Fanfic/Quotes

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


"This is the internet. There are literally hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people, writing ... fanfics. Chances are that at least one of those hundreds of thousands or millions of people is not only writing a ... fanfic with an extremely similar plot to yours, but unless you have evidence that proves otherwise there is a very good chance that this person is doing a better job of it than you are."
Thesis' Original Trainer Fic Guide, Poke-Community forums
"If we as a culture have gotten to the point where the average citizen seriously values the right of Avi Arad (Marvel CEO) to buy himself a bigger jet over the right of creative kids to express themselves, then we, as a culture, are really dumb."
—"ScottH", 4/25/2006, Fanfic discussion thread on neilsenhayden.com
"The next worst word you can couple with the word 'fan' is, you guessed it, the word 'fiction'..."
Strong Bad, Homestar Runner "fan club"
"I have looked terror square in its single, milky eye...There was "fan fiction"!"
Shelley Winters meets her fanclub in Scary Go Round.
"Fan fiction is a way of the culture repairing the damage done in a system where contemporary myths are owned by corporations instead of by the folk."
"[Fanfiction writers] are fans, but they’re not silent, couchbound consumers of media. The culture talks to them, and they talk back to the culture in its own language."
This one's something of a response to the recent finale of RWBY Volume 3. No spoilers, but suffice to say it gets dark. Seriously dark. And you know what? That's fine. But that doesn't mean I can't write something invalidating a lot of that darkness, because I'm a fanfic writer. That's what I do.

It seems to me that if something is being done on an amateur basis by a fan for fans, and is clearly their own work, and is done out of a shared regard for the basic subject matter, then it would be kind of chilly for an author to run around hammering people. It's fandom, for god's sake. I don't give anyone permission, I just smile and think what the hell.

There's a danger, of course, that some dumb bugger out there will interpret this as an indication that Discworld is now in the public domain or open to franchising. It is neither. If anyone tries a commercial rip-off -- not a parody, not fanac, but a cynical attempt to cash in on my Discworld -- then the sewage farm will hit the three megawatt aerogenerator.
I'd rather fanfic went on somewhere where I don't see it. Why? Because if A Fan writes a piece about, say, Discworld tax collectors, and I chose to write about Discworld tax collectors a year later, A Fan will send me the 'nyer, ripoff, you nicked my idea' email.

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