Fanfic: Electrifying the Oral Tradition

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Title:	Fanfic: Electrifying the Oral Tradition
Creator:	Red Hen
Date(s):	May 2005
Medium:	online
Fandom:
Topic:	Fanfiction as compared to oral traditions Canon/fanon characterizations
External Links:	http://www.redhen-publications.com/fanfic.html
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Fanfic: Electrifying the Oral Tradition is an essay by Red Hen. It was originally part of her Deconstructing Miss Granger essay, but was spun off and expanded.

Excerpts

The effect of the Oral Tradition upon any story line or character is to distill it down into the lowest common denominator. To generalize rather than to individualize, to translate the particular into the “universal”, ultimately grinding everything down and rendering it back into the archetype — which is too indigestable to reduce any further. Heroines, even female heroes, dwindle into generic “princesses”, heroes into the third sons of either kings or peasants with nothing really left to determine the difference. Antagonistic females morph into stepmothers or witches, and antagonistic males into robber barons, wicked kings, or evil sorcerers. Characters, in short, who are not characters, and who consequently need no further explanation, types which bring into the story no personal baggage of their own that will distract the listener from the central story arc.

The fanfic community traditionally would have almost preferred to be regarded as an informal thieves’ guild — marauders of published authors’ intellectual property — than as a clot of ephemeral storytellers. To be perceived as a commercial threat at least gave them and their authorial aspirations some degree of credibility. In the era of the worldwide web, this is no longer the case. Nor would it be a viable option. The online community makes what amounts to self-publication far too easy, and has removed much of the commercial component from the equation.

There will always be a segment of the fanfic community who really want to be authors. For these practitioners it’s not enough just to get the story told and out into circulation. They really want to develop some bonafide writing skill and technique. To not just tell a story but to tell it with style, embellished with all the bells and whistles and quirky “literary” tricks that slow down the reader’s headlong rush to the conclusion and give him something to chew on along the way.

The Oral Tradition, however, has no use or patience with this kind of solitary wankage. Nor for stories which can only really be “appreciated” by a self-selecting elite.

Fanficton [sic] has been with us for quite some time. Many of the people currently involved in it now trace it back as far as the original Star Trek in the late 1960s, but it is much older than that. If you tag it onto the tradition of literary pastiche it can be effortlessly traced well into the end of the 19th century and centuries farther back yet if you really try. The most familiar examples which come immediately to mind are the countless “further adventures” of Sherlock Holmes for which A. Conan Doyle can take no direct responsibility, or any of the 200+ apocryphal Oz books that were never published by Reilly & Lee. And, for the record, yes Virginia, there was Tolkein [sic] fanfic back in the late ‘60s as well. Although I do not know whether the phenomenon lasted until they made a movie of the work, thereby setting off a whole new generation of same.

For that matter, what else are the traditional Robin Hood tales but a fanfic legacy whose authors’ identities have disappeared over time? Or, for that matter, many of the tales of King Arthur’s Knights.

But the price of fanfic’s being regarded as an unauthorized form of literary pastiche was for it to be branded a bastardized branch of Literature, usually regarded as very poorly executed, but, nevertheless, subject to all the rules and regulations to which Literature and the aspiring creators of Literature are subject. And for so long as fanfic was confined to text on paper, this was probably the only really appropriate context in which to relate to it.

In an era when publishing a fanfic usually meant reproducing it in ditto, or mimeograph at best, and to sell it to defray one's production costs was clearly treading upon the toes of the copyright holder it is hard to regard the matter as anything other than a lose/lose proposition.

But people still did it.

****

However, the all but complete migration of fanfic to electronic media over the past two decades or so (yes, the World Wide Web celebrated its 20th anniversary in the year of 2013) has shifted this paradigm. In fact, it has bundled it into a van and moved it all the way into terra incognita. We are not now where we once were. And the bulk of fanfiction is manifestly no longer assumed to be even titularly “literary”.

Since fanfic is still typically expressed in text it is difficult to get beyond the impression that we are still dealing with the dynamics of print media. But we really are not. The majority of fanfic is never printed. What is more, it is never really intended to be printed. Its reason to exist is not as a “larval” stage of scaling some great height leading to the pinnacle of professional publication and public distribution. Even the crudest of such work is already publicly distributed. It has already been sent out into the world, as is, to succeed or fail on its own merits and to find its own audience. Or not.

And with ever greater frequency the overt demand from that audience is not; “Give me a new book for my collection!” It is; “Tell me a story!”

And, given the rapidity of the exchange that now exists between author and reader, the dynamic of that exchange begins to look exactly like a storyteller adressing [sic] a large group of children of various ages who require entertainment.

Welcome to the global village.

And the global village storyteller.

It eventually becomes evident to any reader of fanfiction who approaches the exercise with a critical mindset that what a startling percentage of fanwriters seem to want to do is not to tell their friends a new story, but to retell the stories that they all already know — with different costumes, scenery and dialogue, in a weirdly electronic simulation of the Oral Tradition wherein suddenly you have about 14 different variants of what is obviously Snow White, distinguishable only by minor changes to secondary issues.

Which probably accounts for the depressing number of “cookie-cutter” fanfics that abound in most popular fandoms. Particularly in what are known as “challenge fics” which are all written to the same basic “prompt”. The authors are all tacitly agreeing to tell the same 4–5 stories — with varying minor changes to details and dialogue.

It can be a fascinating exercise to watch a storyteller take what is essentially stock material and make something fresh from it. And that can certainly be done. We’ve all watched it happen. Sometimes to impressive effect.