Ranty rant. Or at least grumble.
Jun. 6th, 2009 09:38 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jennaria(Why do I have no ranty icons over here? Everything is all contemplative. I should fix this.)
Item the first: Tokyopop allows you to read select volumes of certain manga online. Which, hey, cool. Mostly it's the first volume of whatever. Occasionally it's the most recent volume. (I think. FRUITS BASKET, for example, has both Volume 1 and Volumes 18-22, which I can only explain with hand-waving and the reported fact that FRUITS BASKET tops the manga-selling charts.)
And then there are times when, instead of Volume 1, it skips straight to Volume 2. Maybe followed by Volume 3. As a marketing ploy, that doesn't seem to make so much with the sense.
Item the second: "She'd never do that to him for real, so I guess that's why fan works exist."
NO. STOP. BAD FANGIRL.
Fan works exist because the artist/writer/whatever else loved something about the original canon, and wanted to explore and share that something. Fan works do not exist to turn three-dimensional characters into paper dolls, to act in ways that the originals wouldn't. If the only thing you're interested in is the pretty, and you really don't care about the character underneath? Go write original fiction, because you're missing the point.
Seriously. This was one of the things that kept me out of anime fandom for years: the fact that the first fans I met who came from a yaoi/anime background, rather than a slash background, were the same ones whose fanworks treated the characters like toys, to be twisted and mutilated at will, with very little care as to whether "she would do that to him for real." For pity's sake, if you're playing in someone else's sandbox with someone else's toys, why insist it's a cheap yellow plastic truck when it's actually a hand-carved wooden train? If you're only interested in a yellow plastic truck, why not go find a yellow plastic truck? It's not like they don't exist in other places and other fandoms!
On the bright side: piles of kittens make things better. (Well, technically only one pile, as I type. This is a streaming feed, so relative degrees of pile-ness are subject to update.)
Item the first: Tokyopop allows you to read select volumes of certain manga online. Which, hey, cool. Mostly it's the first volume of whatever. Occasionally it's the most recent volume. (I think. FRUITS BASKET, for example, has both Volume 1 and Volumes 18-22, which I can only explain with hand-waving and the reported fact that FRUITS BASKET tops the manga-selling charts.)
And then there are times when, instead of Volume 1, it skips straight to Volume 2. Maybe followed by Volume 3. As a marketing ploy, that doesn't seem to make so much with the sense.
Item the second: "She'd never do that to him for real, so I guess that's why fan works exist."
NO. STOP. BAD FANGIRL.
Fan works exist because the artist/writer/whatever else loved something about the original canon, and wanted to explore and share that something. Fan works do not exist to turn three-dimensional characters into paper dolls, to act in ways that the originals wouldn't. If the only thing you're interested in is the pretty, and you really don't care about the character underneath? Go write original fiction, because you're missing the point.
Seriously. This was one of the things that kept me out of anime fandom for years: the fact that the first fans I met who came from a yaoi/anime background, rather than a slash background, were the same ones whose fanworks treated the characters like toys, to be twisted and mutilated at will, with very little care as to whether "she would do that to him for real." For pity's sake, if you're playing in someone else's sandbox with someone else's toys, why insist it's a cheap yellow plastic truck when it's actually a hand-carved wooden train? If you're only interested in a yellow plastic truck, why not go find a yellow plastic truck? It's not like they don't exist in other places and other fandoms!
On the bright side: piles of kittens make things better. (Well, technically only one pile, as I type. This is a streaming feed, so relative degrees of pile-ness are subject to update.)