More thoughts from The Democratic Genre

The My Little Repeats series is proving to be an interesting experience. I don't think there have been any huge surprises so far, in that I haven't changed my opinion on any episode from "strongly like" to "strongly dislike" or vice versa. The most controversial episode has been, as I'd fully expected, "Feeling Pinkie Keen". That said, I'm now closing in on S1's second most contentious episode, "Over a Barrel". I have my own views about that one, but I'll save them until I've rewatched. That's the point of MLR, after all!

Anyway, to the subject of this post. My title refers to the 2005 book by Sheenagh Pugh exploring the literary aspects of fanfic – the one I posted about on New Year's Day. I'm reading it in bite-size chunks to let me digest some of the things Pugh says, and this passage stood out. Here, Pugh takes as her starting point Anne Rice's well-known strong opposition to fanfic and, in particular, Rice telling fans to write "your own original stories with your own characters". Pugh reacts thus:

...this advice misses the point. People write (and read) fan fiction [using canon characters] because they want more of these characters, and not any others. It does not follow that they do not want to write and read about anybody else ever. [...] If that [writing fanfic] makes them "less original" writers it is only in the sense that Robert Henryson was, when he chose to use the characters that Chaucer had already taken from Greek myth.

Of course, Henryson, Chaucer and the Greek mythologists are all long dead, and would have been long out of copyright by now had such a thing existed in their time. As it happens, I wouldn't write Rice fanfic if I read her books, but that's more because she says the idea "upsets [her] terribly" than anything to do with originality. I simply wouldn't feel comfortable doing something that so clearly made an author so unhappy.

Still, I enjoyed Pugh's robust defence of fanfic, something that runs all through the book, as I've never entirely subscribed to the "fanfic writing is what you do to prepare you for real writing" school of thought. I don't think and never have, even back when I had no part in writing the stuff, that original fiction is inherently superior to fanfic. (Unless of course you want to make a career out of it. Then it is.)

Another thing that came to mind as I was reading a bit more of Pugh's book, though this one wasn't brought on by any specific passage, was this: while it's not unprecedented for large fandoms' writing communities to be male-dominated (Doctor Who is a commonly cited example), I do wonder if MLP:FiM may be unique among large fandoms in having a male-dominated fanfic community for a show with a female-dominated main cast. I'm perfectly prepared to accept there may be others, but I certainly don't know of any.

The final thought that hit me leads on from something I did remark upon in my original post: that the 2005 publication date of The Democratic Genre does show at times. The phrase "on an unarchived mailing list", used frequently when quoting, feels like something from the Cretaceous nowadays. More significantly, though, I haven't found a single reference to reading on the move. The book pre-dates the smartphone revolution and even the Kindle. People reading on screen, unless they had a laptop (much rarer then), would be doing it on a desktop computer, probably at home or in a library.

As an aside, it's interesting that the coming of phone-based reading doesn't seem to have dimmed the appetite for long-form fics, as the MLP fandom demonstrates very nicely. Yes, a few prominent stories are available in printed form, but the emphasis is on a few. Plenty of people are reading plenty of stories that are far longer than even a thick paperback novel. I don't have any great conclusion to draw from this one – but as I say, it's interesting.