Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

I’m getting the idea, from the ongoing discussion of AU’s, that AU’s are different things to different people. I’ve come to the conclusion that travel between the canon universe and the AU, and the degree of technobabble excusing the AU, are issues of story structure rather than of AU type. I think I can come up with six different types of AU if I try hard enough, and make up names for them to boot:

The Borg AU Classification

1. Far Alternate: the most extreme AU vision changes the setting to something entirely alien. The characters are transported into medieval times, the Paleolithic or (in the case of non-scifi shows) outer space. Apparently this sort of AU is more popular in other fandoms than in Trek.
2. Near Alternate: the domain of inversion-universes, where the characters and settings are similar, but universe-level details have been changed - e.g., the Federation is now the bad guys, or all the male characters are now women, or Chakotay is the Starfleet officer and Janeway is the Maquis rebel. Such an AU is not rooted at any particular decisive event or turning point.
3. Timeline: the classic AU, rooted at a certain point of past canon - one decision is decided differently, and the rest of the show is changed. This is the “It’s a Wonderful Life” approach to fanfic. Such an AU can be spotted by the question it answers, such as, what if the Maquis had mutinied? (See MJB’s Revolution.)
4. Canon AU: a Near or Timeline established in canon. The classic canon AU is the Mirror-Mirror Universe, although the Year of Hell and the Admiral’s timeline would also qualify. See, for example, DQ Babes in the Mirror-Mirror Universe.
5. Divergent Canonical: a divergence that begins with the canon universe, and ends up places canon is unlikely to go. Although similar to Timelines, Divergent Canonical has a break point which is not sharply defined and therefore is not central to the structure of the AU, making this approach the most open-ended and fruitful. Divergent Canonical stories are the longest - once you start diverting, it’s hard to stop. Such stories, if written before the fact, may be considered simple fanfiction. (The show may end this way.) If written after the fact, some may be more properly considered fanfix than AU. (The show should have ended this way.) See, for example, Virtual Season 7.5. There are non-fanfix examples as well; see The Captain and the Counselor series.
6. Convergent Canonical: the stealth AU tweaks the past in such a way as not to disturb the present. Like Divergent Canonical, Convergent Canonical may be considered simple fanfic. No known rules of canon are broken, but this approach usually pushes the envelope beyond what is decent and believable about canon. For example, any fanfic in which Tom Paris is Kathryn Janeway’s father, or in which Janeway and Chakotay met at Starfleet Academy, had a love child, and were brainwashed to forget it all (e.g., Regression) would qualify as Convergent Canonical. Bonus points if the love child is Tom Paris.

What’s left? What makes a story truly canonical? In some sense, everything we write is AU; only the screenwriters are writing canon. I believe the question of classifying fanfic explicitly as AU is rooted, not in canon, but in fanon. That is, a typical J/C-happily-ever-after story is fanonical for the J/C subgenre and therefore not an AU, although according to the list above it would qualify as Divergent Canonical. Likewise for any other common pairing, and possibly even obscure or squicky pairings.

On the other hand, any time you change the universe, rather than just the characters and pairings, you’re deep into the AU realm - even if you do it manually, by, say, letting the Borg win. An AU is like obscenity - you’ll know it when you see it.

I think that’s enough fanalysis for one night.

I can’t believe I voted the whole thing…

Technically, I’m not done with the ASC Awards yet - there’s best author, and I have no excuse like “I don’t read authors,” the way I did for “I don’t read P/T.”

If you must go and vote for me just to spoil my blog arguments, try not to make it so obvious. Sheesh, try to make a point around here…

Are They Blogging About Me?

Someone mentioned a blog, and I surfed around a bit and read Lori’s half of her pseudoblogchat with Teague. I said something to Christine recently about why I hadn’t posted Thrive to ASC this year. Part of it was the time of year that I wrote it - I don’t have time to post or read new stuff during the ASC Awards season, which tends to last from February to April, somehow. Also, I have a different standard when posting to ASC than when posting to a newsgroup of J/C fanatics, for example. I shouldn’t say a different standard, I should say, I have a standard.

And that leads to the question, not of whether I underrate my own fic and am femininely modest about it, but of how one rates fic in the first place. I know I have a standard, but I’m far from knowing what it is. What disturbed me about “Thrive”? I told Christine I didn’t want to be an intense writer, that angst is to characterization as the drabble is to structure. (Ok, maybe I didn’t say that, but I’m saying it now.) I don’t go by what people like - I like my stories, every last one, every last word of them, but that doesn’t mean that I know how other people feel about them.

For instance, take the very best thing I wrote this past year, the tragic, inspired work that haunted me for weeks afterwards - Yesterday, When I Was Borg. It was a filk. I admit, from a technical standpoint, it may not have been as good as “Wreck of the Voyager”, but it’s my favorite nonetheless. So far, it’s garnered one pity-vote from Seema in the ASC Awards. (I’m not begging for more votes - they would spoil my point here.)

Now you can go and vote for “The Dance” all you want, but what am I to think of the reading public’s appreciation for 225k of “The Museum”, when they clearly have no feeling for even those few brief stanzas of genius in which Seven mourns, “Yesterday, the cube was green; a million burning stars, still waiting to be seen…”? Well?

That’s something of a facetious example, but I mean it to demonstrate that the author’s relationship to her work (and through it, to her readers) is something that can’t be easily pinned down to agreeing or disagreeing with the general opinion of fandom. In other words, maybe I’m not suspicious of my stories; maybe I’m suspicious of my readers.

Or maybe it’s something else entirely…

High Fic vs. Low Fic

Another thing I’ve noticed about the VOY section of the ASC Awards this year is the prevalence of humor far beyond the humor category. Anywhere Liz goes, humor follows, and the Die Seven Die category only compounded the giggling.

Humor is fine in its place, but it’s hardly High Fic. Here’s my personal ranking of fanfic genres, plus annotations of what most sane people would change about it. The order is high fic to low fic.

1. Adventure
2. Filk (most people would call it low fic)
3. Romance
4. Character stories
5. Humor
6. Vignettes
7. Drabbles
8. Angst (most people would call this high fic)
9. Haiku
10. Slash
11. Smut
12. Real people fic

I’m not sure which order slash and smut should be in - I put slash first because the writers seem to think they’re saying something more than smut alone would say, if it said anything at all.

One Hit Wonders

I’ve been voting for the same people over and over again in the ASC awards and at AAA. It’s not just that they’re my friends, it’s also that they seem to write everything, or at least almost everything good. There seem to be very few one-hit wonders in fandom. Maybe the author of Lt. Keegan (in ASC in the Voyager Lower Decks category) is one - I don’t think I ever managed to get through with my feedback, a sure sign of disappearance, but I don’t know whether there were hits before that particular one.

I’d post another song from Buffy Anne Supergirl, but I have more voting to do first. If you want something good to read, hop over to Zendom for Christine’s article.

Mockery and Meta-sharks

You get old, you get bitter, you start writing…metafic. Metafic is fic about fic, something that looks like a normal piece of fanfiction, but is actually a reflection upon fandom and the show. Pardon me for illustrating with examples taken from my Voyager stories - there will be Buffy content (and spoilers) at the end.

Metafic can deal with the fan’s thoughts about writing (e.g., The Author), her end-of series sentimentality (A Light Beyond), the anti-canonical traditions of fanon (The Efficiency Expert), or the foibles of TPTB (DQ Babes in the Mirror-Mirror Universe). Of course, any decent AU fic is an opportunity for frequent digs at TPTB (The Museum), but it requires an effort to take years of abuse from TPTB and twist it around after the fact into the story you wanted them to tell (Lurking).

It may sound like all fic is metafic, and all fic queens are bitter, but I don’t believe so. Sometimes a story is just a story (Taboo). Some fanfic, it has been alleged, could go pro if you just swapped out the trademarked names and airbrushed the galactic map (Colony). Other times, the act of writing is itself the protest, while the fic, in order to be a proper slap in the face of TPTB, must be as tame and believable as possible (Take it on the Run) - “C/7?” says the fan meta-metafictionally, “I’ll show you C/7!”

If not all fic is metafic, surely all humorous fic is parody. Sometimes the mockery is overt (Seven of Borg), sometimes it’s borderline (The Bottle of Bajoran Blue Wine), but all our shows are dramas - funny how no one writes sitcomfic - so all our humor clashes with the genre, making parody. It is not our place to write “The Trouble with Tribbles” - the fan takes the show too seriously. It is the producers who tend to take the show too lightly, to our unending bitterness.

This post is not about Trek. (Pardon the meta-contradiction.) This post is about “Normal Again”, the most recent BtVS episode. Once again, we find The Jossy One doing it better than the fans. I blogged once that I would never write Buffy because it was already fanfic. First it was The Musical to End All Filk, and now, now my personal territory, the exclusive BOFQ genre of metafic, has been Jossed. They warned me about getting Jossed, but I always thought it was a plot thing. If I’d known he had this little respect for the division of labor, I’d have gone back to writing J/C (and that’s saying a lot).

Let’s review it for him: The producer produces the show. The fans mock the show. The producer produces the plot holes. The fans mock the plot holes. The producer produces first-order stories. The fans write meta-fic. It’s a simple system that has worked for thirty-five years now in Trekdom. Undermining the system because you’re some sort of artistic genius who’s caught on to the secret meta-heart of fanfic and is now sucking it dry, leaving us fans nothing to write…well, that’s just not acceptable. Why can’t you write mediocre time-travel episodes like Brannon Braga, eh? Is that asking so much?

What did he do? the unvamped reader may ask. Think of it as “The Six Years of Hell” - a reverse dream-sequence in which Buffy’s superheroic feats are merely a symptom of her pesky catatonic schizophrenia for which she’s been institutionalized all these years. Which is the dream state and which the reality is an open question at the end of the episode, and perhaps will still be at the end of the season. On one level, this is just more Cruelty to Buffy, but if you think Joss drew the line there, refraining from fan-level mockery of his own show, you must come from a happier fandom than BtVS.

It was lovely, it was cutting - the best bit being when the doctor in the institution told Catatonia Buffy that she used to hallucinate much more impressive enemies than this season’s batch of a few evil geeks she went to high school with. Second only to that was Buffy’s own realization that her slayer-fantasy was ludicrous - she told Dawn so while she was stalking her in order to bring a premature and violent end to her Sunnydale delusions. In the midst of an episode full of self-mockery, Joss dares a poignant fannish double-reverse (I did one at the end of A Maquis Holiday, but of course it can’t compare), when Joyce is trying to convince Buffy to return to the land of the sane and instead convinces her to go back to vampire-slaying.

Joss jumped the meta-shark, he confessed his sins of the season - and I do believe that they were sins rather than an intentional setup for a final Catatonia Buffy arc - but he did it so well that we are forced to forgive him. There is a law in literature, there is a social contract of fandom, that was, strangely enough, coined by Freud: “I promise to believe anything that can be made to look reasonable.”

Still, he should have made it look reasonable from the start, or left it to the fans to make it look reasonable after the fact - that’s our job.

Sci-fi is the only literature

It’s not really tonight’s topic, I just wanted to get it off my chest.

Note to Christine: The Fellowship of the Suit sounds like it was ripped off from “The Wonderful Ice-Cream Suit”, one of Ray Bradbury’s better-known short stories (and he’s a man known for his short stories). Bradbury used to write a short story a week; I think he did it for years. I tried it; it lasted for a couple of weeks. Anyway, the Ice-Cream Suit isn’t really sci-fi, but that could be said of a lot of Bradbury’s sci-fi proper. It’s all a bit fantastic, like “Dark They Were, and Golden-Eyed”, one of his many tales of endangered Martians on a Mars that’s like a bit of the Old West, oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere and all.

One other note on something Christine said in her zendom article, and that Lori agreed with by blog: what’s so wrong about Godawful? Yes, it’s a questionable honor to be chosen as Worst of the Web, but I’ve known a couple of people who held that dubious distinction, and they didn’t stop writing. Her friends rallied around one of them, and still revile Godawful whenever it’s mentioned. The other one admitted that her story was, in a word, Godawful. It was an ill-conceived round-robin that she knew deserved its place on that infamous Worst Of site.

Stop by Godawful sometime and ask yourself, is it really so bad to scare these people off writing? They put their fic up in public where anyone can stumble over it, read it accidentally and be squicked in their sense of literary propriety. If we can have rec pages, why not anti-rec pages? Silence is not enough to protect the innocent.

Besides, Godawful serves an educational purpose, just like Bad Fanfic! No Biscuit! claims to. I’ve never quite understood why it’s acceptable to mock bad writers on BF!NB! but wrong to quote them directly (getting them far more hits than their fic merits) on Godawful. In either case, the lesson of Don’t Try This At Home is one that can’t be overemphasized. Not every newbie knows the difference between good and bad fic - else whence the hordes of fluffy-pairing-fic fans?

Even BOFQ’s can appreciate the occasional fic that’s so bad it’s good. Don’t tell me you haven’t read your share of bad, bad fanfic - I was there in fluffdom with you. I heard you squicking.

Originality is such a lonely word…everyone is so un-new

Many thanks to Jintian for summarizing the whole HP plagiarism debate in her blog for those of us who don’t have two hours a day to follow glass_onion when it gets rowdy. Well, you know I’m going to have an opinion. Let me just get out the soapbox…

I give Harry Potterdom a free pass. Let them rip off Buffy. Let them query-replace whole novels. (I recommend Emacs for ease of query-replacement.) Let them steal other people’s fanfic, even. Go ahead, rip me off.

It was Jintian herself, in the case of real people fic, who implied that people who live in glass fandoms shouldn’t throw stones - yet the stones are flying now. So the question that occurs to me is not why plagiarize? but why dost thou protest so much? Aren’t we all just the bottom-feeders of the literary ocean? We “original” fanfic writers use unoriginal characters in our own unique ways. The HP plagiarists use unoriginal characters and unoriginal lines in their own unique ways.

We are artisans, not artists - if you value originality so highly, why not write in a genre that emphasizes it? Insisting on originality in fanfic seems like trying to have your cake and eat it too - you want the ease and accessibility of fandom, plus the glory of having been “original”. I don’t think there’s room in this town for the both of them.

Plagiarism is a term of disapprobation that can only apply in a context where originality was expected in the first place. This isn’t Martin Luther King Jr.’s dissertation, people, this is fanfic. We frown on originality. We abhor the Mary Sue. We shy away from the Delta Fleet. Fanfic is not literature, and cannot be judged by literary standards.

Fanfic is like a troop of Girl Scouts gathered around a campfire, singing the traditional campfire songs (my favorite was always “Green and Yellow”, the tragic tale of a camper who ate a poisonous snake he’d mistaken for an eel), improving the verses that wanted improvement, and adding in original verses. Maybe those verses would get picked up by other scouts and passed on as the One True “Green and Yellow”, or maybe they’d be forgotten, like so much ephemeral J/C flufffic. One thing’s for sure, though - no girl scout would cry plagiarism if she heard her new verse (What color flowers do you want, Jesse my son? / What color flowers do you want, my beloved one? / Green and yellow, green and yellow - mamma come quick ’cause I’m very very sick and I wanna lay down and die…) coming from the next campfire over.

Fanfiction is an open-source movement. Maybe some people don’t want their source spread around, but the common-law history of copyright and the longer history of mankind telling tales around campfires is on the side of the alleged plagiarists. This is what it is to tell a tale - to take the best bits (including the best zingers) of tales you heard before and put them together in a way that pleases your audience. Harry Potter, the fandom, has rediscovered the art of storytelling, and it shall not be taken away from them.

If Joss doesn’t want to be quoted, he can stop broadcasting his best lines. As for the sacrosanct published authors, no one owned their lines until the printing press, and someday soon they’ll be common property again. No desperate clinging to printing-press laws can hold progress off forever. The future will be open-source; the future will be fanfic.