—and in their religion, too, with its distant God who demands obedience more than worship, with its books of Law; and with the very Jewish trait of reading the Law with an eye to its technicalities. Also their being monotheists in a polytheistic world, and being a Chosen People.
It might interest you a lot to learn that Hodgell was picked up in recent years by a major publisher, Baen; her earlier works have been reissued (as two volumes, covering volumes 1&2, and 3&4 respectively), and a fifth volume came out in March; she’s working on a sixth, and there are more to come after that. The fifth one sold out its first printing and is being reprinted, which is a good sign.
@JamiSings
Lol… I have first dibs with Bob the skulls whose eternal search for love or at least ‘sweaty activities’ is very close to my heart! I’m thinking some fanfic of a prequel, before Bob became just a skull and actually had head.
Ooops! …had A head! hee-hee
@ Ann Somerville: I think (not sure, just read that way) that you misunderstood what Jami was saying or her overall intent. Or maybe I did.
If I read it right, I agree with her. There are a few valid reasons to write fan fic, one of them being personal enjoyment. When you decide to share your endeavors with other people who know the world and characters, though, it does seem reasonable to attempt to keep them in character. To go in non-gender orientation direction, for example:
A staunch, avowed atheist character captures the interest of a Bible thumpy Christian fan. Said Christian fan wants to reshape the character to better suit her liking. Character experiences a spiritual transformation.
Presto, you are no longer writing about the same character. Well written characters are fully developed people. Some people are bisexual, atheist, religious, whatever. But if the character isn’t bi- or homosexual, or straight for that matter, they just aren’t. Just like in real life. It isn’t an implied judgment that no one should be those things, just that it probably would disturb an author to have a person they know so well represented as something other than what they are.
That being said, the author should still just deal with it. Come on.
I’m with Ann on this one, although I don’t write or come across too much fan-fic. I think the whole point of it is falling in love with some characters, thinking, “Hey, wouldn’t it be cool IF…” and then running with it.
Anything goes.
And if you offend some other fans’ notions of what’s cool and right and wrong, and the whole thread goes down in a flame war, so be it.
Then again, I often put cheese in seafood dishes, and don’t sweat following the recipe too closely, and switch out ingredients according to my preferences, and laugh at creating “authentic” ethnic food. White wine doesn’t go with red meat? It does in MY world! So make of that what you will.
@laurel
Like I said, that in no way alters the original creation, so why does it matter? Both incarnations can exist without harming the other. It’s not impossible that a fanficcer may write a version of a canon character which a large group of fans find more appealing – I believe this is the source of Cassandra Claire’s popularity despite her well-established plagiarism – but even CC’s much followed Draco Trilogy and her leather pants wearing Dom!Draco can’t come close to matching the success or following of the original Harry Potter books. The movie version of this character was, according to Rowling, very much nicer and more appealing than her conception of him. So what?
But Jami made a special point of mentioning slash as being particular obnoxious to her, and I’m sorry, but that’s a really touchy issue. The heteronormative domination of popular media is exactly one of the things fanfiction specifically attacks, and for a very good reason. Fans want characters to reflect them, and a lot of fans are GLBT, disabled, victims of crime, have chronic illness etc. So when they express their own experiences, their own reality through the filter of fanfiction and established canon, they are only doing what artists and authors have done since Grog first spat paint on a cave wall. They are shaping, reassessing, analysing, making sense of what is often a nonsensical and sometimes offensive canon, as well as a hostile world. To stake out a character’s apparent sexuality as immutable and inviolable not only flies in the face of psychological reality, but is essentially a slap in the face of fans who see themselves and their experience reflected in some way in that character.
In other words, what you – Laurel, Jami – see as unalterable and unchallengable – is not what another reader or viewer will see, or even what the artist or author will see. Authors are not the last word on what their works mean, or how the characters present. Sure, they can express the intention they had in creating the work, but that doesn’t mean the interpretation is set in stone. And what about creators who change their mind about their own characters? Were the people who wrote Dumbledore as gay before Rowling made it canon, wrong? Were the people who made WIllow a lesbian before Tara appeared, wrong? Were the people who refused to accept Ursula K LeGuin’s assessment of women’s magic being less than men’s, wrong before she decided to revise her opinion?
No, I have no patience whatsoever with this line of argument. The only control an artist and author can have is in the creation. The reception, interpretation, reinterpretation, whatever, is not in their hands, and nor should it be. It’s stultifying, and ignores how the human mind works.
@ Ann:
I don’t disagree with you about experimenting with a character in your own mind, I’m just saying I get how an author might find it disrespectful for someone to essentially insert a different character under the name of someone she knows. If you write 15K words of backstory that you never intend to publish just as an exercise of fleshing out a character, it probably chafes.
And regarding immutability, I disagree with you from a roundabout way. I’ve heard the arguments about how my gay friends can be “cured.” I think it is CRAZY. For many reasons. Number one, they are not SICK. They are homosexual. They were born that way, just like I was born with brown hair and some of my other friends were born left handed. It is not mutable. They will not become straight because they or anyone else want them to. I think this applies to straight folks, too. Some of us are lucky enough to fall in love with people rather than genders but for the most part we are what we are and there is no fault or flaw in how we are made.
So if you write fan fic for speculative reasons, I think your camp is right. If you write fan fic as a sort of tribute or desire to stay in the world the author created, observe the characteristics (and characters) of that world. It’s actually a really good exercise in creativity to do so, because it’s very, very hard.
I don’t expect you to agree, but does that at least make sense?