The Fortress That Is Doom! vs the Worf-Shaped Balloon
An earier version appeared on the Superversive Blog
Here at the Wright Household, this article is legendary.
This is in part because I’d been talking about writing it for so long. It is more, however, because of my now-famous speech—in which I laid out for two of our sons the main points I wished to cover in such an essay.
It was December of 2015, and we stood on the ramparts at Bear’s Den in the Blue Ridge Mountains (see photo above), looking out upon miles of countryside. As we halted atop the rocks, where the Appalachian Trail passes, I spread my arm, gesturing toward the open valley stretching beneath us and exclaimed:
“Imagine an immense black fortress, stretching as far as the eyes can see. The vast bulk rises up over the Blue Ridges, dominating the landscape. It is made of solid basalt, and it stretches for miles and miles. It has smooth sides with no handholds, crisply-cut crenulations along the top, and looming towers, from which a lookout could spot anyone approaching from any direction.
“Now, imagine this fortress represents the personality and qualities of impressive characters, such as Dr. Doom, Spock, Snape, or Batman. Pick your favorite.
“Each ‘stone’ of the fortress wall represents a quality about that character. Each was carefully hand-placed by the creators—writers, artists, actors, etc.—who helped shape the character. Together, these blocks of character developing, backstory, speech patterns, appearance, and actions form, in the mind of the audience, the titanic, solid edifice that make up our favorite characters.
“Now imagine that in all that vast, impenetrable, solidness, there exists only one window. It is a round window, the size of a porthole.
“On one occasion, once, a candle passed by this window.
“This flicker of light, seen through the tiny window, represents the emotions displayed by our character, a brief glimpse of suffering or hope or love in an otherwise impassive character.
“Fan fiction narrows the focus of the camera to that window. Sometimes, maybe, it shows a little bit of the basalt surrounding it. Instead of one flicker of candlelight, it fills the window with flames and fireworks.
“It then relies on the fan to imagine that the fortress is still present, even though the enormous mile-long basalt bulk of the rest of it is never so much as glimpsed.”
And, this, folks, is—in a nutshell—the difference between derivative fiction written by fans and the other stuff.
Before we continue, let us pause for some definitions:
Professional – a writer who gets paid.
Amateur – a writer who does not get paid.
Well-Crafted Writing – solid writing and storytelling that stands on its own—it can be in your own background or in someone else’s background.
Fan Fiction or Fanfic — any story written in someone else’s background…both well-crafted and wish fulfillment style stories.
Wishfic – what we are talking about in this essay—specifically, derivative fan fiction that cannot stand on its own and that includes an element of wish fulfillment. It often nerfs characters or manhandles their emotional nature.
Note: Before we continue—PLEASE READ:
Just because wishfic, as defined, is not well-crafted and cannot stand-alone does not mean that it should not be written. Nor does it mean that this kind of fiction is wicked or stupid or even, in some cases, bad writing. It can be great fun—to read and to write—and millions of fans love reading it. Even the badly-written stuff can be great fun.
If you love writing or reading fan fiction—well-crafted or wishfic—don’t let me or anyone else interfere with your joy!
That being said, let us look at our fundamental question: How do you tell well-crafted fiction from wishfic?
First, some thoughts about fan fiction. Some people today try to use sardonically apply the term fan fiction to anything that takes place in another writer’s background.
Using characters and locations from earlier works in one’s fiction, however, is an age-old tradition. Writers in ages past were expected to build on what had come before them. If it were the case that anything written using someone else’s characters or setting was automatically fan fiction, we would have to refer to Mid-Summer’s Night Dream by Shakespeare as “Huor of Bordeaux fan fiction.”
Or label every episode of Batman or Superman that was not written by the original creator of the character as fanfic.
Both of these things would just be silly.
If you use the word fanfic to mean all fiction, because it is all derived from somewhere, the word becomes moot. It comes to mean nothing at all.
For this essay, we are using the term fanfic to mean, specifically, stories that rely on the worldbuilding and characterization of another author.
I first started wondering about this subject when I saw someone refer to my husband (author John C. Wright)’s novel Awake in the Nightland as “Nightland fanfic.” I remember frowning and thinking, “Something’s not right about that.”
I doubly thought this when I heard Andy Robertson’s story of discovering John’s Nightland tales when Mr. Robertson was running the Nightland website. He described how he and a few other writers were playing at writing Nightland stories, basically writing Nightland fan fiction…and then, John, this writer he had never heard of submitted the real thing.
Andy Robertson and his friends recognized that there was a difference between what they were writing and what John had submitted. Theirs were stories that merely took place in the Night Lands background, but they were ordinary science fiction with Night Land flavor. John’s stories struck them—the Night Lands fans—as the real thing.
In this essay, I want to explore this idea—why did one author’s stories feel authentic while the others fell short?
What do original stories have that fanfic, at least the wish-fulfillment kind, lacks?
This subject reared its head again with the publication of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. The script was approved by the author. Thousands have seen the play, and, yet, the debate rages on: Is Harry Potter and the Cursed Child fan fiction? Is it true to the original characters? Or does it nerf them?
The fact that a serious debate can take place on such subjects regardless of the original author’s support shows that there is more to the issue than just ownership of the intellectual property.
What finally pushed me over the edge to write this essay, however, was a brief, unpleasant foray into modern (2017) Marvel comics.
During this period, Marvel replacedthe original heroes we love with new heroes of the same name but who are different. This might not too bad if the characters were noble and heroic, but they are not. The new set of characters are not noble and brave. Instead, they emote. They stand around while others admire or adore them, and they do easy tasks that the real heroes found difficult.
There was something familiar about this kind of writing. I had seen it before. But it took thinking about it for a bit before I sat up and exclaimed, “Oh, I get it! They’re writing Marvel fanfic!”
(For all I know, they actually hired fan fiction writers to be their current writers. If so, that would explain a lot!)
So what is fanfic?
Or, specifically, what is the wishfic portion of fanfic. We will exclude from our discussion the kind of fanfic that is well-crafted fiction in someone else’s background.
The key to understanding the difference between well-crafted writing and wishfic is to remember the example above of the black fortress and the single round window.
You can write about the fortress without mentioning the window. But, you can’t write about the window without depending on the reader to picture the fortress. Because the whole point of showing flames and fireworks through the porthole is to give the impression that these are the true passions secretly raging in the heart of the otherwise impassive character.
A character previously established by the builder of the fortress—aka the original author.
If the audience is not picturing the original character, the wishfic doesn’t work.
Wishfic fan fiction, by nature, is parasitical. Like mistletoe growing on oak, it cannot succeed without a host story, the work of the original creator, to prop it up. In this case, the oak is the “fortress”—i.e., the work done by the original creator/series/etc. to establish the character.
No one is amazed when Spock falls for Mary Sue—unless they believe the person doing the falling is the one true Spock, the emotionless Vulcan,. whose heart Mary Sue has, amazingly and earthshakingly, won.
Because winning the heart of a Vulcan is exciting.
Winning the heart of Smo, the overly-emotional guy from accounting? Not so much.
No one is amazed when Dr. Doom is beaten by Gary Stu, unless they are picturing the most impressive villain of them all, the tyrant ruler of Latvaria with his vast armies of robot Dooms, being beaten by this unknown character.
Actually being able to finally defeat Dr. Doom ( at least without the use of squirrels,) would be truly exciting.
But if Gary Stu merely beats Steve the Thug? Not so much.
Well-crafted fan fiction tells a story that is true to the characters and setting. I
t takes the time to re-sketch the fortress, at least in passing, and to acknowledge its vast size, its massive shape, and its impenetrable walls. If there is going to be a light passing by the single porthole, it gives a solid reason for the light, a reason that does not violate what has previously been established about the fortress.
Wishfic puts the personal desires of the writer and the fans above the needs of the story.
Most often, it does not give any reason for the bonfires and fireworks seen in the porthole. Often it doesn’t even bother mentioning the fortress. But it expects the reader to grant the same emotional bang for its buck as if the fortress had been described and properly besieged.
Readers willing to ceed that ground can enjoy wishfic. Readers who are not cannot.
Jason Rennie, from the Against the Mountains of Madness podcast, described it:
The bad stuff feels wrong because it is forcing characters and a universe into a direction it won’t naturally go. You need to do violence to the universe like some incompetent interventionist god to make it bend the way you want.
But the good stuff, like the [Monster Hunter International] add-on stories work because they fit in the universe and don't do violence to it. They feel like they belong.
Lady Thor and Black Chick Ironman do violence to the universe to fit, as does Mary Sue etc.
But good "fan fic" like Star Trek Continues doesn't do that.
Mr. Rennie defines what we are calling wishfic as “doing violence to the universe.” What does he mean by that? What is the kind of violence that is usually done?
The first kind of violence is emotional.
Let’s return to our analogy for the emotions displayed by stalwart characters—the tiny porthole by which a single candle passes. Characters of this kind often act out of duty or purpose. They do not let their emotions come between them and their goal. Only rarely, at moments of high tension, do they occasionally reveal the single crack in their fortress, er… armor.
Wishfic rips open that crack and makes the whole story about emotions—emotions that the character would not ordinarily feel—much less express.
After the end of prohibition in America, it was popular for a time for movies, such as Philadelphia Story, to glorify drinking. Partway through these movies, the dignified or stiff or uptight characters would drink too much and suddenly blurt their inner thoughts and hopes.
Or kiss someone that they would never otherwise have kissed.
Wishfic of the emotional type treats the characters as if they are perpetually drunk, so they act without inhibitions, saying or doing things the real character—the one that has to live with the consequences of his actions and who, usually, has some modicum of dignity—would never do.
Wishfic characters blurt out—and act upon—their loves, hates, romantic longings, and fears. Personal things most characters would never reveal come pouring out of their mouths. Even worse than things they would never reveal, things they would never even feel come gushing out of their mouths.
This is emotional violence.
Other types of violence committed upon stories by wishfic may include:
Talking about nothing of consequence—conversation limited to things like relationships, how awesome each other are, and other simplistic conversations that have no substance or plot function.
Overly simplistic relationships: everyone is so buddy-buddy, without the real differences of personality that every human relationship faces.
Unearned admiration—a lot of time is spent on how much other people admire the character.
Unearned power — the ability to easily beat anything…quickly and without earning the victory
This is why one can speak of the original author writing wishfic in their own background. If they nerf their characters, stop writing tightly-controlled plots, start overemphasizing the characters’ emotions, or having them overcome dire adversaries without any struggle—then, yes, they have wishficced their own intellectual property.
Years ago, John and I used to watch Star Trek: Next Gen, which we, for the most part, enjoyed very much. But they had one tendency that used to drive me crazy. In order to show how tough an enemy was, they would have the enemy beat Worf the Klingon.
Only, they never spent any time building the fortress that should have been Worf—ie, showing him using his great fighting prowess to win the day. They merely traded on the viewers’ knowledge that Klingons were tough in order to demonstrate how much tougher others were.
This went on for a while, with Worf being tossed around during a number of different shows, without intervening shows where he used his great prowess to accomplish, well, anything. Then one day, empath counselor Deanna Troy was possessed by an evil power, and—to show how EVIL the power was—she picked up and tossed…Worf.
And I jumped up from where I sat on the couch beside John and shouted at the TV: “That’s not Worf! That’s a Worf-shaped balloon!”
And that is what happens in wishfic. It’s not Snape who falls in love with Hermione in the overly-emotional wishfic, it’s a Snape-shaped balloon. It’s not Sabertooth—the baddy who used to beat Wolverine to a pulp—that Wolverine’s adopted daughter beats with one punch (because grrlpower!), it’s a Sabertooth-shaped balloon. (Wish that was wishfic. That one was Marvel.)
And that, in a nutshell, is the problem with most wishfic. Sooner or later, the reader looks up from the porthole where all these wild emotions are happening and exclaims, “This isn’t a fortress! It’s a fortress-shaped balloon!”
Essayist extraordinaire Tom Simon offers both a historical perspective and additional terms that could be useful to future discussions on this topic:
“Puts me in mind of the flap between Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding. Richardson more or less invented the epistolary novel with Pamela, which was a shamelessly sentimental and long-winded tear-jerker that even most aficionados of eighteenth-century novels now find unreadable. Henry Fielding wrote Joseph Andrews, a novel ostensibly about Pamela’s brother, but in a completely different tone – lighthearted, humorous, and salted with picaresque adventure. Richardson was furious and called Joseph Andrews a ‘lewd and ungenerous engraftment’ on his own novel.
“In the same way, we could fairly call 50 Shades a lewd and ungenerous engraftment on Twilight; lewd, especially. Wicked is an engraftment on The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Wishfic of the Mary Sue or slash types could be generally described as engraftments; whereas a genuine contribution to a canon grows organically from the characters and situations already developed.
“Perhaps we could reverse-engineer a terminology for this. The original source material would be root stories; sequels and prequels and shared-world stuff, if done competently and with respect for the root, would be branches; stuff that really does not belong, but is forced on out of fan-service, moneygrubbing, or sheer self-indulgence, we can call by Richardson’s term – engraftments.
“This not only takes the pro-vs.-amateur question out of the equation, it is also independent of the authorized-vs.-unauthorized issue. For instance, The Phantom Menace may have been an authorized part of the Star Wars canon, but it is so different in tone and intention and does such shameless violence to the previous canon, that we may fairly call it an engraftment on Star Wars – even though it was done by the same writer and director.”
An author of well-crafted fiction is the servant of his muse. He listens to the words and wisdom the Divine Muse sends. He writes a story that honors the characters, plots, and themes his muse has provided.
A wishfic author expects the plot and characters to perform for him. He, as we heard above, does violence to the source material. Or, at the very least, he leans on the source material for the force of his story, without himself adding to the “fortress.”
And while some of it is fun, and while some people love it, often, in the long run (and especially for anyone who is not an avid fan of the original material) it frankly fails to entertain.
You have heard of people who are tone-deaf.
Wishfic is muse-deaf.