Fanfic, ownership, and metaficcing

[owlmoose]

So I was talking with bottle_of_shine about getting ideas from other people's fic, and today she posted about it, and it got me to thinking.

It seems to me entirely natural that those of us who write fanfic would get story ideas from reading other people's fic. Because isn't that the whole reason for the existence of fanfic? We look at the canon and we say "But what happened next?/But what came before?/But what if it happened this way?" And seems to me that the impulse doesn't go away just because the story we happen to be reading is written by another fan rather than by whoever produced the original.

So I don't see how anyone who writes fanfic can object when someone looks at a story she's written and says "I want to see more" or "I wonder if I could take it in this other direction?" Because that's what she did when she wrote her fic in the first place. I won't quite say it would be hypocritical to object, but I think it leans in that direction. I'm not talking about someone who copies a story word-for-word without proper attribution, of course, or someone who does a "find-replace" on names but otherwise leaves the story intact or otherwise obvious acts of plagiarism. But fic about fic, or a remix, or whatever you call it when one fic is inspired by another, should be legit, and I think that should be a basic understanding among anyone who writes fanfic.

Or am I missing some completely obvious reason that this would be a problem?

Anyway. Part of me would love to see remixing etc.just become assumed as part of fandom culture. I'm not sure the Final Fantasy fandom has a coherent enough community to spread any kind of overall social norm, though. So in the meantime, I vote for releasing fic under a Creative Commons license, which has the advantage of coming in various flavors, so everyone and label their stories with whichever level of protection they're comfortable with. Just this morning, I put up the Attribution-NoCommercial-ShareAlike notice both here and on my FF.net page, and I invite anyone who agrees to join me.

Comments

[owlmoose.livejournal.com]

But if someone takes more than just one point I . . . really don't know how I'd feel about it.

What I wonder is this: would you feel differently if someone did that, and then credited you? "I got bunnied for this story by solitaryjane's fic about A, B, and C." Because I never said anything about metaficcing/remixing without credit -- I think that does skirt the boundaries of plagiarism.

I disagree, though, with the idea that that fanfic only uses the characters from canon and not much else. We borrow a lot from the source: the world itself, its history, its culture, how the characters relate to one another, elements of the plot. There's a reason my disclaimers don't just say "the characters belong to Square Enix". Lots of the ideas we're working with when we write fic come from the original material. I don't see much of a distinction there at all.

Then again, I tend to believe that no one has a monopoly on any particular idea. An unusual or fascinating idea might get me started on a fic, but what will really suck me in is the execution -- how well is it developed and written? To me, that's the important thing.