I said a while back that I was gonna change my name due to my obscene displeasure with the final season but… nah. I’m Stamets. I love my lil gay boy and I love his lil gay family and I love the ship with the weirdly long nacelles.
I said a while back that I was gonna change my name due to my obscene displeasure with the final season but… nah. I’m Stamets. I love my lil gay boy and I love his lil gay family and I love the ship with the weirdly long nacelles.
I mean, yeah. It’s important to know which works are sanctioned by the creator/owner of a fictional work.
Without that My Immortal is as much of a part of Harry Potter as the Prisoner of Azkaban.
it is though. You can’t own stories. You can own the right to sell books or whatever about them in a particular market at a particular time but that’s a legal contrivance.
Who’s myths are official and who’s non cannon? Are there fairy tales more cannonical than others? Which bits of Arthuriana are more real than the others?
Chant a dead language around whatever scrolls you like while wearing costumes but your ability to enforce some legal structure has no bearing on what is true.
Ebony D’Arkness Dementia Raven Way couldn’t have said it better herself.
Your argument falls flat when you take the wider audience into account. If some internet stranger writes a short story revealing that Sherlock Holmes was actually the Loch Ness monster all along, nobody gives a shit. If someone discovers an unpublished manuscript written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle before his death, his words have weight.
Fan fiction can do whatever bullshit it wants. The general public can, do, and should give greater respect to the people who created a story or those they handed their creation off too.
Don’t confuse audience reach with validity.
Seriously, why is completely fine for old stories to have multiple versions, some contradictory, with varying degrees of reach and all be considered just as much a part of the thing as any other but not that be the case for modern stories?
What about weird tales? All that wonderful pulpy SFF borrowed from each other and had varying degrees of consistency. We lump all of Lovecraft’s tales into a mythos, despite explicit links being rare. We also include those stories making reference to them because they’re just as much a part of the telling and retelling which made/makes them culturally significant. We don’t add all of Lovecraft’s work though as some definitely doesn’t feature in that mythos. It’s a frame for analysing some culture.
Old stories are muddied because they’re old. Authorship is lost to history.
More recent works can be attributed to individuals or groups. Saying that anyone can ape a recent work and their schlock is just as valid as the work of the original author (or authors) is insulting to the people who worked hard to create original works.
You want to make a work inspired by another piece of art? Go for it, people will probably respect you for doing that. That’s very, very different from writing some fan fic and screaming that your work is valid and you should be allowed to ride on someone else’s coattails.
You seem really worked up by this to the point you’re strawmanning me.
It’s culturally part of it, idk what tell you it’s just fact. Not authored by the same person, not having the same impact probably (although sometimes works by other authors outstrip the original), probably drivel, but valid all the same.
Any other approach leads to weird inconsistencies. Like who owns a character in a group effort? generally in our legal systems a company. That company can persist beyond the involvement of all the actual authors. It makes no sense to then later exclude work they do in their own time using the same characters or settings, or ones ‘legally distinct’ but obviously the same.
Even weirder when it’s one author who loses copyright but then writes ‘invalid’ fan work.
Nobody creates original works, all stories are based on other stories. Sure there are degrees of similarity but drawing lines is a messy thing that even in actual law (which is not trying to be logically coherent) it takes teams to arbitrate and only draws conclusions in self-reference.
Removed by mod
Holy fuck, seems a bit extreme.
It does. Let me fix that.
I had to search this one. Bad fanfic?
Regardless, they’re both just stories. It seems like that point gets lost anytime “canon” comes up.
They’re also some people’s livelihoods.
That’s all very fine and good, but what does it have to do with the price of tea in China?
The “just stories” employ the publishing, television, film, and video game industries (plus ancillary industries that support them). I can’t even venture a guess as to how many thousands upon thousands of people feed their families on “just stories”.
The reason why canon matters is because it presents a single, unified creative direction for the fiction. In a world where canon does not matter anybody creating an unsanctioned work can steer the fiction in an unsustainable or downright bad direction, literally taking the food out of the mouths of families.
Distinguishing between official and unofficial narratives keeps the responsibility (and the risk) in the hands of the people who staked their livelihoods on it succeeding. Taking that control away from them just so people respect some lonely teenager’s shitty fan fiction is unconscionable.
Again, these are fictional stories. They’re not real. If you don’t understand that…I don’t know what I can do for you.
Again, it’s real money people pay to experience fictional stories. If you don’t understand that… I don’t know what I can do for you.
Now you’re just contradicting yourself. Good day, sir.