Oh, I just realized I never said ... muchas gracias for this article! I've been saying for years that fanfiction is nothing new, and is in fact one of the basic ways people enjoy and engage with stories. If they're enjoying it enough to play with it, well, that's a hell of a good sign.
I also think it's weird that we gripe about passivity in audiences who supposedly just absorb a story (book, movie, anything) without adding anything, and yet when they do try to be active in the process the creators bitch about THAT. But the second one is so very preferable! Things stick with you much longer if you play with them.
There's a professor at the U of Oregon, Marjorie Taylor, who has done a lot of work on imaginary friends and writers' characters and their autonomy. She calls it the illusion of independent agency, and realized that it really is a highly complex simulation: one establishes parameters for a character, and then turns 'em loose to see what they do--which is why you get authors arguing with their characters as a normal thing. (She also found that on average kids with imaginary friends really do have more empathy.)
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2012-06-28 09:51 pm (UTC)I also think it's weird that we gripe about passivity in audiences who supposedly just absorb a story (book, movie, anything) without adding anything, and yet when they do try to be active in the process the creators bitch about THAT. But the second one is so very preferable! Things stick with you much longer if you play with them.
There's a professor at the U of Oregon, Marjorie Taylor, who has done a lot of work on imaginary friends and writers' characters and their autonomy. She calls it the illusion of independent agency, and realized that it really is a highly complex simulation: one establishes parameters for a character, and then turns 'em loose to see what they do--which is why you get authors arguing with their characters as a normal thing. (She also found that on average kids with imaginary friends really do have more empathy.)