Day: May 31, 2015

We are all too often held back and de-individualized by the things we are afraid to say that we are into. There is rampant fear that people will laugh at us or hold some power over us through their ability to label us as one thing or another based on our ‘secret fetishes’.

When I was in High School I played role playing games with a group of kids from several different social cliques. Not many of us openly admitted to the gaming because we knew what people who didn’t understand would think. I remember one dude’s girlfriend would say to me, ‘you know it’s weird that you guys hang out in his room and do that all the time.’ She was against it. Other girlfriends accepted it as a minor inconvenience. One, purely out of love for her guy, even tried to play but it wasn’t really her thing.

Full circle, I teach now and a coworker recently made it known (proudly) that her boys were very much into My Little Pony. I immediately labeled them bronies and considered 47 different versions of trash I could talk. I wound up talking none at all, because I recognized that them being bronies was actually pretty interesting. I didn’t know any bronies up to that point and, for me, the act of learning about things I don’t know is actually kind of fun and helps me grow. I even tracked down an episode of the show on youtube to see what all the fuss was about. I’m not a fan.

I have watched every episode of Dawson’s Creek and am currently burning my way through the Gilmore Girls. Neither would be shows that people generally assume are watched by a black guy, but there it is. I can think of a dozen ways to label me based on that admission. Throw in the fact that I write roleplaying games and sci-fi as my passion work and the number is squared instantly.

Labeling makes life easier. It helps keep the society together (and quiet) by allowing us to very quickly form judgements and categorize people; it also is terribly defeating. We tend to make fun of what isn’t normally accepted and marginalize people because what they believe an or do aren’t mainstream and that make us different. Frankly I find the whole thing backwards. What makes us different is what makes us unique.

Some Thoughts:

1. No ‘white whales’ chased or published today, so I won’t be reaching as far into my psyche for 1852. Instead I will regale you with tales of water and waste. 1852 was the year that the first public female toilet opened (in Britain). Meanwhile in NYC, the U.S.’s first public bath was opening, only a year after the first YMCA opened… There’s a connection there. I know it.

In my ‘other’ life I’m a Creative Writing Teacher. The question that is thrust my way more often than any other is: Can I write fan fiction?? Honestly, my gut reaction is to ask them, ‘why would you even ask me that?’ however, that is neither productive nor a real answer. Does that mean I hate the stuff and will not tolerate it or does that mean that I have come to recognize the validity of fan-written prose in an established fictional world? As with everything else, the truth lives somewhere in-between those two extremes.

For the uninitiated, fanfic is writing based in the world of established character–usually characters in a series such as The Hunger Games, Bleach, Twilight, etc. In this fiction the writer often tells a tale that peripherally involves characters from the novels or shows and tends to include characters the writer has created on their own. Equally often the writer tells a story about the main characters that reflect parts of their lives we haven’t seen before. Today at Comicon I met an author who wrote a series of graphic novels based on the parts of Mass Effect that are eluded to in the books and games but never actually told in story form. Now he was contracted for his work by the company, so that technically isn’t fanfic, but it started out as such. Fifty Shades of Grey started as fanfic of Twilight and became something very profitable. That in of itself doesn’t legitimize fanfic, but it does tell us that there is a large audience for that kind of writing.

Amazon seems to agree that there is an audience eager for fanfic. The company started Kindle Worlds, a self-described “a place for you to publish fan fiction inspired by popular books, shows, movies, comics, music, and games.” The work on the site is sold and the writer can receive royalties. This in a sense financially legitimizes fan fiction.

Still, I think all of this misses the point: We write because we love to write and we love to tell stories to those willing to listen. As such, if you are writing then you are an author and anything you write is legitimate and deserves a proper critique. I’m never going to tell a student they cannot write fanfic for my class. What I will say is, you ought to develop original characters and work on digging deeper into your ability to tell those stories instead of telling someone else’s story about someone else’s character. As for writing stories in someone else’s world, we all do that anyway. When we write about the world we live in we aren’t writing about the world we created. It is a shared world that, like the Seven Kingdoms, or Narnia, or the may worlds of the Star Wars Universe, was here long before us and will be here long after we leave. It is the characters we bring to that world and the stories we tell about them that makes it meaningful.

 

Some Thoughts:

1. In 1851 Moby Dick was first published. Imagine the irony (perhaps only in my head) that on the day of said post this article is front page news on CNN.com. As it turns out, this particular Captain was  stabbed by his ‘white whale’