Transformative Works - Tumblr Posts
[Image description: The title, "Fanworks Permission Statement Builder," and black line-drawing-style pictures of a hand holding a pencil and of a microphone with a pop filter, over a background of crumpled paper. End ID.] (credit to @rystonlentil for the image ID)
Hey fanworks creators!
Excited about the idea of someone creating something based on your fan creation (like podfics, fanart, translations, etc)? On the other hand, do you not want people creating stuff based off your fanworks and don't want to have to turn them down? Or do you have a more nuanced idea of what you are and aren't comfortable with people doing based on your fan creations? Don't particularly care one way or the other about what people create based on your stuff?
SPEND JUST A FEW MINUTES TO QUICKLY GENERATE A FANWORKS PERMISSION STATEMENT LETTING PEOPLE KNOW YOUR PREFERENCES!!!
What is a fanworks permission statement?
A fanworks permission statement (also known as a blanket permission statement or transformative works permission statement) is very simple: it's something you post in a publically-visible place (usually your AO3 profile) that tells other fan creators what you are and aren't okay with in terms of other people making fanworks based off your stuff. It can be as simple as a sentence or two, or as complicated as you want to communicate your preferences clearly.
Who should have a permission statement?
A permission statement is for anyone that creates fanworks! Yes, even if you don't think anyone would ever want to create something based off your fanworks. You never know! It's not egotistical to post a permission statement, it's HELPFUL. Yes, even if you don't want people making something based off your works. It means no one has to reach out to ask you, they can know your preferences right away.
Is it only for fanfic writers?
Absolutely not! It's great for fan creators of ALL kinds to have a fanworks permission statement! Fanartists, someone might want to use your fanart as inspiration for a fanfic or create fanart inspired by your work in a different medium! Podficcers, other people creating in an audible medium might want to insert clips of your podfics into their work, or copy the way you did certain effects! Fanbinders, you might inspire an artist with the way you do your binding! This is really for everyone, because fandom is infinitely creative and who knows how another fan creator might be inspired by your work!
What do I even say in a permission statement?
That's exactly why we built the Fanworks Permission Statement Builder! So you don't have to think about what to say or how to say it. Just spend a few minutes answering questions about your preferences that cover many of the common things people might want to specify, and you'll have a permission statement ready to copy-and-paste into your AO3 profile, or to edit to your heart's content!
Why use the Fanworks Permission Statement Builder?
Don't want to come up with a permission statement on your own? Not sure what should even go into a permission statement? Want someone to at least give you a starting place that you can edit to better reflect your preferences? Want someone to just hand you a ready-to-use permission statement that you can paste into your profile? Spend just a few minutes answering some questions about your preferences, and you'll have a permission statement ready to use or edit!
Love examples of earlier transformative works!
This is part 7 of I’m not sure how many. Note this is the same publication that ran the “spiders Grantaire” article.
Translation: 1) Valjean gripes about M. Victor Hugo, who roasted his arm for the reader’s entertainment. [T/N: I guess this is a reference to the scene at the Gorbeau house?] 2) With all confidence, Valjean finds King Charles X [well uh not king anymore since the arm-burning incident happened in 1832], uses Charles’ brother, his friend Louis XVIII, as a reference, and asks him if he would be willing to take on the task of amusing the reader until his arm heals. 3) Charles X, who is truly the best of men, takes charge of the reader, tells him about the capture of Trocadero, the “Unobtainable Chambre” [of ultraroyalist deputies] of 1827, and a bunch of things that could not have less to do with Victor Hugo’s novel. 4) King Charles X takes advantage of the Revolution of 1830 to walk out on the reader.
For a second I thought it was slash and got excited. But gender!swapped Twilight should be fascinating, given all the gender scripts the first one followed!
YOU GUYS
STEPHENIE MEYER WROTE AND PUBLISHED FANFICTION OF HER OWN FUCKING BOOK
WHAT UNIVERSE ARE WE LIVING IN
Toad Words
Frogs fall out of my mouth when I talk. Toads, too.
It used to be a problem.
There was an incident when I was young and cross and fed up parental expectations. My sister, who is the Good One, has gold fall from her lips, and since I could not be her, I had to go a different way.
So I got frogs. It happens.
“You’ll grow into it,” the fairy godmother said. “Some curses have cloth-of-gold linings.” She considered this, and her finger drifted to her lower lip, the way it did when she was forgetting things. “Mind you, some curses just grind you down and leave you broken. Some blessings do that too, though. Hmm. What was I saying?”
I spent a lot of time not talking. I got a slate and wrote things down. It was hard at first, but I hated to drop the frogs in the middle of the road. They got hit by cars, or dried out, miles away from their damp little homes.
Toads were easier. Toads are tough. After awhile, I learned to feel when a word was a toad and not a frog. I could roll the word around on my tongue and get the flavor before I spoke it. Toad words were drier. Desiccated is a toad word. So is crisp and crisis and obligation. So are elegant and matchstick.
Frog words were a bit more varied. Murky. Purple. Swinging. Jazz.
I practiced in the field behind the house, speaking words over and over, sending small creatures hopping into the evening. I learned to speak some words as either toads or frogs. It’s all in the delivery.
Love is a frog word, if spoken earnestly, and a toad word if spoken sarcastically. Frogs are not good at sarcasm.
Toads are masters of it.
I learned one day that the amphibians are going extinct all over the world, that some of them are vanishing. You go to ponds that should be full of frogs and find them silent. There are a hundred things responsible—fungus and pesticides and acid rain.
When I heard this, I cried “What!?” so loudly that an adult African bullfrog fell from my lips and I had to catch it. It weighed as much as a small cat. I took it to the pet store and spun them a lie in writing about my cousin going off to college and leaving the frog behind.
I brooded about frogs for weeks after that, and then eventually, I decided to do something about it.
I cannot fix the things that kill them. It would take an army of fairy godmothers, and mine retired long ago. Now she goes on long cruises and spreads her wings out across the deck chairs.
But I can make more.
I had to get a field guide at first. It was a long process. Say a word and catch it, check the field marks. Most words turn to bronze frogs if I am not paying attention.
Poison arrow frogs make my lips go numb. I can only do a few of those a day. I go through a lot of chapstick.
It is a holding action I am fighting, nothing more. I go to vernal pools and whisper sonnets that turn into wood frogs. I say the words squeak and squill and spring peepers skitter away into the trees. They begin singing almost the moment they emerge.
I read long legal documents to a growing audience of Fowler’s toads, who blink their goggling eyes up at me. (I wish I could do salamanders. I would read Clive Barker novels aloud and seed the streams with efts and hellbenders. I would fly to Mexico and read love poems in another language to restore the axolotl. Alas, it’s frogs and toads and nothing more. We make do.)
The woods behind my house are full of singing. The neighbors either learn to love it or move away.
My sister—the one who speaks gold and diamonds—funds my travels. She speaks less than I do, but for me and my amphibian friends, she will vomit rubies and sapphires. I am grateful.
I am practicing reading modernist revolutionary poetry aloud. My accent is atrocious. Still, a day will come when the Panamanian golden frog will tumble from my lips, and I will catch it and hold it, and whatever word I spoke, I’ll say again and again, until I stand at the center of a sea of yellow skins, and make from my curse at last a cloth of gold.
Terri Windling posted recently about the old fairy tale of frogs falling from a girl’s lips, and I started thinking about what I’d do if that happened to me, and…well…
I Am Bad With Carols
You know, seen from a certain point of view, “Do You Hear What I Hear?” is a song about a really weird game of Telephone. The Night Wind tells the Little Lamb about a star. The Little Lamb, understandably freaked out by the fact that the sky is talking, runs to the Shepherd Boy going “The sky is talking! It’s got a big voice!” (and, based on what I know of sheep, probably also “Will it eat me?!” and “Can I eat it?”) And then it goes off the rails. The Shepherd Boy stomps off to tell the Mighty King (and how well connected is this kid, anyhow? He just shows up at the palace, waves to the guards, walks on in) that there’s a child shivering in the cold and we should bring him silver and gold (We? Does this kid have silver and gold on hand, too? Which…might explain the ease of getting an audience, actually…) At no point does the Shepherd Boy mention that his source of information is a possibly delusional sheep, which, okay, I might not bring that up to begin with, either. But how does the Shepherd Boy know any of this? The Lamb is still back in the field babbling about a voice in the sky talking about stars. Where did the child come from? Did the Shepherd Boy make a detour and find all this out? Why even bring the Lamb into it, in that case? And why is the Mighty King going “Whoa! One of my peasants just waltzed in to tell me about a disadvantaged child? THIS MEANS PEACE AND LIGHT!” Honestly, if you’re that easily impressed, you have to figure that a new faith gets founded in the kingdom practically daily. “Your Majesty, the washerwoman’s here and she says there’s a fish in the stream with a–” “ALL HAIL DAGON!” Look, I know it’s a Christmas carol, I am just saying that the narrative does not follow logically from the Night Wind talking about stars to the King informing the populace that there’s a new religion in town. There are some gaps. …yes, I am also really, really annoying to sit next to at movies.
what does “men who adhere to strict gender binary” even mean tho
NO ONE adheres to the gender binary! NO ONE FITS THEIR GENDER ROLE PERFECTLY! THAT’S THE POINT! AARRRGGH!
This broke my heart all over again. I’d never really thought about Persuasion from Captain Wentworth’s perspective. And isn’t that a fairly universal aspect of love, too? Angrily wishing hurt upon someone who hurt you, and then the regret and the love and tenderness that comes afterward, the next time they’re in pain?
And, that’s (sometimes) why transformative works and retellings matter so much. They’re a way of thriving in a world where there really are so many more stories available to us than just the canon. A way of knowing there’s more out there than just the story that we’re left with about what happened by those who wield power. Mm.
I assumed that Flint's Treasure Island death was just a rumor is Black Sails-verse, just because tonally it doesn't make a whole lot of sense. And Jack Rackham's whole ending monologue is about how stories diverge from fact over time, which allows for wiggle room between the show and book.
Listen the heartbreaking thing is that Treasure Island is James Flint’s greatest fear. He says in the absolutely iconic Freedom in the Dark speech that I am still not over
“We will have been for nothing. Defined by their histories distorted to fit into their narrative until all that is left of us are the monsters in the stories they tell their children.”
And that is what happens. That is what Treasure Island is: the definitive pirate story, in which Captain Flint is nothing more but a monster. A novel that almost every child reads….Flint literally becomes a monster in the stories they tell their children. A man who tried to change things, to destroy the myth of the inevitability of empire, to remake the new world…becomes a monster in that empire’s stories.
Well great, anon, now I’m crying.
I mean, the entirety of Black Sails is about stories. The irony is that the reason James is so effective as Flint is precisely because of the myth he himself creates around Flint - and yet in that myth, he is the monster. He has to be, that’s the only way that myth retains power. That label plagues him, as John Silver points out to him (John Silver, conveniently, is “not int he least bothered by whatever labels anyone decides to afix to you.” This doesn’t change - his “I don’t care” in response to Flint’s speech in 4x10 is literally the same sentiment). Part of what makes the war/rebellion so effective is the story of Long John Silver that Billy comes up with. Jack is absolutely obsessed with the reputation he’ll have and the stories they’ll tell about him - seriously, it’s a running gag, and when he goes to Philadelphia he realizes just how much those stories get twisted.
The thing is, queer people have always struggled to tell their own stories, from their perspective. Stories in which they’re not monsters or predators, in which they aren’t insane or diseased or wrong or perverted. Stories in which they don’t die. Stories of their lives as they are. I could come up with dozens of examples. The way that queer people are told “don’t shove it in our faces” while the media is covered with heterosexuality. The way that an entire generation of queer people was lost to the AIDS crisis because the government completely ignored it - and their lives and their stories and their experiences create a glaring gap. The way that Forster’s novel about two gay men who get a happy ending, Maurice, couldn’t be published until after his death, in the 1970s, even though it was written in 1914. The way that the queer character always dies, or the queer couple never gets a happy ending in the media, with very few exceptions. The way that queerness is coded as monstrous in horror cinema. I mean, I could go on for a while here.
Flint, in his “Freedom in the Dark” speech, is talking about exactly that. He is a queer man who is fighting for (among other things, including, yes, revenge fueled by rage) the right to be who he is without shame, who implores John Silver to not go down in history as a monster - and John Silver, who is, as far as I can tell, a straight man, looks him in the eyes and says “I don’t care.” Another queer story is erased, told in such a way as to profit those in power.
In a way, then, since Black Sails is the prequel to Treasure Island, I suppose John Silver’s choice was predictable (though hindsight is 20/20). Treasure Island is the story that we’re left with about what happened, and the finale tells us how that story came about.
So yes, Treasure Island is absolutely fake news and untrue and not what actually happened, but on a kind of meta-level, that very fact is still super important, because the story that gets left behind, even if it’s not actual fact, is important. You could say the whole story of Black Sails is the tragedy of queer stories being erased, of Black Sails being transformed into Treasure Island by those who wield power. And those stories have power - even if they’re not true, they affect things. They change things. James Flint knows this, and that is why he is so scared of going down as a monster in their stories.
This is the most beautiful way to describe fic, transformative storytelling and collective mythmaking. He gets it.
This Guy Won’t Stop Photoshopping Himself Into Kendall Jenner’s Photos And It Makes Them 10 Times Better
Credit: Kirby Jenner / IG
via: boredpanda.com
Ao3 is a scam
It lures you with the promise of fun stories and then you find your soul bonded to the search engine
--
Okay, there is some valid AO3 criticism.