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mask131 · 1 year

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You know, there is one thing that annoys me - and I know that is goes against the current, where everybody praises the "death of the author" concept - but it truly does annoy me how fans sometimes decide on their own they have more authority on a fictional work than this work's author (given I am into liteature, we'll take books as an example).

I am not talking about situations such as "The author forgot that they wrote that in the first book, and wrote something contradicting it in the third, and the fans pointed it out and deemed it bad writing" - no I am not talking about this kind of situation.

I am rather talking about situations such as for example: an author's work gets adapted. The author loves very much the adaptation and finds it faithful or at least that it works well on its own. Some fans dislike it and declare it unfaithful and a bad adaptation. And if the author's liking of the adaptation is brought up, the fans will over-rid it as the author's opnion being wrong, and theirs being right.

The first situation (the one I do not talk about) was about facts, textual facts, internal logic, writing problems - and this is all part of the fan's domain. Because the fan, the reader, is all about accumulating the information given, piecing together the elements created, the fan reflects the author's work in that regard, and thus it is the fan's natural right and duty to point out things such as incoherences, bad writing, plot problems and the like. But the second situation (the one I do talk about) is about opinion, and this changes everything.

We live in an era (well mostly Internet era since it all happens over the Internet nowadays) where, as I said before, the "death of the author" becomes a rule and is encouraged. And the death of the author itself is not a bad thing - in fact, it is the "natural state" of reading a work. When you discover a new author, a new book, a new series, you don't know who made it, what this person is about or for. You just read a story, judge it, and make your opinion out of it. We also live in an era where fan-content (fan-art, fan-fiction, fanzines, fan-games) are even more visible, encouraged and thriving than ever before. They are even reused by the industry (for marketing purpose) and by creators themselves (to share the love and appreciate between them and their audience). But somehow, with such a mass-valorization, with such an effort to make it all common and mundane, something changed, and fans started to think themselves equals, rivals or even superiors to the creators.

We live in an era where fans believe their headcanons and theories can be used as rightful demands, as words of command, as orders over creators of content. We live in an era where fans are somehow so mad at authors they actually insult them for not following their fanfction ideas and for not doing what the fan wanted. This is a new form of tyranny where fans that get invested too much in something mistake their "fan-creator" rank for "co-creator" and believe in some sort of delusion that the work they are a fan of belongs to them and that they can dictate how it goes, as if it was their story and not one someone else created and placed their blood, sweat and tears into.

I do wonder if this bizarre switch of thought on the Internet wasn't partally due to the "Potter-trauma", when J.K. Rowling's political comments completely destroyed and ruined the perfectly "united, happy and peaceful" Potterdom, this entire subculture that had grown over the Harry Potter books and dominated a few generations. This faced the people of the Internet (but especially Americans, who didn't had centuries of literary wars behind them) with the dilema of "What do I do when I love a work, but I hate the person that makes it?". And one of the many answers, one of the many "solutions" to this problem, that was widely accepted, was "Well, make the work yours. You have centered your life around it, you love it, you study it and know it better than the author herself. Just ignore her, ignore her words, cut her off and make the books yours." An answer that was logical and reasonable at the time, in front of the given situation - it is the very simple "Consider the work, not the person behind it" logic behind fiction that is however still hotly debated today.

But ever since, it seems that people have taken this logic to its most extreme ways, and turned into some sort of mania. A mania where people will claim to know better what the author truly wanted to say than what the author themselves say ; a mania where people will contradict what the author says about their book in interviews, promotions, and the like, and clearly consider that the author's words have no weight outside of their own book ; a mania where people will see whatever they want in a story, and completely ignore things such as the context or the intentions behind the release of the book.

I know things are not all simple or black and white. My example about the author's opinion on an adaptation of their work is one that works generally well - because who is on the better position, and on the first-line, to judge a book's adaptation? The author of the book of course! However, to very example there is a counter-example, and I have one right there. Stephen King hated Kubrick's adaptation of The Shining, despite Kubrick's movie being one of the greatest horror movies ever made in America, and King's book being quite flawed (great book, but there's definitively big flaws typical of early King in there). This is a counter-example where myself include I recognize the author can be wrong about such matters of opinion, due to the author's own biases, own personal involvment and vision of their work. In The Shining's case, it is because there is the very nuanced situation of a movie that is objectively great on its own, but is actually a bad adaptation of a book (it does happen sometimes that you have good adaptations that are bad works on their own, and bad adaptations that are great works).

But here's the catch and the result of this discourse: doesn't matter that the author is right or wrong, the importance is that an author's opinion MATTERS and should be taken into account when it comes to their own work. Because they are the FRIGGIN CREATORS and MAKERS of this work - you are not. It is their work, that came out of their mind and hands, it belongs to them, they can change it and decide its fate until their disappearance from the surface of the human world [not accounting for the editors ex machina], and you can do nothing about it. Because it isn't "your" work". If you dedicate your entire life making excellent fan-content of a book, it won't make it "your book". All the fan-content will be yours, for certain, but the original material will stay "not yours".

Yes an author can leave things open-ended, leave questions unanswered, encourage theories and head-canon, and people coming up with their own answers. But it doesn't mean that when the author eventually decides one day to solve their own mystery or resolve their own riddle, you get to insult them and harass them because it isn't the one you imagined! Of course you can criticize an author for coming up with a bad solution - because as a fan you will note for example how unsatisfying such a resolution is, how anti-climactic it feels, or how a story worked better with an open-ending. But only some spoiled bratty child (or child-minded person) would come up to an author and say "I don't like your idea, because it isn't mine, and it doesn't fit this drawing I made of your character - which by the way is mine now". I said it before and I will say it again - we live in the "Misery" era. Stephen King's Misery, where Annie is walking everywhere down every streets, and where all popular authors are at fear of being locked in a bedroom with their feet broken by some lunatic wanting them to write an "official fanfic" with their OCs and personal planned "happy ending AU".

You can argue one thing against this entire speech: But, aren't critics, and literature historians, constatly imagining new meanings and new messages inside literary works? Aren't university teachers and literary students constantly reappropriating works in new ways the author never intended to? Aren't they all just placing their own ideas and biases and interpretations inside books, and then proclaiming it the "good way" to read it? Aren't they the one who decided that a curtain isn't just blue? And to that I will say yes and no. Yes because, indeed, it is their job, as researchers, as studiers of literature, as investigators of the life and works of authors, as theorizers of the book industry, to constantly bring new things in old stuff, and to unravel ad dig up things the author themselves did not plan to have in their work. So "yes". But also "no", no because such a caricatural view only comes from a simplistic overview of literary criticism and literary studies, and even from some anti-intellectualist ideas.

Because this entire world of literature teachers, and profesionnal critics, and scholars of authors, has something that (at least in French) is called the "fairness of the researcher". These people can say the wildest, craziest theories, interpretations and readings of a work, as long as they recognize that A) it is their words, their puzzle, their solution to a mystery they sometimes make up themselves B) there is a context, a life behind the work and things such as publication constraints that were involved in the shaping of a book and C) they have proof, evident and obvious proof of what they advance, and that encourages such a reading.

People who just waltz in with their own personal theories about why "X author wrote a subtle criticism of the sausage industry throughout their three main novels" need to have something to back it up, else they will be mercilessly mocked, ignored and have the door slammed in their face. This is why literature high-studies is such a competitive and "harsh" world, because people constantly look at each other in a rivalry designed to keep in check those that would go a bit "insane" and make everybody doubt their words and recheck their papers to make sure they are not imagining things. On the bad side, it also explains why university-critics and book studies are so slow to change and evolve over time, because due to this need to take into account every influence and context, and to bring solid proof to back up one's reading or theory, it can sometimes take a century or so to realize what is obvious from the beginning if you know where to look.

But even then - even in this context of encouraged, widespread and even accepted interpretations of text, people still do NOT believe the works of these authors somehow belongs to them! This is the true aberration that is festering on the Internet today, and the apex of the "bad fan" behavior. You own your fan-made content, you own your physical copy of the book, you own your hand-written copy of the novel you took five years writing with an ostrich feather - but you do not actually own the book until you bought its rights from whoever has it! And even beyond a mere question of "owernship" - because we all know how big corporations just buy over the rights to everything and fuck them over massively due to not understanding a single thing about what makes them great - it is a question of the author's symbiosis with their work, something that cannot be questioned and that only truly stops when they die, because the author can't create more of the work or express any more opinion or control over it. But before this death, people seem to have forgotten that authors are creators - that they made the work, that without them the work would not exist, and that they made this work with a certain goal, a certain plan, certain intentions more or less subtle. And that the fate of a work usually should rely within the hands of this author, not within the hands of the fans, who are only here to support, love, criticize, hate or judge a work, not act as some sort of board in a big company!

Authors are not your pals that can do you a favor if you offer them a drink (well... scratch that, there's a lot of authors who would do a lot of things to you if you gave them a drink). Rather - authors are not your employees. Yes, authors will work for you technically because they will write for their audience and for their fans - but authors also write primarily for themselves. They are selfish beings who write because they want to tell the stories they have in their head, and they want to do the work they always intended to, and they only want to use their character with their tory, their world, their plot. If you want to tell your story, become an author, but fans should honestly stop pretending they have just as much authority and owernship of a work as their creator just because they spent too much time daydreaming about it.

#this is one of my unhinged rants that come out of nowhere #or rather that come to me when I didn't slept enough #fans #authors #fandoms #i don't even have a right tag for this #due to how unclassified this topic is #because it is all a great mess #and i need to go to sleep #people seem to forget that an author when it comes to their work is alone against the world #or a small group against the rest of the world #but there's no book that was written by everybody that read it #though it is an insanely cool concept

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marypsue · 2 years

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Ahh I’m so excited to see what’s cooking up with former heroes especially bc I know some of the things that bothered you with season 3 were some of the plot points I have the most so I’m excited to see how you change them. Also I’m excited to see the rise of Joyce Byers, love triangle fiancée who is on fire ! (And hopefully not with a hopper that was s3 Hopper) Robin and Steve still scooping maybe?? Nancy and Mike being peak siblings and also Lucas hopefully getting some time shine.

Also I was wondering you hand any sneak peeks available for the Bodyswap AU or the Vampires+Steve pt3 fic!!

Hello hello nonny!

First and most importantly, I am fistbumping you through the computer screen over season 3. I'm really hopeful that this AU version is going to be satisfying, and avoid the major issues I had with season 3 without being unrecognisable from the canon. While I was considering what changes to make and how, I tried to tie it back more meaningfully to the themes of seasons 1 and 2, and I'm pleased with how that's coming through in the outline so far. Hopefully it'll work in the finished product! (Also, I can promise considerably more Peak Sibling Nonsense, and considerably less of season 3 Hopper. Although I am not making any promises at this time on the matter of dumb teenage romance bullshit.)

Also, because you asked so nicely, from the third and (hopefully) final chapter of don't let the sun go down on me:

“Did you hear? They found the Byers kid.”

Steve doesn’t have any kind of a response to that, beyond a blank stare. It’s too fucking early in the morning for how fucking early in the morning it is. He was up way too late last night, again, thanks to Nancy and Jonathan. The last thing he’s prepared to process is Tommy Hagan’s weird enthusiasm about knowing some piece of gossip Steve doesn’t.

Ordinarily, Steve wouldn’t rise to the bait. He’d play it cool, like he doesn’t actually care. Tommy will fill him in eventually, whether he cares or not.

But ordinarily, Tommy isn’t casually dropping a bombshell that could decide the future of Steve’s sanity. If they’ve found Will Byers – then there’s no reason left for Nancy and Jonathan to stick around. “What? Where?”

Tommy’s shit-eating grin gets even wider, and he slings an arm around Steve’s shoulders, steering them both deeper into the crowded, noisy halls. “Floating facedown in the quarry. Sounds like maybe whatever took a swipe at you decided to go after easier prey.”

Tommy keeps talking, but Steve barely hears him. There’s a weird roaring buzz rising in his ears, drowning out all but the pitch and cadence of Tommy’s voice. Suddenly, the crowded hallway is suffocating.

Steve barely manages to mumble out some halfassed excuse before shrugging off Tommy’s arm and breaking for the bathroom. He tries not to look like he’s running. He doesn’t know if he’s succeeding.

He’s no sooner made it into a stall than he’s hitting his knees on the grotty tile floor, clutching the porcelain bowl as his hasty breakfast makes a surprise reappearance. That bagel hadn’t tasted like anything special on the way down. It’s not improved the second time around.

When his stomach seems to be finished turning itself inside out, Steve sits back on his heels, coughing out the last lingering flecks of vomit as he wonders what the hell just happened. It’s not like he ever actually met Will Byers. Or like he’s known Jonathan for more than two days. And Steve had spent part of one of those days thinking Jonathan was a murderer.

Except. He’d been so angry when he’d thought Jonathan was a murderer. Like Jonathan had personally betrayed him. Steve’s not sure what that means. If it means anything. He’s not sure he wants to think too much about it.

Whether or not Steve actually cares about Jonathan Byers and how hurt he’s going to be by this, though – still. Still. That’s a kid. Will is just – was just a little kid. And – Steve’s memory, unhelpfully, decides to play him the highlight reel of that monster’s teeth, his dad telling him there were bites missing, Tommy saying easier prey, the excruciating pain in Steve’s stomach where the monster had slashed him open –

He wonders, with fresh horror, whether that thing got Will while Jonathan and Nancy were busy taking care of him. Even though that timeline doesn’t make any sense, he still has to dry-heave over the toilet again.

“Stevie?”

It’s the last voice Steve wants to hear right now. He groans as he twists to look over his shoulder at Tommy, and it’s only half exasperation.

Tommy ignores him. “Hey, man, you okay?”

“You look like shit,” Carol says, with a pop of her ever-present gum, following Tommy into the boys’ bathroom like she belongs there. “Rough night last night, Steve-o?”

She’s giving Steve an out. A way to save face. He flashes her a grateful smile, and hopes he doesn’t have bits of upchucked bagel stuck in his teeth. “Guess I must still be hung over.”

“Aww,” Carol tuts, with a sarcastic pout, as Tommy leans over to offer Steve a hand up off the disgusting floor. “And you didn’t invite us?”

“Hey, I know what’ll make you feel better,” Tommy announces, like he’s about to put a man on the moon. “We skip first period and hit the diner. Get you something hot and greasy to fill that bottomless pit.” He thwaps the back of one hand against Steve’s stomach with a grin.

Steve’s stomach gives another lurch. He swallows bile.

“Thanks, man,” he says, when he trusts himself enough to open his mouth. “But the diner’s been closed since Monday, remember? The owner killed himself?”

Tommy’s face falls. Steve swallows around a stab of guilt. Tommy’s his friend. He’s trying to help.

He just – he has no fucking clue what Steve’s gotten himself into this time. Neither he or Carol do.

And it’s gotta stay that way.

“Good idea, though,” Steve offers, an olive branch. “Skipping. Think I’m gonna ditch for the day.”

Tommy doesn’t totally lose the kicked-puppy look, but he does try for a smile. “You want us to tell Sanderberg you’re out sick? Sorry, sir, he was throwing up all morning,” he says, to the absent first-period teacher, voice pitched up and eyes wide in a mockery of innocence.

“Yeah, yeah, sure,” Steve says, knowing Tommy will at least get a kick out of winding up the notoriously suspicious Mr. Sanderberg. “Thanks, man.”

“Don’t mention it,” Tommy says, slapping Steve on the back just a little too hard.

“Are you actually sick?” Carol asks, or maybe ‘demands’ is a better word. “You’re acting weird lately.”

Steve forces a smile, hoping it doesn’t look too much like a grimace, as he shuffles over to the sinks to rinse out his mouth. “Nah. Told you. I’m just hung over. Gonna head home and sleep it off.”

Carol, in the mirror behind his head, does not look convinced. But she doesn’t say anything more, either.

Steve does feel a little bad about leaving her and Tommy behind, as he heads out to the parking lot and his car. But they’d never understand. They’d never believe him. Hell, in the cold, bright light of day, Steve barely believes himself.

And, he thinks, as he peels out of the high school lot, there’s no way he could bring Tommy and Carol with him where he knows he has to go now.

#chatter #this is mary's fic tag #stranger things #figuring out that the themes of seasons 1 and 2 included both 'what happens when love becomes stronger than fear'#AND 'things are not always as they seem'#really brought it all together imo and I do have to thank season four for providing me with clarity on that front #(also a bit of plot inspiration which I have blatantly stolen)#writing the vampire fic at the moment feels kind of like speeding down an icy hill in a car that is on fire #we're going somewhere and we're going FAST and things keep happening! but if I am not careful to keep in control #the wheels are going to come off #I think it is going to need a lot of editing to turn what made it onto the page into something that has the impact it had in my head #sometimes you get possessed by an idea that is SO COOL that you forget not everybody can see all the cool parts inside your brain #and you write it down very very fast and then have to give it a little while to cool off before you can look at it with a stranger's eyes #and go 'oh yeah I totally forgot to explain why that bit matters didn't I'

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