Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

Quote of the day: [T]he story is the gift. My feedback is the thank-you note. End of transaction. –Te

Te inspired an immensely long thread at fandom_wank, which brought out an interesting response from Alara Rogers about women in packs. I don’t intend to say anything new or deep about it, but I figure that some of my readers might have wisely overlooked the latest LiveJournal shennanigans.

First of all, I agree with Te. My fic is the gift. Your feedback is the thank-you note. In 99% of cases, the transaction ends after the gift, not after the thank-you note. You may think you’re coming under the radar by not sending feedback, but I track all my hits. I know how few of you send thank-you notes. You’re not fooling anyone.

However, my fic is a free gift. I do not do it for the feedback. (I wrote a logic lesson a while back for those of you who think that’s impossible. Here are two of my other posts on feedback: feedback and feedback and contests.) If you don’t want to send feedback, don’t. If you can’t think of something to say, don’t worry about it. I may set up a feedback form to alleviate the reader’s feedback guilt someday, but it won’t be soon. I have XML to convert first.

If you happen to be, as we say in Portuguese, bem-educado enough to email feedback, I will answer it - not because I’m under any obligation to do so, but because I, too, am bem-educada. If you post feedback in a public forum, such as ASC, the J/C Index, or a mailing list that I’m on, I may or may not reply, depending on whether I see the post in the first place, and whether I think replying will waste more bandwidth than my reply is worth. If you post feedback to a mailing list that I’m not on, of course I won’t reply, because I won’t see it. I may hear rumors of your feedback, but an email in the inbox is worth two in the ether.

If I ever became so popular that I had a backlog of feedback, I might not be as industrious as Te is, making the effort to reply to every email. There is a point at which that sort of thing becomes a burden, and there is no moral or social obligation in RL to reply to every thank-you note or piece of fanmail you receive. Fortunately, I’m in no danger of such fame. My fifteen minutes are up.

One thing no one has been able to explain to me is the objection to the term gift. I don’t know what else to call something made entirely by me, and given away to you (with or without hope of payment in feedback or in kind). Three or four times, I’ve given fanfic to individuals as a gift, on the occasion of birthdays or particularly painful Voyager episodes. Why, when I write a story and give it away to everyone, is it no longer a gift? If I embroidered a doily and gave it away, it would be a gift. Even if it’s a bit tatty and misstitched, even if it winds up a mathom, it’s still a gift. If I buy a book and give it away, it’s a gift. If I self-publish a book and give copies to my friends, they’re gifts. So why is my fanfic not a gift? Have I given it to too many people, simultaneously instead of serially?

There have been occasions where people thought they were responsible for my stories in some way, large or small - so that they might not think of them as mine to give away as gifts. In the case of writing in a group effort, copyright law clearly identifies the writer as the owner of the work, unless someone else has employed (not merely cajoled) the writer to write it on their behalf. There is no copyright in ideas or arcs, only in works that are instantiated in some medium. I also get the sense that certain fandom communities consider themselves responsible, as a group, for the achievements of individual members - specifically, they expect a certain kind of gratitude or loyalty, and will accuse those who move on to other fandoms of forgetting where they came from.

Of course I haven’t forgotten where I came from - I came from my mother and my father, the latter of whom, whether genetically or environmentally, is responsible for all this Trek. My lovely sister Veronica is responsible for my having taken a detour into Buffy. But the harsh truth is, I wrote the fic, every kilobyte of it. Maybe that ties this entry in to Alara’s women in packs:

Do I mean misogyny? Maybe not. It’s not a hatred of women that drives females to bay in packs and leap upon the prey, metaphorically tearing her throat out. It’s a hatred of women who excel, women who are well-known and well-liked and actually admit to knowing this about themselves, women who seek to improve themselves.

So maybe wank is the opposite of snark. Snark is more likely to mock the underachievers than the overachievers, not, perhaps, in principle but because sarcasm is a linguistic skill that is often accompanied by other writing skills - so the snarkers are the overachievers. Snark can also be inside the fic, while fandom_wank is always meta. I don’t see anyone mocking Te with fic, but I live to mock TPTB with fic. TPTB are the true oppressors here, the ones who own the show and do terrible things to the characters - so lay off the poor BNF’s already.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 12th, 2003 at 1:40 pm and is filed under Meta. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.