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/lit/ - Literature

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8237601 No.8237601 [Reply] [Original]

We make fun of fanfiction because most of it is legitimately terrible. However, isn't fanfiction as a medium a legitimate response to modern copyright law?

For most of the history of literature, nobody could claim exclusive ownership of the stories they wrote, the concepts they developed, or the characters they created. This meant that most authors were poor as shit. However, it also meant that those stories, concepts, and characters could freely be taken up and reexamined by different authors, not to mention by artists, playwrights, and musicians. Consider the Arthurian legends. Chretien de Troyes, Wolfram von Eschenbach, Thomas Mallory, and others all took their turns writing these characters. Whoever was the original 'inventor' of the characters and stories and themes in the Arthur cycle couldn't lay a formal claim on them, and as a result we got multiple masterpieces of Western literature.

It even still goes on today with characters in the public domain. Consider all the different interpretations of Sherlock Holmes, Tarzan, Cinderella, and others. Some of them are bad, but some of them are good, and we wouldn't be getting any of them if those characters and stories weren't free for use by all.

Copyright of stories and characters and concepts enriches authors, but I wonder if it doesn't make Western literature poorer. Does it deny future writers access to things with which they could create their own masterpieces? And looked at that way, is fanfiction such a bad thing? Sure, we're always talking about the need to tell original stories, but there's got to be room for retellings and borrowing in the future, right? It's such an important staple of Western literature that I worry what will happen to us without it. And if writers can't do it 'officially,' we're stuck with fanfiction, for good or ill.

>> No.8237613

>>8237601
Yes.

>> No.8237665

>demeaning the artistic merit of fanfiction

Fanfiction is the literal manifestation of the New Sincerity movement.