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humanity. It’s created to satisfy the deeply human need to play
with the stories that constitute our world. There’s nothing trivial
about telling stories with your friends — even if the stories them-
selves are trivial. The act of telling stories to one another is prac-
tically sacred — and it’s unquestionably profound. What’s more,
lots of retellings are art: witness Pat Murphy’s wonderful
There
and Back Again
(Tolkien) and Geoff Ryman’s brilliant World Fan-
tasy Award-winning
Was
(L. Frank Baum).
The question of respect is, perhaps, a little thornier. The domi-
nant mode of criticism in fanfic circles is to compare a work to
the canon — “Would Spock ever say that, in ‘real’ life?” What’s
more, fanfic writers will sometimes apply this test to works that
are
of
the canon, as in “Spock never would have said that, and
Gene Roddenberry has no business telling me otherwise.”
This is a curious mix of respect and disrespect. Respect because
it’s hard to imagine a more respectful stance than the one that
says that your work is the yardstick against which all other work
is to be measured — what could be more respectful than having
your work made into the gold standard? On the other hand, this
business of telling writers that they’ve given their characters the
wrong words and deeds can feel obnoxious or insulting.
Writers sometimes speak of their characters running away
from them, taking on a life of their own. They say that these char-
acters — drawn from real people in our lives and mixed up with
our own imagination — are autonomous pieces of themselves. It’s
a short leap from there to mystical nonsense about protecting
our notional, fictional children from grubby fans who’d set them
to screwing each other or bowing and scraping before some thinly
veiled version of the fanfic writer herself.
There’s something to the idea of the autonomous character. Big
chunks of our wetware are devoted to simulating other people,
trying to figure out if we are likely to fight or fondle them. It’s
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