“Fan fiction is what literature might look like if it were reinvented from scratch after a nuclear apocalypse by a band of brilliant pop-culture junkies trapped in a sealed bunker. They don’t do it for money. That’s not what it’s about. The writers write it and put it up online just for the satisfaction. They’re fans, but they’re not silent, couchbound consumers of media. The culture talks to them, and they talk back to the culture in its own language.”
Okay but actually this is what we do with ancient texts. There’s a concept called the “ur-text” in textual scholarship and it’s the idea that by collecting all the versions of a text (from any era!), scholars can reconstruct the original, ideal, and now lost version of the text (debate over whether such an ideal text ever even existed rages among the people for whom this is of concern).
But even simpler, we know much of what we know about ancient works not because the works themselves survive but because commentariesabout those works survive, and we can approximately reconstruct what the originals were. If every copy of Percy Jackson were to be firebombed off the planet tomorrow, we could probably reconstruct the books via its fanfiction, or at least approximate the predominant themes, plot points, and questions posed by the text. Literary historians do this all the time, even for more recent stuff than uber old shit (in the ~before times~ I attended a lecture on some very obscure French accounts regarding the exile of an official, which implied that the official had written a damning report of a king…and the scholar had pulled together what the report may have been like based on the bureaucratic accounts). All fanfiction is a commentary on its source text in a similar way.
Things survive when we take notice of them and talk about them. Fanfiction doesn’t just need to be preserved because it’s art in its own right, but because it actively preserves other art.
hello yes @sadviper thank you for these fabulous tags! I have a post about novelizations/media tie-ins of films and shows and dolls (America Girl, He-Man & She-Ra, etc.) in my drafts somewhere that I’ve never finished butif you’re interested in that, you might throw my guy plague librarian a follow on Twitter: https://twitter.com/plaguelibrarian. he is working on a bibliography of novelizations (i.e. a big list of books that fall into this category) that will hopefully serve as the research basis for your question: why don’t we have these anymore? in a way, we do have remnants of that practice: we see them when we get film adaptations of novels and then the books are repackaged with a movie poster as the cover. original novelizations in the 1930s usedthe movie posters as the covers to make it very! clear! that the two were one & the same. as you might expect, it was mostly a marketing tool, and the little fragments we have of that practice today are still a marketing tool. but perhaps PL will reveal something new or another angle to approach this history!
to your second question: would they be hard to write? one article asks a similar question, looking at Addy Walker, the first Black American girl doll, whose background story was an escape from enslavement. in this case, American Girl complicated the creation and novels for this doll (and everything she represented) more than they needed to. it’s worth a read!
:O !!! I didn’t actually think someone would take my tag musings seriously! Thank you @sbooksbowm! Now I feel obligated to actually give you proper context rather than me mumbling to myself.
Unfortunately, I’m not on twitter and it looks as if Plaguelibrarian’s tweets are private…but I would love to read your post about media tie-ins if you ever finish writing it!
I mentioned FF7 in my tags because I didn’t have videogames growing up–I saw photos of cool characters in gaming magazines, and then when I visited a friend’s house, sometimes I got to watch some of the game as they played. This was before Youtube, so I literally had no solution until I discovered FF.net and found people who novelized the game! As often happens with longfic, they usually weren’t finished, but since fics often veer from canon anyway, it was fine. I just needed the beginning, key events, and exactly as you described in your earlier reblogs, through osmosis by mentally collecting all the similarities across many, many fics, I eventually knew what the whole storyline was about.
I think maaaybe I saw novelizations on FF.net in the Legend of Zelda fandom, but once I started reading predominantly in AO3, I stopped seeing any novelization fic at all (admittedly, I don’t read that many fandoms). At this point, I can see novelizations feeling like wasted writing effort because it’s so easy now to find full gameplay streams and cutscene-only versions of every videogame being released. Who is going to bother novelizing a show when you can just watch it on whatever streaming platform has it? Or if media companies see enough market potential, they start planning spin-offs, cartoons, videogames, graphic novel sequels, etc. that covers new ground. They don’t waste money and marketing dollars on rehash.
But sometimes as a fan, I get in a state of mind where I just want *more*….but without straying too far, if that makes sense. I want the new feeling while still capturing the EXACT thing that made me fall in love in the first place. You can’t necessarily get that comfort read with books that were adapted to screen, because of artistic liberties/different media-different vision that occurs in translating a story from one medium to another.
I’m ashamed to say that my last question “would they be hard to write?” was not at all deep enough to warrant an interesting article about the difficulty and pressure of being the token representation and having to Do Everything Right and Be Inclusive of All Experiences in one character because of scarcity.
I was actually just wondering if I had the willpower/creativity/bandwidth to write my own novelization of a Korean crime thriller drama called “Stranger” (on Netflix!) that I absolutely love, but which is so perfect to me that I simply can’t do anything to contribute to the fandom. I’m on my 3rd rewatch and I wouldn’t change a thing about it! But some of the performances and the nuances in the script are so subtle that there could be a lot of interesting room for interpretation in novel form.
I was starting to convince myself that it would be “easy” because it’s just writing what appears on the screen??? And then I realized to do it justice, I would have to reorder scenes because quick-visual-cuts-between-different-locations doesn’t work on the page compared to on screen, plus adding all the internalized thoughts that are missing from a visual format, plus there is cultural context that I’m sure goes completely over my head since I am not Korean, plus this is sixteen hours worth of drama, how many words would that equal??? Basically I’d be spitting blood before I finished. -_-;;
Anyway, thank you for giving me more to think about!
I’ve been thinking about this question of “who is going to bother novelizing a show when you can just watch it on whatever streaming platform has it?” I think fic offers, especially for film and television (perhaps for games as well, though I am not a video game person so it’s hard to characterize this at all), a way to experience a character’s interiority that is so hard to convey through screen. So while the story might not be entirely new, the perspective is different
Granted, I don’t think many novelizations today follow that path; we get gap-fillers instead (thinking specifically of the inter-season comics for Avatar: The Last Airbender where we hear Katara’s thoughts firsthand on healing Aang and watching him in pain in The Desert after they lose Appa). Novelizations offer a mode to explore the off-screen moments, so to speak. I think that’s what you’re speaking to with wanting a written version of a story to capture the exact thing but through a new mode.
and I don’t think shame factors into that last question at all! the points you bring up, again, about a story “so perfect to me that I simply can’t do anything to contribute” is the other half of the coin to that article about the American Girl Doll novelizations. often, the best stories are self-contained and do not and should not attempt to “Do Everything Right and Be Inclusive of All Experiences.” I feel similarly about my favorite shows that I cannot read fic for, because I struggle to expand my conception of the story to allow for those gap-fillers or new modular perspectives, so to speak.
anyways, all this is to say that beat-for-beat adaptations from one medium to another are hard and the constraints of executing on them often generate pivots to those gap fillers and whatnot. and, you’re definitely correct that the marketing value of those beat-for-beat adaptations is slim. when I think about my favorite book-to-screen adaptations, the strongest ones use the chosen medium to offer something new (e.g. Station Eleven the novel to Station Eleven the TV show, which are ultimately different stories even as they are threaded together by the original premise of the book), such as that interiority/internal thoughts, the continuity of narrator, etc.
fun stuff!
The Revenge of the Sith novelization is legitimately very good because all the dialogue is what’s in the film or very close to it, and you get much more interiority to the characters (but not too much). It’s a faithful novelization precisely because it is quite effectively the story told in novel form
(Also beside the point but I would lovvvvve to see an episode of the Silt Verses written as if it were a chapter in a novel. MAN would I love that. I’d love to see each of the showrunners and the VAs who are writers each do an episode and also some fanfic writers and somebody who barely knows the show and also Steve Shell all take a swing at a chapter. That would be amazing.)
“Fan fiction is what literature might look like if it were reinvented from scratch after a nuclear apocalypse by a band of brilliant pop-culture junkies trapped in a sealed bunker. They don’t do it for money. That’s not what it’s about. The writers write it and put it up online just for the satisfaction. They’re fans, but they’re not silent, couchbound consumers of media. The culture talks to them, and they talk back to the culture in its own language.”
Okay but actually this is what we do with ancient texts. There’s a concept called the “ur-text” in textual scholarship and it’s the idea that by collecting all the versions of a text (from any era!), scholars can reconstruct the original, ideal, and now lost version of the text (debate over whether such an ideal text ever even existed rages among the people for whom this is of concern).
But even simpler, we know much of what we know about ancient works not because the works themselves survive but because commentariesabout those works survive, and we can approximately reconstruct what the originals were. If every copy of Percy Jackson were to be firebombed off the planet tomorrow, we could probably reconstruct the books via its fanfiction, or at least approximate the predominant themes, plot points, and questions posed by the text. Literary historians do this all the time, even for more recent stuff than uber old shit (in the ~before times~ I attended a lecture on some very obscure French accounts regarding the exile of an official, which implied that the official had written a damning report of a king…and the scholar had pulled together what the report may have been like based on the bureaucratic accounts). All fanfiction is a commentary on its source text in a similar way.
Things survive when we take notice of them and talk about them. Fanfiction doesn’t just need to be preserved because it’s art in its own right, but because it actively preserves other art.
hello yes @sadviper thank you for these fabulous tags! I have a post about novelizations/media tie-ins of films and shows and dolls (America Girl, He-Man & She-Ra, etc.) in my drafts somewhere that I’ve never finished butif you’re interested in that, you might throw my guy plague librarian a follow on Twitter: https://twitter.com/plaguelibrarian. he is working on a bibliography of novelizations (i.e. a big list of books that fall into this category) that will hopefully serve as the research basis for your question: why don’t we have these anymore? in a way, we do have remnants of that practice: we see them when we get film adaptations of novels and then the books are repackaged with a movie poster as the cover. original novelizations in the 1930s usedthe movie posters as the covers to make it very! clear! that the two were one & the same. as you might expect, it was mostly a marketing tool, and the little fragments we have of that practice today are still a marketing tool. but perhaps PL will reveal something new or another angle to approach this history!
to your second question: would they be hard to write? one article asks a similar question, looking at Addy Walker, the first Black American girl doll, whose background story was an escape from enslavement. in this case, American Girl complicated the creation and novels for this doll (and everything she represented) more than they needed to. it’s worth a read!
:O !!! I didn’t actually think someone would take my tag musings seriously! Thank you @sbooksbowm! Now I feel obligated to actually give you proper context rather than me mumbling to myself.
Unfortunately, I’m not on twitter and it looks as if Plaguelibrarian’s tweets are private…but I would love to read your post about media tie-ins if you ever finish writing it!
I mentioned FF7 in my tags because I didn’t have videogames growing up–I saw photos of cool characters in gaming magazines, and then when I visited a friend’s house, sometimes I got to watch some of the game as they played. This was before Youtube, so I literally had no solution until I discovered FF.net and found people who novelized the game! As often happens with longfic, they usually weren’t finished, but since fics often veer from canon anyway, it was fine. I just needed the beginning, key events, and exactly as you described in your earlier reblogs, through osmosis by mentally collecting all the similarities across many, many fics, I eventually knew what the whole storyline was about.
I think maaaybe I saw novelizations on FF.net in the Legend of Zelda fandom, but once I started reading predominantly in AO3, I stopped seeing any novelization fic at all (admittedly, I don’t read that many fandoms). At this point, I can see novelizations feeling like wasted writing effort because it’s so easy now to find full gameplay streams and cutscene-only versions of every videogame being released. Who is going to bother novelizing a show when you can just watch it on whatever streaming platform has it? Or if media companies see enough market potential, they start planning spin-offs, cartoons, videogames, graphic novel sequels, etc. that covers new ground. They don’t waste money and marketing dollars on rehash.
But sometimes as a fan, I get in a state of mind where I just want *more*….but without straying too far, if that makes sense. I want the new feeling while still capturing the EXACT thing that made me fall in love in the first place. You can’t necessarily get that comfort read with books that were adapted to screen, because of artistic liberties/different media-different vision that occurs in translating a story from one medium to another.
I’m ashamed to say that my last question “would they be hard to write?” was not at all deep enough to warrant an interesting article about the difficulty and pressure of being the token representation and having to Do Everything Right and Be Inclusive of All Experiences in one character because of scarcity.
I was actually just wondering if I had the willpower/creativity/bandwidth to write my own novelization of a Korean crime thriller drama called “Stranger” (on Netflix!) that I absolutely love, but which is so perfect to me that I simply can’t do anything to contribute to the fandom. I’m on my 3rd rewatch and I wouldn’t change a thing about it! But some of the performances and the nuances in the script are so subtle that there could be a lot of interesting room for interpretation in novel form.
I was starting to convince myself that it would be “easy” because it’s just writing what appears on the screen??? And then I realized to do it justice, I would have to reorder scenes because quick-visual-cuts-between-different-locations doesn’t work on the page compared to on screen, plus adding all the internalized thoughts that are missing from a visual format, plus there is cultural context that I’m sure goes completely over my head since I am not Korean, plus this is sixteen hours worth of drama, how many words would that equal??? Basically I’d be spitting blood before I finished. -_-;;
Anyway, thank you for giving me more to think about!
I’ve been thinking about this question of “who is going to bother novelizing a show when you can just watch it on whatever streaming platform has it?” I think fic offers, especially for film and television (perhaps for games as well, though I am not a video game person so it’s hard to characterize this at all), a way to experience a character’s interiority that is so hard to convey through screen. So while the story might not be entirely new, the perspective is different
Granted, I don’t think many novelizations today follow that path; we get gap-fillers instead (thinking specifically of the inter-season comics for Avatar: The Last Airbender where we hear Katara’s thoughts firsthand on healing Aang and watching him in pain in The Desert after they lose Appa). Novelizations offer a mode to explore the off-screen moments, so to speak. I think that’s what you’re speaking to with wanting a written version of a story to capture the exact thing but through a new mode.
and I don’t think shame factors into that last question at all! the points you bring up, again, about a story “so perfect to me that I simply can’t do anything to contribute” is the other half of the coin to that article about the American Girl Doll novelizations. often, the best stories are self-contained and do not and should not attempt to “Do Everything Right and Be Inclusive of All Experiences.” I feel similarly about my favorite shows that I cannot read fic for, because I struggle to expand my conception of the story to allow for those gap-fillers or new modular perspectives, so to speak.
anyways, all this is to say that beat-for-beat adaptations from one medium to another are hard and the constraints of executing on them often generate pivots to those gap fillers and whatnot. and, you’re definitely correct that the marketing value of those beat-for-beat adaptations is slim. when I think about my favorite book-to-screen adaptations, the strongest ones use the chosen medium to offer something new (e.g. Station Eleven the novel to Station Eleven the TV show, which are ultimately different stories even as they are threaded together by the original premise of the book), such as that interiority/internal thoughts, the continuity of narrator, etc.
“Fan fiction is what literature might look like if it were reinvented from scratch after a nuclear apocalypse by a band of brilliant pop-culture junkies trapped in a sealed bunker. They don’t do it for money. That’s not what it’s about. The writers write it and put it up online just for the satisfaction. They’re fans, but they’re not silent, couchbound consumers of media. The culture talks to them, and they talk back to the culture in its own language.”
Okay but actually this is what we do with ancient texts. There’s a concept called the “ur-text” in textual scholarship and it’s the idea that by collecting all the versions of a text (from any era!), scholars can reconstruct the original, ideal, and now lost version of the text (debate over whether such an ideal text ever even existed rages among the people for whom this is of concern).
But even simpler, we know much of what we know about ancient works not because the works themselves survive but because commentariesabout those works survive, and we can approximately reconstruct what the originals were. If every copy of Percy Jackson were to be firebombed off the planet tomorrow, we could probably reconstruct the books via its fanfiction, or at least approximate the predominant themes, plot points, and questions posed by the text. Literary historians do this all the time, even for more recent stuff than uber old shit (in the ~before times~ I attended a lecture on some very obscure French accounts regarding the exile of an official, which implied that the official had written a damning report of a king…and the scholar had pulled together what the report may have been like based on the bureaucratic accounts). All fanfiction is a commentary on its source text in a similar way.
Things survive when we take notice of them and talk about them. Fanfiction doesn’t just need to be preserved because it’s art in its own right, but because it actively preserves other art.
hello yes @sadviper thank you for these fabulous tags! I have a post about novelizations/media tie-ins of films and shows and dolls (America Girl, He-Man & She-Ra, etc.) in my drafts somewhere that I’ve never finished butif you’re interested in that, you might throw my guy plague librarian a follow on Twitter: https://twitter.com/plaguelibrarian. he is working on a bibliography of novelizations (i.e. a big list of books that fall into this category) that will hopefully serve as the research basis for your question: why don’t we have these anymore? in a way, we do have remnants of that practice: we see them when we get film adaptations of novels and then the books are repackaged with a movie poster as the cover. original novelizations in the 1930s usedthe movie posters as the covers to make it very! clear! that the two were one & the same. as you might expect, it was mostly a marketing tool, and the little fragments we have of that practice today are still a marketing tool. but perhaps PL will reveal something new or another angle to approach this history!
to your second question: would they be hard to write? one article asks a similar question, looking at Addy Walker, the first Black American girl doll, whose background story was an escape from enslavement. in this case, American Girl complicated the creation and novels for this doll (and everything she represented) more than they needed to. it’s worth a read!
