Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

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.

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.

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.

J.E.M.I.M.A.: Journeying Electronic Machine Intended for Mathematics and Assassination

Oh? I’ll see your Slytherins and raise you twelve Scoobies playing…the Apostles. Yes, it’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer tastelessly cast in the lead role of Jesus Christ Superstar. Willow plays Judas (whose offense, in this case, is the resurrection), and the Legion of Duh will provide a fine Caiaphas, Pilate and Herod. Last but never least is Spike as Mary Magdalene.

Imagine Janeway tilting at interstellar windmills, her loyal bumpkin squire Chakotay tagging along for the ride, Seven of Nine in the role of Aldonza the whore, and the crew of Voyager as the chorus. Frightening, no?