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The One Ring Forums:
Tolkien Topics: TV Discussion: The Rings of Power:
A few points:
Edit Log
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Eldy
Dor-Lomin
Oct 5 2022, 9:39am
Views: 1045
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Fan fiction is really an internet thing, amateur and unauthorized (and mostly involving the writer putting themself into an existing story, from what I've seen). People have always imagined themselves into the stories they love, but before the internet there was no forum for it.
RoP is a professional adaptation, made with the agreement of the rights holders. Doesn't mean we have to like all or any of it, but calling it fan fiction doesn't really make sense.
While fanfiction is most commonly shared online in recent decades, it predates the Internet as we know it. Fanfic used to be shared primarily in zines (i.e., fan-produced magazines), which were circulated at conventions and by physical mail. Star Trek fans were the most important pioneers here, and even today many important elements of fanfic culture can be traced back to Trek fandom. But there were Sherlock Holmes fans writing and sharing their own "pastiches," which share many qualities of modern fanfiction, even while Arthur Conan Doyle was still writing. And there are even older precedents.
I think there are interesting conversations to be had about the definition of fanfiction and whether professionally published works (or professionally produced movies and TV) should count, but what we usually get instead is the label of fanfic being used as a put-down for stories people don't like. I find this unfortunate, since it implicitly denigrates most written works based on the legendarium. While I think the writers of ROP have demonstrated that they understand the source material, there are some amateur fanfic authors who (IMO) demonstrate an even better understanding, whose works exist in dialogue with the original in more interesting ways than the show, and in some cases are just plain better writers.
Also, as an enjoyer of self-insert fanfiction, I feel obliged to note that—stereotypes aside—it makes up a fairly small minority of all stories. It's also a heavily stigmatized genre, though perhaps not as much as it used to be, at least in fandoms where there have been enough high-profile SI stories for the genre to at least partially shed its reputation of being written exclusively in chatspeak by middle school girls. (Which is not to say young girls shouldn't be able to write what they want, regardless of their level of technical writing ability, but there's a great deal of reflexive hate for anything that's seen as a girls' interest.) Of course, this is also a stereotype of fanfiction as a whole, which is why so many fanficcers try to distance themselves from self-insert authors. :P
(This post was edited by Eldy on Oct 5 2022, 9:40am)
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Edit Log:
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Post edited by Eldy
(Dor-Lomin) on Oct 5 2022, 9:39am
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Post edited by Eldy
(Dor-Lomin) on Oct 5 2022, 9:40am
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