Well, it’s as good a guess at a collective noun for “kerfuffle” as any other…
There have been three moderately heated bloggy controversies that I’ve been following over the past week, that I haven’t commented on. Mostly because I don’t really have that much to add to any of the arguments, or at least, not enough to merit a blog post.
I do want to note their existence, though, and maybe by combining them together, it won’t feel so much like a pointless fluff post. So if you’re dying to know my opinions on the crimes of fanfic, Oliver Stone’s casting decisions, or Hooters, click on through to the rest of this post. Otherwise, scroll down the front page, and look at the flowers and dog pictures.
First up: Scalzi has a pair of posts (the original and a follow-up) about the raging controversy in the Harry Potter fanfic community over a popular author’s past plagiarism. The original situation is a “pox on both your houses” sort of situation, as far as I can tell– the plagiarism is pretty blatant, but the behavior of some of the people involved in publicizing it is pretty deplorable.
John uses the whole thing as a springboard to discuss the legal issues surrounding fan fiction, which is kind of interesting. There’s a spirited and wide-ranging debate in his comments, the most surprising moment of which was:
And questions of intended audience aside, it simply always has and always will get my hackles up to see the largely male SF/F community (previous link notwithstanding) dismissing/deriding/mocking the quality/purpose/value of an overwhelmingly female endeavor and community. Full stop.
Never in a million years would sexism have occurred to me as an explanation for dismissing fanfic. I mean, I’m sort of vaguely aware that it’s mostly a female community (and why is that, anyway?), but it never sturck me as an essentially gender-linked activity.
(Personally, I tend to dismiss fanfic becuase the most ardent fandoms around seem to be centered around Harry Potter and Star Trek, neither of which strike me as having enough solidity that I’d want to read non-canon stories in those worlds. But that’s a separate flamewar.)
(This has also prompted a discussion of feral fandom, which was sort of interesting, and worth a link, albeit a parenthetical one.)
Speaking of sexism, the second kerfuffle of interest was sparked by ScienceBlogs’ own Abel PharmBoy, who asked:
Could the San Antonio Riverwalk Hooters restaurant run some sort of promotion during [the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium] for breast cancer awareness, fundraising, acknowledgment of S.A. as an international center for breast cancer research, etc. that would not be perceived as capitalistic, misogynistic or otherwise contributing to the demeaning of women?
I was sort of surprised at the magnitude of the shitstorm this kicked up, particularly after Bora took the question over to Echidne of the Snakes. Abel has a follow-up expressing much the same thing, and re-phrasing the question.
I’m weirdly conflicted about this, entirely for personal reasons. I think Hooters is tacky at best, and exploitive at worst, but I also have fond memories of going to the one in Rockville, MD when I was in grad school, with an uncle who would come to town occasionally for meetings with DoD. He really liked the place, and would flirt outlandishly with the waitresses, and we always had a good time. And the wings weren’t bad.
The second-to-last time I saw him was a trip to Hooters. The last time was at my sister’s wedding, where he was waving around a napkin from that trip, on which he’d gotten one of the waitresses to write some ridiculously improbable note about our visit, which he was using to try to embarrass my mother (this was a recurring game he played). He died later that summer of a massive brain tumor.
Which is a very wordy and downbeat way of explaining why I have a hard time seeing them as a bastion of evil. Sorry about that.
And speaking of downbeat, Kate has spent much of the last few days typing angrily about the casting of Oliver Stone’s 9/11 movie, which does a bleach job on the cast. At least a couple of the real people in the story are African-American, but are played by white actors in the movie.
Kate is quite irate about this, and she probably has a point. I’m not getting worked up about it, because that would require me to expend mental energy on a movie that is a) about September 11, and b) by Oliver Stone. All things considered, I prefer to just pretend that the movie doesn’t exist, because I’m happier that way.
In fact, what was I talking about?
That fanfic thing is interesting because it never occurred to me but yeah, it is mostly a female thing, isn’t it?
Maybe the preferred way for males for become part of their favorite fictional worlds is via hunting and gathering a la the video game. We of the female persuasion, however, become part of our favorite fictional worlds through the creation stories. (And, no, I do not mean Marie Sue-type stories!) As for myself, I have been a proud member of a non-reality based community (fanfiction.net) since 2003. Specific fandom: LOTR. Penname: well, Elf Eye, of course. Winner of two MP (“My Precious”)awards (a 1st and a tie for a 3rd). OK, self-promotion concluded. Go ahead and laugh now.
That was, in fact, the theory I came up with on ten seconds’ thought. So I’m pleased to see someone else coming up with it also!
With regards to fanfic authors being mostly female, I guess I am not too suprised. The average fiction reader is female, so the average fanfic author should be female. To me, the real interesting question is why is the average sf&f author still male?
Another reason for the female dominance of fanfic may be rooted in school. At least from when I was in grade school some thirty years ago, it was always the girls in class who had an easy time putting pen to paper on any writing assignment. To some extent it was perhaps due to the need to actually sit down and focus on one thing for a long period – something young boys seem to have a harder time with – but to a large degree it was also felt by the “cool” majority that creative writing was more of a girl thing (just like reading fiction).
The same situation of women being happier to write and being on average better at it, though less pronounced, persisted at university, showing the effect of that attitude probably persists into adulthood.
So I guess it’s the double whammy of more readers being female, and females being more likely to want and be able to do creative writing based on what they read. As a wild guess, most fanfic readers will also be female, which means the evaluation and approval of stories – which is informally peer-reviewed – will skew towards themes and stilistic conventions preferred by the female readership, which will tend to put another dent in male interest in the genre and subsequent participation.
I don’t believe the video game theory, because video games based on novels are a) rare, and b) usually bad.
“the double whammy of more readers being female, and females being more likely to want and be able to do creative writing based on what they read”
But that’s true of non-fanfic too, right? My completely unresearched guess is that women are a higher proportion of fanficcers than they are of novel submitters or self-publishers, but I could easily be wrong. There are obvious reasons why a naive extrapolation from what I see published could be way off. Has anyone ever done a gender analysis of slushpiles or PublishAmerica books?
The video game theory doesn’t require that video games are based on books, I think, just that they exist as a way of immersing oneself in a fictional world. But I don’t buy it, because video games were a male-dominated thing when the “fictional world” was a maze full of ghosts, and a lot of popular games (fighting, driving, sports sims) are still at that level. If anything, female participation has gone up as the possibilities for immersive gaming have increased.
Off the top of my head, the only video game I can even think of that’s based off a book is the Wheel of Time FPS game, which (once you got past its hellacious learning curve) was actually excellent. Or, at least, the multiplayer was.
Other than that, I’d say a very large proportion of the male SF/F community that might otherwise be writing fan-fic is instead playing table-top or computer RPGs. The GM is, after all, composing a story set in someone else’s world…