Subject: I apologize since I'm unable to track down a link; I'm only speaking from personal experience
Author:
Posted on: 2023-05-09 15:30:10 UTC
Though I can attest that I've seen the "they're not making any money" rhetoric tossed around at least twice, it doesn't seem to be common enough (in the least, not as common as "it was written for fun"), I hereby withdraw my proposal.
Directly continuing from the previous mission, this little snippet sees the agents stopping for some fairy food.
-Yuki is not that much of a culinary aficionado and doesn't have that big of an appetite, she just likes talking and writing about food
Mpreg babies with funny appearances, metal tong fights and all that goodness, on AO3 and Blogspot. Thanks to Ls for his work on the mission.
Welp. It’s finished at last! Looking at the whole story as a whole, you guys did a good job of letting the fic’s errors manifest in funny ways, but not necessarily through letting the agents interact with what was happening. They give various nauseated reactions, but they don’t do a whole lot besides watch, right up until the charge list scene. It would be nice to give everyone something to do, in the future! They also just kind of drift away at the end, without really acknowledging each other, though I know that’s partly just Carlisle being Carlisle. Hopefully Émilie gets a partner soon, so she can go on missions with a little more camaraderie next time.
Hm. I would argue that putting magical cores in a Potterverse fic can be charge, since it’s. You know. Not canon. (Unless it had been written well, as always.)
—doctorlit is glad you saved the children, but whatever happened to Dominice?! He cannot rest until he gets the answer!!
There's no particular reason to recruit her, and it's not like there can't be some random witch named Dominice wandering around Hogwarts.
-Ls
As of the completion of the Ls cowrite, I announce that I will no longer accept requests for or initiate cowrites. The reason has nothing to do with Ls – in fact, it has been great working with him on the project – or the controversy surrounding the canonical source material. I come to this decision purely because I figured that cowriting really isn't for me. The reasons are simple:
However, I'm still open to co-riffing on the Asylum, as it's different from missions.
Seriously, don't blame your self for the delays, you were actually able to accomplish other things, while I wasn't. I do think it's too bad that you underestimate your ability to work with others, you seriously rock. Thank you for working with me on this.
And once you and KeiWorld are finished with the Asylum co-riff, I'd totally be down for that.
-Ls
but I'm at a loss as to how to expand on the reasoning I have here,and what other reasonings to add, and I'm open to suggestions.
=== … am not making any money off this. ===
We are aware, and we do not expect fanfiction to be up to professional standards. However, we do expect that the works be decent.
Furthermore, we believe this rhetoric sends out a bad message to fan writers who do work to improve their craft: that any creative endeavor that doesn't result in material profit is pointless.
It means, "I'm not diverting revenue from the original creator, so I'm not a threat to their IP, therefore please don't take legal action against me."
I think the FAQ addresses the point that fanfiction is not professional writing under the headers "[I] am just doing this for fun" and "[I] am only twelve / am new at this."
I don't think we need to justify fanfiction as something worth doing in a FAQ addressing fanfic writers in an attempt to explain why it's worth doing well. {= )
~Neshomeh
There's a lot of focus on monetising hobbies nowadays - to the point where, as Yuki says, there's a perception that if you're not profiting from it it's useless. I mostly only see it through older people objecting to it, but that's about me, not the culture.
I think the suggested FAQuanswer looks good, though I'll happily yield my opinion in favour of younger, more in-touch minds.
hS
Fanzine culture is pretty big in several fandoms, and several fanwriters have Patreons now. But honestly a lot of the monetisation push applies to pretty much every hobby these days. Everyone needs a side hustle because the main one isn't paying the bills anymore. ~Late-stage capitalism!~
I can't think of any other phrasing for this, either, so Yuki's wording is fine.
Mostly because the whole Patreon thing is literally a legal loophole - in most cases you're not selling your fanfiction, but you're giving a bonus (early access, or extra stuff, or citing the donators in your author notes... this kind of thing) in exchange for a donation - basically separating the "money trail" from the fanfiction itself!
I could literally set up a Patreon, and as long as there is no copyrighted content inside the Patreon rewards I would be golden. If, say, my "perks" are one shots involving only my original characters and things like "for X tier you get to have a minor character designed by you cameo in the main story" the only thing I'd have to worry about is how to file Patreon revenue in my taxes!
For someone who grew up with the "I'm not getting any money out of this so don't sue me" disclaimer being everywhere, and havign used it myself, this is unbelievable.
I find it just as baffling, and quite distasteful, but... it seems to be happening, and we need to recognise that.
hS
so the logic extends that way to fanfiction as well. Some of the top earners on Patreon draw fanart, particularly of the rule 34 variety. Fanartists make up a good deal of the artist alleys at conventions, which in turn is how they're spotted by studios and publishers and go on to make official art--look at Alice X Zhang, for example. Fanartists in MDZS fandom have been commissioned by official sources into making official art, too.
So under that same logic, if fanartists can make money and get recognition from fanart, then it seems double-standard-y for fanfiction to be excluded. Granted, AO3 explicitly forbids any mention of monetisation of works posted onto its site, so fic authors have to "hide the trail", as Sergio mentions, by linking to socials that have links to Patreon or Ko-Fi or other donation pages.
/has done fanfic commissions before to pay for medical expenses because ~America is a capitalist hellscape~, so, uh, yeah.
There is a legal difference, though - you can see that in the Tolkien Estate's FAQ, which I've previously described as forbidding any use of the names of Tolkien's characters - but permitting basically any image that isn't a direct copy of Tolkien's. A £1000 painting of a burning red eye on top of a black tower with a volcano in the background is fine; a button with the word "Sauron" on in Times New Roman is not.
And it worries me. Fanfiction has always existed by the tolerance of the rights holders, and the reason they tolerate it is that it's not being sold. Going "aha, but technically the money I've received doesn't say 'for fanfic' on the invoice, so it's fine" isn't going to hold up if someone big decides to throw their weight around. In essence, fanfic survives by not being enough of a threat for anyone to care about.
Or maybe I'm just an overreacting, panicky hypocrite. Things like Disney dropping lawsuits on people selling Mickey Mouse t-shirts haven't turned into a crusade against fanart in general, so maybe this is just how you achieve a gradual shift to sellable fanfic. I dunno. That's why I yielded to more informed opinions in the first place.
hS
Now that I think about it, selling what's basically fanfiction has actually been a thing in Japan for years - the so-called doujinshi. Traditionallly sold through the Comiket festival (though many are also available digitally year-round now), they're pretty much fancomics, and their sale is not only completely legal, but many of today's big names in the manga industry started that way! (Example: CLAMP, the group of four authors behind Cardcaptor Sakura and many other series, were originally a bigger group specializing in doujinshi back in the 80s) so most manga authors themselves tend to be very tolerant of the thing as that's how they they began too.
(Word of warning: there are a lot of R18 doujinshi, in a lot of cases being the majority for a given work. Proceed with caution if you want to look them up, especially since by the way Japanese laws work you can literally up anything in them - including underage characters engaging in... you get it. To Japanese law, it's "hey, they're splotches of ink on a page, not actual people, no one was harmed".)
In Japan, the general attitude behind doujinshi is "they're their own thing and each comic is made in fairly limited numbers so they don't take away sales of the original and in fact someone might discover the original through them so it's free publicity!"
Now, even then there are some Japanese right holders which is better to stay away from - Nintendo is one which is very known for sending out cease-and-desist letters to anyone mucking with their IPs. But in general Japanese IPs tend to be a lot more lax on the whole derivative works debacle.
fics are sold too.
If there are examples out there of fic writers saying "I'm not making any money at this, so it doesn't have to be good," that'll prove me wrong.
I just haven't (yet) seen that phrasing used that way. I HAVE seen "I'm just doing this for fun" and "I'm not a professional writer," which (as I've said) I think the FAQ already covers.
Incidentally, I don't think "unmonetized = useless" is a new idea. I remember being asked, "Why don't you write original fiction? Then you could publish it for money!" and variations thereon by the people closest to me. They'd always hasten to add that it was fine to write just for fun, too, but the implication was loud and clear.
That's writing in general, though, not fanfiction specifically. Since fanfiction by its very nature cannot be monetized, you'd only do it if you got some other value out of it. That being the case, I don't see how not making money at it could be an argument against getting good at it. It's just... it seems like a weird stance to take. O.o
~Neshomeh
When (some) fanfic writers are using Patreon or other platforms to make money off their writing (didn't Amazon start a publish-your-fanfic thing a while back? That was weird), "I'm not making money off this" isn't just a boilerplate disclaimer defence: it can become either "this isn't some of my monetised fic (so I'm not putting in the effort)" or "I'm not one of those people who monetise this (so you should be grateful you get anything at all)".
I don't have evidence - I mostly see it in the form of people complaining about it (as with so many things). But with Lily confirming that people are using Patreon for this, and Yuki asking for it in the first place, I'm happy to accept the insight of people more in-touch than me.
hS
FAQ = Frequently Asked Questions, after all. I don't think it's unreasonable of me to want evidence that a shift in the meaning of the phrase has in fact taken place.
So far, this is all supposition. And Yuki, forgive me for saying so, but you do have a tendency to jump to conclusions. I can't take your word for it without some kind of support.
~Neshomeh
...Is seeing some measure of hostility in certain circles to the idea that AO3 should be a noncommercial space. Because of course on AO3 you are not allowed to link to a patreon or even say you take commissions for money. You can say that on social media profiles you link from AO3, but nothing can happen on site.
This doesn't seem to be super widespread, but it's definitely a thing.
(by the way, if you see someone trying to monetize on AO3, definitely report it. I don't think I need to explain all the reasons to not monetize fanfic here of all places, but in addition to all of that, using AO3 to your own financial benefit, especially if you donate to AO3, could actually jeopardize the OTW's status as a 501(c)(3). So y'know. That's bad.)
Though I can attest that I've seen the "they're not making any money" rhetoric tossed around at least twice, it doesn't seem to be common enough (in the least, not as common as "it was written for fun"), I hereby withdraw my proposal.
Scource: I tried. And nearly burnt myself out on it. Then again, I did have both a very picky editor and was trying to follow the advice of a even pickier guy who makes writing courses but turned out he was quite the elitist "you have to do things exactly as I say, anything else is wrong and horrible and I'll chew you out on it" kind of guy. He even objected on the use of third person.
I ended up both throwing out that novel attempt (basically Blank Sprite turned into an original) and that guy's course after I had quite a quarrel on it over one of the examples he used for the importance of checklists, about a guy who ended up in trouble because he forgot to manually check the fuel level of his boat since its fuel indicator was unreliable.
I dared point out that checking the fuel level manually was a short term solution, and that it made more sense to get the fuel indicator fixed so the issue simply couldn't happen again and the checklist would be . I got accused of missing the point of the example, to which I had to rebutt that my point still applied to writing-related checklists as the example itself could be paragonable to "check for missed spaces since I have an unreliable space bar on my keyboard" which could be striken off the checklist by buying a new keyboard. That was my point - if the checklist was shorter, maybe the guy would've found it to be less of a chore and he would've actually done it.
I got then accused that the way I was writing down the matter proved that I didn't believe in checklists. Dude, I work in the aeronautical sector. Checklists are my bread and butter - and that's exactly why they should be streamlined when possible. You can't check the tightness of each single bolt before each single flight, for example - the checklist would take days.
Ha ha ha, okay, how is Sheen even alive if he’s putting himself through all these arbitrary strictures every meal? Just put the nutrients inside your body, man! Much as I’m disgusted by too many foods touching each other, I will stand by Helena’s right to eat her food any way she chooses, as long as she’s not wasting any.
Ohoho, what have we here? Trouble in Sheenland? Did he find himself on the wrong end of the Harmonious Honeysuckle Pixie Gourmet Society’s classist little rules? Except he’s still following the rules, so maybe they’re the ones who didn’t like his attitude?
—doctorlit doesn’t particularly like Sheen, or people who act like Sheen, if that wasn’t already obvious
Calligraphy, Doll Festival and all that goodness, with a piece of bonus art.
This is to contrast them with Kaguya and Momoka. They're deliberately given unnoteworthy backgrounds to distance themselves from the badfic they were rescued from, and I want to solely focus on their present time in the PPC.
All my family's cats (a mother and her recently born twins) are given French names.