Fanfiction is purely for escapism and reality has no place: discuss.
I disagree. Fanfiction, like all fiction, has a range of modes, genres, and atmospheres. Some stories are total escapism, some stories are gritty realism, others yet combine the two.
You don't live in flowers and kittens land... Alien!
The image now stuck in my head:
Actually I have a photo somewhere proving that my kitten is really Batmite.
Some lovely nutters have been posting The Goodies to youtube enabling me to do very useful things like send chunks of "Sex & Violence" to a friend about to have the "birds an bees" chat with her kid. Yes, she found it very helpful. Ahem...
Interesting choice. I think if I had a cat a Perry the Platypus cossie might be the way to go.
But yeah, I agree. Fanfiction is fiction. There are a lot of ways you can take it, and no law saying that it all has to be totally escapist without bringing in anything real. Yes, this means that people who like purely escapist stuff have to fish around and find authors they like instead of being able to jump into any random fic and get exactly what they want, but that's true of any form of fiction.
*narrows eyes*
(I never labelled the fic that people are angry over me for with 'fluff'. It was also not full of hijinx and that much goofiness before the ending. And the characters still end up together! They never hated one another. I thought it was more romantic that they waited, but it really pissed some people off,... because it was what should have happened under the circumstances?)
A lovely mate recently posted a great explanation of slash from Henry Jenkins, an American media prof. and then in another comment quoted him too:
Fan fiction is a way of the culture repairing the damage done in a system where contemporary myths are owned by corporations, instead of owned by the folk.
Fan fiction often is escapist, but then so are many of the stories we tell across all sorts of formats... and then many of them aren't. The thing is, even when the story is "escapist" it often contains human truths because that's how we relate to it in the first place.
Sorry, pre-coffee.
And, honestly, I have nothing against escapism, I have written plenty. Like you say, I also don't think escapism is necessarily devoid of reality, so much as it couches it in a certain way.
I just... I find it a little weird that this is by no means the first comment to mention the ending being 'real' or 'realistic', but is the first to suggest "and this is why it was bad."
(I feel like if the characters hadn't chosen to wait to be paired romantically the ending would have been a hell of a lot more amoral, if not downright immoral, and therefore I'd have ended up with other commenters complaining about that. I already had one person mid-fic lambast me for creepiness. It was very much a lose-lose situation so far as pleasing everyone was concerned and I should have factored that in.)
Except that's an honest subjective viewpoint of the "I read fan fiction for the fantasy how dare you be logical about it all" type. And, tbh, I don't think most TW fans are drawn to TW for the gritty realism... perhaps I'm mistaken as I've only seen trailers for it. *g*
The thing is, petal, as long as you write anything at all and decide to share it with an audience then you're going to have to deal with both objective (you didn't warn as you were supposed to, you wrote "prostrate" when you meant "prostate," no, Stiles is NOT currently President of the United States) and subjective opinions and the subjective opinions will always be difficult to deal with because a "text" really is formed as a combination of the writer and reader and there's nothing to be done about it. If you takes risks in writing, and you do, it's going to happen even more.
Edited at 2013-02-19 06:58 pm (UTC)