As a professor, may I ask you what you think about fanfiction?
I think fanfiction is literature and literature, for the most part, is fanfiction, and that anyone that dismisses it simply on the grounds that it’s derivative knows fuck-all about literature and needs to get the hell off my lawn.
Most of the history of Western literature (and probably much of non-Western literature, but I can’t speak to that) is adapted or appropriated from something else. Homer wrote historyfic and Virgil wrote Homerfic and Dante wrote Virgilfic (where he makes himself a character and writes himself hanging out with Homer and Virgil and they’re like “OMG Dante you’re so cool.“ He was the original Gary Stu). Milton wrote Bible fanfic, and everyone and their mom spent the Middle Ages writing King Arthur fanfic. In the sixteenth century you and another dude could translate the same Petrarchan sonnet and somehow have it count as two separate poems, and no one gave a fuck. Shakespeare doesn’t have a single original plot–although much of it would be more rightly termed RPF–and then John Fletcher and Mary Cowden Clarke and Gloria Naylor and Jane Smiley and Stephen Sondheim wrote Shakespeare fanfic. Guys like Pope and Dryden took old narratives and rewrote them to make fun of people they didn’t like, because the eighteenth century was basically high school. And Spenser! Don’t even get me started on Spenser.
Here’s what fanfic authors/fans need to remember when anyone gives them shit: the idea that originality is somehow a good thing, an innately preferable thing, is a completely modern notion. Until about three hundred years ago, a good writer, by and large, was someone who could take a tried-and-true story and make it even more awesome. (If you want to sound fancy, the technical term is imitatio.) People were like, why would I wanna read something about some dude I’ve never heard of? There’s a new Sir Gawain story out, man! (As to when and how that changed, I tend to blame Daniel Defoe, or the Modernists, or reality television, depending on my mood.)
I also find fanfic fascinating because it takes all the barriers that keep people from professional authorship–barriers that have weakened over the centuries but are nevertheless still very real–and blows right past them. Producing literature, much less circulating it, was something that was well nigh impossible for the vast majority of people for most of human history. First you had to live in a culture where people thought it was acceptable for you to even want to be literate in the first place. And then you had to find someone who could teach you how to read and write (the two didn’t necessarily go together). And you needed sufficient leisure time to learn. And be able to afford books, or at least be friends with someone rich enough to own books who would lend them to you. Good writers are usually well-read and professional writing is a full-time job, so you needed a lot of books, and a lot of leisure time both for reading and writing. And then you had to be in a high enough social position that someone would take you seriously and want to read your work–to have access to circulation/publication in addition to education and leisure time. A very tiny percentage of the population fit those parameters (in England, which is the only place I can speak of with some authority, that meant from 500-1000 A.D.: monks; 1000-1500: aristocratic men and the very occasional aristocratic woman; 1500-1800: aristocratic men, some middle-class men, a few aristocratic women; 1800-on, some middle-class women as well).
What’s amazing is how many people who didn’t fit those parameters kept writing in spite of the constant message they got from society that no one cared about what they had to say, writing letters and diaries and stories and poems that often weren’t discovered until hundreds of years later. Humans have an urge to express themselves, to tell stories, and fanfic lets them. If you’ve got access to a computer and an hour or two to while away of an evening, you can create something that people will see and respond to instantly, with a built-in community of people who care about what you have to say.
I do write the occasional fic; I wish I had the time and mental energy to write more. I’ll admit I don’t read a lot of fic these days because most of it is not–and I know how snobbish this sounds–particularly well-written. That doesn’t mean it’s “not good”–there are a lot of reasons people read fic and not all of them have to do with wanting to read finely crafted prose. That’s why fic is awesome–it creates a place for all kinds of storytelling. But for me personally, now that my job entails reading about 1500 pages of undergraduate writing per year, when I have time to read for enjoyment I want it to be by someone who really knows what they’re doing. There’s tons of high-quality fic, of course, but I no longer have the time and patience to go searching for it that I had ten years ago.
But whether I’m reading it or not, I love that fanfiction exists. Because without people doing what fanfiction writers do, literature wouldn’t exist. (And then I’d be out of a job and, frankly, I don’t know how to do anything else.)
She appeared in our shop maybe…two/three-ish?? years ago.
She’s pretty young, maybe now 16 or 17. Her mom appears to work in the hospital down the street, so we think she comes here to wait out MamaArtist’s shift. She’s a small, shy type, with long brown hair and a bright yellow cardigan that she kinda tries to hide in.
She has a sort of “routine” when she shows up. She’ll show up in the far end of the store, peek around the orchids, and if you don’t glance over at her, come to stare longingly at the roses. She’ll then realize there are people around and scatter to the café tables. After building a fort of books, she will carefully sneak a sketchbook out and start drawing. Few hours later, MamaArtist shows up and they leave.
SO one day, she’s staring at the roses, and I happen to have one that breaks off and is too short to sell, so I smile and hand it to her. “Take it, it’s free.”
She just STARES at me, and points at it and says, “Free?”
I nod, “Yup!” and she’s SO HAPPY!! She starts talking to me really fast, and I realize why she’s so quiet– She doesn’t speak a lot of English!
And….ugh….now I’m embarrassed to admit this, but while I recognize that what she’s speaking is Spanish, I can’t speak Spanish beyond like… drunk kindergartener. In present tense. On alternate tuesdays with mild improvements if I’ve been attempting to read the Spanish sides of the warning labels on chemical bottles.
She realizes quickly that I am a deer-in-the-headlights and starts to run off, but I manage to scrape together enough itty-bitty BROKEN ASS Spanish to make her laugh and diffuse things, kinda. I get from her that she loves roses, but they’re too expensive for her art.
(btw my boss is behind her with the waterboy, ABSOLUTELY THRILLED that she’s talking to me, because The Mystery Of The Yellow Cardigan Customer is one that has haunted us for a few months now.)
ANYWAY, I love art, so I try to ask about her art, but, : ( She can’t find the words for it, and I can’t understand her explanation in Spanish, and IT WAS TOTALLY NOT HER FAULT but she got embarrassed and thanked me profusely for the flower and broke the sound barrier to escape.
Boss swoops in for the down low, and….I haven’t really detailed the conversation I had with this girl here, because it is LONG and kiiiiiinda embarrassing and I tried to type it out but i fell like it came off waaaay too one-sided in my favor because I couldn’t accurately recall the Spanish she was speaking. I just felt like it wasn’t fair, you know? She was shy, but when speaking about her art, her voice was confident and she clearly knew what she was talking about, so yeah.
I’m also speaking with some hindsight right now, because I know where this goes, and what she must have been trying to say, but at the time I was beyond confused and embarrassed. Boss hears me out and then sort of hums. She grabs one of the bouquets I’ve set aside for an arrangement and snaps off two of the buds. Then she marches over to the girl’s table and sits down across from her.
She probably gave the girl the roses, and used the power of being a sweet, gentle older lady to coax out the girl’s story, but there’s a wall in between us and the café and I didn’t want the girl to feel….more….cornered, ha ha. So I kept doing my job.
GUYS. I may have hinted at it with “The Artist” but this teenage girl is AN ARTIST.
Boss comes back, this time armed with photos and GUYS. This girl is using the petals of flowers to VERY DELICATELY create watercolor and petal collages of high fashion dress concepts! I’m not going to post the photos, and i hope it’s obvious why, but THEY’RE BEAUTIFUL and WAYYY beyond what you’d expect from a high schooler.
(Okay, so I paused and tried to google for something similar, and I can’t really find anything, but google “petal dress watercolor” and look at the fourth result which is like…a simple outline of a woman with a dress made of rose petals and its KINDA similar? But this girl is making pieces way more detailed and large scale and conceptual. The watercolor she’s painting is also more realistic.)
So The Artist has been using flowers she cant find, or cheaper ones she can afford. One of the paintings (probably about a 9×12) is clearly crafted out of GOD KNOWS HOW MANY little yellow DANDELION petals, and seems to be of Belle from Beauty and the Beast? Another one is a flow-y dancer in Portulaca petals she has totally been snagging from our store displays and tbh ROCK ON girl. I could go on and on, but THIS is what she’s been up to in our café behind those books!!!! ART.
I’m kinda stunned, because DAMN, she’s like 15 (at the time this happened) and I wish I’d had that skill at 15 holy shit. Boss flips through the photos, and shows me the sketch this girl has JUST STARTED for the rose petals I gave her, and its a series of tiny little ballerinas and AAAHHH GUYS SHE’S SO GOOD. Swear to god the second I discover her online I’m promoting the shit out of her.
So here we are, ooooohhing and aaaaahhhing over these photos when Boss gets this super serious look on her face. She stares at me, grabs one of the BRAND NEW rose bouquets– a really big, really pretty set of fire roses (uh, yellow roses that fade into orange and then red at the tips) then looks around the store for our managers and shrugs.
She proceeds to slam the guillotine down just underneath the heads with the most deadass “oops” I have ever heard. She grabs one of our paper bags, and we quickly shove all of the rose heads into the bag. She runs off.
I peek around the corner just in time to see Boss hand the bag over like a sack of cocaine, shoving them behind the girl’s books, patting her on the shoulder, and running off. I’m laughing really quietly but really hard, because The Artist looks SO CONFUSED and baffled. Boss is giggling and grinning, and we don’t even try to hide when The Artist opens the bag and sees what’s inside.
guys, I felt super bad for a second because she started to cry. Like, actually cry. She rushes over and tries to give it back, but we just insisted it was hers. My Boss’ only price? She had to come and show us the finished pieces. Which she did. And has, since we’ve been sneaking her bags of broken flowers to play with while her mom works. We’ve seen her less as she’s gotten older, but she texts Boss pictures every once in a while of her art, and I HOPE TO GOD she’s entering contests because she has some serious talent.
In Osmosis Jones (2001) a statue of a sperm cell can be seen that is labeled Our Founder.
In Pulp Fiction Vincent Vega is constantly on the toilet. One of the side effects of heroin abuse is constipation.
For Interstellar, Christopher Nolan planted 500 acres of corn just for the film because he did not want to CGI the farm in. After filming, he turned it around and sold the corn and made back profit for the budget.
In The Movie ”Unthinkable” You See A Guy Try To Defuse A Nuclear Bomb With Excel.
In The
Lost World: Jurassic Park, the ship that brings the T-Rex to San Diego
is called the S.S Venture, which is a reference to King Kong, in which a
ship called the S.S Venture brought King Kong to New York.
If you watch the film with headphones or properly placed surround sound speakers, every time we see Baby in Baby Driver (2017) wearing only one of his headphones, you’ll hear the song he is listening to through that ear only.
In Team America: World Police, the Paris ‘set’ has a floor made of Croissants.
They couldn’t hide the camera in the doorknob’s reflection of this scene of The Matrix, so they put a coat over it and a half tie to match with Morpheus’.
This Wolverine Easter egg in the opening credits border of The Greatest Showman.
In Saving Private Ryan, a medic gets hit in the canteen. Water first starts to pour out then blood.
In
The Truman Show, the travel agent kept Truman waiting because she has
never needed to show up for work before. Also she is still wearing her
makeup bib since it was a rush job.
In
Die Hard (1988), Alan Rickman’s Petrified Expression While Falling Was
Completely Genuine. The Stunt Team Instructed Him That They Would Drop
Him On The Count Of 3 But Instead Dropped Him At 1.
In
‘The Avengers’, there is a small screen showing the heat signature in
the room where Loki is being held which shows that he has a cold body
temperature because he is a frost giant.
In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, The White Witch’s crown melts as her power dwindles.
Farquaad kills Mama bear to use as a rug in Shrek.
In The Avengers, Hawkeyes states that “They can’t bank worth a damn, find a right corner.” Jarvis proceeds to plot a route around a corner for Tony.
In the Last Jedi, the door for Luke’s shack is made out of a panel from his X-wing.
In
The Shawshank Redemption (1994), the DA who arrests the sadistic
Captain Hadley can be seen reading the Miranda rights off of a card. The
scene is set in 1966, the same year that Miranda v. Arizona court case
made the act mandatory when arresting a suspect.
The skeletons from the pool scene in Poltergeist were real, as they were cheaper than rubber skeletons at the time.
In Back to the Future, when Marty travels to the past and runs over one of the trees, the name of the mall changes.
In “The Fifth Element,”
Manhattan, the Statue of Liberty, and the Brooklyn Bridge appear to
tower above the landscape because the sea levels have dropped
significantly, with the city expanding onto the new land.
In the
Matrix, Morpheus asks Cypher for his phone, Cypher hesitates pulling his
hand out of his pocket because earlier he dumped his phone so they
could be tracked. Fortunately, Trinity immediately gives her phone to
Morpheus.
In Django Unchained, A Man Asks Django What Is His Name Is And How It
Is Spelled. “The D Is Silent”, The Man Responds “I Know”. This Man Is
Franco Nero, The Original Django From The Original 1966 Film.
In Monster’s Inc (2001) Mike has 3 sticky note reminders to file his paperwork in his locker, which he later forgets to do, driving the plot of the movie.
In lord of the rings you can see that gandalf carries his pipe in his staff.
I went to a vaguely pretentious academy that thought it was hot shit, as I’ve mentioned vaguely before (and it was, in the same sense a bag of shit on top a tire fire is lit) so we had lots of committees and stuff. I had to attend etiquette lessons and learn things like “how to host dinner parties and write formal invitations”, which in hindsight turned out to be a lot more useful in my life than algebra. So thank you Madame Williams, I still think of you every time I set out a European table setting for a formal event.
One of the other things we had to do was like, social skills and learning how to work with people on elaborate projects. This could mean organizing charity fund raisers, or things like our own school vacations. (We actually got to set up our own prom or “Leaver’s Function” as it was officially termed, which is why it was a hot mess, but that’s another story) Or in this instance, writing, producing and publishing a formal year book for the school records, and for our own keepsake.
Which went about as well as you’d imagine it would, when you give 17-18 year olds the power to write about each other. It was, to put it simply, total all out war.
It started out normally enough, those of us who wanted to be involved joined, and seen as how I was taking advanced lit, it was suggested to be a good activity for me. Cause y’know, all writing is the same. I was also joined by a couple of my theater friends and a lot of the art dept kids, and a few of the lads who were destined to go into careers in computer science who were told they had to participate because they were the only ones who knew how to work a laptop.
But there was also a large portion of the group who, shall we say, were not interested in playing nicely with others. I have no idea why. I suspect it came from thinking others hated them because they were gifted or nerdy, when in actual fact people hated them because they were assholes.
Anyway, it all went fine for the first few months. We were kept vaguely in line by a rotation of English teachers. And then for some unknown reason, the adult support dropped away entirely and uh, well remember those people who hated everyone else? Well, they started reviewing the year book as a means to revenge.
Articles that got written for clubs they were not a part of vanished. The sports teams lost their pages. Award winning students who were not part of the clique had their honorable mentions scrubbed. Suddenly there were three pages dedicated to the debate team. A page about charity work done by the “popular girls” was ““““jokingly””” reworded to read “Hoes In The Community” instead of “Hope In the Community”.
And when those of us who thought that was a little, shall we say, fucking deplorable, voiced our opinions, suddenly we were no longer included in group meetings. We’d show up to the tower on the third floor on Thursdays to find it empty. Jobs we were supposed to be doing got taken away from us. The photographer we spent weeks securing was cancelled and replaced last minute by the camera club, meaning all our photos turned out awful, and they all had to be done again by a professional, at extra cost cause it was a rush job.
The sponsors in the community we had found to help pay for the project dropped us because the charity work we were supposed to do in exchange for the sponsorship never happened. We had to scrabble to find a printer who would still produce a semi decent (leather hardback) book for a fraction of our previous budget. Which was roughly the point myself and several others said “fuck this, we quit” and washed our hands of the stress. Until one of my friends, Mark, came to find a group of us in the library one day at lunch and said “hey, uh… you should… you should probably see this” and pulled us all up into the computer lab to show us the final draft of the book which he’d stumbled across when one of the Assholes had left the laptop unattended over lunch.
And to find out that all of our articles were completely gone, our pictures had been changed for extremely ugly non-official ones, and our year book quotes, supposed to be written by our friends (so your image would have things underneath it from people saying nice things about you) had been rewritten to say things like “most likely to become a junkie” or “most likely to become homeless”, or in my case “most likely to start a cult”.
And true to form,
Mister Hadley, the piece of garbage that he was, had signed off on it—likely without reading it—and the book was approved to be sent to the publisher on the Tuesday, cause Monday was a bank holiday. And this, was Friday. So there was no way we could fix this. Even if we went to a teacher we had no time to rewrite it all and remake the whole book in time. Not when the school was closed on Monday and the books were meant to be part of a presentation for our formal graduation.
And people were understandably upset by it. One of my friends was in visible tears over being voted “most likely to wind up in a mental institute”, which I’ll admit, was the snapping point for me. We didn’t want our parents to see this, we didn’t want our names attached to it as being part of “The Year Book Committee”. This wasn’t the work we had done. And it would reflect as part of our final grades.
Now, with hindsight, I would hope that the printer would have taken one look at the vile shit that had cropped up under the photos and refused to print it, or at the very least, contacted the school. With hindsight we should have gone straight to our year head with the laptop and pitched a fit.
But I wasn’t thinking logically at that point. I was thinking with all the clarity and rage of a 17 year old who had just been voted “most likely to start a cult”, and I was willing to live up to that particular epitaph. So I proposed instead that we sneak into the school on the Monday when the school would technically beclosed, but was still open while the teachers were in doing work, and work to fix it. Whose with me?!
Cue a lot of coughing and ringing silence, until Mark, gods love him, a willing enabler to a lot of my impulses said “sure” with a shrug and agreed to help me.
Which was how, on a bank holiday Monday, my friend Mark and I went for an early morning stroll through the surrounding forest around the school, and just happened, happened, to come out by the tennis courts up on the west field, hopped the fence, and managed to sneak in through the gymnasium to get into the school proper, and wound up sitting in the computer lab with the lights off, pouring over a laptop so thick and heavy by modern standards it resembled a cinder block and likely weighed about the same.
It took us several hours, but we managed to remove all of the offensive content, and replaced it with the original rough drafts which we’d managed to piece together over the weekend. And what we couldn’t replace, we made up. Benign, bland pleasantries, which no doubt left a lot of people confused. But harmless in their banality.
Things like “going to miss you loads, xoxox” and “most likely to own a posh car one day”. That sort of thing.
We also swapped out the ugly photos for more pleasant ones. And just generally removed the spite from it. Because that’s not what year books are for. You’re supposed to move on from them, not freeze yourself in time through an act of vindictiveness.
But when it came to changing my quotes back, I hesitated over deleting the “most likely to start a cult” line, watching as Mark (several irn brus to the wind and a box of malteasers overwrought) typed up the very kind “most likely to write a best selling novel” comment provided by my friends, and said “actually keep it in.”
Which is why in my year book, I am voted most likely to write a best selling novel, but also, to start a cult. Because while I wasn’t so keen on the nasty things they’d written about other people, I absolutely wanted them to know who had made the changes to the file. I wanted them to open it up on the Tuesday to find a file with no previous saved versions and no other documents, and know that they had to hand it over, or fail.
And Mark, knowing me, and knowing what I was thinking, quietly and wryly joined me by writing the words, “most likely to become a hacker” next to his own name.
And hit save.
It was all very terribly dramatic and unnecessary, but so is everything when you’re 17. And the book was still an absolute piece of shit and dull as dish water. But at least no one was hurt by it.
headcanon that teddy lupin has a little “business” at hogwarts where he will change his appearance to someone and then go do whatever it is that person needs to do. like if someone needs to break up with their boyfriend but are too scared to do it, they’ll hire teddy and teddy will change into them and do it for them. or if they need to go serve detention but the professor is really shitty to that person and they can’t handle it, teddy will go to detention for them so that the person doesn’t have to deal with that professor. or if they are nervous about a date with someone, teddy will turn into that person so that they can practice talking to that person until they feel they can calmly do so. teddy just being a helpful person getting paid in sweets or tutoring or a drink in Hogsmeade
Teddy is not available to serve detentions with Professor Longbottom, who can recognize his mannerisms too well (“Honestly Teddy, your godfather makes that same face.”) or McGonagall, who took one look at him the first time he tried and announced that he could serve his own detention the next night.
blackash26 