Erotica By Helen E. H. Madden

Friday, August 10, 2007

Notes From Shore Leave 29: Part III - Are The Powers That Be Co-opting Fan Fic? And What Can Erotica Writers Learn From Slash?

This is the last post on my adventures at Shore Leave. The con was over a month ago, and I know I'm slow getting these posts up, but that's mainly because they've taken so long to write. Anyway, here we go...

The most interesting panel I attended at Shore Leave 29 was the panel on slash fan fiction, subtitled "Are The Powers That Be (PTB) Co-opting Fan Fic?" The panel was held in a small room with the door closed, making it very warm for the 30 women and one guy present, but nobody was interested in leaving. In fact, this was the most interested group of panel attendees I'd ever seen. Everywhere I looked, I saw t-shirts with pictures of Kirk and Spock, as well as several K/S pendants. The discussion was moderated by two women who were selling the slash fiction in the dealers' room at the con. The main points of their discussion focused on how certain entities, like Yahoo, where trying to find a way to make a profit off of fan fiction. Apparently Yahoo's brain child is a little website called FanLib, an online library of fan fiction. Okay, so it's not so little. It actually looks huge to me. FanLib bills itself as a place for fan fic writers to meet other writers, make friends, and showcase their work. The people at the slash fic panel, however, stated that what FanLib is really looking for is ways to use fan fiction for their own ends. Basically, FanLib has set up a website, solicited fan fic writers to post their stuff without offering any sort of reimbursement, and then has turned around to advertisers and said, "See? We have all these people on the site that you can advertise to!" FanLib gets paid by the advertisers. The advertisers get an audience of potential buyers. The fan fic writers get a place to post their stuff. All well and good, right?

Except that the fan fic writers already have plenty of places to post their stuff.
Hmmm. Most fan fic writers aren't going to make money off of their work anyway, and those that do aren't going to make enough to pay the bills. So why worry about FanLib's plan to use of their work to generate ad revenue that they don't intend to share with the writers? The fan fic writers retain whatever rights they can legally claim on their stories. However, according to the members of the panel, FanLib has boasted to its advertisers and investors that by setting up this site, they've got a way to get fan fic writers to "color within the lines." And that had everyone in the panel at Shore Leave spitting mad.

If fan fic writers were the kind of people who colored within the lines in the first place, they would not be writing fan fic. It's that simple. And the people in the panel definitely did not seem to like the idea that someone wanted to use them to make a profit. Fan fic writers want to do what fan fic writers want to do, and slash writers are probably the most rebellious of the bunch, reshaping a story to suit their wants and needs, not the needs of some corporate fat cat who thinks, "Hey, these guys are writing all this stuff for free anyway, so why can't **I** make a profit off of it?" (Apparently said fat cat never saw the dealers' room at Shore Leave.)

To further inflame the sensibilities of the slash fic writers, FanLib also doesn't take any responsibility if a writer gets sued for what they posted. It seems they want all of the benefits of fan fic, but with none of the risks. Granted, they're not the first business to use such practices. Blogger is the same way, as are plenty of other sites. They provide the forum for your content, hook it up with advertisers, and then deny culpability should things turn sour. It's a business model we've all seen many times before. So often in fact that I think it's standard practice.

Of course, having taken a quick look at FanLib, I don't think the K/S folks are going to hang out there anyway. It's mostly dominated by Harry Potter (a fact they complained about at the panel), there's very little Star Trek there, and the rating scheme is limited to only two choices - "All ages" and "13+." And I've read the "13+" stuff. So far, haven't found anything even remotely scandalous. So there's nothing really there to tempt the prurient minded fan.

The K/S people at the panel basically agreed they had better things to do and better places to go for their fic, so the panel then moved on to other issues, like who's writing slash. Women, they state, which makes me think that slash, yaoi, and m/m erotica really have a lot in common. I remember attending a GLTB panel at the last EPICon where the panelists included six women, gay and straight, and one gay man who was very surprised to see how many women (gay and straight) were into writing m/m erotica. He was the only one surprised, of course.

Towards the end of the slash panel, I asked a few questions, stating up front that I was not a slash writer or reader, but that I wrote erotic fiction and I wanted to know more about what people enjoyed about fan fiction and slash. Specifically, if it was erotic content these people wanted, did they have to get it from fan fic, or would original fiction with original characters be just as enjoyable for them? Hands down, everyone in the room declared, "Fan fic!" Why, I asked. Because...

First, they like having intimate knowledge of a story's characters and the universe those characters live in. It provides a detailed background, so the readers can drop into a fan fic or slash story and already know what's going on. Plus, if they've seen the movie or TV show, or read the book, they've got that knowledge and they already know what they're going to like. No wasting time having to learn a new character or new universe from the ground up. With fan fic, they can just jump in and add their own unique twist to something they already like.

Second, fan fic people want DON'T want to see the books/movies/TV shows they love come to an end. The people at the panel stated that they become very emotionally invested in what they read and watch, and they hate to see a good thing end. That's something I think everyone can understand. Honestly, did you ever like seeing your favorite show wrap up after so many seasons? Personally, it killed me to see "Farscape" cancelled. Fan fic is a way to keep those shows alive. It lets the writers and readers continue to have a relationship with something they love. As one panelist put it, fan fic (and slash) fulfills a need for the fan.

This leads me to a third note. Fan fic people want to see the characters they love so much go through all the ups and downs of life, especially the things that don't get covered in the book/movie/show. Or as it's more often stated, they want to see the 'hurt/comfort' of a character. Hurt/comfort refers to a character suffering, either mentally or physically, and then being nursed, comforted and/or coddled back to a state of happiness and well-being. Why this particular theme is so popular I'm not sure, but I certainly intend to look into it.

After discussing all this, one of the panelists pointed out that if I were to write a series that gave them all that they looked for in the shows and books they write about, they might be interested in reading it. In other words, if I wrote a series that included: a detailed background and setting; fully fleshed out characters; a plot that put those characters through the wringer, but allowed them the opportunity for comfort and reward; then I might have something they'd want to read. And maybe write about too. All of which makes sense. Think about it. Before you had K/S fan fic, you had Star Trek. Before you had Snupin (Snape/Lupin) fan fic, you had Harry Potter. All fan fic is derived from an original source. I'm thinking that if you understand why the original source appeals to the fan fic reader and writer, what it is that inspires them to write about it or draw about it, then you're well on your way to being able to write fiction that sells.

Anyway, that's my two cents on fan fiction and slash.

Labels: Conventions And Appearances, Fandom

Wednesday, August 1, 2007

Notes From Shore Leave 29: Part II - Does Slash Sell?

Someone (Emily) noted that I'm not posting often enough. I'm not, but then the past month sort of royally sucked on the personal end, as I noted a couple of posts back. However, I need to get back on the ball, so here's the latest post.

Recently, I talked about Shore Leave 29 and the panels I attended on e-books. To sum up, neither panel covered what I was expecting, but I did glean a few interesting tidbits on the subject. But now let's talk about something I saw at Shore Leave that I found very interesting... slash fan fiction.

If you have any interest in science fiction, chances are pretty good you know what slash is. For those of you who don't know, fan fiction is a genre of writing where fans create stories based on their favorite books, movies, or television series, using the original characters from those venues but putting them into all new stories. It should be noted that these stories are not licensed by the original creators of the material in question and may even be disproved of (some fan fic writers have been known to receive 'cease and desist' letters for their forays into someone else's playground). The "slash" in "slash fic" refers to the punctuation mark put between the names of two or more characters in a fan fic story who are, for the purposes of that story, involved in a romantic and/or erotic relationship. For example - Scully/Mulder. Princess Leia/Han Solo. Buffy/Spike. Or Buffy/Willow. Frodo/Samwise. Professor Lupin/Professor Snape. And so on. Male/male slash is very popular, and right now Harry Potter slash is incredibly popular (don't even ask about age limits on fictional characters, because I am not going there), but the erotic pairing that I believe started it all is...

Kirk/Spock.

Or K/S as it is known by the voracious, sometimes rabid, fan base of these stories. And no, I'm not kidding. Slash has been around a long time, and there are probably thousands of stories written about Captain Kirk and his Vulcan First Officer Spock.

Technically speaking, fan fiction is not usually written for profit. You can find it for free on the web, either in Usenet groups or blogs or personal websites and libraries people put up. Simply go to Google, type in the character pairing of your choice and add the word 'slash' and you will find a veritable treasure trove of interesting stories, some rated G, some rated PG, and some even rated NC-17 (why Professor Snape, what are you doing with that wand?). Like I said, interesting stuff, and usually it's free.

However, I saw at Shore Leave that you can buy slash fiction in printed format. The printed stuff is usually spiral bound or comes in a professional looking folder, and has some interesting cover art. Some enterprising writers have even put together anthologies on certain character pairings and offered them up for sale. I didn't check what the prices were on anything I saw at the con. I was too busy gawking at the covers (like a rube - yeesh). Some of them showed rather **suggestive** poses of the characters (is that a phazer beneath your kilt, Mr. Scott, or are you getting ready to "beam me up?"). A few covers were very explicit and kept neatly tucked behind some other slash fiction so that only a tantalizing but very noticeable glimpse of the artwork showed. I swear they had just about every slash combo you could think of, from Star Trek to Stargate SG-1 to Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Harry Potter. In fact, I think I saw some Harry Potter/Stargate cross-over stuff. There was also 'The Sentinel' and 'Due South,' two shows that are apparently amazingly popular with slash fic writers.

And there were several tables of this stuff lined up in the main dealers' room of the convention. I kid you not. There were so many tables that I now wonder how much money was being made off of the stuff. Was it enough to make a profit, or just cover the expenses of printing and binding the books?

It's an important question to ask because it's a matter of copyright infringement to make money using someone else's copyrighted material. The theory is that if you're not making a profit off of it, most copyright holders will look the other way when you play with their stuff. But go too far and you could wind up in hot water. Just recently I found out that someone wrote a Star Wars fan fic novel that ended up on Amazon.com. The novel was published via print on demand, and while the author claims it was not intended for mass distribution, just for family and friends, the publisher listed it on Amazon, where it apparently sold enough copies to cause Lucasfilms to ask that the book be removed.

So why write fan fic, especially slash, if you're not supposed to make any money off of it? I mean really, what is the appeal? Well for starters, a lot of people write fan fic to express their enjoyment of particular books, movies, or TV series. It's like any other form of fandom. It's a means for fans to participate in something they love. It's also a way to keep a particular show, book or movie alive long after it has run its course. Say your favorite television show was recently cancelled, and now you're just dying because you were so addicted to it but you can't get your fix anymore because there are no more new episodes. Never fear. A TV show can live on indefinitely through a thriving fan fic community. And when the stories are good, it certainly beats syndicated reruns.

Another reason people write fan fic is because they're longing to see their favorite characters in situations the original writers never wrote about. I think this is especially true when it comes to the slash. What really did happen between Mulder and Scully? Did Xena ever spank Gabrielle? And what really went on between Sam and Frodo up in Minas Morgul? Let your imagination go wild. If you're a pervert, it can be especially fun.

In the end there are probably millions of reasons why people write and read fan fic. But it's getting late and I need to wrap this up, so I'm going to stop here. Next post I'll be talking about how the Powers That Be (PTB - otherwise known as mainstream media) are attempting to co-opt fan fiction for their own purposes, and what erotica writers can learn from slash fic.

Labels: Conventions And Appearances, Fandom