I can completely understand sending lawyers after people when your revenue has been compromised.
Exactly! But like you said, they're totally not. (Thanks for reiterating that whole point, I'd meant to harp more on that but I got distracted.)
If you ask the rest to take their fics down, you're playing favourites, and that's still creative censorship.
Still, I don't think it would be unreasonable for an author to "play favourites" re: what they allow and what they don't - it's definitely still creative censorship, though, which is a good point. But if an author is going to invoke creative censorship in the first place, then where an individual author draws the line between "acceptible" and "not acceptible" becomes the new focus instead of "yes fanfiction" or "no fanfiction". The line is similarly blurry on the "no fanfiction" front: talking and theorizing about her characters is fine, but you're not allowed to do it in an authorial voice. So what constitutes an authorial voice? If someone is talking on a forum about how awesome it would be for Lestat to run for governmental office and decided to put quotations around something that he would theoretically say, or describe in a prose-like fashion what he might do, does that cross the line? Both of these responses involve user participation in her work, but for some reason one is much more threatening than the other.
I wonder if Anne Rice's strong reaction is basically a by-product of the fact that she's more intimately aware of (and by extension, even somewhat involvced in) the fan community and its activities? I mean, she isn't actively PARTICIPATING in the community, but she definitely acknowledges its presence in both accepting and rejecting ways. Maybe it's a combination of her particular personality (being an "egomaniac," as you so nicely put it X-D) and her knowledge of fandom which provides for her really intense, ambivalent relationship with the fan community.
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Date: 2008-10-24 07:23 pm (UTC)I can completely understand sending lawyers after people when your revenue has been compromised.
Exactly! But like you said, they're totally not. (Thanks for reiterating that whole point, I'd meant to harp more on that but I got distracted.)
If you ask the rest to take their fics down, you're playing favourites, and that's still creative censorship.
Still, I don't think it would be unreasonable for an author to "play favourites" re: what they allow and what they don't - it's definitely still creative censorship, though, which is a good point. But if an author is going to invoke creative censorship in the first place, then where an individual author draws the line between "acceptible" and "not acceptible" becomes the new focus instead of "yes fanfiction" or "no fanfiction". The line is similarly blurry on the "no fanfiction" front: talking and theorizing about her characters is fine, but you're not allowed to do it in an authorial voice. So what constitutes an authorial voice? If someone is talking on a forum about how awesome it would be for Lestat to run for governmental office and decided to put quotations around something that he would theoretically say, or describe in a prose-like fashion what he might do, does that cross the line? Both of these responses involve user participation in her work, but for some reason one is much more threatening than the other.
I wonder if Anne Rice's strong reaction is basically a by-product of the fact that she's more intimately aware of (and by extension, even somewhat involvced in) the fan community and its activities? I mean, she isn't actively PARTICIPATING in the community, but she definitely acknowledges its presence in both accepting and rejecting ways. Maybe it's a combination of her particular personality (being an "egomaniac," as you so nicely put it X-D) and her knowledge of fandom which provides for her really intense, ambivalent relationship with the fan community.