Watch Fanlore In Action!

[morgandawn]

I struggled to decide which icon to use for this post: "Fanlore" or "Fair Use." I went with Fanlore.

A tumblr post that uses Fanlore content to make a point for tumblr fans. It's Fanlore in action! Flying the goddamned Bat-Jet!!
"Since a lot of tumblr users may not be old enough to remember, I’d like to remind fandom that the ability to write what you want about whatever characters you want was something that we fought for, not something that was ours by default. It was stigmatized, threatened with legal action, and mostly carried out in secret. You are living in a golden age of fandom, of AO3 and fanfiction.net and tumblr. Fanworks are actually entering mainstream awareness and becoming more culturally accepted. But let me give you a blast from the past, a look at what fandom looked like when the content owners decided what kinds of content they would and wouldn’t tolerate. From Fanlore, on the subject of Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern series..."

You can read the entire tumblr post here.

Comments

[mrkinch]

Thanks for pointing! I read and reblogged it; I remember crap like that.

[the_shoshanna]

Nothing beats Chelsea Quinn Yarbro going to court to seize an entire print run of zines, pulping them, and making a papier-mâché bust from them of her illicitly fanficced character the Comte de Saint-Germain.

(Yeah, that one, the one she didn't invent because he was an actual historical person.)

[morgandawn]

even worse was how she obtained a copy of the zine

http://fanlore.org/wiki/The_Holmesian_Federation#Controversy_Regarding_Issue_8

[the_shoshanna]

Whoops, I misremembered her actually going to court. I remember seeing the announcement in Locus that the zine publisher was forced to run, but of course I no longer have that issue, so I can't prove it. And I'd never heard the story about the agent at a party! I used to have the issue of the SFWA Bulletin with the second half of Yarbro's account of the whole thing, too.