(no subject)

[moon_custafer]

I spotted an in-joke on the second viewing of 'A Scandal in Belgravia' - green_trilobite says he got it on the first take: the hits counter on John H. Watson's blog is always 1895.


This got me to thinking about fanfiction. I've recently been leaning towards a definition of fanfic as "any work that depends on the readers'/viewer's knowledge of an earlier work." For the purposes of this argument I have to exclude sequels, serial and interrelated works by the same artist: Anne of Avonlea is not a fanfic of Anne of Green Gables, for instance. Ulysses is not a fanfic of Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man, but it is a fanfic of The Odyssey. Actually, that last bit is true in practical terms as well - if you want to be less confused by Ulysses, reading Portrait beforehand will help a little, but knowing some version of The Odyssey will help more.

As you can see, by the definition I'm pushing for, a lot of literature is fanfic of mythology.

This got me thinking about Lewis' Till We Have Faces - at first I considered it a Cupid/Psyche fanfic, but it's a sufficiently complete and coherent story that it would make sense, I think, to a reader who'd never encountered the myth; so I think "adaptation" must be a different thing from "fanfic;" even if it's an adaptation that picks an untraditional PoV character.

This brings me back to Sherlock - I'm not sure if it's fanfic or adaptation or both. I suspect it would make sense as a detective show even to those who haven't read the original (which is likely part of its popularity); but there are so many in-jokes for the long-time fans, and this last one wasn't even an allusion to cannon, but to a sonnet which is definitely fanfic: '221B' never identifies anyone by name, but depends on the reader's recognition of an address and a quote.

Adaptation with loads of fanservice, perhaps.

Comments

[donald hutton (from livejournal.com)]

I think it's "Fanservice" if the actual authors* do self-referential works and "Fanfic" if anyone else does it. So the Sherlock series is Fanservice. It's also that way if you include "amateur" in the definition of "Fanfic". However there's also works where there are references to other canons in your own original work: eg. the endless pulp and genre fiction references in the old "Man From U.N.C.L.E." paperbacks. Those might be called "Fanfic" but I think they're generally just called "homages". It's a "Tuckerism" if you put your friends in although Lovecraft and Bloch did it earlier than Tucker when they killed each other off in their short stories.

* Of course here they're not the original ACD authors but I'm counting "author" as someone working within one canon.