"Moralists have no place in an art gallery."

[tocryabout]

Here's a question I have for everybody currently writing re Robin Hobb's frothy anti-fanfic rant: if you did encounter a good argument for fanfic being morally wrong, something you couldn't answer, would you stop writing it? Seriously? Would you feel guilty? Just how concerned are we about the possibility that we're doing something wrong?

I suspect that the answer for many people is "not very", which is why I'm less than impressed with a lot of these metawanks about the ethics of fanfic.

Some people have dealt with the topic in a mature way, admitting that some fanfic can in fact be ethically dodgy, but I've noticed something about these discussions, and it is this: if we go very far in the direction of asking for responsibility and consideration from fanfic writers, the reaction from some corners seems to be "HURR BLURR I AM LIBERATED IN MY SEXUALITY/CREATIVITY/MORALITY AND CAN DO WHAT I WANT, STOP CENSORING ME!!!" Some writers will cleverly leave out the "hurr blurr" in an attempt to throw us off the track, but it amounts to the same thing. When a segment of the community refuses to consider changing its behaviour, ethics begins to be a very low-stakes thing to debate.

The thing is that the argument is about more than copyright: particularly in the case of erotic fanfic, it becomes a question of whether morality ought to have anything to do with art. If we're concerned about what the source's original author thinks of chan, then we might have to be concerned about what readers and people on the street think of chan, and then it's no longer just about the ficcer and how she likes to get off.

And once the militant fetish ficcers get going, the whole argument becomes annoying very quickly.

So in conclusion, all this moral meta is a waste of everyone's time unless and until you admit the possibility that some art can be Bad -- in the sense of morally wicked -- and that Bad fic (as opposed to harmless badfic) should not be displayed to the public.

(For the record, I more or less agree with scott_lynch's arguments against Hobb's rant.)

Comments

[to-cry-about.livejournal.com]

Also, I somehow thought that I already had you friended on this journal, but apparently I'm an idiot. I was thinking, "Man, talktooloose never posts!"