The Logic of Dreams
by Tripleguess
April 17, 2009
SPLAT
I am so tired of seeing my favorite dreams abused.
If you get a sour jug of milk, you can go back with your receipt and get a refund. Safeway will give you another jug of milk exactly like the first (only fresh) and when you get home, the kids will never know the difference. Because there is no significant difference between one jug of milk and another.
Stories are different. No two are alike. If you're attached to one, nothing can quite replace it. True, the things you love about the story aren't unique to that story -- good characters, great plots, special moments all exist in other stories. But still, you can't switch out stories like car parts.
That's what makes me so mad when I get handed a sour one.
It doesn't just taste bad. The effect lingers. You can't hand it back and get a generic replacement that will do just as well. Stories are like kids; no two are alike. Technically, the copyright holder could apologize and reissue a corrected, satisfying version. Realistically, I've never seen that happen.
It's especially bad when well loved and hitherto quality series are suddenly tanked by a dud installment. Lately, it seems to be happening everywhere. I don't know if there's a mad director disease going around or what, but several stories I looked forward to were huge disappointments.
In all honesty, I'm very picky. It takes something rare to get me into a story. But once I'm in, getting jerked around hurts.
Case studies? Let's start with Spider-Man movies. I have never been a big comics fan, but the first Spider-Man movie surprised me. It was so unexpectedly good. It transcended its cheap-paper origins. I got into the story.
Spider-Man 2 was even better, if I can forget about the weird operating table scene (which failed to be either relevant or scary, IMHO...). Two movies in, and I was hooked. When the third one came out, I went with my sister to a midnight showing -- the first time I've gone to a midnight showing.
And? It STANK. The rest of the audience thought so too.
How does that happen? Same director. Presumably same intentions. And yet, it failed worse than a perfume-drenched fanficton. Why? This was the copyright holder's work. It should have been better. We were mad enough to write a letter to Sony. Not that we ever heard back.
Next case study: Batman. I always hated Batman. I thought it was stupid. Then, one day, I got to see Batman Begins.
WOW! I was impressed. The story was dark, moving, tragic -- and hopeful. It sucked me in. When I heard that there was a sequel coming out, I was thrilled. I took my Dad and sister and went to see it.
Well, it turns out the best parts were ALL in the 2-minute trailer. Dark Knight's plot was as inane as its stupid villain. When I think of this movie, I see a guy in clown makeup wearing a hospital outfit, sauntering offscreen as buildings explode in the background. That's as good a summary as any of the disjointed story.
Prince Caspian. I won't say this one was bad. In fact, it was okay. The hero was great. The story was better than average. There was just one teensy little problem: it wasn't Prince Caspian. Some stinker had gotten hold of the copyright to Lewis's book, and used it to produce a story that was nothing like. Horrible, no. A disappointment, yes.
And... this one hurts the worst... Munto TV.
Munto 1 and Munto 2 are my favorite movies in the world. Still are. I know almost nobody likes them, but that's okay; I do. Imagine my happiness when I heard that KyoAni was making a Munto TV series!
Great! So... was this a remake, or a continuation? I did some digging. One by one, the episodes came out. The first six were just OVA footage with voiceovers and a few new scenes. Remake? Continuation? Not really. How about "re-edit"? Why didn't they call it that?
But wait, it gets better. At long last, the series gets into new footage -- three and a half episodes of it, total, featuring inferior animation and storyline. Gone was the hope for thirteen cool episodes of new footage and classic Munto storytelling. Instead the fans got something that'd been infected with Magical Girl sparkles and then run through a blender. Whatever it was, it wasn't Munto.
Horrible? No. A huge disappointment? Oh, yes. It was.
What's a fan to do?
HISS
I understand that the copyright holders came into possession of the story by legal means -- either writing or buying it. I understand that their rights should be respected, especially commercially. I understand that, in a certain sense, the story is their property and they can decide what to do with it.
Still, it's not cool to abuse the stories or the fans. The minute you breathe life into a story and set it free, the minute you share it, that's the minute in which (in a certain sense) you give up exclusive claim to it. Emotionally, others will take up residence in it. Since they're there by invitation, they need to be respected too.
Even in a marketing sense, owners count on fan love -- love of the stories and characters -- to bring in profits. Why, then, does it seem not to matter to some when they stomp on that love? If you're turning out paper for letterheads, who cares how you go about it -- the end product will be read once and thrown away. When it comes to soda cans, they're all alike. But stories are made up of characters -- people who, in a sense, start living and breathing when they walk off the page.
Of course, these people are fictional. But that's the very reason we can expect them to adhere to certain rules. Ideally, they don't switch personalities or change value systems overnight. They don't act out of character without a good reason. They don't become somebody else.
Stories, too. They aren't supposed to abruptly jump genres, lose focus, or spontaneously self-destruct. Fiction has its own logic and needs to abide by it to be good fiction. The rules are subtle and they flex, but they're definitely there. Ignore them and the story's heartbeat flatlines.
Fanfiction is notorious for ignoring these rules. But some of the "official" fiction running around is almost as bad -- and it doesn't have the excuse of being fanfiction. Inheriting a copyright doesn't always mean inheriting the spirit of the story. Even the original creators fail their stories sometimes. And a special few quality fanworks show great fidelity to their inspirations.
Copyright aside, the spirit of a creation can outlive its creator. Tolkien was dead and buried when Peter Jackson directed the epic movie trilogy based on his books. If those movies aren't a faithful translation of the story, the world hasn't seen one. Jackson acted under the blessing of copyright, but it was his love of the series and the outstanding effort of the cast and crew -- all of them -- that made the movies successful, not just at the box office but as worthy additions to the Middle Earth mythology.
If the death of the creator doesn't destroy a story's viability, neither does the absence of a copyright.
RAWR
In a perfect world, copyrights wouldn't be necessary, and if they existed, the holders would live up to the obligation entailed in owning people's dreams. However, with things being as they are, fanworks are often the sincerest form of protest one can make in the face of clearly flawed or self-contradicting official material. As long as no profit is or will be made, as long as fanworks are clearly marked as such and claim no endorsement from the copyright holders, there can be no real reason for copyright holders to get upset about fan productions. If they feel that threatened by fanwork, a simple solution would be to up the quality of their official productions.