Anne Rice and fanfic hypocrisy

Meta
Title:	Anne Rice and fanfic hypocrisy
Creator:	Static-Pulse
Date(s):	very early 2000s
Medium:	online
Fandom:	multifandom
Topic:	Anne Rice, fanfiction
External Links:	online here, via Wayback, Archived version
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Anne Rice and fanfic hypocrisy is an essay by Static-Pulse.

It was posted at Writers University.

Excerpts

There's a rule in fanfic that I find laughable. That rule is, simply put and quoted with near perfect remembrance:

Steal from your betters, not your peers.

That, in my opinion, is the most self-deluded tripe that any fan fiction writer could ever believe. It is basically saying that it's okay to write about the Flash because people who write its canon get paid and are there for better than a fanfic written by a fan...The kind of thinking that a professional writer is a better writer is a foolish notion. Writing is writing and writers are writers. Someone may get paid to write a story, but that does not make them any better. Hell! George Lucas created and wrote Star Wars! However, I would personally say that any of Kevin J. Anderson's "Young Jedi Knights" series blows "The Phantom Menace" out of the water 10 times out of 10! My point is basically this: writers are writers and writing is writing.

Perhaps it's a difference in beliefs. My belief in the free, uncontrolled exchange of information versus someone else's belief that artists retain control over their works. What stumps me, though, are the fan fiction writers who maintain that artists should have control over their work, yet they don't give a second thought to essentially stealing from copy righted works.

Because we pay for comic books, we have the right to write fanfic. However, as fanfic writers we don't get paid, so people shouldn't use our characters. If I were to follow that line of reasoning, Sony should let me have free PSX discs because I paid them for a Play Station. When you pay for a comic book you pay for nothing more than a comic book. You pay for ink, paper, printing time, writers, inkers, pencillers, and editors (to name some of what DC, Marvel, etc. has to finance every month). No where in the price of a comic book have your purchased liscencing. You bought the comic book so you could read the comic book. You write because you like what you read. I see no relation in paying the local comic book store for your books and you FTP'ing stories to your site except that both acts are two aspects of enjoying the same medium.

I'm so close to my characters that I couldn't stand to see anyone else write them. Even if by some chance I went professional, I would stop people from writing fanfic about them. I don't care if it would make me a hypocrite. First off, people, THAT is what Anne Rice is doing. If you agree with what I just paraphrased from a chat and you still think Anne Rice is being unreasonable, take a good, hard look in the mirror and see if you don't wince. Continuing on, if you don't mind being a hypocrite, there's not much I can do about that, it's a personal choice like ignorance and bigotry. What I can do, though, is ask you and Anne Rice, why you don't like other people writing about your characters and universes?