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Ben’s Dream

Friday, March 22nd, 2002

Ben’s Dream

(a filk for Veronica)

I dreamed I met a Californian,
A most amazing girl.
She had that look you very rarely find,
The haunted, hunting kind.

I asked her to say what had happened,
How it all began
I asked again - she never said a word,
As if she hadn’t heard.

And next, the streets were full of wild and undead men.
They seemed to hate this girl.
They fell on her, and then,
They disappeared again.

Then I saw all of the Scoobies
Crying for this girl
And then I heard then mentioning my name,
And leaving me the blame.

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Mockery and Meta-sharks

Thursday, March 14th, 2002

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.

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Jumping the Shark

Tuesday, March 12th, 2002

An explanation by Lori:

A reference to the Happy Days episode in which Fonzie water-skied up a ramp over a tank of sharks. That point at which a tv show stops being Fun and Original and becomes a series of sensationalistic attempts to regain falling ratings. It’s different things for different people. In Cornwell’s books, it’s often the point at which she killed off the love interest for the main character.

I believe Buffy jumped the shark when Riley parachuted in with wife in tow and Spike’s career as an arms smuggler was Suddenly and Dramatically Revealed. Armageddon may be a minor plot twist for BtVS, but some things…some things are still over the top.

Or is that “over the shark”?

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Buffy’s Law

Wednesday, March 6th, 2002

Buffy’s Law

Half a season from newbie to bitter old fic queen - it must be a new fandom record…

I think it’s time to rename Murphy’s Law, and while I’m at it, I’ll rewrite it, too: If anything can happen to make Buffy more miserable, it will. (If you don’t sense spoilers coming with this one, you don’t deserve to be warned.) For a season in which Buffy started out dead, things sure have been going downhill fast for her. Silly me, I thought six feet under was the lowest you could go. I respect Joss Whedon for the dialogue, but his characterization, now that I look at it more carefully, reminds me of the unremitting character-torture of which certain teen fanfic writers are all too fond.

The Mayor was right - that entire Buffy/Angel thing was doomed from the start, and while Buffy had the excuse of being a minor, Angel and Joss had no such excuse. Pardon me for harking back to Midnight Buffy reruns, but I was an unhappy witness to the graduation arc recently - Angel breaks up with Buffy, Buffy can’t really enjoy her prom, Buffy can’t really enjoy her graduation, Buffy had, I was surprised to see, an even worse time when she started college than when she went back for Warren’s time-warped version this season. Buffy can’t really enjoy anything, and it’s not just a lingering aftereffect of death. It is the show. I haven’t seen five minutes of Buffy happiness yet, and I’ve watched this entire season and large chunks of the others. The gypsy curse wasn’t on Angel, after all.

Maybe I just sound newbie, saying I didn’t know the show was even more depressing than real life. I thought the whole kill Buffy thing was a heroic exit and the subsequent resurrection an ironic last-minute fanfix. I thought Giles leaving Buffy in the half-dead lurch was some sort of obscure character development; we had none of that in Trek so I didn’t feel I could criticize. Tara was no great loss for me when she left Willow - the show was ship-heavy then, anyway. Little did I know that the character massacre would extend from Semi-Evil Willow to Random Spike and Neanderthal Xander. Those of you keeping up know that BtVS is down to no ships, unless you count Spike and his out-of-the-blue tart. He must have picked her up along with the out-of-the-blue career as a weapons dealer. Right. And thank you Joss for a half a season of wedding buildup, only to destroy Xander at the altar. I’m rooting for Anya to go back to the demon realm. I would, in her place.

“What this show needs is a big fat reset button,” I told Dr. Deb, fellow refugee from Trek. Two minutes later, I saw the preview. That’s one mother of a reset button, and the worst part is, I think Buffy would be better off institutionalized. I’m half-hoping that it doesn’t turn out to be another one of Warren’s tricks - more than half-hoping. At least the bloody field of corpses that once were Scoobies leaves plenty of room for fanfic first aid.

Where did I put my reset button?

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Other People’s Playgrounds

Sunday, February 24th, 2002


This is another excerpt from my daily tirades in Zendom. Clare asked about something I’d said earlier:

Maybe I’m the only person who makes this distinction, but I think there’s a significant difference between borrowing TV characters and raiding someone’s book (be it HP, LotR, Jane Austen or Trek novelizations). I wonder if HP fandom is such a thieving lot (no offense intended) because of their original sin of raiding the books.

I just got around to answering Clare’s questions (in bold) today.

Interesting distinction. Why is it significant?
The show is primarily visual (once you hire Jeri Ryan, anyway) and completely external. There is no first-person, no third-person-limited, not even an omniscient POV. It’s flat dialogue, camera’s-eye view. What you can do on TV or in the movies is very different from what you can do in a book. So in some sense you’re not invading the author’s turf by making a film of a book, and you’re not invading the screenwriters’ turf by writing fanfic about a show. [In that case,] you’re doing something new, in a medium whose artistic standards differ significantly.

Making TV shows is a corporate enterprise. Writing a novel is an individual art. By writing litfic, you’re doing the same thing the author does, in her territory, without her permission. Almost by definition you’re doing it worse, because writing is an art and her universe is whatever she makes it to be. You’re munging her world.

Also, now that there is a movie of HP (and LOTR for that matter), is there a difference between borrowing characters from that medium instead of borrowing the same characters from the book?
The act is different, and the results would be different, but the author (or someone inheriting the author’s rights) is still there to be offended, and you still won’t be able to get it right because the book is the standard of what’s right for that work in the literary realm. Not that that matters in and of itself (teen fanfic writers rarely get much right from the literary perspective), but doing someone universe wrong is not something you’d want done to you, is it?

Also, what if I were to use Buffy characters from the screenplays themselves rather than the ones on my TV screen?
I’ve used Jim’s reviews for a lot of my fic. The screenplay is just a version of the show with visuals mostly removed. It’s not any closer to a book.

And are the trek characters in the novels different characters [from] the ones on the screen even though they have the same name?
You know how I hate pay-per-fic. […] Media novels are a unique case. There isn’t a single author with a single vision you’re munging, and because of Paramount’s restrictions and the fact that the show came first, they’re a kind of fanfic themselves. The mere existence of Trek novels does not make Trek fanfic into litfic.

Nevertheless, it would be just as wrong to take the original characters or original settings from a Trek novel as it would be from anyone else’s novel. I’ve preached against Justin in fic on exactly this basis - Justin is the property of Jeri Taylor. Paramount has the right under copyright to use him, but if we use him, we’re appropriating an author’s work, whether or not she sold him out to a corporation.

I may seem a little inconsistent here considering that I defended plagiarism in my blog a while back. Using someone’s universe and plagiarizing their exact words are two different issues. You don’t infringe on anyone’s vision by minor acts of plagiarism - you do it by writing litfic in the first place. People don’t seem to understand that (in cases where no one pays for the plagiarized work) plagiarism is an offense against the reader, not against the original author. Plagiarism is merely unoriginality where originality was expected - and I, for one, don’t expect originality in fanfic. So that there’s plagiarism in HPfic doesn’t bother me. That there is HPfic at all is a little disturbing, and LotRfic even more so.

Litficcing is an offense against the original author - not much of a legal offense if no money changes hands and the fandom doesn’t affect the mass-market, but an artistic offense nonetheless. I wouldn’t do it (or rather I wouldn’t make it publicly available) unless the author were (1) long dead, along with his copyright heirs or (2) explicitly unopposed to the activity.

Nevertheless, I believe people have the right to litfic. I find it squicky and irreverent (especially in the case of LotR), but the right to reinterpret what’s thrown at you by the culture is inalienable. While I could live with being both plagiarized and litficced, I wouldn’t do it to someone else because I’m an author myself. I respect the art. I don’t respect TV shows - not even BtVS, which is a close call.

Someday, I’ll get back to real-time blogging.

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Cheating at Blogger

Thursday, February 21st, 2002


It’s past my bedtime, so I won’t be able to generate any original content for you. I can, however, quote myself. Here’s a tangent I took in Zendom tonight, when Seema said VOY was easier to write because of the plot-hole spackling opportunities:

I don’t think VOY had an unusual number of plot holes. The thing I find easy about VOY and hard about BtVS is the episodic nature of the show. You can’t just sit down and write a Buffy story - you always have to place yourself in the Buffy timeline. It’s not just the arcs, but also the characters coming and going. First Oz then no Oz, first straight Willow then gay Willow then Evil Willow then recovering Willow, Angel/no Angel, no Spike/bad Spike/pet Spike/Spuffy, no Tara/Tara, no Anya/Anya/engaged Anya, etc.

There was one character switch in Voyager - Seven in for Kes. Fic from the Kes era is rare indeed. If you block out C/7 like most fans do, then there was one relationship change in VOY - the P/T wedding, and there was marginal P/T for most of the fan-active seasons so you can gloss it over easily. Voy, TOS and TNG had a fixed situation (starship explore explore explore) that made it easy to write a story. I thought of it as the Eternal VOY Now - that moment between The Gift and Endgame (or for jetcers, that moment between Resolutions and Shattered) in which almost all fic was set. If you happened to have seen Drive you’d call Tom B’Elanna’s husband instead of her boy-toy. If you happened to have seen Imperfection you’d write the Borg Children off the ship - but those were minor points. Mainly you thought “how about Voyager hits some kilometer long space avocados that burn out all the whosits, trapping J/C in a turbolift together? Yeah, that would be a good fic,” and you wrote it. You never got Jossed, until the finale.

Strangely enough, though, this reset-button Eternal DQ stasis of Voy tended to lead writers to do the unepisodic - kill off the characters, settle down in the DQ, blow up the ship, stage Maquis rebellions, let all the babies be born, and of course, get the ship home. None of that, if it began in the Eternal Now, was considered an AU.

I’m still not an expert on Buffy, but it seems to me that when people write BtVS, they tend to get all psychological and vignettey, because anything you *do* is an AU the next week. Any little misstep also an AU makes - a petty little AU, not a broad and sweeping AU. (For broad and sweeping AU, see MJB’s Revolution: http://jemimap.cjb.net/voy/mjb/.)

When I think of good Buffy fic, it’s usually fic that has somehow slipped into the Eternal Now, mainly by forcibly eliminating the normal BtVS world. Yatzee wrote Phoenix-something that dealt with Buffy’s experiences in the far future. If you kill off all those complicating rotating characters, you get a sort of Now out of it. And there was Jintian’s fic about Faith - if you, again, cut out the main cast and follow someone off-screen, you get a Now. Anna’s Demon Noir throws the show into a demon dimension in which the Scoobies are relatively minor characters and Spuffy-noir is big. In all those cases, you have to simplify the show - or remake it in your new, orginal image - in order to really *write* something at length. I haven’t followed DS9 fic enough to comment on that - maybe Seema can tell me if my model fits. Voyager certainly always left you room for a novel or two’s worth of plot. XF must have been the same way, while Mulder was there. UST is so Eternal Now.

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In the original Klingon…

Monday, February 11th, 2002

In the original Klingon…

I alleged recently in Zendom that I wasn’t much of a geeky Trek fan, just a writer who happened to write Voyager stories. Now, however, I’ve crossed the line into true fannishness - I wrote a Klingon filk of the Latin psalm in Man of La Mancha. Filk of La Mancha is now done and should be up here soon. Maybe I’ll even get around to the facelift…

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Everyvamp

Wednesday, February 6th, 2002

Everyvamp

Seema has struck again in the Blog Wars, and she even linked her volley. I’m still working on wiki authentication, so that it will remember the few, the proud, the registered users, instead of listing us as TWikiGuest. Don’t hold your breath, though.


I promised a fic fragment, didn’t I? Here goes nothing…

He woke up the next night with a splitting headache, the sort he usually got after dreaming about tasty human happy meals, but he couldn’t remember the dream.

“No rest for the dead,” he muttered, as he pulled on his jeans one leg at a time. He sniffed his shirt - musty, but not yet offensive - and slipped it on. Add one duster and presto, a vamp-about-town.

He was a picture of bloodless cool, leaping up the ladder and out the door of his crypt, striding faster than a human being really could across the dewy grass, going unnoted down the dark streets of Sunnydale, stopping at Buffy’s. He loitered a bit in silence, for old times’ sake, then knocked.

Dawn let him in. Time was, they wouldn’t have wanted the vamp in the house - that was some time ago. He was pretty high up in the white-hat hierarchy now - he hadn’t broken Dawn’s arm, like Willow, or summoned a demon into town to kill the populace softly with his song, like Xander, or left Buffy to fend for herself, like Giles, or fallen in love with the wrong loser in amnesia, like Anya, or left his girl to do the Twelve Steps on her own, like Tara, or committed a thousand little teen sins that seemed so significant to the living, like Dawn. No, Spike was way up there with the Slayer herself - but the Slayer had slept with a vampire, a soulless vampire, leaving Spike the good guy of the year.

Except you couldn’t win that award unless you had a soul, too.

“Nice necklace,” he told Dawn. “New?”

“One of my friends gave it to me.”

“Right.” Being a vampire was as good as being a soddin’ polygraph. The li’l bit’s capillaries dilated tellingly, but he wasn’t the costume-jewelry police. He was just the pet vampire.

“Buffy will be right down,” she assured him. “Buffy!” she shouted, to guarantee it.

The Slayer came down the stairs, reluctantly, Spike thought.

“How about a patrol?” he asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Warren’s up to no good.”

“What else is new?” she asked, but she followed him out the door, telling Dawn not to wait up.

Spike told her his story as they headed for the industrial park.

“It could be a trap,” she said once he was through.

“Why trap you? They’re not vampires.”

“They could be planning to go over.”

“They’re not the type.”

“There’s a type?”

He turned towards her as they walked along. “Yeah. You’re not the type either.”

“I doubt they’d have let me into Slayer school if I were.”

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Some Search Results

Sunday, January 27th, 2002

Some Search Results

Principal Snyder: You. All of you. Why couldn’t you be dealing drugs like normal people?

Willow: Sarcasm accomplishes nothing, Giles.
Giles: It’s sort of an end in itself.

Spike: Spike had a little trip to the vet, and now he doesn’t chase the other puppies any more.

BUFFY ANNE SUMMERS
1981-2001
BELOVED SISTER
DEVOTED FRIEND
SHE SAVED THE WORLD
A LOT

The muches (not as many as I’d expected):

Morbid much? -Cordelia
Pathetic much? -Buffy
Having issues much? -Xander
Overidentify much? -Cordelia
Broken record much? -Dawn

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Sci-fi is the only literature

Thursday, January 24th, 2002

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.

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