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that has decided that it has the moral right to lift scenarios and
characters without permission, that this is part of our larger post-
modern moral crisis that is making the world a worse place.
Some writers dismiss all fanfic as bad art and therefore un-
worthy of appropriation. Some call it copyright infringement or
trademark infringement, and every now and again, some loony
will actually threaten to sue his readers for having had the gall to
tell his stories to each other.
I’m frankly flabbergasted by these attitudes. Culture is a lot
older than art — that is, we have had social storytelling for a lot
longer than we’ve had a notional class of artistes whose creativity
is privileged and elevated to the numinous, far above the every-
day creativity of a kid who knows that she can paint and draw, tell
a story and sing a song, sculpt and invent a game.
To call this a moral failing — and a
new
moral failing at that!
— is to turn your back on millions of years of human history. It’s
no failing that we internalize the stories we love, that we rework
them to suit our minds better. The
Pygmalion
story didn’t start
with Shaw or the Greeks, nor did it end with
My Fair Lady
.
Pyg-
malion
is at least thousands of years old — think of Moses passing
for the Pharaoh’s son! — and has been reworked in a billion bed-
time stories, novels, D&D games, movies, fanfic stories, songs,
and legends.
Each person who retold
Pygmalion
did something both original
— no two tellings are just alike — and derivative, for there are no
new ideas under the sun. Ideas are
easy
. Execution is
hard
. That’s
why writers don’t really get excited when they’re approached by
people with great ideas for novels. We’ve all got more ideas than
we can use — what we lack is the cohesive whole.
Much fanfic — the stuff written for personal consumption or
for a small social group — isn’t bad art. It’s just
not
art. It’s not
written to make a contribution to the aesthetic development of
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