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

[vulgarweed]

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.

Comments

[dreya-uberwald.livejournal.com]

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.

[vulgarweed.livejournal.com]

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.

[dreya-uberwald.livejournal.com]

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.

[tears-of-nienna.livejournal.com]

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.