A post by an author who was criticizing fanfiction on the Internet has caused something of an online furore, inciting much indignation on the part of fanfiction writers and the Internet lynch mob. For myself, I am astonished at the entitled attitudes of such fanfiction writers. They are not writing original fiction, but stories based on an author’s own original characters and world, which arguably belong to her and no one else. I have never felt any urge to write fanfiction (it would not have even occurred to me before I started using the Internet) – in fact, I would feel rather strange doing so as I have my own original story and characters. A lot of fanfiction is quite bad (not to mention perverted – a description of humans I recently thought of is that they are “oversexed primates”).
J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter characters have been appropriated by fanfiction writers, and this extract shows her ambivalent feelings about it:
But it’s also one more example of how she will never really be in control of Harry again. She knows he’s bigger than she is now and not always in ways she likes. Parents may need to let go of their children, but artists want eternal ownership, and you can feel her ambivalence – or even something more fierce and protective – at the prospect of legions of writers who want to take up Harry’s story as their own. One declared at last summer’s biggest Potterfest that, as Rowling had left the sandbox, it was open for all to play in. But this is no game to her. She can tell you exactly which character she was sketching on New Year’s Eve 1990 at the moment her mother died. (It was Professor Sprout, McGonagall’s “pragmatic foil,” she says. “I was six months in, and I was finalizing the composition of the head table.”) Knowing where you were when you first read Harry Potter, she says, is not the same as knowing where you were when you created him. If you can solve the puzzles and break the codes on her website, you can see her earliest drawings and edited manuscript pages and glimpse just how deep her devotion goes. “He’s still mine,” she says. “Many people may feel that they own him. But he’s a very real character to me, and no one’s thought about him more than I have.” (TIME magazine)
Some have said that the author’s opinion is baseless as some of her characters were based on those from other works, but there is a difference between being inspired by others, and actually copying the characters. You can draw inspiration from many sources, mix them together, and come up with your own original work (I do).
Posting fiction or writing on the Internet is a form of publishing, even if it is not for profit. Writing fanfiction for oneself privately is one thing, but an author has every right to be mightily peeved when she sees her characters – who can be quite real and personal to her – being warped by others on the Internet. People would be better to put their creative efforts into original work.
Another blog post on the topic, by George R.R. Martin.
