Media references to fanfic, the week ending 5/3/08
First up this week (and my favorite): mercuryblue144 pointed me to a story in the Daily Mail by Daniel Boffey about the inclusion of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone on the list of required books for English students preparing for the A-levels. What's of interest to me is that students will also have to write their own 500 to 800-word story inspired by the book.

Also, mhari pointed me to a story on AlterNet by John Gorenfeld about Love and Consequences, the faux memoir by Margaret B. Jones. Gorenfeld wrote In the world of Internet fan fiction -- in which amateur fans of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and other shows imagine new adventures, they have a derisive term, the "Mary Sue Story," for wish-fulfillment that crosses the line. That's when a certain kind of fan breaks the rules and makes herself the hero, fascinating everyone, saving the world. This story, about a white girl who makes black people happy by escaping from their ghetto, is a Mary Sue story about race. And people ought to be upset that it passed for realism.

And coaldustcanary alerted me to a story in TIME by Lev Grossman about on Stephenie Meyer, author of the Twilight vampire series: Her books are big (500-plus pages) but not dense--they have a pillowy quality distinctly reminiscent of Internet fan fiction. Pillowy??? I can't speak to Meyer's writing, but mine isn't!!

Another reference related to Meyer's books appeared in Willamette Week (which bills itself as Portland, Oregon's News Weekly). Byron Beck wrote about Lisa Hansen, and her website TwilightMOMS, which features forums full of recipes, exercise tips and fan fiction.

Jim Ridley had a review of the new film Son of Rambow in The Village Voice in which he wrote [writer and director Garth] Jennings finds a tone here that's more winsome and less desperately wacky than his film version of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, especially as the movie-within-a-movie mutates into quirkily revealing psychodrama. Will and Lee's escape into cinema proves contagious, and the project—kids acting out the playground equivalent of fan fiction—quickly overturns their school's hierarchy of cool. IME, half of all playground play is fanfic; some of my fondest memories from grade school were of being cast as Planet of the Ape's Cornelius.

And what do you know? PotA fanfic isn't for seven-year-olds in 1973 anymore, as this blog post by Robin Abrahams on the Boston Globe's website shows.

In other news... in Japan's Daily Yomiuri, staff writer Kanta Ishida had a story about the evolution of Astro Boy. The whole article is pretty interesting, and worth a read; I particularly liked the sushi analogy.

There was an article in The Brookline Tab by Neal Simpson about web-to-book author Jennifer Sampon (who I can't find at Amazon, so I'm wondering about what form her book is actually taking). Samson began writing the series in 1998 and didn’t stop until 2005, long after she’d dropped out of college and began caring for her legally blind grandmother. During that time, she launched a second Web series, called “Sandy Cove,” and began writing fan fiction, or stories based on the characters and settings of popular authors. Um, Jennifer, if you read this, can you say 'yo'?

Finally, In Hamilton, Ontario's Raise the Hammer magazine, Ryan McGreal had an editorial about media ownership in which he wrote More recently, the advent of the internet has made it possible for many more people to create their own content and share it - essays, musings, photographs, cartoons, videos, fan fiction, reports, tools and applications, code snippets, and cutesy pictures of cats superimposed with cutesy text written in pidgin (I CAN HAS LITE RALE?).