"Dear TPTB: Good Luck With That"

[morgandawn]

TPTB on the British TV show Blake's 7 have had an adversarial relationship with slash fandom.  One actor kept confusing his TV character with himself (reportedly saying: It's that fiction where my co-star is always raping me.") Needless to say it was one of the many reasons (but not the sole reason) that Blake's 7 fandom imploded in the late 1980s.

Enter a new set of  "creators". These are ones who bought the TV show rights in the early 2000s.  They've been pushing for a reboot and are in negotiations for a new series to be shown on XBox Live (recast with new actors, of course).

Sadly, their attitudes are still stuck back in the 70s stone ages: "I think slash is distasteful. The actors that are represented do not appreciate it. And some produce this stuff on the web. I think it is bad taste. It has no reflection or bearing on what the show is and it is not a tribute to Terry Nation's legacy. I think it is an abomination. I think what is an abomination is the pornography. I have no problem with fan fiction, but I do have a problem with pornography." Asked what he planned to do, he said: "They will find out how I am going to clamp down on it. The moment you start doing something of an extremely dubious nature of the pornographic variety or for a commercial benefit without acquiring the rights, I and my partners will take a dim view of that."

Of course this was 10 years ago...perhaps they might have mellowed a smidge.  But really, does anyone care? We didn't when the show was airing, I doubt we'll listen 20+ years later. Certainly not when TIIC call large swaths of potential fans purveyors of an abomination.

Comments

[fahrbotdrusilla]

Umm, but no one commercially benefits from slash fanfic nowadays? I kind of guess they did in the time of the Zines, but no one does now do they?

[morgandawn]

I think they'd focus on the first part and not the latter (commercial benefit). In other words the morals/abomination aspect.

There are still zines, but even in the height very few editors "commercially benefited" from them. asking for production costs and keeping it small scale (under 500 copies) pretty much kept most TPTB out of fandom's business. and when they did get involved, it was over ....no surprise....the morals issue. so $ is usually a red herring.

http://fanlore.org/wiki/Open_Letter_to_Star_Wars_Zine_Publishers_by_Maureen_Garrett