vulgarweed | "Corporate Rock Still Sucks"...and corporate fanfic even more so

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"Corporate Rock Still Sucks"...and corporate fanfic even more so

Here's a great post linked from

metafandom on the FanLib controversy.

Hmm. A fanfic "company" that has a board of directors with no women on it? Riiiiiight. Who are they trying to kid? The gullible, clearly.

I've realized that the reason I felt so quickly comfortable in fan culture even coming to it later in life than a lot of people is this: my main subcultural background is in indie-rock/DIY-scene culture. Where news that a band has been signed to a major label is greeted not with unqualified congratulations but deep worry, trepidation, and morbid snark - it's been the beginning of the end for ten times more great bands than have ever found fame and fortune that way (and fame and fortune isn't all it's cracked up to be, is it, Kurt?). Lots of people in that scene feel it's better to keep the day job so that the music can stay among friends and on its own terms. Lots of small labels feel it's better to stay small and equitable than grow rich and rigid. And if it means that listeners have to work a little harder to find what they want rather than having it spoonfed to them on the radio and TV, well, that's fine. (The fans have a hunter-gatherer mentality anyway: they like the chase.)

Lack of money, career pressures, and recognition under my own name are the reasons why I enjoy fanfic so much. It's a feature, not a bug. It's freedom. And the "sisters doin' it for themselves" culture is what makes this possible--it's a potluck/barter economy, not a centralized one, and that's what keeps it free, in both sense of the word "free." And I much prefer a smaller, smarter audience to a corporatized one lured in by advertising. (If that makes me an elitist, so be it, but I think it's more of a natural human tribalism, related to the way folks naturally form affinity groups and carve small neighborhoods out of big cities).

Anyway, these are just random thinky thoughts, not any kind of coherent essay.

In other very sad news, Lloyd Alexander has died.

bellatrys,

tartanshell, and

lixtetrax have written beautiful tributes to him in their LJs. Me, I just remember how he stirred my imagination and love of stories when I was very young (he and Evangeline Walton were directly responsible for my intense literary Cymruphilia). I hope he's gone where the stories go on forever and are dazzling.

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Fanfic.net had its controversies too, but I think in the end it was safer for them to get rid of the NC17 stuff. Too many kids were on-site, no sense in attracting lawsuits. This one will probably attract the younger writers, because they think "ooh publicity!" But for the site to be making money off it? Wtf.

Tribalism. No wonder I feel like I'm trying to protect my campfire somedays...

Alexander: Pity 'Black Cauldron' sucked. I did recognise the Welsh-ness of it, though it wasn't a saving grace.

Walton: Never heard of her either, but may have to look into her works. And I also should make you a copy of this gorgeous CD I have - songs of the Mabinogion, sung in Welsh. It is transcendant.

For ff.net to get rid of the NC-17 stuff may have been smarter and they're certainly within their rights to choose what content they do and don't want, but the way they did it was skeezy beyond belief. (It was 2002; they shut down for a day, ostensibly as a Sept.11 memorial, and removed them all without telling anyone.) Big part of the reason why I've never posted there and never will.

Ff.net's problems relate to what I'm talking about--too damn big and unwieldy. I think an archive that tries to be all things to all people is bound to run into this problem; it's just unmanageable, and quality suffers in the name of quantity.

I don't remember if I ever saw the 'Black Cauldron' movie. If I did, it sure didn't make nearly the impression on me that the books did! Oh, Evangeline Walton's writing is just beautiful! The Mabinogion tetralogy has just been reissued in an omnibus edition.

It was 2002; they shut down for a day, ostensibly as a Sept.11 memorial, and removed them all without telling anyone.

Urgh, that was beyond crass. I remember reading a lot of complaints at the time (think I was still lurking in the LotR fandom) about the removal of NC-17 fic, and seeing a lot of misguided ranting about freedom of speech (especially given that liability would lie with the site rather than the individual user should somebody kick up a legal fuss), but didn't know that ff.net had handled it all in such a tastelessly underhanded way. I can certainly understand why people would be pissed off about that.

Ff.net's problems relate to what I'm talking about--too damn big and unwieldy. I think an archive that tries to be all things to all people is bound to run into this problem; it's just unmanageable, and quality suffers in the name of quantity.

I post a lot of my fic to ff.net, but it's never somewhere where I actually read fic without a rec (well, unless I'm on the hunt for a rarepair that I can't find on LJ). Like you say it's big and unweildy and often extremely difficult to locate what you're looking for on.

Yeah, it was beyond rude. Freedom of speech isn't the real issue here--ethics are. If they'd warned users in advance that this change was coming, and given them a chance to remove the stories themselves, or edit them, and save their reviews it would have been an entirely different matter. And to this day, I still hear all the time about people getting stories removed because someone complained about them breaking some rule or other...when they didn't. They just deleted first and asked questions never, which means anybody with a grudge can do that to you for the hell of it.

I remember when ff.net was a pretty good place to look for stories, especially in smaller fandoms--it was a good home for the Silmarillion fandom for a long time, for example. I think it still functions that way OK. But if you've got something like HP or LOTR (since the movies anyway), fuhgeddiboutit.

They just deleted first and asked questions never, which means anybody with a grudge can do that to you for the hell of it.

Sounds like one of the inherently problematic aspects of running a huge site: nobody available to actually check out what's being reported. I mean, I can see why they would do it when it came to things that could get them in legal trouble (i.e. a 'better safe than sorry' mentality), but it seems rather obvious that people with grudges will falsely report something if they think it will work.

And to this day, I still hear all the time about people getting stories removed because someone complained about them breaking some rule or other...when they didn't. They just deleted first and asked questions never, which means anybody with a grudge can do that to you for the hell of it.

Yup, true story. A while back they made a rule against "script format" stories. Apparently someone reported a couple of my old song parodies because they resembled a script format. A cursory glance by a moderator would have shown that such was not the case, but I don't think anyone gets even that much these days.

I wouldn't even have minded, if they'd asked me to delete them instead of having the moderators take it down right away. Maybe it's shallow, but I really wanted to keep those reviews... *sigh*

I still cruise ff.n for Silmarillion fic once in awhile, but any fandom bigger than that and it's just not worth the time.

(It was 2002; they shut down for a day, ostensibly as a Sept.11 memorial, and removed them all without telling anyone.)

Actually, I'm sure they did warn people because there was a brouhaha with people who changed their stories from NC-17 to R in anticipation of the deadline, and I think they disabled the ratings change - or disabled all changes to fics. IIRC, Jasta Elf had a problem with this - I think she was accused of doing this, but had changed 'Dark Leaf' to fit the R rating (or it was never NC-17 in the first place but she was accused of having changed the rating). Also, I'd have to look at my old mail (assuming I still have it - Lycos Mail is down at the moment), but I think Vorondis decided to take 'Mortal Shores' off the site in the middle of the story because of the pending change. It may be that people who didn't check the site news weren't aware of the deadline and got screwed.

Here from

metafandom.

The way I remember it is the fuss about lowering ratings happened after the purge? There was definitely some idea NC-17 was going away, but I don't think anyone expected them all to be deleted like that. I think people re-posted fic after that with lowered ratings, resulting in the second round of fuss? I could be wrong.

I had a story up I'd rated R all along - because IMO that's what it honestly deserved - that got deleted quite a bit after the NC-17 fics were purged. I was suspended from my account for several days as a punishment, which meant I was unable to edit the other stories that had an 'R' rating. Before I was allowed back in, my entire account - every single story I had on that site - was deleted and my username locked.

But then some friends directed me to LJ and life got better. :)

No, they definitely didn't warn people in advance of the pending change. What they did was lock the NC-17 fics without notice over September 11; when the site came back online on September 12, affected authors were told they could use the site's backup feature to download and save personal copies before the stories were automatically deleted (which happened about a week later), but they couldn't edit them at all or change the ratings. Of course, some people simply uploaded their (still NC-17) fics under new titles, which just made the uproar worse. Vorondis took all her fics down, including the non-NC-17 ones, in protest of how the whole situation was managed; as she said at the time, it would have been different if she had been asked first to make the appropriate changes or to take the fics down, but being treated as too untrustworthy to be allowed to appropriately edit her own work was simply unacceptable.

Fanfic.net had its controversies too, but I think in the end it was safer for them to get rid of the NC17 stuff.

Ironically, it probably put them at MORE legal risk, not less. Fanfiction.net is simply too big to enforce posting rules; there's simply no way they can be sure no one is posting NC-17 fic under a lower rating. Had they faced a legal challenge before they performed their NC-17 purge, they might have been able to claim they were merely acting as a common carrier, and so were not responsible for the content of any specific items posted on their site. Once they perfomed their NC-17 purge, though, they created a reasonable assumption on the part of readers that stories would actually have to confirm to the site's posted ratings requirements. Now when little Johnnie's mother finds her kid reading a (mis-rated) pornfic on ff.net, she will be able to make a strong claim that ff.net is liable because they failed to enforce their own posting rules. "If I had known my kid could find porn there, I would never have allowed him to read the stories on that site. But the site says they don't allow adult stories, and I trusted them..."

If you can't enfore a rule consistently, it's better not to have it in the first place. By claiming not to allow NC-17 stories on the site, ff.net has made itself vulnerable, because it still has NC-17 fics there (and always will, so long as it allows author self-posting).

WORD.

Thanks!

Small is beautiful, and keep your fugly Flash ads off my pr0n. :D

It's a hideous site, and so far I'm not impressed by the LotR offerings. As with most archives, one may have to wade through a lot of crap to find the good stuff (if there is any).

But I also agree with you about music. Feh.

I remember reading a really great article about They Might Be Giants and the DIY ethic once upon a time (in The New Yorker?). Maybe when I'm not at work and swamped, I'll attempt to track it down for you.

Oh, that'd be cool. I'm still so fond of them.

I agree on so many fronts there. The only problem now, I would say, is that I feel like lately you just exchange one group of elitists for another in some fandom and/or music and/or art groups. With fandom you get lucky in some cases; the GO fandom is blessedly free of most of the wank you get elsewhere. My feeling has always been enjoy it, please, and stay away from the bs that crops up in situations like this.

It that's fear that everyone has about GO becoming a movie for instance; the fandom fills up with newbies and bad fic ensues and you're left there saying, "I liked this before I it was cool." And you still love it. But not in the way that all these new people seem to. (It's one of those terrible curses of being a Tim Burton fan, for instance. XD)

I guess also for me, part of that comes from having a family of artists, particularly musicians. I was raised with the idea that I should appreciate any kind of music I wanted simply based on my own damned opinion. So most of my music is old rock and movie soundtracks because I got into myself, not because I was pushed. But I do like some indie. And I do like some pop. The most annoying part of that becomes feeling like you have to explain that to other people for any stupid reason. The point is the freedom, exactly. Freedom to enjoy it because it's music, not because it's popular, or it isn't.

Well, there goes me being all wordy. XD

I love fannish culture -- though I've tended to be too busy for much of it in the last 2 years, but I miss it terribly. I'm going to MediaWest next weekend to soak up more of the DIY, make-your-own-fun atmosphere. I love being around people who write stories, do artwork, etc. for no reason other than to have fun and be creative. I don't see where corporate sponsorship could possibly add anything good.

There has been a lot of worry that FanLib will change the flavor of fandom and fanfiction. But perhaps FanLib will create its own version of fanfiction that has nothing to do with the rest of us. Traditional fanfiction and the corporate version are too dissimilar to rub off on each other.

I've linked to this at

life_wo_fanlib.

Very well said. :)

Once fandom goes commercial, it isn't fandom anymore. Not that I'd expect corporations to understand that; they're blind to the reality that some things simply can't be purchased with money, but must be paid for in other coin.

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"Corporate Rock Still Sucks"...and corporate fanfic even more so

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