Fanfic works best when it grows on its own, I love when fanfic ends up being a little time capsule because it uses theories that ended up being incorrect or something causes the previously faithful characterization to be notably out of date due to later backstory reveals. Trying to cater to fanfic just makes the fanfic experience worse as well.
One related thing I feel you could have touched on is when long running franchises end up having fans work on them, which gets described as 'the inmates running the asylum' for a good reason. And how that 'fan cred' gets used in marketing and discourse. Marvel and DC are the classic examples.
What really annoys me is when the fan pandering is to a completely different part of the fandom that actively hates me and I'm supposed to eat it up, like being a Pokémon fan too young to have started with gen one, which has ended up making me despise everything around the original Pokémon games because I am sick of the heavy nostalgia pandering to it.
Also it's just one example of the many you listed, but I don't think Scott Pilgrim really fits since it was a comic first and there was a notable gap between the movie and new cartoon, which are both adapting the series and covering the same events.
Excellent point about the fans becoming workers. There was a recent interview with Scooter Braun, and he talked about fans running update accounts now being executives--this is an occurrence across the entertainment landscape, and shifts things in less ideal ways for sure.
"What really annoys me is when the fan pandering is to a completely different part of the fandom that actively hates me and I'm supposed to eat it up" -- I'm right there with you. I think part of the problem of picking a loud group of people to cater to is there is likely a lot of friction being stoked internally, but industry seems unwilling/unable to realize that fandom communities are a thing and there's internal dynamics, it's not just fan -> fan object. The recent Variety piece on 'toxic fandom' really annoyed me for this reason.
There's also the current Russell T Davies "Doctor Who" as a prime example of fan -> show runner, who then seems to have doubled down on pleasing such a small audience of fans that the show is now on life support if not outright canceled for poor viewership. Then you have the examples of the loud Anti Fans who make a big show of not liking or not engaging with the original material. I've seen some noise from the new Harry Potter series using that as a PR angle.
"What really annoys me is when the fan pandering is to a completely different part of the fandom that actively hates me and I'm supposed to eat it up"
oh felt (ish). there's no part of any of my fandoms that hates me since I am very happily living my life on the margins, but my tastes are so out of sync with what makes for popular fanfiction that any pandering a franchise does may as well be actively trying to lose my interest.
so sorry you have haters, though. the way fans behave towards one another can be so wildly inappropriate sometimes.
> Sometimes, loved ships are made canon, but in dissatisfying ways.
My favorite take on this comes from a parable I once read. (Almost positive it's from Fanfic Symposium, but I haven't yet managed to track down the actual post.) Writing canon-compliant fanfic was compared to a constrained dance: canon events limit your storytelling possibilities, making parts of the dancefloor off-limits, so the writer's challenge is both negative (to avoid trampling on the canon) and positive (to do a graceful dance).
In this scenario, non-canon ships are the easiest and most fun to write, because there's plenty of space to bust your best moves. When ships become canon, they limit how you can dance. And ships that become canon *badly* are like a turd in the middle of the floor.
Love that! I never wrote Buffy fic but I know they came up with the term “Jossed” to refer to when (new) canon retroactively invalidated fic/accepted headcanon. AUs make things so much easier!
"Do fans want their ships to be canon, when the risk is it will be done poorly, and the narrative might suffer? Or do they prefer to have their playground untainted by the limitations of production?"
As someone who mainly cared about slash and femslash in my fandom days, I always felt there was no chance of anything becoming canon. And even when there was a chance, I was mostly on the side of still not wanting it canon. I wanted my unlimited playground. This goes for stories that go on for too long as well - too much sloppy worldbuilding or character writing ruins things.
There was also historically a difference between shipping generally and OTP (one true pairing). Shipping was a fun exercise in "could this work and how?" regardlesd of whether you thought the ship should happen. OTP is as its name implies. And I've also wondered about a split between fandoms of western media and those for asian media, primarily manga/anime.
The 100 fandom could be an interesting case study for a bunch of things. I was among those that dropped it not too long after a character who was in a lesbian relationship that became canon on the show got killed off. A friend who watched to the final episode was devastated her (het) ship didn't end up together, as were a lot of people. I'm still surprised by that!
And finally, I think this topic wouldn't be complete without a reference back to the "we poppin the biggest bottles when makorra happens tomorrow" tumblr post that aged so so poorly.
Thank you for writing about this, and indulging me if you read all this haha. Modern fandom so bizarre to me.
I'm 100% with you. I liked some canon couples but mostly lived for the slash and rarepairs and the "what if..." and "how would this work?" and sometimes those were favourites! But I would never trust the showrunners to necessarily do them justice.
SO many Tumblr posts have aged terribly...I remember Killing Eve fans waiting for their ship to be canon as well and being so certain. Everything is so messy.
I don't know if I really buy the thesis that these film-to-TV series really count as cash grabs in the contemporary IP-era mode this article describes. Cash grabs, maybe! But I'm not totally convinced this is a new phenomenon, or even the main reason why these adaptations exist. Like... there was a Westworld show back in the '70s that was objectively a cash grab based on the success of the then-recent Yul Brynner film. Is the Nolan-produced prestige drama Westworld a cash grab in the same way? (How many of its viewers were aware it was based on an earlier TV show / film / book?)
There definitely are non-IP works that operate in the same fannish mode as MCU works, though. The Saturday Night movie in theaters right now is fun but it really is just a "point at the screen when Al Franken shows up for five seconds" kind of movie. Oppenheimer is basically The Avengers but with periodic table namesakes instead of superheroes. There are going to be four different Beatles movies, ffs!!! Etc.
One franchise that's always interested me in this regard is Super Smash Bros - the first game has a very explicit (and meta!) narrative going on as introduced in the opening cutscene: the entire game is just you playing with toys of Nintendo characters, and the final boss is literally the player's gloved hand. And then the later games... they don't really bother with this conceit at all, and now all these characters exist in a bizarro Final Fantasy-oid universe. Very weird - but maybe after the turn of the millennium (and the further consolidation of media empires) we didn't need this frame narrative anymore?
It is very difficult for a TV show to be a cash grab simply by virtue of how the industry works, but what I suspect is the case is more that original work is less likely to be commissioned in the first place, or picked up. It's treating the films as springboards and sort of fencing in the talent that could be working on something new, and dragging things out longer than necessary.
But yeah, it's not new. I watched Futureworld recently, so I was thinking about Westworld as well--I actually edited out a section about how I think remakes and the like are inevitable simply because there are only so many stories, and we're just more aware of it now because there's a record of filmed content. It's a new phenomenon in the sense that moving images have been around for a miniscule time compared to human history of storytelling, so we're not used to having all these continuations so easily available.
Yes to all this! Although... I guess "original work" is sort of a funny term in the context of TV! If reboots and film-to-TV adaptations were banned, the void would almost certainly be filled by Generic Reality Show #462 and Generic Cop Show #9823 rather than stuff actually worth watching. It's plausible that the buttress of Remember-That-Movie-That-Plays-On-Basic-Cable-Once-A-Week lets these shows get weird/interesting in a way they wouldn't be able to otherwise. (I neither know nor care if the A League of Their Own show is *actually* good, but there's no way a period drama about a baseball team full of lesbians would get greenlit without the IP tie-in.)
Another way of putting it: maybe IPs have replaced genres? So instead of writing a movie that obeys/lampoons/"deconstructs" sci-fi tropes, you write a streaming series that obeys/lampoons/"deconstructs" Star Wars lore. (Very convenient for Disney, of course, that you can own the latter and not the former.)
Shhh... don't tell anyone, but I've never played a Final Fantasy game!! I know there's a black mage and a sexy guy named Sephiroth and that one or more of the characters can ride cute chicken mounts. But that's about it.
(And yet, I know exactly who Ted Woolsey is. Cultural osmosis via internet is weird!)
Fanfic works best when it grows on its own, I love when fanfic ends up being a little time capsule because it uses theories that ended up being incorrect or something causes the previously faithful characterization to be notably out of date due to later backstory reveals. Trying to cater to fanfic just makes the fanfic experience worse as well.
One related thing I feel you could have touched on is when long running franchises end up having fans work on them, which gets described as 'the inmates running the asylum' for a good reason. And how that 'fan cred' gets used in marketing and discourse. Marvel and DC are the classic examples.
What really annoys me is when the fan pandering is to a completely different part of the fandom that actively hates me and I'm supposed to eat it up, like being a Pokémon fan too young to have started with gen one, which has ended up making me despise everything around the original Pokémon games because I am sick of the heavy nostalgia pandering to it.
Also it's just one example of the many you listed, but I don't think Scott Pilgrim really fits since it was a comic first and there was a notable gap between the movie and new cartoon, which are both adapting the series and covering the same events.
Excellent point about the fans becoming workers. There was a recent interview with Scooter Braun, and he talked about fans running update accounts now being executives--this is an occurrence across the entertainment landscape, and shifts things in less ideal ways for sure.
"What really annoys me is when the fan pandering is to a completely different part of the fandom that actively hates me and I'm supposed to eat it up" -- I'm right there with you. I think part of the problem of picking a loud group of people to cater to is there is likely a lot of friction being stoked internally, but industry seems unwilling/unable to realize that fandom communities are a thing and there's internal dynamics, it's not just fan -> fan object. The recent Variety piece on 'toxic fandom' really annoyed me for this reason.
There's also the current Russell T Davies "Doctor Who" as a prime example of fan -> show runner, who then seems to have doubled down on pleasing such a small audience of fans that the show is now on life support if not outright canceled for poor viewership. Then you have the examples of the loud Anti Fans who make a big show of not liking or not engaging with the original material. I've seen some noise from the new Harry Potter series using that as a PR angle.
"What really annoys me is when the fan pandering is to a completely different part of the fandom that actively hates me and I'm supposed to eat it up"
oh felt (ish). there's no part of any of my fandoms that hates me since I am very happily living my life on the margins, but my tastes are so out of sync with what makes for popular fanfiction that any pandering a franchise does may as well be actively trying to lose my interest.
so sorry you have haters, though. the way fans behave towards one another can be so wildly inappropriate sometimes.
> Sometimes, loved ships are made canon, but in dissatisfying ways.
My favorite take on this comes from a parable I once read. (Almost positive it's from Fanfic Symposium, but I haven't yet managed to track down the actual post.) Writing canon-compliant fanfic was compared to a constrained dance: canon events limit your storytelling possibilities, making parts of the dancefloor off-limits, so the writer's challenge is both negative (to avoid trampling on the canon) and positive (to do a graceful dance).
In this scenario, non-canon ships are the easiest and most fun to write, because there's plenty of space to bust your best moves. When ships become canon, they limit how you can dance. And ships that become canon *badly* are like a turd in the middle of the floor.
Edited 10/28: Found it! "Why Subtext is Better Than Text" by Janis Cortese: https://www.trickster.org/symposium/symp141.html
Love that! I never wrote Buffy fic but I know they came up with the term “Jossed” to refer to when (new) canon retroactively invalidated fic/accepted headcanon. AUs make things so much easier!
"Do fans want their ships to be canon, when the risk is it will be done poorly, and the narrative might suffer? Or do they prefer to have their playground untainted by the limitations of production?"
As someone who mainly cared about slash and femslash in my fandom days, I always felt there was no chance of anything becoming canon. And even when there was a chance, I was mostly on the side of still not wanting it canon. I wanted my unlimited playground. This goes for stories that go on for too long as well - too much sloppy worldbuilding or character writing ruins things.
There was also historically a difference between shipping generally and OTP (one true pairing). Shipping was a fun exercise in "could this work and how?" regardlesd of whether you thought the ship should happen. OTP is as its name implies. And I've also wondered about a split between fandoms of western media and those for asian media, primarily manga/anime.
The 100 fandom could be an interesting case study for a bunch of things. I was among those that dropped it not too long after a character who was in a lesbian relationship that became canon on the show got killed off. A friend who watched to the final episode was devastated her (het) ship didn't end up together, as were a lot of people. I'm still surprised by that!
And finally, I think this topic wouldn't be complete without a reference back to the "we poppin the biggest bottles when makorra happens tomorrow" tumblr post that aged so so poorly.
Thank you for writing about this, and indulging me if you read all this haha. Modern fandom so bizarre to me.
I'm 100% with you. I liked some canon couples but mostly lived for the slash and rarepairs and the "what if..." and "how would this work?" and sometimes those were favourites! But I would never trust the showrunners to necessarily do them justice.
SO many Tumblr posts have aged terribly...I remember Killing Eve fans waiting for their ship to be canon as well and being so certain. Everything is so messy.
I don't know if I really buy the thesis that these film-to-TV series really count as cash grabs in the contemporary IP-era mode this article describes. Cash grabs, maybe! But I'm not totally convinced this is a new phenomenon, or even the main reason why these adaptations exist. Like... there was a Westworld show back in the '70s that was objectively a cash grab based on the success of the then-recent Yul Brynner film. Is the Nolan-produced prestige drama Westworld a cash grab in the same way? (How many of its viewers were aware it was based on an earlier TV show / film / book?)
There definitely are non-IP works that operate in the same fannish mode as MCU works, though. The Saturday Night movie in theaters right now is fun but it really is just a "point at the screen when Al Franken shows up for five seconds" kind of movie. Oppenheimer is basically The Avengers but with periodic table namesakes instead of superheroes. There are going to be four different Beatles movies, ffs!!! Etc.
One franchise that's always interested me in this regard is Super Smash Bros - the first game has a very explicit (and meta!) narrative going on as introduced in the opening cutscene: the entire game is just you playing with toys of Nintendo characters, and the final boss is literally the player's gloved hand. And then the later games... they don't really bother with this conceit at all, and now all these characters exist in a bizarro Final Fantasy-oid universe. Very weird - but maybe after the turn of the millennium (and the further consolidation of media empires) we didn't need this frame narrative anymore?
It is very difficult for a TV show to be a cash grab simply by virtue of how the industry works, but what I suspect is the case is more that original work is less likely to be commissioned in the first place, or picked up. It's treating the films as springboards and sort of fencing in the talent that could be working on something new, and dragging things out longer than necessary.
But yeah, it's not new. I watched Futureworld recently, so I was thinking about Westworld as well--I actually edited out a section about how I think remakes and the like are inevitable simply because there are only so many stories, and we're just more aware of it now because there's a record of filmed content. It's a new phenomenon in the sense that moving images have been around for a miniscule time compared to human history of storytelling, so we're not used to having all these continuations so easily available.
Yes to all this! Although... I guess "original work" is sort of a funny term in the context of TV! If reboots and film-to-TV adaptations were banned, the void would almost certainly be filled by Generic Reality Show #462 and Generic Cop Show #9823 rather than stuff actually worth watching. It's plausible that the buttress of Remember-That-Movie-That-Plays-On-Basic-Cable-Once-A-Week lets these shows get weird/interesting in a way they wouldn't be able to otherwise. (I neither know nor care if the A League of Their Own show is *actually* good, but there's no way a period drama about a baseball team full of lesbians would get greenlit without the IP tie-in.)
Another way of putting it: maybe IPs have replaced genres? So instead of writing a movie that obeys/lampoons/"deconstructs" sci-fi tropes, you write a streaming series that obeys/lampoons/"deconstructs" Star Wars lore. (Very convenient for Disney, of course, that you can own the latter and not the former.)
"maybe IPs have replaced genres?" You just verbalized something I've been thinking about but not had words for! It's worth thinking about, for sure.
if I ever get around to starting that 'stack of my own I've been threatening to make you can bet I will be writing more about this :P
Tag me if you ever do!
I believe the official translation is "Final Fantasoid" now. "Final Fantasy-oid" was a Ted Woolseyism.
Shhh... don't tell anyone, but I've never played a Final Fantasy game!! I know there's a black mage and a sexy guy named Sephiroth and that one or more of the characters can ride cute chicken mounts. But that's about it.
(And yet, I know exactly who Ted Woolsey is. Cultural osmosis via internet is weird!)