thistleingrey: (0)
thistle in grey ([personal profile] thistleingrey) wrote in [personal profile] cahn 2015-09-27 08:13 pm (UTC)

It has to do with who directs what can appear in a text, IMO. For the Star Trek franchise--and I was reading it in its earliest days, i.e. early 1980s--there were acquiring editors and eventually formal rules at Simon & Shuster, the publisher, about what could/n't be included. Imagine trying to impose that on true fan works. Even the shaming aspects of fan culture (FFA, etc.) can't get anything to stick amid a cheerful cacophony.

Publication has to do with an org being willing to take responsibility for making a text available. It's a second-order thing, in other words--not the fact of having been published formally but the stuff that comes with that, before and after the text's release.

ETA I've thought a lot about this as someone who has taught the Arthurian tradition in English translation. Is Arthuriana fic? No, not even the parts that were released before publication in the contemporary sense existed. Intertext, homage, pastiche, parody, and fic--they're related but people use different labels precisely because they aren't exactly the same things.

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