Questions, questions, questions

It seems about half the posts linked to on metafandom are about the legitimacy or otherwise of fanfic, something which seems to have been sparked off by a certain published author’s disparaging remarks about the form. There doesn’t appear to be an equivalent amount of interest about other types of fanart like vids, although the underlying issues would seem to be the same. Is it that vidders basically accept that what they do isn’t entirely legit? Or that vids are a qualitatively different art form to the source material? The complaints about fanfiction mostly seem to come from published authors about fics based on their own work, direct competition in a sense. Then again I’m sure there’ve been authors who refuse to allow their books to be made into movies so it’s certainly possible to feel proprietal about one’s work across those sorts of boundaries. Are there film directors who won’t let people write tie-in novels though? Making movies or TV is a much more collaborative process than writing a novel so maybe even would-be auteurs learn not to be too possessive about their art early on. But is such possessiveness innate or learned? Would Homer have felt he owned the Odyssey? Or more to the point when do children start feeling that the stories they make up are theirs and theirs alone?

And now for something not entirely different:

(  Ten things I have learned from working on El Vid II  )