captain-snark:
There have ALWAYS been fanworks…fanart, fanfic, fancavedrawings fan everything.
We built an entire civilization around it. It’s fucking called language, it’s that thing our ancestors developed so they could communicate, and they discovered writing so they could keep it for generations and share it.
It’s one of the actual beautiful things about spaces like tumblr. It’s an anthropological orgasm. For serious. We are our own society, we have our own languages and vocab, our own rules and mores. Sometimes this, like any society, can grow toxic and problematic. But other times it can be amazing. A fan writes a story about characters and another fan, so enraptured by that idea creates another piece of fanwork inspired by it. This is HOW stories are made, this is how all of those television shows and books and movies have spawned.
There were fans of one thing and fueled that into the making of another and it’s an insane cycle that just will never by its very nature end. HOW FUCKING AMAZING IS THAT.
The first big FANDOM? Religion.
Zeus, and Jesus, and Noah, and Loki and Thor, and Ra, and kami and Buddha, and SO MANY OTHER FUCKING THINGS
AND WHAT THEY ALL BOIL DOWN TO IS THIS: WE RECYCLE
Sit through any art history class and you know just how prevalent certain characters and themes are. Sit through any movie and you know what archetypes the characters are based off of. Over and over again we reuse, not because we have reached the limit of our creative potential but because there are just certain things about humanity that is innate.
Some of it is NOT good and leads to bullshit like homophobia, and racism, and sexism and just badness but it just means that we are all creatures struggling to find out who and what and why we are. This is what art tries to capture. And at the beginning of our story it was renderings of animals on cave walls. Animals who provided not only food but also art. In its first inception the WORLD was the biggest fandom.
And then there was art fuelled by art and music and stories and they were written down and retold and became religion and the desire to capture and preserve its ideals.
I had a professor in college that told me that I needed to look at where other art ends and my own ideas begin. And I didn’t have the kind of conviction in it then that I do now. But, I wish I had. I wish, for even my own understanding, that I would have asked in all sincerity “if this wasn’t a cylon but Christ would that change your opinion? If this wasn’t a reference to Starfleet but the Asgards ? Would that make a difference?
Does it matter that I can talk about the philosophy behind it? Would it matter that I could quote Descartes or talk about the Final Five as an allegory for identity? Or discuss quantum physics in the time travel in LOST? Or the psychology behind the way House Elves are treated?
Stripped to core aren’t all of these just references to something that came before it? Have we really changed so much as a people since the dawn of time that it’s become irrelevant to our culture?
If it is at the core of who we are, and why we are, and what the hell the point of it is, then isn’t ALL art important?
Because the answer is “I know where the line between other art ends and my own begins…it’s nowhere. Because it doesn’t exist. One of the first lessons you’re taught as an art is “art isn’t created in a vacuum.”
So STOP TRYING TO DELEGITIMIZE FANWORK OKAY. EVEN FISTING PORN HAS TO HAVE SOME KIND OF BENEFIT TO SOCIETY EVEN IF IT JUST MEANS EVENTUALLY PEOPLE ACCEPT FISTING AS AN EVERDAY THING AND WE MOVE ON AS A SOCIETY TO A PLACE OF GREATER MATURTIY AND SEXUAL UNDERSTANDING.
YES.
EVEN BAD FISTING PORN IS HELPING HUMANITY. THANK YOU.
PREACH.