Tag: quote

Did you say cheesy? Cheesy is one of the words banned in my world. I’m tired of sincerity being something we have to be afraid of doing. It’s been like that for 20 years, that the entertainment and art world has shied away from sincerity, real sincerity, because they feel they have to wink at the audience because that’s what the kids like. We have to do real stories now. The world is in crisis.

I wanted to tell a story about a hero who believes in love, who is filled with love, who believe in change and the betterment of mankind. I believe in it. It’s terrible when it makes so many artists afraid to be sincere and truthful and emotional, and relegates them to the too-cool-for-school department. Art is supposed to bring beauty to the world.

Patty Jenkins, director of Wonder Woman
(via lightedwindows)

fanculturesfancreativity:

The experience of fandom, especially in the age of the internet, is one of binge reading: most new fans, upon discovering fanfic, gobble it down. The first story you read is usually an eyebrow raiser; shocking, maybe a bit embarrassing. “What is this craziness? Do people really do this? I don’t think I like it. Are they all like this? Let me just look at one more …” And then the next thing you know, it’s four in the morning, it’s three days later, it’s ten years on. You are at your friend’s house, and the floor around you is covered with zines. You are on the internet, and you haven’t showered in days. Your browser history is a dreadful embarrassment. You’ve read roughly forty-five thousand stories, some of them amazing, many of them terrible, and you now have all sorts of opinions about tropes and genres. You have developed a particular taste in fanworks. You really like femslash, or hurt/comfort, or cavefic, or long, plotty gen. But I guarantee you this: no matter what you like, and no matter how much there is of it–there isn’t enough of it. 

And so some readers (and some of you) will start to write. You’ll write the thing you want to read, because how hard can it be? You can do better than that story you read last night. And that other story you read was okay–except, you know what would have been really good? You know what would have been great? This. This is gonna be great.

– Francesca Coppa, The Fanfiction Reader: Folk Tales for the Digital Age (ix-x)

While many people think fanfiction is about inserting sex into texts (like Tolkien’s) where it doesn’t belong, Brancher sees it differently: “I was desperate to read about sex that included great friendship; I was repurposing Tolkien’s text in order to do that. It wasn’t that friendship needed to be sexualized, it was that erotica needed to be … friendship-ized.” Many fanfiction writers write about sex in conjunction with beloved texts and characters not because they think those texts are incomplete, but because they’re looking for stories where sex is profound and meaningful. This is part of what makes fan fiction different from pornography: unlike pornography, fanfic features characters we already care deeply about, and who tend to already have long-standing and complex relationships with each other. It’s a genre of sexual subjectification: the very opposite of objectification. It’s benefits with friendship.

Francesca Coppa, “Introduction to The Dwarf’s Tale,” The Fanfiction Reader (via francescacoppa)