I wouldn’t go so far as saying that fanfic “fixes” what the author did “wrong;” I never agreed with that particular line anyway. But I would say that it can provide a fruitful, useful forum for arguing about the text.

The example I gave in the panel was the moral culpability borne by Albus Dumbledore for leaving Harry in an abusive home for ten years. There are fanfic stories in which Harry confronts Dumbledore about this; stories in which Harry’s friends confront either Harry, Dumbledore or the Dursleys; stories in which Harry is actually removed from the Dursleys and given to a Wizarding family, or to Remus Lupin; stories in which the ghost of Lily confronts her sister; stories in which Harry fights back, and is beaten nearly to death by Vernon. These are explorations — or more precisely, conversations. The different fans are using the fic as a medium for airing their views. It isn’t that Rowling got it “wrong” — but readers who know how crippling growing up in an abusive home can be, and readers who think that compassion for children is the highest virtue, needed to get around the fact that Dumbledore is a highly virtuous man, that Harry somehow came out all right, but that nowhere, nowhere does Dumbledore ever say “I’m sorry; I wish there had been another way. I know I hurt you.” Yes, you can do this in an essay. But there are things you can express through fiction that you can’t express through an essay. (And it’s fun: Ginny’s protective rage, in one fanfic, is glorious to behold.)

Another example is a discussion that began on a forum and turned into a fanfic. Someone after Half-Blood Prince suggested that it was “weak” of Ginny to let Harry go off without her to fight his battle. The response, from the wife of a Marine on active duty, is that it takes tremendous strength and resilience to let your beloved leave you to go to war. She went further, and suggested that having your lover next to you in the middle of a battle might not, on the whole, be the best thing for keeping your mind on your job. There were already several fanfic stories in which Ginny accompanies Ron, Hermione and Harry on the quest for the Horcruxes, but the story that emerged from this debate, “Counting to Five Thousand,” imagined that Ginny did go with Harry to war, that it was a huge mistake, and that the consequences were disastrous.

I think of the whole thing as a conversation — new texts comment on old texts. Yes, you could write Lord Peter Wimsey, but isn’t it also useful to imagine what the cold, monomaniacal Holmes might have done surrounded by more realistic characters? Is this what House, M.D. is? (Are those realistic characters? Never mind…)

Isn’t the whole point of fanfic that the writers want to play in an already beloved world and not create their own new world?

I don’t have a dog in this fight since I don’t read fanfic, but improving on the original seems a perfectly legitimate use of fanfic to me. The Star Trek TV shows did it themselves. “ST:V” gave us a sane female captain. “ST:DS9″ gave us a black captain and real culture clashes that could not be easily solved in one episode.

Thanks for giving this taste of the conference. I hope you have more posts about ReaderCon so I can learn a little of what I missed.

Amusingly, Ori and I seem to be thinking about the same sort of thing this week – she’s blogging about writers who use Things That Annoy Them In Other People’s Stuff as a jump-off point for writing their own fiction. http://orichalcum.livejournal.com/604153.html

I don’t much distinguish between “fanfic” and other forms of adaptation/retelling/transformative work. The Odyssey’s relationship to the Illiad is the same as modern HP fanfic’s relationship to Rowling’s work, assuming that we believe, as the weight of evidence indicates, that the Illiad and Odyssey were not composed by the same person. Examples of historical fanfic that are now treated as being big deals in their own right (sometimes bigger than the original source) are commonplace.

Within that context, using a derivative work didactically, purely for the purpose of criticism, seems fine to me, but unlikely to produce a particularly great work. A Star Trek story that’s just “it’s Star Trek, but I added a gay Mary Sue” doesn’t seem particularly worthwhile to me. That said, I think we need to take responsibility for the art we produce. If I write a series of Star Trek stories, and I introduce a hundred new Starfleet officers, and none of them–not one–are LGBT characters, and none of the canon characters are LGBT, then I’m responsible for creating a world devoid of queer characters as Roddenberry, Berman, etc. were. And so if I were writing Star Trek fiction, of any sort (whether fan-, licensed but paracanon, canon, whatever) I would care about whether my work covered the diversity of humanity–imperfectly, because we’re always imperfect and because IDIC is at least mostly accurate, but I still have a moral obligation to try.

Likewise, trying to tell a Holmes story with more human characters is a valid transformative choice. If your point is merely to criticize, then why bother, except maybe as a one-page satire? But if your point is to engage and transform, why not?

Put another way: trying to “fix” a pre-existing work is a questionable endeavor. But trying to draw from a pre-existing work, while creating something that is at a minimum different, likely more to the author’s taste, and possibly in some general sense better–that’s what we try to do whenever we create any form of art. And I don’t see why fanfic should be any different.

Also, I think it’s worth noting that a common opinion about works of art is “I like this part, but not that part.” “I love the world-building Naomi Novik does, but I don’t much like her plots.” “I love the feel of Hogwarts, but I don’t like the resolution.” “I love the core stories of Star Trek, but I don’t like the character choices.” “I love the romance of vampires, but I don’t like vampires that are secretly good and sparkle in sunlight.” Fanfic (or any other transformative work) can seek to draw on the part that is liked, while changing the part that isn’t. And why not, I say? It may produce crap, but then Sturgeon’s Law applies. But it may produce something that isn’t crap.

“I like this part, but not that part.”

Yeah, I get that, I just feel like… sometimes the parts you don’t like are among the things that make the original work what it is. There’s a whole bunch of matter-of-fact sexism and racism in Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories, for example. This is unsurprising; they reflect their time period. Had sexual orientation entered into any of Doyle’s stories, there would have no doubt been a lot of matter-of-fact homophobia as well.

So it strikes me as being a really delicate line to walk, to write fic addressing those issues, set in that world. Going for historical accuracy runs the risk of appearing to endorse/perpetuate the problem. Adding in the stuff you thought was missing but ignoring the constraints of the setting raises its own problems. If you do that, at some point you should just write your own stuff, because your fic bears no relationship to Doyle’s universe, historical Victorian London, or Holmes. At some point, you just *can’t* make the old story say what you want it to say, and it’s better to move forward and write one that can.

To take one ludicrous example, *not* in fanfic, in a story published in a collection I own – “Sherlock Holmes and the Muffin” by Dorothy B. Hughes, included in _The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes_, edited by Martin Harry Greenberg and Carol-Lynn Rossel Waugh – Watson pauses his narration to make parenthetical commentary about recent education reform, and how there are better schools for girls nowadays but still nothing adequate, and how it’s too bad Mrs. Hudson’s ten-year-old maidservant doesn’t have the opportunity for a good education. Said commentary ends with the line, “Both Holmes and I were staunch supporters of education for all.”

Really?

Bullshit.

Holmes’ misogyny is part of the character. Ten-year-old maids were part of the Victorian world. Nowhere in four novels and fifty-six short stories did Doyle ever indicate either of his protagonists were part of the educational reform movement. So I totally don’t believe Holmes gave a damn about the educational opportunities available to his landlady’s maid. It seems like Ms. Hughes was uncomfortable that he didn’t, but I don’t think Ms. Hughes did anybody any good by putting modern liberal sensibilities in a mouth not designed to speak them. Unless the fic is explicitly alternate universe or satire, there’s something in that type of “fix” that strikes me as intellectually dishonest.

(Which is one of the reasons H/W slash irritates me so much, and one of the reasons I like Novik’s “Commonplaces” so much – because she addresses the cultural and character roadblocks to a sexual relationship in that time, in that place, and between those particular people, instead of (as many H/W slash writers seem to) pretending there’s no problem. Kirk/Spock slash, in contrast, seems reasonable to me – very very VERY different universe.)

To be fair, the counterexample to “Sherlock Holmes and the Muffin” (which is, ftr, lighthearted, but doesn’t read to me as satire) is “The Adventure of the Green Skull” by Mark Valentine, included in John Joseph Adams’ recent _Improbable Adventure of Sherlock Holmes_. It includes a hard look at conditions in Victorian factories, but Holmes and Watson are the “never thought about it much” norm against which the reformer’s anger shines. *That* seems like a *great* way to include characters “missing” from Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes mysteries while still creating something that feels like a Sherlock Holmes mystery.

You said, “trying to “fix” a pre-existing work is a questionable endeavor. But trying to draw from a pre-existing work, while creating something that is at a minimum different, likely more to the author’s taste, and possibly in some general sense better–that’s what we try to do whenever we create any form of art. And I don’t see why fanfic should be any different.” And I think I agree, overall. To the extent that fanfic does the latter, rock on. I’m taking issue with the former, and there is a subset of fic writers who seem to be finding it a worthwhile endeavor. *Somebody* on that panel approved the line “fix things the author is felt to have done wrong,” and I feel that’s risky ground to be defending.

It also does nothing to improve relations between published authors not predisposed like fanfic and the fanfic community – there’s something really adversarial about the attitude, and (should I ever be so lucky as to have someone writing fic about my stuff, a situation that would overall thrill me beyond measure) being told I “did something wrong” that “needed fixing” would put my back up for sure and make me pretty disinclined for further conversation on the topic.