"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

[erunyauve-e.livejournal.com]

(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.

[archon-mentha.livejournal.com]

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. :)

[ithilwen.livejournal.com]

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.