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I don't
know why I think I don't like fan fiction (also known as fanfic).
All indicators say that I should. It's very post-modern to
take pre-existing characters and rewrite them into wacky situations.
If Don Barthelme wrote the classic Garfield boinking a stuffed
toy fanfic, it would have been declared genius by at least
a few people.
I've
been aware of fanfic for a long time. I grew up in a household
where Star Trek was watched and conventions were attended,
and someone (not me) was a member of a fan club with a newsletter.
Things were quaint back then: A person would pay five or ten
dollars and get a membership card and maybe a button and usually
a quarterly newsletter written by some superfans, mimeographed
on colored paper to make it look nice, and chockful of news
about the actors' other projects. It was like a blog on paper!
I think it was called A Piece of the Action, after
a Star Trek episode.
 |
| Chivalry
may be dead, but the Kirk/Spock bromance is forever. |
Anyway,
the Star Trek fan club newsletter did not publish
fanfic, but they often referred to it with derision. I discovered,
via my source, that "old ladies with nothing better to do"
often wrote fan fiction about what the Star Trek characters
did in their off-hours, and some particularly crazy old ladies
wrote what was called slash/fic about Kirk and Spock getting
it on. Apparently, there were secret tunnels on the USS Enterprise
that various characters traveled furtively, including a very
special one that connected Spock's and Kirk's rooms so that
no one would know of their secret love. In fact, slash/fic
got its name from these stories, which were referred to as
Kirk/Spock stories. Aww. They had to hide their love!
Now we
have the internet, and the fanfic phenomenon has exploded.
You name it, there are fanfics for it. You all know about
the Harry Potter fan and slash fic. There are Garfield
fanfic and slash fics, too. And Stephen Colbert fanfics—even
Schnuffel fanfics.
What
the hell is Schnuffel? I wondered that myself when a friend
sent me a link recently, first to a video of animated rabbits
singing a techno song in German and then to a fanfic. Schnuffel,
the big-eyed, lop-eared bunny, is actually a marketing mascot
made to promote a ring tone. Schnuffel was so popular that
the ring tone was expanded into a song, "Kuschel Song," or
"Cuddling Song" in English. In the video, Schnuffel sings
an ode of innocent love to a carrot. Not surprisingly, it
went to number one on the German and Austrian music charts,
and it was in the top ten on the European charts. It spent
70 weeks on the Austrian charts. Two full-length albums later,
we have Schnuffel fanfic.
Sadly,
only Part One of what I think is the only Schnuffel fanfic
(at least in English) is currently posted, so I think we will
all need to reserve our judgment until we have read the story
in its entirety. Is it post-modern genius or, as it proclaims
itself to be, a new low in fan fiction? I declare it to be
both. I felt that this particular piece of writing brought
depth to the previously one-dimensional one-trick bunny that
is Schnuffel, so I'm going with genius. Schnuffel is not just
an adorable rabbit that sings love songs to a carrot. When
the carrot ends up on the catering table during a video shoot,
Schnuff mourns and then decides the best tribute to his late
lamented love is to eat her himself, thus becoming one with
his beloved carrot. It is a shocking but tender moment that
reveals the true animal nature in even the most adorable anthropomorphic
characters.
 The
Schnuffel fanfic got me thinking about a hideous piece of
marketing I remembered from 2008: the Lexus-sponsored "In
the Belly of the Beast," a collaborative story by several
established authors such as Curtis Sittenfeld about two yuppies
riding around in a fancy expensive car. I assume the car is
the Beast, but I'm at a loss to explain why Lexus is invoking
the name of a book about prison written by a lifetime criminal
to describe their car. But then, I'm at a loss to explain
just about everything about this project. Is the Lexus IS
F a metaphor for the prison we make for ourselves out of our
love of luxury items?
Here's
the first line from Chapter One, written by best-selling novelist
and Jeopardy! champ Arthur Phillips: "Panting like
an overweight Labrador and sweating like a brain surgeon,
he awoke from yet another nightmare." If you told me this
was the first line of a Lost fanfic story written by a very
smart 15 year old, I wouldn't doubt you. It doesn't really
get any better until the final chapter by Jane Smiley, where
she at least tries to bring some semblance of craft to the
story.
What
makes "In the Belly of the Beast" worse than fanfic is this:
It was advertising masquerading as literature. Fanfic makes
no apologies for its gushing fannishness, and the writers'
love of the characters and attention to minute details can
make fanfics fun for all sorts of open-minded readers looking
for entertainment. As I read the long-form Lexus ad, all I
could think about was how much money was being paid out for
this. I don't begrudge authors getting paid, but there is
a little something something that comes through when art is
done for love as opposed to commerce.
So, Schnuffel
has brought me a new appreciation for fanfic. It's really
no worse than something that Arthur Phillips got paid to do.
Some fanfics may be dreck, some of it may be genius, but most
of it, at the very least, is highly entertaining, if only
in an OMG kind of way...which is more than I can say for that
Lexus story.
(April,
2009)
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