Failte200: Alone, Together.

After yesterday's post, I decided to jump right off the deep end of the pool. If fanfiction is legitimate, then what is a good example? What is the "Moby Dick" of fanfiction? Or, at least, what could be a candidate for such a thing?

Remember, the power in fanfiction isn't the same as printed literature. Since the characters and settings are mostly pre-made, the originality in the story is more about themes, situations, and realistic reactions of characters to these. A good parallel would be historical fiction or alternative history. In both cases the story often concerns portrayals of historical figures and events. Even if these are manipulated, the portrayal has to feel true enough to the originals to be believable. So true with fanfiction.

In addition, and as I mentioned yesterday, the quality of copy-editing is a consideration only so far as it distracts from the story. It's taken for granted that there will be imperfections.

One of the common themes in fanfiction is homosexual romance, aka "slash". Which makes sense, because there is very little gay and lesbian fiction in print, mostly because it "won't sell" or is censored via homophobia. Fanfiction is often a creative outlet for people who wish there was more gay romance out there. Things are shifting with the advent of Kindle books, but there still seems to be very little of it. What is clear is that mainstream portrayals of gay and lesbian romance are often focused more on the politics of the matter rather than the actual romance. This includes a number of sad, cliche tropes such as Bury Your Gays. People often read romance for happy endings (see every Disney movie with a female lead ever), so it's not much fun to see gay couples struggle through adversity over and over just to have them unfulfilled or dead at the end. Bleh.

On the other hand, gay couples are freed from the standard heterosexual tropes where men are from Mars and women are from Venus. Slash often has an element of gender role deconstruction and communication between partners not seen in traditional romance, which makes their love feel more real than straight romance. "It's...It's almost as if she's a person with her own thoughts and feelings and reasons outside the social construct of her gender. *gasp* ...and so am I." Whowuddathunk?

With these in mind, I'd like to present the best story I've ever read, in terms of my emotional reaction, handling of themes, and how much I've obsessed over it. Sadly, I'm ashamed of it. I consider myself reasonably well read, so my taste can't be that far in outer space. Tell people your favorite novel is Don Quixote, and they'll either think you're pretentious or a fair appraiser of literary quality. Tell them your favorite story is a work of femmeslash fanfiction derived from a 90s American animated TV series, and they'll think you are a loser. Despite being legitimate, I still feel the stigma. I'm showing my vulnerability here. Be gentle (if anyone ever even reads this).

First, the author. Failte200 is an author of both fanfiction and original, Internet-published works who specializes in homosexual romance, particularly gay male originals in recent years. But he got started  through femmslash fanfiction. On his Wattpad profile, he writes: "I used to write femmslash fanfics for Kim Possible. Go ahead and laugh. A Disney kid's cartoon. When I did, I'd only seen a single episode of the actual show, and didn't really like it much. But the characters...there was SO much yummy potential there that I went LOOKING for fanfics (I didn't even know such things existed at the time) and one thing lead to another..." Of these earlier works, Alone, Together is his pièce de résistance. There is a (probably treading a narrow line of legality) dead tree version through this website, not by the author. And there is also a TV Tropes page.

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The following content is largely self plagarism from two reviews of this story I posted at Fanfiction.net. Which no one probably cares about (what's the artistic value of fanfiction reviews?) but I'd rather not be accused of using someone else's text without attribution.

Also, familiarity with the Kim Possible universe is not really necessary to appreciate this story. It is above all, a story about themes, with KP World as a backdrop.

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This epic, if I may be allowed to call it that, is about what happens when ego and vanity meet adversity and being so utterly destroyed, a person is forced to confront The Other. The thing that happens is love. Not usually right away, and not always romantic love, but love the same.

The summary: Two young women start off as enemies, the Action Girl protagonist Kim Possible, and The Dragon, Shego. They are flung, through accidental SCIENCE(!) into another world. A world that suddenly found itself without any people. Sure, the trappings are still there, the items, the mementos, the war machines and the churches. But no people; like a post-apocalyptic world with only two survivors, like a world in which a total Rapture had just happened without the Empty Piles of Clothing. And coming to grips with this, these enemies flee each other to largely wallow in their own misery.

Let's talk about the world they arrive in, because the whole idea has me nearly crying in terror. It's a near extreme combination of The Aloner and Unexpectedly Abandoned. And it's the complete subversion of Nothing is Scarier, because there really is no one, anywhere. Take the zombies out of a zombie apocalypse where everyone is already dead, there's no monsters anywhere. There are animals (see below), but no people, no scary beasts other than what nature might wrought. Most of which can be easily avoided since the leftovers from civilization are everywhere. The terror comes from the aloneness itself, the whole world is like an isolation tank or a desert island, and there's no boat coming, so you best get settled or go gibbering mad. A monophobe's worst nightmare.

Narcissism (which is /the/ psychological disorder of our age) has a hard time surviving in a vacuum. It needs a constant boost from props (i.e., everyone else) or it destroys itself, sometime the diseased with it. Symptoms of vanity and pride and ego do not survive very long when the whole world supporting it is gone. From Chapter 2: "Ace pilot, extreme martial-artist, plasma-spewing Villainess, not to mention Stone Cold Fox – and for what? For who? Who was going to be impressed now? What could she steal? Who could she piss-off? Who would be eating their heats out over her?" Or from the other woman's perspective, "In January she heard "Kim, it's me" instead, and right behind her. Her heart skipped a beat. She knew by this time that Shego would not be there. She forced herself to remain seated, and read the same sentence in her Advanced Engineering Mathematics book over and over: "This can be proved by setting x 0 over all values of R and taking the limit..."". For one, ennui, for the other obsession, but for both, the end of vanity and ego by isolation. Being The Aloner causes insanity, but it can also deliver from self-importance.

So they seek each other out, and in that moment are forced to confront the fact that there is another PERSON, not just a prop or a foil, but an actual other person, not a mirror of themselves, but The Other, the unknown not-me-different-from-me. And when people genuinely do so, the first thing that comes is empathy (as seen in Chapter 3).

But my argument is, and this is something that this story shows so clearly, is that, if narcissism is truly destroyed, and The Other is truly confronted (and mutually so; this is not one sided), that empathy will inevitably turn into love. And I don't mean lust, though this story has plenty of that as well, but actual, self sacrificing love. We see that again and again, and it isn't just some loneliness Stockholm syndrome either. The two examples in Chapter 4, the dogs and the operation, clearly show it's not just 'I need a warm body to not go insane'. And there are numerous more examples throughout the first 8 chapters as they endure hardship and near tragedy, repeatedly self sacrificing for each other. The most poignant of these is in climax Chapter 8, and yes I do mean climax, though the story is only half over. They manage to make it back home, but the story doesn't end there. The denouement is important for other reasons. At the climax, the two trade, first: a chance to return to the previous reality for the happiness of the other, and second: the ability to remain in the reality they had created for the life of the other.

 During this later part of the Other World sequence, there are moments of extreme loneliness in sharp contrast with Beautiful Voids, as they explore North America, are lost to one another, and are found by one another again.

And then, having spent 21 years, a lifetime really, together in empathy and friendship and true self sacrificing love, they are sucked back through the wormhole to 13 days after they left, and all their memories from that time are erased.

Some more about aloneness. When they return after the Climax, at the beginning of the Denouement, they're alone again. The aloneness has done a switcheroo. It's not the lack of people now, people are everywhere. When Red and Doc were together, in that world, they were alone, but they weren't lonely. Now they're not alone, but their lonely, and they don't know /why/. So, inevitably, not understanding everything, they try to fill the gaps, and the only thing that ends up working is reconnecting.

Of course, they slowly regain their memories and you could at this point claim, LOOK, it's just another cheesy story. It's like how Huck Finn wasn't /really/ about racism, see, look at the ending, it's just a silly story about a tween boy who goes on an adventure! To that I say, thank /GOD/ Derrida was right and we are freed from that tyranny of pure text readings. Chapters 9 and on are the denouement because they come after the climax and show why exactly everything that happened was so damn important. These women are originally pulled from their narcissism by flinging them from the world that built it, and then, plopped back into the world they found themselves in again, they were unable to fall back into the same patterns.

And it wasn't /just/ the memories. It took time for those to return, and they did so one by one, over years (and assumed to continue past the end of the story). The experience of ego-death and The Other had changed them so profoundly that even without the memories they could tell something was off. The memories were a tip off, but not the reason. And they try to change back; my favorite examples are the attempted seductions. And yes, /both/ of them were attempts/acts/pretending that they were the same people they left. And both of them utterly failed in the same way: treating other people as a prop to their desires just didn't do it for them anymore. When they finally admit that, the cycle is complete, and then the rest (Chapters 14 to The End) is truly wrap up.

What struck me over and over about this story was, despite how different of people they were, and their lack of attraction beforehand, they ended up coming to love each other. It wasn't out of some shared previous interest. It wasn't just, as I said, a loneliness Stockholm's syndrome. It was the experiences they had and the things that they did for each other that became their love. Not their thoughts or their feelings, but their actions. Force any two people into a situation where they have to confront The Other, they MUST, to survive, even two of the worst narcissists of all time, and love will come out of it. You see this theme again and again in romance, mutual love coming out of adversity, why, WHY? Because adversity strips the vanity and ego that get in the way of love. Seeing this has made me question some of my own decisions, and my motives, and the person I want to be.

I continue to obsess over this story, despite it being fanfiction. It's been 6 months since I first read it and I still can't let it go. It's what convinced me that fanfiction was more than a scratchpad hobby. Other people have similar opinions, I'm not alone. I think I understand why now. And that is, that despite (or perhaps because of) all the messages inducing narcissism in our culture, people love a story that offers self-sacrifice and empathy. Because that thing which is discouraged, that love that leads to deep meaningful living with /other people/, that is what we actually want.

The legitimacy of fanfiction.

First, an article by the AI specialist Eliezer Yudkowsky. Actually, no; I can't seem to find the article in the bowels of the Internet, so I'll instead try to summarize. Aside from his rationality and AI work, Yudkowsy is well known for writing fanfiction, in particular, the hugely massive Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, a sprawling what-if now over 100 chapters and 500 thousand words. In his article, Yudkowsky described his affection for iconoclasm in the literary sense, id est, a critic of the severest level, who overturns idols of the mind. And he sees fanfiction as one such genre of art that is consistently reviled as trash. So, being the iconoclast he is, he writes fanfiction. Some bloody good fanfiction, in many people's opinions. Methods of Rationality has more reviews on Fanfiction.net than any other story.

It's interesting how fanfiction is very much like that other artform, Let's Plays, which is what I planned this blog to be about (and promptly forgot it). They're both partial derivative works, they both tend to violate copyright law, if even in a small way. And they both are universally rejected as art or artistic media.

Now, I'm not going to quote authors on the value of fanfic in their artistic development. Nor am I going to do more than mention 50 Shades of Grey, which famously started out as Twilight fanfiction. Both of these things are much like the presence of women in Congress while the patriarchy still reigns. And, frankly, all of those examples do not show the legitimacy of fanfiction because fundamentally fanfiction is not legitimate under the old order of publishing. The success of modern fanfiction is due to the no-man's land of the Internet, since derivative stories provide free of charge tend to be ignored by lawyers as long as the standard disclaimer is there. Legitimacy of a work of literature isn't based on whether it can be distributed in print. This isn't science, it doesn't need to pass peer review to be read.

What is fanfiction? Defined by me: a derivative work of literature that borrows the characters, settings, and/or situations of previous authors to produce new content (i.e., stories). This is not a new idea, in fact, it's the oldest idea in literature. Take the Greek classics, especially the playwrights. How many versions of Orestia were written, or the Oedipus Cycle? How about Virgil's Aeneid? And, if we're going there, how about Virgil in Dante's Inferno? Shakespeare certainly liked to borrow; is the Bard then suspect, sullied somehow? Of course not.

Yet, and probably with the onset of copyright, derivative works are seen as lesser. This is often of course due to copy-edit quality, but I can think of many books published hastily and full of mistakes. At least on the Internet an author can make instantaneous corrections. My appreciation of a piece of literature stems on punctuation, capitalization, spelling, and grammar insofar as it is distracting. Otherwise, other story elements rule, like plot and themes.

It may be copyright itself, that stories, including their characters, are intellectual property of the original authors, not only legally, but in some metaphysical way. They are not to be handled by other, unskilled fingers, nor shall canon be usurped, lest they be tarnished. Or, the "unoriginality" puts its value in question. Nevermind all tens of thousands of Harlequin pulps about exactly the same thing with the names changed and the situations ever-so-slightly different.

The third reason is that they are free, that no one makes money from them. Which is a pretty stupid way of determining legitimacy of art. It stems from the capitalist mindset, that to be of worth, something must have monetary value.

With copyright, taste, and capitalism against them, fanfictions are ignored in the art world. Well, who needs those smug bastards anyway? Something something Shakespeare something rose something sweetness.

In fact, fanfiction tends to do a few things better than printed works. In particular, fanfiction authors are free of "what is publishable" constraints and can play with themes to their heart's content. It doesn't matter that a story idea would never sell if thousands of people will read it on the Internet.
Another reason fanfiction authors have so much room for theme play is they are not forced to generate characters and backgrounds from scratch. Have a particular theme or situation you want to try out? Plop down the premade personalities and go at it! In terms of their themes, several fanfictions are among the most remarkable stories I've ever read. Fanfiction authors can also generate these stories rapidly and get equally rapid feedback, which means the author and reviewers often end up almost in collaborating, developing the ideas together as the story progresses.

Derivative works are legitimate, when you get past opinions, money, and laws. Indeed, the whole concept of legitimacy is vague and tied more to individual feelings than some unifying notion. And when you get down to the bottom, it's all derivative in some shape or form. To paraphrase a popular claim, everything is a fanfiction; works only differ in that respect by degree.