Damn, now I've got two fangrrrls baiting me. Bad enough BN Buffy Fan Jennifer taunts me about my fanfic habit, but now I've got Alyson, author of the forthcoming Will the Vampire People Please Leave the Lobby?, taunting me on the phone the other night, and I haven't even met her face to face yet. (I just know we're gonna be friends.) And what a taunt too. "Hi!" I says when Jen puts me on the phone with her while they were having dinner together in LA. "Lee, there's this site you have to go to called Fanlib.com," she says without preamble, as though it were the most urgent thing in the world.
Only because it is. I mean, from a certain point of view, as Obi-Wan would say. And that's because these geniuses (with $3M of venture capital, no less), as Alyson pointed out with appropriate outrage, have started an open archive for fanfic in which they reserve the right to profit from your ideas, edit your fic (see Part II) and for the privilege, you must indemnify them against any copyright infringement lawsuits (ditto). As I said in an earlier post about the new Spiderman action figure, WTF?! I'm not sure whether to laugh in their faces or fart in their general direction. Maybe both, in that order.
One of the (many) things that makes this interesting to me is that it follows serendipitously on the heels of several discussions of fanboys' loathing of fanfic over on Feminist SF-The Blog! (a blog, btw, that any woman interested in SF, feminism, comics, and some damn fine pop culture analysis should read on a regular basis). Oddly Fanlib.com's founders are all male and don't seem to have any prior experience with fanfic, which is a largely female endeavor. There had been an ongoing discussion (here, here, and here) about male privilege and female fanfic (specifically slash), i.e., the insistence of many fanboys that only they have the right to define what is a "legitimate" response to their favorite media, and to define the rules of the community. (The old, "you're not doing that right" ploy, designed to denigrate women's approaches and ways of thinking.)
The root of my mixed reaction to Fanlib.com's unmitigated gall (sneer? rage? sneer? rage? Hmm, which first?) lies in their condescending tone and the underlying theme of exploitation that runs through their business model. (Not that exploitation is anything new in business models.) They've completely missed the point of fanfic centered around a community of female writers and readers. Sure we like our strokes from our own fans, but we mostly like reading each other's really good fics, helping other writers improve, writing our own, and talking about our characters with each other: why they do what they do, what they haven't done something we think they should have, where their canonical writers were inconsistent, which way we think the story arc should bend. More importantly, the discussion is from our point of view, which is often distinctly different from the fanboys'. It's fascinating to see how much this infuriates some of them. As Lucy Gillam points out over on the Fanfic Symposium,
The vast, vast, vast majority of institutions, spaces, and subcultures privilege male interests, but because male is the default in this culture, such interests are very often considered ungendered. As a result, we only really notice when something privileges female interests. . . . The second result of the invisibility of male privilege is that a lack of male privilege is taken as active oppression, as male-bashing or bias towards women. It is not enough that the mere presence of something which actively aims at women and women's interests is taken as oppressing men; simply not catering to men's interests is perceived as oppression.
Like fanfic. The grrlz have made a space for themselves, defined by themselves, run as they like, and the boyz would like to step in and not just play, but actually take over.
Fanlib.com is a blatant attempt to redefine the community and its purpose in their own image, and to co-opt the work of a largely female community. Telesilla, who used to post in my fandom (where are you? Sniff!) deconstructs the dastardliness here with a particular thoroughness. When called on their ulterior motives, they've reacted with a whiny defensiveness by spamming female fans' LJs. Truwest, who also posts pretty frequently in my fandom, sums up the problem with the concept pretty neatly, here. The beauty of her post is that she's also a techie and plays both the geek girl and "overemotional male" card to hilarious reverse-sexism effect. and Yonmei, over at Feminsit SF--The Blog! really lets them have it for their sudden epiphany about fanfic.
What really frosts my cupcake is that the guys of Fanlib.com are trying to make a quick buck on the backs of women who do this for love. We've always understood that there's no money to be made in this endeavor; we're in it for the fun and the comraderie. I sometimes think some of us are in it for the love of subverting male culture, too, but that's another story. Put in bald terms, Fanlib.com is an invitation to voluntary servitude. Yes, you can back out any time you like, but why would you let someone else do as they will with your work for profit that does not accrue to you, when the only advantage they offer is something you can already get elsewhere with no strings attached? Sam Johnson said that only a blockhead writes for any reason but money, which exemplifies the attitude of Fanlib.com's creators. But at least Johnson was talking about money paid to the writer, not to the "publisher."
Do they think we're stupid? Apparently, yes. They usually do. And there will always be some newbies who fall for their scam the way new writers fall for the Poetry.com schtick. The difference this time, happily, is that we do not need them. Fanfic may make us poor, but it is not a sweatshop.
Lo, I hear the voices of millions of women whose work, whether created out of love or necessity, has been sold with little or no profit to them throughout history, crying out to me. "For Pete's sake! Not again!" they cry, with a collective historical eye-roll. And I say unto the Boyz of Fanlib.com, in the words of Our Lady Aretha and Sister Annie (with a nod to Brother Dave),
Sisters are doin' it for themselves.
Standin' on their own two feet.
And ringin' on their own bells.
Sisters are doin' it for themselves.
So take your fanfic archive and stuff it, boyz. We run our own websites, servers, and archives; swap our stories on CD-ROMs, print them up in 4-color zines, post them on forums and mailing lists we've set up and organized ourselves. We are an undetectable underground. And we've been doing this for years, decades, without you. We're not in it for the money, but we're sure not gonna let you get rich off of us. We're playin' by our own rules.
*Again, all praise to the nameless TPM fan who made the background of my icon.