A fictional post

[hazelk]

Not being much of a fic person I haven’t really weighed in on the whole FanLib thing but this response by the CEO to criticism hosted in Henry Jenkins’s blog was interesting. It does sound as if rather than hoping to become the fanfic equivalent of YouTube what FanLib are attempting to create is more the fictive counterpart to American Idol with the web site playing the role of the early ‘freak show’ rounds of the contest. Given the current popularity of all manner of talent shows it may well end up being successful on its own terms but be no more or less likely than the TV versions to discover writers/stories with real star quality.

The whole thing does seem to presuppose that fanfic writers have essentially the same motivations as Idol contestants, individual celebrity, fame and fortune. Not that there’s anything wrong with that but writers on LJ don’t give the impression of being there primarily for the competition.

We are pattern-finding and story-telling animals. It’s what we do. We take the real world and turn it into narratives and symbols so our brains can manipulate them more easily.
http://subterraneanpress.com/index.php/magazine/summer-2007/column-bears-examining-4-by-elizabeth-bear/

I don’t write stories in my head to any great extent, I find patterns and chop them into ever finer messes but for those to whom stories come naturally it makes sense that fanfic would be both a way to ‘talk’ about them or function as a form of narrative jamming, taking a storyline for a walk as it were.

Speaking of fanfic but more specifically (and based on a sample size of two) does anyone get the impression that fic!Buffy is a more womanly woman than she was on the show? Emotionally intelligent but otherwise not that bright? Joss’s Buffy can have a hard, quite abstract edge to her thinking. Her first line in the first comic has her philosophising about the world not individual inhabitants of it and she’s as capable as Giles or Wesley of understanding the big picture, that there may only be bad choices that Willow may still be evil. The main difference between her and the Watchers is where she draws the line between a necessary evil and a convenient one.

Comments

[yourlibrarian]

Thanks for the explanation. I've heard those terms thrown around for some time and was never clear on what their function was and what achieving one meant! And now I see why the AP classes are looked at for entrance there. At the time I was in high school taking AP courses was a nice plus on the college application but the overall GPA was more important and the AP tests (especially taking a handful of them) was rather costly. They may be considered more important in U.S. college admissions now because grade inflation has made so many transcripts meaningless.

about how good any 18+ exams are assessing ability. I was good at tests, it always felt like some kind of trick.

*g* Maybe you're secretly a Slayer and don't know it. There's truth to the fact that tests measure school abilities and are not necessarily a mark of intelligence per se. But I actually took a Psych course a few years ago with a prof who's a leading researcher on standardized exams. And in general the scores are very valid predictors of achievement in school. They do not, however, predict completion, which is another thing that's a consideration when admitting (especially at the graduate levels). And clearly that was an issue in Buffy's case as well.