Entry tags:

author entitlement, authors, creator wank, doesn't mean what you think it means, fanfic, suck it up and deal, writers are often pompous douches, your kink is not okay

Diana Gabaldon, author of the wildly popular Outlander series, has an opinion on fan fiction: I think it’s immoral, I _know_ it’s illegal, and it makes me want to barf whenever I’ve inadvertently encountered some of it involving my characters.

Highlights include:

Writing fanfic is just like breaking into someone's house.
Fanfic is WAY WAY WAY TOO PORNY omg ick people have sexual fantasies!*
What to do about an auction offering fanfic to raise money for a cancer patient? She doesn't want to "seem heartless"! So she seeks advice in the comments. Which are mostly full of "Fanfic? I have never heard of such a despicable load of garbage! Also, CRUSH THAT CANCER PATIENT!"

ETA: Unpublished author Eddie Louise (who cannot write the word "shit" and seems to fail spectacularly at reading comprehension) offers fanfic writers A CHALLENGE! Accept it if you dare, sniveling pedo thieves!

ETA 2: Previously, Ms Gabaldon has said fanfic is like selling your children into white slavery. Well. Now. I don't even know what to do with that.

ETA 3: Smart Bitches, Trashy Books has some discussion on the topic.

ETA 4: And bookshop on LJ/DW has a rebuttal.

ETA 5: See what happens when I leave the sweet embrace of the internet for a few hours? Ms. Gabaldon updates her blog!

ETA 6: Evidently Ms. Gabaldon deleted all evidence of her hissyfit, but some wankas have screencaps in this thread.

ETA 7:

kate_nepevu has screencaps and the text of Gabaldon's posts here. And via

alchemynerd, more screencaps available here:

http://www.sendspace.com/file/tiz4vp
http://www.sendspace.com/file/ibidpj
http://www.sendspace.com/file/r6zik6
http://www.sendspace.com/file/hlknqo
http://www.sendspace.com/file/d9alsh

Thanks for all the links! :)

MOD REMINDER: Remember, my little wankas, we DO NOT troll the wank. Nor do we write fanfic after the author has specifically requested people not and post it in the comments here, no matter how tempting it may be. Carry on. oh god my inbox ow ow

*Just as a point of interest, I was a bookseller for 12 years, and had several customers tell me about the sex scenes in her books. Some were pro ("My friend told me to read these books for the sex scenes, and she was totally right, they are so hot, this is best thing to happen to my sex life in years!") and some were con ("What is up with all the sex all the time? Where's the story?"), but one thing you can't say about her books is that they're sexual-fantasy free. :D

(Read comments) - (Post a new comment)

funwithrage
2010-05-06 11:41 pm UTC (link)

Oh, see, I liked Kiss --though, in retrospect, I see what you mean about the Chinese stereotypes, and bleah--and the Imriel trilogy a lot better than I did the first books. To me, Phedre came off as excessively special, and her whole oh-I-am-blessed-yet-cursed-to-feel-pain-as-pleasure thing made me roll my eyes.

(I think because I encountered girls like that in college and...please. You're not tragic and misunderstood, honey, you're into BDSM, and every third sophomore has a dog collar and a whip these days, so get over yourself.)

Also, Joscelin bugged the shit out of me.

(Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

eleutheria
2010-05-07 01:14 am UTC (link)

The reason I liked the Phedre-anguisette thing is that I was coming at it from "does this fantasy religion actually work?" angle and not so much the BDSM one (though I do have a combination of that book series and a friend's blogging to thank for putting a name to my D/s tendencies that I always thought meant I was broken, not that I was merely kinky-- I didn't realize what BDSM was apart from the toys and tools that don't interest me). They kind of did away with sin with Elua and his Companions, but I like that they still had an acknowledgment that the world isn't perfect, that it's still pretty metaphysically fucked up. She's essentially a walking scapegoat, meant to transmute some of the world's brokenness while still being (and suffering like) a human being. I loved the scene in Avatar when she said no to the offered quest and felt her gods leaving her. Thought it was a pretty good, functional example of what it's like to be a deity's chosen-- that you can do amazing things, but what you have to endure makes it almost not worth it. Almost. Basically, I thought the first trilogy had some very well thought out, interesting fantasy religion.

Until she started bringing freaking fantasy ceremonial magick into it with the second trilogy, and then broke the whole damn thing in Kiss with a City of Elua straight out of a Regency paranormal romance and with not one heroic person in there-- made me wonder why I'd been rooting for that civilization to persevere in the first six books if it was going to turn out like that. IMO she had a good initial central concept, and then as she spun further and further away from that concept, she started getting more and more into "my research, let me show you it!" and "mah traveling, let me show you it!" territory with less and less to prop it up. (But then, I loved Joscelin, and Kiss was actually triggering for me, so I'm horribly biased anyway.)

(Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

funwithrage
2010-05-07 04:22 am UTC (link)

Yeah, I think it's a YMMV thing.

I kind of like fantasy ceremonial magic--and undead Not!Cesear, hee--and didn't particularly think the Eluan..s? were bad in Kiss, just sort of Over There and weird experimenty.

I like your take on the Phedre thing, though. That actually makes it much more palatable for me: I like BDSM okay myself, but she came off as one of those people who take their kink waaaaay too seriously, whereas looking at it from a religious perspective makes it cooler.

(Reply to this)(Parent)

(Read comments) -