Trismegistus (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
lebateleur) wrote2005-04-02 05:23 am
lebateleur) wrote2005-04-02 05:23 am
Fen Behaving Badly
Arr, Matey META! And lots of it, at that. I suppose this sort of thing is bound to happen to everyone's journal eventually. Anyway, I hold forth on some fennish pet peeves below.
First up is everyone's perennial favorite, fanfiction.net:
the rule breakers:
I’ll be the first to agree that ff.net is allowed to do whatever it wants with its site guidelines, including failing to enforce them - one of my first posts to this journal was about how posting to ff.net is not a right, let alone a Constitutionally-guaranteed right. That said, I’m a chaotic good personality to the core. I believe that a lot of rules – certainly the minor ones - are unnecessary or even counterproductive.
So if you want to post NC-17 fics or scriptfics or unbetaed fics to ff.net, be my guest. It’s a huge site, and you’ll most likely slip under the radar for awhile, but remember that having your fics hosted there is a privilege. If you choose to break the rules and get busted, gripe to your friends and move on. It sucks, but you aren’t being deprived of anything vital, and the 809 people subscribed to the same mailing lists and communities as you don't want to deal with your crossposted Tantrum of Righteous Indignation over having been caught doing something you shouldn't have.
and the haters:
There was a recent post about user abuse of ff.net on![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
fanficrants a few days ago; nothing new there, but one of the responses really bothered me. The commentor's attitude is that of the typical fandom enforcer - someone who seems to enjoy getting people’s fics, or even entire accounts, TOSed. She evaded my question on anyone would 'take great vindictive pleasure' in reporting people and tones down her attitude in her response to my post there, so I’ll ask my question again here:
Why report people? Even if an author is breaking the rules, it’s a really ugly thing to do, especially to someone you don’t know personally. I’m always surprised by how the ff.net fandom enforcers take the bad or rule-breaking fiction posted on the site as a personal affront to them, as if the authors were posting with the express intent of specifically pissing them off. This is obviously not the case, so why not just hit the back button, maybe have a mock or rant for a bit in another community, and move on? Why bother reporting at all?
From what I've heard from the horse's mouth, fandom enforcers report people because of the ‘vindictive pleasure’ factor, and not for any true concern about the rules. They like making a complete stranger’s day shitty. They enjoy doing something obnoxious to someone they’ve never met, whom they have no reason to dislike. What exactly does that say about those people? (And for that matter, the anonymice who go around alerting people - You're being laughed at in Fandom Wank LOLZ!)
I got TOSed by a fandom enforcer. It was annoying, but I have an lj and a shiny Skyehawke account, and strangely, life goes on. What made an impression on me wasn’t that I was reported, but the manner in which it happened. I had stories up that broke the rules. The story I was reported for was not one of them. It could have been a mistake, but my reporter went to the trouble of tracking me down to send a condescending email explaining why I’d been reported – she obviously wanted a negative reaction from me, and sought me out when I didn't provide one to her satisfaction. She wasn’t concerned about a violation of the posting guidelines, she was trying to pick a fight.
Xing's willing executioners:
So fandom enforcers are more concerned about upsetting people than improving fanfic. And even if they were solely motivated by a desire to clean up the quality at ff.net, reporting fics is not the way to go about it - in fact, it’s counterproductive. Think about it for a moment. Most of the fiction posted to ff.net breaks the rules in some way, but Xing doesn’t need to bother doing anything about it because the enforcers are already doing his job for him. Why should he expend time and effort to police his site (or hire others to do so) when he’s already got a volunteer workforce willing to do it for him, and for free, no less? By reporting fics themselves, the enforcers are taking all the pressure off of the site administrators to systematically address the problem.
And now onto fanart, in which we learn that:
it's not stealing if they're foreign:
I'm not a fan artist myself, so I didn't have much of an opinion on fanart use one way or the other. That changed once I started going to doujinshi events and meeting the artists in person. A lot of them were quite surprised that I was actually bothering to buy the doujinshi from them, instead of stealing it from them online like all Westerners do. Then there was the circle that was reluctant to give me their site URL so I could mail order their sold-out djs because they were afraid I was going to steal their art and put it on my site/lj. The sole reason for this suspicion – I was a Western fan. Think about that for a minute.
Or better yet, imagine if it was you, and you suddenly found some of your fanfiction – even just an uncredited excerpt - on a Japanese site. “Oh, but we can’t really speak English, so we couldn’t ask,” the justification goes, “We never dreamed you’d find it on a Japanese fansite, tee hee! And hey, aren’t you stealing from the creators too, just by using their characters? Why should you care if I turn around and steal from you?” How would you react to that?
You’d probably think it sucks. Yes, the fan artists are stealing from the creators, but I’d like to think there’s honor among thieves. So you steal art from some Japanese artist’s fanpage and pop it on your site. No harm done. But by that token, what’s to stop you from taking art from their page, or her page, or from any of the artists here, and using it without permission? After all, you’re just doing it because you like their art so much (but not enough to ask or credit them). And it’s all stealing from the original creators, right? Yet somehow, people’s attitudes differ when Western artists are concerned – probably because they know that if they steal from a Western artist they'll get caught and called on it. And if it’s something you wouldn’t do to a Western artist, what makes a Japanese fan artist any different? The excuses you use to justify stealing someone else's art don't magically become more valid with distance.
In case you still need convincing:
Manipulating someone else’s fanart without their permission sucks. I’ll admit that I’m more open to manipulations of the original product – say lj layouts from Death Note scans versus lj layouts from Death Note doujinshi scans – because there are questions of fair use, and despite what Western corporations think, fandom at its most basic is like a tumor metasticizing throughout Internet culture, providing free publicity for the original product as it grows. But fanworks are different.
There’s nothing really stopping anyone from doing a photomanip or making an lj icon out of someone else’s fanart. But to offer another analogy, what if I was to take someone’s fanfic and rewrite it to suit my tastes, or take a chapter or two from another author’s story and write my own fanfic based on their fanfic. There’s nothing stopping me, or any other fan, from doing that - except that it just seems lame. People are willing to respect the rights of fan authors – maybe that Saiyuki author or FMA author or whoever doesn’t want me to play around with their story – so why not respect the fan artists too?
So in other words, play nice, kids.
これで以上です。
First up is everyone's perennial favorite, fanfiction.net:
the rule breakers:
I’ll be the first to agree that ff.net is allowed to do whatever it wants with its site guidelines, including failing to enforce them - one of my first posts to this journal was about how posting to ff.net is not a right, let alone a Constitutionally-guaranteed right. That said, I’m a chaotic good personality to the core. I believe that a lot of rules – certainly the minor ones - are unnecessary or even counterproductive.
So if you want to post NC-17 fics or scriptfics or unbetaed fics to ff.net, be my guest. It’s a huge site, and you’ll most likely slip under the radar for awhile, but remember that having your fics hosted there is a privilege. If you choose to break the rules and get busted, gripe to your friends and move on. It sucks, but you aren’t being deprived of anything vital, and the 809 people subscribed to the same mailing lists and communities as you don't want to deal with your crossposted Tantrum of Righteous Indignation over having been caught doing something you shouldn't have.
and the haters:
There was a recent post about user abuse of ff.net on
fanficrants a few days ago; nothing new there, but one of the responses really bothered me. The commentor's attitude is that of the typical fandom enforcer - someone who seems to enjoy getting people’s fics, or even entire accounts, TOSed. She evaded my question on anyone would 'take great vindictive pleasure' in reporting people and tones down her attitude in her response to my post there, so I’ll ask my question again here:Why report people? Even if an author is breaking the rules, it’s a really ugly thing to do, especially to someone you don’t know personally. I’m always surprised by how the ff.net fandom enforcers take the bad or rule-breaking fiction posted on the site as a personal affront to them, as if the authors were posting with the express intent of specifically pissing them off. This is obviously not the case, so why not just hit the back button, maybe have a mock or rant for a bit in another community, and move on? Why bother reporting at all?
From what I've heard from the horse's mouth, fandom enforcers report people because of the ‘vindictive pleasure’ factor, and not for any true concern about the rules. They like making a complete stranger’s day shitty. They enjoy doing something obnoxious to someone they’ve never met, whom they have no reason to dislike. What exactly does that say about those people? (And for that matter, the anonymice who go around alerting people - You're being laughed at in Fandom Wank LOLZ!)
I got TOSed by a fandom enforcer. It was annoying, but I have an lj and a shiny Skyehawke account, and strangely, life goes on. What made an impression on me wasn’t that I was reported, but the manner in which it happened. I had stories up that broke the rules. The story I was reported for was not one of them. It could have been a mistake, but my reporter went to the trouble of tracking me down to send a condescending email explaining why I’d been reported – she obviously wanted a negative reaction from me, and sought me out when I didn't provide one to her satisfaction. She wasn’t concerned about a violation of the posting guidelines, she was trying to pick a fight.
Xing's willing executioners:
So fandom enforcers are more concerned about upsetting people than improving fanfic. And even if they were solely motivated by a desire to clean up the quality at ff.net, reporting fics is not the way to go about it - in fact, it’s counterproductive. Think about it for a moment. Most of the fiction posted to ff.net breaks the rules in some way, but Xing doesn’t need to bother doing anything about it because the enforcers are already doing his job for him. Why should he expend time and effort to police his site (or hire others to do so) when he’s already got a volunteer workforce willing to do it for him, and for free, no less? By reporting fics themselves, the enforcers are taking all the pressure off of the site administrators to systematically address the problem.
And now onto fanart, in which we learn that:
it's not stealing if they're foreign:
I'm not a fan artist myself, so I didn't have much of an opinion on fanart use one way or the other. That changed once I started going to doujinshi events and meeting the artists in person. A lot of them were quite surprised that I was actually bothering to buy the doujinshi from them, instead of stealing it from them online like all Westerners do. Then there was the circle that was reluctant to give me their site URL so I could mail order their sold-out djs because they were afraid I was going to steal their art and put it on my site/lj. The sole reason for this suspicion – I was a Western fan. Think about that for a minute.
Or better yet, imagine if it was you, and you suddenly found some of your fanfiction – even just an uncredited excerpt - on a Japanese site. “Oh, but we can’t really speak English, so we couldn’t ask,” the justification goes, “We never dreamed you’d find it on a Japanese fansite, tee hee! And hey, aren’t you stealing from the creators too, just by using their characters? Why should you care if I turn around and steal from you?” How would you react to that?
You’d probably think it sucks. Yes, the fan artists are stealing from the creators, but I’d like to think there’s honor among thieves. So you steal art from some Japanese artist’s fanpage and pop it on your site. No harm done. But by that token, what’s to stop you from taking art from their page, or her page, or from any of the artists here, and using it without permission? After all, you’re just doing it because you like their art so much (but not enough to ask or credit them). And it’s all stealing from the original creators, right? Yet somehow, people’s attitudes differ when Western artists are concerned – probably because they know that if they steal from a Western artist they'll get caught and called on it. And if it’s something you wouldn’t do to a Western artist, what makes a Japanese fan artist any different? The excuses you use to justify stealing someone else's art don't magically become more valid with distance.
In case you still need convincing:
Manipulating someone else’s fanart without their permission sucks. I’ll admit that I’m more open to manipulations of the original product – say lj layouts from Death Note scans versus lj layouts from Death Note doujinshi scans – because there are questions of fair use, and despite what Western corporations think, fandom at its most basic is like a tumor metasticizing throughout Internet culture, providing free publicity for the original product as it grows. But fanworks are different.
There’s nothing really stopping anyone from doing a photomanip or making an lj icon out of someone else’s fanart. But to offer another analogy, what if I was to take someone’s fanfic and rewrite it to suit my tastes, or take a chapter or two from another author’s story and write my own fanfic based on their fanfic. There’s nothing stopping me, or any other fan, from doing that - except that it just seems lame. People are willing to respect the rights of fan authors – maybe that Saiyuki author or FMA author or whoever doesn’t want me to play around with their story – so why not respect the fan artists too?
So in other words, play nice, kids.
これで以上です。
no subject
Plagiarism is one thing; reworking a source is another. I've seen the Japanese do it- someone's cool trope borrowed and reworked over various doujinshi, and I thought it was neat. I need hardly say, if it was a Japanese reworking my stuff- or hell, just translating it- or hell, just sticking it up on her website- I'd be over the moon. But that's a little different, not to say unlikely.
no subject
I've tried translating some of my stuff into Japanese in the privacy of my own home, and it's a total lost cause. I'd love to see someone do it for me, if only to know how my phrasing would be written in Japanese. If a Japanese found my stuff worthy of sharing with Japanese fandom, I'd be thrilled as well, but I would be slightly less thrilled if I wasn't credited as the author.
no subject
Even if it's something pretty much provably my own idea (because wrong, ie Hakkai's shouldercloth being part of a monk's robe) if someone mentions Hakkai's monk's shouldercloth I feel flattered. Look, I created fanon! But if they then wrote an AN to say 'I got this idea from mjj's fic Gonou' it'd be a letdown.
Oh I'm not fanon.You mean people need to be /told/ that came from Gonou? I go away to weep in chagrin.I'd rather have a deft in-fandom reference that everyone gets (or is assumed to get) than clumsy footnoting all over the place. "To screw or not to screw" Gojou muses; who would AN that with 'This line is adapted from Shakespeare's Hamlet'? Simply, it's more gratifying to assume an idea is iterated because it's quasi-fanon than because the writer was intent on theft. Too much snarling over source and intellectual rights actually prevents the growth of our oral tradition thing called fanon.
no subject
On a completely unrelated note, I can easily think of two Saiyuki authors who would AN a Shakespeare paraphrase. For what that's worth.
no subject
I suppose it would depend how closely it followed the progress of Gonou. What gets changed? Language? Incidents? I still think I'd find it interesting as an exercise in how that person read Gonou, like van Gogh copying Hiroshige: how utterly different when it's a western eye seeing. Like the dj retellings I did, and the stuff that had to be changed there to make them comprehensible.
Of course I *might* be a bit more exercised if all my Saiyuuki fic wasn't so old as to be history...