So, Amazon wants to get its greedy little fingers in the fanfic business, eh?
I have a lot of thoughts on this. Angry thoughts, to be completely honest. I’ll try to limit my use of capslock, but no promises.
I love the lack of capitalism in the creation of fanworks. It’s extremely important to me. We do it for ourselves, for each other. It is a free exchange of ideas and talents, done out of pure love and desire to create. FUCK YOU for trying to take that away from us.
I get it! Corporations just HATE that this huge, popular thing exists and they can’t figure out how to make money off it. So publishing companies scour archives for the next 50 Shades of Grey, trying to find anything that can have the ‘serial numbers’ filed off enough so that it can be resold as an original work.
They want to take something freely available, deny public access to it, then make people pay for the privilege of reading it. Isn’t capitalism beautiful?
I’m not saying that writers wanting to be paid for their work is inherently bad. Of course not! I have bookshelves full of books I paid money for. But people offering up their talents without requiring an exchange of goods in return is something I find truly beautiful. It goes against the grain of society, which teaches us ‘nothing’s ever free.’
Fandom is a small village, sitting around a campfire telling stories to each other. Anyone can sit and listen, anyone can contribute. You don’t need to pay to sit and listen – what a horrible shame it would be if someone built a fence, controlled the gate, held out their hand and denied you entry to the campfire if you didn’t have the cash in your pocket.
That is not what fanfic is about. It’s beautiful as is. Let’s not ever forget that.
AMEN TO THAT.