Fan fic Fooey? Fooey

Adam Stephanides · 20 Jun 2001, 21:46 · from whorl-v0012.mbox · original

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From: Adam Stephanides <adamsteph at earthlink.net>
Subject: (whorl) Re: Fan fic Fooey?  Fooey
Date: Wed, 20 Jun 2001 21:46:58
Message-ID: <whorl-v0012-0869 at digest.urth.net>
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Dan'l Danehy-Oakes wrote:

> Okay, I'm not a
> libel lawyer, but there's a _reason_ for all those "no
> resemblance to any person living or dead" disclaimers you read
> in the front of books, and there's no way any of those Nsync
> fans could claim that their fictional characters bore no
> resemblance to the real bandmembers. Oy, whatever.

Just as a digression, I've always wondered whether those really do any good.
A lot of books with such disclaimers contain charaters whose "resemblance to
persons living or dead" is more than coincidental; and in the one case I've
heard of in which an author was sued for libel and lost for her portrayal of
a fictional character, I'd bet that the disclaimer was there.
>=20
>> If there were Lupine slash, I'd lay odds that the
>> most popular relationship would be Horn/Krait.
>=20
> Duh. Should of thought of that one myself. Or maybe
> Silk/Horn, though it would be hard to locate that
> in the received chronology... Maybe Jolenta/Dorcas...

I thought of that last one, but m/m seems to be a lot more popular than f/f.
>=20

>> But functionally, I would argue that the sections are fiction,
>> and should be read as fiction, with a protagonist who is
>> distinct from Narr, but based on the editors' view of Narr.
>=20
> Functionally, I would disagree strongly. By interspersing their
> reconstructions with the Narr's manuscript, I feel that they've
> implicitly claimed for it a status of equivalent facticity, to
> which it is not entitled. Which drags me back to the Gospel
> According to Luke... but I'll let that one swing.

Okay, "functionally" was not a very good choice of word (I'm not sure now
why I used it).  I agree that the narrators implicitly claim for their
third-person sections equivalent facticity to the Narr's manuscript (or more
so, since it's third-person, and occasionally shows us stuff the Narr
apparently did not witness).  What I was trying to say was that once we
realize that the third-person sections do not have this status, the best way
for us, the readers, to regard them is as a fiction.

Whether or not you want to say the editors are lying depends upon how
loosely you're willing to let them apply the term "re-created."

(To return to the Biblical analogy for a second, I note that contemporary
scholars are reluctant to say that the authors of apocryphal texts, or texts
in the Bible believed not to be by their supposed authors, were lying or
committing fraud in claiming false authorship.  They usually take the stand
that this was a convention of the time, to sign some holy person's name to
your text as a way of claiming authority for it.  To go even further afield,
it occurs to me to wonder if there is any evidence that people of the time
saw things that way--that the attributed author was merely a convention,
making no claim about the real author.)

--Adam

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