Advice from 4500 years ago.
HE DESERVES SO MUCH HAPPINESS YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND MY NEED TO SEE HIM HAPPY, I WATCHED ATSV TO SEE HIM HAPPY AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
I also miss my drawing setup TT This was all done in Magma because I can't use my laptop NOR my trusty wacom and I'm sad... So borrowed my sis' lappy and my friends tablet to make this work HSBJSBDJDNSJS
Putting this on Tumblr because I don’t want to do one of those twenty-tweet long threads on Twitter.
I think there are two kinds of writing: autonomous and improvisational.
Autonomous is your classic novel writing. The author makes up a setting, characters, worldbuilding, optimizing all of it for the plot he intends to tell. If he’s writing a mystery, he makes the main character a detective. He doesn’t have the main character be a dogwalker who becomes a detective for some reason, unless that serves the plot.
Improvisational is almost as classic, because it’s taking a preexisting story and adding to it. The lines already exist, you’re coloring inside them. If you’re writing a Star Trek episode, assuming the series isn’t a reboot (and even kinda if it is), you’re not going to be defining what a Romulan is, or a Klingon, or a Vulcan. If you introduce a Vulcan character, they’ll generally act logically and without emotion. If you want to write a mystery and your story is a sequel to TOS, you have to justify why Kirk or another of the main characters is acting as a detective.
And I call this improvisational because, as with improv, you can’t or (usually) shouldn’t say “No” to what’s gone before you in continuity. You have to say “yes, and.”
This is complicated by the fact, in the chain of continuity, there will always be weak links. No long-running story can eternally get top-tier writers doing top-tier work. Eventually, someone’s going to drop a deuce on the living room floor and you have to clean it up–saying “No,” to return to the prior metaphor–before you once again have people walking around the living room, socializing and having a good time.
So in the X-Men comics, if someone writes morally gray antihero Magneto as pimping out a seven-year-old girl or something indefensible like that, you can’t go back to treating him as a sympathetic sorta villain… you have to reroute the story and explain that actually that was a hoax, or he was being mind-controlled, or it was an imposter, or something. Then you can get back to writing Magneto as an antihero without people thinking “wait, why are the X-Men being nice to him, he’s a fucking child pimp!”
The problem here being that these deuces on the living room floor are different to everyone’s eyes. There are people unfortunately employed by Marvel who think that Spider-Man and Mary Jane being married is worse than, well, at least twenty things I could list that are totally in continuity, and has to be undone before they can get back to writing Peter having an endless string of meaningless relationships that will never go anywhere because he made a deal with the Devil to get rid of the LAST relationship that went anywhere.
So, that’s the problem there. You don’t want writers to come onboard and suddenly throw out something like “Peter and Mary Jane love each other” or “Iron Man isn’t a fascist,” but you do want them to throw out the bits about sympathetic characters being child pimps. This makes things complicated.
The reason I bring this up is because there’s a secret, third way of writing. It’s kind of vaguely situated between autonomous and improvisational. Spoiler alert: it’s fanfic writing.
In fanfic writing, like improvisational, you’re generally not creating an original world. Even if you’re writing an AU, you’re riffing off preexisting characters, relationships, and so on. But it’s not really improv–because of its unofficial, self-indulgent nature (not a bad thing), fanfic is all about going “No” to canon.
A lot of the time, no one is even making an effort to stay aligned with continuity. Which is understandable when you have a LOT of source material or source material that is gradually revealing its secrets (Better Call Saul, for instance, doesn’t reveal what becomes of Kim Wexler during the Breaking Bad timeframe until the last few episodes of the final season).
But, still, you’re getting a story that is supposedly of a piece with other stories, but doesn’t ‘play well with others.’ It might feature characters being different races than they are in canon. They might be gender-swapped. They’re almost certainly a different sexuality than they are officially, having a romance with someone that canonically they’re just friends with (or, you know, hate and want to murder).
Whole swathes of canon might be ignored just because it puts the writer in a bad mood. Characters who the writer doesn’t know well might be simplified or ignored. And there are a lot of common fandom tropes and characterizations and cliches that are ‘imported’ into a story’s canon basically just because the fanficcer likes them, when they have the next to no relation to the actual source material. Stuff like Kylo Ren and General Hux having angry UST instead of just hating each other.
Again, not a bad thing, or at least an understandably bad thing that’s easy for people to ignore… until those fanfic writters start growing up and going pro and getting to actually, officially work with the characters they played around like dolls when they were kids.
And this kind of fans running the asylum is nothing new. I’m absolutely sure there are Legion of Superheroes fans that started writing the comics in the seventies and doing a bunch of dumb shit with it just because. But I feel there’s a marked difference now between the widespread acceptance of fanfiction, the mass commodification of shipping, companies desperately trying to appeal to the social justice generation, and so forth.
Whereas before, you could reasonably expect a fan-pro to be heavily invested in a story’s canon and want to add to it like a brick being put into a wall, now you have fan-pros who will tear the wall down willy-nilly because they see no reason not to get rid of all the bricks they don’t like (or even that are neutral, but not ‘their’ bricks) and put in a bunch of bricks they do like. Hell, a lot of these ‘fans’ don’t even like the wall in the first place. They just want to put in their bricks because they like these particular bricks and they think every wall should have them.
Anyway, that’s why I think fanfiction has ruined mass media, because we have a generation of writers who aren’t good enough to come up with compelling original work, but they also aren’t disciplined enough to add to preexisting work in a way that respects what came before. They’re lazy and they’re self-righteous and they resent any criticism as poorly disguised bigotry.
Not me, of course. I listen to my criticism and thoughtfully rework my writing accordingly. But a lot of people who aren’t me just suck and won’t do research to save their lives.
Rest in Peace John Romita Senior
A blog about comic books and geek culture in general and Spider-Girl and the MC2 universe in particular.